Elizabeth Molina: [00:00:00] Hello, my beautiful people, I'm Elizabeth Molina, and I am your beauty guru in this podcast, I will share with you all you need to know about beauty from the inside out, you will gain access to the latest beauty trends from head to toe, mind and soul. You will hear from experts themselves, the trendy influencers, celebrities, athletes and of course, myself on all things beauty. This is definitely the place to be. Biohacking, beauty, hacking, life, hacking into the wife. For your beauty routine, are you ready for your global obsession? Today's guest is none other than Hala Tala. She is the host of Young and Profiting podcast, frequently ranked as the number one educational podcasts across all apps. Hala is also the CEO of Yapp Media, a full service social media and podcast marketing agency for top protesters, celebrities and CEOs projected to generate over one million in revenue in its first year. She is well known for her engagement following an influence on LinkedIn. She's also known for so many other things that we're going to get into in this episode. You're going to hear things from her that you haven't heard before. She is going to sing. She has an amazing, beautiful voice. She has a story and it is an impactful one. It is a story of resiliency. It is a story of if you set your mind to something and you work hard enough, you will get there. Hala takes us through her journey. And I'm so excited for you guys to listen to a never before heard all of the different adversities that she has gone through and how she's doing it today. So I'm so excited for you guys to meet her.

Elizabeth Molina: [00:01:40] Welcome, Hala.

Hala Tala: [00:01:42] Thank you so much, Elizabeth. I'm so happy to be here.

Elizabeth Molina: [00:01:45] Awesome. I'm so happy to have you here. This is going to be such a great episode. I cannot wait. I'm just going to dive right in because there's so much content. The more I hear you, the more I learn about you. I'm just like, wait, what when did this happen? Like, how old are you again? So I was I want people to know about you and to just hear your amazing voice and power and like, pun intended. You guys will stay tuned for that. So, Hala, let's get to it. How did you begin in the industry you are today? You are a powerhouse to be reckoned with. You have your hands in everything. I don't think there you have enough toes and fingers to put in all the jars that you're in. And tell us a little bit about your back story. Like, let's make it like maybe like not that long. Tell us about all your your journey through radio, through your corporate. Like, tell us about that before we dive in.

Hala Tala: [00:02:37] Yeah, of course. I'll give you the really quick version. So I started my career at Hot 97. It's one of the biggest radio stations in New York, in America for hip hop and R and B. And so I got this internship, my junior year of college. I was in the corporate side, the production side I got I was doing really well. So then they recruited me to be Angie Martinez's assistant in the studio area. So this was like a really coveted role. It was super demanding. And so what happened is I ended up dropping out of college to take it full time and to really take my chances and try to see if I could grow a career in radio. And so I was Angie Martinez Gopher, basically, where I would do all her research. I would answer calls, I would babysit her kids, I would go get clothes for her. I would, you know, go driving around with her to events and was basically her apprentice for three years. And it was totally for free. I never got paid a dime from Hot 97 or from Angie Martinez. So I dropped out of school, like I said. And that was very difficult because I came from a family of doctors. So my dad was a doctor. All my siblings were in med school or, you know, just graduated. I'm the youngest of the baby, the family. And here I was working for free, dropped out of college, working at a radio station when everybody else was in med school.

Hala Tala: [00:03:49] So I was actually looked at as like the failure of the family, which is really funny now. And but I was working really hard, you know, they just didn't understand what I was doing. So then paying roll opened up at Hot 97 and it was to be Andrew Martinez's producer. And for a while I was doing that job. And every morning I would I was already doing that job from before. The reason why she had fired her producer is that he was really underperforming. And I was already doing that job for many, many months. And they decided to instead of hire me, I wasn't even getting paid minimum wage, but literally at the station every day had a key card as if I was employee, like, highly legal. Right. I, I still instead of giving me a job, they decided to promote somebody who is in the video department, who had no production experience, no producer experience whatsoever. And so I was pretty upset. I was a young girl. I was like twenty at the time or twenty one. And I, I sent a text to Jaroussky who is now very popular on Hot 97 all the time and still has his show. And I said he was the one who got the producer role. And I said, you know, I don't feel good today.

Hala Tala: [00:04:55] I don't want to come into the station. If you want to be the producer, learn it on your own and he showed that text to Angie, Angie got upset, fired me, and essentially tried to blackball me from the industry and told all the deejays they couldn't talk to me anymore, didn't even let me say goodbye. I had to pack. I didn't get to pack up my stuff. I just was never allowed to go there again, never allowed to talk to anyone again. And it was really traumatic, a traumatic experience for me, looking back and really impacted the future of my life very dramatically. Because had that never happened, I may have been on Hot 97 as an on air personality right now. And that was literally my trajectory. That's anybody who works for free at the station. It's for that reason they're basically saying work for free because we're going to make you a star, you know, and that's what I was working for free for. So anyway, I didn't let that hold me back. I think they fired me on a Thursday. And by Sunday, I had built like a website called the consortium hip hop strawberry plant Dotcom. And I decided I was going to recruit girls and create this network, this female network. And we were going to empower each other and support each other because I felt like as a woman, I wasn't getting the right exposure and opportunities in the hip hop industry.

Hala Tala: [00:06:05] And so I was going to recruit other girls. So we had girls from Def Jam, VH1, iHeart radio. All these different girls joined us. We started the sort of hip hop and at the height of it we were 50 girls strong. We were hosting the hottest parties and concerts in New York, the same DJs who wouldn't pay me minimum wage. I started hosting parties with them. If you go look on my Facebook and Instagram, you'll see fliers with me on with deejay Carmello and Funkmaster Flex and all these huge DJs that I used to host parties for. And we saw those concerts and a radio show. So it was great. And at the height of that, MTV scouted us for a reality TV show and they filmed us all summer. We got a studio on Broadway. It was finally going to be a way for me to, like, really monetize this endeavor. Like we were a big name in the tri state, but we weren't really making that much money just from events. 50 girls that money spreads quickly can spread thin across so many girls. I was the president, so I would get paid the most. But still, MTV filmed us all summer and then pulled the plug. So last minute they decided they're not going to air the show. And then again, it was one of those moments where where? What do I do now? You know, my life was kind of crumbling.

Hala Tala: [00:07:12] And then a piece of the story that I usually never tell. But I am going to tell it because it's relevant. It's the first time I've ever telling this is after MTV didn't pick our show. I shut down the blogsite, but I also at the same time, it was around twenty fourteen and there was lots of war going on in Gaza, Palestine, same thing. That's what's happening right now. And I shut down my website and I just became like an advocate for Palestine and I raised over three hundred thousand dollars for Palestine. And I had all these fundraising events and that's all I concentrated on for a long time. Yeah, but it was funny because I shut down my website and I basically exited from the entertainment industry and talking about Palestine and like being like political like that was like the nail in my coffin. So like nobody fucked with me anymore. A lot of the people who who supported me stop supporting me. I lost a lot of friends, like a lot of people just didn't mess with me anymore because I started promoting Palestine. So essentially. I exited the entertainment industry and I thought I would never get back on a mic again, so I was like, I'm just going to be I want to be better.

Hala Tala: [00:08:17] I want a more meaningful life. What I was doing before was all fake. It was so such like not sexual, but like we used to host parties because we were pretty girls and I just wanted to stay away from that. I was like, it's time for me to grow up. There's people dying in the world. I want to fix that. I want to be a good person and I want to work on myself because I felt like I had 50 girls under me, all kind of banking on my success for themselves to be successful. It was like I had to do like 90 percent of the work for all these other girls to get all this success. And I was like, I just want to do it on my own. So I went got my MBA. I basically forced myself into the graduate program because I did not have the I would add a two po...

Ep. 16 - Discussing Success & Failure with Hala Tala