Justin Malik & Lee Rankinen — Podcasting With Curated Content

Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.

What's up, everybody? You're listening to the Hustle and Flowchart podcast with your boys, Matt Wolf and Joe Fear. What's up, everyone? Welcome back to the Hustle and Flowchart podcast.

How are you doing today?

I'm doing good. How are you?

It's been a good day.

I'm glad you can make it, Joe. Yeah, I'm glad you listeners are tuning in.

I like how you did a phantom like you all to the corner of the room that's empty.

Yeah, I'm. I'm speaking to our audience now. Listen up, minions. No, I'm just kidding.

Whoa.

That was.

Mat can hate him and not me.

I thought that's how the dynamic went. That's true. It's like a good guy, bad guy podcast. There's no guesses on who's the good guy here.

It fluctuates per day or interview. All right, so we got a fun show today, and this is a. It's another duo show.

A duo interviewing a duo.

That's right. We've done that often. We've done a couple of those recently. This one is with Justin and Lee from the old podcast.

That's the Optimal Living daily podcast.

And they also have some other shows. You can check them out@.oldpodcast.com. i think they have a total of five. Five or seven shows. Either way, they are doing things right.

Yeah. So across their shows, they've got. I mean, they got a couple downloads.

Are you sure it's just a couple?

77 million.

Yeah, it's a couple.

Yeah. So they've got a few downloads of their podcasts. And the. What. What blew us away about what they're doing is their style of podcast. And I don't want to give too much away because it's pretty brilliant, but it's. They're basically creating a podcast around content that they didn't create.

It's curated content. Yeah.

And so they've got a very specific model and method for doing that. And when we heard it for the first time, we just went, man, this. This is awesome. We got to get you on the show to talk about it. And this. They were kind of hesitant. We've probably talked to them for the first time maybe like a year ago.

Yeah. And we've met up with them a couple times or once in person and a couple times online, like Mastermind style.

Yeah. And so we finally got them to agree to get on the show. And I think even at one point, Justin mentioned. I have no idea how you guys Got me. Because I never do podcasts.

I don't think either of them have ever been on a show, but Justin actually is a. A longtime listener. All the way back to your days of multiple authority. Before I just showed up.

Before you dragged the showdown.

Exactly. Just showed up at your dorm. Like, give me a microphone. But Justin, props to you, Van Daegar, listening to this. I don't know if you like to listen to your own voice, but hopefully you'll listen to your own episode. But thank you for listening for so long. These guys, Justin and Leah, are amazing. They have a small team, they're doing a lot, and they have a daily show, too. The Optimum Living Daily is a daily show, of course. And the other ones are a lot per week. I believe they're five times a week. But these guys were in the app space to start things off. You know, they did a lot of app type businesses. Matt and I also did that. The common theme is they pretty much leveraged platforms and leveraged other content or frameworks, things like that, to really put their own spin on things. And I think that's the big takeaway is like they're not really starting from scratch and they're now doing this in the podcast space.

Yeah.

So it's really unique. It's definitely a gap in the market and they're just fricking running with it.

And also, Justin was a regular guest on the Craig Ferguson show.

You gave away the name. No, that's okay. Yeah, I was going to leave it ambiguous.

Oh, the late night show. So he used to be a pretty recurring guest. And we'll talk about that. And it's a fun little discussion.

10 times on show. And he actually got paid for it. So he. He actually explains how that all came out to, like, how he basically became BFFs of Craig Ferguson. It's crazy. And there's actually a pretty cool YouTube compilation video. I think we're gonna put it in the show notes.

Yeah, I feel like this intro is getting really long, so let's. Okay, let's talk about our sponsor real quick.

And then how'd you make it so such an abrupt thing?

I need to. No, we just need to move on.

Okay. Okay. Time Nazi.

Hey, good guy, bad guy. Who's gonna lay down the law?

Oh, okay.

Go ahead. Talk about our sponsor, killing time.

All right, so actually one way that you can use a. Our sponsor, as you call them, genim. So they have highly trained, marketing focused apprentices, slash interns, whatever you want to call that, them. But essentially one way you can use interns or apprentices is to create curated types of content. If you think about it. So the way we're using these genm and this is we have a discount code, so don't just go there quite yet, but essentially you can use them for all sorts of different tasks in your business. Things that are repetitive are great, but marketing related type tasks are the best because they actually are trained but not specialized in what you do. So what's really cool and unique about this is that it's literally $50 a month to get an apprentice who is trained and very eager to work for up to 40 hours per week.

Per month.

Per month. That's right. Not per week per month, but $50 a month for 40 hours a month. It's crazy. So it's a three month commitment that you have with each one of these apprentices. It's up to you to support them. But you have this opportunity at G and M and it's actually a little special discount. We can knock some off the price if you actually go to evergreenprofits.com genm it's what we use. I think we have four apprentices now.

And just to clarify, it's gen G E N M. So evergreenprofits.com genm with a G. Correctomundo.

So just think about all the things in your business that are kind of repetitive or you feel like you just shouldn't be in there. Maybe it's great for someone with enough knowledge to just do the work for you and you're willing to actually put the effort in there to support them as well. Or your team has the time to do that. That's how we do it. Then. This is a no brainer for any business owner, even if you're starting out brand new.

Definitely. So go to evergreenprofits.com gnm g e n m. That'll get you 10 bucks off. And go get yourself an intern doing shit in your business for you.

Virtual intern.

Virtual intern.

Don't even have to come to your office, which is great, or your house like we have.

All right, let's go ahead and jump in with Justin and Lee from the old podcast and hear about their killer strategies for getting 77 million downloads on their podcast.

Hashtag pod fizzle. Hey guys, we're live. How you guys doing?

Great. How about you?

Good, dude.

Just doing awesome.

I love it. This interview is going to be freaking great.

It's not an interview, damn it.

This discussion is going to be great.

So you guys are just awesome. Okay. Remind me how I know. Did you guys reach out to us or was it the other way around?

Yeah, that was me actually. I've been listening to your guys show since. Oh, I'm Justin, by the way, if we need to clear up who's who. I've been listening to your show since it was the Authority Insider. Is that right, Matt?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So I was listening to that pretty early on, I think, and then I'm like, who's this Joe guy? He just showed up randomly. But.

Yeah, and then I think I just reached out and you're like, I finally joined a Facebook group after a couple call to actions from you guys and then something came up where you're asking for, hey, we just want to talk to a couple of you guys. And I instant messaged and it started from there.

Yeah, it's been super rad because we met. Well, Lee, you're out there in what, Michigan? Upper Michigan, yeah, we'll just call it Tundra Land.

So practically Canada, pretty much.

America.

But yeah, no, you were out in Southern California. So Matt and I hopped on a train, which was an adventure in itself, from San Diego to Irvine to meet up with you guys and basically just drink and talk podcasts. It was amazing.

Yeah, that was awesome.

Yeah, it was just like random. We were like, I have no clue what these guys even look like, and podcasts are great, but I'm just.

But it was an awesome time. Like the fact of the matter, it just felt like we were just. We have like a similar dynamic, which I think was funny. You guys are partners, Matt and I, and we have like that same kind of I don't know thing going on when you're talking to a bunch of people.

For sure. That's like kind of what drew me to your guys' podcast even more was that it sounds like Matt's a lot like me and Joe's a lot or Lee's a lot like Joe. So it's that dynamic. It seems like it works really well with businesses where there's like more an introvert, analytical type guy and then a more extrovert salesy type or guy who fronts it and talks a lot to everybody. So. And we just did our Colby test. I don't remember the scores off top of our head, but it sounded very similar to your guys's. From what? From what we talked about.

Yeah. Are you guys going down the route and getting your own assistant or manager?

Yeah, yeah, we had a interview yesterday, but the first person went really well. So we're planning on sending an Offer her way. So again, it sounds very similar to the setup you guys went through, whereas, like, the first person seems like kind of a home run, so.

Yeah.

Yeah. And actually having. Having spoken with your ops manager, kind of got a similar feel for the lady we interviewed yesterday as we felt talking to your ops manager. So it's just really funny, the parallels there. Justin and I were just talking about that yesterday.

That's perfect.

So if anybody's listening in and they're totally confused about this conversation, we do have an episode with Tim Francis, who has a company called Great Assistant. And they're essentially a headhunter that'll go out and help you find a va or in our case, an operations manager.

Headhunter sounds so.

Headhunter. I put them on stakes like Boba Fett. The right ones.

Well, cool. So, Lee, why don't you tell us a little bit about how you guys sort of got into business together and, you know, how you guys got partnered up and we'll get into your actual business model in a minute because it's super fascinating. But how did you guys get connected and start working together?

Okay.

Yeah.

So Justin and I went to grad school together at pepperdine, got our MBAs in Malibu. So we met there, had a few classes together, became friends.

And that was kind of it. We never had. Never started any business, you know, talked businesses a little bit. We both kind of knew we were into entrepreneurship, but. But, you know, with all the free time we had in grad school, we wasted it away instead of working on something like a business.

So about a year after graduation, I was living in Chicago and Justin was still in Los Angeles. And I just shot him a text to see, you know, how things were going. And he was already ready to be done with kind of the corporate world and do something for himself. And I was feeling the exact same way. So we had both kind of been independently looking at different businesses that could be interesting to us, and we both kind of settled on mobile apps.

So I think we both maybe read the same Tim Ferriss article interview about somebody who's really successful building a mobile app portfolio. And we kind of got started and I think from that original text message conversation to kind of being up and running as a company was probably less than six months. So we really jumped in, got after it right away, decided what we wanted to do, raised money, and then proceeded to lose about 95% of that money.

Oh, man.

I think I know the exact article you were talking about on Tim Ferriss blog. Was it one by Chad Moretta?

I Know Chad. Yeah, he's a cool dude.

Yeah, I remember that article and I actually, it's funny because when you were mentioning that, I looked up at my bookshelf because I've got about six books about how to do app development.

App Empire, which is.

And one of them is App Empire, which is by Chad Moretta.

Oh, yeah.

And it just got me thinking about how I explored the app path for like two months and gave up on it.

We all did.

That sounds better than our path.

I invested quite a bit of money into getting something developed that I never released and never made a penny.

But yeah, yeah, we. We spent a ton of money, built this app which we thought was going to be the next Instagram, you know, so we don't need to monetize it, we'll just get a ton of users and then sell it for a billion dollars. And we did a decent job on user growth, but not on user retention. And then obviously not on retention. And just the cost of maintaining that app because we have profiles and all that kind of stuff just became so much. And we were burning through the cash we had raised so quickly that Justin was like. And Justin had left his job to do this full time for us. And I was still working. And so we were down to maybe like a month's worth of money left. And Justin was, you know, looking at the prospect of having to go back into corporate America and he just couldn't do it. So he started teaching himself how to code, like, simple apps.

There you go. Saves the money.

Yeah, we saved money. They were very low quality apps, but he was able to publish one, almost one a day at the beginning. And they got faster and faster and we were just publishing, like what were we doing at our peak, Justin? Was it like three or four a day?

It was. And that was thanks to actually that group of people like App Empire. And then that led to Carter Thomas of Blue.

Blue Cloud.

Blue Cloud.

There we go.

So he was all into app reskinning, which is basically taking like templates of these apps, which I know you guys have a history with for web or online, and it's the exact same thing, except you do this for apps. So you take like a terrible code, usually like a slot machine, something really simple that people will play over and over again. And you just simply change out the graphics and make it like a Halloween casino, which is exactly what we did. That was one of our very first ones was a Halloween slot machine. And that did a couple thousand dollars off of like a hundred dollar source code. And we're like, okay, we got something now. So we turned that to Christmas Casino. We turned that into Valentine's Casino. Going all the way around the year. And that took us from the couple thousand dollars we had left in the bank. And I think I was paying myself maybe two grand a month just to keep. Just so I didn't have to go back to work. And that reversed all of it and we became profitable after that. But just to let your listeners know, that does not work anymore.

I remember those days and I was working with a guy, Amish Shah, who was big in the app space.

He's.

But that's how I met Chad Moretta back in the day. And I remember these times because I was doing the same thing. I think he was as well Amish and Chad Prap. But like these reskinning things, like, it was like it was just a wild, wild west on Apple itunes back in the day and Google Play Store. Yeah.

In fact, one of our first consultant was it. It was quack. It wasn't our first consulting client, but it was. One of our first consulting clients was a guy named Kwok Bui who. He had a. What was his course called before we took it over?

I forget. But it was essentially teaching a similar type of thing.

He essentially had an online course called like how to make iPhone apps or something. It was just a very generic name for a course. And we actually took it over, partnered with Kwok on it and called it the. Rebranded it the app Shortcut and sold that with him for a couple years. So we were actually teaching people how to make apps, but we weren't actually making apps ourselves during that process. But we had an expert.

We had.

Yeah, but Qwok was our expert in that one.

The whole thing is it doesn't work anymore.

Why doesn't it work anymore? Out of curiosity.

So Apple, just like they are starting to do with podcasts, they're shutting down any kind of spammy ness. So if you have a source code that you release over and over again and they know they've had so many, probably hundreds of thousands of slot machines at this point, this is not adding value to the ecosystem. So they're simply just not approving it flat out, like right in the beginning. And that's like. We started to realize that a little bit after we started teaching it. So same thing as you guys. We went down the course route and used Udemy and all this stuff and we're selling source codes ourselves. And we realized, okay, there's actually more money here because now we took A bingo. Source code that we built from scratch now. So we're going back to developing from scratch all the way from the beginning. Paid maybe five. Five grand. I would say four to five grand. And then said, hey, let's sell this source code to people just like these other guys do, like Carter Thomas, and we'll do it for 500 bucks. So all we need to do is sell, like 10 of these to break even. And we sold, like, probably 50. I don't know, something. Something around those lines. So it was like the teaching of it became way more lucrative. And it was actually more interesting for me because, like, doing that grind of publishing every single day.

That'S not fun.

For sure. I remember those days. And I was doing that with ibooks as well, publishing. And so similar thing happened. Obviously, itunes cracks down on certain things, but it's good. They're doing it on podcasts.

I made two apps ever. They're both games. One was an app. I don't know if you ever, if you guys remember the game Fall down forever on the TI83 calculator. It was like the little ball and it would drop, and you'd had to move it before the ball got to the top of the screen and got squished at the top of the screen. I basically recreated that game and I called it Paintball Drop. So it was like a paintball. And then if it got to the top of the screen, it made like a giant splatter all over your screen.

Dude, that app's gonna blow up. Now that you mentioned it, actually, it's.

Not in the app store anymore because I stopped paying the, like, $99 a year or whatever it is to keep it in the app store. But I made that game. I probably spent thousands of dollars having it developed because I developed that from scratch. It wasn't a source code. And then I think I put, like, AdMob and all the various little ad platforms on it, and I think it made like 30 bucks ever. And I'm like, screw this. And then I created a second app that was like a motorcycle game. What was that car game that we used to play where you'd, like, do the flips in the car?

Excitebike.

No, that game that I made was very similar to excitebike, but it was like excitebike crossed with this popular iPhone game, like Extreme Road Trip or something.

Yeah, I'm sure you guys have seen it. I can't think of it.

Anyway, that app I actually had developed, and I just never even put it out there. Never even tried. I just. I kind of decided not to go down that route. But that was actually a reskinned app. So, anyway, total side tangent.

Yeah, we got to a point where.

It was a little more like. We got to actually what I would call. Because we were the Walmart of apps in the beginning, it was terrible. Just the worst quality. And then we got to a point where it actually was decent. It was like, I coded like a choose your own adventure storybook app. So it's got, like, cartoon characters, and it was based off, like, the Bachelor series. You could kind of, like, pick who you want to date. And that was actually interesting because you're picking options and going down a different story route. So that was cool. But it's still like, the grind of it and just over and over getting a writer to write this. And by the time we're releasing the app and sometimes it's rejected for various reasons, they're getting more strict. It's like, it's not worth it. So.

All right, well, hey, it got you in the podcast. All right, well, so what was the transition? Was it like you guys were understanding what the platform was like, you know, itunes and all that stuff?

It was almost kind of random. I got interviewed by Steve P. Young. I don't know if you guys are familiar with him, but he's big in the app world. So I got interviewed on his podcast and to talk about our mobile app business, and I was like, oh, podcast, this is interesting. I'd heard of it, but I never really had spent any time in, like, the podcast app on my iPhone. So I hopped in there to listen to a few of his episodes.

Just to prepare myself, and I'm like, oh, this is really cool. What else can I find? So I'm in there. So all of a sudden, I'm working my corporate job, but it was kind of a job where there's a few hours a day where I could kind of go on autopilot and. And type away and listen to something in the background. So I started doing that with podcasts, and I think I was probably always saying, like, hey, Justin, this podcast is cool, or, this podcast is cool. And Justin and I were ready to transition out of apps. We wanted to do something that was more of a passion project. We were both really into personal development. So we had talked about.

Starting a blog or becoming experts in a certain area, a certain niche of personal development.

And we just realized it's so hard to become, like, that expert in a certain niche like that, especially when there's so many great writers and bloggers and authors out there. So Justin one day was like, hey, what do you think if I just narrate blogs, we'll get author permission or blogger permission. And I'll just narrate blogs that are in the personal development field. So we'll touch minimalism, we'll touch productivity, finance, health, business, all these things. And I was like, it sounds like a cool idea. I would listen to it. I like listening to podcasts. I would definitely listen to it. Let's try it. That was kind of the beginning of it right there. From there, it really snowballed.

Yeah. So just to kind of re explain the concept a little bit, it's essentially you go and find blog posts online that you really, really like and then you essentially read them and they're very highly polished. They sound like audiobooks. It doesn't just sound like somebody just kind of grabbed their iPhone and read a book to you or something. It's very highly polished episodes.

And that's the podcast.

Today. Fast forward. How popular is the podcast? What kind of listenership do you have across all your episodes and all your shows?

So to date, across all five of our narration shows, which started December of 2015 with the first show, we're over 70 million total downloads.

Jeez.

Seven, zero and then million.

That's so crazy.

Yeah, it's blown away any expectations we've ever had. Every time we hit a new number, Justin will set a goal for what the next number should be and then we'll end up hitting it in about half the time of what he was.

So what you're saying is Justin just doesn't think big enough.

That's actually what seriously. When I launched Optimal Living Daily, the first one in December, I was like, okay, by the end of next year, so of 2016, I wanted to have a thousand downloads in one day. And we hit that before the year even started. It was still December. Like right after launch. We hit a thousand downloads in a day and I was like, oh, weird. That's not what we expected. So we set that to 10,000 in a day. I think we hit that at the six month mark. So it was just kind of nuts how it all spiraled. And we did get a little lucky in that.

I love the concept too. And I think that's what we were so attracted by when, when we first started talking was, wow, this is such a unique, interesting concept. And it doesn't seem like there's other people out there doing it. It seems like you guys kind of are. I Mean, you. You'd probably know better than we do if there's other people out there doing the same kind of concept. But I haven't run across it.

I haven't either. No.

I think we were telling you last time the four of us had a call, we were out in Austin and we were getting Joe's Tesla, and we got in the car and we turned to the TuneIn app, and on the screen right when we turned over to the TuneIn app was the big old O L D podcast logo. It was, like, featured inside his Tesla. When we sat down in the car and I took a picture of it and I swore I texted you the picture, but it must not have gone through.

Yeah. Because I was like, matt, you gotta take a picture of this. This is great.

But it's like that was like the first thing that showed up when we turned onto the Tune in app was recommended podcasts and it had the old podcast. And we're like, man, this is insane.

Yeah.

Which is crazy is I have no idea that that was a thing. And we're not paying for that, like, that kind of advertisement or anything. So it's just.

Love it.

Yeah. Organic type of thing.

Yeah. Well, and that's the thing. I think there's so many. Well, I know there's so many podcast platforms. TuneIn is the one that I know Tesla has, at least in my car, but there's so many. I think we've tried to even get on that, but we.

We're on the TuneIn app. If you go to the TuneIn website, you can find our podcast, but if you try to search for it, like in the. The app on the Tesla, we don't show up. It's like the Tesla app.

I'll try it. I haven't tried in like a week or two.

Yeah. The Tesla app seems like it kind of like picks and chooses the cream of the crop to. To put inside of their platform.

I'll be curating it. Yeah, the top. Like the. Maybe the top charts of their own ecosystem somehow.

Now, are there other. Just real quick, are there other people that you've seen kind of doing the same concept?

So a guy after we did our first one. So, no, not to answer your question quickly, no. There was nobody that we knew of that was doing it when we came up with the idea and started doing it. Are you guys familiar with gaps.com?

Yeah, that's the Viper chill guy, Glenn Elsop, right?

Yeah.

So, like, maybe about a year later, he wrote a post and it was like. Because he just likes to show ideas that are working in different industries and say, like, hey, guys, this is a cool idea. It's a gap in the marketplace. Try this. So he just gives ideas to people. That's like the basis of the website. And he featured us and he was like, dude, these guys are just narrating stuff. You guys should be doing this. And I'm going to start it. I'm going to do it myself. And that's also part of the website, is like, he'll start the business for you and then hand it off to somebody. Cool idea. It's like, I'll get this running. You just need to be dedicated and prove to me why you want it. And I'll give it to one person. So he gave the podcast, he started narrating, or he had someone do it because he didn't want his voice on it. And he launched it. He had a website, he had the podcast going and then handed it off to somebody. And that guy continued for maybe a year, got permission. It was mostly through Medium articles. And that guy was doing maybe one a week. And slowly, slowly just kind of gave up on it. And now I haven't seen a new episode in probably six months.

Pod Fizzle. I'm gonna brand that as a new one. That's a Pod fizzle.

Pod Fading. That's what they call it.

I'm saying Joe knows very well that it's called Pod Fade. He's just trying to get his own brand in there.

Pod Fizzle.

No, that's. I'm just. I'm thinking about the concept and it almost like plays off of what you did in the app game. You know, you're essentially leveraging something that's already created. You're not creating something brand new, you're just re skinning it. But you're obviously presenting it in a way and on a platform where it doesn't live currently. So it's a really cool thing you guys are doing that. It seems like it's still a gap in the market, even though this guy, Pod fizzled away. See, I'm using it.

Yeah, we've hit so many niches now. We have five different narration shows covering all these different topics. So it'd be hard to start now. And podcasting is. It just pretty flooded right now. So it'd be. It'd be hard to start now. But also, like with the apps and with this, it sounds like easy. You're like, oh, that's so obvious. You know, just all we have to do is read an article. But It's a massive grind. It takes many, many hours to do it. There's no mistakes when we. When we narrate. They're all taken out. The editing is insane. It's. It's. The grind of it is like, you have to be super persistent. And I was full time when I was doing it. That was the only way I could have done it. It's a daily show, so that's. I can see why the other guy did it, why that was even difficult. Like, towards the end, he's like, all right, guys, I'm gonna experiment with something. I'm just gonna leave the mistakes in. And I was like, ooh.

I understand it, though. It's like, it's so hard to read it, not make mistakes or take the mistakes out after the fact. Either way, it's tough. So.

And you guys really go for that high quality, polished, like, audiobook sound with yours. And I can see people jumping in going, oh, this looks easy. Let's. Let's just go ahead and put on my iPhone, headphones and record it into the sound recorder app and throw it online and see if it gains traction.

Good luck.

But I think the fact that you guys are trying to make it sound like an audiobook and you're going for that polished thing, I think that's another thing that really sets you apart. So what I wanted to ask was, what does the process look like? I'm assuming you're not recording something new every single day. Maybe you're batching. Maybe you've got some other team members that are kind of doing a lot of the heavy lifting for you. What does the process look like to get new episodes out?

Yep. So when I'm doing my show, I batch usually four episodes at a time. Four and sometimes five. I'm feeling nuts. My brother will do. So he's optimal health daily. So he reads like, nerd fitness and stuff like that. And he does five, so once a week. And his is five episodes a week. So that makes sense. He'll just come in, do all five. We script every single word out, so it's all there. And when you make a mistake, we have a dog clicker. You put it right up to the mic. And what that does is it creates a spike in the visual audio, like, once it's in the program, once it's in Audacity or whatever you use.

That's freaking brilliant.

I always clap in front of our mic, and we look ridiculous when we do it. The dog clicker, brilliant.

I was just thinking, I'm like, what the hell is a dog click? Oh, that's a dog clicker. Yeah. Yeah.

So, yeah, it makes it clicking. That's funny though, because the clapping, like, I did that for a while. And also my girlfriend, like, we don't have a dog clicker here, so. And she's doing a separate podcast idea and she was doing intros. I'm like, oh, just clap into the mic. I'm in a different room and I just hear it and it sounds like she's like slapping herself after every mistake.

Like, this is terrible.

But like the dog clicker, it's a really unique. Like, the spike is perfect. It's like it goes all the way to the top. It's really thin, but, like, so you can see it perfectly. And it claps. You know, you have to, like, each one's inconsistent, so this is very clear. And it's a good way to make marks in your audio. So you basically just take that marker and you should move it and say, okay, find where I started that sentence. And you're replacing. We did eventually get somebody else to do that part for us to just take out the mistakes using those, like finding those clicks. So that helps a lot on the editing side.

I love that idea.

Love it. Yeah. So basically you do the recording or your girlfriend or your brother, whoever else, and then essentially you have an editor that kind of takes care of it from there.

Yeah. And I have the perfectionist tendencies, so I do a final run through of it and at that point it's pretty good. But I'll still spend 20 minutes per episode just bleeping out. We're all clean. And that's another thing with the App Store. If you have any bad words in there or you mark one episode out of your entire list of episodes, just one of them is explicit. You're banned from countries like India and some other ones. So we kept everything clean for a reason. So I gotta bleep out the words. Didn't want someone outside of the country doing that because they might miss something.

Well, I guess our show's fucked.

Well, I actually went back in after we talked to you guys because we never set anything and it said clean lyrics inside of itunes because I just never said it. And I went and actually changed it to explicit because I'm like, yeah, I don't want to mess with that. I don't want to get like Shadow banned or something. I don't know what they do, but I just. I set it to explicit because I know we cuss a lot. And I figure most, like, if you're in India or something like that. I'm assuming you're probably not going to listen on itunes if they're going to censor it that much. So they're probably listening from Overcast or our show notes page or something.

Anyway, find us at our website. You'll hear everything you want.

Yep. You have to be careful too. Overcast pulls from itunes. So this is what's kind of a lot of podcast apps. Why Apple like owns everything in podcasting is that a lot of podcast apps just use Apple's API and they take all their information, the charts, the podcast from Apple. So they're not, you don't submit to them. The only ones that you submit to them are like Stitcher and Tunein, I think these days and maybe now Google podcasts. But everything else is pulling from Apple. So it's gotta like, if you're not in Apple, they're not gonna know Spotify.

Is another one you gotta submit to too.

Yes, yes.

Well, that's kind of crazy because I mean, and I'm sure you guys are aware, but if the listeners aren't, itunes is being hardcore gamed the rankings right now. There's all these videos of people, how people are doing it, and it's gotta be short lived because there's people with what, like 10 reviews popping up to the top of the charts and you're just like, what? Yeah.

And you go and look at the reviews and they're like, this show's great, I love it. Thanks for posting this. That's what the reviews look like. You could tell they went on fiverr or something and then hired somebody and just, they just posted random crap to get reviews. But we know now that reviews don't even have that big of an impact on your rankings. So it's kind of a waste.

How do you guys see it shaping up? Like, is it going to be a cleanup? Are they going to leave it or what's the future of this stuff looking like?

They've already started cleaning up quite a bit. I know for our show, you know, we're ranked in the, in the health charts and at some point, you know, we used to always be in the top 10 to 15 and then all of a sudden we're in like the 40s and 50s. And I'm going through just like you guys are saying, and over half of the podcasts that are ranked ahead of us have fewer than like 30 reviews.

And they're all by the same company or two. So it's kind of a red flag. Yeah, most of Those, at least in the healthcare category, are now gone. They're totally scrubbed from that. They're still searchable, so the shows are still out there. But it does look like Apple's either starting to clean those up or the people that were paying for those click subscribes to climb the charts are no longer doing it because they might have not been seeing any actual organic growth from being ranked that high. So, yeah, I just don't know if there's gonna be an ROI there for people to continue to do that. So whether Apple has to clean it up or not, I guess we'll see. But it doesn't look like those shows are really gaining much traction, even though they're getting such top placement in the charts.

Yeah, that's a good thing. Yeah. Think of it like itunes is almost like the center hub of like the podcasting world right now.

At least I think that'll change over time. We'll see. We'll see how it plays out.

Yeah, it's Apple. On most people's podcasts, like, Apple makes up 60% of downloads. But then if you clue, like Overcast who's pulling from it, that's another 20%. Like they're. They're like 80% of really, like, if you think of it that way, they're mostly the downloads. And then you have Google podcasts coming in who's claiming they're going to double listenership. So it'll be interesting to see that fight out.

We actually, if you go into Libsyn on ours, Overcast is our number one. But that's because we actually paid for Overcast ads for a long, long, long, long time. So we have a lot of subscribers in Overcast, so it actually tops itunes for us. But I think we're rare just because we paid for that advertising.

Definitely rare.

So I have a question about the process. How do you pick which blogs you're going to curate? And do you have just like a handful of like five or six blogs that you're constantly reading from, or are you pretty much scouring the Internet looking for anything you can find?

I'll take that one. Since I started full time in March, maybe like February of this year, I've taken over kind of the content curation because Justin had a lot on his plate for a long time. So right now I think we have. If we don't have 100 authors, we're pretty close. So 100 authors are websites that we narrate from.

On average, we're adding maybe 10 new ones a month right now. And I Have a list of probably 150 that are on kind of my review process. So they've either been submitted by a listener, self submitted by the actual author or blogger, or a referral from an existing author or blogger that we narrate. So the content list is ever growing. I mean, it's nonstop.

So from that list of like 100 authors, if you're releasing what, up to five episodes a day? Right. Five shows that are all daily, how are you. I might be off with those numbers too. I think some are seven days, some are five, some are different. But how are you picking from these hundred plus authors each day and deciding this is the one that should go?

Sure.

So we try to space them out just because we like to have different viewpoints, you know, from different authors. So on average right now for each of our shows, so it's 27 episodes a week. So Justin's show, Optimal Living Daily is seven days a week. And the other four or five days a week.

We try to space on each show about a month out. So some authors are narrated on multiple shows because they have content that fits into health and finance and personal development. So it'll be narrated. But on each individual show we try to space them out at least a month apart. So we have a spreadsheet, we track everything obviously on what episode was released, what website it came from, and then we try to just kind of fill them in going down the list and we can see the last date that author was published. And if it's been over a month, then I'll go in and try to find a new article from them and plug it in there.

Got it. So that's actually really impressive the fact that you've only been doing this full time now since what, March ish, February, you said?

I have been. Justin's been going since December of 2015.

So yeah, that's gnarly. You have an editor, it sounds like, and you have other team members. Is there anybody else that you leverage to help do this whole process? Because there's a lot of moving parts.

It sounds like we rarely get somebody from upwork to help with getting the blog content. I would do a one time scrapes just so we can have all the, the titles, which we did your site. So we're planning to get some of your blog posts in there. It's brought to you by evergreenprofits.com and we're trying to get that in and basically it's easier to get. I mean it's so hard to just scour and just look and then trying to find the right blog post with the right number of words to keep this at the right length of time. So we get someone help with that. But other than that, it is just us.

Nice. Yeah, that's. It's impressive, man.

Yeah. So one thing I wanted to ask was. So I know you mentioned earlier that, you know, there was a little bit of luck involved and a little bit of timing involved with when you released your podcast, but I'm curious if there was any other things you did to kind of just sort of jumpstart the growth, because we've talked about this off, you know, off recording before that. You know, starting a podcast two years ago was different than starting a podcast now. And starting a podcast four years ago was different than two years ago. So I know there's some timing and you even mentioned some luck involved, but what other things did you do to kickstart that?

So, yes, I do think a lot of it, a lot of it was luck because we picked the minimalism and personal development topic first and there just weren't podcasts out there talking about it yet. And Joshua and ryan of theminimalist.com they loved it, the idea, and they were the first to give us permission. And they're massive. So they ended up sharing it on their show. They had a podcast a couple months later. And that's the sharing on other podcasts is like the most beautiful relationship because it's like they're already listening to podcasts and if it fits the niche or the you're not advertising on like a completely different podcast, but something that's along the lines of something they would listen to, it's the perfect way to get them. They're already in the app. It's just like go to this other app and hit subscribe. So they mentioned it without us even asking, just because they're nice guys. So that worked out really well in our favor. They're coming out with a documentary just around the time we launched. So there's all this interest in minimalism, just that topic itself. And if you search minimalism in the podcast app for Apple, we're the first result. So that's going to get you a lot of downloads automatically. So that with these shout outs on other shows and just people recognizing this unique idea and mentioning on podcasts has been massive for us.

Yeah.

Hopefully after people listen to this, we'll get you 77 million and one downloads.

Oh, yeah. Packing the power, man.

Yeah, we'll get you at least one more download as a result of this.

We'll take everyone, guaranteed one download.

So if somebody was starting a podcast today, what sort of advice do you think you'd give them on actually growing it? Because I know that's probably the hardest part about podcasting. If we're doing an interview podcast, we all know people we can interview. The tech isn't that hard once you kind of get it figured out. I think the hardest part is because there's an abundance of podcasts right now. It's just hard to get noticed. So I'm curious what advice you'd give people today. Trying to get going.

Yeah.

It'S way harder today. We launched two interview style shows recently, so this is a little bit outside of what we normally do. And because our listeners are not used to it, getting them to go over to that podcast was tougher. It's not the same niche necessarily. So we launched those two and without the shout outs, you don't get anything these days. There used to be new and noteworthy and all this, like you'd get bonus downloads just by being out there because nobody was doing it. Now in 2018, going to 2019, it's going to be rough because like when we do it, we don't see that same thing. We don't see those bonus downloads organically. So you have to do all the work yourself nowadays. So it's going to be guesting on other podcasts, it's going to be massive. That's one thing that if you can be in that medium, so you get shout outs from other podcasters or you're guesting on their show, that's going to be probably the biggest, easiest conversion for you. Because even getting them from a mailing list is not, I don't think, as easy as if you're advertising.

Definitely tough. We were starting out with a mailing list when we started ours and.

It'S been a grind to try to get the people on our list to adopt podcasting or adopt listening to podcasts.

Right. And so if they're not already listeners, you're not hitting like an email list of podcast listeners, then you're gonna. It's gotta be like 15% of people because like, what is it? The 15% of people even know what podcasts are now. Yeah, there's a lot of. That's the other hard part about this is like on our website we have to explain how to listen so clearly because so many people might land on there going, I heard this idea of this cool podcast. I have no idea how to listen to podcasts. If there's this education piece that other mediums don't have. So it is hard. It's really hard to build an audience from scratch if you don't have anything. You have to get out there on podcasts as much as possible.

That's why Matt and I are so bullish on podcasts, is the fact, kind of like what you just said, it obviously brings in a struggle to get people to listen to. But there's such an opportunity with the channel or the medium if you stick with it and maybe you're a little creative and you knit yourself in the right place. Because I know with us, I mean, it's just literally, it's time. It's the fact that we've stuck with it now for what it's going to be two years, fairly soon.

Yeah, with this show.

Yeah, yeah, with this one. And it's. That's like, really, the. The previous shows, they just kind of fell off because we fell off. Yeah, we lost momentum.

Yeah. I mean, consistency has been probably the number one factor for success. And in fact, we had Nick Loper on a few episodes ago, and he basically said the same thing. You know, you ask why his podcast is so successful. You know, he's always kind of up in the top 20 in, like, the business marketing category. And he said, dude, it's just. I've just been doing it for so long, I have so many episodes. When somebody goes and downloads an episode and they really like it, there's a good chance they might go download five, six, seven more episodes, you know, so the fact that he has such an archive and such a backlog of episodes that any new person who discovers this show, the likelihood of them going and downloading more and sort of helping his ranking is, you know, higher just due to the consistency and the. The amount of episodes he has.

Exactly. It's like one listener can end up being a thousand. And we just crossed 1000 episodes on optimal Living Daily. And if you think about all those episode titles which are searchable in Apple podcasts, I keep bringing up Apple podcasts because they're the biggest. They're like 60 to 80%. So that's where you really want to get the growth. And all those episode titles themselves are searchable. You don't want to spam them because Apple will knock you down. But if you have words in there that people are searching for, you're gonna get noticed.

So how do you go about your keywords and your titling and all that? Do you have a process for that?

Well, that's. We're lucky that the Bloggers we pick. So Nick Loper is one of the blogs we narrate from, so he gave us permission.

They tend to, especially on the business side, they tend to optimize their titles for us. Are this already optimized? So we just use the blog title, say the author, and then there might be like a really quick description of what that episode is. But if you go past that, then Apple's not going to be happy.

Right, that makes sense. So switching gears, I want to talk about monetization because that's fun and there's a lot to it. So how do you guys monetize your guys shows?

Right now it's 98% through advertising. So we work with a couple different ad agencies, some independent companies.

And that's the bulk of it. We do do some affiliates. Whenever any of the authors that we narrate are selling a product or a course, we try to publish those as much as possible because not only to make some affiliate income, which is nice, but to help give back to the authors who are giving us permission to narrate their content. But that's still just such a tiny piece of the revenue pie. The bulk of it is coming from advertising on the episodes.

Yeah. And the advertising game, that's obviously you guys know, but it's fresh to us. And I actually chatted with one of the connections you introduced us to and it was pretty eye opening. Just the way that he was just explaining how it kind of all works. It's all off a cpm. The rate kind of depends more or less really, the niche you're in, the frequency you're producing podcasts.

CPM stands for cost per thousand downloads, basically.

Yeah. So it was eye opening to hear all these different factors that we didn't know about because we come from direct marketing and all these other types of ways to make money where sponsorship, we're just like, we have no clue what the worth of our podcast is. And it was a little bit more than we actually thought that we estimated. So it's a different game. So I guess where do you see yourself with monetization? Are you guys going to stick with sponsorship or do you have some other plans in the works?

Yeah, I don't see us going away from sponsorship. There's so much money. I think the numbers from 2017 was like $17 billion spent on radio advertising.

And there was like 200 million spent in podcast advertising in 2017. So podcasting is still such a small piece of the pie. So we assume that over time we're going to see A lot more advertising money. Move over into podcasting, which is really good for us and our niches because we're very kind of strict with who we take on as a sponsor, because it kind of has to reflect the message of the shows. So we do turn down a lot of ad sponsorship or potential ad sponsors. Sponsorships based on, you know, the product that they're asking us to sell or the service.

Yeah. And you got to figure from, like. From like a sponsor's perspective, you know, what people used to be getting out of TV advertising and out of radio advertising there. It's kind of the same concept. It's just way more targeted. You know, like on. On radio, somebody could be, you know, you have no idea what demographic is listening to the station. I mean, you may know kind of whether they're more conservatives or liberals or if it tends to be more like Christians or whatever. Like, I know they have some of that demographic information, but it's still kind of fuzzy with podcasts. I mean, we can drill into our data and tell you exactly who's listening to our show and the type of people that. That are tuning in each week, and that should be really, really valuable to sponsors. I mean, I think sponsors should be willing to pay more to be on podcasts than they do on radio or tv, you know, over time. And another thing about the sponsorships, too, is every time there's a sponsor in a show that sponsors in there for life. I mean, somebody may discover a show that's a year old and that sponsor's message is still in there. They're still getting some. Some benefit from that a year later, two years later. So, I mean, I actually, Joe and I have talked about this a lot. We really, really love the sponsorship model, and we're planning on adding that into the mix fairly soon here.

Nice. Yeah. And it's only going to get better, too, because the technology's getting better, where Nielsen is partnering up with companies, advertising companies, to actually get the demographic data for you, so you don't have to do surveys and poll your audience and figure it out that way. And once you get into that world where they already know who's listening to a podcast, if they have even a job, general idea of age range and household income and gender, it's like, you can go so far with that, because it's just insane to me also, because you can take ads and place them in now and then have it change out to a different listener, so you can have an ad for something locally here in California for us, and then something in Michigan for Lee. So that's dynamic advertising, and that's already happening. So it's.

I didn't know that was. That existed yet, because.

My assumption was, you know, obviously we upload an MP3, and iTunes and places like that are just looking at the RSS feed to grab the MP3 file. So how are you dynamically injecting different ads into an MP3 file?

It's amazing. So the host. It depends on your host. Right now, we're both on you guys, and we're on Libsyn, which I highly recommend. It's a great company, but their dynamic is going to be a lot more expensive if you want to try it. So right now it's not lucrative. But on. There's more and more platforms coming up where that's their main focus. Or you can use Libsyn, and they kind of come in and it's kind of forwarding that MP3 first. So it's going through them first and then it's landing there. It's kind of hard to explain technically, but it's basically through the host side of things. So Apple is just looking at your RSS feed, so you can. They're looking at that MP3, but where it's actually hosted, when they grab it, when it's played, it's kind of live in that way, and so it can change on the spot, on the fly.

That's going to be pretty huge once they get that really dialed in.

Yeah, that's something Matt and I have talked about because we've always been big on software and all that. And we're looking at this podcast space. We're like, man, the advertising is like, that space is just. There's so much more to be desired.

It's archaic.

It's very archaic. So this. This is a turn in the right direction. I love it.

Now, have you guys ever thought about.

Monetizing slots on the show? This is just kind of a random idea that popped into my head. But if somebody was looking to get some exposure and their content sort of fit into the mix of your show, you can always actually charge for slots. Like, hey, I'll read your podcast episode for X and get it in front of millions of people.

So you mean, like, actually put one of their podcast episodes into our feedback?

No, no, I'm saying, like, let's say I have a blog and it's in the blog. Let's say it's a minimalism blog, for example, and I want to get some more exposure for my blog. You know, I could potentially contact you and say, hey, I have a blog that I think would fit into your show really, really well. Can I pay you to have my. My blog curated through your show? I would imagine people would be willing to pay through the curation because you have such a good reach.

It's an interesting idea. It's funny because we always think of our authors as gifts to us, so we would never think about charging them because we have bigger authors. And to us, in our mind, they're just as generous as the small guy who's just getting started but has amazing, beautiful content. It's funny because some of the authors we reach out to will say the reverse of only if you pay me can I give you. Can you take this blog post? So we've never considered it just because our authors are how we make a living. If we didn't have that content, we would have nothing. So to us, it's a gift.

And I think the other part of that too is if the content's really good, I don't care who wrote it. You know what I mean? If somebody has a blog with one follower, but their content is gold, I would much rather have that content on the site, help get them some publicity back to their site so they can keep writing. Because it's not that easy to find really well written content that's consistently written too. Sometimes we'll find blogs and there'll be guest posts from other sites and I'll read them and I'll be like, I really need to reach out to this person to read their content because this guest post was so good. And I'll go to their site and it's either no longer existing or they stopped writing like three years ago. And it kind of makes me sad because when you find somebody that's really a great writer and they stopped because, you know, they just couldn't build an audience. So that's the nice part of us, like, giving back. So, like.

But had they been able to pay you to curate your content, they may have gotten a lot more traffic and their blog may have never faded.

It's a separate slope though, too, right? Because if we open that up and we say, okay, if you pay and you can be on the show but their content's not up to par, then that's hurting.

Yeah, that's. That's the real problem is, is. Is introducing subpar content into the process, into the mix. I think that'd be the bigger issue, really, because, I mean, I definitely think bloggers would be willing to pay to get the exposure that you Guys can offer, but you don't want to sacrifice quality in exchange for that.

Maybe there's a happy medium there somehow. Just a random idea to monetize further.

Yeah.

And if people are interested, they can submit their content right on our site. We take, we take self submissions all the time, so we get a big handful of them every week.

Nice.

I forgot what I was going to say, so go ahead.

I wanted to actually mention something and I feel like I would. I just got to throw the shout out out there. But Trevor of advertisecast, you guys introduced us to him. I think last week it was. I think Justin, you did. And it was funny because we exchanged some emails and some stuff through my evergreen profits email. And then it was last week, like late last week, we got in our support email. I was looking through it and it was Trevor from advertisecast saying like, oh man, I just listened to the Nick Loper episode and I got a shout out. That's super cool. I've been following you guys for a really long time, listening to all your episodes. You guys are amazing. I don't think he made the connection like the name, the podcast. And then he fired me an email like an hour later. He was like, oh man, I feel like an idiot.

That's your show. That's amazing. We gotta talk the same people. Yeah, but it was cool. And Trevor. Yeah, I appreciate you, man.

He's a super nice guy. Yeah, we met him at Podcast Movement this past year. So we got to talk to him and they have a really great team. So we met some of the sales people there and they're doing really well in getting us a decent amount of ads. So I'd definitely look into that. Any podcasters out there?

Very cool. I want to get out to this next Podcast Movement. I don't even know when it is, but I know we want to get out. I know there's been times it's sort of overlapped with Traffic and Conversion Summit and we've had issues or it was too close to it. Having wives and kids. It's a little hard to do back to back events and things like that.

I got another question down that whole awareness phase or so I know we talked about influencer marketing, YouTube specifically. I don't know if you guys want to talk a little bit about that, but I thought that was kind of cool. How if you can get someone to just mention your show once, if they have a pretty rabid following on their YouTube channels, it can completely blow up what you have going on in the Podcast.

So I know that was the case. You don't have to name any names if you don't want to.

We were lucky enough to have a Couple Very large YouTube fashion bloggers mention us, and we just saw a massive increase on that.

It's not even really our niche. That's the crazy thing. But they just have the power because they get so many actual views on their videos and.

Like, their word goes a very long way. So their testimonial is massive. So when they talk about, oh, I listen to this while putting on my makeup, a bunch of people are like, oh yeah, I should try that too. So that's. That's been a really unique way to get more views. And you guys came up with the idea of actually taking that testimonial. Well, this was. Matt actually take that testimonial and then use that as an advertisement on their own channel. So like, if I have a fashion blogger who mentioned us, well, why not clip that out, use like 30 seconds of it and then place that in front of her own videos on other videos like that? She has to advertise that way. We just started doing that a couple of days ago. But what's really hard is getting actual views on that specific channel. So I wanted to talk to you guys about that, whether it's here or offline, about how to actually increase the odds of actually getting on that channel. So we had to spread it across multiple channels, like her friends and stuff like that, and increase the bid and do things like that. But she has ads. But we still can't for some reason get on her own channel. But we get on most of her friends channels.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I know there's some things you can do. It's obviously a deeper discussion, but one of the obvious things is you can always increase the bid. If your stuff's not showing up on her channel, it most likely means that other people are just outbidding you on that channel.

Yeah, that's what we figured. So I think we lifted up to. Because we were doing like 5 cents across the whole thing. And I lifted up her channel to 50 cents, still got nothing. And so we're debating because like one view right now we've done about. In a few days, we're at 1.6 thousand impressions, and that converts to 611 views, which is about a 40% view rate, which also seems high to me. But it could be because it's this testimonial. People are actually watching this ad because.

It'S a fashion blogger on a Fashion blog channel talking right at you. So it might have a higher viewership on those ads, but it's a really cool concept. So we're messing with that and might try it on Facebook, too.

Have you seen a spike in download numbers just since you've turned it on?

Not yet. We're gonna be watching it, though, and check. We check our numbers weekly. I think you guys check daily. I thought was kind of nuts.

It depends on what's happening on the podcast. Yeah, I probably log in daily and.

Look, but we're obsessed with uncertain numbers.

I don't spend too much time in there. I'm just always curious. I did have another question for Lee about the actual writers. You mentioned that we were talking about the quality of writing. This might be kind of a tough question to answer, but are there any specific things you're looking for?

What sort of determines a good writer versus one that's not up to par? Do you have any criteria you're looking for?

Yeah, I do.

And it's not 100% of our post because it's literally impossible to find enough content. That's exactly perfect. But I will tell you that the episodes that stick with me and stick with Justin are always very similar. And the feedback we get from listeners, it's the ones that tell a story. Right. So we do have a lot of content that's like, hey, do these five things to increase your productivity in the morning. And I think those are great. Right. So it's beneficial. It's actionable advice that's really great. But unless you're sitting down and writing those down and implementing them into your life, it's hard to remember those, you know, after a day or a week or a month. But the people that tell a story and whether it's through their own personal experience or some historical perspective, like, there's episodes that went off 500 episodes ago that I still remember. Not quite word for word, but I remember exactly the emotion I felt when I read it and what the moral of that story was. So people that can kind of convey a message of, like, what's important, but do it through, like, a storytelling lens makes for, like, a really great audio experience. Because that's the other part of it, too. It's. This is audio versus reading. There's so much great content that I read, and I'm just like. As I'm reading, I'm like, yeah, it just won't translate to audio. Like, you need to see it. Yeah. And I think that's. Yep.

I think that's like a Big problem with the type of content that we produce because a lot of our content is very case study tutorial based. So it doesn't seem like it would translate super well into.

A readable audio thing that's kind of.

Have you guys done. Obviously YouTube is very readable and video worthy. Have you pulled from there or. I guess you don't really have to. You have enough. It sounds like.

Yeah, we do have enough that.

We get so many submissions too that we always have this content. And in Trello Lee has that hundred blogs that we still have to go through. But yeah, to keep going with that. If you can give an emotional response, that's always going to do better than anything else. And even in the business category, an example might be like Steve Chu of my wife quitterjob.com like he does a good what he does. Like there's lessons in there, but generally it is around a story of his own business or where they felt a lot of pain or happiness. So there's usually something there where it's like something big happened and then here's a lesson from it and it won't be like the 10 tips, it'll just be like this, this one thing. Like this, this way I thought about it. Or we went down this street route. That kind of stuff really sticks with you after time.

Does he do interview style too? My wife quit my job. Or is his all just kind of storytelling each time on the blog?

It is mostly storytelling. From what we've seen. Lee might know a little bit better, but he also does have a podcast.

Sorry, I was thinking about the podcast. That's kind of what I've seen him as. I've never actually read his blog, but I've heard some of his podcast. Yeah, I was kind of curious.

Yep. His blog is like my girlfriend's an entrepreneur too, so she will mention his frequently. Just be like, I love when you read his because it always has like a story about something. So yeah, he does have a. It's a really good blog. And then he does have a podcast too. Yep.

Yeah, no, I like that. I feel like the hardest podcasts in the world, the ones that are most likely to fade, are the ones where they're not interviewing anybody and they're not curating content. It's just every single week or every single day or whatever their frequency is, they're trying to be the voice of the show and it's only them. I feel like those are the ones you tend to see fade out. They'll go like 10 episodes and then Just stop doing it.

Well, we tried that for a bit, you know, it wasn't a full blat, but yeah, I mean, you just run out of ideas in momentum.

Yep.

So, yeah, it makes sense now. Let's see. Is there anything else?

Yes.

That we. I know there's one topic we want to touch on that they probably don't know about yet.

Probably a topic Justin doesn't want to touch on.

Oh, no.

Yeah, probably not.

You don't want to talk about your best buddy Craig in la.

This is just all about doing something out of the ordinary because that's. That's what happened. It's like, I was. I was.

Yeah, it's a late, late show, basically, is what this is all about. Greg Ferguson.

Yeah.

Who's the other guy that people get confused with?

Greg Kilburn.

Yeah.

There's Craig Kilborn. I was going to say Craig Kilborn. So I'm glad Joe wrote Craig Ferguson up on the board here.

Yeah, yeah. We just decided to wear Christmas sweaters one year because we watched this show so closely and he was like, get up here. Like, you just got to think outside the box. Do something different and something cool will happen from it. So, yeah, like, it just turned into a recurring thing because we did something very unique. He saw it in the audience and was like, you're gonna come up here on television and we're just gonna stick you up here. I'm gonna make fun of you guys and pretend you're a couple.

Yeah.

When he says we, it's not me and him. It was a friend of his. Yeah, yeah.

So how many times did you actually end up getting featured on there?

It must have been about 10ish times. Like, we. We went once and we're like, oh, my God, that was amazing. And they had to pay us. That's what made it even better because, like, I guess just. Yeah. It's like by, by law, I guess if you're on television a certain amount of time, you just have to get the money. And it was like, back then, I think it was like 200 bucks. We were on television for five minutes. So I was like, well, that was worth it. So the next time we were like, oh, what should we do? It's gonna be random. It's not Christmas time. So Christmas sweaters don't make sense. So that was the first one we did. And we're just like, let's just wear Hawaiian shirts. So this is like in the middle of March or April. A couple months later, we show up, we're just Both wearing ridiculous Hawaiian shirts. And he's like, oh, it's you guys again. All right, get up here. And then he just made us out to be, like, stoners. I mean, he's just like, this was the theme of that episode. So they had. They paid us again. And then I slowly, like, we had to keep signing this stuff, like, in the back, like, every time we went. And so I developed, like, a relationship with the production manager there, got her business card, and I was like, yeah, just let you know if we're coming again. She's like, okay, cool. So it turned into like, hey, we're coming. I started like, yeah, be prepared, because we're coming. And so we just get, like, a little more alert, elaborate with our. What we're dressing up as. We were both Mario for some reason. One year, I think that was Halloween. Yeah. Suit and tie. Because nobody, like, in these audiences, like, everyone's just, like, in a T shirt. So we just do whatever gets, like, attention. And he'd bring us up every time.

That's an amazing way to basically offset starting a business, too, because making 200.

Bucks a year off of it.

Yeah, Sounds like that was a good little. I mean, I don't know when you ended going there, because I know he's not on air anymore. I don't think he is.

Oh, no. Yeah. That's the one thing we regret is we didn't go, like, the last year. We were kind of over it at that point. Not the show, but it's just kind of like we've done it so many times, and we're like, we're running out of ideas. And then he announced that year he was done. We're like, oh, we should have just gone through the end. We would have made it to the end. But there is. To me, it's like business lessons of just standing out. If you do something unique, that's the same thing with our podcast. Idea was so out there and original that somebody's gonna notice. Somebody will see it, and they'll appreciate it. If you can make them smile, too, that's a bonus. That's gonna get you even better odds. But, yeah, it's like, that's kind of how I try to run my life of, like, just standing out in different ways that you might get negative. Like, some people might just think you're weird or whatever. But, like, if you're doing something unique, you'll get there. Some. Somebody's gonna appreciate it generally.

Well, it's funny because, like. Like, introverts like us, that's Kind of like the opposite of what you would expect.

I was going to mention that. It's just really interesting that. And I mean, not to call it out, but you're doing a lot of the talking here too.

Yes.

Well, I give you guys a lot of credit, but if you're checking my pulse right now, it's probably like 180 or something like that. Especially when I know it's coming. We're like, well, we don't want to go. We're not sure if we should go down this path. My pulse rate just spikes. So it's like.

And I'm like on the verge of.

Collapse, like, of a panic attack.

It's funny because anytime we go to, like, any sort of, like, live performance, and my wife would attest to this, that, like, if we're going to like a live show where at some point they pull people up onto the stage, it's always me, like, a hundred percent of the time, if we go to a show and they're like, we need somebody from the audience and they're just kind of like picking at random. 100% of the time that's happened, it's been me.

It's gotta be the beard.

And I think it's the fact that I'm a 6 foot 3 dude with a giant beard. Like, and I don't normally wear, like, drab colors. I'm usually wearing something like, bright and colorful. And so I think, like, I tend to stand out just by accident. But, like, every time we go somewhere, like, a lot of my wife, she'll always be like, oh, they're picking somebody from the audience. Are you ready? Like, because we just know it's always freaking me.

Yeah, I think for me, like, like, doing that kind of stuff is almost like a way to cope or deal with it. Like, if I do something so outlandish, it's almost like I'm putting on a mask or like a. It's like I get to be somebody different, then it kind of takes me out of my discomfort. So, like, right now it's a little more who I am, like, as a person at Raw, and that. That leads to, like, anxiety and panic and. Yeah, like, when you started asking that question, I did, like, I. I got actually really nervous and I even threw it back to Craig Kilborn because I needed, like, a little pause there just to, like, take a breath myself. Yeah, so it's like, stuff like that is actually.

Yeah, it affects me pretty bad. You might not be able to tell on the phone, but. No, it's Yeah, I wish I had, like, an apple watch going right now or a wristwatch go. That checks my. Because I'd love to see how high it was. It was probably really, really high, like, up to getting into the 200 range.

It's like part of me feels bad, but at the same time, I love how open you are. Like, most people won't even have the balls to say what you're saying there, let alone even come on the podcast either. I mean, like, you've done. And I love the analogy. It's really what you did on TV with Craig Ferguson. Like, the fact that you're in front of millions of people or however many watch. Like, that's ridiculous. So props to you.

I appreciate that. Yeah, I saw Matt kind of had a similar thing that he shared, too, which. That's, again, why I relate to you guys, is that. Yeah, the more you put out there, like, that kind of stuff, it's like, you never know who's gonna relate to it. So it's good to put it out there.

Luckily, you live in California, so maybe we'll send you a package or something that'll calm me down.

I mean, everybody who watch Craig Ferguson already thinks he does it anyway.

No, for. I mean, for me, I battle with anxiety quite a bit. In fact. Starting podcasting originally. When I first started my podcast in 2010, the original reason I started it was, like, to get out of my comfort zone, because I was actually terrified of interviewing people. It scared the crap out of me. If you listen to some of my old episodes from 2010, which aren't online anymore, but maybe they'll resurface someday, like, I sound terrified. Like, you could probably hear shivering in my voice because I was so nervous when talking to people, and it was just through repetition of just interviewing people over and over and over again. And even to this day, if we're going to interview somebody that I feel is sort of like a bigger name that I've kind of put on a pedestal over the years, I get really anxious about it. You know, when we had David Allen on, I was actually really nervous to interview him because I read his book 15 years ago, and, you know, the type of stuff that he teaches has impacted so many people that. But I still get anxious interviewing a lot of people.

And obviously, Lee and I don't ever get anxious.

No, they're just. They're just always school as cucumbers.

We're just robots.

I have my own anxiousness. Things are in the podcast, obviously, life.

And when we go to events now, I'm like, I'm the guy that would probably rather be on stage than out in the crowd because.

True. It's true.

I'm more comfortable being on the stage presenting to people than I am in small group communication. Small group discussions.

How trippy is that? Yeah, well, we've gone on for a while. Anything, Lee, that you want to say on your side about being anxious or anything? Yeah.

You know what's funny is I think it's really good that Justin does talk about it. I know when he first started the show, he talked a lot about it on each of the episodes. And it's amazing how much correspondence that we do get from listeners on that. And it's funny because Justin and I were friends for many years and he had never mentioned to me anything to me about like, you know, having anxiety.

And I would have never been able to tell. I would have never been able to tell. He was like, you know, introverted and got got tired from being around big groups all the time.

So it's one of those things where it's cool as you get to learn somebody and, you know, become closer with them. But I think it's been so good that he's been able to share that.

Because I think it has impacted like a lot of our listeners. You know, a lot of people, they don't, when they're in a public face, they don't want to show any issues that they may be having or any struggles that they're dealing with. And a lot of times when you share that stuff, like, that's the most powerful thing that people are going to remember about you.

And 100% just sharing it too helps actually relieve some of the anxiety.

I've noticed you're not covering anything up. You're like, well, I'm just out here in the open now.

My heart rate has slowed down a little bit. But it's crazy because that lead didn't realize it said it. I thought it like he figured it out at that point. But I can see like how you can't really tell on the outside unless you have a full blown, like panic attack, which I did have, like in a presentation that he was in. So the fact that even remember it just makes me happy, like to know that he doesn't even like recall it. It's like to me, it's like such an embarrassing moment that it's like.

Everybody remembers it. You know, you have that like feeling of like, oh yeah, it replays in your head over and over again. It just like reinforces this, this bad. You know, mentality. But like everyone else, they have their own lives. They don't care. They should not go back to that point in time unless, like, someone brings it up. Like, which is likely not gonna happen.

Yeah, I mean, that's. That's the big key to remember, at least for me, is everybody else has their own shit going on in their head. And, you know, we're all trying our best. Yeah, everybody's got their own stuff going on in their head. And so, like, when I'm embarrassed by something, the likelihood that other people are still thinking about the thing I was embarrassed by 15 minutes later is fairly low because everybody's got their own stuff going on in their head. Right. Like, for me, we were at this event just to kind of close that loop on what you were mentioning. Joe and I were actually at an event a few weeks ago, and we'd been at this event all day long, straight networking. Got there at like 8am and we went to this party thing and it was like the party didn't start till like 9pm so it was just a really, really long day of just networking and talking and just wearing on me and wearing on me and wearing on me. And then we were at the. This, this event and I. And I just started to get real tired and I went to walk away and I just collapsed in the middle of like, this party with 50, 60 people at it. And that was, like, insanely embarrassing. And then we actually went and had lunch with the two dudes who put on the event like, three days later. And I don't even think they knew it happened. They didn't even bring it up.

We're actually interviewing one of the guys today.

Yeah, later on.

But no, it's just. Yeah, we all got our own thing going going on. So, yeah, let's just give ourselves a break and just do what we're good at. Keep challenging ourselves and just keep going. So props to you guys and let's wrap this up because I know we've got a little long, so appreciate you guys. We always like to ask if there's any book or something you like to read or maybe reference often that you'd like to share here. Yeah.

Since I've listened to every episode, I knew that was coming. It's tough because. But we read so many blogs. I'm reading so many that I don't read anymore.

What are your favorite blogs? Share some of those. That works too.

So on the minimalist side, probably like becoming minimalist as Joshua Becker and the minimalists themselves, I ended up narrating their audiobooks because they enjoyed the podcast. So actually that would be a good mention if you're into minimalism, like the minimalist books or audiobooks. You could hear my voice on the audiobooks. But.

Yeah, there's just. So, like, I can't. It's hard to pick, like, from our selection, like, our favorites, because we pick them for a reason that they're all great in different ways. So I don't like to hand pick, but.

So the answer is just go listen to the old podcast and you'll hear all of your favorite blogs.

Exactly. But, like, I know how to win friends and influence people. Like, that had an impact on me. Again, the audiobook, though, I thought they did a really great job with it. Like, the narrator's really good. So if I had to pick a book book, I might go that route.

Yeah, that's cool. I've never heard the audiobook.

What about you, Lee? Are you a big reader?

Less so. In the past couple years, as I've transitioned, I listened to a crazy amount of podcasts and I'm now moving over into audiobooks. So I still have a library shelf full of books that I'm trying to get through so I can fully convert to an audiobook listener. But there is one book that kind of stands out. It's funny, Justin, I don't think he remembers this book, but. But we both took this class together at Pepperdine. It was a really impactful class, and it was all about kind of like your life and what you want to do with it in terms of not only work, but health and kind of what you're leaving behind.

And one of the books that we read in that class was called you, Life Is yous Message. And I'm probably going to butcher his name, but the author's name is Eknath Esmaran.

We'll link it up in the show notes.

But it's an amazing book. I've probably read it like four or five times, and I'm not somebody who likes to reread books, but it's one of those books where you can probably read it in a couple days just before bed. And it's just a really powerful book, and it talks about compassion for other people and what your daily actions and kind of the life you lead, like, how that's really, like, what you're putting out there to the world and what you're going to leave when you're gone. So it's just a good reminder, you know, it's one of those things. Like when we transitioned from mobile apps, which we had no passion for. We didn't really feel like it was delivering any value to anybody over into this space where we're now getting dozens of emails every day or every other day from people that are saying, hey, your podcast really changed my life. And even though we're not the writers of all this amazing content, we're still, like, the medium that's helping getting it out there to more and more people. So it's really powerful.

I love it, man. That's amazing. And, Justin, you know the last question here that I'm going to ask?

Where you want people to go?

Yeah. Our website's oldpodcast. Old stands for optimal living daily, but also works really well. That's oldpodcast.com and any of our shows, like, if you're into audiobooks and you like reading blogs but don't have time, any of the shows would be great. You can search for optimal living daily because we have a network. They will all pop right up. Up.

Love it, dude. Yeah. This is why we call you the old Guys. Like, old guys. We're going to talk to them today.

We're not that old.

I know, I know.

If you guys want to search, Craig Ferguson sweater guys in YouTube will be the. The parody of all the visits of Justin.

We can actually have our. Our show notes guy link that up in the show notes too.

Thank you. We're going to embed it.

It.

Sorry. Maybe we should take Justin's pulse again.

Yeah, that's good. That's good.

Hey, he shared it on Facebook, so he doesn't seem to mind people seeing it.

I love it. No, I did watch it the other night. I was like, holy, this is amazing. Oh, man.

I was.

I was busting up. I like the little soul patch, too.

Yes, yes. You. Yeah, I. I have many different facial beard things going on in. In that. That series.

I was in that soul patch phase for a day.

My best phase was the Fu Manchu mustache, which. You had one, too. I remember that, too. You had a Fu Manchu in one of those, too.

Yeah, it's like a more handlebar style. Yeah, it's pretty thick.

All right, guys, I know we can keep going forever, but we're gonna turn it off. We'll do a round two later.

Sounds good.

All right, guys, appreciate you.

Thanks for having us.

Yep. Thanks.

All right, thank you. And I hope you just enjoyed this episode you just listened to now. Right now, before we sign off, I have a few things I would love for you to do. So the very first thing is to go find our guest on Facebook and tell them that you loved their episode with us. That's going to help them just feel good about themselves, but also it's going to spread the word a little bit more for us. So go find them on Facebook. Everybody's on Facebook. And go say that you love their episode and maybe one cool thing that you learn there. The second thing is to go to itunes and subscribe to our podcast. Just look up Hustle and Flowchart and hit the subscribe button. And the very last thing, the third thing is to leave us a review on itunes or wherever you're listening to this podcast and help us spread the word more. That's how more people are going to get this awesome knowledge, this cool podcast training, and a whole bunch of other cool free training that we give out@evergreenprofits.com so that's about it. Go find them on Facebook, go subscribe on itunes and leave us a review. You would be amazing if you did that, but you're always amazing. So thanks for listening and we'll catch you in the next episode.

You're awesome.