Episode 42 - Meredith’s Four Success Secrets to Launch Your Vision (Live Audience)

Transcript

Announcer: This program is brought to you by PersonalLifeMedia.com.

Meredith Medland: Alright. You’re listening to Living Green – effortless ecology for everyday people. My name’s Meredith Medland and I’m your host and we’re recording right here in Santa Barbara, California at the Pescadrome. Yeeeah! Thank you so much. We are in the midst of an audience filled with amazing, creative people who have really put their life on the line and put their soul and creativity and come together in community. They socialize; we socialize; around all sort of exciting events. That can be music or art, technology and it’s all housed in a wonderful community environment which is where we’re recording from. So we’re going to take a minute to broadcast some of the highlights from today’s show and when we come back from the break we’re going to talk to Alivia and Rachael about what it means to be living green. We’ll be back right after this.

Alivia: I usually don’t use water bottles. I refill the water bottles that I get from my friends and stuff. So just reduce, re-use, recycle.

Rachael: To be living green, it really means to help the environment like if you want to help the environment, first of all, unplug chargers; that is very important because if… It’s true, it’s TRUE! It’s a very big part of electricity and if you keep your chargers in all the time then the power is still running and electricity is wasted.

Rachael: I met someone and she said that her mom was a scientist and blah blah blah, and she said that the world was going to end on December 12th of 2011.

Meredith Medland: Worldwide 2012!

Rachael: But that’s not true; I don’t think the world’s going to end.

Meredith Medland: You’re listening to Living Green – effortless ecology for everyday people. You can learn more about us at LivingGreenShow.com.

Meredith Medland: Alright, we’re here at the Pescadrome. Right in front of me is Rachael. Rachael, what does it mean to you to be living green?

Rachael: Well, to be living green it really means to help the environment like if you want to help the environment first of all, unplug chargers; that is very important because if… It’s true, it’s TRUE! It’s a very big part of electricity and if you keep your chargers in all the time then the power is still running and electricity is wasted. So seriously I needed to talk about that because it’s very, very important!

Meredith Medland: Alright! From the mouth of vase. Wooo! (applause) Excellent, and this is Alivia. Alivia, what does it mean to you to be living green?

Alivia: I usually don’t use water bottles. I refill the water bottles that I get from my friends and stuff. So just reduce, re-use, recycle.

Meredith Medland: And so as you take a look at what your mom and dad are doing or some of the people that are in your dojo. I know both you girls are martial artists so that’s pretty exciting. What are some of the things that you think that you see adults doing that maybe they don’t realize, like that the kids already know or that we’re… What do we need to be talking about from your perspective?

Alivia: Well I’ve seen people and they go out in multiple trips to do errands and stuff like that, so just try to do everything in one trip so that you don’t have to waste time and gasoline and stuff.

Meredith Medland: Awesome. Thank you very much. Now before you guys sit down I just wanted to ask Rachael one more question. So Rachael, we were having a bit of a serious conversation before our show started today and I asked you what you thought about the nature of where the planet’s headed and what’s going to happen when you’re a little bit older? You know, do you think that the world is kind of coming to an end here? We got big problems. Is this doomsday?

Rachael: Well, no. I met someone and she said that her mom was a scientist and blah blah blah, and she said that the world was going to end on December 12th of 2011.

Meredith: Worldwide 2012!

Rachael: But that’s not true; I don’t think the world’s going to end.

Meredith Medland: Alright. Excellent! Thank you very much you guys. Thank you. So one of the reasons that we’re recording this broadcast today is to share with all my listeners as well as the people in the audience about how Living Green started and so you’ve just witnessed how Living Green started for me. I was studying sensuality, actually, in the interest of pursuing a long term lifetime relationship and increasing the fabulousness of our sensual and sexual lifestyle and living in San Francisco and I had had a performance… That’s a whole nother podcast. So I came to this crossroads in my life where I knew that I had always been a performer and speaker and having a speaking career in the corporate circuit but I wasn’t sure that I wanted to make an impression or make a legacy that was around sensuality because I just felt like it was a little incongruent with my desire to teach kids or have kids. I just wasn’t sure how I was going to manage that actual persona. So I had given a lot of thought to that and my friend asked me if I’d be interested in doing a video show which at the time was a little more sexy and appealing than audio with a network on sensuality and so I was really put at this crossroads of deciding ultimately what was I going to do with my life energy and how was I going to make a difference in the world. And so ultimately what I decided was that the information that I had read around indigo children which are, you know,  the children that are prophesizing in the future that are to be the people who are going to be our new leaders; that I wanted to give them a voice and I wanted to do something that created a legacy and a journal and a written experience that they could go back to so that they knew that their elders or the people were hip to some of the things that are happening in the underground and so that’s how the whole thing started. I had started broadcasting and doing podcasting in the corporate world in an internet marketing conference called Adtech so I was familiar with interviewing people and having a microphone and uploading files and all those sorts of things. Living Green is part of a network that’s called Personal Life Media and Personal Life Media hosts 25 shows. Some of them are on sensuality, some of them are on books, some of them are on health and wellness; coaching the life coach; lots of great titles.

Meredith Medland: So one difference in this podcast compared to others is that this is a sponsored podcast; there’s three sponsored breaks. It’s generally a 24 minute podcast. Sometimes it does run over a little bit. And the advertising and the marketing and how I make money doing the podcast comes from the advertisers who support the podcast. There is marketers that are a part of Personal Life Media who call major companies and make requests for them to buy advertising in the form of audio files as well as online advertisements on the website, and so they make their money doing that; I give them my content, and I get a percentage of the advertising. There are a few exceptions to the rule, there is room for creativity for me to do things. One of the things I would actually love to co-create with the Pescadrome and people here is, to have a video to upload for the podcast, and to be able to make Wednesday nights like where we interview and we’ve got what’s happening in our community uploaded to these 25,000 people and all of a sudden the community has expanded, so that’s part of my vision.

Meredith Medland: There is 25,000 people listening to this podcast. Holy shit! You know. Yeah.

Guy: I didn’t know this was going to be such a racy green radio show.

Meredith Medland: Well, you never know what you might get here.

Guy: Spring an orgasm on us.

Guy: My experience with One Taste was really interesting and I think what it speaks to me about is that there’s a level of integral consciousness that is developing and so it says that our sex lives are related to ecology.

Meredith Medland: Susan is a world music diva; a kirtan leader and a progressive ritualist in the Yogo Groove Collective.

Susan: Not only is it time for us to wake up to the beauty and the grace and the immanence of spirit in the natural world around us, but it’s time for us to actually start protecting that.

Susan: We’re all smart humans; let’s not stand in the way of the progress that’s actually going to move us forward with those forward thinking designs.

Meredith Medland: Alright, so that’s podcast number four. And that’s where things started to change for me. So I was interviewing Susan Sterling. So she is a ritualist. She was really involved in Reclaiming in the Bay Area which is the wiccan sect. She does a lot of on the mat yoga oriented retreats in the world music scene. She is someone who plays with Michael Franti and she does basically kirtan, but it’s not, it’s more, it’s Ingles. It’s more like English speaking ecology based information. She is another one of these very eclectic women. So here is what happened: I knew her when I was involved in Burning Man in maybe my fifth year of Burning Man. There was a camp called the Temple Of Venus and we brought extended mass orgasm to the playa. Jacky was there, (laughing) that first year. So I wanted to create a ritual during that experience at Burning Man because I also realized that we were bringing in and conducing a lot of heaving energies; so Susan taught me how to call in the four corners, which is a form of ritual and it involves earth, wind, fire, all these things, north, south, east, west. So I’m in the middle of recording the podcast with her on episode number four and I’ve just met the man in charge of choosing what podcasts get placed where, from iTunes, from Apple, at a dinner party, maybe two nights earlier. And I’m kind of on this high of all I got is a podcasting recorder, I guess we have it up there, a microphone and basically upload these mp3 files, interview anyone you want, we’ll insert the commercials and give you the music.

Meredith Medland: So I was just having pretty much a good time and I was really living in the fantasy of like, “Oh my god! This is going to go somewhere.” I had actually no idea what was going to be happening but I knew it was a cool calling card.

Meredith Medland: So all of a sudden I realize that there is actually no promise that anybody was ever going to listen to any of my podcasts and the numbers came through on the third podcast and I think there were like 800 listeners and I was like, “Uh, that was a lot of work for 800 listeners” which is still pretty cool but I think making the monetization for me making it a full time job is at half a million so it seemed like a pretty far cry away. So I was with Susan and she was just on a performance in Santa Barbara and I was sitting across from her and the question that I wanted to ask was, “How do you call in the four corners?” because I wanted to get it recorded because I felt like it was the pending question that I could ask here. My god. She was a ritualist and she studied it for 15 years but for me it was a bit of a taboo subject because it was kind of like one of those things that you should maybe ask at like four in the morning or if you’ve like paid tuition on some sort of a weekend workshop or something, and so I was facing her, Rachael is here, and I was literally at the table and I looked at her and I saw her gleaning eyes and all of a sudden I realized that there was nobody else in the room; that it’s just me and Susan and there happened to be this microphone and that’s where I learned the distinction between the audience and myself as a performer and that it was really, really important when I produced my content that the questions that I asked were the questions I wanted to know the answers to. So in that moment I asked the questions; I got shivers all over, I ask her all sorts of questions in that interview that began the beginning of asking the questions that you are not supposed to ask with a microphone and I think it was eight shows later, the numbers escalated to 15,000, and have continued to grow since. So the most important thing that I can say is the art of asking questions that produces intimacy and that intimacy, I believe, is what everybody wants and so in each of the podcasts what I’ve really taken the time to create is a place of safety for me, so I told you about the kids and the indigo children… So I had met a man who was really into alternative thinking and conspiracy theory and I’m from Wisconsin. I moved to Chicago; I was in the corporate world; I had not been exposed, I didn’t know what ecstasy was until I was 25 years old. I didn’t know a lot before I went to San Francisco. I was a hardcore business person and I had a fantastic business career. It scared me at a level of anxiety learning about conspiracy theory; it was excruciating and so all I knew how to do to protect myself was essentially to go seek out these people who were talking about go-bags or buying food for food storage or what was going to happen in the future or how do I educate my kids in home schooling; that’s one of the episodes. So I created essentially a database of information that would protect me, so I had left that relationship and realized that I was on my own and I had done all this; I had lived in an 18 person sensual community and then wanted to move to an eco-community and I got scared. I was like, “What is going on?” So I created the meaning for what Living Green means for me, which you said you are interested in creating a podcast so the first thing is, always ask the questions of people of you, that you want to know. Our time is limited and what I found is if you ask those questions, the world pops open. The second, if you’re scared, find a solution, and generally that solution means finding the power within yourself to ask the questions, because you’re scared and then those things don’t seem very scary. In fact, a lot of them seem really ridiculous through time because I became more educated and so they’re like, “Raaaa!” like the world falling apart and all of a sudden I found a lot of people that were making an enormous difference in the world and they were bright, shining spirits. So the second, would really be to ask those questions that are the scary questions. The third is to do what you love and so when I found that I just started asking questions and doing the podcast in a way that was just easy and fun and content that I wanted to produce; I knew I needed a purpose, and so in each of the episodes I just want to kind of show them to you on the screen. Each of these episodes have something to do with creating a legacy and you can see them a little bit here, and I wanted to show you that all the episodes have a written transcript with them, and that’s provided by the network. So one of you had asked me: independent versus network? There are about ten podcasting networks that are still accepting independent podcasters and I’m a part of the association for downloadable media which is the association that supports all the podcasters so we just got together for the new media expo. So if you want to podcast, or broadcast, or vidcast being a part of the network is what I really feel is the only way to leverage money from major brands and the change that is happening in the podcasting universe is extraordinary because there is a lot of alternate things that are being recorded and so what I see as a media producer now is, we’re in the midst of major change because these written transcripts, usually about ten minutes into the interview I start asking some pretty intense questions and so the point is that creating a legacy or knowing why you’re doing what you’re doing when you’re broadcasting, is also really key.

Meredith Medland: So those are the main lessons and the main points of things I wanted to share with you to help your own stability in whatever creative project that you might be doing and again those all boil down to intimacy. And, so if there is a way that you can take your artwork or your music or your broadcast and really look for those places that are the things we don’t say to each other, that’s where I believe we get propulsion into really the next realm of where we’re headed, and that’s where hope has come for me.

Shawn Daily: Hey this is Shawn Daily, host of Green Talk Radio. Green Talk helps you navigate the maze of green and eco products on the market today and make smarter lifestyle choices at home and at work through informative and entertaining interviews with industry authors and experts as well as executives from innovative companies around the world. Find Green Talk Radio on iTunes or at PersonalLifeMedia.com. Green Talk Radio, environmental stewardship through smart consumption. Green Talk Radio.

Meredith Medland: You’re listening to Living Green. I’m your host, Meredith Medland, and today on the show we’re in Santa Barbara, California and I’m telling all about the ins and outs of the podcasting world and what has happened so there has been lots of curiosity so first of all I want to thank all of you listeners. I’ve been receiving your e-mails, your comments on my blog and also you’ve been calling the phone number and calling in and leaving MP3 files that I can play during the podcast so there has been a few questions from our audience and I’m opening up the floor now to come on up if you have any questions and if you don’t, I would love to know what it means to each of you to be living green; and that’s what it’s like to have a fantastic message from our sponsors, so… we are full of that. So I wanted to share a story with you. I was in San Francisco working for a kids cooking camp and I was doing a show there. Yeah. It was super fun. It was all healthy living and healthy food for kids. Now there was a podcasting journalism camp next door which was even funnier and they asked me to present there while I’m actually volunteering at the kids’ cooking camp. It was hysterical how all these things intertwined. And I got a phone call and the phone call went something like this… “May I speak with Meredith Medland?” I said, “This is she.” “OH MY GOD! I can’t believe I actually got a hold of you. Is this, like, this is you? IT SOUNDS LIKE YOU!” And he carried on. He was shocked. He said, “I don’t think you realize the kind of questions you are asking and the guests that you have and the friends you have on your show are giving me access that I don’t have with anyone else in my life. I didn’t know how to talk to people, until I heard you talking with people. I was wondering if there was anything you could do to just start working with me on a weekly basis because I’m forgetting who I am, but when I listen to the people on your show I’m reminded that it’s okay to be a little bit different.” And so after I got the wind back in me, he spoke to me for 45 more minutes and that was when I really got present to the abundance in my life and the conversational abundance and that was when I also realized that things are really changing. I realize that the energy that I put into Burning Man which has been a lot over the years, needed to start going to other places for me personally. And I still love Burning Man. Because I started to hear listener over listener and blog post over blog post and just separate e-mails that what I had experienced as this, you know, Wisconsin girl going to California and gone through this massive transformation was something that other people in the United States don’t even have access to. And so, that’s one of the things that I was hoping that I could encourage all of you to do and maybe work with each other.

I’m kind of at this place in my show where the last episode was about disaster preparedness and it was a really uncomfortable episode for me; I went to the guy’s house to record it and he was actually and old roommate of mine that I had met in like Landmark Forum in 2000 or something, so he wasn’t that nutty, I mean I actually new the guy, you know. It wasn’t like it was this random crazy guy putting food storage together. We got ready to record and I said, “So can I talk about everything you’re doing on the show?” because I always ask for permission and he said, “Well, yeah, just don’t tell people where I live.” And I said, “Okay, I can do that.” And I said, “So what’s all this stuff you that you’ve got?” And I kind of tried to bring myself into the fun, like, “What’s your stuff?!?” but I was also kind of like, “Holy shit! Do I really need to pack a disaster kit and have my go-bag ready and have food storage shelter ready, like, has it really come to this?” And this is a guy I actually know, like this isn’t some crazy dude on the internet. Like, I know this man. And so he said, “So I got a gun.” And I said, “You did? Get it out.” And so he gets out his gun and so I’m studying hapkido, yeah this is actually fun, so I’m studying hapkido and we’re doing gun defense on the mat in the dojo and which is very exciting for me and so I checked the gun like three, well like five times, because I wasn’t totally convinced that it didn’t have ammunition in it and I was protecting and being safe and I said, “What are you going to do if someone actually comes in your house, like what are you going to do with the gun?” And I said, “Pick it up. Show me what you’re going to do.” And he picked up the gun, and I used the technique that I had learned in hapkido that week and turned the gun around on him within, like, two seconds. And I tell that mainly because I see people preparing in all these ways for disaster who don’t have their attention on what’s working or they don’t see that there are all these unsung heroes or alternative media or podcasting or the Paul Hawkins of the world. There is massive amounts of people in the world who want the world to succeed and so I’m starting to see through the alternative podcasting events that I’m going to; seas of people just like me, just like you, who are now saying things on a national media basis that is accessible to anyone in the world with written transcripts and so what I really feel strongly that I’m here to say is that you can make your own assessment about what you want to do and the direction the world is coming to, but I’m starting to see very clearly that there is a lot more people like me, and I feel like freedom really is here and so spending that energy that I used to spend at Burning Man and bringing that out into the United States or out through my show, is what is important to me. Thank you. (applause)

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