And these are just assumptions that we have as a collective society.
The idea that you climb the ladder to success.
The thing is, you do this a few times in which you realize that at the top of every ladder is another ladder.
Like, it really doesn't end.
And so we encourage people to ask the question, who built this ladder?
And whose does it serve?
There was a point where college did work as a solution.
Today, 53% of Americans go to college.
Loads of student debt that will be a burden for the rest of your life.
Today with AI, those entry-level jobs are going to be wiped out.
They're already being downsized.
I love the idea of somebody who's an expert generalist,
somebody who basically understood a broad base of things
and then was detail-oriented enough that they could go
and go drill down on any issue they needed to,
but could see how the things connected together.
And that kind of person is always valuable.
Have is a byproduct.
Do.
Targeting the have, like making that your focus, is a huge mistake.
because the greatest manifestation of masculinity is the ability to say, no, I will not do that.
There are basically more slaves alive today than have ever existed on earth. They just don't know
they're slaves, but they do recognize their dependence, their dependence on the...
Welcome back to G'day Bitcoin. Join us today is Matt Smith, a serial entrepreneur,
college dropout, living in Uruguay, setting up a regenerative farm. Matt Smith, co-author of a
life-changing book titled The Preparation, How to Become Confident, Competent and Dangerous.
Co-authored with his son, Maxim and Doug Casey, it's a guide for young men on how to become an
entrepreneur and not stuck in the rat race to become great, the modern day renaissance man.
Matt, in a recent interview, you said, it always looks like a failure until it becomes a success.
Everyone thought I was screwing up until I became rich. I mean, that's how it works.
The old way, it no longer works.
So Matt, what is the old playbook?
Why doesn't it work anymore?
And what's the new playbook look like?
What should people be doing instead?
Well, you know, the question is, did the old playbook actually ever work?
I'm not sure.
You know, some of the things we do in the book is trying to dispel myths about how the world works.
And these are just assumptions that we have as a collective society.
And one of them is the idea that you climb the ladder to success.
starts when you're in, you know, before you go to college, in school, where you're,
you know, you are supposed to pursue good grades. And, you know, if you do the right things,
and you please the right people, and you get, you know, test well, then you get to a point where
you then you're at the top of the ladder, now you get to go to a good college. And this is how life,
this is how people believe life really works. So you then now you're at the top of that ladder,
now you go and you climb the next ladder. The thing is, you do this a few times,
in which you realize that at the top of every ladder is another ladder.
Like it really doesn't end.
And so we encourage people to ask the question, who built this ladder?
And whose does it serve?
To whose benefit accrues from my climbing of this ladder?
And I would say it does not in any way benefit to the individual that climbs it.
I think of all the remarkably successful people I know, I don't know any that did it by climbing ladders.
Not to say they didn't climb at any point in their life, but their success is in no way attributed to ladders.
And so I think that's one of the big myths that we try and dispel.
And I think that there was a point where college did work as a solution because college wasn't, it differentiated you from most people.
Today, 53% of Americans go to college.
It's like the vast, you know, if you have a pulse, basically, you're expected to go to college anymore, and you will get accepted at one or another, and they'll load you up with, in the U.S. at least, loads of student debt that will be a burden for the rest of your life.
So I think that burden of debt is something that made it different than before.
And the fact that it's not rare anymore to have a college degree makes it different now.
So there was a point where I think it probably was more valuable than it is now.
But now I think it's really hard to justify the time and capital required to do it.
And I think there's even worse parts of it.
I mean, you subject yourself to further indoctrination about certain ideas, good ideas, what's right
thinking, what's wrong thinking.
That's a very dangerous environment to be in because it actually does affect you, even
if you don't think it does.
It really does change you.
I mean, we are humans. We're weirdly shaped by those around us.
I mean, I talk about Rene Girard and his ideas of that humans are the only species that doesn't really know what they want.
And in order to figure out what they want, they look to others and what others want around them to figure out what they want.
And that's a recipe for disaster in general.
It's called these mimic desires that we all end up having if we're around certain people.
Actually, whatever people are around, we are likely to start to want the things that they want.
If you have a bunch of friends and you go golfing every Saturday, you're going to be talking about buying new golf clubs.
It's just what's going to happen.
Anyway, so I think that the old way doesn't really work anymore at all.
And you see this by the fact that the unemployment rate among recent college graduates is significantly higher than the unemployment rate of other populations in the United States now.
I think that makes it clear that it doesn't work anymore.
I think that AI, if you just, I think we're already seeing the effect of that.
I think it's part of the reason why the unemployment rate is so much higher.
But I think the unpredictable nature of the future today with AI makes it so that the idea of studying something like finance, which was the path to the most lucrative career over the last 20 years, is now actually very risky because those entry-level jobs are going to be wiped out.
They're already being downsized.
And so, yeah, it doesn't really work anymore. And what has always worked, though, is to become a competent, resourceful individual. Like that person does well. And, you know, I've hired thousands of people in my life, thousands of employees. And I could tell you that, like, I never looked at college degree, but I would test for things like resourcefulness.
I love the idea of somebody, the name I came up for him was an expert generalist, somebody who basically understood a broad base of things and then was detail-oriented enough that they could go and go drill down in any issue they needed to, but could see how the things connected together.
And that kind of person is always valuable. And I think the book, the preparation is designed to give a young man loads of experiences, unique experiences that in total end up something like a hero's journey, which I think every man definitely is.
And I think no man is satisfied until he has it.
And so it does that, but it also gives you an understanding of how so many different things work,
that you will not approach the world as an idiot who basically only understands how to get food by Uber Eats
or only understands, you know, I mean, you're so overly specialized that you don't understand anything
outside of what's absolutely necessary for you to know.
And so the whole world is open to you.
You have skills and competencies to interact with that world successfully.
Yeah, I agree.
And what I was saying in the intro,
being one of the most unique books that I've ever read,
the way that it's written, there's like part one and part two.
And part one like lays out, I guess, the philosophy behind it.
Then part two is the practicality.
I think let's start a little bit with part two
and then we'll come back to part one.
I've got some amazing quotes that I've highlighted,
but it goes through these different cycles is how you define them.
And am I correct that they're three months or 16 weeks?
per per cycle yeah it's three months three months so 12 weeks 12 weeks and some of the most exciting
ones are um fighter pilot rancher ent and stuff there's a whole lot to go through i guess why do
you choose what you've chosen what did you choose um and i guess like what what are the lessons that
a young man or any any man really could go through your same people in their 70s been going through
it. I think if people looked back at their life and they just went through those cycles, they'd be
like, that's a life fulfilled. Like let alone starting your life with that. I think that's
incredible. But I guess why specifically those cycles and what's the takeaways for someone going
through those cycles? Well, yeah, we chose 16. I think we could have chosen a different 16 and
still made it work. It's not like there's something special about these 16, but the
combination of them all together is what really makes it really, really interesting. I mean,
you will be the most interesting person you know for sure if you do this. And I can say this,
my son was our guinea pig for the last two years in doing all of it, making sure, first of all,
that we were, my primary concern, the reason I wrote the book was because my son had a problem
at 17. He didn't want to go to college. He had a lot of anxiety about what to do. I mean, it was
really messing with him. I mean, I could feel in him the problems. I could feel the struggle he was
having with it. And so I felt compelled to get back with Doug Casey and pick up this book he'd
always wanted me to write with him. For the last 12 years, he'd been trying to convince me to write,
which he called the Renaissance Man, although young men today don't know what that even means.
So I said, that can't be the title. They don't get it. They don't even get it. And they haven't
had exposure to it. So when Doug first explained to me the book, like how all these cycles tie
together. He said, the book is about the three most important verbs in every language. He said,
it's be, do, and have. At first, when he told me this, I didn't even understand what he was talking
about, actually. Like, can you explain more? And he said, I'm not really sure. So he kind of left
it to me to try and figure it out, really, over the last dozen years. You know, and I think I
think I pretty, obviously, I had to really get it before we could write the book. But fundamentally,
have is what motivates most people.
And it makes sense. Why?
Because, you know, we're, again, we get our
wants from others around us. Those wants
are generally external things. Those are things
that you can have. They're possessions. So we want a
nice car. We want a nice house.
We want a beautiful spouse. You know, stuff
like that. These have, have,
have. And especially in our consumer culture,
this has been just amped up to
11, the haves.
The problem is nobody ever explains
that have is a
byproduct of do.
You know, it's like a consequence of it.
And so it's targeting the have, like making that your focus is a huge mistake, especially
for a young man, but really for all of us, because it's just a byproduct.
And there's nothing more than having a lot of stuff.
I have a lot of shit, but it was a byproduct of doing.
And for a young man, this is good news, because doing is what you can, what you're best suited
for as a young man.
You have literally unlimited amounts of energy.
You have no liabilities.
And you could, you know, there's no restrainers.
I mean, you know, as you go through life, you build up responsibilities, like things you just got to take care of.
I can't just walk away and be gone for three months or studying Muay Thai in Thailand.
Like, I just, that's not going to work with my obligations.
I feel you on that.
The joys are grown up.
The older you get, man, they just stack up.
And their choices, you know, their responsibilities we chose to take on, but they're important to us.
And so we can't simply abandon them.
But when you're a young man, you have unlimited energy.
You're open to novelty in a way that you will not be as you get older.
You know, you just start closing yourself off more and more.
It's a mistake to do it too much, but it's just natural that it happens.
And so the book is The Do, which is what most of the book is about, is what exactly to do, is the operative.
This is where a young man's power is.
If it's focused in the right way, it can produce remarkable results.
But The Do isn't the most important.
The most important is Be.
B is all that really matters.
And so to do, to get there, to explain the B, to try and get to even enter that conversation
with young people, we actually have them do an exercise that might seem trivial to most
people, but I actually think every person should do this, not just young men, is to
develop a personal code.
And a personal code is three parts to it.
Let's explain briefly.
The first part is that you, and I hate, I should say, I hate rules.
Like I'm an anarchist, you know.
I don't like regulations at all. I don't like rules. However, I realized a long time ago that
the rules I set for myself were powerful and useful and worked toward me getting done what
I wanted to get done and being the person I wanted to be more importantly. If you've still got your
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And so what we ask a young person to do is just to look at their, pay attention, essentially, in their life and notice the moments that they feel small.
Like, what did they do that caused them to feel small?
You know, what things do they do that might make them feel a little bit ashamed?
Even if the rest of the world has no knowledge of this stuff, you know.
So to write those things down and stop doing them and stop doing them.
And this is super, it seems trivial, but it's super important because this is actually the
formation of self-esteem.
Because this is now, you're not going with the flow anymore.
You're actually drawing a line in the sand and saying, no, no, I don't do that kind of
thing.
And it could be from being a liar, from lying.
It could be bad habits like sitting and scrolling on your phone all day, whatever.
Whatever it might be.
And they're different for everybody.
And only you would know what yours are, the things that make you feel small.
But just deciding then that I'm not going to do those things anymore develops this beachhead where a great self can be built upon.
And so you have to start there, these basic rules.
From there, what we do is we expose people to the ancient virtues.
And surprisingly, most young people have no exposure to them whatsoever.
They're not virtues.
They're not taught in school anymore.
Why do you reckon that is?
It's not useful for the school to teach you virtues.
I think the whole system is designed to make you a cog in a wheel, okay?
Like, they want you to do your part where you're creating enough value that it supports the system.
And they don't want you to really be a rabble rouser.
They certainly don't want you to be the kind of person who really knows who they are and believes in virtues and is able to draw a line in the sand and say no, which is the most masculine thing.
That's the greatest manifestation of masculinity, I think, is the ability to say, no, I will not do that.
I don't care what you do.
I'm not doing that.
I'm not going to participate.
But that starts with being.
Being is the key.
And so the virtues, being exposed to the virtues.
And we ask them to pick some that sound, that call to them.
And, you know, we ask little kids.
Do you have any kids, by the way?
No, I don't.
Okay.
So, like, when you're really little, people ask you, like, what you want to be when you grow up.
And the answers are Spider-Man or a fireman.
Astronaut.
An astronaut.
Those are the most common ones or Superman or whatever.
And the thing is, is that like for a young,
what the kid is saying is he's saying virtues.
He's saying the things that he thinks are virtuous.
He's not saying a job, but that's what, to him,
these are symbols of some virtues in his mind.
And as you get older,
we still ask that same question of young men,
but the question becomes a lot more serious and answers like astronaut or things that like that
they might associate with virtues seem absurd and they are expected to be a lot more reasonable
and to choose something that will get them to a job and uh and so and i think that's a totally
the wrong question the question you should as the kid gets more mature and is no longer thinking of
astronauts and firemen the question should be what kind of man do you want to become because that
gets them back to these virtues, gets them back to these things that are truly motivating for a
young man. Like they want that. They want to be somebody. And everyone knows, everyone knows
in their heart to be somebody, you have to do something worthy. And so that's what they want.
That's what they really want. So ask people the right question is very important. So anyway,
you have the virtues in there, which some of them will call to them. Some of them won't. That's fine.
pick the ones that they do. And then after that, they start listing their actual competencies,
which if you actually exercise, if you do what's in the preparation, they stack up super fast.
And then with that, I mean, you become a whole person. You become a unique individual. You're
no longer going with the flow. You are a different individual. You are not the same as your peers.
In fact, your peers will likely change utterly in the process.
There's one quote that you had, and it's sort of coming back to the virtues.
What we do when fate comes in is completely up to us.
We don't have control over the world, but we always have total personal agency.
And whatever fate may bring, we have the opportunity to be virtuous in our thoughts and actions.
Our reactions are totally up to us.
Our fate, as harsh as it may appear at times, is always an opportunity for personal agency and grace.
a more fatty love of fate is a simple idea with profound implications. When people go through a
program such as the preparation compared to the school system, the way that I see it,
because I was also, I left high school halfway through year 11, we go to year 12 here in Australia.
I just didn't see the point of being indoctrinated so much. And I just,
because the circumstances and stuff, I'm like, I want to be free in my life. I need to be able
to make money so i left school started an apprenticeship as getting like four dollars
six an hour or something and i'm like it's absolutely ridiculous i'm going to go do
something else and i didn't really have that uh virtual guiding principles and my friend group
wasn't wasn't great either so i i lacked that um but compared to and then developed it obviously
and we can go on into like by doing things very much like a lot of the things out of the book is
what I started to do and to be able to stack up and then to be able to self-reflect and gain those
virtues. But if I was just to go along with the normal grind and go through school and then college
and stuff, there is so much indoctrination. But I really feel like what you're saying is a cog in
the wheel. It almost feels like they're just trying to breed like a modern day monetary slave.
Well, as a Bitcoin guy, especially, that must seem super obvious.
You know, I totally agree.
It is a form of, I think there are basically more slaves alive today than have ever existed on Earth.
They just don't know they're slaves.
But they do recognize their dependence, their dependence on the system, their dependence on their paycheck.
You know, how do you get a lot of good people to do bad things, as we saw during COVID?
well, their paycheck is dependent on it and they've got a mortgage and they got, you know,
just following orders.
Free die nuts.
Yeah, exactly. It worked. You know, so I think people are deeply dependent. The system
creates dependency. And, you know, our program is designed to create individuals. And when we
refer to dangerous, competent and dangerous, really what we do mean, we use dangerous in a
couple of ways for a couple of reasons. One, it appeals to all men. I don't care who you are,
that idea of being dangerous appeals to you. And even though you can't define it,
you could, but even undefined, it appeals to you. And so trying to obviously cater to
the audience in that. But in practicality, we do believe, and obviously you should be able to
defend yourself and others from a physical standpoint. And that's a big part of the
preparation. But beyond that, what's really dangerous is someone who knows who they are
and can think for themselves, somebody who is independent.
And that's the goal of the book is to create individuals like that.
Yeah, I think that book paired with a Bitcoin standard.
It's just really life-shaping.
So let's talk about a couple of these cycles.
And I want to stick on the dangerous one for a couple of reasons.
The dangerous cycle most specifically is the fighter cycle going off to, say, Thailand
to be able to learn Muay Thai for three months.
I so wish I had that opportunity to be able to do that.
I go boxing twice a week, go to the gym five days a week.
But with responsibilities, the life, the company, everything like that, like you're saying,
I just can't get up and go away for three months.
But that appeal of being dangerous to the system, but also just to be able to be competent
if a situation was to arrive, I think that's very important.
And even if no situation ever arrives, just the way that you hold yourself, present yourself,
the way that you can walk through the world with intention.
I think that's really incredible.
I guess what was the reason that you guys put the fighter cycle in there?
And not just like the physicality of going and training in Muay Thai, for example,
but it's also like an academic part of it.
It's not like you're going to pick up this book.
You're just going to do the fun stuff, go be an EMT, fight fires, pack mules and stuff,
get your pilot's license, fly through the sky.
Yes, that's a large component of it.
That's the practicality.
But then there's also the serious study that comes with it.
But yeah, if we can stick on like the fighter cycle and how that can help someone became dangerous a weapon.
Well, the way it may become dangerous is because I think the biggest thing comes out, obviously, you have some practical skills that come out of it.
My son is and we encourage people to be doing martial arts all the time anyway.
And specifically, I like BJJ simply because you can go almost anywhere and you can find a gym.
So, you know, wherever you are, and they're pretty welcoming to new people going in there.
And it's a very practical martial art.
So, you know, we encourage that as kind of that you should be doing that along the way.
Because, and there's lots of things beyond these.
Maybe I should explain the cycles.
There's 16 cycles, essentially modeling a four-year college.
supposed to be four years. Most, you know, only, I don't know, what is it? 70% of Americans
graduate in four years, but like, let's assume four years and we break it down into 16 quarters.
And so in each quarter, we call a cycle. Each cycle has a anchor activity. That anchor activity
is like the fighter cycle. You're studying Muay Thai or getting your pilot's license or getting
your EMT or learning to sail in the Falkland Islands and through the Strait of Magellan,
which is definitely throwing you in the deep end as far as sailing goes.
It certainly was for my son.
He'd never sailed at all before, but he did that one and came back different.
Yeah, I bet.
Yeah, so there's the anchor course.
And then on top of that, academics are super important to Doug especially.
I mean, Doug was a real stickler about the academics.
As a college dropout, he went to Georgetown.
I'm a college dropout.
Both of us think college is unnecessary,
but he puts a lot more emphasis on academics than I do. And I think he's right. I do think
he's right that they should be included in there and they are. So we, we basically try to have the
academic program as much as possible be related to what they're studying at the time, the things
they're doing in the physical world, because college is all abstract. I mean, you learn
abstract concepts. You don't learn how to do anything really. I mean, if you're in engineering
school, maybe you do, right. But I mean, for most things, most parts, you're just learning ideas.
And so those ideas, you don't have any understanding of the utility of those ideas.
Are they actually useful in the real world or not?
It's hard to know.
So we try and combine them.
It not the fighter cycle but just as an example one of the cycles is you learn to cook in Italy for a month And you in one of my favorite cities Florence which is surrounded by history and art and beauty And of course you take advantage of that time to study things academically that are very related to where you are and what you doing anyway for this cooking cycle
So the academics are layered in that way.
And there's reading, of course, that's part of that, too.
And the other things, the other two components of a cycle is that we have a whole list of other activities that we think you should get exposure to.
Some are going to really like you're going to love and you're going to continue on with.
Some of them you might do just once and be like, okay, that one's not that big of a deal for me.
But it's opened, at least expanded your horizons.
And it's, again, taking advantage of this fact that you have lots of time, lots of energy.
Novel activity is good.
You meet different people.
You learn about the world.
We encourage as many people to spend, we actually have, depending on the cycle, a certain number of hours weekly allocated for stuff like that, actually.
And then finally, reflection and accountability.
And my son, for instance, has been publishing on Substack every week since maybe about a month in what he got done that week.
And it started off as this very –
I'll link that below for everyone.
Yeah, you should check it out.
I mean, it's our version of proof of work, right?
Love it.
learning as far as I'm concerned. That's what a cycle contains. Each cycle has a theme. So you
have the fighter cycle. You've got the medic cycle where you become an EMT. You have the
sailor cycle where you learn to sail. You have the pilot cycle where you learn to fly a plane.
The cooking cycle in Italy I've already talked about. You have, you know, there's one where you
operate heavy equipment. There's a school and I believe it's in Florida where you actually learn
to operate all the big machines. I mean, not some of the crazy cranes, but basically all the
bulldozers and backhoes and all that kind of stuff and become certified in it.
So you could pursue that economically as a job.
I mean, a lot of these are designed so that these anchor courses do make you economically
viable.
Like you could turn them into a career if you wanted to, maybe not as high earning career
in all cases, but it's not like there are ways then that you can fund your way through
this entire thing.
Like Max, for instance, that's my son.
He got his EMT and then because of his sub stack, somebody reached out to him who owns
this company where they basically contract with the government in the U.S. to fight wildfires.
And so he's always looking and he operates these ambulance crews on the wildfires.
And so he offered it. He said, hey, you know, riding on an ambulance, you don't earn any money.
Normally, it's like minimum wage. You don't want to do that stuff. That's crappy work.
Come work on the wildfires. And he got paid $600 a day for doing that.
Wow.
Which is, I was, when I was his age, I was in the army. And I think my take home pay for the month
was about $600.
Okay.
So, I mean, it's pretty good money.
And so with things like that,
and he gets thrown
these different opportunities
because people see what he's doing
and say, hey, you know,
you might want to try this.
And he worked on a geophysics crew
for a company that was looking
for gold in Nevada for a while.
Not quite making $650 a day,
but making still good money
along the way.
So in the beginning,
he started working at Office Depot.
I don't know if you have
Office Depot there,
but it's just this office supply store.
It's like a total shit retail job.
I mean, under fluorescent lights all day, just terrible.
But he was working his way through the program.
Yeah.
And even with, say, like I define that if someone was stuck there potentially as a bullshit job,
just, and the way that I define a bullshit job is the job may be great for somebody else,
but when you're there, you just want to be somewhere else.
You'd rather be outside.
You'd rather be flying or whatever.
But while he was attending that, he was probably learning like sales, customer service,
product, merchandising, advertising, even to an extent.
It's not like he went there and he's just under the fluoro lights,
under the blue light all day.
He's being hassled.
There's probably, and maybe he still didn't want to be there,
but because he knew that it was just a short period of time,
did he gain a lot from that?
I guess that's the question.
I think he gained, I definitely think he gained some things from it.
I wouldn't say a lot, but he definitely gained some things from it.
And, you know, one, it was the first job he'd ever had.
Partially because the age he was, when he was 16, COVID happened.
So that's when you can really get a job in the U.S. and he couldn't get one then.
And then we moved to Uruguay.
So there wasn't really a job that he could have that was obvious.
So it was the first job he ever had, actually.
So just the basic things about what it means to have a job, showing up on time and all that.
He has no issues with being punctual anyway.
But, you know, the expectations of the employer and how someone runs, they can be ridiculous.
We learned that, too.
He definitely, he said, actually, the biggest thing he learned about it is how poor people were.
Because he was, some of his co-workers were talking, you know, they would talk about money, you know.
And they realized these, like, dire straits that some of the people he worked with were in, just how awful it was.
And, you know, sometimes people would come in to buy things.
And this is an office supply shop.
And then they would see how much it is.
And they'd be like, oh, my God.
you know, you see shock in their face by the price of it, you know, and you'd see, well,
and, uh, you know, or people that had to put stuff away because they get it under their budget or
whatever. And so he, he learned a lot about more other people's experiences. I mean, you know, he,
I grew up in a very poor house. He did not grow up in a very poor house, but so he maybe hasn't
been exposed to as many of those things as possible. You know, the, the reality of people
that just don't have money for things that they need. And so I think that exposure was probably,
I think the biggest thing he took from it, exposure to normal people and how they were
living their lives and how hard it was. And I'm sure there were some other positive things along
the way, but ultimately he really hated that job. He preferred delivering pizzas to that job,
let's just say, because at least he got to be outside. That's right. Yeah. I guess one of the
probably big takeaways in hindsight is he realized that he hated it and he's going to do everything
he can to possibly avoid going back to a situation like that. Would that be fair?
Yeah, 100%.
That's for sure true.
Yeah, absolutely.
Good reason to go out and do a lot of different stuff.
Yeah, we do talk about jobs in the book, and we say, hey, you know,
dead-end jobs can be really useful to you at times.
Because during that time when he had that job at Office Depot,
and it was only like seven weeks he worked there, okay,
because we're moving these cycles.
It's three months.
It moves pretty fast.
It was only like seven weeks, but he saved $5,000.
well five thousand dollars easily paid for his emt kind of you know it paid for his next stuff i
mean i he started off this entire thing one of the objections people get is it oh yeah that sounds
fun but that must be very expensive to do all this it's definitely to do if you do everything
it's not cheap it's about 73 grand if you did everything in the book over four years but it's
not something much is the college degree though basically one year at a good college can cost you
that much. Okay. So you're getting like a hundred to a thousand times the value of college for a
quarter of the price. And at the end of it, you're able to do something, which is very different than
college. You might know some things that you think are valuable, but it's again, someone who's hired
a lot of people, anyone right out of college, first thing you had to do is train them. They
didn't know how to do anything. It sort of comes back to that statement I read in the intro when I
was paraphrasing yourself. It looked like it was a failure or it looked like it was failing until
I was rich, basically. I guess when people are going through those things, they may not be able
to connect to the dots and they may think, oh, that's a waste of money getting your pilot's
license or something, you're going fighting, becoming an EMT. But the character that develops
and for really such a small cost in the scheme of things, when you look back in hindsight,
like, yes, it seems like a lot of money, but I think those takeaways are really going to help
you know shape the course of someone's life especially with ai coming in now just even within
our own company like i can do the job of four different specialized people talking to ai for
two to four hours a day at the moment like went from not knowing what to do to like a lot of
contracts and stuff from like zero income within the first three months to like a lot of income
and all because of ai but if it like i hadn't stacked those skills it wasn't just that as well
It's like sales, customer service, being able to engage with different parties, even just to be able to email in a professional way, for example, to be able to pick up the phone and say, yes, we can do that.
But also what you're saying, when you become competent and dangerous, you can say no, like, no, we can't do that.
Instead of having a new early business and thinking we really need that contract to be able to make payroll next month or next quarter, we don't have the capacity to do that.
We can't do that.
this is what we can do. This is what we're offering. This is the price that it is. Yes,
we'll talk with you. We'll work with you, but we're not going to shortchange ourselves
to be able to provide the service and go backwards for it. But like whatever it is,
I think when you become competent and dangerous and use these skills that we have with AI,
I think it can change people's lives very quickly. But what are your thoughts in regards to AI
coming and how it's going to shape just like the traditional career? Because I agree with
yourself as well. I don't think college for the majority of people, like, yes, if you want to
become a doctor or a lawyer or an engineer, sure, go like, be my guest, do it. But I think for the
majority of people that get a piece of paper, and they're not even employed in that job five,
10 years later, how do you think AI is going to change the way we live, we work, we have
fulfillment in life? Well, I don't know about the fulfillment part. That's a harder question.
But I will say that I think that virtually everyone who's enrolled in university now is going to be extremely angry when they get out because they're going to realize that the jobs that they thought would be there are just not going to be there.
And I think it's going to be the biggest rug pull on young people ever.
And I think we're already starting to see it.
There was an article in The New York Times maybe three weeks ago that talked about two people who graduated with degrees in computer science.
Neither one of them are able to find a job after doing thousands of applications.
You know, one guy had over 5,000 applications, had 13 interviews, zero offers.
And that's computer science, you know?
So it's like, what about the people who get a degree in English, you know?
I mean, I think it's going to be a huge rug pull, and I think it's going to lead to a lot of social tension, as if we could have more social tension in the U.S., but I think it's going to be rough.
And I also think that longer term, AI can, it's hard to explain, but this is really like the Industrial Revolution as it hit America.
It was highly destructive, highly destructive.
Going into it, something like 50% of all, 57% of all Americans were farmers in the late 1870s, roughly is when it kicked off in the United States.
Today, less than 1% of the people in the U.S. are farmers.
But most of that bulk of loss, 1%.
Yeah, 1% are farmers today.
And so I think that the white-collar job is the equivalent of a farmer during the last Industrial Revolution.
So I think that the white-collar job is going to go the way of the small-scale farmers, honestly, and it will be 1%.
Will it be in the Industrial Revolution really over 50 years, most of the damage was done in that?
I think this will be a lot more compressed.
I think it'll probably occur over about 15 years.
So I think it's going to be incredibly damaging to our expectations about what a career is.
I think it's going to be really damaging to that.
At the same time, there are amazingly wonderful things that came out of the Industrial Revolution, like cinema came out of that.
I mean, you could say urban design came out of that.
So lots of things that we certainly, I mean, obviously you have all of the consumer products from the iron to the toaster and stuff like that.
There were like the iron actually made the biggest difference, by the way, in America at first.
That's the most popular thing, the electric iron.
But these things dramatically changed and improved at people's lives.
But it destroyed many lives along the way, and they had to completely readjust.
And so I think that the people going through university now or who have exited in the last five years are in for a lot of damage a lot of damage because not only will they get the rug pull on the employment front but they also got this debt that they saddled with
In the U.S., you can't file for bankruptcy and you can have your debt wiped away,
but not student loans.
You're stuck with them.
And that's why a slavery system, I mean, you talked about slavery earlier,
the COGS, I mean, it really is.
I mean, you're an indentured servitude to, if nothing else,
the debt repayments on your student loans yeah i am employing three people with their doctorate and
at least two of them have student loan debt and stuff and gave one of them a bonus and said there's
like a half of this has gone to tax and she's like oh that's right like that'll just pay off the
student loan i'm like that sucks like that that truly sucks so with this i guess one of the most
important cycles is probably the entrepreneur cycle to be able to take self-agency and to be
able to go out and provide value if the traditional landscape is changing the system no longer works
as it used to work or maybe it didn't work as good or it's been failing for a long time
we have to go out and be able to provide value to the world because it's the only way that we're
going to get compensated that's the only way real value exchanges hands um is maxim still going
through the entrepreneur cycle or he's completed it? He's still going through it, basically goes
through the end of the year. And yeah, what he's doing in particular is he's doing a precision drone
agriculture business, partially because he's here in Uruguay right now. We live on a regenerative
cattle ranch. You know, we live in a semi-rural area. So that's kind of what you, you know,
the opportunities are a little bit different, but, and will he succeed? Will his business be
successful in three months? I mean, you think of it as a guy who's built a lot of businesses,
three months is a lot too soon to say, but you do see whether or not it has potential during that
time period. And you learn the process of identifying the product, identifying the market,
generating leads, selling the product, delivering the product. And for him, there's a twist to it
because he's got to do it all in Spanish, which is another thing you learned along the preparation,
second language. So it's a little bit even more difficult for him than it would otherwise be for
for an entrepreneur but yeah he's still early in it i mean he's really you know technically it was
supposed to start october 1st so he got a couple weeks early start on it for this one because just
because of timing so he got a couple weeks early start on it but yeah he's doing it through the end
of the year we'll see how far he gets it's i saw a video of the drone and it's hard really to be
able to tell from the video but the drone looks ginormous can you talk a little bit of like what
What's the carrying capacity and stuff?
It looks like one of those ones where you could probably hang on to it
and fly around if someone was steering.
If there weren't so many sensors on it, I think you probably could.
It can kind of detect when people are around it.
But, I mean, its payload is only 50 kilos,
but it can clearly carry more than that
because it does that in the zero problem whatsoever.
So, yeah, its payload is 50 kilos.
I mean, you know, you see these, I don't know if you saw the videos
of all the drones in New Jersey when there was that little freakout
earlier this year.
that we had this drone thing where the drones spotted all over new jersey no one knew what
they were and people like it's ufos or whatever to me having seen this thing we first fired it up
at night i'm like this explains it totally like this could definitely be it yeah it's big and
scary yeah it's pretty awesome and what's the point of it i'll um i'll try link that that video
below that you had on x like it's incredible the search light it just turns night today straight
away there's just this thing coming in um it's pretty incredible but what's he doing with the
this drone out of curiosity what's the the points of this amazing machine because it doesn't look
cheap no it's not cheap it's not cheap and truthfully he's in debt on that one to me like
the truth is i wanted one for our for our ranch because so he paid for your toy uh he's in debt
for my toy yes so he hasn't paid yet i mean this is that so i'm like i'm giving him terms smart move
yeah but um no interest but terms so the the but basically what it does it allows you to spread
seeds and fertilizer and and seeds is the big thing honestly more than anything else but uh
the ranch is regenerative but you know there's certain parts that could use some overseeding
and so it's just targeted areas it also has this there's another drone that goes along with it that
is does this multi-spectral mapping
and it can tell you a lot about the land.
It can tell you basically the biomass
that you've got on there.
So if you're, you know,
we have this intense rotational grazing thing.
And so you can understand
whether or not you're overgrazing them
or undergrazing them in certain parts that they're in.
You know, it tells you about the soil health.
Like it can detect whether there's low nitrogen levels,
for instance.
It's, these drones are, like I have,
I love drones anyway.
Like I like them.
So this is no surprise why this is kind of my toy.
Although it really won't be my toy until he goes to Thailand and for his fighter thing,
then I'll really see what I can do.
But I've only ever had the camera drones.
But what they do commercially, it's actually amazing what these things can do.
I mean, they're really, really advanced.
They can do some cool stuff.
Yep.
I had one of those DJIs or whatever, and we look out at the reef and the islands and stuff.
But I just took it off from the house, up the beach.
I'd connected my phone into these, like you just put your phone into these VR type goggles and stuff.
And I was flying seven kilometers away.
Couldn't see anything.
Getting chased by this big sea eagle on the beach.
I'm sure it's not legal.
So this never happened, ladies and gentlemen.
But the capacity for like, this was just a toy, like an entry, maybe not entry level.
I think it was like two, two and a half grand or whatever it was.
So it was a nice toy.
But then to see that machine that you've had,
and I've seen them slinging like concrete bags and stuff in China,
just really amazing what people can do.
I wanted to touch on the entrepreneur cycle a little bit
and then dive into sort of the practicality of what Maxim's doing
is just to give people ideas because the world's changing
and it's changing pretty rapidly and it's getting pretty quick.
And you can either sit there in despair and get scared
where you can just go out and you can just do shit, as Bitcoiners say.
You can just try something new and fail forward to be able to do it.
As we get to the top of the hour, Matt, I'm going to link the book below.
It's just, it's so incredible.
I'm no longer a young man.
I'm no longer a kid.
I read it on Kindle.
I actually want to talk to you.
I'd love a signed copy.
I don't care how much I need to pay for it to be able to get it.
The only condition is hopefully you'll accept Bitcoin for it.
Of course, except Bitcoin. Well, in a month or two weeks, we have a conference here. So Max,
Doug and I will all be together. So we'll be able to sign some then and I'll get one to you.
And whereabouts is that for everyone?
The conference, it's in Uruguay. It's basically how to live and invest in Uruguay. We talk about
residency, like Plan B stuff, which I heard, which we mentioned before we started recording.
Yeah.
I think that's so important. I know we only have an hour. We'll have to get you back on to be
able to talk about that as well, maybe even yourself and Doug together. I'd love to speak
to Maxim. It's very inspiring what he's doing. But I just want to hand over the floor to you.
I don't want to hold you up too much. You're a busy man. Just take a couple of moments to be
able to share a lesson or a little bit of advice or just a message for the audience that they can
take away and run with, hopefully. Yeah, sure. I mean, because you're talking about the
entrepreneurship category. One of the hardest things, I've been an entrepreneur my whole life.
It's been very good to me, but it involved lots of failure along the way. I've won some, lost some,
still have some, sold some, is the way I look at it. The thing is that when you're young,
you really don't know. It's really hard to figure out a business because you have so little
understanding of the world. And so you don't really understand what the needs of the customers
are. You don't really realize the pain points they have. So it's very difficult for you to
figure out what would effectively solve those problems. And your ideal customer are not people
like you who don't have any money. Your ideal customer is somebody who could afford something
of value that you can make a profit in delivering to them. So the best thing you can do is go out
in the world and get experience, get exposure to the real world, get intensely involved in
different things. Along the way, I recommend building some actual skills, but most importantly
is just to get exposure to how the world really works and the exposure to people that you would
never otherwise interact with. And for young people in particular, I think it's a big problem
is they don't, they feel, well, they really are isolated from the older generation. In fact,
if anything, they might see the older generation is the problem, which is dangerous. And in fact,
What they'd learn is that a lot of older people would actually be delighted to help a young, motivated, intelligent, resourceful person succeed.
You know, what you learn as you get older, I'm 50 now, I turned 50 this year, is that you have, you know, you're spending the whole first part of your life saying yes to every opportunity that comes your way.
And I don't know when that tipping point is, but there's some point where you have to say no to a hell of a lot more than you say yes to.
And eventually it gets to a point where you basically have to say no to virtually everything.
And so the opportunities that you have that are table scraps for you as an older person are gigantic opportunities for a young person.
But you'll never get exposed to them if you don't befriend older people, if you don't believe that they have something to teach you, if you don't try and provide value to them in some way.
So I think the key is to get deeply involved in learning stuff.
Get off the phone, go out and learn actual things.
And if you don't know what to learn, we have 16 things in here specifically that we highlight,
but we have lots of other activities that we encourage to do.
And it will be a worthwhile use of your time to do any one of these things.
If you don't have four years to do it, maybe you're out of college already and realize that
that didn't work, so you can't really afford that time that you lost again.
I still think there's a lot still if you did a two or three cycles I think you would have such a
better understanding of how the world actually works and how you can successfully interact with
it how you can step into and create value build businesses solve people's problems you know and I
but the problem most people have today is they actually don't have any actual competency in
anything yeah they might have a lot of ideas they might have a strong point of view about stuff but
if a car breaks down, they don't know what to do. If someone gets injured around them,
they don't know what to do. If someone asks them to
drive a car with a stick, they don't know what to do.
I mean, literally nothing. Most people don't know how to do anything anymore because
our economy is hyper-rationalized
and efficient, that we're allowed to be ultra-specialized into
nothingness. Our job is to be a consumer.
and that's what most people, that's what we've been shaped to be consumers
and that is there's zero value in being a consumer. You're taking, not creating
and so you've got to get real world experience doing something and it also
will give you confidence that you can't possibly get
even if you have really strong opinions and a good attitude or whatever. Knowing how to do
something really changes your life. I agree. Ladies and gentlemen, I'll
link Matt below as well as the book in just a couple
more things. I was reading Alex Hormosey's $100 million offers. This book was recommended
straight after is what to read next. And I think that was an incredible follow on,
but the algorithm has started pushing it. You've sold, can I say how many copies that you've sold
so far? So 8,000 copies are out there. That's 8,000 lives of people reading the book that are
going to change in a dramatic way, whether they go through it or not, just even some of the reading
list with academic lessons within it. It's just such a huge takeaway. So if you're not happy with
where you are in life, male or female, young or old, there is something in this book. It's truly
amazing. And what have you got to lose? It's going to cost you a little bit of money and a little bit
of time, but I dare say everyone's going to take something out of it that will profoundly impact
their lives it truly is a life shaping life defining book i couldn't encourage you enough
to be able to get it but matt it's been an absolute pleasure and honor to be able to have you here
today for everyone out there please do something nice for yourself today
for somebody else out there be blessed peace