Okay, let's go we're now: we're live so um Daniel uh. I think we're gon na pretend like we didn't, have the most amazing conversation for the past 10 minutes. I wish we could share this with you. Welcome everybody.

I'm excited to do this interview for the first time on my main Channel this time we did one previously on my second podcast Channel. This is gon na go on my main Channel, because I want as many people as possible exposed to you and your thoughts and your opinions for those of you who are not familiar uh. Mr Priestly here is one of my favorite entrepreneurs and writers uh thinkers, and they helped me shift a lot of my thinking about geopolitics, um global economy, micro economy. So I really want you guys to listen to this guy.

Some of you in the chat have heard them before, but they you know enough of me rambling. How are you Daniel I'm good mate? I love coming on your show and uh. Thank you so much for having me back yeah the couple of times that we did. This uh this was like eye-opening to me.

I think um. I really enjoy the way you think outside the box, and I think at this point things are really in the place where we need somebody outside the box to figure out what the is going on. I mean I brought you here uh, we, we have a lot of experts on TV experts who are saying really not not expert is, and they will talk about in a second. But how about a non-expert like you who can actually tell us what the is going on with inflation Daniel? I mean yeah.

That's such a broad question, it's a big question, right, yeah and and also just for everyone's context like I I'm an entrepreneur right. So I'm not an investor in the same way that you are I'm not an analyst I'm I build my own companies and I sell my own companies right. So I build and sell companies and I buy companies. I do m a uh mini mini mini M, A like uh.

You know, basically, I put together my own groups of companies and and that sort of stuff, so I'm not uh, I'm not in your world, your analyst world or or the type of YouTubers that you normally hang out with. But look let's we talked about this sort of stuff the other day and we we talk about inflation. The most simple definition of inflation is too much money chasing too few goods and that takes into consideration both the demand side and the supply side. So, on the demand side, uh, if you pump money into an economy uh, you have too much money and on the supply side, if you have too few goods, if there's any Supply shock uh that happens, then you essentially uh have too few goods and it's it's.

It's a combination of both or it's one or the other, or a combination of both but uh. It's an interesting time, because everything is everything as we know it is changing. I think 2019 is the the last year of the World As We Knew It and now we're moving into into a very different um different world. So the world changed um the world changed in 1945 uh when there was a Bretton Woods agreement right and the the world entered into a period of peace and globalization um, and it was a for the first time in history.

There was a deliberate attempt to create a middle class. It was a deliberate attempt to create a peaceful, unified, uh World um, largely that was about putting together countries that would stand up to to potentially a threat of Russia or nuclear weapons. So there was a big change that happened in 2000 in in 1945. Then there was another big big set of changes that happened in 1970s.

In fact, the 1970s is an incredible moment in time, because um so many things happened, we decoupled from the gold standard right. So, let's just zoom in on that fiat currency um all throughout history, dominant superpower, countries have always had a real issue trying to keep up with the currency for their populations right as their as their empire grows as their population grows. Imagine if the currency is bananas, how do you like at the beginning, you're growing bananas and giving out bananas for people to use as currency? Eventually you have to figure out how the hell you're going to have millions of people trading with this stuff so think about? Like gold, for example, if you want to make your currency gold, where do you get enough gold? Let's say: you've got 300 million citizens and they all want to have a certain amount of money and they want to have a certain amount of currency and they want to have a certain amount of store of wealth. You eventually run out of whatever it is.

You've chosen as the store of wealth, as you become more and more successful it just the desire and the demand for money lifts off, and then you don't have because by definition, you're trying to Peg it to something. That's limited right, you're, trying to you're trying to create money, that's based on something that is in short supply. So therefore uh you, you run out of whatever it is. You've chosen right, whether it's seashells bananas or or gold.

So essentially that happens around 1970. They come up with. Also you don't have control like when it's, whether it's gold or seashells, or whatever, the that is you, don't control the supply of money which is like what they love to do yeah. But I think there's this real issue of there's, just not enough of it as your economy is exploding.

So what every single, every single historical Empire in all of history has always done is debase the currency, so they always come up with this idea called well. You know we only need half a half a bar of gold. Not you know not a full bar of gold. We only need a little bit of gold and we'll just kind of debase and debase and they've always done this because they run out of whatever it is, is in short supply.

So they have to kind of try and figure out something and they come up with that same solution. But we came up with something called fiat. Currency and fiat currency is a really smart idea, which is, which is that um, it's redeemable for clearing your tax debt. So if you rack up a tax debt, then there's this legal tender that allows you to clear your taxes and essentially, if we make it that you must clear your tax debt with USD then by virtue of the fact that you interact with the economy, you create A tax debt - that's that's equal and opposite, and then you have to clear the taxes with the USD so that actually creates a scalable system where the scalable system is the more the economy.

Expands, the more taxes get created, the more the taxes get created. The more you have to clear the tax debt with the US dollar. So it's this beautiful system, people say: oh fiat. Currency is not really pegged to anything.

That's nonsense. It's paid to taxes, it's pegged to your ability to pay taxes, and obviously it's policed by police and military and all those kind of things. So you have an entire economy surrounding it. It's a very forget dollars is a huge big as well.

Exactly everything that's of value in the in that economy, so the fiat currency system is the first time that they created a A system that could you know kind of uh take off with an economy. At the same time, you had women entering Workforce. You had double the amount of productive people in the economy, so in the 1970s, the Baby Boomers they hit the working age. Those those women who were baby boomers were the first generation on mass of women to enter the economy, especially in professional jobs, University, educated jobs.

So you doubled the number of productive people in the economy in the 1970s or the people entering the economy. Um. You also had computers. Now, computers, 1970s computers - didn't do a lot Computing systems 1980s.

They started doing a little bit of word: processing 1990s. They start connecting to the internet so from the 1970s to today, or or until recently, compute more computers equals more effective workers. If you have a accountant with a computer they're a more effective accountant, if you have an accountant, if you have a a journalist with a computer they're a more effective journalist, but what happened more recently is that computers actually did two things number one. They stopped making us more effective and just made us redundant right, so they completely um screwed up that system where, where they just cut us out, they cut us out completely and then the second thing is they distract us.

They don't make us more efficient. In many cases we spend time on social media being distracted. We have unlimited access to entertainment. We have unlimited access to all sorts of stuff.

That is non-productive activities, so we're actually computers are actually distracting humans. So, if we look at 1970s, all women enter the workforce. Double the productive people in the workforce, but that happened and then that can't happen. The second time that's a one-off event and then the next thing that happened in the 70s was the globalization system happened right.

So they deliberately moved the jobs from the U.S manufacturing to China now mind. You people talk about that as though it was this horrific thing that they did to the US workers, but there's another side to the story. Most of the manufacturing jobs in the USA were actually importing immigrants to do those jobs, um so uh, you know when they were manufacturing cars, for example, most of the people who were manufacturing cars in Detroit. They were not.

They were not Americans first, they were not. Second generation third generation, fourth generation Americans, they were first generation immigrants who were manufacturing things so remember that the system that they changed was not killing jobs for Americans. It was stop importing uh immigrants to do manufacturing jobs and Export the manufacturing jobs to China. So that was one of the things that happened at that time, so that began the big push towards globalization.

Um and a billion people got lifted out of poverty because of that, so that was pretty amazing as well. We entered into a long piece uh. We had a population um explosion right. There was a lot of population explosion except the population exploded, mostly because of expanded life, uh um, expanded life expectancy and we urbanized, and we had a consciously expanding middle class.

Now, here's what's happening at the moment right, so we're deliberately growing middle class. At the moment, we've now got retiring Baby Boomers. The Baby Boomers are going to become economic sponges. They were just like literally five minutes ago.

They were economic powerhouses, they were in senior jobs, senior roles, running big businesses, they were investing into the economy, they were lending money and then the minute somebody retires they get rid of their business. They stop investing into equities. They stop investing into high, yielding uh into into debt. They want to go cash, they want to go bonds, they want to be ultra low risk because they're retired now and they also become economic sponges.

All they really do is draw down from their Investments and spend money without productivity without corresponding productivity and the cost of Health Care goes through the roof um. So there's all these kind of um there's a big, significant change when a huge percentage of the population go from working to retiring uh, that's happening right now. The next thing is the computers. As I said, it goes from from productivity to redundancy and distraction.

We we're now entering a period of de-globalization where it's now possible for factories to produce things with very minimal amounts of workers. So therefore they're moving factories closer to the markets, we're going through a period of population stagnation decline. Most people are worried about population getting out of control populations, actually falling. China's populations peaked and is now on decline.

Uh one child policy. You've got all these people aging into Oblivion. If you look at demographic charts, I want I want people to have a look at a demographic chart and go and circle the number of women aged 25 to 40 right, because those are the people who are likely to potentially have children right now, mostly, they won't Have children and you can see that they're not having children, because there's no children showing up in the one to five age bracket? But if you go and circle that little circle, like literally get a pen out and circle, how many women are between 25 and 40? You'll see that this is an Ever shrinking group of people who don't psychologically want to have children, and once you actually realize that that tiny little square is the only percentage of people who can have a child. You actually start to realize that we're about to go into massive population decline right uh, so um so populations collapsing um we've got um, feared over stimulation back to back to uh back to what's happened.

So the Fiat system was so brilliant and so wonderful and so incredible, but the only problem with it is that politically you can just expand it as much as you like, especially if you're the dominant country currency in the U.S um. You know uh Bill Clinton was kind of somewhat relatively fiscally responsible and then um uh W bush doubled the deficit to go into uh Afghanistan and Iraq, and then um Obama doubled it again and then Trump doubled it again and then Biden has already doubled it right. So we've actually gone from Clinton to Bush double Obama double again right. It's just double double right, so we're just in astronomical um overstimulation and it's killing the middle class.

So the middle class is just in free fall at the moment. The middle class can't afford houses. That's how we got to 30 trillion dollars of U.S national debt right so now we're now we're just I'll give you I'll give you just by your reference. People should understand and you're not lying uh not long ago.

Our U.S debt was 15 trillion dollars and if you do the math, but what Dan said is just a couple of years ago, it's not that long ago, yeah it's out of control right, so run away. Now, once you pump that sort of money in here's an interesting thing about money, money is time right. So debt is Shifting time from the future to the present and what you're saying is uh like, for example, very simple. Mental exercise is, if I lend one person three hundred dollars to buy a suit, so they can go to a job interview and I lend another person 300 to get drunk and buy alcohol right to buy alcohol and get drunk.

What I'm actually doing is I'm time shifting right so for the person who's gon na get a job, I'm allowing them to unlock the resource of getting a job to create even more money which they can repay the 300 for the person who's going to spend it On alcohol um, I'm I'm time Shifting the ability for them to get drunk to the present and making their life worse right. So it's a Time. Shifting device and money is very much. It is time right, it's just a store of time and like the more you realize and connect, the money is time when you give people money and they didn't have to invest any time for it.

They spend it very freely right. So if you, if you give a kid a thousand pounds, they run out and buy a PlayStation Asian with it, they just go and spend it as fast as they can, because it costs them no time if a kid has to work for five dollars an hour In order to save up for a Playstation they're, very they make different decisions, they value things very differently. So as soon as you decouple income or cash from time such as giving out government grants, the velocity of money goes through the roof. People spend it and then once they get it, they spend it once they get it, they spend it.

If you inject a million into the economy, it gets spent 10 times and it actually goes around the economy and creates 10 million. Because of the multiple spending rounds and the the um, the velocity of money, so when you, when people earn money, they they tend to spend more responsibly, because it's linked to time when you inject money, they there's a higher velocity and higher multiple spending rounds, because it's Decoupled from people's time, so what we're seeing now is this insane velocity of money flowing through the economy um, because people were just given money. It's the same thing when you were a kid and like your dad would give you 50 bucks versus whether you had to go and work for a whole week for that 50 bucks. You haven't actually gave you 50 bucks.

No listen! I'm gon na tell you the shocking story. I'm going to blow your mind so mind you. I have a Russian dad, so this is not it's not as horrible, it's not as horrible as it sounds, but it's going to sound, really horrible. Shout out to the 355 people watching this live right now.

So when I was 17 years old, I was trying to save money for a bike. I don't remember some I needed and my dad yes go ahead. I don't know it was just to get girls. I was about to say something else: anyways so uh yeah and my dad owned a restaurant and he he wasn't really like operating it so much, but he owned the restaurant and he had somebody who ran the restaurant.

It was super busy, so my dad had to be super involved and asked him hey. Can I work there for a couple of weeks, so I can save up some money and then he said sure you can clean tables and then the second day he calls me and says you're fired. I said: what do you mean it's like you're, you're fired you just it's not good, so I came in there and I had this entitlement. Basically, oh, that's my dad's place and I can just you know, skim through it and uh 48 hours into it.

You're fired, and he wouldn't even give me a second. He wouldn't like just say: well, you need to do better. I said: go home, sit in the car I'll I'll. Take you home that well at the end of it, I never worked for him ever again and, like he never said nothing about it, so uh, my dad was really like tough about teaching you real life.

Lessons like what he was trying to teach me, even though he didn't say it like. He was like you up in real life. This is what's gon na happen. My guy yeah he's a good dad yeah, but at that point I hated him for doing this like why? I'm glad I'm I'm glad that you I'm, I didn't know your dad was a was an entrepreneur right, um or he owned multiple businesses and uh.

He got in almost every one of them, except for one of them. This is why you steer away from entrepreneurship. No, no! No! No! He got a lot, but the last one he did was really really good and that's uh, where he like. Finally, he hit it big, but um.

I saw the trouble that entrepreneurs go through like ingrateful employees, regulatory regulated regulatory problems, um IRS problems, uh, basically, seasonality, um cash flow funding. Every like sleepless nights like I've, seen it all like play out in real life like people, think it's a breeze. It's like like another person, so you let's talk about that for a second. Let's take you into that so owning your own business sounds great right.

Oh, I have no boss, like I can do what I want. It's like. I saw my dad literally like um yeah. No you've definitely got a bus.

The customer is the boss uh. To begin with, your investors could be your boss. If you take on investors, your employees, you tend to be their coach, their Mentor, their support, um their resource uh. So you know you it's a um.

It's definitely different one, but look just in the context of inflation. If there's too much money chasing too few goods, that is the perfect situation to become an entrepreneur. If I just told you nothing other than that, if I said hey right now, market conditions there's lots of money chasing too few goods and services. What do you think you should do about it right? You want to set up a business.

You want to have a business in those times because inflation hurts people on fixed incomes, but if you're, if you own a business, you inflate your prices right. So you actually often you actually have fixed overheads and you can inflate your prices. Put your prices up faster than your overheads go up, so the people who uh save money they at this time of inflation, they lose their savings or the value of their savings. People who have taken out debt right right this minute, if you take out, I just I just with one of my businesses.

We just got offered two hundred thousand dollars worth 200 000 pounds of uh additional debt. Um and my managing director said um. Should we take it, I said absolutely, we should take it uh. It is literally one of these push the button and get the get the debt, and the interest rate, I think, was about eight percent, and it's like, if inflation's running at eight percent, which it is at least then literally this debt that they're offering us is free Money um.

So if we're not, if we're not going to take free money, that obviously says we don't we're so incompetent. We don't know what we would do with free money right. So when someone offers you money - and you say - oh no - I won't take that money. Then effectively you say I'm too stupid to know how to get a return on that.

So I don't trust myself so, especially at this particular moment. If you can get your hands on debt at a fixed interest rate of less than 10 percent, the inflation will inflate away the the debt um if you've got savings. The opposite's happening right. The inflation's inflating away the value of your savings.

If you've got a fixed income, the value of your income is going on. If you are a business owner, you just inflate your prices, along with inflation and the the values going up, in fact, sometimes the best times to make money during these crazy periods of time. So I'm a big fan of Entrepreneurship and everyone should be in entrepreneurship, and if you, you know, if you've got any risk appetite whatsoever, you should get yourself out there into the world of Entrepreneurship. There's probably three ways you could go with that uh, the least risky way would be to join an existing team in exchange for some equity in the business.

So some Sweat Equity, you might have a reduced income, maybe your normal income's, 100 Grand and you you take 60 Grand in exchange, for you know, uh some shares or you might bring to the table uh something as a missing piece of the business and you get Get existing Equity, you could co-found a business. You could actually join someone who's doing this for the second or third time you could so one of the best ways. If you're new to entrepreneurship is to join in existing team for equity, you could start something new and scale it up yourself if you've got the confidence to do that, it's it's a bit tricky, but there are very predictable steps to to doing it. If you know the predictable steps of Entrepreneurship, then you should go through those predictable steps.

Entrepreneurship is actually not as complicated as people make out. It's very simple: there's this set of stages that the business goes through and then you could. Alternatively, one of the biggest opportunities in the world right now is the Baby Boomers who want to retire and sell their businesses. So Tom I'll give you an example of some of the deals that I'm doing at the moment and some of the stuff that I find interesting um.

So imagine someone called Dave and Dave is 66 years old. He's paid off his house completely he's got a portfolio of assets, he's got a holiday home uh, he has uh some grandkids who have just popped into the the universe, and all he wants to do is get out of that business. He doesn't want to be hiring firing, running marketing, all of that sort of stuff he's desperate to to sell the business now. The thing you need to know about the business is that Dave's business is great.

Does 1.5 million it's 300 Grand worth of profit? It paid off his house uh, it's done, you know it's done great things all this period of time, except it's too big to be small and shut down, and it's also too small to be big and to be bought by a big company. That's got a big checkbook, so here's a here's, a very classic deal. You could do with someone like Dave. He could literally go to Dave and say: look, let's value your business at 1.5 million one times, Revenue um and what I'll do is I'll.

Take out a loan from you to buy the business you'd lend me you lend me the 1.5 million um, except for the first five years. I just want to do interest. Only so interest only means that I'm going to pay say seven percent interest um, so call it 100 110 Grand a year uh. It's basically like a seller's Finance sellers Finance deal that was Finance but interest only right so for round numbers call it a million call.

It uh seven percent interest, so I'll pay you 70 000 a year uh for for the first five years, and then I will either refinance um and give you the million uh after paying you seven years of 70 grand five years of 70 grand or I will Sell the business and give you your million uh instead or if I can't refinance or any of that sort of stuff. You can sell it to somebody else or you can take it back off me. Um and now you effective, hopefully, control that asset for the interest-only payments. You can double the business you can bolt it together with other businesses.

You can grow that business. You can refinance that business with a private Equity Firm, a private Equity Firm, is unlikely to finance Dave because of his age, but he's highly likely to finance someone in their 40s. So wait the why the he looks like you. I know everyone thinks that we're brothers Rogers from other models.

I've never noticed this bro. You know how they say when people during their lifetime, they start looking like their spouses or their dogs. I can't remember which one you're my Russian brother, I'm thank. You you're.

My brother from another mother, born on the other side to the planet. We reunite yeah yeah yeah, but let me sorry if it drop. You continue shout out to the 410 people listening to this fasted explanation: hey! Can I just push back on one thing, it's hard for me to imagine a hundred percent seller finance deals. I mean usually it's uh they'll want you to put in some Equity bro right, yeah you'd be really surprised, it depends.

It depends whether you can present yourself as a uh as a sensible solution. Um. The truth is, I have met so many people of that age who already have their house paid off and they've already got everything else in order. They just do not want that business anymore, um and uh.

The the million dollars is secured against the business. They see the value in the business. They know that they could rescue the business if needed, um they like the idea. Here's the other thing.

Where else are they going to get seven percent right, so they might say um, they might say uh. You know it's a bit risky because you're not putting down a posit and you can say well, you know that's just the risk you're gon na have to take what else have you got the the trick is with a lot of these deals. The question is: what else have you got right, especially going into a recession? Do you have anyone else, who's willing to buy the business I'm here willing to take on your business and pay you seventy thousand dollars a year and owe you a million dollars at some point in the future, um and uh? You know I'm willing to take it over and start start the thing this is, you know I'll promise you that when someone gets to that age and that level of wealth on many occasions, they've thought of just shutting the business down they've just thought about you know, Maybe I just close it right. I just want my time back.

My times are my most valuable asset, you're thinking like someone who has plenty of years ahead and would like to have more money, not like someone. Who's got plenty of money, but time is the thing that they're worried about um and when you meet someone who's the right person - and you present yourself as the right person, it's a great way to get into a business. And I it's not necessarily here's the thing. Tom, if you went and presented that deal and someone didn't want to take the deal, I would say you need to put together a little leadership team.

Three or four people. Who've got credibility together and you present that as a leadership team, so you actually go to that business and say it's not just me Tom, it's Billy and Sarah Sarah's, an amazing CFO Billy's, an amazing marketer right. The three of us are going to take over that business and the three of us are going to be on the line to get that going. So it's going to be a management buyout um.

You know it's the other thing too Tom. I don't know if you've ever done: property development, but a standard property development loan you know, is interesting, a lot, a lot of interest, only loans uh for a five-year period, while you're doing a property development um and it's secured against the property. So, realistically, it's just a very similar arrangement with a with an existing business, but you can just do it direct with the with the seller um anyway. Look.

I don't want to get too deep into that strategy, because I'm just I'm just simply highlighting that where we are in the economy right now. These are these opportunities. It'll blow your mind, two-thirds of all revenue is currently being done through a baby boomer owned business right. So right now, if you take all the businesses that are out there, um, I'm not talking ftse 100 or S P, 500 or any of those big businesses.

But right now, if you take the privately private Equity, private, owned businesses, uh two-thirds of all revenue is, is owned by uh baby boomers. They all need to sell their business they're they're born 1946 to 1964. uh. They are at that phase of Life.

They have to pass it on a lot of the businesses. Are things boring businesses like elevator, repair and air conditioning installation and uh, all sorts of like really weird random businesses that make you know millions of dollars of Revenue and um their kids? Don't want it because their kids are doing some marijuana, startup or some crypto. You know, coin flipping thing and the kids don't want to know about the boring family business. They want to do something exciting um.

So you know, there's there's a great opportunity, I'm just saying entrepreneurship's, where it's at a lot of people have just lost their shirt with by the way somebody's agreeing with you. Please Morton is saying the same thing you said yeah, I don't know if you can read the comment, how do Neighbors start a landscaping? Business on the weekends grew to a huge business by 60s and I believe he had to sell it. His son didn't want to work that hard all right, yeah yeah, all right, so you actually get to here's the fun thing about that deal. If you imagine that someone else has run 25 miles and you just have to run the last mile, the 26th mile uh and collect the trophy uh, you know in many cases those types of businesses, here's what you can do, let's be really cheeky, let's say take On that business and pretty much immediately, you go out and find a bigger business and you actually do a deal with a bigger business.

That's that's um private Equity backed you. Do a deal to get the capital to refinance plus shares in the lp investor fund. Right with the private Equity Fund, so let's say you bought the business for a million and you have to refinance it right at some point and let's say you say: look I'll sell this business to 1.2 for 1.5 million and it will be uh. One million of cash and 500 000 of share swap or LP fund uh carried interest and now you've just got yourself.

Half a million of carried interest in an LP fund or you've got yourself shared in a bigger company, because you've done a share swap um and uh. You might have a little earn out period, maybe six months 12 months of earn out period. But now you've got half a million to a million worth of worth of equity in a bigger, bigger, more successful business. So these are the types of deals that are going on out there at the moment um.

If you're entrepreneurial, you know not everyone's entrepreneurial, but it's so much more fun and exciting than faffing around with uh uh. You know flipping crypto coins, you know yeah, which is actually a really important question. I I like that question so he's basically saying good. I'm on board, so how do I find these Boomers? Oh well, it's kind of like if I sent you out if I, if I send you out Tom, for a walk around the neighborhood and then when you got back, I said how many red cars did you see you would say I don't think I saw any Red cars, whereas, if I said to you, leave the front door, I want you to go looking for red cars and every time you see a red car, I'll pay you for every red car you spot you're, going to see red cars everywhere.

The reason you haven't spotted these is is because you've not been looking for them, um they're everywhere, quite literally they're they're within a three mile radius of your house. There's like a dozen of these they're they're all over the they're. All over the place go networking at different golf clubs. Go networking talk to your financial planners, talk to your accountants go and talk to um.

You know: go, go and attend the dinners and lunches that are put on by by the boring old business, networking International groups and the um. You know the the local boat club, uh Sailing Club, Etc. You know just go talking to people and just go out and say: I'm looking to buy a business. I want to buy businesses, I'm I'm looking, I'm I'm an entrepreneur I want to.

I want to um. Do that. The other thing I would encourage you to do is look for a management team. If you, if you have a management team, you can go big right.

A CEO CTO, CEO CFO CMO uh. If you put together a an amazingly like a good little experienced team of three to five people, you can go take over 10 to 10 to 20 million dollar business and get private Equity backing. If you want to go big um, you know because remember we're living in a world where there's too much money and too few goods and services. That's true for for the big end of town as well.

There's too much money in private Equity Funds and VC funds and uh, you know, there's I think things are getting over inflated uh at all levels. So if you want to get private Equity backing, you've got a management team uh. You can go. Do that sort of stuff as well, I got ta, ask you so you've coached, I would say hundreds of businesses and then thousands thousands.

So we we have um. We have teams of coaches, we have uh accelerated programs and mentors and we're in London Sydney, Toronto. So yeah now this there's about 4 000 companies that we've worked with. Can you share with me the most unlikely ass backwards kind of success story that happened despite it like, for example, you know when you play basketball and somebody takes a horrible shot for, like Steph Curry range he's like no.

What are you doing then goes in this thing? Yes great, so the the equivalent of that, like did you see some like unlikely story and then turned out to be amazing. Success um, look some of the stuff that you'll see quite regularly. Is you do regularly see people who are the most annoying people, the most up people on the team getting bought out for a lot of money? Because when there's money surrounding a business, there's always someone who is the most annoying and least value person who owns equity - and they often are the one who they are often the first one to get bought out and it's hot, it's Soul destroying. And it's crushing to see someone who's useless, as you know, completely useless.

Who just happened to be there at the beginning? They were friends in high school and and this guy gets like a check to walk away um, it's kind of like cutting out the cancer of the business, and you often see people who you often see people who are shitty annoying people getting paid a lot of Money so that that's very frustrating and here's the worst part. The reason it's horrible is because the value Creator, who is the driving force of the thing they get startled with all of the debt and they get saddled with the investors to to then rectify the thing. So the The gets paid to leave and the the value Creator becomes a plow horse uh and it's you know. You often see that situation.

I have a relative who's like a hardcore entrepreneur. You would love him so he never had a paycheck ever in his life and he like early stage investor Tesla, Bitcoin wow, you name it like super smart, brilliant guy like he can. He just wrote like we were having conversation a couple of weeks ago. It's like yeah, I wrote a trading algorithm and I tested it backwards on gold for the past 50 years and it works, and I just did it for fun.

It's like the so so that kind of level of Brilliance, okay, so anyway, so he has a business and I'm not going to go sorry. I just also I just thought of a crazy one that just sold for Millions as well by the way. Okay. So, let's I'll just tell you the end of it and you can.

You can share with me essentially the bottom line here here he has a business. He wrote the software, he found a solution and it's basically making money. It's this algorithmic investment, but in real estate. It's much much slower, it's not like uh, it selects properties analyzed whatever, but there were two with him in the beginning, or basically free free writing for a whole bunch of time, and then they literally had to pay them to stop meddling with the business and they Took a lot of money to work away, yeah and uh, I exactly what you're describing it happens.

It happens all the time. It's heartbreaking, I hate it. I hate it because I say it so often: um, okay, here's a funny one uh in my in my uh Sydney office. There were these two young guys, 20 years old, and they joined my team a few years back and they said on day one.

We want to work here so that we learn about entrepreneurship and we want to join the team and join the you know. Uh do whatever needs to be doing anyway, the two of them always plotting and scheming, eventually, 2018-19. They leave and they go and set up a business together and the business was um. It's like a sleeping bag, sauna right.

You lay it on your bed and you zip it up and it heats up and you sweat and uh. You then rinse it and it basically it's a personal sauna that looks like a sleeping bag and um and it basically it just makes you you lay. You lay in your bed and sweat right and you have your own personal little sauna. Anyway.

These guys launched this on Instagram. They get like an Instagram following they make. It seem really cool and sexy and and cool they give it a Cool brand and then covert breaks out and everyone's stuck at home and it's winter and it's cold and the idea of being in a little cocoon seems to appeal to everyone. So their sales just explode right and um right, so they just they're selling these things all over the world and um they took on no uh investors.

They just simply made money from selling this really weird product, a sleeping bag, sauna and um. Anyway. They just got uh bought out by private equity for millions and they're they're, both young guys, they're, 27, 28 years old and yeah uh yeah, very, very funny: sleeping bag sauna, that's gon na work, you're like that's, never gon na work, yeah yeah, I mean because literally You're lying in your own, sweat there for a while, like until you get up and clean the thing you yeah, oh wow, but hey well, I can see utility like if you're a wrestler and you need to cut weight. Yeah.

That's one of the people like um UFC has these things they yeah yeah, but this is a small town. Bro, like you, have a natural, legitimate question here from Vito. This is like a professional question for a professional, Daniel, a good question, easiest way to scale car service business from three to four people to something bigger. Okay.

So, let's talk about um, just scaling a business in general, so the the military, the Army um, especially the British army, is about 400 years old and they have a series of uh human uh teams that are in a set of sizes. So they have a two-person scout team, they have a four-person fire team, they have an eight-person section uh and then about a 35 40 person platoon and then it goes up from there so think about it like this. If you've got an idea that you want to see, if it's a good idea, you put a two-person scout team on that. If you want to run a successful campaign, you put a four-person team on that.

Typically, a leader, A salesperson, uh someone who's an assistant or admin and someone who's very customer focused right and then, if you go up to an eight-person team and that person team can normally you've got a leader, a general manager, sales, marketing, admin, um and financial control Operations, it or media, so you've got this eight person really nice little team foreign and that team can actually run between one and four million dollars, one in five million dollars. This, the late person team, especially if you can get the top person the leader to be front facing um. Let me go on a little tangent in the industrial revolution uh. If you could produce something, if you could gross domestic produce a product, then you would have no problem selling it right.

So if I set up a scissor Factory, I would have. If I could make 500 scissors, I would easily be able to sell 500 pairs of scissors. The hard part was making something. The easy part was selling it in the digital age.

The easy part is manufacturing something right or making something producing something. The very hard part is manufacturing demand um, so what we now have is we actually have in the Industrial Age. You had Henry Ford, who was a master at manufacturing Supply with the with the production line and now who are the people who are making the most money they're the masters of manufacturing demand and they have a manufacturing line, a a a carousel right. A manufacturing line of demand Generations right, so they call them funnel hackers uh or they call them um.

You know influencers, but essentially what they're doing is they're a matter of fact, they're doing a production line for manufacturing the demand for something, and it almost almost doesn't matter what it is. It could be a sleeping bag, sauna right and it doesn't matter what it is provided. You manufacture the demand. So one of the reasons that a three to four person team will get stuck is because they think that they're in the business of manufacturing Supply.

They think that they're in the service, business and car servicing and what the business team needs is, it needs one person, who's full-time thinking about absolutely nothing uh, uh thinking about absolutely nothing other than the manufacturer of Demand right. So the supply side's easy the demand side's hard, and you need to start thinking about that um and there's also the other thing to keep in mind. For that person who asked the question is, there's a pyramid of value at the bottom is labor, then the next level up would be skilled. Labor people who have been trained the next level up would be Media or intellectual property uh.

That creates the value and then algorithms and Technology uh, which uh, which just does automation now, if you're trying to make your business work based on unskilled labor you're at the very bottom of the pyramid, it's extremely hard to make huge margins off of unskilled labor. You need to say, okay, what do we do to go from unskilled labor, skilled labor? Even I wouldn't even worry too much about skilled labor as little as possible. Intellectual property and media is the is the where you start getting some real returns and then algorithms or software Technologies, where you get the highest leverage. So essentially, what you're really looking for is to move further and further up that pyramid.

So I would say whoever is asking that question: you've already cut your teeth and learned the basics of business through that, through that business sell the business sell it for shares in a bigger business right, swap it into a bigger business for shares. Now you're an equity holder in a bigger business and you can leave that business go start a business, that's more intellectual property media and software um at the very low you know get together. Some skilled labor create intellectual property and media and software move up the chain. Uh as fast as you can, that would be my that would be my complicated answer.

Uh there's an important super important question from Lulu who had the beard. First, I don't know about you, but my wife has told me: I'm not allowed to shave the beard. The beard must stay for wow 2009.. Oh, you were like I haven't actually, but I have like a full-on beard.

Yeah look, yours is more of a European beer. Mine gives me the impression of having a jawline, which is why you don't need a jawline when you're a millionaire. That's my motto in life um, but to your point my dad told me the sentence when I was a teenager and I was thinking about what to do in my life. I was, I was kind of confused.

Don't listen! It's very simple! If you can do something that everybody else can you're gon na get paid like, if you can do something that nobody can do, You're Gon na Be a Millionaire in between find where you're going to be on the Spectrum. That's how you're going to make money and it's as simple as that - and I agree with that completely and in Supply. Everything comes back to demand, Supply right or the supply of something and there's no value have a look at airline tickets. Airline, the airline business would be the the hardest.

Sorry, the hardest business you could ever possibly run. Everything has to go right. Customer service technology, safety, the whole lot Capital deployment and they don't make any money because it's over supplied have a look at Rolex, watches. Rolex watches are easy to reproduce, but people want the brand and there's 18 month waiting list uh.

So therefore it's you know the the watch doubles in value as soon as you buy it. Yep also Tesla same model, yeah right man in Supply. Iphones I mean iPhones. Do not generate double the value of an Android phone yeah, but exactly, but everyone wants it and iPhones do 95 of the profit that is available in the industry of the actual smartphone industry.

Apple does 95 of the profit um. If I'm, if I'm correct, maybe it's adjusted to maybe slightly less, but it's it's very, very high um two things that are most important is demand and supply and ownership. What do you own and is it in demand right and the two mistakes people make? Is they don't own enough stuff right? They don't own things and then they try and do stuff that everyone's doing so they're. You know they're in the support they're on the over-supplied side, as opposed to the under supplied side, and that could be true for skills.

But the only problem is skills, don't necessarily lead to ownership. You can become a very highly paid person. Your income goes up. Your lifestyle costs go up, um without ownership.

You don't get it. You don't ever get off that treadmill. You've got to own stuff, so the fastest way to own anything is entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship is the on-ramp to capitalism, uh capitalism.

The clue is in the name. Capitalism you've got to have Capital to play. If you don't have Capital you're out of the game - and I can tell you by the way once that, once you've got Capital, the whole game completely shifts uh, because they do things like Lombard, lending and, and you know, High net worth Banking and all this sort Of stuff, you you end up with private banking relationships and you can do all sorts of stuff uh you and I also wear black t-shirts. I just I just noticed this: do you have an iPhone, we're dropping knowledge bombs here and they're just worried about our beards and our phones? Let's see, if you do, you have an iPhone yeah.

I've got the old, I'm waiting, I'm waiting for the new iPhone. I'm waiting for the which one is it mine is 13 regular, uh yeah. No, no, no mine's mine's an older one. It's the big iPhone Max.

What are we talking about these icons? For I don't know, but it just it's fascinating to me that people like they cut they catch the most insignificant topics um. So there's a good point here. Actually I, where was it yeah Lauren is saying and that's a good point. I mean some scientists.

You know they're uniquely skilled, and they only make like a it's demand and supply. The demand and Supply is purely and simply it doesn't matter how you it doesn't matter. How sad you are it matters, the relationship between demand and Supply. If you are a uh, extremely skilled scientist who studies, snail, shells uh, there's not a great demand for people who want to study snails right, so it's demand and Supply it.

Doesn't it's purely and simply it's demand and supply and ownership. Do you own anything and are you in demand and if you can Master those two things, if you can have something, if you can be in demand which is having a brand, if you can have a personal brand, for example, like you've built Tom uh, that personal Brand uh basically means you're always in demand and then, if you can transfer that to to ownership, but the key idea is that the fastest and one thing that breaks my heart is, I see all these people who are pretty much broke, trying to do the investing Game right, so they try and buy shares and they try and trade and they try and do all these investing games. These are ultra high net worth games right. These are the games that you play once you've got tons of money and you've got loads of capital, and - and you know, if you want the on-ramp for having money, it's entrepreneurship, entrepreneurship is the on-ramp.

That's that's how they all do it. That's how we all do it right, starting with nothing the fastest way to to end up with something because think about it. If you start your own company, you're 100 Equity holder, you at least own something you own, something, that's not worth anything, but at least you own something. So in the economy you have new a new set of rights as an owner and a director you suddenly have new legal rights as Associated to you, that's true, but I can push back a little bit before I push back you're, getting a huge validation here from Uh Fresno who's literally saying what you're, what your suggestion was and he's basically putting numbers on it and saying he that he's he's done the same thing.

It was insanely effective for him, so that's kind of validation. It's incredible! You have proof yeah real life proof my pushback on what you said would be. I agree with you and because of what happened in 2020, this whole kind of oh, let me just go double my money on the stock market. It get a lot of, I would say, and but even if you start with three grand and you double your money, you've got six grand you might as well.

Have you know worked at Starbucks for a month? No, but let me tell you something, then: I'm going to push back so unrealistic expectations from the stock market and complete the lack of understanding is a problem. However, if you just uh realize the strength of compound interest and you put a little bit of your disposable income into the S - P, 500 or whatever like safe index for 20 30 years, while you actually do your thing you're going to have a couple of years, I agree. I agree with you that uh, oh we're back, you got me. We had a little bit yeah yeah yeah.

I've got a timer. I've got ta. I've spent too much time on my browser. It get brought up a warning, um uh, so I agree with you Tom.

So here's the thing I I have always stuck money in S: P: 500 uh tracker funds, Vanguard uh. I went to bonds earlier this year, just because everything started to tip and roll over. I was kind of expecting it it's also because you're old, I I was waiting for these rollover signs and I I moved across the Box um and it was great because in my funds, there's actually just a switch. You literally just go risk profile, five down to risk profile, one and it moves you to bonds.

So I spend no no I've. I've done the tracker funds and I mean I am an investor, but let me be brutal, there's a very, very big difference when you've got half a million to a million of income and you can invest and stick money aside compared to someone who's got a limited Income and um and they've and they're trying to make money, make money. It's like no bro go and go and get your income up. First get get higher and higher.

Invest in yourself. Invest in your skills get a business own, a business, get it get Equity like get an equity share in a business for doing that and then get that money into into the markets. I'm not saying look, I'm not saying I love investing in terms of I. I love money that makes money and all of that sort of stuff and the the lessons that people learn are also great, but I still it's like the real money is still like do that as well, but the real money is the is where you spend your Time right what you spend your time on, you want to be paid as much as you possibly can for you for that time.

There's a good question here from my friend I'll tell you about in a second just a quick question, then I know this is going to sound strange, which chair are you using? I don't know is this? Is this? Is that brand uh is it? Is it a known brand after the H like a Harman? It's a German chair. Oh my God, it's the same chair, my guy, look at this dude we are. We are like if we, after we have the same chair, bro universities, we're collapsing on itself right, antimatter and matter. It's called the harman Miller, something whatever yeah.

Yes, how do you have the same, chair bro? I would like to see our wives right.