The Key Pillars Of Wealth-Building That School Doesn't Teach Us: Do You Know Them? | Dave Rubin

I do have worries about job displacement. The big issue I have right now is AI makes it really easy to envision why I need less humans working for my company. Humans are expensive and they're problematic. You know, they come with a lot of expenses, healthcare, retirement funds, stuff like that. There is a real incentive, and it's kind of a perverse incentive, but there's a real incentive for industry to replace humans when technology when it can. I keep in mind Keynes, who was a famous economist. He had a concept called technological displacement, where he said, if technology can do a job better than a human, you should replace the human. It just makes economic sense. He said, what you gotta be careful about is the pace at which you displace human labor. If you displace human labor so fast that you can't repurpose it to another constructive use, you end up creating a societal crisis. Why is it that the people who are for free markets and everything can't seem to market free markets? There has been an increase in the wealth divide for reasons we can get into or not, and people are looking at that and saying, hey, that's not very fair. Objectively, most of the policies that our government has pursued over the past couple decades have rewarded people who own assets, and that's a minority of the country. So the people who don't have financial assets, the regular people out there, all they get is the increase in their costs. They don't get the benefit of the rising asset prices, so the rich kind of move further and further away from the less rich. Welcome to Thoughtful Money. I'm Thoughtful Money founder and your host, Adam Taggart. About five weeks ago, I had the privilege to be interviewed by Dave Rubin on his hugely popular podcast, The Rubin Report. Connecting with Dave has been a big goal of mine for years. I'm a huge fan of his work, and he's got a massive audience that I think can benefit from the themes that we talk about here on Thoughtful Money. So appearing on his show was a real honor for me. We talked about the fundamentals of wealth building and what keeps most of the general public from learning them. I thought the discussion came out quite well, and I hope you think so too by the end of this video. Enjoy. I'm Dave Rubin, and yes, it is August, and I am still off the grid, but that does not stop us from bringing you fresh content. And joining me today is the host of the Thoughtful Money podcast, Adam Taggart. Adam, how are you? I'm great, Dave. Total honor to be here. I'm a huge fan. I appreciate that. As I said to you in the moments before we started recording, anyone with a nice, well-lit moss wall, pretty much good to go in my book. I appreciate the moss. Hey, no worries. You got to differentiate yourself in this industry. And before we start, Dave, let me, you know, some may say this is buttering up the host and maybe it's part of it, but I'm a huge fan of your work and what you do here. I'm a huge fan of your team, Connor, Phoenix, Christy, Joseph. By the way, you should kick that, do me a favor, kick that bucket of fish heads closer to Joseph. Let's let him have a cocktail. He does get it. You know, I keep it right out of reach. So he really has to, you know, late night really just has that extra effort to get the fish heads. Well, he's been working hard. He deserves at least a whole head at this point. But also, I think you do a great show, but just as a guy in the business, I'm really impressed by the business that you've built here. You know, not just with the Rubin Report and I think your videos are up for like 600,000 views a video right now. I mean, you're absolutely crushing it. But also, you know, what you've done with Locals, what you've done with the Creator Network, Copal, I mean, you're really building a business or an empire business off of all this. And I think you're doing it in a really fantastic way. Oh, wow. Well, I truly, truly appreciate that. And interestingly, that was sort of, although I wasn't going to say all those nice things about myself, that was kind of how I was going to start this interview because I did not learn much about finances in high school. And most people seem to not learn much about finances. They don't learn much about debt. They don't really understand credit cards. We don't really learn what the markets are. I'm sure you get a version of this question all the time. So all of the things that I built, I was kind of learning about them all the way. And that still goes to today where I'm learning things about all of this. So when I'm off the grid for August, I like doing shows that are a little more evergreen and we did some on lifestyle and health, but I thought finance would be perfect. And that's why we wanted to talk to you. So first off, are you surprised that still in 2026, there is such a lack of knowledge around all of these things so that a guy like me has to be learning on the fly as I'm building things just because I think they're kind of interesting. And then I have to surround myself with good people who can fill in all the blanks on the stuff that I don't know. Yeah, I'm not so much surprised as I'm just saddened. So what you just mentioned there, this dearth of financial education, financial literacy in our society, it's why I created Thoughtful Money in the first place. And Dave, I went to a good public schooling system. I then went to an Ivy League undergrad. I then got my MBA at Stanford. Nowhere in there was I given a practical course on money management, the practical things that we need to know in life, like how to manage credit card debt or how to take out a mortgage, all that type of stuff. So if I didn't get that, I just can't imagine what the vast majority of people who aren't going to as quote unquote, illustrious schools as I did. And what kind of put me on this journey was my parents got divorced when I was real young. I ended up, my mom ended up getting custody of us. So she was a single mom and she did not have any real financial background. She didn't have any real mentors to help her either. Her parents had already passed away. So I got to see firsthand what it's like to live your life without a lot of financial knowledge. And she ended up making poor decision after poor decision. And of course, the older you get in life, those decisions become more and more desperate because you're trying to make up for more and more lost time. And there's just way too many people in our society that I think are caught in that trap. And it's crazy because the question I like to ask people, Dave, is why do we value education? And I think the short answer most people come up with is because, well, I guess, because if I go to school, I'll be better off in life. Okay, great, that makes sense. What do you mean by better off in life? I think in most cases, people say, well, I'm going to make more money and I'll have more options as a result, right? But our schooling system doesn't teach us at all about money. I think most people watching this channel probably never received a single class anywhere in their education journey around the practicalities of personal finances or money management or the basics of investing. Right, I mean, I remember taking macroeconomics in college, I guess, maybe sophomore year, but it didn't talk about the granular stuff, like once we throw you out of this four-year university and you got to make it on your own. Yeah, you were learning some theory stuff. And usually, I guess, it's sort of lefty theory around these things at most schools, especially now. So what do you, if someone came to you right now, someone's listening to your podcast and they're just messaging you like, man, I'm just starting out in the world, I got a degree. Okay, I got some job. I'm trying to figure out the basics of what to do with my money and set myself up correctly. I know you have several kind of bulleted out ideas on the direction that you would send people and what they should be thinking about. Sure, so just trying to keep it simple, there are really three key muscles you need to develop to become financially well off. There's the earning muscle, there's the saving muscle, and there's the investing muscle. And generally, I recommend that people focus on developing those muscles in that order. Can't really save until you've got income coming in the door, right? And really, your whole financial foundation is built on how can I create value in the world that the world will pay me for, right? Pay me a good wage, or I go out and be an entrepreneur and create a company and people want to buy my product or my service. So I would start there. Then once you've got an income stream coming in, then it's all a matter of, okay, great, how do I contain my costs as much as possible so that I can take as much of that income that's coming in and put it away, right? And then once you've got that working well, then it becomes, okay, great, how can I put my money to work for me so that my money is increasingly making money so that I'm not quite as essential to continuing to build my wealth from here? So at a very high level, just turn that on, right? I think, again, if this is somebody who's brand new to all this, some key foundational things you need to know are compounding and how compounding works. Humans' brains, we think linearly. We don't think exponentially. And compounding is definitely an exponential function. And this is wonderful. So when you put money away over time, that money continues to increase by the return on whatever that money's getting. And the absolute gains you get as you go along in the timeline get bigger and bigger and bigger. This is why wealth generally is associated with age. The older people are, they've had more time to benefit from compounding. And so a really key element there is the earlier in life you can start saving, the much more you can benefit from that over time. So a good example is if you're 18 years old, if you put $5,000 away that year, and then you just put $5,000 away year after year after year, you're gonna be a millionaire by the time you hit 50. And you'll be like 3 1⁄2 million by the time you're 75. Can you lay out a little bit, you don't have to go into every specific on that, but a little bit of how that math works? Because I think people hear that and they're like, that can't possibly be in their head. They're just like, that makes no sense. And Trump, obviously, with these Trump accounts and what he's doing with Michael Dell, he's trying to do a version of sort of what you just described like right there with the public-private partnership. Yeah, exactly. And so, I mean, the simplest thing I could do, and maybe I'll just show it here, Dave, real quick, is just build yourself a very simple little spreadsheet. So- Ooh, I like this. A guest with a, this is a first time, this is a first time Rubin Report happening right now. We got a spreadsheet on the show. I hope you're not gonna show anything else you don't want us to see there. Yeah, hopefully not, hopefully not. But here's just a simple spreadsheet. This is the math I just mentioned. You plop 5,000 as your starting amount, 8% is your annual return. We can make that bigger or smaller or however you like. And then you put in how much you wanna add every year. And then here, I just show you the math. By age 18, when you're starting out, well, you've made 400 bucks in interest that year at 8%. As that number that you have in terms of total capital continues to grow, it's still compounding at an 8% rate every year. So that 8% becomes a bigger and bigger number. So you can see the numbers start getting pretty big here. Now, $5,000 might be a lot when you're 18 or in your early 20s to put away, but it's not that much if you're 30 or 40 years old. So if you wanna say, well, I think on average over the course of my life, I could put away $10,000 a year. Well, bang, you're a millionaire here sometime in your mid 40s. And obviously, people can put, as you have windfalls in life or inheritances or family things, you can add that in here. These numbers get even bigger. So again, like I said, the human brain doesn't really think exponentially, which is why sometimes a spreadsheet helps, but it's a phenomenal force. Now, what's really important to remember is it can work for you, like in the example I just mentioned, or it can work against you, right? So if you have debt and debt has an interest rate and every year you've got to pay, let's say 8% on your debt, it's exactly what I showed you just working in reverse. And this is what I think is really criminal is we don't teach this to kids in our schooling system. And I don't know if you remember Dave, but when I went to college, the first day I went to my college mailbox, I opened it up. It was just crammed full of credit card offers. Oh yeah, I used to get them all the time, all the time. All the time. So we push people out into a world where they are getting marketed to take on credit all the time from everywhere. And yet we don't educate them about the dynamics of credit. So what happens? Well, they very quickly find themselves in a hole and they're saying, Jesus, I'm doing everything I can to pay this damn credit card bill every month, but it's just not going down, right? That $20 pizza you bought late one night with your new credit card in college ends up costing you like 450 bucks over the life of- Yeah, I did a lot of balance transfers when they were zero APR back in the day. And then eventually it caught up to me because eventually they run out. Yeah. Okay, so just moving on real quick for some of the basics here, and Dave, you can interrupt me at any point in time. So understand how compounding works both in your favor and against it. And obviously when you learn about how it can work against you, you want to minimize its ability to do so. In general, take on as little debt as you can, or at the very least, understand the difference between unproductive and productive debt, right? A productive debt might be something like a degree to go to school that's going to help you earn a degree that you're going to make a lot of money with, or it might be a capital investment in a new business that you're starting. It's debt that can hopefully create a stream of future cash flows that will pay off the debt and then some, right? But then there's a lot of unproductive debt in my pizza examples, a great example of that, right? It's just debt you're spending on a one-time fling and then all you have afterward is memories and a bunch of debt, right? So understand the difference between the two. Then understanding inflation. Inflation is essentially the erosion of the purchasing powers of our dollars over time. So even though I gave you that chart of all the money nicely growing over time, what it can actually buy on a per dollar basis is also diminishing over that period of time. So a good financial advisor will tell you, look, the purpose of investing is not to get rich. I mean, that's a goal. And if you do it right, you can get rich. But the number one objective of investing is to keep the money that you've saved, your net worth, at or above the rate of inflation going forward so that at least it's going to buy as much as it buys today in the future, if not more, if you're able to grow it faster than the rate of inflation. And of course, a lot of people, it's called a silent tax. It's something that a lot of people just don't notice is going on. Now that's been revealed. It's been a little more in your face lately, coming out of COVID when inflation spiked to 9%. And even though it's come down to whatever it is today, it's sort of in the 3% range, that's the official number. I think the actual number that most people experience in their daily lives is substantially higher than that. So you want to make sure that when you're investing, you're putting your money there so that it will grow hopefully more than 5%, 6%, 7%, which is probably where the actual real increase in cost of living is these days. Let's pause on kind of the granular stuff for a second. We can get back to that, but more on like the sort of philosophic side. It seems to me that a lot of people have financial problems because of the nature of their relationship with money, that they just think either money is the root of all evil, or now there's this weird hatred of capitalism in America, capitalism, and there's this seeming ascendancy of socialism that they somehow fundamentally think that success and creation and all of these things are bad. And that seems to me to be a major impediment to accomplishing a lot of the things that you'd like people to accomplish. That's absolutely true. And it's interesting, because I think at the same time, Dave, there's sort of a vilification of the wealthy and the rich. And let me underscore folks- Sort of, you're putting it mildly if you've been watching my show lately. I probably am. And I want to be sensitive. Like there are reasons to be frustrated with how our current socioeconomic dynamics are working right now. In other words, the wealth gap has been increasing over time. And there are some real grievances there. But in my opinion, and I think you think similarly, Dave, is the solution is not abandoning the capitalist free market model that has created more prosperity for more people than ever in the course of human history by a long shot. The solution doesn't lie in abandoning that and potentially embracing the solution that we know has a 0% track record of success, right? So I just want to note at the beginning here that there are some, I think, valid claims of things that we could be doing better, but the solution lies in fixing what's not working perfectly with capitalism versus abandoning it. But to your point, there is a vilification. But I also think at the same time in parallel, there's an envy, right? There's an envy that these bastards, these rich guys are enjoying a quality of life that I feel like I deserve. And the solution for that is I should take what they have, right? And of course, we're seeing a lot of political momentum around that right now. So it's funny, you know, money is, it's extremely measurable, right? I can create a spreadsheet like I just showed you, right? But what's funny is there's a great field of study out there called behavioral economics. And behavioral economics basically says, yes, while money itself is inherently quantifiable, we make very irrational decisions around it because we are human animals, right? And there's a video, Dave, I don't know if you've got a chance to put the clip in here now, but maybe we can put the link in the description for folks. Yeah, we'll throw some B-roll in and we'll put the link. Okay, but it's an experiment being run by a behavioral scientist, a behavioral economist. And he basically shows how not just humans, but most mammals are hardwired for justice. And what he uses to describe this is he does a test with these two capuchin monkeys and he gives them both cucumbers for, the monkey is supposed to press a button. And then if he does, he gets a little cucumber from the researcher. And the monkeys are happy to do this all day long, getting cucumbers. Monkeys think cucumbers are awesome. But then the researcher starts giving one of the monkeys a grape and monkeys love grapes. And so what happens is the monkey who gets the cucumber, pushes the button, gets his little reward, then sees his buddy push the button to get a grape. So he rushes and pushes the button expecting a grape. He gets a cucumber again and he chucks it at the researcher. He starts banging his fist. Yeah, and I think the reason why I mentioned all this is just to show that the sense of justice and injustice is hardwired in all of us. And if we feel that we are being taken advantage of, that if we are somehow being unfairly treated or victimized by a group of people or a society, we get really angry, right? I mean, we get kind of rageful. And I think that's what's going on right now is there has been an increase in the wealth defied for reasons we can get into or not. And people are looking at that and saying, hey, that's not very fair. So these are corporate bailouts and things like that where it seems like the rich, I think objectively most of the policies that our government has pursued over the past couple of decades, even if they were made with the best of intent in the moment, have rewarded people who own assets. They've ended up pushing stock prices, the prices of financial assets higher. And that's a minority of the country, right? And oftentimes the policies that have pushed those assets higher have done so by increasing the money supply in the system. Which more money asset prices will go up in response, but also more money prices of everything will go up. So the people who don't have financial assets, the regular people out there, all they get is the increase in their costs, right? They don't get the benefit of the rising asset prices. So the rich kind of move further and further away from the less rich, right? So there's that, I think, objective thing going on, but I think a lot of people, both politically inside the country and outside our country have used that as a lever point to divide this nation and to sell this victimized victimhood narrative to the dispossessed and the younger population who are looking and saying, look, it's a harder road to climb than I have to climb to try to afford a house, a middle-class lifestyle than my parents had. And I'm pissed off about that. And people say, great, here's where you should direct that anger. And I think that's the very toxic dynamic that's going on right now. We should not be vilifying the successful, the job creators, the people that are trying to drive this economy forward, because I think that's where the answer lies. And I can talk more about that in a moment, but I'll take it. Yeah, well, actually, let's pause there for a second. And I'm going to read an ad that pays for this program, which I think makes sense relative to what we're talking about. And I think you're gonna like where we're going with this, Adam. Guys, this video is sponsored by Kalshi. And as you know, it's like buying or selling a stock, very apropos, except the line isn't set by some algorithm working against you. It moves based on where the money actually goes. It shows where people are putting their money, not what the media wants you to believe. Maybe I can get an answer from Adam on this. So will the S&P's 500 annual return beat Bitcoins this year? Well, here's what the Kalshi markets are showing. If you put 100 on, yes, the S&P 500, then you can earn $108, correct? Guys, download the Kalshi app and use code ReubenReport to get $10 when you trade $10. That's K-L-S-H-I, Kalshi. Put your money where your prediction is. Adam, you wanna take a stab at that one real quick? You think the S&P's gonna outperform Bitcoin by the end of the year? I think so, because it's got a huge head start so far this year. Yeah, it does seem like it. Bitcoin's a little banged up. Well, let me ask you, relative to what you were just talking about there, and that there's a certain set of people who are weaponizing sort of perceived injustice, while at the same time you're saying there are legitimate concerns about the way the system has worked and all those things, how much of it do you think is sort of baked in mindset with people? And what I mean by that, you may have heard me talk about this on the show, but the one thing that I really want that I don't have is I wanna have an indoor basketball court one day. Like, that is my dream, and I will work to make that happen. And a few months ago, I was in Austin at Joe Lonsdale's house, and I'm sure you're familiar with Joe, co-founder of Palantir with Teal, and he's done great things, and he actually invested a small amount in locals, but he was a great advisor for me more than he was there for the money, and that actually meant more to me than the money. And I walked into his house, I did his podcast. I didn't know he had an indoor basketball court, and as I'm walking out, he's like, oh, you might wanna see this. And I opened the door, and like, my jaw hit the floor. I was like, this is the, but the reason I'm mentioning this is I was not jealous for a second. I've been around people that have tremendous wealth, and I've always been kind of inspired by it. Like, to me, it's like, wow, what else could I do? What else could I do to either have that or be part of this world or something? Like, I'm not wired to look at something and be like, oh, I should have that or be angry at that, but I think some people actually seem to be wired in that way, too, and I think, so I think we're fighting a version of human nature. Well, I think absolutely that's a big part of the case, but I think that's gonna be true no matter what environment we're in, right? But I think what's going on in parallel to that, kind of like what we were talking about earlier, is I think there actually is an intentional indoctrination going on to try to shift people. You've got the hero mindset, Dave, right? I want to change my station. I want to change my situation. I want a basketball court. Great, I'm gonna go forth and go get that, right? The flip side of that is the victim mentality. Oh my gosh, these rich people have basketball courts. I'm never gonna have one, because life sucks, right? I think there's an intentional indoctrination going on right now towards that, and you talk about this all the time. This is in our education system, and look, I saw this firsthand. I mentioned I went to an Ivy League undergrad. I went to Brown University. You went to Brown, yeah, yeah. Yeah, this was the Wuhan Virology Institute of the woke movement. This is where it was all created and incubated. It was called the PC movement back there, the politically correct movement, right? I got to see the genesis of this, and it metastasized into what became woke, but in parallel with that, colleges kind of became these ideology madrasas of this new way of thinking, and a lot of it is, look, rich, bad, poor, good. We need to seize the means of production from them. We need to seize their assets and stuff like that, and I think, sadly, that's really infected the mindset of anyone kind of under 30 here in America because it's pretty much what they've heard through the education system, and I actually want to ask you this, David, but it's a question I've had for you watching your show a lot. Yeah, yeah. I don't hear much, and I don't personally like to take too much of a Republican-Democrat point of view on my side just because I think that financial literacy should be for anybody. I mean, I'll talk to you whether you've got white hair, no hair, or blue hair as long as, I think everybody can benefit from being more financially literate, but very clearly it seems that the education system was captured a good while ago by a specific ideology. I have not heard much about, okay, if we think that went way too far, what's the movement to actually correct that? I mean, I know Betsy DeVos is trying to dismantle the general federal department of education, but that doesn't do much about what's happening nationally in every state and every private college. You know, it's a great question. I'm gonna let you do most of the talking here, but if by the time this airs, what we're doing right now, I had just taped an interview with Chris Rufo, who I'm sure you're familiar with from the Manhattan Institute, who's really been one of the kind of leaders on getting wokeness out of the institutions and do we have to reform these institutions or burn them down or build parallel things and all of this. And we actually got into that, that why is it that the capitalists, why is it that the people who are for free markets and everything can't seem to market free markets properly and what do we have to do at the educational level? I would say you probably should model it after the state that I'm living in, Florida, which is now doing school vouchers, we're doing charter schools. Ironically, we now have, I think, number one public schools in the nation when 30 years ago, as I'm sure you know, Florida had basically the worst public schools because everyone went to Florida to retire and die so they weren't putting money into it and now it's completely flipped. So, I mean, I would think that you broadly agree with me that the more choice you give to the system and we have, you know, there's tons of pod learning now here and everything else, like that's the only way out. I don't know that you can go in and really and truly reform the inner city schools right now in New York or in Chicago or LA or elsewhere. I think it's gonna be, you know, cities are gonna have highly controlled governmental brainwashing factories that are gonna teach a lot of the wrong things you were just talking about. And then I think a certain set of people outside of cities are just gonna do it a very different way. Gosh, I mean, I hope you're right. I would like to see a more concerted movement than that only because this is, under the best case scenario, this is gonna take many years. I mean, we're probably talking decades and you got a lot of the embedded teaching and administration, you know, talent that are there that they're gonna be there for the next 30, 40 years or so, right? I mean, as Maxwell Planck said that, you know, science advances one funeral at a time. And I think the education system sort of changes the same thing too, unless we do something pretty dramatic. Now, from my perspective, when people ask me, my thoughts on higher education, it's generally, even though I went to these very, you know, highbrow schools, and Dave, look, you sort of slammed the inner city schools. And I agree, there's a lot of really poor schools across the country, especially in inner cities. But I think the bigger problem, the stuff that we're talking about, I don't think they're teaching anything at those really poor performing schools in the inner cities. Oh, yeah, right. I meant that more on like the woke side of things and just all the other bad ideas. I don't think they're teaching wrong economics there. They're probably teaching no economics there. Yeah, they're teaching none. But I think a lot of the kind of the woke stuff that we're talking about, the socialist stuff, that's happening at kind of the more prestigious institutions. So, you know, again, I don't necessarily have the answer on how to fix all that, but I think we're going to need a scalpel to really do it well, not just let time eventually replace it. But I do agree that competition is a big part, you know, show models that perform better. But when people ask me about higher education, I generally say, I almost think it should be the plan B. One of the things that we don't do well in the education system besides financial literacy is just, Dave, who are you? What do you want to do with your life? What's important to you? What kind of job do you think you might want to do? Do you even know what jobs are out there? Let's expose you to different industries and different types of jobs, and you can determine, hey, I think I kind of like this direction, great. And we'll help you learn more about it. Well, maybe we'll help you get some internships there. We'll help you get some real world experience. And so I'm much more about early in life, you know, developing the self-understanding of the trajectory that you might want to take. And I'm not saying you need to know that you want to be a dental hygienist, specifically from age five, but sort of like, all right, I'm more of a STEM person versus an arts person or, you know, whatever. And then getting exposed to the types of professions and jobs that you might want to work in. And so I'm a huge fan of both going into the practical trades and Mike Rowe is a hero of mine and I love what he's doing out there in the world. And to me, college used to not be for everybody. And I think it was for a good reason. And you really only should go to college if that degree is the next logical stepping stone to get into the type of profession you want to get in, right, you want to be a doctor, you want to be a lawyer, that type of thing. Otherwise, I think it's get out there in the real world and start getting real world experience, start developing your marketable skills and how to create value that you can get paid for. And I think the education system actually could kind of create kind of like a hybrid partnership with private industry around that, but we're not there right now. As you guys know, I recently banged up my shoulder and it's been a painful reminder of how quickly pain can get in the way of your everyday life. 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Visit relieffactor.com or call 1-800 My executive producer, Phoenix, who's a huge fan of yours, was my intern when he was in college. I offered him a job. I said, listen, drop out of college now, come with me. He was like, you know, my parents really want me to finish college. Six months later, I get the call, Dave, I'd like to drop out of college. And now he's my executive producer. That was, you know, six, seven years ago. And I've got a couple other college dropouts here. So yeah, the world has changed very fast. So to that point, though, now with this AI situation, you know, there's, it seems to me, there's a very, like, bipolar attitude towards AI. You know, it's either, like, the robots are taking over, there's nothing we can do, or, you know, some other, or, like, we'll completely use it to modernize everything and it's gonna be wonderful for everybody. I'm into it. I tend to lean a little more on the positive side of things generally. So I feel like we just have, as I say to my guys every day with the show, let's keep integrating all these new technologies and make, you know, we made some AI videos this week and we've done AI, Dave, and we're figuring out ways to automate some things. But I think these can all enhance jobs. What's your general take on which way this is gonna go? All right, I'm very conflicted. And I would say, Dave, I'm long-term on your train, right? I've got no doubts that it's gonna be transformative to the economy. There's gonna be just wondrous things that it's going to unlock for us going forward, both in terms of, you know, growing the economy, but also just enhancing quality of life on a lot of different things, right? So I'm on that train. I do have worries about job displacement. And the big issue I have right now is AI makes it really easy to envision why I need less humans working for my company, right? And to be honest, just to deliver the hard truth, humans are expensive and they're problematic, right? You know, they come with a lot of expenses, healthcare, retirement funds, stuff like that. I gotta feed these guys every day, it never ends. They don't show up. They wanna go home and sleep. They wanna take vacations. You put too few fish heads in the bucket and all of a sudden it's an HR lawsuit, right? Yeah, I know. So there is a real incentive and it's kind of a perverse incentive, but there's a real incentive for industry to replace humans with technology when it can. And so I can see that displacement really closely. When you ask the question, okay, if AI is gonna create a thousand new different types of jobs for people, that sounds awesome. And I believe that will happen. The question is, okay, give me some examples, right? And most of the examples I've heard is, well, it's gonna be great for solopreneurs, right? You're gonna be able to create a world-class company and you might not need any employees. You just create your own agents and if they're awesome, you're the next Google, fantastic. But Dave, that's a thin slice of the far right-tailed distribution of the entire workforce. I have not heard the answer to, okay, where are we gonna put 40 million service job workers? Right, and that's where it's gonna hit first because it's going to replace housekeepers first and it's going to replace landscapers and security guards and things of that nature first. Large delivery guys, I mean, we know it's happening already. Amazon's delivering via drone in some places. Yeah, yeah, it's already happening. And I would say you're largely right, Dave. The thing that's different with AI than most of these other transformations is it goes both ways up and down the job skill stack. So a lot of the AI software stuff is increasingly eating the white-collar jobs, even the coders, right? But the coders, the accountants, the financial analysts, all that stuff, that can be increasingly be automated by software. To your point, we've got two revolutions that are going on right now. We've got the AI smart software revolution with the robotics revolution going on. And that is really what's gonna take a lot of the low-skill job off, right? The low-skill jobs, it's gonna eat them up, right? Because there's, you know, robots are the things that do what intelligence can do in the real world. So they can deliver packages, they can bring people their fries when they order fries from McDonald's, that type of thing. What would you say? Have you heard Elon talk about how basically so many of the tasks that we spend so much of our day on will become so much easier and automated and you won't have to worry about so many other things because your laundry will be folded, your coffee machine is gonna just make the coffee and walk it to you. We're just gonna do all these things. We're gonna have 3D printing, printing 3D printers that we can then put on the moon to then print other things that will get us to, like we're gonna do so many things and it will so exponentially happen faster that it will sort of unlock a whole other way of looking at the world that at this point that's really sci-fi. We can't really think about it in some sense. So Dave, I'm with you and I think we should strive for that. I'm not making a Luddite argument that we should roll the technology back. But I do, I keep in mind Keynes, who was a famous economist, Maynard Keynes. He had a concept called technological displacement where he said if technology can do a job better than a human, you should replace the human. It just makes economic sense. He said what you gotta be careful about is the pace at which you displace human labor. If you displace human labor so fast that you can't repurpose it to another constructive use, you end up creating a societal crisis, the cost of which is often larger than the benefit you get from the technology. So that's what I kind of worry about here is not, if we're looking at this in a 50-year time horizon, Dave, I'm like, AI's gonna be awesome, right? We're gonna be out exploring the stars, right? In the next five to 10 years, I do worry that there's a mass jobs displacement where we can't put those people to productive use again fast enough, and we just create a very idle, dependent class. And even those folks that make the argument of, yeah, but your coffee will be delivered to you, and you'll have all this time to learn languages and create art and become your best self. I just hold up my phone and I say, look, we gave everybody the world knowledge for free. And what do we do? We watch pornography and cat videos on it, right? We do not do a good job of stepping into our better self. I don't watch cat videos. So anyways, there's that potential concern of jobs displacement. I hope I'm wrong, Dave, I really do. But I think what I don't hear us talking about is, okay, if that happens, how are we gonna address it? The only thing I've heard so far kind of on the national discourse level is, well, we'll go to UBI, and UBI is basically we'll just pay people to basically not work, right? Which we already know how that works out. You create a huge dependent class. Also, from an economic standpoint, I mentioned inflation earlier. What happens when you send people a whole bunch of checks? Well, the price of everything immediately goes up equal to what the checks were, and the next check you get, buy not nearly enough, right? Guys, summer is the perfect time for a reset, but losing fat, supporting muscle, and improving metabolic health can be difficult without a clear plan. 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When you subscribe to the five-day program, visit prolonlife.com slash Dave, that's P-R-O-L-O-N-L-I-F-E dot com slash Dave to claim your 15% and your bonus gift. Right, we basically all end up like we're in Wall-E, that Pixar movie from, you know, 40 years ago or whatever. Well, at least they're fat and happy. I think we might be fat and really unhappy. Well, until the end, it doesn't work out that well for those fat people. Let me ask you something else on, we're kind of jumping around here, but coming back to putting aside all the future stuff for a second and coming back here. How do you, if you are someone that now is not the first person we were talking about who's just getting in and figuring out how, but now you're somebody who's, you're okay now. You're, let's say, middle-aged, you've made a little money. What tricks would you give to somebody when trying to figure out who should manage their money and the types of relationships you should have with people that are looking at their money and looking after their money and doing things? That's a fantastic question. And I actually have a write-up that I'll send to you afterwards, Dave. Maybe we can just link it in the comments below. So folks can actually- Yeah, yeah, send it to our guys. We'll link it. Okay, great. But first and foremost, I think you've got to determine what type of investor you are. So you asked a question about a specific type, but I just wanted to clarify. Generally, there's two types of investors. There's the DIY investor. Hey, I think I've got the skills. I've got the desire to manage my own money. I don't trust anybody else. I want to be captain of my own ship. Great. The other one is, is no, wait a minute. I don't want to do that. I've got, life is busy. You know, I'm much better off focusing on the things that I do well, like earning my money by being good at my job or whatever. But I don't want to learn the ins and outs of investing. I don't want to have to pay attention to stuff all the time. I want someone smarter and more experienced than me to handle that, right? So I'm definitely on the latter side. On the latter side. And I think most people are. And honestly, I think a good chunk of the DIY people are kind of fooling themselves, you know? And I would say, just to double check yourself, just look at your past 10 year history of how you've performed versus the market. And if the numbers aren't good, then maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the DIY category, right? So if you've decided, okay, I think I want a financial quarterback to manage all this for me. First and foremost, I would find a firm that's been in business for, I would say, at least 10 years. But a firm that's built up a brand and had to go through a couple different market cycles. But it's not a fly-by-night. One, you don't want to be, ideally, you don't want to be a young professional's, you know, guinea pig starting out. And while they're learning from the school of hard knocks, you know, your portfolio is getting beaten up along the way. Secondly, again, you want a firm that's proven to have staying power, has a brand to protect, all that type of stuff. Are you telling me I shouldn't be trading penny stocks with Stratton Oakmont right now? Personally, I don't think so. Well, but that's an important thing. I got to call my guy, remind me after the show. Okay, call him after this. But a good financial advisor will first sit down with you and just listen. And so they'll say, Dave, tell me all about yourself. And what they want to find out is, one, what your current situation is, but more importantly, what are your life goals? What goals are you trying to hit by when? And then they'll start working with you about, okay, well, what do we need to do to try to hit that goal in the time that you want to hit it by? And a very important part of that conversation is going to be your risk tolerance, right? So Dave, a guy like you, you know, who's willing to buy, you know, penny stocks and whatever, you know, they're like, okay, you can take a little bit more risk. But a lot of people, especially probably a fair amount watching this video who are near retirement age or maybe in retirement, you know, they should not be stretching for risk that if it goes against them, where they don't have enough time to recover from that. Right, so you really want to have a guy that sits and listens a lot. Obviously, you want to make sure that they're, they don't have any, you know, major judgments against them by FINRA or the SEC. And this is now my personal bias creeping in. For a lot of reasons, Dave, the markets have performed very well for the past 15 plus years. We had a little soft patch in 2022, but pretty much since coming out of the great financial crisis, the markets have delivered returns that, average returns that we really haven't seen much before. And there's a plethora of reasons to believe that that party won't continue, at least at the pace that it has. And there's a lot of growing evidence to indicate that the odds of what we could call a lost generation, sorry, a lost decade ahead of us is dangerously high. And so I think you should still play the game. By that, do you mean that that wealth will be wiped out or that just, it will just not, the rate will just slow down? The rate- Yeah, so when you talk about a lost decade, it basically means if we took a snapshot of my net worth at the start of it, in the end, it's pretty much the same. I made no gains over that decade and I lost money, I lost purchasing power due to inflation. But lost decades never go flat sideways. They tend to be really volatile. So they usually have some really pretty big market drawdowns in there, which makes them even more dangerous, right? Because the stock market go down by 30% and then you get shaken out because you're like, oh my God, I'm losing everything. And then the market recovers and you've sold and you're sitting there thinking, oh my God, I want to get back in, but the market's too high now. I'm going to wait for it to come back down. It might never do. We still hear calls from people, I still get calls from people who have pretty much been out of the market since 2008 because they just went to all cash and then the market recovered faster than they thought. So the point is, is these last decades can be very damaging, especially if you don't have decades to recover from them. So if you're 50 plus, you really got to pay attention here. So my personal bias here would be to talk to a financial advisor who A, understands that risk and B, has a really good demonstrated track record of risk management, of tools of saying, hey, look, we're not going to jump out of the party yet while it's still going on, but we are going to have a lot of provisions in place such that if it does start to roll over, if we do start to have a really major correction here, we've taken steps to really reduce your vulnerability to that. I think perhaps we should leave it there in that it's August and I only want to bludgeon my people with so much information at one time, but this has been a great intro. I'd love to do this every other month or so and just do a catch up on where everything is financially, because I do want to focus a little more on this type of stuff. And particularly if the midterms go well, I sense we will get to some 80s style boom. That is what I really think could happen if Trump goes fully unleashed. I don't know if I'm crazy or I'm a dreamer, but I think it's possible. And I want my audience to be set up properly for it. And if it goes the other way, I want them to be set up so that they have some protections. Fantastic. And just to let you know, my bias here, I actually think the administration is doing a lot of the right things economically. I mean, they really are doing everything they can to spur economic growth in a sustainable way as possible in the future by making a lot of the investments that we really needed for a long time to unlock this future growth potential. So I'm there with you on the optimistic side about the economy. One note I'll just make, and we can delve into this in a future discussion. Your economy and the stock market are not the same thing and while they have been trending in kind of lockstep for much of the past 15 years, they don't necessarily have to going forward. And so we can talk about that in more depth. Adam, I thoroughly enjoyed it. We will continue this and you can, on the DL, figure out how I can get a basketball court, indoor basketball court. Sounds great. We'll make that the big hairy goal for the next year. All right, thanks, man. Appreciate it. You too. Dave, have a wonderful vacation. Well, I really enjoyed that experience, folks. I hope you did so too. I felt very honored and very optimistic that Dave said he'd like to have me come back on every couple of months or so. I'd be very happy to do that. And if you're a first-time viewer of Thoughtful Money, if you've come over from Dave's audience, welcome. And I just want to end with a couple quick notes here. One, if you enjoyed the video, please do me a favor and hit the like button and then click on the subscribe button below, as well as that little bell icon right next to it. 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So you get basically a $31 profit for free. I'm totally happy if you do that. I just want to make sure as many people as possible pay the lowest price as possible to attend the conference. And with that, again, I hope you enjoyed this video. Would love to hear your comments about it in the comment section below. And I very much hope to reappear on Dave's channel. And if I do, I will hopefully be able to pull that video over to show you then like I've just did with this one. So thanks for watching everybody. And we'll see you again soon.