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We never say this before. Max, the one to watch for a good scream with Cricket. Yeah! Phone plan, streams, and standard definition. Programming subject to change. Fees, terms, and restrictions apply. Visit cricketwireless.com for details. We had some time to hang out at Podcast Movement. He was there, actually. I met your father as well at his Radical Finance Breakfast.

And with that, he has the Radical Personal Finance Show. He is a speaker at the upcoming FinCon event. And let's take it away, Joshua. All right. As we start, I'm going to be looking at my phone. So, quick Periscope lesson. A couple of interesting ways you could do it.

I was going to give this to somebody back there. But what's happening is -- are you streaming? So, our meeting here has been streamed. I'll do that in just a second. So, to begin with, I want to get an idea. And I know you raised your hands earlier, but you've also been sitting for an hour.

So, if you've had a podcast for more than five years, do me a favor and stand up and remain standing. Okay. Four years. Stand up and remain standing. What? Okay. Cool. So, there's two four-years. Fitness guys are standing all the time. Three years. Anyone who's had a podcast for three years?

Two years or more. We've got Alex Harris. We've got Kingsley. We've got Donald. Two -- remain standing. All right. One year or more. Awesome. Okay. If you have a podcast now, but -- oops, you remain standing. Everyone stay standing. If you have a podcast now, but it's been out for less than a year, go ahead and stand up.

Perfect. Cool. So, this gives me a good idea. And everybody else now, go ahead and stand up, please. This is my little secret way to get you up on your feet. Shake it out for a second. I'm going to do a quick thing on my telephone. Get some blood back in your legs.

So, JD here has been periscoping the -- go ahead and have a seat now, if you feel rejuvenated enough. JD has been periscoping our meeting. And so, what I'm going to do here is I'm going to -- I just put out an announcement to my tribe, if we use the popular social media name.

And so, I'm going to pull up his live stream here on Periscope. And he's got my session here. And I'm going to click "Share Broadcast" on Twitter. And then that is going to send it over to Twitter. And so, then hopefully throughout here, some of the people that are in my tribe can go ahead and follow that, and they can see me speak.

So, my -- on Periscope, or he is @JDMcClintock, M-C-C-L-I-N-T-O-C-K. I am @JoshuaSheets, spelled S-H-E-A-T-S. It's a little weird to see myself here on Periscope Live. That's kind of freaky. No, I'm not streaming. I just wanted to do a quick -- do a retweet. Also, before I start my talk, I just want to thank one person who hasn't been thanked yet.

This sitting here in the front row is Sean Smith. Please stand up and wave. Sean was kind enough to bring his equipment here. Sean is a professional musician and also a podcast teacher. So, he was kind enough to bring his equipment, and that's why we have a really fancy microphone and all.

If you all are interested in either doing mobile interviews or if you have not yet started a podcast, Sean has a teaching site where he -- it's called The Mobile Pro. His website is themobilepro.net. And Sean travels all around the world. His wife is from Guatemala. They go down to Guatemala quite a bit.

And then also he's a professional musician. So, he's had to figure out how he can podcast from basically anywhere, whether it's sitting on a mountain in Guatemala or whether it's from a hotel room. And so he's developed some equipment to do that. And his work has been very useful to me, helping me to develop a professional mobile interview setup at Podcast Movement.

I did 17 interviews while I was there, which the last couple weeks I haven't been able to get in front of the mic. So, guess what? Interview, interview, interview. And on Monday I'm going up to North Carolina for a conference up there, and I planned it for XYPN and FinCon.

And I plan to be doing a bunch of mobile interviews there. So, it's due to Sean's work. So, check out themobilepro.net if you don't know anything about it. And just give him a round of applause. Thank him for his sound system here. No, thank you. If I get the clicker, I'll get all nervous.

I'm going to put my phone in airplane mode. And done. If you're speaking, always remove your distractions. Also, I have a prepared presentation, but as I was on my way down here this evening, I was just thinking about my thoughts. And I'm going to share with you a little bit about my journey.

I host a show called Radical Personal Finance. But while I was on my way down here, I was just reflecting on you all, the group of people that I expected to be here. And I was thinking about what an amazing time this is to be alive. So, I want to talk for just a moment about that before I get into my prepared presentation.

The time that we live in is truly extraordinary in the sense of the incredible freedom that we have. And the democratization of information. If you study history just a little bit, what you quickly find is that it has not always been the way it is now. The story of humanity is in many ways a story of struggle.

A story of oppression. And oppression comes in many ways. It comes from oppressing all kinds of freedoms. That's why some of the basic freedoms that we hear and know of a lot in the United States of America, you study a little history and all of a sudden you find out, wow, this was a radical concept.

But especially with regard to communication and information. And there's a long arc of history, but the basic arc of history has been control over communication by the powers that be. That changed with the invention of the internet. Over the last 20 years, we've seen freedom proliferate across the globe in an incredible way.

And that has some really dramatic and not always fun impacts. But even today with the fact that every single one of you in here is now a content creator. You all have a Twitter account, or you can. You all have a Facebook account, or you can. And that's what's influencing society.

Now when you take those platforms, those are valuable, but you add to that blogging. And now you add to that the fact that every single person in this room can have and host and deliver an audio podcast or a video podcast, which can reach every part of the world with no cost to the people that are there.

And there are billions and billions of people who day by day get one of these things. And this changes lives throughout the world. These things are amazing. When you add on to that periscope, it's amazing. Think about the fact that everywhere in the world, anyone who has a smartphone, enough bandwidth to do it, can do a live stream.

And this is having dramatic effects on our society. Now freedom is scary because people often don't know what to do with it. I'm kind of weird. I'm a libertarian. And I'm optimistic about it. Don't be scared of freedom, but use it for good. And we have a tremendous opportunity.

As I was thinking about my remarks, I'm going to tell you my story because I hope it will help and try to share with you some lessons that I believe can be beneficial to you. But I was thinking I don't want to talk so much about my story. I want to share with you and hope that it's your story.

The problem that I have with podcasting and the way that it's talked about in today's world is many times people look at it and they talk about it as if it's all about who's got the biggest show or who's got the most followers or who's got all that. That's cool.

That's awesome. And I've got -- my show's done well, and I really enjoy doing it. But just because -- it's not the only reason to do a show. Think about the underlying effect of freedom and the impact that you can have, and it will, I think, put us in the right frame of mind.

So with that, let's get going. What are the rules of podcasting? I put this out on the Facebook group, and if we had more time, I would take it from you all. But I think our Facebook illustrations here are representative. There are many rules of podcasting that we're all taught.

Those of you who don't have a show and those of you who've launched a show in the last year, which is the majority of us, you will gravitate naturally to about, say, 5 to 10 people who are leaders in the teaching podcasting space. And if you were to go through and to study the information that these people have, you would find that there are a lot of rules, rules such as doing show notes, making sure that you have really great show notes.

Rules such as outlining your show, as Alex mentioned, and having a good script for your guests. Rules like focusing on -- some people say focus on iTunes. It's all about new and noteworthy. You've got to get into new and noteworthy right in the beginning. Do a lot of research on your guests before the obvious and humanize the conversation.

Have great-looking artwork so that your show can get featured in iTunes and so that people are attracted to click on it. Have three or four episodes in the can before you launch so that you can kind of make that push and get everybody in there and get launched in the rankings.

Stay consistent. This is the biggest one, right, because consistency is key, right? Patty talks about that. You've got to be consistent. You've got to publish. If you're going to publish a weekly show or a monthly show, you've got to do it every single time or making sure that you've got really great audio quality.

Now, here's the question. What's missing from those rules? A lot of times what's actually missing is the show. I didn't know that Aisha Tyler said this at podcast moment, but I guess I'm in good -- I didn't listen to her talk, but I guess I'm in good company. But I guess if she said create the show that you want to listen to, that's what I say.

Create the show that you want to listen to because here's the reality. The majority of you that start podcasts and the majority that you have podcasts are going to have very few listeners. There's a simple, normal Pareto distribution to podcast listeners. So the majority of us going into that, we're not going to have 10,000 listeners to our show.

We're simply not. My show will never have a million listeners. That's a cool goal, but it's not going to happen. So what's going to keep us going through that period of time? I say creating the show that you actually want to listen to because there are many benefits to it.

So I'm going to tell you my story, and in doing so, I'm going to share with you a bunch of numbers. And I'm doing this because when I started podcasting, nobody shared numbers. And I didn't know what are numbers like. I had no idea. Now, here's the first caveat that you need to know when people talk about numbers.

Those of you who watched Rob Walsh's presentation at Libsyn, this was a slide directly from his slide deck, and this was how he started his presentation. Everybody lies about their numbers. So start with that as a background. I'm not going to lie to you here, but you might as well guess that I am lying.

I'm not because I'm showing my numbers, but everybody lies about numbers. So you have to filter every advice that you hear from people through the recognition and the fact that everyone is lying about their numbers. So I'm going to show you numbers. It's not to kind of, I guess, build my ego.

It's to try to help you get an idea. I'm going to show you what the beginning of my show is like and tell you the story. So far, as of today, this is my graph of my total number of downloads for my show from Libsyn. And we're going to talk about a lot of dates, but if you look at this, the total number up at the top there is 1,282,296 downloads total over time.

Now, the first thing in looking at numbers that you should know is you should know how to filter numbers and how to take impressive-sounding numbers like 1,282,000 downloads, and you should have an idea and figure out, "Wait a second. What does that actually mean?" Because it's a big number, but you don't know what it means.

This is a chart that says "downloads by day," and any of you that have your hosting service -- I use Libsyn, many of us do. They're quite excellent as far as an audio hosting solution. This is a "downloads by day." So each and every one of those bars there on the chart is a specific download for that day.

Now, the key that you want to look into when you're looking at numbers is you want to look at the actual numbers per episode. So this is an example of some of my recent episodes. If you look at the dates, I chose as an example for this last August, the month that was actually -- we just finished.

So you can see there on the bottom, August 7th, and the next one up, August 11th, August 12th, August 12th, August 25th, 27th, and you can read from there. Now, the key to notice, there are eight episodes that I published in August. This is actually about half of my normal workflow, which is part of the story.

I generally publish about 15 to 20 episodes per month. My show, I target a daily show, Monday through Friday, which I see the looks. You'll understand why in just a moment. But if you want to actually understand a little bit about podcast listenership, what you want to look at is the total downloads for a specific episode.

So these are the downloads for my show for the month of August. And so you can see they range from around 4,000 to the highest was 8,800 downloads. That 8,800 one was an interview that I did at Podcast Movement with a man named Cliff Ravenscraft, who's one of the podcast coaches, fairly well-known and well-respected.

And so it was a great interview. He really liked it. He shared it. And so that resulted in a spike on that listenership. This is about normal for me as far as the current range, 4,000 to 5,000 downloads per episode at this point in my show's growth. The total there, so the reason I'm doing this is to teach you how to interpret numbers.

The total is 44,315. What you want to look at is the average, not so much the daily average, although that's exciting when you get a nice spike, but each episode because that will indicate to some degree your listenership. Here's another slide I stole from Rob's presentation. Rob runs Libsyn, or he's involved with Libsyn.

So they host thousands and thousands of podcasts from the big ones to the little ones. And these are the actual statistics for actual shows. What you see here in June 2015 that the average, the mean, is 2,150 downloads per episode, but the median, which means 50% of podcasts are more than this and 50% of podcasts are less than this, the median is 158 downloads per episode.

You can read the remaining numbers. If you want to get into the top 10%, you need about 4,400 downloads per episode. The top 1% is over 50,000 downloads per episode. So as with everything in life, wealth, income disparity, all this stuff is driven by a Pareto principle. The vast majority have very little and a very tiny minority have a lot.

At this point in time, radical personal finances rated right around between 9% and 5%. I'd say the top basically 8% of podcast audiences. So, again, hopefully that doesn't stroke my ego, but it's to say I'm going to share with you some ideas because what I've done goes against much of the advice that you hear.

But as the numbers illustrate, it's worked for me, and I believe I have an idea of why it's worked for me. So where did it start? I come from a background of being a financial planner. Now, as a financial planner, one of the challenges, there's lots of financial media that's out there.

So I used to listen to people on the radio. There's Dave Ramsey on radio. There's Suze Orman on TV. There are other podcasters, and I always enjoyed listening to podcasts, but I got so frustrated over time with the really bad financial advice that I heard people give. And it really frustrated me.

It's like, "Man, somebody who actually has a clue about finance should create a show." And I could not find any financial podcast that I actually liked listening to. I couldn't find one. And so I thought about it, and I thought about it, and I thought about it. And I said, "Well, finally, okay, I'm going to go ahead and create a show." So I sat down, and on July 15, 2013, I launched my first show.

A few days before that, I had my little $10 audio recorder that you all know what great audio quality. A little $10 audio recorder that came with my Dragon NaturallySpeaking program on my computer. I hit record, and I sat down in the middle of my bed. I figured I should have some good audio quality, so I figured maybe all this fabric around here would help absorb it.

So I sat in the middle of my bed, and I just held it, and I started talking. And I talked for about 30, 45 minutes, something like that. And then I kind of wrapped up, and I did the typical first episode of here's-- and basically, if you go and listen to the first episode of Radical Personal Finance, what you hear is people say-- sorry, is me saying, "I can't stand any of the financial podcasts that exist, so I'm going to share with you some of those things." Now, in that first--I'm going to share with you my ideas of what a podcast should be like.

In that first episode, I didn't say anything more than my name. I didn't say I was a financial planner. I didn't say anything like that. And the reason I didn't is because when you work in the financial advice business, especially with a securities license, all of your public-facing communication is considered to be marketing.

And so I couldn't legally go out there and just say, "Hey, I'm going to tell the world all of my ideas." So I had done a lot of preparation for this, and this kept me from doing a show for a long time. I had spoken to some attorneys. I had planned, and I said, "Okay, I think if I just do it anonymously-- I don't tell anyone I'm a financial planner--then I'll be okay." So I launched the show, and when I launched the show-- here are the first five episodes of the show at this point in time, but the key is-- here's the very first one, and you can see the date that I launched it, July 15.

I decided that I wanted to produce some episodes. I produced one on the 15th, one on the 16th, one on the 18th, one on the 19th, one on the 27th, and one on the 29th. Now, the key was, why was I doing that? Well, I was just excited about it.

Now, I've never liked getting up early. Maybe some of you are early risers. Hal can have his miracle morning, but for me, especially now, I'm going to sleep. But I was so excited about my podcast, I found myself waking up at 4 a.m. every day, excited to get out of bed and go work on my show.

For any of you, I'm not a techie guy, and so I'm watching YouTube tutorials on how to set stuff up, trying to figure out how to launch a blog. But my key was, I just said, "Okay, I'm going to create the show that I want to hear." So I ignored most of the advice that I was receiving, and I just said, "I'm going to create the show that I want." That was why I was doing it as much as possible.

If we go back to this page here, and you look at the advice here, here's the advice I ignored. I didn't do any of the stuff that's in red. The only thing that I did was I actually focused on--I went ahead and got some artwork, and I asked a friend of mine who was a graphic designer to design a logo for me, and I was consistent.

But I didn't have a publishing schedule. I was just publishing episodes as quickly as I could because I was excited about the content. I'll get back to that at the end of the presentation because it's a little unusual for people to be able to produce episodes as frequently as that.

My episodes are not for the faint of heart. My average episode is about 75 minutes long, and my longest is 3 1/2 hours. My shortest is, I don't know, 15, 20 minutes, but on average, an hour and a half a day. So what did I actually do? I focused on deep content.

I focused on lots of content, as in length of shows and number of episodes and a variety of content. Now that was what I wanted because I'm kind of a hardcore guy. If I get into something, I'm like, "I want to get into it." So as we'll come to in a moment, I have a master's degree in financial planning.

I really, really like the technical side. But I also have this strange fascination with the weird stuff. My buddy JD here, he knows me for a long time. I'm obsessed with the idea of living in your car. So at Podcast Movement 2014, not this last year, but 2014, I slept in my car for five days all the way out there and then five days at the conference because I was curious what it would be like to live in your car.

I needed to save money, which we'll get to in a moment. So I'm obsessed with things like that, just these weird things. So if you were to go through and look at my topic list, I've done shows on trust planning for multimillion-dollar trusts. Let's break apart Mitt Romney's $100 million trust and I'll explain to you what an intentionally defective grantor-retained annuity trust is and why he has one and all that.

And I've also done shows on what are the financial lessons we can learn from vagabonds and hobos and dumpster divers. Like that appeals to me. So like I said, it's not for the faint of heart. But what I found was that there was a desire there, that I wasn't the only one.

And again, my deal was I'm going to make a show that I actually want to do. So let's go through the beginning. This is the first few days. And so what you want to pay attention to is the dates at the bottom, 7/15 to 7/20. This was the first five days.

And in that period of time, I think I published four shows. But you could see on the live version, but 10/15 downloads, something like that. And then I had left town. I had published several episodes. And all of a sudden, you know, in that time in your podcasting career, you're popping open your stats three times a day.

Let's see if another ten people have listened. It's really exciting. Like think about that. In this room, there's probably 50 people. Think about the fact that on the third day I had 20 downloads. How exciting is that? That's super exciting. But then I popped it open and all of a sudden I see this big jump.

And I was like, whoa, what happened? I didn't have a clue what had actually happened. So I did some research and I found out that one of my favorite financial books is a book called "Early Retirement Extreme." And I had sat down and done a book review of that topic.

Now, my book review basically consisted of about two and a half hours of me sitting in the middle of my bed practically reading pages and pages from the book because I thought it was so good and I wanted people to know the content. That was my book review. But I got back and I found out that the author of the book linked to my podcast episode.

And later he wrote me a note and he said, "That was an awesome book review." He said, "I hate it when people do short book reviews. So I really appreciated the fact that you read this large amount of content." Probably was totally breaking every copyright law, but for this author, he loved it.

And it was what he was looking for. Later he came back on the show and it's the second most popular episode I've done. And we did a three and a half hour interview that for his tribe is probably still today, I would say, it's probably the best interview of him out there on the internet.

And my audience loved it. His audience loved it. And I really enjoyed spending time with him and talking to him. If you go back and look at the start, and so this is the first ten episodes, and you count the dates from the 15th of July to the 5th of August.

There was a total of 24 days and I published ten episodes. And in that period of time, the downloads grew. And all of a sudden, other people started to do it. And I got the first couple of emails because of the type of content that I was doing. People were saying, "Wow, this is really good." And then this happened.

So after ten episodes, after three weeks of creating my show, I needed to go ahead and notify the compliance department of my company. So I sent the information out and they said, "You're doing what?" I said, "Well, listen, I talked to the attorneys in the home office. I had done this." And they said, "Shut it down." I said, "No, I really love doing this." And they said, "Shut it down." I said, "No, no, no, shut it down.

Either you're done here, you're fired." And I spent five years building a financial planning practice there. Either you're done here or shut the show down. So at this point in time, this was August of 2013. My wife and I were expecting our first baby in September. We had just moved into a new house.

I had put the majority of our savings into a down payment on that house, which had pretty much wiped out a lot of our liquid cash reserves. I was the sole income earner for our household. And so I'm saying, "What do I do? What on earth do I do?" So obviously I shut it down.

So I pulled all the files, which is what those days there of zeros are. And from August 5th of that year, when I shut the show down, to July 1, 2014, I tried to figure out what to do. For the first six months, I tried to think through and say, "Well, wait a second.

Do I actually want to do this? I'm not sure that I actually want to do this." Then I realized after that six months, like, "Yeah, I really do." I had never in my life, even though I'd looked for years to try to figure out what is it that I love to do, I'd never found something that just got me out of bed at four in the morning.

And I'd work from 4 a.m. till about 7.30 or 8, have breakfast with my family, go off work from 9 to 5. I'd have the best days at my financial planning firm that I'd ever had. Then I'd come home, have dinner with my family. I'd be back on 7 to 10, 7 to 11, like, figuring out WordPress.

It's terrible. I hate WordPress. But I was excited about it. I was like, "Wow, this is awesome." And I started to receive a couple of emails from listeners that said, "Man, your stuff is great." And that was what kept me going. For the first six months, I struggled. Then in January, I decided, "You know what?

I'm going to create this podcast." But I don't know how to do it because saying I'm going to make a living on a podcast is like saying I'm going to make a fortune as a best-selling author or as a best-selling recording artist. Is it theoretically possible? Yes. Is it realistically possible?

No. And if it is possible, it's unpredictable. You can't force it. You can't prove it. So what on earth do I do? So here I am. I've done well in my firm. But if I leave my firm, I walk away from the business I've spent five years doing. I walk away from all my renewals, all my passive income that I spent years building up.

And I just wiped out all my savings with buying this big house and having a baby and a bunch of other things associated with it. So I remember in those early days just a total desperation. I just – on that interview with Cliff Ravenscraft, I just told him about this.

It was a pretty cool moment. It was in Fort Worth, Texas at the convention center. And Sean actually – everyone had gone, and Cliff and I were there talking in the hallway and we're doing the interview. And Sean was there because he was manning his booth. He has a picture of about this time.

And I told him about this email that I had sent him. If you look at the date, it's August 5, 2013. And I said, "I need your help and advice, and I don't know who else to trust." Because on the day that I had to shut my show down, I went home and I cried.

And I had no idea. It was like this thing that I love was ripped from me. And I just went home absolutely sobbing. And it was a tough day. And my wife was – she was trying to be supportive. But like what do you do when your husband – this is the thing that I was excited to do.

And the question, if you focus on the first thing that I wanted to say, it's like there's got to be a way to make money off of this podcast thing. But nobody – I don't have what other people have, and I can't – how do I do it? So my first question there, I said, "Cliff, does a well-done, interesting, daily financial podcast have the potential to generate maybe $3,000 of income within 12 to 24 months if I hammer it and work my butt off on it?" That was the question that I wrote him.

Down at the bottom, I reiterated. I said, "So can a well-done daily podcast create revenue within a year or two?" You see by my emails I don't do anything short. So in fact, my talk was 30 minutes. But since the others left some time, if you all are okay, I'm going to just – I'm going to – okay.

You let me know if it gets boring. I promise it will keep it interesting. But this is the problems that we go through. So Cliff didn't respond right away, and I was devastated. I didn't know what to do. It was a rough few weeks. About a month later, he released this episode on his show, episode 324, "Podcasting as an Occupation, How Long Before My Podcast Will Start Generating Income?" And then you can see down here right at the top of his show notes, he references that one person sent me an email asking, "Does a well-done, interesting daily financial podcast have the potential to generate perhaps $3,000 a monthly income?" So he did a whole show about it, and his answer was basically, well, theoretically, you might make some money off of podcasts, but it's not going to work very well quickly.

And so – but by that time I had made my decision. I listened to it, but I was already planning. So August 5th, 2013 to July 1, 2014 was me planning. And so for the first six months I decided, okay, I want to do this. Then in January I decided, okay, I'm going to do this.

But what's my solution? Well, I realized I had to leave the financial planning industry in order to be able to do the public-facing media. So I realized, well, I just need to get a different job. So if I get any kind of job, I need some dead-end, bird-brain job that I can just do and leaves there.

I don't want anything where it's a career. I just want to go and do some work, make enough money to keep my family and food and a roof over our head, and I'll do my show at night. So, okay, eight hours at this job, eight hours at the podcast, and I'll do it.

So I searched all kinds of things. I thought about selling cars. I actually went and delivered pizzas for a week because I had heard you could make $20 an hour delivering pizzas. I did the math. I said I can -- during that time when I'm not actually driving, I listen to podcasts.

I'm like, okay, it will work great. You can't make $20 an hour delivering pizzas. I'm a financial planner, so I did a per-hour income breakdown. It's not $20. $11.13 if you're curious. But I figured out a plan. And on July 1, 2014, I launched the show again. My plan, by the way, was just by pressing on doors.

I told everyone I was leaving. I was looking. I was applying for jobs. I was like, there's something. And then after leaving, I was able to negotiate a contract in the financial planning industry with me working 24 hours a week for somebody who was in charge of a financial planning office with me supporting their younger reps and teaching them financial planning.

And that was just enough money for me to cover my expenses without dipping into savings. And dipping into savings part is important because I did have some savings. But with podcasting, was it going to be 10 years before I make money or 10 days? Some people seem -- oh, I'm making millions in the first month.

It's all lies. You just don't see the first month. But I said -- so I wasn't willing to spend savings. I didn't know if I needed $200,000 saved or if I needed $20,000 saved. And so I said I'll just earn my way through. So I launched on July 1, 2014.

And you can see the start here for the first month. Every day, five days a week, I put out a show. And at first it was slow. 200 -- we hit 200 on the second day because of the previous year where there had been some shows around. So as soon as my show launched, people were like, wow, Radical Personal Finance is back in some of the personal finance forums and whatnot.

And since then, over the last year, if you look from July 1, 2014 to July 1, 2015, you can see there the total daily downloads. And the total downloads was about just over a million downloads, which was pretty cool. At the end, I was like, wow, it would be cool for a million downloads.

But I didn't have any way to affect it. But it wound up being a million downloads for the first year full-time. I published 211 episodes during that year. And so the average per episode comes out to be 4,807. So what did I do? Well, I already mentioned the first three.

But for the first year, I focused exclusively on quality of delivery and then learning how to do better interviews. And I just focused exclusively on my message. And here was my theory. There's a lot of things you can do. And the challenge with building a business is it's easy to get distracted by everything else.

The first thing that business owners usually do, entrepreneurs, when they start a business, they go out, they start printing business cards. They go out and they start buying office furniture and they're measuring their walls to figure out where all the trophies are going to go. Cut that stuff out and go sell.

Thing one of a business is sell. In my case, it was create something. And my idea was the Internet should work. The Internet should work. And so my plan was I focused just on these five things, deep content, lots of it, a tremendous variety, which appeals to me. I can't talk about finance for an hour a day, five days a week unless there's some fun to it.

It's boring. But some of it's boring. But we need some of that. And then also trying to learn to become a better broadcaster and also to become a better interviewer. Now, I couldn't really find much as far as options for that. So I just tried to listen to my show and think, was this a show that I would listen to?

Or is this a show or is that annoying me? Ah, there's the verbal crutches. That's bad pacing. Oh, Joshua, you're rambling. If you look through my reviews, there's 30, 40 reviews that say, Joshua, you ramble too much. Okay, whatever. I'll learn. And so I learned, okay, I need to do a better job with my show notes, my preplanning so that I ramble less, so that I'm staying on target and on focus.

And I've gotten better. Over the last year, I've gotten better. But I ignored everything else. Alex Harris is about to cry. You want to see my website? For a year, it looked like this. What is this, 2012 theme, the basic theme? I put a banner up and that was it.

There wasn't a tag. You know you're supposed to build an e-mail list. Mine was broken for seven months. Terrible planning. Okay, yeah, see, I can see the shocked expressions. It was broken. I didn't know how to fix it. But I just kept trucking forward, trucking forward, trucking forward. Because here is my theory.

If I created the best audio podcast and the best content that would appeal to the people that were a good fit for it, they would find it and they would tell their friends. And the internet should work. And that started to happen. So if you go out and search some personal finance forums, you'll find oftentimes my show is referenced as resources.

Oh, Joshua Sheets from Radical Personal Finance did a show on this. And I just figured everyone else will do it. My job is just to focus on content. I made some mistakes. One of the interesting things, a few of you would like to know, as time was going on -- here's Joshua, not a techie, I'm trying to figure out how do I build things.

On November 10, I deleted all of my subscribers, which was a challenge. Here's an e-mail from Rob Walsh telling me my problem. What I had done was I was redirecting my feed from delivering it with WordPress for you techies to the Libsyn feed. And I found -- all of a sudden everything stopped.

I was like, what happened? So Rob Walsh got the pleasure of a couple days later saying, "Based on your old stats, you're looking at around 1,500, 1,800 people that are currently subscribed to the wrong RSS feed," which was a dead feed. So this was -- the most interesting thing was about this, and my lesson is keep pressing forward, because that actually happened.

If you look here, on November 11, 2014, for my 100th episode, I planned to launch a monetization strategy. I planned to launch a membership program. So notice carefully these dates. On November 11, I launched episode 100, and on November 10, I had deleted all of my iTunes subscribers, which is, for any podcaster, the majority of subscribers.

So what's the lesson? Keep pressing forward. Of course, it's hardcore. I launched my membership program with a two-hour podcast episode telling my subscribers what I was doing and why. So a little bit different. That's not generally how you web gurus would recommend launching a program, right? But it worked.

And over the course of about two months, I signed up about 80 members at $10 a month. I didn't know what I was doing, and I told them, I said, "Well, I'll start a membership site, and you all can support me there, and I'll deliver additional content." But the problem was that after I was every day doing these shows -- it's not easy to do a show every single day, right?

It's not easy. But I'm always feeling guilty, like I need to be creating a product, I need to be creating a product. And finally, after a couple of months, I said, "This is not working. I need people to send me money for the show that I'm already creating." And so I canceled the membership site.

I pulled it back. I made some adjustments to that. And I launched a Patreon page, and I said, "Hey, I need your help." And so this is the current Patreon page where people have the opportunity voluntarily without me saying where they can actually send me money. And at the moment right now, there's 226 individual people -- sorry, it's 225 because I have a fake Patreon account where I send myself $1 a month just so I can keep track of everything.

There are 225 people who send me a total of $2,600 per month and one cent minus the dollar that I send myself. So you do the math on that. Now, the key with the Patreon page is when you focus on this number, it's easy to look at this and lose sight of it.

I'm not going to talk extensively about Patreon. I could do a whole training course on it. But Patreon is probably not the right thing for the vast majority of shows. But for my show, I was convinced it was a good place to start. And so I focused on that.

But what it actually means, if you zoom in on those numbers as a financial planner, here's what this means to me. $2,600 a month is not insubstantial, but I like to look at things and play with numbers. And so I immediately annualize that. It comes out to $31,200 a year.

Now, there are some fees that get pulled off of that, a few hundred dollars a month that Patreon pulls aside off of that. And then I obviously have business expenses, so my Libsyn hosting, my WordPress, all that. I'm just talking gross revenue. So my actual net profit from radical personal finance is under $2,000 a month at this point in time.

But I'm just going to use $2,600 because it's simpler. In financial planning, there's a little trick we call the 4% rule. And the idea behind the 4% rule is that if you have a lump sum of money, so if I were doing retirement planning for you, Joshua, I got a million dollars, and we said, "How much money can you live on or how much can you pull off that portfolio into perpetuity assuming certain"--or for at least 30 years, we want to get technical-- "assuming certain constraints, average market returns, things like that?" And the answer is about 4%.

So every million dollars that you have gives you an income of about $40,000 if you're 65 years old and trying to plan to 95. So there's a useful thing that you can do, which I do, because my number one financial goal is financial independence. That's what many of my listeners are, is how can I be in a position where I'm working because I want to, because I have to as quickly as possible?

And I teach people how to do that within 10 years or less. But the key is take all your monthly expenses, multiply it by 300, and that's the lump sum of money that you need in order to support yourself purely off of the income from your investments into perpetuity.

Just a good round number. And so what this actually means, if I take my monthly--as an example, $2,000 a month times 300, if your monthly expenses were $2,000 a month, you need $300,000 in investments to make you that money. Do the math on if you spend $15,000 a month, good for you.

You need a little bit more. You do the math. Just multiply monthly expenses times 300. What that means for me is that over the course of the last year, the way that I think about it is I've built a $780,000 asset. So I haven't made a ton of money over the last year, and I have three months now, but I've built an almost $1 million asset.

And the reason is because I've created income without any geographic or time-of-day restrictions, doing what I love and something that I believe that the world needs. And so for me, that's a big deal. I can do my show anywhere in the world, any time of day, and that opens up huge possibilities.

My wife and I have a little baby girl. She's two and a half months old, and poor little thing has been suffering from colic extraordinarily. She's really been suffering. So she sleeps about 10-minute naps, and she basically needs to be held all day. Well, I've done--I don't know. You saw my August.

I only published eight shows in August versus my normal 15 to 20. So that's the result of me spending time with my little girl with colic. So that's pretty cool when you can still have a business that works in those periods of time. And so for me to be able to, in a year, create the equivalent of a $780,000 asset-- excuse me, two years if you want to be technical--but a year and a half of hard work, it's a little faster than saying, "Okay, I'm going to go and earn $200,000 as a financial planner, and then I'm going to pull off $50,000," and then say, "Okay, you get the math.

You get the idea." And I'm convinced that radical personal finance is something that I would do if I were financially independent because I love to do it. Now, I don't love to do it five days a week, so I probably wouldn't do it five days a week, but I'd still do it two days a week because it's exciting to me, and I really love to do it.

The key is that money is not the only benefit. I could make a list of other things that have happened. I've met a great new friend. Some of you met him last time, John McBride, one of the guys who's here with me. Great new friend. One of the now best friends that my wife and I have lives near me.

Met him through the podcast. I've had people send me all kinds of things. I had a listener last night offer to send me 15,000 Marriott Rewards points because he didn't want me sleeping in my car to go to another conference. And I told him I'd already bought my hotel for FinCon, and I said, "I'm going to stay at a hotel.

Don't worry, and I'll use those points and take my wife out for the weekend. She needs a break." Money is not the only benefit. And so I chose what I chose as far as the diligence because I want my show to be the product. That's different than most of you.

So I could go through and do a case study, but I won't. But money and direct monetization from a podcast is only one benefit. And I've pursued that strategy because that was what I wanted to do. I wanted to just create the show. But that's not the only reason to podcast.

And my thing is get clear on what your reason to podcast is and pursue that. Now, the big question that everyone has would be, "Can you do this?" What do you think the answer is? Can you guys do the same thing that I've done? I heard a resounding yes.

I would say probably not. And I'm sorry to burst your bubble, but we've got to be realistic about things. And here's the biggest problem that you get into this world. We all look at people and we say, "Well, I'm going to be just like that person." Look, Pat Flynn or John Lee Dumas.

I didn't know who they were when I started a podcast. I never listened to their shows, and all of a sudden everyone's like, "I don't know who they are." I still don't listen to their shows. Some of Pat Flynn's episodes I have because I've enjoyed some of his interviews and I've learned something.

But the point is there's only one Pat Flynn. There's only one John Lee Dumas. And there's only one Joshua Sheets. And realistically, it's not realistic that everybody in here can do what I've done. Here are the actual numbers. Here are the actual numbers. This is what people's podcasts are doing.

Now, I'm sorry to bring a downer. I'll take it up in just a second. But I do want to point out that there's some stuff that you never see. When you hear the overnight get-rich-quick story, there's a lot of stuff that you don't actually know. So here's some things that I have that makes my show of interest to the people who listen.

Number one, I started reading finance books when I was about 12 years old. I should have been out playing football. I wasn't. I was inside reading books about money because I wanted to be rich. And so that's 18 years of reading. I read a lot and I read fast.

So I've accumulated a little bit of knowledge. Hundreds, I would probably say more than 1,000, but hundreds at least of books read. Also, in addition to that, I've actually formally studied financial planning for at least hundreds. I put thousands. That's probably an exaggeration. But at least 1,000 hours of formal financial planning study.

Here's the evidence for that. If you were to look at my business card, this is what my business card says. Now, if you were a financial planner, you would know what those numbers are, but no one else does. But basically, each of those is in many ways equivalent to a master's degree in my field of interest and in my field of study.

So they're not master's degrees. They're formal professional certifications. But in many ways, each of them is a number of courses and a lot of study. So I have actually studied a lot about the formal field of financial planning. So I can converse on a lot of topics that many people can't.

In addition, I have six years of formal financial planning experience, which means that I've sat face-to-face with over 1,000 people and talked to them about their money. When I graduated from college, I wanted to start a financial blog. And I would sit down and I would try to write and I'd try to write, and nothing worked.

After five years of financial planning, I'd met with so many people that I had a totally different perspective. You get a perspective face-to-face with people that you don't get from reading personal finance books. So when I talk about money, I come from the side of having done it, and that makes a difference in what I'm able to talk about.

In addition to that, I'd always worked on my public speaking skills. I'd done – I went through Toastmasters programs. I spent years in there. I did competitions. I won several competitions. So to sit down and create a speech every day, it wasn't the first time that I did it.

I had done it a lot of times, and I had years of pent-up information. So for me to sit down and create an hour podcast is not that difficult. So the question, can you do this? The answer is still probably not. But what can you do? And to me, that's the key for us to focus on.

I'm never going to be a horse jockey. It's not going to happen, right? So it's stupid for me to sit around beating my head against the wall, visualizing and telling affirmations to myself, "I'm going to be a horse jockey." That is stupid. I might have some ability to be a bouncer.

If I pumped iron a little bit more into something, you get my point. We all have certain things that we can do. So my question is, what are the things that you could do that are different? We don't need any more interview shows with just interviewing people and going after the same 15 people.

It's done. It's saturated. At this point, I actually have to apologize because I'm running interviews for this week and next week. I apologize every day. I'm like, "Guys, Radical Personal Finance is not just an interview show, but I can't record any shows. I've got these 20 interviews lined up, so I'm just going to release them all to you every day so you have something to listen to." But I'm not interested in many more interview shows.

They're out there. What can you do that's different? What can you do that's better? I saw Donald Kelly be the emcee at a podcast movement. I couldn't believe it. I get scared speaking in public. I get nervous. I had to go to the bathroom like four times. I'm sweating here.

You can see that. I get nervous about it, but I still work at it because it's important to me. But I watch Donald on stage, and as an emcee, he has the ability to express himself in ways that I don't do. I'm like Mr. Buttoned-Up Financial Planner. It's the first time I've ever given a talk and not a suit.

But I looked at it. I was like, "Wow, I would love to know what are the things that Donald did that contributed to his being able to put himself out there on stage in a way that was incredibly engaging because he sold it." I said, "Wow, I would love to be able to do that." That's a podcast I would listen to.

I don't want to hear interviews with people. I mean, fine if it works in, but I'm interested in niche things like that. Now, that kind of show is never going to have a million listeners, but ten of the right ones, and dude, you'd get gigs all over the place if that were what you wanted to do.

There are tons of other benefits to podcasting that aren't just money. Money is one thing. I've learned something, and thankfully at this point in time, I finished my contract. At this point in time, radical personal finance is my deal, and I'm 100% in on it. My house is on the market right now, so I don't have to deal with that thing.

I moved my family in a rental apartment to cut my expenses even lower so that I could do it. I'm going to get all that money out of the house, and it's all going right into the business. Now, because I'm 100% in, because the future and the opportunity of radical personal finance is huge.

But from the beginning, my personal commitment to myself was I said, "I'm going to do 1,000 episodes of radical personal finance if nobody listens." You know what? Thankfully, some people are listening, but I would have followed through. I think I would have. You never know if you actually follow.

I hope that I would have followed through because from this perspective, 230-something episodes in, from this perspective, the person who's gained the most has been me. That's the deal. The person who's gained the most has been me. Now, don't be stupid and ignore all the advice just for the fun of ignoring it.

This stuff is really important. After 10 episodes, when I was convinced I wanted to do it, I went out and I got rid of this, and I bought a $400, $350 microphone, and I bought a mixer, and I bought all the gear that I needed. So now the audio quality is better.

Audio matters. But if you're not going to follow through, why spend hundreds of dollars on a mic? Pull out your iPhone, record the first 10 episodes of your show, the first five, and listen to them and ask yourself, "Would I listen to that?" If not, hit delete, work on some more ideas, and then do it again.

But the key is don't think about that advice until you've first established what do you do better than anybody else and where can you compete, and then focus on getting better. Because at this point in time, I'm listening to—I'm not a techie, but I go and I listen to Ray Ortega's podcast, Helper, and talk about compression because I didn't know what compression was.

So I said, "I got to go study." You can't be stupid and not study. But don't wrap yourself up in spending all kinds of time studying until you've gotten something done. So I mean it. If you haven't launched a show, which was half the room here, pull out your phone, hit voice record, record an episode, and then listen to it and say, "Would I listen to that?" Now, here's the deal.

Your hands are going to be shaking. You're going to be sweating. It's not going to work. You're going to have to stop and rerecord six times. Get that out of the way with and start, and then tweak as things go on. Just as a quick, I guess, sales pitch on the benefits of podcasting for me, this is just the beginning.

Over the last 200-something episodes, I've clarified a lot of the thoughts that are in my mind, and that's led to some pretty cool opportunities. Number one, it's built a platform where I'm here standing in front of you all, and because of this, other cool things will happen. Next week at those two conferences, last year I went, stayed in my car because I didn't want to spend the money on the hotel room.

And so I went, and I spent all my money on the ticket to get there, make sure my family could still eat while I was gone. But then this year I come back as a speaker, and so things start to work. Now, they're not paying me. They're just covering my conference fees, but that saves me $800.

But next year they'll pay me, and things go on. Well, that starts, that works because I sat down and recorded the show. Now, some people have been faster. Some people have been slower. I have never been able to figure out how to predict quick success. It's never worked. I don't know how to predict going viral.

Not a single one of my episodes has ever gone viral. I was in New and Noteworthy for eight weeks. Didn't make a bit of difference. None of that mattered. I don't know of any listeners that found me because of any of that stuff that anyone teaches. I don't know how people find me.

I just figured, well, if I put it out there, people will find it. And the key is I can predict slow and steady. I can show up and do the work. It's like with sales. I come from sales. Ten prospective clients, one client. The key is not to focus on the one.

You don't know which one of the ten is going to work. You focus on the ten. Now, the other cool thing is I'll just tell you, as a podcast today, the opportunity exists to start with a podcast as a platform. I don't enjoy writing, but I'm a verbal learner, so I speak easily and I learn through speaking.

So, with Radical Personal Finance as the basis, I've got all kinds of other strategies and other things I can do. I've created an outline of a book by talking on the mic for an hour and a half per day, clarifying some of my ideas. And this next month, it was supposed to be this month, but my little girl got in the way of that.

It's all right. Next month, I'm going to sit down and I'm going to write the book that I have in my head that's different than any other financial book that's out there. But I couldn't do it if I hadn't spent hours and hours on a microphone talking out my ideas.

And the cool thing is Patreon is not the magic. It's just the start. And just as an example here, a few months ago, I was sitting down, and I turned 30 a couple months ago. And I sat down with my notebook and I said, "Let's figure out what would be a reasonable approach to make a million bucks gross income from the platform of Radical Personal Finance." And I sat down and I wrote out 10 different business sectors, each of which could easily make $100,000 of gross income.

And I broke them down into numbers. So, okay, if I were going to do a coaching and consulting program and I were going to sell a $2,000 package, 50 a year, four clients per month, there's $100,000 of income. You can see the numbers. You can see the different things.

Will I do all 10 of these? I don't know. But I'm knocking them off one at a time. So it's just the start. The podcast can be just the start. So for me, I wanted to start with Patreon. At the moment, I'm bringing on advertisers and affiliates. But I couldn't have done it without my listeners just sending me the emails and sending me the things.

I thought about giving you guys a bunch of emails and showing you some of the feedback. It's incredible when people start to send you emails. My favorite one, just as an example, still the biggest, but I had a listener that sent me an email and said, "Joshua, because of you and the content on your podcast, today is my wife's last day at work.

Because by listening and implementing what you taught us, we found $30,000 a year of savings from her not working, which allows her to stay home. And we're going to be better off and have a much better lifestyle and be home with the kids," which is what she wanted to do.

I've got a bunch of those stories. People have moved states. People have started businesses. $30,000 a year. I wouldn't trade that for all the money on a monthly basis because think about that. Every city I go to, practically, it feels like there's somebody there. There's somebody that I can connect with.

It's really, really cool all over the world. So there's benefits to podcasting that go far beyond just money. What can you do today? Get busy and start. Do as much as you're able to do. That's not going to mean following what Joshua's done. I want to give you a realistic understanding.

One calendar year, 211 episodes, 75 minutes each on average. That's 264 hours of content, 5.07 hours per week of published content. I have no idea how long I actually spent working on each of those episodes, but my best guess would be maybe six hours of work per show. My longest show prep, I spent 18 hours prepping for one show.

That's, I think, my record. Shortest is interviews where you kind of show up and do a little bit of work. Interviews are easy to do. So if we just guess six hours of work, that's 1,266 hours of work over that year, which is 24.3 hours per week of just prepping for recording and publishing the show, plus everything else.

So, yes, in case you were wondering, I am tired. But it is working. And it can work if you understand what your unique ability is and you sketch out the plan for yourself. Got a few minutes for questions or I can wrap up. But that's what I wanted to share with you all.

Thank you for your attention. It's 846. Anybody have any questions that I can answer? I'll take a few minutes of questions and then we'll wrap up and get to the networking. Any questions? Sean. >> Joshua, how do you keep so motivated? I know you're very self-motivated. Do you have a mastermind group, do you have a network of other people that you can share with to encourage your growth?

>> I try to -- no. I have looked for -- I have a couple people that have been extremely helpful to me. One of them was a listener to my show. His name is Rick Sigmund. And he is a listener of my show. And one of the things that was cool, he wrote me an e-mail and said I wanted to invite you on my show and he said I want to do some shows with you.

I said okay, I'll come on your show and do an interview. He said we should talk. We talked on the phone. He said we should talk. I don't know why he did it but he took me under his wing. Kingsley knows. He's a friend of Kingsley's. We started talking every Friday for an hour or so.

And he's been a huge help. He's been a huge help. And out of those conversations, a few weeks ago, we were talking. He and his wife were selling their house and I was sending them information on the California real estate market. And on Friday afternoon, I was like, man, I really don't like owning a house.

I really want to rent my -- I want to go move into a rental apartment and couldn't find anything. And after that, on that Friday afternoon call, I said I'm going to look again. So I started looking for rentals. And long story short was right after podcast movement, we decided on the Tuesday that we were going to sell our house.

And then three weeks later we had our house on the market, which was -- or we were out of it. And then five weeks later the house was on the market. So that came out of a conversation. I've looked for coaches. I've looked for people. I've looked for coaches.

I've talked to podcast coaches. None of them -- excuse me. None of them get me and none of them get my show. And so the first advice they gave us, well, you should do a 30-minute show once per week. You should do an hour-long show. You shouldn't go beyond this.

You shouldn't have a three-hour show and a 30-minute show. I don't know about you all. I only listen to one short podcast. If me, if I'm going to listen to a podcast, it might as well be a couple hours. I don't want to be sitting there like constantly going to new episodes.

And for me, I don't care how long your show is. The longest podcast episode I've ever listened to was 19 hours. Okay? It's a podcast called The Peace Revolution. Their average -- it took me a couple weeks to listen to it -- or a week or two to listen to it.

But their average episode length is like six hours long. And now there are podcasts out there that are five minutes. Don't tell me we're at the beginning stages of a new technology. Don't tell me that there are rules. It's absurd. It's like thinking there's rules on TV. No, there are formats that people come to expect, and you can't violate those.

But that 19-hour episode, I loved listening to every single minute of that. And it was perfect for that type of content. Other questions? Thank you all for your appreciation. Should we get Alex? All right. Hey, parents, join the LA Kings on Saturday, November 25th, for an unforgettable kids' day presented by Pear Deck.

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