The UGLY Reality: How U.S. Division Stalls Innovation | Jason Wong DSH #612

In China, we're always taught that our common enemy, our common goal is this and our common enemy is this, not with each other.

We went through thousands of years where we were fighting internally.

We had a lot of civil wars.

So we had that in our history.

And now we're like, you know what?

For us to progress as a society, we have to move very fast together in unity.

But when you look at America, we're taught to fight each other.

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All right, guys, today I have with me someone I've known for a long time, Jason Wong.

Thanks for coming on, man.

Thanks for having me.

Yeah, I've known you for almost eight years or something.

Yeah.

Close to a decade.

That is crazy because we're both pretty young.

Yeah, I think like because of our age, we just stuck to each other when we first met.

I think I met you at like a networking event.

Yeah.

Someone introduced me was like, you got to meet meet this guy named Sean.

He was, I think he was doing Jersey Champs.

Yeah, I was doing e-comm at the time.

Yeah.

And I wasn't doing anything with apparel.

So we're like, yo, we're tight.

I'll send you some stuff.

You send me some stuff.

Yeah.

It was sick.

That's funny, dude.

And the Asian, you know?

Yes.

The Asian bond.

And the height.

I was like, wait, that guy stands out.

That's funny.

But here you are now still in the e-comm space.

Yeah, I mean, I don't know.

I feel like I can never really get out of it as much as I do want to get out of it.

So it's always been very impressive how you pivoted into something that you really want to own, the media side stuff.

Yeah.

Oh, maybe I'll get out.

I've had a few pivots.

I tried crypto.

I tried B2B, but this podcast thing is probably my favorite pivot.

Yeah, you look happier here.

I'm a lot happier.

E-comm is fun, but it's just the margins were too thin for me, man.

Yeah.

And there's a lot of headaches.

You're just fighting.

You're fighting every single day for attention.

For real.

Yeah.

And I think for this one, it's just so natural for you.

You've always been really good socially.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I've prided myself on that just because I used to not be good.

So.

Did you just like start podcasting to get out of that space or were you like

podcasting, started going to networking events, conferences.

I was mad uncomfortable at first because I'm a huge introvert, but me too.

Yeah, but there's growth in uncomfortable, being uncomfortable.

So I'll check that out.

Yeah.

But I'd love to dive into what you're up to, man, because I know you got a few brands, right?

Yeah, I mean, I've always been an e-commerce since I was a teenager.

Started off in media marketing.

Then I got into e-comm.

And then recently I'm in the manufacturing side.

Last couple of years, I realized that that was really what I wanted to do.

Kind of similar similar to like what you're saying the e-comm side the margins are too low i had to pivot so i started pivoting and say you know what what can i do to service everyone else instead of just me trying to sell to 10 000 people i just got selled at five right um and so now i started a packaging manufacturing business called packing duck

I don't know.

I think that's my calling.

That's the thing where I'm really, really passionate about.

Nice.

What a name, too.

Packing Duck.

It's one of those like shower thoughts.

You know what?

I think that name really, really fucks.

I love that name, dude.

I love me some duck.

That's a top five dish, bro.

Pecking duck.

Yeah, and it's also brandable, right?

Like there's emojis.

There's like a whole visual motif where people kind of remember it.

When I look at manufacturing and you look at other manufacturers, they're typically in their 40s, 50s.

They're old.

Their name sounds like ABC Holdings.inc.

There's not that much appeal to it.

So I kind of bring this modern twist to the branding side, but combining it to manufacturing.

And it's a lot more approachable.

It feels like you're talking to someone.

And I think I bring my background as a merchant and say, hey, Yoshan, you do e-comm.

I used to do e-comm.

I understand where you're coming from.

Here's how I can make it better for you.

Whereas when you go talk to someone in China, you're doing it on WhatsApp.

You're worried about communication issues.

You're worrying about them screwing you over.

So we fix a lot of that trust and that relatability.

Yeah, you can relate because you came from the e-comm space rather than these guys have no idea what they're dealing with.

Yeah.

There's a lot of problems in e-comm.

So that makes sense.

It sounds expensive to start something like this.

I had a little cheat code to it.

So I basically went back to China to the factories that I was working with for many, many years.

And I asked them this question.

I was like, hey, how much business do you do with the US?

And they're like, not that much.

We do a lot of domestic businesses.

We do a lot of Asia businesses.

But in the US, it's just tough because one, you have to find the clients.

And then two, you have to be able to speak to them.

So you need a whole separate sales team just to work with the Western world.

And I think I got pretty lucky during this time because when you look at the Chinese economy, they're taking a little bit of a hit.

The real estate's taking a hit too.

There's this meme about like how NVIDIA's market cap is larger than the entire Chinese economy, which is crazy.

It's a country that's four or five times bigger than us, right?

So around this time, because the factories were so used to domestic businesses and because domestically the businesses aren't doing that well, they're kind of struggling.

So I went to them and I was like, hey, let me bring you guys to the U.S.

Let me buy a piece of the factory at this price.

And if I can get in, I promise you I'll get you this amount of clients.

And they're like, yeah, I mean, if you can get me this amount of clients, we'll lock in at this rate and you can buy in.

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And that's what I did.

I went to the U.S.

and just grinded my butt off and trying to get all these big brands, DDC brands.

to start using us.

Brilliant.

And that's how I bought in as an owner without paying millions of dollars for these equipment.

Because each of these machines are a million, two million boxes

from Germany.

The Germany printing press.

These apparel machines?

Not just apparel.

We do boxes, we do glass, we do metal tins, but these machines are so expensive that I would realistically never be able to start it.

And then also managing employees, managing the entire facility.

So I basically got a little cheat coat to go in, be a part of it without the exposure of millions of dollars.

I love that.

And you just had to land five clients, you said earlier, right?

I'm saying like for reference, for me to make a million dollars in e-comm, I got to sell it to thousands of people.

For me to make a million dollars as a manufacturer i just gotta find five five clients wow but my deal with the factory was more than five of course yeah yeah you know just a lot of these pls are what 10 50k and they're recurring right if you need bags for your jerseys you're gonna use me for until you find someone better or until the lifetime of your company yeah that's true yeah if you're doing the packaging for each product i mean fashion nova's probably sending out thousands of stuff a day oh tens of thousands a day and it's recurring it's an afterthought too like when you change your product you don't really change your packaging um so we're pretty safe in that space i found that little niche where i feel like it's not that competitive uh everyone needs it and there's good enough margins for us to take all the boxes for what i want to do i love that so you're probably going to china a lot then because that's where your business every other month but it's good like my family's back there so i take it as like a little vacation i go there for a week and see my dad and then i fly back to the factories I got to figure it out, like finally a system where it's dialed.

That's cool.

So your family's been there the whole time?

Are they?

Yeah, I was born in Hong Kong.

My dad's there.

My grandparents are there.

And then when I was eight, I moved to America with my mom.

Just figure shit out.

We got, basically got airdropped into New York City, Chinatown.

I like to call it that.

I basically just got airdropped into a new country.

Didn't speak a lick of English

and just figure it out.

Wow.

And I found that like, you know, being a minority and being an immigrant in a whole new country is very, very...

challenging because you just don't know what's going on.

I didn't plan to come to America.

My mom one day was like, yo, we're going to America.

We're going to start something new.

But I found that humor was the best thing to connect with people.

So I was like, you know what?

I'm just going to watch a bunch of funny movies in English and learn how to make jokes.

And that's how I got by in school.

Wow.

You were that kid that pulled out the memes in class?

I had to.

And then it eventually became one of my businesses when we first met.

I had to move by.

I remember that.

I was in Walmart and stuff, right?

Yeah, we were in different retailers.

Nothing too big.

We were mostly DDC.

Even at that time, I didn't really know how to blow it up.

Like I was talking to retailers.

I was doing all these stuff, but I didn't really know.

No one taught me back then.

There was no e-comm courses.

Think about it, like eight years ago, there's no courses.

I had to figure it out, but you killed it, man.

That shit was on every single Instagram meme page.

Yeah, this is early days.

A lot of the media accounts that are doing those meme pages, I was like their first client to really blow up.

And then, and then they started taking other like the supplements, the OnlyFans ads.

That's what's everything

though, man.

Yeah, I remember in college, so much easier.

Oh my gosh, I could buy any shout-out, any sports page, and my jerseys would fly.

I know, miss those days.

Yeah, I missed those days.

Now I don't even know if it works.

Yeah, really tough because, dude, there's back then we can own an entire market with a few thousand dollars.

Now you get a little blimp.

Yeah.

Right.

Yeah, for real.

Their prices all went up.

World star is like 5k now just to get on there.

Yeah.

Crazy.

Some pages charge like thousands and it's like, damn, they're making hell of money.

They're making a million a year.

Just well, you see that like DaQuant page got so, I mean, of course, with the whole company, but like that kind of put a market cap to what theme pages are worth.

Everyone thought they were hot shit after that.

I mean, I don't like that.

Their prices just went up.

Yeah.

They sold for what, like nine figures, something crazy?

Yeah, it's like 80 some mil.

Dude, when I saw that, I was like, damn, they must have been selling five mil a year in shoutouts at least.

A lot of music companies use them.

Yeah.

Yeah.

A lot of labels use those theme pages.

Yeah, those labels got money.

That makes sense.

So at 14 years old, you were making $50,000 a month?

For a few months, it wasn't for like the entire year, but for like those, I would say like from March to August, those are the best months.

And then it went down to 20K because there was an offer that I was running.

So, to give you guys some context, I used to run a lot of theme accounts myself too, but not on Instagram, it was on Tumblr.

And this is before Yahoo bought it, the good days of Tumblr.

And the great thing about Tumblr is that it was a multimedia platform, meaning that you can do music, you can do text, you can do videos, you can do pictures.

Whereas back down on Instagram, there's only pictures.

And because we have so many more type of media mediums, we're able to to run a lot of different ads.

So I had about 32 million followers in that network.

Damn.

And I was just running any type of offer that I could.

It started off with just like simple apparel stuff, which didn't really make me too much money.

And the biggest client I had at that point was Shein, which back then they was kind of small.

But 10 years later, they were one of the largest ones.

But the money that I made the most was on affiliates because I realized that affiliates are all link-based.

And Instagram didn't allow links back then.

Now you could.

So Tumblr was the only platform outside of Twitter where you can put links in.

So I was just running any type of affiliate offers I could find when I was 14.

And that was honestly the most money I've ever made because we came from a family where my mom was single mom working a job.

So 50k a month was insane to me.

Yeah.

And yeah, I did that for a few months, saved enough money, gave some to my parents, and then I moved out to LA a few years later back.

Wow, dude, 50k a month at 14 is like the meaning of life is just.

Oh, that was what I thought I was going to make in a year.

Yeah.

You know, as a kid, like the concept of money just didn't really exist.

I know.

At that age what are you even gonna buy you can't buy a car could i bought more uh of other blogs so the way that i made it was i got into this whole ecosystem by buying my first account for 800 my best friend naman in high school was like yo get in this buy a blog and start doing ad sends this 20 2012 2013.

i was in florida at the time he was like yo come in buy buy this account just do clicks you know put banner ads on your blogs make some money here and there and there was another platform called my like where you can get paid for sending people through those galleries.

You know, when they're like, oh, top 10 facts that you didn't know, and every single click is an ad.

I used to see those all the time.

Yeah.

So we were running those offers.

And so I bought that blog for $800 and I started making $100 a day.

A lot of those people didn't know the value of it.

Back then, there was no hashtag ad.

You know, that was a few years later.

So people didn't really know the value of it.

They thought it was an organic article.

It was just for content.

You know, people just wanted to run these blogs for content.

So the people that owned them didn't really know how much they could be worth.

So I bought my first one for 800 bucks.

Then I bought the next one for $1,000.

I just keep rolling in because I was using them to run affiliate ads and the click ads.

And so all the money that I made, I just went back to buying more

because that was my arbitrage.

People just didn't know the value of it.

That's insane.

So you've always been like kind of early with everything.

Yeah, for better or worse.

You know, I think sometimes there's good to be early.

There's some times where it's like you're early, you make a lot of mistakes and you just get wiped out by someone who's like, you know what?

They're doing it wrong.

We see everything they do wrong.

We're going to do it faster, better with more money.

um thankfully we've always been like the first one but you know first first mover advantage isn't always that good right i noticed people in the meme culture are actually very early on things yeah i think the memes kind of dictate the timeline of everything yeah i mean it's like a language right we're speaking the language many many years before and and so through those blogs because i was posting a lot on memes they were getting cross-posted onto instagram And so I made a book called The Meme Bible.

When I was, oh, let me see.

I was around, yeah, I was 18 when I made the meme Bible.

So it was four years after the whole Tumblr thing.

I still have that book.

Yeah.

That's crazy.

I have it frame.

That was like the first taste of, oh, yeah, money's real.

Legendary.

Yeah.

Yeah, you made two of them, right?

Five.

I have five years.

Yeah, and then we had like a board game.

We had a bath bomb collection with a candle collection.

Holy crap.

Yeah.

And yeah, that was really fun.

But it was so seasonal because the concept of the meme Bible was we take everything that happened for the year from January up to November and we put it into a coloring book or an activity book.

So there's Hangman, there's crossword puzzles, there's word search, there's color in the blanks.

When my first one was 2016 during the presidential election, so I made like a maze out of a Trump head.

So it can go through from his mouth all the way to the top of his hair in a maze.

So that was the concept of the book.

And people really liked that because it was the first time where we put that meme medium outside of just t-shirts.

A lot of people were just selling t-shirts.

And eventually there was a card game like, what do you mean?

But before that, we were the first one to put it outside of a different medium in a coloring book format.

And people loved it.

Yeah, that's cool.

It's flying off the shelf that's that's really unique yeah i have that game what do you mean also is that yours too no that was from um this company called fuck jerry they own a bunch of those oh yeah

um but that was the first time where i was like wait a minute i can actually turn the media side of things to push a physical product that is relevant to my audience um but the first copy i launched uh i told a few people this but the first copy i launched i actually launched it without having any physical copies because it was actually kind of a joke at first.

I launched it as like, oh, maybe it'll work.

So I Photoshopped

a picture of what the book would look like and insides of it, render it on Photoshop.

And I put it on a website, put it on my accounts.

And the first day I did four grand.

And I didn't have a single copy on hand.

It was just an idea of it.

And then it just kept going because once it blows up, it keeps going.

Second day, the 6K.

Third day, the 8K.

By the end of the week, we did a quarter million.

Holy.

And I still didn't have the book.

I was like freaking out.

This is December 3rd.

December 3rd was my first day selling.

I remember that day very vividly.

I was sitting in class.

This is finals week.

So you're in high school still?

First year of community college.

I couldn't make it into like the big colleges.

So I was trying to get my GEs done.

But yeah, that day, finals week, shit blew up.

And

I didn't have a book.

I was freaking out because this is close to Christmas.

So there's the cutoff time.

Oh, yeah.

So I went to the nearest print shop I could find.

I was like, dude,

please just help me get all this printed so I can fulfill it.

USPS cutoff time was what, December 14th?

Yeah.

You're around that time for Christmas delivery.

I basically have a few few days to fulfill every single order.

But I think that taught me so much relations.

Wow.

I can relate during those times.

If you don't get it out by the 14th, you're done.

You charge back.

Done.

5% and then you lose the processor.

Yep.

And it goes.

But the thing is, I didn't even know about all that stuff.

That was so far ahead from where I was.

I was just trying to launch a product.

Yeah.

Because before that, I was just doing affiliate stuff.

I don't care if they don't fulfill.

I just have to sell it.

Right.

So you had to manually order them and ship them yourself?

I have pictures of me in my room just literally fulfilling books

and driving it to the post office.

But dude, that one week taught me most about e-commerce than anything else.

That was basically my course.

Yeah.

That's where you learn it, man.

You won't learn that shit in school.

It sounds like you didn't care about school.

No, I didn't.

Cause, you know, the reason why I didn't make it to the big colleges was because my grades were bad.

And I could kind of turn that back to I was just so deep in building my media side of companies.

I was up.

16 hours a day in school.

I am on my phone, you know, scheduling my posts, making new content at night i'm i'm i have like a little facebook group of other people in the same space we're just sharing each other's content so i was like teenagers grinding that out i didn't pay attention in school they banned uh phones in my school really yeah you couldn't use them oh i i'll find a way

yeah i was really bored man class was so boring i mean i it's like torture almost I was talking to a friend about this last night.

I feel like kids today are doing what we're doing, but at a much better efficiency, much faster pace.

When I was 16, I was doing all that stuff.

I was probably one of the few kids doing it.

But now everyone's hustling.

I see 14, 15 year olds making millions off crypto.

You know, they're grinding.

They're getting into all the whitelists, the pre-sales, and they're making their own coins.

Dude, 10 years ago, we didn't have that.

And so kids are getting way smarter.

They're going way further than we ever did and a generation before that.

It's such a crazy concept to think about.

What's next?

I can't fathom that.

Be millionaires before they're 10 years old.

Yeah.

I mean, we see some YouTubers who are under 10 making millions.

Yeah, the toy channels.

Yeah.

Yeah.

The crypto thing's nuts, dude.

I mean, I see on my Twitter every day a teenage millionaire from crypto, from Solana altcoins or something like that.

Yeah.

And it's got to get faster and faster.

Like teenagers are now opening their own stores.

They know how to run theme page ads.

Yeah.

They just have so much time and so much curiosity that I feel like as we get older, we're in our late 20s now.

We just don't have that spark of curiosity that teenagers have.

Nah, I don't.

And that's a huge push.

I've lost a step, I could say, because I think just the burnout from working 18 hours a day for five years straight.

Yeah, me too.

And it wasn't efficient.

Like you're saying, like my first five years were not efficient because we didn't have the mentorship.

We didn't have certain things in our life.

But now these kids coming in at 13, making solid money.

Because there's content about it now, right?

Like 10 years ago, there was no YouTube videos teaching us how to do XYZ.

No.

Now there's a TikTok video every single day saying, hey, this is how you're going to make 10K a week.

And like, you know, some of them are BS, but half of them are actually pretty good details.

Yeah.

We just never had that.

The spread of information got so fast and so efficient that people are so much smarter today than where we ever were.

Agreed.

Yeah, I love to see it.

TikTok might get banned, though, right?

Yeah, R.I.P.

I don't know.

This one's the closest one it's been.

Right.

Because it's been a few times where it's like, nah, that's not happening.

But this time it's actually like, wait, some bill just passed?

What's going on here?

Yeah.

I think they're pending a sale, actually.

Like, they both passed.

I wonder who's going to buy it.

I don't know.

I don't know.

I just feel like it's a distraction.

It's never going to be the fixed problem.

You like, you think the U.S.

companies aren't spying on us?

Yeah, they definitely are.

I mean, you saw what happened with Tucker Carlson.

They were spying on all his messages when he went to Russia.

Yes.

Like, come on.

Like, you think of that and you're like, yeah, you know what?

Our enemy is China.

Yeah.

I went back to China recently and it was so crazy how far advanced they are.

Yeah.

My friend and I go through a grocery store.

We bought the item.

We checked out just by walking out because the camera recognized his face.

No.

Just paid.

Just paid just like that.

No card, no nothing.

Membership all safe.

Like you think about Web3 of how Web3 is supposed to connect everything together because it's so seamless.

China did it without Web3.

Everyone had their face saved.

There's a system saying you're a membership of Ralph's.

Here's your credit card info.

And then here's your purchase history.

It's all saved.

Damn.

You pay people, it takes two, three seconds.

There's no wire transfer.

There's no NADA.

It's so fast.

Wait, they don't use wires there?

I mean, there's like big accounts.

You need wires, but like me sending you five grand so fast.

Oh, really?

It takes a second.

It's high-speed rail.

We can go to one country to another, not country, one city to another city super fast.

And I was talking to my friend about this last night

and he was like, why does it happen so much faster in China than in the US?

And I was like, you know, I think there's a few reasons for this.

It's because in China, we're always taught that our common enemy, our common goal is this, and our common enemy is this, not with each other.

Right.

Because we went through thousands of years where we were fighting internally.

We had a lot of civil wars, destroy our population.

We had like five different emperors trying to like just fight for power.

So we had that in our history.

And now we're like, you know what?

For us to progress as society, we have to move very fast together and unity.

And that's why communism has to work in that space.

But when you look at America, we're taught to fight each other.

We were ingrained to fight each other because we come from a sports team.

Hey, I am with the 49ers.

I hate the Chiefs.

And no matter what, I'm backing this team.

You are always my enemy.

Like, it's always got to be butthead.

So we were taught about sports.

And then we're like, you know what, in politics, I'm X color, you're X color.

We're going to clash.

Even if I don't fully agree with the ideologies of this, it doesn't matter.

I'm on team red.

You're on team blue.

We have to fight.

And so this country is always fighting.

And therefore, nothing really moves, right?

You want a high-speed rail from Vegas to California, it will save so much problems.

Got denied many times.

Right.

We're just constantly fighting.

There's a lot of lobbyists because they don't want trains to go up because cars make a lot of money, right?

They don't want payment processors to work better because payment processors make a lot of money.

And that was like an aha moment for me.

I was like, dude, there's something wrong.

And there's so many other countries that just do it so much better.

You can hate on communism for what it's worth.

I think there's a lot of stuff that I don't fully agree with, but you have to recognize that there are certain systems that work with certain countries that move them a lot faster.

And I feel like we're kind of going backwards.

God, it's fascinating.

Yeah, I never looked at it that way.

What do Chinese people think of Americans?

Oh, we love them.

But, you know, I think to a certain extent there's a lot of media from both countries just saying hey you know what like that

we're always doing the bad stuff because the bad stuff gets a clickbait right um and that's what media is the good stuff really gets the attention the things that gets people upset riled up is what gets the attention so almost always we're pushing things that gets the most clicks and almost always they're kind of like a bad image for the artifacts you never see a good media segment about china

no but then once you go back and you visit you're like wait that's actually pretty sick yeah like you don't have to agree with everything but you have to recognize that there is something good that came out of it.

You don't think we're tracking everyone's faces here already?

You go through, what's it called?

You go through the airport.

If you have like a Nexus,

you can just walk right through.

They don't even check customs anymore.

Your face is saving the system.

Yeah.

You have clear now, right?

You have clear.

You have to, yeah.

You have your face.

You have the eyes.

Yeah.

Why can't you pay with that?

Why do I still have to pull off my credit card to swipe?

They're trying at Whole Foods with the wrists.

I don't know what that's about.

Yeah, but dude, we had that in China for years.

It's just things progressed so much slower here.

Damn.

For reasons where there's more money to be made, making things more complex.

Yeah, we got to step it up because I feel like we were the fastest growing country at one point, and we've definitely taken 10 steps back.

There's countries really catching up, and that's in everything.

That's in sports, business, tech, AI, every single thing, you know?

Yeah.

It's pretty crazy.

We're losing our number one title, seems.

Yeah, and you know, I love this country.

I came to this country.

I became an American recently.

I have a passport.

I love this country.

I just want to see it do well.

I just know like we're fighting each other.

We're fighting over the wrong things because it's distracting and distraction is good for the people in higher power.

That's what they want.

They want us to fight each other.

I wonder when people will wake up and not do that.

I mean, there's so much more conversations, even like the ones here where we're talking about it because we're like, wait, pause.

There's something more.

We need to talk about it.

Yeah, I would never fight someone just for their political beliefs or sports teams.

Yeah, I have friends across the entire spectrum.

I love them equally.

You know, we might not agree on certain things, but you also have to think about it.

the way that we were raised, the circumstances that we were at leads to how we think about certain things.

It's not that they're a bad person, it's just how they were raised.

Yeah, right?

Absolutely.

So, you're in LA right now?

I'm in Orange County, right by the airport.

Okay, um, but I actually think about moving to New York, yeah, yeah, um, just somewhere else.

I feel like I got too comfortable in Orange County, like, things are too good.

And you know, I think about my teenage years, like, what was it that made me hustle so hard?

It was because I was in a very difficult situation.

Like, i grew up living in a garage um with my uncles yeah

we didn't have an extra room and you know i came to this country i had to figure out who to live with because my mom and i couldn't afford our own house so we just lived with relatives i was working in chinese restaurants since i was eight like there's pictures of me working in a restaurant in the back chopping up vegetables um and because we didn't have a room we just slept in a garage it was just me my cousins and that situation pushed me to work so hard because i'm like dude whatever it takes i have to get out of this and now i feel like i got to a level where I'm pretty comfortable and I lost that spark to hustle.

And I'm seeing that affect in my personal and my professional growth.

So I'm like, you know what?

I'm going to move myself to a whole new city where I have a good network, but it's completely different than where I'm used to.

And I think that's going to motivate me to work hard because everyone else there has to hustle.

Like if you're not hustling in New York and you don't have a trust fund, you can't afford to live there.

Like you have to hustle.

And I feel like in Orange County, that the pace of life is a lot slower because people made it.

They have money.

They can go slower.

Yeah, it's more like retired people out there, older crowd.

And I don't like LA that much.

So New York's not.

I wouldn't live in LA.

It's good to visit for a day.

Yeah.

Two days, but I'm out after that.

Exactly.

Get caught up in that social media scene.

But yeah, that makes sense.

I mean, when I grew up, it was definitely more hustling because I was grinding out of my mom's basement.

And I've definitely lost that touch for sure.

Because you reach a certain financial point, you're like, oh, I don't need to work as hard.

You see that with a lot of people.

Yeah.

And I'm seeing that with myself.

I'm like, dude, i am not where i want to be i'm comfortable i can i can honestly just not work but that's not where i want to be yeah and i'm not in a place where i'm pushing myself to be where i want to be that was the decision this was like last night damn last night or like the night before i was like you know what i'm moving to new york because i met some new york people and i love their conversation i love the hustle the mentality and that was just like a normal day for them

when i sat into those circles i was like you i don't have that in OC.

I don't have that in LA.

The intelligence, the ambitions, and like the,

even the substance of it, Because I know they're not talking just BS.

I feel like in LA there's a lot of just talks.

But I know these people made it.

I know these guys personally

and the conversation that they have with each other is what pushes them so hard.

They're more direct.

I miss that.

I love that about New York.

Yeah, I grew up in Jersey, so I can relate.

It's more direct, more fast-paced, and they don't care as much about like social media clout and all that stuff.

Exactly.

Yeah.

I think you'd fit in well there.

I hope so.

I think I'm just going to do like half a year there and then winter time, leave somewhere else.

I don't want to do New York winter.

Yeah.

no one's up there oh hell no that's what ty lopez does yeah he lives at three spots a year yeah that might be a good setup the other thing is that i i want to move around while i'm still young you know i don't have a family i don't have a mortgage i can move around and i can just basically get as much as i can from each city like the best of the best right and then eventually find a place where i can settle down with networks i've built around um I can only do that for a few more years before I, you know, find a partner, settle down.

And we're not living in New York as a married couple.

We're going to live in something closer.

Maybe like Utah, Arizona, Vegas.

Like those are things I would think about.

That's what I'm doing too.

Yeah.

But when I'm young, just I think I dropped myself into a hustling, bustling city.

Yeah, 100%.

That's what I'm doing before I have kids because you only get kind of a few year window, maybe five, 10 years to do that.

Yeah.

I think like you and I, we're in this position.

Like you're in Vegas, I'm in OCs because we started really young.

So we got kind of tired.

We got burnt out.

Yeah.

And we just went to like a place where it's a little slower.

But then I'm like, wait, I meet my friends who are 40s, who are in their, you know, mid-30s,

late 30s, who are very successful.

And they're like, you know what?

You still got so many more years to go.

Like, what are you doing here being so comfortable?

Like, you don't deserve to be that comfortable.

And I'm like, you're right.

I don't deserve this right now.

Like, I need to go grind.

But there's also an aspect of like not the hustle porn that I want to go for.

I think balance, health, and family is very important.

I'm right now, I'm in like max comfort.

I need to be in the middle.

I don't want to be like too grindy where I'm working 19

hours a day.

I'm going to be very productive, prioritize health, go to the gym, connect with friends and family,

but still be hustling.

Right now, I'm like the far left of I'm way too comfortable.

Yeah.

You know, I wake up whenever I want, you know, teams all taken care of, money's taken care of.

I can't have that in my 20s.

I would say I'm a little comfortable.

I'm probably not as much as you, but I do want to grind more.

Yeah.

Yeah, it's good that you realize that.

Yeah, because I used to work seven days a week.

Right now I'm working five, which is decent.

Yeah, I take weekends off and feel guilty about it.

Yeah, same.

That's the thing.

My girl's like, oh, I'll take the whole weekend off and I want to spend more time with her, but just something comes up all the time, you know?

How's it like, you know, balancing having a fiancé and work?

Yeah, that's the main reason I took the weekends off, honestly.

And then I take, I used to not take weekday nights off either.

So now I take those off pretty much.

That's good.

Yeah.

But it's needed, man, because I had gray hairs at 21, dude.

It was nuts.

I have a couple.

That's why I'm wearing a hat today dude it's nuts that stress is a killer yeah so i like it i mean gets your mind off things but at the same time sometimes we'll be watching a movie and i'm like oh i need to work yeah you know what i mean yeah it's that hunger you need a girl that can support you through that because the way that i always tell my significant others is um what i'm working on right now is for us you know if you see us long-term together if you just let me go out and work that's for us like that's an extra dollar in our bank account for whatever we want to do because you know i'm if we're together we're together i i'm not dating around so hopefully you find someone that is supportive you that's understanding be like you know it is for us you're not doing this for selfish reasons especially you know you have a ring on it now like it's official yeah they should know that i love that you date asian girls yeah um just grew up around asians but when i first came to america i lived in buffalo uh move up to buffalo upstate and You've been all over, man.

Yeah.

Dude, I lived in all over the country.

I lived in Florida.

I lived in Oklahoma.

I lived in Connecticut.

I live in even lived in Jersey for a little bit.

Nice.

Like a few months.

But then I lived in Buffalo for elementary, for like a year before I moved to California.

And in that school, I was the only Asian kid.

Everyone was just like blonde hair, blue eyes.

And I was like, you know what?

I think this is American dream.

Like I have to bag a blonde hair, blue eyed girl.

And in third grade, this is like the third grade is before they learned racism.

Like this is before like.

they understand there's a difference so when i got to that school everyone loved it they're like oh my god new asian kid just got airdropped into our school like i love this one and I was just making all these friends.

I loved it.

It was such a good environment that it was honestly a good first impression of America for me.

Because in that little town, everyone was so inclusive.

They're so welcoming.

Yeah.

And then

I moved to Richmond, Indiana, where things were a little bit different because Richmond, Indiana is very, very separated.

I think it was like one of the most racist city in America at one point.

Indiana.

Yeah, Indiana.

I didn't know that.

And then I moved to Garden Grove in California.

My uncle just opened up a restaurant next to South Close Plaza.

And so we had a buffet there.

So I went there and the school was like 99% Latinos.

There's like three Asian kids there.

It was like me and like another Vietnamese kid and like another Vietnamese girl.

Dang.

So that school didn't do too well for me.

That was fourth grade.

Fourth grade is when you're like, oh, yeah,

there's something different.

They start getting grouped up.

So it definitely got a lot.

more bullying in that school compared to upstate New York.

Yeah, fourth, fifth grade is when they start forming the cliques.

Yeah.

The first three grades, everyone's unified and and it's great.

It's wholesome.

And then, yeah, it goes downhill from there.

My mom used to beg me to date Asians, bro.

Really?

She always wanted me to date Asians.

But now she's cool, right?

Yeah, she's cool with it.

But yeah, I wasn't into them in high school because they mature kind of late.

Yeah.

So they're not at their peak attractiveness until college.

No, that's very true.

Yeah.

That's so true.

But yeah, I didn't really date until...

late teenagers year because I was just working so much online.

And here's the thing.

I think being chronically online at a young age kind of screwed me over because it gave me a different perception of how to talk to people.

Because I was online all the time, I only knew how to talk to people online.

So going to talk to people in person was so challenging.

I basically became socially innet for a moment.

And then, just like, just like you, I threw myself into networking events.

I put myself out there and I learned how to talk to people.

But man, that was very tough getting out of on like offline to online.

And also, I think having a lot of followers as a young teenager really screwed me over too, because it gave me this idea that, you know what?

I have a lot of followers.

I'll just talk to whoever I want and everyone's got to talk back to me.

And that was true when you had a lot of audience.

But as I got out of that, I was like, wait, I just don't know how to make friends anymore.

I don't know, like, I feel like I need something in order for them to talk to me.

Because back then, I had a lot of followers.

I know that they'll talk to me because I had a certain amount of audience.

I was a teenager.

It's a stupid thought, by the way, if anyone want to clip this.

It's a stupid thought.

But now, you know, getting into society again,

I was like, what do I have to offer for them to be friends with me?

Like, that was constantly in the back of my head.

You know, obviously the truth is that you just have to be a good person.

You just can't be an asshole.

You can't be funny.

Yada, yada, yada.

But for many, many years of my life, after I got out of that circle, it was always on the top of my head.

I was like, how do I make them like me if I don't have anything?

And that really screw with me.

Dude, that follower game is a deadly crutch.

I used to pull up to restaurants, flex my Instagram.

It's so cringe looking back on it.

Yeah.

You think you're hot shit just from having like 100K on IG and stuff.

But we were kids.

Listen, like we were kids.

We look back at kids today, the TikTok kids, right?

Like they do the same exact thing.

It's a repeat of a pattern.

And I understand it.

Like, at least I understand it.

I might not like it, but I also wouldn't have liked it if I saw myself 10 years ago.

Yeah.

But that's growth.

That's maturity.

If you weren't doing something cringy, you know, as a young kid, you probably didn't grow that much either.

Like knowing that you grew out of that is a huge progression yeah i mean look at bryce hall he's blowing up right now because he's owned up to the cringe tick tock dancing videos he used to make and now people love him again yeah uh that personal image switch was huge yeah same with like the paul brothers i like i think they really grew out of it hate them or love them like they are marketing geniuses oh yeah especially i mean logan's killing it with prime but i love jake's transformation yeah I mean, he was like the menace.

He really was.

Now he's like someone you look up to.

Yeah.

It's awesome.

Dude, it's been fun.

Anything you want to promote or close off with?

No, no, I just wanted to hop on because we've been talking about this for a year.

Yeah.

So I really want to just come on and have this conversation.

We just always meet each other in like networking events, but we never really got talking like we learned about each other.

We're all over the place.

It was good getting to sit down with you one-on-one, man.

Likewise.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

Thanks for coming on, guys.

And see you guys next time.