The Iced Coffee Hour - America’s $37 Trillion Financial Reset Just Started - Do This Now! | Andrei Jikh

Episode Date: October 12, 2025

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Do you think that Bitcoin's price is manipulated right now? Probably just because you see these insane swings. Well, in 2025, there's another war for the soul of Bitcoin. There's a fight between two groups of people. One, that's trying to say, is Bitcoin money or is it a store of information? There's a lot of nuance to this debate, but in the end, I think this will determine the future of Bitcoin. What would you say is the best investing advice you've ever heard? I think like the most important investing quality of people that I've seen that have built wealth is like their ability to delay gratification.

You eventually realize that the quickest way to being financially free isn't necessarily by building a bigger portfolio, but knowing what's going to happen next. Are you bullish or bearish for the U.S. economy? I think in the next few weeks, there's going to be a huge wealth transfer. Graham Stephan, Andre Jick, thank you so much for coming on the iced coffee hour. Really appreciate it. Thank you for having me. Vegas Graham here. I try to copy all your content.

Thank you. Huge fan of your channel, by the way. Thank you. I try to do exactly the same style videos as you, but slightly better on the editing. You basically take my exact same videos, but then do them a day later with way better editing. Yeah, I have ChatsyPT sort of repurpose your script, and then I'll shuffle them into my own words. It's working. You have now almost three million subscribers.

Thank you, thank you. And, no, in all seriousness, your videos are amazing. Appreciate it. I mean, the amount of work that you put in your... channel. The editing, I get really intimidated when I watch your videos because I'm like, how could I compete with like a movie quality video about either a cryptocurrency or the US dollar or international affairs? And I'm like, this must have taken you three days straight to edit this video, whereas I'm trying to like slap something together in a few hours.

No, I appreciate it. It's funny because I'm trying to move away from the editing. I don't know if you're noticing it too, but I feel like the less edited it is, the more it's received. Like, I think people appreciate it more when it's less produced. I think YouTube is going back to that. I've tried it a few times, and those videos have done really well, but I'm not sure if it's because of the lack of editing or because I saved the lack of editing for really substantial videos that stand on their own without the editing. That's a good point. And every time you do them, I feel like the comments are like, Graham, you look tired. It's always when I'm sitting in that chair, do people say that.

But when I go back to my, it's just lighting. I think it's a closer camera, so you look puffier and you just look. bigger on this lens. Yeah. I love this conversation. Graham looks puffier on the lens. Andre, thank you so much for coming on the ice coffee. Yeah, really appreciate it.

Also, it's funny looking back because I first saw you, I don't even know how many years ago, you're talking about your dividend stock portfolio and crypto. You're talking about crypto on YouTube a long time ago. I mean, five years ago, I think we had you on the show. And we were talking about Bitcoin when it was at like $20,000, which we all still thought we'd miss the train. Right. Do you think that we've missed the train on Bitcoin still?

No, not at all. Wasn't I like the second guest on your podcast? You were one of the very first guest we've ever had. I remember that. You gave me the Pokemon cards. I got the psychic energy. I remember that. Now we're back.

Yeah. No, yeah, it's crazy. I do remember that. 20,000 was the peak of that cycle in 2017. Yep. Yeah. And then we did again in 2020. That's right.

Yeah. No, and it's crazy to see it out of our hundred now. What do you guys think? You think we've peaked? Michael Saylor would disagree. He would say that we're just getting started here. I tend to agree. Also, you know, we just had Robert Kiyosaki on the podcast,

and that did instill a little bit of fear when he's like fake money, fake money holding up like the dollar bill. It does make sense. He's a huge fan of Bitcoin, right? He loves Bitcoin. He loves gold. He loves silver. He loves assets when you can't just print more of them.

And what's interesting. We were talking about Bitcoin. And I said, are you still buying Bitcoin? And he said, no. And I said, well, give us a price target. How is it at $100,000? And he goes like this. I kid you not.

Yeah. implying that retail investors are being dragged along. Oh. He likes instead, he said silver, gold, and Ethereum. Interesting. And he's not buying Bitcoin at $100,000 levels. Okay. Which is interesting.

I thought he would continue to be buying Bitcoin, given his stance on the dollar. Yeah, from what I've seen silver and platinum and gold outperformed Bitcoin this year, for sure. Maybe he's right. I don't know. I think Bitcoin is a long way to go. I think I've always looked at Bitcoin's final price to be inflation divided by 21 million. And what's inflation? That's infinity, right?

Like infinity divided by 21 million is infinity, essentially. And it seems to be the fastest horse in the race. So I think it'll continue to go up. It might dip below $100,000, though. I wouldn't be surprised. Are you still buying Bitcoin right now? Yeah, actually, the last time I bought it was a couple weeks ago. I bought it at like $115,000.

I just bought the I bet ETF. I know that you've been buying it. Yep. Yeah. So I've just bought the iBit. But most of my Bitcoin is in the commodity itself, the coin. I self-custody. So you do the cold storage?

Yeah. If you're going to do cold storage on Bitcoin, what's the best way of doing it? There's just so many devices to do it. Get yourself a, like a ledger or whatever else is not sponsored. You can get so many hardware devices. And then look into something called a 25th passphrase. It's sort of a plausible deniability wallet that allows you to create sort of a duplicate of your wallet. So if somebody like attacks you, you'd be like, okay, here's my seed phrase.

But you have a secret wallet. That's just one more word on top of that where your actual money is stored. It's called a plausible deniability wallet. It's actually really cool. That's interesting. So for example, when those people like went over to Amaran's house and they were trying to like attack her and get her Bitcoin away from her, she could have just said, oh, I have this code. And then it like looks like it's hers. But in actuality, that's just like a fake code.

you could do that. I mean, at that point, like, people always say, like, the $5 wrench attack. Like, at that point, there's no amount of, like, cybersecurity. You can be like, oh, here's, yeah, I mean, that was an unfortunate thing that happened with her. So when did you first buy Bitcoin? Why did I first buy Bitcoin? I want to say 2014 when it was $600 a coin. How much Bitcoin did you buy it? Why did you buy it? I bought, like, six of them. And I bought it because I was reading, it was like this internet, magic internet money. And I remember reading about it when I was like at $100, but there was no way of buying it unless you were super computer savvy. And then that's when, what exchange was it? Mount Gawks. Mount Gawks, yeah. And I was like, okay, I don't understand any of that stuff.

But I remember buying it. I think it was on Coinbase. I bought six of them. And then it just held onto it for a year. Totally forgot about it. And I checked a year later in like, I don't know, 2015. And it dropped to $300 a coin. So I sold all six of them to buy myself a DJ.

I was like the 1080P DJI, whatever it was at the time. And I eventually crashed that drone. But yeah, I sold it basically all of it. So that drone was about $750,000. Yeah, yeah. It was an expensive, like, learning mistake. But I feel like everyone has that story in Bitcoin. I mean, I told Graham to buy dogecoin, it was less than half a cent.

Oh, he showed me this the other day. We could go back on the podcast. So Jack told me to buy Dogecoin when it was a fraction of a penny, He told me to invest $1,000 into it in one of our first ever podcasts, and I did. I didn't understand it. I thought it was dumb. And so I had 217,000 doge coin for $1,000. Wow.

And I looked at it, and then the next day, I sold it for a loss. He sold it the next day. Paper hands. He has paper hands. I thought it was so stupid. What was it worth at the peak? It would have been worth... $1,26,000.

That's not as bad as me, but it would have been worth about $150,000. But I were a $1,000 investment, which met, and I told Jack this, I would have made more money from that single Dogecoin investment than I would have from the podcast at the time. That's crazy. So I put $100 in Dogecoin when it was about 0.4 cents. Okay. And then I held on, I diamond hands for a very, very long time up until the night of the SNL thing when Elon was supposed to go on there and top. Yeah. And so I cashed out and then bought this exact Rolex with it.

So we call this the dojelix. That's amazing. I remember pleading with you. I was like, dude, look into Bitcoin. You got to get someone. You're like, I don't know. Do you remember how opposed to Bitcoin you were? Not that long ago.

Late 2016 or early 2017 is when I made my first video about Bitcoin. And that was Bitcoin just hit $1,000. That's when I made my first video. You could go back on my channel and see it. Do you ever read the comments? They're like, oh, this is. It's all-age like milk. All the time.

Now, in the video, the thing is... Age like milk. Dude, I wasn't for or against it. It was just, I was neutral about it. And at the time, there was no real use case. It was just people speculating on it. It was like, it did not evolve back then to where it is today. Right.

It just is what it, it was a gambling mechanism back then. Now, people had a vision for it, but back then it didn't have the utility or anything. What changed your mind? It hit 20,000. It hit 17,000, actually. And I bought one Bitcoin for fun, just to see what it was about because everyone was talking about Bitcoin.

And I bought it. And then I started getting involved in all, like, the communities and reading through on Reddit and Twitter and crypto YouTube at the time in 2017. And I had fun with it. But back then, I started, like, just day trading it.

So I would, like, buy it at 17. I would sell it for, like, 172. I'd buy back in at 16.9. I just did that. Right. And it made, like, 500 bucks. And then I put all of it. that into a project called at the time Ryeblocks.

Huh. And that turned into 50 or 60 grand, and I didn't cash out and I lost all of it. Wow. Okay, so we all make mistakes. Yeah. That's good. But that's what turned me on to Bitcoin. Right.

And then I thought at that point, okay, there's no harm in just like investing 1% of my portfolio on Bitcoin. Do you think that Bitcoin's price is manipulated right now? Probably. Okay. Probably just because you see these insane swings. Like all of a sudden, I'll check the price at midnight, and it drops from like 115 to 109.

Right. Instantly. Somebody's selling. Who is that? How is that manipulate? And then all of a sudden, I'll jump right back up to like 112. There's this concept called the rehypothecation. Have you guys heard of it?

No. It's a mechanism to suppress Bitcoin's price, and it's probably happening on it. It's where a lender can essentially take, take the loan they give you and your collateral, and then they can use your collateral. Like, for example, if you're like, Andre, I want to borrow $100. I'm like, okay, here's $100.

Okay, but in return, I'm going to have a claim over your house. Whatever, right, that's the collateral. And then with that collateral, that I owe you, I go to another bank, and I'm like, hey, I got this dude's house. That's my collateral. I'm going to borrow money against it. And then that lender goes and borrows against that. And then before you know it, it cascades.

And now several people and several entities have a claim on the same asset. But now substitute house with Bitcoin. And now you can have five people essentially having a claim over the same coin. And I think that's happening with the ETFs to some degree or another. I don't think we'll know about it until later. But one way to solve that is to self-custody. And that's why I think self-custody is so important because then you solve that. that's why I think like there could be a very violent price movement up.

And so when did you then buy Bitcoin after this one instance of buying six coins selling it to buy a drone that you crashed? I just want to keep reminding you of that because I feel bad because I've lost a lot of money and Robin Hood call options. Were you on Wall Street vets? Yeah, of course. Yeah. Sorry, ask that question again.

So when did you then next buy Bitcoin after that? Oh, 2017. That was during the Block Wars. I don't know if you guys were a part of that or remember that at all. That's right now kind of like the biggest thing that's happening in 2025. So I'm not going to get like too into it. But in 2017, there was a fight for like the soul of Bitcoin, right? And that was called the Block Wars.

Essentially, people were split into two factions. One half thought, well, what is Bitcoin? One half wanted it to be a currency. And the other half wanted it to be. a store of value. So the currency people wanted the block size to be increased

to like four megabytes, okay? Right. It was originally like one. And the store of value people were like, well, let's keep it at one. Because if you allow Bitcoin

to become a currency, which has a much higher TAM or total addressable market size, currencies are much bigger than a commodity like gold, right? It addresses a much bigger market. Okay. So if we allow Bitcoin

to become a currency, and increase the block size, then eventually, like, let's say, five, ten years from now, it'll be prohibitively expensive to run your own node, to basically secure the Bitcoin. The only people that can do that

will be like big mining companies and big corporations, right? And so you effectively centralize Bitcoin to big business. And big business is subject to what? Government control, right? So they're like, let's not make it a currency. Let's make it a store of value.

That was like my introduction to like the craziness of it. And I followed this whole battle. And at the time, the argument that made the most sense to me was to have it a currency. Because I'm like, well, if Bitcoin's going to grow beyond this point, it needs to be a bigger thing, like a currency, right? In terms of currency, you're saying just something that you use to pay for goods and services. Yeah, like a dollar. Exactly. Use it to pay and buy things.

Because even in the Bitcoin white paper, it says a peer to peer currency. Right. And so I was like, okay, so Bitcoin should increase block size. In retrospect, I'm glad that it stayed small because then it means it's decentralized and anybody can run. It's pretty cheap to do. So that was the block size war in 2017.

But fast forward to today, and in 2025, there's another war for the soul of Bitcoin. Not a lot of people know this because it's like really nuanced and nerdy. I mean, I'm not the best person to explain this. I kind of did a lot of the research yesterday. But essentially what's happening right now is there's a fight between again,

two groups of people. One that's trying to say, is Bitcoin money, right, a store of value, or is it a store of information, like all information, not just economic data, but all sorts of data, right? So there is a split between these two. Now, let me just ask you this hypothetical question. What is the best way do you guys think to destroy Bitcoin? If you were trying to take it down or destroy it, what is the best way to do? Unplug the internet.

That's one way. It's really hard to do, though. It's not really, there's no plug. In all seriousness, I would say to destroy Bitcoin, you would have to destroy the faith of Bitcoin. So I think if... So starting a business is super exciting, but let's be real. The legal side of things can be extremely overwhelming.

You hear people say, just start an LLC. But what does that actually mean? What forms do you need? How do you make sure it's done right? Well, we've partnered up with busy to sponsor this podcast because I've actually used them myself and I got to say it was way easier than I could have ever imagined. Setting up my LLC took less than 10 minutes and I just knew ever. everything was getting filed properly and professionally, it's actually so simple.

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but do it. Create the LLC, do it with BISI because it's extremely easy at busy.com slash I-C-H. That is B-I-Z-E-E-D-com slash ICH. Thank you so much to Busy for sponsoring this episode. Start the business. I would say to destroy Bitcoin, you would have to destroy the faith of Bitcoin. So I think if Satoshi somehow dumped on the market, everyone would lose faith in that. Or I think like a huge solar flare that somehow takes out networks. Okay. Not bad. So we can't do Satoshi, right? Because like he's gone. He's never coming back. And we can't invoke him to come back. How do you know he's gone? Because he would have come back at this point if he was like incentivized financially and bitcoin is worth hundreds of billions of dollars

at no point in time is is there a person that's like i'm going to wait i have a couple hundred billion dollars now i'm going to wait until it hits a trillion or whatever it is and you can see wallets that's how you know you can see it yeah his coins have not moved since i forget what's his coins yeah it's in his wallet how many coins does you have wasn't it like a million roughly a million coins yeah so what's the value of that it was like a hundred and twenty eight billion dollars yeah he's like one of the top sitting in his wife's a million dollars sitting in his And you've never seen that is his wallet, transacting. It's never moved.

And it never will. It hasn't moved since when. It was like 2000. I want to say 2011, but I might be wrong. Yeah. Something like. So are people speculating that he's passed away, that he's gone? Most likely he's passed away, yeah.

The people who think he was, but the Bitcoin community doesn't really like to talk about who Satoshi is because that's an attack vector, right? Because if you figure out who that person is or who that group was, you can attack their character. That's a vulnerability. It's interesting. Michael Saylor has been asked, who is Satoshi Nakamoto? He gets mad. And yeah, he just like, it triggers him.

Like he does not want to answer it. Right. And he gets like visibly upset. Yeah, he calls it the, uh, the immaculate conception of Bitcoin, right? Because it's like no one knows who gave birth to this thing. And it's smart. Like, we shouldn't really try to figure that out. Um, but the point is, is that, uh, the best way to really attack Bitcoin is not a solar flare. We can't induce a solar flare.

We can't get Satoshi to spend his coins. The best way to do it is to destroy it from within. Okay. So right now in Bitcoin, there's five pillars of power that make it decentralized. Users, nodes, businesses, the miners, and the developers. Okay. So like a lot of criticism that you hear people that don't understand Bitcoin, they'll be like, well, how do you know it's 21 million? Like, what if they like write in the code and they change it to like 40 million just to give themselves some more? And it's like they could do that, but they wouldn't be able to get that through without. the majority consensus, right? Like, everyone would have to agree that it's in their economic interest to do that.

That's what makes Bitcoin so cool is the game theory aspect of it. So the fundamental rules of Bitcoin have never been changed. But if you were, like, a rogue nation or a government and you wanted to destroy Bitcoin because you're like, hey, this Bitcoin thing looks cool.

Like, how would I control it? Well, I would figure out who the developers are, and I might offer them, like, a salary, like, $20 or $30 million a year. And I would tell them, I want you to make certain propositions in the software that changes the core aspect of what Bitcoin is. And I would put out a huge propaganda campaign

that's like, what is Bitcoin? Is it really gold? Is it really digital gold? Is it really money? Or is it a database of all sorts of immutable information, right? So here's specifically what I'm talking about. This kind of gets nerdy. But there is this feature inside of Bitcoin

called the op return feature, op underscore return. And that feature has an 80-byte limit, meaning, like, that's the storage capacity of it. It's very small. It's about the size of a tweet. You can attach certain random points of data,

like metadata or some kind of proof or some kind of message. Fun fact, in 2017, during the Block Wars, the core development team, which runs the Bitcoin software, these guys are like the smartest, like nerdiest people, right? They do not like having a debate with people.

So they shut people down. They censored. people. And so the big blockers, the people who wanted a Bitcoin to become a currency, they made a decentralized Twitter through this op return mechanism. And the way it worked is you could send a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a Bitcoin from your own wallet back to your own wallet. So you sent the money back to yourself. And it cost you like a fraction of a penny. But in that transaction, you embedded a small tweet. And somebody made that into a website. It was like a decentralized immutable. A small tweet into that data. Into that data. Yes,

a text, a piece of text. A piece of text. Basically. Right. And so they recreated a decentralized immutable Twitter on the blockchain. That's how it was used. But again, it has that limit of 80 bytes. Actually, I brought a cool thing to show you what that looks like. So here is an image of an 80 byte-sized image.

Can you tell what that is? No. You can't really tell what that is. No. That looks like Trump. This episode is brought to you by Tell Us Online Security. Tax season is the worst. You mean hack season?

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Conditions apply. It does kind of. I could see it. The suit, the blue suit. in the hand. Good job. That is actually. It is.

It is. It is. It is. Wow. Did you figure it out? I had no idea, actually. But it's hard to see. Holy crap.

It's really hard to see. Right? Mm-hmm. That was good, Jack. Good job. Good job. Nice and I think. Okay.

So, so right now, the fundamental disconnect in the core development team is that they want to upgrade Bitcoin to remove the limit of the op return, right? They want to get rid of the 80 byte limit. What does that mean? That means that within a transaction, people will be able to include images and videos up to four megabytes in size. So now that image that looks like nothing to most people, unless you're an autist like Jack, that's the real image. Wow. Right?

That's the Trump image. Okay. But that's like a good example. What's the benefit of doing that, though? Well, the benefit is now you can essentially have programmable money. Right? Like you can have Bitcoin that's somewhat programmable. You could have NFTs on it. You can do a lot of like more advanced things is sort of like what they're saying. Sure. But the Bitcoin community disagrees and they're like this is the worst thing we can do because imagine you're essentially bloating now the software. Now the whole ecosystem with with BS, right? Like with images. And imagine if I was like like a pizza file person, right, wanted to send illegal images or videos to somebody. and they didn't want to be stopped, they didn't want to be censored.

They could now use Bitcoin and attach an image or a video that's illegal to transmit into this transaction. Right? So if I were a government, I might want to regulate that. I might be like, hey, all these nodes

that are handling all these transactions, you guys are transporting and transferring all these illegal images. But here's the thing. Wouldn't that all be on the blockchain? And then eventually, if that were ever to be cashed out, you could trace it. Correct. And so the person who cashes out five transactions down the line 10 years later, they're going to get caught.

It's not about who caches out. It's about you transmitting things that are not necessarily something you agree with transmitting. You have no control over this because they remove that limit. Sure. But their argument is like, yeah, but you'll be able to do like NFTs on it. People like Michael Saylor and people like myself, investors, were like, I'm buying Bitcoin because it's the best place to, preserve my economic energy, right? It's like the best place for me to put my time.

And I don't want Bitcoin to be graffeeded over with data. Bitcoin is not meant to be non-economic data. It's purely for economic information, not NFTs and videos and pictures, right? So there's a big divide in the community right now. And the core development team, they're proposing that this change goes through.

They want to get rid of this limit. the people on the opposite side, the people who oppose it, not that you need to know this, but it's the Knott's development team. And this guy, I think his name is Luke Dash Jr., which a lot of people don't like, but he's like, let's just keep it as is. And a lot of investors are like, let's not change anything.

Bitcoin's not broken, let's not upgrade it, let's not do anything. So the most likely outcome that will happen in October, this upgrade is going to happen in October, is that there will be no upgrade. So the nodes and the miners, they're not going to upgrade their software to software. They're going to keep it at 29. That's most likely what's going to happen.

So only people like Michael Saylor really understand what's happening, but I think in the next few weeks, there's going to be a huge wealth transfer. So from a 30,000 foot view, what is your strongest argument for Bitcoin and against Bitcoin? What is the strongest argument for Bitcoin? Oh man. If you were to pitch me, I don't have very much Bitcoin.

Maybe like 1% of my portfolio is Bitcoin and my portfolio. It's not that big guys. But like actually, let me say... It is actually really big. It's half a percent in Bitcoin, I think. Pretend he is Alex. Sure. Pitch Alex on Bitcoin.

He doesn't own anything. And we've always joked Alex if you're watching this. Whatever Alex buy, we're out. That's the people. Alex is our old producer for those that are unaware. I love Alex. So this is borrowed directly from Jeff Booth. This is not my thing.

But Jeff Booth says something really, really profound. So he says that the natural state of, the world and the economy is deflationary. Do you understand what that means? Yeah, stuff goes down in prices. Stuff goes down in price. Like, if you were to just have a fixed supply of money, like let's say I had a hypothetical $100 bill, I don't have one to show you, but like I lit it out and I was like, this is the world's money. Like it's $100, there's never going to be more of it. So naturally, the price of everything in that world would always go down forever. It wouldn't go up because as we get better at producing stuff, as we get more efficient,

we invent better technologies, the price goes down, right? But for some reason, we don't find ourselves living in that world. We live in a world where prices of everything goes up forever, right? That's counterintuitive to how the universe should work. Why? Well, it's because the government has this special ability to make more than just this $100, right? So now if we duplicate that $100, the price of everything now is essentially doubled because it cost twice as much to buy that same amount of stuff because the amount of stuff didn't double it was the amount of paper that doubled right with me so far

okay so now that money that excess piece of paper all of that economic energy it needs to go somewhere to maintain and preserve its value so that's when we hear oh did your stocks went up to an all time high and gold reached an all time higher real estate reached an all time high it's because the amount of money keeps increasing and it's always trying to find a place to go to preserve its value, right? So it's basically like the actual value of something

doesn't necessarily, the value of an asset doesn't necessarily increase over time, but the amount of dollars that it takes to purchase that does increase. Exactly, right. So when you compare that asset to a benchmark like the dollar, it looks like that thing went up in price, right? You're like, oh, you know, gold went up or real estate went up and now it costs more dollars.

That's how we visualize it. But then if you were to take all of those things, right, and compare it against Bitcoin, then literally all of those assets are also deflationary against Bitcoin. Like, take real estate, for example, a couple of years ago when Bitcoin was at, what, $20,000, it took 20 Bitcoin.

to buy a house. Now it's like four Bitcoin, like a little over four to buy a house. And it'll continue to be lower and lower and lower. Right, it'll take less and less Bitcoin. So all assets are being demonetized against a money that is fixed. It is the only thing that exists in this world that is stationary, that is fixed a true money. And so through the lens and through the perspective of Bitcoin, everything is going down against it. So I have a couple of questions about that then. What is the difference then between Bitcoin and gold or Bitcoin and silver or raw materials that there is a fixed amount of? You could take the same exact example for gold. It's like, okay, with this much gold right now,

you could buy like a crazy mansion probably or a really nice house. Sure. With this much gold back in the day, you could have bought more. Yeah, well, gold has certain qualities and not quite on part of Bitcoin and also there's not an exact finite amount of gold. There's also an inflation to gold as we discover and as we dig up more of it. I mean, we can find one on the meteorite tomorrow for all we know. So like gold is not necessarily finite. It's funny you say that because we just had R.J. Middy on the podcast and he said he bought into a penny stock where apparently they owned the rights to an asteroid that is made of gold, full of gold, that they're going to find a way to mine. Right. So I'm like,

Imagine if that were to happen. Like, what would happen? It would decrease the value of gold. Right. The deflation would, or the inflation of gold would increase, and therefore the value would be suppressed. You know, what's funny is that they found a way to make gold. Just like you could make a diamond in a lab, like a lab-grown diamond.

They figured out alchemy? Yes. How? They found a way to make gold. The problem, however, because this was a big discovery, is that it was... It costs more to make the gold than the gold is worth, right? Yes, but the other is that the gold was very unstable, and so they were only able to make the gold appear for a short amount of time before it disappeared. Right.

But the fact is, there is a possible, Jack thinks I'm joking. I'm not joking. I don't think you're joking. Look it up. Look it up. Where's going if it's disappearing? It's just going away. It's like, it's just, it was unstable enough to be a solid form for longer than however many, like a fraction of a second or whatever.

Right. Point being is that they could find a way just to manufacture gold and have synthetic gold that would be identical to the real thing at some point in the future. No, I believe it. Yeah, I believe we will have the technology someday to make and reproduce gold on some affordable economic level. We can't yet, but maybe in the future we could, but Bitcoin is programmed to be fixed forever. Most investing platforms feel exactly the same. You sign in, you see some numbers, and that's it.

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but because we're working off the US dollar, which we could just print more of, it's costing more dollars to buy goods and services. If someone has this information, what should they be doing with their money? I think it depends contextually

what that person's situation is, but for me, I've diversified enough to where if all of this is wrong and all this is crazy, I should still be okay, but for me, Bitcoin is a roughly 30%, 30 to 35,

percent of my net worth. So it's kind of high for most people, but it's still not crazy for most like Bitcoin people. That's pretty conservative, if anything. So that's just my approach to it. But it's funny because like when I look at crypto, I feel like it's such an appealing industry for a lot of people because there's this promise of like get rich quick. It's like a thousandfold of your money. And what I find really interesting is that people make a decision that sounds intuitive, but it's completely wrong. Like, for example, I, I see a lot of people that are like, oh, I think XRP, let's just use that, for example, is going to go to $1,000, right?

It's like, once you've convinced yourself that it's going to go to the moon like that, you've kind of already lost. And at that point, when people have convinced themselves, it has the chance to go 1,000x, they put most of their money into it, which is actually completely counterintuitive. What instead you should be doing is allocating a very small amount to a conviction like that, right? It makes sense because then you work backwards.

You say, okay, if I think this thing's going to 1,000 X, I'm not going to mortgage my house and then put everything into it. I'm going to instead work backwards and say, like, let's say I put in $10,000 and at the thousand X's, then I end up with, what, a million, right? Cool. And then I made a lot of money. But if you sell your house or the equity in your house and let's say you're like, I'm going to go all in and I'm going to put in $100,000 because I know it's going to

$1,000,000,000. Okay, fine. But the difference between you being right in that. scenario is the difference between making a million dollars, which is still nice, and making 10 million dollars. There is a difference there for sure, but the pain between having a million and having 10 million is way less than the pain of being completely wrong and losing your house. Does that make sense?

So if you really believe this thing's going to 1,000 X, don't put your entire life savings into it. Put in a smaller amount. Does that make sense? Yeah, I like Alex Becker, his approach. he made a video a while back when we were talking a few months ago with Ethereum. Yeah. And Ethereum at the time, I think it was like $1,500.

This was recently when everything kind of fell. And he says, guys, I think there's a 50-50 chance you're going to lose everything. That Ethereum's going to go from 1,500. You're going to lose all of your money. Right. But I think there's a 50% chance. It's going to go to 6,000. Okay.

And so that's an asymmetric reward. Yes. Risk versus reward that, hey, you could, it's a 50-50 you lose. But in the other 50%, you could 3x your investment. Right. And I thought, you know what, it's a great phrasing. Right. And I invested an amount where I'm prepared for that 50%.

For sure. And I bought it in that $1,500. It's all risk management. $4,200. That's exactly a great point that you brought up. It's all risk management. So if you see an asymmetric bet, that's exactly what I'm describing. Don't put your entire life savings into it.

Just put enough to where if you lose it, it's not a big deal. And if you make it, it's still a lot of money. That's essentially a roundabout way of saying that. So how are you investing your money now? If you have 30 to 35% in Bitcoin, what is the other 65% looking like? It's real estate, cash, stocks, and miscellaneous things. And what's the best investment you've ever made? The best investment, definitely by far Bitcoin.

By far. Really? Yeah. And it's not even close. Not even close. What's the worst investment you've ever made? Oh, worst investment? Probably.

I mean, that's not an investment. That's like a consumer thing. I would say probably so far honestly out of my bucket real estate Really? Yeah But have you made money in real estate? I still made money but it wasn't as much money as I could have made if I had bought literally anything else. It was like the S&P 500 or anything else.

NFTs That's not an investment. I never considered that an investment. I considered it as like a marketing expense for YouTube. But, Graham, you buy a lot of Ethereum, right? Yes and no. I bought at 1,500 and I've not touched it since then. not added on to it.

Oh, okay. Yeah. I just, I still have that and it's up almost 200% since then. What's your, what's your, like,

theory behind why Ethereum will be valuable someday? I think the fact that Bitcoin is as valuable. I just, it's a pure speculation bet that some of that's

going to funnel into Ethereum. That's it? It's just like, it's like a second place thing. Sure. Yeah. Like, yeah.

But then again, when you look at Ethereum in comparison to my entire portfolio, I think it's like 0.1%. Okay. So it really, I don't care. If it goes back down to 1500, I don't care.

This sounds so out of touch. So out of touch. There was a Rolex oyster quartz that I wanted, and it was $12,500. And I thought I would invest in Ethereum to pay for the watch. Okay. And I was going to sell it when it hit like 20,000 in profit to be able to cash out, pay the tax, and that way get a free watch. And I've just kept it. And now I'm up quite a bit.

So I got a free watch times many times over. from that investment. That was all it is. It was the same thing as me going to a casino, except it was that 50-50 risk reward where I was like, all right, 50% chance I lose it or 50% chance, like a three-actant and just buy the watch that I wanted. Right, but you're still holding onto it. Yeah, I haven't sold it. Okay. Do you buy any Ethereum, Jack? I don't think I have any Ethereum. I might have like, like a couple grand in Ethereum, five grand in it. Okay. Yeah. For my understanding, and like this is, again, that goes back to like risk versus reward. is I think Tom Lee from Fundstra.

I don't know if you guys had him on yet. No. And I guess Larry Fink from BlackRock, this is like their thesis for why Ethereum could someday be like the thing. But here's why I could never like put in a ton of money. So here's kind of how it looks for Ethereum. So Ethereum is supposed to be the blockchain

that will be the rails for the tokenization of a lot of assets across the world, including physical assets like watches, art, and real estate and things like, like that. So we are going to digitize and bring things like real estate onto the blockchain, Ethereum's blockchain. So like, for example, JPMorgan, they tokenized, what is it, treasury bonds. So they actually tokenized treasury bonds on Ethereum. And then BlackRock tokenized money market funds on Ethereum's blockchain. And I thought that was really kind of interesting,

because I could imagine a world where, for example, like, let's say I'm an investor and I want to buy a reet, right? But I don't want like a specific reet that I see as an ETF. Instead, I'm like, you know, I love Hawaii. And I love this street, this street or this area, like this area called Lanakai, right? I think it's going to be a strategic street for real estate. So I want specifically this section or specifically that house. And maybe that corporation or that owner could issue some percentage of that house. Like, let's say like the issue 50% or 10% or whatever it is. So that on my app, on my brokerage app,

I could be like, you know what? Instead of buying an ETF that's a REIT, I could buy this area like Summerlin or like Henderson or this specific street. So you're going to get so granular because of this tokenization and it's going to be accessible to everyone. And I think it's a possible reality that that happens.

So, and that's the same thing for watches, maybe cars. It's like, well, you know what? I want this like $20 million Ferrari collection from Hamilton, the guy you had on, right? And, but I can't afford a Ferrari. So maybe that guy issues some percentage equity in his collection on the blockchain. Maybe that's Ethereum. Does that make sense?

Yeah. So now I could buy it in my brokerage app. Like that's going to happen. That's what BlackRock sees is going to happen. And presuming that it's going to be on Ethereum's blockchain, that's when you get all the gas fees and all the burning things, burning mechanisms. And that's when Ethereum could become deflationary. And maybe that's how it becomes valuable.

But the point I'm trying to make is, like, creating this, like, universe, which might happen someday is these are assumptions of assumptions of assumptions on assumptions, right? Like, we are making so many assumptions about it. That, like, is it going to be this way? Will it actually be Ethereum? Or will it be Solana or it will be Cardano or something else? We don't know. And so the more assumptions there are baked in, the more you could assume the price will go up.

Like in Bitcoin's case, the difference between Bitcoin at a dollar and a thousand, there's far more assumptions that were in place than there are from 100,000 to a million. Like, that's only now a 10x, and that's because so many of Bitcoin's early assumptions, like adoption by Wall Street and the securitization with ETFs and all these things, like they've happened, adoption by corporations,

adoptions by countries. These are all things that have happened already. So now the jump between 100,000 to a million is only 10x. Like, it's still a lot of money, but it's nowhere near the jump between $1,000 to $1,000. That's 1,000x because less assumptions had come true. Local news is in decline across Canada, and this is bad news for all of us. With less local news, noise, rumors, and misinformation fill the void,

and it gets harder to separate truth from fiction. That's why CBC News is putting more journalists in more places across Canada, reporting on the ground from where you live, telling the stories that matter to all of us, because local news is big news. Choose news, not noise. CBC News. What has to happen for Bitcoin to hit a million dollars? We talk about like these cycles, like these mega cycles that Bitcoin goes through.

I don't know if we'll see another huge one. I think it'll be a slow in it. But by slow, I mean like still like 20 to 30% a year melt up to a million from here on until like 2030 or whatever the year is going to be. Like nothing has to change. Just keeps on going at the same rate that it is. You take all the crazy assumptions out of it. it, I still think it ends up at a million, like inevitably. So isn't Bitcoin about one-tenth the market cap currently of gold?

Yeah, about one-thirteenth or so, yeah. I can't help but think that it has to be at some point one-third of gold or half of gold. I think so, too. I think it's inevitable, yeah. But then I can't help but think, if I think that way, it has to be priced in. Yeah. Like this isn't like some mysterious sort of like no one's ever thought of that before. people are paying the price today

with everything currently priced in as to what they believe is going to happen with it. Do you remember Chris Camillo from Dumb Money? I really like his thesis on Bitcoin. He does not care about Bitcoin. He's like, I'm just a pure, like,

social, what is this thing? Social arbors. Social arbitrage. And his entire thesis is really simple. It's just a reshuffling of monetary assets from things like gold and real estate and all the things that we will inherit

from our parents and our grandparents. And it's like, well, thanks for the $2 million house. I can't afford the property taxes on this thing. I'm going to sell that. And gold, thanks, but I don't really get gold. It's not part of my generation. I'm going to sell that. I'm going to put some of it in Bitcoin.

I'm not going to put all of it, maybe, but some of it. And it's just like a simple reshuffling of assets and money from all of those back into Bitcoin. And a little bit from each little bucket, from bonds, from gold, from watches, from cars, from real estate. they might not be able to afford to keep up with and it goes into Bitcoin and that's like a slow melt up to a million.

Gold is becoming cooler now. It is, yeah, that's true. That's the other thing is that I'm seeing a lot of people our own age now interested in gold just for the fact that it's gone up in price. They don't get about it though. But they just know, hey, it was a thousand bucks five years ago

and now it's almost 4,000 an ounce. Just on the basis of that, it makes money, I like it now. Yeah. So gold is coming back in style, whereas before it was kind of unpopular. But it does seem like overall people are more likely to buy Bitcoin who are younger than gold. I agree. They had to choose between the two.

I agree. I don't think I'm that particularly old, but I miss the gold train. Like, I don't own any gold. I wish I did, but I don't have any. And I imagine the younger generation is totally out of it, too. Maybe they're a little more in tune with it now that you said the price has gone up, but I don't own any gold at all. What do you think about alt coins? I think there's a lot of interesting projects.

I'm just not into any of them. I think they're a distraction for the most part. I'm just focused on Bitcoin mostly. And even Ethereum, I'm like, I don't know. Like all those assumptions we talked about, they might come true over time, but I'm not interested in venturing beyond it. You know, it's going to be really interesting.

At some point, they're going to do an ETF of the top 10 crypto holdings, just like the S&P 500. Yeah, I think so. Except of that. Yes. That is going to be very interesting, and I think that is going to spur the market.

because I would place, let's just say I have 5% of my portfolio in Ibit, but then they offer an ETF of the top 10. Right. Oh, man, I would probably put a percent or two into that. Right. I think that is a huge opportunity because there's a lot of projects out there that are interesting that I would never invest a dollar into on their own, but I would into an ETF.

What's also interesting is that years ago I did this whole analysis on the top 10 cryptocurrencies by year, going back to like 2015. And the consensus was that really almost all of the profits in cryptocurrency came from Bitcoin and Ethereum. And that the chance of making money on anything else was pretty much like a moonshot. It was like a one and a hundred chance. And so even if you invest in 100 different projects, you're going to like break even because 99% of them are going to lose money.

but that one is going to have a hundred extra turn. And so it's just going to balance out between how much you make and load. But overall, it was really just the majority of profits came from Bitcoin Ethereum and that's it. Yeah, Europe actually had a product, an ETF that combined the top 10 cryptos

for a long time now. But I imagine that if it came in the U.S., depending on how it was allocated, if it was weight-based, which I'm guessing it would be, like 80% Bitcoin, 10% of Ethereum, whatever it would be. I think it would be a really interesting product.

But I also think it would be kind of like a Trojan horse. I think companies like BlackRock would make a ton of money on the expense ratios and the management fees. But I think from a performance perspective, they would just be diluting it. Like, it's not worth it. I wouldn't, I wouldn't be buying it, but I can see how it's interesting, too. It's also interesting to see how many brokerage coins are going up in price. Like the BNB, $1,000? That's interesting. Wild. Yeah. I'm not messing with any of it, man. I'm just keeping it really simple. Good. Same. I just do I bit. Yeah. It's so easy.

for me just to do ibit in a stock account and then i don't have to worry about self-custody losing access if you forget the the password it's like i hate all of that i like the simplicity of ibit and i would and all i care about anyway is the investment purpose of it the downside of ibit though is that the year-to-date performance is there's a delta of like six percent which is pretty significant like if you look at bitcoin's year-to-date performance it's six or seven percent higher than iBits. And I'm trying to figure out why they're such a big delta. Like, that's a big delta. I know the expense ratio plays a small part of that. Very small. But the reason is that the Ibit trades on a price that doesn't isn't one to one with Bitcoin. So if everyone's buying an Ibit, there's going to be

a premium that the stock's going to trade at a higher price than the underlying coin itself, because there's more demand. But that also might be, there could be at some point, it trades less than the underlying asset. And there might be an opportunity. to arbitrage that if that ever were to happen. But yeah, right now there's so much demand, it's trading in a premium. Right. I mean, that's a lot of premium to give up, though, six to seven percent. Like, imagine if it's six to seven percent every year compounded over like 20 years. Like, that's huge. Isn't that a huge argument for self-custodying it? Could be, but then you're also paying quite a big spread on a place like Coinbase.

Like, I remember seeing it recently. Even a Robin Hood is actually one of the cheapest places to buy Bitcoin. it was trading it 1-16-5. And if I want to buy it, I have to pay like 117. And if I want to sell it, I sell it for like 115. And that's a Robin Hood makes their money on that spread. But that's a pretty big spread. It is. But I don't think it's...

That's 1% right there to buy or sell. For sure. But like 1% compared to 6% or 7%, that's still not. Could be too early to tell, too. I'd like to see that over 5 or 10 years. That's true. That's true. We should look at it from a 5% and 10.

bit new. Right. But yeah, sure. Up until this point, it depends if you care about buying the Bitcoin itself. Like, what are the advantages of actually buying Bitcoin and custody it yourself? Well, those coins can't be re-hypothicated. They can't be lent against by someone else. If something were to happen, you know you have control, full control over your coins. If an exchange collapses, you have to rely on the government to pay you back and that sometimes takes forever. There's a lot of cool benefits to it. Yeah. What about NFTs? What about them? What happened to NFTs?

I don't know, man. They just, the fad died out, right? The whole, I remember talking about it on my YouTube channel. I'm like, you know when we hit a peak when people are spending millions of dollars on pet rocks? Like JPEGs of pet rocks, yeah. I remember those. You're going for $400,000. Sure.

And people were joking that you could just right click on it and then, like, have the same thing. I never understood the NFTs. My theory behind why NFTs blew up is it was hugely a result of the gun. government print. That's all it was. It was the PPP money. It was the stimulus packages. It was all of that stuff. Like, people didn't know what to do with their money. And it was just boredom from sitting at home. And I think that was that phenomenon. And I actually think NFTs will come back, but in a completely different way. Like, it's not going to be, hey, look at my pet rock. It's worth millions of dollars. It'll be maybe more in the digitization of like events. Like if you want to

get like some concert tickets or something, that'll be an NFT, you know, or the maybe depending on how they securitize real estate. Maybe those will be some forms of NFTs. But I think they'll come back from a utility perspective, but I don't think they'll be the same as what they used to be. And what about Cryptopunks? Or CryptoKitties. I don't know anything about it.

What happened to board apes? I don't know. I have no idea. I'm not following any of it. I know they're down like 90%. They're down a lot. Cryptopunks seem interesting to me. Yeah, well, doesn't Chris Camilla own like a bunch of them? Dude, Chris, we were talking.

talking in like 2021, he was buying, I forget what it was, like these nuclear sheep. And he's like, if you buy these nuclear sheep, they give milk. And the milk could use to then buy more like, it sounds dumb. It's in a video. We have it in a video and a vlog where we're recording this. I didn't understand it, but you could like milk these sheep and then use the milk to buy more nuclear sheep. and they're about to, like, spawn. You can breed these nuclear sheep to, like, give, like, offspring,

but then it's randomized to, like, one and it's... Sure. And it reminds me a bit of, like, axi infinity. Yeah, I remember that, yeah, yeah. A bit where people were making, like, thousands of dollars a month playing this game and then, like, breeding the birds or something. I don't know. Jack, do you play with this stuff?

I don't know, man. I do not play with this stuff. This is more up Graham's wheelhouse right there, breeding and playing with birds. Moking sheep. You should put that in the intro. I don't know. The only alts I have are just like the same ones I've always had.

Omi and my NFTs, like the Spider-Man one. And I have no idea where they're at or what they're doing. They're still around. I still have them. Would you sell them? I totally sell them. Yeah. Like I've forgotten about them.

But if they're ever worth anything, maybe I'll come back to it someday. Maybe they'll actually return. I don't know. But they're still around. I still have all of them. I never sold them. What's crazy is that, you know, we used to have this vlog channel.

Yeah. Graham Steffen after hours and all the videos were still there. And we were covering a Logan Paul box break. Okay. And Grant Navar purchased a pack of cards, I think, for like $20,000, a first edition pack. But then in addition to that, Logan Paul was selling the NFTs of the box break. Okay. All of them were sold out.

And all the NFT was, was him pulling out. a card and it was like a hollow. And he was selling these for like $18 to $50,000. He wasn't forcing anyone to buy them, but people were spending $35,000 to get an NFT of just Logan Paul opening up the card and showing a hollow. You know what I think if it ever comes back and is worth anything, my theory is that it'll be like 50 years from now. When we look back at these moments at our youth, we look back at these memories so fondly

And we're like, remember when that was a thing? And we're all like crypto billionaires or Bitcoin billionaires. Like, I'd buy that again. Like that, I could see that. Like Pokemon cards? Yeah, like it's like a nostalgia thing. Like, I could see it becoming a valuable thing

when it becomes nostalgic. Like right now it's just too close to home. It just happened kind of recently. But I can imagine if like 50 years from now we'll look back at it. Like, that was the first NFT ever, the Crypto Punk or like the Spider-Man or whatever it is. I could see that.

Kind of like Pokemon. I try to think of that all the time. of what is going to be the nostalgia play today. Right. All the time. Like the 2005 Ford GT was a nostalgia play. It is. They used to trade it like 120 grand.

They couldn't sell the cars. And now it's like you get that car because that was the car you admired. Pokemon is a good example of that too. But are you ever afraid that that's sort of such a moving target that beyond a certain generation, it's just, it's not a thing anymore? Yeah, of course. Like old 1920s cars are plummeting in value. Because the audience for that is they're passing away. Right.

No one cares. That wasn't a part of their childhood. Right. But the original iPhone in the original packaging is now selling for like $70,000. Right. Or the original iPod. Things like this that were like revolutionary now. You go back.

And that was something recent. And I wonder what is that today? Right. What's out there to? Because there's something today that is going to be, oh my gosh. I could buy that right now and just keep it sealed. And in 20 years, I'm going to make it. make a fortune.

100%. Yeah. That's the Chris Camillo investing. Yeah. It's a social ARB thing. But it kind of also makes you think the other way. Like, when is the top? Is it when I'm 90?

Is it like, well, our generation is the last one that remembers these NFTs, that remembers these Pokemon cards, that remembers the GT40. I don't know. But what are you nostalgic about today? That's what I think. For me, it's Pokemon cards still. I don't think anything tops that. And now they're back up in price.

Are they? Pokemon. My gosh. went through its craze. I think we're getting wildly derailed from it. People love this. People love this, dude, and we'll get back. I know you've checked out.

I've completely checked out. I know, I can tell. Pokemon went up, crashed, went up now even higher. I think the new sets have gone up. Nope. Right? No? Nope.

The Charazard is now selling for like $450,000 again. Really? First edition, Shadowless Charzardard. Wow, I'm rich again. I still have my base set. Yeah. Jack needs, what is it below the screen here? The subway surfers for this conversation.

Okay. He's not, yeah. We could just talk about this, but. You make a lot of interesting videos about global affairs. Yeah. The Russian economy, like China economy, Japanese economy. What would you say are like the top competitors of the U.S. economy? Do you think that the U.S. economy is falling from grace and that, and what are your predictions

for the U.S. economy over the next, like, decade or so? Yeah, I think the biggest competitors. is definitely China. I actually went down this deep rabbit hole of like looking on YouTube of technologies and cars that China's coming out with. Dude, it's unreal.

Some of the car brands and the features and the price, like it's no wonder that it's not allowed to sell these products in the U.S. because none of our companies would compete or be able to hold a candle to these products. They are so much more advanced. Like, Xiaomi released a phone,

that was kind of a carbon copy of the 17 Max Pro that just came out. And they actually called it the 17 Max Pro, I think. Like, it was nearly an identical name. But I watched a review of that phone. Dude, it is legitimately, like, better on every front. Like, it has such cool features. And I'm like, dude, if these products were sold here in the U.S., none of our companies would keep up.

Reminds me of the sports car that they came out with. Yeah. Doug DeMuro reviewed. I saw that. It has the headlights. of a McLaren and the body of the Peresangue Ferrari, it's, it's crazy. And it has like 1,400 horsepower.

If that were in the U.S., everybody would buy it. Like, I would gladly pay $50,000 of Raspic. It's just so unique and so cool. It's, yeah, it's like a $40,000 car. Dude, it's unbelievable. $40,000. $40,000 car. It's unbelievable.

It was like 450 miles of range. Like, ridiculous. And so. But it makes you think, why can't we do that in the United States? You tell me, I don't know why. My understanding is that loose labor regulations, working conditions, things like this, and they don't quite have the guardrails in place for like the government like meddling

with every little thing that allows these companies to basically produce this for such a low cost. I've also heard that they don't have the R&D. So they basically, we spend all of this money developing. then China goes and looks at this, studies it, and says, oh, okay, well, that's how you do it. And then they could make it without any of the initial investment. Right. That's very true. Yeah.

Combined with a low labor cost. Correct. And then you have a product that people actually buy. Right. If it was made here in the U.S., like, sure, we could make it, but it'd be like $300,000 and nobody would buy it. For sure. That's a huge part of it. But back to your original question is, I think it's separate.

Like, from an investment perspective, I think the United States is still far in a way the best country to live and make money in and invest in but from a quality of life perspective i think this is not the best country to live in what do you think is the best country to live in quality of life perspective i think switzerland is far better interesting hold on let me let me bring out i think i have a chart here of of the average life expectancy of people around the world and uh we spend twice as much on health care in switzerland i'm sorry here in the u s than switzerland and we are on average, we have a much lower life expectancy age. Let me find this chart.

Check this out. I have a rant on this. So look at this. Do you see all that? Jeez. Like this is the United States, right? There's a dip with COVID, right? Makes sense.

But that's a massive dip. Wait, why did we dip with COVID so much more than what is that? We have a higher rate of obesity. And so we had more compromised individuals getting COVID. And so they were like, it was more lethal for them. Yeah, I imagine that's a big part of it. The other thing could be. In fairness, that's insane.

We reported a lot of deaths as COVID. Because hospitals were incentivized to report it. Correct. So that seems to me highly skewed. I think that's probably true, too. But I think to your point, or what you said about certain health conditions and preexisting conditions, I think we're worse off. So I want to rant about this. This was really eye-opening to me.

I went to the doctor for a checkup. I had not been in three years. And she ordered a blood test. and I wanted to do all these additional tests and she says I can't order those tests I said why she says well because you need

symptoms yeah to be able to order these tests you need to be dying and so she said do you feel tired and lethargic sometimes okay well we could order that test do you have

you know fogginess you know brain fog sure okay we could order that test And she kind of goes down the list of these symptoms that, yeah, sometimes I wake up and I'm tired, sure. So we order these, but in total it's like eight tests. Right. And they bill my insurance, $1,300. And my co-pay is something like 10% of it.

So I pay like $100 something dollars of it. But anyway, I get it back and it turns out that I have like high thyroid antibodies, which suggests either high stress, I'm overtraining, lack of sleep, could be any one of them. them so I thought that was interesting and then I ordered my own blood tests and I paid out of pocket through a separate company and they were charging like 500 bucks for like 100 biomarkers and I did that and I got the results basically instantly within a few days and it turned out I had no idea that I have like high LDL cholesterol my heart biomarkers were like really genetically high giving me a predisposition for like heart disease and building up plaque in my arteries even

though I'm like active and healthy it's just a genetic thing I never would have found that out if I didn't test on my own and I started making these changes in my life now now I have a whole stack of supplements that I take on a daily basis morning and night I've adjusted my diet a little bit and it's been about three weeks now and I feel so much better just doing that change I never would figured it out had I not done it myself like but but the whole health care system is just designed to treat the symptom dude I wish you had told me this before when did you do all this three weeks four weeks ago I could have told you this because okay so Corey and I went to Thailand specifically for that reason because we wanted to test everything about ourselves and we went to this hospital

I forget the name of it was like bum run grot or something like I don't know how to pronounce it and we go in and it's this like 10 story building super high end there's like royalty there, I feel like, from the Middle East. Just people of all sorts of walks of life, right? So we make an appointment, we get the executive package. Costs like $1,000 almost. I want to pay, I paid like $1,200 maybe. So we go in there and they do like every test known to humankind, like everything.

They do chest x-rays. They do like everything for your organs. They do a heart test, like they have you run on a thing. they monitor like everything they have you pee they have you poop in a cup they take your blood dude they do everything and i got i have like a 10 page report on everything on my body and uh it turns out i have like fatty liver which is a very common thing for americans but you're right it's like you can't order these tests here in the u.s because you have to exhibit symptoms and in in that place where we were at they just do the diagnosis they don't do

any kind of like treatment for it. And that's probably because they don't want to have a conflict of interest, maybe. I don't know. But that hospital doesn't treat against anything. It just purely is a diagnostic center. And they did just about like every test I could ever think of for $1,000. How long did that take? And it took three hours.

And I got the results within eight hours. No, dude, it's amazing. Like, so if you ever want to do that, I would highly recommend go to Thailand. Where was it? Thailand. In Bangkok? In Bangkok, yeah. Interesting.

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that's just catastrophic over like $50,000. Because so far what I've done, I found it cheaper, just pay for everything out of pocket. Yeah. Like I'm buying prescriptions out of pocket. I'm going and just telling them I'll pay cash. I did a whole heart screening. It's cheaper oftentimes.

Yeah. And I was asking like, okay, they asked me, do you want to go through insurance? And I was like, does insurance cover this? Or like, sometimes, but we're going to be booked a few weeks out. And I was like, can I just pay cash and come today? And she's like, can you come right now? And I was like, yeah. Okay, I paid $165.

Win in the same day, just left, did it and got my results back in three days. Does that ever make you wonder, like, as you get older, if you realize how corrupt and how unfair the healthcare industry is, does that make you think outside of that? And like, well, how many other things are not good for you? Like the food and that we eat and like everything about the quality of our life here in the U.S. Do you ever think about that? I saw it was an Instagram post or like a TikTok that says,

like, you know when you're growing up when you go to the grocery store and you realize that 90% of it is extremely unhealthy. Right. And now it's all I see. I walk in the grocery store and thinking, Who would eat this? Right. It's awful.

Like everything has a ton of added sugar. They had sugar. The amount of sugar in ketchup is surprising. Like, sugar in that, really? And then you start looking at the sugar content of everything. They put sugar in everything. High fructose, corn, serum. Yes.

And everything, yeah. Yeah, I don't know. I feel like the older I get, the more I become a conspiracy theorist about everything. It's like that grumpy old guy. They're just like, I don't trust anything. I don't trust anyone. I don't know if you're noticing that about yourself. No.

It's just when it comes to government running things. So everything. No, not necessarily. I mean, healthcare, I don't think that's a government run thing. I think it's just the insurance companies that are just finding ways to gouge. And a lot of that, like, certain things are really run up by lawyers and, like, insurance costs are high because it's so easy to litigate. And so they have to be high because your chance of litigation is high. Because lawyers are very quick to serve you with something.

Okay. Well, I guess we'll agree to disagree. I don't know. I've definitely become a lot more skeptical of things. Yeah. For sure, everything. When I was a kid, I was extremely naive. And then you get burned a few times because you're naive.

Yeah. And then you just have to become selective with what you decide to trust in. Right. Not trust. But I agree, yeah. And really quick, I just want to say, it is wild that we're almost at the end of the year, which means holidays are approached. And for any of you who have hosted, you know that it could often be expensive and stressful.

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Shopify.com slash ICH. I could not recommend them more. Thanks again to our sponsor, Shopify, and now let's get back to the episode. Are you bullish or bearish for the U.S. economy? From an investment perspective, very bullish from a quality of life. And I don't think it'll be the best country to live in for the next 50 years. I don't think it'll be the highest quality of life or the longest lifespan. And you think Switzerland is far better, yeah, for sure.

What about Japan? Probably better, yeah. Probably better. Yeah. I think we're going to see a lot of people our age retiring in other countries. I think so too. I think that's just the only way they're going to be able to do it. If you have $2,000 to $500,000 saved and you're 60 years old.

Which is nobody by the time they're 60. Like very few people get to that amount. If you're lucky enough to have $500,000 saved at the age of 60 and you're done with work and you want to retire and you lose your job because a robot just took it, you can go anywhere in the world and live a fantastic life. on $500,000. I totally agree. Yeah, there's a lot of alternatives. I think that's going to happen. In terms of the U.S. economy, what are your leading bullish indicators? Terms of an investment perspective? Yeah. Well, I think all the same reasons that got us here in the first place, I think will still remain the World Reserve currency. And I do think there will be a

challenger. I think Jerome Powell even said that. He's like, it's okay. There's going to be probably two competing ones. They're probably going to be China's currency. It's going to be our currency. But as long as we have the World Reserve currency, I think it will always squeeze asset prices up, no matter what, because we have the money printer. And as long as the world is still in need of those currencies, of those units, then we'll always export our inflation to the rest of the world. And with that money, they'll be buying our assets. They'll be buying our treasuries because they'll want an interest on it. And that'll push everything from equities to treasury bonds. That'll always... What determines the World Reserve currency? Is it just like who has the strongest military?

I would say that was a big part of it. Yeah, I think that definition is changing, obviously, which is why the dollar's losing dominance over time. Like, not to be that guy. Yeah, I'll show you that. The dollar has had its worst year, I think, since 1972. Yeah, 2025, we've lost 10%. And here's what's interesting.

If, uh, here, strong versus weak dollar, let's see. Oh, there we go. So in 2025, the Dixie index, which measures the strength of the dollar in 2025, lost 10%, which is kind of crazy. What that means is, like, I opened up my investment account. I look at my stocks. So year to date, on this portfolio, I'm up like 14%, which sounds really good. Like, cool.

Like, that's great. 14%, that's not bad. But the reality is I'm only up like 4%. Right? Because the dollars lost 10%, which means if you didn't get a pay raise this year that was 10%, then you lost money in terms of purchasing power. So that $100 at the beginning, of this year now buys you $90 worth of stuff. That's literally this year alone, which means we're

all forced to participate in the market, which is another answer to your question, like why is the U.S. going to continue to go up? Because we are literally forced to put our money in these assets. If we don't, we lose purchasing power. But here's the thing. I'm noticing in terms of daily purchasing power over the last year, you say the dollar's down 10%. Yeah. But I'm not seeing real estate cost 10% more. I'm not seeing groceries costing 10% more. I'm not seeing gas costing 10% more. I'm seeing a lot of those basically in line. Do you go to grocery stores? Yeah. Where do you go? Trader Joe's. Trader Joe's. Yeah. Why? That's like, that's not middle class. Trader Joe's. No, I thought you said whole foods. Yeah. I thought you said whole foods. No. No. Where you go?

Aero one. It's still the same price. Yeah, the $20 strawberry is still $20.00. strawberry. That's funny. I'm just not seeing everything rise by 10%. If anything, I'm seeing gas prices are down a little bit. Energy prices are more or less the same. I don't know, but maybe that's because I'm so isolated here in Vegas. Potentially, yeah.

I mean, I think we're definitely losing purchasing power over time. We're making more, we're printing more money. It's constantly something that's going to keep happening. One thing I actually found really interesting is I don't know if you saw this. Did you see that? So Berkshire Hathaway, Warren Buffett's company. In the last 27 years, it's actually matched the price performance of gold. Look at this.

So in the last 27 years, gold and gold and Berkshire Hathaway, they've basically been the same. So what does that tell you? And then there's this one. So the total returns, it actually goes back to 25 years. This is just a 20 year against the S&P 500. So literally a shiny rock has outperformed all the smartest people on Wall Street, all the innovation. That's kind of nuts. Sometimes I worry that these are very selective dates.

I thought you were going to say that, but like 25 year period. It's not like I was like, let's start right here in a very recent time. It's 25 years worth of innovation. But sometimes going back 30 years to change the picture quite a bit. Or when you look at it from 1978 to today, you get a bit of a different idea because gold, my understanding is that gold just hit its inflation adjusted price as to what it was back in the 1980s. Yeah, it's caught up for sure. It's caught up. So if you invested in the 1980s, you would have the same amount of money today as you would back then adjusted for inflation.

And that's after, what is that, 40 years, 45 years, almost 50 years, we'll call it. And you have the same amount of money as back in the 1980s, if you invested at the piece. Sure, sure. But the most brilliant investor, like Warren Buffett, 25 years hasn't been able to outperform gold. It does make me worry to that maybe Bitcoin could be one of those of like, Bitcoin's version is the 1980s version of gold. Right, where it doesn't do anything for 25 years. Right. And then 50 years later, you're like, oh my gosh, it just hit $2 million.

dollars. Right. It's inflation adjusted. That could totally happen. Could totally happen, yeah. I don't know what to draw from that conclusion. It's just like, that's kind of crazy to me, though, that a shiny rock was able to outperform some of the smartest minds in the world.

I think it's just the lack of confidence in the United States dollar right now is really contributing to that. And tariffs, I don't think, are helping confidence. And I think people just want a safe place to store their cash. And in terms of a safe place to put their money. Stocks, investors feel like, is overvalued. The dollar, they don't have faith that it's going to be worth the same three years from now. Bitcoin is a bit too volatile.

Where do they put it now? Gold, silver, real estate, but even real estate is expensive relative to the current interest rate. Right. So it seems like, yeah, it makes sense how it's gold. And also interest rates are going down, which weakens the dollar. So, you know, less demand from foreign countries to buy our treasury. so that also weakens the dollar, which partially contributes to the 10% loss in purchasing power. It's a lot of things, yeah.

I'm curious, have you made more money investing or with YouTube over the past year? So far, definitely YouTube, by far. Definitely by far. By far. Have you ever had a year where you made more investing than YouTube? Before YouTube. Before YouTube. But I hope it doesn't come across that way on my YouTube channel.

I'm not like, hey, I'm the investment guru. You just follow me because I make more money. I think I'm pretty transparent about YouTube being my main source of income. But I think on a long-term scale, I think obviously investments will make a lot more money than YouTube. But investing just takes forever. Yeah, but you can't compare the two. Like even if you're in the market earning 8%, you can't compare that to like a job that you're working at eight hours a day, five days, six days a week. Yeah, I think most importantly, as long as I don't position myself and I'm not dishonest with people and I'm not like, hey, look at my portfolio and look how much money I have.

You should buy my course because I know what I'm talking about. I hope I'm pretty transparent about that, and I don't think that should be a secret that YouTube is, you know, mainly it. And so why did you give up investing in dividend stocks? I didn't. I still have all my portfolio. So you still held on to them, but you didn't continue buying more of them. Correct. Yeah, I still have all of it. What do you make annually on your dividends?

Like 30K. That's not bad. That's not bad. That's an income. Why were you doing dividend stocks instead of just normal? I think it made it really easy because the fire community, you know, they preach the 4% rule and all these things. It's really easy to plan for retirement because you can see what your monthly income is. And I really like that aspect of it. And the reason that I changed it now back

to index funds is just because of my tax rate. I think if it wasn't being taxed at the rate that I am, I'd be totally okay with staying in dividends. I think dividends are extremely powerful. And I would never knock anybody for being a dividend investor. I think it's really powerful. I know you don't like dividends. I know you're mostly an index fund guy too, but it's just the taxes. I look at the taxes. And I'm like, oh my gosh. When you're earning so much from a job and then you get a dividend, you know, obviously if it's qualified that helps, but it's still, it's a forced tax payment. So automatically 20% gets taken to the side.

And then if you pay a net investment tax on top of that, there's another 3.8% and then there's potential state taxes on top of that, it really adds up. Like imagine living in a state like California and you have a short-term capital gain. You're paying 37% federal. Then you could pay another 10% to the state and then another 3.8 as a net investment tax. So you could very easily all of a sudden pay more than 50% investing your money. That's true. That makes no sense.

Unless you had it in the Roth, in which case it would be tax-free. Correct. Right. So that's a workaround, but you're obviously limited to like what, $7,000 is it now? to a year yeah so I want to also talk about

alternative investments because you bought a bunch of Pokemon cards yeah so you have that I still have that how much money

do you have in Pokemon cards uh probably like 150 to 200 150 to $150,000 $100,000 yeah

Andre's got an amazing collection he has something that I want and you could buy it it could be yours for the cheap price of 300

no I'm kidding I'm kidding I'm kidding. So you have $150,000 to $200,000 of Pokemon cards. Yeah. Would you spend on these Pokemon cards? I will say that that's the principal cost.

Like that's my initial cost. What is, it might be less. It might be more. I've no idea. If I offered you, I think you paid $150,000. For the base set, yeah. If I offered you $150, would you take it? I don't think so.

You wouldn't take it. No, I don't think so. Because you can't find that set. So my set is one of 11 known to exist and one of only 15 that will ever exist. And the reason that we know that is because there's one card in it. There's this card called Chancy. And to the shadowless PSA 10, there's only 15 of them known to exist. And it's still been at 15 through the Logan Paul era.

Like, remember when Pokemon blew up and everyone was buying and everyone was grading cards? Dude, it's stuck at 15 the whole way through because that's like the hardest card to grade. So from that set, a PSA shadowless Chancy is like impossible to get. So there's 11 known sets like mine that exist. and all the people that own them are like multi-millionaires. Like they don't need the money so you're not going to get them to sell

unless they just absolutely need it. So that's... I would buy it from you. I'd buy it at the price you paid if you just want to say, I want to cash out of it. Yeah. I'm sure you could also probably sell it for more.

Maybe. I think over time, probably. But I just, I don't, I have not seen that set since I've bought it. This set, here's the thing with Andres set and just Pokemon in general.

With your set, They don't trade. And so you don't know what price it's worth. It's also really difficult to sell because the market for that is very, very, very small. And usually the trades that do happen, like the buys, they're off markets. You're never seeing them. It's not like it's on eBay or something. That's interesting.

Yeah. And what about watches? I remember we were all in Japan at the same time last year. Yeah. You ended up buying what watch? I bought a Longinzona, a datagraph. It's a platinum datagraph. I believe the reference number was like 403.035.

It's a platinum datagraph. And the watch is like iconic because it's a chronograph. And it's one of the most iconic chronographs that I was ever released. I think it was released in like 1998. And it was the watch that changed high-end watchmaking or high horology, as people call it. Because it forced brands like, Patek Philippe and AP to make their movements in-house. Because prior to that watch, they were all manufactured and modified from a company called Lumania.

It was the Lumania movement. So all these high-end watch companies, they would buy that movement, they would tweak it, and they would put it into their watches. In 1998, during like the watch, whatever gathering that they do, that watch came out and like stunned the world. And from that moment onward, the new benchmark for a high-end watch, watch was an in-house movement. And so then what is the, what did you pay for that watch and was the current value of it?

I want to say that, because we talked to Nico Leonard, we talked to like another watch guy. Yeah. And got his opinion on it. And they said that it was that most likely the cheapest, uh, data graph in the whole world, like that I found in Japan. And I asked the sales associate, I was like, when was this watch listed? And they literally said yesterday. I was like, are you just saying that? And they're like, no, we just got it in yesterday. I look at the reference number and it has,

it matches to like my birthday, like how old I am, like crazy stuff. And I was not planning on buying it, but I've always wanted one of those watches. So I paid 54K for it. 54 grand. It was the cheapest one by probably $20,000. Yeah.

So, like, I think the next cheapest one, I don't know what the next cheapest one on the market is, probably in the 70s, like low 70s. And this was at a time when the U.S. to yen conversion rate was really good. Yeah. Like, it had just ticked. And there's no sales tax. And there's no sales tax.

Yeah. And so you got a smoking hot deal. I think so. Like, if I wanted to get my money out of it, I think I easily could. So I'm curious, why are watches in Japan such a good deal? I've seen so much media on the secondhand luxury watch stores in Japan and how you can go and get like the craziest deals imaginable on some of the nicest, you know, watches like Rolex, Potex, APs over there.

Why is that? Okay. When I sell my business, I want the best tax and investment advice. I want to help my kids. And I want to give back to the community. Ooh. Then it's the vacation of a lifetime. I wonder if my out of office has a forever setting.

An IG private wealth advisor creates the clarity you need with plans that harmonize your business. your family and your dreams. Get financial advice that puts you at the center. Find your advisor at IGPrivatewealth.com. I think, well, at least part of the reason is because anything that's used in Japan, just because, like, their culture, they keep everything in such, like, neat condition.

It's, like, pristine. They have things that are, like, vintage from, like, the 80s, and they look brand new. And they also don't like to, like Japanese people don't like to buy secondhand. They always go. for new. I think because culturally maybe there's like bad things associated maybe with like buying used things. So from that reason alone, in Japan, their market is not necessarily for Japanese

people. So all the people that are buying the watches are foreigners that are flying into Japan. So that's a smaller market than the entire country of Japan obviously. So I think the prices are generally lower. At least that's one of the reasons why I think that is. Yeah, there's more supply than demand. For sure. Japan is also really against anything counterfeit. and if they're caught selling any fake watch or any like kind of Frankenstein watch, they're going to be blacklisted forever.

And these businesses have been around for decades with perfect ratings. So you don't really have to worry about like getting ripped off or getting like a fake watch. And we asked, do you guys sell fake watches? They're like, no, you can't do that here. Now, what's also interesting is that I heard that a lot of Japanese people believe

that when you buy a secondhand watch, the original owner's soul comes with that watch like their soul is somehow attached to it and so when you buy that watch you get a part of their soul and so it's not considered like good to you don't know what you're getting

right in that sense and so they just don't want to buy so from a culture perspective yeah there's a little bit of superstition to it correct yeah so yeah but you get a great deal so the other interesting thing is that they will not really negotiate is that just

They price it at a point where, like, if it sells great, but if it doesn't, like, I tried to negotiate a Zenith, Rolex Daytona, and I was saying, like, hey, can you bring this price down here? Can we save here? Wouldn't do it. And then Macy found a ring that she wanted. And I'm like, okay, but if I buy this, can we throw in the ring at, like, half price? No. The most they did is they said, we're going to throw in a complimentary, like an extra. Rolex box. Right, right. And we'll give you the extra box if you buy it. Okay, fine. But yeah, they don't negotiate either. No.

So that's part of the reason why, I would say. But what's cool is that they can take Amex, which is really nice. And they don't charge you an extra fee. Well, we did get our... Why are you laughing, Jack? That's just funny. No, because the points, just imagine putting that on a 2% or imagine the Robin Hood credit card, 3% back, or the coin.

base card and get 4% back. Gemini, get some Bitcoin back? Yeah. I'm just saying it's like not only are you getting no sales tax a favorable exchange rate, but you could then put it on a credit card to get an extra 4% back. Right. We bought our watches within a day of each other. Yeah. Yeah. So how much did you spend in your watch? I think total, including, because I count the exchange rate and I count also getting points back on the credit card. It was like 19 something. And what do you think it's worth. Low end. I'm talking like

fire sale 21. And that's like fire sale I got to sell in 24 hours. I think it's probably worth 24?

Wow. Did I tell you that I bought a ring in Japan and I appraised it and what happened? Oh, I didn't tell you that story? Oh, dude, we were walking

right by that store that Graham and I bought our watches from. It was called Okura. And I look and I'm like, dude, that's a really cool ring. It was, it was a women's black opal ring okay and I'm for whatever reason just obsessed as grandma's like with aquariums I'm like obsessed with Australian opals and for whatever reason I just know what like

disproportionately more than most people know about opals and I was like dude that ring is so cool so I go in the store and I'm like how much is that ring and they're like $600 I'm like there's no way this ring is 600 is a platinum ring with diamonds and a black opal stone that's like two or three carrots. And I'm like, this is a $10,000 ring. There's no way to $600. And I was like, is this an Australian opal or an Ethiopian opal?

Because there's two types of different opals. Ethiopian opal, which is, I think, hydrophonic, which means it absorbs water, or it doesn't, one of the two. And then the other opal is Australian opal, which repels water. It does not absorb water. But they have different characteristics.

And I was like, which one is that? And they told me that it was an Ethiopian opal. And I was like, that's not an Ethiopian opal. That looks like an Australian opal. I know my opals, okay? And everyone in the store who was shopping there, they were like, no, that's definitely Ethiopian because Australian opals are only black. I'm like, that's BS.

I know that's not true. So I gamble it and I risk it. I'm like, I'll just, I'll buy it, right? $600. And I'm bringing it back to the U.S. And I go to get it approved or appraised. And the appraisal came in at like $9,500. A ring that I bought for $600.

Yeah. Yeah. It was crazy. I guess you never know when that niche knowledge is going to come to your... Yeah. Like that was like, again, so Jack and I talked about this. Like, you guys ever go through life and then something happens and you're like, I live in a simulation. All the time.

Right? Like, we talked about how... This is a true story. It was like, it was like midnight. It was like past midnight. And we were... I was in a random arcade store with me and my friends in Kyoto, of all places, in Japan, Kyoto. I don't even think I knew you were in Japan.

We had no idea that each of us... were in Japan, but we were in Japan together. And I look and I'm like, dude, that's freaking Jack. We go up, like, the odds of us being in a city that we didn't plan to meet at past midnight at a random arcade store

in a city like Kyoto. Like, that was insane. And just like, like, the whole random knowledge of, like, an opal ring. And I'm like, what are the odds that, like, I would find this random store that had this random ring that I knew so much about? What have you done with a ring? I still have it. I got it appraised, and I'm keeping it.

And once I get married, that'll be like my proposal, right? Ooh, that's nice. Yeah, that was cool. Paid for the trip, too. Well, if I sell it, but I'm not going to sell it. But it does go to show you that if you come in with some knowledge, basically go to Japan, buy the right thing, and pay for the entire trip and basically get the trip for free. Yeah, yeah, that's true.

What would you say is the best investing advice you've ever heard? I don't know, I think like the most important investing quality of people that I've seen that have been, built wealth is like their ability to delay gratification. It's just their ability to project into the future and see that there's an older version of themselves that is grateful for their younger self saving and investing money and delaying that gratification, delaying buying the things that you think will make you happy. And on that note, I don't know if you guys agree with this, but like for me, when I want something and I'm like, I really don't want to buy it, but I really want it. And when I buy it, I feel this sense of relief,

but I figured out that the relief comes from not in owning that thing, but in the peacefulness that comes with not wanting it anymore. Does that make sense? It's like, oh, I'm so glad, like, I have it now. I don't want it. And now it's not bugging me as much. And so if you're able to extrapolate that into the future, you could be like, okay, I could buy this thing,

but maybe I can just skip the buying part and then go directly to the not wanting it. A lot of the pleasure is in being able to buy something. Exactly. And also I heard some wisdom, which was not wanting something is just as good as having it. Right, that's true. And so you could take someone that, like, you know,

really, really, really doesn't want a really fancy car for some reason. And they're living just as good as someone that, like, bought that fancy car just because it doesn't matter to them. Like, they have other priorities, other things that make them happier, such as an aquarium or other things that are just more significant to them. But if you don't want something, it's just as good as having it. I remember reading a piece of advice like on the old fire forums that was like,

oh, use this one trick. It was like, I could buy that. I was like, oh, what is this? And I clicked on it. And it was like, the next time you want to buy something, save up enough money to buy it and then see how you feel about it. And oftentimes, just the ability, like you said, to buy that thing is as good as owning it. So, like, it's like, it's my, I could buy that trick.

So the key is you could either save and make enough money to be able to buy the things that you want or you could just want fewer things. Exactly. Yeah. You go directly to that part if you can. And then also, like, I think this is the dividend brain of me, which is, like, most people, I think when they compare, if they want to buy something, they're like, well, how many hours of my work does it cost? Like, if something's $100 and they get paid $20 an hour, like, okay, it costs me five hours of my life to buy it. that thing. And that's how most people think about purchasing things. But what dividend investing has really taught me is to instead think about things in terms of 4%. So it's like, how much money do I have

to have for that thing to passively exist in my life? And that's what we talk about all the time. That's how I just love that. Everything is. I love that the 4% rule. So like how much money do I need invest? If you don't have that much money invested in the market, then you have no excuse to own that thing. Like you can't afford it. That's I've always looked at affording. So is that 4% per year or 4% of the, well, it depends. If it's like a recurring cost, like, for example, if it's like a Netflix subscription, what's Netflix right now per? 12. Let's say $13, right? Times $12, that's $156 a year. That's $25. Or divided by 0.04. That's $3,900. If you don't have $3,900 invested in the market at 4%. You cannot afford. You cannot afford that $13 a month. Like, that's just how you think about it.

I've always thought about it that way. I think that's the coolest way to think about it. And so that's what motivated me to build a dividend portfolio because then I could be like okay now I know how much money I'm passively making and now I can delegate what things I can and can't afford it's so addicting once you start doing that though because I remember in a separate vein it wasn't dividends but for me it was YouTube income because I viewed that as all passive because I would have done it anyway and I remember making a dollar a day and thinking oh wow that pays for and all you could eat sushi every single month for free. And then it started to become, wow, I got a free phone bill every single month at $50 a month. And then my car insurance is 100. Oh, wow, my car insurance is now

free. And everything starts to like stack. And then pretty soon it's like, wow, my mortgage is now free. Right. This is free. This is free. Now I just live for free because I would be doing this anyway and I'm making money. Yeah, that's so cool. And then you eventually realize that the quickest way to being financially free isn't necessarily by building a bigger portfolio. It's literally by removing those recurring costs because that's way easier to do than needing that money invested at 4%. She's like, hey, if I could remove this, this car payment or this, like, I just saved a hundred grand from like retirement.

That's like that's the coolest way of thinking about it. Yeah. Do you think that the money printing in the United States is a strategy? This is a conspiracy theory right here to keep people poor. That's a really good question. I don't think on that level of conspiracy to where I think that is an intentional thing that we're doing.

I don't think people are that organized to be like, this is what keeps people poor, let's keep doing it. I don't think that's the case. What do you think? You think it's intentional? I tend to not buy into conspiracies, but also, if you think about it,

any money printing drives up assets. Assets are owned by wealthy people, not poor people, poor people suffer with inflation. It's just what's happening. And they're printing money to try to help the poor people, but it's like clearly not. So I don't understand. I don't think money printing has anything to do with poor people. Why would they want them to be, wouldn't, they would benefit more of people having more money.

Because they spend more. Like if you gave $100,000 to an average person, I almost guarantee it to be gone. The average person, it'll be gone almost instantly. They're not going to save it. So it's better for people to make more money. There's no incentive for the government to keep people poor. Well, technically speaking, poor people are going to be easier to control with the government. What I think is more systemically realistic is that the school system teaches people just to work.

And follow in line, listen to another person, do as instructed, you take your lunch here, you start here, you end here, you do this whole thing so you could work for someone else. It's just a very outdated system. That I think is probably more likely that they keep people in like a working hamster wheel and then they shove it down throats of like, oh, it's good to go to college. And then now you borrow money. Now you're in debt. And then it's, oh, but you have to buy a house because that's the American dollar. Now you buy a house.

Now you have a $50,000 student loan and a $300,000 on mortgage. You're not going anywhere. And now you have to take that job to keep making those payments because you don't want to lose your house and you can't default on your student loans even with bankruptcy. So now you're kind of stuck. But then you're third. 35 and you think, oh, crap, I'm getting to do an age where I should probably have a kid. So now you have a kid. Now you definitely can't take the risk to start your own business or do anything. So now your stock, work in that job you don't like to pay for the house, to pay for the student loans. And now you have a kid to support. And now you're just kind of, and so you keep working until you're 70 and then you die. Right. So you're saying it's kind of a result of our own decisions and kind of as a byproduct of a shared delusion that we all have about what it's like to live a life. I heard that a lot of the school,

system was created by a factory owner. And this could totally be untrue. And I'm just rephrasing what someone else told me was dictated by a factory owner who wanted more workers. And so they, they set up a whole system to basically keep people in this loop of like learning how to work for somebody else. And that makes sense. Makes perfect sense. Yeah. So I don't know if that's true or not. I think that's separate from the money printer question. But the money printing, I think, is purely a result of the government getting out of control in their spending. And this is the only way they could get out of it is just like, what do they do? Here's how I see the whole money printing thing. The money printer allows governments to do whatever the hell they want, whenever they want.

Because if we operated on a fixed supply kind of system, how long do you think people would put up with fighting wars or whatever the government wants? Because like, if you were to fund a war, let's say, you actually have to tax people. You actually need the money and the revenue from people. But if you couldn't print money, if you could print money, then you can do whatever you want. And so I think that's a byproduct of power being exercised beyond what's in our best interest. And that's what Bitcoin is trying to fix. Like, that's why people are obsessed with Bitcoin is because it's a fixed supply. And therefore, governments have to be responsible. Therefore, they can't just do whatever they want. So then what would you say is the main thing that is keeping people poor then?

just a lack of financial education and literacy, mostly, and lifestyle decisions. I don't know, for whatever reason, these questions make me think of George Collin. Do you guys know what that is? The comedian. He's like, oh, yeah, the rich exists to, like, kind of inspire the middle class, and then the poor exist there to scare the shit out of them. What do you mean? Well, because it's like, keep being in the hamster wheel.

Like, if you don't want to be like these people, you got to keep working. You got to keep doing it. And they keep working is, look at this guy who just bought a Ferrari. Right. You don't you want to be like that guy, but you definitely don't want to be like that guy, but you definitely don't want to be like that guy. It keeps you stuck in the middle. Right.

I heard somewhere that the worst thing you could do to someone is pay them $80,000 a year because it's just at the right point where they're making enough where they don't want to risk it, but it's not so little that they're forced to take big action and make significant moves to do something

that would drive their income so much higher and give them so much more opportunity. It's like that safety middle where it's just enough to keep you going and especially if you get promised like a raise to 90k to then 100 and you like you see the trajectory going up you're going to want to stick on that and not do your own thing the slowly boiling crab right I don't I just feel like in order to be like if you think about it mathematically in order to be the one like if you think rich is to have a lot of money if that's your definition of

rich then you got to do like what the 99% don't want to do like to become the 1% which literally the opposite of what everyone else does, like not going out to eat in restaurants and saving money and not owning a car and bicycling to work. It's like that's what it takes to just have enough escape velocity to get out of that. And I think that's what I focus so much on in my

early 20s because my parents were immigrants and they didn't understand money. And I was like, okay, let me not do that. I've really been following a lot of Alex Becker's videos. He has this new channel Alex Becker Business. And he talks a lot about what people have to do today who are young to make

a lot of money and he talks about just like if you want to be that that one percent who succeeds and does something like really big think of what everyone else is doing and then don't do that right and you put yourself in uncomfortable positions and one thing i really liked is he said the the the moment you turn 18 move out of your house live with five roommates just have a mattress on the floor and a computer and figure it out yeah i think that that's a great point that's a great point yeah I think a lot of people would benefit from doing that. And no Netflix, no video games, no drinking. All three of us did our own version of all of that.

Like, I know you've done that. You've lived with like five roommates and you were house hacking. I know you did that. I did that in my own way with Airbnb and I was renting out a room. I was sub-leasing. Like, we all had to do that and do what I think 99% of people just would not put up with. But if you can just get to that escape threshold, like that escape velocity to where you're not reliant necessarily on that paycheck, even for a little, to go out and, you know, build a

business or whatever. It's interesting, I get really frustrated lately when I see people who are like 18 to 21, not doing anything and just kind of like coasting because I'm like, they have no idea how much opportunities out there and just what they could get involved in. And I'm like, oh, my gosh, it just, it frustrates me to see potential being wasted. You know, I've thought about that too, and I'm kind of like the devil's advocate on that because I think it's true that now more than ever, there's more economic opportunity to make money with so many different things, right?

With like the Uber's, the Airbnbs and like the task grab, it's like the task economy. I get that. And also with social media, obviously, like the biggest opportunity. But I also feel like if I view it from that perspective, it's also very selfish because those are my interests. Like I'm interested in those things. So I'm like, why aren't you doing that? But I feel like for a lot of people, like, what if they're not interested in that?

And they, like, look at the last generation and, you know, their parents and, like, how they got screwed by the system. I could totally tell, like, why they would feel that way. I just feel like as a young guy, because that's like, that's our audience. It's like 90-something percent male. You have to create some sort of value. Right. There's got to be something that you're doing to stand out. And when you have that, like, that energy when you're young and you don't need to sleep eight hours and you don't always look tired in videos because you didn't sleep and you're stressing, it's just like, you have so much opportunity.

It's true. That's where I get frustrated. Do you ever think you're lucky sometimes to be interested in the thing that happens to make a lot of money? Sometimes I look at Warren Buffett and I'm like, that's a cool skill that he has, but it's so, like, one-dimensional and he happens to exist in a world that, rewards him greatly for it. Welcome aboard via rail. Please sit and enjoy. Please sit and stretch.

Steep. Flip. Or that and enjoy. Via rail, love the way. I think I got lucky in the sense that I am naturally a saver. No, I think I would have made money to matter what I would have done. If it were aquariums, I know I would have made money. Right.

doing aquariums because now some of these businesses that like the aquarium businesses, they're profiting like $3 million a year. Right. Doing aquariums. That's cool. It's like incredible. It's a really, really, really good business. Right.

I would have done that. There's just like whatever interest do you have, I bet there's a way to make at least one to 200,000 a year. I didn't schedule. At the end of the day, it's about like not necessarily your interest, but are you the type of person to like roll onto your back? Right. And just like kind of let life happen to you. or are you the person that like comes up,

fails against something, and then tries to learn from it, and then uses that as like a tool in your belt to then, you know, help solve a problem later in life. It's just the ability to provide value and learn from failure. But then again, is that,

are you born with that? Right. Or are you raised with that? Right. That's the trillion. And here's an interesting one between Jason and Brett Oppenheim. Twins,

raise same parents, same school, same experiences, completely different. In what way? Jason is very, like, type A, very motivated business, works all the time. Brett is so laid back and chill. Is he lazy?

No, I wouldn't say he's lazy. Actually, no, I would not say he's lazy. I would say that he just isn't interested in that constant grind and hustle. He just has zero desire to work himself beyond what he needs. And I remember, like, this is years ago, but he would basically do enough business in real estate to chill for the rest of the year. Obviously, if there's a client or something that came up, he would do it. But some of these years, you can make quite a bit of money and then just like, all right,

I'm going to Greece for a while and it's relaxing. Right. And then if he needs more money, he'll just be like, all right, I'm going to go and make more money. It just makes enough. It's just a period. He's got a natural ability to just go and make money. I really admire people like that.

I don't think I'm one of those people. I'm not like, I need to constantly grind and make more money. I don't know, sometimes I feel like people are so poor that all they have is money, basically. I think if that's the only thing that drives you, that's cool. I just, I can't relate with that. How is your definition of success changed then going from being like, from an immigrant family, not having a lot of money and then going through life, earning a lot of money? Yeah.

Now, to now having, you know, quite a bit of money post-tax, just like chilling. I think my definition changed a lot. Like, nowadays, if I see someone with kids, I'm like, that's wealth to me. I don't know why. I just view somebody with a family as like being wealthy, probably because it also costs a lot of money to have kids and maintain a good family. But that's just to me, like, more important at this point.

But also realize it's a privileged perspective because I didn't always have that perspective. It's obviously easy to have that when you have money. Speaking of family and relationships, what is the best relationship advice you've heard? And what does the red pill movement get right and wrong about dating? I don't think I know enough. about the red pill movement to like represent what it has right.

You tell me. I don't know. You know what it is. You were telling me all of this red pill jargon. That's red pill jargon? Right before the podcast. You were like saying the craziest stuff. I was?

Yeah. What? I was like, what do you? So what's the best relationship advice you've heard? Oh my gosh. I don't think I've ever heard relationship advice. Never? No, not really.

Then what is the best relationship advice? Like what works for you in your relationship? Growing up, I saw my parents have a very tumultuous and very bad relationship, and I always equated having a crazy relationship where you always fight as, like, love. And I think over time, that definition has matured and changed. Like, I was like, oh, I'm clearly, I'm fighting with, like, my girlfriend, so therefore that means we really love each other. And the more we fight, the more in love we are. Does that make sense? And I think it's a really toxic way of viewing it.

I think as I've matured and I've gotten older, I've realized that you can be chill and have your own time to yourself and not get like, you know, bothered by a lot of things. And that can be love. And I didn't see that growing up. So I think that's just like experience and time

of realizing that. And also just being so much later in life to have kids or like to want a family. And I think that just comes from maturing, which I did not see my parents do because my parents had me when they were like 19. So it's always crazy to me because I think, oh man, if I had a kid at 18 years old, how old would they be now? It's like 17? Right. I always do that

I'm like hey instead of having Bailey we had a kid they'd be like five and a half years old It's weird stuff like But if you had a kid now Do you think you'd look back in your life And be like I wish I didn't have a kid I wish I could have just made a couple more million Before I did it

It's less about that And more about just the time If I had a kid today And a child appeared I would regret Not having traveled more And done experiences that you just can't do quite the same

after having a kid. And I think travel is a big one. And I would have been like, man, instead of spending all the time working, I should have done all these other things that I just postponed. Really? I don't think you'd feel that way at all.

I think you'd eventually get to do those things, whether it's with your kids or after. Bill Perkins, because we talked about this on that pot, really opened my eyes. And he's like, your window is closing of you before kids. And once you have a child, the you that's sitting here today

is never going to exist again in the same capacity. And he said, now is your time to do these things in your life because it's your last chance. And I was like, oh, wow, he's correct. So I'm in the mindset now

where like, hey, now is a good time to travel. Right. Take it a bit slower, do these things that I just don't want to keep putting it off forever. That's true. I don't think you traveled quite a lot, right? Japan.

Right. But I want to spend a year. And over the year, maybe spend two months of the year. Just spread out throughout the year. Just traveling different places. Do you have like a checklist of places you want to go? And then you're like, okay, I'm ready for a kid. Or is it like how you feel or what's it based on?

I think obviously I love a checklist. But I think you don't need to hit everything on the checklist. But, you know, hitting 50% on that list would be pretty good. How many places do you want to see? Probably four or five. Okay. But spend like a week and a half in each. Right.

So like two months out of the year. Oh. You know, every other month being away for like two weeks. Okay. Perfect. Maybe every three months being away. Do you think you're working towards that, would you say? Yeah.

We're planning to go away this year doing a few little trips. And then next year I want to plan and get that done. Because I feel like at the rate that you're traveling that I know you to travel, like, you're going to take the next 10 years to get to the next five places. Because you don't travel a lot. I said that like vacation. Like Graham will treat everything as his. priority. Like, for example, some gas valve will go out on one of his rental properties and he has to spend, like, you know, six hours of his time, six hours of his time comparing quotes from different

contractors, stressing out about it. And that's just something that, like, should realistically be so insignificant in his life. But at the same point, if he just spent the six hours, like, trying to optimize the quality of his life and doing the things that he says that he wants to do, like traveling the world and going to go visit places, it's like, you should be spending that time optimizing for life fulfillment purpose, meaning, quality of life, figuring out a few places you want to go to, picking some people you want to go visit them with. It's like that right there is actually like being meaningful with the way that you're spending your time. Yeah. And you, you prioritize so many other things that realistically you hate doing, you don't need to be doing over the things that you

want to do, but you don't do. Yeah, that's true. That's a great observation. That's a really good way of putting it from what I've observed of you being the way you are. And I'm similar in the sense as like, once something's on my mind, I'm like, I got to do it right now. But then the things that are so important to us, we sometimes forget to do and plan for and just think they're going to, like, happen organically, but they don't. And I just feel like, man, I think about having a kid, and I'm like, I'm 36 years old right now. When my kid's 36, that would be 72. That's kind of depressing to me.

But see, I think we're going to live into our 90s. But what we have the same, like, quality of life and health? Like, right now you're in your prime in terms of, how you observe and view the world and experience it, how your health is like. When you're 70, like, okay, you might live to 100, but are you going to be as fit and will you care about all this stuff?

Like, probably not, you know? I don't know. I'm planning to live to like, I want to hit 100. I'm just saying, I want to hit 100. I think that would be ideal. So I'm doing everything I can to live to 100. Okay. I would love to live 100.

You got to go to Thailand and get those buyer markers. You do, man. That's going to be the... And not take more than three hours. Saving up now. Not take more than three hours, hopefully. Could be days, man. I don't know.

We've gone full circle. I just can't. We've gone full circle. I'm not like you or I could just like... Wait, so are you planning to have kids, you think? One day. One day. One day.

Like when? I don't put a win on it. But at some point, yes, I would like to have. Do you think you'll be, like, literally everyone that we know that's like, if I had known, I would have done it sooner. Do you think you'll be that way? It's impossible to say because I'm not there. Maybe, but maybe not.

But I just feel like we've heard that, and I've heard you tell me that. Is this anyone who has kids is like, I was scared and I was putting it off, but I wish I had done it earlier. And if you know that now, does that affect anything? Maybe.

All right. But maybe not. I don't know. Just because other people say it doesn't mean I always follow it. Right. I think you just come to your own conclusion. Yeah, I wouldn't know either.

I don't have kids yet. And then what is the ideal amount of money to have? enough to do anything you want with but not too much to where you want to do nothing. How much is that? Somewhere in between. The amount? You got to give an amount.

The way I would define it is just enough. Enough is different for everybody. So what's enough for you? Um, enough to do what with, though? Like, just to live? Yeah, what's the perfect amount of money for Andrejek? I would say,

I'd be happy with it with like $2 million. Even a million. I'd be happy with it. I would make it work. What do you mean? I'm asking you, what's the perfect amount of money? You could just select an amount.

Yeah. You could just select an amount, yeah, sure. So select an amount. What's your guys is? The ideal? Like a perfect? That makes no sense to me. I don't know.

I would say, I would say the perfect amount of money for me is $10 million to initially. I was going to say $10 million to initially. But I'm like, yeah, but like $5 million is fine too. Five million's great. Yeah, exactly. So, like, how do you answer that question?

Five minutes, fine. Ten is better. 20 might be better. 50 might be even better. You know what I'm saying? When I asked you the question, though, you're like, well, it's not so much that you don't want to do things. Right. It's also not so little.

It depends. You know what, on the age you get the money, too. How old are you? Like, at 30, I'd say it's a different age than at 60. I do believe that having so much money, though, like, can be a curse at a certain point. Like, I haven't had enough to where it's like it's become a curse, but I think there is a way to phrase it yeah you could gift somebody a lottery ticket and you could dictate how much money they get how much would you give them and it wouldn't ruin their life you don't want to give too much

where all of a sudden it screws everything up right but you don't want to undercut them either because you could decide how much they get right yeah i would say 10 million's a great amount 10 million's great i would say like like 4 million bucks what's that 4 million i would probably yeah four million would be buying yourself a house, putting some money in stocks, spending a little bit of money. Give me like a picture of like how you've allocated that $4 million. You have $4 million net worth. What does that mean? Four million dollars net worth. You said $4 million. You said $4 million. Let's say you take 4% from that. That's $160,000 a year. Let's say you take 3% from that. That's $120,000 a month. That's what you can spend. Realistically, they're going to go F off with some of the money. They're

going to spend it. But if you have $10 million instead of $4 million, I do think that once you add that extra digit in there, people are going to be like, oh, I need a Ferrari, I need a Lambo, I need this and need that. With $4 million realistically, people are not going to be buying, well, I'm sure they will. But like, I think $4 million is solid because it doesn't appear to be this insane, insane, insane amount of money where you're going to go buy a bunch of new Lampos, some Ferraris, and you could still just put it away in some stocks. Hold on, but you're saying people or you? People? People, okay. I bet they would. I think they would. I think for me, you give anyone a million dollars, they'd be gone in a year. Okay, so what's the perfect amount for someone to win in a lottery

then for 50 bucks. But that's what I'm saying. Like, but I'm assuming you're asking me or, and I'm asking you, Jack, like, what is your amount? Not like a hypothetical for an average person. My perfect amount of money, I would say would be probably between 5 and 10 million. Okay. Mm-hmm. Okay, that makes more sense.

Yeah. Graham? Me personally? Mm-hmm. Or for the average person? Because you were talking about average. You personally. 50 million.

50 million. Yeah. Because it's not enough where you could just. private jet all the time. But you could get a nice piece of beachfront real estate. You could be bi-coastal.

Sure. You could take first-class plane tickets without really thinking through it, and you could have a great collection of something that's unique. You don't think you do that with $20 million? No. No, you're not buying first-class plane tickets with two beachfront property.

Dude, a nice beachfront property is going to be $8 to $12 million. if it's that expensive of property. Yeah. Just it, but you could even have just a normal 2,500 square foot house

on the beach in a great location in Santa Barbara and that's going to be $12 million. The thing that I take away from this conversation is that I'm very glad

I am not in your perspective. I am so glad that I don't have that same perception of like how much I need. I think that's like a burden that I don't have that you do, if that makes sense.

I don't think it's a burden. I think it's a complete burden. How is that a burden? It just is. It just makes... Okay, so the way I would define happiness for people is the difference or the delta between their reality in expectation, right?

It's like where you are today and where you'd like to be. And the delta between where you are and 50 million or 100 million or billion is like crazy. Now, once you've reached like, let's say, it gets like, like, why are some of the richest people, some of the most miserable people in the world? because their reality is like and utopian levels

where do you go from that point there is no more expectation there like there's nothing money will increase and so therefore their happiness level there is there's no space there's no headroom I would say I'm pretty happy though I'd say most days

like 10 being the happiest I've ever been in my life and one being like really unhappy most days I'm like a solid 8 to like 8.5 I'm not saying you're unhappy I'm just saying anybody who ties their happiness to like some perceived like wealth level is it's like it's not a burden you like i like having a goal and then going after the goal and always having something yeah of like hey this would be cool like like your Pokemon collection like 150 grand right that's

that to me would be like that would be cool that would be awesome to have yeah and so then i think about that and i think oh i just just the aspect of wanting something like here's an example of something I postponed for a long time. I really want a Tesla Model S. And a used one, too, like a 2023 Tesla Model S long range. I could go out and buy that thing right now. Okay.

But I purposely don't buy it. Because you're edging yourself. Yeah. No way. But it's just the idea of like, hey, it's cool. But I could, but I have fun going and looking and like every day be like, it's today the day. Because you subconsciously understand.

said by owning that thing, it's like that happiness that you have right now, the excitement, like that's what you're holding on to because you don't have it. You could get it any time you want. That's exactly what I'm trying to prove. Yeah, but my point being is I'm still happy just not getting that thing as I am just looking at them online and maybe getting one one day. Right, that's fine. But that proves my point that like there is some burden that is attached to like thinking

that you'll be happier at like a $50 million thing. I think at some point I get the car, I get the 2023 Tesla Model S. I get a good deal. I really, really, really enjoy it. And then after a year or two, I think, oh, wow, maybe this model X. And then I just edge myself a little further. But I'm constantly just leveling up. It's like every year is a little better than the year prior.

Here's the way I view it is once you're on that hamster wheel and like you'll find the next thing to edge yourself with, right? you'll never find finality in that spectrum. I would hate to find finality though. Right. And I agree with that. But if you only attach that level of happiness to just material things, that that's fine. I'm not saying it's wrong. But like for me, I think there's so many different aspects of life that you can chase and edge yourself with that are not necessarily attached to like some financial figure.

And still find happy. But here's the thing. To get to that financial figure, you're not just making money out of thin air. You have to do something productive. You have to do something meaningful. So in the pursuit of that, you're doing something that's hopefully bigger than yourself. That's true. So it's part of the process.

Yes, but that's financially. But then there's also so many different ways to explore that. Like that's, you're talking about depth. I'm talking about broad, right? That makes sense? Like, you're talking about depth of economics. I think you could have length and girth. Oh, well.

So, you know, I think you could still. I think you could still hit that beachfront property with a nice yard that goes out and descent. The waves break it. You could still do that while at the same time. Listen, I rented an Airbnb in Hawaii for like, dude, I spent stupid amounts of money for like a week. I spent like 15 grand for a week on like,

it was like a $20 million house on a beach. And I live there for like a week. And I'm like, this is cool. But like what I dedicate my entire life to chasing this thing, like I'm like, no, I'll skip it. Like I don't want to. to attach my perception of like the journey of life to this thing that I just got to experience and it's cool but like I'm cool without it. It's not the end of the world for me if I don't

have that. It'd be nice to have but I don't want to spend the rest of my life like not traveling or not having kids or not having more meaningful experiences in lieu of this thing. I think you could do both. I think you can. I think you could still pursue that and still have a meaningful life and have a family and all that sort of stuff. I think it for sure. It depends on how you want to structure your life. So there's nothing at this point that you want besides a family. I think so, yeah. There's nothing that I'm like, oh, I got to build a business because I want this thing.

I'm so glad I don't feel that way. But what about a yard with the pool? That's nice. See, I got you thinking now. What are you going? Here we go. I got that. You don't have a yard in a pool.

I don't need a pool. You know what? It's way more enjoyable to have a purpose. to go to a friend's pool because they pay for it and they maintain it. Only if they heat the pool, which they don't do. Which my friends don't do because they don't want to spend the money. Nope, because it's expensive. Dude, we went to Graham's July 4th party and he's like, I'm not eating up the pool.

Like, dude, I'll pay you $5 to heat up the pool today. It's way more than $5. How much is that? I got to get that beachfront property, man, that $5 compounded in Bitcoin. I don't know. Haven't you like had the same experience where it's like eating someone else's snacks is always more enjoyable than like having it yourself or like going to swim at someone else's pool just so much more enjoyable i like to to have it myself but i also don't i'm i have very few like desires like there

aren't many things that i feel like i need in my life to be happy why is that i i think it's but don't you want a beach house no no no because i just got another house and it's such a pain in the butt and I'm like, oh, like I just, I want few things. But if you have $50 million, you don't have to worry about that. I would rather just rent it, you know? You could rent the house, Jack. There's nothing that says you have to buy it. But I like what I really love doing, what I absolutely love doing and I wish I could do it

more often, is work throughout the day, see my friends, eat some good food, play pickleball at night. That's all I want. That's all I want, and I'll be extremely happy. And that's it. Do you think that's like boring or like wrong? No. No, not all.

Okay. No. Okay. But then again, you walk in Jack's house and there are 30 pairs of shoes. The dining room is a ping pong table. Okay. The furniture is completely mismatched. And there are...

The new house is going to be nicer. It's going to have, you know, I'm going to dress it up well. In fact, maybe I'll put some pictures here or at some future episode. Yeah. Of the before and after Old House New House. Yeah. You got to subscribe because in like two months, you're going to see this new set and it's going to be amazing. It's going to look incredible.

Oh, yeah, we have a big announcement to make here on the ice coffee hour. Guys, this set that we've been using for the past few years, it will no longer be the set of the ice coffee hour. Okay. If you want to get a behind-the-scenes glance at the set, tell you what, we'll post a picture on our members-only page. Okay. We'll also unveil it as soon as it's done done. and I'm telling you right now, the ice coffee hour is going to have a massive, massive upgrade.

How about this? For the members, do a tour of the warehouse. Sure. That's cool. What are you going to turn this bedroom into? Guest bedroom. Okay. This is a guest bedroom in Graham's house, and we've long overstayed our welcome,

and on top of that, it's just so small in here. You guys can't really tell how tiny this room is, but it's cramped. I hit my head on that light all the time, and so we are going to be making an upgrade, and it will be insane. I'm saying, not many podcasts out there that are going to have a set like the ice coffee hours. It is beautiful.

And the funny thing is, too, I do really good work from the bedroom. Like, my favorite is to be in bed with my laptop, coffee to my side, and just work. Yeah. And so I'm going to use this as my office to work in. And I just work from the bed. I don't know what it is about that. Just waking up and just being in a bed. And we have windows over here that overlook the tree and everything.

So, like, I'm looking forward to having that. Oh, that's cool. Yeah. Yeah, I like that. It's a nice bedroom. It's got attached bathroom, too. Mm-hmm. It's nice.

It's an en suite. Good talk. Are you going to buy a new house? Am I? Yeah. I... So, Jeremy has been trying to get me to buy a new house. Like, every week, he's, like, sending me listings and, like, look at this and look at this.

And he's like, my agent found a house so we could go see it this weekend. I'm like, no, Jeremy. But I do look at the market daily. Me too. And I would say... If there's a house that came up that is perfect, and if I could get it at a price, that it just, I'd be dumb to turn it down,

I'd do it. What's the price range? It just, it's, it's, it sounds dumb. It's less about the range, and it's more about how good of a deal I could get. So it's like, if it's worth this, but I could buy it for this, I'll buy it.

But it's got to be perfect, and there are very few places that I've seen that have been perfect. In fact, in the last, three years, there has only ever been two places in Vegas that I loved. One of them, I couldn't get at the price that I thought I would need to pay to do that. If you go back in time, do you wish you bought it? No. No, I'm happy without the house. Because the monthly increase, because where I'm at now, I have like a 2.8% interest rate. I put so little money down. It's not

stressful for me to be here. Spending the money on the other place would that additional stress just wasn't worth it. Like I did I would get a benefit like a happiness boost a five, but I get a stress boost of seven. Right. And so that's not worth it. So I need a happiness boost and a stress boost to either be lower or the same. And this was not, but it was a beautiful house. The other one sold for $15 million. But the house was perfect. I'm talking about. I'm talking about. I'm talking about. I'm talking like as perfect as you could possibly get as a house, this was it. It was one of a kind. It's truly trophy property with a view of the strip, with a yard. It was, everything was perfect. But obviously, it's 15 million. I can't do that. But if that house were six, I would have done it in a heartbeat.

Heartbeat. I would find a way to make that work. That's cool. So if it got sold for less than 50% of its value, then you would have made it work? Way less. If 15 million to six, yeah. Yeah. But it's just, it wouldn't. But I bet at some point there will be a perfect place at a perfect price. It's going to happen. Okay. But it could take 10 years. Huh.

Well, I'm excited to see it. There you have it. Every day, it's like unboxing a pack of Pokemon cards. When I check the market. Yeah. And I see what's on Zillow. It's like, oh, there's a new listing that came up. Let's see that.

Right. Yeah. It's cool. I look at houses all the time, too. Final question. This is kind of an interesting question. We've asked quite a few people on the podcast. Uh-oh.

Would you rather fight 100 duck-sized horses or one horse-sized duck? One horse-sized duck for sure. Andre, yeah. Thank you so much for coming on the ice. Thanks for having me. This was a blast. Great to talk to you. Nice watch.

Thank you, likewise. By the way. Oh, thank you very much. Graham, nice watch. Mm, it's a Cassio. Thank you guys. So much for watching. It really means a lot.

Shout out Andre. Andre's information will be linked down below in the description. Shout out that health thing that you did in Thailand. Shout out the other thing that you shouted out, the biomarker thing that you guys got tested. Function Health, and don't forget to sign up for the memberships to see the tour. Again, Mikey, our editor, loves this. He's been telling us to promote the memberships more.

We've been terrible about it, but it really helps support Mikey. So just, you know, do that for Mikey. I'm sure he'd really appreciate it. And you get to see all of the episodes before they go live publicly. You get to see them in full without any sensors or anything like this. and I think you'll like it and if you don't like it you could always just cancel

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