Episode 179
Follow, Rate & Review On Your Favorite Podcast Player
Video Episode
<iframe title=”Embed Player” style=”border: medium none;” src=”//play.libsyn.com/embed/episode/id/22213256/height/128/theme/modern/size/standard/thumbnail/yes/custom-color/c1bca4/time-start/00:00:00/playlist-height/200/direction/backward/download/yes” scrolling=”no” allowfullscreen=”” webkitallowfullscreen=”true” mozallowfullscreen=”true” oallowfullscreen=”true” msallowfullscreen=”true” width=”100%” height=”128″></iframe><iframe title=”Embed Player” style=”border: medium none;” src=”//play.libsyn.com/embed/episode/id/22213256/height/128/theme/modern/size/standard/thumbnail/yes/custom-color/c1bca4/time-start/00:00:00/playlist-height/200/direction/backward/download/yes” scrolling=”no” allowfullscreen=”” webkitallowfullscreen=”true” mozallowfullscreen=”true” oallowfullscreen=”true” msallowfullscreen=”true” width=”100%” height=”128″></iframe><iframe title=”Embed Player” style=”border: medium none;” src=”//play.libsyn.com/embed/episode/id/22213256/height/128/theme/modern/size/standard/thumbnail/yes/custom-color/c1bca4/time-start/00:00:00/playlist-height/200/direction/backward/download/yes” scrolling=”no” allowfullscreen=”” webkitallowfullscreen=”true” mozallowfullscreen=”true” oallowfullscreen=”true” msallowfullscreen=”true” width=”100%” height=”128Did You Get The Memo? Yemi Penn
Episode Description
You can make your life into anything you want it to be. All you need is imagination, focus, and trust in yourself. In this episode, I am joined by Myles Wakeham of beunconstrained.com. He openly shares his story of surviving a significant auto accident in the outback of Australia, which forced him to question life, purpose, and direction.
Since rebuilding himself, he now knows how to handle and mitigate adversity, and he has honed those skills to live a life unconstrained. Myles is a self-made business-focused technologist, one of the early members of biotechnology corporation Amgen (now the largest biotech company in the world), has invested wisely in Bitcoin since 2011, and owns a portfolio of rental properties. He lives a 100% free and unconstrained life, no job, etc., yet never graduated high school, let alone college. Myles has no job, is a multi-millionaire, lives in multiple countries and pursues opportunities, projects and passions throughout the globe.
Our Conversation Highlights Include:
[2:38] What is an unconstrained life?
[5:17] “I didn’t want money to stop me from doing what I wanted to achieve. I wanted it to be complimentary.”
[17:20] “You make your own opportunity. See something, go for it. Don’t worry about how old you are. What your gender is. What your race is.”
[24:24] The only thing you can control is how you react to life’s challenges.
[30:47] Dismantling the mindset of following the herd.
[35: 53] Understanding the ebb and flow of life.
Learn new ways to live an unconstrained, debt-free and financially independent life by listening to The Unconstrained Podcast, hosted by Myles.
Connect With Myles Wakeham
Episode Transcription
Click to Read Full Transcript
[00:00:00] Bob Wheeler: Welcome to another episode of Money You Should Ask where everyone has something they can teach you. I’m your host, Bob Wheeler. In this episode, we are going to explore why we do what we do when it comes to money. As a CPA for the past 30 years, wait, let me say 25, because that makes me sound younger, I have seen it all when it comes to money and emotions.
And if you think I’m talking about my clients, I’m not, I’m talking about myself. My relationship with money has been, and sometimes still is an emotional rollercoaster. Maybe that’s something you’re also familiar with. Good news. You and I are not the only ones. Our next guest is going to share their money, beliefs, money blocks, and life challenges as well.
Buckle your seatbelt and enjoy the ride.
Our next guest is Myles Wakeham. He’s an Australian who migrated to the USA in 1989. And has since become a multimillionaire lives a 100% unconstrained life, no jobs, et cetera yet never graduated high school. Let alone. He’s a self-made business focused technologist, who is one of the early members of biotechnology corporation.
Amgen. Now the largest biotech company in the world has made a fortune on Bitcoin since 2011 and owns a portfolio of rental properties. Myles was one of the few survivors of a massive auto accident in the Outback of Australia in the 1990s, which forced him to question life, purpose and direction since rebuilding himself.
From that, he knows how to handle and mitigate. Including taken advantage of medical tourism, all over the world for major surgeries, he has honed those skills to live a life unconstrained. He spends 50% of his time in Arizona and 50% of his time roaming the world, seeking out new opportunities. He hosts the unconstrained podcast in which he teaches the art of financial sustainability to his audience in 2021, which is not that long ago.
He and his wife bought a large compound in central Mexico with a bull fighting. And they’re in the process of demolition and development to turn it into luxury home. And world-class recording studio, just another one of his many adventures Myles. Welcome to the show.
[00:02:27] Myles Wakeham: Thanks Bob. Thanks for having me.
[00:02:29] Bob Wheeler: Well, I got to start off with, because some people, you know, I love my audience, but I’m speaking for me cause I’m not as bright as my audience.
What’s an unconstrained
[00:02:38] Myles Wakeham: well, I was having your time that you’re in control of, I think ultimately that’s the one thing in life that we have a finite amount of. I’ve always said that, you know, you hear that common phrase that the guy dying on his death bed has never really worried about how much money is in his bank account.
And I’ve always tried to be the guy that doesn’t want to live my life in regret. So being unconstrained means I’ve got control of my time and what I do with it. That’s on me. But I’m not a guy believes in bucket lists. So I think that you should just go out there and do what you want to do. And if anything is going to get in your way of doing that, you need to find a way to break it down.
And when
[00:03:13] Bob Wheeler: did this all occur for you that this needed to be the priority? Because I know you had an accident before that time. Were you thinking about living the unconstrained life or was this something that had a mind shift for you after the.
[00:03:26] Myles Wakeham: I think it was well before that, I mean, I was one of these kids that was raised in a very musical family.
Both my parents were concert pianists, and they kind of made me become sensitive to a lot of the things that you probably, as a musician that you just become associated with and a very young age. And I think that helped me understand that life. Isn’t about a lot of the things that we think of is what I would call left brain experience.
Pragmatic problem solving mathematics, science. Those things are important, but they don’t really tell a story about who the individual is. I think that’s more of a right brain thing. If there’s a lack of a better term. And I’ve had a life where in my right and left brain have been battling each other since the day I was born and they still to this day, no one wants to drown the other one out.
Sure. But I think with all of that, The idea of freedom and the idea of needing to be able to be unconstrained, to be able to roam freely has been something that is really deep in me. I don’t know if there was a moment as I could go back in time to say why that’s the case. I just always felt that it was our life purpose to be able to go and live the richest possible life we could.
And just to be sensitive to everything that’s going on around us. So we can see opportunities for what they are as they present, which they do. Yeah. And do you
[00:04:51] Bob Wheeler: think growing up in a musical family that was more about, I’m going to imagine that it was more about creativity than having a lot of money in the bank, but there may have been both.
Do you think that that was an advantage for you in that environment of having the creativity? Because a lot of people don’t grow up with either. They don’t grow up with a lot of modeling around money and we’re also not always nurtured to go into our creativity because it doesn’t pay the.
[00:05:17] Myles Wakeham: Yeah, I think you’re onto something there.
I mean, I always remember back in my very, very early days of starting a business that I was taught that a real entrepreneur, and this is the old school definition of that. A real creative entrepreneur, somebody who, a founder, somebody with an idea for something the most successful of them, never worried about money.
They never measured their successful venture name. They’re measured in whether or not they achieved what they wanted to achieve. And there are so many examples of that in history, but you can think about people like Steve jobs of a guy who had a vision of what he wanted to do and the money wasn’t really important.
It came along. If he succeeded in the vision and I wanted that and I didn’t want money to stop me from doing what I wanted to achieve, that I wanted it to be complimentary. It wasn’t until I got older. I had a family. I had a child, I got all of the trappings of Western life, like a mortgage and all of that sort of thing.
Then I started realizing that it was more an issue of survival. If I didn’t have money, I couldn’t transcend those things to get back to what my real calling was, which was more the entrepreneur’s approach to things. And even to this day, I feel like I’ve come full circle. I don’t have a job. I haven’t had a job for 20 something years and I don’t want a job.
I want to go out there and do what I feel is a calling, whatever that might be. And I don’t want money to stop me doing it. But at the same time, I kind of like it when it rewards you and says, Hey kid, you did the right thing. You know, that’s kind of how I look at.
[00:06:54] Bob Wheeler: Absolutely. Let me ask you this. Do you remember as a kid, any financial memories, negative or positive that reinforced go towards creativity or, oh, you need to have a backup plan or a safety net?
[00:07:08] Myles Wakeham: I do. My first business was in around let’s say around the 1980 mark. Now, if any of your audience are old enough to remember that time, the federal reserve had a base interest rate of somewhere close to 20. So the availability of capital had to have a damn good reason why you would get it right. You had to have a solid, guaranteed business plan to get anybody to want to invest in any.
And as a kid back in those days, I didn’t know investors, I didn’t have access to money and no bank was just saying, we’ll load anybody back in those. No, that didn’t happen back then did not happen. Everything was a startup and we bootstrapped everything of my own savings and money that I made from, you know, even back in those days, like paper, route money got converted into some little small business that then turned into something bigger and tuned into something.
The money was always again, the impediment to stop me doing what I wanted to do. I never sold out my dream to any other third party because I couldn’t afford them. So I had to do it myself. Right. It gives you a different perspective on money. You respect it because you earned every dime. And when you invested in something, it’s your money.
It’s not somebody else’s, you have a hundred percent skin in. That lesson has helped me a lot because I realized responsibility that comes with that and that if anybody is to be friendly and invest in my own dreams, it’s a huge responsibility I take to do that because I’m doing it as if it was my money.
Right. And I think that’s a really important thing. Yeah, absolutely.
[00:08:54] Bob Wheeler: Now, growing up with musical family where you, the poor kid, the middle-class kid, upper middle class. The rich kid, where did you fit in the community?
[00:09:05] Myles Wakeham: I guess lower middle-class would be right now. It’s a very interesting question you have there because when I relate to it on how that looked, it tells a very interesting story.
So I grew up in my father had a job working for the same company for all of his life. My mother didn’t work if she did, she had little bits of work here and there, but she was more involved in charities and things like that. And yet, even with that, my father paid his, how him off before he retired. And he got to the point where, I guess when I was about 12 years old and I had to go to high school, he chose to put me into a private high school and a private what we would call a college.
They’re not a university, a private school very much like imagine Harry Potter, Hogwarts, not a bad score, not a bad score. Right. But that was kind of where I went to school. So I went to school with all these rich kids. You know, sons of doctors, sons of lawyers, politicians, architects. And I’m just saying.
You know, my dad works in a place that makes roofing materials. I mean, he’s not rich, right. But I had to act like I fit in and that was insane. It was really hard. And I managed to skate through that whole experience because I was an accomplished musician at a very young age. I got into their music program.
I didn’t have to work at all in school. I could just Bumble through it, you know, but by the time I got about three years into high school, I was looking at again, There’s nothing here teaching me anything. It’s not like I didn’t fit in. I didn’t see any point to what they were trying to teach me. It was better for me to be at home and to learn how electronics worked or play around with CB radios and stuff like that.
Maybe that’s the nerd in me, but that is how it sort of leveraged into computers and eventually into a business and eventually into life in technology.
[00:10:57] Bob Wheeler: And so when you were in high school saying this is a waste of time, did you have that bug already to be, I’m going to be a business focus, technologist, like it was there.
And how did you know you had the skillset or did you just have the tenacity?
[00:11:13] Myles Wakeham: Oh, it’s just a stubborn kid. I saw an opportunity. I remember one day I met a guy who was. Importing electronic parts into Australia. And he had a lot of books and I realized that it’s one thing to be able to get electronics, but you need to know how to use this stuff.
And I need reference material. I don’t know how I worked it out, but there was a company out of Taiwan that was selling low priced, electronic reference books that could be brought into Australia duty free. There was no customs, cause there were. And I wrote a letter to this company in Taiwan, this kid, I was maybe 14 years old and I said, I want to buy a whole stack of your books, send me a price list.
And they did. And back in those days, so two weeks to get a letter back, but I got this price, this, and I’m like, I’ve dealt with 10 of those and 20 of those. And, and so I saved up my money and I want a back in those days, it was a telegraphic transfer you had to use, right? So I sent this letter with this water in this money, over to them and.
A few weeks later, a big box comes in the mail for these books. And next thing I was in business selling these books. Wow. And I made a killing on it and it was for. And there was in the garage and a little corner. I made a makeshift office and that’s how I started. And it wasn’t that I was trying to make money.
I was trying to get money to enable me to do something with it that I then leveraged into a business. And I’ve been doing that ever since. That’s awesome.
[00:12:39] Bob Wheeler: Now, when you decided that school was not for you, were your parents disappointed? Did they just say, yep. That’s cool. Like, what was that conversation like when you had that realization?
It
[00:12:51] Myles Wakeham: was a yet that’s cool moment, which I couldn’t believe that I said to my father, this is insane. I’ve discovered this thing called a computer. It was like 1977. The first ones ever came out and I got one, cause I saved this money and I said, I want this to be what I do. And there is a window of opportunity that is very, very slim right now for me to master this machine because nobody, there were no universities teaching the stuff.
This was something I knew was going to be a big demand. And I don’t know if I just pitched it the right way, but he bought on it. He said, okay, kid Paul, by me, I’ll save a ton of money and need to send you the private school, go and do it. But you know, you fall down, you put yourself up, I’m not digging it out.
And I said, yeah, okay. In Australia, that’s the norm. I come from a country where little insects on the ground or. And snakes are in every corner and don’t go swimming in the ocean because the shark elite, you know what I mean? Yeah. This is how we’re raised. So it’s always on us. So if I go to somebody and I asked for permission to do something, it’s with the complete understanding that good or bad, I own it.
Yeah. And I think that that was kind of the key that I had to sell Kim on that I’m going to own my mistake or I’m going to own my success. And now it’s on me and with his blessing, he let me do it.
[00:14:17] Bob Wheeler: That’s awesome. A lot of parents here in the U S would be having a coronary and would be thinking this was a reflection of them and it was Aaron, not even about the kid.
So, yeah, that’s just incredible that your dad saw this or he took the bait and let you go your own way. Now you started selling the books. You started doing the computer. Did you have any financial setbacks? Did you have any businesses that oh, man, that didn’t go quite the way you
[00:14:46] Myles Wakeham: thought? Well, there was always that, I mean, cashflow was king and that’s the one thing I learned early on running a business.
When I first actually established a business like rented offices, ended up having six people working for. We were writing software for all these big organizations. And I was a kid. Right. But they couldn’t see the kid. All they saw was an ad in the yellow pages. And so the attorney General’s department who needed some software, Britain would call this number up in the yellow pages and we’d answer it.
And they didn’t know who they were dealing with until I rocked up into their conference room and said, hi, I’m the guy. And they’re like, oh my God, what have we done? You know, it’s a kid. I’m like, will you tell me any other kid out there who’s done? What. And I said, if you have any issue with that, find somebody else.
And they said, now he’s right there. Weren’t anybody else supply and demand. So I sat down there and I did a damn good job, and I wrote the software they wanted. And then they said, we’re going to keep this kid around and we just keep feeding him work. But the problem is, everybody else did it too. I was working for a submarine manufacturer, wrote their invoicing software for a vibe billion.
Dealing with a B contract to the Royal Australian Navy out of a software. I wrote on a Macintosh. Wow. That ran that. I was writing. I had a partner, he was a failed biologist who decided he wanted to become a software developer. We ended up writing the cryogenic freezer, storage systems for the universities that I probably would have gone to if I stayed in school.
And then here’s the kid who didn’t even finish high school. I wrote your freezer storage system, dude. I mean, how much irony is that this was the life. I mean, I came to the U S in 89. So I don’t know what it was like 10 years prior, but in Australia it was the wild west. Yeah. You created the industry you were in and you built it and it didn’t matter what your credentials were.
It’s what you could do. Right. And I love that, but that pragmatic idealism is something that it strips away. Anybody telling somebody, I can’t make it here because no, they won’t give me opportunities. It’s like, I’m sorry, you make your own opportunity. Right? Right. See something go for it. Don’t worry about how old you are, what your gender is, what your race is.
None of that. Just do it, right? Yeah. Because they don’t know who the hell you are on the other side of a web page. Just do it.
[00:17:20] Bob Wheeler: That’s awesome. Well, how was it? I would imagine some of the people working for you were older than you. Oh way. Older, way older. So how was that, you know, giving direction to potential people that could be the age of mom and dad?
I don’t
[00:17:35] Myles Wakeham: give direction. What I do is I surround myself with people better than me, so that I rate. Anyway, empower them to do what they need to do. I give them a mission. I give them a set of measurement success factors. Like if you know, you’re on the right path of you hit these points, go, it’s not up to me to tell them how to do that.
That would be disrespectful for them. But if I am. Guess what? That it worked for me, they worked for themselves. Right. And the second that I realized that, and I realized that the key to motivating somebody is to make sure they understand. And they think that they’re doing it for them. That’s when I got extreme results.
Yeah. Did you have to ever let anybody go? Oh, many times. Yeah. Many times, but it was always something where I didn’t really have to explain myself. I could just say, you know, you screwed up, you know, you did it, you did it here. And then two weeks later you did it again. And I paid for this. So outta here.
Yeah. And I didn’t ever feel I was being disrespectful or nasty to anybody, but I made them understand that they have to own their own mistakes. And I’m more than happy to give somebody the flexibility to fall down because I’ve done it so many times. Right. But it’s what you do with yourself. You don’t want to continue to fall down and you don’t want to do it with somebody else’s picking up the price all the time.
Right. That gets
[00:18:53] Bob Wheeler: expensive. Now you had this accident in the Outback of Australia and it forced you to think about purpose and direction and all these things. Can you share a little bit about that, you know, initially emerging from and realizing, Hey, I just survived this crazy thing that a lot of people didn’t.
And then what was that like in that period after
[00:19:15] Myles Wakeham: whoop leeding up to that was interesting at the age of 25, I’d come to the United States and I ended up getting married. And I lived here for six years, five, six years, something like that. And then I had all of these hopes and dreams of things that I was doing in the states and they were going extremely well.
And then all of a sudden I got a phone call that my mother had a car accident in Australia and I had to return back. And with that, I had to take my wife at the time, back to Australia and we had to try to create a life there while I was looking after my mother. And that didn’t go so well. My wife ended up, we got divorced.
She left. I found myself in a pretty depressing dark place. The reason why I ended up in the Outback was some friends of mine sort of scooped me up over a holiday season one year and said, look, we don’t want you not having people around you over new year’s or whatever. Come with us. We’ll go to the gold coast and we’ll go to the beach or something.
And we drove there across the Outback and on the way back that’s when we had this massive correct. And I remember at the time, I guess time goes through one of these lights, still motion effects, leading up to something like that. Like you see the 30 frames, a second of video of everything there. I remember during that time, I had this thought that I can’t I’m done, you know, it wasn’t the car accident.
It was the depression that led up to being in that situation where I had the car accident. It was like, if God wants to take me right now, fine, I’ll accept it. Then. At this guy with a big jaws of life, cut me out of the car that was in the backseat of the car. My buddy’s girlfriend was in the front passenger seat.
She was lying on top of me. Wow. Which is weird. We were leaving. It was totally crushed. It was a major thing. And I remember when the guy was cutting me out of the car, when he’s paramedic kind of guys with the jaws life. And I kept saying to him what I could muster. I said, don’t worry about me. Get her, you know, she’s, you know, And he just kept ignoring me all the time and I couldn’t believe it.
Like, what are you ignoring me? Get her. Right. I didn’t realize she was dead. So when you wake up with a dead body on top of your light that you come face to face with, oh dear. Yeah. Then they put you out. And at that point, I remember when I did wake up, I did this sort of mental check. I said, okay, fingers, do they work?
Yeah. Check. Okay. Toes. Can I wiggle them? Yep. Check. I’m good. I can do with this. And that’s when they pulled me out. I didn’t realize the level of extent of injuries I had at the time, but I knew that if I could use my fingers, I can feel my feet, that I have a core that would survive this as it happened.
That was what happened. But coming out of that, I then dealt with. All of these issues that were outside of me, like the government healthcare system, which kind of letting me down and the insurance companies, which were horrible to deal with. And years of this went on afterwards while I was still disabled, could barely walk.
You know, I lost most of the sort of left side of my upper body was destroyed. And it was just this constant thing, but I always said, I can get through this, you know, and I think I learned many, many decades later that whenever I found myself in an adversarial position, Like the 2008 global financial crisis, for example.
And I found myself in a very, very precarious state where I thought, oh, I’m going to have to go bankrupt. I’m going to lose it all. I knew if I could get through that, I can get through anything. Yeah. I saw it at that age. I was 32. When that happened. I thought that I knew it all. I’d been around the world.
I’d had businesses, I’d done work for these big companies. I’d been around the block. I knew what was going on. I was the main. Yeah. I didn’t know squat until I was being pulled out of a wreckage with a dead body on me. That’s when I realized, and it’s funny these days when I tried to talk to people about similar experiences, the people, I end up talking to a like veterans, you know, guys who have been in the front line being shot at, by the enemy in Iraq or whatever.
And I mean, these are the guys with PTSD or coming back from war that I can understand. Right. Yeah. But the funny thing is. I somehow transcended that experience. I don’t have fear of high-speed cars. In fact, I’m one of the biggest formula, one motor racing fans there is. I mean, it’s like, I love this stuff.
It’s like an adrenaline rush. Yeah. How did that not affect me mentally? I don’t know, but if I have the blessing that it didn’t, I can go out to veterans and I can help them understand that that their buddy was killed with, or just about to. It does not define them. Right, right. Their reaction. I can stop me and tell my daughter all the time.
And I think that’s so true. Everyone gets into a bad situation. It’s how you react. That matters. Right? It’s the only thing you can control. You can’t control all the things are going on about you in the world. But the only thing you can control is how you react to it. And if you have a positive outlook and you can see beyond these things and react accordingly, that is wealth, right.
So, let me ask you
[00:24:24] Bob Wheeler: this, you got all this information you realized you could persevere, you could get through anything. What was the impetus for, I want to share this information. You’ve got a podcast now talking about living an unconstrained life. You’re out there, writing books. You’re trying to get people, maybe not to have the same vision, but to at least question what their vision is or how they want to show up in life.
Why is that so important to
[00:24:50] Myles Wakeham: you? I came from a place in a time, which was extremely atypical to where I ended up in the United States. And the first realization of that was when I got through the immigration process here. And I eventually got my right to work like a dream. And my first job was at this crappy audio rental place in Southern California, but it was let’s guys, you know, they’ll really good people.
And I remember I was having lunch with this guy who was, he was the only guy in the company about 50 people working there. He was the only guy in the company that wore a shirt and tie to work every day. Not a very California thing at all. No. And his name was Joe. And I remember we’d sit down and for some reason he’s kind of befriended me cause I was kind of an odd ball there too.
And we had lunch and I’d say, you know, Julian explained to me his life. He said, I went to university, I got a degree. I ended up working for, I think it was like Lockheed Martin or one of these big defense contractors. I was an expert in quality control on aircraft navigation systems or something like that.
And he thought he had. Right. He thought this was his thing. And then they shut down all the defense contracts, I think to random at the Clinton era, there was a lot of budgetary cutbacks in the military and he ended up on the street and he had to take the only job he could take. And I’d sit down and say to him, so why here, Julian?
Why did you come here? And he goes, healthcare. I’ve got a family that needs medical care. And my daughter, I don’t remember what I own that she had, but she had an ailment that needed hospitalization and needed medical. And I have to take this job because I’ve got to look after my family’s health. I need to be able to take him to the hospital and I’d come from a country where medicine was free.
Right. It was just with a band and you could get it well, in most cases. And I saw that and I said, that’s not right. You shouldn’t have to sow your life out because of this thing that you had no control over that. Well, who’s here to help you, Julian. Nobody. It’s all on me. I’m like, I know what all on me looks like, but that ain’t it.
Right. That’s not fair. But anyway, fair, I guess doesn’t really matter anymore. Not really. I think at that point I started realizing that everybody else did, I started talking to and we’re having lunch with, they had the same story. They went to school, they then went to college. They took on the enormous amount of student loans.
They came down to college. None of them worked for what they studied for in university. None of them. Yeah. I got people who they’d learned. They study psychology. Oh yeah. I’m an event planner. What, the only people who actually did were people that were in hardline professions, like doctors, lawyers, accountants, architects, where their tertiary skills were part of what they were doing.
But for 70% of the people, now, it wasn’t like that, but they’re carrying around a hundred grand. I thought, okay. And then they’d go and they’d get this mortgage. They go get a house, they’d raise a family and they want to buy a house. And some banker was telling them you deserve a house. You deserve the next 30 years of your life being in debt to me.
Yeah, exactly. And I’m like, well, does anybody know what the literal French translation of the term mortgages it’s death contract? That’s what it translates to Mort is death. And why is nobody seeing the setup what’s going on here? You know, the 18 year old kid at the kitchen table with the parents is being told to sign the student loan contract.
And that kid can’t go into the bar and get a beer he’s not old enough yet. And you’d be signing a hundred gram of debt away. Although that ain’t right. And then now you’ve got people out there signing their life away for the house that they probably can’t afford because somebody told them, well, the interest rates are low enough that you can probably afford.
Yeah, but the next 30 years of your life, you’ve given to somebody else, your freedom is gone. Your ability to go and say, I feel like I’m going to move to Thailand tomorrow. No, no. You got a house, right? You’re going to sell the house or stick a tenant in there. Who’s going to wreck it for you or whatever, but you’ve got this obligation.
And by the way, you’ve got, probably got a family and you’ve got a kid and then it’s Julian. You’re having to do all these things you don’t want to do with your one lonely life because of your responsibilities. Most. You took them willingly on the proviso that it’s all about going to the moon and Lambos, and that’s how we’re going to live our life.
And yet we’re in debt up to our eyeballs and we’re never going to be able to pay it off. And then at the end of that, you’re 65 years old and you tell me, oh, Myles, I can’t retire. It’s like, well, duh, of course you can’t retire. Look at what you did. You screwed up. What do you think? Graham doctor who I can roll back time.
You screwed up own it. And so with all of that said, I said to people, none of this stuff makes sense. None of it, this social mantra that we tell ourselves as being a good citizen, a good tax paying citizen, it’s not serving us. And when I look at my own story as atypical and contrarian is that is as the immigrant, we came here with nothing and made millions of dollars.
I look at this and go, well, they want to talk to me about how I did it. It’s not about how I did it. It’s the philosophical embracement of a failed mantra. And the fact that I did it because I avoided that. Right. And then all of a sudden, now I’ve got a story to tell.
[00:30:32] Bob Wheeler: Yeah, absolutely. Well, I definitely think many people are educated to be sheep and to buy into the story and that if we can dismantle that mindset, there’s a whole world of possibility out there.
[00:30:47] Myles Wakeham: I will say, though, I’m looking at the world through my rose colored glasses lecture from where I look and I have to be respectful of the fact that I know so many of my friends are extremely successful doctors and lawyers, and they’re wonderful people and they’re incredibly bright, smart, and they’re great at doing what they do.
And I love hanging around. And they would refute everything I’m telling you. Right? The problem is if you look at them as a percentage of the working population, they’re one or 2%, right. The other 98% would not agree with them. And that’s the people who tend to listen to my word. Yeah, that’s awesome.
[00:31:27] Bob Wheeler: Well, Myles we’re at the fast five.
So we are going to shift energy real quick. The fast five is brought to you by cube money, which is a cash envelope system made easy real-time financial awareness without the hassle of tracking expenses and carrying cash. So Myles, I’m going to throw some questions out to you and let’s see where we go.
What’s the best medical tourism trip you ever took.
[00:31:47] Myles Wakeham: Guadalajara, Mexico. I had a complete shoulder replacement. I was quoted 160 grand to get it done in UCLA, in California. It cost me nine grand out the door best ever job I’ve ever had in my life.
[00:32:01] Bob Wheeler: And you got to have some fun and some tacos gotta
[00:32:04] Myles Wakeham: love them.
Tacos, man, you gotta
[00:32:05] Bob Wheeler: love the tacos besides possibly taxes. What’s the one thing you really don’t like to spend money on
[00:32:11] Myles Wakeham: wasting time. Anything that just is a distraction away from what I’m trying to do in my life. I feel as a wasted because of investment in money or to. So I have to look at each situation different because they’re all unique, but those are the things all avoid.
[00:32:26] Bob Wheeler: What emotion do you experience most?
[00:32:28] Myles Wakeham: I guess this is my musical sensitivity. I am very sensitive to other people’s situations. Whether it be good or bad. Yeah.
[00:32:37] Bob Wheeler: Music. Yeah. I’m a big fan of the creative arts and the importance they play in the world. I think they’re not giving enough value with all the success that you’ve had.
Do you still pay attention to your. Oh,
[00:32:50] Myles Wakeham: absolutely. Every day I pull down my banking numbers in my QuickBooks and I update my spreadsheets every single day. That
[00:32:59] Bob Wheeler: is awesome. People. Listen, do your budgets, do your budgets. What’s one financial habit of yours you would like to change.
[00:33:07] Myles Wakeham: I have a problem that I get on a project with a purpose, a mission, whatever I’m building.
And I forget about them. And that ends up biting me in the butt. When I get to the finishing line, I just don’t quite have enough to get over it. I need to be a little more realistic. Yeah, I hear
[00:33:29] Bob Wheeler: ya. So we are at our sweet spot, our M and M moment. And I’m wondering if you have a practical financial tip or a piece of wealth wisdom, you could give our listeners that’s worked for you.
[00:33:41] Myles Wakeham: When you come from Australia, we all live on the coast. At least I did. You become very good as somebody who likes to go and swim and the beach. And one of the things that as a teenager I did was I learned how to surf and it was the best lesson in life I ever learned. And the way it worked was that I would go out into the ocean with all my mates, with these surfboards.
And we pretend that we knew what we were doing and we didn’t, and we’d constantly get beaten up by these massive waves and the surf board hitch in the back of their head. And you do this day after day after day. And you wonder why it’s going on? Why am I doing. Why is it that some people out there seem to be able to ride any wave without any issue?
And I can’t do it, but she persevere and I kept going out there one day, I worked it out and I became a reasonable surfer. What I worked out was that the universe has this nature of waves, everything in balance ups and downs, north and south pole. If we didn’t have the access of the planet, we couldn’t spin them.
We would be destroyed. Everything has to be in balance and waves are no different waves, have an incline and they crash and then they go away. I looked at that and I realized that the only way that you ever catch a wave is the surface. You have to be ahead of it. You have to be paddling in front of it, and you have to be picked up by it.
When I realized that I started understanding how many other parts of the world that applies to, and I realized that the biggest part of the world that applies to. If you are somebody who studies charts, you see things going up and down, you see the waves and the old buy low sell high metaphor is very simple, but when you bring it back to a universal truth, and that is if you’re at the bottom of a wave and you see it inclining, and you position yourself to take the opportunity of that, the wave itself and its own energy will do all the work.
And you don’t have to do a thing. When I learned that I made a million dollars. Instantly, because I had to understand they’re always waves, but it’s where you position yourself and get picked up by them that determines the ride. And it’s the ride that you want case in point, I bought some real estate in Australia, many years.
Because I had heard that was in a country town that was going to be connected to the city because there’s a government we’re going to drill through a mountain and put a tunnel there. So I bought those properties in the country town before the tunnel was there. I picked my wave, right. The tunnel was built.
I sold those properties five years later for three times what I bought them for all because of timing. But it’s not to just say buy low, sell high. Yeah. Is to not pay proper attention to what’s really going. Everything is in balance in this universe. And when you pick the point where you answer something and you know, the point when you exit it, that’s when you make money.
And that’s when you do really, really well for yourself.
[00:36:43] Bob Wheeler: And at the end of the day, life’s about enjoying the ride. Totally, totally about totally enjoying the ride. Well Myles, this has been such a great conversation. You know, one of the things that I’m aware of is you didn’t do it the typical way. Most kids can’t go to their parents and say, I’m going to stop the school thing, but even along the way you had support, but you also all along the way, it really sounds like you were willing to take responsibility and be accountable for your successes or your failures and not putting that on anyone else.
And even with the ax. Taking away the life lessons versus the trauma and the PTSD from that. But for whatever reason, being able to be resilient and moving beyond it. So I really appreciate that you’re out there sharing the message because I do agree that a lot of people out there don’t know any better.
They’re just following the mantra that was shared with them, which was get a job. Buy a house, have some kids stay in debt, repeat the cycle and going out there and challenging people that there might be another mindset. And there might be another way is a great service to all the folks out there that want something different.
So where can people find you online and social media? Where can people find your podcast? You’ve got a book coming out,
[00:38:00] Myles Wakeham: be unconstrained.com. I created this website and the fetus, all of that. If anyone wants to find out. Me my blabbering on my podcasts and all of that air. Be unconstrained.com. They can read my articles there.
They can subscribe to the podcast, they can read it all. They can consume it all. And on a big open source kind of guy, I like to give information out for free because of it helps somebody else I’ve done.
[00:38:25] Bob Wheeler: Awesome. Well, we will definitely send everybody there. Myles. Thanks so much for taking the time. I know you got to go tear down a bull ring and get your project underway, but thanks again for joining
[00:38:36] Myles Wakeham: us.
Appreciate it, Bob. It’s an honor to be on. Thank you.
[00:38:47] Bob Wheeler: we hope you enjoyed this episode. Did you learn something new about your relationship to money today? Maybe you have a friend who has some financial blocks or beliefs that are holding them back. Please share this podcast. So they too can get off the roller coaster ride of financial. And journey towards financial freedom to learn how to have a healthy relationship with money, visit the money nerve.com.
That’s nerve not nerd. We’ll be back next week with another perspective on money and the emotions that bind us. .