Note: This transcript was automatically generated by artificial intelligence (AI) and therefore typos may be present.

Rob McNealy
Today I’m talking to Leah Thompson. And she is also known on the web as a Girl Gone crypto, you know, and every time I say that, I get this vision of Girl Gone Wild, which was those videos back in like the late 90s, early 2000s. And I’m like, I mean, and I said this, my wife, and I said, I’m interviewing That Girl Gone crypto, she’s like, don’t say something stupid. And I’m like, and I said, you know, I’m going to say something stupid. So I’m just going to get out of the way because I’m going to accidentally call her Girl Gone Wild, and then it’s just going to look stupid. So I said, I get that out of the way. So how are you?

Lea Thompson AKA Girl Gone Crypto
I’m good. Thanks so much for having me on Rob. I know it’s kind of a catchy play of words there. You know, that’s kind of what I was going for. But I know I apologize for all the people that trip over my my channel name.

Rob McNealy
Oh, you know, when I was going back through and and I’ve been on Twitter a long time, and people always ask, well, how do you get this following because I’m like, I was like number 62 in the world by followers at my peak, because I came in so early, I came up, I got my Twitter account just after they started. And so it’s like, and I just named it my name. I never like made a handle or you know, and I’m just always stuck with that. And I was like, maybe I need to do something interesting, but it just kind of stuck. And then I got people like, well, you should worry about your personal brand. So I’m like, okay, that’s my personal brand. My name makes it easy. But then there’s like, you know, there’s a Rob McNealy, who’s like this really successful British like motorcycle racer. So like, I have to compete with a British motorcycle racer for SEO on my own name, which is kind of funny.

Lea Thompson AKA Girl Gone Crypto
Which actually that’s kind of part of why I went was something else because SEO on my name Lea Thompson. It’s spelled exactly the same as the Back to the Future actress. And so I was like that is a hopeless case. I am never going to win that SEO battle.

Rob McNealy
But at least you think about that in SEO is a thing. And it seems like crypto people don’t get SEO, and you lots of other things they don’t get as far as marketing. So anyways, I digress. Tell me a little bit about yourself. How did you get into crypto?

Lea Thompson AKA Girl Gone Crypto
Yeah, so my kind of crypto journey I mean, I heard about Bitcoin back. I don’t I don’t know I want to say like 1415 but it’s just more than I’d heard about it. Like some people that I knew were mining it. But I didn’t really ask more questions. I didn’t really look into it too much. But then in kind of early 17, I stumbled across a blogging platform called steam it I don’t know if you are familiar yet okay. Most people in the crypto space are but you know, and I, I hadn’t really made content before. But I was like, well, this looks kind of fun. Maybe I’ll you know, I play some a couple different instruments. And I was like, maybe I’ll just make a little ukulele cover and post that and kind of see, see what happens. And, you know, it made like $100 or something. And I was like, Whoa, what is this?

Rob McNealy
What did you cover with your little ukulele?

Lea Thompson AKA Girl Gone Crypto
My first cover was creep. Actually, so nice. Yeah. And I, oh, gosh, I should dig up the photo. I tried to look creepy in the photo. I thought that’d be funny. So that was just kind of that got me down the rabbit hole because I was like, well, where did this money come from? And how is it created? Like what now? What do I do with it? What is this thing called an exchange and so it just kind of once I started actually contributing regularly on the steam blockchain and, and posting content, often I was like, Okay, I need to actually learn about this stuff. Like how does any of this work? So That’s kind of what you know got me going down the rabbit hole of crypto and just been kind of, I would say growing my knowledge ever since I’ve been on the steam blockchain for a few years now like I said posting content and I kept getting requests to speak at different crypto conferences because people were following me on Steam and even though I wasn’t even making crypto content, I was just doing like ukuleles and random things. I was like, you know, maybe I should actually dig into this a little bit more and start making crypto content. So that’s when gergan crypto was born probably about four or five months ago. So that channel and brand is pretty new, but it’s been just so much fun. I’m so glad that I did. So is crypto and content creation your full time occupation right now or is this just like a side hustle at this point? Right now it’s just a side hustle. I’m kind of intentionally I don’t wanna say growing slow because it’s that’s not necessarily accurate, but I’m trying to be really intentional about how I monetize is what I’m trying to say like, for me, I, I’m like, you know, I can manage doing this on the side, with my day job, I’ve got a great job that I you know that I enjoy. That gives me a lot of flexibility. So I’m like, as long as I can, I kind of feel like when you get desperate for money, that’s when you start making poor choices, you know, in terms of accepting sponsorships or doing things that maybe aren’t totally in line with your audience. And so for me, I would just way rather kind of hold off on not doing that much monetization at first and just kind of build my content and fill out my audience and kind of see, see where things go first. So yeah, just doing this on the side for now. So you don’t have the doctor stop. But what kind of work do you do for your day job? Don’t name the company, but when I would feel there you’re working in? Yeah, so I work in like sales and account management for a tech company. And so yeah, so I manage a lot of our big client relationships and partnerships. And so I’ve been doing that for about seven or eight years.

Rob McNealy
Very cool. So the ukulele saying Do you take requests like do you do? Do you do crypto ukulele songs? Yeah.

Lea Thompson AKA Girl Gone Crypto
You know, I’ve dabbled a little bit here and there and I actually, I’m working on at this moment a little fun Christmas Carol, kind of crypto spoof. So by the time this interview comes out of the past Christmas, you guys be able to go find it on my channel, but I’m actually planning to record it tonight. Well, if you want to say really nice, I’ll make sure I get this edited out by Tuesday. Oh, alright.

Rob McNealy
So you know, I always kind of joke around in that in crypto, there’s a lot of really cringe worthy kind of like crypto songs out there. But I said I was talking to crypto Euclid I don’t know if you know who he is but crypto Euclid and mystical oaks and they do some weird numbers and I said, you know, you haven’t made it as a crypto project until somebody has done like a really cringe worthy crypto song to your chain. So somebody needs to do an elephant themed crypto song at some point and then once we’ve done that then I’ll know that we’ve made it in arrived.

Lea Thompson AKA Girl Gone Crypto
All right, well, I might have to be that person that does it for you guys. We’ll see I’ll make it as cringy as I can I promise.

Rob McNealy
But you have but you have to have elephant special effects in the song if you’re going to do it. So you have to get some kind of like elephant like, I don’t know what do they call it when an elephant makes a noise? It’s not like a roar elephant roar is it? I don’t think elephant roar was a thing.

Lea Thompson AKA Girl Gone Crypto
I’ll look it up and I’ll include it somehow in the song I promise.

Rob McNealy
You make that you know, I’m pretty sure we can get we can put in a worker proposal fund and compensate you can make but i think i think it’s pretty interesting. So content creation and blockchain You know, that’s very interesting. It seems like everybody’s got a podcast now. And I’m wondering if there’s almost too many. Pretty much and with like, what this podcast You know, I’m not just doing crypto, I do small business stuff and I do shooting and gun stuff, baby. Basically, I’m interviewing the people I want to interview, because I find them interesting. And so I’m not just doing, you know, crypto is the one topic because I think it’s being over killed personally. And I think that’s going to change over time. I’m old enough that I went through the whole social media phrase or our phase from 10 years ago. And I used to do a radio show about small business back then and started, you know, podcasting and taking my radio shows that were over the air and putting them through. And so I was actually podcasting 10 years ago, and that that’s originally how I built a lot of my following because I had a radio show and I was always pimping out Twitter because Twitter was so new. So I was like a real early adopter of Twitter and Facebook for that matter of fact, and now and then I stopped because I just got busy actually running my business for a bunch of years. And then when we decided to get into doing crypto a couple years ago, I noticed Well, hold on, that crypto thing is really on Twitter, so maybe I should like unmothball my Twitter account and which that’s what I did. And and like, it’s funny because people like, you got fake followers. I’m like no, no been here a long time been here since you were in junior high, but thanks for playing. But it’s interesting how like, you know, crypto is actually evolved a lot there. And I’m sorry. But Twitter and Social Media have evolved a lot in that time. And there’s all these like little like all these little vertical communities now, like crypto, Twitter’s a thing. My wife’s a trained medical doctor, there’s medical Twitter, there’s lawyer Twitter, it’s just kind of interesting how Twitter has all these little pockets now of little communities inside of them. It’s kind of funny to me. So what do you find? As far as content creation goes, What do you find are some of the things that are being done right in crypto, and what are some of the things that you think are being done incorrectly or poorly in crypto?

Lea Thompson AKA Girl Gone Crypto
Ooh, okay. I think that in terms of content itself, I mean, I think that depends on how you classify content, right? Like, to me a piece of content can be a tweet, it can be a full YouTube video, it can be, you know, a podcast episode, it can be such a variety of different things. One area that I think, is I don’t see a lot of other people doing as much as they could in crypto Twitter specifically, is posting shorter native videos like to me, that is where I get the most amount of engagement. And it’s just really because it is engaging, it’s fun, like I’ll maybe take an interview that I did with someone, and I will clip out, you know, a minute or a minute and a half little section and kind of edited into something that I post on Twitter. And so that kind of helps drive traffic to the full YouTube video. But it also is just a more consumable little piece of content that gives people kind of a little taste of what they might get if they do want to go watch the whole thing. So in terms of something that I think seems to be working well that people could probably do more of is more short kind of native content. And so I guess I kind of answered what’s going well, and what could be better kind of in the same punch? Sure. Yeah. I mean, I think even like an A and another level of like, what’s not going well as I mean, I think that, and I kind of touched on this earlier when I was talking about not wanting to like kind of over show is I feel like that is a real thing that happens in the Twitter or in the crypto content creation space is people kind of like overextending the use of their audience and kind of over shilling and that it can be that can be a really tricky balance, I think of monetizing your content, but then also being like just really authentic and open with your audience about that.

Rob McNealy
You know, I’ve kind of struggled with that myself. And, for instance, as podcasts, you know, the only reason I started podcasting, again, like a year ago, is that when we first launched two years ago it’s changed a lot since then. But we couldn’t get interviewed on any podcasts in the crypto space because we didn’t have the money. And all these influencers, even really small influencers, were literally charging astronomical sums of money to go on a podcast with like, 100 followers or whatever, you know, it was ridiculous. But since we hadn’t we didn’t do an Ico we were literally the this, like the whole stereotypical community project. Everybody’s got a full time day job. And we don’t hide that fact. But we didn’t have the money to pay influencers and I and I told the team I go, I got a pretty decent sized Twitter following. I’m gonna have to like revamp the audience because my audience wasn’t a Twitter audience or I’m sorry, my Twitter. You know, followers weren’t like a crypto like following so I have been going through like a metamorphosis with it, which is interesting, like people a lot of people don’t like the new type of content and lot of insight, get new followers and old followers. It’s leaving all times. It’s interesting to see how they work. Balance. But I think when we started doing this, I said, I almost have to just become a content creator to promote my own project. And so because of that, I don’t charge like even You, you, you can attest, I didn’t say, Hey, come on my show, right. And I interview other projects that some people might even consider potentially a competitor to task. And I said, Look, I’m in here for the space. And I want to talk to interesting people. And you know, there’s a lot of interesting people working on projects that aren’t mine. So I want to talk to those people. And I don’t charge I’ve never charged a dime for anybody and how I monetize, monetize, quote, unquote, the project is I run a commercial for tusken front of the end, I just run an ad for us. And it’s like an in kind. I don’t take money from people. And it’s funny because I hit I’m starting to get people wanting to pay me to come on, which is interesting. I’ve had a couple people say, Hey, can you tweet us out and pimp this and and I’m like, nope, nope. Cash but how they could but I said to one guy, there’s literally two days ago, I said said, Why don’t you just tell me about what you’re doing and asked to come on the show? If it’s something interesting, I’ll shill it, or at least you know, talk to you about it. Because it might be interesting. But if it’s just kind of like, you know, some kind of like weird scamming kind of play, I’m not just gonna pimp for that. But, but I think that’s one of the things that has been interesting. From the content creation side, we got into it out of desperation. I didn’t want to be a podcast. But what I found is that I really started liking talking to people, because I like to talk I like to type to talk to smart people. And I can always learn something and I’ve already learned something from you. You already give me an a new idea, my little brains kind of working on this thing. One of the things that I’ll give you something that I see that I think is a mistake with a lot of crypto products, but one Muslim, don’t do marketing, let’s number one, but the ones that are doing marketing. I do believe that hosting your own content as much as possible is important, because it drives value to your own domain. And unfortunately, when you host all your content and other people’s platforms, you don’t control that and ultimately, you become dependent on them if they decide to change their algorithms or their terms of service or what have you, boom, you’re gone. And so I’ll give a great example of this now I think mediums an interesting platform. And I leverage medium to drive traffic to other I basically like to drive links back to content that’s already on our existing sites. But I don’t like it when people blog on medium only. And I think that’s a mistake. Because you see a lot of people in in crypto where they’re like, dude, WordPress is free. blog and host your content. Even if you’re a decentralized project, if you got a website, you can put a blog on it. Put the content on your blog, so you can control that content, and drive inbound links to your website. And then what you can do is then link to that content on medium to an excerpt. And then you get that traffic push backwards. From medium medium, and I’ve been testing this I like to test things when it comes to content. Medium Google scans Medium about I found about every half hour, it gets updated that quickly. And I don’t know if you know, but you train Google on how basically Google kind of alters their frequency of crawling based on your traffic and your size but medium is such a big site that once you want to if you want to like get content backlinks now they’re not going to do follow links. But if you want still want links back to your site, and you want them quickly, medium is a great way but post back to content from medium let you already have a hosting on your site. So like I like your idea about you know, doing like a little edited short, almost tik tok kind of length video on Twitter to get people to drive traffic to your YouTube. Well, maybe you put that also that little video of that little on medium and then link back to the full version on YouTube. And I think that would be good SEO. But I don’t see anybody doing that. No, I think that’s that’s great. And, man, I like so many things.

Lea Thompson AKA Girl Gone Crypto
I want to say about what you just said. But yeah. Yeah, I mean, in terms of like you said, Oh, you could post it on Twitter and medium like, that’s actually a huge part of my content strategy is putting things on is re utilizing content and taking one piece of content, maybe it’s my YouTube video, and turning it into all of these other pieces of content. So maybe I clip three different short videos, and I put that on Twitter and LinkedIn, and, you know, Instagram and like all these different places. But then maybe I take a quote, and then I turn it into a graphic and I share that out to and so you don’t have to always constantly be coming up with all of these ideas for content. You can take the content you’re already making and piece that out into more micro pieces of content. And it helps you to have a really active social platform at that point. And, and the other thing that I wanted to touch on that you said was about backing up your own content. I think that’s so smart. Because you’re right, what if YouTube all of a sudden is like, Oh, we just deleted that video and you didn’t have a backup of it or the Like you said that blog post I mean, it’s not that hard to back it up. And I, I say that I don’t actually like a my websites just coming live here in a little bit. But I do back things up to the steam blockchain actually, you know I mentioned earlier how that’s how I got started. And so the content even though I don’t personally like own the domain of that it’s on the blockchain and it can’t be deleted. And so I know that that’s going to be there. So that’s been kind of my backup to this point, which probably isn’t quite as good as, you know, having your own website, but it’s another good option as well, I think.

Rob McNealy
Yeah. And I think ultimately, it’s about, you know, driving traffic back to content that you can monetize other ways. So one of the things that I’m going to be doing is I’m going to take all my old audio podcast content, and I started looking it up because I’ve done multiple content. I’ve done multiple podcasts over the years, and I have almost 200 shows almost two hours of content that’s just sitting on my server. It’s not hosted anywhere right now. So what I’ve decided to do is I’m going to actually put them in, I’m going to put all that old content, I’m going to update it all in the SEO and all this and it’s gonna take me six months to do it, I already know what. But it’ll end up driving the size of this podcast. By mid summer, I’ll have probably 300 posts on this on this feed. And, and I make a video out of each one of them. But the thing is, a lot of the people I interviewed are still actually actually way more famous now than when I interviewed them before. So they have their own names have good SEO associated with them. And I think that’s important. And it doesn’t mean I’m going to make my my feed, you know, stale. I’m going to mix it in and I’m going to list it as an archive show or what have you. But it’s about building up the size of you know, the actual the RSS feed the number of videos, and it shows a bigger about it’s a more representative of the body of the work that I’ve done. As a content creator. It’s just I got it. I just Got a package and I got to repackage it. And that’s going to take a long time. Because the way I do pod like, and I don’t mind talking SEO stuff. But what I do with SEO with this podcast, I do three blog posts for every show and a medium post and foremost, and they get cross posted to six different social media sites. And so it’s a lot of work the posting and just cross posting takes a couple hours for every show. It’s not just the show editing. But all that cross linking will turn this it’ll turn it into a pretty big I think it’ll be a pretty big show here in the next couple months. It just takes time, hard card eskie SEO, I mean, it’s an it’s an investment of time. But if you do that correctly, and you have like a central hub where all that SEO and all that all that inbound link juice goes, you then can rank for anything you want to rank for. And then that’s that’s pretty good tool if you want as a content creator. The idea is that you create enough content, but you bring it back I like it. I liken it to like a hub and spoke system. You want that hub and the hub is I like the hub to be something I control. And then all those other extraneous social media platforms, sites, help content go out, but they also link back into your own content which drives up your SEO from the search engines.

Lea Thompson AKA Girl Gone Crypto
Now, that’s amazing. And, you know, SEO is something that I’m, I’m still kind of even learning about because it’s I realized how powerful it is. I’m like, Okay, I gotta dig into this more. But it’s, it’s true, you know, when you actually when you’re not just throwing up content for the sake of content, and you that’s kind of an area where I think a lot of crypto companies maybe go a little bit wrong as they’re like, I don’t know, I need to tweet I guess. So they like throw stuff up. You have more like research behind why you are saying what you’re saying why you’re doing what you’re doing and you’re actually bringing some intention to it. That’s when you can really see some dynamic growth because you’re not just kind of running in circles. You’re actually you you know, the reason why you’re doing certain things.

Rob McNealy
But absolutely. It was interesting like on our main TUSC website, there’s that there was going to be a lot of sub domains for things like our gooey wallet and the block explorer and our forums, we have all that stuff being built out or is built out at this point. And if you put something on a subdomain, it the Google and other search engines treat things on a subdomain as a different website. And so whatever goodwill, as I call it, or our SEO juice that your main website has doesn’t necessarily be pushed down to the sub domain. So we actually move some things that are that we’re going to be in subdomains and we moved him into directories, because it’s much better for SEO and our developers, like why are we spending all this time doing this? A lot of work and I’m like, trust me, it’s going to be a big deal because I know when on the TUSC website will do all the trackers and all the exchanges live link to it. Well, the link to your block, explore the link to your forum, and I go those are going to be the sites that All the big sites in crypto will be linking to those sites. And we want all that inbound link juice going to the main website, not a sub domain. And so that’s somehow I think about SEO is that we we structure our whole project around how some of the SEO stuffs going to work out knowing how these things work. And I think that a lot of crypto project will be better off starting to get some marketers on their team, so they can figure that stuff out too.

Lea Thompson AKA Girl Gone Crypto
Hmm, absolutely. No, it’s so true. And I think that as the as the space continues to evolve, you know, we’ll see more companies have that marketing budget to right because I think that might be part of it. A lot of it is they, they it’s the developers is the people running it or, you know, the the nerds behind the project, right, that actually are building it and making it work. And so they’re going to need that help that marketing that, you know, kind of personal touch that like how, how that stuff works as they continue to grow. But yeah, so I think that maybe that’s just kind of the phases. We’re in as a just in general as a space, you know, as we’re maturing. We’ll see more of that come up, I hope.

Rob McNealy
I think so. It was interesting and our we’re-our project’s focused on the gun industry. And that’s one of the our little niches that we’re we’re just kind of focused on that space. And it’s interesting. You mentioned earlier if the terms of services of these platforms change what so it’s interesting you may not know this, but I don’t you don’t look like a hardcore gun guy. But did you know that in the gun world is one of the biggest communities on Instagram right now?

Lea Thompson AKA Girl Gone Crypto
I did not. That is interesting. And I do own a few guns by the way. So I do shoot sometimes. Yeah.

Rob McNealy
So but, but so it’s interesting because the way the gun world is locked out, not only does the gun world have a lot of problems with payments and financing, they can’t get bank accounts. They can’t use PayPal, square stripe, they can use any of those payment systems. And our our theory and thesis about how we launched TUSC was that if you’re going to get mass adoption, you need to start with people that have industries that have a recognized problem with traditional payment methods. If you’re just trying to sell grandma on crypto, you’re not solving a problem for grandma, you’re creating work for grandma. That’s not a good way to get adoption. So we so we focus we’re focusing on the gun industry. And we used to have a business in that space. So and I’m a gun guy. So it just kind of is awesome. But the but because of marketing, like the gun space is interesting, because not only that problem with payments, but they have problems with marketing on top of that, because they’re not allowed to do pay per click on most major platforms. Google doesn’t allow you can’t sell guns on you can’t sell and market guns on Google. You can’t do any kind you can’t buy it. Facebook and Twitter and most of the social platforms want to live by ads. And now in so what was happening is the gun world has created all these By the way, this could be a good option for you. All the influencers and all you have to do is be a girl and hold a gun and take a picture and then big companies will pay you lots of money for that I didn’t have a ton of those my goodness I miss it out so and but here’s the thing Facebook said two days ago they’re going to fire the gun influencers off their platform. So they’re banning gun influencers now, that just happened. So this we have it has they said in the upcoming weeks that’s gonna it’s gonna go down that road and and I was talking to someone in the gun space who’s very influential the other day and we were talking about it he says it’s going to happen because he He’s the owner of gun industry marketplace and we were talking about this and his name is Owen York, and I just put that out today, I think. But we had a good conversation offline about this and he’s like, they’re gonna go they’re gonna fire those guys too. And he called it he totally nailed it. And and so it’s interesting this goes back to but now if you’re an influencer and you built your business and your income now around being like an Instagram influencer in the gun space, you are now finding yourself you don’t have a job and or you probably won’t have a job pretty soon. And it’s just interesting kind of seeing a now if you’re an influencer and you’re only did Instagram, it’s great, I would say what you should have been doing the whole time is hosting all those pictures on your own website and cross linking them from Instagram. So now you’re still placed so people can go and your content is there because now they don’t have all that link juice if you think about if so if you’ve been building up this following for you know, potentially years right, you know, you’re not you haven’t and you haven’t been driving all this traffic back to your own personal website. Where do you do now? You’ve lost all that time, all that content now maybe scrubbed, maybe you can download it, I think but but all that goodwill and all the time people only know how to get to your main, you know, Instagram account. They probably don’t use probably not even ranking in Google. And so that to me is what as far as I see a lot of these influencers just not understanding that the game can play or change. I’m sorry, if you’re playing the game, it can change very quickly and you have no control over that. So you should always be thinking about in the back of your mind if I’m going to make a living as an influencer. For instance, what if and this has happened a couple times the last few years where Twitter wouldn’t allow crypto ads and Facebook still won’t allow crypto ads, and unless you know somebody, because we’ve tried. And so the question is, what if you’re a crypto influencer and now crypto Twitter decides to call you?

Lea Thompson AKA Girl Gone Crypto
Yeah, that would hurt. It would hurt but if you’re driving all your content back to your own website, and that’s your focus is pushing people to your website that you do control. I think to me, that’s the smarter way to go. And and I don’t know the best way to do it. I mean, obviously, we’re all doing cross platform stuff, and I do a ton of Twitter. I do a ton of all the social media stuff too. But most of what I do is drive people back to my website. For instance, I have a YouTube channel right but I don’t link to my YouTube channel. What I do is I actually embed my YouTube videos in a blog post for every show and and i SEO that blog post it just says so and so interview video so guess what, if I lose my youtube channel I can re upload all that content to another video player and put it back and I maintain the SEO I just need to change the embed I need to start doing that with my YouTube videos I part of like what you’re talking about with not being so dependent on particular platforms is actually why I’m just building a website right now and I’m really close to launching it’s going to be Leah loves crypto calm because gergan crypto.com was apparently taken but it was I think by some guys got in trouble for it but that’s a different. And so but part of it is because I want to start actually building an email list and like you said, building those those backlinks because then I actually have away to contact and connect with people that like my content. If something happens if suddenly, you mean crypto especially crypto is something that I think the market is still kind of figuring out the, you know, governments, these big centralized social media sites are still figuring out what they think about. And like you said, they might be like, Oh, well, we don’t want to see crypto ads anymore. And so that’s certainly a possibility. And so I think it’s super smart what you guys are doing and that’s such a good idea with the YouTube videos and definitely excited to write a blog post to go with my YouTube videos almost any way, you know.

Rob McNealy
Well, you know, and I’m not saying a corporation would ever do anything wrong, but you can’t tell me that. Well, let’s put in perspective right? You You got Twitter with you know, they’re pushing Bitcoin and some of their own little weird social media, things that they’re doing and I don’t trust jack any more than anybody else. But then what happens if Facebook launches Libra? You don’t think they’re not going to do something to drive people to Libra at the expense of other kinds of projects? Absolutely. And how does that look for not only, you know, banning ads, but are they going to add the content to? Are they going to bear? Or maybe they just bury the content? You know, oh, yeah, you can post this button, but we’re going to shadow band so no one can see it. And to me, I expect that to happen. You know, and, you know, and I work backwards from there. Because I don’t trust these guys. I mean, you know, if, if jack wanted to be open and not worry about censorship, he could make that happen time crypto, but he’s like, No, we want to make our own standard. There’s already open social media standards out there, though, you know, it’s, you know, web three stuffs already working on that. You don’t need to create a new consortium board of advisors to tweak Twitter, you could just adopt this standard exist, but they’re not going to do what they they’re not going to do something that they don’t control. And that’s what it comes down to. Because you know, especially with the Silicon Valley the way it is it’s about control to monetize, and there’s power in that and they’re not going to give up that power. Regardless of the stuff they say I don’t trust I don’t trust companies I don’t trust governments just like I and I don’t trust big corporate media guys whenever they talk about free and open anything Devil’s always in the details. Now I sound like a ranting lunatic but it happens from time to time. But so where do you think things are going to be in crypto here in the next year or two? You know, I’m not looking for like a hardcore money prediction. But where do you think it’s going to happen to the content creators in this space?

Lea Thompson AKA Girl Gone Crypto
I think it is going to be a wild ride because and you look at the content creators that were here in 17 before the big bull run, I mean, they got massive followings, really, because they were creating content during that Bull Run. So all of a sudden, all these people are like, googling things and looking things up and trying to find YouTube videos about Bitcoin and they’re on Twitter looking for questions. And so I think that a lot of those creators really kind of like swept up but you know, a big they’re following probably in that, like, you know, however many months period. And so I think that’ll happen again in the next bull run because again, they’ll be people that aren’t usually really consuming a lot of crypto content that are all of a sudden, really interested because maybe they bought a little bit of Bitcoin, like a long time ago, and they’re like, wait, now it’s worth how much What do I do or the you know, get the FOMO? And they’re like, do I need to buy now? What do I do? So I think that, in addition to, you know, kind of media mentions of the news and different people talking about crypto the next time I have a big bull run, you know, I think that just the general population looking for content is going to massively increase than the current amount that we have right now.

Rob McNealy
I think that makes a lot of sense. So I guess I need to get all my content out there for the next Bull Run. So I can ride that wave. Right. But I think you’re right, I think I think crypto is dead right now. And a lot of people I don’t have hope em by the way, I’m not one of those guys. I’m not injecting like, Oh, it’s gonna go to a billion not like now. I’m very cognizant, and I’m a heretic and that’s why I piss people off. But, you know, I mean, I think it’s possible that the price of bitcoin is $7,000 and maybe that’s what the actual market price of it should be. I don’t know that it’s going to go crazy at any one point. And and I’m open to that, because nobody knows everybody’s just guessing right now, but, but I can tell you even dislike the community right now. I mean, we just had to do our swap and, and, you know, it’s interesting, like how many people are diving in like, Oh, you guys swap like, yeah, we swapped three months ago. Thanks for thanks for playing, you know, because and I think that’s what’s happened. I think crypto got boring six months into 2018. For bigger, boring starting about a year and a half ago after the market tanked. People just went away. And it’s funny because even maybe within a you know, a year ago, it’s like the number of scammers just kind of faded away too. It’s like the scammers got bored. Like, they’re like, Oh, I feel bad for you. Okay, I’m a scammer, but I’ll give you some money because you’re down on your lock raid. So I definitely see that I think the market got really quiet and even the community is quiet. And I think I think you’re right. I think when when the numbers start going crazy, whenever that happens, again, I think you know, people get a little excited and start doing the research. So that’s a good note, I think. I think it’s a good time to build. I think even if you’re a content creator in this space, it is an excellent time to build. But I think you need to keep your content and your own stuff too, or at least have that reserve that you’re always kind of building yourself up. I think that’s important. I also notice I and I am I’m a big believer in personal branding now too. And I think that we had a good I went through the social media wave back 10 years ago when social media became a thing. And it’s interesting because all the big people that were big, I’m big Twitter, you know, I’m a social media guru. Kind of It’s like these crypto gurus, right? In fact, there’s a couple big crypto gurus that were social media gurus and now they’re crypto gurus. It’s kind of funny. But I think what happened is if they don’t do something else, besides just kind of try to ride that latest wave and be relevant in this latest wave, but I think people need to go through and build themselves into something. Out of that social media expert guru wave, there was hardly any of them that are relevant today. I think one of the biggest ones that is is Gary Vaynerchuk. I don’t know if he is a love him. Yeah. So I actually interviewed him a while back and Gary. Wow. Yeah. And Gary came out of the social media world, and then he parlayed it into a lot of other things. And I he’s one of the few that cross that chasm when like being a social like social media is just media and everybody does it now. But 10 years ago, no one was doing it. I mean, it was all brand new. And so, but there was all these other people that were trying to, you know, pimp themselves out is the latest, greatest so media marketing guru expert, right? And I kind of liken them to all these like traders, right? These crypto traders, I’m like, you’ve never traded a stock in your life. But now you’re like this excellent super duper trader on crypto and you got like some avatar dog. Yeah, no. But his, but his avatar dog gonna be there in five years? Are they going to be relevant in five years? And I don’t think they will be I just don’t see that. Because they’re not building anything. They’re not building anything back to a real website. They’re not building themselves back into a person, like their personal identity. If you’re if your identity is this random cartoon thing, but you won’t Dr. yourself for whatever reason, I don’t think you’re getting the benefit of all the content you’re really creating. What do you think?

Lea Thompson AKA Girl Gone Crypto
Yeah, no, I totally agree with that. I mean, there’s certain waves that I think are kind of easier to jump on or maybe more profitable jump on than others. And you know, I definitely say that crypto trading tips and kind of daily charting and stuff like that. I’m like, you know, I am not an expert. I’m like, if I really You want on my channel to blow up I would start doing but I know that that’s not necessarily, you know, my kind of my niche, my passion my like where I feel like I kind of find a groove. And so I guess kind of a question I have back to you cuz I’m curious what you were something you were just talking about is like so if that kind of content, you know, is that dog whatever is that going to be around in five years like what kind of crypto content do you think is still going to be relevant five years from now? Or are you more just saying like, build your own personal brand and then you can evolve along with that as things change?

Rob McNealy
I would ask if you went and looked at the the social media world of who is the social media expert on social media, and you probably can’t find that person anymore, or you probably don’t know them as like a household name brand. And and I would say is, it’s one thing to be an expert and using social media as a tool or any kind of marketing as a tool. But if you yourself are the as the content creator, I think you need to make yourself into something that allows flexibility for evolution going forward. So for instance, even name and I think about this even with projects and businesses and when we came up with the name the rebrand for us because we started as OCC in the beginning. And Tosca stands for the universal settlement coin. And, and it’s interesting because we also want to plan the elephant thing, because that’s our thing, right? Little elephant guy. So but TUSC, not to us, K. But what we said is we’re going to start off in this one industry, just kind of like Amazon was a bookstore for a long time. And but we’re not going to pigeonhole our branding around that one industry because that’s too limiting. And if we’re successful in one industry, we should be able to evolve and grow into others. And I think about personal branding the same way. If all you are is a crypto trader. Don’t Okay, make a lot of money. Great. I mean, I’m not dissing that and maybe you’re really good at trading. Thanks. You know, that’s great. But where does that take you? Where what are the options for you to evolve out of that? And ask, the question I would ask is, is how are you prepared to evolve when no one really cares about crypto trading tips anymore? Because at some point, it’s going to change, it’s not going to be as important out there. And what is your plan for evolving? And how does what you do with your brand now affect that in five years? And that’s that’s that’s just the question. I don’t know the you know, maybe I maybe you’re funny. Maybe you have a great personality, maybe you’re really smart about business on top of that. So you could talk about trading, but also business and that’s what I’m doing with this show. I’m not going to limit it to crypto stuff. Because it’s not one it’s not me, because I don’t just eat sleep and breathe crypto from the standpoint that that’s all there is my life. In fact, I have a lot of different interests. And I love small business and startups and I’ve been an entrepreneur for a long time and I’m going to cover that because that’s important to me. And that’s part of who I am. And so to me, I don’t want to limit myself to only talking about this one tiny subject that very few hundred thousand people in the world right now care about. I want to talk about it. Like I had a guy the other day and he pitched me I didn’t even know dinosaurs are fake guy and I love conspiracy theories. I’m not saying it believe them. But I love conspiracy theories and the guy pitch me and I’m like, that’s just funny. I’ve never heard this conspiracy so that you think like there’s a whole group of people out there think dinosaurs are fake. And there’s a big dinosaur industrial complex and museums are in on it. And I’m like, I know people that work in museums, I did not seem like in spirit they do not seem like there’s like a mafia, right. And so I’m like, I had them on the show, because it was interesting to me. And I wanted to learn about it. And so if I was just a strictly a crypto show, I couldn’t have that guy. And that wouldn’t be any fun.

Lea Thompson AKA Girl Gone Crypto
Actually, I saw my list to watch that or listen to that episode. I saw that and I’m like, I need to listen to like seven here and more people talk about the dinosaur conspiracy. I’m like, What is this? I was like I’ve seen Land Before Time. Come on, dude, Don’t try to fool me.

Rob McNealy
Did I fly? No, you fall. My favorite. Yep, yep, yep. Yep.I still have that show on VHS somewhere I think you really do. But I don’t have a way to play it. Because I don’t have a VHS player.

Lea Thompson AKA Girl Gone Crypto
But I think that’s that’s important is that if you’re going to be a content creator, be flexible, be flexible. And make sure you have some method where you can control it and drive that that content that’s somewhere that you can monetize in other ways. And like in just like I, you know, I live this, like, I still have all my old content. And I’m like, you know what, that would be good to build, you know, an extra 200 shows into my feed, and I have a goal I want to do like 100 to 150 interviews this this in 2020. That’s kind of my goal. I’m going to do probably three a week, but then you throw on another couple hundred shows in the mix. You know, by the end of the year, it’ll be a big show. And that’s important and it’s numbers and as inbound links and you know, maybe someone looks at an old show that I did was someone who has a big brand name I interviewed some big people before Like, CEO of Zappos, one of the former CEOs of Starbucks, the former governor of Colorado, I mean, lots of people a lot, I just call people up, like, come on my show, like, okay, that’s fine. But it’s good content and still recognized brand names. Then Gary Vaynerchuk, I interviewed him, you know, I interviewed lots of people. And so why not throw that content out there. And it’s interesting, isn’t it as an archive show, you can see how they’ve changed in time, and where they’re still the same. It’s kind of fun. So that’s what we’re going to be doing with this project. And to me, it’s all about, you know, meeting interesting people in the space. And I think with content creators, you got to be flexible, and you got to think about the future because if this is what you’re trying to do, and I’m not trying to do this as part of my job, or as my job, so and so I just preface this I, I would probably have to do things a little differently if I wanted to do as part of my job, but I’m not but I would say to people that are even you or people that are aspiring to be, you know, content creators for a living How are you leveraging that in back into yourself? And how are you monetizing that? Or what are you building that you can monetize over time. And to me, that would be important. Like, you know, if you’re really good at this, I mean, if you’re really a good brand ambassador, and you can build your own personal brand up by this one topic, I mean, that’s how you get picked up by like, you know, big companies to go around the world and be their brand ambassadors. And if you can generate an audience that way, there’s lots of opportunities there, if that’s something you desire to do, and you just got to be thinking about that the whole time on how do you establish yourself as being good at getting your own brand out there? And then how do you go through and you know, put that as a solution to like, say, a big corporation or something at some point later in life? Let’s just say this industry doesn’t need influencers anymore. What do you think?

Yeah, I know I think that being able to build a personal brand, being a Market understanding how to communicate with people and how to honestly how to be interesting. Does that make sense? Like, you know, to be like how do I’m screwed I’m screwed then. But just how to create things that people find entertaining educational, or in some way make their, their moment their day better when they come across it. I think that if you can kind of capture that skill, then you can translate that into so many different arenas, like you were talking about like and maybe it’s not even in the same industry like it could even be like Hey, so I I’m able to have this kind of engagement or this I have this kind of feeling or vibe with the audience says that I talked to and with my content, it you can take that really anywhere. So I think it’s almost like a good life skill just to kind of learn how to communicate online and how to create content that is interesting and engaging for people. And so in terms of like, you know, if the industry doesn’t need influencers anymore, like I personally think that I don’t really love the word influencer. But you know, I think that that industry is still growing and I think it is going to evolve and change. And honestly, I think that the crypto space is a little behind the game on certain trends and kind of the influencer marketing realm. You know, I think that a lot of people are just looking at your follower numbers and they’re not really looking at engagement and so much where I think in the rest of the world, you know, they’ve kind of moved on to be like, Okay, well, let’s, you know, let’s actually look at what people are really saying and how people are really interacting so I’m kind of excited to see the crypto space hopefully kind of come along that trend cuz I think you get more robust partnerships when you do that sort of thing. And now I’m starting to sound like a rambling fool I’m just going on about sounded great.

So with it, but I think you’re right i think it comes down to if you can build an audience and and a market let’s just say if you can build an audience about yourself and you do that really well. In a compelling way, that’s how you get a TV gig. That’s how you get hired to do other things for other people. So success breeds success. Ultimately, people want to work with people that have done it before. And and that’s how it is. So you got to understand. That’s why I like the personal brand. That’s why I like that’s why I like doing video on top of audio now. Because if you’re just like this crypto dog, or you know, whatever avatar it is out there, people don’t know who you are. It’s hard for them to kind of get a feel for who you are. And I find it’s interesting because with social media, when I used to go to like blog world and the affiliate summits and all these kind of related type of social media conferences back in the day, everybody just kind of used their own real name. So you can like Oh, you’re someone so Hey, nice to meet you. But now you’re like, and I feel like an idiot. Sometimes when I go to crypto conferences like, oh, you’re seeing your death, crypto and analyst or whatever, you know, it’s like oh, I just did it. Feel like a moron saying, Oh, you’re so and so right now. It’s like, I’m like, dude, I can’t take it seriously, I really can’t. It’s like, oh, you’re that taco dog or whatever. I’m just like, I’m just Rob. That’s just me. I am not that cool. I don’t have a cape, though. I probably it maybe that maybe, maybe I need a cape. Chris, should I get a cape? All right. Okay, the wife says, I can get a cape. So maybe I need a cape. That’ll be my thing. Oh, you’re wrong. But I think you’re right. I think people I think it’s important that people build their brand around themselves. And if they’re going to be in this space, and then they can leverage it and market in any way they want. If and I think that would be my thing. Now. You know, maybe these guys have some kind of, I always wonder if someone’s like an anon, I was wondering what they’re hiding. And I that’s what I think about like, right? It’s like, what do you Who are you afraid of? Why don’t you want people to know you’re doing this thing? Okay, and to me, I mean, and that’s, that’s what my own brain and maybe I get it because it’s like, it’s crypto. And I’m like, well, we’re not doing anything illegal. Why do you? Right? If you’re if you’re spending all this time and you’re really serious, like, you know, I just think it’s weird to me. But anyway,

I think kind of just to kind of offer like a little like Connor thought on that, like, I mean, I put my name out there too because I don’t you know, really care but the at least for me anyway, the reason I kind of went with a more like, you know, a curve on crypto, like, you know, more kind of funny, creative name is because I wanted people’s attention spans are about this big for those of you that are listening and not watching. It’s really small. And I think that when people see an account, and it’s like, you know, maybe so and so following this or something, someone retweeted it, if it just says Leah Thompson, then they don’t necessarily know like, oh, is what is that person about? But when they see something, it’s like crypto, they’re like, oh, that might be an account. I’m interested in So like for me, I kind of did that more as like a people can make that split second decision that they want to click on my name and check out my page. So anyway, just that’s kind of at least me where I was coming from.

Rob McNealy
You just need to put the word girl in crypto and then you’re good. You know, it’s funny. I see like these guys, I’m not picking out there’s this a lot of thirsty boys out there. And it’s like, you guys have a huge advantage. I’m you know, and it’s funny because even my wife, I mean, my wife has. She’s got a lot of followers on Twitter to like, 19,000 or something. And it’s funny because even I just mentioned her in there that I’m like, oh, and they’re like, follow, follow, follow. And I have to like, I’m losing followers every day, right? I’m like, I’m just trying to just keep my head above water. But she’s like, Oh, I got more followers. But, dude, you just breathe your girl and you get all right. I’m just picking. So Lea, where can people find out more about you?

Lea Thompson AKA Girl Gone Crypto
Yeah, so you can find me. You know, we’ve talked a lot about Twitter tonight. That’s probably where I Hang out the most online so you can find me Girl Gone Crypto, and also my youtube channel Girl Gone Crypto. I’m also on Instagram, you know, LinkedIn pretty much wherever people hang out. You can probably find me if you just search girl on crypto will thank you so much for coming on and I’ll try to get this edited before the holidays. Awesome. Well, thank you so much Rob is really fun hanging out with you.

Rob McNealy
Thank you so much. I’ll talk to you soon.

Episode Links

Audio Interview
Video Interview
Interview Transcript