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Speaker 1: Bloomberg Audio Studios. Podcasts.

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Speaker 2: Radio. News.

00:00:08
Speaker 1: Then I look at you. And the world's alright with me. Just one look at you. And I know it's gonna be.

00:00:26
Speaker 2: A lovely day. Ever think of becoming a finfluencer? Shifting your career to TikTok, Instagram, or YouTube? It could be both interesting and lucrative. To help us unpack this and what it might mean for your career, let's bring in Tyler Gardner. He taught economics, eventually becoming a financial advisor and portfolio manager. But then he pivoted to a financial media business, eventually reaching more than 6 million followers. His book, Real Wealth, Make Money Work for You, arrives December 1st, 2026. So Tyler, let's start in the beginning of your career. What pulled you out of education and into finance?

00:01:15
Speaker 1: I think the easiest way to sum it up is I've never been pulled out of education. There was a point, I remember the meeting specifically, it was with our faculty at a school in Connecticut where we had a representative from TIA CREF who came to talk about retirement funds and not One colleague of mine could understand what this person was talking about when they were saying expense ratios or target date funds. And I left saying there's a big problem if 110 truly educated adults in this world cannot understand a basic concept of expense ratio. And so I wanted to add education to the financial component here. And I realized at some point along the educational career in high school, I liked talking to my colleagues a little more about money than I liked talking about semicolons in class to 15-year-olds. I didn't try to eliminate it. I just started to have this vision that becoming a financial advisor or portfolio manager would be education for finance. And I'd get to go teach these things and learn these things. So that was the initial inspiration for the pivot.

00:02:19
Speaker 2: You know, some people would say the complexity and impenetrable jargon is a feature, not a bug, because, hey, if you don't understand what financial people are saying, or for that matter, contractors or doctors or lawyers, what have you, well, then you have to pay.

00:02:39
Speaker 1: Them for their expertise.

00:02:40
Speaker 2: But let's leave that cynicism aside. You eventually become both a financial advisor and a portfolio manager. What surprised you about how wealth management actually operated as an industry?

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Speaker 1: Phenomenal question because that's all it was. It was a big surprise. I worked with great people. I'll start with this. It was a small RIA in Vermont. And the reason I was drawn to that specific RIA is that unlike some of the bigger corporate wealth management firms– They really struck me as valuing education. So again, I got brought into this world thinking I had this real ideal vision that I'd move back to Vermont. I'd get to educate people in my own hometown when I came back. And the biggest surprise was that the majority of people who wanted us to manage their wealth didn't want to be educated on managing their wealth. They wanted us to manage their wealth. And there was a great irony in the fact that so many people, particularly high net worth individuals... wanted to give the assets and say, don't call me, I'll call you. We're all set. I'm paying for the convenience. And that surprised me. I was really looking forward to a scenario in which I had a daily class with people or a daily coffee where people would flock to wanting to learn more about index funds and low-cost investing. It didn't quite work like that.

00:04:04
Speaker 2: So how did the social media experiment begin? You're a natural teacher- What led you to say, well, if my clients aren't asking me to educate them, I'm just going to educate everybody else? How did that really start?

00:04:17
Speaker 1: Well, I think, again, to give credit to the initial RIA for which I worked, they noticed very quickly just what you just said. They noticed and were drawn to the fact that I love to educate. And so they brought their marketing team in and we started doing some short form videos together. they as a firm said, look, this is a really powerful way to reach an abundance of people beyond a very small state in New England. And we want to get the message out. So we started doing videos. We just weren't positioning them correctly. And when I say correctly, I mean, I think we were putting the majority of them on our firm's website and maybe every now and then putting some on LinkedIn. And they just weren't going anywhere. There was no real reach or power. And so when I first really saw the power of, TikTok and Instagram and Facebook. I go, this is the disconnect and this is where, but they knew early on that education combined with a considerable reach of these platforms was very powerful. We just never could hone it as well as I know we all wanted to.

00:05:18
Speaker 2: There are lots and lots of stories of people putting stuff on LinkedIn and Facebook and TikTok and YouTube and doesn't really generate a response, doesn't get a whole lot of follows, a whole lot of likes. At what point was there a specific video or a post that persuaded you, hey, there might be a real audience here?

00:05:40
Speaker 1: Yeah. The number one reason. So I came home after doing probably– we had probably done 10 videos as a firm. And I came home and my wife was actually scrolling TikTok. And she said, you got to look at this person. They're talking about a Roth IRA. And it's really funny. And I looked at the video and it was funny. It was engaging. And the person didn't know what a Roth IRA was. So I look at this. I said, hon, this isn't actually how a Roth IRA works. And so I started going down the rabbit hole because there had been 2 million views on this video and it was complete misinformation. So what I found when I delve a little bit more into the rabbit hole, I found there were a lot of people on these platforms who were very engaging and could speak very confidently and articulately. And they were just flat out wrong. And then the people who were really accurate and data driven and who had done all the work. or who had actually been PMs or financial advisors for 20 years, some of them didn't quite know how to engage. So I looked at it and said, just from a business standpoint, there's a real gap in social media of someone who actually can educate in a simple way, somebody who's used to taking very complex ideas and trying to make them digestible in 30 seconds or less, and is able to also actually bring data points in. I almost took it as a big challenge initially of how can we do this? I look at it as an art form of how can you package something that most of the world doesn't want to think about on a daily basis, finance, investing, and make it something fun. Was there a specific video early? No, it was more the gap in the marketplace that made me want to pursue it.

00:07:27
Speaker 2: Everybody I've dealt with over the years who is both at a regulated shop, be it SEC or FINRA or state regs, and is a creator, blogger, videographer, podcaster, whatever, runs into some issues with their firm. Way back when, some of the big wire houses, when Twitter first came out, would give their advisors a list of approved tweets. Like here, choose from this menu, you know that's going to get no pickup at all. I got really lucky. My general counsel back in 0203, before that, nobody knew, nobody understood, nobody cared. I was on GeoCities and then Typehead. Nobody said a word because what the hell is social media? What the hell is blogging? But I was lucky to have a general counsel who said, listen, about all these posts you're doing, you could talk about the market, the economy, sectors, whatever you want. You cannot say buy Microsoft. You cannot say sell Dell. No buys or sells and you're good. I learned that was really lucky. What was your experience like with legal and compliance?

00:08:37
Speaker 1: I won't say it was quite as loose and I envy what you just said because, man, do I want to come work for that firm. Yeah. And I might have stuck around a lot longer had we kind of appreciated or had counsel appreciated the flexibility of what we might be able to do. But even before I answer that question, just to be fair, I remember when I was studying for both Series 65 and CFA, they would always have a section, and this was probably six years back, seven years back, on social media. And exactly what you're saying, like, what is the regulation behind social media right now? The punchline every time was, we don't know yet. We don't know what this is. We don't know what to regulate. We're going to have to come up with these rules on a fly. Is this person a registered advisor? Is this person a representative? Are they a solicitor? And so the initial draw to produce it, obviously, was the power that it had. The initial challenge was both on a state level and on a federal level, We, as a small RIA, wanted to be very, very careful about what we said and how we said it. And even though, yes, at the end of the day, it was probably just a, hey, don't recommend buying or selling individual securities, we took it so far on the prudent level of just saying, look, let's make this very, very educational. Don't ever name specific funds. Don't ever name specific drawdown rates. because you never wanted to conflate any of this with potential advice. And so I think that the real future for anybody in this space, and again, this is wide open. I mean, there's only a handful of us who have actually kind of made it to a big platform here. The future is basically anyone who kind of is able to say, I know what to say within limits. I know this is not against regulations. And I'm going to market myself and how I think. There's still so much room there to grow.

00:10:30
Speaker 2: No doubt about it. So you began your career as a teacher. I'm curious, what did you learn in the classroom that ultimately made you a better communicator of complex finance ideas?

00:10:43
Speaker 1: Sure. Nobody wanted to be in the classroom inherently. I'll start with that. Other than a handful of students... The beauty of starting, I think, any career as a teacher is that you're fighting, I won't say a losing battle, but you're fighting against a group of people who collectively want their attention to be elsewhere, which is actually very different, obviously, from social media because people self-select to go onto social media and to be in a place. And if they're watching you, they want to. But initially, the challenge was, how can I get a room of 18-year-old students who who would literally rather be doing anything other than sitting in this chair on this May day in gorgeous rural Connecticut, how can I get them to engage with an essay by Virginia Woolf? And again, it always was a game to me. It always was a challenge and an art of what can I say and how can I say it? Not just to capture their attention, but to get them to feel like they have some sort of stake in what this is. And that was where it was, is once you were implicated in If I could communicate to someone you're implicated in this class, you have a stake here. Uh, then I would find obviously more ownership and going forward, but there, but as far as communication goes, it was again, just a matter of, we had a very scarce resource, which was time. And how do I get as much into this time as possible?

00:12:03
Speaker 2: At what point did you find posting financial content, uh, morphed from a side hustle to, hey, this could actually be a real career.

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Speaker 1: Yeah. I'd say the easiest way to say it is when I started making enough money for it to be a real career and when I could actually pay the bills. But when we first, I'd say when I first pivoted, I left my W2 job and I took a leap of faith two years ago. And the reason I took a leap of faith is that at that point, I had opened up an educational one-on-one coaching option. You could come talk to me for an hour about how to invest, types of investments, never advice, all obviously education, always general as possible. What stuck out to me is I couldn't open up enough slots to fill the immediate demand of And I couldn't raise my prices high enough, quickly enough to kill that initial demand or to temper it, if you will. So instantly you see, oh my gosh, there is a massive amount of people here who want this type of information and they're willing to pay a lot of money for it. They're willing to be present with it. I got out of the consulting part very quickly because, again, back to the regulatory component, I didn't love– it seemed like way too much of a gray area. And no matter how many contracts somebody signs saying this isn't advice, I'm not your advisor, I did not feel comfortable having someone ever leave a conversation thinking that they might be getting advice from somebody. But that was exactly the time when I said, look– This platform, wherever we go and whatever we sell, this platform has so much power now that I'm comfortable leaving the $ 100, 000 a year W-2 to really see what we can do with this.

00:13:57
Speaker 2: So you left not one, but two very stable, relatively safe, pretty comfortable jobs to sort of jump into something that is risky and there was no guarantee that it.

00:14:11
Speaker 1: Was going to work.

00:14:13
Speaker 2: What did your friends, family, colleagues think? And what was your own biggest fear?

00:14:20
Speaker 1: I think now, now that I would say I've allowed myself to believe that the endeavor is quasi-successful now. So now I've actually gotten the truth from people about how they felt two years ago when I first made this pivot. And Almost everybody thought it wasn't going to work, that this was a fad, that the attention economy is so cyclical that you might be the internet's favorite person for a week and then fail miserably. And that was obviously the challenge was trying to think about sustainability and consistency. But early on, they made fun of it. And I think every single person who either considers themselves an influencer or somebody else considers them an influencer, you have to go through what we all call the cringe phase. Where you're producing terrible content because you're just not good yet. Just like anything else, you've got to learn how to do it through trial by error. And most people don't want to go through that phase. Your friends all make fun of you and they laugh. And it's very easy in that moment to say, I want to quit. And then all of a sudden, things start to shift when you start getting some of the deals. But those don't come for six months to a year of daily torture and ridicule from the friends, the family. And it's not that they doubt you as a person. They just kind of doubt that this is a thing that a lot of people are capable of, that if you really just sit down and say, look, we can make this happen because it doesn't happen to everybody.

00:15:48
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's fascinating. Doug DiMuro of Cards and Bids and his own YouTube channel, I think his YouTube channel has six or seven million subscribers. He's talked about The first few years of doing video, he had very little pickup and he was also writing a column and occasionally doing a video review on a column. And one day a reader wrote in and said, Doug, the video reviews are the most interesting part. I don't want to read the column. Why don't you do more of that? and an entire business was born. Did you have a moment like that where it became clear, oh, if I emphasize this, this will work out? Or was it really just a grind to build those numbers up to quarter million, half million. And at what point is it clear this is a viable, sustainable business? Is it a million subscribers, a half a million subscribers? Where do you hit that number?

00:16:50
Speaker 1: Yeah. I mean, just like money, I think you and anyone listening will understand this as well as anyone. Your follower account very quickly becomes identical to your bank account. It's never enough, Barry. You think you want to hit a million and that will somehow give you that you know, little endorphin hit and you'll be satisfied. That's not enough. Once you're at one, you want to be at 10. Once you're at 10, you want to be better than that competitor who you have always been going after. So as far as is it enough or what was the moment? There's never a moment. And the algorithms now, too, just to get a little technical about it, it ultimately on most of these channels, it doesn't actually matter how many followers you have anymore. As far as the reach potential, you could you could create a tick. This is where I'd like to inspire anyone to try it. You can create a TikTok account tomorrow. Your video has an equal chance to go viral as mine. And as you mentioned, I have millions of followers across these platforms, but it's the best immediate feedback system in the entire world. It beats every type of job I've ever had. If you produce crap, you don't get reach. It's not a matter of millions of followers. It's if you don't make something entertaining and of value and engaging for those 60 seconds. If you don't earn someone's 30 to 60 seconds, it doesn't go anywhere. So it's kind of a self-selecting process, again, of you're either good or you're not. But the people with millions of followers obviously have in some way honed the skill. You don't get to that level without kind of honing the skill to begin with.

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Speaker 2: So let's talk about that algorithm for a moment. What attracted me to your videos was you weren't doing anything clickbaity or sexy or outrageous to garner clicks. In fact, you're very much a salmon swimming upstream against the tide of that sort of stuff. How do you preserve that? accuracy, and nuance when all of these platforms, they reward speed, oversimplification, outrage. Hey, if you can make somebody furious and angry by manipulating their emotions, you're much more likely to get viral than by saying, and here's how you do a Roth IRA conversion correctly. Right.

00:19:12
Speaker 1: I mean, first of all, you just summed it up flawlessly, absolutely flawlessly. And anyone who's been doing this for a little while who claims they don't know that is lying. If I go on and I make a video that just pokes at people a little bit or nudges people or alienates them, you're going to get more attention. Or if you say something that you know is a little bit less than nuanced and is lacking a little information, you know what you're doing. How I look at it, and I would say how I justify some of the videos in which I know dang well I don't do due diligence and go down as far. as I could on the complexity of this. A, again, it's a limited resource of 30 to 60 seconds. B, my goal at this point is all social media from TikTok, Facebook, YouTube shorts. That's all top of funnel. for me. So even if someone thinks I'm a complete ding-dong who doesn't do something due diligence on TikTok, my goal is to get them to read my newsletter. On the newsletter, I don't cut corners because now I've got someone who is self-selected into a system where they're willing to read that nuance and they want that. So you invite that. That to me is where I try to build more credibility. Same with the podcast, right? So both of those longer form I just want people, I want to get the attention on the short form to get them to a place where I say, look, now can you trust that I didn't really think that social security was something you should decide in 30 seconds after listening to me talk about it and poke you like everyone should take it at 62. I do want to go through this, but again, if you try to provide nuance in the short form, you're not going anywhere. So it is kind of, it's almost like a line I heard in Yellowstone the other day where They're talking about politics and the game of politics before you get the position is you kind of have to poke and alienate and unfortunately be maybe I won't say a lesser version of your moral self than you want to be. But there are corners you have to cut to get the attention that the video will attract to get where people want to go once they're there. then I think you have the responsibility to say, look, now that I earned a little bit of your attention, trust me, I'll reward you with real information and not clickbait nonsense.

00:21:30
Speaker 2: What I'm hearing is that you have to adapt your message to each format and make it fit into that in order to work your way down the funnel. So let's talk about that funnel. You start with short form videos, eventually a newsletter, a podcast, and now a forthcoming book. Um, was that a very purposeful conscience set of decisions to, to keep the focus on the in-depth education or did it just evolve? It evolves.

00:22:03
Speaker 1: I I'd be, I'd be creating a narrative where none exists. If I pretended that any of this was according to some grand master plan.

00:22:10
Speaker 2: Yeah.

00:22:11
Speaker 1: I mean, yeah, I heard a great line years back of your choices are half chance. So are everybody else's and where this has gone is If you had asked me two years ago, I was creating monthly reflections on where I wanted the business to go. For one year, I would look at my notes and it said, don't ever do a newsletter because a newsletter is stupid and it's a joke. And then I remember reading something from Tim Ferriss where he said, you're a joke if you don't do a newsletter because it's the only place where you gather the asset of the email address and they can't take it away from you. And so when TikTok went through its little temporary 24-hour ban, that actually really shut down in the US. For one day, there was no TikTok. And instantaneously, I went from having built two years of this slightly credible platform that had good reach to nothing. And I had no control. They just shut down the system. And I said, look, if I don't diversify these digital assets, I'm being just as much of an idiot as I say people are with money when they don't diversify their assets in an account, in an IRA or a 401k.

00:23:18
Speaker 2: You have to own your own content. You have to own your own platform and use these other platforms to drive the traffic to something that can't... I mean, years ago, I was on Six Apart platform, movable type. And they eventually, years after I moved to WordPress, they shut it down. And we've seen GeoCities was shut down. We've seen all sorts of changes to different algorithms, if you're ultimately not driving people to something that you own, you're at the mercy of these giant technology corporations and they could care less about you. I saw a video of yours recently where you discuss the concept of using your time and wealth is really about how much time you have to yourself. But you make the case that it's really knowing what to do with your time is the big value. And I want to add something to the concept of building your own business, which is agency, the ability to control what you do, how you do it, who you do it with, and how you spend your time and when you do different things. Talk a little bit about how this pivot to social media and content creation has really given you much more agency over your time and your work.

00:24:45
Speaker 1: Sure. I think just building on exactly what you just said, I don't believe that humans hate work. I don't. I don't buy it. I don't think I ever will. I think humans don't like being told what to do and working with people they don't respect. The second you can get out of that and kind of have your own agency or your own authorship or autonomy, call it whatever you will, instantaneously, you now have the capacity to go work with other people that you say, oh, I really do respect this person or I'm really drawn to this person's energy. And then your energy goes up and you look at this. And again, this is entrepreneurship 101 of once you have control over your time, you say, wait a minute, I do want to be engaged in these projects. And you hear over and over again, the people that exit businesses at let's say 35 or 40, and they come into the windfall of a couple tens of million bucks. They don't go sit on a beach for the next 40 years. Within one year, they're looking for another project. Everybody I know goes through a nice honeymoon where they think they made it. And then they're looking for another project. So for me, when I switched to this, the heaven on earth that I created was, again, just being able to wake up and say, if I want to work on a great podcast script today, I can do that for 10 hours. If I want to go film 20 videos today, I can do that. And our minds, as we all know, some days we're on and some days we're not on. And so when we have our own agency, when I think I'm really on and the energy is good and I've had good positive interactions, I can go out and I do go out into the woods and that's when I film my videos. But just like everybody else, I have very crappy days. And if you're the W2 employee, unfortunately, you have a crappy day. You're still showing up for that same type of work. If you have your own agency, I can say, this is a down day. I'm not putting myself out there today. I'm going to write some more today or think about a chapter today. So it's the greatest gift I've ever had is the agency to choose when I work and with what energy.

00:26:43
Speaker 2: Really fascinating. Last question. So someone who's considering a career change, they want to become a creator, a finfluencer, they want to move from something safe to something risky. What sort of advice do you have for those people? Sure.

00:26:59
Speaker 1: And I think I know you know this because I've read a piece where you talk about this, but a lot of people don't, in my mind, think about risk in the way that they say they think about risk. So you just set up the polar concept that if I go to a job like this, it's more risky than if I don't. Whereas I always try to push people just a little bit to say, look, the biggest risk is you sit in the current job you have for 20 years as a safe W-2 employee. And that's fine. I get it. You got the bills to pay. But your upside is so capped, you have no idea. And I would just say that the two things I value most in life at this point, obviously, the cliched one is owning my time. But because I own my time, I have the ability to focus on a daily basis on anything I want to focus on. And so the risk to me is that you get your one life taken away for 20 to 30 years and you're not focusing on a daily basis on the things you want to focus on. And as just with the entrepreneurial spirit, I would tell anyone who wants it, the concept of risk is way more applicable in my mind to losing out on what you could have done than if you go try something. And if it doesn't work out after a year, after two years, after a real effort, what I don't think enough people understand, you can go back. I trust that you can go back to whatever you were currently hired for. I trust, maybe not at that company, but I trust that you can find another stable type of position where you say, I'm back in the W2 land. But you'd never know unless you went out there. And now the upside is insane. As you know, once you start your own business, I'm blown away with where the upside goes, not just on a monetary level, But also just with time and decisions and the fact that I get to make these decisions now. So I'd tell everybody you got to try it for at least six months. You got to get through that initial phase where everybody wants to quit and everybody does quit. Everybody I know who wants to start social media and says, oh, I could do this too. It's just like the New Year's resolution of going to the gym in January. you quit within two weeks because you didn't immediately get a million followers. And I'll just say this has been a trek for four years now to get to this point. So none of this is easy. None of this is overnight. Any story about viral sensations and someone just blows up, that's not how it works. You grind and you grind every day and you learn and you get there, but it has been worth every second and I would tell anybody with the power of these platforms and the fact that it's free, it's a hundred percent free to market yourself and your brand, however you want. If you're not trying this with your business, you're missing out on an incredible opportunity that might not be there in 10 years. Really, really fascinating.

00:29:48
Speaker 2: So to wrap up, if you're in a job where perhaps you're not being challenged or you're a little bored or lack the sort of agency that and enthusiasm that you'd like to have, and you're creative and a good communicator and have the ability to educate or inform or entertain people, consider adding social media influencer to part of your repertoire.

00:30:15
Speaker 1: Who knows?

00:30:16
Speaker 2: It might become a new career. I'm Barry Ritholtz. This is Bloomberg's At The Money.