How many people buy an E-Course each year and never get the value of the course back? Wouldn't it be awesome if you could re-sell that course after you are done with it?
We sit down and talk with Ben Carson, founder of WallStreetPrints and Caffeinated Labs, and discuss how education and online courses will be completely revolutionized with blockchain technology!
Imagine making our course an NFT so your customers can buy, sell, and trade your course!
What does that even look like, and how is Ben using this NFT use case TODAY!
This is an episode you do not want to miss!
Guest:
Ben Carson
Founder of WallStreetPrints and Caffeinated Labs
Host of the Caffeinated Hustle Podcast
Be sure to Follow the Tomorrow Today Podcast wherever you listen to podcasts so you never miss a new episode.
Follow us on Social Media
Duke McKenzie
Kyle Kaplanis
Duke McKenzie
LinkedIn - Duke McKenzie
Kyle Kaplanis
LinkedIn - Kyle Kaplanis
TikTok - @theweb3guy
IG - @kyle_kaplanis
YT - The Web3 Guy
How many people buy an E-Course each year and never get the value of the course back? Wouldn't it be awesome if you could re-sell that course after you are done with it?
We sit down and talk with Ben Carson, founder of WallStreetPrints and Caffeinated Labs, and discuss how education and online courses will be completely revolutionized with blockchain technology!
Imagine making our course an NFT so your customers can buy, sell, and trade your course!
What does that even look like, and how is Ben using this NFT use case TODAY!
This is an episode you do not want to miss!
Guest:
Ben Carson
Founder of WallStreetPrints and Caffeinated Labs
Host of the Caffeinated Hustle Podcast
Be sure to Follow the Tomorrow Today Podcast wherever you listen to podcasts so you never miss a new episode.
Follow us on Social Media
Duke McKenzie
Kyle Kaplanis
Duke McKenzie
LinkedIn - Duke McKenzie
Kyle Kaplanis
LinkedIn - Kyle Kaplanis
TikTok - @theweb3guy
IG - @kyle_kaplanis
YT - The Web3 Guy
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Tomorrow Today podcast. We got my co-host Kyle Kaplanis. How you doing Kyle?
Kyle Kaplanis:What's up Duke. Hey, everybody.
Duke McKenzie:I'm excited. I know I get excited a lot, but today is a real reason to be excited. We actually have a great guest today. Entrepreneur, NFT creator, and podcast host. We have Ben Carson with us today. How you doing Ben?
Ben Carson:Oh, my goodness. Love the intro. Thanks for being here. Love energy.
Duke McKenzie:I'd give you a standing ovation. Actually. I'm gonna do it here. Here. You got a standing. I'm on a new camera working on a new setup, but you got a standing ovation, Ben. So
Ben Carson:I appreciate that.
Duke McKenzie:How are you?
Ben Carson:I'm doing well, man. I'm just excited to be here. I got five kids and they're all outta the house right now. So I'm just enjoying life taking a break
Duke McKenzie:as you should.
Kyle Kaplanis:We're excited to have you on.
Duke McKenzie:Yeah. We're excited to have you on. You are doing a lot of interesting things. You're hosting a podcast. You're starting an NFT collection. Plus you're an entrepreneur as well doing your traditional business. I would love to start off by number one, telling the audience about your origin story. A couple views on entrepreneurship and everything that's going on right now. I would love to hear your origin story and what you're about at the.
Ben Carson:Yeah, that's awesome. I appreciate that. I'm 35. So we're gonna go back to about half my life ago. And basically I got outta high school, used to mow a yard for a guy that was a stock trader in New York, I'm from Kansas. So he. Moved to Midwest with his family. And so I mowed his yard, all my senior year. And he basically talked me out of really going hard at college, he said you might wanna look into a trade. I did college the first year and I decided to take his advice, got into heating and cooling. I did heating and cooling for seven years and I thought I was just gonna do it forever. You can make a hundred grand at heating and cooling when you leave the job, the job leaves you. There's no stress at home. I kind of liked it. But, if you're an entrepreneur, you just know the itch and if you get the itch. it doesn't get satisfied. And so I either needed to start my own thing or just try something else. And as luck would have it, somebody that I knew, was wanting to get into finance, doing stocks and options, very different. It shouldn't have been me. I didn't have a college degree in finance. But life is about who, you know, not what you know. And so I was connected with this person and we took a shot at it. And as luck would have it about the first six months in, we connected with somebody that was a nine figure trader. So they're trading a hundred million plus and they mentored me. And so again, connected with someone that I shouldn't been connected with. It's about who, you know, not what you know. I did that for seven years and basically if you just deal with money what I've come to find out is you really can get burned out. And so there were days near the end that I was just, let's just be honest it was about the money. So I could make $5,000 in an hour. I could be drinking at noon. It just depended on the day and you find your value and your self worth money. It's a terrible price. Terrible way to live for me. Plenty people do it professionally. Nothing but the utmost respect seven years was just my cutoff point. It just wasn't for me. I took a shot at it and it was fine. Didn't walk away cause I blew my account up. Literally just got burned out. What I decided to do was not walk away was to take a break. And so I connected with one of the best artists in Portland, Oregon, and he made some artwork for me that blew up every trader I knew bought one from me. Was literally just trying to redecorate my own office and it just took off. So the website wall street prints is my actual company. First company I started.
Duke McKenzie:Let me ask you a question, basically what happened was you realized that the life of a trader, which is everything measured on money, whatever wasn't necessarily right. For, for yourself. And then you basically purchased some art from one of the artists and you said I wanted decorate office. Did you get into a little bit how that started?
Ben Carson:I should have brought the artwork. Since it's a video podcast, I should have brought it to show you, but if you check out wallstreetprints.com, you'll see it. I literally just said, I want artwork for myself. I was just trying to take a six week break from trading, then go back to it. So I just said, I want these really cool pieces that embody a trader. And so it's literally a business person in a bull and a bear that are dressed like people. And it sold close to $200,000 worth now because people resonate with that because if you're a trader. You need a confidence boost. That's not just by my course or something like, you just wanna see yourself as successful. And so that's what I just wanna do. I wanna redecorate my office, give myself something to look at every day, like embody success before I started the day. And traders started to resonate with that and wanted themselves. And what I realized really, really quickly was that I like helping people and I like actually adding value to society. When you're trading, if you're just doing it for yourself, maybe one other person you're adding value to yourself, or you're subtracting it if you lose, but there's really no value add to society, which is why there's a lot of charities around traders. Because there's just not a lot of value they offer. You can rebuttal that. You can say, retirement's help people. We're helping people long term. That's fine. If you're just killing what you eat. Like I was, you're not taking percentages. You're literally just making money or losing money. There's no value add. Let's just be honest. Let's just be cut and dry. And so right. I stopped enjoying that. I really started enjoying the new thing. And so I did that for 18 months. And basically at this point, I've been a trader for seven years. I know how to trade professionally. I can make a really good course. I've been print on demand for 18 months. I know how to do that professionally. I've made it to six figures really, really quickly could do a course there. I've never liked doing a course because if you charge someone $2,000, you're giving them information, knowledge, but you are making them pay $2,000 and they're never gonna get that money back. And so my artist that is still friends with me today, he got into NFTs and he started telling me about that. And so NFTs for me were, not quite what they were for him, but web three technology opens the door to let you buy access and when you are done with it, you can sell that access to someone else and get your money back. You can get a profit, you can get a portion back. NFT web three technology allows you to get what you need, but not be out of it forever. So many people have bought a course and just it's sitting somewhere on their computer. They've never used it again. What if there was an option to sell to someone else? Education is going to be transformed tremendously through this web three blockchain technology. And that's why we've started our project because I can sleep at night, knowing everything I'm selling to someone. If they don't need it, they don't want anymore. They're not selling. That's an
Duke McKenzie:interesting, interesting take Kyle. So basically what you are saying is, around caffeinated hustle, the collection, but also the course is that. The biggest problem out there is that when you take your online course, you have two areas of knowledge and expertise that you're able to share with people. But what you are saying is that when you're finished with the course or whatever, NFT holders are able to resell that and give access to the course to others, is that correct?
Ben Carson:A hundred percent. Yeah,
Duke McKenzie:that's cool. That is see what I love about don't you love this Kyle. What I love about web three and blockchain technology and all of those things is that we are just scratching the surface as to, different use cases of what's possible.
Kyle Kaplanis:What I love about this as well, is that this makes sense to the mainstream because of the fact that I guarantee you nearly everybody has signed up for some sort of course in their lifetime, right. To learn something new. And again, I'd say 99% of those people never really got their value back, maybe they learned something great, but this is a cool way to take the course, sell it back. And that just makes sense to anybody. If I pitch that idea who would say no to that? Who would say, that's not a good idea.
Duke McKenzie:And when did you start? When did you start it and things, and how's it going so far? And I would love your thoughts around has the market sort of changed things for you at all with the way that it is right now?
Ben Carson:That's so many loaded questions that I love every second of that so all. I started NFTs last October. Was working with another project and then I decided to branch on my own start my own project probably in February. Currently my project, my team has 15 people and basically every person on that team is a believer. Just like you said, the fact that this is a game changer. Because we're not selling one course like on day one, when you buy one of our NFT's from caffeinated creatures. That's the actual project podcast, caffeinated hustle. It proves concept gets you connections, but caffeinated creatures is the actual project, but you get $20,000 of content day one, that's pretty solid. But if you just won a course, you Udemy is still 20 bucks for a course. That's a lot more of fancy selling tactics that get you a $2,000 course, but the connections are very different. I personally didn't go to college, like you heard, but both my brothers went to college. One went for psychology, one went To be a cop and neither one of them are following their career choice. College is now more about the connections than the education. Cuz you could learn almost anything on YouTube. You could learn almost anything if you pay enough money on courses, but the connections meeting with other people that are either really successful or have your desires is really difficult to find when you go into Reddit, because that's not where you're gonna make those connections. No. So,
Duke McKenzie:and a wise man said a couple times on this podcast. It's not what you know, it's who you know.
Ben Carson:Man, that guy sounds awesome.
Kyle Kaplanis:A little bit of our background, we work with content creators across digital media, and I'm bringing a little bit of that into this, is that the value before used to be reach and reach, but really the new value is the community and the people in your community is the 100% value.
Duke McKenzie:So true.
Kyle Kaplanis:And we're seeing that transition across all markets and web three plays a big part in that.
Ben Carson:Yeah, without question. And to answer your last question of, this current market, I would just encourage anyone that thinks NFTs are dead or it's tulip mania, or they like that you really need to go and Google and you type in this internet fad 2001, and you're gonna find a whole bunch of articles. There's one. I just posted on our Twitter on at calf NFT. Basically it was an article that showed up summertime, 2001, just have a.com bubble burst. And basically the Internet's a fad. Turns out all these people were wrong. And the amount of companies going bankrupt in the space is just showing you that this thing's not actually gonna be around long term. yes, we're gonna have massive failure along the way. pets.com was in this NFT hype, you know, but so was Amazon somewhere in there, Amazon, somewhere in there is all these chiefs, everything else that blew up. So you have to ask yourself, is this technology really dead and gone? Was this tulip mania, or is this. Like every other fad that the technology wasn't quite ready. They jumped too fast. Now we've reset. And now the real stuff's starting to show up because eBay just spent a massive amount of money on NFT marketplace. The big players are just getting into the game. You have to decide you believe the pundits who just get paid to write articles, or do you believe where the money's going? I don't believe NFT's are even close to being done.
Duke McKenzie:It's funny. So we have a similar worldview, as in there's two different things, right. We are so early and every time you were early, you mentioned earlier, so I got outta college right during the. First part of the.com growth and then experienced the.com. Boom. And I remember one time, I was in online advertising. I went into the marketing manager, one of the major airlines, and I wanted to give them free online advertising. We would've made the banner ads. We would've made all of this stuff. And they said, no, internet advertising is dead. The us based, online advertising industry right now is 189 billion now, 20 years later. And they're like, oh, it's. This online advertising stuff is over the thing is with any new technology. I can't even imagine the use cases as to what web three and NFT technology will be in the next 10 years. The entrepreneurs have to figure that out. Just like, I couldn't imagine that because of the internet. I couldn't imagine that I would have this phone that I would push a button and a car would come and pick me up and I'd push a button and like food comes and I couldn't imagine that because I couldn't imagine the use case of the smart devices. I'm aligned with your theory and the advice that we tell a lot of the people that we work with, a lot of the creators that we work with and everything are doing a lot of three projects and everything is right now, you leverage this opportunity to build and invest and build and build and build because this is the perfect time to build. Yeah,
Kyle Kaplanis:exactly.
Ben Carson:Very well said.
Kyle Kaplanis:And, and duke, to your point, too, what you always tell people as well is you don't have to buy anything right now. Just educate yourself.
Duke McKenzie:Just educate, learn, because you could make an argument. There is an argument to be made that maybe a JPEG is not worth $300,000. That that's an argument like, like that's not a, that's not a crazy argument, right? You could agree or disagree, but that doesn't mean that what is happening in the community. What I like about your community and your project with the caffeinated labs and caffeinated creatures of what you were talking about is that you're trying to figure out a, how to build a community, but then B sort of like. I have an interesting utility. You have this course and once you're done or whatever it is, you could sell this course or access to these courses or things along those lines. That's an interesting use case. And as we're trying to figure out, okay, how are we going to use this technology to grow and to move things forward.
Ben Carson:Yeah. And I'll just be honest. That's still not even enough. That's just one of our utilities. The bigger one is that we're gonna fund a lot of businesses and instead of take stakes, we're not gonna be an angel pad. We're just going to make them document their journey. So we've got three courses that you'll take on day one. That will teach you how to make a documentary. I'm currently talking to the guy that, basically got pick a ball on the map. He's making a documentary for Netflix next year, coming out. And so I'm trying to get him nailed down to make him a course for day one. We've already got two others, but basically you'll learn how to make content. And then you'll record yourself making a business that we fund you. So we'll give you the money. You need to start a business and then either you'll succeed or fail, but other people will learn. So like the biggest thing here is Because it's like college, it's the connections, but if you just need a course, go to Udemy for 20 bucks, if you wanna see someone build a business, you want a chance to fund your own business like launching and scaling a business is not as easy as what it says on YouTube. And so you gotta see real applicable ways to do it. And so documenting your journey is something that has never been done for, cause people don't wanna give away money for no reason, but if we're doing it to create content for our community, then we can afford to do it. So we're trying to do things like none other, so we don't want people to sell, but you know, if you do wanna. You can sell back. You're not either.
Duke McKenzie:Got it.
Kyle Kaplanis:That's cool.
Duke McKenzie:Ben. That is dope. That is dope. As we're winding this down, I appreciate you coming on. Is there any parting thoughts? Cause I already got one parting thought of Ben Carson. It's not what you know, it's who, you know, I got that down there. Is there another tab, bit of wisdom that you would like to leave the audience before we wind down?
Ben Carson:oh man, put me on the spot. I think everyone is unique and you gotta do what makes you unique? I think my life is very different than most, and my connections gave me opportunities. I didn't have, I shouldn't have had. And so I'm just trying to use my experience to create this. So for any creators out there, don't try and copy Gary V don't try and copy somebody else. You gotta use your journey to your advantage cuz nobody else has your journey. And if you're trying to make somebody else's journey, they're gonna buy theirs. They're not gonna buy your.
Kyle Kaplanis:That's awesome. I love that.
Duke McKenzie:that's great. All right, Ben Carson, thanks a lot for coming on Tomororw Today. Good luck on the projects. That was actually great. That was great. Great, great. And we will chat soon. We really appreciate you coming on. Thanks for having, yeah. Thanks Ben.
Ben Carson:Talk to you soon. Bye.