Original Show Notes: Become Richer with Matt Lane   Matt Lane is a the author of the blog, Optimize Your Life. As a part time blogger, and full time attorney, husband and new father, Matt’s goal is to help people learn that the purpose of money is to allow us to live a happier life, so we need to focus on the big picture of how to build that happy life rather than just focusing on the money and fun fact- we randomly found out we’re neighbors! Welcome! [2:48] Hi. Hi how are you. Good. [2:52] So you’re also a neighbor and local to D.C.. What do you like to do when people come to visit you from out of town. [3:2] Yeah. Well I think it depends on whether they’re new to D.C. whether they’ve been here a bunch of times. The first Go2 is always the monuments and museums which seems to be pretty obvious for D.C. locals. Free and amazing for people that haven’t been there before. It’s really like the essence of D.C. For folks that have been there before and have done all the museums. There’s really a great restaurant scene here now which is pretty interesting and there’s a lot of good breweries and wineries in the area. So depending on what people’s interests are like to hit those up. [3:47] So let’s chat about your blog a little bit, so your blog optimize your life. You had a popular post that was titled Hard work doesn’t pay. Can you tell us a little bit about it. [3:57] Sure. So the idea behind it is that there are there’s a large change going on in the economy and we are not really adjusting to meet that change. [4:13] So as basic as background it’s dealing with the value of capital versus the value of labor. [4:22] Any money changes hands is either going to capital or to labor. So if I make money you make money by working which is Labor or by making money off of my investments which is capital in the same way if I buy something from Wal-Mart. Part of that money goes to the shareholders which is the capital and then part of that money is paid to the workers whether they’re the folks working the floor are the cashier the manufacturer and the truck driver that delivers it. That’s all labor so what we’ve seen from the data is that from at least the 1400’s through around 1970 the share of money going to capital and the share of money going to Labor has been relatively consistent. There’s been some ups and downs there’s been some times when capital makes a bit more sometimes when labor makes a bit more but it’s relatively consistent since 1970 that has been off the charts. The value of labor has been going down down down the value of capital has been going up up up. And this is a huge change that we’re not really addressing at all. And it’s one of the drivers of inequality that we see right now in that the people with the most stock are generally the people with the most money and the people that rely the most on work are the people that are the poorest. So as it gets easier to make money off of stock the rich are getting richer and as it’s harder to make money off of your labor the poor are struggling more and more. [6:14] Yeah and I think artificial intelligence is definitely one of the. One of the drivers behind this globalism as well in the U.S. it’s going faster than in the rest of the world. So we’re seeing it’s also the decline of unions and deregulate it de regularisation deregulation deregulation early don’t. Yes. So deregulation and the decline of unions are sort of speeding right along. But I don’t see any real way to change this trend. I’m sure there must be one but with a eye in globalization kind of just pushing relentlessly. You know it seems like we may need to go to something like a universal basic income or you know some other method of redistribution to address the trend. So where did the idea for your blog come from so I get sort of obsessive about learning different things. And I’ve gone through a lot of different phases of that happiness in psychology economics and economic policy personal finance financial independ