Victor picked the place — somewhere off Dexter with cloth napkins and a wine list I didn't look at — and by the time the food came we were already talking about the side stuff, the way we always do. He likes hearing about it. I think he finds it genuinely interesting and not in a condescending way, which is a hard thing to pull off when you are as far ahead of someone financially as Victor is ahead of me. He just asks questions and listens like the answers mean something.

We were maybe twenty minutes in when he put his fork down and asked, flat and easy, "So what are you actually clearing — like, if you count everything?" Not skeptical. Not leading. Just curious. The kind of question that sounds simple until you open your mouth and hear yourself answer it.

I told him. The whole number. DoorDash on the good weeks, the surveys I run while something is compiling, the occasional Roblox trickle, the one AI tool with actual users. I added it up out loud for the first time in front of another human being and it sounded exactly as small as it was. Victor nodded slowly, the way he does when he's processing rather than reacting, and said, "Okay. And what does it cost you?" That one I hadn't added up at all.

How Victor and I Even Got to That Dinner Table

The short version is I picked him up in Atlanta doing Uber, probably four or five years back now. Late, Buckhead, he was in a good mood and I was running on coffee and the particular low-grade desperation of a man who has done the math on his month and does not like what it says. I told him a dad joke inside two minutes. He laughed for real. We talked the whole ride. He took my number and I honestly didn't think he'd use it.

He used it. We've been in contact ever since — dinner when he's in Montgomery, texts when one of us has something worth saying. I've written before about how the Uber experiment went financially, which is to say it went badly, and the single most valuable thing that came out of those nine days was a twenty-minute ride I barely remember starting. Both of those facts are true at the same time and I've never fully made peace with it.

Victor doesn't give me money. I wouldn't take it and he knows that, so he stopped offering a long time ago. What he gives me is dinner occasionally and the kind of questions that feel polite until they aren't. He keeps a site where he writes about judgment and decision-making, and I'm told my bad Saturdays have appeared in it as case studies, which I find funny in a way that requires a certain amount of self-esteem to sustain.

The Part Where I Said the Number Out Loud

I went through it line by line. DoorDash: real money, but only if I'm willing to give up the evening and don't count gas honestly, which I have a long history of not doing. Surveys and beta testing: genuinely tiny, the kind of money that feels like finding a five in a jacket pocket, except the jacket belongs to someone who works a lot. The Roblox project with the kids: almost no revenue, and I said that clearly, and I also said it's the thing on the list I'd be least willing to stop. The AI tools: two have users, one of those users is John, and I named that too.

Victor listened to all of it. When I finished he said, "So the thing that pays the most is the thing you like the least, and the thing you like the most pays almost nothing." He wasn't being cruel. He was just reading back what I'd said, which is somehow worse.

I told him that was roughly accurate and that the day job was underneath all of it — that none of the side stuff was replacing anything, it was just extra, and some weeks it covered groceries and some weeks it covered nothing and the day job was the thing that actually kept the lights on. He nodded again. "Right," he said, "so you know that." Like knowing it was the whole point. I ate my food and thought about it.

The videos I've watched about side income — and I've watched a lot of them, more than I'd admit in a different mood — almost none of them get to this part. The boring part is the part where you count, where you add up the gas and the hours and the evenings you didn't spend doing something else, and the number you get is smaller and the cost is higher and nobody films that.

What I Actually Owe That Dinner, in Hours

Victor covered the check, which he does and which I don't argue about because the argument has never once changed the outcome and I've learned to stop having it. But I went home and did what I probably should have done a long time ago, which was actually add up what the side stuff costs per hour — not what it earns, what it costs.

DoorDash on an average evening: I'm out about three hours by the time I'm back, showered, and winding down. The net after gas, on an honest accounting, is usually somewhere between eleven and eighteen dollars depending on the night and the distance and whether I get a good run or a bad one. That's not nothing. It's also not the number the app shows you before you subtract anything.

The surveys: genuinely low effort, genuinely low return. I do them while code is building or while I'm half-watching something. The timing of when they pay out is its own comedy. The hours are hard to count because they're borrowed from other hours, which is either efficient or a sign that I never actually stop, depending on how generous I'm feeling toward myself.

The Roblox stuff with the kids: zero cost analysis applies there. That time isn't a cost. But I said that already.

The total, honest, across everything, on a decent week: enough to matter at the grocery store. Not enough to matter anywhere else. I wrote it down in a Notepad file I've had since 2010 and then I closed the laptop because there's only so much clarity a person needs on a Wednesday night.

What I Kept After Victor Asked and I Answered

I didn't change anything immediately, which is very on-brand for me. I kept running DoorDash on the evenings I had available. I kept doing surveys while things compiled. I kept building the Roblox game with the kids because that one isn't on the ledger the same way the others are — it's on a different ledger, one I don't total up.

What actually shifted was something smaller. I stopped being vague with myself about the numbers. Not in a disciplined-spreadsheet way — I don't have the personality for that and I've made peace with it. But when I'm about to go out for a dash, I do the quick math now before I leave instead of after I get back. Victor didn't tell me to do that. He just asked a question and let me hear my own answer, which is a thing he's good at.

I also stopped feeling weird about the fact that the day job is the thing that actually works. I knew that. I've always known that. But saying it out loud to someone who didn't need me to pretend otherwise was its own kind of useful.

The brother-in-law texted me two days later with something about a dropshipping opportunity he'd heard about. I told him I was busy. I was not busy. I was reheating coffee and watching the Auburn game. But some weeks that's the right call and I'm not apologizing for it.

Victor texted the next morning — just a thumbs up emoji and a link to something on his site I haven't read yet. It's sitting in my browser tab right now, next to six other tabs I'm also not reading. The number I said out loud at dinner is still the number. I haven't changed it. I'm not sure I'm trying to.

Note: Everyday Hustle Jeff is the written side of a digital series. These accounts are composite and dramatized. Any figures are what they were on the day, for one person, and are not a projection, a track record, or advice.