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Hey, it's progress report time. A look inside the last year of side Hustle Nation Projects, Experiments, Successes, Failures, Tools, Tactics, Travels and Trials. I'm your host Nick Loper, wishing you a very merry Christmas and a happy new year. Let's start with the podcast. The side Hustle show has been a bright spot for me this year. We crossed 700 episodes, maintained the six episodes a month publishing calendar that started as an experiment last year. As you probably heard, the ad sales network Yap Media, Young and Profiting has done a bang up job of selling out all the available inventory and then some. And in a year where the website income from affiliate partnerships and display ad revenue was down pretty significantly, I was really grateful for that. So to give a sense of scale for the show in the name of transparency, the show is reaching around 220 230,000 downloads a month or an estimated 100,000 unique devices which is an approximation of audience size, which is kind of crazy. Imagine standing at the 50 yard line in front of a stadium of 100,000 people. And that's pretty nerve wracking. And it's also a responsibility that I don't take lightly, like trying to source compelling and legit side Hustle stories and pulling out helpful insights and advice from guests and from the hundreds of hours of audio in the archives too. So there have been a few minor changes on the production side this year. So I'm still using Riverside to record all the remote interviews and then I mark up the transcript with sections to trim for the editor. Hey, where. Where did this go? Off the rails or what? You know, which questions just didn't really land. And what has changed is first of all the input. So I got a new mic a couple months ago, this fancy Shure SM 7DB. I think it's a that was a switch from the HIL PR40 that had powered the show for the previous 400 episodes. I don't know if you can tell the difference, but it was advertised as being better at cutting out background noise and room reverb and all that. And it requires less equipment so there's less stuff on the desk. Desk now anyway. So on occasion on the production side I will use this custom Claude project that I built to help out with editing suggestions. So what I did was I fed in a bunch of before and after transcripts to give it an idea of how the side Hustle show sausage was made. And it still sometimes has a hard time with those transcription files because they can be like 30 pages long for an hour long interview. And we don't always agree on what to keep and what to toss. Me and Claude don't, but it probably speeds up the process a little bit, at least to let me quickly flag sections the AI didn't like. And my prompt is something like, hey, you know, we just recorded this episode. I'd like you to provide some editing suggestions based on the training material. Keep an eye out for sections that are long winded, that are repetitive, that are off topic, or that, you know, take a while to get to the true answer or something like that. And so it comes back with its editing suggestions. Then what's been a bigger time SA is for my show notes writer. Instead of summarizing the entire episode manually like we've done for years and years and years, she can now use Claude to get a pretty solid summary of the conversation and then just edit and format adding the images and the links instead of starting from scratch. Another post production change is recording a separate intro for the video version of the podcast. This was a tip I picked up from Whitney Bonds and Chad Carson, who both do far better on YouTube than I do for their interview content. So trying to create a more stupid sizzle reel, you know, YouTube hookier style kind of intro that's specific to that platform. And then also for YouTube. As the podcasting landscape continues to feel the pull of a video, the plan is to begin selling sponsorships as both audio and video placements. I believe YouTube is introducing a dynamic ad insertion feature similar to what we have on Megaphone for the audio side. So that'll be an exciting experiment in 2026, because up until now I've only ever used just YouTube's like built in ad program. And I think YouTube is probably the best platform for audience growth right now, at least for me. As a long form podcaster, it was kind of weird, kind of surprising. But over the summer, over the stretch of like two weeks, I had a handful of people ask me, you know, what I did? And so I told them about the show. They said, oh, that sounds cool, that sounds great, I'll check it out. And then like four out of five of them opened up YouTube to find the show instead of a podcast app. And I was like, that was really surprising to me. And maybe telling about the future of podcasting if four out of five people immediately thought to go to YouTube first. Where in my head I'm still questioning for interview content specifically, is anybody really sitting there watching two talking heads for 45 minutes? But I guess people are, or maybe they have it running in the background. So I've also continued to invest in listener growth, primarily through a couple sites, Audience Lift and Pod Roll. And I've tested probably a dozen different podcast promotion channels, spent 30, $40,000, probably more, but those two are the ones that I found the most cost effective. So I try and allocate a percentage of the revenue every month into listener growth to hopefully keep the flywheel spinning. Most popular episodes of 2025 included the Ladders of Wealth Creation with Nathan Barry. That was actually a Greatest Hits Replay episode, but people like that one, just a recent release, did really well. Anthony Kologe's vending machine story from zero to over $50,000 a month. You know, building his vending machine route in the Chicago area. Episode 662 super inspiring story. That one did well. The business idea giveaway episode. Those are always fun. Those always did well. That one was with Steve Chu episode 657. We did an episode on the four types of passive income to stop trading time for money. That one did well. Number 672 and number 675 where I asked Mr. Smart Passive Income himself, Pat Flynn, to rate 10 popular passive income ideas. So we'll link those up in the show notes for this episode. But those are some of the ones that performed best on the audio side. In terms of downloads, I think those were all over 40,000 downloads a piece of but next week I will share my picks for the best side hustles of the year. A very subjective exercise but to go back through the archives and pull out some of my favorite ideas and clips. So make sure to hit the Follow or Subscribe button so that you don't miss it. Now more on YouTube so for non podcast YouTube content this year I really didn't do a great job of publishing with any consistency. Maybe like seven or eight videos all year long. Those typically come in three formats. The first is like product review videos which have done well for the channel in the past. They tend to have a long shelf life and there's, you know, maybe an affiliate play in some of those. Second type is repurposed website content type of videos which usually target a specific keyword. And those can also perform well for months or sometimes years. And then the third kind of video is a newer one for me and that's one that targets a topic that has done well for another channel but with my own spin on it. For example, I found a video called Top 5 Online Business Ideas. You can start today with $0 400,000 views on this video on another channel. Way more than their average. So I took a shot at making my own version of that and it is nowhere near 400,000 views yet, but maybe someday it'll get there. In fact, that was some of the video advice that I was given this year. Look at competing channels for the videos that have popped and have way more than their normal number of views and then try to recreate that magic in your own style and your own voice. With the logic being, hey, YouTube viewers really liked this topic and if it went viral once, it could go viral again. But videos have, you know, they take a long time to make and not all of them hit, not all of them have positive roi. For video editing, I have a part time editor who's been with me for years. She does the podcast episodes and the shorts. I've got another guy from Fiverr that I've worked with off and on for one off videos. And then I do a bit myself in screen pal and pull in clips with Pictory AI Pictory like Victory I guess. And I started using that last year. I still like it for sourcing stock footage and turning scripts into videos. Some of the best performing non podcast videos this year. You know, I did a recent review of Flexjobs remote jobs platform. That one's off to an okay start. The best one was get paid to watch videos. That was under that second category that I talked about, the repurposing of website content. So that was an article that we already had. Let me go out and create the video version of that. That's closing in on 9,000 views. Another similar one was websites that actually pay you. I think we have an article called like websites that pay you or websites that make money or something like that. So that one's doing okay. And then I spent some time repurposing a podcast episode that we did about bank bonuses. And that video is doing okay, but like you know, instead of a half hour interview or however long it was, you know, try and trim it down to, you know, eight or nine minute video about earning bank bonuses. So overall, I mean the channel, it's doing okay. Like I'll probably give it a C, maybe a C minus in terms of performance. It's steady, but it just really hasn't found a groove in in terms of either production or performance. We passed 40,000 subscribers this year. That was a little milestone. But nothing would give me more street cred with the kids than to get to that a hundred thousand subscriber mark earn that play button. But at this pace, you know, it's like another decade or so. So hopefully we can accelerate that. Hopefully we can make some more progress toward it next year. Maybe. For me, like, scripting is still the big bottleneck. So I was really excited to try an AI solution for this. Tried, you know, several different prompts and you know, sometimes they kind of have a harder time with generating longer form content. I don't know what the script length would be, but like, you know, to make an 8 to 10 minute video, it's a decent length script and of course you can prompt until you're blue in the face, but it's still so subjective that most of what comes back, it just doesn't sound like me. Or at least that's a problem that I ran into. It's like, ah, that's, that's not how I would have phrased that. So I haven't ended up using this yet because it's still running into that same issue. It doesn't sound like me just yet, but I made my very first Vibe coded project. It was a YouTube script generator. So I built this in Claude code, typing in plain language, the functionality that I wanted, and it actually built a working piece of software. It was like, you know, the, the light bulbs go out, you kind of like, you know, the, the angels start singing, you see you, you can see the light. And it was really exciting. So my idea was to punch in the URLs of the top, you know, two or three performing videos on the topic that I had in mind. Then to have the AI analyze the hooks and the content of those videos. And then I thought this was key, combine it with some side Hustle Nation original content on the same topic, you know, copy and paste in from the website. If we have, you know, something written about this to create a hopefully compelling script that could ultimately compete and hopefully outperform the example videos. That was the idea. And it was a really interesting exercise working with Claude code and having it troubleshoot and pull in API keys and say, oh, we're gonna need to transcribe those videos before we can analyze them. So you're gonna need some OpenAI tokens for that. Okay, do that. Check off that box onto the next step and you just, you know, step by step by step it built this thing. So still we're working on like the, the voice and the tone and like, no, no, no, it's really gotta be, it's gotta sound like Nick, you know, so we're gonna keep tweaking with it and hopefully you'll be able to build out some other projects next year. As well. Again, this was me coming in as a non technical person. Yes, there's a learning curve. The interface is very command prompt and one of the hardest things was trying to figure out, well, how do I even open it up? I, you know, had opened it, figured out this out once and then I, you know, spent half an hour like what folder was it installed in? It was just dumb, dumb, dumb stuff. But hopefully as you go on it gets easier. So to me it's really cool. So I can start to see the light of why people are so fired up about Vibe coding a minimum viable product either for their own internal use like this one was, or as a potential tool to sell to to other people. I can start a software business. Really, really. So that's the podcast and YouTube side of the business. The other big elements have been the side Hustle Nation website and email newsletter list. We're gonna get into those right after this. As a business owner, you worked hard to make that phone ring. But missing a business call? It's like watching money fly right out the window. That's why today's episode is brought to you by Quo, spelled Q U O. It's the smarter way to run your business communications. Quo is the number one business phone system built for 2025, not 1995. In fact, it's rated the top choice for customer satisfaction with over 3,000 reviews on G2. Quo works right from an app on your phone or computer. 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A big chunk of the business historically has come from the Sidehustlenation.com website. And just about like every other informational content publisher, the site's been hit by changing search results, changing search behavior. Reddit AI answers all of that. Now, it hasn't gone to zero, and it never experienced the 90% overnight drop that some other content sites saw in the wake of the helpful content update a couple years ago. But it has been a slow, drawn out erosion of traffic and revenue over the last couple of years. And that's been painful because the website side of the business is probably the most passive and probably the most profitable portion of the revenue. I mean, once you have an article published, it can stick in Google for years with, you know, minimal maintenance. And now even if you do get something to rank, I feel like it's buried under an AI answer, a wall of sponsored results, a Reddit listing or two, an image carousel. You know, people also ask, and then maybe at the very bottom of the page, way below the fold, is your content. It's still ranking well. It's just not getting clicked on at nearly the same pace that it was before. Now in the past month or two, I've seen actually some tiny signs of life here. But overall, I mean, we've stopped publishing new articles outside of the podcast case studies, and I just haven't been super motivated to keep the archives updated like I used to because, you know, I just question if it's really worth the time. Now I have gone in a couple days over the last few months and bulk updated a bunch of posts, trying to target the pages with the highest traffic to make sure they're up to date. This is like swapping out screenshots reordering the list in the listicle, in some cases doing some fact checking, updating statistics, and in a lot of cases removing content to reduce word counts. That seems to be the trend. How can we get to the point faster and you know, not have as much fluff? Right. I think there's still a trend towards like, look, if you're the expert, why don't you do a little curation instead of throwing, you know, 800 different options at us. And that is pretty tedious work when there are hundreds of articles on the site. But you know, I don't want to completely neglect this income stream because it still pays the bills, it still covers the mortgage and then some. So it's not nothing, it's just not what it once was. And I'm not particularly optimistic it'll ever fully recover. But still, if I can spend a few hours a month to maintain what I have or, or to even just slow the decline, it's probably still worth it. And with the organic traffic declining, my next thought was to experiment with paid traffic and specifically paid search traffic arbitrage. You know, driving traffic to content pages with affiliate offers and then hopefully making a profit on that. This was actually the model of my very first online side hustle. You know, buy traffic from Google for in my case, specific shoe related keywords, you know, brand name plus style name, type of keywords and, and then earn a commission when somebody bought shoes through the site. So I'm no stranger to it, but it definitely has become a lot more sophisticated over the last almost 20 years. And even though I'd been running a couple small scale Google Ad campaigns for the last four plus years, never really had a great revenue attribution that I trusted. Like I would put money in and I would feel reasonably confident that it was profitable. But I couldn't tell you for sure. Not a great model when you're trying to ramp up the ad spend. I mean, I always thought it would be awesome to be able to profitably spend $500 a day, $1,000 a day more. Just think of all the credit card points and free flights, right? But this time around, to skip ahead in the story, just could never get it to work. I signed up with any track for the revenue attribution side of things and it actually told me a pretty scary story that the money I'd been spending on Google Ads for years was probably not profitable and probably not even close. So as I refined the landing pages and tested different bidding strategies and worked with paid traffic specialist consultants, it still never achieved reliable profitability. So I can chalk that one up as a big expensive L for the year. Now the other side effect of less website traffic was less people joining the email list this year, which outside of deleting, you know, inactive subscribers, I only ever had a down month or a down quarter. But I started noticing something in the second half of the year that the subscriber count was actually going down. Now I get unsubscribes every time I hit send. That's normal. You probably do too. But the subscriber growth has always outpaced those, so that was not a great sign. So a few things I've been trying on the email growth side, number one is the creator network. This is built into Kit. This is where other creators and newsletters recommend you during their signup process. Like hey, you might also like this other newsletter, you know, co registration kind of thing. And that's driven over a thousand signups so far, which just, it feels like a cool bonus just for being on kit. Another thing I tried earlier in the year was a bit more out there and that was partnering with the owner of a large and fast growing Facebook group for drivers for a popular delivery service. He said, hey Nick, I've got this big group of delivery drivers, but I don't have an email list. Naturally, if they're driving as a way to make extra money, they might be interested in other side Hustles. Would you be interested in paying me for everyone who signs up for your list? I said, sure, that seems reasonable. Let's give it a shot. And so that was driving hundreds of signups a month automated through the Group Leads browser extension and with kind of a language or disclosure that was similar to the side Hustle Nation Facebook group emails sign up like, hey, would you like to receive expert side Hustle advice and money making tips from side Hustle Nation? Or something like that. But ultimately the group got shut down, the faucet turned off. I don't know why necessarily, but I think I would be open to a similar partnership again in the future. Again, I don't, I just don't have great revenue tracking on the email side. Like I couldn't tell you, is it worth it to pay a dollar per subscriber? But I have a sense and maybe a hope that as the list grows, business growth follows. Especially if I can turn an email subscriber into a podcast listener, into a fan who tells five friends, into someone who, you know, finds an affiliate offer they can take advantage of. I'd be open to testing that again. So trying to drive leads and signups from Facebook and even partnering with other group owners there. Another recent one was in our Marketing Tips roundup episode. Lewis Waldron mentioned a newsletter discovery service called Refined R E F I N D Refined and so I decided to give that a shot as well. At a buck fifty per engaged subscriber, they have a pretty aggressive filtering or, you know, onboarding rules system, so you're really only paying for the people who open your message. And of course still trying to derive signups from the podcast through the Playlist quiz and other episode specific lead magnets. Because here's the truth. You're the person I want on the email list. The podcast listener. You know me so much better than the person who got, you know, recommended side Hustle Nation from another creator. So much better than the person who clicked the result in Google and skimmed some article for 45 seconds. So get yourself signed up if you're not already side hustlenation.com join is an easy way to do that. I did create a few new episode specific lead magnets this year. The local directory research file from the episode with Frey Chu was one of those. The AI Assisted Brainstorming worksheet was another one of those. I made a side Hustle selector like weighted decision matrix with a bunch of questions like if you're contemplating a bunch of different side Hustle ideas and you want to pick objectively the best one, this little selector tool will help you do it. And so together those have resulted in around 500 new signups. But that's also another priority, like trying to drive signups from the email list because like I said, those, you know, you are the person that I want on the list because it's such a better relationship than the random person who just happens upon it on elsewhere on the Internet. Starting last year with Jacques, the online course guy and Kit and probably a few others, I've been trying to do more educational workshops and webinars for the Side Hustle Nation audience and bringing in other guest experts to teach them like Jacques. And ideally in my mind that would be, you know, once a month or every couple months as kind of a value add for subscribers. But I think this year we only ended up doing four of them. We did Home Services Academy with Johnny Robinson early in the year. Hopefully we'll have some new cleaning business case studies coming out of that. We did a LinkedIn marketing one with Joe McKay. We did the vending machine Q and A session with with Anthony Kologe. That was awesome. And we did a Flea market Flipping workshop with with Rob and Melissa from Flea Market Flipper. And these are always, you know, a fun time to hang out, live with the audience, get some real time interaction and do a deep dive on one of the side hustles or one of the marketing strategies that we cover on the show. So this is something we'll probably continue to do going into 2026. And if there are any creators or instructors that you want to hear from in that type of setting, be sure to let me know. I'll see if I can get them lined up. The other thing I would like to do is show up as the instructor for other people's audiences. Like we can talk generating side Hustle ideas. We can talk about narrowing down your side hustle idea. We can talk about scaling your side hustle. We can talk productivity frameworks, podcast growth, email list growth, whatever you think would be most beneficial to your audience. Hit me up if you think it might be a fit. So outside of those lead magnets, I did create one new digital product this year. It was a quick online workshop called Scale My awesome side Hustle or the Smash Masterclass for short Scale My awesome side Hustle. It walks through the three levers you can pull to unlock growth and scale in your business, traffic conversion and economics side hustlenation.com smash if you want to go check it out. And as I've done for the past few years, I launched this as part of the BC Stack Bundle sale in June and the pitch might sound familiar. Hey, I built this new thing. I think it's awesome. It's going to be super helpful. But don't have any testimonials for it yet. So this week only you can get lifetime access for half off. But wait, there's more to sweeten the deal. You'll also get access to these 50 other plus products designed to help you grow your online business included for free. And so that was pretty effective. Resulted in around $9,000 in sales between affiliate commissions and bonuses for BCStack. And participating in bundle sales like this one can also be a powerful list building strategy. Talked about it a little more in the episode that we did with Chanel from Growth in Reverse, but added around this time around 500 new subscribers to the list now. Also over the summer our neighborhood hosted a little vendor fair and so I've been trying to be more active in the local community like sponsoring events at the kids school and stuff like that. So this was a good excuse to get out of the house and meet some neighbors, meet some new people and hopefully recruit some new listeners. So I ordered up this cool like expo show table banner with bright side Hustle Nation branding. It looked awesome, it looked legit. And I printed out some family friendly side hustles with the corresponding episode numbers to promote the show. And then our oldest set up shop with me and he was selling some 3D printed toys and fidget gadgets that he made. And so he ended up making 70 bucks or something like that, which was really cool for him. And it forced him to talk to strangers and explain how this stuff was made. And I also brought a stack of books with me to have on display and to sell if anybody wanted them. And I think I sold like two copies. So he definitely outsold me that day in in terms of revenue. But a funny thing happened. I said I'm there mainly to promote the podcast and even the neighbors who came by who knew me, knew what I did. They were like, I didn't know you had a book. And I wanted to be like, I mean, you know, it's self published. I got several of them. Anybody could do it. I promise you, the 700 episodes, the 33 million downloads, I promise you, that's way harder. But it was the book, it was the book that held a certain level of esteem and perceived authority. I just thought that was interesting. If you're contemplating self publishing or adding a book to your product portfolio now, we might have to do a second edition. The book that I had there was the 1,100 Waves book. So we might have to do a second edition of that. And actually the book project that I started working on over the summer was updating the side Hustle book, the permafree title that was last updated 2019. So definitely do for a refresh. Side hustlenation.com book supposed to be free on Kindle. If you are in the us you can check that one out. What is nuts about that? It has been downloaded According to the KDP dashboard, Kindle Direct Publishing dashboard. It's been downloaded over 150,000 times, which is super crazy. So don't sleep on Amazon as a top of the funnel point of discovery for your business due for an update. Maybe AI can help with that. That's on the project list for this coming year. In my latest experiment, we just did an episode on this. My latest experiment has been with the Facebook content monetization program, which is essentially like. It's similar to YouTube, right? It's Facebook paying creators to publish engaging content that keeps people on Facebook longer. So they see more ads, they make more money, they share some of that revenue with you. And this is, this is way easier than creating YouTube videos, at least for me. So this was inspired by Jeff Rose from Good Financial Sense, who I started to notice was at the top of my feed. Whenever I logged in, I was like, what is this guy doing? And then he started sharing some of his earning screenshots and I was blown away. A thousand bucks a day posting random money related memes and charts and tweets on Facebook. So like I said, we did a whole episode on this last month. What kind of content performs best? But the gist of it was Jeff's strategy was to look for material loosely related to his niche of personal finance that had gone viral on other platforms like threads like Twitter, like even Facebook itself, and then repost it with a new, sometimes snarky, sometimes polarizing caption and then post a ton like he was. I think he was doing like 20 plus posts a day. And then trust that a few of those posts will take off, get engagement and make money. The tricky part is I've heard from a few listeners since airing that is getting invited to the monetization program to begin with, which at the time of this recording is invite only. So it's not something that you can apply for, unfortunately. But you might find, like I did, I already had an invite sitting in my long neglected side Hustle Nation Facebook page. So I'm nowhere near $1,000 a day. Full disclosure there. But this is a new income stream for me, which is always exciting to unlock. My best day so far is around $40, and if I could hit that consistently, that would be around 1200 bucks a month. Jeff and some other friends are already doing really well here, so I'm motivated to keep pushing on this one with the ultimate goal of having a team member be the one who sources and schedules the material. Because on the downside, and we talked about this in that episode, it's pretty time consuming, which I guess is all relative. Like for a few hundred dollars a month, it's time consuming, right? For a few hundred dollars a day, that's a different story. But like I mentioned in that episode, I find my screen time is way up. I find myself checking Facebook way more than I ever did before to see if I got any new comments or likes or shares. Probably not the healthiest behavior. So I would love to find a trusted social media manager to take ownership of it once the revenue justifies it. So if you know anyone, please send them my way. All right. We have talked podcast, we have talked YouTube, we've talked the Sidehustlenation.com website, the digital product portfolio, the email list, the new monetization experiments, and I've got a few more progress report updates, including conference travels and what's been on my reading list coming up right after this. On the conference agenda this year was podcast movement in Dallas and fincon in Portland. The family got to tag along in Texas, which was cool. And this was actually my first time to podcast movement since 2017. So it was fun to see some old timers there, members of the Graybeard Club. I called them and actually ran into the old editor of the side Hustle show, Brendan, who I'd never met in person. It was like one of those where I looked at his name badge and he looked at mine and we were both like, dude, you know, it was, it was a really cool kind of moment because we'd never met face to face. He'd done hundreds of side Hustle show episodes in the archives for us. But it was also interesting to see how much the event and the industry has changed. Not a lot of solo independent creators in attendance, a lot of software companies, a lot of agencies, a lot of networks, not a lot of fellow hosts. So rumor was that they, they go to PodFest in Orlando instead. Now at Fincon, it was a great family reunion of Internet friends. As always, I was happy to have a driving distance fincon, you know, just three hours down the road from me. So that was good. But the community has definitely felt the impact of the last couple years of algorithm changes in AI. In the search results, a few friends noted the disappearance of what they called the creator middle class. The people who were making a living online with their website. They were relying on Google traffic and advertising or affiliate income and the freelance writer community that supported those types of businesses. Those entrepreneurs had either pivoted to another model or the they simply weren't there. Which was kind of sad to see. The two big topics at fincon for me were AI and video, at least in the sessions that I attended. And I've already made some changes to the video production strategy like I mentioned, but haven't done a great job of prioritizing any of the agent building ideas that I walked away with. There was one cool session where it was basically write down all of your repetitive tasks and processes and all of those are potential agent ideas and you can use Zapier or Make or N8N or maybe now with my newfound Claude code companion, I'll be able to take a swing at some of those as well, thought about going to the Kit event in Boise Creator, I don't know what it's called. Thought about going to the Mediavine event in Boston but didn't pull the trigger. Thought about going to CEX Creator Economy Expo in Cleveland I want to say, but curious what business events or conferences that you made it to. Send me an email, let me know. Oh, I also went to Rhodium Summit in Vegas. So my coaching program with 2x ended late last year so decided to give Rhodium a try. This is a long running community for online business owners. A couple friends had recommended it, but just one event a year in person instead of like the four in person masterminds with 2x. Just a couple group calls a month. No one on one coaching. Much, much lower price commitment as well. Probably worth mentioning. You know I walked away from the in person summit with a really long list of ideas and that's this is part of my new year planning that I still need to do is like the full brain dump and debrief on my notes to kind of itemize out the potential projects and their time and cost and potential impact to the business as well. The challenge is and it seems silly when when you look at the output. Well, it's only an hour of audio a week that you're making, but it takes a lot of time to keep the show going. So I probably need to do that full time audit exercise again and see where where there's an opportunity to free up some hours. And in fairness I have been grateful to be able to do quite a bit of non work travel and time off this year too. Going skiing with the kids, you know, traveling with the family, going golfing with dad, that kind of thing. Now speaking of the kids, they've gotten into the content creation game themselves with their own dude Perfect Inspired Trick Shot YouTube channel. This has been super fun to work on even if you know my latest side hustle probably doesn't even qualify is as an unpaid glorified tripod A lot of the time Here dad, can you film us? Hey dad, can you hold the camera? But they're having to practice persistence in taking a lot of tries to land a hard shot for one and second they're learning video editing. Our oldest edits all the clips in imovie on his iPad. He's learning to set up the shots to get the right angle and try and avoid getting, you know, street signs and license plates in there. And more impressively, they've actually stuck with it. They made 10 or 12 videos at this Point where, you know, we just did the first one for fun one afternoon in the summer. They've actually kept it going. The neighbors are into it, you know, they're helping set up shots, they're coming up with ideas. I've got kids in their class, you know, when I go to volunteer, they're asking me if they can be in the next video. Hey, I'm really good at flipping water bottles, I promise. And they're motivated, the kids are, to be side Hustle Nation and subscribers. But dad's still got them. I'm still gaining ground faster than they are. So at least so far. But really awesome to see him take an interest in creating content besides just consuming it. I mean, I got this text while I was at Fincon, you know, from. From my oldest, you know, 102 views. We went viral and just loved it. Like, the level of excitement for, relatively speaking, not a lot of content. Like, I remember being excited for, you know, the first 50 download day. So I can absolutely relate to that. It was, it was pretty cool. The other big focus this year has just been on general health and fitness, which should probably always be a focus. I started the year with a pull up challenge, and the plan was to just add one a day and see how far I could get. Like one pull up on 1-1-31, on January 31st, all the way up to 365, potentially, maybe, hopefully on December 31st. So the kids got this pull up bar for Christmas last year, and our youngest, you know, over winter break, he's like knocking out dozens every, every day. And he's got this little, like, clicker to keep track. And this is. It's the combination of not weighing anything and being super strong from doing monkey bars at recess all the time in his case. So I thought I should get in on this. And it seems easy enough. Like, if you can do 10 in one day, you could do 11 the next day. Right? Didn't have to be consecutive. That was the other rule. Like, it was usually just like sets of five or ten at a time. But I was curious when or where this would break down, if it would. I don't know. Never done anything like this before. First month, fine, no problem. Second month, little more challenging, especially while we're traveling, like having to jump into the hotel gym to knock out a couple sets. But second month also fine. So now we're up to 60 a day. And the problem is you never fully recovering. Right. There's a reason athletes, you know, have rest days. Uh, so by March, I start incorporating Some of those rest days, like if it was day 70, okay, knock out the 70, but then only do 35 the next day, then bump it to 72 the next day. But that was still too many pull ups. So the streak, you know, came to an end somewhere in the early 80s for my right lat. Just couldn't take it anymore. But I still do some every day. And the net result is, you know, I do way more than the zero pull ups I'd done for years prior to that. Good for back strength, good for shoulder strength, good for, you know, shoulder mobility, maybe grip strength, maybe some spinal decompression benefits as well from hanging there. Who knows? It was a fun project or fun experiment. And so the pull ups were part of a broader focus on resistance training this year in addition to my existing diet of cardio, yoga and walking. And this was inspired in part by Peter Attia's book Outlive. First part of the book, if you haven't read it, just details your most likely ways to die. Heart disease, cancer, dementia, diabetes. I think he calls him the Four Horsemen. The second part of the book is where he gets into the actual actions you can take to prolong your health span, including a focus on building muscle where there is like this natural rate of decay. And he's like, well, if you want to put your bag in the overhead bin when you're 80, you're gonna have to be able to lift, you know, 40 pounds or something overhead when you're 60. You're kind of reverse engineering it almost in a way. Or you want to be able to pick up your grandkid. Well, that's the equivalent of a whatever, 50 pound kettlebell squat or something today. So one of the most eye opening things for me was the recommended daily intake of protein was about 50% higher than I had been eating. So that was one of the big things. The book also inspired me to make a couple DEXA scan appointments this year, which seems a little sketch because in our area, the ones you can book are in this like random body spec van in, in a parking lot. Like it's not at a doctor's office or anything, but it's like 40 or 50 bucks. Like it's not super expensive. And then they give you your body fat and lean mass percentages and it's kind of motivating to try and improve those numbers. In the six months in between scans, I was able to gain a couple pounds of muscle, which obviously isn't huge, but it was an indicator that at least things weren't going in the wrong direction. What was also fun was uploading the scan results into ChatGPT along with some blood work results to get some recommendations. I was really impressed with the analysis. It felt like a way more in depth conversation than I've ever had at the doctor's office. They always seem to be, you know, rushed to get to the next appointment or kind of hand wavy to any questions or concerns because they don't really have time to give a detailed explanation of that dismissal. But you know, Chatty has got all the time in the world so that was kind of fun. So Outlive Definitely an influential read this year. Maybe late last year I really wasn't motivated to read a lot of of non fiction traditional business books. The other title that comes to mind was Die with Zero because a lot of other people were talking about it. Now I'll say this, this is a book by a rich person for rich people. If you're not in that category, you might be more annoyed by it than helped by it, because at certain points it can come across as really out of touch. I want to say the author is reported to have a net worth in the range of 100 million. So yes, very easy for him to say, hey, spend the money, you're not going to run out. It's all fine. But what was helpful about the book, or maybe eye opening, was his illustrations of people who had already earned the last dollar they'll ever need and yet they continue working for years, sometimes decades, accumulating quote unquote useless dollars. And I get there's a fear, a very real fear, of running out of money in your old age. Which is where the book can feel a little dismissive. But it does require you to take stock of your realistic lifespan and your spending to see where you might end up and ask, well, okay, what kind of margin of safety makes sense? You don't want to outlive your savings, but you don't also want to die with a couple million dollars in the bank that you never got to enjoy. So the book helped solidify some of our thinking around coast fire. The idea that at a certain point you can stop saving as aggressively. You can spend more of what you earn. You can let compound interest do its thing with what you've already accumulated. Those factors, plus a healthy voluntary separation offer inspired Bryn to retire a couple months ago. She put in 20 years, which seemed like a nice round number. And now onto the next chapter. I am excited for that. I'm hopeful that she can help me out with some stuff on the side Hustle Nation to Do list. But I'm also confident she'll keep busy with her own projects, photography or otherwise. So we're excited for that in the extra flexibility that one less working schedule might afford. But on the reading list, not a lot of traditional business books this year. Instead, I've gotten really into this genre that I've learned is called narrative nonfiction. Started a few years ago with Undaunted Courage. This Day by Day account of the Lewis and Clark expedition, American Kingpin. Was that the one about the Silk Road website? And, you know, trying to track down this guy. True stories that read like a novel. The Wager, this incredible shipwreck survival story off South America. Loved it. And so what I started to do was punch those into ChatGPT and say, Hey, I really like these titles. What else have you got? And it has recommended some great ones this year. So this is, you know, all kind of in that genre. Island of the Lost was a recent one, another shipwreck story off of, you know, these islands couple hundred miles south of the south island of New Zealand and living off the land and having to club baby seals to get food. Like, how hungry would I have to be to be able to, you know, whack a baby seal and, you know, and just what they go through and what they're willing to do, what they're able to do to survive. I read Skeletons on the Sahara. It's like Sahara Desert but spelled with a Z. And it's like these people again are shipwrecked and they're sold into slavery and they're dying of thirst and starving across the desert and eventually, you know, how they find their way to freedom and negotiate their way out. The Wide, Wide Sea was another book. This is a story of Captain Cook's second or third round, the world voyage, where, you know, I didn't realize he went in search of the Northwest Passage, which doesn't exist, but he made it all the way up into Alaska and, you know, above there into the Arctic Ocean. They're like, well, it's frozen. We can't go any farther. All the way back to Hawaii, where, you know, he spends lots of time in the Hawaiian Islands. And he ultimately, spoiler if you don't know the story, but, you know, he ends up getting killed south of Kona on the Big Island. And just again, crazy story like the era of seafaring and discovery. I went to the Amazon with the river of Doubt, and that was a Theodore Roosevelt adventure story. The Lost City of Z was exploring the Amazon and Just many ways the jungle tries to kill you. I read a book called Gold Diggers, which is about the Yukon, Alaska, Canada, gold rush. The plight that these poor people went through. Like, oh, you gotta. You gotta climb up this mountain because there's no roads to this place, right? And not only in the movie, like in White Fang or whatever, they show them climbing up this mountain, like in this iconic picture. And in the movie, they just show it once. But like, in reality, you had to do it dozens of times because you had to bring like a year's worth of stuff with you. You know, shuttle it to the top, go back down, grab more stuff. And when you get to the top, there's still no road. You got to build a boat and float down the river and hopefully not die and capsize in the rapids. Crazy, crazy stuff. So I think the. The common thread to all of these is common. People in uncommon situations, usually under extreme hardship, they're facing starvation, they're freezing, they're stranded, they're being sold into slavery. And yet they found a way to survive. They found a way to live through it and tell the tale. And this hits me whenever I'm bent out of shape or I want to complain about something like, oh, man, I just couldn't get comfortable on that flight, or I didn't sleep well last night. That was so annoying. Except, wait, I am warm, I'm fed. I can deal with a few hours of discomfort if these people were able to deal with far, far worse. So those have been some of my favorite reads for the year. I will link those up in the show notes for this episode as well. If you've got any recommendations in that genre, definitely hit me up. Otherwise, I'll be going to that chatgpt well to see what it turns up next. And I know this was a little bit of inside baseball. Just a glimpse into the business of side Hustle Nation. No hockey stick growth to report. Just doing my thing, trying to share cool and creative side Hustle stories and really grateful to be able to do it. Big thanks to our sponsors this year for helping make this content free for everyone. If you haven't checked out sidehustlenation.com deals in a while, that's where you can find all the latest offers from our sponsors in one place. That is it for me. Thank you so much for tuning in again. Merry Christmas to you and your family. Happy New Year. Until next time, let's go out there and make something happen and I'll catch you in the next edition of the side Hustle show. Hustle on the.