Executive Director Of Reconomics: Storm Cunningham AKA The Revitalization Boss – S3E20 (#116)

S3E18 Storm Cunningham.m4a – powered by Happy Scribe

Three, two, one. Welcome back to Boss Uncaged Podcast. Today’s show is going to be an interesting show, and I put this shirt on right? Because by default, you would think I’m probably talking about wealth in the sense of money and management, but we’re going to put a little spin on what wealth really is. And our guest today is a TEDx speaker that talks about understanding Rewell. And his first name is pretty cool, too. I mean, his first name is Storm. So, I mean, you kind of look at it from he’s brewing up storms in different environments to get people to really understand the world that they live in. Storm, why don’t you introduce yourself to our audience?

All right. Thanks for having me on your show S.A.

Yeah, definitely.

So I’ve been doing this focus on re for full time for about 20 years now, ever since my first book, The Respiration Economy, came out. That was the first book to document all the new industries and disciplines that are restoring our natural resources, revitalizing our communities, building resilience, all of this re stuff regeneration, revitalization, reuse, repurposing, renewal, reconnecting all the things that make places better. And so my second book came out from McGraw Hill in 2008 called Rewell. And that was more focused. The first one was more focused on the kinds of projects you can do that make a place better. Second one was my first attempt at trying to find an actual process, some way to increase the success rate of these community revitalization efforts. And that goal was finally achieved, I think, with my most recent book. Re Economics, that just came out last year nicely.

Any time I interview someone, I was getting my nickname, and I’m going to say I’m going to deem you the Rewell boss for obvious reasons. So if you could define yourself in three to five words, what three to five words would you choose?

Well, a lot of people just call me the re guy. Since everything I do starts with re, I guess I’d say if I were to write an epitaph for my tombstone, it would be what we restore, restores us.

Nice. Definitely. Very nice. So let’s talk a little bit about your history. Right. You have a military background. So how do you go from jumping out of planes and skiing? Pretty much like a special Ops, right? How do you go from being that as your predecessoing background to jumping into rewelting and that you said you’re the re guy. How did you go from that to this?

Well, I’ve always been oriented towards major transitions. I’m not an incremental kind of guy. I like to jump from one world into a totally different world. For instance, I did spend some time in Special Ops. I was a Green Beret in the army. And before that, I had spent three years as a hippie hitchhiking around the world. I graduated high school in the San Francisco Bay Area around the time where the hippie trend was at its peak and spent the next three years searching for truth, hitchhiking over to India and Nepal and all that. And within a few weeks of getting back from that, I was in the army, volunteered. So I’ve always liked big jumps. And that army experience actually prepared me for this in two ways. Number one, I was on a scuba team, and when I was down in Key West at the Special Forces Underwater Operations School, I suddenly realized I was being paid to do something most people pay to do. And that kind of spoiled me. I thought, Man, I wouldn’t mind spending the rest of my life being paid to do things other people pay to do. So the other thing was that because I became a diver, then I stuck with that. And about 1520 years later, a German scientist in Jamaica, working in Jamaica, was trying to invent some technologies to restore damaged coral reefs. And he needed some volunteer divers to come down to help them install these experiments on the ocean floor. So I went down and spent a week with them and actually saw places that had been totally lifeless just a few months earlier, come back to vibrant life and realized all of a sudden I’d always been a nature lover, sustainability kind of guy. And I suddenly realized, man, we don’t have to be satisfied with just sustaining this mess of a world we’ve created. We can actually restore it, we can actually make things better, we can undo the damage.

Nice. So this time travel a little bit further back, what kind of kid were you? Were you kind of like the tree loving kind of kid, or were you more so, like, just out there playing around? When did you first get this insight to realize that this may be the profession that you’re going to go into?

Yeah, actually, I was that tree hugging kid. The first obsession I remember ever having, probably when I was four or five years old, was entomology study of insects. I spent several years with that and that switched into herpetology, which stuck with me. I’ve been a rabid amateur herpetologist reptiles and amphibians my entire life. So, yeah, nature was my reason for getting involved in all of this sort of stuff. But it’s funny when you mentioned tree hugging in my early years, my parents, the storm is actually my middle name, not my first name. I stuck with it because I don’t know whether they were prescient or whether the name really kind of formed me. Because one of my earliest experiences that I remember was when a Hurricane tail end of a Hurricane came through New Jersey and my parents couldn’t find me and they were looking all over the place and they found me at the top of the Mulberry tree in the backyard, riding out this storm, waving back and forth in the breezes.

I’ve just always loved storms talk about like that. That’s some serious branding. I could visually see that. Right. So with that, how do you take what you’re doing and convert that into a business? And I think that’s like a general question. I think anyone’s listening to this is like, yes, I love nature. Yes, I want to give back. But how are you capitalizing and monetizing that?

Yeah, well, that’s actually what got me involved in this because I’ve always been an entrepreneur at heart. I was involved in several nature oriented businesses back in the 80s and early 90s. And when I wrote The Restoration Economy, it was largely from a standpoint of helping entrepreneurs find a niche, find a way to actually earn a living restoring the world or revitalizing communities. So it was written very much as a business book, not as an environmental book or as an economics book. And that’s been my focus ever since. And what I’m doing now with Institute Reconomics.org is certifying people as revitalization and resilience facilitators, so they can actually either as an elected official or as a business person or as a volunteer. They can be somebody who helps facilitate revitalization, resilience restoration where they live, and they can do it as a business. Once they get certified, they’ll understand the issues well enough that they can look around and figure out where the business opportunities are. And it could be almost anywhere, depending on what their passion is. If they love heritage, they could make a living reusing renovating historic buildings. If they love nature, they could get in involved in watershed restoration for a living. Billions of dollars are being spent revitalizing watersheds and Rivers right now. That money is going into the pockets of businesses. Ecosystem restoration, fishery restoration is huge. I mean, fisheries are 10% of the entire global economy, and most of them are crashing. So there’s billions of dollars being spent reviving fisheries of infrastructure renewal. You hear that here in Washington, DC, all the time is how our infrastructure is crumbling. And we need to spend literally trillions of dollars to rebuild America’s infrastructure that we’ve allowed to deteriorate into third world conditions in many places.

It’s definitely a fascinating niche, I would think. Like, in this niche, do you deal a lot with lobbyists and politicians in that spectrum as well? Are you guiding the people that you’re teaching to communicate with these people, to kind of get them on board in their local ordinance?

Well, I do have being here in Washington, I do often get called over to Capitol Hill to work, usually with staffers who are trying to craft some bill that’s related to community revitalization or infrastructure renewal or natural resource restoration. But that’s really not how I earn my living. I really have earned my living over the last 20 years as a consultant and public speaker and workshop presenter, doing these talks and training sessions all over the world and dozens of universities all over the planet, all kinds of community planning meetings and revitalization summits and restoration conferences. And the funny thing is that for every talk I gave, I usually heard a dozen because I usually stick around for the whole event. So I’ve probably heard more stories of failure and success in trying to improve places than anybody else on the planet, just as a result of how I earn my living. And that’s what led me to write this book as I distilled everything I learned, all those commonalities, what are all the successes have in common? What are all the failures have in common? And that’s what was in the new book, Economics.

Definitely talking about, like your speaking engagements. I watched your TEDx Talk. I think anyone that’s listening to this, they may not know this perception of the other side of you, but you’re pretty humorous at times as well. Is that something that you started off right off the bat with, or is that something you grew into, into your speeches?

I grew up in England. My mother was a war bride, so she was English. And I think I kind of adopted a bit of a dry British sense of humor that comes through every once in a while. I don’t normally think of myself as a funny guy. I usually cheat and use other people’s cartoons that way. People think I’m funny, but I’m really just using other people’s skills.

I mean, even with that, at least that you have the ingenuity and the insight to realize that would be funny. And it helps break the ice to help the audience absorb your content ten times better than if you didn’t use that. So I think two to give you a patented back. I think at least at the minimum, you understand humor to a certain extent. That way you can kind of make it very translucent in your content, in your delivery, for sure.

Yeah. It makes the message more effective, but it’s also, in these times of intensifying and overlapping crises, a lot of us are losing our sense of humor, and that’s a major survival skill. I mean, if we can’t laugh at our situation, we’re probably on the way downhill.

So talking about, like, laughing at ourselves, right. Generally speaking, always make mistakes on their first bat. When they come on stage in their first early days, there’s always some historical mistake that was made. What is like the worst or the funniest or the one that is ingrained in your memory that you’ve made a mistake on stage in your early days?

Well, it actually wasn’t on stage per se. It was actually in a television interview. And my wife and I have been in natural foods and natural health. She is an acupuncturist. In fact, the name of her practice is Wellness Restoration. So there’s Wellness Restoration.com, so there’s restoration everywhere here. So one of the things we’ve done for the last 30 years is fast periodically, which we find very renewing, gives the body a chance to cleanse and repair itself, and it’s not digesting all the time. And there’s a particular fast called the lemonade fast or the Master cleanser, and it involves drinking a laxative tea at night. So you cleanse yourself very effectively in the morning, and then you drink all this salt water to really flush it out. And I had an early TV interview, and it happened to hit right in the middle of this fast. And what hit right as I was just about to start the interview, they were just about to call me on into the studio, and it hit big time. I mean, it felt like I had a Hurricane in my bowels, and it was totally taking up all of my attention.I said, Where’s the bathroom? I need the bathroom first, and ran over there, and there’s somebody in there. There was only one bathroom. And they said, you’re on. So I had to do this interview with the other end of me trying to explode. I was just in this most incredible excruciating situation. The host who was interviewing me saw the perspiration streaming down. She was trying to say, no need to be nervous. We’re just going to have a conversation here. She had no idea why I was in that situation.

That’s funny. The reality is like, your name is Storm, but she didn’t realize the storm was literally brewing inside of you, right? Yeah. Just to talk about your business a little bit. Obviously, I think you’re a very structured guy, and you can correct me if I’m wrong, but from your military background and just being a Green Beret, that’s kind of like your everyday norm. So how was your business structured? Are you more an LLC, an S Corp or C Corp? And what structure do you have and why?

I’ve actually set it up originally I used the.org extension because I intended to make Economics Institute a nonprofit, but I didn’t incorporate as a non profit right away. This is about a little over a year ago. I didn’t incorporate right away because there are a lot of training organizations that are really for profits. They kind of look like nonprofits because they’re providing some educational service, but they really operate better as for profit. So I kind of left it open for a while to see how the business would evolve as to whether I wanted to stay as a for profit or switch over. And I kind of decided the only reason I would switch over to nonprofit at this point would be if I started to attract a lot of interest from donors, foundations, or private individuals said, I want to support this. I want to give you money, but you got to be nonprofit. And I really haven’t attracted any of that. It’s really been the entrepreneurs, the consultants, the people who want to build a business that improves the world in some way, who have been coming for this certification so at this point, I’ve just decided to stick with a for profit model.

Nice. So, I mean, is that something that eventually obviously, you’re talking talking to multiple people that probably want to donate millions of dollars to what you’re creating. I mean, you’re reevaluating the world at hand and you’re actually taking action towards that and you’re growing other individuals and teaching them in the same philosophy. Would you not think that switching over to a 501 C three would be probably more beneficial?

I’ve had 501 in the past, and in the absence of that kind of major funding, donation based funding, it’s more hassle than it’s worth. The accounting is more hassle. The tax situation is more hassle. It’s just so much simpler as a for profit. So, yeah, somebody calls me up tomorrow and says I’ve got $100 million that I don’t know what to do with. Could you put it to good use? Yeah, I’d be a 501 c3 in no time at all.

Nice.So, I mean, obviously, I think you’ve been on your journey for a period of time. You were talking about you started off in the military in the younger days. You were on the West Coast. You became a tree hugger per se. But in concept of someone looking at this podcast they may be seeing. Okay, well, this guy has a lot of things going on. He’s really helping the environment. Is that an overnight thing, or have you been on this journey for a period of time?

The love of nature that got me into this has been life long. I was really kind of the turning point was in the mid 90s when I realized that I really couldn’t help nature if I didn’t understand the built environment better. And I had no training in the built environment. I didn’t want to go back to school. So I figured, well, the best way to get training in the built environment would be to get a job where I learn as I go, and that way I’m getting paid to learn. And so I got a job as the director of strategic initiatives at the Construction Specifications Institute, which is a technical society of about 15,000 architects, engineers, product manufacturers, and spent five or six years there. And I decided and this is where the incremental thing comes in. I decided I needed an exit strategy because having been self employed before, I figured I could maybe last five or six years in a nine to five environment with a boss before I went totally crazy. So I needed an excess strategy and figured writing a book would be a good one, because that way you’ve got credibility.It gives you a platform to stand on, to launch into a new realm. So that’s when I started writing The Restoration Economy and the way I did that for you listeners who are interested in trying to remake themselves in some way, a book really is a great credibility builder even though publishing a book is a lot easier these days than it was in those days when you had to actually get a publisher to believe in your book so you can self publish these days. But it’s still a big credibility builder. And the way I did it while still earning a living was I’d come in at 06:00, come into the office at 06:00 every morning I’d research the book and write until 09:00, and then start my nine to five job. And that way, every day that went by, I was a step closer to my ultimate goal of freedom.

Very nice. So, I mean, part of that if you had to put a duration of time right again, the perception of being an overnight success is usually a duration of 20 years. How long have you been on this journey?

Well, I guess you could say it started that first morning when I came in at 06:00 and started writing that book. It took me five years to write the book. And when the book came out, I did exactly what I intended to. I jumped I left the nine to five job and became a full time consultant and public speaker. So you could say that five year period of writing the book was the first incremental step to transforming myself. The next was that as I did more speaking and consulting, and as I started researching and writing my second book, I started to shift my focus away from the natural side of things and more towards the community, the urban side of things. And that made sense because most of the damage to nature is being done by cities and the built environment and the infrastructure and the transportation that we use to get between cities. Really, most people these days think of me as an urban revitalization guy, but that took 20 years. Well, it took the first ten years or so for me to kind of make that shift and really get more focused on how do you revitalize a city.

Nice. And I mean, to your point about books, I’m author as well, and I had the opportunity to publish eight books. And to your point, it’s definitely ten times easier now than it’s ever been in society to create books and get books published. So I mean, to your point, I think if you have an opportunity and this is to the listener, if you have an opportunity and you want to write a book, there’s no other better time than now. Only thing you have to do is really start with a simple outline and fill in the blanks from there. So going into another question for you. Right. So obviously you had some waves in your career. You jumped around a little bit. But what you just described is how you’ve niche down like you went from this model and you thought this is going to not work, and you constantly keep reforming and niche it down till you’ve honed into your practice. Right now, if you can go back and whisper in your ears at a younger age, what’s one thing that you would ask for yourself to do differently if you can do it all over again?

I would say to build a really good network of friends and colleagues with resources so that I don’t have to do it all by myself. That’s been my biggest struggle all along, is being undercapitalized.

Got you.And I think for any entrepreneur or small business owners, I mean, I think that’s a gift and a curse, right? It’s trying to figure out what can you leverage and who can you give that to and knowing that they’re never going to be able to do it as good as you envision it. But if you get enough people on that bandwagon, the multiplication of having more than one person working on it should succeed what you’re wanting to do to begin with and in a shorter period of time. So I definitely think that that message about time traveling back and be able to give yourself that word of advice is definitely should be heed to anyone that’s listening to this episode. So just talk about your entrepreneurial insight. Obviously, now you have entrepreneurial insight. You have the entrepreneurial hustle. Does that come from someone in your family? Are you a predecessor of anyone that you were watching when you were younger and listening and seeing what they were doing? Like your dad, maybe your mom?

Yes. My father was definitely well, I could say not so much an entrepreneur at heart, but an entrepreneur by necessity. At a key point, when I was a teenager, he lost his position as director of development at a College, and he drove into looking into reading all kinds of books and newsletters on how to become an entrepreneur. He decided he’d had it with having bosses, and he ended up his books had always been his love. So he ended up starting a bookstore that was actually extremely successful. And I could see that he absolutely loved his life at that point, probably for the first time since I had known him, he felt like he was really in a comfortable place. He was earning his living just havin g fun.

So do you think that’s a factor to your current success, seeing that your dad found his eureka moment in creating a bookstore?

It was a major aspect because he was always passing on those books and those newsletters to me. So it was partly his example, and it was partly the mutual education we were getting, reading all of these things about how to be independent.

So, I mean, since we’re on the topic of books. Right. Like the Boss Uncaged has a book club, and I usually ask this question because I’m always interested in who I’m interviewing, what helps you to get to where you are. So this next question is a three part question, right. Being that your dad owned the bookstore. What book did he give you an opportunity to read in your younger days to help you get to where you are? Second part of that question is what books are you reading right now? And the third part, let’s dive into your book that you’ve written and who those books are really targeted for.

Okay. So as far as the books he read, he was a history buff. He had his Masters in American history, which I had somewhat of an interest in. But I can’t say any of the books that he was reading were books that influenced me. It really got more to that point where he decided to start a bookstore. And like I said, he shared all of these books he was reading on how to become an entrepreneur. That was the thing that really influenced me. As far as what I’m reading now, one of the good things about being I edit Revitalization@revitalization.org, which is a Journal of this whole restoration economy, all these restoration revitalization projects from around the world. It’s published on the first and the 15th of every month. And as a result of having to publish this news Journal twice a month, I have to stay on top of all of this news. And the side benefit of that is that publishers send me free books because they want me to review the books in Revitalization.

For our listeners. He’s actually not on camera right now. He’s reaching, it looks like, to the magical off camera library pulling up resources.

I do. I was going to bring out a book on blueprint for Coastal Adaptation that just came out from Island Press. Unfortunately, I left it on the dining room table because I’m reading it while I eat, so I don’t have it to actually show you. And that book really is where the big opportunities are going to be for the coming decades. Coastal Adaptation, any engineer, any entrepreneur who’s involved in some aspect of helping coastal communities and regions adapt to sea level rise and storm damage and that sort of stuff. There’s so much of this work. We need to redesign communities. We need to relocate communities. We need to strengthen communities. We need to reconnect them in ways that make them more resilient, the single largest business opportunity of the coming decades.

Well, this is definitely interesting, and I’m just recapping what you’re saying. So I guess going to the third part of that question you’ve written, at least it sounds like two or three books. Who is the target audience for the books? And if you don’t mind stating the title of those books again.

Yeah. Well, the first book was “The Restoration Economy”. And like I said, it was more for business people because it broke down all of the different disciplines and industries that are restoring our world into eight categories, four of them on the natural side, four of them on the built side. But it was very project oriented. The second book, the McGraw Hill book, came out in 2008. Rewell, is, like I said, my first attempt to try to find out what’s the process how do you actually put together all of those different projects to create that grand end result that communities are looking for, which is revitalization or resilience? And that’s the weird thing is what I discovered is that every business person on the face of the Earth knows that to produce anything on a reliable basis, you need a process. Whether you’re producing T shirts or peanut butter or cars or whatever, whether you’re a farmer or whatever, you need a process to reliably produce something that’s going to be the basis of your business. The only people who don’t seem to know that are the ones who run communities and regions and nations. Then when they say, we’re going to revitalize this place or make it more resilient, and you ask them, okay, great, what’s your process?They have none. In many cases, they don’t even have a strategy. Sometimes they’ll have a vision. But a vision without a strategy is just a Daydream. And a vision and a strategy without a process is also a daydream because you’ve got no way of actually delivering it. So that second book was an attempt to find out, is there a process that any community can apply? And I had a bunch of case studies in there of communities that had revitalized themselves in a really spectacular manner, coming back from death’s door to becoming a poster child of revitalization. But I still haven’t quite got to what’s the actual process that you absolutely have to have. And that was in my third book,” Reeconomics”, that just came out last year.

Nice. So it seems like you have a lot of systems in place, and not only do you have systems, but you’re delegating these systems on paper to make it easier for someone to replicate what you’ve learned. Right. So within your life, that sounds like a lot of work, essentially. Right. So how do you currently juggle that and your family life at the same time?

Getting up early, get up at 04:00 every morning, which I’ve been doing ever since I started writing that first book. It’s the only possible way. It’s not a matter of balancing so much as it is just making the time for what counts. You’re just not going to fit all that into sleeping late and staying up late.

Nice. So, I mean, you’re talking about your morning, you wake up at 04:00. So that goes into my next question. Like, what does your morning routines, your morning habits look like?

Well, I normally spend the first couple of hours catching up on emails and basically waiting for the caffeine to take effect. And when it’s fully effective, when I’m fully awake, then I dive into feeding that ongoing monster of revitalization that demands dozens of articles in every issue, comes out twice a month. So I get usually put out three or four articles every morning. That takes another few hours. And then I dive into the Rekonomics Institute stuff around 09:00 or so. I usually save the about the eleven to. 01:00 window for doing interviews like this one. And somewhere in there, wherever it happens to break, I go out for a run sitting in front of a computer all day long. It’s just absolutely deadly. So I’ve got to run every day to keep the physical body healthy. And then around usually about 02:00 or 03:00, my wife and I go to the gym.

Nice just to talk about like, legacy for a minute. And this particular question is all based upon currently where you are, but where do you see what you’re doing or yourself or your business or your legacy 20 years from now?

As far as the legacy, I would love to see every community on the face of the Earth have a revitalization resilience facilitator, just replicating what I’ve learned and having people on the ground to actually apply this stuff in every neighborhood and community and city and region on the planet. It’s the only way we’re going to have resilient prosperity for all.

That’s definitely a serious answer when you really think about it. To have a legacy like that, obviously it would multiply, right? It’s not just a linear thing, it’s about more so an explosive expansion over the next 20 years. Definitely. Interesting. So obviously, what tools like as far as software are you using currently right now in your business that you would not be able to do what you’re doing without?

Well, I create my own podcasts right now. I haven’t been doing interviews like you’re doing. In fact, the first 40 or 50 of podcasts are just audio versions of my books, which were never created in the past. And a lot of people would much rather listen to the books than read them. So that’s what I’m doing there. So I use Audacity to edit the audio on those. I also create videos which are part of the continuing education for the people who are enrolled in Economics Institute. And I put out a video every month. They’re usually about 30,40 minutes long. And I use “Movavi” for editing and creating my videos, which is, I think, probably the best video editing tool out there. And most of the stuff, my videos are usually PowerPoint based because that’s how I’ve been doing my talks for the last quarter of a century. So basically, I create my videos the same way I created my talks. I use the PowerPoint, and then I just do voiceover for each slide, and then I convert the PowerPoint into a video and then use “Movavi” to Polish it.

Got you. Very nice. So I’m going to like final words of wisdom, right. For you. I want you to think about the person that’s going to be on the other end of this podcast or maybe ten years from now listening to this interview, what words of insight would you give to someone to establish the definition of what Rewealth is and how they can use it to grow into their own personal successes?

Rewealth, basically, is simply generating wealth for yourself in a way that generates wealth for others and specifically generating wealth for others in a way that actually improves the place they’re living. So it’s restoring nature, revitalizing neighborhoods or whatever. But it’s all refocused. And if you’re really going to make a business out of this or a consulting career out of this or speaking career out of this, I would say the advice is to recognize that we’re in a world as is obvious if you read the newspaper headlines of overlapping and continuously intensifying crises and the demand for both revitalization and resilience is going through the roof. So find some way to address that. There are tons of different ways. It doesn’t have to be as an architect or an engineer. It could be as a lawyer, it could be as an elected official, whatever. But learn more about the underlying problems and learn, most importantly, about the solution, how to put together revitalization and resilience initiatives, which you can do from any aspect.

So how can somebody get in contact with you? Are you on social media? Do you have a website like the email address?

Yes, storm@recomics.org is my email address. If you go to Stormcunningham.com, which is my public speaking site, I’ve got links to everything I do there, revitalization@revitalization.org, reeconomicsinstitute@economics.org. I’m pretty active on Twitter and LinkedIn. I’m on Facebook, but don’t like Facebook, so I don’t use it that much.

Got you. So I got a couple of bonus questions for you. My first bonus question is, outside of your family, what is your most significant achievement to date?

Boy? Well, I guess simply finding a way to earn my living in a way that produces downright ecstasy. At times, it’s not just a matter of satisfaction. I mean, there have been moments like I was down in the beautiful island nation of Dominica, one of the most gorgeous places on the planet. And I’d rented a car, was doing work down there and driving around one morning, got to the peak of a mountain overpass and was looking down on this gorgeous Valley with the sparkling ocean in the background. I got out of the car, I was standing there and suddenly realized, man, I’m earning my living here. I’m in this absolute paradise and I’m earning my living. And this overwhelming feeling of ecstasy just washed over me and said, man, I’ve got to do more of this. I’ve got to have this experience as often as possible. So I guess that’s what I’m most happy about.

I just think, like, your illustrative narrative is so depictive. If someone cannot actually feel your passion and actually see what you’re doing, as you said, it’s very euphoric for you. So it definitely oozes out of you. So I would think that when you’re teaching someone, if they don’t feel this vibration from you, then they’re missing something in their soul. I mean, honestly, I definitely appreciate you for this. So going into my next bonus question, and I think it’ll probably be pretty interesting coming from your diverse background. If you could spend 24 hours with anyone, dead or alive, uninterrupted for those 24 hours, who would it be and why?

Well, I guess I would have to say Gandhi. He’s probably the most courageous person who ever lived or certainly one of them. And he achieved a level of change that virtually nobody had ever achieved before with virtually no resources whatsoever. So that combination of effectiveness and courage was just unparalleled.

Definitely. And I think one of Gandhi’s quote that ”always resonates with me is an eye for an eye will make the world go blind”. And it’s just like when you think about how simplistic it is, but how meaningful that statement really is from that time period until today’s world and into the future as well. I could definitely see you sitting down, having a conversation with Gandhi would definitely be pretty interesting to watch that happen.

Yeah.And one of his other quotes would be the change you want to see. And that’s kind of related to a slogan I’ve been putting out in my talks and workshops for most of the last 20 years, which is what we restore, restores us, what we revitalize, revitalizes us, so we become the change that we’ve created.

Wow. So I think this was a definitely enlightening episode. And going into closing, I always get the opportunity, whoever I’m interviewing opportunity to ask me a couple of questions. So the microphone is yours. Do you have any questions for me?

I guess from the standpoint of your focus on entrepreneurs and opportunities, I would say, are you seeing any kind of increase, any trend related to social entrepreneurs and people who are in businesses that are helping to revitalize neighborhoods or create more equitable economic growth?

That’s a very interesting question, because obviously, when you think about economic growth, you kind of want to see it physically tangibly. Out of everyone that I’ve interviewed to the point I have not really seen, I think you’re probably the first person that I’ve Dove down this particular road with. Now, obviously, there’s a lot of political entrepreneurs that are out there that are striving for economic greatness, but they’re not diving into it onto the level to where you’re trying to reevaluate the world around us. So to answer your question, I have not seen that until you.

Oh, all right. Well, maybe you can change that.

Yeah. I mean, definitely. This is one of those episodes. It’s kind of I always say if I had opportunity to be a fly on the wall versus doing the interview, I would take heed to the information that you’re delivering because it’s such powerful information and it’s a legacy based information. It’s not just about making money or getting wealth. It’s about protecting the environment that we live in. And how can you do that? And you’re growing people and you’re educating people in that space. So I definitely commend you for that.

Oh, thank you.

Great. So if you have any other questions, this will be the time. If not, then we’ll go ahead and close out.

No, I think that’s it for me.

Well, I definitely appreciate you taking time. I’ll just schedule today. I think you definitely delivered a stormy hot full of information that anyone that’s listening could take pieces of this and execute them or at least reach out to you on how they can further execute and help reevaluate theirs. Neighborhoods.

Thanks, S.A. Great interview. Appreciate being on your show.

Great S.A Grant over and out.