Meet The Kids Who Interview Billionaires For A Living

Have you ever been broke before? Excuse me sir, question for you. Have you ever been broke before? This single question has led to over 2.5 billion views, 6 million followers, and never shared before insights from some of the world's wealthiest people. In this episode, I interview the three kids behind this genius content to find out what billionaires know that you and I don't. Everyone that we've met follows a completely different set of rules. One of the biggest ones is... Their most valuable insights from hanging out with the ultra-rich. Do we need one more? Here we go, here we go. Do you know where the most valuable piece of real estate is? And how they took all of these insights to launch their own 35k a month business in just 30 days. During the interview, he threw a question back to him. Do you think there's a shortcut to your dreams? And James said, no. And the guy said, yes, there is. There is a shortcut. The shortcut is... Check it out and really hope that you enjoy. How many billionaires have you guys talked to? We've interviewed about eight billionaires and we've interviewed over a thousand millionaires. What have you learned from them? How has it changed your brain? They play by a different set of rules. I feel like everything that I've learned in school and then honestly, I hate to say it through my parents about money and you know, go to college, get that safe job. And then once you have that job, invest all the money into your 401k, get married, have kids. And I feel like everyone that we've met follows a completely different set of rules. There's a common phrase that the three of us love to follow and it's take the risk or lose the chance. And I feel like almost every single person that we've interviewed over the course of the last three years, they at some point in their career found success by taking a risk. So definitely like take the risk. I think a lot of people that are stuck in some sort of a safe environment, they're not taking that leap. Whether it's they want to go start that business, they want to go ask out their crush, they want to just do something they've never done in their life. They just got to go take that risk. And that's what a lot of the people that we've interviewed, they've done over the course of their career. I feel like one of the biggest lies I was told growing up, and it's such a common phrase, is that every millionaire has seven sources of income. Yeah, that's so true. It's not the truth. So here's typically how I'd say it plays out for 90 to 95% of the people that we interview, is that they get really good at one thing. Maybe that's you build a home improvement company, maybe you have a tanning franchise, whatever it may be. And you get really good at that thing and you build that thing to multiple seven figures or eight figures. And now you have an excess of cash. And then from there is where you're actually, once you have an excess of cash, it's like, okay, let me go find out different ways to park my money. I'm going to put it into real estate or I'm going to vertically integrate into a different business. Or, you know, but like this thought of like, oh, okay, you know, I have a business that's doing, you know, 10K a month. Now I'm going to go look into maybe, I'm going to go see if I can, you know, start this next side hustle or start that lawn mowing company. It's like, no, like focus all your energy onto one thing, become very good at that thing and then expand afterwards. So interesting. Like Alex Ramosi, who's obviously like made it very public, like he wants to become a billionaire and is on track to do that. I saw a video from him like literally two days ago where he had like seven little cups on the table. And he goes, he was talking about this exact myth, where it's like, most people, it's like, they, you know, they try to fill up like each little cup a little bit. And what successful people do is they fill the one cup up until it's overflowing so much that they have to put the water elsewhere. And that's whenever the other income stream comes. It's so funny. Whenever you like click into the Instagram profiles of the people who post that sort of content, it's like, yeah, on my way to making my first 5K per month. And you're like, ah, I'm listening to the wrong person. They have like four online businesses that, you know, they've made, you know, 10K a month, or they lost 10K building those like four online businesses, but then they're making 100,000 selling a course on how to build those businesses. So it's like, it's just most of the people that we talk to and we interview, like Josh said, like they went all in on one thing, crushed it. And then now they're set for life after they put that money into some sort of cash flowing asset. And then they use that money to go buy the luggagery stuff or go start other businesses or what have you. So why did you guys take the risk to start this? And like, why are you interested in money? Why did you want to talk to millionaires and how did you get on the path of doing that? Absolutely, it's a great question. So, I mean, kind of to give a background on ourselves, the three of us who grew up, we were from the Washington DC area, all met in the same Boy Scout troop, all became Eagle Scouts together at different points in our lives. Josh just turned 26, I'm 22 and 24. So we were kind of at different points in our lives when we got out of Scouts. Jack and I are brothers. I was gonna say, did you meet your brother at Scouts? No, so. That would have been crazy. Crazy, crazy. But, and so. Yeah, my long lost brother. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Similar last name, man. Yeah. So, but ultimately all kind of had different backgrounds in what we were doing. So at the time Jack had moved out to Austin about six years ago to go to the University of Texas. Josh had dropped out of community college to start a digital marketing agency and ventured off into some other things as well. In 2019, prior to the year before I moved out to Austin with him, I went all in on TikTok and just tried to study the algorithms and master kind of building out like the brands online and stuff like that and how to grow on social media. And so we started a channel just making content about business, grew it to about 25,000 followers, quickly came to the realization that most people do not give a shit about three young 20 year old kids talking about business. So we made the pivot to say, hey, you know, we've always been great people. Like we've always been great, you know, I guess people, persons that we've never been afraid to kind of go have conversations and start those, you know, cause we always had those kinds of mentors and people in our lives that we were able to build relationships with. So we just started to go find industry experts in our local city, right? Go to the tech district, the financial district in Austin and go to start having conversations. And it was just one viral video after another. In about three years, we built the channel to over 6.3 million followers and we've done about two and a half billion views in three years. We were able to scale so really fast because, you know, at the time, kind of like James said, is most people didn't care about hearing from, you know, three guys in their young twenties talking about business when they haven't built a million dollar company before. And so we're like, hey, what if we could go leverage people that have actually played the game that have built 20, 30, 40 years that people might've never heard from and their story can finally be heard. All that expertise and then advice that was just going to stay bottled up for the rest of their career. But now like, you know, like you kind of said, 10, 20, 30 million people can now listen to that story and maybe take a nugget or two away from it to help them. Yeah, so you're leveraging other people's experience. Absolutely. And they're leveraging you because you now become a distribution vehicle for their message, their brand, their insights, or just their goodwill. Oh yeah. They're like big time CEOs that have never gotten any sort of viewership like they have in a hard knocks interview. It's crazy. Like they're just like, I've never gone that viral before. I feel like one of the biggest lessons I feel like we've all learned throughout our journey is it's not what you know, it's who you know. Because oftentimes it's like, it's not the man, if I just can't figure out this problem that I have going on right now, or like, I'm just really struggling with this aspect of my business. Like, what can I do? And like, I feel like for most people and like, you know, you can go to your books, you can go to try to find YouTube videos, but ultimately if you have that network of people, you can just call them. And oftentimes it's like, look, it's not what you know, it's who you know. And those are the people that are gonna be able to give you access to opportunities that you never even thought were possible. It's like the rule of like what? You're one degree of separation away from anyone on this planet. And I truly feel like with our network right now, that really is true. Where it's like everyone, and even goes for you or anyone else maybe even watching this is that you really are just 1%, you're one degree of separation from anyone you want to get access to. You just gotta ask. Do you feel like the world has got smaller? Absolutely. So, well, especially so like a lot of times now that, you know, after we built the channel up, we had a lot more credibility because it's like, hey, we're not working with just 25,000 followers, we're working with hundreds of thousands and millions. And so, you know, now, you know, a lot of our interviews are really still on the street. Like we'll go on the street and we'll walk up to somebody that's never heard of us before and we'll just try to get the interview with them. But, you know, we've also had the pleasure to meet a lot of really successful entrepreneurs and people with some pretty big brands. And what you'll find is we'll go to a city and we'll interview somebody with a big brand and they know 10 other people in that city that also is worthy of an interview, somebody that you gotta get connected with and they'll plug you with everybody there. And it's just crazy how when you go to the next interview in that city, they know the same 10 people. You go to, it's just wild how close, the higher the ladder you go up, how close everybody knows each other at those different levels. Yeah, it's crazy. So like I was sharing with you guys before we started, so I moved back to Ireland after doing non-profit work, had no money, no network, no nothing, and started a local podcast all about Belfast, which is like a tiny, tiny city. It's like 300,000 people. And within like 100 episode, it's just like you know the whole city. And every CEO, because you do good work and you represent yourself well and you give them a good time, it's like they can just introduce you to just feels like the whole country. So you guys have been able to do that on like a multi-city, cross-state, international level. And at that stage, you just realize like dude, like the top 1% of performers, the top 0.1%, like they all talk to each other on WhatsApp. Do you know what I mean? Like people talk about the 1% rule in the world and it's like, well, they definitely all know each other. Yeah, they're all going to dinner together. They've all, you know, been to each other's house. It's crazy. For sure, yeah. So, go ahead. I was gonna say, it's crazy how important your reputation is in just doing good business and building a brand. I mean, what do we always like preach about anything is we would never put up a video or do anything that necessarily, you know, tarnishes the brand. It's all about brand and longevity and having a good reputation because I feel like, I mean, you can kind of speak on this more. Yeah, well, no, I mean, that's why, especially in a business like media, so many people, their longevity gets killed because they want to go after that quick, short money. Like we've passed up on hundreds and thousands of dollars because we've thought very long-term about the decisions that we ultimately make. And a lot of people, they get very short-term minded, especially in content creation and media. It's hard to make a lot of money, like unless you are really, you know, shit's really popping. So, you just have to be very diligent of that as well. And just to kind of like add onto this, if we're talking about people, it's like, I think in business and life and anything, you're not, oftentimes you're not one gem away, you're one person away. Woo-hoo. There's the gems falling off the table right there. Clip that, clip that. Dropping the bomb on them. Yeah, 100%. So, you mentioned earlier that you think that the lack of, actually, let me put this one first. Why School of Hard Knocks? Like, what does that mean to you and why do you guys call your brand that? So, if you look up the definition of the phrase School of Hard Knocks, it has to really do with like a lot of like life's toughest lessons, learning from, just learning from the school of life pretty much, like when life knocks you down, throws you a curve ball, that's pretty much your learning from the School of Hard Knocks. And so, we love the name for the channel, School of Hard Knocks, because we feel that the interviews that we're conducting with people is they're pretty much, they've made the mistakes. They've learned from the School of Hard Knocks on their way to the top. And so, you don't necessarily, by going to the School of Hard Knocks, by coming and watching our channel, you get to learn those lessons without actually having to make those same failures. Like, we interviewed a guy on our channel and he said, he asked James here, during the interview, he threw a question back to him and he said, do you think there's a shortcut to your dreams? And James said, no. And the guy said, yes, there is. There is a shortcut. The shortcut is mentorship. And it's because those mentors, if you go and learn from them, you don't have to make all the same mistakes that they did. You just have to learn from the mistakes that they made to get to where they are and you don't have to repeat them. You're just like, okay, well, I'm not gonna do that because that didn't work for that guy. Yeah. And I think what's really interesting, and maybe one thing that's played a huge role in your massive success, is there's a huge vacuum and void of mentors. And you can come at this from loads of different angles. You can look at fatherlessness. You can look at like parental relationships breaking down. You can look at education systems failing. But like a lot of guys out there are just like doing it by themselves. And when you do it by yourself, you've got no shortcuts. You've got no one to show you the way versus like we were talking about your last name, Smith. Yeah. Probably from a blacksmith background. Yeah. You know, it would have been, the blacksmith would have taken you under his wings. But an apprentice, right? And you would have been an apprentice and he would have shown you in detail, step-by-step, exactly how to do everything. And there's just an absolute void of that. Well, it's like, and I've seen this in two ways, especially on our channel, like just talking to people. Like one of the thing is that, you know, a lot of people that are really motivated, they want to go start that business and they want to be the solopreneur. There's probably the number one book like recommended, like on our channel, it's called the E-Myth Revisited. Oh, I've read it 10 times. That book, like I look at it as probably the number one book that any entrepreneur should read. And like that book specifically, it really gives you a wake-up call. It's like, I should not be building this business by myself. Like I'm just a technician. I'm in the weeds. Like you need to either go get a co-founder or go get team members and pass the vision onto them to come and come work for you. Hey, I was just, yeah, I got one. You guys are a bunch of freak guys. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. That's what you're telling me, that's all I gotta say. I'll just say this one sentence, being the solopreneur that works 80 hours a week, it's cool for a season, but that's not a flex. Yeah, you're gonna realize when you're in the same place the next year and you didn't, you know, you don't have any other members on the team. Well, that's the thing too, is something that we've always preached about every vertical and aspect of our businesses is that, look, you know, we've mastered content. Organic, right, we do 90 to 120 million views a month on social media. However, maybe there's internet marketers out there that are doing tens of millions of dollars a year. So why not give them a nice chunk of change to kind of come in and help us out grow a certain part of the business, right? What did we always talk about? I'd much rather have a slice of the watermelon than 100% of a grape, right? And like we were talking about, a lot of people want to be that solopreneur and they want to be selfish and do everything themselves, but then that business doesn't scale or grow because they don't bring in the actual experts that can actually help them and kind of contribute to their expertises that they have. Yeah, we were on a community call, live call with Andy Elliott and our community school mentors, entrepreneurs. He's a beast, by the way. Oh yeah, he's great, he's great. Yeah, I talked to the Macklin twins a while ago, they were incredible. And pretty much there's a young man from Germany, actually, and he's wanting to go start his own business and he's asking Andy, he's like, hey, like, what should I do? And Andy just tells him straight up, don't go start a business. Like, just in this conversation, you're not cut out for it yet. You don't have the experience. And meaning like, you don't even have a tangible skill like to go and sell people. So he was explaining to the young man saying like, hey, you need to go be an apprentice, go get, if you want to work in sales, yeah. If you want to go work a sales job, like go work for a sales company that has the best training, that has the best salesmen in the entire country there, go work for them, work there for like three years, work your ass off. I think Hermosi just posted a video about that as well. It's like, hey, go look for that next high paying job, that sort of thing that's going to teach you the skills and do that for 36 months and then go do that next step. But most people, they just want to, I want to start that business. I want to be a solopreneur. Well, let's, what's a smarter path to get you there? It's not that you got to work a nine to five forever, but let's like, let's get you there first. To kind of go back to where we started at the beginning of like things that I've learned or things that we've learned from the millionaires that we interview is that these people are way more, you know, willing to actually take a pay cut to invest in their skills for the long term. Because I feel like oftentimes, you know, people in their, you know, 18s, late teens to early 20s is, you know, when they get out of college or they get out of high school, they're looking to try to make as much money as they can right away. And I do see that perspective, like I completely understand, but it's also what if you could maybe take a pay cut to go learn and be a sponge from someone and actually become amazing at one specific skill. And then, then you can go ahead and start that business. Instead, you can just shortcut so many years of just pain and just shortfall after shortfall by literally just going and learning from someone and then going out and starting your own thing or maybe going to a better opportunity after that. Yeah, it's earned to learn. It's the classic Warren Buffett thing where it's like, you can actually get paid to be mentored and it's called having a job with the right person. Yeah, I don't know if it was, I know Hermoses probably said this, I know Gary Vee said this, I know Tom Bailu has said this to where it's like, hey, like if you don't know, if you kind of know what you want to do, but you don't have any connections to the industry or whatever, like DM a hundred people that are doing exactly what you want to do and be like, I'll work for you for free for 90 days and I'll work harder than anyone else. And if you want to hire me afterwards, which I think you will, because I'm going to work harder than anyone else, then great, I have a job. If not, at least I can walk away with knowledge and connections. Can I come work for you? And you just DM that to the hundred people that you want to go and live that life like. And it's so true. It's just like, hey, what if you just, and how James was saying, everyone wants to go for that short-term bag, but it's like, if you think long-term, like go work for that person, that's that one person away that could take you to the top. Yeah. When I worked in Africa, like African Proverbs hit different. I don't know why, the wisdom is just like insane. And there was this old guy and we were walking one day and it's like a well-known thing, but he said that proverb is like, if you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together. So true. And I feel like that's what you guys have like really encapsulated from a business perspective is if you want to make 3K this month, okay, sure. Go and do some random solopreneur thing. If you want to make 3 billion across your lifetime, it's like, you better go and like gather up the fellow hobbits, like Frodo and Sam and Mary and Pippin and like go on the adventure together because it's the only way you're actually going to go far. Yeah. I mean, before School of Hard Knocks, like kind of like how he mentioned earlier, like I had started my first kind of like consulting, freelancing business at 18. Yeah. And back then I hadn't read a book like the E-Myth. I didn't know better. I was trying to be that solopreneur and I had a lot of technical skills, but I was also trying to do the sales. I was trying to write up the contract and then still fulfill on the product and do all the admin stuff, the legal stuff. And it's like, dude, you need a co-founder. Like you need to go find someone that can actually bring the clients in if I was really technically savvy. And it's just so true. Like the difference I've seen between that first business that I had started versus this School of Hard Knocks that has worked out is like, I have two co-founders that can pick up places where maybe something I'm not as strong in, James and Josh can come in and be that strength or maybe something that they're not as strong in, I can come in and pick up the piece and we keep each other accountable as well. For sure. Yeah. You ever read the book, Who Not How? Who Not How? I've heard of it, I haven't read it. Guys, honestly, if there's one thing that you ever take away from meeting me, I don't care if you forget my name, I don't care if you forget my face, you got to read that book. Ah, let's go. And the subtitle, it's not the subtitle, but like the whole premise of the book is basically like, we're conditioned when we're faced with a problem to ask, how do we fix this? And the whole premise of that book is, as you've already guessed by the nods and the smiles on your face, is you just need to ask, who can help me fix this problem? You know why, right? Why? Because people will take you places that money can't. Woo! The jams are flying! You can tell that one's came out on the interview before. For sure. That's so good. I'm on now. So you guys have gone on this entrepreneurial journey yourselves. You've been in contact and rubbing shoulders with like some of the greatest mentors on the planet. Like what are some of the hard knocks you guys have experienced along the way during this business? Because I'm sure there's a ton. Yeah. Well, I mean, we went to our first business mastermind in I think March, 2023 or something like that. And there was a saying that was said at that mastermind. And I heard that, you know, great businessmen are terrible content creators and great content creators are terrible businessmen. And you see that because like most of the time people don't realize but their favorite influencers actually broke. And they don't even realize that. And whereas on the flip side, there's great entrepreneurs that have hundreds of thousands of fake followers because they just don't understand that. So the blend is being able to put the two of them together. And that's why like, with what we've been able to do and being able to start combining that business acumen that we've been able to build and learn with what we've done. But I mean, at the beginning, it's like you're starting out and you've got three people that you're trying to feed. I mean, and you don't have that traction necessarily yet. Like it's hard to start building out that media company to where that thing's really monetizing, being able to feed three people and then eventually, you know, starting to bring other people in and starting to build that team out. Yeah, I mean, there's a, I mean, that's one of them was that like, you know, you want to go, if you want to go far, go together. If you want to go, like, if you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together. Like sure, on paper, like if any, like if any of the three of us were, were, you know, doing what we were doing alone, like you're making great money. Sure. At the start of this thing, for three people, it was not the case. Like it was trench work and really, really going all in on building a media channel from the ground up. Like most content creators don't really get it like that until they get like several million followers, which is like where we're at now. But starting out, it was not like that at all. And I mean, one of the lessons we had to learn, like, especially if you're listening to this and you're in media is that, and you're a content creator, you can't really build a business on ad revenue, which is like one of the first, like that was the kind of like our first revenue stream that we had unlocked was we were getting a lot of money from bonus programs and things that that, the different social media apps were paying us. Well, guess what? Those, those, those social media apps are basically like, like they own you at that point. Like you, you are, you are, you work for them at that point. So they can dictate, they can take that monetization stream away from you whenever you want. You're the product. And so that was one of the big things. It's one of the reasons why we started a newsletter, because we realized all of our followers on social media are, they are, they are borrowed, not owned. Whereas like a newsletter, like, like when I heard that like newsletters were like 15 to 20 X, the value of a media company versus just your social following as it is. We were like, okay, guys, we got to start this newsletter. So, but yeah, I mean, we've had experiences where like one of our core, like ad revenue streams just like shut down or like, like we got banned for like 30 days for, for just a random reason. Like it wouldn't even like the content was bad, but then it's like a wake up call. Like we're going down to the Facebook office, like, hey, like, can you reinstate? And it's just like, that's the wake up call. It's like, you can't build, if you're in media, especially content creator, and you want to build a business off of that, you have to have a stream that's not reliant just on like what YouTube pays you or Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, whatever your platform of choices, it could be all of them. You got to find something else. So that was one of the big lessons I think we learned early on. Yeah. I think, I think one of the biggest ones for me was, was probably the hiring. You know, we like, we, you know, at the service level, you see the School of Hard Knocks and like our media channel and all that, but you also don't see that we have, you know, the newsletter, we have a content agency. We help people run like their personal brands. We have the community now as well. And, you know, we're doing all these different things, but like, so on, in terms of like the content agency, which is a lot more service intensive, where you actually need, you know, employees to help out and help with the delivery of it. And it was, it was actually in the process of hiring our first US employee. And I've always heard people say that like the first big hire you make is also the most important because this person it's like, you're not like, like this, this is not the person you're hiring when you're like balling out. This is the person you need when you got past the threshold of like, I can do all the work myself versus now I need someone to actually come in and help me. And so that way I can continue to keep growing. And one of the first hires we made, we had the interview process. I think Jack was on there with me, is this lady was phenomenal on, on the interviews. Like, like had all the experience, had everything that we needed. And it was like, okay, this is like the, this is going to be the person that's going to be the, the solution to all of our problems. But what we didn't realize is that, so I have not worked at like a corporate job prior to this. I don't think either of you guys really have either. I know you have. I did in college. But like never really gone through like a true hiring process to really hired someone like for a US based role. And what, so through this, I just did a completely like character-based, culture-based, you know, assessment, right? Didn't actually do anything about like on the job related tasks or anything like that. And so when she came on the team, she was just not what we, she made out to be on the interviews. And, you know, I kept, we kept thinking it was ourselves, like, oh, we're just not training her well enough. Or, you know, it's, it's clearly something wrong with our systems and our processes. And it finally got to a breaking point where I think we're in Miami. And I realized that like, look, like I'm, we're having to double check and do everything that this goes over, doing over. And it's like just causing a much bigger headache, like her being on the team. And we, since then, we had to cut her, we cut her from the team and we brought in someone else. And we realized that it's not, it's not really your systems or the processes that's the problem. It's the actual person themselves who, the person that we have now on our team is absolutely incredible. Like they're, like, I've realized that the difference between like an A player and like a C or a D player is absolutely massive. Because you have an A player, that person will literally build out entire sections of the business for you versus a C or a D player will, you know, literally hinder your growth and bring down the rest of the team. They'll bring down the culture, they'll bring down all the other team members. And it's just a, I think we've put like a, such a big focus on like hiring now and being just so diligent to who we bring on our team because you don't realize that one bad apple will mold the rest of the fruit. Bro, literally at the last Hermosy mastermind, I think he said something like, the end game of every business is always talent. Oh yeah. Because at the end of the day, like once you perfect the business model and the money starts coming in and the marketing's good, it's like the goal is to get the best people possible. Because as you say, like the best person will write their own processes. They don't need to follow a checklist that you've made because they'll go and they'll do it themselves. Oh yeah, well, I mean, the new hire, I mean, this is a classic case of like hire slow, fire fast. Because that second, when we brought in that incredible person to replace that first employee, we, like our hiring process was way more diligent. Like we actually had to like got on the computer and watch them actually carry out the day-to-day tasks, like in like the second interview that we conducted. And it's just a night and day difference. So it's like that slower hiring process. And I mean, we should have fired the first person way faster. They were three months there too long. So it's, but yeah, I mean, absolutely. I mean, it's just like that one, it's like people can take you places that money can't. It's that one person on your team that could really take you to that next level. If you can't change the person, you got to change the person. Yeah. That's amazing. Yeah, that's a good one. I thought you'd be like, I was like I got a boom while they were like just the same. We did a masterclass for our community. Cause one of the, our components for our community is like on demand content. And there's this one entrepreneur, his name is Joshua Crisp. And I swear everything that comes out of Josh's crisp mouth is just a viral soundbite. I mean, this guy, this guy has business sayings down to a T But he has the knowledge to back it up. It's incredible. And James just gets the biggest kick out of it. I think like if you go watch that masterclass in our community, James is just smiling ear to ear. I love it when people drop the soundbites you know. He's thinking viral clip, viral clip, viral clip. I haven't heard that. I gotta run that one back. No no no. Let me say this. If you can't change the person, change the person. It reminds me of like the saying. It's like nothing changes if nothing changes. It's true. It's so true. But one last thing I'll say on this is that… The one thing like despite like having you know… You know you're starting out. You know you're relying on the ad revenue business model. And again you're kind of… You understand the content. Like I said that you're in that position where it's like, hey we understood the algorithms. Just about better than 99.9% of other people. Like what we knew is how to go viral. The one thing that we would always do consistently from the start to now. It's like we were never afraid to book that flight. To get us all on a plane and go get that content spring. Go get that. Because that was our bread and butter. You know we noticed I feel like in our business and with Hard Knocks is that… When we started to like not be at our peak performance as a company was when we tried to… Again like we were talking about earlier. Is you forget that to keep the main thing the main thing. We were a content company right? Media was our vehicle. And we tried to think about how… What could we do in e-commerce and all that. Then you're just starting to waste money because you're getting desperate to hire people that are there. And it's like Mark Cuban talks about this a lot. It's like if you think somebody's just going to come in and save your business. It's going to happen but it's probably not going to happen. Especially if it's something foreign or something that you know. There's no proof of concept there for what you're doing exactly. But I was just to kind of add that point. And this is to anybody that is watching is that it's like… Like he said earlier live by the saying take the risk or lose the chance. It's like you know there were those times where it's like dude like just book that trip. Book that ticket we'll make the money back. And more often than not every time it was worth it. You know regardless of hey you know what it would cost. We would always do that. We always had that mentality. It's like… I don't know what to say other than just like you're right. Yeah. You know and especially like you're hitting me in the feels because you know like I booked a flight in February to like go and visit School HQ to interview some models. And then like I booked another flight to come to Vegas to like go meet Alex Ramosi. And it's like and now it's here. Do you know what I mean? It's crazy. So what do you think was the biggest risk that led to an incredible reward with your business so far? What's the one flight? Like the one interview? The Denver Mastermind for sure. Yeah. Talk to me. That unlocked. I mean at the time I mean like financially like we were putting every dollar we had like into the business. Like okay if our rents are paid for cover it. If like bare bones expenses and then every other dollar that we had went into the business especially and we had three of us that you had to provide for. Anything over the top of that we invested into hard knocks pretty much. And I think it was so like like we I don't think I think we made a pact we wouldn't do this again now that we like we're good now. But like at the time like we only sent those to like James and Josh because we were just we just got to send we got to get people in that room. Like it was basically like a connection that we made in Austin was just like hey like we have a mastermind with like seven, eight, nine figure entrepreneurs are going to be there. Like I can get you guys in. It's like it costs like $50,000 a ticket to be part of this mastermind but I can get you guys in for free if you want to come and do interviews. Who not how bro. Yeah yeah who not how. And it was and we were just like okay could you help cover flights and they're like no. We're like okay well we're sending people there. I don't care. And it's like and just like I mean I'm not I'll let you guys speak on it but it's it was like that was that first event we're like really getting in the room with that much wealth at the same time and wealth of knowledge of people just like so many steps ahead of us and just like the gems and the interviews and the connections made there. Like they pretty much opened up like you guys aren't a media channel. You're a media company. Like you need to start a newsletter. You need to like if you guys want to do that constant agency this is the route you need to take with it. Like it was like it was like night and day difference. They just gave you the mop. Yeah yeah. You had some time for empty handed. You came back with a mop for your whole business. Oh absolutely and I mean but the thing is at the end of the day like all those guys that were there like and guys and girls that were there at that mastermind they got an interview on the channel with you know hundreds of thousands of people seeing them. Incredible. Yeah and I mean just to kind of like add on to that is like you brought up like the who not how aspect is that you know again like it was a risk right to go out there and do that but ultimately we completely changed our trajectory and brought us from just being like a simple like content channel to ultimately now being able to build out like the different verticals from that. I mean we met some people at that event that we're now business partners with. You know what literally the we have a fourth partner for our school community school mentors and we literally he was one of the people at that event. That's insane. So. Crazy. So congrats. You guys were currently here in Vegas. You guys won the school games. You're about to go meet another future billionaire in the making tomorrow. Alex Ramosi for a private mastermind and it genuinely it's like it's one of the sickest masterminds on the planet. You guys are going to love it so much. How did you come across school? Why did you compete in the school games? And like how much money did you make in your first month? Yeah. I mean I would say school like pretty much we knew we knew for a while that like kind of our roadmap for our company was newsletter and then paid community was short to follow. And so we launched the newsletter. I think it was earlier this year earlier this year. I think it was in like January or February. Yep. And then shortly thereafter we were just like okay like we we needed to think of something like a pro like we had waited really three years to to since the start of building our audience to really find something that would be before we turn around and sold to them. Everything else on our channel for them has always been free. And so just trying to build that trust and value building that audience. And so we were just like okay we we had to realize that we're in the bridging business. We bridge people our audience worldwide to successful entrepreneurs, founders, operators, professionals, just people that have been successful. We're like we are not that like we're like we help bridge people to that information. And so we needed to come up with an info product that really suited the needs of our our community like on social media. And so like we put out and we've decided a paid community was the route to go. Surveyed our audience which is something that like I think a lot of people need to learn from is like hey if you're really going to build and develop a product you need to actually ask your audience like hey what do you want before I roll this out. And so we did that got a ton of data and we realized that for the community what we wanted to build was like people wanted to you know actually get in live calls with mentors people that we interview on our channel. They wanted you know more exclusive content things that they could dive into and then they wanted to see a lot of like our uncut interviews as well as a community for networking. And so we built the school mentors and the way that we came across school was I mean Hermosi was definitely a play in it. I mean saw him joining on it but school I think like I saw some other creators had made communities on school and were crushing it doing really well. Hamza was one of them which was like he was crushing on school and I know his I really like the way that he funneled people in. So we talked about a bunch of the different platforms. There's a lot of YouTube creators that have had a lot of great things to say about school. So we ended up picking school as the platform. I mean we honestly believed a lot and you know like I've followed Sam Ovens for a while. Like I've seen what he's built in with consulting dot com things like that. And then obviously Hermosi, 100 million dollar offers was really a book that was a key player in shaping our content agency to the next level for our offer creation. And so with that we're just like okay like let's let's do school. And then kind of around the same time like it was literally like when we were starting to build like like the momentum for the community we got like our fourth partner for it. And school games was kind of that's when it was kind of starting. And so a couple months we spent building behind. We literally flew around the country filming master classes with some of the top entrepreneurs in the country on specific skills to load up the community with a bunch of exclusive content that you can only find in the school mentors. And ended up launching in June. And I think we took third in school games. I think around like 37,000 something like that. It's what we ended up making in one month. Yeah. And just sneezed it out. But just to give you an idea some of the people that like are actually on the platform and that were hosting these live calls with like our very first call was with the former CEO of 7-Eleven and Blockbuster. So he ran two Fortune 500 companies. So think about this. You're out there at any at any part of the world. You can literally hop on these calls and ask your questions directly to the former CEO of two multi-billion dollar companies and ask him anything about. And he was the CEO of the company at the time when they sold to a massive multi-billion dollar Japanese oil company. We had Andy Elliott on a live call. We have Justin Waller on a call in April or I'm sorry in August. We had just numerous multiple nine-figure entrepreneurs in the insurance space and more blue-collar garage store. All these different, you know, businesses and stuff like that that people are actually getting access to ask them questions about what's going on in their career, their lives and their businesses. Same thing with the masterclasses. I mean, we've got stuff that's being taught on learning how to sell from the world's top sales trainers and experts, how to market, how to create wealth and real estate, how to delegate, how to scale businesses from seven to eight to nine figures. All these different things taught from incredible mentors and getting really specific on how they were able to do it. That way people can apply what's been done and what's worked for other people to their businesses. And to touch on that, the core concept of when we first started this podcast, like we said, the concept of what was kind of like our mission is to be able to take that person that's kind of stuck in this place in their life, whether it be a job or they're located in their hometown and they have no really any direction to go. They don't have that person that can help pull them out. Well, we have people like that in our community that have gotten to get on a call with a nine-figure entrepreneur and ask them a question. We started hosting new member welcome calls where all the new members once a week, they can come in on a call and ask questions about their membership. And so, on literally one of the calls, a guy, he didn't have any questions. He just wanted to come and say thank you. He's from South Africa, and he jumped on their calls with James Keyes, the 7-Eleven CEO. And he literally asked him a question because the guy, he said, I'm pretty much set up to go work a blue-collar job for the rest of my life. And James Keyes' advice to him was just like, you should really invest more into your education if that's the route you don't want to go. And so, the guy applied to economic school in another country the next day. And he's like, I would have never done that if I would have never joined your community and hopped on that call with that connection. So, it's just been really cool to see people from all over the world getting to connect. I told you about the guy from Germany earlier. I mean, you could tell on the call, he's starting out. It's fresh. And he's talking to a nine-figure entrepreneur, Andy Elliott. And it's wild to see. So, it's been some of the cool things that we've been able to do in our community so far. It's interesting. One of the things I always think about is that all advice is a form of nostalgia. Because you're always talking to a previous version of yourself that went through that pain. Oh, yeah. And like nostalgia, it's like a Greek word, means like the pain from an old wound, like the pain from the past. And one of my core values, and one of the core values of my team was be who you needed. And what I love about your story is like, you guys have just become who you needed. When you guys were in Washington, D.C., you didn't have access to network, you didn't have access to business mentors, you didn't have access to that collaboration. So, you guys have gone out on a journey to solve the problem that you had for yourself. And now you can share that with other people. And that's what entrepreneurship is. Absolutely. It's the beautiful part of business where it's like you're solving problems for people. And you guys have found a way to do that at scale. I mean, I don't know. I feel like growing up in the Washington, D.C. area, I'd always just go around to like the, you know, super wealthy neighborhoods. I mean, and I'd just be like, man, what do those people do for a living to be able to drive a car like this or to live in this type of house? Like, what are they doing that, you know, my family's not doing, that I'm not doing? Because clearly they're doing something different. And I feel like, I don't know, with what we do now, I've kind of just like, we've kind of just manifested like that type of career path where we literally go up and ask these people how they were actually able to go out and entertain those things. And I feel like one of the biggest things that I've kind of learned along this journey is that people think that others aren't willing to help. But the reality is, is that the people that have gone through the hardship of actually building something incredible are the people that want to give back the most. Are they the go-givers? They do. They want to give back the most. And I find that oftentimes, like when you look at the people that we interview, you know, who are the people that say no and who are the people that say yes? It's always the people that were, you know, that have built something or have gone through something incredibly hard that are the first one to actually provide and give help. It's the entrepreneurs. A lot of the entrepreneurs, you rarely get them to say no. Most of the time, they're always going to say yes, just give that two cents to the younger generation because they've been there before. They've been the broke founder that had their back against the wall. Everything was wrong going on at the time. And they're just like, I don't know how I'm going to make it. And they ended up making it. And so now they can actually, it's that nostalgia factor. It's just like, I literally, I've been you before. So let me, this is my chance to talk to my younger self. I love it. So for you guys, let's play a nostalgia game to kind of wrap up. If each of you, I'd love to hear kind of a thought from the three of you. If you could go back in a time machine to the 18 year old version of yourself and like knowing everything that you know now, like what sort of advice would you give them? That's me, man. Yeah. I would just say don't do it alone. That would be, and the core component of that also would be is take the risk. Because that's what I did, is I did take the risk. Literally, I was set up in a position where I could have gone the corporate route in college, and I decided not to. And ended up going and doing entrepreneurship. So I would have just confirmed it and would have just been like, hey, when you're poised for that decision, take the risk and don't do it alone. Because that was the biggest thing that stopped me from my first company, from like going anywhere so significantly, because I tried to do everything myself. And when I partnered up with these guys, we took it to the moon. So good. Yeah. Well, I would say there's a lot of stuff that comes to mind in regards to, I would say we talked a lot about people and relationships, but I think we could all agree that the absolute most important relationship is that vertical line that we draw with God. And I think that having that first and foremost, no matter what kind of trials and tribulations that you go through is absolutely the most important thing. So that's from more of like a faith perspective. I'd say from a business perspective, I think I would just say, continue to really be a sponge. Cause I mean, that's like literally what we do. That's what I do, engaging with other people. It's like trying to make that person feel like the best person in the world and getting the most out of them. I mean, just with every interview, you really learn something new. So I would say at that point in time, you're starting out, starting all over. It's like, get really savvy with the business aspect of media. Cause I could say right now, if we were to do it all over again, the very first thing that we probably would have done is start getting those emails, start really understanding the business side of the media and stuff like that. Like we've said at a big theme of this has been people. And again, early on, we didn't do a great job of delegating those MWAs, the minimum wage activities, right? We interviewed 195 million lumber entrepreneur in Houston. He said at a certain point, the business owner can't be worried about the price of the toilet paper, which is extremely true. So it's like early on, it's like, hey, this is the money that we're making. This is all that we're focused on. This is the kind of aspects of the business that we're going to run with. But it's like all these things that aren't, you know, adding a lot of money and are very low leverage. Let's, you know, get other people in. Like Grant said, it's like, you got three employees, you got a problem. The more you scale, the more you grow. It's like, you know, it's ultimately going to generate more revenue if you have the right people on the bus, the right people rowing the boat with you. Probably tell myself two things. One is you got to change your environment. You know, like I feel like the first of all, the D.C. area and just the people I was hanging out with, we're not really supportive of like entrepreneurship at all. And I feel like at times that would honestly create those thoughts of just like limiting beliefs. I can't do this. Like, ah, like maybe am I doing this all thing all wrong? Like is entrepreneurship really for me? So one would be just change your environment. And then the second thing would probably be to eliminate your ego. Especially like when you're first getting started out, like it's okay to ask for help and just be completely transparent with people with where you're at and what you're struggling with. Because if you're not honest about where you're at or the things that you're actually struggling with and need help with, then you won't actually get the real answers that you want. You're just getting a half-assed answer and you're not giving people the full picture. And they're not actually able to give you real advice on your current situation. So I'd probably say, one is change your environment to people that are actually like-minded and are or are headed to where you want to go. And then two, just eliminate ego and it's okay to ask for help. And one last thing I'll add on to this too because it came to mind is that another person that we had interviewed back in May was Dean Graziosi. Are you familiar with Dean? Scott's still an entrepreneur. He's done over a billion dollars throughout his career. Business partners with Tony Robbins is that he said, you know, if he were to go back to his 20-year-old self, he said, you know, back then when I was 20 years old, I would have, if you had asked me, I would have thought that it was 90% being in the right, you know, the right business vehicle, rowing the right boat and 10% mindset. And he said, now knowing everything I know now, it's actually 90% mindset, 10% being in the right vehicle. And I think it's very important because whether it's people having that fear of rejection, getting discouraged by not getting the amount of views that they're getting, all those little things, the limiting beliefs that a lot of entrepreneurs have, the doubts that are placed on themselves from themselves or just other people that tarnishes somebody, right? And I think it's only right that we drop this one, right? At the end here, right? Do we need one more? Here we go. You ready? All right. I have a question for you. All right. Do you know which one's coming? Yeah. Do you know where the most valuable piece of real estate is? In between your tears. No, it's in graveyards because there's billion dollar ideas sitting in the ground of people that never took action. He got me. I love dropping that one because it's so true man. Think about the amount of deceased people that had great ideas. They never acted. They never implemented because they got on their own head because they listened to other people and they you know… They could have built something impactful. Legacy. Something like that. There's seven days in the week and some day isn't one of them. There's seven days of the week and some day is not one of them. Wow. That's amazing. So in other words, you say that they start now. Yeah. And not tomorrow. You know why, right? Because procrastination is the assassination of all destinations. I feel like I'm in the middle of a rock bottle. I mean like we're just throwing soundbites that their price is only an issue if value is absent. Oh man. I mean… Y'all put me on the spot right now. I mean… You ever read The War of Art by Steven Pressfield? No. I've heard that for… So I haven't read it, but I've heard that for like people that are in any sort of creative business or just like creatives in general like need to read that book. It's crazy. And he talks about like the difference between an amateur and a professional. And he says like the amateur will always write the symphony tomorrow and the professional starts today. And it's like it's that action-orientated mindset that sets the 1% apart from everyone else. And it has nothing to do with skill. It has nothing to do with skill. It's just urgency. Yeah. Awesome. Guys, I love this. This was killer. Genuinely. This is fun. Thanks so much for spending this time with us. There will be a link to the School of Mentors, which is these guys' school community. Highly recommend you check it out no matter where you are in the world. If you want to get access to these mentors, you want to be part of a vibrant community of people who also are hungry and want to grow together. Link in the description. And other than that, thanks for this time. Appreciate it.