Eating While Broke: JAMES DUMOULIN - School of Hard Chicks

at least for me, I'm like, who is he? And you I felt like when I watch the 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 gonna have me eat today.

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 stuck at it. And I respect everyone that does those jobs absolutely bit more.

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 know 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 fil A, 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 twenty four 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 in mcdonaldge, 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, on to the next one will be okay, the better you'll be.

skill set of walking up to people. I imagine that you had this sales background, but to hear you were in McDonald's in construction prior to starting your channel, what part of those experience led you to seems like as a fan of your show, it seems like you respect and love entrepreneurship absolutely.

I lived in three different cities in South Korea, eventually said 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 people 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 act professional, how to carry yourself in a confident demeanor, in the right way when you're meeting these people, with 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 and 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 of 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.

conservative with his money. He invested, you know, probably ended up becoming a millionaire by the time he was in.

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 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 always telling me, oh, I want you to interview this person. I want you to go and love 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 DC area actually who was actually we met and we were in the same boy Scout troupe all became Eagle Scouts a little bit of a different age gap. So our good friend Josh, who's our other co founder, he's twenty six years old. My brother's twenty four, and I'm twenty two. So twenty two, oh my good, yeah, twenty two.

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?

those conversations. I always like to say that mentorship is like wisdom without the wounds, and so to.

And at all points in life, because there's people in their teams their twenties or thirty forties, fifties that are still trying to figure it out. And like I was asked that question the other day, and to me, the way you kind of come up with that theme 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 five million followers on Instagram yesterday, and I'm like, I'm constantly thinking it's like, you know, how do we get to ten million within the next you know, year or two? You know, So

I'm always singing about that. 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.

starting to get really popular. And now I think TikTok had been on the App Store, like it had been launched maybe late twenty eighteen, early twenty nineteen, but it really started to hit its stride late twenty nineteen, and then going into twenty twenty 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 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 twenty nineteen, 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 ten months on that account,

I had eight hundred thousand followers. Wow, So went from zero to eight hundred thousand followers in about ten months. So that was from like December twenty nineteen up until August twenty twenty.

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 videos didn't go viral so then they're just done.

ten to fifteen post was someone 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 deciding to go to UT You got like

eight hundred thousand views. And I realized right then and there, it's like, okay, I posted that video with I had like maybe two hundred followers at the time, and I overnight I got eight hundred thousand views, And I'm like, wait a minute, So you can literally have like one hundred 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. 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 contents. 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 it wasn't anything where like I could have built a brand out of it. So after those ten months, I hit eight hundred K, but I kind of hit a wall mentally with it where I was like, I got to I gotta do something else. This isn't it.

And so I had connected with the child the childhood friend my brother. We were at like a friend's house. This is right before I moved out from Virginia the DC area to Austin, and we kind of just connected on the fact that hey, we're all from the DC area. A lot you know a lot of us. If you know anything about DC, it's a very structured city, very federal like, we've centered around 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 theme, so we just kind of went back and forth and a year goes by, but it was ultimately my sophomore year in April twenty twenty one where the three of us were like, hey, the creator economy right now is like a five hundred billion dollar 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 let's sort of 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 ablen to doing interviews when we started out the channel, but we're like, nobody gives a shit about three young

twenty year old kids talking about business content. We're like, you know, we grew from zero to twenty five k in like six months, but we're.

So we just started going around cold approaching people, you know, finding people that have industry experience of twenty thirty forty 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 twenty twenty one, and fast forward to twenty

twenty five, grew it to twelve million followers. We've done over four billion views in the last you know, four years, and I've learned a ton about business, you know, content creation, virality, everything. Now we're definitely some setbacks and adversity on the way as we were, you know, building, but Ultimately, it's been an incredible a journeys.

big enough soon enough. And I absolutely loved that. 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 one hundred percent. So we're

about a year into the channel. So my other partner, Josh, he had dropped out so he had gone full time with.

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 twenty twenty one, so a lot of people don't know this. Twenty twenty was the first year that Facebook ever stagnated users, meaning meaning in the entire twenty plus years that Facebook has existed, did the only year twenty twenty 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 new or app.

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 time mid 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 hundred thousand 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 twenty five to thirty five thousand off of Facebook,

We're like, man, this is incredible, 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, which is what we did. So during those months that we were getting paid like that, we were all paying ourselves two thousand dollars a month, which is literally just enough to cover rent and expenses. So we know, none

of us were saving money. We were just taking the two thousand dollars month out each, you know, for the three of us, which covered our rent, covered everything else. Everything else went back into the business. Out of that twenty five to thirty k 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.

to bounce back. And so at that moment we came to that, 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 we get paid or not off of that content.

So we're like, we need to get savvy and it reminds me of Also in twenty twenty three, 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 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 do we do to be able to kind of get on

the right track and figure this thing out? And it reminds me of I'll give you one other less said it than you know, you'll pass it back on to you. But there was a gentleman out in Scottsdale, Arizona. He owns like four eight figure businesses, huge real estate guys. Name's Cody Sperber, 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 where I'm going 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 interewing wealthy people. We're going viral with wealthy people. That's start a 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 get I saw that connect and be able to you know, learn every week from them. So it's like, that's 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 that's what enabled us to kind of come back from that adversity was having that, you know, a couple months of operating expenses in the business. We're like, hey, you know, we can either give this up or we can keep going. And we did and it was worth it.

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. I mean 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 ass, just because we've really done a good job about building

those relationships and stuff like that. But it was it was a good bit of time, you know. So and then I would say, we really didn't start making good money until probably sometime mid to late twenty twenty three, and then we started to clear six figure months. I would say probably back like last like June, like last June,

like like last summer was when we started. Ever since then we've been clearing six figure months and then our biggest month was this past December where we did over six hundred thousand and revenue and then half a million of.

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.

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.

in an outsourced CMO. I mean, 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 them five thousand dollars 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 fifteen thousand dollars and literally we lost more when you talk about paying for the designers, the management, like everything else. And the reason why is because we never talked to the customer. We never talked to the audience. We never figured out is this something that they even want, that they interested in?

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 with me, it's like, due, go book the flight. You want to go film there, just go book it. Even in those even before we were starting to make like really good money.

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 likes. What I was saying is 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 network 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're 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 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, 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 of 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 example, I would argue, I would say that I probably know more about content and you know, just virality, the algorith them as a whole, more than ninety nine point nine nine nine nine percent of people. However, people don't follow me because of that. People don't follow our channel to the School of hard Knocks, because we know how to go viral.

following us. Definitely not so. And 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. Yeah, And when it's like no, it's like what if people actually want, you know, I interviewed a gentleman. He sold his company to Hilton for two point two billion dollars.

Stephen Klubek, 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 four hundred hotels in thirty five countries and so that was that's his thing. It's like him being in the hospitality business. He's always talking to people. He 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 is it's like you know, he his he said it this way that made it really interesting to me, is like that, like the people of Californias 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 businesses like we are always constantly trying to talk to different people.

Are you familiar with Steve Madden the Clothes? So, so I interviewed him and one of the most fascinating things that I saw him do after we interviewed him, We're outside of his you know, apartment in New York City and he's just stopping you know, random random ladies on the street, asking.

And I'm like, that's really interesting. So even I learned a little bit, a little bit 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.

once to monotize. 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.

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 on 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 and know that, hey, if we're in this shit together, like even you know, during what we call like the trench days, where we were just making two thousand dollars got demonetized down to the point where we're making we're making like four k a month collectively for a couple of 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 comp fortibility for a lot of people, to where when you're you know, constantly around.

pressure means low performance. So even causing you to have a little bit of like pressure 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 to 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 not in a nice way sometimes. And that's a great thing about having that third partners that they were able to you know, when you have two people or that third partner's 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, we're 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 at it and not be like, you know, just this person's you know, feeling this way about it. Oh he's from that way, then 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 got to have those own uncomfortable conversations 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 or 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 like living off of our bank accounts in Austin, which is a more expensive city than most places, not la expensive, but it's still it is.

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 paid 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 some.

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?

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, 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 any Atonukue. He's from Dallas. He owns one of the

largest Sunspa tanning franchises in the entire world. And you know, he taught he taught us how to delegate. He taught us how to you know, 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.

estate project out in Texas. And the beautiful thing about having the network that we have and the rowdecks that we have is that, you know, we're able to send the deal that we invested in to five ten different people that are that own tens and hundreds of millions of dollars 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 in 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 and even within that, you're still going to learn a lot from it to be like, Okay, hey, if this isn't it, if this isn't you know, then we probably shouldn't invest here or whatever. But being able to rely on 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? It's like you should always be looking at how I can deliver value to this person off the bat, and not for them to come 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 add value

for you. It's like okay, but then now that person has to think about what you can actually do for them. It's like they probably don't even they probably don't even need you. Whereas it's like, okay, you have 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 incentive to connect with you.

You know, some of these people it's crazy, which is is almost all the time worth it is long 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've 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 got and hundreds of people in front of you know,

multi multime 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 course so, which 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, if you know, we know that we have a question about this or want to get their perspective on this,

where as you know, kind of guide us in this way. Hey, this person's the best in the world at this, let's go figure out, you know what we should do.

twenty 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 one hundred percent 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 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 structures. Like I woke up this morning, I ran two miles. We're getting a lot more into running. I've always been like into like lifting, but I'm like, hey, I'm 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 exercise. And so I would say, wake up. I like to get the work out out of the way early. If I have a couple of calls, depending you know, we've been doing a lot of stuff out in Dubai and in the Middle East recently out there, so yeah, we do. There's a lot of cool st uff 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 twenty countries. I think Dubaia is my favorite city i've been to.

really neat. I'd highly recommend going out there, and 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 twelve. We'll maybe have calls before and after lunch. You know, maybe I'm wor conon 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 five hundred to thousand videos that we've 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 twelve.

his whole thing. It's like, get somebody to do the job seventy percent 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.

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

why is 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 gonna 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. Yeah, that's 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.

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 are 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 was like, I 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.

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.

coming up. It's like when it happens, it happens, and people will just see it. But now, I mean, that's it. Yeah, just you know, like I said, the community's growing. It's doing really nicely. Got about three thirty five hundred or four thousand members right now, so just trying to keep growing that. And then just like I said, I'm always

focused on growth. We got twelve million followers. Now I'm just thinking about, okay, how do we get to fifteen twenty million collective followers in the next year or two, you know, So that's what I'm thinking about.