SINCE3000 Video Podcast with Robert Hartwell

Robert Hartwell is one of the most genuinely multidimensional figures in the entrepreneurial creator landscape — a University of Michigan-trained musical theatre graduate who has performed in five Broadway musicals including Hello, Dolly! starring Bette Midler, appeared on the Tony Awards stage three times, been featured in Pharrell and Jay-Z's music video for "Entrepreneur," and built two multi-seven-figure businesses while serving as host and executive producer of a television series presented by OWN: The Oprah Winfrey Network, HGTV, and Scott Brothers Entertainment. His company The Broadway Collective — founded in 2016 with his life savings — made the Inc. 5000 list of fastest-growing private companies in America with 440 percent revenue growth. His second company, Strength On Stages, is now recognized as the premier storyselling training program for entrepreneurs who want to combine authentic narrative with business strategy to build visible, influential brands.

Robert went viral in 2020 when he purchased a 200-year-old colonial mansion in Massachusetts — a home built when slavery was still legal in the United States — and shared a message about reinvention, liberation, and the specific act of a Black gay man claiming a historic American property as his own and committing to fill it with love, honor his ancestors, tell their stories, and say their names. That post, and the television series that followed, made Robert one of the most distinctive and culturally resonant entrepreneurial voices in the intersection of personal storytelling, business building, and creative leadership.

The "How To Become The Executive Producer Of Your Life" concept is the specific intellectual and entrepreneurial framework that makes Robert Hartwell's coaching and speaking work categorically different from the generic mindset content that populates the entrepreneurial media landscape. The executive producer framing is not a metaphor for surface-level self-improvement. It is a precise, theatrically grounded operational philosophy for how a person takes creative, strategic, and directorial ownership over the narrative of their life and business — the same discipline Robert has applied to producing television for Oprah's network, to building Inc. 5000 companies from nothing, to going viral on social media with a story that combined personal history, cultural significance, and business vision in a way that no amount of conventional content strategy could have engineered.

Culture Add Labs is Danielle Leslie's company — the creator education and community platform that operates the SINCE3000 video podcast as part of a broader ecosystem built around helping creators, entrepreneurs, and cultural leaders build meaningful businesses on their own terms. Danielle Leslie's own story — building a seven-figure online education business and becoming one of the most recognized voices in the creator economy — gives SINCE3000 the specific founder credibility that attracts guests of Robert Hartwell's caliber and audience members whose ambitions match those their host embodies. The SINCE3000 podcast occupies the intersection of personal development, entrepreneurial strategy, and cultural specificity that defines Culture Add Labs' brand positioning — and Robert Hartwell is the specific kind of guest whose presence in that space produces the combination of inspiration, tactical insight, and authentic human storytelling that the SINCE3000 audience comes to the podcast to access.

The video podcast episode format gives the Robert Hartwell conversation the visual dimension that transforms a compelling audio exchange into a fully produced content asset that can be distributed across YouTube, Instagram, and the social platforms where Culture Add Labs' audience discovers and shares new voices. Robert's background as a performer, director, and television host gives him a specific on-camera authority that distinguishes his video podcast appearances from those of guests whose stage presence is less developed — and VID's production approach for the SINCE3000 episode was built to create the visual environment that allows Robert's natural performance intelligence to enhance rather than be constrained by the production format.