Ramit Sethi: Cutting Coffee Won’t Make You Rich. Do THIS Instead!

In America, most people agonize over the saving part of money. Some people think about managing money. Almost nobody teaches you how to spend money meaningfully.

What I'm going to do is I'm going to give you a scenario and you're going to tell me if it's legit or a scam. I want to quit my job to start selling supplements. Scam. Next.

99% of supplements are fucking scams.

I'm thinking about consulting part-time doing what I do at my job.

Legit. You could tell because scammers don't use the word consulting. They want to talk about Bugatti.

NFTs. Fuck. Scam.

When people are scamming, they talk about it incessantly.

All the time.

And then when it doesn't work, they just never talk about it again. Those key cards that people wear when they are badging into an office. Yes. I hate those. They feel like shackles. When I ask people, what's your rich life? They almost always go, I want to do what I want when I want. And I'm like, oh God, not again. I actually think it's unacceptable to simply get more and more money and store it in a savings account and then just accumulate more. What are you, a hoarder? What kind of empty life is that? What do I actually get? This is a philosophy every entrepreneur should ask themselves. Put your hand out, palm up, and say, what do I get? What do I get for taking these risks, for working weekends and nights? What do I get? And the answer better—

Today's episode is a special one. I'm here in Tokyo, Japan, and I'm about to sit down with somebody who's literally helped millions of people with their money and wealth, Ramit Sethi. Now, the funny thing is that Ramit built his wealth with a business. He started a business and grew it and made it an empire. But his opinion on building wealth is not strictly about business. He doesn't believe that everybody should start a business. He thinks that sometimes people should take a traditional path. So when I sit down with Ramit, I'm gonna find out when you should go down the path of starting a business to build your wealth and when you should actually maybe stick to your career and job and invest the money that you make in long-term investments. I'm gonna dig deep and find out how Ramit built his business and why it worked for him and if you should do the same as well. But we also get honest about the realities of entrepreneurship as well as how to make money in a more reliable way as well as how to change some of the scripts in your head when it comes to money. So we're gonna find out how Ramit became rich, how he built his wealth and extract some of the lessons he learned along the way to make your journey to financial freedom a little bit easier. Ramit Sethi, so good to have you.

Good to be here.

You have a hit show on Netflix called How to Get Rich. You have a New York Times bestselling book called I Will Teach You to Be Rich. I want to know how you got rich.

I mean, I did it the way that many people do, which is I had a job, I worked on building my income, and I invested, like, every single year since I was 14 years old, and then I started a business. So that's the highlight reel, and I am kind of glad to get to talk about it because there's not a lot of mysteries. In fact, the most common way people become wealthy— having a job, investing the money for a long period of time. But if you want to do it faster, if you want to get more wealthy, people can start a business or perhaps buy real estate. There's a variety of things, but that's how I did it.

Walk me through your, your job career and then how you transitioned into your first business.

I worked at Roundtable Pizza as a pizza guy. I made pizzas. They didn't let the guys talk to customers. They only let women talk to customers at this Roundtable Pizza. Is this illegal? I don't know. But we were in the back, okay? Like a bunch of degenerate pizza makers and oven guys. They put us in the back. And so that's what I did starting at age 14 or 15. I got promoted finally to oven guy after a long time. And at the same time, I was a soccer referee on the side. And finally, I had a job doing sales for a web hosting company. This is all during high school.

Okay.

So, you know, I'm like learning how money works. My dad was encouraging me to start investing. He helped me open up a custodial investment account at age 14. But those were my first jobs all during high school.

So did your dad or your parents or mom encourage you to like get a job? Like, why were you getting a job?

Yeah, of course. Like, all of us had jobs when we were growing up, and that was just something you do. And plus, we wanted to. We wanted a little extra money. And we— I'd seen my sisters get jobs. So yeah, it was like the thing that our family did. Of course you work.

Yeah, same here. When I was 13, I washed cars. Exactly. Yeah. Awesome. So then how long did that last? And then when did you decide to start dabbling into business?

The web hosting sales job kind of opened my eyes because the better I was, the more money I would make. And it was like, let me get this straight. If I get better at sales, I can make more money. And I do remember being on a call. I was probably at the time 15 or 16, and I could speak, you know, I've had the talent to be able to speak for a long time, but I wasn't necessarily communicating meaning when I would speak. And so I remember being on this call and somebody asked a question and I gave my 60-second spiel. And then the person said, okay, so what did you actually just say? And that was a dagger.

Yeah.

It made me realize it's one thing to be able to sound good, but to actually communicate meaning concisely is a whole different skill set. And so each step of the way, I'm picking up messages from what the market is telling me. Market's basically saying like, shut up, stop talking so much and actually give me value concisely. So these are the things I'm learning along the way. And then I finished that, went to college. And that's when kind of the next part of my journey began.

I love this cuz I had a sales job as well when I was in university. I was selling long distance for MCI. Remember MCI?

Ah, yes.

But I was struggling in the beginning and then those lessons were taught to me by the veteran that was up there that was ringing the sales bell every 5 minutes. And what I learned is It's really hard to know how to sell if you don't know who you're speaking to.

Yes. And listening. Yeah. Like, it's one thing to be able to talk, talk, talk. The first time anyone does sales or tries to run a business, you'll notice this very common thing. They basically have a script and they just talk. They feel they need to check every single box on their script. I need to tell you this. I need to tell you that. And you can see that the recipient the prospect, their eyes are just glazing over. And that is a pivotal moment because you can go one of two ways. A great salesperson will realize, oh my God, their eyes are glazing over. What am I doing? I went wrong somewhere. I need to do a postmortem after this call and figure out what didn't work. Somebody who is not attuned to this won't even pick up on that. And then they'll just go, sales is hard, this customer sucks, etc., etc. Right. So I think that having a customer-facing job, whether it be in car sales, in pizza, or phone sales, whatever, is so critical because you really learn what the market tells you.

Yeah. So I first learned about you through your blog and you were selling like eGuides. They're like $5 guides or something like that.

$4.95. That's right. I didn't have the confidence to cross the $5 mark.

Yeah. So That's where I first kind of learned about you back in the day. I'm aging myself right now, but it was that your first entrepreneurial journey? Were you just experimenting? Did you go into this saying, this is my business and it's going to be an empire? What was your mentality as you were going into entrepreneurship?

No, it was— I had tried to teach my friends in college about money and I would overhear them at the dining hall complaining about some overdraft fee. It's like, hey, just come to my free class. I teach this thing on money, all the stuff I learned. It's 1 hour. They're like, yeah, sounds cool. And then they would never come. People don't want to go to an event about money, especially in college. And the older you get, the more pronounced this is because it makes people feel bad. Why didn't I invest in my 401(k)? So I did this for a year and a half. It didn't work. I was very frustrated. And so I started a blog and the blog I was doing for free. I didn't even put AdSense on it because my feeling was, if it's not covering my rent, what do I care? So I'm just doing it for free for years. I just loved it. And finally, around 2006 or '07, I was like, does anyone on the internet pay for anything? These freaking cheapskates. Does anyone pay for anything? So I said, I want to try it. I want to create something very low cost, in part because I didn't think anyone would pay more. And so I picked the lowest price that my payment processor would allow, and I rolled it out. It was an ebook, Ramit's 2007 Guide to Kicking Ass. And sold it. Sold it, literally, you PayPal'd me money and then I would email it to you. That's how low sales I thought I would get.

How analog it was too.

Yeah. And yeah, there was no like Gumroad or any Stripe. And it was a moment for me that changed everything. That moment, two things happened. Number one, a lot of people bought. Okay. Over the course of a year, about 1,000 or so if I recall correctly, bought. That blew my mind. The people who bought, their open rates on emails were 80%. They wanted more. They would email me, this was great. What else are you creating? Right. I was like, what? But the second thing that happened was this small minority of my blog readers got angry. How could you sell? You're a sellout. Oh, it's, I will teach Ramit to be rich.

Right.

And that actually It hurt a lot because I'd been writing for free for years, every day. But it also made me get really curious about what is the sales psychology? What makes people wanna buy and happily spend money? And what makes people resistant and even become indignant that someone would dare charge for their business? So that really opened my eyes to sales psychology.

There's so much I wanna get into here. Um, what year is this, first of all?

It's 2006, 2007 through 2009.

Okay, so early days. And the interesting thing is, I'm gonna take a guess here, and that this guide, this book that you attempted to write and sell—

What do you mean attempted?

I did. You did, sorry.

That I did, yes.

That you did, and wouldn't be a success if you didn't do the blogging for free 4 years, which is something that I just want to highlight because a lot of people get frustrated with posting 3 videos on YouTube and saying that, you know, I'm not a millionaire yet. So, it takes—

Get used to it. It's supposed to be hard. It's supposed to take time. Otherwise, everybody would post 1 video or record 1 podcast and they would be wealthy. That's not how it works. One thing I really admire about what you do on the podcast is you tell people the truth. Mm-hmm. If you find some— I'm gonna talk directly to the audience. If you find somebody who tells you the truth and you vibe with them, you should follow them deeply and listen closely to what they say because there are too many people online who lie.

Mm-hmm.

And they want to sell you this dream of, oh, you can just have AI agents create 25 videos a day and one of them will go viral. No, that's not how it works. It's supposed to be hard. So when I hear somebody talking about like, oh, I posted 3 videos and I didn't, get $1 million, I go, good. What a gift. What a gift that you are learning the skill of grit and of resilience, because it's supposed to be hard.

It's supposed to be hard, and it's a gift that no one is watching right now because you're just not good enough right now.

Bingo. Bingo. My videos on YouTube, I kept them there. The videos that I've had up for over 15 years, you can go and look at them. Yeah, they're me at my desk when I used to work at the startup that I co-founded. They're me at my desk in San Francisco. The, the angle on my chin is horrific. I look like I have a quadruple chin.

Okay.

The lighting awful. Yeah. The message still the same message I have 20 years later. And I think that's important. That's why I keep it up on my YouTube channel. You can go and look at it. I keep it there because I want you to see it. It doesn't look as smooth and suave. The background isn't as cool. There's no music. but I was working on my message. The message was the same and it just needed refinement and time.

Yep.

All of us have something embarrassing that when we started, by today's standards, not good, but that's what got us here.

Nicole is doing this keynote about, um, the, the dollars are in the details and she was talking about like, just because you're starting out and you don't have much doesn't mean you don't focus on the details. And one of the photos she puts up is, you know, the first few episodes we recorded of this podcast, the $100 MBA Show back in 2000. 14. I'm shooting it in a closet with clothes and Nicole's bras hanging out, and it was just me. Yeah, right. You know, today we have, what, a team of 5 around us here, cameras everywhere, blah blah, but it started that way where it's just me and a mic recording, hoping that my content is good enough for you to just pretend that, you know. And then no one knows it was audio, no one knows, knows that I'm in a closet, but at the same At the same time, I wanted to make sure that I got started. And one of the things I always try to tell people on the show is if you don't have cringeworthy work, you probably started too late.

Yeah, that's, that's powerful for you to share that you were recording in a closet because the glamour of, you know, being in Tokyo and having this amazing crew here, that's not how it starts. I also recorded in a closet. I had a digital program we created called Earn 1K, and we borrowed a back room, which was basically a storage closet of the WordPress company. They let us borrow it because I got an introduction and we shot this program. And I remember back then we didn't know. We didn't know you're supposed to go in front of a camera with scripts. I'm good ad-libbing it. So I was like, roll the camera. And we rolled the camera for like 4 or 5 days and just did this program which we had in our head and we had some outlines, but it was not scripted. That program, the video background is not great.

Right.

The audio is fine. The content is amazing. Okay. It's amazing. It taught people how to start a business freelance and it generated many, many, many millions of dollars.

Right.

So, all this to say, if I had a suggestion for somebody, it is, yes, start early. Yes, get your reps in. And whatever you think you're going to need, it's probably 10 times that. And also focus on the material you are creating because that is something you can control. Maybe you don't know how to get your lighting right. Okay. People will be very forgiving about your audio quality. Is the content amazing? Is it going to produce a transformation? If that's good, all the rest can be forgiven.

That's totally true. Totally true. We're going to get to a lot in this conversation. But one of the things I want to talk about that I noticed about you that I don't see in a lot of people that started when we started back in the day. You've taken a lot of leaps in your career. You know, you were a blogger and then you, you know, created programs, you sold coaching and courses, you have New York Times bestselling books, you're a well-known author, right? You took a leap and now you have a hit Netflix show, you're on MasterClass, and I believe that The reason why you are able to do this is because you're willing to reinvent yourself. You're willing to kind of see what else Ramit can do. I meet people at conferences that started when I started, and they're not heard about anymore. They were big stars when we started. You know, they were the top of the list, top of the charts on all the podcasts or on YouTube or whatever, and now they're just kind of faded in the background. Why do you— this is my theory, but what— why do you think you're able to kind of have new chapters in your life throughout your career.

I appreciate you saying that. I do think reinvention is one of the themes of my business. First, I'll just say there are people, I think we both know them, who were at the top of the charts and maybe are not. Some of them chose that. They prioritized family.

Yeah.

Or they just said, I made enough and I'm good.

Okay.

Actually, almost nobody says I made enough. I know that we could talk about how much is enough, but they, you know, they prioritize something else and I respect that. Yeah, I have a lot of respect for people who know what I want to do in life, but I also think there are some people who hung on maybe a little long to the thing that got them there. And in business, like my blog, that's what I started with, my bread and butter. That's not consumed anymore. And I think one of the most powerful things in life is accepting reality, calling the ball. It's like, like When I was early on in 7th, 8th, 9th grade, I realized I'm not good at advanced math, right? My classmates were. I'm not. And it took me a couple of years to really admit I'm never going to be good at this. Very powerful unlock when you realize there are certain things you are amazing at and certain things you are not. Call the ball. In your relationship, there are certain things that one person is just naturally better at.

Call the ball.

Make it work. Now, it needs to be fair, of course, but call the ball. There's power in accepting reality. As far as reinvention, I just get bored. Like, I don't want to talk about the difference between a traditional and Roth IRA anymore. Read my freaking book. So that means that I want to find the next intellectual challenge. As an example, when I went on book tour for my new book, Money for Couples, I did— I told them flat out, I don't want to do the bookstore talks because I've done it. It's awesome, but I'm I've done it. I also don't wanna give a speech. I've done that. I know how to do it. I've mastered that part of it. What's next? And so for me it was, I wanna bring couples live on stage in a big theater, and I wanna do what I do right there on stage. High stakes. I don't know if it's gonna work. Is somebody gonna cry? Is the audience gonna like it? I don't know, but I'm gonna master this thing. So for me, that's just the approach is what's next in the business. Almost like somebody climbing a mountain. I want to get to one level, lock it in, and then let's take the next step.

I love it. One thing that it reminds me of is Steve Jobs, like Steve Jobs and Apple and understanding that you need to cannibalize your own products. You know, he knew that when the iPhone came out that the iPod video is going to be cannibalized, but he realized, I'd rather do that to my own products than somebody else doing it to me.

That's very advanced. That is really hard to do, especially something like the iPod, which was crushing it, versus we see what happened with a company like BlackBerry. And it is really hard to take the thing that is printing money for you, or in a personal relationship, the thing that is like, you're comfortable with it, you're good at it, and be like, okay, now we're going to destroy that. Hopefully this thing will actually do better, but we actually don't know. We need to take a risk.

And even if you don't destroy it, even if you're just like, I got to now spend my attention somewhere else. Like Nicole and I, you know, we did well with audio, the podcast, and we really crushed it there. But then this thing came out called video podcasting. We're like, is— what is a podcast now? We don't even know anymore. Is it video? Is it audio? And we had to reinvent ourselves and say, okay, we gotta get into this video thing now and start from scratch and be beginners again and not feel special anymore and go to the conferences that are all about video and be like, I'm a beginner again, and No one knows me anymore.

So hard.

Yeah.

So hard to go from this level to this level. But in life, if you want to get good at a lot of things, you have to be willing to do that over and over again. Also, I failed at this. Sometimes when you don't have the courage to make the call, then you mess up your own business.

So I had—

I had I Will Teach You to Be Rich, which I've had for 21 years, and At one point, we started a business site called Growth Lab, and we focused— Yeah, we focused on growing a business, etc., stuff that I talk about in I Will Teach You to Be Rich, but we spun it off. Kind of seems like a logical idea, you know, less focus on Ramit, more focus on the content, and we can drive SEO and stuff. It turned out that we ended up super distracted. So here we have our site, I Will Teach You to Be Rich, which has all the traffic, all the money. Now Growth Lab, we have to spin that up and we have to devote our resources to it, but it's making no money. The traffic is starting at zero. So every day we wake up going, should I just put more fuel on the fire of I Will Teach You to Be Rich, which is already big, or should I spend most of my resources on this tiny fledgling little thing? And the worst part is we did this for like 2 years, 3 years, and finally I had to accept reality. Mm-hmm. We should not have done this.

Pull the plug.

All the money that was spent on that site and business, millions, multiple millions, pull it. It's over. Back to I Will Teach Rich. Everything is centralized here.

Mm-hmm.

So I wish I had had the courage to, to realize at that point there is value in doubling down on what works, or if you are going to try something new, you really have to go all All in.

Total transparency, everybody that's watching. When I was preparing for this interview, I wanted to talk about this idea of getting rich with the business, through a business, but then I wanted to challenge myself, and you challenged me, where it's like, well, maybe that's not the best thing for everybody, right? I want to, through your experience, I want to understand if somebody's listening right now, what qualities do they need to have, do you think, that would make it easier or a better path for them to start a business versus just focusing on your career, taking your money, investing it properly, long-term investment, and following your advice in the books that you, you offer? Or should they go for it because of the qualities that they have?

What do you think?

I want to hear your take on this.

I have a qual— I'll speak for myself first and then what I've noticed in the tens of thousands of students that we have. You know those key cards that people wear when they are badging into an office?

Yes.

I hate those. Like, I hate them.

The retractable?

Yeah, they feel like shackles. Yeah. And early on I decided I'm never gonna wear a key card. And I'm irrationally angry. Like, fuck you giving me a key card. I don't want it. Yeah. I find that a lot of entrepreneurs have some irrational hatred of some part of corporate societal life. You're telling me I have to ask for vacation time? I'm a grown adult. And I like that. I go, yeah, tell me more. Tell me, why do you hate it? Because sometimes starting a business is as simple as, I don't want to do that. I shouldn't have to ask for that. I don't want to have to wear that. Cool. That is a perfectly valid reason. I do think as you get deeper into business, you come up with more meaningful reasons. Like, I enjoy the high-stakes part of making decisions and being accountable for it. When I started Growth Lab and I funded it and I staffed it and then I made a mistake, I had to own it. There's nobody to blame. That was me. On the other hand, when I make a good decision and the team helps, yes, of course, the team deserves a lot of credit. And also I go, yes, that was a good decision. So I like the high-stakes nature of business. I also like that just like when I was in high school, if I work hard and I make the right decisions, I can be more successful. More successful might mean more money. Look at where we are right now in Tokyo, means more freedom. It can mean whatever your rich life is. So I like all of those qualities for me. As for others, uh, what I've seen with successful entrepreneurs is they have a lot of resilience and probably they've been resilient since they were kids, right? It's very difficult to become resilient later in life. You can do it, it's just way harder. They've been beaten down or failed or something has happened. Yeah, yeah. And so I like seeing resilience in people. I notice it in entrepreneurs, and, um, they are willing to try things that are uncertain. Like, if I go to Chipotle and I order a chicken bowl, I know exactly what I'm going to get. There's no uncertainty there. Starting a business or creating a YouTube series where nobody's watching, that's uncertain. And that's scary. And entrepreneurs tend to be more comfortable with that.

Mm. I'm trying to think about why I got into entrepreneurship. Yeah.

Well, you were doing car sales.

Well, my dad was, and I was in teaching.

Okay.

So, I actually resisted business at the beginning because I saw my dad in sales and I thought, there's a lot of up and down in sales. Like one day, you know, one summer we'll have summer vacation at Disney World, the next summer it's in the backyard, right? It was just a lot of, you know, up and down and a lot of vital— not vitality, but vol— velocity?

Volatility.

Volatility.

Wait, but you did not like that?

I didn't like it. And I wanted something stable. And that's why I went into teaching.

And then?

Some of that stuff seeped in, you know, because I was washing cars at the wash bay at my dad's dealership at 13. So from 13 to 18, I was going to work with my dad, and I used to watch my dad sell. I used to be around sales, and I have a love affair for cars. That's a different story. But I just love this concept of how can I help other people make decisions. Yeah, that was a kind of an interesting kind of take that kind of seeped in. But then I was like, no, I want a stable job. I want something that is just going to pay the bills and have a good life. I don't want to go into the military. I don't want to be a doctor. Teaching, everybody needs teaching. This is before AI. And I went into teaching. But somehow the internet came around 2001, 2002, and I thought, let me experiment. What is this internet thing? Can you make money on this thing? And my first sale, first dollar online was arbitrage, basically selling rare Air Jordans to people that wanted rare Jordans. And I was like, this is crazy. You could just make money outside of a salary somehow like this. But for me, my biggest why was— and I say this a lot because I'm not really ashamed of it— is because money was not talked about when I was growing up. And there was a lot of stress around money in our family. You know, immigrant family, worked hard, just never was able to kind of get in front of the 8-ball, right? Just constantly, you know, pushing things along. And I wanted to feel what it feels like to be financially free.

What did it mean to you? Like, did you have a vision? What was the thing?

Yeah, my vision was I want to be able to buy things without looking at the price tag.

Like what?

Anything. Like a meal out.

Which meal?

Like a nice dinner out. Like, like if I wanted to go out for an anniversary dinner, if I wanted to go out for a birthday dinner, I didn't want to have to worry about like, you know, this is going to cost $200, $300.

Did you guys order drinks when you would eat out as a kid?

Never. Yeah. Water.

Immigrants don't order drinks. At least they didn't used to.

Well, appetizers too.

Dude, I never ordered appetizer till I was Maybe in college.

Yeah.

That this is, so this is why I love what I do, which is going deeper and being like, what did you wanna buy? No, what kind of meal? No, what part of that meal?

Yeah.

Because it's everyone who has a reason that they started a business or excelled in their job.

Yeah.

Or became physically fit. There's something very vivid and visceral. For me, we rarely ate out. When we did, it was when we had a coupon to a pizza place. And we would order, you know, like 2 drinks for our entire family to share, no appetizers, and my dad would give us like 2 quarters to play the video games. You know, that was it. So for me, being able to order appetizers feels incredibly rich, beyond the amount of money. If I see 2 appetizers now, I get them both. If I eat out with my team, I always say, hey, the only rule I have for eating out tonight is whatever you see, Get it. It's on me. And the ability to be able to sit down and order anything you want. What does it cost? $50, $100, $200? And it just feels incredibly rich. That's because of the way I grew up. And I think similarly how you grew up. So there are these moments we look back, why am I doing this? And it's actually, it might sound silly. Oh, 'cause I wanna be able to order a drink or appetizers, but it's actually really meaningful.

Yeah. And that kind of leads me to something I want to talk about with you is, does money solve your problems? You know, you've made it, you are financially independent, and you've gone through the whole experience. You've, you've grew up and shared some stories. I have my own opinions on this, but I want to hear from you. Do you think that money solves a lot of problems? Do you think it buys you happiness? What does money do for you?

Money can solve a lot of problems. I think that money in America specifically, most people agonize over the saving part of money. They're taught about saving. Save, save, save. Some people think about managing money, like investing. Almost nobody teaches you how to spend money meaningfully. And because of the way I grew up and the success that I've had, thanks to a lot of luck and my team and the people around me, I have gone through that entire gamut and I spend a lot of money and I spend it meaningfully. So for me, it is incredibly rich to be able to come to Tokyo and stay for an extended period of time. It's incredibly meaningful to be able to hire a personal trainer, therapist, a personal assistant who manages my life. Those things are meaningful to me. For other people, they're like, I don't want a personal assistant. That's weird. And I don't want somebody in my house, you know, cleaning or doing any home services. I want beautiful clothes or I want an awesome car or 4 cars. Great. I don't mind that at all. I love hearing people's money dials, the thing they love turning the dial up on. But I will say that when you learn the skill of spending money meaningfully, it's incredibly eye-opening. When I ask people, "What's your rich life?" They almost always go, "I want to do what I want when I want." And I'm like, "Oh God, not again." But I'm like, "Okay, I'm a professional, be polite." I go, "Wow, so fascinating. So what do you like?" And then they look at me stunned because most of us have never actually thought about what our rich life is. Imagine that. The people listening, working, starting a business, building income. And I go, what's your rich life? What is it for? And they go, oh, I don't know, I like to travel. I go, okay, that's actually great. Where? They go, oh, Europe. I go, what seat on the airplane are you sitting on? What are you going to eat? How are you getting from the airport home? Which hotel? Are you getting a tour guide? Is it a private tour or not? Any answer is acceptable. It's your rich life, not mine. But I want to know the vivid details. That is what creates a rich life, and your rich life is yours and my rich life is mine.

I think this idea of being rich is like a blurry picture for most people. They don't understand, first of all, like, what does it even mean?

Yeah.

And obviously there's levels. It's almost like saying, like, I want to go to space. Like, it's such a big dream for a lot of people, most people I would say, that they don't even think about, well, so what do you want to do in space? Why do you want to go to space? Like—

And this is the thing, you're so right. If you are working hard and part of the outcome that you're trying to build is more money, first of all, there's no shame in that.

If you— That was mine. Yeah.

If you generate income and especially if you have customers pay you, that customers do not trip and fall and swipe their credit card. Nobody does that. You are providing value, creating amazing products or services for them. Great. So that's awesome. Now, what are you going to do with the money? I actually think it's unacceptable to simply get more and more money and store it in a savings account and then just accumulate more. What are you, a hoarder? What kind of empty life is that? Instead, if you say, I love antique woodwork in Kyoto, and so we are doing an antique tour in Japan with a local tour guide, and we're going to find these beautiful pieces which we're going to preserve, on and on, that's meaningful. Or I love a car. Why? I love it because when I grew up, we couldn't afford it, etc., etc. Amazing. Also amazing. But you've got to have a very clear vision and then you've actually got to start living it. So maybe you can't afford a $200,000 car, but you can rent it for a day.

Great. 1,000%. This is going to sound kooky, but I really believe it's very hard to actually make something happen if you can't imagine it in your mind first. Like one of the examples I like to give to explain this point is like, if you've ever gone on a holiday, right? You don't just show up in the Bahamas, right? You had a thought in your head, maybe we should go to the Bahamas. What does that look like? You Google it, you look at some pictures, you maybe look at the hotel prices, you look at the rooms, what do the flights look like? This whole process is creating this image in your head. So it's not like I'll believe it when I see it. You got to see it to believe it. You got to see it in your head at first. And then— and I didn't get this at first. And then when I started seeing myself rich, then I started to figure out how to get to the point where I needed to go through my business, through whatever we do.

What did it look like when you saw yourself rich?

That's a great question. It looked like, first of all, I was smiling. Whoa.

Okay.

I wasn't stressed. It looked like me being able to spend on others, help my family, go on a holiday together, go business class because I'm 6'5" and it's really uncomfortable in economy. So these are the types of things I wanted, right? And I started to imagine these things. Okay, imagine I never have to fly economy ever again, right? What would that look like? And it's just like normal, right? And then You start to— I always say like the how is actually quite easy. The how you'll figure out once you have the clear picture in your head. What are some of the first pictures of your rich life?

My pictures were unlimited books. So when I was in college, I had a scholarship where I could go into— they paid for everything— where I could go into the bookstore and I could buy any book academically related or anything, and I just take it over to a different desk, not the normal desk people check out in, and I tell them my name, show them my ID, and walk out. And I was like, this is like Willy Wonka's candy store for somebody who loves to read. So I bought like so many books over the course of 5 years in college. And when I graduated, I told myself, One thing I want to preserve, I don't have the scholarship anymore, but one thing I want to preserve is unlimited books. So I gave myself Ramit's book buying rule, which says whatever I see a book, if I'm even marginally interested in it, buy it. Don't even think twice. Don't look at the price. That's it. Love it. So that was one of them. I think being able to buy appetizers was another one. And like in my early 20s, it was quite small. It was, being able to take a taxi in New York in August instead of the subway because it's really hot. Yeah, like, this is how small my dream was. But when I hear people and they talk about their rich life, often their dreams are quite small, and I don't mind it. I go, yeah, that's how you start. There's no way I would have dreamed about traveling for months at a time, and now I love beautiful hotels and staying at this hotel and that and taking a tour of the property with the general manager. I didn't even know that's possible. Yeah. But it took steps of being able to happily pay for a taxi and then build on that to see what is possible.

A lot— many of our people that watch and listen to our podcast, uh, they're either in a business or want to start a business, or maybe want to start their second business, uh, and they are on social media and they're fed all this good stuff, some garbage. We talk about how As much as possible, you and I try to be good ambassadors of the internet, but there's a lot of bad actors out there. So we're gonna play a little game.

Okay.

Okay? So this game is called Scam or Legit.

Wow, I was born for this! Tell me.

'Cause apparently everybody can make a million dollars in a week.

That's what they tell me.

Apparently after the second week, they ship you a Lamborghini. The world just ships you one and it comes in a crate. Great. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to give you a scenario. I'm going to give you a prompt, and you're going to tell me if it's legit or a scam.

Great.

And why? Okay, first one: I want to quit my job to start selling supplements.

Scam.

Next.

99% of supplements are fucking scams. I don't even need to know anymore. Please stop. There's like 2 supplements that matter. And yes, they are a high margin business for sure. For sure, you make a ton of money. But why are people going to buy your supplements versus—

Because my cousin told me about it. I got to sign up with—

It's so cheap. Yeah, I got my affiliate link. Yeah, great. You're scam.

Okay. Some guy that drives a Bugatti and smokes cigars told me I need to buy his course on buying real estate.

Scam. I don't mind the Bugatti and I don't mind a course. But when you combine that with real estate, it's a scam. 100%. Real estate in itself is not a scam, but all 3 of them— scam.

Okay. I'm thinking about consulting part-time, doing what I do at my job.

Yes, legit.

Okay.

But you know what? Scammers, you could tell because scammers don't use the word consulting. You know why? Because consulting means work, and scammers don't want to talk about work. They want to talk about Bugattis.

Okay. What about selling an online course on how to plant your own vegetable garden like mine?

Yes. Legit.

Cool. NFTs. Scam.

I mean, it is so funny. My favorite part of it, of the whole NFT thing, is how people used to change their Twitter bio to their NFT or— image. Yeah, whatever. And then one day it just like vanished. They all just like quietly took it down. This is my favorite part of survivorship bias, which is when people are scamming, they talk about it incessantly all the time. And then when it doesn't work, like when they buy some crypto shitcoin and it goes to zero or whatever scam they got involved in, they, they don't go, hey everybody, here's my logical analysis of why I went wrong. They just never talk about it again. Classic. Mutual fund companies have been doing this for generations. They, they, create 15 mutual funds, 10 of them are— they take them out back, shoot them in the head, and never talk about them again. So the only ones remaining are the 5 5-star amazing outperforming mutual funds. This is called survivorship bias. It is well known in the investment literature, and it's used by scammers all the time.

Creating passive income creating AI-generated videos on YouTube channels.

It could be legit, but it's 90% a scam. Let me tell you why. It could be legit because learning how to create videos through AI, very valuable and probably part of the future of what people are going to be doing. Learning how to use it to create income could be valuable, could be legit, no doubt about that. But you're now in this constellation of people who promise you free passive income with no work. So, it's like walking into a casino full of mobsters. Like, could you make money? Yes, you could, but you need to be aware of what's going on right now.

Mm, I like that analogy. Writing books on how to take affordable vacations with your family.

Legit, but a horrible idea. Who's gonna pay? People who wanna take affordable vacations don't wanna pay for an ebook on it. Do not target markets that don't have money. It's just not a good— not with having to pay. They will perhaps click ads. They will do an affiliate type of thing where you could make money on an affiliate. But if they are looking for affordable anything, you probably do not want to charge them for that.

I love it. Last one. Creating a coaching business around what you already know.

Yes, legit. Coaching takes work. Easy way to find clients. It's quite straightforward to identify somebody who has a problem, charge them a reasonable amount, even a premium amount, deliver value to them and transformation, rinse and repeat. You have a $100K business, $300K business, $500K business, million-dollar business. That's great. Wait, how come we don't talk about my own site? Because if you identified it, it sounds like a scam. Uh, guy who creates books and courses on getting rich. And like, I'm like, fuck scam. It sounds like a scam right there. But it— what's the distinction? Why is it not? Let me try to answer it. One, if you read any of the material, within 2 seconds you realize, oh, this takes work and it actually delivers sensible results. Two, just Google people's name. Yeah. Are they legit? For example, there's a reason I talk about going to Stanford. It's not my ego. It's that in order to go to Stanford, you probably have to have worked hard, be smart, be able to follow through on things. But I will admit, if you just look at the surface of something called I Will Teach You to Be Rich, kind of sounds like a scam. Sorry, guys.

The difference is that I think, and you need to be able to spot this difference, is that what you teach requires, like you said, hard work. But also requires time.

Yeah.

You know, it's gonna take time, whether it's your investment advice, whether it's building a business, whether it's— I know that you sold courses on how to make money on the side.

Yeah.

You know, it's gonna take a bit of time. And the reason why it's gonna take a bit of time is because, one, you have to get better.

Yeah.

Right. I think a lot of people don't realize the fact that when you start anything, play any kind of sport, playing a game, and including the game of business, you have to, one, get better at the thing that you're doing, but also get better at this idea of business. And that takes time. And I think that a lot of people just discount that.

You know what? I'm so glad you brought that up because I think a lot of people, they're like, is Omar Zenhom the right person to learn from? Is Ramit? Is this person— is this book good? And those are valid questions for sure. You should be thoughtful about who you learn from, but also you should take a look in the mirror and ask yourself, am I ready? Am I coachable? Because there are a lot of books that are very good, but are you coachable? I remember when I first decided to get fit, there was a gym across the street from me. I was living in New York, and it took me 4 months to get the courage to walk into that gym because I wanted to hire a personal trainer. Had nothing to do with money. I had the money. Nothing to do with time. I had the time. Yeah. I knew that once I hired a trainer, I had to take it seriously. And so when I finally, 4 months later, got the courage to walk in, I go to the front desk, I go, "I want a trainer." He goes, "All right." He literally pulls the next trainer walking by, pulls him. Guy goes, "What are your goals?" I don't know what my goals are. I made it up. I go, "I want to gain 10 pounds of muscle." Where did I come up with that? I don't know. I just made it up. And the trainer looks at me and goes, "Okay, you're going to have to stop doing cardio. We're going to start doing this and that." And I looked him dead in the eye and said, "I'm ready to do whatever it takes for as long as it takes." I was coachable. I was ready. So sometimes it's not about is it the perfect trainer or the perfect book or course. Those matter, but am I the right student and am I coachable? That matters more.

We're here in Tokyo, Japan. Uh, you're spending, spending an extended amount of time here in Tokyo, uh, and we had a chance to meet up here and do this interview but also hang out.

Yeah.

One of the things that we discussed while we're hanging out is like what What's happening in your business right now while you're out here in Tokyo? And you said, oh, the team's taking care of it and they're working on it and all that kind of stuff. And I love the fact that you empower your team, but we know that didn't just happen overnight. What was the first hire you made to start that process where you have a machine that's running for you so that you can travel the world?

The team is, um, handling it amazingly well for months, so I'm not working. And I get a status update once a week. Here's what's going on in the business. It has some links in case I want to double-click in and see closer numbers. And at the bottom, it just says like, "What we need from you." And usually, it's like one thing max. We need an answer on this.

But—

So, I might spend 10 minutes on it. I know what I need to know because of the status updates, and the team is just awesome. It was not like that when I started in my 20s. I did a lot of stuff on my own. I took it on my own shoulders and I didn't travel a lot. In fact, I had this existential crisis about traveling because I'm like, this business is going to collapse without me. A lot of hero idea, like nothing can survive unless it's me. And I finally took a trip for 2 weeks. Like that was a big deal for me. And the business went on. It went on. Maybe it didn't grow as fast in 2 weeks, but it— still existed, and I'm like, oh shit, am I not as important as I thought? And it was quite humbling. I love that moment when you realize, like, the world goes on, you're not that important. So I loved when I traveled. I loved it. I really fell in love with traveling. And so I started to say, okay, what's it going to take for me to do 2 weeks every year? What about 3 weeks? We went on our honeymoon, we went on a 6-week honeymoon, didn't work. And Oh, except for one thing. I did have to finish up part of my book on safari. I was not happy about that. And so just traveled. And now we have this entire operation. So I would say that the first hire I made was an executive assistant. This was in 2006.

Okay.

Like early, early. I was the only friend of mine who had an assistant. They all thought I was trying to show off. I'm like, guys, it's not showing off. It helps me. Run my life. But since then, you know, we have leadership team and everyone's kind of dialed in in the org.

Okay, so that first hire, the EA, what is— what are the first things you took off your plate and gave to the EA?

Amazing, I love it. So any travel arrangements or meeting arrangements, and I did this in the following way: I had a list of 3 different places that I meet people. One was a casual coffee shop really close to me. One was a dinner spot in case I had a dinner meeting. And the third was a little bit more of an elevated place to meet in case I was meeting someone who's, you know, a little bit older or maybe more established in their career. So I wrote down the instructions in an SOP and I was like, here you go. You now know my schedule. You're responsible for it. That immediately shaved off hours per week because I was doing a lot of meetings. So that part. Then eventually, now I have an amazing executive assistant and she manages travel, she manages some of my personal coordination, ordering things that need to be replenished, uh, interfacing with different vendors. Okay, if I'm gonna go back to LA, we need to spin up everything there. So when am I getting a haircut? What about training, right? Etc., etc.

So outside the EA, what was the next hire that gave you the biggest ROI in terms of tech integration.

Back then we didn't have integration for this stuff, and even today it's not easy to make it all work together. Your shopping cart talking to XYZ. That was a great hire.

Are you an Infusionsoft baby?

Don't say that word. Cost me millions.

Yeah.

Wait, are you on Infusionsoft?

No, I'm not, but I was familiar with a lot of friends.

Dude, like, I feel a chill going through my body right now. My— if you say this ask my team, they'll all just look at you like they saw a ghost. Yeah, we were on this software, as a lot of people who kind of grew up in that generation, and it made a lot of promises, and then, you know, it was okay, but we had to get off it. It's tough, and it cost millions. I have spent millions of dollars on technology mistakes and just technology transformations. And so please listen to me, here's my lesson to everybody: off the shelf as much as possible. Don't do anything custom. Find the software that has the most number of users, and if it does at least 80% of what you need, just take it. Do not go custom. It will cost you millions. It cost me millions. Don't make my mistake.

Yeah, I agree with that 100%. We've redid our website and our technology a bunch of times, and the best ones are the ones that just work seamlessly and you don't have to worry about it.

It's like buying appliances. You might want to have the fanciest one. Just get the one that you can replace at Home Depot and just simple, simple, everybody has it, good.

Exactly. Because at the end of the day, you want as least friction as possible for your customers, for your team.

Yeah.

Because they're going to save hours of time and money and all that kind of stuff. And if more that customers can do on their own, whether it's like, you know, checkout, buy, there's still people that I don't know why they don't allow people to buy online. You have to like make a phone call. Um, but then it makes no sense.

Wait a minute, aren't we here in Japan? That's like 90% of the places.

Let's talk about that. Oh my God. What are you learning in Japan?

Dude, it's so awesome here. First of all, like, I think every American comes here and the first time they come here, they all take the same videos, which I did myself. Oh my God, 7-Eleven is so amazing. Like, wow, it's so clean. Like, okay, cool. Did that. That's great. Being here, having come here many times, I think this may be like our 10th time and we're here for a long period of time. I love being able to go deeper. So, like, right now in particular, it's very tempting. A lot of people are posting about how cheap it is in Japan. Okay, yeah, currency and things like that. But I think once you are here and you're talking to people, you realize there's actually a major issue, right? If you're earning wages here, it's really difficult and there's inflation issues and cost of living is really high. While it might be great for Americans, it's not great if you're living here. And so actually I'm not posting videos about look how cheap it is. I don't really think it's appropriate. Yeah, I do love and have always loved, but now love even more, the craftsmanship and focus on detail. Everything from, you know, how somebody might walk you out when you buy something to just the thoughtfulness of the experience in a restaurant. We absolutely love it. We love the design and we're into design and furniture. And so coming on this trip, one of the things that I talked to my wife about was, you know, we travel a lot, but we don't buy, we don't buy things. We don't buy anything. We pack with pretty much carry-on and we come back with a carry-on. We usually have nothing from our trips. We love the experience, we love the food, we like the videos. That's it. I was like, you know what? I think we actually should. Buy a few things when we're here. We love Japanese craftsmanship, we love the design, and it's time for us to start remembering some of these amazing trips we've taken through the things that we have at home. As an example, we have these, you know, beautiful coasters from Rwanda. We remember those every time we put our coffee mugs on them. And so we're, we're looking at those things and we're trying to go deeper and meet some of the craftsmen who make it, maybe get something custom made. That's been really meaningful for us.

That's beautiful. One of the things I love about Japan is the attention to detail. Like, everything is thought out. Everything is— I'll give you a small example. Nicole and I and some friends were at a department store, and there was like a food hall down below in this department store, and you can buy some food, and you can— and they have these plastic bags where you can put the food in the plastic bag like you'd normally see in a food hall.

Yeah.

Those plastic bags are notorious. It's hard to open, right? Like, they're kind of sticky, and usually you'd lick your fingers and do that. Yeah, but that's gross.

Yeah, right.

So they had like a rollerball that's wet that you can just do that to open up the plastic bag. Oh my god. And it's just like, this is a refined culture. This is, this is, this is like, why do we need to lick our fingers? Let's— yeah, let's—

you disgusting barbarians.

Yeah, exactly. I would say that—

invent a rollerball. How could you not have done that.

Exactly.

Wow, I love that.

I mean, I always say that when the Japanese travel, they must think we're animals.

Dude, we think the same thing. Like, what must it be like to come to New York and there's trash and there's people screaming? But I do think it's a, you know, it's kind of a cool experience. But I always, always am wondering the same thing. And now I have a newfound respect for all my Japanese friends who moved from here to the US, because that's not an easy transition. It's very different. Actually, moving Moving from anywhere to the US is not easy.

But there is a lot of rules here, and that doesn't jive with my entrepreneurial DNA.

Yeah, like I had this restaurant that we walked to the other day, and it was like 90% empty. And when I say walk there, we got there at 5:05 PM, okay? No reservation. And we're like really hungry. We're like, um, any— no reservation, any chance we can sit down? And they were like, sorry, we're booked. I was like, I'm like, I could literally be in and out of here by 5:25. Like, I am a fast eater. Nope. And I was just like, all right, rules are rules.

Yeah. The letter of the law is really respected here.

Yeah. But like, for an American, it's the first time that you encounter something where people do not respond purely to capitalistic tendencies. You're just like, what?

You can't make a reservation for like 8:30. It has to be 8:00 because the timing of whatever. And then we go there, the restaurant's empty. It's like, okay, so why can't we do 8:30? Like, yes, because that's the rule.

So how do you respond to that?

I just follow the rule. Yeah, because I'm a visitor here. I have to respect.

Yeah, yeah. In America, we'll do whatever it takes to make the next dollar. But in different cultures, that is not the case. And it takes a readjustment. So when you go to a restaurant and they're just like, "Sorry," and it's empty.

Yeah.

I think the first reaction is like, "What the hell?" But I agree with the way that—

Yeah.

The way you respond is the right way, right? It's not our culture, we have to respect.

And I think it's healthy to go to different cultures, different countries, so you can experience that. And, you know, a lot of that is this idea of following the rules as being risk-averse and understanding that some people have a high tolerance for risk, and will do anything to earn another dollar. Like, you know, and that's kind of applauded in the US and in Western countries. But I think in Japan, it's more like, how are you contributing to society is more of the big, you know, flex here.

Well, that's why coming here is so inspirational from a business perspective. So when my wife and I travel, we— she's an entrepreneur as well, she's a personal stylist. Oh, you know, you've had her on the show. Yeah. So she, she and I both study how does hospitality work? How does business work? How do restaurants work? And then we take that back to our own businesses. So for example, the idea that, uh, you don't actually need to be chasing every marginal dollar, right? Just know the kind of craft that you're in. And once you have done it, run it your way.

Exactly.

That is an amazing part of business that you would not know if you only go to Burger King and Chipotle where they're going to serve it your way. Maybe a business doesn't need to serve it your way. Maybe they actually want to do what their vision is and that's how it's going to be. Or maybe they're going to charge a very high price and they're going to serve this many people per day. And once they're done, they're done.

Yeah. You know, I was in SaaS for 10 years. We are a software company. We exited. But one game that's played in SaaS a lot is pricing and figuring out like packaging and add-ons and figuring out like, let's put them in tiers, and if you want this feature, then you're gonna have to upgrade. And it was sometimes overcomplicated. And we even got to the point where it's like, okay, this is a little bit too confusing. And people are like bouncing in the checkout process because they're not really sure which packages you go, which plan is best for them, right? And there's a rule in business I repeat over and over again, is that a confused mind never buys. So you need to be really Simple. And then we really simplified our pricing page and our plans, and it really helped our customers have a more, you know, a pleasant checkout, but also not buy something they don't need.

Okay. Such a great mental model, which is in the Western world, we would prefer to add more things on. Oh, I'm not feeling well. Give me a supplement. Give me this drink. Give me this.

More, more, more.

Oh, I need something in my house. Buy more stuff. In other cultures, let's subtract. Let's subtract. And that's really hard for us raised in the West to do. What do you mean subtract? Well, what about this? Well, what about if I need this one room in my house once a year when my family visits? How can I subtract? We feel this need that we always have to keep something in reserve. Here, when we're shopping for food, we're buying enough strawberries for that day. And my wife and I actually had a lengthy conversation about could we recreate this in the US? The idea of going out and shopping every day for just what we need. We thought about it, and even though we live in walkable communities, the infrastructure is not set up.

It's not set up for that.

Like, there's a farmer's market, but it's not that often. And the fridges are enormous, whereas here they're much smaller. Like, the whole infrastructure and cultural worldview is different. I like that because it forces us to think, why do we do what we do?

Right.

And is it good? Is it what we want? And maybe we don't, maybe we do like it. I do like buying a big old thing from Costco of yogurt.

Yeah.

So I don't have to go back like every single day. I love that. I love you, Costco. But there are certain things where when we go back, we're like, we don't really want to do that.

Yeah. I would say the most, you know, the average American doesn't know what fruits are in season.

No way.

'Cause it's available all the time.

24/7, great example. Yeah. Yeah. And they're all slightly mediocre or very, but you can get 'em all the time. Yeah, I know. Last night we were eating yakitori and we saw this eggplant and the eggplant was like very modestly sized. And I was just thinking like the eggplant that we have is this fucking big.

It's like a pumpkin.

I wanted to bring it and show it to the chef and be like, have you ever seen an eggplant this big? Like, I wonder what his reaction would've been. It's so big. Yeah.

Different. Rumi, you love coffee. Let's go grab a coffee.

I'd love to.

Let's go. All right, how about this place?

Looks good.

Yeah, cool.

It's really nice.

Rumi, let's have some coffee.

Let's do it.

Speaking of coffee, a lot of people think that The way to get rich is to save money on coffee.

Then suddenly you'll be wealthy after 75 years. Mm. First of all, if you enjoy your morning coffee, these are tiny, tiny expenses. If you add them all up, even invest the money, it doesn't turn out to be that much. But more practically, people are not going to stop drinking coffee and then take that $5 every day and invest. That's just not how people work. So it's this mathematical argument that simply does not hold up to human nature.

Doesn't work with habits. Yeah.

Yeah. I would rather people say, okay, what do I enjoy about my coffee? What kind of coffee beans do I love? Am I going to the coffee shop for the experience? Whatever.

Okay.

If you want to do it, great. But I'm also going to automatically invest 15% of gross income at 10%.

Great.

And I'm going to automatically save. Focus on the $30,000 questions and not the $3 questions.

So you've been talking about money and wealth for over 20 years now. Okay. What are some things that you've changed your mind on, maybe even recently?

When I started out, I remember writing a post on how 1-hour photo development— remember when you take film to Kodak?

Yeah.

And I was like, what a waste of money. You can wait 3 days. What's the rush? And although we don't do 1-hour photo development anymore, I think this idea that I would— I was, um, I would look down on people who spent money on premium services, even sitting in business class. I'm like, we're all getting to the same place. What's the point? You're just quadrupling your spending. I wish I had walked past them on the airplane and thought to myself, hmm, Why are they spending this? If we can afford to sit in the front or the back of the plane, why would someone choose to spend 4 times the amount? It's not that they're getting there faster, probably not because of the food. What are the other reasons? And I think that what I talk about a lot now is, first, you have to automate your money, savings, investments, spend money guilt-free as well.

Yeah.

But as you start to accumulate more, there's a whole different world of thinking about money. You should not be approaching your money the same way when you're 40 and an entrepreneur as when you were 20 and just getting started. Hello. It's actually not okay to be looking at things exactly the same way because your financial status is different.

One of the things that I learned through entrepreneurship that really I changed my mind about is like Growing up, you know, we both have immigrant parents. Hard work pays off. That's the, that's the motto, right? Work hard, that's how you earn more money. You start to realize that that takes you to a certain point. Like, there's only a certain number of hours you can work, and then you have to start figuring out, how do I take things to the next level? And what I realized is that, like, oh, I have to make money work for me. How do I take my money, take the things I, I took my hard work, I turned that into money. Now I got this money, how do I make that money make more money? Yeah, right.

Yeah. And so things like investing is an example, hiring people for your business, hiring the right people, putting them in the right position. Also just being clear about how much money do I need to make. Yeah, like at a certain point you can just be working for the sake of working or building your business for the sake of building business, but what do I actually I get? This is a philosophy every entrepreneur should ask themselves. Put your hand out, palm up, and say, what do I get? What do I get for taking these risks, for working weekends and nights? What do I get? And the answer better be something that really drives you. So I get to be able to buy a beautiful coat in Kyoto without looking at the price. I'm like, yeah, that could be it.

Yeah.

Or it could be that I get to pick up my son or my daughter from school school every weekday. Yeah, because I have the flexibility as an entrepreneur.

I love this question, what do I get? Because this is a question I and Nicole asked for 10 years when we were building our software company, Warrior Ninja, because there's a lot of sacrifices, a lot of long nights. We had a global team, so we had like all hands at 2 o'clock in the morning, and I was like, this better be worth it. And I, I kept on saying, what am I gonna get when I finally sell this company? What is my life going to look like? And that was kind of like the finish line for me. Like, I'm gonna put up with all this BS and put up all this sacrifice and all this stuff because I'm gonna get this, right? But in the back of my mind, and this is something I like to be honest about in business, it's like there's no guarantees that I could have not sold the business. I could have, you know, screwed it up.

This is where you and I are different because you succeeded and like, it's awesome. You have an amazing lifestyle. I I was not willing to take the gamble of an acquisition or a big payoff like so many of my peers who grew up in Silicon Valley. I'm just like, the risk is too high for what? So for me, as an example, a lot of my Silicon Valley peers, they would take like an okay salary, but nothing great for maybe a decade. And the potential payoff might be like $250 million. Okay, amazing if you get it. The vast majority of people don't get it. I'm looking at it and saying, if I bootstrap my business, maybe I don't get a $250 million payoff, but I'm making way more, which I can invest, make work, I can travel at the same time, etc. So I do think entrepreneurs should make this risk calculation.

Yeah.

And also, you got to ask yourself, what if it doesn't work out?

Yeah.

What if your business had not been acquired?

Which is a real reality. And this is one of the things I think that we need to talk about more online is like, how do you mitigate risk? How do you take some chips off the table?

Yes.

How do you actually take your earnings and invest it into something that is a little more stable, whether it's a Vanguard fund, whatever it might be? And I think that because you have that investment background, you had that top of mind, like, hey, I can just, I'm making X amount of profit, let me take some of that profit and put it into something that's gonna give me 10% return. You know, like what's, is it, Is it counterintuitive for entrepreneurs to think this way?

They hate this. They hate it.

Tell me why.

The majority of my entrepreneur friends do not invest in the market. And they're really proud of it. They'll tell me, "Oh, why would I? Why would I put it in a Vanguard fund? I can make 3 times the amount in my own business." I'm like, "How many businesses do you know that are around 50 years later?" Exactly. What are you doing? Take a little bit of money. And when I say a little bit, for an entrepreneur, it might be $25K a year. Depending on the size of their business, it might be $250K or whatever. But take some of it, put it in the market. After a few years, that money really compounds. And what they are seeing is $100K that they took out of the business, which could have turned into $400K. I'm seeing it as de-risking, but it's not that de-risking. It actually grows. 10% growth on average per year.

Very good.

Is really good for a business.

That's good.

Yeah. So it is, it's actually so hard to get entrepreneurs to understand that you should not only be swinging for the fences on everything. There are places to go really hard on, really aggressive, and there are places not to. Like pricing as an example, just in business, you probably don't need to innovate on pricing. Pricing is kind of a well-known art and science. Just copy what other people are doing and you're probably going to be Fuck yeah. You do not need to innovate on your investment strategy. In fact, if you are, you're probably going to lose money. You're probably a dumb rich person who's getting fleeced. And so follow what the industry standard is. Low-cost index funds. Great. Yeah. Entrepreneurs don't want to hear this at all. There's still— none of you guys are going to listen to me. So what am I even doing here?

No, but I have to be honest with you. Like, this is music to my ears because when we sold, I became a lot more risk-averse because it's like, I know how hard it is to have something successful that is valuable enough to be acquired. Yeah, I, I was humble enough to know I had lightning in a bottle. Like, it's very hard to reproduce that. So it's like, okay, now what do I— how do I be smarter with my money now that I have some?

Yes.

You know, and how do I, you know, invest and diversify my investments? And this is something that a lot of people don't talk about not only in the entrepreneurial community, but like sometimes people inherit money, some people like they don't even know what to do with it. Because I think one of the things that people don't understand is that like in order for you to be good with money, you have to have some.

So what I think the principle that I'm hearing here is, at least for me, what I'm taking away from this is the philosophy of don't wait until some magical day when you will change. And this is kind of the undercurrent of so much of our culture, which is like, when I finally have time, then I'll get fit. When I finally have time, then I'll properly invest my money. And I'm like, why don't you just do it right now? Yeah, do a little bit of it right now. And that means taking 10% or 15% automatically and putting it in an index fund. Take the rest, enjoy it, or put it back in your business. Great. Same way, nobody would ever say, I'm gonna wait until I'm 55 to make friends. Yeah. It's too late. You can't do it. You've got to do it along the way, and that's actually the whole journey that makes this whole thing fun. What do we get to do along the way? What do I get? And at the end, a year from now, 5 years from now, it should even be bigger and better.

Yeah, I mean, one piece of advice I got that actually is very simple that I would actually like to pass on to people that are listening: if you're an entrepreneur, take a $500 dividend every month and invest it in a Vanguard Index Ooh, right. That it's not going to kill your business. Yeah, because like a $500 expense is not huge, right? Okay, you're gonna, you know, pay the tax on that, blah blah, but you're, you're kind of shoring up yourself, your family, and understanding that like I'm playing this risk game in the business, but I'm taking some chips off the table every time. People don't realize that every year you're in business, it's like the cards are getting dealt again, right? The longer you're there, the more risks you're accumulating. And the funny thing is that people don't realize that the people that are most at risk are the most successful. People think that, oh, you know, my business is not doing that well, I'm kind of— my profits have been the same for the last few years, so it's not a big deal. But people that do well, those are the people that are the most at risk that things can turn around and you can lose everything you've built in 10 years or 12 years or 20 years.

I like the idea of $500 a month or a quarter, take it as a distribution I love that. It builds discipline. You have to have the discipline of taking that money and investing. I think that's awesome. My buddy Mike Michalowicz wrote this book, Profit First.

Love Mike.

Awesome. Focus on— you've got to focus on the profit. That's what my wife as an entrepreneur, she says, what's profit? What's the profit? I don't care about Instagram followers. What is the profit? And that builds a very disciplined profit-generating business if that is your question. You're asking. I also think that as an entrepreneur, you should ask yourself, what am I going to do for fun? Something that is often neglected as entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs often see themselves as like, I gotta like grind, and I'm like, yeah, you do, you do. I, I—

but, but don't glorify it.

Yeah, yeah. Like, work hard, yes. Sometimes you're gonna have to work nights, maybe a weekend. Fine, that's fine. But what's the fun part? And the fun thing literally could be I get to take my dog for a walk twice a day now.

Mm, great.

And then what's the next step after that? I get to go out to a restaurant. I get to buy this beautiful glassware that I've had my eye on for 5 years. I'm gonna buy 2 glasses because that's what I can afford right now, but they're beautiful.

Yeah.

And on and on and on up until whatever your rich life is.

Yeah.

What do you get? It's got to be fun. And as well as profitable too.

And if you don't know how to have fun, meet some Brazilian people because that's their top priority. You met José, my friend, he's Brazilian.

Or Italians. Yes. Can I just tell you, so on our honeymoon, we took a long honeymoon, we started in Italy. Yeah, we brought our parents with us for that part of it, then we went to Kenya, then went to India, then went to Thailand. And when we're in Italy, we We're like, man, Italians really excel at the game of leisure. Like, they are the world's best at leisure. And I remember we went to the Brunello Cucinelli campus, and this is a clothing brand that I really love. And we were having lunch. They served lunch every day, farm fresh food brought from, you know, within a few miles.

And everyone looks like a model.

We're just like eating. And I asked the person who was showing us around, I said, like, okay, you have a 90-minute lunch.

That's a long lunch.

Takes like 15, 20 minutes to eat. What do people do after they go back to their desk? And she laughed. She goes, look around. I'm looking around. There's like 2 Italians outside smoking a cigarette.

Yeah.

There's 3 or 4 Italians going on a walk together along campus. And they're just enjoying that moment. And at the time I'm living in New York and like you eat at your desk. Yeah. You're hustling. And I remember—

I don't want that person creating my products.

Yeah. Nice.

Yeah.

I remember thinking like working hard is important. I like to work, but it's not all of your life. It's one part of your life. And maybe parenting or traveling or your dog or your hobby. Those are other parts that create a rich life together. So I was inspired by seeing people slow down and have their coffee, and I want to do more of that. And I want to encourage people, you can be successful as an entrepreneur and be relaxed, not in a rush. It's like, take how long we need to take to have this conversation. I'm in no rush. I have all the time in the world. And so that's the way that I want entrepreneurs to see a successful entrepreneur. Entrepreneur, because you can do exactly that.

On that note, Rameen, thanks for being a part of our life.

My pleasure, man.

I hope you enjoyed that conversation with Rameen Sethi. I sure did. I highly recommend if you want to learn more from Rameen to check out How to Get Rich, his Netflix show, as well as his OG book, I Will Teach You to Be Rich, which is a New York Times bestselling book, and his latest book, Money for Couples, which is also a New York Times bestseller. So this guy knows how to write a great book. But if you love podcasts, which I'm sure you do because you're watching or listening to this episode, then I would check out his podcast Money for Couples, which is a really unique idea in the first place, but it's also a great way for you to learn from other people's experiences with money. Go ahead and check it out. It's called Money for Couples on wherever you listen to podcasts.