WEBVTT
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This program is designed to provide general information with regards
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to the subject matters covered. This information is given with
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the understanding that neither the hosts, guests, sponsors, or station
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are engaged in rendering any specific and personal medical, financial,
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legal counseling, professional service, or any advice.
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You should seek the services.
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Of competent professionals before applying or trying any suggested ideas. Behoy.
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Captain David Gallimore welcomes your board. The Regenerate Show Live
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Monday's ten am Pacific on.
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KFOHD Radio at kfohd dot com. We dive into the
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real messy work of transforming our lives, leadership and organizations.
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Bring your hot mess and confusion, lead with clarity, courage,
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and com Together, let's strengthen our resilience, accelerating the health
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of ourselves, people, plan and profits. Now here's your host,
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Captain Dave, your personal regenerator.
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All aboard, Hello, and welcome to episode eleven of The
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Regenerate Show. Our theme this week is Lessons that Travel Home.
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My guest is Mike Schadroff, one of my best regenerative
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life leadership and career coaching clients ever. We're going to
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be discussing his messy middle of his personal and professional transformation,
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how he pivoted from being a very accomplished private school
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teacher administrator a advocate for sustainability and regeneration and welcome
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all to Earth Week. Thanks Mike for reminding me of that.
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Hopefully we can all appreciate our mother Earth even just
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a little bit more today and throughout the week. He
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then was co founder and executive director of the Ripple Center,
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which helped youth get a leg up with mentoring and
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entrepreneurship and discovering how they might look at small business
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as a path forward in their lives. I found him
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on startups dot com, where he was facilitating a regenerative
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and sustainability business community practice. And there's something about Mike.
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As you get to know him, You're going to get
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to know him and love him as much as I do,
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because he is the most authentic and vulnerable person I
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think I've met in a long long time. And smart,
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Oh my gosh, smart. I turned to Mike when I
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try to make sense of this crazy world that we're
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living in. In fact, we had a great chat over
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the weekend about a podcast that I had listened to
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about the US around Israel and Middle East challenges as
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well as challenges of our youth, which we're going to
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be talking about shortly. And what Mike really leaned in
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on with me was rediscovering. I think he knew his
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core values, but he really leaned in to see if
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those were really true for him and discovered some new ones.
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We'll be talking about the power of core values as
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well as his ekey guy, his reason for being and
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how he attracted I think a really really compelling career
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for him. He's starting where everybody has to start, you know,
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at the beginning. But he's got so many strategic ideas
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and fascinating, ambitious plans for this organization that he'll be
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telling us a little bit about. So, without further ado,
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please welcome Mike Schadrov.
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Hey, David, Hello there, Hey, beautiful introduction. I appreciate that.
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You're very welcome. It's it's from my heart to yours
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in the audience. I love your background. Tell us a
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little bit about where that was taken, because you're quite
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a photographer and your lessons that travel.
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Sure, yeah, I mean and again in appreciation of Earth
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Week and you know, as a as a lifelong environmental
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educator at my core and of course appreciator and steward.
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I decided to throw this background up today. This was
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taken a couple of years ago my fiftieth birthday. Did
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a little cruise with my mom and my sister to
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Nova Scotia and this was just this beautiful spot. Everything
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was in full bloom, and you wanted to wanted to
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share it with you and with the audience today.
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Yeah, that's so appropriate. I really appreciate it. And what
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a blast of colors. My goodness. So we always like
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to start off the show with what's that one thing
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that you love to do that lights you up more
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than anything else?
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Oh gosh, to be honest, get outside. I just there
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is there is an energy that you know, goes right
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to my soul when I'm outside. I you know, always
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talk about and you you said in your introduction about
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uh empowering youth and and just all of the different
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things going on in the world. Sometimes it is so
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important to disconnect in order to reconnect. And I find
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that when I am, you know, immersed in nature and
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of course surrounded by people, and we are nature at
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our core, you know, it just allows me to have
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things melt away to find those little miracles everywhere because
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they are everywhere. Uh, and just appreciate and sometimes I
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have to admit, I will have technology with me so
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I could take some great pictures, but you know, just
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just appreciate the things that we're surrounded by.
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I love that. And you've captured quite a bit of
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your travels in the lessons the travel substack that you
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write more frequently than I write in my substack. So
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good on you. So yeah, before you became this global
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education advisor and in your current role, before founding and
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leading the Ripple Center, before your private school teaching and
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advocacy for the environment, tell us little bit about what
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what forged you? What's your origin story? My friend?
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Great question. Well, if you'll indulge me, David since A yeah,
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and it is earthquak. I figured I wanted to frame
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my origin story with a tree as a metaphor because
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I feel like that's what I am now, which is
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what you are, what we are. We're trees. In some ways,
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my life has branched out in so many different directions,
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both above ground what the world sees, and of course
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below ground what I know that exists. Some branches are
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still growing, Others are a little stunted, some have stopped
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growing altogether. But these branches, all of them exist because
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of opportunity I pursued, some by fate, some as a
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result of the weather, good and bad. And then at
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the core of it, there's my trunk, my foundation, right,
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this solid through line, and that is my why, right,
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my seed, the one that continues to spread through roots
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and branches. If you had asked me three months ago,
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what's my why, and I know we've had this conversation,
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I would have said the same thing that I've been
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saying for years, and it would have just been people
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in planet. But really, my why it's a little deeper
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than that. I think the people in planet is a
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result of my why, which is curiosity, connection, and stewardship.
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And because of those I have multiple origin stories. Right
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where each branch has split becomes a new origin. So
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discovering the physical world around me, the people that inhabit it,
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the opportunities to exact change, to travel, to educate, to
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regenerate my own mind and soul. And I can't dismiss
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the fact that no matter how far out my branches
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go or how high they go, that leaf at the
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top spot is still connected and communicating with the root
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that is the furthest underground, so that you know, in
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conjunction with the theme of your podcasts and of our conversation,
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this entire tree is the messy middle that you know,
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that dash that we see on headstones between the year
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of birth and death. Like, that's the messy middle. And
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here's the thing. Messy can be beautiful. It it mostly is.
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And I think the difference between sustainability and regeneration is
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just that, right that to me, the word sustainable kind
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of implies being a little sterile, right. The synonyms for
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it are to sustain, to maintain, to continue, to endure,
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whereas regenerate that implies renewal and revitalization and rejuvenile. So
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if I had chosen to live a sustainable life right now,
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i'd be working in television, I'd still be in the closet,
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and I would be insulated by living and socializing in
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communities that were mostly white, Jewish and middle class. But curiosity,
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connection and stewardship allowed me to travel a very circuitous
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path and grow all these branches in different directions, so
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I could certainly get into like you know, some of
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the major decisions that happened along the way, and you know,
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the very ones. It's funny a lot of people go
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through life and they go, oh, you know, things happen
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for a reason, but then they have to try to
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sit and dissect in that moment, what was the reason?
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What was the reason? You introduced me to a great book, right,
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the Surrender Experiment and The Soul Untethered by Michael Singer,
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and it reinforced and reminded me of this whole idea
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of like, we don't have control over what happens to us.
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What we can control with practice is how we react
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to those things. Right, So like, we don't need to
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figure out what was the reason this happened in that moment,
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because sometimes that won't reveal itself for a few years
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from now. So, you know, growing up, you know, just
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my brief real like the Physical Origin story. I had
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always wanted to be in television from the time I
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was a kid. It was just something I wanted to do.
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I love telling stories, I love writing, I love putting
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together stories, and I wanted to be a part of
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that magic that you know puts stories out there. Fast
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Forward ended up at Rutgers broadcast journalism. New York City
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is my background, and while I was doing a couple
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of internships, I also had a couple of pivotal people
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that came into my life. Richard Hefner, he was the
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first chairman of the Movie Ratings Board, had a show
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on Channel thirteen PBS called The Open Mind, and his
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whole class was communication and human Values. Fifteen students conversations
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each week for three hours on a Monday morning about
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books we had read. And another professor who only taught
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I think two semesters at Rutgers, happened to have them
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in a summer class. Alfred Edman Junior, who was editor
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at large is to this day of Black Enterprise Magazine,
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and he opened up my eyes to the let's just
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the broken system of journalism and the portrayal of people
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of color and minorities in the media. So while I
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had these two individuals, I now is also experiencing firsthand
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what it was like to be in the television studios,
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and long story short, the amount of sexism and racism
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that was built into the culture of television was beyond
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what I wanted to contribute to. And despite the fact
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that this was my dream it was all I had
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thought about for twelve plus years. I knew that in
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that moment, I had to decide did I want to
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live a life that was focused on my wants and
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needs or did I want to focus on a life
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that was going to contribute to the greater good? And
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so I ultimately made the decision to not go into
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television after graduation. And this decision was made maybe weeks
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a month before I graduated. So naturally, what did I do?
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I went and got my series seven and became a
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financial planner right and again, you know, I could ask
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myself the question at the time, why am I going
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into sales? You know, what am I going to need
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to know? All this sales? You know, I was. I
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was dealing with a lot of people's finance and for
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it was one of the greatest educations I ever had,
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and one of the few real educations I ever had
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about financial literacy. Uh and I was one of the
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last rookie standing. But I also began to realize that
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I am putting people in investments and this is this
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is mid late nineties, into into investments that went again
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my own environmental values, and at that time, there were
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no green funds and you know, alternative investments. So after
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nine months, ten months, I said to my boss, you know,
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thank you for this opportunity, but I am going to
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be moving on to my next career. And when he said,
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what's that, I said, I have no idea, but it
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just isn't this so long story short, I ended up starting.
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I decided to become an on entrepreneur, started a small
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publishing company did unofficial guides to colleges. First one I
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did was the Rutgers Students un Official Guide to College.
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At the time, it was the fastest selling trade book
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in Rutgers history, and I was planting trees to offset
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the printing of the books in nineteen ninety eight nineteen
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ninety nine. Again my trunk that I was growing, and
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these branches were really about my why right. I was
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curious to learn more about different people, different industries. I
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wanted to make connections that were authentic, but I also
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wanted to make sure I was stewarding wherever, you know,
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all the ground that I walked upon. So after doing
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that for a couple of years, I realized it wasn't
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quite what I wanted to do. And I always said
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I was going to go back after I retired from
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television and go into education. At the time, I had
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actually been running some youth groups at my synagogue, I
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had been doing some teaching. I was a camp counselor.
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I said why not, you know, let's go into education
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a little sooner than later, and did my student teaching
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with student teaching fifth grade. The first week of my
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student teaching was September eleventh, which was an amazing which
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was an amazing lesson in how important social emotional learning
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and safety, the feeling of safety in the classroom, especially
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as a brain science, is essential for learning anything else.
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And ended up teaching fifth grade in the public schools
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in New Jersey. And what was great though, is I
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was able to incorporate my experiences in television, in entrepreneurship,
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in finance into the classroom. And one of the projects
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I did with students was, Hey, let's take the curriculum
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we've been given and up it. I want you all
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to learn how to start and impact business. I want