Why SAVING MONEY Makes You POOR: Robert Kiyosaki’s 5 Wealth Secrets

0:00It is Ryan C. Crest here. There was a recent social media trend, which consisted of flying on a plane with no music, no movies, no entertainment. But a better trend would be going to chumbacaceno.com. It's like having a mini social casino in your pocket. Chumbacaceno has over 100 online casino style games, all absolutely free. It's the most fun you can have online and on a plane. So grab your free welcome bonus now at chumbacaceno.com. Sponsored by Chumbacaceno. No purchase necessary VGW group void for prohibited by law, 21 plus terms and conditions apply. I want you to run a quick mental simulation for me today. Just picture it. It's a Tuesday. Just a standard boring Tuesday. Totally unremarkable Tuesday. You are sitting at your desk, maybe you're answering emails, or maybe you're zoning out on a Zoom call with your camera off. We've all been that. Right, and then you feel it. Just this dull, rhythmic throb in your lower jaw, a toothache. Oh man, the absolute worst kind of distraction. Because it's subtle at first, isn't it?

1:00Exactly. It's not agonizing yet. It's just, it's there. Little background noise. And because we are busy and because we are human, what is the very first thing that like 99% of us do in that exact moment? We completely ignore it. We deploy the classic. Maybe we'll just go away on its own strategy. Yeah, magical thinking. It's pure magical thinking. We engage in this deep denial. Right. We bargain with it. You start switching your chewing to the left side of your mouth when you eat lunch. You pop a cup of liby-proven and hope for the best. Yeah, you tell yourself, I don't have time for a dentist appointment right now. I have a deadline. I have a life. But here is the reality check. And this is where the simulation gets a bit darker. The pain doesn't actually care about your schedule. It never does. Biology is completely indifferent to your Google calendar. So true. So the throb becomes a pulse. It starts waking you up at three in the morning. And now you're sleep deprived. Exactly. Now you're sleep deprived. So because you're tired, you snap at your spouse over something completely stupid,

2:01like the dishwasher not being loaded correctly. Oh, yeah. The classic dishwasher fight. You're irritable at work. So maybe you blow a presentation or you send a really snarky email. You definitely shouldn't have sent. The blast radius is expanding because it's not just a tooth anymore. It's affecting your relationships, your career. Precisely. And then finally, your face swells up like a balloon. You've got a full-blown infection. You're in the emergency room, not the dentist's office. You're on heavy antibiotics. You're missing a week of work, losing income, and you're spiraling into a systemic health crisis, all because you ignored a tiny dull signal. It's a very visceral image. It literally makes you wince just thinking about it. But I think what's fascinating here is that we aren't here to talk about dentistry today. No, we are definitely not doing a deep dive into root canals. Right. A deep dive into wealth. And that toothache, that is arguably the single best analogy I have ever heard for financial problems. That was the hook that grabbed me too when I was prepping the material for today.

3:02We are looking at the concept of financial IQ, specifically drawing from the deeper cuts of Robert Kiyosaki's work. The really foundational stuff. Yeah. And the central thesis is terrifyingly simple. Money problems are exactly like that toothache. If you do not treat the root cause when the pain is dull, it metastasizes. It infects your marriage, your career, your mental health, basically everything. And I think for the listener, this is a really crucial pivot point. Most people view wealth as this, you know, this passive thing like, I hope I get lucky. Or if I just work really hard, the money just creates itself. Or they think money problems are just math problems, like a spreadsheet error. Exactly. But the source material argues that wealth requires active specific intelligences, five of them to be exact. And if you are missing even one, well, you're the guy with the swollen face in the ER wondering how his life got so bad. That is the roadmap for this deep dive. We are breaking down the five financial IQs. And I have to confess, before reading this, I kind of thought financial IQ just meant knowing how to pick a stock or understanding what an ETF is.

4:06That is a very, very common misconception. Even really smart people only focus on the first IQ, which is making money. But as we're going to see, you can be a genius at making money. You can be a high income earner and still end up completely broke if you fail at the other four. So today isn't about skipping lattes or clipping coupons. We are going to crack the code on high level financial strategy. This is about structural wealth, not just saving pennies. I do have to issue a warning though, a bit of a disclaimer before we jump in. A warning, that sounds ominous. Well, it's necessary. Because to get the most out of this, you really have to suspend your disbelief. Some of this advice, especially when we get to this section I'm budgeting later on, is going to sound completely backward. Oh, the budgeting section is wild. It goes against everything your parents, your teachers, and the mainstream financial gurus have ever told you to do. It honestly borders on financial heresy, but we will get there. Let's start right at the foundation. Financial IQ number one, making more money. The starting line. Now the source material strips away all the complexity of economics here.

5:09It doesn't talk about supply and demand curves or GDP or any of that. It gives a definition of making money that I found incredibly refreshing. It says money is simply the act of solving problems. It's a beautiful simplification. It shifts the focus entirely from the concept of labor to the concept of a solution. Let's push on that a bit though, because I can hear a listener being skeptical right now. They're probably thinking, okay, I solved the New York Times Crossword Puzzle this morning. That was a problem. I solved it. So where is my check? How does this actually translate to a bank account? It's all about the marketplace. Money is an exchange of value. If you solve a problem that nobody cares about like a crossword puzzle, which is really just a personal entertainment problem, the value to the marketplace is zero. Right. No one is paying you for your Sudoku skills. Exactly. But let's look at a professional context. Let's see you work in sales. Okay. Let's say I'm a real estate agent or I'm selling enterprise software. Right. But you have a personal problem. You are cripplingly shy.

6:10Oh, that's a bad treat for sales. That's terrible. You hate picking up the phone. You're terrified of rejection. You get sweaty palms just thinking about cold calling a prospect. That is a personal problem, sure. But it is also a massive financial ceiling. It is directly capping your income. Because you physically cannot make the calls required to close the deals, you were just stuck. Exactly. Now, suppose you decide to attack that problem. You don't just complain about the economy or your boss. You take a public speaking course. You read books on negotiation. You force yourself to talk to five strangers a day until your palms finally stop sweating. You essentially solve the problem of your own shyness. Yes. And what happens next? Well, you become a better salesperson. You close way more deals. Your commission check doubles. Precisely. The money didn't come because you necessarily worked more hours. You might actually be working fewer hours because you're much more efficient now. The money appeared because you solved a specific problem that was limiting your value.

7:10That makes total sense. And here is the rule of thumb that basically rules the world. The bigger and more complex the problem you solve, the bigger the paycheck. This source uses a video game analogy here that really resonated with me. I played a lot of RPGs growing up. So this clicked immediately. Oh, yeah. The game of levels. Yeah. Life is basically a video game. You start at level one. You have level one problems. Maybe you have no skills or you don't know how to write a professional email or you don't even know how to show up to work on time. You solve those and you level up. But here is the kicker and this is where people get stuck. When you get to level two, the game doesn't actually get easier. No, not at all. The game just gives you a bigger, better boss to fight. And a bigger treasure chest if you win. Right. The loot scales the difficulty of the boss. The trap is that everyone wants the level 50 loot. They want the private jet, the financial freedom, the millions in the bank. But they want to fight the level one boss. They want the reward without the rigorous process of actually solving the problem.

8:10It's like wanting to be a neurosurgeon for the salary, but not wanting to go through med school. Exactly. Med school is a massive problem to solve. It's years of sleep deprivation, extreme stress, complex learning, memorizing thousands of drug interactions. That is a massive boss fight. If you solve that problem, society rewards you highly. If you try to bypass the problem, well, you're not a doctor. You're just a guy with a scalpel. You go to jail. Tyler Reddick here from 2311 Racing, another checkered flag for the books. Time to celebrate with Chamba. Jump in at chambacasino.com. Let's Chamba. Don't purchase necessary. BTW Group. Boy, we're prohibited by law. CC and C, 21 plus sponsored by Chamba Casino. There is a much darker side to this problem solving concept, though. The source argues that if you refuse to solve your money problems early, when they are small, like that dull toothache, you don't just stay stagnant. You actually slide backward. You lose your autonomy. This is genuinely the most chilling part of the material for me. It suggests that financial ignorance isn't just a lack of money.

9:12It's a fundamental loss of self. It leads to the parable of the farmer and the rooster. I really want to walk through the story in detail because it is a perfect metaphor for the modern workplace. It sounds like a children's book, but it literally plays out in office buildings every single day. It's a cautionary tale that I think everyone needs to hear. So picture a farm. You have a farmer and you have a rooster. The rooster is just doing his job, greeting the sun, crowing every morning. He's proud. He's loud. It's what he does. It's his nature. Right. One day, the farmer, who in this story basically represents the world or a bad boss or a terrible economy, walks up to the rooster and he is not happy. He issues a threat, a very direct, ultimatum. He says, I don't like that noise. Stop crowing. If you crow again, I'm going to pluck out your feathers. Now pause and put yourself in the rooster's position for a second. He is terrified. He loves his feathers. They are his warmth, his protection, his vanity. So he makes a calculation. He thinks, okay, keeping my feathers as the priority here. I can stop crowing.

10:13It's not that big of a deal. I could just be quiet. He solves the immediate problem by complying. He compromises. He actively chooses safety over his own nature. Right. But the farmer isn't done because power rarely stops the first concession. A week later, he comes back. He says, you know, I don't like the way you're walking. It's too arrogant. It's too strutty. From now on, you walk like a hen, peck at the ground, take small steps, or I pluck the feathers. In the slippery slope kicks in, the rooster thinks, well, I've already stopped crowing. Walking like a hen isn't that much worse. I really need to keep these feathers. I have a family to feed. So he starts bobbing his head. He starts acting like a hen. He starts hanging out with the hens. He is slowly erasing his own identity just to stay safe. He is forgetting who he is. Then comes the final blow. The farmer returns and says, okay, you're walking like a hen. You're acting like a hen. So now, I need you to lay eggs. And if you don't lay eggs, I'm plucking the feathers and you are going in the pot for dinner. And that is the moment of pure horror. The rooster realizes he's completely doomed.

11:15He can't lay eggs. It's biologically impossible. But because he didn't fight back at the very beginning, because he didn't solve the conflict when it was just about crowing, he has lost everything. The devastating story and the connection to our financial lives is brutal. Connect it for us. How is the listener the rooster in the scenario? Think about the person who just ignores their financial IQ. They don't build new skills. They don't learn how to make money independently. They rely 100% on a single job for survival. They inevitably find themselves with a boss who is exactly like that farmer. Stop crowing. Don't speak up in meetings. Do what I say. If you know it's wrong, don't bring me new ideas. And because the employee lives paycheck to paycheck, because they haven't solved the money problem, they comply. They are terrified of losing the feathers of their salary and their health insurance. Walk like a hen. Work weekends. Miss your kids dance recital. Cut corners on safety to save the company money. Fudge the numbers on this report. And again, they comply. They compromise their core values because they feel trapped.

12:18They think, I just really need to keep this job. And then eventually they are asked to do the impossible or their downsize anyway because the company pivots. Exactly. They end up as dinner. The lesson here is that solving financial IQ number one, making more money isn't about greed. It's not about buying a Lamborghini or a Rolex. It's about having the power to tell the farmer, no, it's about keeping your feathers and your dignity. That is a heavy realization. Money is defense. Money is freedom from tyranny. If you can solve problems for the marketplace, you never have to tolerate a farmer who wants you to be a hen. So let's assume a listener takes us to heart. They level up. They solve big problems. They are now a really high earner. They're making 200,000, maybe 500,000 a year. They've won the game right. They are rich. You would think so. That's the dream we're all sold. But this is where we hit the second trap. And it brings us to financial IQ number two, protecting your money. This section had a statistic that completely blew my mind. The source claims you can make $200,000 a year and end up functionally poorer than someone

13:22making $100,000. It sounds mathematically impossible, but it happens every single day. It comes down to the fundamental difference between what you earn and what you keep. We measure success by the top line, like, oh, he makes seven figures. But wealth is actually married by the bottom line. It's net income versus gross income. It's not what you make. It's what you keep. Exactly. The guy making $200,000 has a low protection IQ. He is bleeding money everywhere. He's losing 50% of taxes. He's getting sued. He's getting divorced about a prenup. He's paying outrageous fees to brokers. The guy making $100,000 who keeps 80% of his money. He is actually building far more wealth. He has more soldiers in his army. To keep it, you have to defend it. The source calls the entities trying to take your money financial predators. Yes. And I absolutely love the metaphor used here. It goes back to the farm again. The source call them bunnies and birds. Which is super confusing at first because bunnies are cute. Birds are majestic. That is exactly the point.

14:22To a kid, a bunny is a cute pet. To a farmer, a bunny is a thief. It eats the carrots. It destroys the harvest. The profound insight here is that the biggest threats to your wealth aren't guys in steam masks breaking into your house at night. There aren't bad guys in the traditional cinematic sense. They are the people and institutions you actually trust. They are cute. They stand right behind you. They pat you on the back. They say they are there to help you. They say we're all in this together. And while they are hugging you, they are reaching right into your pocket. The source lists five specific predators. We need to run through these because if you have money, these five will absolutely find you. They can smell money. Editor number one, bureaucrats. Taxes. The single largest expense for almost every human being on earth. The source is pretty harsh here. It says bureaucrats don't know how to make money, only how to spend it. I mean, the material doesn't take sides politically, but it points out a systemic reality. Well, just look at the incentives. In a government agency, if you are highly efficient and you save money, if you finish the

15:26fiscal year with a surplus, what happened? Your budget gets cut for the next year. Exactly. Totally punished for efficiency. So the system is fundamentally designed to spend every single dime and then ask for more. And since they can't create wealth because they don't sell a product in the marketplace, they have to take it. Correct. And they are extremely creative at taking it. We have income tax, sales tax, property tax, gas tax, sin tax, death tax. It's the tax upon tax reality. Your tax when you earn it, tax when you spend it, tax when you save it, and tax when you die. It's a famous Warren Buffett, quote, referenced in the material that perfectly illustrates the weird unfairness of this. Right. Buffett is sitting in a room with the wealthiest people in America, the Forbes 400. And he surveys them and realizes that they pay a lower percentage of their income in taxes than their receptionists or their cleaning ladies do. How is that legal? Is it just corruption? Is it bribery? What's happening there? It's not corruption at all. It's financial IQ. It's understanding the three types of income.

16:28Now, this is a bit technical, but it is vital. If you zone out now, you lose money. You have earned income, portfolio income, and passive income. Break those down for us. Earned income is your salary. It's what you get from a W2 job. It's what the receptionist has. It is the highest taxed money there is. You have zero control over it. The government takes their cut before you even touch the paycheck. You essentially work from January to May just to pay the government. Okay. That's most people. That's the standard path. Portfolio income. This is capital gains, like selling a stock for a profit. That is taxed at a much lower rate, usually around 20% depending on your bracket. So better, but still taxed. And the third one. Passive income. This is money generated from assets like real estate, oil wells, or certain business interests where you aren't the primary operator. This income is the holy grail. It can often be taxed at zero percent if you use depreciation, credits, and amortization correctly. So the receptionist is working for earned income, which triggers the highest tax.

17:28And Buffett is working for Portfolio and passive income, which triggers the lowest tax. Exactly. The predator, the bureaucrat, feasts on the employee, but stars on the investor. The government actually incentivizes you to be an investor through the tax code, because investors provide housing and jobs. They punish you for being an employee. So the strategy isn't to evade taxes illegally. It's to change your income type entirely. Obviously, don't hide money, move it to a different column. Okay. Predator number two. This one is definitely uncomfortable. Partners. Ah, the exit strategy conversation. The source bluntly says happily ever after is for fairy tales, exit strategies are for real life. It sounds cynical doesn't. It sounds really cold, but you have to look at the data. Yeah. 50% of marriages end in divorce. Business partnerships dissolve constantly. When love turns into hate, or when a business vision diverges, financial logic just evaporates. It becomes emotional warfare. It becomes entirely about hurting the other person. So the predator in this case is your spouse, or your best friend you started a company

18:33with. The predator is the situation where you are completely unprepared. If you have a lot of wealth and you enter a partnership with a romantic or business without a contract, you are basically gambling 50% of your net worth on a coin flip. So things like pre-nubs, buy sell agreements, operating agreements. They aren't unromantic. They are intelligent. They are fire insurance. You don't buy fire insurance because you want your house to burn down. You don't buy it because you secretly think your electrical wiring is terrible. You buy it because you aren't an idiot. You buy it because life happens. A prenup protects both people before the emotions get toxic. Predator number three. Lawyers. We live in a highly litigious society. People view a lawsuit as a winning lottery ticket. If you have visible wealth, you are a target. If you have deep pockets, someone will inevitably try to reach into them. The McDonald's hot coffee case is the classic example referenced in the text. Right. And regardless of the actual legal merits of that specific case, the principle stands.

19:34If you have assets in your own personal name, they can be taken from you. The strategy here is deeply counterintuitive. Port Ed says, I own my house. It's in my name. I'm so proud of it. Rich Dad says, own nothing, control everything. What does that actually mean practically, own nothing? It means if I hire a private investigator to look up your name in public records, I should find absolutely nothing. No house, no cars, no massive bank accounts, everything you control should be held in legal entities, LLCs, trusts, limited partnerships. So if I try to sue you, I'm just suing a paper shield. Exactly. You're suing an LLC that might not have any easily accessible assets. It makes you a hard target. Predators light lines on the savannah like easy prey. If you look like a legal fortress, if you look poor on paper, but you actually live rich, they just move out of the next guy. Got it. Be a ghost on paper. Okay. Predator number four. Brokers. Or, as the source accurately calls them, salespeople disguised as experts. This is a really crucial distinction. Because we tend to think our stock broker is a financial wizard.

20:35We think our real estate agent is a property genius. Usually they are just a wizard at selling things. There is a massive structural conflict of interest. A broker gets paid a commission when you buy yourself. They get paid whether you make money or lose money. If the stock market crashes tomorrow, your broker still collected his fee when he convinced you to buy the stock last week. They have absolutely no skin in the game. Zero. Buffett had another incredible zinger here. He said Wall Street is the only place people drive to in their role's voices to take advice from people who take the subway. That is such a burn. But it's entirely true. So how do we spot a bad broker versus a good one? It's just you have to look at their incentives and their actions. Tell them what they personally invest in. If a real estate broker is trying to sell you a condo, telling you it's a great investment, ask him how many of these condos do you own? If the answer is zero, run. If a financial advisor wants you to buy a specific mutual fund, ask to see his personal portfolio. If he doesn't eat his own cooking, he's a predator.

21:36He's selling you something he wouldn't touch himself. And finally, predator number five, businesses. This is simply the constant temptation of consumerism. Every major business has a team of psychologists, marketers, and data scientists working around the clock to convince you that your life isn't complete without their specific product. They want to separate you from your money. The defense mechanism here is just asking one simple question, right? Does this purchase make me richer or doesn't make the business richer? It's a perfect filter. Most things we buy are liabilities. They take money out of our pocket every month. We need to focus our capital on buying assets instead. Okay, let's recap the journey so far. We've solved the problem to make money, which is IQ one. We've built a fortress of entities and tax strategies to protect it from the bunnies and birds, which is IQ two. Hello, it is Ryan, and I was on a flight the other day playing one of my favorite social spin-slot games on chumbacacino.com. I looked over the person sitting next to me, and you know what they were doing? They were also playing chumbacacino.

22:37Everybody's loving having fun with it. Chumbacacino's home to hundreds of casino-style games that you can play for free anytime, anywhere. We'll sign up now at chumbacacino.com to claim your free welcome bonus. It's chumbacacino.com and live the chumbalight. Sponsored by chumbacacino, no purchase necessary. VGW group void for prohibited by law, 21 plus terms and conditions apply. Now we actually have to manage the cash flow. This brings us to financial IQ number three, budgeting your money. And this is what we really have to rewire your brain. This is the hardest part for most people because it requires completely unlearning everything you thought was responsible. The core concept here is surplus versus deficit. Most governments run a massive deficit. Most regular people run a deficit. But we want a surplus. We want money left over at the end of the month. Right. Now if you go to a traditional financial planner right now and say, I want a surplus, what do they instantly tell you to do? They say, cut your expenses, stop buying the fancy coffee, cancel your streaming services, eat rice and beans, live way below your means, save your pennies. Exactly.

23:37That is the poor mindset. It focuses entirely on scarcity. It focuses on shrinking your life and your joy to fit your current income. The source argues for the rich mindset, which is expand your income to fit your ideal life. But how do you do that mechanically, like day to day? The source brings up the concept of pay yourself first. We hear that phrase constantly, but almost nobody understands what it actually means in practice. People think it means save whatever is left over at the end of the month after all the bills are paid. No. That is paying yourself last. That is paying the electric company, the landlord, the grocer, the government. And then if there are a few crumbs left over, you keep them. Paying yourself first means treating your savings and investment capital as an expense, a mandatory non-negotiable expense that gets paid before the rent, before the car payment, before the IRS. This leads to the story of Betty the bookkeeper. Reading the story, I honestly felt secondhand stress just reading it. It sounded like an absolute nightmare.

24:38Oh, it's a high stakes game of chicken with your own bank account. So Robert and his wife Kim decide to implement this exact strategy. They're young, they aren't rich yet, they're struggling. But they say, okay, 30% of every single dollar we touch goes into the asset column. Boom, untouchable. It goes into a separate account for investment. And they hire Betty to run the books for their small business. And they sit her down and tell her the plan. They say, take 30% off the top, hide it in this account, and then pay the bills with whatever is left over. And Betty completely flips out. She screams at them, she's a professional bookkeeper, she says, you can't do that. You have real bills to pay, you're going to get debt collectors calling you constantly, you do not have enough money to do this. She represents that traditional, responsible middle class mindset. You pay your obligations first. You keep your credit score perfect, you don't rock the boat. Which practically ensures you never have any money left to build wealth for yourself. You're perpetually working for everyone else. So they basically force her to do it.

25:40They say, Betty, do it anyway, and the result is exactly what Betty feared. They come up short on the bills. Seriously short. The source mentions they were $4,000 short on their monthly expenses. Imagine that feeling. You're $4,000 in unpaid bills sitting on your desk. People are literally calling you asking for their money. You actually have the money to pay them sitting right there on your savings account. That 30% you just set aside. It's right there. You could just transfer it, pay the bills, and the pain would go away. But you refuse to touch it. It takes immense, almost crazy discipline. But here's the absolute genius of it. By artificially creating a deficit in their operating account, they created a problem. And as we learned in IQ number one, problems make us smarter. The stress of that shortfall. The intense pressure of the creditors calling. It lit a fire under them. It made them incredibly hungry. They couldn't just sit on the couch and watch TV at night. They had a hustle. Kim started calling businesses offering marketing consulting gigs.

26:41Robert picked up extra teaching jobs. They cleared land. They do whatever it took to generate that extra 4 grand. So instead of lowering their lifestyle to match their income, they raised their hustle to match their goals. They turned the deficit into fuel. If they had just paid the bills first, they would have been comfortable. They would have relaxed. But they wouldn't grow in their income. The lesson is profound. Comfort is the enemy of wealth. You have to manufacture a little bit of crisis to force your brain to find new money. Whatever happened to Betty. Betty never got it. She couldn't handle the stress of watching them operate like that. She eventually retired, didn't have enough money saved, and had to move in with her daughter. She played it safe her entire life, paid everyone else first, and ended up with absolutely no surplus. It's a really tragic contrast. It really is. It shows that being responsible by normal societal standards can actually be deeply irresponsible to your future self. Exceptionally well said. You have to be slightly irresponsible to the present to be responsible to the future.

27:41All right. So we're making it. We're protecting it. We're budgeting it. Now we need to accelerate the whole process. Financial IQ number four, leveraging your money. Leverage. The ability to do much more with much less. The committee said, give me a lever long enough in a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world. In finance, give me enough leverage, and I can move markets. The classic example used everywhere is real estate. It's definitely the easiest one to understand mechanically. Right. If you have $100,000 saved up, and you buy stocks, you have $100,000 working for you. That's a one-to-one ratio. Zero leverage, really. If the stock goes up 10%, you make $10,000. But in real estate, you take that same $100,000. You put it down as a 20% deposit on a $500,000 apartment building. The bank gives you the other $400,000. So now you have half a million dollars working for you, even though you only put in a hundred grand. So if the property goes up 10%, it goes up to $550,000, you just made $50,000.

28:44Correct. You made a 50% return on your original money, because you used the bank's money to amplify the result. You were literally getting rich on other people's money. But wait, I can hear my dad screaming in my ear right now. Dead is bad. Dead is risky. What if the real estate market crashes? You still owe the bank $400,000. And he's right. Partially. Leverage is inherently risky. But the source makes a critical distinction that completely changes everything. Leverage is only risky if you don't have control. The car without a steering-real analogy? Yes. Imagine a sports car, a really fast one. The speed, the powerful engine that is leveraged, it allows you to go very fast. Now imagine that car has no steering wheel and no brakes. Would you stomp on the gas pedal? I wouldn't even turn the key. That is a little suicide. Exactly. When you invest in stocks or mutual funds or crypto, do you have a steering wheel? No. I can't call the CEO of Apple and tell him to cut manufacturing costs. I can't force the price of Bitcoin to magically go up.

29:45I am just a passenger in the back seat. You have zero control. So using leveraged like borrowing money on margin to buy stocks is like stomping on the gas in a car you cannot steer. It's incredibly dangerous. That is how regular people get completely wiped out. But with real estate or your own private business, you actually do have the steering wheel. You control the rent you charge. You control the property expenses. You control the insurance policy. You control the marketing to find better tenants. As you have the four controls, income, expense, asset, liability, you can safely use the speed. You can handle the debt because you can physically maneuver the asset to perform better. You can force the value up by painting the building or adding a laundry room. That makes so much sense. The risk isn't in the debt itself. The risk is in the lack of control. Precisely. If you control it, leverage is your best friend. Now leverage isn't just about money, is it? The source talks about leveraging other things, which I think is super important for the listener who maybe doesn't have 100 grand to put down on an apartment building yet.

30:47Yes. You can leverage time, you can leverage knowledge, and you can leverage networks. Talk to me about time leverage, the OPT concept, other people's time. Just look at Jeff Bezos. If Bezos insisted on doing every single thing himself, if he was mowing the lawn at Amazon headquarters and taping up every cardboard box and driving the delivery trucks, Amazon would still be a tiny struggling bookstore in a Seattle garage, it wouldn't scale. He'd be exhausted and probably broke. Massive success requires you to identify what you are uniquely good at, your absolute highest value activity, and ruthlessly outsource everything else. If you were doing $10 an hour work, like filing papers or cleaning the office, you are not building a business, you are the bottleneck holding the business back. You have to leverage other people's time to execute the smaller pieces of your vision. And what about knowledge leverage, OPK? It's hiring experts to close your own skill gaps. If I need a complex legal contract written, I could spend three weeks studying contract law, stressing myself out, and it's still right a pretty mediocre contract.

31:52Or I can pay a specialized lawyer for one hour of his time. I just leveraged just 20 years of rigorous education to save myself three works of struggle. I essentially rented his brain. And finally, network leverage. It's who you know. If you want to get a funding meeting with a big venture capitalist, you can send cold emails for a solid year and get completely ignored. Or if you have a friend who went to college with that VC, you get a warm introduction and you get the meeting tomorrow. One single introduction can be worth years of grinding labor. That is powerful leverage. So the overarching goal is to never try to move the massive rock with just your own bare muscles. Always find a lever. Always. If you're doing it entirely alone, you are working way too hard and achieving way too little. It's just to the final piece of the puzzle. Financial IQ number five, improving your financial information. The fuel for the whole engine. We are firmly in the information age now. The rules of the game have fundamentally changed. The old rules, the industrial age rules were simple. Go to school, get good grades, get a safe corporate job, work there loyally for 40 years, and

32:56retire at 65 with a gold watch on a pension. Those rules are basically dinosaurs now. They are extinct, but people are somehow still teaching them to their kids. The source points out that today wealth is primarily created by information. Look at the kids becoming billionaires in their 20s with tech apps. They didn't build massive steel factories. They didn't drill for oil in Texas. They just had better, faster information about technology and user behavior. But there is a massive catch to this. In the information age, information is wildly abundant. It's everywhere. It's on TikTok. It's on YouTube. There's this, but it is also highly perishable. The yogurt analogy. I loved this part. It's such a simple but brilliant way to look at it. We always check the exploration date on the yogurt in our fridge, because we know instinctively that eating rotten food makes us physically sick. But we almost never check the exploration date on the ideas floating around in our heads. And in the financial world, ideas rot incredibly fast. Faster than ever before.

33:57The source cites a terrifying stat that information essentially doubles every 18 months now. That means a financial strategy that worked perfectly two years ago, maybe a specific crypto trade or an SEO marketing hack or a real estate flipping tactic might be completely rotten today. If you consume that rotten information, if you build a business strategy on it, you get financially sick. You lose your shirt. Exactly. Take the old advice, savers or winners. In 1970, saving money in a bank yielded like 10% interest, it was fantastic info. Today, with inflation running hot, saving money in a standard account guarantees a loss of purchasing power. If you hold on to that 1970 rule, you lose the game. So the biggest asset you actually have isn't your current knowledge. It's your ability to constantly curate and update your information. You have to be constantly learning, but more importantly, constantly unlearning. You need to develop an aggressive filter for bad data. It totally destroys the idea that you can just learn finance once in your 20s and be done with it.

34:58It's a dynamic, living state. You're either actively getting smarter or you're passively falling behind. There is absolutely no standing still. The treadmill is always moving under your feet. So let's bring this all together. We have covered a massive amount of ground today. It really is a chain reaction. Let's look at how the flow works when it's all put together. Step one. Making money. You solve a problem. You face the boss in the video game. You don't hide from it. You actively increase your value to the market. Step two. Protecting money. You realize that once you make it, the bunny's and bureaucrats are definitely coming for it. So you build a legal and tax fortress using entities and smart insurance. Step three. Budgeting. You pay yourself first. You force the surplus by hiding money from yourself. You embrace the productive stress of growth rather than settling for the comfort of scarcity. Step four. Leverage. You take that surplus you just budgeted for and you amplify it. Use controlled debt, teams and networks to scale up rapidly, ensuring you always maintain

36:00this steering wheel. And finally, step five. Information. You keep the entire wealth machine running by constantly feeding it fresh, accurate, unexpired knowledge. It's a fully integrated system. If you pull out just one piece, the whole structure collapses. If you leverage aggressively without protection, you get sued and lose everything. If you make a ton of money without budgeting, you just spend it all on liabilities. You literally need all five IQs. I want to leave a listener with a final thought, kind of going back to where we started our journey today, that rooster on the farm. The one who forgot how to crow. Yeah. I think a lot of us are walking around bobbing our heads like hens right now without even realizing it. We've compromised. We've let the farmer pluck our feathers one by one because we were just too scared of the conflict. We were scared of facing the money problem head on. We chose the temporary pain of regret over the sharp pain of discipline. We chose to be comfortable victims, rather than uncomfortable masters of our own lives. But as we learn today, avoiding the problem is actually the most dangerous thing you can

37:01possibly do. It inevitably leads to the dinner table. It leads to the swollen, infected face in the ER. So the real question is, are you going to reclaim your voice? Are you going to start crowing again? Are you finally going to solve the problem? I want to ask you, the listener directly, look at your life right now. Which of these five IQs is your weakest link? It's such a great diagnostic question. You have to be brutally honest with yourself here. Are you a really high earner? You've got IQ one down. But you are bleeding cash to taxes and bad partners because your IQ two is weak. Are you a fantastic saver who budgets well IQ three, but you're too terrified to invest and leverage your money IQ four? Or are you just running on outdated expired software from 10 years ago IQ five? Identify your bottleneck. That is your homework for this deep dive. Figure out which specific IQ is holding you back the most and take just one concrete step this week to fix it. Do not let the toothache fester until you need emergency surgery.

38:02Deal with the throb all small. It's so much easier. Exactly. Check the expiration dates on your beliefs, people. Thanks for taking the deep dive with us. See you next time. Tyler Reddick here from 2311 Racing. Victory Lane? Yeah. It's even better with Chamba by my side. Race to chambacasino.com. Let's Chamba. No purchase necessary. VTW Group. Voidware Prohibited by Ma. CTNCs. 21 Plus. Sponsored by Chamba Casino.