That's like the weirdest thing ever to like stand and like you're awkwardly I'm awkwardly being talked about and it's like I guess it's all true because I wrote it at some point in my life But um, so I'm Amber like she said I'm so glad you guys are all here with me today And I'm sorry for the short technical delay. I'm gonna take Accountability for that because I use the wrong kind of slides. I don't know so Anyway, I love to travel. I love to go places. I love to talk to people, but I'm actually from Phoenix, Arizona So I'm just gonna start with that right there because I felt like I was like from some world traveler and I'm I'm from Phoenix I live like 20 minutes away, but today we're gonna talk about using the rules of improv to build better creative teams and Through this presentation. My goal is by the time we're done today You will have some tools to make build more collaborative teams More creative teams and that your teams will have more fun because that's my life goal To is to have fun and everything that I do so First of all though a couple more things about me because that wasn't enough First I'm Amber. Hey, I've been practicing waving with my left hand so I could match Tom Hanks for like a week and a half now. I think that's the best presentation. I've preparation. I've done for this talk So I'm a writer I Co-own a creative agency called amplitude media and we write words that sell stuff for people early sass the goal and I've spent the last four years here in Phoenix performing as a stand-up comedian an improper former and I've done some live storytelling I'm kind of a stage whore and But in the best way possible I love I love talking to people where there's one-on-one or in large groups I also make amazing pancakes. It's a thing My best client meetings have been around my kitchen table and I make cinnamon swirl pancakes with butter. I Can't remember the name buttermilk. I said crop syrup all of the things. Anyway, I swear I make it I'm not making that up even though it looked like I was making that up on the fly And even though this is an improv this whole thing's about improv. I actually did prepare. I'm not making up this presentation I'm also not a very good dancer, but I am inherently a creative person.  How many of you didn't raise your hand raise your hand now? Okay, leave your hand up. How many of you identify as being creative people? We all have the ability to be creative We all do and that was a trick it was a nasty rotten trick But by the end of today, I'm hoping that you all have that feeling that you have that ability to I'm gonna let you in on a little secret.  In fact, it usually looks like this This is my greatest fear after alligators tornadoes and trains Which are all perfectly logical rational fears when you live in Arizona As a writer, there's nothing scarier than the blank screen as a performer There's nothing scarier than blank index cards and as a presenter. There's nothing worse than a PowerPoint presentation My goal today is to make this as fun as possible. This is my most boring slide. I'm setting myself up for success Is what I'm doing. Okay, so I am I believe that creativity is a muscle and Although it looks like I go to the gym on a regular basis My creativity muscles are my strongest because I use them every day I used to Be scared that my creative ideas would dry up Because eventually they're gonna run out We all start with only a certain number ideas in our life. You can't have any more after that That's a lie And it's supposed to be a joke, but nobody laughs. So that's okay. It's happened to me before I have four kids. It happens every day. Nobody laughs my jokes. So Creative creativity comes in a lot of forms it comes I've seen some beautiful code that is some of the most creative things. I've ever seen written and I'm amazed that I'm in awe, but if you had asked my my engineer friends if they're creative. They'll say no I've seen some Some super creative math stuff physics is one of my jams And I don't understand it completely I didn't just in awe of it and I love it and I see some things that mean some things that people tell me the Means I'm like, this is the most creative thing. I've ever seen in my life and it's beautiful But they would not identify as creative people. So we all have the ability to be creative We all use creativity to solve problems and that's what we're doing when we're creative as we're solving problems We're finding solutions. So we're gonna start By learning some basic improv rules and exercises for strengthening your creative muscles So we're going to the creativity gym, which is my favorite gym After Jim Belushi, he's pretty funny, but So there are four rules and improv and I talk really fast Even when I'm not talking to I don't know how many of you are like six of you So if I'm talking too fast, we'd be like slow But I have a lot of things to get through and I want to have some fun So that's why I'm like ah and coffee. I've got a lot of coffee today. So The most basic rules of improv the first one is what I'm sure everybody's heard which is yes and So when you're on stage or in a creative brainstorm, you say yes to anything that's offered to you It's a gift when somebody pulls something out of nothing It's a gift when they hand it to you you accept it because if I brought you a box of chocolates You wouldn't deny them, right? Even if you don't like chocolate you would still accept it and take it and give it to somebody else, right?  Maybe some of you do I'm just making assumptions, but the second rule is to listen Which is a lot harder than it looks The third rule is there are no wrong answers Which is the best kind of test ever when you're being creative in your brainstorming. There are no wrong answers And number four is I've got your back. So you're on stage to support your team You're in the room to support your team whether it's your co-workers Whether it's your family whether it's a client whoever your team is your brainstorming to solve their problem Finding a creative solution and you've got their back So we're gonna go over these in more detail So you don't have to write them all down right now, and if you don't write them down I'll send you my slides because I have some really fun gifts and stuff And some other words that are important But here's a bonus tip and this isn't an improv tip. This is a life tip Have fun That's the number one rule that happens everywhere. I go It applies to life and improv if you're not having fun Change what you're doing do something different, but if you're not having fun in your creative brainstorming sessions Change what you're doing change how you're doing it because it should be fun Creativity is fun. It shouldn't be painful That's a lie. I might lie to you a couple times today, but I always catch myself creativity is sometimes painful But it should be fun pain. I know how that sounds and I'm just gonna keep going so the reason I got into improv is because I was doing stand-up comedy and One of my club owners said I think you'd be really good at improv and I'm an attention whore and so I said, okay That sounds like fun I was working in an agency and I wasn't having much fun in my creative life at the time because there were so many rules About how to be creative and the rules were who had the good idea was who had been there the longest Right, I hear some murmuring Some other rules were we don't do that because we've done it before and it didn't work Well, that was five years ago with a different client with a different tactic. So let's try it. Let's try it again Some other rules are we don't know how this is gonna turn out. So we're not gonna take any risks. How many of you done that and it's like The greatest things happen when you take the biggest risks Looking at you two right there because of our conversation before this um So I started and go back a year before that I started doing stand-up because I'd moved to Phoenix and I didn't know anybody and I was kind of bored and Everybody has stand-up comedy when it gets bored, right?  And I'm like, I've never been anywhere.   I'm like, oh Okay, that's a really cool. I that's really cool. I think he was like I'm saying don't do drugs Okay, Nancy Reagan. Thank you very much But he was right. I got off that stage and I was like I needed more I needed that hit again and it's become a glutton. I do I chase that high which is why I perform However, I found that I can find that high with the right creative Creativity the right moment I can find that high when I'm in a room with a client And we have been working on a project for five weeks and we nail it when we say This is your tagline and it's three words that they've paid thousands and thousands of thousands of dollars for The most important three words they're going to build in their company for the next ten years at least and I can say That's when I get that high now because it's still creative and it's still creative energy and we've solved their problem Anyway It's about when I switch from comedy to improv It was more about the less about the me and more about the we and When I switched from comedy to improv is where I saw that my best creative ideas happened on stage With my friends when we were playing on Wednesday nights and performing on Saturday nights And I didn't feel that same we when I was at work And I didn't like it because I thought I should be creative every day Because I think we all should be creative every day including today How many of you are terrified I'm about to call you up here right now now who to call on I'm just kidding I'm not going to do that because I feel like we all have choices We are allowed to make and one of the choices is not to be up here today. So um, I Lost my place in my slides. Okay, so it doesn't do much sense to do this presentation without doing a little demonstration of what Improv looks like right? How many of you have seen an improv show of some sort? So you have a little bit of idea. Okay, um We're gonna play a game. We're gonna warm up and get our creative muscles going So I did ask for a volunteer beforehand, but are there any volunteers before I pull my volunteer Does anybody want to maybe want to volunteer? Okay, come on up Bravery I love it. You are gonna rock this because that's what I've got your back That's what we're gonna do. So what is your name April? Hi, April. I'm Amber nice to meet you We're friends now come for pancakes. Are you living Phoenix? awesome, I Have my first pancake date from WordPress. I actually make really good waffles, too I'm all for all breakfast food, but I you're gonna have to try my cinnamon swirl with better better milk Syrup tastes like frosting. It's not anyway Okay, so we're gonna play a game right now Call the alphabet game and the alpha the game the purpose is we're gonna have a conversation We're gonna set a scene so somebody shout out a place that we're at. That's not here We're at the hospital So the way the game goes is April and I'm gonna have a conversation at the hospital I'm gonna start and I'm gonna start with the letter a whatever. I say I'm gonna start with a you're gonna do b c Back and forth got it We're gonna help you out Objects to have fun, right? That's the object of everything. So we have a conversation now Just don't deny anything. I say accept it as truth and add to it. That's the secret and it's harder than it looks But we're gonna give it a shot. Okay April are you okay? But I just I just I just wanted to fall down the cliff cliffs You jumped off of cliffs. Were you diving? Diving no, I was I was looking to drown Everybody did you hear that? April was trying to drown. I'm really worried about you With the love of God, please Just just let me go Golly April we just became friends If I let you go then we'll never have pancakes. Oh heck Amber I just I just really really just wanted waffles Waffles, I promise. I'll make waffles just don't jump again Jumping was fun though. What's the goal of jumping? Love Men, huh? I get it. I totally get it Never did I see such an amazing man Can you can you tell me about it? It's harder than a look potentially potentially the the mate of my life quite spectacular Okay, so you see a big hit random applause for April I Don't know if I'm gonna if I broke it you can go sit down. Thank you. Thank you for being a good sport Oh, it did come back on it's a lot harder than it looks But it's one of those muscles that the more you do it the easier it gets That was amazing first time. Yes It's one of the ways that you flex your creative muscles by using it. I've played that game a thousand times I have some tricks for remember where I'm out in the alphabet. I am Still forget where I'm out on the alphabet. Sometimes it happens I have tricks for the words that are the hard letters I've I've learned those things because I've I've I've done it so many times that muscle is really strong in my brain And in my creative my creative set So we're gonna talk about the rules, but we're gonna start at the bottom because I don't actually like rules I Have a lot of issues with rules in general. I feel like you should know the rules You know how to break them. However Stuff for now today these rules that I'm making up are the most important rules of your life ever So a large part of my job gets involves getting people Who don't feel like they're creative to get to the heart of their creative problems? So we can help them find creative solutions, but they have to be part of the creative solution I can't build a concept for a brand without knowing the brand and I don't know the brand as well as the CEO knows The brand or the people who've been in the middle of it for a year or two so You have to be able to involve people in the creative process themselves It's the same when you're building an internal creative team. Our job is to come to the best idea We know from experience that when we're all working together We come to better ideas How many of you have ever had the best idea of your life and shared it with somebody who immediately went that is amazing? What if you also did and then they elevated to another level and then we also ever had that happen, or is that just me? Like that's how creativity happens, right when ideas collide and they build better and bigger ideas So in business often it can feel like there's a lot of ownership And it can feel like it's a competition to come up with the best idea And so the one of the challenges that I had in business was that my creative team wasn't very collaborative And it was there was a lot of throwing people under the bus and typical business bullshit And so for me going to improv every week I was on a stage of people who were there to make me look funny And there's nothing I like better than somebody who makes me look funny except for maybe pancakes So we have to flip the script on most business corporate settings So on the on the screen are on the sorry on the stage. It's not about being funny It's about making your team member be funny So one of the things you do when you have a team that practices together a lot as you get to know each other So you know where each other strengths are you know where each other's weaknesses are you can set people up? The guy who has a great Scottish accent you can set him up to surprise and delight the crowd with his accent out of the middle of Nowhere by asking him how Scotland was I say Scottish or Irish. I don't know whichever one so then What you're doing is you're helping him win you're helping him have get the last laugh When your team is doing the best to support you it being funny You have the same advantage because they do it in reverse for you what happens is Everybody's funnier when they're all working together now Okay, so the problem on the corporate level is the often this doesn't happen So how can you do that in your own businesses in your own creative? Collaboration sessions, how can you instill that culture where you're at where you support each other you have each other's back Can you help each other be funny or creative or win? Building a team a team of collaboration. This is the one of the cornerstones of our company is that we are we we're not an eye We're not independent We function as a group and we function as a core with ourselves with each other with our clients When we pull in a lot of freelancers we function as a group and that way when I succeed my partner succeeds My graphic designer succeeds. We all succeed when the client's happy everyone's winning So the third the third rule is there are no wrong answers, how would you like to have had this be a rule when you were in school? Right, we learned very very fast not to take risks Very very fast you learn you have to use the right colors You have to color inside the lines you have to learn to follow the rules that are set out for you There are some reasons to have rules and stuff 2 plus 2 has got to equal 4 most of the time However in the creative process When you are garnered by rules and you have guardrails and you have to you're so wrong about so worried about failing Then you miss the big opportunities I love this quote that creativity comes from the freedom to fail and failure is a Bad word I don't like it because failure is actually opportunity in disguise That's what failure is if you never take any chances if you never take any risks if you never fall on your face You'll never fly you'll never jump off that cliff and fall in love. It'll never happen because you're not going to take any risks On the improv stage. There are no wrong answers You can say anything you want to say and your team has got your back Right rule number four and they're going to support you're going to step what you're going to say and they're going to help you move forward The bigger the risk the bigger the the bigger the magic at the other end of the the other end of the The cliff I lost my words for a minute that happens sometimes We're really really good at stopping ideas our own other People's we're really good at stopping them because they're scary and they're terrifying and the bigger idea and the bigger the risk The more scary and the more terrifying that it is but if you don't ever Explore you're never going to win. So there's the important the important rule of there are no wrong answers for a couple reasons It allows for exploration You don't stop you don't start with no, you don't start with that's the wrong answer you start with huh What if and then you explore the idea and it gets you places You never would have been before because other people's brains are the most fascinating places to explore if they'll let you and I Mean in a not creepy like Jack the Ripper kind of a way or whoever was at eight brains or a zombie way, right? But often our mind makes connections before we see them I'm in the middle of this huge research study right now with one of our clients about making decisions We don't have any answers and you don't know if you don't know the solution so predicting the future and He's doing with math because he's an actuary. I'm doing a brain cognition because that's a lot more interesting and Doing a lot of research and a lot of studying and one of the things when you study anthropology and Evolution and all of that kind of stuff brain science is that we've evolved to make connections and see things before we even know We're seeing them. It's why your gut is usually right when you don't like somebody Or when something seems off because we're really really tuned into those bad signals When you allow yourself to explore ideas you'll find connections that aren't there But if you stop exploring before you can get started then the magic never happens and we're all about magic That's what we're looking for right now it can be a launching place for somebody else to take hold of your idea and make it grow bigger and also many times our first Instinct is correct and if you have to explain your instinct Before you can have the idea then you're not going to progress because often it takes you a couple days of thinking about it That's the other creative magic is you do the painful process You bang your head against the wall and you bang your head against the wall and then you stop and everybody goes home And everybody takes a shower because that's where the best ideas happen Somebody will figure it out. It'll happen One of the biggest gifts of improv training is the ability to think quickly and the ability to speak without thinking Some of us are born with that gift and it gets us in a lot of trouble sometimes though When you can have that fully formed before I just rewound that because that didn't make any sense at all So when you can speak without thinking though, then that's the first instinct and that's what you get to act on So We are gonna play a game, but we have 10 minutes. So if we have time, we'll come back to this game and it's called three things so Keep that in mind. If not, we can play in the hall afterwards. It's a really fun game so Now number two is this can feel contradictory When you're speaking without thinking right? The key to doing that though is by listening. So if I'm having a conversation with you mark And I'm having a conversation and you're telling me something you can tell when I'm not listening. Can't you? It's really obvious. We all like to pretend like nobody can tell when we're not listening, but it's like yeah mark That's really interesting. Uh-huh. Yeah Yeah, and I'm like doing my grocery list in my head or I'm thinking, you know writing dirty lyrics to songs that I know like things like that and You would just it's obvious on stage when you're doing improv You can tell when somebody isn't listening It's painfully obvious and what happens with a lot of stand-up comedians when they get on stage is they're writing jokes So I can I can see I'm like, okay We're in the scene and you're doing this and you're probably gonna do this if I say this punch line I'll get the biggest laugh and that's what I'm gonna do and then the whole scene fails because I wasn't listening because people aren't that predictable and So we're gonna especially especially Improper performers are not that predictable You're gonna think they're gonna stay left and they're gonna say purple and then you're just screwed Because your joke doesn't make any sense So listening to listen versus listening to hear and to understand as a skill We all need to work better on and our creative teams as we learn to listen and slow down and Really hear what somebody's trying to say and understand and ask the questions to make sure we're hearing and understanding It's how we build stronger teams Um so oh, sorry, I'm like getting ahead of myself and backwards and forwards and all the things so When you're on stage or you're in a creative brainstorming sessions You can't have somebody's back if you're not listening to what they have to say That's really the key the number to this rule is that you're breaking another rule when you're not doing it correctly And you can't add to the scene if you don't know what that's going on in the scene I'm telling you it's all about magic and unicorns and rainbows. That's what creativity should feel like it should feel fun and exciting So when setting up brainstorms, especially with clients We warn them that it's going to be super awkward And I just start actually I start most of my relationships and conversations with people that way I just let you know. I'm super awkward. I Say really dumb things a lot of the times and I make jokes that people don't think are funny And then I try to make up for of pancakes. It's just a thing that I do And it works most of the time and when it doesn't I Try harder next time. I don't know anyway So we weren't it's going to be awkward and we are on a phone call with a client They're in New York and Seattle and we're on the phone or brainstorming is an hour and a half long conversation And at one point we warned them. We said this is going to be awkward We're going to make you think and we're not going to answer all of your questions we're going to ask a lot of questions in return and For people who don't function in that way all the time It can be it can be super awkward and at one point the CEO of this company. She's like this just feels so weird Why does this feel so weird and I said because I'm not talking and What you're used to having happened is you say something and I respond immediately I respond I don't want to know what I have to say. I already know what I have to say in the situation I want to hear the third thing you're going to say The third thing you're going to say I want to know what that is and if I talk over the top of you I have no idea what that third thing is because the third thing is Typically where the magic happens the first idea isn't where you win is the third If you let somebody get to the third idea, I promise you'll have And rainbows and butterflies and unicorns will happen And it's awkward and it's okay. So The most commonly known rule of improv is yes and Which is why I did it backwards because I wanted you guys to feel like you already knew what was coming so you're welcome It's a gift actually so yes and is a gift when somebody is creating something out of nothing and they offer you something Right the chocolates you accept them when you're in a creative brainstorm and somebody comes up with an idea out of nowhere You accept it and then you build on it. So that's this. That's the and the and is the hard part It allows them that allows the the scene to move forward on the improv stage This is like the most awkward movie ever and I love it because it feels like my childhood So on stage, how would you feel if you were up here and I'm like, so we're at the hospital. No, we're not Okay, so how are you doing today? I'm not here Like when you stop the scene, right? That's how it feels. It's awkward How many of you have been a creative brainstorming session where somebody throws out an idea and the first thing somebody says is say why it won't work Yeah Every single one of us has been there, right? How many of you have had the thought in your head? This is never going to work, but you don't say it and then it seems to work and then you're like, I'm so glad I didn't say anything That happens to me all the time Usually when my kids have some great hair bring hair schemed idea. I've learned to just accept it and go with it I could say that about a lot of things in my life actually, but and parenting It's a life tip just say yes and see what happens and have really good health insurance But on creative teams when you have to defend every single thing you have to say It's no longer collaborative as combative and that's what you want to do when you're building teams is make sure that you're working together To build bigger ideas. You're not competing and fighting. So that's back to rule number four, right? So we're working together to make it happen And I'm gonna read you this quote even those against all of the rules of all of the things of presenting because this is one of the books I've been reading about thinking fast So allowing people to operate with without having to explain themselves constantly turns out to be like the rule of agreement in improv It enables rapid cognition So if I don't have to explain myself if you just say yes And then you add on it We build a bigger idea because we're thinking so fast. We don't have to explain ourselves yet So that's part of the the agreement, but it's also part of it's also part of the previous rule, too, right? to listen and all ideas are good ideas and working together, but it's also Good ideas can come from anywhere and this is one of the things that I've been really working on lately, too is The idea of diversity in groups and diversity of thought and making sure that we have diverse ideas in a room And so I ran a team of I was in charge of our interns for a couple of years And it was my one of my favorite things I ever did because it's this group of kids who are so enthusiastic And they're so excited and they are target demographic for two-thirds of our client base at the agency I was at and we have them in a room and I told them Speak up say what you're thinking join the conversation your creative ideas are valuable And I tried to train the name film as much as I could before I sent them off into the world to have it beaten out of them Because they hadn't had enough experience Good ideas come from everywhere When you accept somebody's idea and you add to it then you're you're collaborating together And you're raising everybody to a greater greater height and a greater strength and a better team and better ideas. I Think differently than you think you think differently than you think you think differently than you think we all have different experiences different ideas When we all collaborate in a room and everyone has a voice Then we have the idea to build magical beautiful things sunshine rainbows unicorns. I swear it's gonna happen someday I Had a teammate a colleague who was the best at this and she actually taught me this lesson in a way that I've never seen it Done before in a room and it's every single collaborative brain session we brainstorm we would have Every idea was a good idea She is the queen of yes and And so I would say something and she'd be that is a really interesting idea I really liked that she would start she would frame almost every conversation with that every response It would be a positive affirmation of what you said And what if we also did so she's not denying what I said because that's a tricky thing people do sometimes Well, that's really interesting. What if and then they have a different idea And then you're just like well that was denial even though it was trick tricky denial So that's the secret to is to make sure that you're accepting and you're moving the scene forward But you're doing in a way that's genuine and real so that's a really interesting idea. I really like that What if we also and then build as you go? So just to recap the rules of both improv and creative brainstorming collaboration. Yes, and Listen to listen. Don't listen to speak. There are no wrong answers And I've got your back when we work together as a team that's when the magic happens and I'm really sad we don't have time to play more games But if you want to come over for pancakes some in email will play improv games of a great time So thank you so much. If you have any questions. I think we have like 30 seconds. So Yes How do you play three things? Okay, so the way you play three things is you can have as many people as you want and I say I'm gonna say I have What's your name? Julie has three things in the trunk of her car and then and then Julie and so then Julie has to say Three things. So what are three things in the trunk of Julie's car a? body a shovel and A bicycle pump and what we do is we as we do those three things ever goes So we say the first thing and it goes one and then she says the second thing We all go to and say the third thing we all go three and it goes the next person But it's a cadence like this And so the key is is like I have three things in my pocket I have and then the next person and then I say You have three things in your refrigerator, and it's so you just go it's a way of doing it without thinking so it's just like There are no wrong answers. You're listening and you're just you're saying the first thing you think of and It's really fun Because I'm a nerd, but it's really fun any other questions To someone that's introverted okay, so this is actually I am a super super extrovert clearly And when I did improv I was surprised how many introverts were on our team And so my secret is to go and try it that is my best tip You will not know how it feels till you're there, but what happens is you're building a safe space So improv rehearsal feels like a misnomer or an oxymoron. I'm gonna go practice improv right now Happens as you're building a team and so it's the same as practicing Collaboration as a team practice ideation practice creativity. So when you're on a team You're gonna go with your team once a week and you're gonna rehearse for three hours And you're gonna play games with your friends That is my favorite part of improv is like I would go and hang out with my friends and play games Once a week and then on the weekends.  I'm gonna say try it I know there's like there's like I can think of three clubs off the top of my head They have a weekly drop at night if you just want to try it And if you want to know send me an email grab me afterwards I can give you whatever one's on your side of town, but that's my But that's my life tip for everything is just try it and see what happens minus jumping off cliffs Unless you have a parachute or a hang glider or there's water at the bottom. Yeah, there are well I don't know about meetups like a formal meetup.com, but there are drop-in improv classes. So I There's like three different comedy clubs I can think of that have like for public and then it can just go drop in and I'll teach you the basics And you can try it out. So catch me afterwards and I'll point you in the right direction Anyone else? I think we're I think we're out of time. Thank you so much


All right. Good evening, everyone. Thank you for sticking around. I'm Oscar Perry Obello from Next City and we're going to introduce ourselves a little bit here, but let me do a little bit of framing. So we're sort of the second half. We're going to shift a little bit from talking about what we just heard or everything we've heard about racial equity and the differences in wealth and what that means and who has access to and who manages wealth. And now we're going to talk, we're going to shift to talking about who is responding to that problem, who is working on that problem, who's out there doing the work. And so this is sort of why and we can't and there are literally millions of people out there doing something about the racial wealth gap, doing something about gender equity, doing something about justice for the planet. There's millions of them and so we sort of have the shortcut here of having a journalist, having a really two, three-ish journalists, two and a half journalists. So Marjorie Kelly is a long-time journalist and Ted Howard is the co-authors of the Making of a Democratic Economy, which is the book, the title of the session and they have the book here. Available at finer bookstores everywhere. And so we're going to talk about and the book is full of examples of the folks who are responding to that problem. So let me start by introducing myself and talking a little bit about those numbers we heard today. So at Next City, we're an online magazine, a non-profit organization that is dedicated to driving change for the world through cities, through journalism and events around the world. So we were founded in 2003 and in 2003, cities were still the problem places, right? Full of crime, full of drugs, they were the problem places. And now that cities are more in vogue, we look at the neighborhoods in cities as the, as our focus, let me look at those neighborhoods as the places where the solutions really are coming from and can come from, should come from, they're emerging really and they're worth our attention and that's why we write about them at Next City. So we write about urban planning and urban policy and development and design, affordable housing, public chains, banking and finance and access to capital and all that.  The median net worth of a white household is around $171,000, right? And the median net worth of a black household, $17,600, right? If you look at, if you can chop that up by city, there's some, there's some really interesting studies by city. So in Boston, where Marjorie is based, in Boston, the median net worth of a white household is $247,000. The median net worth of a black household in Boston is $8. That's not a type of 8. The median net worth of a white household in Los Angeles is 100 times the median net worth of the, of a black household. And then it's not just wealth, right? That, that, that's a, that's a root cause of many things and there's some root causes that led to that wealth gap, but it results in other gaps. Gaps like here in San Francisco, the average revenue for a white-owned business is around $600,000. The average revenue for a black-owned business is around $119,000. The average revenue for a black-owned business in Oakland is $66,000. And that's, that's just one area. I mean, if you look at Detroit, the average white-owned business in Detroit, in Detroit earns $1.3 million. The average black-owned business in Detroit, $32,625. So that's the kind of inequality and the, that's why the, the numbers we heard earlier about who is managing wealth really matters. And what we're going to talk about today for the, for the next 17-ish minutes, 13-ish minutes, is who is working on that problem. And that, because that, that's really what I really, what I really like about the, the book, Making of a Democratic Economy. So, you know, we're not, we didn't bring millions of people with us, but we brought a couple of folks who wrote a book about the folks who are responding to all of these problems. So, and I want to ask them to tell us a little bit about the communities where, who are trying to respond to that problem of racial wealth, inequality, injustice, environmental injustice. So I'm going to start by having you guys talk about, there's a, there's a really interesting little anecdote in the book of when, of when your organization, the Democracy Collaborative, where Marjorie Kelly is executive vice president and, and Ted Howard here is the president of the Democracy Collaborative. Your organization went out to the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. And tell us what happened. Sure. Yeah, I'll start with that. Thanks, Oscar. Yeah, the very first project I worked on at Democracy Collaborative was we are working with a group of Native American non-profits wanting to get some economic development going. And we went to Pine Ridge in South Dakota.  There was not a single house for sale anywhere on this reservation. And we had the good fortune to work with Nick Tilson, who is, I believe he's here tonight. And so, yeah, Nick was doing a regenerative community trying to rebuild all kinds of wealth on the reservation, skills, culture, and so forth. And they were one part of a cohort that we worked with, we worked with a half a dozen Native non-profits. We came in thinking that our, our job was to lecture these Native leaders. And we came in with our, our PowerPoints at the ready. And the very first morning of this gathering, there was a revolt. And they basically told us, this is like learning from a fire hose, please leave the room. And we'll let you back in when we, when we, when we're ready. So it was interesting, Oscar, they came back and said, well, you know, we learned that we were going to do a process of co-learning. And from then on, this project was a learning action lab. We, we developed the gender together, we, we brought in experts for people and, and really began this whole, this whole process of, of cultural sensitivity. And I, and I want to just end up with a, one of the lovely outcomes of this is one of the women who was involved took some of our work on community wealth building and translated into Lakota. And we published that for them. So it had a, it had a nice stark to it. And, you know, that's just one of the examples in the book. And the thing that stood out to me most is out of eight examples, a majority of them, about five, were rooted in the lived experience of a historically marginalized community. So the Pine Ridge Reservation, you also went to the South Bronx, you take us to Portland. And most, and perhaps most near and dear I know to you, to your hearts is you took us to Cleveland. Yeah. And you have when we have the Cleveland model. So why don't you talk, Ted, introduce the, what is the Cleveland model and how, how it kind of emerged, you know, and do that in like two minutes, right? Good. I can do that. So is anybody here from Cleveland, Ohio? There always seems to be somebody. Okay. So Ohio, we're kind of like the Irish, there's this huge diaspora of Ohioans everywhere. I've been to Amarillo, Texas. And I said, is there anybody here from Cleveland? Oh, yeah. High plans. So Cleveland's a very interesting story. I moved there to do this work about eight years ago. And it's an interesting story because Cleveland back in the day, back in the 50s and 60s, was one of the five wealthiest cities in America, it had a population of about a million people. There are more Fortune 500 corporations headquartered in Cleveland, Ohio, than any city in America, except Manhattan, New York City. John D Rockefeller was born in Cleveland, he's buried there today. There were millionaires, it was quite a city. Today, Cleveland's not one of the five wealthiest, it's one of the three poorest cities in America. The population has fallen to about 385,000 as the, from a million as the city's been deindustrialized, jobs have moved offshore and so forth. And about 35% of the population of the entire city lives below the federal poverty line. So it's a city that's been very, very hard hit as many older industrial rest belt cities were. And we look to see what can we do that can actually start to rebuild a living local economy. And the Cleveland Foundation, the local philanthropy, the oldest community foundation in the world, invited me and my organization to come work there and help design an economic inclusion strategy. The end result of which is the following that while most of the industry had left our city, what remained was a legacy of the manufacturing strength, large place based anchor institutions, Cleveland Clinic, many of you have heard of, Case Western Reserve University. So large universities, hospitals, cultural centers that buy billions and billions of dollars of goods and services. And yet, they're surrounded by six neighborhoods where the median household income is below $18,500. Federal poverty line is $225. So where are those billions of dollars going? Well, they're all exiting our system. So the strategy, what became known as the Cleveland model was to work with the anchor institutions to move their contracts back to the city and into local business. Then we started a network of for profit worker owned cooperatives called the Evergreen Cooperatives to explicitly provide goods and services to those institutions and and be sustained by the contracts from the institutions. So we have two industrial scale laundries employing a couple hundred people doing about 30 million pounds of sheets and towels for the hospitals, employing people who were formerly unemployed and about 50% formerly incarcerated. We built a hydroponic greenhouse in downtown Cleveland, growing 3 million heads of lettuce and 300,000 pounds of basil for the local food market because in Cleveland, because of the short growing season with the weather, almost all leafy greens are trucked 12 to 1500 miles on carbon based transportation from Mexico, Arizona and California. We said, let's grow it there and keep people working. So the end result is that we have close to 300 people currently employed who are in a network of four or five companies more on the way. Everyone receives a family supporting the living wage. They receive what are essentially no cost health benefits. And because they're the owners of their companies, there aren't outside investors as the companies are profitable and they are, they share in the profits. So early this year, final story, final data point for the people who had been at the Evergreen Cooperative Laundry, the longest again, 50% of whom were formerly incarcerated and almost all of whom were formerly unemployed. Those people received bonus checks in January of this year, $5,000 because their labor is what created that profit. And so that's one of the principles of what a democratic economy starts to look like. And that's one story from Cleveland, Ohio. And as you said, their stories are all over the country. And I got to take you, I got to take us one more layer into Cleveland because there's something really interesting that recently formed out of this model. So Ted mentioned there are more worker owned companies along the way. There's a really interesting fund that you guys that is also part of this ecosystem. It's the Fund for Employee Ownership.  So this fund will acquire existing legacy businesses, whatever you want to call them. It will acquire them and hold on to them until such time that the workers are able to take over ownership of those businesses. Yeah, that's right, Oscar. It's a Fund for Employee Ownership. It was started just in the last year. It's already raised 11 million. And it's a it's intriguing. It's a it's a private equity model, kind of a concessionary private equity where, yes, you buy, hold, convert to employee ownership and then exit into the evergreen network of the three employee owned companies. So and it's being tested right now in Northeast Ohio. The fund we think will close on its first acquisition probably by the end of the year. And I want to point out also that this is, it's intended as a model. That's how we work at the Democracy Collaborative. Let's create models that show their different ways of doing things. Anchor institutions, we've done models there and model of how do you spread employee ownership. There are others here working on other private equity, other kinds of funds taking employee ownership to scale. So it's really a growing area and you're going to be hearing more about this opportunities for investors to make, you know, attractive mid-range returns and create wealth for those who have been left out. And let me just say this is incredibly important nationally, not just Cleveland, because of the retirement of the baby boom generation, my people, who, you know, in the next ten years there are going to be tens of thousands of companies in this country that are closely held. They're going to be on the chopping block and that represents millions of jobs. And either we're going to lose those jobs if we sell to competitors and so forth, or we're going to leverage this moment of what's called the Silver Tsunami into a dramatic expansion of employee ownership in America. And we're trying to test that concept through the fund. And so this is, and this is just one of the many things, you know, this is in the book and it's, the reason it's in the book, right, is these, all these examples we just heard about is because they are, they're elements of prints or illustrations of principles of a democratic economy. Yeah. So, you know, just for the, I'm sure folks are wondering, what, what is a democratic economy? Again, you have two minutes to answer that. Yeah. Great. To Karl Marx, like, 30 years, at the British Library, but you're on. Well, just to step back, I mean, impact investing is one piece of a very large movement that is working to transform the economy from the inside out. So it's, a democratic economy is not just about regulations and social safety nets wrapped around the economy as it is, but it's about the DNA. And that's exactly what impact investing is about. We want to invest for mission, we want to invest for social outcomes, along, right alongside financial outcomes. This is also happening in, in ownership. There's public banks that are being started working with the anchor institutions. We do a lot with that. And so, the whole idea is, you know, can we imagine a next system, not just a project here or, you know, an approach there, but an entire economy, a new paradigm around the common good, designed around the common good. So that's what we talk about in the book. When we say this is not a pipe dream, we go and we visit the places where this is emerging and the, and the really brilliant people who are, who are doing this work. And it's, it's an alternative to the extractive economy, which we have now, which as we know, is designed for extraction by a financial elite. So how do you design it for the prosperity of all of us? And that, that work is, is very far along. And, okay, so we've got four minutes left. So I try to, I tried the budget at about four minutes because now we've got to plug what tomorrow's session is about. So tomorrow at 1130, it's going to take four minutes, tomorrow at 1130, we will also be in a breakout session, a workshop, and it's going to be in the theater tent, the gallery tent down at, down at the end of the row here. And so there's eight examples, there's eight examples in the book that illustrate the principles of a democratic economy. There are a majority of them are coming from historically marginalized communities in a sense of illustrating that the economy, one of the reasons the economy is not democratic is that there are specific communities that, for whom the economy is not working. And the, and the book is about how, how can we build an economy that works for those communities that has to be built with those communities. Yeah. And so tomorrow at 1130, there will be one, two, three, four, five other examples of historically marginalized communities that are organizing to build a democratic economy. And so I'm going to take you, take us on a quick tour of these. Right. In West Oakland, community foods market, you might have, you might have heard of it as the people's community market, it opened as community foods market in June. And this is a market that raised 11 million dollars to, for the community to own its own grocery store. How do you get 11 million dollars into, into West Oakland, into a food desert in a way that's non-extractive, in a way that is with the community? Well, they had no other choice. You can hear about it tomorrow. They had, they had, they raised 600, 700-ish thousand in about nine months using a direct public offering structure. Once they got that 700,000, CDFIs, new market tax credits, suddenly everybody wanted in on that deal. So they were able to raise the rest of the 11 million. And they've actually raised 2 million. They've, they kept on raising the, the direct public offering. They've kept it open so that they have working capital after the open. That's West Oakland. That's just one. Another example is Recology. If you're from the Bay Area, you've probably heard of Recology. This is the worker-owned composting, recycling company. They're going to talk about employee ownership and, and what, and what investors can do to support employee ownership. And it's a billion dollar company. Oh, excuse me. 1.2 billion? 1.2 billion. 1.2 billion dollar company. Yeah. That's, that's, that's two. Community foods market, Recology. Three, the runway project. This is a, this is a, a project to create a product to fill in the friends and family capital gap. That wealth gap we talked about earlier. You know, if your median wealth in your, in your, in your neighborhood is 8 dollars, what do you do about how, where do you get the friends family capital? Not just the money, but the friends and family part of it too. So that's, and that would, that has been designed that by, by black folks, for people of color, for black folks. That's, that's, that's number two. Number three is the public banking campaign. So this is a, this is a campaign to create city and county owned banks. California just passed the bill to create a legal pathway for cities and counties to do this. Ten city or, and or county owned banks over the next seven years, at a limit of two per year. So, cities and counties are going to be able to go to the California state regulator and ask for a banking license to create their own bank. And that's about public banking North Dakota. That's four. That's four. And another great model. Wait a minute. Wait a minute. Wait a minute. I have a minute. Beauty foods market. Recology. Public banking campaign. Again, these are all models of communities, historically marginalized communities that are organizing, accessing capital, creating their own capital stack, building projects in, in, in, in the, in their vision, right? There weren't any projects. It's all right. Community foods market. Well, you have to show up tomorrow to find out what's going on. Um, well, thank you very much, everyone. And I think that's our time. Any, any closing thoughts? Could I just say another shameless plug? If you'd like a copy of book, Marjorie and I are signing them tomorrow in the Festival Pavilion at 10 o'clock. But I'd also like to just end with a quote from the book. Marjorie mentioned, uh, our colleagues on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. And people asked me, what's in the way of our achieving truly a democratic economy? And really, I think it's, we don't have the ambition and the vision to drive forward. And so the native leaders on Pine Ridge gotten a sweat lodge and they heard a message from their elders. And this is what they heard, which motivated them into action. How long are you going to let other people decide the future for your children? Are you not warriors? It's time to stop talking and start doing. Don't come from a place of fear. Come from a place of hope. That's a message for all of us. Thank you. Thank you.


Ubuntu is one of the most popular distros in the world, if not the most popular. And if you're just coming to Linux, chances are Ubuntu is probably a pretty good place to start. But the best thing about Ubuntu isn't that it exists, or that it's good, or it has a lot of applications, or it has a lot of support, none of those things. The best thing about Ubuntu is that it has a lot of derivatives. It's kind of like Debian in that way, only Ubuntu is kind of like the son of Debian if that's the way you want to look at it. It's a derivative of Debian itself. So the family history of Linux distros is interesting, but not why we're here today. The reason why it's so cool that there are a lot of derivatives of Ubuntu out there is simply because it gives you a lot of choice. Now you could go through and use one of the flavors of Ubuntu and today we're going to talk about one of those at least. But there are also several other distros out there that are based on Ubuntu that are also really cool. So today what we're going to do is take a look at the top five Ubuntu based distros that aren't named Ubuntu. So let's go ahead and jump right in with number five. Number five on the list is elementary OS and it's a really good distribution out there, especially if you're coming to Linux from Mac OS. If you are very familiar with the way Apple does business, you'll fit right in with the way elementary OS does their distro. They're very much concerned with how it looks, how it feels, how applications interact with the base distro and how you get applications on your system. They're very much a curated experience, if that's how you want to describe it. And what this means is that it allows you to use your computer in a very structured manner. Let's go ahead and put it that way. If you're familiar with the way Mac OS works, you'll be familiar with the way this works as well, not only in looks, but also in how the rules work. So for example, customization and or the lack thereof and how you get applications and so on and so forth. It doesn't mean that there isn't customization, obviously. You can go through and figure out how to customize just like you can with any link distribution. But this is a very much an opinionated distro. They have opinions on how you should use your computer. And if that's the way you think you should use your computer, you're going to be happy there as well. Chances are, again, you'll be happy there if you've used Mac OS in the past and enjoyed it. It's very much a similar experience. So that is an elementary OS. It's based on Ubuntu LTS, which means that you'll get updates fairly infrequently, but also you'll be getting a rock solid stable distro that probably will never break unless you've done something to it. So number four in the list is Papa OS. Papa OS comes in two different versions, either the LTS version or the most recent version version. I suppose you to say it's the version that's based on the most recent version of Ubuntu. So you'll get at the time of recording, that's 21.10. And you also get an LTS version. So you can choose either one depending on which way you want to go. It also comes with two different ISOs. So when you go to the download button, you'll be given the choice of either the regular ISO, which is going to come with the open source, AMD and Intel drivers, or you'll be able to choose an ISO with the Nvidia drivers on it. So you'll be able to choose which ISO is going to work best with your particular flavor of hardware. And this is neat simply because it allows you to get an ISO that works very well with a particular brand of graphics card. Whereas a lot of times you'll get an ISO that is more focused on general happiness. I should say general functionality is probably the word that I was really looking for there. And that means that they haven't gone through and specifically tweaked that ISO for every piece of hardware. Whereas PopOS has gone through and done that with these ISOs. Now PopOS uses a GNOME based desktop environment. And you can tell that because it looks a lot like GNOME, but they've also kind of rebranded it. They gone through and put a whole bunch of extension work into it. They've themed it and they've kind of renamed it Cosmic. But it's still GNOME, at least as of right now, they are working on something different. But that's neither here nor there. As of right now, it's a GNOME based distro. And if that's something that you enjoy, I highly encourage you to try it. They have gone through and enabled a lot more customization than even Ubuntu has gone through and done. So if you enjoy the GNOME experience, but you want quite a bit more in terms of flexibility, PopOS might be the choice for you. In terms of software store and stuff like that, you'll find that they've done something interesting. They actually use something called the PopShop, which is based on the same store as elementary uses. So if you notice in the B roll there, they actually use the same store, although they are pulling from different sources. So that is PopOS. It is a really, really good distro. Now it does have somewhat of a mixed reputation. Some people say it's the best gaming distro out there.  So really, it's going to depend, I believe on what hardware you have. I've had experience on my hardware. I've known some other people who just can't get it to run on no matter what hardware they want. So I highly recommend giving it a try. Just keep in mind that some people have had a bad experience. So that is PopOS. Number three on the list is the only Ubuntu flavor on here. Now when I say Ubuntu flavor, I mean one of those distributions that is officially supported by Canonical, the people who do Ubuntu. And the reason why I've chosen this is simply because I needed a stand-in. Originally, this spot was going to go to ZoranOS. And ZoranOS is an honorable mention, but I could not get it to download. The mirrors were going to take 10 hours to download an ISO. And I tried to then get it through the BitTorrent, also was going to be really slow. So I didn't have that kind of time, so I had to choose something different. So I've chosen Ubuntu Mate. Now Ubuntu Mate, like I said, is an officially supported Ubuntu flavor. And the reason why I've chosen it is simply because it's kind of an alternative desktop experience. Mate allows you to do a ton of extra stuff, but its core purpose is simply to emulate the experience of GNOME 2 back in the day. Out of the box, that's what you're going to get. The really cool thing about Ubuntu Mate, this particular version of Mate, is that they've gone through and allowed you to select several different layouts. So you can choose a different layout that is already pre-configured based on whatever experience you want. You can do one that looks like the Pantheon desktop, one that looks like Mac OS called Cupertino. They have one called Redmond that looks like Windows. They have one, several that are traditional, look more like old versions of GNOME. It's really cool, and that customization comes out of the box. And I actually find that this amount of customization is really rare when it comes to GDK-based distros. Between this and an XFCE-based desktop environment, you're going to get a lot more, a very similar experience in terms of being able to customize stuff and choose panels and applets and all that stuff. It's really, really good. Now, in terms of software experience, you're going to get something called the Software Boutique, and it's not the most extensive software store out there, but you'll find most of the stuff that you're gonna want inside of it, and it's really nicely designed. You'll find that pretty much throughout the whole thing. Now, another reason why I've chosen this is because a lot of the times the stuff that happens in Ubuntu is actually developed first for Ubuntu Mate, simply because the developing team for Ubuntu Mate do a lot of, a lot of work, and a lot of that stuff kind of filters into the other Ubuntu flavors. Stuff like high DPI support appeared in Mate First, which just kind of boggles the mind that it appears there first, but it did. A lot of the compositor work that has gone into several other distribution, other flavors, also happened on Mate First. So by using Mate, you may be getting a better experience than some of the other flavors of Ubuntu. I really like Mate quite a lot, and this particular version is the best Mate of all the ones that you can use.  For me, it's Mate. Supposedly, that's how you pronounce it. But anyways, that is Ubuntu Mate. Number two on the list is a distribution that I have a history with, and that is Linux Mint. My personal feelings aside, Linux Mint is a fantastic Ubuntu-based distro. It is really good, and despite what I've said about it, and I've said a lot, it's still a very good distro. And basically what it does really well is it allows you to use Ubuntu without all the snap stuff. So if you go into using Ubuntu, you're gonna find that they really push the snap craft stuff in your face. And you may or may not know what that means, but for Mint, that's one of the primary purposes that exists. Another one is that they have the cinnamon desktop. Now, if you're coming from Windows, chances are you're gonna be looking for something that looks familiar to you. And the cinnamon desktop, which is the main desktop of Linux Mint, looks similar to Windows. Now, it's not exactly the same. It's not one-to-one, but it's still really close. And it allows you a lot of the functionality and stability of GNOME, but with more customization on top of it. Now, Linux Mint is based on the latest LTS version. So right now we're on 20.4. So this is going to be a little bit more outdated in terms of kernels and stuff like that. But you should get a lot of the most recent software because Mint will go through and do a lot of updates. They're on 20.3 right now. So they've done three updates since the last LTS, but it's still based on that LTS core. And basically what that means, what this LTS stuff means, it means that you're going to be using a distribution that is highly stable. You're not gonna get a lot of updates. You're not gonna get a lot of the latest software, which isn't really that big of a deal. You're going to get just very, very stable software that has been tested over the course of the last couple of years. And that is really what a lot of people are looking for in a Linux distribution. One of the cool things about Linux Mint is they have gone through and done several of their own custom tools. So they have one called, I believe it's called Hypnotix. And that's kind of like an IPTV thing. They've gone through and done their own note taking application. So they've gone through and done several things that are kind of unique to them. And that's really cool. So if you're interested in an experience that is similar to Windows, but not the same, but also offers a lot of customization, Linux Mint might be the one for you. Number one on the list is one that'll probably surprise some people. Simply because it's the only plasma desktop experience that made this list. It's also awesome. It is so good. Now KDE Neon, which is the distribution we're talking about is special in that it does its own thing. It doesn't consider itself a distribution at all. It really considers itself KDE Plasma, but for people who just want the raw experience of KDE Plasma, if that makes any sense at all. Basically what this is, is a rolling release distribution of KDE. So you're going to always going to get the most recent version of KDE on this distro. The underlying system is going to stay the same. It's going to be based on either the LTS version of Ubuntu or the most recent version of Ubuntu. And one of the cool things that KDE Neon does, it allows you to go through and download different ISOs based on which one you can download the stable version or the testing version. And it's kind of more of a, choose your own, how stable do you want this thing to be kind of thing. And the reason why I find it so cool is simply because KDE develops stuff in a very hands-on manner. They develop a lot of stuff and a lot of times they put a lot of new features in really fast. If you are the type of person who's interested in trying and using the most latest stuff, KDE is always going to be the thing that gets the most stuff, but KDE Neon is usually the one that gets all that stuff fastest outside of probably Arch. So basically what KDE Neon does is allows you to use the most vanilla, minimal version of KDE that you're going to experience. You're not going to find a lot of stuff installed on this ISO at all. You don't even get LibreOffice or anything like that. It comes with VLC. It comes with a few of the KDE applications but not nearly all of them. In fact, hardly any. I mean, surprisingly few KDE apps are actually on here. You're just going to get the bare minimum of stuff here and then you're kind of expected to build out your own stuff after you've installed it. Personally, I like KDE the best out of all the desktop environments simply because it allows you to do a ton of customizing. If you're the type of person who will go through and enjoy customizing their desktop environment to the health, KDE is always going to win no matter what. Now, I would say that the other four options on here or at least all of them except for elementary, they all offer some customization. It's never going to reach the level of KDE, obviously, but other than elementary OS, they all offer some level of customization out of the box without actually going through and having to hack anything. Overall, KDE Neon is my choice for the best Ubuntu-based distro. I think that that's probably going to be somewhat controversial amongst a lot of people. I think a lot of people would have chosen Mint or PopOS. Those are probably the number ones that most people would choose. If you have a selection for the number one Ubuntu-based distro, leave those in the comment section below.  I probably wouldn't disagree with you because if you asked me what order to put these in a few months from now, I'd probably shuffle them up a little bit. This is just what I said along this time. So you can follow me on Twitter, at the Linuxcast, you can support me on Patreon at patreon.com slash linuxcast. Today, Devon, Patrick, all Primus, Marcus, Megalyn, Jax and I from Tools, Steve, A, Sebrek, a Linux, Eric, Mitchell, ArtCenter, CarbonData, Jeremy, Sean, Odin, Martin, Merrick, Camp, Joshua, Lee, J-Dog, Peter, A, Crucible, DarkBand, and Sixth and Flat A. Thanks everybody for watching. I'll see you next time.


All right, so let's talk about 15 income streams that you can start in 2024 in order to make money. And I'm actually gonna split this into leveraging time, leveraging expertise, leveraging brand, and leveraging money. So no matter what situation you come from, you're gonna be able to leverage whatever skills, talents, or assets that you already have. And I'm gonna be ranking each one of these based on what I personally think about them after analyzing them and trying many of them myself and which ones are the best opportunities. So first, let's talk about leveraging time. So this would be a situation where you've got a lot of free time, but you don't have a lot of money and you don't have expertise. And in this case, the one that makes a lot of sense is actually just getting a corporate nine to five job. As much as people hate on nine to five jobs and don't get me wrong, you know, nine to five jobs can suck. If you don't have any money, expertise, or brand, you can get a nine to five job and basically get paid to learn. Now, is this the best situation in the world? Is this something you wanna do for the rest of your life? In many cases, no. But almost everybody I know that has been successful has started off in a normal nine to five job. Then you can make money from that job, get expertise from that job and build your brand from the job and then leverage all of that to either get a better job or start your own thing. For instance, when I was first trying to start businesses and escape my nine to five, I used the money and the time that I had during my free time after I got off of work in order to start a bunch of businesses. And on top of that, I learned a lot from work itself. I learned a lot of leadership skills and management skills. And that's helped me so much when it comes to starting my own business. So I just started doing it on the side in my free time. And after I was taking it seriously within a few months, I was able to make a full-time income from YouTube. Now, by the way, I actually do coach a few people per month on how to grow and make money from YouTube. And you can check out a free video on exactly how to do this, which I'll put down in the description as well as the pinned comment below. And after watching the video and seeing how it works, if you'd like to apply to my coaching, I do accept a few people per month. I am very picky about who I actually coach because I only work with people who are really serious about being successful on YouTube and really want to take it seriously. With that being said, if you think you're that person, you can apply down in the description as well as the pinned comment below. So yeah, corporate nine to five, don't get me wrong. A lot of the time they're terrible. Some nine to fives are better than others. Of course, it's a much better situation if you actually get into a good job or maybe you get a remote job, something along those lines. But everybody's got to start off somewhere. Make the most out of it. I'll give this one a seven out of 10 opportunity score. Now, if you don't have any money, but you do have time, one thing that you'd probably want to start is what's known as drop shipping. And this is basically where you sell things online, but you don't incur any cost until the person actually buys it, right? So you don't have to have a big inventory of physical products that you're selling. The only time that you actually incur any cost is when the person actually buys it and then they will actually create it, ship it, et cetera. And so it's a really low risk way of making money online. And the e-commerce market is predicted to be $5.4 trillion by 2026. Now, there's a bunch of different places that you could start off doing this. Of course, you have Shopify stores. You also have Etsy. You could also start selling stuff on Amazon or Walmart as well. If I were personally getting into something like drop shipping, what I would personally be doing is instead of running ads, I would actually just be creating content where I just talk about the thing that I'm drop shipping or I kind of review it or maybe I use it and then I show people exactly how it works. And then, hey, there's a link down in the description or the pin comment below, et cetera. And then they can check it out if they'd like to. Something along those lines. So I would definitely be creating content if I was starting drop shipping right now. So this one's pretty good. Lots of people out there making money from it. But with that being said, it's not as simple as all the gurus make it out to be. I'm gonna go ahead and give this one an 8.5 out of 10 opportunity score. So another one that's very similar to drop shipping is selling on online platforms. So this isn't necessarily drop shipping because in drop shipping, the product is already created. It was probably created by somebody in China like Alibaba, for instance. And then you're basically just a middleman. Whereas if you sell on online platforms, you might actually be creating the products yourself. So Etsy would be one example of where you could do this where you make like handcrafted jewelry or something along those lines and then you would be selling it to people. So this is one that is very time intensive. It does take a lot of time in order to do this. But with that being said, the products are more rare and less sort of mass manufactured and you're not just a middleman, you're actually creating the products yourself. So the profit margins are going to be a lot bigger. And so this can be really good as well. There's a little more complexity to it than drop shipping. But with that being said, there's a ton of people that are having success doing this on sites like Etsy. And so I'll go ahead and give this one an 8 out of 10 opportunity score. Next is going to be selling digital products. And the beautiful thing about digital products is again, you don't have to have a bunch of money in order to store them or create them. So you can create a digital product such as a resume template or a notion template or you can create some kind of like online calendar or you can create ebooks, software, music, arts, basically any type of digital related content. And there's people online that are literally accidentally making money doing this. For instance, this guy right here is a student who accidentally became a millionaire with a cult following after selling his expressionless selfies as NFTs and he says that he just feels confused, right? He's like, not sure how he started making money, but he did. So obviously there's more to it than that. Another thing you could sell is online assignments, online workbooks, guides, mini courses, et cetera. Typically these are gonna be in the lower ticket range between $1 and $300. But if you sell a bunch of them, you can make really good money doing this. And the best thing is you don't really have to waste or risk that much of your own money. So yeah, selling digital products, amazing income stream. I'm gonna go ahead and give this one a 9.5 out of 10 opportunity score. What's up guys? So we're gonna be having a live training where I'm going to be teaching you how to grow and make money from your YouTube channel, okay? So this is gonna be stuff that I've never taught before. It's probably the only time I'm ever gonna teach it. So definitely you wanna show up for it. And it's gonna be at Tuesday, 8 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, okay? So the link to it will be down in the description or swipe up or whatever it'll say it on the screen. But definitely check it out. You don't wanna miss out on this. Next is going to be starting a YouTube channel. So it is very inexpensive to start a YouTube channel these days. You can literally just start one with your phone or a computer. You don't need any fancy equipment. There's plenty of channels that I've seen absolutely blow up using the most basic equipment. And I am a little biased here. I think YouTube is amazing. But my biggest piece of advice here is to solve real problems for real people that have real money. If you're trying to make some kind of little rinky dink entertainment channel, there's gonna be a ton of competition. And it's basically one of those markets where the winner takes all. And so only a very tiny percentage of people who start entertainment channels actually end up making money. And then the people at the very top make like the vast majority of the money. We're talking like the Mr. Beast and the Pewdie Pies of the world. Whereas with education channels where you're solving real problems for real people that have real money and you're picking a specific person and a specific niche to make content for, it is very easy to start making money even if you have a tiny channel. And many of my students, for instance, make over $10,000 a month with less than 1,000 subscribers. So like I said before, if you want to apply for my coaching and my mentoring, if you wanna start a YouTube channel and have me teach you how to do it, you can apply for that down in the description as well as the pinned comment below. I accept a few people every month. And a fun fact here is YouTube, when it first started was actually a dating company. So it was actually sort of like a video dating app. And then of course they quickly pivoted when they realized it could be so much more than that. And there's actually over 435,000 people in the United States alone that are full-time YouTubers. Meaning they're making a full-time income from YouTube. That is an absurd amount of people. That's like almost half a million people just in the United States alone making a full-time income from YouTube. And there's probably millions more that are making a part-time income from it. So yeah, unbelievably huge opportunity. The content creator economy is getting huge. Creating content in my opinion is without a doubt the biggest opportunity right now. I'm gonna give this one a 10 out of 10 opportunity score. And then another one I wanna get into if you have plenty of time would be some sort of physical labor. For instance, you could try power washing. So there's a lot of different things you could use power washers for. One thing you could use them for is cleaning driveways. You could also clean gutters. You could clean decks, the sides of the houses, et cetera. And there's a really cool article I saw on a 22 year old entrepreneur making $155,000 a year with a pressure washing business, right? So generally speaking, you make anywhere between $192 and $401 per gig. And it is incredibly easy to start. All you'd have to do is just rent a pressure washing machine and you'd basically be good to go. So this is one where obviously it is time intensive and it's also hard work. You have to be out in the sun. You have to be washing things. But if you have the time and you're willing to work hard you can make a ton of money doing a lot of these kind of physical side hustles. So I'm gonna go ahead and give this one an eight out of 10 opportunity score. All right, so now let's talk about leveraging expertise. So if you're watching this and you're someone who maybe has been working in the corporate world for a while you've got a really good job or you're just really good at something you've gotten really good at playing guitar you've gotten really good at a certain type of sport something along those lines then you can actually just go ahead and leverage your expertise. And the first way you could do this is either with coaching or consulting. And here's an example of somebody who did it. They basically started off, this is name is Grant and he says that there's five steps to becoming a millionaire from Millennial who did it in five years. And he basically just started off by building websites and he did it for specific types of businesses like law firms. And the first amount that he charged was $300. And then that law firm ended up recommending him to another law firm and in six months he went from charging $300 per engagement to $5,000. And then within a full year he sold his first $100,000 project. Yes, one single project for $100,000. And he decided to quit his full-time job to focus on growing his consulting business. And it took him only five years after taking his first screenshot of his $2.26 balance to hit his first seven figures. So yeah, there's so many different ways that you can consult. Typically it involves becoming an expert on something very specific. For instance, in his case, it was building websites. And then he had a certain component of it that was actually building the website out. And then he was able to transition that from not only building the website, but also consulting on how they can use the website to make more money. And so yeah, consulting, coaching, there's so many different opportunities here and it's not just in the business world. You can coach on health, you can coach on diet. There's a lot of different personal development coaches out there. There's career coaches, business coaches, just everything. So yeah, this is a phenomenal way of making money and to the people who actually do the coaching with me when it comes to growing and making money from their YouTube. This is my number one way that I recommend making money once you start getting a bunch of views on your YouTube channel. So I'm gonna give this one a 10 out of 10 opportunity score as well. All right, so if you're an expert, another thing you could do is engaging in speaking events. So this is literally where you go and you give speeches on whatever your expertise is in. And just as an example, Janet Yellen who is the US Treasury Secretary has been paid over $7 million in speaking fees and she was paid over $67,500 for speaking at a Goldman Sachs event, for instance. Now all joking aside because that's actually kind of ridiculous that somebody who has so much control over the US economy would be getting paid by these corporations but all joking aside, I think you see my point here. If you're an expert, you can actually get paid to speak and typically it's not gonna be $67,000 but it might be something like $500 to $5,000. And if you're really well-known in your field you can get paid anywhere from $20,000 to $50,000. So yeah, this is for people who really are experts in their field. So if you're not like a bona fide expert probably not gonna be able to make money doing this but it can be a really good opportunity. I'm gonna give it a seven out of 10 opportunity score. Next is going to be an info product. So this is where you basically create a course. Typically it's gonna be a medium ticket course so anywhere from about $300 to $2,000 and it's gonna be going over something that you are very good at, right?  So just as an example, let's say you're watching this and you are somebody who became a computer programmer and you make six figures a year doing software development. That means you are an expert in software development. You became a software developer yourself. Maybe you did it without a college degree so that would be a particular kind of unique angle that you could sell on. And you could create a course for other people on how to do software development. So you could get very specific and teach them like a particular framework or a language or you could be a little more broad and just teach them how to get a software developer job as well. So info products are great. They help other people out a lot as well. There's a lot of different websites where you can host info products like Coursera, Udemy, Teachable, et cetera. And they're extremely helpful and they're also very hands off so you don't have to actually coach the person. Now in my opinion, I kind of stopped selling info products just because of the fact that I found that myself as well as other people didn't really get a lot of people results when they were selling courses. And the reason for that is because there's no interactive component. You could make the best course in the world and a lot of the time the person's not gonna get the result just simply because we're not designed to just look at a computer for 50 hours and learn something, right? We're designed to actually interact with other human beings and that's why I transitioned more to coaching rather than making courses. But with that being said, I've still taken a bunch of very helpful courses myself and I've learned a lot from them. I've probably bought over 50 courses in my day at least and those were higher ticket courses. If you're talking about low ticket courses I've probably bought over a hundred of them. So I really do like info products. They are somewhat limited. If you're trying to solve like a hard problem for somebody, they're probably not gonna get results from an info product. But if you're solving something very easy, just a very easy simple problem, info products can be great. So for that reason, I'll go ahead and give these a nine out of 10 opportunity score. By the way, share this video with someone else out there that needs to see it. Someone else who's looking for alternative income streams, other ways of making money. Definitely share this video with them. Next, let's talk about mentoring and coaching. And this is one of my absolute favorite business models. Now it's a little bit different than consulting because I know I talked about consulting before. Consulting is usually a little more corporate. A lot of the time you'd be working with businesses or people that are kind of like working inside of businesses. So it's a little bit more of a corporate feel. Whereas mentoring and coaching is more of a personal type of feel. But with that being said, there's a lot of argument that they're kind of just the same thing. And I absolutely love doing this as a business model because it gets people amazing results. You're able to work directly with people. And that increases the success rate from like 5% all the way up to like 80%. Because no matter how good your course is, they are going to need feedback on that. And they need somebody there who can kind of look at their work and tell them what they're doing right and what they're doing wrong. You know, think about anybody who got good at sports. For instance, there's no way that they would have gotten good at sports without having a coach or a mentor. And it's the same exact thing with business. I didn't get good at business until I had a mentor who taught me. So yeah, mentoring, coaching, absolutely phenomenal. I'm gonna give it a 10 out of 10 opportunity score. All right, so now let's talk about leveraging your brand. So let's say you kind of have a following online. Maybe you have a bunch of friends on Facebook or you have an Instagram that's kind of popped off a little bit. You're getting some views on TikTok, something along those lines. How can you leverage your brand and make money from it? My favorite way of doing this is affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing is absolutely phenomenal if you're getting a lot of traffic, but you don't really have anything to sell to them. And I absolutely love affiliate marketing because it's basically a way for you to sort of test out different products and see what your audience actually wants to buy. And it's also extremely hands off. Literally the only thing you have to take care of is the traffic. That is it, nothing else. You don't have to take care of the sales or the heavy lifting on the marketing like creating a sales page or the operations or the delivery or the customer service or building the product, thinking of the product idea, none of that. All of that is taken care of for you. With affiliate marketing, all you have to focus on is just getting traffic. So I absolutely love affiliate marketing. I think it's a phenomenal way of making money, but you do have to get good at getting traffic and therefore you'd have to leverage your brand. So really love this one with the caveat that you do have to have an audience. I'll go ahead and give this one a 9.5 out of 10 opportunity score. So the next one would be setting up a newsletter. And this is basically kind of like an email list where you're sending emails out to people, but they're really high quality emails. They're curated emails where you're giving a ton of value to the person. And then they subscribe to your newsletter so that they get these emails every week or maybe every couple of days. And then in part of the newsletter, you end up selling something, right? So you'll sell some kind of affiliate product or maybe you'll do a sponsorship in the newsletter and people don't really care because it's just really high quality and they get a lot of value out of it anyways. So of course, this is another one where you do have to have a large audience of people in order to make this work, you have to have a brand. But you'd be surprised how much you can make even with a tiny newsletter of just a couple hundred people. As long as you have the right people, right? If you're solving real problems for real people that have real money, you can make a ton of money from newsletters but you do have to leverage your brand. So for that reason, I'm gonna go ahead and give newsletters a 9 out of 10 opportunity score. Next, let's talk about how you can leverage money if you already have it. And the first way that you can leverage money is by doing real estate. And one type of real estate that's really hot right now is Airbnb. So the way that you would do this is you'd either use your own real estate if you already have houses and properties or you could actually just rent out a property from someone else and then list it on Airbnb and make even more money. So an example of this would be, let's say you rent out a property for $1,000 a month and then if you're able to get that fully booked on Airbnb, you're gonna be making $3,000 a month from it. Right, because you're charging $100 a night. And then after all the expenses and everything like that, let's just say that all the expenses involved are going to be $500 worth of expenses. That means that you would take home $1,500 a month from a single property. Now I actually know a lot of people doing this and pro tip, make sure you sort of market your property as a luxury property and that way you can basically rent it out for even more on Airbnb and you need to actually set it up to where it is a nice luxury property like it's in a good location and it has really good interior design but this can be a phenomenal way of making money. I'm seeing like people that I meet in real life that are making a ton of money doing this. And then once you have kind of a portfolio of properties that you're doing this with, you can make it to a full-time income relatively quickly. So yeah, real estate, great way to make money if you already have money. Of course you have to have some investment capital upfront in order to rent, get a mortgage, buy a house and in some cases and actually in many cases actually make the house look better. So if you're doing a luxury property, you're gonna have to do some interior design and that's gonna cost a lot of money. But yeah, really good way of making money. I'll give this one an 8.5 out of 10 opportunity score. And then my favorite way of making money if you already have money by leveraging the money that you already have is going to be starting a business and investing in your business upfront. So there's ways of starting a business where you don't have to invest anything upfront. For instance, you can start your YouTube channel with just a camera or just like your computer and a phone camera. But with that being said, you're gonna grow a lot faster and it's gonna be a lot easier to start your YouTube channel if you have a decent setup, good equipment and you can hire other people to edit your videos for you, for instance. So with my YouTube channel, for instance, it's basically grown like 300% year over year every single year and that's better than any other type of investment I possibly could have made, right? So if I invested in the stock market, I would have made maybe 10% per year. If I invested in real estate and I was really good at it, maybe I could have made like 20% per year. But businesses are the only vehicle where you can make ridiculous returns on your investment, something like 300% per year, year over year. And so that is my favorite way to invest my money in order to leverage it properly if you already have some money. So if you're somebody who already has a good job or you're somebody who already has a bunch of money and investments and you wanna leverage it in a better way, this would be a great opportunity for you and of course I'm biased but my favorite way of starting a business is to start a YouTube business. And again, you can apply to get coaching or mentoring for me down in the description as well as the pinned comment below. And by the way, I made a great video on 19 side hustle ideas that actually work and you can check that video out by clicking right here.