From Basketball to Entrepreneurship: Dre Baldwin's Inspirational YouTube Journey

When I met Dre Baldwin and I heard his story, I couldn't help but think of this.

Because Dre, he was a basketball player.

Matter of fact, he spent nine years playing pro ball.

And yet, where is he today?

He's a full-time entrepreneur, author of 33 books.

He's given four TEDx presentations.

His YouTube channel has over 142,000 subscribers.

And his daily podcast has been downloaded over 6.5 million times.

Dre Baldwin is a man who knows how to work on your game.

And he has built his brand around a mission to give as much game as possible to as many people as possible.

So if you're ready to work on your game in business, sports and life, if so, then today's episode is for you.

Welcome to episode 258.

What's up, my friend, and welcome to Grit Grace and Inspiration.

I'm your host, Kevin Lowe.

Twenty years ago, I awoke from a life-saving surgery only to find that I was left completely blind.

And since that day, I've learned a lot about life, a lot about living, and a lot about myself.

And here on this podcast, I want to share those insights with you.

Because, friend, if you are still searching for your purpose, still trying to understand why, or still left searching for that next right path to take, well, consider this to be your stepping stone to get you from where you are to where you want to be.

Before you get your game on with Dre Baldwin, I am excited to tell you that if you are somebody finally ready to find out your life's purpose so that you can create the life of your dreams, well, let's do it.

Let's discover your life's purpose.

I want you to text the word discover to 55444.

Again, text the word discover to 55444.

Where I can get you more information into how I can help you to once and for all discover your purpose.

SPEAKER_00: Well, I was always into sports, so I kind of knew about every sport, at least especially like the four major sports football, baseball, basketball, and I guess a little bit hockey.

But I always was into sports, period.

Any kind of sport.

So basketball was always around, but I didn't get around to actually focusing on basketball till you know many years into my life when I was in my almost mid-teens.

So it was always around.

SPEAKER_02: Okay, okay, awesome, awesome.

Now, what about basketball ended up?

I mean, you you said you didn't really start it until 14.

What was it about basketball that you liked better than the other ones?

SPEAKER_00: Well, I had tried a bunch of other sports.

I had gone, I had dabbled a little bit, went to like uh my parents put me in like a little tennis camp.

So I played tennis a little bit.

Then there was uh football, which I never seriously played.

I never really I never got the equipment, so I never really played football.

And then baseball, I played for a couple years, but I wasn't really that good at it.

I was probably my ceiling was probably just to be a mediocre, maybe high school level player.

So basketball was around because an environment that I come from, everybody can play basketball because you need no equipment, you can just show up and you only need one ball and a bunch of people can participate.

So I always knew about basketball, and all my peers eventually dabbled in basketball on some level.

So when I saw that baseball probably wasn't going to be my thing, and I'd already done a little bit of football, and I knew I probably wasn't gonna get it get to play that seriously.

The natural progression was basketball because that's where everybody was at.

So I knew I could get in the game because everybody was playing basketball.

So that's how I ended up just uh wandering over to the basketball court and I ended up staying there.

You know, it's not like I went in there and I immediately was good.

I wasn't good at all.

But good thing about basketball, Kevin, is that you can improve and practice by yourself.

You don't need equipment.

I mean, you just need you need a ball, but other than that, you can practice basketball by yourself as opposed to those other sports that I mentioned.

At some point, you need another person to kind of help you out or at least teach you stuff with basketball.

You could kind of watch other people and pick things up, which is how I basically learn the game.

I just pick things up by looking at other people and then just doing random stuff by myself.

That's pretty much how I developed my skill set.

SPEAKER_02: Yeah, that's awesome.

But you know what?

I never even thought of it in that aspect.

But you are so true.

And the fact of it is the one sport that you can actually really practice by yourself, and uh, that's pretty powerful.

SPEAKER_00: Right.

I'm trying to think as I'm thinking about other sports.

I mean, you could kind of practice tennis a little bit, I mean, but nobody's hitting the ball back to you.

So you can practice it, but you can't you can practice against the wall.

But uh exactly, exactly.

Basketball is you can pretty much practice the most important aspects of the game on your own.

Yeah, absolutely.

Awesome.

SPEAKER_02: Now, where did you grow up at?

SPEAKER_00: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

SPEAKER_02: Okay, okay, awesome.

Now, what was life kind of growing up for you?

What was your family dynamic and stuff?

Did you have like family members also into sports, basketball, anything like that?

SPEAKER_00: Well, both parents at home.

I have one sister, and my mother's not really a sports person.

My dad was into sports as a as a fan, as a spectator, but he wasn't really a player.

And his probably if if we were to pick a sport that he was probably most into, it would probably be baseball.

And my dad's not even that tall.

So I'm six feet four inches tall.

My dad's only like five, eight.

So basketball was never his thing.

I mean, he liked it like as a fan, as I said, and he liked football as a fan, but if he had to pick a sport, it would probably be baseball for him.

So when I played youth baseball, he was involved, he would coach and stuff like that.

But baseball wasn't really my angle.

And as far as your other question, as far as my immediate family know, my sister's not an athlete.

And as I just told you, my parents are not athletes, and I have a lot of cousins, and some of them would dabble into sports here and there, but it's not like I had any my older family member who was already established in sports who took me under their wing.

So if you're asking from that angle, the answer is no, there was not anybody like that.

SPEAKER_02: Yeah, okay, okay, okay, cool, cool, cool.

So you you were just the the one and the only the sports guy who's tall and and ready to to dunk a ball.

I love it.

SPEAKER_00: No, it took me a couple years to dunk the ball, but yes.

SPEAKER_02: Absolutely.

Now, so you said you were 14 when you started playing, so was that like middle school, high school type age?

SPEAKER_00: Just about the start of high school.

SPEAKER_02: Yeah, okay, perfect.

So did you play for your high school team?

SPEAKER_00: One year.

So I only played my last year.

My senior year was the year I finally made the team because coming from where I come from in Philadelphia at that time, Kevin, a lot of schools they were basically shoestring funded.

So we didn't have a lot of people, depending on where you come from.

You go to high school, there's a freshman team, there's a J V team, and then there's the varsity team.

So in our school, there was no freshman or JV teams.

There was just the varsity team, just one team.

So everybody tried out for that one team, and if you made it, you played.

And if you didn't make it, you didn't play.

So it wasn't until my senior year that I made that team.

And so that's what I played in high school.

SPEAKER_02: So you didn't play for the team until like your senior year of high school.

So after high school, then did you still have intentions of pursuing basketball?

SPEAKER_00: No, absolutely, because I mean at that point I'd barely been playing.

So I mean, I and I'd already tried a bunch of other sports.

So I'd figured by probably about halfway through, maybe age 16 or so, Kevin, that basketball is going to be if I'm going to play a sport, it's going to be basketball.

So that was pretty much the decision that I made.

And because I'd only start playing at 14, I hadn't really hit my stride as a player yet.

And I told you, I only played one year high school.

And even that year, I didn't play that much.

I sat on the bench.

I tell people I had the best seat in the house right there on the front row on the bench watching the game.

So I hadn't really achieved anything, but I could still feel myself getting better.

I could see in my mind's eye that I was improving, even though I didn't have any tangible proof that I was improving, because I hadn't really accomplished anything in the game up to that point.

But I knew that if I kept playing, I would probably keep getting better.

Whereas most kids by that age, let's figure graduating high school, 18 years of age, most kids, if they get introduced, let's say my son uh introduced him to basketball and he's old enough to wall.

Like by the time you're 18, we pretty much got a good feel of your development curve.

But me, I don't been playing for three or four years.

So my development curve was just starting.

So that's why, and again, I probably couldn't have explained this back then, but that's why it made sense for me to keep trying to play because I could still feel that I was improving and getting better.

And just by making the team, even though I didn't play, Kevin gave me a little bit of a confidence boost because at least I had shown some type of measurable outcome through all this time that I had put into basketball over the last four years.

At least I made the roster.

That was something.

SPEAKER_02: Yeah, absolutely.

No, no, no.

That's that's amazing.

So when you graduated high school and you went to college, what what happened then as far as your basketball?

SPEAKER_00: Well, I was I knew I was going to college one way or another.

I was going just on the strength of, you know, I went to a pretty good high school and I was a good enough student.

I wasn't amazing, but I was a good enough student.

So I knew I was going to go to college, period, even if I hadn't been playing sports.

So I just figured whatever school I went to, I would just try to walk on to the basketball team.

So anyone who doesn't know what that means, that means you are not invited, you were not called in, but you literally just walk in to whenever the sports team starts to have their practices and you try to fight your way onto the roster.

And I went to the a pretty small school, which is now Division III Cowboys called Penn State Abington, and I was able to do that.

I basically walked on and made the team.

And funny thing is, Penn State Abington's is such a small school, especially at that time, that when I got there, I told you I was developing in basketball.

I was the most talented player on that campus as soon as I got there.

Even though there were other players there who have been playing since they were kids.

But again, this is a very small pond.

So, yes, I was the most talented player there, but that's in the big picture of the basketball world, Kevin, it's not really that impressive, uh to be honest, because the other players there, these guys were not ambitious about basketball.

They were playing because I happen to be at school here and they happen to have a basketball team that I'm good enough to be on.

It's not like they were, you know, it's not like they were looking for basketball, then college.

They were looking for college, then basketball, if if that makes sense.

So for me, I was the most talented player there, and that helped it helped build up my confidence even more once I got to Penn State Admington.

And I played that year, immediately was on the team.

I was a starter most of my freshman year.

And again, I didn't set the world on fire, but I had some pretty good games.

I had some good successes, but I'm still very early in my my learning curve as far as basketball goes at this point.

So this was all just building up my confidence that okay, I can actually do this because I was continually just getting these little pieces of success that was making me feel more confident that if I kept going, I was gonna keep getting better, which at that point was still happening.

SPEAKER_02: Yeah, that's awesome.

Now, what was kind of like your mindset at this point?

Were you thinking to yourself that this could turn into something more going pro?

Or were you just thinking this would just something you did for fun?

SPEAKER_00: I decided when I was 16 I was gonna try to go pro.

So that was yeah, so I already had that in my mind, even though I didn't really know what was the path to actually do that.

How would I get on somebody's radar?

I didn't know how any of that worked.

I just had it in my mind that if I want to try to do something with my life, if I had to put things in it at hierarchy, was the number one thing was it was make it as a basketball player and play pro.

Now, again, there are uh worldwide, you got about 4,000 jobs for an American-born male to play professional basketball.

4,000 sounds like a lot.

That's not a lot.

There are 8 billion people on the planet, or half of them are males, and a lot of us play basketball.

That's not a lot of jobs.

And I didn't know what it would take or what I would need to do to get one of those jobs, and I didn't even know that number until later.

But I did have that in my mind.

If I could do anything, the one thing, my number one choice was that.

And listen, there are a hundred thousand men who had that same idea.

So again, this is it's not really that groundbreaking that I was thinking this.

Every college basketball player, male, all thinks they're going to the NBA.

Or if I can't go to the NBA, I'll eat play overseas.

So you hear it every day from every player.

So I wasn't the only person with this idea.

SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah, of course.

Of course.

No, no, no, that's cool.

So did you end up, did you go all four years to college?

SPEAKER_00: Yes, I did.

Graduated from uh Penn State with a degree in business, and I transferred after my freshman year to Penn State Altoona, which was a a step up actually, because at the time, Penn State Adminton, you were only allowed to play two years of sports at the time.

Now you can play four years if you go there now, but back then it was only two years.

And Penn State Altoona was actually a full-fledged, you can play four years of sports at the Division III level.

So it was actually, I got recruited to go there because I randomly got uh approached by the coach at Penn State Altoona while at Admington, the freshman, I mean, summer after my freshman year.

So he happened to be on campus doing some other business, saw me in the cafeteria, approached me, and started talking to me, and he didn't even know who I was.

He said, You just whooped by the kind of player that I knew I needed, and then he found out later that I was actually good.

And that's how I got recruited.

So that was just random luck, but it was only that random luck only happened, Kevin, because I was showing up to the campus every day to use the gym facilities and practice.

And none of my teammates were doing that.

So that kind of discipline of showing up every day to do the work led to up.

And that's what they say no opportunity and preparation meet, you get lucky.

So that's how I ended up getting recruited to Pensei Altoona, and I finished out my college career at the Altoona campus.

SPEAKER_02: Okay, okay.

That's that's awesome, awesome, awesome.

Now, what happened after college with your basketball?

SPEAKER_00: Well, initially nothing happened.

So I get out of college, I get out of college, and it was the same situation as high school, pretty much, Kevin, even though I had played in college.

Again, uh going from high school to college is a big jump, but going from college to the pros is an even bigger jump.

And they say about 3% of high school players play college ball, and 1% of college players play Pro Bowl.

So it's a very, it's a very narrow strainer, uh, metaphorically speaking.

So getting out of college, again, I played at the division three level.

Most pro athletes come out of the division one level.

So division three players are not even thinking about playing pro, let alone do they actually achieve the outcome of playing pro.

So getting out of school, nobody was checking for me to play pro.

It's not like I had a bunch of offers on the table to go play basketball.

And usually, I mean, that's pretty much the premise of what college is for, right?

You go to college, you prepare yourself for your quote unquote real life, and hopefully you have some job offers when you get out of school.

That's the point of going there for four years.

So I got out of school and my fame was basketball.

I had no job offers.

So I guess I guess college had failed me in a tongue-in-cheek type of way.

So I get out of uh college, nobody's calling me to play basketball.

I get a couple, I just get a regular job.

I go work at Foot Locker as an assistant manager.

And I use my degree for that.

So I guess I can say it benefited me in that way.

And I got a job as an assistant manager, worked there for six months, uh, left there, started working at a gym called Bally Total Fitness, which is they're now out of business, but not because of me, because I sold a lot of memberships in the uh summer of 2005.

And then in the so I graduated college in 04.

So by the summer of 2005, one year removed from graduation, Kevin, what I did was attend this event called an exposure camp.

Are you familiar with those?

Ever heard of them?

I'm not, no.

Okay, so an exposure camp is you have heard of a job fair?

SPEAKER_02: Yes.

SPEAKER_00: Okay, so exposure camp is like a job fair but for athletes.

And what you do there is instead of showing up in a suit and tie and handing out your resume, you show up with your sneakers and shorts, and you and a bunch of other people who also think they're good enough to play pro, but they're currently not, you all basically play against each other over the course of a couple days, and you're basically trying to showcase your skill set for an audience of owners, agents, managers, coaches, basically decision makers from the basketball business world.

And they are looking for talent.

So this is a destination type of event that everybody in the basketball world knows about these, and you circled them on your calendar because you're looking to, if you want to get a job, this kind of thing you have to do.

So I went to one of these events in the summer of 2005.

It was a two-day event, and the event was in Orlando, Florida.

Now I'm from Philadelphia, so me and a couple of college teammates rented a vehicle in Philadelphia, and we drove from Philly to Orlando.

So those who don't know the geography, that's about a 17-hour drive.

And uh we hopped out the car at 9 a.m.

Saturday morning, which happened to be the start time of the camp.

And I tell people at age 23 I can do that.

Couldn't do it now, but I can do it then.

And uh yeah, so I hopped out the car, Orlando, and there's only two days, Saturday and Sunday.

And I played pretty well over those two days, and then we got right back in the car and went right back to Philadelphia.

And I had to be back at work on Monday morning.

I had negotiated with my boss to get two days off just so I can three days off because we had to leave on Friday.

So I negotiated to get three days off.

And anybody who's ever worked in retail knows it's impossible to get three consecutive days off, especially on the weekend.

So I had to negotiate to get those days off, uh, but played pretty well at that event, and then I had to be back at work on Monday morning.

So that's that was the genesis of it.

What I did from there to actually get into Pro Ball is I took the scouting report and the footage from that exposure camp.

And I now I had some collateral.

So now I started Googling and cold-calling basketball agents.

So anybody who knows the entertainment world, this could be actors, authors, and also athletes, is that usually the agents are calling you.

They call the talent because they want to represent you because if they help you get a contract and make some money, then they get a percentage of that money.

So they see you as an opportunity for themselves.

And I didn't have any agents calling me, so I had to call them.

So I was kind of doing the situation the exact opposite of how it normally happens.

So I'm calling basketball agents and basically telling them, hey, here's who I am, here's what I have, and I have some proof now.

So people may be wondering if you listen to the story, why don't you just do this last year when you graduated from college?

Well, the thing is I had nothing to show them.

I didn't have any proof of my ability.

And even what I had done in college, I was playing against Division III players who are not pro prospects.

Now I had played against some pro guys and done well.

So now it has some solid proof.

So I started calling agents.

I called about 60 basketball agents who I could find phone numbers for on Google.

I got in touch with about 20.

So the 20 who I got in touch with, they all said, okay, let me see what you got.

Show me what you had.

So I sent them the link to my scouting report, which was a third-party validated source saying that this guy, Drake Baldwin, he's pro level.

Long story short, that's what the scouting report said.

And the other thing I had was the footage.

Now, this footage was not a link, Kevin.

This footage was on this device called a VHS tape.

You remember those?

Yes, I do.

Yeah, so so the VHS, so those of you who are under you're under the age of 30, listen to this, ask your parents, so you can Google it.

You find out what a VHS tape is.

So the VHS tape, I had to make copies because I had a double decker VCR at home.

Again, millennials, y'all can Google that too.

And I made copies of my VHS tape, the master tape, I made copies on my VCR, and I would mail those out to the agents who asked to see the footage.

And of the 20 who I mailed the footage out to, one of them I was able to get back in touch with, and he said, Okay, uh, see what you have.

I I will work with you, I can help you.

And he signed me to his agency and he got me my first contract, which was this is in late summer 2005, and this was in common Smith Wania.

So that's how I got started playing professional basketball.

SPEAKER_02: Wow, wow, wow.

That is some cool stuff.

You know what?

So, I mean, right at the bat, even at this point in in your story, it's quite evident that that you you are somebody who is kind of driven.

Like if you have this goal, you're gonna make it happen.

And I think that's pretty pretty remarkable.

Oh, thank you.

Yeah, absolutely.

So, what happened?

Did you go like MBA pro?

SPEAKER_00: No, this is overseas.

So uh as far as the basketball world goes, the NBA is its own league in the United States, and they got a team or two in Canada every now and then.

And then you have every other country in the world has their own league.

So just like America is a country or the USA is a country, France has a league in France, Spain has a league in Spain, Lithuania has a league in Lithuania.

So overseas, I played basketball overseas because I would I say overseas, I played in a lot of different countries.

So each year I was on a different team and in a different country.

I never played in the same country twice.

Uh the exception was I was in Mexico, two different cents, but never played for the same team twice, and for the most part, didn't play in the same country twice.

It just we just call it in the basketball world, we call it overseas, meaning you're playing somewhere other than the United States in an NBA.

That's what it means.

So that's what that's how the rest of my career went for the next nine years.

SPEAKER_02: Wow.

Well, so I guess over that nine years, though, I mean, not only getting to play ball, but I mean really got to experience a lot of the world.

SPEAKER_00: Yes, and places that are otherwise, it had it not been for basketball, many of the places that I ended up, I never would have gone.

I wouldn't have gone there on vacation, right?

I only went there because it was basketball involved.

So absolutely.

SPEAKER_02: Yeah, that that's amazing.

Now, just like kind of last little question about that.

How does it differ or does it differ at all from NBA?

Like, are there any anything different about it?

SPEAKER_00: Hell yeah.

We can do a whole episode just on that.

So there's a lot of things different about between NBA basketball and overseas basketball.

Number one, uh, the NBA is the biggest basketball league in the world.

So they get the most attention.

This is why when when I'm out in the streets of Miami and somebody says, Yeah.

A basketball player, and I say, Yeah, and they say, Who do you play for?

And I they mostly default to I'm supposed to play somewhere in the NBA, or they'll say, Hey, am I supposed to know who you are?

And I'm like, No, I played overseas, you wouldn't know me.

I wasn't on TV.

So in the NBA, they have the most fans, they have the most eyeballs, and most Americans don't know anything about overseas basketball.

Even basketball fans, most of them don't watch overseas basketball.

So it's a if you're an American, it's a very niche thing to find someone who knows anything about overseas basketball.

And usually if you do find someone, that means they either played or they're very close to someone who played or they're in the game in some way.

They're a coach or an agent or something like that.

So NBA also is the biggest market, so they got the most money.

So the biggest contracts go to NBA players.

And not that you can't make great money playing overseas, but the NBA has more money.

It's just the bigger contracts.

So the stuff that you see players in the NBA getting, players overseas don't get that much money as it in general, just because there's just not as much of a pie to go around.

But as far as overseas basketball goes, another thing is that there's a very wide range of teams.

So there are teams from their very high levels and their lower levels, and there are many more levels than in the NBA.

So NBA basically has two levels.

You have the like the Knicks and the Lakers, and what city are you in, Kevin?

Yeah, I'm down in Florida.

Okay, so I'm in Florida as well.

I'm in Miami.

So Okay, perfect.

Yeah, so I'm I'm in Daytona.

Okay.

So so in the in the United States, you got the Orlando Magic and the Miami Heat and the New York Knicks.

Whereas, and then you have the second level in the NBA is called the G League, which is the developmental league.

It's kind of like the minor leagues for basketball, but there's only one level.

Whereas in baseball, you have three levels and many others.

Basketball, there's just one level of minor league, and it's not even that many teams.

I think it's maybe one team to every NBA team.

And then you have the NBA.

That's it.

That's all that's happening in the United States.

Whereas overseas, you can go to a country like, let's say a country like Spain.

There are eight or nine levels of leagues.

So there's a lot of players uh running around playing in Spain.

In Germany, similar thing.

Not every country has that many.

Like when I was in Lithuania, it was basically two weeks, two levels.

But in different countries, they all have different things depending on the resources, what kind of teams there are, and things like that.

So there are a lot of players who are playing overseas who, again, you wouldn't even know what was going on unless you know what's happening.

If you don't know that world, somebody can play overseas for 10 years and be completely under the radar and not be known.

So that's another difference.

And then you have no lifestyle differences, and again, it depends.

There's a very wide range, it depends on who you're playing for, depends on the budget of the teams.

There's a lot of things that can be different, even between players playing overseas in the same country.

Somebody could be playing for one team.

I'll give you an example here that'll maybe help you.

So the first job that I had, I was in Countness Lithuania.

And as I said, Lithuania only has two levels of leagues.

Now, I was in the first level league, but my team was kind of like one of the lower teams in that league.

And I had a guy I knew.

He was coming out of a Division I college.

Now, he was a little bit older than me, so he had been playing overseas for a few years already, but he was playing for the big team in the same city that I was in.

So I was on a small team in that city, he was on a big team in that city, even though our teams were in the same league.

Now, he had his place that he was staying in that the team provided, and the team provided a place for me.

They provided his team provided a place for him.

His place was nicer than many of the places I've lived in in America at that point.

And he had he had a car, he had like a state-of-the-art washer and dryer, he had a just a flat with a little island in the kitchen.

It was really nice.

His his place that year in 2005 was nicer than anywhere I'd ever lived in America, where he was living there overseas in Europe.

The place I was staying in was kind of like similar to like a college dorm in the place that they had me in.

So again, it can be a very wide range, even between teams in the exact same league, because it depends on the budgets of the teams.

There's no salary cap overseas, there's also no salary floor overseas.

Whereas in the NBA, you have both.

There's a minimum salary, there's a maximum.

So there's a lot of differences.

SPEAKER_02: Yeah, interesting.

I had no idea.

Absolutely no idea.

Yeah, that's incredible.

So my next question is is where did YouTube enter into this whole life lifeline that we've been talking about here?

SPEAKER_00: Oh, about the same time.

So that VHS tape, I knew that you know, VHS tapes, you lose it, you drop it, you leave it in the sun, get it immersed in water, you lose the footage.

So I knew I needed to safekeep that footage.

So I took that VHS tape to an audio visual store and asked them, is there a way you can put this in a digital format?

And they said, Yeah, we can put it onto a data CD for you.

Would that work?

I said, Yeah, that'll work.

So they put it onto a data CD.

And that footage I uploaded to this new website that says, put as much footage as you want for free.

And it was called YouTube.

So that's where, and this is the same year, 2005.

So this is where I planted the seeds for what became my brand online, but even though I didn't just immediately start building a brand.

And I didn't even pay attention to YouTube for I just put it up there and left it alone because at that time nobody cares about putting content on the internet.

Again, we weren't even using the word content.

So about six months later, maybe I went just to check on the website just to see if YouTube still existed.

And there were comments on the video, Kevin, of people just saying, Hey, who do you play for?

How often do you practice?

You know, can you make more videos about dribbling?

Can you make something about shooting?

And you can make videos about how to jump higher.

Because they saw me doing that in the video, so they figured maybe I can teach them how to do it because I was doing it.

So I realized in that moment, slightly, that there was an underserved audience of people who are now going to the internet to find information as opposed to how we grew up, where you just either need to know somebody or you went to the library or you just were out of luck.

Right.

So now they can go to the internet to crowdsource information.

So I, even though I realized that I didn't do anything about it, because again, what do I gain from being a source of information for people on the internet?

In 2005, the answer is nothing.

You gain you gain nothing.

So I didn't really pay attention to it.

I just kept playing ball and I'm going between countries, I'm back and forth between the USA and overseas.

I'm traveling, and I would just put videos out uh randomly, Kevin, just sporadically.

Every once in a while, I'll put a video up whenever I got around to it, whenever I felt like it, because again, there's no real benefit for me personally to put videos on YouTube.

It wasn't until 2009 that someone forwarded me an article that there was this woman who was also on YouTube, and she would do she was doing makeup tutorials, and she was just sitting in the camera and put on makeup and explain to, I guess, women how to put makeup on your face.

And what had happened was YouTube had gone into a business partnership with this woman where she was getting paid based on the videos that she put up and how much the videos are being viewed.

And someone said to me, Well, Dre, you know how you randomly put those basketball videos on YouTube?

Why don't you figure out what she did and see if you could get up into that partnership as well?

And I said, Man, that's a hell of an idea.

It's a great idea.

And that was right around the time that uh YouTube had been purchased by Google.

So what Google did, a lot of people don't notice, people don't know the history of YouTube, is that YouTube started out as an independent company, but they were hemorrhaging money.

They were bleeding money for about five years because all that bandwidth, those videos that anyone can put up, as much as you want for free, that stores cost a lot of money.

And YouTube was also getting sued by a lot of music companies, music publishers, because people were putting published or copyrighted music in their videos.

So YouTube was losing a lot of money.

So Google came in and purchased the company and they started writing the ship financially.

And one of the first things they did was start putting ads on videos.

So those of you again who don't remember, there was a time you could watch YouTube all day and see no ads because there were no ads.

But then when Google purchased it, they started putting ads on videos and they went to the creators, people like me, and this woman making makeup videos.

Hey, every time your video gets viewed, if it's popular enough, you will make some money because we're going to run ads on your video.

So that's when I found out about this, and I went to YouTube and figured out how I could get involved, and I eventually got myself involved.

So that's when I've really started to monetize what we now call content, and that's when I started to get intentional about building what we now call a personal brand and being an influencer and all of that stuff.

So that's how that started.

SPEAKER_02: That is pretty darn cool.

So so really you were kind of starting on YouTube, though.

I mean, literally at the at its beginning.

That's right.

Yeah, that is too cool.

Too cool.

Now, the content you were putting out, I know at some point uh you started realizing that that people were interested in it more than just athletes.

Talk to me about that.

SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so uh continuing right where we left off there.

So around 2009, another thing that happened that uh didn't say was that my phone was not ringing.

I was an unemployed professional basketball player, so my phone wasn't ringing.

So anyone knows anything about the entertainment world.

Again, uh, you may hear stories about an actor or an actress when they're in between jobs, they go work as a bartender, right?

Or they're at Starbucks or something because they don't know when their next call is coming.

So athletes have that same situation.

So my phone's not ringing, and this is when YouTube is purchased by Google.

So I said, okay, I might I might need to treat this as a full-time business because who knows if the basketball thing, if the phone's gonna ring again, who knows?

It might not ring.

So I started putting videos out every day on YouTube, and now my audience starts to grow even more and even faster.

Now these videos are only basketball, so my audience is 99% basketball players.

And I also started, I've always been a writer, Kevin.

So I was blogging actually before I got on YouTube, but my blog didn't like blow up my blog.

I just blogged.

It was just I was always been a writer.

But it wasn't like I had this huge audience of readers, but I was also focusing more on just all this internet stuff.

So I have my own website at this point, I have YouTube and I'm writing.

And people are kind of starting to pick up on this, and I'm starting to have a little, my name's starting to have a little bit of buzz to it just because I have content online and now more consumers, not even people creating content, but just watching it.

Now people are starting to go, like, oh, if I want to consume material, I don't have to watch TV or read the newspaper.

I can actually get on the computer and get material there.

And I was one of the people doing it.

I was one of the creators out there way before a lot of people were actually also creating.

So I remember telling a friend of mine, actually the same friend who sent me the article about the YouTuber, that this thing that I'm doing on the internet is gonna be bigger than basketball.

I knew that in 2009.

And this is when, again, I'm unemployed from basketball.

So, what happened is the ball players who are watching me on YouTube, they noticed the consistency of my material.

They saw I was putting material out every day before it was cool to put material out every day.

Nowadays, a lot of people do it.

But back then it was not normal.

So they just started asking about the consistency of showing up and putting material out there like this.

Or basketball players would also ask about how do you get the confidence to perform in that one that one day you get the first day of basketball tryouts or in a game is one thing to practice by yourself in an empty gym or at the park is another thing when you got to do those same moves in front of a crowd of people against somebody playing defense.

Or why'd you keep trying all the setbacks that you had?

Barely played in high school, played this small college, nobody was checking for you to play pro, but you kept trying.

What moved you to keep going?

Because a lot of players kind of saw themselves in my own story.

Or they would ask how you get started with this internet stuff, because now getting known on the internet was starting to become a career aspiration.

So now kids were growing up saying instead of being a firefighter or a movie star, they wanted to be a YouTuber.

They wanted to be an internet person.

So I started making these videos every Monday, Kevin called the uh weekly motivation, where I would just talk about a mindset topic because I was getting so many mindset questions, I figured, why not just make a video about mindset and do it consistently so that they can get the point.

And I remember I made one on a Monday, I was in the basketball gym when I recorded the video, and I said, I'll just put this one out and I'm gonna tell y'all what I want to do.

I'm gonna make this video called Weekly Motivation, where I'll just give you all a little mindset strategy or tip every week.

And if you all want me to do this, then I'll keep doing it.

But if you don't, you want me to just stick to basketball, then I'll stick to basketball.

And audience overwhelmingly said, yes, we want the mindset piece.

So I started doing that every Monday, and I would talk about things like uh showing up consistently or how to build your highest level of confidence or how to deal with setbacks in life and use them as a setup for a comeback, or how to not wait around for things to happen in your life where you have to be proactive and kind of make things happen and don't just sit around and hope that something happens for you.

And I did that every Monday, Kevin, for uh 400 Mondays in a row.

And those weekly motivation videos became the foundation of what I have as a business now because those mindset pieces started to attract people who were not basketball players to my audience, and they would just tell me, hey, Dre, I don't play basketball, but the stuff you're talking about mindset-wise, I can use that and you know, I run my own business.

I'm an electrician, uh, I work in an office.

You know, I heard my son listen to your video, and it is useful for me.

So that's what planted the seed of what my next chapter will be after basketball.

SPEAKER_02: That is just I love the natural evolution of you really just taking something that you really didn't really know where it was going, but you knew it was working, and so you kept doing it until it went somewhere.

SPEAKER_00: Right.

SPEAKER_02: Yeah.

Amazing, amazing.

Now you at this point you said that you officially quit basketball in what year did you say?

SPEAKER_00: I stopped playing in 2015.

I wouldn't say I quit, I just stopped playing.

SPEAKER_02: Okay, okay, okay.

We'll we'll we'll rephrase that.

You stopped playing.

Perfect.

So at that point then, had you already did you already know what your next step was gonna be?

SPEAKER_00: Oh, absolutely.

So uh I gotta go back in the story again.

So in uh 2002, I graduated college in 2004, so it was about halfway through college.

I responded to a bulletin board posting, and again, millennials, bulletin boards or these boards they put in the middle of the campus.

If somebody went to make an announcement, you couldn't find it on your phone.

You had to actually physically see it.

So I responded to this bulletin board posting that said, uh, make unlimited income in the summertime.

You want to make some extra money because you know college kids are broke.

And I was playing sports, so it's like you got two jobs and you couldn't make any money, and this is before college athletes would get paid.

So I responded to it.

And it turns out that this guy who put the posting up, he was in the network marketing industry.

And when I went home to Philly that summer, I went to a few of the network marketing meetings of this company that this guy was in.

And there were a couple things that happened at that meeting that are very pivotal for the question you just asked, Kevin.

Number one is that the speaker on stage at these hotel meetings, 80% of what he was saying had nothing to do with the actual product or service that they were promoting.

80% of it was him just simply breaking the audience's false beliefs about money and income and finance.

He was telling us, hey, here's what you've been taught about money, but how about this?

Have you ever thought about it this way?

Have you looked at it this way?

And the things that he was saying on stage made perfect sense to me.

And the reason why that stuck in my mind and why it's so pivotal to this story is that, as I told you, I have a four-year business degree.

And in four years getting that degree, the things that this man was saying on stage for one hour were never said to me in college.

Not once, none of it.

So that was one thing.

And that definitely stuck in my head.

Number two is when the meeting ended, this uh gentleman said, Well, look, when you all leave the room, there's some nice ladies sitting at a table outside the room and they're selling the personal development books.

I never heard this phrase, personal development.

And he explained that if you're going to build up your business, you must build yourself first because you will be the biggest roadblock in your business.

And I said, That makes sense too.

I never heard anybody say that either.

And I went and looked at those books.

Now, again, I'm a broke college student.

I cannot afford to buy the books, Kevin.

So I looked at them, but I just remembered them.

And he was name-dropping these authors like Tony Robbins and Jim Rohn and Zig Zigler and uh Napoleon Hill and Brian Tracy.

I'd never heard of these guys, but I remember the names.

So when I got back to school, I went on my computer and I went to eBay.

Now, this is before Amazon was the place to buy books.

It was eBay.

And I went on eBay and I bought a couple pirated copies for 99 cents of a couple of the books that I remember.

And it's two specific books.

One of them was Risk Dad Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki.

And that book really was my red pill, along with going to that network marketing meeting that told me that I did not want to enter the traditional workforce.

I knew I didn't want to do that.

Even though I did do it as a pit stop, I knew that wasn't my final destination.

Because in that book, Kiyosaki, the first two chapters of that book, he basically takes everything that you thought about how to make money and flips it upside down.

That's pretty much what he does.

Anybody who's read that book knows that.

And the other book I read was Think and Grow Risk by Napoleon Hill.

And in that book, I learned that there's a way that you can consciously and intentionally alter your patterns of thought to alter your actions, to alter your outcomes.

So, with all that in mind, now flash forward back to where you're asking me about.

So I start making these mindset videos, and these people who don't play ball are finding me in my audience.

I still got the basketball players in my audience, and I said to myself, because I always knew, Kevin, that I didn't want to just be a basketball lifer, as they say.

I wasn't going to be the guy who plays, and then I stopped playing, then I become a coach or a trainer.

I knew I didn't want to do that.

I knew I did not want to be a coach or a trainer.

I'm going to play.

When I'm done playing, that's it.

I will still watch the game and talk about it, but I'm not trying to do it as a job outside of being a player.

I don't want to do anything in basketball that doesn't involve playing.

So I knew I needed to figure out what that next thing was going to be.

So when these non-athletes started coming into my world, I said, okay, well, these people like mindset.

I could talk about mindset all day and twice on Sunday.

This is going to be what I'm going to do.

I'm basically going to take all the mindset stuff that I learned in sports and I'm going to teach it to people who don't play sports.

And lo and behold, there was a big market for that.

And as I just told you, I had this entrepreneurial bug in my head from what I read in Kiyosaki and when I got a red pill up by going to those network marketing meetings.

And then I read Tim Ferris' four-hour work week.

That was around 2008.

And when my phone wasn't ringing in 2009, I put all of that stuff together and I started creating my own products and services.

So when I created my first product, Kevin, it was a$4.99 program for basketball players.

One of them was for dribbling and one of them was for shooting.

It was like seven-day programs, and they were just based on videos that I had already created on YouTube.

And I remember when I made my first sales.

And when I made my first sales, I remember I had the BlackBerry phone before I had an iPhone.

And a little red light would blink when you got an email.

And it said, congratulations, you made a sale.

$4.99 for your dribbling program, whatever it was.

I think my first customer bought both programs, I believe.

And I remember I said to myself, I could do this for the rest of my life.

Because what I had just done was create what we now, what I now know as intellectual property.

I mean, that phrase existed, but I didn't know it.

And it was you take an idea out of your head, you turn it into a real thing, you put a price tag on it, and you exchange it for money.

I said, I got plenty of ideas.

I only had two products out at that point.

But I said, I got a million ideas.

I can create more products.

And all I got to do is just tell people I have them and I can make money off it.

Now again, I knew nothing about marketing.

I knew nothing about sales.

I knew I knew a little bit about sales because of the network marketing experience.

But I really didn't know marketing.

I didn't understand it.

I could not have explained it to anyone, but I was already kind of doing it through the content I was putting out.

And then when I started making sales off it, I said, okay, I can just do this.

And if my phone does not ring again and I don't get another chance at basketball, because there was no guarantee that it would, I can just make more of these and now I'm in business.

Now I'm doing what Robert Kiyosaki was talking about because that book, for those who haven't read it, I'll suggest you all do.

But Rich Dad Poor Dad, the general concept that Kiyosaki is teaching is that you need to, instead of using yourself as your only asset, and the asset is simply in financial terms, anything to puts money in your pocket.

So when you go work at a job, you are using yourself to generate money.

He said you need to go acquire assets and create assets so that other things besides you can put money in your pocket, which means you can free up your time and you can eventually put yourself in a position where you don't have to work, but your assets are working for you to produce money.

So when I created those products, I created two assets.

I created two assets that can produce money for me,$4.99 at a time.

And I said, I want to just create more of them.

I can sell them for higher prices and reach out to more people.

I can replace myself as the only asset in my life.

And that's exactly what I started working towards.

SPEAKER_02: So yeah, absolutely.

No, no, no.

That is incredible.

Now, where did the kind of transition take place, though, from making money, you know, creating content to kind of what you're doing now?

SPEAKER_00: Oh, that well, that happened over the course of uh several years.

So about 2014, that's when I got introduced to a woman who became one of my first mentors, my first mentor, when it came to business.

Now, she was a full-time professional speaker, charging, you know, who knows,$10,000 a speech, something like that.

And she knew the whole game.

And she basically taught me the game of uh thought leadership.

So she taught me how, all right, you're an athlete, you have these mindset pieces.

At this point, I'd already self-published, probably have about five books self-published, and already had all these YouTube videos, and I was already using this phrase work on your game.

So I already had some pieces, but it wasn't put together in a way that we're working in entrepreneurial space because I didn't know about what she knew about.

So she told me, well, you're an athlete and corporate and no businesses, sales teams, marketing teams, they love athletes because the same things that you all need, showing up every day, uh believing in yourself, picking yourself up after you get knocked down, uh, teamwork, leadership, discipline, commitment, filling out paperwork.

This is just the discipline part of it.

The business people, they need that and they want speakers who can speak to those things to their teams, to their employees.

And you being an athlete also makes you unique because not everybody gets to play sports at a professional level.

So she taught me that I needed to package this up and put it into a what we now call framework.

Make a framework out of what you're doing.

And that's how I turn work on your game into a brand new framework where I started being intentional about here's it's called this thing that do is called work on your game, and what we do is XYZ, whatever it is that I would say at the time and what I still say to this day.

So that started laying the framework for it.

She said, You already got books, uh, you already have some experience speaking, you'll Online.

Now you need to get yourself out there and speaking to people in person so you can start building up like, hey, I am a legitimate person who can speak to audiences, and I got proof of it and all that stuff.

So that's how it started to uh go in that direction.

So that started with professional speaking.

I had books, I was already making courses.

And did we add anything else?

I mean, we added the consulting.

Of course, our coaching came in at some point.

Someone was just watching me on a live stream and asked me, do you coach people?

And at the time, I had never coached anyone, Kevin, but I said yes.

And uh he responded, he sent me an email and I coached him.

My first client was I charged him$500.

So that was my first client.

And that's how I got into coaching.

And then I just kept doing more of that.

I was doing a lot of professional speaking for about between when I stopped playing in 2015 up to about 2019-ish, I was doing a lot of professional speaking and also writing a ton of books and making courses.

That was basically my focus.

And some of my basketball programs like on the side while all this is going on.

Then about 2020, when uh COVID happened, there wasn't any professional speaking.

That's when I started focusing more on in-house stuff, which is what became Work on Your Game University, which is where we do all our coaching and consulting now.

That is still our main focus now, is the university.

Still do speaking courses, programs, stuff like that, but our focus is the university.

SPEAKER_02: Amazing.

SPEAKER_00: Now, what is involved in the university?

Well, our university is based on our four-part framework, uh, mindset, strategy, systems, and accountability.

So it starts with the way that you think.

That is the foundation of everything that we do here.

It goes way back to my basketball days.

Second thing is the game plan.

That's a plan of action.

What exactly are we going to do?

That's the strategy.

Third part is the process.

How can we execute on a working process over and over again so we can have consistent, duplicatable, and predictable outcomes?

And then the last part is the accountability.

How do you make sure that the people are doing what they're supposed to be doing and make sure that the system is doing what it's supposed to be doing?

We put all four of those pieces together, and that's how we have the work on your game framework.

SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I love it.

Absolutely.

What's the uh like normal kind of client that you see that you're working with?

SPEAKER_00: Man, it's a loaded question for us because we have a very wide audience.

So yes, I have I have people who know me from the basketball days who are watching me when they were in middle school, and now they're working in finance or they have their own IT firm.

They are they are members of our university.

I have people who have been in the military who are transitioning out of the military, retiring from the military, but when you retire from the military, you can be 40 years of age, and they are starting their own businesses and they are members of our university.

We have people who have their own financial firms, like financial advisors, and they are members.

People who are working at big corporations and they're already earning six, seven hundred thousand dollars a year.

They are members of our university.

So some people come to us for each one of those poor pieces that I just told you.

There are some people who come to us because they want the mindset piece.

Like they got the money part down.

They just need the mindset piece.

There are some people who want more of the discipline, like, hey, I'm making all this money, but because of that, I'm not spending as much time with my kids, I'm not working out like I used to.

I've gained all this weight, I'm not spending time with my wife.

Can you help me get my personal life organized to fit around what I'm doing business-wise?

We have people like that.

We have people who want more uh strategy and systems.

So they are people who are doing kind of similar to what I'm doing.

They have online brands, they're writing books, they're doing courses, they're doing speaking, but they haven't, they have all these pieces, but they haven't made sense of it.

How does one piece connect to the other piece?

How do they support each other?

I help them with that.

And then we have people who just, hey, Jerry, I just need the accountability.

Like I know all the things I'm supposed to be doing, but I'm not following through.

And you seem like a real disciplined person.

You seem to be able to explain it.

Can you help me make sure that I'm on top of my stuff and doing what I'm supposed to do?

I know if I know I'm going to talk to you every week or every other week, I know I'm going to follow through more.

Can you help me?

So we have those type of people as well.

So we have a very wide range, and I would say, Kevin, only about 25% of the members of our university are either coming from or are in an industry that I was either in or are in right now.

Meaning only about 25% of the people in our university are athletes or former athletes, or they are authors, speakers, coaches.

Everybody else comes from completely different places, brick and mortar businesses, military, finance, things that I've never even done.

But they're members of our university because we have we have this wide breath, and because my unique ability is not the topic per se, my unique ability is my ability to break things down and make sense of them and explain complex things to make them simplified and easy to understand.

So that's why our audience is so wide.

SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I love it.

That makes total sense.

One of my last questions for you is when you kind of look back on this journey that you've been on, what would you if you if you could credit one thing, whether a trait that you have or something, what do you credit to your success, getting you where you are?

SPEAKER_00: Discipline.

That's an easy question.

Discipline is uh showing up is the first thing we talk about when we talk about mindset here, working the game.

Mindset is our first piece, and the first piece in mindset is discipline showing up every single day to do the work.

That is number one.

That's how I was able to turn myself into something in the basketball space.

It was how I was able to build my name online by just putting out content.

I'm not the best content creator, I'm a terrible video editor, but I got 12,000 videos online, and just on volume alone, I was able to build a name for myself, not on skill.

And on basketball, same thing.

I was not blessed with so much basketball talent.

I had a good amount, but it was showing up every day that I was able to turn that into something.

Uh same thing when it comes to writing, same thing when it comes to uh getting my name out there to this day.

I think I'm a little bit more talented than I used to be, but it's the consistency that catches a lot of people's eyes.

And they tell me this that the fact that you're so consistent shows me that if I need to be consistent, you're the guy that I need to work with, you're the person I need to come to.

So the answer is discipline.

SPEAKER_02: Yeah.

Awesome.

Awesome.

My last question for you is for the person listening today who maybe they're in a season of life where they're wanting to do something new, they feel like they're made for more, they want to do it, but they just kind of feel stuck and uh life's not going quite the way they want.

What would you say to them?

SPEAKER_00: Well, the first thing is we got to figure out why you're stuck.

I mean, the first thing is to figure out where you're trying to get to, what you've been trying up to this point, and let's figure out why the stuckness is happening.

Anytime somebody's stuck, good news about being stuck is that you're trying to go somewhere.

Because some people are stuck and don't even they don't even acknowledge the fact they're stuck because they are they're okay being there.

But if you call yourself being stuck, that means you're trying to go somewhere, you're just not there right now, which is good.

That's a good starting point.

So now we just got to figure out where you're trying to go and where things went wrong, and then we can fix it.

So that's the good news that that we can figure that out.

The challenge that I find with a lot of people, period, Kevin, is that a lot of times their problems are misdiagnosed.

And if you misdiagnose the problem, you can do a whole lot of stuff and still be in the same spot, maybe even a worse situation.

So accurate diagnosis, or what I call operating by an accurate formula, is pivotal at that point.

SPEAKER_02: Yeah, absolutely.

Trey, for the person who wants a little bit more of you in their life, they want to learn more about what you offer, just get plugged into your world, where's the best place for us to send them?

SPEAKER_00: You should go to workonyourgameuniversity.com.

Workonyourgameuniversity.com, or you can uh reach out to us on uh I'm probably most active on Instagram.

My uh assistant mans the direct messages there, so you can reach out to us on Instagram and that my Instagram is just my name at Dre Baldwin, and I'm on every other social app as well.

So anyone you reach out to me on, we'll find it, we'll see it, and it'll get to me.

SPEAKER_02: Amazing, amazing.

Great man, thank you so much for being here today, for sharing your story.

Um, it's very inspiring, very motivating, and I appreciate you taking the time.

SPEAKER_00: Well, I appreciate you sharing your platform here, Kevin.

I thank you for the opportunity.

SPEAKER_02: Absolutely, absolutely.

And for you listening today, I hope you've enjoyed another amazing interview here on the podcast.

Dre is such an awesome guy who I honestly just feel really honored to have him on the podcast.

I hope you've enjoyed it.

Be sure if you're not already following, subscribe.

Be sure you're doing it so you never miss another episode here on Great Race in It's Right.