Curt Mercadante | The Five Pillars of the Freedom Lifestyle

Audio Transcription

Andrew. On today’s show, we are interviewing Curt Mercadante. Try one time. Mirka Don de Kurt to Mirka Dante, Nate, he’s going to teach us today about the five pillars of the freedom lifestyle, how to design a schedule that you will love and how to create true time freedom with both your life and business.

Some shows don’t need a celebrity in the writer to introduce the show, but this show does to may eight kids, Koch created by two different women, 13 moat time, million dollar businesses. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome

to the thrive time show.

Yes, yes, yes and yes. It is always ecstasy. WhenZ is next to me.

Are you, you know, I’m still trying to figure out how to respond to that cause I’m not sure you really know what the word ecstasy means. You know, I’m, I’m, I’m always a little perplexed in how to say thank you. Well let me, overwhelming ecstasy means an overwhelming feeling of great happiness or joyful excitement. Well of course you should be weird about that at all. Dare you question my NA. I don’t just rhyme cause I can now on today’s show we have a Kurt Kurt’s on the show now. Curt, let me tell you what this guy Curt, he’s an international speaker. He’s a trainer. He’s a disruptive entrepreneurs. He needs a nice kind of disruptive.Curt Mercadante, welcome onto the show. How are you sir?

I am doing excellent. I’d say if I do any better, if I was any better, I’d be twins, but as you see, I couldn’t even deliver it and I just stole it from you guys.

Now, don’t Kurt, great try though. There’s a lot of debate right now. A lot of listeners right now are Googling your name right now and they want to make sure they pronounce your last name correctly. Can you just set the record straight for the listeners?

Yes. Mirka Dante, and it’s so long that even I’ve missed [inaudible],

Dominica, Dante, Whoa. A lot of pressure. A lot of pressure to rise above that name. Nash. Impressive. All right. Now how do you spell it? It’s a merkin. Dante. Yes. A lot of pressure.

CA. And then Dante, like Dante is in Ferno, D. a. N. T. E.

okay. Now Z, we’re, we’re on a show with a guy with a very, very fancy, sophisticated sounding last name. And now he’s written this book called the five pillars of the freedom lifestyle. Kurt, what is this book all about?

It’s about being able to build a life that you actually design rather than having the limiting and false belief that you’re confined to a lifestyle by default. Um, that there’s people in this world that simply let life push them around and they’re, they’re those who decide that they’re going to impose their will on life.

I want to just for a second, cause I want to get into your background, but it’s easy. I want to take the show notes and I want to say blah, blah. I want to, I want to ask you a lot of things. They’re, they’re occurring all at the same time. Or, uh, I was a disc jockey when I met dr Zellner. My wife worked at his optometry clinic. She was a sweet lady by the 19. I was 19. We got married. We were 20. And my wife told me the rumors about this optometrist who never saw patients. And I thought, what? That’s weird. And then I realized this man also owned other companies. And then years later I found out that this man owns a bank. And this is the man on the show with us today. Dr Zellner. And I remember one thing that you told me, Z where we’re having a man cave session.

One thing. Well, good thing you remembered one thing and you were sipping on a lag. Uhland yes. And I was sipping on some girly wine drink, which really, really hurt my man heart. And you said to me, you said, Hey, why don’t you have set some goals for your fun? You know, why don’t you do something fun? And I’m like, what do you mean fun? He goes, why you? Why don’t you do something fun? And so the room, we’re in the actual podcast we’re doing yes. And the um, does have this Quint outside space, the man cave, the waterfall, the hot tub, the whole thing. It’s all you’re doing, dr Z because you prompted me to think about fun goals. But again, I had type cat died, typecast myself, Kurt for years as a disc jockey. And my wife was the one who let me know that I don’t have to be one of the few adult men on the planet who’s a disc jockey and w

ho DJs every single night and weekend and every single holiday. So Kurt, what would you say to somebody like myself who was 27 who had a very successful multimillion dollar company called DJ connection.com who has bought into the false belief that I had to DJ every night and weekend for the rest of my life because that was my life.

Well, I open up all my trainings with the simple question, who are you? And invariably nine or 10 out of 10 people get up, raise their hand, and what do they say? I’m Jim, I’m a VP of marketing, or I’m Jane and I’m chief of sales. And I asked them, I said, I don’t want to make you feel bad, but when you came out of the womb, did you have a name tag on that said Jim, VP of marketing or Jane, VP of sales. And we, we come to identify ourselves by the amount of money we being home in our paycheck. Which by the way is not an unimportant thing, but it’s, we’re more than that. We’re husband, we’re a father, we’re a wife, we’re a sister, we’re a friend, we’re, you know, whatever it is, there’s much more that make up who we are.

But so many of us, you know, I have four young children and I regularly ask them, you know, what do you want to be when you grow up? And you know, it changes on a weekly basis, but we have fun with it. And my eight year old son recently said, I want to be a movie director and a spy. And I smile. And we talked about, you know what? Somewhere along the line people stop asking fellow adults and we stop asking ourselves, what do we want to be when we grow up? True. And people get to 40 or 50. And what happened? They went to college or they studied something. You know, you have, you have kindergartens canceling, uh, uh, theater cause they’re not career and college ready enough. And so you have people at age 45 who have lived their entire life based on what was set for them by their parents. Well I don’t want to major in finance. Well no, you gotta major in finance cause that’s what you do to get a job. And they come out at 45 and they realize like you did at age 27, I could be more than a DJ. I can be more than a banker, I can be more than whatever. But at age 45 sometimes it’s tough, right to break out of that because I interviewed sales trainer, bestselling author Anthony Yana Reno on my podcast and he calls it the drift.

We’re all of a sudden you’re drifting along. Things are comfortable enough. You’re making decent money, you know, something’s missing. But the money’s just good enough that you can ignore it and you drift along and then suddenly something happens and you turn around and you’re like, I don’t like this. But you look up and you realize, Oh my gosh, I’m 700 miles off shore. What the heck do I do now? Right. That’s why I wrote this book. Now I a Z, I want to get your take on this because you’re a guy who I’ve noticed with your career, Z you, you refuse to put uh, uh, labels on, I mean people want people to want to say you’re just an optometrist or you’re just a auto auction guy, but you refuse to do that. I think the only label you put on yourself, it’s probably that, that of an entrepreneur Z. How are you able to break out of that typecast of you can’t do anything else just because you’re an optometrist only. And was there anybody who tried to keep you in that path? Cause I think Kurt can talk more about that. But these easy, did you ever feel like trapped or like the people wanted you to be trapped into that optometry? A optometrist. A title. Will I tell a story? I’ve been aunt Connie before. I had, I had an, I had an ad, Connie true

our IP rest in peace and Connie, she’s no longer with us and she was a really sweet lady. She was my mom’s older sister. She was a great rapper. Great, great rap. Great rapper. Yeah. Christmas presents always here. Let’s get the, seems really good. Um, is that the kind of wrapping you meant? Yeah. Anyway, she pulled me aside one day, uh, early in my career and sat me down with this look that only an aunt Connie can give you. And she gave me that look like, Robert, I’m so disappointed in you. You could have been so much more. You could have been in the Wu Tang clan with me. Robert Duke could have been [inaudible] the DJ pops out. I’m so Kurt, you just gotta kind of go with it, you know? So, um, so anyway, and she, she went on to regale me with her ideas of what I should have been when I could have been, I was smart enough to do, I should have been a heart surgeon.

I was going to do this. I was going to do that. And she was just so disappointed and Oh my gosh, the whole family was just looking forward to all the great things I was gonna do in live and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I let her ramble on. And then when she was finished, I said, Len, Connie, I appreciate your opinion, but that’s what it is. It’s your opinion. I want you to know here’s all the good things I’m doing. Here’s how, why, and, and I enjoy what I’m doing and what I plan on doing with that in the future. And just kind of laid out that, and I looked at him and said, I don’t need your approval. I don’t need you, but I’m happy with my, and that’s really all that matters to me. And you can have your opinion, but understand that this is the choice.

This is the path I’ve chosen and I’m, this is what I’m planning on doing. And she looked at me and she goes, see, I knew you were too smart to be doing what you did. Unbelievable. The point is, we all have people in our life to look at us and think that, you know, we’re, we’re in over our head or we’re not doing what we should be doing. Everybody has an opinion. What you do is, the answer to the question is you forget about it. You’d let’s, let’s like water off a duck. I mean, what does it matter? It doesn’t matter. I want to hear a Curt Mercadante. Kurt, what did you start off doing? I mean you, you had a ton of success now, but before you wrote this book, where did you start? Where did your career start and what was life kind of like growing up for you?

Yeah, so I grew up in, in the suburbs of Chicago. I had a great teacher who, we differed politically, but he was a political science teacher. He got me so excited about it and I truly believed that to save the eye, to save the world, I had to get involved in politics and I had always had this, you know, my, my siblings were much older than me cause my parents were both married before and my dad was a real life Tony stark. He worked on the space program, designed fighter jets, do all this cool stuff, right. And so I always had this feeling like I got to save the world and I’m kind of an only child because my siblings weren’t around. So a lot of self play, superhero movies and all that. And I’m like, you know, I’m going to go into politics. So I did.

And I, I went to the university of Iowa, I volunteered on campaigns, I ran campaigns, got into that, then moved from that into public relations, did that, um, worked on Capitol Hill for a while, came back and we were living in Washington DC for a mile. My wife got pregnant. We weren’t, she wasn’t in the political scene. My dad was getting ill at that time. And so I said, let’s move back and you know what? I’m 28 but I’m starting my own company. I don’t care. People say, well, you’ve never been a VP of anything, much less a president of anything. You’ve never started anything. I said, yeah, well I’m gonna start my own business. So I did. I started a PR agency. We morphed and started doing a lot of Vaughn online advertising, all that. So within the first four years, I was making a mid to high six figures and I was totally overwhelmed and frustrated because I was taking every client who offered me money, regardless of if they were paying me what I was valued.

I was overwhelmed, I was frustrated, I wasn’t outsourcing my weaknesses. And I was like, you know what? At the time we had two kids, I wasn’t seeing my wife and kids, even though I worked from home. So I decided, well, I can either give it up, but to go back to an office job just wasn’t, it wasn’t an option. So I did something weird. I fired half my clients. I raised my prices and I started hiring a team around me. So I boosted my expenses and cut my revenue except for the fact that the next year I doubled my revenue because I was able to focus more. I got rid of the, you know, the opportunity cost of working with a client who wasn’t paying me what I was worth, which left me more time to focus on servicing the great clients that valued. And so I went from there, but 2012 my father passed away and he was my hero and he didn’t all those cool things.

Actually when he was 55 54 55 was mid eighties. I was about nine years old and he found himself out of work and he, you know, you’re in your mid fifties. Um, it was hard for him to find another job. He had been president of these companies and all that. So he was out of work for about two years and he was looking, he was looking, I never heard them complain about ageism, anything. He ended up getting, he needed money. He ended up getting a newspaper route. We would deliver the newspaper. I can’t remember if it was the Tribune or the sun times, and they would get me up at like three in the morning. Oh, there we go. I would go to this thing. It was, I hated it, right? And we’d bag the newspapers. My hands would be black and blue or black, you know, why or whatever.

And then we’d go out and I, he’d drive the station wagon. I throw it out and I never heard him complain. Nothing. It was, you know, more than anything I ever learned in school. I learned so much from that because shortly thereafter my dad said, you know what, I’m done being a victim. He decided, he started his own company, reinvented himself as a management consultant, went on to have an incredible career working for Siemens, designed all the electronic switches in the Boeing seven, seven, seven. So when he died, 80 year old men in tears, right? Not a one person at his wake. Mentioned a thing my dad did his career. It was all about husband, father, volunteer and all that. And I decided there, and then, you know what, um, I’m not doing it right. And, uh, you know, I decided to make a change. Didn’t know what it was. Fast forward to several years later, peak revenue of my agency. I woke up one morning and said, I’m done. And I went and told my wife I’m done. And she said, it’s about time. And I started speaking, training and coaching.

How long ago was that? Was that years ago or, or three years ago. That is, you know what this deserves.

Oh,

is he in Chicago?

Gotcha.

He’s a Sox. Really. I was going to ask him, are you, are you a bear fan? Uh, you know what, I grew up a bear fan,

but, uh, the NFL, I just, I watched so much college football on Saturday that by the time Sunday rolls around, my wife’s like, ah, yeah. Who’s your college team? Uh, I went to Iowa, so I’m a big Hawkeyes fan and my dad, uh, is a Notre Dame grad, so I watch Iowa and, and uh, the fighting Irish. Do you like the bears? Uh, I’ll, I’ll cheer for him, but I, yeah, I grew up watching him. I was a big, you know, super bowl, new England Patriots, Walter bear fridge 85. You like deep dish pizza. Uh, I did, but I’m glad I’ve been gluten free for 10 years so I can just smell it and uh, and imagine what it tastes like.

Here’s what we’re going do. See, I’m going to give a Curt Mercadante. I’m going to give a Curt with five. We’ve got about 10 minutes to cover six big things. Okay. And I want Jed to have an opportunity for Charles and Amber to ask any question they want to. So we’re going to go fast. So this is the lightning round card. Here we go. Lightning round. Here we go. You’re not too busy. Your day is just too full of what do you mean?

Yeah. So often when I ask people, what did you achieve today? They said, Oh, I was so productive. I got 15 or 20 things done. I tell them that’s not productivity. Productivity is achieving more of the right outcomes with less effort. And often we listen to the hustling grind pornographers that are out there as sleep when you’re dead, you know, um, just through hog roofers and they fit three hours of work into a 14 hour day. So busy is a choice and just getting stuff done is not true productivity.

Now, Curt Mercadante, uh, you, you talk in your book about breaking the deficit based development model. Um, my first question would be, uh, what does that mean?

It means focus on your weaknesses, which is what we learn as kids from our parents, from teachers, from coaches, et cetera. Focus on fixing your weaknesses.

In your book you talk about wondering where freedom is lacking in your life. Check your freedom index score. Uh, what does that mean? Yeah. In the book

I, there’s about 10 statements and just ask simple questions. You know, do you agree with these on a scale of one to 10, like are my relationships excellent? Is my mental and physical health excellent? Do I have a job that fulfills me with my significant other? If I have a significant other, do we go on at least two dates per month? And half the people when I say that, say I could never go on two dates per month, that’s crazy. The other half says only two dates per month, I say. Exactly. Um, so there are questions like that to determine if you have the freedom in your life that you desire. And if you’re around a five or a six, you deserve a 10.

I would like to get your take on this and then I’ll let Amber and Charles ask any questions they have. Um, when I changed my schedule, um, so when I changed my schedule after selling the DJ business and I had a schedule that was openZ , I’m sure you’ve never had this, but people discover your is open, they discover that you have time. You know, there’s they, they might call your assistant or call someone. They used to call Tonya and say Tanya with his schedule is he opened today. And she would say something like, well yeah, he’s got nothing scheduled today at all. He’s going to be doing this and doing that. And at the time I was doing consulting one-on-ones, he was about 40 clients. But I would like meet him like maybe once a month I would leave, do homework, I’ll come back next month.

So she’s, Oh, he’s free. He’s open, he’s free, he’s open, he’s got, and then so I’d find my schedule being filled with, I’m speaking at the local chamber of commerce, I’m speaking at the local rotary, I’m speaking 11 times in a month in different cities and all of a sudden I’m just traveling around doing things that, uh, so for you, you, you want to be a speaker and you’re a great speaker. And when I can tell from the clips I’ve watched, you’re very good speaker for me. I don’t like traveling, you know, I like to just stay, hang out in the man-cave. How do you Kurt, uh, advise your clients to say no when they finally do create that time freedom? How do you advise them to say no to the, you know, the neighbor who says, Hey, I noticed you’re not doing anything. Could you help me move? How do you teach your clients to, you know what I mean? Cause now I confidently say, I will absolutely not help you move. But I will pay $200 towards the cost of a moving company or I will, I am not going to help you move

under any circumstance, but thank you for asking. But how do you, how do you advise your clients to say no? Yeah, I mean time, a lot of people think money’s not renewable. It is. I’m not saying it’s hard to renew or it’s, it’s not hard to renew, but time is the only unrenewable nonrenewable resource. So, you know, in the book I lay out five pillars of the freedom lifestyle. I’ll talk about the middle three. You have a clear life vision, right? You reverse engineer that vision so that every year, every month, every week, every day, you know, just the three outcomes you need to achieve every single day in just three, not more than three to win that day. That alone allows you to say no to the things that maybe I should do. You know, every day there’s a million things we could do. What are the three things you absolutely have to do?

So vision, but then becoming radically outcomes focused outcomes is another pillar. And then smack dab in the middle is alignment. You know a lot of people talk about work life balance and I want you to take that term and throw it out the window because that assumes that work and life are separate. There’s only life. And how we spend the time in our life is entirely up to us. But a lot of people don’t time block things outside of their life. And I had one guy who said, what are you just waste away? And I said, no, my day is full. But I’ve identified the things outside of work with my relationships and my self care that fulfill me. So my days are jam packed, but they’re jam packed of things I want to do. And work-wise they are the things that I know beyond a shadow of a doubt move me toward my vision. So my vision and my outcomes and my clearly defined, aligned life allow me to say no to whatever does not fit within there. Ooh, Ooh, Charles Cola. Do you have a question for Curt? [inaudible]

loving it. He’s, he’s, he’s on point there. I, I would agree. I agree with him on so many levels, uh, for myself, you know, I didn’t, I love fitness and working out and everybody wanted me to go to college and do all the regular stuff and my fitness is really kind of being a trainer. Ended up building a multimillion dollar business without college at all. I actually went back way later on, but the big point was, is finding my purpose. But you talk about some of your stuff I’ve been looking at and when you find your purpose, it’s like you can’t get enough of it. And you know, finding that work life balance, it’s something that’s, so it’s different for everybody. And uh, but yeah, I, I love some of your stuff. I’ve been looking at it. It’s awesome.

I appreciate it. You know, let me ask you, you know, I compare it to the people in the gym who are there for two or three hours and they think they’re working out. But you know, the, the guys I meet him, they’re checking out the girls. They’re talking to five people, you know, every 10 minutes you’re doing all this stuff and you bitch bro, they might be doing extra exercises that they don’t need to do, right? And then you look at people who consolidate it and are in much better shape and they consolidate it into 20 or 30 minute workouts. Well often entrepreneurs, they do that equivalent of they’re in the gym three hours, but he actually working out for three hours. Or are you wasting time? And a lot of entrepreneurs do that same thing. Oh, Z you are, you are known for the Irish goodbye, the Irish bomb. Do you have, you spent a lot of time researching

the Irish goodbye. Um, you know, uh, I’ve tried to do it. Hold on. You do it. You do it. You just don’t talk about it. You didn’t do it. As soon as I was done, the Irish people, and it’s a, it’s a thing called the Irish goodbye. And it is where whenever you are no longer needed, you just leave and you don’t necessarily have to make a big deal about it. Now that’s the opposite of what the Minnesota goodbye, which is where I’m from, is like this. We would say, Kurt DOB, what time do you have to leave? And you’d say, Oh, I got to leave at seven all right, well about six 55 well, I’ll tell you what, let me help you get your coat on and then all, let me walk you out to your car and then we wave at you. Oh, let me help you.

Do you know where you’re going and we’ll follow you down. Get my plate that I brought my hot dish in. We will literally fall. We’ll follow you down the driveway. They don’t will occur to us that we have not given you your hot dish plate back yet. And this charade, this Schumacher. If you’re from Minnesota, you know that I’m being truthful. It takes an hour to say goodbye, but UC just leave. I just leave him. See. Is that intentional? Do you, have you decided that you’re just going to leave when you’re not needed? Why would I always tell everybody? If you figured out this, you just figure it out. You’ll just figure it out. You’re sneaky at the conferences, at the conferences. [inaudible] Dante, he will come to the conferences. He’ll come in and do his thing and then he leaves and I’m like, where’d he go? He’s gone. He’s gone. He’d 40 go. He’s, I thought he was here. I thought he was a guy. I guess he’s gone. Amber, have you, have you had to learn to be able to be effective with your time at Cola? I mean, what, what, what questions would you have for Kurt? Cause I see you guys living the life that he writes about here. Would you have any question or a question for Curt on behalf of our listeners, maybe or one that you would like to know? The [inaudible]

well, yeah, I think on behalf of the listeners, um, I mean, I would say, Kurt, you’re totally speaking our language. Charles and I take multiple dates a week and would have it no other way. We run our whole life. Our schedule works completely to please us, uh, above our kids, above our families, above our staff. Uh, we don’t let anybody touch our schedule. We’re anyway. We love that. So, um, we’ve been doing that for quite awhile. And how, how would you tell the listeners out there like what’s their first step to move in that direction? Just have one.

Yeah, you got to determine where you want to go. It is that vision because so many people bounce from like a pinball from objective to objective and they think that’s their purpose and that at some times at some point you hit a wall and you’re like, well where, where am I headed? You know, if you’re going to take a trip, unless you’re like Rambo and you have a knife and you’re running into the woods, right? You know your destination, where you want to go and now you use Google maps to re, you know, reverse engineer it for you. But you take that in the old days we’d have a map and then you’d reverse engineer the straightest, simplest, shortest route to get where you want to go. And often we try to plan to our vision. It’s like throwing stuff against the wall and seeing what sticks rather than really defining what do you want your life to look like? Magic wand time, you know, if I could design my life, what does it look like? Getting that clearly designed, writing it down, telling the world, and then reverse engineering it. So way, like you said, you can protect your time. You know what’s important and you can say no much easier. Z, I don’t know if you heard, I just heard there, but it sounds like Kurt Mirka Dante was teaching us how to create a magical [inaudible].

I know a magic wand from dr Zellner. What is your question? Why do I sound like Dante? What is your question for Curt and Don? I call you out. Mark and Dante. Nice. These he donated is not big enough for the two of us. Wait, I think it actually is. Thank you. Al Gore. Thank you. Oh Hey. It’s really fun to see people out there, you know, writing books, helping people in their journey of life, coaching them. Uh, because we believe here that it’s all about you learn from mentorship or mistakes. And you clay it, I’ve made so many mistakes that, uh, you know, that’s how we kind of teach her like, okay, well don’t do this because here’s why. But it’s really fun to see your stuff and to see you out there speaking and your book. It’s fabulous. And, and we want to recommend that. So if anybody wants to go get your book right now, where’s the best place to go? Get it. For someone to connect with you right now. They said, listen, I need some more market. Dante, where do I go and how do I get more Mark and Dante,

because my name is so long and hard to spell. I’ll give you the, uh, address for a landing page on my website, which is five, five pillars of freedom.com spelled out, five spelled out. And you go there and you can get chapter one of the book absolutely free, but it’s also a landing page on my website so you can find all my other fun counters.

Well, that’s not as much fun as saying Monica dunk Bay, Curt Mercadante. I really don’t. Of course. Here’s the, here’s a serious question though. You can go back in time. It’s one of my favorite question. You go back in time, say 20 years and talk to yourself or back when you were just a young snapper say self, this is weird, but I’m you in the future. In the past, I know. What would you, what advice would you give yourself?

I would tell myself that I don’t know everything. I came out of college pretty arrogant and I didn’t listen as well as I should have dementia and uh, it was a, you know, a learning mindset is a growth mindset. I used to be much more dogmatic. That doesn’t mean you don’t have truths that you hold dear and values that you hold dear that are unwavering VUL. But to look at the world in a new fashion every day, to have that learning mindset cause the learning mindset to growth mindset.

Interesting. Mark and Don Martin, Dante, I tell you, I’ll tell you what, for the listeners out there, if you have yet to Google search this guy, look up Curt Mercadante, and you will see in an unbelievable beard. Unbelievable. It’s unbelievable. It’s a beautiful thing. That’s a beard oil working on that. That’s impressive, right? They’re using beetle so soon on that beast or what are you doing to try to maintain that? It’s a goat. It’s a goatee within a beard. We can’t grow facial hair. I’m jealous. Curt Mercadante. I am jealous of you.

Well, I’ve had people ask me if I actually diet and it, no, I grew up from November in 2016 and uh, I had people tell me and at the time I still had my agency. Oh well isn’t going to like

that beard. You’ve got to cut it. And the more people told me that the longer it got you rebel. Mirka Dante, well Kirk, thank you for your time. I hope you have a great rest of your, uh, uh, a day and I will, uh, we’ll get this show released here. It’ll be sometime during the month of December. So, um, December is what we’re looking for. Well thank you very much. It’s been, it’s been a lot of fun. Alright, you take care. Take care of Curt Mercadante. Thanks for being on the show. Get back buddy. See you real quick before we do our next interview, I want you to hear this. I want you to comment on this. This is Al Gore talking about his creation of the, of the internet. Okay. We’re still alive here. Here we go.

I want to get to some of those substantive domestic and international issues in a minute, but let’s just wrap up a little bit of the politics right now. Why, why should Democrats looking at the democratic nomination, uh, the process support you instead of bill Bradley is a friend of yours, a former colleague in the Senate. What do you have to bring to this that he doesn’t necessarily bring to this project? I will be, I’ll be offering my vision when my campaign begins and it’ll be comprehensive and sweeping. And I hope that it’ll be compelling enough to draw people toward it. I feel that it will be, but it will emerge from my dialogue with the American people.

Does he get ready for your comments? Get ready.

I’ve traveled to every part of this country you had during the last six years, uh, during my service in the United States Congress. Uh, I took the initiative and creating the internet. Uh, I took the initiative and moving forward a whole range of it.

Now I’m going to back this up. I’m going to hit play again. I’m gonna play it back to you.

The initiative and moving forward a whole range of initiatives that have proven to be embedding the internet two years, uh, during my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative and creating the internet.

I took the initiative in creating the internet internet. So I just want to thank Al Gore efficient [inaudible] what’s his latest title is a, he was, he was a Senator when he was on the board at Apple. Made a lot of money. So job, no, I mean thank you Congressman. Senator, I need to look that up. I just want to thank you for making this show possible. Cause without him the show couldn’t be possible. We would not have had the warning labels on the CDs. Tipper Gore came up with the, with the explicit lyric warnings on the city. We couldn’t put this podcast to show on like VHS tapes and just gone door to door. Thank you Al Gore for helping us make sure that this show was not a VHS VHS. You have a beta or VHS talks about it a lot. We think Al Gore a lot for inventing the internet, and I just wanted to share her day. We would just mail out hundreds of thousands of VHS. You could do it this door to door stuff. This is cute. I sincerely though, a lot of times we joke around, but what, let’s just be sincere in the show. We want to say, you know, we’ll do three, two, one and then just thank you, Andrew, for going door to door and selling our our video tapes. Okay, so thank you Al Gore and three, two, one, boom.