Digital Storytelling with Moxie - Kirt Jacobs - Moxie Talk

SPEAKER_01 0:04

This is the Beyond the Story Podcast. A show that goes way beyond the story. Kurt Jacobs, welcome to the show, man.

SPEAKER_00 0:26

Hey, appreciate it, Sebastian. Quite an honor, dude. I have a I've been following you for a couple years. You gave me several inspirations in the in the early hours and mornings of uh uh the pandemic, and here we are a couple years out. So, man, it's quite an honor to be on your show.

SPEAKER_01 0:40

You know what? That's why I do what I do is to hear things like that. So I first of all, I'm humbled. Second of all, thank you uh for sharing that with me. I'm glad that uh an experience that you had with me several throughout that week of figuring out how to launch a podcast in five days or less, which is extremely progressive. Uh you were able to take something. Most importantly, go do go do something uh about it. So let's talk a little bit about your story. Let's let's back up a little bit and how'd this whole thing begin and what what brought you to present day with what you're currently working on.

SPEAKER_00 1:09

So I'll I've always tried to keep this very quick, Sebastian. Uh, but it's I'm in my 16th year of production. We started in uh October of 2005. You know, they didn't call it this then, but it was a side hustle. I didn't know it. I was working full time in local government here in Louisville, Kentucky. And um I just kept building on it, working on it on the side, uh, reached out to Government Access. They gave me an opportunity to use their equipment. They said, we'll give you a crew, the camera, you book the guests. And I said, I basically want to make the person the subject, not the book they wrote, the achievement they just got through, or some football game they want, or what have you. I wanted them to be the subject. And for those of a certain generation, you're familiar with Inside the Actors Studio with James Lipton. Sure. And of course, those that know Charlie Rose. And what I wanted to do was combine those two styles of programming. I didn't want to make it all about actors, which is what uh Inside the Actors Studio was, and all very intellectual, in my opinion, the way Charlie Rose's was. And I thought to myself one morning in the shower, and I've shared this at a women's club meeting, I decided that uh I had this epiphany of no audience, one person, so there'd be no performance anxiety, giving the questions in advance. I don't have a journalism background. And, you know, what's your most defining moment? What were your who or what were your biggest influences? You know, how do you want to be remembered? That's our signature question. They get about 22 questions. We migrated from 15 minutes to 30 minutes, and now I really don't have any restriction uh up to an hour. Uh we rebranded, we originally leadership landscape TV, which was a mouthful, and then we became Moxie Talk with Kurt Jacobs after many focus groups with younger people telling me what was right and wrong because I saw the appetite changing and I loved this. And so for me, the the the the epiphany came in January of 15. One of our guests, who was uh, I'm sure you've had a few of them on or met them in your travels, Sebastian. They were they're a love-hate type person. You either really people really liked them or hated them, kind of like some of our presidents. And uh I went to this, uh I always had a rule, I would go to their funerals if it was within reason. You know, they were on my program, um, I would go to their funeral. So here I am, Catholic funeral. If anyone's familiar with those, they're very long. And at the end of it, as we're taking the hearst, you know, they are, and they're going to um to the grave site, the the eldest brother of this individual and the eldest son, and I'm not that tall to begin with, Sebastian, walk over to me and give me these huge bear hugs. And I'm like, you know, my father's now gone. We were very close, he was there with me. And we just got there late, we're standing in the back, and they said, I can't thank you enough. Our family had, you know, drinks. We watched your interview with our father and my brother over and over last night. And now, you know, he died of blood cancer, this individual. So he was in his virility. He was the guy they remember, and he was kind of the patriarch of that family. And in that moment, I looked up and I saw the crucifix and Jesus, and it was in commercial real estate at the time, and I thought, I don't know how I'm gonna do this, but obviously this is what I'm meant to do. I'm gonna make this a full-time gig. Little did I know what we were all about to go through over the next three, four, five, six years, you know, from 2015, this evolution to virtual. Um, and so I left and rebranded in the fall of 2016. We were 11 years in. And so today, you know, we've been doing it as Moxie Talk for about six years, coming up on six years, and we've done 376 interviews, and I've done everything from sitting in a studio one-on-one, nice and cozy with all the lights, to sweating your you know what off at a music festival, grabbing somebody coming off the stage that you'd never get access to otherwise, um, which is a very different dynamic because you don't you're lucky to get three minutes, let alone 30. So it's a very different animal. And I've interviewed former uh governors to to um born-again Christians, you know, recovering prostitutes, people that help with human trafficking. And what I look for are people that are a cut above in their sphere of influence. So if, you know, just to use a sports reference that I think most people would know, if it was football, I'd want to try to interview Tom Brady. You know, he's kind of like the quarterback's quarterback. Sure. Um politics, of course, is a little more dicey. You know, you want to maybe you try to interview the president or a senator, you know, not our they're divisive individuals. Um and then the probably the most powerful one for me was was reformed, for lack of a better word, prostitute, who went on a call with a with another lady one evening right here in Louisville. And she had never been in, never got finished high school, gone to college. She was pimped out most of her childhood. And she went on this call and and this guy was whacked out on drugs and shot her friend right there in front of her in the foyer of the home when they entered, and she turned around and walks away. And as she's walking away, she goes, I've never talked to you, I've never been to church, I've never even really thought about you, God. But if you get me out of this situation, I will, you know, turn my life over to you. And as she was walking away, let me back up. I kind of disjointed the story. When she had shot the other uh lady and killed her, frankly, immediately there in the foyer, he reached and grabbed her around the neck, like so. And when he did to do the gun, because he was whacked out on drugs, he dropped the gun, according to her story. And so he reached down to get the gun, and as he did, he let go of her and she started walking out the door. So let me back up a little bit. And so now she's out the front door. Um, she did, she was afraid to run because it would trigger him to come after her, no pun intended. And she looked back once very slowly as she's talking to God, and she sees him trying to grab the gun up off the foyer to shoot her, and she subsequently gets in her car and leaves, and she made that vow to God, and so she's now started a ministry of women of the well, she gets women of the street, uh, strippers, human trafficked individuals out of that situation and tries to get them rehabilitated into society. And she said the interesting thing is uh that most people uh don't realize that not everyone's receptive to my opportunity in that world because it's a very seductive lifestyle.

SPEAKER_01 7:29

Yeah, it's very very dangerous, obviously, based on that story.

SPEAKER_00 7:34

And I'm just trying to give you one snippet of kind of the individual I look for. I've had all kinds of very powerful stories, you know, an athletic director who told a story that was nowhere in my research where his father got T-boned in a car accident, and his father was his mentor. And this is a guy, Mr. Stoic. I'm sure you've met him, you know, they know emotion. And here he is getting emotional in front of me, telling this story about his father dying. And he had just gotten to the point as the athletic director of the University of Louisville was Tom Jurich. And you know, he said, I just gotten aware, all the stuff he had taught me growing up, I had just gotten made reality, so to speak. And I was really proud of where we were, and then this happened. And he says, you know, it's um it's a very powerful thing when that changes uh your life trajectory, they were very close. And where I'm going with all that is what I found in what I do, Sebastian, is I look for mortality events, um, meaning if you've um if you're an individual that's overcome maybe your own mortality, meaning you've overcome a disease, or if it's um, you know, you've lost a child suddenly to a tragic accident, or you've been in a situation where you barely escaped alive. It's those things seem to trigger um something in the DNA of most humans where they're very wanting and willing to tell their story. Um I think until that happens to an individual, um, you don't really think about the precariousness and how fragile being a human being is in the human journey. And in my opinion, how unbelievably remarkable it is to be a human being. I know there's been billions of us before. Yeah, and billions of us again. But you know, you think about, you know, you could have been a cockroach, you could have been an ant, you could have been a worm.

SPEAKER_01 9:19

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 9:20

Yeah, I mean, you know, you could have been followed, you know, you could have been a salmon getting ready to live a couple days, get eaten. I mean, I could go on. Sure.

SPEAKER_01 9:27

So when you look at it that way, um I think about my mortality a lot post-40.

SPEAKER_00 9:32

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 9:33

I used to, you know, before 40, you think you're gonna live forever. And then somebody you care about dies or life shows up, or some crazy shit happens, and and all of a sudden you're like, Wow, that could have been me. You know? I literally just had a phone call from a family member that was like, oh, I went to go do the pre-screening for a colonoscopy and they found a mask. They went in, they x-rayed the mask, and thank God everything's okay and I'm free and clear. Dude, I was like, I had no words. But that's how quick life can show up. I mean, even more of a reason to stay in gratitude. And when we wake up every single day and our feet hit the floor, we go, good for another one. I mean, it you know, as long as we're going here, you know. So uh you you're right, you're right. We don't think about that. And uh, you know, that whole fame I'm gonna live forever is bullshit because you know we've all got a number, and we are, you know, the Bible's clear that we are mere vapors. And uh I I say that, you know, it was funny I was riding the Metro Rail one time down here in Miami at the public subway, and uh, this little kid was singing at the top of his lungs, take the Jesus, take the Jesus, and the mother looks over and goes, Boy, you better shit up to take your ass. And and I never thought about that. I never thought I I never forgot about that because that is so f true. Like we think we're so gigantic. Go stand next to the ocean real quick, and that'll be a quick reminder of how tiny and meaningless we really are in the grand scheme of things. So I love that you you know your your stories convert to to to people shifting and doing something. You're clearly you know doing work that matters.

SPEAKER_00 11:10

Well, I'm gonna mention this real quick. I've I've I've come to this conclusion of just on spirituality, and I'll just offer this because that's really what the show is about. This person is expressing their own personal spirituality, whether they believe or not. You know, there's nothing around us as far as we know, to our knowledge. You know, there's not, you know, the orange people on Venus and the red people on Mars. I mean, if there were species everywhere that had the power of reason like us, yeah, I would say, okay, then this is probably biology. This is my opinion, of course. But the fact that there's nothing around us and we're just floating out on this rock uh out in the middle of nowhere, to me, that just says we're either a totally inconsequential to your earlier point, or it's so miraculous and such a miracle of a higher power, we should thank ourselves every day that we get up out of bed and assuming all our faculties and arms and legs work, etc. Absolutely. But uh, you know, I've lost six, I've lost 26 uh guests of the 376, and and this was a byproduct, it's not why I do it. Um but I found that when the when the individual passes, it's kind of like my story earlier, and now with everything so virtual and online, you don't have to all you don't have to hand them a DVD, you know, that's what I used to do. Here's a DVD of so and so. I haven't heard that term in a while. Yeah. What's that?

SPEAKER_01 12:33

I haven't heard that term in a while.

SPEAKER_00 12:35

Yeah, I know exactly, exactly. DVD? What does that mean, Dad? Yeah. But um it becomes a very powerful, priceless piece of video. And a lot of times, you know, as much as we like to believe that people watch your show, Sebastian, and watch mine, it usually takes a life event to trigger, you know, someone watching a particular episode, um, especially if they die suddenly. And then they learn all this stuff about a person that they never knew about. That it could be their own husband, it could be their own father, mother, sister. And they're like, I can't thank you enough. I never knew they felt this way about such and such or that. And so that kind of led to, you know, it was an evolution for me. Um, I beg when I first began, I just liked sitting down and chatting with people. I love to talk. Uh, but it evolved into, and what it is now, now that I'm, you know, got a little time on me and I'm middle-aged, and you know, you've got another generation or two coming up behind you. What I'm finding is in all of our metrics and stuff is that we're becoming much more of a mentoring opportunity for people than I ever would have imagined. They want to see where Joe or Jane made the mistakes or overcame this, and you know, not to get into politics or whatever, but we seem to be in a in a time frame in American history where a lot of people want to blame everybody else for their place in society. Um, and I think by looking at these individuals, um can ri can really be inspirational.

SPEAKER_01 14:04

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_00 14:05

And I'll just and I'm I'm thinking about writing a book, and I'll I'll stop on this point, um, where you know, we're all born with a set of cards, you know, we're male or female, we're we're sexual orientation, we're smart or dumb, we're pretty or ugly, you know, we're rich or poor, you know, and we all get this deck of cards when we come to the earth, and by and large, they're pretty static. Um, you know, they don't really change much, but it's how you play the hand that changes how the cards unfold. Because you could have somebody that, you know, came from the Holocaust and they come over here and lead a remarkable life, you know, if they if they lived through the Holocaust and got out. And I'm trying to make a really quick example, and there's millions of examples where you could do that. And I believe everyone has moxie, which is courage, grit, within them. They may lead a life where it's never called upon. You know, I think we're seeing a thing now. I'll try to keep this somewhat timeless, where we've got a world issue going on that here's a guy that never expected to have to take on a huge superpower, and he's staying in his country fighting for the survival of his country and his people, and ultimately his own life and his family. And what I like to always say is sometimes uh a man makes history and sometimes history makes the man. Sure. And so it's a it's a time frame I think that we're gonna look back on, and I hope that that all ends well. But uh my point is I think everyone has it within them to rise above when they have to.

SPEAKER_01 15:29

Yeah, absolutely. If you can't, you must, you must, you can, Tony Robbins said. So well, I love this, man. I love that you started it as a hobby, turned it into a business, and it's it's doing something to you know, this content in the social media things here for one reason, if for for a good reason, and that is to document our lives for generations to come, to to like the ancient Stoics did. They would write about their experiences, about how to improve life 2,000 years ago and save us some time on what we had to do. So keep up the great work. We're out of time. I'd love to continue our conversation on here, but I'd like to go short and sweet on here sharing your story. I'll make sure I include all your links on the show notes. And uh, I do appreciate you taking some time out of your day to hang out with us here, Kirk. Good seeing you again, brother.

SPEAKER_00 16:06

You too, Sebastian. Keep up the great work. We'll physically cross paths sometime in what in this lifetime.

SPEAKER_01 16:11

I I still have not been to uh Kentucky for uh a real decent proper bourbon.

SPEAKER_00 16:16

Uh well, Derby's coming up and Derby's back on the upswing. You know, we've had a couple years of the COVID.

SPEAKER_01 16:21

I don't even know how to get into the Derby, so like I'm looking forward to Okay, excellent.

SPEAKER_00 16:26

We've covered the Derby. That's another discussion, so I know how to get in.

SPEAKER_01 16:29

I got a guy. All right, listen. I listen, you make the call. I no one needs me home for dinner. So I can the answer is almost always yes. If I'm not traveling somewhere, I'm a 43-year-old empty nester that no one knows what time I get home.

SPEAKER_00 16:42

Gotcha. I'll make it happen. Maybe not this year, but soon.

SPEAKER_01 16:45

Let's do it, man. Let's do it. Thanks again, Kurt. Peace out.

SPEAKER_00 16:48

Godspeed, my friend. Thank you, brother. Likewise. Keep up the great work. God bless. See ya. You too.

SPEAKER_01 16:52

Until next time, friends. Thanks so much for tuning into this episode of the Beyond the Story podcast. Be sure to appreciate it. If you haven't done so already, make sure you're subscribed to the show. This way you'll get updates as new episodes become available. If you feel so inclined, please leave us a review. Be sure to appreciate it. Signing off from the podcast, launchlab.com studios.