I had to do a lot of background research, I didn't know who Mercatus was. My name is Dan Butler. I'm the senior director of development at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. I came to Mercatus without knowing what Mercatus actually was, honestly. I was working in New York City, I was a floor trader on the American Stock Exchange, but deep inside I'd always wanted to be involved in some ways in public policy. Unfortunately, I have no political science degree, I don't have a background in any of this, but I had done a little bit of fundraising to which I put on my resume and I sent my resume blindly down to the Heritage Foundation, which had a job bank, a job service placement. And what they did is they sent it over to the Mercatus Center and Mercatus saw that I had a little fundraising experience and said, I'd be interested in talking to you. So again, I had to do a lot of background research, I didn't know who Mercatus was and at the time, honestly, it was only about 20 people, but after several interviews and a day down here, it was a great match and I haven't left 15 years.


It's the Cube, covering HPE Big Data Conference 2016. Now, here are your hosts, Dave Vellante and Paul Gillan. Welcome back to Boston, everybody. Brendan Stennett is here as the co-founder and CTO of Think Data Works, and we're going to talk about open data, Brendan, welcome to the Cube. Thank you, thanks for having me. So, in from Toronto, I said that right, my kid corrected me the other day, it's not Toronto, Dad, it's Toronto, but so, welcome to Boston. Tell us about Think Data Works, why did you start the company, what are you guys all about? Yeah, so we basically wanted to create something to basically look and peer into the world of open data. Open data, we kind of saw something that's very valuable. It was still kind of a new trend when we started this thing. And what we found was that if you actually wanted to find open data and use it, you're going to have to go into all these different government portals. We're talking about every level of government, from the feds to state governments, to county and regional sources, municipal sources, everything. They all have different data under their jurisdiction and they're all kind of doing it their own way, releasing a different file format, some proprietary, some open, whatever, it's a mess. What we wanted to do is basically try and help solve that messiness of open data. Provide one window to search into all the open data that's being published and made available, as well as we actually ingest this data, we do some standardization on it, we'll clean up things like dates, they're all in the same sort of format, currency things, even different locality information. We have Quebec in our country, which is obviously French. They will represent the thousand separator, for example, differently than the English-speaking world would. And that sort of thing makes dealing with open data across different jurisdictions difficult. So that's the sort of thing that we like to standardize and bring in. From there, we provide the ability to search for it. And if you want to integrate open data into your process, we provide API where you can just go and tie that directly in or just full export of the data to bring it behind the scenes and integrate it with your existing private data. So you started the company just to make all this easier for people? Yeah, yeah, exactly. We wanted to do something with open data. We weren't really sure what we were going to do with it. We were thinking, well, maybe we can take open data and apply it to real estate or finance or any of these different industries. And we said, well, we don't know anything about any of these different industries. So how are we going to try and take open data and try and make them better? But what we did see was there was a common access problem to getting to the data itself. And no matter what we did in any of these industries, we'd have to solve that access problem for it. So we said, well, look, I kind of think I can solve that. Let's maybe start a company doing that. What's the most sought after open data set? Is it weather? I'm sure you get that question a lot, but is it Google Maps data? What is the in demand? Yeah, it's honestly everything. Like we see a lot of traction in finance. So there's a lot of stuff there, there's a lot of really cool things. Like there's parking meter locations, for example. This is the one thing that you don't really think about, but usually when you get directions, even with Google Maps or whatever it is, parking meters are where you really want to go, not outside the, you know, it would be dropped off with a door in your car in the middle of traffic and say, okay, I'm just going to stop here. You want to take the closest parking meter, the closest parking spot. And hopefully someday maybe know which parking meters are actually open. Some of these are smart meters where they actually know the vacancy of the spot and we might be able to know if it's actually an open spot and guide you right to the open spot. All right. Where do you find this data? There must be new sources emerging all the time. Yeah, so it all comes from, with open data, it all comes from government open data portals. So that's every level of government. We've kind of created techniques to like kind of search for these different portals, look for certain commonalities, look through lists of different counties and automatically kind of scrape and try and find where these portals are and then tie into them and adjust them into our process. And we listen, we have like Google alert set up so when new things are getting popped up every day, we got team members monitoring Twitter all the time when new open data portals are coming on. We get a lot of them as they're basically the day of release on the platform ready to go. Sometimes people reach out to us too, as they're releasing their portals. What are some of the more interesting and formatting problems you've had to solve? Everything. There's, it'll be things like somebody releasing this XLS file like an Excel spreadsheet and they've probably spent five years of their life working on this Excel spreadsheet and they've got all these macros integrated with it and you can drop downs and if you want to just use the Excel spreadsheet, it's probably going to get the job done but if you want to bring that into the rest of your database basically and try and integrate that into your process, well, good luck. So those things are always very annoying and very interesting to come through but a lot of the other things that we've kind of solved with deal with all the different proprietary formats like Shapefiles for example or GeoJSON or KML or GML or any of those or any of the different CSV formats or it's basically everything, the coding issues. And is it correct to say that you've essentially developed a search engine as the interface? Yeah, for an open data, exactly. You call it NAMARA? NAMARA.io or give us some background. Yeah, NAMARA.io. Yeah, it's exactly it. So basically once we've indexed and basically linked to all these different open data portals, we now provide a window to search into them. That's available for free, we don't charge for that capability, we actually don't charge for any of the access to open data to certain number of API calls. So a lot of that's just here you go, use it if you want to use it. From there we'll take other steps and try and make open data even more digestible for large companies that are trying to use it. It's examples like we've got the parking meter example that I just used. If we wanted to basically take parking meters from 300 of the top cities in the United States for example, you're still having to deal with 300 different data sets that are gonna not only have their, well now if you're just using us at least they're in the same format but we got different problems like different columns to represent so different fields, right? Some of them might have the hours that they're operated and spread across three different columns or some might just have it as one. Some might have the actual rate on them, like it's all the stuff that happens that we want to try and solve that as well so what we're starting to do now is try and come up with these standard attributes for these data, right? If you're trying to represent parking meters this is how parking meters should be represented. And we were talking offline you said you don't go after real time but if I understand that you would if in fact it was an open data set so my question is with the whole internet of things explosion coming on, I would think many of those parking meters, parking lots, buildings, et cetera are going to have open data sets that you can tap into. Is that right? Yeah, absolutely, yeah. We don't adjust any of the real time data because we're kind of more of static snapshot of things as they get updated but we do map to it so you've got things like Google transit feed system like those feeds so we'll map to all the ones that are available there that if someone is actually trying to integrate with it there's other things like next bus APIs where you would be able to see when the next bus is coming based on the GPS tracking location. So we'll tie to all these. We don't have as high level of integration with them as we do with some of our other data sets but we'll map to them. About three years ago President Obama signed the open government initiative and the idea was to standardize data formats across the federal government. Have you seen any changes as a result of that? Is that driving any change in the US statistics or trickling down to other municipalities? Yeah, I think the trend generally is going open for the most part. Ontario we've actually just released something called open by default which is this policy basically saying that unless the data is going to impact somebody's privacy or national security it's going to be made available and it's going to be put open. So I think the trend is more open than closed so absolutely. And we were talking about a thousand that you know of, open data sets were wide right now, is that right? Yeah, we've mapped to a thousand different sources of open data which translates to about 75,000, 100,000 different data sets that's being made out there and that's not worldwide. Unfortunately we only have US and Canada right now. Okay, that's North America. It's North America, yeah. It's a thousand. Okay, yeah. So there's going to be much more once we go in there. We haven't, that's the next step. Presumably, at least double that I would think of. Oh, absolutely, yeah. Triple or triple. And it's everywhere. Like Mexico's got a huge open data movement as well. Like countries that, South America's got things going on now. Yeah, it's everywhere. Tell us more about the company. So how do you make money?  What do you sell? Yeah, so we sell the, it's the same data basically that we also give some of it in some degree away for free but we try and package it even better. Like I just gave that example of trying to call common attributes. So that's where a start of our effort goes in with our data scientists team to actually try and look at all these data sets and how can we represent them as one and how can we get rid of a lot of these differences in the data, package that together and then we'll sell that off. This is people that are trying to digest hundreds or thousands of the same data set just to different municipalities that actually have a business case for it and can justify spending the money for it. And you'll sell that as a service, an ongoing service? Exactly, yeah. Okay, and how many are you? Talk about funding. How did you get this thing off the ground? Yeah, we raised the seed round about 18 months ago. So we're still going on that. We're doing fairly well for ourselves right now. We're still a small team. We're only 12 people. Great. And yeah, Toronto's a little cheaper for a startup so we can make that money go a lot further. Depending on the exchange rate it has been expensive at times. Well, but developers are cheaper. We're not paying the same price we are for developers. We're not paying the same price for rent. We're not paying, the developers themselves aren't paying the same price for their personal rent so they can do it for cheaper than being down the valley. We don't have to worry about healthcare benefits. We've got all the other benefits, but healthcare we don't have to worry about because that's already included in Canada. These are big things, right? There sure are. I think starting a startup in Canada, especially Toronto is sort of the best time right now to actually do it. Well, there's a strong software base up there. I mean, IBM has a huge presence up there. Absolutely, yeah. You must see some good DNA. You must see some interesting applications built using your API. What are one or two of your favorites? Yeah, to be honest with you, a lot of the stuff that we're working with are large companies. We're talking about banks, other companies that I can't really talk about. And some of the applications that they're doing with it are absolutely phenomenal. We only get to peer into some of them. Like our customers really are the people that are paying for the data and they're building the stuff that is really interesting. Fortunately, a lot of the stuff I can't talk about. You can't even describe in general. I mean, we're not asking you to name names. Yeah, yeah, exactly. There's some companies that are doing some really interesting things with linking government purchasing data around together. So seeing trends in purchasing and how money's flowing through government. A lot of people forget that federal government's one of the biggest buyers on any single market. So if you can kind of see how they're buying things and you can kind of relate that back to, is this company strong? Is there a high risk for, can we lend a loan to them with this? Information that becomes valuable if you actually use it the right way. So how do you use Vertica? Where's that fit? Talk about the problem that it solves that you maybe couldn't do without it? Yeah, so we back all of our data on Vertica. So we'll warehouse all this open data so we make it available with rich API access without having to just export flat file and integrate it that way. Vertica's great at what it does. So it is your database, is that right? Well, for that data warehouse component, yeah. Okay, yeah, not the transaction take place for sales. But I mean, could you have done this business without a Vertica-like platform? Well, we were on other solutions before Vertica. Oh, you were, okay. And we've kind of just stumbled to them. Now it came to, sorry, it came to Vertica now. And... So yes, I guess. Yeah, we could have, but not as well. I suppose. What's different? Yeah, take us back to the sort of before and after. What changed when you brought in Vertica? Yeah, some of the stuff that we were just starting to come in to see was just load time performance, to be honest with you, as all this data, as we're getting more and more data in our thing, all the stuff's updating all the time and we are starting to really suffering in load time, where we can constantly have our queue backed up and we can expand and contract most of our pipeline. But the database is a little bit more static. And you were using a traditional RDBMS before Vertica, or is it another MPP database? Yeah, we were using it another MPP one before. I didn't have all the capabilities that we wanted. We moved to actually just a pure index at one point. That worked great. It was just a little bit more expensive than we would like to be doing. Load time's also suffered, so. So it was something that you built on your own? No, we were actually using Elasticsearch at one point. Oh, okay. So how was it, which was? Oh yeah, I'll get you. Yeah, honestly it was phenomenal at giving query performance, blazing speed at actually delivering that, but it's on an index where the data size on disk is just so much bigger that that actually does become an issue at that point. Load time was also a lot slower. So these are sort of things that we couldn't adjust with the same technology, so we had to kind of move to the next step. I always kind of wanted to use a column store for this particular problem, and it's kind of just found the right one. Because why? Add some color to that statement, just from a, you know, translate from a technical mind. Right, right. Well, the data doesn't change in individual chunks. Like it's not like I update my email address on a website and then that cell's changing in the database, right? The whole thing is going to change at once. So it very much is write once, read many times. When you get in a situation like that, column store has a lot of advantages as opposed to a row store, which is meant for rapidly changing and updating data. This is meant for reading data, analytics, high speed performance, high concurrency, et cetera. How do you deal with changes to source data? We dump and replace, basically. It's the quickest and easiest way to do it, and we can start doing GIFs in it and, but it's just faster to just, I tell you, I'm looking at numero.io right now. I'm already hooked. The Houston Dangerous Dog Registry. Oh yes. One of the many phenomenal databases that you have here. This is really a great resource. Well, I went in there too when I started. You have to sort of train your mind to think about what you're actually looking for. Like what you have to do with Google as well. This is actually one of the big problems that we've found with people using our platform was that without being able to like, kind of browse the data, you didn't really know what you're looking for. So people just press enter, and then maybe you get some arbitrary data sets that it might have been recently updated and kind of close to the top, but you don't really know what's out there. Right. So we're actually in the middle of a complete like relaunch of our platform. It's like two weeks out, so really excited and wanted to get it ready for this, but it was a little too, we didn't want to push anything that wasn't ready. But it's way more centered around that whole problem, which is just browsing data and like actually trying to find what you're looking for without having to actually type a search query. Yeah, kind of give the user some visibility as to what's in there and spark some ideas that they can then go explore. So sample search. Cool, yeah, we're actually, we've been working really hard with the new census data actually, so that's going to be all in there and I'm really excited to see what people are starting to use for that. We've got US procurement data, we've got import, export data, so this is data of things that are leaving shipping containers as they're coming out. Extremely valuable in any industry basically, so. Are you keeping just current data or archives of historical data? Anything that's made available, basically. If there's historical data made available, we'll keep it. If it's just the current data, then just the current, yeah. You're making the world's open data available through an engine that is going to expand beyond North America and scale, I mean, architecturally you can scale virtually infinitely. Is that fair? Yeah, the right technology, like exactly things like Vertica is not going to be. Our database might have been the problem before, now it's not going to be the problem and it's continuing advancing the technology to make that happen even faster, so. Awesome, all right, Brendan, we'll give you the last word, maybe your take on Vertica or HPE's big data conference, things you're hoping to learn. Honestly, the conference is great. I don't know if you caught the speakers this morning. Yeah, we did. Really, in fact, we didn't mention that in the keynote. There was, in addition to Colin, there was Phil Black, the Navy SEAL. Yeah. It didn't make me want to become a Navy SEAL, but I awed by people who do. Yeah, and Steve Spear, we're going to have on. Right, I mean, you read books about what they go through in Hell Week and you say, I never would have made it. I would have been ringing that bell in the first 15 minutes. First 15 minutes, yeah, exactly. I don't think I'm kind of far either. So, sorry to interrupt. But no, it's been great so far. A lot of friendly people, everyone kind of wants to talk, share solutions and similar problems that you might be having and a chance to actually talk with people that are having those same problems. Great, well, congratulations on getting the company off the ground and getting some initial funding and good luck. Great, yeah, thanks for having me. All right, keep it right there, everybody, we'll be back. This is theCUBE, we're live from Boston. Back after this word.


Hello and welcome to Chanakya IS Academy. I am Priya Kumari and today we will see the topic that is human freedom index. So before proceeding we will see that why this topic is in news. What is human freedom index? Then who publishes it and outcome of human freedom index 2020. Then what human freedom index says about India and whether this human freedom index is successful or not. So we will see all this topic one by one. So let us see that why this topic is in news. So recently human freedom index 2020 was released. This is a global ranking of personal civil and economic freedom which placed India at 111 out of 162 countries. So what is human freedom index? So this actually presents the state of human freedom in the world. It is based on a broad measure that encompasses personal civil and economic freedom. This is a social concept basically. This recognizes the dignity of individuals and is defined here as negative liberty or the absence of coercive constraint. So human freedom index actually is co-published by the Cato Institute and the Fraser Institute. This Cato Institute is US based and Fraser Institute is Canada based. So as again I will repeat that this index published presents a broad measure of human freedom. It takes account of 76 indicators of personal civil and economic freedoms and ranks 162 countries from year 2008 to 2018. So let us see what is the outcome of human freedom index 2020. So if we see that top three countries then New Zealand is placed first followed by Switzerland and Hong Kong. The last three countries are Venezuela, Sudan and Syria. UK and US tied in 17th place. This index put China at 129th rank, Bangladesh at 139th and Pakistan at 148th. So if you will see this map you will see that region divided like North America, South America, Europe, South Asia and Africa continent. So out of these 10 regions the highest level of freedom is in North America putting Canada and US together then Western Europe and East Asia. The lowest levels can be seen in Middle East and North Africa, Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. If we talk about women specific freedom then North America, Western Europe and East Asia they are leading or we can say that women specific freedoms are strongest in these regions and women specific freedom are least protected in the Middle East and North Africa, Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. So now we will see that what human freedom index says about India. So this actually this index placed India at 111st out of 162 countries. In previous year that is 2019, India ranked 94th. So if we see India scores then India actually scored 6.30 out of 10 in personal freedom and 6.56 in economic freedom. So overall human freedom score was 6.43. If we see if we compare India with our neighbor like China and Bangladesh so India is ahead like China is placed at 129th and Bangladesh at 139th. So is human freedom index like is it successful? Then yes it is like it is the most comprehensive freedom index so far created for a globally meaningful set of countries. So like freedom is inherently valuable and it is like it cannot be taken from any human so it is worth measuring carefully. So the report continues to find a strong and positive relationship between freedom and prosperity but again this human freedom index also finds that there is an unequal distribution of freedom in the world like you have seen previously in previous slide when we talk about region 10 regions then North America and Europe is strongest and Middle East and South Asia they are actually least. So you can see that this there is unequal distribution of freedom and the gap in freedom between the most free and the least free countries are also increasing since 2008. So this is what is today's topic. See you in the next topic. Thank you.


Artist managers, I'm going to let you in on some industry secrets in this video. Some of it might anger you a little bit. Some of it will even relieve you, but either way it goes. I think these insights will be extremely useful for how you continue about your career, because I'm going to provide some answers and clarity at the end as well, but let's start here. Many of you might know that I've been a part of quite a few successful campaigns, have gotten platinum plaques and billboard records, helped artists go from no names to any names that are known, without label work or backing at all, but the industry we are in today is a beautiful place for two things. You can create this beautiful indie path and the information is out there, unlike before. However, that creates a couple of problems. And there's a clear way that we've been solving for it to help artists be successful over and over again. So let's start here. Imagine if you had a friend. You hadn't seen that friend for a couple of years. And when you see that friend, you're like, whoa, man, got a nice car. It looked a little different, different pep in their step. Obviously, they've come across some money. And then you're like, yo, man, I got to ask you, like, tell me. And they're like, what? What have you done, man? How did you get so much money? It's clear. I've seen the IG photos that you're moving on a different level right now. And they're like, oh, man, I can't believe I didn't tell you, I'm sorry things have been moving so fast, but they're building this new town and they've come across some land. And with that came an opportunity to buy some land myself.  So I start using all my profits to buy land in bulk and got way more land and I just kept flipping, flipping, flipping. And that's pretty much how I am. Here's amazing. You should do it yourself, man. I'm telling you. So you're like, that simple sounds crazy, but this is my good friend. Let me listen. You go try to do that. You go and you see the land is a lot more expensive than you would have imagined. But hey, I saw it work for my friend. He wouldn't lie to me. I'm going to go ahead and throw my life savings at this. And you try to sell the land. It's not as easy as you thought to sell the land. But when you finally do sell the land, it's not the profit margin you would have expected.  The math isn't mapping. So you go back to your friend and say, hey, look man, this doesn't make sense. You break down your scenario, how much the land costs, and how much you made from it. And they're like, whoa, the land wasn't that much when I was buying it. It was way cheaper and it was way easier to sell at that time. I'm not understanding why I was like that. And then it clicks for you. You're like, you don't have to tell me. I get it now myself. This was a new town at the time. You bought land early before it had that much value. Now I'm trying to buy land where it's not as many people trying to come in and buy land. It's a completely different phase strategically where I need to be. So I can't do exactly the same thing you did and make money in the same way. And that's what artists go through again and again. TikTok in 2020 to 2022 was your friend, right? These other people benefiting and you saw the work. But then if you hadn't got in during that phase, the profits don't look the same. The growth doesn't look the same because everybody was buying real estate on TikTok in 2020 to 2021. 2022 was dying down, but some people were still getting in. They were giving away land for free, free real estate, free eyes at a massive rate because the platform was a new town and they were trying to get as many citizens as possible. And it's not just TikTok that I'm referring to. It's many strategies that work like this. By the time you find out about it and you see artists finally willing to tell you about it, the exact same way they did it, it doesn't really add up and work the same, partially why they might be willing to tell you about it. Or in many cases, there's artists being genuinely helpful, but they just don't quite understand the landscape and how it's changed because they didn't quite understand the advantage they had in the moment that they were able to go up and up and up. But that's the reality of what you're dealing with strategy after strategy after strategy and you're trying to figure out which one of these strategies matter now, which one of these strategies am I too late to, which one of these strategies am I early to, and which one of these strategies do I seem to be early to, but it's never going to pan out like I would hope it's never going to become that big thing. That's the process of figuring this stuff out and I know it's frustrating. And that's not to say TikTok doesn't matter. We were some of the primary people who took great advantage of TikTok, first from influencers, then we quickly moved and we were early over a year early on getting artists individually on their page just to post content and go directly into streams because we saw influencers getting to the point where they were going to become way too expensive. And even now, TikTok is extremely useful just as a platform, but the strategy looks different. No, you might not be able to come in and just buy land, flip that land and get rich, but maybe you can come in, buy some land and then build houses and now do the housing development. People like the type of house you built, you can attract a certain customer and make money that way. There's different strategies that apply at different phases during different years and also most importantly for different artists. And this is where we get to the second part of the equation. I was talking with one of my clients and he was cool with another one of my clients. And one of these clients were one of these people who had really good timing. They were able to take advantage of a moment in time and get some amazing results, extreme results, but this artist understood. They were like, well, two things. One, the timing isn't the same as when that artist came in. And two, there's some attributes that don't quite add up when it comes to me versus that other artist. Number one, my audience wouldn't make me as big as that artist's audience couldn't make him. Just understanding that alone, that difference takes a lot of weight off of the artist's shoulder because they know the reality of where they can go based on the choice that he made. He knew that he wasn't going to be able to be as big as that particular artist, particularly 100% indie. Doesn't mean he couldn't be successful indie. He's already successful indie, the guy I'm talking about, but he knew he couldn't be that other artist. That level of success, indie, because they have different audiences. It just is what it is. And that's something you should think about for your audience. He also understood his marketability. When you look at him versus that other artist and the type of people that that artist would touch and appeal to is just not the same. Again, it is what it is.  Now, before I go further in this video and speak on how you think through the strategies that you take on, I must say, this is the second video in my Saturday series that I'm starting back up.  So if you could please subscribe to this channel, if you appreciate this type of talk, just straightforward, no fancy editing, then I'll know that it's worth doing because I can always do the fancy editing and those style YouTube videos that trigger the algorithm and speak to a certain set of audience. But I know there's some people out there who really just want the real, they don't necessarily want to just be entertained education wise. So I can shoot these and put these up easily as long as I know that there's people on the other side that want to hear it. Please subscribe. Now, that being said, when it comes to understanding the strategies that you can choose, it truly does come down to building a bridge between you and the audience that you're trying to connect with. And it has to work on both sides. There has to be this balance because if the audience connects with it, it works. But you don't like it. At some point, you're going to burn out. You're going to feel this disconnect with who you are, the brand that you would like to communicate, the expression that you have as an artist, and you're just going to stop. And this is what you see a lot of times where you think, oh man, that artist was moving and they just fell off.  People end up not caring about certain people because they stopped short or their business isn't right in a way that causes them to stop short and not execute. That is way more common than people just actually not caring about somebody after they got on. So making sure that there's this balance where the fans care and it connects with them, but also it meets a certain level of criteria with you that you can do it and you can do it sustainably because you aren't at odds internally. It's an important part, especially for an artist, someone who's trying to communicate something that's coming from them. But beyond that, then we have to get into some other realities. What are your strengths? Legitimately, what are your strengths? So if I just go back to thinking about the two artists that I was, the artists who had this greater pop appeal, if you will, that guy has some talents. He could do all different types of quirky things. It might as well be like a circus act if he wants to. He has that type of talent. But he can't sing like this other guy can.  No music, he doesn't need a thing and grabs your attention just like that. Understanding that, that means I can lean into this ability that that guy can't lean into and it has nothing to do with competition versus somebody else. It's just about understanding your strengths and who you are and if you understand that, pay attention to yourself in that way. Inevitably, you will stand out and beat out other people who don't quite understand themselves to the same level or just can't provide what you can provide. So y'all both have a place. He can't be him and he can't be him. So what are your strengths legitimately? There's some people who can, they can record themselves, they can mix and master, they can do all these things. And when you can do that, it's a lot easier to drop a massive volume of music because you're in control of the entire operation versus somebody who has to spend a lot of money and doesn't have that money to create a high quality mix and master. You hear what I'm saying? All right. So a strategy that might require those things is a strength for one person, but it's pretty difficult for another person. But hey, if you get by to a point where I now have enough money and I have a trustworthy mix and mastering engineer and I could just pay them, oh, now all of a sudden that strategy opens up to you. So every strategy, all right, doesn't have to be a limitation forever. Some things unlock at new levels, depending on what you're achieving, depending on what skills you gain through time. And now you can do something that you couldn't do before. Resources, all these things, leverage, leverage, leverage, everything that you gain from a skill to a group of friends, a community, a fan base, everything is leverage and they unlock new strategies from you for you, all right? But before I get there, I want to go a little bit deeper into those strengths.  That's a real skill. That is a real gift that they can now just freestyle all the time and build their audience. They might be struggling a little bit more and creating great music. Or you have somebody like Juice Row who could literally freestyle for like an hour plus. You have some people who can look at a word randomly and they can make a song. Like I've seen women write songs just like that and sing them like freestyle songs that feels like a song, right? Just because they saw a word pop up, I've seen rappers rap versus. And it's one thing to rap, like I can come up with some bars that kind of string together and rhyme and sound kind of good. But if I just see a random word, I can do that. It's not anything special. Somebody who can do it and people are like, yo, that's dope though. It strikes a chord. That's a certain level. And that's a strength when you can freestyle and people like, yo, that actually made sense. That wasn't just a bunch of random words that kind of sound good together. That was a bar, right? So understand these strips. Your looks could be a strength, right? Your understanding of community. You might have a marketing mind. Some artists legitimately have marketing self promotional minds. There's so many things. There's artists that I know that also had a background in like film. We've got some homies who have some film backgrounds or they did weddings and things like that. And now you're competing against this guy doing content all the time, not realizing, oh, he's moving off the foundation of a skill set, right? So there's so much when it comes to strengths that you really need to think through. And then of course, the opposite of that is weaknesses, right? The last thing that I want to get to, and I touched on this already, and that is your resources.  So they might have more time to put in, right? The skills you have, all these things matter, right? And this is something that we do consistently that have allowed us to help artists blow up in so many different ways from influencer campaigns to just organic content and doing millions and even hundreds of millions of streams legitimately at all these things and different strategies and tying them together because we sit down with artists, we talk to the artists and we have seen so many different things, not just one route of success that we might have done with one artist that we were attached to, right? So we can help them see it for themselves. That's something that you need to do. If you want help doing that, we actually have a program going right now for a dollar. We have a 30-day challenge just for one dollar where you can chop it up with us, see multiple strategies that are available and how you should think through picking a strategy for yourself that right direction and see exactly what it requires to prepare to get 1,000 fans in 30 days, which is what many people who have done this challenge have achieved, right? Only for a dollar at www.nolabelsnecessary.com slash 30 days. Again, that's www.nolabelsnecessary.com slash 30 days. I'll put a link below this video as well. This is one of the most important things you can do because wasting time going the wrong direction fast is not as valuable as finding the right direction and doing it consistently, no matter how slow it is. As long as you know you're going down the right path, the lack of anxiety that comes with that certainty, the lack of overwhelm that you feel is refreshing and allows you to just create, just focus on the thing, right? Which is creating something as dope as possible, right? Connecting with people, but you're doing it with the right people and just getting better at your craft as a whole, including the business side of things. That's cool and it's easy to think about everything when you know it's all for the right reason, the right purpose because it's in the right direction. So that's the trap that we fall in today because of this information age where there's so much available, there's infinite options. The door to your success might be a trap door for me. So please think about your strengths, truly taking consideration your resources before you follow a strategy of an artist that you see that's just doing things, right? And look at when they benefited, how they benefited. Look at the entire climate, right? Did they go from zero to this household name during a period where there was super virality on a platform that they were moving on? If so, that has to be taken into consideration. It doesn't mean that what they're doing doesn't work at all or they don't have any knowledge at all. It just means that that path wouldn't have done the same thing if they did the exact same thing today. So you can't follow their advice as if, oh, I'm going to do the exact same thing and that's going to work today. It's like if you posted one song a week on SoundCloud today, like Russ did, the thing that blew him up, you will be wild for thinking that posting a song a week on SoundCloud and doing nothing else would get you the results that Russ got in 2024, 25, 26 and beyond. And then the biggest thing to consider is when is it worth doing something that isn't you? Because there are moments that exist that it can be kind of worth it. Let me give an example. I'll go back to TikTok because that's just a popular topic people understand when I talk about TikTok in particular. If it's 2020, 2021 and you're like, I don't want to post content five times a day. I just don't want to do it. Please don't make me post content five times a day. Well, it's kind of worth it. The sacrifices that you would have to make, the level that you would grow in that time, if you were doing it right, would be ridiculous and you wouldn't be able to see similar results outside of that window. You would be up here, right? But doing that same strategy today, exactly like that, you're here. Let's pretend you're starting lower than that. So there is a level of success, but now that it only gets you here, there's other strategies that could get you there. So it's worth looking around and seeing which suits you best. It's not as worth just blindly trying to figure out that strategy, right? Because it's on this level. But when that strategy could get you off the charts, right? With just doing that, it was worth thinking about. Does that make sense? You know, I'm just trying to give devices and frameworks to think through the biggest problem that most artists have, which is not lack of money, which is not connections or lack thereof. It's actually understanding what to do with what they have so they can make progress from where they are and then have new leverage from the new place to unlock other strategies that creates another set of decisions that they have to make to make more progress and more progress. Your career should just be a series of making progress over and over again. That's all it is. But you got to figure out how to make that progress. The best way to go about it in a sustainable way. So again, hopefully you find these Saturday videos helpful. Would love to know your thoughts in the comment section below. And as I mentioned, for only one dollar, if you would like to talk with me, hop in the challenge space. I'm in there every day chopping it up with artists, hoping them to think through where they are. It's only a dollar www.nolabelsnecessary.com slash 30 days to find out how to get in while it's still available. Now check out the next video if you're still here.


All right guys, we are live on a Friday evening here. I'd like to welcome everyone who's made their way into the gallery Subscribers to the independent investor channel subscribers To all these other channel creators as well. I see a ton of channel creators In the group making all kinds of different content for your benefit And I'll take this opportunity as well if your first time to the independent investor channel live stream Stick around You will not find a more unique live stream than mine Like I was one of the original live streamers sitting on my dinner table Getting my thoughts off my chest Really identifying a landscape of investing that you know, it's very very very difficult for new investors to make their way into the investing opportunity and Try to make sense of it on the on your own However, that is the requirement We set the bar fairly high on the independent investor channel. We spend a lot of our time Breaking down barriers to entry, which I think unfortunately in the investing arena There's way way too much confusion And I think a lot of people are seeking out information and understanding where it is that they can find good credible information Online I haven't been a self-directed investor my whole life I've been a self-directed investor for about eight years now Made every mistake under the book. No doubt about it Been in a couple class action lawsuits been in hawk with the IRS not once but twice had my fair share of bad beats and I've zigged when the market has zagged I've been in penny stock investing and I have lost money There is nobody out there in the investing arena They may be very very flashy in telling you that they've got all the answers I'm here to tell you that they don't and People wouldn't invest in the stock market if it wasn't a wonderful wealth generating vehicle Okay, but it's a very powerful wealth generating vehicle And I think it's very very easy to get misguided especially for new investors Who are seeking some good answers as to where they can look get some good information? We try to provide a very clear testimonial on what I do in the market We are going to cover the portfolios. I was a little bit misguided this week I guess paying too much attention To the speculative aspect in the portfolio and and and bad on me for doing that while I was doing that the value and The passive investing aspect where we're kicking some ass. They were just doing really really well and You guys are gonna see that and I'll earmark that when I roll out the portfolios to you guys We do that for transparency This is not a make your way to the independent investor channel and and deploy what it is that I do I do what it is that I do because it makes sense for me And I have a very very high bar that's set for you guys In that you guys need to identify whatever purpose it is for you in the stock market That that is the requirement. Okay, there are no shortcuts for you as a new investor and I will tell you that the bar is high What I will tell you is that if you get caught up in all the hype that's out there right now You're just gonna confuse yourself. Okay? If you want to know what the stock to buy of the week is or the month or the year at Any given time you can stick your nose right on the Dow 30 Stick it right on the Dow 30 All right, I own 27 of them. I'm right now a void of American Express Nike As well as United Health Group, but I own the rest of them Why do I do that? It's because I think a lot of people make investing out to be a whole hell of a lot more difficult than it needs to be number one I think a lot of people feel like they need to spend the majority of their time looking for the needle in a haystack that rocket ship That 10x 15x 25x stock. I don't even know what that means anymore. I Will provide a voice a reason. This is my opinion. You can disagree with my want I think all that is BS all of it and People will come on and they will provide flash in the pants that of which is aimed at winning you over as a subscriber to the message Certainly, I'd love to have you make your way to the independent investor community As well as any of these other really good channel content creators as part of a grander community and and quite frankly to speak about a Grander initiative and a grander mission here on the independent investor channel To empower one investor at a time and that means to take control of your own money Okay, and a lot of people would say man. Okay. I don't know time out Ryan. I'm throwing in the towel I've only been on for less for just over five minutes. Okay Something as important as investing in your life. You cannot expect that in five minutes You're gonna have all the answers All right, it has taken me a lifetime to get to where I am now and I think I probably deploy more of a Socratic method and that the more I learn the more I understand that I don't know If that makes any sense And I think a lot of young investors man, especially the young investors You know, the world is your oyster. You've got that ace up your sleeve with time Don't give it away Don't give it away Listen to folks like myself and some of these other really really good investors here in the group as to Their experiences in the market like I've earmarked. I don't I don't make stuff up I don't sugarcoat stuff to make it seem better than what it is. I Sometimes feel the temptation for the YouTube opportunity Because that's honestly what YouTube wants YouTube wants me to come on put on bells and whistles jump up and down and Tell everybody profess to the world that I've got the next best stock I'm gonna tell you right now. That's not possible. It's not You stick your nose on the Dow 30 that that's the best place in my opinion to start Then you can roll right off and take a look at the top 10 and the S&P 500 You're gonna find some interesting names. They're probably Dow components. They throw Berkshire Hath away into that mix as well, okay? But I think a lot of people are looking in the wrong places for their stock market information I'm gonna tell you within the first 10 minutes So you can get the answer and if you've got other things to do with your time and you don't have time to spend 60 minutes with with me, which is the fastest 60 minutes on YouTube. There's no doubt because it has the chance of tweaking your perspective about how you look at the investing opportunity and maybe even how you look at Life in general and how the investing opportunity fits into the total overall picture of your life Okay, why do you invest? Why do you invest the way that you do? What strategy do you deploy? What makes sense for you? What makes sense for me may not make sense for you that's why we come together and that's why I'm so adamant and so aggressive on Coming together every Friday and offering this message Yeah, at about 64 percent right now. I'm starting to get the fever coming on But this is more I got my second vaccine today for anybody who's wondering what's wrong with me I do recommend that to anybody. I've heard the second go-around is a little bit tougher That's fine. I'm a pirate and I'm one tough. I'm one tough bad dude So I'll be fine. I wouldn't miss this for the world I never know who's gonna make their way in and sit in a corner of the world and catch an independent investor live stream that of which I kicked the door open to perspective and Allow anybody to come in and and and hear what I have to say about Investing in the market now Investing in the stock market when I first started I can reach back into the tool bag and tell you It's not all roses You're not gonna get investing in the stock market and not step on a few landmines every now and then It does happen. The idea is that you're putting some freaking risk on the table Right, you're living life and you're living life hard. That's the key Okay, because I can tell you one thing you are never gonna find success in this life if you just live your entire life Careful. All right, so with that guys like to welcome everybody the independent investor channel live stream It's gonna be me running the show tonight. I opted for that and just want to Make sure that everybody settles in grab a drink. Have a good time. Sit back. Leave your comments in the gallery here As I'm looking to engage in a Q&A this evening with you guys It's never really a better time to start defining What it what it is that you want out of this gig and I think a lot of people come to the end of the investor opportunity For some some tough reasons I think anybody that's being turned on to the investing opportunity with what's went down over the last couple weeks I've been a non-participant, of course There's no surprise to the to the gallery or anybody who knows my perspective on the market, etc Where I stand on the game stop short squeeze if you're interested in a 30 minute That was really the only social media content that I put to YouTube this week speaks to a little bit more of a of a grander type of Evaluation of the independent investor channel opportunity and I'm gonna continue on with that Evaluation of the program the projects that I roll out Where I see value for you guys and adjust accordingly, okay? I think you'll find that some of the daily upload Information that comes through on the 10 minute stuff May take a little bit of a backseat here as I focus on my viper group I'd like to welcome all the vipers to the group. That is my private WhatsApp group along with the M1 finance experience I'm doing multiple zoom meetings with my members why because I want to and I think it's necessary to get them where they need to be and This is some of the behind-the-scenes stuff some of the life coaching stuff that I'm not going to get on here and say that I'm making a difference I'll leave that up to the people that are being affected by those opportunities and Just want to thank each and every one of those members of that group It's absolutely one of my favorite things to do Next best thing to actually being physically with other people is the zoom opportunity So I'd like to give a special shot out to to Courtney and Corey Very enjoyable sitting with you guys man I again I would never have the opportunity to meet kind folks like you guys if it weren't for the social media opportunity and Really that's where I footstomp the value on the independent investor channel anyway It certainly isn't me coming on and in a 10-minute offering proclaiming that I have All the answers to life and and the stock market and everything exists there in I don't spend my time with that but the second shot out goes goes out to Ruth and This lady I'm a better person for speaking with this lady I don't think I could provide a better compliment to how incredible this person is She's fabulous and again the opportunity and the trust that is bestowed upon me To really dig deep and really try to find that granular alignment to what people are looking for Sometimes it's just a tutorial where we walk through and we do a screen save a shot of M1 finance And we kind of walk through how do we add a position? How do we take out a position? Why did you do this in this particular sector of the SMP? Why did you assign this level of allocation in technology and why did you assign this level of allocation and materials? He gives me the opportunity to vet those questions one on one or in a lot of cases one on two It's super enjoyable for me But I got to be honest with you some of the stuff that I've rolled out through the project to the channel You do because you do because you do And I'm a man on a mission This is more of a mission to me and it is an ethical mission and that I'm always Evaluating how it is my message is perceived By the community and making sure that we're making a positive impact So it's always that push pull of what YouTube expects me to put out through content and what I know Most people are not looking for But they need they really do So that's really why I I provide those opportunities in the manner that that I do Because you know for a very small amount, you know a nice $9,000 entry fee per year to my private group, you know, which you might think is a lot on the onset But $9,000 I can probably make that up for you over a lifetime If you just pay me the money and and I'll gladly take it for you I'm just kidding the the Annual fee is being evaluated whether or not I want to maintain the sale status holiday winter and summer Or whether or not I digress to an all the time $60 per year. That's a steal It's a giveaway. You cannot expect to send with somebody as good as me And as caring as me In an opportunity where we have the opportunity to talk about whatever you want to talk about Life coaching I've had some people take me up on the budget side of the house credit discipline, etc Guys, there's a reason why I have an 835 credit score. Okay, I can help you with that and again I don't blah blah blah look at me. I'm so good and and this and that now I'm here to tell you man that me nor the other thousand YouTube channel creators out there have any of the answers That there's nothing special about any of us. Okay, there's there's not that big a separator between some of the smaller channels with a few hundred subscribers or a few thousand subscribers and the Graham Stephens of the world and the Nates O'Brien's of the world and the Ryan Scribner's These are all human beings as well. Okay, and I'm kind of here to tell you that I don't think the disparity between those channels really lends itself to to to Reputable information or not in other words the size of your YouTube channel means really little to me And it shouldn't mean a whole lot to you with regard to the opportunity that you can seek Through the social media opportunity However, I give you the answer within the first 20 minutes Okay, the secret to my success in life or anything and especially investing the person that you need to follow is yourself Okay, and as cliche as you might want to think that that is I want you to stop and think about it for just a second And I want you to understand and ask yourself in reflection of your life Successes right hardships that you've gone through Doesn't it seem like the most meaningful things are initiated by you Right in other words if you just tripped and fell into the independent investor opportunity and you looked at my portfolio and said Well, obviously he's killing it. He's doing well. I can do that, too I can just trip and fall into Ryan's portfolio and render the same amount to success You might have a shallow level of return success. Okay, in other words, you may make some money But is it going to be meaningful success? The word meaningful goes a long way with me Understanding why it is you're doing what you're doing why you're making the decisions that you're doing and for you new investors out there You don't have to be an analyst You know, I just gave you the answer where to look the gems of the stock market the diamonds look at the Dow 30 very simple Google it for crying out loud. I'm not going to tell you what they are Hell, I could probably name them off the cuff out of memory How many of you guys can do that? How many of you guys put value in other places and you're wondering what that next rocket ship to the moon is going to be What that next 50x stock is going to be forget all that garbage forget it Look at the visas in the United States of the world. Look at the apple and the Microsoft All right, look at the home depots of the world. Maybe even a Walmart. All right, just take a look It doesn't mean that you have to go buy the Dow 30 doesn't mean that But start to get familiar with some of these companies that you're like man alive Recognize Verizon. I recognize AT&T. I recognize Disney. Okay. Now. I kind of see what Ryan's talking about man Is it really that simple? Jesus Ryan, you're you're given away the most obvious thing in stock market investing It seems to be something that escapes most people Yep, therein lies the reason why I do this channel.   I've read a few books. I'm with the game Ryan. I understand it I can take on a little bit more risk at my age But my question back to you is you say you have a hundred percent to pie to work with What are you suggesting to me that makes sense to you as a beginning investor? Are you looking to take a hundred percent of your portfolio and build out a SPAC portfolio? Okay Better know what you're doing Betty better be ready for roles Right, but if you came back to me and said, you know what I want to introduce 10% I want to get used to this investing gig I want to put some good quality growth companies in there and I want to start a passive base in the S&P 500 Now we're getting to a better place in this evolution of an investor and improving people's real Stewardship to investing and I feel like where the landscape takes 10 steps back on this front I'll still continue to yell from my small corner my small boxing ring here on the independent investor channel There's no doubt about it. Just a bunch of good good quality content creators out there I do want to highlight Kyle's in the house. I very very very cool to see you my friend And I really appreciated the shout-out in the finance youtuber Facebook group. That's a lot of fun in there There's a lot of up-and-coming Folks that want to share their story on YouTube and I think that is great. I really do I think it's fabulous But these guys took and they featured me and did a nice write-up for me really appreciate that There's a few things that I really Really really enjoy in social media and that positive feedback is huge for me Again, the rest of it. I'll leave to the people that end up sitting with me on a zoom meeting for 90 minutes And come out of it with their head like yellow But they're empowered and they've changed their lives So it's great to see a man any time I highlight these folks You want to make sure and kick over and just hit the subscribe button for him? It takes a couple seconds These guys are working really really hard to share their testimonials with you guys and this is just the beginning Okay, the landscape is changing on sharing information Perhaps I say something that motivates you and brings you on to the investing opportunity again Not to just jump on with or jump off the cliff with both feet But motivates you to take a look see Motivates you to maybe start a strategy for yourself Maybe start asking some of those questions that you didn't know how to ask before Very very important man.  What is it ETF? What is the index fund do yourself a little? I'm not gonna teach you or give you your homework if you're serious about investing You'll learn a little bit about what an ETF is or what an index fund is What an ARC ETF is because that kind of covers the younger crowd My ARC ETFs are up a thousand dollars eleven hundred dollars this week this week Week right and I've got a fourteen thousand dollar allocation to the ARC portfolio And for a lot of you guys maybe starting investors couple grand five grand ten fifteen grand That's right in that sweet spot of where I try to identify a lot of people fail to get to So for you guys that are new to the channel, you're like, okay, that's a real result again I don't come on and put on a freaking dance for you guys and put on a dress and yay Look at me.  I don't think that exists. I don't I sought Opportunity and it worked out. Could it go down within the next six months? Yeah Yeah, we need more people speaking about investing as a two-pronged game Okay, there are two sides to the coin and and I know that there's a lot of people in the YouTube community that want to tune in And they just want to focus on Again, boom, I want to get I want to retire tomorrow and that's it. Give me that YouTube channel. That's gonna give me those answers I'm here to give you an answer. I'm here to give you a truth. That does not exist So stop looking for it. All right, stop Okay, look in the freaking mirror That'll help you get to where you need to go so much better than trying to kick over stones And or look for that pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. All right I don't need to tell you that leprechauns don't exist, but they freaking don't all right So let's do the portfolio review and I do want to kind of highlight a few just aspects of the portfolio We rolled it out last week This is the brokerage I will tell you the theme this week again because I can't stop talking because 60 minutes is not That much time for me to blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah get out what I need to get out But we did Liquidate some stock just today. I put some cash to the side I did that as a strategic initiative in my portfolio to take some risk off the table take some profit I always liquidate stock for profit always always all Never ever sell stock for a loss This is how the brokerage account shook out this dipped below a hundred for the last live stream We were back up above that mark Nothing really crazy to to to earmark here IPOE and Hylian have just been the real anchors in this and it's really been my My assessment over the portfolio this week that these have really held me back from participating in what has been a fairly good market this week So pretty disappointed in the performance really kind of holding the bag on Hylian here Still believing didn't help with the Goldman Sachs downgrade to a sell I find that interestingly ironic in that the exact same analyst Just wrote the same downgrade 28 days ago As if the company has changed so much over the last 28 days to write a new downgrade Stock manipulation But anyway, that's what is is happening and I guess the sec turns their their nose to that type of free speech But that's what's going on. Hopefully it does not see the price target of $12 that'll allow them the optimal entry You notice that it drives down during the day and then right when the market closes it buys after market There's after market action on Hylian. That's really really it makes you raise an eyebrow as to what's going on behind the scenes with this company But we're going to continue to hold long. I have IPOE, which is uh, so fee so fine And um, we'll be fine. That's our speculative aspect Whereas the rest of the portfolio has come back quite nicely, but um, these are a little skewed here I give these numbers for you guys that are new to the live stream the 91.24 Is actually a lot less than that. I'm probably a lot more cash rich Which would put this more at about an 80 percent Stock to cash ratio here. Um, and that's just what I wanted to do today So this is the taxable brokerage We'll move on to the Roth IRA number one Again, these are a little bit less as there was some liquidations These are the portfolio holdings as they shook out today But value was on fire philip morris, uh, altria group Um 3m has just been sneaking up on us. Uh, Lockheed martin found a base, of course I thought it would uh for you guys that tripped and fell on my hey. Hey sisco exists out there Um were better for it. Absolutely But yeah value killed it this week. What can I say? value killed it Yeah, everything value oriented um dividend Uh passive investments really were my best performers. I'm up in every etf. I own I did take profits in vti and voo I I just don't want to initiate positions here with the market the way that it is So I'll continue to be patient on those but I'm stacking paydirt And really earmarking some new funds to initiate some really good positions in vti and voo When the market is a little bit more conducive to doing so. All right, so I'm looking to um to to take those positions Um a little more strategically in these accounts, right? But keep in mind those decisions aren't made with an attempt to time the market Okay, because I already have my thrift savings plan that is working for me passively all the time I do not tinker with that. I do not trade the I don't change the allocation I don't change anything with that. It's a hundred percent passive and it's killing it. It went up $1,200 just this week Just this week passive. I did nothing. I did not stress about it I I did not put a short on it I I did not fall over myself trying to freaking put in a limit by order to sell and take profit And oh my god stress about this and that zero effort zero and i'm winning Okay, so for you guys that are new investors, man, heed my call Sometimes the most successful way of entering into the stock market can sometimes be the easiest Yeah And the most lucrative all right So the stock to cash allocation. There's a little bit skewed. I do apologize I couldn't do the math on it because it did not update Um in the in the brokerage yet that'll be updated for monday for next week stream And here it is for ratha. I array two both of these accounts at about 120,000 And and not a whole lot of big changes in here. God mcdonald's has been Raytheon has been on fire oil has just been absolutely fabulous this week Look at these sectors of the market. Nobody's freaking talk about because they're all busy talking about freaking game stop Let it go. Please.  This is where the goods are coca-cola. That's where the goods are Johnson and johnson. I'm up 27 percent in j&j That's what that's what we should be discussing Apple computers microsoft blew out the numbers fantastic google.  It could have been a buy and a hold forever I get it. It was fine. It took a nice run up for me 10 percent in a week. I'm a winner. I'm fine. I'm out I'm good. I render the profits tax protected within the ratha array. I'm good to fight another day I put that pay dirt to the side and I'll monitor like a coiled up viper in the shade ready to rock All right. Yeah mcdonald everything really did really quite well vymi back in the positive vym is killing it Um, very very nice and a three percent yield to boot vymi is a four percent yielder V and q is fighting back. Um What can I say wall greens boots alliance took that into some really deep water and that's almost back to even Nice to see there because I was down a good 1500 dollar bill in that position All right This is everybody's favorite I do nothing with this portfolio. Nothing zero nothing zero zero No effort No wall street bets for me. I don't need it. These are the 11 sectors in the s and p 500 If you're a new investor to the stock market and you're seeing this for the first time Pay attention. I'll give you a second. I won't interrupt you Take a moment This account is increased in value about a thousand dollars from last live stream This is just the sector specialty ETFs. This has a custom allocation or waiting Okay, in other words, I've got 14 percent to the top end holding which is technology And the lowest holding right now is telecommunications with materials right behind it But I strategically allocate to those specific sectors at a lower amount Three and four percent respectively for each of those on the bottom end 13 and a half nothing to shake a stick at Okay, it's not the entire portfolio, but for a lot of you guys it could be Hell I would have killed for this portfolio starting out man in the stock market I would I would have absolutely fell over myself knowing what I know now with the low expense here And to jam these into a Roth IRA. This is a great passive base in my opinion M1 finance makes it possible for this right here. I share these portfolios on every one of my videos So you guys are welcome to kick over if you don't memorize these They're in all of the descriptions in all of my videos that nobody reads This is everybody's favorite.  What can I say? Passive investing Yeah Man, you're amazing Ryan. You're so special. No, I'm not No, I'm not Nope, I do everything that you guys do I walk talk and chew and eat food and drink water and You know, I am affected by this code shot. So I'm not a machine Okay, there's nothing special about what's going on here I'll say it again. There's nothing special about what's going on here. Anybody can do it Anybody, okay?  I'm just providing strategic access to a testimonial. This is real money. It's not monopoly 14 043 we just kicked over 14. This account is up $6,000. We've got about 7,800 Yep, I've invested capital to this and I fund this with about $25 a month Excuse me. I upped this to $50 every two weeks. I'm sorry. That's what I do So I do dollar cost average this on a schedule and I don't miss the money. There it is our key tf's Fantastic and the tsp Approaching that $50,000 milestone that's going to be a really Really nice one for me. I established this thrift savings plan with the intent and I think this is it speaks to the masses out there who can Relate with the idea of having a 401k 403b 457 type of program I just so happen to have the thrift savings plan. They do not match mine. I'm on the legacy plan For you guys that are familiar with the thrift savings plan. Nonetheless, I do contribute 10 to this Okay And this is also I share my allocation because I think there's a lot of people out there that can appreciate How and why I do this This pip is right on the money. I can deal with 17.88 that stands for personal Investment performance over the last year is the way they figure that not too shabby. I'm winning Man, Ryan, you're amazing. Man, you are the best investor ever.  You should have a million subscribers on your channel wrong It's nothing special about what what's going on here It's wealth building 10 freaking one if you're finding your way to this message and i'm failing to entertain you I do apologize, but this is life changing This will help sharpen your perspective on investing. What is possible? I share my testimonial openly so you can see what real results in again. I foot stomp the fact that this is not monopoly I do some covered calls as well There's some of the stuff I've looked at and wrote some contracts on Just for your just for your awareness All right, and then finally I always declare where where we're at here Just staring down that just a little over 30 grand away from my half a million dollar mark I might cry You guys have no idea where I come from man I work really really hard for my money as a lot of you guys do And I hope if there's people who make their way into their channel. That's the part of it that they can relate with They can I work I go to work every day Um, I do youtube on a side hustle I do it to share a mission if people didn't appreciate my missing I would shut it the hell off and honestly through this evaluation and critical assessment of this uh investment opportunity The independent investor channel opportunity Um, I will declare to you guys that everything as of now is on the chopping block I will say this though There was a hell of a comment that snuck its way into the top of the comments and for you guys that don't Make social media. Um, it already actually disappeared, but I will tell you that it was a pretty darn It was a pretty darn positive comment. I gotta go back in here and grab this. I apologize But I'm getting the comments right now um It said, hey man, Ryan, I really appreciate the information you put through it helps people And I think for all the people that maybe make their way at least I presume because Look, I wouldn't do this if I didn't think I have somewhat of a um Very very strategic mission Right and that I I'm I'm always trying to during the two sessions that I had this week. I explained this I'm looking to hear what it is that you have to say Not so I can respond in a manner that makes sense for me I'm responding in a way based on what you tell me Works for you That's the whole idea is if we can streamline you to get to that Strategy and the deployment of that strategy that makes sense for you That's the goods right there and I freaking get it guys. God dang man I struggled with m1 finance specifically just to show you an example and to have that Ability to stick out your hand and say hey man, can you help me? That's pretty freaking powerful And it wouldn't be possible if it wasn't for The youtube opportunity And so I do want to just foot stomp again man The um the opportunity that we roll out through the channel and the opportunity that's been provided to me To sit across from people listen and then provide my constructive feedback or constructive like Encouragement I think a lot of people man. They really really like that like hey, what am I doing right ryan? What am I doing that you would well, okay? Yeah, I know I see this over here I kind of see what you're doing here But how about this this and this and I'm pretty good at just providing options instead of just being like Hey, you need to do it this way. That's just stupid because I don't think in investing It's an arena that's conducive to that whole type of like you need to do it my way or the highway No way that that's why I'm really not that big of a fan on on private groups, especially for thousands and thousands of dollars I mean for the m1 finance experience that I roll out that is In surmount over value that can change your life. Okay I've got to put a little bit of a price tag on it just to protect my time And if you guys want to know more about that I have all kinds of stories about how I've put myself out there And I've been burned by doing that. Okay now the people who have a little bit of stock or ownership in that opportunity Really really want to get down to the nitty gritty and they want to freaking learn They're not doing it for entertainment. All right, they're not doing it to be part of the group They're not doing it to feel accepted into a group. I really don't think that those groups are very conducive to Learning any way it becomes very very difficult. But right now Our group is about 42 people strong And I'm spending the extra time now while the sale is off really focusing on that core group So if you have not got with me Up till now hit me up because if the group does expand Obviously my time is going to have to be budgeted out Okay, very cool. All right. I'm going to get to some of the Some of the deals obviously highly on come on Yeah, pretty frustrating position there honestly. I don't know what to say about it other than I get it. I understand. Okay I I just It's a tough one. It's a real tough one. It's my most aggressive position in the portfolio But with the numbers that I just declared to you. Is it really that risky? In other words is highly ongoing out of business. I don't think that it is Um If it does that would be a pretty big dent to the portfolio that would that would be that would suck Um, I just think that there's players involved with this opportunity that cannot be Cannot be understated. So um, it needs more time. That's it. It just needs more time They're putting the strategic places in place with the senior management That has been done over the last just week and a half two weeks With sherry baker as well as the senior vice president of marketing, etc He's from Dana 30 years in the industry. He's a monster He's going to be great for the company and they need to have those pieces in alignment to take advantage of what I feel It's going to be some lucrative opportunity Not only for the company but for shareholders alike. Okay. That's just my opinion on that guys All right I have all the answers could be smoke And they've always make a light of everything. I you understand my my point, you know I'm a lot more guarded I guess than a lot of people. I guess what what Really gets me disappointed is the amount of followership on social media and people start to get complacent And man, if you don't like something I say scrutinize it, okay I put myself out there In a vulnerable way To be scrutinized scrutinized away if you don't like what you see in the portfolio if you think I suck if you think I need to Just be going completely spack investing And telling everybody on youtube social media that i'm a 10x investor Let me know let me know. I may respectfully disagree with you Okay, but it's your prerogative to offer your opinion for sure I would always come back to Look, I can do the flash in the pants type of thing But I always have to be careful how it's received by the masses And I do a pretty good job of having at least somewhat of an ethical backbone Before manure comes out my mouth and I let it go out of my mouth, especially over a youtube social media stream Let that sink in for a second So I was thinking about at&t. I own a hundred and three hundred and twelve shares at&t happy to do so Great company. I think right here at $29. I think it's good. It is undervalued 32 at fair market value at&t fantastic You bet one of those telecoms, right? If you're going to get some space, right? You see how I seek out my space exposure to telecom. I got a little dab of exposure in the sector portfolio. Yes I also own at&t and multiple other avenues and own the stock outright as well as Owning some cover calls on the position, right? So once you get up to the more strategic Type of initiative and you'll get there. Okay. I don't talk down to people I'm just speaking with people you guys pee in that people That's something that you want to kind of aim toward is the ability to write those covered calls, man it's just a nice way of extrapolating a little bit of premium off of the portfolio. It's a fantastic way of doing it and Especially for a little fella like me Little retail investor, man. If you don't think that there's somewhat of a sense of urgency for me for people To try to make sure that you're on the right side of the income gap when the income gap starts to separate Um, I want everybody in this community to be on the right side of history I really really do and take that to heart. All right got the ambassador to the channel in the house, man All goods in the house. Um, hope you're enjoying your kathy I got green tea tonight and again. I'm pretty proud of myself for making it through this Livestream I am about 64 percent. So if anything else you guys can appreciate my devotion to uh to maybe that new investor Holy moly that is crazy. That's the coolest thumbnail I've ever seen Nice job. It's kind of how I feel right now actually Understand reality think critically. Um, I think if that were the requirement I think a lot of people might be turned off of investing I want to try to water it down as as as much as we can because If you came to me and you said ryan investing is so difficult. I don't know where to start You need to get to that basic like how can I start an account and how can I enter into my first S&P 500 index ETF maybe my first basket of whatever it is you choose. Okay. I'm not here to tell you What what to invest in okay? I can tell you that you're investing thesis your time horizon Where you are in your life where you are in college pursuit of career What your income is maybe you've got that career started all those factors play into it. Okay, so I can't tell you Hey, here's the cookie cutter approach for all investors What I try to do is provide you a tool chest On the independent investor channel that of which you can open up and say I don't need a screwdriver right now I need a big freaking hammer and you grab that hammer or that wrench and you start going to work on yourself That just came off the cuff. That was pretty cool Watch that on the replay. I just had 10 people leave the live stream like okay. This this guy's too much, man Just think about it. Okay the wrench and the group here signifies just that It's your empowered pledge to start working on yourself It is man And if you can come to the channel and say hey, thanks ryan. I really appreciate that I'm pretty humble about that type of stuff. Here's why you don't know me squat Okay, I do this willingly All right And payment to me enough is for you To have found some success in wealth building that you wouldn't have found had it not been for the motivation I provide Okay Yep Thank yourself Look in the mirror and say, you know what god dang it. You did it Ryan motivated me a little bit. All right, man. I'll take partial credit. That's fine if that's what you want to do I know there's a lot of very very gracious people in the community here, man There's a lot of people who are willing to help and I'm willing to acknowledge that but I always want to keep the attention and focus On where the strength of this channel is and that is on the empowered investors I'm very very hungry on those investors that get back to me and they're like ryan. I freaking did it I'm up to that first 10 grand freak man. You set that milestone. I didn't think it was possible I proved myself wrong. Good god dang on me for doing it man. Thank you ryan. Thank you That's what i'm talking about. All right I want to keep the focus on the individuals here that are taking the message and really putting it to practical use in the trenches All right If it's just hey, you come in and sit down with your legs crossed and you're You're very very attentive with your back straight And you just listen or you just take a few notes and you don't understand the first thing about what i'm talking about You're kind of missing the point.  So for that i'm going to kick over. I got a kick over to Uh to check this real quick and I can only do it through youtube. So give me just a second See if I can identify this Where you at? Where you at? Where you at? I very much appreciate that man. I really do that that is so so helpful and so appreciated I'm looking through just a massive thread of comments here I may have to go back through it after if I don't see you here on the fly because I don't want to take too much of my minutes Fantastic. There's mr. Knight's another viper in the group. There you are And There you are My dear It was an absolute pleasure to meet you guys and and that's what i'm talking about with the degree of separation of You know, I think a lot of people are brought to stock market investing for a lot of genuine reasons. I really do But it really does help to take somebody like myself to help align some parameters Or some swim lanes or some avenues of discipline for you to really take into consideration because there are two sides to the stock market All right, I I fear that there's a lot of new investors that are looking at this thing And they're assessing the stock market as an arena or a place that only provides wealthy people. That is Not true Okay, most people fail at investing All right, because most people Are their worst?  You got to get yourself right and ask yourself what you want out of this opportunity. It's super super important Courtney, thank you that that's not necessary I'm not sure if you if you need $45 back. I'll I'll gladly Venmo it to you I don't know if you hit an extra zero. You're like, dang. I just tipped Ryan $50 Very much appreciated. I'm humbled. Thank you very cool Uh, microsoft absolutely killer quarter blew it out. I mean good grief. What can you say, man? The the the opportunity to become a participant in financial markets Is something that hopefully resonates with people in other words If you're a new investor making your way to the channel and you just heard what I said Wow, Ryan just kind of put it in a different way You know, I don't have to buy stock in microsoft. I can actually become a participant In what was a phenomenal quarter Google same thing blowout quarter blew out the members blew them out tech now that they're blowing it out right now They're just absolutely killing it Yep, it's a great time to be an investor. Just keep it within scale. Okay Microsoft is not going to allow you to float into retirement with hundreds of thousands of dollars That's not why we invest we invest in some form or fashion to become participants in these good companies Whether it be through a diversified product or the equity outright Okay, all right fantastic I don't know if I can highlight this comment. I hope I can it doesn't look like I can It's very cool, man And jerry's in the house, man. Very cool to see you my friend bond money could be moved to the utility Yeah, so I I did offer a video on this just an idea a strategic idea Right get a little capital appreciation with a little bit of an opportunity for some nice Higher than average yield maybe that you can get on own a bond specifically so I'm gonna kick over and check that out got less than 10 minutes left I'm gonna try to get in here and I'm just gonna highlight a heck of a lot of comments here guys Arcad wealth, man. Nice to see you guys. It's very cool. If you guys would do me a softy I'm in here devoted like I am every single friday early If you guys have a little time, I don't deviate from the time It's always at nine o'clock, man But don't hesitate to come in and leave your comment or say hi and then kick away As I kick off for the nine o'clock pay attention or pay the premium fantastic He says sell the premium. Yeah, that's a term I've come to love It's a pretty amazing opportunity. I'm trying not to lose my shorts With this opportunity, but it's pretty impressive pretty pretty awesome It's it's a place that we're all striving to get to we really are to understand how important that is To act as the banker and sell that premium on the open marketplace you as the stock owner can do just that Matt my good friend sums it up beautifully our premium. You betcha Yep, it's every dollar that makes their way into yall's portfolio is a win for the little guy, man In specific terms the retail investor and that's what it's that's what it's about. It's not as complicated as people make it out to be This is true. I just think something that really softens the blow Because I have a hard time disconnecting from when I started investing. I was confused too just like everybody they're confused but If you search out the information in the correct way and really sit back and be diplomatic about Just jumping and deploying a specific strategy. I think you can be powerful.  No no big deal. It doesn't mean I'm a bad investor It doesn't mean that you're being critical over critical. It doesn't mean that it just means that for an awareness piece I'm trying to provide jam as much value as I can In 60 minutes as I possibly can the inevitable in tom. I'll need a ride home fantastic Fantastic uber man Ubers in the house. I get my ubers for free It's another story that I'll tell offline Very cool Cruisin down this tonight's great to see you warren fantastic all the best to you my friend Another one of my empowered viper group is going to be great to grow wealth with you and and and yours. It's fantastic I love it and I'm humbled at the opportunity Vibral to me is like 1 million people not 2,000 I don't know anymore. I don't I don't put youtube videos online to go. I don't even know what that means I don't really care. I haven't cared since the beginning. I'm not going to start caring now. I'm not And I will not be owned by youtube I upload when I want how I want and I retain creative control over the independent investor channel At all times if they want to pay me what they pay me they certainly can if not, they don't need to I'm fine financially. I'm independent. All right, and I live it love it and learn it. That's and teach it Be an independent guys do away with the freaking 2020 was the time that I unplugged from the television Now I find myself picking up the guitar more. I find myself searching out music I find myself doing the things that I'm like, man, how did I ever have time to even watch television? What a waste.  Get rid of it It's garbage. It's all may aimed to inundate you on what they want you to hear Get rid of it become empowered. All right tune into 60 minutes on the on every friday and I'll I'll take care of Fine-tuning that perspective for you as long as it takes Yep, I'm pretty aggressive with that all right Marcy, if you stop market is going to crash um correction bear market crash crashes a pretty strong, you know catastrophic total loss as an asteroid hits the earth and we're all gone anyway Um, certainly there's been some sizable drawdowns in the market I I am working on a premonition and I don't come on youtube and profess that I'm a stock god either I I I have a premonition that makes sense for me in my portfolio I had an opportunity to roll a little profit off the table I won on every one of the rollouts and that's it. It's it's okay. It's water under the freaking bridge All right, I go on about my day. All right I'm looking forward to this cannoli that I have in the refrigerator after I'm done with this live stream in less than five minutes remember Real real real just like you guys. All right. Everybody's looking to deploy this as best they can But um, I think it's super super important for you guys to really really up your game If a 401k right now is your game Look at those strategic other areas to add layers into your program, man Because we want to be we want to stay hungry on this. All right. We really really do super important Now i'm cruising through larry says he's up pretty big. I am too. I don't know if it's you know luck Whatever it sure as hell ain't skill It just it was more of a portfolio positioning move for me to enter into the arc portfolio the way that I did And again, if you guys want to see those portfolios in more depth you can use the link and kick over They are affiliate links, man. So I get some compensation back On the channel. Um, don't don't don't lose sleep over it. I'm not getting rich. Okay And I was just joshing about the nine thousand dollars Of entry for my private uh group Nobody in the right mind would charge nine thousand dollars to go into a private group Nor would there be people out there that would actually pay that to To enter into I'll just let that one go. All right Fantastic rebecca's in the house Yeah, this is great, man. I will be there one of these days We've got some plans partial retirement in europe and we've got croatia earmarked Yeah for that initiative But this is a long-standing project for me and you guys are all part of that movement and mission and what little bit or a lot of the involvement that you've had through deploying wealth building strategies You're always welcome on the independent investor channel, man If you don't want to catch every live stream or every upload No problem if you're a self-direct investor, man, you are part of the gig But I really appreciate you tuning in from from england man. That's great. My international community is very very strong I think it's interesting to them how the us perspective on spending and investing Kind of flows through and what a great way of connecting the world I'm just glad to have you. Thank you for making your way on shout out to you I've got less than a couple minutes here guys. I wish I had all these comments at the beginning because it usually gets a little overwhelming Get it guys go with your gut. That's a pretty good comment. I like it Ryan arc is up 11 this week. I'm thinking. Yeah, but I'm gonna see Any of that ha ha nice. Yeah, you know, I don't count my chickens again. I I gave the whole like hey, I'm not I'm not anything special. Okay. I'm just a regular fella. Trust me guys It's nothing that's done here on youtube and I'm sure there's a lot of youtube channels that would be like No, no, I'm I'm I'm awesome. I rock. Um, I'm the best Leave me alone.  You're small. Leave me alone. I'm the man or I'm I'm the lady I just don't believe that's true, man. I don't I don't put people on a pedestal. I don't I don't Want to keep arcs, but they ran up. They did they did run up. That's fine I'm into it for the strategic management And I'm into it for the opportunity that if it does kind of roll down. I can strategically buy it I'm not owning these for a trade. I'm owning these for an investment Okay, so I'm looking to strategically buy these and accumulate a nice position and my goal for this portfolio is not 14 000 My goal for this portfolio is to get to that 25 000 and reassess And arc I think can get me there. All right. We got less than a minute guys. We will close it down I I do apologize. I couldn't get to all the comments tonight, but it was a hell of a live stream Good on me for fighting through it. I'm at about 53 right now. So I'm about half power But I really appreciate you guys Appreciate the private group for coming in always supporting all the channel creators as well There's one right there. He needs to get in here earlier to get a to get a Good seat and not a nosebleed seat Ryan great to see you my friend But I will sign off guys Be well appreciate and remember the theme from tonight's mission Okay, and that mission isn't to always seek out your answers On social media and you know groups like reddit Or wall street bets things like that the best place that you can find those answers that you're seeking Are indeed internally. All right guys be well. We'll check you next friday. All right