Arbitrage Andy is an anonymous social media influencer and financial blogger with large followings on Instagram, Substack, and X. He publishes the bi-weekly Arb Letter covering financial markets, crypto, and world news.
What follows is Part II of a two-part transcript of of our conversation, which took place on July 23, 2025. The transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
CB: What percentage of your Substack subscribers are paying for full content, and what percentage are just getting the free content?
AA: I'd say it's about 15%. So about 15% pay for premium, and the rest are happy with the free version. A lot of people have an aversion to paying for things. I’ve said many times—I pay over $500 a month on various paid resources: other Substacks, Twitter accounts, research I ingest. That’s an attitude you develop once you’ve cut your teeth in business. It takes money to make money. Free stuff is never going to be as good as paid stuff, generally.
That said, you can’t just put out paid stuff and expect people to buy it. It’s just like selling a product. People need to know who you are and what you’re offering. My advice to anyone trying to replicate the model is: you need a balance. Someone I talked to said it should be like 75% free, 25% paid—some kind of breakdown that keeps people happy.
You’ll get people saying, “Why is this behind a paywall?” I get that. You go on The Guardian, or other websites, and everything’s paywalled. The difference is—that’s establishment media. It’s very mainstream, normie, vanilla. You’re not getting a differentiated viewpoint. If people like your content, your angles, your commentary—they’ll pay for it. That’s what it takes to access that second level of content or thinking.
CB: It seems like writing is becoming a status symbol, as in, people aren't even doing it for money, but to signal that they're smart enough to produce a good opinion piece or make a solid point.
AA: It’s kind of funny, right? Like I said, I spend the majority of my week writing now. People ask me what I do now, and aside from running Andy and the e-commerce and the Instagram, the social media side of things, like 90% of my time I spend writing. And I never thought that would be the case. So shoutout to Substack for making that possible and creating that economy.
To your point, I think the reason why people are now kind of seeking that out or gravitating towards it is because of the environment that we find ourselves in. Whether we’re talking about Bitcoin, society, politics, wars going on in the world, government, corruption, who the president is, COVID, jobs, salaries, buying a home—all that stuff—it’s kind of interrelated. I very much feel like COVID especially was a turning point where people either fell back into the hive mind and showed how easily they’re manipulated emotionally, or other people woke up and became very based.
It’s kind of like when I say, “Does this guy get it or not?” That’s just the easiest sort of range of awareness. That’s the crux of the issue. A lot of people realized, hey, the establishment, the media, the government institutions—they’re all full of shit. They always have been. Now we definitely know they are. They want us to come back into the office. They want us to forget all of the lies that we were told. They want us to forget about the elections, the lab in Wuhan, Nord Stream, the Epstein list, the two assassination attempts on Trump.
It’s like The Truman Show, man. There are people living in The Truman Show, and they can’t break out of it. And it’s not that I don’t have empathy, because a lot of people are just living to get through the day. They’ve got shit to focus on and worry about. They don’t have time to think about these bigger things. But that’s very much what happened to me. I was posting exclusively about my shenanigans when I was in my early 20s in New York City, working some corporate job, and I watched the world change in front of my eyes.
There were very few people I could turn to at that time—a handful of family, a handful of friends that also kind of saw it all for what it was. I think writing, media, all this stuff is becoming much more popular now because there’s a lot more to say—but also a lot more noise. Everything has become so much more saturated. You’ve got all these reels. You could probably get on Instagram or TikTok tonight and scroll through reels for like two hours and not see a duplicate. It’s so much slop, so much brain rot. There’s so much shit out there that people are craving things that are unique and differentiated.
That’s one of the major reasons why people are gravitating towards it. Because what people want now is distilled content. They want valuable content. They want to know that there are people that think the way they do, even if it might not seem like it. And they want value. That’s what I would say about that.
CB: How did you get good at writing? I’ve been reading some of your work. It's definitely a skill that you need to hone over time, right?
AA: I've always been a reader. I was a pretty avid reader growing up. I'm a huge World War II buff. I've actually got a copy of A Soldier’s Story signed by Omar Bradley. I’ve got a couple of World War II books that are pretty cool—original copy of The Dirty Dozen, Guadalcanal Diary. I was that weird kid who only read about World War II.
I crushed verbal, writing on the ACT and SAT. Did okay at math, but definitely not my forte. If you're picking a business, if you're looking at a side hustle, one of the things I tell people is you’ve got to figure out what you’re good at—and what you don’t mind spending your time doing over and over again. Because if you're trying to build a business, you're going to be eating, sleeping, living that nonstop.
For me, writing or staying up to date on what’s happening geopolitically, in markets, in crypto, in politics—that stuff I do anyway, so it doesn’t feel like work. There are parts that suck, just like anything, but you’ve got to figure out where your strengths lie. You have to be objective about it. You can’t be like, “Oh, I’m really good at Excel,” when you suck at it. You need that feedback from the world that tells you, “You’re good at this.”
There were little things I figured out along the way—reception of Yik Yak posts, doing a stock pitch competition and actually convincing a professor to buy a stock when I didn’t know what I was talking about. You learn what you’re good at—whether it’s persuasion, distilling information, being good with people.
But it’s consistency, it’s repetition. When I was going through investment banking interviews—I never ended up doing IB—but when I was going into it, I didn’t know jack shit. After three or four months, I could build a DCF, an LBO. I just hammered it for three months straight and learned how to do it. You can learn how to do anything. But the goal is to figure out what you’ve got a little bit of an edge in—and monetize it.
Writing for me is something I do anyway, and it was just a logical extension to get more of my commentary and viewpoints across, as opposed to just making memes or shitposting.
CB: Is there a science to crafting a great meme?
AA: You know, it's changed. It's changed over the years. You know a good one when you see it. Social media has changed so much. Back in the day, there were, like, three different apps that most of us used. All kinds of finmeme accounts, shitposting accounts on Instagram. A lot of them were very crude—looked like they were made in Microsoft Paint—but they would do numbers. Starter packs, stand-still memes, that kind of stuff. They’ll still do pretty good if they’re unique or if the algo picks them up.
Nowadays, it’s more like sarcastic reels with Snapchat-style text filters. Absurd situations. Like the Friday Beers guys—they put out good content. The quality has gone up. People are putting themselves in the videos. That obviously came about with TikTok and reels.
As far as a science goes, man, it’s changed a bit. Back then, I’d crack one, post it, and know in five minutes if it was a banger—likes, comments, all that. Now it’s more hit or miss. I think because of the algorithm. I don’t know how they work. They say it’s stuff you’d enjoy, but your followers don’t see your shit. It’s a big black box.
Look at that video of the Astronomer CEO—two and a half million views. That’s the most any of my content has gotten. Maybe one other one, a random drone strike in Ukraine I posted on the ARB Letter Instagram. That wasn’t even a meme, per se, but original content that just ripped. You just don’t know.
I did a starter pack on the LA riots—thought it’d flop. Did over a million in three days. Had no idea that would happen. Bottom line, it's a lot less predictable now. Back in the day, the platforms were more permissive of edgy, fucked-up humor. You might still see that on X or occasionally on Instagram, but they’re not pushing it like they used to. It’s just evolved so much. It’s pretty tough now.
CB: It's really interesting how they've developed social media tactics for politics. I think right around the time you started, the political world hadn’t yet optimized social media at all. I think the real test case was Brexit and Trump 2016.
AA: Yeah, so you can look back. I mean, there are countless examples, right? We can look back at the admission from Zuckerberg right before Zuckerberg made this, like, I'm-a-Chad-bro transition—who likes UFC and wakeboarding with an American flag costume. A lot of people forget he came out and literally admitted that, you know, the FBI essentially told them to censor the Hunter Biden laptop story. We had the FBI reaching out to former executives at Twitter, telling them to shadowban accounts that were talking about the lab leak or the 2020 election or January 6. This is very much what Orwell predicted in 1984, and that's cliché, but it's true.
What people don't realize is that, you know, this recent video of this Astronomer CEO at the Coldplay concert—that would not have gone viral if they didn't want it to. Now, I'm not saying they had some strong reason to let it go. They probably let it go because it did absolute fucking numbers. If I did two and a half million, that probably garnered like three, four, or five billion views in that 24-hour period. If they didn’t want that to happen, there are ways for them to allow that not to happen.
There are very sinister ways—either omission of content or pushing it to certain people, certain demographics, to tailor public opinion on ideas, concepts, political candidates, cities, people. You name it.
There's a guy I follow that does good analysis on government systems and intelligence agencies, Mike Benz—his Twitter handle’s like @MikeBenzCyber. He was on the Shawn Ryan podcast. He’s done detailed research on USAID, talking about how intelligence agencies facilitate regime change overseas.
A huge part of that, if you're talking about a color revolution or the Arab Spring or any instance where intelligence agencies want to trigger action—the way they do that is to spread narratives online. They might have bots. They’ll use bots to make it look like an opinion is more or less popular than it is. There are ways to manipulate the feed.
And because of how plugged in we are, people just have no concept. Like, this might be working on you and me as well. It’s a subconscious way to program people. Most of us spend all day online—it’s an entire new front. We're moving away from traditional psychological operations to a dystopian digital playing field where you have no idea what is actually going on. And of course, AI only adds fuel to the fire.
CB: A lot of people think that crypto is going to become some kind of reserve currency, or a permanent store of value. I wanted to get your thoughts on that—obviously, you're a big crypto guy.
AA: Yeah, for sure. So we'll kind of start from the top, right? We left the gold standard in 1971, and, you know, for people that need a refresher: that essentially untethered the US dollar from any hard asset, so it allowed governments to print unlimited fiat money without constraint, which is basically what we've done. Between February 2020 and February 2022, the US money supply surged by 40%, or just over $6 trillion. On their own, the US Federal Reserve injected, I think it was about $3.5 trillion of that in 2020, through QE and through other emergency lending programs. We remember stimulus checks, all that good stuff, right? That was unprecedented money printing, right? That is really the major driver behind elevated inflation. Jerome Powell said inflation is transitory. That inflation rose very, very sharply in ’21 and ’22, and the US economy just sort of took that massive injection of liquidity to its face. And that was when we saw meme stocks—GameStop, Shopify, Zoom—go absolutely fucking vertical.
I learned about Bitcoin sometime around 2017. A trader that I was working with mentioned it to me. I didn’t know anything about it at the time. I was like, you know what? If I can fucking flip some money here, I’m going to do it. Bitcoin, in the current environment… I love it because it is the cleanest bet that you could have on sovereign preservation of value in a system which, in my opinion, is rapidly losing all credibility.
Everyone right now is begging for rate cuts from the US Federal Reserve… and they want a little bit of pressure eased up on the housing market, which is understandable.
What we're watching is fiat currencies across the world get debased. You're watching institutions break trust with the public, and then you've got governments at the same time that are flirting with capital controls and surveillance finance. If you think the censorship and the shadowbanning and the control that these big tech companies have over social media is bad—think about that, but in money form. They can freeze your bank account. You can have no access to your money. They could freeze your business. They essentially have absolute control over your money in a CBDC-type situation.
Bitcoin, to me, is, like, the ultimate get-out-of-the-blast-radius asset. It's fixed in supply. It's immutable. A lot of people have this preconceived notion that you can’t exchange it for dollars at any point in time. That’s not true. They think it’s a scam, a Ponzi. It’s used in crime. But those sorts of drawbacks that people highlight are also its strengths.
In a world where you have all these sort of synthetic components of markets, and you have unlimited money printing, Bitcoin, to me, is essentially an exit plan.
If you look at Bitcoin, a lot of people are pissed off they didn’t get in early. But when I look at Bitcoin, which I’ve held for, I think maybe seven, eight years at this point, I will hold for a very long time. The value of Bitcoin in fiat, in dollars, continues to climb. And I think kind of a fun sort of conversation I have with myself and other people is: what is becoming more valuable, right? Is Bitcoin becoming more valuable, or is the dollar just becoming worthless?
I still think that crypto is largely undervalued. The last three to four weeks, I think I’ve seen the highest engagement for the newsletter in two to three years, which is kind of saying a lot.
If Bitcoin is digital gold, the way to kind of think about Ethereum, in my opinion, is like the new internet, right? So it is essentially the platform on which a lot of new applications are going to be built.
Chainlink is very much a play that is tethered directly to a bet on tokenization, which is putting real-world assets onto a blockchain. There are a lot of corporations and institutions that are already adopting blockchain technology, smart contract technology.
We get into decentralized finance, and we get into different altcoins and different blockchain tech that these firms are adopting… you're looking at a more streamlined, democratic, sovereign form of money that is completely and entirely digital.
The big thing with crypto is, like, you have to be patient, and I think people’s patience is going to pay off in a massive way, because this is the future.
Do I think that everyone’s going to be going out and buying coffee and pizza slices with Bitcoin? Not necessarily… But at this point in time, if you’re looking at crypto, the order of risk kind of flows from Bitcoin to Ethereum to altcoins to meme coins.
Bitcoin and crypto in general is the new financial frontier. I think it’s the future. I think it’s going to present an opportunity to young people that we haven’t seen yet… I think AI sits adjacent to that, and I think automation and robotics also sit adjacent to that.
CB: If you're exiting to a luxury real estate market, what kind of areas are you eyeballing right now?
AA: When I say that, I mean, like, a nice home, right? I don't necessarily mean a luxury building in Manhattan. I don't want to kind of drone on about real estate in the same way that I just droned on about crypto. But, you know, the big sort of question mark for people—we talked about salaries, right? You asked about, you know, finance salaries and keeping up with inflation and that kind of thing. The big question mark for a lot of young people right now, if they don't have family money, if they don't come from wealth, is, like, am I going to be able to afford a home? That's fair, right? That's been the American Dream for a very long time. That's sort of, you know, a mark of adulthood. It's something that people have used in past generations to gain financial independence and freedom, which is kind of interesting nowadays, because you see all these posts about people paying off their homes, and they still owe absurd property taxes. So it's like, do you actually own that? Or are you a serf, right? I think you're a serf.
When I talk about exchanging Bitcoin for real estate—BowTiedBull talks about this a lot of times—you know, it's like the “make it” number. It's like, when are you finally free? Like, when do you get your escape velocity to exit the system? And they argue that it's a paid-off home. That's personal preference, right? I don't know if you want a $400,000 home—if you could find one, it's probably out in the middle of fucking nowhere. What I see here in the Northeast is a very reasonable starter home for $1.1 million—like, the drop-off in value from, like, a $1 million, $1.1 million home to, like, a $600,000, $700,000 house is absurd. Like, you get nothing for six or seven, you get everything for $1 million, $1.1 million. The only thing you’ve got to do in order to get the $1.1 million house is put down 20% and have an absolutely absurd mortgage rate, where you're paying 65%, 75% of the value of a home in interest over the course of the loan.
Well, some people are trying to buy houses cash. That’s great if you’ve got a million dollars laying around, right? And then you’ve got another half a million, a million dollars to live on. And so for me, where I could have bought a home up to this point, I didn’t for a couple of reasons. I mean, the big one was, I was in New York City for nine years. But that’s kind of my goal, right? My goal is, hopefully Bitcoin continues to appreciate. Maybe we see some sort of mini-issue in the housing market, and there are opportunities. If not, I’m afraid people are just going to have to bite the bullet.
CB: Yeah, it seems that way. It does. Sometimes I can be a little pessimistic in the short-term.
AA: In this current environment—and this is just one man's opinion, so take it with a grain of salt—but in this current environment, right, there's only a couple of ways to get rich, or make it, if we want to use that term. A very small percentage of people can get a top corporate job, right? So, private equity, or maybe they're, like, a skilled doctor. They’re a neurosurgeon, they work at a top hedge fund, and they don't get fired, and they have an insane year, or five years, or whatever it may be. They're 0.01% performers. There is that option. But for the most part, the way I see it, you can start a business, you can get equity, right? Somehow, either you start your own business and you end up getting equity, or you're fortunate enough to join a startup, and the timing is perfect. Or you can buy assets like Bitcoin, right? Or risk assets, equities, tech stocks, high-growth stocks, that kind of thing. In my opinion, the best thing to do is to try to blend them all together, right?
But you just have to adapt, because, as you said, everything is cyclic, right? Nothing lasts forever. Nothing truly lasts forever. And you need to adapt, and you need to figure out a way to basically get to that escape velocity point where it doesn't matter anymore. I very much am doing my own thing. You know, I spent some time in corporate, took some skills away from it, realized it wasn't really my cup of tea. Moved on. Now, I'm betting on myself. I've got my fingers in some other stuff.
They're starting different types of businesses. They're consulting online. They're taking back, essentially, roles and occupations that require hard skills—and not just, like, some fancy email signature at a big corporation that you could lose next week, right? Me, personally, I think that's great. I think that's a direct response to what is happening around us. And it doesn't mean you can't do both, right? As long as you have, like, a solid understanding of the way things are trending—which is, like, hard skills, actual value—everything is going digital for the most part. In terms of finance, there are lots of different opportunities and ways to make money on the internet. But it does require a very pragmatic, kind of sober view of the landscape around us. Like, you can't be in denial about it and be like, everything's fine, the house is on fire.