Mo Gawdat: Moment 75 - What You Think You Know About Money Is Wrong: Mo Gowdat

00:02You asked me a question about money and then you said, you know, what does money mean to me? And then when I asked you, you said you think you've come to learn that you think money is one of your illusions. What did you mean by that? Money is an illusion at every, every level. Money doesn't exist. You and I know that anyone who understands fractional reserve and how money is printed and generated. Money does not even exist. you walk into a bank and you ask for a 50,000 pounds loan for a car and they literally write the numbers 5-0-0-0-0 in a spreadsheet and poof, money comes out of nowhere. That money never existed before you borrowed it, okay? And will only exist when you work your backside off to pay it back, right? And interestingly, that illusion was created to make our lives easier and then it ended up making our life a lot more difficult.

00:56Now, why? Because most of us are so chasing the revenue side of money without a full understanding of the cost side of money. Let me try to explain. For you to get a job in London that pays you 100,000 pounds, just for simplification of the mathematics, you have to live in London, which costs you 70,000 pounds. For example, I don't know London very well, but let's say these are the numbers. But on top of the 70,000 pounds, it also costs you your stress.

01:32It also costs you being far away from your mom if your mom lives elsewhere. It costs you, you know, your time, which is your most valuable resource. The only thing you really have in your life is your time. And it costs you so many other things, right? And so most people don't understand the cost-benefit relationship to start. Now, you take that and then you add a Louis Vuitton bag or a fancy car, and suddenly your money is not even going as far as it could because you could get yourself a bag that is beautiful and everything for £100, but then you choose to buy one for several thousand pounds, and then you have to work harder, which makes you pay more costs and the cycle becomes even more vicious, right?

02:20You continue further than that and you start to say, so I save some of my money in the future, but your savings are suffering inflation. So you save a thousand pounds, they become 900, they become 800. When in reality, by the way, you've saved the thousand pounds when you could have borrowed them by entering some numbers in a spreadsheet. The entire recipe around that story is wrong. Everything around money is not what we believe it is, okay? Which basically makes it an illusion.

02:50Now, the biggest part of that illusion, believe it or not, is, and I know you have money in the bank, is that you have nothing. I don't know if you realize that. Most people don't understand that if I have 100 pounds in the bank, I literally have nothing. I have nothing. The bank has my hundred pounds and the bank can decide whatever they want to do if they wanted to take it away from me. Okay. And it is only my money when I choose to buy an iPhone or something with it.

03:19For that one instant, that money is mine. And then once I get the iPhone, it's not mine anymore. I now have the iPhone. Right. You basically assign that money that is never yours. it's the banks until the minute you spend it to spending it on things that most of us don't ever interact with. I mean, look at your own home, anyone listening to us and how many things you have in that home that you've not ever used ever. You know, you saw that pair of shoes in the window and you were like, oh my God, I have to have them, spent several hundred pounds on them or several tens of pounds on them and then ended up taking them home, never, ever putting them on. Right.

03:59Now, all of that waste along the way, the cost of earning the money, the things that you spend it on, the actual value of the things that you spend it on, basically tells you that there is one truth to money, which is I have basic needs. I have basic needs and my basic needs are to be reasonably covered, reasonably fed, reasonably safe, and so on and so forth. and in in in islam in the islamic culture we call this rizq which is different than income rizq is not what how much money you earn it's the good that that money brings you it's did you eat a meal today that is actually what you're looking for in life it's not the money that gets you the meal okay what you're looking for is the meal could you actually buy something for your daughter today, the thing is what you're looking for. It's not the money that got the thing. And if you start to chase that, something very different happens, right? Suddenly you start to ask yourself, is buying that thing worth the 17 hours of work I'm going to put in them, right? Which of those, which would I prefer if I gave you the two choices and said, buy this bag or spend 17 hours with your friends. If you see it that way, you may make very different decisions. It leaves us with the very

05:21big other illusion, which is, but money is safety, Mo. You know, it's not like I want money because I want more fancy things. I just want to feel safe because the world is unpredictable. Sadly, when the world is unpredictable, money is not going to save you. Okay. And I think my story has been very, very, very big eye open. I had enough money. I, you know, I had enough connections and enough influence and I, you know, failed to protect my child's life when it was time for him to go. Right. I, you know, I think we know many stories of someone that maybe falls and breaks your back. What will your money do for you? Safety is a much bigger thing than just a little bit of money in the bank. And by the way, safety is an attitude, is an idea to tell yourself when I need it, I will make it.

06:10When I need it, I will have it. Perhaps the answer is I don't need so much of it anyway. And I think, you know, again, like everything in life, you want to have the skill of making money. Money is power. You know, again, when you were speaking on slow-mo, you basically said, I love the idea of being able to build this setup for the podcast of spending on my show and so on. That's wonderful, okay? Money is power, but it's power as long as you own it and it doesn't own you.

06:43The minute money owns you and lack of it starts to distract you and looking at how much your other friend has and he has a little more than you, you know, hurts your ego. Once it gets into that realm, then money works against you. It doesn't work for you. Do you think it's a noble cause that when I answered that question and I said, for me, money is basically the fuel of my mission. It enables me to, I said, I put on my Diary of a Sea or Alive tour.

07:11It cost me about £600,000 to book these 10 venues, to book the London Palladium for three nights, to book this massive choir of 40 people, to book this big musical. There was about 100 of us, 100 people I had to book and pay for to put on that show. At the end of the show, I break even. but without the that tour you know reaches almost 20 000 people it's the most thrilling fulfilling and uh biggest honor that i've ever had to be able to do that in front of all of those people and to share that message which is very much in line with my mission and i look at money and said if i if i didn't have the money it would have been much much harder not impossible but much much much harder to do that absolutely so do you feel like that is a noble relationship with with money look uh you we agree on this nothing is good or bad nothing is right or wrong everything is both right and wrong and everything is can be both good and bad it depends on what you want to do with it and one of the messages i constantly tell everyone in the world is absolutely become successful become powerful become rich because the biggest problem with our world is that the most successful, most powerful, and the richest are the worst of us. Okay? And I don't generalize

08:26and say that's the truth, but it's actually easier to make money if you break some rules than it is if you're ethical. And so as a result of that, a good chunk of the big money in the world is not super ethical, right? And if I have more money, I can fuel my 1 billion happy mission. And that's a good thing for the world. That's, by the way, owning money, not letting it own you, right? So if I can get to the point where I make it and actually give it to 1 billion happy, then that's amazing. If I get to the point where I make it and then suddenly go like, oh, let's wait a little bit, grow it a tiny bit and then give it to 1 billion happy, then I'm not doing the right thing. Having said that, and of course, you know how I admire you and respect you. This is your zoom lens of the world. Okay. For someone else, four pounds, some sticky paper and a couple of scissors and spending an hour with her daughter doing something beautiful. Okay. Is as impactful, maybe even more impactful than the entire show, because that one daughter with the sticky paper and scissors might end up becoming one of the most pronounced artists in the world prominent enough to change the world with four pounds, scissors, and a piece of paper.

09:45Now, we somehow, especially those of us like you and I who had experiences in life where they put effort and the effort rewarded them, okay, we think that we are the ones that are changing the world or making a difference. No, we're not, okay? The reality is we need to understand that again i you know i admire you and i know you'll you'll you'll not feel upset but half of what you know is wrong half of what i know is wrong more than that absolutely right and it's it's just an attempt it's just an attempt what you know whether that attempt uh uh steve is is is an attempt because of money or is it it's an attempt because you just spend time with your driver talking about something or you were telling the story, all of those things. I think the game is I'm going to do the best that I can to acquire the resources that I'm good at acquiring to direct them in the investments that I have accessible to me. If you are a cashier at a supermarket and you're making enough money to spend wonderful time with your daughter to, you know, to do a bit of art, then that in itself is a form of contribution that changes the world.

11:12And you'll never know that one daughter might cure cancer.