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- [00:00]
A
You can literally price the stock market in Bitcoin. You can price houses in Bitcoin. You can price anything in Bitcoin. And Bitcoin is. It just breaks people's brains because we've never known a truly deflationary technology, even though technology is inherently deflationary. Like, you would think, right? Like, if we wanted to make a car today, it's not like we have to have Henry Ford, you know, line where everybody has their one piece that they do now. You can literally have robots automate the entire thing, and all of a sudden the price of cars should go down. So why does it go up? Because we don't have. We have, like, a broken money, basically. You know what I mean? That's really what it is. So. Hey there.
- [00:30]
B
I'm Cody McGuffey. I'm a husband dad of three, and I'm the founder of Ever Be Everbee.
- [00:35]
A
Ever Be Everbee, where we serve over.
- [00:37]
B
A million creators across the globe, helping them grow thriving online businesses. I believe every single human is a creator, and I believe every single creator should own a business, a business that gives them the freedom to build the life that they dream of. Built online is where creators, entrepreneurs, and leaders get real insights, real stories, and the edge to build something that actually lasts. This is where the next generation of builders get built. Ryan. What's up, man?
- [01:05]
A
Hey. Good to see you, Cody. It's been a while.
- [01:06]
B
I know, man. It's been a while. It's probably been, what, eight months since I think you came on last?
- [01:10]
A
You know what, man? Time is flying. I can't believe It's August of 2025 already, because it feels like just yesterday I was planning the year, you know, I was, like, trying to say, like, what do I want to do in 2025? And now we're two thirds through the way.
- [01:21]
B
You know what? You. You're so right. I was just thinking about that today too. I think about that pretty often, actually, everywhere I set goals. I'm really big on setting goals. It excites me. I get a. I get a lot of inspiration and. And movement, momentum from setting goals kind of throughout the year, but mostly at the beginning of the year, naturally. And I tend to try to check in on those goals, you know, throughout the year, of course. But I noticed that when goal setting, it can work against you a little bit from, like, an excitement standpoint when you're just like, oh, my God, I forgot about that goal. And, like, we're already in August, and I haven't really made any progress on that. Goal. And so I kind of like use it. It's almost like a double edged sword, you know what I'm saying? Do you ever experience that?
- [02:00]
A
For me, yes. Like I need goals for when I'm having like an, an off day on my brain. Like some days I can just get after the really hard things. Other days, like, I still want to be productive, but maybe I didn't sleep as well the night before. So when I have like almost like a predetermined list of things to get done, I have things that maybe don't require as much like mental activity. And so I'll just go down to that, that part of the list.
- [02:19]
B
You said like big yearly goals. Like I'm gonna like double my net worth this year or I'm going to like completely remove myself from like a bottleneck in the business and I'm gonna like get back 20 more hours of my time per week or so. Like, do you have big goals like that or do you not really think that way?
- [02:35]
A
Not, not always. I think some things are like cyclical on like a, maybe like a longer than a one year timeline. So I think I just kind of take it in stride. But I definitely factor that in at the beginning of the year when I'm trying to project what I want to accomplish for the year.
- [02:46]
B
Cool. Yeah. I feel like I try to group my goals into like three like family, health and wealth. And families are, it depends on what you're trying to like build. But my family is one thing and then the health is usually more objective. It's very objective. It's like, oh, I'm trying to like decrease my body fat percentage or gain X amount of pounds of muscle like lose 20 pounds. Right. Like it's very measurable. And then that's what I like about that. And then business same thing. It's like you either grew in revenue or you did not. You grew in profitability or you did not. Like you either grew this, this, this or not. You know, bank account got to this or not. So I like those things for sure. Yeah. Anyway, that's, that's, it's funny we were talking about that, but that's the thing that excites me.
- [03:25]
A
Yeah, man, I hear you. I try not to set like the, like, I like to let things kind of flow to me kind of deal. So I don't, I don't like to get too like quantifiable with my goals as long as I'm like staying on top of things, you know, like kind of like you said, like in the gym, bank account, as long as I can cover what I need to cover, you know, all that, all that good stuff.
- [03:41]
B
Do you think it serves you to, to be less, less specific? Is it better to be less specific for you in your case, or have you just not really tried to be more specific?
- [03:49]
A
But you know what's funny is by being less specific and trying to be open to what you know, I don't want to say like what the universe is going to provide me or whatever, but it's however you kind of, it's kind of like what I'm, what I'm feeling excited about. Like I want to be able to kind of dedicate some time to it. One of the benefits of being self employed and then definitely a skill set that I've been cultivating over the years is how to like monetize things. So kind of segueing into what I would love to talk some to you, some about today with investing and whatnot. Like that kind of presented itself to me even though it's been something I've been passionate about for the last like five years, really since 2020 March, I noticed kind of a similar almost setup in the markets to 2020 March when everything had sold off massively due to Covid. And back in April of this year with the tariff sell off, you know, I noticed a very similar almost position in the markets and got kind of sucked in. You know, I was almost like obsessing over it for a while because I saw the potential for markets to really bounce back. And you know, now we're talking in August, so it seems obvious. But I did put even. I have a separate YouTube channel, much smaller for investing videos. And I, I put the proof out there so it's timestamped. Showed you exactly what I saw and basically said, hey, like the market bottomed. There's a massive opportunity ahead if what I see comes to fruition. And we're right in the middle of.
- [05:08]
B
It now, so that's so cool. Okay, cool. Let's. Before we jump that to that, let's. For the people that don't know who you are, which is probably a small, small segment, but who, who's Ryan? And then we'll jump back to the, to the investing piece.
- [05:19]
A
Yeah, I'm a former web developer, so I had that skill set, technical mind. I like to build things and you know, one benefit of learning to program too. You see things in a little bit more like objectively. So I can see things kind of almost like modularly like, like print on demand is here. Amazon is here, Etsy is here, web developer business is here. Like they can exist in like their own little thought bubbles in my mind and I can kind of cultivate them together without having to be all in one or the other. Yeah. So former web developer turned, you know, I don't want to say e commerce expert or guru because when am I ever truly an expert? I feel like there's always so much more to know and I love learning, I'm addicted to learning. But I started Amazon business, Etsy business sold on other platforms including eBay, Walmart, Redbubble and my goal is just to create passive income streams where I'm selling things online, but the fulfillment is automated. So like 95 plus percent of the business is automated, allowing me to scale and literally make money when I sleep. And then the next phase is kind of multiply my wealth through investing.
- [06:19]
B
Beautiful. And to just nail that down once more. Why do you do all those things? Like what are you trying to chase after? Yes, I get that like you're creative and you know, you like building things but like you, I know that I know how you, how you are. I believe I do at least is like you're, you're going after your goal and is that goal to you said make money in your sleep. Why is that important? Is it, is it freedom or what are you chasing after? Is it like life? Life, freedom time freedom, financial freedom. Why are you doing all this?
- [06:47]
A
Yeah, one weird thing about me is like I, it's not even really as much about the money. Kind of like earlier when I said it, I don't think about how much money I kind of have. I've never really worried too much about that. I think I grew up with gaming and so I've almost like gamified life where, where money is the point keeping system. And I've always tried to like be good at what I spend my time doing. So it's kind of like I gave up computer games, played the game of life where money is the point system and just tried to be good at it. You know, found different ways to not only make money but also things that I can get, you know, excited about. That's why I have my YouTube channel where I talk about launching online businesses, et cetera.
- [07:23]
B
Yeah, very cool. And, and for anyone that doesn't know who Ryan is, I mean Ryan, to me you are know, inspiring person. You're also very down to earth person, very relatable and you break things, bring complex things down to like the, in their simple form so people can actually understand and Actually apply those things. You're really, really good at doing that and just. Yeah. I always look forward to our conversation. So thanks for coming.
- [07:46]
A
I would say too, I wanted to say, like, you're an inspiration to me, Cody too, because you're like really excelling at business, you know, and it doesn't seem like anything intimidates you, but you also have like a family on the, the, you know, other side of the camera lens and you know, we don't even see them or talk about them, but I know they're there and I'm sure you're like a great dad and a great husband and that's something that I aspire to be too in the future. You know, money is having the money now, having that taken care of now, when I have more control over my time is definitely going to hopefully serve me on the back end when I, you know, I'm raising kids and whatnot.
- [08:14]
B
Thank you for saying that, man. I really appreciate that and I am very proud of my life and I think anybody listening to this, they should be. You should be proud of your own life. I think it's really important for us. Certainly to me, I am certainly not perfect by any means. I'm not even trying to be perfect. I would say there was a point in my life where I was trying to be perfect, like the perfect Cody, like my, my ideal perfect self. But I recognized eventually that, oh, that's actually like super taxing to try to chase perfection, like, stop that, you know, so like that's, it's kind of a new realization. But, but yeah, I am proud of, of I, for anyone that doesn't know that because I don't talk about that all the time. It's like, yeah, I'm married. We just had our 10 year anniversary and three kids. I have a 6 year old, a 4 year old, a 8 month old boy. So I have boy, girl, boy. And I have a business that, that, that I'm, I get to talk about entrepreneurship and creating businesses and creating lifestyle freedom and financial freedom and time freedom every day. Like, dude, I'm literally like in a dream and I'm blessed for sure. And I, I see that in you too. And that's why I love hanging out with people that see things similarly. So. That's awesome.
- [09:24]
A
Yeah, man, that's. It's funny because not everybody aspires to that, but I definitely am right there with you, you know, in, in that and I've only been married for a year, but it's, it's great how it does change you, like, you kind of alluded to, you don't have to constantly be chasing perfection. You can kind of just kind of relax and find comfort in, like, who you are and who your partner accepted you to be and then just. Yeah, I love. But I love the idea of continually trying to set goals like we talked about, and improve ourselves. Like, it's not just about money, right? It's. It's literally like family, health, wealth, I think, is the order you put it in. I would put it in a similar order.
- [09:51]
B
Yeah, totally. And then if you have spirituality, which I. I am faithful. So, like, I have that inside of, like, my health category and. Of course, but. Very cool, man. All right, now that we kind of laid that you built your online businesses through all those marketplaces and these different strategies that you've done in the past, and you mentioned the next phase that. That you do for your personal strategy is to, one, build income streams through online e commerce mostly, and you deploy that capital, the profits, into investing to maximize that wealth.
- [10:24]
A
Is that.
- [10:24]
B
Is that correct?
- [10:26]
A
That is an accurate assessment, yes.
- [10:28]
B
Then let's. Let's talk about that vehicle, because you have a. For someone that builds. Builds businesses, you eventually have success, and you eventually have a surplus of cash, surplus of profits, and a bigger bank account. And it's a beautiful, beautiful, beautiful problem to have. And the next thing that you do is like, okay, well, I have money in my bank. How much money of this should I invest? How much money should I not invest? Should I stay for the rainy day? What vehicles do I want to invest in? You have the stock market. You have real estate, you have treasury bonds, you have Bitcoin. You have cryptocurrency. Okay, what kind of cryptocurrency? Embrace that. Open. So that's where we're at today, I think. Let's dive in there. Yeah.
- [11:07]
A
It's a dangerous topic. And I didn't prepare any notes of a linear, logical way to go through this. Um, it's a dangerous topic because, like, I could talk. I could probably stand on a soapbox and talk for, like, four hours straight without a. A moderator needed about all this stuff. And some. A lot of it, I would say, I know to be true. Other stuff is more conceptual, like even just the idea of money. You know what I mean? Like, what is it really, if it's not backed by something like, you know what I mean? It's more or less just a. In my mind, like a social contract, like an agreement, like, hey, you know, we'll exchange this unit of currency called a US Dollar, you know what happened prior to US Dollars existing? Well, they exchanged a different unit of currency. Right. Back in the day dollars were backed by gold. Now ever since was like the 70s, you know, we're off the gold standard. Now it's just backed by faith and what the, the backing of the US government or something like that. But I think it's important to just say like the idea of money, the concept of, of currencies has changed over time. So we should always like I like I love to zoom out and just be respective of the fact that like while we were born into a system where US Dollars are the norm and transacting them is the norm and interest rates kind of setting the price of money is the norm, we're looking at the system from within and there have been and will be others completely different systems in the past and in the future that would look at our current system be like wow, like here's 10 things that were very obviously suboptimal. Right. That probably don't benefit us everybody watching this video but benefit people at the top of the hierarchical control structure is typically how it works that are responsible for enacting the rules of the game almost completely.
- [12:40]
B
I agree with this. What would, would you. Let's talk maybe less about not trying to give advice here. So by the way, blanket statement, this is none of this is financial advice. We're going to be talking about what Ryan is doing and Ryan, so what, what are you doing right now? What is your strategy?
- [12:55]
A
Yeah, so I would say I first and foremost do believe in diversification. I don't like to be all in any one asset class you have like US Dollars that you might keep in a bank account and your bank account depending on the type will pay you interest rate. Interest rates are kind of set by, you know, we don't have to get into that. But the interest rates are kind of derived from other people, essentially humans that just put pen to paper and decide what they're going to be, which is a little bit weird. But then there's other interest rates that are kind of set by free market on things like Treasuries, but they still are kind of also sensitive to the, you know, Federal Reserve rates that they set. So it's a little bit of gameplay here almost a little bit of a rigged game is kind of why I say that. It's not like necessarily always everything has to be rigged, but there's also like there's human tampering basically. It's not like we don't have really have Free markets, but so you have, like, money that you can put in a bank account worth noting. Just while we're on the topic of bank accounts that like fdic, I think covers, like, you know how they say we'll ensure up to like a quarter million dollars if anything goes wrong? The reality is they've got something like 1% of the assets that they cover like, that they claim to be able to cover. They've actually got, you know, 1% of what they claim to be able to cover. So it's 9 or 99 is like unfunded. If they ever actually need to be called upon United. So just take that into consideration.
- [14:07]
B
I think there's. I mean, not that you mean to go super technical. We're going to try not to go super technical.
- [14:12]
A
Sorry. Yeah, I'm already in the weeds, but I.
- [14:14]
B
It takes me to the weeds too. But yeah, there's. There's such things like sweep, sweeping. Sweeping accounts now too, which I think are a little bit more helpful. I'm not sure if they're necessarily the solution to that, but it gives you at least a little bit more peace of mind.
- [14:25]
A
Yeah. And with, with banking, how it works is like you're. We won't talk a bunch about banks, but it's like just real quick, like one minute, start the clock. It's like we're also a un. What is it like an un. I'm never forget the word now, but like we're an uncovered creditor on something. Creditor to the bank. So it's like if a bank ever went under, essentially they would give us stock in that bank as a failed bank to cover the deposits that we had. And then they take the deposits that we do put in the bank and they buy Treasuries on the back end with it. Which is how banks essentially go under when interest rates go up. If they ever need to, like sell those Treasuries back into the market. Well, higher interest rates mean the actual Treasuries go down in value. And so if they ever needed to, like, sell them to cover withdrawals, which is what happened to like Silicon Valley bank just like two years ago, I think, when essentially they made it sound like it was a bank run, but it was just 10 large depositors all withdrew the money at the same time and it collapsed the bank. So this is, you know, again, some weird stuff going on there. But anyway, so we can have money in the bank getting interested. We have an inflation rate. Essentially, it's the purchasing power of our dollars gets eroded by some percentage Every year we kind of think of it annually, but it is measured month to month by a metric that the government essentially tracks and it's been tampered with over the years. So it's not necessarily as reflective of the truth as it maybe used to be. Usually in favor of hiding the true inflation rate. Then you can buy other assets. So you could buy assets that hopefully do either a better job of maintaining your purchasing power relative to inflation or maybe even outpace inflation, which should be your goal. So it's like you could have money in the bank where you collect interest that will always be under the inflation rate. You could buy an like a hard asset like gold and you could self custody it maybe in like a safe or there's other ways of going about it. There's like ETFs, like there's literally and I say ETF, that's an exchange traded fund that you could buy in your stock trading account. Like whether it's Robin Hood, whether it's Schwab, whatever it is you could buy. Like GLD is the ticker. And when you buy that they're essentially supposed to be buying the physical gold on the back end. So it has a, essentially it's reflected in the price of physical gold, whether it's, you know, up or down. So you can get exposure to hard assets, gold, silver, etc. I personally, like I said, I like to be hedged. So I'd like to have some exposure to hard metals like that. I like to have exposure to the stock market. And what's cool is again there's ETFs that you can buy where they will like you could essentially put, let's just say like $500 into an ETF. And by doing that they will break it down on the back end where you get exposure to like all of the companies in let's say the S&P 500, which is more or less the stock market. I think most people would say. So you don't have to, you don't have to go and worry about buying one share of the top 500 companies. You would essentially get like an equal weighted. Well there's weight essentially too. Like you know, the S&P 500, the top like seven companies represent like a massive percentage. They're like.
- [17:08]
B
But they're buying like they're buying an industry like essentially like distributing across some industry. So the industry goes up, you kind of ride up with it rather than betting.
- [17:15]
A
Yeah. So there's ETFs that where like you can get equal exposure to every company in the S&P 500. But like, if you do that, you're going to underperform massively because most of the money's piled into what they would call like blue chip high beta stocks like Google, Amazon, Apple, Nvidia, like all the names you're familiar with. So essentially what you can keep this very simple is how I should have said it. You can buy an ETF called the Spy, just one, for example, that will track the S&P 500 for you automatically and it'll pay you a dividend. And to me, if you just track the S&P 500, which is the default performance, if you just buy the SPY etf, you keep pace with my measure of inflation. My personal measure of inflation is the performance of the S&P 500. Then they pay you a dividend, so you essentially are outperforming it just slightly, you know. And then other asset classes include like, maybe higher risk stuff like cryptocurrencies and whatnot. Treasuries you could debate, but I'm not busy.
- [18:05]
B
What do you think the inflation rate is? Just in, like, what do you think it is right now? And what is it? What is it published right now? Is it three and a half percent now? And it was super high.
- [18:13]
A
You know, what I would rather do is just go to Google and type in the S&P 500 in the last year, and it's up 20.4% in the last year. So to me, 20.4% loss of purchasing power. Why do you think?
- [18:27]
B
Because that goes up. Why, why does buying power go down for us?
- [18:31]
A
Because to me personally, it's just my belief having, like, I didn't mention that since March of 2020, like, I've kind of obsessed. I have like more of an obsessive kind of personality when I really want to understand things. So, like, I've obsessed over it almost daily for the first four years, and I would say 2024 to 2025, not as much. But I believe that, like the people who. Have you ever seen, like, the wealth disparity charts where it's like the top 1% has like 40% of the wealth or something, and then what are the top 1% of the top 1%? It's just the same disparity all over again. I believe that those people, they don't have like, you know, money's fake, right? There's nothing backing our US Dollars like we kind of set up initially. So they're not like holding US Dollars, right? Their money is derived from the value of assets that they hold.
- [19:13]
B
When I Google though, when I see like when I Google, it says annual. The annual annual inflation rate of USA is 2.7% right now.
- [19:21]
A
Is that even true? Because I think CPI inflation is even higher. But maybe, maybe keep in mind too, it's a, it's a moving metric. Like they've redefined the CPI inflation enough times over the years where it's, it's not really reflective at all of like an average, you know, American standard of living.
- [19:37]
B
Got it. Yeah. And 20% aren't say, I mean that would mean that basically groceries would be be up 20% higher than, you know, in August than it was in January.
- [19:49]
A
That would be like an annual basis because it might grow up like X percent month over month. And this is another thing that like not many people gras very well. Like for me, it's like I had to kind of think about it a lot, but it's that it's the idea of compounding and it wanted to kind of bring me back to initially when you were talking about investing. Like compound growth is a special, special thing and it works against us in inflation, you know, because if inflation is up like even just 1% month over month over month, it's not, you know, it think of it like this. If it went from a hundred dollars, like if we're just measuring something compound a hundred dollars and it's up 1% now it's 101, then it's up 1% again, now it's 1% of 101, not of 100, you know, and that, that gets out of control very quickly. Which, dude, I could, like I said, man, if I'm doing a bad job talking about this, like I could talk so much about this, but like inflation and asset value appreciation, I think almost makes it too obvious that this thing called dollars, the US Dollar is getting away from us. And it's not a new phenomenon, right? This happens like all over the world with other currencies. So then all of a sudden you have asset classes form bubbles to take pressure off of the easiest to spot metrics. Like to me, the, the S&P 500 having gone up 20.4% in the last year, they don't want it going up 20% in my mind. And I came to this conclusion that I'm going to share with you in a second on my own, independently, just thinking and thinking and thinking that when bitcoin kind of popped up, and I think bitcoin's like kind of misunderstood, I can go into it a little bit if you'd like, but like it as an asset class. Now over $2 trillion market cap is taking pressure off of things like the s and P500 and maybe even real estate. I mean, again, the people with the money, like, they just need to park it in assets that appreciate relative to US Dollars. Meaning, like, they bought it for a million, they wanted to at least be worth a million, but ideally worth, you know, whatever the inflation rate was since they purchased it over time, compounding, which is a weird way of valuing things because a lot of people just think like, oh, I bought a house for a million and now it's worth 1.5. I'm a genius. The reality is, if The S&P 500 is up more than your house, you lost money. Like, in my mind anyways.
- [21:55]
B
So. Yeah, so I want to clarify that real quick, because to me, that doesn't mean that you lost money. They just maybe lost opportunity cost or an opportunity.
- [22:01]
A
Sure, yeah.
- [22:01]
B
Yeah. Is. Are we. Are we talking about the same thing as opportunity loss?
- [22:05]
A
Right? Like, your buying power is. Your purchasing powers is less than it would have been. But the flip side to a house is if you're living in it, like, that comes back to like, family and everything. And like, that's what it's really all about. Right. Because we're just passing through this world anyways. And if you actually get into, like, how laws work, a lot of things that we think we own, we don't. We don't even necessarily truly own when you go deep, deep, deep in the rabbit holes. So.
- [22:26]
B
Yeah, but okay, just to clarify that real quick, too, 20% S&P rose, you consider that the. You could have invested in that. In that your purchasing power would have went up by 20%. But if I didn't pursue it, then I actually am paying. Like, there's an inflation rate associated with that. But it's not necessarily like, my groceries went up by 20% because that would be actual real, like, inflation or gas went up by 20%. Like, everything went up by 20% or used now.
- [22:54]
A
Yeah, it's how they calculate. Well, to me, like, that's just my base inflation rate because we don't have a reliable metric. Because the CPI is what most people cite.
- [23:00]
B
Sure.
- [23:01]
A
But it's been, it's been tampered with so much that it's completely disconnected from, like, you know, talk to average people right now that go to the grocery store and have to like, you go up 3%.
- [23:09]
B
Like, no, it went up way more.
- [23:10]
A
Yeah.
- [23:11]
B
Double rates was like, yeah, I Get that. Okay.
- [23:13]
A
Yeah. So I just think that the people with most of the money are parking their money in the stock market is like a really easy way of summarizing it. And I think they treat that like their bank, you know, and there's things you can do. Like you could live off dividends that it pays you. You could literally. There's a lot of ways you could do it. Basically, like you can leverage that and take loans against it. Like Elon Musk takes loans against his Tesla stock that he owns without selling the stock.
- [23:33]
B
You know, it's beautiful. Yeah. Okay, so let's play with that for a second. What is a good rate of return, I guess that you're targeting with, with your investments, plus maybe if you include dividends or like what do you, what, what's, what's a winner for you? We're just like, oh yeah, that, that, that would bet on that. Let's do that.
- [23:49]
A
To me, a true no brainer is just parking money in like the Vanguard S and P fund, you know, like whatever they call it, like the whole stock market fund, because you're basically going to keep pace, you know, with everything and nothing's going to get away from you. I don't look at that number like, you know, like my dad, for instance, like he'll talk about like his 401k and stuff and how good it's doing, you know, and how he like went out of bonds and went all in on stocks at some point in the past. And like, I love hearing that. But also at the same time, to me it's like that's like the very, that is my baseline. Like I, I consider that my true baseline. Like if I was giving my money to a money manager, I. It's called like generating alpha. It's a relative measure. So I would expect my money manager, if the S and p is up 20% to generate more than 20%. If he's up 21%, he generated me 1% of alpha, if that makes sense. Like that's how I base, benchmark it in my mind. So. But I also am, am not always trying to like get rich through investing. And also I think investing and trading are two different things. So like I take most of my money and if it made logical sense for some reason to like put it in a bank account, like they, they raise interest rates to like 20% tomorrow or something, it would make a ton of sense because the cost of capital becomes higher, things sell off, you know what I mean? There's inverse relationships. So all of a Sudden, like it wouldn't make sense to have massive forward pe, you know, price to earnings ratios on companies like Nvidia or Palantir. Here's an insane one, right? Like those dispersions would make a lot less sense. But also if you just think about the other way, it's like you can justify them because this money is seeking a place to go. It knows that a bank account is getting wrecked relative to inflation. But if you put it in the stock market and the stock market creates a massive bubble, that's okay. Like these bubbles, like these cyclical, you know, boom bust cycles, they're not as random as people seem or might think they are. And a lot of times too, if you just open up these charts, man, I'm telling you, and I know this is an audio podcast with a video component, but like I could blow you away with some charts that are just like basic. Like let me draw a trend line. Like one quick example is, you know how there was a tariff sell off in April of 2025. So if you go into the log scale chart and you go back all the way to the Great Depression and you connect the top of the stock market bubble before that preceded the Great Depression, and you connect that to the next highest point, which was the dot com bubble top, okay? And you just extend it out. It was right there. This, our stock market today was rubbing up against that trend line, that same, you know, literally the, the two biggest drops in stock market history. And it did that and then it sold off. And then everybody called it the tariff sell off. And if you ask me, I could have told you, hey, the stock market's looking for a reason to sell off here. You know what I mean? I don't know what it's going to be called in retrospect, but it is looking for a reason to sell off. Like these, these cyclical things are healthy, but there are also lines in the sand where they become not healthy anymore and indicative of an actual problem.
- [26:33]
B
Interesting. Okay, so now you're, you're, you. You talked a lot about bitcoin earlier in our, I think before we hit pre record. What are you doing? Bitcoin.
- [26:45]
A
So I think bitcoin is almost, I think, number one, it's a misunderstood technology. You know, people call it a lot of things. It can be used in a lot of ways.
- [26:54]
B
Are you buying as much as you can right now or are you like trading it, buying it and selling it? And like, what are you, what are you doing with it?
- [26:59]
A
No, I consider myself more of an investor, man. That's one great thing that if we bring it back real quick, like when you have passive income streams and you just have, basically have excess capital that you don't need to like fund your, your lifestyle and your family and whatever all their needs, meet their needs, you know, you can then focus on like just owning assets. Like that is the game. The game is not to be trading in and out of things because also every time you do that at a profit, you create a tax liability. So it's like, that's something nobody even talks about. It's like short term capital gains tax. It almost makes no sense to trade most of the time. So yeah, I'm, I'm more like trying to just own assets that appreciate that, you know, just play the game. Basically. Like if the stock market's going to give me compounding growth of 20% a year, yes, I want all of that. And if I think bitcoin grows faster, which, I mean since inception it has, I want as much of that as I possibly can. And what I would love to mention too, just in terms of the charts at some point, is why I'm so bullish on bitcoin today.
- [27:53]
B
That's interesting, man. Very cool. What has, can you share any like, wins? I, I'm, I don't watch the charts.
- [28:01]
A
Probably.
- [28:02]
B
I haven't watched it for years, to be honest. I look at them occasionally, but I don't really watch them. What has bitcoin done for you? Like return wise, like, let's name a win. Like, is it gone up 20? Is it 10? Is it 2%? Is it 100? What is it?
- [28:16]
A
Well, I think most people, and also just so you know, most bitcoiners don't talk about like how much they own and stuff like that just because it can create like a little security liability type thing in real life. But it's, it's one of those things like it, it humbles people that try to trade it. I've been guilty of that. Like, I've been, I, I bought the most bitcoin like I owned. I bought, I read the bitcoin white paper. In 2014, I got my first piece of, you know, fractional bitcoin, literally because somebody was giving it away for free on Reddit. They just said, hey, make a, an address, post it here and I'll send you 0.01 Bitcoin, which today is worth like over a thousand dollars, you know, and they were just trying to get people interested. And this was probably like 2014 or 2015. I, I bought the most When I was essentially ahead of the. It was in 2019 basically or no, 2020. 2020, I bought the most, you know, ahead of the big run up. So. And a lot of the things that remain true about it then are true now. But even it's its use as a technology has evolved and its use case as a store of value is more validated because of, you know, again just more or less people putting pen to paper and saying hey, let's recognize this as you know, a true asset class and store of wealth. What role that has to play in like the future of finance is yet to be seen. But one thing that's interesting about crypto, that or bitcoin I should say against crypto is that like it is proof of work, not proof of stake. Proof of work means its basic value is derived from the hash rate of the network and the network secures the transactions on the blockchain that don't require a central entity to say yes, no debank that person, he doesn't, you know, agree with the policies of the sitting political party. You know what I mean? Like it's truly like trustless public ledger. Something that's like unfathomable to anybody that grew up and all they knew is our current financial system. And Bitcoin, I don't think it, a lot of people have disagreed about like what role it could play in the future. Like there's a great book called Hijacking Bitcoin by a guy named Roger Ver who started Bitcoin Cash which is like a fork of Bitcoin. Bitcoin with some changes to the. The core source code could have theoretically been used to facilitate like microtransactions. The way we swipe credit cards today, it looks like that's not in the plans now for the future of Bitcoin. Looks like it's going to be more digital gold that won't be transacted regularly even though there's layer two technologies like Litecoin Lightning Network that can facilitate that. I've bought food at a food truck and used Lightning Network to pay. But it's, it's probably not going to have widespread adoption like we might think. I think it's going to be more digital gold.
- [30:41]
B
How about. Okay, that's besides bitcoin, do you see a future where commerce, right? E commerce, which mostly everyone listening to this is here because of, of that. Do you see it as a future where people are going to be purchasing shirts, a print on demand shirt with their dogecoin or cryptocurrency of choice. Probably not bitcoin, because you said store gold. But do you think, do you see that as a future?
- [31:04]
A
What's crazy is like, it totally could be bitcoin. Right. I just don't know that it needs to be like, yeah, the, the. There's a bitcoin, like core developers who have the ability to kind of influence changes to the code base. But the whole thing is bitcoin doesn't have a CEO like virtually every other cryptocurrency has a figurehead behind it. Like Ethereum has Vitalik, I think his name is. And also Ethereum used to be proof of work, now it's proof of stake, so it favors the large holders. It's not really, you know, the ethos of most cypherpunk, like kind of like freedom oriented. Yeah. Cryptographic believers. So. But yeah, like bitcoin totally could. What's cool about the network is there's a. Essentially based on how much usage the network is getting, there's variable costs to transact. And the miners that facilitate transactions, they are rewarded transaction fees. But also like currently, because they're mining bitcoin, you know, these blocks come out at predictable increments and they're just doing behind the scenes, like they have like actual hardware that are trying to just solve like cryptographic problems that aren't really actually like manifesting in this real world. It's kind of just like guessing the right number. But essentially if you get it right, you get the reward. And those mining rewards, they, at a predictable pace, like get halfed. So like, you know, back in the day, you get like thousands of bitcoin for solving the block. But like bitcoins weren't worth anything. You know, there's the bitcoin pizza story, if you ever heard that, where somebody bought, you know, a pizza and somebody paid him in bitcoin. The bitcoins today are worth like over a billion dollars. You know what I mean? But it's because, like, this has kind of evolved over time, but there's a lot more to bitcoin. So I'm doing like a broad stroke here.
- [32:37]
B
Oh yeah, of course, of course. Beautiful, man. I recognize. Where are you at 30, 32 minutes in. What do you see is the future for Ryan? And what do you see? So is it just more of the same, like where you're just going to continue to build your passive income streams and then continue to deploy capital into asset classes of choice, which is bitcoin and some other ones that we talked about. And what, what's, what's Next for you.
- [33:00]
A
So, yeah, I love more of the same. Like as long as I'm excited and enthused about doing what I'm doing and it's working, it's. It's meeting my needs of, you know, I love the idea of, like you said, making money and then piling it into assets that appreciate, you know, and outperform inflation. Like, I'm all about that. I love to challenge myself to, you know, understand the, the world that we're kind of born into as best I can. Like, thinking about what is money, right? Like, we all trade our time for money. Most people where I live have to sit in like an hour of traffic, minimum a day just to get to their job, to barely make enough money to get by, which I, you know what I mean? Like, I feel bad, like it's not right in my mind, you know. And have you heard that based on our parents generation, if we were to have, like, if our money that we make today was reflective of the life that they were kind of born into, it would essentially be like 60 something dollars an hour minimum wage would be the equivalent today that we would make for us just, just based on something that we didn't choose, which is like when we were born and you could say where we were born in the United States. So it's like we have to work way harder now just to maintain like a, you know, less, less of a. Less of a lifestyle.
- [34:02]
B
The baseline house, right? The how the house, the white picket fence, the American dream that was kind of sold. Interesting how my. This is something that came up to my mind. I remember as a early stage entrepreneur, I was asking myself this question. When is enough cash and your bank enough to justify moving it out into an investment vehicle? Like the mentality behind that, it's. It's different for everybody. I understand that. But what do you think of good rules? Do you have any rules of thumb for that?
- [34:34]
A
No, I think that's a great question. And earlier I wanted to kind of comment on that because it really is to me, like that's one of the first things, if anybody's watching this, and that's probably the first thing they were thinking is like, when do I have enough to start buying bitcoin or putting money in the S and P, buying gold, like, you know, no one even considers that. But like, think about like how much gold appreciated in the last like five years. It's up, it's up like over 50%. I'm pretty sure, you know, it's at like 3, 500 an ounce. Now I have this trusty little thing behind me that kind of cycles between bitcoin gold and the S P. So it's like, you know what I mean? It's like anybody who's watching my YouTube videos is getting that subliminal messaging like, hey, look like this stuff is getting more and more expensive over time. You know, I think you. There's a weird thing called unit bias. Like most people will never touch bitcoin now because it's above a hundred thousand per bitcoin. But the reality is like bitcoin can be denominated in these things called satoshis. It's the smallest unit of a bitcoin and it extends like eight decimal points out. You know, there's 100 million satoshis in one bitcoin. So people's goals should be in my mind, like in terms of bitcoin, which I think is the most advantageous asset class currently. And it's not financial advice to accumulate just based on the past. Like even above a hundred thousand if that, that number is, is worthless. It's just a value in USD. Like you can literally price the stock market in bitcoin. You can price houses in bitcoin. You could price anything in bitcoin. And bitcoin is. It just breaks people's brains because we've never known a truly deflationary technology, you know, even though technology is inherently deflationary. Like you would think, right? Like if we wanted to make a car today, it's not like we have to have the Henry Ford, you know, line where everybody has their one piece that they do now you can literally have robots automate the entire thing and all of a sudden the price of cars should go down. So why does it go up? It's because we don't have, we don't, we have like a broken money basically. You know what I mean? That's really what it is.
- [36:25]
B
So, so what do you think is a good number to have in the bank account before you invest? Or what is the rule of thumb in your head?
- [36:30]
A
I think like, honestly, truly the best advice I would give to my. You know what I mean? It's the best way I'd put it, or any of my friends who don't listen to me is dollar cost average into bitcoin and the stock market just start there. And the whole thing about, and we call it DCA dollar cost average. You can set up automated buys. So literally like as long as you have enough to cover your rent, like keep your next rents pay in the bank plus your Like, I think you should know how much you spend based like look at your credit card or something in a month and keep minimum that. Because you can also sell this stuff off. It takes like what, like a day or two to like transfer. Transferred out of like a stock account into your, back into your bank. But yeah, the sooner you start, the better because this, this trend is accelerating. You know what I mean? It really is the trend. And, and there's a bunch of other stuff. Like I said, four hours is like the minimum that I could talk for, but I know we don't have that. Yeah, you got to start soon.
- [37:20]
B
I love that. No, that's, that's super helpful. I, I would say for anyone too, if I answered my own question there is the way that I think about it is it depends on, on the asset class that you want to bet on more, I would say, and the priority of the asset class. So when you're building a business, building an asset. So, and you need capital to build the asset. Like you need to invest capital into that. But eventually when you build that asset up, you start to throw off excess capital and you need to make sure that that asset, just because you deploy it. And if you take cash from that asset, let's say I take money from this, my business, and put it into Bitcoin, it's very, very important to not hurt the asset that I just spent like the last two years building just because I deploy it into another asset class. That's where I see, I, I see that mistake happen fairly often, usually amongst earlier stage, like younger entrepreneurs. They're just like, oh, look at Bitcoin, it's about to pop, you know, and then, so they literally empty their business bank account and then they go in on Bitcoin and then what they have and they have a blip in their, in their business. And all of a sudden they're just like, oh, I need to, like, I need to have cash somewhere. And so then they end up having to sell their bitcoin for a loss sometimes or whatever. Cause it's in a blip over there. And so they end up in this spiral of just like, shit, I'm, I'm, I'm bad or I've just like ruined everything. The, the reality is just set rules and just set rules in the business to where as soon as I have like three months or six months or 12 months of like Runway, burn Runway in the bit in the business, it's excess. You have access and you can just plow that thing aggressively into the asset of Choice, which is Bitcoin in this case. What are your thoughts on that?
- [38:55]
A
I love it. I think it needs to be almost rules based, like you were kind of alluding to. Because if you are doing it based on, like, when it's on your mind, it's going to be on your mind. You know, markets, they literally go up and they go down, right? I know that's not news to anybody, but it'll be on your mind when it's up. And when it's down, you'll be like, I'm, I'm happy, I don't own any. And that's like when you should be buying. But that's when we'll be telling ourselves, we'll be like, like the, the market maker. Algorithms, I'm 100% convinced are written by the smartest minds on planet Earth. And they're responsible for trading like every asset class, basically every asset class that is financialized, that has reached a market cap where it has been accepted into the financialized world. And like, I know that's kind of a weird thing to say, but like, essentially like automated trading behind the scenes. These automated algorithms have one goal. It is to exploit the retail trader. It's to exploit Cody, it's exploit me. It is to exploit human psychology and mass. And the best way they do it, honestly, like, I don't have the statistic written down, but I've heard it many times. It's like most asset classes, the stock market, bitcoin, basic, you know, almost anything these days. If you were not fully invested for like the 10 most green days in like the last 10 years, your gains would have been like significantly lower. Like, essentially what I'm saying is, you know, they have huge game days and like, you just basically need to be like permanently exposed at a level where psychologically you can handle it and you don't have to like second guess. And this is where like having a true understanding of the assets that you're invested in and also the dollars, because we think of them in terms of US dollars, right? So it's like you need to also understand the dollars in my mind so that you can sleep peacefully at night and just understand like, hey, like, I know what I'm doing, I know what I'm working towards. Don't just listen to me, right? Like, if I said, hey, as long as you can cover your next month's expenses, you're good. Like, no, like, if you're uncomfortable with that, then do whatever works for you. But the dollar cost average thing, whether it's daily Automated buys, weekly automated buys, monthly automated buys. Doesn't really matter. Just have that automated exposure to these assets that appreciate.
- [40:52]
B
Love that, Ryan. Thank you, man, for coming on as always. It's fine. I can't pay. 40 minutes just blew by so quickly. Okay, where can people find you? For anyone that doesn't no idea where to find you. Where can people find you?
- [41:05]
A
I would say Type Reinhoeg into YouTube. You'll get my e commerce business side of things. You'll get my investing videos too, which I've been doing more of since April of this year. And I just wanted to mention really quickly the reason I was inspired to even request to come on this podcast. Thank you for accommodating me.
- [41:17]
B
All right.
- [41:17]
A
Is rubbery. Bitcoin is, by my opinion, not financial advice. And disclosure. I own bitcoin about to break out, like significantly. It spent five years trying to break a level, like a overhead resistance. It spent five years and it had to try to break through this invisible line on a chart seven times before it broke through. And now we've had five weekly closes depending on when you watch this, six above it. Okay, so this is.
- [41:44]
B
It's gonna be a cool documentation for you, Ryan, when. When people. When you rewatch this, let's call it like six months.
- [41:49]
A
There's no coincidences charts, I promise you. Like, just like when I talk about the tariff sell off, like, there's no coincidences. I see what's building, it's loading. And that's why I was excited to kind of just like share the message.
- [42:00]
B
So cool, man. Again, like Ryan said, this is not financial advice. Do whatever you think is best. We're just two dudes talking about building businesses and lives of our dreams. But Ryan, thank you for coming on again. I appreciate you.
- [42:12]
A
Yeah, Cody, man, keep up the good work. Especially at Everbee, obviously Cody's tools have helped me build the businesses that are funding my bitcoin stack. So I love it, man.
- [42:20]
B
Thank you, man. Talk to you soon.