Okay, so welcome back everyone.
Our guest for today is Jay.
He has spent more than 20 years building tech products at major companies then walked away from the corporate life in 2025.
So Jay, let's learn a little bit about you and your background.
Sure, thank you, Mihir.
As you rightly said, uh I'm Jay.
I worked in tech for 20 plus years.
I've worked in all kinds of companies from the largest like Amazon and to my own small startup.
I've been through the entire spectrum.
Like most of your listeners, I also was born and raised in India.
um When did my undergrad in computer science came to America?
more than two decades ago with this American dream.
Landed in the land of opportunities, built my entire career, got married, had kids and whatnot.
So life has been super rewarding.
uh For last 20 plus years, I've spent uh most of my time building high tech products, working in tech companies, both on the engineering and the product side.
In between, was also an entrepreneur.
uh
For the last couple of years, I was going through this in my head.
How long do I want to this?
Is this forever or do I want to do something else like as our kids are getting older, we were thinking about like, what is the second phase of our life?
Like, what do we do?
We don't want to be in this corporate grind forever.
So I basically took the plunge.
in November 2025, walked away from my corporate job, took a couple of months break completely to refresh myself and really think about what have I learned, what mistakes
I've made, and how I'm going to progress forward.
And now I am building two businesses, helping out one for my wife, another one I'm doing with my daughter.
With my wife, we essentially run a real estate consulting specifically focused on global sovereignty and we can dig into this part.
And one of the areas, one of the location that we focus on is Dubai.
I know right now it's not in the best of the picture due to the unrest in the Middle East, but I think Dubai will come out much, much, much stronger from this than it ever was.
So I'm not too worried.
And the other one is with my daughter, there are some bits and pieces for my learnings about finance.
It will be around finance.
I'm not gonna disclose a lot because we'll be launching it in a few weeks.
So please stay tuned and then we'll broadcast once that product is live.
So that's in a nutshell about me.
oh And I'm happy to dig into any part that you want to.
sure.
So like when did good career good money I know you have been in this industry for so long right so when did that stop feeling like enough for you.
ah I think money is never enough to be honest.
There's this whole idea of...
You know, knowing what, what do you really want?
And my perspective on money is somewhat different than a lot of people.
Like lot of people work from a number.
If I had X crores, I'll be OK.
That's a fallacy in my mind.
And the reason it's a fallacy is that's a moving goalpost.
When you reach one crore, your goal moves to two.
When you reach two, your goal moves to three, five, ten, twenty, thirty.
and you go to Reddit and other places, people are throwing all kinds of numbers.
Right.
I would rather say start from what kind of life do I want?
Like when I define my ideal life, then basically work.
What do I need to afford this life?
I'm not chasing a number.
I'm chasing a life.
But so for example here, right?
Just hear me out.
Like let's say there are lot of people today who are kind of who earned a lot, right?
For example, like if you had a big tech career, maybe when you were your 35 and your 40, you want to try retiring.
But then.
they like do you think when whatever idea they have of life that they want to live right now is going to be the same let's say 10 years 15 years from now because like you said
right like if you said one crore two crores is not enough then how do know that the lifestyle that you want is going to be enough for the rest of your life
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
uh
So the funny thing is...
Again, I'm not talking about anybody thinking of, of I'm going to fire in my early thirties.
Right.
Somebody who's in mid forties, like 40 mid forties, when you already at the peak of your life, you already have kids, you're married, you know, you're your parents and whatnot.
Your family isn't growing anymore.
Right.
From that point on, if you look 10 years out and say, let's say, you know, I don't know your situation, but like 10 years ago, when my kids were younger.
I would have imagined I want a place where the kids have freedom to run around.
They would have their own rooms.
When the time needs, we can have our own space.
The kids can have their own space.
it's large enough for that mobility, but it's small enough for us to be able to see each other every day.
Once we defined that, it was much easier.
Because we know, now we are at a stage of life when our older one is already in college.
Mm.
our younger one goes to college next year.
So we are only gonna downsize from here.
There is no growing from here, there's only downsizing from here.
So we are at the peak of what we want.
Sure, I probably would want more travel for 10 years, but I won't be traveling 25 years from now.
So there is this whole idea of there is a peak and then your expenses start declining.
Right.
Like I can tell you from my own experience, when I was in twenties, I fancied, you know, nice cars and whatnot.
I don't give a damn anymore.
I'm happy driving a Honda or Toyota.
And that's practice.
Actually, that's what I drive today.
Whereas 15 years ago, when I was in my early thirties, I had a BMW.
I made that mistake, learned my lesson.
Job of car is to take you from one place to another place.
forget it.
So the point here is you have to realize what is that peak of your life.
Sure, everybody wants to be an Ambani, but how many of you will be?
Right.
Right?
So I think that's the more important part.
calculation from there saying, okay, this is going to be what my peak will look like.
And from there is going to be kind of a downward journey where, um, you know, I've kind of figured out that these are my wants, these are my needs, and this is how my life is going
to be for the next, you know, whatever 30, 35, 40 years that I'm going to stay.
Yeah, yeah.
So the other way to think about this is, let's say somebody wants to retire in India, right?
You could be a mountain person, you could be a beach person, you could be a city person.
You pick what you want, right?
Let's say you are a beach person and you say, okay, I want to retire in Goa, right?
In Goa, I would want to have a three-bedroom apartment to live where, you know,
If I'm retiring with younger kids, they're with me, but eventually they'll go out with me and my wife.
Right.
That's it.
And what does it cost today?
Pick up the nicest area.
Like pick up the nicest things that you can fancy.
I'm not one of those penny pinchers.
I don't want anybody to say, because I want to retire early, I'm going to cut everything.
Right.
Define the ideal dream life you want.
Aim for that.
not for a money goal.
right and then you plan your and then you plan their expenses according to that goal then m
Yes, it's in my mind.
It's all goal based, right?
If you make money your goal.
That goal is never enough.
That goal is never accomplished.
Right, because your your desires keep changing, right?
Earlier you were going taking domestic vacations, your income increase, you want to take international vacations, you were traveling economy first.
Now you want to go in business class, right?
Earlier you were staying in budget hotels.
Now I wouldn't want to stay in five stars.
Things don't end.
Right.
define what your ideal life is.
And the most important part here I would say is be on the same page with your partner.
Great.
That's the most important.
Yeah, I think I wanted to talk about that maybe at the end, uh know, talk about family and other things.
So I think we'll start off with like, I know you've achieved financial independence.
So what part of fire is math?
And what part of this is actually psychology?
oh A big part is psychology.
Again, as I saying earlier, defining what you want is psychology.
And I don't know if people have read oh some psychology of money by Morgan Housel.
He very recently came out with another book called as Art of Spending Money.
Yeah, I saw that.
Right.
So I've read both of them multiple times.
He also has a third book, same as ever.
But these two books are specifically to money.
And one thing he talks in art of spending money, which is which basically resonated with me, kind of aligned with how I was thinking about stuff.
Was he said, imagine that you are living on a remote island with your family and there's nobody seeing you, nobody.
and then define what your life is.
Because that's the life you want.
Everything else we end up doing because we want to show it to somebody else.
A lot of people don't buy fancy cars because they want it.
They buy fancy cars because they think when people look them in the fancy cars, they will look of them differently.
majority reality is when people look at somebody in a fancy car, they're looking at the car, not at the person.
Yeah, I think I read that somewhere that when you ask somebody, if somebody goes in a fancy car and then if there is a bystander and if they ask them, uh what did you think
about him or the car?
Right.
Like they always talk about the car and not the person actually sitting inside.
So it's all about whether what kind of uh car you want to drive to show it to others.
Right.
Yeah, exactly.
Exactly.
It's all about like your perception superimposed on what everybody else is thinking.
Okay, so uh in couple of your interviews I have seen you said that financial independence is not just about saving money, right?
It's more about building a life you actually want to live.
So what does that look like in practice though?
So for me, like as you were talking backstage,
Financial independence comes hand in hand.
Financial independence in my mind is there is a freedom to do what you want, when you want, with whoever you want.
For an example, if I want to go out for lunch on a Wednesday with my wife, I shouldn't be looking at my calendar saying, oh, I have this meeting.
Oh, let me ask my boss.
Oh, it's, you know,
be impromptu, we just decided you want to go off or for a coffee or, you know what?
There is this nice, oh you know, theater that we know there's a show that we want to go, but it happens on Thursday at one p.m.
Sure.
Right.
That that's the true definition.
Financial independence is not about how much money is the independence of doing what you want to do, not
what you have to do.
Mm.
subtle difference in words, but it's a very profound difference once you understand it.
lot of people that I have met come across and met in my career, in my life, they are in the professions and the careers because that gives them the paycheck, not because they
want to be in that profession.
That's the truth, hard truth.
Right.
So I know you are.
uh So I want to get into your investing philosophy as well a little bit, right?
I know you are big into Bitcoin, into AI.
So can you talk us a little bit about like did that come from the start?
Because I mean, I know Bitcoin was not there maybe when you started investing, right?
But what was that journey like?
When did you think about fire and when did that turn, you know, kind of into a thought that, okay, this is something that I want to really do.
So unlike a lot of people, I'm not a big time, like old time fire pursuant now.
Right?
I came across fire during the COVID time or like right before that time, like 2029, 2019 or 2020 something.
Um
That said, in my mind, the definition of fire is not retiring early.
In my mind, when I look at the re of fire, I think of it as recreationally employed.
And not as in I am just killing my time as a barista.
Maybe for some people that might be the goal.
But for me, it's like I wanted to spend time with my family to help our
with the things that they wanted to do.
Now I can.
Earlier I didn't have time because I was in meetings from eight to six and by the time I came out, I was drained.
I had no energy, no mental capacity to think about anything.
So that in my mind is the fire definition.
So I was thinking about this for a very long time, for the last five, six years.
The only thing that was holding me was
I didn't want to leave a job.
I wanted to get into the new chapter and I wasn't sure what the new chapter was.
I didn't want to just quit my job, sit home, binge watch Netflix.
That's not what I wanted to do.
Not even a little bit at the start because that's what I've seen a lot of stories where they say, okay, I retired and then I did all of these things, binge watch this, did that
for six, seven months.
And then I realized, okay, this is not something that's sustainable for the long term.
And then I started thinking about what I want to do next.
Yeah, so sure, I took a couple of months break too.
But the point I'm trying to make here is like one of my early mentors suggested this to me.
Always run towards something, don't run from something.
So I wanted to be sure what I'm retiring to, because it was always clear what I'm retiring from.
Right.
So that clarity was super important.
I got that clarity over last, you know,
12, 18 months, so I basically phased it out and eventually I found like last, end of last year was the right time.
Now you talked about the investing philosophy.
Mm.
I wasn't a very uh informed investor from the early stages.
Like many of us who were born in India, of our parents were never into investing.
The best they ever did was bought a piece of land or bought some gold and that was it.
Yeah, the biggest scams of the world.
But uh one thing that was very clear to me from very early stages,
which was like my dad was a government servant.
So he had a pension when he retired.
I knew I'm in a corporate job.
There is no pension waiting for me on the other side.
state.
And in very early parts of my career, I saw big downfalls, big declines.
Like I saw global financial crisis.
I was coming into workforce when 9-11 happened and all that stuff happened.
So that between 2000 and 2008-9, there were so much disruption.
So I saw layoffs.
fireings happening very early on in my life.
So I knew that there is no guarantee of the job.
So I took that very close to my heart and I was maximizing my 401Ks from the day I started getting my paycheck in the US.
From that day on.
But that was my only thing.
For the longest time, I didn't even know where my money was parked.
Mm.
It was parked in Target date funds.
That was a default that fidelity does and whatnot.
And I had no idea what Target date funds were.
I'm fine.
It's doing something good.
eh I was not doing any investments.
Then I slowly started, you know, coming to know other people that shared information.
I started doing a little bit of investing here and there.
But the biggest mistakes I made on that path was anytime there was big expense,
Hmm.
we are buying a house, we need to make a down payment.
Sell everything, put it here.
Oh, I'm doing an MBA, I have to pay a fee.
Sell investments, put the money here.
Something else come, we are going for a vacation, we need 20 grand.
Sell everything.
So we made those mistakes plenty of times.
Plenty of times.
Mm.
It was not until like 2015, 2016 when I basically started my wrapping my head around money needs time to work.
You can't put money and look at it in six months, 12 months later and they all, what did it do for me?
Right?
That was the key learning.
And that's when I started digging more.
I learned about all of this thing like buy, borrow, die strategy, power of compounding, everything that comes along came after that.
Okay.
uh But the best thing was I never touched my 401k.
I still haven't and I still can't touch for another 15 plus years.
But that brings me an interesting point, right?
Like you're saying between 2015 and 2025 is when you retired, right?
So in a span of 10 years, you were able to actually go from, let's say, no aim in life for financially to become financially independent, right?
That's crazy for me, right?
em
So this is where the seriousness came.
So good thing that comes alongside of that was my career was doing very well.
So through those last 10, 12 years, only my markets did very well, but my income did very well.
And because the learnings came, I was able to divert more money towards investment and not
That's it.
Mm.
than I was ever able to do before.
state.
Right.
So the key thing here is and this is what I've been teaching my kids off lately is no education system in the teaches you what to do with money when you have a little nobody no
country no school no university they don't teach that in on top our society is kind of you know m
groomed in a way that they push you towards spending.
As they funny say, when you go ahead and buy a $100,000 car and take a $2,500 installment on that, people think you're doing very well.
But if you put like $2,000 toward S &P 500 or Nifty 50, people think you're stupid.
Like what's gonna that do?
Yeah.
people don't realize that power of compounding is a real thing.
So how did your investments change like the philosophy that you had, right?
Like when, let's say when you were starting out in 2015, 2016, versus when you retired in 2025, right?
what, like two things I want to know is one is how did the investment philosophies change?
And the second is how did that look like from a numbers point of view, right?
Like from your asset allocation and things like that, what changed in these span of 10 years?
oh I think the philosophy changed that
I was very clear any money that I'm putting in is not gonna come out anytime soon, right?
So I was basically starting to think in, okay, what are my goals?
The goals are my daughter has to go to college, my son has to go to college, right?
Then when we retire, we have to find a retirement home and we have to sell our primary home and then we have to retire and in retirement, we need to travel.
So I was thinking in goals like that.
Mm.
So the goal and any money that was put towards a longer term goal would stick there for longer term.
So you can like in the fire terminology, they say the bucket strategy.
I don't call it specifically bucket strategy.
In my mind, I'm tying it to goals.
So any money that I've tied for my like retirement retirement, which is let's say 20 plus years away, I'm not gonna touch that money for 20 plus years.
So my retirement accounts, they're locked.
So they are sorted out so that one goal is taken care of and and that clarity was there from 2015-2016 itself.
As I started building my philosophy there, that was the first thing I realized.
Okay, you what?
This is how I'm gonna think.
I'm gonna keep a little bit of money for me for the emergency stuff.
Again, I'm not a big proponent people say one year, two year, three years.
I don't keep that much cash because once your portfolio is at a certain level, you can always generate cash if you need them anyways.
And especially living in America, you have credit cards.
If you urgently, like if you are, I have to go tonight somewhere and have to spend $20,000, you can.
And you can tomorrow, day after tomorrow, or you have like 30 days on the card to generate the cash, which you can.
Right.
So that was the thing.
I was not a stock picker.
I'm not a stock picker.
I don't want to be a stock picker.
I burnt my hands, tried there.
Not good with it.
Stop it.
um I'm big time, I was big time index fund investor.
Majority of my funds still stay in index funds.
I'm not a gold investor.
I don't believe in gold for many different reasons and we can talk about it if you're interested.
I don't believe in bonds.
I know there are people who basically say there are bonds that help.
I've replaced the bonds with real estate.
Yeah, I think that that's interesting, right?
Let's let's get into the gold plus the bonds part.
I think that is something pretty interesting.
Yeah.
So.
Gold has many issues.
Let's start with gold, right?
Gold in my mind has only two use.
One is the industrial use.
It gets used in some industries.
Very good.
We should continue using it.
Second is jewelry, ornaments.
Sure, if your wife wants to have gold bangles or uh gold chain, by all means.
Buying a gold bar and putting it in a safe and holding it is stupid.
Now, why is it stupid?
somebody was looking at this was, gold has done so well in two hours.
Also, last two years, sorry.
Yeah.
But what has gold done in the last 20 years?
Right.
Gold.
Again, I don't know the Indian rupee prices very fresh, but I know dollar prices.
I'll give you a correct example.
Then people can check this data.
In 2011, gold touched about 18 or 19 hundred dollars an ounce.
An ounce is thirty one point one grams.
Right.
And then it fell to twelve hundred an ounce.
It took more than 10 years to break 19.
Sure, it's over $5,000 today.
But if you were sitting on that for 10 years, would you still hold it?
Mm.
first thing, right?
The second issue with that is the safety and security.
Hmm.
in a place like India or even the US, right?
If somebody knows, oh, Mahir has five gold bars in his house, what's happening next?
A group of mobsters will show up at your door with guns and everything else, and they'll take the gold from you.
Right, so physical gold I understand but like what about ETFs and things like that like there are lot of options these days.
Okay.
If you don't want to buy physical gold.
Why buy gold then?
So ETFs, you don't have claim on physical gold.
The purpose of gold always has been as an inflation hedge.
If you hold a paper, what do you hold?
And I don't know how many people know it, but if you look at the data, you'll find out in gold and silver, depending on what data you use.
The claims are one is to 30 to one is 200 for one ounce of gold or one ounce of silver.
There could be 30 to 100 claims that I this is mine.
Do what you do with this information.
Right.
So if you want to invest in in an ETF freaking buy S &P 500 and chill.
Just chill.
Why bother.
Right.
The third issue with gold is...
Let's say people in Middle East right now, when this uh unrest started, people wanted to leave overnight.
You can leave, can liquidate your uh brokerage account later and wire the money.
How will you take your gold?
If anybody has any doubts, no matter where you are in the world, try taking...
uh
200, 500 grams of gold with you.
I'm not even talking about in kilograms, right?
Just try taking out that out through an airport and see what happens.
Right.
Right?
So mobility isn't there.
Safety isn't there.
It does very well in certain periods, but doesn't absolutely nothing in others.
Mm.
And what's the point?
And the most important thing is selling gold is so hard.
Mm.
It's so hard, it's not like you have SPY, you can log into your Robinhood tomorrow and basically say, okay, I want to sell one share of SPY and you get the exact market price or
the mid price and you have your cash next day.
Right.
But like if you see from from an industry perspective, right, like I've I've heard a lot of even asset management companies and people who are managing a lot of money, even they
have some piece of it in gold because it looks like when the markets are going down and things like that, it's a hedge against those kind of things.
Right.
So like I know you're saying don't have a lot of gold, but should you at least have some percentage of your assets in gold?
If you want to have gold, have physical gold.
Okay.
oh
I don't believe in wealth managers.
I don't believe in asset managers because their primary job is to make things look very complex to you and shave fees.
Look at all these ETFs like gold ETF in the US itself.
I think it's like 0.2 or 0.25 % of AUM.
So every year you're losing quarter percent to them irrespective
Gold did anything or not.
At least physical bar at your gold is not losing value.
.
Right.
Yeah, make sense.
So the other thing to note is.
And I shared this with my daughter's podcast, too.
Whenever somebody is pushing any kind of investment to you, be it your wealth manager, be it a financial advisor, be it whoever.
Just ask yourself.
How does it benefit them?
And how does it benefit you?
If both of those incentives are not aligned, don't do it.
And majority of the times these wealth managers, wealth advisors, these financial advisors, they make their fee irrespective you made any money or not.
Right.
right, because they usually charge a percentage of asset under management, AUM.
So you lose anywhere from 0.7 to 1.2 to 1.5 % every year.
And if they get returns better than the market, they might shave off some from that too.
So why bother?
And I think Warren Buffett said it very rightly, more than 90 % of these wealth managers, financial advisors will never beat the market.
Mm.
So just buy the market.
Right.
If you believe in gold by all means, but don't fall for paper gold.
Do not buy physical gold.
Take take custody.
Take security.
And do it just like land.
Like, would you just buy a piece of land on paper and not actually have custody of that land?
No, right?
Yeah.
Okay.
I think let's, let's talk a little bit more on that.
Like what about real estate?
Like, do you think that should play a part in your asset allocation?
Um, yes.
But in my mind, real estate plays two games.
Or it plays two roles, not games in this in games, but it plays two roles in my portfolios.
One, it basically does what fixed income or debt does, or bonds to, right?
Bond, debt, same thing.
They generate income.
Hmm.
and they provide some level of stability to the overall portfolio.
Right.
And guess what?
More than stability, what is more effective is that income.
If you have a fixed, consistent income, your portfolio can go and up and down.
doesn't matter.
Like why when you are young and when you have active income and you're not reliant on your portfolio.
The reason is you have an income, if portfolio goes down 30 percent, two years later, it will be up 50 percent.
Who cares?
Right.
It has happened so many times.
So that is one part where it can replace the, you know, the bond part.
Right.
The second thing it does is it provides you location independence.
I would never buy real estate in one location.
Like I see I have a lot of friends who buy like five units in close proximity and whatnot.
If something goes wrong in that area, what would you do?
Where would you go?
I had a similar question, right?
So going back to your point where let's say whatever is happening in the Middle East right now, you said taking out gold is difficult, but let's say you have real estate there that
itself is going to be even more difficult, right?
Like how, because it's kind of an in liquid, in liquid asset, right?
So if I have to leave the country today, like you said, I can liquidate all my stocks later and things like that and transfer the money.
But what about the real estate that I have there?
Great, this is a very good question and that's reason I would never go 100 % real estate.
The key thing here is real estate is a liquid asset.
So I would never go 100 % real estate.
In my mind, I've only been, if you look at the 60-40 portfolio, so I've replaced some part of this 40 with real estate.
So if you look at my portfolio, my real estate would be about 30%.
So, now that you are talking about your asset allocation let us complete that piece right 60 percent and 40 percent.
30 % is, so traditional 60-40 portfolio is 60 % equity, 40 % bonds.
That has been a portfolio, at least in the US, that has been time tested, has weathered any kind of market for 30 plus year.
know, Bengen was the study, Bengen was the guy who did the study, who came up with the 4 % rule.
Very recently he revised that rule to 4.7%, right?
But that was predetermined on the 6040 portfolio.
Before we go further into it, there's another point I would want to make about like why I don't believe in bonds anymore.
So I don't know how many people actually observed it, but at least in the US.
Since 2020, since 2022, bonds have crashed over 50%.
In 2022, equity went down, bonds went down faster because of interest rate risk.
People don't understand it when Fed increases the interest rate, bond prices crash.
Mm.
So in the whole idea of 60 40 portfolio where bonds provide you hedge against downfalls in 2022 it was more like a correlation one kind of an event where everything went down.
Gold went down, real estate went down, equities went down, Bitcoin went down, like everything was down.
So like what hedge did it provide me?
Absolutely nothing.
Mmm.
Right.
And in 2020, were, if you at the beginning of COVID, when fed cut the interest rates to zero, the interest payment went to almost zero.
So you were not getting any payments and now you lost 50 % of value.
Like stupid.
Right.
So
What I did was I basically revised that.
said 60 % is equity, 30 % is real estate, 10 % is my play money.
This 10 % is what I put my hands into Bitcoin.
And there is a reason why I put 10 % and now I can talk more about that.
But I also do option selling.
Not option buying, option selling.
Because option selling...
to get more into that right.
Like I know you're a big believer in Bitcoin.
So let's start with Bitcoin and then or maybe we can start with option selling and then I know you like to talk a lot about Bitcoin.
So maybe that we can take it up later.
Sure, whichever way you want.
can very quickly give a brief on option selling and then we can move over to Bitcoin.
I do option selling.
Option selling is a way for me to generate income off of a sleeve of my portfolio.
I never expose my entire portfolio.
I've taken a small...
So if you look at the equity, if you...
For a moment, let's believe Bitcoin is equity.
So my portfolio split will be 70-30.
Right?
sorry just to clarify one the 60 percent is totally in index funds there is there is no other type of equity there.
fund, there are some oh RSUs from my past jobs, which I have to slowly divest as my incomes have slowly dropped significantly now.
So I have to now uh start divesting from them and go back to index funds or Bitcoin as I deem fit.
So in this 70%, there's part of Bitcoin, is index funds.
And there is a small portion where I, on that I basically write
options like covered calls or cash secure puts just to generate income that help me with my monthly expenses.
Sorry, I'm very new to this term.
So if you can explain that in maybe like like a five year old
So.
um
Do know what option is?
What option contracts are?
So option contracts, essentially they're derivatives.
Option contract is basically a right to buy or a right to sell.
Right to buy is a call option.
Right to sell is a put option.
When I say I sell options, so if I'm selling a call, I'm selling a right to buy.
So let's say Apple, Apple share, right?
Each contract, at least in the US, is 100 shares.
So let's say if I have 100 shares of Apple, I can sell one contract on that, one call option.
And I don't know what the price is, but let's say price is 250.
I can basically say 30 days from now, you can buy Apple shares from me at the price of 275.
Mm.
And for that right, you will pay me whatever one, $2 per share times 100 because 100 shares, I will get 100, $200 today, which is for me to keep.
If at the end of this period, 30 days, if the price of Apple share is more than 275, I have to sell to you at 275 because we entered into this contract.
For me, it's a binding, for you, it's an option because you bought it, I sold it.
Okay.
If the price is lower than 275, then if you were a buyer, you would say I would buy it from the market.
Why would I buy it in 275?
So my hope is the price won't go above 275.
Your hope is price would go far above 275.
So that's essentially the nutshell.
Similarly, there's a put option.
Go ahead.
if it goes below 275 then I have to buy it from you right because we entered a contract or that's that.
Okay.
But you have to sell it.
Okay.
Makes sense.
Right.
But in order to do that, I get that uh premium.
So in very simplest term, you know, you talked about LIC, right?
What does LIC do?
LIC says for 20 years every year you're going to pay me 50,000 rupees.
If you die within 20 years, we're going to pay your family one crore.
Right.
If not, we'll pay you back something, but not everything that you paid.
Mm.
Right.
Both of you.
So in your mind, you are paying this premium, hoping that if something happens to you, your family will get paid.
Insurance companies betting on you're not going to die in 20 years.
They get to keep everything.
Exact same play in simplest words.
okay.
Now it makes more sense.
Yeah.
as an option seller, my risk is defined.
Mm.
Right?
In this case, my risk is defined in the sense I had Apple shares at 250.
I have capped it at 275.
I cannot make more money if the share goes above 275.
Right?
But I will still be in profit.
I still be able to bridge this gap plus the premium that I collected.
For an option buyer, their risk is defined too.
They will lose the premium.
So for example, the Apple share closed at 274.
You will lose the $2 that you gave me per share.
Great.
Right?
But if you study the options, if you study the skewness and whatnot, majority of the times, majority of the options expire worthless.
So option sellers make money and option buyers lose money.
Hmm, okay.
So that's essentially the idea.
So that's what I am learning and I'm trying my hands on just to generate some extra income.
got it.
Okay, so option selling is done.
Now the Bitcoin part.
coming to Bitcoin, I'm a firm believer in Bitcoin.
Right.
I'm a firm believer in Bitcoin because it solves the problems of money that humankind has been wanting to get solved, but have never solved.
Hmm.
What do I mean by that?
For everything in the world except money, we have a standard defined unit of measurement.
Temperature, have Celsius, you have Fahrenheit, but one Celsius is one Celsius.
The hundred years ago, hundred years from now, today, is the same value.
Height, length, weight, everything has a standard unit of measurement.
But money is something that is not standard.
Like why is that $1 today is not same as $1 tomorrow because its purchasing power has gone down.
Right.
And the prime reason that people people say all the bullshit about inflation, inflation is good.
Kenjin economics and whatnot.
Inflation is terrible.
And real inflation is not the number that governments print or the government show the actual number of actual inflation is the amount of debasement.
What does debasement mean?
Every government in the world is printing money.
If anybody has any doubts, go look at the money supply.
Just to give you an idea, United States during the COVID time, we printed $5 trillion.
Right?
If you just look at the chart of money supply, just go search for US M2, India M2.
They're like hockey stick charts.
It looks like you're looking at Nvidia chart for last five years.
It goes up like this straight line.
Right?
If you look at, and I know more about the US numbers, not so much about India numbers, but I'm pretty sure India numbers would be very similar, if not worse.
Mm.
In the US, for the last 50-60 years, the debasement rate is about 7%.
plus the two or three percent CPI number they basically say.
and that's every year.
every year on an average.
your inflation, actual inflation rate is about nine to 10 percent, not seven percent or not two percent that they talk about.
And that's the reason you see everything is lot more expensive than it was five years ago.
Hmm.
There is a reason why homes in the US have doubled in the last five years in most of the country.
But nobody talks about that.
you say you say DBS mint is 7 % But what does that actually mean like when when you say 7 plus 2 what what what does that mean?
Let's talk about this.
Let's say oh you had $10, like 10 $1 notes, and the world has only one product to sell.
Okay.
Let's say that's an apple, not the apple phone, the apple, the one that you eat.
eh So there 10 apples, $10.
That's all that exists in the word.
In this word, each dollar will cost $1.
Each apple will cost $1.
eh Now suddenly, number of apple is same, but somebody throws in $10 more in the mix.
Now suddenly you say, know what?
I can pay $2 for each apple, big deal.
Right.
Somebody throws in 10 more.
Mm.
suddenly goes three.
So the basic law of economics, the law of supply and demand, if the supply of something increases and demand stays constant, the price of that thing decreases.
So in this case, what is happening is the number of dollars in the market
that are trying to chase the same amount of assets is fixed.
Right?
So assets are fixed, number of dollars is increasing.
So purchasing power of each dollar is going down.
But because we use dollar as a measuring stick or Indian rupee, if you're in India, you think everything else is going up.
No, what is happening is purchasing power of your currency is going down.
That's debasement.
Okay.
That's debasement, that's tax, invisible tax, that's theft.
People don't realize your purchasing power is being eroded every year silently without you even knowing.
and then how does bitcoin come into this.
So the big difference with Bitcoin is Bitcoin brings to the world true scarcity.
Why is something valuable?
Because of scarcity.
Like why is a villa on Juhu Beach is more expensive than a uh condo in a middle of a town in Baroda, for an example.
The main reason is
There is only so much land, which is sea facing, that you can build on.
If there is a house that is built on, that will be more expensive.
If there's apartment in the middle of a city or in the middle of nowhere, you can build many, many more.
So scarcity goes down.
And that is also the reason why gold is more valuable than silver, than iron, copper, whatnot.
Because we believe gold is more scarce.
Hmm.
Okay.
But none of these things have true scarcity.
Nobody can tell you today how much gold there is in total on this planet.
There are estimates, but nobody knows for a fact.
But for Bitcoin, we can tell you, we can mathematically prove it.
There would never be more than 21.
Hmm.
and 20 million out of those are already in circulation.
So only less than 5 % are left to be mined, but everything else is in circulation.
So first time humans have seen true scarcity.
True scarcity backed by math.
Math doesn't lie.
It's not your president said so, your politician said so, it's math, right?
And it's backed by energy.
Mmm.
because it requires a tremendous amount of compute to mine a Bitcoin, just like it takes a tremendous amount of energy to mine gold from us.
It's very similar concept.
Right.
So that's one dimension.
The second dimension is Bitcoin solves all the problems that gold could not solve.
What do I mean by that?
Hmm.
in the last century.
Because of communication, the trade evolved.
Trade started to happen at the speed of light.
Right?
You could enter into, for example, you and I, we are sitting thousands of miles apart, but we are having this conversation in real time.
Thanks to technology.
You and I can agree in a contract to buy or sell something as well.
Mm.
but I cannot send you gold at speed of light.
Right.
Because of that gap, the whole idea of this electronic ledgers, these trusted third parties, the rise of visas, mastercards and Amex happened and the swift network and
whatnot, right?
Okay.
So Bitcoin solves that problem.
Mmm.
You don't need anybody else.
It runs on a network just like a protocol.
I believe you are in software domain, so you probably understand TCP IP.
So TCP IP is a protocol.
You can build anything on top.
If TCP IP wasn't there, we wouldn't be talking right now.
Similarly, you can build so many things on Bitcoin protocol, Bitcoin network.
The Bitcoin, the actual currency thing.
Hmm.
one use case that it can settle it can.
So the basic thing it solved is it solved the problem of moving value electronically.
Okay, so if we were able to sell gold at the speed of Bitcoin, maybe that we would have solved this problem a while ago.
Okay.
Gold was money for 5,000 years.
I don't know how much you know the history.
Like up until 1930s, I'll tell you a little bit of US history for anybody who's entrusted.
Up until 1900s, gold was money.
Even in early 1900s, dollar was backed by gold.
Then few things happened.
In 1933, FDR, Franklin D.
Roosevelt, who was the president of United States, he signed Article 6102, which basically made any American holding more than $100 worth of gold at that time.
Illegal.
They basically said you have to come and surrender your gold and convert it to cash.
Right.
And once you did that, they immediately revalued gold.
Gold was something at, I think, 18, 19 dollars.
They revalued it to like 40 dollars, something like that, or 33 dollars, something like that.
I don't remember the exact numbers, but they can read.
Search for article 6102, you'll find the whole thing.
Then in 1971,
Hmm.
President Nixon basically came on TV August 15, 1971.
I remember this date because of India's Independence Day.
He came and basically said, from now on, dollar is not backed by gold.
Think of it like, you you probably were in India when demonetization happened.
Like Modi came on the TV and said, from tonight, these notes are no longer valid.
Ready.
How can one person, one party, one government completely devalue you overnight?
Mm.
And since that day, between this, somewhere, every currency was kind of pegged to US dollar.
Because US dollar moved gold out, every currency is now complete fiat.
It's basically, trust you, I owe you.
There is no value.
There's nothing backing it.
It's just your trust in the government.
So Bitcoin solves that.
Bitcoin basically says, don't trust verify.
I can talk about this for hours and I know we will run out of time.
So I'll let you ask any questions you have.
So, um I think I want to get into a little bit about family and how did they think about fire because I know initially you said that one of the most important thing is to have
your partner be aligned with your goals, right?
So, how did that conversation take place with your kids, your wife, I don't know, your parents and the people around you?
I think the most important person here is your life partner because you guys are, you know, joined together in this journey.
So I don't think it's my goals, their goals.
It's our goals.
Right.
So it was never, Hey, I want to do this.
It was more about, what kind of life do we want?
So for example, right.
If one partner say I'm happy living in solitude, I want to go up in the mountains completely remote.
buy a piece of land, build a house.
Nobody sees me.
But the other partner says, no, I want to live in the biggest city, most happening place.
If you guys are not aligned, forget fire.
Not gonna happen.
Right?
You both have to agree to a similar life.
So my wife and I, we have been talking for years and we still talk.
We still talk for hours every day.
What have we learned?
How does it impact our plans?
What do you want to do?
Oh, I tried this.
I don't like this part.
What do you think?
Should we change it?
We talk about all this every day, every day.
The only thing is in my mind, at least both of us agree on this part that we think of our plan as not written in stone is just a guiding post.
Directionally we are going there.
We'll keep course correcting as we learn more because at the end of the day, it's a life.
Life is full of unknowns.
Right?
So that's about the partner.
I don't think it matters to the kids.
In our case, uh kids really don't care.
Right?
Now, you know, like my daughter is 20 years old.
My son is 17.
ah
Like my daughter, she's already at a stage where she's thinking about what her life is gonna be.
Like she's gonna graduate, what she's gonna do after that and whatnot.
And my son is thinking about where does he want to go for college and whatnot.
So for them, like what we do with our life is irrelevant.
Right.
So it was between two of us agreeing on something, yeah, this is what we want and that's where we landed.
And in that sense, my wife started building the business a few months before that.
She started last year, April.
So I saw what she was doing and I kind of saw that how this is lining up with what we really wanna do.
And as I said, I don't wanna like...
None of us want to sit home all day binge-watched because if that happens, we'll probably go mad or die very soon.
So we started with that and that's when we started building this whole, the consulting, Plan B, uh so location freedom, global sovereignty kind of stuff.
sense.
Okay so for somebody hearing this right uh what should people build before they quit financially mentally and strategically.
know what you want to do after first beforehand, right?
Don't say I'll figure it out.
In my experience, the people I have seen, again, I have not met many, I'll be honest, I've not met many people who have taken early retirements, but people who said I'm gonna retire
and we're not gonna do anything, then I'll figure it out.
You're not gonna figure it out.
And six months, 12 months, maybe 18 months, you'll be back, at least looking for work.
The second thing is make sure that you and your partner are aligned.
Don't surprise them.
eh Talk, hear them, address their concerns, share your concerns, share how you are feeling, why you're feeling that way, and kind of make that conversation healthy.
The last but not the least, and if it eventually comes, is look back at your numbers based on the goals that you set up for yourself.
Do the numbers make sense?
eh That's how I would position it.
Sounds good.
So just one last thing, was just listening to your podcast with your daughter and then, uh you know, there were a lot of talks about AI and the stock market.
And I know there were a few things that you had combined, but just one question out of it, right?
Like the stock market exists partially because humans are inefficient at allocating capital, right?
So if AI becomes dramatically better at, you know, forecasting and decision making and doing things on its own, could the stock market, as we know, become less relevant?
in the future.
I don't think so.
Yeah, because I'm asking this because if somebody's planning for the future, right, like, I'm sure equity is a large chunk of their portfolio, right?
And if somebody somebody would come and tell me, oh, you know, here in 25, 30 years, you will not even have a stock market, then how would I think about retirement?
So let me say a simple saying that somebody said to me and that kind of blew my mind.
And the saying goes, if you buy a stock and the company goes to zero, that's your problem.
But if S &P 500 goes to zero, that's America's problem.
Right.
So U.S.
government is so highly financialized.
Mm.
There is no way S &P 500 would go to zero.
Now, somebody might ask, oh, would all the companies inside the S &P 500 succeed?
Hell no.
AI would displace many.
I have no doubts about that.
But the way S &P 500 is constructed, some companies will go out, the others will come in.
It happens every quarter.
S &P 500 rebalances every quarter.
They take out the worst performers, they bring in the new contenders.
So I don't see SMB 500 going to zero, but would AI displace many companies?
Yes.
But I would challenge one thing that you said.
Hmm.
which was about stock market exists because humans are inefficient capital allocators.
I don't agree with that.
Humans are inefficient capital allocators.
I agree with that.
But that's more relevant in a business term.
When you as a business owner, you have limited capital and you have to decide I want to do this project or that project or that project and I can only only fund one.
And you take a lot of time to think about it and you waste lot of money while thinking about this.
that's where I will help.
Stock markets don't exist because of inefficient capital allocations.
Rather, lot of jobs exist because of inefficiencies in the process.
Yeah, I heard that statement as well.
In that podcast, I think there was a lot of
yeah, I'm profound believer in that because I look at my career for 20 plus years.
Majority of the times we were building stuff because two things didn't talk to each other.
Right?
Anybody who is in software would understand that.
How many times you're writing integrations from this software to that software, transforming data from this format to that format.
Right.
Yeah.
Right?
Within the organization, two systems don't talk to each other.
Hmm.
Yeah.
I think lot of those jobs will go away.
Mm.
A lot of what we are seeing for last three months actually started on February 5th when Anthropic announced go work.
Since then, the software stocks have been hammered.
Yeah.
Rightfully so.
eh Again, not a financial advice, but the way I see the world is
In future, in the world of AI, when the companies will be much, much, leaner, all these companies that have built businesses on a subscription per seat license model, their
revenues will decline.
Or even if not decline, they will not grow.
And don't forget, stock market rewards you for growth, not for anything else.
right.
If you are not growing, then nobody rewards you.
Yeah, think it was great talking to you Jaya.
think it's a wonderful episode.
Thank you so much for this one.
uh I think there were some great insights.
uh I can't wait for people to hear this piece.
So thank you so much.
Thank you, Mihir.
Thank you for having me.