The Action is the Juice🧃
A conversation with Andrew Fenichel
blog.fifty-six // April was a big month of pre-production for our team. Now, with May coming into full swing, we’re officially moving into the production phase of our calendar.
Our team drove to Grand Rapids, Michigan today to shoot photos and more alongside our next Creator Mag cover star. The story is about many things: perseverance, filmmaking, and the pursuit of creative fulfillment.
We’ll have more to reveal on that front in June. For now, if you’d like to pitch a story for our next print edition, you have two more days to do it! Thanks to the fifty (!!) of you who have sent in pitches thus far—it’s been a pleasure reading through them all.
Below, you’ll find my conversation with Andrew Fenichel. He’s not only a full-time sports creator and commentator, but he’s also my former college roommate, and we even worked together on the earliest iteration of Powder Blue way back when.*
Sharing this conversation feels like a real full-circle moment, as it’s been a real joy rooting Andrew on over the years. Stephen A. Smith, watch out—your seat’s getting hot.
— NGL
P.S. Last blog, we wrote on the why behind our season-long theme, “WHERE DID YOU GO?” You can read it here.
Sponsored by Fourthwall
Notice Anything Below MKBHD’s Videos?
That’s right: The Internet’s most famous tech reviewer sells his custom apparel directly on his YouTube channel.
How? Through Fourthwall’s YouTube Shopping integration, which lets MKBHD connect his ecommerce store to videos in seconds—meeting his audience right where they watch.
The best part: Every time a fan purchases a product on YouTube, Fourthwall handles all of the logistics and manufacturing, allowing creators to focus instead on making that next video.
Join MKBHD, Phil DeFranco, New York Magazine, and 200,000+ others who use Fourthwall to power their online stores—get started for free today.
Andrew Fenichel is a sports creator and commentator based in Los Angeles. He’s reported everywhere from the Clippers’ practice sessions to the front row of last year’s NFL Draft. Also, I beat him in Twenty-One the last time we played.
The following conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Nate Graber-Lipperman: Hey Andrew! First question: What was your biggest win of 2024?
Andrew Fenichel: Meaning, like, win as a creator?
NGL: It’s open-ended.
AF: Alright, fair enough. The biggest win as a creator was obviously going full-time. I mean, that had just been the goal—the peak of the mountain for so long.
Along with that, getting a brand deal with YouTube and the NFL to go cover the NFL Draft [in April 2024]. That was just the coolest five-day experience, you know?
It was this legitimate moment where I thought, oh, wow. I built all of this, and now I'm here on behalf of these companies to do the thing I've always wanted to do.
NGL: Is there a big learning you brought into 2025 as you look at the year ahead?
AF: Biggest learning…I like how open-ended these are.
It's a little cliché, but I would say I learned that I'm about it. Like, I can do this. This is my life now. You know what I mean? Any doubts I might have had entering 2024 about the feasibility of this as a full-time career went out the window, and I think that's pretty cool.
As far as bringing that into 2025, once you kind of pass that hurdle, it’s full steam ahead. That just makes me even more motivated. It makes it easier to explain to your parents what the hell you're doing [laughs].
So yeah, I would say that the biggest learning about myself is just like, you know, I got the juice.**
NGL: I love it. As I've been listening back to more of these conversations, something I’ve enjoyed hearing folks talk about is hope. What’s got you feeling the most hopeful outside of the day-to-day YouTube world?
AF: I would say my friends. That was another thing I realized last year.
Like, I have so many incredible friends from all different parts of my life, and they’re all doing their own different things. It’s just made me very lucky, right?
I have people I can hang out with, people I can disconnect from work with. I have friends in the industry that I can talk about the industry with. I can go play golf. I don't know, I just have a great support system. And it's cool.
I think now, being in your mid-to-late twenties, it's like, okay, everyone's kind of having their own successes now, and we're all growing. You see the vision, and people are getting married and starting families. It's kind of cool to take a step back and see how great all my friends are doing, and then the fact that they're always there for me, and they've been so supportive.
NGL: You talk about the idea of, like, being full-time. There’s the identity aspect, and community, and stuff like money or status—to a degree.
But you’ve also told me how getting to the point where you could go full-time helped contribute to the lifestyle you wanted to lead. Getting in shape was a big factor for you.
AF: Last year, I was working at my previous job. I had a client, and I started getting to know him more. And, you know, he's a former NBA player. He's now a pretty successful business guy, media figure.
But I saw that he had freedom. That wasn’t some revolutionary idea—that freedom is what the goal should be. I think for every person it's different.
For me, what I realized is like, yeah, I want to be able to not only have freedom of time, but also freedom of opportunity. And going full-time on YouTube gave me freedom of time. There's no one telling me what to do every day, right? It's up to my own jurisdiction and my own self-motivation to do the thing every day.
So then the second half of that, of course, is freedom of opportunity, which in a lot of ways just comes down to developing a network of resources to kind of do what you want. That’s what’s got me motivated.
So yeah, those are my two goals, and going full-time unblocked fifty percent of that—I can go work out at nine a.m. if I want to. And I feel so grateful to be able to do that.
You can follow along with Andrew’s journey here.
Thanks for reading! Shoot us a reply, comment, or DM if anything resonated with you in particular—we respond to them all.
* If you’re new here, Powder Blue is our Chicago-based creative studio behind Creator Mag. For some real Powder Blue lore, go watch The Hot Takes Show (2019).
** Yes, I used this quote as an excuse to write the title of this blog, itself a reference to the classic 1995 action thriller Heat. Somewhere, my older brother is pumping his fists in celebration.