Ownership Is Controlling Your Time.Michael Rayner

This is the Own it show where we tell stories of how everyday people made ownership theirs to create extraordinary success.

Welcome back to another week of the Own It Show, Couch Conversations. And coming live to you from Aspen, Colorado. I'm Justin.

And I'm Elise. This is the owner show.

Hello. How are you?

Typical couch in Florida. I'm in the one in Aspen. How's the coach down there? Is it nice?

It's nice and comfy. It's missing you.

Just like I left it.

Yeah. Awesome.

Well, guys, I know we often talk about going and pursuing your passion, going and doing exactly what you want to do and living life on your terms. And it's ironic that quite often we don't even know what that means. Like, how do we actually get there? And the harder we kind of try to seek it out, the more it kind of seems to evade us. We do what social media tells us to do. We do what the environment tells us to do. We do what other people tell us to do. And rather we leave what we truly want to do behind. And today, our guest has really made a career of doing things that people would not ever consider, like juggling and running hamburgers around umbrellas and his comedic routines and really, truly loving it and living in his place. And it's taken him all the way from America's Got Talent to the Late show with James Corden to the David Letterman show to working with people like Elvis and Sinatra. And it's amazing to see what actually living in your passion and truly owning what you want to be can actually do. So, Michael Raynor, thank you so much for coming and spending time with us today. And thank you really giving your message to our audience because it's one that I think everybody needs to hear.

Thank you so much for having me on the show. And to be clear, when I worked with Elvis, he was dead and I was alive. You know, just to be clear, they spliced us in together so it looked like we were together. And it was. It was for a TV commercial. And it was like, I'm a conspiracy theorist that believes Elvis is still alive and I'm a gas at a gas station. This is for. Oh, it was for Energizer batteries. And the weird thing is the Energizer Bunn had a bigger trailer than I did. I just had a chair. The bunny is a robot, and had two trailers for all the animatronic people. I hope I'm not spoiling it for you kids of thinking it's real, it's an actual lie, but they sliced actual Elvis into the commercial with me. But it is weird. But when I worked for Sinatra, I promoted his CD and I asked the director did he approve me in casting and the director said yes. I don't have any documentation to prove that, but the director said yes. So I've been approved by Sinatra and I worked with a dead Elvis and I've also worked with a Beatle. I did a commercial with Ringo Starr. So all those things together make me completely unemployable but vastly employable all at the same time.

I guess that's amazing and certainly unlike anybody we've ever had on the show.

I hope so. I hope so.

Michael, tell me a little bit about this. Like, how did you grow up? How did you end up coming into this true passion of juggling, and how did you end up finding this skill set that you have?

Well, this is what I like to tell everybody because I do a fair amount of zoom shows, podcasts, people talk about the journey. And I want to get this clear because I don't think I've been. I think this is the first show I'm going to get clear for everybody. I had no other skills. If you're great at school and being a doctor, a lawyer, maybe a trade, a plumber. If you're great at those things, go for it. I graduated with a 1.97 because I was just thinking other things. I was a C minus and I went to New York City at 18 very late to start what I do. A lot of people think athletes and I want this to really address those people out there that think they're too late to start. A lot of people that do things don't start until after high school. Even athletes. I've read a lot about some people in the NBA started late, late, late in their career. Where you think they're in the NBA. Yes, exactly. I was going to bring up Giannis. I have to back up real quick. I don't know if you saw how you got me on this show was I was on SportsCenter Instagram and I don't know if that might have been how you got me on it. You don't understand how delighted I was. I was between Jordan and Giannis when they were like in thing and I'm like, how did this happen? A small town kid from Michigan. Tiny town, no like one blinking light. When I was growing up, McDonald's was like 30 minutes away. And here I am on the SportsCenter Instagram between Yanis. You don't understand how much I love Giannis because the guy is everything I believe, and he just loves it. He loves it. He just loves everything he does. And he did it to get out of poverty from his mom. And I tear up when I see him. You know what I mean? To me, he is everything that we should all ascribe to be. And you know, they go down to. I'm sorry we're tangent, but they go down too. And everyone's like, oh, oh. And the grit on that guy. Just. That's what I want to get back at. I graduated 1981, had no skills, no desire. I saw a juggler in a play in New York City, thought it was amazing. I was introverted. I like Steve Martin, I like performers. And so all my thug friends who are getting in trouble stealing snowmobiles, I'm from Michigan and doing all their thuggie stuff, even though they never invited me out to do the stealing because I was not. That wasn't my kind of a thing. I started practicing. Day one was, let's see, July of 1981. Two years later, I won my first talent show in a small town doing five minutes of tricks. Got $25 and won once. That incentive creeps into your being. Like, I do five minutes of fun and juggling tricks and you're giving me $25. Boom, we're off and running then. And practice and rehearsal became like, like just two to four hours a day for the first, like four to five years. Now it's a little bit less. It's probably much less because I'm working on routines and things like that. But the skill and the repetition, two to four hours a day, you know, five days a week, cold Michigan days. Going down to a church camp that they let me use the gym in the winter, jumping into a gym, doing tricks at, you know, sub zero temperatures in this gym, it was, it was just, it was the rehearsal and the practice because I had no other skills and I thought it was fun and exciting, you know. So there you go. That's it in a nutshell.

When you first picked up at your first juggling in July of 1981, how good were you?

Oh, I was terrible. Oh, this is what I want to tell all your athletes out there, because I know you probably have some athletes maybe watching, even just everybody watching. I am one of these guys. If you remember. There's so many baseball players that I think maybe it was David Eckstein just talking about how he. Because he was so tiny and little and how he had to train so much more because he was just a Tiny guy, if you rem. And then he beat the Tigers in the World Series on the team he was on. I don't even remember what team he was on. It was devastating. Some from Michigan, but it takes me three times as long to get a trick than most people. All the athletes at my school, everybody else, if they tried, I know they could do it quicker and faster. But as somebody that does sports or anything, you've got time on your side. Now, if it's a team sport, you've got to work harder on your own before you get into the team situation. But if you're a. A golfer or anybody that does solo sports, invest three much, you know, 3x time. You can invest the time if you're not gifted or natural. So that's how you do it.

It's really interesting, your process towards becoming this fantastic juggler that you are, because it's almost as if on one hand you were extremely lucky and special because you knew exactly what your passion was. But on the other hand, you weren't naturally skilled at it. Like you said when you first started, you were that great at it. It took you three times longer. But you have that original thing which most people in their lifetime never obtain. They either know what their passion is, but they're too afraid to go after it, or they never. They never figure out. Figure out truly what their passion and their purpose is. So what I'd love to understand a little bit more from you because you've talked us through a lot of the. The tactical piece, the how, right. How long you're practicing, how you got there. But tell us about the process in your mindset and getting there, knowing that some of it was stacked against you.

You know, I think the thing is just, just me, this is my mindset, being terrified. I know this sounds weird, but. Terrified that I was going to have to do something I didn't want to do. My time wouldn't be my time. Terrified that I would have to go get a job, that I would just sit in the drudgery. Listen. While I was practicing, I went to the University of Michigan, Flint, which is an extension branch of U of M, about an hour north of Ann Arbor in Flint, Michigan. And I was. While I was going to school, I was a janitor. But then I would also. I would take classes. Then at night I would sweep the floors just thinking about if I graduated, what I was going to do. Because I didn't say at that time, I want to be a performer. It was just like, I'll be in business. How Kids say, you know what I mean? And then as I was those two years of practicing, going to the university, which I say, it's great to go to university while you figure out what you want to do. They built an amusement park by my college. And this sounds like it's out of a movie, but this is absolutely true. I would take this huge bin and dump it into this industrial compactor, and behind it, way in the distance, they were constructing this giant dome amusement park. And I. And I'm like, well, they got to have entertainment there. Sure enough, two years later, from. From that day, they have auditions. I audition once, don't get in. And then immediately they have another set of auditions. So I just said, you know what? I'm going to do what I want to do. And I performed, did what I thought was funny. They hired me, and from that point on, it was just like, oh, I get it. I've got to go find the opportunities. This one happened to be in my backyard or my university. How lucky is that? Like, if you're in the middle of nowhere, there's not an amusement park being built where you're working. But that was one of those serendipitous things. Be prepared for serendipity. Coming to your life where you're training for something, you don't know what yet, but you're training for, and then it happens right there. So it was fear. I didn't want to. I wanted my time to be my own, and I didn't want to be bored. And. And if you want to be an accountant, my accountant that does my taxes. The guy loves being an accountant. I'm not disparaging that, but I can't even fathom being an accountant. You know what I mean? So I think that was it. Fear. Fear was the motivator. So that was. I think that's it in a nutshell.

So really it was fear of you becoming something you knew you didn't want.

Exactly. Perfect.

Your motivation for that first piece of. For that first piece, that passion was so strong that no amount of hard work would ever stand in your way. And you owned whatever it was you needed to do to make sure that you were living in alignment with that passion and that purpose.

Yeah, no, I mean. Cause I was. I was making money just doing my janitorial stuff, taking classes at the same time. And then. And then, you know, then it happened. And then. And then you have to keep on reinventing yourself. Once it happens, obviously, then the real work begins. I mean, once you start to make money at what you like to do. Then the work, even then you accelerate because you want to be better, you want to be more well known, you want to get better gigs, you want to increase your rate. Then the work begins. That first step is the baby step. You know what I mean? It's Steve Jobs in his garage with Wozniak creating the first Apple. Nobody wanted that. And everyone said that only three people in the country would need personal computers. Then the work begins. You know what I mean?

You've said a couple things that I want to bring attention to, to our audience. One is that you have to go out and seek the opportunity. There's nobody coming to save you. There's nobody coming to say, oh, hey, Michael, you want to be an entertainer?

Great.

Here's all the entertaining gigs for you. And like, just. You just show up. And I don't even know, even given how famous and great you are today, I don't even know if that happens to you today.

Oh, no, I'm always working. And I mean, let me digress a little bit and say that I'll bring you up today. How you found me was once the pandemic struck, that's like going to ground zero. I had like 120 shows immediately canceled. And this is your livelihood. This is what you do for a job. And it's. It's wiped out. And now a lot of people are freaking out. So I had a process a. I know there's PPP loans. I'm going to get on those because I know I'll qualify. So I got two of those. While I get ppp, I'm not going to just sit around wondering what I'm going to do. I'm going to up my game. I'm going to get in my backyard, I'm going to start practicing new variations, crazy tricks. Get on TikTok, which as the older generation constantly like, well, if that's for dancing girls and whatever, no one's going to want me on TikTok. My daughter, who at the time was 15, she goes, Go on TikTok, put on some trendy music, get in the algorithm, and it's going to happen. The first few posts, nothing happened. But you post again. Nothing happens. And then you hit a post. You hit the right music, you hit the right algorithm. All of a sudden you're trending, it's accelerating. You're going from like a few thousand. A few thousand. Pardon me. I keep on having this alarm go off to remind me to come to your show today A followers to like 100,000 to 150,000. And then Reddit picks you up and then you're viral, and then. And then your Instagram starts growing, and then people are offering you, like, little shows from that. So I got on TikTok and I upped my Instagram game Facebook. Lately, I've been concentrating more on Instagram. Re on Instagram reels is starting over. I'm 58. I started over at 58. Everyone's like, well, I can't be on TikTok at 58. No, you're limited your mindset. That's ridiculous. If you have something and if you don't, if you have a thousand followers, that's a thousand people that want to hear what you have to say. Don't disregard those people. So that's what I did. I jumped on social media, created new weirder tricks. Then I started doing weird trick basketball shots. I'd never done that before. And some of those I got on, like, on some of the other sports Instagrams and also, like on Complexes Instagram and Worldstar put some of my stuff on there. So that was how everything vanished. I'm starting again. Let's see what we can do. And now I'm starting to get little brand deals where people paying me some money to, like, do little TikToks and little Instagram stuff for their product or their service or whatever, or using even just a little bit of money for using their music in one of my. In one of my posts. So it's a whole new skill set that was driven by, back to it, fear. Everything was wiped out. And so you can just sit and be scared or you can be active. Be active. That's what I'm saying.

Congratulations on your success, Michael. And one of the things that we often find with a lot of our guests is they have this really special thing about themselves where they continually level up and level up and level up and level up. And you're talking about how you had to reinvent yourself. What did you say at The Age of 58?

58. Age of 58.

Think about having to reinvent yourself again. I mean, it's. It's amazing that you went through that, but you went through it with such positivity and openness to life and a way in which you were like, no, this is an opportunity. There's nothing standing in my way. Look at what could come from.

You want to be clear, there was. When all those shows were canceled, it was a bit of a bummer. You know what I mean? I mean, I want to be clear that that Was. That was a. You know, that was a. That was a bit of a bummer. But you still got to fight through that, you know what I mean? It was like the same thing, leveling up. When we first moved la, when my wife and I moved here, we wanted to get into acting and getting out your headshots, starting to do auditions, figuring out how that works, figuring out what works and what doesn't work, you know, and then all of a sudden, even not doing juggling stuff. I've done like 65 national TV commercials, you know, then trying to figure, you know, get into writing. And that's been more of a tricky thing where I've written for, like, a few people, like Game Show Network, Nickelodeon, but that hasn't taken off. But it's not. But it's like, it's not that it's not taking off.

It's just.

It's a skill set that you're always trying to learn where I've got this other thing that makes me money, and then I'm still trying to learn other skill sets at the same time. You know, I just like doing creative things. I think that's the thing. I like doing creative things and trying to figure out. But I just want to say the pandemic's been a bummer for everybody. Don't feel bad if it gets you down, but do whatever you can. Get out of bed, run around, get activated. So that's what I have to say to that.

It's unique when you talk about fear, because I've heard this in a couple different settings. And when you look at it, fear can take you one of two directions. Fear can take you into this massive state, doubt, self doubt, and just make you curl up in a ball and hold onto a couch and just say, somebody, come and save me. Or it can send you the other way into this massive level of confidence and makes you drive into action. And you drove into action. You've said it multiple times. You had a fear of going and having to work for somebody or do something that you didn't want to do. You had a fear of where your next paycheck was coming from because of everything getting shut down.

And you became.

When you don't have the resources, you become resourceful. And I love the resourcefulness of what you're talking about here and living in that true flame and passion of what you had.

And I do my show sometimes, I call it the Found Object Show. And I'm doing shows for kids and families at different events because a lot of times people put Limitations like, well, I can't do a show. I don't have the right equipment. I have my phone, and I have a garage full of stuff. Some of my weird tricks that I developed during the pandemic, where I would grow, grab a paint roller, do a trick with a paint roller, grab whatever I found in the garage, and create with what I had. I mean, you know, small businesses, and this applies to everything. You can start with so little today because of what we're doing right now, because of the Internet. A little bit of bandwidth goes a long way. If you have just a little bit of Internet and a phone, you can pretty much do anything. You know what I mean? You don't even have to have a computer. You really could have just a halfway decent smartphone and a little bit of bandwidth and you're good to go.

I just love your story because I think it resonates with so many people who truly are just afraid to start and truly afraid just to put themselves out there and go for it. And that's what you did. And I'm curious how you touched on.

It a little bit.

But I'm curious, Michael, how it took you from not just being a juggler, not just being a performer, but took you into the state of comedy, took you into the state of acting, took you into writing. Now, like, kind of elaborate on that, how they. It started to really turn over a whole bunch of opportunities for you.

Well, when we first got to la, we just, you know, we just left on a friend's floor and then we got an apartment. No money was coming in. You got to remember, no money's coming in. So you're like, okay, let's look through and get our agents. So you. You go through this. Just a quick thing for everybody out there that's not sure how this works when you get to. And this is. We got to LA in 1994, but I felt really starting the work, 1995, tons of agents are listed. You put it. You get. Actually, you got one right here. You get this right here. This was the olden days. Now you can do it electronically so much easier. Put your headshot in it, address it to the agent with a little letter. That's olden time now. You don't even need to pay for a stamp. A little bit of bandwidth, as I said. And you could submit to agents now. And five agents wanted me. Agents wanted my wife for voiceover. And my first agent, all of a sudden, like three months in or four months in, I would just do what I felt was interesting at the audition, like I. I knew a little bit like, say, do this, do that. But I just. From all the years of performing, because I'd been doing amusement park, doing my comedy juggling show, so I knew how to relate to an audience. And I always assumed that the auditioner was much like an audience. And whatever copy I got, I would bring that to it. And one of the first big auditions I got was working with, as I said before, Ringo Starr on a series commercials. I had to fly to Canada. And then there were other celebrities in the commercials and was like, that one gig that I went to, that one audition made enough money for us to live that 19 in 1995. That was very exciting because no money was coming in that one thing. And then at the same time, I was still doing my show at like Knott's Berry Farm on the weekends or different things, or doing private events. Then through a series of events, I got to start working in tv where I would do warmup for sitcoms. I don't know if you're familiar with live TV shows for sitcoms. There's a guy that hangs out with you, and I was that guy for many years. And it's just a. One of the biggest things, just super be nice and super nice reacting with people so that when an opportunity comes up, they're like, oh, I remember that, dude. Unless you're super talented, then you can be kind of an asshole. You know what I mean? But if you're not the most talented person in the world, make an impression that you're a good guy. And if they like your stuff, I would go into, like, I would cold call this. There's so much to go through here. When I was doing warm up on sitcoms, I would. I would go and open up a book called the Ross Report. But now it's on the Internet, a little bit of bandwidth, and you find the phone number for production, say, hello, I do warm up on sitcoms here. I know you probably have one. And please let me be your backup, you know, until I happen to get a producer said, we don't have one. Come on in. I made an impression in the office. And then that really got the ball started the ball rolling on that. I did like a year on that 70s show. And so it's just the cold calling, the persevering, the using, you know, using all the resources we all have available to start getting gigs, you know. So I think I make it because we're here in such a compressed moment in time. I make it sound so easy. No It's a lot of work. It's a lot of pounding the pavement. It's a lot of rejection and putting the rejection aside and waiting for those glimmering, you know, 1% moments. And that's, you know, what we're waiting for.

Of course it's hard work. And I think that's one of the things that I'm really hearing loud and clear from you today, Michael, is that. And a lot of our listeners are entrepreneurs, and I think they could benefit from hearing your answer on this is it's almost as if you're. You never knew where the next opportunity or the next paycheck was coming from, yet you had trust and belief in yourself and that something was going to come your way. Plus, action, hard work. Like, they don't stand solo on their own. It's almost like a really good marriage of the two. So what I think a lot of our listeners would love to hear from you is what's some advice that you can give when it comes to an entrepreneur who probably doesn't know where their next paycheck is coming from or where their next opportunity is?

Well, you know, it's so weird because I never think of myself as an entrepreneur, but thank you for saying that. I am an entrepreneur 100%.

You're an entrepreneur.

I guess it's like, I've always just seen opportunities that I wanted to go for, and I guess the product is always me. So it's hard to scale up. But how I do scale up is I keep on getting more money. That's how I kind of scale. You know what I mean? That's the kind of exciting thing, I think the thing that for entrepreneurs is you have to a different yourself, make your product different somehow. That. Why is your. Because one of the main things I did in my show is spin a cheeseburger on a parasol. That trick alone has gotten me into so many doors, so many opportunities, because nobody's doing that trick. A lot of jugglers are juggling balls and pins, which I can do, but if you look at my Instagram, I do those very, very rarely because I know that's out there. I try to gravitate to what's not there. My tennis racket trick that just now I just looked that I did two tennis rackets on a balance board. That's up to like 13 million views. Because people I know, they're like, people don't even know what's going on. They're like, how is this even possible? It's like, they can't because Most people, it's a, it's called a devil stick. It's a, just a stick with two other sticks that jugglers use. Not very interesting. It's, it's one of the least interesting props. But I realized you could do the same trick with a racket, which is something we grab that we know what it is and it looks cool. So you, you, you have to know that you're, you're doing something different. That will be like attention getting. And then, and then, and then you just have to stay the course as long as you know and stay the course. And then of course you have to have, you have to have some success to know that you're going like, you know, people start booking my show, amusement parks started hiring me, TV shows start putting me on the air. You know, a few years in, you do have to know, oh, this is going, this is happening. If you have no sales in a couple years, you have to adjust. I mean, there's ways that I've been like, I'd be like, oh, you know, this trick works better than that. You have to, you know, much like you know anybody in sports, you know, you can, you can stay in the major leagues, you know, you know, hitting 220, 230, but then do you want to maybe hit 275? Who doesn't want to hit 275? Even though you're in the, you're in the show, I still feel like I want to get to the show, you know what I mean? So you always are trying to work like this whole new thing with being on social media that's helping me get in the show, you know what I mean? So at 58, I'm still trying to go from 220, you know, making money, having two houses in LA. I don't want to brag, but we bought our mother in law a house. What are you going to do? But you still want to accelerate. So you got to figure out the ways to accelerate past what you've accomplished and keep on going forward. You got the product, people love it. What's the new thing? Or how are you going to repurpose that? Or how are you going to be better? I hope that makes sense. Right?

So be different, stay the course and continually level up.

Yeah, level up. I love that. I love that. Level up. Yeah, that's, that's my favorite thing is it really, it plays for video game people. And listen, Eleague people. You figured out how to level up making money doing video games. So much respect for Eleague. There you go. How have you.

How have you been able to level up yourself? What is something that you do to keep yourself ahead?

Oh, that's. That's such a great question. I constantly, when I'm performing, figuring out new bits, like I do a lot of shows at Flappers Comedy Club and figuring out how to integrate my show with the comedy. You know, I'm always working on new bits and figuring out new ways to engage the audience. You know, there's a new bit that I've been doing where I challenge the audience. If I can't balance your shoe on my nose for seven seconds, I give you $5. It's like a new bit that I've done like for the last three years. The audience loves it. And it's like I've balanced like Jason Sudeikis from SNL's Shoe on My Nose, Neil Patrick Harris's Shoe On My Nose, Morpheus from Matrix, Laurence Fishburne's Shoe On My Nose, all these. Because I do a lot of shows in la, which there's always famous people around the shows, which is kind of fun. That becomes engaging because a, we've set up a theater right then that, oh, oh, I can win. He has to perform. And sometimes I can't. If it's a strange huge boot that's all floppy, I can lose. So even in losing, you win because you've made. In an event that there's drama, there's always. That's how I think I'm leveling up right now, is that every show I want there to be some kind of drama. New thing that happened in the last few years. I don't know if you saw it on any of my social media or anything. I realized that a show once a pickle was in my cheeseburger flew out at the audience and the audience went nuts. So I figured out how to re engineer that so that every single show I can have two or three pickles eject from my cheeseburger into the audience. So now that's a standard bit that I do, which was once it just happened because I usually would get a plain cheeseburger. So I took something that happened organically, figured out how to reverse engineer it, and now it's a huge staple of the show and people love it. So, yeah, you're always figuring out new bits and figuring out how to make everything that you've done better, make what you've done better.

I love it. Michael, I love your energy. It's no wonder that you've been able to find these opportunities and create these because just being in your essence and being in your environment, you're engaging. So I think that's, I think that's something very, very cool. What is next for you? What is, what is that next thing that you're looking for?

This is such an easy, easy question. It's like I would love, and this is for, you know, I would love to have a Netflix comedy special or an HBO comedy special or, you know, I've had my own comedy special, was called Bananas. It was on a Christian TV network, but I would love to be on Netflix, Amazon prime, hbo. And you know, I keep on working with people and with the social media exploding, you don't understand how important when the networks see that you have an active social media presence, that's one of the main keys. A lot of people tell me, oh, I don't do that near that Twitter and the Instagram. And that's just, that's for, no, you've got to, you've got to be engaged in what's current. It's just, you're just saying that. It's like saying, it's like saying like when Alexander Graham Bell invented the phone and you were a door to door salesperson, you're like, ah, the phone Shimon. I don't want to deal with the phone Shimon. You know. No, you have to, you have to challenge yourself to keep on going forward with whatever media is available and whatever tools are available. So I would love to have one of those, you know, shows and plus then I would love, you know, a lot of my friends have shows in Vegas. Love to have a Vegas show. That'd be incredibly fun or even I know that Penn Teller, which I'm friends with Penn Jillette's wife, that really means nothing. I don't know why I said it, but just to name drop, I loved their show. I saw their show probably I think four times and they just started, you know, they had a little New York theater show and then it just exploded, you know, so those are the things I'd love to have a New York theater show. One of my pals, Derek Delgadio has a show that's on Hulu called and of itself. It debuted here in LA at the Geffen Theater, that thing that he created. It's an hour show, super immersive, interactive, went to New York, played a little bit there. Stephen Colbert took notice, then got it on Hulu. He was just a guy like, he was just a guy like me and he leveled up and I love him for it. It's just like he took magic, which people think, how can you create an artistic, surreal theater event that grabs people? And he did it. And Stephen Colbert became the producer, and then his Hulu show just got released, and it's fantastic. People love it. So that's. For me, that's what I hope. Let's make it happen.

Let's make it happen. Hopefully we have some HBO or Netflix or Hulu producers listening to the show today, and they can just pick that up.

That'd be great.

So, Michael, question of the hour. It's clear that you have such an ownership mindset and mentality. You certainly would not be where you're at today. Continually leveling yourself up, continually challenging yourself, continually reinventing yourself. So what our listeners always love to hear this is one of their favorite questions is in a couple words or a short phrase, what does ownership mean to you?

Ownership means controlling your own time so that you can spend it really most with family. I've got a wife and two kids. That's ownership. You know, I mean, it really means nothing if I was constantly on the road or away from home. Owning your own time, I think is one of the. What it means to me, you know, time. Owning it.

Yeah. Focusing on the things that really matter at the end of life.

Yeah, I love. I love it. Michael, where can people interact with you? Where can people find you? Where can people see more of your work? And as funny as the world does when you put out things, the right people find you. So I would not be surprised if you had that special here in the next. In the near future.

That'd be awesome. Always DM me. I always respond to my DMs. I think you DM me from brokenjuggler on Instagram. I think that's how we got together. Yeah, I always respond to my DMs on that. And even a dude was really funny yesterday. He goes, I love you. And then a few. And a few minutes later, he goes, I mean, I love what you do. I mean, I know. I love you. I said, it's okay. You can love me. It's all right. You know, it's like, no problem. Thanks for the support. And it's so funny. It's just really sweet how people have been really responding. And I have to say that the Internet community is how much. The level of appreciation I get is like 99, 9.9% positive. And all the love, maybe.001 haters. And so that's what I love is the fact that as much as people warn you of the Internet and social media. So many sweet people out there. And it's okenjuggler, super easy.

I love it. So, guys, be sure to check that out because Michael's got just a heap of entertainment on there. And it's one of those things that really sucks you in. And not only that, but he's an extremely quality person just to get to know and to be in his essence. You're going to level you up just being around that. So as we've spoken about today, a lot of us get crippled by fear. We are fearful to start and thus holding our best work inside of us. And if you've ever heard Gary Vee, he talks all about it's never too late to start.

I love Gary Vee. I love it. He's the man. Yes.

Never too late to start. You can always go and always make a dollar somewhere. You can always make a step somewhere. And it's never a bad decision to follow that passion. It's never a bad decision to dive in to what you truly love and what truly brings you joy. And along the way, you're going to get rejected. It's going to be hard. You're going to have to be your own white knight. But that is what makes it special. And on that road, make sure you differentiate yourself. You don't have to be better, but you have to be different. You stay the course and you act with patience. You celebrate your wins and you keep on working and continue to level up. What we always say success is different. So be different and own it. We'll see you guys next week.