At The Money: Considering a Career Change? How About FINFLUENCER?

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2:19Ever think of becoming a Finfluencer? Shifting your career to TikTok, Instagram, or YouTube? It could be both interesting and lucrative. To help us unpack this and what it might mean for your career, let's bring in Tyler Gardner. He taught economics, eventually becoming a financial advisor and portfolio manager, but then he pivoted to a financial media business, eventually reaching more than 6 million followers. His book, Real Wealth, Make Money Work For You, arrives December 1st, 2026. So Tyler, let's start in the beginning of your career. What pulled you out of education and into finance?

3:04Tyler Gardner:I think the easiest way to sum it up is I've never been pulled out of education. There was a point, I remember the meeting specifically, it was with our faculty at a school in Connecticut, where we had a representative from TIA, Cref, who came to talk about retirement funds. And not one colleague of mine could understand what this person was talking about when they were saying expense ratios or target date funds. And I left saying there's a big problem if 110 truly educated adults in this world cannot understand a basic concept of expense ratio. And so I wanted to add education to the financial component.

3:44Tyler Gardner:And I realized at some point along the educational career in high school, I liked talking to my colleagues a little more about money than I like talking about semicolons in class to 15 year olds. I didn't try to eliminate it. I just started to have this vision that becoming a financial advisor or portfolio manager would be education for finance. And I'd get to go teach these things and learn these things. So that was the initial inspiration for the pivot. Some people would say the complexity and impenetrable jargon is a feature, not a bug, because, hey, if you don't understand what financial people are saying, or for that matter, contractors or doctors or lawyers, what have you, well, then you have to pay them for their expertise.

4:30But let's leave that cynicism aside. You eventually become both a financial advisor and a portfolio manager. What surprised you about how wealth management actually operated as an industry?

4:43Tyler Gardner:Phenomenal question, because that's all it was. It was a big surprise. I worked with great people. I'll start with this. It was a small RIA in Vermont. And the reason I was drawn to that specific RIA is that unlike some of the bigger corporate wealth management firms, they really struck me as valuing education. So again, I got brought into this world thinking, I had this real ideal vision that I'd move back to Vermont. I'd get to educate people in my own hometown when I came back. And the biggest surprise was that the majority of people who wanted us to manage their wealth didn't want to be educated on managing their wealth.

5:20Tyler Gardner:They wanted us to manage their wealth. And there was a great irony in the fact that so many people, particularly high net worth individuals, wanted to give the assets and say, don't call me, I'll call you. We're all set. I'm paying for the convenience. And that surprised me. I was really looking forward to a scenario in which I had a daily class with people or a daily coffee where people would flock to wanting to learn more about index funds and low cost investing. It didn't quite work like that. So how did the social media experiment begin? You're a natural teacher. What led you to say, well, if my clients aren't asking me to educate them, I'm just going to educate everybody else.

6:05How did that really start?

6:06Tyler Gardner:Well, I think, again, to give credit to the initial RIA for which I worked, they noticed very quickly just what you just said. They noticed and were drawn to the fact that I love to educate. And so they brought their marketing team in and we started doing some short form videos. They as a firm said, look, this is a really powerful way to reach an abundance of people beyond a very small state in New England. And we want to get the message out. So we started doing videos. we just weren't positioning them correctly. And when I say correctly, I mean, I think we were putting the majority of them on our firm's website and maybe every now and then putting some on LinkedIn and they just weren't going anywhere.

6:46Tyler Gardner:There was no real reach or power. And so when I first really saw the power of TikTok and Instagram and Facebook, I go, this is the disconnect and this is where, but they knew early on that education combined with a considerable reach of these platforms was very powerful. We just never could hone it as well as I know we all wanted to. There are lots and lots of stories of people putting stuff on LinkedIn and Facebook and TikTok and YouTube and doesn't really generate a response, doesn't get a whole lot of follows, a whole lot of likes. At what point was there a specific video or a post that persuaded you, hey, there might be a real audience here?

7:30Tyler Gardner:Yeah. The number one reason, so I came home after doing probably, we had probably done 10 videos as a firm. And I came home and my wife was actually scrolling TikTok. And she said, you got to look at this person. They're talking about a Roth IRA and it's really funny. And I looked at the video and it was funny. It was engaging. And the person didn't know what a Roth IRA was. So I look at this, I said, hon, this isn't actually how a Roth IRA works. And so I started going down the rabbit hole because there had been 2 million views on this video and it was complete misinformation. So what I found when I delve a little bit more into the rabbit hole, I found there were a lot of people on these platforms who were very engaging and could speak very confidently and articulately, and they were just flat out wrong.

8:20Tyler Gardner:And then the people who were really accurate and data-driven and who had done all the work or who had actually been PMs or financial advisors for 20 years, some of them didn't quite know how to engage. So I looked at it and said, just from a business standpoint, there's a real gap in social media of someone who actually can educate in a simple way, somebody who's used to taking very complex ideas and trying to make them digestible in 30 seconds or less, and is able to also actually bring data points in. And so I almost took it as a big challenge initially of how can we do this? And I look at it as an art form of how can you package something that most of the world doesn't want to think about on a daily basis, finance, investing, and make it something fun.

9:10Tyler Gardner:So was there a specific video early? No, it was more the gap in the marketplace that made me want to pursue it. You know, everybody I've dealt with over the years who is both at a regulated shop, be it SEC or FINRA or state regs, and is a creator, blogger, videographer, podcaster, whatever, runs into some issues with their firm. Way back when, some of the big wire houses, when Twitter first came out, would give their advisors a list of approved tweets. Like, here, choose from this menu. You know that's going to get no pickup at all. I got really lucky. my general counsel back in 0203. Before that, nobody knew, nobody understood, nobody cared.

9:56I was on GeoCities and then Typehead. Nobody said a word because what the hell is social media? What the hell is blogging? But I was lucky to have a general counsel who said, listen, about all these posts you're doing, you could talk about the market, the economy, sectors, whatever you want. You cannot say buy Microsoft. You cannot say sell Dell. No buys or sells and you're good. I learned that was really lucky. What was your experience like with legal and compliance?

10:26Tyler Gardner:I won't say it was quite as loose and I envy what you just said because, man, do I want to come work for that firm. And I might have stuck around a lot longer had we kind of appreciated or had counsel appreciated the flexibility of what we might be able to do. But even before I answer that question, just to be fair, I remember when I was studying for both Series 65 and CFA, they would always have a section, and this was probably six years back, seven years back, on social media. And exactly what you're saying, like, what is the regulation behind social media right now? The punchline every time was, we don't know yet.

11:01Tyler Gardner:We don't know what this is. We don't know what to regulate. We're going to have to come up with these rules on the fly. Is this person a registered advisor? Is this person a representative? Are they a solicitor? You know, and so the initial draw to produce it obviously was the power that it had. The initial challenge was both on a state level, on a federal level, we as a small RIA wanted to be very, very careful about what we said and how we said it. And even though, yes, at the end of the day, it was probably just a, hey, don't recommend buying or selling individual securities. We took it so far on the prudent level of just saying, look, you know, let's make this very, very educational.

11:44Tyler Gardner:Don't ever name specific funds. Don't ever name specific drawdown rates because you never wanted to conflate any of this with potential advice. And so I think that the real future for anybody in this space, and again, this is wide open. There's only a handful of us who have actually kind of made it to a big platform here. The future is basically anyone who kind of is able to say, I know what to say within limits. I know this is not against regulations, and I'm going to market myself and how I think. There's still so much room there to grow. No doubt about it. So you began your career as a teacher.

12:23I'm curious, what did you learn in the classroom that ultimately made you a better communicator of complex finance ideas?

12:32Tyler Gardner:Sure. Nobody wanted to be in the classroom inherently. I'll start with that. Other than a handful of students, the beauty of starting, I think, any career as a teacher is that you're fighting, I won't say a losing battle, but you're fighting against a group of people who collectively want their attention to be elsewhere, which is actually very different, obviously from social media because people self-select to go onto social media and to be in a place. And if they're watching you, they want to. But initially the challenge was, how can I get a room of 18 year old students who would literally rather be doing anything other than sitting in this chair on this May day in gorgeous rural Connecticut?

13:11Tyler Gardner:How can I get them to engage with an essay by Virginia Wolf? And again, it always was a game to me. It always was a challenge and an art of what can I say and how can I say it, not just to capture their attention, but to get them to feel like they have some sort of stake in what this is. And that was where it was, is once you were implicated, if I could communicate to someone you're implicated in this class, you have a stake here, then I would find obviously more ownership and going forward. But as far as communication goes, it was, again, just a matter of we had a very scarce resource, which was time, and how do I get as much into this time as possible?

13:52At what point did you find posting financial content morphed from a side hustle to, hey, this could actually be a real career?

14:05Tyler Gardner:Yeah. I'd say the easiest way to say it is when I started making enough money for it to be a real career and when I could actually pay the bills. But when we first, I would say when I first pivoted, I left my W-2 job and I took a leap of faith two years ago. And the reason I took a leap of faith is that at that point, I had opened up an educational one-on-one coaching option. You could come talk to me for an hour about how to invest, types of investments, never advice, all obviously education, always as general as possible. what stuck out to me is I couldn't open up enough slots to fill the immediate demand.

14:50Tyler Gardner:And I couldn't raise my prices high enough, quickly enough to kill that initial demand or to temper it, if you will. So instantly you see, oh my gosh, there is a massive amount of people here who want this type of information and they're willing to pay a lot of money for it. They're willing to be present with it. I got out of the consulting part very quickly because again, back to the regulatory component, I didn't love, it seemed like way too much of a gray area. And no matter how many contracts somebody signed saying, this isn't advice, I'm not your advisor. I did not feel comfortable having someone ever leave a conversation thinking that they might be getting advice from somebody.

15:28Tyler Gardner:But that was exactly the time when I said, look, this platform, wherever we go and whatever we sell, this platform has so much power now that I'm comfortable leaving the $100 ,000 a year W-2 to really see what we can do with this. So you left not one, but two very stable, relatively safe, pretty comfortable jobs to sort of jump into something that is risky and there was no guarantee that it was going to work. What did your friends, family, colleagues think? And what was your own biggest fear? Um, I, I think now, now that I would say I've, I've, I've allowed myself to believe that it's, that the endeavor is quasi successful now.

16:18Tyler Gardner:So now I've actually gotten the truth from people about how they felt two years ago when I first made this pivot and almost everybody thought it wasn't going to work, that this was a fad, that the attention economy, you know, is so cyclical that you might be, you know, the internet's favorite person for a week and then fail miserably. And that was obviously the challenge was trying to think about sustainability and consistency. But early on, they made fun of it. And I think every single person who either considers themselves an influencer or if somebody else considers them an influencer, you have to go through what we all call the cringe phase where you're producing terrible content because you're just not good yet.

16:58Tyler Gardner:Just like anything else, you've got to learn how to do it through trial by error. And most people don't want to go through that phase. Your friends all make fun of you and they laugh. And it's very easy in that moment to say, I want to quit. And then all of a sudden, things start to shift when you start getting some of the deals. But those don't come for six months to a year of daily torture and ridicule from the friends, the family. And it's not that they doubt you as a person. They just kind of doubt that this is a thing that a lot of people are capable of, that if you really just sit down and say, look, we can make this happen because it doesn't happen to everybody.

17:36Yeah, it's fascinating. Doug DeMuro of Cards and Bids and his own YouTube channel. I think his YouTube channel is six or seven million subscribers. He's talked about the first few years of doing video. He had very little pickup. And he was also writing a column and occasionally doing a video review on a column. and one day Rita wrote in and said, Doug, the video reviews are the most interesting part. I don't want to read the column. Why don't you do more of that? And an entire business was born. Did you have a moment like that where it became clear? Oh, if I emphasize this, this will work out or was it really just a grind to build those numbers up to quarter million, half million?

18:29And at what point is it clear this is a viable, sustainable business? Is it a million subscribers, a half a million subscribers? Where do you hit that number?

18:40Tyler Gardner:Yeah, I mean, well, that I mean, just like money, you know, I think you and anyone listening will understand this as well as anyone. Your follower account very quickly becomes identical to your bank account. It's never enough, Barry. You think you want to hit a million and that will somehow give you that, you know, little endorphin hit and you'll be satisfied. That's not enough. Once you're at one, you want to be at 10. Once you're at 10, you want to be better than that competitor who you have always been going after. So as far as is it enough or what was the moment, there's never a moment. And the algorithms now too, just to get a little technical about it, it ultimately on most of these channels, it doesn't actually matter how many followers you have anymore as far as the reach potential.

19:21Tyler Gardner:You could create a tick. This is where I'd like to inspire anyone to try it. You can create a TikTok account tomorrow. Your video has an equal chance to go viral as mine. And as you mentioned, I have millions of followers across these platforms, but it's the best immediate feedback system in the entire world. It beats every type of job I've ever had. If you produce crap, you don't get reach. It's not a matter of millions of followers. It's if you don't make something entertaining and of value and engaging for those 60 seconds, If you don't earn someone's 30 to 60 seconds, it doesn't go anywhere.

20:00Tyler Gardner:So it's kind of a self-selecting process, again, of you're either good or you're not. But the people with millions of followers obviously have in some way honed the skill. You don't get to that level without kind of honing the skill to begin with. So let's talk about that algorithm for a moment. What attracted me to your videos was you weren't doing anything clickbaity or sexy or outrageous to garner clicks. In fact, you're very much a salmon swimming upstream against the tide of that sort of stuff. how do you preserve accuracy and nuance when all of these platforms, they reward speed, oversimplification, outrage?

20:46Hey, if you can make somebody furious and angry by manipulating their emotions, you're much more likely to get viral than by saying, and here's how you do a Roth IRA conversion correctly.

21:00Tyler Gardner:I mean, first of all, you just summed it up flawlessly, absolutely flawlessly. And anyone who's been doing this for a little while who claims they don't know that is lying. If I go on and I make a video that just pokes at people a little bit or nudges people or alienates them, you're going to get more attention. or if you say something that you know is a little bit less than nuanced and is lacking a little information, you know what you're doing. How I look at it, and I would say how I justify some of the videos in which I know dang well I don't do due diligence and go down as far as I could on the complexity of this.

21:41Tyler Gardner:A, again, it's a limited resource of 30 to 60 seconds. B, my goal at this point is all social media from TikTok, Facebook, YouTube shorts, that's all top of funnel for me. So even if someone thinks I'm a complete ding dong who doesn't do something due diligence on TikTok, my goal is to get them to read my newsletter. On the newsletter, I don't cut corners because now I've got someone who is self-selected into a system where they're willing to read that nuance and they want that. So you invite that. That to me is where I try to build more credibility accessibility same with the podcast right so both of those longer form i just want people i want to get the attention on the short form to get them to a place where i say look now can you trust that i didn't really think that social security was something you should decide in 30 seconds after listening to me talk about it and poke you like everyone should take it at 62 i do want to go through this but the art but again if you try to provide nuance in the short form you're not going anywhere.

22:44Tyler Gardner:So it is kind of, it's almost like a line I heard in Yellowstone the other day where they're talking about politics and the game of politics before you get the position is you kind of have to poke and alienate and unfortunately be maybe, I won't say a lesser version of your moral self than you want to be, but there are corners you have to cut to get the attention that the video will attract to get where people want to go. Once they're there, then I think you have the responsibility to say, look, now that I earned a little bit of your attention, trust me, I'll reward you with real information and not clickbait nonsense.

23:19What I'm hearing is that you have to adapt your message to each format and make it fit into that in order to work your way down the funnel. So let's talk about that funnel. You start with short form videos, eventually a newsletter, a podcast, and now a forthcoming book. was that a very purposeful conscience set of decisions to keep the focus on the in-depth education or did it just evolve organically?

23:52Tyler Gardner:It evolves. I'd be creating a narrative where none exists if I pretended that any of this was according to some grandmaster plan. Yeah. I mean, yeah, I heard a great line years back of your choices are half chance, so are everybody else's. And where this has gone, if you had asked me two years ago, I was creating monthly reflections on where I wanted the business to go. For one year, I would look at my notes and it said, don't ever do a newsletter because a newsletter is stupid and it's a joke. And then I remember reading something from Tim Ferriss where he said, you're a joke if you don't do a newsletter because it's the only place where you gather the asset of the email address and they can't take it away from you.