You Can’t Get Rich Without Following This Playbook | Humphrey Yang

When I say that younger people are now poorer than ever, yes, they are, because everything is so much more expensive. My name is Humphrey Yang, and I've been making content about personal finance. My YouTube channel, we have 1.2 million subscribers, TikTok 3.3 million, and then Instagram about 600K.

What is the number one wealth killer?

Ah, yeah, new cars. Buy a car that's 3 years used. I found that like that's the sweet spot.

So should you actually quit your job every 2 years?

Like, I switched jobs a few times in my 20s. Even the most successful people I know in Silicon Valley, they're literally job hopping every 2 years.

How does the average person become rich, Humphrey?

How does the average person become rich? It's really just a combination of—

All right, Humphrey, how are you?

I'm well. Thanks for having me.

Yeah, thanks for being here. So for those that don't know you, who are you and why should people listen to you?

Yeah, so my name is Humphrey Yang and I've been making content about personal finance for the past 4 and a half years. And previously in my previous job, I was a financial advisor. And I also worked in tech and I also started my own business in e-commerce selling posters for 3 years before I did content. So as part of like my entrepreneurship journey, I was like creating businesses and I was trying different things. And then 3 years into the poster business, I was just trying a bunch of different stuff and content seemed to stick. And I always wanted to be a YouTuber. So it kind of, it kind of was like a nice marriage of everything that I had done previously. Cool.

I want to come to your main business in a bit as well. I just got so many questions here. So why are young people now poorer than ever?

Well, okay. Yes. So one of the reasons is that cost of living is so expensive now and owning a home is so expensive compared to, let's say, in 1950. So in 1950, in the middle class, I believe the middle class median wage was $33.50 a year. $33,300. I actually have it on my phone somewhere else. Let me pull it up real quick.

$3,350. That's thousands, right?

No, $3,350.

Okay. Yeah. Yeah.

Sorry. Okay. The median wage in 1950 was $3,300 a year and the median house cost $7,350. So it took you about 2.2 years of your wages to buy a home. These days, the median wage is $70,000. Household wage is $70,000 in the US and the home is $430,000. So that's 6.14 years to buy a home. So when I say that younger people are now poorer than ever, relatively speaking, yes, they are, because everything is so much more expensive. And, uh, you know, if you're making minimum wage, which by the way, minimum wage hasn't changed in like 15 years since 2009 or something like that. If you're making something like less than $15 an hour, like there's really not going to be a shot that you can buy a house.

So what do they need to do? Do they need to reskill? Like, how do they break out of that funk?

Yeah. So I do think that we do live right now one of the best ages to actually make more money than possible because of the internet and because of how much we can scale online. And so I think, yes, our minimum wage hasn't changed, but we have more opportunities presented to, let's say, the average 24-year-old these days than, than you did in 1950. In 1950, you showed up at the local company or the local industrial plant and you just worked there and like that was it. But these days you kind of have freedom of location. You can work remotely, you can take on a bunch of side jobs which don't even require you to be there. There's a lot more opportunities for income. It's just like it's a little bit more fragmented, if you will.

Yeah, no, totally agree on that. I think it's the opportunities all there. Go ahead, take a sip. Yeah, the opportunities there and it's just At the end of the day though, everyone wants to win. Nobody wants to prepare. And so nobody can make excuses anymore, but still people do. And go ahead.

Yeah, I mean, it's tough because I think that— hmm, I don't know. I don't know how to put this in a nice way.

Just say it.

Okay, well, It's tough to say this, but some people are just lazy, right? And if you're lazy and you have some opportunities ahead of you and you don't take advantage of those, then that's kind of on you. However, if you're really diligent and hardworking— so don't take this out of context— but if you're diligent and hardworking and it's still not happening for you, perhaps you need to look for a different job, which we talked about a little bit before starting this podcast. But you need to figure out how can you get yourself, position yourself So that there are better opportunities for yourself. Right? Right.

So let's talk about that one. I mean, so we had Vivian Tu on this pod and she said that you should quit your job every 2 years. That's what the data says. So should you actually quit your job every 2 years?

Okay. So I did see that clip and Vivian says that if you quit your job every 2 years, you'll earn on average over your lifetime at least double, right? She says if you don't quit your job, you'll earn 50% less over your lifetime. I actually think it's a lot more. So you actually make a lot more if you switch jobs every 2 years because that Forbes study, I did look it up after the fact. It was accounting for a 10% raise every time you transitioned every 2 years. But you and I know, if you've ever switched a job, like I switched jobs a few times in my 20s, my raise was much higher than 10%. I went one job, I went from $40,000 to $60,000 a year. That's a huge jump. That's not 10%. What is that, like 40%? Am I doing the math right?

Well, I'm just saying, I'm just public math. I'm just going to assume you're right. 50%. You said 40 to 60?

40 to 60 is 50%.

That's 50%.

And so if you think about that, if you can compound your salary that way, I mean, you're going to, you're going to make a lot more money over the course of your career. And even the most successful people I know in Silicon Valley, I look up their LinkedIn, they're literally job hopping every 2 years and now they're like the VP of, let's say, VP of HR at NVIDIA and then boom, you know.

So here's what I'll say to that. I think so basically I'll share some data too. The more data we can share, I think the more helpful it'll be for people. So when I was making, I was making $32,000 a year at my first job, so graduated out of UCSD, right? It was a dead-end job. Anyway, the next job I got, I was making $45,000, and the next one after, it was $55,000. And by the way, I changed 6 jobs in the first year. So like, oh my God, a lot. And my mom was like giving her a heart attack, right? But then at the end of it, I went from $55,000 to $75,000. And then when I changed the next year, I went from $75,000 to $150,000.

My God.

And so like, it's— and then I'm 25 years old, I was like a director, right? And I had no idea how to manage people. But point is not to brag. It's just to say that It's worth it to not necessarily chase the money, but to chase the opportunity. And that's how you're going to grow, right? And Vivian said this in that clip. She said a lot of people take it out of context. They're all fighting each other in the comments. But she said, you got to go up or out. So that means you can either get promoted or you got to be out. And so she's not saying like, if you're really good, you get promoted. Yeah. Like, you know, there's program managers at Amazon, they're making like, you know, $500K, $600K, $800K a year.

Oh, wow.

And some AI developers are making like $2 or $3 million a year. Right. So Anyway, that's, that's my take on it.

Yeah. So to share some salary history for me, I went from, let's, I think it was $40,000 a year in 2012. And then I went to financial advisory. That was $50,000 a year starting. And then you obviously got commissions on top.

What'd you get on the commission?

Commission, not too much actually. Probably less than $10,000 my first year. Because I don't know if you knew this about financial advisory, but financial advisory for a really big firm, For the first 4 years, you're in one of their junior programs and you get your Series 7 and your Series 66, and then your whole job is to start prospecting. Your job is to find clients through your network. And a lot of these big firms will do that. They'll hire these young strapping lads or young strapping women, and they basically want you to use your network so that you can get them clients.

It's an MLM.

Kind of, yeah. And so, that's actually part of the reason I left. It's because a lot of financial advisory, they would just put you in standard products for investing. And the standard products aren't even beating the market half the time. So it's like, at that point, you're just paying a lot of fees for a financial advisor to hold your hand and invest in something that you can invest in yourself. Now, if you need estate planning, tax planning, retirement planning, planning for your kids, then yes, get a financial advisor. And many people have complicated situations. However, just for the investing piece, I don't think they're doing that much.

Yeah.

So I went from like $40,000 and then $50,000 at the financial advisory firm plus commissions. And then when I went back to video games, so I, I went—

I was mostly working at a video game Mm-hmm.

Uh, before and after the financial advisory thing. Uh, when I went back to video games, I think I was making like $18 an hour. So that, that comes out to $36,000 a year.

Wow.

So I actually took a pay cut.

Yeah.

I was able to do this 'cause I was living at home.

Right.

So we can talk all about that in a little bit.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I was making $18 an hour, but then soon a, a new position opened at that company. It was a startup. It was growing like crazy, and they needed someone to do monetization for, for live events. So basically it was a live operations role. And what that meant was, if you've ever played Candy Crush, you know that when you log in to Candy Crush or any mobile game, there's a sale that's shown to you. And that sale is typically chosen by somebody or a team of people. And that was my job within not Candy Crush, but a different game to basically come up with the in-game contents of the package that we would sell you. And that role paid $75,000 or $65,000 and then quickly $75,000 right after that.

Got it. How old were you during these, these years?

I was 26.

Okay, got it. So you went from $40-ish down to $36,000 and then up to $75,000.

Up to $65,000. And then 3 months after that, $75,000. And then about 6 months after that, $100,000.

Wow.

And then 6 more months after that, it was $140,000 after I left. This is right before I left, $140K.

But you got promoted like 3 times really quick.

So yeah, from the age of 26 to 28, I was promoted 3 or 4 times and my salary went from $75K to $140K. And this was 2017, 2016 when I left.

That's an argument to stay at a gig sometimes.

Well, that is an argument to stay at that particular gig, but they also worked us about 60 to 80 hours a week.

Wow.

Because it was a live operations role. We had real-time data of how much the company was making via these sales.

Yeah.

And it was almost like a trading floor. Like you had employees all looking at this data of like how much revenue is coming in and you can make a change to the sale Any minute, any second. So like if some— if the hour wasn't tracking to the hour that your hourly goal, yeah, you could just change, change it like that. And they had 24/7 coverage. Yeah. So oftentimes I would show up to the office 10:30, 11 in the morning because it was Silicon Valley time. I wouldn't leave until 10:30 or 11 at night.

Wow.

Every day. And that was for like at least 2 years straight.

So what does your hourly rate end up being? Not very good.

Yeah, it's very good. It's almost cut in half, basically.

But there is no complaints from the staff about, you know, Work-life balance, mental health?

Uh, yeah, there were, but I think that the CEO is rather genius in the fact that he overpaid for the market rate. And so when you're getting overpaid for what the market is paying you, you don't want to leave because it's like anywhere else you go in the gaming industry, you're going to be taking a pay cut. And so like he viewed that as valuable because each person that was online and at least monitoring the revenue he would see an ROI out of that, right? Like if you're able to make changes when everyone is sleeping, like if there's one person that's up and making changes, you could be saving the revenue for that company in the multitudes of hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars for that hour. So like, there you go. You can just, you know, overpay someone by $20K a year and boom.

I think it's important for people to know this. Like if you're going to go start working somewhere, understand that if you're getting paid $50K, the owner expects a multiple on that. They expect a return on their investment. And basically this guy knew psychologically that he could lock you guys in kind of, and he knew he was getting an ROI on you guys.

100%. He could have paid us all 3 times as much and still got an ROI. And I think like that was probably genius CEO, right? Like smart guy.

You know who else does that?

Who?

Guess if you're to throw a random name.

Zuck?

I don't know. You're close. You're in the realm.

Elon.

Yes.

So have you read his book? No.

I mean, the new book. I mean, it's super entertaining, right? But like the one thing that, that like One thing that sticks out to me is like he overpays everyone, but he expects people to be hardcore, right? So he can— you could be on the other side in Florida, right? And he might say, everybody, all SpaceX employees, you're coming to Texas tomorrow. You're all coming tomorrow. You guys will figure out your accommodations, whatever. And then if people aren't working at 9 p.m. on a Friday, he'll be like, where's everybody? Get everyone in, right? So like, he'll do that. It's like, it's pretty hardcore. I can never imagine myself doing that. But I'm saying like, that is an example of paying your engineers, you know, $500K plus and expecting them to be on call.

Yeah, because psychologically it makes sense. It's like, why, you know, if I quit, I'm going to take a $40,000 pay cut. And you know that most people aren't very good with their finances, so they're going to have lifestyle creep and they're like, okay, you know, I'm living a good lifestyle here. I'm not going to, I'm not going to change this. So there's no way I'm going to get paid $100,000 after I just got paid $150,000 at this company. Right.

So lifestyle creep, that's a good one. I'm going to note this down over here too. So how does the average person become rich, Humphrey?

How does the average person become rich? It's really just a combination of making an income, right? You got to make your income and hopefully you're increasing that income over time like we talk about and then having good defense. So I always like to say defense is like knowing what you spend, knowing what the categories you spend money on are, and then figuring out if you're spending too much in those categories and making sure that the delta between your offense, your income, and your defense are big enough, right? And then with that delta, you're saving and investing hopefully in the stock market or something that appreciates and scales over time. So typically index tracking funds, index funds that track the market. Right?

Right. And how much should you save to become rich? Because us growing up Asian American, right, it's like your parents want you to save everything, actually.

Yeah. I mean, my dad famously would tell me that he tried to save out of every $10 he made, he would try to save 9 of them, which is Insane. You can't do that in this day and age. There's no way. But that was his, like, intention. But these days, I think if you want to become a millionaire as quickly as possible, I would try to strive for 20% of your paycheck. But that's going to be— that's going to be really hard for most people too. So the recommendation is typically 10 to 15% is a really good gauge.

Right.

And that includes like something like a 401 match, right? So like if you're saving 8% and your match is 8% as well, or 6% and 6% is Usually the more typical breakdown, that would be 12%. So try to get in the 15 to 20% range, and you're likely going to be more comfortable than most people.

And when I say Asian save, it's actually— so Asian save is actually cash in the bank, not like investing. You're talking about actually being invested, right?

Yes. So I think there is a distinction that we have to make. Yeah. Like in typical Asian culture, if you're saving, you're just literally taking cash, you're putting it under your mattress, or you're putting it in a bank account, earning a little bit of interest, hopefully. But Uh, in the way that I'm saying saving, I'm also talking about investing that money. And so you should still have your emergency funds, you know, any funds that you need just for short-term, short-term needs, but then the rest should be invested.

How big should your emergency fund be?

I like 6 to 12 months, and I'm more risk-averse and conservative when it comes to emergencies. So I like 6 to 12 months of expenses saved up, but the typical recommendation is 3 months, 3 to 6.

Yeah.

And then if you follow like Dave Ramsey, it'll be like, let's get you to $1,000 as quickly as possible. And his philosophy is like, if you get to $1,000, like especially if you're struggling with money, if you get to $1,000, that's like a really big psychological barrier, right? Like you got to 4 digits and then that kind of motivates you to start saving more and more. So his goal is like, you know, the first step is $1,000. So I also identify with that too. But I think that If you're doing slightly well in your career, strive for 6 to 12 months. You'll be— you'll have a lot of peace of mind.

Got it. And the rest of it, the safest thing to do, probably put it into index funds. Like, I guess we can talk about asset allocation a little bit, but I mean, just in general, population probably should drop it into index funds.

Yeah, I would say the average investor is not good at picking stocks. They're not good at tracking the market. They might not even want to track the market, right? Like, it's, it's kind of a hassle for people. It's stressful for a lot of people. It's emotional. And oftentimes they will be panic selling or panic buying depending on how they're feeling that day. And an index fund is something that will just help you set it, forget it, and then you'll just slowly beat them. You'll slowly match the market over time, which will beat the average investor, right, who is trying to pick stocks and even beat professional hedge fund managers. Right.

So for sure.

Yeah.

Warren Buffett did that bet, right? You can feel free to tell the story.

Yeah. So Warren Buffett did a bet where You know, he bet a hedge fund manager over a course of 10 years that his index fund strategy, just investing in index funds, would beat the professional hedge fund manager. And he beat him by like a lot. I don't remember what it is, but his simple strategy of just like setting it and forgetting it actually beat someone who professionally does it for his job 40 to 60 hours a week. Right.

So, and the S&P average was that it's like 9% over a long period of time.

Typically the S&P averages, we like to say conservatively, 8% since it the inception, but actually over the past 10 to 20 years, it's been closer to 10 or 11%. Yeah. Okay.

So Humphrey, how does— so why does net worth explode after $100K?

Yeah. So, so that was the video that just came out today. And the principle is like, okay, it takes a long time to build up to $100,000, right? Let's say you save $10,000 a year and you're getting a 7% return in the market. It takes you 7.84 years Of saving $10,000 a year, getting 7% return in the market to get to $100,000. But after that $100K, now your $100K is making you that 7% as well every single year. So it's compounding. It's like a snowball rolling down the hill. It's getting easier and easier. And by the time you're at the $900K level, it only takes you 1.35 years to get your next $100K. So it's like 481% faster from $900K to $1 million than it is from $0 to $100K. So what does that tell you? All the friction is at the very beginning of wealth building, right? So that's why all these people online are saying don't buy coffee, don't buy avocado toast like Graham.

Yeah.

Like the reason is, is like they're trying to get you to your first $100K and that first $100K, every single dollar on your way to that first $100K is so important because it's going to speed up that entire compounding process.

Got it. How do you feel? So you agree with that? Don't buy avocado toast, don't buy coffee.

I don't know if I agree like full wholeheartedly with that, but I think that if you're pre-$100K net worth, you should be viewing your dollars as more weighted. Like they're worth way more than just a dollar. Your $1 technically is worth a lot more, like $33 over the course of like 60 years, right? Or I don't know what the math is. So yeah, we'll have to fact check that. But you know what I'm saying? It's, it's, it's much like a dollar is so much more important on your way to $100K.

Also, the time value of money right now is way higher than like in 20 years. So yeah. So how does someone get to $100K net worth ASAP?

Oh, man. Okay. So typically, there's— there was a study done on fourpillarblog.com. It actually showed that most people with their first $100K, it's not from investment returns, it's mostly from savings. So even at like, I don't know what the exact numbers are. But typically, it's comprised of 80% savings and 20% are actually from investment returns. And the typical time it takes is about 6 to 7 years. And that's if you're saving like 8 to $10,000 a year. So if you want to get there as quickly as possible, increase your income. That's the easiest way to kind of propel things forward. Get side jobs, you know, DoorDash, Uber, anything that you can get your hands on. Flip stuff on Facebook Marketplace and put all that money towards your investments to grow that initial nest egg. And then also just be frugal, right? Like you might have to eat something you don't really want. You might have to eat like Lean Cuisines all day, or, or you just have to reduce your expenditures, especially if it's early on in your wealth-building journey. And that's a goal of yours. You should be willing to sacrifice a year or 2 of your fun, you know, for that.

Yeah. Have you seen that graph? So, you know, us growing up Asian, the parents are like, yeah, you got a 401, house and all that. And then you realize that this one graph shows you the asset breakdown, really asset allocation of $100K, $1 million, $10 million, $100 million, $1 billion. Have you seen that before?

I actually haven't seen that. Okay. So explain that.

So yeah, so basically like it is exactly what our parents thought, right? It's like at, you know, $1 million net worth or so, like most of your assets are tied into your house, your 401, your car and all that. Right. But once you go up to like $100 million, $1 billion plus, like most of your assets are what, like business equity?

Exactly.

Most of the vast majority of it is business equity. Your house is like a sliver, right? And you might have some in stocks here and there, you know, but But it's just like most of it comes from business. And where I'm going from this, for, for with this really is you talked about Naval Ravikant.

Yeah.

And he has said that you can't get wealthy with a job. What's your take on that?

So I think Naval's point was like, it's hard to get wealthy renting out your time. Right. And typically what a job is, it's you're renting out your time for a set salary. And so what he suggests is like you find some way to get equity, right? So something that scales disproportionate to your time. And I definitely agree. Like, if you're trying to get to $5, $10, $15, $20 million net worth, you're going to have to find something besides a high-paying job, unless you're some sort of high-paying job that is, let's say you work at NVIDIA and you get paid a million bucks a year as the VP of whatever. And then you also have, but you also have stock options, which probably gets you most of the way in terms of your net worth, right? And so even stock options are a form of equity. So you can still get rich with a job. But you want to make sure that job has sort of some sort of equity play for you or some sort of ownership of something else besides just renting out your time. So yeah, I agree.

Yeah. And ultimately, I'm sure you've done a video on this. It's like you have to, you have to own assets. You can't own assets are they compound better over time also because of inflation and all the money printing and stuff. Right. So what's, what's your philosophy around asset allocation?

Well, let's talk about assets first. Yeah. Whenever I talk to— I have, I have a friend of a friend's father who's quite wealthy, I'd say a couple hundred million dollars worth. And when I asked him at lunch, hey, like, how are you and your friends all getting wealthy? It's like, typically it's by owning assets. Assets in the form of equities, stocks, which a lot of people did, or equity, or equity in terms of real estate, or equity in terms of investments in alternatives, or whatever you may have it. Business equity. That's all they got. That's how all of them got wealthy. In terms of asset allocation, what do you want to know?

Like, yeah, how's your asset allocation?

My personal one?

Personal.

So personally, right now, I think right now it's 70% of my net worth is in stocks and 30% is in cash.

Okay.

And I don't own any real estate. And the reason why I have that 30% in cash was to buy a home this year. But now I'm kind of having second thoughts with the interest rates being so high and the real estate market being so competitive, especially in San Francisco where I'm from.

Let's talk about this. So my podcast co-host on my other podcast, we talk about like, he, you know, he does well for himself. He had 4 homes in Beverly Hills. He's like, I want to get rid of all of them. Right. And, you know, and then we're just talking about our philosophy around real estate. I'm just like, you know, if real estate's your main business, fine. Right? Like, sure, you're going to get a better return than like your 6% cap rate. Right. Or 5%, whatever it is. But for most people, my philosophy, and we can debate on this, right, is like, If your main business is something else, your return is going to be much better there right now unless you're going to have a family and have a home. Like, yes, have a home. Right. But, you know, the argument from my mom who's in real estate, she's like, you should have a home. You should have— I used to have a home. I'm just— I don't want a home. Right. It's a pain in the butt. And, you know, it's just another thing to manage. Right. So that's my take on it. What's your take on homeownership? Because I don't think you— most people think that you get wealthy off of it. It's not the case.

That is. Yeah. I mean, it's definitely a hot topic, right? Like, I personally would like to own one home at least just so I can—

it can be mine.

And it can't be hopefully taken away from me other than, let's say, if the entire world crashes. I want to be able to own at least one home outright so that at the end of the day, I have somewhere to live. I don't have to worry about even if everything crashes, I still got my one house. That's what I personally would want. As to what your mom said, or what your friends say, which is like, don't be in real estate unless you're in real estate. Basically, don't invest in homes just because it's the cool thing to do. But really only if you understand it. I agree with that. I think like if you're really good at something else, focus on that one thing that you are good at because that will probably pay way more dividends than like you trying to like dabble in the real estate market when you don't really understand the real estate market.

Actually, that's a good topic to hit on. It's like, I think when you— let's focus on your stocks first. So you're 70%. How many stocks do you own?

So right now I think I own 25 stocks and 24 of them are in a dividend portfolio. And so it's just a selection of dividend-paying stocks and I have those. And then that, that 25th one is just all VOO, which is the S&P 500 ETF. Yeah. And most of it is in VOO, by the way. Yeah.

So my reason for asking this is because even when you look at your, your investments, it's very focused. It's not all over the place. Like some people think you need to have 50 different stocks or 100 different stocks to diversify. Right. How do you think about diversification and portfolio concentration?

Yeah, so theoretically you're well diversified as long as you're across at least, you know, there's 11 sectors. So as long as you're across multiple sectors and in different types of equities in those sectors, theoretically you're diversified. So it could take as little as 10 to 15 stocks if you wanted to in your portfolio. I'd say most people are over-diversified if you buy an index fund that's already going to be at minimum 100 different companies that you own within that index fund. If you buy an S&P 500 index fund, you own 514 companies. So you're always— you're already going to be really, really well diversified. But in terms of minimum diversification you need, I don't know, 15, 20, it's probably, probably already really good.

Yeah. Have you heard of the Warren Buffett Rule 1 investing? Have you heard of that?

No, I haven't.

So it's basically like he— if you look at his portfolio back before Berkshire became really big, it's like it's just like 10 stocks. It's just the same 10 stocks. And it's like, you know, you just mentioned like 15. It doesn't need to be a lot. So, right, it's kind of—

I think even Warren's portfolio today, if you look it up online, isn't it just like 50? It's like 30 to 50 stocks.

Something like that.

And most of it's concentrated in like 10 of the stocks, right? Like Apple and—

Right.

I don't know what else else he has. Johnson Johnson. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, like, he's got his investment philosophy. You have yours, obviously. I think you start to talk about your portfolio a little bit. Like, there is a certain like, oh, this is how Humphrey thinks, right? So what is your investment philosophy?

Okay, so my investment philosophy is— hmm, my personal investment philosophy is that I'm going to hold most of my portfolio in VOO, the majority, VOO, so 50% or more. The rest is going to be— I have dividend stocks, but I also have like a few growth and tech stocks like Apple, Meta. I own some Nvidia. I kind of want to ride any like AI hype that there is, at least in these next few years. So it's a— so that concentration of those AI type of stocks like Meta especially has gone really big over the years. And I technically should be rebalancing some of that Meta profit into some of my dividend-paying stocks like Vu. But I'm just kind of like letting it ride because right now I'm not really needing my investment portfolio to live off of and it's not my retirement money right now.

Right.

So for now, I'm just like trying to increase my income with my main business. And then with my investments, I'm just kind of like Letting it ride, sit there.

Got it.

Yeah.

So here's a good one for you. Are financial advisors useless?

Well, just like I said a little bit earlier, I don't think they're completely useless. But I think they're really dependent on who's hiring them. So if you're hiring them just for investments, yes, I think they're useless.

So where would they— sorry, I must have missed this. In what context would they be helpful?

So if you have like, you know, tax planning strategies that you need to implement, or estate planning, let's say you're about to Maybe you're on the older side and you have to start planning for that. If you're trying to set up college plans for your kids, trying to maximize your 529 plan for your kids, retirement planning stuff, I think a financial advisor could really help you. It also depends on the person. Some people really want that reassurance from their financial advisor, right? And some people love doing it themselves. And so if you're not someone that loves to do it yourself, then yes, you might need a financial advisor for sure.

You might know this, but what is the difference between a fiduciary and a financial advisor?

So not all financial advisors are fiduciaries, but fiduciaries are legally obligated to do what's in your best interest. So they can't sell you, let's say, an investment product that makes them a bunch of money upfront if it's not in your best interest. So I don't know how that's kind of judged, but it is the law. And so if you're legally deemed or certified a fiduciary, you must act in the client's best interest. And hopefully if you're looking for a financial advisor, you find someone that is also a fiduciary.

Got it.

Okay.

So people should be looking for fiduciary.

Yes. Yes. And most financial advisors probably are.

Yeah.

But obviously you should always double check.

Got it. Speaking of house, I do agree that I would like to have one house like for my family, maybe more like, you know, vacation homes and all that in the future. Right. But you have a— you call this the house buying rule. It's the 8.71% rule. So can you explain that?

So that's from a video. And it basically— it's a big— so that's a little bit tough to explain just in podcast format, but it's a big math equation on figuring out whether it's more worth it for you to buy a home versus rent a home. And that rule updates depending on what the interest rates are. So at the time I made that video, it was the 8.71% rule, but I don't know what it would be now. And I'm not really that— I can't recall it that well that I could speak on it.

I think the idea is like you have a margin of safety on top of the current prime rate or whatever it is, right? Something like that. But everyone basically Just go check out the video. Yeah, 3.71% rule. Humphrey Yang. Just go search that on YouTube. How about, how about the— Humphrey, what is the number one wealth killer?

Yeah, new cars or just cars, car payments in general. So I made this video last year about the number one wealth killer that nobody talks about. And in my opinion, I don't think anybody should ever buy a new car. If you're trying to be financially savvy, never buy new because buying a new car is basically just throwing your money away to depreciation most of the time.

Yeah. Yeah. And how much are you losing once you drive the car off the lot?

Yeah, off the lot, depending on the model, 15%, 20% right off the top there. And then in the first 3 years, you typically lose 40% of the car's value. That's typical depreciation curves. Obviously, for some sports model cars, it could be a lot higher. For some cars that hold their value well, like I think a RAV4 holds their— holds their value really well, it might be lower, but on average, about 40%.

So I'm assuming then you should buy— you should buy used. Yeah. And that's just it. You should also never lease a car, I'm assuming?

Leasing a car could be good depending on who you are, but you should almost never— okay, you should almost try to always buy a car that's 3 years used. I found that that's the sweet spot because if it's 3 years used, it still feels new. It probably has less than 30,000 miles on it, hopefully. And honestly, the models don't change that often, so people will just look at you and they're like, oh, he's driving a new car. Or she's driving a new car and it'll save you so much money. So if you are going to buy a new car, make sure it's 3 years used, 4 years used, maybe certified pre-owned, and you'll save a bunch of money that way.

I love it. What other money-saving hacks are there?

Oh man. Uh, let me think. Other money-saving hacks.

Yeah. Like for example, here, I'll just, I'll lead off. So you have the car one, like you should buy a used car, right? Yep. Um, like in business, for example, have you heard of the, you know, you know about QSBS?

The— yes, I actually have. I don't know what it stands for.

Qualifying Small Business Program Deduction or something like that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But like, that's instant, like minimum $10 million, if not more. You can be like 10x the value or sorry, you can be on the valuation of your company too, right?

Oh, right.

Yeah. So you can say you want to be a C corp. You have to be a C corp, but you can convert to a C corp and then let the 5-year period go. So anyway, I'm sure you got a bunch of personal finance hacks. I'm just trying to get you going.

Oh man, I'm trying to think of one off the top of my head. Money saving, correct?

Could be anything like, yeah, money saving, like in that used cars context, like you just saved like, you know, tens of thousands of dollars. So what else do you— what else is there that people can just latch on and say, give me that?

Yeah, I think the easiest one is just to call around to different insurance providers, especially for car insurance or home insurance, and try to just get them to compete with another car insurance company for the— for a different quote. That can save you a lot of money just off the bat. through a phone call, right? That's something you can do. You can call Comcast every 6 months to a year, say you're about to cancel. They'll always give you a better rate or a better promotional rate. Yeah, not all the time, but most of the time. There's so many, there's so many little hacks like that. Like, I remember Adobe Photoshop, every time you go into the portal and you click cancel, they always give you an offer.

Oh my God.

It's like, hey, have 2 months free. You're like, all right. And then you wait 3 months, you do it again.

But you can't even cancel. You have to like call Oh no, it's Adobe Photoshop. Well, that's what it was like 2 years ago.

Oh, these days they have like a lot of retention offers to get you to stay. So I think you have a lot more leverage as you— more than you think as a consumer. And so you should be trying to leverage that in different situations. That's the best one I can really think of off the top of my head, besides like credit card points. But that's a controversial topic.

Oh, okay. Well, we should talk about it later if it's controversial. So, um, what else do people waste money on?

Generally status. So anything to look, look a certain way.

Asian people love status. Asian people can only say that because we're Asian.

We can.

Yeah.

Anything to make you look like you're better off than you are is typically a waste of your money, right? So like if you're buying designer, you're trying to drive a nicer car than you should, you're buying fancy watches, fancy necklaces just to show off, it's probably not a good investment.

Got it.

Yeah.

Where does your, where does your mindset come from? So in my mind, frugal is a positive term, right? So would you consider yourself frugal?

Yeah.

Where does that come from?

My dad.

Okay.

Yeah. So my dad grew up in Shanghai in 19— so my dad's 92, so I'm 36. So he had me when he was 56.

Damn.

And he grew up in a really poor time of China, right? A really poor time in China. And he had like nothing to his name. But, and I think he, he would grow up hungry, right? Like there are times he wouldn't eat. So he has a really— if you talk to my dad these days, he has a really— he's got a scarcity mindset towards money and he tries to save every single dollar even to this day. You know, he's got enough money to live. He's got enough, you know, he doesn't have that many years left. But at the end of the day, he still doesn't want to spend $20 on lunch. He'd rather just make it at home or eat something frozen. And so I think it's the mentality that got him out of poverty and that's kind of just stuck with him the whole time. And he's— that's kind of rubbed off on me throughout my life, right? He's always like, hey, save, save, save. So that's probably why I'm risk averse. But also I'm trying to break out of that mentality a little bit because I think you need to have more of an abundant mentality to basically take on more risk, especially financially, and also make more money eventually.

Right.

Got it.

And I mean, you did take a risk by deciding to go off on your own, start a YouTube channel and start your business now.

Right.

What gave you the confidence to go out there and do your own thing?

Yeah, so I definitely want to acknowledge that I was very privileged in the fact that my dad just gave me a free place to stay and let me stay as long— he wanted me to stay there as long as I wanted to. If it were up to him, I'd still be living at home. Like, he wants me at home and he's very proud of me and wants me to stay.

Only child?

Not only child, but the only child in my age range, if that makes sense. My dad had some kids really early on and had some kids later, but—

Active.

Active. That's a, that's a great term for playa.

Yeah. Yeah, I love it.

Yeah. So, I mean, living at home afforded me a lot of opportunities that I probably would have not had otherwise because I wasn't paying rent. Right. And so when it came to taking on a risk, I had the support of my father in terms of just like free stay. Never. He never asked me for rent payments. He never even asked me to pay the utilities. Like, obviously I would try to help out, you know, throw him a couple hundred bucks every month, but he never asked for it. And so I think having that stability and also that to fall back on is coming from a place of privilege. So I need to acknowledge that. And I know that not everybody has that, but if you do have that, it can be a huge, huge leg up because you can take on some risk and not be too afraid to fail.

Yeah. Did you stretch the living at home thing till—

Too long. I was 34 when I moved out.

My God, you did stretch it a lot. Yeah, I stretched it a good chunk too. But yeah, so that's a lot of money saved. How much money do you think you saved?

I think by the time I moved out, I probably saved close to half, half a million dollars.

Wow.

Yeah.

Okay. Amazing.

And that's even with that. Well, that was a combination of good investing, number one. Number two, when I was working at that video game job making $140K, $120K, sorry, $140K, $100K, and also $75K. I saved all of that. Like, I wasn't really spending that much money. And I've been tracking my expenses since 2014, and my expenses have not gone too far out of line since then. So it's been 10 years of tracking. And literally, if you look up my expenses in my spending tracker app, I spend roughly the same amount as I did 10 years ago.

Have you shared publicly what that spend is?

No, I haven't. Okay.

If you're comfortable, like, like, A range?

It's usually like between $1,500 and $2,000 in discretionary expenses that I would spend every month.

Wow. Okay. So I'm just looking at it this way. So on $140,000, maybe in California you're pulling in like $70,000 to $90,000 or so?

Yeah, maybe like $90,000 or so. Yeah. And then I might spend $24,000.

Yeah.

$25,000. There were some years I spent less. Yeah. And so really I was just that $50,000 to $70,000 difference, I was just pocketing it, investing it. So Amazing. By the time I mean 34, I've been working for like 13 years at that point, right, on different jobs and stuff like that.

So that's a good job. Okay, so you have the half a million and you just kept the money invested. That's what it really is.

Yeah, well, now I have a bunch of it in cash, but yeah, kept the money invested.

So what are you waiting to do with the 30% in cash? Are you— so let me back up a second. So I was talking with my coach yesterday. I was like, you know, consumer sentiment's terrible right now. Like the economy, like I think 2024 is going to be worse, but it's like at the same time, it's The S&P is ripping, right? But then I talk to all my business owner friends. It's like nobody's really optimistic, right? And you see a lot of— I think January was a— was the record 15-year record for layoffs, right? So what's your sentiment on the macro economy right now?

I mean, the only big thing that I could see that could hurt our global economy right now is the Chinese market. It's, it's been tumbling quite a bit for the past month or so. or some sort of black swan event. And obviously there are layoffs, but sometimes layoffs aren't the worst thing for stock market, right? Stock market is not exactly the economy. Oftentimes you see a company like Meta do a huge layoff and their numbers get better.

Yeah.

And that's what private, private equity companies would do. They would just come in and just cut it. You know, they want to cut, cut the people that aren't contributing as much or, or reduce headcount and then get it to more profitability. So I don't necessarily think that layoffs equals economic recession. But what I do think is interesting, what you just said, which is some of your business owner friends say they're not that optimistic. I think that is more interesting data to me, even though it's anecdotal. It can show you how sentiment is. I don't know. I'm still kind of bullish on 2024 because it's a presidential year.

Yeah.

And there's going to be a new president. And I think that interest rates will slowly come down this year. So everyone's kind of like still kind of in this euphoric state.

Yeah. I think 2025 is going to rip. I think crypto is going to rip this year. I don't know. I think there's a recession in— there was a recession in software and tech and e-commerce, but I think that's coming out now. So we'll see what happens. I have an agency type business, right? So there's been a recession as well.

Really? Has it been slower?

Yeah, it's— so January, February is the slowest for agencies usually. And 2023 was really bad for a lot of layoffs, a lot of shutdowns, a lot of people Just it was like chaos, right? And I'll tell you this, I don't know if you know this, but most people don't know this. Agencies were selling for like a 15 to 20x multiple in 2021. If you had it like greater than $5 million in profit, you can sell for like, you know, $100 million plus, right?

So now?

Now, no. Now it's like, you know, you'll probably get like 5, 10 if you're lucky. But which is still like, okay, right? So anyway, back to— we can go back and forth here, but I, I want to go to— this is another video that you made.

Okay.

Why is the middle class screwed?

Well, it was just earlier what I said about the middle class. Everything is just comparatively more expensive. Tuition is more expensive than it used to be, you know, in the '50s, '70s, and '80s. Homes are more expensive. Even the car payment is more expensive. So that dream of a white picket, white picket fence house is kind of gone for most people in the middle class. And these days, I think the, that class, the class system is becoming more divided. It's almost like You're either rich or you're not. And I think that's a big problem that we have in this country.

Got it. But by the way, I just did the— I'm doing some, some of the math over here. If you're, let's say on your $500K, you compound at 8% over 50 years or whatever. Yeah, it becomes pretty significant.

Like $15 mil?

Well, this one says $23 mil.

Well, that's pretty good.

But let's say like you go— let's say you get a little more aggressive and it's like 10% or so, then $58 mil and then like, you know, 12% here, then it's like $144 mil. Yeah.

Wow.

Yeah.

Okay, so I just have to outlive.

Yeah.

Okay.

That's what it is at the end of the day.

Yeah. Yeah, I did read— I did hear from that one podcast with Morgan Housel, you know, the psychology of money guy, that most of Warren Buffett's net worth came after his like 80th birthday or something like that. That's pretty crazy.

My friend, so like, he's like a disciple. Like, he's like, he was like preaching a lot of Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett quotes when we were doing the retreat last week. He's like, Eric, just 1-foot hurdles, 1-foot hurdles. I don't want 7-foot hurdles. Right. And like, it's like they say so many wise things, Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett. And it's just like the main thing. I don't know if you like— we're basically the same age and it's like, yeah, you know, it's just like you focus and then you wait for decades and then you will build something generational. Yeah.

You know what sucks, though? It's boring.

Yeah.

It's usually boring. You always want the dopamine hit of like hitting that 10x or 20x stock or something like that. You don't want the boring stuff. Yeah, who wants that?

No. Well, here's the thing. So here's the problem with us, right? I'm assuming because you worked at a game company. Yeah. Um, I played a ton of games growing up, right? Like, you play a ton of games?

Yeah.

What'd you play?

Uh, I played my favorite games.

Yeah.

Uh, well, we want to talk Super Nintendo.

Let's, let's go all the way back.

My first favorite game ever was EarthBound on Super Nintendo.

Yeah.

And then in middle school, I played this game called Subspace, which no one probably knows anymore. I played a lot of Diablo 2 and StarCraft. And then I got into Counter-Strike. So Counter-Strike was my main game until—

You look like you're in a clan. Which clan were you in?

I was in a great clan.

What was it?

I was in the 2nd best clan in the world at some, at some point in time. It was 2001, 2002.

Cali?

This was before Cali.

Oh, wow.

It was called Rumble in the Desert. That was like the first time I started playing. I remember Rumble in the Desert. Yeah, yeah, yeah. First I was in this game, uh, this clan called Death Comes Knocking.

Yeah.

And their tag was DCK. So it looked like dick.

I remember that one too.

I was in that one. Yeah. And then I was in Weekend Warriors. I remember Weekend Warriors. Yeah, that was the one I was in.

I remember Weekend Warriors. Um, God, no, one of my friends was in 3D. He was in a 3D guild.

Yeah, yeah. So I— yeah, so then I also played Warcraft 2, Warcraft 3. I played all the Blizzard games. I loved all the Blizzard. And then I got really into World of Warcraft. Yeah, right when it came out.

What class were you?

I was a priest.

Okay, what, what server were you on?

I was, uh, at first I was on some small server called like Lightning's Blade.

Yeah.

And then I joined Tichondrius because my roommate— sorry, not my roommate, the guy that lived down the hall from me was on Tichondrius.

Yeah.

And this was vanilla.

Yeah.

And so I joined his guild, which was one of the best guilds on the server at the time.

So here's, here's the thing. So like, sorry guys, we're nerding out a little bit. So can you talk about how gaming has helped you in life and business? Yeah.

Yeah. I think especially role-playing games are really meritocratic, right? Like whatever you put in is what you get out. And oftentimes they're kind of just like time-gated, right? Like, so the more time you put in, the better you get. But it kind of teaches you— not only does it teach you social skills. So I learned a lot of my social skills from just playing online games as a kid. But it kind of teaches you, I guess, capitalism in a way, like, you know, trading a skill or trading an item for profit and, you know, how to stack that. Yeah.

It's just like scamming people with the Tarnhelm or Stono Jordan scam.

Yeah. It actually teaches you to like be really wary against scams too. Like I got scammed so many times in Diablo 2, the Stono Jordan scam. I've gotten scammed by that. And so now I'm just really paranoid. So it definitely helps you in life. And I think that it also encourages like this rapid feedback system that you can take information that just happened to you and learn from it. And with business, it's very much the same. You look at your analytics, you say, okay, what, what, What went right here? What went wrong here? And then you learn from that and you iterate. And that's what happens in a video game typically, especially a role-playing game.

Yeah.

And on YouTube, very similar. And a lot of the best YouTubers these days used to be really good gamers.

Mm-hmm.

Or they used to be hardcore gamers. And a lot of like the people that work in YouTube, like let's say MrBeast hires a YouTuber, he likes gamers because I actually don't know if he likes gamers for sure, but I'm pretty sure he likes gamers because they learn fast.

Yeah.

And they, they're gamers, so, you know, they're going to be online all the time. And also, I don't know, they're just quick with it.

Yeah. Some of the craziest gamers are like, they're the best business people in the world. Like Elon plays Diablo 4, right?

Yeah.

And like he spends a lot of time there. There's a— you remember Thresh?

Yeah.

Yeah. So he ended up starting like a bunch of businesses, right? So there's a lot of these people. And the reason why I got to gaming for a second was because the dopamine hits. The problem is If you're addicted to games, you have an addictive personality. You start to like look at all the other cool things you can do in business or start like multiple businesses. And that's the danger behind having a gaming background too.

Yeah. And I, yeah, and I think that was a big issue for me early on when I was starting my entrepreneurship journey. I wanted to do everything and I wasn't sure what to do. And I think that building a profitable business takes minimum 3 years if you're lucky. If you can do it before then, even great. But that's a long time to focus on one thing. But all the gains are compounded. So the longer you stick with something, usually the better, as long as it's the right fit.

That's interesting that you say it's the 3 years because it's no matter— it's like my podcast co-host and I, we find that it's always if you want to build an audience or a business, it's always a magical 3-year number. And I think for you, can you share your story? Because it's like I think you were trying a couple of things with you to achieve success with YouTube/business.

Yeah. The first business I started after I left the video game company was an e-commerce business where we sold custom posters. Wasn't my idea. My friend came to me, friend of a friend came to me, said, hey, they're making these posters in Europe. They're just posters of maps. So you would take like some mapping software, think of like Google Maps, and then you would layer some cool colors and cool skins on top, and then you could sell that custom. So like you could get a custom slice of Los Angeles if you wanted to, like maybe just a street just a neighborhood in Venice and you could call it Eric's Pad or something like that.

Right.

And those were kind of cool at the time. It's just custom wall art. And we ran that for 3 years. We were pretty profitable right from the get-go, but we weren't taking that much out of the business. We were reinvesting everything. But even I think I did that for 3 years and I realized, you know, the total market size was too small. So it was never going to be a big business. I think the best competitor at the time was making $3 million in revenue a year. And so if your best competitor is making $3 million in revenue a year and you're making $1 million, it's like, how much higher can the ceiling go? Probably too low.

Yeah.

And then the other thing I learned positively was how to grow an Instagram account. So that was the one positive I took away from that business. But I mean, there are many positives I took away from that business, don't get me wrong. But that was something that served me in my next thing, which was like creating content. And even my YouTube channel wasn't really that successful. Until maybe year 3. And year 3 was '22, end of 2022. That's when, when it really started to— some things started to click. And then 2023 was a breakout year for us. And then now this year we're just trying to compound on that.

What happened? So I know that TikTok was driving a lot of the traffic to YouTube or a portion of it.

Actually, it wasn't.

Okay.

But I think it helped that people knew my face.

Yeah.

And initially it helped me get the first 10,000 subscribers on YouTube. But I remember from 10,000 subscribers all the way to 1 million subscribers, we've always had the issue of like having too many subscribers for how many views we get. And that's mostly because a lot of my subscribers came from short-form videos, not just TikTok, but YouTube Shorts itself. And so even though I have 1.2 million subscribers, I would say half, 600K, are from Shorts. And because of that, sometimes our view counts don't look like they reflect a channel of 1 million or, yeah, 1.2 million.

Got it.

Which is fine. Which is fine. Got it. It's just something to know.

And you're— what's your stack look like right now? And when I say that, I mean, how big is your YouTube channel? How big is your TikTok and all the other channels?

Yeah. So I think my YouTube channel, we have 1.2 million subscribers as of right now. And then TikTok, 3.3 million, and then Instagram, about 600K. And then we have a newsletter with 45,000 subscribers.

Got it. And I know I was listening to a podcast where you did— you did this morning and you were very intentional about YouTube since the beginning, right? Like even though you started to take off on TikTok, YouTube was the golden goose at the end of the day, right? So why is that?

Yeah. So I grew up watching YouTube as my prime entertainment source. Like I would watch it whenever I got home from, from class or whenever I was just— I had some downtime and I always kind of looked up to some of the creators, like the early-on creators. Like I would watch like Jenna Marbles I'd watch some of the Asian creators like Nigahiga, if you remember him. And in 2015, I watched a lot of Casey Neistat and Marques Brownlee. So like, I always looked up to them as kind of like role models. And I always was like, oh, maybe one day I can try that job. But I never like gave it a shot.

Right.

It wasn't until Graham started making videos. So thank you, Graham, that I was like, oh, well, I can talk about finance as well. And so Graham really paved the way for a lot of financial creators. So I think, you know, As a financial creator, I think I owe a lot to him.

Yeah.

But YouTube was always a thing and I made 3 YouTube videos in 2019, in the summer of 2019. They went nowhere. I got like 10 views on each one and they're all like your friends, right? Like you send it to your friends like, hey, watch my video and they sucked. And then I found TikTok in summer of 2019 and I was just watching it for fun and I was like addicted to TikTok. And I searched for the hashtag personal finance on TikTok, like in August of 2019, and there was like one video. And I knew from like listening to all these entrepreneurship podcasts and stuff like that, I was a big fan of Naval Ravikant at the time. I was like, okay, if you're first to market in something like this is going to be really good. So I kind of looked at TikTok as an opportunity to grow a following, but also to get them to my YouTube channel that I eventually want to build. So from the very beginning, I was doing TikTok to get to YouTube and I think like I think that was a good decision because what ended up happening was if you just stayed on TikTok all the way from 2020 till now, you know, your revenue is not that predictable. And I think it's much better to have a sustainable business on YouTube. Now, obviously, YouTube could get taken down anytime. That's always a platform risk, but less so than TikTok, I think, and more so— yeah.

Got it. So yeah, I actually looked at your channel today. I think it was last month or last 30 days or so. Maybe it was like 8 million, 8.9 million views. What, what percentage is Shorts versus—

I think it's— I think right now it's 6 million views Shorts and then 2 million long form. Got it.

Which is pretty good. That's pretty good. Yeah.

Yeah.

Got it.

That's pretty good.

What do you think led to the breakout in 2023 for your YouTube channel?

Better titles and thumbnails. 100% better. So the number one wealth killer nobody talks about. Good title. Thumbnail also good. Thumbnail was inspired by Nate O'Brien. Nate O'Brien actually told me to make the video, so shout out to him. He had made one video on his channel 3 years before mine called The Wealth Killer, The Number One Wealth Killer. And it was also about cars. But he's just like, hey, you should just do this again and just make it better. And so that's what I did. And funny enough, now there's like 5 other videos about the number one wealth killer. It's all the same. It's all the same.

Copying each other. Do you see a lot of personal finance clones popping up now?

Yeah, yeah. But that's fine. I mean, I think we all win whenever It doesn't matter. Like, you know, let's say you start a personal finance channel. It doesn't matter. I think net-net, everybody wins. A rising tide lifts all boats. So it's not the worst thing.

Got it. And so what's the— I guess going into YouTube a little bit then. So can you talk about your team? Last I heard, it was one thumbnail person and you had a video editor. How does it look now?

Same. So I have a full-time video editor. And also runs my newsletter. His name is Ricky. He's great. And then I have a short-form video editor that helps me from time to time for the Shorts contract. And then I have a thumbnail designer, and that's most of the team. And then I have a data guy. So a data guy, he's on retainer every month and he helps me look at videos that are doing well, not only on my channel, but across all of YouTube, try to identify different videos that we could possibly try in the future, look at retention graphs, try to figure out how can we get better within YouTube Studio's data. So yeah. Okay.

What's like your 3-year goal with YouTube? What do you want it to look like?

Oh yeah, I still want to be making content in 3, at least 3 years, maybe even 5, 10 years. And so just grow the channel as big as possible, promote financial literacy to all. And then I'm going to try to start a website where we can review different types of investment products, bank accounts, investment platforms, credit cards, debit cards, anything that is financially related. I want to be, I want to be a trusted source for that.

Got it.

Yeah.

And your, your content stack right now, like how does, like how much time are you spending creating content each week, videos or whatever, your newsletter and all that?

Yeah, I think that, you know, you're an entrepreneur, you probably spend not that much time making content compared to your other ventures. But right now I'm like literally just full-time content. So right now I probably spend 60% of my time on YouTube, 20% on Shorts, and then 20% on like miscellaneous stuff like newsletter and like, you know, website or something like that.

Right.

But most of it's YouTube and it's mostly that one main YouTube video per week that we come out with.

And that's like a 15 to 25 minute thing.

Usually 15 minutes.

Okay. Got it. And those are— I mean, it seems like you do a lot of research ahead of time, hours of research, right?

Yeah. Yeah. So an average video probably takes like 4 to 6 hours of scripting plus research. Maybe sometimes more. It depends on the video. Like the $100K video that we just came out with, like why your $100K explodes after— why your net worth explodes after $100K. That's kind of easier for me because I already knew a lot of the principles. I knew exactly what I wanted to say. So that was maybe 3 or 4 hours or maybe less. But it's still a lot of time. It's still a lot of time. Most videos is probably 6-ish, 6-ish to 8-ish hours. And then we— and then I film it. And then after I film it, you know, there's 5 to 10 hours of editing that goes into it at least.

And you're editing it? No, video editor.

Sorry, Ricky is. And he also animates. So what's really nice is that we have beautiful animations on our video, on our, on our videos, and we try to make them better every, every video.

I think this just goes to show you too that YouTube, the bar is continuing to be— it's rising, right? And so 4 or 5 years ago, I could just walk in, I can wing it with like a 3-minute, 5-minute video on marketing salaries, right? And then they'll get like a couple hundred thousand views. And then I kind of stopped, or I stopped posting as consistently. I started talking about other things when I did post. And so I wasn't a good employee to YouTube anymore. And so YouTube's like, okay, you're not gonna get your reach anymore, right? Um, whereas for you, like, it's taking you 3 to 4 hours plus another 4 or 5 hours of editing to make a 15-minute thing.

Yeah.

And so like what people could do before, they can't get away with it anymore. And I think the bar is just going to continue to get higher, right?

The bar continues to get higher, and watch time is so coveted these days by the algorithm that, you know, if your video doesn't have as much watch time as, say, somebody else's, you're, you're just not going to get shown as much.

Right.

And also, if you come out with, like, let's say, 4 bad videos in a row, your reach is just going to be really limited on that number 5. And that's what YouTube won't tell you, is like momentum actually matters.

Yeah.

Which kind of sucks. But like, if you think about it this way, like If you ever go on YouTube, all the videos you see are based on what you just watched, your, your watch history.

Recency.

Your recency, right? And so like if you watch like, let's say, 5 videos from Casey Neistat, you're probably going to get Casey Neistat, his next upload. But let's say Casey Neistat uploads 5 more times, you never click on it. YouTube's like, why would I keep serving this person Casey Neistat? I'm going to serve them something else. So now Casey Neistat's 7th video is not getting even in your homepage anymore. because maybe he's made 6 videos about something completely different.

Yeah.

And so when you have the momentum, momentum, you really want to hit it hard. And when you don't have the momentum, you're just in this pit of despair. I've been there many times. It's just like—

So even when you're consistent with everything, you're still talking about finance. Sometimes if you just suck a couple of times in a row, you see your reach just decrease dramatically.

Yeah. And I think that's— it's mentally tough. Like you don't want like 8 10s of 10s. You know what a 10 of 10 is, right? 10 of 10 is like Worst of your last 10. And actually, I track all my videos and if they're 1 of 10 or 2 of 10 or 10 of 10 after the first 30 minutes, which is also too soon, by the way. But there was a stretch last year, I think it was like August to end of October, 8 of 10, 9 of 10, 9 of 10, 9 of 10, 10 of 10. It was just going downhill. And then you could also just see based on that, we also track our 24-hour 24-hour stats. So 24-hour impressions of, of our videos. Impressions in the summer were like 500,000 impressions after the first 24 hours, and then it was down to like 200,000. So you could tell my reach was like halved or more.

Yeah.

And that's because of the recency thing. And then now we've come out with a few quote unquote bangers, and now that, that number's going back up.

Yeah.

But it's really interesting that I think YouTube is more about recency than people think.

Interesting. Yeah, it's true. 'Cause, um, sometimes when I eat lunch, I watch these StarCraft 2 replays. Yeah. And so when you watch one, like today I watched one, I was like, oh crap, this is 30 minutes, right? And now I know like it's just a bunch of my boxes now are gonna be StarCraft, even though like I only watched one video, but it's because I spent so much time watching it.

Yeah. Yeah. Sometimes I'll watch like a, I don't know, like a workout video and I'm not even interested in working out, but then I'll just get recommended all the workout videos. I'm like, oh damn. Okay.

It happens.

Yeah, it happens.

And so, um, but that's also another argument that you need to stay focused because if you start to talk about different things, when they get recommended your other stuff, it's unrelated. then you kind of fall flat, right? Yeah.

And that's the tough part about YouTube. Like, unless you're an all-encompassing brand or personality that can talk about multiple different things, you know, people just kind of want to go to you for that one thing and as close to that one thing as possible. So the idea is like, okay, if you're trying to be a personality, you try to— you're trying to branch out of that and you're trying to like give the audience something similar but a little bit different. So finance, but just a little bit different so that they can get used to you talking about different types of Topics. Like Ali Abdaal is really good at that.

Well, we could talk about that one later too. So yeah, he was sitting in your seat maybe 2 or 3 months ago.

You talked to him?

Yeah. So, but the thing is that video didn't perform as well.

Oh, it's there.

Like, it's like a couple weeks back.

Did he have any clippable moments?

There weren't. I think the unfortunate one there, it's like usually we're doing like an hour and a half or 2 hours or whatever, right? That one, like, because we were split on— we ate lunch for too long. So he wanted to interview me on his So we did 40 minutes of me on his and then 40 minutes vice versa. Got it, yeah, yeah. So it wasn't that long either. So yeah, but we'll have to do it again. Anyway, you talked about this, you briefly touched upon this, like I— here's how I phrase it. You have creators and you have creator operators. And so I look at myself as a creator operator, meaning that maybe I spend 80 to 90% of my time on the business, 10 to 20% is creating content like this, right? I think your side is— your equation is flipped where as a pure creator, mostly creator, 90% goes towards creating, right? Yeah. Yeah.

But eventually you probably want to flip that. I probably want to be more like you. You know what I mean?

So yeah. So let's talk about that. So what is the plan with the business? How does it look like right now? Like you talked about the content setup, but you got the newsletter. What else do you have going on?

That's all I got.

Okay.

I'm trying to start a website right now that reviews products, so that'll hopefully be up in the next 3 or 4 months. And then the idea is to drive traffic from my YouTube channel to that platform. Also get better with SEO, just organic content, and then hopefully that can be a resource for people to go to. And the idea is to be like kind of like a Points Guy or a NerdWallet, but a little bit more transparent than some of those. Yeah. Than some of those sites. Yeah.

Yeah. What would you call it?

No idea yet. I'm thinking about names. Any names?

I don't know.

I didn't want my name to be a part of it in case one day I wanted to sell it or something like that. But something money related. I'll let you know when it comes out. But right now I'm just still in the very early process of it. But I would say That is something I think about. It's like I see a lot of my other creator friends, they're like starting businesses, they've got courses, they're monetizing like crazy. And I'm just kind of sitting here like, okay, well, I make content, I got my newsletter, it's free. You know, mostly the revenue I get is from AdSense and brand deals. And so my business is not well diversified at all, but I still think that my leverage on the internet is increasing, especially increasing over time on YouTube. And I don't think that that's a bad thing. And so I talk to, I have a mentor and sometimes he's, he's just like, well, do you feel like you have enough leverage Right now. I'm like, yeah, I have a lot of leverage and I think it'll just keep growing. He's like, just keep doing that. You don't have to have all the answers right away. And so I don't, I don't have all the answers right away.

Got it. On 2 million long-form views per month on YouTube, how quickly is your email list growing off of that?

Uh, it probably grows a few thousand a month. Okay. 3,000 a month maybe. Got it. Yeah.

The reason I ask is because like I have a friend, his newsletter business, he just does— it's a financial newsletter. They do about $30 million a year.

My God.

And he spends like $1 million a month on ads and then they sell ads to other institutions.

Right, right.

And they're just, you know, a lot of people— I'm in this newsletter mastermind and a lot of these people, they're just— some are spending like $800 grand a month or whatever. Right. I'm not spending anywhere close to that.

Crazy.

Like a fraction of a fraction anyway. But it's like they're just trying to buy new newsletter subscriptions and then just plugging it into their model and it works out right. Do you see yourself doing something like that?

Yeah, maybe. I haven't dug deep into the newsletter network or the newsletter strategies, but I know that there are a lot of strategies to grow your newsletter faster than what I've been doing. Yeah, mine has actually been kind of slow because I've had my newsletter since 2020 and it's only 45,000. Got it. Right. And, you know, it grows at maybe 2,000 to 3,000 a month if I do a call to action. If I don't do a call to action, it doesn't really grow.

And when you say a call to action, that's in the mid-roll video?

Yeah. Okay.

Got it.

Either mid-roll or within the first like 2 minutes. Maybe at the end. Got it.

Yeah, I bet you if you had like a crazy enticing offer, it'd probably go up like double or triple.

Oh, 100%. Yeah. Like, like what, what offer? Like, uh, what, like get a free template or something?

Get HubFree's secret investment tactics for 2024 or something, right? You know, the conversion rate just goes way higher.

Oh yeah, for sure. Yeah. Oh yeah. Yeah. It's funny because people download my templates and then they get, they give me their email and I think they forget that they give me their email because sometimes I get people like, I didn't remember subscribing to this, but I love it. So I'm like, okay, that's good. Yeah, at least you love it. That's cool. Honestly, when I'm thinking about my own journey and I sign up for a newsletter and I start getting it in my thing, I don't remember where I signed up for it. Signed up for it from.

And I'm like, as long as it's good, you got to get them to look forward to the next one.

As long as it's good.

That's right. Yeah. So what numbers can you share around the business right now?

Well, last year on YouTube, I can share that we did $300,000 in revenue on AdSense. Brand deals. Yeah, brand deals, maybe a little bit less. And then That's most of our revenue. So that's basically it.

So how do you like— how do you like— maybe that's a question. So brand deals, like, do you like doing those? Like, and I'm sure you get hit up for them all the time.

As long as they align with my personal values, I don't mind doing them.

Yeah. And how much did you— you said $300 off AdSense. How much off brand deals?

A little bit less. A little bit less than that.

Call it $200 or something.

Yeah, probably $200 or something.

Got it. You know what's funny? I'll tell you. I'll just tell you right now. Like, I have Web3 gaming companies that hit me up.

Oh yeah.

With— they were asking for you.

Oh, asking for me?

And I'm like, I like, I'm like, wait, I don't even know him, right? So now we know each other.

They assume we're related or something.

I'm like, what? So anyway, go ahead.

Yeah, I don't do a lot of integrations on YouTube. We're trying to do a little bit more this year, but we just want to make sure that the companies we pick are things that I would actually use and things that don't lose people money. So if it's like, let's say some sort of alternative investment project like Masterworks or something, we might not do it just because you could lose money in that. Right. Yeah.

So that's— Did you get caught up with the crypto ads back in the day, FTX or anything?

No. So luckily no FTX blowback, but I did have money on FTX that I still am waiting to get back, which that remains to be seen. It's not that much, but yeah, I still had some. I remember I What's interesting is I had money on FTX, okay? I had it in Bitcoin and I had it in Ethereum. The Ethereum I transferred off and that was basically instant, you know, like 5 minutes for a transfer of Ethereum. For my Bitcoin, and I was— I don't know why I was like, I knew that the big— it was, it was like the day that the news was getting reported that they might collapse.

Yeah.

And so I went on FTX, like, all right, let me transfer my— I transferred my Ethereum out. For my Bitcoin, I had like $20,000 worth of Bitcoin and instead of transferring it, I didn't want to transfer Bitcoin to Bitcoin because it takes 30 minutes for a transaction sometimes. So I was like, oh, I'll just sell it for USD and then withdraw the USD.

Yeah.

Uh-oh. Bad idea. Because I clicked withdraw, they said, oh, that'll take 3 to 5 days, and then I never got it back. But if I had taken that $20K, bought Ethereum, and then transferred it off, it would have been fine. Now, the only reason I didn't buy Ethereum and do that is because I had to go to get my haircut and I was late.

And that haircut basically cost me $20K. Oh my God.

That's the title of this video.

That's the title.

Yes.

The haircut that cost him $20K.

You know what I mean? So it's like, it really goes to show you with crypto sometimes it's like you just got to like, if you know something's unsafe, you got to like get out when something is guaranteed. You like, I knew I could get Ethereum out, right? I just didn't have that extra 5 minutes of time to do it. So I was just like, I just want the withdrawal.

Fuck. So I mean, look, I think we're probably into crypto probably because there's a gaming element to it. It feels like, you know, you're— it's Like like platinum or gold or whatever, right? From games. Why should people seriously consider crypto?

Mostly asymmetric upside. Like crypto has been, especially Bitcoin and Ethereum, have been some of the best performing assets in the last 10 years. And I think that, yes, it is funny internet money, but at the same time, it's like, it's hard to ignore that fact. So I'm not saying you go invest in like a $100 million market cap coin or like a $10 million market cap coin or like some crap coin like that just comes out, but I'm saying if you're looking at Bitcoin, Ethereum, some of the top 10s, you're likely going to be— yeah, you could still experience some risk, right? You're going to experience— you might experience a 60% down, but it could also run up, right? It could also run up much higher than 5x.

Yep.

Depending on— I mean, if you bought Solana last year when it was at $10 a coin, it's at $100 a coin now. And how often do you get a 10x in stocks? Not very often. But you have to be willing to deal with that volatility. So that's kind of why it's exciting for a lot of people. But it's really just funny internet money. And does Solana actually do anything? Do anything? I don't know.

Yeah. You know, so are you like, what percent of your portfolio is in crypto?

Oh, very small. Like 3%, 3 to 5%. Yeah.

And are you looking at it with a 5-year horizon, 10-year? How are you looking at it?

Like a 10-year horizon, probably. Like just kind of buy and hold. I don't really trade it that often.

Yeah, no, I'm the same way. I just leave it. That, you know, it's— my mom calls it big corn.

Big corn?

Big corn.

Big corn.

Big corn.

Not even a bit.

So she's like— she tells me more about the prices than like I know. She's like, you see big corn today?

Yeah. But yeah, I will say I do like Bitcoin for the fact that like nobody owns it. So that's like a really big draw, I think, of the currency itself. It's like Decentralized.

Yeah, it's like our version of gold.

That's right.

Yeah. And so you don't mess around with the other stuff, right? I think it's just ETH and BTC for you.

ETH, BTC, Solana. Okay. Yeah, got it.

Yeah, I'm kind of the same way. And some Chainlink too.

But yeah, I think that's what, in the top 15, top 20?

Yeah, I just think there's a lot of enterprise companies using— I'm like, I think it's got to go somewhere.

Yeah. As long as the market cap is not like, you know, $10 million, I think you're doing okay.

Yeah.

Yeah. Don't, don't speculate on those really small gambles, right?

Yeah. So you don't mess around with like Dogecoin or anything like that?

No. Yeah, but I will acknowledge, like, you know, there are a lot of people that have made a lot of money on those really small crappy coins because they can also 50x. Yeah, but 99% of the time they go to zero. So it's like, are you willing to take that risk?

Yeah.

Yeah.

What do you think, I guess, with the business right now, like what do you think are your perceived blind spots?

Platform risk. So yeah, if a platform, if a platform goes down, like YouTube disappears. Yeah. Or like TikTok disappears. brand deal risk. If all of a sudden there's a recession or something, brands aren't going to be paying anymore. But, you know, I feel really comfortable with my business because I've built up a really big war chest. So emergency fund for my business, I have like 12 months of runway and even longer. That includes my 12 months of runway, includes my salary. So like if I don't pay myself, it's even longer than 12 months.

Yeah.

So I think I feel pretty secure with my business, but I think blind spots are just like the 2 aforementioned blind spots. Plus, I'm probably not moving as fast as I should be on like different types of businesses.

So what do you mean by that?

I feel like every day that I'm not creating a business is like a lost opportunity almost because I have like the viewership now and the viewership is not guaranteed, right? Like, you know, like we talked about, you could have like 10 straight tens of tens and then you don't have that viewership anymore. Or you see a lot of ghost channels where like they used to have big followings And now they don't have that much. They have like, you know, they're not getting, they're getting a fraction of the views that they used to. So that's definitely a risk.

And that's why you're trying to diversify to your email list where you don't necessarily have that risk.

Yeah. Or start that website. And then, um, the other risk I'm probably blind to is burnout. I don't think I'm going to get burnt out because I've enjoyed it so much for the past 4 and a half years.

Gamers know how to grind.

Yep. They do.

We know how to take it.

Yep. That's right. That is also another good skill of grinding or of gaming. It's just the grind, you know, I, you used to have to kill like 20— no, like 2,000 rabbits to, you know, finish a quest or something. So it's like, I don't mind just like clicking.

Yep. Just mindless. 3 a.m. Mindless eating Carl's Jr.

Yep. Yep. So those are probably the blind spots. Got it.

Yeah.

Do you, do you see any blind spots for me? I mean, let's talk about that.

Like, what do you think?

What do you think the blind spots are of a creator business?

Well, I'll tell you an interesting story here. So have you heard of 8ify.app? Okay, so it's this AI tool that summarizes YouTube videos. This is genius. So basically, in the last 12 months, they got like 70 million SEO visits, right? And they're growing very quickly. So SimilarWeb shows 70 million. I don't know if it's actually 70 million. Ahrefs, which is another SEO tool— I'm an SEO nerd— but it keeps going up and to the right. And what they do is they just summarize the best videos on YouTube, the most popular ones, right?

Oh, interesting.

And that's all that's happening. So I'm like, oh, okay, well, if you're trying to do this SEO play, like, can you just go take all the personal Take your personal finance stuff and maybe take all the other ones and just summarize it. And you've got the biggest personal finance site out there, right? Yeah, I'm oversimplifying it. Obviously you want to make it not as janky, right?

Make it look good.

Yeah.

You know?

Yeah, yeah. But I mean, when you think about it, like a lot of these SEO, like NerdWallet or whatever, heavy SEO driven, right? And I know like my, my podcast co-host site, like he gets— he's got like 1 million, 1.5 million email subs or so, and he cleans it a lot. It's because he gets so much organic traffic from, from Google. Most people don't talk about Google because it's like, it's not sexy. It's getting harder and harder. Yeah, but the people that do decide to play the game, like if I were you ever starting from scratch, I might just go buy a website like a personal finance one that's maybe under-monetized through AdSense and just pay a multiple on it or whatever.

Oh, interesting.

And then, then I now have an asset and then maybe I'll just— excuse me— find a way to put a bunch of content on the site.

Hmm. Got it.

And you just shoot it up to the right and then it helps you grow your email list and then I might consider buying more emails to grow your email list too.

Got it. That makes sense.

Because then you're unstoppable.

Well, how long does that take? How long does— like, let's say you start a new site from scratch and you put all this personal finance content on there. Doesn't it take the Google crawlers like 6 months before you start even ranking for stuff?

Longer. Like, if you're brand new, think of it this way, right? Like, you're, you're just like Joe Schmo, like, on the, on the block. Like, you have no links, you have no votes of confidence from other websites. And like, if you could buy a website that has strong domain authority, that has that's been around for a long time, you already have a head start. Most people don't think that way. It's like, how do I do marketing from an— how do I do M&A from a marketing standpoint to go buy the attention? Because you already have a lot of attention right now. So how do you get more of it?

Right. So like by buying that one domain that has authority, you can just like jumpstart like yourself, like head start a year or two probably, right?

Probably longer. More than that, right?

Well, can you change the name of the domain too?

Well, I mean, you can't know because the TLD, the top-level domain, is a top-level domain. But you can change whatever it is. So hopefully it's like a generic name. Yeah, but it can be like, you know, well, if the website's bean.com, maybe it's like Bean by Humphrey Yang.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, bean.com. Yeah, I know what you mean.

Yeah, cool. But I mean, the other thing is—

Yeah, I'll look into that.

Thanks. I think— yeah, you're welcome. I think the other thing is like us being Asian and frugal, I guess. You mentioned it yourself. Like, I think it can slow us down sometimes. I think I learned this the hard way where it's like, You gotta just be able to bite the bullet on hiring people.

Yeah. Oh God.

Yeah, and then you have people problems, right? But, um, you know, it's a new set of problems. Like, new levels, new devils, right?

Yeah, I've actually been thinking about trying to hire one more person, but I wouldn't even know what they were gonna do, what they would do, you know? So I'm just— I'm still thinking through it.

I'll share stuff with you offline.

Yeah, that'd be great.

Yeah, but I mean, look, like, the, the Atify thing, like what they're doing, I'm like, just, dude, like There's this honeymoon period for the next year or 2 where people doing this are just going to like eat things up. And then I think AI is just going to change SEO pretty fundamentally. So we'll see what happens there. You mentioned one thing. Actually, let me back up a second. We were talking about brand deals. Yeah. How should people charge for brand deals? How do you charge for brand deals?

Yeah. So typically on YouTube, the way that brand deals are charged is that you take the average views of your last 10 videos. And then you multiply it by a rate, a CPM rate.

These are your long-form videos?

Long-form videos. So we'll talk about long-form first, and then we'll talk about short-form. Long-form, let's say you're averaging 100,000 views a video for your last 10 videos. You divide that by 1,000. So what is that? 100,000 divided by 1,000 is 1,000? 100,000 divided by 1,000 is 100. And you multiply that by a CPM. So let's say your CPM is $50, then your brand deal integration should be $5,000. Got it.

Okay. So, so then your— when you say brand deal integration, is that you making a video dedicated to them?

Not dedicated. That's just a 60-second. Yeah, I think dedicated you can charge a premium of like double.

Got it.

At least. But $50 would be a high CPM. You know, that's probably a financial CPM. But for more lifestyle stuff, it's probably between $25 and $35 is typically what brands will pay. And then you can also charge them for usage. So, you know, if they want to use your integration as part of ads for social links and stuff like that, or social, social cutdowns, you can charge, you know, $5K per month for that depending on your size or $10K per month or whatever it might be. But yeah, every 30 days and then exclusivity, right? So like if you're only exclusive to them or you're not, you can charge for that too per month. So it all adds up. But I have a manager that helps me with that.

Got it. And I'm assuming the manager gets like a cut.

Yeah, they take— well, they're agent plus managers together, so they do both roles and it's 15%. Got it.

And you're— so your videos, are you averaging 100K? I think you're doing more, right?

I don't know, actually. I don't know what my average is right now.

So they're doing the deals for you?

They're doing the deals for me, yeah. And they also do the short-form deals. But when I was doing the short-form deals, it's very subjective. I will say, like, some brands will pay a lot just because they want your brand name. Other brands will look at your views and be really picky.

Yep.

But it just seems like these days brands are just getting allocated budget. Like, hey, you've got, you know, $500,000 for short-form, you get $500,000 for long-form. I'll find creators. It feels like they have way more money for short form these days, even though I'm not sure it converts as good as long form.

You know what's interesting? We were talking about the Vivian video. That video got like a couple million views and it made like $120.

On Shorts?

Yeah. Whereas the long form one, she got like, I don't know, 350K views. And then I think it's like, you know, $5K or something.

That's good.

Yeah. Yeah. On just one long form video. So long form's worth a lot.

So that means this conversation could be worth $5K to you if we can, if we can beat Vivian.

Yeah.

Get us beating Vivian. Watch this video 5 times in a row without stopping it. Watch it on 0.25x. It actually gets you more watch time.

Have you met her before?

Yeah. No, only calls.

She's great.

Yeah, she's great.

So are you— do you have like this personal finance, like, society?

Graham Stephan and all these people? No, but, you know, I have a lot of the personal finance creators' numbers. I have Vivian's, I have Graham's. We don't like all talk every day. There's some group chats that we have, but no one really talks in them anymore.

That's cool. Yeah. Yeah.

So we're all friends. Yeah.

Yeah. You guys should do like a personal finance, like, retreat or something. Yeah.

Or a boxing match.

Yeah. Oh, I don't know about that. That's hardcore.

No, Graham's really good at boxing.

Is he?

Yeah. He trained for the boxing thing.

Who's like this personal— who's like up there right now? Graham Stephan, you, Vivian. There's just like personal finance YouTubers.

Oh, Andrei Jikhin.

Andrei.

Yeah.

Are those the main ones?

Nisha in London.

Oh yeah, she's great. She's just like, here's the thing, like grew like crazy.

Tae Kim, you watch Tae Kim? I don't know, like this. I think he's Korean.

That sounds Korean to me.

I don't know if you're Korean or not, but he's in his 40s, I think, and he's got a lot of great like financial evergreen content for if you're in your 40s or 30s. So I get a lot, I get served a lot of his content.

So yeah, I think there's a lesson there because everyone has their own angle, right? Like for example, it's It's like we're doing a podcast. Well, okay, let's just go to your content. Sure. Your content, you guys are all personal finance, but Vivian's got like, she's got sass, she's got spice in it. Like yours, what would you say like your angle is?

Calm and rational with some data. Yeah, that's— I asked Paddy Galloway, hey, what's my brand? You know Paddy Galloway? I was like, hey man, like I actually don't know. I asked him this like last year. I was like, hey, like I don't really know why people come to me because it's hard to know. why people come to you when you're the creator. And then Patty was like, I think people come to you because you're the calm and rational personal finance guy that makes you feel a little bit better about your finances backed with data. And so ever since he told me that, I kind of leaned into that.

I like that.

Yeah.

Can you speak to Patty Galloway and what he does? Like, how often do you speak to— because I know a lot of YouTubers speak to him.

Yeah. So Patty has a cohort, a course on YouTube where he calls it his Creator Accelerator. He runs it every like, I think he does it 3 or 4 times a year. And that was great. I took it. And then before that, I probably met with him 3 or 4 times just every 6 months, just for an hour consulting call. And he used to, he used to do those and charge money for them. But now I think he closed that off. I think he just only does his recurring clients, which he has a few, and then he does a cohort. But he's a, he's a wanted man, as in many people want to work with him. But I think his, the main thing that I really learned from Paddy Galloway is titles and thumbnails really make a difference and the idea is everything. So he really helped with that. And, but he's also just a good thinker because he's seen all these channels. Think about it. Like if you, if your brain was just filled with all the best data of like all the best channels and their performance, you know what works and what doesn't. And he has that brain, right? And so like, that's the value of Paddy Galloway. And he's also just very calm and rational as well.

Mm-hmm.

He doesn't say anything too sensational. He's not, you know, he's not like too out there. There's not like crazy hot takes. It's just like, hey, I love YouTube. This is what works. I've worked with the best. I have the data to back it up, you know, all that stuff.

So. And were you paying him for calls?

Yeah.

Yeah. I'm assuming it's a couple hundred bucks a call. Yeah, something like that.

I think it's less than $1,000, but it was more than $500 for sure. Yeah. So I think it was like $800 maybe. Sorry, Patty. I don't know what you're at now.

But yeah, but, but I think like what I'm trying to get at with, with this is like, you know, people— some, some people don't like coach— like, I look at this as a coaching situation. Yeah, yeah. And like, I think there's a lot of benefit to just paying someone for that time.

100%.

Because you just save like all hours, days, weeks.

I would say Patty saved me probably years because there was a point— the first call I ever had with him, I was deciding between starting a second channel where I focused on more like personal finance challenges, like MrBeast, but personal finance. And then, uh, my main channel stuff. And just having him to bounce those ideas off of really helped me.

Yep.

And I think everyone should have a coach. Even Tiger Woods had a coach.

Yep.

Has a coach.

Yep.

Like, he's the best in the world at golf.

Yep.

He needs a coach. So, uh, coaches can help you shortcut, save a bunch of time. And these days I'm still looking for a coach. Like Ali Abdaal had a bunch of business coaches. I'm like, Give me their number because I'm trying to find one. Yeah.

So what kind of business coach do you want?

I don't know.

Creator-operator coach? Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. I might have some people.

Yeah.

Thank you.

Cool. Let's talk about this. I mean, Patty talked about it is the idea that matters, right? And, you know, I've— on the Marketing School Podcast, we talk about the idea of an idea TAM, so total addressable market. So how do you, how do you think about that? Like, how do you think about your ideas? I know you have a data guy that's saying, hey, maybe we should consider this and that. But obviously, it also— like, how do you go about picking those?

Oh man, TAM is big. TAM is one of the biggest things that we think about, right? So can this idea reach a large audience, especially if you're just going straight up for views, right? If you're not going for views, then it becomes very different. Like if you're just trying to do niche stuff, like if you're making like travel credit card content, then make travel card content.

That's Sebi's.

Yeah, Sebi's great.

Yeah.

So like that will hit that audience and maybe those views are valuable to you, right? But if you're just trying to hit get a wide audience, yeah, you want an idea with big TAM. So it's always a factor in ideation. But we're also looking at what's trending on Google. What are people talking about on Reddit? Reddit's a good place, actually, if you actually just like look up Reddit personal finance and see what's hot, what's trending, what's hot, what are people controversial, like controversial topics? Like what are people like irked about? TikTok's a great place because you can see like what's trending, like loud budgeting this year is a huge thing. So like loud budgeting, It's basically like Gen Z being proud of budgeting and like being thrifty.

Got it, got it.

Versus like maybe like last year they were more into like spending. Yeah. Um, it's like stuff like that can kind of inform your decisions, or you can just look on YouTube and see what's been successful in the past. That always helps.

Yep.

Stuff like that.

And your job is to just— if it's something that's worked well in the past, you might try to like 10x it basically.

Yeah, you want to 10x it, but you also want to twist it up so it's not the same video and you want to like make it better, hopefully. Yeah.

Yeah. You know, YouTube's going a lot harder on podcasts now, right? Because when you look at like Colin Samir, like their average view duration is like 42 minutes. Oh yeah, right. You know, we're lucky if we get like 20 minutes on one of these, right? But how come— I saw you start to do a podcast for a little bit. Are you doing a podcast right now? Okay.

No, I have one video that is classified as a podcast because someone told me that if you classify a longer video as a podcast, it might get that podcast reach. Yeah, that did not happen. Okay, so that was a test. So that was a test, and that's probably why it says I have a podcast tab on my channel, but there's no podcast.

Got it.

And I don't really want to start one. I don't think I have that much to— I don't know what I would start it on. I don't have an angle. Yeah, versus this is leveling up. I like that. Yeah, but, um, average view duration is also self-fulfilling. So like, as you gain a fan base, a bigger, bigger fan base that comes to you just for that type of content, they're going to sit around and watch for longer. So like, I've even noticed on my own channel, like, average view has slowly crept up over the years just because people are used to me and they might throw me on while they're cooking or like, you know, brushing their teeth or something. Yeah. And so, or they'll just leave me on in the background.

So like— Do you watch YouTube while you're brushing your teeth or cooking? I just can't do that.

Yeah, sometimes.

Really?

Yeah.

Wow.

I watch YouTube like all the time.

Huh.

Like I download, I download, I have YouTube Premium, so I download a lot of videos too. And so like on the plane over here, I was watching Colin and Samir.

Okay.

Yeah.

Wow. Fascinating. Yeah, we all have different behavior. Okay, so the, the reason I ask about the podcast too is because like there's, you know, there's— you've seen the Andrew Tate strategy or the Iman Gadzhi strategy. Like they're just like they take the video podcast, they chop it up into thousands of pieces and then they just get distribution everywhere and they're getting hundreds of millions of views per month.

They also have other people posting them for them too, which is really smart.

Yeah, it's— I mean, there's this— I talked about this on a podcast a couple of weeks ago and that clip actually did well. It's like, you know, So these people will charge $35,000 to $40,000 a month and they'll give you like 5,000 pieces and it goes to like TikTok, Snap, Shorts, whatever, right? Instagram. And let's say from this 2-hour thing, we probably have like a bunch of clips.

Really? Yeah.

Sweet. I think we have a bunch of clips.

Have you been— have you been trying— have you been trying that out or no?

Yeah. So last month we got— and so my channel is relatively small, right? So we got 10 million views, 5 million from TikTok, 5.5 on YouTube. And like—

From this one agency?

No, we didn't use them. We're just doing it ourselves right now. Doing it yourself?

Wow, that's great. Yeah, 10 million.

10 million. Yeah, but it's like, but, but then I talked to somebody that worked with them and they were like, yeah, we're paying $35,000, $40,000 a month and they're getting 60 million views a month.

So you're basically a sixth of that for free.

Well, for free, I mean, whatever my costs are. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I mean, I'm just saying, man, podcasts could be interesting. Like You just have finance people. That could be interesting.

Yeah. I also think you also got to get some good clips, right? Like, I mean, Tate is already controversial in and of himself.

Oh, he's just a walking highlight reel.

He's a walking clip, right? And then same with Iman. Iman's pretty good at his clips too. So, you know, I definitely get it.

Yeah. So a couple more things. How do people start a business with minimal risk?

Well, you can start a business while you're still at your job. That's probably the easiest thing to do. When I was at my video game job, I had a friend of mine older than me by 10 years. He was like, you should start an LLC. I didn't even know how to start an LLC at the time. But just going through that process of starting an LLC and maybe even creating one type of product that you were thinking about selling or trying to make, going through that process, that's the best way to learn how to create a business. I think that you can read all the business books you want, but until you do it, you're not learning it.

Yeah.

What I did was I took $1,000 and I was like, all right, I'm going to try to create something with this $1,000 at the time that I had a full-time job. And that kind of got the wheels kind of turning because a lot of people are wantrepreneurs, like they want to do it, but they don't know where to start. I think a really easy way is while you have your job, start an LLC, start a sole proprietorship, try to sell something, anything, or try to create an app or something. Just get, get the wheels moving. And I think that helped a lot.

The key thing is to take the first step then.

Yeah. And actually like getting skin in the Because like, that's the easiest way to learn stuff.

Yeah.

You know, it's not— you don't learn it through a book. You got to learn it by like failing. Yeah.

Speaking of books, I mean, look, you have coaches. What's in your learning stack? Like, how do you— how do you get better?

Yeah, I watch a lot of— I learn the best from podcasts, to be honest. Podcasts and listening to others and getting inspired by others. And then also reading, like if they have books, like for example, Morgan Housel has a book, so I'll read that. But usually I only read the same books over and over rather than reading a bunch of books. And then if I don't like a book within the first like 30 pages, I just don't waste my time and try to finish it, if that makes sense.

So you're trying to reinforce the same kind of mental models, ideas, instead of trying to pull everything in?

Yeah, exactly. And then I will— I have a very open mind with books and I have a Kindle. And so I will buy a bunch of books. Like if Ali Abdaal has recommended a few books on his podcast, I've bought them all. I'll start reading through them and then if I don't like it, like there was one that he recommended, like a business framework book. I don't even remember the name, but I got like 50 pages in. I was like, this is really not for me. I only have one editor and that book was more for like an organization with like 20 people. I was like, this is not going to help me right now. So I kind of tabled it.

Yeah.

But I'll buy everything. Not everything, but I'll buy the books I'm interested in. I don't really read fiction, unfortunately. I should.

Yeah.

But I just read for business purposes. Yeah.

Got it. You know, I actually— so this is interesting. It's like, what advice for nor— what financial advice for normal people doesn't apply to rich people?

Yeah. So like the 401. 401 is a really good account for most people that have a hard time saving money because it's a forced savings account. The money gets taken out of your paycheck immediately, so you never see that money and it goes into your 401 for your retirement. Really great tax advantages, all that stuff. But I think a lot of rich people, especially really wealthy people, they might not even have a 401. They're not even worried about their 401 because the 401 max contribution is what, $30,000 this year? $23,500, I think, or $24,000.

I thought it was a little higher, but I don't know.

And I think it's $30,000 for catch-up. I don't know, we can look it up after. I've made a video on it, I should know the numbers, but I think it's $23,500. Yeah. And, uh, the idea is I think a lot of wealthy people, from my experience, they'd rather have liquidity, and they, they know what to do with that $23,500 to make them more Yeah. Than 8% in the long run. So a lot of them, they view the 401 as a forced savings account. And then also, let's say you're maxing out your 401 from the age of 22 to 32. That might, that might be like $200K that you don't have access to until you're 60. But what if you need that money? What if you wanted to buy a house? What if you wanted to, you know, get married, have a nice wedding? Or what if you had an incredible business opportunity that you just can't invest in because it's all in the 401. So that's probably something that's a little more unconventional.

Yeah.

But yeah, it's something I think everything comes down to information arbitrage at the end of the day.

It's like, what do you know that other people don't? And if you know more than other people and you see this investment opportunity, you're going to jump on it because what's gold to you, like other people don't see?

Sure, definitely agree.

Yeah. So what— this will be the final question here. So what are the controversial takes that you have on personal finance? Because everyone's saying the same thing, like, yeah, you got a 401 or you buy index funds and everything, right? So What are some of yours?

One was never buy a new car, which we already talked about. Yeah. I don't think that's that controversial. That's not that controversial?

Yeah.

I think, I think, okay, so I think in a Roth IRA, I think that you should, you should be aiming for absolute highest capital gains possible. And sometimes people will just say buy index funds in your Roth IRA, but in a Roth IRA, it's tax advantaged, tax-free at the end of the, at the end of the day. So you should be trying to hit some home runs in your Roth IRA. That's kind of controversial because a lot of people won't say that. But in my Roth IRA, I have like Nvidia, Apple, Tesla, you know, like I've got a lot of the Magnificent 7 in my Roth IRA. So it's like I'm trying to go for those big gains because it's gonna be tax-free. Um, I'm trying to think of some other controversial topics. Do you have any controversial— you know, Ramit Sethi, he's like, never buy a house. Yeah, that's controversial. Yeah, I don't know if I believe in that.

Yeah, I, I, I think it's That's the headline. I think he'll eventually own a home again. Yeah, like, I think it's just the, you know, it'll get views.

Yeah, his point is I think you need to run the numbers yourself and make sure it makes sense for you.

Yeah. I mean, I mean, mine is like everyone should have a business. Like, if you have the ability to, anybody that complains about not having freedom or not making what they want, they should go start a business. And like, you know, no matter what, you're gonna learn right now. Is everyone gonna succeed? Probably not. But I think If starting a business is the best personal growth engine and it forces you to take responsibility for yourself. And because the people that you see complaining everywhere, it's like most of them like didn't want to figure things out for themselves. And you said like, you know, people are lazy, right? Or maybe— I hope that's not the clip that we use. I'll say like a lot of people are lazy, right? And it's like, you know, at the end of the day, it's like, why don't you take responsibility for yourself?

Right.

So yeah. Anyway. Humphrey, this has been great.

This has been amazing. Thank you. Yeah.

What is the best way for people to find you online?

Yes. Find me on YouTube, Humphrey Yang. Please subscribe.

And on Instagram?

Sure. Instagram, Humphrey Talks, but mostly YouTube. I want you to subscribe to me on YouTube.

And then subscribe to his email list as well.

Yeah.

All right. Thanks, Humphrey.

Appreciate it. Nice to see you.