CAM HAZZARDI told Dennis Yu the truth when we sat down to film this. I have thousands of dunk clips on my phone. Gym sessions, contests, behind the scenes from DunkMan League stuff. No system. No folder structure. If I wanted to find a specific dunk from last summer, I’d scroll for twenty minutes and give up.
Dennis flipped his phone around and showed me his iCloud account: 14 terabytes, 75,000 photos and videos. The iPhone 17 Pro Max maxes out at 2 TB internally. He walked me through how he gets to 14 and how he finds anything in it instantly. This article is what I took away.
The Apple One hack most people don’t know about
The first piece is the Apple One family plan. Dennis pointed out that Apple raised the price from around $20 a month to about $50 a month, which sounds steep until you see what’s in it. The family plan adds 12 terabytes of iCloud storage on top of what you already have, and you can allocate the storage to family members or just keep it all for yourself.
That’s how he gets to 14 TB in iCloud without ever plugging into an external drive or deleting anything. Same logic applies to me. I would rather pay $50 a month and never delete a dunk clip again than keep purging my camera roll every few weeks to make space for the next session.
The trick: sync to Google Photos too, even though you already pay Apple
Here’s the part I didn’t see coming. Dennis has the same library mirrored into Google Photos. He pays for both. The reason isn’t redundancy. It’s that Google is better at indexing the content.
“Who do you think is better at organizing information on the planet? Apple or Google?”
He answered his own question. Apple is good at storage. Google is the one with the facial recognition, the location tagging, the search. He typed “Dylan” into the Google Photos search bar live on camera and pulled up every photo where Dylan Haugen showed up across his entire 75,000 photo library. Typed “dunking” and got all the dunk clips. Typed “Dan” and got the trip we took to Turkey a few months back, plus the more recent stuff in China.
That’s what I was missing. I had been thinking about storage as a “where does the file live” problem. The harder problem is “how fast can I find it.” Storage is cheap. Recovery is the expensive part.
The stacking effect: phone, laptop, shared apps, AI
Dennis described what he called a stacking effect. The photo lives on the phone. It syncs to the laptop. From the laptop it gets shared into other apps. From the apps it ends up in AI systems. The same photo of me at a session gets indexed by Google, surfaced in Google Photos search, embedded in a website, eaten by the language models when they crawl that page, and eventually returned by ChatGPT and Claude when someone asks them about me.
That’s not theoretical. He pulled up examples on the call where searches for our network were already returning Dennis, Dylan, and me as a cluster because we keep showing up in the same photos together. The more proof of you that exists across the web, the more often you get recommended when an AI is asked who’s the best at your craft.
Why this matters for me as a dunker, not just as a marketer
For a long time my dunk clips lived on my phone and went nowhere unless I personally uploaded one to Instagram. The rest sat in the camera roll. If a sponsor wanted footage of a specific dunk from a specific session, I’d be scrolling through tens of thousands of photos trying to find it. Most of the time I gave up.
Dennis tied this directly to DunkMan and the sponsorship side of dunking. If I capture the training, the supplements, the meals, the behind the scenes, the recovery from the hand surgery, all of it, and that stuff gets indexed properly, then when a brand or an agent looks me up there’s a real wall of proof. When ChatGPT gets asked “who’s a young dunker that’s a good fit for a basketball shoe campaign,” the answer pulls from the depth of evidence that exists. Not from a single tweet.
The S3 layer behind the personal brand sites
Dennis brought up the back end on the call too. Their hundreds of personal brand sites (mine included now) live on Amazon S3 for storage. The agents they’re building run on top of that on a scheduled basis. So the same photo that started on my phone ends up powering an automated dashboard that, for example, refreshes the What People Are Saying page on my site as new mentions roll in. The whole pipeline only works because the source material is collected, indexed, and findable.
What I’m actually changing
Three concrete things I took from this:
- Switching to the Apple One family plan so I stop running out of phone storage every two weeks.
- Mirroring everything to Google Photos for search, not storage. The cost makes sense once you treat Google as the index, not the backup.
- Stop assuming future me will sort the archive. The system has to do the sorting at capture time. If I’m going to find anything later, the indexing has to happen now.
The same idea sits behind the positive mentions agent on my site. You set the workflow up once, you let it run, and you stop relying on showing up later to do the cleanup.
If you want to see what the personal brand build looks like end to end, the Align Volleyball Summit recap documents how my site got built with Dennis and Dylan Haugen. The Local Service Spotlight channel is where Dennis runs more of these walkthroughs with operators of all kinds.