The Podcast on Fame

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Women’s Cycling World Record Holder Denise Mueller Jun 07, 2017

Show notes

https://makeyoufamous.co/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/World-Cycling-Record-Denise-Mueller-podcastv2.mp3

Denise Mueller not only holds the world speed record for women’s cycling which she set on the Bonneville Flats in 2016, she’s now intent on beating the men’s speed record for cycling as well. Her intensity makes one think she will do it – and it was her intensity that got her on the cover of the Wall Street Journal.

Jeffrey: So Denise I think people are really going to be interested in how not only you set the world speed record but how you got such great publicity including making the cover of the Wall Street Journal. So where do you want to start, Denise?

Denise: Well, definitely there’s a two parts on the how the heck did I end up doing this it’s the actual part about how the logistics of doing a land speed record, which was accomplished in September at the Bonneville Salt Flats in 2016 during an event called world of speed and it was in the draft of a Range Rover that we were using and I had a specialized bicycle that was sponsored by KHS that had double rejection gearing, motorcycle tires and wheels, a set of gearing stabilizers, shock absorbers in the front, there’s a technical effect as far as what I did but then on top of that there’s also the “why the heck would I do this?” element of how I also accomplished it was the thought of it; but then also the mental and physical preparation that went into that.

But to answer a little bit on the cover of the Wall Street Journal sometimes it’s just too lucky break when it comes down to some of this and also the connections with people that you know. My bicycle racing coach John Howard did this land speed record in the male category in 1985 at a 152 miles an hour and he have been long time friends with Bill Walton and he was being interviewed by Wall Street Journal for a story that they were doing on Bill Walton and happened to interject about this whole land speed record that we were doing — the first ever female pace bicycle land speed record and they actually had an interest in covering the story. And they were very active — you would think it will be something like sports magazine or something a little bit more in line with the sporting side, but Wall Street Journal was really interested in it and Jason gave one of their reporters who is also a cyclist and they happened to be looking for opportunities with virtual reality because we had a virtual reality 360 degrees video made that’s about 13 minutes long that the Wall Street Journal…

Jeffery: Okay. So lets me interject a couple of things. So it pays to be friends with someone who had done a similar thing and have already gotten press because they are probably still getting interviewed and stuff and they mentioned you. And now you mentioned that you have a technology angle that was part of your endeavors. So that’s interesting because if people add a new twist to something like a bicycle land speed record and the bicycle that’s interesting — an interesting angle on the story as a journalist. Tell us about how did the thing VR thing happen?

Denise: The virtual reality side of it really was a pure opportunistic situation with the Wall Street Journal; they have an app and they were wanting to get more virtual reality video up on that and this was one of those very high speed ones that was going to test some of the technological abilities of doing this because it’s like a series of 6 to 8 go pro cameras facing in all directions to be able to capture the 360 degree video and they thought this would be a great opportunity because of the speed we were going, it was going to test some of the limit. With virtual reality that you’ve seen out to there a lot of times is very fix objects or very slow moving object and this is going to be an extremely fast moving situation that sort of pushed the envelope for them, I believe, in a way and they saw that as an opportunity so that was almost like the cherry on top, as they say.

Jeffery: You did get a little press earlier and I think you even did [inaudible 00:04:13] to raise money and there were other things that that you did that generated smaller press for your endeavor along the way. Tell us about those things, you know, we started at the top we should work our way backwards. How did you begin this project and then who helped you in the early stages getting early publicity to help rally funds and those kind of things? Tell us about that.

Denise: A little bit of two-fold. One, again, it comes to who you know and having a great story or a great angle — being the first woman ever to do this was a great angle to get people interested. So where we really started was home town. So some of our first interviews were not only a friend of mine freelance for a local magazine which is where I happened to live. So she very early on did an article, which then, once you have one article printed then you can start mentioning that towards getting other articles because now you’ve already received a press, so it’s almost like a little bit of a tipping point. Once you started receiving press then more people want to start covering that in different venues.

The other thing is that we sourced out different angles; one of which is I happen to be a business owner and my business is a security company and so we went to the security journal, which is a very different group than the cyclist and a very different one from the [inaudible 00:05:41]. So we went and we asked everybody that we know who they have contacts with and would they be interested in doing a story so again who you know and also having a bit of an angle. So we started with local little area code, you know, [inaudible 00:05:55] and 92009 Magazine a year and a half, two years almost before this..

https://makeyoufamous.co/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/World-Cycling-Record-Denise-Mueller-podcastv2.mp3

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Fame Can Be Hazardous to Your Life May 30, 2017

Show notes

https://makeyoufamous.co/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/donna-rockwell.mp3

Dr. Donna Rockwell speaks on the negatives of being famous, and how to transcend the downside and leverage fame to do good.

Fame isn’t just glory and adoration. Fame objectifies people, creates mistrust of others, and eliminates privacy. Children whose parents help become famous bear a responsibility to help their kids not lose touch with reality. But ultimately, fame can be used to help others, by helping to solve critical issues in our world. By serving others, celebrities, and all of us, can give meaning to our lives beyond being liked, followed and admired for our material gains and popularity.

Dr. Donna Rockwell is a Mindfullness and Celebrity Mental Health Expert who has appeared on Katie Couric Show, been quoted in the NY Times, and whose articles have appeared in Huffington Post and elsewhere. Her paper, Being a Celebrity: A Phenomenology of Fame, looks at the effects of fame on 15 celebrities in various walks of life – from actors to business executives.

Excerpt:

Dr. Donna: It’s lovely to be here. Thank you so much for having me.

Jeffery: I’ve asked you to connect with me because I’m writing a book about how to become famous. It’s called This Book Can Make You Famous. So I thought it would be great to talk about some of your work because I’ve read some of it and so you can share your thoughts for the wider audience so you can give everyone listening, a realistic assessment of the experience of being famous. You’ve seen a lot of people, so what is it when people become famous? What happens to people? How does it change and their mental health?

Dr. Donna: In addition to seeing celebrity as Clinical Psychology patients I also did my doctoral research on the experience of fame by interviewing 16 famous celebrities; national and international. So a lot of my information about the actual experience of becoming famous, what it feels like to become famous and the effects of fame comes from scientific qualitative inquiry research into that experience specifically. So it’s not just from seeing clients and hearing what their life experiences are, which I think gives it a different edge.

But to answer your question, what’s interesting is that most of us don’t realize how precious or how valuable anonymity is, and when people become famous I find that the thing that they miss the most is this precious anonymity that the rest of us have in the sense that we can walk down the street in complete privacy, where as, a famous person sort of surrenders their privacy when they achieve fame and they spend the rest of their life sort of craving it again, that privacy, that anonymity.

There is a great quote I love from Harrison Ford who says that “being famous is like walking down the street with a skunk on your head”. Everybody wants to be famous but the intense scrutiny and the living under the microscope of society and especially today with the Internet it’s so intensified so quickly that it’s pretty hard to be famous actually. And the other thing that happens is the sense of losing trust, so who do I trust? What can I trust? So some pretty existential and fundamental issues come up.

Jeffery: Yeah, I was going to ask you about mistrust, absolutely, because you end up surrounded by people and you don’t know whether they’re really your friends or they just want to be with you because you’re famous.

Dr. Donna: Exactly, and there’s this notion called reflected glory, which shows that — and speaks to the fact that we all love to be around fame its a sort of a high, its a kind of a drug and it feels kind of trippy to be around famous people, to be in that world of fame. It’s very heavy, and so addictive and its own way for the celebrity as well for the friends of the celebrity.

And yes, I mean, I think the famous people — and they often speak to this, “why do you like me? Do you like me because of who I am or because of what I do?” And that feeling of mistrust never really goes away, both for real old the friends and for new ones. A A-list movie star I interviewed for my dissertation, for my research said that being famous when you go out with your friends — he said, “Fame sits between them on the table like a bloated cod,” you know, it’s always there and the feelings of jealousy mixed with envy, mixed with excitement at being amidst the spotlight and the reflective glory that comes from that can create incredible mistrust and sort of a lack of joy. People may look like they are partying, but are they joyfully partying?

Jeffery: So then why do you think people want more fame? So you’ve become a little famous, you get recognized for something, which is normal to seek recognition for your talent and so forth, but then, why do you want to more?

Dr. Donna: Your passion and your art, why do you want more? Well, why is it there such a thing as addiction? Why do we start out with a small amount feels good but then I need more? In many ways, it could even be about ice cream; but we’re not satisfied, our threshold rises and of course, as human beings we have a natural level of competition, so there is such a craze celebrity culture environment in which the petri dish in which were all living right now.

https://makeyoufamous.co/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/donna-rockwell.mp3

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Founders Space Steve Hoffman Innovates His Life May 30, 2017

Show notes

https://makeyoufamous.co/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/steve-hoffman-founders-space-podcast.mp3

Always innovating on his life, Steven Hoffman, known as Captain Hoff, has tried more professions than cats have lives, from game designer to venture capitalist. After starting three venture-funded startups in Silicon Valley, Hoffman launched Founders Space with the mission to educate and accelerate entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs. Founders Space has become one of the top startup accelerators in the world.

Excerpt:

Jeffery: So I’ve known you for a long time, so I went back and looked and I met you 2010 when I came to some early events when you were just starting Founder Space. Now you have over 50 partners in 22 countries. What were the key choices you made to go from there to here?

Steve: I can tell you. So when we first met, I was really just beginning. It was just an experiment for me. I didn’t even think of it as a full-time job; I was just out there kind of helping friends doing business like you. We’re both guys here in Silicon Valley, we’ve both done a lot and I was helping out a lot of my friends get funded at the very beginning. You know, they came to me because I’d done startups: “where do you go? How do you get this done?” So I was helping them do that.

Then, I saw an opportunity, and I think really one of the keys to growing a business to becoming famous, to doing any thing that grows into something much larger is to recognize an opportunity when you see it. There are opportunities all around us everyday, and, you know, most of us walk right pass them… we never see them, including me, you know, if I saw these opportunities I would’ve started Uber or Airbnb or all these other things, but I didn’t see those opportunities.

But at least I found one opportunity that I did see at the right time when I was in the right place to do it. And that was, we had to position ourselves different than anybody else. So when you are doing anything in business, if you are the same as your competitors, you are instantly in “everybody destroys everybody” mode. It’s also competitive and it’s very hard for you to get out ahead of somebody else and actually make wave and become known for something because you’re just doing what everybody does so there is nothing special about you

Jeffery: I get it. So make a choice that distinguishes you from other people.

Steve: Yeah. In my business in particular, there are a lot of incubators here in Silicon Valley, a lot of people doing a lot of great stuff out there, like 500 startups. You know, they were ahead of us, but I saw that there was an opening… that innovation was happening globally, startups were sprouting up all over the world, and each of them had different advantages and disadvantages in each country, you know, everything from Israel doing high-tech security stuff to Germany with there precision machine, mechanics and all that and in China and all these other markets. I thought we will position Founder Space as the global incubator in accelerator. So instead of just bringing startup founders to Silicon Valley like our competitors, we would bring Silicon Valley to them. And that was just the fundamental decision at just the right time because that’s what the market wanted. There were all these startup founders all around the world who really wanted to form startups both here in Silicon Valley and learn from us, but also do it in there home country. And we became the one to kind of export the knowledge of Silicon Valley around the world.

Jeffery: Brilliant. You know, coming from that, you just came back from China and I followed your exploits on Facebook. You were speaker at all these events, you got a lot of press, but the phrase “with great power, come great responsibility” comes to mind. So what does that mean for you? You’re in the position of high public visibility in international relations, so what does this mean?

Steve: So it’s funny, because I’m well-known here in Silicon Valley now because of Founder Space, but I’m even better known abroad because we took that opportunity to become kind of the leader in global, so now I’m literally spending 70% of my time travelling, as you mentioned. I spend a lot of it in China and in china I’ve actually become a super star there, like, it’s bizarre to me, you know you say how did you get famous? I don’t even quite understand how it happened, but I’ll just enlightened you on this point and then I’ll get to your responsibility question, but my feeling was it happened because we had Founder Space already successful here and our mission was to bring Silicon Valley abroad and we came there at just the right time with Founder Space and just being there at the right time with the right thing more than anything else is what propelled us very quickly into kind of the star player in incubation in China if people wanted to get the knowledge we have in Silicon Valley. And so that was amplified even more abroad than in our own country.

Now, because I’m so well known in places like China, Korea, Thailand, all those countries, you asked the question about responsibility and I’ve actually thought about this quite a bit because I feel like I don’t want my life just to be about making just money because… well, we all want to make money and it’s nice to be well-known because it give you a lot of power to do a lot of things.

https://makeyoufamous.co/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/steve-hoffman-founders-space-podcast.mp3

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Rob Reger on Discovering Emily the Strange May 30, 2017

Show notes

https://makeyoufamous.co/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/rob-reger-emily-the-strange-podcast.mp3

Rob Reger is creator of Emily the Strange came to life in the early 1990’s and quickly became a beloved counterculture icon all around the world. The complete Emily the Strange, published by Dark Horse Entertainment, made the NY Times bestseller list in 2016. Now Reger and his collaborators are in negotiations to finally produce the Emily the Strange feature with Amazon Studios animation.

Rob: Hey, Jeff.

Jeffery: Hey, you know, we’ve been friends for a while and I know that you’ve been talking with Hollywood for quite some time. How is that going recently? What’s going on with that?

Rob: Well, we have a new partner, Amazon Studios. I like these guys. They are a studio that really wants to make quality programming and movies and entertainment. They are very artist and creator and writer and director driven. They don’t put a lot of emphasis on most of it being authentic to the awesome people they’re working with and I think that’s one of the things that’s driving their success. Anyway, it’s music to my ears that they actually want to make a movie about my character and not use my character to make a movie for some notorious reason.

Jeffery: That would be because you’re character has a struck a nerve with people. Why do you think Emily have such a staining power? What do you think people love about Emily?

Rob: A number of things, but I think maybe in the beginning it was perhaps different than it is even now, but overtime I certainly know that one of the things people appreciate about her is that she’s a character that kind of represent certain things that often we’re all a bit shy to put out there. She stands up for herself; she’s very, very comfortable in her unique way of being. I think that her merchandise in the early days, in beginning the t-shirts and the slogans and stuff on her, you know, different things we made really represented, like, an attitude that the person who wore the shirt or have the notebook or backpack or something– it kind of portrayed the attitude that that person would have wanted or help people get to that voice themselves.

Jeffery: So Emily, she has an attitude that people want to have and so they gravitate towards her because they identified with that what she’s expressing?

Rob: Yeah, I don’t know, it’s a multi faceted or part thing but I would say that’s one of the thing, then also once you kind of start to understand the mystery behind the girl you also just identify with or, you know, I think that everybody has a little bit of that part of them that has at one point in their lives at least felt isolated or alone or that no one truly understand them and with Emily that’s okay. And so I think there’s something about relating to a character that enjoys that part of her, whereas a lot of the stuff, the most difficult part of her life something to come to terms with. So Emily kind of represents it being okay that you’re an outside person.

Jeffery: Yeah, I get that because a lot of people feel that way. I get that.

Rob: The third part to continue on that thought, I think just the darkness of the character and the fact that she has cats is also a big part of it. A lot of people in the early days and now might be drawn to her because they like cats and I use a lot of cats in there imagery and so they might identify with the coolness of the cats or, like, that kind of thing and then kind of get to know Emily afterwards. So I think the cats are sometimes the gateway drug to Emily.

Jeffery:The cats are the gateway drug to Emily. So speaking of cat there was Sylvester the cat and then there was Tweety Bird; people who are listening might not be familiar with Emily yet. There’s the Tweety Bird dynamic from years and decades and decades ago, why do people like Tweety bird when you can pick another historical animated character if you wish, but why do you think people like Tweety Bird or whomever?

https://makeyoufamous.co/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/rob-reger-emily-the-strange-podcast.mp3

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Calling All Birds with Nicole Perretta May 30, 2017

Show notes

https://makeyoufamous.co/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/nicole-perreta-podcast.mp3

Nicole Perretta has appeared on Ellen show and Jay Leno because of her unique talent imitating bird calls realistically. She’s now up to 165 calls. Nicole has written several books, like How to talk to birds, and performs at birding events and teaches classes about bird calling. She was a zookeeper at the San Diego Zoo for 7 years and is available to call birds for you!

Transcript of the 1st 5 minutes.

Nicole: Hello, how are you?

Jeffery: I’m good. So we’ve been chit-chatting a little before starting to record and this is going to be a really interesting call. We met at, you know, I heard you perform at a birding event and you described besides doing a lot of interesting bird calls, and I’d like to hear you do some of those during our call; but you described how you discovered this talent, you know, I’d like you to start there and tell folks how you discovered your talent for this.

Nicole: Oh, sure, you bet. So I was doing bird calls at the Anza Borrego birding festival. I started when I was pretty young. I can’t remember, maybe six years old about, and I was very fortunate to grow up in East County San Diego and we used to own some property out there that was out in the wild and I had a lot of birds, you know, hawks and ravens and quails and I used to listen to them all the time.

First of all, I think I have to say that I grew up in a very open type family. My mom loves animals and my mom is the kind of person that if she sees a cat or a dog or a bird she’ll talk to it in its own language. So she’ll see a cat walking down the street and she’ll go, “Meow,” and the funny thing is the cat will turn and run to my mother, like, she can call any cat and it will come to her. So I grew up with watching my mom bring animals to her. So I saw that and said, “Hey, maybe I can do the same thing.” So I practiced and practiced and it wasn’t until I was in elementary school that I really started to get the hang of doing the bird calls. And one time I was walking home from school and I saw a pair of ravens sitting in a tree and I heard them calling and I decided to call back. And this is what a raven sounds like [making bird call sounds], so I did that, I went [making bird call sounds], and then the Raven answered me back like that [making bird call sounds], and I’m like, “Wow! This is really cool.”

So I just stood there and call at them for a while, but then you know like most kids I had to get home by a certain time so I said, “Okay, I better go.” So I just kept on walking and the ravens kept calling. So I’m walking home and I’m a couple of blocks away and I’m going [making bird call sounds], and I can hear them for way [making bird call sounds], like that. So I keep walking and calling and all of a sudden I hear, [making bird call sounds], like, right above my head and I look up and the ravens are right in the tree right above me. They had basically followed me on my trail home. And so I kept walking and basically got into my house and I had two ravens circling over my house. I kept calling them from the window and then there’s these two birds just keep circling and calling so it was a wonderful introduction because as a child I said, “Wow, if I can get these birds to come to me,” and that was it, that was a very beginning.

Jeffery: That’s amazing, Nicole. It’s very, very rare that people discover this kind of talent. What happened then? I’m sure you kept talking to different birds and having different experiences. Are there other interesting stories like that that you can relate along the way when you were little older?

Nicole: Okay, yeah. When I was in elementary school, again, I was playing in the playground and I saw a red shoulder hawk soaring in the air — and they’re very vocal birds and they’re often up there soaring and then you can hear them going [making bird call sounds]. So I decided to imitate that call because that’s one that I’ve been practicing. So I called back to them and sure enough this bird had been a speck in the sky and had dropped down almost right above my head, I mean, maybe roof level and it was circling around calling and calling because it thought I was another bird. So it was pretty amazing to see that happening and I just kept doing it. I started going bird watching and part of bird watching is walking around and looking at birds and if I heard a bird I didn’t recognize I would follow it until I found it.

https://makeyoufamous.co/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/nicole-perreta-podcast.mp3

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Embed Yourself in a Culture Be A Spokesperson for “The West” May 30, 2017

Show notes

https://makeyoufamous.co/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/mark-mullen.mp3

Mark Mullen explains how volunteering led to making a huge political impact in a far away place.

As a young backpacker volunteering in Malawi, Mark Mullen had no idea he would become a spokesperson for the West leading up to the peaceful revolution in the Republic of Georgia. Eventually, he would be known by many of the 4.5 million citizens of the ex-Russian province as the guy who helped bring down Eduard Shevardnadze. He wasn’t working towards that goal at all, but by diving into Georgian culture and getting to know everyone, he became the go to guy for Georgian journalists looking for a statement from “the West”. Mullen was there for 15 years, instead the the typical two year tour for foreigners. Also, unlike many diplomats, Mullen was willing to stick to his neck out and say something substantial on TV. When Shevardnadze finally fell, the Speaker of the House became President. Of course, she asked Mullen for advice. He told her to simply say on TV, in English, and thus to the world, essentially, we’re good here in Georgia.

Mark: Well, to try to not have too long of a backswing, I graduated with a degree in history from Wesleyan University with not much of an idea what to do with it and ended up traveling around. I was in Japan for a while and then ended up getting a job distributing food during a drought in Malawi in East Africa. I mean, it wasn’t really a job I sort of volunteered for 80 bucks a month, but then they had a referendum there on whether to become a multi-party democracy and it was very exciting and I observed that and sort of put myself into the middle of that and then I found the National Democratic Institute or NDI when I came back and got ready for a lengthy job search and they were opening a office in Malawi — didn’t know anyone who’ve ever been there and so they hired me and I moved back there and did a civic education program there.

Jeffery: That’s something because it’s almost like a random beginning, right? You were in Malawi and you were traveling around, you started to help distribute food and then you came back and you look for a job and you had this credential from Malawi which allowed you to get a job at the Democratic Institute…

Mark: NDI…Yes, exactly. It was totally random. I mean, even how I got the job in Malawi to distribute food was kind of somebody I talk to… it was all completely random. Now, my first year in Malawi I was really just hired because I’d been there and I kind of just did the run to the office and dealt with getting a telephone line, which at that time was quite difficult, you know, all the certain logistical stuff; but I’d been there for a while so I ended up having influence in sort of how we design the whole program there. They had never had elections and all that stuff.

And then after a year there I went directly from there to — I was promoted fairly soon after the Oslo agreement was signed to do what was supposed to be a voter education program ended up… I was supposed to be there for three months, it ended up being almost 3 years because the status negotiations took so long and so there I designed a civic program and set it up throughout the West Banks and Gaza and East Jerusalem.

It was at a very interesting time, I mean, looking back everyone says, “Oh, that was such an optimistic time.” I mean, it don’t really feel like it then because the closure was on and it was pretty tough, but I guess compared to now probably so. So then at that point I thought, “Well, okay, I probably ought to get a life and do something real,” I thought maybe I should get a master’s degree because I never studied any of the stuff that I was doing and I thought development studies seem like a good idea, graduate school in the UK was much cheaper. And so I applied to graduate school in the UK, got in, was ready to go and my employer said, oh, you’ve done a good job and stuff like that and I said, “Okay well I want more money and I will only go to the these four countries and I will only go if I’m the head of the office and I only want to do civic work, I don’t want to deal with political parties, you know, whatever else or Parliament. It was sort of like I was leaving anyway, I had already paid my deposit in graduate school and I didn’t think they would take me up on the offer and the four places I said I would go were Ghana, Sri Lanka, Vietnam or Georgia and they were just places where we had stuff going on and it seems like interesting places I couldn’t complain about and so they offered me the job to go to Georgia.

https://makeyoufamous.co/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/mark-mullen.mp3

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