My interview with Your Friend Andy - Nuggets of crypto wisdom gold

Hey, this is James Pelton, and I wanted to take a little break from looking at projects today. And I have on, he's a YouTuber. His name is Your Friend Andy. You might be familiar with him, but I like to bring on YouTubers, just different YouTubers who have different philosophies. So I'm more of like a crazy degen, like go look at tons of different projects with high returns, but they're risky. And he's a little bit more conservative, I would say, and solid projects with a little bit lower returns, but they're more solid. So I like to have these different opinions on, and then you can kind of get both angles, and then you can come up with your own strategy. But he's been in crypto longer than I have, so I just wanted to bring him on and just kind of pick his brain and see how he thinks through things. So I hope you enjoy this, my talk with Your Friend Andy. But maybe you just want to start out by introducing yourself and then telling a little bit about your story of how you got to YouTube and how you got into crypto, and kind of start from there. Sure. Well, hello, my name is Andy. Some think that I'm their friend. I'm Your Friend Andy. And I've been on YouTube with this channel since June of 2020, but my first foray into YouTube was actually in 2015. I have a cinema channel called Burger Fiction. It has 150,000 subscribers and like 75 million views, and that was a lot of fun. I learned how to build on the platform with that channel, and that kind of gave me some appetite for the YouTube space. However, cinema channels are not highly monetizable, as it turns out, and studios are, you know, there are clips and stuff that we use in video essays and super cuts and stuff. Those clips are precious to the studio, so copyright strikes aplenty. So that was a fun like first trial into YouTube that kind of made me fall in love with the idea of it. And then I sat on the idea of personal finance, investing crypto channel for like two years or so, and I just kept seeing Andre Jicks, the Graham Steffans of the world, like raking in the dough. I'd watch their how much I made on YouTube videos, and I'm like, I have a passion for this type of stuff. Why, you know, I should go do this. If they can do it, I can do it. And then for whatever reason, I just, busyness or whatever, I just kind of sat on it for a long time. And then finally in 2020, my small business because of the pandemic was basically without income for several months. And I just said, okay, time to start this thing up, and kicked it off as a general personal finance channel, general investing kind of channel, which I do like all that stuff. But eventually I kept talking about more and more crypto on the channel because that's really truly where I'm the most excited. And now it's full crypto channel, I guess. I've made a full pivot, and the results speak for themselves because as soon as I made the pivot, and I started talking about what I'm really, truly excited about all the time, and because the market has been so exciting, maybe not on days like today, but other days, it's got a lot of traction. But anyways, crypto is something I've been into since heavily since 2017. I first tried crypto in 2014, built a Litecoin mining rig, and all kinds of stuff like that, but didn't get really serious about it until 2017. And then all the big bubble happened, and the big pop and crash, and lost a lot of money, learned a lot of hard lessons. And when a lot of people gave up, I just kept trudging through the past four or five years, and kind of stuck to my strategies, and stuck to my guns, and put my money where my mouth was, and it's put me in a good position now. So I'm very excited about what the future of it all looks like. Yeah, no, that sounds similar to me. When I started my YouTube channel, I was intending to be more of just a passive income guy, but then it was like, well, you can make 12% annually on this housing fund, or you can make 26% monthly on strong notes, or something like that. It was hard to get real excited about these other passive income plays. And so then, yeah, it just was pretty much every passive income thing I was looking at was crypto-related. So yeah, that's kind of a similar story, too. It's a funny paradigm shift, though, because now, if I talk about a more conservative crypto passive income project that pays 30% APY per year, I will get comments that are like, this seems dumb, a dumb place to put my money. This is terrible, terrible returns. I can get 10 times that with this other project. So it's good and it's bad, because I'm really excited about all those high APY projects and stuff, but will some of these last another year, two years? That's a big question. Along with that, so on days like today, it makes me think more about, okay, how can I, if we enter a bear market, let's say, how do you approach taking profit and compounding and getting into new projects? Do you take any out of crypto into other investments, or how do you kind of think through some of those things? Yeah, so I mean, I have a profit-taking plan for the next big bull run, but if we enter another full-on crypto winter or bear market, like more than a current correction, then I'm just a hold it until the next cycle kind of a guy. I'm not very good at timing the markets. I've tried in the past to time things, and that's been unsuccessful. So I just literally have a spreadsheet that has reasonable, in my mind, price points for some of my biggest holdings and how many of the coins at each price point I sell and take profit in a bull market situation, while still maintaining a moon bag, just in case it does another 1000X after my more conservative targets. But in a bear market, my strategy, like the last one, it's just buy as much good stuff as I can, try to find the plays that will continue to pay me, even during a bear market, and load up on other things that I think are important in a bull market. For example, in the last one, I've bought lots of GPUs, I've bought lots of mining motherboards, I've bought lots of mining rig frames, I've bought all this hardware, and I use some of it, but a lot of it I just have impressively selling off on eBay in the past year or so, as it's all blown up. And I bought it for bargain basement prices, just absolutely rock bottom prices, and sold it for 20, 30X what I paid for it. Wow. So I'm a big fan. I really think you can become extremely wealthy if you play a bear market correctly. But the catch is you have to have the conviction, you have to also have the money, you have to have cash flow from something else, and you have to be able to put money into the market and be willing to publicly look stupid for a while because everyone's thinking, what an idiot, you're buying this stuff, it's clearly the end of crypto, it was a scam, whatever, and then hopefully you come out the other side much happier and much better place. Yeah. Well, it's funny how psychologically how difficult it is to buy things when they're down, and then how easy it is to buy when they're up, even though that makes no logical sense. Like, you definitely should not buy when it's at high, but psychologically, even knowing that, it's really hard for me on days like today to be like, oh, I'm gonna go out and buy a bunch of stuff, just as psychologically difficult. So maybe you could tell me, so I'm a bit newer to crypto than you are, so I was pretty skeptical of crypto. Really, it was the final dip in May of 2021 when it went way down, and I was like, there it is, it's the end of crypto, and then it came back so quickly, stronger than it ever had been before. That's when I started to like, oh, I don't think this, I don't think it's possible for this to go anywhere, for it to go away. So what would you say to someone who's newer to crypto, who's been in it for maybe like a year, opposed to somebody who's been in it for five years, what lessons would you say you might give to newer people, or I guess nuggets of wisdom that maybe I could glean from your experience? Sure, I mean, the May stuff, that kind of tells the story of crypto. It's both, you have this amazing potential for upside and asymmetric returns, but also if China bans Bitcoin mining, and at the same time, Elon Musk says we're no longer accepting Bitcoin for our cars, that's what happens to the market. There's like a 50% dip in two weeks, which is wild. So you have to be able to withstand the downturns to enjoy the upturns. I mean, I'm a big believer in a little bit of boring investing when it comes to crypto. Now, I am far outside the realm of normal traditional investing to most of the world. Most of the world thinks I'm a crazy person with 75% of my net worth in cryptocurrency, like that's wild stuff. But within the crypto world, I'm seen a little bit more conservative sometimes because I love Bitcoin. I love my core position in that, and I love some safe, quote unquote, safer plays. I kind of preach that I like to build a foundation, and then I build on that foundation, I add passive income sources, and I add some highly risky ones, some highly risky plays with potential payoff. But basically, if some of those plays go to zero, it doesn't kill me. It doesn't kill my entire position, which I really like. So that's something I always tell people. But honestly, when it comes to like volatility and stuff, it's, I really think it's just a few factors. It's like if you buy things, and then a few weeks later they're down, and it's just like ruining your day, it's ruining, it's all you can think about, there's a chance that you might be just overexposed, just have too much money in the thing, and you shouldn't have put so much in, just you weren't listening to your gut, which I think is highly important in this space. But also, you just might not understand what you bought. Like so many people buy because I talk about something, or you talk about something, or someone tweeted something on Twitter, and we don't want to miss out on that ride, a rocket ship ride. And that's so common, and we don't actually know what the thing is we're buying. We haven't spent hours and hours researching, because we just want to catch it before the price changed, you know? And I think just fundamentally understanding, even if it's like an ultra risky, maybe even potentially scammy project, just the fact that we don't research them a little bit to understand exactly the nature of it is a big problem. And then too, just once you understand it, once you've sized your position accordingly, you just need time in the market. Like my first year of crypto, oh my gosh, the ups and downs wrecked my world, you know? But the more you understand it, and the more conviction you have, and just the longer you sit in the space, like the easier the stuff becomes. Like I've, my portfolio was, my crypto portfolio was $2 million at the beginning of January. And then two weeks later, it was 1.5. So I lost $500,000 in, you know, two weeks. And I don't, it honestly doesn't bother me. I was making videos about it and talking about it with a smile on my face. It really, at this point, I mean, maybe it will bother me if it drops from 1.5 to like 100,000, you know? Maybe I'm having a serious talk with myself. But most of the moves in the space don't really bother me like they used to, you know? I still prefer it all to just line to go up, up and to the right forever. But I just, lots of time under my belt, you know? That's one of the biggest things I tell people in the space. Yeah, no, that's super helpful. I really like what you said too. I had a friend, wealthy investor friend who, he said he does this sleep at night check on his investments. And if there's ever an investment that's keeping you up at night, then that means you're overexposed. You put too much into it. That's good, yeah. That's like the gauge that he uses. That's really good. I also like too what you said about FOMO because I'm finding that in myself that every project that I hear that's doing well, I'm like, I gotta get into that, gotta get into that quick. And eventually, there's been so many that I've had to just take a step back and say, okay, I'm gonna just rejoice that they're doing so well and I'm gonna just watch this one from the sidelines. So, I mean, I don't think there's ever a point where you can fully escape FOMO. I mean, I still succumb to it. I think you get better at handling it and how you handle the emotion and stuff, I guess. But still, you see things, it's like you knew about it early, you passed on it for whatever reason, you look at it again, it's just like taking off and everybody's talking about it. It's really hard to say, well, I'm either gonna see what happens or if I do jump into it, I'm gonna have a very specific size in which I'm okay with losing it or whatever. But controlling the urges is still tough no matter how much experience you have with all this. So, this is completely speculation, but where do you think we're at? I mean, you've been in it a lot longer, but do you buy into bear market and things are going way down? Do you think this is just a correction? Again, complete speculation, but where do you think we're at? Yeah, every time I talk about predictions and stuff with people, it's like, I'm just a guy on the internet, what do I know? I don't know anything. But I mean, me personally, I don't think we're entering crypto winter, I don't think we're entering a full on bear market with an 80% correction yet. I'm still very optimistic about this year and next year, personally. I still think we have a big, bright future ahead of us, at least in the next year or so term. But I don't think we have reached a tipping point, an adoption point yet where we have, we've gotten past the normal crypto cycle. We will probably have another 80% correction, but we might have $250,000 Bitcoin, $15,000 Ethereum, what have you before that happens. And then we correct down to levels maybe that are higher even than we're at now. I don't know what that looks like. But I do think at some point, crypto does hit that inflection point, there's a tipping point in which we had such adoption that we are more or less in a super cycle that where there's small corrections, but we never have the massive on off switch like we have had in the past, which has repeated itself since Bitcoin was incepted. But short term, no, I'm optimistic. I think 2022 is gonna be a great year, even despite the fact that Bitcoin, well, it's back above 40 now, but it was under 40 for a moment there this morning. I'm optimistic about basically everything I'm in for the next year, year and a half, but who knows? We'll see. What about you? What do you think? Yeah, well, I have this Bitcoin ticker, if you can see it on my screen in the background. And so I try, on days like today, usually I unplug it because I'd rather just not know if it's gonna come back, I'd rather just not know. But yeah, so I haven't really been around for any of the crypto winters. And so it seems to me, there's been 10 times in the last two months where I'm like, uh-oh, this is the end, I'm gonna lose everything. But then it comes back. And so it's hard, every time it drops, it seems to come back. So it's just hard for me, from my perspective, to be like, oh, nope, this is the time, it's going down. And it seems to me like we're at a much different place of adoption than we've ever been before. Like I just, Microsoft's buying into Metaverse stuff, and Facebook changes their name to Meta, and countries are coming out saying, hey, we're gonna accept, the FBI put together a team that's gonna investigate Bitcoin, things like that. So all those things make me just feel like we're probably not gonna have the same cycles that we've had in the past. But again, like you said, we're just guys on YouTube. Like don't, don't listen to us. My last video, or a couple videos ago, I talked about how crypto YouTubers don't know anything. Like we're just, basically I'm just saying what I do. And not saying it's gonna work for you, not saying, and me and you have very different philosophies. So you're kind of more like foundation first, and then do some of the weirder stuff. And I'm kind of like, let's do the weirder stuff, and then we'll use the foundation as like a savings account. And then I had a Jack from Jack's Passive Income, and he's like, just do the weirder stuff. So there's kind of all sides here. So, well I don't want to take up too much of your time, so I appreciate you hopping on here, but I wanted to just kind of end with maybe like your top plays for people. So again, I would consider you kind of a safer, like more rational than a lot of the stuff that I do. So just what would be your like top projects that you would not financially advise, but that you would financially nudge, is what I say. You should definitely 100% put your money into these projects and invest. Right, yep. Don't listen to me. I'll sign a document saying that I'm liable if they don't work out. Yes, don't listen to me. But yeah, so one of my top ones is easy. I just put out a video before we jumped on this about it, which is Flux. I think you should take a look at Flux. Flux nodes are awesome. It's one of the few node projects I have run since they came to be in 2019 that still exists and still pays me out. I think this project has an incredible future ahead of it still, and it's already been on one hell of a run so far. It's got an amazing team and all that good stuff, but it's just a really cool idea. It's got actual use case. They actually have adoption. They actually have like things happening on their network and stuff like that. And more so, it's just the lasting power has impressed me. But it's, again, you know, the lowest tier node is like 30% APY. So it's not gonna melt your face, but it is an incredible APY compared to the traditional world. And they're also real nodes. So there is some complexity to setting up a cloud server and actually an Ubuntu Linux server running the commands, launching this node. But I guess you get to learn some cool skills if you haven't done that before, which is why I love it. But yeah, Flux is my number one position. Bitcoin, for the longest time, was numero uno in my portfolio by size and weight. But because of this run that Flux has been on for the past six months or so, it's now my number one position. And it's definitely the one I'm the most, had the most conviction about other than Bitcoin. But another passive project that maybe you've heard of, it's also not super sexy with the actual returns, but I love the project, which is Presearch. Presearch nodes, they are a decentralized search engine. So they don't wanna compete with Google as much as, in my mind, I mean, maybe they'd say differently, but in my mind, it's not a Google competitor, it's a like DuckDuckGo competitor. So fully private search engine, but instead of being centralized like that one, it's spread out with user run nodes, which is super cool. And as you run a node with very small requirements, I think it's, right now you can buy the 2000 Presearch tokens, which is the minimum staking amount for like 500 bucks. So it's a very easy entry point for a lot of people, but it doesn't make very much money right now. But you run those and as searches happen on your node, you get these returns and stuff and there's other cool ways you can earn. And they've got a cool way to like advertise and make money with like a stake. You can use some of your pre-tokens to stake a keyword. And then when someone searches for that keyword on their search engine, your ad or your affiliate link or whatever you wanna stake on there shows up at the top. So I'm actually making money through some of my affiliate links on Presearch by staking pre-tokens, which is just a really neat like dynamic they have. But again, fairly unsexy returns overall compared to a lot of this new crop of nodes. That's why we have you on here is for non-sexy. I mean, I put money into plenty of the, things that are popping off and everybody's talking about. It's just probably not insane amounts of money compared to some people. And then if you want another, maybe a little on the conservative side, I just can't help but keep talking about Anchor Protocol. I love Anchor Protocol. That one is 19.5% APY. But again, I view that one as a savings account without the FDIC insurance. But if you are used to a bank account at your bank that pays you 0.05% APY or something like that, and you can put $10,000 on there and make $10 a year or something like that, which is sad, then this is very exciting because it's nearly 20% APY. It's based on their stable coin, UST, US TerraCoin. This is a Terra Luna project. And I think it's rad. It's just super cool, super easy to use. The way it's built and background is very transparent, how the money works and it's sustainable at the moment. And it's a sliding scale APY. So if it does, if things slip, they can adjust that so they're not paying out too much. But it's a great place to like, as you take some profits, like just put some in there and just stop thinking about it. It's not like, I'm not investing into it like I do some of these other projects, but it's a place where I can just capture some profits here and there and just dump them in there and just not think about it and still earn a very respectable return over the long haul. Yeah, no, I agree. Anchor is, and that's exactly how I use it too, is I use kind of my crazy stuff. And then pretty much whenever I take profits, I take a percentage of it and stick it into Anchor and just have that sitting there. So no, that's awesome. Well, thank you so much for coming on. And just collabing like this. I just wanted to introduce you to my audience and my audience to you. So I want, if you're watching this, go follow Andy and listen to his conservative views on things. He does talk about some D-Gen stuff too. I see it on there from time to time. Oh, and it's getting worse. I think I'm getting more and more addicted to the D-Gen stuff. So yes, plenty of that. Well, you know what happens is with the foundation, if you're going to hold Bitcoin, well, it's hard, it gets kind of boring, right? Like, okay, I bought Bitcoin, I'm holding it. So you have to go a little more D-Gen to keep things interesting. Oh, it's definitely fun. But also, it's like I built this big foundation. So now it's like when I do these D-Gen plays and stuff, it's like, if they go to, it's like, who cares? I put $4,000 into this one, $10,000 into this one. It's like, I still have my core positions. I feel untouchable when it comes to these D-Gen plays, messing with that stuff. So yeah, it's like I can do this stuff and it's a lot of fun. But yeah, it's certainly very exciting. It's tons of fun. Yeah, and for my audience too, I just want you guys to just hear different perspectives on things. So he does foundation and then D-Gen. I do D-Gen into foundation. But just listen to multiple people and then do your own thing. Find your own risk tolerance level. But yeah, I just, I appreciate you coming on here, taking the time out of your day to do this. And I think my audience will really enjoy it. Yeah, James, well, nice to finally meet you in digital person. And thanks for having me on your channel and everything. I really appreciate it. We got to do this online now. Yeah, no, I would love that. Just let me know when. I'm happy to come on. I think it'd be fun sometime to do like a YouTube crypto in-person meetup. Like just get everybody together. Yeah, I'm down. That might be on my to-do list. My to-do list is getting kind of long of things I'm working on. Yeah, that's how it works, yeah. So, well, hey, thanks, man. Appreciate it. And I hope the market's turned green today. And yeah. Well, yeah, let's chat and connect again sometime in the future. And then I also brainstorm when I should have you, love to have you on my channel and all that good stuff. Return the favor. Sure, yeah, just let me know when. I'm down whenever, so. Cool, James. All right, nice meeting you. Have a good day. Yeah, nice to meet you. Love you.