• George Brett Olson is one of a set of comedians who've called out AI accounts for ripping off their work.
• Olson said he was upset with Meta for allowing the situation to persist on its platforms.
• Instagram's top exec said the platform is invested in promoting original content and would look into the issue.

This as-told-to essay is based on an interview with George Brett Olson, one of several comedians who have lately called out AI accounts for ripping off their jokes. It's been edited for length and clarity. Instagram head Adam Mosseri said he would look into what could be done about the issue and that the platform was invested in driving traffic to original content.

I started doing stand-up in 2021 after getting burned out from being a winemaker. I'd been doing live shows, and this joke I made about, ironically, AI stealing jobs went viral. The whole joke was about AI stealing jobs and people still blaming immigrants, which is very silly when the most powerful people were saying, "We're literally coming to take all your jobs."

Then a friend sent me the video of this lady doing the joke. He's like, "AI is for real, for real, stealing your jokes." It was basically me, in my clothes, but it's a 42-inch butt. It's just the pornification of women online. It was very strange.

I'd been doing that joke for a year. I thought of it after working out with my buddy, and we were talking, walking. It takes a lot of work to get a joke stage-ready. It's a lot of repetition, tweaking, driving from place to place to perform. Comedy's not easy. So it's pretty sad to see it happen, especially when the AI comedians who are stealing jokes have more followers than the people they're stealing from.

I asked the account behind the joke if she was real. She said yes. Then I asked, "Did someone help you do this?" And she just left me on read. She also left a comment saying, "Sorry, won't happen again," and removed a bunch of videos.

I've had a bunch of followers try to report it. Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram, replied and basically said, "Not all AI's bad. We don't know how we're going to stop it, but people shouldn't be able to steal. Seems like we should do something about that."

[This was Mosseri's exact comment: "I don't think it's practical for us to try and ban AI content from the platform. It's gonna be harder and harder to identify, and it's not all bad content (though yes, there is plenty of slop). But we are very invested in trying to drive more traffic to original content creators, and if an AI creator is ripping off content wholesale, it would be good for us to work out what we can do about that. I'm not sure what it would be, but I'll make sure to talk to the team and look into it."]

I blame Meta, not the AI

I don't blame someone for stealing. That's just someone trying to make a buck with the tools they have available. We want to hold people responsible that do not have the mechanisms of power because we can't hold an institution accountable.

I feel demoralized more by Meta's response. The language that's coming from all of them is that we're powerless, and this is inevitable, and there's nothing we can do. 
And it's just not true. And you just have to sit, be powerless, which is demoralizing.

As a comedian, you just want to sell tickets to your shows, engage with live people. That's why most of us post on social media — so people see that you're funny so they come to your live shows. I do live shows every week.

If we flood the internet with agents, and we don't know the difference anymore between what's real and what's not, this could be the death of the internet. Hopefully more people come to live shows. Because the one thing about AI comedians is: You can't see them live.

• James Dumoulin has turned street interviews with moguls into a business on track for $37 million in revenue this year.
• School of Hard Knocks uses staged drama to hook viewers and sells consulting services and memberships.
• Dumoulin and his partners aim to expand and become the "Barstool Sports of business content."

As James Dumoulin approaches a private equity investor in Lagos, Nigeria, there's an ominous moment when a bodyguard holding a rifle puts his hand up and demands the content creator stop.

"I have a channel with 24 million followers," the School of Hard Knocks cofounder responds, and then asks if he can interview the investor, Adesuwa Rhodes, for one minute about how she got rich.

Rhodes steps forward, dressed in a vibrantly patterned suit, and begins answering Dumoulin's questions, explaining how she broke into the business, the importance of persistence, and her faith in God.

The video's formula — mixing a high-drama street interview with advice from the wealthy and successful — has been distilled down to a science by 24-year-old Dumoulin, and helped him create a company that's on track to do $37 million in revenue this year, profitably, according to copies of financial documents he provided to Business Insider. The initial set-up is also, as Dumoulin readily explains, partly scripted.

"They're screaming at me, and it looks like a war is about to break out, and then I get her to calm them down," he said of how he blocked out the Rhodes scene. "And she gave some incredible sound bites and advice."

Street interviews, which have their predecessors on radio and TV, have been reborn as one of social media's hottest formats. Standout stars of the genre include Kareem Rahma of "Subway Takes," who gets opinions on hot topics from strangers, and TikToker Caleb Simpson, who asks people what they pay in rent and tours their apartments. As the format has grown increasingly lucrative, it's also become more orchestrated. Rahma and Simpson have both leaned into celebrity appearances, for example.

In Dumoulin's case, the upfront drama of the street encounter is contrived, a way to draw the viewer in and hook them so they'll listen to the interview, which is where he says the valuable information actually resides. He asks his subjects how they made their money, what their leadership principles are, and for advice for future entrepreneurs. The conceit is that they're lessons not taught in school.

"People love tension," Dumoulin said. "They want to see that conflict, they want to see what's going to happen, and then the payoff is a great interview on the back half. That's why I think our videos do really, really well."

Dumoulin's success in the creator economy — where the term "authenticity" is employed like a sacred totem — raises a host of questions about what it means to be "real," and how much it truly matters if you're entertaining and informing your audience. Any questions of authenticity haven't seemed to hamper the growth of School of Hard Knocks, though, which has nearly 11 million Instagram followers and over 7 million on TikTok, plus several million more on YouTube and other platforms.

Dumoulin said he'd consider a video a failure if it got under a million views.

The 'Barstool Sports of business content'

The videos serve as the center of an operation — run by Dumoulin, his brother Jack, 26, and their childhood friend Josh Smith, 28 — that contains a slew of businesses. The partners say they expect their media revenue to double over the next six months.

"One of the long-term visions of the School of Hard Knocks is to create the Barstool Sports of business content," James Dumoulin said.

The brand has done long-term sponsorships with companies including Shopify, ZipRecruiter, and Alibaba, but advertising isn't the most lucrative part of the business. The core moneymaker is School of Content, which provides social media consulting to small businesses.

The other two contributors are Hard Knocks Agency, a short-form video production and social media management agency for business owners, and School of Mentors, a membership community for aspiring entrepreneurs. Members pay $19 or $49 a month for live calls, workshops, and training with founders and operators.

Jack Dumoulin said the subscribers to its Mentors community are people who want to connect with successful entrepreneurs and learn from them, while the agency's clients are established businesspeople who want to build their personal or company brands.

"Founder-led brands are becoming a really, really big thing, where we're seeing more and more founders become the face of brands, their product, their service, or their company," Jack Dumoulin said.

Monica Khan, CEO of Creator Revolution, which helps creators build businesses and advises companies on influencer strategy, said she sees strong demand from execs and founders for help building personal brands, and business-to-business (B2B) creators are stepping up.

School of Hard Knocks took a smart approach by building a media brand first by interviewing entrepreneurs, then turning that credibility into a service, Khan said.

"We're going to see a lot more of that," she added.

The School of Hard Knocks cofounders have also invested in real estate, including a portion of an apartment complex in San Antonio and commercial properties.

The founders went through several pivots

The Dumoulin brothers grew up in a military family in Northern Virginia and became friends with Smith while serving in the same Boy Scouts troop. All went on to become Eagle Scouts.

James Dumoulin attributes some of their success to the mentoring they got from the military dads who ran the troop. He recalled the especially long conferences they'd have with scout leaders evaluating them for advancement to the next rank, and the scoutmaster who used to say, "There's never enough time to do it right, but there's always enough time to do it again."

"That resonated with us," he said.

The three reconnected in Austin in 2020. Josh Smith had gotten into digital marketing, and Jack Dumoulin, who had won a trophy in a worldwide Microsoft Excel competition, had become a junior analyst at Buc-ee's. James Dumoulin was in college, making TikTok videos. They combined their skills to make online content.

School of Hard Knocks was by no means an overnight success. They experimented with several approaches, including giving their own business advice. People didn't care about a 20-year-old kid's perspective on business, James Dumoulin said.

"Ultimately, we were like, 'What if we tried doing interviews?'" he said. "'What if we were the ones that were able to go seek advice from the most successful people?'"

They started approaching people cold on the street, asking them for interviews, and more often than not, getting blown off.

"It was just constant rejection after rejection," James Dumoulin said. "You'd probably have to go to 100 people before you get anybody to even look at you in the eye."

Their big break came in 2022 when they intercepted Mark Cuban outside the South by Southwest festival and asked for an interview. The gregarious entrepreneur obliged.

"That one interview was so powerful for us, because I leveraged it in so many other interviews," James Dumoulin said.

Eventually, PR agents were calling them to have their clients be featured on the channel.

The videos are carefully planned

School of Hard Knocks videos have a spontaneous feel that belies the meticulous planning behind them.

They start with a cold open, often creating tension by involving a security guard or other bystanders. For an interview with Ring founder Jamie Siminoff, James Dumoulin roped in a few employees from a store on Rodeo Drive where he met Siminoff and asked them to stand in a group, chatting. Dumoulin asked the group who the richest of them was. As briefed, they pointed to Siminoff, who said he was an inventor who made "something on your front door."

James Dumoulin reshoots the opening several times until he's satisfied with the result. The rest of the interview is shot in one take. He approaches his subjects with hearty enthusiasm and said he does minimal research on them, to preserve a certain amount of natural surprise in his reactions. All told, he takes five to seven hours to edit videos that are between a minute and a half and two minutes long.

"He's got unbelievable guests," said Josh Suggs, founder of StreetTalk, an ad agency built around impromptu street interviews. "He has real A-list celebrities. So I think people naturally want to hear what an A-list celebrity is going to say. At the same time, he asks a question people want to hear: How much money do you make? It's very scroll-stopping questions."

Some subjects — like Shaq and Tom Cruise — are household names. Most are not. James Dumoulin said the best-performing videos are unknown moguls because they create a curiosity gap.

He doesn't press his guests on controversial topics. Convicted felon "Wolf of Wall Street" Jordan Belfort and streamer Adin Ross, who has hosted far-right creator Nick Fuentes and self-described misogynist influencer Andrew Tate on his stream, get the same treatment as everyone else.

A platform reality check

The cofounders said that when their content started to take off, around 2022, they got a reality check about dependence on platforms.

They said their content was making about $30,000 a month, mostly from Facebook, when they were unexpectedly demonetized by the platform for what James Dumoulin said was an "unoriginal content violation." (They've since been reinstated.) Their monthly revenue dropped to $5,000. They said it was a wake-up call that they had to find other, more predictable sources of income. They started their first offshoot, the Hard Knocks Agency, in 2023.

"Sometimes you're not in control, because you don't own the platform," James Dumoulin said. "It made us realize, 'We've got to create a media company.'"

The School of Hard Knocks founders are also aware of the risk they run of being dependent on a single person. That's why they're adding new brands like Hard Knocks Business and Hard Knocks Women, with Hard Knocks Sports to come. The goal is to get to eight channels by the end of the year.

"If it is all really relying on one person, if something happens to that person, the whole company's kind of screwed," James Dumoulin said. "And so I think that's why it is very, very important to have that distribution beyond just one channel."

• Fox-owned Red Seat Ventures is going after Substack's turf with a new newsletter option.
• CEO Chris Balfe said the company has had an early success with Tony Hinchcliffe's paid offering.
• The home of Tucker Carlson and Nancy Grace is also on the hunt for more big creators.

Fox's Red Seat Ventures is coming for Substack.

Led by Chris Balfe, Red Seat made its name running sales and production services for podcasters including Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly, and Nancy Grace.

Now, as the lines between creators, podcasters, and writers continue to blur, it's adding newsletter functionality to its stack. The newsletter feature will live under Supercast, a company Red Seat bought this year that offers a menu of subscription options like livestreaming for creators. They can now build free and paid newsletters and track their performance on a dashboard. The newsletter feature is included in Supercast's base pricing of $0.59 per subscriber per month, with custom pricing available for big networks and media companies.

"We want to be a one-stop shop for creators," Balfe told Business Insider. "Whereas Substack has done a really good job going after written-first creators, and then adding podcasting capability on top of that, we're going at it from the other direction and saying, for most of the creators that we work with, their audio and video is their main business. So, let's add other features like email and livestreaming."

Balfe pointed to comedian Tony Hinchcliffe of "Kill Tony" as an early example of Red Seat's success in using a multifaceted approach. Since launching a subscription, Kill Tony+, Hinchcliffe has signed up thousands of people who get his uncensored, ad-free show and bonus content.

Hinchcliffe plans to create another, super-expensive tier where people would pay to get roasted by him, Balfe said.

"It would be like $10,000 or something like that to roast you," Balfe said. "We will sell out of these so bad."

He also pointed to an early pilot of Supercast's livestreaming with "This American Life," which drew more than 1,700 paying audience members.

Red Seat is aiming for 10 big deals

Balfe wants to make Red Seat a creator-economy juggernaut, with some 200 shows. The company has around 30 shows now and is looking to do a lot more deals quickly, especially in sports, lifestyle, entertainment, and tech. Red Seat's top creator deals generally pay a minimum guarantee against projected sales.

"We really want to accelerate our rate of dealmaking," Balfe said. "I think if we did 10 big deals in the next 12 months, that would be big."

Balfe disagrees with industry insiders like iHeartMedia CEO Bob Pittman, who say podcast distribution deals are getting too expensive. He said there was strong advertiser demand and that hosts have the ability to branch out into other areas. Balfe said he's doing deals where the show itself accounts for as little as 60% of the revenue, with the rest coming from other projects.

Balfe also sees the potential for creators to make longer deals. YouTubers are often used to getting short-term ad deals, while Red Seat is pushing for 12-month partnerships for its clients, he said.

"We're trying to do annual deals," he said. "YouTubers are attracted to that sort of consistency that the podcast business model has allowed."

Podcasts are TV now

Podcasting has become more of a video-first medium as it has evolved from its audio roots.

Forty-four percent of US podcast consumers watched a video podcast in the past week, up from 40% in 2025, according to a report from trade group Sounds Profitable released this month. YouTube is the top podcast platform, used by 63% in the past 12 months, ahead of Spotify (33%), Netflix (21%), and Apple Podcasts (15%).

Balfe thinks video will continue to grow its share of the pie. People are watching more podcasts on YouTube, especially on TV screens. Spotify is making the case that video consumption outperforms audio on its platform.

Major streamers are also hungry for podcasts, and linear TV players like Versant's MS NOW are looking for lower-cost programming to fill their schedules. Red Seat's shows aren't running on Fox's linear networks today, but Balfe said it's only a matter of time before that happens.

"I look at the next phase of video opportunities, and we have every streamer that wants our content now: Hulu, Peacock, and Amazon Prime, and Paramount Plus," Balfe said. "We also have the linear guys that are starting to come to us and say, 'Actually, what you're producing looks kind of like a talk show. Maybe we should just put it in late night or daytime.'"