--:-- Ryan Hanley: Chapter 17 is "Complaining is for Losers," but I like "Stop Fucking Bitching" better. I wish we would have named it that. It's so easy to complain and bitch. I mean, it's so easy. We all fall into it, but the bottom line is it's horrible for you. There's even studies showing that your brain shrinks. I mean, it literally makes you dumber. Let's go.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: The Ryan Hanley Show shares the original ideas, habits, and mindsets of world-class original thinkers you can use to produce extraordinary results in your life and business. This is the way.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the show. We have one of the best episodes we have ever done on this podcast about money teed up for you today. We are talking to Dr. Brad Klontz and Adrian Brambilla. They are the authors of *Start Thinking Rich: 21 Harsh Truths to Take You from Broke to Financial Freedom*.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: We discuss some epic topics today, only the way these two guys can deliver them. Why only poor people think the system is rigged, why "money can't buy you happiness" is terrible advice, and why your political party doesn't give a shit about you. This is a tremendous episode, absolutely tremendous. You are going to want to stay for the full conversation because it only gets better as we go. These guys are funny, they're fun, and they deliver incredible tactical advice.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: They sent me a copy of their book, *Start Thinking Rich*, and I blew through it in a weekend. It's that good. I put this on par with *The Psychology of Money* and some of the other perpetual top 10 books on personal finance. This book is right there. I am just so excited to share this with you because we all have issues with money, all of us. Whether you believe you do or not, you do. Sometimes when we think through some of the nuances, particularly the way that Adrian and Dr. Brad deliver them, we start to see why we may make certain decisions versus others.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Guys, as always, I love you for listening to this show. I don't run ads on this program. I have gone back and forth. I recently just said no to another sponsor because I want to be able to talk to whoever I want. I want to be able to share ideas, mindsets, thoughts. I want to be able to bring guests on. I want to start talking to people who think outside the box, who take different perspectives, who have unconventional ways of solving problems and thinking about the things that impact our lives. I don't want sponsors to dictate that.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: So the only thing that I ask is you share the show. Text message it to a friend. Post it on social media. Email it out to a colleague. If you don't want to share a like, a subscribe, or even a comment, go over to YouTube. Leave a comment on your thoughts. What part of what Dr. Brad and Adrian share makes sense, you don't understand, or you just completely and utterly disagree with. That engagement helps drive more individuals to this show, which helps it grow, which helps us bring even more amazing guests in. Regardless of which way you choose to support the show, I love you for being here. Let's get on to Dr. Brad and Adrian.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Guys, incredibly excited to have you on the show. The new book is fantastic. I appreciate you sharing an early copy with me. I've been through most of it. Made me question a lot of the life decisions that I've made with money, so that's a wonderful thing. I also very much appreciate, as you said, the aggressive chapter titling, which I think is fantastic. I actually want to start on the very first line of the introduction, which you write: "Most people hate the statistic that 90% of millionaires are self-made." Why is that the case?
--:-- Adrian Brambilla: Well, I think it's highly confrontational because what it really tells you is that perhaps I can go from poor to rich too. Perhaps those individuals got there through their own efforts. The whole phrase "self-made" really makes people so mad. Anytime I post about it on social media, people get so mad. What they want to do is change the definition of what self-made means.
--:-- Adrian Brambilla: Essentially, it could be really rough. I grew up lower income. Ryan, I know you had a lot of hustle early in your life. The big message of the book is that it is possible for you. This is a message of hope and inspiration. We're not looking to shame anyone. But I think what happens is people have created a narrative in their head about why they can't, or why it's really difficult for them, or why it's impossible. Anything that challenges that narrative, people resist.
--:-- Adrian Brambilla: I think it's a very freeing narrative. But if you've been stuck, if you've been struggling, perhaps even for generations, if not decades in your own life, it's easier psychologically to say it's impossible than to face the reality that people just like me who've come from where I've come from, have experienced what I've experienced, have been able to climb the socioeconomic ladder. So I could potentially do it too. Sometimes that's a bitter pill to swallow.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I hear a lot of people thrash Elon Musk and say, "Well, his dad gave him all this money" or "He got all this stuff." Then I started listening to Walter Isaacson's biography of him and learned about how absolutely fucked up his childhood was, how that's 100% not the case. While brilliant and crazy, some mix of the two, this dude really did grind out a lot of stuff. Sure, he made opportunities for himself. But I find it incredible that someone could look at this particular individual and use "he was given money by his dad early" — which is not the case — as the reason he got to send spaceships to Mars, make electric cars a reality, create an interface between the brain and machines, put the internet around the world in places standard corporations wouldn't.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I mean, you look at all these things and people go, "Well, yeah, he was given a bunch of money when he was a kid." And it's like, what are we talking about here? Is that really — you have to tear that down even when it's false to make yourself feel better? I just don't understand that mentality.
--:-- Adrian Brambilla: Dude, this riles me up so much. I hate how so much people focus on people's privilege. They'd rather focus on the privilege versus what they've done. In our book *Start Thinking Rich*, we talk about having a rich skill set and a wealth skill set. A wealth skill set is for people who do get inheritance. Just because you receive a lot of money doesn't guarantee anything. The data behind this: if you look at 70% of people who win huge amounts of lottery, in five years it's all gone. Think of that. That's almost gaming the system. You get hundreds of millions of dollars, it's like, "Oh, is everything figured out now?" Absolutely not. A wealth skill set is your ability to take whatever money you are either making or inherited or have, and then have that money make money. That's a rare skill set.
--:-- Adrian Brambilla: So just because someone did get something, you can't discredit them. If anything, you're analyzing from where they started and where they went. We could do that with everyone. A lot of people here — my parents immigrated from Mexico. They started with, I would say, the negative. They built a platform for me. That platform was they paid for my college. They saved their whole life to do that. Now I've taken it and I feel like I've changed my family tree with what I've done. I couldn't have done it without that platform. I always try to acknowledge that was a privilege I got. But don't measure me and say, "Well, your parents paid for your college, that's why you're a multimillionaire now." No, you're discrediting everything.
--:-- Adrian Brambilla: Also, just to comment, a rich skill set we say is your ability to earn income. Some people think, "Well, that person makes six figures, so they have to be successful." But a rich skill set and a wealth skill set are not related, which is why 50% of people that make six figures live paycheck to paycheck. These are high income earners, but being a doctor or a lawyer doesn't mean you're going to be good with your money. You need to have a rich skill set and a wealth skill set. You can't just earn your way to financial freedom. You have to be able to live underneath your means no matter how much money you make. Then you have to be able to learn how to invest so that money continues to make money. It's this whole formula, and just being good at one thing isn't enough.
--:-- Dr. Brad Klontz: I call these "19th hole confessions." When you're out on the golf course, everyone likes to talk about their fancy watch and their new driver and the Porsche they have in the country club parking lot. Then when they get a couple pops in them at the 19th hole, you start to hear about how they can barely make the payments on the car. Their wife is yelling at them because they're late on the mortgage payment. They're fighting with their boss for a raise at work. You're like, "Wait a minute. Nine holes ago, you were Mr. Blinged Out, look at my life. Here we are, you got a couple drinks in you, and all of a sudden wife's not so good." I've always found that interesting how that happens almost every time you do a country club round of golf.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Amazing. I was hoping you could break down — for you guys listening at home, this book is going to be an absolute must. It's going to be on my recommendation list. I've read a bunch of books about wealth, money, this kind of stuff. I think the language you use and the way you break down these topics is very digestible and allows someone to actually take in the difference in these concepts. The first one I pulled out was just maybe define broke versus poor. I think so many people use these terms interchangeably, and you guys really clearly set what the difference is between the two.
--:-- Adrian Brambilla: Yeah, I think we had to because one of the chapter titles says that if you want to get rich, you have to get rid of your poor friends. That one we've already got a lot of heat about. But "poor" has nothing to do with how much money or lack of money you have. It's actually your mindset. We describe poor as a mindset. It's a way of thinking. It's a bad way of thinking.
--:-- Adrian Brambilla: People that have a poor mindset don't believe in saving. "What's the point?" These are people that have a poor mindset that have great jobs. They're the ones that as soon as Friday hits, they go out to the clubs. When they go to a restaurant, they're getting appetizer, they're getting wine. Nothing wrong with that if it's within your means and you're saving and investing. A person with a rich mindset can still do those things, but their biggest expense every month is investing, and then they're living their lifestyle off those investments.
--:-- Adrian Brambilla: A poor mindset is again — I think the golf analogy is perfect. Those people who by that 19th hole are demonstrating that the facade of rich, at the end of it a couple drinks in, they actually have a poor mindset because they're living way outside their means. Being broke is something that I've been, Brad's been — yes, we've all been. Typically, unless you were born with a silver spoon, we're all broke at some point. That's a temporary state.
--:-- Adrian Brambilla: When we define broke and poor, people that are poor have a poor mindset and are probably going to be not just temporary but a very, very long term in being broke. If you have that recognition of how you think, broke doesn't have to be a long place. Maybe you come from a family that was always broke, money was always hard. You can change that, and it starts with just the way you think.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: One of the things I liked about how you broke that out was that you could go broke multiple times, but if you have this rich mindset, you can remake the money. That's one of the things I've always — I had to reset a lot of my friendships in the last, say, 10 years of my life because I have a very high risk tolerance. I have goals and I want to go after things. Sometimes those things don't work. That's what happens. You have to reset.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I've had buddies go, "Geez, man, why are you always doing this? It feels like you have to keep resetting." I'm like, "Well, that was a tremendous four-year experience. A lot of good things came out of it. Yeah, I got to reset because life happens, different things happen. But now I remade that in two years instead of four. If something else happens, I can do it even faster because I've learned. Now I know what needs to be done to get back to that place."
--:-- Ryan Hanley: As you guys lay out, I love the way you focus on mindset because it forces you to remove yourself from this particular moment in time and focus more on the activities that get you to the place you want to be. It's this snapshot mentality: "I currently am not in a position that I want to be, so screw it. I'm never going to get there. I might as well blow it all on Netflix and DoorDash and live for today."
--:-- Ryan Hanley: This is where I want to ask my next question. I just had a guest on a couple of weeks ago, Dr. Eric Peoples, a wonderful guy. We were talking about generational thinking. How much does this rich mindset, poor mindset play into "I'm just living for me and my kids are on their own" versus this concept that I feel we've lost in our country, which is thinking about the generations to come, not just our current moment in time?
--:-- Dr. Brad Klontz: Yeah. A couple of things, Ryan, that you said that were so wise. When we've done research on millionaires, we find that the average multimillionaire has faced three major financial catastrophes. The average non-millionaire has faced slightly less than one, which is a statistical anomaly. Essentially, what that tells us is that they try and then they're like, "Oh, forget it. I'm never going to try again because the world is set against me because X, Y, and Z." Meanwhile, people with a rich mindset have what we call in psychology an internal locus of control. They look at it and say, "Okay, I had this massive failure. Very embarrassing. I lost a bunch of money. Everybody knows my business failed. Where did my thinking go wrong? What did I miss? What can I learn from this experience?"
--:-- Dr. Brad Klontz: It's that mindset versus blaming the world. There is a never-ending supply of people to blame your misery on. By the way, I'm married to a wonderful woman, but I could spend all my time blaming my bad mood on her. She's an imperfect person. It's not a very effective way to live, though. Not in your marriage, not in your relationships, and definitely not in your business and financial life. So it really is about being able to take that sense of personal responsibility. "Where is my thinking? Where did it go wrong? I'm going to learn from this."
--:-- Dr. Brad Klontz: Let me segue from that into this multi-generational mindset thing. Certainly, your beliefs around money are getting you the results you have right now. A lot of these beliefs weren't inherited. We talk about generational wealth, but we also have generational beliefs that have been transferred down to us. Part of really getting a handle on a relationship with money is understanding our family story. It's really, really important.
--:-- Dr. Brad Klontz: Probably the best psychology you could do for yourself is to interview your parents, your grandparents if you're lucky enough that they're around, your siblings, your aunts, your uncles, to try to figure out what is the psychology around money that I inherited from my family.
--:-- Dr. Brad Klontz: I lost a bunch of money day trading. I thought this is how people got rich when I was in my 20s. I had such a painful realization after I lost all my money day trading. The tech bubble burst — otherwise, I'm sure it would have gone great. I actually went home and interviewed my parents. I sat my mom down and said, "Mom, what was it like for you growing up around money?" She told me these stories.
--:-- [Ad break for "One Call Close System" by Ryan Hanley]
--:-- Dr. Brad Klontz: That blew my mind. Turns out my grandpa went to the bank one day in his 20s and all his money was gone. It was the Great Depression. Bank was locked. Zero dollars. It doesn't even exist anymore. Imagine having that experience. All of a sudden, the fact that my very hardworking, wonderful grandfather lived in a trailer park made sense to me. He never put a dollar in the bank the rest of his life. He lived into his 90s. He was so afraid. He went unbanked his entire life.
--:-- Dr. Brad Klontz: Then my mom's anxiety around money started to make sense to me. She would only put money in CDs. She would never put it in the stock market. She was so risk averse. Then I came along and I'm like, "I know what you guys are doing isn't working and I don't want to be poor like you." So I call it a dysfunctional pendulum swing. I swing all the way to the other side, taking the most possible risk I could take. Lost all my money.
--:-- Dr. Brad Klontz: If I wasn't aware of this belief pattern in my family, I guarantee you — and a bunch of people have done this, a bunch of millennials especially — I would have said, "I'm never trusting the stock market." I would have adopted that same mindset. Just like drug abuse and alcoholism can pass through the generations where people have a distorted relationship with it. Someone's an alcoholic, next generation won't touch it, which is an extreme relationship with alcohol. It's fine if you don't drink, it's probably better for you. But it's kind of extreme. It has a bunch of energy. Then you're going to pass that energy to your kids who then become alcoholics. Understanding your family history is very, very important if you want to get a handle on your wealth building.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I love this idea of self-reflection on these experiences, particularly experiences around money, losing money, and if it's public. I heard this story the other day about Kobe Bryant. There was a game, and he had three shots at the end of the game that if he had hit one of them would have won the game. Game's over, he's sitting on the bench, towel on his head, hands over the towel, head down. Everyone starts to clear. He gets up, starts to walk off the court, and a reporter comes up to him and says, "Kobe, what were you thinking about when you missed those shots? How are you feeling?"
--:-- Ryan Hanley: He goes, "Feeling? I don't feel anything. I was thinking about the things that I did during those shots that made me miss. I now know what I did wrong, and I'm going to go work on it after the game." Instead of sitting there — this is as public as it gets. This is a superstar. Three shots to win the game, misses all three. The reporter is looking for, "You're sad, you're frustrated, you're mad." He's going, "No, all I did was dissect what happened so that I don't make that mistake again." We just don't go back and reflect.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I really appreciate the second part, the idea of interviewing your family. As you're saying that, I was thinking about my own. I think I have a similar — not the grandfather losing all their money in the Great Depression. But I think my parents were the same way: "Don't invest, put it in a savings account." My dad is one of those guys who doesn't make a ton of money, but he also doesn't save any money. He's like, "If I got it, spend it. That's what we make the money for." That mentality. We were also very low income. I think that plays a role in my own risk taking because I was like, "I don't want to be like that. I don't want to live paycheck to paycheck. I don't want to worry about the man firing me."
--:-- Ryan Hanley: That takes me to my next question. There's a chapter — I don't remember which one — but it was the idea that "only poor people think the system is rigged." My dad thinks the system is rigged. He's a great guy. I don't mean that as a negative to him, but his mentality is the system is out to get him. He's not one of the elites. Therefore, everything he does is always going to be throttled. It's always going to work against him. That corrupts his mentality, particularly around making money and money in general. Maybe just break down this idea and go as far as you want on it.
--:-- Adrian Brambilla: I think the concept we teach — money can have so much baggage — we try to teach it from the perspective of a game that we're playing. For some people, that's already a challenge because it has so much emotional baggage. But if you just allow yourself to think, "What if money was a game?" Who doesn't like playing games? Games are fun. For me, I played Final Fantasy as a kid and Tekken. I played video games. To me, it's kind of like a video game because all my money comes from online.
--:-- Adrian Brambilla: The first person I saw that really shaped me to become an online entrepreneur was — back in the day, I used to be a professional hip-hop dancer. I danced for T-Pain. There was one time — by the way, that makes me like you even more, just to be clear. I have to get that in there. That's awesome. T-Pain released a song in front of us one time. It was called "Reverse Cowgirl." Terrible song, actually. But he was able to launch — this is in his prime, 2010 era. He looks over at his manager. He had his own liquor company. It was like 10 o'clock in the morning, he's already kind of buzzed. He looks over at the manager and says, "You guys want to see the video before we drop it?" He plays it for us. Super awesome. He looks at the manager and says, "Yeah, you guys ready? Okay, cool." Then they hit play.
--:-- Adrian Brambilla: This is back in the day on iTunes where you had to buy every song for 99 cents. I remember looking at how many downloads. Within like 10 minutes, there was like 5 million downloads. I watched him make like five million bucks while getting drunk from hitting a button. I was like, "To me, he figured out the game. He figured out he could live his dream life. He's drunk at 11 a.m., he's made five million dollars, he's going to chill the rest of the day."
--:-- Adrian Brambilla: We use an analogy like that: making money is a game. There are a lot of different games, a lot of different ways to do it. The only reason you don't like making money is because you're probably playing the wrong game. The best analogy is a lot of people I talk to look at me and learn from me on how to monetize and become an influencer because they hate their job. For whatever reason, they went to school or they didn't go to school, and they're in this job and they hate it. They're recognizing, "Is this what I'm supposed to be doing?" They're in the wrong game. They could be placed in a different area and have fun.
--:-- Adrian Brambilla: When I make money, it brings me energy. It's like a game. I love doing it, and I've found my outlet. I think everyone can do that. But first, understanding that mindset is different because most people are just playing the wrong game. Instead of having that recognition, they think the system is rigged. But the system actually is rigged. It is. There are tax laws. For example, if you were to start a business, you could do things like write off your phone, write off your Wi-Fi. These are things where people say the rich keep getting richer. Entrepreneurs have advantages for us to do things like this.
--:-- Adrian Brambilla: I also have to mention because Brad and I come from totally opposite backgrounds — I know he's going to clap back and say 95% of businesses do fail, which is true. But having this recognition of the game you're playing and recognizing that the system is rigged if you're playing the wrong game — if you're trying to play football on a basketball court, of course you can say it's rigged. "What the heck's happening?" I think that's where we dive into the chapters of recognizing what game you're actually playing.
--:-- Adrian Brambilla: I'm a big believer that you can learn pretty much anything from YouTube these days. It's not like we say, "Oh, you have to go back to four-year university." No. There are tons of different opportunities in freelancing and AI that are making it easier for us to diversify our income and find a game that you like to play.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: To me, when I hear that, all I really hear is you don't want to put in the work to learn the rules. The deeper that I've gotten into — I don't know how much you guys know about my history, but 20 years in the insurance industry, executive positions, all different kinds of stuff, goods and bads. Then I started my own business and I exited in November in the insurance industry. When I did that, I kept one foot in the insurance industry just because I love it. It's my home industry and it's great. But then I broadened out and started doing entrepreneurial coaching and online business stuff like what you described.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: As I've gotten deeper into that, I knew how to play the insurance game. I knew what to do, who to talk to, where to go, what message had to be said, how the message had to be delivered in order to get people to buy stuff in that space. Then when I got into the broader entrepreneurial influencer podcast game, I started like, "Why aren't these things working the same? How come when I was purely talking to the insurance industry, I could create a video on LinkedIn that would get 50,000 views, and now I get 1,700 views? What's going on?"
--:-- Ryan Hanley: What's been interesting is I've just had to relearn a new set of rules for a different game. I love that analogy. Then people are like, "Wow, the system, you know, the most influential people just work with each other and they don't work with anyone else." I'm like, "That's not true. I haven't found that to be the case." They just aren't going to play with you if you don't know how to play the game. But they don't want to learn. Why? I guess my — and as much as you can answer this, and maybe Brad, this is for you because you're the psychologist and probably the smartest of all of us here, at least from a degree standpoint. That's looking at least.
--:-- Dr. Brad Klontz: Yeah. I'm not sure about smart. I don't know about that one.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Best hoodie on the show, you know.
--:-- Dr. Brad Klontz: So, you know, why? Why don't we want to do this? Why do people settle into these places where they're willing to bitch but unwilling to work?
--:-- Dr. Brad Klontz: Yeah, so it's such an awakening to just sort of realize that if you understand it's a game, you are already better off than nine out of ten people. Because nine out of ten people think, "Well, this is the way the world works," and they're stuck in this little bubble. They have a bad experience, and they're like, "Oh, rich people are terrible. They're nasty." Because they saw a rich person treat their family in a bad way. Now they've figured it out: if you have money, you're a bad person. They will hold this in the back of their brain for the rest of their lives. They will sabotage themselves anytime they start to have success. I've worked with people like this. They say, "I don't understand, Dr. Brad. I start to get some success and then I sabotage it." It comes down to that childhood experience where they associated money with bad.
--:-- [Thoughtfully]
The other thing that keeps us stuck is that we are tribal in nature. This is probably one of the hardest things that keeps people stuck in their socioeconomic level. It's great if you're wealthy and you love it. It's bad if you're poor and you don't like it. We surround ourselves with people who look at the world the way we do. They're all playing the same game. They all know the same rules. They don't know the other game. That's a foreign tribe, and that's scary. But once we start to leave our tribe, people will try to sabotage us. Not because they hate us—the irony is it's because they love us. They don't want to lose us. They're afraid we're going to leave them. So they'll make us feel guilty or encourage us to overspend.
--:-- Ultimately, I think one of the things that keeps people stuck is the belief that the system is rigged and everybody's out to get me. And by the way, there are people probably out to get you and things aren't fair. But if that's your focus, you will see that everywhere and you'll never go beyond it. It's something in psychology called learned helplessness. We talk about it in the book—these terrible experiments with dogs. They put a dog in an electrified cage with no place to escape. They'd shoot electrical current through the cage, and the dog would jump up and down, run all over trying to find a place to escape. Eventually, it just lays down and whimpers. That is learned helplessness. You've learned that no matter what you do, you can't change it.
--:-- A lot of people's childhood is like that. You're a child. You can't escape what's happening in your life. If you grow up poor, there's nothing you can do about it. You just have to lay down and take it and try to get through childhood. Trauma, abuse—growing up in poverty is multiple traumas. Here's the problem: they then took that cage and made half of it not electrified. All the dog had to do was jump over a little barrier and it was totally free. Those dogs who grew up in that trauma didn't even try to escape. Inches away was freedom from that pain. That's really what happens for many of us. All it is is one book away, one relationship away, one mindset shift away. But we feel like it's impossible, so we lay down and just take it. It's so tragic to watch.
--:-- That's part of what we're trying to do with this book—wake people up to that reality. To realize that it is a game. Learn how to play the game. You can win the game.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: It's like we create a ceiling that doesn't exist. Another good example is in Thailand. They train elephants with a cord attached to a stake. When they hit a certain age, they take the cord off, but the elephant won't go anywhere. It stays right there because it still believes the cord is attached. For the rest of its life, it stays by that stake even though the cord is gone. It's crazy.
--:-- I completely agree with that. Looking at my own life, my journey with money has been interesting. I was low income. I got a scholarship to play baseball at the University of Rochester, which I didn't realize at the time was a safety school for kids who wanted to go to Ivy schools but were too dumb to get in. So I start being surrounded by all these really rich dummies. I show up with $127 in my bank account. Day one, the kid I'm roomed with is driving a Range Rover with a Rolex on his wrist. I remember saying to myself, "I'm fucked. How am I ever going to get there?" I had one pair of jeans and two button-down shirts. This kid's rolling in a Range Rover his dad bought him with fancy coats and sunglasses. I didn't even have sunglasses. Those were for rich people.
--:-- Only through a life of experience and then meeting a very good friend of mine—he lives in Connecticut, his name's Chris Paradiso, he's a co-author on the book we're writing called *The Civilized Savage*—he showed me that he never had that mental ceiling. He just kept growing and building, and he would see opportunities. I'd be like, "You can do that?" And he's like, "Why can't we do that?" We can't even imagine these opportunities are possible for us, even though they're right there. This is why I love podcasting—we get to share this kind of stuff.
--:-- I want to briefly talk about something because this is one of my traumas. My mother will say to me all the time, "Don't work so hard. Money doesn't buy you happiness." You guys address this directly in your book. I don't believe her. I'll say, "That makes you sound like a communist, Mom." I give my mom a lot of shit—she's the best—but she has that relationship with money. She said that to me even today when I went on vacation. "You don't have to go to those fancy places because money doesn't buy happiness." I'm like, "Well, have you ever been on Taylor Bay Beach in Turks and Caicos? Because that was pretty fucking nice." Talk me through this.
--:-- Adrian Brambilla: Yeah, we say being poor sucks. It's fact. My dad came from sub-poverty, like in a village in Mexico where they built their own houses. When they came here, it was an hour north of San Diego in Oceanside. I remember there was this one stretch of freeway we would never drive on as a kid. When I got older, I made the turn to go on that freeway and my dad was like, "Wait, don't—oh, it's too late." I asked why we could never go down there. He shared that when he was in high school, that was the road he'd have to walk five miles to go to his part-time job. He was one of those guys walking on the freeway.
--:-- That's one of so many hardships I've learned about him. He struggled to find food. He went hungry. I've never been hungry—I've been hangry, but never hungry. I never had to go a day wondering what happened. In the book, I share a story with my dad's permission where he had to go into a neighboring farm, dig out an onion, and bite it. When he shares the story, it's funny—he doesn't share it from a sad perspective. He's like, "It was the best onion I've ever had. I took a big bite and it was amazing." At first, I thought it was a good story. Then as I grew up, I realized I've never been like, "I'm just going to take a big bite of this onion because it sounds delicious." But when you're hungry, anything sounds good.
--:-- The goal of this book is to help people elevate. If you've never been hungry, if you come from a family tree who suffered, you can learn from that. I didn't immigrate here—I was born here, the first Brambilla to be born here—but I have an immigrant mindset. That's the beautiful thing about adopting mindsets. That's why books and podcasts are amazing. You get to listen to other people's experiences and adopt those mindsets.
--:-- We make it super clear: having no money sucks. We don't sugarcoat that. But we also don't sugarcoat that it's easy. We make it real. There are tangible disciplinary actions on how we think about money that affect our actions to change. I watched my parents do it. They came here with nothing. They were the first millionaires. They did it through saving. They didn't invest in the stock market—just through saving CDs. They did things most people would think are insane. They didn't buy clothes for three or four years. They didn't eat out for years because they were so focused on saving. When you talk about not going out to a restaurant for a year, that's privilege. But to an immigrant mindset, they're willing to do whatever it takes. That is such a lost mentality today.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I have friends on a spectrum. I have friends from my old life who still struggle with these things, and friends from the second half of my life where I really started to embrace success and money. I grew up in a town of 900 people in the middle of nowhere in upstate New York. We used to say you could leave your doors open because the criminals lived there—they didn't steal from there. I remember being 10 years old looking around this dusty ratty town with one streetlight and saying, "I don't care what I have to do. I'm never fucking coming back to this place. This isn't going to be where I raise my kids."
--:-- I was talking to a friend the other day who was bitching about bills and money. I said, "Dude, I mean this with the most love: suck it the fuck up. Change something. I'll help you. I'll share the things I know. I'll introduce you to people smarter than me. But stop fucking bitching. Instead of this 20-minute diatribe, you could be putting together a side hustle or a business."
--:-- You guys talk about this a little bit. Where do people start? Is it expense first? Go make more money first? A combination? I don't want you to give away everything in the book, but if someone's listening and they're pissed off and ready to do something, what's the first baby step they could take tonight?
--:-- Adrian Brambilla: Our chapter 17 is "Complaining is for Losers," but I like "Stop Fucking Bitching" better. I wish we would have named it that. It's so easy to complain and bitch. We all fall into it. But the bottom line is it's horrible for you. There are studies showing your brain shrinks—it literally makes you dumber the more you complain. If you really love your friends, let them complain for a minute, set a timer, and then say, "Okay, so what the fuck are you going to do about it? And by the way, I'll help you. Let's go."
--:-- It is a mindset shift. First is this awakening: "Oh my God, you mean I can do it? Success is possible for me?" But you've never done it before, and everyone around you tells you it's too hard. Of course that's the ocean you're swimming in. Wait, there's a different ocean? That is the biggest thing.
--:-- We have a chapter where we say you should immediately start saving and investing. Most financial experts say 10%. I always shot for 30%. When Adrian lived in a van, he was investing 95% of his income. The richest immigrant I know is a billionaire. He invested 95% of his money while sleeping on his mom's couch eating ramen noodles. We say start investing right now, even if it's 1% of your income. Put those mechanisms in place.
--:-- If you say you can't afford to invest, we have a chapter where we break it down. Get a roommate, start riding the bus, get sober, shave your head. We ran the numbers. The average American, if you got a roommate, rode the bus, got rid of your car, shaved your head bald like I do, and stopped drinking—after 25 years of investing that in average market returns, it's close to $3 million. But people say, "Well, I don't want a roommate." We have a chart in there based on the number of roommates you get and how fast you can become a multimillionaire. It's a bit tongue in cheek, but this is what people do.
--:-- People who grew up like you, Ryan—you said, "I am not coming back here." I had that mentality too. Being poor does suck. Anyone who tells you money won't make your life better is often already middle class. They have no idea how bad it sucks. The best advice I can give anyone is start investing today. Another huge mistake people make is saying, "Once I pay off my debt." If you're the average American, you're never paying off your debt. You're going to get a house and owe a mortgage for 30 years. Start investing today, even if it's a dollar.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I want to share something I've never shared on the show before. I live in a 1,300-square-foot ranch. I could afford a much bigger house, probably. I'm divorced, I have two boys. We live in a nice part of town. The house was built in 1960. I bought it off a 96-year-old woman moving in with her 98-year-old sister. I got it for an absolute song. It was a complete disaster. I've spent the last year and a half fixing it up.
--:-- Friends insinuate the question, "Why do you live in that small house?" I'm like, "Who am I showing off for?" For those listening, you can see Dr. Brad's shirt: "Experience is over stuff." I want to take my kids to ballgames. I want to go on vacations with my girl. I want to do fun stuff and see shit. The place I sleep is so meaningless to me. I've made it nice, but it's me and my stepdad pounding away at shit.
--:-- What society expects of us—or what we perceive society expects—is a big part of why we stay in this poor mindset. You get a raise, so get a better car. Does it get you where you need to go? If it doesn't break down all the time, I don't understand the need to upgrade unless you've hit a point where that expense isn't tearing you down. I have a buddy with a beautiful second car, a convertible. He loves it. But he worked his ass off and hit a level of income where purchasing that luxury doesn't impact his day-to-day life. Good for him. But I have other friends with similarly nice cars who are living paycheck to fucking paycheck to pay for something to show off.
--:-- I think my brain is broken. I've just never given a shit about that. It's a blessed superpower. I see so many people get bogged down by "What will someone think if I don't take my family to the nicest restaurants?" It's such a limiting belief.
--:-- Dr. Brad Klontz: I agree. Living under your means is such an underrated superpower. The truly wealthy people do it. You're allowed to have nice stuff, but the difference is that really wealthy people don't trade their time for objects. If you're a W-2 earner with a high income salary and you purchase a nice vehicle without investment income, you're technically trading your time for that asset. How many hours did I have to work to get this? That's a middle-class mentality.
--:-- We have a chapter that says you don't actually want to be a millionaire—you just want to spend a million dollars. A wealthy person will save and invest as much of their W-2 income as possible until that investment income is paying them. With that passive income, they go buy the Porsche. That's the huge difference. Wealthy people don't trade their time for it. They spend their money on investments, and those investments purchase their lifestyle.
--:-- Adrian Brambilla: When I was living in a van, that's when I got really popular online. I gained like a million followers overnight because I was making seven figures online and documenting it since my first dollar. I was living in a van showing how much money I was making. It was a complete contradiction. If you're a millionaire, there's no way you're living in a van. People couldn't wrap their minds around it. It became an accident, but that's why it went viral.
--:-- It makes me a little sad. We talk about why we accumulate money, why we save and invest—it's so we can own our time. Time is our most valuable asset. Financial freedom is to do what you want, whenever you want, for as long as you want. Money allows you to have that freedom to spend time with your family, with your kids, working on hobbies until you don't want to anymore. That's an amazing place to be, and most people never get to experience it.
--:-- It takes discipline to avoid the shiny objects and portraying success. Social media has made that part worse. When you pull up Instagram, you see your friend's best version of their life. You don't know the behind-the-scenes. Rich is what you see, but wealth is what you don't see. That person looks successful, but did they trade their time? Are they in debt with their time? Are they trapped by their objects? Or do they have real estate or stock that's actually paying for that? You can't really tell until a crash comes, and then you see who's swimming naked.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I coach entrepreneurs. They all come in wanting growth strategies. I have to backdoor into resilience because no one wants to hear it. Your goal on a day-to-day basis shouldn't be to win the game. The goal is the ability to keep playing the game. How do you keep playing? Because eventually you're going to get your wins. But if you think about it just as your next win, you won't be prepared for 2008, 2009, the tech stock bubble burst in 2001, COVID, or whatever the next thing is. They seem to be coming more frequently.
--:-- That takes us to the final topic I want to hit. You talk about how your political party doesn't give a shit about you. We're coming up to an election. The words communism, socialism—it's insane. For full disclosure, I have both a Trump sign and a Wu-Tang Forever sign in my front yard, just to give you an idea of where I stand. Why doesn't your political party give a shit about you? And how does that impact your wealth?
--:-- Dr. Brad Klontz: They literally don't care about you. Politicians are all narcissists. They all care about themselves. What they really want to do is get reelected. They'll promise you things. I grew up lower income. I'm in my early 50s now. The poverty rates have not changed at all. A couple hundred years ago, it was 80% of the world in poverty. Now it's like 17%. But they're not doing anything for poor people. Even if there's some policy that gave you a tax credit of a thousand bucks, that's not going to make you financially free.
--:-- I run across this all the time on social media and in my trolling comments. People are so focused on the system having to change before they can take action to better their life. I'm a clinical psychologist. I dare you to offer me the person who has the most stacked against them and me be unable to help them in some way. Even if everything is stacked against them, I guarantee you they can climb the ladder with a mindset shift and some tips along the way. Most of it is mindset.
--:-- If you're sitting around waiting for the system to get unrigged and for a politician to save you, it's never going to happen. Your boss isn't going to help you be financially free. Your boss probably isn't financially free. Even if they were, why would they want to eat the cost of training your replacement? You're going to have to do it for yourself.
--:-- The great news is that when I was growing up, you couldn't invest in the stock market. You had to have a broker make the transactions, and you had to have a certain amount of money to even have that relationship. Now you can download an app today and invest a dollar today. It's unbelievable. There's never been a better time to make money. Adrian's a great example of that.
--:-- We joke about college. I went all the way. I'm still debating whether I should send my kids to Adrian's house over the summer so he can set them up to make a bunch of money, or if I should send them to med school. I think I'll probably send them to Adrian's house. Once they're financially free, they can decide if they want to go to med school. But it's never been a better time. You just have to embrace the concept that it's possible for you, because it absolutely is.
--:-- Adrian Brambilla: We don't pick a political side. We talk about red and blue at a much higher level. Where your energy is focused ties back to what wealthy people think. They have an internal locus of control. They believe that their life—good, bad, ugly—they're the person most accountable for it to change, for it to improve. They're the ones in control.
--:-- Right now, I feel like everyone is a political activist, consuming every single update. It's already happening on my social media. It's so annoying. Most of the time, these people are not financially free. If you are financially free and you control your time and you want to spend it being a political activist, I think that's great. It's your freedom of choice. But if you are not financially free, if you're behind on bills, if you're in debt, if you're not at a job you love—why are you spending hours of your time debating and fighting trolls online and trying to be a political activist?
--:-- Adrian Brambilla: And again, if you're a politician, I think that's what you should do. That's your job. But if you're a regular person that's in debt, doesn't have a lot of investing and saving, it'd be better to read a financial book. It'd be better to start a side hustle because you're in control. To think that anyone is going to save you is just not true. So it's about energy, focus, and discipline. Politics is like another huge shiny object that can distract just as bad as Netflix.
--:-- We compare it like this: if you watch the full *Game of Thrones*, that's enough time for you to literally start an Amazon business. That's enough time for you to sell something on Etsy. It's hours of time. I don't know if there's a stat—we should probably look it up—the average amount of time people spend consuming politics now. Before, it used to just be during election year. Now it seems like it's all year round. It's the never-ending Netflix of what's happening in the political world.
--:-- Ultimately, we all get one vote. So you could spend all year, every single day, spending days and months to get your vote in, or you could just catch up in the last couple of weeks and vote. We do believe you should vote, but ultimately your energy should be spent elsewhere if you're not financially free.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Yeah. I always come back to the political pieces like incentives dictate action. Look at how they're incentivized across the board. Take my own political affiliation out of the mix. What are their incentives? If their incentive is to be re-elected, they're going to do whatever they have to do to make that happen.
--:-- I love that clip from Warren Buffett who says, "I could balance the budget in five minutes. If at the end of the year the budget hasn't been balanced, none of them are allowed to be re-elected. They're all done." The budget would be balanced tomorrow. It would be over.
--:-- You think about it and you look at the actions. Not to get too granular, but things like the tax code—volumes and volumes. If they really wanted your life to be simple, there would be one line: everyone pays X percent, period, done. They'd be like, "Just live your life." We all know what it is and we all go. But they don't. They build in all this stuff: "If you do this, and we..." It makes them feel better to get more votes if they tell you you should buy a house, so they stuff that thing in there. But it's never going to look the way they told you it was going to look.
--:-- That's why I find it so interesting. I enjoy politics as theater, but not as reality. It's theater. It's like going to a Broadway play. You're just watching people perform. I find it intriguing in that aspect, not so much in that I think any of them—and I think this is your point, and I think it's 100% the right point for everything you've said—which is: stop fucking bitching and get to work.
--:-- Adrian, Dr. Brad, this has been phenomenal. We're going to push the book hard. I'm going to add it to my recommended reading list. I think this is one of the best, most practical, and most real-language books on wealth and getting your shit together financially that I've ever read. I appreciate the hell out of you. Besides going to get the books—we'll link in the show notes—where else can people find out more information about you?
--:-- Adrian Brambilla: Well, thanks so much for having us. Not just a regular link. If you go to startthinkingrich.com slash Ryan, we want to give an extra bonus for everyone that's part of your audience. That's a way to say thank you to you and all of your fans as well. It comes with a financial masterclass as well as a couple of live workshops we're planning on doing after the book is launched. That's one way for us to say thank you.
--:-- Also, the book is really amazing, but the book is just a starting point. You can have a whole library of financial books, but it's really about taking action. So that's what we hope with some of our bonuses for your audience—we can help too.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Tremendous. Thank you, guys. I wish you nothing but the best. I know this will be a huge success, just like just about everything else you guys do. So thank you.
--:-- Adrian Brambilla: Awesome. Thanks for having us.
--:-- Dr. Brad Klontz: Let's go.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Make it look. Make it look. Make it look.
--:-- [Outro music begins]
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Thank you for listening to The Ryan Hanley Show. Be sure to subscribe and leave us a comment or review wherever you listen to podcasts.
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