Two days before the biggest fight of his life, Ryan Garcia answered the door at his home in the Hollywood Hills wearing no sunglasses, relaxed, and completely unhurried. The 27-year-old boxer had made $35 million in a single year doing something he first started at age 7, and he wanted to talk about taxes. That contrast, a young man from a lower-income family who has already paid over $30 million to the IRS and is still standing in his own home talking freely about faith and financial discipline, is the thread that runs through an afternoon spent with three of Hollywood’s most recognizable names. James, the interviewer behind School of Hard Knocks, sat down with Garcia, NBA veteran Tristan Thompson, and actor Mark Wahlberg to ask the question most reporters skip: not how much they made, but how they kept it and what actually drove them.
The boxer who started at seven and still worries about taxes
Garcia’s family had no money when they bet everything on a child with boxing gloves. ‘Lowerass family,’ he said plainly. ‘My family took a big risk on me. Everything they had, they poured into me.’ Two decades later, the financial reality of elite sport hit him in a way that surprised even some of his peers. ‘The IRS will humble you real quick,’ he said. ‘If I give you any advice, put that mental into the tax game.’ His strategy for building a following of nearly 20 million on social media was equally stripped of mystique: find the video that got the most traction, tweak it slightly, post again, repeat without reading the comments, and treat the whole thing as a numbers exercise until the brand shapes itself. The driving philosophy underneath all of it came from his faith. He described evolution as a spiritual obligation, pointing to the way the angels in scripture continuously discover new sides of God. ‘If we’re not always evolving,’ he said, ‘we’re not moving in the right direction.’ His most memorable line of the afternoon had nothing to do with boxing: when asked what gets a person through the hardest moments, he said simply, ‘Nobody’s coming to save you. Nobody’s coming to discover you.’
The NBA veteran who retired his parents at nineteen
Tristan Thompson met James at the Maybourne in Beverly Hills, dressed in a Balenciaga tracksuit he identified as coming from London. He grew up in government housing in Toronto, four people sharing a two-bedroom, one-bathroom apartment, and left home at 16 to attend prep school in New York and New Jersey after his high school coaches told him he would be back within a year. He returned to Toronto 12 months later as the number one player in the country. After 14 years in the NBA, the biggest single-year check he has ever received did not come from basketball at all. He declined to name the exact source but placed it in the tech and defense space. His investment in Poppy, the healthy drink brand based out of Austin, produced a notable exit. Current positions include robotics, drones, energy, and data infrastructure. The framework he applies is straightforward: use name recognition to get into rooms, then educate yourself enough to contribute something beyond the name. ‘Sit at the bridge of the gap between culture and power,’ he said. His mother worked three jobs simultaneously as a school bus driver, grocery bagger, and babysitter. At 19, shaking David Stern’s hand at the NBA Draft, Thompson told his parents they would never have to work again.
The actor who wakes up at four in the morning at fifty-five
Mark Wahlberg met James outside one of his newest ventures, a Mexican restaurant he was opening at the time of the interview. He is the youngest of nine children, his parents divorced when he was 11, and he has never attended film school. He owns roughly six businesses and described his acting income as the funding mechanism that makes the rest possible. ‘My acting career is paying for all of my businesses,’ he said, ‘but we have skin in the game in every business.’ His message on brand deals was direct: attaching a name to something without cutting a check is a category of business he does not practice. He still wakes before 4 a.m. ‘I am hungrier now than I have ever been,’ he said. At 55, he does not believe he has hit his prime yet. His most practical advice for breaking into any competitive field was to lean into whatever real experience you have that classically trained competitors do not. He credited channeling focus into faith and family as the single organizing principle behind everything that has worked.
The detail nobody scripted
Garcia’s corner-man story about Luke Campbell almost went unnoticed. He described getting knocked down in that fight, feeling dizzy, and his own brain telling him, ‘You’ve been worse drunk.’ He stood up and knocked Campbell out with a body shot.
Wahlberg walked back inside to a restaurant that did not exist yet as a finished business, the tables not fully set, the signage still going up, a 55-year-old man with hundreds of millions of dollars in the room spending a Tuesday afternoon making sure the thing got done right.
