Nick Pardini: Why Time Feels Faster & Life Feels Harder!

Ben BeeriHello, everyone. Welcome to the Authentic Journey. I'm really excited to have Nicholas Pardini joining us today. Nick is the cofounder and portfolio manager of the Newport Beach based wealth management firm, Spearhead Advisors. He's also a top voice in global economics and the creator behind the YouTube channel, Analyzing Finance with Nick, where he breaks down market trends and global money moves in a way anyone can understand. Nick's built a huge following for his ability for spotting opportunities before they hit the mainstream.

He's worked with top investors, built his own research platform, and built his money management practice that continues to shape the way people think about finances and the global economy. I'm thrilled to dive into Nick's authentic journey. Let's get to it. Welcome, Nick. Yeah. I know. It's pretty funny if I can I know it's really, like, who are the people that, like, actually end up, like, dressing up? Right? It's like like, what are the different, like, attires you wear for, like, different types of careers? It's lawyers, financial people, generally the ones who dress up for the most part. Lawyers, financial people, and government employees. If you're in the FBI, you're wearing a suit. If you're in the IRS, you're wearing a suit. Yeah. Politicians.

Nick PardiniYeah. That's the other one. I mean, I personally don't like ties. I only wear them for, like, weddings and funerals or if it's, like, some super formal institution I'm meeting with. Yeah.

Ben BeeriYeah. I I mean, I'm to the point now where I just dress pretty casual. I mean, at the end of the day, it's like, there's no I mean, don't get me wrong. I can dress up a little bit upscale, but it's like wearing a suit is like I don't work for the IRS.

Nick PardiniI don't work for the FBI. Like, I don't need to wear a suit going to work. Yeah. I mean, I don't wear suits all the time either. I mean, there's this typical finance bro outfit of, the Patagonia sweater vest and jeans and the button up shirt or in the winter, I like my cashmere sweaters. But, if I'm going to be the guy who's making content about being an example of avoiding pro adrift and living a classier life, it's kind of made me think, maybe I should dress better. And dress better in terms of? Like, just making myself look more presentable and not just being overly casual all the time. But that's more so you're doing that for you. Yeah.

Yeah. It's more early for me. And I feel like just in general, maybe because I grew up as the oldest of five siblings, I always feel like I had to be a good example to others. Because they were always looking at what I was watching, what I was doing. And now that I have a bigger audience on social media, I feel kind of that same kind of dynamic to a certain degree.

Ben BeeriWell, the end of day, mean, you're kind of showing yourself to people. You're being yourself. Right? And your following is really getting built off of people who respect you for being you. Yeah. I say a lot of things that other people are either too afraid or can't verbalize very well. Yeah. Because it's kinda interesting because it's like as we say, hey, what are we doing to like build a following. Right? But the thing is, is the only real way to build a following is just to be as authentic to yourself as you can be. And like, the people who genuinely like you will follow what you have to say.

And the people there's no, like, artificially

Nick Pardinimaking it happen type of thing. Yeah. I think it's especially true in the age of AI because a lot of the stuff that other people have done and that's kind of like the generic thing is that that can now be created with an LLM or through, like, for music, there's Suno, For video, there's Sora. And any of these influencers who really just make a living basically being like, I'm, like, the perfect example of x y z and just give you very, um, boilerplate platitudes

Ben Beeriare gonna be put out of business by the bots. Well, I I saw one of my friends was doing it just for fun. It's like all of a sudden, he put himself he put his face on, like like, New England Patriots quarterback, and all of sudden, he's throwing a touchdown at Gillette Stadium. And it's like and the commentator's saying his name, and it's like, hey. We think it's a cool video. Like, we obviously know it's AI, but it's like, there's so many different things you can actually do with AI now. And it's like, usually, like, AI is gonna be so much greater than the real thing as far as videos and footage and stuff like that. Yeah. I mean, I think AI is going to be a great opportunity

Nick Pardinifor those who are enterprising and creative enough to be on the the user side of it, and it's gonna be a great cause of economic distress for those who are being disrupted by it.

Ben BeeriYeah. And you have all these different, like, fields. It's like, I mean, you have Instagram models are now having to compete with AI Instagram models, and the AI Instagram models, I mean, they don't have any, like, limitations as to what can be done. They could be any place at any time wearing anything, and they don't gotta book a flight. They don't gotta buy clothes. They don't gotta work out to get a certain physique. It's like they got to punch in a few things on Yeah, if you're trying to sell yourself based on physical appearance now, and

Nick Pardiniparticularly looking perfect, that's not going to be possible competing against the AI at this point. Like, the effort in some of the AI influencer models generate more revenue than real people do.

Ben BeeriYeah. Because if you're going for perfection, you're going for AI. So that's why it's like we almost have to in this day and age. It's like you have to be yourself as much as you could possibly be and then have people, like, want you. Like, you as for who you are. And it's like, hey, I understand you're human. I understand you're not perfect, but I'm going to decide to follow what you have to say because

Nick PardiniI like how you deliver this message. Yeah. And if you offer some insight that just can't be found, um, by running a chat GPT model or Google searching, like, some people have wanted me to make certain content that I could make by doing that kind of thing, but it wouldn't be authentic because what insight am I providing that you can't do by just having a conversation with GPT or Grok? Yeah. So what is something that you've kind of been working on lately as far as providing insight and stuff like that? I've been doing a deep dive on several issues are going on in the economy and the cognitive dissonance between why do people feel like life is harder than ever it is, but at the same time you see economic data showing that life is easier for a lot of people now than it's ever been.

And what is accounting for this mismatch? Why are a lot of people so unhappy about the economy? And why are there in certain corners data that points to recession, or on the other hand you see economic data looking strong and material growth in living standards throughout the world? And that's kind of the question that I've been trying to address lately on my channel, and depending on when this comes out it will be whether I've released this video or not, but the long and the short of it is that there's two things: one, different age groups have different perceptions of economic prosperity because they're facing different cost structures.

If you are somebody who's 55 and never divorced from their first marriage and went to college, you probably are pretty well off right now. You were able to have your career mostly in prosperous times. You were able to save your money without maybe as many catastrophic events, God forbid. And you've already paid off your house. You've already sent your kids to college. You've already kind of went through a lot of the things that the consumption increases that young families have to go through when they start a family.

So if you're and you have your investments. So your investments are growing because the stock market's growing, and you're collecting a solid income on those. And the consumer prices have lagged those for the most part, you're looking pretty good. And a lot of things that a retiree spends money on, like international travel, or day to day hobbies, or Medicare protected health care, has not gone up that much in price. On the other hand, let's look at the opposite side. Let's say you're a very young single person who is able to go to finish school without much debt or any, and either don't the social stigma against living with your roommates until you're a little bit older or with your parents is gone.

So you don't really have that big of a cost structure either if you have either a decent paying job or a small remote paying business that you can move around, you can also geoarbitrage to cheaper places. Those people are doing pretty well too. That's why the whole digital nomad thing has came. But on the other hand, if you're somebody, say, who's in their 30s or 40s, you're getting married. You're getting married. You are about to have kids, you want to buy a house, and you want to save for them to college or send them to private school because the quality of public schools is deteriorated in most of the country, particularly here in California.

That's a lot more expensive than it used to be. The cost of the stereotypical upper middle class family lifestyle, like having a 2,500 square foot house, two to three kids, having them go to college without debt, you driving like an entry level or a mid level Mercedes or BMW, going to your gym or non golf country club membership, these kind of things that we thought were just kind of like a middle class or slightly above middle class comforts that a lot of people assumed they'd get to a certain life, that is depending on where you lived anywhere from going up 2.7 to three times what they used to be on a real basis.

And so while getting by and just doing okay or being a comfortable retiree is easier now than ever, if you want to strive and push from like, I'm just getting bi level to, I can have the upper middle class childhood that a lot of people are accustomed to, probably that for my kids, that's a lot more difficult than it has ever been. And buying a house and housing costs are the bulk of that and also higher taxes, not just because the tax rates have gone up in states. Actually, lot of states have cut taxes. It's more that because the bracket creep. You need to be in a higher tax bracket now to generate the kind of income you need because the expense of having that idealistic, upper middle class life has gone up way more than inflation.

And so the combination of taxes, housing, health care, and to a lesser degree education costs, both college and pre college for children, has made people give up before they even start trying because they can do the math in their head. My income, even myself or if I have a spouse helping you, will never get to that level. So it's really just a product of how the market has responded to recent socioeconomic trends and how the money supply has transmitted the price level of certain assets or certain goods and services above others. And there's a lot of regulatory factors there too.

And the then the dissonance between how much easier it was for their parents to do the same thing, I think, is causing a lot of this problem. If I I didn't mean to ramble, but I just kind of ex that's what I've been researching lately.

Ben BeeriThat's really fascinating stuff. And then you also get to a point. It's like, about the people that are wanting to, like, get married and have kids? Like, that's probably affecting the amount of, like, kids that are being had or the amount of marriages that are occurring. Yeah. Birth rates are going down. Marriage rates are going down, or certain people are prioritizing

Nick Pardinimore superficial things in their romantic partners over others because they want to make sure that they can afford the lifestyle, for lack of a better term. So the other thing, too, is that I was surprised when I did this research about retirement, because retirement costs, I actually think, are not as bad as people anticipate, especially if you don't need as much money as you did in your peak earning years. But even if you do want to have the same average salary of your working years in retirement, you have to save a decent amount of money, but it's not unattainable.

Like, I've run a wealth management firm, and one of the first things I talk to a prospective client is I really kinda ask them, like, what kinda lifestyle do you want to if you didn't have to work, and how much would you your your monthly expenses to get that? And when I run the numbers and I tell them, like, look. Based on what you've tell me and a realistic expectation for returns, you can get there well before 70 years old most of the time. And you can get there even probably if you start young, like in your 20s and 30s, even before 60.

And it's more attainable than people think, and you don't have to live lives of clean austerity. And again, it depends on your income level and what kind of lifestyle you want post retirement, but you really only really need to save about 15 to 20% of your after tax income to get there. Some people might think that I'm elitist and out of touch for saying that that's even possible to do, but it's doable is the point. Whereas you see a lot of the mainstream media giving the narrative like, oh, nobody will ever be able to afford to retire again because maybe Social Security is insolvent. But my even my assumptions, I'm assuming you're not gonna get a dime in Social Security, or it's gonna get inflated away to the point that it won't make a difference to your budget anyway, and you can and it's still doable.

So I think people, I think, are getting a little bit too discouraged, at least on the retirement side, of their financial futures. And I think the housing stuff will ultimately self correct due to demographic reasons. So even that, I just think the level of pessimism among individuals' futures, even if I think there are some signs of possible recession in the next year or two, the long run is still pretty bright for people who make the priority to have a solid plan of what they're doing and can have the discipline to execute it. So if you're in college and you're getting ready to graduate, what can you

Ben Beerigo out and do to ensure that you've got a really stable financial path going forward?

Nick PardiniOkay. Well, there's a few things you do. First, this is the most challenging part because AI is really changing things. Like, this is the first, like, time ever in the, um, modern economy where the unemployment rate for, like, recent college grads, like, 22 to 25, is higher than the same age group for people who didn't go to college. And the reason of that is a lot of LLMs and AI is replacing a lot of entry level work. Say if you run a hedge fund or a law firm, and instead of hiring maybe five entry level lawyers or entry level analysts, now you might be able to do the same amount of work with just two of them.

So yeah, that'll make your firm a lot more profitable and a lot more efficient, and even there might be higher salaries for the few people who still have their jobs. But that means three other people who otherwise would be employed in a high skilled profession that requires a college degree or above doesn't have a job. And you're starting to see, especially as the cost structure due to years of inflation the last couple of years being elevated for a lot of businesses and companies are going need to cut costs and maintain their earnings, they're experimenting with AI to not necessarily fire their existing workforce, but to stop hiring the next generation.

And that's where I think that this gap is coming from. So that's kind of the first challenge, and this is the part I don't really have a good answer to. What is the timeline of jobs that are going to be disrupted and how safe is any given profession? I generally don't recommend people trying to game what they want to do for a career. And I think you and I are both examples of people like this based on what, I don't know, The Wall Street Journal or The Harvard Business Review or The Financial Times tells you are the hot places to be. There's this thing called the Harvard Business Graduate Indicator, the industry that is popular among Harvard Business School graduates to get jobs is often the one that has a bust two or three years later. They're kind of too late to chase the party.

You can't build a career chasing the hot thing, because often by the time you get there, it might not be there anymore. If it is still there, you might not like what you're doing. I know plenty of people just through my own life experiences and business experience who pick a career based on what they perceive as stable or a lot of growth, but they're like, What the hell am I doing this? I hate every day of my life. And that's not sustainable. You will burn out. You'll probably binge spend to make it harder to accomplish your savings goals.

And they'll eventually show up in the quality of your work, and it will make you, when it is time for replacements in that sector, be more at risk of it, in my opinion. So what I do recommend to people is kind of a Venn diagram that goes three ways. You've got to figure out three core things. I recommend for a young person to go to a place with no internet, maybe like a campsite, maybe like a beach cottage or wherever that there's not Internet, not many distractions your way and far, like a few hours drive away from where you live so you can really focus.

And basically be like, what are the things that I can do better than 95% to 99% of people, especially if I have the right credentials and, um, app and, like, put the effort to educate myself on if you're a younger person who's not fully educated on the field yet. What is something that there is demand for that people already ask me for help with right now? And the third component really is what is it that gets you excited to wake up early in the morning on a weekday? You need to find something that's the intersection of all three, because if you fail for getting up in the early morning when you're going to burn out, if you fail for the demand one, you'll start a business that nobody wants to buy your product or service. Believe me, that's happened to me before in the past. And if you don't have the first one, you're not going be able to compete because there'll be too many people better than you at your job.

So you've to find what the intersection of this and then basically figure out what does that mean for where you're going to be when you're 40 or 50, and then look at where people who are at that level, at the end point are, see what their paths are, and then work your steps backwards. Like most people are the opposite. They try to figure out what's the highest paying job or the most stable job right away, and they keep doing that on a few job hops. And then by the time they're, like, in their mid thirties, they're like, what the hell am I doing with my life?

Ben BeeriYeah. I remember for me when I was in college, I was sitting there trying to figure out what major I wanted to be. Yeah. And I didn't fully believe in myself to go out and, hey, I'm gonna work on my sports memorabilia business full time. I started it when I was in college, but I thought it was kind of, hey, okay, part time hustle slash can turn into a business that I can do on the side from whatever job I do. So I'm like, let's go into business administration. I think I ended up doing, like, a concentration in finance.

And I remember sitting there in one of my finance classes one day, and the professor's sitting there telling us, he's like, oh, I had a chance to invest in Facebook early on, and, uh, I didn't do it. And he sits there and he starts telling us about opportunities he may have had to, like, invest in other companies that are bigger. Hey. I could have invested in Uber. I didn't do it. Oh, but then I invested in this company, and, uh, it failed. I'm sitting here going, like, excited to learn about the stock market and excited to learn about finance.

And I'm like, when is he going to tell us about the investment that he made that, like, he succeeded at? It was great. He made a ton of money on. And a few weeks went by, I kind of realized I'm like, okay. If he had made an investment that made him a ton of money, then he wouldn't be here teaching the class. That's generally true.

Nick PardiniHowever, there are some people who go back to teach just as kind of like a passion project after they've made their money. Like my business professors in my entrepreneurship program were like venture capitalists who sold businesses, made a good amount of money and just wanted to live a chill life in Santa Barbara. And they just taught a couple times a week to give back to the community. That sounds like a vibe, man. That sounds awesome. I wouldn't mind a later stage in my life just for fun, like when I'm retirement age, getting a PhD in economic history and then just having a class at UCI or UCLA if it's only once a week, being like,

Ben BeeriThis is Nick's economic class, but it'll just be me talking about whatever I want that day. Yeah. Totally. No. Sounds fun. No. I mean, sounds like a good thing to do to give back. I mean, we all have we all wanna give back in different ways, and it's really, like, noble of anybody who goes back and teaches as a college professor kind of But I do get for a fun type of thing. But I do get your general point. Yeah. Like, there's those who can't do teach Yeah. General mantra. But the interesting thing is is I kind of realized as the years went on, it's like, okay, the one person didn't believe in me was me.

And it's like, it took me to believe in me in order to get to a spot where I could actually go on the path that I wanted to go down and say, hey, you know, I am actually not going to be seeking to get a job. Yeah. I am just going to go all in on my business. And I'm really grateful I did that now. And looking at things, it's like, you know, like, you know what you're passionate about. Yeah. Like, most people know. They just don't have the audacity to, like, basically go for it, like, right off the bat. Like, they think that they may have some kind of Or they're passionate about something they have no talent in.

Nick PardiniThat's possible. Like, there's a lot of musicians, for example, who may not actually be good at music or people who want to be basketball players but who are five foot five. There are those examples, but I think that there's not one thing you could be talented at. That's my point. The other thing too is you fortunately found your niche while you were in college and you had a proof of concept with the sports. Now, Biblius, you did it the right way. You've got it on the ground while you were in school, you still finish your degree as the hedge. That's what degrees are essentially today. They're not going to advance you up the social class ladder or be some path to the golden ticket. What they do instead is they are like insurance so that even if your pursuits don't work, you could find a job that pays well enough just because you have that degree.

So I'd say, view your college degree more like an insurance policy than a stock investment, if I put it in financial terms. But when it comes your case, I think you did it right with building the business while you're in school and going off on your own while you have the degree. But if somebody doesn't have something with traction already or a clearly defined path, even if they still kind of know what they want to do at the end game, I still think it's worth getting three to five years of experience in your field. But the difference really, my view on career management versus maybe somebody else's, is that you don't go work to try to move up the ladder and get every promotion and work the extra hour to have an extra five hours a week or ten hours a week to get maybe an extra one to 5% of your bonus.

That doesn't really make any sense to me. Think actually the whole idea of working hard is kind of just a general issue that people don't know when it makes sense to work hard or when it doesn't because it's not as simple as you should just work to live and do the bare minimum at all times. Also, like the Gary Vee, I should grind at all times. Both of those aren't realistic, and both of those aren't ideal and either are optimal. But I think the reason you need the three to five user experience so you know, one, how does a company in your industry actually operate and work? And you should think about that while you're at the company. Think about, how does my boss run this business?

How do the numbers work? What are the things I actually need to do in terms of technology, equipment, hiring people, legal, regulatory? How do I get clients? Think about how your current employer does all that stuff and just kind of use this as a time to pay. It's like college again, but you're getting paid this time. And that's kind of how I felt my working career was for me essentially. And then the other thing is that it gives you time to save up enough money so you can have like a couple years of living expenses.

So if you don't make any money the first year or the second year of your entrepreneurial journey, you don't have to scurry back to a job. So I think that the ideal time to probably start a business is in your late 20s, early thirties, if you've done all the groundwork beforehand.

Ben BeeriAnd you're sitting here talking about the people who are in college right now and may not have the opportunity to go and get jobs because of AI. Right? You're sitting there. You gave an example of, hey. Two lawyers at a firm will get hired, but the other three won't. Are we gonna start seeing an uptick in, like, people going towards, hey. I'm gonna try to get on be an entrepreneur, like, coming right out of college? Yeah. I mean, I think you'll see more of that because it's gonna be more viable for a lot of businesses,

Nick Pardiniand especially for more newer industries. There was always these jokes right before AI came out of these job postings that say, Oh, you need five years of working experience using ChatGPT when ChatGPT was only around for six months. I don't know if you've seen that. It's like, you need ten years of experience using XYZ technology or software language that was only invented two years ago. For those kind of industries that are new and there's not actually anybody who's a real expert in it, there are opportunities just to go and do it right away. Or if you figured out your niche, to go do it right away.

But I think that the risk of jobs declining to the point we're not at that point yet. That's probably like a five to ten year problem from now. I think at the current point, there's going to be less jobs, but it seems like a lot of the job losses are being absorbed by boomers retiring. And so the fact that we just have a smaller cohort of young people, because starting 2008, started having less kids, I think that natural attrition, unless if we have some massive surge in immigration, then yeah, then I think that a lot of this stuff will kind of self cancel each other out to a certain degree.

But yeah, it's going to be harder, but the thing is also you might have to maybe work at a more startup firm. Instead of working at the established big corporation right out of school, you're maybe the third or fourth person at a new startup with somebody who's a few years ahead of you. I think you might see more of that, to be quite honest, because of this. So people going more so into entry level type of stuff coming out of college. Well, it's always the entry level, but what entry level is is going to be different. Like, entry level is gonna probably require more personal risk than before.

Like, again, you're fifth guy at the startup versus number 10,000 at Mega Corp.

Ben BeeriYeah. No. It's true. And it's interesting to just see how people go on their journeys because at the end of the day, everybody has something that they're passionate about. And not everybody's cut out to be entrepreneur. Like, it takes a certain amount of risk to stomach to be an entrepreneur. I mean, there are some days you make some money, there are some days you make zero, and then there are some days you lose some money. And I've been through all this. So many different things that happen. And, like, your path is really meant for you. Like, there's really no right or wrong way to do things. It's just interesting to hear, like, statistically speaking, what is kind of, like, the, I would say, average or standard things that people shoot for. Because, I mean, for years, you're hearing, hey. White picket fence in the suburb, husband, wife, x amount of kids. Right? And that's kind of, like, a target demographic that

Nick Pardinia I lot of still think that's what mostly people are shooting for, but because of ingrained cultural cynicism, a lot of people are trying to create alternative meanings because they've resigned themselves that they can't get the original goal.

Ben BeeriIt's interesting. Also see birth rates are declining, divorce rates are rising.

Nick PardiniActually, divorce rates are declining too. Because a lot of people who are never suited for marriage are avoiding marriage, but I think the ones who are being more smart about it, like divorce rates peaked in the eighties. Really? Like the low fifties percent. Now, like the first marriage divorce rate is probably anywhere you see anywhere from thirty seven to forty percent. So on a percentage standpoint, or is it, like, from a, like, numerical standpoint? Percentage of people who get married and their marriage survives for life, like, it's gone up. Like, was, like, fifty percent in the eighties. Now it's probably anywhere sixty to sixty three percent, depending on which source you look at. Okay, and they're getting married at a later age? Yeah, they're often getting married at later ages. That's usually correlated to economic cycles. When economic times are tough, particularly for the middle class people, marriage rate age goes up.

Particularly for women's marriage age goes up because a lot of people don't want to get married until they feel like they're somewhat financially stable. I think our culture is taking to the extreme. I think this is a mistake, and I talked about this on my videos, is that they don't think of marriage as kind of like a foundation stone to building your house. They want to be the capstone. So they want these $100,000 plus parties that are the equivalent of, I made it. This is the last time things are going to all be about myself.

And so the expectation of the wedding culture is kind of a byproduct of the culture as a whole, that marriage becomes something that you do shortly after you finish school and right when you're starting work, something that you do once you've established yourself. I probably think ideal outcome is probably somewhere in between, and I think it varies for everybody's situation. Entrepreneurs probably should get married later, particularly men who are entrepreneurs, because they don't have as much of a timeline for having kids, because you don't really want to put your kids through all the risk of an early business, and you need to keep your burn low when you're starting a business.

Whereas people with more stable career trajectories probably should get married at younger ages. So it really kind of depends on I don't think there's no one size that fits all on when people should get married and how people should get married. But I think I got sidetracked. Was there something else that you wanted me to answer?

Ben BeeriNot specifically, no. We're just shooting back and forth here, and you've got some phenomenal ideas and phenomenal ideologies. And it's kind of interesting to think about, I mean, the way society is today with, I mean, people getting married and having kids, and that you see like, it all originates from, hey. What was primal, like, way back in the day before society was in place for people to have? Right? So back in the day, there used to be x amount of kids that was a much larger amount that was needed for survival. Right? You were in a village.

Um, you'd have, essentially,

Nick Pardinilike, masculine roles and feminine roles, and then the kids would be kind of raised to step into those roles so the entire village could kind of survive and then to see Yeah. I think it was not necessarily, like, the very primitive times, but it was the agricultural revolution when it started to make sense. Like, once you have a family farm, you stay in the same place. Every kid needs somebody to help with the farm. The only real risk is that once the parents die, how do they split up the farm? Like, that's why primo geniture was a thing. That's the time idea that you only pass on the estate to the oldest child.

Because the reason they do it that way, not because they just favored the oldest child naturally, it was because if you split up the farm too many ways, everybody would starve. And so the other children eventually would have to make their own pass. Pretty much the entire Southeast US was built on the second sons of nobility in Britain. When they knew that only their older brother was going to get all the land at home in England, they moved to America to start the plantations. So this has been a thing for a while. And then also the marriage age thing, I think, is a little bit skewed because the baby boom actually, like the post World War II era, was a record low for average age of getting married.

The curve was shaped like this. In the Great Depression and in the previous economic hard times right around the US Civil War, you had marriage ages quite high. For most of the nineteenth century, a lot of men didn't get married until well into their 30s. And women didn't get married till their late 20s in those time frames, too, on average. It dropped a lot for both men and women at the low. It was right around 1950, I think it was. And you can look up the numbers if I'm a little off on this, but I think it was like twenty two to '23 was men got married, and twenty to twenty one was the average age for women getting married. But that was because you had extreme levels of prosperity where back then, because the rest of the world was destroyed by the war, you can get a job at a factory or as a young executive out of school, or if you didn't go to school, sometimes even out of high school, that in today's money would pay closer to low 6 figures or even higher.

The cost of living was significantly lower than 2 because there was just a lower population and more resources per capita that it was equivalent of the same wealth profile as somebody at 30 today was at 20 back then. And that was an anomaly. I don't think we need to be going back to the era when people were getting married at 20. That was just a weird exception. And I think that the late marriage age thing is higher than usual, but I think that's just a cyclical thing as a product of stressful economic times for the reason I've said before. If you had more economic prosperity, particularly for younger people, I think the marriage age would go back to its historical mean, which is about 26 to 27 for men and 23

Ben Beeri25 for women. Yeah. And then there would be people having more kids because they'd have more time to have more kids. Yeah.

Nick PardiniActually, is the first time I've seen a statistic that the birth rate for women 40 is above teenagers. Wow. And if you look in general, a lot of the birth rate going down isn't fundamentally entirely a bad thing because in many parts of America and I don't have the full statistics on this, I got this from another podcast that I watched the birth rate for women 25 is higher or at the same level as it was twenty years ago. It's just women 25 are not having kids, and particularly teenagers are not having kids, which I think is a good thing. I don't think teen parents are resulting in good outcomes for children.

It's just a matter of we need to the way to fix the birth rate problem is you need to encourage the family that has maybe two kids right now to have a third, not these people who are saying that you should just try to have five to 10 kids. I'm from a very large family, and above a certain level, the logistics get hard and the parental attention dwindles. I think you'd be better off convincing more marginal families to have, say, three to five kids, then encouraging a few radicals who are afraid of the demographic crisis to be having seven to 10 kids.

Ben BeeriInteresting. Love for people to get to know you, right? I had an interesting

Nick Pardiniupbringing, which kind of influences how I have an understanding of the content that I talk about on my channel. I grew up in Newport Beach, California, which people know is a very new money town. It was more of a professional class, upper middle class town when I was born, but it was still a fairly wealthy place. Yet I was from a pretty large family. I was the oldest of five siblings, and so I kind of lived probably a more upper middle class lifestyle growing up in an environment of people who were either significantly wealthier, who had a similar financial background but had to split it with less kids.

And so that kind of provided me with a little bit of a different perspective. I also have a bunch of family members all across the class spectrum and in different countries around the world, and I had some ancestors who basically blew old money fortunes before I was born and learned about all those stories and my heritage. And it brought a lot of questions. And then after that, I went to college. And then college, while I was in college, learned from a former hedge fund manager who had this internship program at my school about that I didn't just have to wait till I was 60 and have my own nest egg of millions of dollars to manage money. People would pay me a fee to do it for them. And so I was like, that's kind of how I figured out. Because I've always liked stocks. My grandparents gave me stocks when I was 12 years old instead of cash, and that's what originally got me curious. And my grandparents were very influential in general for teaching me about finances and saving and investing at a very early age. This was something that was

really instilled in my upbringing to be very important about financial responsibility and about how money works. Even I didn't really know what economics was as a thing, I kind of built an intuition for it, being in a family not of small business owners. I am a fourth generation small business owner. My great grandfather, when he came to America from Italy, started a canned food business. My grandfather had a medical practice. My dad owns his own company. And now myself, with my wealth management firm currently, and my siblings and basically most of my uncles too, a lot of them are founders of businesses as well. So I kind of knew that this was a path, it was something I wanted to do, and I always looked at school and my career path of developing the skills, the expertise, the network, and the initial capital needed to go on my own. So I kind of always had that mindset built in.

And I also knew as my career fortunes changed one way or another or how my relationship to money, because class in a sense is not about how much money you have. You can be a middle class person and make more money than a professional class person. The thing is it's more about how your relationship is. Like a typical middle class person, their source of income is primarily from one employer. It's a high enough level that they can save for retirement and buy a house and do a lot of the classical trappings of a middle class lifestyle, though they're not just getting by or living paycheck to paycheck.

But still the bottom line is that their income is from one primary source and they don't really have any social connections within a reasonable amount of degrees of separation to the establishment elite and the people who make the world go round, for lack of a better term. Whereas people in the higher classes may make less money than the most successful middle class people, but they either have more degrees, closer degrees of separation to the elites, which is the establishment pyramid, or they have diversified their source of revenue over a series of clients, whether it's like a handful of clients that hire me to manage their money or and do so every year on a recurring basis. Or as in your case, it's anybody who's selling a product on your marketplace.

Like, even if our biggest client stopped using us tomorrow, we would not be out of business. Whereas an employee is essentially kind of like somebody who's selling their services but to only one person. And that's really kind of the biggest difference to being those on the independent track versus the middle class. And the institutional track, you still are mostly dependent on one person, but you have enough social connections, like within certain networks that you could kind of maintain your position that way and or like leverage those connections to be able to have somewhat other streams of income, but they're still generally tied to you're connected to one or a few powerful people.

And as you move up, there's different degrees. And I did a whole video on this. But as I kind of navigated through different levels of this and known people at different levels of this through my career and working in finance, you see the whole gambit, really, of people in these profiles. You wonder, why can I relate to some people better than other people? Why do certain people have certain political ideologies or certain underlying motivations for their decisions that may seem contradictory to on a pure dollars and cents thing, pure dollars and cents basis. My most popular video was this one called Why Old Money Supports the Left, and it was about this idea that a lot of people who are multigenerational, inherited wealth tend to support progressive politics, which in theory you would think that's contradictory because, wait, why would they support people who run on raising taxes and taking away wealth from wealthy people? But when you look at it from another perspective, what they're doing is if you've already made your money, you've already paid the taxes on it. You already are on the top of the social pyramid, and what it does is actually

make increased barriers to entry for your potential competitors, whether that's through taxes or regulations or a variety of other things. And so from that perspective you could see like there's actually multiple ways of forms of self interest or class interest that are not as directly obvious? And I try to explore a lot of these questions that people deep down kind of know what's going on but either can't verbalize it or struggle to fully kind of connect the dots. I'm not a conspiratorial person really at all. I try to have evidence and facts in everything I say. The challenge is probably I've read so many books and done a lot of research or talked to enough people about a lot of things. I don't know half the time where my knowledge comes from, but I deep down know that it's real. I don't know if you've ever experienced that problem.

Nonetheless, I try to have a and if it's something that's very controversial that I'm going to say, I do put in the citations where I got it, because I don't want to be misleading anybody or misrepresenting anybody. But my career really essentially is after I graduated from college, I struggled to kind of get into the industry because I graduated right after the financial crisis and there simply just weren't jobs. So I kind of did go a little bit of a more entrepreneurial path, and after doing that I made my big break at a bigger institution, and then I worked as an analyst and portfolio manager at various different buy side institutions and hedge funds, mostly here in California, but I did spend some time also living in Singapore.

And then I started my own research firm when I moved back here from Northern California. And I did that for a while, writing research for institutional investors and then, um, making some video commentary too. And then, um, I, just in my intellectual curiosity, got into some more of these obscure topics like this stuff I talk about on my YouTube channel that's more macro, that doesn't have an immediate trade tied to it. And I'd really just share with my clients. Maybe like, Nick, this is really interesting, but it's not really actionable. Stick to the actionable investment stuff for us, and you can just do that stuff for yourself.

And so I was like, I have these interesting ideas. Why don't I share them on YouTube? Especially this is shortly after the pandemic. People had more free time to watch this kind of stuff. So I was like, okay. I will put some of them up. And for the first three years, pretty much nobody watched my channel. But then, this is why I asked some of those things in the earlier video about things that are under the radar. I saw us on the radar some videos I made about social class two years before were all of a sudden getting traction without me promoting them or me sharing them or making any new videos on that content for months, over a year. And I was like, well, maybe I should try to go back to that say, go back to that topic because people are curious about it and it's interesting.

There's more stuff I wanted to do, but I didn't think people cared. And so I made another one. And that's kind of what turned my channel from a very small channel to what it is now. And also, the way I pivoted from research to wealth management was during the post NFT crash, the last big crypto bear market, the post pandemic bear market, '22, where a lot of these COVID related trades collapsed very quickly, a lot of people were asking me for help with managing their own money on a personal level. A of local high net worth individuals and younger people who might not hit that territory, but given their savings rates, rapidly on their way to doing it. They're calling me and be like, Nick, what should I do with my money?

Stock market doesn't seem as easy as it used to. And I got so many of these inquiries, I kind of pivoted away from research and at least research that I would sell to larger institutions and moved more towards doing the wealth management firm full time. This was a gradual process. It wasn't overnight. I focused more on that. And that seems to be where I was able to help more people at a much larger scale in a more direct way. This is kind of a law of responsibility, but it's rewarding that you're really allowing people to develop their path to financial freedom due to the research and the analysis and the investments to put them in the right places for their stages of life. So that's kind of a little bit about my professional track. On a personal level, the other thing that inspired a lot of the content I make is I've been really big into international travel.

I've lived in four different countries: The US, Singapore, France briefly, and Italy for my semester abroad, and I've been to 49 countries now, with the most recent one being Belgium this summer. By going to all these places, spending a seminar time overseas, I've also now gone to 48 of the 50 US states. I just have Kansas and Missouri, so I'm going go to Kansas City next year to wrap that up. We go on a thirty minute drive. We'll get that done for you. So Get you some barbecue. Yep. Get some barbecue and, just see the Great Plains. That's kind the last region of the country I haven't really fully explored.

And by just kind of being out there in a way and just trying a lot of new things, whether it's new hobbies, living in different cities, whether it's doing different experiences, going involved in somewhat like minded communities, at the same time asking unusual questions for people because maybe partially because I don't have the politeness filter or partially just because of my curiosity. I've gained a lot of insights on things that have helped me advance through this world and also

Ben Beerihave propelled my intellectual curiosity to do the deep research on intuitions I've had previously. Hopefully that answers your question. Yeah, no, awesome, awesome. And what, like when you're saying you went to 49 countries, like what drives you to like continue to go to all these different countries and have these different experiences?

Nick PardiniWell, a lot of it is just I grew up in a family that is really into travel. My grandparents came from Switzerland to The United States in the 50s, and my mom is a really adventurous woman. She always liked to have us go to new places, whereas my father's side of the family always liked to go to the same single family reunion destination in Northern California every year, and some people are more like that. But for me, I don't really like repeating myself. Like certain parts of my life, like my friends and my family and my personal relationships and like the city I live in. I like keeping that stable. I don't like turnover.

But like, in terms of like what I do in the business world, which is why I like the markets because there's always something, there's always some new development. There's always some new idea, or in my travels, I like more variety in that sense. And I feel like you have to somewhat experience things to truly understand and learn certain stuff, especially if it's not self destructive. Assuming you're financially responsible about it, don't think traveling is self destructive. Won't experiment in something that's going to hurt my long term health, physical or mentally, or damage my relationships.

But in terms of exploring new places, and also I'm a very big fan of history and geography. I read Atlas for Fun in the fourth and fifth grade. You give me a blank map and I could probably fill in every country and most major cities. We should test that. No, I'm kidding. I I would do that maybe on a future episode. You had the printed template,

Ben Beerimaybe that's for me to come back to do. All right. We've got get them a blank map for next time. But yeah,

Nick Pardinialso and I studied a lot of history, and so I wanted to like and history, the reason I'm fascinated with it, because it answers the question why. Geography answers the question where. Like, where are things and why do certain things happen in different places than others? And history is about why. Like, why are we here today? It's because somebody invented this technology. It's that professional sports leagues were established for X, Y, and Z, or the capital markets were invented by the Dutch to be able to finance their colonial empire.

There's always a reason why everything that you do exists, and I'm just amazed about the relative lack of curiosity that some people have with this. By traveling, I kind of see it and I have my own perspective and allows me to come up with new ideas. I feel like I always get a creativity boost when I travel and also helps me relax. I have a pretty intense life. If not four or more time zones east or two or more time zones west, like I'm disconnected enough from market hours, I cannot relax. I feel like I'm still kind of working.

I'm too in tune with things. And if you're far enough away, you can really kind of separate yourself, for a lack of a better term. So, yeah, I gained a lot of insights from all of that. Hopefully that answers your question.

Ben BeeriWhat is something that really sticks out to you from an experience that you've had while you've been traveling?

Nick PardiniA lot. Even most recently. This is the first time that I've traveled since I've built my YouTube channel, I had meetups overseas in three cities in Amsterdam, Zurich, and Rome. I was amazed that people who had only seen me on YouTube, who don't even speak English as their first language, would turn out and have in-depth financial and economic conversations with me on the other side of the world. I can have a much more unique experience where I can actually meet people from these places who are involved in the business community of these places or on their way and can hear directly perspective on a lot the dynamics of things that I read about or I research from a third party perspective.

And because of the tour, I've been able to meet new friends in 23 cities, basically, across the world. I'm going be doing it again next year. So that is something that was really unique. There are certain sports that I can't play anywhere else due to cost restrictions. For example, I went to Argentina in 2017 and I played polo. If I tried to play polo in California, not only would I need to have an expensive membership to a polo club, I would need to own at least one horse, probably four, and I'd have to take care of all of them, and I'd have have all this equipment and all this other thing. And this is why even people from fairly well-to-do backgrounds, like you're making a million dollars a year, you're probably still probably can't afford to maintain a polo life. Whereas in Argentina, you could fly down there, pay like 200 to $250 to be part of the Argentine Polo Day camp.

And I highly recommend doing this if you've gone down to South America. It's one the most fun experiences in my life. They'll pick you up from your hotel or Airbnb. You get breakfast, lunch, you get to learn how to play polo, you get to ride around the horse and play yourself, and then hang out at the pool and have some wine afterwards and ride home for less than a sporting event ticket for an NFL game. And I'm like, that's really cool. And there's a lot of other things like that, that there are certain things that you just can't do in your hometown. Unfortunately, I live in Southern California, so we can do most things here.

But I can't play polo here. I can't swim in a tropical beach where the water is 80 plus degrees like when I go to Hawaii or The Caribbean. So that's why I tend to have a bias for a lot of those places if I want a relaxing vacation. I can't see two thousand plus years of history like I can when I go to Europe or to Turkey or to Asia, which is why I like going to those places. Everywhere has that one thing that you just can't do in your hometown. So I think like yeah, I think the tour is a really interesting one. Think Argentine Polo Day was a good example.

And you also the strategy I think is you try to avoid the places that are popular on Instagram because the stuff that's easily seen on social media or YouTube, you can find on social media or YouTube. So why do you need to go? And the other thing too is in your niche, sports is actually a really good way to get to know certain parts of the world, particularly in America, like Middle America cities, like in certain towns like Cincinnati or Milwaukee or Nashville or the places outside, basically the Northeast and California, the best way to really get a vibe of the local culture is either going to a college football game, a college basketball game, or a baseball game, where people go more for the social experience and the atmosphere more than just the game. The NFL and the NBA have a pretty standardized experience at this point.

Same with hockey. But if you enjoy these more like college sports or baseball, it really gives you kind of a good idea of a local culture that you just can't get anywhere, especially in a sports crazy country like America. So whenever I go to these cities, made a priority this year. The only baseball game I went to this year was not even here in the Angels, even though that's typically the team I root for. I actually went to a Reds game in Cincinnati just because I happened to be in that part of the country. I thought, what a better way to have a unique experience in that city than to go to a Reds day game? And it was really cool.

So that's another example. And then there's also trying local foods in certain countries. There are certain parts of the world where you can't even import that certain fruit because of contamination risk. Southeast Asia has a lot of things. They're very difficult or very hard to find to eat in The United States. Or the way they feed their cows makes steaks taste different for a country. A steak in Argentina is a lot different than a steak in America or a steak in Italy. And it's because of the way they feed and treat the cows.

If I had to rank them in order, I'd probably put South America number one, North America number two, and Europe three in terms of continents for steak. Then there's that kind of dynamic too. And yeah, I've lost kind of the train of thought for the question, but those are kind of my answers. That's cool. That's cool. And it's amazing how there's different

Ben Beeripeople in different places who live differently. Like, we're all the same as human beings. We all have similar human needs. We all are born. We do x amount of things while we're alive, and then we die. But we live our lives in such different and diverse types of ways, and a lot of that is dependent on the culture of where

Nick Pardiniwe're at. Yeah. Other thing is it does brought me a lot of gratitude. Like, a lot of people who travel, particularly those who live in sheltered backgrounds who don't really realize and don't study history, they'll go to travel and they'll develop this attitude. I call it Europeanization, for a lack of a better term. So an American lives in Europe or goes for a long time and they start to develop a snooty, snobbish attitude, like, Oh, they do so much better in Europe than America. You guys are so simple minded and all focused on money and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, where somebody who actually understands history or somebody who's a business owner, particularly because I learned about how I've made a lot of friends to entrepreneurs in other places in the world. I realized how different the legal and regulatory system is for businesses in different parts of the world. And it makes us grateful, particularly being an American. And just I'm more grateful to the life I had and the background and the upbringing and the valleys I was taught. When I went to places,

I went to the opposite in many parts of the world that have very different value frameworks or very different religious backgrounds or very different ways they structure their economy and their society, it was very eye opening. I realized, look, I'm so grateful that I'm in a place that is built based on a certain code of values and a certain legal and economic structure that if I wasn't and I was born in a different place, I would not have what I have now. I wouldn't have the opportunities. I wouldn't have the freedom. I wouldn't have the values that I'm embedded in now to help me develop the life that I do. And I think that if you ever feel like that your life is not doing so well or you have the means to do it, I recommend going to a place that is very different than yours and you'll realize that grass isn't always greener.

Again, I'm assuming you're a little bit more experienced in the world. You're not like a college student who thinks that the latest place they went to is the greatest ever. Because living as a tourist somewhere or experience as a tourist is very different than living there as a resident. And I think a lot people who do travel fail to accept that distinction.

Ben BeeriIt's interesting because you get culture shock when you go different places. I remember going to Europe and it's like all of a sudden, it's like, hey, you're sitting down for lunch, it can take a little bit longer than over here. It's like you're chilling. You're sitting down. It can take you an hour or two to eat, and you're just being kind of leisurely. Meanwhile, it's like here we're in California. It's go go go lunchtime. Time for me to get a sandwich and scarf it down as quickly as possible.

Nick PardiniYeah. There are certain places that are even more go go than California, like New York City, or certain cities in Asia. There are different paces of life everywhere as well. What I recommend for people who want to get more involved in exploring the world is first make sure that you don't spend too much of a percentage of your income on it, other and second, make sure you're doing something you really can't do at home. Like if you're going to go somewhere just because it's slightly cheaper, the amount of money you spend on the flight in the hotel will more than wash away that. I don't recommend traveling for a relative bargain for a specific activity. Polo might be the rare exception to that, but there's other things to do in Argentina as well.

The other thing I don't really recommend doing is just checking off a bunch of places and sightseeing spots and then going to a few restaurants for brunches and dinner and going to bed. That's what a lot of common travel patterns are. But I think the first step is you should go, if you haven't left your home state, take a road trip to other states in The United States. People from places like California and Greater New York, surprisingly a lot of them have never left. I have people in Mohsos in my life who have never left not just California but Northern California.

It baffles me, but there are some and it's not really an income or wealth thing, it's just they just don't have as much curiosity for that kind of thing. Whereas there are others who just go everywhere just to check it off a box, and I kind of had a little bit of that habit when I was in my college years, but I've kind of learned my lesson since then. And the thing is the next step, assuming you've done that, is to go to the especially as us Americans, it might be different for other countries where you are in the land of your ancestors is to go visit the land of your ancestors if you know what it is. Like for me, I'm half Swiss, so I know that the land of my ancestors are two specific towns in Switzerland.

And when you go there, it's like a different vibe. You get a homeland kind of feel to it, and it's different enough that it stimulates you, but it's familiar enough at a deeper level that it's a little bit less of a culture shock, and you get some sort of experience to kind of see, like, where your roots are. And I recommend that highly, assuming your country is geopolitically safe to do it and there's no war going on, of course.

Ben BeeriWe all have different motives for why we would want to travel as well. Yeah.

Nick PardiniI think I did a video about this called Travel the Escapism for the Upper Classes. It's the idea that travel, depending on your social class, is very different. But a lot of people travel simply to escape because they don't like their actual life or their reputation in their hometown is so destroyed they need to move and rebuild elsewhere. I remember when I had a corporate job and I liked my job, but I didn't like my life outside of work and I didn't like the city I was living in. So I made a priority. Every three day weekend or longer that I had off, I was on a plane and gone somewhere, whether it was just to come here to visit my family or flying across the world. This is when I took my trips to South America and to Turkey and to Sweden and a variety of other places.

I explored a lot of the country because I had enough of a high paying job and no wife or kids that I could afford to do it. But also, I just didn't really like the city I was living in. The value of me just simply getting on the plane and getting out paid for the whole trip, essentially. Whereas now I actually like where I live, so I'm not as motivated to travel. Like I said, going most holidays, I stay here, like, especially around the holidays, like Christmas. Like, I'm not gonna last two weeks of the year, This is a perfect place to spend Christmas news. Why wouldn't you go anywhere? Totally. But, like, now it's but I still have that curiosity, and I get that itch, especially since, like, during, like, the pandemic era, I took, like, kind of a break, and I didn't really leave the country really for three plus years.

It was like almost four years that I left. And if you count outside of North America, it had been six years since I had gone anywhere outside of this continent. And so I was like, I got the itch again, and I tried to one new place within North America and one new place outside of North America, ideally per year.

Ben BeeriHas there ever been a spot you've gone to that you just I regret going here? Yeah.

Nick PardiniBut it wasn't my choice. It was a family vacation. I think the worst place that I ever went to was Lake Powell. I don't know if you're familiar with that. It's this lake that's in between Utah and Arizona and the desert. The water is super cold, but it's like 100 degrees in the summer, the whole houseboating thing. It a comedy of disasters and errors, and it was the worst vacation of my life, not even close. What made it bad? It was uncomfortable because, like, just the cooling systems on the boats didn't work very well.

I had to be around, like, certain relatives I did not get along with that well at the time. Again, the extreme heat and the extreme cold of the water making it not refreshing, houseboats I don't know I think there's not much to do on a houseboat, especially when you're like a 14 year old. You're just seeing similar cliffs and water, and this is like a desert that's not that much life. There's not really that much going on. It's a very rural, remote area. I, yeah, I got bored fairly quickly.

Ben BeeriIs it about where you go or who you go with?

Nick PardiniI think it's where I went for this one because I I like my family, pretty much all of them. So, if we did the same people because I've been with the same people at different places like Switzerland, for example, or Santa Barbara, and I enjoyed it. That was definitely more the location. Yeah, there are certain other places that I didn't particularly enjoy the trip, but they're usually because it was arguments within the family on voting where to go, I lost that debate. And sometimes that's the nature of when you travel with groups of people, is not everybody's going to agree. And sometimes, especially since I'm more of a contrarian naturally in a lot of ways, I lose the vote on a lot of these things. And I'm trying to think almost every trip that I really didn't like going was because of that or I misperceived. Like a city I didn't like very much was Brussels and Belgium. Overall, I loved my trip to Europe this summer, but I had one day in Brussels between my time in Bruges and my flight back to Switzerland,

and I just wasn't very impressed with the city, to be quite honest, for a variety of reasons. I was like, It's probably a bad call to go here, but I don't regret it because have I curiosity about it. I'd always be on my mind like, I What really miss down on something in Brussels? It's like the capital of the European Union. I got to go see it at least. That's a lot of places I may not have enjoyed perfectly, but there were some other valuable lesson I gained. For example, I went to India when I was in college with my mother.

I was not really a first choice in my place. She wanted to go, and I wanted to not have her go alone, so I joined her. Did I particularly have the best vacation of my life? No, but the experience revived my religious faith in Roman Catholicism through seeing a culture very different than my own. And also I got to see the Taj Mahal, which is one of the most beautiful buildings in the world, probably only second to St. Peter's Basilica in Rome. And even though I had a lot of hassle doing that trip, I didn't entirely enjoy a lot of the things, and I got pretty sick after because of just the exposure to diseases.

After that, I don't regret going, And that kind of applies to most places I go. Some of them are just not that great, but I'm like, Hey, at least I got to see it. You'd have this lingering curiosity if you didn't do it. And also I've become, as I've gotten older, pretty smart about the places where I don't think they are worth going, and I'm just not going to do them.

Ben BeeriIt's interesting because from the trips that I've taken, I've kind of gathered that you become a certain type of like, you become a certain person at certain destinations. It's like when you're no longer, like, stuck in your home, society or where you're at or your regular structures or your regular routine, you end up falling back into more of, like, who you are as a person in this random place halfway across the world, and it's like, what are some patterns where you just realize you're like, I didn't really know that side of me before I did this, but

Nick Pardinithat is who I am. Yeah. I generally am more adventurous when I'm on the road. Like, I will do things that I normally would not do at home, whether due to fear of social embarrassment, whether just being used to my routine, or whether there's some novelty factor. For example, there are certain countries where I hate the cuisine of their food, but I'll eat it while I'm there just because I wonder if the real version is different or is better. It's like you kind of that that and there's many other examples of things like that. Like, don't really when I used to surf, I did surf occasionally here in Orange County, but I surfed way more when I traveled.

I think partially because the water was warmer and the wave pattern was a little smoother, but also it's like, when am I gonna have a chance to surf in Bali? When am I gonna have a chance to surf in Hawaii or in South America or Mexico? Um, whereas I could theoretically surf in Orange County San Diego just about every day, and then the water's cold and I'm more likely to get not as pleasant of experience for a variety of reasons. I tend to be a little bit more adventurous when I'm on the road than when I'm at home. That's the thing I have noticed. And your state of mind changes at times. It's kind of interesting.

Yeah. And I do recommend it particularly for people who have their footing set but are not yet have children. Even when you're married, should probably still travel because you just take your husband or wife with you. But that's probably the ideal time. Then also once you have kids over the age of, say, like, eight, because then they could come with you and actually remember it.

Ben BeeriI feel like you also get to expand your comfort zones when you're gone. Yeah. You you'll do things that you normally don't do

Nick Pardinithat ends up, like, adding to the person that you are when you come back. And the other thing it does, and it's not just traveling, but just flipping your routine, is slowing the perception of time. Like, I've never been in the studio before. I've never done a podcast with you, Ben, And this time has gone slower than I thought. I thought we've been here for several hours, and it's actually been a lot less. And there's a lot of science to this. And if you want your life to not be perceived to be just going like a blur, You need to mix up different things. You don't need a mix of everything. Don't need to move out of your town. You don't need to have a different romantic partner. You don't need to, like, reset all your friends. No. But it's just, like, simple things. Like, you take a different path to your office driving than you do a different day. Or you eat at a different restaurant on a Saturday than you normally would.

Or you create a podcast about a different topic than you normally would. All these things kind of compound. And I'm in my 30s, but I feel like I've lived just because of a lot of the stuff I have done that's unique I feel like I've lived fifty plus years of life. You'll say, oh, high school is just like yesterday. Have ever heard that comment before? Or college is just like yesterday?

Ben BeeriWell, you've heard the saying time is an illusion. Whereas I feel like that

Nick Pardiniwas a whole century ago, honestly. I don't even remember. I have some memories of it if I really deep down would think, but it feels like a whole another world and a whole another era. I have the opposite view of this. Even two years ago, my life was so different than it is now that two years ago probably feels like five or ten years ago just because of all the changes and different things I've done. I feel like a lot of people could use that because I had the opposite problem growing up as a kid. When you're in school, you have the same pattern. You have class and you have certain holiday breaks, and then you just go through your Monday and Friday typical schedule, the same classes, same homework, the same tests, the same sports you do, the same random place you go to hang out with your friends, or if you don't have friends, the same video games you play.

I know because I was on both sides of those coins at different points in my life. And it just becomes a blur. Like, I remember always the second half of the school year going faster than the first half, even though they're the same amount of calendar days. And I was wondering why? Because the first half had breaks, like, unique things did. Like, your my birthday is in the first is in the fall. You have Thanksgiving. You have Christmas. You have a lot of these, like, unique seasonal shifts that kind of break the monotony. Whereas, like, from January to May or June, there's less of the holiday breaks.

And even if there are three weekends, they're not things where they change the decorations of the environment or have unique traditions. It's just like a day off, a President's Day or something like that. And just have kind of, um, a and so it just goes by super fast. And I recognized this pattern by the time I was in high school. And I was like, wait, I hear all these stories of people saying, oh, if you think life goes fast now, wait till you're 30. It's going to feel like a decade. It's going to feel like a month. And I'm like, I never want that to happen.

I want to actually truly maximize this experience on this Earth. There's just so much things to do. I want to make sure that I live long enough that's why I prioritize my health to do all of them. And second, I want to feel like that I'm truly, living the moment and experiencing things. I don't just have my life go by a blur when I'm in my 50s or 60s, and I'll be like, What happened to my life? I think I've done a fairly good job of that since I finished college.

Ben BeeriI don't know if you've ever had that kind of experience. It's interesting, right? Because there are certain moments of your life where you're truly present in the moment. And as a result of that, you get to experience that time slower. And that time gets to be more significant in your life, and you end up remembering more of it because you're actually there. You're actually there doing the thing that you're doing, and you're just you're appreciating it versus it's like, another day at work, another week at work, another day at school, another week at school, another month at school. All of a sudden, it's like, okay. Hey. Mean, it's like we've got all these different sections. Right? I mean, tell me about specific day in elementary school. You're not gonna remember. It's like, yeah, elementary school's all a blur. It's like, went there k through five, and all these different years happened.

For me, things ended up getting interesting because I went to middle school, and then I got kicked out of middle school. And then I went to high school, uh, and it was just some not very not a good situation for me. And it's like, I remember that because as wild as things were and as uncomfortable as things were and as hectic as things were for me at that high school, there was never a dull day over there. And it was interesting, and I remember the process of how do I get myself out of here. Like, part of it was for safety purposes.

The other part of it was for my own sanity. Yeah. And I remember that time going by slower. I was a lot press more present. I was trying to get myself out of that situation. And it's like when I go back and I look at my schooling, like, growing up when I was a kid, it's like, hey. When things were average and monotonous and nothing interesting was going on, you don't really remember that. So I think what ends up happening in life when things are memorable, whether on the good side of the scale or the bad side of the scale, you slow down time and you remember it, and then that time becomes that becomes more significant to you later on in life. You can recall that stuff. Yeah. I think that's what travel is a shortcut for.

Nick PardiniIt creates more of those moments. Most of the quality time I spent in my family and my life, I remember through my travels. I have more memories of the times we've gone places together than just being here at home. Like, mean, we spent way more time here at home Yeah. Over the years, but a lot of it, again, becomes kind of a blur. But it's it's interesting. Like, sometimes you'll have it, like think of, like, hey. You'll see a friend that you haven't seen in a while. Yeah. You'll have an interaction with him. Interaction

Ben Beerilasts an afternoon. You're not gonna see that friend for another year or two, but that interaction sticks out to you. You're like, wow. I remember this afternoon with this person. I remember what we did. I remember where we ate. I remember what we ate. And it's interesting to think about that. It's like, I may not see this person for another couple of years or whatever, but I remember a time we got together, and I'll probably remember the next time we get together. And it's just kind of interesting that when things aren't as frequent in your life, you end up bringing yourself into a place where you're more willing to experience them thoroughly.

And those are the experiences that stick out in life and that you can recall on. It's like it's funny. Like, I remember I remember very vividly, and at this point, we're probably a few years ago, but I had this one high school teacher who was awesome. Loved the guy. I'll give you a shout out. His name is Bill Collins. When I was at, um, my independent study high school, After I went to my remedial high school, that didn't work out very well. And Bill was the first teacher that I would say kind of, like, believed in me as a person.

And a few years went by, I didn't really see him. And I remember very distinctly, like, couple of years ago, meeting with him for lunch. Came by, we had lunch, we sat down. Uh, I remember bringing him by my company's warehouse to kinda check things out. And it's like, hey, man. Like, you were right. I wasn't the total lost cause. And it's like, that was the most recent time I saw him, it was a few years ago at this point, and, like, I'm really grateful for that time. I hadn't seen him for a while before that, but it's cool to sit there and recall. It's like, hey. I got to spend meaningful time with a meaningful person, and it's like, I still remember it today.

But then there's people that you see every day. It could be a coworker or a classmate or whatever it is, and it's just like, we worked together for three years. Like, nothing specific to recall. Yeah.

Nick PardiniI think also shaping your life in terms of a narrative helps with your memory too. Like, if there's like a like a pattern or a theme of why you've done everything or like a story arc, it's easier to remember than if it's just kind of aimless. Totally.

Ben BeeriLike we end up in spots where it's like we sit there and we think and also like what do we tell ourselves? Like what's the story that we tell ourselves about that narrative? And it's like, it like does it come in a positive connotation or does it come in a negative connotation? Like, I remember for me, like, getting kicked out of middle school and going through a place of, hey. Like, I'm now in a remedial high school. Like, this high school is one step up from juvenile hall. Police are coming to the school on a daily basis.

I'm getting threatened by other students. Like, I have to stand up for myself. I have to do certain things I have to do to survive. I remember looking at that I was younger in a negative connotation, like, hey. This was bad. This shaped my life negatively. Like, I don't want anything to do with this. And I look at it now, and I can really view it in a positive connotation because it built character. It made me who I am today. I realized that if I can go through that and survive that era of my life, that there is plenty of other things that I could go through that were likely not going to be as difficult as that and get to a spot where it's like, hey, okay, guess what? We've got a eighteen hour workday ahead. Well, okay. Don't be a bitch. Just power through it. You'll get to sleep after the day's over, and you can do it again the next day type of thing. But it's like there's so many things that occur in our lives that are really, like, not as challenging as it could be or should be.

And it's just it really all depends on the mindset that we've built over time and the connotation which we view it in. It's like, hey. Is this positive? Is this negative? And the truth is is we rush to assign a connotation to it when it really doesn't matter. It just is. Hey. You tripped and fell and you sprained your wrist. Well, that's what happened. Like, it just is. Like, it's not a good thing. It's not a bad thing. I mean, you go and you win the lottery and you win, not the real lottery, but you win a 100 or $200.

Not a good thing. It's not a bad thing. Even by the way, even if you go and you win millions of dollars, right, can you view it as, hey. It just is. It's not good. It's not bad. It just is. To the world. You can yeah.

Nick PardiniSometimes that's good to manage downside things, but you also want to be able to feel the joys in life as well, which is why I don't entirely buy into stoic philosophy because it's kind of like Buddhism in the sense where it just kind of preaches for just an intentional indifference. It might help you get through bad times,

Ben Beeribut, like, if you're intentionally indifferent about everything, like, it kinda makes all the things that are really I wouldn't I wouldn't say indifferent. I would say more so having the mindset of whatever's coming up. Like, appreciate it for what it is. Hey, if I've got bad times coming up, I appreciate the bad times because they are going to form me into a person that is building its character throughout this process, and I'm going to become a better person as a result of this. Yeah, that's a different perspective. And if I have a good time that's coming up, well, I'm going to enjoy the experience and appreciate the experience,

Nick Pardiniand that is also going to build my character, and that is also going to make me a better person. Yeah, that's a better way of putting it. And also, just when you do have good times, you need to make sure you can't just assume it's permanently repeatable because that's where a lot of hubris comes in. You know, it's so interesting because we never really know, like, the good times that we're having. Like, don't actually know that we're experiencing something for the last time when we are. A lot of social resentment in our society now is because a lot of us grew up in the nineties, which was arguably the best time to be alive, especially for middle class living standards.

When your childhood was in the golden age of American history or one of the golden ages, we've had several of them and then you have relatively harder times in your adult life, it's easy to create a lot of disillusionment with people. I did a video about this, the why the nineties are the best time to be alive. Based on many human development and economic growth based metrics and a relatively affordability of a lot of basic cost of living stuff back then. It arguably was, especially for the middle 70% of the population.

The internet's winner take all impacts on society didn't really happen to the same degree as they do now then. A lot of people expected that's just what normal was because this boom lasted for eleven years, basically from the fall of the Berlin Wall to nineeleven. And then when you went back to normal or some parts of that more tough economic times, people are like, Why can't you just go back to the 90s when everything was good? But they don't realize that that was a golden age and weren't really just assumed that it would be repeating. And now we're of the opposite. We're in a relative dark age, I think arguably for the last twenty years arguably, or at least from 2008 to 2024, you could argue it was a relative dark age for The US economy and for economic living standards growth in Western countries.

People think, this is just normal now. Life's just always going have to suck, or The cost of living is always going to go up faster than my wages, or whatever other excuse that we talked about before. What it really is that we might just have been going through a downturn or a fourth turning, and there might be better days ahead. So it kind of works both ways. People think that the current status quo is kind of or at least the last decade of their life is what is normal when you might be in an aberration, whether it's a good aberration or a bad aberration.

Ben BeeriTotally. And I believe you can learn. I believe you can grow from both. And it's just it's cool. I'm grateful that I've been able to adopt that perspective because, like, I've used been able like, I used to look at things like, hey. Like, this is gonna be tough. I'm gonna brace for whatever's coming up. But the reality of the situation is is the odds of us even being born as people is, like, what is it? One in trillions or whatever it is to even be, like, conceived and born. And it's, like, the fact that we're out here getting to live this human experience however long we get to live it for. Like, as a fellow, like, entrepreneur, how do you feel about, like, all these time

Nick Pardinipublished stats, like, you've got a one in 10 chance of your business lasting five years, or you have a 6% chance of getting into a good university or whatever. The odds of anything worth having are extremely low. I

Ben Beeriwanna hear what your thoughts are because I have some data. Well, so I think the odds on, like you said, the odds of anything that's worth having are significantly against you. Like, are going to fail on a, like, whatever basis there is. I mean, even if you talk about something as simp like, something as Nuance says, hey, I want to go and make a friend, like an actual lasting friendship of however many years. Right? There is like, you are 99% likely to fail at maintaining a five year friendship with any human being that you walk up to and meet randomly.

Yeah. Like, you're going to go and meet somebody. Hey. I meet like, I met you a few years ago. Right? We were able to form a friendship that's lasted Yeah. These last few years. And I'm very grateful for you, very grateful having you in my life. It's been great. I've really, really enjoyed getting to know you. And I sit there and I think, how many people do you talk to, do you connect with, do you make friends with? And then to what depth does that friendship form and how long does it last? Because so often, like, things don't last. In order for things to last, they need a certain amount of work.

And just statistically speaking, it just doesn't like, the odds are that it's more likely to fail, but having a friendship is one of the greatest things that you can have in life. And if you completely take that away knowing it's like, hey, this is 99% likely to fail. Well, if you don't try, it's a 100% likely to fail. And I think those things in life that are 90% 99% likely to fail, those are the greatest things to have. It's like I'm about to come up on ten years in business Yeah. For Golden State memorabilia, and I'm extremely grateful for that. Right? And, I mean, again, if I was to look at the statistics of what are the odds of a business starting being profitable and lasting for ten years and having a team of employees. Right? Again, likely, 99% of businesses do not achieve that. Right? So it's like so I sit there, and when I look at something that's 99% likely to fail, I view that as a privilege to give it a try.

Uh, by the way, we're here. We're having a podcast. We're talking. Another thing that is also statistically 99% likely to not reach a certain audience or area of, say, monetization or spread a message, but what is the metric of success that you're looking for? Right? And for me, it's like, hey. Is there one person that will tune into the episode and take something that is important to them or significant to them or they can apply to their lives and make the world a better place and become a more authentic version of themselves? And it's just interesting to think about the things that are 99% likely to fail that are worth trying because if you get them, the feeling of having them is amazing. Yeah. I mean, I think the solution to this is increasing the denominator.

Nick PardiniLike, if something has a low odds of success, that can work in your favor because if you try enough times, the odds will eventually shift from going against you to when you fail. Spearhead was not the first business I started. If I quit on the first business I started, I wouldn't be sitting here right now. That's also the same approach with my YouTube channel. I didn't create it to be a big YouTube channel. I created Analyze Finance with Nick just to share some interesting ideas of finance and hopefully somebody learns something that they can apply to their life and make better decisions or just be a little bit more knowledgeable.

And one person's life is better because of the stuff I've made, it was probably worth it. The channel is now at a size, and depending on when we release this, it could be even bigger, that my channel is bigger than 99.9% of YouTube channels and I never thought I'd get this place. Same with my business world, same with any friendships I've had. When you go to an event, a social event, meet friends, like two thirds of them out at the bat, don't even wanna talk to. Yeah. And then within the one third you do wanna talk to, like what are the chances any of you're gonna actually

Ben BeeriWell, see more than the first that they actually wanna talk to you? Yeah. That too. And then that you go and you talk to them, and then you guys actually, like, connect well,

Nick Pardiniand that you can actually form, like, a lasting relationship. Right? And the odds become even slimmer when it comes to meeting a significant other. Yeah. Like, I mean, if you think, oh, your first date you ever go on your life should go well, and if you didn't, you're gonna be alone. That's ridiculous.

Ben BeeriYou know, I think there was a stat out there, and it's interesting because it's like so, like, Steph Curry practices, like, 500 shots a day, like, every day. He's been playing in the NBA for seventeen years. That's three hundred sixty five days times 500. You do some math on that. Right? And he's been practicing long before he was in the NBA. Yeah. And, essentially, the guy's taken millions of shots, three point shots to get them up and to become the best that he could do. And he's made about 4,000 plus three pointers in the NBA, which is more than anybody else. And it's like, he's taken millions of shots so he could be as optimized as he can when he shoots his shots in the NBA, which he shoots about I think he makes about 40 ish percent of his threes Yeah. Which the elite players, that's all they make, 40% of their shots. So he's attempted about 10,000 shots in the NBA off of the millions that he's taken in practice, made about four thousands of 4,000 of them, and the moral of that is is

less than 1% of the stuff that occurs in your life actually counts. Yeah. But the less than 1% of the stuff that counts

Nick Pardinicounts for such a more significant percentage than all the other stuff. Know what what your effort results in that thing. You, like, that's that's so you have to still put in the effort because you don't know, like, what stuff's actually gonna lead to the outcome, what stuff is extraneous. Totally. Totally. But, yeah, thanks for taking the time to do this. Then I thought this was a great conversation. Absolutely love having you on today, Nick. It was really great. Where can our audience connect with you? Where can they see the stuff that you're doing further? I think it's few ways. You can go on my YouTube channel, Analyzing Finance with Nick. They could join my Substack, which is called Nick's Present Value or just nickpartadini.substack.com to find that. And if you join, you get a free access to an e book of my top 100 books recommended reading list for the stuff on finance, social class, economics, etc. You can also reach out to me via email at afwithnikgmail, which is my YouTube related email.

You can also find me on my website, nickpardini.com. Amazing, amazing. Well,

Ben BeeriI really appreciate having you on today, Nick. I mean, such a great conversation. I mean, we touched on so many different topics. And if anything resonated with any of you guys in today's episode, uh, we'd love for you to share it with your friends. Uh, give us a like. Comment. Let us know what you think. We're always open to having feedback. Uh, really enjoyed having you on the authentic journey, Nick. You can reach us on Instagram at the authentic journey pod. I'm your host, Ben Beeri. You can reach me at benbeeri on Instagram at benbeeri.

And we'll see you on the next episode of The Authentic Journey.