MI332: The Financial Freedom Formula w/ Your Friend Andy

23:24Yes. In the world of online gurus and personal finance stuff, there's this phrase thrown around lifestyle design. And for some people, it has a negative connotation and it's kind of frou-frou or whatever. But I'm a big believer in it in just the practical sense. and that if once upon a time, if I want to take a vacation, I had to ask someone's permission to do so. I had to put in for time off or whatever. And that's not the case with every nine to five job and I'm not anti nine to five, but you have to answer to somebody, if a boss who's gonna tell you what to do and you have to work towards whatever their vision is for the company or whatever.

24:00And I just don't want any of that. I just want to decide what's important to me and I want to chase that thing on my time and with whatever amount of motivation or lack of motivation, depending on what day it is, I want to throw at that problem. But I also want to, on a Tuesday, go to the movies or the following Thursday, me and my wife decide, oh, let's go to Japan or let's go to a different state. Let's go. Or just a few weeks ago, I went just skiing with my dad. I like having that freedom to do those things. And that's a money thing. But that's also just like a lifestyle design and like being my own boss thing.

24:34Money helps with that whole situation, but also just like cutting all the constraints, all the rules. and I'm not lawless. I can't do whatever I want, but getting outside of working for a company or having to ask permission or whatever gives you a certain level of extra freedom, which I treasure. And that is one of the most important things to me. The money is a tool that gets me there. It's the side thing. I've never been fixated on like, I love, it's fun to stack money. It's fun to build these things, but I've never been fixated on, I love money so much. I'm Scrooge McDuck. I want to stack whatever.

25:06I'm fixated on if I build up enough of that stuff, it lets me do the stuff I actually care about. Yeah. I love that. I had an interview with Dickie Bush, who I don't know if you follow him on Twitter. He was working for BlackRock and he had this epiphany like in his early twenties where he saw a guy like who was 35 or 40, somebody that he would aspire to be eventually have to ask for permission to go to his son's little league baseball game. And I think it was like a light bulb moment. He's like, I don't want going to live this life, even though I'm making this massive salary. And who knows how much this guy was making?

25:41He's like, this is not what I want. I want optionality, like you said it. Man, optionality, it's just, once you, it's as an intellectual exercise, it's fun. But once you actually taste it a little bit, I don't know why anybody would ever not want it. So I want to get into getting to that point. One of the things and ideas that you and I touched on briefly before we got the interview started was making asymmetric bets. So explain to me how you think about asymmetric bets. So asymmetric bets, I mean, this is a very broad idea and it can apply to a whole bunch of things. I can speak specifically about how I've applied it to my life, but also how, what I view an asymmetric bet.

26:22And that is, it is some way that you either leverage your time or your money or something. You make a bet putting one of those things on the line. And the downside is fairly minimal, meaning if it completely, if the enterprise completely failed, it just blew up in your face, it materially wouldn't affect your life all that much. But the potential upside is maybe limitless, maybe unlimited. It's so massive. It's like, why would you not do this thing? So for me, that has been, for example, early on in the investing, well, early on for me in investing, when I first found Bitcoin, I started investing a little portion of my money into that.

26:57If you have$1 ,000 and you put$900 into what you deem as the safe investment, but you put$100 into what you see as something that has a huge amount of potential possible. But if it goes to zero, you lose$100, you still maintain 99 % of your wealth. Now I've shifted on my percentages since this, but initially that's how I viewed it. And it just blew my wealth up. It rapidly increased my net worth and stuff like that. But another angle that I think is maybe even more interesting is leveraging your time for asymmetric bets. Again, going back to when I was still working a nine to five job and just taking all my extra time and pouring into a side business.

27:35What's the downside there? If it failed and it just didn't work out and I'm staying at that job, the downside is I still have my salary. So I didn't lose that unless layoffs or something happened outside my control, but I still had that. The only thing I lost was just maybe a year of my life that when I gave up the social things, I didn't give up everything, but I give up some of it. And then the next year I can party hardy and have fun or whatever. It's materially doesn't affect you very much beyond the short term, but long-term, it has radically changed my life. Building my own business and just getting back into a mindset that I had once upon a time, but then kind of let myself get programmed out of has opened so many possibilities where I can't even imagine going back to the other thing.

28:14So let's get into Bitcoin a little bit. Tell me about your origin story there. How did you get turned onto it? At what point did you become, as they say, red-pilled? Talk to me a little bit about your, or orange-pilled, rather. Tell me about your story there. I first heard about Bitcoin in either 2012 or 2013. I was big into computer, building my computer and overclocking. And this, I was online in my computer enthusiast forums. And I had some friends who I'd chat with about, you get the latest video card, you check out the new Intel CPU, just very nerdy stuff. And those are some of the first people who ever encountered Bitcoin because it was the idea that you could take your computer home and mine, quote unquote, mine this cryptocurrency, whatever that is, and get this thing.

28:56And it has some kind of monetary value. And I had a friend of mine who was using his computer just like at night in his off time. And he was mining like, I want to say it was like five to eight Bitcoins a week, something like that, which he was very excited that he could sell every week for about 30 bucks in total. So he's like, I paid for my video card in just two months after doing this. You should do this, I'm like, this has got to be a scam. This is bogus. You can't make money out of thin air. This is so stupid. And I just completely dismissed it. Yeah. And then 2014 rolls around. And this is right after the bull run of Bitcoin, where it went up to$1 ,000 for the first time.

29:31And I'm like, that just happened. That sucks. I didn't get involved in that. Can I still get involved in this space? And so I built a mining rig to mine another crypto. And I played around with it, trying to figure things out. And this is when I was working my job, doing my side hustles, building my business. And this is early days of mining and stuff. So every time I come home, it would be like offline and I couldn't figure it out. And I did mine some stuff and I did a few things, but it was just my head was swirling. So I was like, done, give it up, sell it on eBay, done with that chapter and ignored it again.

30:04And then 2000, maybe end of 2016, beginning of 2017 rolled around. And I just kept seeing people online talking about it. At this point, I'm like, I think there's something here. Started investigating it a bit more, learning, poking around, figuring it out. And I've just bought a little bit here, a little bit there. And then towards the end of 2017, which I know you said was kind of when you first got involved as that price was running up and up, I was like, oh my God, I got this is what's happening. I got to be involved. And then I made a series of just boneheaded mistakes, bought at the wrong times, bought the wrong stuff, got involved to just outright scan, you know, lost a lot of money.

30:38But going out of that kind of crypto bull run at the end of 2017, the beginning of 2018, as it all crashed back down to earth. And I watched so many people give up and just say, it's a scam. I'm done with it. You can't make money in this space. This was third time's a charm. This was the time that I finally, in my head, I'm like, okay, I lost a bunch of money. Very painful. Made a bunch of bad decisions. I'm going to learn from those, but there's something here. What is this thing? And I started to investigate and went to the deep end of Bitcoin. Every free dollar I had, I dumped into Bitcoin all the way from$20 ,000 down to sub$4 ,000 and then back up to$12 ,000 and then back down to$7 ,000.

31:15And just when my friends were like, you're going to lose all your money. This is so stupid. It finally clicked for me that what Bitcoin is, what it could be, and what this was akin to, and which in my opinion, it was like if you were in the dot-com bust in the 90s, as the internet after, at this point, 30 years of existing, it's finally starting to get mainstream adoption and attraction. It just had this massive collapse of everything. But if you were one of those people who was willing to pick up the pieces and sort through and figure out what is quality and interesting in the space, because that space is not going anywhere, there's a lot of opportunity there.

31:48So that for me was crypto, which is a big part of my story, which of course, the cornerstone of that is Bitcoin. And I've just been drinking the Kool-Aid ever since. And now it's a huge portion of my net worth. It's a huge portion of my portfolio. And I've effectively not paid any attention to index funds or traditional investments over the past couple of years. And I've almost 100 % gone into the space and that's where I am at today. It's interesting to me. It's like you, you got in or heard about it early enough to see enough of these cycles to know that there are some patterns here that repeat.

32:21It's great that you had the conviction to be like, to be able to buy it, like as it's going from 20 down to 3 ,500 or whatever it went to and continue to just keep that high conviction. What was it that allowed you to do that? Who are some of your influences? books, articles, like how there's a process that I think people have to go through to develop that kind of conviction, whether it's Bitcoin or any investment. I've read many of the normal books you read at, you know, for Bitcoin stuff. I've got several on my shelf, like the Bitcoin standard and stuff. I've read those and those were certainly influential in helping me understand broadly what it is and how it works and stuff like that.

32:59But I think a lot of it was just, and I can't, it's really hard to pinpoint exactly specific individuals or stuff. But I feel like I had seen a series of people who were fairly experienced investors, one, gravitating towards Bitcoin, but two, had talked from experience how they've seen these other things, these big moments in history, these fundamental changes happening. And again, it's just hard for me to not make that comparison and parallel with the internet in the early days and talking about things like that. And the pieces just kind of slowly clicking into place that I felt like if we're going to have a world that is internet connected and a digital world where we're all moving everything online, why would we not also have a monetary system that is built in that same world?

33:43And that started me down a rabbit hole of investigating fiat currencies like the US dollar and others and how they don't last very long traditionally. And the US dollar is one of the longest lasting ones at this point. And that's a little scary, but also starting to learn about how it works. How does the Federal Reserve work? They can print money basically whenever they want and however much quantity they want. And we, as the end user of that currency, we lose our buying power. We succumb to inflation and rapidly rising prices and stuff. And so Bitcoin just kept sitting in the back of my head as this idea of maybe this is a way I can actually protect my wealth against those things.

34:20And I say this while also being on Twitter at the time during these bear markets and watching every expert and every pundit and every dissenting opinion on Bitcoin talk about how, oh, what a great hedge against inflation you have here that's down 86 % or whatever. But for some reason, I don't know what to attribute this to. I've just been able to zoom out a bit on Bitcoin for the first time in all my financial life and really see a bigger picture. Instead of just looking at the six months or nine months ahead of me, the 12 months ahead, I started thinking about some of these things in terms of five, 10 years, 25 years, and where I think our economy in general is going from a macro level and where I think me on a micro level need to be poised in order to not be completely eroded by these kind of big systems that are in place.

35:07And Bitcoin is just the logical explanation for that conundrum for me. And so I just kept reading it about it, watching videos about it and digging in deeper and deeper. Did you ever read The Creature of Jekyll Island? Was that one of the books that you happen to read? It's like the history of the Federal Reserve and it reads like a murder mystery. It's really, really good. And after you read it, you're pissed off. And at that time, when the author wrote it, Bitcoin, I don't believe existed. It was like his recommendation was precious metals, you know, for hard currency. Yeah. It's fascinating to see the cycles of it.

35:41I remember this is totally a little off point, but I remember the internet collapse, the.com collapse right around 2000, 2001 and Amazon plummeted down to, I forget how low it got, but I remember buying Amazon at$12 a share. And I thought if it goes up to 16, that's a 30 some percent return. I'm going to sell at 16. That'll be great. And I did, you know, and in retrospect, It's just like, you know, you calculate what that would have been had you just held on to it. And, you know, in hindsight, it's whatever. Hindsight's 2020. But I've had the experience of that and it didn't cost me much at the time, really.

36:16But like now I realize it's like these site, these drops are opportunities, you know, where when everyone else is panicking, it's that's the time to push the chips in and acquire more if you can. Yeah, I think your analogy there to gold, precious metals is another big one that kind of hit home for me. As I investigated, again, it's hard for me to tell exactly which people I was listening to at the time, but it was a reoccurring theme that when confronted with the problem of inflation, time and time again, people talked about the power of being in something like gold and a precious metal. But simultaneously, I'm learning about Bitcoin.

36:50And in my estimation, it seemed like Bitcoin was the next evolution of gold, which is why people call it digital gold. It has certain there's certain arguments to be made about the properties of it. It's not actually physical. You can't use it for other applications like you could gold and electronics or whatever. But many of the other things it does have where you can transform energy into this pretty hard asset. It's very safe and secure. But whereas gold was tough to move across borders or expensive to handle or whatever, it's just this cumbersome thing that no one actually wants to transact in.

37:20Bitcoin solves all those problems where you can send your wealth across time and space and stuff. And it's just this kind of beautiful picture of where you could sock away your money into this digital gold that has been invented. And you can carry that wealth with you going forward and hopefully withstand the storm of inflation. And I can tell you just in the past six to seven years that I've been in this space. Yes, it has some very dramatic cycles, very dramatic downturns and stuff. But if you zoom out from when I started to where I'm at now, it has is just absolutely just sucker punch inflation in the face.

37:55and blown away gold and everything else. It's just been this incredible way for me to protect and grow my wealth. But you have to, again, have kind of like a 40 ,000 foot view of it. A couple of things. Talk to me about how you deal with the volatility, like seeing it go from 67 down to, I forget where it went, 15 or 16 ,000. How do you deal with that? That's hard to see your net worth like in Bitcoin terms. Well, in fiat terms too, it's like, this is painful. How do you deal with it? Yes. So I've thought about this a lot. And I feel like for me, there's really three reasons why people panic with that stuff.

38:32Because yeah, if we talk about the last cycle, Bitcoin hit$69 ,000. And then at the which baby, I mean, it's too early to call, but I'm assuming at this point, with hindsight, the bottom was 15 ,800, right after the FTX collapse and all that. That's dramatic drop. But I feel like most people who go through those things, they panic and whatever, because number one, they don't understand what they're buying. or what they bought into. They don't truly understand the thing that they have put their money into. They heard people talk about it. It's probably people who watch my channel who just buy into things because I talk about them, even though I constantly say, please do not do that.

39:05You have to like investigate this stuff yourself, be curious on your own, just decide if it's a good place for your money. People just buy into things because they think it's going to make them rich overnight or take your pick. They don't truly understand it. So having a real, true understanding of what you're getting into is crucial to, you know, dealing with these major downturns and stuff, downtrends for the asset. Two, I have the advantage, and I'm not even an OG in the space, but I have the advantage of having six to seven years of experience doing this now. Some people have been at it for over a decade now or whatever, and that's pretty awesome for them.

39:37But the more time in the market, the better your capability of withstanding these things. Time in the market always beats timing the market, as they say. But truly, the more cycles you live through, the more you understand how it all functions. But then the last thing I would say, and this goes for anything where you're just like, you're watching the price like a hawk and it goes down and you're freaking out. That's oftentimes a signal that you're overexposed. You've just, if you're investing money into stuff and it's money that should have gone to your rent or your utilities or your groceries, and you're just dumping it all in and you watch it go down and down and you're like, oh no, I needed that money.

40:12Like you just never want to be in those places. So like I've just tried, I've learned the hard way with all those things And I've tried to kind of incorporate those into how I view this stuff. And now I have the advantage of being in the space for a while and having a pretty good understanding of what I bought into, having that kind of long-term view and not feeling overexposed, even though other people for outside observers will look at how much of my net worth is Bitcoin or whatever and go overexposed. I know if it were to go to zero tomorrow, I would be okay. And these are all important things.

40:42Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors. Hey, it's Sean O'Malley, just popping in with a quick message. If you like this podcast, well, I've got great news for you. We've got a handful of other shows for you to explore, from learning about Bitcoin to embracing a richer, wiser, happier lifestyle. Just go into your podcast app and type in We Study Billionaires to find our collection of shows. We Study Billionaires is our flagship podcast, and we've made a name for ourselves over the years by interviewing the best investors in the world, including Ray Dalio, Howard Marks, Joel Greenblatt, and many, many more.

41:17My colleagues Stig Brodersen, Clay Fink, Kyle Greve, Preston Pysh, and William Green each host their own We Study Billionaires episodes and bring their own unique perspectives. A whole new world of insights awaits you. Just go ahead and type in We Study Billionaires into your podcast app and see what you've been missing out on. Seriously, go ahead. I promise you'll like what you find. Bonus points if you show your support for our work by clicking follow. If something piques your interest, just start listening. No hard feelings. I'll be waiting for you back here. Just like everybody else, there was a time when I was a beginner investor, and I have to say, investing is particularly filled with jargon that can just make it so difficult for new investors to understand what is going on.

41:57But it's never too late to get smarter about stock investing from the ground up. At The Investors Podcast Network, we've made a habit of studying the world's best investors, and now I'm distilling those learnings into a simple course for you or for anyone in your life who you might want to share the gift of knowledge with. With my How to Get Started with Stocks course, you can master the principles of excellent lifelong investing with valuable insights for both beginners and pros. The course covers 10 different sections, beginning with the basics of what a stock actually is and how the stock markets work, to strategies to optimize your retirement savings, how to pick great companies for the long term, what to look for in ETFs, and how to monitor your investments, plus so much more.

42:36To begin getting smarter about investing, just visit theinvestorspodcast.com slash get started with stocks. That's theinvestorspodcast.com slash get started with stocks. And for a limited time, you can use code STOCKS15 for a 15 % discount at checkout. Not to be cliche, but building a market-beating portfolio really doesn't have to be a mystery, at least with the right tools. If you've listened to our podcast for a while, then you know we spend a lot of time learning from savvy investors. So why not use the same tools we do? With TIP Finance, you can. Screening for great companies, calculating intrinsic value, keeping up with legendary investors' portfolios, and more are all not just possible, but easy to do.

43:22TIP Finance was created by investors for investors. It's quite literally the tools we wanted to use ourselves when researching investments in a simple to use interface. You can get started by creating an account for free. Who knows, maybe TIP Finance will help you find your next 100 to 1 investment. Between the screener and Legend Investment Portfolios to reference, I've gotten a ton of ideas from TIP Finance. What are you waiting for? Take the next step in your investment journey today with the right tools at your fingertips. Grab your device and type into your browser, theinvestorspodcast.com slash tip-finance to get started.

44:00That's theinvestorspodcast.com slash tip-finance. All right, back to the show. Yeah, I think that third point, the can't sleep at night, whatever, test, is a really good one. I don't want to put you on the spot, but do you have any price predictions at all for like this next cycle that we're in? Do you have any kind of numbers that you think we may or may not hit? Well, I was one of the people who was convinced we were going to$100 ,000 in the last cycle. So, you know, take my predictions with a grain of salt. I do stand with that prediction though, because I was assuming that we'd have the spot ETS approved in the last cycle.

44:40And I thought that was the missing ingredient and it just did not happen. But we have it now. and I follow the statistics on the inflows of capital and the available Bitcoin that's being bought up by the black rocks and fidelities of the world. And it's, in my estimation, fairly shocking what is about to happen. But I think conservatively, I think this cycle is the one where we see$100 ,000 Bitcoin. I would not be surprised to see $100 ,000 to$150 ,000 Bitcoin, if not much higher, depending on how much attention it gets. But that's my metrics for right now. Yeah, we'll see. Time will tell, right?

45:10It's fun times. This is the fun time. Yeah, we've just started to embark on the fun time and I'm here for it. Yeah. I want to touch a little bit on Bitcoin mining. You said you got into that early on, pushed it away because whatever, time stuff and maybe whatever, lack of interest or whatever, but you're back into it now. So tell me about Bitcoin mining, how you do it, just a little bit about what part it plays in your portfolio, how you think of it. So when I first started meaningfully investing in the world of crypto, I was still in my infancy when it comes to my personal finance journey. So I was really struggling to invest more than a couple hundred bucks per month into all this.

45:49I was trying to grow my salary and grow the amount of money I could put into the space. But I was aware and I understood what mining was. And so I was really interested in it and I wanted to get involved. But as things progressed, Bitcoin mining became more and more cost prohibitive, became a bigger thing. And it just was kind of this, it's kind of far away dream, but I kept thinking about it. And then I went through a full crypto cycle very successfully. And I was able in this most recent one to start jumping into in a meaningful way, Bitcoin mining. So as of today, across machines I actually own, and then being invested in companies that run machines, and I have a part of those, and then also in publicly traded Bitcoin mining companies through stocks, I've invested about$120 ,000 to$130 ,000 into Bitcoin mining so far, which is not as much as I put into Bitcoin directly.

46:37But for me and my income and my overall portfolio size, that was a fairly meaningful investment. So I got pretty serious about it. And so far, the experiment has worked out pretty well. I've been doing it for about a year and a half now, and I've mined about two and a half Bitcoin. And if I had deployed that capital at the time of buying the machines, I could have had a little over three Bitcoin. So I'm just short of that. I will hit right under three Bitcoin mine before the halving and then the year following the halving, if things go the way I think they will, probably mine about four in total in that year following.

47:10So the experiment has been very eye-opening and fun and lucrative so far. You're not doing it at your home though, like heating your hot water tank or anything like that. You're not one of those guys, are you? No, but that is super cool. There are people I've followed on Twitter who they heat their house with machines and a buddy of mine, he used heat exchangers and liquid cooled his Bitcoin miners and heated his pool with his machines, which is pretty cool. No, all miner at facilities in a few different states around the country, just because my electricity costs here in Austin are a little too high to successfully do it.

47:45And also there's the noise and just power requirements, the infrastructure, it's a lot. So I have someone else manage all that for me. Fun, fun. Is that something you think you will continue to do to dollar cost average into Bitcoin mining? Or how do you think about that? Like directly investing into Bitcoin versus going and buying miners and going that route? Directly investing into Bitcoin is always the thing. If people are interested in Bitcoin, that's the direction I always recommend because it's just so simple and you have the coins and there's no added complication. It just makes sense. And it's the proven path.

48:18Mining is full of so many unknowns and variables. It is very much an experiment and you are at the mercy of your entry point in the cycle and different things like that. However, mining is extremely exciting to me for a bunch of different reasons. One, the math, which I model it all the time. I have a spreadsheet modeling the block rewards and upcoming halving in the current price and various things. The math shows that I can actually mine more in total coin bitcoins than I could have bought buying directly. So that's one really cool aspect. It's not a guarantee. I might not. The jury's still out on that.

48:51We'll see in a year or two. That's really exciting. But one of the exciting parts for me is the hardware arbitrage opportunity. I buy these machines. I mine on them for a year and a half to two years. I wait for us to get into a full on bull market. I wait for pandemonium and everybody's just desperate to get machines. I sell my machines for a profit and I keep all the Bitcoin I mined along the way and potentially even further crazy increase the profitability of the entire enterprise. And then I wait for a bear market. I buy machines again at bottom dollar prices and then I start the entire thing again.

49:24Now, this is my first full cycle of doing this. So I might get it all wrong and it might not work out that way. But I have done lots of hardware arbitrage in the past, just not to the same degree. And it's been very successful. So that is one of the big motivators for doing this was seeing how that aspect of this experiment plays out, because I think it could be very exciting. I like how you're thinking about that. Let's talk about your YouTube channel. And you've also got a podcast. I think you've got a newsletter as well. You're putting out a lot of content. When did you get started with YouTube and realizing the power of YouTube and wanting to create content?

50:00So YouTube, I started in 2015. I started a channel, a cinema channel called Burger Fiction, which is where this, that silver play button came from. I was pretty successful. That one has like, it's like 85 million views or something like that. So I learned some of the ropes of building on YouTube. I started that with a good friend of mine. And what were you doing you were doing like movie reviews movie reviews super cuts uh where like we did one that is every jason statham punch ever and every tom cruise running ever which was a 20 minute video where it's literally showing you every second from every movie he's ever been where he's running and my god we would spend 40 hours on a single video because you have to watch through every movie and the catalog of that person and find every little so it is an unbelievable undertaking Some people are like, super cuts.

50:48Those are dumb and easy or whatever. It was like a lot of work. And that was fun. And I figured out how to build a channel. And I had kind of developed a love for YouTube, but a cinema channel was not a moneymaker. So I retired that one, still had the love for YouTube. And then I started a personal finance channel in 2020 because my photography business, because of something that happened in 2020, which maybe people remember what that was, caused my business to go on pause for nine months where I had no work or whatever, which is another moment where I was like, I'm so glad I have an emergency fund.

51:20I'm so glad I have investments. I'm so glad I have some passive income going because dealing with that type of stuff out of the blue, it's crazy. But I all of a sudden had more time. I wasn't spending all my time on my business. So I finally had the time to put this idea in the back of my head of start a new channel and talk about this love of personal finance you've been developing over the past decade as you've done this journey. So I started Your Friend Andy in June of 2020. And it was personal finance. And I wasn't getting much traction with just talking about best ways to save your money.

51:47So I was like, how can I be useful? So I started reviewing banks and credit cards and stuff like that. And then I got traction with those videos because people actually wanted to get an opinion on this bank account, know what all the features were and stuff. And the entire time I was doing that first, probably nine months to one year, the channel doing that type of content. I still had this love of crypto and Bitcoin, but I was scared to talk about it online because I know what the cycles are. And I know the moment that it turns sour, my channel gets no views. And why would I want to talk about a thing like that?

52:17But I eventually just, I'm just so passionate about it. I'm so excited about it. I couldn't not. And so I did. And that's the moment, of course, the channel blew up. It just tripled and quadrupled my subscribers in a single month and just views and views and views. And then the crash and the bear market. And then I've been just building for the past year and a half and finally crossed a hundred thousand on the, on this channel. But it is, it's been, it's super fun. It's my favorite job I've ever had. And as it turns out, if you pick the right things and you're smart about it, YouTube can also be a big time moneymaker.

52:50So go into that a little bit more. How is it monetized? I mean, there's a lot of people listening to this that watch a lot of YouTube, but really don't understand like the background of it all and how a guy like you is making money from it. Yeah, so it's different for everybody. There is a unlimited ways you can monetize your channel. I just I choose a couple different ways. There's the base way, which is YouTube pays you for playing ads on your channel. And depending on what niche or which topic you talk about, those rates might be pretty high or they might be pretty low. If you're a gamer and you have millions of views on your channel, you might not make as much as my channel does with only a few hundred thousand views because finance and this world is just higher up the hierarchy of advertiser interest.

53:32There's ones that are even more lucrative than that. When I was making the banking content and my channel had 5 ,000 subscribers, the channel is making about$10 ,000 a month. It was a very tiny channel just because that was such a lucrative niche. But that's not just from the ads. I was also doing affiliate links and referral links. So if someone signed up for a bank account that I was recommending, some of those banks give you a kickback for sending a friend or family or whoever their way. And someone opens an account, you get a hundred bucks back. And if you do that on scale, you put a video out there that's working for you.

54:02And the platform is pushing in front of people, you make money. And then the big other way I've made money with YouTube is just sponsors, people who reach out directly and say, hey, I have a product or a service or a company and I want you to talk about it. and traditionally I've said no to 99 % of those because a lot of it is junk and a lot of it isn't great, but there's so much quantity. I do find ones in there I do really like and then I work on a partnership with them. They pay me directly and maybe even on top of that, I get a referral. That's like the three main ways I've monetized it, but now I have another way, which is I have a private membership community.

54:35You can see that there's channels who sell merchandise or they sell digital products or courses. I mean, I don't do any of those things, but there's like a limited ways you can do it And every single one of those is its own standalone income stream that if one of them starts dipping one month, the other one might compensate for it. So not only do I have multiple passive income streams or income streams in general, like YouTube and my other business and crypto passive income and my investment appreciation, but each one of those has five to 30 individual streams within it. And I really, that's one thing I love about YouTube and a lot of things I'm doing is I love that compartmentalization of having all these streams in these different categories and having that redundancy and having a very robust way to make money.

55:17When did you sever your ties with your full-time job and leave and to pursue all this? You're doing a lot of creative things and people need time to do that. So when did you leave behind your W2 job? What year was that? 2014. Okay. So it's been a while. Yep. And then after that, I did my small business for 11 years and I just retired that. I shut that down completely two years ago now. Got it. So I think they say the average millionaire has seven streams of income. It sounds like you've got 30 at least. The Crypto Passive Income one is like 30 sources by itself. The YouTube one is at least four or five streams.

55:55Yeah. It's pretty wild. Quantity is helpful. Tell me about your newsletter. How often does that come out? What's it called? What kind of content are you covering? It's called Passive Bytes. And it's funny to ask how often it's supposed to be a weekly newsletter. Some weeks I miss or whatever. It's a little bit at my own discretion. It's two things. It's one, it's sharing passive income opportunities that I'm looking at or considering. But two, it's also just sharing my thoughts on building streams of income, building wealth, investing, or whatever. Things that I think are helpful that I wish I could have read at my various stages of my journey to get here.

56:32But really, I don't know what it is because it's one of those things where I was told by a lot of really smart people, you need to have an email newsletter and you need to have this whole thing. And so I just did it because it was smart to do. And I'm figuring it out as I go what it should be. I've had fun with it and I think people do like it, but it's an ever evolving animal. Sure. Yeah, that makes sense. Do you find you're pretty transparent and open about everything you're doing, the numbers, things like that? Do you find there are downsides to that or have you experienced downsides? My family doesn't like it.

57:04They think it's pretty weird and maybe not a great idea. You know, I see there's multiple sides to it. On one side, especially being in the world of crypto, having good OPSEC or good operational security is very important because you don't want people to know exactly how much you have in your wallet so they can attack you specifically and try to get your money. So I wrestle with that side. But I also wrestle with the side that, especially for the nine to five world, talking, becoming friends with people and then finding out after several hanging outs and several lunches and stuff, we get real comfortable and we talk about our salaries and stuff and, you know, realizing, oh, we do almost the same job and they get paid$20 ,000 more a year than I do or having a conversation with somebody who does something more than me and finding out I make more than they do and then being bummed about that.

57:49and just how in the dark everyone is all the time about things involving money in our culture. That aspect too. But also wanting to share these things because I think transparency makes things more real and makes them more achievable. And I still stand by the fact that I don't believe myself to be special. I think anyone can do the stuff I've done. And if me sharing it gives you a little bit of like oomph or motivation to do it yourself, because early in my journey watching YouTube, I remember watching like the Graham Steffens or the Andre Jicks of the personal finance world who are the giants in that space now.

58:24And they share like how much they make in passive income or how much they make from their YouTube channel. And my mind just being expanded and going, I want that. I want those things. I didn't go, they're bragging. I'm jealous or envious. I said, they can do it. I can do it. So I'm going to do it. And so part of it is also just me sharing those things. I really hope truly that people see that and feel that way. But it also gets a lot of hate. A lot of people really get bothered by it and you get both sides. But that's just being online. If you're going to be online, you have to be okay with people who just hate your guts.

58:56Yeah, you got to be prepared for that. Talk to me about, you had mentioned Kevin Kelly's 1 ,000 true fans. Talk to me a little bit about that idea for somebody that's not familiar with it and how you think somebody could do what you are doing if they have 1 ,000 true fans. Yeah, so Kevin Kelly, if people don't know who Kevin Kelly is, you should definitely go look him up and just check out all his stuff because he's such a cool guy, definite innovator, early adopter, smart guy, successful. He also has some just really impactful ideas on me, which namely A Thousand True Fans, which is maybe his most famous online written piece.

59:30But it's the idea that anyone can make it in this new digital world if they can just find 1 ,000 true fans, 1 ,000 people out there who really love what they're trying to do and what they're trying to share and are willing to come along on that journey with you and support you in some way, whether it's like buying your t-shirt or subscribing to your channel or buying your membership or whatever, that anyone can make it out there if they can find a thousand people just like that. And a thousand is a little bit of a daunting number, but it's also a very realistic number simultaneously because there's YouTubers with millions of subscribers.

1:00:04I don't know if I'll ever get to millions of subscribers, but I can tell you once upon a time, 100 ,000 subscribers seemed like a far away idea. And now I'm there. My first 1000s, it was a struggle to get there, but I got there. And it just was this idea that I kind of latched onto that said, if I could just do this, I can make this whole thing work. And so far, it has absolutely been proven true. What advice do you have for someone who is just getting started? What would you tell them to keep pressing on and how to do this the right way? What would you say to somebody? So there's a saying in investing, and I think it applies to more than just investing, which is scared money don't make money.

1:00:42And I love that because almost everybody you encounter in life, everybody you would lump into the realm of having average lives or mediocre lives, and they're not particularly happy or particularly unhappy. They're just going through life doing their own thing, which is good and bad. I'm not trying to dismiss that. They're almost overwhelmingly doing things that are within their comfort zone. And that's why they're where they are. And so if you want to do anything that's outside of the average or outside of the mediocre, and you want to do something that is off the beaten path or different, you're going to have to do something that's scary or something that's risky or something that makes you deeply uncomfortable on a multitude of levels.

1:01:21However, if you're able to internalize the upside and really believe that it's worth the embarrassment or the other downsides, which those are real things. I was very embarrassed early on with a lot of the stuff. Then you should absolutely chase that because let me just tell you, it's one of the best decisions I've ever made in my entire life. If you watch my early videos on the channel, I'm very uncomfortable. I speak like a robot. I'm very slow to speak. And that even that was me having experienced my previous channel. And that's how bad I was at the beginning. But I still just pushed through it because I had this dream or this idea of what this could mean for my life.

1:01:56And I think that if you're going to chase that, it has to be more than just it's gonna make me a lot of money. It's gotta be something you actually like think is going to be just a blast to do. But if you have ever had that thought, and you aren't doing at least something to act on it, you're doing yourself a great disservice. because the last thing you want in your life is to be 80 years old in your deathbed and looking back on things with major regret. There's, that's one of the most scary and terrifying things I can think of. And that's been a huge motivator is I refuse to get to the end of my life on my deathbed.

1:02:23If I make it that far and look back and go, I really wish I had done this. Or, oh, if I'd only done that, if I'd only seen this, if I'd only tried this. And it truly, it's so, it's so like trite, but it's like, I would rather try to do those things and just fail than just never tried them before. And that's always been a stronger emotion than the fear or whatever. So you can just get over that fear, man, it can be so good. That is a great place to stop. I really appreciate all your insight here and talking has been really fun. Is there anything we didn't touch on that you wanted to talk about?

1:02:56That's if you can digest a little bit of that and run with it, then my job here is done. I'm happy. Awesome. So for our listeners that want to find out more about you, your YouTube channel, follow you on Twitter, what's the best way for them to do that? just hop on YouTube and type in your friend, Andy, and you'll find my channel. And then from there, you can find my Twitter and my newsletter and everything else. Awesome. Andy, thanks so much for your time. This has been a lot of fun. Thanks so much for having me. Okay, folks, that's all I had for today's episode. I hope you enjoyed the show and I'll see you back here real soon.

1:03:27Thank you for listening to TIP. Make sure to follow Millennial Investing on your favorite podcast app and never miss out on our episodes to access our show notes, transcripts, or courses. go to theinvestorspodcast.com. This show is for entertainment purposes only. Before making any decision, consult a professional. This show is copyrighted by The Investor's Podcast Network. Written permission must be granted before syndication or rebroadcasting.