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

Summary

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Podcast Summary: The Iced Coffee Hour

Episode: America’s $37 Trillion Financial Reset Just Started – Do This Now!

Guest: Andrei Jikh
Hosts: Graham Stephan, Jack Selby
Date: October 12, 2025

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Overview

This episode dives deep into the shifting landscape of global finance, inflation, asset classes, and the future of Bitcoin amid what Andrei Jikh describes as a “$37 trillion financial reset.” The discussion tackles pressing current events in crypto, explores practical investing philosophy, and touches on broader issues like U.S. quality of life, healthcare, and definitions of wealth and happiness.

Tone: Candid, energetic, sometimes nerdy, and genuinely reflective, marked by honest admissions of mistakes and “what ifs” from all three speakers.

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Key Discussion Points

1. The State and Future of Bitcoin

• Bitcoin’s Role (Store of Value vs. Medium of Exchange):

  • Ongoing “war for the soul of Bitcoin” (00:44, 12:52).
    • In 2017, it was about block sizes and whether BTC should be digital cash or a store of value.
    • In 2025, the new divide is: Bitcoin as money vs. as a store of (all kinds of) information.

• Potential Attacks on Bitcoin’s Integrity:

  • “The best way to really attack bitcoin is not a solar flare. We can't induce a solar flare. ... The best way to do it is to destroy it from within.” – Andrei Jikh (18:48)
  • Rehypothecation risk: ETFs and multiple claims on single coins could suppress price (11:13).

• Tech Debates:

  • “Op_return” debate: Increasing transaction byte limit could make BTC programmable, allow NFTs, but risks bloat and illegal content (21:39–24:31).
  • Most in the community and prominent investors (Michael Saylor, etc.) prefer to keep Bitcoin strictly as economic data.

• Predictions:

  • “I think in the next few weeks there's going to be a huge wealth transfer.” – Andrei Jikh (01:24, 25:49)
  • Long-term slow melt-up to $1 million per BTC by 2030, provided current trends continue (42:16).

2. Investment Philosophies and Strategies

• Risk, Asymmetry, and Diversification:

  • “If you really believe this thing is going to 1,000x, don't put your entire life savings into it. Put in a smaller amount.” – Andrei Jikh (35:17)

• Portfolio Allocations:

  • Andrei: 30–35% Bitcoin, rest in real estate, cash, stocks, some collectibles (33:05, 36:25).
  • Graham and Jack: Both stress risk management and skepticism toward altcoins and over-diversification.

• Biggest Wins and Mistakes:

  • Best investment: Bitcoin.
    • “The best investment, definitely. By far. Bitcoin. By far. … Not even close.” – Andrei Jikh (36:32)
  • Worst: Real estate (lower returns vs. stocks, S&P, etc.) and early panic sells in crypto (Dogecoin and drone anecdote) (07:41–08:45).

• The Importance of Delayed Gratification:

  • “It’s just their ability to project into the future and see that there’s an older version of themselves that is grateful for their younger self saving and investing money and delaying that gratification.” – Andrei Jikh (92:00)

3. Comparing Asset Classes: Bitcoin, Gold, Real Estate, NFTs

• Gold vs. Bitcoin:

  • Gold’s new popularity among younger generations for price action, but Andrei argues gold isn’t truly finite (risk of asteroid mining, lab synthesis) (31:32–32:47).
  • Gold has matched Berkshire Hathaway’s performance over 25 years, raising questions about “smart” investing vs. simply holding a “shiny rock” (74:20–76:39).

• ETFs and Diversification:

  • Debate on future crypto ETFs (top 10 coins). Majority of crypto returns have come from BTC and ETH; diversified baskets mainly benefit ETF issuers (45:20–47:12).

• NFTs and Collectibles:

  • “They just—the fad died out, right? … People didn’t know what to do with their money ... it was just boredom from sitting at home” – Andrei Jikh on NFT bubble (50:01–51:07)
  • NFTs may return as digital ownership/utilities (e.g., concert tickets) rather than speculative art (51:07–54:23).
  • Andrei’s $150–200K Pokémon card set: “You can’t find that set. My set is one of 11 known to exist.” (80:29–82:11)

4. The U.S. Economy and Quality of Life

• Bullish on U.S. Investment, Skeptical on Quality of Life:

  • “From an investment perspective, I think the United States is still far and away the best country to live and make money in and invest in. But from a quality of life perspective, … I think this is not the best country...” – Andrei Jikh (59:07, 70:16–70:47)
  • Cites Switzerland for quality of life, healthcare, and longevity.

• Healthcare Rant and Comparison:

  • U.S. healthcare described as inefficient and symptom-driven (61:04–65:36).
  • Andrei details full-body diagnostics in Thailand for ~$1,000, faster, better, and comprehensive (62:53–64:48).

• Money Printing and Inflation:

  • Printing benefits asset holders (wealthy) more than wage earners (middle/lower class) (97:13–98:00).
  • Money printer allows unfettered government spending, particularly on wars (99:42–100:43).

• Rise of China:

  • “Some of the car brands and the features and the price … none of our companies would compete or be able to hold a candle to these products.” – Andrei Jikh (56:52–58:09)
  • U.S. manufacturing limits, advantage due to Chinese regulatory environment and R&D “borrowing.”

5. Life, Happiness, and the Meaning of Wealth

• Wealth as ‘Enough’:

  • “Have enough to do anything you want with, but not too much to where you want to do nothing.” – Andrei Jikh (115:53)
  • Debate over “the perfect amount”: $2-10m for Andrei/Jack, $50m for Graham.

• Materialism and Motivation:

  • Graham enjoys the pursuit as much as attainment (“edging” on buying a car, searching for rare property) (122:17–123:44).
  • “The difference or the delta between their reality in expectation [defines happiness].” – Andrei Jikh (120:25)

• Routines and Simple Pleasures:

  • Jack: “I have very few, like, desires. … What I really love doing … is work throughout the day, see my friends, eat some good food, play pickleball at night. That’s all I want.” (126:28)

• Advice for the Young:

  • Importance of “escape velocity” via savings, learning, effort.
  • “Think of what everyone else is doing, and then don’t do that.” – Alex Becker wisdom cited (102:58–103:13)

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Memorable Quotes & Segments

• On Bitcoin’s Inherent Strength:

  • “The fundamental rules of bitcoin have never been changed ... What makes bitcoin so cool is the game theory aspect of it.” – Andre Jikh (18:48)

• On the Wealth Transfer:

  • “In the next few weeks there’s going to be a huge wealth transfer.” – Andre Jikh (01:24, 25:49)

• On Investing Big Wins & Regrets:

  • “So that drone was about $750,000.” – Graham Stephan, reflecting on Andrei’s early BTC sale (07:41)

• On Asset Performance:

  • “A shiny rock was able to outperform some of the smartest minds in the world.” – Andre Jikh on gold and Warren Buffett (76:27)

• Delaying Gratification:

  • “The most important investing quality ... is their ability to delay gratification.” – Andre Jikh (92:00)

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Highlighted Timestamps

• Bitcoin's Soul & 2025 Upgrades: 00:44, 12:52, 21:39–25:49
• Andrei’s Bitcoin Investment Story: 06:45–07:41
• Dogecoin Regrets: 07:50–08:45
• Rehypothecation & ETF Risks: 11:13–12:29
• Comparing Gold, Bitcoin, and Asset Classes: 29:30–32:47, 74:20–76:39
• NFTs & Collectibles: 50:01–54:23, 80:29–82:11
• Healthcare & U.S. System: 61:04–65:36
• Quality of Life, Switzerland vs. U.S.: 59:32–65:36, 70:16
• Perfect Amount of Money Discussion: 115:53–124:08

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Conclusion

The episode offers an in-depth look at how today's macro shifts affect individual investing, financial security, and day-to-day life. Whether you’re seeking practical strategies, macro context, or simply candid banter on the pitfalls and privileges of chasing wealth, Andrei, Graham, and Jack weave together expertise, hard-won lessons, and philosophical musings in a style that’s both engaging and insightful.

Notable Takeaway:
There’s no magic number or asset. True financial confidence stems as much from education, risk management, and delayed gratification as from market timing or luck. Stay skeptical, diversify wisely, and remember the journey is as important as the goal.

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Transcript

[Andre Jikh]

I'm no tech genius, but I knew if I wanted my business to crush it, I needed a website. Now, thankfully, bluehost made it easy. I customized, optimized and monetized everything exactly how I wanted with AI. In minutes, my site was up. I couldn't believe it. The search engine tools even helped me get more site visitors. Whatever your passion project is, you can set it up with Bluehost. With their 30 day money back guarantee. What do you got to lose? Head to bluehost.com that's B L-U-E-H-O-S-T.com to start. Now, I think it's true that now more than ever there is more economic opportunity to make money. Do you think that bitcoin's price is.

[Graham Stephan]

Manipulated right now probably just because you see these insane swings?

[Andre Jikh]

Well, in 2025, there's another war for the soul of bitcoin. There's a fight between two groups of people. One that's trying to say, is bitcoin money or is it a store of information? There's a lot of nuance to this debate, but in the end, I think this will determine the future of bitcoin.

[Jack]

What would you say is the best investing advice you've ever heard?

[Andre Jikh]

I think like the most important investing quality of people that I've seen that have built wealth is like their ability to delay gratification. You eventually realize that the quickest way to being financially free isn't necessarily by building a bigger portfolio, but knowing what's going to happen next.

[Graham Stephan]

Are you bullish or bearish for the U.S. economy?

[Andre Jikh]

I think in the next few weeks there's going to be a huge wealth transfer. Foreign.

[Jack]

Stefan, Andre Jick, thank you so much for coming on the Iced coffee Hour. Really appreciate it.

[Andre Jikh]

Thank you for having me. Vegas Graham here. I try to copy all your content. Thank you.

[Graham Stephan]

Huge fan of your channel, by the way.

[Andre Jikh]

Thank you. I try to do exactly the same style videos as you, but slightly better on the editing.

[Graham Stephan]

You basically take my exact same videos but then do them a day later with way better editing.

[Andre Jikh]

Yeah, I have ChatGPT, sort of repurpose your script and then I'll shuffle them into my own words.

[Graham Stephan]

It's working. You have now almost 3 million subscribers.

[Andre Jikh]

Thank you. Thank you.

[Graham Stephan]

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

[Andre Jikh]

No, I appreciate. Funny, because I'm trying to move away from the editing. I don't know if you're noticing it too, but I feel like the less edited it is, the more it's received. Like, I think people appreciate it more when it's less produced. I think YouTube is going back to that.

[Graham Stephan]

I've tried it a few times, and those videos have done really well. But I'm not sure if it's because of the lack of editing or because I saved the lack of editing for really substantial videos that stand on their own without the editing.

[Andre Jikh]

That's a good point. And then every time you do them, I feel like the comments are like, graham, you look tired.

[Graham Stephan]

It's always when I'm sitting in that chair. People say that. But when I go back to my. It's just lighting.

[Andre Jikh]

I think it's a closer camera. So you look puffier, and you just look bigger on this lens.

[Jack]

Yeah. I love this conversation. Graham looks puffier on the lens. Andre, thank you so much for coming on the ice.

[Graham Stephan]

Thanks for the hour.

[Jack]

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

[Andre Jikh]

Right.

[Jack]

Do you think that we've missed the train on bitcoin still?

[Andre Jikh]

No, not at all. Wasn't I, like, the second guest on your podcast?

[Jack]

You were one of the very first guests we've ever had.

[Andre Jikh]

I remember that. You gave me the Pokemon cards and I got the psychic energy. I remember that now. We're back.

[Graham Stephan]

Yeah.

[Andre Jikh]

No, yeah. It's crazy. I do remember that. 20,000 was the peak of that cycle in 2017. Was it?

[Graham Stephan]

Yep.

[Andre Jikh]

Yeah.

[Graham Stephan]

No, and then we did again in 2020.

[Andre Jikh]

That's right. Yeah. No, and it's crazy to see it at over 100 now. What do you guys think? You think we've peaked?

[Jack]

Michael Saylor would disagree. He would say that we're just getting started here. I tend to agree also. You know, we just had Robert Kiyosaki on the podcast, and that did Instill a little bit of fear when he's like, fake money, fake money holding up like the dollar bill. Because it does make sense.

[Andre Jikh]

He's a huge fan of bitcoin. Right.

[Jack]

He loves bitcoin. He loves gold, he loves silver. He loves assets when you can't just print more of them and what's interest, you can.

[Graham Stephan]

We were talking about bitcoin and I said, are you still buying bitcoin? And he said, no.

[Andre Jikh]

Hmm.

[Graham Stephan]

And I said, well, give us a price target. How is it at a hundred thousand? And he goes like this. I kid you not implying that retail investors are being dragged along. Oh, he likes. Instead, he said silver, gold and ethereum.

[Andre Jikh]

Interesting.

[Graham Stephan]

And he's not buying Bitcoin at $100,000 levels.

[Andre Jikh]

Okay.

[Graham Stephan]

Which is interesting. I thought he would continue to be buying bitcoin given his stance on the dollar.

[Andre Jikh]

Yeah. From what I've seen silver and platinum outperform and gold outperform bitcoin this year for sure. Maybe he's right. I don't know. I think bitcoin has a long way to go. I think I've always looked at bitcoin's final price to be inflation divided by 21 million. And what's inflation? That's infinity. Right. Like infinity divided by 21 million is infinity, essentially. And it seems to be the fastest horse in the race. So I think it'll continue to go up. It might dip below $100,000, though. I wouldn't be surprised.

[Jack]

Are you still buying bitcoin right now?

[Andre Jikh]

Yeah. Actually, the last time I bought it was a couple weeks ago. I bought it at like 115,000. I just bought the Ibit ETF. I know that you've been buying it.

[Graham Stephan]

Yep.

[Andre Jikh]

Yeah. So I've just bought the iBit. But most of my bitcoin is in the commodity itself, the coin. I self custody.

[Jack]

So you do the cold storage.

[Andre Jikh]

Yeah.

[Jack]

If you're going to do cold storage in bitcoin, what's the best way of doing it?

[Andre Jikh]

There's just so many devices to do it. Get yourself a ledger or whatever it else is. Not sponsored. You can get so many hardware devices and then look into something called a 25th passphrase. It's sort of a plausible deniability wallet that allows you to create sort of a duplicate of your wallet. So if somebody, like attacks you, you'd be like, okay, here's my seed phrase. But you have a secret wallet. That's just one more word on top of that, where you're. Where your actual money is stored. It's called a plausible deniability wallet. It's actually really cool.

[Jack]

That's interesting. So, for example, when those people, like, went over to Amaranth. Amaranth's house, and they were trying to, like, attack her and get her bitcoin away from her, she could have just said, oh, I have this code. And then it, like, looks like it's hers, but in actuality, that's just like a. A fake code.

[Andre Jikh]

Correct. You could do that. I mean, at that point, like, people always say, like, the five dollar wrench attack. Like, at that point, there's no amount of, like, cybersecurity. You can be like, oh, here's. Yeah. I mean, that's. That was an unfortunate thing that happened with her.

[Jack]

So when did you first buy bitcoin?

[Andre Jikh]

When did I first buy bitcoin? I want to say 2014, when it was $600 a coin.

[Jack]

How much bitcoin did you buy and why did you buy it?

[Andre Jikh]

I bought, like, six of them. And I bought it because I was reading. It was like this Internet magic, Internet money. And I remember reading about it when I was like, at $100. But there was no way of buying it unless you were super computer savvy. And then that's when. What exchange was it? The Mount Gox. Mount Gox? Yeah. And I was like, okay, I don't understand any of that stuff, but I remember buying it. I think it was on Coinbase. I bought six of them, and then I just held onto it for a year, totally forgot about it. And then I checked a year later in, like, I don't know, 2015, and it dropped to $300 a coin. So I sold all six of them to buy myself a DJI drone, which is like the 1080p DJI, whatever it was at the time. And I eventually crashed that drone. But, yeah, I sold it, basically all of it.

[Graham Stephan]

So that drone was about $750,000.

[Andre Jikh]

Yeah. Yeah. It was an expensive, like, learning mistake. But I feel like everyone has that story on bitcoin.

[Jack]

I mean, I told Graham to buy Dogecoin when it was less than half a century.

[Graham Stephan]

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

[Andre Jikh]

Wow.

[Graham Stephan]

I looked at it, and then the Next day I sold it for a loss.

[Jack]

I sold it the next day. Paper hands. He has paper hands.

[Graham Stephan]

So stupid.

[Andre Jikh]

What was it worth at the peak?

[Graham Stephan]

It would have been worth 220.

[Andre Jikh]

That's not as bad as me, but.

[Graham Stephan]

It would have been worth about $150,000. But dollar investment, which meant, and I told Jack this, I would have made more money from that single dogecoin investment than I would have from the podcast at the time.

[Andre Jikh]

That's crazy.

[Jack]

So I put a hundred dollars in dogecoin when it was about 0.4 cents.

[Andre Jikh]

Okay.

[Jack]

And then I held on I diamond hands for a very, very long time up until the night of the SNL thing, when Elon.

[Graham Stephan]

Literally. Yeah, yes.

[Jack]

And so I cashed out and then bought this exact Rolex with it. So we call this the Doge Licks.

[Andre Jikh]

That's amazing. Yeah. I remember pleading with you. I was like, dude, look into bit to get someone. You're like, ah, I don't know. Do you remember how opposed to bitcoin you were? Not that long ago.

[Graham Stephan]

20, late 2016 or early 2017 is when I made my first video about bitcoin. And that was bitcoin just hit $1,000. That's when I made my first video. You could go back on my channel and see.

[Andre Jikh]

Do you ever read the comments? They're like, oh, this age like milk.

[Graham Stephan]

All the time now in the.

[Jack]

In the video, the thing is age like milk, dude.

[Graham Stephan]

I wasn't for or against it. It was just. I was neutral about it. And at the time, there was no real use case. It was just people speculating on it. Like, it's not. It did not evolve back then to where it is today. It just is what it. It's just. It was a gambling mechanism back then. Now people have a vision for it. But back then it didn't have the utility or anything that it.

[Andre Jikh]

What changed your mind?

[Graham Stephan]

It hit 20,000. It hit 17,000, actually. And I bought one bitcoin for fun, just to see what it was about because everyone was talking about bitcoin and I bought it and then I started getting involved in all like the communities, reading through on Reddit and Twitter and crypto YouTube at the time, in 2017. And I had fun with it. But back then I started like just day trading it. So I would like buy it at 17. I would sell it for like 17 2. I'd buy back in at 16. 9. I just did that, right? And it made like 500 bucks. And then I put all of that into a project Called at the time, rye blocks.

[Andre Jikh]

Huh.

[Graham Stephan]

And that turned into 50 or 60 grand, and I didn't cash out and I lost all of it.

[Andre Jikh]

Wow, okay, so we all make mistakes. That's good.

[Graham Stephan]

But that's what turned me onto Bitcoin. And then I thought at that point, okay, there's no harm in just like investing 1% of my portfolio in Bitcoin.

[Andre Jikh]

Do you think that bitcoin's price is manipulated right now?

[Graham Stephan]

Probably.

[Andre Jikh]

Okay.

[Graham Stephan]

Probably just because you see these insane swings. Like, all of a sudden I'll check the price at midnight and it drops from like 100 to 109. Instantly somebody's selling, who is that? How is that manipulated? And then all of a sudden it'll jump right back up to like 112.

[Andre Jikh]

There's this concept called the rehypothecation. Have you guys heard of it?

[Graham Stephan]

No.

[Andre Jikh]

It's a mechanism to suppress Bitcoin's price. And it's probably happening on it. It's where a lender can essentially take the loan they give you and your collateral, and then they can use your collateral. Like, for example, if you're like, andre, I want to borrow a hundred dollars. I'm like, okay, here's $100. Okay. But in return, I'm going to have a claim over your house, whatever, right? That's the collateral. And then with that collateral, that iou, I go to another bank and I'm like, hey, I got this dude's house. That's my collateral. I'm going to borrow money against it. And then that lender goes and borrows against that. And then before you know it, it cascades. And now several people and several entities have a claim on the same asset. But now substitute house with Bitcoin, and now you can have five people essentially having a claim over the same coin. And I think that's happening with the ETFs to some degree or another. I don't think we'll know about it until later. But one way to solve that is to self custody. And that's why I think self custody is so important, because then you solve that. That's why I think, like, there could be a very violent price movement up.

[Jack]

And so when did you then buy Bitcoin? After this one instance of buying six coins, selling it to buy a drone that you crashed? I just want to keep reminding you of that because I feel bad because I've lost a lot of money in Robinhood call options.

[Andre Jikh]

Were you on a lot of Wall street bets?

[Jack]

Yeah, of course.

[Andre Jikh]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, Sorry. Ask that question again.

[Jack]

So when did you then next buy bitcoin after that?

[Andre Jikh]

Oh, 2017. That was during the block wars. I don't know if you guys were a part of that or remember that at all. That's right now kind of like the biggest thing that's happening in 2025. So I'm not going to get too into it. But in 2017, there was a fight for the soul of bitcoin. Right? And that was called the block wars. Essentially, people were split into two factions. 1/2 thought, well, what is bitcoin? One half wanted it to be a currency and the other half wanted it to be a store of value. So the currency people wanted the block size to be increased to like four megabytes. Okay, Right. It was originally like one. And the store of value people were like, well, let's keep it at one. Because if you allow bitcoin to become a currency which has a much higher TAM, or total addressable market size, currencies are much bigger than a commodity like gold. Right. It addresses a much bigger market. Okay, so if we allow bitcoin to become a currency and increase the block size, then eventually, like let's say five, ten years from now, it'll be prohibitively expensive to run your own node to basically secure the bitcoin. The only people that can do that will be like big mining companies and big corporations. Right. And so you effectively centralize bitcoin to big business. And big business is subject to what? Government control. Right. So they're like, let's not make it a currency, let's make it a store of value. That was like my introduction to like, the craziness of it. And I followed this whole battle. And at the time, the argument that made the most sense to me was to have it a currency. Because I'm like, well, if bitcoin's going to grow beyond this point, it needs to be a bigger thing, like a currency. Right.

[Jack]

In terms of currency, you're saying just something that you use to pay for like a dollar.

[Andre Jikh]

Exactly. Use it to pay and buy things. Because even in the bitcoin white paper it says a peer to peer currency. Right. And so I was like, okay, so bitcoin should increase block size. In retrospect, I'm glad that it stayed small because then it means it's decentralized and anybody can run. It's pretty cheap to do. So that was the block size war in 2017. But fast forward to today and in 2025, there's another war for the soul of bitcoin Not a lot of people know this because it's, like, really nuanced and nerdy. I mean, I'm not the best person to explain this. I kind of did a lot of the research yesterday. But essentially what's happening right now is there's a fight between, again, two groups of people. One that's trying to say, is Bitcoin money, right, a store of value, or is it a store of information? Like all information, not just economic data, but all sorts of data. Right? So there is a split between these two. Now, let me just ask you this hypothetical question. What is the best way, do you guys think, to destroy Bitcoin? If you were trying to take it down or destroy it, what is the best way to do that?

[Graham Stephan]

Unplug the Internet.

[Andre Jikh]

That's one way. It's really hard to do, though. It's not really hard.

[Graham Stephan]

In all seriousness, I would say to destroy Bitcoin, you would have to destroy the faith of bitcoin. So I think, if so, starting a.

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[Graham Stephan]

I would say to destroy bitcoin, you would have to destroy the faith of bitcoin. So I think if Satoshi somehow dumped on the market, everyone would lose faith in that. Or I think, like, a huge solar flare that somehow takes out networks.

[Andre Jikh]

Okay, not bad. So we can't do satoshi, right? Because, like, he's gone. He's never coming back, and we can't invoke him to come back.

[Jack]

How do you know he's gone?

[Andre Jikh]

Because he would have come back at this point if he was, like, incentivized financially. And bitcoin is worth hundreds of billions of dollars. At no point in time is. Is there a person that's like, I'm gonna wait. I have a couple hundred billion dollars now. I'm gonna wait until it hits a trillion or whatever it is.

[Jack]

And you can see wallets.

[Andre Jikh]

That's how you know you can see it. Yeah. His coins have not moved since.

[Graham Stephan]

I forget.

[Jack]

What, his coins?

[Andre Jikh]

Yeah, it's in his wallet.

[Graham Stephan]

How many coins does he have?

[Andre Jikh]

Wasn't it like a million? Roughly? A million coins? Yeah.

[Jack]

So what's the value of that?

[Graham Stephan]

It was, like, $128 billion.

[Andre Jikh]

Yeah, it's like one of the.

[Graham Stephan]

Sitting in his.

[Jack]

And you've never seen that. Is his wallet transacting?

[Andre Jikh]

It's never moved and it never will.

[Graham Stephan]

It hasn't moved since when? It was like, 2000.

[Andre Jikh]

I want to say 2011, but I might be wrong. Yeah, something like that.

[Jack]

So are people speculating that he's passed away, that he's gone?

[Andre Jikh]

Most likely he's passed away, yeah. The people who think he was. But the bitcoin community doesn't really like to talk about who satos is because that's an attack vector. Right. Because if you figure out who that person is or who that group was, you can attack. That's a character. That's a vulnerability.

[Graham Stephan]

It's interesting. Michael Saylor has been asked, who is Satoshi Nakamoto Mad? And, yeah, he just like it. Like, it. It triggers him. Like, he does not want to answer it.

[Andre Jikh]

Right.

[Graham Stephan]

And he gets, like, visibly upset.

[Andre Jikh]

Yeah. He calls it the. The immaculate conception of. Of bitcoin. Right. Because it's like, no one knows who gave birth to this thing. And it's smart. Like, we shouldn't really try to figure that out. But the point is, is that the best way to really attack bitcoin is not a solar flare. We can't induce a solar flare. We can't get Satoshi to Spend his coins. The best way to do it is to destroy it from within. Okay, so right now in bitcoin, there's five pillars of power that make it decentralized. Users, nodes, businesses, the miners, and the developers. Okay, so like, a lot of criticism that you hear, people that don't understand bitcoin, they'll be like, well, how do you know it's 21 million? Like, what if they like write in the code and they change it to like 40 million just to give themselves some more? And it's like they could do that, but they wouldn't be able to get that through without the majority consensus. Right? Like, everyone would have to agree that it's in their economic interest to do that. That's what makes bitcoin so cool, is the game theory aspect of it. So it's. The fundamental rules of bitcoin have never been changed. But if you were like a rogue nation or a government and you wanted to destroy bitcoin because you're like, hey, this bitcoin thing looks cool, how would I control it? Well, I would figure out who the developers are and I might offer them like a salary, like 20 or $30 million a year. And I would tell them, I want you to make certain propositions in the software that changes the core aspect of what bitcoin is. And I would put out a huge propaganda campaign that's like, what is bitcoin? Is it really gold? Is it really, is it really money? Or is it a database of all sorts of immutable information? Right, so here's specifically what I'm talking about. This kind of gets nerdy. But there is this feature inside of bitcoin called the op return feature, op underscore return. And that feature has an 80 byte limit, meaning, like, that's the storage capacity of it. It's very small. It's about the size of a tweet. You can attach certain random points of data, like metadata or some kind of proof or some kind of message. Fun fact. In 2017, during the Block wars, the core development team which runs the bitcoin software, these guys are like the smartest, like nerdiest people, right? They, they do not like having a debate with people. So they shut people down, they censored people. And so the big blockers, the people who wanted bitcoin to become a currency, they made a decentralized Twitter through this op return mechanism. And the way it worked is you could send a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a bitcoin from your own wallet back to your Own wallet. So you sent the money back to yourself and it cost you like a fraction of a penny. But in that transaction, you embedded a small tweet and somebody made that into a website. It was like a decentralized, immutable tweet into that data. Into that data, Yes.

[Jack]

A text.

[Andre Jikh]

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

[Graham Stephan]

No.

[Andre Jikh]

You can't really tell what that is?

[Graham Stephan]

No.

[Jack]

That looks like Trump.

[Graham Stephan]

It does kinda. I could see it. The suit, the blue suit and the hair.

[Andre Jikh]

That is actually.

[Jack]

It is.

[Graham Stephan]

It is.

[Andre Jikh]

No, it is. It is.

[Graham Stephan]

Wow.

[Andre Jikh]

Did you figure that out?

[Jack]

I had no idea, actually.

[Andre Jikh]

But it's hard to see. Holy crap. It's really hard to see, right? Mm.

[Graham Stephan]

That was good, Jack.

[Andre Jikh]

Good job.

[Graham Stephan]

Bigger eyes than I think.

[Andre Jikh]

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

[Graham Stephan]

Wow.

[Andre Jikh]

Right? That's the Trump image. Okay, but that's like a, like a good example.

[Graham Stephan]

What's the benefit of doing that though?

[Andre Jikh]

Well, the benefit is now you can essentially have programmable money, right? Like you can have Bitcoin that's somewhat programmable. You could have NFTs on it. You can do a lot of like more advanced things is sort of like what they're saying.

[Graham Stephan]

Sure.

[Andre Jikh]

But the bitcoin community disagrees. And they're like, this is the worst thing we can do. Because imagine you're, you're essentially bloating. Now the software, now the whole ecosystem with, with bs, right? Like with images. And imagine if I was like, like a, like a pizza file person, right, Wanted to send illegal images or videos to somebody and they didn't want to be stopped, they didn't want to be censored. They could now use Bitcoin and attach an image or a video that's illegal to transmit into this transaction. Right. So if I were a government, I might Want to regulate that? I might be like, hey, all these nodes that are handling all these transactions, you guys are transporting and transferring all these illegal, illegal images.

[Graham Stephan]

But here's the thing, wouldn't that all be on the blockchain? And then eventually if that were ever to be cashed out, you could trace it.

[Andre Jikh]

Correct.

[Graham Stephan]

And so the person who cashes out five transactions down the line, 10 years later, they're gonna get caught.

[Andre Jikh]

It's not about who cashes out, it's about you transmitting things that are not necessarily something you agree with transmitting. You have no control over this because they remove that limit.

[Graham Stephan]

Sure.

[Andre Jikh]

But their argument is like, yeah, but you'll be able to do like NFTs on it. People like Michael Saylor and people like myself, investors were like, I'm buying bitcoin because it's the best place to preserve my economic energy. Right? It's like the best place for me to put my time. And I don't want bitcoin to be graffitied over with data. Bitcoin is not meant to be non economic data. It's purely for economic information, not NFTs and videos and pictures. Right. So there's a big divide in the community right now and the core development team, they're proposing that this change goes through. They want to get rid of this limit. The people on the opposite side, the people who oppose it, not that you need to know this, but it's the Knots development team and there's this guy, I think his name is Luke Dash Jr. Which a lot of people don't like. But he's like, let's just keep it as is. And a lot of investors are like, let's not change anything. Bitcoin's not broken, let's not upgrade it, let's not do anything. So the most likely outcome that will happen in October, this is, this, is this upgrade is going to happen in October is that there will be no upgrade. So the nodes and the miners, they're not going to upgrade their software to software 30. They're going to keep it at 29. That's most likely what's going to happen. So only people like Michael Saylor really understand what's happening. But I think in the next few weeks there's going to be a huge wealth transfer.

[Jack]

So from a 30,000 foot view, what is your strongest argument for Bitcoin and against bitcoin?

[Andre Jikh]

What is the strongest argument for bitcoin? Oh man.

[Jack]

If you were to pitch me, yeah, I don't have very much bitcoin, maybe like 1% of my portfolio, Bitcoin and my portfolio. It's not that big, guys, but like, actually, let me say it is actually really big.

[Graham Stephan]

It's.

[Jack]

It's half a percent in bitcoin.

[Graham Stephan]

I think pretend he is Alex.

[Andre Jikh]

Sure.

[Graham Stephan]

Pitch Alex on bitcoin. He doesn't own anything.

[Andre Jikh]

Okay.

[Graham Stephan]

And we've always joked, Alex, if you, if you're watching this, whatever Alex buys, we're out. That's the Alex.

[Jack]

Alex is our old producer. For those that aren't aware.

[Andre Jikh]

Alex. I love Alex. So this is borrowed directly from Jeff Booth. This is not my thing, but Jeff Booth says something really, really profound. So he says that the natural state of the world and the economy is deflationary. Do you understand what that means?

[Jack]

Yeah. Stuff goes down in prices.

[Andre Jikh]

Stuff goes down in price. Like if you were to just have a fixed supply of money, like, let's say I had a hypothetical $100 bill. I don't have one to show you, but like, I laid it out and I was like, this is the world's money. Like, it's $100. There's never going to be more of it. So naturally, the price of everything in that world would always go down forever. It wouldn't go up. Because as we get better at producing stuff, as we get more efficient, we invent better technologies, the price goes down. Right. But for some reason, we don't find ourselves living in that world. We live in a world where prices of everything goes up forever. Right. That's counterintuitive to how the universe should work. Why? Well, it's because the government has this special ability to make more than just this $100. Right? So now if we duplicate that hundred dollars, the price of everything now is essentially doubled because it costs twice as much to buy that same amount of stuff. Because the amount of stuff didn't double. It was the amount of paper that doubled. Right with me so far. Okay? So now that money, that excess piece of paper, all of that economic energy, it needs to go somewhere to maintain and preserve its value. So that's when we hear, oh, did you hear? Stocks went up to an all time high and gold reached an all time high. Real estate reached an all time high. It's because the amount of money keeps increasing and it's always trying to find a place to go to preserve its value. Right.

[Jack]

So it's basically like the actual value of something doesn't necessarily. The value of an asset doesn't necessarily increase over time, but the amount of doll that.

[Andre Jikh]

Exactly. To buy does increase. Exactly right. So when you compare that asset to a benchmark, like the dollar, it looks like that thing went up in price, right? You're like, oh, you know, gold went up, or real estate went up and now it costs more dollars. That's how we visualize it. But then if you were to take all of those things, right, and compare it against bitcoin, then literally all of those assets are also deflationary against bitcoin. Like take real estate, for example. A couple years ago, when bitcoin was at what, 20,000, it took 20 bitcoin to buy a house. Now it's like 4 bitcoin, like a little over 4 to buy a house. And it'll continue to be lower and lower and lower, right? It'll take less and less Bitcoin. So all assets are being demonetized against a money that is fixed. It is the only thing that exists in this world that is stationary, that is fixed, a true money. And so through the lens and through the perspective of bitcoin, everything is going down against it.

[Jack]

So I have a couple of questions about that. Then. What is the difference then between, like, bitcoin and gold or bitcoin and silver, or raw materials that there is a fixed amount of?

[Andre Jikh]

Right.

[Jack]

And you could take the same exact example for gold, right? It's like, okay, with this much gold right now, you could buy like a crazy mansion, probably, or a really nice house.

[Graham Stephan]

Sure.

[Jack]

You know, with this much gold, back in the day, you could have bought more.

[Andre Jikh]

Yeah, well, gold has certain qualities and not quite on par to bitcoin. And also there's not an exact finite amount of gold. There's also an inflation to gold as we discover. And as we dig up more of it, I mean, we can find one on a meteorite tomorrow for all we know. So, like, gold is not necessarily finite.

[Graham Stephan]

It's funny you say that, because we just had RJ Mitte on the podcast, and he said he bought into a penny stock where apparently they owned the rights to an asteroid that is made of gold, full of gold that they're gonna find a way to mine.

[Andre Jikh]

Right? So imagine if that.

[Graham Stephan]

They're not gonna.

[Andre Jikh]

But imagine if that were to happen, like, what would happen?

[Jack]

They would deflation the value of gold.

[Andre Jikh]

Right. The deflation would. Or the inflation of gold would increase, and therefore the value would be suppressed.

[Graham Stephan]

You know what's funny is that they found a way to make gold. Just like you could make a diamond in a lab, like a lab grown diamond.

[Andre Jikh]

They figured out alchemy.

[Graham Stephan]

Yes. They found a way to make gold the problem, however, because this was a big discovery, is that it costs more.

[Andre Jikh]

To make the gold than the gold is worth, right?

[Graham Stephan]

Yes. But the other is that the gold was very unstable, and so they were only able to make the gold appear for a short amount of time before it disappeared.

[Andre Jikh]

Right.

[Graham Stephan]

But the fact is, there is a possibility. Jack thinks I'm joking. I'm not joking.

[Jack]

I don't think you're joking.

[Graham Stephan]

Look it up.

[Jack]

Look it up.

[Graham Stephan]

It's going.

[Jack]

If it's scary, it's just going away. It's like poof.

[Graham Stephan]

It's like. It's just.

[Jack]

It's.

[Graham Stephan]

It was unstable enough to. To be a solid form for longer than however many, like a fraction of a second or whatever. But point being is that they could find a way just to manufacture gold and have synthetic gold that would be identical to the real thing at some.

[Andre Jikh]

Point in the future. No, I believe it. Yeah. I believe we will have the technology someday to make and reproduce gold on some affordable economic level. We can't yet, but maybe in the future we could. But Bitcoin is programmed to be fixed forever.

[Jack]

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[Graham Stephan]

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[Jack]

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[Graham Stephan]

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[Jack]

So then, what should the average person do with this information? If the natural state of the economy is supposed to be deflationary, things are supposed to get cheaper as time goes on. But because we're working off the US dollar, which we could just Print more of. It's costing more dollars to buy goods and services. If someone has this information, what should they be doing with their money?

[Andre Jikh]

Well, I think it depends contextually, like, what that person's situation is. But, like, for me, I've diversified enough to where if all of this is wrong and all of this is crazy, I should still be okay. But for me, bitcoin is a roughly 30%, 30 to 35% of my net worth. So it's kind of high for most people, but it's still not crazy for most. Like bitcoin people, that's pretty conservative, if anything. So that's just my approach to it. But it's funny because, like, when I look at crypto, I feel like it's such an appealing industry for a lot of people because there's this promise of, like, get rich quick. It's like, it's like a thousandfold of your money. And what I find really interesting is that people make a decision that sounds intuitive, but it's completely wrong. Like, for example, I see a lot of people that are like, oh, I think xrp, let's just use that, for example, is going to go to $1,000, right? It's like, once you've convinced yourself that it's gonna go to the moon, like that you've kind of already lost. And at that point, when people have convinced themselves it has the chance to go 1000x, they put most of their money into it, which is actually completely counterintuitive. What instead you should be doing is allocating a very small amount to a conviction like that. Right? It makes sense because then you work backwards. You say, okay, if I think this thing's gonna 1000x, I'm not gonna mortgage my house and then put everything into it. I'm gonna instead work backwards and say, like, let's say I put in $10,000, and at a thousand Xs, then I end up with what? A million? Right? Cool. Now, I made a lot of money, but if you sell your house, so the equity in your house, and let's say you're like, I'm gonna go all in and I'm gonna put in a hundred thousand because I know it's gonna thousand X, okay, fine. But the difference between you being right in that scenario is the difference between making a million dollars, which is still nice, and making $10 million. There is a difference there for sure. But the pain between having a million and having 10 million is way less than the pain of being completely wrong and losing your house. Does that make sense? That does just like. So if you really believe this thing's going to 1000x, don't put your entire life savings into it. Put in a smaller amount. Does that make sense?

[Graham Stephan]

Yeah. I liked Alex Becker, his approach. He made a video a while back when we were talking a few months ago with Ethereum. And Ethereum at the time I think was like $1,500. This is recently when everything kind of fell. And he says, guys, I think there's a 50, 50 chance you're going to lose everything. That Ethereum's going to go from 1500. You're going to lose all of your money.

[Andre Jikh]

Right.

[Graham Stephan]

But I think there's a 50% chance it's going to go to 6,000.

[Andre Jikh]

Okay.

[Graham Stephan]

And so that's an asymmetric reward.

[Andre Jikh]

Yes.

[Graham Stephan]

Risk versus reward that, hey, you could. It's a 50, 50 you lose, but in the other 50%, you could 3x your investment.

[Andre Jikh]

Right.

[Graham Stephan]

And I thought, you know what, that's. It's a great phrasing.

[Andre Jikh]

Right.

[Graham Stephan]

And I invested an amount where I'm prepared for that 50% for sure. I bought in at 1500 bucks.

[Andre Jikh]

And now it's all risk management.

[Graham Stephan]

4200.

[Andre Jikh]

That's exactly a great point that you brought up. It's all risk management. So if you see an asymmetric bet, that's exactly what I'm describing. Don't put your entire life savings into it. Just put enough to where if you lose it, it's not a big deal. And if you make it, it's still a lot of money. That's essentially a roundabout way of saying that.

[Jack]

So how are you investing your money now? If you have 30 to 35% in Bitcoin, what is the other 65% looking like?

[Andre Jikh]

It's real estate, cash, stocks and miscellaneous things.

[Jack]

And what's the best investment you've ever made?

[Andre Jikh]

The best investment, definitely. By far. Bitcoin. By far.

[Jack]

Really?

[Andre Jikh]

Yeah.

[Jack]

And it's not even close.

[Andre Jikh]

Not even close to.

[Jack]

What's the worst investment you've ever made?

[Andre Jikh]

Oh, worst investment, probably. I mean, that's not an investment. That's like a consumer thing. I would say probably so far, honestly, out of my bucket. Real estate.

[Jack]

Really?

[Andre Jikh]

Yeah.

[Jack]

But have you made money in real estate?

[Andre Jikh]

I still made money, but it wasn't as much money as I could have made if I had bought literally anything else. Feels like the S&P 500 or anything else.

[Graham Stephan]

NFTs.

[Andre Jikh]

That's not an investment. I never considered that an investment. I considered it as like a marketing expense for YouTube. But Graham, you buy a lot of Ethereum, right?

[Graham Stephan]

Yes and no. I bought at 1500 and I've not touched it since then. I've not added onto it.

[Andre Jikh]

Oh, okay.

[Graham Stephan]

Yeah, I've just. I still have that and it's up almost 200% since then.

[Andre Jikh]

What's your, what's your, like, theory behind why Ethereum will be valuable someday?

[Graham Stephan]

I think the fact that Bitcoin is as valuable, I just. It's a pure speculation bet that some of that's going to funnel into Ethereum.

[Andre Jikh]

That's it. It's just like, it's like a second place.

[Graham Stephan]

Sure.

[Jack]

Yeah.

[Graham Stephan]

But then again, when you look at Ethereum, in comparison to my entire portfolio, I think it's like 0.1%.

[Andre Jikh]

Okay.

[Graham Stephan]

So it really. I don't care if it goes back down to 1500. I don't care. This sounds so out of touch. So out of touch. There was a Rolex Oyster quartz that I wanted and it was $12,500. And I thought I would invest in Ethereum to pay for the watch.

[Andre Jikh]

Okay.

[Graham Stephan]

And I was gonna sell it when it hit like 20,000 in profit to be able to cash out, pay the tax. And that way I get a free watch. And I just kept it. And now I'm up quite a bit. So I got a free watch times, many times over from that investment. That was all it is. It was, it was the same thing as me going to a casino, except it was that 50, 50 risk reward, right. Where I was like, all right, 50% chance I lose it or 50 chance I can 3x and just buy the watch that I wanted.

[Andre Jikh]

Right, but you're still holding on to it.

[Graham Stephan]

Yeah, I haven't sold it.

[Andre Jikh]

Okay. Do you buy any Ethereum, Jack?

[Jack]

I don't think I have any Ethereum. I might have like, like, like a couple grand.

[Andre Jikh]

Okay.

[Jack]

In Ethereum. Five grand in it.

[Andre Jikh]

Okay. Yeah. From my understanding. And, and like this is again, that goes back to like risk versus reward. Management is I think Tom Lee from Fun Straight. I don't know if you guys had him on yet. No. And I guess Larry Fink from BlackRock, this is like their thesis for why Ethereum could someday thing. But here's why. I could never like, put in a ton of money. So here's kind of how it looks for Ethereum. So Ethereum is supposed to be the blockchain that will be the rails for the tokenization of a lot of assets across the world, including physical assets like watches, art and real estate and things like that. So we are going to digitize and bring things like real estate onto the blockchain, Ethereum's blockchain. So like, for example, JP Morgan, they tokenized, what is it, treasury bonds. So they actually tokenized treasury bonds on ethereum and then BlackRock, tokenized money market funds on Ethereum's blockchain. And I thought that was really kind of interesting because I could imagine a world where, for example, like, let's say I'm an investor and I want to buy a reit, right? But I don't want like a specific REIT that I see as an etf. Instead I'm like, you know, I love Hawaii and I love this tree, this street or this area, like this, this. This area called Lanakai, right? I think it's gonna be a strategic street for real estate. So I want specifically this section or specifically that house. And maybe that corporation or that owner could issue some percentage of that house. Like, let's say like they issue 50% or 10% or whatever it is. So that on my app, on my brokerage app, I could be like, you know what, instead of buying an ETF that's a reit, I could buy this area like Summerlin or like Henderson or this specific street. So you're going to get so granular because of this tokenization, and it's going to be accessible to everyone. And I think it's a possible reality that that happens. So. And that's the same thing for watches, maybe cars. It's like, well, you know what? I want this like $20 million Ferrari collection from Hamilton, the guy you had on, right? But I can't afford a Ferrari, so maybe that guy issues some percentage equity in his collection on the blockchain. Maybe that's Ethereum. Does that make sense?

[Graham Stephan]

Yeah.

[Andre Jikh]

So now I could buy it in my brokerage app. Like that's gonna happen. That's what BlackRock sees is gonna happen. And presuming that it's gonna be on Ethereum's blockchain, that's when you get all the gas fees and all the burning things, burning mechanisms. And that's when Ethereum could become deflationary. And maybe that's how it becomes valuable. But the point I'm trying to make is like, creating this, like, universe which might happen someday is these are assumptions of assumptions of assumptions on assumptions, right? Like, we are making so many assumptions about it that, like, is it going to be this way? Will it actually be Ethereum or will it be Solana or will be Cardano or something else? We don't know. And so the more assumptions there are baked in, the more you could assume the price will go up. Like in bitcoin's case, the difference between bitcoin at a dollar and a thousand, there's far more assumptions that were in place than there are from a hundred thousand to a million. Like that's only now a 10x. And that's because so many of bitcoin's early assumptions, like adoption by Wall street and the securitization with ETFs and all these things like they've happened. Adoption by corporations, adoptions by countries like these are all things that have happened already. So now the jump between a hundred thousand to a million is only 10x. Like it's still a lot of money, but it's nowhere near the jump between a dollar to $1,000. That's a thousand X because less assumptions had come true.

[Graham Stephan]

So what has to happen for bitcoin to hit a million dollars?

[Andre Jikh]

We talk about like these cycles, like these mega cycles that bitcoin goes through. I don't know if we'll see another huge one. I think it'll be a slow. And by slow I mean like still like 20 to 30% a year. Melt up to a million from here on until like 2030 or whatever the year is going to be. Like nothing has to change. Just keeps on going at the same rate that it is. You take all the crazy assumptions out of it, I still think it ends up at a million, like inevitably.

[Graham Stephan]

So isn't Bitcoin about 1/10 the market cap currently of gold?

[Andre Jikh]

Yeah, about 1:13 or so. Yeah.

[Graham Stephan]

I can't help but think that it has to be at some point one third of gold or half.

[Andre Jikh]

I think so too. I think it's inevitable. Yeah.

[Graham Stephan]

But then I can't help but think, if I think that way, it has to be priced in. Yeah, like that this isn't like some mysterious sort of like no one's ever thought of that before. People are paying the price today with everything currently priced in as to what they believe is going to happen with it.

[Andre Jikh]

Do you remember Chris Camillo from Dumb Money? I really like his thesis on bitcoin. Like he does not care about bitcoin. He's like, I'm just a pure like social. What is this thing?

[Graham Stephan]

Social arb.

[Andre Jikh]

Social arb, right. Social arbitrage. And his entire thesis is really simple. It's just a reshuffling of monetary assets from things like gold and real estate and all the things that we will inherit from our parents and our Grandparents. And it's like, well, thanks for the $2 million house. I can't afford the property taxes on this thing. I'm going to sell that and gold. Thanks. But I don't really get gold. It's not part of my generation. I'm going to sell that. I'm going to put some of it in bitcoin. I'm not going to put all of it maybe, but some of it. And it's just like a simple reshuffling of assets and money from all of those back into bitcoin and a little bit from each little bucket from bonds, from gold, from watches, from cars, from real estate they might not be able to afford to keep up with. And it goes into bitcoin and that's like a slow melt up to a million.

[Graham Stephan]

Gold is becoming cooler now.

[Andre Jikh]

It is, yeah. That's true.

[Graham Stephan]

That's the other thing is that I'm seeing a lot of people, you know, our own age now interested in gold just for the fact that it's gone up in price. They don't give a about it though. But they just know, hey, it was, you know, a thousand bucks five years ago and now it's, you know, almost 4,000 an ounce. It just on the basis of that, it makes money. I like it now.

[Andre Jikh]

Yeah.

[Graham Stephan]

And so gold is coming back in style, whereas before it was kind of unpopular. But it does seem like overall people are more likely to buy bitcoin who are younger than gold. They had to choose between the two.

[Andre Jikh]

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

[Graham Stephan]

What do you think about altcoins?

[Andre Jikh]

I think there's a lot of interesting projects. I'm just not into any of them. I think they're a distraction for the most part. I'm just focused on bitcoin mostly and even ethereum. I'm like, I don't know, all those assumptions we talked about, they might come true over time, but I'm not interested in venturing beyond it.

[Graham Stephan]

You know, it's going to be really interesting at some point. They're going to do an ETF of the top 10 crypto holdings for sure. Just like the S and P. Yeah, I think so. Except of that yes, that is going to be very interesting and I think that is going to spur the market because I would place, let's just say I have 5% of my portfolio in IBIT, but then they offer an ETF of the top 10, right? Oh man, I would probably put a percent or two into that.

[Andre Jikh]

Right.

[Graham Stephan]

I think that that is a huge opportunity because there's a lot of projects out there that are interesting that I would never invest a dollar into on their own, but I would into an etf. What's also interesting is that years ago I did this whole analysis on the top 10 cryptocurrencies by year going back to like 2015. And the consensus was that really almost all of the profits in cryptocurrency came from Bitcoin and Ethereum and that the chance of making money on anything else was pretty much like a moonshot. It was like a one in a hundred chance. And so even if you invest in 100 different projects, you're going to like break even because 99% of them are going to lose money, but that one is going to have a hundred x return. And so it's just going to balance out between how much you make and load. But overall it was really just the majority of profits came from Bitcoin, Ethereum and that's it.

[Andre Jikh]

Yeah, Europe actually had a product, an ETF that combined the top 10 cryptos for a long time now, but I imagine that if it came in the us, depending on how it was like allocated, if it was weight based, which I'm guessing it would be like 80% bitcoin, 10%, whatever it would be, I think it would be a really interesting product, but I also think it would be kind of like a Trojan horse. I think companies like BlackRock would make a ton of money on the expense ratios and the management fees. But I think from a performance perspective they would just be diluting it, like it's not worth it. I wouldn't be buying it. But I can see how it's interesting too.

[Graham Stephan]

It's also interesting to see how many brokerage coins are going up in price. Like the bnb. Yeah, A thousand dollars.

[Andre Jikh]

That's interesting.

[Graham Stephan]

Wild.

[Andre Jikh]

Yeah, I'm not messing with any of it, man. I'm just keeping it really simple. Good.

[Graham Stephan]

Same. I, I just do ibit. Yeah, it's so easy for me to do IBIT in a stock account and then I don't have to worry about self custody.

[Andre Jikh]

Yeah.

[Graham Stephan]

Losing access. If you forget the, the password. It's like, I hate all of that. I Like the simplicity of ibit and I would. And all I care about anyway is the investment purpose of it.

[Andre Jikh]

The downside of IBIT though is that the year to date performance is there's a Delta of like 6% which is pretty significant. Like if you look at Bitcoin's year to date performance, it's 6 or 7% higher than iBits. And I'm trying to figure out why there's such a big delta. Like that's a big delta. I know the expense ratio plays a small part of that.

[Graham Stephan]

Very small. But the reason is that the IBIT trades on a price that doesn't. Isn't one to one with bitcoin. So if everyone's buying an ibit, there's going to be a premium that the stock's going to trade at a higher price than the underlying coin itself. Because there's more demand.

[Andre Jikh]

Yeah, the.

[Graham Stephan]

But that also might be. There could be at some point it trades less than the underlying asset and there might be an opportunity to arbitrage that if that ever were to happen. But yeah, right now there's so much demand, it's trading at a premium.

[Andre Jikh]

Right. I mean that's, that's a lot of premium to give up though. 6 to 7%. Like imagine if it's 6 to 7% every year compounded over like 20 years. Like that's huge. Isn't that a huge argument for self custodying?

[Graham Stephan]

It could be. But then you're also paying quite a big spread on a place like Coinbase. Like I remember seeing it recently. Even Robinhood is actually one of the cheapest places to buy bitcoin. It was trading at 116 5. And if I want to buy it I have to pay like 117. And if I want to sell it, I sell it for like 115. And that's how Robinhood makes their money on that spread. But that's a pretty big spread.

[Andre Jikh]

It is, but I don't think it's.

[Graham Stephan]

1% right there to buy or sell for sure.

[Andre Jikh]

But like 1% compared to 6 or 7%. That's still not.

[Graham Stephan]

Could be too early to tell too. I'd like to see that over five or ten years.

[Andre Jikh]

That's true. That's true. We should look at it from.

[Graham Stephan]

It's a bit new.

[Andre Jikh]

Right.

[Graham Stephan]

But yeah, sure, up until this point. Depends if you care about buying the bitcoin itself. Like what are the advantages of actually buying bitcoin and custodying it yourself?

[Andre Jikh]

Well, that those coins can't be rehypothecated. They can't be lent against by someone else. If something were to happen, you know, you have control, full control over your coins. If an exchange collapses, you have to rely on the government to pay you back. And that sometimes takes forever. There's a lot of cool benefits to it.

[Graham Stephan]

Yeah. What about NFTs?

[Andre Jikh]

What about them?

[Graham Stephan]

What happened to NFTs?

[Andre Jikh]

I don't know, man. They just. The fad died out, right? The whole. I remember talking about it on my YouTube channel. I'm like, you know when we hit a peak, when people are spending millions of dollars on pet rocks, like jpegs of pet rocks. Yeah.

[Graham Stephan]

I remember this. You're going for $400,000.

[Andre Jikh]

Sure.

[Graham Stephan]

And people were joking that you could just right click on it and then like have the same thing. I never understood the NFT.

[Andre Jikh]

My theory behind why NFTs blew up is it was hugely a result of the government break. That's all it was. It was the PPP money, it was the stimulus packages, it was all of that stuff. Like people didn't know what to do with their money and it was just boredom from sitting at home. And I think that was that phenomena. And I actually think NFTs will come back, but in a completely different way. Like, it's not going to be, hey, look at my pet rock. It's worth millions of dollars. It'll be maybe more in the digitization of like, like events. Like if you want to get like some concert tickets or something, that'll be an nft, you know, or the maybe, depending on how they securitize real estate. Maybe those will be some forms of NFTs, but I think they'll come back from a utility perspective, but I don't think they'll be the same as once what they used to be.

[Graham Stephan]

And what about cryptopunks or cryptokitties?

[Andre Jikh]

I don't know any of that.

[Graham Stephan]

What happened to bored apes?

[Andre Jikh]

I don't know. I don't know. I have no idea. I'm not following any of it. I know they're down like 90%. They're down a lot.

[Graham Stephan]

Cryptopunks seem interesting to me.

[Andre Jikh]

Yeah, well, doesn't Chris Camillo own like a bunch of them?

[Graham Stephan]

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

[Andre Jikh]

Sure.

[Graham Stephan]

And it reminds me a bit of like a game. Axie Infinity.

[Andre Jikh]

I remember that. Yeah.

[Graham Stephan]

Yeah, a bit. Where people were making like thousands of dollars a month playing this game and then like breeding the birds or something. I don't.

[Andre Jikh]

Jack, do you play with this stuff? I don't know, man.

[Jack]

I do not play with this stuff. This is more up Graham's wheelhouse right there. Breeding and playing with birds, milking she.

[Andre Jikh]

You put that in the intro. I know. The only alts I have are just like the same ones I've always had. Omi and my NFTs, like the Spider man one. And I have no idea where they're at or what they're doing. They're still around. I still have them. And would you sell them? I'd totally sell them. Yeah. I've forgotten about them. But if they're ever worth anything, maybe I'll come back to it someday. Maybe they'll actually return. I don't know. But they're still around. I still have all of them. I never sold them. What's new?

[Graham Stephan]

What's crazy is that, you know, we used to have this vlog channel.

[Andre Jikh]

Yeah.

[Graham Stephan]

Graham Stephan After Hours and all the videos were there, and we were covering a Logan Paul box break.

[Andre Jikh]

Okay.

[Graham Stephan]

And Grant Navarre purchased a pack of cards, I think for like $20,000. A first edition pack. But then in addition to that, Logan Paul was selling the NFTs of the box break.

[Andre Jikh]

Okay.

[Graham Stephan]

All of them were sold out. And all the NFT was, was him pulling out a card. And it was like a holo. And he was selling these for like 18 to $50,000. He wasn't forcing anyone to buy them, but people were spending $35,000 to get an NFT of just Logan Paul opening up the card and showing a holo.

[Andre Jikh]

You know what? I think if it ever comes back and is worth anything, my theory is that It'll be like 50 years from now. When we look back at these moments at our youth, we look back at these memories so fondly and we're like, remember when that was a thing? And we're all like crypto billionaires or bitcoin billionaires. Like, I'd buy that again. Like, that I could see Pokemon cards. Yeah. Like, it's like a nostalgia thing. Like, I could see it becoming a valuable thing when it becomes nostalgic. Like right now it's just too close to home. It just happened kind of recently, but I can imagine if, like 50 years from now, we'll look back at it like, that was the first NFT ever. The Crypto Punk or like the Spider man or whatever it is. I could see that kind of like Pokemon.

[Graham Stephan]

I try to think of that all the time, of what is going to be the nostalgia play today.

[Andre Jikh]

Right.

[Graham Stephan]

All the time. Like the. The 2005 Ford GT.

[Andre Jikh]

Yeah.

[Graham Stephan]

Was a nostalgia player. They used to trade it, like 120 grand. They couldn't sell the cars. And now it's like you, you get that car because that was the car you admire. Pokemon is a good example of that too.

[Andre Jikh]

But are you ever afraid that that's sort of such a moving target, that beyond a certain generation, it just, it's not a thing anymore?

[Graham Stephan]

Yeah, of course, I like, old 1920s cars are plummeting in value because the audience for that is they're passing away.

[Andre Jikh]

Right.

[Graham Stephan]

No one, no one cares.

[Andre Jikh]

That wasn't a part of their childhood. Right.

[Graham Stephan]

But the original iPhone in the original packaging is now selling for like $70,000 or the original ipod. Things like this that were like revolutionary. Now you go back and that was something recent and I wonder, what is that today?

[Andre Jikh]

Right?

[Graham Stephan]

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

[Andre Jikh]

100%. Yeah. That's the Chris Camillo investing.

[Graham Stephan]

Right.

[Andre Jikh]

It's a social arb thing, but it kind of also makes you think the other way. Like, when is the top. Is it when I'm 90, is it like, well, our generation is the last one that remembers these NFTs, that remembers these Pokemon cards, that remembers the GT40, I don't know.

[Graham Stephan]

But what are you nostalgic about today? That's what I think.

[Andre Jikh]

For me, it's Pokemon cards still. I don't think anything tops that.

[Graham Stephan]

And now they're back up in price, aren't they? Pokemon, my gosh, went through its craze.

[Jack]

I think we're getting wildly derailed from it.

[Graham Stephan]

People love this. People love this dude. And we'll get back to back.

[Andre Jikh]

I know you've checked out.

[Jack]

I've completely checked out.

[Andre Jikh]

I know.

[Graham Stephan]

I could tell Pokemon went up.

[Andre Jikh]

Yes.

[Graham Stephan]

Crashed. Went up. Now even Higher.

[Andre Jikh]

I think the new sets have gone up.

[Graham Stephan]

Nope.

[Andre Jikh]

Right? No.

[Graham Stephan]

Nope. The Charizard is now selling for, like, $450,000 again.

[Andre Jikh]

Really?

[Graham Stephan]

First edition Shadowless Charizard.

[Andre Jikh]

Wow. I'm rich again.

[Graham Stephan]

Yeah.

[Andre Jikh]

I still have my base set.

[Graham Stephan]

Yeah. Jack needs. What is. What is it below the screen here? The subway surfers.

[Jack]

Okay.

[Graham Stephan]

He's not. We get to talk about this, but.

[Jack]

You make a lot of interesting videos about global affairs.

[Andre Jikh]

Yeah.

[Jack]

The Russian economy. Like, China economy, Japanese economy. What would you say are, like, the top competitors of the US Economy? Do you think that the US Economy is falling from grace and that. And what are your predictions for the US Economy over the next, like, decade or so?

[Andre Jikh]

Yeah, I think the biggest competitor is definitely China. I actually went down this deep rabbit hole of, like, looking on YouTube of technologies and cars that China's coming out with. Dude, it's unreal. Some of the car brands and the features and the price. Like, it's no wonder that it's not allowed to sell these products in the US because none of our companies would compete or be able to hold a candle to these products. They are so much more advanced. Like, Xiaomi released a phone that was. Was kind of a carbon copy of the 17 Max Pro that just came out, and they actually called it the 17 max pro. I think, like, it was nearly an identical name. But I watched a review of that phone. Dude, it is legitimately, like, better on every front. Like, it has such cool features. And I'm like, dude, if these products were sold here in the US none of our companies would keep up.

[Graham Stephan]

Reminds me of the sports car that they came out with.

[Andre Jikh]

Yeah.

[Graham Stephan]

Doug DeMuro reviewed.

[Andre Jikh]

I saw that it has the headlights of a McLaren and the body of the person Sangui Ferrari. It's. It's crazy. And has, like 1400 horsepower.

[Graham Stephan]

If that were in the US everybody would buy it. Like, I would gladly pay 50,000 a raspberry. It's just so unique and so cool.

[Andre Jikh]

It's.

[Graham Stephan]

Yeah, it's like a technologies.

[Andre Jikh]

Yes. It's like a $40,000 car, dude. It's unbelievable.

[Jack]

$40,000.

[Andre Jikh]

$40,000 car. It's unbelievable. It's like 450 miles of range. Like, ridiculous. And so.

[Graham Stephan]

But it makes you think, why can't we do that in the United States?

[Andre Jikh]

You tell me. I don't know why.

[Graham Stephan]

My understanding is that loose labor regulations, working conditions, things like this, and they don't quite have the guardrails in place for, like, the government, like, meddling with every little thing that allows these companies to basically produce this for such a low cost.

[Andre Jikh]

Right.

[Graham Stephan]

I've also heard that they don't have the R and D, so they basically, we spend all of this money developing. Then China goes and looks at this, studies it, and says, oh, okay, well, that's how you do it. And then they could make it without any of the initial investment.

[Andre Jikh]

Right? That's very true. Yeah. Combined with a low labor cost. Correct. And then you have a product that people actually buy.

[Graham Stephan]

Right.

[Andre Jikh]

If it was made here in the U.S. like, sure, we could make it, but It'd be like 300 grand and nobody would buy it for sure. That's a huge part of it. But back to your original question is, I think it's separate. Like, from an investment perspective, I think the United States is still far and away the best country to live and make money in and invest in. But from a quality of life perspective, I think this is not the best country to live in.

[Jack]

What do you think is the best country to live in?

[Andre Jikh]

Quality of life perspective, I think Switzerland is far better.

[Jack]

Interesting.

[Andre Jikh]

Hold on, let me, let me bring out. I think I have a chart here of the average life expectancy of people around the world. And we spend twice as much on healthcare in Switzerland. I'm sorry, here in the US Than Switzerland. And we are, on average, we have a much lower life expectancy age. Let me find this chart. Check this out.

[Graham Stephan]

I have a. I have a rant on this.

[Andre Jikh]

So look at this. Do you see all that? Geez. Like, this is the United States, right? There's a dip with COVID Right. Makes sense. But that's a massive dip.

[Jack]

Wait, why did we dip with COVID So much more than. What is that we have a higher.

[Graham Stephan]

Rate of obesity, and so we had.

[Jack]

More compromised individuals getting Covid. And so they were like.

[Andre Jikh]

I imagine that was a big part for them. Yeah, I imagine that's a big part of it.

[Graham Stephan]

The other thing could be, in fairness.

[Andre Jikh]

That's insane.

[Graham Stephan]

We reported a lot of deaths as.

[Andre Jikh]

Covid because hospitals were incentivized to report.

[Graham Stephan]

Correct. So that seems to me highly skewed.

[Andre Jikh]

I think that's probably true too. But I think to your point or what you said about. Yeah, certain health conditions and preexisting conditions, I think we're worse off.

[Graham Stephan]

So I want to rant about this. This was really eye opening to me. Me, I went to the doctor for a checkup. I had not been in three years. And she ordered a blood test and I wanted to do all these additional tests. And she says, oh, man, I Can't order those tests. I said why? She says well because you need symptoms to be able to order these tests.

[Andre Jikh]

You need to be dying.

[Graham Stephan]

And so she said, do you feel tired and lethargic sometimes? Okay, well we could order that test. Do you have fogginess? Brain fog? Sure. Okay, we could order that test. And she kind of goes down the list of these symptoms that yeah, sometimes I wake up and I'm tired. Sure. So we order these. But in total it's like 8 tests and they bill my insurance $1300 and my co pay is something like 10% of it. So I pay like a hundred and something dollars of it. But anyway, I get it back and it turns I have like high thyroid antibodies which suggest either high stress, I'm over training, lack of sleep could be any one of them. So I thought that was interesting. And then I ordered my own blood tests and I paid out of pocket through a separate company and they were charging like 500 bucks for like a hundred biomarkers. And I did that and I got the results basically instantly within a few days. And it turned out I had no idea that I have like high LDL cholesterol. Uh, my, my heart biomarkers were like really genetically high, giving me a predisposition for like heart disease and building up plaque in my arteries. Even though I'm like active and healthy, it's just a genetic thing. I never would have found that out if I didn't test on my own. And I started making these changes in my life now. Now I have a whole stack of supplements that I take on a daily basis, morning and night. I've adjusted my diet a little bit and it's been about three weeks and now and I feel so much better just doing that change. I never would have figured it out had I not done it myself, like, but, but the whole healthcare system is just designed to treat the symptom.

[Andre Jikh]

Dude, I wish you had told me this before. When did you do all this?

[Graham Stephan]

Three weeks, four weeks ago.

[Andre Jikh]

I could have told you this because. Okay, so Corey and I went to Thailand specifically for that reason because we wanted to test everything about ourselves. And we went to this hospital. I forget the name of it. I was like bum run Grod or something like I don't know how to pronounce it. And we go in and it's this like 10 story building, super high end. There's like royalty there, I feel like from the Middle east. Just people of all sorts of walks of life. Right? So we make an appointment, we get the executive Package costs, costs like a thousand dollars. I want to say, I want to pay, I paid like twelve hundred dollars maybe. So we go in there and they do like every test known to humankind. Like, like everything. They do chest X rays, they do like everything for your organs. They, they do a, a heart test. Like they have you run on a thing. They, they monitor like everything. They have you pee, they have you poop in a cup, they take your blood. Dude, they do everything. And I got, I have a, like a 10 page report on everything on my body. And it turns out I have a like fatty liver, which is a very common thing for Americans.

[Graham Stephan]

Hmm.

[Andre Jikh]

But you're right, it's like you can't order these tests here in the US because you have to exhibit symptoms. And in, in that place where we were at, they just do the diagnosis. They don't do any kind of like treatment for it. And that's probably because they don't want to have a conflict of interest maybe, I don't know. But that hospital doesn't treat against anything. It just purely is a diagnostic center. And they did just about like every test I could ever think of for $1,000.

[Jack]

How long did that take?

[Andre Jikh]

And it took took three hours and I got the results within eight hours. No, dude, it's amazing. Like, so if you ever want to do that, I would highly recommend going.

[Jack]

Where was that?

[Andre Jikh]

Thailand.

[Jack]

In Bangkok.

[Andre Jikh]

In Bangkok? Yeah.

[Jack]

Interesting.

[Andre Jikh]

Get the executive package. Corey got like everything.

[Jack]

And how much was it?

[Andre Jikh]

Thousand dollars.

[Jack]

That's not bad.

[Andre Jikh]

No, it's amazing.

[Graham Stephan]

I wish you had an option to opt out or like just some sort of, like some sort of health insurance that's just catastrophic over like $50,000. Because so far what I've done, I found it cheaper. Just pay for everything out of pocket.

[Andre Jikh]

Yeah.

[Graham Stephan]

Like I'm buying prescriptions out of pocket. I'm going and just telling them I'll pay cash. I, I did a whole heart screening.

[Andre Jikh]

It's cheaper often.

[Graham Stephan]

Yeah.

[Andre Jikh]

Yeah.

[Graham Stephan]

And I, I was asking like, okay, they asked me, do you want to go through insurance? And I was like, does insurance cover this? Or like sometimes, but we're going to be booked a few weeks out. And I was like, can I just pay cash and come today? And she's like, can you come right now? And I was like, yeah, okay. I paid 165 bucks, went in the same day, just left, did it and got my results back in three days.

[Andre Jikh]

Does that ever make you wonder, like, as you get older, if you realize how corrupt and how unfair the Healthcare industry is. Does that make you think outside of that and like, well, how many other things are not good for you? Like the food and that we eat and like, everything about the quality of our life here in the U.S. do you ever think about that?

[Graham Stephan]

I saw it was an Instagram post or like a TikTok that says, like, you know when you're growing up, when you go to the grocery store and you realize that 90% of it is extremely unhealthy.

[Andre Jikh]

Right.

[Graham Stephan]

And now it's all I see. I walk in the grocery store and thinking, who would eat this?

[Andre Jikh]

Right.

[Graham Stephan]

It's awful. Like, everything has a ton of added sugar. They had sugar. The amount of sugar in ketchup is surprising. Like, sugar in that, really. And then you start looking at the sugar content of everything. They put sugar in everything.

[Andre Jikh]

High fructose corn syrup is in everything. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. I feel like the older I get, the more I become a conspiracy theorist about everything. Sound like that grumpy old guy that's just like, I don't trust anything. I don't trust anyone. I don't know if you're noticing that about yourself.

[Graham Stephan]

No, it's just.

[Andre Jikh]

Just when.

[Graham Stephan]

When it comes to.

[Andre Jikh]

Okay.

[Graham Stephan]

Government running things.

[Andre Jikh]

So everything.

[Graham Stephan]

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

[Andre Jikh]

Okay, well, I guess we'll agree to disagree. I don't know.

[Jack]

I've definitely become a lot more skeptical of things.

[Andre Jikh]

Yeah, for sure.

[Jack]

Everything. When I was a kid, I was extremely naive. And then you get burned a few times. Times. Because you're naive.

[Andre Jikh]

Yeah.

[Jack]

And then you just have to become selective with what you decide to trust in and.

[Andre Jikh]

Right.

[Jack]

Not trust.

[Andre Jikh]

So.

[Jack]

But I agree. Yeah.

[Graham Stephan]

And really quick. I just want to say it is wild that we're almost at the end of the year, which means holidays are approaching. And for any of you who have hosted, you know that it could often be expensive and stressful. But it doesn't have to be that way because our sponsor, Wayfair, helps you tackle everything you need in one place at prices that just make sense.

[Jack]

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[Graham Stephan]

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[Jack]

And when you knock out your shopping early, it frees up so much time to actually enjoy the holidays the way you should with your friends and family.

[Graham Stephan]

So get organized, refresh, and get ready for the holidays for way less. Just head to wayfair.com right now to shop for all things home again. That is wayfair.com with the link down below in the description. Wayfair Every Style, Every Home. Now, really quick, I just want to say that when Jack and I first started the Iced Coffee Hour now over five years ago, we had to figure out everything ourselves. From the best cameras to use, the best editing equipment, how to get guests on every day was a brand new challenge. That's why if you're starting or running your own business, you know how valuable today's sponsor is. And that would be Shopify.

[Jack]

Shopify is basically your all in one business partner. They power millions of businesses worldwide, from major brands like Mattel and Gymshark to entrepreneurs just getting started. And here's a fun fact, if you've shopped online in the us, there's a really good chance it was actually through Shopify. Because they power about 10% of all American e commerce.

[Graham Stephan]

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[Jack]

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[Graham Stephan]

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[Graham Stephan]

Thanks again to our sponsor, Shopify. And now let's get back to the episode. Are you bullish or bearish for the.

[Andre Jikh]

US Economy from an investment perspective? Very bullish from a quality of life. And I don't think it'll be the best country to live in for the next 50 years. I don't think it'll be the safest. I don't think it'll be the highest quality of life for the longest lifespan.

[Graham Stephan]

You think Switzerland?

[Andre Jikh]

I think Switzerland's far better. Yeah, for sure.

[Graham Stephan]

What about Japan?

[Andre Jikh]

Probably better. Yeah. Probably better. Yeah.

[Graham Stephan]

I think we're going to see a lot of people our age retiring in other countries.

[Andre Jikh]

I think so, too.

[Graham Stephan]

I think that's just the only way they're going to be able to do it. If you have two to five hundred thousand dollars saved, right.

[Andre Jikh]

And you're 60 years old, which means nobody by the time they're 60, like very few people get to that amount.

[Graham Stephan]

If you're lucky enough to have $500,000 saved at the age of 6, 60 and you're done with work and you want to retire and you lose your job because a robot just took it, you can go anywhere in the world and live a fantastic life on $500,000.

[Andre Jikh]

I totally agree. Yeah, there's a lot of alternatives. I think that's going to happen.

[Jack]

In terms of the US Economy. What are your leading bullish indicators, terms.

[Andre Jikh]

Of an investment perspective? Yeah, well, I think the same reasons that got us here in the first place, I think we'll still still remain the world reserve currency. And I do think there will be a challenger. I think Jerome Powell even said that. He's like, it's okay. There's going to be probably two competing ones. There's probably going to be China's currency, it's going to be our currency. But as long as we have the world reserve currency, I think it will always squeeze asset prices up no matter what, because we have the money printer. And as long as the world is still in need of those currencies, of those units, then we'll always export our inflation to the rest of the world. And with that money, they'll be buying our assets, they'll be buying our Treasuries because they'll want and interest on it. And that'll push everything from equities to treasury bonds.

[Jack]

That'll always what determines the world reserve currency. Is it just like, who has the strongest military?

[Andre Jikh]

I would say that was a big part of it. Yeah. I think that definition is changing, obviously, which is why the dollar's losing dominance over time. Like, not to be that guy, but.

[Graham Stephan]

I'll show you that the dollar has had its worst year, I think, since 1972.

[Andre Jikh]

Yeah. 2025, we've lost 10%. And here's what's interesting if here, strong versus weak dollar. Let's see. Oh, there we go. So in 2025, the Dixie index, which is. Measures the strength of the dollar in 2025, lost 10%, which is kind of crazy. So what that means is, like, I opened up my investment account. I look at my stocks. So year to date on this portfolio, I'm up like 14%, which sounds really good. Like, cool. Like, that's great. 14%. That's not bad. But the reality is I'm only up like, 4%. Right. Because the dollars lost 10%, which means if you didn't get a pay raise this year, that was 10%, then you lost money in terms of purchasing power. So that $100 at the beginning of this year now buys you $90 worth of stuff. That's literally this year alone, which means we're all forced to participate in the market. Which is another answer to your question, like, why is the US Going to continue to go up? Because we are literally forced to put our money in these assets. If we don't, we lose purchasing power.

[Graham Stephan]

But here's the thing. I'm noticing in terms of daily purchasing power over the last year, you say the dollar's down 10%, but I'm not seeing real estate cost 10% more. I'm not seeing groceries costing 10% more. I'm not Seeing gas costing 10% more. I'm seeing a lot of those basically in line. Line.

[Andre Jikh]

Do you go to grocery stores?

[Graham Stephan]

Yeah.

[Andre Jikh]

Where do you go?

[Graham Stephan]

Trader Joe's.

[Andre Jikh]

Trader Joe's?

[Graham Stephan]

Yeah. Why?

[Andre Jikh]

That's like. That's not middle class. Trader Joe's. No. Trade shows is nice. I like Trader Joe's. Yeah. I thought you said Whole Foods.

[Graham Stephan]

No, no.

[Andre Jikh]

Where'd you go? Arrow on arrow. It's still the same price.

[Graham Stephan]

Dude. The 20 strawberry is still 20 per strawberry.

[Andre Jikh]

That's funny.

[Graham Stephan]

I'm just not seeing everything, everything rise by 10%. If anything, I'm seeing gas prices are down a little bit. Energy prices are more or less the same. I Don't know. But maybe that's because I'm so isolated here in Vegas.

[Andre Jikh]

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

[Jack]

So what does that tell you?

[Andre Jikh]

You. And then there's this one. So the total returns, it actually goes back to 25 years. This is just a 20 year against the S&P 500. So literally a shiny rock has outperformed all the smartest people on Wall Street. All the innovation. That's kind of nuts.

[Graham Stephan]

Sometimes I worry that these are very selective dates.

[Andre Jikh]

I knew I thought you were going to say that. But like 25 year period, it's not like I was like, let's start right here. In a very recent time, 25 years worth of innovation.

[Graham Stephan]

But sometimes going back 30 years could change the picture quite, quite a bit. Or when you look at it from 1978 to today, you get a bit of a different idea because gold, my understanding is that gold just hit its inflation adjusted price as to what it was back in the 1980s.

[Andre Jikh]

Yeah, it's caught up for sure.

[Graham Stephan]

It's caught up. So if you invested in the 1980s, you would have the same amount of money, money today as you would back then, adjusted for inflation. And that's after, what is that, 40 years, 45 years, almost 50 years we'll call it. And you have the same amount of money as back in the 1980s if you invested at the peak.

[Andre Jikh]

Sure, sure. But the most brilliant investor like Warren Buffett, 25 years hasn't been able to outperform gold.

[Graham Stephan]

It does make me worry too that maybe bitcoin could be one of those of like bitcoin's version is the 1980s version of gold.

[Andre Jikh]

Right. Where it doesn't do anything for 25 years. Right.

[Graham Stephan]

And then 50 years later you're like, oh my gosh, it just hit $2 million inflation adjusted.

[Andre Jikh]

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

[Graham Stephan]

I think it's just the lack of confidence in the United States dollar right now is really contributing to that. And tariffs I don't think are helping confidence. And I think people just want a safe place to store their cash. And in terms of a safe place to put their money, stocks investors feel like is overvalued the dollar. They don't have faith that it's going to be worth the same three years from now. Bitcoin is a bit too volatile. Where do they put it now? Gold, silver, real estate. But even real estate is expensive relative to the current interest rate.

[Andre Jikh]

Right.

[Graham Stephan]

And also it seems like, yeah, it makes sense how, how it's gold.

[Andre Jikh]

And also interest rates are going down, which weakens the dollar. So, you know, less demand from foreign countries to buy our Treasuries. So that also weakens the dollar, which partially contributes to the 10% loss in purchasing power. It's a lot of things. Yeah.

[Jack]

I'm curious, have you made more money Investing or with YouTube over the past year?

[Andre Jikh]

Mm, so far, definitely YouTube. By far.

[Jack]

Definitely.

[Graham Stephan]

By far, by far.

[Jack]

Have you ever had a year where you made more investing than YouTube?

[Andre Jikh]

YouTube. Before YouTube. Before YouTube. But I hope it doesn't come across that way on my YouTube channel. I'm not like, hey, I'm the investment guru. You should follow me because I make more money. I think I'm pretty transparent about YouTube being my main source of income, but I think on a long term scale, I think obviously investments will make a lot more money than YouTube, but investing just takes forever.

[Graham Stephan]

Yeah, but you can't compare the two. Like, even if you're in the market earning 8%, you can't compare that to like a job that you're working at eight hours a day, five days, six days a week.

[Andre Jikh]

Yeah. I think most importantly, as long as I don't position myself and I'm not dishonest with people and I'm not like, hey, look at my portfolio and look how much money I have. You should buy my course, because I know what I'm talking about. I hope I'm pretty transparent about that. And I don't think that should be a secret that YouTube is, you know, mainly it.

[Jack]

And so why did you give up investing in dividend stocks?

[Andre Jikh]

I didn't. I still have all my portfolio.

[Jack]

So you, you still held onto them, but you, you didn't continue buying more of them, correct?

[Andre Jikh]

Yeah, I still have all of it.

[Jack]

What, what do you make annually on your dividend?

[Andre Jikh]

Like 30k. That's not bad. That's not bad. And so that's, that's an income.

[Jack]

Why were you doing dividend stocks instead of just normal?

[Andre Jikh]

I think it made it really easy because the fire community, you know, they preached the 4% rule and all these things. It's really easy to plan for retirement because you can see what your monthly income is. And I really like that aspect of it. And the reason that I changed it now back to index funds is just because of my tax rate. I like, I think if it wasn't being taxed at the rate that I am, I'd be totally okay with staying in debt. Dividends. I think dividends are extremely powerful and I would never knock anybody for being a dividend investor. I think it's really powerful. I know you don't like dividends. I know you're mostly an index fund guy too, but it's just the taxes.

[Graham Stephan]

I look at the taxes and I'm like, oh my gosh. When you're earning so much from a job and then you get a dividend, obviously if it's qualified, that helps, but it's a forced tax payment, so automatically 20% gets taken to the side. And then if you pay a net investment tax on top of that there's another 3.8% and then there's potential state taxes on top of that. It really adds up. Like imagine living in a state like California and you have a short term capital gain. You're paying 37% federal, then you could pay another 10% to the state. To the state, and then another 3.88 as a net investment tax. So you could very easily all of a sudden pay more than 50%.

[Andre Jikh]

Right.

[Graham Stephan]

Investing your money, that makes no sense.

[Andre Jikh]

Unless you had it in a Roth, in which case it would be tax free.

[Graham Stephan]

Correct.

[Andre Jikh]

Right. So that's a workaround, but you're obviously limited to like what, 7,000 is it now a year? Yeah.

[Jack]

So I want to also talk about alternative investments because you bought a bunch of Pokemon cards.

[Andre Jikh]

Yeah.

[Jack]

So you have that.

[Andre Jikh]

I still have that.

[Jack]

How much money do you have in Pokemon cards?

[Andre Jikh]

Probably like 150 to 200.

[Jack]

150 to 2. 150 to $200,000?

[Andre Jikh]

Yeah.

[Graham Stephan]

Andre's got an amazing collection. He, he has something that I want.

[Jack]

You could buy it. It could be yours for the cheap price of 300.

[Andre Jikh]

No, I'm kidding, I'm kidding, I'm kidding.

[Jack]

So you have 150 to $200,000 of Pokemon cards?

[Andre Jikh]

Yeah. Would you, would you spend These Pokemon, I will say that that's the principal cost. Like, that's my initial cost. It might be less, it might be more. I have no idea.

[Graham Stephan]

My offer, I think you paid 150.

[Andre Jikh]

Grand for the base set. Yeah.

[Graham Stephan]

If I offered you 150, would you take it?

[Andre Jikh]

I don't think so. I wouldn't take it. No, I don't think so, because you can't find that set. So my set is one of 11 known to exist and one of only 15 that will ever exist. And the reason that we know that is because there's one card in it. There's this card called Chansey and the shadowless PSA 10. There's only 15 of them known to exist, and it's still been at 15 through the Logan Paul era. Like, remember when Pokemon blew up and everyone was buying and everyone was grading cards? Dude, it's stuck at 15 the whole way through because that's like the hardest card to grade. So from that set, a PSA, shadowless chansey is like impossible to get. So there's 11 known sets like mine that exist and all the people that own them are like multimillionaires. Like, they don't need the money, so you're not going to get them to sell unless they just absolutely need it. So that's, that's.

[Graham Stephan]

I would buy it from you. I'd buy it at the price you paid. If you just want to say, hey, I want to cash out of it.

[Jack]

Yeah, I'm sure you could also probably.

[Andre Jikh]

Sell it for more maybe. I, I think over time, probably, but I just, I don't. I have not seen that set since I've bought it.

[Graham Stephan]

This set. Here's the thing with, with Andre's set and just Pokemon in general with your set, they don't trade and so you don't know what price it's worth. It's also really difficult, difficult to sell because the market for that is very, very, very small.

[Andre Jikh]

And usually the, the, the trades that do happen, like the buys, they're off market, so you're never seeing them. It's not like it's on ebay or something.

[Jack]

That's interesting.

[Andre Jikh]

Yeah.

[Jack]

And, and, and what about watches? I remember we were all in Japan at the same time last year.

[Andre Jikh]

Yeah.

[Jack]

You ended up buying what watch?

[Andre Jikh]

I bought a longanzone. A data graph. Graph. It's a platinum data graph. I believe the reference number is like 403035. It's a platinum data graph. And the watch is like, iconic because it's A chronograph. And it's one of the most iconic chronographs that I've ever released. I think it was released in like 1998. And it was the watch that changed high end watchmaking, or high horology as people call it, because it forced brands like Patek Philippe and AP to make their movements in house. Because prior to that watch they were all manufactured and modified from a company called Lumania. It was the Lumania movement. So all these high end watch companies, they would buy that movement, they would tweak it and they would put it into their watches. In 1998, during like the watch whatever gathering that they do, that watch came out and like stunned the world. And from that moment on, the new benchmark for a high end watch was an in house movement.

[Jack]

And so then what is the, what did you pay for that watch and what is the current value of it?

[Andre Jikh]

I want to say that because we talked to Nico Leonard, we talked to like another watch guy.

[Graham Stephan]

Yeah.

[Andre Jikh]

And got his opinion on it. And they said that it was the most likely the cheapest data graph in the whole world. Like that I found interesting Japan. And I asked the sales associate, I was like, when was this watch listed? And they literally said yesterday. I was like, are you just saying that? And they're like, no, we just got it in yesterday. I look at the reference number and it has, it matches to like my birthday, like how old I am, like crazy stuff. And I was not planning on buying it, but I've always wanted one of those watches. So I paid 54k4 for it. 54 grand.

[Graham Stephan]

It was the cheapest one by probably $20,000.

[Andre Jikh]

Yeah. So I think the next cheapest one, I don't know what the next cheapest one on the market is, but probably in the 70s, like low 70s.

[Graham Stephan]

And this was at a time when the US to yen conversion rate was really good.

[Andre Jikh]

Yeah.

[Graham Stephan]

Like it had just ticked.

[Andre Jikh]

And there's no sales tax.

[Graham Stephan]

And there's no sales tax.

[Andre Jikh]

Yeah.

[Jack]

And so you got a smoking hot deal.

[Andre Jikh]

I think so, like if I want to wanted to get my money out of it, I think I easily could.

[Jack]

So I'm curious, why are watches in Japan such a good deal? I've seen so much media on the secondhand luxury watch stores in Japan and how you can go and get like the craziest deals imaginable on some of the nicest, you know, watches like Rolex, Patek, APS over there. Why is that?

[Andre Jikh]

I think, well, at least part of the reason is because Anything that's used in Japan, just because, like, their culture, they keep everything in such, like, neat condition. It's, like, pristine. They have things that are, like, vintage from, like, the 80s and they look brand new. And they also don't like to, like, Japanese people don't like to buy secondhand. They always go for new, I think, because culturally maybe there's, like, bad things associated maybe with, like, buying used things. So from that reason alone, in Japan, their market is not necessarily for Japanese people. People. So all the people that are buying the watches are foreigners that are flying into Japan. So that's a smaller market than the entire country of Japan, obviously. So I think the. The prices are generally lower, at least that's one of the reasons why I.

[Graham Stephan]

Think that, yeah, there's more supply than demand, for sure. Japan is also really against anything counterfeit. And if they're caught selling any fake watch or any, like, kind of Frankenstein watch, they're going to be blacklisted forever. And these businesses have been around for decades with perfect ratings things. So you don't really have to worry about, like, getting ripped off or getting, like, a fake watch.

[Andre Jikh]

And we asked, do you guys sell fake watches? Like, no, you can't do that here.

[Graham Stephan]

Now, what's also interesting is that I heard that a lot of Japanese people believe that when you buy a secondhand watch, the original owner's soul comes with that watch. Like, their soul is somehow attached to it.

[Andre Jikh]

Okay.

[Graham Stephan]

And so when you buy that watch, you get a part of their soul. And so it's not considered, like, good to. You don't know what you're getting in that sense. And so they just don't want to buy sex.

[Andre Jikh]

So from a culture perspective. Yeah, there's a little bit of a superstition to it, correct? Yeah. So, yeah, but you get a great deal.

[Graham Stephan]

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

[Andre Jikh]

No. So that. That's. That's part of the reason why I would say.

[Graham Stephan]

But what's cool is that they can take amex, which is really nice, and they don't charge you an extra fee.

[Andre Jikh]

Well, we did get our.

[Graham Stephan]

Why are you laughing, Jack?

[Jack]

Because it's funny?

[Graham Stephan]

No, because the points. Just imagine putting that on a 2%. Or imagine the Robin Hood credit card 3% back, or the Coinbase card and get 4% Gemini.

[Jack]

Get some Bitcoin back.

[Graham Stephan]

Yeah, yeah. I'm just saying, it's. It's like, not only are you getting no sales tax, a favorable exchange rate, but you could then put it on a credit card to get an extra 4% back.

[Andre Jikh]

Right. We bought our watches within a day of each other.

[Graham Stephan]

Yeah.

[Andre Jikh]

Yeah. So that was.

[Jack]

How much did you spend on your watch?

[Graham Stephan]

I think total, including. Because I count the exchange rate, and I count also getting points back on the credit card. It was like 19 something.

[Jack]

And what do you think it's worth?

[Graham Stephan]

Worth? Low end. I'm talking, like, fire sale, 21. And that's like, fire sale. I got to sell in 24 hours. I think it's probably worth 24.

[Jack]

Wow.

[Andre Jikh]

Did I tell you that I. That I bought a ring in Japan and I appraised it and what happened? Oh, I didn't tell you that story. Oh, dude. We were walk. Walking right by that store that Graham and I bought our watches from was called Okura. And I look, and I'm like, dude, that's a really cool ring. It was a women's black opal ring. Okay. And I'm, for whatever reason, just obsessed, as Graham is like, with aquariums. I'm, like, obsessed with Australian opals. And for whatever reason, I just know what, like, disproportionately more than most people know about opals. And I was like, dude, that ring is so cool. So I go in the store, and I'm like, how much is that ring? And they're like $600. I'm like, there's no way this ring is $600. It's a platinum ring with diamonds and a black opal stone that's like two or three carats carrots. And I'm like, this is a $10,000 ring. There's no way it's $600. And I was like, is this an Australian opal or an Ethiopian opal? Because there's two types of different opals. Ethiopian opal, which is, I think, hydrophonic, which means it absorbs water or doesn't one of the two and then the other opal is Australian opal, which repels water. It does not absorb water, but they have different characteristics. And I was like, which one is that? And they told me that it was an Ethiopian opal opal. And I was like, that. That's not an Ethiopian opal. That looks like an Australian opal. I know my opals, okay? And everyone in the store who was shopping there, they were like, no, that. That's definitely Ethiopian, because Australian opals are only black. I'm like, that's B.S. i know that's not true. So I. I gamble it and I risk it. I'm like, I'll just. I'll buy it, right? $600, and I'm bringing it back to the US and I go to get it approved or appraised, and the appraisal came in at, like, $9,500. A ring that I bought for $600. Yeah. Yeah. It was crazy.

[Jack]

I guess you never know when that niche knowledge is going to come to your path.

[Andre Jikh]

Like, that was like, again, so. So Jack and I talked about this. Like, you guys ever, like, go through life and then something happens and you're like, I live in a simulation all the time, right? Like, we talked about how this is a true story. It was like. It was, like, midnight. It was, like, past midnight, and we were. I was in a random arcade store with me and my friends in Kyoto, of all places in Japan. Kyoto?

[Jack]

I don't even think I knew you were in Japan.

[Andre Jikh]

We had no idea that each of us were in Japan, but we were in Japan together. And I look and I'm like, dude, that. That's freaking Jack. We go up, like, the odds of us being in a city that we didn't plan to meet at past midnight at a random arcade store in a city like Kyoto. Like, that was insane. And just like. Like, the whole random knowledge of, like, an opal ring. And I'm like, what are the odds, like, I would find this random store that had this random ring that I knew about?

[Jack]

What have you done with the ring?

[Andre Jikh]

I still have it. I got it appraised, and I'm keeping it. And, you know, once I get married, that'll be, like, my proposal ring.

[Jack]

Ooh, yeah, that's nice.

[Andre Jikh]

Yeah. Yeah, that was cool.

[Graham Stephan]

Paid for the trip, too.

[Andre Jikh]

Well, if I sell it. But I'm not going to sell it.

[Graham Stephan]

But. But it does go to show you that if you come in with some knowledge, right, Basically go to Japan, buy the right thing, and pay for the entire trip and basically get the trip for free.

[Andre Jikh]

Yeah. Yeah, that's true.

[Jack]

What would you say is the best investing advice you've ever heard?

[Andre Jikh]

I don't know. I think, like, the most important investing quality of people that I've seen that have built wealth is, like, their ability to delay gratification. It's just their ability to project into the future and see that there's an older version of themselves that is grateful for their younger self saving and investing money and delaying that gratification. Delaying buying the things that you think will make you happy. Happy. And on that note, I don't know if you guys agree with this, but, like, for me, when I want something and I'm like, I really don't want to buy it, but I really want it. And when I buy it, I feel this, like, sense of relief. But I figured out that the relief comes from not in owning that thing, but in the peacefulness that comes with not wanting it anymore. Does that make sense? It's like, oh, I'm so glad, like, I have it now I don't want it, and now it's not bugging me as much. And so if you're able to extrapolate that into the future, you could be like, okay, I could buy this thing, but maybe I can just skip the buying part and then go directly to the not wanting it.

[Jack]

A lot of the pleasure is in being able to buy something.

[Andre Jikh]

Exactly.

[Jack]

And also I heard some wisdom, which was not wanting something is just as good as having it.

[Andre Jikh]

Right. That's true.

[Jack]

And so you could take someone that, like, you know, really, really, really doesn't to want. Want a. A really fancy car for some reason, and they're living just as good as someone that, like, bought that fancy car just because it doesn't matter to them. Like, they have other priorities, other things that make them happier, such as an aquarium.

[Andre Jikh]

Right.

[Jack]

Or other things that are just more significant to them. But if you don't want something, it's just as good as having it.

[Andre Jikh]

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

[Jack]

So the key is you could either save and make enough money to be able to buy the things that you want. Or you could just want fewer things.

[Andre Jikh]

Exactly, exactly. Yeah. You go directly to that part, if you can. And then also, I think this is the dividend brain of me, which is most people, I think when they compare, if they want to buy something, they're like, well, how many hours of my work does it cost? If something's $100 and they get paid $20 an hour, okay, it cost me five hours of my life to buy that thing. And that's how most people think about purchasing things. But what dividend investing has really taught me is to instead think about things in terms of 4%. So it's like, how much money do I have to have for that thing to passively exist in my life? And that's what we talk about all the time.

[Graham Stephan]

That's how I just love that.

[Andre Jikh]

I love that, the 4% rule. So, like, how much money do I need to invest? If you don't have that much money invested in the market, then you have no excuse to own that thing. Like, you can't afford it. That's. I've always looked at affording it.

[Jack]

So is that 4% per year or 4% of the.

[Andre Jikh]

Well, if. It depends. If it's like a recurring cost, like, for example, if it's like a Netflix subscription. What's Netflix right now per year?

[Graham Stephan]

12.99.

[Andre Jikh]

Let's say $13. Right. Times 12, that's $156 a year.

[Graham Stephan]

That's 25.

[Andre Jikh]

Or divided by 0.04, that's $3,900. If you don't have $3,900 invested in the market at 4%, you cannot afford. You cannot afford that. $13 a month. Like, that's just how you think about it. I've always thought about it that way. I think that's the coolest way to think about it. And so that's what motivated me to build a dividend portfolio. Because then I could be like, okay, now I know how much money I'm passively making, and now I can delegate what things I can and can't afford.

[Graham Stephan]

It's so addicting once you start doing that, though. Because I remember in a separate vein, it wasn't dividends, but for me it was YouTube income, because I viewed that as all passive, because I would have done it anyway. And I remember making a dollar a day and thinking, oh, wow, that pays for an all. You could eat sushi every single month for free. And then it started to become, wow, I got A free phone bill every single month at $50 a month. And then my car insurance is a hundred. Oh, wow. My car insurance is now free. And everything starts to like, stack. And then pretty soon it's like, wow, my mortgage is now free.

[Andre Jikh]

Right.

[Graham Stephan]

This is free. This is free. Now I just live for free because I would be doing this anyway and I'm making money.

[Andre Jikh]

Yeah. That's so cool. And then you eventually realize that the quickest way to being financially free isn't necessarily by building a bigger portfolio. It's literally by removing. Removing those recurring costs because that's way easier to do than needing that money invested at 4%. She's like, hey, if I could remove this, this car payment or this, like, I just saved a hundred grand from like, retirement. That's like. That's the coolest way of thinking about it. Yeah.

[Jack]

Do you think that the money printing in the United States is a strategy? This is con. This is a conspiracy theory right here to keep people poor?

[Andre Jikh]

That's a really good question. I don't think on that level of conspiracy to where I think that is an intentional thing that we're doing. I don't think people are that organized to be like, this is what keeps people poor. Let's keep doing it. I don't think that's the case. What do you think? You think it's intentional?

[Jack]

I tend to not buy into conspiracies. But also, if you think about it, any money printing drives up assets. Assets are owned by wealthy people. People, not poor people. Poor people suffer with inflation. It's just what's happening. And they're printing money to try to help the poor people, but it's like, clearly not. So I don't understand.

[Graham Stephan]

I don't think money printing has anything to do with poor people. Why would they want them to be. Wouldn't they would benefit more from people having more money because they spend more. Like if, if you gave a hundred thousand dollars to an average person, I, I almost guarantee average person, it'll be gone almost instantly.

[Andre Jikh]

Right.

[Graham Stephan]

They're not going to save it. So it's better for people to make more money. Like, there's no incentive for the government to keep people.

[Jack]

Well, technically speaking, poor people are going to be easier to control with the government.

[Graham Stephan]

What I, what I think is more systemically realistic is that the school system teaches people just to work and follow in line, listen to another person, do as instructed. You take your lunch here, you start here, you end here. You do this whole thing. So you could work for someone else. It's just a very outdated system that I think is probably more likely that they keep people in, like a working hamster wheel, and then they shove it down throats of like, oh, it's good to go to college. And then now you borrow money. Now you're in debt, and then it's, oh, but you have to buy a house, because that's the American now you buy a house. Now you. Now you have a $50,000 student loan and a $300,000 mortgage. You're not going anywhere. And now you have to take that job to keep making those payments because you don't want to lose your house, and you can't default on your student loans. Bankruptcy. So now you're kind of stuck, but then you're 35, and you think, oh, crap, I'm getting to an age where I should probably have a kid. So now I have a kid. Now you definitely can't take the risk to start your own business or do anything. So now you're stuck working that job. You don't like to pay for the house, to pay for the student loans, and now you have a kid to support, and now you're just kind of. And so you keep working until you're 70, and then you die. Right.

[Andre Jikh]

So you're saying it's kind of a result of our own decisions and kind of as a byproduct of a shared delusion that we all have about what it's like to live delivered.

[Graham Stephan]

I heard that a lot of the school system was. Was created by a factory owner. And this could totally be untrue. And I'm just rephrasing what someone else told me was dictated by a factory owner who wanted more workers. And so they. They set up a whole system to basically keep people in this loop of, like, learning how to work for somebody else. And that makes sense.

[Andre Jikh]

Makes perfect sense. Yeah.

[Graham Stephan]

So I don't know if that's true or not.

[Andre Jikh]

I think that's separate from the money printer question.

[Graham Stephan]

But the money printing, I think, is pur. Result of the government getting out of control in their spending. And this is the only way they could get out of it. It's just like, what do they do?

[Andre Jikh]

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

[Jack]

So then what would you say is the main, main thing that is keeping people poor then?

[Andre Jikh]

Just a lack of financial education and literacy mostly, and lifestyle decisions. I don't know. For whatever reason, these questions make me think of George Carlin. Do you guys know who that is? The comedian? He's like, oh yeah, the rich exist to like kind of inspire the middle class and then the poor exist there to scare the out of them.

[Jack]

What do you mean?

[Andre Jikh]

Well, because it's like keep being in the hamster wheel. Like if you don't, if you don't want to be like these people, you got to keep working. You got to keep doing it.

[Graham Stephan]

And to keep working is. Look at this guy who just bought a Ferrari, right?

[Andre Jikh]

Don't you want be like that guy? But you definitely don't want to be like that guy. It's just, it keeps you stuck in the middle, right?

[Graham Stephan]

I heard somewhere that the worst thing you could do to someone is pay them $80,000 a year because it's just at the right point where they're making enough, where they don't want to risk it. But it's not so little that they're forced to take big action and make significant moves to do something that would drive their income so much higher and give them so much more opportunity. It's like that safety middle where it's just enough to keep you going. And especially if you get promised like a raise to 90k to then 100, like you see the trajectory going up, you're going to want to stick on that and not do your own thing.

[Andre Jikh]

The slowly boiling crab, right? I don't know. I just feel like in order to be like, if you think about it mathematically, in order to be the one, like if you think rich is to have a lot of money, if that's your definition of rich, then you gotta do like what the 99% don't want to do, like to become the 1%, which is literally the opposite of what everyone else does. Like not going out to eat in restaurants and saving money and not owning a car and bicycling to work. It's like, that's what it takes to just have enough escape velocity to get out of that. And I think that's what I focus so much on in my early 20s, because my parents were immigrants and they didn't understand money. And I was like, okay, let me not do that.

[Graham Stephan]

I've really been following a lot of Alex Becker's videos. He has this new channel, Alex Becker Business. And he talks a lot about what people have to do today who are young to make a lot of money. And he talks about just, like, if you want to be the. That 1% who succeeds and does something, like, really big, think of what everyone else is doing, and then don't do that.

[Andre Jikh]

Right.

[Graham Stephan]

And you put yourself in uncomfortable positions. And one thing I really liked is he said, the moment you turn 18, move out of your house, live with five roommates, just have a mattress on the floor and a computer and figure it out.

[Andre Jikh]

Yeah.

[Graham Stephan]

And I think that that's pretty good advice.

[Andre Jikh]

That's a great point. Yeah.

[Graham Stephan]

I think a lot of people would benefit from doing that. And no Netflix, right? No video games.

[Andre Jikh]

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

[Graham Stephan]

It's interesting. I get really frustrated lately when I see people who are, like, 18 to 21 not doing anything and just kind of, like, coasting, because I'm like, they have no idea how much opportunity is out there and just what they could get involved in. And I'm like, oh, my gosh. It's just. It frustrates me to see potential being wasted.

[Andre Jikh]

You know, I've thought about that, too, and I'm kind of like the devil's advocate on that, because I think it's true that now more than ever, there's more economic opportunity to make money with so many different things. Right. With the Ubers, the Airbnbs, and the taskrabbits, the task economy, I get that. And also with social media, obviously the biggest opportunity, but I also feel like if I view it from that perspective, it's also very selfish because those are my interests. I'm interested in those things. So I'm like, why aren't you doing that? But I feel like for a lot of people, what if they're not interested in that and they look at the last generation, that and their parents and how they got screwed by the system. I could totally tell why they would feel that way.

[Graham Stephan]

I just feel like as a young guy. Cause that's our audience. It's like 90 something percent male. You have to create some sort of value. There's gotta be something that you're doing to stand out. And when you have that energy, when you're young, young and you don't need to sleep eight hours and you don't always look tired in videos because you didn't sleep and you're stressing, it's just like this. You have so much opportunity.

[Andre Jikh]

It's true.

[Graham Stephan]

That's where I get frustrated.

[Andre Jikh]

Do you ever think you're lucky sometimes to be interested in the thing that happens to make a lot of money? Sometimes I look at Warren Buffett, I'm like, that's a cool skill that he has, but it's so like one dimensional and he happens to exist in a world that rewards him greatly for it.

[Graham Stephan]

I, I think I got lucky in the sense that I. You found a naturally. A saver. No, I think I would have made money no matter what I would have done if, if it were aquariums, I, I know I would have made money, right. Doing aquariums. Because now some of these businesses that, like the aquarium businesses, they're profiting like 3 million a year doing aquariums.

[Andre Jikh]

That's cool.

[Graham Stephan]

It's, it's like incredible. It's a really, really, really good business.

[Andre Jikh]

Right?

[Graham Stephan]

I would have done that. Bet there's just like whatever interest you have, I bet there's a way to make at least 1 to 200,000 a year schedule.

[Jack]

At the end of the day, it's about like not necessarily your interests, but are you the type of person to like roll onto your back and just like kind of let life happen to you? Or are you the person that like comes up, fails against something and then tries to learn from it and then uses that as like a tool in your belt to then, you know, help solve a problem later in life? It's just your ability to provide value and learn from failure.

[Graham Stephan]

But then again, is Is that. Are you born with that or are you raised with that?

[Andre Jikh]

Right, that's the, that's the trillion on.

[Graham Stephan]

And here's an interesting one between Jason and Brett Oppenheim. Twins raised same parents, same school, same experiences, completely different.

[Andre Jikh]

In what way?

[Graham Stephan]

Jason is very like type A, very motivated. Business works all the time. Brett is so laid back and to trying chill.

[Andre Jikh]

Is he lazy?

[Graham Stephan]

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

[Andre Jikh]

Right.

[Graham Stephan]

And then if he needs more money, he'll just be like, all right, I'm gonna go and make more money. It just makes enough. It's just appear he's, he's got a natural ability, right. To just go and make money.

[Andre Jikh]

I really admire people like that. I don't think I'm one of those people. I'm not like I need to constantly grind and make more money. I don't know. Sometimes I feel like people are so poor that all they have is money basically. I think if that's the only thing that drives you, that's cool. I just, I can't relate with that.

[Jack]

How has your definition of success changed then? Going from being like from an immigrant family, not having a lot of money and then going through life earning a lot of money.

[Andre Jikh]

Yeah.

[Jack]

Now to now having, you know, quite a bit of money post tax, just like chilling.

[Andre Jikh]

I think my definition has changed a lot. Like nowadays if I see someone with kids, I'm like, that's wealthy to me. I don't know why I just view somebody with a family as, as like being wealthy. Probably because it also costs a lot of money to have kids and maintain a good family. But that's just to me like more important at this point. But also realize it's a privileged perspective because I didn't always have that perspective. It's obviously easy to have that when you have money.

[Jack]

Speaking of family and relationships, what is the best relationship advice you've heard and what does the red pill movement.

[Andre Jikh]

Oh my God.

[Jack]

Get right, get right and wrong about dating.

[Andre Jikh]

I don't think I. I know enough about the red pill movement to, like, represent what it has, right? You tell me. I don't know. You know, what it is.

[Jack]

You were telling me all of this red pill jargon.

[Andre Jikh]

That's red pill jargon, right?

[Jack]

Before the podcast, you were, like, saying the craziest stuff.

[Andre Jikh]

I was? Yeah.

[Jack]

So what's the best relationship advice you've heard?

[Andre Jikh]

Oh, my gosh. I don't. I don't think I've ever heard relationship advice.

[Jack]

Never?

[Andre Jikh]

Never. No, not really.

[Jack]

What is the best relationship advice? Like, what works for you in your relationship?

[Andre Jikh]

Yeah. Growing up, I saw my parents have a very tumultuous and, like, very bad relationship. And I always equated having a, like, a crazy relationship where you always fight as, like, love. And I think over time, that definition has matured and changed. Like, I was like, oh, I'm clearly, I'm fighting with, like, my girlfriend. So therefore, that means we really love each other, and the more we fight, the more in love we are. Does that make sense? And I think that's a really toxic way of viewing it. I think as I've matured and I've gotten older, I've realized that you can be chill and, you know, have your own time to yourself and not get, like, you know, bothered by a lot of things. And that can be love. And I didn't see that growing up. So I think that's just, like, experience and time of realizing that and also just being so much later in life to have kids or, like, to want a family. And I think that just comes from maturing, which I did not see my parents do because my parents had me when they were, like, 19.

[Graham Stephan]

So it's always crazy to me because I think, oh, man, if I had a kid at 18 years old, how old would they be now? It's like, 17, right? I always do that. I'm like, hey, instead of having Bailey, if we had a kid, they'd be, like, five and a half years old.

[Andre Jikh]

It's weird, but if you had a kid now, do you think you'd look back in your life and be like, I wish I didn't have a kid. I wish I could have just made a couple more million before I did it.

[Graham Stephan]

It's less about that and more about just the. The. The time I. If. If I had a kid today and this child appeared, I would regret not having traveled more and done experiences that you just can't do quite the same after having a kid. And I think travel is a big one. And I would have been like, man, instead of spending a lot of time working, I should have done all these other things that I just posted.

[Andre Jikh]

Really? I don't think you'd feel that way at all. I think you eventually get to do those things, whether it's with your kids or after.

[Graham Stephan]

Bill Perkins, because we talked about this on that pod, really opened my eyes, and he's like, your window is closing of you before kids, and once you have a child, the you that's sitting here today is never going to exist again in the same capacity.

[Andre Jikh]

Yeah.

[Graham Stephan]

And he said, now is your time to do these things in your life because it's your last chance. And I was like, oh, wow, he's correct. So I'm in the mindset now where, like, hey, now is a good time to travel.

[Andre Jikh]

Right.

[Graham Stephan]

Take it a bit slower. Do these things that. I just don't want to keep putting it off forever.

[Andre Jikh]

That's true. I don't think you traveled quite a lot. Right.

[Graham Stephan]

Japan. But I want to spend a year and over the year, maybe spend two months of the year just spread out throughout the year, just traveling different places.

[Andre Jikh]

Do you have, like, a checklist of places you want to go? And then you're like, okay, I'm ready for a kid. Or is it, like, how you feel or what's it based on?

[Graham Stephan]

I think, obviously I love a checklist, but I think you don't need to hit everything on the checklist. But, you know, hitting 50% on that list would be pretty.

[Andre Jikh]

How many places do you want to see?

[Graham Stephan]

Probably four or five.

[Andre Jikh]

Okay.

[Graham Stephan]

But spend like a week and a half in each.

[Andre Jikh]

Right.

[Graham Stephan]

So like, two months out of the year, you know, every other month being away for, like, two weeks.

[Andre Jikh]

Okay, perfect.

[Graham Stephan]

Maybe every three months being away.

[Andre Jikh]

Do you think you're working towards that which you say?

[Graham Stephan]

Yeah, we're planning to go away this year doing a few little trips, and then next year I want to plan.

[Andre Jikh]

And get that done, because I feel like at the. At the rate that you're traveling, that I know you to travel, like, you're going to take the next 10 years to get to the next five places because you don't travel a lot.

[Graham Stephan]

I said that vacation.

[Jack]

Like, Graham will treat everything as his priority. Like, for example, some gas valve will go out on one of his rental properties, and he has to spend, like, like, you know, six hours of his time. Six hours of his time comparing quotes from different contractors stressing out about it. And that's just something that, like, should realistically be so insignificant in his life. But at the same point, if he just spent the six hours, like, trying to optimize the quality of his life.

[Andre Jikh]

Right.

[Jack]

And doing the things that he says that he wants to do, like traveling the world and going to go visit places. It's like, you should be spending that time optimizing for life. Fulfillment, purpose, meaning quality of life, life, Figuring out a few places you want to go to, picking some people you want to go visit them with. It's like that right there is actually, like, being meaningful with the way that you're spending your time.

[Andre Jikh]

Yeah.

[Jack]

And you, you, you prioritize so many other things that realistically you hate doing. You don't need to be doing over the things that you want to do, but you don't do.

[Graham Stephan]

Yeah, that's true.

[Andre Jikh]

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

[Graham Stephan]

I think we're going to live into.

[Andre Jikh]

Our 90s, but will we have the same, like, quality of life and health? Like, right now, you're in your prime in terms of how you observe and view the world and experience it, how your health is. Like, when you're 70, like, okay, you might live to 100, but are you going to be as fit? And will you care about all this stuff? Like, probably not, you know, I don't know.

[Graham Stephan]

I'm planning to live to, like, I want to hit 100. I'm just saying planning to do it. I want to hit 100. I think that would be, that would be ideal. So I'm doing everything I can to live to a hundred.

[Andre Jikh]

Okay. I would, I would love to live 100, but you got to go to.

[Jack]

Thailand and get those biomarkers you do.

[Andre Jikh]

Man, that's going to be the hardest part. And not take more than three hours.

[Jack]

Saving up now.

[Andre Jikh]

Not take more than three hours.

[Graham Stephan]

Hours, hopefully could be days, man, I don't know.

[Andre Jikh]

We've gone full stop.

[Graham Stephan]

I just can't. We've gone full man. I'm not like you.

[Andre Jikh]

Where I could just like, wait. So are you. Are you. Are you planning to have kids, you think?

[Graham Stephan]

One day.

[Andre Jikh]

One day. One day, like when I don't put.

[Graham Stephan]

A win on it, but at some point, yes, I would like to have.

[Andre Jikh]

Do you think you'll be like, literally everyone that we know? That's like, if I had known, I would have done it sooner. Do you think you'll be that way?

[Graham Stephan]

It's impossible to say because I'm not there. Maybe, but maybe not.

[Andre Jikh]

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

[Graham Stephan]

Maybe.

[Andre Jikh]

All right.

[Graham Stephan]

But maybe not. I don't know. Just because other people say it doesn't mean I always follow it.

[Andre Jikh]

Right.

[Graham Stephan]

I think you just come to your own conclusion.

[Andre Jikh]

Yeah, I wouldn't know either. I don't have kids yet.

[Jack]

And then what is the ideal amount of money to have?

[Andre Jikh]

Have enough to do anything you want with, but not too much to where you want to do nothing.

[Jack]

How much is that?

[Andre Jikh]

Somewhere in between the amount you got.

[Graham Stephan]

To give an amount, the way I.

[Andre Jikh]

Would define it is just enough. Enough is different for everybody.

[Jack]

So what's enough for you?

[Andre Jikh]

Enough to do. To do what with, though? Like, just to live.

[Jack]

Yeah. What's the perfect amount of money for Andrew? Check.

[Andre Jikh]

I. I would say I'd be happy with. With like $2 million or even a million. I'd be happy with. I would make it work.

[Jack]

What do you mean? I'm asking what's the perfect amount?

[Graham Stephan]

You could just select an amount. Yeah.

[Andre Jikh]

You could just select an amount. Yeah, sure.

[Graham Stephan]

So select an amount.

[Andre Jikh]

What's your guys'.

[Graham Stephan]

The ideal, Like a perfect.

[Andre Jikh]

That makes no sense to me. I don't. What does that even mean?

[Jack]

I would say. I would say the perfect amount of money for me is 10 million million bucks.

[Andre Jikh]

I was gonna say 10 million too, initially, but I'm like, yeah, but like, 5 million is fine too.

[Jack]

5 million's great.

[Andre Jikh]

Yeah, exactly. So, like, how do you answer that question? Five minutes. Fine. 10 is better. 20 might be better, but you're 50 might be even better.

[Graham Stephan]

You.

[Andre Jikh]

You know what I'm saying?

[Jack]

When I asked. When I asked you the question, though, you're like, well, it's not so much.

[Andre Jikh]

That you want to do things right.

[Graham Stephan]

You know what? On the age, you get the money, too. How old? Like, but at 30, I'd say it's a different age than at 60. 60, dude.

[Andre Jikh]

I do believe that having so much money, though, like, can be a curse at a certain point. Like, I don't. I haven't had enough to where it's like, it's become a curse. But here would be a good way to phrase it. Yeah.

[Graham Stephan]

You could gift somebody a lottery ticket and you could dictate how much money they get, how much would you give them, and it wouldn't ruin their life. You don't want to give too much. All of a sudden, it screws everything up. But you don't want to undercut them either, because you could decide how much they get.

[Andre Jikh]

Right? Yeah. I would say 10 million is a great amount. 10 million is great.

[Jack]

I would say, like, like 4 million bucks.

[Andre Jikh]

What's that? 4 million?

[Graham Stephan]

I would probably.

[Jack]

4 million would be buying yourself a house, putting some money in stocks, spending a little bit of money.

[Andre Jikh]

Give me, like, a picture of, like, how you've allocated that 4 million. You have $4 million net worth. What does that mean?

[Jack]

$4 million net worth.

[Andre Jikh]

You said 4 million.

[Jack]

You said hypothetical situation.

[Andre Jikh]

You said 4 million.

[Jack]

Let's say you take 4% from that. That's $160,000 a year. Let's say you take 3% from that. That's 120, $10,000 a month. That's what you can spend. Realistically, they're going to go f off with some of the money. They're going to spend it. But if you have $10 million instead of 4 million, I do think that once you add that extra digit in there, people are going to be like, oh, I need a far, I need a Lambo. I need this, I need that with $4 million, realistically, people are not going to be buying. Well, I'm sure they will, but, like, I think 4 million is solid because it doesn't appear to be this insane, insane, insane amount of money where you're going to go buy a bunch of new Lambos, some Ferraris, and you could still just put it away in some stocks.

[Andre Jikh]

Hold on. But you're saying people or you people? People.

[Graham Stephan]

Okay, I bet they would.

[Andre Jikh]

I think they would. I think for you, give anyone a million dollars, they'd be gone in a year.

[Jack]

Okay, so what's the perfect amount for someone to win in a lottery then? For 50 bucks.

[Andre Jikh]

But that's what I'm saying, like, but I'm assuming you're asking me or. And I'm asking you, Jack, like what is your amount? Not, not like a hypothetical. For an average person.

[Jack]

Perfect amount of money I would say would be probably between 5 and 10 million.

[Andre Jikh]

Okay, okay, that makes more sense. Yeah.

[Jack]

Graham.

[Graham Stephan]

Me personally or for the average person? Because we were talking about average.

[Jack]

You personally.

[Graham Stephan]

50 million.

[Andre Jikh]

50 million, yeah.

[Graham Stephan]

Because it's not enough where you could just private jet all the time, but you could get a nice piece of beachfront real estate.

[Andre Jikh]

Right.

[Graham Stephan]

You could be bi coastal.

[Andre Jikh]

Sure.

[Graham Stephan]

You could take first class plane tickets tickets without really thinking through it. And you could have a great collection of something that's unique.

[Jack]

You don't think you do that with 20 million?

[Graham Stephan]

No, no. You're not buying first class plane tickets with two beachfront prop. Dude, a nice beachfront property is going to be 8 to 12 million for that expensive property. Yeah. Just it. But you could even have just a normal 2,500 square foot house on the beach in a great location in Santa Barbara. And that's going to be $12 million.

[Andre Jikh]

The thing that I take away from this conversation is that I'm very gl. Am not in your perspective. I am so glad that I don't have that same perception of like how much I need. I think that's like a burden that I don't have that you do, if that makes sense.

[Graham Stephan]

I don't think it's a burden.

[Andre Jikh]

I think it's a complete burden.

[Graham Stephan]

How is that a burden?

[Andre Jikh]

It just is.

[Jack]

It just makes. It makes.

[Andre Jikh]

So the way I would define happiness for people is the difference or the delta between their reality in expectation. Right. It's like where you are today and where you'd like to be. And the delta between where you are and 50 million or a hundred million or a billion is like crazy. Now once you've reached, like, let's say it gets like, why are some of the richest people some of the most miserable people in the world? Because their reality is like at utopian levels. Where do you go from that point? There is no more expectation there. Like there's nothing. Money will increase, increase. So therefore their happiness level there is. There's no space there. There's no, I would say headroom.

[Graham Stephan]

I would say I'm pretty happy though. I'd say most days like 10 being the happiest I've ever been in my life and one being like really unhappy most days I'm like a solid eight to like. Yeah, five.

[Andre Jikh]

I'm not saying you're unhappy. I'm just saying anybody who ties Their happiness to, like, some perceived, like, wealth level is. It's like, it's not a burden.

[Graham Stephan]

But I like. I like having a goal and then going after the goal and always having something. Yeah. Of like, hey, this would be cool. Like, like your Pokemon Collection, like, 150 grand.

[Andre Jikh]

Right.

[Graham Stephan]

That's. That, to me, would be like, that would be cool. That would be awesome to have.

[Andre Jikh]

Yeah.

[Graham Stephan]

And so then I think about that, and I think, oh, I just. Just the aspect of wanting something, like, here. Here's an example of something I postponed for a long time. I really want a Tesla Model S and a used one, too. Like a 2023 Tesla Model S long range. I could go out and buy that thing right now.

[Andre Jikh]

Okay.

[Graham Stephan]

But I. I purposely don't buy it.

[Andre Jikh]

Because you're edging yourself. Yeah, right.

[Graham Stephan]

But it's just.

[Andre Jikh]

It's just the.

[Graham Stephan]

Just the idea of. That's exactly my point. But I could. But I have fun, right? Going and looking and like, every day be like, is today the day?

[Andre Jikh]

Because you subconsciously understand that by owning that thing, it's like that happiness that you have right now, that excitement, like, that's what you're holding on onto because you don't have it. You could get any time you want. That's exactly what I'm trying to prove.

[Graham Stephan]

Yeah. But my point being is I'm still happy just not getting that thing as I am just looking at them online and maybe getting one one day.

[Andre Jikh]

Right? That's fine. But that. That proves my point that, like, there is some burden that is attached to, like, thinking that you'll be happier at, like, a $50 million thing.

[Graham Stephan]

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

[Andre Jikh]

Higher. Here's the way I view it, is once you're on that hamster wheel and, like, you'll find the next thing to edge yourself with. Right. You'll never find finality in that spectrum.

[Graham Stephan]

I would hate to find finality, though.

[Andre Jikh]

Right. And I agree with that. That. But if you only attach that. That level of, like, happiness to just material things, that. That's fine. I'm not saying it's wrong, but, like, for me, I think there's so many different aspects of life that you can chase and edge yourself with that are not necessarily attached to, like, some financial figure and still find happy.

[Graham Stephan]

But here's the thing. To get to that financial figure, you're not just making money out of thin air. You have to do something productive, and you have to do something meaningful. So in the pursuit of that, you're doing something. Something that's. That's hopefully bigger than yourself.

[Andre Jikh]

That's true.

[Graham Stephan]

So it's part of the process.

[Andre Jikh]

Yes, but. But that's financially. But then there's also so many different ways to explore that. Like, that's. You're talking about depth. I'm talking about broad. Right. If that makes sense. Like, you're talking about depth of.

[Graham Stephan]

I think you have length and girth.

[Andre Jikh]

Ah, well, so I'm a girth kind of guy.

[Graham Stephan]

I think you could still hit that beachfront property with a nice yard that goes out into the waves breaking. You could still do that, while at.

[Andre Jikh]

The same time, listen, I rented an Airbnb in Hawaii for, like, dude, I spent stupid amounts of money for like a week. I spent like 15 grand for a week on, like, it was like, a $20 million house on a beach. And I lived there for like a week. I'm like, this is cool, but, like, what. I dedicate my entire life to chasing this thing. Like, I'm like, no, I'll skip it. Like, I. I don't want to attach my. My perception of, like, the journey of life to this thing that I just got to experience. And it's cool, but, like, I'm cool without it. It's not the end of the world for me if I don't have that. It'd be nice to have, but I don't want to spend the rest of my life, like, not traveling or not having kids or not having more meaningful experiences in lieu of this thing.

[Graham Stephan]

I think you could do both.

[Andre Jikh]

I think you can.

[Graham Stephan]

I think you could still pursue that and still have a meaningful life and have a family and all that sort of stuff. Stuff.

[Andre Jikh]

I think it for sure. It depends on how you want to structure your life.

[Graham Stephan]

So there's nothing at this point that you want besides a family?

[Andre Jikh]

I think so, yeah. There's nothing that I'm like, oh, I gotta build a business. Cause I want this thing. I'm so glad I don't feel that way. It's.

[Graham Stephan]

But what about a yard with a pool?

[Andre Jikh]

That's nice.

[Graham Stephan]

See, I got you thinking now.

[Andre Jikh]

Now, what do you mean?

[Graham Stephan]

Here we go.

[Andre Jikh]

I got that.

[Graham Stephan]

You don't have a yard. And a pool.

[Andre Jikh]

What? I don't need a pool. You know what? It's way more enjoyable to have a pool to go to a friend's pool because they pay for it and they maintain it only if they heat the.

[Graham Stephan]

Pool, which they don't do.

[Andre Jikh]

My friends don't do.

[Graham Stephan]

Nope.

[Andre Jikh]

They don't want to spend the money.

[Graham Stephan]

Nope. Because it's expensive.

[Andre Jikh]

Dude, we went to Graham's July 4th party, and he's like, I'm not heating up the pool. Like, dude, I'll pay you $5 to heat up the pool today.

[Graham Stephan]

Way more than $5.

[Andre Jikh]

How much is it?

[Graham Stephan]

I got to get that beachfront Property, man. That $5 compounded in Bitcoin.

[Andre Jikh]

I don't know. Haven't you. You, like, had the same experience where it's like, eating someone else's snacks is always more enjoyable than, like, having it yourself or, like, going to swim at someone else's pool. It's just so much more enjoyable.

[Jack]

I like to. To have it myself, but I also don't. I'm a. I have very few, like, desires. Like, there aren't many things that I feel like I need in my life to be happy.

[Andre Jikh]

Why is that?

[Jack]

I. I think it's.

[Andre Jikh]

But don't you want a beach house?

[Graham Stephan]

No.

[Jack]

No, no, no.

[Andre Jikh]

Why not?

[Jack]

Why?

[Andre Jikh]

Because.

[Jack]

Because I just got another house. House, and it's such a pain in the butt, and I'm like. Like, I just. I want few things, but if you.

[Andre Jikh]

Have $50 million, you don't have to worry about that.

[Jack]

I would rather just rent it.

[Graham Stephan]

You know, you could rent the house, Jack.

[Jack]

There's nothing. But I. I like. What I really love doing, what I absolutely love doing, and I wish I could do it more often, is work throughout the day, see my friends, eat some good food, play pickleball at night. That's all I want. That's all I want. I want. And I'll be extremely happy. And that's it.

[Andre Jikh]

Do you think that's, like, boring or, like, wrong? No. Like. No.

[Graham Stephan]

Not at all.

[Andre Jikh]

Okay. No. Okay.

[Graham Stephan]

But then again, you walk in Jack's house, and there are 30 pairs of shoes. The dining room is a pingpong table.

[Andre Jikh]

Okay.

[Graham Stephan]

The furniture is completely mismatched. And there's the new house.

[Jack]

The new house is going to be nicer. It's going to have, you know, I'm going to dress it up well. In fact, maybe I'll put some pictures here or at some future episode.

[Andre Jikh]

Yeah.

[Jack]

Of the before and after. Old house. New house.

[Graham Stephan]

Yeah. You got to subscribe because in like two months, you're going to see this new set and it's going to be amazing. It's going to look incredible.

[Jack]

Oh, yeah. We have a big announcement to make here on the Ice Coffee Hour, guys. This set that we've been using for the past few years, it will no longer be the set of the Iced Coffee Hour. Okay. If you want to get a behind the scenes glance at the. The set. Tell you what, we'll post a picture on our members only page. Okay. We'll also unveil it as soon as it's done. Done. And I'm telling you right now, the Iced Coffee Hour is going to have a massive, massive upgrade. Massive upgrade.

[Graham Stephan]

How about this for the members? Do a tour of the warehouse.

[Andre Jikh]

Sure, that's cool. What are you going to turn this bedroom into?

[Graham Stephan]

Guest bedroom.

[Andre Jikh]

Okay.

[Jack]

This is a guest bedroom in Graham's house. And we've long overstayed our welcome. And on top of that, it's just so small in here. Like, you guys can't really tell how tiny this room is, but. But it's, it's cramped. I hit my head on that light all the time. And so we are going to be making an upgrade and it will be insane. That's all I'm saying. Not many podcasts out there that are going to have a set like the iced coffee.

[Graham Stephan]

It is beautiful. And the funny thing is, too, I do really good work from the bedroom. Like, my favorite is to be in bed with my laptop, coffee to my side, and just work.

[Andre Jikh]

Yeah.

[Graham Stephan]

And so I'm going to use this as my office to work in. And I just work from the bed. I don't know what it is about that just waking up, up and just being in a bed. And we have windows over here that overlook the tree and everything. So, like, I'm looking forward to having that.

[Andre Jikh]

Oh, that's cool. Yeah. Yeah, I like that. It's a nice bedroom. It's got an attached bathroom too. It's nice. It's on suite. Good talk. Are you gonna buy a new house?

[Graham Stephan]

Am I. Yeah, I. So Jeremy has been trying to get me to buy a new house, like every week. He's like sending me listings and like, look at this. And look at this. And he's like, my agent found a house and we could go see it this weekend. And I'm like, no, Jeremy. But I do look at the market daily.

[Andre Jikh]

Me too.

[Graham Stephan]

And I would say if there's a house that came up that is perfect and if, if I could get it at a Price that. It just. I. I'd be dumb to turn it down. I'd do it.

[Andre Jikh]

Hmm. What's the price for range?

[Graham Stephan]

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

[Andre Jikh]

Huh.

[Graham Stephan]

But it's got to be. But it's got to be perfect. And there are very few places that I've seen that have been perfect. In fact, in the last three years, there has only ever been two places in Vegas that I love. Loved one of them. I couldn't get at the price that I thought I would need to pay to do that.

[Jack]

If you go back in time, do you wish you bought it?

[Graham Stephan]

No. No. I'm happy without the house because the monthly increase. Because where I'm at now, I have, like, a 2.8% interest rate. I put so little money down. It's not stressful for me to be here spending the money on the other place would. That additional stress just wasn't worth it. Like, I would get a benefit. Like a happiness benefit boost of 5, but I get a stress boost of 7.

[Andre Jikh]

Right.

[Graham Stephan]

And so that's not worth it. So I need a happiness boost and a stress boost to either be lower or the same. And this was not. But it was a beautiful house. The other one sold for $15 million. But the house was perfect. I'm talking, like, as perfect as you could possibly get as a house. This was it. It was one of a kind. It's truly trophy property with a view of the strip, with a yard. It was. Everything was perfect. But obviously, it's 15 million bucks. I can't do that. But. But if that house were six, I would have done it in a heartbeat. Heartbeat. I would. I would find a way to make that work.

[Andre Jikh]

That's cool.

[Jack]

So if it got sold for less than 50% of its value, then you.

[Graham Stephan]

Would have made it work way less. Fifteen million to six. Yeah. Oh, yeah. But it's just. It wouldn't. But I bet it's some point there will be a perfect place at a perfect price. It's going to happen.

[Andre Jikh]

Okay.

[Graham Stephan]

But it could take 10 years.

[Andre Jikh]

Huh? Well, I'm excited to see it. So there you have it.

[Graham Stephan]

Every day. It's like unboxing a pack of Pokemon cards. When I check the market.

[Andre Jikh]

Yeah.

[Graham Stephan]

And I see what's on Zillow, it's like, oh, there's a new listing that came up. Let's see that, right?

[Andre Jikh]

Yeah, it's cool. I look at houses all the time too.

[Jack]

Final question. This is kind of an interesting question. We've asked quite a few people on the podcast. Would you rather fight 100 duck sized horses or one horse sized duck?

[Andre Jikh]

Well, one horse sized duck for sure.

[Jack]

Andre.

[Andre Jikh]

Yep.

[Jack]

Thank you so much for coming on the ice cream.

[Andre Jikh]

Thanks for having me.

[Jack]

This was a blast. Great to talk to you. Nice watch.

[Andre Jikh]

Thank you. Likewise, by the way.

[Jack]

Oh, thank you very much, Graham. Nice watch.

[Graham Stephan]

As a Casio.

[Jack]

Thank you so much for watching. It really means a lot. Shout out Andre. Andre's information will be linked down below in the description. Description. Shout out that health thing that you did in Thailand.

[Andre Jikh]

Yes.

[Jack]

Shout out the other thing that you shouted out the biomarker thing that you guys function health.

[Graham Stephan]

And don't forget to sign up for the memberships to see the tour again. Mike Mikey, our editor, loves this. He's been telling us to promote the memberships more. We've been terrible about it, but it really helps support Mikey. So just, you know, do that for Mikey. I'm sure he'd really appreciate it. And you get to see all of the episodes before they go live publicly. You get to see them in full without any sensors or anything like this. And I think you'll like it. And if you don't like it, you could always just cancel. But don't. But don't do that.

[Jack]

Shout out Gavin, thank you for listening to the audio. Thank you guys for watching so much. We wouldn't be here without you.

[Andre Jikh]

Thanks.

[Jack]

Time.

[Graham Stephan]

This episode is brought to you by Light LifeLock. It's Cybersecurity Awareness Month and LifeLock has tips to protect your identity. Use strong passwords, set up multi factor authentication, report phishing and update the software on your devices. And for comprehensive identity protection, let LifeLock alert you to suspicious uses of your personal information. Lifelock also fixes identity theft, guaranteed or your money back.

[Andre Jikh]

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[Graham Stephan]

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