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Michael Stewart
Good morning, good morning, wherever you are in the world, it’s Mike Stewart dot live, live TV show. And this today I don’t have a guest. This is kind of my Thanksgiving show here in the United States. This week we celebrate Thanksgiving. And I thought I would reflect on some things about 2020 and things that I have gratitude for. And if some folks show up, I’ll be glad to take your questions at the end. But this will be probably a very little short show up. But amazingly, you know, I didn’t even do a promotion for this show. And we got people showing up. So thanks so much for you folks showing up. But be sure to go into the comments area and let me know that you’re here. But today, you know, I’m, I’m grateful for the internet. I’m grateful for understanding how microphones and cameras work. So this is gratitude about audio and video online. And I put a little presentation together to talk about what I call my gratitude and bewilderment of this year. So if you let me indulge, you own just a little bit of a trip down memory lane, and maybe there’s some sub lessons we can all learn from that. But I see people showing up. Hey, David, David Kavanagh’s here. Thanks, David. Glad you’re here. And so let me let me share this little story and then we’ll have a little discussion. But here in the US, it is the week of Thanksgiving. I’m kind of excited because I’m going to be going to Georgia to see my grandkids and see my kids. So I want to share with you my thoughts on 2020 and my gratitude. So number one, um, I’m thinking about 2020 and I call it the year of gratitude and the year of the wilderness number one, I came into 2020 with a lot of excitement. There’s an oldies band here in the States called the Box Tops. They had four number one records called the letter cry like a baby, soul deep, you can google them the Box Tops they were originally called the de veils, and that fell out in the top right hand corner is Gary Talley. And Gary has been a good friend of mine for years and Bill Cunningham is Darien bill are the founding members of 1967 of the Box Tops. And the stories they have just make me happy. I’m so grateful for the stories that I get to hear. Bill’s brother was BB Cunningham had a hit record called let it all hang out in the 60s, you got to check that out. It was the first rap record. And Bill’s dad, BB Sr. Worked for Sam Phillips at when BB worked

At Sam Phillips Sun Records, Elvis, and Johnny Cash. And I mean just the stories are amazing that Bill can share from his childhood. And so being a member of the Box tops was exciting in 2020. And I think I’m so tickled to hear my good friend Wayne Moss, who will be a guest on this show once we get his internet working flawlessly so he can stream Thank you Wayne for for being here.

And my good friend Jeff Herring is here. So anyway, the story is I came into 2020 with a lot of anticipation. My gosh, I’ve come to Nashville, and a dream I get to tour with these guys there. There’s me, I’m the keyboard player for the old Box Tops. And, you know, we get to do a lot of really cool things. That was February of this year. Then we get to march. And you talk about something that that scary, but I’m very grateful for is that the tornado that came through Nashville was within five miles of my house. And unfortunately, in Nashville, it did a lot of damage, but I’m grateful that more people weren’t hurt. But it was you know, it’s like that’s how we came into March I mean, you know, they used to talk about March comes in like a lion and goes out like a lamb or vice versa. Well, this year it came in like a like a herd of lions through about five miles from my house.

And then

Michael Stewart
a couple of weeks later on, you know or not even a week later, a few days later, the pandemic started you You’re in Tennessee, and it started all over the world. And my goodness, it was a scary, scary time for us all. It’s still a scary time. But, you know, I had just joined the Boxtops. And we were, we were out in Texas. And we had concerts booked in Texas in that week, you know, right after the tornado in Nashville, and they canceled our concerts, and we had to fly home early.

And I just remember, it was just, you know, what’s going on with the world, it was very much akin to 911. I remember 911 was just one of those weird days is like, what’s happening to the world? And, and, you know, ironically, you know, how many years ago was it? It was 1963 on November 22, I was a child, but I remember the, the emotion of the day, Kennedy was killed. I mean, these were all negative things that just makes the world scared. And it’s hard to be grateful and thankful when you’re scared and bewildered. But, you know, one of the things that I’m have a lot of gratitude, and I hope, I wish this for all of you, is being comfortable with online technologies. I’m thankful that when the pandemic hit, that I wasn’t struggling to figure out how online worked.

You know, one of the things I knew how microphones, I knew have webcams, I knew how cameras I editing software. I mean, there’s so many things in the online video world that everyone should at least aspire to have a mastery of. So I was thankful that I didn’t have a learning curve. One of the things that that became evident to me was that the world discovered zoom back in March. And this is a networking group that I’m very active with, it’s called nti. Online. It’s, you know, a group, I, one of the biggest things that helped me in my business was networking. Like when I used to speak at events, you know, like David, Kevin or not, David and I are friends from In fact, here’s here’s David’s a Facebook and his picture. David is my mate all across the world. David’s in Thailand right now, can’t believe what time what time, David, you have to tell us what time it is in Thailand right now. But networking at live events that used to get on an airplane and fly all over the world to talk about audio and video. Now, you can do it with these streaming technologies. And it’s interesting how of all the great streaming technologies out there Go To Webinar, WebEx, Microsoft online, zoom is the one the world embraced. And people struggled with it. And it’s really been I’m grateful that I had knowledge to help a lot of people overcome their frustrations and, and fears of zoom and, and realize that, you know, we can still connect safely with the technology, audio and video and streaming on the internet. That’s, that’s, in fact, if we go to the next thing that I’m grateful for, is because of this pandemic. I started researching all of the streaming technologies. And my good friend Daniel Hall, shared with me join stream yard.com. And I said, Oh my gosh, this is this is the solution. This is the ability to do video strategies like lower third text, and the ability to engage with people that are watching you. You can pull up lower third comments from from people watching you live. You can throw up your phone number, your web addresses, I mean, it’s just lower third text is a strategy I can I can switch and show my me talking on the camera. You don’t need to see me right now. But I mean, you can see there this is what stream yard does stream yard makes this amazingly easy for the world. And it’s one of the things that I struggled with trying to teach years ago, because years ago, I bought the domain name dot live secrets. And this was the thing that I learned and I’m grateful for back in May

Michael Stewart
is there’s my buddies in a band, I was in a band in 1982. We were one hit wonder, have we had a record called Pac Man fever. And I have been here trying to figure out how to help musicians and the music world understand that they can monetize music in Amazon with other than just streaming audio streams of music don’t pay a lot of money. And there’s there’s technical reasons. And there’s economic reasons why that is, and it frustrates my friends and colleagues and brothers and sisters in music. But you can sell music through Amazon for a lot more money. And we proved it back in May, with using straight join stream yard. And we debuted a video and we sold our Kindle music book. And we proved that 10% of our fans would buy a $5 Kindle book. So we were able to prove and that all came about because we were locked down, we were in quarantine, we had to use audio and video on the internet to monetize. So anyway, okay, but I’m so I’m grateful you know, even though this horrible pandemic is here, and I pray for it, to come back to where we can all gather in groups, and we can have live events. But you know, I don’t think it’ll ever be insane because I think the world has learned that streaming audio and video has a place. And sometimes you don’t have to, you know, burn fossil fuels and get on airplanes and drive across town and, and spend, you know, spend money on hotels, you can accomplish a lot, just sitting right in front of your webcam and your computer and your internet connection. So that’s, that’s what I learned here. So this was May of this year, and I’m grateful that Daniel Hall and Jerry Buckner and you know, go to Buckner Garcia.com. And check this out. This was was really groundbreaking for us we prove something. And then three days later, we had the horror of the George Floyd incident. And it saddens me that that that, you know, that became the news. Nobody cared about Pac Man after that happened. And I totally understand. I’m not trying to be political here at all guys. I’m just saying it’s a history what happened. And it broke my heart that that this was, you know, we had just come out of getting, you know, a little bit settled on, okay, we’re in this lockdown, what can we do differently? And then then that horror, you know, started happening all over the country. And, and I just pray, you know, one of the things I want to pray for and be thankful for is if we can come together and, and live in peace, you know, anyway, that’s what John Lennon wanted. He was a Beatle and he said, you know, give peace a chance. So I get it. But because of my experience with doing the Pac Man fever, live stream, my colleagues and in fact, David Cavanagh, was one of the fellows there. Tom Wah Jason Buckner, and the group at click seminars. They were originally called the world in it summit and the world at summit was based out of Australia. And I mean, I flew to Australia five times to speak at those seminars, because that’s how I made money. I built business and was grateful for it. I remember one time I was in Australia, and it was July. And I said, Now why am I in the dead of winter in Australia? Oh, so I can live at the lake in America. That’s why I’m here. I’m here to help people make enough prosperity so that I can live my dream. And so anyway, Tom and Jason, and I’m having a brain brain. When you call it a brain fart, that’s what you call it. The other lady there I’ll remember her name later. Anyway, they said they were going to do click seminars, calm and sort of the world at summit. I said, No, guys, you stream yard, we can do a live worldwide event. And we can do it completely, with very little calls with webcams and presentations, you know, so it was the inspiration to help these guys. And I was grateful that I was asked to be the host of both of these events worldwide, made them a whole lot of new friends this way, connected with a whole lot of people. And it was it was a great experience.

Michael Stewart
So that was the inspiration that I’m grateful for that made me say I bought the Domain Dot live secrets.com two years ago, and I tried to use a piece of software called OBS if you’ve seen the OBS Studio it’s it’s a pretty amazing free piece of software. And it allows you to live stream. But even as experienced as I was, it was very clunky. It was very it was open source software. I just felt like that my community would struggle with this software. So I abandoned dot live secrets because I just didn’t feel Like it was here. But when I found stream yard and started using streaming, the very thing I’m using right now to live stream to you. That’s when I was able to. And so I’m grateful that the lockdown and the quarantine made me say, Okay, I’m concet here and do nothing, or I can sit here and and create things that can make a difference in people’s lives. So that’s what I did. I finished this. And it works I ever haven’t really even finished all I’m going to do with it. Of course, I always tell you that this show is brought to you by domains, you control.com where you buy hosting and websites and not live secrets. Then the next thing that I want to share with you that was I’m grateful for my good friend, Hal Coleman, the bug guy said, For years, Mike, we need to do an online Pest Control TV show. And we tried to do it on zoom. And we tried to do it a couple other ways. And I just really wasn’t pleased with the way it went. Zoom is a meeting technology. Yeah, you can get zoom webinar, and I believe it’s good. But stream yard enabled me to launch this. And oh, my goodness has this been an amazing thing for us since March. unbeknownst to us, but we’re very grateful for pest control is an essential business in this pandemic. And we got busy and our clients got busy. And instead of back in March, when I thought things were going to be in a decline. We’ve had a booming year, you know, online technologies, Netflix, apple, Amazon, eBay, LinkedIn, all of these online technologies that embrace audio and video have been booming this year. So that should be assigned to you. That should be a lesson. And that happened because of the negative that happened back in March. And then of course, me, it made me realize I need to give back to my community. I need to be a content marketer. Like Jeff herring says, You need to build lots and lots of content you need to be like Gary Vaynerchuk says, and I was procrastinating I didn’t you know, a lot of people procrastinate because they feel like it’s too hard. Or they feel like there is there’s too many. There’s too many roadblocks. There’s too many things that make it difficult. I didn’t have any excuse. Other than I was procrastinating, you know, I need to do I need to, you know, I know how to podcast and I need to I’m telling people they need to podcast. And here I am being hypocritical not doing it myself. So I said, after we launched Pest Control marketing dot live, I said I am I own the domain name, Mike Stewart dot live. And I said I’m not going to build a course and not do it myself. So I made a commitment to go live twice a month, whether anybody watches or not to be a content marketer. And the benefits have been overwhelming. Oh, more than I expected. And I’ll never stop doing it. My motivation, my why to do this. I hope I give something that’s an inspiration to somebody else. I hope I help others. And then I hope as a percentage of people do business with me to you know, because Zig Ziglar says if I give you what you need, get you what you need, I get what I need. And what I want to do is just be able to be on the planet longer and and help people and do things that I have passionate about doing. So Mike Stewart dot live, I’m grateful for it wouldn’t happen this year had had the chain of events not been as they were. I’m very grateful for my children. My daughter wanted to get married

Michael Stewart
in September, and she put out an invitation to her friends and because of this COVID pandemic, even her friends were scared to come to a wedding and we found a place in Florida that does, um, through the internet. They do what they call eloping packages. And I was able to buy my daughter and my new son in long Cameron they’re a really a memorable wedding at a bed and breakfast in Florida. They were able to ride in a Rolls Royce to a socially distant four star restaurant have a meal. They were able to livestream the wedding. We were able to watch it. In fact, I posted the wedding on my Facebook. So we had a socially distant COVID safe wedding for my daughter and now I am grateful for my new son in law and that my daughter seems to be the happiest she’s been in our life.

Now, two years ago, maybe maybe it’s been three years. We did have a wedding for my son and this is a company Using thing that’s my wife, Susan and I. That’s Eric and his wife, Lindsay. So I have a daughter named Lindsay. And I have a daughter in law named Lindsay. And now that Lindsay is Lindsay Lindsay rentals. Now my daughter in law is Lindsey Stewart. And that’s the children’s mother Sherry. And that was when we were able to attend their wedding two years ago, and then there’s my son, my stepson, but I consider him my son, Michael and Jolene, my daughter in law, my beautiful daughter in law, and I am so grateful for this family. Because I believe I’d never thought that I would see the thing that’s gonna probably make me cry here.

That’s what Michael and Jolene and Eric and Lindsey are brought me. There’s my precious Harper, Grace, Martinique, and Harland. And I’m so grateful that we will be leaving this week to go spend time with these amazing little children. So I’ll get a little choked up here.

But that’s what I’m grateful for that, that I’m still here. And that, that I live to see this. And if I don’t get another day, I have nothing to complain about. But anyway, talking about gratitude, if it wasn’t for all the technologies today out, you know, like FaceTime streaming video, I wouldn’t get to see these kids grow up, because you know, it’s hard for us to be with them. But we are going to be with him this weekend. And I’m grateful for my life in Nashville. That’s my, that’s my bride, Susan. We’ve been together. Over 30 years, we’ve been married almost 25. And you know, she, she would love to be around the grandchildren more, but she knows for me to be happy.

I gotta be around Music City. So I’m grateful for my life in Nashville. Now, if it wasn’t for online marketing, if it wasn’t for online video and audio, there’s no way I could have moved to Nashville, you know, I wouldn’t have had a way of making a living. But because of you folks, I’m grateful for all of you. You’ve enabled me to have my dream. And there you can see, look at the smile on my face with that Hofner, Beatle bass. I love being here in Nashville, and I love being around music. And I can’t wait till I get this guy Wayne Moss to be a guest on my show. I can’t wait for that to happen. And anyway, so the last thing I want to tell you I’m grateful for and then we can maybe take a few questions, and that’ll be the show. These are two people. That I hope you will maybe take a minute and visit just for Mike. This is a my mom and dad’s Memorial website that his name was Hanes Stewart and Martha, Haynes Stewart.com. And you can hear my daddy singing, and you can see the pictures of when he was in the railroad. And you can’t I can’t tell you he’s been gone. Because he almost 20 years and my mom has been gone 12 years. But I can because of audio and video on the internet, I can share my mom and dad with you folks. It’s not about making money. It’s about this man. And this woman were two of the most amazing people I ever knew.

Michael Stewart
I want to be grateful for so much. And I hope I am and I hope I can help a lot of people in the world with audio and video online. So with that being said, we got a few people here live. I didn’t even announce that I was going on live here. But I mean, this means yes, Wayne, I’m thankful for you. And we’re going to get get you more and more online because this man has so many stories The world needs to hear. And thank you, Vicki, you’re so sweet to show up and say these things. And thank you, Michael. Thank you, all of you. So if we don’t have any other questions, any comments? If you celebrate Thanksgiving, then I hope you have a great Thanksgiving this week. If you don’t know that us in the US that on Thursday, we we try to pause for a moment and be thankful for the great things in our life. And I just want to share the ones that this year in spite of the craziness of this year, I hope that there’s some good things that have come Your way and and I hope and pray that 2021 and beyond will only be better and I believe it can be better with the power of audio and video and audio video marketing. So and thank you my dear, thank you for being there for me. I love you all

Transcribed by https://otter.ai