The Iced Coffee Hour - Confronting Techlead About Everything (As A Millionaire)

Episode Date: April 11, 2022

Elevate your writing with 20% off Grammarly Premium by signing up at https://grammarly.com/icedcoffee  This episode we have on Techlead and discuss his token, crypto, and balance in life. You can find Techlead here: https://youtube.com/c/TechLead Add us on Instagram:  https://www.instagram.com/jlsselby https://www.instagram.com/gpstephan https://www.instagram.com/alex_nava_p... Official Clips Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCeBQ... For sponsorships or business inquiries reach out to: [e-mail] DOWNLOAD MY NEW FINANCIAL APP: https://hungrybull.page.link/graham GET YOUR FREE STOCK WORTH UP TO $1000 ON PUBLIC & SEE MY STOCK TRADES - USE CODE GRAHAM: http://www.public.com/graham  MY NEW COFFEE IS NOW FOR SALE: http://www.bankrollcoffee.com/ Join the 2x weekly mentorship group: https://tinyurl.com/yaexko4o The Equipment used: https://tinyurl.com/y78py5g2 Audio Equipment Used In Podcast: Rode NT1, Rodecaster Pro The YouTube Creator Academy:   Learn EXACTLY how to get your first 1000 subscribers on YouTube, rank videos on the front page of searches, grow your following, and turn that into another income source: https://bit.ly/2STxofv $100 OFF WITH CODE 100OFF  For Podcast Inquiries, please contact [e-mail] *Some of the links and other products that appear on this video are from companies which Graham Stephan will earn an affiliate commission or referral bonus. Graham Stephan is part of an affiliate network and receives compensation for sending traffic to partner sites. The content in this video is accurate as of the posting date. Some of the offers mentioned may no longer be available. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome back to the Ice Coffee Hour. This is Tech Lead, and the Ice Coffee Hour has made some pitiful amount, like $2, 5 bucks. Whatever it is, I probably lost more than this in the crypto markets. But welcome. Yeah, to this, it's probably, it's nothing to you as a millionaire. But to us, it is $191,913 in one penny. Is that supposed to be a lot?

It's like nothing, you guys. It's nothing. It's a pitiful amount, as you said. It's supposed to be something. thing. But anyway, we were almost at two years now. Yeah. So it's almost two years with anniversary. Yeah. Again, this is something I just make or lose in the day every day based on the crypto markets and fluctuations. How much did you make or lose today in crypto, your entire portfolio? Millions. Multibles of millions. Multiple of millions. It's just whatever ether scan

tells me. It's just paper gains, paper losses. What I do is I mint a coin for, and I sell it for like a dollar. But if I meant 10 million coins, I have a network. of 10 million, you see. That's genius, actually. Yeah. Well, we got a lot to cover today. So first of all, as a background, I watched your channel when you were at X-Google, X-Facebook. So I've seen your progression on YouTube and, like, through your careers working in tech

as a tech lead. Yeah. And then-X-Go-X-Go-X-Meta, ex-husband, ex-convict, ex-socialopath, X-cyclopath, tech. It's hard to keep tracking more. Well, but we... Just shows how far ahead I am with you. Yeah, I guess I have a lot of catching up. Most people underestimate me.

You can find the ways to go. I don't know if the ex-convict. Yeah. Definitely not next job. You'll get there. Ex real estate agent. Yeah. But, you know what?

I've almost got my license now in Nevada. So I've taken all the classes online. I just got to take the state exam. And then I will be licensed again in Nevada. So I will no longer be an ex-sense. Real estate agent. I'll use you. Yeah.

No. But I've been managing my own property. Ex-husband, maybe. Come out? No. You got to get there to join the ranks of Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Elon Musk. True. Myself.

Oh, gosh. Anyway. So I had you back on the channel on the Graham Steffin show. This would have been three years ago had you on and then brought you back very shortly after when you made a video about your ex-wife leaving you. And she took your. your kid to another country. Yeah, good times.

And this was just a crazy story. And I remember you making these, these videos just discussing the subject. And these videos were just not only very heartfelt, but like we're gaining, like garnering millions of views on some of these topics. And then was it around that time that you were like, tell a bit of your story here because I think it's a very tumultuous. Probably in high school, I was already a straight-day student, Valick, right like very traditional upbringing you could say paved the road into becoming essentially a software

engineer i'd always been interested in programming i got into uc berkeley you know top three college in the country maybe for a computer science electrical engineering computer science during that time i did spend a year studying abroad in japan right and that was probably one of the best years in my life so you know travel and minimalism and there's some things that have really been instilled in me. After that, came back, I spent some time working at some microsystems for internship. I did an internship at Microsoft, a software engineer. I worked, I went to UC San Diego for grad school for about a year, went to Sony Pictures, worked there for a year, 75K income. At the time, it was really good. And I was feeling like, I was hot stuff. I was like 23, 24, something like

that. During my time there, I built my first app. I taught myself PHP web development, full stack. The Facebook apps were happening. So I launched that app and it took off. Right. So I made probably a million dollars right there by the time I was 25. And this is something I recommend to everybody is you don't need to take, like I'm against taking risk. Like I don't believe in taking risk. Your is far too valuable to risk it on anything like. So I would do both at the same time. I did my side hustle in the evenings and weekends, did my full-time job in the daytime.

After that, I went off and traveled, actually, doing the digital no-math thing, been to a bunch of different countries, worked from like London, the UK, worked from Hawaii for a while, worked from Japan, went to New York for a while here and there. And I kind of went back and forth, and alternated with some full-time jobs actually here and there, right?

So, like, I would go back to Silicon Valley, work in some app companies, 120K income over at Playdom, some app company, worked at a group on, worked at some startups, worked at some of my own ventures again, right, making more apps and projects. Some of those also blew up. So this is the time I made, like, 50 apps or so, you know, like more than that. a bunch of different websites, ideas that failed, some of them succeeded and made maybe another maybe another million dollars or so, right? And then probably at around that time, I did go to

Japan. I met my wife over there. I was doing my own independent side hustles during that time. And you know, you can fill up these gaps in your resume by saying like, yeah, I was working on this venture, venture, this project, right? That's how you can fill this. up came back landed the job at google and that set me on several years working there as a tech lead went to uh transferred over to facebook after that right voluntarily so that that was a clean transfer um and then during that time at facebook i had also my youtube channel that i was starting to do so went to microsoft too a lot of people don't know that but i did get married i had a kid my wife from Japan, so I met her in Japan.

She one day decided to accuse me of domestic violence. I would say it's alleged. I don't think it's real. But she used that as an excuse to take the child to Japan. This is actually a pretty big issue if you're into various circles. But, you know, Japan is known as a black hole for child abduction. So she took the kid. It was at the time it was devastating.

now I've kind of pretty much moved forward with that, you know, the show has to go on. Like, I can't just, kind of like it's made me realize that you need to focus on making the most of your life no matter what. And that life is short, so you have to enjoy it. Like, there's certain things you just can't go up against. Like, it's not worth fighting necessarily. We can talk about this a little bit more. But then, yeah, after that, I mean, during this time, I also did work at Google, text. lead there, you know, and then I went over to Facebook also working as a tech lead over there.

Some people at Facebook think I'm not a real tech lead, but I mean, this is why I have to keep telling people I am an ex-Google X meta tech lead. So Facebook was doing $600,000 in income over there. Actually, one day they decided to fire me for running a YouTube channel. And yeah, ever since then, I've been running this YouTube channel. You can check it out tech lead, but I essentially ran out of content like two or three years ago. I don't know what people are still there on the channel for. It's probably loaded with crypto trading bots just trying to scam you, but maybe it's the only boss watching my channel right now. You know what? I'm always curious how many of our views are due to the bots, because as soon

as I will post, there's always like, there's always one who will comment on every single post. Now, they could probably do that with one view because it's the same account, but I'm curious. There's got to be like at least a few thousand views just for the bots. The boss are the bread and butter of my monetization strategy, right? It's like I know a lot of people say they don't want boss on YouTube, but I need them for my ad revenue. You think they watch the ads? They probably add to the impression counts on the ads and boost the revenue for the creators. Yeah.

So going back, you mentioned that Japan was a black hole for child abduction. Is that because they don't have, because it's hard to track people from the U.S. to Japan or is that because they they don't have the infrastructure to or the resources to track people or why is that yeah discussion unrelated to finance perhaps but there is the idea that Japan believes in single custody of children right and and they typically have the situation where the the mother watches the child the husband goes to work all day and barely shows up at home and if there's a separation, the mother oftentimes will get the child single custody.

The father never sees the child again. And that's just the system that they go with. And what happens is it's just maybe my personal point of view, but there's kind of this princess psychology. Like a lot of Japanese women tend to grow up as little princesses. In my personal view, there's a lot of immaturity involved in this. So when there's conflict, there's not good conflict resolution. And there's no concept of double parenthood there.

In my personal view, I kind of made peace with this because if you've ever seen a woman give birth, you'll know that it's massively painful. And, you know, it's like my view is if somebody wants a child and they get like the woman should probably get to say. Like, I kind of see how single custody, if anybody gets to decide, maybe it should be the mother. Because, like, if you ask me, would I like to push a watermelon through my body and then say, this is half somebody else's? I would say, like, that's not a clean deal. Like, maybe it should just belong to this person. So, yeah, that, I mean, as far as enforcement goes, the more you pursue somebody, the deeper into hiding that they go. There are things like the Hague Convention, which.

are very difficult to enforce. People try to pursue this. It costs, I know people who have spent like $250,000. I've met these people on trying to get their children back. There's their entire communities. And this happens, I mean, this happens everywhere in divorce as well. Like all of these situations,

you can plow hundreds of thousands of dollars into this. And you still may not get the result you're looking for. And the only people that win oftentimes are going to be the attorneys, the lawyers. So, I mean, there was even this guy. He made the headlines a while ago. He was starving himself to try to get his child back in Japan. This guy was like a finance manager, Vincent Fitchell. And like these people are all, many of them are very well to do.

But to me, it's not worth, like you have to pick your battles in life. Right. And to me, it's like this open world game. And there's some bosses on the map that are just, you can spend a lifetime fighting for. Like, you can spend, you can throw your whole life trying to defeat this boss. And maybe you're going to win. Or you can go explore all the other fun parts in life. So even though, yes, I can go throw hundreds of thousands of dollars into this hay convention

and hire all these attorneys and take this very aggressive attitude. I think it's better to just say, I'm going to go continue to enjoy my life as best as I can, make the most of it in the short time that I have, and take a more gentle approach, which is typically like, this is a problem with Western culture, is that we believe in litigation, and we believe in confrontation and aggression, and getting our way, fighting for it, and that is victory.

But I would say, if you can find an approach that, is more gentle and reaches compromise, that's going to be more ideal. So my approach these days is really more towards compromise and just understanding that people are like totally insane sometimes and irrational. Yeah. And to just treat everybody like rabid dogs, like people are not rational. So you just have to try to manage it as best as you can. I can try to fight this person and confront them and reason about them.

or I can just say, let me just give you what you want, right? Like, let me just handle this situation as carefully as I can without trying to provoke this other person more. The ride that steals the spotlight every time it hits the road, that's the Volkswagen Tiguan. Its sleek exterior makes a first impression you can't ignore. Step inside to find available full leather seats and wood accents. Under the hood, the available 201 turbocharged horsepower engine

gives it a fun to drive edge. The refined tiguan. You deserve more style. Visit vw.ca to learn more. SuvW, German engineered for all. You've just accepted the situation for what it is and done your thing. Yeah, I think some things,

like I just don't want to throw resources, time and effort into fighting, right? Like, it's just, uh, if the mother wants the child to grow up without a father, that's her choice. And, And I think that she does have priority.

The law may say there's 50-50 ownership, but if there were no law, by nature, the mother has priority. That's what I would say. And also through the divorce, what were the finances like through the divorce? Because I know, especially for high earners,

the results can be pretty controversial. And when did you become a millionaire? I think it was 25. 24, right? We talked about this on the early episode of the Graham Steffing show. I mean, I've been a millionaire since age 25. So I've lived with wealth. When were you a millionaire?

26. All right, see? That's how far ahead I am with you. And it compounds, by the way, too. So it's like, it's just the distance. He's going. Yeah. I'm not going to ask your net worth, which maybe I do it.

You could ask it. No, I'm so upfront about it. I made a video. About it's 15 and a half. You didn't ask, but that's what it is. What's yours? Check ether scan. I mean, I was worth like $20 million on the ether scan.

Check that out. Paper gains right there. And I can probably mint another $200 million if I want to. It's like simple, just make a coin like that. What were we talking about? The wealth that you've built up your twice. How you did that? And then what happened in a divorce?

This is how you get messed up. in family court, right? Like, whatever amount that you offer, you can say, I'm going to offer you $5,000 child support, a million dollars in total finances. The other person does not know what is fair, right? So because they have no understanding of what is fair by the legal system, they're going to say,

give me more. It's always going to be more until the other person gets to a point where they made really until an attorney comes, and the judge says this is fair. But that makes mediation incredibly difficult, in my opinion. And what happens if you're a higher earner is that if you go talk to an attorney, they will just charge you through the roof on everything. So, like, I tried to do everything myself because I don't want any funds to go to the attorneys,

if at all possible. But if the other person is, there come situations where, like, other person can try to get you to pay their attorney fees. So you're paying double attorney fees. And attorneys can cost, what, $800 an hour if it's a good one. So you could be paying $1,600 per hour in the worst case, possibly, maybe. But what happens is like, I probably spent $25, $30,000 on an attorney and they didn't even get me through a single trial, right? It was only paperwork up to that point. So I fired the attorney and just said, I'm going to just represent myself in trial, go in, and I just lost. And, you know, like, I went in there and I said, this is a kidnapping.

This person's taking the child. You know, this isn't fair. And they're just like, cool. So, so let's let's have you pay. And I think that's just a norm for family court. Even if she's in another country and you have zero custody. Even if she's in another country, kidnapsing. Nobody, it doesn't matter.

just the way family court is. This is the California family court? I think it's all Western courts. Yeah, I think because number one, child support has nothing to do with custody. So it's simply based on like, we don't care what happened. We don't know, like, even if this was a kidnapping, whatever, like, you pay. It's just as simple as that. The divorce is, the divorce is still going on, quite frankly.

So this is going to be another, it's kind of. going to be another headache. How did you build your wealth to begin with? So I think this is something valuable for people to understand, but my wealth was built over probably five, six, seven different projects over my career, right? It's not a single thing. And these took many years. So it's really the personality that you have and that determination and persistence to keep doing success after success, after success, in my personal opinion, that's going to get you to a successful position, right? So like, probably my first million was made from making a bunch of apps on my own, right? Like Facebook apps, Facebook gaming, right?

When that took off. But that only got me to one million or so, less than that. You know, I probably had to create three different social gaming apps, taking advantage of the whole app trend on Facebook, Twitter apps and all that to get to that stage. but that's not enough to retire on. That's why I went back to work many later on. And, you know, like there was the whole Google, Facebook career episode I had that made me some more money here and there. I had episodes where I had to learn stock trading, right?

Because after a while, your investments take over. If you make money but you don't learn investments, you're going to be limited, right? Like there could be massive gains there that you don't pick up on. after that then maybe there's the whole youtube section right segment which helps make more money but if all i did was youtube i would not have monetized as much as maybe if i were able to create additional content and courses and continue to pivot the channel to stay irrelevant to just keep the clickbait farm coming along right so you know you see a lot of other people they're making their youtube channel maybe they make one channel that's all they do it fades out

they go back to work, right? And so I would say the thing about me is I kept reinventing myself and kept finding new opportunities. So it's not like, this is why when people say, oh, you're just lucky. Well, I got lucky like seven times, 10 times in a row, right? Like these are ventures, multiple ventures, not just one. And many people have trouble even doing a single venture, right,

in their entire life. they don't ever get off the rails. I'm a little confused on the storyline here. So this is, I'm assuming, just after college, or was this while you were in college when you started developing apps? Yeah. So the apps business was done right after I finished grad school. But before you started working at Microsoft.

Yeah. So it was in 2007. Facebook was booming. People were making lots of money on the Facebook apps. Everything was going viral. right so i i actually had to teach myself a php javascript uh it was hellish you know like full stack web development server management um this is not something that any college is going to teach you right like nobody teaches you this stuff you just have to go learn by yourself uh so that's what i did

why that did you just spot an opportunity you how do you come up with the idea so i i think i'm personally attracted to whatever is just interesting or cool or trendy at the time, right? Like, this was just a very interesting trendy technology. You know, like the whole Facebook apps thing, you can make massive impact. And maybe it's impact for me that I've been attracted to. It's like anything that can, that looks like, yeah, it can just make impact upon the world, right? The Facebook apps was the ability to reach massive amounts of people. You could kind of say the same with the whole YouTube thing.

When I saw YouTube, probably when you saw it too, many people were not taking it seriously, right? It was like if you were doing YouTube, people would laugh at you. People would say, oh, professionals don't do that. Nowadays, you see venture capitalists and entrepreneurs and like loads of professional people on YouTube trying to build their audience, but they're way too late. So, you know, there's the what? There's the followers and the leaders. tech lead like me. But, you know, it's like if you're attracted to impact, then I think you may have what it takes.

There's many people who come to me and say, they're attracted to code. They love coding. That's not right. Code is a tool to achieve impact. It's a tool to achieve massive scalability at low cost to reach it, right, like massive amounts of people and deliver value. But code is not the draw. It's never been the draw. It is the product, that impact that I've always been seeking.

So I just learn whatever technology is necessary. Like when I was working at Google and Facebook, it was through iOS development. iOS is completely different tech stack than full stack web development. Completely different technology. So I switched right away to just whichever technology is going to be necessary. YouTube, in my mind, YouTube is also another different tech stack, right? Like, it's a whole set of skills that you need. And so when people come and say, they just want to learn to code.

It's like, if all you do is learn how to code, what you're really looking at is a 30K job, low income in the outsource facility center where you're at the computer 12 hours a day for 10 years straight. That's coding. I don't think anybody really wants to do that. but you see so many people say, oh, my dream is to become a software engineer.

There's plenty of software engineers like the Linux programmers who just sit in their basements and never achieve anything with their lives and make zero impact upon the world. Those are the people I've never envied. Who we envy are myself. Jeff Bezos,

Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and myself. And the people who make the impact, right? These people were not just programmers.

They were, entrepreneurs. But first, I want to thank our sponsor, Grammarly. So, guys, it's already April, but I feel like the years just started. I've been spending way too much time writing and perfecting emails. Jack, if you want to save time writing emails, just install Grammarly. Grammarly is an all-in-one writing tool that helps you communicate clearly and effectively, even when you're short on time. Grammarly is like having a professional writer look through your work 24-7. And their free version is also amazing, since it protects you from things like basic spelling, grammar, phrasing, and punctuation. But the real magic happens when you upgrade to Grammarly Premium.

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And when you're ready to upgrade to Gramerly Premium, you can get 20% off just for being a listener. Again, guys, that's 20% off at Gramerley, G-R-A-M-M-A-R-O-Y.com slash iced coffee. Thanks so much, Gramerly, and back to the podcast. How much were you making on the app at its peak? Because you must do, yeah, you were 24, 25 years old. Yeah, I mean, the, so the first app I built is a social gaming app, probably was about a million per year type of thing, total. Oh, yeah.

There were some apps that were doing $20,000 per day, actually. So like, but these apps can be short-lived things. Other apps would do $5,000 per day. But the thing that people don't understand is. even though I had, say, three, four highly successful apps, there were 50 apps I built, probably, that were not successful that nobody heard about, right? So, you know, one lesson I did learn I remember was,

in my younger years, an entrepreneur told me, you need to fail three times before you find your first success. What do you think about that? I don't know if I've really failed. at I'm just wins Yeah I'm thinking of it

Like I didn't have many Failures in the sense What about the blog? Huh? I wouldn't I wouldn't call that necessarily a failure But it's like you have to have three failures To have one success

Unless you count a failure like Don't want to see open houses For you was the very first YouTube channel You started it was just Instant Yeah everything I've done it's usually done well But I've never never gone into anything I've done for the money. It's always been, I do something because I really

enjoy it and it happens to make money. Like, what started off is taking pictures for reef aquariums, for fun, turned into a job that then turned into this whole passion throughout high school where I just make money. Same with real estate. It's like, I did a quick job before that that I thought I wanted to go in investment banking. So I got a job at a precious metals investment firm. I hated the job, but it was really good experience. But, you know, but you, Even as an agent, it's like, I just wanted to, like, I wanted to work for free, honestly. And it turned into a great career. And then YouTube was something like, I would do that for free.

It turned into a great career. I would say even for YouTube, you have videos that perform poorly, right, that get 10 out of 10. Yeah. And some that maybe after you do a series of poor videos, you get a one out of 10, right? So, like, you can even consider some of these videos to have been sort of somewhat failure. I don't know. I think it depends how you frame it because some people are like, oh, I failed at this. This sucks. I'm worthless. But I've always viewed every failure as like, why did I fail? What did it? So I guess I frame any failure as like, oh, I learned something good. So it's never been a failure for me. Because if there is something that doesn't work, I'm like, oh, what can I do? How can I do that differently? Oh, I learned a really good lesson from this.

Here's how I'm going to make it better in that. And so like that's, it's almost like a step up. I think that's a good point. Yeah. Because like even for me, maybe I made 50 apps. Even I don't consider those to be failures, right? It's like maybe I made an app and I learned something or I got a few hundred bucks from it. And so a lot of people say, being an entrepreneur is so risky because you may fail. I don't think these people fail, right? Like they probably make a few hundred, few thousand dollars from their venture.

They learn something and they move on and they satisfy their curiosity. So even for them, they may not picture it as a pure failure. Yeah, I think it depends on how you frame it. And there's, what is it called? I read a book on this, or it was like an audio book about like a self-fulfilling prophecy that when you start doing well at something, it spirals into another thing into another thing because you have that self-fulfilling belief that if you do something, you're going to do well at it. And because of that, you shift your mindset to do well at that because you believe in it.

Versus other people get caught in the mindset of like, oh, I suck at this. Let me give it a shot. And it's probably not going to do well, but let me try. And it doesn't do well. It's like, oh, man, I suck at this. I can't do this. And that continues, that influences the next choices. Yeah.

So this is something, this is a theory I have that plays into this, which is, you know, how love cannot be negotiated, right? Desire cannot be negotiated. You cannot rationalize somebody to love you. Right. It's like you can't sit down and have a conversation and say like, here are the top 10 reasons why you should love me. It's just if the person wants it, they will rationalize to themselves all your good traits. And if they don't want it, they will convince themselves that you're a terrible person, right? So in the sense, it's like we are where we are because we chose that place that we wanted to be and then self rationalize ourselves into that. And it's kind of like how people also say, I don't have time for this.

No, you didn't, you have time, right? You didn't want to make time. It wasn't a priority in your life. And so therefore, you decided not to create the time for it. And you made these excuses. So I tend to believe like all of us are exactly where we want to be. No, I think all of us are where we, we think, we're at where we deserve

or we're at what we believe to be our own limit. That's what I kind of think. I don't think anybody could look at, not anybody could look at their life, but I think a lot of people would look at their life and say, I'm not necessarily happy, but I didn't want to be here.

I want to be over there. But I think deep down maybe it's they, they are where they are because they feel like that's what they, that's what they deserve. Or like, that's what I'm worth is this. it's like we many people are addicted to their own struggle their own self-missory right like somebody may say i want to i want to be a book author and that's this state of mind that they stay in and they never write a book

right and i think we kind of push ourselves into these limiting areas and there's this there's this other book i read called the courage to be disliked it's a pretty interesting one but it's based on the idea of So like young psychology basically says that we are a product of our past. So they say if you had trauma when you were a kid, then for example, you can never have a happy family left because you have this trauma as a kid. And so therefore your future is predetermined. But there's also this idea that trauma doesn't exist.

Okay. So it's like if you're here and you just will yourself to be happy, You can be a happy person, right? Your point in time, you're not necessarily the result of prior action. So anyone can just say, I'm happy. And what, like, suddenly I'm happy, right? And you can let go of that prior identity that you may have had. So based on that idea, it's like you can choose where you want to be.

Kind of like say to yourself, if you want to be a happy, like if you just want to say, I'm a happy person, the things in my life, I'm going to. to view with a certain perspective as being that of success, then say, right, like maybe these were good things, right? Like some people say to themselves, I had the bad day. Maybe you had the wonderful day, right? You're not in jail, right? Like, you're not dead.

You're doing fantastic. And then other people may just characterize that as something bad. Yeah. It's weird. I always view things as it could be worse. And I try my best. Even if I have a bad day, I'm like, well, at least this didn't happen. Well, that could have happened.

It didn't. Or I try to think, you know, how could this be better? Am I going to, what? There's something else here now. Something new. From exclusively on Paramount Plus, it's the series Stephen King calls Scarious Hell. Everything here is impossible, but it's also real. Sci-fi vision calls it the best show streaming right now.

We're running out of time and we still don't know the rules. Don't miss what the movie blog calls something you need to watch. Saving those children is how we all go home From Binge All Episodes exclusively on Paramount Plus How was today for you? Terrible Could it have been worse? It could, yes, today was the worst day I've had in probably a year.

I'm sorry about that. Yeah, maybe two years. This is probably been the most, yeah, this was the worst day. Yeah, basically my aquarium sprung a leak, and that's like every aquarium owner's worst nightmare is the seam of the tank just all of a sudden bust. So I woke up this morning 40 gallons of water.

You see, Graham, this is why minimalism is what you need. You're a slave to your possessions, right? You're a slave to your aquarium. Oh, but I love the aquarium. The aquarium is the one thing. It brings me so much happy. Yeah, it's so much happy to see a crane. You're an emotional slave to your things.

Right, but I think Graham actually likes being. Like you mentioned, people are generally where, like wherever they are, they're at their happiest because they made their own choices to put themselves there, right? And Graham may be a slave to some material things, such as his aquarium, such as his Zenith El Pramero. Oh, I'm not a slave to that, but... Aquarium, yes. But I think that that's kind of what fuels him.

He's a very interesting person insofar as, like, he's very fueled by, like, stress and, like, negative emotion. Oh, gosh, I don't have negative emotion. This is, like, a jacker-downeat. Have you done, like, a personality trait? Like, there's a trait in the ocean analysis for a neuroticism. So that's the tendency to over-worry. or to overstress. I don't know.

I'm happy to take it and see what come up for me. What's your MBTI? Do you know that? What is that? Myers-Briggs. Oh, I, and I don't know. I'm T.J.

or something like that. I'm not really sure. Cool. But yeah, but the aquarium is something. I was unhappy with that the aquarium because I really wanted an aquarium. And that was years of just looking forward to getting an aquarium.

And I get the aquarium. And it leaks. But I'll get a new one. But you still got an aquarium. I still got an aquarium. And I'll get a new one. in three weeks that I could set up. So now I'm thinking like, okay, what's the, what's the bright side?

Well, the tank didn't explode. Wasn't that sad. Everything is still safe. And I get a new tank. What's the downside? Well, it's a day. It's basically two days of my time. That's the downside, is it two days.

One day is going to be very memorable of cleaning up all the water. The next day is going to be transferring it to a new tank with that. And I'll put sand in this tank this time. Didn't put sand before. I'll make it better. So I try to view everything like that. If something bad happens, it's like, Like, how could it be worse?

Do you practice gratitude? I did. You got to get on the influencer path. Yeah. Like, we influencers have to, like, have mindfulness, practice gratitude, drink black coffee due to intermittent fasting. No. You got to get on that, man. I mean, otherwise, you're not legit as an influencer.

Yeah, I got to take cold showers too, wake up at 4 a.m. to meditate. Yeah, you got to do that. I did. I did practice gratitude. Minimalism? Where is that? I couldn't do minimal. Animalism.

Really? No. Why? I think there's some of that that I would enjoy temporarily, but like deep down, I'm a collector. I love collecting things and I like to have a collection. Consumorism, materialism. You're just consumed by your own physical desires. I love having a collection and that fun and the challenge of putting together something that it's like the searching of putting together a puzzle.

Like for me, it would be a car collection and like what cars can I buy? Well, the Ford GT, it would be a Tesla Roadster and SLS, AMG. If you cannot be happy with a cup of coffee, you can never be happy. Because your desire will be limitless, right? Like, if you temper your desires, you can be happy with anything. Otherwise, you're always going to be on that hedonic treadmill. But see, I'm happy looking forward to stuff. Like, I'm looking forward.

I want to Tesla Roadst to head. You know, I'm looking for it. Yeah, sure, there will always be something else. But like to me, that's part of the collection. But if everything got stripped away from you, would you be able to be happy? Yes, but I would be happy with the expectation that I'd be able to build that back. So you're not going to be happy unless you have this Tesla roaster. That's hoping you back.

I mean, you've already got. But it's a part of the collection. It's like, but for me, it's the fun of picking a car that I think is a good investment. But what if you can't buy the car? Because you got stripped of everything. Then it's just the hopes of being able to buy a car? Yeah. Yeah, I've always had the hope and the belief that like, well, if I'm not going to do it now, I'll be able to do it in the future.

Always had that. This is the thing I've realized is investment is the most boring thing in the world. Like, I used to be into it just like you, but I'm, I've like transcended. Maybe transit beyond that. Yeah. But like, let's pretend that Bitcoin is the ultimate investment. Let's pretend that it's just going to outperform any other thing. Sure.

So then would you just say, and let's, so would you just say, okay, let's just like get rid of everything. Put the all into Bitcoin. If you make more money, put it more into Bitcoin. And it's like just anything you get, you're just going to plow into crypto, some type of cryptocurrency. No, because now I valued more so my time. So I'm like, I'm doing things now that would save me time or for convenience. So like, I do see more of a value in that. But as far as the car, I mean, the car is something you could enjoy.

So the car is part of something that, like, you could go and stare at it. It's like a piece of art. Can't you just rent a car? Like, here's the experience that changed me is, have you ever driven, like, a Lamborghini? Yeah. Huracan. Like, I went to this race course. You can do one in Las Vegas.

You drove a Lamborghini hurricane next to, like, an Asson Martin. And, you know, there were GTRs and, like, Ferraris. And everybody just said, yeah, the Lamborghini. Lamborghini and Ferrari are in a totally different class and just like the other cars just look like pure trash compared to like the Lambos. And after driving that for me, I just thought I have absolutely no desire to own like a GTR, which I used to want to own. Because it's just total trash. And, you know, other cars, you're playing the status game. Like, people say Audi is the car for basically like poor, wealthy people, right?

People who are trying to show status who are actually poor people, right? Like, if you want to actually show status, get a classless car. So for me, like, which cars have no class? Mini Cooper's, Tesla. Mini Cooper and Audi's. Yeah, I mean. And let's say Tesla too. Yeah, they're saying all of Macy and Graham's car.

Yeah, like, Priusy is an Audi and she's. In Volvos and Prizes. Yeah. And Priests too. Yeah. I'm pretty up there. I mean, you guys don't have to compare yourself to me. You have transcended everything and everyone and everything.

Life experiences, you know, like, let's talk about life experiences, which, like, have you been out of the country? Yes. But never out of the continent. So you've been to, like, Canada. Canada and Mexico is a travel. When I was your age, I had already been to, like, late 30s. but I say to myself early 40s just to give myself the last time.

He's transcended beyond his actual age. His actual age. How can I das like you here, Jack? Like, what is age anyways? Techly doesn't have an age. Techly just is. I use like the lunar calendar. Yeah, he lives in the moment.

He is how old he thinks he is. Age is just a mindset, Jack. Like when I was your age, yeah. I studied abroad in Japan. You know, I had already been to like inquire. what Cambodia, Vietnam, Hulong Bay, Thailand multiple times, sailing in the Caribbean. Like it's beautiful. You rent a cat man for like a week, you go sell it in the Bahamas, in the British Virgin Islands. I went sailing in Thailand. You know, I had already lived

in, have you been to Hawaii? Yeah, you went to Hawaii. I had already lived in London. You know, the UK, I spent time traveling through all of, going from like the Swiss Alps. down through the French coast, right, into the southern Spain area. I've been to Iceland, right? Like done all of these things. And you're like here reading news, right? Like you're reading a bunch of news and making video about news in order to buy more bit like paper wealth to invest that into more paper wealth.

For me, I realized I was like, I just think this is time that you're not going to necessarily get back. What are your assets? Health, wealth, time, and youth. Youth is important, right? Because if you go, if you go traveling when you're 40 or 50, or if you're driving in a Porsche when you're 40 or 50, nobody cares about that. And your experience will be totally different than if you do it, you know, now.

And arguably, since I made my wealth early, I recognized everybody gets wealthy. Everybody becomes a millionaire by the time they're 60, 70, right? Like, it's very simple. You work 30 years for 30K. That gets you, what, a million bucks? So the advantage that you have is your time. People want that money now in order to experience it and use it. And I don't think it would, like, this is something you're going to realize when it's too late, maybe.

But you're going to say, lose the next five, ten years of your life. And then you're going to say, okay, I made another, uh, $1 million. What happened? You made $5 million, but then you lost $4 million in the market crash. So, right, or you may have made some money, you lost a bunch in the market crash, and then you got divorced, or whatever, right? Like somebody sues you, and then you break your leg. And what happened, right? That was it. Maybe you get cancer. So people often say, like, you have to enjoy your journey. The destination is going to be trash. Like in many ways life is a car crash in slow motion. The ending, we all die.

We all just die. So in my opinion, like, you create the lifestyle that you want and you need to live that. And the lifestyle needs to use money, right? Because many people, I think, they go through life, they make money and they want to live the fire dream, right? financial independence dream where they're they're essentially just burning very little amounts of their money and they're just living at home watching tv and they take two vacation trips a year this is something that you're born with right like when you were a kid your parents already gave you that life right like just go live with your parents if that's what you want you can go you can play your

video games you don't have to work and your parents can take you on like a vacation twice a year or something like that right like it's extremely boring I would say this financial independence route. Fat fire is one where you're able to live a little bit more. But these people still end up with multiple millions, right, in their bank account when they die. And they never truly, they never truly find the use for that money.

You know, and it's kind of saddening and extremely boring, especially now that we have cryptocurrency, where you just say, if you get money just put it into into this digital dashboard right that's what we're all doing make money put into a digital dashboard number go up that's it keep doing that and then 10 years past 20 years pass so in my opinion saving money and investing money is like living on autopilot it is the most boring and lazy path and if you're able to actually figure out how do you deploy cash, right? Spending money is difficult. It's extremely difficult to spend money and deploy it into a way

that achieves enjoyment for you. You can go buy a Rolex. I don't know if that gives you much joy, especially, right, like you buy it, you put it in a cabinet in a drawer somewhere and you say, okay, this is a nice investment. And you don't really look at it so much. I guess you two own Rolexes. See, yeah, here's the thing, though. For me, it's like, I think a lot of lot of people enjoy what they do and they would be doing it regardless. So for me, it's like, I don't know right now. I would enjoy vacations like that. Like to me, that just sounds, I'd rather just like, what sounds great to me is a free schedule over the next week, get to work. If you could pause time right now, though, and there was no expectation of you

posting, the algorithm would stop. How would you spend that time? Gosh, I don't know. I probably want to get ahead. I mean, yeah, like that would make me feel good. I have family friends who say like, they're doing extremely well. I mean, we all have friends like this. They're doing extremely well and they're still working in their 60s or 70s. And they say, oh, I love my job. I would never quit because I wouldn't know what I would do with my time. It's extremely lazy, isn't it?

Right? Like, these people are on autopilot. They followed the path laid out to them by society to do their 9 to 5 and to not think further than that when there's a whole world waiting for them and you have to actually it takes extremely amount like a lot of time and effort to figure out what you want to do like what I think about is an itinerary like when you take a vacation trip you need to spend maybe two weeks planning the itinerary you need to actually sit down and put in time and effort and research this like what are you going to do if you don't have an internary

and you never put in the time and effort to think about what you want to do, then you just say, well, I wouldn't know what I would do. It's too hard. I guess I'm just going to keep working because I can make five bucks an hour if I do this. You're going to reach a point in your life. You may have already reached it where your investments, the returns on your investments will outpace any active income that you as an individual is able to generate.

Right? Like, and at that point, why do you work? You can increase your, like, let's say. Fun. I enjoy it. Like, I don't know. I love doing it. Like, this is kind of work, but, like, I would be doing this regardless.

And I've even thought, like, what would I do if I took, you know, a full week off? It would work. Like, I would be loading a podcast. I would do more podcast guests. I'd do more reactions on the second channel. I would just keep doing what I'm doing. Yeah. Probably for you, this is absolutely the position.

you should be in. Let's say you're 10 years older. Oh, yeah, I know it's going to change. Let's say you're 10 years older now. Is your answer still the same? Probably not. But I would have the options to do at that time, or it could be in a month.

I mean, realistically, it'll probably be two to five years. That's what, you know, kind of, and at that point I could re-evaluate the schedule and kind of maybe figure out something different. But I see probably two to five years, like, I love this. And maybe if it's longer, it's longer, if it's less, I've always just done, like, what I felt in my gut. It's just like, this is what I want to do. I'm just going to do that.

And that's the right choice. I have a question for you, Graham. Yeah. If you knew you were going to be gone one week from now, what would you do? If I were going to be gone? Yeah, I don't want to say it because of the YouTube algorithm. I would be unalived in one week. What would you do?

Oh, gosh. I would probably go scuba diving in Fiji with Macy with everybody I would take everybody I could Me too? Yeah, and you two I would probably take 30 people to Fiji to go scuba diving and then I'd find a way to divide up my money so that it goes to the right people

You're such a great guy Jack who is that I'm not going to Jack? I didn't say anything I didn't say anything good guy It goes to Ramsey and Bailey Oh okay The Ramsey and Bailey Foundation. They're going to have this huge house in Bel Air.

Yeah. It's going to be so nice. Let's say like, let's say you make a video, you get no views and you get no money. Do you still make videos? Certainly not. But there's good. Because like there's two things that feed you. Number one is your own ego, right, by getting the views.

You feel self-important, right? Like, hey guys, everybody's watching me. The second thing is maybe, maybe money. The money is going to get to a point where, and you may already be at this, where it's money that, like, for me, I'm going to die with money in the bank account. There's going to be money in the bank account when I die, even if I tried to spend it. Many people are going to get to that point. You're probably at that point. So the money is just kind of like, you can make it.

you're never going to touch it in your entire life. And quite frankly, your investments may outpace your active income by 10 to 1. I mean, you may get to a point. Your own narcissism or ego is something that you don't necessarily, like if you escape out of it and get out of the status game anyways. Yeah, but I think it's less about myself and more about like what you provide to somebody else. And for me, it's the fulfillment and purpose that I get when I see someone come up and say, hey, it's because of you that I bought a house.

It's because of you that I got my first credit card and I did this and now I'm like, now I'm financially secure. And like, that's the sort of stuff for me that really pushes me. And it helps that money is a byproduct of that. And like, obviously that's a component of it. I enjoy that.

And that just as far as it gives me more content to make. But even something like this, it's like, I would say there's a very small portion of like ego. And I would say the bigger portion is that whoever's watching this is able to get a different perspective that they wouldn't have without us being in this room together and spending our times like talking about stuff like this.

So I think that's great for me since I'm basically like I was where you were like 10 years ago or something. It's like I had my face where I dedicated a year or more of my life to reading news every single day and day trading. I got nothing out of, like, the news I read, I'm not sure if I attained any scale out of, right? No long-term lasting learnings, no personal growth. I realized that all the news I was reading every day was I couldn't care less about. It's like Jerome Powell raised interest rates by 25%.

You know, Joe Biden is doing something. They're printing this much. Some company released some annual earnings report. two weeks later is that news important no it's complete garbage right it's like it's unactionable priced into the market so you do this long enough you do this another five 10 years you may get to a point where you're just like buy and hold you guys right if i want to help you i tell you a buy and hold deploy all your cash into uh amazon apple google s mp 500 and just hold it right and and get like Bitcoin or whatever, right?

Get some crypto. And that's it. Just buy and hoat don't sell. That's all you got to do. Maybe that's it. And then all the other news that you're reading is just causing you to work around to spin. And you're just like, do I buy? Do I sell?

No, just you already deployed your capital. So just hold on to it. Yeah, but some of that I think I enjoy it. I love the process of reading through the news every day. I love seeing what's new. And for me, it's like, it's components of that but both entertainment because like I watch I watch like every finance video that's out there and I would say half of them I watch just for the information and that's it

I just wanted just the details but the other half is entertainment like I'll just sit there and I'll like eat dinner or I'll eat lunch and I'll watch a video and like that's what I just but I also acknowledge that I'm not I'm kind of weird when it comes to that sense that I find like these very specific topics extremely interesting and I fixate on them. And so for me, it's like the reef aquarium and business and making money. It's just like those are the two segments that I just love. I mean, I would say I still do pay attention.

I still read it as well, but it's just like when you step back, it's maybe the most interesting thing of all the boring news out there. So it's still something to pay attention to. Yeah, that's interesting. But let's say, for someone like that, you know, you're not, you're not chasing anything. Why? why do this? Why create million token? Yeah,

million token. Check it out. Million token.org. We got them, you guys. We're on the Grahamstaff and Ice Coffee Hour. Check it out. With Jack. Yeah, with Jack. Yeah, a million token. Yeah. One million limited supply.

So I had spent probably the last nine months of my YouTube channel really promoting this, right? This token was released in July of last year. initially it was i mean i mentioned this before as well it's a joke right it's like it was supposed to be this fun social crypto activity because i'm a programmer i know how to create how to create some of these smart contracts that it would be this community activity we could just all get together and it was going to be something that just lasted one video really right like uh is that really is that really yeah it was like it was going to be this fun activity show you guys how i created the token, how you can create your own tokens, and just put it out there.

Right. And it was supposed to be this, like, I make apps all the time. Right. So to create a token, like, I make programming projects on my channel occasionally as well. So to me, it was just like, hey, this is kind of neat. I didn't give it much more thought than that and deployed it. It turns out over time that the token has pretty good fundamentals, actually, right? It's like one token backed by one USD coin.

The rest is up to market fluctuations. And it actually had some legs to continue running. And the more I looked at it and other people started getting into it as well, it's just like this is actually pretty neat, right? Like the fundamentals are actually pretty good. I mean, I don't want to take my own horn here, but the fundamentals are super clean because it's like it's never been hacked. It's bridged across almost every blockchain.

You know, you got Ethereum, Binance, Smart Chain, Avalanche, Phantom, Harmony 1, maybe some more. The zero inflation rate, transaction times are super fast. You can use any blockchain that suits you. Right. So it's like if you compare it, it's smart contract compatible. It supports NFTs. It supports like all of the capabilities of that. So when you compare to, so here's the thing, right?

Like Bitcoin and Dogecoin are first-gen coins. They don't support smart contracts, right? They don't have NFT support. They don't have staking, right? Aren't they working for Bitcoin? They're still trying to deploy that, right? Like Jack Dorsey of Twitter is trying to come up with like smart contract support for Bitcoin still. Right?

Like they're trying to work on some of this stuff. then you've got the second gen coins which i would say is like um maybe shiba innu or something like that some some token that is purely on ethereum gas fees aren't crazy expensive and plus some of these coins have pretty terrible fundamentals like they may have inflation you don't know who the founder of shiba coin is it's like you don't know how many coins like there could be some shady stuff going on in there so when you take a look at a million at least lease it's interesting because it's on so many chains you can get super low gas fees and like the founder is stocks and it's it's it's just kind of a neat but why but why create it just for fun was it was it

was it out of boredom was it just what why why put your time into that when you could be traveling or doing something else i tend so again i believe in like what the journey right it's like whatever's neat whatever's interesting maybe it's in like an art project or something right so i i make apps out there all the time of whatever i think is just kind of interesting so that's it's really like it's game theory it's a social experiment right it's like if if i put out a token backed by one u sd coin one interesting thing about this is it will never uh disappear right the project will never lose value it won't just vanish because there's always value attached to it So and then any price above that is simply market dynamics.

Right. So it's like what would happen to this? It's also pretty cool because like it's an NFT. It's a hybrid NFT. Right. It's like it's a fun badge for anybody at least on my channel like as a millionaire. If you also want to be a millionaire, you can own like a million token. So like there's some pretty fun things with that.

It didn't take too long to deploy. I always wanted to. Way to go, Bailey, for lightning the mood here. I always wanted to just try out the smart contract. So, yeah, that's... What happened with CoffeeZilla? We saw some big... This was the biggest drama of YouTube back then when this came out.

CoffeeZilla made a video. Yeah, so unfortunately, here's the thing. When CoffeeZilla initially messaged me, he was intent to just like he builds his reputation on destroying as many he just wants to call everything a scam that's how he gets his views if he came and said this project is pretty neat actually there's some things i like about it hey crypto's kind of cool you guys he's going to alienate his audience right he builds his life on criticizing other people like what value to add but when he came to me he said i i want to destroy your token value basically like i i want to just come and make this video that

your scam and I'm just like there's a lot of people who are holding onto this and like I want I don't think the value I don't think you should just go in and like trash these people's values right you're not hurting me you're hurting these people I'm trying to protect my community but he just wanted to make any claim that he can so he comes up and makes up this claim that really has no basis but what he's saying is he particularly lashed onto this thing about liquidity okay so we're he says, I put a million dollars, I said I put a million dollars of my own money into a million token. And he says, well, did you really when actually the way I deployed it was I put $50,000 liquidity with $50,000 of the tokens, right? This is just a way that uniswap works, but

here's my original thinking. Right. I was going to say, I have a million of these token supply. I'm going to, I actually like through Coinbase, I can't just bring in a million dollars, right? They have all these restrictions and account limitations. So I'm able to bring in 50,000 and deploy, match that with 50,000 tokens and deploy that. But originally I was going to say, why don't I deploy these tokens over time? I'll release 50,000 tokens and back each one with $50,000. Right. So the backing is there. When those are sold out, I'll release another 50,000. and set a buy floor for another 50,000, right? So I will set these buy floors and just put in the buy order for 50,000 at the time.

Now, if you have 50,000, and I'm not that familiar with it, if you just release 50,000, wouldn't that mean less liquidity, meaning there's more volatility in the price to go up because there's fewer being released? So at this point, I did not even understand liquidity. Like, I didn't, all I knew was I can create a token. I want to figure out how to get it deployed. I even imagine in my head that I can set buy floors. So I can deploy 50,000 set 50,000 buy floor.

Deploy another 50K, put another 50, so what's a buy floor? Is that, is a market order, right? A market limit order to buy, you know, like 50,000 tokens at one USDC. Okay. It turns out that in the decentralized exchanges, you cannot set, I mean, this is getting into the weeds, right? Like, you cannot set market orders for buy and sell.

There is no buy and sell order, actually. What you're doing is you're doing a swap, and you're interacting with liquidity pools. So because of the way this works, essentially, like, you need to deploy the liquidity, you basically need to match up the number of tokens with the liquidity that you put in and you just put that out anyway. So, but there's no way that you could set a minimum be like,

I'm going to put 50,000 out there, but the minimum price I want for these 50 is $2. Yeah, you cannot set limit orders like that. So this was something that, I mean, at the time, but you couldn't, but don't you have to guarantee that it's a dollar? Doesn't there have to be a limit order to be like, well, I'm not going to sell this below a dollar? So at the time, Uniswap V3,

which is concentrated like capital efficiency, liquidity, pools is this is complicated concept um it just came out people were still figuring out how it works um i was able to over time i realized that i can use the v3 pools to set a liquidity wall at one usdc for one million token and so now there is you can check even there's a million dollar liquidity wall for uh one million dollars worth of usdc for every token so that backs each token but yeah even now like it's excess you can even say it's excessive right because if i if i release 50 000 tokens and i have a million dollars liquidity while that's like you don't need that much capital backing whatever you release right so isn't there a chance that let's say i

100,000 people want to sell at the same time. And there's only 50,000 in liquidity pool. Is that possible that more people can sell than liquid? No, not if you monitor. So again, you have to keep track of how many tokens are in the free market. If there's like 10 tokens floating around, you only need a liquidity wall of 10, right? 10 USDC coins to back all of those, right?

So essentially, like every token that was always and has always been backed. Yeah. Right. By the one USC peg. And Coffeezilla is simply, I think he was simply just saying like, hey, you only put in 50,000 at first. Right. And this, the. And then like as the, basically as people exchange USDC coin for a million token, there were more.

there were more USDC coins that I figured out, hey, you know what? Rather than waiting for Coinbase to bring in more funds to deploy, since people were exchanging one for one, the USDC can actually be used to deploy more tokens. And in either case, right, they would always all be backed. But how many do you hold on to? Because, I mean, and again, I'm not familiar with this, but let's just say you hold on to 900,000.

So there's only 100,000 for sale. Doesn't that mean a smaller float essentially means that the price could go up higher if more people are buying a smaller amount? Like with GameStop, the reason it went up so high was because a lot of those were held. And there wasn't a lot on the market. So because there weren't a lot of people were buying. It was driving up the price higher. Couldn't that be a component? Yeah.

So I think this was probably one thing that I wish I could have done earlier was to deploy more of the tokens faster. Given like, again, this was something I was not. super familiar with, but the whole liquidity thing I learned over time. But like, I did not think, like I deployed with 50,000, you know, and within the next day, I think I deployed another 50,000. So, but I was thinking, how much are people going to buy? Right? Like, maybe 5,000 tokens. So in my mind, 50K was just like excessive. But I was just thinking, you know what? This is the limit I can bring in. and I deployed the tokens pretty much as quickly as I could, you know, to people who wanted it.

Yeah. Could you disclose how many you have now? Yeah, I mean, you can totally check on the ether scan. I own 60, about 6% basically of the million tokens, which is from a distribution standpoint, this is what you want. Like you don't want whales in the community. So this is like, I mean, at first we had some people who would just come in they recognize hey this is an opportunity

they they kind of knew like their game around the cryptocurrency so they bought a whole bunch they were whales and they were able to like like the whales are very dangerous in a community like i see people sometimes in the past they would be holding on to massive amounts of tokens and would just be thinking when are they going to sell this um if you try check the distribution now, it's like, there's no whales. It's a very nice distribution. When you take a look at those coin, doge coin, do you know, like, 50% of all those coins are held by, like,

10 wallets or something like that? Right. So, like, it's like these 10 people or so can crash those coin if they wanted to get out. Now, I am curious, though, because you went from 100% ownership with a million dollars down to six. doesn't that mean that to give up your ownership, you've been selling coins along the way at whatever price someone's willing to pay

because you provide a million, but if someone says I'm willing to spend $20 for everyone, that has to come from you, right? No, it's, so I don't, to understand liquidity, like if I were to sell, I sell to myself. If I'm the liquid,

I'm the primary liquidity provider. I can, right? Like, you trade against, the liquidity pool. If you create the liquidity pool and you buy and sell, you're trading against yourself. So I think this is one thing some people don't understand. It's like it's actually, I think it's actually difficult to try to so-called rock pool project because if you sell, you sell, you sell it back to yourself.

So what I do is I provide the, I create the liquidity pools and the liquidity pools were a way for people to just, the tokens essentially get deployed as the, as they're buying pressure. All right. Right. But the price, deploying the liquidity pool is generally a neutral position. And it never causes the price to go down. But I guess my question is, let's see, you deploy 50,000 at a dollar. The price gets bid up to $2, let's just say.

And you said, now I need to provide more liquidity. So I'm going to give another. 50,000 tokens, but the price is $2 now. By you giving up that 50,000 tokens, does that now mean that you, in return, get $100,000 because you gave 5% of your liquidity? Because you wouldn't sell it for less than what people are willing to pay, because then that would be unfair to the people who bought the first $50,000. So you have to match the market value.

So wouldn't that mean that you went from 100% ownership and would, release the liquidity at whatever price it's trading it? So I think it's important to recognize that you can lose money on liquidity. Yes. Okay. So like let's say the price is 200 and you deploy a liquidity pool. That's an agreement to not only sell tokens at a price of 200, but an agreement to buy them back at 200 as well.

So so if if you think the market has gone ahead of itself, Like let's say it's just there's a lot of hype and speculation and you deploy liquidity. You're buying, you could be buying a bunch of the tokens. And if the token, right, you'll be buying them at 200, 199, 198, 198. The price can drop. And then you're holding a bunch of million tokens. And then you redeploy more liquidity at a lower price. You can lose money, right?

because no matter what, right, like let's say the price goes down to $100, you deploy more liquidity, you would have, and let's say at that price, you sell out all the tokens then. You would have lost half of your money by then if you were to do that. So what you're trying to say is that just like you would provide liquidity from $1 to $20, you could also provide it from $20 down to $1. So just like you're making money, the price goes up, you're also losing that equivalent money as it goes down.

You can lose massive amounts. I mean, I remember there was a moment where I put it in like $100,000 maybe more of liquidity in order to try to just support the current price range and it got wiped out in four hours. Because some will decide to just sell out. So they just cashed out that liquidity position. So, you know, typically liquidity is supposed to be a neutral position. It's actually anybody can do it. It's not like I'm special in any way.

Like anybody can just come in and add liquidity if they want. So when you're going back and forth with coffee zilla, how much of that was strategic of just? You're going to drive more attention to Million Token because I watched your videos. And I think a lot of people can't differentiate. you being real versus sarcasm. And I like, I kind of knowing you would watch these videos of yours, you'd be like,

well, you know, you're being really sarcastic here, but you're, it's also trying to prove a point and it's driving still more traffic. Nothing I say is ever a joke, you guys. You need to understand that.

But, you know, I've dealt with coffee zilla enough before. I mean, come on, I'm ex-convict. But I've dealt with him enough before to know that many people, especially in his audience,

are simply out for a mob hunt, right? Like, it's kind of like the Twitter mob coming after you, and people have already made up their minds. They believe what they want to believe, and there's no reasoning with people, you know? So it's like, yes, I can sit down and give you this long explanation like I've done already, but it goes with my prior note, my philosophy that people believe what they want to believe.

You know, they are where they want to be, and then they come up with all. sorts of self rationalizations and explanations for why this is the way it is. It's kind of like how I told you, you can't negotiate love. If I can give you somebody the best explanation in the world, they don't want to, if they don't want to understand, they will will themselves not to. So when I'm debating with Coffeezilla, it's just like, just feed into it, right? like just feed into just fan the flames you know and get some views out of it and give i can give

some explanation which i've done but at the same time humans are irrational like i said so you can i would say like do you believe it's necessary to explain anything right like if somebody asks you for an explanation um should you explain why you're a rational being hey i'm rational This is why I'm rational. Or should you just say, I'm a psychopath, you guys. Humans are irrational. What do I have to explain? It's like asking a rabbit dog, please explain yourself.

It was like, don't expect people to be rational. I don't know. Sometimes I think a good explanation goes a long way in a very calm, collected way because I feel like you're able to articulate something that might be misconstrued. So if there is something thrown at you, combating that with points against it and why the other person might be incorrect or explaining your point of view, I do think goes a long way because I think people are able to see that and contextualize it.

I don't think you can argue with a mob, right? Like, have you tried to arguing with the Twitter mob? Well, I think there's a difference between arguing with each person individually and addressing the situation as a whole. So I think, yeah, like there are certain comments that I've received that are like, no, not going to respond to this comment but here's the other thing like coffee zilla never i don't think he wants an explanation right like he's every this is the youtube game everybody's in it for money he builds his business off of criticizing other people and just calling like life like right like

is life a scam yeah it probably is right is marriage a scam sure sure it is like is life unfair. He should make a video about that. Hey, life's unfair, you guys, breaking news. It's like, if he already has, in my view, if he already has a perspective and he doesn't want to sit down and have a long conversation, explanation about this, and you know what he's going to do. He's going to just clip out whatever he can and just attack the other person and just make a video and leave out anything necessary. Right. So like, this is my problem with criticism culture by, the way. Criticism is easy. Everybody can criticize. I've had so many people come criticize me in the past. You know, like I made a tech interview pro course, right, to sell interview tips on how to get

into fame. And people come and say, hey, this is a scam of you guys. This is scam. These people never even took the course. Meanwhile, other people came in and said, let me just see, like, Let me try to focus on myself instead of just blaming other people. Yeah. I heard a story about that. And let me ask you if it's true. I heard that there was a competitor. I don't know where I heard this.

I think it was a video that I saw on YouTube. Someone said that there was a competitor to your program and their website expired. And you bought their website. And then when people went to their website, it rerouted it to yours. That was a pretty old piece of drama. Yeah. And I mean, we can go into that if you want. No, I'm just, there's plenty of content.

But like, I would say he should focus on himself and focus on collaboration instead of, it's like if you're trying to tear, like let's say you spend your life tearing somebody else down. Let's say you spend your life trying to write all the injustices that were done to you. So you grew up to age. some age. And you make a list of everybody who wronged you in your life, right? Hey, that person stole my website. That person stole my piece of candy. I'm going to go back and just like get these people back. I'm going to find justice. You got to focus on yourself, I would say, eventually. If you want to find success, there's no room for anger. There's no room for hate. Like it's, think about it.

Hate is a luxury, right? Hate is a luxury that if you truly want success, you cannot afford to, like, right, isn't hate something that just an anger or something that just makes you feel good, but you lose in the process of pursuing that. So it's a luxury that I would say you cannot afford. If you're truly going after the highest success, you collaborate with everybody. somebody wrongs you you say cool you wrong to me how can we still make the best of this situation instead of saying oh you wrong me let me burn my bridge with you let me just burn all of my bridges let me like get you back and focus my life on tearing other people down then you tear yourself down too amazon presents jeff versus taco truck salsa whether it's verde roha or the orange one

For Jeff, trying any salsa is like playing Russian roulette with a flame thrower. Luckily, Jeff saved with Amazon and stocked up on antacids, ginger tea, and milk. Habaniero? More like Habinier, yes. Save the everyday with Amazon. Got it. Yeah, I think, what was it? I forget someone a while ago, I've had two instances, but both of them have turned out really good. one person, I think it was on, I think it was TikTok. They got my, like my screen name, like Graham Stephan. And they were really kind about it. I forget what it was, Jack.

Maybe it was TikTok. It wasn't Instagram. I forget what it was. But anyway, I reached out to the person. They were like, oh, yeah, no, I got it. Maybe it's a clubhouse. I got it because I didn't want anyone else to take it. Here you go.

I'm so nice about it. And then one time my domain, Graham Stephan expired. And I don't know who did this, but they, They bought Grahamstaffin.com and rerouted it to go to meetkeven.com. Or like met Kevin.com. It was like one of those funny things. And I asked Kevin. I'm like, dude, is this you?

He's like, no, it's not me. And then eventually they just, they gave it back. But I just thought that was really funny. But both of them have really good endings. This was a year ago, probably over a year ago when Clubhouse first went out, Jack just got a whole bunch of us. I got a bunch of usernames. A whole bunch of good usernames.

We don't have to mention them specifically. But these are names that like should be reserved. served for like the elite of the elite and Jack just I went in and yanked them all I got my friends phone numbers and I was like can I use your phone number can I use your phone number because you need to attach it to a phone number and then I just got them all to yeah I mean it's because you're poor Jack but I asked Jack and guess how much money I got out of it zero dollars tens of thousands of dollars but I have good usernames if you had cash out you'd make like a few pennies here's the thing though it now you never know I

I asked Jack. It's like, what's your plan with this? And he's like, well, if they ask for it, I'm going to give it to him. I'm like, you wouldn't sell it. He's like, no, I wouldn't sell it. But like, I would just give it to him. The downside, though, is that in the beginning, you didn't know if it was going to go the route of Instagram. Or eventually, like, you have a one word username on Instagram.

That's like 20 grand. Is Jack behind all those YouTube boss? You're the one posting on all those channels. Yeah, that's how he bought those. Yeah. But unfortunately, Clubhouse is just like it would really downhill. And now all your usernames are kind of worthless. completely.

But it was still, I mean, it took me what? An hour and a half and I gave myself an opportunity to have, I don't know, a lot of upside.

You got to go 10X, Jack. Yeah, but he has good us good usernames of also like corporations and like, uh,

this isn't passive income, man. No. It was very active and it also wasn't income. So, so yeah, never, what,

never sell your time. Never sell it. Well, I also enjoyed it. It was kind of fun because you try a username and it doesn't work. And you're like, oh,

what about this celebrity? And then you try it. And then maybe, it works and they give you a little, you know, a rush. It was just a late night. Yeah, but Jack got a few people with, with well over like $40, $50 million. Yeah. Yeah.

It was a good time. Gosh. Worth nothing now, but it was fun. Yeah. Yeah. So in terms of, in terms of your channel now, I've noticed that you've made some, we don't have to mention specifically, some controversial opinions and topics lately between some channels. How much of that is simply for the shock value of, you know, of, you know, you've made some,

of let me say the most out there thing. I'm against the current thing. What's up? I'm against the current thing, whatever the current thing is. Pretty much. Like, whatever it is, you'll take the opposite stance of it. But I notice when you do that, the views are like 5x, what they would be any other way. A lot of pushback.

But at the end, do you just see this as like a, if I say this or I take this stance, there's more upside than downside or people move on or what? I think it comes down to, like, I stopped reading mainstream news, right? Because there's no alpha there. Like, everything there is priced into the market. So if all you do is follow mainstream news, you will always be one step behind. You know, Yahoo Finance is going to come and say, this is what you should believe in, whatever, right? Like some market's doing well.

But that's all priced into the market. Everybody's seen that. have to think by yourself and oftentimes go against the herd right because that's where you find new thoughts new opinions and ideas and where you're really at the forefront right and so you have to keep your mind open and just question and ask yourself question like just ask yourself like is this really the truth don't just believe what whatever you read um that's where the so to speak alpha is right that's where the reward is um so Personally, right, it's like I avoid mainstream news.

I like to read controversial news. I mean, even Elon Musk, right, recently took a hold of Twitter to say that there's no free speech anymore. Yeah. If you say anything that is against current mind speak, the current thing or believe whatever, like, you could be canceled for sure. But then you don't find returns on investment. You don't find opportunities because you're just following the herd all the time. So what I like to do sometimes on my channel, at least, is I present different opinions, right? Different points of view.

Ask people to question themselves. And this is something that, like, let's think about your upbringing. You were raised with certain values. Your teachers, your mentors, your parents all came to you and said, these are things that are important. These are things that these are your values. So then you go into the world. and you're afraid to reflect your values into the world. You're quiet.

So the flame that they lit in you to stand up and speak your voice was extinguished because you're too afraid to speak. Right? You let the voices of others drown you out. Maybe, and this is maybe a freedom that's only provided to people who are not able to be canceled. Like maybe if you really want to reflect the values and respect everybody you met in your life who gave you the values and beliefs that you currently hold. And these people spent so much time and effort trying to get you to believe in these things and hold these values that are so strong,

maybe you should reflect those values into the world too, simply to show respect to every mentor and teacher that you encountered in your life. But when you let other people just drown you, you out because you're afraid. You're showing disrespect to anybody who put any time in you. They should have just said, why am I even wasting time with you? Why am I even trying to teach you anything when you're going to just cowered out and just be quiet because you didn't want to speak up? And then if you were to speak up enough about whatever it is, right? Like maybe even just saying, hey, guys, maybe we should think about this. I'm not sure if I believe this.

like maybe if enough people say that together that forms an opinion that forms a voice is it okay to be some people don't want to be the first candle that lights up right because they're afraid to go against that crowd

maybe you're a follower that's why I'm the tech lead right like maybe maybe you need to lead and like initiative is extremely difficult to find them people impact. You probably know. Most people are extremely low impact, low initiative people, zero initiative, right?

Like, this is what separates tech lead, by the way, from software engineer. So, right, software engineers, by the way, they only do what they're told to do. The Android company, they're great coders. You give them a task, they do it. Solid engineer. Great.

You did the task. The senior engineer, what separates them is initiative and impact. So you need to take initiative. You need to come and say, I've seen enough of the world. I have experience. I know what's right. Or I know what's worth pursuing, what's exploring. Here's an idea.

And not only is it something worth thinking about, but we need to make it a reality and actually execute on this idea and take that initiative. So like very few people do that. most people say hey wouldn't it be cool if somebody made this hey I had an idea for an app that's that's kind of interesting

hey this somebody should do that sometime yeah I'm going to do it one day one day I'm going to go to South America and explore one day I'm going to go scuba diving in Fiji with all of my friends are you ever going to do that right like probably maybe it's never going to happen

because maybe do you have sufficient initiative and impact to execute. And that execution can be extremely ugly. It's where the rubber hits the road between what, dream and reality, right, between sky and ground. That's a very dirty, messy part. Sparks are flying. But you have to get in there sometimes.

And yeah, people can disagree with you. There can be a lot of mess going on. It's not a place that a lot of people want to be. It can push you out of your comfort zone. it can make you look like a fool. Your pride, your ego, your status can get in your way. You may still need to just say, let me go make a fool of myself. Let me humiliate myself.

And by doing that, you take initiative. Why did you leave California? Some of that I know was, you know, maybe some of the taxes. Yeah, how did I end up in this whole, this random desert? And you made a video complaining about dry skin and just the temperature. Yeah, just washing my thing. face with hard mineral water that's just scratching my skin on. It's going to make you age more. Yeah, just aging and dry air. I'm crying now. Actually, you just can't see my tears.

Yeah, but if money was a consideration, wouldn't you just say, I'm going to live in California where my skin's going to be better? Are you here for the money for your tax savings? That's definitely a component. But I would say for me, I would say taxes is one of them, But the lifestyle is a huge component of just I feel like I'm getting way more than I would be able to do in California. Las Vegas is very functional, right? It's very nice, actually, so far from what I've seen. Like, I spend time in San Francisco, and it's total trash. It's a total trash pile of a city.

Like, everything boarded up. But, I mean, this is where, like, if you're rich enough, you end up in a desert in the middle of nowhere, right? Like, if you're kind of middle class, you might be in a nice city, like New York, making your way, Los Angeles or something like San Francisco. Really for me, after I figured out, like, after I totally trashed this city and told everyone how, how trash it is, hey, I'm here, you guys, I'm in Las Vegas. Now you know why I don't have friends. But for me, it was a decision.

Like, I realized that if I'm going to be, my plan is actually. to do more traveling, right, to integrate more traveling into my life. So if that's my plan, it simply doesn't make sense to get what, like, a nice seaside apartment in Los Angeles or something where I'm paying, whatever rented is, and I'm not using the space, right? So it's the cost of living, I would say, for Las Vegas that gets you something pretty good for a price that's not going to just, you know, like, it's not going to be something that, you're not even paying for.

Or it's not going to be excessive to that point. It's pretty reasonable here. So, yeah, I wouldn't say the tax savings are meaningful at all, really. It's like 10% tax savings is not meaningful. You should go to Puerto Rico, right? Like, if you're really after tax savings, go to Puerto Rico. So to me, it's kind of like, it's a pretty decent cost of living base from which, is close enough to California for me.

If my family were on the East Coast, I would definitely go to Puerto Rico. But since I still have family, I have a dog, I need to take care of over in California. Occasionally like to go back and visit. So Las Vegas makes sense, and it's a pretty interesting change of pace.

And I think, I mean, this is an experiment kind of for me, but, you know, I've been interested in travel. Like, I'm trying to maximize experience. I have I have very little interest in material things. You know, like I don't own a nice watch. I don't own a nice car. I don't own a house.

I don't want to own a house. You know, like your aquarium exploded, right? It's like, I don't want to maintain that. I have no interest in fixing anything. My hands are for typing. That's it, right? As a digital, like I live in the metaverse. But so I'm trying to focus more on traveling and experiences.

and Las Vegas is a great base for that. So that's kind of my current plan. But I'm not here to save money. I think saving money is a waste of youth and time. Like, I'm not sure I believe in saving money even anymore. Like, I believe if there's a young person who has youth, time, and health, and they're only lacking in wealth, but they have every other capacity to maximize happiness and enjoyment.

Maybe they should deploy that capital at that point in their life to maximize that then waiting until they're 60 or 70, and they're not able to deploy capital to experience life. That's easy to say that when you have the money, because then it's easy to go back and be like, well, you know, I got this. I could focus on the other aspects. but when you have no wealth and it's it's a grind of like well i have to suck it up at this job

for the next 30 years just to pay my just to break even every day it's not like it's like enjoy the journey right i so i don't think like you can like what you've got to maximize enjoyment every step of your life if you think what i'd like to think of is right like if the most successful of people are doctors and lawyers they achieve wealth, early retirement, at the best, age 40, maybe age 50. By then their life is over. Right? It's like, so you've, and that's in the best case to know, so you have to make sure

you're enjoying life every step of the way and deploy, I think you need to find ways to deploy capital to do that because as you get older and, you know, you're going to realize that you cannot derive enjoyment anymore from your, from money, you know, you, you may find that or you may find it very difficult to deploy it in a way to make yourself. See, I see it as a means to an end. If you have a job that you dislike and you're 25 years old, you have, you have health. But he's talking about you. Well, let me also say like, has anybody saved their way to riches?

I think so. I think like we all made our wealth through focusing more on making money than on saving on like, Starbucks coffees. I mean, I did that. I mean, it's hard for me because I saved everything. I lived so cheap. I mean, I would, even a $5 subway, like, I thought about that purchase. And I'm like, do I really need the $5 subway?

Or can I do, uh, eat at two eggs and ham and cheese for 97 cents? You know, I did that for- I did that too, but I think it's, I think it's a scam story that the media sells you as an easy way for anybody. Hey, we can all. become rich. Here's how. It's so easy. All you got to do is skip lunch.

When the answer is far more difficult than people want to hear, go start a business. Go apply yourself and make money. It's easier to make money than to save it. Who wants to hear that? I don't know. Part of me thought it was easier to save than make. Because if I save a dollar, I'm saving a dollar after tax. If I'm going and making an extra dollar, I'm taxed on that, it's worth less than just if I saved it.

So for the first, from really 18 to 30, I was just like hyper-fixated on just saving. And those habits, there would be no way I'd be here today if it weren't for those habits that were just so ingrained from the very beginning of just like save, save, save, save, save. It was the habits, but it wasn't necessarily the saving itself, right? Yeah, I mean, obviously, if I were making $15,000 a year, but I was saving $14,000 of it, and, you know, then obviously I wouldn't be here today either. But I think it was a combination of saving everything, but then also actively working on improving myself and making more money at the same time.

If you're a young person, use the money that you have, don't save it, and deploy it into like learning something, right? Acquire some skill, use the money to go to the business. I think it's free. I think so much learning could be done. for free. Besides books, I learned everything from YouTube and Reddit. I mean, that's like, and then if it was something I didn't know, I would learn it in real

estate. I would talk to other agents. I just, it was my time. I spent my time. Let's just put it this way. There's so much advice online and from every, like, Dave Ramsey person who's saying, you need to cut your budget. You need to, like, pack your lunches.

everybody feels that's actionable they feel good about themselves nobody's saying hey why don't you like start a YouTube channel why don't you like build a course why don't you try to teach something

like why don't you like build a product start a business nobody tells you that so everybody's just out there saying okay 401K let's let's max out that 401k you guys well because those those are

I want to say those are pretty surefire guaranteed ways that people could have instant results. I think starting a business, a lot of them fail. Doing a lot of these things, a lot of them fail. So by focusing on the core of the foundation of these, I know, contributing to a Roth IRA saving money, that's money in my pocket.

That's guaranteed. Anything I do beyond that, that's where I take the risk. But let me at least have my fortress over here, and that gives me the safety and the reassurance that I could focus on whatever else I want. And once those pay off, or if they pay off, then I could take that route. It also is like, yeah, like he said, it's the safety and reassurance that you know for a fact.

If you do end up saving money, that is completely within your control is that you can't save money and you can invest it. And it's a safe way to collect a lot of money rather than going and starting a business, starting a YouTube channel where you have so much chaos and variables. You're poor. Hey, I mean. You bought a house. That house is up 15% this year. You're poor. Like, look, let the millionaire speak.

Okay. I'm not talking about Graham. I'm talking about me. The true millionaire. I have a question for you, Graham. Yeah. How much money were you making per year when you hit a million dollars net worth? Somewhere between 150 and 220 a year, probably.

Maybe two, no more than 250, definitely. In my opinion, 120 to 250. I think that you didn't make yourself wealthy by all the penny pinching. I agree with tech lead. No, I would disagree. I think it were, it would, first of all. there would have been no way first of all

there would have been no way that I could have bought those all of those properties that contributed to that net worth and that foundation of income had I not saved every single penny even at the time I bought those first few properties I was still like $2,000 short

and I didn't have money to pay a contractor and I had a tenant moving in shortly and I went to my grandma and she gave me two grand that would be like thanks grandma I'll pay you back in three weeks. I'm literally getting this money from... She could give you three grand, right?

Could you have driven Uber's? Driven Uber on the weekends. No, I was working on the weekends. I was a real estate agent. And those weekends, I would go up to San Bernardadino, check out properties. From, I was... Here's how I know this.

At 8, I think it was 18 or 19, my girlfriend at the time, throughout high school, broke up with me. And I was so sad and depressed. Because you were too cheap. No. No. She's Graham?

It's you need to buy that Starbucks. No, no, no. That's what it costs you for being... No, no, it didn't. For all the savings. I mean, you don't know what you lost. No, I know it had nothing to do with money. That was absolutely, yeah.

If you had focused more on making money, you would be a billionaire now. Right? In comparison, you're only a millionaire now. So that's what it costs you. I feel like, but you could say the same thing. I could be a billionaire. You'd be like, well, you could always be worth $10 billion. You know, or if you focused more on this, you'd be more.

But my point being is that when I went through that, my way out of it, my escape was just like, I'm going to put everything I can into bettering myself, improving myself, going to the gym. And any moment of free time, I poured myself into work because that was my, like, outlet. And that was my creative, just, I felt alive doing that. I had so much fun doing that. And that was, like, made the days fly by because I enjoyed it so much. But, yeah, I mean, but.

I saved every little bit of that because I knew that my income was so sporadic as an agent that that's what gave me comfort. It was being like, okay, if I make a commission, I could save it. I also, in a competitive sense, felt like I could net more than the agents who's been doing this for 20 years because I've seen how they live. I mean, they'll spend everything they make. They make 300 grand. They've got nothing left over.

But if I could make 50 grand and save $20,000. 25 of it, then technically I'm saving more than they are. And that's how I've, yeah. Yeah, I mean, if your spend rate is extremely high, then, then yes, maybe my spend rate just tends to be low either way. But in either case, it's just a, it's just a recognition for me that there's a lot of mainstream media saying, hey, just put it into 401k, save your money, that's how you're going to become rich.

And I'm just questioning that narrative, right? like, I'm a futurist. I tend to think, what are people 100 years in the future? People are going to look back and laugh at us and say we were totally idiots. So, like, right now everyone thinks 401K and saving money is the way to go. In the future, everyone's going to say something else, right? They may say, yeah, this is totally flawed. Question that.

Well, I think the end goal is that there's probably both. I'm not a huge fan of the 401K. I'm much prefer the Roth. but if someone makes more than $6,000 a year, I would do anything possible to tell that person save everything you can until you max out that Roth IRA. Whether you're 18, 19, 25 doesn't have saved everything. I guess I would tell the person like,

buy a DSLR camera and start a YouTube channel, right, like start a business. Maybe use that and learn programming and, right, get a job as a coder instead of just saving that and working a dead end job. and you're going to save like 50 bucks. See, the issue that I see is that people view either, let's say in your YouTube channel example as a means to, and I'd be like, I'm going to start the channel, make a ton of money. Everyone who I've seen who's done YouTube has done YouTube for fun first,

and if it takes off great, and that will eventually evolve over time. But everyone's successful that I've seen never started being like, I'm not going to max up my Roth IRA. I'm going to start the YouTube channel and make a lot of money. It's just, I've never seen that happen. One day, you're negotiating with suppliers. The next, you're installing a shelf in the back room. Running a business means moving in many directions all the time.

TD's new small business banking accounts are built for how your business moves. It's how we're making banking more human. I would agree with that, that money is an extremely poor motivator. And people should not be chasing money in the first place. Like, it's not going to... You get money. just going to throw into Bitcoin or crypto or something like that. It's like figure out the life you want.

Many people, even if they achieve massive wealth like you, say the life I actually wanted was to stay at home reading news and making videos all day. That's actually what I wanted. Well, you didn't need wealth to get that. I think the money gives options. And it gives the person the option to say, hey, you know what, I don't feel like doing this today. Or maybe 10 years from now, if I want to do this, I can.

that's why I think the value is. Because otherwise, if I knew that I'd be perfectly happy, just making a video every day and so be it. But I don't know if that's going to last forever. I've always just gone with, hey, this feels right. This is what I want to do. This is where my intuition leads me. I'm going to pursue that.

It's always been like that. And having money gives me the means to pursue whatever it might be. I would say money is definitely useful. most people who have it don't know how to deploy it and never use it properly but if you know how to figure out how to actually deploy that

and maximize that in conjunction with your other assets like health, wealth, youth, and time you may be able to figure out how to actually use it properly but generally it's very difficult I would say to deploy money in a way that's going to bring you happiness

right? Some people just buy a car that makes them happy for a month and they lost $500,000. And they gave them one month of joy. Right. I mean, right. Not if they buy a 4GT that goes up in value,

then they can make money and enjoy the car. I mean, I can tell your status just from that. It's like pretty cheap. Like, it's not very rich. I mean, you think that's expensive? What's expensive to you? What would improve? press you'd be like wow graham has a lexas lFA mcclaren f1 it would be like uh owning a catmaran

out in the british version islands right it's like you're you're a land lander you just go around on land all right if that's what you enjoy you know some people got catmaran's out there yeah i'd still need to transcend i'm going to work on that yeah you'll get there keep working If you're here, I'm like, right around there. I know. That's why that's why I always have to look. Jack, you're like under the table by now. Jack has to transcend to my level.

Where's Bailey and where's Alex? They're not even. They're not worthy. But like this table is even. They're not even worthy of his mental energy. The table's worth more than me. Why isn't this table go plate it? This whole studio is trash.

How much was that? How much was that Jackie you're wearing? This is, um, this is top-notch stuff made out of ex-husband material this is a gift yeah this is a gift from my ex-wife you know how much she costs me

half my assets yeah that's how expensive that's how much it was no this I mean this you know this is like I wear out in gear right it's like it's status list class list I would say so

if you're wearing like Prada or Gucci I know your social level right away it's like it's not that not that out there. What do you think you can work on? I mean, what I'm working on now is really this new project for myself, which is I'm curious about can money buy happiness.

Everybody says no. Everybody says, oh, money can't make you happy. I'm trying to understand that and to challenge that belief. I'm trying to find more creative ways to deploy capital. right like I told you it's autopilot and extremely lazy to just go through life selling on the nine to five course and to just continue working like Elon Musk is living uh it's it's a very boring uh it's it's it's nice that he's doing that but it's also a thoughtless path that requires zero creativity or the people who are uh I'm inspired by Tom from my space he quits social media entirely like three four years ago he disappeared one off to like explore nature. You know, I think some of these other people

who you never hear about are living probably the best lives out there. So like I'm challenging some of those beliefs from myself. And that's kind of the current thing that I'm trying to explore. So for me, like saving money, investing money is a boring pursuit to me. And I'm personally more interested in just figuring out

how to deploy capital in a meaningful way. Thank you so much for coming on. It was really nice meeting you. Appreciate it a lot. Mentorship group, link down below. Yeah, where you can also get your free stock. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, $1,000 for public with the code, GRA, H-A-M.

Thank you for having me. Thank you so much. Thank you. It was nice meeting you. I really appreciate it. Thank you for coming here. And until next time. Bailey, what is it?

What did it?