[00:02:21] Patrick Donley: I am really happy to have you here. I mentioned before we got started recording that I’ve been a big fan of yours and your content, YouTube content for, I don’t know, probably three years ago.

[00:02:30] Patrick Donley: I remember following you and I’m happy to just have you on here today. We’re going to talk a bunch about a lot of different topics, but the first thing I wanted to go into is some of your early days, like you got into a little bit of a financial pickle. I think you were in debt, like 86, 000 or something like that.

[00:02:46] Patrick Donley: I wanted to talk about just some of those early money mistakes you made. And then just your quest for financial literacy and digging yourself out of that hole. 

[00:02:55] Your Friend Andy: Yeah. So when it comes to my personal finance journey, the first thing you need to know about me is I’m a late bloomer. I talked to people online, me being a part of Twitter and YouTube and whatever.

[00:03:04] Your Friend Andy: I meet all these people who are very young and already investing in this. I was doing any of that into my twenties. I was just. credit cards were just disposable, scan it anywhere you want. No big deal. Racked up the debt. I had no investments to speak of. I was living paycheck to paycheck. My salary wasn’t great.

[00:03:20] Your Friend Andy: There was no inheritance coming my way. I’ve never received it. There’s no saving grace, no saving throw. So I had this kind of just a bunch of bad decisions compounding over the decade, notice my twenties. And then at. 29, I guess I finally decided to like to awaken it and grow up a little bit, but I just, I kept having panic moments.

[00:03:39] Your Friend Andy: There’s nothing quite like not being able to pay your bills or worrying where your next dollar is coming from or whatever to just like on a regular basis to just set this anxiety inside of you. And I just got me and my wife were just fed up with it. We’re just like, this has got to change. And so I started investigating how I could.

[00:03:56] Your Friend Andy: change that and fix that. And the very first thing I ever read was I will teach you to be rich by Rameet Sethi. And looking back, do I agree with every single thing he outlines in that book now? No, but it was a great starting place for me to say, Hey, here’s what you can do with your money.

[00:04:11] Your Friend Andy: Here’s how you can manage it. Here’s some places to invest in it. Here’s what investing does. And it showed me the 25 year old versus a 35 year old, both starting from zero and what it looks like in the future and how much that extra decadive compounding is it can smoke that, that other comparison there.

[00:04:25] Your Friend Andy: So I opened a Roth IRA and started investing and started thinking about how I could better manage my money. And then slowly, but surely got to where I am today, which is on a much better financial footing, but I do not miss those early anxiety riddled days of my finance journey at all. 

[00:04:42] Patrick Donley: Was your wife on board with this?

[00:04:44] Patrick Donley: Was she part of this journey too, like financial education? Was she reading Romet’s book and other books that you guys might have been into? 

[00:04:53] Your Friend Andy: She’s on the same page in terms of we need to make a change here. She’s never been really into finance. Like me, I geek out about it now and I really enjoyed learning about it and reading about it.

[00:05:02] Your Friend Andy: She was never doing those things, but I guess I lucked out or chose well, had to think of how you want to view it, choosing my wife and that she is a very frugal person. Whereas I obviously for a long time was not, she took a real risk there jumping in with me, when I’m like, Hey, we need to do these things right off the bat.

[00:05:17] Your Friend Andy: She had the, she was equipped to do this kind of change of pace with me. And so she was able to use that kind of saving mindset and stuff and let’s be frugal and be careful how we spend our money. And then I’m just learning as I go and she’s just being supportive of that. So yeah, it was a lot, it’s nice, like a partnership in doing that, but it wasn’t.

[00:05:35] Your Friend Andy: Both of us were trying to drive the financial ship at the same time. It was just some complimentary ingredients there. 

[00:05:41] Patrick Donley: You mentioned, I will teach you to be rich. Were there other books that were influential at the time that as you started your learning journey, they were books that made a big impact on you?

[00:05:51] Your Friend Andy: That was the biggest. And I don’t even remember how I found that book. I probably. typed the best personal finance book into Google or something and found it. And then I got a tattoo. I started reading Ramit’s blog and stuff. I really liked the way he talked about personal finance. I was given Dave Ramsey’s total money makeover at one point.

[00:06:09] Your Friend Andy: I did read most of that. Dave did not resonate with me as much, but I will say being on this side of things, I’m not anti credit card. I’m not anti debt, but I really appreciate that perspective. When you’re in a place where you can’t control it, or if you just never can in the future, then I see a lot of merit to it.

[00:06:27] Your Friend Andy: But yeah, on this side of it I’ve learned how to control these things. I think some of that stuff is a little bit silly, but I think it also has a real place for certain people. And just ignoring my credit cards and basically cutting them up was a. Kind of a big step in the right direction for me in the early stages of the journey.

[00:06:45] Patrick Donley: Did you ever get into Mr. Money Mustache? Was he a guy that made an impact on you at all? 

[00:06:51] Your Friend Andy: Later, not in the early stages, but yeah, I started, I, we first got out of debt and started doing investing and things like that and saving and budgeting and all this stuff. And then I. Kind of got introduced to the whole fire movement and this whole retirement early idea, financially independent, retire early.

[00:07:06] Your Friend Andy: And I had never heard of that. And of course, if you search that stuff online, you’re going to find Mr. Monday mustache and others. And I was intrigued by it. I will say it did not resonate with me. In terms of what they would call like lean fire and stuff, I’d be more of the fat fire kind of a person because some people they truly figure out what their absolute minimum is to just stop everything and retire right now and they’re perfectly happy to live that really frugal lifestyle and I can respect that and I appreciate that.

[00:07:34] Your Friend Andy: But one of the things that I want my wealth to do for me is buy some comfort, but also buy me time freedom to travel wherever we want, whenever we want, or to go to nice restaurants and stuff like that. I do like the idea of retiring early, but it would definitely be more on the luxurious side of retiring early if I was going to pursue that.

[00:07:52] Patrick Donley: Let’s go into a scenario like there’s somebody listening to this, they’re in debt, 50, 60, whatever, the number is 60, 000. I remember at 25 looking at that same chart where it’s oh, and I hadn’t started saving much at all. And you compare that to if you wait till 35. You really, I started to feel like I’m behind the eight ball already.

[00:08:13] Patrick Donley: Like I haven’t gotten started. I need to get started. So let’s say there’s somebody in their twenties listening to this. They’re in debt. What are some just like first money moves that you would recommend to them to make, to start building, scratching, clawing their way out of that situation they’re in?

[00:08:27] Your Friend Andy: I’m a realist, first of all. And the harsh reality, if you are in that situation, you’re 35 and you haven’t quite got started on your financial journey, it would have been a lot better if you’d started earlier, it would have been better if. Dumb young Andy hadn’t waited till 29 to start on my financial journey.

[00:08:42] Your Friend Andy: If I had started at 19, the world would be very different for me personally, if I’d done that’s a reality. However, I also simultaneously believe that, and I truly believe this because I feel like I’m a walking testament to this, and I’ve seen others who are even older than me who. I started from zero and who are a testament to this, that it’s truly never too late if you start, the worst thing you can do is just sit on the sidelines and continuously weigh your options or worse yet you go, Oh, I’ll do it tomorrow or the next month, or I’ll get on that next year because that just never happens.

[00:09:13] Your Friend Andy: So the first thing to do is just reality check where you’re at. And then go, okay, this is fixable, savable, and then to start breaking it down into as small of pieces as possible. And for me and my wife, that was literally the most boring and mundane and everyone’s least favorite thing when it comes to personal finance, which was just budgeting, because if you don’t know where your money is going and what it is doing, you’re going to be clueless about taking control of that situation.

[00:09:37] Your Friend Andy: So we used YNAB, which I love. Which is, what does that stand for? you need a budget. And it’s a little bit of a different way to go about budgeting. You put your money to work ahead of time and then you spend out of those buckets and stuff. It’s the envelope system, but digitally with a few caveats.

[00:09:54] Your Friend Andy: It resonated with us once we got over the learning curve and it really helped us take control of that. But taking control of your spending is huge because. You might already be in a surplus if you can take control of your spending and have a little bit of extra money to start making some good future moves.

[00:10:07] Your Friend Andy: If you do the budgeting stuff, you realize you’re still at paycheck to paycheck, which is where we were. Then the next step, in my opinion, is just use the one thing you probably have some abundance of in terms of assets, which is time, and just start trading your time for money. I did. every side hustle imaginable.

[00:10:23] Your Friend Andy: I ubered and lifted and I did help people with handyman tasks. I did photography on the side. I did video editing freelance, anything I could to earn extra money to take my salary and then expand that. So I have some extra capital to start working with. And I had to give up a lot of social time with friends and hanging out and stuff like that.

[00:10:42] Your Friend Andy: But it’s like such a short term sacrifice. If you can really get the ball moving, then eventually you can start enjoying all that stuff. But if you never do that. You never get to enjoy that stuff without being constantly in a panic attack mode because your money’s not going very far.

[00:10:57] Your Friend Andy: So take control of your money, figure out where it’s going and then figure out a way to make more money. So you can start putting it to work. 

[00:11:05] Patrick Donley: So what was your full time job at the time you were doing these side gigs? But what were you doing full time? 

[00:11:11] Your Friend Andy: I was a creative director at a software startup here at Austin and when I was doing these side hustles and things I would do this when I got home, but also I was trying to start my business, which I’ve done for the past 10 years, which was a photography business.

[00:11:24] Your Friend Andy: And I would, all my lunch breaks, I would go to the startup and so they were still building out the building. There’s an unfinished side. I would take my lunch and go sit in one of the unfinished conference rooms on the other side of the building, sit on the floor and get on my phone while I’m eating my sandwich or whatever, and call potential clients that I can try to convince to hire me.

[00:11:45] Your Friend Andy: be a photographer for this event or that thing and I was trying to simultaneously while working my normal nine to five job build the side business and then when I got home I would do more of that and I’d edit photos or I’d go shoot and then all my weekends were just spent photographing and then free time when I wasn’t photographing or doing the job I’d be driving for Uber and Lyft or whatever I was just trying to make as much Money as I possibly could on top of my normal salary so I could just put it to work and clear at the debt and start investing and start actually feeling like I’m a little bit ahead of the game.

[00:12:13] Patrick Donley: Whereas I’ve been so far behind the entire time, was your wife also doing side gigs at the same time you were doing your hustles? 

[00:12:22] Your Friend Andy: yeah, not as aggressively. I definitely took, I was definitely the really aggressive one with that, the photo business is something we both did together and that was on top of her full time job at the time, but she’s always like flip stuff on eBay and Craigslist and she will go shopping for vintage clothes at Goodwill and clean it up and steam it and fix it and then sell it on Poshmark or eBay or whatever.

[00:12:42] Your Friend Andy: So yeah, she has done a lot of that, just not, I went crazy with it because I was, all of a sudden super motivated, a group effort. 

[00:12:50] Patrick Donley: So how long did it take you to pay off that? It was 86, 000 worth of debt. How long did it take you to pay that off? And were you, I wanted to hear about how you did this.

[00:12:58] Patrick Donley: Were you investing at the same time or were you strictly trying to pay that debt off before you even got started in investing? 

[00:13:05] Your Friend Andy: So the first thing we did was we tried to build up a little bit of an emergency fund. And at the time it was very meager, like 1, bucks or something like that. Just something like When the tire on the car explodes again or has an emergency like a doctor thing or whatever, we have a little bit of money.

[00:13:20] Your Friend Andy: We don’t see you swipe the credit card. So once we built that up, we were almost solely focused on debt because I was just so fixated on that. But then as I was reading, I will teach you to be rich and probably some stuff online and people are just talking about the importance of retirement and this magical thing called the Roth IRA.

[00:13:35] Your Friend Andy: We then focus on just saving up. 5, 000, which at the time was the minimum to open a Vanguard Roth IRA. And I opened one for me and then we did it again and opened one for her. And then we were just back to the debt attack. But the debt, I think it took us a little less than three years, like two and a half years, just throwing everything in the kitchen sink at it and working around the clock to knock it out.

[00:13:56] Patrick Donley: And then the Roth, were you investing in index funds? 

[00:14:00] Your Friend Andy: It was a target date retirement fund, which. In hindsight, I picked that because it was just like the Vanguard recommended thing. It was very non aggressive and the exposure to the S& P 500 was also not huge. It’s also like bonds and stuff in there.

[00:14:15] Your Friend Andy: And so in hindsight, I probably would have just thrown it all into S& P 500, but I did that. So it didn’t quite grow as quickly early on as it maybe could have. But yeah, now it’s all been. It’s all S& P 500, basically. 

[00:14:28] Patrick Donley: At what stage of the game did you realize that you talked about fire, at what point were you like, this is realistic, I could leave my regular full time job.

[00:14:38] Patrick Donley: When did that start to become a reality, and how did it become a reality? 

[00:14:43] Your Friend Andy: that became a reality when, while I was doing all these side hustles and things, I was building that side business, and the side business kept growing and growing until I was making the same at my side. business that, I just said the extra time I had left over, I built that thing was making as much as my full time job.

[00:15:00] Your Friend Andy: And I didn’t want to do my full time job anymore. I wanted to not have a boss. I wanted to be my own boss because my entire life I’ve been an entrepreneur, elementary school, junior high school, starting all my own little businesses, and doing all kinds of crazy things in college. But just before college, I got this, I was convinced that you go to college, you get a degree, you get a job.

[00:15:20] Your Friend Andy: You follow the script. I did that. Yeah, I followed the script. And then as I was executing on the script at my job, I’m like, why am I doing it? So jump ship to do my own thing. and then I just poured money into investments and stuff. And that’s when I started seeing what the potential was and the possibility was.

[00:15:37] Your Friend Andy: And then I started, I think that’s probably about the time I encountered the idea of retire early and how you calculate, percentage drawdown on those investments and what they could look like in terms of an annualized salary and what those numbers need to be to have a certain amount. And Oh, wow.

[00:15:51] Your Friend Andy: If I do this for X number more years, work could be optional. If I decide I don’t want to do my own thing anymore. And that was a very exciting prospect. 

[00:15:59] Patrick Donley: Let’s go into calculating some of those numbers a little bit. You’re familiar with the 4 percent rule, right? Can you explain that to our listeners?

[00:16:06] Patrick Donley: I love the 4 percent rule. I think it’s, I like to think about it all the time, not all the time, but it’s like a, it’s a fun calculation to do. Can you talk about that and just how I think about it in your own life? 

[00:16:16] Your Friend Andy: Yeah, sure. I think it’s the Trinity study is what it’s called, but this number is based off of, but essentially the idea is if you’re putting your money into your investment account, you’re investing into stocks or index funds or whatever of that entire giant amount of money, there’s a certain percentage that you can take out of it on a yearly basis and live off of, and you will never diminish the main amount.

[00:16:39] Your Friend Andy: You’ll perpetually grow into the future. And the reason this works is because if you take the S& P 500, for example, which is just a collection of the 500 largest companies by their market cap size in the U S if you buy into that. index fund. That’s that, the picture of the U. S. Stock market over the past 100 years or whatever it’s existed.

[00:16:56] Your Friend Andy: It’s returned on average 8 to 10 percent a year. Now, some years it’s down 7 percent and other years it’s up 23 percent over 100 years. It’s average at 8%. So the idea is if you were invested in something like that and you draw 4 percent from it, there’s still another 4 percent over time that it continues to grow and it will perpetually grow and you can still live off of it.

[00:17:18] Your Friend Andy: Now, I think that study There are certain scenarios where it doesn’t do as well. So some people who are really conservative don’t do 4%. They do 3 percent or they do 2%, but there are calculated ways. You can take money out of these investments. You’ve worked so hard to build up, live off of them and still have more money than you did before.

[00:17:39] Patrick Donley: Yeah, I love it. It’s just, it’s fun to think about how much you need per year to live on and then figure out, all right, here’s what nest egg I need to make to withdraw 4 percent and. That I’m good. There’s a guy, an investor I like, Nick Sleep is his name. We mentioned Clay Finck, my colleague who, he’s really into Nick Sleep, who was a, he was a hedge fund manager and He was a value investor, but he had this idea of an X number where after a certain amount of time of his investing career, once he hit this X number, he was going to be done.

[00:18:10] Patrick Donley: And he actually did it. He shut down this fund. He told his investors to invest in Amazon, Costco, and Berkshire Hathaway. That’s what I’m going to do. And he was done at 40 something. Is that something you think about for yourself where you’ve got this number? And if I hit that, I can stop doing everything.

[00:18:27] Patrick Donley: Or do you enjoy all the, for me, I would think it would be hard to quit a game that you’ve excelled at. Like this guy, Nick Sleep, he was an excellent investor and he just stopped. I wanted to hear your thoughts on that. 

[00:18:38] Your Friend Andy: Yeah, so there’s two aspects. One, I’m talking about the 4 percent rule. You can dream up what your scenario is going to be.

[00:18:45] Your Friend Andy: You can say, if I want to live on 100 grand per year, or if I want to live on 200 or 250, 000 per year, that is 4 percent of a year. What number and that’s, your end goal number. So you can dream up and think about whatever. What’s that big number, that big, shiny object you can chase? And yeah, I do have changes all the time.

[00:19:03] Your Friend Andy: it’s been like 10 million, like 20 million or something. And maybe I’ll hit those things and I’ll actually want to stop doing whatever. But I’m having a lot of fun with all the things I’m doing now. And I think. It’s exciting, the idea of hitting a certain number and quitting and doing whatever you want.

[00:19:19] Your Friend Andy: It’s a great dream. But I also think it’s just as exciting to hit that number or whatever. And for that, for work and all things to be totally optional. And that’s exciting in and of itself. And then still doing something else that makes money if you want to or for fun. Or do it for a little while, take big swaths of time off and go travel and come back to it.

[00:19:40] Your Friend Andy: That’s one of the things I love about investing and building wealth. And whatever is, it gives you options, it buys back your time effectively, and if you can do it successfully enough, that’s just, I don’t know, it’s just such a freeing, calming, anxiety cure in my mind to know that at any given point, at the drop of a hat, I can say, I’m going to take the next year off and there’s no consequence to me whatsoever.

[00:20:05] Patrick Donley: Tim Ferriss has got the idea of taking many retirements. And I’ve always thought since reading the four hour work week, I thought that’s a great idea. And you just took one, you went to Japan, you had mentioned that you had gone to Japan. It’s great to have that flexibility to just be able to be like, Nope, I’m going to take a couple of two, three weeks and go visit Japan.

[00:20:23] Your Friend Andy: Yes, there’s in the world of online gurus and personal finance stuff there, this phrase thrown around lifestyle design and for some people it has a like negative connotation and it’s frou or whatever, but I’m a big believer in it in just the practical sense and that If once upon a time, I, if I want to take a vacation, I had to ask someone’s permission to do I had to put in for a 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 is gonna tell you what to do and you have to work towards whatever their vision is for the company or whatever. And I just don’t want any of that.

[00:21:00] Your Friend Andy: 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.

[00:21:18] Your Friend Andy: Let’s go. Or just a few weeks ago. I went 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. Money helps with that whole situation, but also just like cutting all the constraints, all the rules and I’m not lawless.

[00:21:41] Your Friend Andy: 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 things I love.

[00:21:58] Your Friend Andy: It’s fun to stack money. It’s fun to build these things, but I’ve never been fixated on them. I love money so much. I’m Scrooge McDuck. I want to stack whatever I’m fixated on. If I build up enough of that stuff. It lets me do the stuff I actually care about. 

[00:22:11] Patrick Donley: 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, in his early 20s, where he saw a guy, 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.

[00:22:31] Patrick Donley: And I think it was like a lightbulb moment. He’s I don’t want to live this life, even though I’m making this massive salary. And who knows how much this guy was making? He’s not what I want. I want optionality. Like you, you said it. 

[00:22:44] Your Friend Andy: Man, optionality. It’s just once it’s as an intellectual exercise, it’s fun.

[00:22:50] Your Friend Andy: But once you actually taste it a little bit, I don’t know why anybody would ever not want it. 

[00:22:56] Patrick Donley: 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. explain to me how you think about asymmetric bets.

[00:23:10] Your Friend Andy: asymmetric bets, 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 as an asymmetric bet. And that is, it is some way That you either leverage your time or your money or something.

[00:23:25] Your Friend Andy: 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.

[00:23:43] Your Friend Andy: 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 if I have if you have a thousand dollars and you put 900 into what you deem as the safe investment But you put 100 into what is something that has a huge amount of potential possible if it goes to zero, you lose 100 and you still maintain 99 percent of your wealth.

[00:24:11] Your Friend Andy: Now, I’ve shifted on my percentages since this, but initially that’s how I viewed it and it’s just. blew my wealth up. it rapidly increased my net worth and stuff like that. But another angle that I think is maybe more, 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, what’s the downside there?

[00:24:35] Your Friend Andy: 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 gave up some of it and then the next year I can.

[00:24:53] Your Friend Andy: Party hardy and have fun or whatever, it’s materially doesn’t affect you very much beyond the short term, but long term, it is radically changed my life, building my own business and just getting back into a mindset that I had once upon a time, but then let myself get programmed out of has opened so many possibilities where I can’t even imagine going back to the other thing.

[00:25:12] Patrick Donley: So let’s get into Bitcoin a little bit. Tell me about your origin story there. Like, how did you get turned on to it? At what point did you become? As they say, like red pills. Talk to me a little bit about your, or orange peeled rather. Tell me about your story there. 

[00:25:26] Your Friend Andy: I first heard about Bitcoin in either 2012 or 2013.

[00:25:30] Your Friend Andy: I was big into computers, building my computer, and overclocking in 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 I ever encountered.

[00:25:47] Your Friend Andy: Bitcoin, because it was the idea that you take your computer at home and mine, quote unquote, mine this cryptocurrency, whatever that is, and get this thing. And it has some kind of monetary value. And I had a friend of mine who was using his computer just like at night and his off time. And he was mining like, I want to say it was like five to eight Bitcoins a week, something like that.

[00:26:06] Your Friend Andy: he was very excited that he could sell every week for about 30 bucks in total. So he paid for my video card in just two months after doing this. You should do this. I’m like, this is gotta be a scam. This is bogus. You can’t make money out of thin air. This is so stupid. And I just wrote it off and completely dismissed it.

[00:26:22] Your Friend Andy: Yeah. And then 2014 rolls around. And this is right after the bull run of Bitcoin, where it went up to a thousand dollars for the first time. And 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.

[00:26:42] Your Friend Andy: And, this is what I was working on, 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 being offline and I couldn’t figure it out. And I did mine some stuff and I did a few things, but there’s just. My head was swirling. So I was like, done.

[00:26:58] Your Friend Andy: Give it up. Sell it on eBay. Done with that chapter and ignored it again. And then 2000, maybe the 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.

[00:27:16] Your Friend Andy: 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 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 it the wrong times, bought the wrong stuff.

[00:27:34] Your Friend Andy: Got involved in just outright scams, lost a lot of money, but is going out of that. That kind of crypto bull ran 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. Then you can’t make money in this space.

[00:27:49] Your Friend Andy: This was the third time’s a charm. This is the time that I am finally in my head. I’m like, okay, I lost a bunch of money. Very painful. Made a bunch of bad decisions. I’m gonna learn from those, but there’s something here. What is this thing? And I started to investigate. I 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 and then back down to 7 and just when my friends were like, you’re going to lose all your money.

[00:28:16] Your Friend Andy: This is so stupid. I just, it finally clicked for me that what Bitcoin is, what it could be and what this was akin to, in 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 attraction, adoption and attraction.

[00:28:36] Your Friend Andy: it just had this massive collapse of everything. But if you’re one of those people who is 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. So that, that for me was crypto, which is a big part of my story, which, of course, the cornerstone of that is, is Bitcoin.

[00:28:52] Your Friend Andy: And I’ve just been. drinking the Kool Aid ever since. And now that’s, 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 percent gone into space and that’s where I am at today.

[00:29:11] Patrick Donley: 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. It’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.

[00:29:28] Patrick Donley: 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. 

[00:29:42] Your Friend Andy: I’ve read many of the normal books you read, for Bitcoin stuff.

[00:29:47] Your Friend Andy: 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. But I think a lot of it was just, and I can’t, it’s really hard to pinpoint exactly like 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 kind of, these fundamental changes happening.

[00:30:21] Your Friend Andy: And again, it’s just hard for me to not make that point. Comparison and parallel with the internet in the early days and talking about things like that and the pieces just 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?

[00:30:41] Your Friend Andy: And that started me down a rabbit hole of investigating fiat currencies like the U. S. dollar and others and how they don’t last very long traditionally. And the U. S. 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?

[00:30:58] Your Friend Andy: They can print money basically whenever they want and however much quantity they want. And as the end user of that currency, we lose our buying power. We succumbed 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.

[00:31:19] Your Friend Andy: And 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 percent or whatever. But for some reason, I don’t know what to attribute this to.

[00:31:37] Your Friend Andy: 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 5, 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.

[00:32:06] Your Friend Andy: And Bitcoin is just the logical explanation for that conundrum for me. And so I kept reading it, about it, watching videos about it, and digging in deeper and deeper. 

[00:32:17] Patrick Donley: 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.

[00:32:24] Patrick Donley: It’s really good. And after you read it, you’re pissed 

[00:32:28] Patrick Donley: off. And at that time, when the author wrote it there, Bitcoin, I don’t believe existed. It was like his recommendation was precious metals. for hard currency. Yeah, it’s fascinating to see the cycles of it. I remember, this is totally a little off point, but I remember the internet collapse, the dot com collapse, right around 2000, 2001, and Amazon plummeted down to a, 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.

[00:32:58] Patrick Donley: I’m going to sell at 16. That’ll be great. And I did, in retrospect, it’s just you calculate what that would have been had you just held on to it. And, in hindsight, it’s whatever. I can say it’s 2020, but I’ve had the experience of that and it would. didn’t cost me much at the time really, but like now I realize it’s like these sites, these drops are opportunities, where when everyone else is panicking, that’s the time to push the chips in and acquire more if you can.

[00:33:26] Your Friend Andy: 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 recurring 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 and in my estimation, it seemed like Bitcoin was the next evolution of gold, which is why people call it digital gold.

[00:33:56] Your Friend Andy: It has Certain, there’s certain arguments to be made about the properties of it, it’s not actually physically, 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.

[00:34:10] Your Friend Andy: It’s very safe and secure, but whereas gold was tough to move across borders or expensive to handle or whatever, and it’s just this cumbersome thing to transact in. Bitcoin 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 It’s just absolutely just sucker punched inflation in the face and blown away gold and everything else.

[00:34:56] Your Friend Andy: And it’s just been this incredible way for me to protect and grow my wealth. But you have to, again, have like a, 40, 000 foot view of it. 

[00:35:05] Patrick Donley: Couple 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 How do you deal with that?

[00:35:15] Patrick Donley: That’s hard to see your net worth like in Bitcoin terms. in fiat terms to it’s this is painful. How do you deal with it? 

[00:35:23] Your Friend Andy: 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 because yeah, if we’re talking about the last cycle, Bitcoin hit 69, 000 and then at the, which baby, it’s too early to call, but I’m assuming at this point with hindsight, the bottom was 15, collapse and all that.

[00:35:44] Your Friend Andy: That’s a 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.

[00:35:59] Your Friend Andy: 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. You have to investigate this stuff yourself. Be curious on your own. Just decide 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.

[00:36:12] Your Friend Andy: take your pick. They don’t truly understand it. So having a real true understanding of what you’re getting into is crucial to dealing with these major downturns and stuff, downtrends for the asset. Two, I have the advantage, and I’m not even an OG in space, but I have the advantage of having six to seven years of experience doing this now.

[00:36:31] Your Friend Andy: Some people have been at it for over a decade now or whatever, and that’s pretty awesome for them. But. Yeah, 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.

[00:36:50] Your Friend Andy: 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 often. 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 dumping it all in and you watch it go down and you’re like, Oh no, I needed that much.

[00:37:11] Your Friend Andy: Like 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 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 have 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.

[00:37:36] Your Friend Andy: I know if it were to go to zero tomorrow, I would be okay. And these are all important things. 

[00:37:41] Patrick Donley: Yeah. I think that the third point is that I can’t sleep at night. Whatever test, it’s a really good one. Yes. I don’t want to put you on the spot, but do you have any price predictions at all for this next cycle that we’re in?

[00:37:53] Patrick Donley: Do you have any kind of numbers that you think we may or may not hit? 

[00:37:57] Your Friend Andy: I was one of the people who was convinced we were going to 100, 000 in the last cycle. 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 and 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.

[00:38:22] Your Friend Andy: 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.

[00:38:41] Patrick Donley: Yeah, we’ll see. Time will tell, right? It’s fun. This is a fun time. 

[00:38:45] Your Friend Andy: Yeah. We’ve just, yeah, we’ve just started to embark on a fun time and I’m here for it. 

[00:38:50] Patrick Donley: Yeah. I want to touch a little bit on Bitcoin mining. You said you got into that early on, pushing it away because whatever time stuff and maybe whatever lack of interest or whatever, but you’re back into it now.

[00:39:00] Patrick Donley: So tell me about Bitcoin mining, how you do it. Just a little bit about how, what part it plays in your portfolio, how you think of it. 

[00:39:09] Your Friend Andy: So when I first started meaningfully investing in the world of crypto, I was still in my infancy when it came to my personal finance journey. So I was really struggling to invest more than a couple hundred bucks per month into all this.

[00:39:21] Your Friend Andy: I 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 this, it’s a far away dream, but I kept thinking about it.

[00:39:38] Your Friend Andy: 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 a hundred.

[00:40:03] Your Friend Andy: 20, 000 to 130, 000 into Bitcoin mining so far, which is not as much as I put into Bitcoin directly, but 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.

[00:40:26] Your Friend Andy: 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 mines before halving. And then the year following the halving, if things go the way I think they will, I’ll probably mine about four in total in that year following.

[00:40:42] Your Friend Andy: So the experiment has been Very eye opening and fun and lucrative so far. 

[00:40:47] Patrick Donley: 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? 

[00:40:54] Your Friend Andy: No, but that is super cool. There are people I’ve followed on Twitter who 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.

[00:41:08] Your Friend Andy: no, all miners, facilities and a few different states around the country, just because my electricity costs here in Austin. A little too high to successfully do it. And also there’s the noise and just power requirements, the infrastructure. It’s just, it’s a lot. So I have someone else manage all that for me.

[00:41:25] Patrick Donley: 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? 

[00:41:39] Your Friend Andy: Directly investing into Bitcoin is always a 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.

[00:41:48] Your Friend Andy: It just makes sense. And it’s the proven path. Mining 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 people things like that. However, mining is extremely exciting to me for a bunch of different reasons. One, the math, which I modeled all the time.

[00:42:06] Your Friend Andy: I have a spreadsheet modeling the blocker words 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 directly. So that’s one really cool aspect. It’s not a guarantee. I might not. The jury’s still out on that.

[00:42:23] Your Friend Andy: We’ll see in a year or two, but 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.

[00:42:41] Your Friend Andy: I sell my machines for 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 Think again. Now, this is my first full cycle of doing this.

[00:42:59] Your Friend Andy: 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.

[00:43:17] Patrick Donley: 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? 

[00:43:33] Your Friend Andy: YouTube I started in 2015.

[00:43:35] Your Friend Andy: I started a channel, a cinema channel, called Burger Fiction, which is where this silver play button came from. I was pretty successful. That one has 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.

[00:43:50] Your Friend Andy: And what were you doing? You were doing like movie reviews? Movie reviews, super cuts, where like we did one that is every Jason Statham punch ever. And every. Tom Cruise running ever, which was a 20 minute video. It’s literally showing you every second from every movie. He’s always 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.

[00:44:17] Your Friend Andy: So it is an unbelievable undertaking. Some people like super cuts. Those are dumb and easy when I was like a lot of work and that was fun and we built and I was figuring out how to build a channel and I had developed a love for YouTube, but a cinema channel was not. a moneymaker. So I retired from that one, and still had a love for YouTube.

[00:44:35] Your Friend Andy: 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.

[00:44:52] Your Friend Andy: I’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 to 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.

[00:45:11] Your Friend Andy: 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. So 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.

[00:45:30] Your Friend Andy: 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?

[00:45:49] Your Friend Andy: But 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 then the crash and the bear market, and then I’ve been just building for the past year and a half, and finally crossed 100, 000 on the, on this channel, but it is, it’s been, it’s super fun.

[00:46:13] Your Friend Andy: 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. 

[00:46:23] Patrick Donley: So go into that a little bit more. How is it monetized? there’s a lot of people listening to this that watch a lot of YouTube, but really don’t understand the background of it all and how a guy like you is making money from it.

[00:46:34] Your Friend Andy: Yeah, so it’s different for everybody. There are unlimited ways you can monetize your channel. I just, I choose a. A couple of 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.

[00:46:52] Your Friend Andy: 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 of finance, and this world is just higher up the hierarchy of advertiser interest. there’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 was making about 10, 000 a month as a very tiny channel, just because that was such a lucrative niche, but that’s not just from the ads.

[00:47:17] Your Friend Andy: 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 account you get 100 bucks back and if you do that on scale you put a video out there that’s working for you and the platform 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.

[00:47:46] Your Friend Andy: traditionally, I’ve said no to 99 percent 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 and then I work on a partnership with them. They pay me directly and maybe even on top of that, I get a referral.

[00:48:01] Your Friend Andy: 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. You can see that there’s channels who sell merchandise or they sell digital products or courses. I don’t do any of those things, but there’s like unlimited ways you can do it.

[00:48:14] Your Friend Andy: And every single one of those is its own stand alone 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, YouTube and my other business and crypto passive income and my investment appreciation, but each one of those has five to 30.

[00:48:36] Your Friend Andy: individual streams within it. And I really, that’s one of the things 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. 

[00:48:49] Patrick Donley: When did you sever your ties with your full time job and leave and to pursue all this?

[00:48:54] Patrick Donley: 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? 

[00:49:02] Your Friend Andy: 2014. 12. Okay. So it’s been a while. Yep. And then after that, I did my small business for 11 years and I just retired. I shut that down completely two years ago now.

[00:49:14] Patrick Donley: Got it. So I think they say like the average millionaire has seven streams of income. It sounds like you’ve got 30 at least 

[00:49:21] Your Friend Andy: the crypto passive income. One is like 30 sources by itself. The YouTube one has at least four or five streams. Yeah, it’s pretty wild. Quantity is helpful. 

[00:49:30] Patrick Donley: Tell me about your newsletter.

[00:49:31] Patrick Donley: What are you, how often does that come out? What’s it called? What kind of content are you covering? 

[00:49:37] Your Friend Andy: it’s called Passive Bites. And asking, 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. 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.

[00:49:58] Your Friend Andy: things that I think are helpful that I wish I could have. I read at various stages of my journey to get here, but really it’s, 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.

[00:50:12] Your Friend Andy: And so I just did it because it was smart to do and I’m figuring it out as I go. What is it? Should be. I’ve had fun with it and I think people do like it, but it’s an ever evolving animal. 

[00:50:23] Patrick Donley: Sure. Yeah, that makes sense. Do you find you’re pretty transparent and open about everything you’re doing, the numbers, things like that?

[00:50:30] Patrick Donley: Do you, do you find there are downsides to that or have you experienced downsides? 

[00:50:35] Your Friend Andy: My family doesn’t like it. They think it’s pretty weird and maybe not a great idea. 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.

[00:50:55] Your Friend Andy: So I wrestle with that side, but I also wrestle with the side that, especially in 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, 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.

[00:51:21] Your Friend Andy: And 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.

[00:51:40] Your Friend Andy: 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, and they share like how much they make in passive income or how much they make from their YouTube channel.

[00:52:01] Your Friend Andy: And my mind is 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 the things I really hope truly that people see and feel that way.

[00:52:18] Your Friend Andy: 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, you gotta be prepared for that. Your guts. Yeah. You gotta be prepared for that. 

[00:52:30] Patrick Donley: Talk to me about, you had mentioned. Kevin Kelly’s A Thousand True Fans.

[00:52:34] Patrick Donley: 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 a thousand true fans. 

[00:52:43] Your Friend Andy: 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.

[00:52:54] Your Friend Andy: He’s also had some just really impactful ideas on me, which, namely, A Thousand True Fans, which is Maybe his most famous online written piece, but 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, what they’re trying to share and are willing to do.

[00:53:15] Your Friend Andy: come along on that journey with you and support you in some way, whether it’s 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.

[00:53:36] Your Friend Andy: I don’t know if I’ll ever get to millions of subscribers, but I can tell you once upon a time, 100, 000 subscribers seem like A far away idea and now I’m there, my first 1000 was a struggle to get there, but I got there and it just was this idea that I latched on to that said, if I could just do this, I can make this whole thing work.

[00:53:53] Your Friend Andy: And so far, it has absolutely been proven true. 

[00:53:57] Patrick Donley: 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? 

[00:54:08] Your Friend Andy: There’s a saying in investing, and I think it applies to more than just investing, which is, scared money doesn’t make money.

[00:54:14] Your Friend Andy: And 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 are 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.

[00:54:32] Your Friend Andy: 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.

[00:54:53] Your Friend Andy: However, if you’re able to internalize the upside and really believe that it’s worth the embarrassment or the other downsides, which are real things. I felt I was very embarrassed early on with a lot of 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.

[00:55:11] Your Friend Andy: 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.

[00:55:28] Your Friend Andy: And 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, thinking 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.

[00:55:44] Your Friend Andy: 80 years old on your deathbed and looking back on things with major regret. That’s one of the most scary and terrifying things I can think of and that’s been a huge motivator. I refuse to get to the end of my life on my deathbed, if I make it that far, and look back and go, I really wish I had done this.

[00:55:59] Your Friend Andy: 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 trite, but it’s I would rather try to do those things and just fail, than just never have tried them before. And that’s always been a stronger emotion than fear or whatever. So you just get over that fear, man, it can be so good.

[00:56:19] Patrick Donley: 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? 

[00:56:28] Your Friend Andy: That’s if you can digest a little bit of that and run with it, then my job here is done. I’m happy. 

[00:56:35] Patrick Donley: Awesome. So for our listeners that want to find out more about you, your YouTube channel, and follow you on Twitter, what’s the best way for them to do that?

[00:56:42] Your Friend Andy: 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. 

[00:56:49] Patrick Donley: Andy, thanks so much for your time. This has been a lot of fun. 

[00:56:52] Your Friend Andy: Thanks so much for having me.

[00:56:53] Patrick Donley: 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.

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