Walter O'Brien & Kent Clothier on ChatGPT, Investing & Real Estate | E5
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The top 1% of the wealthiest people in America, we all think they're billionaires and trillionaires. They actually make 500K a year, 425,000 K a year, top 1%. And after taxes, then that's like 200, 250 K.

So that means if you lay out the life you want, you want to live in this house, I want a vacation once a year, two cars, a few kids, go to college, each kid is a million bucks. So $250k for high school, $250k for college, that's $500k after tax. So about a million you have to earn per kid. So if you look at all that, you need to make over $250k to get that kind of life that you want to have.

Well, if only 1% of people do that, that means 99% of the people around you 99% of the time are wrong about everything. Wow. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Money Mondays. This is a very, very special episode because I have a very, very dear friend here. He is one of the only humans on the planet that I actually reach out to when I have questions for advice about almost anything. If I want to learn about...

aliens, math, situations, what should I do with my life or business? I call Walter O'Brien. He has a TV show for years called Scorpion. The main character in the show was called, you guessed it, Walter O'Brien. He executive produced with Scooter Braun. He's done some amazing things in his life. He hacked NASA when he was a kid. I don't want to disservice the story that he's going to tell to give you the background on him, but please, ladies and gentlemen, give a warm round of applause to Mr. Walter O'Brien.

Thanks, Dan. So, Walter, on the Money Mondays, we talk about three topics. How do people make money? How do they invest money? How do they give it away to charity? However, I'm going to have some special questions for you because it's you. So, if you can, start off with a couple-minute bio, give people the background, and then we're going to dive right into questions. Sure. Congrats on the new show. Thank you. Background, farmer's son from Ireland. Didn't fit in at home or at school. Didn't know why. Yeah.

Teachers complained I asked too many questions. Started learning the code when I was nine, self-taught. By 13, hacked into NASA, stole the spray shuttle blueprints, got busted by the NSA via Interpol, did a deal with them, started working with the government. Since then, had my IQ tested. It was 197, which would be the fifth highest in the world. Einstein was 160 for reference.

So I opened the company by hiring other geniuses from the Gifted Children's Society and other groups and then thought that would be a good idea to have a company full of geniuses. Quickly learned that was a mistake. The higher the IQ, the lower the EQ, the emotional intelligence, common sense, people skills. So we went out and hired single moms, elementary school teachers and psychologists who scored higher on EQ tests and taught them how to babysit the geniuses and customers. And we called them super nannies.

and that balanced out our think tank. And from that day to this, we've been for the first 20 years solving technical problems. My degrees are artificial intelligence and computer science. And then in the last decade and a half, we've solved any problems because we found that taking a disciplined engineering scientific research approach to everything from people's divorces to disgruntled employees, legal cases, materials research, whatever people needed,

By taking that structured approach to planning and figuring it out, we came up with kind of an overall master model for solving any problems. Removing assumptions from it, taking emotions out of the equation, and then having backup plans, removing single points of failure, and we can end up securing businesses and lives in much more secure ways than they used to be.

What's the website name for that? ConciergeUp.com. Got it. Okay. So before we get into the money and questions like I normally do on this show, I got to ask you, there's something you mentioned to me a year ago that's been burned into my brain about automated vehicles. If Elon Musk or some other business owners or big car dealers, like if they actually make automated vehicles at scale, what happens to our economy? What happens to like

car washes and parking lots and insurance and windshield repair and all the things that go on with cars. You said it to me and now it's just like, it's mind blowing. So if you could explain what happens if driverless cars becomes a big thing. Right. Well, there's a bit of a ripple effect. So our cars are parked or unused 97% of the time, which is why companies like Uber can thrive on the inefficiencies of both the taxi market and the fact that we don't use our cars most of the time.

So it's very inefficient for taking up space, environment, plus parking. So then, since we have self-driving cars now, I mean, Tesla can drive from Santa Monica to New York. It just has to get more certified and approved to be allowed to do that, which is an interesting process because people will complain about the one Tesla that crashed. Right. Or the two Teslas that crashed and completely ignore the humans that crash 4,400 per day. So it doesn't have to be perfect. It just has to be better than human, which I believe it is now.

Um, so imagine then if Uber owns all their own cars and they're partnered with Volvo, which is owned by the Chinese to do exactly that. And those cars all drive themselves around. Well, Uber has your credit card. It knows your address. It knows if two people are meeting for lunch because who's friends, because they Ubered both of you to the same place at the same time regularly. Um, so they have all your data, which means that they will become free because if they don't have to pay a driver and the cars are electric, um,

then they might as well just put a big screen with Netflix in the back and just advertise the hell out of their captive audience. So then, if that happened, and you can get everywhere for free, why would you own a car? Wow. If you're a student, why would you put 20 grand out for a car? So if the cars go away and they're all self-driving by Uber, then Uber will charge them up, maintain them, take care of them like the Metro buses.

So then you don't need car washes, gas stations, windshield repair, tire centers, brake centers, pep boys. Oh my gosh. And you also don't need valets or parking lots because you never park an Uber. They'll just keep circling, especially if you're self-driving. That affects commercial real estate because half of that of any major city is zoned for parking. Right. So that parking land then, after it crashes the commercial real estate rarity, can then be used for cheap prefab housing and apartments. Right.

Because when people are doing Zoom calls and playing virtual tennis and plugged into Oculus Rift, then they don't need a large mansion or house. And I'll go into these stats later, but less people are getting married, less people are having kids, less people are interested in showing off to their neighbors, less people are interested in that classic American dream. They prefer to be nomads, own nothing, and move around easily. So because of that, then, that crashes residential real estate. Wow. Wow.

And residential real estate has lots of spaces for driveways and garages, which wouldn't be needed if you don't own a car. This is going to be my favorite episode. I can already feel it. So, Walter, oh, my gosh. There was another story before we go into money. There's another story that you told me about where you helped a very wealthy client figure out a situation about their son. Can you explain the story? Sure. So, you know, like most interesting companies, ours evolved fast.

kind of by accident to where we're at where we went from solving technical problems to our hacking systems to hacking lives and we ended up a few wealthy clients who would ask us to help them out and one of them where we had helped him previously was a billionaire in Europe whose son fell in love with a Ukrainian gold digger and he asked us to break him up before the wedding but not let him know we interfered because his relationship with his son was tenuous already so

Thankfully, we've worked with the three-letter agencies with the government for years. We've learned a few tricks, including PSYOPs, psychological operations, which other people tend to describe as the Truman Show, where you put someone effectively in a movie without cameras for six months who don't know they're in a movie. So we start by our deep web and dark web research and background checks and

classic private investigation and we found out that the son loves to party. We found out where he's living, where he loves to party on sunset, where he likes doing his bottle service, etc. Where he likes to drive. So we found another billionaire son who's a client of ours

who was an actor and was willing to play this double agent part. So he rented a mansion for him down the street. He drove the same Aston Martin. He had similar suits. He had the same bottle service booth next to the other guy. Quickly, they became best friends. Then the girlfriend of his, she likes to work out every morning, go to a particular Starbucks afterwards.

So we put another Ukrainian girl in designer jeans, two places in front of her in the line, Starbucks, speaking loudly on her phone in her native language. And they didn't talk. And the next day we put her two spaces behind her in line and they didn't talk. And then we got a heads up that there'll be rain on Friday, which is rare in LA. So we hired actors and extras to fill the Starbucks, every location except for one seat next to our girl. So she died.

The girlfriend came along and sat there. She had nowhere else to sit. And our girl struck up a conversation with the old country, talked about how naive Americans are and how easy it is to make money over here. And eventually the other girl opened up and said, yeah, she has a billionaire son on the hook. They're going to get married. She's going to get her green card processed. Then she'll...

Divorce him as soon as possible, ask for an exorbitant amount of money, threaten the family and use the money to bring a real boyfriend over from the Ukraine. So now our girl was wearing a wire, but that's inadmissible in court. We also didn't need to show it to the father. He already knew we couldn't show it to the son. He would know we interfered. So that recording was just for me because I need to know that they weren't being, they weren't, it wasn't a genuine relationship and that we were doing the greater good. As soon as I knew that,

Then we went ahead and, as I said in the office, she's now fallen on the wrong side of my fairness algorithm. So we can sit down and do planning meetings on where do we go from here. So we made out a plan and it involved a teenage psychologist writing a speech of exactly the wrong things for the father to say to the son. We then had an acting coach teach the father how to escalate the argument and deliver it believably.

We sent him a text signal on Thursday night. He escalated the argument. The son got pissed off, grabbed his luggage and left there and went down the street to his new friend's mansion where he told him all about it. And his friend was packing at the time for a trip and said, look, this is terrible. You should find some way to get back at your dad. I have to go to Dominican Republic tomorrow on the jet. My friend is getting married, but you're welcome to stay here. And it took a few minutes, but eventually it dawned on the son that

that the plan was to grab his girlfriend, elope with them on the jet, get married after the other wedding happens and without a prenup and just to get back at his dad. So that's what they did. And they went to Dominican Republic. They had the first wedding, small group of 50 people. And it was very nice. And then some of the people stayed and our guy went up, our target went up and he got married.

And then we saw while they're on the honeymoon, she's applying for I-94 and her visa status and everything else literally that night, sending off the info. And we tracked them over the next six months or so. And as soon as she got her initial approvals on visa and being able to stay, she then went to the son and threatened him with all of this stuff the son had told about the family and the father would be highly embarrassing and threatened to go to the press with that.

Unless she got a divorce plus an exorbitant settlement amount. So the son was freaked out and panicked and knew his dad was going to kill him. So through his friend recommended this law firm that might be able to handle the divorce quietly, which turned out to be our entity. And so the girlfriend shows up a little bit later for her divorce papers and

And I go into the room and give it to her. And she's looking at the contract. She said, this is an acting contract. And I said, I know. Do you recognize the signature? She goes to the back page and turns white because the signature was the priest from the Dominican Republic. So the first wedding was fake. The people were fake. The attendees were fake. The priest was fake.

Which means the wedding certificate was fake. Which leads me to the second envelope I gave her, which was her being banned from the U.S. for 10 years for immigration fraud for filing a fake marriage certificate. We had the Uber waiting for her outside. It was not self-driving. Otherwise, it could have a bug in the software. But...

the uh with her bags packed to take her to the airport uh we had a handwriting expert replicate her handwriting for a dear john letter back to the son to say he doesn't want any she doesn't want anything from him and she left and never contact her again which he was very happy to not do and he's rebonding with the father who never interfered and we don't exist in that story wow so fun

So you mentioned two words. You said the greater good. And I noticed when I watched Scorpion, I watched all four seasons. And in that show, oftentimes it was always about the greater good. What does that come from? What does that mean? What is the greater good? Well, I'm a logical creature. So like most people, I mean, I grew up without money. So I spent the first half of my life scrambling to go, okay, how do I pay the rent? And then at one point I get to a point where I'm like, okay, I don't need to worry about that anymore. And then I'm like, well, what's life about now?

And I had to define what success meant for me. And being a logical person, I realized that the optimal, because I'm all about being optimal, solution for me would be if I can keep my average happiness above a 7 out of 10 while doing the most good for society with the skills that I have, while not hurting anyone or lying to anyone, then that's probably the best mixture of a good life.

So the greater good then just became, okay, well, how do you do the most good possible? A lot of charities, if you donate to them, 60% of the money disappears on admin fees. If you try and do it directly, it's hard to know which one and how to scale. Then I started going down that rabbit hole. I realized that, well, if I help the people who can help the most people, so if I pick smart kids, for example, who have high IQ but don't know they're missing EQ,

or the parents literally can't afford to give them a laptop or internet, or they're brilliant, but they can't afford to go to college. Those are the people I should help. And those people could turn around and be the next Elon Musk or cure cancer or something else. So that's where I started investing in IQ.

And as same as I'd done in my own company, I treat it like a precious commodity while everyone's fighting over gold and silver. I realized that while we're ridiculing and making fun of geeks, if I can grab high IQ enthusiasts and bring them all together in one company, sooner or later as stuff gets serious with the economy and otherwise people will need that. And yeah, so then doing the greater good is always a careful calculation from there. And it's never as obvious as you think. I used to think saving lives was doing the greater good.

but not necessarily if it's causing overpopulation. Interesting. So I remember your technology actually helped with the Boston bomber case. That's part of your saving lives and you've done that a lot of situations you can't even talk about, but that one where you were actually able to explain what was the technology like? How did the Boston bomber situation work? So yeah, if you're asking about metrics on doing good earlier, that was what you're prompting is 44 kids brought home from sex trafficking, over 4,000 put through college and

29 terrorist attacks avoided and about half a million lives saved and so on. I got the Humanitarian Lifetime Achievement Award, which is a nice recognition that I'd done more good to save more people in half the age. I got it by 40. In terms of Boston bombing, so the first step in facial recognition technology is finding people's heads. So I use just that piece and

to look at the 4 000 hours of footage we had from the bombing eliminate all the footage where nothing interesting was going on because there's all different formats time stamps and then um by putting a red dot on everyone's head and doing motion flow analysis which tracks that red dot from frame to frame if you're in a typical situation and a bomb goes off everyone goes down at the same time everyone comes up slowly at the same time and everyone then exits whatever way they came in and so all the red dots would be kind of in a v shape out the same door

So if someone didn't go down, didn't act surprised, started wandering slowly at a different speed in a different direction, then that's non-herd behavior. And that's how they identify the Boston Bombers. Wow. That's really good. Okay. We can finally talk about the money. Sorry, I had to get those things out of the way from a personal perspective. And I hope you guys enjoyed some of those stories. All right.

How to make money. How does either Walter O'Brien or Scorpion or Concierge Up, let's talk about some of the ways that, or the business, or executive producing one of the biggest TV shows ever, like how does Walter make money? And how can some of the people out there, what are some things that you think that they could make money doing? Well, if we start at the high level principles, there's three priorities in life that I recommend to people. Priority one is don't go backwards, don't get worse.

So whatever you've got, keep it, protect it, back up your laptop, keep your relationships and so on, and value your friendships. Because there's no point in earning more stuff if you can lose everything you already have. So dotting your I's, crossing your T's, having insurance, et cetera. Step one, don't get worse. Your health, et cetera. Step two then is proactively seek and motivate validated sources of wisdom. I choose my words carefully. So proactive means you've got to get off your ass to do it.

Go out and look for who knows more than you in the areas you're interested in learning in. And you validated that they know what they're talking about and they've done better than you in that area. Because they say never take advice from anyone you wouldn't swap lives with. And then motivate them to help you. You know, you're one of the busiest guys I know, Dan. I'm pretty busy and other folks are busy. Everyone's wanting stuff from us. No one's offering stuff to us.

So if someone gets off their butt and goes, okay, I've studied what you do. I know what you do for your business. I thought this connect might be useful. And someone makes a few offers, they stand out from everybody else. And then you have reciprocation guilt where you're like, wow, I owe that guy something. I got to think of something for that person. And then you start a quality relationship. Step three, then make money from at least three different sources of income in unrelated industries.

with as much, as little effort as possible for the, so you're preserving your time and your flexibility. And that way, when something like COVID hits, you're impacted for about 30% of your income, not 100% of your income. So if you start at that high level principle,

You know, I could tell people how I make money. You know, I invented 177 different intellectual properties and software. I've done military, Fortune 1000, and high net worth individuals for years. The TV show stuff happened 34 years later, so I call it a 34-year overnight success. That was kind of at the end of it all. I went back and told the story to inspire other kids and teach other kids that being smart is cool. But that may not be your forte or your skill you're particularly good at.

But it's very smart to only use your passion in one of your businesses to make money. The other two businesses fit the mold of what I call dumb businesses. If you own, it used to be, if you own a parking lot or a coin-operated laundrette or something like that, where you don't have to run it, any person or a high school kid can run it, or ideally nobody runs it, a bunch of vending machines, something like that. Nothing where you have to personally be involved. You'll do almost better in those businesses because you're not emotional about your decisions in them.

And then one can be your passion business that you might get lucky and make money. You might not. So one or two dumb businesses, one regular business. And then being extremely careful upfront about who you decide to get into bed with business wise and try to avoid partnerships at all, at all costs. As I said to my, an investor trying to buy out my company at one point, he said, if I believed in partnerships, I'd be married by now.

And he was on his fourth divorce and smiled and thought I had a good point. So, you know, partnerships are tough just because it's extremely rare. Like a marriage, it's extremely rare when it works out and both people are actually pulling their weight and both people actually feel like they contributed 50-50.

You know, 75% of people believe they're above average in most things and looks and their thoughts and so on. And by definition, that can't be the case. So you put two of them together, they both think they did 75% of the work. So that's not a good recipe. So those are some of the basic principles. I mean, other things on investing. Keep in mind the government, you have savings, but the government has debt. So it's in their interest to keep inflation going.

Try to avoid delusion. I ask people, what's reality? When is something real to them? And a lot of adults are pretty shocked that they can't define it. They never thought about anything I can touch. And I'm like, do the pyramids exist? Like, you've never been to Egypt. Well, yeah, it does, because everybody says so. So, does Santa Claus exist? Well, no, we know that's fake, so...

Um, so I go with the scientific definition again, cognitive bias, cause I'm a scientist, but anything I can do 32 times in a row on demand under observation, I knock a glass of water off the table 32 times. It always smashes on the floor. Anytime you ask me to anywhere you ask me to with anyone watching and I say that's gravity, then that's a pretty consistent demonstration, which means it'll, the odds of it not working 33 times is very low. So it's beyond reasonable doubt.

So anything that meets that is real to me, is concrete. I can now depend on that as part of the Lego bricks of my life. Anything that doesn't meet that, whether it's you and Casey asking for aliens or anything else, I'm not saying it doesn't exist. I'm saying it's unreliable. And I don't want to build my life on unreliable stuff that may or may not work if I pray hard enough or lucky rabbit's foot. So...

I try to build my life on reliable people and reliable things. And that makes me reliable when other people come to me then for help. So speaking of Casey, at our wedding, you said that you hope that we're a mathematical anomaly. Explain why you think that weddings or marriage is a mathematical anomaly. Sure. That's a good one. And it ties into something else in the investments I should point out. So I had a quick note here on this one. So

Across the US, there's a 50% divorce rate. Marriage now is at its lowest rate in 50 years, six people per thousand. And two and a half of those get divorced every year. 30% of them have no kids at all. And the 50% who are single are single all the way up to 50, 55 years old. They never get married. The marriages last three to five years, depending which state you look at.

And we're going to live to about 100, 110 years old, depending on what age someone is now, on average, because we keep extending life expectancy. In the last 50 years, we added 20 years to how long people can live. The last 10 years, we added, I think, five years to how long we can live. Now, of course, we might reach escape velocity where we don't have to die at all, but that's a later conversation. But when you look at that and you're like, okay, you meet someone now, you might have to be married with them for 80 years.

There's no creature on the planet that's together or monogamous for that long. People always bring up penguins as an example, but they only live 12 years. Interesting. So that's what I meant at your wedding when I said I wish you guys would be a statistical anomaly. And even so far, you have been because you're both wonderful people. But it's very rare that that works out and that both people find their groove and don't become either too claustrophobic with each other or too distant.

So on the Tim Ferriss podcast, I remember it was a riveting story where you talked about like taking someone's head and transferring their brain. And like someone could be in China or Japan and someone's here and you could... Something about a meat carcass and you could just transfer energy across like... Explain. What does that mean? Well... What is a meat carcass? Am I a meat carcass? We all are to some extent. So...

This is something a little bit further on the extreme, because if you reach a certain level of wealth, any goal you pick in life, you can just write a check on Monday and it's done. So, you know, where's the excitement in that? And, you know, I spoke to a therapist on this and he said, well, either learn to plateau and enjoy it or pick a big mountain to climb. So I decided to pick a big mountain to climb. And if I analyze my greater good strategy, which is, you know, use the gifts and skills you have to do the most good for society before you die, I

It would be obvious that the first thing I should do is not die. Then I can do more good. So that starts going down the philosophical rabbit hole of like, what am I? What are any of us? Well, we're not our fingers and our toes and our arms and our legs. We are our memories and our consciousness. Well, what is that? It's electrical signals running on a biological computer with about 100 million neurons and two and a half petabytes of storage or estimate of our memory. So.

We have computers now that have that much storage and we are getting to the level of MRI scans to get to the molecular level where we could replicate a human brain in software as is. Not AI, not code, not rewriting it, just port it over as is. So if I could upload or backup my brain and then we have stem cell cloning, we've had it from sheep to chimpanzees, unofficially we've done animals, or sorry, unofficially humans, um,

Well, let's say we stem cell clone you and then adjust your telomere level, which is usually used to slow down aging. But if we sped it up, we could grow you a 20-year-old twin brother in four years in embryonic state. And if we could download your brain into that person, then effectively you're 20 again. If we do that every time we turn 30, then that's immortality. You're not going to die.

And even if you get hit by a bus tomorrow, we take your backup from last night, your stem cell brother from the closet, and all you lost is breakfast. So now if you take that brain file, let's say you call Hertz Rent-A-Body in New York and you rent the George Clooney special or the Angelina Jolie, depending on the mood you're in, and email your brain file to New York, you can now wake up in New York and use that meat vehicle to get around. Just like now when you fly, you rent a car. You don't bring your car with you.

Your body's the car, you're the driver. Or what I like to say is your body is the iPhone and you're the software. Every couple of years we throw away our phone and buy a new one, sync it up with the cloud and now the phone's back. Same with us. Now, there's head transplants, which are a little messy. They've been done 29 times on animals and some of those successfully. And first human corpse a couple of Christmases ago. And we're getting better and closer at doing that. And the tricky part is just refusing the spine, right?

But it does grow back over three nanometers if it's put in traction. And we have a one nanometer laser. So it's cutting it close, but it's possible. We have 10,000 volunteers waiting to do this who have ALS, MS, HIV, and other incurable diseases, spina bifida, etc. Why cure a disease if you can throw it away with the old body? Now, let's say we're all in a virtual world where we upload and we don't come back to a meat vehicle. So we're kind of in a metaverse, but one that works, that's high res, right?

Well, if we all had our own version of the planet, there's lots of things we could do. If you had traumatic memories, you can delete them and edit them out. If you copy your brain file and delete your memories, is that your son? If I upload you once and download you five times, 10 minutes later, which one's the real you? And if we think about all the wars in history other than the current one, they've all been religion-based. And you're less worried about God if you're not going to meet him.

So fascinating. Okay. So we talked a little bit about making money. Let's talk about investing money. And the way you like to actually talk about it is more like about protecting money, right? More than investing, like to protect money. Explain your thoughts about investing and protecting money. Sure. Well, for our clients, once they come to us with their initial problem and we solve that, we like to protect our clients, the good ones, and say, okay, well, let's do what we call SPOF hunting, which is SPOF is an engineering term for single point of failure.

So what else, what one thing could go down? Like if you took the San Francisco bridge and let's say one of those bolts snapped on one of those cables and it caused a ripple effect of all the other bolts to snap and the whole bridge to fall down. That's a single point of failure. Or if the computer crashed in a Boeing 747 and therefore it couldn't be flown and it couldn't land, that's a single point of failure.

So we eliminate those from someone's life. So whether it's one divorce, they run a big company and they have one tech guy who has all the passwords and all the data and everything else, something happens to that person or that person just gets pissed off, that's their single point of failure. So because we're so used to dealing with that after the fact, we've tried to get up front with it and we can look at your life and identify here's all the places that could bite you in the ass on Monday.

Why don't we go take care of those now, which is much cheaper and make sure you have two of everything. Not necessarily twice the cost. Maybe you need someone four hours a month to make sure he can access everything that your chief technology officer can access, for example. So then protecting assets, we predicted FTX two or three months before it actually happened. Our clients saved us 70 million by transferring their crypto out of there.

We discovered crypto wallets that were not secure. So we got people to transfer out before the hackers discovered they were not secure. We predicted crypto winter in advance and got, you always recommend, and I always use your advice on this, 40-40-20 in terms of how people allocate their funds. But what we do is apply oversight to that and go, you were 40-40-20 three years ago. Let's say your Bitcoin has doubled or halved. Did you look at it again now? Because we've had people who were 40-40-20 and now they're 90% secure.

in their gambling money because it grew so much relative to the rest. So our people spend their whole life building a business. I'm like, have you ever taken cash off the table? Have you taken care of your family, your kids, your house, so that if this one company gets sued or goes bankrupt, you don't lose everything. And we have so many people come to us with that going, I've been too busy to even think about it. So SPOF hunting is one thing. BCDR is another discipline, which is business continuity and disaster recovery. You have backups, but can you restore?

If you can't go to work on Monday because of a chemical spill, is everyone able to function from home? How do you know? When's the last time you tested it? So we do disaster recovery rehearsals every quarter to make sure a whole company can function, even if nobody can go to work. And these are just good disciplines to put in place. And yeah, people ask us then to look at the macro level of what's going on in the world and the economy. What currency is safe? How do you avoid inflation? Should you invest in Europe, New Zealand, Australia, Australia?

When water levels rise 10 feet, where is left in the US to have real estate that's worth anything for retirement homes and stuff like that? We just did that research. So we're looking 10, 20 years ahead. If California is burned to a crisp because of global warming, then where can you live comfortably? And if the FAA shut down the airlines, if you have a seaplane with extra fuel tanks that has the ability to land on a lake and you're within a mile of the lake for your summer home,

then effectively you can avoid the ganglands that the cities will turn into. Get off somewhere where you have a bulletproof vehicle, two months food supply and a seaplane to get in and out. And your family will be relatively much more comfortable than any other family that didn't plan ahead. So what Walter mentioned there, the 40-40-20 principle for listeners that haven't heard about it before. It's where I take 40% and then invest in low risk. These are things that I want to make between 5% and 9% for the year.

40% medium risk. This is what most people like where you're hoping to make between 10 and 30% a year. These are things like real estate, the stock market,

cash flowing businesses and then 20 high risk this is what i call the shot at glory you're hoping for something big to happen 2x 3x 10x 20x something big happens this is cryptocurrency nfts and especially angel investing and you're hoping that the medium risk and the low risk will cover the high risk that 20 you can adjust it you can change the percentages based on the type of investor that you are but ultimately this is what i've done for many many years is low risk medium risk and

and high risk and so for those of you that are listening consider for yourself if you had 10 grand saved up or 100 grand saved up or whatever number that is thinking about taking 40 of that for low risk 40 for medium risk 20 for high risk walter what are your thoughts about the 40 40 20 principle and how people can think about it for their own lives

Well, I've managed funds, as you know, that went from 500 million to 1.9 trillion for seven years. We moved eight and a half billion a day and we would lose a million a minute if the systems went offline, which is why I was involved. That was my finishing school in after college. And I learned a lot about risk and diversification being in that situation. And I

The 40, 40, 20 is as good a rule as any in terms of a good balance. I mean, you can adjust that depending on your circumstances as you get older. So you can take a little more risk when you're younger because you have more time to recover in the market. But as you get closer to retirement, you might be cashing that money out in five years. You don't want it to be in a down cycle where you have to wait 10 years to get it out. Generally, I think what people don't understand is if you look at income in the US statistically, the top 1% of the wealthiest people in America

We all think they're billionaires and trillionaires. They actually make 500k a year, 425 hundred K a year, top 1%. And after taxes, then that's like 200, 250 K. So that means if you lay out the life you want, you want to live in this house, I want a vacation once a year, two cars, few kids go to college. Each kid is a million bucks. So 500, 250 K for high school, 250 K for college, that's 500 K after tax. So about a million you have to earn per kid.

So if you look at all that, you need to make over 250K to get that kind of life that you want to have. Well, if only 1% of people do that, that means 99% of the people around you, 99% of the time are wrong about everything. Wow. Everything on Instagram, everything they post, all the well-wishing, you know, be yourself, don't judge, there's no right or wrong, follow your gut feeling, you know, go with the flow, the universe will take care of you, et cetera, et cetera, is all categorically wrong. Now, if you take emotion out of it and then you look at investments...

factually, where you do proportional due diligence. You know, someone might spend 20 years of their life earning 100k to invest and they'll spend two hours doing due diligence on where they invest it and they wonder why they lost it. For example, I looked into cemeteries, funeral services, air conditioning, rehab companies, rubber manufacturers. Now that's very non-sexy stuff to invest in.

But that's the very reason why, because they don't have any competition. No one else is looking into that stuff. The people who collect our garbage, the waste disposal company collects our garbage, makes 20 billion a year. We're not going to have less garbage anytime soon. Sure. In recovering from a pandemic plus a recession and people being depressed means there's no reason why we should have less funerals. Now, if I base that on zip codes in Jewish communities, then I don't have to worry about cremation, bypassing the cemetery land rights or land values. Then

For example, a good way of looking at things, you look at something like Tesla and you're like, well, there's potentially a good investment or not, depending what the CEO does that day. But there's not enough lithium ion to be mined on the planet right now to give everyone electric cars. That's going to slow things down significantly.

And California will say things like there'll be no combustion-based cars sold in 2035. But again, there's no governance without consequence. If they break that rule or push it out another 10 years, what happens to the original politician? Nothing. He's retired by then. So he can say whatever the hell he wants. So when you can see the world for what it really is, and if you use that as an example, okay, so I don't know if we're going to use electric cars or combustion cars. I don't know if we're going to use cars at all if they're all owned by Uber.

But I do know that cars are going to need tires or wheels. And that means they need rubber. So why, if I look at rubber factories and rubber equipment that produces rubber, there's no reason to believe we'll need less rubber anytime soon. Plus those cars are accelerating zero to 60 in two or three seconds, which means they're scraping rubber off. And those tires are probably softer than classical tires to get that much grip.

So this is the kind of rabbit hole stuff I can look down that no one else is looking down and go, I think there's a safe bet. And a safe bet to me is, okay, there's no reason for this to get worse. It may not skyrocket 4,000%, but it shouldn't get worse. And if everything else gets worse and it doesn't, then relatively I did well. I might be up 30 to 60%.

all right well to the last question obviously i have to bring you back to do a whole other episode last question is on philanthropy so i always ask how do you make money how do you invest money how do you give it away to charity what are your thoughts about philanthropy in general and how can people be more efficient at it um be specific in the philanthropy a lot of people i asked them you know if you had a million bucks right now and you couldn't spend it on yourself where would you spend it and they're like i don't know you know kids in africa or the homeless and that means they haven't really thought about it they haven't thought it through specifically

Whereas if someone actually goes to the trouble now, as if they did have a million bucks from their uncle they had to give away, that they actually went, who deserves it? And let's go visit those places and let's see the poverty or see the issue and understand. A friend of mine realized that for every 5,000, they could pay for a classroom in Ethiopia to teach kids for a year. So now they're very motivated to get out of bed every morning and make an extra 5,000 bucks. Every 5,000 bucks is a classroom. What you do with the homeless, with the backpacks,

That's really specific. That's what they need. That's what they want. It's practical. People can hand them away. It's brilliant. So there's something that now you've been motivated like, okay, every time I earn X amount, it's an extra 100 backpacks. So even though you don't have the money now to give it away, a lot of people make the mistake of waiting till they have the money before they'll think about it. I say think about it now and it'll motivate you to go make the money because it's not about you anymore.

If you were able to help 100 people a year, that means 100 people a year are going to suffer every single year waiting for you to catch up and get off your ass and get to that point. Another thing people don't do well in figuring this out is you can't be charitable while you're still a charity yourself. So you've got to be selfish until you can be significant. So take care of yourself first. And that means do the math on it. So if you're 30 years old and you can live on 10 grand a month,

that's 120 grand a year plus let's say four percent inflation on average between now and you might live to 110. do the math on that what's that 33 million before after taxes so until you make 50 you're homeless unless you get ahead of that curve you'll be working at denny's when you're seven so that's called your lifetime runway how much money does it cost between now and today your last day on the planet to feed yourself just do the math on that until you hit that number you are the charity wow

People run to real estate as an assumed investment. Well, let's say real estate, someone's land is, let's say, half a mil and their house cost to build it is half a mil. So it's a million dollar home. But then we sell it for three million. But where did that extra two million come from? It comes from assumptions. Assumptions that location, location, location. Well, that doesn't matter if we're all on Zoom calls.

We assume that people want to somewhere close they can commute to for shops and infrastructure. Well, not if Amazon drones will be dropping stuff off every half an hour, along with Walmart and UPS, then we don't need to do that much for shopping. Like, well, we don't want to go long distance. Not if you're asleep in the back of a self-driving Uber for free, you won't care. So all the assumptions that made real estate a safe investment are no longer there.

So, people need to question these assumptions. Real estate did make the most money for the most people over the longest period of time. Doesn't mean it always will. Just like being a blacksmith used to be a good business. Right.

Ladies and gentlemen, you have watched Walter O'Brien on the Money Mondays. If you want to have some fun, go look up Scorpion on CBS. They had four really good seasons. It's one of my favorite shows of all time. Also, check out conciergeup.com so you can see what Scorpion and what Walter O'Brien's business is. His fun project with all the nerds and all the wizards and all the smart people he has and the geniuses that help people with their businesses and their situations. But we have one favor, one request.

We all grew up thinking that it's rude to talk about money. And I think, and I hope Walter thinks the same thing, that it's rude to not talk about money. And so what we need you to do is share these, subscribe, share with your friends so that we can get more people talking about money. We'll see you soon. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Money Mondays. Well, I'm really excited about this guest. He's like, how do I say this?

All the real estate guys that I work with look up to him to ask him questions and advice. And whenever I have anything to do with real estate related or investing related, he's literally the first one I call or ask if I can just show up and come over and we start whiteboarding together. And so for me, this is on a personal level, I'm just going to ask him questions that I want to know about and it's going to be beneficial to you because if I want to know about it, hopefully you want to know about it. So the concept for the Money Mondays episode

as always is we skip all the emotional stuff. We skip all the long backstories so we can get straight to the money. So Kent Clothier, please give us your 60 second bio so we can get straight to the money. 60 second bio. Um, I am, like you said, I'm in the real estate space. I, uh, my family and I own a company called REI nation. We flip, um, anywhere from 800 to a thousand properties a year, 11 different markets manage about 8,000 single family homes right now. And, uh,

Own several different funds, several hundred million dollars in commercial assets, et cetera, and lending. I mean, if it's real estate related, I'm in it at this point. So very fortunate. You just say it so casually, like 8,000 single family homes and hundreds of millions of commercial real estate. Like how did this all come to be? Have you always done real estate or was there something past? I've been in real estate for the last 20 plus years. I think I'm in my 22nd year, 23rd year.

Before that, when I was a kid, I was 17. I started in an arbitrage business in the grocery industry. My dad was in the grocery industry. And so where we were just buying and selling truckloads of groceries, kind of trading on different pricing. And before I knew it, that that little business turned into a 50 million dollar company by the time I was 23, 800 million by the time I was 27 and 20.

1.8 billion by the time I was 30. So no, I haven't always been in groceries, but I've always been in business. So this is a money question. So when you say arbitrage, what does that mean? So you buy like lettuce for 20 cents and sell it for 24 cents? Is that what you mean? What's cool about groceries is you have a static product. In other words-

Anybody that's listening or watching, if you look down at any item in your grocery store or sitting on your desk, there's a universal product code, UPC, that barcode. What that is, is that tells the entire world that this product is that same product everywhere. And what's different is the manufacturer actually sells it

for a different price everywhere in the world. And they do that to gain market share, to move markets, right? So, you know, a can of Red Bull in or a case of Red Bull in Miami might be selling for $40, but the manufacturer might sell the exact same item in Seattle for $140. Whoa. And so, you know, a guy like me, this is pre-internet. What we would do is we would come into where it was being sold at a discount and

And we would say, "Hey, we'll pay you $45, put it on a truck, thousands of cases, ship it to Seattle and say, "Listen, you're paying 140 from the manufacturer all day. How about we sell it to you for 120?" - Right. - And they have to have it on the floor. - Everybody wins, of course. - And everybody's winning. - I love it. All right, so let's dive into real estate. So on the Money Mondays, there was only three topics. How do you make money? How do you invest money? And how do you give it away to charity? So let's start with the first topic. How does Ken Clodier make money?

At this point, we have an active real estate business, as I just said. So we are actively buying and selling properties every single day, hundreds of times a month. And once we do that, we've been very fortunate and very deliberate over the years where we have then realized that

When we have that one transaction, there are multiple, there are other transactions that come behind it. So in other words, we have built an entirely vertically integrated ecosystem. So not only do we sell you the house, but then we will rehab the house. You know, now we have, we will find the renters. We will, we own the property management company. We own the insurance company where we have lending. We have the lending company, you know? And so that is a, you know, very strategic way that in, from an active standpoint, how we make money equally, uh,

We have several funds that are actively out there buying commercial properties, RV parks, self-storage, multifamily that we're then adding value to those properties, putting renters in place. It's a totally separate business, by the way. Different operations teams and then ultimately flipping those properties with investors. And then...

equally, you know, a very successful education and coaching and mastermind company that coaches tens of thousands of people every year, uh, shows them how to do very, a lot of anything in real estate. And, um, we make money that way. And so not only are we making it actively, but we've got a lot of passive stuff going on as well.

So walk us through on the masterminds and education side. Is there different levels in pricing? Like let's talk actual money. Like what does it cost to join? Yeah. So we have our coaching program. If you come into our, to our, if you want to learn how to be a real estate investor, right? So most people they'll watch Chip and Joanna Gaines or whoever it is on TV, they'll get a little enamored. And they'll come to us to learn how to actually do it, whether that is rehabbing or whether that is wholesaling a property or whatever the case may be.

And so we have a 15,000 all the way up to $25,000 program, 90 days up to six months where we'll effectively kickstart their career or show them how to do it. And then what we have definitely found in the last years and where I've spent the last five years really focusing on is there's not a lot of people in the industry that then show somebody how to turn this little hustle.

into a real business, right? And that's something that we've become really good at. And so then they start graduating into our mastermind and into ultimately working. They can even work with me privately on CEO coaching to where we kind of tap into that next thing. You've solved the income challenge, but you have no idea how to be a good CEO. You have no idea how to put the systems and the processes and the people and all the things that might intimidate you.

We then take them in that mastermind format and really show them how to do that. And then, you know, our mastermind is a true mastermind. I mean, somebody who's never been inside of a mastermind. I mean, you make an investment for sure. $30,000 to $60,000, but we surround you. This is a group of 200 of the best real estate professionals in the world.

We curate it like crazy. And that group gets together four times a year. And over a two day period, we are breaking each other's businesses down. So it's not only it's highly tactical, but it is highly inspirational and aspirational because, you know, to your left or to your right are people that are

doing what you want to be doing, right? And they've accomplished what you're looking to accomplish. And so that mastermind is extremely powerful when it's done correctly. And it's been around for 10 years. So why should someone join a mastermind? Whether it's in a fashion industry or makeup or health and fitness or food or real estate investing or just general business, why is it important to be in a mastermind setting? Because there's only one way to coast and that's downhill. If you're not peddling,

then you for sure are going in the wrong direction. You have to keep trying to become better. You have to, there's a big world out there. And a lot of people get trapped inside of their own four walls and they start believing their own BS. And, you know, they're a big fish in a small pond. And I don't care what city you're in. There's always a bigger fish. There's always somebody doing it bigger. And, you know, you know that, I know that. We hang around people that

A lot of people in our world look at us and they're like, oh, man, you guys have got it all figured out. And then we go sit in other rooms where people are like, oh, I don't have anything figured out. Right. And that's the point is when you get around people that are doing it bigger, not just business, but business, life, money, financial wealth, everything. It opens up a world of opportunity for you. You don't know what you don't know. And as long as you whenever you stop seeking success.

then you're just going in the wrong direction, man. I mean, I'm just a huge believer. I didn't come this far to come this far. And I think that's what every mastermind does for you is if it's done correctly, not only are you getting the strategic and the tactical, but you're getting inspired and you're connecting dots extremely fast. It is a way to effectively collapse time. High-level entrepreneurs, one thing's for sure, will get there. But as far as I'm concerned, why would I wait?

I mean, if I could get there tomorrow, you know, if I've got a challenge, I'm picking up the phone and calling you, right? And, or whoever, if my network can suddenly bridge it for me like that, why would I, why would I take, why would I not take advantage of it? That's one of the smartest investments you could ever make. So I always say once a wallet is open, it's way easier to get more money from that wallet than to go open a new wallet. No doubt. And so when you mentioned, um,

they can buy or sell the house through you, but you can also help them with their loan or their insurance or their title or their flipping or the remodeling or everything involved. That's the same concept. You know that first person that needed to sell their house or they had a divorce and a situation happened or they have a business, they want to move to another city and they got to get rid of that house or buy a new house.

From there, you knew that there was this situation, this situation, this situation. Basically, all your vendors, clients, partners around you, you replicated some of those to create your own businesses. Is that correct? Why don't more people do those type of things? And how can they start looking at their own business and be like, you know what? I could do what that vendor does or what that client does, or I could partner with them and JV with them. I don't necessarily want to do it. I don't want to create a...

escrow and title company, but I could joint venture. Like what are some things people could do to actually sit and look at their own businesses to figure out how can I make more money within the same customer base? Well, there's two things. One, the first question, why do people not do that is because, um, they're transactional, right? Um, it's,

it's it's it's a what i've learned it is a hard bridge to go from hustler to ceo right that is a not absolutely not a natural bridge for people to follow in fact i would argue that the hustler is in direct conflict with the ceo um because you know if you're transactional you you have been rewarded all the accolades everything you know the money everything has come from that dopamine hit has come from that transaction right so you're you're a fiend you're constantly you're a deal junkie you're constantly looking for the next thing

And when you go to a CEO and you start thinking more strategically, then you're not, that dopamine hit comes in a different way. Like this one transaction that I've worked so hard to get, you know, the question I would tell everybody to ask yourself is what's the transaction that your transaction just created? So think about it in real estate. You know, if you, if somebody buys and sells a house, well, that's just the beginning. The moment you did that, there are so many other people that now you created a transaction for them. Title, escrow, an appraisal.

contractors, right? Moving companies, direct TV, insurance. I mean, all these other things were created because you did your job. And as a CEO, when you start thinking strategically like that, you're like, wait a minute, my one thing

That's my transaction. But the reality of it is, is I just created two dozen other transactions for other people. Why would I not try to figure out a way to capture more of that audience and extend the lifetime value of my customer? Most, you know, what people don't think about is if you're doing a deal and you're making 20 grand, if you actually think about it and go down the line, you'll see that in a lot of cases, certainly in real estate, another 20 grand was created in fees or interest or whatever the case may be.

the fastest way to double the size of your business, go get that business. You're already doing it. You already did it. You don't have to go get more customers. You don't have to do bigger deals. You just need to go capture more down the line of what's going on. And it effectively is free money because you already did all the hard work. All you have to do is whether it's partnering or JVing or actually owning it, the reality of it is, is the money is going to transact whether you do it or not. So you kind of have an obligation, a responsibility as a CEO

you have an obligation to try to figure out how to extend the lifetime value of the customer. So last question about how Kent makes money. There's CEO coaching, there's speaking fees, there's books. What are some of the other things that as someone that's out there that they might be able to add as a revenue source for themselves? How can they decide I'm going to be an author or I'm going to start speaking at events or I'm going to create a mastermind? What are the other things or ways for Kent as a person or as a business that

I mean, I look at it the same way I just said. I mean, the reality of this is, is that I worked hard over the years, just like others have, to create authority and influence in the market. I didn't always have a clear line of sight on what that actually meant. But I can tell you now more than ever, when you have authority and you have a social media presence and you have some influence in the market and you're a trusted agent of all that,

opportunities, whether that's in coaching or whether that's in courses or whether that's in speaking fees or writing books or whatever. I mean, that's all there for the taking. And I will tell you this, you know, kind of a caution, cautionary tale, if you will, is that the first place I would always look is what is a natural byproduct of your core business? I can't tell you how many times people come to me and they've flipped a few houses or they've done a few things and suddenly they want to open a coaching program, right? And I'm like,

It is a completely different business. It is not the same thing. Anything that would naturally kind of fall into your business is the first place you want to look. Right. Then as you get the systems and the processes and people in place, and they're kind of running this business and you kind of are at a place where it's like, all right, now I can actually start to potentially monetize other things. Every one of those things you just mentioned, courses, coaching, mentoring, speaking, those are businesses. And yeah,

I will tell you in those businesses in particular, it's pretty costly to be wrong. In other words, because it's public now. Right. Right. You often start coaching somebody and they have a bad experience, whatever. I mean, they're going to light you up on the Internet, FTC. There's all kinds of things. So you have no choice but to run it like a business. You have to be good at it and you don't get to passively do that kind of stuff. And so I would I would look inward first, get it perfected and then go outward. All right.

Question number two of the how to make money, invest money and give it away on the investing money side. How does Kent or your business, how do you look at investing money since you're so good at making money? How do you invest money? You know, naturally a byproduct of what I do is real estate, right? And so we invest, I mean, if not all the vast majority of our holdings are almost always in real estate. The way we look at it, we really look at two things. Um,

Because every business has a different season. And so there's sometimes where we need to be looking at investments more from a cash flow perspective. Are we creating real cash flow in real time? And those investments are things that we would go into like self-storage or multifamily where we can create cash flow very, very quickly and quickly.

Do some value add, spruce it up, et cetera. That's that's what and in, you know, anytime you're investing, I really believe you have to look at it through those two lenses. You have to look at it like, OK, does my business need the cash flow right now or my investors need the cash flow? Or is this purely an equity play? Right. Are we playing the long game?

And we're not going to see any money. We're going to invest the money. We're going to invest in the infrastructure. We're going to maybe ground up development, whatever it is. But we're going to play the game to where we're going to make an exit in three to five years on a property. And then everybody's going to get paid. But there is no cash flow. And so we look at every investment, big investment through those two lenses. And so examples of cash flow, like I said, self-storage.

Uh, we have one of our funds that does nothing but lends money, right? When in large part, we're arbitraging other people's money. Our investors are giving us the money. Uh, we have the deal flow and then we're making that Delta on going out there and being a good steward of their money, putting it into good deals, lending to good borrowers and turn around. And as that money comes back in, but those are cashflow investments because we're getting paid every month out of the deals. Um,

You know, we have a hotel project that we're working on in Palm Springs. We have another one we're working on in Las Vegas. Those are all ground up type stuff. We're not going to see a dollar for many years, but we know when we do see dollars, it'll be tens of millions, hundreds of millions. And so I really think that every investor should really look at it through, through those two lenses. Cause it's, and you know, last but not least is probably another one that we definitely look at is, you know, what are we doing from a depreciation standpoint? And, and,

If I can get real tax benefits in real time, especially at the end of the year, millions of dollars in write-offs, et cetera, a lot of times that's a big enough reason to make a strategic investment into a property that, again, it's more of an equity play, not going to be cash flow, but we can do a cost segregation study and we can do an accelerated depreciation, be shocked how the tax code can work to your benefit real quick to get...

a lot of offset, a lot of taxes really fast at the end of the year. So those are really probably the three main buckets we look at stuff through. So someone listening, they're making some money, they're making 60 grand, now they're making a hundred grand or maybe 200 grand or 500 grand. They start progressing through life and they're starting making more and more money. Why should they be investing also along the way? Because if you don't, you will be a slave to that job or that income for the rest of your life. It's that simple. And 99% of the people out there

Don't even get it. Right. But the most effective way to get rich in the long run is uninterrupted compounding interest. When you're in your twenties, it's not sexy. When you're in your thirties, it's not sexy, but I go and tell you, you know, if you can go get five, 10, 15, $20,000 into an investment and it is compounding year over year, uh, and you're investing every year at an 8% interest, you will be a multi millionaire by the time you're 60 years old. Um,

And what makes that so effective is time, not the money. Right. So I was just showing my daughters this this past weekend that that the difference that of what my 17 year old retirement account will have in it versus my nine year old.

And that's, you know, effectively we got eight years here, but that eight years, what that will do is by the time what we set aside for our kids and how it will compound over time. When my 17 year old turns 59, there'll be $22 million there. Oh my God. But when my nine year old, it'll be 46 million. Wow. Eight, eight years. Teenage years. Because you're compounding on a $22 million compound.

number now. And then it compounds again and compounds. And so what makes it so interesting is that time. And so back to your point, if you've got, I don't care how much money you make, get money working for you now and let it work. And you can invest in real estate funds. You can invest in, you know, you don't have to have a whole lot of money. You know, you can, if you get a money and go or get money and go put it into a self-directed IRA, the government will let you put

you know, $6,500, I think somewhere in that neighborhood and into a fund every year and go deploy that directly into a fund like anything, friends and family, it doesn't really matter. And allow that effectively to bake and just keep deploying. Don't ever take it. And the reason why the self-directed IRA thing is important because you can't get your hands on it. You have to keep deploying. Right. And so just keep rolling. Just keep on rolling. Keep on rolling. Keep on putting that $7,000 in there every year and just keep on putting it in. And

It will just make you ungodly rich. But we live in a world. I mean, we live in the social media world. Everybody's got an attention span of 15 seconds. Everybody wants instant gratification. Everybody wants to be able to post the watches and all that kind of stuff. I mean, that's income, baby. That ain't, that's not wealth. If you want to get wealthy, get into real estate and do it now and allow that money to bake. And I don't care how much money it is, 10, 20, 30, 40, get you to a place where you can actually make, you know, get it moving. So the tattoo you have, the time is now.

And tell me why. Well, I'll give you three reasons why. One, you know, I talked about that big company at the end of my 30s, 1.8 billion. In the end, my partners and I got into a run-in and I walked away from that company and got humbled over the next 22 months and lost every single dollar I'd ever made and had to start all over and got into real estate. So I realized real fast,

how important the time really is and spending time where it really matters. Because I'd spent night and day building a company and ultimately figured out real quick that just how fragile and how crazy life can get, right? Then I held, a few years later, I was holding my mentor's hand

tens of millions of dollars in the bank and just retired. He was 60 years old. My uncle holding his hand when he passed away and said something very profound on a whiteboard to me because he was all hooked up in a hospital bed, couldn't talk. But he said, I just wish I had more time. And when he said that and wrote that on the whiteboard and then passed away a few minutes later, I knew he had 30 to $50 million in the bank. And I was like, wait a minute, he's got all this money and it cannot buy him the one thing he actually wants.

Which is one more minute. Like he would have given $50 million for one more minute. Wasn't going to happen. And so, and then I was, uh, you know, a few months after that, I happened to be on a plane that, that, you know, had to make a very, very, very scary emergency landing, uh, with my young daughter and,

and wife on the plane and plane filled with smoke had to be diverted. We were told to brace for impact, all the crazy stuff you never want to hear on a plane. Um, and so, you know, those three experiences really kind of helped me to get a lot of clarity around what really matters. And it, it's about time, baby. I mean, we want it to all be about money. The reality was, was we want what the money gives us, which is time, be able to control time, be able to do whatever you want, whenever you want with whoever you want,

You know, whether it's showing up for your kids' soccer games or going to cheerleading practice or traveling around in an RV and doing podcasts just because you can. That's what we want. We want to control time. And so, yeah, when I, you know, I don't wear a fancy watch. I wear a little bracelet that says the time is now. I've got a tattoo that says the time is now. And the funny thing is, every time I look at my wrist, it's always right. I mean, this is the moment. This is what you got. And so make the most of it. Set yourself up where you get to control time and you'll be shocked at how good life gets.

All right. And the last segment is how do you give it away? Like what is important to you from a charity perspective, if at all, and why should charity be important to other people? Yeah. I mean, I love the question and it is extremely important to me. I believe, you know, that, uh, I'm one of those guys. I just believe that we are here to leave it better than we found it, right. Create real impact and not at some superficial level. Um,

My wife and I give a great deal of money to charity, but I, you know, I had the good fortune back in 2012 of making a, uh, I got actually had a mentor drag me down to Haiti, did not want to go, didn't know anything about it. And it was, had a profound experience on me or profound, you know, it really, really changed me in the, in that if you've ever, if you've never been to Haiti, Haiti, it is probably the most destitute place on the planet. It is, we don't even know what poverty is here. Like that's real poverty.

And when I got down there and just saw what I saw and got to experience what I got to experience, I came back, changed and immediately went to work, started working with some really smart people. We have helped a lot of charities down there. One of the things I'm most proud of is we built an entire village down there, raised hundreds of thousands of dollars and built a 60 family village in Haiti that there are 60 families that have, you know, real shelter down there, not a blue tarp.

Um, we work a lot with charity water and providing wells all over the, all over the country. And then we have our own kind of cause here that is near and dear to my heart that started about 14 years ago. Uh, you know, raising kids with money is hard. And so when my, about 14 years ago, I started taking my kids, uh, at Christmas time to stores to pay off layaways anonymously. And we would go and

And look at all the outstanding layaways and Walmart and Sears and Toys R Us and see all the ones that had kids toys on it and just write the check, swipe the card. We got it. Don't tell them we did it. Just go take care of it. And that's now grown. As I started to share with my community, we have a cause called 1000 Layaways. And so every year...

uh, all over the country. And we pay off thousands and thousands of layaways completely anonymously. And what, what's baffling about this is that, you know, if you don't, if you come from money, you have no idea, but when you actually go to pay off somebody's layaway, you'd be shocked, right? So there are hundreds of them sitting in the back of a store like Burlington,

And these people have had these things on layaway, their kids' Christmas gifts for several weeks. But on the 12th or 13th of the month, those stores have to cancel that layaway and put it all back on the shelf for the last Christmas rush. And they're going to get a call. I mean, we literally go in there on the 12th. They're about to get a phone call that all the stuff they've been doing is about to go away. And you go look down at the receipt and you're like, oh, they owe $12.

They owe $50. They owe $67. You're like, this 60 bucks is the difference between this child having Christmas and believing in Santa Claus or not. This is the difference between a parent getting to be a hero, a lot of times a single mother, or not. It's just baffling. And it's so easy to be cool.

And so that's how we give our money away. Again, you know, we are trying to train our kids to be good stewards and think about it and not just be consumers to really think about trying to help as many people as they can. And I just love the idea, especially with the layaways that, you know, all those 60 families in Haiti, I'll never get to know them. All these thousands of people in the layaways, I'll never get them. The parents get to be

the hero. I mean, to me, that's a... I sleep very well at night knowing that at least we tried. So you've seen at the Masterminds, there's only one question that's recurring at every single celebrity athlete that I interview. There's no other questions the same except for one, and I'm finally going to ask you. At the end of the day, 50 years from now, 100 years from now, whenever it's time for you to pass away, and you've got $50 million, $100 million, $500 million, $1 billion, $2 billion, whatever Kent and his wife has amassed over the years,

What do you leave to your kids? I mean, I can tell you because it's set up. My kids will get 5%. My kids and my, so we have a legacy plan, right? So my kids will get 5% and then my grandkids will get 5%. Now we've already recorded an entire, effectively an online course.

um that in order for my kids and my grandkids my grandkids and great-grandkids to get to that money they have to actually complete the course to go through it and i think it's 52 modules right and so they have to go through it and understand what we did to create this um and what actually what our values are right and until that is completed inside of that course

Um, that money will not unlock for them. The rest of it, we have several charities, um, that has already been designated. Um, I mean, we have, we have a plan and it, but it is not just distributing the money. It is distributing the money with strings that I want them to know, not just how we've worked for it, but I want them to know what is important to us. What, what, what would matter the most to me is that everything that we've worked hard to do, um,

Doesn't just go one generation, doesn't go to that. It goes all the way down the line that in order for people to access all that capital, all that liquidity, all the properties, all the companies that we've built and to play active roles in it, that they're going to have to be good stewards. They're going to have to actually have the same values. And if they don't, guess what?

Go do your own thing. I'm cool with that. I'll still teach you the lessons. You can still go watch it. And people ask me, why do you bother with the courses and everything else? Because, because I, that will live forever. My kids, grandkids, great grand, they're going to be able to see everything I do on social media for the next hundred years. Um, if they want to get the money, they're gonna have to go through a specific, but they're definitely going to know what we, what we stood for.

All right, guys, you're listening to the Money Mondays. Make sure to like and subscribe. And if you could just do us one favor, if you like some of the clips or you like the whole episode, please share with your audience so we can get more people on here learning about money because I think it's rude to not talk about money.