YOU'VE BEEN TRAINED TO BE BROKE | Wallstreet Trapper and Jaspreet Singh

This is how the wealthy play the game of life. Not in survival mode, but in offense. The moment you can switch from survival mode to offense, the game changes. If you understand money, you become financially educated, you're willing to talk about it. Well, now you can be financially stable doing whatever you want. And you can follow something you love and still be financially okay. Because we assume that you have to have this in order to make money. You have to have this job in order to make good money. You have to have this career if you want to be financially stable. But that's a complete lie. Being around people that understand the importance of investing. Investing in their personal development. Investing in their business. Investing in teaching them how to run businesses. Like being around them, you'd be like, damn, I gotta invest in myself too, right? Like, and it's something we take for granted. And being around people who understand that a certain amount of money isn't what you may see. That's a lot of money. Somebody's like, no, I may spend that on investing in myself. I may spend it on buying assets. Like understanding that people who build businesses are different. Those conversations change your life. You can use your money as a tool. And this is what wealthy people do. Because now what do they do with their money? You use your money to buy your time back. Because what so many of us do is we're exchanging our hours for dollars. You go to work every single day and you get paid. But what are wealthy people doing? They're not working just to use their money as a way to buy hours. They're using the money to buy their time back. Because now you can build things and build processes and invest your money. Because now you can use your money as a tool instead of as a fool. But you got no savings. You got no investments. You're doing something wrong. Your priorities in the wrong place. What are you doing? You're making Gucci rich. You're making Louis Vuitton rich. You're making all these companies rich. But you're keeping yourself broke. Follow your passion. I think it should be follow your purpose. Everybody should at least once in their life go all in on something. Something that you just believe in. That's living to me. Because for me, I always, I don't need motivation. Because when I look at my life, my motivation is saying I'll never go back to that again. My motivation is saying that I have a daughter that I never want her to experience that life. So getting up every day knowing that I can change my family. Knowing that we are now in a time where we've never had the opportunity like we have now. And if I don't take advantage of that opportunity, when it's time for me to go, I'm gonna feel real messed up all day. We're never given any sort of financial education. So what ends up happening for the majority of people is you end up just being a pond in the system. Because guess what? Corporations are going to get you to spend. And they hire some of the smartest people in the world to get you to borrow more money, to create programs to entice you to borrow more money. Again, this doesn't make them necessarily evil. This is just the way the system works. The system is fueled by spending. What we don't have, the problem is we don't have the education to then tell us when we should spend and when we shouldn't spend. This is what it is. It's like gravity. It's happening around us. Do you want to fight gravity or understand gravity? Because when you understand it, now you can take advantage of the system too. Because now when you understand this, you can own a piece of the system as an investor. And now you can benefit from the way the system works. Because now if we take one step back from this and we go just a little bit more higher level, guess what? Our entire financial system is reliant on this. I released a video talking about how inflation is making the majority of people poorer. And they never see it happen. You put your money in the bank, you're losing 2% of your savings value every single year. It might not seem like a lot of money in one year. But over the course of your career, you were losing a lot of money by just saving your money in the bank, which is why inflation keeps so many people poor. Inflation comes from the word inflate. What do you inflate when you have inflation? You're inflating the monetary supply. You're inflating money. So the Federal Reserve Bank is the central bank of the United States. While they're called the Federal Reserve Bank, they're not federal. It's not a federal entity. It says so on their website. They're not a reserve because they don't keep any cash reserves anywhere. And they're not a bank. You and I can't go there to deposit money. So what do they do? They control and oversee our money system in the United States. And one of the things that they're able to do is influence how much money is out there. They can print money and they can take money away. Well, when you print money, pieces of paper, without producing more wealth, what happens? The value of each individual dollar goes down because you can't just produce more wealth. You can't print more wealth, but you can print money. And so this money, this piece of paper, then loses value. And we've been seeing this happen for a long time. Whenever you print more money, the value of each individual dollar goes down, which then in effect causes the price of things to go up. That's why $100 today cannot buy you what $100 could 20 years ago. And that's why $100 today can't buy you what $100 could 100 years ago. But what does that mean when we go back to the topic of, you know, the system that we were just talking about? Well, inflation, the whole purpose of it, because the Federal Reserve Bank doesn't want 0% inflation. If you listen to anything that they say, they say that they have a target of 2% inflation. But why 2%? Why this random number? Why not 0%? Why do we want any inflation? Well, because it's their way of growing this system. See, inflation disproportionately benefits the financially educated and the wealthy, and inflation disproportionately hurts the financially uneducated and the poor. Because when you don't understand inflation, well, you're the one that's paying the price. If you leave your money in the bank, and your bank is paying you 0.1% a year in interest, while inflation is 5, 6, 7% a year, you're losing value in the bank. Your savings are slowly losing value each and every day, because you're saving your money. Now, this doesn't mean you shouldn't save any money. This means you have to know how to save your money strategically. That means save your money for an emergency, save your money for an investment, or save your money for a big purchase. But then beyond that, why are you putting cash aside? Well, it should be to invest. But now going back to that question of the system, right? What does inflation do? It grows the economic system. It encourages more spending, more dollars out there. And so who does that benefit? It benefits the economy. It benefits the investors who own a piece of the system. But it hurts the people. Because if you don't understand this, what happens? Oh, maybe you got a raise because of inflation. Great. People spend more money. Great. But now you're poorer today than you were a few years ago, even though it might look like you have the same bank balance, even though you might have gotten a raise because the prices of everything around you have gone up faster than your income. And that's why today, you have people struggling more than they were 50 years ago. 50 years ago in 1970, early 1970s, you'd have one person going to work, the man of the house. And they would have one income. And the one income would allow a family to survive comfortably, have a nice home, have a nice car, and have a nice vacation. Today, you have the majority of households are two-income households. And people are struggling to buy homes. People are struggling to afford a car. People are struggling to have any sort of freedom to go on a vacation or really do anything, even though we have two-income households today as opposed to one-income households in the 1970s. So what's the difference? The value of the dollar is dropping. This grows the system. This benefits people who understand the system, the investors, the financially educated. But it comes at a price. And the price is at the expense of regular people. I realized how powerful it was for me to, one, become economically powerful in my mind. Because the thing about investing, especially in stocks, is that piece of ownership of everything that I use now makes me say, well, if I own that Apple, God, I don't care about buying an Apple phone. If I'm going to wear Levi's and I'm going to wear Timberlands, if I can own VFC Corp, then I own the stuff that I'm buying. I'm okay with that. Like that subtle shift in my mindset changed everything for me. Because now I was after just owning everything that I consumed in the beginning. That was my introduction to the game. Let me just own everything I consume and then I'll feel okay. And then one dope thing happened to me. In 2010, just after I'm home from prison, I'm home from prison. I'm back in the streets hustling. Because even though I have the information, I don't have the money. Right? And I'm like, well, shit, I got to get the money. My door gets kicked in, in 2010. They get eight pounds of weed, $10,000. Yeah, by the cops. Eight pounds of weed, $10,000. A 223, a 40 with extended clip and a beam, and 100 X-pills. So a cop tells me, you ain't learned your lesson. You ain't learned your lesson. And I was like, damn, that was some dumb shit. Right? Like I got knowledge, I got information, but I still felt victim to the same shit that everybody around me knew. So therefore the knowledge that I had wasn't powerful because it wasn't applied. So I was fortunate, God bless me. I wound up getting found out guilty because it's called fruit of a poisonous tree. So they kicked in my door, but they didn't have probable cause because they stopped me in my truck, didn't find nothing on me. So they went to my house, kicked the door in with no search warrant. So now everything you find is null and void. That's purpose, man. Because that's not supposed to happen, right? I'm thinking about it all the time. And then, but that put me in a situation because now even though it cost me $60,000 to beat that charge, I don't have no money. So now I get into the robbing game. So now I start robbing dope dealers, right? Because a OG told me that a person who works a job every day, they not a part of this game. So they not fair game. They, you don't mess with them. But somebody who sells a nickel bag, he fair game. A shark don't care if it's a tuna or whatever. If you in the ocean swimming, you fair game. And so I started robbing dope dealers at the time because I was like, yo, if you won't, you can't call the police. If you won't see me, see me, I'm with it. And I got in a situation where I was good at it. Me and my partner, God bless his soul. And then one day I almost got killed. And I'll go to my partner and I say, bro, I'm out. Like I said, done deal. But when they kicked my door in, something happened. So they took my truck. They took my money, but they didn't mess with my stock account. It didn't freeze. It didn't, I said, hold up. They don't think I'm smart enough for this. In the book, 48 Laws of Power, it says never underestimate your opponents. And at that point, I realized that America underestimates us. And it's not, it's from a class issue because we've never said we're capable of doing this. It's a game we just didn't play. So I say, okay, God, what do you want me to do? All I know how to do is be a hustler. And the voice from 1999 comes in my head and says, you're just playing the wrong game. Like, all right, cool. So I went to tell my homies like, yo, check this out. Instead of us just blowing the money, we're going to wear the Fendi anyway. We're going to wear it anyway. Let's just own that shit too. Like, let's play the game both ways. So my homies really wasn't getting it. So I had to say, all right, yo, like the education, the knowledge is the fertilizer to your wealth, right? So as the education and as the knowledge changes, so does the conversation change because now I can have conversations about different things. So I really just locked in on it. And I started teaching my homies and I was like, all right, how do I make it realistic to them? How do I make them tap into it? So the second thing was like, yo, check this out. We all, none of us can beat the game. Everybody I knew had the same problem. Nobody had a solution. How do I now start looking like, stop looking like the problem and start representing a solution, right? So I can't talk to everybody, but I can talk to street dudes. Like I can talk to them. So I'm like, yo, check this out. If you go do a bid, which is going to happen, what do you come home to? Like, you got to get back in the streets. You got to get it out the mud again. So if you had money invested for you, when you come home, you got money. You don't got to ask nobody for no handout. What if you go do a bid and what you've made the sacrifices, you took the chances, what do your family have? Like, so let's start thinking bigger pitching out. What happens if you get killed in the street? Because most of us either go to jail or we get killed. What do you leave your kids? Wealth is mindset before it hits your bank account. And when it comes to the differences between the rich and the poor, it doesn't start with how much money you make. It doesn't start with what degree you have. It doesn't start with who your parents are. It doesn't start with what background you have. It starts with what mindset you have. And this is really the root of wealth. We're all given 24 hours in a day. So the difference between somebody who becomes successful versus somebody who does not is now what input you put in those 24 hours. If you're spending your time on Netflix, if you're spending your time playing video games, if you're spending all of your time doing things that don't add any value financially to your life, well, if you compare that for somebody who's now working, who's now learning, who's investing in the education, you're going to see two completely different outputs. Wealthy people spend their money to earn more money. The majority of everyone else spend their money to buy things, which makes everybody else around them rich. You have to understand that this is just what the system is. Lenders are in the business of lending money, period. They make money when they lend money. So it is in their best interest to lend you more money. A salesperson is in the business of selling something. It's in their best interest to sell you something bigger, sell you something more because they're on commission. The more they sell, the more money they make, period. And so now when you understand this way of thinking, you're going to start changing the way you start looking at things. What is a corporation's best interest? A corporation's best interest isn't for you to keep your money in your pocket and invest your money and be financially smart. A corporation's best interest is to now get you to open up your wallet and buy their stuff because that's how they make money. Does that make them evil? Well, I'll let you decide. I think, look, you don't need to decide an emotion. It just is what it is. Because once you understand this, you're just going to look at the world very differently. Because when you understand the way the system works, now you can say, in the business of selling me something, a bank's in the business of lending me something, a salesperson's in the business of getting me to buy something bigger. What do you need? I need the financial education to know what I can buy. Because guess what? We all need things. And when you have money, you don't feel so bad about spending money because you know how to control it. Now I can go to a corporation and buy the things that I want, that I like, and have a great experience. Because I can. I can go out and know when I should borrow money. Maybe I use money, borrow money to buy other assets. You borrow money to buy rental properties. I borrow money to grow a business. Maybe I go to a salesperson and I have them sell my things for me. Now you start thinking about things very differently because you understand the way the system works. Best return that I got on my investment isn't the real estate investments that I made, even though those have made me great returns. It's not the stock market investments that I made, even though they made me great returns. It's not the startup investments that I made. It's the investments that I made on myself. Because for me, the investments that I put into my own financial education have paid off many, many, many, many, many times over. And you can't see those returns anywhere else. They say that the best investment you can make is in you. And for me, that was first by reading books. When I started my financial education journey, YouTube didn't have this level of financial education out there or just general business education or whatever. So I started by reading books. Now you don't even have to pay the price to get a book. Just go watch as many YouTube videos as possible about financial education, starting a business, about increasing your income, about investing. Anything related to financial education, go start watching YouTube videos. You don't have to watch my channel if you don't like it. Watch whoever you want. I'd rather see you successful than anything else. So go watch as many videos as you can. You have a ton of videos as well. Once you start watching videos and you absorb yourself into this, now you might want something a little bit deeper, something a little bit more comprehensive. And this is where then start reading books. I would recommend that you go out and start by reading 25 books in financial education and read them. Find the top five books in money management and investing, the top five books in starting a business, the top five books in scaling a business, the top five books in managing a business, and the top five books of entrepreneur biographies. And it doesn't matter which ones you pick. Find the ones with the highest ratings, and just read them. This is going to cost you less than $500. But when you do that, you're going to be able to get an MBA level education without paying the price of an MBA. And you're going to look at the world, your money, and the way you use your money completely differently once you finish these books. So I say the key to building wealth is not how much you can work. You can't work your way to wealth. You got to invest your way there. And all wealthy people, black, white, Asian, Chinese, they own a whole bunch of shit. The people who aren't wealthy is because they don't own nothing. You only have your money sitting in cash. If your money is just sitting in cash, realistically, you're becoming poorer every day. Some people actually fear success. Success comes with a lot, right? But until you can overcome that average reality that you live in, no matter what you're on, once you become comfortable there, it becomes average. Anyone can live in average. Everyone can live in mediocrity, right? Then there's those outliers who consistently push themselves to go to the next level. Knowledge is what gives us leverage in life. It's not about how strong you are. It's about what you can learn. And then how can you actively apply that? The more money they print, the more money that money loses value. It's the reason why the bank wants you to have your money there so they can take it and use it and invest it so much and be like, And so the idea of ownership was, yo, we can just start owning everything that we, no matter if it's just a stock. Like that's powerful because if you can start owning the businesses that you now consume every day, you turn a one-time transaction to a lifetime of profit. And that was major for me because if I go to the store and buy a pair of Nikes, that's a one-time transaction. In order for me to get something from them again, I gotta come back and buy another pair of Nikes. But if I own the Nike stock, long as I own it, it's a profitable vehicle for me. So that one-time transaction can become a lifetime of profit if I own that business. If I'm gonna buy Apple, if I know I'm an Apple user, if I know I got the phone, I got the AirPods, I got the MacBook, I got the PC, I got excited when Apple was about to drop something, why wouldn't I own it? So he said wealthy people stop trading time for money, they start making their money work for them and they give value to, as much value to people as they can. The caveat, I mean, we got a little deep into that. He said, the reason why you give people so much value is because if you give them so much value, they'll never leave you, they'll always be there for you and you will never need for anything as long as you give value to people. Wealthy people, first they get into stocks, then they start a business and then they get real estate. As long as you believe in it, like you said, the only belief that matters is what do you believe you can do? I personally believe that there is nothing I cannot do and for me, it's all about impact, purpose, fulfillment, like the money is a byproduct of everything else that isn't my focus. My focus is, I have a knowledge and information that I know that can change lives, not just one life, not just like lives and so the way that you change lives is by consistently learning, finding new ways to put that information out there, being able to open up, being able to be vulnerable because people need to connect. So like just coming up in the streets, you only see the game from the lowest level and you look at everybody else in part admiration and part like jealousy because you see it and you're like, damn, I will never get there, right? And so the only way that I think I can get there is through sports or hustling. That's it. That's the only, or rapping. Those are the only three options that you have and so you make a decision on which way you want to go, right? And so you look at it from like, damn, and so me, I'm at the time like, man, I can't rap, damn sure I can't play sports. So hustling is what I got. You limit yourself and nobody comes along and teaches you anything different. The reason why people think wealthy people are people with money are sinister is because that's what you kind of taught in the hood. It's like you kind of taught like, the people who really have money, like they did some wicked shit to get it. They did some backstab and cut those shit to get it and you'll never get that, right? And so that same mentality now happens on a lower level, right? The hustling, the dope business. So now you think like, yo, I gotta just do sinister shit to get money. And then the people who are successful in the drug game, they're looking at the people at the top like, damn, I want to be that. But the people at the bottom would never get a taste of that. And so now we just kind of living off ambition. And so now the people who are in the middle who work in, they're like, all them people with money, they all crooks. They all, because being at the bottom teaches you to envy people at the top. It just happens. It's a, it's something that grooves down there, right? It's kind of like you cook. I don't know if you had gumbo before, right? But it's kind of when you cook, I mean, right? The base goes to the bottom. And so most people live in that bottom, never knowing how they will get up there. No one now believes that it's possible. Once you keep passing that down, you start accepting the lower level. And then there's a few of us or a few people who said, no, I'm an outlier. You're like, I'm about to go for it. And then whatever happens, I'm with that shit. You feel me? So for me, again, one of the greatest things that happened to me was my mother telling me like, the world is wrong and you got to get this shit how you live. But I also saw my grandmother be a legal entrepreneur. So I saw it from both worlds. The greatest thing that ever happened to me was going to prison because I was able to sit down and mature in that environment. Whereas had I been in the world, I'm not saying I wouldn't still be this, but the path would have been completely different. If you understand the system, you can use it to your advantage. If you don't understand the system, it is going to screw you over many, many, many times. When you say manipulate the money, they literally just make more of it. Right. Magically. Literally. And this is where the rich will become richer. The poor will become poorer and the middle class will get wiped out. And the reason why is because some people, rich people will understand money and they will continue teaching the kids and everybody else, the majority of people who have no idea what's happening will continue to become poorer because they don't even see it happening. As the value of the dollars drop, what happens? For regular people, your salary doesn't stretch as far. Your savings don't buy you as much. And so you're effectively becoming poorer each and every day because for most of us, we're taught to save our money. That's what I was told to do growing up. You know, the traditional Indian house is save, save, save. And so I was told to save my money and your savings are becoming less valuable each and every day. Well, what wealthy people do is they're not storing cash. They're buying assets. So your investments are zero and your savings are trying to grow. They're thinking that you're kind of, you're going to become wealthy, but you're never going to be able to out-save inflation. You're going to, your savings are literally making you poorer each and every day. However, you don't want to just not save any money. You got to be strategic with it. What I like to say is there are three reasons why you should be saving money. You save money for an emergency, have somewhere between three to 12 months worth of expenses, depending on your risk tolerance. Save money for a big purchase. You want to buy a car, you want to buy a house, you need some cash to do that. Save money for an investment. If you're not saving money for one of these three reasons, you are saving your money the wrong way and it's making you poorer each and every day. What are the things, the habits that keep people poor? Wow. Well, the first one really has to do with understanding money because unless you understand what money is, none of the other habits really matter because at its core, what is money? And when you ask people that, you might say it's a $100 bill, $50 bill, that's what money is. But what is that money? Because that money that we have today is different than what money was 60 years ago. The money that we call money today is currency. It's really just pieces of paper. And when you understand that, it's going to change what you do with the money. And the reason why I'm saying that is because my family's from India, stayed in India called Punjab. And over there, it's a very traditional thing that when you earn this paper dollars, many people will convert this cash into gold because they understand that these paper dollars lose value and it's just paper. So they want to convert it to something real, something tangible. So they will go out and buy gold with it. You have the government and the Fed. The government spends money. Now, where do they get their money? Well, they get the money from taxpayers. People like you, me, people watching this video through tax dollars. Now, can we hammer that for a second? Sure. The government does not make money. The government takes money from people who are making money. Right. Now, that's not necessarily bad because they provide a lot of amazing things. They provide services. They're not necessarily efficient with their dollars. You know, you have to understand what someone's role is. If you are a company, right? You have a company. Your job is to make a profit because if you don't have a profit, you're not going to be in business unless you have some other stream of, you know, venture capital debt or something. But if you don't have a profit, you can't continue operating. And so your job is to be as efficient as possible as a company. The government can actually be benefited by being inefficient because what is the government's job? You have to understand what is their role. If their goal is to create jobs, well, then you can be as inefficient as you want. And you can achieve that goal because if my goal, if I'm the government, I just want to create as many jobs as possible. I can pay people to pick up this mug and put it from the left hand to right hand. I just created the job. You're employed, you have an income, but you're not producing anything of value. And this is where you have to understand, okay, what is that purpose? And so now, you know, if we get away from the politics for a second, the government now spends money. They get money from taxpayers because the government is not a for-profit entity. They don't create a product and sell it for, or create something and sell it for a profit. Instead, people make money and then the government taxes your income. Now, just like anybody else, there's checks and balances. If the government has a million dollars, they can only spend a million dollars, you would think. But that's not how it works. So the government has a million dollars and what's happening now is they're going to spend significantly more than a million dollars. Now, if you have a certain amount of income and you spend more than that, what do you do? Well, you're going to have to subsidize or find that extra cash somewhere. And in the government's case, what they can do is they can go out and look for a loan. It's called a treasury bond. For as long as anyone can remember, it has been considered the safest investment anybody can make. Well, what it is, is you're literally loaning money to the government. But what happens now if there's not enough people out there to loan money to the government? If the government wants trillions and trillions of dollars, if there's not enough people out there to loan that money to the government and they keep wanting to spend more money, you still got to make up this cost. Warren Buffett didn't become Warren Buffett until 20 years, 30 years. And so you got to figure out who you are as a person, who you are as an investor that take you to that next level. Money is one part of our lives. And the reason why people are scared to talk about it is because we're insecure about it. And that's because we don't understand how money plays a part in our lives. It's one aspect. I say that there's four. You have to be physically healthy, mentally healthy, spiritually healthy, and then financially healthy. If you're not financially healthy, well, it can make everything else much more miserable because you can't pay your bills. But if you're financially healthy, you're rich, but you have nothing else, more money just makes you more miserable. So you need to live a holistic life and understand how money plays a part in your life. That way the finances can have the biggest power. And then you understand that more money just amplifies who you are. It's like fire. It's like fuel. It fuels your fire. If you're a good person and you have more money, you have a tool to do more good. If you're a bad person and you have more money, you have a tool to do more bad. So financial independence is saying I now can make money for myself. I don't have to worry about my job. I don't have to worry about none of that. I can create the cash flow that comes to my own. Financial freedom says money is no longer even an issue. Big difference. Because even someone who can create money for themselves still doesn't have freedom all the time. Right. You can be an entrepreneur and be a slave to the business. You build yourself a job. Yeah. But financial freedom says your money is not even an issue no more. And that don't even have to be a lot. Make your life better. Yeah. And you don't want to be now just buying a whole bunch of Gucci and Louis Vuitton. It's now actually improving your life. So the simplest example would be you start a YouTube channel. We talked about buying a camera. But one thing that you could do is you can hire a video editor. You know, you go on a freelance site, hire a freelance video editor. And now what are you doing? You can spend more time making more videos instead of spending all your time editing the content. So you can focus on your time. You can hire someone to mow the lawn. You bought your time back. You hire somebody to help get you your groceries. You buy your time back. It costs money. You have to spend money in order to do that. But you're getting something in an exchange. And now you're buying your time back so you can use your money as a tool. And you can use your money as a tool to buy your time back or you can use your money as a tool to make you and attract you more money. That's what wealthy people do. And so you want to be able to use money in that way. Again, class of people are used to life dictating them. Man, what's up? How you feeling, man? I'm making it, man. Well, you ask somebody, what's up, man? Just closed out on a deal. You know, got a couple of business meetings. I love attacking life. And it don't have to be, it don't always have to be going the way you want. As long as you attacking it. Every day I get upset. Yo, I got an opportunity to go attack. Right? I got an opportunity to change something. To make sure, turn my last name into an asset. Right? Turn my last name into an asset. That's cool. Like own my 24 hours. That's the goal. Like the person who can own their 24 hours can create freedom. There's nothing wrong with spending money. There's nothing wrong with having luxuries. There's nothing wrong with having the nice things. Yes. But it's a matter of when can you actually afford it? You have to know when the right time is for you to have it. Because you want to first make yourself rich. And then, hey, blow. If you can afford it, do whatever you want. you