Episode 300 - Part 1: The People Who Got Us Where We Are Today

Going even further back, I was telling you earlier today that I think the very first business book I ever read, before I read Rich Dad, Poor dad, before I read Four Hour Workweek, any of that kind of stuff, was the E. Myth.

Yeah.

And literally today, the day that we're recording this episode, we've been having emails back and forth with Michael Gerber because he's going to come on the podcast. And I'm just. And I'm just like, holy shit. Like, this is going back even, like further. Full circle. Yeah.

This is an intro. Intro, intro, intro.

Hustle and Float, Shark with your boy. My boy, Matt Wolf.

Joey.

Hey. Welcome, welcome.

We are back. We are.

Who's our guest today?

Me. Yeah. And you and you and us. Okay, it's getting weird. We're actually in a different environment for this recording. We've walked a full six feet to the right.

We're no longer in my office. We're now in your kid's playroom. Yeah, it's pretty much. I don't know what we. This, we literally just call this room.

The middle room, but it's basically another living room. But the kids typically take it over and it's actually the cleanest I've ever seen it. Typically there's like Legos everywhere. But. So, like, my nightmare is, oh, I love Legos now.

There's just Legos in a few places.

Yeah. But like nightmares is just middle of the night, stepping on a Lego man.

Oh, yeah.

It feels like a knife going through your foot.

Yeah, that's like the bottom of my feet of built up calluses.

Sure.

It's like I've stepped on LEGO so many times.

Yeah. But your kids, I gotta give them props. They both are like little architects. Like, I would just build like messes of all like comboulated colored blocks and things and they're just like perfectly orderly. Here's my castle. Nice and ornate. And thought that. And I'm like, yeah, dude.

They're like that in the real world and the virtual world. It's like. Because, like, when you mean virtual world, they play Minecraft. So, like, their favorite thing to do is play Minecraft. So if they're like, they're playing Minecraft on their Kindles when they're not playing Minecraft on their Kindles, they're building the same shit in real life. And they. They literally call Legos, like, look, we're playing Minecraft in real life. It's like, yeah, the Legos came first.

You know, I was just about to ask you. I assume that does. Do they both Play now or.

Oh, yeah, they're both, like, ultra into it.

Interesting. I kind of want to watch. I have this, like, I want to see how they play that game. A, because I don't understand that game.

But B, oh, they'll show you.

Well, they're not here right now, but next time, no.

If you were to, like, hey, can you show me how to play Minecraft?

They'll be like, all right, come with me.

And like, they'll go. They'll talk to you for about four hours straight.

Okay, I'll give them an hour. I think that'd be cool.

They'll be pissed that you cut them off.

Yeah, they see me enough, they'll give me more.

Anyway, so this is our. This is a milestone.

This is a huge, monumental moment in time. Yes.

This is our 300th episode of the Hustle and Flowchart podcast.

This is drying my sweaty hand, Matt. Oh, yeah, that was good.

Now I have to go disinfect my.

Damn hand in your couch.

But we're sitting socially distanced.

Yeah, but you just touched my hand.

You touched my hand. Get out of my house.

Now you're just confused.

Alrighty.

Yeah. So this is the 300th episode, and we are taking notes on this one, as always. We're not going to do our normal intro thing. We just want to kind of get into a cool conversation here, but we are going to take notes. So you can get those notes over@hustleandflowchart.com comp. They're free if you grab them within, you know, a couple weeks of this episode going live and we'll hook you up there. So go get those.

Yeah, get them. And yeah, so this episode, the. It's going to be kind of like a two halfer, or maybe. I don't know if it's going to.

Be maybe a one, a one part and a two thirds.

Yeah, we'll call it two parts since we don't know the lengths of each. So in the first initial half here or portion part is going to be kind of us reflecting on what. How we got to the point we're at right now, more for ourselves to remember. Like, the. To be very honest, it's. It's hard to remember all this stuff, but when you start piecing one person, like, oh, this connection to that person, that you start to almost develop this bigger picture. And we started to go down this memory lane last week, and we had to stop ourselves because we're like, oh, hold on, this is too good. We got to record it. But then we Thought this could be a really cool way to give gratitude to the people who have seriously brought us here to this point right now. And that's not to fricking be cheesy and stuff, but no shit. If it wasn't for just a single connection 10 connections ago.

Probably wouldn't not be here right now doing what we're doing. And, I mean, we'd be somewhere else probably being all right, but it's just cool to reflect and give gratitude to these peeps.

Yeah. So we're going to kind of talk through our timeline here for a minute and, you know, pick up where we left off. Actually probably go back even further than where we started.

So. All right, so here's how it kicked off.

Before that, let's just. I'm going to quickly tell you for the second part of the show.

That's right. That's right.

We're going to do it.

Excited, man.

So we actually. We emailed our email list and we went to our Facebook group and we said, hey, are there any questions you want to ask us? You know, personal business, Nothing's off limits. Send us your questions. We probably won't talk about politics, but anything else goes. And so we. We had people send us a bunch of questions. We got a booty load responses.

A booty load? Yes.

And your booty. We're gonna. We're gonna spend some time kind of just working through these questions.

So we were overwhelmed. I'm just going to start and say that by the. The sheer number of freaking responses, they were rad. And we honestly have not read a single one of them yet. But our goal basically, on this episode is to answer as many of these we can before this episode just gets way too long, because we want to make sure that people don't get turned off by the link of this episode.

And it's also a chance for us to show gratitude to you guys and give you the people that did write questions. We're going to shout out your names and all that good stuff, so we'll.

Do the best we can to answer all of them. As Matt said, boatload or booty load? Booty load of questions.

Booty load is slightly less than a.

Buttload metric, so we're aiming for the buttload.

I'm going to stop. All right, so let's start with. All right, so first half or part of this freaking thing, the whole reason we started going down memory lane, I think, is because we were reflecting on just the interesting projects we're involved in right now. And then we quickly realized oh, most in. Not every one of the projects, but most of these projects involve a mentor that we were actually studying from like 10 years ago, maybe even later. And just like that got us to think. We're like, how the, how did we get here?

We need to like, retrace our steps a little bit.

Yeah. So I kind of want to work backwards.

Yeah.

I don't want to work from the beginning to now because that's boring. And I don't think we're going to actually be able to do that accurately. We need to come from. Yeah, because that's what we started.

Style. I get it.

There you go. It is. Well, let's. Let's start like, like, seriously with, I guess, the projects we have right now. Right. So let's talk. Let's talk about them. So list out the things that are basically we're involved in.

Members Pro.

Okay. So Members Pro, that is, we're partnered up with. With Chris Benetti. He's one of the longest listeners, I would say longest time listeners of this show. And he reached out and we partnered with him and his business partner and team over there. So Members Pro is one of them.

Unicorn Equity.

Unicorn Equity is with Roland Frazier, definitely one of our mentors, Oliver Schmalholz, who connected us through Roland. So newer friend of ours, but partners nonetheless. And that's expanding into very interesting places that we can't speak about yet.

Yeah, there's some other interesting partners getting.

Involved, but that's the Future branches. That's 400th episode we talk about maybe.

Yeah, yeah.

So Unicorn Equity is the second project.

We've got a partnership project going with Jay Abraham right now and Rich Efrin.

Yeah. So we're partnered up with them on a new product that Jay's launching called Master Passive Income. And we've arranged some deals with him and essentially that's in collaboration with Rich Sheffrin. So both of those gentlemen have been guys that we've studied for for about 10 or beyond 10 years and read books, listened to audios, videos, all that stuff. So now being able to partner with them, crazy and amazing. And then of course, we have a bunch of affiliate stuff. We're doing tons of partnerships there, of course, and then podcast, chat with people all day long. And then the membership.

Yeah, I mean, the podcast just itself is kind of crazy. It's just kind of a. Like I'm constantly pinching myself over the conversations we're having. I'm just like, holy crap. And I think that's actually what started this conversation was just like Some of these names that we're getting on our podcast, some of these people that we were getting connected with. And then I was going, like, all the way back to the very beginning and sort of connecting dots from then to now with, like, first books that I ever read on the topic of business, connecting them to people that we're interviewing now. And just like, just this spider web that happened over the years that got.

Us here, and that's exactly what it was. We started thinking about the books that we're reading. So one of them that stood out was Rich Sheffrin and the Internet Marketing Manifesto. And that's. I don't know how old now, but over, what, probably 12 years old.

Yeah, probably more. Well, Rich said on the show, I think it came out in 2010, 2007, maybe.

Okay, okay.

So I don't know, somewhere between 2007 and 2009, if I recall correctly.

So there you go. It's over 10 years old. So that's wild to think about. And that was one of the first books that Josh Bartlett told us to read. And Josh Bartlett is the owner of ThriveCart, and he's been on the show, really longtime friend of ours. He will be within this path, of course. So we're saying a lot about how we got here, so let's dive into it. So I would say the podcast you mentioned that. That is, we talk about it as a selling point to start your own podcast, but start a damn podcast if you want to grow your network.

We got someone, one of our listeners.

I'm forgetting his name right now. I apologize, because you might be listening. But we hooked him up with a, you know, little discount on the podcasting course, and he had nothing. He honestly, like, was at a business job and all that stuff and essentially took what he learned there and applied it to podcasting and freaking got ownership of a company that's doing, like, $35 million a year, and now he's fricking rocking. And it's because he's implementing stuff that we talk about podcasting. So, you know, it's like, a huge selling point to bring all these opportunities. He did that within, like, two months from nothing. So, like, the podcast is a freaking linchpin to connections and opportunities.

Yeah. Well, okay, so Unicorn Equity is with. Partnered with Roland and Oliver. Right. We met Roland because we asked for an introduction so that we can get him on the podcast. Roland came on the podcast. That's how we got to know Roland. We later got invited by Bob Serling to be in a mastermind that Roland was also in. And then we were able to even get in closer with Roland.

You know, with members pro. Chris Bonetti. Yeah, he listens to the podcast. Right. So that connection came directly from somebody who was listening to the podcast.

Jay Abraham. The reason we're working with Jay Abraham now is because we invited him to be on the podcast he agreed to be on. We did our interview after we hit record to stop recording. We chatted with him for a little bit longer, started talking about a project that we'd done in the past, and he went, oh, that sounds interesting. Can you do that for me? That project is a result of this podcast.

I think you covered the branches there like the other projects. Now what I'm hearing is from the introduction, as. Let's just say Jay was from Roland. And that was actually a text to me because Jay was looking for some help with some stuff in their business, and I was definitely happy to help and have a conversation. So big gratitude and props to Roland. And he's probably tired of me saying thank you to him. I've even asked Matt. I'm like, do you think I'm thanking him way too much? Because I feel like he has helped us so much. And so that door was open because of Roland and you mentioned. But really. And then go back a little further. It was Bob Serling. And so a massive shout out to Mr. Serling. I mean, you have been absolutely freaking amazing. And we chat every week, I know, in some portion or another. Usually it's making fun of each other, bird pictures.

But it's awesome. And he's a great friend of ours. And if it wasn't for that mastermind, I mean, that got us very close to Roland quickly, but also a whole group of amazing folks in that mastermind.

Yeah. And, well. So you reconnected with Bob Serling by inviting him to be on our podcast. Right. You reached out to him and invited him to be on this podcast. And I'll tell you, you reconnected with him. So how did you actually get to know Bob in the first place?

It was. I think it's his. Dan Ryan. Oh, no, no, no. From the first place, we can't mention that name. But he asked a question. I see his name on the list.

So I think I'm obligated to. He told me to.

Yeah, well, when we ask the question that he asked, then that will make sense.

Okay. Yes. Okay. So unnamed guy named possibly Dan Ryan.

It goes further back than him. This goes back to when I was running a video agency. All that stuff With Mike Koenigs. So shout out to Mike Koenigs. I did a crap ton of work with Mike for many years and he referred me to Bob for doing a PDF, a nice looking ebook thingamajiggy. So I just did a single project with Bob maybe five years ago, six years ago, something like that. And it was a one off project, had one call ever. But we hit it off him. It was all cool and. But that was kind of it. It wasn't like. It was kind of transactional in a way, but all good.

But I knew he was a licensing guy because the project was all about licensing. And that's when Dan Ryan creeped up and he was like, hey, you know, Bob, I need some licensing stuff or something around that regard. And then that got me to connect those guys. I'm like, oh, yeah, I can connect you guys. And then that kind of triggered. Yeah, that whole thing.

That's when Bob popped back up.

And then that's when he popped back up. I think that's when we brought him on the podcast. And then it's been a bro ship ever since.

Bro ship. Bromance.

I was keeping it at bro ship.

Bro ship. I mean, that's just a new term to me.

Well, it's just as good as bromance, right? I just. I just came up with it.

What did you say? Broseph.

All right. Bro Bob. So those are thanks to Bro Bob Brobob. We're going to be using that. Bro Bob, when you listen to this, text me and just let me know you heard this.

Yeah, when. When I email him a lot of times, I'll say Bobbo. For some reason, like in my head when I read it back, I read it as Bobo.

That's cool. Anyway, so that's. I don't know how to do this. It's not gonna. So this is what's interesting. I feel like we're creating a tree right now. Yeah, we're just talking about all sorts of, like, we're kind of at the top right now still. Yeah, like, there's a lot of stuff, like different projects. So we just went down like a vein of, you know, like the Bob Serling, Mastermind, Rolling Brain.

Well, how do you know Mike Koenigs then?

See, this is. This is what I'm saying. Like there's. Okay, so maybe Koenigs, I'm just gonna interview you on.

That's how you made connections to people.

So I'll take it back.

Yeah, no, but I mean, they'll intertwine.

They will. Yeah. Koenigs popped up from my good buddy David Klein. DK's amazing event that he needs to restart. And if you've ever been there, I know unnamed man named Dan Ryan maybe was there. And this is how I met Dan, is through DK as well. And so Dan's been mentioned so many times. That's this guy, linchpin David Klein. And, you know, shout out to dk. A lot of people know him. He's a chiropractor. Was a chiropractor. Is a chiropractor. And I met all these people through him. He had this Think tank event. It was like, I don't know, 60, 100 people max. Probably not even 100, but it was like, no pitching. It was just hanging out for like a whole weekend or something on the beach, just doing cool shit with entrepreneurs.

And dk, you knew because he was your chiropractor.

Chiropractor, yeah.

We probably don't need to go back farther than that.

No, no, I'm sure it keeps going back. I'm trying to remember. DK connection. There's no. We were at dinner with dk and I think Mike, Phil, same was even at that dinner. It was in downtown. You were there. We met DK at a dinner that we went to with someone else during.

Like, Amish, wasn't it? The dinner? It was like, in the rooftop hotel.

Nope. I met Amish at Think Tank as well. Through dk. DK was my linchpin there.

Oh, okay.

Yep. So Amish Shah, he's been on the show as well. I was partners with him on a project back in the day, a couple projects, and worked with him. Yeah, he was back in the Frank Kern days. We were watching Amish.

And, yeah, that was like, when we were just kind of starting out. So he's like the Frank Kern days. Yeah.

Like, that era is over.

I don't know. I'm just thinking of those, like, launch days, I guess. What years were those? Like 2010? Ish. 11. Yeah, 12.

That is when everybody just had, like, a $2,000 launch and it was like the exact same thing replicated over and over and over again.

Yeah. So I met. So going to DK really quick here, call him dk. David Klein. He ran Think Tank. Think Tank was an event. I think it went there twice. I think it ran for three years and then he stopped. That's why he needs to bring it back because everybody, anyone who's been there has been like, dude, that was the best event. It's just. Because it was just like, you're chilling at the beach all day, but everything's provided for you and you're hanging out with like literally the cherry picked people. And the way I got in there is I think I was helping DK on some projects. I was paying him as a chiropractor. But I knew and I gotta remember who connected me to dk. Someone told me. Or no, it was at that dinner. But like how I got to that dinner. But either way I just liked that guy. And I think we just hit it off where I got an invite there so I was able to get into those people. So I met Mike Koenigs there. I remember he was like, yeah, he came zipping in his Tesla and his yellow little Tesla. This first one that he made a documentary about. And DK introduced me to him because DK knew I was trying to get work. I was trying to basically do all the keyNote slide presentations. VSLs, like wasn't really webinars then. It was all video, you know, pitches and videos and stuff like that. So Mike Koenigs did a lot of those and DK knew that, so we he made that introduction happen. I worked with Koenigs for freaking three, four years and still I'm in a mastermind with him now.

Yeah. Was it something related to the Henry Evans meetings? Because that was almost like maybe if I'm going back to like as far as I can remember, like the first sort of networking kind of events that we went to in the business world were put on by Henry Evans.

Yeah, he preceded DK and all that for sure.

Yeah. So I'm wondering if it was like through a connection from somebody at one of Henry's meetings.

We were downtown for sure. I think you were there and I think it was at like after one of those like maybe a frankness control.

Or something like that.

Seriously. I think it actually was.

Yeah.

Because that's where I remember at DK's Think Tank event is where Frank actually did pop into one of those like days that we were doing masterminding. And I was actually able to surf with him. It was like no one else wanted to go surfing with Frank. I was like, fuck it, sure. So him and I frickin surfed. And it was just him and I. And that was kind of cool. I suck. He was way better. It was like shitty surf. I just remember it being a pain in the ass. I'm like, well this is cool. But that was all, that was all because of dk. So I want to give a shout out to him because yeah, there's Branches and friendships that came from there that are insane.

Maybe one day we'll make our own version of an Ancestry.com map of how we got here and all these people.

Well, I want to. Yeah. So. Well, should I go from here, Matt? I want to make sure that we're. Because I want to go back to really what we were saying. Like, Josh Bartlett shows up in this whole line because we were going back to, like. I want to get back to, like, where we started. Started.

Yeah. I think we were a little too focused on trying to start at the end and then go backwards.

Yeah.

I think maybe now we should just jump to the beginning and then somehow it'll meet up.

Yeah. Because let's just say through all of this, we really got started online.

In this course from Alex Jeffries.

Yeah.

So big shout out to Alex, and we gotta have him on the show. We've been talking about it far too long. Yeah.

Yeah. So, like.

So talk about that. Because that whole era there was, like, the catalyst to our online ventures.

Yeah. So this is. This is what we were talking about in the car. We're trying to, like, remember some of the, like, the very, very first memories of us getting into, like, online marketing. Because I remember I was working at Artisan, the shutter company. And just, like, in the evenings, I would be, like, on the Warrior Forum reading articles. The first blogs I remember reading were Ramit, Sadie's and Shoe Moneys. And, like, you know, Ramit was about, like, personal finance and, you know, investments and stuff like that. And then Shoe Money talked about, like, affiliate marketing and stuff like that. And I think because of the Shoe Money blog, I discovered the Warrior Forum. And I started going down this Warrior Forum route and lived in the Warrior Forum while I was supposed to be working at the shutter company.

I was working there at the time. And I would clearly remember this all the time in the afternoon, mainly. Matt would always look pissed if you walked in there and, like, asked him a question related to work. I was like, what the. Like, you're working, right? And he was like, what? What? You know, like, you were, like, completely in a different world, and it was always in. Because then you would say, like, oh, hold on. Because sometimes you'd be like, hey, check this thing out.

Yeah.

And I'd be like, what the.

What?

You're doing this? All right, Fuck work. Screw the shutter. What are you learning about Google Ads and SEO? How do you game?

That's.

But, yeah, that was. See, I learned about that the other day when you mentioned that. So the Warrior form and that's how we were saying.

So then we were trying to figure out, like, how did we find, like, Alex Jeffries? Well, I found Alex Jeffries because Justin Brooke tweeted about him. And I was actually following Justin Brooke. I think somebody mentioned him on the Warrior forum or something. I can't recall how I got connected to Justin, but he had a website called Sate Fling that I was a fan of, and I read it. It was basically about flipping websites. And at the time, I was doing some freelance website work for some friends of my parents on their websites, and I was learning about WordPress and things like that, like, in the off hours. And so when I came across Justin's site and I was already doing blogging stuff, I started to get these ideas of, like, oh, I could build up a blog and then I could sell it. So I kind of started going down that rabbit hole of flipping websites. And then Justin Brooke was an affiliate of Alex Jeffries, and he tweeted about it. I saw his tweet. We bought Alex's course. And then that just sort of. Now that spider webs into a whole bunch of relationships.

Yeah. And so that's well explained there. And we both, during that period was. So we'll do this. This will be interesting. So I'm just gonna give you, like, you are here on the map right now. You're at our catalyst. We're talking about joining Alex Jeffries. We'll talk about the before side in a minute. So before that, I want to talk about at the shutter company, what we're reading and all that kind of stuff, too, because there's a couple people that really kicked it off before then, too, at least for me, mentally, and thinking of business. And then after which we can do.

Now, hopefully people listening to this don't care about linear storytelling.

Yeah, well, we're not linear.

Oh, man. Yeah. So the after part of, like, joining that coaching course with Alex was we met amazing people. So what? Josh Bartlett is probably the longest standing one of those.

Yeah. Probably the biggest impact connection that came.

Out of that 100%. So shout out to Josh. I mean, he's opened up so many doors, and he was the first guy that told me or the only, you know, like the guy that basically pushed me in to do videos, like, do this stuff back in the day. So, you know, he kind of pushed me to kind of create a niche for myself and that created my initial network purpose here. I know he pushed you into. Not pushed you, but recommended the website stuff.

Yeah, well, at the time, I was Doing like freelance work for. I had a couple clients by this point that I was doing some freelance work for. And Josh was actually the one who suggested, like, instead of doing freelance work, why don't you make videos and teach people how to do this stuff? Then you can sell access to the videos and you can stop doing freelance. You could just sell access to these videos. And then I was like, ooh, that's a good idea. I can make like a WordPress training course. And he's like, yeah, and you could call it the WordPress classroom. I just checked the domain names available and like he was doing all that. And then so I bought the domain name and then like the next day he sent me like a PSD file, like a Photoshop file. He's like, dude, I just, I did a mock up of your website for you. And he literally like mocked up the WordPress classroom design for me in Photoshop.

It had a chalkboard and everything.

Yeah, yeah.

So basically, because we joined the Alex Jeffries group, we got into the forum, I met Josh. We both met Josh. Right. Josh basically recommended my first business model. He named it for me and he designed the website.

Can't beat that.

And then for Joe at the same time, I believe Josh was Joe's first video client.

Well, that's exactly what I was about to say. Yeah. And that video client, or the business was easy video player. So not just a tiny little opportunity. That thing went into a million dollar plus launch or something. I mean, the thing crushed it when video players, people didn't really have good options. So he made it easy. But yeah, I did all the sales videos there. Prelaunch videos. Sales videos. So he, he gave me really more structure than I ever knew around that stuff. He pointed me to the resources that I should be studying, the best practices. He gave me a shit ton of coaching in terms of what to.

Just how to present things, even all the way down to tonality of your voice. I remember that, like that like inflections and stuff because I would do the voiceovers for a lot of this stuff and it would sound kind of monotone, but I didn't know it, you know, But I was like, oh shit. Yeah, I gotta put energy into this thing and pacing and things like that.

Yeah, yeah.

So big, big props to him.

I mean, as far as like in the business world, people who had like the biggest impact on the trajectory of our business, Josh is probably like the biggest impact. Mm, yeah, I would say, like. Cause I mean, Josh pretty much led to like every other spiderweb we can think of.

And that's the beauty of. He got in early. Yeah. You know, like, if you think about it, because of him, I mean, so many other things have opened up. He's the one that really told us. I mean, this is a recent thing, and we made a whole episode on it earlier this year that, you know, to kind of urge us to stay the lane as being promoters and affiliate marketers. Like, we were struggling.

Even still to this day, he's, like, probably giving us some of the best advice on the direction of our business.

Yeah, well, it's because he knows us for so long. So that's the beauty of, like, he got in early. We got in early as a friendship in this. In Internet marketing or whatever you want to call it, just life. He knows us. We trust each other. We're like brothers, basically, at this point. Like, I mean, we got places to go. If shit hits the fan here, I'll just say that.

But you know, what country we'd probably most likely move to, there's trust.

And so, I mean, that just comes in time, I think, you know?

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, a couple notable mentions from that Alex Jeffries group. That's how we got to know Dean Holland, who was recently on the show. Who else was in that group that we kind of connected with?

I mean, Marcus Pass. You got to give him a shout out. I love that guy. I don't know if he even listens to our show, but I hope he is. I hope so, Marcus.

And then we're still, like, really great friends with Alex Jeffries, too.

Alex. Yeah, yeah, Alex. We saw him earlier this year at Rich Sheffrin's event.

We actually. We saw Rich Jeffris speak when we were in Alex Jeffries coaching. We all went out to Vegas and. And while we were. For Alex Jeffries seminar, that came with the thing that we bought. And Rich was one of the speakers and Mike Filsaim was one of the speakers.

That's right. So we got to. Yeah, it's crazy, man. And that was our first time really hanging out at like, a conference Y type of thing, you know, and then parties and all that.

That was also the same weekend that Mike Vilsaime was doing his affiliate.com VIP party thing. So we were there for Alex Jeffries event, and we were affiliates of one of Mike Phil Same's products. So we actually were going for two events that were all. That were happening kind of at the same time.

And that's just. It was a lot because that was like. That was really. We Got tossed in the deep end, I feel like, pretty quickly. But, yeah, so props to, you know, to obviously, Alex for the coaching, Josh for everything. A lot. And.

Who. Other people in that group. Matt, are there any other notable mentions or. We can go.

I mean, that's. That's where we connected with Rob Temple, who we've been.

That's right.

Kind of talking to him and his business partner.

Kennedy works with him, response suite and all them. Now.

I feel bad if we miss people.

Well, I mean, there was a lot of. We made quite a few friends in that group. I'm just trying to think of the ones that are, you know, kind of still operating in this space.

Well, the cool thing.

Oh, Joey Zotto came out of that.

That's right. Yeah. Yeah, he was in there. He does videos. We've had him on the show. So, yeah, it's interesting. But you mentioned Rich Sheffrin. Like, we're doing work with him now in a couple things. And he's just an awesome guy. He's one of those folks. It's like. That's really rad.

Yeah.

Now we can.

Yeah, go ahead.

Yeah. No, it's just really cool. We're doing that project with him. One with Jay as well, combined. And it's just interesting how it goes. Like, he was. One of the first initial books that we were recommended to read from Josh was Rich Sheffrin Manifesto, Internet Business Manifesto. That's why I think I said Internet Marketing Manifesto before. But, yeah, that was the first thing. And we were talking about it earlier. Felt like it was over my head when I first read it. We just weren't ready for it. But it's cool that we are ready for it now, obviously. But that way of thinking has really changed how we're doing things.

Yeah, for sure. So then how do we. How do we connect this storyline now? Because I was fairly.

Yeah, because, you know, you are our.

Story sort of like interweave. So it's like there's times where you're kind of working in your business and I'm working in mine, and then we kind of converge for a little bit and then separate for a bit.

Yeah.

And I don't know if we really want to get into all the details there. I just want to make sure that we're. We're, you know, shouting out the people that were like the sort of pivotal people along the way. One thing that comes to mind, too, is, like, going even further back. I was telling you earlier today that I think the very first business book I ever read before I Read Rich Dad, Poor dad before I read Four Hour Workweek. Any of that kind of stuff was the E. Myth.

Yeah.

And literally today, the day that we're recording this episode, we've been having emails back and forth with Michael Gerber because he's going to come on the podcast. And I'm just. And I'm just like, holy shit. Like, this is going back even, like, further, full circle.

Yeah, well, let's touch on that, because I think that'll shore that piece up as best we can. Because, yeah, the E. Myth goes way back. You read it before I did. That's probably around the same time where we were both, like, starting this, thinking. I don't know what triggered that, but I was working at that shutter company with you. You were.

Playing with your dinghy over there in the warrior form in your office. I was, like, manning the phones. So I was, like, kind of in the middle of everything.

So I also ran the factory at the same time.

I know you were doing a lot.

But the thing is, the Factory left at 2:15, and I was supposed to stay at the office till 5. So between 2:15 and 5, what am I going to do?

Exactly. And that was the point where, like, pissy mats of it, like, you know.

I'm like, the factory's closed. Leave me alone.

Yeah, exactly. Pretty much. So.

There'S some other things I want to say, too. I don't know if it's appropriate.

If it scares you, then say it.

Well, you would take the longest dumps. I remember that because I think you were just always on your phone.

I don't recall this.

I just remember because there was only one freaking bathroom in the. I was like, matt.

They eventually built a second bathroom.

Eventually. Took a while.

I was the catalyst viewer, probably.

Oh, I lobbied.

Tmi.

Hey, you scared? You or me? I guess. But yeah, no, there was an installation guy there, an installer. Larry, right? Yeah. I don't know his last name.

Speaking of the longest dumps.

And he would do it in the. In the open room area. So, like, when he was. Oh, God, never mind.

Let's not go there.

Let's.

That's not a tangent we want to go down.

Larry wasn't the cleanest individual. We'll just say that. But you know what? A lot of love to that guy. I don't know where he's at or what he's doing, but that guy, I remember connecting with him because, like, those guys are all contractors, right? Like, they're installing and measuring all that stuff for your dad's company. Shutter company and your dad and your mom's. And basically, like, I would go on rides sometimes. It was very messy, stinky van. But, like, the conversation was always good. It was all about, like, different ways of thinking. It was a lot of mindset stuff. And then he started talking about running a business and, like, getting out of the dollar per hour rate and how, like, going flat rate or, you know, and investing and stuff like that. And I was like. We were just really into it. So he said, finally one day I was working at the. Whatever, the little desk thing on the phones and stuff, and he came by and, like, dropped this book on my desk, and it was Rich Dad, Poor Dad, Robert Kiyosaki. And he was like, I think you're really going to like this one. This, like, changed my life and my thinking, Okie dokie. That's pretty heavy words, you know. So I did, and I, like, gobbled it up fast. So that was my very first book that, like, you know, Catalyst. And then I told you about it, and you've never read it. So you did. And then you basically were like, holy crap, too.

Yeah.

And I think that was, like, the combined, like, all right, let's do something about this. Like, let's make something of this, because I feel like we're smart enough to make something happen here. Yeah.

And then I remember I was at the Barnes and Noble in Mission Valley, and I was like, like, I just finished Rich Dad, Poor Dad. And I was like, that book was so good. I want to find something else like that. And so I was walking through, like, the business section. You know how, like, whenever there's books they want to feature, they kind of, like, turn them out so you can, like, see them. Well, there's one that I walked past called the Four Hour Workweek. I was like, huh? A picture of, like, two palm trees and, like, a dude lying in the hammock, right? And I'm like, this book looks legit. I like it already. So I picked it up and was, like, looking at it, and I think on the back there was, like, a testimonial from Robert Kiyosaki or something like that. Or there was, like, a sticker on the front that said, like, for. For fans of Rich Dad, Poor dad. Or I don't remember, there was something that, like, tied it to Rich Dad, Poor Dad.

Yeah.

And I'm like, all right, I'm getting this book. And so I went and got that book, and I read through it, and I was like, dude, you thought Rich Dad, Poor Dad's going To change your life. Check this one out.

It did. Yeah. And you're right. 100%, man. So that's cool. But that was. That was the. I was just thinking, Dan Ryan. We need to thank him. There's another little branch there we got to cover, but just to wrap this section up. Yeah. Like, back to rich dad, poor dad, man. That was it. And then that was where we, like, really started diving into, I think, the blogging stuff and then figuring out how to make some cash through that. And we were just like, we had no direction, no coaching. And then that's when we found Alex Jeffries through Justin Brooke.

Yeah. Yeah. Like, we knew we wanted to do, like, an Internet based business, but that was about as far as, like, we had thought it through.

We're like, we didn't know what or how.

If we spend enough time at this computer, people should be sending us money. Right.

Like, pretty much.

We couldn't figure out, like, oh, like, we actually need to, like, figure out a way to provide value to other people. Like, that wasn't on our radar yet. We were just like, if I. My mind, I was like, if I spend enough time reading the warrior forum, somebody is going to have this get rich quick thing. That's going to work.

That's all there were.

That was the way my brain was working at the time was like, I am going to find all of these get rich quick things can't be scammed. There's got to be at least a couple good ones.

Yeah. So let's just plan to not lose all of my money on buying all of them, but at least enough to find out the winners.

So that's what I was doing on the war room, not the Warrior four. I was on the warrior forum. Just like, I'm like, one of these get rich quick schemes is gonna work eventually. So.

Finally hit. Yeah. Oh, man. That's. Yeah. So that's cool. It's so crazy. So. All right. I don't think there's. Is there anyone else to thank before? I don't think that's it. Or I think that is it. I want to jump to Dan Ryan.

We have to.

I know. We have to pay him every time we say his name. So I was gonna say we should.

Just give him a nickname then.

Poop Head.

That was the best.

No. I don't know. I'm not good at this. What do you got?

Ryan Daniels.

You're just making him sound like he's. He's cool or something.

I don't know. All right, well, just go. Just Go ahead, let's tell. Where were you going with Dan Ryan, poop head?

So he no big shout out because he taught us the freaking Google strategies.

He did.

I mean, like, it's the stuff that's like the backbone for a lot of our traffic.

Okay, so here's how that happened. Come on.

That's why we're talking about Dr.

So I didn't know Dan Ryan very well. I think I was in through me. Yeah, yeah, no, I got connected to Dan Ryan because. Actually, I got connected to Dan Ryan because of Amy from Henry's meetings.

We gotta shout out Henry after this now, too.

Yeah, we've shouted out. I mentioned Henry earlier too, but yeah, go ahead. But yeah, so Amy, who the strong marriage now? Amy, she invited me to a mastermind and I invited you to the mastermind, and we went to the mastermind. And Dan Ryan was also in that mastermind. But you, I think, had already known him from the think tank.

From dk. Yeah, specifically. He used to just hang out creepily in dk. He's the chiropractor. I would go get my back cracked and DK would be like, hey, Joe, you're an Internet marketer. You should know this weird, creepy guy named Dan Ryan in the back room that's always creeping around on my computer. And he wears Birkenstocks all the time in plaid and ripped jeans.

Dan's like, stop describing me, please.

No, he still looks that way.

Longer beard now, I think. But yeah, he was in the back room. And I don't know what we talked about, but stuff marketing. But eventually that's how I met him. And then he was cool. So every time I went in there, I would always just sit in that room and we'd riff about some random crap and then that's about it. And then that eventually, yeah, then Think Tank was really, I think, where we started talking.

So.

I met Dan because Dan was in Amy's mastermind, but you had already sort of previously known him. So you kind of reintroduced me at that mastermind. Right. But anyway, fast forward to.

A little bit later. We were up living in Marietta and we were moving back to San Diego. But when we were moving back to San Diego, we sold our house before we had locked down a house in San Diego. So we actually moved in with my wife's parents for three months while we were house hunting. And I didn't have an office space. I didn't have anywhere to work. And that's not very great for an at home business. Right. So I didn't Have a place to work at my in law's house that we really great. So I went online and went on Facebook and said, hey, does anybody have a good office space I can use or where's a good place to rent or executive suites or anything? I need a space to work. And Dan Ryan's like, hey, I got an office you can rent from me. And I only met him maybe twice before that at the Mastermind, maybe three times at the Mastermind. And I was like, cool, I'll come check it out. I went over there. It was above a brewery.

Solid location.

Yeah, it was like, above a brewery.

And like I said, a lot of.

Shoot. What's that? Bingo.

Bingo. Bingo store. Yeah, no shit. Sold bingo equipment. We actually had to walk through the bingo store to get to our offices because, like, we were on the second floor and the stairway was in the back of the bingo store.

So literally, like bingo stamps and like.

Old ladies and like, the balls with the numbers on them and all that stuff. That's what they sold. And but you had to, like, walk through the bingo store to the stairs that were in the back of the building. And the office was above the bingo store, but, like, next to it, below downstairs was a brewery. So I think in that window that. That I was working in that office for a few months. And then when you moved back from Chicago, you moved into that office too. But during those. Those months, I think I probably gained, like 30 pounds because we had a fucking happy hour every day. Every fricking day.

Two kegs. And you were above a brewery? Like, yeah, we had to have two kegs in this office that was only 30ft from another.

That's how we paid our rent.

That is true. I can't complain because, yeah, like, yeah, we have a standing invitation to more office space, and our rent is always.

Dan never let us pay money. He just let. He had us buy him beer.

At the time. So anyway, getting back to how Dan taught us Google Ads, it was when I was working in that office space, I was. I was running my podcast, and at the time was the Authority Insider podcast. But I was still trying to do affiliate marketing stuff, and I started to promote ThriveCart and Dan. I was running a lot of Facebook ads@thrivecart. Never touched Google Ads in years. And Dan's like, dude, you guys should really experiment with Google Ads again. I'm like, dude, I know nothing about him. He's like, I'll tell you what to do. And so Dan literally came into our office, which was next door to His. And stood over me. I turned on screenflow and hit record. And just like, as. He literally stood behind me and said, all right, click that button there. All right, open that window. Type this here. All right, turn that setting on, that setting on, that setting on. And he literally just, like, over my shoulder, like, explained what I wanted to do step by step with Google Ads until I had it frigging figured out, and I was recording the whole damn thing on screen flow so I could go back and refer to it later. And from that day on, we became very proficient at Google Ads really, really quick.

No kidding.

And every time I had an issue, like, every time I'm like, damn, this ad not performing, I'd be like, hey, Dan, take a look at this ad. What do you think of it? And he'd be like, oh, yeah, turn that setting off. You'll get more. More qualified volume if you turn that setting. And I'm just like, cool. All right. And I just sort of, like, mentally built a blueprint based on what Dan was telling me.

Yeah.

Which later sort of spun off into what we teach at the PAG course.

Like a piece of it. Yeah. So it's. And that's a backbone of how we do a lot of our promotions, man. It's wild. So, yeah, that's. Damn, that's cool. Yeah. So, I mean, like, I guess the reason why we're talking about this is like, yeah, give thanks to all these folks. I think it's really cool. And I think there's a lot more people. I think we hit the biggies.

Yeah. I gotta talk about Bradley will probably for a minute.

Oh, yeah, yeah, do it. And then I'll actually give a shout to Amish as well. Yeah.

So, like. So Bradley was. I mean, he's a big piece of my story. Right. Just like Amish's more of a piece of your story.

This is the portion that now this is.

This is where it kind of merges.

Really. This is. Yeah, this is like. It was like a fuzzy area, but it merges as well. Yeah, yeah. It's an interesting time, but we're always there to support.

Literally, it was when I was partnered with Bradley and you were partnered with a Mish and, like, getting towards the end of those businesses. We were both kind of. I think you and I were sort of connecting again, more over the fact that, like, we were over certain aspects of the current business we were in.

Well, we were just transitioning out of them, really. We kind of. At least for me, I hit the marks that I think I was Able to in that one. And it was just time, I think, for both of us to change.

Yeah. So Bradley, I had the WordPress classroom, which was the company I mentioned. Josh really helped me with in the beginning. And I was a few years into it. It was generating pretty good consistent revenue, but it was, you know, it was leveled off.

Right.

I was making pretty much the same amount every month. I was kind of not growing very much. And you And I actually met Bradley for the first time at the Action Seminar. John Carlton Seminar.

Long time ago.

That was, I don't know, probably 2010, 2011.

Probably. Yeah.

But so Bradley was.

Having had his show, I forgot what it was called.

Yes. Unchained or Unstrapped?

Unstrapped.

Unstrapped. It was like a YouTube reality show where him and a bunch of other online audience entrepreneurs all moved. It was like the real world, but everybody was entrepreneurs, like, trying to build a company.

California.

Yeah, but on that documentary that they were making, they were building a company called Free Blog Factory. That's like what the documentary series they made was all about. So, well, that Free Blog Factory company sort of all split up. There was some sort of falling out. I don't even. I mean, I'm sure Bradley told me the details, but I don't remember them to this day, but they had some sort of falling out. But Bradley ended up with the Free Blog Factory brand and system. And so we got connected with Bradley at the action seminar. You know, connected, chatted a little bit. He had a blogging related company, I had a blogging related company. So we connected over that for a little bit. But I don't think I talked to him for like maybe a year or two after that. And then we somehow reconnected. I think he emailed me. I had a list in the WordPress space. He's like, hey, can we run our webinar for Free Blog Factory to your list? And I said, sure, let's do it. We did a webinar together. It did really, really, really well, actually. And I made some really good commissions working with them. And I don't remember how the conversation came up, but at some point we're like, dude, why don't we just, like combine efforts like you're out there teaching blogging. I've got like a cool sort of systematic way that just automatically installs blogs for people. Let's just merge them. When people sign up for a free blog through our system and we install it for them, we can upsell them to your training and stuff. Let's just like combine Them. So at the time I was kind of getting nervous because my brand was growing and growing and it was called the WordPress Classroom. WordPress is a trademark. Stupid idea, right? So I was kind of worried about the branding. And so Bradley and I kind of agreed to partner up and rebrand to learn to blog. And so we ran learntoblog.com for, I don't know, three or four years together and grew it to a pretty good size. And he was the one who got me to really get comfortable with running ads. Running Facebook ads. Before then, I'd never been running ads like WordPress classroom stuff that I was doing prior. It was never, ever, ever ads. It was purely, it was affiliate marketing, content marketing, blogging forums, that kind of stuff. Like, I was just boots on the ground. Just fricking boots on the moon. Boots on the moon. No, I was just like, totally boots on the ground. Just.

Contributing everywhere I frickin could to get people to come to the WordPress classroom. And that was also part of my warrior form journey was you could put a signature down in there.

Well, that was like one of our very first strategies for traffic was that.

Yeah, go and be helpful in forums, but have a good signature.

That's it.

Right? So that's how I was joined, the WordPress classroom. Bradley came in, he's like, dude, you're doing it the hard way. Like I got this buddy Kurt Molly, and Kurt, he like, he's a fricking wizard. Like, you put $1 in, you take two, it spits $2 back at you. Like, we gotta like.

Like this. I'd been in the game for, you know, six or seven years by, by this point, my list was maybe 3,000 people after all of that time.

Yeah, right.

And so like, I wasn't growing fast, but I was making a living off of it, you know?

Yeah.

And so when Bradley came in and we got connected with Kurt and Kurt started running our ads for us and like, next thing I know, like, okay, we're running $1,000 in ad spend, 2,000 in ad spend, 3,004. We can have to. We're spending 60 grand frickin month in ad spend. And I was like, oh my God, holy crap, like, how did we get to this? And we grew our email list to like 120,000 subscribers in like a year or something like that. And I'm just like, like he showed me that like through advertising you can just pour fuel on the shit, you know. And so like he sort of unlocked, you know, broke a fear in me that the fear of spending ad money and, like, putting money in to get money back. I thought the way to do it was create content, offer the content for sale. But the way to get people over to where you're selling it is to just put out more content that shows how good you are so that people want more of you. And he showed me, like, dude, no fucking sales letter run ads to it. Let's see what happens.

I love it. And Kurt is a big piece. Is still a big piece of what we do as well. So shout out to him. Yeah, that's cool. Yeah, Bradley, He's. Interesting story. Just how that's meshed up. And then I guess I'll kick it back to my side. So with Amish, we've mentioned him earlier as well. I met him over at think tank, DK's event, and I think I was introduced as like a slide guy, video kind of production guy there from DK as well. And both these guys. Koenigs, Mike Koenigs, Amish. I met a bunch of other people that I still chat with from Think Tank as well. But, yeah, I don't know, I just hit it off with Amish pretty well, and I think we quickly started chatting further. I helped him out with all various projects. Ended up partnering on a couple things.

Still now he's one of my best friends. He's an amazing guy, and we chat all the time. And, like, it's just. It's just pretty cool because he was one I was learning from when I was starting out, you know, like very early days, watching all these launches and being in awe of, like, holy crap. You know, and then now being really good buddies with the guy and, like, hearing all of the stories of what happened and how they did that and how crazy it was for them and the highs and the lows, like, you know, and just like, I. I think what. I'm grateful actually the most about him, specifically with Amish. And I think he shared a lot of this on the podcast we did with him years ago. We should bring him back.

Yeah, we need to round two with him. He's been up to a lot of.

Big things because now you're. Yeah, he is. And you know him better now as well. Yeah.

Yeah. I've actually.

For a long time, you didn't really know him much.

Yeah. Yeah.

But, yeah, so with him, I have. I think I've been very fortunate that I saw his, you know, like, his deep or lowest points in his life. Like, it wasn't when I met him. I met him right after that point, but he told me all about these things, and he's been very clear about these for a while. I don't think he told anybody. I was like one of those folks. He told me just how after all these crazy successes, he bought a bunch of stuff. Bunch of stuff he didn't end up liking. Cars and big houses and stuff like that. And, like, it just felt, like, empty inside and very depressed and suicidal, even, and all that. And it got me to quickly see that, okay, it's not the things that I'm gonna be going after. Like, fuck. You know, and it, like, I just. And if I'm hearing it from the dude himself, and I saw that he had all those things, and I just, like, it's not bullshit. I'm like. And then, you know, you always hear these stories of it, but then I'm like, no, okay. That, like, I think, trained me from day one before I, like, really kind of figured out what the hell I was doing. I was like, all right, cool. So I got to make sure my priorities are in check, because I don't want to do that. And I think he was wise and kind of knowing that, like, hey, I'm going to learn something from this.

Yeah.

So that's a big gratitude to him. And, I mean, he's introduced me to so many people, to clients, other partners, and obviously, good friend, too.

Yeah, dude, this is. This is tough because, like, as we're talking about this, like, my mind just goes to, like, 30 more people. I'm just like, oh, dude.

But how do we do?

Like, all right, so here's, like, quick.

Because I think we are getting a little long.

Yeah, yeah.

Almost to an hour.

We're almost to an hour, and we're still gonna do our questions here. So we got a jam.

All right, let's go.

There's a handful of people now that I'm just like, okay, so guys, like James Schramko.

Yes.

So James is, like, an amazing connector.

I mean, set a timer, actually, for each person, one minute per person. I'm serious. Or else we'll be here all night long. It's okay.

Yeah. So with James, James is just, like, this amazing connector. Like, he has connected us with so many different awesome people. It's like, whenever he has, like, a really good interview on his podcast, he's like, ooh, that was a good guest. He makes the connection to us and says, oh, you guys should really interview these people, too. And, like, he's just, like, such a good guy. And he's also always so willing to just, like, Jump on a call with us real quick and, like, hammer out an idea with us.

Yeah. He's helped us through agreements with partnerships. He's with business models. We've been very vocal that we've watched his. Looked at his model really close at building a platform and community and how he even just interacts with those folks. We model that our business in a big way. And affiliate marketing. Yeah. So we got 17 seconds. Anything more?

No, I was gonna say. So James Schramko was connected to us from Aaron Fletcher.

Yeah. Okay, cool. So he'll be the next one. All right, so let's go. So Aaron. Yeah, Big shout out to Aaron. I mean, he followed you, actually, originally.

Yeah. He was from the store of the WordPress classroom. Yeah.

Yeah. So I think he found you first. And he was like, holy crap, Matt's an og. And here's Aaron, you know? So Silicon Valley guy ended up becoming more Internet marketing, I guess, online business. But, dude, Aaron's just such a cool dude. I miss that guy. We haven't seen him in far too long. Before the whole Covid thing, we were supposed to actually go to the Comedy Store in la. But now, like, Joe Rogan's saying he's not even gonna live in LA anymore. So it's like, man, are we never gonna be able to pull that bro trip off? I don't know.

Hopefully.

Well, here's the thing. We gotta do another podcast with him. You guys, if you haven't listened to Aaron on our show in years past, he's been on twice. Like, you're gonna love him. Yeah, he's so cool. But we gotta do a round three. He has a jujitsu thing in his office now. Whole thing so he can kick our ass.

Oh, boy. Sounds like fun.

That's why we're not gonna record there. We'll go on the beach.

All right, next person, Brad Costanzo.

Go. Yep.

So Brad Costanza, we're actually business partners with him, but we. So we bought a business together and we sold a business together. So we had a acquisition and exit with him.

We did.

We got connected with him because he came to one of our overtime events.

How cool is that? So, yeah, Brad. I mean, like, he's just one of us.

Yeah.

Like, from day one, we just started chatting and we're like, oh, cool. We speak the same language. This is gonna work. That was about that. And we just had. It's just. Yeah. Shit. He's another one I miss, man. And he knows it and we know it.

Dude, he's been such a Difference maker for, like, my mindset. Like, he is. He's got the. He's got the mental models down. He's got like the, like, he is just a NLP mindset ninja. And he was the one who led us down the path of buying, selling, acquisitions, deal making. Like, he was the one who introduced that world to us.

Yeah. So I got to give him an extra minute. Brad takes. He deserves this. So bacon wrap business, y' all go go check out that podcast if you, you dare. If you're vegan, you won't like it, but yeah. So Brad, do you need a vegan version waiting? So Brad, I mean, he's just like the deal making side. It's one of those things, once you learn it and the way that you can leverage just different business agreements or just like deals and structures and barters and whatever, like, holy crap, you can't unlearn it. And that's where the thinking like, Roland has really, like, that's why we synced up super tight on like, oh, man, we gotta learn this stuff that like, Roland's putting down with business buying and selling and Perry Marshall. Yeah. We went to a thing in Chicago with Brad, you and I, we met all sorts of people, but that was all about leveraging, like, deals and stuff. And yeah. Ever since then, like, a lot of our business model is that thinking. And that's extended to, like, my wife, she called right before I was about to hit record and she's like, oh, my God, I just got offered an advisory board member on a big wedding company. I'm just like, what? And like, this is not a normal way of thinking for marketers, quote, unquote. But once you start thinking, like, higher level, and I think even Roland told me he did say this the other day, is like, okay, marketers don't think like business people. But if you start. If you're a marketer, but you start learning some business y skills like this, holy shit, the world opens up to you.

Yep.

So Brad.

Yep. Okay, so we had Bradley Will. We had Brad Costanzo Spencer can't get through it without talking about Brad Spencer. So Brad Spencer actually gave us Jay Abraham's Mind Shift Challenge. And holy shit, did that book change our lives.

I would say so all the way to the point where we just had a great chat with Jay yesterday. Yep.

As of the day of this recording, we were talking to Jay on a call yesterday, and we're literally partnering on a project with him.

So. Yeah, but that Mind Shift challenge, so everyone should get their hands on that. I Don't know exactly where to get that right now. Maybe try abraham.com or. I don't know if we'll be able to find a link and put in the show notes as a resource, but it's like 100 pages. I believe at the time of this recording, it's free. But Brad sent that and he was like, dudes, you gotta read this. And we did. And again, it's like all these examples of lateral ways of doing deals.

And Yeah, I mean, Brad Spencer goes all the way back to the Warrior Forum days for me. So back when I was reading the Warrior Forum, that was when I got connected with him. I jumped on a Skype call because I met him on the Warrior forum.

Wow.

And to this day, I have a call with Brad Spencer about once a month, and we just talk for like three hours.

Oh, yeah, you're gonna peel off some time, but, like, when you chat with Brad and everyone can attest to this, you're gonna go deep. And he is so damn curious and so damn smart and so damn, like, like lateral thinking.

Yeah. I think I'm gonna split this into two episodes. So it'll be a special 300 episode part one and a special 300 episode part two, so we could finish off our gratitude. And then in our part two, which will come out the same day, so it'll be ready.

Cool, man.

But the part two will be, like, us answering the questions probably, so it's.

Not so daunting looking, huh?

Yeah.

Yeah.

So we'll also up our download numbers this month.

Yeah, that's what pays the bills, right, Matt?

Yes.

That's a podcaster lie, by the way, y'. All. If you're a podcaster and you think you need more downloads, make more money. Bullshit. All right, done with that rant. But yeah, that thinking, man. I think Brad was the two Brads. The two Brads were really the dudes that. So we had our marketing chops. I would say Josh was a big catalyst to help us in that front, like, point us in the right directions, like, business wise, because he was. He had the business, has the business since Bartlett we're talking about, but also a good marketing sense for everything too. So with that, we had a good foundational thing that the three of us would hop on calls all the time on Skype all the fricking time. I remember. So we have that foundation, but then now we're layering on the more lateral thinking, bigger partnership, collaboration thinking from the two Brads, and then that led into J. Abraham type things and all These interesting. Rolling.

Yeah. Perry Marshall.

Perry.

Yeah. I mean, Perry Marshall is going back to Brad. He dragged us out to the Rosetta Stone. Rosetta Stone, Yeah. Yeah, yeah. So it's crazy. I mean, who else? I just had another name in mind, but it's. I lost it. Who else you got?

Oh, man. Shoot. I'm actually. I think I'm getting. There's. There's a lot of guys, good people, but I'm forgetting it.

Henry Evans.

So the very Henry, obviously.

How did we come across gk? Because we got. We got introduced to gkc. The Dan Kennedy. Glazer.

Kennedy.

Like, yeah. Bill Glaser. Dan Kennedy. We got introduced to those guys. Well, Josh Bartlett, he was the one who introduced us to Dan Kennedy. He told us to get the no BS Time management book.

That's what it was.

That was the first Dan Kennedy book I ever read, and it was amazing. And that was a Josh Bartlett recommendation. And I think in the back of this. This book, they always have a. Like a sort of a pitch, and it says, hey, look for a local GKIC chapter in your area.

That's what it was.

And I think you and I, like, went on the website and we're like, oh, shit, there's a San Diego chapter of gkic, and the first meeting is free. And you and I were like, let's do it. Let's go out to this meeting. And that's when we met Henry Evans. That's when we met.

Josh.

Grillo.

Grillo.

I bought some pickles the other day, and it says Grillo Pickles. I was actually about to take a picture. I forgot to do this, but I was gonna send it to him. I was like, you make really good pickles. I haven't chatted with him in years, but I'm sure he's an awesome guy. Yeah.

That's where we met. That's where we met those guys. Amy Barnhart, who led to the Mastermind. Who. Pat Flynn was actually in one of those Mastermind meetings, too.

Christine McDaniel.

That's where we met Christine McDaniel. That's where we met Theo Lussier. Theo, who's been on our podcast two times about podcasting, came through. Henry Evans.

Damn right. I mean, dude, that's where we had. We watched, you know, interesting presentations. We got to meet.

Glazer. Bill Glaser.

We met John Assaraf through that, too.

That's right.

Rode in a taxi with him to a GKIC meeting.

That's right. Yeah. Up. And we paid his Uber. Yeah. Up in San Francisco. That was before Uber was a thing, actually. It was a different service.

Maybe it was Lyft or something.

No, it was before all that was some other service. I don't remember, but it was black cars and like, you know, we wanted.

To look like ballers for John Asaraf, so we paid for it.

It wasn't even that much more, though. And like, yeah, we. That was like our first Ballin moment. I remember that we. I think I hired it on my phone and I was like, okay, cool. We're getting like an Escalade or whatever.

Yeah.

And yeah, we're going from SFO to downtown San Francisco. And we're like, yeah, screw the train, it smells like piss. We're gonna get. Get this thing and get a guy to the suit to drive us. We're fancy hot. We weren't making shit for money. But then, you know, Henry was there. We all took our flight up there and yeah, John Assaraf was right there in the airport. We're all going up there for tnc, right?

Oh, yeah, it was tnc.

That's what it was. Yeah. And we were all taking. I think we all took the same flight. And John looked a little lost and I was like, do you wanna just hop in our car?

Yeah.

And he was like, oh, yeah. Awesome.

John Barrett. We met John Barrett through Henry Evans meeting, who became a good buddy of ours. We briefly partnered on. We did some stuff.

Implementation agency, I believe is what his thing is. Yeah, I forget. But yeah, John is such an awesome guy. I mean, he's always been such a solid, consistent guy. Like, in terms of he's just a techie, but marketing ninja. Yeah. Works with. But Henry. Yeah, he's still in the mastermind with us with Bob Sterling. Henry is actually looking through my text and I see one of his texts here when he was reminding me because we were late to a mastermind meeting. But he held a great mastermind that we were members of for a long time as well. We met a ton of people. So that was my first experience of a legit mastermind and how that works. Okay. We're here to help each other. We're all different businesses. Oh, I don't know. Bring something to the table to share.

Well, that was when I realized that, holy shit, Internet marketing isn't the only thing in the world. I was in that mastermind and I was one the of of two people in the group that was focused on Internet marketing. The other guys were like real estate people, direct mail, print people, auto repair guy, you know, newsletter guy. Yeah. Like, one of them was like, investor capital, like, equities guy.

See, it's crap like that.

I owned a freaking cheese company, but it was like a $50 million a year cheese company.

And here, like you and I, I felt like a joke in these groups.

No, that was like. Like the imposter syndrome probably started there. I walked into the room and I'm like, Yeah, I made $60,000 last year in my pocket. And like, the guy next to me is running a company, selling cheese and making $50 million a year. And that imposter syndrome kicked in, like in those masterminds. That's when I. That's. But I think that was like, so good for us to like, to learn about business. Like, holy shit. Internet marketing isn't the only thing.

I think that was the biggest growth lever that we forced ourselves into. And it is a thanks to Josh.

Yeah.

It got us out of our comfort zone. I mean, I know you did Toastmasters too.

I did, yeah. Where I met Thomas Mangum.

There you go. So Mangum shout out. Yep. But yeah, like freaking gkic. We traveled a bunch of places too. So we go to these super conferences. Went to Chicago a ton of times. Vegas, you know, with Henry a lot of times as well. And the whole gang there, John, Christine, I mean, the whole Ted, you know, Theo. But yeah, it's. It's crazy. Yeah. I think we, like, threw ourselves in the deep end pretty quick. And a lot of it was.

Dude, it was a pretty fast ride in the beginning. We're like, hey, let's do Internet business stuff. And we're like, okay. And then I signed up for Toastmasters. We started going to GKIC meetings. We jumped into Alex Jeffries coaching. Like, we just went frickin full force.

Yeah. And we were both working or I.

Think you and I, like, pushed each other. It's like, if I was just on my own, I don't know if I would have done it. If you were just on your own, I don't know if you were, but, like, we were both sort of like, well, I don't really want to, but he does. Like in our minds. But neither of us really wanted to be doing it.

No, we did. And I don't think we would have done it ourselves. Yeah, definitely. We would have stayed a lot more comfort level.

Yeah. I do think you and I force each other out of the other's comfort zone quite a bit. I mean, like, I was never into the speaking thing and you just, you would go sign us up for speaking gigs and you're like, hey, we're doing a speaking gig. I'd go, oh, fuck. Okay. I guess I'm gonna figure this out.

And it's funny because, like, I reached a point where I never liked speaking when I was younger, ever. But I was like, you know what? Screw it. I really feel like we can pull this off because it seems like we can carry our way. You know what? It was actually, I think it was Henry now I think about it. Cause he would always pull us up there in front of the whole meeting. That was I. I took Toastmasters.

I was always nervous because of the GKIC meetings. I was like, I could get pulled up anytime. So I started doing the Toastmasters because it, like, I was like, I want to be comfortable when I get up in front of people. And the Toastmasters for me was just about the repetition.

Yeah.

Like, the more I'm up in front of people, the less I'm gonna care.

And that's, I think, what. What happened. And I never did Toastmasters. I probably would have benefited a lot from it. But at the same time, now I think we forced ourselves into do the repetitions ourselves a lot.

I think we've gotten really good at going, like, okay, that thing's slightly out of our comfort zone.

Let's do it. It's almost like. Well, it's the whole thing of you don't want to go further outside of your comfort zone or your abilities. I think Kotler might have said this, Steven. And I think Nick Peterson has something on this as well. But you want to go just enough. It is Kotler actually on some. Something about flow. It's just enough out of your comfort zone where you're not going to be, like, too super anxious and stressed and figure it out like a brand new thing. It's just enough to keep pressing a little bit more and a little bit more. And that's what I feel like we've done quickly. But, yeah, we just do that a lot.

Yeah.

All right, so thank you, Henry.

Man, all Joe has to do is look through his text messages and you're like, oh, yep, there's another one. There's another one. There's another one. I mean, so we've talked about, man. Well, here's the thing, though. We've talked about all the people that have had, like, the growth impact on our marketing skills. We've had the people talk about the people that have had the big growth impact on our, like, business skills. Yeah, we haven't really talked about the people that have, like, the biggest Rubio, like, mindset Mental skills and Marks Acosta, Rubio, Aaron, more recently. Yeah. Like, you know, some of these names we got to give some quick shout outs to. Yeah.

So Marks, I mean, this guy came through. Dan Ryan, actually. So that's how that connection is. And Mark's just. From day one, I think he was teed up. We were teed up pretty nicely from Dan, and basically he wanted to help us out, so he did. And he's always kind of been there in our corner. We've done mentoring calls. He's kind of done a lot of mindset stuff with us. He definitely has not kind of. He taught us to look back and start this whole journaling process and recording process and kind of work through our own limitations from way back when. So you can, like, if you start kind of plucking all these things, life just kind of gets a little easier. He's the one that was telling us recently to like, hey, schedule fun instead of business first. Fun first. And don't sacrifice the reason why you even have your own business. You're gonna work better. You'll probably definitely make a lot more money, actually, because you're forcing yourself constraining. So.

Yeah. And I mean, other. Other than the, like, the mindset stuff and, you know, the. All the stuff that he helped us with on that side of things, he also has been, like a mega connector for us as well and connected like, he was our connection to David Allen on the podcast. I mean, there's been a handful of guests that he connected us with, but I'm kind of drawing a blank on which ones they were off the top of my head, but I. He was on the David Allen episode with us.

Yeah. And we've done various episodes with him, and I mean, we've had a lot of cool connections and he came through Dan Ryan. That's what I said. Yeah. So, yeah, we got to pay him again, though. You just said his name again. Yeah.

This bill's racking up. I know this half a penny per shout out.

Well, I don't know if we can afford that, so. Yeah, lots of good shout outs there. I kind of feel like we should probably wrap this up, though. Okay.

We can go ahead and wrap this up. I just would feel like crap if there's any, like, big, pivotal people that we miss their names.

I don't think we're perfect. But there's a lot of folks that if you. If you are. If you're mad that we did not mention your name, write to us and we will make sure you get a mention later. There you go. That'll cover our ass, right? Will it? No, I don't know. I mean, there's. There's a lot of cool names on this list I'm looking at. Like, I see Justin Moffat. I see Justin and Lee from. Yeah, the podcast.

Justin and Lee are basically responsible for, like, most of our connections in the podcasting world. Chris Kos.

There you go. Yeah. Okay, so Justin and Lee from Optimum Living Daily. I was going to say from the old guys podcast.

Optimal Living Daily Podcast.

That's just what we call them, the old guys. But, yeah, miss those guys. We should reach out. But yeah, those guys open up kind of like our. That's a very good point. All right. They are a linchpin to that podcasting education conference space with Chris at PodFest.

They were listeners of our podcast. They actually, like, wrote in Justin.

They. Huh?

Yeah, Justin listened in. They wrote us, wanted to have a call to, like, bounce some ideas around podcasting off of us. It was just a very, like, out of the blue email, like, hey, I'd love to chat with you guys sometime. Got on a call with them, and we, like, hit it off really well. Chatted for, like, an hour, went up, met him in Irvine one time, rode the train up and met him, got to know him really well. And they just like. Like, they open doors for us in the podcasting space because their podcast is massive. And so they made all these connections. We got to know Chris Komitz, who led us to Dustin Matthews, who we did Wealth Fit stuff with.

And we speak at podfest all the time. We'll be doing that on Friday.

Yeah. Which is Chris Komitz's company. We met all the people in the advertising world in podcasting, like Trevor Smithlin and Heather Osgood and some of the people from those advertising companies through those guys. Yeah, we got to know the people at Lynch Gibson. Like, those guys opened a lot of doors on the podcasting side for us.

You're right.

And that was just kind of a random, cold reach out. And we're like, that led to a lot.

I guess the point here, I want to like. And there's more names. Like, actually, this one name is Chris Martinez. I'm sure you are.

Don't forget him.

You know, he's listening and he's giving us a big middle finger because we totally forgot about him when we were thinking about the Henry folks.

Oh, yeah.

Chris Martinez was.

Oh, yeah. He's probably the one from Henry's group that we're still the most connected to outside of Henry.

He's like, the most obvious one, and we're. Nope. I don't know.

I think we're good there.

Oh, jeez.

Sorry.

Well, see, we've redeemed ourselves. He probably already quit.

In there's David Gonzalez, who's really awesome. I was just texting back and forth with him the other day.

Yeah, so DG is awesome. He's been on the show. I was gonna say, like, you know, Mars Burden is here too. Mars connected us with Rich Sheffrin and that whole thing that led us to all these. I was just looking because I see Jay Abraham is on here as well, and it's like, we mention him. I'm just looking through my text to jog my memory. But I think the whole point of this here, people even are still listening to us ramble. Be open to opportunities and kind of lean into the flow of things. If it feels like it's just kind of. It's kind of meant to be in the right moment, or it can develop into something, but it still feels like it's on your path, pursue it. Maybe. Because, like, shit, man. Most of these opportunities came from us just being in the middle of something, like being in the conversation the podcast now serves as that. It's nice because we can network every single day pretty much, and not have to go in person, obviously. Conferences were a big thing, linchpin, and getting us started, though, and that got us networking. So, shoot. It's just kind of cool to see how if you can somehow involve networking in your business, in your day to day grind, whatever that grind looks like. Expand your network, man. You can make deals so fast and things happen.

Yeah, no, it's pretty crazy. I mean, pretty much everything that has happened for us, the growth of our podcast, the guests we've had on our podcast, the places that we've gotten to speak at, and all of that kind of stuff is literally just a result of the networking and just building relationships, just getting to know people, chatting with them, connecting them with people. You know, they connect you with people, and this spiderweb just grows. And I'd really actually like to see a visual of this. Like, I imagine, like, you know, like, when they're searching for serial killers and they got the pictures all over the board with the, like, pins and the string, and I'm like. I can, like, visualize doing this with, like, the map of all these connections, because it's like, Dexter, it's like, holy shit. Like, the. The reason that people actually listen to us isn't because of anything we did. It's because of, like, this fricking giant spider web of, like, connections that led up to this.

And that's the whole thing is our currency, is our network. And that's where this. I think that's. Maybe that ties a bow around this part of this episode. The 300th is like, this is our gratitude to our currency. Because, shit, without that, man, there's no way that we'd be in the position we're in right now where we're just doing these. No shit. Like, we feel like we're pinching ourselves all the time. And, like. Like, oh, my God, we just pulled this thing off. Oh, my God. Wow. And, like, to think that we're not behind the scenes going, like, what the heck? Yeah, we're pretty vocal about it. But I feel like a lot of people are probably like this. If something big happens, they're just, like, not expressing it, dude.

I also want to give a quick shout out to, like, all of our. Our team members, past and present, you know, because we got. We got Jacob, who's editing this podcast and kicking ass at it. Like. Like, dude, Jacob goes so above and beyond with these podcasts. I barely gave him any instruction on how to edit. And he goes and watches YouTube tutorials and constantly figures out how to improve our audio quality. And we'll get on our team meetings, and he'll just start telling me, like, oh, yeah, I was experimenting with EQ and the compression, and I got this to sound just right. And he's dialed. He's really sort of dialing in his skill level for the podcast editing. And he makes us sound better than we actually sound in real Life.

Oh, yeah, 100%.

And then, you know, we've got sue, who takes all the notes on all of these episodes that come out and, you know, just so dependable, Just like clockwork. We never have to question if the notes are going to be here on time. And both of them. Both of them are fricking dependable is crazy. Sure, it's crazy. But, you know, like, we appreciate those guys so much for everything they're doing for us.

And sue helps out a lot and support as well. And probably in some other parts of our business, I mean, really, our team members are going to go with us wherever we go, as long as they're down for the ride, you know, and because that's how we like to roll, and they know we love to have fun. I feel like everyone that we've ever worked with knows that. Yeah, it's a reflection of what you're hearing here.

So what you hear is what you get. Even on our team meetings.

Yeah. Yeah. So Sue, I mean, is just. She's helped out so much in terms of just like putting that whole. Both of them, I mean. But I want to compliment sue and the notes and the fact that she's just like, that's such a workload that we just don't want to do.

Yeah.

And it develops into our EGP newsletter, like our printed letter that we send out in the mail every month. Like that's a result of Stu's hard work there. So. Yeah.

And then Alana, my wife, she actually is our editor. She'll go. She does a second pass on pretty much every content, all of our content everywhere. She's kind of doing another pass on it before it gets released.

Least we've got listening to all of our podcasts too. Probably not.

I don't know. I think she probably gets enough of my voice.

And then, you know, Shannon and Patty, we can't do this without mentioning them. They were huge, huge, huge, like helps in our business.

Hey, like, we still. I haven't chatted with Shannon in a bit, but Patty still chat with her often, you know, maybe once a month or so. And I'm sure if she's listening, I think she might be. What up? Big love always. You and Matt. Yeah, other Matt. Not this Matt. No love to you. Matt W. Matt W. Yeah, the other Matt W. Not confusing. So yeah, she was with us for a long time and again helped us kind of create the first systems and the foundational of what the hell. Hustle and Flowchart is the podcast, the business. And then Shannon basically like stepped in for frickin decking out systems, dude.

Shannon was, she was like the first person to come into our business, look at what we were doing and going, why the hell are you doing that? You shouldn't be doing that. I could find somebody for $5 to do that for. You know, like not a real example, but, you know, like that's what she did in our business. She came in and looked at everything we were doing and going, dude, you guys are working too hard. We need to like build systems automations or get you the hell out of doing all the day to day monotonous stuff. And it was Shannon who really, really pushed us to systematize and get out of doing so much day to day stuff.

Yeah, yeah, she did.

She had some cool opportunities offered to us and we didn't want to hold her back. And I thought it was like, because we honestly. Because what she stopped working with us four months ago, maybe five months. I don't know. Something like that. Yeah.

I mean, it was right around the beginning of all the COVID stuff.

Weirdness was starting to happen. So we hooked her up with another opportunity, and she was stoked on that. But she took us to a point where, honestly, our business got so dialed in the core operations of what we do every day, for our membership, for our podcast, for support and ads and all that stuff you pretty much have all handled, though, but, like, dialed in the systems where we kind of, like, stopped. Really. I mean, she kind of systemized herself so well that she. She built a perfect system.

Yeah.

You know, it's not perfect, but at the same time, it showed us. We're like, wow, we can really simplify our business. It got us to, like, shave off a bunch of crap that we should.

Well, it wasn't until Shannon was in the mix that you and I started going like, why do we work so hard? Why don't we go to the beach on a Wednesday every once in a while? Why are we at a computer all day, every day, all the time? When Shannon came in, she came in and was like, okay, this needs to be taken off your plate. This needs to be taken off your plate. And she just found the people, found the systems, found the connections through Zapier, whatever, to take monotonous daily stuff off our plates. And then. And when she was on board, that was when we started going, okay, we don't actually have to be at our computer every day, all day.

Yeah. Yeah. It was like a mind. That was another mind shift for us.

And she came from Tim Francis. But we. You know who's awesome?

He's awesome and he's great. He's. Yeah. I mean, we're gonna go forever on Zack.

I know. I think we need to wrap up. You already wrapped it up a minute ago, so we can go ahead and finish wrapping it up. But, like, the team members that have helped us along the way have been pretty damn pivotal.

Oh, yeah. I mean, everyone is. And everyone has their place. So I'm happy that we were able to give gratitude and spend this 300th episode, part one. I don't know when we're going to record part two.

Maybe in just one minute.

Okay. Hopefully it doesn't go all night long.

Cool. Well, thank you for listening, everyone. If you're still listening.

Now, we're going to record the part that you probably came to hear.

See you there.

Bye. Bye. Thanks so much for tuning into that episode. I hope you Dug it. I know Joe and I dug it. I actually kicked Joe out of the room. He's not here right now. Because I wanted to tell you about a tool that I really, really dig. We use it in our business. We recommend it all the time. It's called Easy Webinar. And it's a tool that lets you do live webinars, automated webinars, hybrid webinars, and, you know, pretty much any other kind of webinar, if there are other kinds of webinars. But anyway, this tool is kind of like your all in one, do it all tool for anything webinar related. It's Easy Webinar. It's put out by a dude named Casey Zieman. He's been on the podcast. If you haven't listened to that episode, it's a killer episode. He's a really smart dude, but his software is amazing. It does everything. It's, you know, the title tells you exactly what it does. It's an easy webinar platform. And we use this in our business to run automated webinars all the time. We don't do a lot of live webinars these days. We like to do the kind of automated webinars where somebody can register and then it, you know, they can either watch it like 15 minutes later or they can watch it the next day, but it's just kind of always running. And it's a system that helps us make autopilot sales off of our webinars. Super cool tool. If you haven't tried it yet, you know, it's, it's, it's an amazing tool. And Kasey is actually hooking you up. He said for listeners of Hustle and Flowchart, I can't believe he's doing this, but he said for listeners of the Hustle and Flowchart podcast, he's giving 25% off of the membership to use Easy Webinar. It's already super, super inexpensive for what it does and all the cool features it has. But he's hooking you up with 25% off because you're a listener of Hustle and Flowchart. Go to easy webinar.com hustle. That's where you can get that 25% off discount. That's Easy Webinar.

It's a awesome tool. You're gonna dig it. So just go grab it. Check it out. Easywebinar.com hustle. See? No, not see ya. You'll hear me in the next show. I don't know. I don't know. How to close these things. Go get easy Webinar. Talk to you later. Thanks everybody for listening to this episode of the Hustle and Flowchart podcast for taking the time to listen. We want to give you something a little bit special. Every single episode that we do, we actually have somebody on our team take notes. We basically have a Cliff's Notes version of every episode where you can go and find all of the tips and tactics that they laid out, all of the resources that they laid out, all the good stuff from this episode. We actually have a nice simple notes version that you can find on our website. So go to evergreenprofits.com find this episode that you just listened to, and give us your email address and we'll send you the notes. Thanks for listening.

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