Jesse Day is the host of Commodity Culture, a Youtube show regularly achieving 250,000 views about investing in commodities such as gold, silver, uranium and copper.
"If I could go back in time ten years and explain this to my younger self, he would be looking at me with a mix of confusion and disbelief. This is because I always saw myself as an entertainer, whether it was music or acting, my place was on stage or on camera expressing myself to the world. Nowadays, I’m content to ask a few questions and then get out of the way as people with far more wisdom than myself share it with my audience, hopefully to their great benefit.
My journey here has been a long road of giving up on a variety of projects that I thought I would be doing forever. Looking back, I believe that my willingness to throw in the towel on an idea and move on to the next has been instrumental in finding my purpose.
“Never give up.”
“Winners never quit and quitters never win.”
“Never stop trying. Never stop believing.”
These phrases are a common part of so-called “success” literature and have been ingrained in most people's brains. The average person thinks of themselves as a failure when they give up on an idea or project they were previously excited about and I think that stops a lot of people from moving on to something even greater.
My first dream was to be an actor. I made all sorts of stupid little films on a home movie camera growing up in the 80s and 90s and then took acting courses in university. A few small gigs here and there came up, but I never really saw an opening to make it to Hollywood. Around that same time, I started to get serious about Hip-Hop music. I’d been rapping along to my favourite artists since I was a kid, and I decided to take a shot at putting my own music together.
For an indie artist, I did pretty well and even ended up organising, promoting and hosting my own monthly Hip-Hop show in Vancouver that showcased local talent. I decided to put the acting thing on the back-burner.
In a twist of serendipity, I started making friends with students from Korea studying in Vancouver. It was just a few at first, and they introduced me to Korean Hip-Hop music. I fell in love, despite not knowing the language. The flow and the beats were completely different from anything I’d heard and I decided then and there that I was going to learn to rap in Korean. As I began to pursue this angle, I started to become known to the Korean student community at large.
“Did you know there’s a Canadian rapper who loves Korean Hip-Hop?”
It was unheard of at the time and so Korean students started flocking to my shows until my gigs in Vancouver were wall-to-wall Koreans in the audience. The other artists performing were confused but happy to have a large crowd in attendance.
My Korean friends started helping me with the language and essentially trained me to use correct pronunciation when I rapped. Once I learned my first song, I recorded myself performing it and uploaded it to the Korean net. Within a few days, it was a top trending video on Naver, which is basically Korea’s version of Google. After seeing all the supportive comments, I made another shift: I would move to Korea and try my best to be a player in the entertainment industry there.
I left behind all the momentum I had built up in Vancouver because I saw a bigger picture, and I believed I could achieve it.
After a year of nearly going completely broke, eating instant noodles and kimchi every day and living in what is known as a gosiwon - pretty much a box that barely fits a bed and a small desk, normally used by students cramming for exams - I got my first big break: a leading role in a children’s television show. It wasn’t glamorous but boy, was it fun.
From there, I started to get various one-off modelling and acting gigs, playing the token foreigner role in a TV drama, or the American business executive in a Samsung advertisement. All the while, I never stopped rapping in Korean, along with learning to speak the language. Finally, the opportunity to use my Korean rap chops popped up: the popular TV variety show Star King was looking for foreigners with unique talents and auditions were starting the following week.
I marched into that audition room, rapped my heart out, thanked them for giving me the opportunity and walked out knowing I had given it my all. Unfortunately, my all wasn’t enough. They passed. Not the angle they were looking for at the time. I was disappointed but somehow knew there would be another opportunity, and so I kept working on my Korean rap skills.
In the meantime, my acting career started picking up. As one of the few foreign actors in Seoul that spoke decent Korean, directors started asking for me by name as I was easier to work with than talent that needed an interpreter and thanks to my days as a children’s entertainer, I had really picked up on the ability to give them the expressions they were looking for on camera.
I got the chance to audition for Star King again, around a year after the first attempt, and I was ready this time. I passed the audition and found myself backstage surrounded by the country’s top K-Pop stars and actors. I thought to myself, I’ve finally arrived.
Over the next several years, I built up a career that I could be proud of, but I never broke into the top one percent of the field to become a household name. I did become somewhat of a niche cult figure though, when I started a Youtube channel featuring myself wearing a yellow Bruce Lee jumpsuit and challenging Korea’s spiciest dishes. I grew the channel to 90,000 subscribers and featured some celebrity guests along the way, but three trips to the hospital and many other painful instances in my apartment after shoots where I thought my stomach was going to explode eventually led me to take an early retirement. For those wondering, the level of spice in Korean food can be daunting and the concept of my show was to take things to an extreme.
I ended up falling into hosting travel TV shows where I journeyed to the far corners of Korea and enjoyed festivals, cultural monuments and local cuisine. This was an amazing experience and I’ve now been to nearly every city and town in South Korea, some of them two or three times.
Eventually, I started to feel like I was getting complacent. I didn’t think I had the focus to make it to the big time and I’d grown lazy in my everyday life. I was too comfortable and was no longer hungry like in the early years of my career. I decided it was time to flip the script and head back to Vancouver after nearly eight years in Korea.
Back home, I struggled to find my purpose. I got an agent and started doing acting auditions. I picked up the microphone again and started performing at local Hip-Hop shows. It was fun, but it wasn’t the same. I’d lost the spark and the passion that originally drove me to be an entertainer.
Then came the pandemic. I was working a sales job at the time, a far cry from the heights of clinking champagne glasses together with top Korean celebrities at private VIP parties in Seoul city. My boss called me into his office and told me that he had to let me go. There weren’t enough customers coming in these days and profits were taking a nosedive. I understood completely but now I was truly lost.
No job, no passion, no purpose anymore.
The only positive thing I could find was the seeming generosity of the Canadian government. They were sending me checks every month, and not small ones. Then, they sent me a bonus check for some reason. I counted it all up and I was making nearly the same amount of money sitting around at home as I was working eight hours a day. I was happy at first but then I thought, how is this even possible?
That question took me down the rabbit hole of central banking, government policy, and sound money. I learned that central banks were printing record amounts of currency into existence to pay everyone not to work, and that this would inevitably cause prices to rise due to more money chasing fewer goods. I stumbled onto gold and silver, metals with a 5000-year plus history as money and I was enthralled. I learned about Richard Nixon removing gold backing from the U.S. dollar in 1971 and all the problems that caused in the global economy since and I was mortified. Either way, I had to learn more.
This led me to voraciously read any book on investing and finance I could get my hands on in the local library. I then read about energy production and how coal, oil, natural gas and uranium allowed humanity to ascend and build the civilisation we now enjoy. I learned about copper and base metals and their vital role in electrification. I came to the realisation that everything around us in our modern world comes from metals and minerals extracted from the earth and that became my focus. It was like the universe was speaking directly to me and revealing what my purpose was.
Since then, I have dedicated my life to trying to understand financial markets, economics, investing, and the role commodities play in our everyday lives. This is what led me to start Commodity Culture and spend my days speaking to some of the brightest investors, fund managers, economists and analysts on the planet. The channel has just reached 70,000 subscribers as I write this. The people I’ve met and the relationships I’ve formed as a result have completely changed my life for the better.
I’ve found my purpose, but I had to give up on a lot of things to get here. And who knows? Maybe Korea will come calling again, and I’ll dust off the old yellow jumpsuit and dive into a bowl of fiery noodles in Seoul. Somehow I doubt it, but one thing I’ve learned is that having a purpose is not a static event that we have to follow to the end, but rather something that can change, grow, and evolve along life’s winding road.
Check out my content on Commodity Culture."
