January 12, 2026 – What Can I Get Out of This Dr. Carlo Rotella and Passage to Profit Richard & Elizabeth Gearhart

0:04 Intro 1: Broadcasting from AM and FM stations around the country. Welcome to the Small Business Administration award-winning School for Startups Radio, where we talk all things small business and entrepreneurship. Now here is your host, the guy that believes anyone can be a successful entrepreneur, because entrepreneurship is not about creativity, risk, or passion: Jim Beach.

0:26 Jim Beach: Hello everyone. Welcome to another exciting edition of School for Startups Radio. We are out of a new studio now. We have moved unbelievably. I was in my previous place for 11 years, and now I’m at a new place, and so let us know if it sounds any different. We’ve tried to make sure that it doesn’t sound any different. We want to neutralize the sound in both places anyway. We have a fantastic show for you today, three great guests. We’re going to start off with Dr Carlo Rotella. He has a new book out called, What Can I Get Out of This, which is a fascinating topic. It’s not what you think about though. It’s not opposed to the JFK, What can you do for your country? It’s not the opposite of that. It’s a very unique twist on the words. You have to pay really close attention. And then after that, Richard and Elizabeth Gearhart are with us. Richard is an attorney, and his wife runs the office and does the marketing and is an entrepreneur herself and does all of that. And so we are excited to welcome them. I was on their show, Passion for Profit, very recently. Man, of course, wanted to reciprocate. They are fascinating, and I wanted to hear their story. They’re on 38 stations around the country, which is incredibly impressive. And so I just wanted to get to know them and find out their story. We have a great conversation, questions like how do you grow a show, and how do you find content, and all of that long format versus short format questions. And so I do think that it is a good one for you to listen to. So unbelievably, here in Atlanta, we’ve already started Valentine’s. I had a Valentine’s party with my little daughter, the 10-year-old, over the weekend. We had a fantastic time. But the important thing is, there’s already Valentine’s stuff in the store. The market’s already there. If you’re thinking about a business, Valentine’s is one, and love and dating and all that. I think there’s a lot more space there than is being satisfied. I read a statistic that 65% of men in America are lonely. There’s a business right there. That’s incredible. We’ll be right back with a great show. Thanks for being—

2:53 Jim Beach: —with us. We are back, and again, thank you so very much for being with us. Very excited to introduce my first guest today. Please welcome Dr Carlo Rotella. He is a writer, journalist, scholar, and works on interesting issues like exploring why cities and city life work the way they do. He’s also interested in boxing, sports, music, literature, and people, and how people get good at things. His newest book is, What Can I Get Out of This: Teaching and Learning in a Classroom Full of Skeptics. He’s also author of the very successful The World Is Always Coming to an End. That’s an upbeat book. Carlo, welcome to the show. How are you doing?

3:33 Dr. Carlo Rotella: I’m fine. Thanks for having me. Very interesting—

3:37 Jim Beach:  Very interestingtopics and interesting career.  Did you always want to be a writer? Was that : the goal from the beginning?

3:45 Dr. Carlo Rotella: I think so. I didn’t really know how to do it. It turned out that school was useful for that, because there’s assignments and deadlines and, you know, sort of sitting down to write, capital T, capital W, didn’t work at all. I needed, you know, I needed somebody to say, hey, write a paper about this. Write about that. So by way of school, I’ve found my way to writing about all kinds of things that go far beyond school, like boxing and city life and things like that.

4:11 Jim Beach: Well, it’s been a fascinating career. Congratulations. I left out some of the stuff: you’ve won the Guggenheim, Howard Dubois fellowships, State Department, U.S. State Department grants, and all sorts of other awards. It’s been an amazing career. What do you consider the highlight of your career?

4:32 Dr. Carlo Rotella: It’s still sort of sinking in that explaining how things work and what things mean is my job. It seems like a great job. I don’t have a boss, which is also deeply satisfying. And there’s constant new crews of young people coming into the classroom, and my job is to show them ways of coming at things, and they come with their own interests, and we practice getting good at things, which, to me, I can’t think of a most satisfying thing to do for a living. 

5:02 Jim Beach: Are they becoming more skeptical?

5:06 Dr. Carlo Rotella: I don’t think so. I think they’re getting a lot of— I think that their parents are becoming more skeptical, and the culture is becoming more skeptical, especially about what we’re doing in school and what it means and what it might be good for. I think students are pretty game. Young people are pretty game. And so far, in my experience, whatever I ask them to do, they will do, and they can do. But, you know, they’re getting a lot of people telling them, you know, giving them bad advice, you know, like you need to pick a major that has the same name as a job, which you will then do for the rest of your life, which is exactly how it doesn’t work for almost everybody. So I think they’re coming with more sort of cultural skepticism, you know, more baggage like that. And we need to kind of get some of that stuff out of the way so we can get down to the business of doing what we do in the classroom.

5:54 Jim Beach: The title of the newest book, very interesting: What Can I Get Out of This? It’s sort of the opposite of the JFK mantra. It seems to me that all about what I can get out of this. What is the— what is this title supposed to be? It’s very provocative, very well—

6:12 Dr. Carlo Rotella: I hear that. I think the genesis of it is— so it’s a book about one semester, one class, one group of 33 students, and it sort of goes back and forth between, you know, between being in my head and being in their heads. I spent a couple years interviewing them all, asking them not only just like what goes through your head in class, but also where do you come from? What’s your hometown like? What do your parents do? All that stuff. So the genesis of the title is that it’s a required class. Almost every student who goes to Boston College, which is where I teach, has to take it. So their first response to being told that they have to take a mandatory literature course is, can I get out of this? And it’s my job to say, actually, if you add a word to that question, it’ll be a much more useful experience, which is, what can I get out of this? You know, what skills can I put in my toolkit in this class that I will be using, not only in college but for the rest of my life.

7:05 Jim Beach: All right, that’s a great attitude. And you want to fill up your tool set, don’t you? Yeah.

7:11 Dr. Carlo Rotella: And also, you know, the idea— I think one of the misapprehensions people have about a literature class is that we’re somehow just like giving you your cultural capital. You know, that, oh, I have read Shakespeare, you know. And instead, I think the way to think about it is we’re practicing a basic life skill. We’re practicing the skill of extracting meaning from the world around you and making arguments, evidence-supported arguments in support of that interpretation of what you find. And, you know, that’s a skill you use for everything: for being a citizen, for being a worker, for being a neighbor. We happen to practice on novels and poems and plays and things that are expressly designed to carry meaning. But we do this with everything. You close-read and interpret, you know, the State of the Union address, the state of your neighbor’s yard. You close-read and interpret that cryptic comment your aunt made about your cousin’s shirt at Thanksgiving dinner. You know, we do this kind of interpretation all the time. And, you know, for 15 weeks in your freshman year of college, it’s a good time to practice making reasoned arguments about what things mean.

8:14 Jim Beach: And so what was the takeaway from the 33 students? Was there a discovery at the end of this?

8:20 Dr. Carlo Rotella: Well, I think that that  there’s two things going on, and there’s many things going on, but there’s two things going on in class like that, which I run purely as a discussion, so I don’t lecture at all. And one is the acquisition of skills that we’ve been talking about, but the other is citizenship. The other is the experience, which is becoming a rarer and more precious experience all the time, of being in a group of people trying to solve complicated problems, which means you can’t just sit there quietly and hope the semester passes. You have to contribute, but you can’t dominate, because then that will get in the way of other people contributing. You know, this is good practice for the kind of workplace, for instance, that these students are headed for. You know, people who go to college, they’re not shooting for working on the line in a factory. They’re shooting for doing this kind of post-industrial work where you’re with a team of people and you’re trying to solve complicated problems, and you get stuck, stuck, and you back up and you go around, and that’s what we’re doing in class. That’s what we’re practicing. It’s just 15 weeks of problem solving and being a citizen of a community. So one of my policies is that we have to hear from everyone at every class meeting. And that’s, you know, the students told me that’s really hard for them. They’re really— that’s very intimidating for them to speak up like that in a group that size.

9:36 Jim Beach: Well, my goodness, they need to learn that skill more than anything else.

9:41 Dr. Carlo Rotella: and they’re getting less and less opportunities to practice that skill in their lives, right? So the further we go along the technological path that we’re going along, the more rare and precious it is to sit in a room for 75 minutes with a group of people and try to solve a problem. So, you know, one policy is that we hear from everybody. The other policy is no devices, right? So hard copy only, and it’s just 75 minutes to pay attention to this thing we’ve all read and to each other, and that’s what you’re paying for, right? You’re paying for the other people in the room. That’s— you’re paying for the admissions policy and the hiring and promotion policy. And at Boston College, you’re paying $5 a minute for classes, right? So we owe it to each other to pay attention to each other and to this thing that we’ve read. And, you know, I would argue that’s never going to happen again in the normal person’s life, ever, that they’re going to be consistently in a room with a bunch of people who’ve all read the same thing, trying to figure out what it means, not even in church, where people have not always done the reading, right? So I think that the further we go along the path, more and more this is really kind of a first and last chance to do this kind of thinking with other people.

10:52 Jim Beach: Sir, if you were making $90,000 a year and your child wanted to go to BC or BU, what would your thoughts be? Would you send your child to a $80,000, $70,000-a-year school if they ended up borrowing 90% of that? What are your thoughts on sort of the macro issue, if everyone belongs in a college, and if everyone belongs in the best college, and the idea that $300,000 of loans is acceptable for a 22-year-old? What are your thoughts on all that?

11:33 Dr. Carlo Rotella: Yeah, well, first of all, let’s say I’m not an expert on that, but I am a parent, right? And I am a son, and I went through this, you know, I’ve gone through this from various angles, and I see students coming and going, and especially in doing the research for this book, I got some insight into their families and how they work. And I can say a couple of things. One, obviously, college costs too much, right? For, you know, for our shrinking and hollowing out middle class in particular. Do I think it’s worth it? Yes, I think it’s worth it. Should everybody go to college? That’s not for me to say. I don’t think so. I don’t think it’s, you know, absolutely mandatory everybody go to college. And I also, you know, come from a family— my father ran community colleges for a living. You know, public education is one of the great strengths of this country, especially at the higher end, higher education. And I can’t look, as a person in the situation you’re describing, I can’t look them in the eye and say, you have to make sacrifice to go to the most expensive school you can get into. I would say, go to public school. And I also think that the quote-unquote ranking systems are so bad and so off that, you know, that’s really kind of a scam that’s been perpetrated on the college-going population. This idea that, well, this one’s ranked number 52 and this one’s ranked number 40, so it’s 12 units better, is just ridiculous, right? There’s probably, you know, when my kids wanted to go to college, I told them it totally doesn’t matter where you go. There’s probably 500 schools that I would be happy that you would go to. Maybe more. Maybe there’s 1,000. Maybe there’s 2,000. There’s probably more good colleges than there are good high schools in this country. So the idea that you need to make the maximum sacrifice to go to the school that the editors of U.S. News and World Report ranked the highest, I think, is a mistake.

13:29 Jim Beach: And what about borrowing all that money?

13:35 Dr. Carlo Rotella: So the math here is— depends who you ask on the math, right? In terms of lifetime earnings, it probably works out. But, you know, so much depends on a family situation that it’s hard for me to make a blanket statement. You know, if it was me in that situation, I would urge my kid toward the, you know, toward public university or community college, right? It’s still not free, right? But you’re not talking about— you know, it’s really more like $100,000 a year when you talk about the top end and, you know, room and board and travel and everything that goes with it. I don’t know, you know, I can’t say to a family, yes, you have to make that sacrifice. I think some higher education is a good idea. How you get that— there are a lot more choices than I think the typical semi-informed family is presented with. You know, because I think the story that you’re told is you have to get into the highest ranked school you can get into. And I think that is an error.

14:44 Jim Beach: I went to Middlebury College, just up the road— view a little bit— and it’s one of the more expensive schools. Carlo, I arranged so that I could stay a whole extra year for my parents to pay that. Just— I had credits to graduate, and I could have gotten out there a year earlier, but I didn’t want to leave college, and so I stayed for a fourth year. You know, I could have gotten out in three or three and a half, but I stayed for that full fourth year at $80 grand, $100 grand, whatever it was. I didn’t tell my parents. They’re dead now, so I can finally talk about it.

15:17 Dr. Carlo Rotella: But so— so was it worth it? Did that last year make a difference for you that you can look at and measure?

15:25 Jim beach: I can’t look at the four years and look at something that I can measure. I feel like I got nothing out of it. But that was my choice. That was—

15:39 Dr. Carlo Rotella: my choice. Yeah, I mean, I— that’s the other piece of this, right? As we talk about this as if it’s, you know, it’s a commodity that people buy. And, you know, my view of this is that an education is something you go and get. It’s something you actually take from your teachers and your fellow students. It’s not something that’s handed to you for being a good boy or girl. So depending on the student and depending on the effort and depending on the attitude, that investment becomes more or less of a good idea. Obviously, yes, if you’re going to coast and, you know, AI your papers and all that, then spending $1 for college is a waste of your money, right? But on the other hand, if you’re going to work hard, yeah, I think it’s worth it, you know. And obviously, we’re in different positions. I’m in 53rd grade, you know. I’m a school lifer. Like, I believe in school. But I can’t say to people, you know, pay top dollar, especially if they’re not going to make the full effort, you know. And I happen to be at a school where the students really do, by and large, make the effort, and that makes a world of difference. I mean, obviously, that— that’s the big thing, right, is the commitment of the students.

16:52 Jim Beach: Well, I was committed to filling one of the stairwells with snow. So down the scenario, the stairwell, as you know, you hear these rumors that they did that in the past, and so that was more important.

17:07 Dr. Carlo Rotella: Yes, well, you know, you never know, right? And college is obviously more than just classes. It’s all kinds of other things. It’s a, you know, it’s a matchmaking outfit. It’s a networking experience. People do pick up cultural capital. All kinds of things going on. One of the things that I was really interested in talking to the students about for the book was that there are a number of students in that room whose view was, everybody else in here comes from money and I don’t, but they sort of masked it and hid it so well, they weren’t even visible to each other as a population, right? So there’s also all this class stuff, social class stuff, going on in college. That’s, you know, it overlaps with the class and the school sense part, but it’s different. And, you know, there’s a lot of different things happening in college at the same time. That’s part of what I was trying to capture in the book. And then in the classroom, and all kind of bubbles to the surface, sometimes in code and sometimes really right there on the surface. You remember Ivan Boesky?

18:08 Jim Beach: You remember Ivan Boesky?  Oh, sure, yeah. One of his kids was in my class and came to school the first day in a helicopter. Great.

18:16 Dr. Carlo Rotella: Well, it’s a little more subtle than that. Usually it’s more like wearing Canada Goose and, you know, who’s going where for spring break and all that kind of thing. But that’s very much on the students’ minds, you know. And the theme of the class I was teaching, the literature class, was the misfit, the social misfit. And that also kind of colored the conversations I had with the students about themselves and where they were, you know, because the other thing is, right, they’re 18, most of them, are living away from home for the first time, in charge of themselves in a new way for the first time. And they’re figuring out who they are and who they’re going to be and, you know, literature is a place— these novels are sort of a series of laboratories in which they can look at people making choices. You know, how much am I going to fit in, and how much am I going to go my own way? Am I going to do what I’m supposed to do or not, right? And even if the situation of the novel seems pretty alien to them, like we read Edith Wharton’s novel, The House of Mirth, in which this 29-year-old woman has to marry, you know, or leave society. And like, you know, that was totally alien to them in some ways, but the idea that she has to decide between, here are the choices available to you, which is a bunch of guys, potential husbands who are all terrible, or are you going to go off the map and do something else, that they can appreciate. And the discussion of literature also turns into a discussion like, where am I? What am I? You know, what am I doing?

19:39 Jim Beach: How do you write? Those of us who went through high school and were told that we were B-minus writers, for example, you know, in my class, there was a guy who the teacher just fawned over all the time. This is the greatest writing ever, greatest writing ever. And he publishes a small regional magazine that probably 1,000 people read— not that many, 500 people read. And here I am, the B student in the class, and I’ve got seven books out, and bestsellers and McGraw Hill and stuff like that, and I’m the crappy writer my teacher told me, so, yeah—

20:23 Dr. Carlo Rotella: well, that’s— but that’s bad teaching, right? I mean, you know, I think the first thing to say about teaching writing and about doing it myself is to demystify it. It’s a craft. It is not an art, and it’s definitely not a science. It is a craft like building a cabinet and planting a garden. And the kind of writing that we do in a class like that is basically analytical writing, right? You observe— it’s basically an exercise in pattern recognition. You read the literature, you look for word choices and images and structure and all that stuff. You assemble it as evidence. You make an argument about meaning. You deploy the evidence to support it. It’s not mystical. It’s not, you know, you don’t have to be brilliant to do it. You just have to, like, lay pipe that doesn’t leak, you know. So part of it is to demystify it and turn it into a craft exercise that anybody can do. And if class is going along well, the way I teach, it should feel a little bit like a band practice, you know, or a team practice, like everybody’s working on their individual chops, and we’re doing this thing together. And definitely there’s no, you know, there’s no utility in my saying this person’s a good writer and this person’s a bad writer, right? It’s more like, let’s make stronger arguments. If we encounter arguments that aren’t strong, how can we make them stronger, right? Everything is kind of a craft challenge. And I guess I think about writing the same way. You know, the main thing for me is to just go out and do legwork, find out what people are up to in the world. You know, gazing at your own navel does not tend to produce good writing, I think, but going out and being observant and looking at what’s out there in the world does.

21:53 Jim Beach: Do you write at the same time every day? Do you physically put a pen on a piece of paper? Do you type? Do you dictate? How does it physically..

22:03 Dr. Carlo Rotella: Mechanically I basically— the earlier in the day, the better for writing new sentences. So I try to get up and be writing within minutes of becoming conscious. And then as the day goes on, I slowly scaffold the activities to less and less creative ones. So I write first and I edit, then I deal with preparing for class or whatever, and then at the end of the day I do whatever business stuff I have to do about, you know, the sort of administrative university kind of stuff. I can do that when I’m fried. So really, the value is, really the first few hours of the day is for me— that’s when I can draft, that’s when I can make new stuff. And if I’m really rolling, like writing a book, you know, I can write a couple thousand words a day, maybe something like that, and then that’s it, you know, cut it off. So usually by noon, I’m done in terms of writing new words.

22:58 Jim Beach: Okay, I’m finding I’m most productive right now at 2:00 a.m. I’m just— there’s people like that.

23:06 Dr. Carlo Rotella: But you should know that about yourself. That’s— you should know that, right? You figured out. But, like, that’s what a lot of my students told me, is they were wrong about themselves, right? Like, I thought I was a night person, you know, and then it turns out they’re a day person. They should be setting the alarm and getting up, you know. I thought I was a night person when I went to college. I was totally wrong. I’m a morning person. So it’s one of those things you got to figure out about yourself at the stage you’re at in life. You’re pretty sure that you’re a night person when it comes to writing, right? And, you know, you just got to live with—

23:34 Jim Beach: Yes, there’s nothing I can do about it.

23:39 Dr. Carlo Rotella: I’m stuck with— yeah, exactly. Well, if you’re stuck with it to the tune of seven books, that’s not so bad.

23:45 Jim Beach: That’s right, that’s true. AI—

23:46 Dr. Carlo Rotella: what are you— well, let me just tell you this. I—

23:53 Jim Beach: am loving AI. I put a chapter in and it says, here are the seven things that I think you should think about. And I love it. It’s better than a professor helping me. I think my writing is improving because of AI and using it as an editor-type tool. What are you seeing in the classroom? What are your personal AI discoveries that you’ve run across that are making you more efficient.

24:21 Dr. Carlo Rotella: Well, we are the exact opposite on this one. I just wrote a piece for The New York Times Magazine about this, about teaching English in the age of AI, and I take the absolute opposite approach, which is, you know, the sort of do-your-own-work approach, which is, if you think of what we do in the classroom like being in the gym, you should lift all the weight and run all the distance yourself, and not outsource anything, especially if you’re 18, 19, 20 years old. And I hope my students encounter professors who do teach them how to use AI and who do show them how to use it. They do it well, but I’m going to be one of the professors that shows them how to do their own work. So no devices in the classroom. Everything hard copy. And I actually tell my students, turn off spell check. Turn off grammar check. You know, the point of the gym is not for the weights to go up and down, but for you to lift. And we’ve had machines that can run faster, move faster than people, and move more weight than people for centuries. But if you want to get stronger, you got to do it yourself. So I’ve gone completely the other way. I don’t ban it, I don’t punish people, I don’t treat it as plagiarism. I try to show students why it’s in their interest in this class to do it themselves and come out more capable.

25:42 Jim Beach: But I hear you— like you misinterpreted what I said. I use it for editing. I write, and then it tells me if it’s good or not. Yeah, you’re not liking it either.

25:51 Dr. Carlo Rotella: No, I actually— what I wanted to do is share their work with classmates and do peer review and ask the same question, and then at some point, you know, it’s probably the second they leave college. Yeah, of course, that’s what’s going to happen. So I just want them to have some built-in compass, like you have in you because you didn’t use AI when you were learning how to do this, that will allow them to judge the reliability of what they read, the quality of what they read, the meaning of what they read, and so that they don’t have it available to always tell, right? Because they will. And, you know, I’m not worried that my students will never encounter AI. It’s rather the opposite, right? I want them to have some kind of just native capacity to handle this stuff. So, you know, the main thing is, just my hope is that every class they take will have a different AI policy, and they’ll get the whole range. And it’s my job to just be absolutely clear about what my policy is, so there’s no doubt in their minds. And I hope all of my colleagues are doing the same thing. And there shouldn’t be a uniform AI policy. It should be different in every class, so that they have this range of experiences. And, you know, and then I’m still in touch with a lot of them. They’re at work now, and obviously at work, they’re using it all the time, right? And I’m hoping that they’re a more competent user of it, because they have kind of some native, inbuilt ability— judgment— that comes from doing it yourself at some point.

27:25 Jim Beach: How do we find out more about you? Follow you online, get a copy of the book, read some of your other writings.

27:30 Dr. Carlo Rotella: So CarloRotella.com is probably the best way to do it. There’s links to where places you could buy the book, and latest writings and all that kind of thing. The book is available in all your finest and most typical venues that sell books. And I’m still book touring, so I’m still traveling around a lot and giving talks, and on the website, there’s a page that sort of says where I’ll be next. Fantastic.

27:57 Jim Beach: Thank you so much for being with us. Congratulations on the book, and we’d love to have you back with the next one 

28:02 Dr. Carlo Rotella: one. Thank you very much. Thanks for having me.

28:05 Jim Beach: and we will be right back.

28:20 Jim Beach: And we are back again. Thank you so very much for being with us. I’m very excited to welcome two great guests, not separate, but a couple actually married. Please welcome Richard and Elizabeth Gearhart. They are the duo behind the Passage to Profit entrepreneurial radio show. It is on 38 stations around the country. Incredibly impressive. I was on the show about a month ago, and it’s got a great format. It’s a multi-interview show. So they interviewed three of us at the same time, had separate sections with each guest, and then had portions of the show where all of the guests were commenting. It was a really great format. I enjoyed it quite a bit. You should check it out. Richard is an attorney, and is the founder of a law firm where they specialize on intellectual property. Elizabeth is part of the marketing team there, and a successful entrepreneur in her own right. Richard and Elizabeth, welcome to the show. How you doing?

29:26 Richard Gearhart: I’m doing great, Jim. Thanks. That was— you nailed that intro. Thank you very much.

29:31 Jim Beach: We offer that as a service. I will walk around and introduce you like that every time you go into a new room. And we even have add-ons. You, Richard, like an add-on: world-renowned lover, you know—

29:47 Richard Gearhart: whatever. You can stay with us for a while. How does that sound?

29:53 Jim Beach: Let’s start off with the show. Tell me about Passage to Profit, how long you’ve been doing it, how you decided on the format. It is interesting and unique, I think.

30:00 Elizabeth Gearhart: Tell us about the show. Elizabeth, um, yeah. So the way it started, Richard and I had been networking, and somebody that we met in New York called me up one day and said, hey, I have an idea for you. And Richard— come meet me in New York and let’s talk about it. So I went and met her, and she pitched the whole show. She said, I just moved to iHeart. Could you have a one-hour time slot for you guys? And it can be about entrepreneurship, and this is the format that I want. Now, we’ve changed the format a number of times since, but I think this will work. And it was paid advertising for us. So Richard was at a different networking event, so I waited till the next morning to pitch him, and that was in 2018, and here we are.

30:44 Jim Beach: You said paid advertising. In other words, you have to pay for the slot.

30:49 Elizabeth Gearhart: Yeah, we pay for the slot, all right. And if you had time now to—

30:55 Jim Beach: ROI it and figure out if that makes sense on a financial standpoint, do you get new clients from the show?

31:06 Richard Gearhart: so, no, we’re not in the black yet. We do generate some revenue. We’ve done it mostly, I think, just because we enjoy doing it. I mean, we meet interesting people, like we met you. We learn a lot about the cutting edge of entrepreneurism, and so that benefits me in my practice for sure. But we also meet people, we network. Sometimes they become clients. So there’s a benefit there. Sometimes I’ll offer clients a spot on the program. So it benefits our relationship there, and it distinguishes us from other intellectual property law firms. Not too many have a syndicated radio show, and we’ve used it to, for example, you know, bring in high-quality guests from the community, which leads to other opportunities for us. So in that respect, it’s been great. And then we do have some commercials, but we’re really now— this year— we feel good enough about the product to go out and start knocking on some doors for sponsorships and advertising. So 2026 is going to be the year of that for us.

32:47 Jim Beach: I love it. I love it, and it’s a weekly show. So you do about— is it one hour a week? Little more?

32:58 Elizabeth Gearhart: Well, it’s edited down to an hour for the radio, but we end up taping for longer. So some segments, we put the whole segment on YouTube and as a podcast, but yeah, it ends up being an hour after the cutting room floor.

33:15 Jim Beach: All right. And it is edited, right? Big distinction in the world today. This is not edited. All of our flaws will be exposed.

33:24 Richard Gearhart: Oh, gracious. I’ll have to watch what I—

33:26 Jim Beach: say though. Exactly. You edit your show, right? You have a whole team that does that.

33:31 Elizabeth Gearhart: We have an iHeart producer who edits it and gets it ready for the radio, and then he also does the podcast as well, right? And then we do our own YouTube editing. We have an assistant who edits it for YouTube.

33:45 Jim Beach: All right, you have to get asked: How did you get radio spots? A lot of podcasters are going to be very jealous of that. How’d you get so many stations?

33:56  Elizabeth Gearhart:  Richard was instrumental with that. Yeah.

34:00 Richard Gearhart: I mean, we knew a guy who knew a guy who knew a guy who put us in touch with— well, they put us in touch with Radio America, their syndication service. They’ve just been amazing. And we started with 28 stations. I think we’ve been syndicated about three years now. And, you know, we just keep adding stations, which is really great. It’s really, really cool. We added our first international station in 2025. Guess which country that was in— Estonia. Well, could be Estonia. It’s Guam, and so it doesn’t make sense. I guess we’re popular in Guam, so hello out there to all of our Guam listeners. But now we can claim to be international. So we have, you know, good markets. We have Chicago, we have Portland, we have Cleveland, Washington, DC, of course New York City, which is the number one media market in the country. So it’s been a steady progression of adding affiliates, and we love them all, and it’s just been a great, great experience. And every once in a while, we’ll get an email from Radio America saying, hey, we added another affiliate to your list, and we’re like, yeah, big celebration. So do you have anybody else—

35:46 Jim Beach: to appear? We’re paying, yeah, we pay the—

35:50 Richard Gearhart: syndicator, but we don’t pay per show, so to speak, or per station. So, right, but you— you’ve got a lot of affiliates out there, don’t you? We’re right—

36:04 Jim Beach: at 100. Yes. I think I lost one this week, but I think I gained two. So we’re at 100. And we have tried to put it in a no-growth mode, that number. I’m not trying to grow that number anymore. You know, if it’s 100 or 107, is that any difference in the consumer’s mind? No, it’s not. So right now, I have no advantage to grow.

36:33 Richard Gearhart: And so, but we were talking about this— you didn’t use this syndicator. You just hustled and did it on your own, right?

36:39 Jim Beach: That’s correct. I have had a syndicator for a while, but I didn’t like that. It didn’t work for me as well. And so most of our growth has been internally generated, me making telephone calls to get on stations, which is the way to do it, as far as I know, and getting through and convincing the station master to add you to the lineup. Usually I’ve had a progression. I found out that it’s hard to sell an hour show, but it’s easy to sell a minute-long show because, believe it or not, the stations don’t have enough content to fill out the top and the bottom of the hour. We— they do the news and the weather, and they run a couple of ads. Usually they don’t have enough ads right there. And so I offer a 92-second product that they can—

37:32 Jim Beach: use. That’s five themed topics for the week. So this week is January is a myth month. January is not what it pretends to be. And next week I’m doing five cool stories from businesses that you might not have heard of, like the FedEx story. You know, he went and literally gambled Monday’s oil and gas money— gambled it over the weekend and doubled it so he could afford Monday’s gas. You know, that’s a true story at FedEx. So that’s when, you know, we throw that out for 90 seconds, and then a year later, they’ll call and say, hey, I hear you have a long-format show too. And so my trick has been to offer them, for free, a 92-second product that they can run whenever they want, do whatever they want to with it, and then that’s my introduction. That makes sense.

38:27 Richard Gearhart: Wow, that’s pretty clever.

38:30 Jim Beach: And you could do the same thing. You could do, you know, legal tip of the week, and, you know, just basically format through the textbook and say, this week we’re going to talk about intellectual property for startups, but only online startups, you know. And next week we’re going to talk about cement companies, and how to, you know, IP company for a cement company. Yeah, I think it’d be a great format for you.

38:57 Elizabeth Gearhart: That’s actually brilliant. That’s brilliant, because I’ve been doing a lot of research on how you get ChatGPT and places like that to recommend your content, and how it affects what’s happening with Spotify and Apple. And right now, the more specific you can be and niche well-defined podcasts are growing faster in 2026. So having those keywords like cement or whatever, and not just having it be general, is really a great tip for people.

39:32 Jim Beach: Then also, you can use it as a Google short or as a TikTok short. Also, yes, you know, if you put video to it. So multitask our content, I guess. Let’s move on. Richard, one of my big thesis points on the show here is that if you don’t have a business idea, you should just go copy, borrow, or steal it. My first business was 99% a copy of another business. I didn’t copy any of the trademarks, copyrights, or patents. Am I going to burn in hell?

40:06 Richard Gearhart: Probably. I think we’ll both be down there together. We’re going to have a smoke or two. How does that sound?

40:18 Richard Gearhart: Okay. Elizabeth, on the other hand, will be in heaven. She’ll be in heaven. And our cats, you know.

40:25 Jim Beach: Legally— copy. And is it moral? What are your thoughts on the whole copy issue?

40:31 Richard Gearhart: Oh, well, I mean, you know, everything is copied. I mean, there’s— you know, intellectual property is reserved for, you know, unique ideas, right? And so if you’re going to be like, you’re going to set up a hair salon, you know, there’s nothing especially new about cutting hair. So, you know, what makes that work is the people who are there, their personalities. And, you know, hopefully they do a good job, and they, you know, take good service. And so, you know, there’s nothing wrong with visiting some hair salons and seeing what they do right and what they do wrong, and then, you know, weaving that all together in your own special way. So that’s very common. Where intellectual property comes in, though, is where you have something that’s, you know, novel and not obvious. And so the government is willing to give you a 20-year monopoly on that idea if you file a patent, and so the patent is published, and the idea is that other people can look at the patent and learn from it, and then use that as a basis to come up with their own ideas, right? And so that’s sort of the rationale of the patent system. And trademarks are a little bit different. Of course, branding is so important for any business, and you want to have something that’s distinguishing, and you can get a trademark. And I personally think it’s fair game that if somebody took the time to build a business, invest in it, create it, and people know of it because of their name, somebody else tries to sort of piggyback off that— that’s wrong, right? But that doesn’t stop somebody from starting a similar business and calling it something else, and that’s fair game. So, so I mean, to answer your question, I think you did the right thing. I think from an entrepreneur standpoint, it’s harder to reinvent the wheel, right? And if you see something that works and you want to do it too, you can do it. You just have to be careful. Now, we always tell entrepreneurs that if you’re going to launch a new product or you’re going to start a business, then you need to check out— make sure that you’re not infringing somebody else’s property. And this is especially true when you’re naming the business, because if you do that, if you accidentally take somebody else’s name, then two or three years down the road, after you’ve invested a lot of money in websites and packaging and advertising, somebody from the other side of the country can come and send you a cease and desist letter if they have a federal trademark. So a trademark search usually isn’t that expensive. It’s maybe— if you were to work with our firm, it’d be about $750, and I understand that that could be a lot of money to entrepreneurs, but think of the cost if you get it wrong and then you get into a lawsuit. You could spend hundreds of thousands of dollars. I had one client— we did a search for him. We found a similar mark. He decided that he was going to stay with the mark that he wanted, and he was infatuated with it, and I think it had some connection to his children. And he went and launched, and about five years later, this other trademark holder that we found came after him, and he spent $300,000, you know, defending his trademark. And ultimately we were able to settle the case. So he only had to make a minor change to his name, but that was a lot of stress and also a lot of money. And if you’ve got a big company, you know, down your throat, and you don’t know if you’re going to be able to do business on the name you did business under for five years, that’s a lot of stress for the business owner. So I think it makes sense, if you can, you know, head it off at the pass and make sure that whatever name you select is free and clear, and that way, you know, that’s one less thing you’re going to have to worry about as your business succeeds.

45:32 Jim Beach: I got a cease and desist from Entrepreneur Magazine. This show was originally called School for Entrepreneurship, or something like that, and School for Entrepreneurs, maybe, and Entrepreneur Magazine is incredibly vigilant about enforcing their trademark on the word entrepreneur, which, to me, is just crazy that they were able to get a trademark on that. There’s actually a movie about it called Trademark Wars. I don’t know if you ran across it. I was interviewed for the movie about certain organizations that own trademarks that they shouldn’t, and one of the example is Cure, C, U, R, E. If you try to cure something other than what Susan G. Komen is curing, they will sue.

46:18 Jim Beach: They will sue you, which I think is just crazy. Z, Z— so anyway, all this is so important. Elizabeth, now that you’re leading, how do you grow that podcast? How do you— how are you all growing yours so successfully?

46:35 Elizabeth Gearhart: Well, I do want to say something here, and it’s probably something your listeners don’t want to hear, but I’ve been researching a lot on how to grow podcasts, and the people that start off with a bang, they put money into advertising early on. So I think that one reason our podcast is growing is because we spend money on it. So we have the law firm sponsors it, and we do use it to drive business to the law firm. So there is a natural connection there, but we’re able to hire two assistants. We’re bringing on a third, and we’re able to do a lot of research. I’m doing a lot of research now on how we can move up, and we’ve got some new ideas for 2026. But I think you either have to have time or money, or preferably both, and that’s really what leads the most to growth. But if you could only do one thing, the common wisdom has been to advertise on other podcasts, because people are already there listening to podcasts, so they’re more likely to go listen to another podcast than to jump off and go on some other platform. Okay.

47:40 Jim Beach: Okay, have you found that to be a successful method? Is the ROI there for you? Not yet.

47:48 Elizabeth Gearhart: We are launching a new podcast, and very soon, it’s called AI and Business Use Cases from the Real World. It’s a spin-off from the Passage to Profit show, and I have been doing extensive research for the last three months on the best way to launch that for maximum growth. And there’s way more than I can tell you, but schema markup is important, and having a website and all of that. So we’re going to be putting a lot of those things into practice and maybe spending some money on advertising too, to see if we can really make this one take off quickly, because Passage to Profit started as a radio show. We weren’t doing a podcast with it to start, and iHeart turned it into a podcast. So we really weren’t thinking in the mode of, let’s get a lot of podcast downloads. We were in the mode of, let’s get a lot of listeners. And that’s very different, as you know yourself, right?

48:39 Jim Beach: Yes, it is very, very different. All right, I hear you want to play our game, the Quick 10. Yes. All right, fire away. Here, yes.

48:50 Jim Beach: So we are going to play the Quick 10. Unbelievably, I had to have some help. Elizabeth, you’re going first. So, Richard, you close your ears or just walk away. Elizabeth, you ready?

49:02 Elizabeth Gearhart: I’m ready. The music’s a little loud, but yeah, I can hear you if you talk a little louder.

49:07 Jim Beach: We had enough of the music. Are you going to accept a standard wager?

49:12 Unknown Speaker: What’s the standard wager? The bet that everyone else made? And what is the bet? The thing—

49:19 Jim Beach: that everyone else did. You say yes. Go. Let’s go. We don’t have time. Yes, yes, yes, yes.

49:23 Speaker 2: Favorite creativity hack, walking. Number two, favorite bootstrapping trick, selling stuff I have. Number three, name your top passions.

49:37 Elizabeth Gearhart: Spending time with my family, spending time with my pets, learning, researching, and reading.

49:46 Speaker 2: Number four, the first three steps in starting a business are—

49:51 Elizabeth Gearhart: product evaluation, focus group, market analysis, and a business plan.

49:57 Jim Beach: Number five, the best way to get your first real customer.

50:00 Speaker 2: Number— is networking. Number six, your dreamiest technology.

50:07 Elizabeth Gearhart: I love this one: a robot that cleans the house and does all the cooking.

50:11 Speaker 2: Number seven, best entrepreneurial advice: make sure people want to buy what you want to sell. Number eight, worst entrepreneurial mistake—

50:21 Unknown Speaker: oh, hiring the wrong team member.

50:24 Speaker 2: Number nine, favorite entrepreneur, why? Sir Richard Branson.

50:31 Elizabeth Gearhart: I think that guy is amazingly smart, and he doesn’t seem to get a lot of negative press. And number 10, favorite superhero: I love Mighty Mouse.

50:41 Jim Beach: Excellent answers. Fantastic job, Elizabeth. All right, Richard, are you up? Can we—

50:46 Richard Gearhart: get— by the way, you do have a cleaning robot. His name is Richard.

50:50 Elizabeth Gearhart: Oh, give me a break. He’s broken most of the time.

50:57 Jim Beach: Richard, are you ready? Yeah.

50:59 Unknown Speaker: All right. Number one, your favorite creativity hack: AI. Number two, favorite bootstrapping trick: AI. Number three, name your top passions: cleaning the garage. Number four, the first three steps in starting a business are—

51:26 Unknown Speaker: beg, borrow, and steal.

51:29 Speaker 2: Number five, the first way to— or the best way to get your first real customer is gunpoint. Number six, dreamiest technology: a robot that—

51:44 Unknown Speaker: cooks and cleans.

51:46 Speaker 2: Number seven, best entrepreneurial advice: give up. Number nine, worst 

entrepreneurial mistake—

51:58 Unknown Speaker: starting in the first place.

52:00 Unknown Speaker: Number nine, favorite entrepreneur—

52:04 Unknown Speaker: favorite entrepreneur, Steve Jobs—

52:07 Unknown Speaker: and favorite superhero, Superman.

52:13 Jim Beach: All right, excellent answers all around. Our team has calculated the score to see who— finds out the wager. So we’ll pause, get that done. How do we find you? Get in touch. Hire the law firm. Listen to the show. All that, please.

52:32 Richard Gearhart: Well, for the law firm, you can go to our website. It’s www.GearhartLaw.com. That’s G, E, A, R, H, A, R, T, L, A, W dot com, and we offer free consultations, so ring us up.

52:49 Speaker 2: All right. Elizabeth, how do we find the show?

52:54 Elizabeth Gearhart: The name of the show is Passage to Profit, and we have a website, PassageToProfitShow.com. We are on YouTube. Selected segments are on YouTube, and the show is on Spotify, Apple, and anywhere you get your podcasts.

53:08 Jim Beach: All right, fantastic answers. Great job. All right. Oh, I’ve just been given your scores. Oh, I’m so sorry. You both got a 94, which is an excellent score, but you have to have a 95 to win. Apparently, one of our judges is from Manhattan, and they were dinging anybody from New Jersey. I think you owe us a Tesla. We always play for that. Here soon—

53:31 Unknown Speaker: okay, we’ll send you one.

53:33 Jim Beach: Elizabeth, thank you so much. Had a lot of fun, and wait to have you on again. Good luck with your new show. Thanks very much. It’s a pleasure. We are out of time for today, but you know what we do? That’s right, we come back tomorrow. Be safe, take care, and go make a million dollars. Bye now, you.