#47 How to Build Wealth From Scratch (Even If You Feel Behind) | Joey Nguyen

Financial literacy, investing, high-yield savings accounts, S&P 500 investing, entrepreneurship, and building wealth—Joey Nguyen explains the simple financial principles that can change your future, whether you're in the military, starting a business, or simply trying to get ahead.

In this episode of Based Business, Parker McCumber sits down with financial educator, YouTuber, and Bullet Finance founder Joey Nguyen to discuss personal finance, investing, entrepreneurship, content creation, and the mindset required to build lasting wealth.

As the son of Vietnamese refugees, Joey shares his mission to become the person who changes his family's financial future. From helping military members avoid common financial mistakes to teaching beginners how to invest, Joey has built a community around making wealth-building simple, practical, and accessible.

One of the biggest takeaways?

👉 Financial freedom isn't built through complicated strategies—it's built through consistent habits, smart investing, and continually investing in yourself.

💡 In this episode, you'll learn:

• Why financial literacy is the foundation of entrepreneurship
 • How to build an emergency fund with a high-yield savings account
 • Why S&P 500 index funds are one of the simplest ways to build long-term wealth
 • The 50/30/20 budgeting framework for managing your money
 • Why investing in yourself often produces the greatest return
 • How Joey built a successful YouTube channel through mentorship and consistency
 • Why trust and community matter more than chasing views
 • AI tools that help creators and entrepreneurs work more efficiently
 • How small daily habits compound into financial freedom

🚀 Who this episode is for:

• Entrepreneurs building long-term wealth
 • Military members and veterans
 • Young professionals learning personal finance
 • Anyone wanting to start investing
 • Content creators growing a personal brand
 • Business owners looking to leverage AI and digital marketing

🔗 Connect with Joey Nguyen:

🌐 Bullet Finance (Skool Community)
 📺 YouTube: Joey Nguyen
 📸 Instagram: @joeynguyenofficial 
💼 LinkedIn: Joey Nguyen 

⏱️ TIMESTAMPS

00:00 Business Mindset Cookie Jar
 00:47 Meet Joey Nguyen – Veteran Finance Creator
 01:45 Money Mistakes in the Military
 03:26 Be the One to Change Your Family's Legacy
 06:13 Escaping the Comparison Trap
 08:20 Why Joey Chose YouTube
 11:38 High-Yield Savings Accounts Explained
 15:37 Simple Investing with the S&P 500
 19:44 Budgeting Rules & Financial Benchmarks
 21:50 Why You Should Invest in Yourself First
 25:01 Learning Valuable Skills for Free
 28:26 Side Hustles That Build Wealth
 30:01 Graduation Photography Business Story
 31:16 Going All In on YouTube
 31:38 Humble Beginnings & Finding Mentors
 33:17 The White Belt Work Ethic
 37:36 The YouTube Metrics That Actually Matter
 39:30 Turning Content Into Clients
 44:00 Building a Real Community
 45:30 Investing in a Content Team
 46:32 AI Tools Every Entrepreneur Should Know
 52:43 The 1% Mindset
 56:46 Where to Find Joey
 57:15 Closing Thoughts

#financialliteracy #investing #entrepreneurship #personalfinance #wealthbuilding

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Absolutely. Business is not easy. Business, you're gonna be dealing with a roller coaster of emotions. And on top of your business, family stuff gets in the way. Personal issues get in the way, relationship issues get in the way. But if you can conquer your mind on the inside, and you have what I like to call a cookie jar. I got this from David Goggins' book. But you have a cookie jar of all of the things that you've accomplished in the past that are hard, you can rely on those things to tell yourself, hey, whatever I'm going through right now, whether it's hard or not, I've done things that are even harder. And so I know that I'm capable of doing it.

SPEAKER_01 0:47

Welcome back to Base Business. I'm your host, Parker McCumber, and I'm here with a special guest today, Joey, who is on a mission to help veterans master their financial situation. Is that right, Joey? Yeah, that's that's it.

SPEAKER_00 1:01

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:02

Give us a quick blurb. Introduce yourself and then tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do.

SPEAKER_00 1:08

Uh yeah, so my name is Joey. I run a bunch of different YouTube channels as part of my full-time job. And on my own personal YouTube channel, I help military members and veterans with uh money. I talk about money, I talk about finances, and my whole thing is I want to just help the whole military community uh save more money, make more money, and learn financial literacy because that's something that's not really taught in the military, and it's something that wasn't taught to me ever. And so I had to figure out everything on my own.

SPEAKER_01 1:45

So I actually came across you on Instagram initially. Because, you know, I'm in obviously the military too. Uh, I'm in the finance world. We love business and entrepreneurship. And I came across some of your uh social media content. I'm like, man, this guy is uh doing some cool stuff. Let's reach out, let's see if we can get him on the show. I especially admire the willingness to work with veterans. And the reason I think that that's important here, like you said, is that they don't, there's no financial literacy training. And what essentially happens, I mean, it happened to me for sure, is you get, you know, the vast majority of military members fresh out of high school. Uh, I enlisted at right after my senior year. We go to basic training, we get some money, uh, you go to your first duty station, maybe a deployment in there. But what happens is you're still a 20, 21-year-old kid, and now you've got some money. And what do you do? You spend it on 21-year-old kids' stuff, right? Uh, you go out partying, you get a car. Um, dude, I had a private, I had a private who legit got a truck at a 21% interest rate. Like all those horror stories that you hear about. And uh, you know, it's kind of a shame, in my opinion, that you have so many service members that one don't understand best financial practices, but there's no one immediately available to them to help with that because we're all in the same boat. We all came right out of high school, we all joined the military like that. So tell me a little bit about how you got into that world.

SPEAKER_00 3:26

Uh I so I come from a Vietnamese, uh, so I'm Vietnamese, and my parents, they are from Vietnam, and so they they they came to the states because of war, basically, because of the Vietnam War. Like they had to fled, they had to flee their country as teenagers. And my mom worked every day her for life to basically pay for us to to live in the states. And so I was never from like a, you know, I I saw all of my friends growing up or people around me growing up, and they had better financial situations. And so I knew that I needed to be the one, be the generation to help uh, you know, future, future family members succeed and and not have to worry about finances like I did.

SPEAKER_01 4:26

I like that you use the term the one. Uh, are you familiar with Ed Milette's popularization of the one?

SPEAKER_00 4:34

No, I I know Ed Milet's uh the do one more, like the the one more rep. The power of one more, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 4:44

He also teaches this concept of being the one. And uh in short, he talks about every family that ever came to the United States was poor at some point. Uh you walk down, you know, uh the beach, maybe at like uh Huntington Beach or something in California, you see all these nice beachside houses, and you're thinking about, man, it'd be so nice to live there. They're big, fancy, expensive homes. At some point, that family was broke until the one comes along. And though in short, the one is the one person in that family or in that bloodline that changed the trajectory for everyone that came after. I'm the one in my family. And it I mean, I admire you're the one in your family now. We're actively changing the trajectory of what comes after us. It's a little bit of a daunting task, too, though, because there's a lot of responsibility with being the one. You think about the financial burden of yourself, of the family that you're trying to, you know, improve the situation for. You're thinking about the longevity, the investment, the return, all of that, right? Uh, as well as the positioning for future generations.

SPEAKER_02 6:07

It's kind of a daunting task, isn't it?

SPEAKER_00 6:11

Very. Yeah. And I'm I'm still super young too. I'm only 24 years old. And most of the time I feel like I'm behind. Because nowadays with social media, it's like you got 18-year-olds who are crushing it, making a million dollars per year or whatever.

SPEAKER_01 6:27

Um, but obviously that those are like the you and far between, yeah, I I wouldn't even say 1%, probably like the thousandth of a percent. I mean, that that gets me two still. I um, for example, recently uh we went on vacation, we went to Italy uh with Ferrari, Salt Lake City. They took us on a Ferrari tour. And uh I go there, I mean my wife and I, we're the youngest people there. And so I kind of find myself in this position where I'm comparing myself to people that have done like multiple eight, nine, and even 10 figure exits in their businesses. And I'm I'm like, man, I I've done nothing, I've accomplished nothing. But then they put it in the frame of reference for me. Dude, you're 20 years younger than anybody else here. And you're here, you're in the room. So, I mean, I I I would always try to recommend you keep that in mind. Like, yeah, you're young, you're young, but you're on people's radar now. Like, I I mean, we found you. Uh, you're doing big stuff, keep doing big stuff, and let it compound over time, right? The biggest difference between where you're at now and where you want to be is just the time variable, in my opinion.

SPEAKER_00 7:43

Yeah, that's true. Thank you for that. Everybody who I talk to who is older and successful, they they always tell me, like, dude, you're only 24, chill.

SPEAKER_01 7:54

Uh yeah, when I was 24, I was in Korea. And uh man, just just patrolling the DMZ, making 30 grand a year as a you know, E4, E5. So you're in a much better position already. Keep winning, dude. Keep winning.

SPEAKER_00 8:16

Yeah, I need to remind myself of that constantly.

SPEAKER_01 8:20

So, how did you get into uh YouTube specifically? I mean, like uh what led you to thinking that was the vehicle that you were gonna use to help veterans learn financial literacy?

SPEAKER_00 8:33

Yeah, I always wanted to make videos. Ever since I was young, I would make skits with my friend who also does content now for a living. He has like millions of followers and he's like one of the biggest um comedy creators in terms of like short form content. And so when we when we were younger, we would just mess around and make you know vines back in the day when vine was something. And so I always had that, you know, passion and I always had that creative kind of spark in me. I just didn't know that it could turn into an actual job, an actual career until um 2019, around that time is when a lot of creators started to blow up. And then during COVID, even more creators came out uh and built million-dollar businesses off of that by building a personal brand. And so it all just started to make sense that it's like, okay, this is something that I love to do as a kid, and it's something that I can use to help others and provide a lot of value and help hopefully millions of military members out there and give back to the community that gave me a lot as a 17-year-old right out of high school. Yeah, didn't know anything. And so, yeah, I don't know how long you want the story to be.

SPEAKER_01 9:57

It's uh I mean, share, share away. Uh, so I I tried to frame the show. I'm sure Trinity gave you a note before. Um, when I started in business, I put my head down and just did the work because that's what the army taught me to do, right? Um and I took a lot longer than I needed to to learn some lessons because I wasn't actively looking for help or mentorship, right? So I just I put my head down, I did the work, I grinded, and I tunnel visioned on it. When I could have asked somebody else for help, I could have learned from somebody else and their expertise. And that could have shortcut the time for me to find success. The show is largely framed around how do we help maybe a young entrepreneur, somebody who's interested in business, how do we help them shortcut the time requirement to succeed? How do we help them overcome the obstacles that they're probably facing? And you have a really interesting perspective that I'd like to dig in on. And it's it's twofold. One, the financial literacy side, I think is uber important. And most people don't learn it until they're already suffering through it, if that makes sense. And then the second part is YouTube. Now I'm very bullish on YouTube. I actually think that for a creator, if you're trying to make money and monetize, that is the most important platform to be consistent on and grow and build success with. So I want to kind of pick your brain on those two uh avenues. Like if you were to, I mean, find your ideal clients, perhaps, and teach them the most important fundamentals of financial literacy from your opinion.

SPEAKER_03 11:49

What would you teach them right off the bat?

SPEAKER_00 11:54

Something that I notice in a lot of military members that I've talked to over the years about finances is a lot of them just need to know the basics. And the basics are an emergency savings account. So putting your money into a high yield savings account instead of a regular like Navy federal yeah, 0.004% interest. Exactly. And so that's something that is an immediate win that a lot of military commun families can take advantage of, both the military member or if you have a spouse or anything like that, if you have friends or family. Whatever savings that you have, you can immediately start earning hundreds of dollars per year for free just by putting it into a high yield savings account, into a better bank. Sure. And so that's like the first thing that I always like to talk about. Can I give an example real quick?

SPEAKER_01 13:00

In my life, so I had um right traditional setup, uh, checking account, money market savings account, so a little bit higher yield, right? But it's like three percent maybe. And then um right, credit card, right? That was my initial setup. I got Robinhood Gold. I'm not sponsored by Robinhood, just telling you guys my example. Um and they are offering, you know, 5%. So just taking the money out of one savings account, moving it over there generated an extra 2,000 bucks a year, something like that. And I'm like, 2,000 bucks a year for a lot of people starting out, that's um, you know, a couple weeks of work, a month, maybe of extra, you know, spending cash. It makes a difference for sure, especially when you start. So I mean, I love what you're saying. Look for a better return that you can get immediately.

SPEAKER_00 13:59

Yeah. And there's so many other things that you can go into from there. That's like the gateway activity that you could do as a basic person who has never been taught anything about money is just putting your money into a high-yield savings account. Um, I personally love like Ally. I use Ally, I use SoFi. Uh Chime has a really good um APY percentage. And yeah, it that's just super easy to do. And then from there, I would say most people can benefit from investing into the stock market with whatever savings that they have left or maximizing their retirement accounts if they are interested in like a Roth IRA, um, which is basically like investing into index funds for the long term, except you don't pay any taxes when you take it out.

SPEAKER_01 14:56

So I I always try to prioritize you, get in get into my IRA first, first uh investment every year, max that out. Something that my financial advisor recommended and is uh doing for me now is he's making sure that we do high dividend paying uh like uh index funds in the Roth. So that because you can only you can only put in, you know, your 7,500, 7,000, whatever it is, uh, each year. Um, but those dividends pay back into it too, help it compound over time a little bit. Just kind of a cool, cool strategy he he turned me on to.

SPEAKER_00 15:31

Yeah. There are so many different strategies out there once you start doing research. But yeah, that's that's like another place to put your money after to have a good savings account.

SPEAKER_01 15:42

For somebody thinking of like uh perhaps a military veteran again, who's looking at starting to invest in the stock market? What advice would you give them? They're just starting out, right? They're they're in the military still, so they're not doing like a ton of market research or looking into that stuff. Uh, what advice would you give them starting? How do they keep it simple and and probably a higher likelihood of success?

SPEAKER_00 16:08

Yeah, simplest thing is just the SP 500 with uh the so that's an index fund, which basically means that you're investing into an entire bucket of stocks instead of just one stock. So instead of investing directly into Apple or Tesla or Facebook, you're investing into the top 500 companies in the US. That's what the SP 500 is. And so you can do that with Robinhood, you can do that with you know any brokerage, any stock investing platform out there, and invest what you can afford to lose. Like don't invest more than what's gonna like mess you up mentally at night, sure. Where you're like, oh snap. Like if I lose all of this right now, I'm done for. I won't be able to, you know.

SPEAKER_01 16:56

Yeah, let me let me uh caveat or add a add a tag here too for people. Uh when you invest in the broad market like this, uh whether it's an index fund, ETF, something like that, there's built-in diversification. Uh, and that's important, I think, on the same note, right? Don't invest more than what you can afford to lose. But when you do a broad broad strokes fund, your likelihood of a catastrophic loss is significantly reduced. It's not like the insane volatility that you would get with an individual stock because it's the market as a whole, right? Just a yeah, just a tag, tag for the people that are listening to this and they're like, oh my gosh, I'm gonna lose everything.

SPEAKER_00 17:43

Yeah, no. I mean, historic, if you look at the historical return on the SP 500, I think over the last 70, 80 years since it was first created, is it's returned 10% on average per year.

SPEAKER_05 17:56

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 17:57

And sure, some years it goes down, but most years it's trending upwards. So obviously during like COVID, for example, it was a great time to invest because it was at a low. And if you look at from where COVID was to now, we're now at an all-time high. And then looking into the far into the future, we're gonna look at today as like, oh, that wasn't that was the low. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 18:24

Have you ever heard the term uh the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago? The second best time to plant a tree is today.

unknown 18:32

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 18:33

It's the same thing.

SPEAKER_00 18:34

We'll say that about investing in real estate too.

SPEAKER_01 18:35

Yeah, absolutely. Well, uh, because I mean, ultimately, real estate, similar method to stock market investing, right? You're giving your your resources time to grow. That's what it really boils down to. So in real estate, I mean, you think about depending on the market you're in, obviously, uh, it's not uncommon for a property to double in value over 15 to 20 years. Again, depending on the market that you're in, the location, growth around it, all that stuff. But if you think about it like that, okay, you buy a $500,000 house, 15 to 20 years later, that could be a million-dollar house. You're giving your money time to work, essentially in your benefit. And it's the same thing in the stock market. You put in, you know, your your $50,000, maybe over the course of the next 10 years with a an annual return, it's compounding over time, you've got a hundred and $150,000. And that's not unheard of.

SPEAKER_03 19:38

But it does require time.

SPEAKER_00 19:41

Yeah, it requires patience and not being like scared when everybody is panicking. So the economy.

SPEAKER_01 19:51

Let me ask, in your opinion, what's a good uh a good starting benchmark for people? Um, so they they get a high yield savings account, they're putting some money into that each month, or they're they're moving their uh existing savings account into it. That's already a win. Do you typically have a uh a best practice you recommend when it comes to like percentage of funds invested versus saved?

SPEAKER_00 20:17

I mean, there's like a basic budgeting rule called like the 50, 50, 30, 20. Have you heard of that one? I have, yes. Yeah, so that one's super simple. It's just 50% of your expenses can go into necessities. So this would be your rent, your gas, your insurance, things that you need to have in order to live and do your job and things like that. And then the 30% can go into your wants. So, like any entertainment, like if you want to go to the movie, Netflix subscription to eat. Exactly. And then the 20% can be put into your savings and investments in order to grow your money.

SPEAKER_01 21:00

And I I mean, I've found that that's pretty much a good rule of thumb to follow. You live pretty comfortably with that as long as you're comfortable within your uh your income level, right? Mm-hmm.

SPEAKER_00 21:11

Yeah, you can get way more aggressive with it too. Like you can go, like some people go 50 or like 40, 10, 40, where they go super like heavy on investing. Um, and then there's the aspect of like investing in yourself too, where it's like, okay, you can make 10% per year average in the stock market, or if you invest that in yourself, or you invest that in a business or a side hustle, you can make way more than 10% after a while. Yeah, after a while.

SPEAKER_01 21:45

Again, it's that that that time matters, man. Okay, so we we touched on uh I guess first two foundational principles high yield savings, investing. Uh, what would you say is the next most important? Block for somebody to understand.

SPEAKER_00 22:04

The next block is exactly what I was just talking about, is like starting to invest in yourself. I think that is going to be the next area where a lot of people have fears, they have blockers, they have self-limiting beliefs that stop them from pursuing their passion, their purpose, their ultimate dream in life that can that can happen. Like it's possible. There are so many stories out there of people who come from nothing and they make it and they they're living their dream. They have their dream job. They're helping millions of people in the world. They're giving value and they're getting so much fulfillment from it. And it's all possible. Can we dive into this and have a comment?

SPEAKER_01 22:51

Yeah, yeah. I so I love what you're saying here. If I could go back in time, the biggest piece of advice I would give myself is to invest in myself earlier, faster, often more. Right. This is important, I think, for anyone that has a big financial goal or a dream that they are aspiring to achieve. Investing in yourself makes you a more valuable person. If you're a more valuable person, your capacity to earn is greater. Earning more allows you to invest more, allows you to spend like everything about it just improves. So I'm a big believer that when you have extra money, maybe you fit this into your 50% or 30% in the budget. Um, when you have extra money, you should be using that to make you a better version of yourself. And that comes in many different forms, right? That's formal education, that's experiences, that could be uh taking a course online, that could be, you know, any any number of things that makes you a more valuable version of you and a better version of yourself so that you can become more marketable, earn more, save more, give more, all that.

SPEAKER_00 24:01

Yeah, I love that. Books is another thing that's very easy to do. Yeah. Because you don't even need to buy the books. You can go to a library and borrow the book, and you're basically getting access to somebody's life work, whether it's a successful business owner, a successful athlete, somebody who's doing something that you would want to do. They have basically put their entire life's lessons and experience into a book. And so you can basically jump into their mind, jump into their life. And basically, like you're having a lunch conversation with them where they're spilling all their secrets. And that was like huge for me, too, when I first started.

SPEAKER_01 24:41

Shameless self-promotion. How the hell are you doing this? By Captain Parker McCumber. Now out. It is parkermaccumber.com forward slash book. Nice. Yeah, I'll just plug myself real quick. This this video was sponsored by me. I'm the only person sponsoring these podcasts. Um, yeah, cool. I I actually really like that too because if you're lower on monetary resources at the time, dude, you can you can still learn so so much. Like I like the library idea. I'm a big believer that you can learn pretty much anything on YouTube these days. And then between that, I mean, you're what's a library card cost, man? If you're a resident in a city, it's free typically. If you're out of city resident, 15 bucks, 20 bucks, something like that. So you get your library card, you get access to all of the books. The books give you knowledge, the knowledge makes you more valuable. You go out, you learn a skill, a trait, something. Go profit off of it, right? I'm a big believer in that, and I love if you can get access to the internet, you can get access to YouTube. If you're on YouTube, you can learn anything. Like actually, this is a mind-blowing thing for me now. Because I I couldn't have fathomed this as a kid, but it's commonplace now. People go learn how to do Photoshop on YouTube, graphic design. Boom, they've got a career. People learn how to go to, they go on YouTube, they learn how to do social media management, how to how to run different AIs, how to run uh like content calendars. All of a sudden they've got careers. They've got careers just because they learned a skill from watching videos and then applying it over and over and over again until they they win.

SPEAKER_00 26:25

Yeah. And they're making like way more than somebody who goes to like a prestigious college for like four years and they don't actually do anything, they just learn about stuff. And not to like, you know, say anything bad about like call college is definitely necessary for some jobs, but I think if you have a big goal of becoming a millionaire, becoming a multimillionaire, becoming financially successful, it's very, very difficult to do that with a regular job unless you become like an executive in one of the big tech companies or something, and you have a lot of stock options. That's definitely possible then. So I've got this friend. Oh, go ahead. No, no.

SPEAKER_02 27:14

So I've got this friend, Braden.

SPEAKER_01 27:16

Shout out to Braden. Uh he was going to school to be a pilot, right? So he's going through flight school, all this stuff. And he started uh taking uh automotive photos on the side. It was like he was doing some car shoots and stuff like that to pay his way through school, essentially. Keep people pay him a couple hundred bucks for a photo shoot type thing. And he grew that the photo business, um, to doing shoots and then doing workshops, teaching other photographers, and then he starts doing um social media, social media management, and he realizes I can make way more money than I would ever have as even a possibility as a pilot just doing this. So he learns a skill, develops it over time, and then even uh you think about a pilot as one of the most high-paying jobs in the United States. I mean, you're up there with like surgeons and things like that. But that can be dwarfed through ownership and entrepreneurship and just the constant self-investment.

SPEAKER_00 28:25

Yeah. I have a genius business idea for the audience. If they're young here and they are hustlers, they can make a killing with this during the summertime specifically. I just went to a couple of graduations at USC and UCLA for my my cousin-in-laws. They were graduating, and I have a camera, and so they were like, Hey, can you help us take graduation photos? I spent one hour the night before watching a YouTube video on how to take photography, like portrait photography photos on the camera. I showed up, I took the pictures, I saw other people there taking pictures as well. And I realized that that's something that you can easily charge on graduation day. There's no need to like, all you need to do is just drive there. Drive there to the college campus during graduation. You walk up to family members and you ask them, hey, do you guys want a picture? I'll take 20 solid pictures for you right now, and you just have to like sell me 20 bucks. And you bring like your SD card with you, a dongle, and you can like do it right from your phone. You just plug the SD card into your phone and you just airdrop it to the family. And if you do that for five families, which only takes, let's say each family takes you uh 10 minutes. So in an hour, you do six families for 20 bucks. That's 120 bucks.

SPEAKER_01 29:58

I would even take it a step further. If you can, if you decide you're going to do this ahead of time, you can probably start targeting, like uh, you know, because all the social media platforms they let you do uh where your locations are and geography and stuff like that. I would start looking for people who are posting in those areas talking about graduation, just sending them cold DMs ahead of time. Hey, we'll come out and do a graduation day shoot with you, with your family, 100 bucks.

SPEAKER_00 30:29

Yeah.

unknown 30:31

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 30:31

If somebody is listening to this and they do that, they can make 40 to $50,000 in one summer. In like just bouncing between graduations. The bouncing between college campuses, high school campuses, too. Exactly. A lot of these students are planning it out because it's four-year degree, whether it's their uh what bachelor's or master's or whatever, and they're planning it ahead of time. They're scheduling and they're finding photographers online to be like, hey, I don't want to take pictures on graduation day when I want to spend it with my family. I want to do it beforehand. So can I book with you? And so you can you can spend an entire summer making a lot of money with that.

SPEAKER_01 31:13

Awesome. Awesome free value there. So we we've kind of talked about the three foundational principles for the investing side, financial literacy side. Let's uh dive into YouTube real quick while we still got you around. So I'm curious, you talked about doing Vines beforehand. When did you realize like YouTube is where I'm going all in on?

SPEAKER_00 31:38

So I was I was very fortunate enough to have the opportunity to work with uh my my mentor. And that's the per his name's Charlie Chang, and he's the one who taught me everything that I know about YouTube long form. And um I mean, I was doing nothing related before. I was working security, I was a wait, I was a waiter at Olive Garden, and I was in the Marine Corps Reserves uh at the same time. And he originally posted on his Instagram, hey, I'm looking for a script writer. I applied to the job. I just sent like a quick email, hey, I'd like to apply. No response. A year later, he posts another job saying he's looking for a personal assistant. This time I sent him a huge email basically telling him that I'll do anything. I'll scrub his toilets for him if he needs me to. No job is beneath me. I just want to put my foot in the door and help and give value. And I want to, I want to get into the industry. And so he could sense my my hustle mentality. And from there, I I was working 60 to 80 hour weeks um at 19 years old, 20 years old, and I was yeah, I was I was in the grind. That was when I learned a lot about content creation and and YouTube specifically. So a lot of uh a lot of blessings that that I've gotten from from Charlie. But I think if I wasn't ready, if I wasn't in the right mindset to send those those emails, I think a lot of people will send that first email and they'll get rejected and they'll just quit. But I knew that I could get in. It was just a matter of time.

SPEAKER_01 33:17

Something that I really liked was uh the humility that you approached that with. Right. I mean, you went all in on the email. I'll scrub your toilets like anything. Uh nothing's nothing's beneath me. That is the hardest thing to get people to do right out the gate. I mean, uh like Gary Vaynerchuk popularized this thing a couple of years ago, the go work for free. Right? Like just go and provide massive value, make yourself undeniable through the value you provide, and you'll never have to worry about job or money again, right? I was doing that before uh before I really knew what it was for myself, essentially, because I started my my e-com business. Uh, I worked for free for two years before I took a paycheck, just investing everything back into the business. And then, you know, over time, time compounds uh the investments, the the business grew. And then it got to the point where it could financially support me and my family, and and you know, we could start hiring employees and all that kind of stuff. Um but I I'm noticing this recurring trend in people that I talk to, people that come on the show. You have to be willing to swallow your pride and just put in the work and recognize that there are things you will have to do to grow and learn and be in the positions that you want to be in that are gonna be uncomfortable. They're gonna make you dissatisfied for a temporary time, but it's only temporary, right?

SPEAKER_00 34:51

Right. Because you have so much to learn. It's like the white belt mentality every time that you get into a new space. You are a white belt, you are a private, you have no experience, you have nothing to offer, yeah, but your free time and your labor.

SPEAKER_01 35:09

So well, it's it's the perfect opportunity to learn, but you have to swallow your pride and be willing to learn. And that's hard for people to do. I mean, especially people that go through a four-year degree, right? Like I noticed that they have the hardest time. Like they think they've earned something because of their degree. And again, it's not a knock on it. Like, I'm I'm doing my doctorate right now. Like, I'm I'm all about formal education. Um, but you have to check your ego when you step into a new arena or a new market or a new realm, and you have, I mean, there's necessarily a learning curve, and nobody wants to come out and pay you hundreds of thousands of dollars to get started, right? You got to swallow the pride, do the dirty work, learn as you go, and increase in value over time.

SPEAKER_05 35:57

Mm-hmm.

SPEAKER_00 35:58

Yeah, exactly. Or like in the military, if they are, you know, if they do an eight-year contract and they get out as like a staff sergeant or just a high rank and they come out and they all of a sudden have to start from zero in the civilian world, that could be a huge That's a tough sell for a lot of them.

SPEAKER_01 36:18

A tough sell. I mean, unless you uh get to a point where you you have some like a retirement, right? You get your pension, you do 20 years or something like that, then it's a little bit more comfortable because you got your retirement. Um and typically if you're around for that long, you've got a higher level of experience, you get a little bit a little bit of a different look. But but that's a tough sell for people too. I mean, a lot of a lot of NCOs, E5 to E7 range, uh, they're used to having a little bit of uh authority, rank, being the boss, and then you move to the civilian world and you've got to start over. That's uh it's tough. I mean, the easiest thing, in my opinion, the way to overcome that is to just learn so much so fast, like what we said, investing in yourself. If you're gonna go into a uh a real estate-related field, learn everything about real estate in your market. If you're gonna go into uh social media management related field, you learn everything you can about platforms and algorithms and the content that they're promoting and trying to give preference to. If like just got to learn, you have to commit to learning again. Yeah. Just like you had to do in the military. Yeah, yeah, it's excellence. Yeah. So I uh I'm I said earlier, I'm bullish on YouTube right now. I think it's the best platform to be on long term if you're a creator looking to monetize. I think they've got a very uh a good system for that. I think they're generally the most fair with creators when it comes to uh like monetization policy. So if you were going to give some advice to somebody who is starting their YouTube journey, what would you tell them?

SPEAKER_00 38:12

I would tell them what I would tell myself, which is you know that you want to do YouTube, but you're afraid. And so you are only gonna regret the fact that you didn't start sooner, not any failures that you had along the way.

SPEAKER_03 38:32

Best time to plant a tree. Start sooner or right now.

SPEAKER_00 38:38

Yeah, I like a lot of people will just give up too. Like they'll they'll just give up by like video 10 or video 20 because I think they're worried about the wrong metrics. They're looking at views, they're looking at subscribers, and they're not looking at the impact, they're not looking at the data because the views and the subscribers, they tell you the least and they discourage you the most. Yeah. Because if you don't see the number that you think is good, you're gonna be disappointed. But it's also the fact that, like, hey, if you have even just 50 viewers on your video or a hundred viewers, think about have being in a room with 50 people or a room of a hundred people. That's a lot of people to be talking to.

SPEAKER_01 39:27

Absolutely. I love that mindset there. I um to share my own story a little bit, you know, I started a YouTube channel and podcast back in like 2022, and it flopped, man. I did three videos, I was recording them on a crappy webcam, like it just wasn't good. And then I I got discouraged and I wasn't proud of the work, so I stopped. Just kind of quit. And I I came back to it a year or so later. I did a few more videos. Uh again, quality wasn't great. I think that time I was filming it on my phone. Um, so I quit again. And last year, 2025, uh, I made the commitment. I was like, you know what, I'm gonna do this again. I'm gonna do it right. I had, you know, some more uh money from business success and stuff like that. So I started just investing in it. Bought better cameras, started investing in lighting, uh, set up, you know, my my studio a little bit better. Um and I just I started podcasting. And the thing was, at this point, and it's my third attempt going in on it. Uh, I'm getting, you know, at the time I started 20 to 50 views per video type thing. But I started also clipping, uh, putting it onto short form. And so I was doing at least one long form a week. I was doing the shorts, I was posting them across all the social media platforms, and I started getting people that reached out to me. Uh uh actually last summer, so June. Girl uh that I went to high school with reaches out and she goes, Hey, I'm a small business owner now. Every time I open my phone, I see your content on Instagram, on YouTube, on Facebook. I get you're everywhere that I'm at. I know you need to help me. Um, can you coach me? And I'm like, huh. Yeah, let's hop on a sales call. She's like, uh, dude, I don't need a sales call. I'll just pay you. What do you need? Like, but but coach me. And a couple weeks later, I get another message. Uh guy from Europe, dude uh was essentially referred to me by another friend. And he's like, hey man, I'm I know you're an e-com. I'm an e-com. I see your content. Like, can you coach me? Can you help me? I'm like, okay. It's weird. Like, less than a month apart, I got two people reaching out. They're talking about seeing my content. A couple weeks go by, I get a third person. I'm like, dude, what is going on? Like, I'm not getting that many views. Like, all these posts are sub- hundred views. I mean, on the videos. But what was happening when I reverse engineered it was the short form content was driving views back to the long form content. The long form content showed how I thought, how I solved problems, how I helped other people. That built a lot of trust. And people would reach out to me. And so now I'm like, okay, well, I've I signed three clients over the course of you know two months, all from just doing the long form content, clipping it, posting it, being omnipresent as best I could, and doing it consistently. Now it took me six months to get to that point. Um, again, of literally every week posting, every day, daily clipping type stuff. But it wasn't like the views weren't impressive. No one would have looked at that and said, dude, your podcast is a success. Um, nobody would have said that. Like and that was, I mean, views on YouTube, Spotify, everything, less than a couple hundred. But what makes it a success then was it was growing my business. I was getting clients from it all of a sudden. Now, what's more important, is it more important to get 80,000 views or $80,000? And I'm like, okay, it doesn't matter about the views. Views were the wrong metric, they were always the wrong metric.

SPEAKER_00 43:20

Yeah. It's trust. Absolutely. People giving value.

SPEAKER_01 43:25

People talk about us being in a trust recession now. Uh, but I think recognizing that trust is the de facto currency and just going all in on how you build it, be very authentic and how you solve problems and how you help other people, how you have conversations.

SPEAKER_02 43:40

That's what resonates with people, man.

SPEAKER_00 43:44

Yeah. So that that that's that's the other thing that I was gonna say is like, don't don't look at the views, don't look at the subscribers. Look at the impact that you're making, look at the trust that you're building, look at the community that you're building and the people that you're helping.

SPEAKER_01 44:00

So that's something that I I I would highlight too is the community aspect. Um when you make content and it's consistent, right? On theme, like uh I teach uh five content pillars. So you should have like five subjects essentially. All of your content falls within one of those five subjects. Uh the beauty of that is you get people who are interested in you and your content and those subjects. And then when you have a lot of people that are interested in those, you should be building a community where they can interact with each other, where they can support each other. Like I'm a big believer in the mastermind concepts. So we get a mastermind community going. Um, and then we do events together. Everyone comes in. Like uh, you know, last January we did uh a mastermind day, and then we like rented a suite at a jazz game, and like all of us go and we just hang out for a day, we help each other grow, and then we go hang out in the evening and have dinner and watch a basketball game and all that stuff. Ton of fun. But people care more about the experience and the network in the community than they do about the individual lessons or the pieces of content that I put out.

SPEAKER_02 45:05

So when you start to have that consistency, build the community 100%.

SPEAKER_00 45:12

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 45:12

I'm curious, are you building any community right now?

SPEAKER_00 45:16

Yeah, I am. I'm I'm building a school community that's like right on. Have you heard of school?

SPEAKER_01 45:22

Yep, I'm on school.

SPEAKER_00 45:23

Okay, perfect. Yeah. So same thing, just focused on helping military members with with money.

SPEAKER_01 45:29

Yeah. Right on. Any other uh pro tips you would give to somebody getting started on YouTube? Because I'm a big believer. Everyone should be getting on YouTube. If you own a business, if you're an entrepreneur, you run a sales team, get on YouTube. Just get on YouTube, build the trust.

SPEAKER_00 45:45

Yeah. One of the biggest things that I would tell myself, my younger self, is do like invest back into the business as much as you can, like how you did with your e-commerce business, where you worked for free for two years before you took a paycheck. I would have told my younger self to do the same thing and invest every single dollar that I had in my savings into my team. Because if I had that team in the beginning, I could have done so much more content. I could have helped so much more people, and I could have grown so much faster too.

SPEAKER_01 46:23

Absolutely. Okay. So we talked about you, your journey a little bit. We've talked about uh what you specialize in, your business a little bit. Let's talk about strategy moving forward. Like I said at the start of the show, the theory here is that we're helping other people get started or overcome their obstacles too. So, what's working right now to help Joey grow?

SPEAKER_00 46:47

What's helping right now? Man, Fable just came back.

SPEAKER_01 46:50

Oh, yeah, I got that notice yesterday.

SPEAKER_00 46:54

Yeah, Fable is really, really strong. So AI tools, you got to use AI tools. If you're not using them, then can I ask, how do you recommend using them? If you're gonna be using it for YouTube, then there are so many different systems that you can create when it comes to creating good video ideas, scripting out the YouTube videos, creating good thumbnails, and creating so with each one, right? Like we can get super tactical about it. For example, with YouTube script writing, I have a skill on Claude that knows everything about me, knows my life story, all of my biggest life lessons, and I have what's called a story bank. It's a Google Doc of all of the stories, and I have all of that just written into a Google Doc. I plug that into the Cloud skill, into the AI, and it knows all of that, so it can bring up those stories that I would forget into my YouTube videos.

SPEAKER_01 47:59

Very good.

SPEAKER_00 48:00

And that makes the process so much easier when I have basically like Tony Stark, like Jarvis, like an AI assistant, right? Just telling me, like, hey, don't forget to talk about this when you're making your video.

SPEAKER_01 48:15

I like the that you're putting the emphasis on the stories too. Stories are what sells, man. Everything is a hook story and an offer. So tell the story. Uh I'll give an AI example too, just for the listeners. So I come into the the studio, I record 30 uh advertisements, right, for my mastermind that's upcoming. Shameless self-promotion, Mission Ready Mastermind, July 23rd and 24th at Club Pahetic in America Fork, Utah. Be there or be square. Anyways, um, so I come in, I film uh advertisements for that. Now each of the ads has its script, right? We talk about those five content buckets, so they're all leadership related, team building related, um, organizational scaling, that kind of stuff. Then we take those, take them back to the AI. I give the AI the scripts, I give them the videos, uh, I have it tailor five different um five different attack angles, is what I call them, but on the the actual like primary text and headlines that are going to be paired with those. Now that's important because after the uh it would have been July 2025, Meta released the Andromeda update. The Andromeda update put a lot more emphasis on creative variation when it came to advertising. They want as many variants as possible so that they can find the best angles, and then their eye can AI can also feed off that too. So I take those 30 ads. Now each of those 30 ads gets five new uh again attack angles for primary text and headline. That creates five different variations of each of those. Now I've got, you know, 150 ads like instantly. And then we can obviously play with it a little bit more and just tailor them up, pick the winners, launch them, split test them for a couple bucks a day, find the ones that are getting the best traction, the clicks, whatever, like that, scale those. So the advertising game shifted immensely just because of the creative volume that could be put out rapidly. And then in addition to in addition to the um attack angle variation, it can also take the video and take the um themes from the scripts and make static images and stuff like that for them. So now those, you know, 150 ads are years 250 ads, and it just boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. Things that would have taken me weeks to accomplish two years ago, I can do in an afternoon now. So it it it uh the beauty of AI for me now is it will speed up whatever you're doing. So if you're if you're if you have a good system in place, it makes that system faster. If you're making money, you're making money faster. If you're losing money, you're losing money faster. It's a it's an accelerator, in my opinion.

SPEAKER_00 51:23

Yeah, very true. There's so much potential with AI, and people need to be using it for their business. And yeah, like everything with with the marketing, like paid media, that's that's awesome. And YouTube not only is a great platform to generate leads off of not needing that many views, but it also reduces the cost of your ads over time because the people that see your content organically and they see that you give them value, they are they're they're building that trust with you. And so they only need to see your ad once or twice before they actually click on the ad and they go forward compared to a different business owner who does no YouTube content, no, no organic content, and they're just pushing out ads. People don't know who they are, and so they're gonna be continuously seeing their ads before somebody eventually clicks.

SPEAKER_01 52:20

Absolutely. I've got a whole module on this in my school community, actually. The organic and the paid feed each other, and they're I think necessary to a holistic strategy, right? Like you said, they warm, they warm each other up, they warm each other up, and they just make uh make everything else work better. So cover all the bases. I love that. Okay, I know you've got a hard stop here in a few minutes.

SPEAKER_03 52:43

Is there any last piece of advice that you would give the audience or the listeners? Um man, I don't know.

SPEAKER_00 52:57

I think uh it's for people out there who want to be business owners or succeed, I think uh having the mentality of becoming the one percent of the one percent is a is a good mentality to have. Whatever you do, if you are like I I come from military background, so that's already one percent. And then I asked myself, how can I be the one percent of the military? And I knew that I could do that through running journeys, through my Iron Man training, through insane physical challenges that I've done out throughout the years, and it's giving me so much confidence in everything else that I do because those things were so hard physically and mentally, they made everyday business seem easy. Absolutely. So business is not easy. Business, you're gonna be dealing with a roller coaster of emotions, and on top of your business, family stuff gets in the way, personal issues get in the way, relationship issues get in the way. But if you can conquer your mind on the inside, and you have what I like to call a cookie jar. I got this from David Goggins' book. But you have a cookie jar of all of the things that you've accomplished in the past that are hard, you can rely on those things to tell yourself, hey, whatever I'm going through right now, whether it's hard or not, I've done things that are even harder. And so I know that I'm capable of doing it.

SPEAKER_01 54:51

I love uh I love what you're touching on here because this is a theme that I've I've tried to share throughout my uh my business journey. I often say if you want to be in the top 1%, you do top 1% things. And that's not exclusive to any one avenue, right? Uh military, less than 1% of the population joins the military. Uh running half marathons or marathons, less than 1% run run those. Uh bench pressing 315, you know, that's less than 1% of lifters run that. And I mean, that's even a small fraction to begin with. So, like, there's all of these physical goals that I use in a very similar method to you, where it's like, I'm I'm gonna chase this, I'm gonna achieve this, and it makes everything else easier. Uh, I noticed I like I had friends that would ask me why I was running half marathons. Because when I left active duty, I swore, like, and I was I was adamant about it, I was never running more than two miles ever again. Just wasn't gonna do it. Um obviously that stopped being true. I started getting into marathons and like stuff like that. But the reason I got into it was because it was a discipline piece for me. If I could do that, everything else the rest of my day was easy. If I got up in the morning and I ran 10 miles, everything else the rest of the day was on easy mode. Because I'd already done the hard thing. So I I love the mindset that you that you're sharing here with this, because I think that it's a crucial, a crucial skill to develop if you want to be successful long term. Master control of your body to master your mind.

SPEAKER_00 56:36

Dan Martel says it really well. He says, uh, savage the body, tame the mind.

SPEAKER_01 56:43

All right on. Yeah, I like that one. Okay, Joey, for anybody who's uh listening, where can they find you? How can they follow you? How can they join your school community? Give us all the plugs.

SPEAKER_00 56:54

Oh, um, yeah, so you can find me anywhere if you just search up my name, Joey Nguyen. Um, my school community is called Bullet Finance. So it's finance for people who like shooting bullets. No, no, I don't know.

SPEAKER_01 57:10

I like shooting bullets and I like finances. Let's go.

SPEAKER_00 57:14

Yeah. Yeah, no, thanks, thanks for for doing this and thanks for having me.

SPEAKER_01 57:18

Dude, I really appreciate you coming on. I uh to be honest, man, I am very much admiring you, the tenacity of your journey. You're doing it at a young age. It's it's honestly inspirational, and I hope more people see you, find you, learn from you, because what you're doing is making a difference. And again, time will make it compound.

SPEAKER_00 57:40

So keep it up, my brother. Yeah, no, thank you. You're you're an inspiration for me too. I'm seeing all of the cool cars that you have, and I need to I need to get to your level one day.

SPEAKER_01 57:50

Dude, cars is a whole nother uh a whole nother podcast episode we could jump into. I uh yeah, they uh they help with everything, in my opinion. Help you scale, help you get into the right uh bigger rooms, networks, more more room for impact. So get a car. Cars are cool. Okay. Okay, brother. I appreciate you. Thanks so much. Yeah, thank you.