Today's episode is like a cozy fireside chat, where we're looking back at some of the most mind-blowing, heart-touching conversations of 2023.
Our theme for the annual retrospective? "Betting on Yourself." You know, that moment when your heart whispers, "Hey, there's something here!" And instead of shushing it, you lean in and say, "Alright, let's dance with this idea." We've got snippets from incredible folks who took that leap, reshaped their lives, and found their purpose.
Tune in to hear from: Humble The Poet, the hilarious Kyle Cease, the truth-spitting Africa Brooke, the soulful Reverend Michael Bernard Beckwith, the dissect maestro Cole Cuchna, and the poetic Mark Nepo.
Each clip is a bite-sized burst of inspiration, around 10-15 minutes. Check the show notes for episode numbers, and maybe, just maybe, you'll be diving into their full stories. Ready for a dose of courage? Let's roll!
Today's episode is like a cozy fireside chat, where we're looking back at some of the most mind-blowing, heart-touching conversations of 2023.
Our theme for the annual retrospective? "Betting on Yourself." You know, that moment when your heart whispers, "Hey, there's something here!" And instead of shushing it, you lean in and say, "Alright, let's dance with this idea." We've got snippets from incredible folks who took that leap, reshaped their lives, and found their purpose.
Tune in to hear from: Humble The Poet, the hilarious Kyle Cease, the truth-spitting Africa Brooke, the soulful Reverend Michael Bernard Beckwith, the dissect maestro Cole Cuchna, and the poetic Mark Nepo.
Each clip is a bite-sized burst of inspiration, around 10-15 minutes. Check the show notes for episode numbers, and maybe, just maybe, you'll be diving into their full stories. Ready for a dose of courage? Let's roll!
The game changer was when I started filming my performances. I would go to this place called the Drake Hotel and they had a spoken word, kind of community Like, and I had their own online forum. They had everything, and then you would sign up and very much like, I guess, comedy clubs would sign up and then they pick you and they tell you you're performing. When I started putting it on YouTube and this is like early, early like the first year, second year of YouTube like everybody would see it and then people started showing up.
KC:And I get this email and it's like hey you, con man. It said I read this blog, this comedian wrote about you and I clicked the link. This is like 2010. And a comic that didn't know me and wasn't there wrote a blog spelling out how I must be doing this for the money which I really wasn't making. And all of a sudden, it's this viral point that I am scamming people as like a cult leader for money and I was too young to handle that. I, like something in me needs to die to handle this, because it was so overwhelming and I got so much hate and I felt so horrified. But I had enough Tony Robbins in my body to know I'm about to learn a new thing.
AB:We're saying that we want unity, we're saying that we want solutions, but actually our behavior is proving otherwise, because the moment someone asks questions, we're ashamed of them. The moment someone deviates from what is seen as acceptable, we dox them, we humiliate them. I'd fallen into the trap of identity politics and then I started writing about it bit by bit in my notes in my journal, and that eventually became my declaration why I'm leaving the cult of weakness.
MB:I had a crook in my neck that I was going to the chiropractor on a regular basis to get fixed. He put it into place. I could turn my neck to the right Quickly, though after a while it becomes sedentary again, it becomes stuck, and I couldn't have full rotation to the right. I could go to the left, I couldn't go to the right. So when I finally said yes to establishing a spiritual community, my neck popped into place. I never had to go back to the chiropractor. That, this condensation of energy, was my resistance towards the destinators trying to come forward.
CC:That first season of serial is landmark in podcast history, to say the least, probably the most important podcast season ever at this point, I think because it was a watershed moment for the format and a lot of people discovered podcasts through that season of serial. Yeah, just like a lot of people, I fell in love not only with that show but also the possibilities of the format and, like me, anything that I take a liking to I'm always like oh, what if I did that? What would my version of that be? Like I just can't help myself. Anything that I end up liking creatively, I can't help but start to formulate like what my version of that thing be.
MN:And I've come to understand that the soul wants the heart to be a lie, doesn't care how. You can do it by stamp collecting, you can do it by gardening and so that separates out the real work from what happens to it. And so ever since still being here after my cancer journey, real work is staying in the river of the connection, of my connection to the universal stream which produces the books, and my connection to you, which comes in the teaching circles and being with loved ones and like, oh, that's it, there's no five year plan, that's it, there's nowhere. No, that this is just to be as alive as possible, as loving as possible, holding nothing back, giving our all. Then we light up, then we are light and everything else is an illusion.
LW:Hey friend, welcome back to the light Watkins show. On light Watkins and I interview ordinary folks just like you and me, who've taken extraordinary leaps of faith in the direction of their path, their purpose or what they've identified as their mission in life, and in doing so, they've been able to positively impact and inspire the lives of many other people who've either heard about their story or who've witnessed them in action, or people who've directly benefited from their work. And today I have a very special treat for you We've got our annual retrospective, where I have hand selected clips from some of my personal favorites, my most impactful conversations from 2023. The theme for this year's retrospective is betting on yourself. In other words, when you get that internal nudge from your heart and instead of burying it, like a lot of people, do you say to yourself hmm, this is interesting. Okay, I'm going to explore this, I'm going to see what this is about, I'm going to take the next step. And the clips that I've chosen are all from past guests who have done just that they bet on themselves. People who've taken a leap of faith that allowed them to pivot away from whatever they were doing or whatever they were experiencing to what they now identify as their purpose, and the featured guests for this year's compilation are author and musician Humble the Poet. We'll hear from author and speaker and transformational comedian Kyle Seese. I also have author and speaker Africa Brooke, who went viral after publishing a blog called why I'm Leaving the Cult of Wokeness. We've got a clip from my interview with the Agape International Spiritual Center founder, reverend Michael Bernard Beckwith, as well as a clip from my conversation with Cole Kushner, who started one of my favorite podcasts called Dysect. And finally, we're going to hear from viral poet and author Mark Nipo, and each clip is going to be about 10 to 15 minutes long and I will put the individual episode numbers both in the introduction to the clip as well as in the show notes in case you feel inspired to go back and listen to that guest's entire backstory, which I obviously recommend doing. So, to kick things off, we're going to hear from Humble the Poet, who I interviewed back in episode 137. Humble Crowe funded his very first self-published book, which was called Unlearn, and he wrote grants to fund his early music ventures and he started doing shows in exchange for people buying his self-published book. Eventually, he got a book deal and found himself being interviewed by Charlemagne the God on the Breakfast Club, which is a pretty big deal, and in this clip, humble talks about how, if he didn't leave his job as a teacher when he did, he probably wouldn't be where he is today. Let's listen in.
HP:The game changer was when I started filming my performances. I would go to this place called the Drake Hotel and they had a spoken word kind of community like, had their own online forum, they had everything, and then they would have you would sign up. You would sign up and very much like, I guess, comedy clubs you sign up and then they pick you and they tell you you're performing. And then I remember very quickly realizing that, like that process, because it'd be a drive. It'd be like a 30 minute drive to get into the city because I was living in the outskirts, not being able to rely on that process. So then I would always just sign up as an amateur. So the amateur is people would have a much lower bar for you, but I would constantly perform as an amateur. I would never sign up and be on the list of the main performers because I realized, being an amateur, you're guaranteed to perform and then people aren't expecting you to do great things. I did that for a while. Then I started filming it. Then, when I started filming it, when I started putting it on YouTube and this is like early, early, like the first year, second year of YouTube, like everybody would see it and people started showing up because it would be like, you know, gone. We're saying Drake Hotel, june 3rd 2010.
AB:It would date where I was thinking the way we're thinking now.
HP:So then people knew this is where, oh, we've never seen a guy like this doing this. Let's go see him. So people started showing up. Then I got into music. I was writing spoken words of different instrumentals, trying to use them as like backdrops, and then that instantly turns into you rapping over a beat, and then I started putting out audio. I think after going to the studio two or three times, I learned what equipment to buy. Somebody sold me their mic and another friend who produced music taught me how to connect everything to my computer and how to use what was I using back then Pro Tools, I think and I started recording, writing and recording music every day.
LW:Is the studio expensive, like, how did you pay for that?
HP:I had money. I was working as a teacher. I had money working and I have, and I live at home, so I don't have any expenses, okay, but it wasn't, it wasn't. No, I remember I bought the microphone. I bought the microphone for $200 from a guy who had a very nice studio, so he had upgraded his equipment, sold me his mic for $200. And then I bought like a back. Then you had to get an interface, an inbox interface, so that's what you plug your mic into and then that'll plug into the computer. I think I paid $200 for that and I think that came with the software and there's more about learning how to do it. And then I would just go and download instrumentals and just rap over. I remember dropping music every single day and doing lyrics videos on Windows Movie, not Windows Movie Maker. First I was a Windows Movie Maker and I was taking forever. And then I got a Mac and then I was doing lyrics videos on iMovie and literally the same lyrics I typed out. I would just put them in scroll like credits and they were just and they were lying over, they wouldn't. And then again this was back where it was cool, like mixtapes were okay, you could take someone's beat and rap on it and you wouldn't get a copyright strike. Yeah, and I remember the day. Like years and years later, I was in Kenya. It was like 2016. And I remember I was in the middle of nowhere and there was, like they called it, the Wi-Fi couch. There was a couch at this place. That's the only place the Wi-Fi worked. I remember sitting on the couch, turning on my phone and instantly getting five copyright strikes on my SoundCloud and they shut down my account and it was all from like mixtape shit I recorded in like 2008, 2009. But I would just take whatever beats I liked and just rap over. You hadn't cleared anything, no, you just ripped the beats and then you would loop the beat. You just get the beat at the end and loop it. This is like when mixtapes were cool. It was like 50 cent era. This is Drake. You know that when Drake was doing mixtapes, this is like when it was okay. That stuff's not okay anymore, but there was a good time when it happened. I was just making music and then I started finding other people who were trying to make music and then I connected with this producer who at that point, claimed that he had been making music for artists and Japan and Japan had a really good hip hop market and then he really put a battery in my back in terms of being an artist and he really wanted me to work more on making things happen and I think I was gaining traction. Whatever that was back then, whether it was having 20,000 people on Facebook or something and he was like yo, I got us an opportunity to write music for other people. I don't know if you watch Atlanta with the episode about a young white avatar. It's a newer episode.
LW:Is that from the recent?
HP:season. Yeah, the recent season. I haven't finished the recent season yet. Okay, it was the same idea. He pretty much hit me up because yo, these like pretty boy white kids that want to rap, will write their music for them and there's so much money in that. And he had brought me paperwork and everything and I was like, oh my God, I can quit my job off this money. This is more money than I make working as a teacher for two years. So then that's when I quit my job, take my tenant out of the place, moved in there so I can focus on the music, and then after about a year it wasn't happening. His deal wasn't real. His motivation is behind lying about the deal to this day I'll never know, but at the end of the day, like that really started the journey and then that was probably the end of 2011.
LW:A couple questions about that, I think anyone who's 40 or above has experienced something like that, where you thought something that was too good to be true was where you learned that something that was too good to be true was bullshit. When you were first entertaining that offer from this guy so the $120,000 advance did you feel anything inside that kind of hinted at the fact that this may be too good to be true? Or were people saying to you this is probably not real and you were ignoring it? Or you genuinely were thinking this is it.
CC:This is my launch.
HP:No, I think I was ignoring it. I think when I saw the paperwork in my head, that was enough. I thought that really made me and I was also desperate. I wasn't in the best financial situation because I wasn't the best with my money back then. So I think it was you believe what you want to believe. I think we're all guilty of that. We see what we want to see and the cognitive dissonance of that. So that's what I wanted. I wanted to believe that I was good enough to make a lot of money doing this. I wanted to believe that this was an option and this was going to get me out of the financial challenges that I was going through, because this is also like my own property. But I also was making investments and random stocks here, there and stuff like that. When I was young. I was trying to figure that stuff out in 2008,. 2009 hit, so then I got walloped, so it was like I was in debt from that. So this was me trying to figure out how to get out of debt, me trying to figure out everything, and it was like it's going to take eight years from your salary to pay off all this debt. And here somebody's coming in with this promise of just and I think he probably heard me say that a lot where I was like I can't leave my job, I need the money, like I'm in debt, I can't do this. So while I was all these years doing the art, while having a job and meeting artists who were like full time and didn't have much going on, they're working service jobs or they're living paycheck to paycheck, doing whatever else they're doing, or gig to gig, I didn't want that life. I didn't want the struggling artist life. So I was avoiding that. And I think he figured all that out. So he was like, okay, what if I offer this guy a lot of money, it'll make him take this route. And so I don't know if he thought that was going to make me step up my game and then he'd figure out the money later, who knows? And then in that sense, it did end up working out that way. It didn't happen in a year, it took maybe five years, but it ended up playing it that way. If I didn't leave my job and didn't become a super struggling artist, then I wouldn't be here today.
LW:I mean to his credit. Isn't that kind of the Scooter Braun? Was it Justin Bieber that he discovered Like, where he didn't have any connections? He just pitched? I don't know if he'd be promised Justin something else in dollars, but I know that he didn't have as many connections as he'd made it out and it worked out based on his talent.
HP:Yeah, but I think with Scooter he also had intense hustle.
LW:He also worked like so this guy didn't have it, he didn't have it, he didn't have it, he didn't have it.
HP:He didn't have it. I'm not sure exactly what he had going on and I think, just I never went too deep into trying to figure it out, but I think there was just a history even in the family, of they just weren't above board people, and I think, yeah, I never dug deep into it and at the end of the day it didn't matter at that point. Once I realized it wasn't real, like how it was, in like intense survival mode, I had to figure out everything, what was going on, how I was going to pay my bills, how I was going to get out of debt, and that really started the journey then.
LW:So you obviously look very different from your average hip hop artist right? And I'm curious, were you bought in all your image the entire time? Were you thinking, oh, I need to do different things in order to be embraced by this community? Or how did that whole thing go? And when did Humble the Poet become your stage name?
HP:Humble the Poet was my stage name from before all of this. It was even before I was putting stuff out there. I think I was in the studio. Humble was the name that I was using when I was doing like online battle raps and stuff like that. Then Humble the Poet came from one of the battles, saying screw the rappers, screw the MCs. I'm a poet, so that's where it came from. So it was really like a the name was throwing it in the face of the people that I was battling against. And then when I was in the studio with a bunch of other rappers, I was like they were asking me if I had a rap name and I was staying Humble the Poet and then they were all saying that's a stupid name. So I kept it out of spite at that point. I think with most rappers in general, is that the chip on the shoulder is just can I rap and you overdo that, and that's generally the undoing. I have friends who rap in Toronto right now and they're still trying to improve, they're still trying to impress, like Eminem and Cannabis, and that's great, but none of that music is going to pay your bills. And I was in the same space. I think the only difference was I was using I was also using hip hop as an outlet of expressing messages and things that I care about. I mean, I'm doing the same now. I was thinking about that very recently, not wanting to play this TikTok game and promote music and stuff like that. I was like I can just write about stuff that I care about and create a moment and drop it, not worry about what it does anymore, and go back to the original reason that I was making music, which is to get out ideas, the original reason I was making music. Now that we've just been talking about it, I was sitting in a room. There was a group of like young professionals and they were trying to create this how to help the youth. There was a lot of crime in the neighborhood and two young professionals from the neighborhood trying to like figure out what to do. And I remember there's like a doctor in the room and he was talking about like the amount of HIV that's going around, because a lot of truck drivers were like going down south sleeping with prostitutes, getting HIV and bringing it back to their families. So all these like untold stories that we didn't know were happening in the community. And then somebody I made the comment like the kids just don't listen. And to me, being a teacher, I was like it's not that the kids don't listen, is that you don't know how to talk to them. So I think hip hop originally was me saying I know how to talk to young people. That's been what I've always been doing is just trying to find people's either their inner child or speaking to children and communicating that way. And that's where the music originally came from. That's what I was trying to do back then. It was never about trying to make hip music or anything. But then, because back then you don't even think you can, you don't think like a full time artist making one like that's not something I could do, that's not. You don't know anyone who's done it at that point, yeah, and then they kind of manifest itself extremely organically with all these ups and downs.
LW:That was Humble the Poet from episode 137. I highly recommend checking out his entire episode and in the meantime, we're going to hear a clip from my interview with transformational comedian Kyle Cease of episode 144. After over 20 years of achieving what he originally thought was his dream of being a headlining touring comedian and actor, kyle suddenly discovered that the belief when something happens, I'll be happy is not exactly how life works, at least on a spiritual level, and he realized that he needed to start doing what would make him happy first, and then everything else would flow from that. So Kyle decided to quit his stand up comedy career at its peak, mind you, and he began branding himself as a transformational comedian or, more accurately, as a spiritual thought leader who used humor to engage his audiences. And in this clip Kyle describes his process of transitioning from conventional comedian to transformational comedian and how, when you justify not doing what you feel in your heart, you end up burying that heart voice and you may even get to the point where you can't hear it at all. Okay, let's listen in.
KC:Because I became this Tony Robbins in the comedy scene and wanting everyone to know they can have the life they want. I got very passionate about as a headlining comedian, showing aspiring comedians that they could have this life too. And so I started doing this thing where I was coaching aside like would do events, where I wanted young comedians open micers, whatever to know they could have this. And I created this thing called stand up boot camp and it was like this boot camp for aspiring comedians or people that just wanted to bring comedy into whatever their life was or whatever. So it was kind of combining my massive life experience as a comic with some of my version of Tony Robbins principles, so there'd be this kind of motivational point Plus all the lessons I learned from the road and some big comics came and spoke at it and one was Louis Anderson, the late, great Louis Anderson, and he and I ended up partnering together and we were teaching people this and I went through this kind of six months maybe or so of us doing these events on the road and the audience was either aspiring comics that liked it, or there were other comics that knew about it, thought it was cool, or there was also a wave of people that weren't going, who comics are about calling BS on everything, and I would hear through the grapevine, comics that were peers of mine were talking crap about me. Kyle went off the deep end. Is he a Scientologist now? Is he a cult leader? What's going on? And I remember one very big day. This is the big week of the next level of my shift. I met breakfast with Louis and I'm telling him I really want to get over what people think about me. And I go back to my hotel. There's a car that's supposed to take me to the airport and I get this email and it's like hey, you, con man. It said I read this blog. This comedian wrote about you and I clicked the link. This is like 2010. And a comic that didn't know me and wasn't there wrote a blog spelling out how I must be doing this for the money, which I really wasn't making. It was funny as a comic, which I stopped doing to do this for a while. I was making five to 10,000 a show and this I was. We're developing it. It was like a hundred to $200 for the weekend and this blog was written and spelling out that I'm this guy doing this for the money. You can't teach comedy. Anyone that says you can is. I also had a belief that I get some of their points and sometimes I still believe what I believe, which is I believe everyone can be funny, and this is the thing that really pissed comics off, because anyone can be a comedian. And an example I give is if you've ever said anything headliner level funny, like you're just at a dinner with someone, you're riffing about an X or politics or something and it comes through funny that you have that in you, right, that's there. Maybe you didn't channel it or use it or harness it, but that was a huge argument against me that Kyle just thinks anyone can be funny. And I've now seen some comics that have worked 10 years that are not funny and have continued to be not funny. So I'm like I get their point too, but they're working. So I don't know. I'm not trying to shit on them, I'm just open to maybe not everyone is supposed to be a comedian also. So I get that point and I think there are some people that have insane comedy potential that think they're not funny, that aren't tapping into it. That could. So there's arguments to both. So I read this blog this guy wrote and he gets shared among the comics, like tons of them share it. And all of a sudden it's this viral point that I am scamming people as like a cult leader, for money and I was too young to handle that. I like something in me needs to die to handle this, because it was so overwhelming and I got so much hate and I felt so horrified. But I had enough Tony Robbins in my body to know I'm about to learn a new thing. So I told the car that was going to take me to the airport to go without me. I canceled the next week's tour and I stayed in the hotel for six days and I just watched, as I had no idea what to do. And for the first four days my body kept coming up with all these solutions, like karate kid. I'll show them with another number, one special. I'll prove it circumstantially right and I would feel these triggers and these fears and see myself on the other side of them. And on day four I had this moment where I watched as noticed Wait, it's been four days of me safe in a hotel saving my life, but I'm safe Like I've been in fight or flight based on my thoughts of the future versus the circumstance. And this moment happened where my thoughts were over here and they're just well, I'll do this. And I'm looking at them and I just feel this moment where, like I'm not, my thoughts, like these thoughts that are going crazy, aren't me, they're saving their life. And there was some separation where, all of a sudden, I wasn't my problems, I wasn't my accomplishments, I wasn't my history, and everything just collapsed and I was just a dude staring at the wall and time changed. There wasn't time like five hours past when I'm just staring at the wall and it felt like very quick and I just I don't know. Everything was suddenly different, like this whole shell of all my fears and everything just collapsed and this was suddenly. I'm not against motivation, I love it, but this was the end of the motivational phase of my life and the reason is because, when I got back, I had these things I was actually hearing myself say at the boot camps and teaching and stuff, and I heard this calling in me that goes and this, by the way, isn't a pitch for raw veganism as much as it's the story of the lifting of the thing but I heard this calling in my body go. What if you went raw vegan for 90 days? And so I decided to leverage myself to for sure do it. And I announced to the public I'm going to go 90 days eating raw vegan. If I eat anything cooked or animal product, I'll give away 10 grand. So this put me on the island and burn the boats, like someone walks by with a cookie and offers it to me. It's a $10,000 cookie. I'm not eating it. So for 30 days I remember getting really healthy and doing this with my friend Diego. He was doing it with me. He was also does good filming of stuff and everything. And we get to day 30. I remember this moment where someone walked by me with a hot dog and I smelled it and all I smelled was chemicals and metal. And I noticed that my taste buds just changed. Like that blew my mind that 30 days ago a hot dog would have been an amazing craving and now it felt like it fell off of me and just feels ridiculous. So I started going what else feels heavy and getting excited about letting go of other things. So I was like, what if I got off Facebook? What if I didn't date for a while? What if I whatever? And this began, this principle. That was really big. And this moment I said to Diego he said this quote I said what if I canceled Facebook? I didn't cancel it, but I said to him, what if I did? And he said the only thing I know he was in the car with me he goes. The only thing I know is, if you do, your stress comes from, you'll only be able to measure what you'll lose. You can't see what you'll gain. This became the essence of how I lived If it's heavy, let go of it. If it's heavy, you're keeping it because you don't trust and there's a higher thing. So we get to like day 45 and I was going to do stand up at a comedy club and I remember thinking I don't want to do. I was just literally going ugh and I had this moment. I'm like, oh shit, I went up. So I went up in vibration and now my dream career comedy is heavy, right. So this was a big moment because I was like I have to honor the thing. If it's heavy, you can only measure what you lose. You can't see what you'll gain. So I tell the clubs I'm not coming, we're not going to go do stand up. The next week was a big week because I'm now someone who's not doing my old dream career and I can hear what's here. I'm in fact, I would even say and this is something that should be exciting for people I realized I'm even bigger than my dream career because I'm letting go of it. Right, I'm not these external have tos anymore. I'm bigger than it. And so we get today, whatever, 45, I let go of it. It's a week later and I hear my body go what if you combine comedy and transformation? And I hear my ego go no one's ever done that, like at least the way I want to do it. I know there's comedians that make points, but it was like no one's ever done that and my soul was like no one's ever done that, it's your own field. It'd be like your own thing. So I said to Diego, what if we film videos for the colleges by name and I literally make a video? And we've shot hundreds of videos where I'm like, hey, this is a video for Diane Johnson at North Idaho University and this is Kyle Cease, and many of those people had me as a comedian there. So I said I'd love to do the lecture circuit at your school. So I remember comics that we give me shit Like, why aren't you going to do a club? And then a ton of those colleges said yes, at a way higher price, like around 10 grand a pop. And instead of me doing a week at a comedy club, doing morning radio at a club next to an Applebee's for three to five grand, I'm now flying out hitting one college saying exactly what I believe, flying home for 10 and getting a ton of those all of a sudden being the best choice for lecture circuits as it's the guy from 10 things I hate about you and these movies. They know, and I'm their age, more and everything, and just getting all this work for so much more money. And I had a huge agency. I had a really big agency and they wanted 10% of these gigs. But they also wanted me to stay a comic. They didn't like this weird transformational person I was becoming. So, even though they were a huge agency, they were becoming heavy, right, like they were out of alignment, even though they handled household name people. They want me to stay a comic and they want 10% of this stuff. They have nothing to do with it. I'm getting more gigs on my own anyway. So they're out of alignment, they feel heavy. So this was a scary let go and I was justifying keeping them because they get me auditions for movies and stuff and I have a big rule that if you're justifying keeping something, you have to let go of it. This is really big because wouldn't it be weird if you're on a date with someone and they go? I guess I like you because I like your clothes. Like you know, they don't like you. Wouldn't I be a crappy dad if I was like? I guess I'll keep being Vivi's dad because she gets good medical coverage. And I don't justify what I do for a living. But we do have things in our life we do justify. Like I hate this job, but I know I'm getting a promotion later. I don't like this person, I don't feel safe with them, but they took me to a nice dinner that one time. When we justify something, this is what that is. That's your ego explaining to yourself and making sense out of why you're ignoring your heart. And if you keep that thing, you ignore your heart more and more until you just bury it. So people that are in jobs they hate for 30 years they don't even know there is a calling or a heart. They've just ignored it so much. I don't say that with judgment. I understand why too, but when you're justifying something, you have to be explaining why you're not doing what your soul wants you to do.
LW:That was Kyle Cease from episode 144, which was an instant classic, so you definitely want to check that one out. And next we're going to go to the UK to listen in on one of my most profound conversations from 2023 with author and speaker and coach, africa Brooke, from episode 150. Africa, whose family is actually from Zimbabwe, which is in Africa, she went viral back in 2020 when she bet on herself by publicly announcing, after the outrage caused by George Floyd's death, that she was leaving the culture of wokeness and, as a black woman, this obviously caused a lot of controversy, but she stood by her belief and she became known for speaking out against cancel culture. She had a very popular interview with Jordan Peterson and Stephen Bartlett and a bunch of other people, so I was honored to have her on the podcast. And what's even more interesting is how she arrived at that place for herself when she decided to speak out against cancel culture, and that's what this clip is about, so I'll let her say it in her own words. Let's listen in to my conversation with Africa Brooke.
AB:So when 2020 came around, there was already tension around the handling of the pandemic and the medical choices that people would make or might not make, et cetera. But the George Floyd incident it was a very emotionally intense time. I don't think I've ever felt anything like that in my lifetime and I don't know if I will On a collective level. That same intensity. Everyone focused on one thing that is happening in one country, but it's so global and it's kickstarting such vital conversations and I will never dismiss that. I actually think a lot of things have changed for the better, because it's meant that people have had to be in a state of self-inquiry, which I'm awful, but I immediately slipped into a place of deep anger and rage and part of me felt like I had to, like I didn't have any other choice but to do that and, very similar to you, I made one specific expression of rage and anger. I think there were things that I was resharing and reposting at the time, just different mantras and different phrases and different things. Again, the emotions it was all consuming, but there was also this very addictive and beautiful solidarity that was happening at the same time. So you have this sort of cocktail of feelings and emotions, and I was very angry because, essentially, I was being told that I'm always going to be oppressed, that this incident is absolute evidence that I will always be in the position of victim, always, regardless of what I do, regardless of all of it, none of it matters. We will always be in this place of victimhood. And that made me very rageful. So I was resharing a lot of things without any critical thought, without asking who's saying it, where is it coming from? What is the context? There was no rationale, nothing. It was purely emotion. So it meant that anytime someone approached me to say, hey, have you thought about this? Or a conversation from a place of rationale, it made me furious, because someone trying to speak to someone who's in a deeply emotional place from a place of rationale it never works. And there were a lot of mantras that I was repeating around white supremacy and assignments being violence, et cetera, and many other things of that nature that I didn't truly believe. But I think there was this deep desire to belong and I felt like I was already starting to belong anyway, that I was just finding myself performing and behaving in ways that I hadn't even decided. So, anyway, I shared something specifically, this man sent me a message, and he was a mixed race man. He sent me a message saying something along the lines of do you think this is the best approach to take Because of a lot of things that I was sharing at the time and reposting? So he simply asked a question and I publicly shamed this man. I took a screenshot of something that he had said to me in private in my DMs and I made it a post on my Instagram, and it was at that time where there were so many eyes on Instagram, you could post one thing and it could just take a life of its own. So many careers were created in that time. So many people's identities were formed in that time because of the validation and affirmation that they were getting in this really unique environment that I don't know if that will ever happen again. Immediately, and in the caption, I wrote something around you know it being an example of white supremacy people positioning their questions as something along those lines, and immediately it got validated, immediately, there was a huge response to it. Thank you for saying this. There's people were calling out this man, et cetera, et cetera. There were maybe 4,000 likes in this space of under 10 minutes, just these things that really just feed your ego and make you feel exonerated that you've done something right, you know You're on the right side of history, whatever it might be. And just as quickly all just started to feel very wrong. It felt very wrong just as quickly. I think that post was up for a maximum of 20 minutes and there were hundreds of comments and it was being reshared. This is an example of white supremacy blah, blah, blah. Suddenly, it's almost like I had an out of body experiencing, where I was witnessing an alternate reality version of myself which wasn't actually me, and I felt deeply uncomfortable. I knew that I had found myself in the clutches of groupthink. It had abandoned all rationale. There was no critical thinking, I was not asking questions. I had betrayed my values and my own boundaries in order to belong, and this moment was illustrating this perfectly. And I immediately deleted the post and I didn't message the man straight away, but I did a couple of days later and I apologized for that and he didn't think it was that big of a deal, but I definitely did. And that was the moment where I started to zoom out of this very addictive environment that was feeding my ego and I started to realize what I had been participating in and, as someone that had been researching and studying self-sabotage for such a long time, I realized that what was happening was collective sabotage. People called it council culture, et cetera, but at the time I didn't believe that council culture existed. I thought it was just an excuse for people to evade accountability, which is another mantra that you hear right. But the language that was more specific to me and made sense was collective sabotage. It was a group effort to get in our own way. We're saying that we want unity, we're saying that we want solutions, but actually our behavior is proving otherwise, because the moment someone asks questions, we're ashamed of them. The moment someone deviates from what is seen as acceptable, we dox them, we humiliate them. We, you know, I always think of it like a virtual public stoning session. You know you're in the public square and everyone's stoning you. That's how it feels and that's what I did. That's the environment that I created, and that's when my own process of realizing that I had participated in something that was so vile and disturbing to my spirit and not only that, I had been internalizing certain things as fat, without even asking myself questions. I'd fallen into the trap of identity politics, and then I started writing about it bit by bit in my notes in my journal, and that eventually became my declaration why I'm leaving the cult of whopeness. So I would say it was around June, july that I started to write and started to think about putting some of my thoughts out, and the beautiful thing is that it had never fully become a part of my brand, this idea that I'm oppressed. I was using other people's words and language to share my stance on what I was supporting, but I never used that language myself. Specifically, I think I did indirectly, whether it's talking about opportunities that were not given to me as a black person, blah, blah, blah. But before that lesson even came out, I started sharing my thoughts on intolerance. I started sharing my thoughts on division. I started sharing my thoughts on being mindful of the people that were put on pedestals without actually allowing ourselves to think critically. I was sharing about the importance of not discarding people because of one mistake. As someone that had made plenty of mistakes and had the blueprint of getting sober, I knew that I had dismissed a lot of people, a lot of people who are now brilliant friends of mine, different thinkers and different curious people that were contrarians or mavericks or people just went against the grain. I had dismissed them because of their identity, because of something that they said once without taking in the full picture. So everything that I was starting to realize about my own behavior and participation I was sharing. So I had built a little bit of confidence over time before that lesson. But everything that was in that open letter was very raw and it was very direct and it was very upfront, even in the way that I opened the letter with. If there's one thing I'm not afraid of, it's being canceled, and saying something like that in 2020 or early 2021 was just like a very audacious thing to say. But I knew that's what it had to be. And in the moments before that, I was in my living room which is where I was speaking from right now and I was on my couch and I had been writing this thing for a couple of hours and I was feeling so much, I felt so charged. I felt like I could shoot up through the roof like a little rocket, like a little bald rocket. I felt so nervous, I felt so scared, I felt so uncomfortable, but I also felt so excited, I felt so liberated. It was almost like that first feeling that I had when I started my Instagram page on day one of getting sober and putting that picture up off a cocktail a photo that I'd taken before and saying that I've found myself, at 24 years old, in the clutches of alcoholism. It was that same exhilaration and fear and the exact same feeling. And then I shared it to my newsletter. My heart was pumping. I think at the time I had a very modest number on my newsletter I think maybe about 3,000 people I can't quite remember which felt modest at the time compared to my following in other areas Shared this thing and I'd never received so many replies before of people saying thank you so much for sharing this. I've always felt this way. So again, it was this validation and affirmation that I'd received months prior, but it was in a different way. I'd shared this thing from a case of integrity and knowing that this is not comfortable, but I have to be honest. I can't lie anymore and I knew that sharing it in my newsletter was hiding. I was hiding because it's safe to do it there, because then I did your fans. Exactly so. The next day I believe that it was January the second I posted it onto my Instagram and then again, this thing just took off. I had no control over it and the comments were not all just loving, Thank you, Of course they were not.
LW:You're not black, you're so right.
AB:How can you say that before calling me?
CC:What about this or that situation?
AB:You're the British Candice Rowan. There were a lot of things that people were saying, but still those comments were not even that many at all. They were not even that many at all and I think it's because in my open letter it wasn't just me leaving the left and going into the right. It wasn't that. And I think sometimes it's easier to deal with a person when they're moving from one ideology and neatly into another, One political party and neatly into another. But for me it wasn't anything like that. I am. If we look at my values, I am a left-leaning person. I don't overattach myself to any kind of ideology. But if we look at my values and what I stand for and who I am, you could think you know where to place me. I think for a lot of people that they didn't and still don't know where to place me. But what I was saying was echoing so many people's hearts and it offered so many people relief. And I remember not being able to sleep for about three days after that. I just couldn't sleep you keep checking the comments. Oh, of course.
LW:What was your relationship to comments like? Were you replying to everything? Were you just letting off your advance reply?
AB:I was allowing people to have the conversation amongst themselves. I was responding to some things, but the energy was so intense and so overwhelming and this thing was spreading and some very high profile people shared it at the time. So it was going beyond what I could control and, with the analytics that I could record for my end, for my newsletter, it was read by. I think within the first three weeks it was read by 1.5 million people. It was shared, but on different platforms that I don't have any control. This thing's huge.
LW:Was Fox News reaching out wanting you to come on into.
HP:Tucker Carlson or something like that.
AB:They didn't. They didn't, but I was able to have really important conversations. But something that I knew from that time is that I don't want this to become a gimmick. I don't want it to become my personality. I don't want to become the person that speaks about workism. So I've been very mindful of that from the very beginning, which is why I think also, my work resonates so much, because I will have the conversations and I will say what I need to say. But I know that the problems is much bigger. It's a philosophical problem, it's not a politics problem, and I know that if I just focus on looking at the cost of self-censoring, it allows me to stay honest and it allows me to really stay in the gray the moment before pressing share in such a public way. There was a lot of discomfort, there was a lot of anxiety, but I knew that I had to speak. I had been holding this thing in for such a long time, so my need to stay true to myself was always going to come before adding discomfort that I felt.
LW:Again. That was Africa Brooke from Episode 150. If you're considering going public with a self-empowering yet unpopular belief, definitely give Africa's entire episode a listen for more inspiration. And next we're going to play a clip from one of my favorite people on the planet, reverend Michael Bernard Beckwith. I had the honor of interviewing Reverend Beckwith back in Episode 154. It was, hands down, one of my favorite interviews since I started this podcast, mainly because of the Rev's generosity of spirit and incredible storytelling. And for those of you who are familiar with his story, you know that Reverend Beckwith founded the Agape International Spiritual Center in Los Angeles, which is attended by Stevie Wonder and Oprah and a bunch of other really high profile luminaries. But in order to create that space that became Agape, reverend Beckwith had to take a massive bet on himself by following his inner guidance, which told him to stop doing one-on-one privates and to create a space for more people to be impacted by his work, his spiritual wisdom. And in this clip he talks about those early days of Agape and the various obstacles that he faced when finding his first spaces to hold services and how the plan was less about taking the conventional route to acquiring business loans and such, and it was more about cultivating the vibration that became Agape, but he tells it better than me, so let's go to this clip with Reverend Michael Beckwith.
MB:I was the director of training at the prayer ministry. I was on the faculty at the university there teaching, and I had my private clientele and I was doing seminars, a lot of them out of my living room, a lot of it running places and things like that. I was doing all of this. So part of me was like I'm doing. Well, I was doing seminars before they were popular. You know what I mean. Now it's like a thing. But there was. I knew I was being pulled to start a community, but I was resisting. I was like I really don't want to like my weekends and I remember a couple of things happened. One when I said yes. First of all, I had a crook in my neck that I was going to the chiropractor on a regular basis to get fixed. He put it into place. I could turn my neck to the right quickly, though After a while it becomes sedentary again, it becomes stuck, and I couldn't have full rotation to the right. I could go to the left, I couldn't go to the right. So when I finally said yes to establishing a spiritual community, my neck popped into place. I never had to go back to the chiropractor. That, this condensation of energy, was my resistance towards the destinators trying to come forward. I do go to Mexico I think it was Puerto Vallarta, I think it was and I actually saw Agape. I saw, I had a vision of it. I remember coming back to Los Angeles and telling the director of the prayer ministry that I was going to be leaving. I was going to start a community and she said to me where? And I said I've been advised to start it in Santa Monica. And she says why don't you start a community for your own people? And I said short people? And she turned red and felt embarrassed because she was saying why don't you start it in the hood, why don't you know what you know for black people? And she was so embarrassed about saying that and eventually I started my vision group. Whole people put together in my living rooms. I had three groups of people that I pulled from. There was my private clientele. They were all people always saying if you ever started a thing, please let me know. And I would say I'm not going to start a thing, don't worry. And then there was I was teaching a practitioner class at the time and they were always saying to me if you ever start a thing, we're going to be right there with you, okay. And then there was people that from the seminars I was doing. So anyway, I pulled, curated a number of people to meet in my living room. I started this vision group and Ivana Gale was there. I can see Deborah Johnson there, I can see Joan Stebbin, I can see Bill Russell, I can see Unicell Fine. I can see all these people. I can see them all in that. Coco Stewart, they're all ministers. I started this vision group to open up to the possibility of catching a vision for a spiritual community and then becoming the vibration of it, number of months, number of months just meeting every week to become the frequency of the community we wanted to birth. So it wasn't about business plans, wasn't about linear strategy. It was about becoming the consciousness of agape, the consciousness of love, the consciousness of connection, and then letting that determine the actions. And on November the 30th 1986, we had our very first service. 36 years ago. Was there any?
LW:politics involved, when you left the guided church of religious science to do your own thing.
MB:I think that when I left, there was a couple of things that happened. One before I left, I mentioned everything I was doing at the time. One of my students in my practitioner class was a part of a church in Fullerton. Minister had left and they asked me would I come speak? I said, sure, I came as well. The congregation wanted me to be the minister. I said I don't really think this is a fit for me. I said I don't mind guest speaking, but I don't think I'm to be the minister of this church. And they just bugged me and I said, okay, I'll put my hat in the ring and see what happens. So I began to speak. The congregation they filled out a poll in 99.9, so people wanted me to be the minister. But there's a small group of people that was controlling the board it was called the selection committee would not turn my name in because they were saying things like we can't have a black man the minister in Orange County. The property values are going to go down, there's going to be trash on the lawn, all these stereotypes about black people. They're going to put their cars on the front lawn. And now what unbeknownst to these people is that my students. Two of them were on that board, but they thought that these people were thinking like them, so they would get in these so-called private rooms and they'd just be talking about me. We can't let this in be minister of the church. How are we going to stop this? So I've graduated now, obviously, from the school of ministry, my first ministerial meeting. I'm walking across the campus and a big time minister who I had much respect for was speaking. I could hear him through the window. He was saying there's a travesty happening. We have to pray to stop it. And I'm wondering what that is. He said there's this black guy that's trying to become the minister of this church in Orange County. We've got to stop it. They're talking about me and I'm thinking, wow, this metaphysical movement. We still haven't cleaned out the skeletons of racism. But I walk into the room and I sat right in front of him, front row, and just looked at him and he changes the subject. Okay, long story short, I pull out of that and I just said you know, this is not for me, but I never was going to allow anything outside of myself to determine my destiny, which quickened me to start my own thing. I wasn't going to put myself into a position where a human being was going to choose me and subsequently that church, when it had that big earthquake back, then split down the middle and was uninhabitable for a long period of time. They had to meet somewhere else and the woman that they hired to move in really quick so they can say that they were diverse and everything, and she ended up pilfering a lot of the money and leaving. So all the things they were worried about happened. It was very interesting, but a few years later they came to Agape and apologized and they felt very sheepish and humble and just really felt bad. That particular experience took me to the depth of forgiveness because I would not allow them to birth rank or resent me or at a mostly in my soul. I wouldn't allow it. I would not be killed. They said all kinds of things about me. I never graduated from the school. I had the top class In terms of taking the test. I had the top ever in history. I didn't graduate. I did. They started all these lies about me, but I wouldn't allow it to infiltrate my mind and so I taught my students because they were mad at what they were saying about me and what they were saying about black people. I said, no, we're not going to go down that path. We're going to bubble up love them, forgive them. They don't know what they're doing and we're going to move forward, which is what we did, yeah.
LW:Obviously, agape grew into this massive movement, but in the early days did you have some imposter syndrome getting up there talking or trying to find loans to finance buildings and all?
CC:of these kinds of things.
MB:What did you call it? The imposter? Yeah, the imposter syndrome. What is that? We had a couple of things that happened when we moved from Santa Monica to Culver City. They sold the building in Santa Monica, and so we had.
LW:That was that women's building right.
MB:The Santa Monica Bay Women's Club was the first place we met. Okay, we only met there for a month because we grew so fast that they got nervous because, unbeknownst to me at the time, that place was used as a sign to mind church many years ago and the organ was still there from the previous church and I remember talking about it in a sermon one day and they got nervous that maybe I was trying to take over the building or something. I don't know. But they grew so fast that they didn't want us there anymore. So we moved to the Miramar Sheraton Hotel and we started to grow from the basement to the Wedgwood Room, to the Starlight Ballroom, to the biggest room they had, and we had all these extra rooms for the youth ministry. It grew quickly. So we got our own building over on Olympic and Centinella in Culver City and eventually took over another building that Barbara de'Angeles had. She let that go, so we had nice little campus going on and then it was sold. It was sold very fast and we didn't know it was being sold because we may have been wanting to be in the running to get it. But anyway, that's neither here nor there, so we're meeting in hotel rooms. People had to call a hotline to find out where we were going to meet week to week. It's like where are you going to be? And so obviously during this time. So we finally find the place at Buckingham and we have a conditional use permit. The politics behind that was this particular area was never to be used for a nonprofit jiggly church. But there were some people on the city council that really loved our work, and so we had enough votes to get the conditional use permit. The other people put in a couple of obstacles we had to have it rebuilt in a certain way, according to certain standards, and two, we had to have it completed by a certain period of time or we would lose the conditional permit. So here I have a staff, I'm paying rent on a building and I'm paying construction workers to complete the sanctuary. All this is going on. I'm really trying not to let go of the staff as well. So the money's dwindling and it doesn't look like linearly, logically, rationally, this is not going to happen. So I call it board meeting on a Saturday, and I also invite the main contractor and a couple of his guys into the board meeting. We're sitting in my office and we talk about what we have to do and how much money we have to raise by a certain period of time and people are just really sad about it because it doesn't look like it's going to happen. And so I said listen, it's a big item, jerry. I had Jerry sit in a chair at the door of my office. I said nobody's leaving, jerry, don't let anybody leave, we're going to stay. So I went around in a circle. I said is it possible for us to raise the money and have this sanctuary completed? We didn't have to have everything completed, we had to have the sanctuary portion completed with the choir, law, everything to code so that the choir could stand on it, pass the code, the whole thing. And they said no, it's doubtful, but it's possible. I would say hold the possibility. So you went around the whole circle until everybody I got from everybody it's possible. I said all I want you to do is just hold the possibility. Don't let your mind go into how we're going to do this. Just hold the feel that it's possible. Just hold it for the next week. It's all I want you to do. We prayed and everybody go. That was a Saturday, so that Monday or Tuesday we had applied for a loan We'd have any collateral. Obviously we're at the church and one of the owners of the bank was going by the guy who had our portfolio and he looked over his shoulder and says what are you doing? He says, oh, it's a God pay. They want to borrow a few hundred thousand dollars. They don't have any collateral. And the owner says is that beckwisk? And he says, yeah, michael Becker. He said they'll give him the money. He says what he said they don't have any collateral at all, they just want the money. They don't have any collateral to give. He says is that beckwisk? Yes, given the money. So in a couple of days we had the money. So then the contractor calls and says you know what? I was so moved by that meeting on Saturday I'm going to double up my crew, I'm going to pay for it out of my own pocket because I know you guys are good for the money and we will complete this thing by this particular deadline. So within a few days we had the money. We had the crew working day and night and it was completed. And there's a photograph of me when we open. I'm jumping up and I'm higher than the podium. I might just jump up really high going. Yeah, I can. So it was all about possibility because it linearly, rationally, it shouldn't have happened. But if you hold the field of possibility, with God consciousness, all things are possible, and so that became a rallying point for a lot of things. Whatever things get dire and condomies dipping and whatever's going on, what's the possibility here? What's the possibility here? What's the possibility?
LW:That was Michael Beckwith from episode 154. The next clip is from the creator of one of my favorite podcasts, which features long form musical analysis. It's called Dyssect and the luminary behind Dyssect is none other than Cole Kushner, who I got to interview back in episode 161. Long story short, while working at a coffee shop, cole, who was a new father and a recent music school graduate at the time, he would find himself just sitting there wasting time scrolling through social media at night and having dissected hundreds of classical arrangements while he was in music school, one day Cole hears Kendrick Lamar's critically acclaimed album to pimp a butterfly on the radio. And not only was Cole obsessed by this album, but he wondered why not take the same approach to hip hop songs that I took to classical arrangements? And I can dissect Kendrick Lamar's songs into pimp a butterfly. And this was his inspiration to start what became the podcast known as Dyssect. After dissecting to pimp a butterfly in season one, cole went on to dissect Kanye West's critically acclaimed my Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, frank Ocean's Blonde, as well as albums by Tyler the Creator, mac Miller, beyonce and more, and eventually he got the first exclusive podcast deal with Spotify to produce Dyssect. He was able to quit his job and he was, for all intents and purposes, living his dream, and in this clip, cole talks about how he pivoted away from his work as a coffee shop employee to become a podcast producer in his garage and in his closet at home, and all of the challenges that he faced along the way.
CC:Let's dive in, I genuinely fell in love with coffee and I had resigned myself to thinking that it could be a career path that I would be satisfied with. At that time it felt like that. I think, looking back, it probably would have ran its course. I think I would have probably maxed out with that If I did it too long. So when I got out of college, I had a job at the coffee shop and then I was making music. Still, I self-released an album that I did on my own, produced Mixmaster. Everything you start to finish was me. So I still like Alternative rock or what was the genre? It was like electronic music combined with classical music was the idea. Okay, I was trying to fuse those two elements together, not like dance electronic, but more ambient electronic, some hip-hop influence, drums and stuff. That was mostly me. I wasn't trying to make it. I never played a show, but it was just my creative outlet at the time. And then that ended. I was still making music, but I was doing it less and I just had a kid or I was about to have a kid. There definitely was a feeling that something was missing. I always had creative opportunities with the job that I had, but they were limited. I wasn't making music as much and, yeah, definitely there was a little bit of time there where it felt like something was missing. And I really miss writing is what I came to miss about college the most, actually was I missed writing essays and so that kind of, if you want to get a dissect, that's where it started.
LW:You also came across the Serial Podcast. That was like the first episodic podcast, Myself included. A lot of us came across and it got us thinking, us creative types thinking about.
CC:maybe I could do something like this. That first season of Serial is landmark in podcast history, to say the least, probably the most important podcast season ever, at this point, I think, because it was a watershed moment for the format and a lot of people discovered podcasts through that season of Serial and it was really well done. Capt the limitations of an audio storytelling or the perceived limitations of storytelling through audio. I think they broke a lot of ground there and really proved that you can create captivating, serialized long form content, just audio. And it was super compelling, just as compelling as watching a TV show and, just like a lot of people, I fell in love not only with that show but also the possibilities of the format. And, like me, anything that I take a liking to, I'm always like what if I did that? What would my version of that be Like? I just can't help myself. Anything that I end up liking creatively, I can't help us start to formulate like what my version of that thing be? Go ahead, if you had a problem. You didn't like the sound of your voice, oh yeah, still don't. How were you going to navigate that with the podcast? I mean, I was definitely like one of the initial mental hurdles, like I think anyone that's tried podcast like it's a big mind fuck Having to hear your voice over and over. Like anyone that doesn't do it often will hear their voice on video or whatever and be like that's what I sound like. Imagine that like cutting hours of audio to make a show as an existential crisis.
LW:So word on the street is you didn't think about it very much, you just started putting it together. I guess you wrote your first episode and went into your closet recorded it Is that how it went down.
CC:Yeah, pretty much the story I always tell is I think it's important because it's just you just never know how things come together in the way that you just would never predict, because dissect ends up representing everything that I've ever done in my life into one thing. They told me like five years before I started the podcast, like you would be a successful podcaster one day I'd probably say what's podcasting so long, even if I knew what podcasting was like. How is that ever possible? I can't even imagine what that looks like. Yeah, yeah, a couple of things all happened at once. I could try to briefly explain. Yeah, the biggest thing was I was having my first child and so that's obviously changed your life more than anything. But I just remember one of them. Like I said, I have a terrible memory, but one of my most vivid memories is bringing my daughter home from the hospital on the first day and Kendrick Amar's album to Pimp a Butterfly coming out. The day after the day we got home from the hospital, kendrick Amar released this. What I was hearing was this fantastic album, so I put on headphones, was listening to the album while holding my daughter in her nursery, while she slept, and it was like in the morning super early, obviously in the morning, because the sleeping hours were regulated at that point. And so there's like sunrise coming through the window, like very picture perfect moment, hearing this album for the first time, holding my newborn daughter in my arms for the first time or at the house, essentially and just having this like really beautiful experience, with the music and the emotions of your child being home. And that experience stuck with me. The album stuck with me and I kept listening to it and I was like this is just fantastic, it is incredible music. But then also I just knew that there was stuff being talked about, there's a story that I didn't understand. There's certain lines or issues or concepts that I like. What is that? What is he talking about there? And I just kept listening to it and I just became more and more curious about what he was saying. And that's when the kind of light bulb went in my head and was like I want to learn more about this album and if I studied it in the way that I used to study music in college and that was the premise for what became Disec was that initial idea of like what have? I took this album as seriously as I used to take Beethoven or Shostakovich in college.
LW:You said you had also been killing time just scrolling through, I guess, Instagram or something at night, hours on end.
CC:Yeah, not another component of it, it's just not having that creative outlet, and you got to do something with your time, and I just felt like that was when Instagram was first popular and social media was really taking over our lives, and I just it was like one of the first time well, it's probably the first time it was 20. Yeah, 2015, 2016 Time the kind of the time we started realized like these devices, this social media's, can be toxic or can be Wasteful, or like it really got into a point where we were starting to realize some of the detriments of it. And I found that, like I was spending on how I used to put it was like I was spending a lot of my time on A bunch of things, which means like just scrolling through Instagram, the next post, the next, but you just these microseconds of your life all accumulate to this. You'll spend hours on your phone, but you're not really spending any of that. Substantial amount of time is not being spent with any one thing. I was. So that was motivation of like I want to spend my time like I used to, which was like Dedicating myself to one thing rather than a million things, and so that again was inspired by Kendrick Ammar and just really sitting down and like Writing an essay about it and then, with the serial influence, was like what if I formatted it Similar to serial, where it's a long-form analysis, just like serial tells a long-form story, just broken up into these short episodes? And I was like what if I did one song per episode and by the end of the season we have this comprehensive analysis of an entire 16 track album? It seemed like a consumable way to go back to my kind of comments about the music that I used to make, which was what I Thought was meaningful, innovative but also accessible. That was a kind of accessible component of the podcast was like, yeah, we're gonna do a 13 hour analysis of one album, which sounds pretty daunting on its own, but yeah, we're gonna break it up into these 30 minute episodes.
LW:You got this amazing idea right, but you also just had a kid. Did you give me pushback from your wife or your parents? Anybody saying, look, cole, look, this is hard having a kid and you can't spend your free time working on some Passing project anything like that, were people pretty supportive?
CC:I don't think I told anyone about the podcast Aside from my. A sign for my wife and tell it out. Oh, it was about to come out, was that?
LW:intentional like you, just don't want to hear it. Do you have anything to say?
CC:And it was mostly because I wasn't really Doing it for anyone else, like it really started as a passion project, like I wanted. I needed that creative outlet filled. I wanted to do a study of Kendrick Lamar's album personally. I just wanted to learn more about that album and so I truly didn't do it for anyone other than myself. Like I always say, if I were trying to start a successful podcast, it would not be a 13 hour analysis of one album. That's not the one that sounds like it would be a hit not at all. So it really was about me just getting back into something creative and then the act of publishing it and conceptualizing it as a podcast. Of course I would want people to listen to it, but it was mostly just me like making sure that I followed through with the thing. I think, at least for me, the imaginary audience is really important knowing that someone is gonna hear this eventually, you're gonna share this eventually, rather than just me writing about the album with no structure or whatever. It was way easier, more manageable for me to, yeah, have this concept and fulfill this concept and give me kind of a goal to work towards. Otherwise it'll just be aimless writing. I think so. Just conceptualizing that way is also exciting. Well, I'm gonna make this podcast and learn how to do that. It was fulfilling all those creative juices that I was missing, but, yeah, it's definitely not the one that I would have.
LW:I didn't wasn't trying to be successful in the beginning at least you brought together music, composition, theory, history, culture, philosophy all the things you've been essentially passionate about in your life. Curious where did the experience at the coffee shop come into play? I know you were like a creative director there that play a part in maybe coming up the logo or like what did that end up? Translating us in dissect?
CC:Yeah, I think the marketing experience there Really helped. Actually, I found myself to be pretty good at social media, so much so that I ended up doing it for the company that I was working for, temple, and we had really good success. That was when Instagram was taking off and coffee voters, specifically, was in the early days of Instagram, was a huge trend, I'm sure you remember. So we really capitalized on that trend and our Instagram account exploded, especially for that time that I really learned how to navigate social. As much as I knew the double-edged sort of social media, I also understood the utility of it, and so when I did end up conceptualizing dissect, packaging it as a product and then selling it on social media, I ended up doing that pretty well dissect and continue to do it pretty well with dissect now, and so that was definitely something I took from. That's more logistic. There's some creative aspect to social media, for sure, but there's also a marketing, strategic part of it which I was forced to learn by doing social media as my job for temple Definitely got some reps in there and figured out the algorithms and all the ways to get yourself out there, which really helped with dissect eventually.
LW:Okay, so I started this podcast in 2020. We recorded maybe five or six episodes. The audio was horrible. I almost didn't release it. I was like I just can't, because all you hear are the mistakes. You don't hear like great content, you know. So what was your version of that? Did you have to, like, redo anything where there are challenges that you just were other than your voice? Was there anything else that you think was boring or what was your feeling launching it?
CC:Yeah, it was. I was good at the audio stuff because I had done that for years. You know, the Colossus, which is a big hurdle for a lot of people, was not one for me. I wasn't. It wasn't anything fancy out of a hundred dollar microphone and garage band or you know logic on my Mac, but you don't really need anything fancy for podcasting. So that component was not the issue for me. It was mostly getting the format in a way that I thought was entertaining, making sure there was the music clips and the analysis were spaced out in a way that was flowing. But the biggest hurdle for me was definitely my voice. I just felt comfortable. I'm naturally low energy and monotone, like just that's the way, just in real life. That's who I am and so I didn't think that would be entertaining for people. I thought people would get bored and I hadn't yet realized that podcasting is at its best when you are yourself, whatever that is, and if you listen to the first couple seasons of dissect, you'll hear me playing with my voice in real time. You listen to season one versus season two. I have a different voice season, especially season three, from season two, totally different voice, and it's me trying to overcome this insecurity of my voice being monotone and I'm like trying to Be animated in all these different ways that I look back on now and just be like sounds so forced and bad. And Even just in the last couple years and I've now been doing this what? Seven years or something Only then, only by season, I want to say season seven Is when I really started to feel like I was just being myself and finally found my voice, like over a hundred episodes in where I just felt comfortable and really I realized that like people were connecting to me personally very fast in season one. But I didn't really let that manifest into the creative of the show in terms of me just trying to talk Naturally while I read the scripts, like it's such a simple concept. Now I'm just like why did you take me so long? But let's, all I had to do is be myself, read how I normally read or talk how I normally talk, and it's going to be fine. People will pick up. That's my natural personality. But that was the biggest hurdle, not only publishing the podcast, but just for years after even having success with dissect. The success actually brought more pressure to be more entertaining, which then led to me playing with my voice in all these weird ways that I cringe at now.
LW:That was Cole Kushner from episode 161. If you are a music fan, you will love this entire episode. And last but not least, I have a clip from prolific author and poet, mr Mark Nipo, from episode 171. For a long time, mark taught poetry and wrote books that had modest success, and then he was diagnosed with cancer and he could have easily justified, you know, giving up on his work and taking time to himself, but he continued his writing because he began to see it as his own medicine and after experiencing a spontaneous healing that doctors couldn't explain. One of Mark's books was passed along to Oprah Winfrey by one of her assistants, who attended a yoga class when the teacher was reading from the book and Oprah became obsessed with Mark's work, which, of course, skyrocketed Mark's work to best-seller status and he developed a massive platform just as spontaneously as he healed himself from cancer. And this just goes to show when you bet on your purpose, the universe will use everything to place you right where you need to be, even in illness. So we must never, ever give up on ourselves, and Mark's story is a testament to that. Let's listen in as Mark describes this moment along his life path.
MN:Everyone that lives will be given the opportunity to be dropped into the depth of life, and it's often something difficult or life-shutening, but it doesn't have to be. It could be Wonder, surprise, beauty, being loved unconditionally for the first time, you know. So it's not just a great love and great suffering. Drop us it. And once we're dropped into the depth of life, that's where our real journey begins. So for me, almost died from a rare, formal infoma in my 30s was that drop into the depth of life. So I talk about that Not because to deify suffering. That just happens to be what it was for me. And I had my doctorate. I was teaching at the University at Albany, I was trying to get published, I was Getting a teaching career and all of a sudden I found myself and I was in an earlier marriage and my former wife. We both wound up having different cancers at the same time. She had cervical cancer and neither of us had been through anything like threatening. It was terrifying, it was upending, everything was thrown in the air and of course I was focused on her. And while I was focused on her, seeing her through her journey, I started to have this growth on my head and it didn't hurt and it grew to the size of a grapefruit and I had friends stop me and say hey, I know you're concerned with Ann was my former wife's name but you're growing a second head, buddy, you better check this out. I went huh and I just thought I bumped my head. I didn't think anything of it. And then I fell into a whole journey of it. It was a tumor growing in my skull bone both ways, pressing out and in, and I went through being thrown into a journey of discovering what it was and what to do with it. And so I went through all kinds of very difficult Tests and biopsies and I had to do it all a week because no one wanted to give me general anesthetic in case they Discovered something and had to throw me into surgery right away. So it turned out that tumor, that tumor vanished and that was a miracle. And I was like Jonah, I was thrown out of the mouth of the whale, back into life.
LW:What change? What caused that spontaneous remission that the doctors could explain?
MN:You know, no one knows, and this is one of the things that has led me to be a student of all paths. You know, I had people from all traditions, formal and informal, all for me, help and blessing and love. And so when I was still blessed to be here I was not, and all these years later I'm still not wise enough to know what worked and what didn't and so I believed that I was challenged to believe in everything, and ever since then all my work, all my books, all my teaching, I am a student of all paths. And so that wasn't the end of that journey. That was so dramatic. I was thrown back into life like, okay, who am I now? And within 10 months, that was so dramatic on my head that no one realized, including me there was a sister tumor on a rib in my back, and now that started to grow, and that was the real point of despair for me. You know, the first tumor, I wasn't really afraid of dying. I was afraid of what I would have to go through. But the second time I was like I don't need to wake up, cool, I'm awake, thank you. And all the things that I tried to welcome and the first time around weren't working and now I was really in despair because now I feared I would die and I had to have that rib and its adjacent muscles removed surgically and I had to have very aggressive chemo after it which almost killed me, until I had to stop that and I've been well and healing ever since, and that's been almost 35 years ago.
LW:So you had written 13 books prior to the book of awakening, which became.
MN:Oh no, actually, the book of awakening was probably the third book I wrote, but it had been around. It came out in 2000. And it wasn't until around 2010 that Oprah really wound up being moved by it and, of course, it went everywhere in spitely, that's what I meant.
LW:I'm sorry. You had 13 books on the market by 2010. What's the backstory of how Oprah got a hold of that book?
MN:Oh, well, yeah, I have learned. She had several administrative assistants, and one of them is wonderful young woman, pierre, what's her name, and she was taking a yoga class in Chicago. People at Melville Teachers have always, for some reason, loved the book of awakening, beginning sessions, quoting from it, and so she was really into the book. And then so she gave the book to Oprah as a birthday present, and you know how that is you could sit on a shelf. It just happened that wherever she was at that time, the book spoke to her and so, unbeknownst to me, she's saying who is this guy? I want to talk to him. And the next thing I know I'm getting one of those calls that I'm saying this can't be real. One of my friends has to be playing a joke on me, but it was real, you know. I have to say she is an amazing breacher. She is so authentic and strong of heart and just is the real deal.
LW:Before you got that call, you were writing prolifically at that point, had you resigned yourself to just having modest success with these books, and they will all take shape and a life of their own at some point, and maybe 50 years from now, when I'm not even here anymore, somebody will discover it and blah, blah, blah. Or what was the story that you were telling post-cancer, post-awakening? You were telling to yourself about your own work prior to skyrocketing to the stratosphere.
MN:Right. This goes back to what we were beginning talking about earlier following what is true. Because after almost dying, that re-arraying that blew up all the ways I was taught to what success means and failure I no longer thought about. This is again this assumption that, oh, success is if it reaches what A, b, c or D over here. No, no. So I had a reasonable following as a poet, as a teacher. At that point I really didn't have. I did have a sense like, yeah, maybe when I'm gone, hopefully my work will continue and people will continue to relate to it. But I was not. I no longer had a plan, I no longer had a dream or somebody else's dream of what success meant, because almost dying meant if you reach out to me and I reach out to you and we're real and we touch, that's all the succession of the world. Where else, where are we going? We'll go there. This is the atom of love that keeps the universe going. You know, I'm human, but we hold it different. This gets to a deeper question that I've been exploring over the years about what it means to dream and have goals and ambition. We, in our world, our modern world, we have a dream, we have a goal, let's find the work towards things, but we deify there and then we enshrine them, and then I'm not complete until this happens, and if I don't, then I'm a failure. And I've come to understand that the soul wants the heart to be aligned, doesn't care how. You can do it by stamp collecting, you can do it by gardening, and so that separates out the real work from what happens to it. And so, ever since still being here after my cancer journey, real work is staying in the river of the connection, of my connection to the universal stream which produces the books, and my connection to you, which comes in the teaching circles and being with loved ones and my dog. That's it. There's no five year plan, that's it. There's nowhere, no, that that's just to be as alive as possible, as loving as possible, holding nothing back, giving our all. Then we light up, then we are light and everything else is an illusion. And so, of course, are we still as human beings. If you don't understand what I write, am I disappointed? Yeah, that doesn't define who I am. And if you do get who what I am, that makes me feel good, but that doesn't define it. The Buddha said praise and blame are like the swish of a horse's tail. We're human, we feel them. This is why it's important to to find that element, our God given element, to find our gift, to let it be our teacher so we can find our genius, our attendant spirit. And that has to do with knowing the authority of our own being, which gets its authority from the authority of all being, and so that's this way. And then we need to belong to each other, and that's this way, where they are both twin callings. So, yeah, it's been a great gift to have my work be counterpulted the way Oprah did. It's provided so many wonderful gifts for me to keep writing and keep teaching and keep being with people in ways that I never would have imagined. But you know, these are also two archetypal positions, and it's not just about publishing. But when we're unseen, then the challenge is to retain our worth. Well, because no one sees me as a matter, why bother? Okay, and so that's if you're walking into a very strong wind, like a real force of wind, you lean forward and you take and you make good steps and keep going, being been blessed to have me see, it's the same walk, except the winds at my back. So, in order to keep working, I just I have to lean back and still walk a step at a time, and make sure I'm grounded.
LW:I would also offer that the fact that you had such a long career prior to that happening and to cancer, everything else is the best. Well, the best position to be to retain that humility as now a famous author whose work is recognized around the world, absolutely.
MN:I'm thankful that things have unfolded the way they have and I think that I was. The crucible for me was that cancer journey, of course, and you know it led. There was another time I'm 72 now that I thought when I met someone my age when I was younger, they were ancient, it doesn't seem so old. But the other time that was difficult for me was when I was in my late fifties and cause of the chemo damage had done to me I had a very difficult journey with it, had given me neuropathy and so I had a stomach flu and most people get over it, but because of the neuropathy I didn't and that made my stomach like a backdox sink. And when that happens, people there are, some people wind up living chronically with that the rest of their lives. Some people it clears up. Nobody knows how. It took about seven months for me and thankfully I cleared up, I feel for people who, my God, who have to live like that. So all it is to share this other moment. Okay, that was the way. What's in the way is the way. So at this time one of the things that happens when you have that condition is can't eat very much. I lost a lot of weight and you can't tell if you have three bites of cottage cheese or four. The fourth bite will give you a pain in your stomach and it's unpredictable. So you wind up fearing eating Russian roulette. Yeah, so I had a fear of the present at that time. At that time I was working one of the few times I did a job outside of teaching and I my job. Many of us were just let go, our jobs were eliminated and that meant no health insurance, nothing. So here I was sick and I had a fear of the future as well. And right around that time, with my journey with both my parents I had been estranged for them for many years because they were not able to be there for me during my kids' or journey and that kind of cut a cord between us and I was reconnecting with my father after all, about 15 years of no conflict, and I really wanted to. But I was afraid, like what's going to happen, going back into that psychological nest. What's that going to do to me, you know, in my own sense of myself. So I had a fear of the past. So all of a sudden I ran out of tenses, nowhere to go, and I learned again. I had to stand right where I was, even though the only thing solid under me was a couple of inches, and then, as long as I stayed there, then it grew to a few more inches and then it was a foot, and it was only by standing completely where I am, except the retrusive of what's before me, that I was able to then build, not be rescued or reframe it, but actually through solid being, being authentic except the truth of my experience and move on.
LW:That was Mark Nebo from Episode 171, and that concludes our year-end compilation episode. If you enjoyed these clips, I highly recommend that you check out the entire episode of each of the guests. It's always more inspiring to get the entire backstory and you can find the whole archive at lightwotkinscom slash podcast. Course, I'll put links in the show notes which you can also find at lightwotkinscom slash podcast. And if you relate it to these conversations and you find this podcast inspiring and you're thinking to yourself, wow, I'd love to hear light interview someone like I don't know, richard Branson or Barack Obama, here's how you can make those interviews potentially happen. You see, I reach out to my own short list of dream guests. All the time I would love to interview Barack Obama, but some of those guests will accept, some of them don't. And that's because when a gatekeeper receives an invitation, the first thing they do is they go to the podcast page, usually on Apple, and they look and they see okay, how many reviews, how many ratings does this podcast have? And that's honestly one of the main ways that a gatekeeper will vet a podcast to see if it would be worth the time of one of those bigger guests. So that's why you always hear podcast hosts like me always droning on about. Please rate and review the podcast, because it's literally the best way to ensure that this podcast stays relevant, to ensure that the podcast host can continue getting bigger and bigger guests. And all you have to do is just take 10 seconds to go to the Apple podcast page for the podcast. Just click the name of the show on your iPhone, scroll down past those first few episodes. You'll see a space with five blank stars. Just click the star all the way on the right and you have given it a five star rating. If you want to go the extra mile, course and life, it's always great to go the extra mile. When possible, leave a review, just write one line to saying what you enjoy about this podcast and that's how you cast a vote for this show continuing to stick around and continuing to thrive. And if you don't already know, you can watch these interviews on my YouTube channel. If you want to put a personality to a story, just search Light Watkins podcast on YouTube and you'll see the entire playlist and feel free to subscribe there as well. And you can also listen to the unedited version of every podcast in my happiness insiders online community. Just go to thehappinessinsiderscom. I'll put a link in the show notes and there you will also find access to my 108 day meditation challenge, which has an 80% completion rate, which means eight out of 10 people who start the 108 day challenge end up making meditation into a daily habit after just three months. Okay, I look forward to hopefully seeing you back here next week with the next story about someone just like me, just like you, taking a leap of faith in the direction of their purpose. And until then, keep trusting in your intuition, keep following your heart, keep betting on yourself, and if no one's told you recently that they believe in you, I believe in you. So you have me in your corner, all right. Thank you so much and have a great day.