The 21 Secret Habits of Millionaires

There are two reasons I was not going to publish this episode. Reason number one is some of these habits and tricks billionaires do not want you to know. That's not me just being sensational. I know and have interviewed 21 billionaires and hundreds of people worth 10 million, 100 million or 500 million. And they all say the same things behind closed doors about how they really got rich. I'm going to make a big claim. You've never seen any content like this on the Internet ever about what it really takes to get rich from really rich people. Why? Because billionaires would never tell you how they avoid tax. Billionaires would never tell you how they control policy and politicians. And this is exposed in this episode. The second reason I wasn't going to share this, because actually I have another podcast called Money, and this is all about money. The 21 Habits of Money, the super rich, and the billionaires that they don't want you to know. We go deep into this episode with specific examples and stories. I have a slight fear about putting this episode up because a lot of the private conversations I have, I believe you need to know, but these billionaires will never tell you, and they'll probably be pissed off.

Habit number one, curiosity, no question is stupid. They can learn from anything or anyone.

Something that shocked me was one of the early billionaires I interviewed, David McCourt, and I thought interviewing a billionaire, you'd get someone probably strong, maybe even a bit arrogant, knows everything. I mean, to be a billionaire, you have to know a lot. And he immediately turned the interview on me. That is within two questions. He's asking me questions. He was asking me about launching a podcast, building the personal brand, Modern Media. He was in more traditional media, and I was quite shocked. And of the 21 billionaires, I've actually found they're very curious and they don't look down on you like you would think that they might, because they know that they can learn from everyone. And generally, what you find in business and life is those that have got a little bit of success, they're the arrogant ones. They're the ones that think that they know it all. But to become a billionaire, you have to have seen everything. You've probably lost loads of money, you've probably had a zillion legal battles, you've probably got loads of staff. You know that you can learn from every single one of those people if you actually have that mindset. And after all, what's the point in having staff if you can't learn from them? You also know that with all these staff, you couldn't achieve your own mission. You also know, for example, Bill Gates, billionaire, he said that, you know, the growth of your business is in the complaints department. That is talking to your customers and being curious as to what their problems are. What I found when I started my business 18 years ago was if customers complained, I'd get quite defensive. I'd take it personally, I'd be hurt, or I might know you're wrong. But actually sitting down and allowing customers who've got some complaints to air their frustrations and make them feel comfortable, like giving you feedback and you being curious about the customers experience in your brand, that's how you learn and improve. So people don't think that billionaires are curious. They think that they're arrogant and monopolistic will come to that, because they kind of are monopolistic. And that surprised me when I first started meeting Billionaires, what, nearly 20 years ago?

Yeah. I suppose to be a billionaire you have to solve a lot of problems or one problem for a lot of people. And if you're always just pying off complaints, it's very easy just to not succeed that much.

Yeah. Also, the day that you stop growing is the day you think you know it all. But people perceive that a billionaire would be arrogant because they perceive that they know a lot. The challenge you have when you become successful is you know what it takes to become successful. So you know you've got something about you that's different from those that aren't. But then you also need that humility because becoming a millionaire is way easier than becoming a billionaire.

Number two, full responsibility. Even if it's not your fault, take and don't give the blame.

Yeah. So lockdowns or covids or recessions or depressions or legal cases or legal or legal cases or bank defaults, there's a lot of things outside of your control that you could blame. And most people do, they want it to be someone else's fault. Because if it's someone else's fault, they can't. Because if it's someone else's fault, then they're not going to have to look at themselves in the mirror and realize their own flaws and failings. And the really rich people, and this isn't just billionaires, hundred millionaires, deca, millionaires, whatever, they all have challenges. It's not like these billionaires never had a challenge. In fact, the billionaires have the biggest challenges. They might have legal cases with the government. Now, if you imagine you run a, if you imagine you run A billion dollar company, your lawsuits are going to be huge. You know, you could have lawsuits with class action from thousands of customers. You know, imagine you're in pharmaceutical, you might, people might die from your drugs or your trials. So as you get bigger, there are bigger problems. And I naively thought when I started in business, once I got to a certain level, 10 grand a month, 20 grand a month, 50 grand a month, 100 grand a month, million a month, be happy, there would be no problems. Your reward for solving a problem is a bigger problem. And with every new level is a new devil. So the only way you can continually grow is that everything is your fault, even if it's not. So a better word is full responsibility. Because fault is blame, responsibility is ownership. But to me they're similar. So if, if at any point I go, that's someone else's fault, I can't change it because I'm reliant on them fixing it. Now I could say it's their fault for the failure. So therefore I'm going to fire them and replace them with someone else. That's my responsibility. Their fault they messed up. Well actually I can own it because I hired them. So then I have to take the responsibility and let them go and get someone else new in. And that's how that's full ownership. And I've never met a billionaire ever that made excuses that blamed everyone else. They just fix up, look sharp, you know, have a look in the mirror, tell themselves that they can do this and they go and sort shit out. They don't hide from problems and they own everything.

What's the hardest pill you've had to swallow? Then something that's a massive colossal fuck up and you've had to go, that's on me and I've got to fix it.

Well, probably lockdown. Because if you think about lockdown, that would be easy to say. That's not my fault. I didn't cause lockdown. How could you even have predicted lockdown? You couldn't. However, I know that what they call the Black Swan event, the event you can't predict, you still have to plan for. The event you can't plan for, you know, the zombie apocalypse. At home you don't expect anything. But you've got your basement, you've got your stash of water and condensed milk, little vault dug in the basement at home. So in a way for business, in business you have to have your own contingency plan for a zombie apocalypse. And when lockdown happened, it really blindsided me. However, we didn't just survive and endure through it, we thrived. Here's how. We had more cash than we needed. We had retained earnings. We were able to be flexible with how many staff we had. We let go of some, but then we put all of them back on furlough. We. We took all of our online events and pivoted them quickly on. We took all of our physical events and pivoted them quickly into online events. It would take us nine months to design an event. We were doing them one a week. So lockdown was the hardest thing I've had because the government made it illegal for me to run my business. Yet I think that what they did was illegal, maybe even a crime against humanity, and they're going to get away with it. So it would be very easy for me with how I felt about how. And our government shut this entire country down not once, not twice, but three times. It'd be very easy for me to blame them. Very easy, because actually it is their fault. But once I say, yeah, it's their fault, then I have to immediately be responsible because I'm either going to walk into 10 Downing street and physically get them to change the law or I'm going to change my business. You've got two choices. The thing that happened, you change it or you change you. And this is what billionaires are so good at. The billionaires I've met, they've got this crazy power where they believe they can mold the universe. Like Elon Musk really believes he's going to inhabit Mars. That there will be 0.001% of the population that actually believe they could inhabit Mars. Elon Musk believes he can. So you have to have this sort of naive delusion that you can change the world. And sometimes that is something that happens. That's a Black Swan event that's out of your control, that you actually go, well, I can change this. But the government weren't going to listen to me and I was ranting every day on Facebook and I can go and knock on number 10 and nothing's going to happen. So then I have to go. Okay. I should have been more prepared for the lockdown. Yes, it's a Black Swan event. I couldn't predict it it would happen, but I can predict that a Black Swan event would happen. Thankfully, we sort of did with the way we run our business. We hold retained earnings. We only draw 66% of profit. The other 33, 34% with a third. A third. A third stays in the business for cash reserves.

So is that because you. There's two of you in the business.

Yeah. So there's 50, 50 shareholders in our training businesses. So we draw a third each and retain a third. So we had cash reserves. I learned this from Bill Gates. Bill Gates said, you know, he always wanted to get to two years working capital in the bank, which means no business for the next two years. You can run all your overheads. So we, your first goal is to get like a month and then three months and then six months and 12 months. And I remember back in 2007 when we started, I'd be like, we've got a month's working capital in the bank, let's get to three. We've got three months working capital. If you think about most people, they haven't got even a month of savings. So if they got made redundant or something happened to them, or they were injured or ill and couldn't work for months, they'd be screwed for money. So that was the hardest thing, but by a mile. I mean, you know, you make bad senior hires, laws change, you get legal cases. These things all happen. These are normal now. But certainly the worst, hardest thing was lockdown. And the hardest thing was actually to fully own it yourself.

Yeah, I can imagine that's tough. Let me just ask you a question on the believing they can mould something. So this is something I've seen with quite a few successful people and I want to know if you've seen the same is they have short term memory to trauma. And what I mean by that is they only ever really remember the wins and they kind of forget the pain of the losses. And I think that helps them sort of power through. Kind of like how people say, like, you forget the pain of childbirth and that's why two years later they're like, oh, I want another one. Have you seen the same thing? Because I'm assuming if you're a billionaire, you've probably lost it all. You know, you've had all of the challenges and yet you're still motivated to carry on and take all these risks.

I would say no.

Interesting.

But yes.

Okay, Right.

So the no part is most very successful people I've met, they're carrying a big childhood trauma. I know I am. And generally being motivated towards the attainment of a goal or pleasure is nowhere near as motivating as running away from something very painful. So actually, if you look at very successful people, Oprah Winfrey, billionaire, abused as a child, and if you look at a lot of the billionaires, they did not have the loving Nurturing childhood. They were the youngest child, they got beaten up, they got abused, they got ostracized, they were severely challenged. So I would say that the big billionaires, they're running away from a main trauma that burns inside of them that's never actually going to be fixed because you imagine you were raised with all the love and attention you ever needed. There's no pain there. So you're not going to drive and strive and compete and feel the hard pain of loss to get back on the horse and go again. So I think they have the long term memory of trauma, but I think what they're able to do is move through short term losses, defeats and dust themselves off. But it's driven by the long term pain and trauma.

It's probably insignificant compared to what they're already carrying. So it's like, oh, I've lost a million quid, I'm a billionaire, whatever. Next thing.

Well, here's the funny thing about billionaires is the thing that happened in their childhood might be relatively small. You know, they may have been overweight, they may have been bullied a bit. Now some have been seriously abused and that's obviously horrific. But they've turned it into a gift, I. E. They use it as fuel and motivation. But often the things that happened in our childhood that really emotionally scar us, they're not really that significant. But we play them out over and over again and we get triggered in current situations back to our childhood before. But the thing is like, people don't want to say this in society right now, but you know, shame and anger and frustration and jealousy and envy and bitterness and these are all actually really productive emotions. Like how many really happy? Chill. You know, everything is awesome. Billionaires out there do you know, I mean, everyone's saying, oh, none of the billionaires are happy and they've got really bad relationships. I mean, they don't know, but they say that. But I don't think a billionaire is supposed to be happy. I think a billionaire is supposed to change the world. It's not a happy pursuit, changing the world. You have to solve a lot of problems. You know, right now we've got a lot of moving parts in this business. I have a big 18 month mission. I was actually thinking before I came in to talk to you, not particularly happy right now, but my job is not to be happy. My job is to fix that, fix that, fix that, fix that, fix that, fix a million fucking things in the next 18 months. And actually the best motivator for that is anger, frustration, because they drive you to get shit done.

Yeah, I was listening to a podcast yesterday and somebody, I don't know who come out and said like we need to listen, look after the mental well being of our sports stars. And this guy's like, no, I want my athletes a fucking psycho. Like Michael Jordan was completely tapped mentally. But that's why he's an absolute killer and that's why it's so entertaining. I think if you are kind of normal or emotionally okay, you haven't got that drive to go do something that is beyond everybody else above, not even above average, just hall of fame worthy.

Yeah, well, I mean I don't know what percentage 0.01 you have to be to be a billionaire. So by definition of statistics they are completely abnormal. So if you're the kind of person that observes the masses, does the opposite, loves to rebel against convention. People are always telling you you're weird and different and not normal. It's probably a good sign. And yeah, I like, I think there's a difference between wanting someone to be obsessive and completely unique and diva ish. And you know, maybe a little bit as they say on the spectrum to be successful in their career. I think it's after, you know, I know a lot of ex sports stars and they really struggle once they finish their career because you know, look at Cristiano Ronaldo like he is actually in a way, I don't know him but I'm going to observe quite childish. Like there was this time when he went to see one of the presenters, Gary Neville and he completely blanked Jamie Carragher because Jamie Carragher had said something in his commentary about him. I mean that's childish but clearly that, well, you're against me, so fuck you. I'm going to train harder to prove to you because you play for Liverpool and who are you like that childish, like resentment and bitterness is really fucking motivating. So I think a lot of the millionaires, well, I know this because I am one and I've observed it. I'm not a billionaire but you know, I've observed it is all these childish emotions that society is trying to say, well that's not good for your mental health. You know, be mature. They're actually really motivating if you want to be successful. There's nothing more motivating than wanting to be successful, than being bitter and resentful to all the other competitors. It's not a healthy emotion. This is not a well being interview. Yeah, but like obsessed with the competition and like so much pain if you lose and so much pleasure if you win. And you will not stop until you're the best, you know, monomaniacally obsessed. This is kind of what you need to be a billionaire, by the way, if you don't want any of this, be a zeroer. You know, go watch another. Go watch some, I don't know, Happy Happy Joy Joy podcast. These are just the realities. Emotions, they have no meaning. So there is no good or bad emotion. Is anger good or bad?

Depends, right?

Well, everything depends. Anger's really bad if you're unleashing on your children unfairly without knowing what they did wrong. But if your business is struggling and you get angry at where it's at because you know in your soul it should be better. Angry is a very productive. Angry is a very productive emotion. So I think billionaires, so I observe billionaires, they've transcended the judgment of all of this. They're not trying to be happy. They know what their emotions are and they're able to leverage those emotions, control them, master them.

Number three, trends and early market movements. What does that mean?

So if you now try and get into the car business or the insurance business, you're really late and it's going to be really hard to get any market share because they're already massive monopolistic behemoths that completely dominate. Imagine trying to set up a pharmaceutical company to provide drugs for every person on the planet. I'm not saying it's impossible. I mean, if you're really disruptive and you completely change your market, I mean, after all, Apple got into the phone business and that was a pretty competitive business, but they're unicorns. So generally you want to get into a business which is upward trending. So AI, Upward trending crypto, Upward trending related businesses to AI and crypto. Upward trending information or the reduction of overwhelm. Upward trending. If you get into a business at that inflection point where it's gone through the initial stress of, of testing and setting up like the lily, that expands really quickly across the pond once it's fought through the first few, doubling every days. If lilies were to cover an Entire Lake in 30 days, it would cover half the lake in 29 days, it would cover a quarter of the lake in 28 days. So in 28 days out of 30, where there's only a quarter covered, but as it doubles every day, so you get this inflection compounding with. Once you time the market at the right point, now that's not easy to do. Most mere mortals can't do it. Billionaires all do it. Because you can't get. Because you can't go into a decaying or dying market. Now, that's either because they've got a higher sense of timing than most other humans because they've got that you could call sixth sense, or they've got this naive delusion that they can mold the world and they can create that information inflection point. Because you either go into a trending upward market or you reteach the world, like Steve Jobs, literally, with the iPhone. Retort the world, because everyone used to press buttons and use those toggles. And Steve Jobs famously said, I know my customers better than me. Steve Jobs famously said, I know my customers better than them, so I don't ask them. Henry Ford famously said, if I ask my customers what they want, they'd want a faster horse. So these unique unicorn billionaires, they know what the customers want better than the customers know, and they know the inflection points and they can create the trends. That's a very unicorn thing to be able to do. And they're like the highest echelon of billionaires. The others just get in at the right time. Like if you're Bill Gates and you're around supercomputers at the right time, you're at the right time. If you're in, you know, east. If you're in the east and there's oil everywhere, then you're in the. There's no oil in the UK that anyone's making billions out of. Dubai was all built on oil money. So you've got some circumstantial. So you've got some circumstantial inflection points of trending upward markets, or you, you create it. This is important, though. That's called an early mover advantage or the early adopter phase. But you can be too early. I bet if you looked at all the billionaires, I bet the very first phone company went bust. I mean, the guy who invented the Internet, I don't think he became a billionaire. Everyone else leveraging the Internet became a billionaire. So you don't want to be first because nothing is proven.

What percentage of the billionaires you've interviewed would say it was luck?

Well, this is the thing. So I'm gonna. This is my first calling out the, that I see about what billionaires or their PR companies. Because here's the thing, every billionaire is going to have loads of PR advice, and I'm going to make this little Bet, and I'll make a bet that most of the rhetoric you see on social media doesn't actually come from the billionaire like a lot of the politicians, they have writers, it's pr. So I reckon the good PR to be the loved billionaire would be to give luck lot of credit, because that's nice and everyone wants to hear that, but at the end of the day, you make your own luck to a greater degree. So whilst I respect the humility of anyone who says I was lucky, and I'd probably say to be a billionaire or a trillionaire, you probably need more luck than to be a millionaire. But actually, most people on this planet could belligerently, attritionally smashed their way to be a millionaire in the end, if they just kept going, no matter how much bad luck they had.

So anybody could be a millionaire?

Just most people. I mean, look, if you're in the third world and there's no Internet and you have to walk 10 miles to get some water. No, if you've got access to the Internet and you've got access to information and you want to learn under those pretenses, anyone could be brute force your way there. Yeah, well, you've got to want to first. You know, there's a lot of people in the entrepreneurial millionaire billionaire space. Anyone could be an entrepreneur, anyone could be millionaire. No, you can't. If you're in Africa, you have to walk 10 miles to get water and you haven't got the Internet and you go to school and the books are 70 years old and there's two of them. No, you can't be. But if you want to be, and you've got access to information at good speed on the Internet, now you've got a chance. So anyone like that can be. Now take any individual, they're going to get their own dose of good or bad luck. But here's the thing with luck, define what's good luck. Like having a car crash and losing some of your limbs. Well, my friend Mark Ormrod went out to war, came back with half an arm and all of his limbs blown off. And he said to me it was one of the best things that ever happened to him. So is that good luck or bad luck? He met Prince Harry, he raises his millions for charity. He's got a really good personal brand, he's really bloody good at Jiu Jitsu as well. Is that good luck or bad luck? Well, ask him because he says in many ways it was one of the best things that happened to me. I mean, that takes A hell of a lot of mental strength to be able to reframe that. But what's bad luck? What's good luck?

I suppose it's your interpretation at the time.

Well, it's not what happens to you, it's how you respond to what happens to you. And I can tell you this, every single millionaire and billionaire would have been dealt a bad hand. They'd have had bad hires, a bad part of the economy, but they turned it into good. Like the recessions. More millionaires are made in recessions than any other time because what happens is dumb money moves to smart money. Always the same in recessions and corrections. So actually, for most people, a recession is a bad luck, bad timing. For millionaires and billionaires, recessions equals opportunity. So I would argue that anyone who's successful in anything turns bad luck into opportunity, so they make the most of bad luck and turn it into good luck. So in the end, no matter what hand you're dealt, like, if you play cards and you've got skill, in the end you'll beat everyone even if you keep getting dealt bad hands, because you'll, you know, you'll learn how to bluff well or play the game well or read the. Read and count the cards well. So luck's a tricky one because shit things happen to good people, but a shit thing can happen to a good person, and that good person can do nothing for the rest of their life and be on, you know, benefits. Or a shit thing can happen to a good person. That could be the motivated thing that makes them have an unbelievable life of wealth and meaning for the next 50 years.

Do you have an example in your own life of something like that?

Of what?

Something shit happening to a good person or what others might assume is bad luck, but you've used it to your advantage.

Well, I don't really perceive that I've had much bad luck. And maybe that's a trait of being successful, is you kind of blank them out. I mean, I'm fortunate enough that no one really close to my family has died. I imagine if they did, that would fuel the fire even more. I mean, I would argue if something really traumatic had happened to me, like major abuse or close death in the family, which to me would probably be the most traumatic that I can think of, I would be 10 times as motivated. I'd probably be 10 times more successful. Maybe I haven't had enough trauma and pain. Maybe just being the fat kid in school wasn't enough. Because, you know, I've made, I've done hundreds of millions in sales and made tens of millions in net worth. Not a billionaire obviously. I've been mentored by many and I have interviewed 21. So I'm able to give you the non PR, non fluffy, non filtered view. But I've had a relatively charmed last 18 years. Although gone through two recessions, gone through lockdown, I mean they probably wiped out 80% of my competition. So they all might say that they were bad luck. I didn't see those as bad luck.

Well, this is what I was mentioning earlier about maybe short term memory loss with successful people when it comes to traumas of things. Because you started negative 50 grand in debt and then started your business in the 2008 crash. A lot of people said, well you didn't really have the easiest ride, but now look at you.

Yeah, yeah. But I just see it as the opportunity. So like if you force me to, I could sit here and tell you 85 things a day that break and I could go, why the fuck? And why are they so shit? And why did that happen to me? I just see them as a problem waiting for a solution.

Don't.

I don't really, I don't really see luck as a concept. The problem with luck as a concept is it's external, that is someone else's responsibility. So I go for my, I do my 15 or 20,000 steps a day. If it's raining, if it's windy, if it's cold or if it's nice, I do my cold shower on my cold ice bath every fucking day, no matter what the time or what the temperature. Because I could easily go, oh well, it's not barbecue weather, therefore I'm not going to. Or it's windy and rainy, therefore I'm not going to do my walks. And if it's impossible weather, I'll go and do it on the treadmill in the gym. And that's just the way I see life. Whatever happens, you just adapt and evolve.

Number four, one word, energy.

So Warren Buffett, I don't know how old he is now, but he must be approaching 90. His business partner, Charlie Munger recently passed away in his 90s. He's 93.

93.

Warren Buffett is 93 now. He's not climbing up the walls doing Tony Robbins, rah rah, high fiving everyone. I'm not talking about that kind of energy. I'm talking about the consistent energy like the pilot light in the boiler that's always on and never burns. Like that cell in the middle of Iron man. That's Always burning. And anyone who's successful has an ever glowing, ever burning energy, an energy for the passion and the love of what they do, or an energy and a consistency to be able to work 12 hours a day, 16 hours a day, seven days a week, 365, for, you know, a decade or more. And you see a lot of people who are like a magnesium flash that you did in chemistry or a firework, and then gone two months, three months, six months, a year, two years, all this noise, all this energy gone. So how can you manage your energy so that every fucking day, without fail, you don't have to be there on energy, but you have to be there every day or there six days a week, and then you can be there for the Sabbath, you know, because everyone's allowed a bit of time off. Even Elon Musk and Steve Jobs, I'm sure, took some time off. That's what I mean about energy. And all the successful people that I know, all of them, and I'm talking thousands, whenever I'm with them, their energy is good. All right? When you get to know them really well and they're dear friends and you hang out with them 16 hours a day, they get tired like normal humans. But everyone says to me, rob, your energy is always there. It is until I go to bed. And then it's like one. But that's what sleep is for. So. Because energy is everything, like the universe is energy, sales is energy, a pitch is energy. If I can't put any energy through me and to you, you're going to give me any money to buy shit from me, you're not going to invest in me if there's no energy. In this interview, I was going, this is boring. Click off. I bet you actually, if you look at the retention, it's good at this point, when my energy is good at this point, everything is energy. And you know, those people. You hang on, I. You will never meet a billionaire. Never. Never. But let's just be clear, it doesn't have to be way up there. You know, Warren Buffett's fairly level, but consistently a good energy.

I suppose it's those compounding. It's the compounding gains you get by being even a 7 out of 10 for 70 years.

Yeah, in the game.

Yeah.

Like. Like strikers in football or, you know, basketball, they miss more shots than they take, but they play the most amount of minutes in the game. It's consistency. It's your bad day being better than most people's bad day. And even when you have a bad day, you still carry on the next day.

Number five, education and continual improvement.

Yeah, so I've never met a billionaire or 100 millionaire that doesn't want to learn. Fact, never. I know loads of zero heirs. I've done my degree and I've done my college and I just want to do my job. Just this is it. Never met any rich person that doesn't see life as like a library or a playground. You know, one of the big traits of billionaires is that they almost see the world as their playground or their putty at which they can mold whatever they want in the world. They can have influence over billions of people. And that takes a desire to continually learn, to continually improve. Nearly every millionaire I know prolifically reads. I can only think of one that doesn't, but I think he uses that more as a marketing stunt. So continual development and learning. What you don't know now you can learn. Because here's the thing, every winner was once a beginner and every master was once a disaster. So every millionaire and billionaire knows that, okay, let's say I need to learn a new skill. Well, one day I was a zero error and I didn't know it, but I knew I could learn it. So that open mindedness to know that there's always more to learn and, and reading and getting mentors learning from people who are specifically technically skilled. Because generally the more wealth you build, the more of a generalist you have to become. Not always because you can get very rich doing one technical skill better than anyone in the world. But if you look at the billionaires, they're usually running multiple companies that hire tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of staff. And you've got to put a lot of different, you got to put your PR media hat on, your legal hat on, your strategy and vision hat on, your sales hat on, your marketing hat on, your recruitment hat on, your HR hat on, all of the compliance hat on, you know, there's just so many things you've got to manage. So you generally you become more general that the, you become more general the richer you become. So then what you do is you leverage the skills of the specialists, but you still want to learn about what they do enough to know what they do.

Yeah. Alex Hormozy has a quote that goes, it costs you a million dollars every year when you don't know how to make a million dollars. And now he's worth 100. He's changed it to it cost me a billion dollars every single year. I don't know how to make A billion dollars.

Yeah. That's a reverse way of looking at it. That's a pain. Leverage.

Yeah.

That's basically saying every year I don't make a million, it cost me a million because I didn't make a million, therefore I lost a million compared to making a million. Yeah, yeah. It's just a reframe and you have to. But it's a good way of looking at it because sometimes loss drives people more than gain. You know, I've got a business partner. I said this in a previous episode. I reckon he'd get more pleasure in saving a grand than making five because he's. Well, he's just more loss focused.

Yeah.

And so it's really also about knowing what motivates you. A lot of successful people are defeat or loss. Focus I. Winning isn't about winning. It's about avoiding defeat. Because defeat is pain, therefore winning is pleasure. But it's actually not really just about the attainment of pleasure. It's avoiding defeat.

6. Consistency and persistence. When it gets hard, you get harder.

Yeah. So consistency and persistence are actually two different things and people mostly don't know the difference. Consistency is carrying on when it gets easy. Actually, I'll reverse it because it sounds better. Persistence is carrying on when it gets hard. Consistency is carrying on when it gets easy or boring. So a lot of people have a high need for variety, and that's where inconsistency comes in because they're always chasing something new. Warren Buffett's done the same thing since he was 12. He's now 93. That's 81 years of reading investment reports, making a few investment decisions a year. Many people would find that too boring. So you really need to know yourself. If you're the person that likes high variety, you have to meet your boredom, need or threshold somewhere else so you can stay consistent within your business or making money. If you're the kind of person that loves a challenge, then you're going to focus in on persistence. When it gets hard, you get harder. But many people, when it gets hard, they bail.

First thing that comes to mind is the founder of Five Guys was on an interview and they don't do any advertising at all. And his main mission statement throughout the company is just do the thing that we do and nothing else. Just really good burger and fries and that's.

It worked for them.

Yeah. And just never change.

But the thing is to make their burger and fries that good because they are that good. Across the world in a global franchise where keeping the consistency of quality time and time again globally is not easy. We take it for granted when we go to a Subway or McDonald's or whatever people go to, it's the same all the time. It takes decades to get that good and that systemized that is. I mean there's definitely persistence in growing a brand like that, but that's all. It's just hardcore consistency. Like imagine how many iterations of improvements and quality controls there were. One, to learn how to cook the perfect burger and fries that the most amount of people want. And then two, to have that scaling to two franchises, let alone thousands. And then three, continue to run these restaurants doing no advertising, just relying on people telling everyone how great their burgers are. The amount of patience and consistency you need for that is rare because consistency can also be persistence, I. E. Keeping going, doing the same thing when everyone else is doing something different or where there's pressure on overhead or it's like we've got to sell more things because we need more revenue. Is persistency a word? Consistency and persistence can be interlinked. But to be honest, most people just aren't strong enough at the thing or aren't prepared to do what it takes enough, or aren't hard enough or aren't built for the fight or don't have a thick enough skin. Because to be a billionaire you have to have at least 10 million haters. Like most people just couldn't handle one hater. Name me a billionaire that doesn't have 10 million haters. I mean if I think of billionaires who I perceive are unhateable, to me Elon Musk is unhateable, but he's got so many haters. And talk about persistence. I mean he took over X and that was a massive message and in his opinion a really woke company that was making no money and had no commercial drive to get rid of nearly all the stuff fight, you know, the wokeism and all, whilst managing Tesla and SpaceX and all these other massive multi billion dollar companies. I mean that's persistence on another level. I mean sometimes some billionaires are, I'm not going to say autistic or on the spectrum because that's what people like to say and I think that's too simplistic but they definitely have an element where they're non emotional enough to not get upset by what people say and do. So if someone is very emotional, very an empath, very empathetic, expressive, those people generally don't become billionaires because it's too hard, you feel too much pain. I actually think this is one of the reasons why there are so few women billionaires. You know, I'm asked quite a lot, why are there more male millionaires than female and billionaires than ma? Why are there. Why blah, blah, blah, why are there fewer female millionaires and billionaires than male? Now, I think that having children and having a focus on that, because you can't have children and make billions unless you are a complete unicorn. And it has been done. And the amount of admiration I have for those handful of females in the world, because it's just really hard. But emotions and empathy is more about caring for people. Whereas to become a billionaire, you do have to be ruthless, you do have to be able to switch where you just. You don't care about people. In that moment, I'm quite empowered. Pathic. I like people, I like my staff to like working here, but I have to let people go on a regular basis and I have to make decisions which hurt people and I have to be able to change that dial. I think we've got on here and one of the 21 habits and traits is the delusion of extroversion. So a lot of people think you need to be an extrovert to be a millionaire or billionaire. It's actually often not the case, but I think it's on here.

So we'll save it on persistence and consistency. As a business owner, how do you know when to double down? When things get tough and go, no, no, no, this is the right mission, let's just push through this versus actually, no, this is not a shiny object. This is a genuine opportunity.

Yeah. So how do you know when to give up? Because actually giving up, billionaires do it a lot. You know, to have their $1 billion unicorn company that's made them a net worth billion was. Well, the average millionaire starts three and a half companies before they become a millionaire. So a billionaire's got to be, you'd have thought, double that. So it might be their seventh company or they might be winding down and starting new companies all the time. So they have to know when to give up and not have so much ego. I'm not very good at giving up because I just think I'm just going to keep going until this thing works. But there is such a thing as flogging a dead horse. So here's some things to think about. Number one is, did you get into it in the right reasons? So generally every billionaire that you know has been in this industry for decades, sometimes they're born into it. And so it's just in their DNA. And other times it's a real mission of theirs. Like their billion dollar unicorn isn't just a another company. It is a burning vision and mission within the soul of that human. So if that's the criteria on which you started your business, it's probably right to keep going. But if you're starting a new business every six months and then winding it down just because it got hard for the first time, or you're not doing enough diligence and research, you're too flighty, then you might need to give it up. You also need to know when a market is dead and when to evolve it into a new market. Now, for example, Mark Zuckerberg is essentially saying with his change with Meta, that he's predicting the end of his existing business in advance. I. E. Social media will one day die because the metaverse will be the big thing changed everything to meta. Elon Musk is looking at financing and banking across a lot of his brands and he changed Twitter to X. So he knows. So he's predicting his own death in some of his companies. But surely it's better to know your own death and have a plan to evolve than to just die and have nothing left to do. So billionaires have this vision where they're like, okay, I'm making billions now. Facebook and Instagram and WhatsApp. But in 10 years, my bet is the metaverse will dwarf all my social media. And as is Elon Musk doing the same with what he's doing with X.

7. Continual solution to problems I used to.

Think that when I solved a problem, that would be it. It was fixed. I can move on to the next thing. In reality, things are fixed then, then fixed, then, then fixed, then, then fixed, then they're continually fixed and nothing is fixed. And then you can just let it go forever. You know, I own a lot of property and when you get a tenant in is a good tenant, it's good. But every six months or 12 months or three years or five years, you'll need a new tenant and you'll need a whole new set of tenant vetting inventory boilers go every now and again. Properties need maintaining. So even in things that you can build them and systemize them and they can be automated and recurring, there's still an element of ongoing management required. So if you have an attitude that once you fix something that'll be fixed forever, then you're in delusion land. And what billionaires do is solve bigger problems. So zero errors, avoid small problems. Billionaires demand and face big Problems. And the biggest problems in the world pay the most money. Getting off this planet is going to make people billions or trillions actually, once the need is big enough. And just things like making water and heat and electricity, making them accessible to every human made the oil companies and the water companies probably in total trillions. And imagine the huge problems you have drilling for oil or trying to pipeline through the world or, you know, steel made billionaires because it laid rail and connected the entire world. The telecommunications made billionaires because it connected information across the world before we had the Internet. The Internet has made many billionaires. But things that scale. But things that. But things that scale that big continually break. Like to get a car to go 100 miles an hour is probably quite easy. To get it to go 150 miles an hour is harder. 200 miles an hour, really hard. And then every mile, or 5 or 10 miles an hour, above 200 miles an hour, 250 miles an hour, everything breaks. Like, you know, the dramatic increase in wind resistance and, you know, the materials that break or melt. And, you know, you imagine the rockets and the spaceships. One tiny little issue with one tiny little screw can implode the whole fucking ship. So the bigger the responsibility, the bigger the business, the bigger the reach, the more people you serve. You know, if you look, for example, at any of the big billionaires, they've often got monopoly cases against them. They've always got loads of legal battles against them. All their past is being dragged out by all their competitors who want to bring them down. So you have to change your attitude from avoiding little problems to putting your chest out to big problems.

Have you seen, at the moment, prime have got a fairly big lawsuit against them and it looks like we'll see what happens. It's just a lawyer trying to make his name. And Logan Paul's done a video saying, we get lawsuits like this all the time. People just do it for fun, right, or for press or whatever it is. And most of the time it's got no basis.

Well, no one's going to attack a tiny brand that no one knows. So if you think about it, the big brands are going to get all the lawsuits because that's the biggest leverage. You know, people who call out others for beef don't call out people smaller than them. You know, it's all the big influencers that get called out for the beef. Yeah, because, you know, that little bird that's sitting on the back of the rhino or the hippo just picking the ticks off of it, they're like a little bottom feeder. So that's just one of the costs of being big. Like everything has a cost. Being broke, we all know the cost. Lack of freedom, lack of enjoyment for life, lack of speed, even malnutrition, lack of health. Being rich doesn't have those problems, just has different ones. No one's going to kidnap the kid of a broke person, but they will kidnap the kid of a billionaire. No one's going to knife someone in London and kill them for a Casio watch. But they are for Richard Mille. So you have bigger problems when you are rich. And some people, they just can't handle those kind of problems which is why they always self sabotage and they always stay small. You're going to have problems anyway. So I choose the upside problems, not the downside problems.

8 goals. Fantasy and struggle. Reality.

Yeah. So goal settings. Set goals. Be hags. Big hairy, audacious goals. I'm sure millionaires and billionaires still set goals, but most of them I know, they know that a goal is really just a fantasy. It's an ideology. Really what they're about is enduring challenges and struggles and continually pushing through to some outcome that then they know when they get there is going to grow and grow and grow. So yeah, goal setting used to be big in the 1980s. Now it's really more about missions. Because really what is a goal? A goal is an ideology. Oh, I'm going to be a millionaire. Well a millionaire isn't just a goal setter. I mean saying I'm going to be a millionaire is the easiest part of being a millionaire. But doing all the work is the hardest part. So if you think about it all, setting a goal to be a millionaire is, is sitting in your car and typing in the postal zip code into your satnav. That's it. But then if you sit there and don't drive the car and don't go through the traffic and the diversions and wait in rush hour and all the other that you've got to do, you're never going to get to your destination. So goals are kind of overrated because all they are is going I'm pinning there where I'm going to be one day. But then everything else is the struggle, the graft, the craft, the sweat and the smarts, the hard work and the leverage is all encompassing things to get you there. And by the way, by the time you get there, it's probably changed 15 times. Because by the way, having a goal to become a millionaire, the only really good thing that that's for is to get started. Because being a millionaire probably isn't enough for most people right now. Like, I reckon if you want a figure where most people on the planet could be comfortable for the rest of their life, assuming that they're not really old, 10 million. Because inflation will wipe that million way away in the next 10, 20, 30 years, 12 to 15 years, that million is going to have spending power of half a million. Twelve to 15 years after that, that half a million is going to have spending power of quarter of a million. 12 to 15 years after that, 125 grand. Think about what 125 grand can buy you now if you want it to last 40 years. And then you've got to invest it wisely and then you've got to beat your return. It's got to beat inflation, not just your capital. So 10 million, you need a lot more. So really, goals are just like checkpoints. Okay, that's my next checkpoint. All right. I still know what I've got to do to get that. Okay, and then it's next checkpoint. And then it's next checkpoint. And the thing with the goal is, the reason I call it a fantasy is because we naively think when we get to the goal, everything will be perfect and we'll be happy. No, we won't. We just want more.

Do you ever get the impression that a lot of rich people's missions are just kind of bullshit because it's their PR team and really they just want to be really rich? And that's okay to say that?

Well, I imagine if you make masses of money in oil and masses of money in gambling, you don't give a fuck really about changing the world. I mean, you're supplying the world and you have a product that the world sees as valuable. I personally despise gambling. It's the opposite of investing. It's the surest way to go broke. The only people who benefit are the gambling firms. Now, is there the odd person that can beat the house? Like there's a unicorn that can beat the house. 0.001% maybe. And when the house figures it out, they just ban them. Like if someone beats gambling firms, they just ban them from gambling. I mean, if you think about it, that's fucking outrageous. But at the same time, it's their business. So no one wins but the gambling firms. So to me, that's a consuming, not value adding business. But there's a need and they meet a need. So I don't know any billionaire gambling owners. I've tried to get some on my show. They won't come. And I guess I wonder why, I wonder why. But if I was arguing their point and fighting their corner, well, there's a need and if there wasn't me, there'd be a black market and there'd be someone else. So I'm just fulfilling a need. And I also agree with that. Just like oil, you know, Do I think the oil tycoons are going to be trillionaires? I think, you know, we've got a meaningful mission to change the world and make it a better place. No, I just think they're going to provide oil to as many people as possible and get fucking rich. And anytime there's any other fuels that are cleaner and better than oil, maybe they'll just squash them. Are there other people that really have a meaningful mission that might want to change the world? If you look at Anita Rodick and Body Shop and what she changed in the cosmetics industry industry, it seemed like she had a, a wholesome meaningful mission. There are those people too. And it takes all kinds. And I'm not here to judge them because at the end of the day, if oil and gambling wasn't needed, these people wouldn't be billionaires in them. But yeah, like the vision, the mission, the changing the world, it actually is a great driver. You know, my mission is to help as many people on this planet get better financial knowledge. That for me is a North Star. And when I'm frustrated and challenged and demotivated and locked down and just general day to day and I'm feeling a bit fatigued, which usually doesn't happen, but can at times. That North Star is so fucking valuable to me to know that, that, that guides me so it's powerful to have a meaningful mission.

Why is that your mission?

Because I think the education system right now does the opposite of teaching you how to be financially free. I think it teaches you how to be financially the to the governments and central banks, you're a financial to them. Like the only people who really make money out of gambling is the gambling magnates. Well, the only really people who make money out of the masses are not the masses, it's the banks and the, the governments which I think are in cohorts. You know, the central banks make trillions. They make it in interest, debt, taxes, inflation, money printing. I don't judge them. They are a corporate entity and their mission is to make maximum profit, maximum shareholder value. Is that maximum customer service? No. Is that maximum care for the planet and the 8 billion people that live on It. No, it's maximum shareholder value, I. E. The few people that own the banks make maximum profit, profit at all costs. That would never be me. Maybe that's why I'm not a billionaire yet. That will never be me. I just don't think that that's good for humanity. I don't judge it because maybe if I was in that position through birthright, or maybe if I had the opportunity to have a business like that, maybe I wouldn't be able to turn it down because billions sounds and looks and tastes very nice. That being said, I do love money and we do have board meetings and we do look at our net profit margins and we do have to make commercial decisions which affect humans, you know, because they might lose their jobs or they might have to be, you know, moved around and sometimes that doesn't feel nice. But that's life. So you can't just have a vision, mission view without a money view because the money is the guide at which you are moving in the right direction.

All right, so government's fucked, school system's broken. But why do you care specifically? You're rich, you could retire. I mean, you've tried about 14.

Retirement for me is just so soul destroying. My self worth just eats itself. My self worth cannibalizes itself when I do nothing. And I've learned that that is a me thing, but it's also quite a male thing. We need to be working. The world needs us to work. This is why the fucking work from home lockdown, you know, bullshit. Fucking woke apathy towards the only way the economy is going to get better, the UK is going to get better because it's everywhere. The only way it's going to get better is if people fix broken and if people fire up the economy and that is through work. That is through doing more and building and struggling and not through working five hours a day for three days a week and expecting a full time salary. It's just so woke and so like I care about like our roads are so fucked in the UK and this, there's literally roadworks everywhere. The NHS is so broken you can't get in. So what that's doing is the private sector now is a disgraceful ripoff. I have some slight redness in my skin. Oh, yeah, we'll just, we'll. What is it? They call it a consultancy. I either just look at my face. 200 quid, like I've got a wisdom tooth that's causing an issue here. 4 minutes in the private dentist, 165 pounds to then refer me. But you're not going to get in the NHS for three years because your face isn't falling off and you haven't got a cancerous lump in your face, even though it really fucking affects me. And I'm basically going to have to pay 3 times 200 quid to then maybe have it removed. The police are so fucked. Like rape and theft, their conviction rates are sub 5%. It's an outrage. Everything in the UK is fucked. We don't make anything anymore, we don't own anything anymore. Tax, tax is the relatively the highest it's been since the late 70s. Our spending power is the lowest it's been since post World War II. So we're as fucked pretty much. We might as well blow everything up and rebuild it and no one fucking cares anymore. The politicians don't fucking care. The big fucking corporate magnates don't fucking care. It's so easy to get on the dole. It's so easy to game the system. We're paying way too much to these. You know, I go around the streets in Peterborough interviewing people and like, I'm open about it and they're open about it. People who are on the streets, I say, why don't you get a job? No point. Why not? Well, I get my house given to me and I can get 200 quid a day begging, so why would I go and get a job? There's no point, because I've got a free house and I can get 2, 200 quid a day begging and all I have to do is run away from the community support officers. Oh, so you're not really like begging begging? No, no, it's just, it's my job. And their job is begging. They're professional beggars and they say to me, there is no point me going back to work because I can make more being on benefits. Now, I bet you if you looked in their soul of self worth, they'd actually like to work, to have something meaningful, because who wants to just do that all day? No one. No one wants to do that. Look at all the. Look at all the beggars and how apologetic they are. No one comes up to you with volition and confidence and go, give me a tenor because I am worth it. No, they're all at the same. No one actually wants that. Now, I know some people have had a fucking hard life. I know that because there's a difference between them and all the people who are gaming the system. But if the system can be gamed, it's the system's fault. Yeah. Of course they can easily just take it all away and then support them to work. So I don't even know what your question was, but the country's. So ah, my mission. Why do I care? Because it saddens me to see this happening. And the only way this changes is, number one, we fix the economy. Because the economy is driver of everything. And to fix the economy you need people who know how to make money. Usually it's entrepreneurs who know how to make money. Like if I had a billion and I had to give it to our top economist to deploy. Or Elon Musk. Elon Musk. Every day he's going to deploy a billion. Way better than some politician, you know, an expert economist. No, a theorist. Most of them, they don't run their own businesses. So I care because I want this to change. It affects me personally because I don't like how much everything costs. I'm rich, but fucking hell, I spend a lot of money just to live now like everything is. You know, they say money doesn't make you happy. Well like if you want to get your teeth sorted, that's thousands of pounds. If you want to make sure you don't go old in your face, that's tens. And I'm not just talking cosmetics, I'm just talking general health. I mean me, the creams that my wife buys, they're hundreds of pounds. Everything is so expensive because of lockdown and inflation and supply and demand. And I want to change that. Oh, and I do love money.

So just to consolidate that, Rob wants to give financial education to the masses because potholes break your Lamborghini. Moving on, number 10, partnerships and relationships.

Yes. And no one got rich on their own. No man is an island and there is no such thing as self made. Arnold Schwarzenegger famously came out and said, I'm not a self made man. I've got my trainers, you know, my partners. He's got his team. No billionaire became a billionaire on their own. And it's like we've got this ideology, this fantasy that, you know, self made, I'm an entrepreneur, I'm going to work hard, I'm going to going to do this myself. Everyone, it is me. No, I don't know how many stuff we've got in here now. It fluctuates from 110 to 150 depending on where we are. And insourcers and outsourcers. This recent budget should warn you that your pension is not safe and secure. And they're coming for your inheritance. Do you even know how much is in your pension or where your pension is invested? Add to this the recent inheritance tax grab on your pen pensions and the risk of a market crash. You probably didn't know this and I didn't until recently, but physical gold can be added to your pension. Pot Gold is inheritance tax free and has grown 700 in the last 20 years. You probably know from my content I'm investing heavily in silver and gold and that's why I've partnered with Direct Bullion. Myself and Nigel Farage are brand ambassadors and direct bullion can help you with gold to protect and grow your pension. I buy my gold and silver silver from direct bullion and I don't earn any money on any purchases of gold or silver if you buy direct from direct bullion. So if you go to robmore.directbullion.com you can get a great price on your silver and gold and you can get the Pension Gold Investing Guide completely for free. As you know, I don't do many strategic partnerships and when I do, I do them with people who are credible, who've been doing it a long time, who invest in things that I invest into and gold and silver's going wild. I'm investing heavily in gold and silver and I recommend you check out robmore.directbullion.com so without all of those. This recent budget should warn you that your pension is not safe and secure and they're coming for your inheritance. Do you even know how much is in your pension or where your pension is invested? Add to this the recent inheritance tax grab on your pensions and the risk of a market crash. You probably didn't know this and I didn't until recently, but physical gold can be added to your pension Pot Gold is inheritance tax free and has grown 700% in the last 20 years. You probably know from my content I'm investing heavily in silver and gold and that's why I've partnered with Direct Bullion. Myself and Nigel Farage are brand ambassadors and direct bullion can help you with gold to protect and grow your pension. I buy my gold and silver from direct bullion and I don't earn any money on any purchases of gold or silver if you buy direct from Direct bullion. So if you go to robmore.directbullion.com you can get a great price on your silver and gold and you can get the Pension Gold Investing Guide completely for free. As you know, I don't do many strategic partnerships and when I do, I do Them with people who are credible, who've been doing it a long time, who invested things that I invest in too. And gold and silver's going wild. I'm investing heavily in gold and silver and I recommend you check out robmore.directbullion.com I have to do everything myself. I can't do the job of 110 people. It's impossible. So there's no such thing. So there's no such thing as self made. Every product manufacturer, let's say Apple, relies on a logistics company, a supply chain, a packager. You know, how many of their own internal parts of the phone do they make? Probably not a lot. Probably a lot of them are made by other manufacturers. Look at how the world was when we went into lockdown. Look how the world was when we went into lockdown. And all the. Nah, look how we were in lockdown when all the supply chain shut. Parts for cars that you couldn't get went through the roof. So then prices of those cars went through the roof. Everything is. If you don't have a full end to end logistical supply chain. And we all need that. So you need partnerships, collaborations, staff, customers. People often forget when they get rich, it's the customers that put them there. You know, without my customers I wouldn't be wealthy. Hopefully without me they wouldn't be either. So it's a team dynamic.

It's quite a unique take. I like that one. I hate the word self made.

I would say what self made really means is I took personal responsibility for my own life and I fully owned the direction. And then from there it's like, well, I need your help and your help and I need that partnership. Like in every car you go in. Now look at the speakers. Who are they? Made by the car or they're made by Bose? Name, Burmester, Bang and Olufsen. That's a collaboration. If you look at any brand that you buy, like this is Alexander McQueen but it will be made in another country and they'll have PR teams and marketing consultants and, and now obviously Alexander McQueen passed away. So there's a head designer. There isn't even Alexander McQueen. Rolex didn't used to make their own watch movements. This used to have a zenith movement in it. So they, they, they're called Rolex, but they outsourced the whole inside of the watch to a company that had been doing it a long time and was better than it. There is no such thing as self made. The only thing you make is you take responsibility for the direction of your.

Life 11 sales and marketing.

Well look, when most people start a business, business cards, brand, website, going to go networking, you know, they're doing all this shit which doesn't put money in the bank. What puts money in the bank is brand marketing, sales, in that order. But the problem is it's hard to make money in brand unless you're Apple. So if you started a phone company today, you're going to make money in brand? No, because no one knows you. So only when you've been doing it 5, 10, 20, 50 years or you've been a huge influencer like the Logan Paul and who was his partner in prime?

KSI.

KSI. They built a massive personal brand before they launched Prime. They could not have launched prime without that massive brand. Well actually the power of brand, both of their brands and the power of the brand of the beef between them, they actually had three brands, Logan, Paul, KSI, and the notorious beef between them and the tens of millions of followers and the 10 years each that they put into it. And then prime was launched and now it has a brand. So you should always be working on brand. But you can't monetize brand yet. You can only monetize brand when you've got one. But if you don't start building one, you haven't got one.

So.

So the most immediate way to monetize is sales. I E I call you up and I sell you what I've got or I DM outreach you and we talk a bit and we book a zoom and I sell you what I've got or I drive you to my website and you buy online what I've got. Anything you're doing that isn't that if you're starting a business is probably procrastination and avoidant. And to become a billionaire you have to sell a billion fucking units of something that's not too expensive or hundreds of thousands or millions of units of something that is. And imagine if you sell something for a dollar like Post it notes. This would be fun. Google it. I don't know. I don't even know if you'll find it. How many Post it notes have been sold ever. So 3m they make post it notes. I bet you're not even going to find it.

One trillion.

And I bet that's packs, not actual notes, individual.

Okay, so by some estimates more than 1 trillion individual sticky notes have been sold worldwide since the product was first introduced 35 years ago.

Well, there you go. So 1 trillion units.

Jesus, 35 years.

Yeah, so you eat like they're selling those. So marketing is in the middle. Marketing is when your messaging is good and people pay you from your messaging. Marketing. Great. Marketing got OJ Simpson literally off murder because his lawyer said if the glove doesn't fit, you must acquit.

He earned every dollar.

He should have been paid 10 times what he was paid. So that is a slogan. And if you think of slogans that you can remember, just do it. Yeah, just do it. What a brilliant marketing slogan. So marketing is outbound messaging which creates ownership in someone's mind. If I say think of a fizzy drink, you might think of Coca Cola or whatever you think of owns the brand and the marketing created the identity for you to think about it, to buy it. So you know, why do companies like McDonald's spend billions on advertising? Because they just want to trigger, to remind you to think about McDonald's, to try trigger that hunger pang. So anything other than brand, but that's long term. Sales and marketing is not going to put money in the bank and you're not going to make money out of it. So stop about and start doing more of that. And when you start, people say to me, oh, well, I want to get a loan and I want to, I want a vc, I want an angel, I want a dragon. I'm putting a pitch deck together. Just make some sales and then use that cash to reinvest in, to grow the business. Business. And you know what? You will always make money if you're good at sales and marketing. Always. Even if you lose everything, you'll always make money if you're good at sales.

Manage emotions.

So you cannot become a billionaire if you are a child with your emotions. I don't feel like it today. Oh, that's so unfair or whatever. Childish. We all have childish emotions. Every emotion that every human can experience, that biologically can, does. So we're all going to have the full range and spectrum of emotions. But what a billionaire is able to do is to control it. So when the billionaire is in the negotiating room, on the negotiating table, looking into the eyes of the other person where this deal could be worth billions and one small percentage could be worth hundreds of millions, they're not throwing all their emotions out. They are stoic and they are hiding what they really feel. And I don't know if you've watched any of these public trials of Mark Zuckerberg. Mark Zuckerberg gets a lot of shit, right. I have a lot of respect for that man in a lot of ways. Obviously his massive behemoth Facebook has its downsides I know that you can't have any massive behemoth without his downsides, but you see him getting publicly grilled in front of the whole nation, and he's just there, and he's professional and he's stoic, and he's showing no emotion, and he's calm, and he's not getting triggered. That would have taken 20 years of mastery because, you know, he was apparently quite an angry kid. You know, you watch the film Facebook, he seemed quite emotional. Steve Jobs, you know, quite famous for being quite angry. I don't know the guys, but just from what I've seen. But you. They're unflappable, these, you know, Donald Trump, man. Like, who's ever gonna beat Donald Trump? A lawsuit? Or like the whole fucking country's trying to shut him down. And he does not seem to care. Just the more they attack him, the bigger, the bolder, the more bravado that seems to come out, and that's just ultimately managing pain. Now, some people are made for that. Naturally. You know, I said, you know, if you want to be a billionaire, you have to face bigger problems. But if you're emotional and you just, oh, well, this is just how I feel. It's just important to express how I feel. Problem is, you feel different in any moment. So if you keep blurting out how you feel and everyone should, like, bow to how you feel, well, you hire one minute low the next minute, and everyone's confused. So, really, to be a good leader, I'm not saying you have to be dead flat, but unflappable. And occasionally some passion is great, especially if you're trying to rally the troops or if things are hard and you've got to do that Oscar speech. But that's a tactical, strategical move. And every day I've got shit going on, which really fucking pisses me off. And no one in this office knows about. About it because it's not their problem. And I've just got to be professional and do what I've got to do. There's loads of things I could be doing right now. And if I picked up my phone now and checked all the things I've got to do, that could take me away from what I'm doing here with you. So you can learn to manage your emotions. I. E. Feel it and do nothing. Just feel it and then start to analyze it. Oh. Oh, I feel that that's triggering. Okay, what does that mean? Okay, is this based on now or is this past trauma? Yeah, probably some past trauma. Does this thing that's made me feel this way, know it's going to make me feel this way? No, probably not. So therefore, should I react to this emotion and lash back out at them based on them probably not knowing what they've triggered as my emotion? No, probably not. Does this emotion have upsides as well as downsides? Yeah, probably. Okay, what are they? Okay, well, you know, maybe they're motivating or maybe that is a sense check that, you know, I feel passionately about this or maybe there's something I should have done that I haven't done. Or maybe I need to own this issue. Maybe I can learn. Okay. And if you go through that process before, you open your mouth, because most people who are broke could be rich, but they go broke opening their mouth, blaming, complaining, moaning, making excuses, criticizing, attacking people. Managing emotions is power.

Is it? Ollie Ollerton, you interviewed with his mindset trick. And if you can't do anything about it, then what's the point?

Yeah, so that's another thing. Something's happening. If you can't do anything about it, let it go because it's outside of your control. What you can do, if you can do something about it, is immediately write down some actions that you can do to fix it. Yeah, but even anything out of your control, you can still control because you can control how you respond to it. So, you know, if, if corporation tax goes up, I can put my prices up. I mean, I'm not saying I would, but that's one immediate solution I could do. Or I could go to my accountant and say, how can we make a saving on our corporation tax to the same amount that they've just put our corporation tax up? What tax release are we not searching for? There's always a workaround. Here's the thing. Rich people find a workaround. Like, you know the billionaires who avoid all the tax it really everyone else off. Well, the problem billionaires have is 2 too much profit. So now they have a big problem. Like, do you want to pay half a billion a year in tax? No. Is that a big problem? Yes. Is it a first world problem? Yes. But are you just going to go, oh well, I'm a billionaire, so this half a billion I've got to pay in tax, I'll just pay it. No, of course you're fucking not. No one would. So you are going to pay 50 million to save that 500 million. You're going to find a good lawyer, you're going to see if you can influence policy, can see if you can know any politicians who might give you a helping hand because you're fixing a big problem.

Especially if they are a billionaire. They know more about money in the economy than where the tax money is going. So maybe from a place of ego, maybe actually just very intelligent is, well, why would I give you 500 million? Because you're going to spunk it on something it shouldn't. Where it's like, elon, okay, nobody's taking global warming seriously. I'll reinvest that money and get us onto another planet. There you go. So, yeah, I don't really mind them doing that.

Yeah, well, the problem is that there's a lot of people who hate billionaires. But they aren't rich. No, rich people hate billionaires. It's all broke people or woke people. So what they want is the billionaires to pay loads of tax. Why? Be honest. Because they fucking don't like the billionaires. Not because they want better for humanity. Because if they thought what's better for humanity, the best thing for humanity is for governments, billionaires, to work together to deploy the tax revenue better. Like actually everyone watching and listening now, transcend all your judgment, what you think is right or wrong, whether billionaires should or shouldn't pay tax and, you know, if we should have monopolies and what's fair and right. Transcend all your judgment. How do we improve the planet? Well, we need financial investment. What we need to do is stop wasting fucking billions. Because my business partner has vetoed me from talking about some of the wastage I see in our local cities. But it's disgraceful. The hundreds of thousands and the millions they just piss up the wall because they don't have a clue. And I can't even blame because they don't have a clue. So, you know, do you remember Edward Scissorhands? I mean, if you gave him a baby to hold, he's going to cut the baby up because he's got Scissorhands or Freddy Krueger. You're not going to give Freddy Krueger a babysitting job. So we've got all these people in government who don't know what to do. It's maybe not even there. I'm not even judging. They just don't know how to deploy money. Elon Musk knows how to deploy money. My business partner and I could deploy the tax revenue in our city way fucking better than the council. But that's just because we're entrepreneurs and we have to deploy our own money. Well, so what actually would work better is if the government Say to the billionaires, look, come help us. We'll get you on the board, in the government, we want to change the world. Come and review our spending, tell us what we should do. We're going to give you some incentives and some tax breaks to do that. But we are going to ask you to pay a bit more because we think it's a bit too low. So we are going to change some rules. We will give you a favorable rate because you are going to help us invest our 1.2 trillion, which is what the, like the UK get 1.2 trillion and no one has a fucking clue.

What to do with it.

It's obvious, because if they did, our services will be better. But imagine a mastermind table of the biggest entrepreneurs and billionaires in the UK all going, this 1.2 trillion, how do we turn it into 2 trillion without raping and pillaging all the entrepreneurs and all the people? By increasing the tax. So the first thing that this powerhouse mastermind would probably advise the government to do is get the tax down a bit, incentivize growth, give them benefits and reliefs and work with them and grow employment and grow sales and grow markets and increase your overall revenue. Because what you're doing by taking more off of those that are generating revenue is you're slaying your own golden goose. So the billionaires should have some tax breaks, but they should also feed back their knowledge and money into society. But it's all it, it's bent now because the billionaires can just pay off the, yeah, the politicians, and the politicians are careerists. Instead of saying, no, don't. You can't pay me off because I'm unbribable. I can't call influencing a change in policy a bribe because if it's legal, it's legal. So it's not a bribe. Many people would call it a bribe or like, oh, here's 10 million for your campaign, but it takes a politician to go, no, I'm not doing that, but I will work with you and I need your knowledge because you know more than the government and I will give you some tax breaks, but I will expect you to pay a bit more because 4% on out of 20 or 25% corp tax, it's not, not enough, needs to be 8, would you pay 8 and come and so. But none of this isn't happening because the banks, the central banks don't want it. Politicians don't have any incentive to do it. They're controlled by more powerful people anyway.

So didn't Musk Offer to give like billions to either the UN or the US government to help with hunger in.

Africa or something like challenge or condition.

On it though, it was like, you tell me how, yeah and I'll give you the money and I'm. We can Google in a minute. I'm pretty sure it's around the same time that he bought Twitter, right? And it was about the same thing. I think it was about 50 billion or something.

Well, that's it. He. He knows that like if you gave the UK a billion, most of it goes in other.

What do you mean exactly?

Right? Now, if you look at how the tax is broken down and where it goes, the highest percentage is other nhs really high interest on debt. So NHS is broken and fucked. Other is probably politician salaries and wastage, otherwise they would call it something else. And interest on debt is good money after bad. So there's. There instantly is maybe a 35, I don't know a high percentage hole where of the billion. 350 million of it. It's just been pissed torch papered. So. Yeah, but you know, this is why I care so much. This is why I do all this money content. This is why I've written 19 books and money. This is why I have a foundation to help as many people on the planet start and scale their business. Start meaningful businesses that change the world. This is why I do content every fucking day. This is why I have Rob team. This is why I have a global mission. Because a, it affects me personally when everything is fucked because the services are really bad. You know, I need doctor, dentist, I need all these public services, health. You know, if I'm ill, I'm going to have to go private and the private fees have gone crazy and if I'm really ill, it's going to cost me a shitload of money. You know, if labor come in, they're going to add that on the school fees and school fees. Now, after tax, like, after tax you need like school fees can easily be 50 to 70 grand a year. So if they add VAT on, that's another 20%. And then if you pay after tax you add on another 50. You've got to earn 150 grand a year for the privilege of getting your children educated. Well, how is it that that's how it should be? Because surely a divine birthright of our children is a good fair education. So yeah, this is why I'm on this ranty mission.

We're halfway through sell for 10, make two.

Yeah. So if you sell for 10 and it costs you 11. That is a loss that is trading insolvently. If you sell for 10 and make four net, you've got a good high profit margin. As you grow, it will sell for 10 and you'll make three and then two and then one and some massive global billion companies, Tesco I think, make 3% net profit. So you have to make net profit, which if you're too greedy, you'll make high profit. But the world will rebel against you, customers will complain, there will be legal cases and lawsuits and in the end your margin will reverse. But if you're too philanthropic or I just want to start a charity, I just want to serve my clients, I'm just not going to charge them much, I just want to help them or I just want. I'll do some case studies first. Just, you know, basically if you have low self worth and you don't charge enough, then you're going to make a negative margin. And by the way, one of the worst things you can do if you've got a low or no profit margin is to sell more because that is like pouring more water that's scarce into a bucket with a hole in it. So it sounds obvious, but you need to be focused and obsessed on your gross profit margin, which is your sales or revenue. They're two, two different things. Most people don't know the difference minus the cost of the sale.

Can you explain the difference then?

Yeah. So sales are your transactions done. Revenue is all income because you could have sold ten widgets at £100, that's a thousand pound. But you might have bank interest and you might have, you might have invested some of the company money into the stock market, which creates interest. You might have payment plans coming in from previous months. So revenue is all of that? Yeah, sales are the new transactions that you've done and our sales are about. Well, no, our revenue is yet generally about 65% of our sales, generally in a year.

That's a big chunk.

Yeah. So yeah, and revenue could be more than sales and sales can be more than revenue. But gross profit is the cost of the sale taken off the top and then net profit is all the fixed and variable costs taken off the. Essentially to get to the. That's why I call it top line. Yeah, bottom line. So at times our sales have been brilliant and our net profit has not been brilliant. At times our gross profit has been low. At times when lockdown happened, our sales weren't great, but our net profit was high. So these all move and you have to obsess about these so if you're starting and scaling a business, make sure you get a good set of management accounts and you review them every month.

So, so put in order. What is your priority list of what metrics you're tracking to make sure you're going in the right direction?

Oh, I mean, there's loads actually, I've got. If you go to robmore.com KPI I noted about 65 of my main KPIs and I don't mind offering that for free to people watching or listening. Robmore.com KPI I mean there are a lot if we're just talking about money. So I track daily sales, daily revenue, daily cash in bank. They're daily and I track them from my different companies because, you know, I'm on at you, aren't I? Every week probably. What are our sales? What are our sales? What are our sales?

Every morning.

Yeah. Where focus goes, energy flows and result shows. Yeah, yeah. So I want to know those figures. I want to know our bad debt ratios. I want to know our refunds as a percentage of turnover. Because if your refunds are going high, it's like pouring water in the bucket with a hole in it. I want to know our gross profit margin. If it's going up, it means it's costing us less to make a sale. If it's going down, it means it's costing us more to make a sale. I want to know the difference between our fixed and our variable costs. And so if our fixed costs are going up, that's just a risk and a stress on the overhead. I want to know how many leads we're generating a day because I want to know how many ticket sales we're making a day for one of our companies. Because you can work, okay, let's say you sell tickets for events. You might go, well, If I sell 150 tickets a week, then I know by the end of the year I'm going to hit my turnover figure. So you want to track daily how many tickets you know doing to get to your weekly. 150. What you want to do is create a dashboard where, and honestly we're improving in this area because at times we've been a bit bloated. We do have the metrics, but they're a bit all over the place. But what you want is a dashboard. You know, when you fly the helicopter, which, you know, I've a license for my, for the two seater and four seater helicopters, you have a dashboard airspeed, ground speed, you know, you have engine rpm, you have an Altimeter. And you have all these. Basically this dashboard that tells you everything that's going on. You have your engine temperature, you'll have your warning lights, and you want one of those for your business, I. E. And you want. You want it in real time. If the problem, if you. If you've got it weekly or monthly, is it's hard to change as you get bigger. You're not quick enough. You know, if the helicopter. If there's something wrong with the engine and it told you next week, that's too late, you need to know in the moment. Yeah.

Because I suppose it.

Yeah.

If you lose a month and then by the time you've made the change, that might be another month, you've lost one sixth of your year.

Well, when we were lean and mean, you know, you could recover a month, a week out because you could just get on the phone and sell. Now, if we're behind three or six months ahead, we're behind. We can't change the direction of the oil tanker because it takes so much longer. So I can't recover this month, a week before the end of the month. I can't recover the next three or the next six months this month. You know, you're often saying to me about booking in, us doing some content together.

Yeah.

And I'm saying, you need to give me more notice because I need to be planned months in advance. I think Jeff Bezos was interviewed and he said, oh, you had a very good quarter. And he said, yeah, I knew that five years ago. That's very powerful. Yeah. To be five years ahead.

What a quote, by the way. He's getting cooler the older.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

All right, 14. Accept criticism.

Yeah. Look, if you. If you stop at every dog that barks, you'll never reach your destination. That's Winston Churchill. And if you cannot accept criticism and you have a soft, fleshy underbelly rather than the hard tortoise shell, then how are you ever going to be successful? Because all you'll do is avoid criticism. Which means the only way you can avoid criticism. I think it was Mark Twain, say nothing, do nothing, be nothing. It's the only way you can avoid criticism. So you have to face on your mission like I picked my enemies. Like I want criticism from wokies, lefties, hippies. Yeah, I want criticism from them. Because, look, I. I also know every human's individual, so I know I'm making some generalizations. You know, the left is a generalization, the right is a generalization. But you know, someone who is stereotypically woke, they're going to hate me. And actually I need to be more me to be successful. And then one of the measures of me being more successful is more wokies hating me. So I just accept that now if you, if you are a sponger and you want everyone else to work for you but get paid, you can go off. You're gonna hate me. You know, if you are socialist where you believe that I should work really hard so you can chill, Netflix and chill, you can go off. No, because that's not. How are we going to get out of recessions, depressions, lockdowns if the hard workers have to give all the money to the lazy? No, we all have to work now. I believe that lazy, I'll teach that lazy how to make money and then that lazy can go and make money. And I don't want anything off them. And I would support them in their right to have free speech and I'd support them in their right to not pay loads in taxes because we should have a meritocracy. And people say, oh well, all these billionaires, they make too much money. Well, we have a wealth redistribution system already. It's called tax tax takes off the rich for the benefit of everyone else. Oh no. But as a percent, no, billionaires and millionaires pay nearly all the tax. So yeah, so I, I accept. If you're woke, hippie, left of emotional disposition, where anything, anything honest you can't handle. Troll me, hate me, comet, bring it on. In fact, if anyone here's got haters and you don't want them, send them to Rob fucking more I want them.

You need those 10 million haters. You're trying to be a billionaire.

If I, I don't have enough haters yet. Well, I don't. And so like here's the thing, let me be a bit nicer and warmer and softer and more fluffy and cuddly.

To be honest, I don't think the left woke or hippies are still watching.

But they love to hate me. Well, yeah, there's nothing better than a hater that can't stop watching you. Nothing better. Oh, I hate you, but I have to binge you. Oh rob, fuck you. But secretly you love me. So let me be softer. If you want to criticize me, that's none of my business because you're entitled to your opinion. And if I want my opinion, then you must have yours. So it's none of my business what you're going to criticize me about. So why should I even get involved? Number one, Number Two is if you criticize me, you might actually have some useful, valuable feedback. Like anyone who doesn't agree with anything I've said, I would actually encourage you to criticize me or to give me feedback or to tell me to go and read something or say, rob, you know, you said that thing I challenge that. I invite people to come on my show and debate me. I've said many times, if you're a billionaire and you're in gambling, come and debate me. But because I will be open minded that I could be wrong, anyone who's very left, come and debate me. So criticism is how you learn. The problem that humans have is most humans are not good at giving criticism in a way that it's well received. And most people aren't good at receiving criticism because of the way it's given. But if you take the responsibility when you give criticism to give it well. And if you take the responsibility yourself to receive criticism even if it's given badly, the world will instantly be a fucking way better place. Because you'll be honest about me and giving me feedback and you'll trust that you can do it because I won't get all defensive on you and I'll learn. So accepting criticism, seeing it as feedback, you know, feedback is the breakfast of champions. And no billionaire ever got big by never listening to anyone. All right, their monomaniacal vision, maybe they were singular focused on that, but they took loads of feedback and criticism.

15 multiple streams of income.

Yeah. Look, some people say that to get really rich you have to specialize in one thing. I don't agree. Like if you look at every billionaire, they have multiple streams of income, but they started on one thing. So if you're was. So if you're watching and listening and you want specific, practical, time, tactical and accurate information, you're going to love this. The problem with social media and content right now is it's hard to get that. But usually the truth is nuanced. So here's the nuance. To get to a reasonable level of success and wealth, not billionaire, maybe not even millionaire, or maybe low level millionaire. You've got to get good at one discipline. But to go from 1 million to 100 million or to a billion, you have to diversify. So Warren Buffett gets loads of money public speaking. He has multiple different assets. It's not just one stock. Jeff Bezos, he started only selling book, now he sells everything. How many income streams does Elon Musk have? Well, SpaceX, Tesla X, I mean he had PayPal. I'll probably I've missed at least two big companies.

Boring company, Neuralink.

There you go. So. And he'll have image rights, brand deals. He'll be making a packet out of that book from Walter Isaacson, I'm sure that wrote that book about him. He'll have deals everywhere. But you know the footballer that's worth 400 million because it's got Nike and all these brand deals first had to get really fucking good at football. But once they got good at football, to get really. If you want to get really rich, you need multiple streams of income. One is not enough because it can't compound quick enough. But to get new rich or just over the threshold of rich, you've got to get good at one thing.

What do you classify as rich?

It depends if you're defining me or society or unicorn.

You in, let's say the uk.

I'll define it all. Me, I think rich is a quarter of a billion plus. I'm not far off that, but I'm not close to that. I'm far. I'm close enough that I could get there. I'm far enough away that it feels like a lot. I remember when ten grand. No, I remember when three grand a month felt rich. Then five grand, then ten grand, then twenty grand. I know that when you get to ten million, which I surpassed a reasonable while ago, that is rich by all society's definition. So for me, rich is quarter of a billion. Rich is a billion plus. For society, Rich is 75 grand, apparently. But it's not to me because you can't do shit with that money. If you want a reasonable lifestyle, you have to harshly budget.

In your experience, what number can buy you 99% of the things the world can offer? Obviously there's private jets and yachts that are just stupid.

Yeah.

But, you know, pretty much 10 million.

Net worth on 5 to 8% recurring income on that and then still earning every year. In your vocation, you can do anything other than, you know, a massive yacht and a decent sized private jet, but you can do anything else. You can eat at the finest restaurants, you can go to the finest places, you can travel first class. I mean, if you're smart, you can use your credit cards and get a load of air miles and do business or first for fraction of the cost. So you can play the game. You can have a fleet of supercars. Yeah, 10 million is. But it has to beat inflation every year to stay at 10 million. So it has to be, you know, 10 and a half, 11 million the next year and 12 million the next year. Yeah. Now, obviously, everyone has their own definition now, by the way, if you have no overhead, five grand a month can make you a really good life. If you have no mortgage, no car loans, five grand a month despite. Because there are people who are earning a million a year that don't have five grand a month.

Disposable, no kids.

Yeah.

I feel really rich until. Yeah, until I grow up.

You might be netting more than me not having two kids. Oh, my God. Oh, by the way, my dog is costing me so much. He's 16. Like, his ears are. He's blind. Every week in the doctors, like, sorry, the vets. 160, 200. 250. So when you got one dog and two cats and two kids and two cars and a mortgage, that can wipe out 5 to 10 grand a month gone.

For me, it's house. I don't get much pleasure in a house because I know I'm going to be in kitchen. Don't really spend much time in the living room and bed. But that could easily wipe out everything, like all of your money. What side note, but what do you really value spending money on?

My business partner is probably going to love this, so I hope he doesn't see it, but he does watch quite a lot of my content. But I probably do value more now the lived experience of life. Whereas I used to more value appreciating material items because owning appreciating material items cured my addiction to depreciating material liabilities when I was broke. So I was broke and I would buy clothes on credit cards, you know, nice designer clothes, and I'd buy things I couldn't afford with money I didn't have to impress people I didn't know or like. I was in that trap, which a lot of people are in. And the way I got out of that addiction was I started buying Rolexes, which then became Audemars, Piguet, Patek Philippe, Richard Mille and I. You know, our first Ferrari, because my business partner and I shared it was a Ferrari 430 Spider. And we bought it for 70. We basically bought it in the 70s and sold it in the 70s. I can't remember which way round whether we lost three or made three. Mark would know. But we bought it in the 70s and lost and sold it in the 70s. We owned it for five years.

Wow.

And like, as far as owning a Ferrari goes, I mean, it cost us, but minimized it. So Ferraris and supercars and watches and clothes. When I learned to minimize the depreciation or even many of them appreciate. I really valued that and that was a really good journey for me to go on because I wasn't losing all my money. But now, you know, like, I know I'm going to get some hate in the comments for this, but go fuck yourself. But like, owning a load of cars is a pain in the ass. I've got seven supercars, if you include the RSQ8 as a supercar, which is a 4x4 supercar. I remember one day, five of them were in the garage. They regularly don't start, the insurance is ridiculous. So, you know, they are a pain. They go. The classics go wrong all the time. The Testarossa, the Ferrari Testarossa, it's been in the garage for two months because the window won't shut. And like, you can't drive the thing because it'll obviously get soaking wet and ruined, but you can't buy a motor for a Ferrari Testarossa. So as I've got old and grumpy because, look, I'm still positive, I'm still on a good mission, I still love life, but I have got a bit ranty since lockdown. I am pissed off with a lot of things and. And I'm okay with that because it's. Because it's wrong. But now a lovely dinner with good people. Upgrading to first class for 15 quid or 1500 quid, because on the train to London, often The upgrade to first class is 10 quid. But you know, the peace, the calm, the ability to get work done, you know, the lack of noise, I really value that. I value things that sort of de stress you. I value time now. But here's the thing. Time costs a lot of money because to have time, you have to not have to work to pay for time. If you think that time is not work. Now, I'm fortunate. One thing I did in my life, actually, I'm not fortunate. I am fortunate in that I created this fortune in my life because I was gonna say fortunate as lucky. No, fortunate as in I have created great fortune in my life by strategically choosing to monetize what I love to do. You know, I don't have any fucking hobbies. You know, I start work at 2 in the morning. You know that about me. And I don't expect anyone else to be like that. I just would rather do that than anything else. I don't want to. I don't want to play golf. There's nothing else I want to do. So that's a great gift because I enjoy what I do. Because you give a third of your life away to work, you give a third of your life away to sleep. You've got a third of your life left. So I value experience and time now and I will spend money for that. I'm spending a lot of money to make sure I'm healthy because I want that extra 10 or 15 years on my life. I wasn't doing that in my 20s. You're probably not doing that right now. You're not. Probably not. Ice bathing every day and on NMN and you know, thinking about health insurance and life insurance and wills and all this stuff because what, you're in your 20s?

Yeah. 25.

Yeah. But at my age you will.

Yeah.

Actually, I don't want to be the old bastard. If there's one thing I can say to you, being 45, think about those things ahead of time. Because if you, if you get to an age where it's too fucking late because, you know, the people who are a bit anti money say, well, money can't buy you health. It can, but you've got to invest it in your health, but never sell your health for money. That's what you shouldn't do. And it's a fine line because right now I've got a lot on. I'm quite. And I'm like positively stressed and I've got to be careful not to let it get me negative.

Extremely stressed.

So, yeah, I've changed my tune. I. I value time and connection and experience, but my seven cars often give me that.

Yeah. Drive to a nice dinner in a Lamborghini. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I still want them. I'm not selling it, mate.

So. Yeah, yeah. I think my life insurance is about eight quid a month.

That's good. You don't smoke?

No, no.

Good. No. Well, when? As soon as Mark and I learned to fly the helicopters, our life insurance quadrupled. If you want to keep your life insurance down, don't fly helicopters, which is the telltale sign. I haven't flown for quite a while and everyone around me just doesn't like it. They're fucking dangerous.

So is that a bonus habit of billionaires that their hobby happens to be business?

I couldn't say because I haven't distilled that from all of them. Do they all commit their life to their work? Yes. Would I say all of them. Their passion is their profession? No. Like if you're in oil and gas, like, did you dream when you were five of being in oil and gas? Probably not. It's just ridiculous. Money you either worked your way in or it was a family entry. So they're committed to their work and their mission. But there is also the other side, naivety to this. Like every billionaire that I have ever met behind closed doors, when they're telling you the truth. Because here's the thing I haven't yet said, and David, maybe you want to feed this in at the start as well as a little intro. Every billionaire says different things to me behind closed doors. Like when there's no pr, there's no media, it's not on tv, it's not on social media, they all say different things. And one of the things none of them have ever said to me is I just really love what I do. What they say is it's big problems. Oh, I've got my PR team, I've got my legal team. I'm big problems all day. So I think they have a commitment to the cause but not a naivety, that they've got to love their passion into their profession. But could that commitment be love? Yeah, it's an expression of love. But actually a lot of them know that they've got to do hard 16.

Avoid the drains, ruthless time management, and have the right people around you.

Yeah. So to become a billionaire, you have to be doing something long enough and big enough and wide enough and fast enough. So the law of compounding is your greatest friend, I. E. The more time you're in something, the more benefit you will get. So if you look at Warren Buffett's net worth curve and you look at time along the bottom axis and money along the top axis from 12 to 50, it looks like it hasn't even moved. You have to get a microscope to go and go, oh, that was £20 million by age 50 or whatever it was. But you know, his net worth being 100 billion or whatever by age 90, just, just Google Warren Buffett net worth curve or graph. Maybe we could edit it in, David. But yeah, there you go, you can see it. It's great.

It's like that.

It's like flat forever and then it just goes exponentially high.

Okay, so suppose, I think early years might be a bit 14 starts at 5k, which about 100 years ago.

Quite a lot for a 14 year old. Yeah.

Okay, so it becomes a millionaire at age 13. 30.

I became a millionaire age 30.

Well, as long as you stay till 93.

Yeah. The problem though is money was worth a lot less when I became a millionaire than when Warren Buffett did.

Yeah. So if he became a millionaire at age 30. Do you want to guess when it hit billion, what age do you reckon? 60, not bad. 56.

Well, he would have been at the time then. One of the youngest billionaires ever, because to be a billionaire in your 50s, 30 years ago. Bill Gates, I think, became a billionaire in his late 50s. Or that was, that was really young to be a billionaire.

Yeah. So that, that was just a couple almost 40 years ago.

Yeah.

Then.

So the billion is still nowhere near his top, is it? No, no, no, no, no.

So 56. In 10 years it goes to 17. So 17 X's in 10 years.

Yeah.

Then that's age 66. At age 83, is it 60 billion.

Of course, the obligatory spam for the blog post you just looked at. So basically goes flat, flat, flat, flat, flat, flat Manhattan.

Yeah. And now it's 131 billion billion 131 years. Yeah. So that he went from 58 at 83 and in 10 years it's gone to 131.

In order for you to become vastly wealthy, you need to be doing something long, deep, sometimes fast. What are you talking about, slow? Yeah. Hard. Yeah. But the key is long. Yeah, Keys always long.

Yeah. It's story of my life.

Warren Buffett started at what, 12 net worth 5 grand and now he's 93 net worth 131 billion. Yeah. So if you blame, complain, get distracted, let people interrupt you. If you are distracted, overwhelmed, if you're moving from device to device, if you're getting distracted by social media, you ruin and rob yourself of all that time it takes to get compounding. You need to be relentlessly focused in the moments when you're doing the work. You can't be focused all day, every day. And you might have three or five different tasks to do in a day, day, but when you're doing it, you're doing it. And you don't get distracted. We haven't once stopped this. We must be two hours in now, I'm guessing, I don't know what it is. Okay, so we're one hour 56 in and we're not getting distracted. And we're not stopping, we're not checking social media, blah, blah. We would never get this done if we kept getting distracted. You have to just get it done. So. But the thing is, everyone wants to distract you. David wants us to stop you. A pop up wanted to distract you there, like social media, your kids, your family, you know, your own distracted mind, your own emotions, hunger. I mean, whenever I write books, I seem to be hungry all the time. It's distraction to go and check in the fridge and have a 15 minute break. You must relentlessly avoid all time drones, which means discipline, focus, teaching people, that is, I'm working for the next two hours. Come and see me after. You could be polite, but like, don't talk to me right now. And when you've got to get something done, you get it done. Like you can write a book in an hour a day. I reckon in 90 days, one hour a day, anyone could write a book. But you need to write for that one hour. Write the entire one hour with no distraction.

Yeah. It's Seinfeld. I don't know if you've seen the story, but when he was writing the show, he would lock himself in his room for sort of four or five hours and say, I don't have to write, but I can do nothing but write. So I either sit there or I just do the thing. Yeah. And you have to power through it.

Yeah.

With no distractions. I suppose for Warren as well, his best friends being Bill Gates and Charlie Munger probably is a good influence on that.

Yeah. Well, I don't know if we have in here your network, but definitely all billionaires and millionaires. No billionaires and millionaires. Would you say the secret millionaires know is the millionaires they know.

Nice.

I like one of mine.

Nice.

That'll be ripped off.

Yeah, 100%. Would you say having access to these people through the podcast and interviewing them, getting them behind closed doors, that has helped you make money or build important relationships?

Without them, I wouldn't have been able to do it. How do you know how to make money until you find someone who knows how to make money and teaches you how to make money, well, then you've got to find out yourself. So if you want to learn how to fight, you can either go and be trained by a bare knuckle fighter or you can just get in the ring and fight a bare knuckle fighter. Which one are you going to do? Yeah, if you want to learn how to be a bare knuckle fighter by just getting in the ring with no experience, you're probably going to be dead before you can learn how to be a bare knuckle fighter. And money and business is the same. So if you go into business and money thinking that you can just learn it yourself, because you could just watch YouTube videos and you know, I'm a quick learner. Yeah. No, you cannot. You can't. You go to jiu jitsu. I just learned it myself. No, you need instructors and teachers. So the secret that makes millionaires and billionaires rich is they find people who are successful and rich and they learn from them. And every billionaire has had, got mentors, all of them.

What's the biggest single lesson you've learned from knowing a billionaire? Is there one that stands out?

Yeah, it's one of ours. Here it is. That the biggest expense in the life of a rich person is tax.

That's our next one. So let's go.

All right, so let's do it. So what have we got?

Avoid taxation.

So I have these conversations all the time with millionaires, so I have these conversations all the time with millionaires and billionaires and most of them will not. So I have this conversation all the time with millionaires and billionaires, and most of them will not say this publicly. And I don't mind because it's true. You can never become a billionaire paying the maximum tax rate that you'll be given by the government. How can you. How can you earn and then give half? Earn and then give two thirds? Earn and then give a quarter? Earn, earn and then give 3/4? How can that compounding ever happen if everything you earn, you're giving away half or two thirds? Now, by the way, if anyone says, well, tax isn't half or two thirds VA sales tax, in the UK it's VAT. 20% corporation tax. 20, they might put it up to 25. Highest rate of income is 45, by the way. There's this void bracket, around 100 grand where you're taxed up to 60%. Then you've got national insurance, I think it's over 10, over 10%. Then you've got business rates, which is essentially a tax. And then there's all these legal things and data and everything that you have to pay for that's a tax. And then everything you buy as a tax, Fuel has three taxes on it. If you want to get a car, you have to pay sales tax. To buy it, you have to pay road tax. The fuel you put in has, I think, two taxes on it. Parking is a tax, speeding is a tax. Insurance, insurance is a tax. And then every repair's got tax on it. So you are paying, I reckon, 60 to 70% in a Western country like the UK in tax. How can you become a billionaire if you're giving that away every year? You can't. It's impossible. So every millionaire gets to a point when they realize, you know what, I'm going to make net more money saving tax than I am making more sales. So they focus on reducing tax as a strategy of income. So I know this year that if I just accept and pay all the tax without trying to offset and work out what is fair and reasonable to offset and what business expenses I can run if I just go, oh, well, you know, I just pay all the taxes they say, without figuring out my, you know, depreciables and offsetables, I'm going to make all. Tax is my biggest expense by a long way. I pay millions in taxes and all the revenue we generate and all the staff, millions. So that needs to be. That's a massive expense. No one will say it because it's bad pr, but I don't think it's bad. I just think it's the truth. And by the way, the government want me to offset some taxes they actually do, otherwise there wouldn't be the tax break. Now, the biggest offset you could do in tax is to have a company because then your travel, your accommodation, as long as it's linked to business, is a business expense. So I used to do more social things that I'd buy after tax, after lockdown, when taxes went through the roof, I stopped doing more social things. And most of my travel is business. And so it's a business expense and of course it's completely legitimate and the government want me to be able to offset that, otherwise I'm not going to be able to run my business. Despite their attack and their hatred for entrepreneurs and business owners, they still want us and need us. So there's probably less reliefs and breaks than there used to be. There's still plenty of reliefs and breaks. You know, in an llp, I own cars and I can run them all through. I have a Lamborghini and other cars through the llp. That is your biggest expense. Buy a mile. So. But of course, if a billionaire says this, well, you're only paying 4% corp tax and you've set up your company in Ireland and you're just raising money through shares, they just get mass hate. It'd be an awful PR campaign, so they have to give it your PR shit. And by the way, do I blame a billionaire for getting a good tax accountant and figuring out how to save the biggest overhead in their business? No, no, it's good fiduciary responsibility. And would you, like you said earlier, would you want it wasted by. Would you want to pay 500 mil just for the government to spunk it? No.

Yeah, I love the quote when Trump was going against Hillary Clinton and she was moaning about him avoiding taxes. Yeah, that's why I should be in power. I know how the system works. And by the way, all of your backers do the same thing. Absolute mic drop moment. I'm kind of happy he's running against good entertainment. 17, one word. Leverage.

Yeah. So with a lever large enough I can move the world. I think that was Archimedes. So, you know, if you think of a car, is it a car jack or a vise? You know, where you can lift up an entire car with just this little vice just with a lever so you can move great weight with a long enough lever. And it's the same in business and money. I can leverage the bank's money to earn on their bank, so I can leverage the bank's money to earn on their money. So I have a real estate portfolio of about 340 rental units and I might have 58, 60% bank finance on that varies depending on market values. And you know, I'd have to check with my business partner exactly what it is, but we like to keep it, you know, low. Ish. But that bank debt has given me tens of millions of pounds property portfolio. I can leverage staff to do work for me. I can leverage a train to get me from A to B. I can leverage a mentor who might have failed in two businesses before he made 100 million to teach me how to not fail in business to make 100 million. So leverage is achieving more with less and mentors and financial leverage and time leverage and task leverage. You know, if you have a PA or a va, you've got admin and task leverage. So poor people will think I can't do it. People who are just about getting by will think, how can I do it? Rich people think, who can I get to do it? Of course it is because I created. Yeah, well it's a great time this shit for 18 fucking years.

That's fair enough. 18. This is a very you1 learn, then break the rules, then make them.

Yeah, so I'm going to keep this really succinct. There are three levels to wealth and this is unfair. But life isn't fair. You don't get what's fair, you get what you negotiate. Bill Gates said that. So if you think life is unfair, you'll always be at the unfair end. If you think, well, you make the rules, you'll always be at the fair end because you make the rules. You know, if you're playing Monopoly and you're the banker, you don't think it's unfair. I'm the fucking banker. If you Make a game up and you set your own rules. You don't think that's unfair because the rules benefit you. So 0s they don't even know the rules. Get in theirs, learn the rules. Millionaires break some rules. Billionaires make the fucking rules. So people don't like all this. Well, political donations and policy influence from billionaires. But billionaires are literally making the rules of policy in government to benefit themselves because they have that power. They are literally making the rules. Now, when you're a millionaire, you're going to break some rules, I. E. You're going to observe the masses. I'm not talking about legal rules. You're not anything illegal. But, you know, conventional ways to make money. You know, they start a company, they pay their tax, tax last, not first. Whereas everyone who's employed has to pay their tax first. So they're the different levels. You don't even know the rules. You learn the rules, you break the rules, you make the rules.

19 or 20, sorry, creation versus consumption.

Yeah. So if you're a zero, where you don't really create anything or make anything, because you'd get paid for it if you did. The more you make and the more useful it is, the more you get paid. If you make amazing art, you'll get paid well. If you make one canvas, you'll get paid quite well. If you make 100 canvases, you'll get paid 100 times better. So you've got to make useful things at a solid volume. In fact, my formula for wealth is wealth equals perceived value plus fair exchange times leverage. So, so leverage is how many of the volume of the thing that you make is perceived value is the quality and the value of it that someone perceives. You know, if you make one nice Richard Mille watch for a quarter of a million, you might make 50 grand profit. If you sell 5,000 of them, you got 5,000 times 50, you've got a lot of fucking money. So generally, broke people consume more than they create. They consume pharmaceutical products, they consume food, they consume Netflix and TV and media, whereas the people who are the billionaires are the ones that are creating it. The founders of Netflix became billionaires creating the content, and then all the consumers are broke consuming it. So if you want to get rich, you need to go from more consumption to more creation. Simple as if you want to be an influencer or a creator in the creator economy on social media, stop looking at social media and swiping, stop looking at social media and swiping and scrolling and start creating content and making and building, you know, build something.

That's a point I make in all of my talks is how many people spend an hour a day scrolling. Right, it can be social media or it might be, it's LinkedIn, but it's work or Tinder or Grindr or right Mood. Like whatever it is, I hate the idea or I hate the phrase and people say, oh, I don't have time for that. So some of the biggest entrepreneurs on the planet are prioritizing their brand because of the leverage that pulls because then they can sell more units or add a zero to the price or whatever it is.

Well what you just said, priority, it's not about time, it's about priority because you're prioritizing something. Say prioritizing swiping for hours on dating websites instead of getting down the gym and getting in good shape and feeding your mind with good quality education so you can become a higher value man that attract a better woman or you're just going to sit there and scroll for hours. So that word priority, you know I said one of them was a time drain. Well the opposite of time drain is prioritization. Ruthlessly know well, this task is worth a million pounds and this task is worth a thousand pounds and this task is worth £5. So I'll do the million pound task even if it takes me six months and I'll outsource the others.

That's one of the biggest things I actually learned from you. It's figure out your hourly rate. Anything less outsourced. Yeah, pretty much anything around the house now is done for me.

There you go. So I wrote about that in Life Leverage. So the formula for wealth is in money matrix, wealth equals perceived value plus our exchange times leverage. And that is an unbreakable formula. You know, like a universal law of physics. This is a universal law of wealth. Took me a long time to figure it out. But in Life Leverage I write about key result areas, income generating tasks and knowing your income generating value. And people think I can't afford to outsource it. You can't afford not to outsource it if it costs you less than what you can earn in an hour. So cleaning, cooking, ironing, it's funny out my book Life Leverage with it's pound for pound. It's got a lot of tips in it. But the little section, it's only a brief section that people love the most all the time is the personal out leverage where it's cleaner, cook, gardener, you know, driver, I have a driver. Whatever your driver costs, it's A bargain because dead time is driving. If you drive somewhere for two hours and drive somewhere back, probably cost you another two on top of tiredness. So it's at least six hours dead. But you have a drive and do six or four hours work and save those two hours. I'll give you an example of this. I upgraded to first class. Now, I don't always upgrade to first class because even though I'm very rich, I still realize that what got me very rich was making more than I spent. And I can make a lot and still spend a lot. So I like to keep myself very grounded. I always buy dinners. I had many dinners over the last two days that I paid for and they were a lot of money. But I'll be looking at sing single to London. 40 quid standard, 55 quid first class, 60 quid first class, 70 quid first class. If it's 30 quid more, I'll probably get standard if it's not busy. If it's busy, I always upgrade to first because of the time it kills. But if it's not busy and it's a decent upgrade, I won't pay. I'll just. I came back on standard and actually got a table seat and I got work done. But I upgraded and it was like 30 quid more, which is quite a lot really, for the upgrade. So I said, well, I'm just going to do a 10,000 pound task. I just said to myself, I don't know what yet, I'm gonna do a 10,000 pound task. I actually wrote a sales page for a new launch we're doing, which on my prediction will probably do 300 to 350 grand. And I wrote the sales page and it took me the one hour on the train that would have taken me a week of around and I got it done in an hour. And that was a could be a hundred thousand task. So how you value your time and what you see as an investment versus a spend is huge. And a driver, a cook, a gardener, a cleaner, all of that for me is a major investment of liberating my time.

It also has made me happier because those are things I didn't like doing. Whereas you can spend more time doing things you do like doing, which is making 350 grand on your new funnel.

Yeah, there you go. Now, one caveat. If you love gardening. You love gardening.

Yeah.

Or if you're being made to clean the kitchen, put this podcast on.

Good idea.

Or maybe you're cleaning or doing one of those jobs while you're listening to this podcast, Good Time Leverage.

Absolutely. Finally, control, legislation and policy, right?

This is another one that billionaires don't want you to know. They all say it privately, they won't say it publicly, you understand why, but they basically run the world. The people who run the big conglomerate empires, you know, the media companies, the tech companies, the pharma companies, and then the blackrock who have got trillions all their tentacles in all these companies controlling them. They ultimately control most of the financial policy in the world.

So do you think billionaires control the world?

I think the people who control the money control the world because maybe some billionaires are controlled by people who are even more rich than them. I think the people who control the money control the world. Now, in all my pursuit of over a thousand episodes, 21 billionaires, hundreds of millionaires, and I've asked who controls the world a fuckload of times, hundreds of times I've asked this. And what I can distill it down to, it I would say is this. Whoever controls the money and whoever controls the media controls the world. And we don't know who that is yet. There are 12 families who control most of the money. I had to change their name slightly in the book Money Matrix. And by the way, this, there's not a moral judgment on that. I control my business partner and I control all the money in our company. The world is a company to the globalists. We might hate. It might not be for the good of the people, but it is for the good of them. And they may. You know, I was driving around in Geneva, the Rothschild's estate, you know, that's. That is hundreds of years old. They're born into that. That's just what they know. I don't really judge it anymore, but they're parts of it. I want to change because I think if I were to judge it, I'd find some moral issues with it. It just could be more fairly distributed or more democratic. That would be better. More democratic. We've lost all democracy. It's just globalization. It's just control of the few. We just need a bit more even distribution of input of running our world.

What's your thoughts on let's say, lowering or removing income tax but 100 inheritance tax?

I've never asked, but I've never been asked that. I have to think about that. 100% of inheritance tax, 100% of any tax is just basically theft. And isn't one of the purposes of life to carry on our familial legacy? Isn't that the only Thing that's left. You know, I always used to think in the last 20 years at least, my legacy is the empire that I built. Because I've studied a zillion entrepreneurs and billionaires and millionaires. But Dana White said, that's not your legacy. Your kids are your legacy. Well, yeah, like, I had this really quite scary realization, Kane, and that is, if my son doesn't have a son, my name is dead. And that like, makes me feel something. Like, it makes me feel emotion. If my son doesn't have a son, my name is dead. And so after him, I'm dead. There's nothing left of me. So to think that there'll be 100% inheritance tax, which would grossly, unfairly hinder the familial legacy, that's wrong. But I've just redone my will and I will be strategically distributing over a long period of decades my inheritance to my children. They will not be getting it all in one lump when I die. And there'll be trusts involved and I might even match what they earn. And I'll be very tactical because I don't want them to rely on my money and become juvenile and dependent. I want them to learn how to be entrepreneurial. So I get this 100% inheritance tax thing maybe discourages entitlement, but it also discourages this generation of building money. Why are you going to build such a massive empire if 100% of it is gone?

Well, you wouldn't know any different. You'd be dead.

Yeah, but what, but then you live for your children. You wouldn't know this. You don't have them.

Very true.

So I, I think inheritance tax is too high and income tax is too high. I think you're shooting in the wrong barrel. I think what you should, we should do is the billionaires, the entrepreneurs and the governments and the banks should create a, a decentralized mastermind where they, they all have equal input on how we can benefit humanity the most. And we learn how to drive economic growth without taking and consuming off everyone. There could be more money for the governments and less percentage in taxes for us. Because if we are helped to make money and some of the money is invested in helping us make money, and there's less friction and more speed and ease, we make more money and more of it cascades down to the government. I don't know. David, if you can edit in the Laffer curve. But the Laffer curve is a curve which shows when a government charges zero tax, they get zero tax. But when they charge 100 tax. They also get zero tax. Why? Because no one would pay 100 tax. So they'll just off to Monaco or Lisbon or dubai. So there's zero tax at zero and there's zero tax at 100 and it goes up and it peaks somewhere and then it goes back down, I. E. The less you tax, the less they get. But the more they tax, the less they get because everyone either works out how to not save it or turns to illegal means or literally elopes and leaves. So many billionaires I know are leaving. My friend Alfred Best has just gone to Monaco.

He's left, sold all his cars.

So hundreds of millions of revenue from the UK has disappeared. So there's an optimum. So what we need to do is find that optimum and we're way over it, way over it. And it would be better to be slightly under it, because if we were slightly under, like if our country was under resourced, but it was because it was low tax, I would put my hand in my pocket and I would donate to my council and a billionaire would go, would, you know what? We're underfunded here. I'm going to help you. Because humans do that. But because they're fucking greedy and they're overcharging us, all the billionaires and millionaires are going, fuck you. You can't blame them because it's unfair. So, no, this low to no income tax and maximum inheritance tax, I don't think it would work. I think a lower overall tax and working together and an incentive to grow is the solution. Don't alienate the billionaires and the entrepreneurs. Work with them. Now look, billionaires paying 4% or virtually no corp tax is unfair. It is unfair. It's not enough. It should be more. But they should get some breaks and reliefs for the amount of jobs that they create and the amount of revenue that they produce.

That's all of them.

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Disruptive Media, helping bold entrepreneurs stand out through podcasting, video and social content. Visit disruptivemedia.co.uk to learn more.