1100 – A Life Well Lived: Tom talks My Life In Bullets

SUMMARY BY CHATGPT

🧠 Executive Summary
Tom Antion shares his life story as a series of key moments (“bullets”), illustrating how persistence, continuous learning, and entrepreneurship allowed him to build wealth and independence. His central message: avoid the traditional “commute life” and create income from skills and digital business.
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📌 Key Life Phases & Lessons
1. Early Life & Entrepreneurial Roots
• Born mid-1950s, youngest of six boys.
• Overweight as a child but developed discipline through sports (football, wrestling).
• Started entrepreneurial activities early:
o Selling matchbook ads at age 10
o Scrap metal collection
o Buying/selling cars at 15
• Lesson: Entrepreneurial mindset can start very young; initiative matters more than circumstances.
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2. College & First Major Success (1970s)
• Attended West Virginia University on a football scholarship.
• While still in college:
o Bought multiple apartment buildings
o Acquired a hotel using creative financing (after 50 loan rejections)
• Earned significant income and profit from real estate.
Key Lesson:
👉 Persistence + “give before you get” creates opportunities others never see.
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3. Early Career & Failure (1980s)
• Opened and scaled a nightclub into one of the largest in the state.
• Faced:
o Violence (gunfights, knife fights)
o Total collapse when drinking age changed (18 → 21)
• Lost ~$400,000 but:
o Refused bankruptcy
o Paid all debts to protect reputation
Key Lesson:
👉 Your reputation is more valuable than money.
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4. Rock Bottom → Reinvention
• Moved to Florida, suffered Achilles tendon injury
• Lived extremely poor (mattress, no income, debt)
• Created Prank Masters (custom practical joke business)
Breakthrough:
• Media coverage (Washington Times → AP → global exposure)
• Scaled to:
o 4,000+ jobs
o 35 employees
Key Lesson:
👉 Creative ideas + persistence can turn desperation into opportunity.
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5. Speaking & Internet Breakthrough (1990s)
• Joined National Speakers Association
• Built speaking career + products (books, tapes)
• Struggled early with the internet (1994–1996)
• Breakthrough after training from Corey Rudl
By 2000:
• Became a multi-millionaire
Key Lesson:
👉 Investing in the right mentor accelerates success dramatically.
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6. Scaling Business & Influence
• Created:
o “Butt Camp” (long-running marketing seminar)
o Mentor program
o Multiple books (including Wake ‘Em Up Business Presentations)
• Delivered ~3,000 presentations in 12 countries
Shifted from:
• Paid speaking → high-profit live events + product sales
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7. Lifestyle Design & Assets (2000s)
• Built a retreat center (bought below market value)
• Focused on:
o Mentorship
o Events
o Digital products
Also:
• Donated efforts to charity (e.g., feeding homeless children)
Key Lesson:
👉 Design your business to support your lifestyle—not the other way around.
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8. Education & Credibility (2013+)
• Founded:
o Internet Marketing Training Center (licensed school)
• Goal:
o Provide affordable, practical skills vs. expensive traditional education
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9. Podcast & Current Focus (2018–Present)
• Launched Screw the Commute podcast
• Reached 1100 episodes (rare milestone)
• Current focus:
o AI
o Digital marketing
o Mentorship
• Ongoing projects:
o Documentary: The American Entrepreneur
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💡 Core Philosophy
1. “Give Before You Get”
Helping others and learning first leads to opportunities.
2. “Don’t Quit”
Repeated failures (loans, businesses, injuries) didn’t stop progress.
3. Escape the Commute
• Traditional jobs waste time and limit income
• Build home-based digital income streams
4. Make It “Too Expensive to Work”
• Build side income until:
o It exceeds job income
o You can quit safely
5. Skills = Freedom
• Learn high-value, in-demand skills
• Especially digital marketing & online business
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🔑 Key Takeaways (Actionable)
• Start before you’re ready (like he did as a kid)
• Learn by working for free when necessary
• Seek mentors who are already successful
• Protect your reputation at all costs
• Build multiple income streams
• Transition gradually out of a job (don’t quit cold)
• Focus on digital, scalable income
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⚡ Bottom Line
Tom Antion’s story is about relentless persistence + strategic learning + unconventional thinking. His message is simple but powerful:
👉 You don’t have to spend your life commuting and working for someone else—build skills, create digital income, and take control of your time.

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Episode 1100 – My Life In Bullets
[00:00:08] Welcome to Screw the Commute, the entrepreneurial podcast dedicated to getting you out of the car and into the money with your host, lifelong entrepreneur and multi-millionaire, Tom Antion.
[00:00:24] Hey everybody, it's Tom here with episode 1100 of Screw the Commute podcast. 1100, folks. Man, that's a lot of podcasts, don't you think? Only a couple dozen podcasts in the entire world have ever reached that level. So we're real proud of this. I'm going to do something different today. I don't know whether you're going to like it or not, but I'm going to do what I call my life in bullets because a lot of people ask me every time I'm interviewed on something like wanting to know my background, how you got where you are and all this stuff. So I'm going to give you my life in bullets. Let's see. Hope you didn't miss episode 1099. That was the invisible expert. You don't want to be invisible. So we gave you a lot of strategies so you're not invisible anymore. Pick up a copy of my automation book at screwthecommute.com/automatefree. Version 3.0 is the latest one. And check out my mentor program at greatinternetmarketingtraining.com and my school at IMTCVA.org. Save yourself a couple hundred thousand bucks and get a marketable, highly in demand skill in as little as six months. And we've actually had people making money before they graduated, and it's certified to operate by SCHEV, the State Council on Higher Education in Virginia. But you don't have to be in Virginia because it's quality distance learning.
[00:01:51] Okay. This is episode 1100 My Life in Bullets. Here we go. And there should be some lessons along the way here, folks. So I was born in the mid 50s. I was the baby of six boys. My mother always wanted a girl, and I think she got me dolls when I was, you know, desperate, I. But I turned out to be a boy. My dad was an immigrant from Syria. Came over on a cattle boat. That's going to be part of the American entrepreneur documentary about his trip over here and becoming an entrepreneur and so forth. So he came from Syria in the early 1900s. My mom was a Pittsburgh native, and they eloped when she turned 18. And my dad was twice her age. And my. And what's interesting is my dad was married to my mom for 57 years. And you say, wow, that's something. Tom. Yeah, except he was married to another lady for 20 years. So he was married 77 years. And the fun part that nobody ever mentioned in the family is he had a giant tattoo on his chest of his first wife's name. Uh. Let's see. So I was a super fat kid. I'm told I weighed £140 in first grade. I was like a candidate for the blob movie, which I never got my part in, which I was promised. So. But that. But really just a total, you know, fat kid. But I was entrepreneurial. And by ten years old, I was selling advertising matchbooks and collecting scrap copper. And my dad would take it into the scrap yard for me.
[00:03:40] And then after I got my driver's license, I was selling encyclopedias. So very entrepreneurial right from the start. I bought my first used car at 15 years old before I had a learner's permit. Right? I fixed it up and sold it at a profit before I even had a learner's permit. And I grew up very fast physically. So by 12 years old, I was. So it was six years old in first grade, just a lump. By 12 years old, I was six foot, 220 pounds, and I played midget football, which the average kid was 55 to £60. Right. And so after me, weight limits were installed in midget football. So 150 I think was the weight limit after after me. But I worked out really hard and I was teased tremendously for being a fat butt. But I worked out really hard to play high school football and wrestling end up being all state in Pennsylvania football. And let's see, along along the way, at 16 years old, I started martial arts training. My physics teacher was a black belt in Shorin Ryu Karate and I started training with him. I mean, we were walking in the dead of winter and barefoot and in cold water Pennsylvania streams and, you know, all kinds of stuff. So I was starting to he was toughening me up, in other words. I ended up being fourth in the state.
[00:05:14] Pennsylvania is a hotbed in wrestling. Fourth in the state in wrestling. I was only beaten by two guys that went on to play big pro football careers. So I was fourth in the state in wrestling and then more than 40 top ten and top 20 schools offered me scholarships for football after becoming All-State. And I was also pretty good student. So student athlete Hall of Fame for the Pittsburgh chapter. And I was a straight-A student and valedictorian of my high school. However, I had a crazy mother. She's gone now. But here's the thing. I didn't drink or smoke or run around. Straight-a student scholarships. Great athlete for the time. I came home one day in my senior year of high school, and my entire bedroom was thrown out on the front lawn. All right. She, uh. I guess she was getting ready to go through that empty nest syndrome or whatever, because I'm the baby, remember? And like I said, she was crazy. According to her, my girlfriend and all my brother's girlfriends and wives were scum. Now I'm being kind by using the word scum. She had some really, really nasty things to say about all these females in our lives. But anyway, I decided not to be like her. And in 1973. I chose the top 20 school of WVU West Virginia University. You got to say West, by God, Virginia. All right. Because my parents were elderly and I needed to stay close in case they needed me.
[00:07:04] So that was 1973, and I played first team starting guard at WVU, like I said. Top 20 school at the time. During that time, I got my private pilot's license while I was in college and starting with nothing, I bought my first triplex apartment building while in college. And by the time I graduated, I owned five apartment buildings and a hotel. All right. So the apartment buildings. This was long before no money down stuff. And just a real quick sidebar here. That's a good learning point. Is that the reason I got the hotel was because I was renting, even though I had five apartment buildings, I was paying less rent than I was charging the other kids. So I rented from this guy. His name was Frank Biafra, and he would come over to work on my apartment and I'd say, hey, Frank, let me help you with that. But you teach me what you're doing. You know, putting gutters up or fixing doors or whatever. And at the end of the semester, he came over and he says, hey, Tom, I want to talk to you. And I'm thinking, uh, oh, what did I do? Right? He says, I've been renting apartments in this town for 25 years. He says, not once, ever has a kid offered to help me do anything, let alone try to learn something about it.
[00:08:32] He says, I own a hotel in about 20 minutes from here in Fairmont, West Virginia, and he says, I want you to have it. You know, he knew I had these other buildings and I was very capable. And he says, if you come up with the first mortgage, I'll hold back a second mortgage and you won't have any down payment. This is long before the no down payment craze was around, and I went to 50 lending institutions to try to get the first mortgage, and they kept shooing me away like you little punk. Okay, you got a couple apartments, but this is a hotel, and I hear my dad telling me, don't quit. Don't ever quit when you're trying to get something good. It took me 50 tries to get the first mortgage, and I 50 different lending institutions. I got the first mortgage. He held back. The second mortgage I had, I went. There was a manager at the hotel. I went down once a week to pick up the rent checks and or the, you know, the deposit checks and had a manager there and I'd make small repairs, which I learned to do because the guy, you know, my dad taught me tons of stuff and this other guy taught me stuff. And, uh. I was making $65,000 a year just on that building net. And the city ended up buying it for a couple hundred grand.
[00:09:54] And I made about half $1 million on it. Just after I graduated from college. So. So, um, that's, uh, the lesson there is give before you get. I was, you know, it was a sponge. And in today's atmosphere, you don't have to do too much to beat some of these, uh, your competitors by, you know, being gung ho and a continuous learner and people will give you breaks. See, the older people that have money are kind of sick of the young people now because they're all entitled and they don't want to do work. They don't want anything. So if you're a step above that, you can get all kinds of breaks from people, I tell you. Okay. So anyway, I graduated in 1978 with a Bachelor of Science degree in psychology, and I ran my rental properties. Basically, I would just pick up rent checks and that's all I had to do. So I would hang out at the airport and I used this, this idea again of give before you get. And I would hang out at the airport and I would work for free. I would learn from the guys, I'd listen in on the training sessions and, and I was there and they weren't paying me. And I eventually got my commercial multi-engine and instrument ratings, and I would take every kind of job flight that they had that nobody wanted like to take an airplane across country to that they sold.
[00:11:20] And I'd fly, fly it there for free, just for to build my experience levels and, and so forth. And so they made sure I got my commercial multi-engine and instrument ratings. And then they hired me. This is in the mid 70s for 30 bucks an hour, whether I was flying or sitting or waiting for people. That's kind of like a high class show for basically a freelance charter pilot. Part 135, which is a higher level charter pilot. So that was just after college. And then in 1980, I bought the Anchor Lounge, which was kind of a biker bar, a local bar, and I turned it into the second largest nightclub in the state. But, you know, those bikers didn't really appreciate my efforts that much. So that's where I was in gunfights and knife fights. And I couldn't leave. I had my whole life tied up in this place seven days a week for six years. We got four days off a year, like I think Christmas Day, New Year's Day. But that didn't count because New Year's Eve you were shot. You know, you were working so hard. And Easter, I don't know one other one I forget, but it was seven days a week for six years. And then in 1986 in West Virginia, The drinking age went from 18 to 21. I lost everything. I lost about $400,000. I refused though, to go bankrupt.
[00:12:50] I this is another lesson. I went directly to all the creditors before I was delinquent with them. You know, I lost everything. I didn't have the money to pay him. So I went to them all before I got delinquent. Told him what happened. They all knew me. They knew I wasn't a drunk. And drinking up all the the profits. And, you know, they could see the drinking age changed and as a college town. And so it was a giant, you know, second biggest nightclub in the whole state. And it just couldn't make it. So I went to them, every one of them. I said, I will not go bankrupt if you give me time, I'll pay you off. And I did. I paid everybody off. If I went back to that town, if anybody still living that remembers that, they'd say, that's the guy that didn't screw us. Okay, so that's your reputation. Okay then. So that was 1986, and then I went down to Florida and playing racquetball after being pretty sedentary, just working the bar for all those years. And I tore my Achilles tendon with no health insurance. And then I ended up living on a mattress in a vacant building for two years until I could walk again. I was, um, a friend of mine had a house he was remodeling and let me live. I was a mattress on the floor, a black and white TV.
[00:14:13] I had this giant rubber thing that I had to put over if I crawled into the shower. So the cast didn't get wet and I couldn't walk right for about three years. But during that time, I was trying to stay upbeat. I was living off credit cards, totally broke and, um, watching Candid Camera on TV. And that's when I got the idea for the practical joke company called Prank Masters that I invented out of thin air. This was long before Punk'd and all this stuff that's going on now. But Candid Camera was, of course, the old standby, but you'd have to get caught by the camera. So I said, well, yeah, that's pretty tough. You have to live in California. You get caught by the camera to have anything to do with this. So I said, I'm going to create this company and do custom design, practical jokes for people. But I knew I needed a big city for this. So I moved to Washington, D.C. after I could just barely walk, and I opened Prank Masters and we custom designed practical jokes, and I that was my federally registered trademark Prank Masters incorporated. And basically I starved to death for two years while running the company, taking every kind of job I could get and gorilla grams and clowns and and pulling custom practical jokes and and so forth. But then in 1990, roughly, I can't remember the exact dates.
[00:15:47] The Washington Times did a feature article on me and then the Washington Post picked it up, and then the Associated Press picked it up. It was the story went to 1200, uh, major networks around the world and including the Tokyo Today network and I mean, Australia, Canadian broadcasting all over the world. And then it went crazy. We ended up doing 4000 jobs in and around Washington, DC. I had 35 people working for me, and I wrote custom humor every day, and I did over a thousand of the jobs myself, and most of them were comical or, you know, after the joke was up, then I'd do some kind of routine for them. And. And I wrote custom humor for all the other characters too. So I pretty much was a professional level comedian at that point. But I was thinking, you know, there must be something bigger out there, a TV show or something or a movie. But it turns out that I, um, I in 1991, I thought, okay, I've got tons of business experience and I'm damn funny because of all this humor I've been writing. And so I joined the National Speakers Association. Dottie Walters was the one of the female speakers at that back in the day. That was like, there was hardly any at the time. And she wrote a book called Speak and Grow Rich. The way I ran into her was just bizarre, and I told it on other things.
[00:17:21] But anyway, got a consultation with her and started my professional speaking career. But here's the thing. I just didn't instantly become a top pro speaker, right? So I might have been doing guerrilla grams and various pranks. And then I'd get a job speaking to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission or the Air Force. I did the 50th anniversary of the US Air Force. And then I probably went home and did a guerrilla gram and balloon delivery or pulled a joke on somebody. So, so anyway, it wasn't an instantaneous top pro speaker thing, but and then I was creating products, books and tapes and CDs and all that stuff. But in 1994, the commercial internet came around, and at the time it was hard enough to sell my stuff across the street, let alone around the world. So I thought, I'm going to figure this out. And so from 1994 to 1996, I just I was doing my speaking around the world, 12 countries and, you know, a couple thousand speeches, but I wasn't making money online at this point. In fact, just the way it was in those days, it took a year for me to get the picture of my wake em up business Presentations book on my website. It was all HTML and nobody knew what was going on. And you would just think of this. You would take three hours to download a 32nd video that would play about one inch big on your website.
[00:18:57] That's the way it was in those days. But anyway, I kept fighting and fighting and fighting just like my dad taught me. Don't quit, don't quit. But then in 1996, I got training from Corey Rudl. Corey Rudl was the 30 some year old grandfather of internet marketing for small business, and it was $1,230 for 30 minutes to talk to him. He was making $5 million a year from his base, from his apartment. All right. Selling books. And he was selling Ferrari emblems and but he really knew his stuff. And so I took consultation, bought his course, and then I immediately started making money. And then I was making money. So much money, people started noticing. That's what happens when you try when you do something really good, people will notice and then they'll ask you to teach them. And that's when I started. Butt camp, not boot camp, butt camp. The reason I did is I had this comic background, and everybody's begging me to have a boot camp to teach them how to sell online. And I said, oh man, everybody has boot camps. Geez. You know, I'm sitting there thinking, I'm sitting on my rear end making all this money. I thought, I'll call it. But camp I had caught on, and it's the longest running ever internet and digital marketing seminar. There was other guys that started around the same time and even before me, but they've long gone, you know? And I'm still here.
[00:20:34] So that's butt camp. And then in 1997, I also wrote Wake em Up business presentations. And that was it turned out to be one of the classics of the industry. All the things I knew about being funny and keeping people's attention. And it's still to this day, cells. I haven't reprinted it. I just sell the digital version and it's been selling since 1997, what we call evergreen stuff. Now there is some stuff in there with overhead projectors and things, but I mean, this book, if you did a 10th of what's in here, you would and you were a speaker, you would just jump up out of sight being a good speaker. So anyway, I ended up doing about 3000 presentations in 12 countries. And then, uh, we'll get into that in a minute. Then around 1998, I started my mentor program. It was maybe a couple hundred dollars a month at the time, and I was the only one at my level that would talk to somebody one on one, and I didn't have any staff. I just had one part time lady helping me on the side. And so I would teach, you know, internet marketing to people. And then around that time, I wrote click. The ultimate Guide to electronic Marketing that sold for years in like four different editions, a thousand page e-book with all the stuff I knew about marketing.
[00:22:00] And then by the year 2000, only four years after I got good training from Corey Rudl, I hit multi millionaire status, which I enjoy today. And I'm kind of a fanatic. I could have quit back then and I, I just love this, you know, small business stuff. And that's why I'm still here. Then in 2002, I had this idea like, oh, I guess I had the idea around 2001 to have a great big retreat center where people could come in for an immersion weekend as part of this year long mentor program. And again, I was up in D.C., you know, still living in Washington, D.C., and, and I couldn't find any place that would do what I wanted to do. You know, I needed space because I wanted a pool and I wanted a tennis court, and I wanted a lot of space for people. And I ended up doing a fundraiser for the Virginia Speakers Association. And usually they this is kind of crazy. They, they usually, well, I usually demand that I stay in a hotel if I'm speaking because I don't want any. There was no Uber in those days, and I don't want any taxi problems or breakdowns because I'm the main event. I got to be there. But they said, you know, we'd like to save some money. Would you say at one of our members houses? And usually I say no.
[00:23:28] I said yes. I don't know why that's the house I'm sitting in right now. And I was telling, you know, it had all the stuff already. It had the pool and the tennis court and there's a couple acres and it was, you know, gigantic place. And, you know, I told the owner I had been looking like a place for a place like this for up in D.C. and I see him look at his wife and he's like, oh, we got a hot one here. So he was a retired cosmetic surgeon and wanted to retire, or he wanted to retire. And so he sold it to me for $300,000 under appraisal. Right. And then here's another thing about don't quit. I said, oh, I have this no money down deal that I had on the hotel. I'm going to get a no money down deal on this house and everybody, everybody on earth, mortgage brokers say there's no way on earth you're going to get a no money down deal. Forget it. Doesn't matter who you are. Forget that. Did I get one? Yes. Did I take it? No. I put 5% down because it was, uh. It was a better deal, you know, with interest wise. And then I paid it off way early, and then it's gone up, like, double the values. So anyway, that was in 2002. I opened the great Internet Marketing retreat center, where people actually stayed in the house with me and everybody, all the other gurus, you're crazy letting people in your house, blah, blah, blah, you know? But I carry a gun.
[00:25:01] I said, I'm not worried. You know, I've already been the bikers trying to kill me. How bad could it be? You know, so. So I ran this till right before Covid. And then, uh, since Covid hit, we just decided to do a big remodel because, you know, we didn't don't want people, you know, people didn't want to come to the, you know, be in a house with somebody. And so we're still doing the remodel even since COVID's done. Okay, so then I forget around what year, but I quit paid speaking and concentrated on public events. When I quit paid speaking, I was 20,000 for a speech. But the thing is, is in public events with back of the room sales, you could do, you know, ten times that. I did five times that minimum. Every time I spoke, I was headlining the mega seminars for the Chicken Soup People and then author 101 for many years, and other public seminars where I could sell at the back of the room. And I also, I raised a lot of money for animal rescue and I the best thing I ever did is I fed 288 homeless kids for a year just by auctioning myself off in about five minutes.
[00:26:13] I made that happen by auctioning off myself to help people with internet stuff. So I ran my mentor program. I sold products and services. I split off to protection dogs since all the bad stuff I was through in the nightclub, I came out with brutal self-defense. I'm a tennis nut. I did fatso tennis selling internet and digital marketing and public speaking stuff. So that's what I've been doing all these years. And then in around 2007, I spoke the lady that got me into the professional speaking industry, Dottie Walters. I was known as her right Coast son because anytime she'd be on the East Coast, I would go and help her for free. Again, this theme of given before you get and help her with her speak and grow rich seminars for free. Just because every time I was there, I learned something new. She was not doing a dog and pony show, so I was asked. They all knew that she just loved me. So they asked me to come out and speak at her memorial in California. And in the audience was a lady named Terri Marie. She was a Hollywood documentary producer, 35 documentaries under her belt. And I met her for maybe two minutes. Hello. How are you? Nice to meet you. Isn't this a beautiful event? You know nothing. Basically. And around 2008, she approached me about doing a documentary. She said you never had a job.
[00:27:52] You've done all these entrepreneurial things. I want to do a documentary called The American Entrepreneur. And I said, I thought you had to be dead to have a documentary about you. She said, no, you don't. So she followed me around for several years, interviewing or watching me and interviewing people that came to my events and knew me and that I had helped. And then she had a whole string of setbacks. Her her husband died. Her mother, her sister, I mean, 3 or 4 people died in a matter of a couple of years. And she was just zonked. So it kind of kind of went dormant. And they had told me, anyway, don't quit your day job over this, right? But anyway, it's resurged. So it's supposed to come out in a couple of months, but I've heard kind of heard that before. So I'm kind of getting ready to help do the launch on it. And I took over some of the work because she's just like I said, was had all these bad things happen to her. So, so I took over and I'm going to do the, the premiere and the launch, but we got to figure out where it's going to happen and all that stuff. So, then so that's supposed to come out pretty soon and we'd love to have you on the launch team. So if you want to go to screwthecommute.com/launchteam, then if you watched the movie when it comes out and you know, maybe, you know, tell some people on social media or email.
[00:29:22] Uh, we'd really appreciate it. Okay, so then around 2013, you know, I was seeing that, you know, I could, I could hardly, you know, with one on one with everybody, it was hard to handle at some times as many as 60 mentor students. I mean, just I was like day and night doing consultations and my whole now I had a team at least that to do some of the stuff, but it was mostly me. But I was also seeing all these rip offs, people just stealing money from people like 50, 100,000 bucks at a time. And so I said, you know what? I got to do something to set myself apart. I'm just another internet marketer to some new person that's never heard of me. So that's when I took three years to get the license to open my school IMTCVA.org, it's the Internet Marketing Training Center of Virginia. Now it's distance quality, distance learning. So you don't have to be in Virginia and it's certified to operate by SCHEV, the State Council on Higher Education in Virginia. And it took three years to get the license. I have to re-up the license every year. And they do spot checks on you. They check your curriculum, they do all this stuff, your finances, everything.
[00:30:39] And so, you know, when somebody calls himself a university or a college or something, most of them aren't real. Well, mine is, and it's not even a university or college. It's an adult learning facility. It's a certificate school, basically, but it's licensed and highly scrutinized background checks the whole bit. All right. So that's been running ever since. And it's a boutique school. So, you know, there's it's not hundreds of students in a classroom, you know, so. So, but I tell people, it'll save you hundreds of thousands of dollars to. Because four year schools are a lot, you know, they just raise the GPA averages artificially. They're making it up. They're raising the tuitions. The books are rip off, you know. So in my school, you can get a highly in demand skill in as little as six months. And we've actually had people making money before they graduate. So anyway, open that in 2013. So it's been running quite, quite a while. And then in 2018 is when I started Screw the Commute podcast and again, based on me because I never, you know, I've always said people are, you know, spending half their life in their car making somebody else rich. So screw the commute. And that's also trademarked. I didn't trademark that until, you know, last year 25, But we've done this is the episode 1100, which I think just a couple dozen podcasts ever have reached that, that level.
[00:32:15] And let's see what else I've got here as we come down to the end here. Oh, in 2024, I had a school program for disabled people, ran a GoFundMe, and we put three people through the school. And I have to be totally honest, one was a blind lady and, um, she tried, tried, tried, just couldn't make it. Another was a school teacher with massive medical problems. And she finally she finally pooped out. But the one guy, Charlie Collins, he's mostly blind, but he ended up opening up a website and a business and everything. So we got at least 30% of them, you know, got something that I made happen with the donations from from folks. So I'm real happy about that. And then let's see. And now concentrating on artificial intelligence and and all along the way, uh, dogs, dogs, dogs. I mean, Maggie, pixie, baby. Rubik's, tuck. Jenna. Abby, Willow. And now. Well, let's see, Jenna was what we call a, um, foster fail. That means you foster a dog, supposed to give it back, and then you say, I ain't giving it back. So. And now we have. Maybe timber has been here for days, and already we're talking. Oh, no. Another foster fail we got going here. So that's my life in bullets up to this point. And I got no, uh, no, nothing, uh, slowing me down. I got lots of hobbies, too.
[00:33:59] I built a cute look up a cute all wheel drive vehicle. I got a rokon two wheel drive motorcycle. I got a Kawasaki motorcycle and don't have my license yet. I got an eagle coot, which is a collector's item I'm going to probably sell. You know, all kinds of hobbies and things that interest me, but it's all because I'm working for myself out of my home. I got time to do stuff. Uh, rather than being stuck in traffic all day long, you can live at, you know, three lives. I mean, when people see all the stuff I've done, they're like, ah, you're a BS. You couldn't possibly have done all that stuff. But when I tell them, you know, look, you know, people are spending 2 to 4 hours a day just commuting five days a week. That's 20, that's, uh, five days a week times four hours a day is 20 hours a week. It's 80 hours a month just in their car, spending gasoline and oil and beating the crap out of their car and some of my. I got a pickup truck that's 24 years old and my suburban is, uh, 14 or 13 years old now, and there's hardly any miles on them. The 24 year old truck has 36,000 miles on it. So. So there's all these other benefits if you really take to this, and some of you have been working most of your life for somebody else.
[00:35:28] Well, you know, the rest of your life doesn't have to be that way. It can be, uh, it can be just like I'm living now from your computer out of your home. You just have to learn some stuff and, and you don't have to take this job and shove it right away. You can do it part time. My what I claim that my, my goal is, is to make it too expensive for you to go to work anymore. Too expensive because the time you're spending on creating your digital products or your affiliate stuff, or learning your AI stuff makes it you make more money doing that than going to work. And, and actually, you don't have to make as much money to equal what you did as an employee because you get so many tax deductions when you have your own business. So I highly implore you, get in touch with me. I'll help you. You know, like I said, I'm a fanatic. I'm in this for the money, but I'm also crazy about helping people get out of that car and into the money. How about that? All right, well, that's my story, and I'm sticking to it. Hope I didn't bore you to death, but that's, uh, my life in bullets. All right, let me know if you have any questions or if you need any help on anything. I'll be here. All right. Catch you on the next episode. See you later.