How To Become A 37 Year Old Broke Loser

So, this is a video topic that I've been thinking about doing for a while now, and something happened recently that made me think it's finally time to make this video.

There are lots of videos out there on how to become a millionaire, but in this video, I'll teach you how to become a broke 37-year-old loser despite having an advanced technical degree from a prestigious university.

Now, there are lots of people on the internet who like to lie about their qualifications. So, to show you my expertise in becoming a broke loser, let's do a review of my current financial and living situation.

As of today, I have about $650 in my personal bank account. I have one personal credit card with a balance of about $1,580, and I have a second personal credit card with a balance of about $830. In my business bank account, I currently have a balance of about $120, and on my business credit card, I currently have a balance of about $3,100.

Recently, I acquired a couple of new unexpected liabilities that made me think it's finally time to make this video. I recently scheduled a visit to the dentist after being overdue for a checkup. A couple of days after I scheduled the visit, I felt what I thought was a filling fall out. Unfortunately, the dentist informed me that actually, the tooth had fractured and it was going to need a root canal.

These days, a root canal costs $1,737, and apparently, this one needs a crown put on top of it as well, so that's another $1,500 on top of that. For those of you who are wondering about dental insurance, I've done the math before, and it's cheaper to not get insurance.

So, here's those two liabilities added to the list. But it's not all bad news because I still have a few more assets to add to the list. I also have a tax-free savings account with $250 in it, and I have an RSP account with $1,620 in it. Finally, I also have an old Bank of America account that has around $500 US in it, which will exchange to around $250 Canadian dollars.

In terms of the immediate dental work, I will be able to cover this, and I've already taken steps to shut down these accounts and cash them in. This explains the current state of my balance sheet.

But what about my cash flow? Currently, the cost of my rent is $1,100 per month, and for food and personal expenses, I spend around $300 per month. For things like internet, phone, and a few other service expenses, I spend around $200 a month.

As of today, my only source of revenue is from YouTube, and over the last six months, the revenue has been around $700 on average. This leaves me with a monthly net cash flow of around $900. Fortunately, I do have one of the $700 YouTube payments coming in a couple of days, so together with my existing bank account balance, I can definitely pay rent for the month.

According to the dentist, the dental crown is something that I won't have done until January, so in the meantime, I can still use some of the cash from these liquidated investments. However, this overall financial picture is completely unsustainable in the long term.

Now, at this point, you're probably wondering why I don't have more income. Where are all my investments? Why don't I have any savings? What have I been doing for the last 10 years? I'll answer all of those questions later in this video, but first, let's talk about my living situation.

For those of you who have been following my channel for a while now, you know that I'm currently being rent-evicted, so I might as well provide an update on that subject. So far, the landlord has given out 61 eviction notices in this building alone, one of which was sent to me. The landlord has also filed a formal request with the Ontario Tenant Board to request my eviction. My eviction hearing is currently scheduled for February 19th, 2025.

This landlord is extremely famous in Ontario and has an exponentially growing empire of buildings. What he does is buy up older rent-controlled buildings and immediately start issuing N13 eviction notices. An N13 eviction is a legal way to evict someone from a rent-controlled property for extensive renovations.

In these N13 eviction notices, he claims that the renovation process will take 8 to 9 months and that the unit will be uninhabitable during the renovation. This is despite the fact that I can personally confirm that my neighbor's apartment was renovated, and that renovation took less than 2 months, possibly as little as 1 month.

The stated reason for the so-called extensive renovations is supposedly to replace the plumbing stacks. However, according to another tenant, the bathroom plumbing stacks were already replaced 10 years ago, and that didn't require that everyone be evicted. Furthermore, others have claimed that they talked to the person who has historically maintained the plumbing in this building, and the claims of needing to replace the kitchen plumbing stacks are dubious at best.

Even if it was necessary to replace it, it doesn't require vacant possession. After the N13 renovation has been completed, the tenant is supposed to have the right to return to the unit. However, this landlord has a reputation for not honoring that requirement, and furthermore, at that point, you've already been displaced for multiple months.

There have been well over 100 news articles written about what happens in these buildings after this landlord takes over. A few months ago, we had a fairly substantial fire in the apartment that was being occupied by the person who does the day-to-day management of this building. According to the fire department, the source of the fire was either an air fryer or the stove and wasn't deemed suspicious.

According to a tenant who lives on the same floor, the smoke detector inside the individual unit didn't go off, so the fire was able to grow for quite a while until a tenant noticed it and pulled a fire alarm. On that same floor, the fire occurred on the floor above me, and I actually witnessed smoke coming out of the top of the apartment door just before the fire department arrived.

The fire was substantial enough that the firefighter needed a breathing apparatus to even enter the apartment. We also experienced things like surprise inspections for unauthorized appliances like air conditioners or freezers. I even got a notice for an inspection and unwanted pest control treatment that was then canceled.

At one of the other buildings, the landlord also hired security enforcement that resulted in a physical altercation with elderly tenants. This landlord is so notorious that he's even been mentioned by name in the Legislative Assembly of Ontario. Despite all of this attention on the issue, nothing ever happens because these practices are entirely legal in Ontario.

Attempting to fight back legally is also becoming increasingly difficult in Ontario. Many lawyers that practice tenancy law have shifted to only representing landlords and don't offer their services to tenants anymore. Some of you are probably thinking, why not set up a tenant union or work with organizations like ACORN?

A tenants' union in this building was set up, but the landlord was able to successfully intimidate the leaders of the tenants' union into giving up their apartment by issuing additional eviction notices, claiming that they were a nuisance to other tenants. They also returned from a brief vacation one day to find that the power to only their apartment had been shut off and that all of the food in their fridge had been warmed up and spoiled.

As for ACORN, they have provided some introductory advice on dealing with rent evictions and provided some emotional support for tenants. They also organized some protests. In terms of more specific legal action, I won't say much more than that because many tenants in this building have not had their eviction hearing yet.

It's entirely possible that my landlord or someone who works for him may even watch this video, given how much is financially at stake. If you do the math on how much money you can make from evicting a building full of people who are protected under rent control, it's about $1,000 per month for a building with 100 units. That's a profit of about $100,000 per month or about $1.2 million per year.

Currently, my landlord has at least a few hundred million dollars worth of assets under management, and its portfolio is rapidly growing. Attempting to organize tenants in this situation can be very difficult because many of them have chronic physical and mental health conditions that make it difficult for them to do extensive legal research. Some of them are cancer patients or elderly people with Alzheimer's.

Many of the younger people are not doing well either. Some of them are completely distracted with taking care of elderly loved ones or just barely struggling to survive financially. Some tenants have lost faith in our legal system and government altogether and simply consider it a foregone conclusion that the legal system will actively work against them.

This sentiment is not universal, but it's also not an exaggeration. The mainstream media tends to downplay and contort the message of what's going on in these buildings. One tenant mentioned that he was in a local coffee shop one day where he saw an older woman reading a newspaper article about his own rent eviction. He said that this lady remarked that the people in this building were all bums and just need to get jobs. This is despite the fact that the man already has a full-time job.

Now, many people have arguments against the entire idea of rent control. The argument is that in order to make it economically feasible to actually build new housing in this country, it has to be profitable to do so, and rent control makes this much more difficult. This argument makes sense to me, but even if you disagree with the idea of rent control, I made life decisions to stay here based on the understanding that rent control was a real legal protection that existed here in Ontario.

Having to move is very disruptive, not just because of higher rents. My mail gets delivered here, my government addresses are set to here, my internet is hooked up, all of the random stuff and groceries that I've stocked up on. Even if I move somewhere else and start paying higher rent, I'm starting to wonder what I would do if I end up in this exact same situation in a few years.

A woman in one of the other buildings that's experiencing a rent eviction says that this is the third time that she's been in this situation. Now, I know that when I do a video like this, there are sometimes very generous people out there who will give huge donations, but I'd ask that you not do that for this video. My problems are not your problems, and it's not your job to fund my unsustainable lifestyle.

Fundamentally, the math here on my income just isn't working, and it's my responsibility to get my monthly income up; otherwise, something is going to break. I debated whether I should even share this information at all, but since this is my real lived experience, I figured it's worth sharing. If you decide to pursue an entrepreneurial path like I did, this may very well be the outcome for you, and I think it's important to provide the world with more examples of this.

There are a lot of motivational speakers out there who will tell you to take risks, be bold, reach for the stars. Not every story is a happy ending, and unfortunately, most business owners who find themselves in this situation are too embarrassed or psychologically compromised to talk about it. As a result, all you hear about are the success stories or embellishments of the truth.

Paul Graham has an interesting essay where he touches upon this topic. I also want to point out that I'm in very close contact with my parents, and they've offered a number of times to help me out with this situation. I also have family in Toronto that I can stay with temporarily if necessary.

I've also had some hypothetical discussions about what it would take to leave Ontario entirely. Finally, if you watch some of my other videos, you'll see that I've passed on a number of really great employment opportunities in the past, so you really don't need to feel bad for me.

This renovation situation has led to me getting out and talking to my neighbors more and engaging with the local community organizations. These experiences have made me much more aware of how much society has deteriorated in the last few years and made me question why I live in Kitner in the first place.

Kitner has been going downhill over the last few years, and the reasons that I chose to live here seven years ago no longer exist. So, I'm honestly somewhat neutral on getting evicted. I used to have a few friends from school who also lived in Kitner, who I met up with regularly. One of them was another entrepreneur who did quite well for himself.

A couple of years ago, a homeless encampment started up near his house, which led to things like theft and vandalism. I met up with him last summer to talk about startups and technology for a few hours. He had already made a lot of the same observations that I did and decided to leave Canada entirely not long after.

If I'm able to win at the tenant board, that'll be awesome because then I can continue to live in my apartment. If I lose and get evicted, that'll also be awesome because then I don't have to pay rent anymore. I can also go visit with family and have new adventures. It'll be lots of fun either way, so you should subscribe to join in on the adventure.

The great thing about YouTube is that you can just passively observe other people's situations without having to get involved. If some of you were still thinking about helping me out, I'd ask that you instead just become a long-term channel member on the 99-cent tier. This way, if you get buyer's remorse, you can just cancel in a month or so, and it still helps me out the same in the long term.

So, the next important question is: what's your immediate plan? What are you going to do to improve your situation? The immediate plan will be to take the funds from the TFSA, RSP, and US bank account and use that to fund the root canal and dental crown. If necessary, I can ask a family member for a small loan for a couple of months to see if things improve.

If things don't improve or I get evicted, I'll put all of my stuff in a storage unit. Then, I'll probably couch surf for a while and spend some time with friends or relatives. Eventually, I'll probably leave Ontario entirely and move back into my parents' basement for a while.

As for the rent eviction, I'll continue doing legal research and contest the N13 eviction process at my hearing on February 19th. Now, I also need to find a way to get this monthly revenue up, and I have a few ideas in mind that I'll probably try over the Christmas holidays.

My overall plan is to double down on producing YouTube content, as crazy as that might sound. YouTube is the only business activity that's shown consistent revenue growth over the last 10 years. I said before that the average monthly YouTube revenue was around $700, but this month it's already on track to be around $900.

You're probably wondering, couldn't you just hustle and get another software development contract? Sure, I probably could, but I've been doing that for 10 years now, and there's just no long-term growth in doing that. Technically, I still haven't even quit doing contract work; this latest period is just the first time in 10 years where my contract work pipeline has dried up to nothing.

One of my long-term clients, who I've worked with for over 5 years, requested recently for the first time ever that we pause all future work for a while, and I have a feeling that it's not coming back. So yes, I could get out there and hustle for more contract work, but by the end of this video, it should be clear why I'm not going to do that.

The short version is that finding contract work is actually very easy, but filtering for work that actually pays you and isn't a waste of time is nearly impossible. YouTube has never made a commitment to pay me and then let me down, but I can't say the same for the contract work that I've done.

A lot of people seem to think of pursuing YouTube as some sort of vain attempt to become a celebrity or something, but I've come to view it as more of a general communication presence that any successful business needs to have nowadays. In the 1970s, there were only hundreds of celebrities, but today there are tens of thousands of YouTube channels that each have at least millions of subscribers.

Having a social media presence has replaced other forms of advertising like classified ads, Yellow Pages, or even having a sign outside of your business. In the long term, I'd prefer to do better than just barely survive, and to do that, I have to focus on building a source of revenue that can actually grow in the future.

The next thing that you're probably wondering is: why don't you just get a normal 9-to-5 job like regular people? That's a very good question that most of you are probably thinking right now, so I'll break down my thought process on the subject.

For my life and career development, I've decided that I need the following four things: reliable cash flow, compounding exponential growth, human interaction, and the ability to build or become a part of a community.

Let's consider reliable cash flow first. The biggest benefit of having a 9-to-5 job is the reliable cash flow and being somewhat sheltered from swings up or down in the economy. Having said that, the concept of job security is not what it used to be, especially with the recent waves of high-tech layoffs. But it is still much more stable than entrepreneurship.

As I've mentioned before, the cash flow from the consulting and contract work that I've done over the past 10 years has been extremely unstable. But it's much worse than just getting large infrequent sums of money. The biggest issue is with people paying late, not paying at all, or talking up a storm about some huge project or major investment that's just about to start and supposedly bring in lots of new work, only to never mention it again.

YouTube, on the other hand, gives a consistent payout every month, and as long as I don't get banned, that's likely to continue for the foreseeable future. The revenue could potentially go down, but so far it appears unlikely that it will abruptly go to zero.

My next consideration is about compounding long-term growth. In the 9-to-5 jobs of the bygone era, this was something that you could frequently look forward to. For this, I'm thinking of those people from the 1970s who worked their entire lives at a single company and moved up the corporate ladder by working their way up.

I'm sure that there are still isolated examples of this today, but this career path is becoming increasingly rare. More than likely, if a company tries to sell you this vision of the future, it's just a tactic to get you to work there and then throw you under the bus the instant the economy turns sour or there's some kind of corporate restructuring.

The other type of compounding growth that I think people don't focus enough on is in relation to skill set and personal branding. If you want to get a tech job at a company today, you'll have to spend your own time getting up to speed with the latest Java, JavaScript frameworks. But then when you get laid off in a year or two, you'll have to spend your own time again relearning an entire new set of JavaScript frameworks.

You could argue that these new frameworks represent progress, but there is a cost to keeping up with these changes, and companies will push that cost onto workers as a condition of even getting employed. If you calculate the cost of preparing for, searching for, interviewing for, and getting laid off from a given job these days, the total compensation could look quite a bit different.

Younger fresh graduates are a lot more tolerant of constantly running on this treadmill of new technologies, many of which don't add significant value. This is one of the reasons why companies prefer to hire younger workers instead of older ones. Since they're young and naive, they don't realize that they're wasting their time learning a framework that no one is going to be using in a couple of years.

Another important part of your career growth to consider is to think of how much personal branding you can build from whatever you work on at a company. If I told you that I personally wrote the software in the most popular app on the first version of the Apple iPad, you might be impressed and want to hire me because of this.

In reality, I can't say that this is true because I've never written any software for the iPad. Instead, I wrote software for a live radio app that was intended to run on the very first version of the Blackberry Playbook, a commercially unsuccessful tablet that you've probably never heard of.

Halfway through the development of this app, the product manager decided to make substantial changes to the mockups of the app purely based on a whim. This led to us throwing away much of the work that we had done on the app without him ever even reviewing it. Even though I spent a lot of extra time and late nights making sure that the app would run well on unstable networking environments, the app was never even commercially released at all.

If I tell you about all of this, you won't be impressed because you've never even heard about this app at all. You don't even know if I just made all this up; maybe I'm lying. When I reflect on the software that I've been paid to write for the various companies that I've worked for, I realize that almost every piece of software that I've been paid to write in my life has been a waste of time.

Long ago, I worked on some user interface features for a company that did product reviews. Eventually, this company got acquired, and the product that I worked on was shut down and no longer exists. I worked for another company that was trying to build a sleazy advertising link-wrapping feature. The CEO insisted that I work late on more than one occasion to fix some critical bugs and produce reports. Eventually, they gave up on this idea, and the entire company no longer exists.

At another company that I worked for, we were tasked with maintaining and upgrading a number of reports that were available on an internal portal website. After doing much work to maintain the reports, it came to light that no one at the company was actually using the reports and that they had, in fact, been written by an eccentric former employee on the unfounded assumption that the reports would be useful to someone else.

I also did work for a company that asked me to rewrite a server that multiplexed network communications between a large number of IoT devices that were installed in vehicles. I spent a lot of late nights staying up until 3:00 a.m. to try and get the server rewritten in time to meet the company's deadlines and performance criteria. Eventually, I did finish the server, and the company quadrupled the number of paying units soon after.

However, the company had misrepresented their finances and imploded shortly afterward. The founders simply walked away and ghosted all of the employees and contractors. I don't even think that they kept the source code for anything that I wrote. Even though I had no control over the failure of these products, I still bear the personal branding cost associated with them.

Another consideration is that many tech companies operate with a high level of secrecy. Even if you do work on something important, you might not be able to talk about it when applying for new jobs. On the other hand, I found that every piece of content that I publish online has a very small but incremental compounding benefit. Each time that I release a new video, the individual video doesn't make much money or attention, but it does cause a little bit more traffic on everything else that I've published in the past.

All of the abandoned software that I've written will have exactly zero benefit to society over the next 10 years. However, at least a few of the videos that I've published will probably have some benefit to someone over that same time period. I'm not trying to pursue some sort of idealistic goal about changing the world or maximizing impact; I'm just trying to be practical about what I think is going to be relevant in the long term.

An economy that's based on writing garbage software that immediately gets shut down or abandoned doesn't seem very sustainable to me. So far, I've been very wrong on this take, but I keep coming back to one of Warren Buffett's favorite sayings: if something cannot go on forever, it will eventually stop.

Now, the third item on the list is human interaction. At almost every corporate job that I've ever worked at, I'd be in almost constant isolation, either in a cubicle or a room by myself or in noisy open office spaces where everyone just wears headphones all the time. Sometimes we would have meetings or stand-ups, but these were always high-stress interactions that would focus exclusively on the low-level details of work.

I've talked in other videos about the 10,000-yard stare and cubicle life that I experienced at Amazon and Nvidia. Other companies are only marginally better. When I talk about things like this, there will no doubt be some people, mostly managers, who say things like, "Our company culture is not like that at all. We have a fun corporate environment. We have Nerf gun battles and a foosball table that you're welcome to play any time of day."

At one of the companies that I worked for, we had mojito Fridays where we would all take off work at 4:00 p.m. and make mojitos and other alcoholic drinks after having stared at our screens all week. Our conversations would usually devolve into a discussion of whatever Jira ticket we were working on. For some people, the corporate social environment of mojito Fridays is exactly what they're looking for, but I'm not one of those people.

The last item on the list is the ability to build or become a part of a community. In the corporate world, attempting to build your own community is likely something that could get you fired. Of course, you could call the company itself a community, but for obvious reasons, the values and goals of the company don't always align with and sometimes actively work against the values and goals of the employees.

On the other hand, I've recently started to think more about how YouTube could be used as a vehicle for building a so-called community. I'm actually somewhat surprised at how many interactions I've had with people that I know in real life through YouTube. Clearly, a lot of people watch YouTube, and the possibility always exists to convert these online interactions into real-world ones.

I don't have much time to focus on this right now, but this is something that I do think about for the future. For the reasons that I've just described in this video and others, I've decided that I'll never be returning to a traditional corporate software development job under any circumstances.

The next important question is: why don't you have any savings? What have you been doing for the last 10 years? The short answer is I've just never been able to produce meaningful income.

Here's a brief summary of my pre-university years: I was born in the middle of nowhere in New Brunswick, Canada, and did a bit of work in the forestry industry growing up. At 19, I moved out of my parents' place to live with a friend in a nearby city. At this time, I had around $5,000 in savings, and my pipe dream was to make money by day trading stocks.

I spent a lot of time learning about and watching the stock market all day. I came to the conclusion that in order to be competitive in the stock market, I'd have to learn how to do automated trading using software, specifically artificial intelligence. I got a full-time job as a stock clerk at a local bulk food store and continued studying the stock market and software development on the side.

This was in 2007, and I can remember watching and rewatching one very specific Google tech talk by Geoffrey Hinton on restricted Boltzmann machines. Back then, I actually started trying to replicate some of Geoffrey Hinton's work based on recognizing handwritten digits. Since I had no formal education in software development, I didn't get very far with the automated trading.

I had written thousands of lines of Visual Basic code to do backtesting of moving average-based stock trading strategies, and this code would cause my computer to reboot whenever it ran for long periods of time. In hindsight, I probably had a memory leak.

It was around this time that I started to think more seriously about going to university. When I applied to the University of Waterloo, they said that since I was applying as a mature student, I should first complete their self-study pre-university courses, which were supposed to be a refresher of high school. However, I found that these courses were not a refresher at all, and they covered completely new material that I had never seen in high school.

In hindsight, doing these pre-university courses was absolutely necessary. After doing these pre-university courses that Waterloo had suggested to me, they actually rejected me, possibly because I was a bit slow in finishing some of these pre-university courses. I was ready to accept this rejection, but my father insisted on calling the university and asking why. As a result, I was put on a waitlist, which did lead to a conditional acceptance to the software engineering program starting in 2009.

Completing the software engineering program at the University of Waterloo took four years and eight months and consisted of eight study terms mixed with six work terms. On the day of my last exam, I had $53,922 in my bank account. I also had no student loans since the co-op placements were able to fund my education, which I estimate cost around $80,000.

After graduation, almost all of my peers moved to the United States to take full-time positions. I wanted to start my own business, though, and didn't have any kind of visa sponsorship to live in the States, so I chose to stay in Canada. Back in 2014, Canada was a politically stable country with a bright future ahead of it. At the time, I also still had a bit of a social network here of other entrepreneurial friends.

I officially incorporated my business on July 4th, 2014, and immediately began reaching out to people in my network to try and secure my first contract. By August 13th, I had secured my first contract with a struggling startup in Toronto that produced audio-related software. Around this time, I did everything that I could think of to try and start securing more contracts.

I emailed basically everyone that I had networked with during my undergraduate degree. I asked many of my former professors if they'd be open to meeting with me and discussing my business ambitions. For a while, I also just walked into local businesses here in Kitner and asked if I could chat with them about their business needs to try and pin down the market niche to go after.

I also tried making some direct mail flyers for a while and mailed them out to specific companies. Another thing that I started doing around this time was writing blog posts as a form of content marketing. One interesting insight from talking with some of my professors was just how easy it is to get into grad school.

I asked a few different professors if they had any kind of research work contracts that I could do. I had a couple of different professors who were interested in the idea, but they said that I could only get the contract work within the context of grad school. From what I recall, it had something to do with the funding for the contract only being available if I was enrolled in a grad school program.

I explained that I wasn't interested in grad school, but one of the ideas that was floated for a while is that I could just enroll in grad school to get the contract and then just skip all of the classes and fail out of the program since I didn't care about it anyway. This seemed a bit convoluted, and the potential pay was quite low, so I didn't end up pursuing this route.

During this period, I quickly discovered that the most likely reason that a potential lead wouldn't work out was because all companies only wanted to hire full-time employees and didn't want to work with independent contractors. To me, the whole point of starting a consulting business was to get a lot of high-quality work going at the same time and then start hiring employees to do the work, train them, and build up the business.

As for the first contract that I had secured with the company in Toronto, I had negotiated a higher hourly rate on the basis that my work would be temporary until they found a dedicated full-time employee. I started to think that maybe this would be the winning business model: to fill a role temporarily at a higher lucrative rate until the company found a cheaper full-time employee.

The first contract ended around the start of 2015, so by this time, I had a little bit of savings to work with. During this period, I took some time to further develop a side project that I'd been working on over the last few years, which was a self-compiler to run inside of a very simple emulator.

Since I was a fresh university graduate, my mind was still focused on grandiose academic topics. One of the last courses that I had done in university involved using static analysis tools like C to discover bugs in software. I figured that if I could develop my compiler and make it good enough, there might be a business model in selling software for a more intelligent compiler with better static analysis and error messages built into it.

My long-term goal was never to stay doing consulting and contract work forever, but instead to get enough cash flow and business experience that I could bootstrap a real startup with an actual product. In 2015, I pursued a huge number of potential business leads, a few of which actually resulted in revenue. One of which was actually initially advertised as a volunteer position.

I decided to respond to the ad anyway just to see what was out there. I would describe the company's product as something like a very aspirational community or social network for people who want to do charity work. I found some of the product's messaging to be a bit strange and confusing at the time, but years later, when the WE Charity scandal made headlines, I saw where some of the inspiration came from.

In order to do the development work of the website, the pattern that the founder was using was to recruit students from Conestoga College for unpaid internships. Many of these students didn't have the qualifications to do the work, and in some cases, these were embedded system students who were now being tasked with doing complex web development work.

I tried to train some of these students so that they could do the development work, but the founder would grow impatient if the students weren't immediately productive. At one point, I think we had four of these unpaid interns, and the founder was still trying to bring more of them on board. Eventually, some of these unpaid volunteers quit, and by this point, I was already very familiar with the company's platform since I had been trying to train these students to do the actual work.

I was in an ideal position to just go ahead and do the work myself, so I suggested to the founder that I could do some of this work for a discounted hourly rate. Since I had initiated this engagement as a volunteer, I was very careful to be extremely clear about the terms of the paid work that I was proposing. I clearly spelled out how much I would be invoicing for and the exact dates upon which I would send those invoices, and the founder explicitly agreed that they understood.

Almost immediately after I had issued one of the first invoices for the work I had done, the founder said that they didn't have any money to pay the invoice. At one point during this engagement, the founder abruptly told me that I should expect a phone call from someone who was reviewing one of the company's grant applications without providing much context about the expected call.

When the grant reviewer called me, he mentioned that even he didn't have much context about this company's product. He didn't even know the website address, so I provided the reviewer with the website address so that they could take a look at the product. The grant reviewer also mentioned that the founder had claimed to have obtained a patent for their product, but the application reviewer hadn't been able to confirm this.

At the time, I recognized this claim as one that the founder had repeated to me on multiple occasions. I believe that the supposed feature that this founder had supposedly patented was effectively a set of coefficients on a linear equation that was used for boring someone on a personality quiz. After I had the call with the person who was reviewing the grant application, I learned that the founder was quite upset that I had given the website address of the product to the grant reviewer.

I finished up the in-progress work on this contract and became busy with other contracts shortly afterward. Another engagement that I had around the same time was from a man in the United States who had a full-time job working sales. He had a number of different business ideas and some kind of Node.js application for collecting leads. He sent me a copy of this application without much context.

I tried to get it running, but it seemed like there were parts of it that were missing. I asked him a few follow-up questions about this application, and instead of answering my questions, he sent me another unrelated piece of software for another business idea that also seemed incomplete. He seemed to switch topics a lot and shift his focus wildly between different hypothetical business ideas.

For this contract, I did build for a few hours of general consulting, but we never actually did pin down what piece of software to build. Another noteworthy lead from around this time was from a local government-funded organization that shall remain nameless. This organization supposedly supported innovation through programs that were funded on the taxpayer's dollar.

For this lead, I didn't quite understand what the goal of the project was, but I ended up taking a meeting with them to discuss what the goals were for their project. From what I could understand, this organization had done a startup acquisition of some kind of web service from a small startup in the area, and they wanted to further develop this into some kind of product.

The person that I met with talked very highly of their organization and the product that they had acquired, but I still couldn't quite figure out what they wanted me to do, even after asking a lot of pointed questions. For example, I asked them if the application had many active users already. This is very important to know because developing on a production application is very different from building one from scratch.

Specifically, a production application requires much more care in maintaining the contents of the database. You need to add things like database migration and maintain the integrity of the data throughout the migration. But in a from-scratch application, you can just delete the entire database every time you do a deployment.

When I asked how many active users they had, this person first suggested that it was a very popular app and many people depended on it. However, after talking with them for a while, it was clear that absolutely no one was using this application. The person seemed to sheepishly admit at one point that they were under some kind of contractual obligation to keep developing the app and that my role was just to keep developing the app without any specific goal in mind.

There was also another employee of this organization who was supposed to be present at this meeting, and furthermore, he supposedly had a grand vision of what this application would become. Even though he was invited in advance, he never showed up to the meeting or responded to phone calls or emails throughout the duration of the meeting, and so I never got to hear what his grand ideas actually were.

I tried cloning and running the application, but the version of the software on the master branch didn't run. They were still in contact with the original developers who had moved on to other projects, and they suggested trying out one of the other 50 branches of this application. The whole thing seemed a bit sketchy to me, so I decided to pass on it.

I also had a number of other bogus leads during this period. I also distinctly remember talking to one potential lead who I would describe as a much less successful and much less charismatic version of Andrew Tate. He spent about an hour talking to me about his business ambitions while working out on the treadmill. I could barely hear anything that he was saying, but I do recall that he thought very highly of himself.

He just seemed to want to tell me about how great he was and didn't really have any software that he needed developed. For a while, I also entertained the idea of building websites for small businesses that didn't have them yet. I thought my sales strategy could just be to physically walk around and look at businesses, and then look up if they had a website. If they didn't, I would just walk in and try to sell them one.

I recall visiting one pizza shop that didn't have a website, and the son of the business owner seemed very keen on talking to me for a long period of time, but they never really seemed to want to commit to anything. Instead, they just tried to haggle over the potential hosting costs for a few dollars a month.

Another local business that I visited was a print and copy store. The store wasn't visible from the road, and the owner lamented the fact that he had switched leases with another tenant who had better road visibility. They didn't have a website and at first seemed very interested in getting one. I immediately went home and came up with a specific proposal and a quote that I thought would work for them.

When I came back and presented it to them, they seemed to have completely lost interest in the idea. About six months later, their business had completely disappeared, and the unit was vacant. Overall, I came to the conclusion that if a business didn't already have a website, then they didn't want one at all.

I also talked to one potential client who wanted to develop an app that was effectively designed for helicopter parents who want to monitor everything that their child does. They didn't have any money to fund the development, and the whole idea seemed a bit overzealous and intrusive.

I mentioned previously that blogging was one of the things that I tried as a form of content marketing. Some of my blog posts ended up on Hacker News, and I figured that if I could develop more of a following there, then maybe I could get some contract work with Y Combinator companies. I actually know quite a few people personally who have gone through the Y Combinator program, and one of them told me that at one point I was actually recommended on an internal YC list serve, although I don't have access to this, so I can't confirm it.

I do recall getting at least one inquiry from someone doing a Y Combinator startup, but they were only looking for a full-time employee, and as soon as I mentioned a business relationship, they lost all interest. I also tried posting once on one of the Hacker News threads for people looking for contract work and mentioned my services. From this, I got several calls and emails from one very persistent individual who proposed that I should sign a non-disclosure agreement before he would even brief me on the idea because apparently it contained some military stuff.

I told him that there was absolutely no way that I would sign his NDA, and he proceeded to tell me anyway. His idea was effectively identical to the one shown in Mark Rober's famous glitter bomb video, except in his case, he wanted to use a custom embedded device instead of using a cell phone for the network connection.

This brings us to about the year 2016. During this year, I did a contract for a custom WordPress theme. The lead came from a result of networking with another local small consulting business that made custom websites. Initially, I was a bit confused because I thought this consulting company was subcontracting some of their work to me, but in reality, the person who ended up briefing me on the details of this project was actually a friend of the founder of the consulting company.

When I met this person, I learned that the actual website was going to be for an industrial company in Alberta, and that I was to act as a subcontractor for this individual. After discussing the project and contract details, I signed a contract with the person who was subcontracting this work to me. Almost immediately after we signed the contract, they suggested that we should change the contract so that the client listed in the contract would be the company in Alberta and not the person I was talking to.

Their reasoning was that this would save them a little bit of money on sales tax since the rate was lower in Alberta. I then asked him to sign a termination statement for the current contract, and we did end up involving the other party to act as a client on the contract. This contract only produced a few thousand in revenue.

Throughout this period, I continued going to networking events to try and get more business leads. One lead that I entertained ended up being an elderly man who wanted to build automated day trading software that was based on a betting strategy that is effectively known as a Martingale, a logically flawed betting system that is well understood mathematically.

I explained to him why his system wouldn't work, but he wasn't convinced. He also tried to get me to work for $30 an hour, around this time I think I was still quoting people $50 an hour. I also talked to a middle-aged divorced woman at a meetup event who was thinking about starting some sort of food catering business and wanted to involve software somehow. After talking with her for a while, it occurred to me that she was just lonely and didn't have any serious business ambitions at all.

In late 2015, I had also started teaching as a part-time professor at Conestoga College. The main thing that I had been doing to try and get new contracts was visit lots of networking events. By chance, at a talk that I attended, I happened to sit next to one of the engineering department chairs at Conestoga College. I only had a chance to speak with him for a few minutes before the talk started, and I mentioned my C compiler and operating system project that I'd been working on for a while.

He mentioned that they were looking for professors and that I should send him an email. So, of course, I did send him an email, not expecting to hear back, but to my surprise, about a week later, I had a teaching contract at Conestoga College.

There's a lot that I could say about my experience teaching at the college, but I'll probably have to split that out into a separate video because there's just too much to say. The long story short of why I didn't continue teaching at Conestoga College was just because of how time-consuming it was for a part-time professor.

The hourly compensation rate makes it seem like it's fairly well paid, but the reality is that the amount of time that you're paid for and the amount of time that it takes to actually teach the course are completely disconnected. My teaching contract only paid me for the scheduled lecture time when I stood in front of the class to teach. Things like creating tests, marking tests, creating course material, and responding to student emails were all volunteer activities that were expected to be covered by the hourly lecture rate.

The college also had extremely poor public transit access. Since I don't have a car, my only option to get to the college was to take public transit, which was extremely overcrowded with students. There were several days when it took over 3 hours and three transfers for me to get home from the college by bus, when an equivalent car ride would have taken 20 minutes.

This might sound like an exaggeration, but I can assure you that it's not. During the last term that I taught at Conestoga College, a strike happened which lasted just under 5 weeks. Since I wasn't teaching during those weeks, I didn't get paid, but I was still expected to return at a moment's notice at some unknown time in the future. The strike was extremely stressful on students and faculty.

From what I learned while working there, a similar strike happened a few years prior, and the reasons for the current strike were mostly related to broken promises made during the end of the last strike. During the brief time that I taught there, there was also a public transit strike, which made it even more difficult to get to the college.

One of the next paid contracts that I actually did quite a bit of work on involved writing software to produce reports. I won't be more specific than that, but I will say that it's one of the better contracts that I've had over the years. This contract lasted until recently, and theoretically, it could start back up in the future.

However, on more than one occasion with this contract, there have been many months-long periods where payments have been late, and for multiple months in a row, the response would be, "Oh, I'll definitely pay that tomorrow." For this contract, the payments have always eventually come, but sometimes I have to wait a while.

Teaching at the college and working on the reports contract kept me busy for most of 2016 and 2017. In 2018, I also started work on a contract with a local company that was producing IoT software and hardware. This company had actually existed for 7 or 8 years now, and I had actually been recommended to the company by a couple of other engineers that I know to be competent and trustworthy.

One of these engineers had done contract work with the company for multiple years now, so it seemed fairly safe and established. The company wanted me to rewrite a server that processed data packets from a fleet of IoT devices. The primary goal of my work was to reduce the amount of data that was being used by these network packets in order to reduce the company's mobile data costs.

I had always wanted to do a contract where I negotiated some sort of performance upside for myself, so I came to an agreement in the contract that if I met their data reduction goals, I would get a bonus. After a few months of work, I was able to complete this work and deploy it to production.

Around this time, they were almost 1 month late on one of my previous invoices, which did concern me, but one of the previous invoices was also paid late, so it wasn't completely abnormal. Since I had just completed and verified the data production goal, around this time, I issued my regular monthly invoice along with another invoice for the performance bonus.

Unfortunately, the company had substantially misrepresented their finances, and it was at exactly this time that they started to implode. However, at the time, they were not clear about this at all. Even as much as a year later, they were still trying to suggest that they were just about to get a huge investment and that everything would be great again.

Eventually, the CEO of the company was fired by the board of directors, and in subsequent court filings, they attempted to claim that the company had actually gone defunct long ago. This is despite the fact that just weeks prior to the claims that they submitted to the court, they had attempted to restart the company under a different name.

I knew the employees who worked there well, and one of them tipped me off to this fact. They had hired another local consulting company and attempted to continue development work on the product. Shortly after they started, this new relationship fell apart, and work on the product stopped entirely.

Just before they ran out of money, they even persuaded a recently hired employee to put business expenses on their personal credit card and then laid the person off shortly after and didn't reimburse them for the expenses until they filed a legal claim to collect unpaid wages. Initially, some employees were still being paid and kept coming into the office, so I gave the company a few months to get their affairs in order.

But once it seemed inevitable that the company was going to fail, I put in a claim in small claims court, hoping that I might get something once the company's assets are liquidated. In total, the company owed me about $188,000 for a couple of months of work and the performance bonus. I had already seen some of their financials, and I knew that they did have around $20,000 in revenue per month, and my work specifically had reduced their expenses by about $4,000 a month.

So, I thought that there was at least some hope that I would get paid or that there would be at least some proceeds from selling off the functioning business components. I requested an examination hearing in small claims court, which they failed to attend, and in late 2019, I was able to get the directors of the company to provide me with some closure on the company's financial situation by threatening to submit a letter to the judge requesting that the court find the directors of the company in contempt of court for missing the examination hearing.

At this point, the directors did produce some financial records, which made it clear that the company had millions of dollars in unsecured creditors and effectively no unsecured assets to dispose of. The few assets that they did have were secured by bank loans, including one from the Canadian government.

The amount of drama that took place at this company was absolutely incredible, and I think it would have made for an excellent script on the TV show Silicon Valley. When I started working with this company, they mentioned another consultant who had started working with them about 6 months prior. They said that they had hired him specifically to improve the product quality and to organize the team better.

The way that they described him made it sound like this person was effectively going to be my manager. At the time, I thought great, there's lots of issues that I can see with this product, so I can talk to this guy and we can come up with a plan to fix all the issues in the product. However, after working with them for a while, this guy never seemed to be around when I was there visiting their office.

The founders had once said to me that this person was supposedly writing unit tests for the database. This sounded a bit strange to me, but I attributed this to the fact that the founders were not that familiar with software development themselves and maybe just used strange wording. I figured maybe he's just writing some unit tests for the data access layer.

As I gained more access to their systems and learned about what everyone there was working on, I realized that I didn't know where the git repo was for whatever this guy was working on. I mentioned to the founders that we really ought to make sure that whatever software he's writing is checked in somewhere.

I started to talk to more developers at the company to learn more about the history of this manager consultant person. According to one employee, they had only ever received one email from this person, which contained a document describing coding standards. He showed me this document, and I was able to identify it as a plagiarized version of Google's coding standard for the Java programming language.

The consultant had simply removed any attribution to Google and replaced it with the name of the company that he was consulting for. When we asked him about the code that he was writing, he simply sent a large zip file of the repo with no source control. We asked if he had a version of the code that tracked the history from the company's mainline branch, but he said that since the company never gave him write access to the repo, he had to develop outside of source control, which is, of course, nonsense.

In the meantime, he had simply been sending the founders random invoices in the amount of $2,000 to $4,000 for these so-called unit tests. I spent way too much time digging into the code that he sent to see if there was anything there that we should try to merge in. What I found was a bunch of autogenerated empty unit test stubs that didn't actually test anything.

He claimed to have written thousands of these lines of code by hand, but in reality, he used a code generation tool and then deleted the autogenerated stubs that gave attribution to the code generation tool. I know that this is true because he forgot to delete some of the comment stubs, which allowed me to track down the exact version of the tool that he used and reproduce his results exactly.

The founders didn't really understand what he was working on and continued to give him the benefit of the doubt, but as soon as they started asking more detailed questions about the unit tests, he threatened to sue them. At one point, a very physically fit man claiming to be the consultant's CEO visited the startup company. During this interaction, the so-called CEO said that he sympathized with the startup founders and that he was disappointed in the consultant's work products.

He apparently said that if the positions were reversed, he would not have paid for the work that the consultant delivered either. Then later that day, this same CEO person threatened to sue them again. In doing this consulting work for the company, the consultant had incorporated a special purpose shell company specifically for this contract. The address of his business was a vacant unit in a nearby business center.

I did a bunch of Googling about this person's details, and I just couldn't stop digging because things got weirder and weirder. I came across a news article about someone with the exact same name from another province who was apparently busted for running a medical marijuana growing operation with an expired license from the wrong province.

I also found a record of a grant being issued from the Canadian government to one of this person's businesses for a supposed hydroponic lettuce growing business. I also found some SEC filings related to cryptocurrency ICOs in his name and evidence that he had financial success in developing a network of hundreds of low-quality mobile phone games that made money selling advertisements.

It was around this time that it became clear to me that my existing business model wasn't working. I had initially thought that at least one of my clients would eventually become a stable business and start sending me lots of high-quality work, but that never happened. I can understand that sometimes businesses don't work out, but I was unprepared for the level of unprofessional behavior that most of these businesses exhibit.

2019 was the first year when I started experimenting with Kickstarter campaigns on the side. I was still looking to pick up new consulting and contract leads around this time, but it seemed like things were a bit more difficult than they were in the 2014-2015 era. I set up one small Kickstarter campaign about using SSH to do remote backups. I didn't do any work to advertise this campaign at all, and it got $390 in pledges.

$390 is not a lot of money, but for having done almost no marketing, it made me think that maybe there was something there. After this, I did four more Kickstarter campaigns, and each one made successively more money. The fifth campaign that I did was for regular expression fridge magnets, and this campaign made over $45,000.

This was enough money to make me think that there might be a business model behind repeatedly doing these small campaigns. I thought maybe I could build a list of repeat customers and then start using social media advertising to get new customers and achieve growth. Around this time, I started experimenting with paid advertising on different platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Google Ads.

I also started my YouTube channel around this time, and some of my initial content is from these Kickstarter campaigns. At first, I was able to make a handful of sales through paid advertising, but I was never quite able to achieve a positive return on ad spend. I think the limiting factor in my case was that I just didn't have enough sales and marketing data to make the ad targeting effective enough.

Around 2021, the iOS 14 advertising apocalypse happened. This event, along with the fallout from things like the Cambridge Analytica scandal, made Facebook advertising much less effective. I also noticed around this time that the Kickstarter campaigns I was doing became much less effective and were only able to make a few hundred.

What I think was happening was that my Kickstarter campaigns were inadvertently benefiting from the targeted advertising of other people's Facebook campaigns. Using Facebook ads to direct traffic to Kickstarter campaigns was quite common around this time, and many people who convert on a given Kickstarter campaign are also likely to make a pledge to a second Kickstarter campaign.

If you make a pledge on a given campaign, Kickstarter will start recommending similar campaigns to you. When Facebook traffic was cheap and effective, I think there was a huge surplus of this warm traffic from Facebook, and I was able to pick up the scraps without spending anything on advertising.

In 2023, I was fortunate enough to get another software development contract from the company of someone that I knew from university. From a pure business perspective, this contract was the best one that I ever had in my 10 years of doing this consulting business. They paid me on time, the project goal was well-defined and compartmentalized, and the work appeared to actually serve a meaningful business purpose.

The development work itself wasn't very exciting; it involved picking up a stalled project migration and getting it deployed to production. The project only lasted about six months, and once it was completed, the company sought full-time employees to maintain it. By this point, my viewership on YouTube had been growing for a while now, and I was still doing a bit of work on the reporting contract.

June 2023 was the first corporate year-end where I recorded revenue from YouTube in the amount of $495, and for the June 2024 corporate year-end, I recorded revenue from YouTube in the amount of $652. So, here's a graph that shows a breakdown of all my revenue in every year over the last 10 years.

In total, over the last 10 years, my business has produced around $257,000 in revenue, mostly from eight distinct clients. As you can see, the revenue is pitifully small and shows no signs of growth. In fact, I've only ever had one year where I made more than $30,000, and last year I made almost as much money as the first year that I started.

On top of that, almost all living expenses are now twice what they were 10 years ago. Now, it's worth asking: where did this $257,000 go over that time? About $110,000 became payroll toward myself, about $30,000 went toward operating expenses, and around $30,000 was reinvested in the business for things like business experiments, computers, and hard drives.

The camera that's in front of me right now, I spent around $25,000 in accounting and legal fees, about $10,000 went to employee and employer contributions to the Canadian Pension Plan, and about $5,000 went to corporate and other payroll taxes. Over this period of time, I've personally spent around $120,000 on rent.

You might be wondering how it's possible that you spent $120,000 on rent, but you've only paid yourself $110,000. The answer is that I've had a family member as a roommate for some of the last 10 years. As of today, I have absolutely no equity in any form of real estate, and I'm just barely hanging on to my apartment.

Reflecting on the last 10 years, I can give you the following insights: isolated and self-contained software development projects are extremely rare, and most of the work that companies want done always requires integrated communication. It requires many back-and-forth emails, meetings, clarifications, corrections. This is one of the main reasons why companies don't want to hire an external contractor.

Another major reason is part of the whole pump-and-dump model of venture capital-funded startups. The goal for most of these companies is not to actually run them and produce economically valuable output; instead, it's to get acquired by Google or Microsoft. The amount of payout from an acquisition will usually be based on the company's headcount.

This means that it's better to have 100 employees that are doing nothing at the time of an acquisition than it is to have one external contractor who productively runs your entire business. You may have been misled in the past into thinking that companies prefer to hire external contractors since there are some benefits like not needing to do payroll or pay health benefits.

However, many of the articles that you read about it being better or cheaper to hire external contractors are actually just propaganda written by consultants and contractors themselves to try and get business. The other major mistake that I made was in assuming that most entrepreneurs actually want to produce economically useful outputs.

In reality, most entrepreneurs, especially tech entrepreneurs, are really just scamming investors or the government. A fairly common model that founders follow looks something like this: raise venture capital for a company based on a pitch that follows whatever the current trend or virtue signal is, whether that's big data, Internet of Things, artificial intelligence, or climate change.

Then assign yourself the role of CEO or CTO and pay yourself at least $170,000 per year with some extra benefits and bonuses sprinkled on top. Additionally, network with prominent people in your industry and government; maybe even get some of them to join your board of directors.

Next, try to get your company additional investments through some kind of taxpayer-funded innovation initiative. Once you get the investment, do the bare minimum to keep the company running until you run out of funding and can't raise any more rounds. Then the company will eventually fail or get acquired for an amount of money that's less than the sum of the input investments.

To the uninformed general public, this might even look like success. At this point, though, you've already been paying yourself a handsome salary for years, and you can just shrug your shoulders and say, "Oh well, I tried." You might even get to liquidate a bit of your equity even if the company is acquired at a loss.

This strategy is not ethical or economically sustainable, which is why I haven't pursued it at all. I don't advise you to do any of this, but this is an extremely common strategy that I've observed. This topic is one that I've wanted to discuss for a while now, and now that there are more examples of this being reported in the mainstream news, I can hopefully convince you that what you see reported in the mainstream media is just the tip of the iceberg.

These kinds of things are highly unethical, and I don't advise you to do any of them, but unfortunately, this is increasingly becoming the only way to run a successful business in this country. White-collar crime in Canada is starting to get out of control, and it's starting to compete with the regular civilian economy.

This ecosystem of unproductive startups wouldn't be possible if it weren't for the substantial misallocation of taxpayer money that you see repeatedly reported in the news today. Case studies like GC Strategies, the SDTC fund, and the WE Charity scandal are all perfect examples.

Even in my tiny business, I've occasionally gotten cold calls from companies offering to do grants for me for a cut of the action. This is despite the fact that in the last few years, I basically never get new software development leads anymore. Back when I first started, I did get a few inbound leads here and there, but that's mostly dried up.

The narrative of the last decade has been that software developers are in extremely short supply, but I think that the actual truth is that good leadership is in short supply. Basically, all of the high-paying tech work is concentrated at the big tech companies, and everything outside of that is mostly just unproductive nonsense.

On the other hand, I do probably get about five emails a day from other software development companies wanting to sell their services to me. Even in just the last few days, I received a couple of emails from people looking for work. Having said this, if you look at the content that I've been posting on social media over the last couple of years, you might say that the reason I don't get consulting leads anymore is because a lot of the stuff that I publish is quite unprofessional.

But the reality is this is the only type of content that's shown any growth for me. I've been quite professional and obedient for pretty much my entire life, and that didn't get me anywhere, so I'm going to stop doing that now.

Switching topics back to my future and living situation, you might be wondering why I don't get a roommate again to help pay the rent. I actually had been thinking about getting a roommate again recently. Unfortunately, according to my new landlord, I am not allowed to have roommates, even though I pay for a two-bedroom apartment.

From what I understand, this is not consistent with existing tenancy law, so it's yet another thing that I'll have to fight for at the landlord and tenant board. As I mentioned before, I'm starting to become a bit neutral on the idea of getting evicted. Having to fight against draconian restrictions like this is becoming more and more common here in Ontario, and if the conditions for a normal human life don't exist here anymore, then maybe it's time to move somewhere else.

The next question that you're probably wondering is: why don't you have a dual-income household? Why are you not married? Why don't you have a family of your own? There's a lot that could be said about this topic, but the short version is that almost every environment that I've been in in my adult life has been almost 100% male, 100% senior citizens, or both.

Growing up, I lived in the middle of nowhere in a rural area populated mostly by elderly farmers. In 2009, I moved up here to Ontario to study software engineering, and I still have my original class photo list from when I first started. Looking at the class list right now, I count 7 out of 117, or about 5%, of the starting class was female.

Now, let's take a look at my graduating class. I count five out of 85, or about 6%, of the graduating class was female. However, this can be an overestimate of the gender ratio since a few of my elective classes, such as real-time programming, were literally 100% male.

Now, you could say, "But Robert, you've got to get out there, meet people outside your program, go to extracurricular activities," and that's true. So, I did for a while. I actually took dancing lessons at the University of Waterloo, but even this was about 70% male since there were not enough women to pair people up. Some of the men would end up dancing by themselves or dancing with another man.

I also found that dancing lessons require a surprising amount of focus and practice. I was never really good at it, and I didn't particularly enjoy it. In my opinion, dancing lessons don't provide a great venue to get to know someone anyway.

As you might expect, the gender ratio of the workplace in tech isn't much different. Now, this is kind of an exaggeration, but since I've started doing software development, I've never actually had a female coworker who I worked with on a daily basis. Of course, many roles in HR and marketing are usually filled by women, but my jobs usually have little to no interaction with these teams.

Now, the exceptions are I did have a female boss on four different occasions. I also had a period of about a couple of months during one co-op placement where I did sort of have a female coworker. I would usually say hi to her when I arrived at work in the morning, although she almost never responded. I don't think she was being rude; I think it was just an autism spectrum thing.

I also think that I might have had a female team member for a brief period of time just before I left Amazon, although I never interacted with this person, and she worked remotely. In doing my contract work over the years, I have occasionally interacted with female managers and product managers, and at Conestoga College, there were a few older married female professors who I interacted with occasionally.

Now, you could say, "You've got to meet people outside of work, go to events," and that's true. When I was at Amazon, I did go to local networking events for a while. Since so many of the people in Seattle work at Amazon, a lot of them are just other men who are exactly like me with the same idea.

I also talked in my other video about how the entire team had to stay late on Valentine's Day to release Amazon Redshift, and many of the full-timers had to work past midnight on this day. When you combine this with the fact that full-time employees also have to do on-call work, this doesn't give you a lot of opportunity to develop a personal life.

Now, the next question you're probably thinking is: surely in the last 20 years, you must have met some people outside of work or school. So, for completeness, I've constructed this diagram which illustrates every time that I can recall going on a date with a woman or being in a relationship.

During undergrad, the usual pattern was that I'd meet someone and have a handful of interactions with them. As the term picked up, we'd both become so busy that both of our schedules would always be in conflict. Then, after the four-month term was up, we'd both be in different provinces or countries and never really see each other again.

After I graduated, I sacrificed a lot of personal time to try and build up the business. I had hoped that things would pick up and that I'd naturally build up a community of people around me. In 2018, I started to think that business was finally picking up and that I'd be able to bank a lot of money. That is, of course, just before the company that I was doing work for started to implode.

Since they never made it clear that they were giving up on their business and, in fact, said the opposite as much as a year later, I wasted a lot of time chasing them around in court hoping to recover some of the money that they owed. On top of that, I had to scramble to try and look for more contracts to make up for the incoming shortfall.

Late 2019 was when I finally got closure on the lost income and started to get my momentum back. Then, a couple of months later in 2020, a global pandemic happened, and this caused some of my other work to be canceled. So again, I was scrambling to try and find new sources of revenue.

I almost forgot: during the pandemic, you weren't allowed to go anywhere or do anything. Then in 2023, the building that I live in was bought by the famous rent eviction landlord, and for 2024, most of my spare time has gone toward trying to avoid getting rent-evicted.

When the rent evictions first started, I actually thought that this might be a great opportunity for me to start meeting people again and work together to fight the rent eviction process. Unfortunately, society has deteriorated a lot more than I had thought in the last few years, and many people seem to be struggling with serious mental, physical, and financial issues.

In meeting some of the other tenants who live here, one of the things that I paid attention to was: are there any single women who are less than 65 years of age who live in this building? So far, I haven't met any. However, it's not all bad news.

Now, I don't mean to brag, but since the rent eviction started, I do have semi-regular contact with about four or five elderly women who live in this building. Sometimes I meet them on the sidewalk and help them carry their groceries home. I also try to keep them updated on the current renovation situation.

So, if you're looking to meet elderly single women, I can testify that Kitner is definitely the place to be. The rent evictions in this building have caused a lot of tenant turnover and have led me to meet even more new people. Recently, I've networked a bit with some of the new tenants who were replacing the old ones. Many of them are immigrant families with young children who just arrived from countries like Syria, Sudan, Lebanon, and India.

When I meet them in the lobby or the elevator, I'll usually chat with them a bit to try and get to know them better. Many of them seem quite friendly, although often when I try to have an extended conversation with them, a lot of them will just say, "No English."

The final question worth asking is: given everything that you've said in this video, what would you do differently? What kind of life advice would I give to someone who is just starting out where I was 10 or 15 years ago? That's a very difficult question to answer.

It's easy to give advice about what to do if you could go back into the world of 10 years ago, but your life is not going to start 10 years in the past, and the conditions of the world today are completely different. If I was able to rewind the clock and go back to working at Amazon or Nvidia directly after graduation, I could have been a millionaire.

$20,000 worth of Nvidia stock options from 2014 would be worth about $5 million today. But then again, most of the money would have come from the appreciation of the company stock, not from the salary of actually working there. So, the best strategy would have been to just get a student loan and spend all of it on Nvidia stock and then go sit on the beach for the 5 years that I spent in school and the 10 years that I spent trying to start a business.

However, giving life advice that's based on the last 10 years of stock market performance is lazy and somewhat irresponsible. I went to school with someone who got a full-time job at Uber back around 2011 or 2012. I remember having discussions with my peers about how this guy was going to become a millionaire when Uber IPOed.

However, because of unfavorable market conditions, Uber kept delaying their IPO over and over again and didn't actually end up IPOing until 2019. Even though he did the full-time grind for years, he ended up leaving well before the IPO date and, I assume, didn't benefit much from the stock options.

If you only focus on the salary that I would have made from Nvidia or Amazon, then I would probably have a partially paid-off house or condo by now. I also graduated into one of the best possible job markets for software engineers, but today the job market is a lot more competitive, and housing is way more expensive.

The most significant economic factor of the last 15 years was the unprecedented period of near-zero interest rates. But as you may be aware, interest rates are now higher, and the Federal Reserve has repeatedly stated that interest rates will now be higher for longer.

If you're young, you might think that interest rates have little to do with the job market or the economy. However, the single best piece of advice that I can probably give you in this video is to make sure that you understand the relationship between the Federal Reserve's interest rate decisions and the overall economic cycle

Life in Canada would be a lot better if our housing affordability situation would improve a bit. However, when you look at the CMHC's housing forecasts, they seem to predict a fairly bleak future until at least the 2030s.

From what I see in the news, housing affordability is basically out of control in all Western countries right now. It's tempting to think that the grass is greener if you just move somewhere else, but if you do, you might discover that you're actually just trading one bleak future for a different one.

So, it's important for you to do a lot of research before you move. I'm not qualified to speak about what life is like in somewhere like the Bay Area or Texas, but hopefully, I've provided you with a fairly detailed look at my entrepreneurial experience here in Canada.

Another conclusion that you might draw from this video is that I might have done better if I had just gone into the trades instead of getting an expensive and tedious academic degree like software engineering. But again, I think it's more complicated than that.

A couple of years ago, I talked to some trades workers who were here in my apartment doing repairs under the previous owner. I made some comments about how I might have done better in life if I had gone into the trades instead. The worker said that in his industry, it's nearly impossible to get trades work unless you do it through an intermediary company, and that all of the apartment buildings and construction companies collude together to keep wages suppressed.

The worker said that he can make around a hundred Canadian dollars on a good day. In the last year, since this building was taken over by its new owner, I've had many chances to chat with the trades workers who are doing the renovation work. Some of them have said that they're very unhappy with the working conditions, but they have no choice. Others simply reply with "no English," even when I ask them a simple question like, "Hi, how are you?"

When it comes to giving advice on how to start a software consulting or contracting business, the advice I'd give you would probably be to not start one at all unless you already have a lot of deep industry or government connections from day one. Your experience might end up being similar to mine.

And there you have it—the full story of why I'm in the situation that I'm in and an insight into the logical reasoning that got me here. Hopefully, you can analyze the things that I've said and the decisions that I made so that you can avoid becoming a 37-year-old broke loser.