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The speaker argues that the traditional American dream no longer works the way it once did. He introduces his background, his early ambition, and why he began questioning the value created by modern finance.
Everything you were raised to believe about the American dream is wrong.I run an American factory that brings in $25 million a month in revenue, and I'll be the first to tell you that America is still the greatest place in the world to make money.It's just that nobody told you that the old rules don't have the same results as they used to.Millions of Americans follow that same old path that worked 50 years ago and wonder why they're stuck in the exact same place.That's why everyone is panicking about losing to China.So, to break that pattern and avoid wasting years chasing an empty promise of success, you need to understand what's changed and what actually predicts success right now.For 3 years, I spent every waking minute chasing a life that I believed was the epitome of success.It gave me a taste of what I thought was the American dream.
I grew up in Talladega, Alabama.My parents weren't in finance or private equity or venture capital or technology or any of that stuff.No, I'm from a small town that was mostly textiles, and that textile industry left.The decline started in the '80s, NAFTA accelerated it in the '90s, and China joining the WTO in 2001 pretty much finished it.When that industry left, the local economy left with it, and I watched that happen in real time.So, finance was not in front of me growing up.I had to find it.When I was in school in Washington, D.C., I had a routine.Every Sunday, I'd go to the Barnes & Noble in Georgetown.I'd sit in the coffee shop and do all my studying and homework for the coming week, get ready for whatever was coming.I still do this routine today, just not in Washington, D.C.
In all my breaks, I'd walk over to the career section and read the Vault Guide, the Vault Guide to Finance.And on the first page, number one was always Goldman Sachs.I'd read about what life at Goldman was like, what the pay was, what the opportunity would be.I read that every single weekend for two or three years until I got the job.That's one of the first things in my life, I think, that I actually manifested, if I'm being honest with you.That was the American dream, not the white picket fence version, the upgraded version.You came from a small town with little to no opportunity, you work hard, you get the education, you get the prestige job, and you're set.That's the whole promise.You go to school, go to college, you get the job, and you are basically guaranteed whatever your dream is.
That's been the promise of the American dream since 1931, that you could just start from anywhere and still be able to reach your fullest potential.If you're chasing something like that right now, I'm not going to tell you not to do it.I'd do it again, honestly, but I want you to hear what it was like when I got there.In my 7 and 1/2 years at Goldman Sachs, I cannot tell you what value I created.I was an options trader, mostly emerging market options.Now, the argument for that job is a good one.You need a well-functioning financial system so people can hedge risk.There are real corporations with real cash exposure in one currency and cash flows in another, and they need to hedge that in smart ways.That's why my job should exist.It reduces friction.It was genuinely useful.But when I left, if I'm honest with you, effectively zero of my actual customers fit that description.
I was a bookie for hedge funds.That was my whole job.A hedge fund wanted to take a bet, and I was on the other side of it, in the same way that you would see with sports betting and prediction markets right now.Being a bookie for hedge funds can be very lucrative, but what's the real economic value created?It's intangible, and a lot of the time, it's zero-sum.One person wins and another one loses.Those years taught me about incentives.I love the Charlie Munger line, "Show me the incentive, and I'll show you the outcome."Some of the smartest people I have ever met were in that building, and they were motivated almost entirely by money, including me.I was extremely attracted to it.That's exactly why I dreamed of being in that room in the first place.But when you incentivize pure money that hard, you get enormous brainpower pointed at building financial structures that may not be in the best interest of the people they're built for.
On paper, it makes a lot of money, but at its core, the real world value is dubious, and that scared me.And I want to be clear here because it's easy to hear this the wrong way.I am absolutely not anti-capitalism in any way.I believe in free markets.I don't have some better system to hand you.My issue is with the incentives we've built inside the system, not the system itself.But, take a look at your own situation.Can you articulate the value that you create?Not the value that your company creates, the value that you create.Over the years, it's often gotten harder for people to actually see that value, and that's a big part of why the old definition of the American dream stopped working.
He explains why he left Goldman Sachs, bought his family’s struggling business, and began thinking differently about where value really comes from. This section contrasts financialized work with building tangible businesses and communities.
Why I left when I was 29.I decided to leave Goldman.I didn't leave because I hated it.I left because I couldn't find any meaning in it.Everybody told me I was throwing my life away.I think people at their core want to feel productive.They want to feel like useful members of society, like they have a purpose.I genuinely believe that, and historically, we got that purpose from doing something productive.For my great-grandfather, that was making denim.For me, at Goldman, there was nothing I could point to.Making money without being able to understand why or what value you're bringing is pretty empty.At least it was for me.And I was 29, I didn't have any kids yet, and I knew once I had a family, my options would be more narrow.I wouldn't be able to take that kind of risk.
The window was open right then, and it wasn't going to stay open.So, in 2012, I bought what was left of my family's business.My grandfather started Towne Machinery and Supply Company in the 1950s after he came back from World War II, selling supplies to the textile industry because that's what he knew.By 2012, what was left was an industrial supply business selling to the wood products industry, you know, sawmills and that kind of thing in the Southeast, doing about $300,000 a year in net income.I quit a $2 million a year job to buy it.Everyone thought it was crazy that I was going backwards, that I was throwing my life away to buy a dying supply business.And that's the part that stuck with me.The disconnect between the people who financialized assets and the people who actually run things day-to-day is enormous.
Those partners at Goldman were not stupid.They just could not see the value in a real business with a real product because that's not the game that they played.And my theory is that the value is only getting larger and larger.With AI and the commodification of technology and information, the power goes back to the builders, especially builders in the real world, the people who put the systems together, the people who provide the product or the service or theinfrastructure that actually gets product delivered to customers.Nobody at Goldman in 2012 understood that.It seemed far-fetched, but right now we're watching that happen on a much larger scale.In a lot of ways, I'm an old-school industrialist.I'm a bit of a relic from the past, and I'm aware of it.There's some good in that, and there's some bad in it.I'm very much a creature of my upbringing and the place that I came from, and that shaped how I see all of this.
So, take it for what it is, but over time I've had to update my own thinking, too.People assume I picked air filters because I cared about air filters.I really picked them because of shipping cost.I'm not in the air filter business, I'm in the logistics business.So, I owned this supply business, and I had to decide what to do with it.I went looking for a product I could manufacture in the United States competitively and sell direct to consumer.And I especially wanted something where I would not have to compete with imports from China or anywhere overseas.Air filters have a very specific characteristic.They're bulky and they're cheap relative to what it cost to ship them.That gives you a strategic logistics advantage if you make them here.And I figured out pretty early that I'm really in the logistics business, not not the air filter business.
We obviously have to have a product to sell, and the product is air filters.But at the end of the day, it's logistics.And when you're in logistics, local presence is critical.That's the boring answer.It's not a passion story.I looked at the physics of the product and the map of the country and picked the thing where being American was an advantage instead of a penalty.And that's the exercise that you need to do.Don't ask what you're passionate about, ask where you have a structural advantage nobody can undo with cheaper labor.My great grandfather got paid in company money.He bought his groceries with it.That world had something that we're missing now.He had worked for a company called Avondale Mills in Sylacauga, Alabama.At the time, Sylacauga was basically a company town.A good chunk of the people in that town worked for Avondale Mills.
They paid him in script or company money.That's how he bought groceries at the company store.That was legal in this country until 1938.It was an economy inside of an economy that was common back then.These towns were microeconomies and the microeconomy supported the town.Now, there's good and bad in that and I'm not romanticizing it.There was real exploitation in these towns.Child labor that was normal then would be considered abusive now.I am not saying we should go back to it.I don't think it's sustainable and I'm absolutely not advocating for it.But in that world, people looked after each other.Avondale built a hospital.They paved the streets in the village and built houses.Everybody was connected to the same company and the same industry and that became their identity and how they paid their bills.And they had pride in it.
They were rallied around being the best at something.In their case, it was denim, the indigo cloth that jeans get cut from.That's a purpose.People need to be financially taken care of, absolutely.Food on the table, opportunity, all of that stuff is critical, but they also need a reason to get up in the morning.I grew up in the tail end of that.In the '90s, Talladega was still kind of a relic.A few companies were basically everybody worked.People looking after each other.Then, the textile industry left, and people pivoted to machine shops and industrial supply, which is exactly the business my family was in.But, it never replaced what came before it.And Avondale itself hung on longer than you'd think.They didn't close until 2006.Three plants in Sylacauga alone, plus Alexander City, Pell City, Rockford.Over 4,000 people in several states lost their jobs when it went down.
That's a 109-year-old company gone.And here's the part that matters for this whole video.When you distance yourself far enough from the product you consume or from what actually puts food on your table, you lose perspective.You lose the community.I think exporting all of that at the expense of those communities was a societally costly decision.Objectively.That community is what we lost.We can talk about what happened and why and what we missed.But, focusing on reversing it doesn't do us any good.It's about us taking responsibility for how we add value now.
The speaker defines the modern American dream as creating more opportunity for your children and argues that many old assumptions no longer hold. He critiques college, student debt, homeownership, retirement, and the loss of meaningful middle-class work.
Ask an American what the American dream means today, and you'll get 10 different answers.And most of them won't sound confident.We have an identity crisis.Nobody can define the American dream anymore.The old one, you could put a picture to it.You know, a white picket fence, a spouse at home, two and a half kids, food on the table, kids get a good education.Now, ask me what it means today, and honestly, I struggle to define it generically.That's part of the problem, I think.If I had to distill it down to one thing, I think today it means this.Are my children going to have more opportunity than I did?Because every parent instinctively wants that.And I think if you polled the average American, they would not be confident that that's true.And they'd be right to feel that way.For kids born in the 1940s, about 90% of them out-earned their parents.
For kids born in the 1980s, it's about 50%, a coin flip.The tech people will tell you we have more abundance than ever.The average person today lives better than a king did 300 years ago.There's factual truth to that, but people need to feel relative progress.They need to feel like they're bettering themselves, like their quality of life is improving.And I think that the average person in this country believes that's getting harder, not easier.By that measure, we're failing as a society.I do believe it's still possible.I absolutely believe that we can deliver on it, but it's going to take a different framework than the one that most people are using today.So, let me go through the specific pieces of the old framework that I think are actually broken, what each one promised, why it doesn't work now, and what it costs you if you're still running it.
Nobody ever asked the second question about college.We asked whether you were going.We never asked what you were going to do at the end of it.We pushed for education, but never measured whether it produced anything valuable.Work hard, get an education, get a job, and you're set for life.But, we never really talked about what you're getting an education in, what value you actually bring when you finish.It got financialized and commoditized.And once it did, nobody was measuring the quality of the education, or more importantly, whether the skills would be rewarded by society in the future.So, you get people believing you can go become a sociology major and be guaranteed the dream.There is no guarantee.There is no social contract.That just simply doesn't exist, certainly not anymore.Your quality of life is going to be directly related to the amount of value you can provide, and that value has to be relative to what society actually values.
That's it.That's the whole equation.A lot of the degrees that we push people into and let them borrow heavily for are not highly valued today and are probably not going to be valued more tomorrow.We sold people outdated information and we called it a plan and the cost was optionality.And this is the part that I think most people miss.Student debt in this country is now about $1.9 trillion, four times what it was 20 years ago.If you carry too much student debt, you can't take an apprenticeship.You can't take a pay cut to go learn something that would make you far more money in 5 years.You have to service the debt now.So, the thing that was supposed to open doors is the thing keeping you from walking through them.And separately, it's 4 years.4 years you could have spent learning how you're actually going to make a living.
If you're deciding on school right now, ask yourself one question about the degree.At the end of this, what can I do that somebody will pay me for?If you can't answer it, don't sign the loan.I started Filterbuy in 2012, but I didn't buy a house until late 2020.And that wasn't an accident.I view my home as a luxury, not an asset.And I know I'd have been better off renting.A house used to be a signal of long-term stability, a place to raise a family.Eventually, you pay it off and you have a roof over your head you never have to worry about it again.And that stability was genuinely helpful.In today's world, it creates less opportunity, not more.Opportunity now is often virtual and it's in another city or sometimes another country.If you want to be upwardly mobile, you have to be willing to be flexible, to move, to experiment.
That's not consistent with owning a home.If you were going to live in one town your whole life and work at one company your whole life, a house was an asset because it gave you stability, but that's not how the world works now.So, being tied down actually takes away upper mobility.And with a typical mortgage today, you don't really own it.The bank owns it.I lived this.I rented for the first years of Filterbuy.I bought in late 2020 and I knew at the time it was a luxury purchase, not a functional one.I own a home now and I view it as a luxury.All my housing costs are an expense.Undeniably, I would have been better off financially long-term renting, letting somebody else pay the carrying cost and investing the difference.Whether that's into Filterbuy ventures where I get a high return on capital or just simply the S&P 500.
If you get to a point where you can afford to make a luxury decision, that's perfectly fine.That's what I did.But, let's be clear, it is not a financial decision and it comes with two cost.The first is mobility.You get an opportunity in another city and now you have a transaction to unwind before you can take it.Most people just don't take it.The second is the math that nobody runs.10 or 15 years ago in a lot of places, you could buy meaningfully cheaper than you could rent.Since 2021, rates doubled and prices went up about a third.Nationally, the median mortgage payment now runs about 20% above the median rent.So, the monthly rent is way cheaper than the monthly cost to own.And that's even before you factor in maintenance, upkeep, and property taxes, which I don't think that most people take into account at all.
Run the actual numbers in your market.There are exceptions, but they're few and far between right now.And that old adage, if you rent you're throwing away money, if you pay your mortgage, you're building something, now that's just not true anymore.Waiting for retirement, I could have stayed at Goldman and made more money over the last 10 years than I did.I know that, but I don't think about it much.Max out the 401k, wait until 65, and then start living.I think that that's a bad trade.The promise was that if you put money in the 401k, you kept your head down, you retired at 65, then you could go and finally live.But, start with the small thing.It's not 65 anymore.If you were born in 1960 or later, full retirement age is 67.They moved the finish line while you were saving for it.
The bigger thing is that we're not promised tomorrow.The better version is you need to find something that adds value to society because society will pay you for that while also giving you a life that's sustainable and happy for you.And that looks different for everybody.There are lots of ways to do it.Think about my great-grandfather again.He worked hard.He didn't make much money by today's standards and he was part of something.He had fulfillment and he had a community.So, why bet 40 years of your life in the hopes that the last stretch makes up for it?I could have stayed in the last 10 years, I probably would have made more money than I did, but I wasn't finding fulfillment in it and that's why I went on and did something on my own.Don't optimize your whole life for a version of yourself who might not show up.
Find work that pays you and fulfills you at the same time.
There used to be a real path up inside a company.The reason you can't work your way up anymore is that the middle got stripped out.There used to be a real path.You'd start somewhere in a company, you'd get mentored, and then you'd work your way up and make a better and better living.That's much harder to do today.Not impossible, but much harder.The middle layers got stripped out.You don't get the same mentorship.So, much of the actual power and economy sits with the bigger corporations and those people are enormously distant from what's being produced and from the people producing it.And this is where it gets expensive in ways the numbers don't show.When you strip meaningful work out of a community, you don't get a neutral outcome.In rural communities, this happened first and what happened was drugs, big drug problems because people no longer have purposeful work that they can be a part of.
So, if you get everybody hooked on sports gambling and short-form videos and a very small percentage of people making enormous amount of money doing it and everybody else is left behind, I think you do more damage than theeconomic numbers show.So, stop waiting to be promoted into the middle of something that no longer exist.The formula isn't broken because America is broken.We are the most vibrant economy on Earth.There's no question about it.
He lays out a new path built on self-agency, learning, and choosing skills society will pay for. The chapter closes with practical examples of trades, entrepreneurship, and the mindset needed to build a life on your own terms.
The people who feel left behind are the ones running the old playbook against the new economy.Now, I want to be really clear about something.We're the most vibrant economy in the world, and it's not even close.And unlike a lot of hierarchical economies, if you're good and you bring value here, you can change your life.That's 100% true.The tools available to any one person are better than they have ever been.The problem is that people don't know how to harness it.They don't know how to execute on it.And frankly, that's because our educational system doesn't teach the right things, which is part of why I make these videos.The people who feel left behind are largely the people following the old playbook while the new one is right there.And the new playbook takes self-agency, and that's the hard part.You have to be a constant learner.
You have to be paying attention to where the economy is moving and what people actually value right now.The old playbook was passive.You follow the rules, you go to college, you get a good job, become a middle manager somewhere.I don't think that path works anymore.You have to always be thinking about how to add more value, how you learn more, how you evolve, whether you're working for someone else or for yourself.With that mindset, you can always win.So, what does that look like concretely?Let me give you the one path I'm most confident about, and then the version for people who want to build something big.Here's a path that doesn't require genius.It requires showing up and being reliable.And it ends with private equity writing you a check.Here's the ladder out of the old path.Rather than going and getting the degree that nobody's going to pay you for, go learn a trade.
I know it gets talked about a lot, but it's still right.Become the best plumber or the best HVAC technician that you can be.You now have a vocation that will pay you.If you're a great HVAC tech and you're reliable, I promise you you can go work for an HVAC company and pay your bills and build a financially decent life.You're not going to start at the top.You're going to start somewhere between 50,000 and 70,000 dollars a year.A good tech, even on a salary at a larger company, can get into six figures.Call it 100,000 to 120,000 dollars.But, the reason I love this path is what you can do with the skill afterwards.Step two is you go 1099.You run your own crew and you start taking installation jobs.Step three, you build a business around it.Your own brand, your own customers, your own book of business.
You're a small business owner.Step four, if you want more, you expand into neighboring cities or you buy other businesses in your space that you already understand from owners who want out.And here's where you take advantage of the financialization that I've been complaining about this whole video.HVAC specifically has been a darling of private equity.A well-run HVAC business trades somewhere around nine to 10 times earnings today.The private equity platforms buying those businesses up are themselves changing hands in the high teens.Blackstone bought Champions Group in February at somewhere around two and a half billion dollars, which works out to roughly 18 times earnings.That spread is why your inbox fills up with people who want to buy your company.So, if you grow that business to a million dollars of EBITDA, you're looking at an enterprise value in the range of six to eight million dollars.
The bigger you grow it, the bigger the multiple that you can get.Work 20 years building that, which I think almost anybody could do if they just stick with it and stay patient, which is exactly why I call it boring, and you're in a position to engineer that outcome, or evenbetter if you want.And notice what this path doesn't require.No debt.Somebody else pays you for training through the apprenticeship.You have a guaranteed skill set that isn't disappearing anytime soon, and you can take it as far as your ambition allows.That's a real path that you can start on Monday.If you want to see exactly what that path looks like with real people and real stories, subscribe to watch Boring Money on this channel.If you have a story that's similar to what I just showed you, and you want to talk about it on the show, click on the link in the description.
Let's get back to where you start.A guy built a nine-figure brand on TikTok selling comfortable clothes.Nobody gave him permission to do that.The people winning right now didn't wait for anybody to hand them the playbook.There's a company called Comfort starting by a guy named Huss.They sell hoodies and comfortable clothes, and they built the whole thing on TikTok.Nine figures in revenue.I actually read somewhere he may do a billion dollars this year, 10 figures in revenue.Nobody gave him permission.He took a boring clothing line and figured out modern marketing and built a huge brand.There are a lot of examples like this.Poppi, the soda brand, sold to PepsiCo for about two billion dollars.The husband and wife team behind Blume bootstrapped, figuring it out, no venture capital, no outside help.But honestly, the examples I'm most excited about are smaller and more repeatable.
The first person I ever had on my podcast was a guy named John.He and a friend put in a thousand dollars.He was 18 years old.They built a 3PL that will now do over 50 million dollars in revenue and clears them millions of dollars a year.He's maybe 26, 27 years old.I had another guy on who runs an electrical company in Texas.He ran the exact ladder that I just described.He started as a technician at 18, worked for somebody else for 10 years, got the experience, then went out on his own about a year ago.He's got two employees now, and he's trying to scale, focused largely on data centers.He's in his late 20s with no debt.Almost everybody who comes on my podcast fits this mold in one way or another.They all took specific action rather than waiting for somebody else to show them the exact playbook.
And this is where I think we're going as a country.Not back to the company town, but back to valuing the people who actually build things.The answer is figuring out how to create value in the physical world and in the intellectual world.The technology side, the US does a great job of.What we need to rebuild is the culture around building things for the community as a whole.That's what we lost when we outsourced so much of our industry so quickly.That doesn't come from policy, it comes from individual people making that choice.That's the whole idea behind boring money.The old dream had a picture of white picket fence, two and a half kids.I'm not going to give you a new picture and I think that that's the whole point.To be honest with you, the old version was limiting in some ways because not everybody wants the same things.
And that's the beautiful part about now.It comes down to what you actually want out of life.It's harder without a clear dictated path that everybody blindly takes, but you get to craft your own outcome.Whatever uniquely fits you and your ambition.On my podcast, I spend most of my time asking people what they actually want out of life and then reverse engineering a business outcome that helps them to get there.I want people building an entrepreneurial journey that's consistent with their life and additive to it.Not one that takes away from it.For some people, that's hitting a number and then living quietly with family off that income.And that's perfectly fine.But then there are others like me that are more ambitious and want to build a legacy that will take the rest of their life to build.And I'm very clear on what mine looks like.
And some people don't want a business at all, they want the stability of a job and they genuinely love working on one specific thing.Maybe they love marketing and want to be the best marketer they know how to be working for interesting entrepreneurs with marketing problems.And that can be a great life.There are an infinite number of ways to craft it.And I think that there's a lot of beauty in that, but every version has the same requirement.You take agency for yourself.You don't expect somebody else to hand you the playbook that works for you, because the incentive structure of the people at the top is to not change anything.So, there's a lot of misinformation, and your job is to learn to think for yourself and to take responsibility for your own life.
So, do these three things.Pick a skill that society will pay for, and be honest about whether it actually is one.Don't take on debt that removes your optionality.Not student debt, not housing debt.And decide what you actually want your life to look like before you pick the business, not after.Nobody showed me the road map for building the world's leading indoor air quality company.I'm out there doing it because I took agency, and I keep learning.If you want the practical version of this, watch my video on the six boring businesses that almost always make millionaires.That's where I'd start.