The Crypto inquisitions

First full disclosure #1: I’m not a “crypto” guy. I have many problems with the whole concept of crypto, admittedly have not studied it much in depth, and other than a brief attempt at investing in it a few years ago have not done anything with it, often mock those who are obsessed with it, and am overall a big skeptic of it. Which brings me to full disclosure #2: I’ve also been profiting from it too. How? Because someone who very much is a crypto guy, who has financed entire software platforms with crypto, and now spends much of his time trading crypto and loving every minute of it… is my business partner in the software space Troy Broussard. And the way I’ve been profiting from crypto without making a single trade myself is, he takes a portion of our software sales each month and uses a clever “formula” he’s invented for trading crypto to bring in some steady, and very reliable results for our companies. Which brings me to the here and now: Since I know jack about crypto, with less than an infantile grasp on the subject, I recently decided to interview him on it all, what he does (so I can at least know how I am benefiting from it…) and how others on my list can use his same methods to potentially do the same. None of this is investment or financial advice. Just me doing an aggressive “inquisition” on Troy about what he does. And yes before you ask: There is an offer if you’re so inclined, to get his coaching on this. And if you do, and if you use my affiliate link, you’ll get in at a fat discount. But forget about that for now. First, here’s part one of our interview: BEN SETTLE: Before we begin let me be very, very, very blunt about something. I am not, never really have been, I hope to be though, a “crypto” guy. We're going to be talking to Troy Broussard in a second. And he'll be the first to tell you, he spent years always telling me about crypto and I'm always just rolling my eyes and it's not my thing. It doesn't interest me anymore. I think it was 2018, when I had a Coinbase account and all that. And this is when Bitcoin was at $4,000 and it was just starting to rapidly go up. And even I could tell, "Oh yeah, this is a good speculative investment." And I had about, I don't know how many, maybe $50,000, $60,000 set aside to invest in that. And Coinbase could not for some reason hook up to my bank account. So I sat there and watched it go up to $20,000 from $4,000 this whole time. And I didn't know jack about what other wallets you could do and all that. But the whole thing just turned me sour. So I just checked out of it all together. Now that said, I've also seen guys like Troy and other people too, take it and use it wisely and understand what it is and what it isn't. And with Troy especially, he's found a way of doing investing very wisely. And nothing's 100% obviously, but I would say it seems very safe. And apparently, I've been doing this whether I like it or not because in one of our jointly owned companies, he's been like: “Look, Ben, I'm going to invest some of this money into crypto using my methodology, and we're going to... It's like found money. When we make money, we can pay bonuses and all this with the gains and not have to always take out of the savings or budget.” So that's one of many, many ways. I'm already doing this whether I like it or not. And I want to talk to Troy about this. Now, I'm coming at this very, very skeptically. I have not looked at anything he’s sent me about all this. Just yesterday he is like, “Ben, did you watch the video I posted?” So I don't know jack about this. I'm coming in like everyone else. I am completely at an infantile stage of knowledge when it comes to this. I want to learn this from the ground up, what Troy does, how he does it. I want to know what he's been doing for me because I'm a Guinea pig for him right now. I sent him some money so he could show me how this thing works, and he's doing it. And I'm a case study. That's why he's doing it. He's not a charity. He's just doing this for me because I'm a good case study and I'm so skeptical. And we're going to talk about this. So Troy, thank you for being here. Tell us who you are and your background in both science and business because I think they both come into play with this. TROY BROUSSARD: Yeah. Well thanks Ben for having me. I appreciate it. This is fun for me, especially with somebody that is so adamantly against. It makes it all the more fun for me because we've had our conversations back and forth. But my background started out in the Navy in nuclear engineering as a submarine in the Navy. And did their electrical engineering program, and then into the program with the Navy. And then came out and went through a Rozzi scholarship into computer science and electrical engineering in college. And all of that is just kind of relevant in the sense that it just... I have this math and engineering type of a background, and that comes into play pretty heavily. So does my business background, which as you know, I was a marketing automation specialist, still am. And that a lot of that went into the founding of our Berserk Mail Platform was all based on my history with marketing automation and your history as being a daily emailer. So the marketing automation side, along with the mathematical and engineering background is something that really heavily goes into everything that we're doing now with crypto, because I've kind of built my entire methodology around that history. And as you know, I teach really long term strategy, how to go deep with things. I focus on iteration and strategy. And so all of that really, really plays so well into the crypto space. And I've been an investor with crypto since Bitcoin. Back in 2014, I started just playing around with it. I really wish I would've been serious about it back then, and then we wouldn't even have to have this talk then. I'd just be retired on a beach somewhere. But I started buying it when it was like $110 in 2014, 2015 range and playing around. But I never got really that serious until it kind of started hitting the $1000 to 3000 range in 2017, which sounds like the story that you were talking about at Coinbase that had to have been fourth quarter of 2017 because that's when Bitcoin really made a massive surge from the $3000 range all the way up to $20,000. And so that sounds like that was that same kind of timeframe. And that's where I went really heavy with crypto. And from that period forward, I've been really a convert of the technology and big proponent of it. But what's interesting is, I have done a lot of trading in the past with mutual funds and investment accounts and stocks and bonds and all of that kind of stuff. And so I'm not really a fanboy of crypto. I'm just somebody that really understands the opportunity, I think. And that's where I kind of bring a different perspective, I'd say, Ben. BEN SETTLE: I'm going to give some more context here. Troy was putting way more hours than I was into the software ventures. I'm the marketing side, I get my stuff done. But I wouldn't know anything about the operation side or any of that if I wanted to, it wouldn't matter. And he was spending, I don't know, 50, 60, 70, 80, maybe more hours a week in and out, just going at it, grinding for the longest time, for at least a year and a half straight. And suddenly, I don't know if I inspired this or not, Troy, when I just checked out to start writing fiction or if you just were going to do it anyway, it doesn't really matter. And suddenly, he starts doing this crypto thing and the countenance on this guy… just in his voice, he went from super intense, stressed, had to deal with horse crap all day… to just having the time of his life. You genuinely sound happy these days. TROY BROUSSARD: Yeah. BEN SETTLE: And Stefania hears your polo sometimes, and she's like, "Wow, he sounds like a totally different guy." So this isn't just some biz opp thing. This is just fun for you. And it just happens to be something that works, is what it sounds like. TROY BROUSSARD: Yeah, it's interesting you bring it up that way because I literally had a client yesterday pay me for some time. And discussing what she could do. And I just use the exact story you just said of, look, I've been grinding for so long. And one of the things been like, I'm always been a bit of a polymath. I've got skills in all different areas. And unfortunately, most people think that that's a blessing. And yes, there are aspects of it that are blessing, but it's also a curse because when you can do a whole bunch of different things, you do a whole bunch of different things, and you're not focused. And like you said, I just got in a grind with software. It's been about a five year grind for me. And I just got so burned out that I just said, "You know what? I'm just going to go do something for fun and I don't really care what the end result is. It's just going to be something for fun for me." And I've always enjoyed crypto. And so I went deep, deep, deep down the rabbit hole on this. And I don't want to say this to try to throw numbers out or whatever, but I'm saying it because I want people to understand how deep down the rabbit hole I went. And this is not how much money I have or how much money I made or anything, but trading volume, I did over six and a half million dollars of trading volume in about 75 days. So when I say I went deep, I did go really deep. Now, trading volume doesn't mean that I had that much money in the bank or anything else. It just means that, if you are making a thousand dollars trade and you buy and then you sell, well that's $2,000 of volume. And I was doing a lot of leverage trading, which would multiply that by 10. So $1000 trade might become a $10,000 buy and a $10,000 sell, and that's 20,000 in volume. So I don't want to over-inflate it or over exaggerate it. But I do want people to know that when I say I went deep. I went frigging deep, right? And I just kind of checked out. And what you said about how you retreat into your own mind and away from planet Earth when you go into writing your fiction books, I'm kind of the same way in this. And so, interestingly enough, my advice to the client that hired me, my advice to her was to have fun. Because when you're having fun, everything just kind of rolls, and you start to do things creatively and you have a confidence and a sense of enjoyment out of it that really alters the playing field. So yeah, I think that's a really good analogy. BEN SETTLE: I've already established that I'm a total skeptic with this. And I am. I've seen you do stuff, but one of the reasons I haven't done a lot of research at all is because I want to approach this call like like a skeptic, because I'm a skeptic. TROY BROUSSARD: Yeah. BEN SETTLE: And I've been thinking lately about how you've been kind of formulating a business relationship, maybe even a friendship. I don't know how deep it's got with Dan Kennedy, and if anybody's going to be a skeptic, it sounds like he is. I mean, this guy still only uses a fax machine. He made you get a fax machine just to communicate with him. He doesn't even use the computer or email or a mobile phone. But now, what do you tell guys, not just me, but guys like him who actually laughed at some of this stuff. He respects what you're doing. But he thinks the whole thing is just a scam, is what it sounded like. What do you tell guys like that? TROY BROUSSARD: Yeah, it's funny because he critiqued my sales copy and said the sales copy was genius. And that was really cool to hear that from Dan Kennedy. And he said that I did one thing in the sales copy he wished he had done in all of his financial sales letters that he had done over the years. So that was pretty cool. But then he giveth and he taketh away. After he paid me a bunch of compliments he just basically said that he thought the whole thing was for and he would never do anything with crypto. So it's kind of funny. But there's a few different reasons I'm going to talk to you about on this because there's a few things that people don't really understand about crypto so I want to go into that. But the high level answer is, I've talked about this many times, where you can't predict the future, but you can see the future. And what do I mean by that? Well, if you look at somebody like Gary V. Gary Vaynerchuk is famous or infamous for his investing in bleeding edge technology, even advancing of bleeding edge. He invests in it before it ever gets bleeding. I think he's still hunting it, but he tries to predict the future and he puts $10,000 here and $100,000 there, and all these different little startups trying to predict the future. Now, every once in a while, he strikes gold. Then when he does, it's so early in that he gets massive returns out of it. But he really is just kind of betting. He's so early as an angel investor that you really don't have anything yet. And he's just betting at that point, gambling on it. That's trying to predict the future, okay? But you can see the future. And if you follow what I mean by that, it's look at things like, you can go all the way back to the baby bells with the phone system. You can look at the cable system, cable TV structure, you can look at streaming TV now in the evolution. You can even look at movie distribution from the days of VHS, to laser discs, to DVDs, to streaming, right? All of these things, you can see the future. There's only one thing you really have to look at. And if you get nothing out of this whole conversation, this applies to so much broader scope than crypto. It's just not even funny. As I just said, everything example I just gave you had nothing to do with crypto. You can apply this same philosophy to smartphone usage or even the internet itself. And what I'm talking about is adoption rate. Everything comes down to adoption rate. Adoption rate is how fast a technology is being used and growing. How fast are people adopting that technology? And when you look at the adoption rate, you can see the future Once the adoption rate starts to get momentum and critical mass, there's no turning it back. You don't have to be a rocket scientist to know that it's going to go up. When Steve Jobs got on stage and introduced the first iPhone, you did not have to be a rocket scientist to know that smartphones were here to stay. And if you looked at the adoption rate from the time he introduced through today, it's insane. The internet, prior to crypto, the internet was the fastest adopting technology in the history of mankind. Today, crypto has shattered the adoption rate of the internet. Right now, today, crypto's adoption rate is growing like 165% compared to 85% on the internet. There is no technology in the history of mankind that has been adopted and growing as fast as crypto. And so when you set everything else aside, and I agree with a lot of the criticism of crypto by the way, and I'll talk about that, but if you throw all that out the window, it doesn't matter. The adoption rate says everything, right? You go back to the VHS and the beta. The beta max was far technically advanced over VHS. It didn't matter because VHS had the adoption rate. It just didn't matter. It had already won the race before the beta max even entered. And that's the way it is with crypto. So I know that people have a love hate relationship with crypto, and that's totally fine. You can hate on it all you want and still become a millionaire off of it. So that's kind of the basic, Ben. And I'm going to go into some of the other things. But before I do, I'll pause there because it really, truly is all about adoption rate to me. BEN SETTLE: Oh, that's really, really interesting to hear. So getting into the nuts and bolts of what Troy Broussard does, what makes your way of investing different? And I know you're applying science and you're applying math and it's not wizardry or anything like that. And I know it's very steady, it's not like, "Oh, Ben, I made this trade and I made $10,000 yesterday." It's not like that. It’s not Wolf of Wall Street exaggerations. TROY BROUSSARD: Yeah. BEN SETTLE: But it is very intriguing, the way you've explained it to me. Can you relay that to everybody? === So ends part one. I’ll be sending out part two tomorrow. In the meantime if you want more info on Troy’s coaching and get a fat discount on it should you decide to partake of it, simply use my affiliate link below and sign up by Friday 11/11 at midnight EST: [https∶//www.EmailPlayers.com/crypto]( Ben Settle This email was sent by Ben Settle as owner of Settle, LLC. Copyright © 2022 Settle, LLC. All Rights Reserved. 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