The Billionaire Cab Driver: 50 Years of Wealth Wisdom

So welcome to Dawn of a New Era, the Billionaire Brain Podcast. And today's guest is Joseph, aka Jody Talal Jr., pioneering fee-only financial advisor, author, and educator with more than five decades, five decades of experience helping wealthy professionals build and manage and protect their wealth. So you've taught financial management as leading medical schools.

You've written three books, which is a lot. I'm on my third book at the moment called The Billionaire Brain. This is why we've invited you, because your book that you created was The Billionaire Cab Driver. I want to learn more about, obviously, you know, your journey.

So can you tell our listeners a little bit about you, Jody? I started back in 1970 when there wasn't really an industry called financial planning. I went to work for a gentleman, worked for professionals. He was helping them with some changes in the tax law, and it allowed professionals to incorporate.

So there were a lot of good things that professionals were all of a sudden allowed to do. And so that's how we got started. I had a partner. Unfortunately, in the financial planning industry, I don't want to say unfortunately, which is fact, there's a lot of product sales that end up at the end, and that's where the income comes from.

So you're selling insurance and disability and life insurance and mutual funds and things like that. And around 1975, I noticed my clients were kind of shying away a little bit towards the end of it, where they were really engaged during the middle of our sessions. And I asked, Does this bother you? And they said, Yes.

So I said, Would you like me to give up all product sales and all third-party commissions coming from other entities, and would you be willing to pay me a legitimate fee for my services? And they said, Yes. So I looked downtown, attorneys back in 1975 in Dallas were earning a hundred bucks an hour, so I said, I'll do that, and we started. So that's how I got into the business.

Yeah, and you were America's first fee-only financial advisor in the 70s, and that's crazy. Yeah, I was credited from the—when I used to know Bernard Winn, who was the executive director of the International Financial Planners Association, and he told me he thought I was the first in the industry. Wow. So what did you see in this sort of traditional financial industry that made you want to create the different model?

Was it just the unfairness and just talking to clients that you just thought there must be a better way to serve them? No, it's just that if you're getting compensated from a third party, then you start looking towards yourself and what you can find. And if you're only compensated from one source, your client, that's the only thing you care about. So that was something that never felt great with me in the beginning.

Yeah. Something that felt really wonderful when it was over with, and it allowed me to do some very unique things. I was able to go to the school and say, Look, I'd like to create a course for the doctors that are getting ready to graduate, and that—since I had no allegiances to anything—they said, Yeah, let's do that. And that grew from one medical school into four medical schools.

And so I literally, traveling around the country, giving Category One medical credit courses to doctors, teaching them how to manage their money. This is fascinating. And I think the thing is, is that when we think about wealth advisor, we do think about that one model where, you know, they've got an alliance. Can we trust what they're saying, or are they just getting the biggest kickback from that particular place?

And it's certainly something that I've been aware of and seen in my financial sort of investing journey. I think what's interesting is that you're invited to teach at these medical professionals, including like Baylor, Tulane, and University of Tennessee. I mean, these are big institutions. Why can someone be highly educated and successful in their career, but yet still struggle to manage money confidently?

And this is something I see across founders all of the time. Well, the problem is most people are educated in one thing, and they spend a lot of time becoming very proficient in that one thing. Doctors, for example, get 10, 12 years of concentration of nothing but the physical body, what they're doing, how it works, and everything else. And being in academic affairs at SMU—I'm sorry, at Southwest Medical School—told me when I approached him originally, he said, You know, I think it's important.

They don't have any time. Education, we don't have one minute to give them. We're teaching them what they need in order to practice medicine successfully. And I think that transfers into law, that transfers into accounting, and it transfers into any line of professional.

Then you get the big problem, and that is one is very successful as an attorney or as a doctor or somebody that has achieved something like that, they develop somewhat of an ego that, Look at what I've accomplished, and they assume they can transfer that knowledge without the similar type of efforts of education into something, and that's why they do so poorly. So this is so interesting because obviously across five decades, you will have met a lot of different people. And what do financially successful people understand about money that most people never learn? That's a very good question, because here's how I learned what I learned.

I started realizing my clients are financially undressing in front of me, just like their patients financially undress in front of them. I worked on this exclusively. And all of a sudden, I realized I have privy to all of their history with 20/20 hindsight that they gained after the mistakes were made, as well as the successes. So I used to create little piles on my desk after, you know, that I'd go back and research looking for red threads.

It was the left side was the successes. There weren't that many there. And right side was the failures, and that thing was real tall. And I used to go through that looking for all the different red threads.

And then I started coming up with ideas, and I started creating investments myself. And then some of my clients said, Can we partner with you? And I said, Yes. And what ended up happening was I looked and got rid of all the red threads that were in the failures, and I magnified red threads in the positives, and it directed me into a course of action.

And the investments I did from 1975 to 1985 were the ones when I was most active. I retired in 1985. I was 35 years old. I was worth 38 million at the time.

So, you know, very successful as, you know, what I did. And I looked at that, and I mean, there was a 63.8% internal rate of return on every dollar that I touched that we invested during that period. So— I bet our listeners are listening to this thinking, How can we get Jody out of retirement?

This is crazy. I mean, that's a lot of return. I mean, you think about some of the investments and things in 2026. What do you think the difference is in the financial economy then for investing versus now?

Well, that's a big question in itself, because there've been so many evolutions and change. And I'm going to be very candid. When I was doing this, I was in something that there wasn't a lot of people who—it was real estate, it was specialized, it was commercial corners that were not developed, that would be developed in five to ten years. That kind of got isolated from things I saw from the people that made money.

And most of them, it was really kind of funny. Doctor and— And he'd be out away from town, and all of a sudden the country club in town decided to move out of town and put the country club next to him, and he ended up with a lot of golf course lots next to it for $250, about $30,000 an acre. Yeah. And another guy, when they were building Interstate 10 through Louisiana, came in and he bought all the corners in his town where the freeway was crossing, and they became extraordinarily valuable, obviously.

He became worth about $20 million. So that kind of directed me and said, you know, this is a pretty interesting path. And I started doing the same thing in Dallas, and it was extraordinary. It's fascinating.

I mean, literally, I wish we could just have you on for hours. My next question: across thousands of people, obviously, who you've advised over the years, what are the habits or the actual behaviors that you see most commonly that prevent high earners from turning income into lasting wealth? Or, again, positive traits that you've seen in people who have excelled? Yeah, that's also a very good question, because there's a lot of personal things.

I consider money a boundary. And so, where money grows, your boundaries of what you can do grow. And a child, once you expand their boundaries, it's real tough to bring them back into more confined space. So we have more income, we expand.

And that's the thing that we have to learn, that, look, the money is coming in, and I was doing well before this new increase. If I just take a portion of the increase and improve my lifestyle, I'll see results and I'll see benefit. But if I take a bigger portion and put it towards my future, I'll see some type of development. That doesn't happen naturally with people.

They see money come in, there's a new car they want to buy, they go buy it. They get more money. It's time to move out of this little house into a bigger—just give me a bigger house. So it's a matter of a mindset of realizing money is finite.

I can tell you the end of your life, the last breath you take, there will be an exact number of dollars or cents or pounds or whatever your currency is that you earned during that period. Now, every dollar you consume is a dollar gone. So the question is, how do you get the highest and best use of all the dollars that come in your possession? So if you're out looking for a TV and something catches your fancy and the thing is, you know, $2,000, then you turn around and you write a check.

What if you could have looked around and found that TV on sale for $1,200? You could have had the same TV.

But you'd have $800 left over for something else. And so it becomes more of a mindset of understanding that. And most people just don't develop that naturally. I think that's so true.

And I see this as founders scale, so do their bills. And quite often when founders come to me and they're like, Well, Dawn, I've scaled to 100K months, they're actually no better off than when they were at 30K months because they've hired so many people, they've added in resources, and the profit margin has depleted somewhat. Yeah. And I see this a lot because they buy the house and they put more and more pressure and responsibility on.

The founders that value enrichment and their lifestyle tend to have less of a focus towards the materialistic side of things. They'd rather have a house with no debt, and they'd rather travel and do things like experiences. I mean, obviously you've retired very young, so what did you do with your wealth? Well, that's the extra middle part of the story in the book.

The book is my life, but it turned into a terrible format of something that would be fun to read, and it's a fictitious little island off in the South Pacific, and a little guy that's wanting to get off the island, he meets somebody that trains him, and he learns all this stuff, and then he comes back and becomes a cab driver because that's what he loves to do with people, is talk and then show them. So it turns out the guy's worth 20 billion when this is all over with. So I'm not worth 20 billion. I'd be candid with you.

But in answer to your question, I stopped taking clients in '85. I was a cyclical investor, so I was buying in recessions and down, and I was selling in the booms when people were buying like crazy. And so I was usually prepared, and at that time I was prepared for about four or five years worth of a down period, when they normally last 18 to 24. So it was all thought out.

Well, it happened in Texas that was unprecedented, and that was our entire banking system collapsed in 1986, and we went into a 10-year depression year. It wasn't a recession; it was a depression. And they started selling at the end in absolute auctions for six and seven cents on the dollar. I lost everything.

So I had to start all over again. I did that in 1995. I was retired again by 1999, and I decided I don't need to climb the same mountain I climbed before. The first time I bought everything there was to buy.

Had 71-foot sailboat, had ranches, had limousines, Rolls-Royce convertibles. I mean, the whole thing. There was nothing left to buy, and there was no more excitement in life at that point. I was fully jaded.

And so, you know, when it was gone, it was a real introspective period for me. And that's when I learned everything I really learned in life, and that's what was more important, and how to build it, and how to do it safely. The challenge is this: you know, Don, people, they have a process to get ahead, and they climb a mountain. You climb and you keep climbing.

You make five million, you make 10 million, you make 20 million, you make 50 million, you make 100 million. You go on and on and on and on and on. The problem is you can fall off a mountain at any time. But more important, there's a peak or a summit at every mountain top.

And if you haven't identified where your personal summit mountain top is, you never know when to quit climbing. And while you're climbing, you're always at risk. So I learned that, and once I reached my next peak, when I was right before, you know, 2000, I said, Okay, I'm done. And that was how that worked.

So interesting, so interesting, because you're right. I just see people wanting more and more and more, and I ask them, like, when is the end? Like, what is the balance that you're actually looking for? Because you can go and make money all day, every day, and founders thrive on it.

They love it. We've all done it, and we throw ourselves into it, and it's our life. But at what cost, and at what sacrifice? And I do see that there is a point where founders start to get slightly delusional of why they're doing it, and they've come so far they've forgotten what it was in the first place that they actually wanted.

I mean, accumulating this amount of money, obviously you've got to protect it, but what are the biggest mistakes that people make once they've got this significant wealth? What do you see happening? I think the biggest mistake is, number one, thinking it's endless. You do it, the better it works, the worse it gets, actually, because you keep doing it, you get confident, you do it more, and there's always something, no matter how far ahead you thought, that could be beyond anything you would have comprehended.

I never could have comprehended in 1985 that every major bank in the state of Texas would go out of business in the next four years. One, which of I, and that one that didn't have anything to do with real estate. I never would have been able to anticipate that the government intervention would be so inefficient in trying to deal with tens and tens of billions of dollars of REO real estate, and their inability to move it properly, and that they could flop a market that bad. I mean, these are things beyond comprehension.

So, you know, you can go to Vegas, you're gambling. Well, you're investing, you're gambling too. You turn with me anytime, there's a chance you won't see it back. You can get better and better and better at managing risk.

You get better and better and better at understanding the questions to ask that make you more intelligent. But you get better at seeing in the crystal ball what the future holds. So you're saying that basically we have to understand what is our peak, where do we want to reach, and what are we doing it all for? Obviously to protect it, and you've obviously lived through recessions, inflations, market crashes, major changes in the whole economy.

Family, you want to do all these different things, and those have a price tag, by the way. You can figure out to the penny how much you need in order to live the rest of your life at whatever lifestyle you want. That's an algorithm that I actually have a program I created that does that. So it's something that's real simple.

But once you have got everything there is on the list that you want, what is it doing unless you're trying to fill some empty hole that's not fillable? That's the bigger problem. That's what happens with a lot of founders, is they're out trying to prove something to themselves, and they never fill the hole in themselves so they can never prove enough. Yeah, and it becomes a bit of an ego cycle, I think, and it's like feeding the sort of the God complex slightly.

You're more than ego. Yeah, yeah. I need more, you know, and it's just, you know, I mean, it's all kinds of stuff. I learned a lot.

It took me 10 years of psychological work in order to pass that, and I came out of it with a whole new personality, a whole new structure. I mean, it must have been very cathartic. I mean, you've retired twice. I mean, tell us more about this program that you've written.

Can people access this? I had it. It was originally online, but the situation's changed. I'm rewriting it right now, having rewritten it.

How am I going to get accessible on the website where the book is available, which is called Billionaire After Iver Life. Tell us about these books then, because I think you piqued people's interest, because there's a lot of layers here. It's not just wealth; it's the whole wealth psychology and mindset that comes with it. What was the first book, second, and third?

First book was Multi-Million Dollar Discover, and that was written in 1979 or so. And the second— Huh? That was the year I was born. Yeah, well, you're one year older than my daughter.

Oh. Anyway, the second one was the multi-million dollar—I'm sorry, that was Multi-Million Dollar—it was Charting Your Course to Financial Security. And both of those were traditional financial planning books, just like the stuff I taught in my courses to the doctors. Yeah.

And it was dry subject. This is not fun. And I really wanted to write something, and I had a lot more perspective the last time around because now I had all this other new information that was way beyond just money and finance and, you know, a lot of personal insights, everything else. And I wanted to include all of that, and it became—I wrote a book called The Richest Man in Babylon.

Have you ever heard of it, George? Well, I looked at it because I looked into you. It's a wonderful book. It's a great book, and it's a parable, and it goes back to the time of Babylon, and everybody's got the same problems they have today, but the guy's got to get enough money for the sandal maker so his kids can have sandals.

I mean, all of this stuff, and he teaches financial lessons all the way through it. So basically every single page is another lesson. At the end of the chapter, there's all the lessons laid out, and it's in a story format. You're never hearing anything other than a narrative of a story, and I wanted to do something like that, and that's how I built The Billionaire Cab Driver.

Yeah, a fictitious character. He lives in a small Polynesian island. He figures out how to get off the island through the help of a mentor, which is somebody I had in my life that taught me how to use my brain and taught me how to program for goals and taught me how to plan things in the future. All of those things were responsible for me being able to move forward and do the things that I did.

All of that's in the book. I mean, it gets into—the Billionaire Cab Driver gets into all the philosophy behind... How do you control your mind? How do you take and implant goals and make them work in your subconscious when you're sleeping?

You know, all of the various different things so that you're not sitting there consciously having to figure it all out. You're simply— I look at it this way: the mind is like a big fertile field. You plant seeds in it, you water them, they're going to grow. Plant positive seeds, you grow a bunch of corn.

You can plant negative seeds, grow a bunch of poison.

The more seeds you plant, the more you're going to grow. Well, you learn to clear out the negative seeds. You learn to become conscious of what you're thinking, and you put the conscious thoughts in there and let those go to work. And so all of this stuff is included in the book Beyond Just About Money.

So obviously, after more than half a century in, like, business, investing, educating, public service, writing, where is your sort of definition now of what wealth is to you? Wealth to me is peace of mind of knowing I've done what I need to do. I've taken care of all the things that need to be taken care of, and the things that make me comfortable. And I don't need to move and do anything hard.

I mean, I reached that point in life, and I'm very comfortable. It's like, yeah, there's nothing that I really feel like I have to prove to anybody anymore. I rewrote the book. The first book, Billionaire Cat Driver, was published in 2017 and sold out its initial copies.

I was at a dinner for my wife's birthday, and my two grandkids, who were 27 and 25 at the time, sitting across me, and they said, Papa, just want you to know, we talk about your book all the time. And I go, What? They said, Oh yeah, we found so many things in there that changed our life, and we literally talk about it on the phone. I go, That blew me away.

I mean, I gave them that book in 2017. This is 2024 at the time, and it dawned on me, wow, if it had that kind of impact that long after somebody had read it, I need to go through and do it again. I need to make it better. So I did, and that became the new version, which is the second edition.

It's the one we have out. Yeah, and I'm working my way through that at the moment. And I think the thing is, is with all the work I've done, 25 years in, and I've interviewed so many different people, I think one thing that always stays true across every millionaire, billionaire I've ever met is that money was always the central reason, and then it always moved to something different. I don't know if I've met anyone who hasn't been through that cycle where wealth became the goal, and then wealth then moved down past other things.

So there was experiences, family, freedom. There was things that were more valuable in life than the money. What was the one point in your life where you really feel like you understood what that switch was, that definition of wealth? After 10 years of therapy, and it was intense therapy, I looked back and said, you know what?

This is what life is, really. Yeah. It's funny. The first therapist I worked with, he said, Tell me about Jody.

I said, Okay, I told him about all the things I'd done. He said, No, no, tell me about Jody. And so I told him about more of all the things I'd done, and I told him, you know, I mean, he said, I want to know about Jody. I said, Okay, and I went and reiterated some of the things I just told him.

He said, Everything you've told me is what a circus animal can be trained to do. Tell me who you are. And boy, that blew me away, and I had no clue. Yeah.

It's identity, isn't it? It's like wealth is the identity. Who I was. I was the accomplishments.

I was this. I was that. I achieved this. Yeah, that's who I was to me.

And that's the whole I've been trying to fill constantly, was trying to prove that that was okay. And so the therapy helped me get through the point of realizing, you know what? I'm a different person. You know, I'm a great dad.

I'm a wonderful husband. I'm the best papa in the world for the grandkids. And those became the things that I started focusing on and enjoying. And, you know, my grandkids, first time I said, Well, get on the floor and play with kids.

I mean, when I was an adult with my first kids, you know, it's like, Hi guys, it's off to work. And I see this a lot, like in founders, where they've said that they're better in the second generation, where the grandkids get them, whereas the kids saw them going to work away doing all the things. And, you know, if you were to go back and change one thing, would you, and what would it be? I really wouldn't, because if I were to try to change what caused me to fall apart at the end, then I would have gotten the lessons that I learned from that, which are much more valuable than what I had that I lost.

True. So, you know, I really wouldn't. I wish I wouldn't have suffered as long through it as I did. Yeah, yeah.

It's a lot. I mean, you've come out the other end, and obviously you're enjoying life now. I mean, I want everyone to go and find these books and learn more about them. Where is the best place to connect, and just repeat the website for everyone that they can find the details?

Well, the book's on Amazon, Billionaire Cab Driver, if you will. That's the easiest place to get it. The website is Billionaire Cab Driver Life. So it's the life you would live if the billionaire cab driver's living.

com. So, but Amazon's the easiest place to get it. Perfect. Okay.

And as ever on my podcast, I always end with either a funny story or an embarrassing moment. And you thought I'd forgotten about this, didn't you? So what is your embarrassing moment or a story, Jody, that you can tell us? I've been really focusing on trying to come up with one.

I think probably it's not so much an embarrassing moment. It's just a realization and an awareness, and that was you thought you had it all understood, and you really didn't. And it was, you know, a flash that came into me at that, at the end. Wow.

Wasn't that interesting? And I think that's true. I mean, you've spoken very candidly about what's gone on and the highs and lows of obviously being an entrepreneur. If you think about the books, the podcasts, things that, or the people that you've met in your life, is there any recommendation of podcast or book or any person that has been, you know, instrumental in how you've improved your journey?

Yeah, actually two books that were instrumental in almost 80% of what I was able to accomplish was Richest Man in Babylon was great because it opened my eyes to a whole new series. There was another book that was, to me, much more important. Now, this book was written a long time ago, but I reread it not long ago and it's still 100% applicable. It's called I Can, and it was written by Dr.

Ben Sweetland, S-W-E-E-T-L-A-N-D. And that is the book that taught me how to program my mind with my mentor. He introduced me to it. He taught me some of the things that were in it.

I read it and, I mean, it is phenomenal in being able to understand. I mean, if most people understood that all you have to do is change what's going on in your head, becoming a witness to what you're thinking and becoming aware of it and being able to change it while it's occurring, which you can if you become practiced at it. He gets into all of that, and it was very, very important. I think I'll have a read of that, definitely.

Well, thank you so much for joining me, and thank you for saying yes to appear on the podcast. We didn't know... Thank you for having me. I had a great time listening.

All right, take care, Jody. And guys, if you've enjoyed today's episode, please remember to rate and review and tell someone about Dawn of a New Era, The Billionaire Brain. Thank you.