Earning from Passion, Finding Purpose, & Building a Business Around It w/ Matthew Stibbe – Ep. 111

Today's show is sponsored by Money Insights and their investment optimizer strategy. In my book, I share how I use the same strategy starting over a decade ago to invest my money in two places at one time. This strategy has been used by the wealthiest for generations for estate planning, minimizing taxes, preserving wealth and increasing stability for their investments. Now you can do the same thing. In addition, you can build a plan to build an emergency fund, pay for college, fund a business plan for retirement, and ultimately optimize your total financial picture. To find out more information, check us out at the banking link@nextlevelincome.com on today's show we have Matthew Stibbe. Matthew is a serial entrepreneur, marketing maven, writer, pilot and wine enthusiast, not necessarily in that order. He created marketing strategies, content and campaigns for clients including Microsoft, Google, LinkedIn and Hewlett Packard, as well as contributing to Wired, Forbes and Popular Science as a writer. Currently he is CEO at Articulate Marketing, a UK marketing agency specializing in the technology sector. Also, his geek credentials are strong, which we love here on the Next Level Income show. Previously he was founder and CEO at Intelligent Games, a 70 person computer games company where he designed games for Lego and produced two games based on Dune.

Welcome to the Next Level Income show where it's our goal to raise your income, invest investments and life to the Next level with your host, Chris Larson. Get your free copy of his book@nextlevelincome.com book also, if you're an accredited investor, check out the Invest link to learn how to gain access to institutional quality real estate opportunities.

Matthew, welcome to the show.

Hey, great to be here Chris. Thank you for having me.

Yeah, so I love having guests on that are not from the United States, that are, that are somewhere else in the world. And I don't know if we should should let the audience guess where you are, Matthew. Or you know, maybe they can take and take a take some hints from your clocks on the wall and your accent, but why don't you, why don't we spill it? Why don't you share where you're coming to us from today and also I'd love to hear a little bit more about your background.

Well, I'm coming to you from sunny West London. As you can tell from my accent, I'm English by upbringing, the by heritage and I it's very warm over here right now. We're having a bit of a heat wave so I but when I'm not being warm and talking to lovely podcast hosts, I run a marketing agency called Articulate marketing. But I have other things that I have done a computer games company for more than 10 years. I have a commercial pilot's license and I fly flew a lot. I'm a big fan. Lego. I used to design LEGO computer games, in fact.

And really. Oh my gosh, I gotta go grab my younger son. I should bring him. Oh, he would.

This side is all my old computer.

Oh, check that out.

Yeah, that's cool. I'm really a bit of a geek and it's funny you should ask me. You know, you very correctly assumed that I'm in England. But the funny thing was when I was doing my commercial license, because I have a US and FAA license, they made me do a test to check if I could speak English. And I've got a degree in history from Oxford. You know, I kind of grew up in England. No, no, you've got to do a test. You're not from the usa. So I'm fully authenticated as an English speaker by the US government.

That's. You know what? There is nothing more bureaucratic than something like that. Right? That, that definitely. Well, yeah, I just left the meeting this morning. So I coached my son's cycling team and I've, I've, I've raced bikes on and off for 30 years. And to be a coach, I had to get certified in on the bike skills after. After having had nearly three decades of race experience. So just to. Yeah, I had to. I had to be certified that I could ride a bike, even though I've, I've been riding since I was. Since for 40 years. But yeah, it's funny, but I think that the audience is more interested in hearing a little bit more about what you're doing today. I'd like to go back in time. So you're the gaming company that you had, you sold that right to another gaming company.

I sold it to my management team in 2000 after starting it in my bedroom aged 18. And I sold it. There were 72, 73 people. So yeah, I was a young entrepreneur and went on to do other things afterwards. And that was a learning curve, a bit of a baptism fire sometimes as well. I wish I knew then what I know now.

Yeah, I mean, I think you know, I'm. One of my passions is helping teach young people about not only investing, but also entrepreneurship. And I think it's so valuable. It's something we don't do a good enough job in, in school. And you said you started, you started that company at 18, how like kind of. And how long did you Run that for Matthew.

Well, I was 12 years, but I was, I did the first few years I was at university as well. So it was, it started being a business with employees. The after I left university, which was 91, so it's about nine years, 10 years with employees and, you know, starting small and then going. But I designed, when I was at university, I designed a game that was eventually published by Electronic Arts. It was a space strategy game. And I designed a game for another company about the Vietnam War, sort of a war game, political simulator. I was interested in playing games and designing games and, you know, that's how I got my. Got myself through university, I suppose. And, and after I left I interviewed with, you know, I did what we call in England the milk round. So I went and interviewed with all the banks and the management consultancies. Most of them didn't want to have anything to do with me. I was too weird. Them offered me a job and. And I was like, do I go and work for this management consultancy or do I just go carry on with the computer games? And yeah, I went down the entrepreneurial route and I don't regret that at all very much. I'd rather reign in hell than serve in heaven, as Milton put it. Because for me it's very important to have autonomy and to serve, have some control over my environment and sort of make something and build something. But my thinking about running a business and kind of the ambition for it has sort of evolved a little bit. I think I'm also interested now in kind of what impact my business has on the environment, on communities I work with, on clients and the supply chains. There's a little bit more sounds a bit woolly and a bit do goody and I don't mean it to be, but there's a little bit more sort of conscience about it that has value for me now as well as just sort of building a business and making some money, which is also important. Which is also important.

I love John Mackey, who founded Whole Foods. He talks about conscious capitalism and his belief is you can do it both, you can do both, you can do good and you can make money. And that's what. It's a great book. I read it, you know, several years ago.

I think I think the two things are interrelated, actually. I think I think purpose is very important for business. I think it's really valuable for owners, managers, entrepreneurs and employees to feel like they're working for a company that has something in mind when they're doing it. Some intent, some value. I mean, if we were only doing things for the money, we'd all end up being pimps and drug dealers. Right. That's, you know, if you didn't have a conscience and no ethics at the one end of the extreme, you know.

You, or maybe work on Wall street or politics.

Yes, I would, you know, there are definitely, there's a spectrum that starts, you know, over there and works its way along. And you know, I gosh, this all sounds terribly do goody good but I think it's important to have some direct and I think that businesses that genuinely have that and enlist the support and encouragement and engagement of their staff and their managers align around direction that they believe in. I think they do better.

No, I agree. And Simon Sinek talks about that and I'd love to. This is a great segue, you know, the why, like what's the why behind what you do? People believe in that. And a big reason why I wanted to have you on Matthew is because I think an entrepreneur that then goes on to have a company handles affairs a little differently than somebody who's always been in the corporate world. So I'd love to hear why did you decide to sell that company? And what's been the evolution between that point in time and where you are today?

Well, yes, the set of intelligent games is a story. At that time I really enjoyed making, designing, playing computer games when I was, you know, that was the thing that made me start it and suddenly probably snuck up on me in the way that a pot of boiling water sneaks up on a lobster. That actually I wasn't doing the fun things that I wanted to do. I was talking to lawyers and accountants and negotiating contracts and having difficult HR conversations and recruiting people and you know, writing business plan and looking at spreadsheets a lot. I was like, okay, unless, unless your idea of a fun real time strategy game is, you know, video game, dim video game company. That wasn't fun. I mean, it's funny there are computer games now where you run a video game company, but that's another story for me really. Why would I ever.

I would not buy that 10 years of my life.

But you know, so I kind of, at that time I was not a very manager and I didn't, you know, I was struggling with it a little bit. I was, you know, I wasn't necessarily mature enough or experienced enough at that stage to run a 70 person company and, and I hadn't quite got the kind of ability to go and what I'm, what I've been doing the last 10 years. So is meant to get mentors and coaching and training and learning and reflecting on it. So I wasn't having fun. It was, I was beginning to feel a little bit like a bottleneck and a valve to progress. And at one point one of our clients came along and almost bought us and it just fell through at the last minute for various reasons outside our control. And, and, and once colleagues realized that they, that I was actually always a bit frustrated and they wanted to take over and run the business and they thought this deal, they said, look, Matthew, do you want. We'll buy you out. You, you go do whatever it is you want to do and we'll carry on running the business. And it was, it was a, it was a good outcome in the sense that everybody got what they wanted. Yeah, I tell you something, I sold the business and I walked out of the office having signed, you know, sheafs and sheets of paper and I had no idea what I wanted. But I did know I didn't want to employ anyone else again. Well, I've broken that rule. And I did know I never wanted to have another office again. And I have kept that. We've always been at my marketing agency now. We've always been remote working. So, you know, it was a, it was an, it was probably a decision against what I was doing rather than for something else. I think that journey of running a games company had sort of run its course for me.

Yeah, yeah. No, I mean, go ahead. Sorry.

It reminds me, as a very wise friend of mine said, it's never too. To have another happy childhood and by extension the job you're in or the company you started or the career path you started going down. That is not a lifelong commitment. You can change your mind, you can do something else. Life is a long time. You can do different things.

I love. Wow. You know, I want to pause on that because there's, there's a book, it's called My Plan to Live. It's to live to 152 and I might be messing up the number there, but it's by Dan Sullivan, who founded Strategic Coach. And he basically has, he says, hey, technology is going to change. I don't know what it's going to look like. But he's in his 70s right now. He's like, I'm going to live basically another 75 plus years. 75, 80 years. And it's a mind exercise where you say, well, wait a minute, what kind of impact would I have if I lived, say 20 or 50 years longer than I think I'm going to live because a lot of people think, hey, I lived at 80, maybe 100. What if you lived to 120? What if you lived to 150? How would you live your life differently? And I think it goes into play. And this is why I really. People say, oh, Chris, you retired. And I always say, no, no, no. I use air quotes. If you're listening, I retired because I don't like that word. I've kind of changed, turned the page in the chapter of my life. And I think a lot of people go and they choose a profession that makes sense for them for a certain reason at that point in their lives. But as they evolve, and especially if you're 18 or 20 or 25 years old and now you're like, I AM in your mid-40s, you have a couple of children, your values change, your desires change, and if you have the freedom financially to do different things, then you get to choose those things. And I think a lot of people would choose to continue to work and have an impact in this world if they had the freedom to do it.

Yeah, I agree. But here's an interesting life experience for me was, as I said, I didn't know what I wanted to do. And I came out of that and I tried or I thought about and I explored all kinds of different things.

How long, like, how long was this period?

About two, three years. I was a bit of a dilettante at different things. And, you know, I had. I mean, I was lucky because I had a little bit of a financial cushion to allowed me to try stuff.

Yeah.

But here's the thing. I did not know at the beginning what I wanted to do. I didn't know I was going to start a marketing company. I didn't. I was going to find a career as a writer, but I started writing for a magazine. Just somebody that I had, I knew and I wrote and I loved it, Loved it. And I just. That ability to just. What was. What did it? Mal said it, I think, let a thousand flowers bloom and just some allow. Allow experimentation, try a few things. I mean, even if you're in a job, you can write a blog in the evening, you know, or write music or whatever it is that's gonna. Is gonna do it for you. I think it's not just a case of being stuck in a job. It's also just stuck in a mindset where you just do one thing. Anyway, so my journey was through writing and I wrote for some magazines and then I started writing a bit For Wired and I started writing for Popular Science in these American magazines and I got my pilot's license. So I thought I know what I will write reviews of business because that sounds like fun, right. And so I wrote, I don't know, a couple of dozen of those for various magazines and that was quite fun. And anyway I ended up bumping into some people from the UK government. The Design Council was a government body at that time, it's now Pendant. And I bumped into some people from Microsoft and they both separately hired me as a writer. And I thought it's much nicer writing for companies because they really appreciate what I do. They're really, you know, and they pay a lot more than magazines. And I, I'm very curious about business. I like business. I have some business experience and suddenly I stopped being a freelance writer journalist and I started being effectively a marketing copywriter. And that was around 2002, 2003. That's where articulate marketing came from. My first clients were Microsoft and the government's Design Council. So not, not a bad start. I think there's a bit of serenity and luck in that.

Wow. And I think it's, it's fairly unique because coming out of an engineering program, you writing usually isn't a technologist or an engineer strong suit. But you that didn't seem to hold you back.

Well, there are some extraordinarily good writers who are also engineers or vice versa. Michael Collins, who went round the moon when Neil Armstrong went down and landed on the moon. His book, his autobiography, he wrote it, he didn't ghost it. And it's really well written. So you know there are, he's an example of that.

Yeah.

I sometimes make this observation that almost everybody can write, but not everybody is a writer. But writing combination of two things. There's a series, a set of technical writing skills you have to actually learn about controlling suspense and send structure and article structure and interview techniques. A whole bunch of practical things that probably I could teach somebody in a couple of weeks and they could refine to a certain level in a couple of months. Right. There's that and then there's the sort of the passion, commitment, interest and curiosity in the world and the kind of the energy that you need to face the blank page and fill it with words that are interesting. Right. And there's a sort of, you need to find a well for that. Whether you're writing a novel or non fiction or magazine articles or marketing copy. If you've got both of those things, you're a writer.

Yeah.

If you, you know, writing an email for your work, that's not being a writer, that is just writing.

There we go. I like that. That's a great definition. So now you help other technology companies with marketing. Is it mainly through writing or how's the interplay? How's that evolved over time now? And are you still working for other companies or are you freelance now again?

So I run articulate marketing. We're 18 people, so have another business. At the heart of what we do is copywriting, which is coming from my heritage and experience and passion for that. But we've added website design and development, we've added marketing automation, we've added sales enablement, we've added various strategy and consulting elements so that we can do quite a lot of marketing things for clients. And we work for Dell Technologies at the high end. Large companies all the way down. Our smallest client has three people in it. That super ambitious. So, you know, and we mainly work in the B2B technology space. It's the area, a geek area of interest for me throughout my life. So I'm writing for software and technology companies. Except these days I'm not writing so much while talking to lawyers, accountants and looking at spreadsheets again. But I'm enjoying it this time.

Oh, there you go. I like that. So it's interesting because you've always been fully virtual with your company articulate market now and this is something that has rapidly gained momentum here during COVID What have you learned and what can you kind of advise other companies that are struggling with this process right now? Matthew?

Yeah, I like to say we were doing remote working before it was fashionable. Well, we went through that Covid homeworking thing without breaking a stride because we were used to it. But one of the things that Covid took away from us for a couple of years and we're just now starting to plan again, is company meetings. So one of the things that we thought was very important for remote working is that we bring people to regularly and build those social connections and out of work relationships and just sort of see people and put some, put some in, into the, into the bank account of trust and relationships. Right.

Makes a big difference. And this is, this is in person.

Yeah, we. So before COVID we meeting four, five, six times a year for a couple of days a time and we pay for everyone's trips, we put them up in hotels, we fly them and we used to do it in London and places all over. All over. So doing that is quite important, I think. And we're looking forward to getting back to that. What else have I learned about working remotely? Well, fundamentally you need to be a good manager whether you're working remotely or not. Right. So you know, it's everything that you do to be a good manager in an office, you have to do a little bit better. As a remote worker. I will remember that lovely story about Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire. She said once in an interview, I did everything Fred did, but I did it backwards and in heels. Right. So remote working is a bit like working in a real office, but backwards and in heels. Just a little bit more effort, a little bit for mindfulness, a little bit more consciousness about doing, about the communication style. We think it's really important to measure output and results rather than input. So we don't do timesheets, for example. And that would be a really easy thing to, you know, I think most people's first reaction to remote working is okay, I want you to keep sheets. You tell me exactly how long everything took. And that's not really. That doesn't really work because lots of reasons I could bore for England about why timesheets are off. It's also I think very important to pay attention to culture. And so we have, for example, we're an 18 person company but we have happiness officer and her job is morale and really kind of a little bit of pastoral care. You know, that's a real commitment.

Feed her like caffeine and antidepressants or. I'm joking, I'm joking. So like part of her job is.

To send people birthday presents and Christmas presents.

I love it.

You don't have to have alcohol at articulate, but if you are open to having alcohol, you will probably get a bottle of wine twice a year from. From Liz, so. Or something for a little while we used to, we were producing our own gin.

Oh.

So we.

Summer favorite.

Yeah. We went off to the Cambridge distillery and sat down with Will there, who's the head distiller and we invented. We created our own gin and then he would patch it up and it. But yeah, so we. That the writer's gin was a thing for a few years anyway. So just paying attention to this kind of thing is quite important and the B Corp thing is important for us. It's another way of measuring and testing and validating and committing to our values and that, that helps I think just make people feel like they belong and make sure they feel like they're aligned and engaged with the business.

Yeah. Let's dive into that for a moment here because for listeners who don't know what a B corporation is. You're a certified B Corp. Explain that a little bit for the audience, please.

Sure. So B Corp movement and a kind of a register of certified businesses. And it's an audited, objective standard for companies commitment to the environment, to their stakeholders, their communities, their people. And it's about business as a force. Good. But the key word there is business. We know we're still here to make money. Right. But we're trying to do it in a provably, demonstrably, well run, respectful, ethical. If I can use. I'm using air quotes now for people listening at home ethical way. I don't mean ethical in the sense of ironic.

But we didn't wink. You didn't wink for people. Yeah, you used air quotes, but you didn't wink.

So the point being that there's a. There's an awful, awful lot of freight with the idea of ethical business. And what B Corp does is it makes all of that very practical. There's a very long audited checklist of things that they would like you to do that you can do to prove that you are a B Corp. So for example, the relationship or the ratio between the most highly paid people in the company and the lowest paid people in the company. And you get some points if it's a narrow ratio and you lose some points if it's a big ratio. So each of these things is scored and you complete this assessment. And by the way, anyone can go and do their business for free on the B Corp website, you get a score. When we started the certification process, we were scoring about 34, 35. And the threshold for being. It's no, it's, it's, it's, it's on a. There's a.140.150 is the upper limit at the moment. Gotcha. The threshold for certification at that time it was 70. So we knew we had to do some work to get to the certification threshold. And you can get that, that certification from different things. But once you've got that, what it gives you also is this incredible roadmap of we do this and this and this. And it's like a project for making the business more practically, well run, more respectful, more environmental. And I think it's that practicality that's very valuable.

Yeah, well, no, and I think, you know, it's. I like the saying, what's measured matters. And if you're measuring it, you show that it matters. And man, I really love the results based on management style. Yeah. Look, I was in, I was in sales for most of my career so you know, I would. No one ever asked me how much I worked, although I did have one manager and one of my coworkers said, why don't you just follow them around for a day and see if you can keep up? And that was the end of that conversation. But Matthew, how do you.

We're great believers in OKRs, for example, along those lines. Sorry, you were going to ask me a question I interrupted.

Oh, no, no, I. No, go ahead, say that one more time.

Oh, well. So we like a lot of companies, use oaks, but amongst our company objectives, our core objectives, we have the goal of becoming net zero and we're progressing towards that in various ways. We currently offset CO2 emissions. We have objectives around supporting communities and various allyships. So you know, we're putting these objectives actually in the same mechanisms as our sales targets, as our customer retention targets and things like that.

Yeah, I think that's great. How is a leader, especially in a virtual organization, do you really kind of, you know, filter these ideas down or disseminate these ideas down to your employees?

Yeah, yeah. I'm very wary of the danger of cynicism. Right. I mean there's nothing more dispiriting than a corporate boss standing. I'm going, we are going to be good. You know, Google saying don't be evil because it opens you up to any time that you do something somebody disagrees with, they go, well, you said you were going to be for us. I think one of the things that's been very pleasing about becoming a B corp and then progressively improving our score and working on those issues in the way we've involved the staff. So we have working groups within the company at the moment focusing a lot on the Net zero work and some other things that we're prioritizing and engaging them in the decision making, engaging them in the project, making them part of that. I think that's that you enlist their support. I think if B Corp is a top down tick boxing exercise kind of have failed from the start.

Yeah, no, I think again going back to Simon Sinek, especially with this generation, I think these things make a big difference. What are some of your advice to companies that are having a hard time finding and retaining talent? Because it's, we're, you know, we're having, I mean one of my coaching clients, they're, they're just struggling to find, you know, kind of lower end, you know, 15, $20 an hour type employees. But I had the same issues When I was hiring people that were making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. Yeah.

And I feel that pain. We're recruiting right now for two roles and you know, historically we would put up an advert for a marketing copywriter and we'd get 6, 700 applications. We were a little company. For us, being a remote working company in the old days was a real differentiator. Right. But now not so much. And of course, we're dealing with this very volatile and uncertain economy and we're dealing with the great resignation. If that, if that really is a thing. There's a lot of going on in the world that is affecting that. For my part, the things that we're trying to do to rectify this, we putting work into our employer branding. So for example, on our website we're adding more about what to work here, what are benefits and kind of what the, the things that we do that are interesting to try and surface some of these stories rather than just like, we're a nice company work for us. We've, we've been working. We, we hired last year a very experienced CFO who had come out of a large corporate environment and she brought a lot of, I would call, sort of rigor and precision to, she took on, took on the HR role as well as the, to all our sort of HR processes. So bonuses, appraisals, recruitment, job descriptions, intranet, all that stuff. And we've just hired now for one or two days a week an HR consultant to help us with, specifically with recruitment and the branding. So it has become progressively sharper and sharper, sharper in focus. And I guess as it becomes harder, it becomes things that you have to invest more in. That's my experience. And generally in business, I find if you want something done, if you kind of make it somebody's job and then you measure their progress on it and then you have work with them to develop the initiatives and discover best practice, especially if you can get experts in. That's the way to do it. I have to tell you, I don't have all the answers on this. I thought we had it nailed and then suddenly we're in the same boat as everybody else and we're working quite hard to recruit right now.

Yeah, I mean, it's, I think, you know, talent is, it's, it's such, it's such a challenging thing to find and do that and you have to always be, be working at it.

Well, but like you, I suspect I've worked, I've run businesses through, you know, upside business cycles and down business cycles. And I, you know, the dot com crash and the 2008 financial crisis. And I remember hiring programmers for my games company in the early 90s and there was a, you know, economic crisis back then. And it was, yeah, it was really easy for a couple of years, and then it was really difficult. And then it was really easy and it was really difficult. You know, the market and the economy are. One of my friends gave me this very good advice. He said, you know, there are lots of things that you have in your control. Right. And there's lots of things you don't have in your control. I have no control over, for example, this awful Ukraine. Can't make it stop. I can't do it. I have no control over my stupid government and who is and isn't Prime Minister.

Right.

I can't do anything about that. I can't really do anything about the economy or Coronavirus, except perhaps protect myself, my family and my colleagues. So I, I have to work with what I've got in my control and kind of also spend my psychic energy on things that I can control and not worry too much what I can't.

So great. So great. My coach says, control what you can, cope with what you can't and concentrate on what matters. And I love that. So before we wrap up, I got to ask you something. So I've been hearing a lot about the Metaverse. Okay. So we do a lot of real estate, real estate investments, and people are starting to talk about, hey, we can buy real estate in the Metaverse from somebody that used to design video games. Matthew, I'd love to hear if you have any, any perspective or opinion on the Metaverse in the future as we kind of start to blend the real world with the digital.

Okay, wow.

Should we do a whole nother podcast on that?

Yeah. Well, okay, I have a couple of thoughts and give me. I am starting from quite a cynical place about this. Right. It doesn't, I mean, I've read Snow Crash and I've read, you know, books about Snow Crash being in, in, in, in virtual realities. And you know, when we were working with Lego back in the 90s, had, they were doing a lot of early stage virtual reality and they had all the craze and Silicon Graphics machines and VR goggles went. But way before anyone else. It's always, it's a bit like AI it's always five to 10 years away from being, you know, universal.

Right.

Well, maybe there's some AI that is reversal and Google. Yeah, I mean, you can, you can Speech recognition is, you know, commonplace now, and it wasn't 10 years ago. But I. So I am skeptical when people tell me we're all going to be wearing AR glasses and VR glasses, where, you know, it's not yet. It will come. So that's the first thing. So, you know, there's a hype cycle and don't believe the hype, in my opinion. Second thing, I would not. I think anyone who is selling you. Selling you real estate in the metaverse is selling snake oil. Right. Because the cost to create more real estate in the metaverse is zero. Right. So what value does it have? And we've been through this. I'm old enough to remember Second Life and all the hype about that, but he's buying slices of Second Life. Where is that now? And I remember giving some advice to a client who was like, we're going to set up a place in the Second Life and we're going to do this and this and don't do it. It won't be here next year. Luckily, they didn't and it wasn't. So I would be a fast follower in the metaverse. I wouldn't be an early adopter. And that's maybe just being cynical.

Yeah, well, I like that perspective, but I'm a little biased. We got a lot of real estate, so it's real and it's. But it is fascinating to think, like, what the future may bring there before we wrap up. I don't think I mentioned this in the intro here, but you also have. You're really a Renaissance man. Let's see if the audience can believe this. You also have an advanced wine diploma as well, on top of your commercial pilot's license.

Yeah, I don't mix the two hobbies. Right. That's not.

I was going to ask about that. Yeah. What's your favorite wine to drink while flying?

I like a nice Pinot Noir when I'm coming in to land at Heathrow. I. Yeah. So I. If you've seen that film Somme, where they've been constantly tasting, tasting, tasting. I did. That's a master sommelier exam. And there's. In the uk, that's a. Of wine. I did the one below. That took me two and a half years of study. I was doing all the tastings and everything that you see in that film, I reckon between me and my wife, when we were doing. Because we both did it together. This.

Oh, that's fun. Yeah.

We. We ended up tasting professionally. Meaning notes and kind of calibrating more than a thousand Wines over two and a half years for this course. So now I'm back to being amateur wine drinker. But the only benefit of all of this study, apart from the pleasure of doing it, is one, I have much more expensive tasting wine than I used to, which costs me money. And two, whenever I go to a restaurant, people always hand me the wine list.

It's not bad. Yeah, I'm the same way with whiskey and bourbon. It's like the more I, the more I learn, the more I drink, the more expensive my, my hobby gets and Slippery slope. Yeah, my favorite Pappy's is the 23. And I blindly, I was like, oh, that's a bummer. Well, hey, let me see. So what is your favorite wine for the value right now? Well, we're going to end with this little nugget for the audience.

I'm going to get a little bit on my horse. Right, Go for it.

I'm going to go and buy it right after this before I publish the episode too.

Well, okay. I'll give you a specific wine recommendation. I'll give you a general thing. I think French wine is significantly overpriced and overvalued and over esteemed. You pay two or three times the price for a good French wine than for an equivalent. So I if a collectible, you know, Van der Garde kind of library wines. I'm really interested in really good bars. I'm really interested in Amarones and I'm really interested in like Italian, sorry, in Spanish like Vegas Sicilia or something like that. So these really, you know, Grand Cru, non French wines. So that I think that's where I would go. Some Vega Sicilianica would be, would be my higher. But I think where there is real value right now, and this is probably a little bit distant for your American listeners. My wife is Romanian. I have been to Romania. I love the Romanian wine scene. There's a producer there called Aurelia Visinescu who produces really good French inspired wine in Diare. And her Pinot is fantastic, all her international varieties. But she has also the Romanian classic grape for Tasca Nagra. She makes a wine called Tre Fata Negra out of that and it's phenomenal. It's 20, 25 pounds a bottle. If you see it anywhere, grab it. But I'm going to give you one last tip on wine because I'm a big fan of wine. But if your Romanian wine has Dracula on the label, don't buy it.

I love it. Oh man, this is, yeah, that's, that's a nice little nugget here is we, we build out our wine cellar here. And I really thank you for that because that's my. My favorite is finding like a good bottle of bourbon for less than 50 bucks that you don't feel guilty drinking, you know, but you can also off.

The shelf, widow something. Widows from Brooklyn.

Black Widow or Widow Jane? Widow Jane.

Widow Jane. I had some over the weekend. I just got it. I thought that was fantastic.

Yeah, the widow Jane, 10 years. Great. One of my best friends gave me a bottle. Yeah, it's fantastic. It's 60 or $70 a bottle now, but it's. Yeah, it's. Oh, I'll have to. Maybe I'll shoot you an email with a couple of my favorite suggestions currently and we can trade suggestions, Matthew, but again, we're probably going to have to have you back on here because I feel like we can continue this conversation. Unfortunately, we're out of time as we look at your back wall there. Matthew, thank you so much for sharing all your wisdom, your knowledge with our audience today.

It's been my pleasure, Chris. Thank you so much for having me.

Absolutely. Hey, Chris, here again. I hope you found this episode valuable. Now I have one more thing to gift you. We have a page for my coaching clients where you can get a free copy of my book as well as much more from previous guests on the show. Just check out nextlevelincome.com coaching to get a free copy of my book, audiobook and much more. I'll send you a copy of my book and cover all the shipping costs as a thank you for listening to the podcast. Also, please like share and take just 90 seconds to give us a rating on Apple Podcasts.