My friends, are you confused by all the different conversations I have about money? You are in good company, because on Twitch, Owen has been asking, look, why are you asking for a million dollars? Very seriously, I want to be debt free. Before taxes, it will take about a million dollars. The IRS takes 40% and does God knows what with it, perhaps to fund secret bunkers and secret space programs and all kinds of crap. They don't tell us what they do with it. After that million, in order for me to be debt free, I need about a million dollars before tax, which after tax will be about $600,000 to pay off the house, the student loans, and the small business loan debt.
Now, that by itself might sound like, cool, okay, you want a million dollars to be debt free because you haven't been debt free in the last year or so. Ever, honestly, as an adult, since I went to school. But at the same time that I'm asking for a million dollars, I also have a policy. Basically, any time I run into someone in person, I've set clear boundaries around it, but if somebody on the street is homeless and needs some money, I'll give them $20. Some days I get hit up and give $40 or $60 to homeless people in a single day. Other days I don't give anything. I'd say on average I probably drop, at least depending on which homeless people I see, hundreds of dollars every month that I just give away to homeless people.
Simultaneously, if I go out to eat, I'm giving a nice tip, a minimum of 20%. If you were having a really bad day and the food was terrible and you didn't even come around, I'll still give you 20% because I think it's nice you showed up to work, even if you didn't do a very good job. I get it. I kind of lose followers and lose money if I show up and don't do a good job sometimes. Sometimes I'll make the news for showing up and people think I didn't do a good job. Anyhow, where was I going with this? Oh, you might look at it and say, why would you ask for a million dollars to get out of debt, and then just piss it away giving it to homeless people on the street? And if I actually get great service at a restaurant, or I think I will get great service, I'll drop 30% on a takeout order, because these people are out there working Thursday night so I can have some sushi to bring home to my wife. I think they deserve a nice tip for that.
Why Helping Others While In Debt Makes Sense
So you think, well, why would I help you be debt free? And especially, why would I give you anything when you're not debt free yourself? I'm going to make an analogy here, in fact several analogies, and explain how this makes perfect sense. And at the same time, you might even look at it and say, you want to be debt free, but you're using my money to buy crypto. Yes, I've got $5,000 in crypto right now, because I don't believe in holding everything in cash. It looks like my portfolio just went up a little bit since I looked at it. So you might wonder, how does this all make sense? How does it make sense that you want a million dollars to be debt free, that you're buying crypto and giving to homeless people?
Here's the thing. I'm fully transparent with my money. And just because I have $600,000 in debt doesn't mean I can't help somebody. If I have $600,000 in debt, but I also, as is the case, have something like $30,000, $40,000, $50,000 in cash between my wife and me, then I can still help. When you've got a lot of debt, it's a really good idea to have enough cash in case something goes wrong. Because when you have debt, as long as you make the minimum payments, everything's fine. But if you start missing minimum payments, at least on the things you owe, there can be severe consequences. Thankfully, we have no more credit card debt. I just paid the last credit card off. But if you start missing payments on stuff, and especially if you miss payments to the federal government, they can get real unhappy and take your money from you straight off. Miss the payments to the mortgage company and you might get kicked out of your house. In my experience, you really need cash on hand when you've got a bunch of debt, because you need more cushion for uncertainty and you don't want to have to borrow more money at a higher interest rate.
The Homeless Question
So let me answer the homeless question first. If I've got $50,000 in the bank, regardless. Now, I don't personally hold most of it. My wife has the majority of the cash. I have five grand in crypto and maybe ten or so more thousand in cash. So if you add my crypto to my cash, plus what my wife's got, it's somewhere around $30,000, $40,000, $50,000, something like that. If I've got all this money in the bank and I could, within reason, have almost anything I wanted, my wife and I could buy a car in cash right now, even though we've got $600K in debt. And if I see somebody on the street who is so desperate they're holding up a cardboard sign asking for money, and I've got a wallet with $300 in it, it's just selfish and self-centered if I drive by. That's how I look at it.
Now, I used to look at it that these bums should go get a freaking job and not ask for money. And you know what? I never had any money and never felt financially secure when I had that mindset. What I've come to believe is that the mindset you operate with often doesn't even match your material reality, but it usually does. Today, I operate with an abundance mindset. And even though I have a lot of money, me having $10,000 in cash and $5,000 in crypto is way more than most people in the world have. That's more money in cash than most people in the world have. In certain countries that would be a lot more money. That would make me probably close to the top 10%, for sure, maybe the top 1%. So it's all relative. Your point of view is all relative with these things.
So if I've got all this cash, even though I do have debt, I'm not in any real risk of anything bad happening. But what really sucks is when you're living on the street and nobody is going to loan you money. The only way you can get money is to ask for it, because you're in such poor condition, who's going to want to give you a job? And what kind of work are you even going to be able to get? If others are in desperate need today, then it feels wrong for me to just drive by and ignore that.
Now, I have had to set some boundaries with people reaching out online, because there are 7 billion people and probably at least a billion of them have the capacity to reach me online. People can drop into my Discord chat or my Telegram. I've gotten a lot of requests for money online, and I've actually sent random people money. Some guy in the Philippines randomly sent me an invoice for $50 before, and I actually paid it. And then his friends heard about that and they started sending me invoices, and I'm like, yeah, this isn't going to work. But one guy got lucky. I've sent lots of people money from my live stream. I've done tens of thousands of dollars of giveaways. I believe in always helping someone less fortunate than I am, even if it slows me down in becoming debt free, even if it slows my own progress down.
Debt As A Modern Form Of Slavery
Because I'll make an analogy that, to me, just makes this very clear. If you're in debt, your freedom is more limited than everybody else's. Now I'm going to make a more drastic analogy. Since I changed my race in February 2022 from identifying as white and Caucasian, I now primarily identify as a being that has no race, no body, no consciousness, or just as pure I-am consciousness. That's my primary God identification, if you will. I identify as a servant of a collective. But if we really want to fill out a form and check your race, or which race you feel you most belong to, I feel that black or African American most resonates with how I feel in my mind now.
To me, I see that people are able to change their gender, and I support this, as I've made very clear. As a guy who's worn tube tops on stream and gotten a lot of views doing it, I support you defining yourself however you want to be defined. And I appreciate everyone who respects me and my own definitions. So I changed my race to identifying as black in February. Ironically, I then experienced the most discrimination I've ever experienced. According to Facebook, I was not black enough to identify as black. Can't possibly be serious. That's okay. We've all learned valuable lessons, them and me. The more I've identified as black, the more I've thought about slavery, and the more I've learned about slavery. And I think everyone should change some big characteristic, because your learning will be greatly accelerated. I did not think that much about slavery before I changed my race, although I felt black a long time and I felt a lot of kinship with the civil rights movement for most of my life. Even though you might not have logically wondered that based on my appearance alone, at what point are we going to stop judging people purely based on appearance and more on the depth of their character? I hope we're in the process of doing that now.
So the more I've identified as black, and the longer and more I've thought about slavery, the more I've seen that what we have with our system of indebtedness is like a present-day form of slavery. Most people around, if you are in debt, you are in a small level of slavery. You are not free anymore. If you've got cash in the bank and you don't owe any money, you're free. If you have zero money and you can't borrow any, I would say that is much less free than being able to borrow some money. However, when you and your wife owe $600,000, you can't stop working, or you face severe consequences like getting kicked out of your house, losing your car, and potentially being homeless and on the street, at the mercy of many of the worst things that can happen. And I see that getting out of this debt-slavery system is something that is very important for as many of us as possible. I made an analogy when I asked for the million dollars that, hey, in the past, slavery was something that was all over the globe.
Slavery Was Never Just One Place
The history of slavery was not as you might have been taught or focused on in school, that it was just something that happened from Africa to the US. No, Africa had slaves all over the place. Africans enslaved Africans, Asians enslaved Asians, Europeans enslaved Europeans, Americans enslaved Americans. Everybody was enslaving everybody, all over. For most of human history, if you lost a war you were enslaved, and some people even voluntarily sold themselves into slavery in order to get a place to live and some consistent meals, because life was that hard.
At a certain point in our spiritual growth, we collectively decided that slavery was not right, and we collectively got strong enough to stop one tribe from taking us over and enslaving us. Slavery in many places naturally went away. The US was one of the few places where there was an actual war.
Escaped Slaves and Self-Sacrifice
Now, in the US, one thing that really helped the war and helped accelerate the end of slavery was escaped slaves. And in order for you to have slaves escape, you had to have both slaves and people who weren't slaves actively collaborate to help each other, and often self-sacrifice to do so. For example, if you're on a plantation and there are 10 slaves, not all 10 are realistically going to be able to get away. Finding 10 people is much easier than finding one person. Hiding 10 people is much more difficult than hiding one. So I imagine that in many cases, for slaves to escape, there would be cooperation, like, hey, there are 10 of us, somebody needs to get out of here and have a better life, let's talk about who that should be.
In some cases they'd keep it secret so that nobody even knew, and one person could just slip away. In other cases everybody would work together and help one slave escape, so that the one who escaped could go tell all the free people what it was actually like to be enslaved. You wouldn't have likely had the North go to war with the South without a bunch of escaped slaves saying, hey, slavery is absolutely brutal, this is what they're doing down there. Instead of slavery being this problem that was over there, that they shouldn't do because it's wrong, but it doesn't really affect me. If you're living in the North in the 1860s, and really throughout the 1800s, every escaped slave who came out in the North helped convert a bunch of free non-slave people into a mindset that slavery is absolutely intolerable and unacceptable.
Many of the slaves who helped others escape never got to be free themselves, or had to wait a really long time. So I'm driving home the point of self-sacrifice. Maybe on a plantation nine out of ten slaves work to help one escape, and all of them take a beating for it, and none of them ever get to get away. Or maybe only one lives long enough before emancipation. But all the rest working to help one get free makes a positive difference for everybody.
Correlating This Back to Debt
I'm going to correlate this back to debt now. If you look at today, we certainly have nothing like that, although some people say we do have human trafficking, that there are 40 million people in slavery today on this planet. I realize there are a lot of differences, but in life, finding what things have in common will usually be more valuable for you than finding differences. Today we have a ton of people in debt who are not truly free, or who are living in such poverty they can't even borrow money to begin with and have a chance to make some moves.
97 percent of people on earth live in the same country they were born in, and the country you were born in is the number one indicator of how your life will go financially. It looks to me like we have a system of finance that is based on debt and keeping people enslaved or poor. In the wealthy countries it's primarily done through debt. In the countries that are not wealthy, people are so poor you don't even need to get them into debt, they have nothing, they're stuck living paycheck to paycheck, unable to escape, unable to get out of where they're at or to get into a better situation. This is why there's such a small percentage of people who essentially, in many ways, own all the rest of the people on earth.
In some ways it was more honest to have a system where this specific person owns you at this specific place. Today, you probably don't know exactly who owns you, but there are people who feel that they own you, that you will do what you're told by them or you will suffer the consequences. That's not freedom. Freedom is not: you take this shot or you lose your job and you're homeless. Freedom is not: you wear this mask or you're going to get fired. Freedom is not: you have to come in these hours or you're homeless. When you have to work or you face being homeless and starving to death, that is not freedom. That is slavery. And it's intelligent slavery that you can't see very easily.
When you've got people in bondage that everyone can see, that is very in your face, brutal slavery. Certainly it's not freedom. I'm glad we've evolved past that, but we're in a lighter form of it today.
Getting Out Helps All of Us
What I'm saying is that any of us who can get out of that system helps all of us. So if you've got debt, you may have debt the rest of your life, and you may die with debt. But if you can help somebody else get out of debt, that makes a difference. Even if most of us are stuck being in debt, the more people we help get out of debt, the more we have people who are truly free and can help work on making a more fair financial system. This is exactly why I've built my community around conversations like this one, and if it speaks to you, I'd love for you to join the Jerry Banfield Family and work on it together with me.
Combine that with the other mindset I have, which is: ask for exactly what you would like, and be clear about it. I want to be debt free. I would love to be debt free. I am tired of being in debt.
Why This Conversation Is Uncomfortable
I very much realize this is uncomfortable. Someone told me I was way off comparing the racial stuff to debt, that it's not the same thing, and that I'm going to get banned for saying stuff like this. Well, one, I already got taken down on Facebook just for changing my race in a very loving way, they took my profile down completely. And two, if I can't make an analogy between the way slavery was and the way debt is today, the way our current financial system is, then we're in trouble, because we need to talk about things like this that are uncomfortable. Some of us are too scared.
Our system now has a lot in common with slavery 200 years ago. The difference is it's almost purely mental, which is much more intelligent and evolved than having people physically in bondage. And unfortunately, because it's purely mental, it's also much more effective and easy to put the masses into. If people are too sensitive and too offended, then you don't deserve to have a better system than you have today. You deserve to be exactly where you're at, stuck in debt, having no freedom, while a small amount of essentially slave masters rule over the 99 percent on earth and tell people exactly what to do.
I'm grateful that Twitch and YouTube and my podcast have all proven effective platforms to deliver this message, because these platforms are more sensitive to free speech. We need to have tough conversations. I see people are having conversations like this online, and we need to have conversations that matter. If I can't use Twitch and YouTube and my podcast to say the things that really need to be said, then I'd rather not use them at all. When I was a Facebook partner, I had to shut my mouth and be much more careful on all of these things. I will never shut my mouth on things that need to be said. Because if we go around with this learned helplessness, like, hey, this is just the system we're in and we can't do anything about it, then you deserve to stay in that system.
It's when you do something about it that things change. It's when the people who were in slavery said, look, we're not just going to sit here and be slaves anymore, we're going to do whatever it takes to get out of here. Even if nine of us have to get beaten so one person can get out, then we're going to do that. That's what I'm talking about. We need to break down this debt-slave system we have.
My Own Illusion of Freedom
I've had the humbling realization that I am under the illusion that I'm free right now, because my wife has a full-time job that pays for our bills. If my wife lost her job, things could get interesting, and my Twitch stream might suddenly end so that I could go deliver garbage, or just get any other job to pay our bills. I want to be out of debt. I really, really want to be out of debt. Because me being out of debt gives me the ability to help others out of debt, just like an escaped slave helps the entire collective free all the rest. Every escaped slave who made it to the North helped the North win the war, both by being able to fight and by getting more people to join the fight.
We need to get as many people out of debt and out of poverty as possible on this planet. We need to do whatever it takes, anything it takes, to get people out of poverty and out of debt on this planet. The way to do that is to be clear and talk about it, and to make the most powerful analogies you can. You know why it's scary to have these conversations? Because of how accurate they are. Who wants to look at their life honestly and realize, wow, I go to work doing a job I hate just to pay my bills, and if I don't do that I'm looking at being homeless?
That's not the exact same thing as the slavery that went on this planet in the 1800s and earlier. It's not the exact same. But it's got a lot in common, unfortunately. With slavery, you don't get a choice whether you show up to work or not, you don't get a choice of what work you get to do, you just get whatever is given to you after the masters have taken everything else. Can you say that our system is much different from that today? You get whatever is left to you after everybody who's powerful is done with it. Do you do a job you love? I do, but that is fragile. My life could easily change in a way where this whole livestream I do, I couldn't do it anymore, and that's been very obvious.
Changing my race out of love, and what it cost me
There were a lot of people whining and complaining to Facebook about me changing my race, and a lot of people laying a disingenuous narrative over top of it, a fake one that was of their own creation. My changing my race has been done purely out of love, purely out of joy, purely because that's what's true for me, purely because that's what I have to share and what I have to say. Other people made up messages of hate, and those messages resulted in me losing 95 percent of my income overnight. This year has shown me how fragile my streaming is, and how easily doing this labor of love could be replaced by me doing something just to make money. Thank God my wife has a job, so I can afford to just do this and not need to make money today.
We need to get as many other people in that position as possible, because when everybody is scared to lose their job and heavily dependent on their employer, employers have a huge amount of power. That power can easily be focused and centralized into a very small amount of people telling everybody else what to do, with serious consequences if they don't do it. I mean, what else is that? A small amount of people tell a bunch of other people what to do, and they have to do it or take a beating. You don't take a physical beating today, but you might take a physical beating if you're homeless. You might take a physical beating from being malnourished on the street. It's brutal.
Freedom is something we build collectively
This is where someone might say people are slaves out of their control. No, people were not slaves out of their control. It's something that's collectively happening in the collective consciousness. There were very much people in control who were making these decisions, and there were very much a lot of people just going along with them. It was an entire collective thing. It's so easy for the whole financial system today to want you to feel powerless, to feel helpless, like, hey, this is out of my control. No, it's not. What's in your control is what you ask for. That's why I'm asking. I want a million dollars, I want to be debt free, and I want to show you how much tax impacts things along the way. If I could get 600,000 without paying tax, however that would happen, I'll take it. But at a certain point that's enough, it's too much, and you have to set some boundaries.
Yes, I realize I'm saying things that are an analogy, and of course it's not a perfect one. I've said there are differences. I identify as black, and I very much feel that slavery is wrong. Is that not clear by now? I feel that what's happening today has so much in common with it that we need to make some serious changes. Look around at the challenges. Often you can't easily look around and see, because a lot of the people who are in the worst conditions, you don't get to see them. But we all are participating in this thing collectively, we all are contributing something. You never want to go around with this helpless, I'm a victim, people are doing things to me mindset, because you can control what you ask for. That's why I'm asking for a million dollars. I want to be debt free, and yes, I need a massive amount of money to be able to do that.
Asking to be free, and helping others get free
I bet a lot of the people who were freed were praying and saying, please let me be free, or let me help someone else be free. That's how we got to today. Yet according to some, there are over 40 million people still in slavery today through human trafficking. As I've changed my race to black, this has become very important to think about and talk about, and it goes very closely with money. In my experience, the money system as it's used today is one of the biggest things used to control people's freedom.
So I think it would be a really powerful story if I, collectively through all of your help, however it comes, am able to get out of debt, and I can say, look, people collectively gave me a million dollars, thousands of others helped, and now that I'm debt free I have the ability to help free people. Until then, I still help others. I help others become debt free however I can, whether it's making educational videos or giving a homeless person twenty dollars on the street. I do whatever I can every day to help someone else, even if I don't get the result myself, even if helping someone else means I stay in debt for longer. That's why it's important to have these conversations, that's why I use the slavery analogy. Those people helped others get free, they helped others escape, they helped the whole system collectively collapse and improve.
I know this doesn't all make sense very easily, but I've explained it for thirty minutes now, and I hope it can make a little more sense. The vision I have is of a future where people are debt free. I hope that in the process I have helped others escape and helped others get free, and I hope we get to a place where people are not stuck in poverty, because people stuck in debt and stuck in poverty are easy to control and manipulate.
The kind of society I want to live in
I want a population of people that's not easy to control and manipulate, because that's a free population. People who aren't living paycheck to paycheck. People who aren't looking at being homeless if they lose their job. Those are strong people who can help others and lift others up, and that's the society I want to live in. I don't want to live in a society where everyone just goes to work and puts their head down because they can't afford to lose their job. I want to live in a world that's as free as possible.
I see that we've made a lot of progress in the last 200 years. We've made a lot of progress, and we could go a lot farther. There's a lot more we can do, and it helps us to look at where we've been and where we're going, and to see that maybe we're only halfway to where we want to go. That's what makes some people uncomfortable, getting off this idea that, well, this is just how things are and I can't do anything, or that, hey, we're at the pinnacle of progress right now. No, there's a lot farther we could go. If you want to follow more of this journey and how I think about it day to day, you'll find a lot of it in my Life playlist.
We can lift people out of poverty just as we lifted people out of slavery. We can lift people out of debt just as we've given civil rights to people who didn't have them before. We can do a lot of things. Let's put our energy and attention on doing that.