Meet The Man Who Makes $3 Million Doing Nothing

welcome back to the iced coffee hour i am charlie from charisma on command and this podcast so far has made 212 thousand dollars of ad revenue hey no that's close that's close yeah if we compare that with our other guests that's close yeah it's compared to the other guests yeah you came in you're like i watched the other episode 160 but then you said it was old yeah i didn't expect you you'd say that much well it's 163. okay slower growth than i'd originally anticipated what yeah not the best no it's not but but this was the worst january in in going back the last like four years compared to december for us too at rpms yeah everything's down 25 yeah with views down we're at a third of what we were in december yeah man so i had to sell the house oh wow no no we're fine we're good that's not where most of our money comes in but we can talk about all of that let's talk about i'm looking forward to it so you've had a channel now going on seven years right so that makes you officially you're an og youtuber yeah i was like second generation the ogs the joey graceffa's and all those people at vidcon i i remember going to my first vidcom and looking at them and not feeling in the same league as them but yeah we've been doing it since 2014 was the first video i put up but we didn't really catch any traction until 2016 or so when we started doing the breakdown style that i think we've become more known for these days so for those that don't know charisma on commission maybe your audience doesn't know this yeah yeah is a youtube channel where basically they teach people like tips and tricks how to be more charismatic how to get people to like you how to tell funny jokes that don't hurt other people uh how to be the most confident person in the room stuff like that yes so self-help stuff you know what the funny thing is i've been recommended so many of your videos because you have this few videos every now and then that just pop off that just kept showing up in the homepage and i know just like even even before all of this years ago i know i know i've seen the channel before yeah and i think a lot of people have yes i think people they don't realize it because it's not like a face that is often associated with so we did a video predicting that trump would win the presidency early on in his presidential run we've got some of the most famous marvel actors i think they think of us as like a screen rant sometimes or some faceless corporation but really it's it's mostly me and ben and ivan and a handful of other people behind the scenes nothing nothing too crazy or complicated it is crazy because i remember the first time i met you was uh at vidsummit and this was october was it october that time and uh i recognized the name charisma on command but i didn't really recognize like i didn't recognize you nor ben and uh and then i looked back and i like saw your videos and the types of videos you made and i was like wow i've watched so many of these over the course of like the last like three four years it's just like randomly shows up in my feed i'm like how can i be more charismatic yeah exactly what yeah he made such a good first impression no joke you i told you this right what was the what did jack do what do you do okay so when you're at when you're at vid somebody you were there uh there's this uh idolization thing that can happen when people introduce themselves to you and they get really nervous and they put you on a pedestal and it can be alienating and then there's the reverse where people play it way too cool and they don't give a about what you do when they're they're trying to not do that first thing you were able to be complimentary of our channel and then treat us like humans instantly and you it was like yo dude i love your channel do you want to get a drink and play poker was that what you said no we were we were playing uh we were playing what hold him that night yeah yeah yeah and then you didn't take it easy on me you you cleaned me out wow wow that's high praise exactly no you made a fantastic first impression thank you and then stay in touch you came and visited the house and and here we are we got to talk about this but almost yeah six million subscribers later for you right yes we're at about so we've got a several forms do you guys have foreign language channels no we do not you should consider it and i can introduce you to some of my people if you're interested yeah we have uh it's about five on our main channel but then another four or so on foreign language channels that we just give them access to our google drive they usually translate or dub over it and we own all the channels split half the revenue that comes from course sales and ad rev it's not a ton of rev but it's like a significant amount of our views are in foreign countries which is pretty cool we're legit more famous in russia on a per capita basis than we are in the united states of america and the english-speaking world that's interesting yeah now i'm curious i first want to ask before we get into the house by the way jack has talked non-stop about your house i think since vid since i visited a men's house yeah that's right let's just start talking about this house so we'll get to that in a second why not show your face good so we have a couple of videos back in the day probably 2018 or 19 was the last time i was on the camera so there's a lot with my face on it uh but we found a couple of things format wise the breakdowns just do better i do the same topic standing in front of a wall in my own house not going to do as well as when i put robert downey jr's face on the thumbnail so that was the first decision and the second is that recently actually ben who is here with us today has been doing the videos for us and i realized that we had a very personality driven channel when i was part of it i didn't want to have to be attached to every single thing that was being done so i've you know transitioned to ben and hopefully we'll be able to transition to other writers for the content and not have to be involved every day with you know all the video stuff that we're doing so that's that's been a conscious decision that we've made as time has gone on yeah don't you feel like uh by doing that though you're missing out on growing your own personal brand yeah 100 yeah i i don't really want a personal brand these days i actually feel uh the benefits of fame is something that we were talking about i think are were oversold in my imagination than in my experience and i've much preferred being behind the scenes helping people to to grow within the business rather than having to be the face of everything that is said and being relied upon in that way and it's nice because you get you know cool interactions with jack at vidsummit where people recognize you and you can't can't discount that but mostly i feel like it puts a target on your back these days where people uh could come at you for cancellation or any sort of thing i just i don't no longer feel interested in the fame side of things got it yeah well let's talk about your house i'm really curious about what's going on with the house let's talk of giants nuts first of all i pulled up the place is a mansion yeah like i i remember graham and i we went to logan paul's house i like your house way more than logan paul it's not my house to be clear i rent right right right right yeah but it is amazing at a crazy price for some pretty crazy reasons yeah go ahead and so yeah he told me that you would you would have feelings and i'm excited to chat about it so we for the longest time i mean i slept on floors i live in tiny apartments we had nothing nice uh and then this apartment is it's a it's a home that i could not afford to buy if i wanted to buy it it's too expensive but the amount of money that we have made has made it so that i felt like i could and the reasons that i wanted specifically because it's got five bedrooms which meant that my entire family was able to come for three weeks extended and not be on top of each other which for me is one of the most valuable things that i can do as i get older is try to spend time with my mom and dad and sister and and not uh grow to hate one another in three days of like super close quarters living so that's been a big reason and then we wanted to get out of downtown santa monica which is sort of falling apart unfortunately i don't know if you've been in the area these days but often i saw you yeah i'm leaving california and a lot of what you spoke to uh and a lot of people have spoken to is like i experienced that we were in the very center of third street and it just was not the area that we wanted were you in one of those apartments oh yeah i can reveal this now yeah we were right on exactly right yeah yes so that area it's funny because i would always walk by and see those places i'm like what is it like to live there but i envy that because i'm like i can't believe you could literally just take an elevator down and you're right there it was like walking distance to the beach the coolest when we moved in it was so awesome rent there was when we moved in it was for a single bedroom like three thousand for a two bedrooms like 4300 or something like that prices actually went down over covid but they didn't reflect that for us because we had contracts uh but yeah it was amazing when we got there you're right next to everything all the stores all the shopping people coming in town all the time he's got the bungalow if you like to go out and then with time they i think there was an ordinance that kicked the homeless out of venice and so they migrated a lot of them towards the downtown area in santa monica uh and i mean i've got stories we don't need to go over them but there it became much more uncomfortable to just walk around your front yard and walking the dogs became not something that i looked forward to and wanted to do in the same way and taking a stroll in that area was not something that was uh it used to be the best part of my day and then there was just an added stress that i didn't want to deal with so we moved up to malibu as well for that reason and i set a price that i thought i was going to pay and then i found this house and that was like 1.3 to 1.5 times more than i had planned on so there's a different financial philosophy all right how much are we talking about how much is how much is rent i knew we were going to ask me i normally don't talk about the stuff but i'm on the podcast thank you yes uh so it's 20 000 a month okay is the rent and it's malibu it's a it's a large place uh yeah it's massive it's massive it's beautiful it's got a pool and it is the type of place that i don't know i'll be able to live forever but will be happy to have lived in for the year that i that i did but first i'd like to thank our sponsor huel man i could really use some human fuel right now graham help alex turned into 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now they actually have free shipping and they'll throw in a shaker and a free t-shirt so just head to heel.com ich and that's hulehuel.com ich to get a free shaker a free t-shirt and free shipping on your first order thank you so much jule and back to the podcast and i remember back when i went to your house you were explaining to me some funny rules that your landlord had implemented on you guys yes and like weird restrictions that they gave you yes so they're they're first off i really actually like them a lot the way that the house works is they live in the casita basically in a separate area in the back but it's large enough of a place that they're pretty separate uh but this house is their pride and joy it's it's the thing that they love it's got all of their furniture which is the reason that i picked it because it's i didn't have to bring anything because i didn't have anything uh but they've got some like a 1950 motorcycle antique that's in there it's worth a hundred thousand dollars it's just like please don't touch me and i trust me i don't want to but they have all of their furniture they have this workout equipment from the 70s that that is they don't want to throw out so it's just filling up space so we're trying to like find a room to put a set in but it's just carved out with these crappy old stairmasters that we have to like put behind curtains on all this kind of stuff so there are some weird rules i'm not allowed to hang anything in the house uh they asked this isn't that weird but she's allergic cats no cats we've got dogs so they're not they're uh it's it is their pride and joy and so they're very particular about like they don't want us to make it our own they want us to be people are they renting it is it financial it must be it has to be you know i it is i asked them this question i said why do you do it she said i like money and i i was like okay but they're old so yes and this is and again maybe they don't view it that way but from my perspective i was like you love this thing so much and you they do have enough money like i don't get it uh to me i would want to enjoy the place that i they built it themselves over many many years i don't get it but i'm happy for it because when there's a problem they're on it lickety-split they're over the next second because they care so much uh and they rented it to me which but if they like more happy they're renting to you for twenty thousand dollars yeah but realistically what's the market rent on that place six million something probably oh for market oh like the for sale sorry the market rent yeah i would say if they if they comparatively i would guess 30k is what it's actually it could go for if they weren't so stringent about the type of person that's in there and they they like us because it's me and my brother they're like you guys gonna throw parties no i don't i don't drink i don't do any of that kind of stuff i'm not gonna have like a big rager at the house at this point where we're both uh getting old and just we hang out with our dogs we sit by the pool there's nothing crazy going on so they are looking for a particular i think type of renter which is why they're happy to do it at a discount um and maybe they just don't know that it could go i don't even want to say this because i like it jack showed me your house online i looked it up i honestly thought about 20 to 25 i think so really realistically yeah i think it's tough to get an actual feel of the house though without seeing it in person like online does not do it justice the backyard is it just goes on yeah it keeps going it's it's nice i i when i was looking at comps because you know more about the market than i do but i for a moment in time became aware of like what my options were and there was nothing like this in that area um the ones that were smaller than this were selling for 25. yeah i wasn't even looking at ones that were more expensive the issue is that like you're renting it with their furniture yeah you take the tenant exactly cut that down 75 exactly no hanging things cut it down further you got to keep treadmills in there cut it down further so it's like how many people are going to rent this place very few true it's going to take a long time for them to exactly and that's why it's the right fit for us so because they are so particular about it and most of the things we don't mind it makes it makes it a good fit for us yeah yeah that's interesting any thought of leaving moving somewhere else yeah so we i mean we talk about puerto rico so we've discussed this and this is perhaps the interesting question about like philosophy of money which ben and i often discuss and and maybe you have a different take um it california's really expensive and not only the house but you know this the taxes and all of that kind of stuff the amount that i spend on a daily basis to be in california compared to nevada is probably over a thousand dollars a day just for the privilege of a few hours of sunlight and should i do that i come to the conclusion that yes i should because one right now i can afford it and there's it just makes me marginally happier than being in puerto rico that's that's why i come to the conclusion the idea of stacking up more money while nice seems less valuable to me than sunshine in the afternoon and uh i don't know if that's i don't think that's something that i'm going to regret later in life but i don't actually know what i would do if i had say at the end of the year and i saved a bunch of money say i had another 250 000 or 500 000. there's nothing that i can conceive of that i could use that money for that would add to my life and that's 500. that's it so you need some good dividend stocks yeah and so what is your so do you just get joy out of uh seeing the the pile grow like why have more and is there an enough number for you where it's like you know what i'm gonna splurge i just screw it at this point i am to a certain extent uh no i don't look at the whole number i look at like whatever whatever the number is so let's say it's you know a hundred a hundred bucks i'm like okay now i could spend three dollars of that yeah so i just spent three percent so whatever that number is uh you know three percent of it so right now i could you know i'm really living off like the imagine i make like a hundred grand 150 i keep it about that yeah so um so whatever i earn more is just you know i increase it three percent got it and so is that what why not spend more is it because you don't think it would make you happy or because you would stress about not saving as much both i wouldn't be any happier but also i would stress over it's unsustainable like i know if i spent more if something were to happen i can't keep that up so i'm not gonna even try i'm gonna stay within my means got it yeah but there's there's a three percent of four percent of five percent of six percent why why not spend like you have making 250k here because i know that you're making seven plus not seven plus figures seven figures solidly right yeah yeah but any more than three percent it's not guaranteed to last through inflation or a downturn that could last however long so aren't you not spending three percent it means less i don't know what i don't know what it is but but mentally it's a significant plus or minus three percent it's it's three percent it's like one agreement it's like it's less than one percent i could see a downturn the market's down market's down okay bitcoin's down fifty percent well sure but i guess here's my question the the seems like the implicit idea is that you wanna have enough money to survive forever should you never be able to work again and but the impression that i get from you is that you are smart people are yeah you are smart hard-working i don't want to have to do that that's the thing but you do never want to give in your own mentality to a certain extent i think i think it's worthwhile to be able to you know when the sun is shining you make hay and an opportunity like this i don't think necessarily is guaranteed to stay around for forever so uh at this time i think it makes sense to double down when things are working and at some points things are going to change yeah so i'd rather look back at this and be like all right you know i've done everything i could on this and things could change got it is is there a age or an amount that you would have to be like the sun has been shining for 12 years i don't have to make hay anymore or no no i think it's i think it's slowly just you know over time i think uh you know as as i get older i think just the more you want to kind of just take it easy a little bit more each and every year i think it'll be a gradual thing i don't think it's going to be one day i'm like all right i'm done you know just maybe an hour or less a week every now and then and then two hours a week yeah a little bit less yeah yeah and i i don't think one is right and wrong i guess my philosophy which we'll see how it plays out is i want to re i want to enjoy the benefits of retirement while i'm young and if i am forced to work and to make hay uh i believe that i will be able to do that and i know this is the other thing that we kind of talked about is like the the worst case scenario for me is living on a friend's couch because i have done a good job of making friends and having people that care about me so i don't believe that i will ever be in real deprivation i might be in like socially ostracized you're a big loser you're 45 years old and you can't pay for yourself i think that's worst case scenario um but yeah it's up for me to conceive of of true calamity uh barring the total collapse of the united states of america in which case i'm screwed anyway like i don't know how to work a gun and i can't make my own food so yeah i'm in trouble jack told me that you are thought would be with that amount of money why not purchase a smaller home own it build equity those sorts of things right uh yeah preferably not in malibu yes what is your opinion on malibu uh i i think if you live in malibu you may as well live in ventura for half the price i mean what's the difference very little you're driving an extra 35 minutes north uh and everything's half off yeah so i would rather do that or move out of state entirely because your voice doesn't your your image doesn't need to be attached to this channel so why why live there yes so i guess it's a few reasons when i think of the things that matter to me in life and i've tried to take stock and i've lived in a lot of different places weather comes up very very high on the list and so southern california as compared to here for instance in vegas where it's like low taxes that's why we stay in california uh instead of ventura it i've got a girlfriend ben's got a girlfriend and it was just do we want to live 20 30 minutes away from your girlfriend or do you want to live an hour away uh and so that was a decision but certainly in the future i could see myself in ventura um but yeah there are there are smarter decisions that i could have made i think the underlying philosophy though with regard to why i chose to spend probably more than you would have been comfortable with is that uh i do jack jack has told me that you feel that the youtube train could run out and i totally agree watching my ad revenue go from 90 90. it's okay it's a safe place 90 to 30 from december to uh to january and that's the first day yeah and that's and of course we got salaries and i'm splitting with the team and with ben of course uh watching that is like yeah this this can end uh but i'm under the impression this has always been true for me that i tend to perform better one when i have a financial necessity like when when the pressure is off uh i take my foot off the gas and that's not something i i mind doing but i feel like i can be on the hook to build grow in the future if it's necessary financially but when it's not i'm happy to like chill coast enjoy got it okay but first we want to thank our sponsor morningbrew man i'm so tired i could definitely use some morning brew right now me too alex there is nothing i love more than learning and keeping up to date with the latest trends first thing in the morning from a cup of coffee no alex from morningbrew morningbrew is a company that makes the best daily newsletter that keeps me up to date with all of the business news that i used to miss out on i read morningbrew's email newsletter every single day now and i can honestly say that i love how easy they make it to keep up with today's current events i found morning brews daily newsletter while i was uh doing work and i saw their article on why taylor swift's newest album was scaring record companies and now morningbrew even has a youtube channel i found this really cool video of them going into detail about how the chip shortage is affecting our economy and how tech companies might have to invent new semiconductor infrastructures to keep up with today's demand and that's just one of many fascinating and entertaining stories morning brews youtube channel has to offer so go subscribe to morningbrews youtube channel if you're interested in business finance or tech we have links down below in the description thank you so much morningbrew and back to the podcast well before we go into my thoughts on that how do you get started on this channel what made you what made you get into charisma on command yes so i was a super super shy kid so ben my co-founder i keep pointing to him he's hiding here in the corner uh he was my best friend in high school a little bit more outgoing than me but i was especially shy and he was my closest friend that often translated for me to uh girls that i might like or that sort of stuff so when i separated from in college especially was when i had to start learning it uh to be more outgoing confident charismatic because it was not something that came naturally to me uh and so through reading books and i got a chance to study abroad and kind of reinvent myself and sort of build the fundamentals of relating to people from the ground up through that process i learned a lot about how to do it came back started talking to friends they were super into it and then i think i started writing on a blog just like here's what i'm learning eventually that became classes that we taught eventually that became youtube videos and we saw traction very very quickly with everything that it was that we were teaching it was one of the most uh quickly not widespread but the people that were exposed to it were very quickly very interested which is why it was something that we stuck with when we came time to you know try to figure out how to start a business and not live a life of consulting or investment banking in ben's case so it was mainly just talking about like how to be more charismatic and stuff like that at the beginning it was it was very much about getting dates and girls because i think we were trying to solve the problem that we felt most acutely picked up from where a simple pickup left off because they they abruptly ended i think right and then and then there's this big like uh this big market out there i think for a lot of people especially when youtube was becoming more popular and people were home those are the people who needed the dates watching youtube so of course they're gonna watch youtube videos and how to get dates yeah and the videos the videos by that time in my life the dating part was not uh it was still important to me but it wasn't like the the forefront of my mind we were doing first breakdown that went viral was of bill clinton and then we were doing barack obama it became much more public speaking making friends moving up in the workplace all the things that we found were important to people and not just the dating stuff which i think was over emphasizing some of the people that i wanted to differentiate myself from when i had the youtube channel got it yeah but let's start with the dating for a second i think i think that's interesting uh how did you begin teaching that and what strategies have worked the best in terms of boosting someone's confidence so we started in new york skillshare back in the day did you remember that it was an in-person platform did you ever use it so it used to be basically a classroom booking platform and it was you would like say i am an expert in x y and z and i have 10 spots and they would give you okay come into our location and we will be the ticket selling platform to your class wow that was the first thing that we ever did um we had 10 seats gave five of them away for free on a local reddit and then five people came through the skillshare platform spent like 15 or something so after the cost of subway and you know all the food that we had to get it was like we made eight dollars each and the first class was how to i think it was how to talk to girls in the park and so we just kind of ran through like a model for how you might do this okay here's how you work on your confidence here's what you can say to start the conversation here's the things that are important when you're setting up a date and here's how you make it all happen at the end of it guys were hanging around class they were like so when can we do this like oh i hadn't thought about that so then we started uh taking people out and we would go out and very much it was i guess the pickup model at that time was like go talk to girls and we were definitely trying to not be like most of what we saw out there but this was the business model so we took a handful of guys out to the park if we saw a pretty girl we would go up talk to her if it went well fantastic if not totally cool and teach them to do the same so that was what started it and then from there eventually that became one-on-one coaching with the guys that were most interested once that got booked up the question was how do we scale this and the answer was let's make a course of what we're doing by that point we'd realized that the people that were most interested in dating and exclusively interested in dating were not the people that we wanted to work with uh why is that uh without judgment or trying to shame it was like when i went to the friend of mine and i was like hey man i'm going to teach you you know how to date girls he might be interested in that but that was a reputation that he didn't want to associate with himself with understandably in more mainstream society that pickup artist stuff was like icky and gross and anything adjacent to it nobody wanted to be related to yeah so when we talked to the guys that we most wanted to be working with they didn't want that to be the primary focus so we realized that in order to attract the type of person that we wanted and still talk about dating we were going to have to add all of these other pieces that were very important as well and that was why we focused on charisma broadly rather than dating specifically it was just because we wanted to surround ourself with a different type of person that was naturally attracted to pure dating does that make sense yeah it does yeah so where do someone start if they're not confident at all if they have a fear of going out talking to people making friends how do you begin people on that journey the first i mean so we have our course broadly and it's what i try to do is give them the easiest fastest thing that they can implement right off the bat and so day one in our course is be better than good so in every conversation no almost everyone somebody's gonna ask you hey man how's it going and most people be like not bad or fine or i'm doing good the easiest way to set an interaction up to do well is to find a way to be better than that so i mean hey man i'm doing awesome or i'm exceptional i'm great like it's been an awesome day when you inject a little bit of energy into the beginning of the conversation the other person tends to give back some and then it's much easier to make conversation so we when we're starting we start at the beginning which is like what do you say at the beginning of a conversation that is very easy very small that evolves into longer later in our courses and what we're teaching it might be about storytelling and more complex ideas of how do you hook someone in a story and when should you digress and tell a funny aside versus when should you just get to the punch line but that's it's those small things that we try to do first when when we're talking to someone and these days it's almost all done through the course i'm mostly in behind the scenes doing not charisma stuff honestly i'm doing more business these days yeah okay how long did it take for you to go from someone who is a little bit insecure and shy maybe to someone who was pretty pretty dang good at like being confident better than good yeah pretty dang good okay yeah fantastic exactly sure i was listening pretty dang good isn't that better than good no i appreciate that he's doing it all right i i just like that you think i got better than pretty dang good no so it took uh for me months it took a long time uh and that's because i i was floundering in fact i made a lot of bad decisions because when you are not good at anything any advice seems plausible so for instance one of the pieces of advice that someone gave me was when you're at a bar and a girl asks you to hold a drink that's like a beta move never do that she's trying to get you to do a favor and you can't do it that way so i was like okay i don't i don't know any better so when people ask me to hold drinks i would be like can't do that no and i would try to be some cool tough badass until one day a friend of mine basically chewed me out and told me that i was being an and it was like those sorts of mistakes that i was making because i had no way to filter the good advice from the bad advice via my own life experience so it took a longer time for me to go oh that's crappy advice and i did probably didn't need to go down that path and define oh that that stuff is actually good so months at least if not years for me to get interesting so you could take it from someone who you you'd listen to and you'd put all of their advice into action oh yeah i didn't know anything you just believe it and then you had to learn through your own experience that's hilarious funny thing i watched a guy who i thought had great eye contact and i determined it was because he had big eyes which was wrong but what i learned is when i talk to people you should do this and for like a week i was running around like that's a great point i swear to god and i think it was ben who one day i was at the gym he's like or not the gym we were out at a club and he goes dude what the are you looking at i was like i'm making eye contact no way guys stop doing that it had probably been a week of me practicing that is so funny and it was so and i think it had to be there is understandably uh sort of a social stigma that comes from having to learn this stuff as consciously as i did you're supposed to just get it but for whatever reason i didn't and i think a lot of people didn't um i'm not like i'm aspie or asperger's or autistic or anything on the spectrum i don't think i just whatever influences i had in my life didn't leave me to figuring this stuff out so i had to learn in a very analytical way which is the way that my brain tends to work that's most people now i feel like the fact that we're spending so much time online you get in contact with somebody else you're like i forgot what to do even with me if i'm working for like a few weeks and i don't really do anything i get out and i'm so uptight i'm like i forgot how to act like what do i do with my hands yeah am i supposed to look for too long how long is too long it's you start getting in your head about that how about coming out of the pandemic i mean i felt that to the extreme not interacting with people and then going in and trying to have a conversation with the person who's serving you food was just i didn't know what to do it felt so strange because it'd been so long away from that world and i think if you grew up like that for whatever reason i was playing starcraft brood war like that can that can be your life if you don't intervene and do something about it which is hopefully where our channel comes in that's interesting yeah i felt like it does take practice and it is something that well no i guess not for everybody but for me like the more you socialize the better you get at it yeah i mean by the end of vid summit you're like you you're in the flow right yeah i saw you at the end i came and i had to break through eight people to say oh yeah it's graham stefan he's over here hi graham please see me yeah that was crazy i had two people following me yeah uh yeah one guy was giving me a stock tip and i forget this i forget the stock he was telling me about this pharmaceutical company uh but i think he was a part of it so he wanted he wanted me to make a video on this company oh i remember that guy yeah yeah he wanted me to talk about like in a video i'm like i'm not going to talk about a pharmaceutical company in the video but yeah he followed me for like 10 minutes yeah to die i wish i knew this imagine if the thing is up like a thousand percent now should have taken this i should have been i should have taken it so you said after meeting me you had a you had a great first impression what about after meeting graham oh oh yeah so how about after meeting me and give both of us things that we could improve on okay how was that yeah yeah i'll have to i did not come prepared i will say um outside you actually made a funny impression so before we got in we were it's freaking cold in vegas right now we're standing outside of your house uh trying to knock in and we hear on the doorknob things with the rings speak to us vacate the premises the cops are being called and i thought what an impression honestly and if there's a principle behind that it is um it's treat people as friends immediately oh yeah as opposed to uh i've got to be formal or professional i was like that i think that's a very good initial instinct maybe open the door a little bit sooner because it was cold you know the funny thing is i was trying to get the speaker to work and my mic he was trying to get the speaker he was committed so he's committed to the joke he's like i cannot let the movie out alex and i were sitting here we're looking at you guys trying to come in i thought you'd get the code right dude we're like yeah i forgot it yeah and then i was trying to get the speaker to work for like 10 seconds yeah they're fumbling outside and i mean that was it literally i shook your hand there and then we've moved in and had this conversation so i'll i'll sit in we can we can splice something in but i that was that was the moment um of that was the strongest emotional feeling that was out of the ordinary from normal interactions that popped in my head was like oh good for him like he's uh no seriously the there it's and i can fall out of this i can be i'm a philosophy major if you ask me a question i'm going to answer it as deeply and literally as i can but i think the instinct to found can i say that oh we'll bleep it out yeah yeah is a good one it's a really really good one and it's uh i need to do a better job of it if i was if i was back in my career as well i probably have to talk a little less i i have this thing now joking around i love scaring people you do how many times have i scared alex it's so much fun and you scared me yeah yeah literally ricky scared me probably like five times yeah joking and right right before this podcast like as we were driving back from the protein and veggies wherever we ate i called graham like yo we're heading over right now he's like i thought you said eight and i was like oh my gosh alex i'm like alex he said eight right now he's like yeah no we gotta finish we can we gotta hurry go i called him on his bluff though anyway you're used to it yeah i'm used to it yeah everybody's got the prankster friend that is just like um yeah i would come home uh he got me a couple times there was one where i came home to my facebook with a message written to the girl that i had a crush on saying hey i know it's been a while but i just wanted to let you know that i really like you and i have a big crush on you and i want to talk to you and i was like mortified freaked out started going what have you done because he's a prankster and this is exactly the thing that he would do and i realized they touched the screen it was a totally photoshopped image he was he's the type of person to put hours of work into a 15-second prank yes and it was good because if he had done the first thing and actually that would have just pissed me off and and not been a good right but the fact that he scared me with it without doing it was i thought he got me he got me hard and made me freak out that's a great prank so how was jack's score meeting jack uh for what could jack so jack and i have hung out um now for a couple hours no jack is uh jack's got it man i think some people it comes easily i know it comes easily to for some people i actually think have you worked at all to try to be more charismatic i have not yeah you're you're natural honest honestly wow congratulations thank you but that's because you're not jack's date yeah so i think i think we put you if you were a date it would uh you know maybe things would be a little different oh yeah is that is that the i might honestly just be good around dudes i think that's probably the case you're telling me you're not good with women oh is this like a man running gag that you guys have i like to think that i'm good with them but my track record says otherwise interesting yeah i suspect suspect but i'll buy it no a lot of okay so this is realistically if i hang out with a girl there will be two outcomes yeah okay one outcome is i end up not really being like super into the girl and then for some reason for the next like couple months she's just super interested and i just try to distance myself and then the other outcome is uh i just don't get a text back afterwards but i i do after a date yeah really yeah oh we could work on that really if this is an actual thing that's happening and not something it's an actual thing no no no that's not no yeah we can hear it i'm cool yeah i don't know 100 it's not super troubling to me though like i'm not super invested in any of these dates what the heck what is going on here multiple times and you'll feel like it's gone well uh one i felt like it went well okay and then the other ones i kind of know i'm like you know i either a should have made a move or b like i should have done something else differently and i often times like i'll feel kind of like detached from the conversation if i'm like with a date and i think that's something i can work on for sure huh we need like a hidden camera we need a series we gotta film a dating show that's a genius yeah a few times because jack runs these scenarios by me and i'm like oh it's because of this or it's because of this there's been a few times though that i'm like no the only thing i could think of with one uh it was a girl that he met and uh then she deactivated her account online yes and then i totally shut down social media because of you no yeah it was such a bad experience i think she's probably seeing somebody else yeah or went back with an ex in vegas seeing someone else because i lived here for four years it uh not as uncommon as you like there's some weirdness going on in vegas there's a lot of double dealing i know girls that like a girl that i dated the guy that she thought she was dating prior to me i told her that he was in the cia and what he really had was a wife then no i swear to god man swear to god and he would take these i've gotta get on call and and i'm not kidding i'm not kidding he told her that he was in the cia who had to take these bit these like important trips and couldn't tell her about these dealings yeah and it was i think it went on for a handful of months like a small number of months and then i think the woman may have reached out to her if i'm remembering the story correctly but i've heard a ton of those stories in vegas that's crazy not not the highest integrity dating town but not is that a surprise like could be some boyfriends out there and i know that there was on the podcast there was there was the issue yeah i explained to him the thing with the girl [Music] yeah that was tough heartbreaking heartbreaking but anyway all so excited by the end of the podcast yeah all of us man yeah we were pumped true love just cucked yeah for those that don't know i we basically brought on a date for me on the podcast uh this was a long time ago it was my first time ever meeting this girl on the podcast and then after the podcast i asked her on a date and then she said she had a boyfriend and then like an episode or two later we brought on her boyfriend and confronted him and uh jack what was the name of that uh yeah confronting jack's girlfriend's boyfriend yeah what's the name of the podcast that was the olden days we're different now yeah yeah i mean fun times sure you're like whatever it takes yeah yeah whatever don't click out now though click out at the end of the video to watch one of our most viewed videos though in the first twenty yeah it was confronting i think it was confronting my girlfriend's boyfriend was it meyer jax i want to see the face that you chose for the thumbnail i think it was the first time we used the famous like the long hair just weeping yes yeah oh my gosh yeah it's okay so do you have any advice for jack could you could we walk through something yes well well is there a particular scenario you can run me through the surprised you i can try to actually uh like a scenario that happened between a girl surprising not call back or surprising where you thought that it where you went on a date and honestly none of them are that surprising just being completely honest like seriously you know you know at some point in the interaction [Laughter] yeah at some point in the interaction like interaction something probably definitely went wrong but nothing that serious at least in my opinion yeah so i don't know and i also think like to a lot of girls that i'm going on dates with i may be a little intimidating interesting yeah i mean are they familiar with you from prior to the no i i don't bring up like the youtube thing or any of that stuff but yeah like going to my place and seeing like maybe a house and like you know what i mean like i own this house i don't even tell them that they they usually ask me like i try to leave some of those details out which which i think like if i were flaunting yeah if the house i got a car i got a miata you know what i mean yeah yeah are you sports car yeah i feel like you live in a pocket universe where where you are not crushing it i'm blown away by this but we we should definitely talk more i'm okay with it you know like it's it's really not something that troubles me that often nor is it something where like i'm like lying about like oh i just wish i had a girlfriend like that doesn't really ever happen yeah it's funny though when we talk about this i i check the retention rates of every video and every single time we talk about jack's dating the retention just goes off people want to know why is he struggling so much the most interesting we could make an entire episode i'll give you the three the three broad dating things that we talk about is um and we have people self-diagnosed which if these is not going well for you so there's the there's the first thing is basic interest so this is like you're talking to a girl she says i got to go to the bathroom that is a lack of basic interest she doesn't even want to speak to you really conversate well if that ever should happen like in an interaction not that she would take a pee and then come back but that she would excuse herself and never be seen or heard from again oh so are you in interaction is she engaged in conversation answering with more than one word answers following up with questions reciprocating interest to you that's the basic thing and that's not sexual at all that's like person to person sure so is she interested the second thing is are you communicating that you actually have standards meaning a lot of guys the standard that they implicitly have for women is are you willing like do you like me because i'm in if that's the case and i think this is what happens when you see men putting women on pedestals and a woman might say you know he'll ask her what do you do for work and she'll say i'm an accountant he'll go oh an accountant that's so amazing that's so cool and he doesn't give a crap about accounting but whatever she were to say it's amazing and people pick up on that and sense that you lack any sort of standard and are only interested in them for their looks and that's a turn off and then the third piece is are you building sexual tension and that starts with like lasting eye contact it's the second thing you might do is rather than sitting across a booth from somebody you can sit on the same side of the table or at the bar so that when you're joking with them you can touch them on the shoulder or laugh by by touching their hand or high five like you wouldn't want to sit like we are right now on a date because it's going to be much tougher to establish any sort of comfort with physical contact and then what happens is at the end of dates a lot of people who don't do that piece you know you're walking the girl to her doorstep you haven't touched all night and it's like how do i bridge this gap between you and me because we're not even comfortable holding hands at this point and i got it close to my wow so that's those are the things that i would ask anyone out there self-diagnose which is the area that is lacking uh and if it's any of those areas there's prescriptions that you can give to to start to not falter so much in those areas that's some really good advice thanks man and it's kind of stuff that i feel like i intuitively just know yeah you know what i mean but i just dropped like i said well i don't like just reinforce it to myself as often as i probably should sure so it makes sense and and if i look back on my dates i can kind of understand why like like i mentioned where do you think of those three this one ring true um every date is a different experience man it really is so for example one yeah like we didn't have any contact until the end of the date uh everything beforehand seemed to go well though another one i honestly kind of rejected the girl throughout the date which was kind of just like my bad yeah on that uh i don't know i was just feeling weird that day i guess uh another one what what other dates have i been on you i did i didn't text a girl all two of them now yeah that's just that's it so i don't know i feel like i can diagnose for the most part like what's going on and i also i don't think i necessarily try very hard on the dates like i kind of just go and whatever happens happens um so i suppose i could also work on that there you go you know the answers well we'll see we'll see no i'm curious what about your business because you mentioned that that ad rates have declined yeah yeah how is your business broken up now well good news is that our business not dependent on ad rates it's it's very very heavily tilted towards the course sales that we have so those have dipped but not nearly to the same amount that ad rates have gone down core sales more closely track views that we have and the other thing is that as we build a back catalog a lot of the people who join our course are not new to the channel they've been watching the channel for two three years so whether or not we have a good month this month there's still somebody who two years ago tuned in and is like oh this is my this is my day to buy um so we've seen the core sales have for us not have been close to solid record highs for you know it's continued to grow so that's another reason is that even though some of the indicators on the business are down the business itself is actually doing quite quite well sure yeah could you provide some numbers oh we how about this do you want me to talk about it and we can you can make up your mind if you want us to trim it no i can i can give you rough numbers um because honestly i don't even know the true numbers uh i we should probably do that we uh i think last year made of revenue somewhere in the three to four million dollar range of rev and then that is uh we're we have pretty solid profit margins but we do have people that work for us we have costs associated with some of the things that we do um and then i get of the profit i get roughly 46 co-founder ben gets roughly the same amount and then we have a cmco who takes would he like to be named his name is ivan he gets seven percent and we're hoping to grow that into 10 for him as he takes on more responsibility i kind of want like the dana white to that that's what we're looking for it's like i'm fatigued a brother i started the thing and then i want to have a front man that is not me uh more heavily involved with the day today how many people are involved in this uh so it's a lot there there are several people that have like part-time things but the core team is uh depending on the time is roughly 10 people and then we also have these language channels which if you multiply that out there's 30 people within their teams because they each have you know one the russian guy has like 10 people that work with him um so there's there's quite a few but they're not all ivan is are you chit-chatting over here do you 32 total yeah got it but they're not they're not all like directly the the reason that i don't feel as nervous and i would if i had 32 employees that were like every month they're on a salary i'll the vast majority of those people are on a profit share which is when the profit like i i can't owe more money than i'm making because we're sharing in the profit together which makes me feel much easier and i wouldn't want to coast if i had an operation that had super high overhead that would make me that would make me nervous for sure walk us through the process of making a video how involved are you like what do you do yeah it's been nothing nothing it's been a year since i've been involved with the videos yeah yeah that's crazy to me yeah see yeah all of this so far i'm like that's good that's what impresses me yeah so wow that yeah well good news bad news i turned it over to my co-founder ben and so he makes he's very involved uh but we've been able to get more and more help as time has gone on so when it started it was uh i would decide on a person or idea that i was interested in say it was donald trump at the time and those were the fun ones because i did not understand donald trump i was like why is this guy popular and so it was fun to watch the videos and sort of figure it out uh i watched the videos and i'm keying in for the moments when the audience or i have an emotional reaction to this person like i like this person i dislike this person and then when i find those moments i'm reverse engineering what they're doing that is creating that and i bundle those all together throw them in an outline and then write a script off the back of that very quickly in the process because i started also editing the videos we outsourced to an editor who would then be in charge of getting b-roll um and now we have that that initial process is done in tandem with a sort of a junior writer that we are training right now i am not training ben is training right now to help us with that whole video process but our goal by the end of the year our number one goal for the business is not related to revenue it is to have our junior writer level up to writer writer and have us receive a video that we did not have input in that is up to our standards and we are ready to put on the channel if we can do that by the end of 2022 i will be thrilled and i know benny ben will even be more thrilled than i am because he's making the video how difficult was that to turn over to somebody else because you're doing this channel in the beginning i mean this is yours did you find that it did better with you behind it you kind of like going through everything putting your own touch on things yeah there was a there was i think an investing in like when ben came in he had never done it before yeah um and so if you looked at our best months it was oh that might have been off our best month but i actually think our best month ever i think was when ben and i were splitting videos or he was making some of them so it was easy to turn over to ben in a way because he had been with me through since i'm 13 14 years old like he's my best friend forever and so he saw the whole process he was a quick study relative to somebody totally fresh there was that emotional component of people are going to think this is me what are they going to think i don't actually think in that in exact way that ben does i don't you know uh that nervousness but i've uh gotten past that these days i what i more felt was stress of being responsible every week to come up with a new video and i was ready to offload it at the end of it i got burned out i never thought it would happen because i would watch these creators talk about burnout and i really felt that i had said all of the interesting things that i had to say and was just repeating myself which i'm a fairly creative person drove me nuts like not covering new ground to me was very stultifying and boring so now i told jack like we're starting at dungeons and dragon show i suck at dungeons and dragons i don't know anything about it but it's fun to do something that i don't understand and know how to do well that's that's where i get the most enjoyment god i got it yeah how long did it take you to get burnt out from 2015 to about two three four years for me to get burned out of a video a week i would say uh and then then it's taken about six months yeah yeah about and i it i i got to do and to his like i got to do a lot of the fun ones i got to take like the super charismatic marvel actors and do uh robert downey jr and now he's like who's left and i've done i've done most of the people we would want to do so it does feel like what is cool what is interesting about what you do is some of what you cover is news related so there's always something right to cover uh i'm trying to make a channel that could mostly be i've said it it's over like human interaction hasn't changed tremendously since 2018 so just refer to an old video and that is kind of how i feel of what i've said i'm sure there's some more that could be added around the edges but i am not the guy i feel like that has it anymore i really said my piece in that domain so i wanted to step aside and learn how to be a good boss a good trainer all those sorts of things rather than being the content guy and what about now do people look for like uh do your people look for what's in the news and be like all right we got this new rising star we got the weekend what's cool about them oh no that's that's oh my gosh if you guys did island boys why people hate or love the island boys we i did a a video on the second channel on the island boys that was one of our most viewed videos in the first like three to four days on the second channel so these on the island boys i've seen a photo of them that's all that i know about them yeah i don't know i don't know anything about the island boys so you gotta start tonight that's your next viral video i want but i want you to make this video oh yeah i i happen please please if you trust charlie is it going to happen no there's no way there's no way it's going to happen what if you trust me on this one i said it's going to get a million views you can almost guarantee if you told me he's going to get 10 million views i wouldn't do it i have enough views i have enough money charlie is literally i i realize this you are the exact opposite of crap you guys are so similar but completely obviously you know when you are completely detached from views and money you are extremely attached to views of money you got to be the bottom line someone's gotta do it well jack told me he said and i think we have this in common he said that graham's the type of person who like only does what he wants and what he wants to do is work related stuff and i'm the same way except work related stuff doesn't make it into my only wants to do category yeah uh but yeah so why not do it because the prize is a thing of which i already have more than can make me happy uh i think part of like the process was and i there was a time where i would have been like oh jumping yeah exactly but i'm sure i really am curious for you um do you still have goals because what i found is like my first goal was say a hundred thousand and then a million and i just watched the goal posts get moved while my satisfaction with the completion of those goals did not rise and so i got i got turned off to the whole process of trying to grow past a certain point of enough which for me was like i can cover my rent i'm not worried about food and uh i don't sweat it when we go out to to eat or something like that that's actually like the amount of money that i would i definitely want to work to have yeah um but yeah i'm curiou that's is that ring true or not really no no i just enjoy it i would say there i've this was a good week for me i've had a good week um yeah no i i would say it's sometimes like day by day some days i'm like i just don't feel like doing anything but i do it anyway because i've kept the schedule i don't want to break the schedule uh but then other times like this week there's so much like i feel like there's so much new happening in the markets that like i was so excited yeah to be able to make a video and like post it and like i'm really proud of these videos and i just i just love doing it so um yeah i don't know probably 80 percent of the time it's just i that's just what i want to do good i just i really enjoy it and then 20 is like that's part of the grind yeah i can't miss an upload i'm going to post something today what can i talk about that makes sense i guess do you feel like your drive to do it these days is more joy-driven or anxiety-driven meaning you're trying to avoid the anxiety of not doing it or there's a joy of the creative process that you want i enjoy the creative process and i like i like having that schedule and sticking with it i i think i take a lot of personal pride in the fact that uh i don't miss uploads yeah man if people for now but i i know i'm sure at some point that'll change sure yeah yeah and and i think i there was a time for me where it was joy driven i'm and there of course there's always a balance of like oh i'm nervous that i don't want this thing to fall apart but there was a uh discovering that was going on when i was like more learning the stuff doing the people i was most interested in and that phase ran its course for me and then it became the reason that i'm doing this is because i'm anxious about losing what i've built and at that point i uh was like okay i need to go find something that genuinely sparks my creative juice even if i suck at it even if it doesn't make money because i did charisma for five years before i made a dime and i'm willing to do dungeons and dragons or explore psychedelics and open a clinic for five ten years because it's it's what i like to do uh and then maybe there will be money at the end of that because i'll have become one of the people in the world that is most fascinated most obsessed that's kind of what i've realized is that i monetized my obsession and then i and then the obsession died and so trying to keep that thing going would just uh defeat the purpose of why i did it in the first place which was to be free to choose how i spent my time that's good yeah i like that see this is easy man it's not bad birds of a feather wow jack told me he's like graham is going to get you on that house he said graham is going to hear he's talking about it so one thing graham would get you on that you mentioned to me when i went and visited your house is the fact that you said when you're making like five grand a month 60 grand a year you already hired someone to do your laundry oh yeah well this is do you not have this i actually think if you're interested in making more and growing i think you'd benefit tremendously from this so he told me that your team is like almost nobody you guys don't have virtual assistants you process your own refunds do i why don't you have a virtual assistant for what uh to to make sure that your brain isn't going away from the valuable things that you do that you're uniquely capable of so like doing your own laundry processing refunds that's time where your brain what i found i don't know if this is like you is that it's not when i'm sitting in front of the computer it's that like slow churn time which can be interrupted with stupid tasks that people can do for 15 an hour and if when you outsource that my output got a lot better and went through the roof and i started yeah i don't know i feel like my system work i mean i think it works and it's like if it works why you know why try to fix something uh so in a sense because really my workload hasn't changed that much it's a lot of the same stuff i feel like you know i got alex processing refunds uh you know the most i can think of is someone to go through my emails but even then it's like usually in a day there's only maybe two things that that are even worth responding to and those are things that i just need to respond to anyway sure yeah so we had i guess we had a lot more customer service things we had editing which i didn't want to necessarily be involved in uh and your business might be different what i found is that for us my the thing that i was uniquely good at was writing the videos i was not uniquely good at responding to emails doing laundry uh preparing my own food any of that stuff and so when i spent money to free up more of my time we made a lot more money um and that that worked well for me and the added benefit of i don't do laundry make my own food like i'm it's there's something wrong with it two degree because i've become totally dependent upon other people to function uh like a normal person like i wouldn't know where to find the detergent to do my own laundry these days um but that it has actually wound up being in you know special helping me specialize more and do the things that are most valuable to the business when i'm working on the business and these days i've taken more time away from the business yeah i don't know i try to keep things simple the only thing i would i would think about is hiring a uh hiring a uh someone to cook food and bring in like do that like three times a week you'll love it um yeah i'm gonna respect macy on this she's very like she doesn't want to do that and she's like i want to be the one to to cook the food this is kind of i'm like well then you know but but that would free up your time like a match if you could get an extra video a week uh so you know what it's like it does it doesn't make that much of a difference someone else is doing it yeah yeah i mean my yeah my preference would be give her the time back and just have have a professional coming three times a week yeah but to me it's you know if she's happier the other way i don't and that's the thing if you're if you truly deeply enjoy cooking laundry emails processing refunds anything do it i don't want to i don't want to take anyone away from the things that uh that they really love doing but if they feel that they ought to or that it's a poor use of money i have found that one ought to it doesn't make any sense and in terms of poor use of money usually there's a handful of if you were to like put the value of your time on the different tasks that you're doing you find that there's a huge thousand next discrepancy between some of the things and that that was helpful for us yeah i i agree with that i could probably be a little bit better about a few of those things but make sense yeah what else am i not going to like jack um well when we're talking about your numbers specifically uh the way that you're investing or not investing that's yeah we could yeah we could get into that sure uh i don't like the not investing yeah well this is this i actually this is an area where i would love to learn more because i am i think the other areas i've thought about a lot and i like my philosophy my my investing is like i'm ignorant i don't know a ton about it i never thought that i would have any money saved and now that i do i'm not super sure of it so here's what i've done i probably have 40 to 50 percent of my net worth in cash come on get me down i'm ready to go oh my god you're lucky right now you're not lucky right now we're not we're only down to where we were like five months ago yeah so unless all of your cash is in the last five months you've lost a ton of money yeah how long you've been cash for uh for as long as i've had money which is i mean we started making it a couple of years ago oh come on why i don't know anything about it i've never i've never learned oh yeah so you're telling me outsource this outsource that you have an outsourced you're investing exactly yeah that's costing you more money than i guarantee every other thing that you've outsourced yes well you know you might be right um i think in terms of the income generating i've probably stopped that so this is an area that is important i've i have outsourced some of it to ivan who runs the business and i actually best thing i ever did was like what's a cryptocurrency here's twenty thousand dollars will you buy some cryptos for me yes and he crushed it he crushed it this was two and a half years ago like and how much is it now uh he bought me 25 eth or something like that and you've just you've just held yeah i don't touch anything i don't touch anything um he bought me an east he bought me a bitcoin he bought me a like i've you know i was like oh cool and then he gave me a nano and said don't lose this these are so i've got that um so yeah that was a good that was a good outsource that i did back in a few years ago um but yeah i've got a i've got a retirement thing i've been putting in stuff into my sep and uh other than that i have a lot of cash on the side how much cash five five years of savings well for me it's two million dollars we donate it's we do donate a decent amount of charity so it could be it's no it's not a few million dollars it's like half a million dollars is 40 50 of my net worth i would ex okay where's the other 50 uh i bought the mortgage on my parents house okay uh should charge rent there i know i could get it no but i've elected not to um they're great tenants uh so yeah but they they'd paid 75 percent of it for the long time i started getting money i wanted to to help with that and then some of it is just in that retirement fund someone went to the crypto that i described there's a handful of random investments some of them are psychedelic related so like i mentioned i'm super interested in the future psychedelics um some of them might be confidential so you might have to leave them some of them are confidential so i have to leave them a bit vague but uh invested in uh startups and things that are related to that and those are like 100 that's like a hundred thousand dollar investment i got an opportunity i think i can say this to invest in spacex early um so bought just took a flyer on that for like 25 uh and it's a it's you add all that up it comes out to my net worth about a mill about jake yeah okay yeah it's just a lot to be spending on rent relative but it is you're able to you're writing that off right so it's uh only 60 because i'm not i'm not it's a huge house and i can't it's like it's got a lot of and this is a frustration with it's like i don't need this big of a master bedroom i just wish this could be office space yeah uh but yeah so like roughly 20 of the houses area that i use for sets and those sorts of things but the rest is not got it yeah that's expensive it's legit expensive yeah well i would encourage you to begin trickling that so of the 500 000 let's just say keep 50 50 to 100 000 in cash and then the other 400 000 trickle it in the markets probably over the next six months set a plan over six months and not two years you think go faster two years i was thinking faster than six months oh my god six months no i think if he's waited five years now he's not waiting for that dip yeah i i there's there's nothing i could say that would make you dump it all in the morning 100 oh to be clear actually there is there is it's it's not because i'm stubborn it's because i don't think okay my thought which i'm totally open to amending is you should have enough money for a couple of years in pure cash no a couple of years is that success usually usually six to 12 months max that's about as much as you would need i got because you got plenty to fall back on and and uh the chance of like the business going belly up and you not being able to pay your rent and all this stuff it's chances are if that even happens a year of runway is more than enough time to find out another plan got it i mean i'm 100 totally down to do that to take to to set a much lower threshold and then what just put it into s p 500. yeah or you could do what might be better it's just a total stock market index fund that way you're not just concentrated in tech but you're encompassing everything maybe like two three thousand companies what do you think about and this is uh what do you think about china alibaba tencent that kind of risky yeah because you don't really own the company itself so the stock is like you're buying a stock in a holding company so you know there's some it's a big risk a big reward um to me it's too risky if you were to invest 10 percent of it i was just curious fine well i guess the broader question is you mentioned uh a lot of like the u.s stock market do i need world exposure do i need different you could you could yeah so there so there's two trains of thought one is that the us has dominated for quite some time and that's probably going to continue the other train of thought is well international markets are catching up pretty quick and they might have more growth so you know it's it's either one it could really pan out what i've done is is allocated from my index funds about 10 to 20 with international stocks and just an international uh index fund that's it i so you could just say i legit will probably i will tell either you take a note if you want yeah what i what i would do if it were me i i'd probably if you want a safe approach is like 80 in a total stock market index fund and 20 with international yeah that if that were my hundred grand that's probably what i would do um you know it is very safe i like it i like safe but if you want riskier you could you could put five ten percent in crypto bitcoin i've got 10 crypto on account of ivan's uh purchasing he could just leave that alone or you could put five to ten percent in and fund speculative companies like the alibaba neo and stuff like that that might do really well or it might just go to zero yeah i i think the chance of those companies being de-listed is pretty small but you never know yeah it's a risk dude i'm i'm totally game for this and this is this is an area where i uh confess near total ignorance and disinterest so i do need to and you're dead right outsource it because i'm not going to be the guy that learns this stuff and manages my own money but the good news is you've already learned it that's that's you're done that's it yeah there's not much to it it really is if you literally just said all right for every hundred dollars i earn 80 bucks goes into the total stock market 20 goes into the international and you do that for 50 years yeah you know what's so silly is that i have done this in lump sums and it's it speaks to just i guess human behavior is that i haven't set it up on an autopilot so like i took care of this one point a while back and then just left it yeah i just need it yeah i need it recurringly established which is probably just going to these platforms and saying take action yeah there's everything yeah yeah most platforms at this point have auto invest so you could just say you know every month i want uh 10 grand to be divvied up this way 80 20. that's it and you don't even think about it every month it'll be invested or every week that's it i got rich on this podcast dude i got real maybe the market drops i should have stayed in cash he got 50. i was waiting to deploy and waiting for this imagine we dip more than more than the prices were five years ago and then he's like i would have just made out bank right now i knew i was saving for a reason so i'm not the next chance i'm not an expert on this but there was something when the economy like or the stock market boom during corona i was like it's fake and and that i know that's kind of a like a crow magnet approach to it but it does seem weird that the stock market goes parabolic while productivity doesn't no because yes and no in hindsight you could look back no that's fake but in a moment and even still now you could consider that well how much money was printed into the economy a lot of money what was it uh was it 40 40 yeah so you could look at that objectively and be like all right 40 more currency went into the market people use that money to invest in the market and now it's there so that justifies the price going up and that doesn't reflect a gain in real productivity that just reflects this dollar is going to be inflated if you don't keep it in the market so just just to keep pace yeah so it's like instead of seeing inflation necessarily in the price of your your bread you're seeing inflation in the price of the stock market because that's where the money's going yeah so it's impossible to really quantify how much was really caused by that how much it's going to go down is this the new normal is it going to stay like we have no clue yeah i got it i'm set i'm rich guy that's it i thought your fear was that this was all about this was all sham china was gonna take over well well oh no so though well yeah i can i can pick something are you familiar with like ray dollar has been a yeah a pretty big uh china bull uh for a long time has talked about sort of the end of the u.s empire yeah he's been saying that for a long time yes uh it seems to be that am i do you think that is eventually going to happen like maybe in our lifetimes yeah i think they're i think they're a huge market and it seems as though uh a lot of overseas markets are like that's even bigger than the us and their demand is even bigger than the us i would not be surprised if that continues um can they be as innovative as the us and can they and can they create um create more than what we can here maybe probably i don't know to what extent though yeah so i i'm thinking you know the us is is so far proven but i think there's more potential overseas it's just we don't know yeah that's the way i see it i think they're just as likely to do to do as well but you know you're taking a bit of a risk that it's a little bit less you know proven sure so far yeah and i think it even to my concern that you know if let's just say that my hypothesis that the u.s is the it is a bubble and all of this stuff is over-inflated that doesn't mean that my money ought to be on the sidelines it means that it maybe should be in the european market or somewhere else but not sitting yeah i mean probably anything's better than sitting but you have a 66 chance so far i mean that's what it's been like if you dumped it all into the market at once 66 of the time you'll make more money than dollar cost averaging right so yeah yeah but dollar cost averaging is going to it's going to lower the exchange it's going to lower the volatility right got it yeah and that's what i want but two out of three times you'll make more money just saying all right today i'm gonna put it all in i think i i can't remember over the period i think it was like 10 to 20 years yeah and that's more money doing it and that's the other thing is i don't want to need or touch any of this money for ever you know i do plan like there's there's things that are changing in the business but i'm not planning on completely having my income go to zero and if it did you'd see a lot of activity for me and other fields doing other things yeah the goal is to leave it in there and not need it touch it for a long time yeah part of it and part of it to just mentally just assume the second you invest it everything's going to drop fifty percent so i don't even i don't care just even assume fifty percent's gone anything that that drops you know less than that it's a win yeah exactly no if money is stressing this is i don't know i've noticed in some ways i've been more stressed with more money and that's what i've tried to guard against when i had no money i couldn't lose any and the market went down i didn't care and i was already sleeping on ben's floor and so like it couldn't get worse than that so i want to make sure that i don't become one of the people that has a lot of money and is stressed about the fluctuations of the market when it's like you're better off than you were 10 years ago but you're mentally screwed every time and i hear people like freaking out about this most recent tip that are losing their mind uh and definitely don't want to be not even it's not even that bad of a drop i mean ten percent i know i mean yeah yeah some people may be struggling some people some people might put your initiative it depends what you're invested in if you're invested in an index fund it's 10 and it's like you know yeah but if you're invested in uh other companies jack i know a guy remember remember i was going to pay jack 300 to sell out of one stock that we don't have to name here and robin hood robin hood had he and i was going to pay him to sell robinhood and he didn't do it i'm bullish on it well maybe it's worth another 20 yeah it's just so clumsy so not only would he have saved money that 30 days would have been up you would have been able to buy back in at a lower price and profit 300 and then this dip probably would not have happened no and then you could have affected the macro economy exactly in america we'd all be better off if you would have taken the 300. yeah it's odd the moment jack bought in robin i was telling him don't buy in it's going to drop don't do it bought in it dropped it just plummeted when i listened to you you know what i'm reminded of the way that i uh my video game seems like your stocks like it to me like do you do you matter if he buys or doesn't buy it you just seem very interested in like it does it matters because as soon as he buys it it always goes down well he's superstitious i am okay okay so you got superstition to me it does matter okay so it is not just like i like to play the game and and you know optimize the dials this is important to my future every time jack buys something it goes down every single time yeah every time but i poke his buttons because i'm not superstitious whatsoever so if i see him buying a stock i'm gonna buy it it bothers me so purposely i do i now have to buy socks and secret so he won't buy them because i know if he buys them they're going to go down he didn't tell me he was buying robin hood when i bought it i just looked over his shoulder and saw him and i got toying around like frantically looking at him like jack please just just wait to buy this no like i went in really heavy for me and the loss is proportional to how much jack invests oh yeah you're just like the anti yeah rabbit's foot yeah got it as soon as he sells that's the thing it's the whole thing we're not selling we need this think of them how about this what if i had vlad call you it's a jack cell sell robin hood yes i would sell he would yeah i would sell who's your i'm at the point no it's virtually nothing i wonder if we could make this happen can you get him on the podcast vlad yeah i don't think he would tell me to sell robin you know what [Laughter] his own company that would be hilarious if we got vlad on the podcast that would be viral jack imagine that hey like the next day they they introduce crypto wallets they put you know shiba inu on there their stock just like finally have a good net income yeah they turn profitable don't do it stand strong yeah it's about principal diamond hands i bet we i bet we might be able to get him on the podcast i would love to yeah yeah it would be a bit of a controversial episode yeah because people hate him well i don't want to say they they hate him some people just like him it's it's it's very easy on the internet to like to gang up on somebody and just automatic i don't like them yeah so and i'm not like you know people people didn't think that you know defending him or like oh graham's part of the suits he's uh you know i don't care but like objectively people you know it's in some of the internet comments there's uh they assume that i have a lot more control over the world than i do that i'm like part of i've seen on occasion some comments that intimate that i have uh i don't know that i'm part of some elite group of people that that is uh making videos for any other purpose than just to get views and sell my course that it's actually some you know that you would have influence over robin hood for instance being in the same vein of thing that you would be related to that somehow because you're a finance youtuber that they would contact you and then pay you to say nice things about them i think that people overestimate uh the amount of people trying to influence what i say it's it's zero yeah yeah like donald that was that was it yeah donald trump his people must have gotten in touch with chris oh yeah what no nobody no nobody gets a what i say i was actually hoping that uh the democrats would reach out to me when they saw that video didn't happen wow yeah it didn't happen they didn't they didn't want my strategy i had a good one i was ready what would have been the strategy oh it would have been like it would have been uh so hillary at the time this is 2016. was leaning very heavily on uh her story and it was like very leaning heavily on the fact that she was a woman and i think barack obama set the example which is he was a black man who became president but did not run on being the first black president that was not his his mantra and i think for hillary it was much more what she drove at uh her her attacks on donald trump at the time were she sort of bought into his frame if you it's been a long time but if you remember back to the election donald trump framed himself as an outsider as you know that he was going to come and drain the swamp and hillary instead of going why the heck would you want an outsider like i was there when osama bin laden was killed i've done this job better than other people i've got years and years of experience this guy only has failed hotel chains she said you know who could be more of an outsider than me the first female president which was just totally uh an unbelievable claim to make that you hillary clinton who lived in the white house are an outsider so she bought into the framing of what makes a good president that donald trump had set up and if she had instead said i'm going to set the frame for what makes a good president someone with experience someone who is serious someone who doesn't you know call other people names and that's that's how i'm going to do things i think she would have had a much much better chance of yeah so what have you noticed with trump because you because you were mentioning frame setting and that is something i i actually never even thought about until you mentioned that that he could go in with a narrative and other people feed into that yeah i think unconsciously even if they don't want to feed into it they end up doing that which i think is really interesting he was he dictated the terms immigration became an issue why no one else was talking about it no one else cared when he talked about that we need a strong leader and jeb is weak everyone rushed to prove how tough they were instead of like why are why is this guy dictating the rules of the game because when you think about it a president what makes a good president well in 2016 donald trump got to decide for the entire field and he picked things where he would excel and everyone else just reacted to it so yeah a lot less reactivity to his campaign and a lot more and this is what people have you know joe biden actually won on this um but i think standing for something would have done much better for uh hillary and framing it you know about the experience thing that we talked about would have been a much better call joe biden was very reactive to donald trump and just kind of ran as the i'm not donald trump candidate that actually worked out for him yeah and i think probably could work out again given given his success and how many people learn to hate him over the course of his time in office that's fascinating would you would you ever run for president no no no no no it's worse job ever i would never you wouldn't no even if someone just said all right you can i don't have to campaign fix our problems i mean you've heard you've heard my work ethic i think i'd be a poor president i don't outsource it hire a virtual assistant like take care of this meeting my yeah my team my crack team no that's i would definitely not want to i the white house would be in malibu yes exactly landlords i want to if i do things in the future like i said i would be to uh have a like psychedelic trauma treatment clinic i think is something run a dnd show and potentially a video game studio one day but those are all nice to haves definitely not politics and what's like the the time horizon on those uh when possible oh asap no no uh so we're actually i mean we're gonna be putting a d and d show up within the next couple of weeks that's going up if you guys are in town you want to hop in for a game you guys are welcome you want to do some dnd graham i'm not good have you ever tried i i've i've watched it done you've never done it though yeah no it's it's it's so weird and it's like what what is this ridiculous make-believe game that these 34 year olds are playing i i get it it's uh i just love it i have a great time with it and so to sort of the friends that i play with but we've got that show coming up uh in a few weeks hopefully so that'll be out psychedelic center time frame when it's legal they're legalizing it in oregon mushrooms at least will be legal within two to four years ketamine is being legalized all over the u.s i am a big fan of for treatment mdma for post you can have what is it ptsd all sorts of things are are well done anxieties i find and often hidden anxieties things that i didn't know that i had i'd be really curious if you took mdma what you'd get out of it you wouldn't like it because you'd come out you wouldn't be working as hard wow any potential to change or alter my mind yeah no i have no desire yeah and it does it if it works it it takes away edge for a lot of people it takes away the um and it not like the chip on the shoulder the drive that this because it it forces you to answer some of the questions like why this edge why this thing um which i've appreciated but i totally respect people don't want to do it yeah i have to put it into your drink secretly it should be kicking in any moment so thank you so much for coming on i really appreciate it and thank you guys for watching make sure before you leave subscribe hit the like button make sure to get your free stock down below in the description sign up for public but more importantly subscribe thank you guys so much for watching thank you and until next time thanks guys uh really quick can i have you look in the camera yes