Expert financial advice from Peter Mallouk, coauthor of The Path

hi everybody it's tony robbins i'm really excited today to share with you a dear friend of mine and that has been a business partner of mine in the past a gentleman who was the co-author of a book many of you have already read called unshakable but we've put together a new book together and we're really excited about especially for these times and it's called the path subtitle is accelerating your journey to financial freedom and couldn't be a better time to be talking about that than right now and so many people are in fear and so

many people think this will be the worst time it invests and i think this interview is going to be really eye-opening to you because it's not going to be based on opinion it's going to be based on facts based on trends that have gone on for literally centuries in the marketplace and peter's the guy to talk to you and i'll tell you why he's a dear friend yes but he's also one of the people i respect most in this marketplace and the reason is you can take my word screw my word take a look at

how he's performed at the highest levels you know barons has named him first of all he's built creative planning into a 50 billion dollar company pretty amazing and done in a very short period of time but behrens has named him the number one top 100 independent advisor in america three years in a row i want to make sure i get this right cnbc is picked in as the top wealth management firm two years in a row but what's unique about peter is he's the only one actively giving advice on that list right now so pretty

amazing and great accolades but those accolades are earned so i've had the privilege of knowing peter for almost seven years now and working with him and learning from him and extracting information as much as i could from him and applying it and trying to share that with all the people that follow my work who are truly interested not only just financial security but ultimately really true financial freedom or independence and uh peter has decided to put this new book together and approach me on it and it really helps you kind of pull the curtain back

on what's really happening in the marketplace and show you you know we wrote unshakable knowing that this was coming we didn't know it was uh you know going to be a pandemic that's for sure but we knew the markets were going to take a hit we kept talking about it winter's coming and the book was designed to make you unshakeable during that time well now that we're here we want to give you a step-by-step plan a kind of a path to get from where you are to where you want to be and show you how

during maximum pessimism is the greatest opportunity so that's a big intro but let me welcome now my dear friend peter miller give him a hand everybody as you're seeing him peter great to see you it's good to be with you tony tell me man um let's start if we would go back a step because not everybody knows your background share with us a little bit about what really got you into investing how did you come about building creative planning and what you know what are the what were the insights or principles that you used to

really grow that business because i jumped on board with you because i saw the kind of impact you're having so share with us a little bit of that background if you would you know i know when you wrote money master the game you kind of backdoored your way into the industry by learning really what was wrong and getting upset about it and then going and researching it and talking to ray dalio and charles schwab and john bogle and then figuring out what could you share with your followers and mine was similar it wasn't so much

i had an idea on how to do something was more i was witnessing all the things that i saw were a problem i was an estate and a tax attorney and i would give advice to other advisors clients i really got a feel for how advice is delivered and there are a lot of good advisors out there but there are a lot that aren't good and are very conflicted with their clients and really salesmen in disguise and so i really wanted to have a firm that had an independent was totally independent didn't have its own

investment products to sell didn't didn't even have products that they were getting kickbacks or revenue sharing on when it came to investing you just someone is paying you for investment advice they should get investment advice and not be sold investment products and i also know that as you know that a big part of this is getting tax and legal issues right it doesn't matter if you're one or two percent more and pay 10 percent more in taxes and so really having all of that put together was the impetus of you know getting going with creative

planning you built it uh into an incredible momentum now in terms of impact uh one thing that pulled me to you is for people to understand is you kind of created almost like a family office for those not familiar with it family office you have all these experts together the problem today is you go to somebody for advice on how to invest and you got to go talk to your tax attorney then you got to take a look at what's going on with your mortgages and so people that are super wealthy have these family offices

with all these experts and the thing that you did is you put together a team for everybody and one thing i want you to know about peter is you know he's certainly a successful businessman but he has an incredible heart and i went to him and i said listen if i'm gonna do this with you i want you to do this for people that have like a hundred thousand dollars and to your credit peter you built that you've helped so many people would never have access to your type of advice but explain people what does

that mean family office and what is it that you're really trying to deliver for people you and i both know that most people are overcharging one percent more in fees and you need to pay i'll cost you a decade of retirement income over the long term because of compounding but what what really is the thesis behind it you start to touch on it but what do you really deliver for people you basically instead of just saying hey this is your risk tolerance we're going to put you in this model portfolio or this is your age

you're going to get these investments we really said look what are you trying to accomplish what are your goals i like to say goals are another word for dreams like what are we what are you dreaming of doing charitable things leaving your kids a bunch of money spending a certain amount of money in retirement you like your job but you just want the freedom of being able to walk away if you want to let's let's not let's define those and let's prioritize those and then let's look at where you stand today and what are the

investments that create the highest probability of making that outcome happen those are the things that we want to own and it doesn't have anything to do with your age and it has very little to do with your risk tolerance it really has to start from what you're trying to do and it makes everything you're doing more purposeful so now we have an investment plan but then we want to do an incredibly tax sensitive way we don't want to pay fees where we don't need to we don't want to pay commissions ever very rarely should we

ever have to encounter that and definitely never to a financial advisor and we also don't want to lose everything in an incapacity or a death so having all those components really allow somebody to not just have the money pointed in the right direction but have the whole framework of everything you can do to grow and preserve and transfer your wealth in place these are all pieces to the same puzzle they really have to be talking to each other before people be in a world where they're always the general contractor on anything they ever built they

had to go get the drywall person and the plumber and the electrician well the general contractor can get you know screwed over quite a bit in that setup unless they really know what they're doing and so we really have this ability to sit with the client and be alongside them as that we put all those pieces together yeah and every client i see you do that with families together which is one of the other things that happens the conflict in families you have two people who love each other but a lot of those conflicts because

they have one's more security driven one's more growth driven and i've watched you guys and not just yourself and you built an unbelievable team really navigate that with people so they can have some certainty which brings up the big question why this book now i mean there's so much uncertainty out there there's so much fear i mean fear is the real virus now obviously there's a virus out there but it's the virus is a lot smaller than the fear that it's devastating families and emotions and economics and businesses so why why did you come in

why did you want to do this book at this time you know when we did unshakeable it was really all about investing and preparing for a bear market and like you said we didn't know what the bear market was going to be but we knew it was going to come and i mean the book couldn't have been you know better timed really having unshakeable come out but it's only really a piece of what we're doing and it's only a piece of wealth management even if you're understand markets and you understand how to invest you still

need to understand well what investments make sense for you and what are the legal and tax implications so the path is really about all wealth management so whether somebody's a sent a millionaire or somebody has a hundred thousand dollars or fifty thousand dollars or any amount it really walks through step by step how do you define your goals how do you measure your success how much do you have to set aside to make it work what tax strategies are there what legal strategies are there how do we not lose everything because your insurance isn't right

and it just goes chapter by chapter walking you through how to get your house in order and really put that extra push into things to propel you towards your goal and also has a lot to do with what money is about so even if you've got all the planning right the wealth management right which is what's new to this book it also touches on money serves a purpose and to really enjoy life and how money fits into that we talk a lot about that including the chapters that you covered in the book yeah well tell

me you know you navigated one of the reasons that you and i got together uh was because i just saw the way you navigated 2008 2009 it was the last great recession as we all recall it's pretty painful time for most and yet you grew geometrically what similarities do you see today to that time what's similar what's different and what helped you to be successful to help your clients during that time you know paul volcker who is the federal the the fed chair a long time ago he's got this famous saying he says about every

10 years we have the crisis of a lifetime and basically 08 was the last one and covet has been the most recent one so what they have in common is both times something comes out of nowhere and really jolts the markets before that there was 9 11 and before that there was the tech bubble and when you have uncertainty people don't know what's going to happen they panic and they go to cash but as we know and we wrote about it unshakable and i write about very extensively in the path the market turns very very

quickly when some even just some of the cloud is lifted it looks forward and in 089 we took advantage of a lot of tax trading we did a lot of buying when it was down we did the same thing this year in march we were tax harvesting for clients we were buying more equities for clients and so when we got towards the end of march and the recovery happened very very quickly i mean most of the losses in some markets were erased within weeks we had already purchased more of those securities before that turn and

so really just having the resolve understanding and believing over the long run in the economy and the markets and then having the resolve to go the opposite direction of everybody else at that time and take advantage of the tax implications too really can put you in an advantage and i walk through a lot of that in the book and it's something we do at creative planning and that we did you know through march and april as well this year let's talk about the the obvious mistake that so many people make uh it happens all the

time it's based on human psychology and emotion and that's people trying to time the market you know i remember interviewing warren buffett he said it didn't just say it to me he said it a million times but he's got that famous phrase i forget how to language it with me but the essence of it was the only reason that we have market timers is to make fortune tellers look good right so and there are all these people you and i both know that they're always talking about the chicken little the sky is home and sky

is falling and you know even a you know stop clock is right twice a day type thing right so tell us what's the what's wrong with the idea of market timing and how does that you know the worst day of investing in the best day investing how do they compare like if you entered the market on the worst day for this best day because i know you and i both know there's been studies done on it and they're they're counter-intuitive to what almost anybody believe most people think you get on the worst day you get

on at the peak and then it drops through the floor you're done forever right or if you got it at the bottom man you're guaranteed success but you and i both know it's a very small difference but tell us what's wrong with market timing and what are the distinctions between best time and worst time so that people hopefully can rid themselves of that burden to destroy so much potential wealth in the world yeah it's the number one wealth destructor you know number two is over betting in one's one sector that doesn't work out but the

number one is just people doing themselves in with market timing whenever you bump into somebody they say oh because of coronavirus with my investments i lost everything or with 911 or the tech bubble or 809 that means they either left the market at the bottom or overweighted to a sector that did poorly or their advisor did that for them and sadly that's what a lot of people do and what's dangerous about that is like we talked about the market turns very very fast even we look at march six of the best days of this entire

year happened in march so if you exit and you miss out just a week or two you may never get that back so if you're the worst investor in the world and you invested the day before 00809 or 911 or the tech bubble what's happened since then you either doubled or tripled or quadrupled your money that's what's happened picking the worst possible days so i think even if you were a super unlucky investor and you bought the day before coronavirus really started to drive the markets down the odds are very very great if we look

forward you're still gonna double your money as long as you've got the resolve you don't miss those those quick upswing days yeah uh jp morgan actually did a study i pulled it out here over 20 years the s p 500 averaged 8.2 percent compounded but here's what's crazy guys if you missed just the top 10 trading days it went down to four and a half percent that was your total return it cut it in half if you missed 20 days out of 20 years 20 of the top trading days because you thought you knew when

the bottom or the top was going to happen you end up with 2.1 percent you might as well have had something in a bond of some sort without the risk and then 30 missing if you missed 30 days in 20 years the 30 top trading days you made zero money just being up 30 days in 20 years i mean it's impossible but here's the craziest thing and you just demonstrated it six out of the ten best days in the market over the last 20 years occurred within two weeks of the 10 worst days maybe you

can give people some insight as to why is it really like if a ferrari that was for 400 000 was on sale for 150 you know most people that's incredible but when a stock goes on sale because of fear people run away tell us a little bit about that psychology and how can we combat it well i think there's this myth that the market's like a casino and it goes up and down and so people try to avoid the down part and get in for that part but it's not like a casino at all you

know if you go to a casino every single game as this great chart from bloomberg shows every single game has losing your odds the longer you play the like the more likely you are to lose but in the market no matter when you go in your odds are going to be positive a year later about 75 percent uh over five years it's about 89 over 15 years it's almost 100 percent so it's the opposite of a casino with the market you are the casino you are the one that the longer you play the more likely

the odds are in your favor and you just have to kind of get out of your mind that it goes up and down that's not what it's like at all so i try to explain to to clients when they're concerned about it um if you really think about say a candy bar or a can of coke or go to a restaurant during coronavirus some of those things might be on sale because they're having a hard time selling them and so they're encouraging people to come to restaurants or buy drinks or whatever but we intuitively know

that's not what they're not prices are not going to keep going down over the long run they're probably going to go up you know here are some you know great charts that i like to use as an example like if we look at the market over the long run it just goes up but it's not just the market if you look at mcdonald's cheeseburger from 1955 to today has it had periods of time where the price has gone down it has but over the whole time it's gone from being you know about a quarter to

a buck sixty it goes up same with corn flakes same with a hershey's bar and that separates the myth from reality the market is just these products the earnings associated with these products reflected in stock prices so you cannot have a hershey's bar go up and a can of coke go up and a meal at mcdonald's go up without there being inflation and inflation is part of the market return yes and help people understand i know schwab did a study also i grabbed it here to remind myself the details they said that you know if

in 1993 you invested two thousand dollars and you did it on perfect timing you made eighty seven thousand dollars i'll put it up on the screen here afterwards here if you invested just the minute you had any money you made eighty one thousand dollars on that money if you did dollar cost averaging right you're putting the same amount in every month you made seventy nine thousand if you were the worst timing if you got into the peak and the market crashed the next day you made 72 000 so 72 versus 87 it's so minor over

that 20 years of investing and if you stayed in cash of course it was the worst you made 50 000 right 51 000 so it's really important i think for people to understand that this is driven not only by prices but what's the what's the role of immigration what's the role of population growth what's the role of technology and making the market continue to grow because a lot of people right now think oh my god the market's going to shrink and it might in the short term you and i both know absolutely could but why

over the long term can we count on that besides just prices growing so people have more of a larger understanding of the dynamics yeah this is much much more important than just understanding the market goes up over time simply because of prices it's not just that it's it's what era are we living in and and objectively speaking we are living in the best era ever to be a human i guess not even debatable but definitely as an investor and if you look at what drives investing uh you need to have people to buy stuff so

part of its demographics and the other part is we need innovation and technology so when we when we sit in high school like sun sits in high school classes today and my daughter sit in those classes they're going to learn about the industrial revolution and they're going to learn about the technology and they're going to learn about you know invention of fire and all those things in the wheel but thousands of years from now if we haven't messed up the earth by then thousands of years from now they're going to be studying this period right

now and the rapid speed of technological innovation that's impacting everything from the way we communicate to the way that we grow to the way that we print to medical care and everything else technology and innovation isn't just happening which is a prerequisite for economic expansion it's happening at a faster rate today than it ever has in all of history and what it's doing is it's allowing us to compress time to be more productive like instead of delivering a letter on on a horse uh or even a fat overnight mail or a fax or an email

you can be texted and we no longer have to use you know tablets and and print you know you get something instantly online you get the answer to everything in a library on wikipedia if you want to or in a book everything is moving faster and at the same time it's costing less okay so we're not only getting more advanced technology like a phone that now replaces everything but the phone is more accessible to everybody in the united states the average person living in poverty has a phone i mean a phone has more technological power

than we used with apollo 13 right in just that phone and it replaces about a hundred things from an alarm clock to an atlas to just everything but the idea is it's become more accessible it's become more affordable it expands knowledge it drives innovation and we have these demographics we have over a billion people coming out of poverty in the next 10 years all over the world and what are they going to do they're gonna do what everybody coming out of poverty does they're gonna buy stuff so you put these forces together on top of

normal market forces that have found a way to propel markets forward no matter what's happening regardless and you've got a great time to be alive and a great time to be an investor and you know there's so much discussion about the wealth gap and it is a true wealth gap but i've been reading some of the studies that show in those wealth gap they don't show other assets that are owned it's kind of interesting but more importantly people get more from their money today i mean you know i remember growing up and being in a

position where if you wanted to steal music you had to go to a store and you had to really risk something right you couldn't go online and go click click click and just take what you want but sincerely today people have privileges opportunities who never could have afforded a million years and we take it for granted do you have some examples you could share because i want people to understand the quality of life even though the pandemic has hit everybody to their knees to some extent in the short term the quality of life seems to

keep improving whether we go through a world war or whether we go through swine flu or they'll go to world war ii or we go through you know great economic reckoning we seem to keep moving forward and the quality of life seems to be improving including for those that are most impoverished around the world oh there's there's absolutely no question um so if you look at for example what we used to be able to spend on what we want to spend we spent spent 43 of our money over 100 years ago was on food 23

just to get some kind of shelter with no heating or plumbing or electricity or anything like that and 14 to just buy a couple pieces of clothes and that left us 20 to do other things today we only spend a third of our money on a home 13 on food 3 on clothes and over half our money the average person over half their money they're doing what they want to do with it it's totally completely discretionary so the money goes a lot further today it buys a lot better things than it used to it used

to be no one had a radio and today everyone has a cell phone no one had a tv and most people have uh flat screen tvs let's just take a look at the average american home in 1950 to today 1950 983 square feet with 55 of americans having home ownership today it's 20 it's 2 349 square feet with 80 of americans owning a home 10 percent of people had televisions back then today 95 percent of people have tele televisions back then uh back then average earnings was 11 000 today adjusted for inflation it's 44 000.

okay we're making four times as much qual listen to this quality of life back then 68 year life expectancy uh 50 of seniors living in poverty 75 of african americans living in poverty zero years was the average years in retirement today life expectancy 78 years 9 of seniors living in poverty 27 percent of african americans living in poverty average retirement is 12 years anybody that says they want to go live in the good old days is has their head in the sand and is just absolutely having to go out of their way to construct a

narrative where somehow that is better and remember the market was going up through all of that so if you look at where we are today with better quality of life from life expectancy to years in retirement to technology to heating plumbing cooling medical care and everything else and you look at the all these people coming out of poverty all over the world and advancements of technology you have a recipe for long-term success so you shouldn't just be able to look at every bear market in history and say hey they've been overcome with a new bull

market you should say it's even more likely they're going to be overcome because we're living in a much better time today than we used to but we have higher expectations so sometimes we don't appreciate as much as what we have and we talk about that in the book also because it's one thing to get more money but somebody got more money or plenty of money and they're still unhappy and we'll address that with you in the book as well we'll leave that for the book but i i view two things one is the wealth gap

though is real and there are many people still suffering way more than we want to obviously there's been gigantic progress in humanity in that area but uh you know if you look at people today living in poverty you know you and i we're donating by the way a hundred percent of this book is being donated feeding america uh we've done that i've done that with all my books my most last 10 years of books anyway and we did it together unshakable i'm proud to tell you by the way we're going to hit 700 000 meals

this year i set a goal 10 years ago to feed a billion meals to people in america and we're going to hit 700 000. so we obviously care about that want to deliver that but what's missing so often and you hear kids today for example talk about there's no opportunity or hear people talk about socialism who've never seen it you know i worked down in venezuela i'm very familiar with that i went to the ussr when it was still the soviet union uh i know what that really looks like it made me a capitalist but

we don't teach people to be capitalist today we don't teach them to invest and so you know no one thinks in terms of how to add value no one has that financial literacy i shouldn't say no one a small percentage that's why uh 60 of americans can't afford they don't have a thousand dollars say for their retirement even though the opportunity is so huge and i realized that this is gonna be forty percent of americans couldn't handle a five hundred dollar emergency this is before covet so i'm not i don't wanna downplay the challenges i

just want to say that if we can teach people how to find the way to take a small portion of it you have how little you have and invest that the power of compounding can you touch on that because most people i think believe i got to make you know 10 million a year and then i'll be financially free and you and i both know we both coach people that some of the greatest athletes some of the most amazing entertainers actors who made fortunes and then literally we end up going bankrupt some of the most

famous names in the world have done that so what can you get across the people so that not only they want to learn this themselves but perhaps share it with their friends or their family or their children well i think that the powerful thing about investing is you just absolutely have to start as soon as possible whether you're 72 or you're 22 time is your very best friend even if you only get a rate of return of around seven percent every dollar you invest is gonna double in ten years so if you're if you're 30

and you get to double from one dollar to two to four to eight to 16 you can see how that really really adds up and so you really want to get the benefit of compounding on your side warren buffett called compounding or not warren buffett albert einstein called compounding one of the great wonders of the world and i think that that the key there is start early and use an automatic system to really get that on your side and get into a diversified portfolio where you don't get caught up in the day-to-day of what's happening

with any specific stock or any sector we talk a lot about this in the past about really figure out what you're trying to do and how much time you have to do it and then we can back into what you're going to have to invest in and how aggressively you're going to have to save to make that happen well you know i always give an example for people for their kids you know if you uh take an example and you take this kid joe i'll throw it up on the screen for you here but joe

puts away 300 a month his parents says look you're living at home you know you can afford to do this we want to get the right discipline in you and he puts 300 a month and he continues to do that till he's 27 years old so he basically does it for eight years and then he stops for the rest of his life and he's putting a total of twenty eight thousand eight hundred dollars over that period of time just 300 bucks a month that's what it is and then his best friend sees what he's doing

and when he quits at 27 his best friend bob decides he's going to start investing he puts on 300 a month aside same thing a tax you know free environment tax deferred environment rather gets an average if it's 100 years would be a 10 return which one he invests 140 000 over almost 40 years 38 years you know the first gentleman joe is investing you know 28 800 over eight years that's it but who has more money at the end as you can see joe's got 1.86 million from eight years 300 bucks a month that's

it for his whole life and bible here's got 1.5 million and he did it 38 years so boy anyone can get wealthy if they can start with just even the smallest amount and for the people watching you know there's been great studies where people say i can't save and what happens is they they took a group of people in middle america working with blue collar workers and they said we're going to take three percent of your pay out you will never notice it we're gonna do it and they did it and then they said every

time you get a raise we want you to put another three percent in within 12 years they were putting aside an average of 17 percent and becoming absolutely financially secure and independent so it's really changing your psychology and that's a part of what we talk about obviously in this book as well tell me why is it so important to be absolutely clear about what it is you really want and what are your four fundamental rules on really how to achieve financial freedom because i know that we both believe that complexity is the enemy of execution

like keep it simple so tell us you know why is it so important to be so clear about what you want what are those four rules for you i mean think about an athlete that's going to go to compete they don't just start working out they know what they're going to compete in they know where the starting line is they know what the finish line is they know what they have to do to win and you really have to look at wealth management that way so you start by having a plan what am i actually

trying to accomplish and then you build a portfolio and you might have several portfolios one might be to accomplish educational goals one for retirement goals one for charitable goals but we want those to match up with the timeline we want to get on the savings plan to get there we want the right investments to get there and then we've got to revisit the plan occasionally test yourself run swim the labs run run the track are you on track for the goal or not are we going to have to do something different to make the goal

work you might have a year where the market does really great and you can change your investments because you're ahead of track for the goal and and vice versa and then ultimately the ultimate rule is just don't mess it up you know unshakable was all about don't messing don't mess it up don't screw up don't get make a behavioral mistake and the path is all about constructing the overall plan to help get you there and that's what everybody needs today especially in this environment a plan that'll get you out of fear a plan that'll move

you forward tell me uh you know part of helping people to get beyond that fear is to understand patterns like you know pattern recognition is power if someone is great at anything they have great pattern recognition and so pattern recognition allows you to anticipate what's going to happen because you see where it's going so in the markets there's some really clear patterns that people get freaked out about that are actually predictable can you talk a little bit about the differences between you know a true bear market versus you know just a correction what that means

and how often they occur so that people might have a different mindset when they see everybody being afraid so if you think about these corrections in bear markets those are those are things that people think are predictable and we we know that they're not predictable we write a little bit about that in the past but we know that these corrections the correction is just a 10 drop or more they happen every year on average if you haven't it's predictable yeah what's predictable is it's going to happen so don't freak out when it happens and you

know the average correction doesn't this market doesn't go down 10 then turn around and go go up it usually goes down 13 14 plus percent um and sometimes it goes on to be a bear market which is dropper 20 or more and most of the time it doesn't so this drop of 13 to 14 that is what is predictable so you want to take advantage of that now it doesn't sound like a big deal people are like oh who cares well i mean that's thousands of points of a drop in the market i mean in

every time the market drops thousands of points the financial media is going to get in your face and freak you out you're going to go my god what's happening and people tend to panic and convert because it's the elections or it's covid or it's the greek debt crisis or it's brexit or whatever it is there's a nice narrative always to go with it but what's predictable is that the correction is going to happen so you want to take advantage of it by accelerating savings or shifting from a more conservative more aggressive allocation occasionally you get

the ultimate gift and that's a bear market the bear market's a drop of 20 or more and that happens on average every five years and what a bear market does is it gives you a long time to accumulate shares in a down market if you're buying you want the market to take a long time at the bottom before it goes up if you're retired you should have enough bonds to meet your needs the bear market shouldn't face you anyway no one should be phased by a bear market anyone in the accumulation phase should be thrilled

that they can be buying more buying more shares uh while the market's down and so if you just understand how predictable these are how often these happen it gives you the strength and the resolve to do the investing you need to do to get your on the right path to hit your goals and i think it's important for people to remember that these happen on average every year for the last 100 years on average not every year but almost every year and the average drop down is 14 so someone sees that they start thinking it's

the end times the media is always promoting it because listen the media's not bad people they just they have a job and their job is to get you to watch and they know something it's no longer an information society right we're drowning information we're starving for wisdom so what do they do fear sells baby so their job is startle you and so if you allow yourself to get startled that's where you're going to lose but you know as you said and to point out to everybody 80 of the time those corrections do not turn into

a you know bear market but when they do that's when everything goes on sale and that's when you gotta manage your fear because it is the greatest opportunity in your life for wealth building so off of that tell us why is now you've already kind of said it but you know there's a chapter in the book that i love so much we're really talking about why the world is better than you think why is now the time to invest why is now one of the best times to invest so that people get a sense because

i think most people have the very opposite view most people are frozen with uncertainty i'm trying to figure out how to survive not invest well i think the big part of it is you know you talked a little bit about the wealth gap but it's true there's a bigger wealth gap that there's ever been but there's more people emerging from poverty into the middle class than ever before so really a lot of what drives the markets is you have this big move the biggest move between classes is the lower class the working class into the

middle class it's been unbelievable i wish we would hear and read more about it but what you're seeing at the very very top end is not really the top one percent but the top one one thousandth of one percent there the separation between them and everybody else is also greater than it's ever been and the reason for that ironically enough is technology so 50 years ago if you had a great athlete well they were a great athlete well today they can leverage themselves all over the world their brand all over the world michael jordan could

never do what lebron james is doing it just didn't exist he was at the beginning of the cusp of that and you go back to babe ruth babe ruth had no chance compared to michael jordan so the ability to monetize because you can get you can get an instant audience all over the world and you can do things so much quicker is so much greater and that's what's created the wealth gavel jeff bezos has a great idea or mark zuckerberg has an idea uh or jack dorsey has an idea it's no longer gonna be i'm

gonna start in my backyard and a hundred years later my grandkids might have a brand all over the world if you've got a great idea people are going to discover it it's going to rock it and a lot of that wealth goes to you and that's created a lot of i think the the hostility between classes but this idea that there's let more people in in poverty than ever and less people the middle class class there is absolutely not true we have a more people moving from poverty to middle class than ever before and from

the middle class to the upper middle class than ever before but it is also true that that one outliers really become a very big outlier but what's important about that is that middle class is what makes everything work so in the middle class that's where we've got the engineers the doctors the lawyers the small business owners all of these folks my people they are your people and this is the backbone of the country as people going to work every day whether they're doing drywall or running a restaurant or seeing patients that's what we need and

we have more of that group than ever before and you combine that group with all the innovation and technology and the advancements that we see in the future that's what makes it a great time to be alive and a great time to be an investor if you ask a doctor who's who's a neurologist or a cardiologist they'll tell you that they've learned more about the brain and the heart in medicine in the last 20 years than the past 10 000 years combined that's the era we're blessed to live in today and that's what's propelling the

economy forward is all of these advancements and innovations they cause this turmoil in the market that scare investors because companies come and go quicker than ever restaurant used to open it might stay open for years and years if it was just okay today if it's just okay it's gonna be gone in a few months but we're not running out of restaurants and so we're living in just this amazing amazing time and it reflects itself in in the economy and in the markets and for someone with discipline they've gotta they can do a lot of great

things a lot of people think that money is just about accumulating more money and whoever has the most wins or maybe even it's just a simple goal of being retired and i know you talk all the time about how money's just an ends to a mean and i know you write about this in the book so tony if you could share with us you know how you see money fulfilling needs a little reversal on me here in the interview okay well i think it's really important especially you know i think covert has brought it up

even more you know you see so many people suffering and the suffering it certainly comes from not having certain resources that weren't planned for but the suffering also comes because we haven't learned to manage our own fears our own emotions i mean you know i know the soviet union in the 60s uh did a bunch of studies on how much they could embed fear into people until they would just comply and it literally took less than two months where when people then were revealed the truth they wouldn't change their mind and i think it's so

critical to understand that wealth is mental it's emotional it's spiritual and it's financial it's also health it's physical and so if you don't have abundance in all levels it all gives a lot of money i know a lot of people a lot of money they're very poor i know a lot of people have very little money but they're very wealthy in the quality of their life i really believe that the you know extraordinary quality of life is what we're all after you know it's people some come to me and they'll say you know i want

to grow my business you know 200 percent or you know i want to lose 30 pounds or i want to turn my relationship around or can you please do something with my kid or whatever but all these things have in common is what we're really after when after money is a better quality of life we want to have more autonomy more freedom more choices and it's not even that you don't work because you and i both are in a position we don't have to work another day of our lives and we both have friends that

have sold their businesses for you know plenty of money hundreds of millions we have and some people billions some of our friends and then you see them happy for about three months on average i've seen this happen so many times because it's not so you have enough money you don't work it's you have enough money you don't have to work so you do what you love because you want to do it then you walk different you talk different but it doesn't start with the money it starts with a psychology and what i try to get

across to people is the quality of your life is the quality of your emotions like where you live emotionally we all have an emotional home so think of it like you know we all know people that are pissed off all the time doesn't matter what's happening they find something to be pissed off about we all know people that worry all the time there's nothing to worry about in their own life their own kids they worry about the universe right now someday the sun's gonna explode and you're it's gonna be gone you know and so worries

warriors worry i should say right angry people get angry and while we all know some people that you know think they're funny but they're not really but they crack themselves up and you find yourself laughing too so human emotion you could have a billion dollars and if every day you live in the emotion of pissed off or frustrated or overwhelmed then your life is pissed off frustrated alone doesn't matter how much money you have so part of what we share in this book are some of the tools that can have you really have one of

the greatest qualities of life ever right now it's like you know you can't wait to get beyond you know fear you can't wait to get beyond you know living in scarcity you got to start beyond it and so decisions are what my life's about i help people make decisions and you do that as well you do on the financial side and we that's one of the reasons we got together in the first place because it's your decisions much more than your conditions they're going to determine the quality of your life it's not oh my god

covets happened it's oh my god the market's gone up or down it's what you decide to do the market is never taking money from anybody you know that i do it's our decisions that have done that are fearful decisions so if you want an extraordinary quality of life right now while you're building the financial side of wealth and you want the other side of wealth now you have to learn to discipline your mind you have to learn to discipline your disappointment because life is filled with disappointments discipline either destroys you or it drives you right

and so what this book is really about is getting you a path and we say a path we literally mean a plan a path that will get you from where you are to where you want to be and what's in the way of that path is a lack of education we're giving it to you the tools the strategies the ability to know exactly what to do designed for you but also it's really about being in a position where you have a path for quality of life and so i think there's two skills everybody has to

master skill if you want an extraordinary life skill number one is the skill of being able to really master your ability to achieve master your ability i call it the science of achievement it's like the capacity to take where you are right now and say no matter what's happening here's how i'm going to get there now it's not going to be a straight line if you take off from florida here and you want to fly to hawaii it's not a straight line you're off course a good deal the time but instead of the pilot going

oh my god we're off course we're going to die you know experienced pilot like an experienced investor goes hey i just need to make a little correction a little correction a little correction and they land on a dime that's what the path is but in order for that path to work we got to work your emotions a little bit and you got to know how to achieve which the book shows you but also lots of people achieve you know you know i interviewed more than 50 multi-billionaires all people who started with nothing nobody from the

lucky sperm club they all did it on their own and they did it all different ways whether it's ray dalio or carl icahn or warren buffett or anybody of paul theater jones and as i interviewed all these people and i dug underneath it all what's really interesting is not everybody know how much money they have is fulfilled and that is really the ultimate test because success or money without fulfillment is the ultimate failure i mean making much money and you're miserable you don't get along with your kids or you don't have love in your life

and so i think the second master skill is the art of fulfillment you've got to master what fulfills you and that's different for everybody it's like you go to the forest and you see everything's different so if you want to know what the universe or god or whatever your belief structure is whatever made all this certainly loves diversity and so your ability to find that fulfillment today that's some day when you have a certain amount of money because it's like when i tell people about giving you know yeah easy for you you give you're wealthy

and no if you don't give a dime out of a dollar you're sure as hell not going to give you know 25 million dollars like you and i are doing this year or anything of that nature to people you're not going to take that and do that but if you learn to give if you learn to operate in a way that's more fulfilling if you learn that it's not just about getting it's about growing becoming and giving then it's unbelievable and the research today is it's not some psychobabble or some positive thinking i'm sharing with

you now scientists can actually about a saliva that you inject they can figure out which hormones are triggered by activity you going and buying coffee for three people in line behind you at starbucks will give you an emotional level of fulfillment more than almost any other thing we spent a lot more money because you did something that was completely outside yourself you did something was pure it wasn't your stars on your chart you just did something because it felt right and research shows that you're going to be fulfilled by getting to a certain extent but

things don't give you long-term fulfillment experiences that's why taking your family on a trip or going something or learning some new experience that's why those are so fulfilling to give us lasting joy because they make us grow and we get to share but also what also does it for us is just pure giving and giving is one of the greatest gifts in the world so finding what will fulfill you the last thing i'll say is because i'm dumping it all really fast and she asked me the question oh happy to share is that you really

got to understand that it's all here and here like the quality of your life is what you do inside your head in your heart and decisions that i think the most important decision i learned in my life was this decision to live in a beautiful state no matter what not some phony fake positive thinking rah-rah bs but what i mean by that is to find the good and whatever's happened that's what'll make you a great investor that's what'll make you more importantly a great husband a great wife a great parent a great friend a great

leader in a business because any idiot people sometimes say to me well i'm skeptical you know i'm pessimistic and go let's be honest you're gutless i'm not i'm not being harsh but it doesn't take any guts to go nothing's going to work it'll never happen oh give up any idiot can do that it takes courage it takes faith to try something and maybe fail and pick yourself up and learn something from it and fail again and fail again to get to where you want to go but that's what everyone succeeds does so if there's one

decision that we'll talk about in the book with you if you pick it up is this this idea of making the decision that you're going to live life in a different way and that you give yourself 90 seconds to get out of that lousy state and if you start with that kind of standard for yourself you'll discover something interesting you'll come up with answers a lot faster in a beautiful state than in a pissed off one than in a crying one than a sad one than a depressed one and what we show you in the

book and part of my expertise is showing somebody how to do that in seconds that's real by learning how to use your body in a certain way to change your biochemistry stuff i've been teaching now for gosh 43 years my 43rd year doing this uh you know four years ago harvard did a study on what they called power postures and showed you can literally change your biochemistry in two minutes not by making more money by standing a certain way breathing a certain way with your shoulders in two minutes you'll see an increase of testosterone by

20 cortisol which creates stress will drop by more than 20 percent and your risk tolerance will increase by 33 meaning you're willing to move forward so the book is really designed to give you the path but also the psychological emotional path that'll make sure you're fulfilled as well and i think that's equally important because it's too many people i've known i've i've watched um not naming names obviously i have a lot of very wealthy friends i started with absolutely nothing myself and i'm grateful i start with nothing because it really makes me appreciate everything in

my life and i get more joy out of it and i've had friends that they're sitting there fighting with their wife or their children because they spent a thousand dollars and they're a billionaire and so that's not a way that to me isn't wealth and so this book is really about also how do you enjoy it all you go tony show me how to make it i'll figure out how to enjoy it i'm sure you will but you might find some tips here helpful as well let me come back to you now tell me what

uh what what is there anything we've not covered that you really want people know what what's most important for us to leave people with so they go wow this this there is a way to move forward i mean i've loved you've given us some stats and some ideas about how life is better today in spite of what people are you know constantly embedding in their psychology because of media um but what do you want people to leave with and what do people want to leave this book with what what's the promise for them that can

really change their life you know what i'm so excited about this is we both on our own and together have written books just about money just about money and this time we really got into a lot of things you just spoke about which is what's your purpose what's your vision what are your goals what's going to fulfill you let's talk about it now let's not move the goal posts all the time let's figure it out now and let's come up with a real plan not just how we're going to invest but everything in life so

that we don't there are a thousand things that can derail us from someone not having a health care or power of attorney to make a health care decision for somebody i had a client whose daughter got in a car accident coming home from college and the mom couldn't make the decision for her daughter because she was an adult she was 19 and the state wouldn't let the mom make the decisions think about that simple document how it changed things for that family so i covered the details like that and we cut together we cover a

lot of the big picture and the vision so what i love about this is obviously you know creative planning we manage over 50 billion that's a big part of what we do but the reason we're here is because we help people crystallize their goals and we make sure they don't get derailed from legal or tax or insurance things that seem like they don't matter but they matter a lot you really have to have the loose ends tied up and have a vision and then everything else falls into place and so of all the books that

i've done with you or on my own this is the one i'm the most proud of because it really covers everything that uh that someone would need to really get where they want to go i love the detail that you've gone into in this book specifically on helping them figure out which investments precisely and also just risk management because that's life you know how to manage risk you're just touching base on that there's some little things that if you just don't know ignorance is not bliss ignorance is pain ignorance is poverty and when you have

that power when you have that understanding and it's so simple so easy to act on first of all i want to thank you again and again it's the path accelerating your journey to financial freedom and it'll be something i promise you'll be loving we'll look forward to hearing from you online what you think of the book and how you've done to change your life peter thank you so much for your time today i really appreciate seeing you again and you sharing your wisdom with our audience thank you so much tony thanks for all you do

thanks brother blessings you