Advertise on podcast: Behind the Brand with Bryan Elliott

Vanessa Van Edwards studied hundreds of Shark Tank pitches and spent nearly 20 years on her new book, Conversation. Her verdict on smart founders is blunt. Here is what her playbook says about winning the room, and how she built a business where the book is the smallest piece. Vanessa Van Edwards walked into a PTA meeting at her daughter's school and saw the problem in one glance. Every parent in the room was staring at a phone. "Now my conversation is competing with their feed," she told me. "How's the weather?" loses to Instagram every time. To win, her opener has to beat the feed today and give the other person a reason to stay off the phone next time, too. Van Edwards founded Science of People, teaches at Harvard, and wrote Captivate and Cues, an instant Wall Street Journal bestseller. More than 75 million people have watched her on YouTube and in her TEDxLondon talk. Her new book, Conversation: How to Connect with Anyone and Make Every Interaction Count, came out from Portfolio on October 6. Vanessa told me that she researched the book for almost 20 years and kept holding the manuscript back. Then AI arrived, and she rushed to publish. We talk to our technology more than we talk to each other, she argues, and we have become "conversationally flabby." She calls conversation skills career insurance in the age of AI. Master conversationalists get remembered faster, she told me. When an idea, an opportunity, or an invitation comes up, their names come to mind first. Support the show

She sold her first AI startup, then started posting TikToks. Her mom asked if she had run out of money. I believe the best way to learn anything is to model the people who are doing what you want to do at a high level.  Steal a page from Sabrina’s playbook and your chances of making your first million with AI are high.  When Sabrina Ramonov started posting TikTok videos, her mom had one question. Had she run out of money? From a Silicon Valley point of view, the question made sense. Ramonov, then Sabrina Atienza, co-founded Qurious.io, an AI speech-analytics company, and sold the company to Pegasystems in January 2021. Forbes had already named her and her co-founder, George Ramonov, to its 30 Under 30 list in enterprise technology. Founders with an exit on the books rarely start filming themselves without makeup or fancy filters for strangers on the internet. "People thought I was being weird and cringe," she told me. Build the tool you need Ramonov does not love making content and she’s honest and unapologetic about it. She loves building, learning, and teaching. She is a phenomenal teacher. In my experience, being a great teacher requires equal parts patience and empathy. The “soft skills.” But these skills are hardly soft anymore as self-awareness, honesty, vulnerability and relatability are the new currency. Content is the tax she pays to reach millions of people. So she built software to cut the tax. "I built it for myself because I'm really lazy with content creation," she said. The tool is Blotato. On a typical Saturday, she batches 14 to 20 TikTok videos. Blotato works with AI agents, like ChatGPT and Claude, to automatically schedule social media posts across Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, Threads, X, Bluesky, and Substack. When a viewer comments a keyword, Blotato sends the prompts or resource they asked for via DM automation. The Starter plan costs $29 a month for 20 social accounts. She priced Blotato for the solo business owner "in the grind trying to make it work." Support the show

James Dumoulin built one of the biggest interview brands on the internet by walking up to strangers and asking how much money they make. He co-founded School of Hard Knocks in 2021 with his brother Jack and friend Joshua Smith. The early channel gave business advice and stalled around 25,000 followers. So James flipped the format. He started cold-approaching millionaires and billionaires on the street, pointed the camera at them, and let them talk. His 2022 Mark Cuban interview changed everything. Today School of Hard Knocks reaches more than 17 million followers and over 4 billion views across TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube. The clips run under five minutes. The business behind them runs on four engines: ad revenue, brand partnerships, high-ticket consulting, and School of Mentors, a paid community of nearly 6,000 entrepreneurs. In August 2025, James reported his biggest month yet, with 700,000 dollars in revenue and 400,000 in profit. At 23, he became a millionaire and put his first major check into a 200-unit apartment complex in Texas. In this conversation, we cover the pivot, the real hit rate on cold approaches, the money behind the views, and what hundreds of interviews with the wealthy taught him about building wealth of his own. Follow James and School of Hard Knocks: TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@theschoolofhardknocks Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/realjamesdumoulin/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@theschoolofhardknocks Support the show

Brendan Kane built a social media following of one million people in 30 days. Not with a big budget. Not with a team of 40 like Gary Vaynerchuk. Just relentless testing and a framework most people overlook entirely. Kane is the founder and CEO of HookPoint and the author of three books: "1 Million Followers," "Hook Point: How to Stand Out in a Three Second World," and "The Guide to Going Viral." He has spent over 20 years decoding what makes content break through on social media, and his findings might surprise you. In this episode, we dig into why storytelling is the only metric that matters, how formats rooted in 1920s entertainment still dominate today's feeds, and why 99% of creators are focused on the wrong things. Kane explains the science behind the three-second hook, what the algorithm is actually looking for, and how a creator with 10 followers can outperform one with 10 million. We also get into the costly mistakes brands and entrepreneurs make when trying to grow on social, why copying what works for someone else usually fails, and how to find the format that fits your personality and goals before you create a single piece of content. If you are trying to build a personal brand, grow an audience, or figure out why your content keeps falling flat, this one is for you. Brendan Kane | HookPoint.com Support the show

Robert Greene has sold over twenty million copies of The 48 Laws of Power. His books are favorites of rapper 50 Cent and millions of people trying to get a grip on the dynamics of power. They've also been banned in prisons. He doesn't lose sleep over any of it. In this episode, Greene takes me through the winding road that led to his first bestseller: 60-plus jobs, years living across Europe, a brutal rejection from a magazine editor, a stint in Hollywood watching power moves play out up close, and finally, a sunny afternoon in Venice where he improvised the pitch of his life to a book producer he'd just met. Greene talks about why making yourself indispensable is the most important of his 48 laws, and what that actually looks like in practice. Don't make people like you. Make them need you. Spread your roots across a company, build a skill set nobody else has, and become the person who's too costly to lose. He also gets into how he's handled critics throughout his career, the difference between knowing your life's task and being a con artist, and why every bad boss, dead-end job, and rejected manuscript ultimately ended up in his books. His newest book at the time of this recording was The Daily Laws. Nothing in his career, it turns out, was wasted. Support the show

Most executives treat sleep as a variable. Something to compress when things get busy. Something to fix later. That’s the ROI brain talking: Sleep is overhead, not output. The science disagrees. One in three people globally struggle with sleep, and the effects are not limited to grogginess. Poor sleep is linked to cognitive decline, impaired decision making, elevated anxiety, weakened immunity, and early onset dementia. If you aren’t sleeping well, you aren’t operating well. Full stop. This is the market that Somnee is building into. The company was founded by four UC Berkeley neuroscientists, including Matt Walker, arguably the world’s leading expert on sleep science. Its product is a headband, worn for 15 minutes before bed, which reads your brainwave activity through clinical-grade EEG sensors on your frontal cortex, then uses neurostimulation to recalibrate your brain toward sleep-ready states. Tim Rosa, Somnee’s CEO, describes it simply: If stress has your brain running at the equivalent of 220 beats per minute, the device reads that and brings it back to 90. It’s not a sleeping pill. It’s not a sleep tracker. It is the first consumer device that reads your brain and rewrites it. “Sleep is foundational to overall health,” Rosa told me. “Not getting enough of it creates a cascade of problems. And you’re starting to see more research connecting poor sleep quality to cognitive decline as you age.” The NBA invested in Somnee and ran a research pilot. The results: 31 additional minutes of sleep per night across the cohort. Time to fall asleep dropped from 24 minutes to eight minutes. The NFL Players Association invited Somnee to pitch during Super Bowl week. They won. Conversations are now active with the players union covering roughly 2,400 active players and more than 14,000 retired ones. Elite athletes are the early adopters here because they understand that recovery is performance. But Rosa makes clear the product’s reach goes well beyond sports: “Whether you’re an executive, middle management, or showing up to work on time consistently, sleep affects everything.” Support the show

Life Advice That Doesn't Suck  aka "The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck" flips the self-help script. Instead of telling you to think positive and chase happiness, Mark Manson argues that life is full of problems and always will be. The goal isn't to avoid struggle. It's to pick the struggles worth having. What you choose to care about defines who you are. Manson builds his case around a simple idea: you have a limited amount of attention, and most of us waste it on things that don't matter. Social approval, comfort, status. He pushes you to get honest about your values, because bad values produce bad problems. Choose better values, and your problems become more meaningful. It's not a feel-good read. It's a reality check. Support the show

Perhaps one of the most aptly named individuals I’ve met, James Clear possesses a clairvoyant ability to articulate his understanding and mastery of habit formation.    His book Atomic Habits, which eclipsed the sales speed of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, has sold nearly 20 million copies and is one of the top books recommended by high performers.  However, he didn’t set out to write bestsellers. James’s journey from basement projects to a multi-million subscriber list is a testament to the power of resilience and adaptability. He turned early setbacks into a strategic advantage, proving that sometimes, the best plan is the one you never intended to follow. Building a brand is like building a new habit. Despite aiming for consistency, Clear emphasizes that success in habit formation isn’t about rigid adherence but rather the ability to adjust.  Rather than fragile, unwavering discipline, Clear’s methodology is flexible enough to adapt to the relatable complexities of maintaining habits amidst life’s inevitable changes.  “The way to be consistent is actually to be adaptable,” he explains.  Your best asset could be the flexible mindset that keeps you on track even when life’s rhythms get a bit unpredictable. Rather than imploding upon routine and environmental changes, we should focus on accounting for the natural bouts of turbulence. “Reduce the scope, but stick to the schedule,” says Clear, encouraging a flexible approach, adjusting the intensity of activities rather than skipping them entirely. This mindset is critical to avoiding discouragement and self-sabotage, which can derail long-term progress." Support the show

Jocko Willink’s story reads like an adventure novel that takes us from the serene landscapes of a small New England town into Navy SEAL training, the Iraq War battlegrounds, and a multifaceted civilian life of entrepreneurship and leadership consulting. “I always wanted to be a commando of some kind as soon as I realized that you could actually get paid to carry a machine gun,” he says. Joining the Navy out of high school and going through the notoriously demanding BUD/S training, Jocko spent most of the next two decades on active duty as a SEAL, platoon commander, and then a task unit commander in his final deployment. Jocko took on the role of the officer in charge of all of the advanced training for the West Coast SEAL teams. His discipline and extreme personal ownership defined him not just as a soldier but as a leader among leaders.  Things are about to get real as I’m hunkered down in a small, dark bunker-style room blacked out with soundproofed walls. There’s a spotlight overhead, like a scene from a movie when someone is being interrogated. I’m sitting at a table filled with an assortment of large machetes and hunting knives.  This is Jocko’s San Diego podcast studio nestled in Victory MMA and Fitness. We talked in depth about his origin story and keen ability to spot, start, and invest in great business opportunities. Support the show

Seth told me, "It doesn’t matter how fast you’re going if you’re headed in the wrong direction." He's right.  Here’s my attempt to create a hierarchy for this idea: 1. Strategy = This is your approach, given all the factors, systems, games, players, and environments. It’s about who, how, and why. 2. Objectives = To-do items or steps on the path to help you achieve the goal. It’s about how you’re going to get there. 3. Tactics = The actions or individual steps for accomplishing the objectives. It’s about what you’re going to do. “A goal might be part of strategy, but strategy is not a goal,” Seth explains. “Strategy is a goal along with a sketch that becomes a plan.”  Unlike a rigid plan, the strategy must allow for flexibility. It should act more like a compass than a fixed map, providing a directionally correct route to success rather than insisting on a singular path.  Support the show

Do you ever stare at a beautiful product and wonder what stories are hidden behind its journey? The culinary poetry of the HexClad brand products begins with a hypnotizing hexagonal pattern with an intricate layer that looks like a futuristic industrial honeycomb. The brand’s hallmark design isn’t just for style points but is the result of countless refinements, merging non-stick convenience with the resilience of stainless steel. How the AI Bubble Ate Y Combinator | Inc. Explains The cool, polished handle reassures with its promise of quality craftsmanship. Lifting the pan, the perfectly balanced weight is designed for capable culinary precision from the likes of anyone with a basic desire to cook, all the way up to chefs with Michelin stars. Daniel Winer designed the pan to cook the perfect steak, pasta or whatever dish today, tomorrow, and decades from now- and he stands by it with a lifetime guarantee.  Support the show

The Red Hot Chili Peppers’s Chad Smith is betting that music education is key to preserving the creative thinkers businesses need most... In 2006, Sir Ken Robinson stood on a TED stage and asked a simple question: Do schools kill creativity? 76 million people have watched that talk. It’s still the most-viewed TED Talk in history. It was my honor to sit down with Sir Ken in 2014 and talk about this subject at length, and it’s still one of my most memorable interviews.  Robinson’s argument was clean. Creativity belongs in education the same way literacy, math, and science do. Instead, we rank it last. We fund it last. And when budgets get tight, we cut it first. That was nearly 20 years ago. Not much has changed. Except Chad Smith is doing something about it. The Chad Smith Foundation launched in 2025 around three pillars: Inspiration, Access, and Support. This is followed by support via instruments, teachers, and places to play. The After-School Music Program, known as AMP, launched in Milwaukee in March 2026; Smith chose Milwaukee deliberately because his brother, Brad, and nephew, Lewis, who serves as executive director, are based there. It’s a pilot, intentional and methodical, built to figure out what actually works before scaling anywhere else. For more information, visit chadsmithfoundation.org Support the show

Alex Hormozi built a portfolio of companies worth over $200 million before he turned 35. No outside funding. No famous co-founder. No viral moment that handed him an audience. He did it by studying the math of business more seriously than almost anyone in his generation, then teaching everything he learned in public. That last part is what separates him from most founders. He gave away the playbook. The question worth asking is whether Hormozi is the greatest business educator of his era, or something bigger. His books have sold millions of copies. His content reaches tens of millions of people. But the real measure is what his audience does with it. Entrepreneurs are closing deals, pricing their offers, and scaling their teams using frameworks Hormozi posted for free on the internet. That kind of impact is hard to argue with. This episode, we find out what drives the man behind the movement and whether the GOAT conversation is even worth having. Support the show

Nobody warns you about the first time… One morning you wake up, look in the mirror, and your face has started doing something on its own. You have hair! It starts by looking like peach fuzz or dirt above your lip. But it’s not a problem and you’re proud it’s there.  And usually without anyone showing you what to do or handing you a manual, you pick up a razor. Just like that—and hopefully without nicks cut or other injuries— you're in the club. This is an exceptionally well designed electric razor without sharp cutting bits. Relax, you’re safe.  What they don't tell you about being in the club:  This four inches of real estate on each side of your face is sacred ground.  Okay, maybe you’re outgoing and more people touch this area of your face than you realize. But that doesn’t mean this area is any less important. And if things go well in your life, a special person gets clearance to go there whenever you want. So the thing you press against that ground matters. The ritual matters. You're not just removing hair. You're deciding, every single morning, what kind of man shows up today. Some of us grow it out. We do this because we can. Others like it smooth like butter. Whatever the case. This is the one moment of the day that belongs to you. Men are simple. We've been told this is an insult. It's not. Simple means we know what we want. We want the game to be on.  The face, chest, pits and below the belt are the places a man actually has to manage. You can cover everything else with a hoodie. Bad day? Nobody sees it. Bad decisions? Hoodie covers the mustard on your shirt. But the face? The face is always on camera. It’s the money maker, bro.  Let’s get it.  Please support our sponsors! This episode is brought to you by Magic Mind. I talk to some of the sharpest founders and operators in the world on this show. And one thing I hear constantly is that the biggest challenge isn't having good ideas. It's having the mental stamina to execute them at a high level, day after day. That's exactly what Magic Mind is built for.  It's a 2-ounce daily shot with 12 clinically-backed ingredients, things like: Lion's Mane, and Cognizin® support memory, mental clarity, and neuroplasticity for sharper cognitive performance.Ceremonial-Grade Matcha, Rhodiola Rosea, Cordyceps, and Vitamin B Complex deliver sustained energy and mental stamina without jitters or crashes.L-Theanine, Ashwagandha, Turmeric, plus Vitamins C and D promote calm, balance your stress response, and support brain health.All designed to give you sharper focus, sustained energy, and a calmer stress response throughout your day. No jitters. No crash. Just steady, clean mental performance. I drink it in the morning before I sit down to work and lately about an hour before a tennis match. Two ounces, one shot, and I'm locked in. If you want to feel that for yourself, go to magicmind.com and subscribe. Right now, new subscribers get 50% off their first order. That's magicmind.com.  Check it out. Support the show

In 2015 Todd Meleney, a young inexperienced newcomer, helped build Nobull from a three-person startup to $250 million in annual revenue. Then just 18 months ago he walked away to do it again, from scratch, in one of the most competitive markets on the planet. The result is While on Earth, a performance wellness footwear and apparel brand he launched in fall 2024 out of Providence, Rhode Island. Less than two years in, the brand is in hyper growth mode, operating primarily direct-to-consumer, with a product line expanding in 2026. Meleney also has three big-name pro athlete co-founders to help design, develop and legitimize the brand, including arguably the best player in the NFL who gave up a multi-million dollar deal with Nike to join them. Meleney is a visionary entrepreneur who believes time is our most valuable currency, and he’s passionate about helping people reach their full potential through performance and wellness. Before launching while on earth™, Todd was the award-winning CMO and first employee at NOBULL, where he oversaw marketing, content, and revenue from pre-launch to $200M+ in annual sales. He’s known for building a cult following and orchestrating some of the largest and most highly anticipated product launches in the athletic space. In this episode, Todd talks about his philosophy behind while on earth and how he’s scaling the brand as an influential leader in athletic performance wear and wellness; lessons from growing NOBULL from the ground up and building an engaged community; collaborating with elite athletes like Christian McCaffrey and launching authentic brand partnerships that actually move the needle; his insights on marketing, product launches, and entrepreneurship in the performance wellness space. Support the show