[Ep. 404] Unlocking Your Potential with Jeff Lerner

Hello and welcome back to the More Money Podcast.

This is episode 404.

I’m your host, Jessica Moorhouse, and this is the season finale of the More Money Podcast, season 18.

Can you believe it?

And yes, we’ve officially now, officially, officially hit nine years of the podcast, which means next year.

By this time next year, 10 years, a decade.

How, how though?

I don’t want to think about it.

That’s, that’s too weird for me that it started 10 years ago.

What happened?

Where did the time go?

I don’t know.

But in any case, I’ve got an amazing guest to have off this amazing season of the show.

And his name is Jeff Lerner, and he’s the CEO of ENTRE Institute.

And he’s an amazing background backstory.

Like it’s crazy.

So in 2008, he was a professional piano player.

But then he unfortunately injured his wrist.

And at that time, too, was facing eviction and divorce and struggled with the depression and had almost $500,000 in debt.

So things were not really looking good in 2008.

And to be fair, no one was really having a good time 2008.

Really, right?

Not a good year.

He was able, within 10 years, only 10 years, he was able to turn things around.

He founded three eight-figure businesses, along with getting happily remarried and getting in shape.

Hey, that’s, that’s important, too.

And adopting and or fathering four kids.

And it was a total life turnaround that he credits to a unique entrepreneurial.

So entre is part of his business name, just so you know, you can’t see this, but it’s his entrepreneurial life operating system that he developed based on the three P’s, which is physical, personal and professional.

And in 2019, after exiting his other businesses, he founded his new company, Entre Institute, which is the world’s first whole life transformation platform, which combines his life OS, the Entre Way with entrepreneurship and modern business training.

And in its first four years, Entre enrolled over 250,000 students and has become one of the most recognized and influential education companies online.

And in 2021, he launched a podcast, Unlock Your Potential.

And in 2022, he published a national bestselling book of the same name, which we’re going to be discussing and I’m going to be giving away a copy of.

So yeah, pretty amazing guy to have on the show for the season finale, right?

And we’re going to be talking about, you know, the system he’s created, what’s worked for him, how he was able to turn his life around so dramatically in such a short amount of time, quite honestly, and how we can all learn to unlock our potential.

So with that, let’s get to that interview with Jeff.

Welcome Jeff to the More Money Podcast.

I’m so excited to have you on the show.

So grateful to be here, Jessica.

Thanks for having me.

You’re so welcome.

So I wanted to have you on the show.

You wrote a book, which I feel like has a great title and message, Unlock Your Potential, The Ultimate Guide for Creating Your Dream Life in the Modern World.

And I feel like this is something that most of us would love to know.

What’s the secret sauce?

What is the guidebook that we can?

Because I think most of us entered the real world, you know, maybe from high school or college and realized this is not what I was told, this is not what I signed up for.

The rules have changed.

And especially too, I feel like, you know, millennials, Gen Zs in school, you know, you’re given gold stars and grades and you think, oh, I’m amazing.

And then you enter the real world and you’re like, actually, everyone else is amazing.

How am I going to compete?

And you know, I’ve dealt with a lot of, you know, imposter syndrome myself, I’ve talked to a lot of people who’ve had those similar experiences.

And it makes you question, do I actually have potential to unlock?

Do I actually have what it takes to live the life that I thought was possible beforehand?

And so I’m really excited to have you on the show, because your kind of origin story is really incredible.

And I think it’s inspirational to hear that someone who kind of lost a lot was able to regain it and grow something even bigger.

So do you want I kind of want to start there.

So tell me you were I mean, I heard you before we started this interview that you’re playing piano.

It’s beautiful, by the way, you used to be a professional piano player.

What happened there?

I did.

I was a professional piano player and I suppose I will always be a piano player.

And yes, I was noodling before before you came on and you got to you got to hear some of that.

But actually, that was Brahms, not my noodling.

But I yeah, I was I dropped out of high school at 16 my junior year because I had this profound sense that, you know, I hate to.

But it’s kind of like the matrix came along and like packaged up some of my my feelings into a into a visual.

And so it’s easy to reference, but it’s also sci fi.

And so it sort of makes it maybe discreditable.

But I had this sense that like, we’re kind of living in a matrix, like everybody’s sort of going along doing their thing like a little programs, you know, bot.

And it’s not as nefarious as all that.

I don’t think there’s like some arch evil, you know, computer programmer in a castle somewhere that’s like, you know, coding all of our futile existences.

It’s just that we’re given these, these values, these principles to kind of live from that, you know, I think at best sort of innocently originate from a different time and are thus no longer relevant.

But I think there probably is something a little more, a little more deeply troubling than that, that it’s really like, you know, to the extent, the extent that we sort of all buy into a, a shared playbook, it makes it pretty easy for us to at least be predictable.

I don’t know.

I think it’s, you say it makes it easy for us to control and people go to like these evil stereotypes.

It’s the human mind craves predictability.

And the thing, and the thing that we so deeply wish would be most predictable is the, that which is tends to be the least predictable, which is other people.

And so, so think about this, this is, this is my like structure for my sort of grand conspiracy theory, right?

It’s a, it’s a, it’s an inadvertent conspiracy, right?

Nobody’s intending to be this way.

It’s just, but it actually makes sense that we are.

So if you think of wealth, wealth and that which we value as materially as a society is essentially that which puts distance between us and death.

So like, if I have a big house, I theoretically have more physical space and insulation between me and somebody that would try to do me harm.

And probably pretty soon in that expansion, I’m going to install a security system.

If I’m really wealthy, I’m going to actually have guards.

I’m going to live in a gated community and I’m going to drive a fast car that makes it easier for me to get away from someone that wants to like think about all the things that we associate with like wealth and prosperity are basically like, they allow me to be isolated.

They allow me to be independent.

They allow me to move quickly.

They allow me to be mobile.

They basically allow me to stay alive with more predictability than the next person.

And so it is intrinsic to wealth to try to create predictability within our environment.

And the number one thing that we wish was more predictable is other people.

So it stands to reason that the people that have the most wealth and power in this world historically across all time would tend to want to perpetuate ideas that create predictability and or distraction for most other people most of the time.

And I think that explains probably most of human history right there.

And certainly our reality as young or younger people trying to make our way in the world, there’s people that want us to be very, very distracted by focusing on something that we will ultimately discover didn’t actually matter that much.

And so you were able to kind of realize a little bits and pieces of this when you were in high school, and that’s what inspired you to leave and do something different.

And the great gift that I was given, my parents were, I would say, upper middle class.

So they were not like the richest people you’ve ever met, but they were wealthy enough that they were able to put me in a private school.

And I grew up being like actually one of the less wealthy kids in the school, because they were like legit like children of professional athletes and billionaires and CEOs and everything went to this school.

So I was around, call it wealth culture, and I looked at it and I was like, first of all, there’s no more happiness here than I find elsewhere.

Like I would go to, you know, camps in the summer with, you know, call it the non-elite kids.

And like they frankly seem more well adjusted and probably on the balance a little happier than the people I was around.

But also they there was like, I don’t know, it just it kind of gave me a window into the power, an elite structure of the world.

And I’m just like, I think this is kind of a game and it’s rigged against most of us.

And so I’m like, if I’m going to have to endure a life, I would like to be creating and doing something fulfilling.

And so I dropped out to become a jazz musician.

Yeah, wow, that’s that’s that’s pretty incredible.

But it’s interesting that you say that because I think most people, especially I mean, I’ve never really lived a very middle class life and never experienced, you know, friends or family with wealth.

And I think a lot of people have that experience.

And because of that, then we want what we haven’t had.

And we see what’s online and we see it’s in TV and movies.

And it looks like that is what we should be aspiring for.

But then you look at the data, you look at the research when it comes to all the problems that wealthy people have, and happiness, correlation with money.

You’re right, money doesn’t actually bring happiness.

It can’t solve any kind of problems that you already have.

It can solve money problems for sure, but not other types of problems.

And I think that’s kind of where there’s a lot of disillusionment, is either people are frustrated that they can’t get to that level, because maybe the system’s in place, but let them get there.

Or if they get there, they realize it’s actually nothing like they expected it to be.

So for you, I mean, now it’s interesting having this conversation, because I know you have a very successful career, and you probably have some money in the bank.

So how, when you kind of started your career in piano and then again started this career as an entrepreneur, teaching other people lots of different kind of systems to change their lives, unlocking their potential, how are you able to, I guess, strive for excellence or build wealth when you have a mindset of like, but once you get there, just realize it’s not going to actually make you happier, it’s not going to solve your problems, it’s actually not as great as it looks?

So I’ll give two perspectives on the question.

One that’s, call it the meta perspective, which is like based on aggregated information across a number of people.

And then the other will be like the personal perspective of just my life.

The meta perspective, I’ll reference the pretty much the most prominent study on the correlation between money and happiness, which was done, I want to say in 2002 or 2009, I’m blanking, but it was done by Daniel Kahneman and Angus Deaton, two economists at Princeton.

And this is the one that like, if you’ve ever seen the episode of Orange is the New Black, where Piper tells, because you know Piper came from the wealthy, and then she got incarcerated, and she’s telling her fellow inmates that like, well, you know, money, happiness tops out at like 70 grand a year, which, and it was 2002.

Now I know it was 2002, because I know that it’s 22 years of inflation have happened since, and that it’s now more like about 110 grand a year, is where happiness supposedly tops out.

But if you actually read that study, there were two measures of happiness.

One was call it emotional, like day to day emotional equilibrium, or essentially what mood are people in.

And money’s impact on your daily mood tops out around that number.

So it’s like beyond that, I’m no more stressed about being able to pay my bills than I would be if I were at a lower number.

But you start to get below that, it’s like I daily feel the weight of not having enough money.

But there’s another measure of call it happiness that I would argue is more a word I prefer, which is fulfillment, which comes from the Old English to fulfill one’s prophecy or destiny.

So it kind of speaks to this.

We come pre-installed from the factory with a design and an orientation, and that the more we find and align with that over the course of our life, the more fulfilled we’ll be, hence fulfillment of our destiny.

But the way that’s measured in the study is through a metric called the life satisfaction index, which also uses a psychology heuristic called Cantrell’s Ladder, which basically asks the question, on the scale of all possible lives that you could envision yourself having with the ultimate dream life at the top, how close are you to the ultimate life you would design?

And that shows no drop-off in the increase correlated with money.

In other words, Jeff Bezos, with his $150 billion, is presumably more life-satisfied than your run-of-the-mill $1 or $2 billion guy.

It goes up to infinity, and theoretically, the world’s first trillionaire is going to be the most fulfilled guy in history, although Genghis Khan inflation-adjusted was presumably a trillionaire because he basically owned Asia.

Presumably, he was the most fulfilled guy in history at that time.

And so that’s interesting, right?

But to me, what that says is, it kind of goes with this fulfillment idea, money is useful toward happiness or fulfillment to the extent that it allows us to operationalize or to engineer our environment to reflect our internal sense of value and that which we hold dear, and that makes sense.

The more money I have, the more I can make the outside world look like my inside world.

And Elon Musk grew up as a boy dreaming of space and going to Mars, and he’s literally making the external world resemble that fantasy right now.

How fulfilling is that?

And he can do it because of his money.

But that’s the meta perspective is that when you understand that the infinite correlation of money to happiness comes from manifesting your values out into the world, now it makes a lot more sense than just saying, oh, well, the more stuff I acquire, the happier I’ll be, because that we actually find is an inverse correlation, right?

Okay, so that’s the meta answer.

The personal answer for me actually is extracted from that observation, which is just, okay, my definition of success is no longer about material acquisition.

Frankly, if I had, you know, I have a wife and kids and they require, I think, a certain amount of stuff to feel safe and have that predictability in their life.

But if it were up to me, I’d probably go back to being a jazz musician and I would try to live with as little as possible because of that negative correlation with material things.

But what absolutely is how I define success is the ability to navigate the broadest possible set of life’s experiences while being in complete integrity with myself and my values.

Right.

And if you think about, this is why in psychology, there’s an adage that dependency breeds hostility.

And the reason is because the more dependent people are on someone or something else for their okayness, the more subject they are to the compromise of their own internal value set.

Because my boss tells me to do something I don’t agree with, and in my mind, I’m having to calculate, okay, well, I could stand up for what I believe and risk losing my income, which means having to tell my wife and kids that I can no longer pay the rent, which means we’re going to be out on the street because I’m not super employable or whatever, as opposed to, you know, this is why they call being rich having F you money, because I can literally say, F you, dude, I don’t agree.

I’m not going to do it, right?

That’s that ability to live our values across the, and I say the full range of human experience, meaning if I’m scared, if I’m sad, if I’m excited, if I have this, you know, not most people live a pretty narrow band of emotional experiences, and we try to mitigate the extremes, I want to be able to have the full range of human experience and not at all have to compromise who I am, and that’s how I define success, and that’s why I would want to have money.

Okay, so yeah, just to kind of re-cut that, there was a lot going on there.

Sorry, I get a little carried away sometimes.

No, it was great.

It’s really kind of reframing this idea of wealth, kind of not maybe the picture that we were given, that it is about having stuff, being on those millionaire, billionaire lists, getting accolades and all that kind of stuff.

We know that stuff doesn’t actually, it gives you temporary happiness that dissipates really quickly.

But you’re saying the motivation that we should have to build wealth isn’t just to have it so we feel, oh, we’re better than other people, it’s so we can have more predictability in our lives, more safety and security, which I think we all crave, having that foundation.

And then also having the resources to not have to do things against our personal value system and have to do something against our integrity and stuff like that.

Is that kind of what you’re saying?

Yeah, it is.

And I think rather than focusing on building wealth, which externalizes the objective and sort of decreases the sense of attainability, which then leads to demoralization, despondence, depression, disenfranchisement, college students camping out in the common area, trying to pick fights over politics they don’t even understand because actual fulfillment doesn’t seem so attainable in the modern world.

So why wouldn’t I just sit here and be a rabble rouser, right?

I’m getting into a little bit of social critique there with what’s going on in the world.

But it’s like the more people feel detached from achievement of fulfillment, the more problems we have as a society.

So rather than focusing on building wealth, I say focus on building value.

And really, I think that’s something that we don’t do enough is really take the time to be like, what are my values?

Because a lot of us have just adopted values from other people, our family, our friends, and we may not have looked at, but what are actually my values?

And really figuring out what makes me feel fulfilled.

Yeah, values and value, and it’s interesting because values are up to me, value is up to everyone else.

Like my value is, and this is like the self-esteem movement would say, no, you have intrinsic value.

That’s great.

Like God may love you and your mother may love you, but that doesn’t mean you deserve to be wealthy.

Like on what basis are you out there saying, come to me, oh, you know, blossoms of money?

Like I deserve you.

Why?

What are you good at?

What are you doing for the world?

Right?

And so if you strive to build value, I’ll give an example.

I knew a guy who was a, he was actually on the spectrum.

So he was very, extremely on the spectrum, somewhat socially, let’s call him incompatible.

He just didn’t navigate socially very well.

And his opportunities in the world were kind of limited because of that.

But he worked, he took his focus in isolation and used it to become a world class computer programmer who had mastery of some specifically fairly complex things.

This guy was probably never going to be a billionaire because he didn’t know how to play that game.

But he was, I mean, you talk about wanting predictability.

This guy could go to any company in the world virtually, tech company, whatnot, and they would roll out the red carpet.

Here’s a $300,000, $400,000 a year coding job.

And we’ll leave you alone.

You don’t want to talk to people.

You can sit in the corner.

You can play Grand Theft Auto when you’re not working.

We don’t care because you’re so good.

You’ve created so much value in this skill set.

We will literally give you the life that you would design for yourself based on your personality traits.

And that’s where people can have any life they want if they get good enough at stuff.

But we’re so busy getting good at things that don’t matter, like mastering the Tinder algorithm or winning the game of Halo, which I presume is possible.

I don’t know.

I’ve never tried.

But we’re investing all this time mastering things that don’t matter instead of mastering things that do matter to other people.

And if we did, we could have any life we wanted.

And that’s a big part of unlocking your potential, is figuring out what can my value be?

And I think that’s such a simple question.

It’s like, oh, just figure something out that you’re good at and then hone those skills so you can master those skills.

And then now you have some value.

People will want to hire you or you can start your own business because you’re so good at it.

People will want to learn from you, things like that, or buy your products or services, et cetera.

But I think the hard thing is there are so many options.

There are so many things you could do.

You could do anything you want.

And that’s likely why a lot of people don’t do anything because it’s just so overwhelming.

Your potential is everywhere.

So how do you figure out, this is what I should focus on and then dedicate years to really hone my craft?

Spend some time alone and disconnected from all the distractions.

I mean, yeah, people say, oh, there’s so many options to choose from because I’m living my life swimming inside of optionality called the feed or the media or the TV.

You know, my therapist once told me, he’s like, Jeff, you will stop needing to come to me the day you spend enough time sitting alone on a rock with nothing to do.

Like, you’ll sort your stuff out, but get quiet, get still.

And we live in a world, and you can see it.

The world is like antithetically opposed to us having peace and stillness in it.

For sure.

There’s everything coming at us at all times from everywhere.

It’s very noisy.

And so I would say that’s part of it, is spend enough time alone to get to know yourself well enough to actually know what you prioritize, not what’s been prioritized for you.

And then the other is, and this, I swear, I had such a blessed youth because I had all these things put in place that I didn’t understand at the time.

But the other thing I would say is you’ve got to build the muscle of separating your sense of being okay from the opinions of others.

And until you build that muscle, you will never truly discover what you yourself really value.

The stat is that only in Western societies, liberal democracies, where we’re presumably free to think and believe whatever we want, only 12% of us will ever land on a fundamental religious or spiritual conviction different from our parents.

So 88% of us in cultures where we’re free to draw our own conclusions never fully bother to pressure test the conclusions of our parents.

And I think we would all empirically agree, it is statistically unlikely that my parents are 100% right about everything.

And therefore, it is no more likely that they would be assuredly right about the most important things, like the fundamental questions.

Therefore, my statistical likelihood of being A, right or B, true to self, is less likely the extent to which I simply adopt my answers to the most important questions in life from someone else regardless of whether or not I’m related to them.

And yet 88% of us never bother to even really land anywhere else.

Okay?

So we’re fundamentally irrational creatures.

That’s fine because there’s safety in the tribe and there’s certainly safety in the family unit.

But that really speaks to the extent to which we’re dominated by these sort of inherited, you know, primitive associations.

And in my work, you know, I do these personal development events where it’s actually the reason we do personal development as part of our life design platform, which is like helping people design the life they want.

So my company Entre, we help people design the life that they want and then learn the practical tools or skills and acquire the right tools to actually be able to go bring that life to life.

And the number one thing that we find is in resistance to all that, that really kind of keeps people from getting very far down the path, is they’re just so worried about what other people are going to think.

Of course.

And yet, we’re allowing the opinions of people whose lives, in most cases, we would not put at the top of our own Cantrell’s ladder.

We would not say, oh, that person clearly has it all figured out because they’ve created a life that looks exactly like what I want my life to look like.

And yet, I’m going to allow their opinion to stop me from even trying.

It’s so cray cray.

Well, I think that’s the hard part is that’s largely, I think, what holds lots of us back.

I know that holds me back in certain instances.

It’s like we want people to like us because that’s also, again, going back to human behavior.

That is a natural thing.

We, of course, want to be part of the group and not isolated and people to like us.

We don’t want enemies, all that kind of stuff.

Again, going back to that safety idea.

But like you said, if we want to design a life and actually pursue that life and have it, we have to make sometimes some difficult decisions.

And maybe some people may not understand some of those decisions.

And that’s really difficult.

And I’d say that’s probably also very difficult to maintain that.

It’s one thing to make that decision and start it.

How do you maintain that long term?

Does that mean I have to make new friends or I have to limit what kind of topics I talk with them because they just don’t understand some of the choices that I made?

I don’t know.

What was your experience when you had this big life change?

Did people look at you crazy or were they understanding?

I talked about the and I said I was going to close the loop, so I’m glad we’re back to it.

But how I was very blessed in childhood to have a number of sort of blocks put in place for the foundation that I have ended up living my life from.

One is that I was born with a genetic disorder called Wardenburg syndrome.

So I’m kind of funny looking, although I think I’m getting less funny looking the older I get.

I just look more like a middle-aged man and less like a kid with a genetic disorder.

But when I was a kid, I looked like a kid with a genetic disorder.

Craniofacial.

It’s like my eyes are too far apart.

I had a unibrow, which I’ve learned to do something about now.

Yeah, pluck or dare I say even wax at times.

I go with my wife.

It’s a bonding thing.

But literally, that was a pun.

And so it was an adhesive, like wax joke.

Sorry, okay, I digress.

But yes, that was such a blessing.

Because I grew up not only feeling very alienated from my peers, but actually sort of I saw belonging as undesirable.

Why would I want to belong to a group of people that would treat me differently on the basis of a genetic thing that I had no control over?

Why would I want to belong to a group of people that see me as this rather than this, or dare I say even this?

I’m pointing to my head and my heart if you’re hearing this on audio.

So I’m fine.

So I’m actually going to look inward for completion or completeness.

And I think I was a very spiritual kid because of that.

You look inward long enough and you start finding that hole in your heart that’s shaped like something, that you’re trying to find the thing that fits the hole to complete that existential yearning or whatever it is.

But I was having those feelings at four years old because the kids in preschool were telling me to, they were trying to hold me down and feed me grass in the playground.

So that was a blessing.

Well, I mean, you turned those lemons into lemonade.

I’ve done quite a bit of therapy to find the silver license.

Yeah, you were able to hear some good out of that not so good situation.

But I also had this friend, my best friend growing up, he’s still probably my closest true friend, the guy that is still in my life for no reason other than the simple fact that we love each other, as platonically, as friends.

This is my best friend, right?

Even if we don’t talk that much.

And his name is Rob.

And he was a little bit of a misfit like me growing up.

And so our friendship was heavily based on dares.

So I dare you to do this.

I dare you to do that.

And we were teenagers.

We met in Driver’s Ed.

And so invariably, the dares, like 50% of all the dares, involved going up and talking to some girl that was way out of my league.

But I had to because it was a dare.

Or it would be things like, okay, I want you to do the robot all the way through the largest shopping mall in Houston, Texas.

And you can’t stop and you can’t break character, right?

And so this progressive intensification of dares, coupled with the fact that I had grown up, I’m actually being serious.

My friendship with this person was developmentally essential to my life.

Because I got to where I realized, if you do things that are beyond an order of magnitude beyond normal life, people actually ignore you.

Like if I walk into…

And you’re like, it’s fine.

You didn’t, you know, die of embarrassment.

Yeah, if I walk into a…

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, there’s like these people hold no power over me.

It’s not…

Now, a thousand years ago, when I was completely dependent on the tribe for my survival, it would have been a real risk to be kind of weird and idiosyncratic.

But, you know, Ayn Rand said that civilization is the process of setting man free from men.

And I remember when I read that and was like, holy crap, that just like that puts such a fine point on it.

I can do virtually anything in this world because here’s the here’s the what you graduate up to.

When you stop worrying about the opinions of the 10 or 50 or 100 people in your life that have the most to say and apparently the least to do in their own lives other than weigh in on yours, you graduate to the level of inspiration and connection with the millions of people that are that are looking to connect with other people that have them that have set themselves free from those same opinions because they want to to because we all intrinsically recognize that the tribe is a prison.

And then people like Jessica and Jeff end up finding each other on the Internet because we live in a world where liberated people can find each other.

And there’s a whole other existence waiting to be lived for people that will just break up with the 10 people around them.

And it doesn’t mean you’re an asshole or it doesn’t mean that you look down on them or that you have nothing to do with them.

You just don’t allow them to define your existence and your choices anymore.

Is part of it too, I guess, because you said, you know, the tribe can kind of feel like a prison, that it’s more we have the opportunity to build new tribes of people with similar values, similar paths, so we can kind of connect with.

I see a lot of people.

I mean, I’ve done that especially.

And again, the Internet is great for this.

You can meet so many people all across the world and create new groups of people have lift you up that are encouraging on your path.

Yeah.

And it’s a new tribe built on a new currency.

If you think about what is the currency of tribal association, right?

In high school, let’s say it’s well, I would say in elementary school, the currency is to some degree, it’s approval.

Like you did something wrong.

I’m going to tell on you because we need authority to approve of us because we’re completely dependent on authority for our existence.

Then you get older.

And I think puberty is the transition from a currency of approval to a currency of belonging.

Now it’s, hey, I want to fit in with my group, right?

That’s the currency.

The tribe, you nailed it.

You said you can find a different group of people that are all connected by values when your currency transitions to your values, which, by the way, you know, the danger there is people that haven’t spent the time getting clear or personally defining their own set of values will sometimes shift tribal alliance over once they find a tribe whose values simply make them feel better or more comfortable within their own insecurities or unresolved or unhealed traumas.

Well, that’s no different.

You’re just out of the frying pan into the fire because you’re still living externally.

But when you get really clear on who you are, which is a journey, which I mean, that’s that’s what our lifelong journey really.

Yeah.

At the very least, I think that’s what our 20s and 30s are for.

And then you can and then you go out and you intentionally engineer your environment not to be an echo chamber, but to be values based.

Like I’m listening.

Like, for example, I’m a Christian.

I’m listening right now to a book by Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, which is like sort of the ultimate treatise for atheism.

And I’m not doing it because I’m looking to convert.

I’m doing it because on the basis of my values, I want to stay in alignment with my values by pressure testing my values and making sure that what I’ve landed on for myself is not something that I inherited or I accepted unconsciously, but that I’m so firm in them that I can withstand great challenges from brilliant minds and come out the other side knowing exactly who I am.

And I think that’s important to learn about what other people’s value systems are, even if they’re not for you, because that just builds empathy, which we lack a lot of in this world.

It’s like, that’s okay if you disagree, as long as we can agree that, you know, that’s good for you, not for me, but we can still coexist and still hang out and like each other.

That’s okay, too.

You know, we’re 90.

Like, do you consider that you have the same value set as a chimpanzee?

I don’t think so.

Like, you’re not engaged in the worship of bananas as a life orientation?

I’m not, no.

And yet, you’re 99% genetically similar to a chimpanzee.

Yeah.

And so I’m, you know, no matter how much I disagree with a person, I’m still much more like them than I am like a chimpanzee, which was already 99%.

So, you know, I don’t know.

I have some different beliefs about values and what they link to.

I think values are kind of like a portal into the realm of the non-physical, and it all converges in thoughts and whatnot.

But like, I just don’t think we’re on this earth so that we can arrive at perfect alignment with the acceptance of all the other people on this earth that are themselves on this journey to figure out who they are and what they believe.

And it’s sad because, again, I have the practical experience of working with thousands of people that are saying, I want to design my own life.

I want to change my external reality to more resemble my internal reality.

But because they spend all their time focused on trying to change their external reality, they’re somewhat naïve to what their internal reality actually is.

And they’re mostly dominated by the desire to be acceptable.

Yeah.

So you’re saying that most people are focused on changing the external without doing that internal work first.

And if you’re doing that, then you’re doing it in the wrong order.

And without breaking free of the prison of needing to be approved of by others.

In which case, even if you figured out who you are, you wouldn’t manifest it because other people might not approve.

Interesting.

Yeah.

Well, going back to, again, unlocking your potential, it sounds like part of that, the big part is really discovering who you are, what you value, and then how you can develop value externally in terms of developing your skill set and things like that.

And then, you know, the kind of financial component is how can I use money as a tool to help me create that life?

Now, I’m curious, too, because we mentioned millionaires, billionaires, how important do you think it is to also set our own, not budget, but this amount of money I’m good with?

Personally, I don’t believe there should be a world of billionaires.

I think that’s too much money for one person to have, too much responsibility.

So for me, I feel like everyone kind of should set this amount of money is good.

I don’t need to keep going and going and going and become a million.

If I’ve already achieved the fulfilled life that I want, that’s okay.

I’m curious what your idea about that is.

This is kind of something I thought would be interesting since we talked about wealth and achievement.

How do you know when you’re done, when you’ve hit the level of we’re good, fulfilled?

I think it’s focusing on the wrong thing, personally.

I don’t think that, A, I don’t think that it’s our lot.

I mean, I think this has been validated economically, it’s been validated socially, culturally, that I don’t think any of us should be in the business of trying to limit what another person is capable of.

If somebody wants to go create a trillion dollars worth of value in the world and be justly compensated for that, I mean, you could argue, again, going back to Jeff or Elon, they have, and you can pick apart their life and say, oh, they were in the right place at the right time or whatever.

Okay, somebody’s in the right place at the right time, to the extent that the right place and the right time exists in a world that has people in it.

But what did they do with that opportunity?

And for those of us that want to attack them for that, how many of us have been in the right?

Have you done an exhaustive audit of your own life to find all the times when you were in some form of right place at right time but did not seize that opportunity?

Maybe that’s a more worthy study than trying to poke at somebody else.

But let’s assume that Jeff Bezos, through AWS, the Amazon Web Services, has reduced the cost of enterprise web services for basically every business on earth because they’re either a customer of his or he’s repriced the economy in which all other equivalent services have to compete.

So by lowering the hosting costs of every business on earth, has he created that kind of value?

Probably by literally creating a system that allowed people to still get groceries in the middle of a pandemic when they were scared to leave their house.

Has he created that kind of value?

You can argue it.

I mean, at least it’s a worthy question.

It’s not just like an open and shut case that no one deserves that.

And so I think it’s focusing on the wrong thing.

If somebody says, what is the amount of money that allows me to operationalize my values and live a congruent life across a range of human experiences?

I don’t know, figure out that number.

But I will tell you that we live in a world that discourages people from doing very much basic math.

Because the number that even the conservative, even the investment banks, not the investment banks, but like the retail financial institutions, like the Charles Schwab’s and the Merrill Lynch’s and the Edward Jones, the people that want you to give them your money around this arbitrary concept called retirement, which I love to debunk because retirement is a less than 200-year-old idea that was created for political reasons.

But that’s perhaps another podcast.

But even to the extent you buy into this idea, they’re telling you that you need net worth, depending where you live, somewhere between probably $2 and $5 million net worth.

And I don’t even think that’s a very reasonable number.

It’s probably closer to between $5 and $10, depending where you live.

I mean, if you live in San Francisco or New York, it’s probably between $10 and $20.

But that’s just for you to have a comfortable retirement.

What do you believe about the world today?

How’s it going to be for your kids and their kids?

And how many generations do you want to take on responsibility for?

Like, I can pretty easily get to a rational argument that in today’s world and where I think…

You know, and I wrote my…

I published my book two years ago now, and everything I said about inflation has been completely validated and where we’re going.

I think you could make a pretty rational argument that multi-generational predictability requires probably around $100 million net worth.

Goodness.

Because you work backwards and say, okay, what are the…

You know, the average family office, which, you know, family offices are what really wealthy families set up to basically manage their money.

It’s like a business that’s just one family’s wealth.

The average family office…

Because once you’re wealthy, your goal is not so much to make lots of money, but like don’t lose money.

I’ve already got it.

I don’t want to lose it.

The average family office return in this country is 7%.

Work backwards and say, what amount of low risk, passive, predictable income do I need to have to ensure generational security for myself, my kids, and my grandkids?

Let’s just leave it at three generations.

$100 million working backwards, $7 million a year working backwards.

That’s about half a million dollars a month.

And that sounds extreme to people, but actually start breaking down the math.

Let’s assume there’s going to be riots in all the major cities in the next 20 years.

And you got to be alone with a bunker on a mountain.

That’s why.

And so again, I’m not saying this to say, no, everybody needs $100 million.

I’m saying this to say it’s an arbitrary thing to focus on that has nothing, that I’ve already said doesn’t actually have anything fundamentally to do with my definition of success.

So so you’re saying don’t focus on a number because like we’ve kind of touched on a number won’t make you happy.

You’ll always maybe want more or will be dissatisfied with what you’ve got.

It’s again, going back to that kind of internal stuff is the key.

Yeah, what’s the number like for me, if I believe that I was put on this earth to be a jazz musician, what’s the amount of money that allows me to be a jazz musician across, you know, and there’s always going to be asymmetrical risk or, you know, acts of God, right?

Like what if the world’s biggest tornado destroys all of the Western United States?

Okay, well, I have a skill that would allow me to relocate.

I mean, music is a global thing and find a new place to continue to be a solvent jazz musician.

And what’s the nest egg that gives me that foundational security?

But that’s because I believe something about what I was called to do in this life.

Until you know what you’re called to do in this life, how the hell can you come up with a number?

Okay, the last thing I want to touch on just to kind of close the circle, since we touched on, you know, numbers and things like that.

And also, again, doing your internal work and building the life that you want.

How important do you think it is to also integrate the idea of giving back philanthropy, especially to once you have figured out, okay, I’ve got my finances sorted, I’ve got all these things sorted, I’m good.

Then is the next natural step, how can then I do this for other people, whether that is charitable donations or volunteering or creating structures to help others?

To answer that question, I have to declare my fundamental political orientation, which is basically libertarianism.

And libertarianism is based on the idea that the only legitimate use of, like at its intellectual extreme, libertarianism says that the only legitimate use of force is to oppose the illegitimate use of force.

In other words, the enemy of freedom is coercion.

What do you believe?

What does a person believe?

So there’s, let’s call it three possibilities for the charity, three possible generalized beliefs about charity.

One would be I should do it at every stage because I believe it is noble and that it has some kind of like karmic reward system, where even if I’m doing it on the come up, which essentially means subtracting from my own asset base, even while I’m still at the stage where I’m very dependent on and focused on building my asset base, but that’s okay because the universe will sort of pay me back and then some over time.

So that would be one possible belief.

And if that’s what you believe, then that’s what you should do.

The next belief is charity is good, but to use the airplane analogy, I have to, you know, if there’s trouble, I have to put my own face mask on first, and then and only then can I help the person next to me, in which case I will not be charitable until I reach a point where I’ve checked this box of security or predictability, and then I will begin being charitable because it is a good thing, but there’s no universal system encouraging me to do it before I’m ready, so to speak.

So that would be the second option.

Or you believe it’s simply not worth doing, because, you know, in a Darwinian sense, my design as a created being is to fend for myself.

Whatever you believe is what you should do.

And the one thing that none of us should do is be in the business of telling other people what they should do, unless it’s to prevent them from telling other people what they should do.

I try to ration, I try to think of, you know, I’m probably overly obsessed with frameworks, and like breaking life, you know, sort of deductively taking.

And this is why it’s so important, I think, to figure out what your principles and values are, because then you have something to work deductively from, and say, okay, what do these ideas look like in practice?

What is the actual doing of living based on what I’ve determined about the being of living?

And most people do it the other way.

Like, I’m going to do, and once I’ve done enough, then in my retirement, or in my wealth, or my, you know, or my sedation or whatever, I’ll have the time to ponder the being.

To figure that out.

You know, I made the mistake of pondering the being at a young enough age that it made most of life untenable, and I had to drop out of school and do something I felt that mattered, right?

So, you know, careful what you wish for.

Without the, you know, and another thing is to understand that none of us are going to have like intellectual certainty about virtually anything.

We don’t have enough, we’re not an AI that can, that can scan every data point in the world.

We’re not going to know enough to say that we know for sure.

I never capitalize the word truth, you might say.

But on the basis of my lived experience, I do believe that there is some sort of reward for being charitable across time, even when it’s, and actually that it works sort of ironically, the harder it is to be charitable, the greater the reward for doing so.

Like if you’re a billionaire, it’s easy to give a homeless guy a 20.

But if you yourself are struggling to make rent at the end of the month and you give a homeless guy a 20, like my lived experience says there’s something, and I don’t think it’s like, oh, the button pushers in the sky will then, you know, I will stumble.

You got a good-for-you point and that’ll come back to you.

I don’t think it works like that.

I think it’s something that shifts internally when I operate on faith.

You know, St.

Augustine said, seek not to believe, no, seek not to understand that thou may believe, seek to believe that thou may understand.

And so when I operate on the basis of belief, I think something shifts in me so that I actually become a different person for whom the probability increases of achieving my goals.

That version, the version of me that gave the guy the 20 is the version of me that’s more likely to go out and get what I want.

I think that’s how it works.

And so I put it, I decided, yes, I’m going to be charitable on the come up, but I also have to be a very, very good steward of my energy and attention because that’s finite.

And all outlier success exists at the margins of money, of attention, of energy and so forth.

And what that means is, let’s assume everybody works 40 hours a week.

So working 40 hours a week doesn’t give me any advantage.

But working 44 hours a week, that extra 10% might give me a 200% advantage.

So it’s like asymmetrical to go beyond the norm.

That’s what I mean when I say asymmetrical upside exists at the margins.

And so for me, to try to ration, I want to be able to keep my energy and attention completely available to focus on that which I deem important for my own goal achievement, because I know that statistically most people in this world don’t achieve their goals.

And so the likelihood that I will is going to depend largely not on just paying attention like everybody else does, but paying a little more attention than most people do, applying a little more energy than most people do.

It’s all at the margins.

So I want to keep my attention clean or available even if I have a value that says I should pay attention to something else.

So that’s all a long way of saying, I believe in charity on the come up, but I believe in automating it so you don’t have to think about it, because you want to keep your attention free.

Because seeking opportunities to be charitable on the come up, it might be a value you believe in, but it’s a tension that you may not be able to afford.

So I just set it on my credit card.

I picked what are the charities that I believe in, and every month they’re going to automatically deduct from my credit card, and then I can stay focused on my work in the world, because now my work in the world includes being able to pay that credit card at the end of the month, but I’m not having to give it much attention.

And that’s how I chose to do it.

So part of the fun thing about being charitable, I think, is that transaction of knowing you are giving something that you have away to someone in need, and you feel that instant kind of gratification.

I do, at least, when I manually do it.

Though I do feel like, in general, I’ve talked to lots of people in the charitable space.

It’s actually great to automate.

Charities love that because, again, they’ve got that predictability of charitable donations.

They could do more with those kind of funds.

So what you’re kind of saying is, you know, it may be a good…

And I do have the same value system in that I believe, at no matter what stage, there are so many ways to give back and to, again, make the world more like how you’d like to, you know, see it.

You want it to be charitable.

You know, everyone’s had situations where they could use help.

And so wouldn’t you want to, you know, be in that position where you could be that person to kind of fill that void?

And, you know, then creating a system, like you said, which is, I feel like, again, very alignment when you’re designing your dream life, that could be part of it.

That could be part of the ideal situation, is to have that part of it, automate it, so it doesn’t kind of detract from any other things, but you’re still doing some good.

And again, I really liked what you said that when you do it, you feel like you are more like the person that you want to be, which I really think is really pretty good to say.

Yeah, and that person is more likely to go out and do the work that’s going to create the resources to offset the expense.

And, you know, most of us, depending on your income bracket, I mean, like for me, I work January through May of every year is for the government.

It’s just to pay taxes.

It’s almost 50% of my year.

So then if I say, OK, June and July are going to be for others because I’ve automated a certain amount of giving in my life, I still get that transactional joy throughout the year.

If I give away roughly 15% of my income, that’s two out of every 12 months.

You know, that’d be 16%.

Then I get to feel like I am actively working for others.

And because I have set these to come out of my credit card, regardless of my other financial situations, I have to pay them first before I pay myself.

So OK, January through May, I got to pay for the government, which wastes money, and I don’t really believe in most of what they do with it.

But OK, I got to get through May so that June and July, I can work for other people, and then I can spend the back five months of the year actually working for myself.

But all of this type of thinking, I talked about the need to separate ourselves from the opinions of others.

The other fundamental thing that we have to make true in our lives if we want to actually thrive over time is to stop playing these shorter and shorter games.

Play the longest game possible, and be constantly engineering and optimizing your life within your resource constraints to say, how do I make my life about as long a game as it can possibly be about?

And you might say, I don’t have enough money to be playing a 50-year investment game.

Okay, how do you reduce your expenses so that at least you can start thinking in terms of years and not months?

Because the short game, think about it, the long game taken to its extreme is about infinite impact.

If you only lived your life around the longest conceivable game, honestly, you’d be Jesus.

And if you only live your life around the shortest conceivable game, you’re like a crack dealer on the corner who shoots anybody that threatens them.

And that’s a pretty obvious polarity that I think intellectually and philosophically and emotionally and spiritually and all other ways supports always trying to extend the horizon through which you view your life.

And that’s why poverty is so terrible, because it just focuses us so intensely on the present.

And we start trading our future for our present, because we’re poor and we’re desperate and we’re scared.

And that’s why money matters.

But you can accomplish a lot of the same things simply through taking enough time to be alone, to philosophically muse and figure out what you believe about life and about the world.

We don’t need money for that.

I think in a lot of ways, money is how we distract ourselves from having to think about these things.

Yeah, so I feel like that would be a great way to close this episode is the call to action for everyone listening.

Take, what would you say, like 30 minutes, an hour, just to even get started to start the process of really thinking about who am I?

What do I want?

I know you have a whole system and a whole course and things like that, but what a great way to just like after this episode, take like 30 minutes to yourself, no distractions.

And how often do you give yourself that, right?

Yeah, my therapist initially recommended four hours.

He said, I tell every one of my patients to go sit alone on a rock for four hours.

And I mean alone, like go out, away from everything and sit for four hours without your phone.

You know, if you need to set a timer and put it over in the trees to go off after four hours, whatever.

But he said, I tell all my patients and the number of them that actually do it.

And it’s not like we can’t say, I don’t have four hours.

It’s the same as people say, I don’t have time to go to the gym.

If you’ve like, have you ever seen the Star Wars trilogy?

Awesome.

You could have done the wrong exercise twice.

You know, like we’ve all got the time.

But very few people actually do it.

So yeah, I would say that’s the call to action.

I mean, in our work, my wife and I, the events that we run, I don’t want to give away too much about them because I, you know, hopefully one of your listeners might be intrigued to come try one.

But we do some of this.

We sort of create secure isolation opportunities for people to really get to know themselves.

So yes, I think that is a wonderful, wonderful call to action.

So yeah, before I let you go, where can people find more information about what you do and your books?

Where can people find all that?

So if you want to know more about me and, you know, kind of try before you buy, so to speak, like decide, do I like this guy?

This podcast was a start.

My YouTube channel, I think I have, I don’t know, somewhere on the order of a thousand videos, plenty to sample from, of like, do I like what this guy has to say?

And because I am, I will declare, my goal in this world is to help people design the life that they want and learn the practical skills and acquire the practical tools that make it possible to bring that to life in a true, ordinary, non-trust fund funded life, because those opportunities exist, which I think is the miracle of the modern world.

And I talk all about that on my YouTube channel.

My book is called Unlock Your Potential, as you mentioned, and it’s available wherever books are sold.

Amazing.

Well, it was literally so fun chatting to you.

We really talked for almost an hour there.

So thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show.

It was a pleasure.

Well, thanks for having me.

I come on a show like the More Money Podcast, and I’m like, are they going to like me?

Because I’m going to talk about money only very indirectly.

But I will just say…

We talk about all things on this show.

And it’s not really…

Most people think this show is called More Money because it’s about how to get more money.

It’s like, no, you got to listen to the show and you’ll find out it’s actually more than…

It’s about more than money, actually.

More than money.

Well, and the cool thing is I don’t think that’s a dichotomy.

I think in the modern world, you get more money, and I think I’m a living testament to this.

You get more money by being about more than money.

Absolutely.

Because money is attracted to value, not to itself.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, thanks again.

It was so fun having you on.

Thanks, Jessica.

And that was episode 404 of the More Money Podcast with Jeff Lerner, CEO of the Entre Institute.

You can find more information about that at entreinstitute.com.

So that’s entreinstitute.com, and then you can follow him on Twitter, at the Jeff Lerner, and on Instagram, at Jeff LernerOfficial.

I will make it really easy for you and just include all of the links to everything in the show notes for this episode.

So you can just go to jessicamoorhouse.com/404 to find all of that information.

And like I mentioned, he has a book called Unlock Your Potential.

And I am giving away a copy of it.

So make sure to go to and also buy a copy, obviously.

But if you also want to enter to win, you can go to jessicamoorhouse.com/contest.

You will find that and all the other books that have been featured on season 18 of the show.

Just so you know, I always buy these books with my own money and then give them to winners because A, I want to support my fellow authors and thank them for coming on the show.

But also I’m hoping, you know, selfishly, there’s some good karma for me for when my book comes out and people actually buy it.

But anyways, that’s neither here nor there.

jessicmoorhouse.com/contest where you can enter to win a copy of many, many books.

So this is the season finale, which is crazy.

This was a good 18 episode season, a good long one, and a lot has happened.

I was still, I think, writing my book by the time this season started airing.

And now we’re in the stages where I’m getting asked, hey, what kind of copy and stuff like that for the online listing for your book?

We’re making some moves.

Things are happening.

This book is going to be an actual physical thing very soon, which is really exciting.

So I don’t really have too much more info about what’s going on, but I will, I’m sure, be keeping things or sharing whatever I can on Instagram during the summer break, as this podcast will be taking a summer break until sometime in September.

And of course, don’t forget, I do have an e-newsletter that I send out maybe once a month.

So it’s never going to bug you that much, honestly.

jessicamoorhouse.com/subscribe is where you can sign up for that.

And I just want to know as we kind of wrap things up, just let you know about a few things that you may or may not know.

So got that newsletter.

But also I have a free resource library.

So it’s right on my home page, jessicamoorhouse.com.

You can sign up, but you can also just go to jessicamoorhouse.com/resources.

And you can sign up for that, all these free goodies.

I’ve got a plethora of budget spreadsheets that have just been updated on my website, jessicamoorhouse.com/shop.

And of course, I have my newly updated investing course, Both Building Blueprint for Canadians, where you can find more information about that and how to apply jessicamoorhouse.com/course.

And very soon, I’ll be able to say, go to jessicamoorhouse.com/book to buy my book.

I mean, that page does exist.

I did make it because I was seeing lots of people were Googling jessicamoorhouse.com book, and then they were faced with no page.

And so there’s a little landing page.

So it really just takes you to sign up to my newsletter so you can find out more about when the book comes out.

But yeah, I think that’s really all I’ve got to tell you about.

But you know, this has been an amazing, amazing season.

I feel so privileged to be able to say that part of my job is to be a podcaster.

And I feel like honestly, I have the most amazing listeners.

I get so many amazingly nice and friendly DMs and comments and emails from listeners.

I really appreciate it.

Just in case you’re like, I don’t know, I don’t want to bug her, you can bug me all the time.

I’ve even had people that have had this happen twice, twice y’all in the past couple months.

Real people in real life in Toronto have stopped me on the street and asked me, are you Jessica Moorhouse from the More Money Podcast?

And you know what?

That’s really nice.

I feel like a celebrity.

It’s really nice.

Of course, one time, I looked awful.

So sorry to that person.

I just got a facial and my face was on fire and I looked crazy.

But hey, I still love it.

I still love saying hello.

So if you ever find me in the wild, say hello.

Yeah.

So that’s really, I think, all I’ve got to share.

So stay in touch with me over the summer break on Instagram, at Jessica I.

Moorhouse is where you can find me.

And of course, if you want to check out the Instagram for the podcast at More Money Podcast is where you can find that.

And I’m hopeful too, because I actually don’t really have any summer travel plans besides like, you know, one week in early July, I’m going to be just home in Toronto for the summer to, you know, continue making some more YouTube videos.

So jessicamoorhouse.com/youtube is where you can find my channel.

And, you know, check that out.

But we’re very close to 30,000.

We’re very close to 30,000 subscribers.

Very exciting, which is, I mean, still a long ways away from 100,000.

But hey, we’re we’re trying our best over here.

We’re trying our best.

So again, a huge thank you for supporting me, supporting this podcast and listening and telling your friends and family about it.

I really, really appreciate it.

And I also really appreciate all the hard work by my podcast team.

Video edit by Justice Carrar and produced by mravcanada.com, mravcanada.com.

Thank you so much for producing and putting this podcast together this season.

I really, really appreciate it.

And it was really fun doing a video podcast for the first time ever.

I think I’m going to continue doing it.

I think people really enjoyed it.

So did I.

So yeah, with that, have an amazing summer and take care of yourself.

You’re amazing and you deserve to take care of yourself.

And I will see you back here, as always, back here for season 19 of the show.

This coming September, I will let you know, you know, over email if you’re part of my newsletter list or Instagram or wherever, when I know when the season will start.

So look out for that.

But otherwise, have a great summer and see you soon.