The Breakfast Club - Eating While Broke: JAMES DUMOULIN - School of Hard Chicks

Episode Date: November 29, 2025

The Black Effect Presents... Eating While Broke! From Fast Food to Entrepreneurial Success: James Dumoulin's Journey | Eating While Broke In this inspiring episode of 'Eating While Broke', host Coline Witt sits down with "James Dumoulin", co-founder of the 'School of Hard Knocks' media channel, to explore his incredible journey from working fast food and construction jobs to becoming a media mogul. James dives into the importance of mentorship, lessons learned from early financial missteps, and strategies for building a successful brand. He shares his experiences growing up in a military family, living overseas, and how these shaped his professional skills. From starting on TikTok to founding a content agency, James opens up about the challenges, setbacks, and triumphs along the way. YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@BreakfastClubPower1051FMSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Hi, Kyle. Could you draw up a quick document with the basic business plan? Just one page as a Google Doc and send me the link. Thanks. Hey, just finish drawing up that quick one-page business plan for you. Here's the link. But there was no link. There was no business plan. I hadn't programmed Kyle to be able to do that yet. I'm Evan Ratliff here with a story of entrepreneurship in the AI age. Listen as I attempt to build a real startup run by fake people.

Check out the second season of my podcast, Shell Game, on the IHeart Radio app or wherever you get your podcasts. On this week's episode of next chapter, I, TDJ, sit down. with Denzel Washington, a two-time Academy Award-winning actor and cultural icon. I don't take any credit for it. I just didn't put me first. I just put God first, and he's carried me.

Listen to the next chapter podcast on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. New episodes drop weekly. Hi, I'm Dr. Priyanko Wally. And I'm Hurricane DeBolu. On our new podcast Health Stuff, we demystify your burning health questions.

You'll hear us being completely honest about her own health. My residency colon was like a cry for help, honestly. And you'll hear candid advice and personal stories from experts who want to make health care more human. I feel like I never felt like I truly belonged in medicine. We want to make health less confusing and maybe even a little fun. Find health stuff on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Hey guys, welcome to another episode of Eating While Broke. I'm your host, Colleen Witt, and today we have very special guest.

School of Hard Knocks, James Dumoulin, is in the building. Did I say that right? That's correct. That works. I did. Okay, okay. I don't know if you're being super nice to me or not. So we are all the way here in Austin, Texas.

I literally been like, do not miss a follow-up when it comes to getting you. and you're very responsive and I'm super thankful. I watch your show School of Hard Knocks and I love that you really make the show about the content. But then you're always curious about like, who's James? You know, well, at least for me, I'm like, who is he? And you, I felt like when I watch a show, you're almost so hidden. It's like you have to like really stalk to find out who you are.

So I'm excited to be able to have you on Eating While Broke. Before we get into all about James, I would like to know what you're going to have me eat today. Absolutely. Well, thank you so much for having me on. I love the concept of your show. I'm a media, the media mogul. That's what I like to call it. But I love interesting concepts, and I thought that this was a fascinating concept for a podcast.

So I really liked it. But we're going to be actually having a 12-count chick-fil-a-nugget meal with fries and our sweet teas. That's a classic. It's something that I've ever since I was a young kid grew up eating and still to this day sometimes, I knowledge. Well, let's go ahead and try. I'm not a huge Chick-fil-Aer, even though in LA it's like the most popping, you know, that and in and out. But I've had this before. My favorite thing at Chick-fil-A is the cross-fries, but you said fries, and this is all they gave us. They don't have regular fries? I thought they did. No, that's what they had, the

waffle fries. Oh, okay. And great job on the sauces, too, barbecue and Chick-fil-A. Those are the go-to, and I didn't even say that, so. Oh, yeah, yeah. Okay, perfect. So take me back. I mean, We've all had it. Shout out to the listeners. You know a good Chick-fil-A meal. The sauce is definitely the best. Let's go ahead. Now, when was the last time you ate Chick-fil-A?

I want to say maybe like a month or so. Okay. A little bit of time. Okay. Well, take me back to the nostalgia of Chick-fil-A. Absolutely. So my first job ever, I actually worked at Chick-fil-A. So for like 10 months when I was a sophomore in high school, was making 725 working at Chick-fil-A.

7-25, Jesus. 7-25 an hour is crazy. But you almost kind of have to, in my opinion, experience that in any capacity. Maybe it's working in the food industry, you know, as somebody who's taking orders and stuff like that, to kind of realize that, hey, this isn't what I want to be doing forever. And then my second job was actually construction. So I worked construction for two years, my junior and senior year. high school paid a little bit better but still was again one of those things where it's like hey this was this was cool you know made a little money doing it was smart with it saved it but just wasn't

something that i wanted to be doing forever yeah i did uh fast food shoutouts to macdonalds but i realized very early on that as crazy as this may sound i thought that job was really really hard the fast pace of it the just i honestly said i tried uh fast food and i tried waitressing and both were absolutely like, Colleen, two jobs that you could never have for the rest of your life. It's draining. You have to be like real positive. What if you're having a bad day? Or, you know, if I'm anxious, I can't remember anything. So I learned, you're right. This is two careers. And I tell my friends all the time, like, I can't be a waitress and I can't work in fast food. Absolutely would suck at it. And I respect everyone that does those jobs. Absolutely. Even more. Yeah. And it does

teach you some skills as well, you know, like with Chick-fil-A, one of the things that, you know, how their structure is is they kind of instilling you to like treat people with kindness and have that customer service, which you can take with you in a lot of ways, depending on what type of business you go into. If you're selling, because there's a lot of nose. There's a lot of people that are rude. I've experienced it a ton, especially when we were, you know, coming up, starting our channel, going up to random people. I was told no in every possible way that you can kind of hear, but also remembering sometimes like when you're working that fast, food, working at a place like Chick-Fleigh, you get treated like shit behind the counter

and you kind of just have to learn to keep a smile on your face and just keep going and you can't let that ruin your day. You know, I always think about it this way. It's like there's 24 hours in a day, why let one second or one minute ruin the entire day? So I think that's something as well, you know, because anybody that's worked in that position, I'm sure, like you said, working, you know, fast food at McDonald's, you probably have some people that were super rude. And oftentimes most people just kind of let that ruin their days, which is very understandable but the minute you can kind of realize to kind of just take it as hey it is what it is onto the next one will be okay the better you'll be i have to steal that logic because that is

impressive i never even thought of that usually even even when something bads i have to be like it's just this moment just isolate it right now i try to imagine how you got the skill set of walking up to people i imagine that you had this sales background but to hear you were in mcdonald's and construction prior to starting your channel, what part of those experience led you to, it seems like, as a fan of your show, it seems like you respect and love entrepreneurship. Absolutely. So what's interesting is that I don't attribute any of my interpersonal skills of being able to go up and talk to people from working at Chick-fil-A and working construction, obviously. It's more of like a trait, it's like a hard, hands-on skill. But I actually like to say this because

from 6 to 10, I lived in South Korea. So I lived overseas. My dad, he ran the largest overseas military base in the entire world. So he was a garrison commander. So I was from a military family. I lived in three different cities in South Korea, eventually settled back into the DC area before moving to Austin five years ago. But when I was living in South Korea, I was watching my dad speak and lead in front of tens of thousands of troops, people from Korea, even the American soldiers that were over there. And I was constantly used to people coming up to him, coming up to our family, and just learning how to communicate with elders, people who were way older. Some of these people who were, you know, in significant positions

of power in the military and the government over there. So I had to learn from an early age how to, like, act professional how to carry yourself in a confident demeanor in the right way when you're meeting these people, these heads of states, you know, the top people in the military. And so I took that with me from an early age to every aspect of my life to going into, I was in Boy Scouts. I became an Eagle Scout and all of my, you know, scout masters were all elder people, ex-marines. But again, it's, you know, always having those kind of like mentors to kind of conversate with and be able to guide you. It instilled, I feel like, that ability in me to conversate with people who are older, maybe from a business or financial standpoint that maybe

they're a little bit more like superior, more experienced. And I think a lot of it I do attribute to being from overseas or at least living there for a couple years, traveling all the time. You know, we lived in three different cities in South Korea, but we also went to a ton of countries like China, Cambodia, Australia. And so I always say to me, there's two things that will teach you more about yourself than anything else. It's traveling the world and fighting. Fighting will instill in you a different level of humility because, you know, you can have no experience or a ton of experience and you can still go up against somebody and get your ass beat and that will teach you more about yourself than anything else other than traveling. Because traveling, you're experiencing different cultures, different people. And in my opinion, it allows you to look at the world from a much more global lens as opposed to like a very narrow view on things and not thinking outside of the box.

So I think that between traveling and just being around a lot of older people taught me more about myself how to communicate and handle those conversations. So take me back. So your parents are, you come from military background. They're affluent middle class. Yeah, 100%. Yeah, definitely middle class. You know, my dad was military for 31 years. He gets out in his. kind of just going to work in DC as like a government contractor sort of thing. The typical thing that a lot of the military guys do is they're in the military, they get out and they do the contracting things. So definitely middle class. However, you know, my dad was a guy who was very conservative with his money. He invested, you know, probably ended up becoming a millionaire by the time he was in his like late 40s or 50s. But regardless, did instill a lot of good money habits within us,

meaning he wasn't blowing money. He wasn't spending money on dumb shit. If anything, he was teaching us how to invest at an early age because with him, you know, he didn't start a investing until those 30s, whereas my brother and I, you know, we grew up, when we were working fast food, I started working in construction. I was taking a lot of that money and putting it into the market, started to invest in stocks like really early on, which, you know, again, it's everybody, every millionaire and billionaire will tell you to start early, right? Because a lot of them, they don't start putting money away or they didn't start putting money away until they were in their like 30s or 40s. And so, you know, starting early is something that's very

important as well that was instilled in us. It seems like your father had a lot of transparency to even bring you to these places where you're meeting these leaders and watching him interact? Absolutely. So did you guys spend more time with your dad than your mom? Definitely more time with our mom. Just because, again, you know, my dad was, you know, very busy. A lot of the times he was deployed or he was constantly going to different military bases, going to meet with different head states, different military leaders and stuff like that.

So for that reason, we definitely spent more time with our mom, but he was still very present, especially, you know, when he was finally done being deployed and came back. we were in the DC area, never missed a baseball game, was always, you know, there for his two sons. So I was very blessed to have, you know, two great parents. And they instilled a lot of great life lessons in us. And it's interesting because, you know, when we first started doing our channel that we have now, they were very hesitant at first. They were very, like, unsure of the idea because to them, it's like, it's a foreign concept. Like, you can make money just by posting videos. Whereas, like, now, you know, they're like our number one supporters. My mom's

was telling me, oh, I want you to interview this person. I want you to go and do that. And so, yeah, it's really cool to kind of see. Is it you and your brother? It is. It's me, my brother. And then one of our childhood friends from the D.C. area, actually, who was actually we met and we were in the same Boy Scout troop, all became Eagle Scouts, a little bit of a different age gap.

So my, our good friend, Josh, who's our other co-founder, he's 26 years old. My brother's 24 and I'm 22. So 22. Oh, my goodness. Yeah, 22. So usually when I have a younger person on the show, and off camera we were talking about this, I was like, oh, when we have a younger person, sometimes I prefer older because I'm like, you know, I want to know that you guys have hit enough failure to like really entertain me because I believe failure is at the end of the day. That's the closest way to get to success. And sometimes with a younger person, I'm like, I don't know if they've hit their head enough. But with you, I was just like, the wealth of knowledge you have, I'm like, between your traveling, I assume I have this fantasy of who you are, so you can feel free to pop all the bubbles. I'm like, man, he must be well read. He must be pounding books and all day long on top of

these interviews. Am I even closely right? No, I maybe read one book in my entire, maybe half a book in my entire life. I'm not a reader. I mean, I get knowledge in a lot of other ways from these interviews. And maybe that's one thing that I really do want to work on is reading a lot more, because I will say a lot of the wealthies people I know, they're avid readers. But it's just, it's just not my style of learning. I don't like sitting still and reading a book. I'd much rather get it from actually going to seek out other people and have those conversations. I always like to say that mentorship is like wisdom without the wounds. And so to me, it's like I have. I love that. It's great, right? And I always say mentorship is literally the only way to, the only shortcut

of success. Obviously learning from yourself from your failures. But the way that you mitigate all that, like I said, is getting that mentorship, is getting around those types of people. But, you know, I always say, too, you know, I'm also not. not a big person of like structure. Like I am probably one of the worst people I know about keeping a calendar and sticking to it. But everybody has kind of those things that they're great at and that they're not. And I would say that that's maybe one of my flaws is that. But no, I'm not a big reader. I just like am obsessed about what we do, which is something that I've also noticed among, you know, and this is a great point is that a lot of younger people will ask, like,

how do I figure out what that thing is for me? And at all points in life, because there's people in their teens, their 20s, their 30s, 40s, 40s, 50s that are. are still trying to figure it out. And like, I was asked that question earlier day. And to me, the way you kind of come up with that thing where you know that this is what you need to be doing is when you just can't stop thinking about it is when you're genuinely obsessed. Like, I will be up at all hours of the day, all hours of the night, depending on, you know, the day just constantly thinking about, you know, what can I do, what can I do better? You know, what can I, you know, how do I get more innovative? We just hit 5 million followers on

Instagram yesterday and I'm like I'm constantly thinking it's like you know how do we get to 10 million within the next you know year or two you know so I'm always thinking about that and but that's again how I know that what we're doing is what we should be doing because it's just the peer obsession with it I love that now take me back you graduated college in Texas when you were doing the fast food you were in high school your parents were definitely taking care of you and then you were just taking the money and investing yeah At what point does school of Hard Knocks start to enter the picture? Yeah.

So, you know, I was, so I'll first say this. I mentioned that I had those first two jobs, right? Well, my senior year of high school, actually, this is the year I was working construction. It's about December 2019. And, you know, I start to hear about TikTok. It's starting to get really popular. Now, I think TikTok had been on the app store, like it had been launched maybe late 2018, early 2019. but it really started to hit its stride late 2019.

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I was literally, I was like, this doesn't track for me at all. When he found out Trey's shortcomings. I'm kind of excited at talking about, you know, I think he's a guy who spends time in Central Park. You know, he's probably, you know, there'll be some surgery stuff, you know. And I was like, all this kind of stuff going on. And they were like, yeah, yeah, yeah, fine. And they said, but he's impotent. And I was like, he's impotent.

And why he chose not to return to it just like that. They came and presented an idea. And I was like, I get, I see it. It's so kind of a one joke idea. Right. You don't want to miss this. Listen to Are You a Charlotte on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, Kyle.

Could you draw up a quick document with the basic business plan? Just one page as a Google Doc and send me the link. Thanks. Hey, just finished drawing up that quick one page business plan for you. Here's the link. But there was no link. There was no business plan. It's not his fault.

I hadn't programmed Kyle to be able to do that yet. My name is Evan Ratliff. I decided to create Kyle, my AI co-founder. After hearing a lot of stuff like this from OpenAI CEO Sam Aldman, there's this betting pool for the first year that there's a one-person billion-dollar company, which would have been like unimaginable without AI and now will happen. I got to thinking, could I be that one person? I'd made AI agents before for my award-winning podcast, Shell Game.

This season on Shell Game, I'm trying to build a real company with a real product run by fake people. Oh, hey, Evan. Good to have you join us. I found some really interesting data on adoption rates for AI agents. in small to medium businesses. Listen to Shell Game on the IHeart Radio app or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Dr. Priyank Wally.

And I'm Hurricane DeBolu. On our new podcast health stuff, we demystify your burning health questions. You'll hear us being completely honest about our own health. I'm talking about very serious stuff right now and you're laughing at me. And you'll hear candid advice

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Everything you need to know about fiber and how to poop better. How to minimize the effects of jet lag and how to stay hopeful in times of distress. We human beings, all we want is connection. We just want to connect with each other. We want to make health less confusing and maybe even a little fun. Find health stuff on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And then going into 2020 is when it just passed Google as the number one search engine. And I was just watching TikTok casually, but I started to notice, like, there's these kids out there who are my age, who are younger than me, some older.

older than me and they're making ridiculous amounts of money, tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars a month, just making content about stuff that they were passionate about because they were able to build an audience and monetize it. And I love the saying that where attention goes, revenue flows. And to me, I saw that in late 2019 and I just decided to start posting on TikTok. I didn't have any clear direction of how I wanted to take my brand or anything. I was just building my personal brand on there, just a personal TikTok. And I just kept trying different things, hopping on different trends, and I would go viral. And before I knew it, within about 10 months on that account, I had 800,000 followers.

Wow. So went from zero to 800,000 followers in about 10 months. So that was from like December, 2019, up until August 2020. And it wasn't, it was different types of things, video. Different types of content. My first ever video that I posted that went viral. So my first viral video was probably like my. 10th to 15th post somewhere around then but I try to tell people that it's like look most successful

creators I would argue the majority of them if you ask them how many pieces of content did it take for you to have one viral video a lot of them it wasn't until their 50th or 100th or 300th video that it takes to go viral and like most people they don't understand that and therefore they get discouraged because all you know my first couple of videos didn't go viral so then they're just done they give up and it's like I try and remind people that like look some people yes does that you know happen overnight sure it does a lot of the overnight stuff though where's the longevity to most people that go viral overnight there isn't any longevity for the most part yeah whereas you know people it's a long game media

content creation it is a long game and if you want to like actually have be very successful in it you have to be committed to it for a long time and so like I said 10 15 post was the one that went viral it was literally just me making a decision video on going to the University of Texas. So like I had applied to like three or four places and I was did a video like showing all the places I got into and then decided to go to UT. It got like 800,000 views. And I realized right then and there it's like, okay, I posted that video with I had like maybe 200 followers at the time. And I overnight it got 800,000 views and I'm like, wait a minute. So you can literally have like 100 followers and you can have hundreds of thousands to a million people that see a piece of your video. I'm like,

count me in like this is crazy there's i i mean obviously this has existed but i hadn't seen it for myself and so like i said it did that once and then was just posting a lot of miscellaneous content so some of it was like me you know doing self-improvement advice or making like lists of like my top favorite movies my top favorite rappers like stuff like that but and it wasn't anything uh where like i could have built a brand out of it so after those 10 months i hit 800k but i kind of hit a wall mentally with it where i was like i got I got to do something else. This isn't it. And so I had connected with the childhood friend. My brother, we were at like a friend's house. This is right before I moved out from Virginia, the D.C. area to Austin. And we kind of just connected on the fact that, hey, we're all from the D.C. area. A lot of us, you know, a lot of us, if you know anything about D.C., it's a very structured city. Very federal. They're like centered on a lot of federal agencies, government jobs, contracting, defense. It's not entrepreneurial. So we kind of gravitated. towards one another, being that my brother, myself, and our friend at the time, we were all

kind of doing our own thing. So we just kind of went back and forth. And a year goes by, but it was ultimately my sophomore year in April 2021, where the three of us were like, hey, the creator economy right now is like a $500 billion industry. And we all kind of have different skill sets. My brother was an analytics genius. I knew content. My other partner had a digital marketing background. We're like, let's Let's start a media channel together. All of our skill sets kind of complement one another, and we're like, let's start a business media channel. So we started the channel originally, and it was just the three of us that were making the content ourselves about business. We weren't even doing interviews when we started out the channel, but we're like, nobody gives a shit about three young 20-year-old kids talking about business content.

We're like, you know, and we grew it from zero to 25K in like six months, but we're like. That's amazing, though. Yeah, it's great. However, again, kind of how I hit that wall with the other one, with. this one, I was still like, how do we, it was all over the place where like, how can we kind of be different? And even though, you know, street interviews have been around for 20 years, like every major news site or channel, you know, has done street interviews with people. But I'm like, it wasn't done in a way in which I saw like the opportunity. So we just started going

around, cold approaching people, you know, finding people that have industry experience of 20, 30, 40 years in different businesses from tech to real estate to finance to general entrepreneurship and just tried to get those insights and be able to package it and pass it on to the younger generation. So that was, you know, sometime in 2021 and fast forward to 2025 grew it to 12 million followers. We've done over 4 billion views in the last, you know, four years and I've learned a ton about business, you know, content creation, virality, everything. Now, there were definitely some setbacks and adversity on the way. way as we were, you know, building.

But ultimately, it's been an incredible journal. You know, I love failure. Absolutely. Well, I'm happy to give you. Or speed bumps or road bumps. Absolutely. So, you know, this is one that's been very, I think this story is very helpful for a lot of people.

So one of the best pieces of advice that I've ever received was from a gentleman in Houston. His name's D.L. Woods made like $16 million in a year. And, you know, the best entrepreneurship advice that he gave me. was stay small enough, long enough, and you'll be big enough soon enough. And I absolutely love that. And all the wealthiest people will tell you to the best investment you can make, especially when you're starting to become profitable and actually make money,

is reinvesting and putting it back into the business. The reason why I bring this up is because this was very relevant to what happened to us. And had it not been for that, the three of us would have been screwed 100%. So we're about a year into the change. channel. So my other partner, Josh, he had dropped out. So he had gone full time with this channel. He dropped out of college. I love that. So he had, before we even started, he had, he dropped out years ago. Like I said, he's a bit older. So, you know, he dropped out to pursue digital marketing agency years ago. So he had already dropped out. But he, you know, his digital marketing

agency had a partner. They kind of went through separate ways. And then when he started doing this, he went full time with the content channel. Like really before we were ever making money. and as I said with like media content creation it's a long game unless you want to dilute your brand like you're not going to be making good money off of content for at least you know a year or two but so anyways we're like a year year and a half in by this point I'm probably a junior in college my brother is now graduated at the time so he's full time on the business my other partner Josh is full time the three of us are full time and we're at a point now where you know this is what 2021. So a lot of people don't know this. 2020 was the first year that Facebook ever stagnated users,

meaning in the entire 20 plus years that Facebook has existed, the only year, 2020 was the first year that they stopped growing. And the reason why they stopped growing is because you've got TikTok, which from a short video perspective just started crushing everybody. Instagram had adapted with the reels. And obviously Instagram at the time was a little bit more. relevant that it was a newer app. Facebook was a lot older. So Facebook sees this and they go, you know what, we got to start incentivizing people to create content, create videos on Facebook. So they roll out this monetization program on there that's paying creators a lot of money. And so we're about a year into the to the Hard Knocks channel. And we get invited into this

program. And for a couple months in the program, we're making $25,000 to $35,000 a month. So this is like a year to year and a half into Hard Knocks. However, we knew content, but we didn't know the media business. So for that reason, our entire business model and our entire monetization was just relying solely on ad revenue. We didn't have a content agency at the time. We have one now. We weren't monetizing in any other ways. We were approached every once in a while to do like a brand partnership or create content for a brand.

But even then it's like at the time, we had a couple of things. 100,000 followers on TikTok and didn't really have a huge presence on Instagram, so we weren't making any great money off of brands. And there's three co-founders. However, the ad revenue for those couple months that we were making 25 to 35,000 off of Facebook, we're like, man, this is, this is incredible. Yeah. This is great. And again, one of those reoccurring pieces of advice that we were receiving was to, again, put the money back into the business. Don't be greedy. Don't take the money for yourself, right? Yeah. Which is what we did. So, During those months that we were getting paid like that, we were all paying ourselves $2,000 a month, which is literally just enough to cover rent and expenses.

So we, you know, none of us were saving money. We were just taking the $2,000 a month out each for, you know, for the three of us, which covered our rent, covered everything else. Everything else went back into the business out of that $25 to $30K. Well, when you post a video on Facebook or Instagram or TikTok or YouTube, I tell people this. When you post on their platform, you no longer own that content. They own that content. I didn't know that. Well, they do because at the end of the day, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, they can decide whether that piece of content stays up.

They can decide whether they want to pay you offered or not. That's what I'm more so. Obviously, you as the creator that posts the content. Yes. Do you technically own the content? Sure. But at the end of the day, when you post it on their platform, who owns the platform? They do. Yeah. So for that reason, we posted a piece of content on Facebook. And it was our own interview, but something got flagged and we ended up getting demonetized. So we go from making like $25 to $35,000 to $35,000 a month to literally like $3,000 to $4,000 off of just TikTok. Wow. Because TikTok was still paying, but TikTok at the time, you know, you know, paid pennies compared to what they were paying. So we go from making $25,000 to $35,000 a month all the way down to $3,000 to $4,000 a month between three people.

Wow. And it was like that for a couple months. And, you know, that's kind of when we're starting to have the conversation. Like, do we disband? Like, do we like, well, we're just because it's like, you know, we weren't, we weren't making any money off of it. And it's like, you know, again, making $3,000 or $4,000 a month. Like, but what kept us afloat, again, was those couple months where we were. only paying us of $2,000.

Yeah. We put a lot of money back into the business. So we had a decent account. We're like, hey, we just need to figure this thing out. And we can, you know, we'll be able to bounce back. And so at that moment, we came to the, we realized that you cannot build a business off of ad revenue because you don't determine how much you're paid. You don't determine when you're paid.

You don't determine whether you even get paid or not off of that content. So we're like, we need to get savvy. And it reminds me of also in 2023, I had gone to like my first ever. mastermind with a bunch of eight figure, seven, eight, nine figure internet marketers. And a gentleman said a statement to me that stuck with me, you know, to this day is that great businessmen are terrible content creators and great content creators are terrible businessmen. And it's very true because some of the most successful business people I know, they're

terrible at content, right? They know their business, but they don't know content. Yeah, yeah. And most content creators that I know are broke. Like most content creators, they don't understand the media business. They don't know how to monetize it. so then we began to look at okay there's three of us what what do we do to be able to kind of get on the right track and and figure this thing out and it reminds me of i'll give you one other less

said it then you know you don't pass it back on to you but there was a gentleman out in scottesel arizona he owns like four eight-figure businesses huge real estate guys named cody spurber and he told me a piece of advice that you know i love this piece of advice is that a savvy entrepreneur, he looks at their business and looks at two things. Number one, all of the people making money off of their efforts and number two, all of the different ways in which they can be making money. So it's that vertical integration. So the wealthiest, the most successful people that I know, they look at their core business and they look at how are my competitors or how are my customers, like how are people making money off of me and I'm going to go start a business there

or I'm going to integrate my business there. Or like, okay, us, right, our core business was media was attention. How can we use our platform to then begin to make money, which is exactly what we did. And, you know, our first thing we started, okay, we're interviewing wealthy people. We're going viral with wealthy people. That's sort of marketing agency to, therefore, we'll go viral with them. And then we'll close them on doing their content. Let's build their personal brands. And so we have a content agency where we work with some of the biggest, most well-known entrepreneurs in the space. And we do their personal brand. So it's like, okay, there's one business, we're like, okay, the number one question that we get asked is how do you connect

with these people? How do we get access to them? So we started and built one of the biggest online communities for business owners to connect and be able to, you know, learn every week from them. So it's like, that's what it's all about. It's like, okay, this is our core business. It's attention. We get eyeballs. How do we now monetize this? And, you know, in doing that, you know, that's what I'm able to us to kind of come back from that adversity was having that, you know, couple months of operating expenses and the business were like, hey, you know, we can either give this up or we can keep going and we did and it was worth it. Wow. And then during this little, this, I want to say, how long was your hurdle for that gap? Six months at least.

It was six months. So you guys were almost getting down to the wire at that. It was a while. I mean, I mean, yeah, I mean, I would say maybe like three to four months into it, we may have closed our first client, but we didn't know anything about scaling. We didn't, we didn't know. I mean, again, we've been learning a lot about business, but we weren't implementing it. And I always say that information changes situations, but only through implementation. And so, you know, now it's like, okay, we are genuinely, like, learning from these people and we're constantly adapting. Like, we'll pay to have a phone call with somebody successful. And obviously now our Rolodex, our network is unbelievable. And, you know, we do our best to provide a value to as many people as possible and as many of

these people that we really, really, you know, value. And therefore, it's like, hey, if we go to ask them a question or, hey, would you invest in this if you were us or whatever it may be? It's now like never like a hard ask just because we've really done a good job about building those relationships and stuff like that. But it was a good bit of time, you know. So, and I would say we really didn't start making good money until probably sometime mid to late 2023. And then we started to clear six figure months, I would say probably back like last, like June. Like last June, like last summer was when we started to ever since then we've been clearing six-figure months.

And then our biggest month was this past December where we did over 600,000 in revenue and then half a million of that was profit. So, jeez, that's amazing. A half million in profit last December. How, how, now, so you have the school that people can, they pay to subscribe and how, when you were going about building. that school, how did you work out the infrastructure of how you were going to lay that all out? This is a great question. And this is where a lot of people go wrong is that, and I'll give you one more, a little setback. You can give me as many as you want, okay? Absolutely. Well, this is just probably like the worst, one of if not the worst financial decisions that us as a company ever

made. So one of the biggest mistakes that content creators make is that they get shiny object syndrome to where they're like, okay, you know, I'm, I just went viral, I'm getting followers and all this and that. I'm going to start a clothing company. I'm going to start an e-commerce store without even, you know, thinking about the most important thing within the audience, which is why they actually follow you. So what we did probably, this may be like a, you know, 2022. So probably when we started to make a little bit of money or actually maybe maybe this was actually, I'm sorry, this was actually probably before we even got demonetized. So we were, again, having those months where we were doing decently off of like just the ad revenue, probably like a

year, year and a half in. And we're like, you know what we should do? We're like, since we're doing, you know, these interviews that are motivational, we're interviewing successful people. We should start, we should start a canvas store. Like, you know how like there's like motivational like wall art and stuff like that? We're like, that would be a great idea. it and we're all going yeah yeah yeah like like let's do it and we even to the point where we were serious about it we started to work on it and we even you know for three months hired or invested in invested $5,000 a month in an outsource CMO meaning we had somebody that we knew who was incredibly talented like probably one of the most well-respected internet

marketers, e-commerce entrepreneurs that I actually know to this day is absolutely crushing it. We paid him $5,000 a month for three months to come in and help us build it out and help us market it and sell it, offer us to maybe sell five to ten canvases. So we spent $15,000 and literally, we lost more when you talk about paying for the designers, the menu, like everything else. And the reason why is because we never talk to the customer. We never talked to the audience. We never figured out, is this something that they even want that they're interested in?

And so, but like Mark Cuban always says is that it's like, nobody's going to come save your business. Like a lot of people have this idea that, oh, you know, I completely agree with the fact that do you need to hire like people bring them on, do partnerships a million percent? Like my whole thing is, is like, I'd rather have a slice of the pie that 100% of a great. Whereas like, if people are genuinely talented and they're. the way you talk is just you got to repeat that it's in sound bites right no but the the 100 percent a small piece of a pipe this is genuinely like one of my favorite and the most important things because a lot of a lot of entrepreneurs they want to be the solopreneur and do everything themselves without realizing that hey maybe you know like I said perfect example is like a content

who's great at content but they suck at business it's like dude go find somebody that is incredible at business they know how to build this out they know how to market it and you just do what you do which is create content and that's like my philosophy even with me and my two other co-founders my brother and my friend is like hey they know that I'm incredible at creating content so with their philosophy of me is like dude go book the flight you want to go film there just go book it even even in those even before we were starting to make like really good money they were still like dude just book the flight just book it you know and that's like a great way to operate if you're strategic about it. But yes, it's, you know, as an entrepreneur, I would rather have a

slice of a pie than 100% of a great. Meaning it's like if you partner up with somebody who is extremely good at an area where you're not and your skill sets can complement one another, you're going to make significantly more money, even though you're giving split of the money as opposed to you trying to do everything yourself. Because there's only so much that you can do. There's only so much, you know, area for growing that you can do if you're trying to do everything yourself. And so, yeah, I think that that was, you know, incredibly important. Like what I was saying, it's like, I'm a huge advocate of that. But at the same time, it's like, you know, most people, they fail to ask their audiences why people follow them. And over the last couple of years,

as we were starting to interview more super high net worth people, billionaires and stuff like that, people were always asking us and DMing us saying, hey, who is this? How can I get access to them. How, you know, could you send us their contact and all this stuff? So to us, we're like, okay, the number one reason why people reach out to us is literally for the ability to get in contact with or to figure out how we're meeting these people. And so we started to realize that, hey, you know what business we're actually in? Yes, we're in media, but we're in the bridging business where we are bridging everyday people, consumers of content, and we're bridging them directly to the, you know, some of the most successful people in the

entire world. And for that reason, you know, we're like, okay, let's, it just made sense for us to think about building a community that connects. Yeah. The everyday people directly to these people, which is exactly what we did. And obviously, it took, you know, six months plus to be able to build out the infrastructure, you know, we, there's a lot of on-demand content master classes there's weekly calls but we also did a lot of you know polling like saying stuff like hey if we built an online platform or community what would you guys want to see in there or out of these four things what is the number one like most important or like thing that you would want the most and we did a lot of that for a couple months and I think that's very important and very underrated that a lot

of people mess up on when they're building their brand creating content starting to get some traction is like before going all in saying okay I'm going to start a clothing company what if people aren't following you for what you're wearing like for prime example i would argue i would say that i probably know more about content and you know just virality the algorithm as a whole more than 99.999% of people however people don't follow me because of that people don't follow our channel the school of hard knox because we know how to go viral so like if i wanted to you know build and sell attempt to sell the the viral video blueprint or how to go from zero to a million followers on social media it probably wouldn't hit.

I mean, are there some people that maybe would bite just because of the sheer amount of volume and eyes that we have? I'm sure, right? But is that what would make the most sense for our existing audience and our existing type of content

and why people are actually following us? Definitely not. So in a lot of it, is you have to remove your bias out of it. You have to remove any emotional attachment that you have to, oh, I'm great at this, I should go sell this. And when it's like, no, it's like,

what do people actually want? you know, I interviewed a gentleman. He sold his company to Hilton for $2.2.2 billion, Stephen Klubeck. He's actually running for governor of California. And he said, and he said that it's like, you know, the most, that's what he always preaches is like talk to your customer, talk to the, you know, he owned like over 400 hotels in 35 countries. And so that was, that's his thing. It's like him being in the hospitality business, he's always talking to people, hey, what can we do better? Well, you know, what is it that we could add to our resort to improve and stuff like. that. And now his big thing is, like, with the people of California's, it's like, you know, he said it this way that made it really interesting to me. It's like that like the people of Californians are like customers of California. And so hearing that perspective, even shifting it to like what we're doing as a, you know, content creator building out this business is like we are always constantly trying to talk to different people. Are you familiar with Steve Madden? Yes. So I interviewed him and one of the most fascinating things that I

saw him do after we interviewed him were outside of his you know apartment in new york city and he's just stopping you know random random ladies on the street asking where did you get your shoes from and he's just talking to different people about what do you like about them and all that and i'm like this guy's a billionaire his company's doing three billion two to two to three billion dollars a year in sales yeah and he's just talking to random people asking them about their shoes and stuff like that and i'm like that's really interesting so i mean i learn a little bit a little bit from from everybody but that's something that I've really, you know, those couple things have really made sense to me when it comes to like the decision for us building out. That's what went into thinking about launching the

community and the infrastructure for that. Yeah. I get, I get nervous any time, even with eating while broke, if I'm like all of our revenues coming from one area, I like to see split. I'm like, I don't mind one part taking up 30 to 40 percent. But anytime it hits over that 40 percent where all of our revenues coming from. I'm like, we got to find something else. We have to start really thinking. But it seems like you guys started to do that once the monetize, once the life supply kind of came out,

you guys were like, oh, snap. Was there another painful lesson in the business where it was just like with that you literally kept, you guys started to argue, maybe kept up at night, started reaching out to your parents, like, I don't know. You know, I don't know. I know that one thing I'll say about the partnership that I have with, my brother and my good friend, and I think this is also very important because a lot of people

will argue against going into business with friends and family, but I don't see it that way. I think there's one thing that you guys do have to have in order for you to partner up, because I think the beautiful thing about going into business with family or childhood friends where you know the kind of people that you are and what I mean kind of people, not what you're good at and what you're bad at, but genuinely, like when I see. and I hear from a lot of entrepreneurs about why their business failed or why big companies failed. A lot of it had to do with a bad disagreement or dishonesty between the partners or the founders or whatever it may be. And that's the one thing is that I can say confidently that

you know, between myself, my brother, my other partner, I know them morally. I know that our values are all aligned that we're all in sync and that I wouldn't ever have to worry about somebody taking a dollar behind somebody's back out of the business or doing something dishonest. I know that for a fact. I know for a fact that I wouldn't do that to them, obviously because I love them, but obviously, like, I just was raised in a way that like, hey, that's not, that's not the right thing to do, no matter what point you get to. And it's, it's really cool to be able to know that, hey, if we're in this shit together, like, even, you know, during what we call in like the trench days where we were just making $2,000, got demonetized down to the point we're making,

like 4K a month collectively for a couple months. Even during those days, we were still just very, very, you know, close with one another and we're really in it together. But the problem with that is going into business with people that you know and that you love is that it does create a sense of comfortability for a lot of people to where when you're, you know, constantly around people that you grew up with or that you live with, you can become very comfortable because it's what you're used to. Whereas it's like, okay, that's why people always say it's like, get out of your hometown, go do something uncomfortable.

I think that's some of the best advice that you can ever give somebody is to like literally like leave hometown, go get uncomfortable. It's going to, you know, to me low pressure means low performance. So even causing you to have a little bit of like pressure to where you have to make, you have to meet people, you got to make connections, you got to build without knowing people. I think that's a great thing. But I don't think we ever experienced that comfortability because we were never afraid. put one another in check and most importantly like I said that one thing that you have to have is that you cannot be or you cannot be surrounded by a yes man and none of us were yes man meaning if somebody felt a certain way about something but the other person completely disagreed

we were not afraid to just butt heads to the point where it's like it could go on for a while just like arguing like you know pretty harshly you know genuinely yeah I would say like yep not in a not in a nice way sometimes and that's a great thing about having that third partners that they're able to you know when you have two people or that third partner is able to kind of go in there and reason with one of them or go agree with one of the two it's you're able to kind of come to a decision in a better way because that person who's disagreeing with the other two is like okay if you two are saying this then I don't really don't have a choice because it's like look there's three of us here maybe I need to see it from your lens a little bit more however

it takes those two to go out of it and not be like, you know, just this person's, you know, feeling this way about it. Oh, if he's feeling that way, then I'm, then, you know, he's absolutely right. We were never like that. And that was extremely important. So I think that like you just, whether it's you, you, the people that you decide to partner with, you just cannot be a yes man or a yes woman towards each other because like, again, it's, you've got to have those uncomfortable conversation sometimes to ultimately make. the decision that's going to move the needle the furthest for your business or whatever endeavor that you're doing. So I don't know if there was like a specific thing in which, I mean, I'm sure that there were a lot of different things here and there on the way that were. But like to me, like those were the, when I think of like setbacks that we had, it was definitely the one where we completely got demonetized for months. We're like a year and a half in making a couple thousand dollars, you know, or to that point we weren't even really paying ourselves. We're just living off of our bank accounts in Austin, which is a more expensive city than most places, not L.A. expensive, but it's still

It's getting up there, but it's definitely more affordable. For sure. And you guys were doing a lot of this too, it seems like during the pandemic. Can we talk about that, like the hurdles you faced doing that? So during the pandemic is when I actually started on my personal account. So that was from, you know, December 2019 to like August 2020 was like peak pandemic was when we really was when I started to grind on TikTok. And so a lot of my, you know, close friends, relatives, people I went to school with, a lot of them were looking at the pandemic, not everybody, as maybe like a vacation or like time off. And don't get me wrong, like run a business and not thinking about podcasting, think again.

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Why would I bring her a cardboard baby? I was literally, I was like, this doesn't track for me at all. When he found out Trey's shortcomings. I'm kind of excited at talking about, you know, I think he's a guy spends time in Central Park. You know, he's probably, you know, there'll be some surgery stuff, you know. And I was like, all this kind of stuff going on. And they were like, yeah, yeah, yeah, fine. And they said, but he's impotent.

And I was like, he's impotent. And why he chose not to return to it just like that. They came and presented an idea. And I was like, I get, I see it. It's so kind of a one joke idea. You don't want to miss this. Listen to Are You a Charlotte on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, Kyle.

Could you draw up a quick document with the basic business plan? Just one page as a Google Doc. And send me the link. Thanks. Hey, just finished drawing up that quick. one-page business plan for you. Here's the link. But there was no link. There was no business plan. It's not his fault. I hadn't programmed Kyle to be able to do that yet. My name is Evan Ratliff. I decided to create Kyle, my AI co-founder, after hearing a lot of stuff like this from OpenAI CEO,

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I found some really interesting data on adoption rates for AI agents and small to medium businesses. Listen to Shell Game on the IHeart Radio app or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Dr. Pryonk Wally. And I'm Hurricane DeBolu. On our new podcast Health Stuff,

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From when to utilize and avoid artificial light to how to sleep better. Everything you need to know about fiber and how to poop better. How to minimize the effects of jet lag and how to stay hopeful in times of distress. We human beings, all we want is connection. We just want to connect with each other. We want to make health less confusing and maybe even a little fun. Find health stuff on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I feel horrible for people that, like, they were lined up to go to the school or they were lined up to do something really great.

I mean, I know a ton of people, you know, I think about all the younger kids, like the athletes that didn't get that showcasing to different schools or, you know, whatever it may be, getting in front of the right people. But I genuinely took it as such an opportunity. And I think that's also another important thing as well is that, like, when everybody's kind of, you know, chilling out. And obviously there was a lot of reason why people, they had no choice. because people were getting laid off from companies and in order for them to go find work, like people weren't really hiring. Like a lot of businesses were losing tons of money, especially like if you were something that was like, full on shutting down.

Yeah, full on shutting down, right, which was crazy. But I, to me, looked at COVID as an opportunity to get ahead on, honestly. And that's why, like, I, when I was doing my like personal account and I went from zero to 800K in the 10 months, every single day during COVID, I was posting two to three times a day. Every single day. It didn't matter where I was, whether I was on a train, flying somewhere, going to visit family, going to visit relatives. I was just posting nonstop relentlessly. So I looked at that as an opportunity to where, okay, obviously, you know, I was a senior in high school. Our semester just ended in like March, which was crazy. And as opposed to waiting months before moving out to Texas to go to school in August, I was like, okay, what could I be doing now until then? I still worked construction that summer, actually, but I was still doing that. And then I was also, I was also, I was doing the construction. But then I was just blowing up on the social media side of things.

So I just looked at it as an opportunity to, you know, hey, why not run with us? Just kind of see where it goes. Yeah. I, I love mentorship. I love my mentors. I seek out, I try to tell, because I mentor a lot of younger people. And I always tell them, I like to seek mentors that aren't in the same line industry, remotely different. industry, completely different, you know, stratosphere almost.

For me, it's like I gain more knowledge. You with everyone you interview, do you have a particular, like, handful of mentors that are like in your, or in your roller decks, or do you just, everyone that you interviewed that kind of supports, like, do you just say, hey, do you want to be my mentor? Just trying to figure out. You know, that's a really good one. there are definitely like a handful of people that I would say that I have in my Rolodex that I know that I can text them at any time of day or call them any time

in the day and that if I needed something that like they would be there for me but I look at it is that in your life you should have mentors for just about every aspect of your life you know whether it be spiritual mentors definitely a Christian so I know that there's five to ten people that I know that know more about the Bible than anybody else to where if I have a question about this or, you know, spirituality, my faith or whatever, I can always call on one of them and they'll be able to give me insights or guidance if I'm struggling with something. And then also when it comes to the business side of things, it's like just because we're constantly meeting these people, we're nurturing, we're building

these relationships. You know, a lot of them, maybe I meet once or twice, but I try and stay in touch with them. I try and check in on them. Now, some of them, you know, maybe it is literally just for, you know, you do an interview and anything comes up maybe to do another one or another opportunity at some point like that, then we'll make it happen. But I would say I definitely, and especially when we started our content agency, where we started to work with a lot of super successful entrepreneurs closely to build their personal brands, to strategize and everything. that got us to know them a lot more and become a lot closer with some of these people. And so I've got a couple, you know, that I'll just kind of like shout out.

There's a gentleman, his name's Ani Adenukee. He's from Dallas. He owns one of the largest sunspaw tanning franchises in the entire world. And, you know, he taught us how to delegate. He taught us how to, you know, stop working in the business and start working on the business. Like remove ourselves, stop being employee entrepreneurs. He's also extremely successful in real estate. him and another one of my clients, his name's Todd Napola, who owns hundreds of millions of dollars

worth of real estate out in South Florida. So, you know, in January this past year, we made our biggest investment ever, me and my two co-founders, into a huge real estate project out in Texas. And the beautiful thing about having the network that we have and the Rolodex that we have is that, you know, we're able to send the deal that we invested in to five, 10 different people that own tens and hundreds of millions of dollars of worth of real estate where they've invested in great deals and some not so great deals. And again, the mentorship thing is like it's genuinely wisdom

without the wounds because we're able to ask these people and be able to get that kind of unanimous decision from them on whether or not this is a good idea or not. Without having that and we're just going and blind to a deal or making a decision, the deal could blow up in our faces or it could ultimately be a bad, you know, decision. And then even within that, you're still going to learn a lot from it to be like, okay, hey, if this is in it, if this isn't, you know, then we probably shouldn't invest

here or whatever. But being able to rely and have so many great people that we can reach out to and ask questions about, that's like a beautiful thing to be able to have. And we've definitely taken advantage of that. But also it's like, I look at it that not only do we ask these people for help, I'm always looking at ways to be able to add value to people. And I think that there's a lot, a lot of power in that. And what a lot of younger people and people from all across the board,

what they struggle with is that when they're trying to connect with people who are, you know, higher net worth or, you know, money's not everything, but like just in a capacity, when somebody's trying to connect with somebody that seems like maybe like out of reach or that it's like a long shot, a big problem is because they make it all about them. Yeah. When in reality, it's like, how do you make it about this person? every single time is like you should always be looking at how I can deliver value to this person off the bat

and not for them to try and come up with ways of how you can like be intentional about what you can do for that person how you can help them out how you can add value to their business or whatever that they're doing on a regular basis and not saying hey I'd love to come work for you for free and come out value for you it's like okay but then now that person has to think about what you can actually do for them and it's like they probably don't even they probably don't even need you whereas it's like okay you have a skill set here this person's clearly lacking that boom go and tell them exactly what you what and how you're going to do it for them and it gives them much more of a reason and an incentive to connect with you so i think that you know there's there's a lot to be said about that though as

well as in trying to like connect with and network with the right people a lot of it just comes down to straight up just adding value to those people and those relationships to make them lasting and to make them worth it for the person who's taken the time to connect with you you because a lot of, you know, mentorship, if it's not organic, it's literally going to be like paid. You know, some of these people, it's crazy, which is almost all the time worth it as long as it's with the right person. But, you know, to me, I mean, we built our network organically without spending a dollar on. I mean, we've gone to masterminds and events and we paid for people's time before for sure,

which I think is necessary in a lot of different capacities. But just from building what we built, you know, we've gotten hundreds of people. in front of, you know, multi, multi, millions of people. So giving them that attention, that exposure, a lot of the times makes the people that we interview feel like, hey, anything you guys need you, let me know. Of course. So, which is a really nice thing to have and be able to do because now it's like, hey, a lot of these people, you know, we have them kind of in our back pocket that like, hey, you know, we know that we know a question about this or want to get their perspective on this or ask, you know, kind of guide us in this way, hey, this person's the best in the world of this. Let's go figure out, you know, what we should do. Yeah. And I know I haven't let you eat not one bite.

I'm going to let you eat this cold Chick-fil-A right after this last question. And my question is, what's a day in the life of James? Just, I really am trying to get to know you. So I just want to know, wake up today. Obviously, there was a text from me in there, but what's a day in the life of you on average? Yeah. Well, that's what's really interesting. Like I said, I'm not the best person that keep in a schedule.

there's times where like I'll set up three calls for 12 o'clock and I'll just move all of them back like 20 minutes and so that's again something that I'm not great at and obviously like depending on you know the opportunity and how pressing something is it's like okay I will 100% make this priority like will not mess this up or whatever but you know I would I would say typical day in the life I'll give you kind of like two two different ones one if I'm home base here in Austin versus like if I'm traveling because that is when it kind of gets completely different. Because when I'm here in Austin, I do have much better structure. It's like I woke up this morning. I ran two miles. I'm getting a lot more into running. I've always been into like lifting. But I'm like, just for heart and health purposes,

have been wanting to run a lot more and get a little bit more that like higher intensity, cardio and exercising. So I would say wake up. I like to get the workout out of the way early. If I have a couple calls depending, you know, we've been doing a lot of stuff out in Dubai and in the Middle East recently. I see you out there a lot. So, yeah, there's a lot of cool stuff going on.

But we did a really cool partnership with the Dubai government. And so that was a big reason why we were out there or have been out there. And we'll continue to go out there. I mean, that's probably, I've been in 20 countries. I think Dubai is my favorite city I've been to. I've never been, but I see everyone going there. I'm like, well. Yeah.

I mean, obviously, I'll say for us, do we have a slightly biased perspective? Probably just because, you know, we went out there for some specific reasons and got to do really some incredible things but but even if you're just going out there to visit i mean it's it's beautiful it's clean it's safe there's a lot to do different ecosystems you've got the beach you've got the desert you know the city life so it's really neat i'd highly recommend going out there and there's a there's a lot of hitters that are out there as well so definitely recommend checking it out but yeah i would say i mean i'm a i'm a wake-up workout kind of guy probably eat the first meal around like 12 well maybe we have calls before and after lunch you know maybe i'm working on videos you know the one

task that i have not been able to give up yet and a lot of people like they don't believe this or understand this i still edit every single one of our videos you edit i edit every video if you look at my last probably 500 to thousand videos that we posted on that channel the school of hard knocks i've edited every single one and each video takes a minimum of an hour to edit like for example before before i came here i put a video up today at 12. I edited from like 10 to 12 today. I, and I was assuming that you use schedulers.

No, so, I mean, so I have a content agency and I have, we probably have five to 10 editors that work for us. I still edit every one of our hard knocks videos. That is crazy. It's crazy because, you know, I've mentioned we, I have a client, his name's Ani, and he's, again, in Dallas, very successful entrepreneur out there. And his, like I said, a lot of, you hear a lot of, you know, successful entrepreneurs talk about delegating, buying back your time, right? And that's his whole thing.

It's like, get somebody to do the job, 70% as good as you can. And then move on. Like, you need to stop doing those. You know, they call them the MWA activities, the minimum wage activities. Edding is definitely one of those activities. However, it's one that I just have refused to give up. Why is that you think? Is it because you don't trust anyone else particularly?

You know, because I think the number one thing that we are, my partners and I, but I would say that I am the absolute best at is taking a 20 minutes worth of content. Because I would say our interviews, even the ones on the street, are anywhere on average from 10 to 20 to even 30 minutes. I would say I'm probably the best in the world or one of the best in the world at taking 20 to 30 minutes worth of content. and putting it down to one to one and a half minutes. So the way that I edit is very interesting being that I will take, you know, different parts from three different answers and combine it into one to make it the most engaging and entertaining as well as just the overall pacing, the flow. I mean, there's a lot that goes into virality and like short form content. So I would say that that's wise. that to me, in order, if I were to explain it to somebody, hey, I want this piece here

and this part there and let's put these two answers together and take out this and that. And if I were to do that and then also do revisions on top of that, it would take the same amount of time for me to get one video back as opposed to me just, you know, doing it myself. And at some point, I'm sure, like, I'm going to have no decision but to like literally just, you know, kind of give the ropes off to somebody else. And I'm sure, too, that I will, you know, at some point also just train somebody who's really talented at what they do from like an editing standpoint and just let them do it. But yeah, that's, I mean, so, I mean, we post, I would say now like every other day or once every, you know, two or three days. So I'm still editing all the videos, which are pretty, pretty time consuming.

I'm not going to lie. I love to know that about you, though. Yeah, it's interesting. I would have never thought, never, not even. Thanks for sharing that. Yeah. Yeah. Well, when I bring that up to people, they're like, you edit, I was like, I was like, I just.

do edit yeah trust me i'm a i'm a premier pro wizard you know really absolutely i don't edit anything really yeah but i mean our channel isn't the greatest on online yeah i mean everybody everybody everybody you know start somewhere you know but i mean so yeah i would say again editing workout calls stuff like that is but like a typical day will look like when i'm like here at home base and then when i'm traveling i mean it's you go go go go go so i mean it's like hey you know first i was just in new york city we did the interview with we did two really cool people back to back barbara corkran you know barbara from shartan she loved your interview i saw yeah she was yeah she was great and then right before her like 30

minutes before her we did the one of the owners of equinox do you know equinox i know equinox so yeah harvey spivac it was another great interview i haven't posted it yet but i did them back to back and even before those two interviews like i was out on wall street for like two hours just filming organic content, like any people going in and out of the stock exchange, then did those two interviews, then after them, went back to Wall Street film for a couple more hours before it got dark, then had the community call, and then probably went to go eat some food out in New York City. So, you know, the days, especially because when we're traveling to places, you know, we'll be there for maybe two to four days. We try and, you know, film as much, take advantage of

as much of the opportunities or the people that we can connect with or collaborate with while we're out there. So I think, yeah, it's maybe like a typical day in the life like here versus on the road. So, but no, I always like to say, no day is ever really the same, especially when we're traveling, doing content, because when we're always doing some, some interesting things and connecting with some really cool people. So it's always a good time. Wow. Well, thank you so much for your time. I would like to, if you can share some of the things that we can look forward to as school of Hard Knock fans. Is there anything we can look forward to? You know, yeah, I mean, just I would definitely say get a part of the community if you're not already.

Because, I mean, every, you know, we're hosting some crazy great live calls with hyper-successful people. You know, this month we've got three calls. Next week we got a call with a $100 million venture capital entrepreneur the week after that. And Malum, she sold solid core for a couple hundred million dollars. End of the month, we got another good one. So I would say definitely get a part of that. as far as interviews my thing about this and it's you know i'll tell you off air we do have some really cool interviews lined up but i don't like to say them like publicly just because i don't

know i feel like a lot of people they celebrate too early or they you know they say things before they actually happen and especially in this world and in this business these can fall through like that yeah so even though i'm very optimistic and happy and looking forward to some of the different collabs and stuff like that that we have lined up, I don't like to address it too much publicly just because you never know. I mean, I've came super close to getting like some of the biggest people in the world and just one little thing can cause it to fall through. So for that reason, I mean, I'll tell my partners and that's it. I don't even tell my, you know, family sometimes when you have something cool coming up. It's like when it happens, it happens and people

will just see it. But no, I mean, that's it. Yeah, just, you know, like I said, the community's growing. It's doing really nicely. Got about 3, 3,500. or 4,000 members right now. So just trying to keep growing that. And then just, like I said, I'm always focused on growth. We got 12 million followers now. I'm just thinking about, okay, how do we get to 15, 20 million collective followers in the next year or two? You know, so that's what I'm thinking about.

All right. Well, thank you so much for your time. I super value and appreciate it. I will never forget this. Thank you so much. I'm happy to be here. It's a great podcast, great questions, good food. And thank you for having me on it.

It means a lot, really. Thank you guys for tuning in. Peace out. What do you get when you mix 1950s Hollywood, a Cuban musician with a dream and one of the most iconic sitcoms of all time. You get Desi Arness on the podcast. Starring Desi Arnaz and Wilmer Valderama, I'll take you in a journey to Desi's life, how he redefined American television and what that meant for all of us watching from the sidelines, waiting for a face like ours on screen.

Listen to starring Desi Arnaz and Wilmer Valderrama on the IHard Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. Hi, Kyle. Could you draw up a quick document with the basic business plan? Just one page as a Google Doc and send me the link. Thanks. Hey, just finished drawing up that quick one page business plan. plan for you. Here's the link. But there was no link. There was no business plan. I hadn't programmed

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