We're Burning The Ships!

Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.

What's up, everybody? You're listening to the Hustle and Flowchart podcast with your boys Mount Wolf and Joe Fear. Wiki, wiki, wiki.

We have burned the ships.

We did.

Wait, no, we didn't. Yeah, we did. We didn't burn the bridges. We burned the ships.

That's why my pants are on fire.

I think it's fire. Hold on.

Right? We've been going with the fire theme on video.

Maybe more superimposed fire, if Joe knows how to figure that out. Yeah. Urgh. Flames.

Joey's our video editor at the moment.

At the moment.

We'll get into that next week.

Well, yeah, there's a reason why. And that's what this episode's all about. I think that's what we're talking about. Part of it, part of it, not all the way. That's not why you're here? To learn about video editing? Heck, no.

No, no. You know what?

What are we here for, Matt?

We're here to talk about what ships we're burning, why we're burning them, what new ships we're jumping onto and creating and creating and just sort of where we're going with our business. We had this realization maybe three weeks ago. We were sitting around going, all right, we need to just do a complete pivot and just 180. Just completely go in a different direction with our business. We were not super excited about the stuff we were talking about. We were overextended financially, trying to create what we were creating. There was a lot that needed to change, and we went, let's just go hardcore and all in. And that's what we're gonna talk about today. But let's talk about it right after this.

Yo, I think I would like some more organic traffic for our website.

Who wouldn't?

Yeah, I mean, we have a lot of traffic. Do you think we want more, or do you think everyone else would deserve or would like more for their websites? Is this a rhetorical question? Yes, it's a rhetorical question. Dang. Right? Yeah.

Well, I wanna know if I can do it for free.

Well, you can now. Why is that, Mr. Matt?

Cause if you go over to ahrefs.comawt, they have a new tool. Well, it's a cool tool.

It's a cool tool.

Yeah, Called Ahrefs Webmaster Tools. And it's over@ahrefs.com awt and it does a lot of the same stuff that the full fledged Ahrefs does, but it's.

A free version so they basically made this tool, webmaster tools, @ahrefs.com AWT it's gonna monitor your SEO health of your website. So you can make sure, hey, are there any issues I should be looking at? And it basically scans your site. There's like, over a hundred typical SEO issues that would, like, Flag, Google and all the search engines. Well, it's gonna tell you what's wrong with your site, so you know. Exactly. And actually, the advice on how to fix those things, that's pretty dang important. I mean, SEO still is our number one new traffic driver for our websites. Really? That's across all of our websites. That's how people discover us. So you might as well have a little read, a finger in the pulse of the health of your website. And the SEO, it also does backlink monitoring, all these other search traffic terms and things. It's free, though.

It's free. Yeah. Monitor your SEO health, backlinks and keywords for free over at ahrefs.com awt that rhymed.

We're back. All right. Yeah. Hey, we're here. So everything. Yes. To what you just said about Ahrefs, about that, but also the intro prior to that. I feel like this thing has been kind of simmering in the background for us for this entire year.

There was stuff happening that we were kind of pretending not to notice that.

And we just didn't figure out what the direction looked like. We felt like there was a better model for our business behind the media side of stuff. And like you said, financially, things were getting a little out of hand. It felt like. Because we were feeding the media machine a lot.

Yes.

And it was all great, and it is great. But the business model behind it wasn't working out to support that. But also our interests, like you said, like, talking about the topics, you know, the same old kind of stuff that we've been chatting about for since the beginning of our marketing careers. Yeah.

Well, we sort of alluded to it into some of the past episodes where we felt like we were talking about things that were going to be obsolete soon. Right. Like, we did do a full episode where we said, like, these are the struggles we're having with email marketing. These are the struggles we're having with advertising. These are the struggles we're having with SEO. These are the struggles we're having membership platforms. Right. And we made this whole episode about how it feels like a lot of the market is sort of going in a different direction. And a lot of the tactics that people are using right now, they're Going to become obsolete in time as people value privacy more, as people move off of social media, as people try to get a little more anonymous. Ish.

Well, at least, yeah, it's protecting privacy. And there's a lot of the big web two type companies like Google, Facebook, Apple. I mean, there's a lot of restrictions coming down that have already happened. Obviously, you have the pixel stuff on the Facebook side. You have Apple doing anonymous style emails when you purchase an app or some other stuff. This is all gonna affect marketing.

Yeah. And we're not saying that stuff's dying. I know last time we did a conversation about that, it was probably one of the episodes that I got people reaching out to me the most going, here's why I think you're wrong.

That's good. You're putting predictions out there. You're ruffling. Yeah. Good on you. Good on you.

That specific episode that we're talking about was the one that I got the most comments from with people going, either I highly agree with what you're saying or I really, really disagree. And we're not saying that those strategies, those tactics are going to stop working. I think Facebook and Google and the email marketing people, they're all going to figure out new workarounds and new ways to make this stuff work for them even better. It's just. I'm just not sure it's a journey we want to go on.

Yeah. What we realized in the last three weeks, but also, I feel like it's really been months and months and months prior to having this feeling of the topics we're bringing in on this show. Basically the topic here that we'll be chatting about is we want to take to where we see the puck going. It's the reference that Matt has made ever so famous on this podcast that's also been made famous by Mr. Wayne Gretzky. That's really what we've realized in the last few weeks and really made some massive moves in within these three weeks where it's shifting the business model, it's shifting our products, our internal products, and some are going away. We'll talk about that. Some are just shifting into other hands. We're doing partnerships. That's cool.

Yep.

And then at the end of the day, the topics that you're gonna hear on these shows or watching this show is gonna change and possibly in some of their locations too. There's a lot to unpack in this episode. Yeah, it's gonna be fun. I mean, it's scary as hell, I feel like, because it's like a new endeavor we're taking on.

But we know we're gonna lose some listeners, too. We know that what we're doing and what we're saying on this episode and some of the past Tuesday episodes that have come out over the last few weeks, people are like, that's just not a topic I'm interested in. And I'm just gonna go in a different direction and I'm just not gonna pay attention. What we know we're gonna lose some subscribers, but we also feel so strongly that the stuff that we're going to be talking about and the direction we're taking things is where the puck is going. Right. It is the future. And anybody who is basically saying, I don't want to pay attention to this stuff, well, you're basically turning a blind eye to where things are going. So I will put that out there. But I do understand. No love lost. If you want to tune out.

Well, I promise we're going to make it interesting. So hang with us on this episode and you're going to hear what the changes are we have in mind. But at the end of the day, it's just serve you. It's also to serve us and our curiosity because right now, I would say we are currently learning more than we ever have in our entire career span, just in the amount of knowledge and new paradigm shifts that we've been studying. And the whole idea is that we're diving into a whole new realm. So crypto, web3 blockchain, and all of the crazy technology and economies that are being built through communities and cutting out a lot of the middlemen in all of these things. And this is where we see a lot of marketing and community building going. It's already happening. And like you said in previous episodes, we kind of been hinting at this, but now we're just like, okay, it's time to go all fricking in on this bad boy. That's where the show's headed.

Yeah, yeah. And I mean, we've got a Discord community now over@hustleandflowchart.com Discord. And we've been starting to talk about this stuff in the Discord community, and it seems to be lighting up a lot of people. I think a lot of the crypto, we've been kind of saying web3 is this all encompassing thing. It's kind of the creator economy plus blockchain technology, plus creating different economies within.

All of that too. It's giving ownership to everyone who's involved in projects on there.

Yeah. So Web three is kind of like the all encompassing term for all of that stuff. That's kind of the direction we're going in. And so far from the discord discussions we've had, it seems like we're. Most people are really, really interested in this topic. They've been hearing about it. They know that this is kind of where the future is. This is where things are going. They just didn't know how to get involved. So they tend to tune out because they're like, this is over my head, I can't get involved. And I feel like that's where we can bring the most value.

That's why you want to stick around. If you feel like crypto, blockchain, web3nfts, all that stuff that might be confusing or sound fringe to you. Well, it's not because like it's, it's popping off everywhere.

Like the World Series had a fricking sponsor that was a crypto sponsor.

Yeah, it was on the umpires uniforms. I didn't even know you could sponsor that. I guess the World Series, they just want that money. Yeah, but yeah, it was a crypto exchange. It was one of the big markets. It was called ftx. You can look it up on World Series footage and there were even banners. It was like, hey, get your, you know, your biggest crypto exchange. This is on the World Series. I mean, I don't know if the world's really watching the World Series.

The World Series is mostly an American and Canadian thing, but that's it.

But it was a lot of money and that's a big stage. And then like, I didn't believe it, but you're like, no, no, no, that's legit. And like, sure enough, there it is. So we're like, okay, so it's getting mainstream. I'm seeing billboards around town with it advertising elements of crypto. All this to say is we want to bring you there, but not bring you in with all the nerd talk. And I mean, you'll get some of that.

You'll learn the nerd talk through us.

You will. Like, the way I've been like describing this a lot and seeing this is that we want to be the bridge for you to learn about this new space and us bring in the types of experts and interesting players in this field that you can learn a lot from. Because we're still so green to the. I mean everyone is, everyone's kind of new, even if you've been doing crypto stuff for years. And we have some stories there which we've told before, but we want to make it digestible and understandable and open your eyes to be like, oh, okay, maybe you're not going to actually apply some of the tech side, but maybe it's worth investing in some of this stuff, seeing where the puck is going, but actually doing your own research and hearing it from other people, not just us say this. So I think it's super fun and we're diving all in on this thing.

Yeah. Let's talk about some of the changes we're making in the business, and then let's circle back around to some of the stuff that really excites us. Why we've gone down the rabbit hole of. Of this stuff. Right. So some of the things that we're changing in our business. And you know, as far as the Evergreen Profits letter goes, anybody listening to this that's a member of the Evergreen Profits membership is already aware of this, but we are canceling our Evergreen Profits newsletter. So the print newsletter is no more the November issue that probably arriving at people's doors about the day this is going live. That is going to be the last print edition of the EGP letter. And then we've also phased out the action guides. If you've noticed the last handful of shows. We're not saying, you know, go to get the notes anymore because we're not taking the notes anymore.

Point being is, yes, we're shutting down some stuff. I just want to say why we're choosing to do this, because you and I have had so many deep talks on how to do this, why we're doing this. And you told me many times, you're like, I'm tired of these micro adjustments. I'm tired of just incrementally moving into the direction that we see things going because we've always. We haven't allowed ourselves to do that. We haven't really fully ripped the band aids off. Let us kind of mentally breathe into a new space and actually digest what's going on. Because it's going so quick.

I mean, if I had more than two feet, I keep multiple feet in different ponds. Right. Like, we're kind of always feet.

It's weird.

Yeah, I know you can't see, but Octopus man. Yeah, it's weird. My doctor said it's fine. So, you know, we've always kind of been a little bit in digital marketing. We've always kind of. Not always, but we've always been in that sort of creator space, you know, more on the YouTube side recently, but we've always been in the creator space from a podcast standpoint for a decade now. Right. So we've been in the podcast creator space. We've been in the digital marketing space. We've kind of had a toe in the water crypto since 2011. Decade at least.

Mental toe in the water.

Yeah. We put full feet in the water back in 2017, but didn't go all the way in on it.

It's an interesting time, but it was a different space back then too. Yeah.

Like, we've kind of felt like we've been in this business purgatory of making these micro optimizations that just kind of get us, like, a teeny, teeny bit further along. And we're kind of sick of making these micro optimizations. And that's what led to, let's just burn it down to the foundation and start building it back up again.

That's exactly what we did. We realized we're very positioned well, with where we're at in our careers, with our knowledge, with our network, and with this show, with our media, where, okay, what if we just positioned ourselves into this new space, but still bring as many of y' all with us? But also it's going to attract a lot more people, and we have some ideas. Well, there's some stuff we've already been doing, which we'll mention how we're actually going to exponentially grow this audience fast with a little partnership we're working on. But all that to say is that gave us the confidence to be like, we bought ourself Runway. We created Runway, and we now have the ability to jump in.

And by Runway, you mean Financial Runway.

Financial Runway. But that just gives us clarity. We all have these little obligations that we feel like we got to do. And what you and I chose to do is like, okay, how can we system automatically kind of trim off all this stuff that doesn't seem to be serving? So, yeah, burn it to the ground, and let's just know that we have a foundation that we can build off of again and position that we've kind of created over the last however long we've been doing this. The show itself, about five years. We can parlay that into this other space but still connect it to where we're already at.

And so what that kind of looks like bringing it down to the studs and rebuilding it. Right. The EGP letter, we're wrapping that up. The reason we're wrapping it up was it wasn't very profitable. We just thought it was cool. Right. We thought it was cool to have a print Newsletter. There was like this novelty factor to it.

A lot of people liked it.

A lot of people liked the print newsletter. I personally liked getting the print newsletter. I reviewed them when they came to my house, and so there was a lot going for it, but it wasn't really making us money. It was kind of barely above break even every month, but it was quite a bit of time and effort and team members working on it and all that sort of stuff. So it just didn't make sense. And also with us kind of having an eye on the future, right, we're looking at blockchain technology. We're bringing on, like, futurists onto the show, things like that. And here we are sending direct snail mail to people on the other end. It just kind of felt like there was this weird dichotomy going on of like, we're one foot in the future, but one foot in the past. So, you know, we've done that. We've phased that part out. We've stripped down the business to where it's just me and Joe. We have no team members anymore. It's literally just us right now.

That was a big deal. And I don't think we've actually said that really clearly, but we. Unfortunately, I think it's the best for everyone. But we. We definitely had to let some folks go. And one of them, sue, our note taker. Absolutely fabulous human and an amazing note taker. I mean, she literally was running the show for us.

If you guys looking for a note taker, hit her up.

She is gold. So, yeah, go contact us. If you want her, contact Sue's. She's so cool. Love you, Sue. And Jacob was our head of content. And I mean, both these folks, I bet there's a future. We just reworking the situation here, you know, so Jacob was heading up all of the content, like, period. We'd record, send it to him, and he took care of it all. The audio editing for the podcast, publishing, YouTube editing, managing other editors, posting everything, the schedule, social media.

I honestly think that the day that we had to let those two go was the hardest day I've had in business yet.

Yeah, I know. No, I know. It was. It sucks. It's. I mean, yeah, I don't know what to say. And I know you. It was a very apparent, you know, I mean, it was tough on both of us, but I know, I know it really hits you hard. And it's never a fun thing at all for anyone. I mean, I've been there on that side. Same kind of situation almost exactly the same, actually. But it always happens. It always ends up better. Yeah. I mean, at least from my experience. And. And the cool thing that we, you know, being positioned in the way that we are here and knowing a lot of people is that we can help them out to get some gigs almost immediately. And we already. Already kind of did that, so. But more can come. So if you're looking for great content, head of content editor and just amazing manager, project manager type, and do that has a lot of leadership skills. Jacob. Jacob's the man. So reach out if you want his contact. He might not be available, because, I mean, that guy. So he's gold. So I hope he's available when and if we need him in the future. But again, love you, Jacob. You're a freaking rock star. And, I mean, dude, we worked with him since he was an apprentice.

Yeah.

He was working at a barbecue joint in Nashville and just didn't really know much. And it's been, what, over two years working with him and Sue? I think it was about two years as well.

Yeah. About the same time.

It's crazy. So it sucks. But you know what? It was. I think they understood. And, yeah, the fact that we actually went through with it just made sense for us to just like, okay, we need a reset here.

And so what that meant for our business was Joe and I just wanted to figure out how do we get as lean as possible financially. Right. How do we make sure that the Runway, the financial Runway we have lasts as long as we can? Right. We want the longest Runway possible. So that meant we. We pretty much got rid of all of our expenses. We. I think we canceled another fifteen hundred dollars a month and just, like, SAS tools, software stuff.

Yeah, for sure. And there was a lot of stuff we obviously weren't even using or just kind of ignoring. We're like, one day we'll use that. Oh, that's an extra hundred dollars. Oh, that's $200 a month.

Exactly.

And then you start doing the math. You're like, oh, wow.

So we cut all of that back. I took over audio editing again. That's literally what I went to college for. So I'm actually, like, going back and doing a lot of the audio editing again. Joe took over video editing, which is literally what he started in when he got into starting his own business was doing video editing. So Joe and I, we kind of had this. This pull to go back to our roots a little bit, because audio editing and video editing, it's a creative pursuit.

Right?

Like, we get into the audio and we're gonna go and find little ways to polish it up and add little Easter eggs into the content.

Oh, we are.

And stuff like that. So we've had that call, that drive, to like, let's get more of this creative stuff back on our plate. So now I'm doing the audio editing. Joe's doing the video editing. We cut out the notes and the action guide, and our business is just as lean as it possibly can be. We've got the building that we're in now, which we have six months left on our lease, and who knows if we're going to stay here or not. But at the end of the day, we just wanted to make sure that we were bare bones. There was no expenses on our business. So everything that we do from here on out is going to be.

It's on us.

Yeah, it's on us.

To labor love. I think we're working more, but I don't think that's going to last for too long because we're actively trimming a lot of other pieces of the business that aren't going to last in another month or two. Yeah, yeah. And we'll talk about what that transition on some of these other products look like, too. It's definitely a labor of love going back to our roots. And I think it's really cool because it allows us to look at pieces of our business that we weren't really looking at before. We were kind of, I want to say, ignoring it on purpose, but we definitely.

Well, we had team members that it was kind of their. Their responsibility to check in on things. So we just. A lot. There was a lot of things that we just weren't paying attention to anymore. And we've already learned some lessons with just having those people gone going, oh, this was another thing we didn't realize they were doing, and we got to make sure we do now, too.

Yeah. I mean, yeah, there's probably some more stuff that'll pop up, but it also told us, oh, wow, there's a lot of stuff that we didn't really need to be doing or they didn't need to be doing. So we're like, let's just cut that out.

So we're back down to bare bones, and we cut out the EGP letter. And also with Pod Hacker, Pod Hacker's the other one. There's gonna be some minor tweaks. I would say. Most Pod Hacker customers aren't gonna notice, like, a major difference other than the fact that there's some new faces involved.

It's fortunate that We've been in this podcasting community for, I would say about three, four years. We've been, like, hanging out with that crew and kind of creating more of a network outside of the Internet marketing space. And, you know, PodFest was a big reason for that. Chris Komitzos. What up, Crypto meets those, actually. And Adam, scheibly. So he's a guy who will be on the podcast soon. He has not been on yet, but he's. He's been in our communities and all that. And he has some amazing podcasts himself. He's at podcast business school. I think he's one of them.

That's his show. And then I think he's got a. Is his course called the Download Growth Club? Yeah, so he's got a course called the Download Growth Club, which teaches people how to grow the heck out of a podcast.

He has a new podcast, too. I'm gonna look up the name really fast.

And then we've got our Pod Hacker course, which is a course that teaches you how to grow and monetize a podcast. And we decided, you know what, let's just kind of merge together and create, like a super podcast course.

Team Bingo.

Right? So me, Joe, and Adam now are all gonna be merging the two courses into one mega podcast growth and monetization course.

Yeah. And the other podcast, I was gonna say that heads up. This is a newer one. It's called Podcast Launch Tips. So that's kind of like clips from it. Like, we're on the latest episode there, but just to get a taste of what Adam's got going on.

It's just the tips.

Just the tips. Yeah. So Adam dude's so damn cool. I mean, like, he calls us the Flo Bros. We call him Mr. Butter Voice. And you know why? When you hear him. But he's so. He's all about the community. He's deep entrenched in the growth hacking side of podcasting. He's been doing it a long time. He's a trainer. He came from the fitness field, so he just loves to train and work with people. And we're like, man, that's like the perfect person. We want to head up the pod hacker community with us. Kind of be like more advising of this. And this was always part of the roadmap.

And we'll still be part of the marketing team. Right. So we're going to be growing it and helping with a lot of the growth side. We're going to still be on some of the trainings. He actually does two a lot.

Three.

I Think three live calls a month at least.

I think he's like willing to even add more. So.

Yeah. So you know, the Pod Hacker lives are going to be taking over by Adam now. So he's gonna be doing the continuing on the live calls, but we're gonna be on some of the live calls. We're gonna be part of the marketing team and we're gonna be advisors behind the scene on Pod Hacker. But we're still gonna be involved in Pod Hacker. We're just kind of, we're creating the dream team of podcast training and we're gonna do a whole episode with Adam where we'll dig into our sort of action plan there with, you know, some podcast growth tips and stuff. Cause we gotta, we gotta get the tips.

Well, the tips, we gotta, we gotta share the tips too, right? We can't just keep em to ourselves. So those are the two products internally that we are one shut.

The membership is going to stay active though. So if you are a paying well, you're not subscribed anymore because we canceled you but kind of freak some people out. So we'll deal with that. Sorry if we scared you. It was actually kind of interesting. We had a lot of people write in almost immediately. They're like, I didn't want to cancel this. Reactivate me. I'm like, we can't because once.

There's nothing to reactivate actually.

So yeah, this is why we're doing this.

But you still get access that they've had.

They still get definitely. So that access will stay alive. And so if you're in there, awesome. If you're not, if you never joined that membership and like there's 400 plus notes, there's all these exclusive videos and cool content resources. You made it very easy to discover this content through your little sorter thing too. Great work, Matt. We'll probably launch that as a separate standalone thing that you can get access to if you didn't get the chance while it was live.

Yeah, you can get all the archives. We will sell the archives for anybody that wants it. And then.

So much value in there. Yeah.

And then with Pod Hacker, anybody that's listening to this, it's a POD Hacker customer. Your membership's just gonna get a whole hell of a lot better. I mean, pretty much you're gonna get more content. You're gonna get opportunities to join on more live calls and ask questions live.

And get more voices involved too. And that's what we've always wanted. It was the roadmap for Pod Hacker was not to just have us run the thing. And luckily Adam is. I mean, he's better than any buddy we're even imagining just for his skill set and what he's already doing.

Now that we have all of this free time and this additional Runway and not a lot of projects on our plates to be dealing with, what the hell are we gonna do with our time?

Well, let's talk about what we're probably not gonna be talking about on the show anymore. Cause I don't think we're really specific about that quite yet.

Marketing.

Yeah, we've talked about this a lot, but we love marketing. It's our roots.

I forgot. I'm trying not to cuss. You can bleep that.

Oh, it's on me now. Dang it. That means I need to find some sound effect and go blep. I'll make you sound like a ro or something.

Okay.

You know, like a doodle.

So it'll be like, what don't we want to do anymore? Marketing. Cockadoodle do.

Like, what did he say? Let's figure it out.

This is going to be interesting to hear the edited version of how this comes out.

I'm just creating myself more work. So the stuff we're not going to talk about, I mean, we're going to talk about marketing. Because let's be honest, all this is going to be marketing. Everything is marketing. But what you won't see on this show or hear in the show more often are things like the tactics that are about, like Facebook ads, Google Ads, sales tactics.

It's been done, it's there. The content is available for you right now to go. Listen to that. If we brought on another, like Facebook guru or SEO guru, they're going to kind of teach you the same stuff and maybe a different analogy.

Let's be honest, most of this stuff is gonna be like. Like we were talking to a buddy. I won't name his name because I don't know, but he's very savvy in the paid media. And he is like, come on. Everything's going to where you're pretty much gonna give them a card, your freaking credit card, tell em kind of what you wanna do, your budget, and they're just gonna run em for you.

Yeah. And they're gonna optimize for you.

Yeah.

Like, it's getting really frickin close.

And this is why we don't wanna sandbox. You know, there's a much bigger sandbox that is growing right now that we want to be a part of you. Like what I Did there? Yeah. You should go get some sandbox. Not financial advice. So it's a reference to crypto if you're not aware. But point being, I just love sand.

I'll just say that sand is.

Sand's great.

Sand's great.

You really like sand these days. I know. I just wanted to say the stuff that you're not going to see as much here and maybe some of the people that are trying to connect us with awesome people, like we're going to have to rework a lot of stuff like our Dream 100 and stuff like that. But like the coach types, leadership training, I mean it's all awesome and we've had it, you know, a lot of mindset stuff. I feel like that was a big season in our lives and it's fixed now.

We don't need it anymore.

Yeah, we're perfect. Obviously got that problem solved.

Next.

Next. It's all gonna creep in, I would imagine, but it's not gonna be focused on that. So saying all that, where are we going now? So the puck is going to fast in the direction of this new web and that's where we want to take you because it's exciting the hell out of us. It is. It's crazy. So like the last, I would say what, three months we've been kind of diving deeper into the crypto space again. It started back in 2011.

2011.

Yeah. I mean I think we've told the story before, but that's when we heard about bitcoin. It was at one late night in Austin, Texas at a cafe that I would never know where to find this cafe.

Denny's type place. But it wasn't a chain.

No, it was like some like, it was like a diner. It was legit. One in the morning. I think we're there to like three in the morning talking.

I know one of the people was Michael Taggart.

Yes.

The person that was with us and Michael Taggart, he was a younger dude.

And he was a. He was just friggin sharp and I'm sure he's still crushing it. I don't know his name. Maybe we'll meet him one day again. But they told us about bitcoin. This is in 2011.

He was mining it and he. And right at that time bitcoin was somewhere between one and two dollars a coin.

We could look it up. Yeah. But I would believe it's right around there. And they were explaining what this thing is, what cryptocurrencies are, what bitcoin is and how there's A finite amount of them and a lot of the tech on how to mine them and what rig you need and all this stuff. And we're just like, wow, this is really fascinating. I don't know what this means. And like, probably because it was 1am to 3am or it's like, I really wish it was probably fresher in the mind. Yeah. This is after like a traffic and conversion full day.

Yeah. And we'd probably been drinking, let's be honest.

Guaranteed. And yeah. But like, we were listening to this and we're like, this seems really important. It seems like we're on the inside scoop. And literally I'm actually getting flashbacks of like us walking out of that place right now and us saying that, like, this is something that most people don't know about. And, like, this is going to be huge. And we're just like, if we would.

Have just bought fricking 10 coins back then spent 20 bucks, it'd be worth $600,000 right now. We could have turned 20 bucks into $600,000.

That's me knocking my head against this microphone.

But if we were honest, it probably would have gone from like $2 to like $8. And we were like, holy crap.

Totally. You know, we totally.

Whatever. 4 extra money.

Can't think like that. But you're right. We would have done that because it was what, like four years later or something?

We. 2013.

Yeah. We had an office north of San Diego. Matt and I had this office monitor and we heard something about bitcoin. We're like, what's this bitcoin? What price is that at now? Because we heard it in the news. It was like 200ish bucks. And we're like, damn.

Yeah.

Yeah. We would have definitely sold before that.

And we set up. We literally had a monitor set up because that was when we really started to get into. It was 2013. And we had a monitor set up in our room that literally had the price chart of bitcoin. And we were just sitting there watching it because we're like, we're going to finally get in. As soon as it drops below 200, we're going to make a buy order. And we just sat there waiting for it to drop under 200. And it didn't.

It was probably like 205. That's how cheap we were. Back, like, little lower, Joe boy. Can't spend the five investment bucks. Yeah. But all that to say is the Trend continued until 2017.

Yeah.

And then we did jump in then that's when, like the Whole ico, like, initial coin offerings were hot. You know, you saw a lot of. There's a big bull run in the crypto market, and a lot of people are talking about it. And then a lot of people lost their shirts because there's a lot of stuff that tank as well. My stuff actually got stolen. I got hacked. I don't know. That, like, put me in a little weird headspace where I kind of, like, shoved my head into a hole and just kind of forgot about crypto. I was, like, doing these hackers, and that was dumb. But luckily for you, you held your money.

I stayed in.

It didn't get stolen.

Yeah, I stayed in and I was kind of passively keeping an eye on it. But it was the type of thing where I'd check in every, like, two months and go, well, it was bigger than it was last time I checked. Let it ride.

So she said, so fast track, what, like, four, five ish years later, now it's back. Like, it's been here the whole time. But now there's all these crazy utilities and things like NFTs that you've definitely been hearing in the news and media and whatever your friends telling you to get in and, like, they have stupid JPEGs.

Well, if you go back to our podcast in 2017, we were actually talking about it quite a bit. We had two episodes with Michael Taggart. I did an episode about Steemit at the time and how to earn cryptocurrency through blogging. We had Phil Towne on. We talked crypto with Phil Town. We had Jason Rotman on. We talked crypto with Jason Rotman. We had Michael Trainor on. We talked crypto with Michael Traynor. In 2017, we were really, really hot on crypto, but we were getting feedback from the audience of, like, you know, go back to the marketing stuff. I'm not that interested. So we kind of went, all right, our audience isn't that into this stuff. Let's pivot it back to just kind of sticking with the marketing tactics this time around. We're talking about this stuff, and everybody's ears are perking up, going, okay, I think it's legit now. Maybe we should pay attention.

Yeah. And I think it's just a different phase now. You know, now there is more things you can do with crypto. It's not just like you're betting on a coin and hoping it rises. There's a lot more stuff to understand now that's a lot more tangible and elements like NFTs and what can happen when you own one and the access it gives you and the ownership and the economies that are being created. And that's where it was just like, dude, we can't ignore this anymore. No, like this would be, this is almost like the other option.

It'd be irresponsible of us to ignore it.

And to everyone watching and listening to us, that's what I mean.

Irresponsible on, you know, on behalf of our audience.

Totally. Yeah. So it's like we can't let this one pass us again. Like, so that's why we saw this. We're like, it's a blue ocean right now for really everyone. It's so early. Like we had Joel Kahm on the podcast a couple months ago and he said like we just now entered the early adopter phase. And before that, you know, it was, it was like pre, earlier this year and he was talking mainly around like NFTs and stuff. But really if you think about crypto as a whole, when you understand it, like that's a lot of what's making up this whole thing now. And like the engineering are these NFTs and, and you know, there are still the coins to invest in all that, but there's a lot more utilities and things to understand. It's not just, hey, toss some money at bitcoin and let it ride and hodl.

Well, what really excites me about this is the NFT stuff is fun. It feels like a giant game trying to find which one's going to pop next, which ones are going to actually provide long term income and stuff. But NFTs still feel a little like gambling. It's kind of just like, it's fun, but you're always like, I might lose everything with this trade right here. What really, really excites me is two areas. DeFi decentralized finance and then crypto gaming. You know, we were hinting at sandbox, we won't go deeper. Look it up.

Yeah, it's interesting. Yeah, check it out. The sandbox.

Yeah. So those two worlds I'm really, really excited about defi crypto gaming and a little bit of the NFT stuff. It's like really those three buckets that excite me. But the defi stuff is like, this is like the world changing stuff. This is going to literally change the way the economy works when it comes to banking. If I had $1,000 and I put it into a savings account, my bank might give me a half a percent interest rate on it. So I earned $5. Right. Is that math right. $5 off my thousand dollar investment after.

A year sounds about right with that low percentage.

Yeah. Which doesn't even outpace inflation. Right. So the value, like, yes, I might have $105 now, but what used to, you know, what I used to be able to buy for a hundred dollars now cost me $107. Right. So like, I didn't outpace inflation with that money. Well, with Defi protocols, a lot of these protocols, you can put your money into these protocols, stake them, meaning you're providing liquidity for the protocols. We'll get into this in my future.

Episode if we're losing. You just hang on. This is part of the mental shift.

Just think of staking as like putting your money into something and then just saying, I'm not going to touch it for a while. So the company can use this as the company's liquidity.

So essentially, yeah, it's, it's investing in a project or a protocol. Protocol is basically a mechanism, but it's launched with a purpose on back of all these blockchains. All this technology won't have to go in there, but you're essentially putting up your money. And instead of you hear mining bitcoin and all that, well, you can also mine by putting up your money to a project that you believe in. It's just like people believing in bitcoin. That's why people had all these rigs to mine and spent a lot of money to do so. It's because they believe that thing would grow in value.

Yeah.

And there's a, you know, there's a whole mechanism. You could do the thing, same thing with your money, your dollars now with stuff like Defi.

Yeah, yeah. So, you know, pulling ourselves back out of the weeds, what that really means, like comparing it to the banking that you do, you could put $1,000 and stake it into a coin that you believe in. There's one called Anchor Protocol that you can look into if you'd like. And that'll earn you 20% on your money over the years. So you put that same thousand dollars in at the end of one year, that thousand dollars is, is worth $1,200.

Not guaranteed, not invested.

Yeah. I mean, these are the rates that the websites are stating. Right. So if you go to the website right now, Anchor will say, we'll get you a 20% return on your money. Right. So that's their words, not mine. That can fluctuate over time. But you know, you start to see this kind of stuff and the way that it's Working is when you put your money into a traditional bank. Right. You put your thousand dollars into the bank. The bank doesn't just go, okay, we're going to sit there, put it in a vault, and then when they come back and get it, we're going to pull it out of the vault and give them that thousand dollars. No, they take that money and they put it into investments. They lend it out for mortgages, they lend it out for small business loans. They lend it out with their credit cards. Right. They give that money out, they earn an interest rate on it anywhere from 3% for something like a mortgage, all the way up to 20% for like a credit card.

It's basically we're funding them to make more money off of our money.

Yeah. So they're making like 20% on that thousand dollars that I put in, and they're giving us back 0.05% in return. Right. Well, what these defi protocols are is there's no CEO, big head, big boss at the top of these things. So all of the money that they're like, you stake your money, they lend that money out. The money that comes back, the interest that comes back, instead of going to some sort of corporate bank account, it gets redistributed among all the people that put their money in.

Bingo. So, yeah, if you own. Yeah. If you've staked your cash, however much you put in there, well, you're going to get a percentage of that back in the form of an interest that now instead of. Yeah, the 0.5%. Because all that's going to probably 50% is to the leadership of, you know, let's call it bank of America or whatever, you know, and then the rest. The rest, it's barely given out to the people who've actually put their money into this bank. And it's probably paying to put their money into the bank, too. So it's like you dirty. But yeah, on this, it literally is cutting out the middleman. And without going super in the weeds, it's all managed by the blockchain and it's all written in code. Smart contracts that are written there, and it's publicly visible. And there's no person, one singular person that's in charge of this. If it's perfectly decentralized, there are some centralized elements, and there's always going to be an element of. And when we say centralized, that's something like a bank, I guess, or it could be like a YouTube, Google, Facebook.

Coinbase is centralized.

That too. Yeah. So that's like there's and I was reading like there's always going to be a need for those type of. Of businesses to operate off of that. But the whole value add here is that, you know, you can actually kind of leapfrog over that, you know, maybe get in through a centralized thing like Coinbase, but then quickly get decentralized.

Yeah.

And then start to reap some rewards because you're working with these kind of independent projects.

Yeah, yeah. And I mean, we're going to get way more into the weeds in future episodes with this stuff. The other thing I like is crypto gaming, which I'm not going to get into that right now. But just imagine a world where you can go and play a video game and they pay you to play the video game. Like that's kind of the world we're entering right now. Right. So between DeFi and video games, we're going to create all new just economies, all new careers, all new industries that people could go and make their money in. I guarantee you, 10 years from now, it's going to be a career path for kids to grow up playing video games that earn them money and then take the money that they're earning, stake them into DeFi protocols and earn interest off of the money that they're staking. And that's a career.

Just think about World of Warcraft. So if you've had kids or if you played World of Warcraft, you can build these characters with all these traits and things and people sell them on ebay and this is not on blockchain, but this just shows you that these things have real world value. So if you're investing your time or money, because some people can just leapfrog and just buy the thing and then grow it and maybe flip it or whatever, I've heard of people doing all sorts of stuff with that game, but now think of that. But on the blockchain and like things that are like a legit economy within a game and then sometimes those economies can actually be attached to multiple games. So you're bringing like a character to all these different things that are synced up because of this technology and you can make money off of it. Yeah, no, it's just one way.

To me, it's exciting. And we're going to go down a lot of these rabbit holes on the show and explain them in a little bit more depth and try to clarify them for you and in future episodes.

So what we're gonna do with this show, let's talk about what we're doing here because we're getting down the rabbit hole here already. Hustle and Flowchart's not going anywhere, so nothing's going to change in terms of where you listen to us. But we are partnering with network who is already deep into the NFT crypto space. They're called Lads City, L, A D, Z City.

I still don't actually know what it means or there's a meaning behind it. We should ask.

We will. Yeah. So, yeah, we don't know that, but if you check them out on YouTube, they have quite a following. And essentially we're going to be partnering with them. So our show is going to, like, one of our episodes in the week are going to be released on their network. It's also going to be on hustleandfluidchart tv, so you're not gonna miss anything. We are also gonna publish it on audio, like a day after. Cause it's gonna be a live stream on Mondays. It's gonna go live on Tuesday here. And then we'll still have a Thursday episode that will be likely kind of like a flex episode. It'll be us or it'll be maybe some creators. Cause we still want to bring in the YouTube creator side of things because it all blends. It's totally blended. This whole web3 thing is built by creators run by creators. And those are the people that are gonna make money too, and the community that's built around it. So we just figured, okay, this is gonna be a perfect little hybrid show here, and you're gonna see that change happening pretty dang quick.

Yeah, no, it's fun. The guys that are in this Lad City, one of them we actually go way back with. I mean, we've known him since probably 2011. And the funny thing is, we were watching the Lad City show and we didn't even realize it was our buddy because he didn't have a beard when we knew him. Now he has a beard. Like, we didn't realize the first, like, two times we watched the show, this was our buddy. And then when we realized it was him, we reached out to him and he's like, let's. Let's. Let's build the network together. Because, you know, we've done episodes in the past where we talked about how we want. We have aspirations to build a larger media brand. We want it to be similar to like a barstool sports for entrepreneurs. Right. Well, when we got to talking to these Lad City guys, they had the same aspirations.

They literally said bar stool sports.

Literally said, we want to be the bar stool sports of Web3 and crypto and stuff like that. We're like, let's just merge models.

We're your boys.

That's what we're trying to do. Right. So that barstool sports model where we have a whole bunch of different shows under one larger brand, and then we can pool sponsorships together and then, you know, we really good insights and intel about, like, you know, what cryptos to be checking out and stuff like that.

Yeah. And share it with everyone. So definitely check us out at Lads City. We're gonna link all this stuff up. So just know that we are combining with them because in our role here. And this is what we've always wanted to do anyway. And they're super stoked on this because we're filling a gap in this space is we've noticed that there's just not really a bridge to this space that easily walks people through or clearly walks them into this new ecosystem that's happening and being built in real time, but it's also tangible now, so you could do stuff with it. So we're gonna be the one to introduce new folks, newer folks or people that want to learn from experts and people who are just already doing cool stuff and can explain this better than us. So we're gonna be like the dummies in a way, but also bring our side of things to the show. I think it's gonna be fun. What else, Matt, what have we got to cover before?

I think we kind of covered everything. I'm reading our notes here. Lad City. They got an amazing community. We got a discord. They've got a great discord. I rec. Recommend being in both. They may merge over time. We're not sure.

Yeah. But, yeah, either way. I mean, keep a lookout because I'll just read my notes as I wrote it here.

Yeah, read it exactly. Because I like that I said, if.

You are even a smidgen interested in where marketing and business will be mainstream in three to five years, don't go anywhere. It's not mainstream yet, so you still have time. Even Joel Calm said it on the podcast a few months ago. That's why we're doing this. And we figured now's the time to do it.

If you want to be an early adopter, too. Come along for the ride.

This is your chance. So keep watching us here, listening. Wherever you're at. Hustleandflowchart TV is where you're gonna see all the new episodes. Go join us on the Discord. That's. We're not really doing the Facebook thing anymore. Obvious reasons still there. If you want, if you like it, use it. We'll pop in every now and then. But go find us on discord. It's @hustleandflowchart. Discord, hustleandflowchart.com. there's an important piece there.

If you ignore the dot com, it won't work.

But go find us on Discord. If you don't know what Discord is, just do it anyway. You'll learn quick. It's basically another messaging platform, but way cooler. And there's a lot of people in there already. So yeah, you'll find some folks you probably know.

Cool.

If you don't know, you'll meet them.

Yeah.

Last thing, what else? Easy webinar. So webinars, they'll still apply over here?

Absolutely.

Everyone needs marketing and to present that stuff with a nice system. So easy.

Do a webinar coming up in the near future. Probably will actually crypto trading bot stuff. But I won't, I won't talk too much about it yet.

Yeah, just stay along with us here.

I have a hard time time leaving all the good news out.

We do a lot, we talk about a lot. So go check out EZ Webinar. They've been sponsoring this show for a long time. Good reason, because a lot of folks have been loving it. So go get the tool if you have not used it. If you're doing webinars or been thinking about using webinars in your marketing, go to EasyWebinar.com hustle and get a fatty discount. They're good people, so we recommend them.

Highly recommended five star review.

Thank you. If you're on YouTube, we'd love, well, anywhere. We always want to hear from you and Discord's great, but go through it on one of these centralized channels so we can read it on the, you know, help us out on the YouTube because we do want to grow this puppy and have more people follow along with us because we honestly think this is doing a service for a lot of people that don't even realize what's coming yet. Our job is to open up everyone's eyes to this and it's fun. So go, go. Leave a comment, go rate, review, subscribe, whatever you got to do. Pass this around to your friend, your mom, your dad, whoever wants to.

All the friends you have that are like talking about crypto. But don't listen to our show, go to them and be like, hey, I got the new show. You got to start listening to my boys.

Yeah. Good episode. Hope you enjoyed it. See you next time. Bye.

It.