Show Transcript

0:00:01 - (Kevin Lowe): Have you ever had that situation in life where you thought you knew where you were going because, well, you had a goal in mind and you were excited to get there. And yet, somewhere along the way, life started veering you off in a different direction. You didn't even realize it until you ended up where you did. And quite honestly, where you ended up was even greater than what you had originally thought.

0:00:26 - (Kevin Lowe): 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.

0:01:02 - (Kevin Lowe): 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 Gracelet inspiration. I am your host, Kevin Lowe. 20 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.

0:01:51 - (Kevin Lowe): 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, we'll 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.

0:02:30 - (Kevin Lowe): I want you to text the word discover to 55 four. Again, text the word discover to 5544, where I can get you more information into how I can help you to once and for all discover your purpose.

0:02:51 - (Dre Baldwin): 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 until many years into my life when I was in my almost mid teens, so it was always around.

0:03:16 - (Kevin Lowe): Okay, awesome. Now, what about basketball ended up. I mean, you said you didn't really start it till 14. What was it about basketball that you liked better than the other ones?

0:03:27 - (Dre Baldwin): Well, I had tried a bunch of other sports. I had dabbled a little bit, went to my parents, put me in, like, a little tennis camp. So I played tennis a little bit. Then there was football, which I never seriously played. I never got the equipment, so I never really played football. And then baseball, I played for a couple of years, but I wasn't really that good at it. My ceiling was probably just 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.

0:04:06 - (Dre Baldwin): 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 going to 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 wandering over to the basketball court, and I ended up staying there.

0:04:28 - (Dre Baldwin): 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 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 learned the game. I just picked things up by looking at other people and then just doing random stuff by myself. That's pretty much how I developed my skill. It.

0:05:00 - (Kevin Lowe): Yeah, that's awesome. You know what? I never even thought of it in that aspect. But you are so true in the fact of it is the one sport that you could actually really practice by yourself. And that's pretty powerful, right?

0:05:14 - (Dre Baldwin): I'm trying to think as I'm thinking about other sports. I mean, you could kind of practice tennis a little bit, but nobody's hitting the ball back to you, so you can practice hitting it, but you can practice against the wall.

0:05:24 - (Kevin Lowe): Exactly.

0:05:25 - (Dre Baldwin): Basketball, you can pretty much practice the most important aspects of the game on your own.

0:05:31 - (Kevin Lowe): Yeah, absolutely. Awesome. Now, where did you grow up?

0:05:34 - (Dre Baldwin): Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

0:05:36 - (Kevin Lowe): Okay, awesome. Now, what was life kind of growing up for you? What was your family dynamic and stuff? Did you have family members also into sports, basketball, anything like that?

0:05:46 - (Dre Baldwin): Both parents at home? I have one sister and my mother is not really a sports person. My dad was into sports as a fan, as a spectator, but he wasn't really a player. And probably 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 6ft four inches tall. My dad's only like five eight. So basketball was never his thing. I mean, he liked it as a fan, as I said, and he liked football as a fan. But if he had to pick a sport, it'd 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, no, my sister's not an athlete. And as I just told you, my parents are not athletes. 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 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.

0:06:44 - (Kevin Lowe): Yeah. Okay, cool. So you were just the one and the only, the sports guy who's tall and ready to dunk a ball. I love it.

0:06:54 - (Dre Baldwin): It took me a couple of years.

0:06:55 - (Kevin Lowe): To dunk the ball, but, yeah, absolutely. Now. So you said you were 14 when you started playing. So was that like middle school, high school type age?

0:07:05 - (Dre Baldwin): Just about the start of high school, yeah.

0:07:07 - (Kevin Lowe): Okay, perfect. So did you play for your high school team?

0:07:11 - (Dre Baldwin): 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 jv team team, and then there's the varsity team. So in our school, there was no freshmen 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, 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.

0:07:44 - (Kevin Lowe): So you didn't play for the team till your senior year of high school. So after high school, then, did you still have intentions of pursuing basketball?

0:07:55 - (Dre Baldwin): Oh, absolutely, because at that point, I'd barely been playing and I'd already tried a bunch of other sports. So I 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 a 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, which 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.

0:08:40 - (Dre Baldwin): But I knew that if I kept playing, I will 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 introduced him to basketball, and he's old enough to walk. 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.

0:09:02 - (Dre Baldwin): 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.

0:09:22 - (Kevin Lowe): That was absolutely. No, that's amazing. So when you graduated high school and you went to college, what happened then, as far as your basketball?

0:09:34 - (Dre Baldwin): Well, I. I knew I was going to college one way or another. I was going just on the strength of. 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.

0:10:02 - (Dre Baldwin): And I went to a pretty small school, which is now division three college 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 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 soon as I got there, even though there were other players there who have been playing since they were kids. But again, there's 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, 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.

0:10:44 - (Dre Baldwin): It's not like they were looking for basketball, then college. They were looking for college, then basketball, if that makes sense. So for me, I was the most talented player there, and that helped build up my confidence even more once I got to Penn State Abington, 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 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 going to keep getting better, which at that point was still happening.

0:11:24 - (Kevin Lowe): 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?

0:11:39 - (Dre Baldwin): I decided when I was 16 I was going to try to go pro. 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 a hierarchy, what's the number one thing was, it was make it as a basketball player and play pro. Now, again, there are, worldwide, you got about 4000 jobs for an american born male to play professional basketball. 4000 sounds like a lot. That's not a lot. There are 8 billion people on the planet. Half of them are males. And a lot of us play basketball. That's not a lot of jobs.

0:12:19 - (Dre Baldwin): 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. Again, this is. It's not really that groundbreaking. And 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 least play overseas. You hear it every day from every player. So I wasn't the only person with this.

0:12:51 - (Kevin Lowe): So did you end up, did you go all four years to college?

0:12:56 - (Dre Baldwin): Yes, I did. Graduated from Penn State with a degree in business, and I transferred after my freshman year to Penn State Altoona, which was a step up, actually, because at the time, Penn State Abington, 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 three level. So it was actually, I got recruited to go there because I randomly got approached by the coach at Penn State Altoona while at 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 look like 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 that random up 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 kind of that discipline of showing up every day, do the work, lets you 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 Penn State altoona, and I finished out my college career at the campus.

0:14:04 - (Kevin Lowe): Okay, that's awesome. Now, what happened after college with your basketball?

0:14:12 - (Dre Baldwin): Well, initially, nothing happened. So 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, 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 ball. So it's a very narrow strainer, 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.

0:14:43 - (Dre Baldwin): 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 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.

0:15:06 - (Dre Baldwin): So I got out of school, and my thing was basketball. I had no job offers, so I guess college had failed me in a tongue in cheek type of way. So I get out of college, nobody's calling me to play basketball. I just get a regular job. I go work at foot locker as an assistant, 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, 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 summer of 2005, I graduated college in four. 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?

0:15:49 - (Kevin Lowe): I'm not, no.

0:15:50 - (Dre Baldwin): Okay. So an exposure camp is. You have heard of a job fair?

0:15:53 - (Kevin Lowe): Yes.

0:15:54 - (Dre Baldwin): Right. 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 of 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.

0:16:22 - (Dre Baldwin): So this is a destination type of event that everybody in the basketball world knows about these, and you circle them on your calendar, because 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 hours drive.

0:16:48 - (Dre Baldwin): And we hopped out the car. 09:00 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. 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, case. And then we got right back in the car and went right back to Philadelphia. 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, but played pretty well at that event.

0:17:25 - (Dre Baldwin): And then I had to be back at work on Monday morning. So 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 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.

0:17:59 - (Dre Baldwin): 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 three players who are not pro prospects.

0:18:25 - (Dre Baldwin): Now, I had played against some pro guys and done well. So now I had some solid proof. So I start calling agents. I called about 60 basketball agents who I could find phone numbers for on Google. I got in touch with about 20. Of the 20 who I got in touch with, they all said, okay, let me see what you got. Show me what you have. So I sent them the link to my scouting report, which was a third party validated source saying that this guy, Dre Baldwin, he's pro level.

0:18:49 - (Dre Baldwin): 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?

0:19:00 - (Kevin Lowe): Yes, I do.

0:19:02 - (Dre Baldwin): So the VHS. So those of you who are under the age of 30 listening 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. You 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.

0:19:26 - (Dre Baldwin): 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, see what you have. 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 countess, Lithuania. So that's how I got started playing professional basketball.

0:19:46 - (Kevin Lowe): Wow, that is some cool stuff. You know what? Right off the bat, even at this point in your story, it's quite evident that you are somebody who is kind of driven. Like, if you have this goal, you're going to make it happen. And I think that's pretty.

0:20:08 - (Dre Baldwin): Oh, thank you.

0:20:09 - (Kevin Lowe): Yeah, absolutely. So what happened? Did you go, like, NBA pro?

0:20:15 - (Dre Baldwin): No, this is overseas. So 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 say overseas. I played in a lot of different countries.

0:20:44 - (Dre Baldwin): So each year I was on a different team and in a different country. I never played in the same country twice. The exception was I was in Mexico, two different since, but never played for the same team twice, and for the most part, didn't play in the same country. Just, we just call it, and in the basketball world, we call it overseas, meaning you're playing somewhere other than the United States and an NBA. That's what it means.

0:21:04 - (Dre Baldwin): So that's how the rest of my career went for the next nine.

0:21:08 - (Kevin Lowe): Wow. 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.

0:21:16 - (Dre Baldwin): Yes. And places that I otherwise, had it not been for basketball, many of the places that I ended up, I never would have gone. I wouldn't have went there on vacation. Right. I only went there because it was basketball involved. So. Absolutely.

0:21:29 - (Kevin Lowe): Yeah. 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? Are there anything different about it?

0:21:42 - (Dre Baldwin): Hell, yeah. We can do a whole episode just on that. There's a lot of things different between NBA basketball and overseas basketball. Number one, the NBA is the biggest basketball league in the world, so they get the most attention. This is why when I'm out in the streets of Miami and somebody says, you're a basketball player. And I say, yeah. And they say, who do you play for? And they mostly default to, I must have played 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 if you're an american, it's a very niche thing to find someone who knows anything about overseas basketball.

0:22:27 - (Dre Baldwin): 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. Not that you can't make great money playing overseas, but the NBA has more money. It's just the bigger contract. 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.

0:22:56 - (Dre Baldwin): But as far as overseas basketball goes, another thing is that there's a very wide range of teams. So there are teams from, there are very high levels and there are lower levels, and there are many more levels than in the NBA. NBA basically has two levels. You have the Knicks and the Lakers. And what city are you in, Kevin?

0:23:13 - (Kevin Lowe): Yeah, I'm down in Florida.

0:23:15 - (Dre Baldwin): Okay, so I'm in Florida as well. I'm in.

0:23:17 - (Kevin Lowe): Perfect. Yeah. So I'm in.

0:23:21 - (Dre Baldwin): So in the United States, you got the Orlando Magic and the Miami Heat and the New York Knicks. And then you have the second level. In 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, say a country like Spain, there are eight or nine levels of leagues.

0:23:56 - (Dre Baldwin): So there's a lot of players running around playing in Spain and Germany, similar thing. Not every country has that many. Like when I was in Lithuania, there's basically 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 could play overseas for ten years and can be completely under the radar and not be known. So that's another difference.

0:24:27 - (Dre Baldwin): 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 countess, Lithuania. And as I said, lithuania only has two levels of leagues.

0:24:51 - (Dre Baldwin): 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 one 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.

0:25:18 - (Dre Baldwin): 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 a car. He had, like, a state of the art washer and dryer. He had just a flat with a little island in the kitchen. It was really nice. 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 and the places 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.

0:26:03 - (Kevin Lowe): Yeah. Interesting. I had no idea. Absolutely no idea. Yeah. That's incredible. So my next question is, where did YouTube enter into this whole lifeline that we've been talking about here?

0:26:21 - (Dre Baldwin): Oh, about the same time. So that VHS tape, I knew that 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 audiovisual store and asked them, is there a way that 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. It was called YouTube.

0:26:52 - (Dre Baldwin): 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?

0:27:23 - (Dre Baldwin): 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 love, right? So now they can go to the Internet to crowdsource information.

0:27:49 - (Dre Baldwin): So 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 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 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.

0:28:19 - (Dre Baldwin): It wasn't until 2009 that someone forwarded me an article that there was this woman who was also on YouTube, and she was doing makeup tutorials, and she was just sitting in the camera and put on makeup and explained 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?

0:28:50 - (Dre Baldwin): Why don't you figure out what she did and see if you could get into that partnership as well? And I said, man, that's a hell of an idea. That's a great idea. And that was right around the time that 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.

0:29:18 - (Dre Baldwin): 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.

0:29:48 - (Dre Baldwin): 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 start 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.

0:30:14 - (Kevin Lowe): That is pretty darn cool. So really, you were kind of starting on YouTube, though. I mean, literally at its beginning.

0:30:21 - (Dre Baldwin): That's right.

0:30:22 - (Kevin Lowe): Yeah. That is too cool.

0:30:24 - (Dre Baldwin): Too cool.

0:30:25 - (Kevin Lowe): Now, the content you were putting out, I know at some point you started realizing that people were interested in it more than just athletes. Talk to me about that.

0:30:38 - (Dre Baldwin): Yeah. So, continuing right where we left off there. So around 2009, another thing that happened that I 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, 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.

0:31:02 - (Dre Baldwin): So my phone's not ringing, and this is when YouTube is purchased by Google. So I said, okay, I might need to treat this as a full time business because who knows? If the basketball thing, if the phone's going to 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.

0:31:26 - (Dre Baldwin): And also started. I've always been a writer, Kevin. So I was blogging, actually, before I got on YouTube, but my blog didn't blow up my blog, I just blogged. 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 a 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.

0:32:11 - (Dre Baldwin): So I remember telling a friend of mine, actually, same friend who sent me the article about the youtuber, that this thing that I'm doing on the Internet is going to 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 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 do 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.

0:33:06 - (Dre Baldwin): 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 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 weekly motivation, where I would just talk about a mindset topic. Because I was getting so many mindset questions, I figured, why don't I just make a video about mindset and do it consistently so that they can get the point?

0:33:38 - (Dre Baldwin): 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 going tell you what I want to do. I'm going to 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.

0:33:56 - (Dre Baldwin): And audience overwhelmingly said, yes, we want the mindset piece. So I started doing that every Monday, and I would talk about things like 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 400 Mondays in a row.

0:34:24 - (Dre Baldwin): 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 I run my own business. I'm an electrician. I work in an office. 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.

0:34:54 - (Kevin Lowe): 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, right? Yeah. Amazing. Now, at this point, you said that you officially quit basketball. In what year did you say I stopped playing?

0:35:19 - (Dre Baldwin): In 2015. I wouldn't say I quit. And I just stopped playing.

0:35:22 - (Kevin Lowe): Okay, we'll rephrase that. You stopped playing. Perfect. So at that point then, did you already know what your next step was going to be?

0:35:32 - (Dre Baldwin): Oh, absolutely. So I got to go back in the story again. So, in 2002, I graduated college in 2004. So it was about halfway through college, I responded to a bulletin board posting. Again, millennials bulletin boards are these boards they put in the middle of their 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, make unlimited income in the summertime. You want to make some extra money because 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.

0:36:03 - (Dre Baldwin): 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 of 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.

0:36:37 - (Dre Baldwin): 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 1 hour were never said to me in college.

0:37:00 - (Dre Baldwin): 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 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.

0:37:27 - (Dre Baldwin): 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 Ziggler and 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 Ebit. And I went on eBay and I bought a couple of pirated copies for ninety nine cents of a couple of the books that I remember.

0:38:00 - (Dre Baldwin): And it's two specific books. One of them was rich 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.

0:38:27 - (Dre Baldwin): Anybody who's read that book knows that. And the other book I read was think and grow rich 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 want to play. And when I'm done playing, that's it.

0:39:07 - (Dre Baldwin): I'll still watch the game and talk about it. But 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.

0:39:33 - (Dre Baldwin): 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 red pill by going to those network marketing meetings and then I read Tim Ferriss's 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.

0:39:53 - (Dre Baldwin): So when I created my first product, Kevin, it was a 4.99 cent program for basketball players. One of them was for dribling and one of them was for shooting. It was like seven day programs and they were just based on videos that I'd 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 will blink when you got an email and it said, congratulations, you made a sale, $4.99 for your dribling program, whatever it was. I think my first customer bought both programs, I believe.

0:40:23 - (Dre Baldwin): And I remember I said to myself, I could do this for rest of my life because what I had just done was create 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.

0:40:51 - (Dre Baldwin): I knew a little bit about sales because 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.

0:41:11 - (Dre Baldwin): 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 that 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.

0:41:59 - (Dre Baldwin): I can replace myself as the only asset in my life. And that's exactly what I started working towards.

0:42:05 - (Kevin Lowe): Yeah, absolutely. No, that is incredible. Now, where did the kind of transition take place, though, from making money, creating content, to kind of what you're doing now?

0:42:19 - (Dre Baldwin): Well, that happened over the course of 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, who knows, $10,000 a speech, something like that. And she knew the whole game. And she basically taught me the game of thought leadership. So she taught me how you're an athlete, you have these mindset pieces. At this point, I'd already self published, probably had about five books self published, and I 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 would work 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 businesses, sales teams, marketing teams, they love athletes because the same things that you all need, showing up every day, believing in yourself, picking yourself up after you get knocked down, teamwork, leadership, discipline, commitment, filling out paperwork, this is just discipline. Part of it.

0:43:22 - (Dre Baldwin): 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 what we now call framework. Make a framework out of what you're doing. And that's how I turned work on your game into a brand new framework where I started being intentional about this thing that I 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.

0:43:58 - (Dre Baldwin): You already have some experience speaking at least 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 go in that direction. So that started with professional speaking. I had books. I was already making courses.

0:44:17 - (Dre Baldwin): 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 he responded. He sent me an email and I coached him. My first client was charging $500s, 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 selling my basketball programs on the side while all this is going on.

0:44:56 - (Dre Baldwin): Then about 2020, when 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.

0:45:15 - (Kevin Lowe): Amazing. Now, what is involved in the university?

0:45:18 - (Dre Baldwin): Well, our university is based on our four part framework, mindset, strategy, systems, and accountability. So it starts with the way that you think. That is the foundation of everything that we do here, and 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.

0:45:53 - (Kevin Lowe): Yeah, I love it. Absolutely. What's the normal kind of client that you see that you're working with?

0:46:00 - (Dre Baldwin): Man, it's a loaded question for us because we have a very wide audience.

0:46:05 - (Kevin Lowe): You do? Okay.

0:46:06 - (Dre Baldwin): Yes. 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 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 could 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 600, $700,000 a year. They are members of our university. So some people come to us for each one of those four pieces that I just told you, there are some people come to us because they want the mindset piece.

0:46:47 - (Dre Baldwin): 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 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 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.

0:47:23 - (Dre Baldwin): 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 ain't 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.

0:48:06 - (Dre Baldwin): But they're members of our university because we have this wide breadth. 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.

0:48:23 - (Kevin Lowe): 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, 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?

0:48:42 - (Dre Baldwin): Discipline. That's an easy question. Discipline is the first thing we talk about when we talk about mindset here. Working again. 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.

0:49:11 - (Dre Baldwin): And just on volume alone, I was able to build a name for myself. Not on Skittle 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. Same thing when it comes to writing, same thing when it comes to 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.

0:49:34 - (Dre Baldwin): 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 I need to work with. You're the person I need to come to. So the answer is discipline.

0:49:43 - (Kevin Lowe): Yeah. 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 life's not going quite the way they want. What would you say to them?

0:50:03 - (Dre Baldwin): The first thing is we got to figure out why you're stuck. And the first thing is 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. Because anytime somebody's stuck, good news about being stuck is that you're trying to go somewhere, because some people are stuck, and they don't even acknowledge the fact they're stuck because they're okay being there.

0:50:21 - (Dre Baldwin): 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 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 in a worse situation.

0:50:48 - (Dre Baldwin): So accurate diagnosis, or what I call operating by an accurate formula, is pivotal at that point.

0:50:54 - (Kevin Lowe): Yeah, absolutely. Dre. 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?

0:51:05 - (Dre Baldwin): You should go to work onyourgameuniversity.com. Workonyourgameuniversity.com. Or you can reach out to us on. I'm probably most active on Instagram. My assistant man's the direct messages there. So you can reach out to us on Instagram. And 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.

0:51:29 - (Kevin Lowe): Amazing. Amazing, Dre, man, thank you so much for being here today, for sharing your story. It's very inspiring, very motivating, and I appreciate you taking the time.

0:51:40 - (Dre Baldwin): Well, I appreciate you sharing your platform here, Kevin, and I thank you for the.

0:51:44 - (Kevin Lowe): 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 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 grit grace and inspiration.