Adam Cox: Hypnotic Wealth and the Psychology of Money

This transcript is auto-generated and lightly edited for readability, it may contain errors.

[0:00] Sammie Ellard-King: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Money Gains podcast. This is your host, Sammie Ellard-King, and today my guest is Adam Cox. Now, Adam was a self-made millionaire at the age of just 27, having launched his own PR agency in his early 20s. But that is not all. Adam is a hypnotherapist and he has treated celebrities, CEOs, and even royalty along the way. He’s the host of two podcasts in the iTunes charts and has a new business called Hypnotic Wealth, which is what we talk about today, where he helps people with financial roadblocks that could be yourself, CEOs, anyone across the world with their finances. And what he does is hypnotize you essentially to create these new pathways in your brain which you can access and get over these financial roadblocks. It’s such an interesting conversation. We discuss all about this on today’s episode. But if you are listening on YouTube, please do whack that subscribe button. If you’re on Apple or Spotify, please do hit the review button and hit the follow as well. It really does help the show grow. And we really do appreciate you guys. But for now, let’s get started on the Money Gains Podcast. So Adam, welcome to the Money Gains Podcast, man. How are you doing? You well?

[1:33] Adam Cox: I’m very well indeed. It’s a privilege to be here. Thank you. It’s good to have you. Um yeah, I your CV is incredible. I was, you know, reading all about what you’ve been doing to date. Um and yeah, wow, like what a CV. Would you mind updating the audience about what you’ve been up to today? Yeah. So I had an interesting part, some of which isn’t on the CV. So um I was a very shy, introverted teenager, um, which caused problems. Uh, when I moved to university to study psychology, um, a few chain events happened that led me to have severe social anxiety. So, in effect, I was a recluse for about a year. I was only leaving my apartment to get essential groceries at kind of 24-hour Sainsbury’s, coming back, uh, avoiding people. So I now I work a lot of people with phobias. My phobia was humans, and it’s very difficult to live in a world with 8 billion humans. Um, so I kind of went on a journey to say, well, I don’t think I’m depressed. I don’t think I have anxiety, I think I’m creating this myself. So I would late night go into the psychology department of the library when there was no people around and just learn and thought, I want to fix myself. And that’s where my journey of managing my own emotions and my own belief systems started. It took me about two years to get to a place where I could kind of be around people again. But what I found is that inadvertently, by fixing myself and dealing with severe anxiety, I could also deal with anxiety in different areas. So because I was shine introverted, I went into uh the world of media, I worked in a radio station, and I chose the career that would force me so far out of my comfort zone. I chose sales because it’s you have to deal with people and you have to deal with communication. And then I went from uh radio to PR and at the age of 23 felt that I’d acquired some skills and wanted to be uh self-employed, set up my own agency. On paper, became a self-made millionaire uh at 27. I’m saying this to someone that understands finance. On paper is very different from having the money in your account. Yeah, that’s liabilities. You know, technically I was a millionaire, but was not liquid at any point. Yeah. I had a business that was generating cash flow. Um, with that cash flow, I’m not extravagant, you know, I don’t feel like wasting money. I didn’t need the money. Weirdly, I had a dream at one point of when I was kind of like this anxious teenager. Oh, I need the Lamborghini. But when I had enough money for a Lamborghini, it was the most ridiculous decision in the world. Why not buy another property that I could get cash flow forever? So I went on this journey, and actually it was at the age of 35 where I felt like financially I was in a very secure position, but not getting the same level of fulfillment. And it was psychology and mental health that I kept kind of being drawn back to. Those were the books that I was reading just because I was interested in them. So at the age of 35, uh, literally overnight, signed up to do a hypnotherapy course, um, got distinctions, very good grades, and then because I had a back background in business, decided where else, other than Harley Street, would I set up a hypnotherapy practice? And then as a combination of running a PR agency but also having a practice in Harley Street, managed to get high-profile clients but also high-profile media coverage. Um then the the short version of the story is COVID came along. Harley Street was not a good idea at that particular point when you’ve got high rents and no clients seeing face to face. I launched a podcast called The Hypnotist, which is now one of the world’s most popular hypnotherapy podcasts. Yesterday I just found out I was number one in the mental health charts. Okay, it’s Bermuda, uh tiny island, but it’s still number one in the mental health charts. So it’s been a it’s been a crazy journey, but there’s two passions of mine, and one is money and finance, and and the second is hypnotherapy and mental health. So recently I’ve launched a course called Hypnotic Wealth, which is a fusion of these two passions of mine.

[5:32] Sammie Ellard-King: Wow, I love that CV. And you you you’ve actually um you’ve actually performed hypnotherapy on quite some interesting individuals as well. Do you care to let us know who? Yeah, well, I mean, the the nature of hypnotherapy is that unless I’ve got permission from them, um, I have to have confidentiality. Sometimes I train with clients that um they could tell me they’ve murdered someone. I’m not gonna reveal that. It’s that level of confidentiality. There’s some exceptions to that where part of me doing hypnotherapy was agreed, sometimes because I did it free in exchange for feedback or testimonials. So there was a uh, I mean, I have worked with members of royalty, um, not the not the British monarchy, but royalty in in different parts of the world. Regularly worked with leaders of businesses, so CEOs and C-suite uh individuals, because they want to go to someone that has a track record, time is their scarce resource, not money. Um, but in terms of celebrities, I’ve worked with kind of pop stars and girl bands. Don’t know if you remember what was that band uh in the in the 90s, um Cleopatra. I don’t know if you remember those.

[6:34] Sammie Ellard-King: Oh, yeah. Oh yeah. And and all three of the sisters I was I was kind of working with um them. Then there was a reality TV um personality called Zara McDermott, and um she had achieved some recognition from being on Love Island, wanted a career in music, but had a childhood experience where she was mocked in front of classmates and had a real fear of performing in in public. We did a session in in Harley Street, and within four months of that, she’s performing on the biggest music TV show in in the UK, Celebrity X Factor. Um, didn’t win it. It would have been great for my CV if she if she’d have won it following that hypnotherapy session with me. But but the fact that she was able to perform to a huge live audience, but also to an even bigger TV audience months after you know having effectively panic attacks and anxiety at just a small audience, that that’s quite a big deal. So I I always focus on how do I deliver results, but the vast majority of my clients I can ever talk about because confidentiality is built into their agreement.

[7:38] Sammie Ellard-King: So obviously, a lot of people will be out there thinking, you know, some people will have an understanding of hypnotherapy, others won’t. Um, you know, it’s not swinging a clock in front of your face. What is the process that you go through? Because actually, I was talking to someone about this. We were at an event this week, and uh a money coach is deep into the psychology, and we were talking about hypnotherapy, and she said a lot of it is about relaxing the mind so you can change the neurons within the brain. Is that right? Or am I totally off? Yeah, I mean that there’s some truth to that. I mean, every your hand movements there weren’t conscious. That’s neural pathways that are pre-built. You know, if I was in the room with you and threw a ball at you, you could catch it without thinking about it. How’s that happening? It’s unconscious neural pathways. You have a pattern to know to detect in rapid time, ball traveling through air. To teach a robot to catch a ball traveling through air, it would need millions of pounds worth of sensors and algorithms and kind of chips. As humans, we can do that unconsciously without thinking about it. So these neural pathways are there. Neurons are just the building blocks of a neural pathway. A neural pathway is just something that once it’s built effectively, you’ve learned it, if that makes sense. So you don’t have to learn how to walk every day or learn how to drive every day. Those neural pathways are there. A lot of what hypnotherapy is, is accepting a strange premise. And that is if you consider that a lot of what you do on autopilot is like a trance state. So if I want to see lots of people in hypnotic trance, I don’t go to a stage hypnosis show. I see people on the London Underground. As a hypnotist, everyone is in a trance. Yeah. You have something called somnambulism and an arm catalepsy where your arm is like rigid. Look at everyone on the on the on the metro and on the underground, looking into their phone, deep in trance, they have no idea. Pickpockets, of course, take advantage of the fact that all the focus is inward. But my job as a hypnotherapist is to get people in these trance states, and almost that’s kind of distracting the gatekeeper, gatekeeper of of kind of beliefs and thoughts. And while they’re distracted, you’re actually able to make quite useful changes because for a lot of people, they don’t audit their belief system. They’re they’re just walking around with beliefs that they’ve accumulated over their lifetime because of something they they heard or you know, people they grew up with, or something they saw on social media, and they’re just walking robots with all these belief systems they’ve kind of collected. Um, some of them are useful, a lot of them aren’t. And those ones that aren’t useful can cause real problems. Um, so you know, you don’t have to think about blinking or breathing or walking, but imagine that every time you got stressed, you uh started binging on chocolate and ice cream. You know, in a few days, that makes no difference. Over a few years, that could mean that you’re, you know, a lot heavier than you want to be. And if it goes on for decades, it could lead to type 2 diabetes. And that’s just you in a trance state because every time you feel anxious, you do something. So you’ve got these useful things and you’ve got these unuseful things. And that same principle applies to money. Um, you know, there are some people that if they’ve got a bank balance or if they’ve got you know a balance on their credit card, they have a compulsion to spend it. It’s almost like they can’t sleep if they don’t spend it. Well, you know, that desire, let’s say someone’s linked dopamine to purchasing something. Uh you know, I’ve worked with people that shoppeholics, you know, call it retail therapy, it’s an addiction. There’s people with they got the dopamine boost from buying the thing, not wearing the thing. They’ve got uh you know bags and bags and boxes of unopened things because the compulsion wasn’t to wear the thing or use the thing, it was to buy the thing. And you know, you’ll know this, but a lot of people don’t. Living above your means, if you spend more than your income, then you’re accumulating debt. Debt incurs an interest, and the law of compounding is then working against you because that interest on interest means that you’re financially enslaved. But the opposite of slavery is freedom. So if you have assets that accumulate an interest rather than incur an interest, and the interest feeds on interest, well, then the opposite of slavery is freedom, and then the same principle can make you financially free. But if you’re doing things on autopilot that inadvertently lead you to a life of slavery, like you have to work, you don’t get to choose that, that’s a horrible future. And my job is to help people create changes to give them uh more freedom and choices in their life rather than um the pressure and the stress and and financial problems cause so many mental health issues that can lead to suicide as well. So we’re not talking, it’s like, oh, someone’s a bit sad because they don’t have enough money. No, people will kill themselves if they’re in debt sometimes. So it we’re talking about serious things.

[13:10] Sammie Ellard-King: Hey guys, Sammie here. Just a quick one. If you wouldn’t mind heading over to upthegains.co.uk, hitting the subscribe button in the top right hand corner, and entering your email into the box. For your troubles, you will receive a free net worth calculator worth £25. Now, this net worth calculator, if you enter your assets and your liabilities, will tell you exactly how much you are worth today. Now, what you can also do is set yourself some financial goals and track your net worth along the way using this tool. It’s totally free. So head on over to upthegains.co.uk, hit the subscribe button, pop your email in, and you’ll be sent straight to your inbox in a matter of minutes. Now, back to the podcast. Yeah, I read a stat the other day which blew my mind. 80% of stress-related illnesses in the UK are money related. And that is uh just blew my mind. But actually, when you think about it, this deep-rooted issue that we have as a society around money makes perfect sense, and that’s why work like yours podcasts like this is so important, because we are then just changing this belief system that we seem to have ingrained in a large portion of our society. And I think that a lot of this comes back to you know, something that we bang on about here on the podcast. I’m sure everybody’s gonna be like, no, no, not this again, but you know, education is so in paramount, and if we don’t get it from our parents or in the school system, or you know, in universities or workshops or or anywhere, really, we can be left to our own devices, and often those those journeys that people take, they can take the wrong path because advertising is so powerful, social media is so powerful, and as you were saying, very much there, like you know, one of the things is people become shopaholics, they become addicted to spending, and that can create debt, debt can create this cycle, suddenly you’re in this stress-related illness, and you’ve got this, then you’ve then got to deal with that alongside all of the other things that you’re dealing with on a day-to-day basis, whether that be work, family, friends, issues, you know, daily life. And it’s just wild how we are left to do that. Um, so what are you seeing is the um you mentioned shopping. If someone comes into hypnotic wealth and they sit down with you, what’s kind of the biggest thing that you see?

[15:42] Adam Cox: We weirdly, they it it’s uh it’s an evaluation that they’re not good with money, but they don’t know why. Um in in in weight loss, it’s different. When I work with people with weight loss, they know they’re eating too much, they know they’re not exercising enough. With money, it’s different. Sometimes they’re not even aware of it. That point that you made with knowledge is very valid. You know, it’s one of the pillars that you know I go through in hypnotic wealth is uh knowledge, but also strategic knowledge, not just knowing but what to do with that knowledge. But in a in a strange way, knowledge is trumped by emotion. So the reason that people can know that it’s better to save and still spend the money is because they’re seeing people they know, you know, quote unquote flexing by spending money on frivolous things on on Instagram. And it creates this feeling of lack, you know, and that feeling of, oh well, you know, look at them, you know, they’re so good because they’ve got that car, that watch, that house, you know, or those trainers, and here I am with what I have. So if I want that status, I need to spend money. Even though they know better, they don’t do better because emotion trumps logic, if that makes sense. And the emotion comes from belief systems. So by and large, the main thing that I’m working with is belief systems, belief systems that mainly link to the emotion of fear. Because what stops people doing things is they’re scared. They’re scared because there’s so much misinformation. You know, it it used to be that you were told by parents it’s like, own your own home because renting is throwing money on the fire. I’ve I’ve seen numerous influencers because they know that their target audience of people in their 20s can’t afford to buy a home. They’re like, you know, buying homes for mugs, you know, renting gives you the freedom. And I’m thinking, renting makes no financial sense whatsoever. The only way that renting makes financial sense is when you’re renting to other people. You own the property, you own the asset, and then you rent to other people. Or if it’s very short-term, you know, things like I don’t buy a house if I’m going on holiday for two weeks, you know, you rent an apartment. But if you’re talking like a year or two plus, you know, it doesn’t make sense to rent. So you’ve got all this misinformation. So then the fears come in. It’s kind of like, well, if I buy a home, I’m trapped, you know, or it’s kind of like if I invest in an ISA, it could be a scam, I could lose it all. What if the market goes down? All these kind of fears. It’s the fear of loss, it’s the fear of a mistake, but it’s also the fear of what are my friends and family gonna think, or what’s my partner gonna think? If I make a financial decision and it goes wrong, I’m gonna feel like an idiot. So, you know, although inaction seems like it’s a really poor choice, if the alternative is, well, if there’s a 10% chance that something goes wrong and I lose it all, or suddenly I’m I’m the laughing stock, I’m the idiot, you know, in my social group, you know, I’d rather not do nothing because at least I’ve got what I’ve got. Unfortunately, the the strategy of any modern economy is to debase the currency through quantitative easing. So those people that do the safe thing by holding on to cash, that’s the safe thing, is actually a highly risky thing because it’s being eroded by increase in the money supply. And and the the lack of knowledge that people have about this means that you get these weird paradoxes where the safe thing is actually the risky thing, and the risky thing is the is the safe thing. When I tell people I have more than a million pounds in debt, they look at me and they say, How do how do you sleep at night? What they don’t realise is that one million pounds of debt have accumulated, you know, way more than a million in assets that create a cash flow that have a rising appreciation in the value of those assets. So when you can use debt that gets depreciated through the increase in the money supply, so if I take out a hundred grand loan and then that’s being eroded by about 5%, but I only have to pay back the 100k capital plus, you know, two years ago I could get interest rates at 3.1%. It’s so it’s kind of like, but inflation’s higher than that. In real times, my debt is making me money, but then I’m buying assets at deflated or reduced prices because of the lack of liquidity in the market. Or suddenly, when they they turn the money printers on again, those asset prices skyrocket. But it’s the lack of knowledge. What most people think that I do is highly risky. They think that’s so risky. How could you be so reckless? And I’m thinking you’ve got one source of income from one job, and your financial future is inextricably linked to a decision that you’re not in control of. That seems really risky to me. So it’s just a different perspective, but it’s linked to belief systems. My belief systems are different from you know what most people have, but I was able to get to a financial security comfort and into a position in my mid-30s where I didn’t have to work, it was a choice, through doing risky things. Except to me, they weren’t risky because I understood that by doing anything, you get either a win or a or a lesson learned. So it wasn’t that I made every great decision, it’s just that I learned from the decisions that weren’t so good. So this way of thinking about money is almost like a game encourages you to be experimental. Whereas, you know, you’ll probably remember kids from school that because they weren’t naturally athletic, they didn’t want to play football, they didn’t want to play basketball because they weren’t good at it. But how are they going to get better if they never play the game? And sometimes it’s an acceptance that, okay, I’m I’m willing to be crap at this game, but if I keep playing it, I’m gonna get better. And I think money, investing, and all the substrategies of of wealth, like property, shares, you know, whatever it might be, um, that’s also sub-games within the game. And for me, I like playing games. And if you if you throw yourself into those games and you have fun doing it, well then, you know, people waste hours and hours, you know, a month watching TV, going on social media, playing games. They’re not financially rewarded. Why not play a game that can put you in a position of complete financial freedom? Which for me means you decide what you do with your life, you decide who you work for, what you do to earn your income, if even if you want to earn an income. Because if you’ve got the income coming from different places, you don’t have to, you don’t have to technically work, you do it through joy rather than necessity.

[23:16] Sammie Ellard-King: 100%, man. That’s exactly like what we’re talking about at the moment. It’s financial freedom isn’t it’s is financial freedom in the literal sense, but actually what it creates is time freedom. And time freedom is the most rewarding aspect of all of this, if you think about it. Like if you if you turn around to someone and say, What do you want to do when you retire? Often they say, travel the world, buy a home abroad or you know, do something great with it, i.e. give back or look after my family. Pay for my kids at university. Imagine if you can do all of those things, uh, and or have the choice to do any of those things. And that is what you want to create for people. And it often though, we are now stuck in this kind of rut of you’re exactly right. What you said there was one source of income, the decision about your life is in somebody else’s hands who you may have never even met or even seen before. And that that can be extremely like when people actually sit down and realise that it changes everything, I think. And it changed everything for me. When I started realising that you know I was working for the man, I I went on to start my own businesses, but that that was what drove me to go and start my own businesses because I realised that actually, hang on, if this bar or restaurant group just suddenly has a bad year, marketing is normally the first thing that gets cut. So hang on, it’s like, well, um that that’s me. That I’m you know, I’m the head of that department, so that you know, I’m my you know, my either my team or myself were on the line here. Um, and we’re the first ones to go, so I need to flip this round. So my mentality was like, right, side hustles, need a business, let’s go. And how do I work towards that? And got there very quickly because I had the right mindset to do that. But luckily, you know, a lot of people don’t have the belief that they can go out. It’s interesting what you said there as well about fear, because fear is massive, and that is probably the number one thing if you can get past fear, absolutely anything.

[25:32] Adam Cox: Yeah, and and and the way that I prove that with clients because they think it’s oh, I don’t know what to do, I don’t know enough about business or investing. I say, look, with the exact knowledge that you have right now, imagine you’ve got a time machine and you can go back 10 or 15 years just with the knowledge you have right now, no more knowledge, just this knowledge. And you’ve got the the challenge of becoming a billionaire at your current age, just with the knowledge that you have, you go back in time 10, 15 years. You don’t need to know about Bitcoin to know that it goes up. You don’t need to know about Tesla to get an idea of, oh yeah, that did quite well as a company. You know, there’s certain things that you could you could do, or you know roughly when there’s you know a dip in the in the markets to buy things, you know. You would know with the benefit of knowledge, oh yeah, didn’t stocks go down in the first month of COVID and then shoot up with all these stimulus checks and bounce back loans. Oh yeah, I think I vaguely remember. So you don’t even need to, you know, be a financial guru and know the markets, but just with the knowledge that you have right now, almost everyone’s a billionaire. Here’s what they don’t do with that time machine, they don’t go back 15 years and get a nine to five job. Not if they’ve got the knowledge of certainty of what happens in in kind of these these trends. Even if you borrowed money, even if you worked money and then bought some assets that you think, okay, I think Amazon does quite well, I think Google does quite well, you know, you’re gonna get a huge value with no more knowledge. And the one difference with that time machine, you know, effectively everyone becomes biff out of Back to the Future 2, is you don’t even need the almanac. You know, you’ve effectively, just with the knowledge that you’ve got, everyone becomes wealthy because there’s certainty, and certainty is the antidote to risk. So the ideal way to get people in that mindset of being comfortable with risks, with the uncertainty, is that you have certain uh irrefutable trends. So for example, you know, and sometimes I use the idea of the multiverse or twins to kind of highlight the disparity. One of my hypnosis sessions is called the money twins. And you imagine a uh two twins born exactly the same day as twins tend to be. One grows up and their desire is to kind of show off and spend money whenever they can, and the other is to incrementally throughout their entire life save what they can and then buy assets like a home, like different things, you know, reduce their expenditure and do that. Now, at the age of 50, you’ve got entirely different lives just because the overall trend is one is spend everything they can and more, you know, put it on the credit cards, and the other one is spend less than you earn, and the difference, start buying some kind of assets that actually you know could appreciate in value. Makes no difference. The twin in their teens that is saving money looks like the idiot. In their 30s, it’s like you could have a better car than that, you could have a better house than that. Yeah, but I want to own it instead of rent it. But at 50, that twin that that kind of made not radical, they weren’t risking it all on the stock market, but just slowly living below their means and acquiring assets throughout their lifetime, has a dramatically different life to that person. And the thing is, a lot of the things that people buy, if you consider a pair of trainers an asset, okay, well, the moment you use them, you’ve depreciated that that asset by about 60%. And then within two years, it’s it’s gone to zero. Now, if I said if if you invest in Google and that could go to zero in two years, would you invest in that? You’d be like, no way. Okay, but people are buying quote unquote assets, you know, these things that go to zero all the time. Okay, well, you can still have those fun things. The utility is not the appreciation of the value, it’s the enjoyment you get from the thing. But why don’t take some of your money so you can get status? For example, I get some of my status. I don’t I don’t say I invest in companies, I say I’m a co-owner because when you’ve got shares in a company, you’re a co-owner. I’m a co-owner of Tesla, I’m a co-owner of Amazon, I’m a co-owner, co-owner of I get my significance and status. You know, it’s kind of like I own, you know, shares in online retailers and I’m a co-owner of Zoom and and all these tech companies. And to me, that gives me a feeling of security, freedom, significance, way more than I would get than, you know, let’s say wasting it on clothes that could be, you know, not very valuable. But you reach a point where you’ve got so much cash flow coming in from your assets that then you can, you know, have the expensive things. But you’re but you’re not you’re not taking it from your asset column, if that makes sense. So my goal really is to get people into that mindset of, well, if it’s about risk, what’s more risky? Never acquiring any assets and hoping that you get lucky with work and employment with a boss that you love and work that you enjoy in every year of your entire life and you never get sick, or that you acquire assets. So even if those things happen, you’ve got that ability to make a decision. And one of the most profound things that happened to me, my first job in a radio station, um, my boss, and and it was that that phrase, fuck you, money, that you hear a lot now, but you never heard back when I was like 20, uh, 21. But he he he told me about when he first started working out, he um worked really hard. He got he got a house, you know, he said he wasn’t going out, he wasn’t wasn’t really enjoying his kind of early 20s, but he bought a house young and it went up four times in value in the space of like 10 years or something like that. So he’s in his 30s, he’s got like hundreds of thousands worth of equity. And he said the thing that that gave him more than anything else was the ability to say no or to use his word fuck you to any situation. So, and and he everyone knew that about him. So nobody could take advantage, nobody could, and he wasn’t like a multi-multi-millionaire, he just had enough that at any point in time he could say no to anything he didn’t want to do, take a year out, reassess his options, and then do something else. But the fact that he carried that energy was like a force field, no one could like make him feel small, no one can kind of you know, um make him you know work overtime if he didn’t want to do it. It it was like a superpower. And I heard that story at the age of like 21. I’m like, I want fuck you money.

[31:41] Sammie Ellard-King: Yeah, yeah. It’s amazing. Once you first realise it is possible as well, it’s like it really does change your whole entire like I think the first thing I ever did was the compound interest calculator. That blew me away. That blew me away, yeah. It’s nuts. Like the first time you do it, you stick the £100 and you look at you go, uh huh, I’m gonna put £100 and I make 80%. And I’m gonna do it for 30 years and it chucks out, you know, 150 grand or whatever. But you it’s when you see the compounding of your money in the later part of the years, which is obviously that you know, you’ve been building your wealth for a significant amount of time. That’s what affects your mind. The thing that I first, when I first uncovered that, it was on a website called the Motley Fool. I don’t know if you remember the Motley Fool. No, well, yeah. And and there I was, early 20s, and they have they have this story, and they have this story of if a person starts investing, let’s say 100-200 pounds a month from the age of 20 to 30, and then stops at 30, the person starting at 30 with the same monthly amount could spend that money each month for the rest of their life and never catch up with the person that started in their 20s. So I’m like compounding, right? I need to do that. So there I was, you know, when when my business started making money, then you start looking at tax-efficient ways to leverage that. So to begin with, revealing my age, but back then it was a 7,000 ISA allowance. It’s like, right, my goal is each year hit the seven grand ISA allowance. Now it’s 20 grand. So it’s like every year I put 20 grand into my ISA. There’s a SIPP limit, you know. So for people not familiar with SIPP, self-invested personal pension. Um, but you know, depending on your on your income, you can have about 40 grand that you can put in tax-free into a pension.

[33:22] Sammie Ellard-King: So every year it’s gone up now, it’s 60. 60 this now, 60 this tax year, yeah. Even better. So I I I like free money, and and for me, having these tax allowances um is is great. So for the last few years, I’ve been putting 20 grand in my ISA, so 40k into my uh pension. From this point onwards, now I have this new information, it’s the importance of knowledge. It’s gonna be whatever the ISA limit, let’s say it’s still 20k and then 60k in my pension. Because by doing that, I know that over time, and this is this is where people look at risk the wrong way, they look at it in a time frame that’s too small. So if you look at tech companies from the peak in 2021, when there was all that ice, you know, kind of COVID stimulus, and now some of these tech companies are down like 70, 80%. But if you were to look at it from the time frame of pretty much January to today, the six months of this year, it’s gone up about 40%. Um, if you pan out and you look at it over 10 years, the overriding trend is on the up. So you kind of think, well, you know, you want to invest in things, you know, with that Warren Buffett approach of buy and hold, keep it for a long time. You know, you don’t want to be trading, because if you’re trading, you’re trading against the bots, you’re trading against the hedge funds. Investing is a different strategy. Buy in good companies or funds that, you know, have a collection of good companies, hold for a very long time and then don’t send, don’t intend to sell. So for me, my ISA and my pension is my security strategy. Um, my my comfort strategy comes from property because the cash flow I get from property pays all my bills and more. But I know that over time, yeah, it’s likely to be a crash in about six or twelve months because of the high interest rates, but it will bounce back and it will keep going up because they’re not building enough properties and the population keeps increasing. So you’ve got you know a solid asset that again puts money in your pocket, and then I have a strategy for uh call it freedom or luxury. And this is where they’re the furthest on the on the risk curve. So I invest in crypto, I invest in speculative tech stocks. But the great thing is not all of them have to do well. Because some of these, when they do well, you’re getting like 10, 20, 50, 100x returns. That’s fine to do if you’ve already got a strategy for security and you’ve already got a strategy for comfort. The mistake that people make is they don’t, they’re not going to be secure and they they they kind of put all their money in some random meme coin and then they they’re crying when they’ve lost it all, and then everyone around them says, Yeah, I know crypto’s risky. Well, it’s risky if you do it that way. But if it’s a small proportion of your overall asset and you know that whatever happens, you’re not only secure but you’re comfortable. Well, then you can take that risk in a safe way with the you know very high, you know, kind of exponential returns. Um, without, you know, you get the upside, but you can tolerate the risk. And and it’s for for me, the the art of you know, kind of making wealth, two key things you could put it down to. Keep on increasing your asset column, you know, and and that could be by building or or buying assets, could be property, intellectual property, businesses, whatever it might be. Um, and then manage your risk. And you can manage your risk by rebalancing, you can manage your risk by diversification, you can manage your risk through knowledge and understanding, you can manage your risk. We live at a time where I’m able to listen to people way smarter than me. You know, I can go on YouTube, I can go on podcasts. You know, go back 20 years, how would you be able to learn the knowledge of a CEO of a multi-billion power company like Michael Saylor? You couldn’t do that. You can do it now, you know, and you can you can listen to uh Sam Altman, the the the founder of OpenAI, talk for four hours just about the future of AI technology. Before YouTube and podcasts, you couldn’t do that. You’d have to spend thousands to be in a conference room just to be in close proximity to these people. So we’re living at a time where you can get access to information and inspiration and strategies at low cost, you know, it’s hugely accessible, but only if you desire that thing. And and what the the reason that most people don’t desire that thing is that they’ve already assessed, I’m not, that’s not for me. That’s fine for you know the children of millionaires, that’s fine for other people. That doesn’t apply for me. So when they see the FTSE or they see the price of Bitcoin or they see property market, it’s almost like it’s a different language. It’s like, oh, they’re not talking to me. There’s other people that see that, and that’s relevant for them, but that’s not relevant for me. And it could be. So these things like the FTSE going up and down, that made no sense to me before I got an index tracker when I was 22 years old. And when I did, it’s like, ah, it just means that the total value of that fund has gone up 5% or down 5%. That’s all it means. And people are intimidated by the language, they’re intimidated by the acronyms. Um, and I think the financial industry, particularly financial advisors, thrive on that because when there is ignorance that can be exploited, and the moment you realise that the vast majority of financial advisors are not advisors, but salespeople that are driven by commission rates to sell you not the thing that’s in your best interest, but the thing that makes them the most money, then it’s it’s a duty to learn about this stuff yourself, because otherwise you’re giving your money to people that don’t have your best interest at heart, and they will screw you over if they can. Sometimes not even intentionally, but it’s just the it’s just a side effect, side effect of their incentives scheme. So for me, hypnotic wealth is to take people on a journey so they get to figure out do they have any disempowering belief systems? Do they have any fears? And being a hypnotist that have helped people change beliefs, and and I’ve had people with the most severe phobias you can imagine not have those phobias. So if I can do that with people with a fear of flying or public speaking or fear of needles and, you know, all this kind of stuff, I can do it with someone that has a fear of losing money in the stock market. You know, it’s it’s the same structure, it’s just applied to a different context.

[39:29] Sammie Ellard-King: So talk to us a little bit about so someone comes into your clinic today, what’s the like what’s the journey? Excuse me, Rug and Fro. Um, what’s the journey that they go on? Yeah, so for me, the majority of hypnotic wealth is actually an online course. There’s like about 30 hours worth of content on there. But I also offer wealth coaching, which takes the principles of hypnotic wealth. But I charge 500 pounds for 90 minutes when I do wealth coaching. A lot of people can’t afford that. So actually, the same cost for 30 hours worth of content in hypnotic wealth seems a bit more viable. I also have um criteria so that for people working with me one-to-one, they have to demonstrate a certain level of net worth because it it wouldn’t make sense for someone that you know is earning 20, 30 grand a year to be spending 500 pounds for 90 minutes at the point where they’ve got more net worth than it makes sense to work with me because just one belief block could be costing them thousands. Like one of my beliefs, for example, when I was in my early 20s, is that debt is bad. Okay, clearly with over a million pounds worth of debt, I don’t believe that now. But if I kept that belief, then I wouldn’t have the majority of the assets that I have right now just with that single belief. So when I work with someone, it’s doing an audit. I would I would say, look, what’s the biggest dissatisfaction in your life? What would you like to have that that isn’t there? Or what is your current strategy, you know, for you know, for your finances? And and sometimes you you see a mismatch because they’ve been told some information and they say, Yeah, most of it’s in gold or bonds. And it’s kind of like, well, what’s the purpose of gold? And it’s like, well, it’s a safe haven. It’s like, well, it’s also going down in value. It’s it’s it’s not going up. If it was truly a hedge against inflation, if gold’s truly a hedge against inflation, gold should be rallying right now. Yeah, but it isn’t. So sometimes it’s just eliciting these belief systems, challenging those belief systems. But I’m not a financial advisor, so I never tell my clients what to do, but look at the belief underpinning their choices and say, would it be helpful to believe something different? And then we do a therapy session or we do coaching that enables them to re what one of the great questions you can ask to figure out if you’re on the right track is to ask yourself the question knowing what I now know, is this still the right thing to do? And quite often it isn’t. It’s just an echo of a decision that you made years before and you’re you’re following that pathway. But here’s the here’s the great thing about that question. If knowing what you now know, it’s still the right thing to do, keep it. You know, but if it isn’t, then you can change it. And by changing it, then actually you get the opportunity to change that. So when I do the hypnotherapy part, um, a lot of my sessions are over Zoom, but it’s using things like inductions and deepeners and getting people into uh a place where we can start changing belief systems. The metaphor I use with the belief is that you can’t plant a tree if there’s already a tree in the same spot. So you’ve got to remove the tree, and then in that big hole where the tree roots once were, well, then you can plant a new tree. Um, and that’s important because a lot of people are colliding, you know, they’re they’re getting new knowledge from podcasts like this. But if they’ve got belief systems that could be built through experience. So here’s an example. If you grew up in a household where your siblings would spend your money if you didn’t, okay. They you just had older siblings, you had a money box, and it’s like you wanted to save, but whenever you save, they would just go in and take it and spend it. Then you learn very young, okay, there is a risk to saving money, and the best thing you could possibly do is to spend it. In the same way that if you’re a a bank robber and you’ve you’ve sold three million, but you know at any point in time you could be captured, sent to jail, and have your assets seized. Is there any incentive to save? No, your incentive is to spend. So that could be a belief system that that someone has, but then they hear knowledge you know from podcasts like yours and many others that try and inspire and encourage people to, let’s say, take a proportion of their income, buy assets or invest or save and and you know, have that journey towards a better relationship with money. But if your belief system is it’s reckless to not, you know, money’s money’s there to be spent, or that classic, you know, you only live once, you can’t take it with you. We’ve got all these kind of belief systems creeping in, and you and you’re like, yeah, might as well just spend it. But then by spending it, what you’re doing, it’s it’s money is is the the the trade-off between instant gratification and delayed gratification. So they did this study, this psychology study, where they gave kids uh one marshmallow, but if they didn’t eat it in five minutes, they would get two marshmallows. Over half the kids ate one marshmallow, they only had to wait five minutes and they would have doubled the marshmallows. That’s that’s a hundred percent you know in interest in a day. I mean, the APR on that is is ludicrous. They couldn’t wait five minutes. They wanted it then and there. And I think listens to the show, I would ask you, would you eat the marshmallow? Would you wait five minutes? Because if you would eat the marshmallow, you’re probably doing that with your money. You’re probably spending it when just just saving a little bit of that or buying a few assets. What if those assets suddenly be worth 10, 20, 50 times more and you never have to work again? That’s so my my mission is to help people change how they think about money to create life-changing money. It’s not you know a tiny difference that doesn’t change your life. And life-changing money doesn’t have to be that you have a mansion and you and a yacht. Life-changing money is that you don’t have to work if you don’t want to. That still changes your life. It’s life-changing money.

[45:12] Sammie Ellard-King: Do you when you work with do you find because obviously you’re working with quite a lot of high-level execs as well. How are they? How are they doing often? So here’s here’s the thing, you would expect that they’re really good with money, except quite often their their reward structure is being entirely dedicated to their profession. So to get to the C suite in a corporation, you you don’t do that by working minimum hours. You’re working overtime every single day, quite often weekends. So you don’t have that opportunity to learn about other things. Also, your peer group is other high earning, high spending individuals. Individuals, you know, their kids are also in private school. They’ve got the latest car also. They’ve got that 20 grand watch. So by keeping up with the Joneses in that case, what you find is you would imagine that people earning, you know, six figures, you know, and high six figures would be super on the ball with money. No, all it is is the same as everyone else, but amplified. Quite often. Yeah. That they’re still in debt. It’s kind of like, you know, you would expect, and and and there’s of course differences to that because high-level execs tend to have slightly higher IQs and they’re a better appreciation of money, but not to the level I expected. I expected, okay, you know, I can’t help them, they’re going to know exactly what they’re doing. And it’s kind of like, no, like you can still have people earning 200 grand a year and living above their means. You know, you can still have their liability column of you know car loans and you know, holiday homes and all this kind of stuff. That’s really big. And it’s like, what’s in your asset column at my house? Like that would terrify me. Because, you know, just last year there were people at very successful companies like Facebook, like Google, like Amazon. The amount of layoffs in tech companies were huge. Anyone would have said, you know, oh, I’ve got a job at Google, that’s safe, until it wasn’t. And it’s kind of like, just imagine that your lifestyle is in accordance with 250 grand a year, and now you don’t have that 250 grand a year. Like, I mean, that that’s super risky. And all they had to do was to reduce their lifestyle to a certain level and start accumulating some assets, particularly cash flow generating assets. And it’s kind of like, okay, you’ve lost that 250k, but you’ve still got 100k worth of cash flow coming in. You can you can tighten your belts and live life, you know, have that element of sit back and then pick the opportunity. But I would say if someone’s on 250 grand a year and then they’re on nothing, they they they’re going to be desperate and they’re going to take a job for less than they can get in the market because they just need a job. Okay, because they don’t want to be out of the game. I I heard a terrifying stat that in America some ridiculously high percentage of the population are, you know, three months’ paychecks away from being living on the street. Um, and it’s kind of like that terrifies me. So, yes, these high-level excepts tend to be smart, they tend to be high earners, and a lot of them, yeah, they could get fired or made redundant and just walk into another job because the talent is so high and so in demand. But there’s no guarantee of that. And therefore, having a strategy either, and quite often they don’t have time for multiple sources of income, but they have high earning, in which case the goal isn’t to have a side hustle if you’re working, you know, kind of 60 plus hours a week, but you do want to have an asset column that generates the cash flow, so your income stream is not work-related. That feels a bit safer.

[48:44] Sammie Ellard-King: So interesting you say that because I was talking to um Carla from Wealthbrite the other day. She she focuses on law, and you know, these are some of the highest paid individuals. She’s changing, she’s doing very similar work to yourself in changing the mentality of of junior senior lawyers. And you know, these guys are 150 grand a year, sometimes out of the gate, 100 grand a year, straight out of university. And they are uh really struggling, really, really struggling because they it goes back to exactly this so this whole reasoning, isn’t it? It’s like they just don’t understand, and there’s no there’s no like formal education for them to really like be able to be confident about making money decisions. So it doesn’t matter if you paid 20 grand or 250 grand, you haven’t got the foundation or or you’ve got habits, you can be exactly the same type of person. It just doesn’t matter, it just means that you’re buying more expensive shit, basically, at the end of the day.

[49:49] Adam Cox: But but that that principle also works when it comes to investing, because people have this idea that if they invest, that they have to go all in. So let’s say you went to Vegas and you’d never played blackjack before, you don’t you don’t go to the high roller tables, you go to the tables with the low stakes to figure out the game. And and and investings like that, you don’t have to buy you know 50 grand worth of shares, buy a couple of hundred or a hundred or fifty pounds worth of shares because it’s fractional. Or a pound these days, you know, like there’s so many entry points. That’s it. So, you know, and and and you know, go back in time. You needed to, you know, know a guy with a top hat that you know could get to the London Stock Exchange. Anyone with a phone can can buy these assets now. The barriers to entry have never been so low. But one of my belief systems is that the journey prepares you for the destination. So I’ve worked with people and they’re terrified that if they if they’re suddenly super wealthy, they’re gonna lose their friends or they’re gonna be sued or they’re gonna, you know, have gold diggers try and take it from them and all this kind of stuff. But if you if you understand that the journey prepares you for the destination, because you don’t go from having nothing to having 10 million in the bank in one day, like it and and it’s a rocky road, it’s not even a straight line that goes upwards because you have these business cycles, and when it goes dip, you have to figure out how to manage your emotions. You know, you you know, if you’ve got a portfolio, it’s not surprising that if it’s a small portfolio, it can go go down five grand in a day. And then when it’s bigger, it could be 50 grand a day, and then it could be, I’ve had days where it’s gone down a hundred grand and I’ve and I’ve felt like, oh, that’s not a good day. And then I’ve had days where it’s gone up a hundred grand in a day, and you think, oh, I’m a financial genius. It’s like, no, the market is volatile, it will it will do these things, but the journey itself prepares you for the destination. You get comfortable with money, you get comfortable making the first trade you ever make, you’re gonna have your heartbeat a little bit faster, but your 53rd trade, you don’t think anything of it, even if you’re dealing with tens of thousands of pounds, because life has prepared you to get to that that point.

[51:50] Sammie Ellard-King: I’ve absolutely loved this. This is such a cool chat. Like I really would love to go deep, deeper, deeper into this, but I think we’ve got to get this out for people because yeah, what uh what if you were to say if you had one thing that you know, let’s say you you you’ve got this person and you’ve got 10 minutes with them, like what would you really drill into them? That the riskiest thing is to do nothing when it comes to money. The risk the riskiest thing is ignorance, the riskiest thing is inaction, and the riskiest thing is to rely on a single source of income. So, therefore, if you accept that that’s risky, anything else doesn’t mean it has no risks, it just has less risk attached to doing nothing. And then it’s kind of like figure out what stops you, you know, and and and the key thing is it’s in the language that people use, it’s in their frames of reference, it’s in their heroes. It’s kind of like, you know, if your hero is someone that you know is living that kind of extravagant life, that’s probably a reflection of the belief systems and your values when it comes to to money. My heroes are people that are successful in in business and they’ve had an impact on the world, you know, it doesn’t matter if they have a Ferrari or a Lamborghini outside the front or or not. So audit and assess your life and then figure out do you have a strategy for security? Do you have a strategy for comfort? And do you have is it even feasible for you to be multi-millionaire? And if it isn’t, well then why not set up a strategy to make at least make the game winnable? You know, you if you were to stop the average person on the street and say, if you were to be a millionaire, how would that happen? The average person is going to say lottery or some inheritance from a relative that doesn’t even exist. Okay. Whereas actually, a millionaire now is not the same thing as a millionaire in the 70s or 80s because of this debasement that we talked about before. So it’s not even challenging to be a millionaire these these days, but it’s impossible if you don’t have a strategy and the belief systems that make that game winnable. So that that would be if I had 10 minutes, I’d say, you know, what you know, if there were no limitations, what would you want? And then do you have a strategy to do that? And in 98% of cases or more, there isn’t. It’s just a belief that, okay, other people, pop stars can do that, you know, children of billionaires can do that, but that’s not me. And and that itself becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy because if they hold that belief, that will be their future.

[54:23] Sammie Ellard-King: It’s incredible, man. Yeah, no, I uh I mean everything you’ve been saying today has really hit home for me. And it’s there’s actually elements of my own life I probably need to address as well, and that’s always the way. Like, you know, you need to improve and never stop learning, always bring as much knowledge and uh into your life as you possibly can so you can make the best decisions for yourself. I really do believe that. Um, Adam, thank you so much. Honestly, I’d love this. Where can people find you if they’re interested in uh in getting in touch? Yeah, so the first two modules, first two videos of hypnotic wealth are actually on my website completely free. Uh so if you go to adamcox.co.uk, uh, the course itself is a paid course if you want the full thing. So there’s no bait and switch here. I’m being fully transparent, but the first two modules are completely free. Um, but equally, if someone wants to experience my hypnosis, there’s downloads on that same site, adamcox.co.uk, or check me out on Spotify. If you look for the hypnotist uh on Spotify or Apple Podcasts, I’ve got almost a thousand hypnosis sessions again, completely free that people could check out.

[55:23] Sammie Ellard-King: Cool. Yeah, I’m I’m gonna get ducking into this. It sounds great, fun. Um thank you so much again, Adam. Really appreciate it.