Financial Literacy, NZ Economy & Personal Sovereignty with Luke Kemeys

Lisa: Well, hey everyone, welcome into Pushing the Limits. Fantastic to have you with me today. I have Luke Kemeys with me. Welcome to the show, Luke. Fabulous to have you.

Luke Kemeys: Thanks, Lisa. Good to be here.

Lisa: You're a bit of a legend in New Zealand in the financial world and the literacy and accounting. Tell us a little bit about yourself and what your mission is, because you've got a bit of a mission on.

Luke Kemeys: Yeah, thank you. Those are kind words to start with. I've done the traditional uni accounting, get qualified route, become a chartered accountant. I received my fellowship in chartered accounting for some of the work that I've done since having that, but always had an entrepreneurial streak to me and really enjoyed building things and business. I made my first investment at 16 at school in a fake account and then went home and sort of went, "Wow, this is pretty cool. You can buy a share in a New Zealand company. Hey Mum, I found this website, I can sign up to it, it looks pretty legit. Can you sign this form for me? And I'm going to put my paper run money in." And kind of got into that world nice and early.

Luke Kemeys: And I guess as the years have gone by, I have gone home and had conversations about politics and money and problems in New Zealand. And I think when you're in your 20s, you just want to avoid a lot of that stuff and go, "That's nothing to do with me." But I guess I got to a point where I thought, well, as a chartered accountant, you're kind of called to give back some of this knowledge. And I'd been in the content creation world, I understand that. And I thought, well, people will go sit on boards, they'll go on boards of trustees for schools and stuff, and I thought that's not really for me. I don't like the conflict and the argy-bargy. I'm more of a, "Here's what I'm good at, I can lean on this, and if other people can benefit from it, then great."

Luke Kemeys: So I really value community and bringing people together and educating them to try and find a better version of themselves, which is basically the same journey that I've eventually gone on. So I started creating a lot of content for people to learn from around money, the economy, just planting seeds in people's lives to see that there are so many different ways that you can achieve success. You can do things, you can live your life. It doesn't just have to be this one systematic way. And along the way, I've ticked up two million downloads of my Keep the Change podcast, 1.5 million views on YouTube now over the last sort of 18 months as I've taken that more seriously. I guess ending up on a few more people's radars, and that's probably how I've got to here today.

Lisa: Exactly. Came on my radar, and then I was talking to a couple of friends in my circle and they go, "Oh, we love Luke. He's the best." And we listen to everything he said. And diving into your work, it is absolutely... So, Keep the Change, everyone, is on YouTube and your podcast. Make sure you go and check that out, especially if you're a Kiwi and you want to know what's going on in the country.

Lisa: That's what I came to you for, because as I said to you before, I've been studying monetary history and monetary policy and how the world works and all of that sort of stuff for about five or six years now, and deep into the world of crypto and now AI and things like that. But it's had a very American focus, because that's just where I found the best teachers, right? Until I came across your work and I'm like, "Hey, finally I've got someone who actually can help me relate that and break it down into New Zealand terms too." And I had Paul Quicken on the podcast last week actually, through listening to him on your show, because I've got to start relating it back to New Zealand. How does it affect New Zealand law? How does it affect New Zealand accounting? All of that sort of stuff that you don't sort of pick up from the American side of things, while there's some brilliant teachers and people over there that are great at explaining, and we can dive into that.

Lisa: So I wanted to dive into a number of things today. As I said to you, I sort of had my paradigm broken five or six years ago through that whole COVID time when we had the government telling us what to do, like beyond what I believe should have been. I'm very much a self-sovereignty type of person in health and wealth, right? And so what I saw, I didn't like at all, and it scared the crap out of me. So that sort of sent me on, "I've got to start learning this stuff."

Lisa: And so the more I've studied, the more I've understood how broken our system is, really, from a fiat money perspective. But we've known nothing else. You and I are born in New Zealand. We have a New Zealand dollar and that's it. We sort of don't really talk much about the debt of the country going up year after year after year, how that's robbing from our future selves and our future citizens that are coming along after us. So what's your take on the whole sort of big picture, helicopter view? What's going on in the political and monetary systems? Why are we feeling so squeezed?

Luke Kemeys: Yeah, sheesh. Where to go from there? A few things I've been thinking about recently. I was trying to strip out the political side of it and just look purely economic and go, "Okay, Auckland's got unemployment of 6.1%, average of 5.2 across the country. We've got 400,000 Kiwis that want more work." That's the highest I think it's been on record. Why do they want more work? Well, they probably want more money. Why would you want more money? Because things are more expensive. That's where our brain goes to.

Luke Kemeys: And you think, okay, insurance is going up, rates going up, cost of things are going up. You go get a filling for the first time since prior to COVID. Whoa, that's now double what it used to cost. Okay, my emergency fund isn't covering this anymore. 71% of households have got a pet if they've got a child as well. Effectively, you could argue you probably need an emergency fund for yourself, your kid, your pet, the devices — everything is larger in cost. And I think people are... these things are breaking, or they are being told by the media, "Look at the price of butter." And so we're constantly being reminded that we're paying more but not receiving anything more.

Luke Kemeys: And I think that frustrates Kiwi people. So I think they are learning by that method about inflation and then trying to figure out what's going on. We talked a lot about inflation during the pandemic and whatnot because it blew up, but I think it's still really in everyday lives and people are frustrated by it. And if you go back — you can look at the political side and they blame each other and they say, "Oh well, you guys printed all the money." "Well, you guys are now borrowing more than us." But if you go into the Reserve Bank calculator and have a look at inflation, I think it averages 2.6% over a 25-year period. You're going to lose 47% of your purchasing power.

Lisa: That's the official... that's the official —

Luke Kemeys: Yeah. And that's your basket of goods. And it's like everybody's got a different basket of goods because all of our lives are different, right? So I think subconsciously the boomer generation and older, people do understand this in New Zealand, but they've had property as a mechanism to protect themselves. So they haven't cared about inflation because they go, "Well, who cares? I'm still wealthy on paper." And they champion it: "I bought my house in 1990 and it cost me this and it's now worth this." And they're like, "Wow." So I think we celebrate this like, "I'm a hero. I got it right. Look at me." Instead of going, "Bro, why is that box still worth... why is it worth five or four times what you paid for it and you've done nothing?"

Luke Kemeys: And now you're having young people come along buying some of these houses and they're saying, "Whoa, the roof is 50 grand to fix. Whoa, there are issues with this house. Oh, my rates have gone up three times." And so we're in a really peculiar time, I think, of New Zealand history, and we don't have a lot to compare it to because it's been some time that we've been in an economic environment like this.

Luke Kemeys: And then just to add to that further, you've got the NZX50 which has kind of moved sideways for the last four years. It's slowly starting to inch up. NZ property, the same sort of thing. Auckland and Wellington, probably two powerhouses of the economy nationwide, both squeezed in terms of house prices and unemployment. And so what we would normally do is go, "Well, I haven't been taught how to increase my income." So what are you going to do if you do need more money for the deck or the TV that broke or the whiteware or whatever, or the daughter's braces? "Oh, we've got equity in our property. I learned about that." Or, "Hey, ASB, can I please borrow some more money and put it on the mortgage?"

Luke Kemeys: And that's how we learned how to continue to survive, because we don't learn how to create wealth or build income ourself. And so that's what people have done for consecutive decades and felt like we're getting wealthier and go, "Well, I haven't had to worry about this stuff because I normally just put it on the mortgage." Now, 2024 was one of the lowest years on record of putting it on the mortgage. So here we are in mid-2025, when foolishly people believed "survive to 25" as a mantra, which actually came out of American commercial real estate, and the media jumped onto it and it was like, "Oh great, survive rhymes with five, let's tell people that." And unfortunately a whole group of Kiwis thought, "Oh, get to the first of January and everything will be better."

Luke Kemeys: And then you've got "grow, grow" coming at you and you're sitting here in August going... I swear. So it's like people are... what has happened here? And we haven't taught Kiwi people the skills of how do you protect yourself against inflation. And that's two things: where are you going to put your money and how are you going to increase your income? And then if you do have people that teach you how to increase your income, it's like, "You're greedy. Oh, you're obsessed with money. Oh, come on, man. You shouldn't have to, bro. This is a chilled country, work-life balance, come on, man." So then the people that are kicking ass are like, "Shit, I better keep my head down. I can't tell anyone how well I'm doing."

Lisa: Tall poppy syndrome. Yeah.

Luke Kemeys: Yeah. So, hopefully that answers it, but that's what we're living.

Lisa: Wow. Yeah. Exactly. And that's exactly that. When I studied sort of monetary history and —

Lisa: I've been studying people like Jeff Booth — I don't know if you know Jeff Booth, but *The Price of Tomorrow* — or *Broken Money* by Lyn Alden, or *The Big Print* by Larry Lepard, or *The Bitcoin Standard* by Saifedean Ammous, or *The Fiat Standard*. You start to study the history of money: what is money, what do we actually think of as money, and how that's evolved. Because we've just grown up with New Zealand dollars, that's it. That's what we were born into, that's all you know.

Lisa: But then you start realising that every 40 to 80 years pretty much every currency dies, and this inflation, this system, is built on debt, and that the banks create the debt. We create money out of thin air. We're printing money ongoingly. During the Covid period obviously was a huge print. I don't know the New Zealand statistics, but I know in America 40% of the monetary value that was put in, in a two-year period — 40% of the entire monetary value was added to the system, and that ended up in the top 1% of the population, not in the rest of the people. So you're getting this huge divide.

Lisa: And then you've got AI and tech and all of that also creating a divide, where you've got the super, super, super wealthy billionaire types, and then you've got the middle classes that are just being squashed down, down, down. That's causing a revolutionary type of pressure where you've got the socialist sort of mindset rising: we've got to look after everybody — which is a great mindset, but hey, how are you going to actually do that? And where does the money come from? And it's, okay, well, let's tax the rich. Well, that doesn't work, as we know, because when the rich get taxed, they leave the country, they take their businesses. It's a little bit more complex than that, right?

Lisa: And so we've got this system, it seems, that breaks every 40 to 80 years. The last time was like World War II sort of thing. And now we're sort of coming to a time where debt is spiralling like a hockey stick, it's going up in the charts all around the world, every country. The bond markets are breaking. There's just some heavy-duty stuff going down. Inflation is higher than what they're telling you it is. Debasement is happening. I sort of see it as 12% debasement a year, 12 to 14% debasement a year. And if you look at that and you're getting a 1% increase in your wages — my husband's a firefighter, they're on strike at the moment because they've been offered 1% for the next three years or something.

Luke Kemeys: Yeah.

Lisa: And it's like, you're going to be 40-odd percent down in three years. That's not doable, right? So how can people look at this, start to teach themselves, start to learn, so that they're not just blindsided by the debasement of money? And why is it that when you go to the supermarket butter costs $11 and last year it was $4? What the hell's going on? What is your take on all of that?

Luke Kemeys: Well, there's a bit there, right? You could get into the tax side of it and whatnot, and then the other side would argue, well, we need more tax to be able to put up the firefighters' wages and whatnot. Then another side would argue, well, you need to stop wasting what you do have. And I think that's what New Zealand's very good at — having the big argument, but then not teaching people how to do something different.

Luke Kemeys: So, Sharesies now have 700,000 customers, maybe a bit more, which is great. I went and spoke at a university this week, and I say, "Hey, who understands inflation?" Boom, everyone. "Who understands Bitcoin?" Boom, everyone. "Who's heard of Sharesies?" Boom, everyone. "Who's heard of Xero?" All these hands are going up. I go and talk to year 11 boys every year: "Hey, who's heard about inflation?" Boom. It's starting to come through, but for a long time that didn't happen. The boomers will say, "Oh, we wish we had what you had," and I think, well, Smartshares just had their 30th birthday. The stock market's been here for a long time. I think we've just been so consumed by property going up that we haven't had to look for a solution.

Lisa: So that has been it, like subconsciously, with your property.

Luke Kemeys: Yep. Yeah. Like, get on the ladder. Hey, where does the ladder go? "Oh, no one's ever asked me that." Like, the sooner you're in the better. Just zoom out — property always goes up, property doubles every 10 years. And so I think people have known, and that's been their way to protect their wealth.

Luke Kemeys: But I think Kiwi people need to understand that if you're not in control of your income, then exactly that — you're not in control of your income. So you can choose to get in control of it, or accept that you're not. And effectively every year it's going to get harder and harder for you to outrun how much debt is getting put into the system, and the fact that people who understand this are buying assets to try and protect themselves from this happening. And then you're going to end up angry at them because they've got assets, because they're trying to — they've figured another chapter of it out and they're going, "Sheesh, what am I going to do about this?" And it might be art, it might be crypto, it might be diamonds, it might be gold. It's whatever people believe is going to store their wealth, that they are putting this money into to try and protect it.

Luke Kemeys: And eventually, I think the narrative is going to get strong enough where those asset holders will be taxed. I have two minds. I believe that I will see a capital gains tax of some form in New Zealand, and then we'll get on with it, and then the same people that think it's going to make their life completely different and better will go, "Oh, damn, I'm still out of control of my life." And it'll be the next thing: "Oh, now we need a wealth tax," or "Now we need to put GST up," or "Now we need to tax the people who are leaving New Zealand." It'll just — because they won't understand.

Lisa: Control, too.

Luke Kemeys: Yeah, what's driving this. And I kind of look at it and go, well, okay, if politicians believe that more taxes are going to help solve these problems, then what are you going to do? You're going to take money back from the private sector. Okay, but you created a whole stack of money and put it in and it didn't fix the problems that you were hoping to solve. So do you actually know how to solve the problems?

Lisa: Governments don't. They're so inefficient.

Luke Kemeys: If you give me another tax in my life, I'll still kill it, because I'll figure out how to. But not everybody can. And I think that's what people don't understand about winners. Winners win and they focus on winning, and losers focus on winners and think that they have something that they don't. But a lot of the time winners just decide not to be a loser, and they go after what it is that's going to help them. So they might build a business, they might start investing, they might leave the country, they might put their prices up. They might find a way to protect themselves because they can see what is happening to them. But so many Kiwi people, I think, just delegate their life and control out to the employer and the government.

Luke Kemeys: You see, "Oh, KiwiSaver balances are lower than Australia. Our employer should be putting in more." And it's like, bro, you don't put in anything, man. You don't even save for your retirement. What are you talking about, our employer should do it? We're so quick to be like, somebody else should do it for me. And I feel like we should be a little bit embarrassed that we've let so many people go down that path. I'm all for helping people. I spend every week helping people that want help. That's what I live for, and I've grown up learning that that's very important. But there is a whole group of people in New Zealand that could be helping themselves that just don't want to, and that's embarrassing, that we've let that happen.

Lisa: Oh man, it's 100% out of my playbook. I've been talking about this in the health sector for 10 years, right? Because we do the same thing. We give our control out to, "Oh, the doctor will fix it. I don't need to take any responsibility for my health. I don't need to think preventatively. I don't need to do the exercise" — like you went to the gym this morning. "I don't need to be eating better. I don't need to be doing all of these things." Whereas you and I know that when you leave it up to the authorities to have your back as far as health or wealth is concerned, it's not going to end well, and we've got to take control.

Lisa: Now, the problem I have is — I'll just give you my circumstance, right? I'm looking after a disabled mum for 10 years. She costs a huge amount of money because she gets the best medical care that I can possibly do for her. So I have to earn an awful lot of money, which means I have to run three companies, which means I'm trying to run three companies and look after a mum 24/7. I have a husband who's on a fixed income. The price of that is going down, down, down. He's looking at what sort of side hustle can he build, how can he get extra money coming in, et cetera, et cetera. So the pressure piles on, piles on, piles on.

Lisa: Now, we're right into Bitcoin, crypto, understanding AI — we're motivated people, right? Like, fully motivated. But then I look at a lot of other people and they're just cruising along. They're not like, "Right, we've got to go hard now." We're sacrificing a lot now. And I'm in my late 50s. I started too late, because I spent my youth being an adventure athlete and running the world and doing stupid stuff. And I'm glad I did, because hey, life is for living as well. But then you've got to — and you had a couple of disasters in life, marriages breaking up, things like that, where you've gone back to zero.

Lisa: So then you have to start from scratch. And so what I've learned is that you have to be responsible for your health and your wealth, and that you can't outsource that to any one person, and that you've got access via the internet, via podcasts, via whatever means, to learn anything you want to. You don't have to go to university now. It's a complete nut and a waste of time, most university courses. Just get on and start learning. We've got AI now, for God's sake.

Lisa: We can learn anything. Intelligence is helicopter intelligence now. It's just like helicopter money — it's helicopter intelligence. It's everywhere. You can learn, but you have to be a motivated go-getter type of person. In the health space, I can speak of much more than the wealth space, but we are lazy as a health nation. We don't want to know — just give me the one pill, give me the drug that's going to fix me. They don't want to know about pathways and biochemistry, they don't want to know about testing and functional medicine and how biology does not work like that, and that you need to do this, this and this — a multifaceted approach to attack a problem.

Lisa: With my mum's story, it was a multifaceted approach, years of rehabilitation. I know how to grind and I know how to put a team together and I know how to put all these pieces into place, but most people would have just gone, "Oh, too-hard basket, put her in a home, put her in an institution, she'll die," end of story. If you're not that way inclined — you're very much a fighter mentality, which I am — then you understand, no, there is another way. There is a possible light at the end of the tunnel. I don't know if it's going to work, but I'm going to give it everything I've got, that type of approach.

Lisa: And we need to get off our asses and do this. Whether it comes to our health or our wealth, we need to start learning, empowering, listening to people like you, taking a little bit of "I'm going to sacrifice for today for tomorrow's benefit." Like you said before, people that are wealthy are the ones that are buying assets, the right assets — not the wrong assets. You've got to be studying assets, because when you buy assets that are going to increase in time, you're hopefully going to keep pace at least, if not outstrip inflation and debasement, and it's going faster and faster. So if you're not buying the right assets, you are in trouble. If you're just waiting on your wage to come in every week, living paycheck to paycheck, you're in deep trouble.

Luke Kemeys: There's a few things there I just want to touch on. Make sure I don't forget to talk about your partner. But firstly, on the health piece — I read that we're the third most obese country in the OECD. Again, how do we let that happen in New Zealand? With amazing trails, with good weather, with... I can see water around me. I built myself to a position where I can. And this is why: because I researched that if you can see water, you're more creative, I'll achieve more. Great. So then I'm like, okay, I'm going to earn enough money to go and do that. And I could feel something about seeing the blue in the water. And I thought I'll go to the beach all the time. I barely go to the beach, but I see it every day. Okay, anyway, that's sidetracked, but I'm just blown away that we've let that happen.

Luke Kemeys: So then we don't learn about that. But just think about that if you're listening to this: who's going to pay for that? Because you know that when these people then need healthcare —

Lisa: Exactly.

Luke Kemeys: — they're going to say, "Oh, I didn't know." And it's the same with people that don't save for their retirement. They're going to get to retirement, and we live in a country where we will not let those people have nothing. So I can see a world where those who save well in their KiwiSaver and whatnot at the moment are then going to be the ones that get means tested and get attacked by people who don't. And it'll be like, "Well, you did that, you were privileged, etc." And so they probably won't get as much of the pension or whatever, because we just have so many coming crises in New Zealand — ageing population, healthcare, infrastructure, just to name a few. And those are big, expensive pieces of the puzzle.

Lisa: Exactly.

Luke Kemeys: Now, back to your — just to finish on that, what shits me is that I see young people that will then say, "Oh yeah, all good investing, but what's your money going to be worth in the future?" Bro, right diagnosis, wrong solution. You've figured it out —

Lisa: Yeah.

Luke Kemeys: — you've figured it out and then you're not doing anything. What I learned and what I think about is, I get a chance to invest into some of the smartest businesses and business minds in the world from my shitty little New Zealand-based laptop now, with my shitty New Zealand dollars that's losing value. And what are they going to work every day to do? To innovate, to export, to improve the world. And lastly, to beat inflation. So I don't just need to do it, I can invest in these people that are going to do it for me. Why are they doing it? Because they know that money is getting wrecked, and so they're trying to do it. So great, I can lean on them to help me solve my problem that I can now see: my New Zealand dollars are losing value.

Luke Kemeys: Now, okay, if I want to speed that up on a fixed income — I can't do that on a fixed income. Am I in control of that? No. Okay, should I speak to my employer? Is there an ability for me to increase my income with my current vehicle that I'm in, i.e. my fixed income? No. Okay. Should I get out of the vehicle or stay in it? That's a you decision, right? If we get out of it, what do we do? Now, if we take your husband, did you say?

Lisa: Yeah, yeah.

Luke Kemeys: As an example, I would suggest: what skills does he have? Did you say firefighter?

Lisa: Yep. Firefighter, 30 years — well, 29 years in the fire, in the air force, and very good on computers. So he's learning AI, he's learning agents, he's learning like that. But it's very, very hard to step out of that when you've been in there for so long and you're a passionate firefighter, like you love being a firefighter.

Luke Kemeys: Yeah, and that's the hard thing — you want to control your income, but then you love what you do. So what Kiwi people need to understand is, where did the wealth accumulate? It accumulated in property and term deposits, not shares. There's some money in shares and whatnot, and there's a rich list and whatnot, and they don't have four rentals, they've got some serious going on. But the boomers have the wealth. Now, what do they do? Well, they've put all their money in property. So then what do they need? Need maintenance, need the lawns done, need repairs done. And then you've got term deposits. But those people didn't even realise that they're losing money in their term deposits.

Lisa: Yeah, they're losing money in term deposits. Disastrous.

Luke Kemeys: That's going to come out. What are they going to do with it? It's going to sit in transaction accounts. That increases our likelihood that we can get some of it. So we've got an ageing demographic in this country. And we keep telling people, "Oh, go get a job, apply for a job." Man, if I had a kid, I would be embarrassed telling my kid, "Oh, apply for another job." "Dad, unemployment is at 5.2%. 400,000 people want more work. Why would I fish in a pond where the fish aren't there?" "Oh, you're right, son. Over here, mate. We've got a pool of fish and no one's fishing in there."

Luke Kemeys: So I think fundamentally we let Kiwi people down by not teaching them to make money in other ways. We pounded people for decades: job, job, career, job, job, job. Oh, that's not working? Go back and restudy. Get more debt. Go get another job. Well, that ain't work when unemployment's where it is. So, what skills do I have? Can I mow the lawns? Can I clean someone's car?

Luke Kemeys: Yeah, you did.

Lisa: We literally did that. During Covid, my husband — we were mandated out because we were on that side of the fence.

Luke Kemeys: Yeah.

Lisa: And so within a week we had to do something. So we bought a lawn mowing company. We did that for a while and then he managed to get back in and everything was good again. We sold that and made money and carried on. But you've got to put aside your dignity, your "I'm above that" — all of that. You've got to do what you've got to do to get through the moment and then carry on from there hopefully, and rebuild.

Lisa: What I see though is the stress levels that are going up when you're trying to run multiple companies, and we're competing now against AI. And this is coming like a freight train at us. I'm in the medical world, I'm in functional medicine. I have a hyperbaric oxygen clinic, a red light therapy clinic. I do health consultancy with people all over the world. I have a biotech company, etc. I'm trying to integrate AI agents, everything, into my business, which is freaking hard for a non-technical person trying to understand this world. But I know that if I don't, my competitors — the people in the podcasting world, the people in the health world — are not sitting on their asses. They are doing it. Therefore, I'm competing against the entire world in this niche. And all of us are doing that. We're competing against the world.

Lisa: And AI is going to come and massively disrupt the middle class — the white collar workers, the administrators, the HR people, the accountants, even the lawyers. There will be a way around for those people; we don't quite know exactly how it's going to impact. But what I want people to do now is to invest time in learning AI, understanding what's happening, how fast it's happening, so that you're not completely and utterly blindsided by it, and that you're trying to at least keep up rather than the head in the sand, "I don't want to know about that because it's crazy." And it is. But if you don't, once again, you're going to be blindsided by what you didn't see coming at you.

Lisa: And we've got a chance now to be having these conversations in New Zealand: what are we doing with AI? What's our plan? What's our strategy when it comes for our people's jobs? When half of these software companies start laying off half of their staff, or whatever the case is, what are we going to do then? Because I see that as the next freight train rolling at us. Your take on that?

Luke Kemeys: My take would be, you're putting too much pressure on yourself and worrying too much about it. Hopefully that's advice — to think everybody's going to do this. Just step back and go: people are broke in New Zealand and they are unhealthy. We live in an amazing country where you don't have to be broke and you don't have to be unhealthy. So people are going to get railroaded by AI and they're just going to let it happen. They ain't going to go and educate themselves. But you're so worried about it that you're probably missing where's the low-hanging fruit at the moment. You're not competing with everybody, because only 1% of people do this stuff.

Luke Kemeys: I'll say to clients, "Hey, go do a flyer drop." And the one who does it, it's like, "Oh man, we just closed 20 grand worth of work and we quoted 40, and it cost us $80." The other 99? Nah, not doing a flyer drop, man. Come on, it's 2025. So you're probably already doing enough to stay ahead of most people. Do you need to be a 1%er? Maybe you've got too much on to be at the cutting edge of it, but the simple advice is: sell solutions to rich people, because they have the money and they're going to want to let it go. So find unhealthy people that need your help, and then charge them in US dollars and continue to charge them more.

Lisa: Yeah. And I do have lots of billionaire clients and things like that, really wealthy people who do invest in their health.

Luke Kemeys: But you're right as a theme.

Lisa: I know what you're saying and I know what you mean.

Luke Kemeys: I think it's just going to be another one of those waves where New Zealanders will go, "Oh." At the moment, think about it, Sir Adrian — I call him Sir because he's probably the best engineer in the country, because he engineered the recession that we're in, and he told us, "I'm going to engineer a recession." And now you've got people being like, "I can't believe I lost my job." It's like, well... Or even, "Whoa, look at inflation." In 2021 I was recording podcasts saying unemployment's 3.3%, hasn't been lower, you need to think about increasing your income, this is going to be incredibly important. And people are saying, "Bro, you're all about the money, man, chill out, bro, what's the deal here?" I'm like, okay, well, you can't just put heaps of money into the system and then... And Sorted's Money Month this month, they're running a campaign around getting your emergency fund sorted, and people are saying, "Oh, that's tone deaf, they've got no money." And it's like, well, do you think in 2021 if they ran this campaign you would have listened? You wouldn't have listened then, and you won't listen now. So I love helping people, but I realise that in New Zealand a ton of people don't want to be helped.

Lisa: I totally hear you. It's the same in the health space. I work with people with cancer, dying, and dementia, and really heavy-duty stuff, and I go, "Right, we've got to be serious here. We're going to really rip into this, we're going to go hard. Are you in? Are you in? Are you in?" "Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah." And then I start, and we're deep in the research for them, deep in the thing, putting together this really complex programme and doctors and whatever, and they're like, "That's too hard." I'm like, "Yeah, you're dying." And they still won't take a few pills and they still won't take action. And I just don't get it. People go, "Oh, you're just like that, that's the way you're made." No, it's freaking hard work. I'm more worried about your life than you are about your own half the time. It's really mind-blowing to me how people just give up.

Luke Kemeys: But what a beautiful gift that we have, to have people like you that do care that much, because if you weren't here then there's even less people, you know what I mean? But it is frustrating, because I think once you get to this position in life, you think, why don't more people want to do this? Even in New Zealand — okay, you've got KiwiSaver to save for your retirement. Some people are against it, but okay, that should solve a part of it for the masses. Sharesies comes along — oh, you complained about not being able to invest, even though you could invest already. Bang, we're going to make it much easier. Cool.

Luke Kemeys: And then it's like, your house is expensive? Yeah, it is. Okay, well, you can Airbnb it out for a long weekend, make some money to help you pay for the roof repair or whatever. If someone goes into my top drawer and sees my three-inch dildo, like, who cares? What the hell is wrong with you? You're broke. Fix the problem. "Oh, I've got all this stuff sitting around my house that I don't need, but I'm complaining I don't have an emergency fund." Go on Facebook Marketplace. Go on TradeMe. People built those. Wealthy people, smart people, solved a problem for you. "Oh, that takes time to do and I can't be bothered with the people that come around to my house." People are constantly solving problems for us, and instead we sit back and complain.

Luke Kemeys: A good example at the moment is this Money Month campaign about putting away an emergency fund, and it's like, "Oh well, that's tone deaf." Bro, Afterpay have a four-day sale and they call it Afterpay Day. They're trolling us at this stage. Afterpay Day is four days encouraging you to go into more debt for stuff that you don't need. And we're like, "Yeah, that's epic, bro, so good, I'm going to wait for the sale." Are you serious? But then if a mate comes along and tries to sell you something, it's, "Oh, he's selling me something, man. Who does he think he is? Oh, just trying to get rich for himself." So we've normalised beating down on each other, but then just handing over our cash to more debt and to these big organisations.

Lisa: Marketing campaigns that are brilliant. Yeah.

Luke Kemeys: There's two million individual credit cards in New Zealand, right? And there's 940,000 people using buy now, pay later, and 42% of people have multiple accounts. But Sharesies have 700,000 customers. So we're always going to go the easy route. Instant gratification.

Lisa: And the marketing and the AI and stuff, all it's going to do is do that. And that's what you've got to understand too — the marketing is made to be very persuasive, hit your dopamine centres, all of that sort of stuff. So it's really hard to stand up against that. Running marketing programmes and stuff that I do for my companies, I don't like a lot of the approaches that the consultants that I employ take, but that works, right? And you're like, "Yeah, but isn't it better to be open and honest and say what it does and what it doesn't do?" Well, that's not going to work. We've got to pump this up. When you've seen behind the curtain, you sort of understand all of that.

Lisa: I think you and I are just super motivated to help people, motivated to improve our lot. We don't always get it right — I certainly don't — but I'm very glad that we have access now to all of the tools that we have. If I'm talking to a parent of a young person and they're going, "Oh, what should my kids study?" I'm like, "Get on AI, start learning." Unless you're going to be something specific where you have to get a qualification. But if you're just going to do a BA in politics or something, go and actually spend time on AI, spend time learning. It's like having Einstein in your back pocket. It's really, really powerful now, and this is the dumbest it's ever going to be. It's only going to get better from here.

Lisa: And you might think, "Oh, that's all rubbish, and it hallucinates and it does this." It's absolutely super powerful and you can use it to your advantage — until it might kill us all. Who knows? We don't know. It's not looking too good on that front, but this race is happening, so why not take advantage of it while you can? And it's getting cheaper and cheaper to do that. You can teach yourself anything.

Lisa: Before AI, you and I would go on a podcast and listen to people. We've got access to the information; we didn't have it. When I left school in 1987, I did like you — I was studying accounting at school, and we were investing in a fake share market account and I loved it, and I got right into it. And then I was going to go and do accounting, and did it for a couple of years, and then I bugged off overseas and spent my life adventuring around the world. Not sure if that was a good investment or not, but anyway, that's what I did. I was into it back then and it was available back then — it was harder. But we sort of had the mentality, because I came from a middle-class family, a teacher and my dad was a firefighter, and it was sort of like, "Oh, stocks are for rich people. You have to have a stockbroker. You can't do that." So that mentality just carried with you, right? You're a wage earner, you go and get a job, you do this.

Lisa: And I was an entrepreneurial spirit from the get-go, so I didn't know that back then. I never fitted in any box and I never sort of worked it out. Now I know that I'm an entrepreneur and that's my thing, for better or worse. But yeah, find out who you are, spend the time, invest the work into learning, finding what you want to do. You can teach yourself programming, you can teach yourself building agents, you can teach yourself health, you can teach yourself anything. You don't need to necessarily go to Harvard University anymore.

Luke Kemeys: Yeah. Someone said to me the other day, the answers are in the questions. And I think the more questions you ask of yourself, the easier life gets — but that's when it actually gets hard. It gets easier after it gets hard. So you start asking, why am I doing what I'm doing? Why is this important to me? Why am I not taking this seriously? And you start having those tough convos with yourself, and most people won't want to do it. Like, why is it important for you to look after your mum? Other people would go, "No, no, I've got my own things that I need to do." You've obviously asked yourself those questions and have values and whatnot.

Luke Kemeys: I went to a conference in the States, and part of the big takeaway was this triangle where people go from survival to status, to freedom, and then the top is purpose. And people don't get to the purpose stage because they're stuck in survival or status. But the thing is, when you're in survival mode, all you want to do is be at status mode. But all that happens at status mode is you buy nicer, and you basically stay in survival mode and don't think that you're in there. So your Toyota Corolla becomes a financed Suzuki Jimny.

Lisa: Yeah. Yeah.

Luke Kemeys: And then you're still not asking yourself those questions.

Luke Kemeys: The beautiful thing about my life now is that I get access to so many different people at different ends of the spectrum, and I ask them these questions. I'm like, why are you doing what you're doing? Why is this important to you? What's behind this? Why do you need another rental? You've got five. What's the sixth one going to do for you? And often they're like, "Oh, I haven't even really thought about it."

Lisa: A lot of people are just on the treadmill.

Luke Kemeys: Yeah. Yeah, they get this. I've talked to so many people that have won the money game. You know, $12 million property, "Mate, I'm miserable, mate. Hate the maintenance. Don't like that the kids aren't there anymore. It doesn't feel like home anymore. We've put it on the market." It's not success. But when you don't have these conversations with yourself or other people, you don't get to take nuggets from them and be like, "Ah, okay, what does that teach me?"

Luke Kemeys: I lent out some of my crypto, for instance, in the last bull run and whatnot, and a mate said to me, "Oh mate, that sounds shaky. You need to get your money back." And I was like, "Oh, I'm actually not too worried if I lose that money." Which again, people are like, "What a stupid mindset." I'm like, I'm going to see what happens. And so I just went through the process to see what happened, and sure enough, the company went under.

Lisa: Was it Celsius or FTX?

Luke Kemeys: Yeah, yeah.

Lisa: Yeah, we got that too.

Luke Kemeys: Yeah. And I'm like, "Oh, okay." I had the knowledge but I still didn't take action. And part of it is I want to go through the lesson. But people aren't willing to. I've gone through a process of like, okay, why did I want to do that? I like doing things and learning and getting the experience and knowing that the more you're in control of your stuff, the better it feels. So many people in New Zealand are fully leveraged to their mortgage that they can't take any risk outside of that. So they subconsciously know something's broken, but they have married themselves to the traditional Kiwi life, and then they're like, "Get a property, it'll go up." And it's not going up lately, you know? It's going down lately. And I listened to your interview with Tama. That was brilliant.

Lisa: Yeah, I learned a lot actually from that, because property is not something — I mean, we've got a house, a nice house, but we've gone more down the crypto route because I was looking into rentals and I was going to do that, and then I went, hang on a minute, the hurdle rate for me is Bitcoin. If it's not beating the CAGR on Bitcoin, why am I doing it?

Lisa: And okay, the past is not the future and all of that sort of thing, and it's probably going to get lower to some degree, but for me, the hurdle rate for me now is Bitcoin. Everything is in that mindset, right? So any business that I want to go into, any property I want to go into, anything that I want to do, it has to beat the Bitcoin hurdle rate or have the possibility to do that. Otherwise I'm not going to even bother. I'm just going to buy Bitcoin and sit on it and hope for the best. And we all make our bets and none of us know what the future is, right? But I've done a lot of homework and I believe that that's the best way forward for us, and other cryptos as well.

Luke Kemeys: Can I just inject there and ask you something? So if it does go to zero and you lose everything, are you like, "Oh well, I made those decisions, I'm comfortable with that"?

Lisa: Yeah. Because everything in life is risk, right? When I'm working with Mum, who's had terminal illnesses like at the wazoo, or other people who have got terminal illnesses, they say to me, "Was this going to work?" I have no idea. Here's the research. Here's your other option: dead. Here's a possibility. No idea. 5% chance, 10% chance. Are we going to take it? Yeah. Okay, right, let's go.

Lisa: And that's the same thing — when you make the best informed decision that you can make, and you make mistakes along the way, and you will make them. Especially in crypto, you will make them, like we did too. Celsius — we got hit with Celsius. I was looking at it a week before. I was interviewing Rob from Digital Asset News, and I remember asking him — at that point it was the darling of the thing, right? Celsius, it was the thing that sort of fell over. There was a big fraud, for those listening. And I could look at his face when I looked back at the interview and he was like... I'm like, I should have taken that as a sign to get out right then, and I didn't. And a week later, hello, crash. And he knew that was probably coming.

Luke Kemeys: The thing that concerns me a little bit about the Bitcoin and the crypto space is — and this is not directed at those that have really studied it and have really got a life-changing amount, or are married to it, right? You've got these people that are like, "I've got a thousand bucks worth of Bitcoin," and they're rolling around trolling everyone and leaving comments, and they've got a bit of XRP or whatever. And they think that they're Jake the Rattlesnake. And it's like, bro, have a bit of ego about yourself, man. Just check yourself — you're not rich with 10 grand. And that's what I don't really like about it, is this kind of, "I've figured all this out and I'm anti-government" and whatnot. And it's like, okay, well, you don't even have an amount to change your life. It's hard to articulate, but I just worry for those people that, you know, another crash, or they're in the wrong thing, and it's like, where do they go from there?

Lisa: Yeah, I mean, there are massive risks, especially when you've got an evolving ecosystem that's evolving at one hell of a rate, and there are some dodgy characters in there — as there are in the governments, by the way, and as there are in the central banking system, the hugest, dodgiest people on the planet.

Luke Kemeys: True.

Lisa: So there's always bad people out there, and so you've got to be really careful, and careful what you do. Spend the hours, spend the 10,000 hours studying Bitcoin before you make a judgment — or a thousand hours at least. Understand what's — the more I dive into this... At the beginning it was like, we want to make some money, other people are making money on this, let's get into this, this is going to make some money. Then it's like, actually, here's the deeper reason. Here's how the system is broken. Here's how this possibly could fix the system, maybe, in an ideal world.

Lisa: It becomes more of a bet on the future, a hopeful bet. It gives me actual hope that there is a way to stabilise some of the system. Otherwise I don't see a way around World War III. We do this over and over again as humans. We inflate our monetary system to the point that there's a revolution, and then there's a war of some sort, and then we start again. And we don't need to do that this time. We've got an option out.

Lisa: And I know that sounds really deep, and it is really deep, because I'm really deep into the whole philosophy of it. But it is a system that is giving us hope because it is a finite monetary system. There is only ever going to be 21 million Bitcoin. That's in code, and it's either trust the code or trust the politicians. In my case, I'm trusting more in the code — until maybe quantum computing does something in eight years' time or something. Keep your tap dancing shoes on, as one of the guys that I follow says. Always keep your head out the window, always thinking, what is changing? But for the moment, that's our take and that's what we're doing and what we're trying to learn and understand.

Lisa: But yeah, if you just come in as a tourist and you buy at the top of the market like now, and then you just think it's going to be all up from here, you're going to get burnt and you're going to pay your dues. And you and I paid our dues. We paid our dues, we've made mistakes. You either walk away from those, or you get back up and go, hmm, what did I do wrong there? Is the whole system flawed, or did I make a mistake? I made a mistake. Move on.

Luke Kemeys: Yeah. I famously told the story as a YouTube video where, in the lull of Bitcoin balances, I sold 0.4 of a Bitcoin and went over to the States in 2023, had the time of my life and rinsed it in Vegas. And people troll me about it, like, "You're the idiot that sold his Bitcoin." I'm like, "Yeah, man, and I'm probably still doing more for society than you are, so what are you on about?" But my point being, there's a lot of...

Lisa: You had a good time, I hope.

Luke Kemeys: Well, but I got my lesson too. It was like, why did I do that? Why didn't I just use some of the cash that I had? People often say you pay the price that you deserve for Bitcoin. And everything's easy in hindsight, but I think it attracts some of these people that are probably not doing as well as they may think they are, but kind of like, "I've figured out the game. I've got my two grand of Bitcoin. I'm going to show all of you." And it's like, bro, you still need to be a productive human in society and figure out how you can add value, who you're going to be, how you can help people. All that money and excess money is a form of energy to give you options to do cooler stuff. So if all you're going to do is buy Bitcoin and then go around being like, "Oh, I told you. I got it right. Look at me." Seriously, bro, log yourself out of the internet and go and get in the sea for a bit, freshen up, and then come back out and figure out how you're going to make the world better.

Lisa: Yeah, absolutely. I totally agree. And when you hear some people in the Bitcoin space, it's like they can't wait for the fiat currency to go down, and when the debt's going, they're going, "See, we knew, we knew, we knew." Careful what you wish for, right? We don't want a collapse of the fiat. I'd rather see Bitcoin not go up so fast, just a steady step up in a slow sort of pattern, but the fiat

Lisa: currency to be able to survive for another 10, 20 years, whatever we've got left in it, and kick the can down the road, as the government's doing by taxing more and printing more and borrowing more and doing everything. But I'd rather that slow letting go of the cushion rather than a complete pop. Because if we have a complete pop like you see in the countries with hyperinflation, like Venezuela and Brazil and places that have been through hell — you don't want that. You do not want that. So be careful what you wish for, right?

Luke Kemeys: Well, we've had it for the last five years in New Zealand.

Lisa: Yeah. Yeah, we're heading there.

Luke Kemeys: But equally, I know that's probably going to offend a lot of people, what I've just said, some of those types of people. What I do love about good people building options is they do good things. I've got a great story about a mate of mine who has come to New Zealand. He's sending it for the clouds, trying to hire 300 people. That's his goal. The average — 97% of businesses in New Zealand hire less than 20 people. He's like, "I'm going 300, I'm going 400, I'm becoming an exporter, I'm going big." Like, why not? And I said to him, "Well, why? Why are you going so big?" Because Kiwi people don't think that big. And he's like, "Well, I spent all my time in Australia. I stacked up my superannuation. It's big enough that it's going to compound through to 65. I'm sweet." He's like, "This whole thing can fail and I'm all good."

Luke Kemeys: And I'm like, man, that is a powerful mindset, right? And what that is, is backup and options. And so these people that are building wealth behind them — there's a thing, I think it may be biblical, but it's like, is money a lake or is it a river? What is it going to do, flow? What are you going to do with it? And sometimes I question myself. I'm like, do I buy another 10 grand of Bitcoin, or do I spend 10 grand on Facebook ads to find more people, or build content to find more people to then learn more so that they can go on their journey?

Lisa: I have that dilemma every day.

Luke Kemeys: Yeah. And I know that that 10 grand is better flowed through the world, and then they get to build wealth, they get to become the best version or a better version of themselves. But I'm like, oh, selfishly I want to stack it. And so I've got to find a blend of that. But what a beautiful situation to be in. I tell you what, I've been 15 grand in a credit card hole with a mortgage going, "I'm a chartered accountant. What have I done? You should know better than this, bro. What's my path out of here?" Oh, pay it back. Get back to zero and suck it up and go on the journey. Sorted myself out, got my way out of that, and now through to the other end where you think, "Oh, become a millionaire," and you go after that goal and you get there and go, okay, it just gives you more options. You're still making the same decisions. Do I put 10 grand into Bitcoin this time, or do I put 100 grand in, or do I put 100 grand into a videographer, some Facebook ads, some content creation?

Lisa: Yeah, it's a tough one.

Luke Kemeys: Yeah. Or into a nice apartment, because then I'm going to be more creative and it's going to give me more ideas and I'll be a better version of myself. Oh, don't waste your money on rent, you know? So the game is never done.

Lisa: No, and you're just so right. There's so many choices we're having to make every day and there is no one right decision. I make those same choices every day. Do I reach more people with my podcast and spend more time on SEO, or do I actually make more content, or do I do something else with my time? And when you get to my age and you're sort of a little bit sick of the freaking grind and you've been at it for 15 years and you haven't cracked the code to the level that you want to crack it — it is frustrating, because you get sold the dream too when you're a content creator. You've just got to hire another consultant to do your SEO, and your website's got to be better, and the e-commerce store is not doing it, and the photos are the wrong size and the alt text isn't right. You know, the daily —

Luke Kemeys: Could I just ask something? Do you run paid workshops online?

Lisa: I have tried it in the past. I haven't been particularly successful.

Luke Kemeys: Okay.

Lisa: Partly because of my situation with Mum and the world I have. It's got to be fluid, because Mum takes up most of my day.

Luke Kemeys: The reason why I ask that is, if we go back to AI before, there's information everywhere, we can learn everything, but people aren't. It's like I've gone through the wave of podcasting. You think people should be better educated, but no, they're tuning into — the true crime ones are the top podcasts. Are you serious? You want to learn about everything going on? Yeah. Or you let a radio personality just become a podcaster and they're the popular one. Are you serious? You want to listen to more of the background of their life? What is wrong with us? There's never a line for the library, right? But there always is for the concert, the entertainment, the escapism.

Luke Kemeys: Why I raise this is because my thesis is that there's so much information that people are going to go back to, "I need to pay, and I need to hear it directly from you. I don't want this AI version of you, bro. I want to know that you're literally there and you're going to coach me on it." So I've done four or five workshops under my nextAdvisory umbrella this year, and I think we might have made 40 grand Kiwi, $100 a ticket. It weeds out all of the tyre kickers. It weeds out those who sign up like, "Hey, I didn't get my recording. Oh hey, it wasn't even that good anyway." And you're like, "What the hell? Why am I dealing with this?"

Luke Kemeys: So if anybody's listening that's smart at something, think about if you can package up a workshop and run it live and answer people's questions. And all I do is I say, "Look, if you don't learn anything, I can't give you your two hours back, but I'll give you a hundred back because I feel really bad." And out of that 40 grand, I've refunded one. And it was one guy who didn't like the amount of swearing that one of my guests had. So I've brought on other specialists as well and said, "Hey, can you come and we'll do this together?" You build a process, you build it, and you're there for a couple of hours. You teach about something and then Q&A, and people love it. It's community, they're learning, and there are actionable things to deploy. So that would be a little tidbit that maybe I'd suggest for yourself to think about.

Lisa: Yeah, I have tried it a number of times in the past. It sort of fails on a couple of things. Mostly my time — when you're spread so thin, like you've got so many companies and so many projects on the go. Without it being an excuse, having Mum 24/7 round the clock, who has super high needs, and then trying to set up the systems. And that's the thing, you've got to be good at the system building, right? Which is my weakness. And so I've tried to get the right people to help me do those things. I've run them before and they've been successful to a degree, and then not successful enough that I carried on with it.

Lisa: I'm running a group at the moment of doctors and health and allied health — an education group. So we run every six weeks, we have guest speakers, scientists, doctors, researchers. It's a labour of love. It's not even a paid thing, but I'm building a community. I'm building a community that wants to learn outside of the standard medical model, who wants to know what the cutting edge stuff is. That in turn helps me with my business, because I'm now connected to really good people within New Zealand and overseas, in the Philippines and in America, and I've created a community.

Lisa: So there are things like that that you invest your time into for nothing, but you're creating a network and a community out of it, which is really, really important for me — and educating. Because I'm moaning all the time about the state of our health system and the state of the medical, and the control that the Medical Council has, and the way that things are run, and the drugs and how they're pushed, and how natural supplements don't see the light of day, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. All these things to complain about. And I'm like, well, you'd better do something about it. So you've got to do whatever you can do in your little corner of the woods to try and improve the situation.

Luke Kemeys: Can I ask you a question then, whilst I've got your expertise? I take this like every day. Just ran out.

Lisa: Yep, yep. For your microbiome. Yeah.

Luke Kemeys: Yeah, for sure. When I wake up in the morning.

Lisa: Yes, very good.

Luke Kemeys: Take a bit of magnesium. I try to start the day with some protein. I eat reasonably cleanish. I don't have as many abs as I used to 10 years ago, and the body fat's increased, but is this stuff — am I a high performer chasing another 1% and actually I'm wasting my money? Or is this actually doing something?

Lisa: Yeah, I don't know Gutsy itself. I haven't studied their product particularly, or know their formulation or whatever. But there are good supplements and there are bad supplements, and there is quality and there is marketing. I run a biotech company. I have a flagship formulation. It's an immune formulation that goes after immunos. I know how it works. I know it because I've done the clinical research. I've got 15 years of clinical research behind the ingredients that we've got in it. And then there are the ones who just chuck something together and put it in a bottle.

Luke Kemeys: Yeah, and then I buy it. I'm like, "Yeah, give me that."

Lisa: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you need someone that can help you weed the stuff out. And we can have a talk offline if you want to have a talk about longevity and health optimisation and what you can do to actually move the needle. It's about personalisation, basically. I'm very, very keen on things like genetics and functional medicine testing and finding out exactly what's missing in your body before we go and put in a whole lot of stuff. What is

Lisa: ...it that you're missing specifically, or what is it that you're dealing with? Which toxins, which heavy metals, or which part of the energy cycle is not working in you? All of these sorts of things that we can look at, and then we can know, okay, we've got the data now. Just like an accountant. We've got the data, we can make some good decisions here and here's what... which all costs, by the way. When you do the functional medicine testing and genetics, all that costs money. And unfortunately, it is a pay-to-play system. And that's what people don't understand too, I think. They think the medical system should be a socialised system and it's paid for by the government, and it is, but when you get that level of care, that's what it is.

Luke Kemeys: Absolute one size fits all, right?

Lisa: One size. Yeah. And it's great, don't get me wrong. They're brilliant surgeons, you've got brilliant people. If you break a leg, you do things like that. But when it comes to chronic illness, it's an absolute disaster area. When it comes to the degradation over time, longevity stuff, the metabolic dysregulation, the weight gain, all those things that start to happen to us, hormonal dysregulation, all of these things, they're not doing a good job in that. And there are functional medicine practitioners who are doing a better job, and there are holistic and there are people in the allied health sort of professions who could probably guide you better.

Lisa: So it's horses for courses and personalising what is right for you. Just as a typical thing, magnesium — pretty much everybody's deficient in magnesium. It does over 300 processes in the body. So probably that one's a good one to stick to. Fish oils, you never want to buy cheap, shitty fish oils. You want a quality clinical-grade fish oil if you're going to do fish oils. You buy the shitty ones from the supermarket, it's oxidised. It's going to do more damage to your body, the way it's processed.

Luke Kemeys: Without naming it, can I say something that rhymes and you can tell me if I should get a different one, or should I do it offline?

Lisa: Yeah, maybe we talk about that after. Don't want to get anyone suing us. I mean, if you wanted official, I can get you one, right? A good quality one. And that's one of the ones I'm very careful with, with fish oils. Other ones, like, it's not too bad if you take a magnesium that's a cheaper one. You're probably going to get some benefit out of it. Maybe not as much as another higher quality one, but you'll get some benefit without any detriment. But with things like fish oils, the oils in general, you've got to be really, really careful. So yeah, we'll have a talk offline about that.

Lisa: Just to round up, because I know you've got to go and I've got to go and move Mum and stuff. Luke, you're very passionate about helping people. I can feel that through your podcast. You want them to take control. What are the top sort of couple of tips that you can give people or leave people with today to go away and do some homework and think about? If you're talking to a young person here, maybe someone who's 30 and they've just got married and they've got a house and they've got a kid or something, what do they need to be thinking about?

Luke Kemeys: So a few things, right? Like, it's never too late, because that's a lie that we're told. "Oh, it's too late for me, I've got my mortgage," or "I've got kids now." The lies that you tell yourself are going to hold you back longer than they need to. "You don't understand, I'm a solo mum." The buzzy thing now that I've done this for so long: you give me any profile of anybody, I've then got a message from somebody in basically a worse position, or with two kids, three kids or whatever. And they're like, "Well, here's what I did." And those two people probably need to talk. But me talking through them like that — that person's probably not ready, and that person's, "Now you make it all sound too easy." So that person just stays stuck, and then I become the mansplainer or the privileged or the white guy with no kids. And so it's like, okay, but that still doesn't help you. You're still angry about your situation and you took the time to come and tell me about it. So you know that you want to take action on this at some stage.

Luke Kemeys: But anyway, the things that you learned as a kid: rich people are evil, money is the root of all evil, rich people are greedy, money doesn't grow on trees, all of that stuff, get on the property ladder. Where did these sayings come from? What are they? Do they serve you well? Do they not? Okay, do some work there to start with.

Luke Kemeys: But my biggest sort of teaching is business related, and I've crossed it into personal, and it's: every month you want to track your assets and your liabilities. That gives you your net worth. Now, why do we want to do that? Well, businesses have to do it. That's what they report on every year, every quarter. That's what the companies we want to invest into are telling us: here's our assets, here's our liabilities, here's how we make our money. So you want to track, what money do I have coming in? What money do I have going out? And then, okay, that's your statement of cash flow, as we call it in business. And then your balance sheet. Your balance sheet, your assets minus your liabilities, that gives you your net worth. We're either going to have negative equity, so we owe more than we own, or we're going to be positive. We want to see the growth in that.

Luke Kemeys: Now, why? And we want to do that every month. We want to track it. And then we can go back and we can have a look a year later. Okay, what progress did I make? What do I notice here? Like, oh, my Bitcoin did dip in August, but my life is still good. I'm still here, I'm healthy a year later, and I kept buying it. The world didn't end. Whatever. I forgot that I lived through all of that anguish in that month. And then we can actually go back and see it. But people will be clearing debt and they feel like, "Oh, I'm just not getting ahead." And I go, "Well, how much debt did you clear last year?" "Don't know." How much? So then what does getting ahead mean for you? So this is my teaching, and the people who do this, they're like, "That's just changed my life dramatically. I can see my student loan coming down, my credit card coming down." Humans, right? We love progress. So we've got to actually track our financial progress to tell ourselves whether we're making progress or not.

Luke Kemeys: And then once you sort of tidy up some of those basics — you have been lied to. In New Zealand, there are so many ways to make money. You don't have to just get a job. You can get in control of your income. You're not a bad person for doing that. You can get paid. I always thought, okay, 100 grand income and I'll retire and ride off after the sunset, I'll be investing into the stock market. I kind of figured this out at 16, right? And then by the time you get to 100 grand, you're like, "Well, what happened to my money?"

Lisa: Is this it, you know?

Luke Kemeys: And what about these taxes? Holy — why do I have to give all of this away? And you've got to figure out, like, how much money would you like to have every month as a cash amount, like cash, and you go, "That would be epic." And it might take you five years, it might take you four, it might take me three, it might take you 10. Who cares? Like, start aiming towards it and go, "Well, here's my gap. How am I going to get there? How else could I do it? Could it be Airbnb-ing? Could it be a side hustle? Could it be dropping Disney, Amazon Plus, etc." that not only cost you money but suck your time out. Where are you giving your time?

Lisa: Love it.

Luke Kemeys: And then overarching all of that, why is this important to you? And you've got to ask yourself those hard questions. And for you, it's probably looking after your mum, building a way that you can do that, and that's incredibly admirable. We've each got to find that, because what happens is we find it too late. Like, Mum does get sick — as a generalised example, not just your situation.

Lisa: Yeah, did happen to me. Hit me in the face. Yeah.

Luke Kemeys: And it might not be as major as your situation, and we go, "How could this happen? This is such—" And like, you have to feel the feeling of not being able to provide for people in your family, and know, like, "I knew better, and I wasted my opportunity." A lot of us—

Lisa: Exactly where I was 10 years ago. I did exactly that when this happened to her, and I was like, "Why the hell didn't I see this coming?" I was so focused on my own career and my own thing, and I didn't. Now, try and undo it.

Luke Kemeys: Yeah. And so many people are obsessed with, "Okay, I'm buying this," or "I'm saving for this." And I say to people, save for options. I tell you what, when things come up in your life and you go, "Oh, I can afford to go on that trip," or "I can afford to solve that person's problem," or "I just got asked to donate $1,000 — like, here you go," or, "Oh, I can buy some good quality meat that is organic and whatnot that's actually quite valuable for me to spend my money on now." Didn't used to be, but now I could — I've learned about it, okay, like it is, and I might get it delivered directly from that butchery. You get to save money and stack for options, because you don't know what is coming in the future.

Luke Kemeys: And I think financial advice has become so generalised of, kind of, get on the ladder, save for your retirement, but then people don't run the numbers. We take out a 30-year loan with the bank and then go, "They make a lot of money, it's bullshit." And you go, "Well, are you paying them back any faster? Give their money back." "Oh, what do you mean? It's 30 years." No, no, stuff them. Let's pay it back faster. And then you go and do a compound calculator on the bank website, for instance. Okay, if I pay an extra $100 a fortnight, how much is that going to save me in interest? Wow, I'm going to save what? Four years that I'm not going to have to pay the bank? Are you serious? It's like, okay, maybe earning $100 a fortnight is worth it all of a sudden. So individually, I think we've got to find reasons. Probably no different in your space. It's like you talk to people and you go, you can go down this path and make your life better, or you don't have to. But the reason is probably going to be the thing that drags you down the right path.

Lisa: Oh, absolutely, 100. And you can take it into every area of life. I learned that from ultramarathon running — how to set a massive goal that everyone tells you is absolutely impossible, can't be done, and then going and doing it, finding a way, going through the hell and the pain and the preparation and the despair and the doubt and all of that you go through, and then coming out the other end and going, "Oh, I did it. Where's the next one?"

Lisa: And when you do that over and over again — okay, I did it to the extreme, but you start to understand that is life. That's the way it functions. You have to do that. And you've just given people actual tools that they may not know for that particular genre. I might know it in the health sense, you know it in the accounting sense, and you give people the tools. Well, go and — how do I calculate the compound interest, how do I do all this sort of stuff, how do I take control? And that's your superpower, walking people through that. I think it's absolutely gold. Same mindset principles across sport, health, wealth, whatever you're trying to achieve in life, basically.

Luke Kemeys: Leading up to the last election, I did a Two Ticks You. And I say to people, before you vote for the politicians, make sure you've given yourself two ticks. Make sure you've got all your own stuff in order first. And basically, I challenged myself to see, could I put more money in the back pocket of everyday Kiwis than both politicians were proposing to do if you voted for them? So it's called Two Ticks You. I think it's one of the best pieces of work that I've done. It's about an hour 10. I put weeks into studying it and finding all these different ways that people could increase their household income. There's something in there for like every single Kiwi.

Lisa: I'll look at that one. I missed that one.

Luke Kemeys: Yeah, that was quite a while ago. But the final thing I would say too is that we've come so far quite quickly. Even in my lifetime, we've gone from — right, you would go and do the paper run, you would get a pay slip, you would get this cash in a bank account, you might go to the ATM, draw the money out, go to Subway, give them the $20 or whatever, and it was so much friction. And now we live in a world where — or even if you just take that and go to the mall and buy something. Now it's like, "Oh, do you want to buy something?" "Oh, here you go." And, "Oh, just double press this button," and bang, you can put it on finance and pay it back over six weeks. And you go, no wonder people have got problems.

Luke Kemeys: Everywhere they look now, a big corporate or someone is like, "Hey, you've got money. Give it here. Give it here. I'm going to figure out how to get it off you." And we're walking around going, "Yeah, I'm doing pretty well in life." And you're like, "Man, you don't even understand. You're just getting played by these people." And I just think even having that awareness and going, "Ah, I'd never thought about how many things I've got coming through each week, subscription emails trying to sell me something. I innocently signed up for buy now, pay later to help me budget over six periods." Yeah, but now go and have a look at how many emails they sent you with another sale, with an upsell, with — what ads are you getting on social media now? We're so unaware of what we're letting people do to us.

Luke Kemeys: And I'll try and say this really prophetically: the less that you want, the more that you'll have in life.

Lisa: Wow, that is good. That's really good. I think that's a good place to wrap up. You're on fire today. You are on fire. I think we're two birds of a stone, with different specialties obviously, but just, yeah — go go go after it. Sort your stuff out. Take control. Don't let anyone else control you, and move forward. So hey Luke, where can people find you? Where can they consume your wonderful content and all of that?

Luke Kemeys: Keep the Change. If you search that across Spotify, Apple, YouTube, you should enter my world and see some of the content. There's a lot of back catalogue in the audio. I've only been doing video maybe for the last 18 months, but I've been doing the podcast for four years. So there's 700 episodes, and that's enough to put some people off because they go, "Well, I'm not going to start with that because there's 700, and I'd rather put on another true crime and rot my brain about the murder of Bastian something street and not take any action in my life." Or you can just Google Keep the Change, follow me on LinkedIn. I talk like this in the podcast and stuff. It's just who I am. I come from Dannevirke, I worked in a meat works, just — it's just me.

Lisa: Love it.

Luke Kemeys: Everyday lad that wants to see people do better and then hear their stories when they do.

Lisa: Good Kiwi bloke. Well, Luke, thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing your wonderful wisdom and your thoughts. And I love your content. I'm going to keep consuming it, and maybe we do this again.

Luke Kemeys: Sounds good. Keep doing what you're doing.

Lisa: We'll do.