Listen closely because what I'm about to tell you is the difference between being the hunter and being the prey. Most of you are waking up every day grinding your gears and wondering why the bank account stays flat while the world gets more expensive. You've been told that if you just work harder, keep your head down, [clears throat] and climb that corporate ladder, you'll eventually make it.
That is a lie designed by people who want to keep you exactly where you are. You're playing a game that was rigged before you were even born. As Nicolo Maki once said, "Men are so simple and so much inclined to obey immediate needs that a deceiver will never lack victims for his deceptions.
" Right now, you are the victim because you are playing the wrong games. I'm going to show you the three traps that guarantee you stay poor. And the first one is the most dangerous of all.
trading your finite, unreoverable time for a handful of paper. You think the path to wealth is a promotion or a slightly higher salary. That's not a path.
It's a leash. The elite look at you and they don't see a team member. They see a unit of labor to be extracted.
Think about someone like Larry Ellison in the early days of Oracle. He didn't get rich by being the best coder or working the most hours for a boss. He understood that as long as you are selling your hours, you have a hard ceiling on your worth.
You only have 24 hours in a day and the system is designed to take most of them just so you can afford to come back and work again tomorrow. If you want to join the top 1%, you have to stop thinking about hard work and start thinking about strategic position. The wealthy don't work for money.
[music] They create systems where other people's time and effort flow into their pockets. If you're still counting your worth by the hour, you've already lost the war. This isn't just about [music] economics.
It's about power dynamics. For most of human history, the structure has been [music] identical. You have a tiny sliver of people at the top who control the resources and a massive sea of people at the bottom [music] who do the heavy lifting.
We pretend we've moved past the days of lords and peasants, but the only thing that's changed [music] is the terminology. Instead of land, they own platforms, algorithms, and debt. The elite understand that wealth comes from ownership, not from labor.
Look at the story of how the massive shipping empires of the 20th century were [music] built, like those of Aristotle Onasses. He didn't start by working on a ship for 40 [music] years to save up. He moved into a position of ownership through calculated risks and understanding that the laborer is always the most replaceable [music] part of the machine.
He knew that the system doesn't reward good [music] people. It rewards those who understand how to control the flow of value. The industrial age perfected this trap.
When the old [music] elites realized that the masses were starting to see the massive inequality, they didn't give up their power. They rebranded it. They created the career and the salary to give you the illusion of progress.
They made you believe that your situation is fair because you have a choice of which master to serve. But if you were born without assets, you were born into a game where you are starting 10 miles behind the finish line. The elite had to invent a narrative to prevent a revolt.
They needed you to believe that your poverty is a personal failure of effort rather than a systemic feature of the game they built. They want you focused on your cubicle so you don't look up and see who actually owns the building. This is a control system that uses your own ambition against you, turning your desire for a better life into the very fuel that keeps their machine running.
Before we go any deeper into how the elite actually rigged the game, I want to make sure you're ready for the reality of this journey. This isn't for the weak or those who want to [music] stay comfortable in their delusions. If you're ready to stop being a porn and start learning how to think like a prince, make sure you hit that subscribe button and join our growing community of high performers who are done playing [music] by the old rules.
We are building a tribe of men who understand that the world isn't moved by fairness, but by those with the will to take what they want. Now, I want you to take a second [music] and really think about your own life. Have you been stuck in that time for money loop, [music] feeling like you're running on a treadmill that never stops?
Drp a [music] comment below and share a reflection on what you've realized about the job you've been told to value so much. Now, if the first game, the time for money trap, [music] is the physical cage, the second game is the mental one, the myth of meritocracy and the fallacy of playing fair. You've been conditioned since you were 5 years old to believe that the world is a giant scoreboard where the hardest workers and the most virtuous people get the biggest rewards.
This is a fairy tale told to you by the people who are currently winning. Maria [music] observed that a man who wishes to make a profession of goodness in everything must necessarily come to grief among so many who are not good. If you think you're going to get rich by being the most obedient rule following person in the room, you're going to spend your entire life waiting for a reward that will never come.
The elite don't follow the rules. They write them. They bend them.
And when necessary, they break them to suit their interests. They understand that fairness is a social lubricant used [music] to keep the masses cooperative while the people at the top carve up the world. Look at the way real fortunes are actually consolidated.
[music] Take someone like Bernard Arno, the man behind the LVMH empire. In the business world, he's often called the wolf [music] in cashmere. He didn't become the richest man in the world by playing fair within the polite circles of French corporate culture.
[music] He gained control of Christian Dior by promising to save jobs and protect [music] the company, only to ruthlessly liquidate the parts he didn't want and fire thousands of workers the moment the ink was dry. He didn't care about being liked. He cared about being effective.
He understood that the meritocracy everyone talks about is just a filter to catch the people who aren't bold enough to take what they want. While you're worried about being nice or doing the right thing, according to a handbook written by an HR department, the 1% are looking for the structural weaknesses in the system that they can exploit for maximum leverage. They know that in the eyes of history, the winner is always right.
This leads us directly into the second part of this mental trap, the saving game. This is perhaps the most brilliant deception ever pulled off. You are told to be responsible, to live below your means, and to put your hard-earned money into a savings account or a conservative index fund and wait 40 years.
But while you're saving pennies, the elite are using the very banks you store your money in to fund their empires. When you put money in a bank at a 1% or 2% return, you aren't investing. [music] You are providing cheap capital to the people who actually know how to play the game.
They take your savings, leverage them 10 to one, and buy [music] assets that appreciate faster than inflation. Inflation is a hidden tax on the poor and the middle class. [music] A way of melting away the value of your labor while the owners of real assets see their wealth skyrocket.
If you're saving, you're losing. You are literally [music] working for a currency that the elite are printing into oblivion. Think about the story of the 19th century commodor Cornelius Vanderbilt.
He didn't build his shipping and railroad empire by pinching pennies and putting them in a local bank. He was famously aggressive, often operating at a loss just to bankrupt his competitors and then buying their assets for a fraction of their value once they were [music] desperate. He understood that cash is a weapon, not a security blanket.
If you're focused on the safety of your savings, you're not playing to win, you're playing [music] not to lose. And in a world designed by Machavevelian thinkers, playing not to lose is the fastest way to get slaughtered. The elite want you to be a saver because savers are predictable.
They are stationary, and they are the ultimate source of the liquidity the 1% [music] needs to make their next big move. You're being told to play a game where the finish line is moved further away every single year by inflation and rising costs. It's time [music] to stop being a good person in a game played by wolves.
You have to realize that the rules you've been taught were designed to produce a stable, compliant workforce, not a class of competitors. The education [music] system and the media work in a perfect loop to make you feel guilty for even wanting more than your fair share. While the people at the top are laughing as they consolidate more power [music] than the kings of old ever dreamed of.
They want you to blame yourself for your lack [music] of success. They want you to think you just haven't hustled hard enough or saved enough. This creates [music] a state of perpetual psychological debt where you are always trying to catch up to a standard that was designed to be unreachable for someone in your position.
Take a moment to look at the wisdom you've been following. Has it actually moved the needle for you or has it just kept you tired? I want you to drop a comment below and share a reflection on what was just discussed.
Have you ever felt like you were doing everything right according to the rules only to watch someone else jump the line because they knew how to work the system? Let's get real about how the world actually functions. Once you stop believing in the lie of fairness, you can finally start learning the strategies that actually produce power.
We've covered the traps, but now we need to look at the weapons. The next part of this [music] journey is about moving from the mindset of a subject to the mindset of a sovereign. Once you stop being a victim of the fairness myth, you're ready to [music] pick up the tools of the sovereign.
The elite don't play by the rules of labor. They play the game of ownership. In the eyes of a Makavelian strategist, labor is simply a commodity to [music] be purchased at the lowest possible price.
If you are the one selling your labor, you are the [music] resource being mined. To flip the script, you must move from being the fuel to being the owner of the engine. Makavelli noted that the innovator has for enemies all those who have done well under the old conditions.
The old conditions for you are the salary and the cubicle. To break [music] out, you need viru. Not in the sense of moral goodness, but in the classical sense of prowess, energy, and the ability to seize a position of power.
Wealth is not built by what you do. It's built by what you own that works while you sleep. Consider the strategy of someone like John Malone, often called the cable cowboy.
While his competitors were focused on quarterly earnings and playing the traditional corporate game, Malone was playing the game of ownership and taxefficient leverage. He didn't care about showing a profit on paper for the sake of appearances. [music] He cared about controlling the infrastructure.
He used massive amounts of debt to [music] buy up smaller cable companies, creating a monopoly of ownership that made him untouchable. He understood that in the modern world, ownership of the pipes, the platforms [music] and systems is the equivalent of owning the fertile land in the middle ages. When you own the system, you don't have to work for the people using it.
They are all working for you, whether they realize it or not. This is the first real game. shifting your focus from increasing your hourly rate to acquiring assets that generate cash flow without your physical presence.
The second [music] tool in the sovereign's toolkit is leverage. And this is where most people get scared. You've been taught that debt is a burden or a danger.
For the poor, that's true [music] because they use debt to buy liabilities like cars and clothes. But for the elite, [music] debt is a weapon. [clears throat] They use other people's money, OPM, to magnify their reach.
This is a concept Machavelli would have recognized as using the arms of others to secure your state. If you only use your own money, your growth is linear and slow. If you use the bank's money, the public's money, or your investors money, your growth becomes geometric.
The 1% understand that the financial system is a giant machine designed to lend money to those who already have a plan to take more of it. Look at the rise of the Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onasses. He didn't build his fleet by saving up his wages.
He used a revolutionary method of financing where he would secure a contract to move oil first and then use that contract as collateral to borrow the money to buy the ships. He was essentially building an empire with zero of his own capital at risk in the early stages. He understood that the secret to massive wealth isn't having money.
It's having the audacity to control assets using the resources of the institutions that are desperate [music] to lend. While the savers are waiting for their 2% interest, the leverage players are using that same money to buy up the world. This requires a cold, calculated mindset, [music] the ability to see debt not as a threat to your security, but as a tool for your expansion.
However, ownership and leverage are only effective if [music] you understand that the game is never played on a level field. The education system will teach you how to be a professional, a highle servant, but it will [music] never teach you how to be a principal. Business schools teach you how to manage someone else's empire, not how to build your own from the wreckage of your competitors.
The elite know that the real rules of wealth are written in the margins of the law and the fine print [music] of contracts. They aren't looking for permission to succeed. They are looking for the strategic high ground.
They understand [music] that to win you must often be the lion and the fox simultaneously. strong enough to frighten the wolves and cunning [music] enough to recognize the traps. Before we move into the final most controversial game, how the elite actually rigged the system to stay on top, I want to see who is actually paying attention to the mechanics of power.
If you've understood the power of using other people's resources to build your own kingdom, I want you to comment the word leverage below. It's a simple affirmation that you're moving away from the worker mindset and toward the owner mindset. This is how we signal to each other that we are done playing the small game.
We've talked about how to build the engine through ownership and how to supercharge it with leverage. But there is a third game that ties it all together. It's the game of structural advantage or what the common [music] man calls rigging the game.
If you think the elite just got [music] lucky with their assets, you're still missing the biggest piece of the puzzle. They don't just play the [music] game better. They ensure the game can't be won by anyone else.
The final and most misunderstood game is the art of rigging the system. While the masses are busy arguing about whether a policy is fair, the elite are busy ensuring that the policy is profitable for them. They understand a truth Machaveli laid out centuries ago.
He who is the cause of another becoming powerful is the ruin of himself. The elite do not want you to become powerful. They want you to be a predictable consumer and a compliant laborer.
To rig the system doesn't necessarily mean breaking the law. It means understanding the law better than the people who follow it blindly. It's about creating structural advantages that make your success inevitable and your competitor's failure a statistical certainty.
This is the difference between playing a game and owning the board. Look at the story [music] of Peter Theel and the way the PayPal mafia restructured the Silicon Valley landscape. The famously argued that competition is for [clears throat] losers.
While the average person is taught that competition is the heart of a healthy economy, the elite know that competition eats profits. [music] They seek to create monopolies systems where they are the only viable option. They don't just enter a market, they capture it.
They use the tax [music] code which is written by and for the owners of capital to ensure their wealth compounds while yours is eaten away [music] by the IRS. They understand that a dollar saved through a strategic [music] loophole is worth far more than a dollar earned through labor because the labor dollar is taxed at the highest rate while the owner dollar is protected by the very structure of the state. If you want to move from the bottom to the top, you have to accept that the transition is not a walk in the park.
It is a siege. You cannot simply quit your job tomorrow and expect to be a prince by Friday. You have to live a double life.
You work your 9 to5 to pay the tax [clears throat] of survival. But your real life begins when the sun goes [music] down. This is where you build your assets, where you learn the laws of leverage, and where you acquire the ownership stakes that will eventually set you free.
Most people fail because they lack the discipline to fight on two fronts. They get home, they're tired, and they surrender to the comforts the elite have provided to keep [music] them sedated. The entertainment, the cheap food, the endless scrolling.
The Makavelian mind sees these for what they are. Bread and circuses designed to prevent you from realizing your own potential for power. Think about the sheer audacity of someone like Steven Schwarzman, the co-founder of Blackstone.
He didn't build one of the world's largest private equity [music] firms by being a good employee at an investment bank. He identified a shift in the way the world was moving and leveraged every relationship and every dollar he could [music] to buy up real estate in companies when they were undervalued. He was willing to be the bad guy in the eyes of the public because he understood that the public's opinion doesn't pay [music] dividends.
He stayed focused on the long game, building an institutional machine that now controls hundreds of billions in assets. This is the level of strategic focus required. You have to sacrifice the now for the forever.
You have to be willing to be misunderstood and even disliked by those who are still trapped in the fairness mindset. The choice is now yours. You can keep playing the games of time for money, saving for retirement, and meritocracy is real.
You can keep hoping that the system will eventually reward your loyalty. Or you can wake up to the reality that power only recognizes power. You can start acquiring assets, utilizing leverage, and positioning yourself in the gaps of the system where the real wealth is made.
The road is long, and it is paved with the failures of those who weren't cold enough to see the world as it is. But for those who have the virtu to see it through, the reward is a level of freedom that the masses will never even know exists. If you've [music] made it this far, you're already part of a small percentage of men willing to look the truth in the eye.
This is just the beginning of the journey. If you're ready to stop being a porn and start your ascent to the top 1%, [music] hit that subscribe button right now. Join our growing community of sovereigns and high performers who are committed to shared growth and reclaiming their futures [music] from a rigged system.
Before you go, I want you to drop a comment below and share a reflection on what was just discussed. What is the one rule you've been following that you now realize was [music] designed to keep you small?
