The Money Expert: This $1 Habit Can Make You $10,000/Month! | Daniel Preistley

The penalty for being average has never been so severe. But the payoff for being great has never been so high. What you need to do is find a way. When I first arrived in London, I don't know anyone. I've never been above the equator in my life. And I thought, okay, I want to accelerate the time that it takes to be successful in this city. I did 4 million worth of sales in our first 6 months. Spend time developing your own strategy because in any economy, there are successful businesses and unsuccessful businesses. What would you say right now are the main opportunities available? Technology is the advantage. If you're using AI to create stuff, now you can do superhuman work. I believe entrepreneurship is the journey of a,000 pictures. A,000 average pitches gets you nothing. And a,000 great pitches gets you 10 to $100 million. If you were starting over today and you want to make a million dollars, how would you do it? the two things that I would do. Daniel, thank you so much for coming on the Ice Coffee Hour. It's a pleasure. It's really good. Would you say making money is easier today than it's ever been before? Depends how you're making money, but um certainly if you are an entrepreneur or you're entrepreneurial, uh it's never been a better time. It's the most incredible moment in history. Uh because think about it like this. You can start a business cheaper and easier than ever before. where you've got access to all this incredible free technology to spread a message. You can find a team who might be working anywhere in the world, you can find customers who might be anywhere in the world with a problem that they want to solve. Um, you know, it used to be that if you wanted to start a small business not that long ago, you needed huge amount of startup capital, um, especially if you wanted to be a global business or you wanted to have customers across America or around the world, that was a serious investment. And now lots of people who've got a Tik Tok account and a little shop, they've got customers in 12 countries and you know they're they're they're away. So it is a pretty magical time. The reason I don't give you a clear answer on that is because we got two systems at the moment. We've got something that is the dying industrial age system, which is the system that kind of went from the early 1800s to the 2000s. Um and that was like the system we all kind of grew up in and all of our institutions are based upon. and that system's in decline. And then we've got the uh rising digital age. And that digital age is a new system where you can live and work from anywhere. You can do business anywhere. Um so it has a new set of rules. So the reason I'm not giving you a clear answer is because it depends if you're playing by the old set of rules or the new set of rules. Well, it seems like a lot of people say that they're worse off than their parents are. Is that actually the case or are people just becoming a lot whinier? Well, you are definitely worse off than your parents are if you're in that industrial age system. So, like the the peak of that industrial age system was the late uh 1900s, you know. So, that was the best time ever to have a normal job. Um, you know, everything just kind of worked. It was the latest stage industrial age. Everything was set up, everything was working and nothing had really been disrupted by digital at that point. And now that we're 5 years past co, co was the thing that um accelerated the digital transformation. It meant that everyone suddenly had to work from home and everyone had to figure out technology. You know, businesses had to take their business online. So it really it does come down to if you are someone who has a very similar job to your parents, you're probably worse off than your parents. However, if your parents scratch their head and go, "What the heck is this podcasting thing? What do you mean that you have an Instagram account and you send people to a Shopify account, right? Then you're probably better off than your parents. So like most of my friends who work in the entrepreneurial space and have their own businesses, they earn more in a year than their parents might have earned in their entire career. And you know, they're sitting there saying, "Well, actually, the startup costs were lower than ever. I didn't have to take on VC capital. Uh I can totally live on my own terms and by my own rules." So, it it really is this big distinction between industrial age or digital age. Which which set of rules are you playing by? Old rules or new rules? I love your story. I love your debates. All the content you put out on YouTube. I think it's incredibly informative and you do such a good job at relaying your message. For those that are unfamiliar with you, who are you? Explain yourself in like a minute. And what gives you credibility to talk on this? Sure. So, I'm an entrepreneur. I started my first company when I was 21 years old and it uh grew to be a business that was doing 10.7 million in the first 3 years. Um since then I think I've done seven startups that went 0 to a million in their first 12 months. I've had three businesses go north of 10 million. Um so I'm very much a startup founder. I get involved in starting things. My passion is starting things from scratch. Um today I run a group of seven companies which are a combination of businesses that I've started or bought. Um, and I run an entrepreneur accelerator that's worked with five and a half thousand companies globally that helps them to stand out, scale up, and make a positive impact in the world. And I've written five uh bestselling books on entrepreneurship and and startup culture. So, being someone that's built up so many different multi-million dollar businesses, what opportunities at this exact moment would you say are the hottest? Because I feel like back in the day it was Shopify, drop shipping. I feel like for a moment in time, people wanted to be like day traders and that hype has kind of died down. Yeah. Good. What like even Amazon uh FBA that was a big one. What would you say right now are the main opportunities available? So I want to answer this in three parts. Opportunity one, opportunity two and then how to think about that question. So uh opportunity one is a personal brand linked to an elegant scalable business model. So, if you can build a personal brand, if you can have or if you can find someone who has a personal brand and let's call it, you know, that they have 100,000 plus followers and they've got a good relationship with those followers and then you can link that personal brand to an elegant scalable business model. That is the probably the number one opportunity in the world. And when you see this, you'll see it everywhere. So, like for example, this drink is Chris Williamson and his business partner who are both influencers. They both got big personal brands and they figured out uh we can put a scalable business model on the back of that. Um you see this with J Shetty, you see this with um uh Driver CEO Steven Bartlett. So you're going to start seeing everywhere that the influencers are not taking sponsorships anymore. They're just going to bolt businesses onto their own. They're going to do influence for equity. they're going to basically use their influence uh to generate enough cash flow to live on and then the additional influence goes into building equity value of a business that's scalable. Um and this is going to be a really sensible investable scalable business opportunity for a long time. Now if you don't have a huge brand you can be the one who finds a good business and links it to a personal brand. You can be a partner to someone who is uh has a personal brand. So that's opportunity number one. And that's probably one of the biggest opportunities in the world. Second biggest opportunity is the one Cody Sanchez talks a lot about uh which is taking over a baby boomer business. Baby boomers are aged 61 to 79. They have more than half the economy in their hands. So 52% of all value is in the hands of a small group of people who are 61 to 79. They have something like 70% of all business equity. Um so businesses by valuation mostly are owned by baby boomers. But they're at that stage of life where they don't want to be running those businesses anymore. They want to pass them down. And there is a demand and supply imbalance of the number of people who want to pass over a business versus who they can pass that business to. And that represents a huge opportunity for younger people. Um like one of the coolest things you could do, I was talking to some young guys the other day. they're going to be buying a landscape gardening business and the business is in decline. It has been in decline for about four or five years and it still does more than seven figures of revenue, but it's in decline. And as soon as they just went and did some testing where they knocked on a few doors, what we did is got them to take an iPad, you go uh take a photo of the front uh of the house, you ask Chat GBT to show what this house would look like fully landscaped, go up to the front door and say, "Hey, we've done a rendering of your house, what it would look like fully landscaped." And people go, "Wow, that's incredible." Chad GBT's renderings, especially for like interior design, are incredible. Yeah. Their ability, if you just say, "Hey, make it like this style." You don't even know what the proper nomenclature is, like words for a certain style. You just tell, "Oh, I want it a little bit more elegant, a little bit more hard angles and stuff like" and it makes crazy renderings. Yeah, it it's wild. And it's free. Like these are the types of things that used to cost maybe a few hundred and take a few weeks. So there was no way you could possibly go doortodoor showing people what the house would look like. Anyway, that's an example where the baby boomer is not going to do that. They don't have the energy for it. They're not they're not in that phase of life. But a younger person who takes over that business, vendor financed, they they buy the business with the previous owner financing them into the deal. Then they apply some technology, they apply some energy, and away they go. They've got that. Do you think this is something the average person can do though like with now that we can access you know cheaper labor in all these different countries and we have a global network and you have access to things like Chad GBT that it's then decreased the bar in terms of like skill necessary for being a successful entrepreneur because the common argument against this is that not everyone can be an entrepreneur like there's certain skills and and maybe personality traits and character traits that are ne necessary in order to be an effective I not everyone can be an entrepreneur. Not everyone should be an entrepreneur. Um, with that said, everyone can be part of an entrepreneurial team and you're going to have a lot more fun being part of an entrepreneurial team than being part of a big corporate. So, if you have an experience, I think you had an experience of going into an investment bank when you were young and they just shoved you in a corner. Data entry. Yeah. Got you doing and you like just tried to say hello to the boss and he's like, "You're not allowed to say hello to me directly." Or the manager, the chain of command. Yeah. The shame of command, right? you know, you are not allowed to talk to the boss right directly like that's the kind of nonsense that people put up with in corporate jobs. Um, so you know if you had have worked for an amazing founder with less than 10 12 other people on the team. So like not everyone can or should be an entrepreneur but there are um you can be part of entrepreneurial teams. Uh the you know entrepreneurship is a team sport. One role on the team is captain of the team, founder, you know, that that sort of thing. But there are plenty of other roles. Like in my entrepreneurial team, you know, I've got a CFO and a COO uh and a C chief revenue officer. I've got like people on my team who are earning a lot of money. They've got equity ownership in the businesses. I might have started those businesses, but they are part owners in those businesses and they're earning a lot of money and getting a lot of uh value from it. So you don't have to like if you think being an entrepreneur means um that you are a founder that you're starting from scratch. Not everyone can or should do that. Who should not be an entrepreneur? Well, you you said the word average. You know, if you're if you've got enough self-awareness to say I'm average at the moment, I'm just an average person. Go join a team with someone who's above average. You know, that's that's totally normal. It's normal to be average. Average is normal, right? So, like we we we all think that we should be in the top 1%. 99% of people can't be in the top 1%, but we can get around those people. Um, you know, you did pretty well if you're on the same team as Michael Jordan back in, you know, back in the day. So, um, I I'm a really big believer that, um, you do an entrepreneur apprenticeship, you do at least two years working around someone. I think you guys met through like almost you were Yeah. Yeah. It was I mean we all kind of had the same story of like you know reaching out to someone who was successful in a space we were interested in provided them with free work uh which a lot of people don't like when we say oh gosh people get so triggered when I say go and work for free go and work for free yeah well there there you go you're going to get some but the counterargument to that is what if I'm supporting a family I got three kids at home I'm barely making ends meet I get I come home at 8 p.m. I can't afford to work for free. And the people who can work for free have all of these uh things working in their favor. For starters, for starters, life's not fair. Like, at no point in human history has it been fair. Just get over that idea that it should be fair and that like here's the thing. You've got three kids. That's not fair. That's amazing. That's an incredible blessing that your family's got that some other people don't have, right? So, count your blessings for what you've got. But with having I'm a father of three kids, there are certain things you just can't do. There are young entrepreneurs who can outperform me because I also have a commitment to drop my kids at school every morning and they're working when I'm dropping the kids at school. That's it. That's fine, right? We all have there's no fairness. There's just trade-offs. Now, what you what you need to do is find a way. So, finding a way might be that 80% of your time you do the stuff that pays the bills and you take on a little bit of uh additional work uh in order to get your foot in the door. All all we're talking about with get all we're talking about with work for free is normally that advice is pitched at young people who don't have much experience to leverage and it's like just get your foot in the door. You're not actually working for free. What you're doing is you're providing your labor in exchange for higher level experience than you could normally get your hands on. So you're there's an exchange going on. It may not be a direct cash exchange, but the exchange is hey I'm going to invite you in above your pay grade, right? And you're going to you're going to be in an environment where you get to jump up. I have got a dozen 12 uh ex employees who are now millionaires because they came and worked uh for me and around me and they did two to three or four years working for me and then they went off and did their own business or they took over their family business and now they're multi-millionaires. My exass assistant took over his father's business that was 500 grand a year and it's now 5 million a year. um two young guys who were on my sales team. Um they met on the sales team, they came up with their idea on the sales team. They uh left, they started a business and they sold it for $7 million. So, you know, and these guys are early 20s. So, you know, realistically, if you want to work in close proximity with me, like a lot of people would pay a lot of money to do that. So, it's like paying for college. Yeah. Exactly. So, yeah. People go, "Oh, you can't work for free." But you can go to college and get into debt, right? See, it's so funny. I said the same thing uh with Caleb Hammer and he had one of his employees with him and his employee was talking about how much he was making and I said I thought that was great that he's getting paid for this because people would pay Caleb for that same job and people got so upset that here I am advocating for free labor. But at the same time, I'm thinking like when you look objectively at the opportunity that that what Caleb is doing and how much that's valuable to somebody else who wants to do that. I mean like people should like his value I think is worth like 80 grand just to pay Caleb just to see how his team works. But look at I mean just look at anyone who's a high performer. They you know they ate glass for several years in one form or another. you know, Ed Sheeran busking on the streets day after day after day while writing his songs, getting his performance skills. You get the comedians who do like years of like little tiny clubs and then they get their breakthrough. Um, so it's just it's just a way to accelerate. And by the way, you don't have to do that. It just takes longer. Like working for free is just an accelerant. So all we're talking about is do you want to accelerate the time that it takes? It's no different to this. When I first arrived in London 2006, I arrived with a suitcase and a credit card. And I don't know anyone. I've never been above the equator in my life. Born in Australia, moving to London for the first time. Um, and I thought, okay, I want to accelerate the time that it takes to be successful in this city. So, I rented a private dining room at a nice restaurant for 30 people. I reached out and found the who's who in the business scene that I was uh entering and I invited them to a a private dinner. And there was 28 people who came along. They mostly came to see each other. So I kind of reached out and said, "Hey, look, I'm coordinating. This is the guest list. These are the people who I'm inviting." And they, "Oh, okay. I'll go because so and so is there." So I brought together this group of 28 people. Um, I pay for dinner. I I put the whole thing up. During the dinner, I stand up and I say, "Hey, look, I'm Daniel. I've just arrived. I'm I'm young. I'm 25. I've just arrived uh from Australia. Uh, it's my first time in in London. Uh, I'm looking to start a business. Um, ideally I'd love to have a one-to-one meeting with you. I've just joined a a great little members club for business. Uh, if you're happy to have a meeting with me, I'm going to head around and make a time. So, I go around and I book 24 oneto ons. Uh, we I then do in the following two weeks, I do 24 oneto ones. And out of all of it, I I think I agreed 20 joint venture affiliate partnerships where they were going to email their email list uh and help promote my launch event. day of launch event, 800 uh bookings come in for our first launch event. Uh I think a total was about 3 or 4 thousand across the rest of the week. Um in our first 6 months, we did 4 million pounds worth of sales. Now 5% of businesses in the UK get to a million or more ever. I did4 million worth of sales in our first 6 months. Now why why did we do that? Cuz I accelerated. I I said, "For the cost of putting on a dinner party and buying 30 people dinner, for the cost of buying cups of coffee and and creating a deal, oh, by the way, the deal for them to get involved with my launch was also I'm going to run a launch event. The launch event is going to have a ticket price and 200% of the ticket price goes to you as an affiliate commission." So, the ticket price was like 30 and I said, "We pay 60." So, for every person who pays 30, we'll pay you 60. How'd you afford to do that? Were you just was there upselles at the event that you just tanked on? I just Well, we just knew that we were going to we were going to sign up clients. So, I I set it up from the beginning that when we've signed up all those clients, we'll owe you the the commissions. Um but we will owe you that amount of money. Um I just I just built a little system and and executed. But what do you think you had at, you know, in in your early 20s that the average person now in their early 20s doesn't have? Because most people probably look at themselves like, I'm either broke or I'm in college debt and I'm struggling to get by. You probably were somewhat in the same circumstance, but you still had the ability to make something of it. What differentiated you from the What differentiated me is uh two years working for a mentor. So, I worked for this guy uh called John from 19 to 21. Um and here's the super lucky thing. Of course, with everything going on with the economy these days, you have to ask yourself, what does the future hold for business? Because if you ask nine different experts, you're going to get 10 different answers from a bull market to bare market. Things are going up, interest rates are going down. Be very helpful to have a crystal ball at this point. But until that happens, over 41,000 businesses have already futureproofed their business. 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Thank you so much Netsweet for sponsoring this podcast. And now let's get back to the episode. So I worked for this guy uh called John from 19 to 21. Um and here's the super lucky thing. Uh I dropped out of university. I at university I was running nightclub parties and I was the cool entrepreneur who was running the nightclub parties and I was really frustrated that university was not teaching me anything about actual business and none of the lecturers had done any business themselves. They're all academics. So I decided on a whim that I'm not going back. I I quit after year 1. And I go to work for this guy uh who was doing a startup and it was a disaster. Like it was just a total shitow. And then I asked around my friendship group and my family group, is there anyone else who knows someone who's starting a new business? I want to be part of a startup. And my dad through a friend said, "Hey, we've this this guy called John. He previously has had successful businesses, marketing agencies, and and these sorts of businesses. He's doing a startup. Do you want to go and uh he he's willing to have a half an hour meeting with you if you want to come and join his team?" So, I go and knock on the door and it's the best house I've ever been in. like it's the first time I'd ever set foot in a beautiful designer like special house with a big door and all of this sort of stuff. And I I walk in and I'm like I'm not leaving until I I get the job with this guy. We ended up talking for 3 hours and it was clear that there was really good mentor chemistry there. He was 37, I was 19 and he um he you know we just vibed and basically he said you can come and join my team. I'm going to give you all sorts of jobs. You're going to be my shadow. Um, and for two years I shadowed him around. Uh, I did sales, lots of sales. I did lots of marketing meetings. I did hiring and firing and all this sort of stuff. So I got two years working for John. We went from zero startup to 6 million in the first year. Um, we went from working out of his kitchen to 60 people in an office uh, in year two. So I got the experience of what that was like to At what point did you start accepting salary from him? Uh, at no point. So I had I was commission only uh so commissiononly sales cuz that was his he basically said you've got no skills yet. Um but he said you can be a commission only salesperson. He said but on top of commissiononly selling I'm going to give you all these other jobs cuz my pitch to him was I want to be an entrepreneur like you. I want to learn from you. He's like okay so you're going to I'm going to teach you a lot but you're going to do commission only selling and then when you've got any spare time you're going to do all this other stuff that I need you to do as well. and he was an amazing mentor by the way. What would you say are like the key things that you took away from him that then allowed you to go and build these several different businesses. Lesson number one, everything is downstream from lead generation. Lead generation is like your primary first mover. You need people's attention. You need to know who they are. You need to know that these people are interested. So any business that I start, I start with lead generation. Um and that I got from John very early days. So, if I was to launch a new business, let's say I was going to launch a a podcast studio, and um I'm thinking I'm going to have like an actual space, a physical space. People can rent it and all that sort of stuff, right? This I'm just thinking cuz we're in a podcast. I'm not going to buy any equipment. I'm not going to lease a space. I'm not going to do anything that costs money. All I'm going to do is launch what's called a waiting list campaign. And that waiting list campaign is basically we're launching a studio in Las Vegas. Um it's for anyone who wants to have a podcast. you want to do more than 10 episodes a year. If that's you, register for the waiting list, answer five questions. Um, and uh, and then we'll get back to you when we're ready to launch. If I can get 150 people to join the waiting list, then I'm going to progress to round two, like as in the second thing we'll do. But, um, ultimately, I'm not going to advance that idea if I can't generate leads. So, what most people do is they do it the other way around. They they try and spend 100 grand setting up a podcast studio and then see if they can get people to book in. And I'm like, "No, no, no. We don't spend anything unless we know we've got the bookings." So, I'm looking for lead generation first. So, that the first thing that John taught me is everything is downstream from lead generation. You have to be amazing at lead generation if you want to be in business. Yeah. One thing I really liked, you had a great debate with Gary's economics, a diary of a CEO got quite heated at some times. And what's interesting is that it seemed like on YouTube a lot of people or at least the top comments agreed with Gary, but on Twitter, yeah, everyone was agreeing with you. And I saw the stark difference between where people were hang hanging out and congregating online in terms of like which belief they they aligned with. But for those who haven't seen it, Gary argued that the system is rigged and the average young person is getting poorer while you argued for entrepreneurship and fewer barriers. What do you think he got most wrong in his view on how to fix inequality? I think his solution for inequality may have worked 50 years ago, maybe 60, 70 years ago, because we lived in a world back then where the wealthiest people had physical locations. They had physical businesses. Um, you know, if you were wealthy uh 60, 70 years ago, the 1950s, you probably owned a factory or an office. you had people in that office and there was no way you were going to run that remotely. Like it was impossible that you could move to Dubai and have a remote, you know, business. So you could overt tax people. It was very very difficult for people to just throw their toys out the pram and leave and and and be fine about it. The the issue that Gary's not taking into consideration now is that the rules have fundamentally shifted. Uh I go to a gym in London and I asked my uh my trainer who owns this gym. Oh, it's an Australian guy. I'm like, oh yeah, like is he around here? He's like, no, he lives in Australia. And it's like, well, oh, how how does he run this gym in London? Oh, he just like via Zoom. He's got a manager and he runs it remotely. Um, so you can have almost any business that you just run remotely now that you can you can be anywhere in the world. So the issue that Gary, he's not considering second and third order consequences. So you you ramp up taxes on on wealth and and all of that. And of course, it's kind of like imagine if I said to you, look, winning tennis is pretty easy. All you have to do is just serve the ball really hard and and ace, you know, just ace them. And if you keep doing that, well then, you know, you'll win all the points. You say, "Yeah, but you're up against Roger Federer. He knows how to return the serve. Like he knows what to do next." Um, so it's like ramp up the taxes on the rich and wealthy entrepreneurs and they go like, "Oh, okay. This is no longer an attractive country. I'll just move my company somewhere that is attractive to to do it." In the UK, 1% of people pay 30% of taxes. 10% of people pay 60% of the taxes. So, you don't need many people to leave in order to crash the economy. Why do you think there's so much inequality though? Because you hear people saying that the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer. Now, that is the question. And that is the question Gary should be asking. His answer for why is there inequality is because inequality creates inequality. So that's it's a circular reasoning. There's inequality because there is inequality and the inequality gets worse because of the inequality. The reason for inequality all inequality is an advantage, right? Think about it just logically. If there's inequality in a sports team, one sports team has an advantage, right? So what is it? Maybe this team's taller. Maybe this team's been training harder. Maybe this team is a rookie team versus a professional team. Whatever it is, there's always an advantage. So the question is what's the advantage? Like what is what is the advantage right now? The biggest advantage is technology. And technology creates inequality. And a simple example would be if we all were up against each other in a marathon race and I've got a bicycle and you guys are running on foot. We don't have to think too hard about who's going to win, right? my technological advantage. If I have a piece of technology that I can leverage and you're not leveraging that same technology, if I read the rule book and it said you can either run or cycle and you guys go, well, it's historically it's always been running, so I'm going to do it the traditional way of putting on my laces and running with my running shoes. I'm like, well, the rules changed. You can use a bicycle now. In fact, you can use a car. I'm going to use a car, right? So, I do my 26 miles in a car enjoying the air conditioning and and texting at the same time. You guys are running your asses off, sweating it out. And it's like, well, there's a massive inequality in our finishing times because I leveraged technology and you didn't leverage technology. Yeah. So, technology is the advantage. The reason that society is dividing in two is because especially AI. AI has two superpowers. Superpower number one is the ability to get you to uh consume way more than you thought. You go on Tik Tok thinking, "Oh yeah, I'll just have a little look at Tik Tok for 10 minutes." 2 hours later, you're still scrolling. That's technology. That's that's an algorithm. That's AI that did that to you. It hacked your attention. Uh you know, when you've got a cat and there's a laser pointer and the laser pointer looks like a something to attack and the the cat goes running after it. It's primitive brain can't keep up with the fact that there's this thing called a laser pointer. We are now that cat chasing dopamine through these scrolling mechanisms. Plenty of people now have 6 7 hours a day on their screen. So the AI is doing that to us. It's creating hyper consumers. So half the population or more than half the population is going down the hyper consumption route. And then the second piece of superpower for AI is hyper creator. So if you're using AI to create stuff, you're creating all these things with the support of AI. Um now you can do superhuman work. So there are people in my circle, I bet you guys as well, where I say, "Oh, what are you working on at the moment?" They're like, "Oh, I've got a book on the go. I'm organizing a conference. We're doing a retreat for this. We're launching a SAS product. Um, I've got a team of 10 people who are working on this and I've got some people in the Philippines who are like outsourcing to this and blah blah blah." And you're like, "Wow, how are you doing this with like just a small dynamic little team?" It's like, well, we use a lot of tech. You know, we got an amazing tech stack. So these people are using technology to their advantage. These people are using are being used by technology to their disadvantage. And that is the fundamental wedge. This is the bifocation of society and soc and it's going to get so much worse by 2030. Isn't this just going to continue like you said just getting worse and worse and worse, making it harder for the average person to compete? Because the way I see it is that maybe 50 years ago you had every local economy served by those few businesses. And so it was easy to kind of spread things around where people could earn a pretty good living being in one town serving that town, but now you're competing against Amazon and one big giant retailer who's able to undercut everything and then they just keep getting bigger and it's like how do you compete against something that big? And isn't this just going to continue getting worse? The penalty for being average has never been so severe, but the payoff for being great has never been so high. Now, are you familiar with uh a a a distribution called a bell curve? And the opposite of a bell curve is a power law. So, the industrial revolution moved everything to an even distribution on a bell curve where essentially everyone's life fit within a nice little average bell curve distribution. Um, most doctors aren't the same as all other doctors. Most even around the 1950s and 1960s, blue collar workers earned pretty much the same as white collar workers like it was a mar it might have been 10 or 20% difference but it was mostly the same neighborhoods and the same people and all of that sort of stuff. So everything had moved towards this bell curve. Digital technology moves everything onto a power law. So in the world of dating 1% of daters do 90% of the people who want to date them. Um, yeah, Jack. Jack, it's Jack's fault, right? Um, he's lying about his uh he's lying about all of his stats here. He's got his photoshopped pictures on online. Um, and so, so what happens with power laws is you get something like the 1% that does at least 30%. Um, and technology moves everything from a bell curve to a power law. Um, so it really does uh do this. Now, there are a new set of rules that will allow you to build your own mini power law where you can carve out a micro niche um that you can build a brand within that micro niche. Um, and you can actually have your own little power law where you're the king of that power law. Um, you know, that that does exist. The the biggest thing I keep coming back to in this is that there's the old set of rules and the new set of rules. The old set of rules worked really well. So, prior to 2000, the benefits of being average were were huge. Probably the best in human history in all of human history. It was the best time to be average. Just an average person did well. You had an you got if you were average, you got a house, you got a car, you got a holiday, you didn't have to take on lots of debt, you got education, you got rising wages, income security, retirement security, healthcare. Like, all of it was packaged up for the middle of the bell curve. And all they've said is just play by the rules and you'll get all of this stuff and the middle of the bell curves there. After 2000, we move slowly and slowly and then rapidly towards this power law. People like, "Hey, I'm playing by the rules. I'm like I'm I'm a good average person, right?" And it's like, "Yeah, the penalty for being average is now severe. Um, you you can't be average." I'm not saying this is right. I'm not saying this is the way, right? You're just it's you're saying it's how it is. I'm just observing what is like I can only play the cards that I've been dealt. If I could wave a magic wand and go back to 1999, I'd say fantastic. Like, let's let's freeze in time. Let's have that economy, um, let's get rid of everyone's smartphone. You can all have a Nokia 3210. Um, you know, and we'll take away social media or whatever. That would probably be good for most people, but I can only play the cards we're dealt. Let's play devil's advocate for a second in that debate between you and Gary. his main points, if you were to argue how they are correct, what would you say? Well, for starters, um, his identification of the problem is bang on. Um, he he's raising the alarm on the problem and he should be raising the alarm on the problem because most politicians still think that it's 1960 as well, right? So, all the politicians are caught in the past. He's raising a red flag and saying, "Hey, there's a huge problem and it's getting worse." However, if you look at something called the clinical method, which is how doctors and how the medical industry works, there is the problem, there is what's causing the problem, and then there is the treatment plan that's appropriate for those causes. Gary just is stuck on the problem. And the annoying thing is is we all agree like everyone can everyone can see the problem. That's not the you know, pointing at a fire doesn't make you a firefighter. It just says, "Okay, you notice that the building's on fire. That's great. Screaming about it. Okay, good. we we all understand the building is on fire. Um so Gary's what he does really really well is he brings attention to the fact that there is a big problem that a lot of people who are playing by the rules are not getting ahead so a big section of society the rug is being pulled from under them. So that that's that's um fantastic. Where I worry is that he's jumping from being ex extremely good at articulating the problem to then just going ah the solution is this. And what most people who are watching him are doing is they're going oh because he's so good at articulating the problem he must have a really good solution. And those things are not necessarily correlated. Sometimes people are good at understanding the problem but they don't identify the cause or the right treatment plan. So you actually have to have that all three of those things in the chain in order to fix something. You have to problem, cause, and treatment. It seems like he's really emphasizing the victim mindset, though, and getting people hooked on this emotional feeling like it is impossible for me. The system is rigged against me. I am the underdog and therefore I should be outraged and there's nothing I could do about it, but I got to follow Gary. Like, by the way, I get it. Like, it sucks. It really sucks. Um, we went to a we all went to a schooling system and the schooling system taught us how to be and how to behave and like gave us a set of rules and now if you play by those rules you don't get ahead. Um, and that really does suck. Um, and it feels like we've now the other the other interesting thing too is that when I was growing up, you had almost no visibility as to what the lives of a wealthy person looked like. like you knew that maybe they had a Rolls-Royce or maybe that they had a Ferrari. You you kind of drove past big houses and you might have wondered wonder what the people who live in those houses do, right? But you didn't really have a lot of visibility into that. Today, you open your phone and it's just, you know, this guy's got a new Lamborghini and, you know, she's now hanging out in Thailand having an amazing holiday um and and living in, you know, living the dream. And you go through and you're scrolling through and you're going, "Gee, my life really sucks. I'm on the wrong side of this. And obviously it's amplified by social media, this discontent. Um, so I get the outrage, but outrage doesn't solve anything. Like you can either wait, here's here's the choices you've got. You can either wait for the entire economic system of the world to change and to go hyper socialist, perfectly redistribute the wealth, not crash the economy like it does every single other time they implement socialism. Or you can say, "Hey, guess what? The rules have changed. Some people know those rules. I can learn from those people. I can play by those rules. I've got to throw away some of the stuff that I learned in the past. I got to join an entrepreneurial team, learn from a new mentor, right? Go through a bit of a process. The like, it's not like the money has disappeared off the planet. The money is there. Like, we have money on this planet. Um, it's just that it's not flowing down the same rivers that it used to flow down. Got to go and find the new rivers. 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All of our viewers need to do is go and buy Dan's book, become an entrepreneur, and become a millionaire. It's that easy. Why weren't you guys doing it to begin with? They're idiots. The viewers are idiots. They should be just being more entrepreneurial. It's as simple as that. More entrepreneurial. Start a business. Listen, I come from East London, okay? My friends can't feed their kids, okay? And if it was as simple as going out and being an entrepreneur, I can bet you they would do it. I can bet you they would do it. Let us I'm I'm sick of multi-millionaires telling kids who can't afford to turn the heating on, you just need to be more entrepreneurial. It's sick, Dan. It's sick. But I This gives people mental illness. It gives people mental illness. Tell them the truth. Okay? We, your older generation, we took the opportunities and now it is almost impossible to get out of poverty. And don't just don't just stand up and wave, you know, your millions of pounds in front of them and say, "If you were entrepreneurial like me, you could do it. You could have it." Because it's sick. Because they can't they can't feed their kids down. They can't turn the heating on. Don't tell them to be more entrepreneurial. Fix the system that drives more and more and more of them into poverty every generation. I find it very strange. I've got a bit of trauma from from being around Gary. Yeah. Gary gives me uh anxiety. I could see almost a recoil. Yeah. That gives you depression. Yeah. That particular point. What's the question? Or did you just want to trigger me? No, I just wanted to hear like what would be your Well, I mean, he he says at the end, fix the system. How how do you want to fix the system? Because when you ask him, how do you want to fix the system? He says, subscribe to my YouTube channel and I'll tell you what to do in the future. That's what he said at the end of the debate. Um, so he's just screaming, "I'm sick of it." You know, and everyone's like, "Oh, yeah. I'm sick of it, too. We need to fix the system." Okay, what what do you want to do? So, one of his main solutions is wealth taxes. So, there's so many problems with wealth taxes. They've been tried 15 times across Europe. They got rolled back 11 times. And these are like socialist countries that rolled them back cuz they just don't work. They cause a wealth exodus. It's it's impossible to quantify what is wealth cuz on any given day, markets fluctuate up and down. People then take evasive action to fluctuate the value of their assets down. Um, could I get credits because my portfolio always goes down? Yeah, you could, right? No, under Gary's law, you can't. Probably not under Gary's law. Oh, okay. You should be able to, but not under Gary just looks at you and says, "You look too rich. We're going to take what you've got." Right. He He's very clear about just wanting to punish the rich for being rich. Look, every time these kind of socialist ideas I I've got lots of friends who grew up in Eastern Europe, uh where they where they tried all of these redistribution um methods and they tried wealth taxes and they tried super high taxes and like it crashed their economy. A great example is Poland. Like Poland was one of the poorest countries under socialism in the whole of Europe and now after 40 50 years of capitalism, it's one of the wealthiest. Like it's it's the fastest growing. Poland is the out of all of Europe, Poland is the one country that is sticking most closely to capitalist principles and their economy is booming. Uh so free markets like what sucks is that socialism sounds like a really great idea but it delivers horrific results. Capitalism sounds like a horrific idea and it actually delivers amazing results. So we have this issue where you know Gary's like screaming, "Fix the system, Dan. Just fix the system." Okay. What do you want to do? What do you like what do you want to do? Because ultimately what he's describing is I mean the the UK government has already uh done high taxes and it's been a disaster. Like we we found out this week that we've collected 15 billion less than we were expecting for the last uh period I think 90 days. So 15 billion of taxes wiped out because high taxes equals high high tax rates equal lower taxes collected. It's funny. It's funny you mentioned that in Los Angeles they just enacted a measure called ULA which is basically a mansion tax. Any property over $5 million in the city or county of Los Angeles subject to this additional tax of 5%. So if it's $4.9 million no tax. If it's $5 million a $1 extra is a 5% tax on that. They thought that it would raise all this extra revenue that they could then put towards the homeless problem of Los Angeles. After a year of going through this, they raised substantially less revenue even though they had a higher tax on this property simply because people said, "I'm not going to sell." Yeah. Or I'm not going to pay it or I'm going to structure my property differently so that it sells under the $5 million amount. And so maybe it's worth 5.2, but I'm going to sell it for $4.9 and then throw in the furniture for that extra little bit. And those are two separate transactions or genuinely the market just moves down like the the buyers won't pay over 5 million themselves. So everything's shifted downwards and those 5.1 properties are worth 4.8 and also people have choice. So plenty I bet well I know that plenty of people have moved out of California and they've come here to Vegas. That's what we've done, you know. Um Joe Rogan I mean how much did it just cost California to lose Joe Rogan? Um you know tens of millions. Um Elon has moved his head office out uh to Texas. So I mean these are the high-profile examples, but there's thousands of these happening every month where smaller businesses I mean and also accounting firms, they go and set you up in Delaware. You might live in California, but your company is over in a different place, you know? So like it's very easy to say, "Oh, it's easy to win tennis. Just slam the ball as hard as you can and ace the other player." Okay, but you're up against the Roger Federers of the world. They can return the serve. They have they know how to they play tennis too. So whatever the government comes up with remembering this the brightest people don't work for government. The dumbest laziest people work for government. So the smartest hardest working people don't work for government. So the idiots come up with rules and then the smart people go oh well this is just how we get around those rules. I liked your advice though when your response to Gary and you said if I heard your advice when I was younger I never would have started. I would have been so discouraged by what you have to say that I wouldn't have even even tried and I wouldn't be here today. And I agree with you. When I was younger, I would look to other people. Tim Ferrris was was a huge inspiration with his book, The 4Hour Work, and his example of a guy in Malibu making $60,000 a month and being able to drive his Lamborghini down PCH. And I remember reading this like 18, 17 years old. Makes a big difference. It just just thinking that that's possible. Yeah. just open the opportunity that now I think wow if this guy could do it I could do it too. It's interesting. It was I think it was a couple of your like how I make x amount per month on YouTube videos that for me motivated me to be like okay well like you know if this guy can do it I feel like I could get involved too and I could start making money. And it's funny because now he can't make those videos because people were like you're just bragging. you're just the amount of comments on those videos that were positive where people were like, I couldn't believe you could make this on YouTube and it's inspired me to start my own business to get on YouTube to make a brand for myself. Can't make them anymore. Yeah, it's it worked up until a certain degree and then beyond a certain point you hit a critical mass. Yeah, it's it's either that I can't provide new value because everything is exactly the same and there's nothing new I could say about it or it becomes an amount that just becomes unattainable or unrelatable to people and then it just almost serves the exact opposite intention as I as I meant for it. Yeah. Look, young men are pretty simple creatures. We need to have a pathway to get ahead. And I think a lot of people are angry because the traditional pathways just aren't working. And I I like I get that. Um, the problem with Gary and I, we were talking past each other, there was parts where we're talking about the system and then we're talking about the impact of that on personal individuals and because of the emotions were running hot and a lot of a lot of curiosity had evaporated out of the room at that point, you know, like the best conversations are where everyone is at the table with a spirit of curiosity. Let's see if we can come together cuz like an amazing conversation would have been Gary, you've got a great point. Um, let's brainstorm how we could fix like you want to fix the system. let's talk about it like and let's put all options on the table. Um, hey Dan, you've got a good point that wealthy people can just get up and leave. Let's think about how we could potentially, you know, fix the system in some way. So, um, and also let's look at the underlying cause. The the underlying cause is technology. You've got to keep that in mind. The the reason this is all happening is we we all used to live in walled gardens, like special little walled gardens. So, a town was a walled garden. it was very very unlikely that someone in Las Vegas had to compete with someone in Los Angeles or had to compete with someone in the Philippines or had to compete with a tech product in Silicon Valley. Um, right up until like even 2010 that was probably not happening. But today, if you're setting up a business, a traditional business, it's very likely that there is a uh remote working solution, that there is a interstate solution, that there is a tech solution. So we pulled out the walls of the walled garden. We basically said everyone here is in competition with everyone there because by the way in the last 20 years incomes have exploded in the developing world. You know you go to uh southern parts of you know Bangalore or southern India like they've gone from uh maybe 20 $30 a day to 105 an hour um in you know in a fairly short space of time. Same as the Philippines. the Philippines economy is growing at 6 7 8% per year um and money is pouring into those places because of technology has made remote working um a a viable option. So if you imagine that the bathtub like has a big divider in the middle and this half's full and this half's like you know empty if you pull that divider out it's going to equalize. Same sort of thing. If you have uh a protected class of people in the USA and uh the developing world or technology over here and you pull the divider out, it's this one's going to go down and this one's going to come up. So you're saying that divider in that analogy would be technology. But technology No, the divider is geography, right? Geography kept everyone separate, but the thing that pulls the divider out the thing that pulled it out is technology, right? So that's kind of the solution that causes this fision between like those who are successful and those who are not successful. But technology is still somewhat of an external variable. Like if you were to draw this to a more internal approach, what would you say is the main variable that differentiates between those who are successful and those who are not? Would it be motivation problem, a knowledge problem? Let me start right at the beginning. Okay. So, first thing you want to do is you want to work for a company that has less than 10 employees and you get to work with the founder. This is if you want, by the way, this is if you want to go on that journey. I'm not saying everyone should or can, but this is if you want to do this. So rule number one is get yourself around a mentor. So you have to get find yourself a job with a company that has less than 12 people. There's a founder. Um they have regular team meetings. You get firsthand contact with the founder. You're in an environment where you can see what's going on. The problem with big companies is they just put you over here. They isolate you. You have no idea how things actually work inside a company of less than 12 people. You actually get to see this is how we make sales. This is how much we spend on ads. This is how we h deal with customer complaints. This is how we keep customers happy. So all that stuff is visible to you. So you're going to learn a lot. There's three things that you're trying to build. You're trying to build self-awareness. So you learn about yourself. Commercial awareness. You learn about what makes money and access to resources. You know where to get stuff. You know how to get technology. You know how to raise money if you need it. You know how to um run ad campaigns if you want to run ad campaigns. You know how to do a joint venture deal. Right? So self-awareness, commercial awareness, and um access to resources. So you're trying to do that through work. The purpose of work now is to get those three things. That's why you go to work for those three things. Once you've got those three things, you then want to do little mini side hustles that are open and shut within 90 days. So side hustles with 90-day open and shut windows. So, what you might do is say, uh, I'm going to, um, uh, I'm going to run a, a nightclub party, right? Or I'm going to, uh, sell 500 hoodies on on Etsy, or I'm going to, um, uh, take on three clients who I can provide a service to. I'm going to do a setup service, right? So, you're going to come up with little mini little mini projects to see what works and what doesn't work. So, for me personally, at my at my time when I was 18, uh I was selling roses doortodoor. Um and I would buy the roses for 40 cents and sell them for $4. Um that was one little side hustle. I did um underage nightclub parties. So, we did nightclub parties for 14 to 17 year olds and that was amazing. Um uh I I did all the usual stuff like car washes and garage sales and all of those kind of things. So whatever it is, you're trying to come up with a 90-day experiment for you to actually see how you do uh in that space. So So you've identified it basically as a knowledge issue. If people had the proper knowledge, then they would be successful. Yeah. So there's there's self-awareness, which is understanding your own strengths and weaknesses, understanding your skills, understanding uh whether you're an A player, a B player, or a C player yet. Right. So there's that. There's commercial skills or commercial awareness and commercial skills so that your ability to execute things and the res you need those three. You can't just have two out of three or one out of three. You have to have those three things. How much of success is luck versus skill? A lot of it's luck. A lot of it's luck. Um but luck is here in Vegas. We know that next to the word luck, you've got something called the odds, right? So you've got luck and you've got odds of luck happening. So if we go to certain casino games, we know that like for example a black or a red at the um roulette wheel is almost 50/50. It's slightly off 50/50 because of the double green things, right? So that's called the odds. So even though success is largely about luck, there are things that you do to rapidly increase the odds. So you can go from a 1 in50 chance to a 1 in two chance through certain behaviors. So what we like luck is definitely going to play a role in everybody's success but you can change the odds dramatically change the odds. So for example sitting at home watching Netflix uh decreases your chances of any luck happening. There's very little luck that happens around watching Netflix. Going out and networking with a group of entrepreneurs who are having like a meetup uh massively increases the odds of luck. Um, having a mentor who's super successful already rapidly increases the chances of luck happening. Um, reading books about how business works, listening to podcasts, watching videos, this is going to dramatically increase the amount of luck uh that that happens in your life. So, I can't guarantee that everything goes perfectly. It's not like a 100% guarantee, but I can definitely say that you go from like very very low odds to quite high odds through behavior. Do you think people are lacking in common sense? Because a lot of what you say seems to be common sense, like go and do these things. Don't sit at home and watch Netflix. The the the issue with um the issue with common sense is you got to remember we went to a schooling system that was architected in the 1800s about 1850 was when the schooling system really um kicked in. Um and it was built around uh industrialized workforce. So the people who built the work uh built the schooling system, they were trying to solve a problem which was we need factory workers. We don't have enough factory workers. We need people who can come straight out of this environment and go to a factory environment. Prior to the schooling system, we used to do apprenticeships with our parents or our parents' friends. So it was very normal that you went to a church group um and you kind of got the ABCs around Sunday school and church group and all that sort of stuff. There was something called dame schooling which also happened around churches. So you got the very basics but then you just pretty much as soon as you were about 13 14 you apprenticed. So you went and apprenticed uh working for you know whoever your parents knew or your parents or whoever they knew and you you did these apprenticeships and it was very entrepreneurial. Most people had access to small businesses or family businesses or all that sort of stuff. So that's how it was up until 1850. They wanted to break our spirit and install start on a bell, finish on a bell, don't talk back, do what you're told. Don't don't team up, right? A big theme in school is don't form teams, right? So, they do not want you like when you take a test, you don't take the test with your three best friends and like you work on, hey, do you know the answer to this? No. But in real life, of course, you do this with three best friends, you know, like you form teams. So what happens is people go off and they try and do everything on their own rather than building a little team together. Um you know in school if you get a if you get a bad grade for maths they say you need to work on your maths right you got to work on that weakness. In real life you just get the CFO to do the maths and you go and work on your strengths. So you don't fix your weaknesses you double down on your strengths in the real world. um in the real world if you are a disruptor or an attention seeker then they put you on the front cover of Inc magazine but in school if you're a disruptor or an attention seeker they punish you for it. So there's all these things where these are natural behaviors that are very successful behaviors that you get punished for in school and then you get out into the real world and say hey why isn't all this working like why why why do I feel mismatched to the economy? Um, and that's what's that's kind of what's happened. I have two completely random off-topic questions, but I have to ask cuz I keep like thinking about it, so we need to address it. Has anyone ever told you you look like Leonardo DiCaprio? I I've heard Leonardo DiCaprio. I've heard weirdly like I don't know if it's this angle. It's like a little bit the hair. It's like the nose like I get I get fat Justin Timberlake. Okay. And Zalinski. Zalinski. That's funny. So if Justin Timberlake I think all of them together. Zalinski. Yeah. Yeah. And then also, why do people from the UK call it maths? They pluralize its like I've I've always heard that and I've just never listen, we invented English. You have to catch up with what we say. I'll tell you a fun thing about English about the American. You know how you guys have zeds instead of s's for like enterprise and um all the all the words that end in uh we we do with an S. Zed. Yeah. You guys have a zed instead of an S. Um Z. Yeah. A Z. A Z instead of an S. uh the there was a massive wave of German immigrants. There were more German immigrants to the USA than English uh immigrants and it was the zeds the z's uh that came from Germany. So that's that's a little bit of the the Germans came in and said we're going to do that with z. I had no idea. Yeah. So what role should the government play in all of this? Because it sounds like I was the same way. I thought school was a huge waste of time. I didn't want to apply any energy towards it. I didn't like we actually uh I went to a kindergarten briefly and they pulled me out of the kindergarten. My parents did. Was this recently? Because they should have pulled you out of the kindergarten. Just just like the other week in kindergarten. Yeah. You're not meant to be there. Uh but they wanted everyone to line up on a line to go to like the break and I didn't want to stand on the line and they uh kept telling me to get in the line and I didn't want to stand. You're not going to be a good factory worker, right? But that ended up being an issue that I was sent to like the principal's office. They wouldn't stand on the line and my parents saw the issue in that and took me out of that kindergarten and put me in a different one that was just like, you know, the opposite of we don't want you to conform. And that little moment probably for formative for where you are today. I'm sure it did. But what role should the government play in all of this? So we need to prepare people people for the world that we're now going in. So there's definitely a change that is needed in the role of education. So let let's start with that one. The the old world of education is this long arc that you're going to do 15 years in education, then that ends. Then you're going to do about 25 years working for a manager, 10 years being a manager, 5 years being a leader, and then you're going to do 15 years of retirement, then die. That's that's the long arc that they want you to go on. That's that's the kind of the business model of of production of people from the industrial age. If we think about what's coming, it's going to be very high velocity economy with multiple projects going at any given time and it's going to be notice a problem or notice an issue. Uh get together with one or two other people to discuss and research it, come up with a minimum viable solution, test it, see if it scales, scale up the team, scale up the tech, exit it, uh either make enough money to never work again or uh go on to the next problem and and solve another problem. But if you imagine high velocity loops in in our career is going to be made up of lots of loops and included in those loops is rapid learning and upskilling for the loop and then moving on with something else. So in this little loop I might need to learn the skills of public speaking because that's what's required in that one. In the next loop I might need to learn some technology skills. So we need to have an education system that acknowledges that it's going to be lifelong learning, lifelong problem solving, high velocity, multi like plural things on the go at any given time. Um you look at people who are doing well right now, they got five or six things on the go. They have multiple businesses. They might be writing a book. They might be doing a podcast. Um they might uh you know be uh a a supplier to one business and they might have another business themselves. So they're what they're doing is they're executing on a high velocity uh you know these little loops. So we need to study what are the dynamics of those fast high velocity uh business or um career cycles and train people for those fast cycles and say that this is your career is actually just going to be in some projects you'll be the leader and in some projects you'll be the supporter. Um and that's fine, right? You might have two of those projects going at once where you're leading one and supporting on another, but that's we we need an education system that prepares people for the world that we're going into. So that's definitely something that government uh should do. The main thing most governments need to do at the moment is actually step back and see what breaks and see what happens. Um because all of our systems and institutions were built for a time that's come to an end, the industrial age. And now we need to see what actually works and what doesn't work. So, for example, you needed to regulate, you know, that you know in the USA it costs like 40 or 50 grand to have a hair salon license or something like this. Um, it's like this crazy like just to cut hair. And that was probably before Google uh star reviews like Google reviews. Now, you don't need to regulate hair salons. Google reviews regulates hair salons. No one's going to go to a a hair salon that has two star average reviews, right? So, you have like we have other systems that actually perform that function in society pretty pretty rapidly. I have a question for you. 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And now, let's get back to the episode. So, what about taxes? because that was a big part of your debate with Gary. You were proposing lower taxes if anything encourage business owners and it's one of the reasons we moved to Nevada was because of low taxes. They were very pro business. And uh fun thing, but when I made that video saying that I'm leaving Los Angeles, uh I actually got an email from someone at the city council who was on like the business board thanking me for moving and said, "We we're so happy to have you. If there's anything we could do, please reach out. We're here." Like I loved that. I couldn't believe it. LA, they'd say, "Well, if you want to do this, you have to register for this additional T." Like, I'm paying this 1% business tax to the city of LA for for no reason at all. It's just and and just every year and now look and now they've cut off their nose to spite their face because we all come to uh Vegas to come and see you and your businesses run from here and you know, so so much of what they're missing out on. um you what we have to do is what's called going back to first principles and going back to first principles is asking the question what should a government be there for like what's what's its purpose um and there are different answers to that question so um you know like the USA has traditionally said that the government there is to ensure uh individual's rights and it's all about freedoms and the the rights of the individual and the rights to for people to for better or for worse to have a free way of living right so the the founding founding fathers. They tried to create a system of government that said that you are primarily an individual with agency and that you may screw up your own life and that's on you but the government our job is to limit the powers of government so that you can screw up your life if you want to or you can do well but that's that's your life you get to do it. In other parts of the world, they say the purpose of government is to make sure that we look after anyone who can't look after themselves and that the like the government is there to have collective responsibility over the people. You're going to have less individual rights um but the government is going to provide more for you and all that sort of stuff. So the first thing is you have to go to first principles and say what do we want our government to be um like what is the role of government? What's the and we need to ask basic questions like what is what is an economy for like is an economy for becoming successful? is an economy for getting needs met, is an economy for preventing poverty, like what is it that we we're trying to do? Then you go back to best practices like what experiments have been run and how do you apply the knowledge of those experiments? Um, and you got to re you kind of got to rebuild it from the ground up because we've had such a fundamental shift because of technology. This this technology thing is not a small thing. This is a like the last time this happened was the agricultural age where everyone worked in farming. 90% of people worked in farming and then there was this one day where two guys rocked up with a tractor and they went and in 2 days they plowed the whole field. 97 people stood there and went, "Hey, wait a second. That used to take us 2 months and these guys just did it with a tractor in two days. What are we all going to do?" the the the minute that tractor plowed the very first field, that was a turning point. That was a moment where life would never be the same again. You will as soon as that tractor works, we know that 97% of people in farming are out of a job and it's only a matter of time. The clock is now ticking. So that's where we had to create a new economy with new rules called the industrial age. So we went from the agricultural age into the industrial age. Um we went from a feudal system and a colonial system. uh into an industrialized modern system that we we know as soon as the very first AI writes a contract, we know that the legal profession is going to be profoundly impacted. As soon as the very first AI um does a better job at diagnosing a than a general practitioner, a doctor, we know that we have fundamental these are tractor moments and we've had hundreds of tractor moments that have just happened in the last 5 years. As soon as the average individual person can outsource and have an assistant in the Philippines, holy smokes, right? That should that should send tingles down most people. It's like, wo. Okay. So, are you saying that the bookkeeper, the accountant, uh the sorry, the bookkeeper, the personal assistant, um all of these roles that used to be in an office, these can now be in the Philippines at a fraction of the cost and just as good. Okay, that fundamentally changes the economy. So, we've had all these moments where technology has made things available and we've got to say we got to rebuild the economy with that in mind. Where do you think is the best place in the world to start a business? Um, so at the moment, uh, depends. There's two types of businesses that you want. You either want a lifestyle business or a performance business. A lifestyle business is a business that's going to be typically between 1 and 5 million of revenue. It's going to have high six figure, maybe low seven figure uh profit. Um it's built around fun, freedom, flexibility. Um you know, it's going to be you it's going to be like a dream lifestyle business. It's going to look good on Instagram. Um and that's going to be a lifestyle business. A performance business is one that you intend to sell. So you're working backwards from exit. You're going to try and get tens of millions of revenue, seven figure, maybe even eight figures of profit, and you're going to try and sell that for a life-changing amount of money. So it really you have to work out are you trying to build a business that is built for exit or you build a business that's built for Instagram, right? And uh lifestyle or performance and then pick your pick your spot there. The USA is still a phenomenal place. There's enormous amounts of money here, technology and support. If you're building a performance business, USA is the leading ecosystem in the world, but it may not be the leading ecosystem for lifestyle businesses. If you're doing a lifestyle business, where would you go? What about Dubai? Places like Dubai is amazing. Um, you know, well, it's difficult for you as an American citizen cuz you get taxed globally anyway, but for for British people, we don't get t if we leave the country, so many people are leaving because the way to the number one way to avoid taxes in the UK is to just leave the country. Um, so, uh, how does that work, by the way? Like, do you go to Dubai, make millions of dollars? Can you just come back to London, let's just say, and spend it? It depends. Oh, you can definitely come back and spend it, but you have to spend less than 90 days in the country or else you're deemed to be a tax resident in back in. Yeah. But let's say let's just say hypothetically you spend 5 years in Dubai. You make $20 million and then you come back to London. Are you good? A lot of people Yeah. You've you've paid taxes on on that amount of money which is not zero. You've paid your zero and now you're bringing money into the country. Uh so you're you're now coming into you're basically coming into the country as an as an external tax resident coming into it. Why doesn't the United States do this? Aren't they the only country in the world that does this? I think there might be two or three countries, but you're the main country that that does this. Uh you ring ring fence the population. I think it's historically because you had such a big economy um that you didn't and and s you had such a disparity between the wealth of the United States and the rest of the world that someone figured out I think it was Clinton actually who implemented this. It was like in the late '9s. It was Bill Clinton who came up with the idea of we're going to do uh exit taxes and we're also going to do worldwide income taxes because I think he saw the writing on the wall wall that people could just leave the USA, be slightly outside of the USA and make all their money in the USA but live abroad. Yeah. Speaking of all that, what are your thoughts on tariffs? Yeah, I mean there's not a lot of things economists agree on, but most economists agree that trade wars are not good and tariffs are not good. um unless they have like some really specific purpose like um like if you really for a strategic reason want a particular thing to be manufactured inside your borders but broad blanket tariffs um I mean that's you know it's kind of like imagine the economy is a very delicate machine um like it's a very delicate like watch or something like that and pieces pieces putting in people tweak and tweak and tweak putting a like massive tariffs on everything that is Like that's like just hitting it with a baseball bat and seeing what happens. Um, do you think we're on the brink of maybe a recession or like some sort of financial apocalypse? It could be. Great question. Uh, that's going to go in the trailer for this video, isn't it? Um, unfortunately, unfortunately, what Trump wants to have happen is probably not going to have happen. Like, it's very unlikely that manufacturing jobs are coming back to the USA. Anyone who brings manufacturing back to the USA, have you heard of the concept of a dark factory? No. Dark factory is essentially a factory that requires no workers other than some engineers who work on computers to manage the robots. So, it's called a dark factory because they can theoretically just manufacture everything in the dark. M um so you know there I think there is a pair of there's a company that makes jeans like Levis's jeans type thing and it's something like hundreds of thousands of pairs of jeans that it produces and it has like 12 employees cuz it just does everything from from that principle. It's just totally fully autonomous. There's a steel plant uh in the USA that used to employ 30,000 people and produce 5 million tons of steel uh and now does 8 millions of tons of steel but with 2,000 people. Wow. Right. So like the the so that is examples of like manufacturing that didn't leave. It stayed here but just doesn't need that many people anymore. So the idea that you can erect tariffs and then suddenly all these jobs come back. It's highly unlikely. It's very unlikely that the USA is ever going to be gluing shoes together and doing that at a great like s suddenly there's going to be this amazing boom for Americans to glue the Nike soul onto the thing like that that that strikes me as that's not going to happen. So what do you think is the outcome to this? Because I have a hard time people seem way too optimistic and I'm just from what I'm reading online it just doesn't seem like it's going to be easily solvable anytime soon. Yeah. Uh I think that each individual listening to this needs to say there is you you have to stop thinking that the government's there to make your life better. Governments don't make your life better. Governments can make your life worse. Um governments can sometimes be a good fail safe to stop really bad things from happening. So like you know in my in the UK we have emergency health cover and health health care that is paid for by government. It's not great, but it certainly saves a lot of people from going bankrupt due to health issues like you guys have in in this country. So, the government can do things that um make bad situations less bad, but they're not there to make your life better. They they can be they can be a safety net, but like they're not here to make your life better. You you need to you need to do what you can to make your own life better. You need to stop wanting the system to reward average and just say I have to become extraordinary. I've got to become better. Um, you know, like I know not everyone can do that, but unfortunately that is the world we're in right now. You got to be part of a team that's going places. So, how do you think a recession would impact entrepreneurs? For those who are playing by the industrial revolution rules, it's going to be devastating. Um, and for those who are playing by the uh digital rules, it's going to be just fine. So like for example, one thing that doesn't have tariffs on it is services and the clue is in the name software as a service. So SAS businesses from overseas can trade in here and Brit uh UK uh USA SAS businesses can trade across borders as well. So software as a service is like one of these things that just you know e easily done. Um and you know everyone's looking to get more software to run more efficiently. Um so you know your type of business podcasts in times of disruption people listen to more podcasts. Um they want more uh coaching and consulting. Uh you know the other thing too is that your business there's really no reason why you couldn't create a product for people living in Dubai and people who are living uh in you know um Switzerland and people who are living all over the world. You can you could you know the funny thing is is that when I ask people how much do you want to earn for the year and most people say something like 500,000 to 5 million I go okay let's break that down into how many customers you need paying how much and it never turns out to be a big number like a lot of people it's like oh I need 1 1500 customers who pay 50 bucks a month or something like that like that's not going to be hard if you build the right product you can have 1 1500 customers who pay 50 50 bucks a month there's 1.8 8 billion English speakers online. Um there's 70% of the world's population has fast internet. Every single country in the world now has an affluent base. There's someone there. There like go to Vietnam now. There are there are very affluent areas of Vietnam. There are very affluent area like you know Singapore, Hong Kong, Bali like there are rich people everywhere now. So if you essentially said, oh, like my whole mission is really just to figure out how much I want to earn, create a product, launch the product, make sure that it can be available for anyone anywhere in the world. Uh it solves a problem. Um doesn't matter where you are, you can you can buy the product. Like I can I run through a few of my products I've launched. So I've I launched Score App, which is it's a software that creates software um quizzes and assessments and waiting lists. Uh, so it's a software product. Um, online diagnostics, online surveys, online quizzes, uh, and waiting lists and mini courses. So, it's a really cool little piece of technology. Um, we've got, uh, at the moment over 8,000 paying customers, 120,000 free accounts. Um, and they are in 150 countries. Um, super successful business getting up there to be worth close to $100 million as a business. um like that like we launched that 5 years ago from scratch with no VC. Um then I've got bookmagic.ai. So that's an AI wrapper that helps people to write their book. So it uses our intellectual property as to how to write a book and publish a book. Combines it with chatgbt and creates essentially like a coaching program for you to get your ideas out and helps you with analogies and research and all that sort of stuff. It's still you writing, but it's supporting that process. So we launched that a year ago. Um, it's currently growing 8% month-on-month compounding. Um, so it's like just going like that at the moment. Um, so bookmagic.ai, um, we're about to launch awards app, which is, um, uh, an AI that supports you to win awards. So if you've got a business and you want to win some awards, it tells you every awards ceremony in the world that is relevant for your business, what the categories are, it shows you examples of who won it in the past and how their, you know, what what their application would have looked like. Um, it then helps you using AI to answer the key questions that the judge is looking for. Um, so we're about to launch that one. Um, so yeah, ultimately like, you know, I'm finding it incredibly easy to just spin out little products and services that scale globally. Uh, very rapidly. They they start making 20, 30, 40 grand a month. Um, you know, the bigger ones more like 7 800 grand a month. Like the world we're living in, AI is disrupting everything. It's cheaper and easier than to than ever to create software. Um, a team of 10 people with AI built in, take over, you know, you got the opportunity to disrupt old industries like so so much opportunity, but you just got to move towards that opportunity. Now, what about actually applying that though and using that towards practical things in your life like owning a home which right now is out of reach for a lot of people. How do you think that impacts everything? Do you think there is a solution to just housing prices going through the roof? Is it even worth it to buy a home anymore? Well, this that's a really great question. That's a really great question. There's an emotional thing about wanting to own a home, but with all the taxes and the prices of homes, especially the the closing costs and buying and selling costs, you got to ask yourself the question, is it worth me uh wanting to own a home? And you may even ask that question like, do I even want to like be so wedded to a particular location? Because if if one of your ancestors from a 100 years ago came came in a time machine to today and they looked at our lives and they said, "Wow, these cameras, this equipment, these microphones, what what the heck is YouTube? What the heck is Instagram? What's Tik Tok all about?" And they're looking at all this amazing stuff. The thing that they would be completely uninspired by is houses and how much you get for your money. They'd be like, "H, like they're the same houses we lived in. These are boring houses. There's you guys haven't really done much with houses. This is like most of these houses look the same as our houses. Um, you know, they're not floating or doing anything. And and they're super expensive." And then they might ask the question, why would you want to be pinned down to one location? Because if a government gets a little grabby, don't you just want to hand back the keys and go somewhere else. So like for sure like do that. Once again, I'm not saying this is right. I'm just saying here's how to play the cards that you're dealt. The way to play the cards that you're dealt is that you do a couple of things. You build businesses that become wildly profitable first. So you build profitable businesses or you get part of a business team. And if you're going to get into real estate, you get properties that you can rent out to people and you can become a landlord first. And then there comes a moment where you can either close out those properties and then buy yourself a family home or you can close out one of the businesses and buy a family home. The majority of people who can actually buy a family home right now, they either a start with being a landlord first even though they're renting their own house um or b they're running a successful business and then through closing those things out they can then buy a big family home, you know, and a lot of people pay cash, you know, so like you can sell your company for for quite a lot of money and then buy buy the big house if you want to from there. Um, but with that said, and I know I'm going to get so much hate in the comments. Like, I'm aware that this really triggers people cuz it's an emotional thing about owning a home. I'm not saying this is right. I'm saying these are the cards that were dealt. So, the upside of this is that it's never been cheaper to rent amazing houses. Um, and you know, you you you you enjoy living there, and if things change, you just say, "Here's the keys. I'm going to go live in Costa Rica." Or, "Here's here's the keys. is I'm going to go a different state. That's what I think right now. A lot of people reach out to me and they say, "Hey, I'm thinking about buying this house." And I'd really do my best to try to talk them out of it. Like I think that could backfire if in 30 years from now that home is worth 10x. And I was like, "Oh man." But in the short term over the next few years, it's so much cheaper to rent. Like I'm looking at the cost of buying and the house might be like six grand a month and the taxes. But I'm like, "Yeah." Or I was you could you could rent the exact same house down the street for 3,000 a month and just save the difference. The other thing too is our lives change uh in in really big ways. So like our grandparents lives didn't change massively across 40 years, but if you go to today, you're probably in your early 20s going to want share accommodation with friends um where you all live together in a cool place together, then you might uh form a relationship and you want to have like a cool trendy flat that you live with in a cool area and it's like a two-bedroom flat with you and your your girlfriend or whatever. Um, then you might break up and, you know, go back to share accommodation. Then you could get another flat again with another, you know, fiance this time. And then you live in this really cool inner city location. Then you have your first child. So you want to live a little bit out and have a three-bedroom house. And then you might have another child and you say, "Okay, now I want a four-bedroom house." And then you might have another child and you want a 5-bedroom house, let's say. And then maybe you get an amazing job opportunity or business opportunity into state. So you go, "Hey, you know what? time to go to Austin, Texas, you know, because that's where that's where the opportunity is. So, our lives are very different to our grandparents lives. So, one of the best things you may benefit from is just having the flexibility where you're not just hanging on to this house all the time. Now, with that said, you can then if you want to own property, if you want to be in the real estate game, it's very easy to buy properties that you don't live in because the reason they give you the loan is based on the rent, you know. So, when you buy a house you're going to live in, they want the deposit and they want to know how much you earn from a job. When you buy a house that you're going to rent out, they want the deposit and they want to know what the average rental value is of that property. So, because the house is generating its own mechanism for paying the bills, you know, you're you're buying a house that comes with an income stream. So, you know, it's kind of easier to say, "Oh, okay. I'll buy a one-bedroom inner city apartment that's that needs fixing up. I'll fix it up and um and now I'm going to uh rent that out. You know the problem though these days is that it's so expensive to buy that you're renting at a loss and you're competing against the other person who bought their home at a 3% mortgage and has a really low tax basis and really low overhead. So they could charge just above that just to break even because they they just want something easy versus the person who buys today is going to have a payment that's 50% higher and they have to charge higher but they can't compete. M people with 3% mortgages. I agree with you. It kind of sucks. It kind of sucks. Look, you're also up against people like myself who I just park money in real estate in terms of like I have no expectation of it providing a return. It's just a good place to stay above inflation. Why not do treasuries or why not park it Bitcoin or something? You can do do all of those things, you know? So like you can have some treasuries and you can have some like a you know if if you end up in a place where you get a liquidity event like you sell a company You're probably going to have S&P 500. You might have some treasuries if you're older and you need the security. You might have some houses for emotional reasons. So, a lot of people I know they want to have like a house uh or a couple of houses as like fallback positions if the worst should happen or or for their kids. Maybe they have three kids. They they say, "I'm going to have I'm going to have three kids. So, if I when if I die, each child will get an apartment to live in or or something like that." So, you know, once you hit that category, you have a diversified portfolio. What are your thoughts on the US economy? Do you think that it's possible that the US dollar could lose its dominance? Let's start with the strengths of the US. There's some fundamental strengths that are hard to ne negotiate. The US has the most amazing geography. If you're China, you have 14 land borders with other countries. So, if you go and try like go this way, it's the Philippines. Up here, it's Japan. It's here, it's Korea. Over here, it's Vietnam. Over here, it's Russia. That's Mongolia. So, India, right? Tibet, right? So, you've got all of these countries and you've got historical grievances with 14 different countries and all of them are [ __ ] scared of you and have militarized borders, all this sort of stuff. So, China for all of their strengths cannot get out of that little ring fence because they got 14 land borders. You know, the USA has got massive ocean on the left, massive ocean on the right, friendly neighbor up north, manageable situation, one one border that's manageable. Um, and that's it. Like that's that's the USA. You also have energy security and food security. So, if all things go to custard, you can make enough food and enough energy to run your country independently without importing a thing. Now, if you go to China, 40% of their calories are imported. Most of their energy is imported. And all of the energy imports have to come by boat through an island chain. And at any point around India, Malaysia, Indonesia, at any of those points, if you were to somehow stop those boats, that's it. Lights go off. Um so geography is one of the things that uh the USA just has hugely like it's impossible to overstate how much of an advantage that is that is the ultimate advantage on any other country. Do you have any predictions for like the US economy? You think that like I said that it could ever lose its its dominance with the US dollar? I'm a really big believer that you should focus on what you can control and ignore big things like this for most people. So when you focus on the economy, see your brain can only adopt so many pro projects at any given time. One of the easiest ways to totally derail your own personal success is to worry about things that are above your pay grade. So you you need to play the cards that you've you're dealt. If you um if you are sitting there worrying about the economy, it sets up a dynamic of worrying about something that you have no strings to pull. you have nothing to do with the economy. It's this massive boogeyman, this huge complex system. Like there are there are really good arguments for the economy going like this. There are really good arguments for the economy going like this. And what you have to do is say all of that is irrelevant. It's my job to create my own personal freedom. It's my job to create my own uh success. What are my strengths? What are my weaknesses? What are my opportunities? Where is the best place for me to be? um and block out the news, block out Twitter, block out all of that stuff. Spend time developing your own strategy, right? Because in any economy, any economy, there are successful businesses and unsuccessful businesses. Even if the like if the economy were to completely tank, there will still be a restaurant that has a lineup out the front and that restaurant's making profit. There will be a business coach who's got 12 business coaching clients and they're making a million dollars a year cuz they got 12 clients who pay 100 grand a year. There will be a lawn care business that that is the best lawn care business and it's making 400 grand a year. There will be someone who goes and buys up all these businesses out of bankruptcy and they will say, "Oh my goodness, the the economy collapsing was the biggest thing that in my life. This changed my whole family's life. We're generationally wealthy because of that thing that happened." What are the main things that distract you right now? And how do you eliminate those? So the human brain, it's fun to think about the brain. I don't know if this is true or not, but it's fun to think about the brain in three levels. There's reptile mode, there's autopilot mode, and there's visionary mode. So, reptile mode is fight, flight, freeze, freak out, right? So, it's the worst of you. Um, throw tantrums, uh, raise your voice, get angry. It's that base level emotion. And you know what it's like to be reptile. Like, think back to the last time you had a reptile moment. Would you say has them anytime someone cuts in front of him? Okay, I don't really care about that so much. His reptile moment is is like getting cut off, right? So, in that moment, do you think you gain IQ or lose IQ points? Right. Of course, you lose IQ points. That explains a lot. Yeah. And you say stuff that you have to apologize for later and you you you know, you're a it's not your best self. So, reptile mode is a very real thing and it shortcuts every other part of the brain and you have a 10-minute reptile mode moment. Um, autopilot is repeat the past. There's a big part of the brain that just says, "If I walk down this path yesterday and there were bananas, then tomorrow I'm going to wake up and walk down that path and get the bananas again and I'm just going to keep doing it and eventually I don't even know why I'm walking down that path. I just walk down that path every day." Right? So, this is the autopilot mode. Um, where you're not really thinking, you're just like you're just allowing momentum to to to capture you. Then there's visionary mode. And visionary mode is where you get a big picture. It's often in the shower or the bath. It's often when you're driving. It's often when you're traveling, when you're on a plane, when you're on holiday, and you start to think, "Why don't I call that person and like see if we could do a deal together?" Or, "Hey, wait a second. So and so talked about like sponsoring something. We could get a sponsorship deal going." Or, "Hey, I know someone who's amazingly talented. They could join the team. Why haven't I asked them to join the team yet?" Right? So, you have those kind of like big picture connect the dot moments. So, all all success comes from being in visionary mode. And what you have to do is the first thing to become way more successful is to recognize am I in reptile, autopilot or visionary mode. Where do I spend my time? So throughout a given week, most people spend most of their time in autopilot and reptile and very little time in visionary. So the reason I say tune out from macro is because all things all things that you can't control force you into reptile mode. You cannot think you because they're outside of your control. All they can do is make you fearful. And fe fear is the thing that robs you of IQ. So you what you want to do here's a couple of ways to get into visionary mode. Go somewhere new that's really high up and you can look at the whole city and you can actually observe the whole city. So go to a high like a physically high place and just sit and journal from a high place. Turn off the phone. Uh stop watching the news. stop like log out of X, log out of the social media, like actually log out of it. Um, and see if you can just give yourself some time. Go for a daily walk but without headphones in. Um, you know, like not listening to anything. Take a notepad and a pen. Like even if you can just leave your phone behind and just allow yourself that time to just think and just dream a little bit. Um, give your brain a challenge before you go to bed at night. So like have a notepad by the side of your bed and write down a question that you want to have the answer to and just say while I'm sleeping I want to be thinking about this in the background and it's incredible like the following morning you come you you get an answer to these things. So um and also be around people who are at the next level. So if you can you know if you've got uh a career that you're unhappy with and you start spending time around people who've got a career they're happy with that's going to put you into possibility mode. If you are doing a million and you hang out with someone who's doing 10 million of revenue, that's going to put you into the mode of possibility. So, you want to do whatever you can to be in visionary mode. What's a business you dislike, even though it's wildly profitable? Uh, I'm not a fan, for me personally, of anything that is like um fastmoving consumer good uh that creates a lot of plastic or waste or um something that is just like it's bad for the bad for the environment. I hate volume based businesses. My my personal thing is I don't like volume businesses for me personally to run. Like uh any business that requires tens of thousands of sales every week in order to stay in business. Like not my favorite. I also like I really want like there's only a narrow set of things that I do like. I like recurring revenue. I like digital assets. Um uh you know I like build it once, scale it. You know get it right once and then you know on board more people. Um, I like things that can be run with teams of 30 people and we can punch well above our weight with a team of 30. Uh, these are the types of things that I I really enjoy. What about side hustles? Are they ever worth it? Sure. But the the when you say worth it, they're worth it to get that self-awareness. They're worth it to get commercial skills. Um, like you know, and do it from a place of fun. Like if it feels like an obligation, probably not. But um you know it's kind of fun to do some side hustles, you know. So like me and my kids, we um you know, we we build a lemonade stand out the front of the house and sell some lemonade. And you know, it's kind of fun to What tricks do you do when you're selling lemonade like that? Oh, you don't need tricks with you know, seven-year-olds. They just dance around and say, "Lemonade, get your lemonade." And everyone everyone comes and uh comes. So why don't you have kids in front of every business just just repping the business try to get customers? Might be illegal. Well, because we're doing it not to make money. We're doing it to learn. Um, but look, side hustles are great. What are you thinking of when you think of side hustles? I think of people doing something that's usually wildly unprofitable that they spend hours and hours and hours on for like 10 bucks. Side hustles are great for learning. So, the idea behind the the the phase one is working for a mentor. Phase two is doing some side hustles just to feel just to feel like what it's like to be um business owner, customer service. Exactly. So, it's just that building your confidence that you can do this. So, if you know that the purpose of this side hustle is not to become a millionaire, it's to actually just lay some foundations of what it's like to be in business and that it's especially open and shut 90 days where it starts and finishes in 90 days. Those are the best side hustles. And then you evaluate what did I learn from this? What are your best ways to come up with ideas in terms of creating a business or how to spot trends for demand for certain things? Okay. So, so a great business is going to come from three angles. So, angle number one is something I'm passionate about. Angle number two is something that solves a problem. Angle number three is something that is people are paying for like there's money involved. So, it's either going to be passion problem or payment or right. Well, great business opportunities are the three converging. So, I'm passionate about this. It solves a problem and the market has has money to spend. they're going to pay. So, what we're trying to do is we we start with any one of those three things. And what we're trying to do is come up with a list of 10 business opportunities that we can then research. The goal, the the goal is not to get stuck on one idea. It's to have 10 ideas and say which one's the best of these 10. Um, and to and to essentially conduct fast and cheap experiments to see which one is going to be the best one. So, what I would love to do is we if I was like doing this with you, we'd come up with 10 ideas and I'd give you a series of like ideas based on passion, payment, or problem. We'd come up with our 10 ideas. Then we'd pick three to test. And what we'd do is we'd launch a landing page and we'd set up a landing page that says, "We're going to be launching a new business that does X, Y, and Zed. It's for this type of person that solves these types of problems." We'd have some images on the page and we'd say, "Join the waiting list um and you will get exclusive access into a WhatsApp group for people in the same situation as you. You'll get some great content um and you'll get a initial discount off the product when it launches. You'll get a launch launch special offer. So, join the waiting list." When you join the waiting list, we're going to have a button that says join waiting list. And then it's going to ask five questions. Which best describes your current situation? which best describes your outcome that you're looking to achieve. What is the top thing that has prevented you from getting this outcome in the past? How much do you want us uh how much are you prepared to spend? And um what else do you want us to know? So those are like the big five questions that that um uh you would ask. Then they join the waiting list and we begin warming that group up. Now my first thing that I want to do for launching any business is I have a minimum threshold of can I get 150 people to join that waiting list and how hard was it to get 150. Now if I've got three opportunities that I'm testing uh it's going to be the case that one gets 50 people, one gets 100 people and one gets 200 people and it's like okay this one with the same amount of effort is four times more people are interested. So the data can then support which opportunity to go for. Yeah. Unknowingly, I did something similar to this that I was telling you about. Um, but I wanted to create this entrepreneur like meetup and I posted on Instagram to see like, hey, any established business owners interested in doing something like this a few times a year. And I just posted that with a Google Sheets so I could get some data on like who's applying cuz I had no idea. And we ended up getting over 2,000 people applying. M. And so we started to top the list with people who uh self-reported and and we loosely verified that were earning more than $10 million a year in revenue or had a business that you could see very clearly like this is doing well. And we just talked to them. call them and we did an hour with basically each person, vetted them and we found like 15 people who are like the best of the best of what they do throughout various fields of like real estate, cryptocurrency, uh various finance industries, SAS businesses, a few had like physical products and it was incredible to to put these people together in a room and to see how they interact and like what excites them and just talk to them on on a deeper level. Yes. Yeah. So, like out of those 35, are you happy to say how much revenue you did off the back of that? Uh, it's it's in the six figures of revenue. Now, in fairness, we we are reinvesting a substantial amount back into the group. Uh, so I'm not really looking at from a profit perspective. There's nothing wrong with profit, but selfishly, I do get to meet people that ordinarily I wouldn't be able to meet and I do these events. You get paid to have your network. So, there's a couple of things I love about that story. Thing number one is that you just launched the waiting list. It's all what you called an expression of interest list. I just wanted Yeah. Proof of So expression of interest. So you didn't like organize anything. You didn't spend anything. You didn't put deposits down for anything. You didn't spend any money. It's just you went to Instagram or you went to LinkedIn and you said, "Hey, I'm thinking of doing this. Give me an expression of interest if you'd be up for this." You got more than 150 people uh who said, "Yes, I'm interested in that." So well over that, obviously 2,000. So it's a they you know, it's a great result. So the first test I call a 150 test. 150 test is can I get more than 150 on a list. The second test I like to do is called a 30 test which is talk to 30 and find out what 30 have to say. So without even knowing this that's funny. That's that like so my method is 150 test 30 test 150 on a list talk to 30 uh and find out specifically what they're looking for. That's interesting you said the 30. We talked to 30 people and we picked of the 30 there was like 15 that we could tell were a good fit. the other 15 weren't quite as like not not the match that we're going for. But what what you also know is that roughly half the people who meet a certain criteria are ready to go ahead. So that also tells you you got another 200 people on the list uh who meet that criteria. So there's another 100 sales. You just pick up the phone and talk to the next 200. If you guys are interested, there is a link in the description where you could apply. Fantastic. There you go. Like it's that isn't it funny? It's like it's that easy, you know? It was also interesting speaking with a lot of these people because above $10 million a year, it seemed like they had a lot different problems that they wanted solved than the person in the the 100k to million price point. Of course, there's there's six figure problems. So, like to break it down, the first six figures comes down to four problems called chaos. Concept, audience, offer, sales. Then the six figure to seven figure journey is about establishing a key person of influence to be the front person of the business. And they have to pitch, publish products, profile, and partnership. So that's the key person of influence problem. After that, we've got the challenge of aligning teams and developing teams, putting in a tech stack, developing assets, right? So there's all of this kind of scalability, building out a product ecosystem, building a team and a culture and a brand. So now this is where business gets a bit tricky. So four things, chaos, next key person of influence, then uh the more grown-up problems after you hit 10 million. Yeah. Um, so you've just broken it down and you've figured that out like effortlessly. A lot of people are going to be crossed and they're going to say, "Oh, easy for you because you've got this whopping big brand. I don't have a brand." What you must do if you don't have a brand is you need to start building a brand but also partnering with someone who already has a brand. Now, it doesn't necessarily have to be someone who's got a million followers, but if you partnered with someone who's got 20,000 followers on on LinkedIn, you could you could replicate a version of that. Um, so the problem with being someone who has tens of thousands of followers is that your time is spread so thin, you're looking for people to come and join your team and partner with you. So like if someone appro like I'm not saying you because you get approached all the time, someone who's like imagine you with 100,000 followers, someone comes to you and says, "Hey, look, I'm prepared to do this whole mastermind thing. I've got um a way of structuring it. I've researched it. Uh here's how we do it. All that's required of you is to do a LinkedIn post and from that LinkedIn post I'll take over and I'll do all the sales calls. I'll put everything in place. Well, it's funny because that's exactly how the idea of this entire group. It's called the index came to be. Someone paid for a consulting call and I almost never do consulting calls, but if someone reaches out with just a good enough just like, "Hey, I want to pick your brain on this topic." And they they check out, I'll do them. And this guy was different. Um his name is Justin. He reached out without any questions. He just said, "I just wanted to chat and just just talk." I was like, "Okay, really?" for 45 minutes. Yeah, sure. And he was asking me questions about like, "What would you do if you had the opportunity? Where do you think your enjoyment is?" Just random questions. And we he asked me if you could do any business right now, what would you want to do? And I told him this this kind of like Meetup networking idea. And he took it to heart and then came back a week later with the whole thing done. It's like, "Hey, we came up with a name. Here's how we could do it. I have like this figured out. All you need to do now is just if you want to test the proof of concept, just post on Instagram." And I was like, "Yeah, I'll I'll just see cuz maybe there's not enough interest in this." And then we could just shut it down right then and there. But it was just from that. So there you go. From one consulting. Yeah. So So you know, people might be listening to you and say, "Well, I can't do what you do, but you can definitely do what Justin did." Mhm. That like awesome. Entrepreneurship's like it's fun. It's so much fun. Yeah. It's It's good. Yeah. Even even this podcast, by the way, with was Jack's idea. So, like Jack came to me in beginning of 2020 with this idea that like, Graham, you should start a podcast because this is a great way for you to connect with your audience. I had no intention of starting a podcast. And Jack said, "All you need to do is show up and give me an hour of your time once a week and I'll take care of everything else." I did the same with bookmagic.ai. that was a team who came to me and approached me with that. Um, awards app was Donna who came to me and approached me with that. Um, score app was my business partner Steve who basically started brainstorming it with me. So, um, like all of these amazing opportunities like people come like the other thing you can do as well is if you want to approach someone very highprofile, you can approach them as a team. So, if you put together three or four people who are an amazing ready to go team, but you're missing that key person of influence who can be the face of it. If you show up with cavalry, if you say, "Hey, look, so and so's got great sales background. So and so's got great finance background. So and so's got great ops background. The three of us are going to build this business with you as the face of it. You're going to earn a ton of money uh just by just by being the face of it." By the way, that was my first my very first business that I launched at 21. That's how I did it. I paid 5% of revenue to a guy who was the face of my business. Um, and myself and three people, we built that into uh we did 1.3 million in the first year and 5% of that went to the guy who was the face of the business cuz he was well known in the industry. And um we paid him I think we paid $5,000 speaking fee once a month. Um and that you know that was obviously about 60 grand and then we paid another 65 grand for 5% of 1.3 million. So, he earned 125,000 in year 1, but we got 1.3 million. And I remember having about 400,000 worth of profit off the back of that after year 1. But all of that was because I'd done a deal with someone who was the face of the business. So, where do you go to get your advice from? I've got some amazing mentors. My mentors now are people who typically have sold businesses for 200 million or more cuz that's kind of my next um mindset. Like that's that's my next milestone. Uh some big big exits. Um, so I'm, you know, I've got mentors who have been in private equity. I've got mentors who have, um, sold tech companies, strategic exits. Uh, I've got some amazing wealth managers who come from the world of wealth management. So, I just kind of crowdsource a group of people who I, you know, regularly meet up with. But I'm a big believer that people are smarter than me. Like, let's let's like business is a team sport. You know, you want to treat it like a team sport. You don't want to try and do everything on your own. What do you think about work life balance versus hustle culture? There's a large population that say you have to work 247 if you want to be successful and a lot of people detest that. Did you have to put in those hours when you were first getting started and do you think that's a sacrifice that needs to be made in order to be exceptional in business? I'm curious. You're you're 26. You've spoken to a lot of successful people. What's your initial take on this? My initial take is that you do need a couple years realistically where you're working some outsized hours. um and making some pretty hard sacrifices. But it also depends on the industry you're in and also your aptitude. Like if you're someone that is just super intelligent and you can leverage things better, then maybe it will require less sacrifice. But you usually need to know like basically top down how your business is going to work, have your hands dipped in every single operational thing, and that all takes just a lot of time for anyone. That's a great answer. Um that was true for me. I almost feel like when you're getting something big going, imagine like this big concrete wheel and in the in the early days, it's so much energy and effort to just get it to move. Um, and it takes it takes 12 14 hours a day to just get that thing to move a few inches. But once it starts to spin, you can just tap it and it will keep spinning. So like for me, my early days, cuz I started in my 20s, early like 21 was my first company. I rolled out of bed in the morning and I worked, I had breakfast, I worked, I had lunch, I worked, I had dinner, I worked, and then I went to bed. And I did that for maybe 10, 12 years. Where I am today is total ridiculous work life balance. As in like I just have fun all the time. And I've got seven different companies and they're all successful and they're doing really well and they're profitable. I can start new things. And because I put that energy to get the flywheel going in the beginning, I can now just go tap tap tap tap. that goes that goes you know someone says oh we we need to solve this problem oh okay I know someone who can solve that problem so I I built a network I built up some skills um I built some momentum and now once that flywheel's spinning it would actually take a lot of effort to slow it down so if you were starting over today and you want to make a million dollars how would you do it well you got to remember that trying to make a million dollars from the existing economy is incredibly hard because the whole economy is not built for that the way to make a million dollars is to bring something into the economy to to to to create something to be creative force to do something to be the organizing force for something new that didn't exist. The two things that I would do is I would uh work really hard to get the valid the data to validate a a good idea and then I would go to investors and I would say um we're going to launch this idea and it's going to be initial seed investment. we're going to raise 500,000 at a 2.5 million valuation. Um, and I would show them the financial forecast. I'd show them the initial data, the the waiting lists, the data that we've collected, and all of that sort of stuff. I might have uh I might go and pitch to 10 investors who each put in 50 grand or 20 investors who put in 25 grand or 50 investors who each put in 10, but I'm going to try and raise that half a million at a maybe 2.5 million valuation. And as soon as that round is done, I'm a millionaire, aren't I? Right? So I'm I'm now worth a million on paper. So like um provided I can go in with that now what I can do with that half a million is I can hire a couple of really good people. We can execute on the plan. Um you know, we can we can grow the thing forward. Uh next next thing we can do is raise 1.5 million at a 10 million valuation. Um I can take a little bit off the table perhaps. There are a lot of people out there that don't have those connections. not in those circles. Can I be brutal? You've got to stop thinking about the worst case scenarios. Like every everyone like if you're always if you're always thinking about but what about the person who's got like they they don't have shoes and they're like they live in a puddle and they eat worms. It's like like you can always make the case that there's someone who just can't do it. Okay, fine. They can't do it. Right? the people who are listening to this podcast, they're going to be sick of like they're going to sit there and say, "But I'm not in a puddle. I don't eat worms. I can I can do this." Like your your people, your listeners are people who are ambitious. They're they're pumped. Like they're ready for it. They're up for it. They're smart. If they're listening to this podcast, they're smart people. We don't necessarily have to take care of everyone. Everyone's got to run their own race. Unfortunately, some people are just not going to make it. Like, I hate to say it, like that's just the truth. So, it's not my problem to fix every single person's thing. Here's what for me personally, I talk to people who want to be entrepreneurs. I talk to people who are entrepreneurs. I talk to people who are already trying stuff. They're reading books. They're listening to podcasts. I wouldn't be I wouldn't be talking to someone in Chicago who lives in a puddle and eats worms and has no shoes. That's that's not my that's not my guy. That's not my person. Like I talk to people like I'm on this podcast because you attract listeners who 8% of them have more than 10 million, right? Like so if you constantly doing this like and the reason I'm being a pain in the ass about this is I see this all the time and it's like oh but what about this person? What about that person? I don't know, right? I can't solve for every single person. Here's what I do know. Here's what I do know. If you get a critical mass of successful entrepreneurs, they're going to lift the whole economy up. Right? So if you let's say that person that person is going to be better off because an entrepreneur who's in their city is growing and that entrepreneur hires a team and that team eat at a cafe and that cafe needs a worker right and suddenly the economy like the economy is moving the economyy's like stuff's happening. I talk to the engine room of the economy. The engine room of the economy creates second order and third order consequences that lifts everybody else up. Am I saying that everybody can be in the engine room? No. Not everyone can be in the engine room. Everyone can benefit from the engine room firing on all cylinders. Does that make sense? Yeah. So, I'm curious though get hate. No. Like the reason why I ask questions like this is not necessarily because I agree or I disagree with like kind of the what I'm inferring by the question. It's just because I feel like a lot of people that are watching are probably wondering that. And so to those that may have an adverse reaction to what you just said, do you have anything to say to them or do you think that it's kind of just it is what it is? Congratulations for listening to the podcast. That's what I'd say. You like you're on a path. Get a job, right? Like you're not going to be an A player from day one. You're not going to be a black belt. You don't walk into a martial arts school and become a black belt on day one. You go and learn from black belts. In fact, you don't even learn from black belts. The black belt teaches the advanced class. The green belt teaches the white belt class. So you, you know, if you know that you're starting out from scratch, you know, it's it's just unrealistic that you're just going to be able to go in and say, "Oh, I listened to one podcast with Daniel and now I want to be a millionaire." No, you're going to get a job first and you're going to work for a small dynamic team. My advice for anyone who's in that situation is work for a company that has less than 10 people because then you're going to learn what goes on. I learned so much working at McDonald's. I worked at McDonald's for a few years and as a 15year-old I'm running a $2 million a year restaurant and like the the store manager was 22 years old and like a bunch of 15 16 year olds we're just like cranking out you know uh 40,000 must have been more than 2 million but we're cranking out like thousands of dollars in lunchtime rushes and we're making food and selling food and doing all this we're following systems and procedures and we're seeing how money gets shared. Like I was there to learn. I went to McDonald's to learn how McDonald's runs. And I did 3 years just learning everything I could about McDonald's. I can still tell you all sorts of things about it. 54 nuggets in a bag. I can tell you how hot the toasters are. This is from 25 years ago. The the training was that good. Um why does it seem like I don't see like 16-year-olds working at McDonald's anymore? Like everyone that I see is like 30, 40 years old. Yeah. I don't I don't know. I don't know. I I don't know here. I haven't been in a McDonald's for a long time. I know that Starbucks spends more money training their staff than on their coffee. Um, so like go work at a Starbucks, but even better, go work for an entrepreneur. Go work in a small business that has less than 10 people so you can learn learn the ropes. We can spend a lot of time talking about how hard it is at at the bottom. The the thing that raises the bottom is the engine room. We need an engine room. So if you're ready to be part of the engine room, that's going to lift everyone up anyway. Also, I hate to be a absolute ass about this. I have a really good friend who's a quadruple amputee and he lost both arms and both legs on one day. Um, and woke up at age 19 as a quadruple amput being a super healthy, fit, amazing like 19-year-old. And then the next day he's got no arms and legs. Um, and he has gone on to get married to a beautiful woman, have kids. He started a a rehabilitation clinic for amputes. He's one of the best in the world. People fly from all over the world to go to his clinics. It's more than seven figures of revenue. He's a best-selling author. He's an international public speaker. Um he is a absolute killer. And every excuse that you can come up with like he just didn't he just didn't accept it. He's just like, "Okay." And he's not from a wealthy family. Like he's not from some family that just said, "Oh, we're gonna pay for everything." He just was sitting there um he was sitting there on the couch watching endless television shows about a few weeks after he got home from hospital and he said this is not going to be a good life. Like I have to make a decision. Like he realized no one's actually going to come and save me. No one's going to come and figure this out for me. If I don't do this I like this is this is on me. Um and he he had this vision where he said it's either the worst thing that's ever happened to me or the best thing that has ever happened to me. And he's cheeky because he says, "I would have been working in a corporate accounting firm like my brothers." His brothers work in like the big corporate accounting firms. He's like, "Now I live the best life ever." He's like, "If I had to choose to get my limbs back, um, but then go and work in that accounting firm, I He's like, I think I would keep keep the ampute." Would you say you're happier having more money? Yeah. Yes. At what point would you say the money kind of has a diminishing return on your happiness? Uh I don't know somewhere like um this I mean these are these these are kind of cheeky questions but uh cuz this will get a lot of hate. I don't know like when you start earning 50,000 to 100,000 a month most things are pretty good in terms of like you can do almost like the economy is not built for people who the the economy is built for people who earn 75 grand a year. So everything's priced for 75 grand a year. Um, so everything is essentially made to be affordable for people who are on normal wages, provided you don't go into super luxury environments that are built for the super rich. In the normal world, if you're earning, you know, half a million to a million a year, like the the world's pretty much your oyster. You can, you know, do all those sorts of things. I don't know. I I haven't hit that point. More money is great. Um, I don't understand all these people who are like, "Boohoo, I'm made made money, but it didn't make me happy." It's like rubbish. it did not make you h happy, right? You removed all the things that that made you unhappy for starters. You might still be left with some things that money can't solve. Money can only solve money problems. Um, but most problems can actually dramatically improve. One thing I will tell you about, I was super happy when I was broke. Um, so I moved out of home. I was living on a concrete like I I took a garage floor, put a carpet on it, put a mattress on top of that. Um, and like so I was 18 years of one week and I was so broke that I would go to the vegetable and butcher shop and ask for the offcut boxes and like do can you what can you give me for a couple of dollars and I'd make that sound like grim last Tuesday make that into a soup and um you know you know like my hobby was walking in nice neighborhoods because like that's all I could afford just walking. Um but at this at one time I was pizza delivery driver bman doortodoor salesperson um running my own nightclub parties uh doing trying to do university like like crazy stuff. Um and doing everything I knew how to do. I was making barely enough money just to like just survive. And I could only really survive on things like canned tuna and pasta. And I learned how to make like uh this canned tuna pasta dish with some like tomato sauce in it. Like horrible stuff, right? But I figured out how to make really cheap food. And um I got a parking ticket and I had to eat just non-stop uh special K breakfast cereal for like a week so that I could afford the parking ticket. Um you know, so I've been there. But the thing I will tell you about myself is I was I was like I was super excited cuz I'm like this is just part of the journey. I'm going to be I'm going to be I'm going to be like flying one day and I'm going to remember what it was like to start at the total bottom. So, you always knew you were going to be rich. I was optimistic. Yeah, I was super optimistic. You had the confidence. Yeah, I I'm also just I'm quite a happy person. See, that's the thing. I mean, I was trying to isolate the one thing that I feel like differentiates a lot of the people that are successful versus are not successful. And it seems like you're coming from the perspective that it's knowledge like they need to go in and get the experience, be with the right circles. I have a feeling that it kind of starts a little bit before that in terms of faith. Like you had the confidence and the faith that if you did the right things that the universe would reward you, but I think a lot of people like they have good aptitude. They're intelligent people, but they just don't think they don't have the confidence that if they do the right things that good things will happen. Yeah, that's probably true. And I'm probably super lucky that I got like, as I say, luck is a big part of it, you know. Um but but it was interesting. It was it's like a dance with luck. You do some stuff and then you get lucky and you do some stuff and you get lucky. So for me, I took this huge risk to put on my first nightclub party when I was 18. And I rented the top nightclub in town and then I approached McDonald's to be the sponsor and I approached the radio station to be the sponsor and they said yes, but I had committed to this venue. And then I run this nightclub party and I think I made I don't know $5 $6,000 in a night and like it was all cash and it was like wow like this is amaz like this was amazing huge and then I ran six of those that year. Um but then because I had done those nightclub parties John took me on as his apprentice. So I when I sat down with John for that first conversation, my my mentor, he only took me on because he'd seen me hustling and creating the nightclub parties. So that luck came from this hustle. So bit of hustle, bit of luck, bit of hustle, bit of luck. Um yeah, I think I think you got to keep like there in my mind there's no choice. You just have to stay positive. You have to have your eye on the prize. The alternative is being miserable and it repels people. Is there anything that you've spent money on that's not worth it? Normally cars and sports cars and things like that are not like it's it's shocking how physical things become extremely like they lose their shine so quickly. Like I remember you know you buy you buy a really nice car um and mind you there are nice cars and then they're really nice cars. You buy a nice car and it becomes like it becomes a daily driver really fast. It becomes like the most normal thing. the the the value relative to the enjoyment drops off a cliff within about 3 to 6 months on on those sorts of things. You know, experiences are always the best. taking family on holidays. Um you know going to nice restaurants. uh you know uh putting together a group of like having a like my wife puts on this amazing um Christmas party every year and like we invite all of our friends from the year and you know bring people around to the house and she has like a jazz band and a magician and you know those kind of things and those experiences you know that that stuff is just such a positive um you know so I'm I think experiences tend to be really great um having a fitness trainer is definitely a win um The negative stuff is all the status orientated stuff. Like the like the status treadmill is such a losers game. Like getting into the whole like I have to have Louis Vuitton everything and then if I'm not seen in Louis Vuitton then I you know um you know it's a disaster or like just being on this treadmill of having to spend six times as much as what it should cost on everything. Like I I don't know. For me personally I've I just haven't found that that is the juice is not worth the squeeze there. What do you think? Yeah, I would say um in terms of things not being worth the money um 100% I think status symbols like that if if you're buying them for that symbol then I don't think it's worth it. I think expensive clothing is really not worth it. Um I think a nice watch is is is actually worth funny enough a lot of the watches are have been gifts. Yeah, believe it or not. I wear them all the time. The watches hold their value and they last a long time. So, actually, I would say that they are they're not not they don't necessarily the things that drop precipitously in value like clothing, cars, you know, those things tend to be plus a watch will get the right kind of attention whereas like a Gucci depends on the watch. Yeah, it depends the watch. Um, going into debt for stuff really like I I know in the US there's a much bigger culture around just going to debt for stuff. Um I I I find personally I just don't really like being on a debt treadmill um for something it better be worth it. What's your advice to broke people? Um I think environment dictates performance that get around an environment where people are succeeding. Um you know you want to be around an environment where being disciplined around money and earning and success is the norm. Um, when I was in my 20s, I got dragged along to Latin Jive dance classes and I felt so embarrassed. I thought like what like who goes to dance classes? And I I just thought that's so like counter to my identity and I just didn't think this was a good thing. But as soon as I was around this group of people who go dancing, suddenly dancing was the most normal thing in the world. I ended up doing it for 3 years and becoming quite good. And I remember just this idea of environment dictates performance. When you get in the environment, it becomes normal to do different things that you didn't think you would do previously. So when you're in an environment where everyone around you is saving, investing, starting businesses, growing businesses, um having conversations about trends and uh performance and teams and all of those kinds of things, it just im immediately kind of just levels you up. So like like do whatever you can to either virtually be in that environment which means you have a content diet that supports you know growth like listening to these podcasts and that sort of stuff. Um and then an actual physical environment where you hang out with people and you can be the one to put that together. So you can reach out to some people and say hey I want to put together like a monthly catchup where we get together and just talk life, liberty and strategy and happiness and all of those kinds of things. Do you want to come along? Do you want to be part of it? You know, so try and you can even create a little environment like that. What is something you wish more people asked you? I think a lot of people think I know this one's very specific. A lot of people think that creating a software company is um is really difficult and it's become a lot easier. And um I AI is going to have a profound impact on society. I mean, one of the things I love talking about at the moment is just like getting into what is the profound what what are the second third order consequences of AI. Um, I I think AI we as soon as the tractor plowed the first field, we were in a different environment. As soon as AI generated the first text that made sense, we're in a very different world. Um I I really genuinely believe we are now living in a post AI world and it's just there are now going to be second and third order consequences and like essentially what are those second and third order consequences? That's a very big discussion but like that that's where my head I spend a lot of time thinking about that. What about Bitcoin? What are your thoughts? I I wrestle with Bitcoin. I totally love the idea of it and hate the idea of it. I um I I hate that it doesn't have have fundamentals. Um and also I understand the value of it not having fundamentals. Like when I buy Nike stock, I know that Nike is making shoes that people wear and I kind of re makes me feel reassured that there's a fundamental reason why this like this company makes this amount of shoes and this amount of profit and this like so there feels like a very good reason to own that asset. Um Bitcoin is more buyers than sellers. like it has its value because it's a brand and I understand that in this new digital economy being a brand has a value um you know an accepted being an accepted brand um does actually have a value but um uh you know as a student of history there are times in the past where things seemed like such a really good idea until they weren't like you know there there have been crashes things things that were once considered like so for example uh you know the East India Company went down the the Dutch tulip mania um you know and it's one of these things where it totally makes sense until suddenly the the this consensus on it flips and then when that consensus flips if there's nothing holding it up so I like I hold Bitcoin and I have Bitcoin but it's it's still something I'm not if I'm perfectly honest I still get spidey senses about it just just because of Like what's the fundamental? We're going to go on to some rapidfire questions. Are rich people greedier than normal people? No, because most of the rich people I know, they're constantly thinking about how do they add value? Add value. Add value. The conversation is constantly how do I add value? And it's and it's a mindset of what are the problems that need solving in the world? How do I solve those problems? If I ask someone, think of an amount of money that Let me do this for you. Let me see how you go with this activity. I want you to think of an amount of money that if I can give you that amount of money, right? You'll be happy, right? All of your needs will be met. Um, but I don't want you to be greedy. So, pick an amount of money that's not greedy where all of your needs get met next year. 2026, give me that amount. So, that would be my net worth if I had No, no, this will be your income next. Next year, how much do you want? All of my needs are met. I would say like 250 grand. 250 grand. Okay, great. So, that's a really greedy number because all you've thought about is your own personal circle and your own personal circumstances. A less greedy number would be a billion because if you said with a billion I can buy a rainforest. I can help homeless people. I can help extended members of my family. Um so if you said that my personal needs I have a need to make a big impact in the world like if you if you said my my core driving need is to make impact then 250 grand is not going to make impact it's just going to look after your own little world. So the smaller the number the more greedy by definition you're only thinking about yourself right now that's an interesting perspective. Yeah. Now, someone who's got a family would definitely say a bigger number because they're thinking, "Well, my needs are to provide for my kids and my family." And someone who's got a close extended family might say, "Actually, I'm going to pick 1.5 million so I can help my parents and my sister." And and then someone who's like community-minded would say, "I'm going to pick a bigger number so I can help my community." So, it's greedy to want less and it's not greedy to want more. I would And the main thing like because a lot of people have their needs met with less than 250 grand. The reason why I said that is because one need of mine is to like be incredibly ambitious. And if I'm not solving for that for that ambition, then you're still thinking about yourself. Yeah, I know. That's that's 100%. Now, when you said like the other thing was like I want to make sure I'm saving enough to be able to provide for a certain like quality of life for my future family. That was another consideration. Future family. So, it's still very close to home. Imagine if your scope of influence that you felt a need for like there's this young guy called Boent Slatt. He's a young guy who is pulling plastic out of the oceans. He's ending plastic out of rivers and streams. He's building boats that harness all the plastic that goes down rivers, pulling it out and getting it out of the river system. He's going into the deep parts of the ocean, pulling all this plastic out. Now, if I ask him that question, how much do you need next year to get your needs met? He's going to save billions cuz I want to pull all the plastic out of the ocean. Do you see the difference? So, it's greedy to think about your own personal needs and it's not greedy to think about how can I make an impact in the world. The people who are the richest and the wealthiest that I know, they think way bigger and their need their their core desire is big impact. So, yeah. So rich people I I think a they're always talking about value ad solving big problems at scale and they're thinking about their need is to solve a big problem at scale. Does money change people? Can it make you turn into an a-hole? It's an accelerant. If you're an [ __ ] if you're an a-hole, then uh it's going to it's going to amplify and accelerate that. It's going to give you more scope. It's it's leverage, right? It's it's the thing that gives you maximum leverage. So, if you're a very generous person, you could become generous at scale. If you're an a-hole, you become a-hole at scale. Best and worst investment you've ever made. Uh, the best investment is um when I met my wife and I said, "Let's travel together for the next 3 months. Let's travel around the world together." And and that's where we, you know, it could we could have our paths could have uh gone different ways. But best investment was was uh making sure that relationship worked. Best investment having kids, you know, making the commitment to do that. Uh worst investments have always been based on this is a really good way to make money. Like what would be the worst investment? Oh, like I stuck, you know, angel angel investments where like I'm not actually passionate about the team or anything, but they've done a really good pitch about how much money they're going to make and I go, "Oh, that's exciting. I'm going to put 20 grand into that." And then of course it goes to zero pretty quickly. Um, so anything that's just purely money motivated tends to be like th those ones have been my worst. And anything that's like like I love the people. I really want to see them succeed. Um, like the best investments are into relationships. So like I recently made an angel investment into this company. Um, and it was basically I I wasn't interested in this. I was just in interested in the relationship. Like Chris Williamson, awesome guy. I want to see him succeed. Like great drink too. Yeah. But I didn't I didn't make the investment based on the deck. I made the investment based on Chris. What is the worst financial advice you constantly hear? The worst is around the idea that um compounding alone will get you to this amazing affluent place. Um it tends to be that if you save and invest, you will stay ahead of inflation. Um you will get slightly ahead. You will get comfortable. But in order to in order to get ahead, you've got to commit to being of excellent service to others at scale. Should you leave money to your kids? Uh, depends on the kids. So, let's say you have uh a kid who's disabled. Of course, that's going to change their life. They don't have they don't have an ability to to to do that. Maybe you have a kid who's massively community-minded, but not entrepreneurally minded, and they're doing doing great work, and it's like, you know what? It just so happened to be that I was entrepreneurial and and that was my thing and if I can support this other work then that's a good reason. If you have a child who dedicates themselves to being part of the business so here's here's like this is why it's not such a simple question. Let's say for example my daughter decides that by the time she's in her 20s she recognizes that we have an amazing family business and that it would be the best opportunity to work together uh on building that. Let's say she dedicates 10, 20, 30 years of her life into building out the fin uh the family business. It's only right that she becomes a major partner in the business and an equity partner and all of that. Um should you just throw money at a spoiled brat who uh who wants to live large without any exchange? Probably not. But yeah, it depends on the kid. Favorite book? I believe that the book that changes your life the most is the one that you write, not one you read. So, I'm a really big believer of getting people to write a book and I'm like like make an effort to write a book. But what's your favorite book? The books I've written. Yeah. You just came out with a book, right? Are you coming up? What's your favorite book that you haven't written? Well, stick with the point. The point is that reading is consumption and that's great. It's great to consume. Writing is creation. We make money from creation, not consumption. So if you can create a book, you're going to learn so much and earn so much more than any book you could possibly read. So I can give you a list of great books, but I want to challenge people to be less on the consumption side and more on the creation side. Like I want to say the technology has democratized the ability to have a book out. You used to have to have a publisher. You used to have a distribution channel. You used to have all of these things that were very hard to get. Now all of those things are easy. So, for the first time in human history, technology can help you to write and publish and distribute that book. So, why not make it a short-term goal in the next year or two to write, publish, and distribute a book and have a book and have that intellectual property asset that's working for you? Have an intellectual property asset that is positioning you as an authority at something and push yourself through the challenge of writing something rather than just being the same person who just reads stuff. Like, reading stuff is not hard. Writing stuff is hard. Do the hard thing. What's a daily habit you swear by? Being sales focused. Business. Business is demand and supply and no one's going to come and do the demand side. You It's very easy to get people to come and do the supply side. It's very hard to generate demand. Um being involved in marketing, sales campaigns, selling, pitching. I believe entrepreneurship is the journey of a thousand pitches. That one way or another, if you're going to be a successful entrepreneur, you're going to have to pitch that thing a thousand times. A thousand average pitches gets you nothing. And a thousand great pitches gets you 10 to 100 million. So a thousand great pitches. So a daily habit is like I need to pitch my business every single day to somebody new, right? Or reenroll someone. It's a new employee. It's a new customer. It's a new investor. It's a new supplier. It's a new partner. But pitching, pitching, pitching. Entrepreneurship is the journey of a thousand pitches. Daniel, thank you so much for coming on the show. We really appreciate It was a fun episode. It was a lot of fun researching you. I feel like I've learned a lot. Yeah, me too. Thank you to all of the viewers out there. Yeah. If you haven't already subscribed, by the way, and you've made it to the very end. It's totally free. Here's my sales pitch to you. It's free. It takes you a split second just to click one button. You're going to be seeing episodes just like this. We post every single Sunday with bonus episodes thrown in. And if you want to see this episode as well without any cuts, completely uncensored, those few little swear words, without any sponsors, nothing, we do have a membership. you can join as well. Anything you would like to say? It's been absolutely awesome. I love the show. I've been a fan of the show for years. Um, uh, many of your episodes, Amosi and Cody Sanchez and you know, some of those great ones. So, it's an real honor to be on the show. Thank you. No, we've really enjoyed this and like I said, that that debate on Diary of the CEO. You guys so entertaining. I I think I listened to it like twice because I I listened to it once when it came out. I was like, this is crazy. And then I listened to it again for this. If you guys want to see Gary's economics coming on the show, we would love to have him on. Daniel's gonna try to put us in touch with him. So, yeah. And we'll link to all of your info down below in the description as well for anyone who wants to follow along. Thank you so much. So, so much for watching.