Ep. 1: What's It All About? The Who and What?
What are you willing to throw your life away on? With Andrew Reed and The Liberation. It's a serious question, one worth pondering. Am I living the life I want, an intelligent life, or something else? How can I have a better experience of life?
Speaker 1:These are some of the questions explored in this series of messages without the brag and the advertisement. Getting beyond even human institutions and society into the wilderness, nature, the reality of how life actually operates on this planet. These messages range from intimate recordings from the awakened forest to concerts, national conferences, and broadcasts on a wide array of philosophical topics.
Speaker 2:Hello. My name's Andrew Reed, and welcome to What Are You Willing to Throw Your Life Away On? And I'm here in the Awakened Forest at my lonely mountaintop hermitage where I often isolate from society. And what I'm offering in this series of messages is really a few considered opinions. Of course this is an introductory episode in this series.
Speaker 2:And you know some of you will be familiar with my music and artistic works, others with the intellectual consulting work with MBI. But what I'm really trying to do here, my objective is just to be as open and honest as I know to be. Again, I'm not seeking likes or subscribe or anything like that. I just wanna get it out there, and I wanna do it in a way that's much more unguarded than maybe I've done it before. For example, if I'm with a music interviewer, well, I don't know what kind of consciousness I'm dealing with, so that colors my answers.
Speaker 2:And of course you don't want to be completely misunderstood or misinterpreted. And yeah, I just want to be open and honest. And this question, what are you willing to throw your life away on? It's a great question. It has immense implications.
Speaker 2:It goes to the core of philosophy really and with its central question, how best to live. There is a lot wrapped up into it and I think that a lot of us, we recognize that from moment to moment our lives are being frittered away and time is passing by and we don't want to feel like it's wasted. Right? And this question, what are you willing to throw your life away on? There's a danger aspect that things could go wrong, you could die, all of this.
Speaker 2:And so it invokes some aspect or ideals of courage. Courage to choose, to actually sit back and say, What would satisfy me? What would make a great life? Again, that takes courage. It takes guts.
Speaker 2:And I think that most people live outrageously conservative, Way too conservative. I mean, what's really at risk? Which kind of brings us to the question, is life serious? I mean, are we really risking anything? Well, certainly wrapped up in what are you willing to throw your life away on?
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's serious. Things could go wrong. I could die. I could lose my house.
Speaker 2:I could lose my fortune. I could lose whatever. And that holds people back. But also you could look at it as life is a little more nonsensical, that we can be a little more frivolous, that we can take more risks calculate it risk, apply some intelligence, and have a better life. But all life has risk.
Speaker 2:Life is risk. And every time we wake up in the morning, we don't know how that day is going to turn out. Hell, we don't even know who's gonna wake up. Is it gonna be the energetic guy, the depressed guy, the sick guy? You don't know.
Speaker 2:So, you know, you strap on your rubber underwear and your armor up for the day, and you go out, hopefully with courage in a direction that you feel would satisfy you and give you the life that you see. Now this message is really a background message, a reference or efficiency message as the wind blows on the top of the mountain. It's really so I don't have to retell my story over and over. I don't have to present my certificates or diplomas. I don't have to explain my basis of faint authority on certain topics.
Speaker 2:No doubt some of you will probably ascertain that I was probably denied a few drops of sap at birth or perhaps my air tube was constricted or that I ate lead paint chips as a child. Those probably explain my peculiarities and all the nonsense I have to offer. But I will say this, and that other people have pointed out through the years, is that I do tend to think in a both type of mindset. I think in musical terms and I think in intellectual terms. The music, of course, in the spatial part which is usually associated with the right hemisphere of the brain and then the concrete reality based pragmatic of the left brain.
Speaker 2:I seem to have a pretty good balance there. Obviously we can become unbalanced at times and all of us become unbalanced at times, I assure you. But I suspect that there's some truth to that observation. And this is really a complimentary message. It goes along with the podcast series Creating the Perfect Company where we share our organizational expertise.
Speaker 2:But this one is much more broad where we can explore in a very substantive way deep philosophical topics and ideas and ideas ideas, how I love ideas. And I know that exposing ourselves to high value ideas or thinking is a great thing to do. And in my opinion, one of the most valuable things a person can do. Why? I think firstly is because all things in this material world of c one consciousness, that is what we can touch, started from the intangible in the form of an idea, whether it be a computer, whether it be a architectural structure like a building, whether it be a gun, whether it be whatever invention of food.
Speaker 2:It start out as an idea and some creativity and energy applied to it. But I think the second aspect of the value of ideas, that our very experience of life is somehow dictated by our ideas or attitudes or beliefs about life, and that these color our experience. That has incredible value. And that the higher consciousness ideas that we have, those with more energy and I'm not saying we have to be optimists all the time or pessimists. In fact, the middle way is probably the wise place to be.
Speaker 2:But the fact that these things in our heads dictate our experience, that's that's immense to understand. And, of course, then the rational logical person would want to surround themselves and cultivate a high consciousness. So just understanding this, it is a huge deal, and it comes from ideas. Again, our constructs of how the world operates. Okay?
Speaker 2:Now, again, in this initial episode, I'll try not to embarrass myself because I find this kind of thing very hard to do is to reveal kind of the truth about you because why? It's embarrassing a lot of times. And you can be embarrassed by what you've achieved as well as what you haven't achieved or your setbacks. And so know that I'm not trying to be mister big here. I'm not gonna try to impress you because I found that when I try to impress others, I don't.
Speaker 2:Better to be real, better to be authentic even if it embarrasses you. And the thing about the truth or being candid about people, like when you're pointing out in maybe a noncritical way, but you point out flaws or shortcomings, is that it clears the air. And you can focus on the real issues or problems or whatever you're trying to do, and it clarifies things. And being honest and open is a much more difficult task than I think a lot of us suspect. I mean, consider Mark Twain.
Speaker 2:I mean, here, he was gonna do this. This is an intelligent, bright, witty writer. And he produced three volumes of this. And he told his publisher that he couldn't publish these, obviously he'd be dead too, until a hundred years after his death because then all those that were implicated, all those family members, those people that he criticized, whatever, would be long dead. Again, being open and honest is a much more difficult task than we suspect.
Speaker 2:Now any intelligent person's gonna say, you know, where does this come from? I mean, this this guy that's talking at me now. And I'm this guy, and I've had some pretty pretty great success in life, at least in worldly terms, you might say, in a number of areas and fields. I'm also a guy that's lived a really unusual life and with a lots of different experiences, but I'm also this guy that's had a tremendous catastrophic loss both in frequency and scale. I mean, it's almost embarrassing.
Speaker 2:I feel like I'm the subchapter of the book of Job and I'm just waiting for locusts and boils next. But all this colors my life in some way. In some way, I've had to integrate this experience of life into one. And we all do this through all of our experiences, and then we add our special flavor to it. It's just like part of the reason I'm putting out these messages is because I've been impacted by the ideas and thoughts of all these marvelous thinkers in history that have helped me so much.
Speaker 2:And these voices are in my head, and we all do this. I don't claim to have any original ideas, really. But I'm a synthesis, a layering process, a cumulative thing that what comes out of me in my voice is a synthesis of all these other voices, all these heroes in my life that have helped shape my experience of life. You know, the list of these guys is just, you know, something else. Will Durant, Alan Watts, Doctor.
Speaker 2:David Hawkins, Emerson, obviously, classics, the Plato, Socrates, all all these all these Voltaire, Kant, all these brilliant people, their ideas are in my head. And then I lend my particular flavor to the world. And, again, you do the same thing. So I don't think it's so much about being original. It it's about just, again, being you, and we'll talk more about that really in in the series.
Speaker 2:Now we talk about this kind of wild adventure that I've been on. And, again, when you're missing a few drops of sap, you know, you're just and, you know so I'm this guy that's lived this unusual life. And just, you know, just to snap off a few things, I've been an Alaska fisherman farmhand I've been in gunfights I've got bullet wounds on my head to show it I'm the songwriter and guitarist for Universal Music and Virgin Music Group. Again, biggest music companies in the world handle Taylor Swift, what have you. Why they keep me around?
Speaker 2:I don't know. I've been this one time Australian jet setter, entrepreneur, janitor, I've cleaned toilets, bellboy, busboy, board member with my billionaire buddies, lots of romantic interests and encounters woven into the story. This organizational expert that I defaulted in just because I was very interested in that, CPA, system analyst, programmer, customer service zealot. Yeah, love that. Teacher by default because at some point if you're going to replicate or run an organization, you've got to develop the talents of people.
Speaker 2:So I've trained over 10,000 CEOs and senior executives where they fly, used to fly this conference center we had to just burnt down. We'll talk about that later. Obviously in the arts, we've produced all these billboard charting songs, albums, and I'm that wild guy that's building a church, kind of like Voltaire dedicated to the intelligence of nature. And at least both halves of nature, the positive and the negative, the light and the dark, the day and the night, the two hemispheres, the brain, the male female, the Democrat, the Republican, all of those dualities have seemed to be all over this world that we have to acknowledge and somehow integrate. I suspect most of the frustrated people of the world are only half living.
Speaker 2:People with small mouths that only want the sweet, that only want the good, the right, not realizing that there's absolute beauty and magnificence in the ashes, in the debris, in the wreckage, in the death. There's something impressive about that side. And that in some way, the intelligence behind nature, which I sit in now, which nature is my master teacher, informs me that that's just part of the design of life. So rather than protest against it and rail against it and make banners about it, why don't we align with it and make common cause with nature? That seems to be a successful formula, at least in my humble estimation.
Speaker 2:But then I've again, I've had all these losses, and perhaps one of the most important or significant things about loss is to allow or let it do the work in you. Again, inside of you where the kingdom of god is, where you know that you are a center of consciousness experiencing the external or life. And these rock bottom events, these tough hits, these deaths, that somehow these compel us to explore the profound of life, to confront reality, to look at it steely eyed and say, how does life actually operate on this planet? But on some level, we've got to be humbled a lot of times, especially if we have some fairly pedestrian views of the world that are not based in reality. Sometimes it takes blowing up your world, losing your mind, losing your love, losing your children, losing your health, losing the use of your limbs, being so lost that you can't ever imagine the sun shining as bright as it did before.
Speaker 2:That's when my son drowned right after graduation. I couldn't even conceive of the sun ever shining bright again. But these ashes, this manure, this debris, this wreckage somehow gets our attention, gets our focus, it humbles us, it softens us, it shakes us up, it destroys our beliefs, or belief systems that I finally call BS. They force us, the external world force us that we dance with, it forces us to a new place. So going broke, hitting rock bottom, being depressed, feeling guilt, feeling regret, all somehow necessary in the process of life.
Speaker 2:And then the question is, can the process of life, intelligence behind this universe be trusted? Now these messages are not about popularity and success, though we will talk about those, but you're not gonna hear a needy voice from me saying, like me, subscribe, follow, all this social media stuff. Why? Because I'm not needy. And there'll be a couple people that this will probably resonate with, and, of course, I always appreciate you and both of my fans tune in.
Speaker 2:But there's a downside of success. Right? I live a great life now other than half of it's burn up from the Black Cove fires, which you'll hear about. No. There's the downside of success where you lose your privacy, where you end up eating sawdust from all the demands on your time, your very life, where you have strange people camping out.
Speaker 2:There's all this baggage that comes with it. And anyone that's experienced some level of success realizes this. But yet we go on. So I put these messages out with a little bit of trepidation just to be truthful about it. Now with this said, I'm dedicating really this series of messages to three main points.
Speaker 2:The first is intelligence, the second is helpfulness, and the third is goodness. So intelligence, helpfulness, and goodness. Intelligence, why would you listen to me if you perceive that I'm dumber than a rock? No, there's something to this and most of us want to live an intelligent life. And again, by observing nature and applying the patterns that we observe in nature, we, and we align with it, make common cause, we will have a better experience of life, no doubt.
Speaker 2:That's the way the pattern dictates. We rail against it, we protest in this artificial conditioning from society, we will have a worse experience of life. Again, it's our choice. Intelligence will help us. And then there's helpfulness.
Speaker 2:Well, helpful is a great thing. It's an assured way of achievement in this world, helping others on their journey, what they want to be, do, accomplish, and somehow chiming in or helping them on their journey and figuring that out, well, that's of great value and significance in your life. And plus, it makes you feel good, which brings us to the third point, which is goodness. And after my second child died in a tragic car wreck, I dedicated myself to goodness. And goodness is like a gift.
Speaker 2:It's hard to describe. But but having high enough of consciousness to to be truly considerate of other people. Now there are times when you need to rip people's lungs out. I realize that. Of course, you wanna do it the nicest way possible.
Speaker 2:So it's not like all light, all good, you know, all the time. You've gotta have the salty side and the vicious side sometimes. But having the intelligence to know when to apply it. Right? Again, by putting out these messages, I'm sharing them because why?
Speaker 2:Or at least what is one of the main things? Well, it's because other people have helped me along the way. Right? All these other people that I talked about, again, Durant, Nightingale, Emerson, Voltaire, all these voices in my head. We owe such a debt to those that came before us, that preceded us.
Speaker 2:All civilization is built on this, right? Otherwise we'd have to start from square one with no base knowledge or heritage. So we're bestowed with this richness in which to start to take basically our species to the next place, right? And then we synthesize this into our particular voice, add our flavor and our interpretation, our color for life, and boom. We are doing our job.
Speaker 2:Now I'm sitting here in nature. Why? I love nature. I've since I've been around it for so long in, again, Iowa, agriculture, all that, watched the fields, all that, And then Alaska for nearly a decade. And then for the last twenty some years up on top of this mountain in the Appalachians.
Speaker 2:And I sit out here, I isolate observing nature or what I perceive as the truth about how life works. To me, that seems intelligent. And, you know, sometimes I've been hundreds of miles from the nearest road or town, when you're in the bush, extended periods of time. And there's something about people isolating themselves, going out into the wilderness to get in touch with themselves, to be surrounded by the truth rather than something that's maybe made up like a lot of society, to find out what they really want. Because most of us can ask ourselves the question, what do I want?
Speaker 2:What would really satisfy me? And we don't have a very good answer. Do you know what you want? And as we look into nature, we see again this system of patterns that is not random. That there's a system of organization.
Speaker 2:There's intelligence going down way beyond anything that we can conceive of to the microscopic and below subatomic levels. There's all kinds of things going on. And then above us there's things so much larger than us. There's galaxies, there's universes, there's the infinite that we can't even get our minds around. But none of it's random.
Speaker 2:All has pattern and that it's a system of mutual reliance. And let me say this, if I have any claim to success, it is from studying these patterns and applying them to life, to the organizational work that we do, which is somewhat abstract, to how to actually live. So there's there's huge value in that. Now with this said, nature has a mechanical exactness that's terrifying. That might seem cold to some people, but yet it's something that can be trusted.
Speaker 2:And if we cooperate with nature and flow with it rather than go against it, our likelihood of success on this planet, however we wanna define success, goes up exponentially. You'll notice also that my language is probably odd in that I try to soften it and I try to avoid statements of certainty such as always, must, should, never. Rather, I substitute sometimes, often, I suspect, usually, perhaps. I try to leave a little bit of gap or room for the unknown. Because what, it seems like soon as you make some statement of certainty, someone finds the crack in your clay pot and there's a paradox.
Speaker 2:There's a contradictory, unconsidered element. There's a counterintuitive aspect of it. And that seems to be in everything because no one has the whole enchilada. Here we are being on this planet. We have five senses to interpret the world, six if we stretch it.
Speaker 2:And it's not like we have 72 like Volt here talked about with the Martian who dipped his toe in the Mediterranean and that only lived fifteen thousand years and then suspected that, oh, we're just born and soon after fifteen thousand years when we're finally learning how to live, we die. So these statements of certainty, and if people are, I'll say too confident, I hold them with some suspicion because nobody, again, knows it all. No one has the whole enchilada. And all answers are technically a dead end. Why?
Speaker 2:Because all topics are infinite. Is that not true? In the conference center, in the studio that is now a pile of ashes on top of the mountain, I used to have a bust of Voltaire, arguably one of the five most brilliant flames to ever grace this planet. And this is what he had to say about, quote, knowing it all. This is paraphrased, of course.
Speaker 2:To have doubt is an uncomfortable condition, but to be certain is absurd. So if that came from arguably one of the five brightest people to ever walk on the planet, I figure that we all need to have some humility regarding our declarations of life and what it constitutes. Because all explanations are insufficient at best. So with that said, let me go into my life and I'll kind of be like Steve Martin in The Jerk. What?
Speaker 2:My story? And then he goes into it. I was born in Independence, Iowa farming area, and I was raised in the cultural metropolis of Winthrop, Iowa, population seven eighteen, but I realized there's been a population explosion since then and they're up to seven fifty eight. Raised normally, my mom was a beautician, my dad was a barber, but yet I had the longest hair of anybody. I'm sure that was bad for business.
Speaker 2:Anyway, I tested high regarding IQ and then I get into first grade and I'm like the class clown. I'm daydreaming. I'm making rocket ships on standardized testing forms. Disruptive, I am sent to the principal often or out in the hall where I push my little wooden chair up to the water fountain. Thought it was pretty cool.
Speaker 2:And what did they do? They did what any logical people would do with the outsider or the outlier. They failed me with devastating effect on my psyche. It took me till the fifth or sixth grade to snap out of it to realize I wasn't just as dumb as a brick. Not that I'm trying to demonize bricks.
Speaker 2:I wanna have a love for all expressions of life. But it really did something and maybe there's a lesson there regarding our kids and their self images but I felt like I was absolutely stupid. But I was just naturally one of these kids that would drift off, daydream, cut up, felt very free. And you might call me a space cadet, and there's a song that, one of my best songs I feel, called Spaceman, and I recorded it with Artemis Pyle of Leonard Skynyrd who was playing drums, and then Tony, the bass player from Marshall Tucker Band, was playing bass. And but this is a very autobiographical song really about this period of my my life.
Speaker 2:These daydreamers, well, you're actually focusing on something. There's something that's capturing your imagination. And I think that explains me to some extent that I've always had this very deep ability to focus, which has improved everything, quality, whatever. That's how things get done. Whereas when you lack focus or you have things that are vying for your attention disrupting you like a cell phone.
Speaker 2:I mean, holy cow. That is the antithesis of focus. You're getting texts. You're getting notifications. You're getting emails.
Speaker 2:You're you're you're getting phone calls, And it and it just it breaks your concentration or your love for whatever you're doing. So much for the outlier there. And then I, you know, I liked making money. I was fairly ambitious and so I delivered the Cedar Rapids Gazette. I mowed lawn, shoveled snow, detached with corn, baled hay, picked up rocks.
Speaker 2:Of course, how Iowa got its great soils because it was really borrowed from Canada and Minnesota because the clay issues had to push it down, bringing the rich soil, but bringing the rocks, which we had to extract to get out of the fields because of the combines and plows and everything. Not good on the blades. I swept the floor at my dad's barbershop of hair and all that. And then at 15, I went to Alaska. Why?
Speaker 2:Because most of my family lives in Alaska. That's the highest concentration of family, in fact. And I'd asked my Uncle Chuck, both Uncle Chuck and Uncle Earl and even Wally, all of them, all my family spent time in Alaska, but they homesteaded back in the late '40s, early '50s, where the town of Anchor Point is now. So Uncle Chuck let me come up and I was a commercial fisherman for the better part of a decade in Alaska working in Prince William Sound, Kodiak, Cook Inlet, salmon seining mainly. I did do halibut and stuff like that too.
Speaker 2:Again, 18 tons of salmon a day or nets as big as a few football fields and all that. And I became pretty accomplished at this, but you think about Alaska, you know, you're working around the roughest people there are. I mean, you're lumberjacks and killers and people from Nassau and all these strange characters in Alaska. And we have these sayings like in Alaska, where women are men and men are animals. And I figured there's two kinds of people that are attracted to Alaska.
Speaker 2:Number one, seekers, religious people, people trying to find themselves, get in touch, you know, great things. And then the other type of person, those who are running from something, normally the law. And so I've had my share of run ins and and drama around that. So Alaska, something else. Then music's always been part of my life.
Speaker 2:I started playing guitar, bass guitar. I started out with around 12 years old because I looked at a six string guitar and said there's no way that I could do that. This one only has four, and you only have to play one note at a time. So, you know, with all my insecurity issues, of course, I started out as a bass player because I would never be able to play guitar. And, anyway, I found out that I was quite musical, and music came easy, and we became great entertainers even in high school.
Speaker 2:I mean, we just killed it and did mainly progressive type rock. Of course, then college comes in and I went to Iowa State. I majored in telecommunicative arts. I took marketing classes at the University of Northern Iowa. And then somewhere along the way, bam, I got the religious fever.
Speaker 2:And I went to Bible school to become a preacher because I was just kind of disillusioned with stuff. And I'd always had a spirituality to me. I mean, just felt like there was some intelligence, maybe that linked to nature or what have you. And I was born and raised Catholic because it's like 90% Catholic where I come from. And if you go to any of my houses or at least a number of my buildings, you're gonna find all these artifacts of Catholicism and all that just because I think it's beautiful, it's magnificent, it's reverent, all that.
Speaker 2:But then, you know, I realized, hey, there's all these other faiths. So I started going to the Methodist Church. I like their youth group and all that, Baptist Church, Assembly of God, speaking in tongues. All that was of interest to me. But then I went down to Bible school and I got expelled like, you know, three times.
Speaker 2:I had hair issues because I liked my long hair and of course you couldn't have that and it couldn't touch your collar. So, you know, there I was in the dean's office. And then even though I had, like, a 3.8 grade point average, I got a d in my preaching course because my sermons were so scandalous, apparently. I'm surprised they let me graduate, but I did graduate like a good Iowa boy because we finish what we start even though I really wanted to drop out at different times. The other thing I did while I was in Bible school is I met wife number one.
Speaker 2:Now I knew having numerical system to keep track of such and with wife number one, I had three children. Again, of them deceased at this point and we'll talk about that. Well, let's talk about it right now. I mean, Roman drowned right after graduation at age 19, and then Chantal was killed, in an auto accident, age 25. Both died in my estimation in troubled states of mind at night in rainstorms.
Speaker 2:Therefore, one piece of advice that I offer people about life itself is just relax. Don't panic. You might find yourself at night. You might find yourself in a troubled state of mind. You might find yourself in a rainstorm.
Speaker 2:Just relax. The storm clouds will pass. Wait it out. The sun will come out again. Now fused into this story and my travels to Alaska, college, bible school, all this, I was always playing, jamming, playing music.
Speaker 2:I played a thousand something shows and of course not always getting paid much. So working odd jobs along the way, janitor, maintenance man, cleaning toilets. In fact, I clean, the Texas Pete manufacturing plant. If you're into that hot sauce, it's great. I was a busboy, then a waiter.
Speaker 2:I had to start out as a busboy because they took a look at me and said, this guy, he's not smart enough to be a waiter. And then I did get to be one, and I was good. A bellboy as a maintenance man at a apartment complex, sold insurance. I even delivered newspapers again. I mean, I did whatever is needed.
Speaker 2:Why? Because somewhere along the way, again, got married and I had Roman. And being a provider is a big deal to a guy, definitely wired into the psyche. So playing in these bands, we were good. I mean, there could be three people in the bar at the beginning of the night and it would be packed.
Speaker 2:If the capacity is 300, we'd have 300 there, whatever it was, because we were a spectacle. People couldn't take their eyes off us. And that led to a major label management and recording contract, a six year, six album deal. And so we worked that for a few years until I got sick of it. I had figured out the music game.
Speaker 2:The economics not great. So we're gonna get how much? We're gonna get a quarter and we have to pay back whatever the advance was, say it's $50,000. So we're gonna have to sell a half a million records and we're gonna be in hock the whole way. And not only that, I realized that the music industry was full of fruits and flakes and lots of relatively low consciousness people.
Speaker 2:So I had had it one day and I marched up to the top level of the United Artist Building in Nashville and I told my manager, I'm done. And he he said, well, it's not quite that easy, Andrew. I own all your music. I own every picture of you in a musical context. You can't even play in a bar legally.
Speaker 2:So then I thought, I've gotta work out a new way to make a living. So I thought, wait. Computers are kind of the new thing. So I taught myself how to program. Okay.
Speaker 2:So I taught myself how to program in basic and and in c and in c plus and then I talked my way into a job with a compensation company that made compensation software. And they were hemorrhaging customers, and I stopped it cold just by being a real person, being helpful, looking and considering their needs, and solving them. And so they made me a system analyst where I directed people after that. And then I thought, well, money's probably important, so I knocked out my bachelor of science in Accounting and I became a CPA. Okay, so I'm kind of on the corporate track at that point, conform a little bit, hair gets a little shorter, you know how it goes.
Speaker 2:Then I saw an ad in the paper to work for a hospice, and I thought, well, I'd kinda like working something herbal. And I answered the ad, went in from the interview, found out it was healthcare, end of life care, profound work. And so I came in as the accounting manager. Immediately I had to understand what we were doing. I just was curious.
Speaker 2:So I started going out on visits with nurses, LPNs, hospice aides, chaplains, social workers, all of the interdisciplinary team, because I felt it lacked integrity for me to be advising people, telling them what their numbers should be, if I didn't understand what they were doing, what they were experiencing on the front lines. And I worked as close as I could with those clinical leaders just to get into their world. Then the organization had a few problems, 3 and a half million dollar payback. Well, I worked out how to how to fix it. And then, of course, got promoted to the CFO by Deborah Daley, one of the brightest people I have ever met.
Speaker 2:And Deborah just took me under her wing and taught me so much. I owe a great debt to Deborah. When she went to to be the CEO in Palm Beach, she took me along with her, made me her number two. And of course, that was a great experience, and we turned that place around and we put away a hundred million dollars in a relatively short period of time, but I ripped out every system that they had. And I need to add this to the story is that Deborah has said, Your background is a programmer and all that.
Speaker 2:You've made all these great things for us in addition to running the financial areas. Our productivity is not that great and our quality, frankly, could use a facelift. Could you make a compensation system for us? I said, Well, I don't know if I can, Deborah. Now at that point I had done like 38 companies, textile, restaurants, country clubs, things like that, comp systems for them.
Speaker 2:I'd never done healthcare. And she says, Well, I need it in two weeks. And so I basically just took patterns that I had known and I applied them to this healthcare setting and it resulted in a 100 increase in productivity in almost every discipline except for one. In that outlier, we only had 50% increase in quality and productivity. And of course, this gets me on the national stage.
Speaker 2:The whole hospice world wanted to know about this and so they invited me to Washington, D. C. To speak at the national conference and there's 2,000 people in attendance. And so I'm there explaining what I did and all that to them and they hated it. This guy is Satan.
Speaker 2:He's destroying our lovely hospice world of kindness, making it into a business. They basically booed me out, heckled me out. So if I wear black a lot, just realize I have issues. But fortunately there's a few smart cookies, Entegris people. And I'm not saying the others weren't Entegris.
Speaker 2:I mean we're all operating from whatever our view of the world is, what our paradigm is, our understanding. But they saw there's some directional correctness here to what Andrew is saying. And so I started getting all these calls and that led to me forming MultiView, this company that studies you know, what's going on, where we put our little piece of software into around 1,300 organizations at this point. And every month we pull out nine eighty nine data elements with nine twenty two cross calculations, again every month. And then it goes to our data warehouse in Florida where we quantify all these things and then we study the ninetieth percentile.
Speaker 2:What are they doing to get this great result? And then in a Six Sigma kind of way, we structure it or systematize it and then communicate those practices to our clients so hopefully they can get a similar result, which often results in quality going up hundreds of percent as well as economics because they go hand in hand. And that explains kind of the multi view equation. Now one of the strange things in this story is that after the six years, I started getting calls from music executives and artists saying, Andrew, your catalog is open now because some people knew about it, And you had some great stuff. Can we record it?
Speaker 2:And suddenly I find myself, bam, right back in the music business. And we've had tremendous success with that. I mean, I've built a couple of different studios. We still have the broadcast studio at our headquarters building in town. Again we have the one that hopefully will reconstitute when we get all the insurance situations all sorted out.
Speaker 2:But it's been pretty epic. And then we've had all these artists in addition to just, you know, my stuff that we record out there, all these famous musicians. And it's kind of a musicians of musicians studio where Taylor Swift's people will come in, John Mayer's people come in, widespread panic, Steve Canyon Rangers. I mean, list goes on. Leonard Skynyrd, even some of these Grammy winning classical groups like members of, again, Blue Turtle.
Speaker 2:And and then these blues folks tend to gravitate and folks that have worked with BB King, Jimmy Bond, you know, John McVeigh, you know, a great artist. The blues. The blues. I am so about the blues. Why?
Speaker 2:Because I've lived the blues. My fretboard is soaked in real tears, real dirt, real sweat. I am the blues. And so when I play it, I mean, it it's coming from my my gut, and it's a way that I kind of get it out. So the one thing I want to point out though is that, okay, quit the music business.
Speaker 2:I quit something that I loved. Okay, so that's a form of loss or limitation or constraint or perceived negative. But what did it do? It worked a miracle in my life. Because by cutting that off, I discovered that I had a, what, a left brain, the critical side, the practical side, that I could put numbers together.
Speaker 2:I would have never known that I had that ability should I have just stayed in the artsy fartsy world, Unless that limitation would have caused me to have to go in another direction. There's so much in nature that when a branch gets broken or cut off, that it springs forth in another direction because there's no other option. And that's the way life works. That we discover things about ourselves that comes from the external world, that somehow we've got to integrate and understand and then choose what attitude we're going to have towards that circumstance, especially if it's perceived as negative. So that's that.
Speaker 2:In my life, pretty much it's fiftyfifty music business, with the other half, the intellectual half, I'll say, being satisfied by our expert organizational work through MBI, the consulting side. Also in the mix that I probably need to mention at this point is my second marriage, number two, obviously. And I was on tour in Europe and I met this Australian bombshell and fell in love. I married her in seventy two days. I rented Shark Island in the middle of Sydney Harbor.
Speaker 2:We got all our jet setters, celebrity, fancy friends, movie stars, INXS, all those from down under, and and got married. But I was living between two continents, North America, Australia. That's a long flight, and I was doing it several times a month, and I had a breakdown. And there's something about waking up in a foreign land and hearing foreign birds and whatever and realizing that you're gonna be there and there's chances that you might not even get home. I know that sounds maybe a little exaggerated, someone gets sick or whatever where you're needed and then you got kids on the other side of the ocean that you're not seeing, and all I know is that whole situation broke me down.
Speaker 2:And finally I went to my doctor, good doctor Smith, and he said, Andrew, I think you've bitten off more than you can chew. And so I had to end it, you know, for my sake, for my kid's sake, and all that. Now let's talk about the losses, the counter side, the dark side, the shadow of this. Again, I'm trying to be as committed to openness and truthfulness here because all I know is that, again, when we are candid, we can bring things up and examine them. Big one, again, two of my three children dead, again, in states of anxiety, at night in rainstorms, dying early in life and never really getting the chance to grow up, or for me to see them grow up.
Speaker 2:That's a loss. I've been divorced twice and I also along the way lost the love of my life, the true love. And I think about that every day. Money, I've been wiped out a few times. Of course, after a divorce, that's usually a tough hit.
Speaker 2:But I've also had obviously bad or stupid business decisions sometimes along the way, but again, you can come back, right? And I'm an example of coming back several times and just staggeringly great, beyond what you could even conceive of before, in fact. I've lost my health. Again, I've had four breakdowns due to this over occupation aspect of my personality. I just tend to overdo it.
Speaker 2:And you might say that I was born with the off switch broken. But I've also in these breakdowns, you have this vertigo and all that, and I've not really felt well probably most of my life ever since, say, age 32. But there's a vision in my life that just presses me on. And I think that speaks to the value of a vision. That if you have something that you really want to accomplish, normally you can muster the energy to pull it off.
Speaker 2:And a lot of people say, well, I can't do this. I didn't feel well, or I didn't report to work because of this, they call off or whatever. Well, to me, sometimes, or most of the time you might say, it's just an excuse because a lot can be accomplished by people that don't feel very well, and I'm an example of that. I've also, in the health realm, I've lost use of my right hand and arm due to an accident. Then I had this physician error.
Speaker 2:I lost the use of my other arm, and I've had to rehabilitate the use of my hands. And your hands are essential. But again, hard work, sweat can be done. I can play guitar better now than I ever could when I was at full strength. And then just to add on to this, we've had these natural disasters over the last couple years.
Speaker 2:So I I lose Chantal, and, you know, that grieving process is is just what it is. And then hurricane Helene hits where it wipes out this mountain. I mean, of trees and and structures destroyed. 32 inches dumped in just a couple hours, wiping out our only bridge and road in to where we have to get out on foot. It took us weeks to cut ourselves out.
Speaker 2:We were living on the most primitive of levels. And talk about testing your prepping. And we did this for five months until finally a temporary bridge, a one laner, was installed. But when you go into town, you strap on your boots, you put on your backpack, make sure you have your light, your flashlight, your knife. You proceed down the hill or down the mountain past the rockslide, past all the debris, and then you have cliffs to scale.
Speaker 2:And of course, we've upgraded from the rope and the ladder to scaffolding where we have three levels of scaffolding to go down to get down to the bridge, to cross over, to go uphill again through the mud, to hopefully a vehicle waiting to take you into town with your pack. And of course on your return you have your provisions and you question whether to buy the half gallon of milk because you have to haul it up the hill in reverse. So we lived like that for a long time. I worked side by side with special forces guys, my buddies, I was used to that though from upbringing. And then just one month ago, the Black Cove big hungry forest fires, which overtook our community, again, burnt down 13 of my buildings.
Speaker 2:Again, two homes, a recording studio, greenhouses, art studio, just wiped out. Now I've got 10 others. And you can say, Well, no tears for the rich man there. You've got a lot, Andrew. It hurts.
Speaker 2:60 guitars, a grand piano from this majestic family in Japan that sent it to me. 1965 Hammond, Oregon. '19 '70 Voyagers. I mean, irreplaceable instruments. Guitars, again, from the forties, fifties, sixties, seventies, eighties.
Speaker 2:Again, I'm a collector of many things. Go on. They're more than just things to me. Now with that said, my loss is small comparative to some of my neighbors. Some of them lost their house, their one house.
Speaker 2:So relatively, that's a bigger hit. So that's taught me a whole different respect for things, the importance of things. I almost cry when I'm at this cabin right now because somehow it survived. I can't believe it. It shouldn't have.
Speaker 2:It burnt the front, But some firefighter from Oregon used his shovel and put it out. There's a guy I need to seek out and get a gift. So the losses. It just seems again, we're always doing this dance with the external that is some kind of fifty fifty life of push and pull. It's not just, again, Newtonian dominoes, a cause and effect that this happens and this happens and this happens and this happens.
Speaker 2:Again, if that were the case, then nobody bears any responsibility for anything. Right? Because we can just blame everything we are today on the past. That's not the way the world works. If I want to have the will to grab a cup of tea and drink it, I'm doing that.
Speaker 2:And thus, this duality that I speak of, this reconciliation, helps to explain things and helps us reconcile the victories, the sweet, the sunny of our lives with the dark nature. And sometimes we need that push, that loss thing, even though they can be catastrophic and tough. And again, it's great to grieve. It's great to cry in our beer for a time, but there's a time where he was saying, I'm not really accomplishing much, being depressed, or thinking about this too much. I need to get my mind on something else.
Speaker 2:I need to do something constructive. I need a new vision. Let's start rebuilding. So and a lot of that, I'll just say this, has to do with attitude towards life. We can look at life with a hostile attitude, Or we can have a much more friendly or warm attitude or approach to life.
Speaker 2:Give it that gap that, hey, maybe we're not just a little speck of dust being pushed around by the big bad world, but there's something I can do about it. And I at least have the ability to have a good attitude. And as in Viktor Frankl's famous book, Man's Search for Meeting, that he penned right after he got out of the Nazi concentration camp, where he said, The last of the human freedoms is the ability to choose one's attitude in any given circumstance. That's powerful because he talked about all these really strong physically robust guys in the camp and how they would just die off quickly. Whereas you could have some shriveled up guy with a rich world of inner experience by ideas that would live.
Speaker 2:There's value to our thinking and the ideas that we choose to have. So that's my story. Hopefully, you know, my voice will offer some type of benefit, you know, or gain. And I realize that my voice will probably go in and out of your life over time, that is if you listen for some period of time, and that other voices are going to capture your attention and that's natural. But just like my heroes, the voices that are in my head, when an external event or something happens where it summons those voices or that knowledge or that idea and I go back to that voice, that reliable, friendly, comforting voice that sures up my soul and cultivates again an attitude of hope, of vision, or whatever I need.
Speaker 2:My hope is to be one of those voices, and hopefully it's a voice of helpfulness and goodness too. And let me add just one other thing. Some of you are saying, Andrew, what's with this liberation thing? Well, obviously, the first thing that comes to mind is Andrew Reed and the liberation. Okay.
Speaker 2:My band. You know, those guys that support me when I'm playing. And God knows we all need some support. But it's also an idea. It's something that we're all trying to do, whether we are conscious of it or not.
Speaker 2:We're all trying to be liberated or get as liberated as we can in our life. So what is liberation? To me, it is just to be you, and only you can liberate yourself. And as part of my job, as I perceive as this forest dweller, is to bring you to yourself. Your own self reliance, your non neediness, your complete realization of what you are.
Speaker 2:You know, giving yourself over to your own ideas about the world and being able to confidently present yourself and your views as you see them and make your full contribution. That's your job. Your job is to add your flavor, your synthesis of your interpretation of life, and to communicate yourself to the fullest extent possible, where you reserve the right to speak boldly on whatever you perceive. Of course, with tech, you you want to get along with people and you want to be held in good standing, of course. But to communicate yourself with a confident and not a needy voice, but then reserve the right to completely change your views the next day if you wish.
Speaker 2:We are all changing all the time. I certainly don't have the same views as I had when I was seven. Right? They change every day. I'm not even the same guy I was yesterday.
Speaker 2:It might be an extra wrinkle. Definitely another tad of knowledge. I might have killed off a few brain cells with little excess red wine. But we're never the same. Life's always going forward, and and that's it.
Speaker 2:So this brings us to the end with the question. And, again, questions have juice. They have life. Again, because answers are dead stops, and all answers are incomplete at best because all topics are infinite. But the question is what?
Speaker 2:What are you willing to throw your life away on?
Speaker 1:Thank you for listening. If you need anything further, just go to MBI.life.