Episode #476: Ramit Sethi on his Netflix Series ‘How to Get Rich’

Episode #476: Ramit Sethi on his Netflix Series ‘How to Get Rich’

 

Guest: Ramit Sethi is an entrepreneur, author of I Will Teach You to Be Rich, and star of the Netflix show releasing April 18th called How to Get Rich.

Date Recorded: 4/11/2023     |     Run-Time: 1:00:51

Summary: In today’s episode, Ramit gives us a preview of what to expect from his new Netflix show, which he describes as a mix of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy & Marie Kondo but for money. He spends time explaining what he means by helping people live their rich life. Then we walk through some of his rules and thoughts around money – whether that’s flying business class for any trip under four hours or not buying into the American idea that everyone should buy a home.

Comments or suggestions? Interested in sponsoring an episode? Email us Feedback@TheMebFaberShow.com

Links from the Episode:

  • 2:00 – Welcome Ramit to the show
  • 2:10 – Summary of his Ramit’s new Netflix show – How to Get Rich
  • 7:50 – Why money shouldn’t be a taboo topic of discussion
  • 12:30 – People’s biggest hangups with money
  • 16:11 – How much can people/couples change about their money habits and mindsets
  • 23:00 – ‘Money rules’ as something everyone should practice
  • 28:30 – The money dials exercise
  • 39:00 – Ramit’s thinking about housing: Jason Zweig article
  • 42:20 – Personal finance is about rationalizing money not just the numbers
  • 46:35 – Ramit’s trolls on social media
  • 51:15 – Biggest thing Ramit’s changed his mind about when it comes to money
  • 53:06 – What belief he holds that most disagree with
  • 54:20 – Great books about spending; Die with Zero by Bill Perkins
  • 54:46 – Most memorable investment; The Best Way To Add Yield To Your Portfolio
  • 57:36 – Finding Ramit: iwillteachyoutoberich.com

 

Transcript:

Welcome Message:

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Disclaimer:

Meb Faber is the co-founder and chief investment officer at Cambria Investment Management. Due to industry regulations, he will not discuss any of Cambria’s funds on this podcast. All opinions expressed by podcast participants are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of Cambria Investment Management or its affiliates. For more information, visit cambriainvestments.com.

Meb:

Hello, my friends. We have our first episode with a Netflix star today. Our guest is Ramit Sethi, entrepreneur, author of I Will Teach You To Be Rich, and star of the new Netflix show releasing tomorrow called How to Get Rich. In today’s episode, Ramit gives us a preview of what to expect from his new show, which he describes as a mix of Queer Eye for the straight guy and Marie Kondo, but for money. He spends time explaining what he means by helping people live their rich life. We all spend so much time on this show and elsewhere thinking about how to make money, how to optimize our investments, but so little time thinking about how to spend it. We walk through some of those rules and thoughts around money, whether that’s flying business class or not buying into the American dream that everyone must buy a home. Please enjoy this episode with Ramit Sethi.

Meb:

Ramit, welcome to the show.

Ramit:

Thanks for having me.

Meb:

Where do we find you today?

Ramit:

I am in LA. Excited about what comes out tomorrow, the new Netflix show. Just counting down the hours basically.

Meb:

Give us the overview. I want to hear a little bit about what’s the vibe for the show. You didn’t name it exactly after your book. Surprised me. We got How To Get Rich, listeners, go cue it Up. Comes out this week. But you didn’t call it I Will Teach You To Be Rich. Give us the thesis for the show.

Ramit:

Think Queer Eye for money or Marie Kondo for money. And the magic of money is that there hasn’t been a TV show on money in over a decade. That’s because it’s really hard. People think of money as boring. They think of it as restrictive. They think of some old dude with a pocket protector busting out his Excel spreadsheet. I don’t want to watch that. I literally, Ramit Sethi, do not want to watch somebody doing financial analysis on TV. That’s not what I turn on Netflix-

Meb:

I want to know what the one was over 10 years ago. What are we talking about, family ties? I don’t even know what would have been back then. Press your Luck.

Ramit:

No. I mean, back in the day, Suze Orman had a show on CNBC, and that was personal finance oriented. That was almost 20 years ago. There have been variations: There’s Shark Tank, there’s various business makeover shows, but nothing about money. So this is a big bet, and I think part of it is, my philosophy with money is that it’s more than just a series of numbers. A lot of people look at their finances and they see a spreadsheet. I look at it, I see a family trip to Disneyland. I see a beautiful cashmere coat. I see them being able to pick up their kids from school every day. So to be able to show that on a screen is awesome. The magic of the show is that all I know about the guests who I meet over eight episodes, there’s a variety of guests, individuals, couples, I know their name and I have their financials. That’s it. That’s all I know.

Meb:

Were you sourcing them? Netflix source them, the production company?

Ramit:

No, we have casting. We have casting who finds them. So I told them, “Here’s the type of people who I work with on my podcast. I work with couples. And here’s the stories that are really interesting. Here’s the stories that I think people in America and around the world need to hear.” And then of course they have their own perspective, from a TV perspective, what makes a great show. So we put our heads together, and then casting goes out and finds them.

Meb:

I saw on Twitter someone was trying to say, “Hey, this is like the Indian Dave Ramsey,” and you’re like, “No, hold on. Hard stop. Well, that’s not what we’re going for here.”

Ramit:

First of all, I believe in masks. Second of all, I don’t promise people 12% returns, which is bullshit. And third, I don’t tell people to cut back on coffee as if it’s going to change their life. It doesn’t. $3 a day is not going to change anybody’s life. Let’s stop talking about that, please.

Meb:

One of our early podcast sponsors is a LA roaster, Bar Nine, and I just reached out to them. I said, “We’ll give you guys some free sponsorship if you send us a free coffee subscription.” I think they’ve forgotten at this point because they keep sending us coffee, and it’s amazing, but we can meet up there one day.

Ramit:

I love it.

Meb:

How many episodes? Is this eight, 16?

Ramit:

Eight episodes. Yep, eight. They all drop it once on April 18th. You’ll find somebody, I think, like you. Everyone’s got somebody. Somebody might be in debt, somebody might have a partner who just doesn’t want to see money the same way you do, and you see how we work the process together.

Meb:

30 minutes an hour, what do you got?

Ramit:

Should be about 40 minutes an episode. The cool thing is, unlike a network TV here, we don’t have to make room for ad spots. So I mean it’s pretty dramatic. Some people are ready to make a big change. Some people come just like a fitness journey. They’re like, okay, they show up at the gym, maybe they get a trainer, they’re ready to make a change. Other people, people are people. Some people change, some people don’t. That’s how people are, and that’s real. So that’s what I wanted to have in this show.

Meb:

Your messaging seems to have really gotten tight over the years around this concept of the rich life. That seems to me at least my perspective. Tell us a little bit about the framework when you sit down with these people, what you’re messaging and what your general big points are.

Ramit:

I want people to think about their rich life. I want them to think about it intensely, vividly, and specifically. One of the first questions I ask people, for example, who come on my podcast, I’ll ask them, “What’s your rich life?” And roughly 90% of people say the same thing, “Ramit, I want to do what I want when I want.” I go, “Oh, okay.” They kind of pause for applause. I go, “Oh, that’s so clever.” And then I go, “So out of curiosity, what do you want?” And they just stare at me and blink. And that’s because most of us have never actually thought about what our rich life is. When we think about money, it’s just a series of episodic transactions, one after another. Should I get an extra-large Coke? We got to pay for kids’ soccer and on and on, and then we do that until we die. It’s so depressing. Even the media framing around money is words like challenges or stock drops. Or these days, T-bills, who really gives a shit about T-bills? Why should an average ordinary person even be thinking about T-bills? It’s totally irrelevant.

Meb:

Your second most popular tweet measured by likes is a good one, I think, back in 2020. So, really at the peak of the crazy mania. You’re like, “Where people try to save money: $3 coffee.” Although come on, Ramit, I don’t know where you’re drinking $3 coffee in LA. That’s more like five or seven.

Ramit:

Okay.

Meb:

But you said, “Areas that actually matter: investment fees, 50K+ asset; asset allocation, 50K+; negotiating salary; mortgage interest; student loan interest. Stop asking $3 questions and start asking $30 questions.”

Ramit:

$30,000 questions.

Meb:

30,000. As we get in, we’ll dig in more, but I think the commonly accepted belief is that money is a very taboo subject in the United States. One, we’d love to hear your perspective if that’s true or not. But also B, through your experiences talking to people, is it really that it’s taboo or they just either feel embarrassed or don’t feel safe talking about it? What’s the general consensus now that you’ve had so many of these conversations over the last decade plus?

Ramit:

Money is as taboo as it gets. There’s research that I cited in the first edition of my book showing that people would rather talk about their sex lives than about their credit card debt. I find that to be totally true anecdotally as well. People are much more open about sexuality, about even drugs than about things like credit card debt. Now, why? Now, this is a question that I’ve been consumed with for the last 15, 20 years. First, my background is in psychology. So when I was studying human behavior and persuasion, and I was also reading all these books on personal finance, it was extremely obvious to me that the emperor has no clothes, meaning the way that we are taught about money, as if money is purely an informational problem. “Here, let me show you another compound interest chart, and that’s really going to get you to start investing.” We even accept it.

In the government, we have government officials constantly saying, “We need to give people the right information so they can make the right decision.” Informational influence is one of the least persuasive things of all. You think Louis Vuitton is out there comparing the sturdiness of their leather? No. So by applying some basic psychological principles, that is meeting people where they are, helping them create a vision, getting them to do buy-in, and then also helping them to understand scale, what matters and what doesn’t, people are actually really motivated to change with their money. So yes, money is taboo. I don’t think we talk about it the right way.

And then on a personal level, one of my goals has been to shine a light on it. When my wife and I talked about signing a prenup, I called up my friend Tim Ferriss and I was like, “Hey, this is crazy.” All this stuff is behind closed doors. There’s no blog posts about it. It’s all done in lawyer’s offices and on little chats. I go, “We just went through this process.” He goes, “Would you talk about it?” I go, “Yeah.” So we sat down and talked about what exactly is it like to sign up prenup. That’s the kind of thing that I think needs to happen more often.

Meb:

We’re thinking about this concept of, you ask people, they say, “I want to be free.”

Ramit:

They say freedom a lot. That’s a really common word, freedom, which is just a word. It means nothing. You got to get deeper than words and aphorisms in your rich life.

Meb:

We have a lot of financial professionals listening. A, I think this is important for their own personal lives, but B, many of them have hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of clients. Maybe tell us a little bit. As you’re having this conversation with people, so you’re talking about your rich life and they say, “What do you do with freedom?” what are some of the questions or how do you unlock these people that have grown up not talking about money? They may or may not even talk about it with their partner, certainly not their parents, their kids, on and on. How do you get them to sort of open up?

Ramit:

So I always start by asking people, “Tell me about a time in the last 30 days where you were not on the same financial page.” What this does is, it stops people from going into platitudes like, “He always says this, he always does that,” and it takes into a very specific place, “Well, he invited me out to eat Thai food, so I expected him to pay and then he didn’t and we got into a big fight.” I go, “Okay, hold on, hold on. So when he invited you, what did he say? Walk me through it.” And I’m walking through it to the point where we can all feel we’re in that room, we can smell that Thai soup, and after I get her perspective, I might turn to him and ask him the same thing. That really sets the stage for us for a specific moment where they both saw money differently, and from there we can unpack what goes on. This is how I do my podcast every episode.

Meb:

I’ve listened to it and it’s good. I’ve actually said, I don’t know if it was on Twitter or podcasts or both, I was talking about it, I said, “I’m surprised.” You don’t see more financial advisors or people in your role that really just, it’s almost like case studies. It’s like a much more relatable Harvard business case study. You’re sitting down with people and actually just actually walking through it. I feel like that narrative storytelling is much easily more digestible than sitting down and just being like, “What’s your financial plan?”

Ramit:

Ugh. That’s like my nightmare: to sit down with a couple and we pull out a big old pamphlet doc. Ugh, who wants to do that?

Meb:

It’s funny, when you look at a lot of financial advisors, their website, but also the experience of sitting down with them, particularly the younger ones, they often lead with, “Here’s how smart we are. This is based on Nobel laureate research. Here’s your asset allocation. Here’s how we’re going to optimize it.” And people really are just like, “No, am I okay? I don’t know what any of this means.”

Ramit:

Exactly. Am I going to have enough? Is it too late?

Meb:

But it’s consistent, you see it all the time. And the good ones I think have figured that out. What seem to be the most typical hangups that people have as you’re going through this process? And you take a little bit different angle. I think the thinking about how to spend it is a totally different mindset and skillset than how to earn it and everything that goes with it. Maybe talk a little bit about that. What are some of the main choke points you see with people that are consistent?

Ramit:

The biggest problem, at least between couples, is no shared rich life vision. So they have no vision about what they want to do with their money, how they want to use it, even how they see it. Life has shrunk down to a series of transactional conversations about, did you spend too much at Target? As I am there as a third party, it’s helpful for me to be able to point out, do you want to keep talking about a $27 expensive Target? It’s actually not relevant at all. So that’s the biggest joint hangup.

I often see patterns among people. One will be an over spender, one will be an under spender, one will be a believer. A believer is someone who just believes that their big success is right around the corner, “I’m going to win the next deal, lottery ticket, et cetera.” We often have a parent-child dynamic where one person will do everything and then become frustrated that the other person has no buy-in or desire to change. As you listen to the podcast, you start to hear these patterns recur, and at a certain point it almost seems like magic because they tell me three or four sentences and I can almost guess, “Okay, let me guess, your parents were divorced and you grew up in this part of the country, et cetera.” But it’s not magic. It’s that we carry certain beliefs such as somebody who’s using a debit card probably has credit card debt. Somebody who says, “I’ve been poor before, I don’t mind being poor again,” you can tell exactly how they grew up. So there’s a variety of different class differences, knowledge differences that come out and in peculiar ways.

Meb:

I think everyone listening to this is probably rewinding through their head some personal experiences, whether it’s with their marital partner, parents. I mean, my father grew up on a farm in Nebraska, tiny town, no running water in his house. Became successful engineer, but watched his financial mindset his entire life. I remember, I was a kid, this is a very distinct memory, and all I really wanted, like any child of the ’80 and ’90s, was a waterbed. So this would’ve been ’80s then. Listeners, waterbed was actually as if your mattress was full of water. It was amazing but ridiculous in retrospect. And we went to eventually get a waterbed, but watching the actual physical pain that we’d already decided to get one. But even checking out, it was hemming and hawing as if something was going to interrupt this transaction. And I didn’t have any of that baggage, and it obviously made an impact, but even through rest of life, started to come up with mental constructs.

How can we reframe behaviorally some of these situations that’ll make it less painful for him? And there’s so many of the ones that are well taught today: try to pay for something ahead of time so you can enjoy it, give you the time to fantasize about it, on and on. But how much of this do you think is “changeable”, “solvable”, particularly with couples and people? Is it traditionally through talking it out? Is it through putting systems in place to really keep them behaving? What are the main muscle movements on what really helps people change when it comes to some of these ideas?

Ramit:

The biggest predictor of successful change in my experience is that the stakes must be high. If two Google engineers come to me and they go, “Hey, we have $450,000 sitting on our checking account and we’re just not sure what to do with it, what do you think?” it’s like we have nothing to talk about because the stakes are low.

I had a couple, one of my most memorable couples, and he wrote me, in all caps, he said, “Ramit, help me. My wife of 21 years is about to divorce me because I’m too cheap.” I was like, “Click.” And I spoke to him and his wife. It’s early on maybe episode 20, 25, something around there. They were an extremely successful couple. She said, “We’ve been married over 20 years. He trusts me but, he asked me to find a mattress for our daughters.” She spent two weeks coming up with a mattress that she found. She put it into Excel, created a pivot table around the mattress. The mattress was like 500 bucks. And he said, “No, that’s too expensive.” And that, plus they haven’t got their front yard landscaped, and guess what their net worth is, Meb. Any guess?

Meb:

I mean, I probably listened to the show so I don’t want to ruin it. Tell us.

Ramit:

$13 million

Meb:

Not bad.

Ramit:

And she was at the beginning of the episode, checked out, “I’m done. I’ve said what I want to say. I’ve proven that I’m loyal. It’s our money and he constantly is looking over my shoulder for every little expense.” By the end, there are some quite surprising changes. So the stakes were really high in his case. Stakes have got to be high. People can change, absolutely. They can. If the stakes are high enough, you’ll be shocked at how much and how fast people can change. To have long-term sustainable change, it’s got to involve systems because it’s not enough to say, “I’m going to try harder.” When they say stuff like, “Well, I’m just going to be better,” I never accept that. I go, “That’s not a solution. That’s just words.” So I want to know rituals. I want to know how often they’re talking about money. Obviously I want the money to be auto invested and auto transferred, all the automation from my book. But ultimately, there’s got to be a reason for them to change.

Meb:

I mean, it reminds me how many examples have we seen of couples that break up or get divorced or whatever, and particularly the one that gets dumped gets into amazing shape the next three months because they finally are motivated, have an excuse to get it together. But how hard is it for someone who’s under that? And some of them take pride in the frugality and cheap bastard mindset.

Ramit:

Oh, God. I always say I can help a lot of people, but I can’t fix cheap, especially in this country.

Meb:

The ones that want to change… So this guy in this scenario loves his wife, has plenty of assets, so it’s not a real issue. How do you kind of say, “Hey, okay, here’s how this comes to front of mind,” other than just like, “Hey, you need to want to change”? Are there ways to get him to actually get his shit together and move on?

Ramit:

Absolutely. So before I tell you how I did it, and my way is just one way, there’s lots of great people out there doing great stuff, I would challenge everybody listening, how would you approach a conversation where somebody comes to you and says, “My wife of 21 years about to divorce me, and by the way, our net worth is 13 million”? I think a lot of people would say, “Look at the compounding, that turns into $26 million in seven…” This is not a numbers issue. In fact, they were both highly sophisticated with money. What I did was I asked him, “How do you feel about money? What do you remember growing up?” And he remembers grinding, he grinded it out. He became very successful, went to business school, all kinds of stuff. His wife, same thing. They had this moment where they were young and they were grinding it out.

I said, “What changed over time?” And I kind of went on that journey with them. I’m asking them a lot of questions that really nobody has ever asked them because deep down, a lot of us are desperate to tell our story and not be judged for it. And I’m not there to judge on the podcast. That’s why a lot of times people in the comments, especially on YouTube, are like, “Oh my God, this is insane.” I go, “Hey, I might even agree that it’s insane.” But if I say that, that’s not going to produce any change. So then, I ask his wife, I ask her a lot of questions, “How does it feel? What do you love about him?” And what we discover together is that he’s afraid that if he spends a little bit, he’s going to trip and fall and spend $10 million overnight. This is a very common thing for people who grew up frugal. I know because I grew up in a frugal family.

By the point we get to the emotional part and I say like, “What would it mean for your wife to feel good about money, to feel like a teammate, et cetera, et cetera?” he’s starting to get it. And then I really go in and get ultra-specific. I say, “What do you love to spend money on?” This is what I call money dial. And he loves, I think, some basketball camp or something. Half the stuff people tell me, I’ve never even heard of it. So he loves a basketball camp, I go, “Wow, that’s really cool. Who would you go play with?” And he tells me some NBA star. I go, “That’s amazing.” And I said, “What if you could do that in the next couple of months?” He goes, “That would be really nice.” I go, “What if you could do that and your wife could get landscaping and you could both do in a happy way?” So I get them to commit to certain specific things.

The most beautiful part, I now do follow-ups. They followed up and sent me a picture of the Peloton they bought and how their conversations have become much healthier. That’s all I want. That’s what I want from one of these conversations.

Meb:

Was it a used Peloton that he searched for hour?

Ramit:

That is a good question.

Meb:

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One of the cool things you do, and I would say like of the Venn diagram, we got a lot of overlap on thinking about money. You have your money rules automation for your life. Do you ever recommend to the people you chat with to kind of write down their money rules or to come up with a list?

Ramit:

Yes.

Meb:

And feel free to share some of yours. I see 10 of them, which is nice, even number. But is that something that you think is useful?

Ramit:

Yes. I love when anyone has rules for something that’s important to them. So I eat out with a foodie and I ask them like, “Oh, what are your rules around food?” And they are just like, “Oh my god. Finally, someone asked me,” because they’ve been developing them for 20 years. They go, “We never eat at this type of place. We always eat at this…” Awesome. Parenting, I love when parents say, “This is our approach.” I don’t even have to agree with them, but don’t we all love somebody who’s deeply thought about something that they’re into? That is really inspiring.

So for me, money rules are almost the way to roll up all of your knowledge, all of the decisions you’re going to make on a monthly basis into one key rule. So I’ll give you a few examples. Some of them are really simple, basic financial ones, like always have a year of emergency fund in cash, meaning like in a savings account. Okay, boring, whatever. Save 10%, invest 20% of gross income, whatever. Let’s get to the fun ones. Never question spending money on books, appetizers, health, or donating to a friend’s charity fundraiser. Okay, why? Why is appetizers on this list of money rules, which some of these are quite large rules? Because when I was a kid we couldn’t afford to buy appetizers, ever. So now, to be able to go to a restaurant, see two appetizers, I go, “I’ll get them both,” it feels amazing. So that’s a rule.

Meb:

There’s a restaurant somewhere in South Bay, I think it might be Torrance or Gardena, that’s literally just, it’s called either Appetizers or Tizers or something. It’s literally just the entire menu. I’m going to send you a gift card, Ramit.

Ramit:

Oh my God, this is my dream.

Meb:

You go down there and just go nuts on a full menu of apps. All right, keep going.

Ramit:

So one of them is business class on flights over four hours. Let’s talk about this one. So this is not affordable to everyone. To me, at a certain point I looked at it, and when I was younger I would walk past the people in the front of the plane and I would actually scoff. I would be like, “So stupid. Why are these people paying four times the price? We’re all getting to the same place. Hahaha.” And I wish I had been less disparaging and more curious. Some of them are very qualitative, and I think these are actually the most important ones. One of them is earn enough to work only with people I respect and like. Well, that’s why I’m here talking to you. I like your work. I like what you do. I think it’s awesome. And marry the right person. Ultimately, the biggest financial decision many of us make.

What I love to see is for people to create their own rules. I often find when people create their own rules, they start off with a bunch of restrictions. I’m like, “Do you even like these rules?” And they’re like, “No.” I’m like, “Then why don’t you just not do those? Let’s do some fun one.” It might be, always get two desserts, if you love food. Great. Always have a date night once a month. Fine. But start with a place of possibility. I have some more guidelines in some of my material about how much should be financial, what percent should be dreamy. But I want you to create your own point of view on money. That’s the point.

Meb:

I think that question you mentioned earlier, but there’s very few questions when you ask that elicits a visceral response of like, what would you spend this money on if you could? And people light up, like you mentioned, a lot of people, it’s travel, a lot of people, it’s food. There’s like the anti-version of this, which if you ask someone what their number one pet peeve is, almost no one has no answer.

Ramit:

Oh, dude.

Meb:

Everyone is like, “Motherfuckers that walk into the elevator without opening it. You chew with your mouth open,” whatever. So it’s a good question because it elicits that response. When we talk a lot about this in the investing world with people, the vast majority of investors we talk to, and this includes pros by the way, they just sort of wing it. Our buddy Josh Brown talks about financial advisors have been in business 20 years. They own across their book something like 200 mutual funds.

Ramit:

It’s insane.

Meb:

And it’s just a mess. Call it mutual funds salad. We love asking polls on Twitter, and one of which was, “Do you have a written investment plan?” Doesn’t even have to be complicated. It could be, “I put 50% in stocks, 50% in bonds, rebalance once a year, whatever.” And it’s like 90 ish percent say no. And a corollary, and this goes along with your automation, is do you establish sell rules for a position when you’re going to buy something?

Ramit:

Totally.

Meb:

And it’s not important just when things go south, but it’s important if it happens to go really, really right. It could be a house, it could be a stock. So at least going through the very simple exercise of trying to write down, even on a note card or one piece of paper, some of these ideas causes people to at least go through the exercise of thinking about it, which most don’t. They just kind of just bumble along.

Ramit:

They’re reactive, and that’s how we are with money. Whether at the professional level or certainly at the individual ordinary person level, we’re just reactive. The world presents us something in the form of a bill or something on the cover of the New York Times and we get worried and then we react to it. I don’t want to live that way. I’d much rather be calm, cool, methodical, and create my rich life. And I wish the same for everybody. Part of it’s also just fun. There’s some fun exercises that you can do solo or with a partner. One of them is the money dials one. Let’s just do it right now so everyone can hear and they can do it along. So Meb, what is something you love to spend money on? Not like, but love.

Meb:

I’m trying to think of things that aren’t going to be the standard cliche.

Ramit:

No, no, no, no, no. Just give me yours, right off the bat. Don’t overthink it. We’ve got to overthink around our hands.

Meb:

I’m going to give you two. You know the questions when you do the end of an interview and they’re like, “We’re going to do lightning round”?

Ramit:

Yeah.

Meb:

I am the world’s worst lightning round. I just feel like I can’t even do it.

Ramit:

I’m literally asking you the easiest question in the world itself and it’s taking 20 minutes. I’ll give you three.

Meb:

Yeah.

Ramit:

So just give me one.

Meb:

I got a five-year-old, and tonight, since we’re quarantining for COVID for who knows how long, we got a giant Lego, so we’re going to spend the next two or three days doing that. So giving good gifts for people, I think, and not worrying about, “Hey, this is going to be costly.” But I love thinking about, particularly with our family, like many families particularly in the US, that are kind of spread out, trying to figure and come up with ideas to kind of bring everyone back together. So whether it’s just a yearly trip, and I suck at this and my wife also is horrific at this, and we know and we need to get to this, tonight maybe after this podcast, I’ll say, “Jackie, Ramit reminded me,” we probably need to hire, it’s antiquated, but a travel agent. Is that even a word anymore? Personal trainer but for travel.

Ramit:

Yeah. Okay, first of all, I can introduce you easily. This is a very solvable problem. Easy. But okay, so wait, I’m hearing two things: gifts and family travel experiences. Would that be right?

Meb:

Yeah. I mean, put friends in the same bucket, but I love doing it. I am notorious for last minute, which there’s plenty of benefits too.

Ramit:

You already told me the answer. So I’m looking for one, one thing that you love spending money on. It sounds to me, of all the things you told me, the one that actually you’re doing it right now is gifts for your family. Is that accurate?

Meb:

Yeah.

Ramit:

All right, let’s go with that.

Meb:

Adventures in the travel is one, but that’s a little bit nebulous.

Ramit:

Okay. Just so everybody knows, this is called a money dial. I call it money dial because you can turn it up or turn it down. The most common money dial is… You want to guess, Meb?

Meb:

What people like?

Ramit:

They love to spend money on.

Meb:

You’re going to get two. It’s got to either be food or travel. I can’t think of anything else would be.

Ramit:

Nailed it. You’re in the correct order. Eating out is number one.

Meb:

Also, I listen to enough of your shows, so it’s just probably, it’s subconscious. It just bubbles up.

Ramit:

Good.

Meb:

So I already know the answer.

Ramit:

Okay, so eating out is number one. That’s by far the highest money dial.

Meb:

So gluttony, all right, keep going.

Ramit:

Next is travel. Third is health and wellness. Four is mine, which is convenience. Gifting is way down the list, but I love it. When I hear it, it’s usually a very considerate, generous person.

Meb:

I think it’s just front of mind because it’s getting ready to happen as soon as this… We’re probably hearing knocks on the door right now for [inaudible 00:31:26]. All right, keep going.

Ramit:

For everyone listening, I want you to have thought about what is your money dial? And now the second question is, if you could quadruple your spending on that money dial, what would it look like and feel like for you?

Meb:

I think I have a good handle on this, or I’d like to think that I do. I don’t really have a problem with spending or doing this or putting that into effect.

Ramit:

Nobody said you have a problem.

Meb:

No, no. I mean, I’m saying like, what does it look like? I think it looks the same. I don’t know that it looks any different for me.

Ramit:

I’m shaking my head. Quadruple, 5X, 10X, pick a number. I want you to dream.

Meb:

I don’t know that money makes it any different, like the actual act of doing it. It doesn’t have to be that it’s like a fancy gift. And this is maybe a bad example.

Ramit:

Can we stay on this example for one second? Because I think that a lot of people, especially technical people, they take a lot of pride in saying, “If I had $10 million more, I wouldn’t change a thing. I have a good life. Why do I need to spend more?” And there’s a common misconception that I’m telling people to just go out and eat at some fancy restaurant every night. That’s not the case at all. But I do think if something is really important to you and you love it, to be able to turn that dial up, you can think multi-dimensionally.

Let me explain. A lot of times I’ll hear people say, “Eating out is my money dial.” I go, “What would you do if you could quadruple your spend?” And they go, “Well, I’d probably have to watch my weight because I eat out four times a week. Hahaha.” I go, “Okay, but would you eat at the same place?” And their eyes start to open. They go, “Oh, maybe I’d eat at a different place.” I go, “Where would you eat?” “Well,” one guy goes, “I have a list of every Michelin-starred restaurant in D.C. I would go.” And I go, “Who would you take with you?” And he got really quiet. He goes, “I’ll take my family because they can never afford to eat there.” So if Legos are your thing, there’s a limit to how much you can spend on Legos. Okay? I’m just using it as detail.

Meb:

I don’t know, man, they’re pretty expensive.

Ramit:

But what about this? What about taking your son or daughter to Lego Land? What about getting a behind the scenes tour? What about getting a custom whatever? If that’s your money dial and if you’ve got all your savings and investment dialed in, what I want people to do is actually be able to dream about where do I go from here? Because otherwise, what’s the point of all this work we’re doing? Just to accumulate a bunch of savings? That sucks. So that is the exercise which you have basically dead-ended me at and I can’t show my exercise. So thanks, Meb.

Meb:

I think we talk a lot about it on the podcast about, I think people spend, I don’t know, 90 plus percent of their time thinking about how to make it, particularly my world, what is my optimal asset allocation when in reality they then spend very little time on how to spend it. They get into just sort of the way they’ve kind of always done it and they just end up with a pile and then it’s like, “Okay, what do with this?”

Ramit:

Then they die. The most depressing answer when I ask people, “What do you want to do with your money?” the most depressing answer by far is, “Well, I need to save it for health care.” My question was, what do you want to do with your money? And their answer was, “I need it for health care.” And these are young people. That, to me, is not admirable and it’s not even a critique of our system, which is terrible anyway. It’s a lack of imagination. They don’t even know how much they’ll need. The second worst answer is, “I’m just going to give it to my kids.” It’s like, “Your kids want you to have fun. Spend some money.”

Meb:

It’s problematic too because you see so many people who, particularly entrepreneurs, people that didn’t come from money become millionaires, deca-millionaires, whatever it may be, and particularly family offices and generational type of groups. And this is a problem that they, I think, really, really, really struggle with, which is, Chris Rock talks a lot about this, but their childhood resembles nothing like their children’s experience and trying to not raise entitled brats and pass along the money lessons. I know some of the banks do family office style education. Maybe they could just kick them over to your funnel. But I think that’s something that not a lot of people think enough about ahead of time as they get to this finish line of wealth.

Ramit:

I totally agree. The way I put it is, everybody teaches you how to save, but nobody teaches you how to spend. And whether it’s for children or yourself, it’s critical. A lot of times I’ll have parents come on, sometimes very wealthy parents, they go, “Should I give my kids an allowance? Should I do this and that?” And what really stands out is, are you modeling good behavior with money? If I asked your kids, “What do Mom and Dad think about money?” a lot of times it’s stress, it’s fighting. Do they ever have joy? A young woman who came on, she told me that her favorite thing to do is go to Target. Okay, now I like Target as much as anybody. I grew up in the suburbs. But Target cannot be your rich life. You cannot have a commodity store where you buy Formula 409 and say, “That’s my rich life.”

So we started digging in. I asked her about her childhood. She told me her mom used to take her to Target. And when she went as a little girl, her mom would let her buy a toy or candy. Well, guess what? That’s passed along. Now she’s passing on to her kids. I said, “Do you want your daughter to limit her dreams at Target?” “No.” I said, “What do you really want to do?” She goes, “I’d love to be able to get a massage once a month.” I said, “That sounds amazing.” Looking at her finances, I can see all her numbers, I said, “You could afford it.” She said, “But I don’t think that I can do that,” because effectively it would mean time away from her family. And when I asked her one single last question, that’s when she started crying, I said, “What lesson does your daughter take away from the fact that her mom cannot even take one hour per month for her own self-care?” Tears.

To me, this is very influential in helping people to change their money behavior. We get to the numbers, we look at their asset allocation, we do all that stuff on our podcast, but she’s got to be able to trace where her beliefs about money come from. And I also want everybody to know that there’s hope. There’s a place you’re going to somewhere better than today that gives you a reason to work and save and open up a 529 and all this stuff. Otherwise, why do any of it?

Meb:

I wonder how much of that is the embedded guilt. I struggled for a long time with nap guilt, unrelated to money. But just as a CEO, I should be working, I should be setting an example. But over here, hoofing around on the couch taking a nap. I’m 90% past that now.

Ramit:

What do you tell yourself now?

Meb:

I’m like, there’s just so much evidence, it’s very clear, I’ve kind of prepped everyone around me.

Ramit:

Oh, that’s very logical.

Meb:

Yeah. I mean it’s kind of a logical, it’s a twinge. I still feel it.

Ramit:

What if you’re just like, “I want to and I can”?

Meb:

Like I said, I’m getting there. I’m not a hundred percent-

Ramit:

I’m not saying it’s right or wrong. I’m just curious, would you ever say something like that?

Meb:

I can try it.

Ramit:

I’m curious. I don’t know what’ll happen.

Meb:

I mean, I have a couch in my office, so it’s very clear that I’m working towards that.

Ramit:

Wait, if you’re about to say, “And the number of naps per wear so that I can quantify how long-”

Meb:

I know. No, dude. Man, you got to come down. We have a new office in Manhattan Beach that was supposed to be ready in December. You talk a lot about housing and the romance of ownership and the reality.

Ramit:

Reality.

Meb:

And the costs. And Manhattan Beach government, if you’re listening, we love you guys, but we are now on month six or seven of a very basic renovation, and oh my god.

Ramit:

But Meb, it doesn’t matter, right? Because housing always goes up and it’s always the best investment. And of course it’s better to own than to rent. That’s what everybody on Twitter says.

Meb:

So listeners, Ramit, one of his favorite hills to die on, one of his favorite topics is talking about housing. We bought a house here, and I used to have a lot of these conversations with my wife, and literally the week after we bought it, it was raining in LA, which is rare, not as rare this year. We were walking up to the garage and there were legit mushrooms growing out of the wall, which I’ve never even seen nor heard of anywhere in my life-

Ramit:

What?

Meb:

… straight up. And I just kind of laughed and said, “Hey, we just get some butter and olive oil and chef these up. Now we’re homeowners.” But give the listeners your quick take on housing. I don’t want to trigger you before the finish, but please talk about it.

Ramit:

I don’t know how this has become my most controversial take because it’s actually not controversial at all. Here’s my belief, that for the biggest purchase of your life, you should probably run the numbers. Is that out of line? I don’t think so. But what I point out to people is that in America, real estate is religion. And we believe that owning is always better than renting. And that’s simply not true. And I have my own exact data and lots of other data to show. I’ve rented by choice in San Francisco, New York, and LA. In each of those places, it was much cheaper to rent than to own, actually made more money renting and investing the difference than I would’ve owning. And as a single example to share with people, I lived in Manhattan, I was very attuned to real estate prices. I looked at a building right next door, same view, same square footage, same number of bedrooms and bathrooms, and it would’ve cost me 2.2 times more to own than to rent when I factored in all phantom costs including taxes, maintenance, insurance, opportunity costs, et cetera.

So this is like somebody telling you that the sky’s green. Now, maybe the people listening, you tend to be a little bit savvier, but ordinary people have literally been told for decades that owning is the path to wealth. Owning is generational wealth, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And that’s just not true, especially now, especially in certain cities. So my point is not that buying is bad. I will buy one day. I already know, I know it’s going to be terrible financial decision, but I’m sure the house is going to be fucking awesome, but we got to run the numbers and there’s no shame in renting. Especially for the young people listening, never feel ashamed of renting. It might actually be a better financial decision for you.

Meb:

There’s an old Jason Zweig article about this topic that I think is wonderful, I’ll put in the show notes, but he kind of talks about the reasons to buy a home may or may not be necessarily financial.

Ramit:

Yes.

Meb:

The one argument that I make, we have over I think 140,000 investors now just spending time with a lot of people over the years and knowing how crazy they are with money, the only real argument that I think is really in favor of the housing part is like a forced savings that it’s money. A lot of people would just nuke on cars or something otherwise. The rational people like yourself, and I’m a lifetime renter, that would take that money that would otherwise spend and invest it and put an automated program, whatever it may be, that’s different than the person that sees that is like, “Oh, this is money to go and spend on bottles of the club or whatever.”

Ramit:

That’s a good argument.

Meb:

I have some sympathy with that argument. But the pure math of it, I mean a boat is worse, but housing, people tend to ignore the expense side of all of it.

Ramit:

They pull out. Granny bought her house in Texas in 1970 for $40,000 and she just sold it for $500,000, and she just made the difference of big number minus small number. I’m like, “Do you understand even inflation?” But whatever. You’re right. And I love your point that personal finance is not really just about the numbers. In fact, the numbers are often the smallest part of it. I’m irrational with a lot of stuff. We’re all irrational. And the trick to living a rich life is to actually acknowledge that, that we are all irrational. It doesn’t matter how many books you’ve read or even written. And also, what is my rich life? If my rich life is owning a house and I want to spend a little bit more for it, fantastic, as long as I can afford it.

Meb:

The podcast guest we had directly before you was Professor Thaler, and he talks a lot about putting these automated processes into place and trying to nudge you in the right direction. Listeners, as long as you get the big things right-

Ramit:

Yes.

Meb:

Hey, the salary, 10, 20% is getting shaved over into my 401(k) or IRA and the little stuff.

Ramit:

It’s irrelevant. What is simple life to just be able to say like, “Wow, I got the big things right. Every six to 12 months, I’m going to review it once. And it doesn’t matter how many pickles I buy at the grocery store, it’s irrelevant.” That feels so much freer to me.

Meb:

Is there anything you’ve seen in the past few years… We tend to go through waves, and there’s stories as old as time in our economy, good times, the bad times, recessions, depressions, all that stuff. Booms. COVID, a little wonky. We had a scenario where a lot of people became sort of flush with cash, couldn’t really spend it in many cases, but also get used to the hedonic treadmill of having more cash. Have you seen any general changes in behavior of the past 10, 20 plus years you’ve been doing this that you can make any generalizations about? Or is it kind of just people going to be people?

Ramit:

People are people, and we see that with things like get-rich-quick schemes. I mean, there were different ones in the ’70s and ’80s, but there’s even more now. There’s a lot of quacks on TikTok promoting their bullshit whole life insurance quackery.

Meb:

I was laughing when you said advice on TikTok. I was trying in my head to think of what percentage of that is actually reasonable advice versus-

Ramit:

I’ll tell you what’s good.

Meb:

… the people that are like, “Oh, this is my option trading system.” And-

Ramit:

Ugh. Okay, it drives me crazy, but you got to take the good with the bad if you want to open up the pool to more people. So the people I like on social media, TikTok, they’re sharing their personal experiences, “This is what it was like. Oh my gosh, did you guys know that you can actually negotiate a raise?” That’s amazing. That’s personal. I love that. Anyone who is wearing shorts and an Under Armour shirt and walks through a cafeteria to a whiteboard and starts explaining why a Roth IRA is not as good as his custom whole life insurance, that person is a quack. Let me tell you right now, front and center.

Now, what are the things have changed? Technology’s gotten really good. So if you actually do want to save automatically, you can do it with a snap of a finger. I always encourage people, you should be spending less than one hour per month on your finances, all of it. You could do that now with automation, automatic investment, all that. I do think that there’s more noise. So I hear people in the last three years, think of how many things came up and just disappeared overnight. What should I do about a bank run at SVB? What about inflation? What about T-bills? What about CDARS? What about this? What about… You could have actually done nothing with any of those things and you would’ve been perfectly fine. That’s why the importance of a plan is even more important now because we’re going to be hit with more and more noise and you need to know what to not pay attention to.

Meb:

Which is your most liked tweet, by the way, which is, “This is what I mean when I don’t take financial advice from people on social media.” And it’s a screenshot from some guy, Side Hustle King, who says, “Would you rather get paid a million right now or $50 every month for the rest of your life? I’ll take option B. That’s what passive income is. Find a way to make passive income. It’ll change your life.” You, more than anyone, like to mix it up with your critics.

Ramit:

Huh? Really? I thought I’m a lovable teddy bear. What are you talking about?

Meb:

We keep a running Google Docs of our favorite trolls and-

Ramit:

What?

Meb:

… insults. It’s great because it’s been 10 years now. So` I get-

Ramit:

Wait, can I have access to this? I collect insults.

Meb:

We’ll send you some.

Ramit:

Thank you.

Meb:

I was on CNBC the other day and it was actually good. Because a lot of them, let’s be honest, they’re kind of funny, but one of them said, “Meb, have fun losing all your money in your hairline.” And I said, “That’s actually a pretty good one.” But we got a bunch, and I promise this was not intentional, I promise this is not intentional.

Ramit:

Okay.

Meb:

This mug that I’m drinking out of was from a company called Mutual Fund Observer. The founder came to watch one of my speeches and was so disgusted he left five minutes in and wrote a horrific scathing email, or he wrote it in his letter, which I then of course published or tweeted, and laughing about it. So at least he had a good sense of humor and sent me a mug. But-

Ramit:

Wait, this is amazing. First of all, I just have to give you a round of applause. I never met anyone who loves revenge and insults as much as I do. This is incredible.

Meb:

I think the concept of, you and I being out there have to have a sense of humor, otherwise you’ll never exist. But one of the challenges I think that I struggle with is seeing the bad behavior in our world, which there’s plenty. There’s the people who A, are kind of morons and don’t know it, maybe on TikTok, et cetera. There’s the people who are intentionally, and the financial industry has been littered with these for a hundred years, leeches. I don’t have a better way to say it. So we always struggle with trying to expose frauds and trying to not be super negative. It’s a fine balance for me because we’ve actually found a few that have been a couple hundred million dollar frauds. It’s a struggle for me, but I like that you get after it in the DMs. But the funny thing is, for a lot of the ones you talk to, they kind of come around, or many of them do.

Ramit:

Some of them not really. They don’t really come around. I share everything you said. I’ve thought about this a lot because ethics was a big part of my academic study. I had a really great professor, a professor of persuasive technology, and we baked ethics into everything we did because you can easily turn this stuff bad. So when I think about ethics, which I talk about on my social media a lot, in my own business, we have a rule where we prohibit anyone with credit card debt from joining our flagship programs, our expensive programs. And we tell them, “If you disobey the rule and you join anyway, and we find out, not only will we refund you, we will ban you for life.” And we have a very long list of people who we have added to our DNS, do not sell list.

I talk about that and I talk about the type of people we want and we don’t want. We often turn folks away because they’re asking questions that make it very clear they want quick money. They’ll say to us, “I just got laid off. I’m down to my last two checks. I need this to work.” And we’re like, “This is not the right program for you. Please use my book from the library. Get set up, come back, and we’ll be here when you are.” I think with the financial scammers, honestly, I feel very privileged to be in a position to go after them. I like doing it. That’s really weird that you and I both have a love for take-downs. Not a lot of people do. They actually always are like, “How do I deal with trolls?” I’m like, “Deal with it.” They’re like, “Don’t you get tired?” I go, “Tired? It gives me energy. I love it.”

So I think that, number one, I have the gift. I don’t know why I was given the gift, but I will definitely plan to use it. And two, it keeps me sharp. I’m dealing with people who are coming at me left and right, that’s actually an amazing way to practice responses because sometimes… Well, I’ve been dreaming for the last 20 years, will there ever be a troll who actually has a single good point? It’s been 20 years. There’s been maybe two. Please, any trolls out there, if you have a good point, please try to make it. I’ve been looking for you. I haven’t yet found you. The latest troll I’m getting is people who say that they’re paying 70% in taxes. I go, “Have you ever heard the word marginal?” No, they have not. Therefore, they’ll learn nothing.

Meb:

Tax is another topic we’ll have to take up on podcast number two. You and I are both not recording this from Puerto Rico or another tax haven for good reason.

Ramit:

Yeah, that’s so weird, man. Both of us know about money and we live in California. That’s so weird. We’ll have to talk about that.

Meb:

It’s because every time I’m at the beach and watching the sunset, I’m like, “This is kind of nice. This isn’t so bad.”

Ramit:

I could squeeze out an extra 2.3% tax savings.

Meb:

I only have you for 10 more minutes. Let’s do a couple more quick questions, and we’ll definitely just do this again post stardom. What do you change your mind about? You’ve been working with money for a long time. Anything substantial over the last decade or so that has really been a shift for you?

Ramit:

The biggest one for me since my early 20s was being less judgmental about money. I used to not only be judgmental but wear it as a point of pride. Now looking back, there are a lot of clues that that was a really bad belief to have. When I was in college trying to help my friends with whatever minor financial question, when you have recently learned about the power of a Roth IRA, they’re like, “You got to open up a Roth IRA.” It’s like a vegan or a CrossFitter, and I could see their eyes glaze over. I could see it, but I didn’t understand why.

One of the lessons is meet people where they are. That’s number one. Another lesson was, nobody really wants to be a financial expert. Most people don’t want to go A to Z, they just want to go A to F. So we have that framework in our company, A to F, not A to Z. And A to B, honestly, I’ll take the win. And then the third one is just read the room. When you’re talking to people and it’s not connecting and you’re trying to help them, if you really want to help them, I needed to put my own ego aside and maybe I got the chance to talk to them about a Roth IRA two months later, maybe never, but at least I might be able to connect as to why does it make sense to start doing something at this young age. That took me a long time to get. It’s a little infuriating that my wife just naturally does that, and I’ve had to work at it every day of my life. Sometimes she just does it and I’m like, “How did you do that?”

Meb:

The framing of it. We spent a lot of time thinking of structures that sort of alleviate the need for people to really go in deep where it’s just like, “Hey, everything is in your favor. You just have to make the A decision. You don’t even have to get to F in this scenario. You just have to…” It’s not always simple, but I think it’s worth doing. One of my favorite tweet threads of mine, it’s up to about 20 now, is what belief do you hold that the vast majority, so 75% plus, of your peers in your world would totally disagree with?

Ramit:

They should spend more time focusing on how they want to spend their money instead of how they want to accumulate it. And I mean that spending is a highly refinable skill. If travel is your thing, like my wife and I love to travel, I’m a hotel guy, love nice hotels. I know which hotel, I know which room.

Meb:

You have to give me a top three or top five after the show.

Ramit:

Yeah, for sure. I love to talk about that. I’ll talk about it all day. And to be able to turn the dial-up on travel for us, for example, to travel for months at a time, et cetera, feel very fortunate. Now, at the same time, I drive a really old car. We live relatively modestly, but we love a couple things and we spend a lot of money on that. That to me feels great. So spending is a skill. I don’t think a lot of people think about it like that.

Meb:

Is there a, other than your book and courses, listeners, which you should go sign up for, is there even any books? I’m trying to even think of any books that focus not exclusively, but majority on the mindset of spending.

Ramit:

No, there’s one that just came out, Die with Zero. Bill Perkins, he’s done some really good interviews. The concept is catching on, but I will tell you this: Most people don’t actually think it’s a problem. Cheapskates don’t think it’s a problem. Nobody really thinks it’s a problem. So that’s a challenge.

Meb:

We ask everyone on the show what’s been their most memorable investment. So for you it could be good, it could be bad. Anything come to mind?

Ramit:

Yeah. I did this when I was a teenager. When I was a teenager, I had a little bit of money, and my dad encouraged me to open up a custodial IRA and get it all set up. He was awesome. Here I am, reading tech in 1998, ’99, I thought investing meant picking stocks back then. I picked three stocks: One, JDSU, bankrupt. The next company, Excite@Home, now bankrupt. And the third company was a little company called amazon.com. Now, that was great. Financially speaking, I still own the stock. But of course the lesson for everyone, when I tell the story, they go, “Oh, okay, cool. So I should just pick Amazon.” I’m like, “No, no, no, no, no, no. That’s not the lesson. The lesson is don’t do that at all. That was complete luck.” I should have just picked an index fund, but that was my most memorable investment.

Meb:

I mean, the lesson is kind of that you’re a psychopath because to have held Amazon means you had to have sat through a 95% decline, amazon.com, which is nearly impossible for most people. They lose that and they throw up their hands and so be it.

Ramit:

To me, when I think about my investments, I have the same emotional balance as sand. I feel nothing. I look at it, if anything, I’m proud of my allocation, but I’m like, if you want to get excited, go to the beach, get a dog, fall in love, but not looking at a Vanguard fund.

Meb:

We did an old post, and I can’t remember the name of it, but we’ll put it in the show note links, listeners, but it was basically, it’s called something like The Cost of Your Personal Alpha Quests.

Ramit:

Nice.

Meb:

And we’ve done a ton of research that shows as long as you have a decent asset allocation, doesn’t really matter, stocks, bonds, global real assets. What does traditionally matter is you pay attention to fees and taxes. Yeah, the basic stuff. But we gave an example because he said, “All these people will spend all day long on Twitter. Hey, following me, listening to podcasts, God bless them if it’s a hobby and it’s interesting, but actually believing that they’re going to improve and beat the market.” But I made it a formula and I said, “How much money do you make? How much time do you spend? This is how much alpha you have to generate for it to be even a wash.” And the basic takeaway is like, unless you have 20 million, you should be spending zero time. You should be trying to get a raise, signing up for Ramit’s course, learning how to get a raise, get a better job, and actually trying to beat the market is just a total boner move.

Ramit:

I like that. I have to tell you, I’m excited about the show notes of this episode, and I’m on this episode. I can’t wait to see some of the resources you mentioned.

Meb:

We got a lot of nerdery back in the day. Ramit, this has been a blast. Tell the people, where do they go? Where do they find all your good stuff?

Ramit:

My show is out on Netflix. It’s called How To Get Rich. You can go to Netflix and stream it starting April 18th. You can also find me, my website, I Will Teach You To Be Rich. I have a book by the same name and a podcast, which I think you would really like because you can watch couples as we go through this process together.

Meb:

Watch and squirm.

Ramit:

Yeah, watch the body language on YouTube. Listen. Oh, you’re going to love it. So Meb, thank you for having me.

Meb:

Thanks for joining us today.

Podcast listeners, we’ll post show notes to today’s conversation at mebfaber.com/podcast. If you love the show, if you hate it, shoot us feedback at feedback@themebfabershow.com. We love to read the reviews. Please review us on iTunes, and subscribe to the show anywhere good podcasts are found. Thanks for listening, friends, and good investing.

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