Podcast 84. Unconstrained and Surfing to Financial Freedom with Myles Wakeham

Average Joe Finances:
0:00

Welcome back to the average Joe finances podcast. I'm your host, Mike Cavaggioni. Let's get to today's episode. Hey, how's it going everybody? So today's guest is miles way cam and he's an Australian who migrated to the USA in 1989 and has since become a multimillionaire. He lives a hundred percent free and unconstrained life, no job, et cetera. You get the gist yet. He never graduated from high school. Let alone went to college. He's a self-made business focused technologist who was one of the early members of the biotechnology corporation, Amgen, which is now the largest biotech company in the us. He's made a fortune and big points since 2011, which is pretty cool and owns a portfolio of rental properties. He spends 50% of his time baking in the sun and Arizona, and another 50% of his. Roaming the world seeking out new opportunities. He's the host of the unconstrained podcast in which he teaches the art of financial sustainability to his audience. So miles awesome background, really excited to have you on the show. Thanks for joining me today.

Myles Wakeham:
1:01

Thank you for having me honored to be here.

Average Joe Finances:
1:03

Absolutely hey so I want to start this off the way I start every episode off with my guests. And the first question I have for you is I gave a little bit of the wave top description of who you are and your background, right? So if you could maybe share a little bit more about yourself, Share your story. How did you get started? What made you want to just become an entrepreneur and live this unconstrained?

Myles Wakeham:
1:24

I didn't know. It was, you were supposed to do anything else, but that, to be honest, it's a funny situation because that question does come up and. It's taken me and some time to actually come to gather with an answer that makes sense. Not only for people wanting to know the answer, but also for me, I grew up at a time in Australia in the, I guess I hit my heyday sometime in the 1980s, but I grew up in the seventies as a kid and Sohn and this was a, in a country that had a lot of high interest rates. So nobody really had debt. You were raised on what you had and you made things work. And if you, your car was breaking down, you didn't go and buy another guy, you fixed it. And if you couldn't afford to get somebody to fix it, you learn how to do it yourself. It was a world of the buck stops here. But with that freedom came whatever you want to do with your life, it's up to you. You can take things as far as you want any way you want to go. And we call that free range Australians or free range kids. We will not tell now you couldn't ride your bicycle on the street, cause somebody gonna hit you with the car. And yet we're in a country where everything on the ground will probably kill you with snake or a spider or something. So you're raised with this sense of responsibility and you're raised with this hostile environment around you. And rather than shying away from that, you really can't. You have no choice. In, at my time when I grew up and certainly all of my peers, my friends, then this is how we were with life. We just knew the buck stops on our disk and we'll do whatever we have to do to make things work. Once you transcend that and you accept that the world's your oyster. And I think that was how. That's was the foundation I started with.

Average Joe Finances:
3:29

Okay. Yeah. Right on. So that, that is when you think about when you're describing, where you grew up in Australia, how you know, everything just in, in general, so you had the high interest rates that you were talking about, but you live more of a, you already, I guess you could say you already started. Unconstrained with this free range as you call it, free range. Just being able to go out not having a fear for what's around you, but being responsible enough to understand. The dangers that were around. And it's funny what you said about how nearly everything on the ground there can kill you. It's a running joke that my wife and I have every time she says she wants to visit Australia. And I'm like, why? So everything there that, so we can go visit a place where everything there wants to kill us, but it's just it's funny because when you think about some of the most dangerous and poisonous animals in the world, They all happen to reside in this one place down under it's when you mentioned that it kinda just, it triggered that in my head.

Myles Wakeham:
4:24

It's a good observation. And one of the things that comes from coming from the running race and environment, like that is a sense of balance. Like you have to co-exist with nature. Nature's not going to do what you want it to do. You have to accommodate. And I told, I tell a story to my audience about when I was a teenager. I grew up on the coast on a city, on the coast in Australia where all of my friends where you went surfing every weekend. And surfing's a great way. It's a great analogy for life. It taught me. Pretty much everything that's worked for me in my life, which is weird. You've got people out there, they go and get an MBA at Harvard and they do all this sort of stuff and they think they've got it. They've got the secret to success in life. And maybe some do, but I can tell you right now, most of the world that we're raised in is a distraction from the universe that we all live. The urban cities are artificial. I live in Arizona. It's a hostile environment, humans not supposed to live here, but we created an artificial environment and all around us with distracted by artificial. And the reason why that's important is that getting back to the surfing analogy. When you learn how to surf it hurts. You're going to get beaten up. You're going to buy a surf board, hitting you in the back of the head. You're going to get big waves crashing and breaking every bone you've gotten. It's tough, but what happens after you've done it enough and you've had your bruises and your aches and pains is you start understanding that you can't control the way. The ocean will always be there and it will do what oceans do. Waves will arise, wave will break. And what you start realizing is that in order for you to ride a away, you have to be ahead of it. You have to be ahead of it and you have to move forward before it comes upon you. And then if you're in the right place, moving forward, it will pick you up. And the energy of the universe will transfer to you and you'll have the greatest ride of your life. And it's almost like a spiritual experience. Anybody who's been surfing will understand this.

Average Joe Finances:
6:44

Wow. I really liked that. I really liked that analogy. How you do that, like the, just the transfer of the power. When you actually catch that wave and you're riding it in, that is a, that's a really great way to, to think about it.

Myles Wakeham:
6:56

It's synergistic, you become at one with the universe around you. You can't. Tell the wave not to be a wave. You have to deal with it. If you take the exact same analogy into the financial markets, you're a billionaire. You buy something before it happens. You see it rising on the horizon. You get in position ahead of. You stop paddling, which is effectively to buy or to engage you, let it come upon you. If you pick the right one, it will pick you up and it will propel you forward at a pace faster than you can ever paddle, and you will get the natural and nurture of the universe. It's how I make my money with Bitcoin. It's how I make my money in real estate. It's how I've made one money period. And anybody out there who says, oh, I've got to go and, get this degree or learn this thing or whatever. I come back to the BA I'm a simple guy. I come back to the basics. What's your end game? What are you trying to achieve? And is this going to propel you there at the greatest momentum with the greatest pace? And for me, I learned those tricks as a learning opportunity growing up in Australia as a surfer.

Average Joe Finances:
8:15

Yeah. And what a great analogy, right? When you talk about just the wave itself and how you ha you can't tell the wave to not be a wave, like you said it's going to do what it's going to do. You can't stop it. You don't have the power to do that, but when you do have the power to do is. Conform to that energy, make it your own and then use it and to propel yourself forward. And and you mentioned how, this is how you've treated your financial just mentality as well. When it came to investing in Bitcoin and real estate. Now I wanted to ask you, because now, when we talk about your background, you had invested in Bitcoin back in 2007, So you obviously saw this little swell that was coming up and you're like, this is going to be a good way to catch. I'm going to paddle, I'm going to, I'm going to start turning now so I can catch this and not, have this thing just roll over me. So what did you see back in 2011 that said, okay, this is it. I'm going to go in Bitcoin.

Myles Wakeham:
9:13

I was a real estate owner in 2008. I had a lot of rental properties, I watched them get decimated by the banking industry. So already began anything after that with a very much a mistrust of banking. I didn't believe that putting my money with all my assets, with other people being tied to the risk of the counterparty defaulting on.'cause. I did nothing to deserve losing half my net worth and real estate. That was somebody else. So I knew that if I was using a counterparty, there was an advantage in using them and I needed their money, but there was also a downside risk that I put on my faith and trust that they do the right thing. Clearly they didn't. So I came out of that quite stressed out and quiet, broken. And realized at some point in time, that may be, there's got to be a better way. So I was following a guy from my home country who also happened to be in the technology industry. He came a little off to me, but I knew of him and I knew of the people he associated with. And that was Julian assigned. And I had been following what he was doing cause Wiki leaks about this time, it started to really get some exposure. And I realized that he posted a whole published a whole bunch of things that upset tons of countries and state departments and whatever all over the world. And then they had done this thing with the banks to shut him down. They'd stopped. Visa, MasterCard, PayPal bank of America, Wells Fargo, everyone was not allowed to send in money. Now I come, I'm working in the technology industry and I run a well, I have a cluster of servers in a data center. I did them and he had the same thing, but his was in Sweden. And I knew how much it costs to keep the servers running and the bandwidth and the power and everything. So I said, you know what, I'm going to. Yeah, give him some money I'm going to donate. I couldn't. And so after I started realizing that there was this problem that the banking industry had effectively shut down his ability to operate. I see. This isn't right. It's look, whether you agree or disagree with what is morals were always intention. I think there's clear that any exposure or transparency on things that were going on back then were positive for society in some way. So I said there's gotta be a way to do it. And then he himself had come up and said there's this thing called Bitcoin. Now he came from a thing called the cipher punk movement. The encryption guys, the guys who develop all that technology to keep us encrypted. And if you know anything about history encryptions, the reason why societies were able to exist in a Soviet environment, for example, in 1970, And the 1970s in Prague and Czech Republic they created a parallel society there that it could exist within the confines of communism. They actually have the ability to thrive. They have their own economy, their own money, their own communications, and it was. Based on surrounding yourself in encryption. And this sort of thing is what we would often call it, maybe the dark web, or we would call it some sort of encrypted place. But the reason why it's important is that assigned face the same restriction in his ability to publish and to communicate and to have commerce or to be able to pay for things because. Third party banks and so on was shutting him down. So what did he do? He went to Bitcoin. He discovered the white paper in 2009 through his work within that community. And he made it known. And I learnt from that now, meanwhile, I was facing very similar problem. I had a guy working for me who is living in Bangladesh programmer. Now this is the post nine 11 period. You've got any Muslim country is being considered a risk from a state department perspective in the United States. And yet I needed this guy was a brilliant programmer who was doing great work for me. I needed to pay him. So I needed to get money over to him. And it so happens that this intersection. What was going on with the cypherpunks and assigned. And then I found myself in exactly the same situation. Bangladesh was considered a terrorist country. It didn't have reciprocal banking agreements. I couldn't PayPal the guy and he's doing great work and I need to send him money. How do I do it? Initially? I managed to wire money to him, but it was costing me between 50 and $75 per wire. And he wanted me to be paid every week. And this was stupid. So either I wire in the big ton of money and then trust that he's not going to abscond and do it, which he wouldn't, he was a good guy, but then we both together said what about. Okay. So I said look, I tell you what I'm going to do something. Cause I'm going to send a Samsung. So I've got to buy some of this stuff. I need to send you something it's going to cost me $75 to wire money to anybody. The only exchange at that time was in Japan. So I just said, you know what? It's not expensive. I think it was like $7 each at the time I would just buy hundreds of these things. Because it doesn't make sense for me to not have a stockpile because I'm going to use it like a checking account. I'm just going to pay you with it, pay you with it by you with it. And I started realizing, whoa, this is really cool, but not just it because of what it could do. There was no bank. There was no counterparty. You held the private keys yourself. You can, you were your own bank. It was amazing. And it had. Ethicacy. It had absolute relevance for what I needed to do transactionally at the time. The problem was that years later, as the price, started going up and then you've got all of these scammers and hackers and all this stuff in there. And you're in the wild west. This is frontier land, but remember I'm from the country where the thing's going to kill you. If I can handle living in the wild west. I can, I'm willing to do. So I said, okay, buy a ton of this stuff. I hadn't transferred to an exchange in Hong Kong. I was paying everybody I needed to pay with this. The world was great, everyone was happy. And then the price went Cub, bam. And I'm like, oh, maybe I shouldn't be using this now to transact. That was my first mistake. The thing is the reason why the price went up is because everyone found it to be very valuable for what it was. If you start holding it and you don't move the Bitcoin around on the process stops going up, I was just sort of flat lines, but what was happening was that everybody was starting to get the wind of, I should buy some, I should, so the price went to a thousand and then 2000 and by sometime roundabout 2017, I think it went to $20,000. And I'm sitting on this stash and I'm gone. Wow. That was easy. I didn't deserve to win this. This was a purposeful transaction for, with an intent that was not to walk away with a ton of money, but it was to be able to empower those that had no voice. And I still to this day, believe that really is the reason why it should exist. Now we're talking $50,000 Bitcoin. Raymond raid comes in and all of that. And you're like, I know if I want to be dealing with this now a bit too stressful,

Average Joe Finances:
17:21

It's it's like a, as Bob bras would call it a happy little accident. We're going to turn this into a little money tree now. Wow. What a way to really get in before it was really a thing. I started looking at Bitcoin, probably around 2016 when it was getting up into the thousands. The lower thousands. I think when I was looking at it, when I first started looking at in 2016, it was around four grand or something like that. And then when it shot up to 20,000, I'm like, oh, there's no way it's ever going to go higher than that. That's crazy. And then it dropped back down to about 12 and then you look at it today and it's in the fifties. It's a it's. Crazy. But again, like you said it's because it's moving around. It's not because it's a whole bunch of people buying it and holding it and it's stagnating it's because it's changing, ownership, they're moving from wallet to wallet. And that's the only way to get the value of it to go up. But now it's also the way I look at it too. It's also a scarcity mindset now because the value of it's also going up because there is a limit to how much they can make and they're getting close to that. Very interesting. I've had a couple of guests on recently to talk about crypto. And each one of those conversations was very interesting and I felt like I learned a lot, but I still feel like, I don't know a darn thing about crypto and blockchain and everything. You finding it that early is, and your reasoning for doing it to Valid reasons. It wasn't like, oh, I think this is going to be an up and coming thing. It's no, this is useful. I can utilize this to, pay somebody that works for me and things like that. So you found you found a use for it that worked and, you had that happy little accident happened, when it shot up in value. That's fantastic. So I know you said you were also in real estate, right? So you said. Back in 2008. One of the things I wrote down here in my notes is you lost your shirt in 2008 with with real estate. And that's what made you start looking at some other things. So what do you still own cause we talk about your background, right? So it said that. And you still have some real estate assets. So in 2008 what, what shifted for you? Did you have to do a sell off? Did you say, okay, Hey, this is an opportunity now to buy some more discounted properties. How did that affect you when the real estate market crashed?

Myles Wakeham:
19:23

I was in a very unusual situation, crisis events. My wife and I are both from Australia. Then in the mid 1990s, I had a house in Australia that I owned pretty much freehold. And then I found myself on a plane to the United States after I'd lived in Southern California for six years in the early nineties. And then I went back to Australia and then I eventually returned in 99. But I had this house that was bought and sitting in Australia. So I had to put somebody in it. I had to find a tenant to occupy it while I was off with my family, having my next round of adventures around the country, around the world. So I learned how rental supposedly works in reality. I learned how it didn't work, but that was okay because one way or another, I was learning. And then by about 2001, 2002, we had made some money in the United States and the exchange rate was really. At advantageous to the U S at one point, I think probably the worst point in time, the Australian dollar was trading at about 48 cents to one us dollar. So I was in the United States making all my money in the U S thinking. Now everything's at a 50% discount back into Australia. So we'd go back to see family and we'd learn through talking to people and knowing from our own history about the country, what was going on and what we could see as the future. And so we ended up pumping on three single family homes that were in our hometown, in an area we thought was going to get some growth as it happens, it did quite substantially. So I had these three properties, actually four properties in Australia. And then. The problem was the rental market down. There was very controlled by the government. There was so much like rent control and there was a negative attitude to landlords and a real pro tenant mindset. And we found that the properties never really cashflow, they should have based on the amount of money we put in there and what they were getting in units and rent, but they just weren't. And that kind of surprised me. I felt like the property managers were letting me down or that the natural environment of the economy wasn't working because I did all, what I thought was the right things with this on a spreadsheet, but it just wasn't working out. That's how life is most of the time you don't have anything planned on a spreadsheet has about a 50% chance of going correct. And probably that is even overstating it, but the truth is the equity value on these properties were going up because right at that time, Australia started export all of its natural commodities to China. And that just kept growing and growing. And there was a lot of money sloshing around in the economy. And so the value these properties went up. So we had then done the exact same thing in Phoenix. We had bought half a dozen properties in Phoenix. They were cash flowing, but their equity wasn't really going anywhere. Not substantial. And certainly when 2008 happened, all of the properties we held in Arizona or in the United States just crashed. So equity was not wiped out, but certainly my LTV positions were, underwater. So anyway, long story short, we decided we'd sell the properties we had in Australia. We'd cash out and we pay out any obligation of debt to the banks that we had in the U S. Because the property is tripled in value in Australia. I bought them at 50 cents on the dollar because the exchange rate, I did pretty well out of that. So not only did we have enough money to clear all of our positions, settle things down in the U S in 2008, but we had this big surplus of cash. So I remember sitting out in the brand or having a cup of coffee in the morning with my wife one day. And I said to her, Everybody around here is freaking out. No one wants to touch real estate with a 10 foot pole. It's like the spawn of the devil, I'm gone go the opposite way. I'm going. I understand this one thing in life that I can count on. And this is coming from that universal truth. And that is that, if you have a study like Maslow's hierarchy of needs, you'll know that the lowest level in the pyramid is the physiological need of food shelter. I liked the business to shelter. Cause it doesn't matter what the economy is up the economy's down. People still need a roof over their head. And I believe strongly in that. So I said, okay, I'm going to go to the local court auctions. They had these options in Phoenix, which were bit of a trip guy with a 10 gallon hat on out there with a clipboard gun who wants to. Who wants it, a couple other guys going, yeah, I'll have it. I'll have that. So I'm sticking my hand up. I'm just buying everything in sight. I ended up buying your street just a street of multifamily properties. And then I got them for pennies on the dollar compared to what they were, what I thought they were worth, because I believed in food, shelter, clothing, basic physiological need. And so I did that. And I walked away with all these titles and a whole bunch of refurb and, maintenance work and rebuilding and whatever, but that was fine. We did that. And three years later, those properties went up five times what I paid them, and I bought so many of them that I was an instant multimillionaire from doing it and still to this day. And I've got properties I bought for 75,000 that are worth 700,000 now. I mean against the wave, right? The surfer.

Average Joe Finances:
25:27

It's also th that is the exact principle that Warren buffet talks about with his, his famous quote about be fearful when others are greedy and greedy when others are feel for all right. So in 2008, when all this stuff was happening, you see everybody like getting out of real estate because they were fearful of what was happening. And you looked at that and said, no, this is an opportunity. And you jumped in you went all in bought like a whole street which is really cool. So just hearing you describe, how you pushed forward in real estate while the market was crashing, just immediately brings me to that. And immediately just says, you did the exact thing that somebody with a millionaire mindset or success mindset, so that is super cool. And, it goes back to what you discussed about your background and growing up in Australia. Even when you were talking about Bitcoin I'm going to rewind a little bit to that, to how it became like the wild west, and even in real estate, it, back in 2008, that was similar. It was like the wild west. It was, every man for themselves. And you said, okay I'm going to go in there and I'm going to take action. And I'm going to take over this area because that's what I need to do at this time. So yeah, so 2008. So it's funny. Cause I wrote this note, lost your shirt in real estate in 2008, when that was absolutely not the case. It started off that way, but not really for you because the properties you bought were back in Australia when you first started. So even in 2008, when that happened, you were able to sell those. Because the market here, wasn't effecting the market over there. And, it's unfortunate that we had these banks with these predatory lending practices, which is what caused it. And that's why, like a lot of people have asked me to like, if they, what my thoughts are on the real estate market right now, There's another 2008 coming. And the reason why I think it's not is because this is different. This is different than what it was before. We're now looking at a surplus of money hitting the real estate market because of the lower interest rates when the market regulates itself which we're starting to see some markets start to like plateau and start to flat line again. I don't think we're going to see this huge drop off the side of a cliff. I think it's going to stabilize. And then it's just start going back to the normal, two to 3% per year growth rate versus this, 25 to 50% that we're seeing

Myles Wakeham:
27:46

Well let me ask you a question. Sure, sure. You think a crash in the market is a bad thing?

Average Joe Finances:
27:51

Not so not necessarily right. It's sometimes hitting the reset button is a good thing. I just don't see. The way that the trend is going right now. I just don't see that as being a thing. I don't see the market as coming to a halt and then crashing. I'm sure there can be some occasional dips possibly. And it's all going to depend on specific local markets, right? It's not going to be the same, like where I live at in Hawaii. If the rest of the mainland crashes, it's not going to do the same thing out here that happened in 2008, 2009, when we saw like on the mainland 40 to 60% drops in value. In Hawaii, it was like a three to 6% drop. So it's also about the local market itself and what the availability looks like. So out here on, I live on an island and, you can only build so much, we're running out of space. That's going to cause values to go up because you get less of an opportunity to build newer properties. So the existing properties become more valuable. Now in an area like where you're at now, there's plenty of spaces and places to build. But at the same time, I think, you'll see like newer developments and it'll provide an opportunity to have lower cost points and lower the prices of the homes with some of the newer develop. And sure that can cause the local market in the area to dip a little bit more, but I don't think it's going to be this 10, 20, 30% drop or anything really higher than maybe five to 7%. But that's just my personal opinion. Because this is way different than what 2008, 2009 look like. So that's just my thoughts on it.

Myles Wakeham:
29:28

The reason why I asked you that question is because of the general we'll call it the mainstream thinking. When the property market is high, everybody's heavy. This assignment, Bitcoin, it's the same in anything. People are really Haiti. They rushed to it. The fear of missing out Jean comes out and all of us were like, oh, damn, I wish I bought that property in Portland back, 10 years when grandma was selling it or whatever, we live in that world of regret.

Average Joe Finances:
29:57

You see it in the stock market too right now.

Myles Wakeham:
29:59

To me when the market's up is the worst possible thing that could ever happen, because see, I don't sell real estate. I rent real estate. I live on grants. I don't want to kill the gooses, laying the golden eggs. I want more geese. Give me a cheap price on geese. And if that means that the flock of geese out there, and everyone says, no one wants geese anymore. I'm like, I'm all in I'm buying. So that's why. See my end game is not to all own a billion dollars in a real estate portfolio. My end game is to be financially sustainable. So that I have enough rents coming in where I can live a really good free life. And I don't have to have that much, but I just have money that's coming in that I didn't have to toil to get that I'm not a slave to. And once I have that, I have the greatest thing in my life that I could ever want. And that's. Because, everybody knows this is the goal, right? The old, everybody agrees with the statement that the last thing you want to say in your death bed is I didn't spend enough time at the office. Yeah. I hear that. It's like a pat saying, why is it that nobody actually does it. They're willing to say that they're not willing to do it. And the thing is. As somebody who was raised in a free range, buck stops here, hostile environment that you know, that you need to rise to the occasion and deal with these things because that's life, then it's not hard to go into markets without fear. It's not hard at all. So if you're looking at that, then you say what market do I want to go into? I want to go into the market and everyone is. Because I can't get on the freeway and get to my destination. If there's a traffic jam, I want to go where the traffic isn't and that's why real estate right now. I'm not buying, not here, but here's the weird thing. And this is the surfer waves. Go up waves, go down. Think of it like a chart on the stock market. You never buy when there are. You buy when you buy low sell high, right surface, never catch a wave. When the market's up, you've got to be out there early, seeing something happening on the horizon. Positioning for it. The question should be what is going to be the market in two, three years time, because I want to get in that ocean and get ready for it. That's the key. So I'll tell you, I'll tell you in your audience something that I'm doing, it's not advice, but it's what I'm doing. I just spent a crap ton of money buying land in Mexico, online of it. And I'm developing that land into subdivided, a compound, if you like, or subdivided communities in places that are very close to where there's a lot of manufacturing going on. Why am I doing that? Because I just saw 20 years of China owning Australia. And I know how the Australian people reacted to that. I know their stupidity and the way they're overreacting to the fear of losing their identity, which is what's going on with the authoritarian movements going on in Australia at the moment. It's pretty sad, but the reality is it's a playbook out of. It's nothing against Chinese people, but it's against communism. And the reality is if you look at a graph 20 years ago, of what countries in the world, where they did their trade with the number one country was the United States. If you do the exact same chart in 20 20, 20 is Only about 20% of the markets in the world would say that their main trading partner is the United States. 80% of trading with China. China owns everything. So as a result, the us and we will also, let's also include Canada and Mexico and Western Europe. In that let's say there's an Alliance. They want to be able to retain their identity and this sovereignty, we're proud Americans. We wanted to retain that. So we've meanwhile, we're battling against the global financial world who wants to do have your manufacturing done in Shenzen or Beijing or wherever. And yet we know that ultimately that doesn't serve our interests. Philosophically ideologically or economically, right? It says the interests of the corporation. That's trying to make more money for its shareholders, but it's a short term play that could lose our entire economy in the process. The reason why I feel that Mexico is an important player in this is that the United States will move its trading alliances from China away from China to trading partners that are in the same time zone within easy transporting proximity to the U S and a ideally have favorable trading agreements with the us. And I look at all of the countries and it's clear to me that the number one is Mexico. So what do I do? I go to Mexico. I spend a lot of time in Mexico. I'm learning Spanish. I go down there. I get to know the people. I get to know the cold. I get my residency status in Mexico. I go and buy real estate in Mexico and I watched the trade routes. I watched the roads, I watched the rail, I watched the sea platforms and then I go to cities like , which is the fastest growing city in Latin America. And what do I find? They're massive corporations investing billions and billions of dollars to build manufacturing hubs there that would rival shin. All of this tells me that the Mexican middle-class economy is on the rise. People can get jobs where they couldn't have before they can become upwardly mobile, they can afford to send their kids to college. They've got free health care down there. They're already set for that, but there's a positive future. You talk to anybody in country there, they will have a big smile on their face and they will tell you how good the future will be. I can't get that in Phoenix. And that's the difference. That alone for a contrarion for surfer is why I've gone down there and started paddling, because I know that market will be the next wave, but it won't be a small wave. It could be a tsunami. And that's how I operate. Now. I could be wrong. What's the worst that's going to happen. I'm going to own a ton of land down there that I can have a nice time by the beach. Okay. But what I'm trying to say is that this is the mindset of somebody who doesn't want to live a constrained life, right? This is not the mindset of somebody who said, I need to go to college to get a degree so I could get a quote, good job. A good job is enslavement. I'm not going to give 40 or 50 hours of my time to one client because the client could go away. I'm going to retain my ownership of me and my time and my life. And I'm going to have the world serve me and know it's not selfish. It's not, it's being responsible because if I understand the universe and how the universe works, it'll be there long after I'm gone. But what if I learned to surf the wave and let the universe serve me? Because it doesn't cost anything to arrive right away. So this is how my head works. I go into these regions that most people would fear to go in and I get to know the region and I buy in. If I feel that there's an upside and I sit back and I watch that's how it happened with Bitcoin. It's how it happened with real estate. It is even how it happened in technology in my life. And that's how I get a hundred times on my earning, not a hundred percent, a hundred times when I bought Bitcoin, I made 1100 times what I invested with. That's not somebody patting themselves on the back. Cause they bought Vanguard, VTS a X and got 15% on the markets. U P it's a bull market. Everyone's making money. No. How about 1100 times what you put into it? How would you like that? Because it's out there for anybody who wants to surf the wave and becomes at one with the universe very soon.

Average Joe Finances:
39:05

Wow. Wow. That's that is a lot that they can. So you know you talk about this mindset you have, right. This unconstrained mindset, and, you're looking for, what is the future going to look like in the next, you're not talking like 10, 20, 30 years from now, you're saying, Hey, in the next two to three years that's what you're looking at right now. So you're looking at. Out at the ocean, looking for that swell, like which wave is going to be the right way for me to catch, because you can catch plenty of waves. It doesn't mean it's going to be a good ride in, it's a matter of catching the right way. It felt oh, this is the one, this is going to be the big hammer. And what you're doing right now is you've identified potentially what can be a really significant. And you're paddling out towards it. That is something that, when we've talked about on this show several times about mindset, right? And this is a different way of looking at your mindset and trying to become I, not just one with the universe, but one with yourself. And really listen to yourself. And you're doing that with this unconstrained mindset. So I want to talk about that. Actually I want to, I'd like to ask you about. This unconstrained mindset. So what is an unconstrained mindset?

Myles Wakeham:
40:17

It's when you transcend everything that's constraining. And the simplest way of putting it is that anywhere in the world, there are different things. If you lived in Sub-Saharan Africa, what would constrain you would be while I need food to eat, I need water. And I need a roof over my head for my family that would constrain you. If you can achieve all of those things, you're unconstrained. And you go to that position of, now, the now what place in the United States, we have very similar problems. We're constrained by a social mantra that says, go to school, study hard, get a degree, get a job, work hard, save. And at the ripe old age of 65, you can go out there and retire and live in the Florida or whatever the reality is. Is that our life expectancy is dropping not going up. And if you look at the CDC numbers, we've got a average, us male has a life expectancy of 75.3 years today. And yet we have a government telling us that we would like you to not take your social security until 67. What's what that idea is you've got, is to live with this. You worked all your life for this, and you're going to get ICU. Meanwhile, you got a bad back and bad hip, so you can't go to Europe and do the bucket list and all this sort of thing. And then you're sitting around living a life in regret. I don't like to live life in regret. There's a lot of things in my life. I would have changed. I would have done differently that I've learned that I was too young or too immature, or just made a stupid idea, stupid decision. There's a lot that has worked. There's a lot that happened, but it's because of the things that haven't, if I was able to debrief and learn from that, then eventually you weed them out. And then most of the things you start doing. But the one thing that I honestly have to say is that you can't live life in regret. And if you're on some glide path right now, we're just turning up to work every day in dealing with a boss. You can't stand. And what makes you barely tolerate? If that's your will and you think this is life, then I think you'd need to start taking the red.'cause at some point that you just can't exist like that. That's not a life, it's not an unconstrained life, right? Yeah. I remember when I was thinking about this whole concept of trying to bottle it, trying to make it understandable for people. It came about because my daughter who graduated college did the polar opposite of what I did. And at the end of graduation, her and all her friends came to me and said, what should we do? And it was like I I thought you would have known that's why you went and spent a hundred thousand dollars to get a degree. Now we had no idea. This is what you should do. You need to go get a backpack and get your ass to Europe and spend two years running around the place, learning how the world works and learning who you are. And then eventually you'll come back and go, don't answer that. I know what I have to do. That's what the missing link most of us don't have. And. And the point is you can't teach that. You can tell stories of people who did it. You can learn from other people's experiences, but it's not a professor in a college. That's going to tell you how your life will work like that. And with this whole concept of being unconstrained, I realized that there's a name game. And for me, we all have to know what that is. We have to have. What is our mission? What have we, as individuals choose our direction to be not what somebody tells you it should be, or what your smartphones says or what your followers on Instagram are doing, but what do you want? What ultimately makes you happy if you have that mission? And you were working towards it and you can take all of the things that constrain you, that stopped you getting to it, and you can push them aside and get them out of the way you will achieve it. But if you can't because every w there's more month than money, every, and the 78% of people are living paycheck to paycheck and all this sort of thing. They've got no hope of seeking that out. I, my goal here is to give them. A reset option to say, stop it. What you're doing, isn't working. You have to swallow your pride, suck up that maybe you made a mistake. And before it's too late, you have to put some perspective of what really you should be doing is, and if you're not doing that, you will never be happy and you will always be constrained. So my whole concept of being unconstrained and what I try to talk about and evangelize with other people is really just a question of what do you value what's most important to you? Because as much as we were your show's about money and I talk a lot about money is a tactic. It's not a strategy, right? If you've got all the money in the world, the last thing you care about is.

Average Joe Finances:
45:47

As a tool to means to an end.

Myles Wakeham:
45:49

Exactly. Exactly. I love doing what I do because I learn about the world, about me, about the universe, about things that react, it's like a puzzle, like a riddle. And I love that. I love getting out and trying to solve puzzles like that. It's not because I want to make a billion dollars. That's not going to help me. What's going to help me is that I discovered something that I never knew existed, that I fell in love with. It might be art or people or cultural or something that was never there because I never chose to physically engage with. But if I got the money out of the way, I got all the time in the world to physically engage with these things. And then the world looks like a much happier place, man.

Average Joe Finances:
46:41

Absolutely. Miles. I really liked the the matrix analogy that you gave to, take the red pill, especially now that they're coming out with a new matrix movie this December. And actually by the time this episode airs the movie's already out. So go check it out now, but Hey. This conversation has been absolutely amazing. I'm looking at my notes here and like the list of questions I wanted to ask you and just having this conversation, pretty much all of them got answered and I'd even have to ask you some of the questions that I had written down here to ask you. And we got into everything. And your, what the value that you add with, what you're discussing about this unconstrained mindset is. Invaluable. It's just something that somebody can take and just really change their lives. And I really like your way of thinking. It's it's fantastic. There's going to be people listening to this episode that are going to want to know more about miles and this unconstrained mindset. And I understand you have a podcast as well, that talks about this. So where can people find more information about you listen to your podcast. Do you have any social media, anything like that you can share with us?

Myles Wakeham:
47:50

Yeah. And do everything from my website, which is called be unconstrained.com. So from that point, they, if somebody goes to that website, they can go to everything. They'll find me on various social media. They'll find where they can subscribe to my podcast, but you can get it on Spotify or iTunes or whatever. I also do another podcast for, I do like a subscriber program for people who are on Patriot that's. This is a secondary podcast I do every week which is called this weekend freedom. It's designed to unearth the opportunities that I see on a daily basis and the risks that I see as well, and to try and give somebody a bit of a it's like local knowledge from the guy who lives by the ocean. You want to go surfing, but before you make that long trip down to the beach and find out that the waves have flat, and it was a waste of time, you call the guy up, he's looking out of his window and he says, yeah, there's some surf there. Or, it's really good today, or no, it's crap. You don't need that. But that's what I do on this weekend frame. In that podcast, I'm the local knowledge. So yeah and everything that I talk about, everything that I write about, everything that people can find me talking about is life is real experience. I'm not talking academically about something that I haven't done. Every single thing that I talk about is something I did or I am doing. And I can give people like the step-by-step. So yeah, that's the value in that knowledge? I hope there is any way.

Average Joe Finances:
49:24

Yeah, absolutely. And it all comes back to surfing with it and I love it. So yeah. What you're doing is you're providing. Real-world experience, not just a, something that you read about or learned about, and you want to share with other people, this is, from the experience of miles, the things that you've gone through or you're currently doing right now, which is absolutely awesome. And that provides a lot of value to those that want to listen and get that information. I really appreciate you sharing that with us. For everybody that's listening right now I'm going to make sure that the link is in the show. Go check it out, listen to his podcast. I really hope that you all enjoyed this episode. I certainly enjoyed this interview because miles is just a, he's the whole package. And I just want to say again, thank you so much for taking time out of your day to have this conversation with me.

Myles Wakeham:
50:12

Oh no. Anytime I appreciate it. I'm honored to be on your show.

Average Joe Finances:
50:16

Absolutely. Hey, so we're out of here Aloha from Hawaii. Thank you for making it to the end of this episode. Greatly appreciate you being here with me today on the average Joe finances podcast. If you haven't done so yet, make this the episode that you go leave us a five-star rating or subscribe to our YouTube channel. The average Joe finances podcast is for informational and entertainment per. Only have an outstanding day.