Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: You are listening to the wealth without Bay street podcast, a canadian guide to building dependable wealth. Join your hosts, Richard Canfield and Jason Lowe as they unlock the secrets to.
[00:00:10] Speaker B: Creating financial peace of mind in an uncertain world.
[00:00:13] Speaker A: Discover the strategies and mindsets to a financial future that you can bank on.
Get our simple seven step guide to becoming your own banker. It's easy. Head over to Sevensteps CA and learn exactly the learning process required for you to implement this amazing strategy into your financial life. That's Sevensteps ca.
How do we take personal sovereignty and a holistic approach to managing your money and creating the success you deserve and that you want in life? Well, we're joined today by Jay Martin. He's the host of the Jay Martin show, and man, he's got some epic followers going on in his community now. He's created one of the largest investment conferences in Canada, the VRIC, the Vancouver Investment Resource conference. We're going to talk a little bit about that today. He hosts renowned politicians, economists and investors. It typically attracts over 6000 people every year. He's interviewed the former prime minister of Canada, Stephen Harper, former president of Mexico, bestselling author Robert Kiyosaki. Everyone on our program certainly familiar with him, as well as well known austrian economic thinkers such as Dr. Ron Paul, leader of the Ron Poole revolution movement for many of our listeners will be familiar with that. And of course Peter Schiff. He's an investor, author, very successful entrepreneur, and he's an ultramarathon runner. This guy's a triathlete. It's going to be crazy. We're going to have a lot of fun as well as a father of three young boys. So we're going to talk about his perspective, his experience, the importance of understanding commodities and having more control over your personal wealth and economy relative to some of the, let's just say, manipulation of money markets that's been going on in the world. So Jay, welcome to the show. Happy to have you.
[00:01:58] Speaker B: Yeah, Richard, it's my pleasure. I'm glad to be here.
[00:02:02] Speaker A: Well, I kind of want to kick things off a little bit. So you've got this epic conference. I know you've got one coming up. I believe it's an annual conference in January beginning in 24. And I would really love to know, share with our listeners a little bit what inspired you to create this conference and put it together.
How has it blossomed since day one? The idea came to you and then you put that into motion. Tell us a little bit about building this conference.
[00:02:29] Speaker B: Yeah, well, the event, business, it's a fun business, right? And so at our largest, we had eleven conferences per year spread across North America, all focused on the investment sector.
We did diversify a little bit here and there. Like I spread into a couple of consumer events. In 2014, 1516, we had events in the drone space. In the cannabis sector, our bread and butter is commodities. But we ended up building two conferences in Canada that became the largest technology investment conferences in the country. Cantech in Toronto, and extraordinary future in Vancouver. There's a lot to love about that business, but there's also a lot to hate about that business, to be honest with you. And when we got shut down in 2020, like any live event production company, did, it hurt immediately. But what it allowed me to do is reallocate my time to the business that I've been trying to building in my spare time for the previous six years, which was a media company, and we went all in on that and it ended up being a much more pleasurable company. This is what I do now. I've got a couple of YouTube channels, a couple of subscription newsletters, podcasts. I've got some online courses. Those are super fun. But when we got the green light to go back to the event business, Richard, it wasn't an obvious yes for me. It was actually like a big conversation. It's like, okay, I don't miss it.
I don't really want to resurrect it, to be honest with you. But we'd also invested twelve years in building that brand equity and it just seems silly to let it die on the vine, right? So I'll just be frank. I resurrected that company in 2022 with the sole intention of taking it to market as fast as possible, which, you know, it's like a horrible mental state to be in when you're running a company, because I would have taken any bid. Like, you give me your Toyota Corolla, like, you can have it, just take it off my hands. I don't want this business anymore.
[00:04:20] Speaker A: How did you know about my Toyota Corolla?
[00:04:26] Speaker B: It can be a tough business building investment conferences because your cash outlays like 1218 months in advance. Sometimes you can't predict the volatility of the market. There's a lot going on and you hit a bear market. No one wants to come to a commodity investment conference if metals are in the tank and all this stuff. So anyways, when we resurrected it, I was like, we're going to do it different. We're just going to resurrect one event. We're going to throw all of our weight behind that one conference and just make this the Super bowl. Because it was like, we can go back to doing eight to eleven medium sized events and kind of claim territory in California and Chicago and Toronto and Calgary and Vancouver. Or we could just go all in and build one grand slam conference and that's what we ended up doing. I now love that business again, which is so lovely. I've built it completely, got, you know, I think two full time employees. I've contracted everybody. So just the nice thing about that period, Richard, was like, I got to rebuild the company I'd been running for twelve years from ground zero. Can you imagine who gets that opportunity?
All your mistakes are erased because the business was shut for two years. And then when we resurrected it, I got to resurrect it from first principles and build it with all the lessons right along the way. And so now it's like an absolute blast. It's three months of my year. We go all in. Yes, it's in January, January 21 and 22nd. The keynote roster is always amazing. I take a lot of pride in that. Like, I really put my name on it. So it means a lot to me that we really impress the city and we should see 6000 investors this year. We'll see. But at a high level, there's sort of three stakeholders at this event. There's keynote speakers and they kind of own the stage. And we have seven stages that will wrap around the perimeter of the Vancouver Convention center.
And those will be anybody from. Yeah, former politicians. People always ask me, why do you want to talk to politicians? I'm pretty libertarian in my psychology, so what's with that? But I enjoy.
[00:06:26] Speaker A: You're in the right room today, by the way, because.
[00:06:30] Speaker B: I enjoy understanding the psychology of decision making and how people interpret the world. And either way, like, love or hate our political leaders, you're going to learn something. When you square off with the leader of a g seven nation like you just do. They're going to have been in rooms, been in conversations that I'll find enlightening. And so I still enjoy. And frankly, I think it was a good, it was last year we had Prime Minister Stephen Harper, and it was a good time to bring him back because for my non canadian friends, he was the leader that navigated Canada through the 2008 financial crisis. And we came through Canada, came through that crisis with a healthier balance sheet than any other g eight nation, strictly because we had a leader who knew how to leverage our natural resources to the global. You know, he did unthinkable things in today's terms, like he ran a deficit but kept the temporary. He ran stimulus but kept the temporary. Promised he would and he did. And you don't meet politicians like that anymore. Definitely not in Canada. So anyways, yeah. Keynote speakers wrap the room. The center is like a marketplace of investment opportunities. So 300 ish early stage companies will be set up in a trade show and they're all looking to raise money or promote. And then investors show up to do their diligence, shop around, meet new potential opportunities, but hear from the experts and hit the workshops, hit the speaker hall and hear from a variety of money managers who have been in the game a long time, made tons of mistakes, made tons of wins, and survived bull and bear market cycles and all this stuff. So it is a bit of a party. It's super fun. And if you like to geek out on macro and geopolitics and raw materials and commodities, then it's a good place to be.
[00:08:13] Speaker A: I think it's interesting because you use the COVID scenario, which, again, decimating to hundreds of thousands of businesses across North America and certainly in Canada, and one's in a space that definitively requires physical people to attend and pay money to attend an event. I mean, that's a hard pill to swallow, but you took it and you did something that one of our mentors, Dan Sullivan, talked about is you created a future that was much bigger than your past in the reimagining of that new business.
Like, yeah, you had that vested interest, but you were able to pivot and say, okay, I want to bring with me from the past the parts that I did like and enjoy about this business, and I want to reactivate those, and I want to basically take a shotgun to all the stuff that I didn't like.
[00:08:58] Speaker B: 100%. Exactly. And Dan Sullivan is the man, by the way. I love that you dropped Dan in here. I'm rereading ten x right now. Absolute critical book. But, yeah, that was it. It was like, you have the second chance to build the same company, do it smarter this time, and do it in the way that you love it. Right. And I love it again, I don't want to sell it today, which is great, because in that place two years ago where I was literally like, I'm just building it to get rid of know, not the mindset you want to be in when you're taking something to market. Right.
[00:09:27] Speaker C: Yeah, that's fantastic.
[00:09:28] Speaker A: Jay.
[00:09:29] Speaker C: Sorry, my voice is a little hoarse. I was just saying to rich, before you got on the call, I was at my son's football game last night, and I can't even help myself. I'm like a proud dad. I was yelling for 60 straight minutes for the whole entire game, and my son actually got recognized by his team as the player of the game. And I'm super friggin proud of him because he's never played the game in his life, and he just got better and better and better as the season went on, and he played incredible last night. But anyhow, yeah, thanks for letting me share that. I just wanted to know I might have missed this. How long is the conference? Actually, I would imagine it sounds like it's much bigger than one day.
[00:10:02] Speaker A: How long is it?
[00:10:03] Speaker B: We squeeze it into two days.
We get pitches almost every year, asking us to expand to three and four days.
It's definitely tempting, but I like where it's at. We'll do some preshow boot camps, some post show activities, but the core conference itself is just two full days, and it's jammed. But everything that we do at that conference is recorded and published on our media platforms. It's all free, actually. I don't charge for it. So people that can't attend or more frequently, what we hear is somebody comes and they're like, there's six stages going at once, and I want to see these two individuals, you've got them squaring off against each other, and I get it, but it's a fine balance, right? Because you want a busy room, you want high volume traffic, you want full speaker halls, because that creates a certain kind of energy, and that energy fuels productivity and good conversations and a positive experience for everybody. And so spreading that over more days, you do risk diluting that energy a little bit and that sort of productive memory, right? And so we do compress it. It's very busy as a consequence. But it's the formula that I like a lot.
[00:11:15] Speaker A: And being able to offer a lot of those things again in post production, out through your other media channels, I think, is a huge benefit for people to get some more bite size. And even if you attend the session again, like you say, you can't see every speaker, every keynote, you're not going to meet at every booth, necessarily, but you have a chance to reengage. And often repetition is our best teacher, or certainly at least our best memory cognition tool to go over things again and again and again. So I think that's a huge advantage. Now, I know I've listened to a lot of incredible interviews that you've done. There was one that you did a while back with Brad Wall, former premier Brad Wall, which was very interesting. And something you said about the opportunity to communicate with a politician who's operating at that level or previously had what I find very unique. And in some of the interviews I've watched has been the opportunity to recognize, okay, when were the challenges and strife that occurred and how were they able to overcome those things? And specifically for me personally, what really connected is we all have an idea and a vision of how our political environment should maybe be moving forward in some direction. And we always wonder, why is the machine moving at a snail's pace? And I think that some of the interviews that you've done that I've been able to be a participant in watching have really isolated what are the barriers that these political figures are beating their heads up against trying to get initiatives moving forward. And they're running into all kinds of challenges and walls that are placed in front of them. Not wall, not to be used as a joke there, but that's a real issue that they face. And so I'm curious in the conversations you had, because you've interviewed many from, again, former president of Mexico, like lots of different variables, not just in Canada.
What comes up for you when you think about some of those conversations you've had in the political.
[00:13:18] Speaker B: You know, a key theme right now in Canada, which I've heard from former British Columbia premier Christy Clark, from former Saskatchewan premier Brad Wall. And although I haven't had her on the show, we're hearing it all day right now from Alberta, Premier Danielle Smith is the federal overreach that's sort of reaching down into the provinces within Canada and limiting the actual decision making that's been allotted to the provinces as per our constitutional rights.
And there's two really interesting pieces of legislature in Canada right now. One called the Alberta Sovereignty act and the other called the act. But you don't have to be canadian to appreciate this is like the states rising up and saying, we've been promised our sovereignty to a certain degree, as per our federal constitution. And right now we have a federal leader who's reaching down into the states or in Canada's case, provinces and stepping on the toes and hamstring in our local economies and not allowing us to govern the best interest of our local economy, which is so important because the more you centralize anything, the more mistakes are made and the more vulnerable that system becomes. Right. And the more blind spots you open yourself up to because you can't possibly know everybody's unique advantage or pain point and so I don't know how you get out of that in the case of Canada's government, for example. But I think that I'm very inspired right now by the work of Danielle Smith and the Alberta Sovereignty act and the work of Scott Moe in Saskatchewan. He's the current premier of Saskatchewan, threatening to, for example, withhold carbon taxes, right. If his providence doesn't start getting a fair shake from the federal leadership. But here's something to think about, though, like an inefficient government might be the best thing ever. And if political leaders can't see eye to eye and can't come to mean, isn't that why? That was kind of the beauty of the american experiment, wasn't it? It was to limit the power of any one person. And as a consequence, the United States president has far less power than a canadian prime minister. And that's by design. And that's a really good design, right? You should limit the power of any one human being. I mean, that increases the sovereignty of the civilians and decreases the impact of centralization. Now, that's eroded a lot over the last 200 years. It's not what it used to be, but that was the initial intention. And what a great one. What a great one. And probably a large reason why we've seen United States accelerate from what was honestly not that long ago like a third world country pulling into the edge of the Atlantic Ocean, into now being a global superpower.
A lot of that's just left to the individual innovation and ambition of the citizens.
[00:16:14] Speaker A: Become your own banker and take back control over your financial life. Hey, is this even possible? You may be asking, can I even do this? Well, you better believe it. In fact, it's easy to get going. So easy that we put together a free report. Seven simple steps to becoming your own banker. Download it right now. Go to sevensteps ca. That's seven steps ca. Now, let's get back to the episode took something that I think for many, they look at it perhaps as a very bleak outlook to some degree. And you've got a very interesting perspective about the advantages of the slow moving machine. So I think that's fascinating vantage point. And it's important to have context as we look at these things, because from a day to day perspective, you could see a news article or a headline and you could get a little frustrated about it real quick. But if you take some time to think or ruminate, think upon your thinking. Both our mentor, R. Nelson Nash and Dan Sullivan very focused on the idea of to rethink your thinking about a particular subject or a matter. And so I really appreciate your method of doing that and what kind of comes up to me a little bit know as we hit the go button here for a know, I mentioned a little bit something know central banks. And I know in a lot of the commentary, especially in recent episodes, I mean, you've had Peter Schiff on who was interviewed by one of your team members.
You've had Dr. Ron Paul on so many individuals who, again, with that austrian thinking mindset, looking at the issuance of, we'll call it funny money, that effectively isn't really real and how that's being pumped into the marketplace and creating a lot of, I'll call it havoc over extended periods of time. And so with some of the interviews you're having recently, a lot of communication, a lot of talk about where maybe there's a large bubble that's forming and appearing. I'm just curious to get your opinion when you think about amalgamating some of these recent conversations you've been having. And for me recently thinking in the last two to three months, but I'm sure in your mind's view, it's actually probably the last three to four years.
What's some things that comes up for you here that you'd like to talk about with some of the themes that you're hearing in those interviews that are taking place now?
[00:18:31] Speaker B: Well, I think that we tend to separate the behavior and intention of governments from the behavior and intention of regular people like you and I as if it's different in any way.
Everybody got hooked on cheap money and cheap credit, and consumers are going through that right now in a certain way, and governments are going through it in the exact same way. And so on the consumer front, what do you see? You see things like auto loan delinquencies, not at all time highs, but they're kind of a hockey stick curve going that direction. Mortgage delinquencies in some pretty scary scenarios right now.
Once again, in Canada in 2022, I think 70% of new mortgages were variable rates. They're getting whacked right now. Mortgage demand is down like 25% this year alone. New mortgages down 50%. People are getting priced out of their homes, all this stuff. An interesting data point that gets less attention is new credit card application rejections, that is at all time highs. New credit card application rejections are at all time highs. So this is people that can no longer afford their monthly nut. They've become accustomed to reaching out for more credit when that occurs. And now they cannot get.
So, you know, this is silly to me. When people ask, are we headed towards a recession? It's like, well, what are you waiting for? This is what a recession looks like. I mean, United States set a record for corporate bankruptcies in August. You're waiting for CNN to provide you affirmation that, yes, this is in fact a recession. We're in one. Right. But our federal leadership is in that exact same situation. And it's important to think about it that way. Right. We're looking at in the United States, the $32 trillion debts, $2 trillion deficits. And I pause to really prophesize on those numbers because they sound crazy. And when you say a $2 trillion debt, how is that sustainable? As if a $1 trillion debt was or a half a trillion dollar debt was. Right. Like 32 trillion in debt. This has to end. It's like, well, was 20 trillion okay with you? It doesn't matter at this point. It's irrelevant. These are just digits.
[00:20:37] Speaker A: The goalpost just keeps getting pushed further and further out almost to an exponential level where the word trillion and billion, they don't have a visual impact to the human being because we're so unfamiliar with seeing it and it's being tossed around so much that it's like basically just being the boiled frog, essentially. Right. When we're hearing these terminologies and it almost becomes inconsequential, but yet it's monstrously consequential.
[00:21:08] Speaker B: Yeah, of course we're desensitized to these numbers.
[00:21:13] Speaker A: Exactly.
[00:21:13] Speaker B: Who can wrap their mind around 32 trillion of anything?
It's not a fathomable concept.
And there's always a reason to think this time it's different. Right. We're looking at a pretty serious treasury oversupply. The global demand for US Treasuries is still actually pretty much on par with where it's been, but we're needing to sell more of them to finance our debt because how do you reconcile a $2 trillion debt when you can't make cuts to really anything on the budget outside of the only two buckets that would make an impact would be entitlement spending. And that's political suicide when there's an election cycle every two years. So no politician is going to touch that. And then military spending and don't think that's going anywhere, not in the near future.
And then you got interest expense. And so I step back from this and I'm like, what does this really tell us? Because I can't invest on this information. I can't really make any short term adjustments or predictions based off this information. But if we depart from the noise of, like, this quarter, last quarter, next quarter, and say, what does this tell us about the big trends that might be occurring right now? And if you look at the cycles of empire over the last 500 years, we got six empires to analyze, right? We got the portuguese empire, which had its own global reserve currency. It was kind of maritime specific, but it was recognized relatively globally. The spanish empire, the Dutch Empire, the british empire, and now we're living in the era of the american empire. So six empires inside of 500 years tells you a little bit about the expeditious nature with which power rotates around the globe, and therefore, what inning we may realistically be in in the era of the american empire. And nobody wants to hear that. And I imagine that the citizens of any empire didn't believe it when it was occurring to them, because all they live in is their recency bias, right? And this is the world that I was born into, and it's the one that will continue forever. And that's a reasonable thing to think. But when you step back and look at the big picture, it's like, oh, it's a guarantee. Of course, this is obvious where we're at. And inside of those cycles, you see the same kind of behavior, right? A country, typically before it starts, as sort of a developing but highly ambitious country. And the citizens become very productive, usually by stealing the middle class jobs from another empire that wants to outsource that. I mean, that's what happened in the case of Spanish to the Dutch and Dutch to the British. They built their power off their maritime strength and determined that it was cheaper to have, in Spanish's case, to have the Dutch build their ships. And so they outsourced their middle class jobs to the Dutch to build cheaper ships. Turns out the Dutch got really good at building ships and also got rich from building ships for the spanish empire. So the spanish empire hollowed up their middle class, essentially outsourced it to Holland. Holland took over, took that puck, and ran with it, right? And they built their empire on the back of maritime strength. Surprise, surprise. But then they did the exact same thing, and they outsourced their shipbuilding to cheaper labor in Britain. And Brits became really good at building ships, ended up with the largest navy the world ever.
So we're seeing that now. Have we not hollowed out the empire? Sorry, the middle class of the american empire, obviously we have, but that hyper hungry, productive populace becomes wealthy, just do hard work. But the stages they go through is like, productivity leads to wealth, and then you become accustomed to wealth, and then that wealth leads to decadence. Then you become accustomed to decadence, but you're not as productive as you used to be. So now you fund that with debt, and then debt fuels decline, and that productivity fuels wealth. Wealth fuels decadence. Decadence fuels debt. Debt fuels decline. That's the cycle that you'll see in all six of those empires. And so when you ask that question about the american empire again, it's like, you tell me where we're at. This whole conversation is about debt. So it's like, yeah, we know. We know where we're at, but that doesn't mean that the end days are tomorrow or inside of five years. And it took 30 years for the british pound to really give space to the american dollar. It was a slow, arduous process, and it will be again.
So you have the insolvency of the state that we're seeing right now. That sort of debt fuels decline scenario, the final innings, right, of the empire. We're there for sure. I think we can say that with confidence that the state's insolvents. There's no real way around that that I can see. The two other factors you often see at the end, during those end days are civil unrest that explodes to a point that borders on civil war, becomes, are we there? I don't know. You can make an argument that we're kind of close.
[00:25:49] Speaker A: I don't think I've seen any polarization happening in the news in the last two years. Right.
[00:25:54] Speaker B: Calm and collected, and we're there. And that's often in response to the wealth gap that's created when you outsource the middle class, but the affluent class continues to build wealth. This creates civil unrest, and that division spreads. And people don't know who the enemy is. They just know their life's not as good as it used to be, and they can't afford what they used to be able to, so they look for an enemy. And that's the whole thing right there. The lack of financial education, I think, is at the root of a lot of that, because if you bought the story that you were sold in the should go through high school, take the student loan debt, get the degree, do what you love, don't do it for the money.
We were all told that. Did that work out? You got the liberal arts degree for 100 grand. Now you're 35, 100 grand in debt out of the housing market, and you're looking at people your age who are millionaires. And you're like, there's no way I did everything right. I went to post secondary. I worked hard, I did what I loved, but they're a millionaire and I'm broke. Like, they must have cheated. And then you get this animosity back and forth when all that really happened is that you guys are both playing the same game. But only one person knew the rules, right? Because we go through the education system without ever learning about capital gains and leverage and credits and how these are core. These are core. So, anyways, we have the civil unrest, we have the insolvency of the state, we have the civil unrest. And the third bullet point that you typically see in those end days is an external power rising to compete with the existing power. And so does that exist today? Like, historically, it's not one nation that rises up and challenges the existing power. It's a collection of smaller powers that are able to pause their ideological differences in order to overthrow the existing superpower. So are we seeing that? Yeah, we're seeing that, too. And so, near term debt crisis, I don't know what happens. I think we can kick the can a lot farther than people think.
And the evidence of that is just look how far we've kicked it thus far. We kicked it to 32 trillion. Like, who saw that coming? We kicked it to a $2 trillion deficit. Who saw that coming? We can kick this thing really far.
[00:27:56] Speaker A: Five years ago, you would have been labeled a heretic just for even suggesting that we could get to $32 trillion 100%.
[00:28:04] Speaker B: Absolutely, you would have been. Yet here we are. Right. And so I can't predict the short term impact of the debt crisis, but you can step back, look at history, and say, okay, but what's the big picture telling us? And I don't know about you, but I do find it's easier. Right. It's hard to predict near term volatility. Like, I can't tell you what the market is going to do inside of six months, but I can make some assumptions about what the world might look like inside of ten years. That's actually easier game to play. And those big trends, they don't move as quickly. They're not as volatile. They're the supertanker kind of going one direction. And these little speedboats jotting all over the place, which are harder to predict, but that's how I tend to process that stuff.
[00:28:42] Speaker A: Byrne, does that remind you of anybody's number one rule that we know?
[00:28:47] Speaker C: Thinking long range.
[00:28:48] Speaker A: Right? Thinking long range. Our Nelson Nash, our mentor, he wrote the book becoming your own banker. And rule number one is you got to learn how to think wrong. You got to learn how to think three generations down the road. And love that. His iteration of that was so he passed away in March of 2019. He was 88 revolutions around the sun is what he would say. And so he had a breadth of experience going through cycles. He saw and lived through much of that empiric rise that we've been discussing. And he also was a very big student of history. In fact, if you go to his website, he's got something about 250 books, most of which are on economics and history. But he says you can't have an understanding of economics if you don't first have an understanding of history. So he would go back to Richard Cannellon, who many people would recognize as where the auspices of the austrian school of economic thought really stems from. And he thought about how, in his own lifespan, if you started to recognize that, you could think beyond your own lifespan, and you started to picture, okay, what's the family? What's the legacy? What's the things that you actually want to do and accomplished? And you made goals and targets in relation to those things, the actions you took today would begin to adjust through that mindset and through the intention that you set about what that three generational outlook is. And so, for us, the idea of family banking and seceding from a system that we generally don't believe is there to support you is how do we, slowly and incrementally, or as quickly as reasonable, disconnect, unplug ourselves from, at least to some degree, the banking sector and system that isn't designed to support your initiatives as a human being, and plug into another system utilizing the backbone of a framework built on insurance, with insurance companies who don't fractionalize the money supply so that we can begin to still incorporate the day to day transactional aspect of banking, but be in the driver's seat of all the decision making process, rather than tapping into this commercial sector that has this fractional reserve principle attached to it. And so his mindset was that if we could get 10% of a population base, so the idea that as soon as you get 10% of a population of any size doing the same thing, you create that automatic adoption process, it'll work its way through that entire community or population base. So if we could do that at some measure of scale over a period of time, then we would be able to, without having to do the Ron Paul model of end the Fed. Nothing wrong with that. I think that's great. Personally a big fan of end the.
You know, he referred to that as a top down thinking methodology. He believed that the only way to really get it done was a grassroots model where it was a bottom up solution. And so unplugging from the system by voluntarily making the choice where you're seceding from what's there and plugging into this one where you're now in free contract with other free people, a sovereign model where you can now profitably engage in financial activity that you're already doing. You could now separate yourself by seceding from the system that doesn't support you. And there's a little bit of advantage in private contracts that aren't publicly aware and reported to the canadian government as well. So those were some of the checkboxes that he saw in the implementation of austrian thinking. Using one of the most traditional financial vehicles that's been available to us as a secondary location, an alternate banking method to go about accomplishing the things in life you're just going to continue doing anyway, such as buying commodities, which is one of the big focuses for yourself.
[00:32:33] Speaker B: And that comment about you can't understand economics until you understand history. Like what a haymaker? It's so correct, isn't it? We say the most undervalued asset on Wall street is a history book. And it's true.
Absolutely. And duration is, I feel like it's the competitive advantage that everybody has access to, but very few actually capitalize on. But it know, for example, everybody knows Warren Buffett. He's the oracle of Omaha, maybe the most successful investor that we've ever heard of.
The number one reason that he is a household name is because he's been an investor for 80 years. That's why he started in his early teens. He's still going in his ninety s. And had he run the exact same portfolio strategy from age 30 to age 65, like most people, he'd be worth less than 1% of his current net worth and no one would have ever heard his name. He'd still, by the way, be rich. Like it still would have worked out. Because 35 years is a long tenure. That's still great duration.
But he wouldn't be the Oracle. It's only because he's compounded his results for 80 years and stuck in the game.
The number one asset that most any investor ever ends up owning is their house. And it's not because real estate always outperforms. It's because it's the one asset that they'll hold for 25 years. Duration wins because we think about our house as something we own. You don't trade ownership, right. Whereas when it comes to the equity market, most people identify as investors, but they're really acting like traders and they're just trading share prices. That's all they're really doing. They're not understanding that they're owning a company when they buy equity in it. And that shift, your frame of thinking really shifts how you operate and helps you manage the short term volatility. Right. The bumps along the way.
[00:34:26] Speaker A: You should get some shirts made that say that we don't trade ownership. I really like be that. That's really.
[00:34:35] Speaker C: Oh, sorry, Jay, I didn't mean to cut you off there. But rich, I just can't help but think of that story that Jason often shares about his is he shared that story before where the one asset that he actually had that was performing, that he actually owned, that had some value that would continue to compound and serve his family for the rest of his life. And even after he was gone, his brilliant financial advisor told him to cash in his whole life policy. Just as soon as he retired, he cashed it in. He bought some toys, bought doodads. Bought doodads. And then less than approximately a year later, he was gone. And then he left his family with problems and doodads that they didn't want, need, or could do anything for.
[00:35:18] Speaker B: Payment plans.
[00:35:19] Speaker A: No financial value and no tax free windfall.
Again, that ties directly, again, to that longevity thinking. And it's not that he did anything wrong or incorrect. It's simply that he didn't know. And so the education component, your conference, it's a mass opportunity for 6000 people to gather and get a bunch of education and learn about new opportunities to learn about from other people who are well exposed to not just a geopolitical environment, but a financial and historical environment. And you're bringing minds together that are, in general, looking at things through the lens of bigger time. And time. The relevance of time impacts us in everything. I think about it this way. You have three young kids. How old are your kids, Jay, if you don't mind me asking?
[00:36:12] Speaker B: They're three, five and seven.
[00:36:14] Speaker A: Okay, so I'm at six and eight. And so we're in the same ballpark. And if you just think about that. So three, five and seven. Now, Verne's kids are a little bit older. Okay, he's got maybe ten years on us there. But if you think about the relevance of time, your three year old has gone through monstrous leapfrogs in cognition and everything and skill. In a three year period. That is almost uncanny if you really consider what's transpired. Learning how to walk, learning how to feed themselves, like learning how to dress themselves, momentous changes.
But the time relevance, if you think, oh, well, a year and a half or two years ago, hey, we were still in COVID lockdown in our house or whatever. And so that was a really crazy time I had. My business was shut down. I was pivoting into something new. There's all this other chaos happening in a short time frame. And so a lot happened in that time frame. But in his lifespan, it's an exponential change of everything. And so I think about that as I look at my own children. I think, wow. If I go back eight years and I think about when my son was born and all the stuff that was happening there, and then I think about ten x opportunities that have taken place in my own life during that time frame. It's like, wow, a lot has happened in a decade, in a short period of time, but it is such a micro blip on the radar in the 42 years I've been on planet Earth.
If Nelson was still alive today, he would be like, 92. And I'm like, well, what happened in his time frame? Well, there was no indoor plumbing. There wasn't electricity in the house. They didn't have a fridge when he was born.
The context of what time has allowed us to do and the sheer absolute prosperity that we live with today, people can't even fathom and respect the value of what we already have to some degree. Would you agree?
[00:38:06] Speaker B: Yes, 100%. And you use that ten x analogy there, right? And it's a fun one to play with. So the concept that you could ten x your results, ten x your growth, ten x your development. I mean, yeah, I'm watching my three year old do that every six months, right? So it's possible.
But isn't that funny how just because I'm rereading that book right now. Phenomenal book, by the way. Dan Sullivan.
Ten X is easier than two x. Phenomenal read for any entrepreneur, anybody, to be honest with you, because we tend to set goals in terms of, like, 10% improvement, two x gains. I want to double this. I want to grow this by 1020 percent. And when you reflect back, it took me some time to get through this. The first time I did this exercise, I looked it back in my life and I was like, have I ten x anywhere before? And the first time I thought about it, I was like, I don't know. I don't really think so? Because you diminish your milestones as soon as you accomplish them, right. You set this colossal goal. You work at it for five, six years. But the day that it's done, it's small to you because you've grown into the person that that is a small thing to. And so in hindsight, it's like that was obvious that happened. Of course I built that business. Of course. No brainer, right? Of course I did. But when you get real with yourself and look at that experience under a microscope and say, oh, actually I've ten x everywhere, my confidence as an entrepreneur. Yes. My net worth and income, my standards for relationship, my parenting ability, my physical ability. Right? Like I wasn't running ultramarathon six years ago. I was an alcoholic seven years ago.
We've done a lot, you know what I mean? And then when you reflect on that and then project that into the future, then it's like, why would I plan for less than ten x? It's silly to discount myself like that because I've got all this evidence that shows me I've done this multiple times in the past and we all have. We all have, by the way. And so don't shortsaw yourself when you're planning into that future. Right? It's like, it's silly to think any other way about it. So valuable principles. I love that.
[00:40:02] Speaker C: That reminds me of another Dan Sullivan book, gaining the gap. So there you.
[00:40:08] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. It's very easy to get stuck in the gap and I'm starting to recognize seeing that even where my children now are being stuck in the gap. And so I wouldn't say that I'm becoming expert level at helping them get out of it, but I'm certainly becoming expert level at trying, right? And it's through the act of trying that hopefully we can able to do things. And funny enough, right before we hit the go button, I was actually on a session with Scott Donnell, who wrote the book we've interviewed on our podcast, the value creation kit. And it's all about helping kids understand the importance of value creation and how to save, spend, share so that they can take on responsibilities very early to develop the real world skills of money management at the earliest possible age through gamification if you don't have it, value creation kit. It's amazing book, Scott. Donald is a wonderful guy and so he's putting some coaching programs together for families to deep dive into that a little bit more. And so literally leading into our conversation, it's just kind of funny that we're talking about this here, but I was coming from that inspiration into our great chat here today. And so I really do think a lot about, and again, being a member of strategic coach, one of the things that Dan Sullivan does when you join coaches, you get to do the lifetime extender exercise. And it's a thinking exercise that puts you into the hot seat right away where you have to really start reimagining what longevity of your own lifespan looks like to you. And if you gained x amount of more time on the back end of your life, what now becomes available to you to accomplish that you didn't know you could accomplish before? It's an unbelievable exercise that really, it could shake you to your core on recognizing what's truly possible in your own world when you get to realize what the potential of longevity looks like today, given the rapid expanse of technology, especially in the medical field. So thinking today, and I'm just curious, taking that inspiration and thinking about your life today, I mean, you're still a young guy, Jay. You've got a lot of road ahead of you. You got ten X thinking being beat into you really effectively self beat. I guess my curiosity is, if you think about what you've already been able to accomplish to this point, and as you look forward into your ten X future, what are some of the opportunities that you see yourself building manifesting as part of the legacy that you want to leave and create?
[00:42:36] Speaker B: Oh, man.
[00:42:37] Speaker C: Okay.
[00:42:41] Speaker B: So a project that I'm building right now that I am very fired up about, and this is the reason that I reread Ten X is easier than two X because I wanted to ensure I was thinking about the future of this business appropriately.
And it actually touches on a handful of things that we've discussed thus far, including the value creation kit, which you just mentioned. So I'm going to look that up because I'm unfamiliar, but teaching financial education to my kids is paramount. And as I said earlier, I think a lot of the people feeling disenfranchised and cheated and all this is because we're all playing the same game, right? But only a few people actually know the rules, and that's the game of money. Like, love it or not, we're all playing that game.
Do what you love, but you got to pay rent, you know what I mean?
Money does not buy you happiness, but it does buy you options, and it can solve problems, and it is important. And building wealth can allow you to be the rock that somebody else needs to lean on. And you don't have to be that rock but you got the option to be one if you have wealth, if you don't, you're dependent.
It's not evil to want to get rich. It's actually, I think, a very noble endeavor anyways. So financial education is paramount. I think that when it comes to people educating themselves about finances, they may watch channels like yours or channels like mine, but in my experience, individuals are very hesitant to ask what they deem to be dumb questions. They don't want to look like the rookie and ask something silly. And because there is a lot of ego and intimidation in the world of finance, no one wants to look like the idiot, right? And so they won't raise their hand and say, I actually don't even know what liquidity is. Everyone's talking about an inverted yield curve. I have no idea what that is, right. People won't ask those questions. And so we're now building sort of a university. It's not an actual sanctioned university, but it is a series of online courses that I'm super fired up about. And the first one we just launched a month ago, it's called the commodity university. And this is a ten chapter lecture series led by myself. But I'm joined by a whole bunch of friends on various chapters where they lean in. So for example, I've got a chapter on risk management for commodity investors. And Rick rule from spot asset management leans in on how he's managed risk over his 45 year career being a commodity investor. But it starts with the absolute most basic fundamental principles. The first chapter literally asks, what is a commodity? Let's start there. And ten chapters later we're into portfolio construction. But everything in the middle is like which economic indicators actually move the price.
What are supply and demand dynamics, and why do those matter? We do deep dives into sort of five metals that are front and center for most commodity investors, like gold, silver, copper, uranium, energy metals. Everybody's talking about renewable energy. But what are the ingredients required in that infrastructure? And what does that mean? Do we even have those ingredients? Turns out we don't. We need to get them somehow. And there's a whole bunch in there.
[00:45:41] Speaker A: Imagine that you have to destroy some of the earth to get those things out so you can protect the earth. Isn't that weird?
[00:45:46] Speaker B: Isn't that weird? Yeah, I love to talk about that, this university project. So thecommodityuniversity.com, if anybody wants to check it out, but it's the first of eight know. Next up is the geopolitic university discussing the rotation of power around the world where it lies today, speculating on where it might go next. We've got the currency university, the energy university, the behavioral economics university, because and then we've got the Titan University, which I'm super fired up about. This is like studying about twelve different very interesting personalities, from Marcus Aurelius to Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, jpMorgan. Like a whole bunch of just people, I think we can learn from, who have changed the world with their intentions and their ten x visions, to be honest. And it's very personal because that's how I interpret the world.
This is all a consequence of human nature and raw materials, like the people that exist and what they do with the stuff they have. Real simple, this is how you build economies, you build civilizations, you build technology, you become competitive, like all this stuff. But to make it really sports specific, to use that analogy, at its core it's human behavior and it's raw materials and those two things playing off each other. What you have, what you don't have, what you need, who's got what. All of this stuff kind of dictates a lot of how the world functions. And so that's how we built this curriculum and starting with that. So there's a lot in human nature, a lot in behavioral economics, a lot of storytelling about people who have been there, done that, and what we can learn from their stories, and then who has what, right, the raw materials, components. So that's what we led with the commodity university. But bleeding know, what you build on top of people and stuff. People and raw material, what gets built on top of, you know, currencies, energy production, all this that, that I think that, Richard, that is what I am hyper focused on building into an incredibly disruptive platform that provides people the education we're not getting, definitely from the public school system, and I think is just lacking in general, because we're all kind of rushing to catch up and try to understand the world of macro and the world of finance and the world of investing. But there's 100 different directions you could go, and they're all kind of right, depending on who you are and what you're looking for.
So the most intelligent step that I could think of is like, let's get down to absolute first principles. Assume, you know, nothing, right? And let's just start there and start educating from that standpoint with a focus on all, it's all tied in. So very important. But that's it, man, I'm fired up on that business right now.
[00:48:28] Speaker A: Well, I'm excited to hear that. One thing that it reminds me of and Vern will understand where I'm coming from, though, this is, again, something that Nelson Nash would say is, well, if you know what's going on, you'll know what to do.
And the simplicity and the premise of working from a foundation. You can't build a skyscraper unless you have a solid foundation. So if you don't work on the foundation first, what's the point of starting to add walls and floors and furniture and all the other things and glass if you don't have anything for it to stand on? And so the educational base and those foundational principles, again, a little bit around what are the different types of things. Understanding basic terminology, going through real world experience of other people is a way to have a look back. So it's, again, going back to Dan Sullivan. You get to choose what you bring into your future that you're designing, and you get to pick and choose what parts of the past you want to bring. But it's not just your past. You have the capacity to learn through the past of other people. I think about that a lot. When I think about Nelson Nash or a person like Dan Sullivan, they've got years of time ahead of us. And I know, thinking back, I think I had the lucky opportunity to be blessed with having older parents. And because of that, I always found myself around older groups of people. And I was fascinating being in those environments because they had the better stories. They had a lot more stories, and their stories seemed to have more interesting context to them. They talked about their failures or things that didn't go well, and they had a lot of other good, very interesting, all of them with vehicles ending up in the ditch for some reason. But regardless, it was an interesting capacity to learn vicariously through those experiences. And so I've always been interested, anytime I go to a room, I look for who the oldest people in the room are because I want to go talk to them. I want to go to them first. What is it that they know versus what someone else knows? And often those individuals, I even find they don't even recognize the relevance of the stories that they have to someone that's younger than them. So you have to extract them out by asking good questions. But you, through these interviews that you're doing, as well as the other education components, you're taking these experiences of other individuals, and you're providing a look back that allows for a look forward for the individuals that are going to go through this training academy, this university. I think that's phenomenal.
[00:50:48] Speaker C: You said something that I thought was super critical and something that I probably learned from Jason or Richard because I'm the some parts of all the guys that came before me and the great mentors that I have. But I think it's really critical. I love what you said. I might be dicing this up a little bit. I don't know exactly how you phrased it, but basically people are afraid to ask what is perceived as a dumb question. And I say to people that I meet one on one all the time, look, you can't ask a dumb question. The only dumb question is the one you didn't ask. So with those university programs that you're putting together, even for a person like myself, I'm no geopolitical expert. I'm not an expert in commodities and those kinds of things. And I'm really interested to learn more about what you share in those universities. I like that you break the programs down right from, hey, here's the absolute basic. Like what is a commodity all the way through to bringing it, to putting together a portfolio? Because somebody might be super intimidated to get involved in that. And they're like, well, I'm never going to change my future because I have no idea even where to start. And you start it down to the basic roots and you don't make somebody feel unwelcome or silly for not knowing about any of this stuff. They can actually get involved and learn. I think that's pretty inspiring.
[00:51:54] Speaker B: Well, it's such a roadblock, isn't it?
We deal with this in our personal lives and we're facing a challenge that overwhelms us, like some monumental crisis in front of us. If it's a business problem or a family problem. And when looked at as a whole, it's hard to find the attack vector. Like where do I even start on this thing? Because it's so overwhelming and it's monstrosity. But when you're able to step back and compartmentalize and maybe break the problem up into tiny little micro problems, then you can find out how to approach this. And here's where I should start. And this looks like you see the opportunity, you can get started, right? And this was like maybe the biggest learning for me as an entrepreneur was maybe I was facing a cash flow crisis or a marketing crisis or an HR.
[00:52:41] Speaker A: That never happens in business, right?
[00:52:44] Speaker B: And it's like you look at it and it's just like you're kind of paralyzed. Paralysis by analysis, they say, because you're just looking at the whole thing, the whole pie, and it's like I don't know how to solve this problem. But if you're able to say, okay, well, what does this problem consist of? What is it built of? What are the ingredients in the problem? Who's involved with it? Right. What's the best case outcome? What's a minor case outcome? And what's the thing I could do today to get started? And then you build a path, and you create a strategy, and it's like, oh, it's all approachable. It's all fixable, actually. Right. But, yeah. So I think financial education is like that for a lot of people, and we have a value. At my company, it just says, be first. And that's what it speaks to. It's like, raise your hand first, ask the dumb question, go first. And what you'll find is that you're not alone. People will be really grateful that you were the brave one. Fortune favors the bold. And you raised your hand and asked the question that ten other people were wondering about, but nobody wanted to stick their neck out and risk embarrassments. Right. We kind of driven by that. Back to the human nature thing. We're driven by this desire to look good and not look bad. To a large degree. It dictates a lot of our behavior.
Again, that's why we focus a lot on human nature and human behavior in this course, because how people are. How people are with each other and the psychology of decision making and how we navigate our biases and our heuristics and our blind spots.
It's how the world organizes around us, because that's how we navigate through it. And the principles that we learn in those chapters, like biases and blind spots and heuristics, they apply to everybody. And we talked a lot about government policy and central bank policy and all this stuff, and we tend to impersonalize that stuff, like, oh, it's some faceless governing body. No, it's just a bunch of people. And there's one or two that are making the decisions, and they're just like you or I. They're governed by fear and greed as well. And we maybe make the assumption, you guys probably don't, but a lot of people make the assumption that our governments and our politicians are looking out for our best interest, our collective interest. Right? And I would love that to be the case.
What am I looking out for? Right. I'm looking for a good deal. I'm looking to take care of my kids. I'm looking to better my situation, looking to elevate my tribe, right. My collection of people that I take care of. Right. That's what I'm concerned with. And that's not to say at the cost of everybody else, but I think everybody functions that way to a degree. I don't believe that we are electing leaders who are there for the common good of everybody. They're there to further their career path, to get a good deal, to take care of their tribe, like the same things. Right? And so that is what drives. And if those leaders are reliant on two year election cycles, then expect them to behave accordingly. Don't be surprised by empty promises of 2035 that they'll never have to keep. Of course. Why would you expect anything different, right. And I think that provides a bit of realism.
[00:55:44] Speaker A: Right.
[00:55:45] Speaker B: It's like, okay, now we know what the game is, right? We know who we can trust and who's saying what for what reasons.
It comes back to something you shared there, Richard, about the importance of sovereignty. That's like detaching yourself from the decisions of other humans because you can't control them. And they're probably not acting in your best interest, but you can act in your best interest, and it's in your best interest to do so. But personal sovereignty, from my perspective, is just like. It's recognizing that nobody's got my back, and then it's recognizing that that's a really good thing because it puts me in the driver's seat. I'm the only one accountable for my future. And so step one is, I can never point the finger. I'm here because I put myself here. I could have put myself anywhere, but I put myself here. So who would I complain to, right? And you may not always agree with that. Sometimes you might have been wronged or maybe somebody broke your trust, but as soon as you blame somebody else, you put them in the driver's seat, you give them control of the situation and of your future, and you take your hands off the wheel and never want to do that, right? And so personal sovereignty, for me is like, how can I emancipate myself from the poor decisions of other people or just the decisions of other people? How can I eliminate as much counterparty risk in my life as humanly possible? And you can do that with your bank account, with your portfolio, with your personal life, personal growth, your family, the education of your kids.
And we're seeing that, I think, become a bit of a trend, aren't we? I think people are waking up to the importance of independence and personal sovereignty. And we talked a lot about education, but I have so many friends now that are pulling their kids out of the school system and taking control of that, and either doing some version of homeschooling or unschooling or remote schooling or ala carte schooling and kind of piecing together what they think it's important for their kids to be learning. And frankly, my wife and I, we've gone down that path. We were in a school called nature learners a couple of years ago, seeking an alternative path for our kids education. It ended up being a bit of a mess. It was like this awesome, on the surface, kind of hippie school. The whole thing was outside, and the kids would learn about the world through cycles of the environment. And so on day one, they'd literally walk into the forest. They'd find sounds so ridiculous, but they'd find a tree friend. That was day one. And then over the course of the year, they'd visit their tree friend and they'd watch how things change, right? Like the tree friend has leaves and moss on the bark, and then it gets cold and the leaves fall off, but then the leaves come back and you learn that, like, oh, most of the world is cyclical, right? Things get really dark and scary, and then they get better again. They get dark and scary and better again. And the salmon were in the river and now they're gone. Did they die? No, they came back again. And it's like, that's what they learned about. And for a handful of reasons, it wasn't sustainable, but it was awesome. It provided like a cool foundation. I think that if you understand cyclicality, it can help you in those dark moments, right? Whether you're fighting through a business challenge or a marriage problem or whatever it is you're fighting, it's like, man, we get in those moments and it's so hard to remember that it's not going to last, right.
And things get better. Right. But good things usually come in response to really bad things.
Anyhow, I'm on a tangent here.
[00:59:00] Speaker A: One of the nice things about that foundation of understanding that cyclical nature for you and your kids is that you'll always be able to bring them back to that. Something in the future is going to come up. And you've now isolated a couple of key lessons that happened early on, that you can bring them back to an explanation of something else that's happening in their general environment or even the larger community or the global scale. And you can say, hey, do you remember how that tree that you had, that was your friend that did blank, blank and blank? And it's like, take a look at what's happening over here. So I'm always just looking for where's that inspiration point of something that's already happened that's proven to be either successful or momentous or impactful in some way? And can I allocate future learning opportunities back to that event? And I've done that with my kids around us discussing a family banking system and how we implement financial energy differently in our life for our family. And Vern has an amazing presentation about the family banking system. Awesome video that came out today supporting a wonderful charity and that whole capacity for them to understand. Look, hey, we're going to Hawaii next week. It's going to be awesome. I'm excited. It wasn't originally on the books. It kind of happened a little bit short term and never been. So I'm really pumped about that. And so that's going to be a wonderful family memory and vacation. And we're going with some friends. Well, we're going to have some moments and opportunities that come up there that I'm going to hold on to as fuel for future conversation, integration with my kids, probably around the family banking system. I don't know what it's going to be yet, but I guarantee you something's going to happen and I'm going to be able to utilize that as fuel for discussion. And so we understand that when we go to do a large family thing like this, that there's value exchange. To make that happen, we have to return what we utilize from our family economy, our family system, back into the warehouse so that we can utilize that again for a future endeavor the next time we want to go to a Hawaii or a family trip. So beating those lessons home early at an early age, they don't understand the details of the system, but they don't need to. They understand fundamentally, when we utilize capital, we have to set up an intentional plan to put it back. And when we do it the way that we do it, we get to use it again later for future endeavors. And the simplicity of that lesson is really becoming a core pillar for how I can bring them back now to even the smallest little endeavors versus the bigger ones and having deeper conversations about value. What does value look like? I'll give you a quick example. We got artificial turf installed recently. It's amazing. I can't even believe it. It's changed our whole life. It's fantastic. Making life much better for a lot of reasons, but I had my reasons. I wanted to hear the kids reasons, so I got them to share with me some of the things that they were frustrated with or disappointed with or what was going on with them around the burnt, destroyed lawn by two dogs and how difficult it was to play soccer and play with their friends and all these things that were in their world in their mind's eye. And I said, well, if we continued letting it go like that, would it ever get better? What would happen? How would that show up next year, next summer when you wanted to play in the summer after that? So I got them really thinking about what the future implications were say, so if we replace it here now, it's going to cost us money. And I said, okay, we could do it ourselves. We could get three wheelbarrowers. I can get little wheelbarrows for you guys.
We can haul dirt out, we can haul the new stuff in. We can figure out how to watch some YouTube videos and learn how to roll out turf and do all these things. It might cost us less from the family banking system, but it would cost us a lot of time. And if we had all that time, how many meetings would daddy be able to have on the know? So I got them to connect with some of those opportunities to recognize, oh, yeah, it makes a lot more sense for us to pay someone who knows how to do that, to bring it in and for them to do the work. And in two days it's done and then boom. How much value did that create for them? So the conversation opportunity to buy artificial turf, I would have never imagined before it happened, would create such a goldmine of learning lessons. But I can integrate them all back to the foundation. Arnel Sinesh taught us that we implemented in our life around the longevity of thinking three generations into the future. And so you never know when an opportunity to have a good conversation of any kind, but certainly one with your children, is going to show, you know, immensely grateful for that. And here you go telling us a little about the cycles and the trees. And I just see such wonderful opportunity for you and your own kids to reemphasize some of those lessons with future endeavors that come up.
[01:03:37] Speaker B: I hope so. Yeah. And I love that, by the way. That's so great to teach them the exchange of money and time. And I don't know if you find this to be a challenge when I'm taking off in the morning or whatever and I've got a kid hanging onto my knee and it's a tough one, isn't it? It's like depart the time that you're spending with the five year old to go to the business, but then to explain to them why this is important, why that is more important than being here right now. And I don't have the secret sauce there, but one way I've begun explaining this with my kids is like, we all grow up and play a game. Well, we all play games all the time. But Daddy plays a game. He plays a very specific game and everybody plays a game. The waitress at the restaurant is playing a game, right?
And Daddy's game is he makes videos and he makes videos and he writes for a living. And that's the game I play. And so I acquired a certain set of skills that allow me to play a certain game. And depending on what game you play, you'll be rewarded accordingly. Right. And generally speaking, the more skills required to play the game, the more rewards you get for that game, right? And your game could be anything. My five year old is like a Lego maniac and he wants to be a construction worker when he grows up, right?
[01:04:54] Speaker A: Of course.
[01:04:54] Speaker B: My wife's like, no, an architect.
[01:05:00] Speaker C: This is all Lego, man anyway.
[01:05:03] Speaker B: It is.
[01:05:03] Speaker A: All right.
[01:05:04] Speaker C: Yeah, this is all Lego.
[01:05:06] Speaker B: We are going hard on the Lego right now. It's so fun. But it's just, we kind of explain it that way. Like you're acquiring skills that allow you to play a certain game, man. You get to take that game out one day and you get rewarded for that game, but it's all about the skills you acquire. You can also choose not to acquire skills and you can play a super low level game and you'll get a really low reward for it. That's a choice you can also make, right? But there's consequences to that too. And starting to frame that thinking a little bit, I don't know if there's a right way to do it, but they're fun conversations to have for sure.
[01:05:36] Speaker A: I think that's a great analogy. And as you were talking about the kid hanging off of you as you're going to go play the game, I just pictured that happening for Vern and being very difficult because Vern's son is much bigger than Vern now and I can't imagine what that would look like.
[01:05:49] Speaker C: No kidding. He keeps me on my toes for.
[01:05:52] Speaker A: Well, well, Jay, I really appreciate you sharing your knowledge and your wisdom with us here today. This is a lot of fun. Our final question, really, before we end the program here, I'd love to know. Again, circling back to the Vancouver investment resource conference, putting 6000 people into a room year after year, getting people through education, building an epic university training method for people to learn basic financial concepts and historical value. These are not small tasks. You may not recognize that you're showing up as a hero for people who are going to come through that university program, attend your investment conference, but to some degree you probably are. And my curiosity really is for you. Who do you most want to be a hero to?
[01:06:34] Speaker B: My kids, man. No question. No question. My seven year old, my five year old and my three year old.
It's funny, but it's paramount for me. I never really thought legacy would matter to me. And I don't know what legacy means yet. I think I haven't figured that one out. Maybe I'll figure it out in a decade or so. But in the meantime, it's like, what do I want to leave behind for them? I want to leave behind an example that you can build whatever you want, right? It really is up to you. And you can build something very impactful if you want to. And you can change the lives of people if you want to, right?
It's not lost to me. I'm driven to build personal wealth for my family. That's very important to me. I'm a provider in my community and my immediate community is my kids, my wife, my parents and close friends and family. And I am a provider to that community. And I know what that means, right? It means I got to go out and collect and I have to build things of value.
And it's fun. I like identifying that way. This is what I do. This is who I am.
As soon as you asked that question right away, it was like one, two, three. My three little boys. Absolutely love it.
[01:07:54] Speaker A: Awesome. Well, thanks again for being with us here, Jay. Amazing. All the best to the incredible conference you have coming up in January and the launch of the brand new university. So amazing stuff and we look forward to hopefully having you back on the program again in the future. I know. I would love to come and attend the event in Vancouver. That'd be fantastic. Except Vernon and I are actually going to be in Costa Rica that week at a real estate conference. So unfortunately we won't be able to be there. But hopefully I can catch the next one for all of our listeners tuning in again. Thanks for watching the program. If you're on YouTube, go ahead. Boom, right there. Check that out. New video. It's going to be great. Check it out. It's good stuff. Thanks for listening to the wealth without Base street podcast where your wealth matters. Be sure to check out our social media channels. For more great content. Hit subscribe on your favorite podcast player and be sure to rate the show we definitely appreciate it. And don't forget to share this episode with someone you care about. Join us on the next episode where we continue to uncover the financial tools, strategies, and the mindset that maximize your wealth.
