Baxter stood outside Big Ben holding a single penny, charging strangers one pound for a photo, and trying not to think too hard about what would happen if nobody said yes. The stakes were straightforward and brutal: make enough money to survive in London and buy a flight home to Australia, or the whole thing falls apart. Starting with literally nothing in one of the world’s most expensive cities, he had 14 days, five countries, and five increasingly absurd goals standing between him and a ticket home.
The hustle that started with a gold suit
The Big Ben photo booth earned him his first few pounds, but the real turning point came when he dropped five pounds on a skintight golden suit from a street seller, hat included, and stood silently in a public square. Within 15 minutes, strangers were tossing in ten-pound notes. ‘Those two people who gave us ten pounds each, if you’re watching this, thank you,’ he said afterward, still sweating through the metallic fabric in 30-degree heat. That afternoon pulled in around 25 pounds, just enough for a hostel bed and dinner.
The bigger breakthrough came overnight. Baxter had quietly launched a content clipping business, cutting 30-to-60-second highlights from a Las Vegas storyteller named Mickey Maze and posting them to fresh TikTok and Instagram accounts. By morning, one clip had climbed to 38,000 views on TikTok. By the following afternoon, it had crossed 1.5 million, triggering a payout of roughly $1,421 from the clipping platform at 60 cents per thousand views. That single overnight run funded flights out of London entirely.
From Milan kitchens to Monaco super yachts
Italy came first, and the goal there was disarmingly simple: make pizza with an Italian. Baxter found a local instructor, spent an evening learning to stretch dough and spread sauce, earned a certificate of proficiency, and walked out genuinely satisfied, though he quietly admitted his version had ‘a stray hair’ as a distinguishing feature. Alongside the gelato-making and the hailstorm that nearly derailed the whole evening, he was simultaneously running leveraged crypto trades on an app called Invo, copying positions from high-performing traders on the platform. A short trade on a coin called Peanut closed for $416 in profit. A follow-up trade on another coin closed for $1,054 profit during dinner. By the time the Milan apartment was checked out, the trading account sat just under $4,000.
Paris produced the trip’s most human detour. Cameraman Henry, fresh from a breakup, was handed a budget and sent into the crowd near the Eiffel Tower to find a date. The first strategy, walking up to strangers and asking ‘kiss or slap?’, produced a series of enthusiastic slaps and zero dates. The second strategy, just asking someone nicely, produced Anastasia. They talked for three hours at a restaurant, traded accents, and got back to the hotel at 2:30 a.m. ‘I kind of found love in Paris,’ Henry admitted. Baxter, who had been lurking nearby with the camera the entire time, was mainly relieved he could finally sleep.
Sweden meant a night in a hotel made entirely of ice, sleeping in jeans because he had not packed for sub-zero interiors, and a plunge into a lake fed directly by Arctic mountain runoff. The Uber driver had warned it was ice cold. He was not exaggerating. Monaco, the fourth stop, required a different kind of nerve. Posing as Mr. Beast’s little brother and running a fake live stream through an AI chatbot app, Baxter spent six hours circling the harbour under the watch of private security before a CEO on a super yacht not only invited him aboard the deck but waved him inside to see the captain’s station and the dining area.
The trade that went sideways in Zurich
Switzerland arrived with the account sitting around $5,500. Baxter put the entire balance into a single Dogecoin trade and could not check it for hours because his mobile data had run out on the train. The trade came good, eventually closing near $5,000. But a different position taken the night before had already hit a stop-loss for a $1,514 loss, the single worst result of the entire run. The drop shipping store, which had cycled through a dog car protector and a pair of yoga shorts before finding any traction, made its first sale that same afternoon: two pairs of shorts, about $30 in profit after ad spend.
Henry had secretly booked a skydive as the fifth and final challenge, knowing Baxter was terrified of heights. The skydiving operator cancelled due to weather. Henry immediately rebooked it for Baxter’s first day back in Australia. ‘I feel like I lived an entire lifetime of stress in that 15-minute window,’ Baxter said, watching the clouds clear over a lake that was genuinely, impossibly blue.
The yoga shorts that kept selling
The drop shipping store continued processing orders after the cameras stopped rolling, eventually crossing $2,000 in total sales.
Somewhere over Switzerland on the final flight home, with the trading account sitting just under $5,000 and a skydive already booked and waiting in Australia, Baxter closed the last open position and noted that a challenge which began with one penny and a photo at Big Ben had technically, measurably, worked.
