Taking a step back (what happened)

Hey, so right off the bat I want to acknowledge that this is going to be a much different pace than my usual videos because I'm not scripting it out word for word. I'm not trying to find the perfect way to say every sentence. I'm not playing to the YouTube algorithm. I'm not trying to enhance retention in any way. This is purely a video that I'm making, not thinking about the YouTube algorithm. This is just me talking to you, and I have a few bullet points that I want to openly talk about, and that's really it.

So if you're a longtime viewer of the channel, you're a business owner, you're an entrepreneur, and you want to learn about what's going on and maybe incorporate some of these things in your own life as well, great! Keep watching. If you're a viewer of the channel who just comes for the personal finance content, that won't be this video; that'll be next week's video. I'll resume with the normal content for next week. It's just this video is going to be a bit different. So, uh, that's the warning going into this. This is different.

Okay, so now that we got that out of the way, for those who are unfamiliar with me, it's been a long time since I've talked openly to a camera about myself. I usually shy away from that. I mostly wanted to keep it on personal finance, saving money, real estate, topics that have to do with the economy. So this video, let's bring it back, and for those who are unfamiliar with me or my background, I'll bring you up to speed because that might help provide some context.

Since I was a kid, for some odd reason, I have been weirdly obsessed with two things, and that's saving money and working. Like, I remember as a kid I would be obsessed with trying to find rare coins. Did you know that quarters earlier than a certain year are silver? Well, I became obsessed with trying to find those quarters because I thought I could make money doing that. I was also the type of kid who would just save all the birthday and Christmas money—like, you know, your grandma would go and give you 20 bucks when you saw her every now and then? Well, I would just save those up. It was difficult for me to want to spend the money.

I say that because I've had this tendency to find, like, very specific interests and just dig really deep into them. Like when I was 12 years old, I got a saltwater aquarium because I was obsessed with these aquariums at the fish store, and I'd see the saltwater fish, and I knew I wanted them. And when I got one of those tanks when I was 12 years old for saltwater fish, I became obsessed with it. I would spend all of my time after school on reef aquarium forums, talking to other hobbyists about keeping fish and coral alive. It was what I was enamored by. Thankfully it actually turned from the internet to real life because, uh, shortly after that I ended up getting a very part-time job working at this marina aquarium wholesaler where I helped them out.

In the beginning, I got paid in free fish and coral, and then as it evolved, I actually ended up making some pretty good money for being a teenager. Like, there were some days where I'd make as much as $120 again in a single day at 15 years old because I was getting paid $1 for every picture that I photographed, photoshopped, and helped put on their website. I just worked there as much as I could because I loved it so much.

And here's a cool story, by the way—almost 20 years later, I had the owner of that company come on my podcast, "The Iced Coffee Hour," to talk about it, and that was a full-circle moment because here is the person who gave me a chance at a very young age, getting to talk about that experience. So here's a quick clip of that just for fun:

"Who was doing the job before Graham?"
"Me."
"You were?"
"Yeah, for the most part."
"Yeah, that was a pretty easy guy to work for for the most part. I just wanted my deadline. If you reached your deadline and you did a good job, I think you got a little whiny sometimes when I asked you to re-edit photos. Sometimes you got kind of whiny about it."
"I mean he was making like... at the end I think he was making like a buck a coral."

Alright, so the point I'm trying to make here is that for whatever reason, working at this age kind of ruined it for me in terms of schoolwork or doing anything else that wasn't related to doing something I thoroughly enjoyed that I saw in some way as building towards a greater future or a career. It made it really impossible for me to want to do homework when I knew I could do something else instead that made money and that I had a lot of fun doing. So as a result of that, I really let my schoolwork slide. I would just do the bare minimum, basically not to flunk out of high school.

It was hard for me to see the point; it wasn't that I was struggling with it, it's just that I didn't want to be there. I didn't want to do it; I wanted to follow what I felt was right for me. Obviously, in hindsight as a teenager, there's only so much you can conceptualize about the importance of education, and that kind of bit me a few years later because when I was 16 years old, they ended up selling the company to a new owner. I did not get along with the new management; it wasn't as fun as I liked. I didn't have the freedoms that I used to have.

I just felt like I was being bossed around all the time. I felt like I actually knew the business better than them, and we'd have disagreements on ways to handle certain orders and the way we should be running certain things. I left. I know it was... I'm sure they saw some 16-year-old kid who's like, "Why is this kid telling us how we should be doing our business?" But you know what? Jokes on them because the company ended up shutting down afterward.

So, uh, you know, I'm not saying I'm right, but I'm just saying it didn't last much longer after I left. It was going downhill and I jumped ship. Anyway, this was a really weird time for me because here I was with work experience, but I had really terrible grades. I had a lot of knowledge on aquariums, but that's only going to go so far, and I just knew that I wanted to secure a future. I wanted to do well; I wanted to be successful.

So in my mind, I landed on investment banking. Again, keep in mind that at the time I decided, "I want to go into investment banking," I must have been almost 18 years old, and I thought I knew everything. I had a whole bunch of confidence, so I just decided I'm going to cold email every investment firm within a 10-mile radius of where I lived and just ask for a job. My whole pitch here was that I was just really enthusiastic. I really wanted to learn. I would work for free; I would do anything they wanted me to. I just wanted to get my foot in the door and gain experience.

Surprisingly, it actually worked. The job I ended up getting was pretty much like starting at the bottom of the barrel. It was doing data entry work and doing inter-office mail deliveries. I mean, it was super simple stuff. But after about six weeks or so, I quickly learned the corporate 9 to 5 was not for me. It felt like they really stifled all creativity, any individualism they wanted to stamp that down. So I made the decision to leave that because I didn't feel good about it.

That, of course, is when I came across the idea of becoming a real estate agent, and so that's what I started to do. I realized I could take my licensing classes online and what I thought I would do instead of cold emailing investment firms, I was just going to go to open houses every single Sunday and just talk to other agents and get their experience.

Keep in mind this was the beginning of 2008, so the real estate market had just peaked and it was about to go down for the next four years. A lot of the agents that I met were really disengaging about me getting into the industry. A lot of them said that business was drying up. "It's not as easy as it was before, I missed it by a few years, and I should go to college instead and gain some more experience." I just didn't believe them, so I just kept going.

Eventually, I met an agent at an open house who was super encouraging and was saying, "Now is the perfect time! You're going to be starting off at 18, and by the time you actually build up a business, you're going to be like 22, 23 years old! All your friends are going to be getting out of college, but you will have four years of work experience. You could be making $100,000 a year. You could be doing really well, and this is the perfect time to do it because you don't have a lot of overhead expenses, you don't have a family, you have no kids; like you really have nothing to lose at this point."

He offered me the opportunity to work underneath him and just split whatever business I brought in 50/50, and I thought, "This is an incredible opportunity!" Of course, I jumped on it, and that's what I did. Without exaggeration, I would spend 12, sometimes 13 hours a day, seven days a week doing the deals that no one else wanted—all the little tiny commissions that agents would lose money on. Those were the deals that I did because me earning a few hundred doing a leasing commission, to me, a few hundred may as well have been a hundred grand.

That was a lot of money, and I was gaining experience and just being able to meet people. I did anything I could, but here's the thing, though. Over time, that business really grew—it's like it wasn't just one deal; that person would refer me another person, and then I'd close their deal. Even I'm talking like leases, like them renting for $2,200 a month. I would help them find a place, and I would get a commission, usually 5-6% of whatever their lease term is for, you know, a year or two years.

But then that person would refer me to another person, would refer me to another person, and that business grew. I just saved practically all my money that I possibly could over those next four years. In 2011, I ended up buying my first house, and it was a foreclosure in San Bernardino County. It was $59,500. I sunk $112,000 into it, so I was all in this house $72,000.

And that was also around the same time where business really began picking up, and I ended up purchasing two more properties shortly after that that were also these foreclosures because the market was so bad. Even though a lot of people were telling me, "No, it's a bad time to invest, the market's going lower, the market's kind of gone; it's not going to come back," I just saw these as such good opportunities. It's what I knew.

After that, the market turned around. The business I was doing grew every single year by like 50%. I was seeing crazy high returns because the clients that would lease for me would go and buy a house from me, and then they would refer me someone else who wanted to buy a house. Once I started going from leasing to more selling and representing buyers of properties, my income skyrocketed.

In 2015, I became one of the first agents to join the Oppenheim Group, which is now Selling Sunset on Netflix. Honestly, in terms of numbers, like every single year had been better than the last. I think it was around this time, when I was 25 years old, that I really just began gaining confidence as a person because I started to feel like what I was doing wasn't just dumb luck; it was consistent. I was able to build a business on mostly referral at that point, and things just kept getting better.

Like, I saw progress, and that gave me a lot more security in myself that if I could do this once, I could probably do it again and continue doing this, and it was going to be okay. All of that extra business, though, allowed me to buy a fourth property in Los Angeles, and after I fixed it up, when everything was said and done, I was able to hit a million-dollar net worth by the time I was 26.

It was really due to just three factors. One was having a good income. Second was not spending that income. And three was investing as much of that income as possible. That magic three just was this winning combination for me that really set things off. Then, of course, is where you come in to play because in late 2016, I started making YouTube videos.

Prior to then, really going back to like 2007, give or take, I watched YouTube videos as my form of entertainment. Like, it was so cool to see these creators on the platform share themselves with everybody, watch them grow as a person, and just feeling like I was a part of that journey. I've always wanted to do that. I always thought it would be so much fun to be able to turn on the camera and talk to people, but I thought to myself, honestly, no one would want to watch me.

I thought I'd embarrass myself in front of a whole bunch of people. I thought friends would find out that I have a YouTube channel and like laugh about it. I was like really embarrassed, and as proof of this, I even made a post on Reddit saying that I didn't have the charisma to be good in front of a YouTube channel, and I wanted to invest in the channel instead because I had money, and I thought, you know, maybe I could just buy someone's ownership in a channel and help them grow it from like a business standpoint because business was something I was always really interested in.

It's like how to save money, how to grow a business; that was my interest. So I thought maybe I could combine that interest with my love for investing into YouTube, and no takers, unfortunately. So I thought, after years of putting it off and saying, "Ah, no one would want to watch me," I made my first video, and that was posted on December 26, 2016.

As soon as I did that, I realized that nothing bad happened. I didn't quite embarrass myself even though the video was private, in fairness, because I just... I was swearing in that video and I just... I didn't like that. So, uh, I kept posting, though. At first, I started posting once a week, and then after a few weeks I realized my videos did better if I posted twice a week. So I started posting twice a week, and then I thought, "What if I posted three times a week?"

So within about three months of starting this, this is the beginning of 2017, I started posting three videos a week every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. For almost seven years I would work full-time as a real estate agent, usually from 9:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m., and then after 7:00, I would go home and I'd work on YouTube videos until 1:00 in the morning. It was me planning out videos, filming them, editing them, and then scheduling them out. I just loved it; it's all I wanted to do really.

I would just go through all day as an agent just looking forward to having a bit nighttime so I could make YouTube videos. It was silly; I just loved it. But thankfully with that schedule within a few months, we hit 10,000 subscribers. Within a year, we hit 100,000 subscribers. A year and a half after that, we hit 1 million subscribers, which to me was like we are in an alternate universe that, like, we would be able to hit a million subscribers on a finance channel because that just doesn't happen.

It's finance; it's not supposed to be that. It's supposed to be like a really niche channel, so the fact that it could reach a million people was mind-blowing. It really wasn't until everything shut down in 2020 that I fully committed to going full-time on YouTube, and that to me was pretty obvious because everything in real estate was shut down. So it was like kind of by force that with everything shut down, and we're inside, I'm just going to double or triple down on YouTube, and that's exactly what I did.

I went full force on my second channel, ended up starting a podcast, I ended up hiring Jack, who is now the co-host of that podcast, and he helped me edit the videos on the second channel. Between all the channels, by the way, I was doing three videos a week on the main channel, three videos a week on the second channel, one podcast a week, and then there were also times where I was doing like three vlogs a week, a live stream a week. There were sometimes like 11 videos every single week that would go out consistently, and I did that for years up until recently.

Okay, so now that I've brought you up to speed, here's what's going on because some things have obviously changed. For the longest time, ever since I started working, I have been terrified of giving something up—not working more, not being open to new opportunities—because for whatever reason, I was terrified of it going away. I know it sounds sometimes ridiculous, but even as a real estate agent, I mentally just prepared that each commission I earned was going to be the last commission I ever made.

And so I budgeted off the mindset that if this is the last money I ever make, how am I going to make this last as long as possible? I get that it's completely illogical; it makes no sense, it's probably not healthy. But since I only got paid if a client bought or sold a house or completed a transaction, I didn't like relying on that, and I didn't like that being the reason I would make money or not make money. It just felt largely outside of my control.

Now on the one hand, this mentality was invaluable from a financial standpoint because it meant that I saved a lot of money during a time where the markets consistently hit all-time highs. It allowed me to invest a lot of that money, and I would not be here today if it were not for that scarcity mentality of, you know, paying attention to every dollar as though it were a million. But on the other hand, it made me terrified about not working with certain clients or not going above and beyond—not working every single day, all the time, 24/7—because I just kept thinking it could all go away on a moment's notice.

So, you know, while everything is working, like I should just be as diligent as I can and give everything 120%, no matter what. Even here on YouTube, for the longest time, I was under the impression that more videos were better. And so I just thought, "Hey, if I post one video and it did well, let me post two. Let me post three. Let me post seven." Well, if I'm doing seven, ten must be better! So I was just like, "Hey, the more the merrier. As much as I could physically do, I'm going to make that many videos."

I also kind of felt guilty because I knew people had become accustomed to a certain schedule. I didn't want to let those people down. I thought that people relied on those videos as part of their normal everyday scheduling, and why would I take that away from them? And then I also felt a sense of guilt like, you know, I'm in such a great position; a lot of people would love to be in. It's something that like I've, you know, aspired to be where I am now, and I'm like why would I post less if I'm capable of posting more? So just grind through it.

This is the reason why, for the last seven years, I have done nothing other than figuring out how to maximize every hour of the day. There's not a moment that would go by that I wasn't thinking about work, how to optimize, how to make something better, how could I improve, looking back on all the previous work that I've done and thinking, how could I optimize? This retention was low here; why was it low? How could I improve that? And then just diving headfirst into the YouTube algorithm to see what would work, what didn't work. I would just get obsessed with this.

It was kind of like I was spinning a whole bunch of plates at the same time, and as long as I kept my focus on just spinning those plates, I could do it. It was sustainable. But as soon as you threw something else in there that I wasn't prepared for—whether that be just a meeting or going to a breakfast or something really light like the video—maybe it takes longer to do, and like it pushes back the other thing—or a podcast comes up in the middle, just like anything else would completely throw off my schedule.

And I would just think, "Okay, now I'm just going to sleep less because I got to make up that extra 30 minutes, and I'm just going to pull from sleep." But then that's going to make the next day worse. It was bad. This also meant that it was pretty much impossible to turn my mind off.

Even though I could be physically present for a conversation or for a meeting or whatever it might be, in the back of my mind I'm thinking through thumbnail ideas and title ideas and thinking like, "Huh, you know that comment is pretty good. Maybe I should pin that comment," and how I would respond to, you know, this comment. Just, it's just my mind was constantly going, and I could not shut that off.

Now, in fairness, the same thing was also happening as a real estate agent. I'd constantly think about properties and like, "Oh, maybe I should make an offer on this." So that's probably just the way my mind works. But this, though, was probably like double the badness that it used to be. At least then it was manageable; this was just consuming.

Now thankfully, that did in a way make for a really successful career, but I also think that's only sustainable for so long until eventually something has to give. Of course, at this point, you might be thinking, "But Graham, why don't you go and just outsource all of the work? Just go and hire employees. Why don't you go and just have all the busy work you don't need to do? All you have to do is just go up and film."

Trust me, I thought about that. In 2020, I hired Jack, who is now the co-host of the podcast, at the time to edit my videos in the second channel, "The Graham Stephan Show," because I was spending so much time on this channel that you're seeing here that the second channel video editing was slacking. I would really do the bare minimum to slap it together just to get it out because I was so short on time.

Those were days I was working like 15 hours a day. So Jack came in, edited those videos, freed up some of my time to spend more time on the main channel here. And then he also did a lot of the work on the back end for the podcast, "Iced Coffee Hour," so that all I would have to do is show up, talk to the guest a little bit, make sure the cameras were all good, and then he would do everything else on the back end. So that was certainly a huge help.

But the main channel, which is this, was really, really difficult to let go of because the thing is it's not like I disliked the work here; I loved it. I really enjoyed it. It was something I just wanted to immerse myself in. But it was very time-consuming, and when I get on something, it just becomes obsessive. Like, it becomes everything I think about. It's all I want to do.

So it wasn't as though it was like a chore. The main channel work here was something that I'd look forward to every day, so it seemed weird to want to outsource that. But I tried to a certain degree. There was a time, I think in 2021, where I wanted to look into outsourcing some of the research and scripting of the videos. But, uh, after getting some scripts back, I just realized like this isn't me. The channel from the beginning was mostly based on just me filming in a half-converted garage talking about topics that I'm interested in.

It was never meant to be like this big conglomerate corporation with a whole bunch of employees; it was meant to be just like, "Hey, a dude sitting in a room on a Saturday night with a sleeping dog and cat here, just talking to a camera." That was the point of the channel, so it seems like outsourcing that took the soul away from it, and, uh, I decided not to do that.

It was also really difficult because I had such a tight video deadline. Like, I would often wake up at 5:00 a.m., 5:30 to be able to have a video out the same day by 3:30. And so having a scriptwriter, it was usually on current events that were happening that day. So unless someone was physically present with me and could write in like the same style as I speak, it would just take too long. Like, it's faster just for me to write it myself, and if the point is to save time, I may as well just do it myself.

So I did, so I just continued running just by myself, with Jack editing the second channel videos and podcasts, and that worked for a while. Now, I did however hire Alex sometime after that in 2021 to help run the vlog channel. He edited some of the podcast clips, and he took over editing some of the main channel videos. But it was really weird for me because editing the main channel videos, like this was my mind's way of decompressing because it was a time where I could just zone out, focus on the content, and relax.

So when Alex took that over, it was like I had no time to decompress. It was really strange because here I was offloading what would be six hours of work a video times three, 18-20 hours a week of editing, and I just used that time instead of decompressing. Instead of finding a way to relax, I filled that time up with more work.

So now that I had a free 18 to 20 hours a week, I found a way to then optimize that 18 to 20 hours a week doing other things. So I was just as busy. I guess anytime I tried to outsource anything, it just felt like this really futile attempt because if I save time, I'd feel lazy if I wasn't doing something. So I would purposely find the highest-level work that I could to fill that time to justify hiring it out because otherwise I may as well do it myself.

I don't know; I think I was in a really weird headspace at that point because I would calculate and optimize every single task I would do and then think if I wasn't doing that, what else could I do with that time? And if I found a better use of that time, I would have still have a hard time outsourcing it because I felt like, "Well, I could do both concurrently, so if there's enough hours in the day, I could do both of them," and usually that's faster than training someone else to do it. So I’ll just keep doing it myself.

And, uh, here's my rambling. Okay, so I've gone on for this. We'll continue. Anyway, all of this really just got bad enough to the point where I was calculating the cost benefit of spending an hour working or spending an hour going to the gym. Is it going to make sense to have lunch in the afternoon or work that afternoon? It didn't make sense to do a podcast in the middle of the day during market hours because, you know, maybe something could happen in the market. I could make a video on it.

It didn't make sense to travel anywhere because I would be spending idle time at the airport without something I could actively work on, so I would only go and travel if I knew I'd have a video to edit so that I didn't waste any downtime. I was like hyper-focused on this. I just think that after, like, years of doing that, I started to get burnt out. It wasn't enjoyable anymore, and I started to acknowledge that it wasn't healthy to be this extreme.

I think for me I just stopped enjoying the process. It stopped being about, "Hey, we're having a whole bunch of fun doing this," and more about, "Optimizing," and more about the algorithm shifted this way, and let me make these videos because this is going to do better. And if it didn't do better, what's wrong with the titles and thumbnails? Just everything was on my mind, and it just got to a point where I think it started to overflow and I was unhappy.

And when I'm unhappy on something like that, I could tell the work suffers, and when the work suffers, people notice that. This is not good. So if we could stop that and return back to a place of really enjoying the videos, which is where this channel started to begin with, that's where it should be. Now, to complicate the situation even more and confuse me even further, I've had this habit of asking people who are more successful than me what they would do if they were in my position.

A lot of these people are worth hundreds of millions of dollars. I look up to them; I take their advice very seriously. And when I ask them this question, they say, "Well, you should be building out a team; you could be hiring all these people, you could be leveraging this, you could be building out the network. You could, you know, you should be building this empire and this and that." They throw all these things, and I start thinking to myself, "Wait a second! If someone who is more successful than me, you know, decades older than me, seems to know a lot more than me, is telling me these things, they're probably right."

But you know what? I'll tell you firsthand; the more adventures I tried to do and the more I tried to take on, the more miserable I became, the more unhappy I was. And that was really difficult for me to comprehend because this is their advice. I'm asking for their advice; it seems on the surface it's the correct advice. Why was I not enjoying that? Why did that not feel good to me?

I guess just this idea of starting a thing and then being responsible for this idea and bearing the weight of growing it did not sound appealing to me whatsoever for any amount of money. I think in my mind I just felt like I was doing something wrong if I wasn't trying to maximize growth or scale or start all these different things and try to, like, you know, be competitive and all that. I just felt like, you know, that's what you should be doing. That's what you're always told to do.

It's like the natural progression— you want to, like, do this thing and then do it even better and then, like, improve over here, and, uh, yeah, just not me. But when I began optimizing instead for happiness, just I guess my entire perspective shifted. So what changed? Well, I guess the answer here is twofold.

One, when I started the channel, I had a whole bunch of knowledge and experience that I could share with everybody that was new for me to talk about. I was also working full-time as a real estate agent, and I was actively buying and selling properties and renovating them as well. So there was always something that I could pull from to talk about on the channel, and that's what kept things really fresh and interesting.

But in 2020, everything shut down, and I basically just locked myself in a room for three years talking about nothing else than what was going on in the markets, and I was not gaining the experiences that I should have as a person to become just a well-rounded individual. But second, in terms of the actual change, I would say this occurred about a year ago when I took a five-day trip to New York City.

At that time, I went with Jack and Alex, and we filmed the most expensive listing in the United States. We recorded a few podcasts, and I was able to film with Barbara Corcoran. And really, near the end of that trip, it just sunk in that like, "Hey, this is the work that I really enjoy!" It was really happy for me to be able to do all these things. Like, I wasn't stressed out. I got to meet new people; I got to hear different perspectives.

And this was one of the few times that I felt like I was still accomplishing something without feeling like I have to be in 100% overdrive mode to make it happen. That little spark ignited a conversation that I had with Jack because up until that point, the Iced Coffee Hour podcast was doing good, but it wasn't doing great. And a lot of that was because of me; I was the one holding the podcast back because I couldn't travel to guests.

My main channel took priority over anything else, and going and traveling to the East Coast from the West Coast sometimes is like a day of travel; filming there, a day of travel back, and it's like three days that were kind of like gone. So it was like it was highly inefficient, and I wasn't able to do it. A lot of the guests, as well, would have to revolve their schedules around coming to me, coming to us in person, around the schedules of the main channel videos, which really just meant that they were free to come like weekday or weekends, usually after 7 p.m. I couldn't film before that; they'd come here, and it really limited the amount of guests that we had.

But I think in that moment I just asked myself, if I optimized for happiness instead, what would I be doing? And my answer was I would be traveling more for the podcast. I would be giving that more time. I would be posting less on the main channel. I would be talking about the topics that I was more interested in myself instead of topics that I knew would do well from an algorithm standpoint.

And if I wanted to be the happiest version of myself, which I would also argue makes the best version of you— I mean if you're happy, you're just going to do better work in general— I would be doing that. And so I thought, "You know what? I'm going to give it a shot." I know it seems like I'm exaggerating here, maybe making it to be a bigger deal than it is, and it probably is okay, but when you've been doing the same thing for seven years straight without changing the schedule whatsoever, it's terrifying to change anything!

Like, I honestly thought if I didn't post three videos here every single week, the channel was going to die. I thought the views were going to take a nosedive. The algorithm would deprioritize my channel; I may as well just like sink that ship, drive it all the way down to the ground if I stop posting. And, uh, I just bit the bullet and I went down to two videos a week, and surprisingly nothing happened. The channel didn't die; views did not nosedive off a cliff; the algorithm did not punish me.

And when I realized that like nothing bad happened, I went down to one video a week, and to my utter amazement, everything is still just as good. If anything, views went up on a per video basis when I started posting less, which is something that I never thought would happen. I thought for sure this would just be a stab to my channel that, like, you know, you always hear about algorithms, just like, "Hey, the algorithm changed," and like that was it. I thought that would happen if I started posting less. Posting once a week, nothing has changed.

This allowed me to shift my focus and attention to interviewing some really incredible people who a year ago it would have been impossible for me to have traveled to go and see them. And I'm seeing this now that like I wouldn't trade those experiences for anything; it's 100% worth it. And it's also cool to see the progress on that, that when you focus on something, you see so much more improvement.

Like since then, the podcast has now almost at a million subscribers, and we're routinely doing over 450 million views a month on that channel. I'm also proud to announce that I've taken my health a lot more seriously lately; like I've cut out almost all processed foods and sugars. I go to the gym usually 5 to 7 days a week. I have a lot more energy; I'm trying to get a little more sleep, and I'm proud to announce—hey Ramsay—I'm proud to announce that I've lost like five pounds of belly fat, which has been sitting on me for like five years.

I would say, like, I'm in the best shape I've been in since 2019, which says a lot because the last few years I’ve definitely not been as healthy as I should have been. I've also had the extra time to indulge in some hobbies, like the reef aquarium. I've been painting some art, like these three pieces I did for the hallway or just kind of messing around with acrylic paints. I started landscaping and turning this area with half-dead plants into this.

I took on some home improvement projects, like painting the garage. And even though I still struggle with trying to optimize every moment of the day, and sometimes I wake up and I'm like panicked because like I feel like I should be doing more, more, I'm proud to say that I'm managing that. It's at an acceptable range. It's not like a full-on panic like it used to be, but it's, uh, I'm coping; I'm doing better now.

Another aspect of this is that I'm finding myself having much better relationships with friends, family, my fiancée since I could mentally be there—not just like physically be present and like run through the motions, even though in my mind I'm thinking like work and all this sort of stuff—but I could actually be there. And I think it's just like making for a much better life in general.

I'm also able to go and experience like different cultures in different parts of the world to get a much broader understanding. Like Macy and I went to Japan recently, which is a place I've always wanted to go to ever since I was a kid. Like, this has been the one place for me that's like at some point in my life I want to be able to go to Japan. Like that was always the pinnacle! And to be able to do that recently and just see parts outside of the U.S. just gives me a much greater appreciation for just the world in general and seeing how things work and operate, meeting new people.

It's just like those are such priceless experiences. This is all just really allowed me to step back and just recognize something that we all hear people talking about, and that would just be the word enough. Like, if money were the only focus here, I would be doubling down on the amount of content that I'm producing; I would hire out the team; I would try to outsource as much work as I can. I would try to start different companies and try to, like, you know, maximize the value of every hour that I could possibly work and try new things, get my hands in everything.

But I think I'm at a point where I just recognized where, like, I'm truly happy with where I am at this point in my life, even if that means sacrificing long-term growth unless, of course, it's just out of a place of enthusiasm and passion and what I'm doing, which lately has been in like. I know it's random; I know artwork in the aquarium, I know it's silly, but those two things I've just had a lot of fun doing. And guess what? They make no money!

Maybe one day if someone wants to buy artwork from me, maybe that's it; maybe that makes money, but, uh, besides that, they don't make money. Look, in a weird way I've just had this really difficult time separating work from my personal life because usually, my personal life is work, and it's hard to find a balance between the two because usually if you prioritize one, the other suffers.

But this is the closest that I've been to finding a good match to being able to have a great relationship with my fiancée, to be able to have a great relationship with my parents, to be able to see them more often, to be able to see friends more often, to be able to, you know, just grow as a person. And that's something that, uh, you know, unfortunately, I don't think I've quite done to this degree in a very long time, just because I've been so consumed with like doing one thing.

I have a feeling at some point there's going to be something else that I'll want to, like, focus 100% of my attention to, and every big thing, I guess, is just naturally progressed from the last. Whether that be from like aquariums to then getting into real estate to then going and buying properties to then going and making YouTube videos. And it's always been like this natural progression where it's like so evident what the next thing is, and I got like shift into it.

This time, I think that next thing for me is just acceptance of being grateful, practicing gratitude, and having appreciation for everybody that just comes along with the journey. I'm definitely not saying I have it all figured out because that would be far from it; I still got a lot of work to do, but I at least feel like I'm heading in the right direction.

And that's the update that I want to give you if you watch my channel, if you enjoy it, maybe that helps in some way. Maybe not; maybe this whole video is just me rambling way too long. But like I said, I'm doing a video here where I'm not thinking of the algorithm, I'm not thinking of retention. It is just me talking to you, and that's what this entire video is meant to be.

Now in terms of what's to come next, I'm really excited to say that we have some incredible guests coming up in the Iced Coffee Hour. And I don't want this to seem like this is a plug, but like, hey, I'm spending a lot of time on the podcast recently. We're like, we have like 10 filmed episodes already that we're just like strategically releasing. So if you want to go and follow that over there, like I'm traveling anywhere we need to get the best guests possible, and I think that's become evident over the last eight months that anywhere we need to be to get you just a good guest, even if it loses money—like sometimes we'll spend thousands of dollars getting like last-minute plane tickets just to go and see a guest for an episode that'll lose money, but it makes a great episode.

So, uh, feel free to go and subscribe to that. I'm also going to continue posting here once a week every Wednesday unless, of course, there's like this crazy topic that I really want to talk about like sooner than that, then I'll post sooner. But for the most part, once a week. And beyond that, get married this year, so there's that! And as far as other big business endeavors or topics, you know, I'm really just letting things unfold and letting things come without forcing it.

So, uh, with that said, thank you so much for watching! I really appreciate it. Uh, hey, hit the like button, subscribe if you made it all the way over here! At least do those two things, and check out the podcast, The Coffee Hour. That would make me very happy. And if you want to follow the stories I do every now and then on Instagram, maybe some art that I'm doing, just follow me on Instagram, just GP Stephan. That's it! So thank you so much, and until next time!