Latest / The Keri Croft Show / The Founder Who Sold His Hot Chicken Restaurant and Walked Into the Woods with Joe DeLoss
Transcript
- 0:00Keri Croft: Avena Women's Care is a collective of 40 plus providers that have been serving central Ohio communities with comprehensive women's health care for decades.
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- 0:32Keri Croft: Be sure to tell them Carrie sent you.
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- 0:55Keri Croft: This is about feeling refreshed, balanced, and confident again.
- 1:00Keri Croft: So if you've been craving a real pick-me-up, Donaldson is ready when you are.
- 1:05Keri Croft: Okay, if you know Donato's pizza, you know their thing is edge-to-edge toppings.
- 1:10Keri Croft: Now, when I say it's their thing, I mean it's their thing.
- 1:14Keri Croft: They actually own edge-to-edge.
- 1:16Keri Croft: It's a registered trademark, y'all.
- 1:18Keri Croft: They absolutely load up their pizzas with toppings and they go from one edge of the pizza all the way to the other.
- 1:25Keri Croft: Lots of toppings, no crust uncovered.
- 1:28Keri Croft: If you want the true original edge-to-edge pizza, you want Donados.
- 1:32Keri Croft: That's how they've done it since 1963.
- 1:36Keri Croft: Hey there, you beautiful badass.
- 1:39Keri Croft: Badass.
- 1:39Keri Croft: Welcome to the Carrie Croft Show.
- 1:45Keri Croft: Yeah, I remember um I'm very familiar with that song, and I remember thinking that too.
- 1:52Keri Croft: Like, what a cool little, like delightfully different tune than anything else.
- 1:58Keri Croft: I loved it.
- 1:59Keri Croft: It's I like when people do that.
- 2:00Joe: Elevator music in the middle of a of a Beastie Boys album.
- 2:05Keri Croft: They're like, you think you know us, you think you've got us in a box, and you don't necessarily.
- 2:14Joe: Yeah.
- 2:15Joe: But yeah, I grew up on that.
- 2:17Joe: My I have a sister who's nine years older than me, my only sibling.
- 2:22Joe: And um, you know, as she's a 16-year-old newly licensed driver, helping out my parents by like shuttling me somewhere or or just spending time with me and taking her much younger brother out.
- 2:38Joe: Um we listen to Beastie Boys, like probably on a tape, you know, in uh in the early 90s, shuttling around with her.
- 2:49Joe: And uh so I have all these like nostalgic memories that had really nothing affiliated with the band other than enjoying their music.
- 3:00Joe: Yeah, and then they end up like Intergalactic comes out when I'm like that whole Hello Nasty album comes out.
- 3:09Joe: Maybe I'm in high school, college, I don't know.
- 3:12Joe: But anyways, um, this song has always stuck with me.
- 3:16Joe: And uh in my adult life, I have I find so much more depth and meaning in it, you know.
- 3:24Keri Croft: Well, I I feel like you find depth and meaning in a lot of things, which is we'll get it, we'll get into that.
- 3:29Keri Croft: But I I love this choice of song.
- 3:31Keri Croft: Uh thank you for re-reacquainting me with that.
- 3:34Keri Croft: If you had to pick a favorite Beastie Boy song of all time, what would it be?
- 3:39Joe: Like right now, somebody says it's hard for me to do favorites because like what comes to your mind right now of connection to something, and then it passes.
- 3:47Keri Croft: So I love this song.
- 3:49Keri Croft: So what you want?
- 3:50Keri Croft: Oh yeah.
- 3:51Keri Croft: Like I just love that song so much.
- 3:54Joe: I just maybe in the last year I was talking to my daughters about the Beastie Boys, and like uh we were on a vacation once, uh, we were in Mexico, and on the resort TVs, there was like an MTV station, which I guess, yeah, they just recently went away, but it was an MTV station that was just playing music videos, they were all in English, and it was all the pop, pop music that we grew up watching on like TRL or whatever, you know, each one.
- 4:26Joe: And the girls, anytime they were in the room, they'd turn on the station and they just love the videos.
- 4:32Joe: And so I was like, you really don't know anything.
- 4:36Joe: You gotta see like a a Beastie Boy video or a Fat Boy Slim video, or these like these kind of like category-breaking um productions.
- 4:47Joe: And so we watched a whole bunch of old Beastie Boys music videos.
- 4:51Joe: Oh, that's so good.
- 4:52Joe: It was so sweet.
- 4:53Joe: And I mean, the music still holds up.
- 4:56Joe: And for sure it does.
- 4:58Keri Croft: Um did they appreciate it?
- 5:00Joe: Yeah.
- 5:01Keri Croft: Were you a Moby guy?
- 5:02Keri Croft: Not really.
- 5:04Keri Croft: So I don't know why when I hear Fat Boy Slim, it kind of reminds me, it takes me back into Moby too.
- 5:10Joe: I used to tell my wife that at my funeral, I want you to sit uh I want the Fat Boy Slim praise you song to play.
- 5:16Joe: Yes.
- 5:17Joe: And I just want everybody to dance awkwardly.
- 5:19Joe: Yes, I love that.
- 5:20Keri Croft: And it's like a long, drawn-out, weird song.
- 5:23Keri Croft: So it'd be like, are we supposed to be partying here?
- 5:26Keri Croft: Are we supposed to cry in here?
- 5:27Keri Croft: What are we doing?
- 5:28Keri Croft: Very awkward, yeah.
- 5:29Keri Croft: You know, that's a great way to just, you know, really orchestrate things from Yeah.
- 5:33Joe: From and I think, you know, maybe that song will still play, but I wouldn't really want that gathering or anything.
- 5:39Joe: No.
- 5:39Joe: And so, but um, just know at one point in my life I had this awkward request, and I'd like you to honor it somehow.
- 5:47Keri Croft: Yeah, I have another see, we could just go off.
- 5:49Keri Croft: Let me introduce you real quick.
- 5:51Keri Croft: Um, but I have something I want to say about that.
- 5:53Keri Croft: Joe DeLos.
- 5:54Keri Croft: Friend.
- 5:55Keri Croft: We're friends now.
- 5:56Keri Croft: We are friends now.
- 5:57Keri Croft: Welcome to the show.
- 5:58Keri Croft: Yeah.
- 5:59Keri Croft: So um, quick tea up.
- 6:01Keri Croft: We've circled each other's orbit for a while now.
- 6:04Keri Croft: And again, I was gonna reach out and I'm like, I've kind of felt like I knew you.
- 6:08Keri Croft: And then I did.
- 6:10Keri Croft: And then you're like, I'll do you one better.
- 6:12Keri Croft: Why don't you come to Mount Vernon and spend some time with me in the woods?
- 6:17Keri Croft: And I was like, so okay, this guy.
- 6:21Joe: I gotta get better at those invitations.
- 6:22Joe: Like I did sound real creepy.
- 6:23Keri Croft: No, it's actually really wasn't creepy.
- 6:25Keri Croft: It was actually, I loved your approach, but I think it's funny because I'm like, okay, don't know him that well.
- 6:32Keri Croft: He's inviting me into the woods.
- 6:34Keri Croft: Could be really weird.
- 6:36Keri Croft: Yes, I'm in.
- 6:38Keri Croft: That's just how I operate, right?
- 6:39Keri Croft: So we had a great time.
- 6:41Keri Croft: I loved it.
- 6:41Keri Croft: Love everything you're doing.
- 6:42Keri Croft: And now here we are.
- 6:44Keri Croft: I've invited you back onto my turf.
- 6:46Keri Croft: Okay, enough of that.
- 6:47Keri Croft: So let's go back to when we do pass away.
- 6:50Keri Croft: Because all this traditional shit, like, you know, you either, first of all, you're buried or you're cremated, and then you have to go to this weird, like funeral home, and everything's really not great.
- 7:00Keri Croft: I'm like, no way.
- 7:02Keri Croft: You're doing a celebration of life.
- 7:03Keri Croft: We're gonna have all my favorite songs.
- 7:05Keri Croft: If we even do that, I don't need some big hoopla, right?
- 7:08Keri Croft: Can we just pass without it being a big deal?
- 7:11Keri Croft: Like, what's your take on that?
- 7:14Keri Croft: What do you want?
- 7:15Joe: My favorite, my favorite ritual around death is a Tibetan sky burial, which is where um they chop you up on top of a mountain and let vultures eat you.
- 7:27Joe: Uh it's an eastern kind of Buddhist-rooted tradition.
- 7:31Joe: And uh I don't imagine that's in my orbit, but I I have a deep connection to vultures and I love vultures.
- 7:39Joe: Um maybe we'll talk about that.
- 7:42Joe: But um I I I kind of like err towards your angle on this, which is that if the impression you left as you lived was not material or meaningful on others, any version of reverence or ceremony is misguided.
- 8:06Joe: Yeah.
- 8:07Joe: And so I just kind of think like, let it rip.
- 8:10Joe: I am on to this great mystery and I'm I I've anticipated that and sought experiences to experience closer and closer moments to that great mystery.
- 8:24Joe: And so just know that I'm probably in the spot I want to be in whatever's next.
- 8:31Joe: Um I've been chasing kind of weirdness and darkness most of my life to try to learn and grow, sometimes intentionally and sometimes not.
- 8:40Joe: And so, yeah, let me rip.
- 8:44Keri Croft: Yeah.
- 8:45Keri Croft: You know, it's funny though, it's like uh there's this whole thing, like, you know, you judge your life by how many people are gonna show up at your funeral.
- 8:52Keri Croft: Isn't that the most misguided thing you ever?
- 8:54Keri Croft: Now that we're talking about it, it's really I don't care.
- 8:56Keri Croft: Like, I yeah, I think that and that's a that's such a it's so uh bass awkwards.
- 9:02Joe: Right?
- 9:02Joe: I think it's uh I appreciate the ritual and the ceremony.
- 9:06Joe: I know it's well-intended, like many well-intended rituals and ceremonies culturally, they they get appropriated, misguided in different ways.
- 9:14Joe: But I I I recognize the impulse of um providing an opportunity for people to grieve in community with one another.
- 9:22Joe: Yeah.
- 9:23Joe: I think the way that's been commoditized and way we've been conditioned to think like you gotta you are you're dead and gone.
- 9:32Joe: Um, if you want to revere this person's life, you gotta get the a $20,000 casket that now never allows them to decompose.
- 9:40Joe: Um up by me, there's a beautiful resource uh that's operated by a land conservancy that will do traditional burial in like a burlap sac in a wildflower pasture.
- 9:53Joe: And I'm like, oh man, if if there's any way, minimal minimal chemicals into the ground, into the earth is like pretty beautiful.
- 10:04Keri Croft: If anybody was meant to live in Mount Vernon, it's you.
- 10:07Joe: Yeah.
- 10:08Joe: What took you so long to get there?
- 10:09Joe: Don't know.
- 10:10Joe: I feel grateful that I've been received there from all the great people that are already there.
- 10:15Joe: That Benji.
- 10:16Joe: Yeah, yeah, you've actually.
- 10:18Joe: Yeah, Benji and I've covered a lot of miles in uh Mount Vernon together, a lot of trail and a lot of running.
- 10:26Joe: And actually, we ran through the parking lot when I soon after I moved there.
- 10:31Joe: We were running on this country road right by that land conservancy's kind of natural burial site.
- 10:38Joe: And I was like, dude, what what is this?
- 10:41Joe: And it's literally there's like a drive and a turnaround.
- 10:45Joe: There's no monuments, there's a drive and a turnaround, and when you get into that turnaround, which might be where they would have any version of a service if people gathered that way.
- 10:56Joe: There's just an open pasture full of wildflowers, and that's what you see.
- 11:02Joe: And I'm like, That's so great.
- 11:03Joe: Beautiful.
- 11:04Keri Croft: Um, so speaking, it's Benji from Yellowbird Food Shed.
- 11:08Keri Croft: For anybody who's wondering who's Benji, he's the Benji in Mount Vernon.
- 11:13Joe: The local food guy.
- 11:14Joe: As far as I'm concerned.
- 11:15Keri Croft: Um region, probably.
- 11:17Keri Croft: So I do think it would be interesting for people um to just know sort of like why did you move to Mount Vernon?
- 11:24Keri Croft: And I think also it's timely because post-COVID, like everyone was talking, you know, either going and getting or an RV or doing all these random things, thinking about, and especially with like the world the way it is, people have you know joked about moving out of the country.
- 11:38Keri Croft: People are actually making moves like that more than ever.
- 11:41Keri Croft: So like talk through, yeah, talk through like what that's been like and the like pros and cons of you were in Columbus and now you're in literal Mount Vernon.
- 11:53Joe: Yeah, I mean, I outdoor adventure and outdoor, like engaging in nature in that way has been a kind of a big piece of my entire life.
- 12:07Joe: And probably going into COVID, um, my family who we lived in Merion Village, right?
- 12:17Joe: A couple blocks from Schiller Park.
- 12:19Joe: Um, we had a a pretty small space, uh shared walls with our daughters that were young at that point, um, uh, like just starting school age.
- 12:31Joe: And we started cooking up an idea of like, I didn't think I could have distance from being in the mix because of the work I was doing.
- 12:44Joe: And so we started to think, what if we got some land somewhere and almost had like a primitive family campground?
- 12:52Joe: Like we could have a trailer there or we could build a small cabin, but let's just have a place for when we're able to get away that's within an hour and um is wide open wild space for our daughters to be as feral as I'd like them to be.
- 13:11Joe: To experience a version of the childhood I had that had kind of unbridled access to the outdoors, even if it were like the small patch of woods behind a subdivision, you know.
- 13:22Joe: Um and so we're on that path and uh COVID happens.
- 13:30Joe: And so we tabled a lot of that because I was running a restaurant in the midst of uh a pandemic, and uh inevitably, though there's a lot of points to that story, inevitably like um my relationship to work changes because we start open restaurants in Cleveland, we have restaurants in Columbus.
- 13:54Joe: I had cultivated like a really great team of people.
- 14:00Joe: And so my contribution to the business in terms of how fast I would have to get to a problem, that time started extending because I was like third on the call list.
- 14:11Joe: Um and so we started to just think, well, what if what if um we don't think about this as like a weekend destination?
- 14:21Joe: And what if we go the alternative, which is we buy a home out somewhere?
- 14:28Joe: Um, we had started homeschooling our kids during COVID um and pulled them from a private school they were in while we lived downtown.
- 14:37Joe: And so there was like this inversion that happened.
- 14:41Joe: And then a month after we took possession of the property we live on, um, I got a phone call that led to the sale of hot chicken and a whole other thread.
- 14:52Joe: But anyways, so it was uh as designed, it uh all came together, I suppose.
- 14:59Keri Croft: Has it been so much better for your life?
- 15:01Joe: Yeah, it's been it's been a really meaningful.
- 15:04Joe: And it was I, you know, we made that transition knowing that um I think I saw still saw Columbus as my community.
- 15:13Joe: Um it's not that it isn't still, uh, but Columbus is changing.
- 15:18Joe: Um because of the nature of a hot chicken takeover and the visibility we were getting, it became like increasingly like uncomfortable for me to to be out and always with the risk that it turns into work somehow because of a relationship or an inquiry or a fan or whatever.
- 15:39Joe: Um, so that felt really nice to have space from that.
- 15:42Joe: And um unbeknownst to me, I I got an opportunity to actually build a new community.
- 15:50Joe: Yeah.
- 15:50Joe: Um, we didn't move to Mount Vernon because we like Mount Vernon.
- 15:53Joe: We moved because we found a property we liked.
- 15:55Joe: And I think naively thought we're gonna live rurally and privately.
- 16:01Joe: That's kind of the objective.
- 16:03Joe: And now I realize such like a I just got access to a really rich, hospitable, kind, compassionate community, and I get to be a member of it and and I get to like cultivate some things there now, which is exciting too.
- 16:19Keri Croft: You probably did get a lot of people coming up to you like, Joe, what's up, bro?
- 16:23Keri Croft: Like they knew you here.
- 16:24Keri Croft: A little bit, right?
- 16:25Joe: Yeah, yeah.
- 16:26Joe: I mean, we we were there was like a meteoric rise of that business idea.
- 16:32Keri Croft: Yeah.
- 16:33Joe: A meteoric rise of my ego alongside of it.
- 16:36Joe: Um, and um, we had a lot of access, and it was a compelling story.
- 16:41Joe: There was a lot of novelty about what we did in the nature of who we hired, how we hired them, the product we sold, um, how we launched our business as a pop-up, like all of those things that are kind of more not traditional, but there's more of those stories happening now.
- 17:01Joe: But at that point, hot chicken hadn't been popular.
- 17:04Joe: Pop-ups were not what, oh, I'm going to a pop-up coffee shop.
- 17:10Joe: Like, that's just a a normal thing now.
- 17:12Joe: And all of that stuff was different.
- 17:14Joe: And so there was so much novelty that I think people latched on to.
- 17:18Joe: Um, and I'm yeah, forever grateful for it.
- 17:21Joe: Um, what a wild wild ride.
- 17:23Keri Croft: Yeah.
- 17:23Keri Croft: I love the the way that you acknowledge your ego.
- 17:26Keri Croft: Like you acknowledge your flaws, I think, in a way that like no one does, very rarely.
- 17:32Keri Croft: I think it's fantastic.
- 17:33Keri Croft: But what when you say that though, like your ego rose or whatever.
- 17:38Keri Croft: Yeah.
- 17:38Keri Croft: Like, were you do you feel like you treated Pete?
- 17:41Keri Croft: Like, were you like look back, you're like, I was a dick?
- 17:44Keri Croft: Like, what do you what did you do that was so I was a dick, yeah.
- 17:47Keri Croft: You were a dick.
- 17:47Keri Croft: Okay.
- 17:48Joe: Well, yeah, but in uh um cosplay and benevolence, perhaps, you know.
- 17:55Joe: Um, I I mean, I spent the the 12 years prior to launching Hot Chicken Takeover, I had a career arc trying to do functionally what hot chicken did.
- 18:07Joe: Not I I was building a fried chicken empire was never on my bingo card.
- 18:13Joe: Um, but I was deeply like engaged and committed to workforce development and criminal justice reform and things that were like a critical part of my life.
- 18:24Joe: Uh and and the education I received by meeting people that had an experience in life so differently than me.
- 18:31Joe: So I that's all true and valid.
- 18:35Joe: And after you spend 10 plus years trying to climb some summit, some mountain, all I was motivated to do was get on top of that mountain finally, build something that finally works, that finally validates these ideas I have made sense.
- 18:53Joe: And the perspective of that summit, you know, became a lot more interesting than uh the path to get there.
- 19:04Joe: And so if you encountered me in those early years, especially when we finally started getting validation, the idea starts working.
- 19:11Joe: I start raising investment capital, all these things, things I had attempted to do for so long to validate myself or whatever the intention was.
- 19:20Joe: Um more than likely you you would be a means to an end for me.
- 19:27Joe: The end was getting on top of the mountain.
- 19:29Joe: Um and uh so the wake, the wake behind my leadership, behind uh my work, the wake in my family, all of those things were pretty deep shadow.
- 19:43Joe: Um and I inevitably I think we all do that.
- 19:47Joe: Some of us that try to put ourselves out there in such a way where our sphere of influence glow grows the way mine did, even though I was super unregulated.
- 19:56Joe: Um that shadow impacts a lot more people.
- 20:01Joe: And so um I was thankful to kind of find my way to a bottom because of the wake I was leaving for others, um, because the volatility of our business, other things like that.
- 20:13Joe: Um, and and I would say it kind of emerged from that literally months before COVID became a thing.
- 20:20Joe: And so I entered COVID kind of already feeling like I had been through a bit of a storm.
- 20:26Joe: And it was so interesting because what the business needed in that moment was somebody that was more of a founder, more of an entrepreneur, more of like the wild man that I really loved to be.
- 20:38Joe: And um, so I had this kind of interesting swan song at Hot Chicken Takeover of like really navigating that compassionately for people without conditions of what it meant for my validation or ego.
- 20:52Joe: And I don't know, it was a it was a wild ride.
- 20:55Keri Croft: Well, who was your biggest mirror?
- 20:56Keri Croft: Like who helped you see the era of hands down my wife, yeah.
- 21:00Joe: Was she likes just like you because that's most of the time what happened, like with the person who sees you and they're like, uh intimate long-term partnerships have to be the the best reflection.
- 21:10Joe: Uh-huh.
- 21:11Joe: And um, I think we're probably on our, you know, third, maybe fourth marriage at this point to one another.
- 21:20Joe: And I'm I'm just like deeply grateful that I've been afforded the grace.
- 21:25Joe: I've been learned, I learned to afford the grace from so many great teachers and friends and mentors and therapists.
- 21:32Joe: But that it seems like we keep getting to to choose to do another round of it.
- 21:40Joe: Um and uh yeah, it's a it's a remarkable mirror.
- 21:46Joe: And having having children was a monumental one for me.
- 21:50Joe: Um, I think for a lot of men, um, but there's this period where, and I I've seen this pattern play out with people I've supported or people that have participated.
- 21:59Joe: And some of the stuff I'm doing now, where men in particular, um you have been taught what masculinity is, and you're gonna be a tough, you're gonna be a dick, you're gonna do all these things, you're gonna like drive a hard bargain.
- 22:14Joe: And um and if you're in a uh like a conventional hetero relationship with a partner and kids, inevitably these children come along and your partner's attention biologically shifts where it should be, where it's been programmed to be.
- 22:32Joe: And you start to recognize the distance uh between the attention these children are getting that you used to get.
- 22:40Joe: And instead of recognizing that you've been a fucking child this whole time, um, you protest and oppose and create more kind of opposition for your family and more entitlement to what you deserve instead of earning the privilege of getting uh the actual partnership and and entering into that new season.
- 23:01Joe: And so I it was like textbook, you know, I can talk about it because I felt it.
- 23:07Joe: And um I have a lot of fear about the way some of the masculinity, like these in these environments, the masculinity conversation that's happening feels really uh backwards to me.
- 23:18Joe: But yeah, so, anyways, I I was that, and um I think kind of the next season of my work is you know recognizing the the guilt and the not enoughness and the shame I carry for who I've been.
- 23:35Joe: And um, sometimes you lay you let all those things take away from who you're becoming, you know, and who who I am right now.
- 23:43Joe: And uh that's a disservice to the people around me in a different way.
- 23:47Joe: So yeah, I don't know.
- 23:49Keri Croft: I think the marriage conversation is really important because, like when you said we've been married to each other like three or four times, that's a great way to put it.
- 23:56Keri Croft: And I think people coming out and kind of saying that, because I I think people feel very much alone.
- 24:03Keri Croft: No, no one wants to talk about marriage in terms of like what it really takes and what really happens between the two people because we're all sold, you know, going back to this funeral thing, right?
- 24:14Keri Croft: We're all sold this idea that marriage then is supposed to be this very romantic.
- 24:19Keri Croft: You walk down the aisle and you have this, you know, it's this like precious, like love affair situation.
- 24:28Keri Croft: And the reality of marriage is like it is the most critical, if not one of the most critical relationships, the most intimate in terms of proximity and all the things.
- 24:41Keri Croft: But it's laborious, it is a mirror, it is hard ass work.
- 24:48Keri Croft: And so to choose each other and to have different iterations and to say, we're in a bad spot, or we don't know if we want to continue doing this, all that shit's normal.
- 24:58Keri Croft: It's normal for people.
- 25:01Keri Croft: And I think people need to hear that because nobody wants to talk about it.
- 25:06Joe: You know, it's like everybody wants to show up holding hands and like, you know, so good for you for just saying it, you know, like it's I think good for me that I got dragged so far into it, um, that I finally learned it was important to say it and important to ask the questions, and to like have this can orientation towards through the hardship, continuing to be curious and to learn, learn about who I'm becoming, who my wife's becoming, who our children are becoming, and not and when perhaps that expectation you had on what this might feel like or what might this might be like, um, inevitably that's you know, like all great teachers say, that kind of the the discomfort is the reac b difference between reality and those that expectation set.
- 25:59Joe: Oh yeah.
- 26:00Joe: And you realize how much pain we create because we're not accepting that somebody might change, we're not grieving the loss of that expectation versus we're just fighting like hell to get what we want out of it.
- 26:15Joe: What we wanted, which is just another, it's another act of the same thing.
- 26:20Keri Croft: Um, so expectations are truly if you can.
- 26:25Keri Croft: So I might I have a great therapist, and she and I were talking about this in my most recent, you know, couch chronicle with her.
- 26:32Keri Croft: And it was just all around expectations is like it's the root of suffering.
- 26:36Keri Croft: You know, if you if you can really let go of your own expectation about what you have decided something is supposed to be and just see it for what it is, what a like how how what a relief.
- 26:51Keri Croft: But how hard that is to do.
- 26:53Keri Croft: Like this is the way it's supposed to go because this is the thing I've set in my brain.
- 26:58Joe: And I man, we've been pretty well domesticated and conditioned to set a goal and achieve it.
- 27:06Joe: That's the and and I I think increasingly for me, just in my own practice of how I'm trying to develop as a human and uh as a contributor in this, like, you know, this meat sack for a little while, is um that I I I don't know where these things are leading.
- 27:25Joe: Like I I don't know the destination, but I know if I keep cultivating a practice of staying really aware and really open to what I can like see, witness, learn about myself, about others.
- 27:43Joe: Um if I don't hold grip so tightly to some destination, um I get to, it's it's a lot more enjoyable, but it's also a lot richer.
- 27:57Joe: And and so I get to cultivate just the skill of being present, the skill of being a listener or an observer.
- 28:05Joe: And sometimes I just get to sit back and like watch this movie about a guy named Joe that's done these different things.
- 28:13Joe: And I if I pull up Netflix to watch something, there's 18 different genres I could watch that will entertain me.
- 28:22Joe: And so I'm just trying to recognize that um sometimes this story is a thriller and uh rom-com and a horse story and an action movie, and uh it's all entertaining.
- 28:35Keri Croft: Yeah, you know.
- 28:36Keri Croft: Would your wife though, would she say, like, yes, the Joe today is markedly different in a really good way?
- 28:44Joe: I hope she would.
- 28:45Keri Croft: Yeah, because I I feel like just this is my second time sitting down with you, but you just seem so, and I know I'm at a 10,000-foot view, but you seem very pensive and reflective and calm and open and all the things.
- 29:02Joe: I mean, I know you're not perfect by any means, but yeah, I think I I think that outward achievement, that that that orientation towards like adventure and exploration that was always like, let's just get, let's see what's on that mountain.
- 29:15Joe: Yeah, yeah.
- 29:16Joe: I'm sure I'll feel great then.
- 29:18Joe: Um, I think just recognizing that my path is to to have that spirit of exploration and adventure as an internal movement.
- 29:29Joe: And so I I think I'm I'm hopefully increasingly better and better at reflecting on how I'm showing up and what impact it's having on the people around me.
- 29:41Keri Croft: Is yeah, is your um you wanting to climb the summit, is that the precipice for all the running, all the wild long runs?
- 29:50Keri Croft: Or were you like, I want to suffer?
- 29:51Keri Croft: I want to do, did you say you did a hundred miles?
- 29:54Keri Croft: Yeah.
- 29:55Keri Croft: Let's let's let's let's let's talk about that.
- 29:58Keri Croft: Because that's that I'm so curious about that.
- 30:01Joe: Yeah, I I mean, I think the way I think about it is um so in my highest, like my brightest light, highest frequency, I am showing up for the world openly, compassionately, all those things and presently.
- 30:18Joe: And so the idea of exploration is for the sake of exploration to see what there is to learn.
- 30:24Joe: In the lowest frequency, that is that kind of shadow of achievement, or my life will be better when, if, whatever.
- 30:34Joe: Um, so I'm thankful that at least my most recent kind of push at endurance athletics, uh, which was in running, trail running, came from a healthier place.
- 30:47Joe: Um, I experienced it that way.
- 30:50Joe: Yeah.
- 30:50Joe: Um, which isn't I'm not running away from anything.
- 30:53Joe: I'm I'm gonna put myself in increasingly uncomfortable positions, outpast my edge, out past the possibility of what I've known I've been capable of before to see what's out there for me to learn.
- 31:08Joe: And um, it happened at that season of my life and my body and my capacity and just the time I had that outpass that edge was to run 100 miles.
- 31:21Joe: Um, but again, it's just as much of a false summit as inevitably when you get to the top of the mountain, what you see is shit, there's a lot of mountains up here.
- 31:33Joe: Uh, there's a lot of things to do.
- 31:35Joe: And so um I'm thankful that I did that experience.
- 31:40Joe: I had that training arc, and I hadn't assigned a lot of value or attachment to like how great it would feel.
- 31:48Joe: And actually, within a few months of that, I came down with Lyme disease and my running life got yeah, that thing.
- 31:56Joe: It was like, oh, I guess that season's done for a while.
- 32:00Joe: And I'm actually my body's just emerging from some of that right now.
- 32:05Joe: But that became the new frontier of I guess my edge is that uh I'm not gonna be able to do this thing.
- 32:12Joe: That felt so good to me.
- 32:13Keri Croft: How long did you see the woman that just got um broke a record on the treadmill?
- 32:17Keri Croft: Did you see that?
- 32:18Keri Croft: Yeah.
- 32:18Keri Croft: She a hundred miles, dude.
- 32:21Keri Croft: Yeah, that would be, and that just being there in a gerbil wheel would be, I think, the worst ever.
- 32:27Keri Croft: So what was your normal running?
- 32:30Keri Croft: Like, I want to hear logistics.
- 32:31Keri Croft: So when you decided, oh, 100 miles sounds like a good idea, what kind of runner were you prior to that?
- 32:37Keri Croft: Were you doing like 10 miles a day?
- 32:40Keri Croft: I mean, that's a long run.
- 32:42Keri Croft: And how how much do you stop?
- 32:44Keri Croft: And like, how do you do how do you do that?
- 32:46Joe: Yeah, um, so I had, I had like when I was younger, I did a lot of endurance mountain biking.
- 32:51Joe: And so, meaning like uh a hundred mile race or uh, you know, or just even when we had restaurants in Cleveland, if I had team members going up to those restaurants, I would throw my duffel bag in their car and ride my bike, and then I they'd leave it for me at the hotel.
- 33:09Joe: And uh, and so there's that's always been that kind of long experience.
- 33:15Joe: Hold on.
- 33:15Keri Croft: So wait, you so you rode your bike from here to Yeah, from Columbus to Cleveland.
- 33:23Joe: There was a bike path.
- 33:24Keri Croft: Okay.
- 33:24Keri Croft: So how long did that take you?
- 33:26Joe: Like, you know, the better part of a day.
- 33:29Keri Croft: That's amazing.
- 33:31Keri Croft: Yeah.
- 33:32Keri Croft: It is to your common person, you know, like that's so great.
- 33:35Keri Croft: It's really cool.
- 33:36Keri Croft: It really is.
- 33:37Joe: And there's something liberating of recognizing all these.
- 33:41Joe: My daughters and I just went on an adventure, and and something they pulled from it is like, oh, we walked, we walked almost 30 miles from um where a van dropped us off to where a car was parked.
- 33:55Joe: And so just the idea of like traditionally how you would engage with that distance, or I need to go to Cleveland.
- 34:02Joe: And so there's something about like, I wonder what it would be like to walk there or drive my bike.
- 34:07Joe: And um, I think endurance events at some point get far beyond physical fitness and they become a lot more about your spiritual fitness, your emotional fitness, or like mental athleticism, like that orientation of like when things get really weird, how well have you cultivated your capacity to keep it together?
- 34:28Joe: Um and so for me, uh my body had the resources to do that.
- 34:36Joe: My I had the time and the resources.
- 34:38Joe: And so logistically running a hundred miles, you never run a hundred miles in your training cycle, generally.
- 34:44Joe: Um and I I was really cognizant that I didn't want my pursuit of that thing to take away from my presence with my family.
- 34:55Joe: So the way I approach training in that cycle, aside from just putting down a lot of miles, and so maybe peek at like 60, 80 miles a week for a like your most concentrated training, I also oriented myself towards training in really weird and bad circumstances.
- 35:15Joe: And so, like if I was gonna go, my longest run was 60 miles in my training cycle, and I showed up at a state park at five o'clock on a Sunday night, and then I started my run.
- 35:26Joe: So I did it on a sleep deficit, I did things fasted, I did because it's like if it's if it's pouring down rain, you're like, oh, I wonder what it would feel like to run 20 miles in the rain.
- 35:38Joe: But the more you practice the chaos of what might inevitably happen, and then inevitably I got to my race, and my event was um like sunny, perfect temperature and lovely, and I just got to enjoy myself.
- 35:55Joe: Um, and you take you can take naps or you can do you can do whatever you want.
- 36:00Keri Croft: Because you have to take a break, I mean, or not, yep.
- 36:02Joe: You kind of do a full push.
- 36:03Joe: Um, I had some hiccups in my event because I um on the second half of races, often they'll let you have somebody come meet you.
- 36:13Joe: And I was trying to time that and ended up stopping for too long.
- 36:17Joe: And I don't know, it's fine, but you you have a great time and it's a really rich community of people because there's a very small percentage of people that are at those events that are gonna podium and win races.
- 36:30Joe: And so most people are out there because they're competing with themselves in some capacity, not not because I think I can run faster than Carrie.
- 36:39Joe: And so to be in a community of people that are all invested in their own development and care in that way, oh, yeah.
- 36:47Joe: They have committed such an investment and discipline of time and all those things is like that's a new level of like savage.
- 36:54Keri Croft: That is like savage.
- 36:56Keri Croft: I didn't even know there was a bike path that goes all the way from Columbus to Cleveland.
- 36:59Joe: It actually goes from Cincinnati to Cleveland.
- 37:01Joe: It's called the Ohio to Erie.
- 37:03Joe: And it's probably 80% like bike paths, a lot of old railways that have been turned into like paved paths.
- 37:10Joe: Um, it's pretty flat.
- 37:12Joe: Um I've done I've done both directions.
- 37:16Joe: Um the ride from Columbus to Cincinnati is really beautiful uh too.
- 37:22Keri Croft: Was there ever a point in time though where you're you're there and you're like, what the fuck?
- 37:25Keri Croft: Like, this is I really got myself into something here.
- 37:27Joe: Or are you just I mean, that's the point of it, right?
- 37:29Joe: Yeah, I mean, the amounts of times I've gotten myself into those things, and you keep cultivating the competency of like, how's my body gonna handle water?
- 37:38Joe: What's your nutrition feel like after you've ridden your bike 120 miles and you still have 50 to go?
- 37:43Joe: Like, you know, and then you just find yourself in some random rural gas station, yeah, eating oatmeal cream pies and drinking a, you know, four Cokes.
- 37:56Joe: Cause it's like, oh, I I came in, I rolled in here dehydrated, and then you lose an hour because your body's got to recuperate before you go.
- 38:06Joe: But there's something about the absence of the safety blanket that makes it that's that's out past your edge.
- 38:15Keri Croft: You've always been like this, right?
- 38:16Keri Croft: Like when you were younger, like when you were little, you're always riding a lot, like this is just how you're built.
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- 39:39Joe: Yeah, I don't know.
- 39:40Joe: I think it's always been for whatever reason, it's also like before I understood you could like meditate or you could pray or you could sit still and like receive guidance.
- 39:53Joe: Um, the way I got present, the way I shut down all of the stories and all the expectations and the noise was like to get on a mountain bike and dodge trees in the woods.
- 40:05Joe: Because if you the moment you lose attention in that setting, the moment you lose your presence, you'll really hurt yourself.
- 40:12Joe: I proved it multiple times, you know.
- 40:16Joe: Um and so it was like I I've been seeking presence and awareness my whole life.
- 40:26Joe: I just didn't call it those things.
- 40:27Joe: Those are like, you know, new wellness commodities we're trading that are easy to talk about.
- 40:33Joe: But we all have access to these moments where we can feel the most who we are, I believe.
- 40:41Joe: I think nature is a really powerful piece of that.
- 40:44Joe: But um, yeah, for me, it was on a mountain bike back then.
- 40:48Joe: And before it was a mountain bike, it was like a BMX bike that I saved quarters and hustled for so that I could build homemade ramps in a subdivision out of a construction dumpster and and ran with the kids that wanted to do that with me, you know?
- 41:02Keri Croft: Yeah, you were always doing money, you were trying to make money from like a young age, weren't you?
- 41:07Joe: Yeah.
- 41:07Keri Croft: Like hustle, like yeah.
- 41:10Joe: Yeah, I think that's one of the reasons why I got so compelled by working with the people I got to work with at Hot Chicken, is that spirit of like hustle and entrepreneurship that I had.
- 41:21Joe: My my parents were pretty remarkable and um they had worked really hard and had made a transition from kind of like um uh at that point, like blue-collar wages to white-collar wages, and as their careers developed and changed.
- 41:39Joe: And so the experience I had in life was a pretty well-resourced, privileged one because of my parents' hard work.
- 41:44Joe: And they always instilled a lot of service in me, as well as grandparents that I had as models.
- 41:50Joe: And but I was always interested in like, well, I don't want to really have to listen to all your rules or have to comply with a boss of any kind.
- 42:01Joe: I've been a shitty employee, you know, most of my life.
- 42:04Joe: And so um I want to be able to generate for myself so that I have freedom.
- 42:11Joe: Yeah, autonomy.
- 42:12Joe: And uh, and inevitably I would meet a lot of people, um, whether it was like in a prison recruitment event uh for hot chicken or at a community shelter that we're recruiting from or whatever, that had the exact same spirit with a lot different resources.
- 42:31Joe: And they self-preserved the same way I did.
- 42:36Joe: It just uh got them into trouble.
- 42:37Joe: I got access to the right kind of trouble.
- 42:40Joe: Yeah.
- 42:41Joe: And um, and inevitably, had I had a consequence or a natural consequence, or I had been caught doing any number of the probably illicit things I still did as an adolescent and a kid, I would have had a a resource structure that would have mitigated the damage in a different way.
- 43:01Keri Croft: That reminds me of the wet the um the book The Other Westmore.
- 43:04Keri Croft: Do you know Westmore?
- 43:05Joe: I don't.
- 43:06Keri Croft: So Westmore, um what does he do?
- 43:09Keri Croft: Is he a governor now?
- 43:11Keri Croft: He's he's very cool.
- 43:12Keri Croft: Anyway, he wrote a book.
- 43:13Keri Croft: It was like years ago, it's called The Other Westmore, and he's African American, and there's this other African-American named Westmore who didn't have the same opportunities, and he was in prison, and this Westmore had all these, you know, because like what he says is like potential is universal, opportunity isn't.
- 43:31Keri Croft: Yeah.
- 43:31Keri Croft: Um, but it it reminds me, I wanted to ask you this.
- 43:34Keri Croft: I think you mentioned like 65% or something of your employees there were either formally incarcerated or homeless at Hot Chicken.
- 43:42Keri Croft: Yeah.
- 43:42Keri Croft: Did did you find and you were they the most loyal?
- 43:45Keri Croft: Like, could you see a like a complete like loyalty thing where like you gave them a shot and they're like, we are gonna be the best?
- 43:53Keri Croft: And did you see a mix though?
- 43:55Keri Croft: Did you also see like their work ethic or their background kind of Of come out where you're like, oh God, like it was probably a mixed bag.
- 44:03Joe: Yeah, like, yeah, it's a mixed bag.
- 44:05Joe: Go talk to anybody that's ever been an employer anywhere, and it's a mixed bag.
- 44:08Joe: Mixed bag.
- 44:09Joe: Um, but I had been doing that work for the greater, I had been doing that work well before Hot Chicken.
- 44:16Joe: And um I I think what was unique, there's a lot of novelty about like who our business hired, um, less conversation about how we hired and the nature of community we all fostered together and the way we cared for one another, held one another accountable.
- 44:34Joe: Um, and so like in any employment relationship, this is other like weird now HR consulting part of my life, but in any other employment relationship, you'd say, um, if you applied for a job, I'd say, Carrie, this is your job offer.
- 44:49Joe: Here's everything I'm gonna give you.
- 44:50Joe: I'm gonna give you a salary and benefits and pay time off and a 401k or whatever, you know, whatever competitive marketplace things.
- 44:58Joe: And in return, you're gonna, you're giving me performance of this job description.
- 45:03Joe: This is our contract.
- 45:05Joe: Anytime that contract is breached in either direction, um, we can have a conversation about it.
- 45:12Joe: What we did at Hot Chicken Takeover was no different than that, it was just that we were right sizing our offer to employees and our expectation of them to us to be inclusive of like things that would advance their life.
- 45:28Joe: And so um if you're recently incarcerated and starting to get on your feet and you had um uh you're just trying to get into your first apartment, something like a 401k that might not have a financial benefit to you for 25 years is not on your time horizon.
- 45:52Joe: It's not of interest to you.
- 45:53Joe: Um, not to say it won't be, but right now you're probably worried about that security deposit and um stability to have some furniture.
- 46:02Joe: And so we'd partner with remarkable organizations like the furniture bank, or we'd um do a match savings account.
- 46:09Joe: So when you're making those investments, the company will invest behind you, you know, one-to-one up to some amount each year.
- 46:16Joe: And so our employee benefits that people earned because of their hard work and their capacity and their strength would translate into like meaningful advances.
- 46:27Joe: Yeah.
- 46:28Joe: And now imagine you're in a community of people that are all growing together and thriving, and both employee and employer have some sense of ownership in that.
- 46:39Joe: Like you're gonna be that's like the best employer ever.
- 46:43Joe: Oh, yeah.
- 46:43Joe: And and so it wasn't so much, I think a lot of philanthropy and charity strip away dignity for people that have unique needs because of the unique circumstance of these complex clusterfucks of communities that we operate in.
- 46:58Joe: And so to be in a situation to say, hey, the harder you work and the more aligned you are with your contribution here, here's what we can keep making to you as a promise.
- 47:08Joe: And um, when somebody's rolling to job as a manager of a restaurant in a car that they earned and um had a relationship to a car dealer that wasn't predatory because um we were helping negotiate some of that stuff.
- 47:25Joe: Like that's like a really beautiful relationship that is meant to last until somebody has a newer opportunity.
- 47:33Joe: And so I don't know.
- 47:35Joe: We we had a remarkable team of people, many of whom had life experiences that I couldn't even comprehend.
- 47:41Joe: Yeah.
- 47:41Joe: The best education in my life.
- 47:43Joe: And um, but like any uh like any employer, you get you get great ones and you get bad ones, you get mediocre ones.
- 47:51Joe: Yeah, our percentage of like great employees contributing to our culture and our cause were um just remarkably higher than any other employer in our industry.
- 48:02Joe: They uh kept their jobs three to four times longer than the conventional industry.
- 48:08Joe: The year we sold Chipotle had 300% turnover a year.
- 48:12Joe: Um we were in that has to be exhaustive.
- 48:15Joe: We were in barely double digits.
- 48:17Joe: And and so yeah, yeah, so it's wild.
- 48:22Keri Croft: Yeah.
- 48:22Keri Croft: And so fast forward to today, you got Baker Road.
- 48:26Joe: Yeah.
- 48:27Keri Croft: So I guess how are you in this new Joe realm?
- 48:33Keri Croft: How are you fighting that intrinsic want and need to still climb a summit?
- 48:40Keri Croft: Because you're you know, you're you're you're essentially building another business, right?
- 48:43Keri Croft: I mean, yeah, but like how how are you fighting the inevitable that probably creeps in still, right?
- 48:52Keri Croft: It can't be perfect.
- 48:53Joe: Yeah, yeah.
- 48:53Joe: Our shadows always follow us along, you know, and they're always they're always we only have shadows because we have a light shining on it.
- 49:01Joe: Right.
- 49:01Joe: And uh, and so mine's there, it's alive and well.
- 49:05Joe: Um alive and kicking.
- 49:07Joe: Um, I think, I think to me, when I think about what we're fostering at Baker Road or what we intend to foster, um, we're like we're cultivating a community of people that are chasing awareness to keep learning about themselves and to be in a community of others that want to do that and want to talk about it and share about it.
- 49:27Joe: We happen to do it through adventure and nature and retreat in nature.
- 49:32Joe: Um that's our flavor of that and flavor of our community.
- 49:37Joe: But the reality of it is um, you know, I'm in this, like, I've cultivated a peer group for myself, and I've been invited into, you know, a lot of great relationships with people that have a similar orientation.
- 49:50Joe: And um, there's accountability in that because there's enough trust, and like when you get out past the edge with somebody and get in a weird situation or or encounter some hardship or willfully encounter hardship together, um, there's like uh an honesty and trust to the nature of the relationship.
- 50:13Joe: And so if I'm out there and uh I think nature can break us open in unique ways too.
- 50:19Joe: Um but I'm open about what I acknowledge that shadow and discomfort to be.
- 50:27Joe: Like I'm open about the fact that like um if this were unchecked, I'd be like running a cult, I presume, you know, in like my my post-apocalyptic zombie skill.
- 50:39Joe: Yeah is like somebody's got a lead, uh, I'll probably be the person that would jump into that.
- 50:44Keri Croft: Yeah.
- 50:45Joe: Um, and so yeah, perhaps I have the proclivity to that.
- 50:48Joe: And so I want to make sure a lot of people are aware that I'm aware of it.
- 50:52Joe: And anytime I behave in a way that's uh not honorable, not of serving people with um a condition of affirmation or validation or something.
- 51:02Joe: I want somebody around me to tell me.
- 51:06Joe: And uh I'm really thankful.
- 51:09Joe: Like what started as just my relationship with my wife is his um in that kind of reflective, intimate perspective is now a community of people that can um cultivate that awareness for one another and compassionately create accountability for each other.
- 51:28Joe: Um yeah.
- 51:30Keri Croft: So I had an experience with it wasn't like it I came to Baker Road, you and I did our thing.
- 51:35Keri Croft: Yeah.
- 51:36Keri Croft: Right, which I loved, which I do want to talk more about that and like the community I'm building because I can I can see us all up in that area with like the soft um, whatever those things were, the pine needles like that.
- 51:46Keri Croft: I felt like we were in a room, like where you and I sat.
- 51:49Keri Croft: It was so cool.
- 51:49Keri Croft: But who's this for?
- 51:51Keri Croft: So someone's out, yeah.
- 51:52Keri Croft: I feel like we need to draw this in a little bit more because someone's probably peaked right now, like, wait, so you know, I know who he is from Hot Chicken.
- 52:00Keri Croft: Now he's doing Baker Road.
- 52:01Keri Croft: What is that?
- 52:02Keri Croft: How can I, how can we get people to understand more about what you're doing?
- 52:06Joe: Yeah.
- 52:06Joe: Uh I mean, I learned so many lessons through Hot Chicken Takeover.
- 52:09Joe: Um, I learned lessons how to grow a business, lessons how to sell a business, all of these things, right?
- 52:15Joe: Um I also learned that I have like an intrinsic love for hospitality.
- 52:22Joe: And so imagine Baker Road is like the hospitality provider for you as you need to retreat.
- 52:30Joe: And so we have a whole bunch of offers of our own.
- 52:33Joe: And so we'll do community programming.
- 52:36Joe: We got a lot on the horizon.
- 52:38Joe: Um, but we also offer like backpacking trips and adventures and retreats where somebody could just sign up for a Baker Road adventure.
- 52:46Joe: Alternatively, somebody like you, Carrie, that's like regularly building a community and gathering people, could come and partner and say, Hey, I um I have this group of like listeners and friends, and we'd like to have a restorative experience together and a social experience together that doesn't devolve into a trip to Vegas.
- 53:10Joe: Um, not that there isn't space for that, but like, yeah, we'd like to maybe see what we can learn as a group together by getting out in the woods.
- 53:19Joe: Yeah.
- 53:19Joe: And also, we want to sleep in comfortable beds and we want to eat beautiful meals.
- 53:24Joe: And we would just accept that invitation and piece a retreat together for you.
- 53:30Keri Croft: Yeah, we're gonna do we're gonna do that.
- 53:31Joe: Yeah, it's gonna be cool.
- 53:32Keri Croft: Yeah, because um, after this IRL that we just did, this in real life, our first in real life event, I'm like, oh my God.
- 53:39Keri Croft: I mean, it was it was something.
- 53:41Joe: And so we're gonna, I'm just it's I'm gonna build there's so much value in this medium, but I think this idea of like cultivating a more analog intelligence, particularly is this backdrop of more and more shifting to thinking that's being done for us.
- 53:59Joe: Yeah.
- 53:59Joe: Like all the garbage we put in uh to AI that's coming back to us in a way that makes us feel certainly positive.
- 54:06Joe: I think just reminding people they have the capacity to access peace of mind, happiness, joy, hardship, all those things.
- 54:17Joe: Um, I think as Baker Road grows, we'll just find more and more ways, more and more offers to do that.
- 54:22Joe: And uh yeah, in the meantime, it started with adventures.
- 54:27Joe: Actually, Benji came to me um uh with an idea of crafting a rite of passage experience for his adolescent son, his oldest son, and knew as father, I'm not gonna be the one to do that.
- 54:42Joe: And so I I was a trusted adult in the son's life and organized a backpacking trip that I had been on so many times before, but with the intention of how do we cultivate experience for these young men.
- 54:56Joe: And uh that was, I mean, Baker Road was that was it.
- 55:00Joe: That was the start, the catalyst um of physical exertion that's right size to that group, you know, nature.
- 55:10Joe: Thoreau calls it um the tonic of wildness.
- 55:14Joe: Like it's a there's a medicine.
- 55:16Keri Croft: He's throwing out Thoreau, guys.
- 55:18Keri Croft: The guy is this guy is deeper than the deeper than the C's, deep, deeper than the C's.
- 55:24Keri Croft: Reciting Thoreau, I love it.
- 55:26Keri Croft: I could do with his cup, with his with his cup from the woods.
- 55:30Keri Croft: He actually is bringing some of the woods here with his, he's that's probably in his backpack.
- 55:35Keri Croft: I mean, but in all seriousness, if, and I know people are out there who you know, work for companies, run companies, I would say if you haven't considered, or if you're not having a conversation in your, you know, think tanks or your boardrooms or whatever about how to create some intimacy with your community, your employees that's that's outside of four walls.
- 56:02Keri Croft: And I think you guys are right on time for that because your attention to detail, your your intention overall.
- 56:09Keri Croft: Like I love the fact that you have the actual space that's right on like main and main, and you walk in and there's like this huge, I can already see myself teaching a yoga or like a mental athleticism there.
- 56:18Keri Croft: I've already, that's how I am though.
- 56:20Keri Croft: When I walked in, I was like, oh, there'll be a day, I'll be doing something weird in here with my soon-to-be community.
- 56:26Keri Croft: And then I love the idea that you have that home base, and then you can take people out into the wilderness with your chairs and your freaking knife and your, you know, the granola that you wooed me with.
- 56:38Keri Croft: He's like, if I'm listening, here's what I'm gonna do with this lady.
- 56:42Keri Croft: I'm gonna take her up to the pine needles.
- 56:43Keri Croft: I'm gonna have a chair for her, and then I'm gonna get out a knife and act like it's normal.
- 56:47Keri Croft: I'm gonna cut some apples, and then I'm gonna top it off with some freaking whatever that matcha was and the granola.
- 56:53Keri Croft: I was like, you don't have to do anything else, Baker Road.
- 56:56Keri Croft: I am sold.
- 56:57Keri Croft: And then you and I were just doing deep talks.
- 56:59Keri Croft: We went from like zero to deep talk.
- 57:02Keri Croft: Yeah.
- 57:03Keri Croft: You know, it was great.
- 57:04Keri Croft: I loved it.
- 57:04Keri Croft: And then you showed me all around, and I love that little hut, that little like the house with the thing we can do yoga there too.
- 57:12Keri Croft: It's happening.
- 57:13Joe: Yeah, I mean, maybe important to note um, well before we had this plan, I was I started kind of cultivating a field of dreams in Knox County of like amenities, uh, assets, resources, spaces, um, understanding a wild land, relationships with the land stewards so that we can get into those spaces.
- 57:35Joe: And so it is a little bit of like we just want invitations from people to consider retreating differently.
- 57:44Joe: Um, I think a distinction I've made really recently recently is I just for where I'm at, I don't really want to work with business people.
- 57:52Joe: I'm happy to work with people in business.
- 57:55Joe: Yes.
- 57:56Joe: Um, I think whatever this next season of the world, the next season of life is necessitates we are all willing to show up as our whole selves.
- 58:04Joe: Sometimes that can't happen in a in an executive team of people that's not HR compliant, another, you know, hat professionally to wear.
- 58:13Keri Croft: So you need to have a specific it would need to be a very specific, like a startup or even just like a community of like-minded people.
- 58:22Joe: You don't want like a or single leaders that are at inflection points.
- 58:26Joe: It's funny, we're actually to never would I ever have thought that I'd get paid to take business leaders out on walks.
- 58:38Joe: But the idea of like having accountability that somebody will set up the chair for you, somebody will feed you.
- 58:46Joe: Um kind of like a concierge level of execution and service from a hospitality perspective.
- 58:54Joe: Um, but that we need to be in relationship with the retreat.
- 58:58Joe: So I I need to set that up for you as a contract service so that you take it seriously enough that you do it for yourself and you do it for your sphere of influence and your team.
- 59:08Joe: And so, yeah, I have this new career as dirtbag concierge.
- 59:13Joe: It's funny.
- 59:14Keri Croft: Do you know that when you use that word initially, I was like, did he know that I use that word all the time?
- 59:18Keri Croft: Concierge?
- 59:19Keri Croft: No, dirtbag.
- 59:19Keri Croft: Like I call myself a dirtbag all the time.
- 59:22Keri Croft: Whenever I'm on the show, I'll be like, Oh no, I'm just this dirtbag.
- 59:24Keri Croft: Like, that's kind of an adjective that I use.
- 59:26Keri Croft: And I saw that, and I'm like, oh my God, he's a dirt fellow dirtbag.
- 59:29Keri Croft: You know what I was thinking too?
- 59:30Keri Croft: Like, could be another potential is people who are doing these 200-hour yoga training things, and a lot of times it's within four walls, which is meh, it's fine.
- 59:40Keri Croft: But what a cool like component to like get the group kind of in, you know.
- 59:46Joe: It's I I I mean, for some reason, it's maybe this false summit.
- 59:51Joe: Like, I will only experience peace if I do my 200-hour yoga training in Bali.
- 59:56Joe: There's a there's a mountain there to climb, you know, of like, and it's beautiful and it's a privilege to be able to experience that.
- 1:00:05Joe: Um, but we have grass and forest and ponds and rivers like right in our backyard, that this idea that I have to travel this far or make it this big of an experience or this long to access presence in nature when we have beautiful parks in central Ohio.
- 1:00:25Joe: And our, I mean, where we're at, we have so much untouched beauty that you can access, um, from pine forests to like raging rivers.
- 1:00:37Joe: And uh, and I I think for one reason or another, it doesn't feel accessible to people, and so it's weird to think of like a contract service providing you the support and hospitality so that you walk out in the woods on a trail that's in the public.
- 1:00:52Joe: Yeah, is so silly in so many ways, but for the moment we're at, it feels really important.
- 1:00:58Joe: And uh, I I feel really grateful to like even be exploring in this way.
- 1:01:04Joe: And um, it's a super lovely season.
- 1:01:07Joe: And I I hope, I hope we get to meet more people out there.
- 1:01:10Joe: But um, yeah, we'll we'll do everything from private retreats to group retreats to that uh, you know, instead of a bachelor party in Vegas, how about a bachelor retreat where you invest some more energy making sure that that bachelor that's going through this rite of passage actually feels better prepared uh by the hardship of what's to come because nobody's talking about how difficult marriage is or you know, wherever we started this conversation.
- 1:01:36Keri Croft: Let's talk about me again, real quick.
- 1:01:38Keri Croft: Let's come, let's come back to me.
- 1:01:39Keri Croft: Yeah, because I already have this idea.
- 1:01:41Keri Croft: So Benji has to be there in some capacity.
- 1:01:45Keri Croft: Yeah.
- 1:01:45Keri Croft: Whether he's I don't even know if he can cook, he can chop some shit up.
- 1:01:49Keri Croft: I want Benji, and then can we have a DJ?
- 1:01:53Keri Croft: Yeah.
- 1:01:54Keri Croft: Like an E, but but I want like some cool like EDM, Enya remixes, like something that goes along with the vibe.
- 1:02:02Keri Croft: So I'm I'm also feeling like lights hanging.
- 1:02:07Joe: You're inviting me to kind of like think about how we're gonna do it.
- 1:02:10Keri Croft: I'm inviting you to create right now.
- 1:02:12Keri Croft: To create this because what was gonna happen is this.
- 1:02:15Keri Croft: This will be probably like one of our quarterly um things.
- 1:02:22Keri Croft: My idea is like this whole community, and then there's different connection points.
- 1:02:26Keri Croft: One of the connection points is a quarterly happening that's always different.
- 1:02:30Keri Croft: So whether it's at somebody's home, whether it's at like a cute boutique where I can shut it down and give them a discount, whether it's like something like this.
- 1:02:38Keri Croft: Um, this I feel like we could do more than once.
- 1:02:40Keri Croft: This could be like a recurring theme.
- 1:02:42Keri Croft: But I would love the idea of like utilizing the indoor space a little bit, but then also going out.
- 1:02:49Keri Croft: And then when it gets a little bit later, like I want people to be able to not party, but like let loose, hang out, have fun after they've done all their work.
- 1:02:58Keri Croft: I can see kind of like an outdoorsy rural kind of like vibe situation with music, you, Benji.
- 1:03:08Keri Croft: Is there anyone else in Mount Vernon that can turn this thing up that can help us get it?
- 1:03:13Keri Croft: Like, I want it to be like the textbook, like this is the coolest shit we've done yet.
- 1:03:20Joe: This, these are the invitations that we want.
- 1:03:23Joe: Because I think um this idea of like the tonic of wildness, if you think about wildness, like it means I'm gonna be out in nature and it's gonna have a thunderstorm, I have nowhere to go.
- 1:03:34Joe: That's wild.
- 1:03:35Joe: That's not for everybody.
- 1:03:36Keri Croft: I would love that though.
- 1:03:37Keri Croft: Yeah, me too.
- 1:03:38Joe: Um, but this idea of like um what we can learn from the power of wildness is that there's unexpected things, there's maybe some hardship, maybe some joy, maybe some uh all these things.
- 1:03:54Joe: I think the intention of Baker Road is to to to help people access that and also simulate it.
- 1:03:59Joe: And so imagine a group of people.
- 1:04:02Joe: Now we're saying I I don't want to give you my best idea because why because it wouldn't be a surprise.
- 1:04:08Joe: But here's here's the idea.
- 1:04:11Joe: Um people that are going through all of these experiences that might be doing a guided hike with a forager.
- 1:04:23Joe: Um, that forager is going to be uh you're gathering ingredients that we'll use for our fireside chef dinner that night, you know, whatever that is.
- 1:04:33Joe: But part of the beauty of it is when people get care and hospitality in wild spaces, it feels very dissonant.
- 1:04:43Joe: And so that dissonance is actually, I think, what like moves us forward, the uncertainty of it all.
- 1:04:48Joe: So imagine doing a night hike, a meditative silent night hike that ends at a bonfire and music and lights, and again, it's about like uh curating an experience that feels like this doesn't belong.
- 1:05:05Keri Croft: Yes.
- 1:05:06Joe: Like I have a I have a huge barn uh on on one of our spaces, and I have this idea of doing this um country drag show um in my barn as a destination experience.
- 1:05:18Joe: That would be cool.
- 1:05:18Joe: It would be called a hoedown.
- 1:05:20Joe: Because come on, that's amazing.
- 1:05:24Joe: But those types of things, like part of the power of it is it it feels so unexpected.
- 1:05:32Keri Croft: Yes, and so good.
- 1:05:34Joe: And that allows people to get pulled into the present moment in a different way.
- 1:05:37Keri Croft: Yeah.
- 1:05:38Joe: Um, and now I I mean, I don't think there's anybody left to sue me from hot chicken, so maybe we'll have hot chicken there.
- 1:05:44Keri Croft: Yeah.
- 1:05:45Keri Croft: So I assume you're connected to like Nina West and all the and then um Alex Copeland is the he owns uh plenty of cookies.
- 1:05:53Keri Croft: He's an amazing he does drag.
- 1:05:55Keri Croft: He's so great.
- 1:05:56Keri Croft: I've met um they're so great.
- 1:05:58Joe: And Andrew always used to come in the Store and friends.
- 1:06:02Keri Croft: Another vibe I'm feeling for this, just to then we'll we'll we'll shelf it for now.
- 1:06:08Keri Croft: I I like when people enter into this like moment with like music and lights and stuff, I want there to be kind of a dress code.
- 1:06:16Keri Croft: So like I want everyone to have to wear like this is what they did in Bali.
- 1:06:20Joe: And I now who's the cult leader.
- 1:06:22Keri Croft: Well, but here's the thing.
- 1:06:24Keri Croft: No, it's it could be really cool.
- 1:06:26Keri Croft: It could be everyone just wear white or everyone just wear and then everyone's kind of like flowing.
- 1:06:32Keri Croft: You think that's cultish?
- 1:06:33Keri Croft: See, the I got this idea from Bali.
- 1:06:36Joe: So it's beautiful.
- 1:06:37Joe: And it was lovely on Instagram.
- 1:06:40Joe: Well, I don't care.
- 1:06:41Joe: I think the message of what you're selling is too, it's too that you want people to find the path to the best version of themselves.
- 1:06:49Keri Croft: Okay, let me redact.
- 1:06:51Keri Croft: So what I said, okay, the Bali thing isn't gonna work.
- 1:06:54Keri Croft: She made us all wear white and it was flowy and it was great.
- 1:06:57Keri Croft: Okay, that's not gonna work.
- 1:06:58Keri Croft: You're right.
- 1:06:59Keri Croft: Thank you.
- 1:06:59Keri Croft: So for the IRL, I was breadcrumbing them like the week before.
- 1:07:04Keri Croft: Like I want everyone just to show up in your true essence.
- 1:07:06Keri Croft: So if it's like gingham and clogs, like I want you to like deck out in your true Joe.
- 1:07:14Keri Croft: Okay.
- 1:07:14Keri Croft: And I was like, I'll be probably wearing ripped jeans and whatever, but whatever you are, I want it highly concentrated.
- 1:07:20Keri Croft: If you're someone who wears like red lips, I want the red, and people understood the assignment.
- 1:07:26Keri Croft: They walked in and every single person was like dialed up, but in their own, that's what that's exactly that's the same thing.
- 1:07:34Keri Croft: It's like, what's your dialed up, like rural version of your badassery, whether it's like fringe or like whether it's like a pair of like, I mean, I don't know if you're ready for this.
- 1:07:44Keri Croft: I don't know if Baker Road is you may need to build some infrastructure for this.
- 1:07:49Joe: But that's the invitation we receive, which is that part of our effort is to build the infrastructure for your vision and get out of the way.
- 1:08:00Joe: Yeah.
- 1:08:00Joe: And so, you know, we've got somebody, we've got a podcaster talking to us about an analog backpacking trip for their audience.
- 1:08:09Joe: And the idea would be that we'd curate that adventure and curate in the programming time and other things.
- 1:08:16Joe: Um but yeah, part of kind of, you know, what we intend to do in that kind of vulture spirit is being being real comfortable being in the background and being really comfortable doing the productive work to make people feel like they're right at home in the most unusual of circumstances.
- 1:08:37Joe: I love it.
- 1:08:38Joe: And that's the that's the power of it.
- 1:08:40Joe: And that's I I mean, nature's been offering us that for the longest time.
- 1:08:44Joe: And we generally have just taken it for granted.
- 1:08:47Joe: Generally try to try to control nature in a way that it just inevitably doesn't work out.
- 1:08:54Joe: Um and so we want to be not in opposition to it, but to actually be a complement to it and to help bring people into those experiences that otherwise, you know, short of their trust in you, would never be like, I'm gonna, I'm gonna go to a bonfire music party in the middle of the night in the middle of the woods in rural Ohio.
- 1:09:20Joe: And so can we cultivate a container of trust between the two of us that makes people feel safe enough accepting that invitation and allowing themselves to be their whole self?
- 1:09:29Joe: Like there's not a it sounds ridiculous, but there's not a better example of building a safe container for people to do the work they need to do.
- 1:09:40Joe: And maybe that's dancing around a fire with bright red lipstick in heels that we would tell them aren't trailworthy.
- 1:09:46Joe: Right.
- 1:09:47Joe: You know, don't wear the heels.
- 1:09:49Joe: Whatever.
- 1:09:50Joe: Um yeah.
- 1:09:52Joe: So I mean, those are the those are exactly the kind of invitations we want.
- 1:09:57Joe: Yeah.
- 1:09:57Joe: And this, I I mean, I'd say all of this to say this is a real shit business strategy of like, how do we cultivate something so unique for an audience of people we don't know?
- 1:10:09Joe: Um, that will never probably happen a second time.
- 1:10:12Joe: Because if it happened a second time, it's not wild.
- 1:10:16Joe: Yeah.
- 1:10:16Joe: And uh, but it's it's such an act of service and an act of learning about ourselves, and it's really a privilege to show up in those moments.
- 1:10:24Joe: And so, yeah, I'm super excited about it.
- 1:10:27Joe: Sounds like we've done half the planning already.
- 1:10:29Joe: I think we have.
- 1:10:30Joe: I really at least for one event.
- 1:10:32Keri Croft: So, what is the deep connection to vultures?
- 1:10:36Joe: Um, you know a turkey vulture, yeah.
- 1:10:38Joe: Right?
- 1:10:38Joe: Um, did you see that our mural?
- 1:10:40Joe: We had a great Columbus artist come up and do a huge turkey vulture mural on the back of our downtown building.
- 1:10:46Joe: Um, anyways, if you've seen turkey vultures, what do you think?
- 1:10:50Keri Croft: Oh, I saw you mean the one in Mount Vernon.
- 1:10:52Joe: You have the yeah.
- 1:10:53Joe: What do you think when you see a turkey vulture?
- 1:10:56Joe: No wrong answers.
- 1:10:57Joe: I don't know.
- 1:10:58Joe: Like this is one of the blackbirds, redheads on the side of the road.
- 1:11:01Joe: What are they what are they doing?
- 1:11:03Joe: Eating?
- 1:11:05Joe: Eating roads.
- 1:11:06Joe: Carcass?
- 1:11:07Joe: Carcass.
- 1:11:08Joe: And so um most people flinch when they see a turkey vulture.
- 1:11:14Joe: Um, what I've come to understand, actually, I was at a free community environmental event in Mount Vernon that was put on by Kenyan's uh conservancy and effort.
- 1:11:24Joe: Um and the woman had a turkey vulture.
- 1:11:28Joe: This woman had all these majestic birds of prey she's showing, and um a biologist or something, uh she like an aviary rescue, and she pulls out a turkey vulture years ago, and you see her entire presence change.
- 1:11:43Joe: She's filled, she she just had, you know, like a wounded bald eagle on her arm or something, and she pulls out this turkey vulture in her entire demeanor.
- 1:11:53Joe: She saved the best for last.
- 1:11:54Joe: And it was what became a conversation about um the biological capacity of these animals, the way they were designed was to be of service, and they've oriented their entire bodies to be able to safely crawl into a dead carcass to keep their legs sanitary, to keep their head sanitary, eat things that would otherwise put you on the ground or in a hospital bed.
- 1:12:23Joe: And by the time they process all of that, all of that becomes something that nourishes our crops that can be ingested essentially by our planet in a safer way.
- 1:12:35Joe: And really all they get in can turn in return is judgment for like, oh, it's gross.
- 1:12:42Joe: I think I actually read a statistic about how much money they save like state highway cleanup crews because they can put a group of dead roadkill down.
- 1:12:53Joe: And so what I love about it, when a group of vultures is gathered around a carcass, it's actually called a wake.
- 1:12:58Joe: We we're drawing a lot of things.
- 1:13:00Keri Croft: We are now like coming to the colour.
- 1:13:02Joe: This is where to end it.
- 1:13:03Joe: Um, and so you imagine a wake of vultures are processing and revering some of the most hard things to look at the death, decay, discomfort, grossness.
- 1:13:18Joe: They are revering and processing that in a way that makes that productive again.
- 1:13:23Joe: Um as like an aspiring good man, I would suggest this is a really good role for masculinity, which is to do the hard work without any request, without any need for affirmation, for validation.
- 1:13:40Joe: Do it because it needs to be done.
- 1:13:42Joe: And uh what better archetype for that than a vulture?
- 1:13:46Joe: And so that's why I love vultures.
- 1:13:50Keri Croft: I mean, I don't know if we've rounded out a I don't know if we've rounded out a conversation this eloquently in all of the three years of the Carrie Croft show.
- 1:13:58Keri Croft: Joe, you know, you just don't disappoint, do you?
- 1:14:00Keri Croft: Vultures.
- 1:14:01Keri Croft: You know what I would like to do with you though?
- 1:14:02Keri Croft: Like I would love to be a bug on the wall just for like just the real, like day-to-day, like, yeah, did you get the toilet paper?
- 1:14:11Keri Croft: Yeah, did you because you are so my view of you is just so like, you know, profound and like, you know, whatever.
- 1:14:20Keri Croft: Like I would love to just see you in like a very just how intentionally I put toilet paper.
- 1:14:25Keri Croft: Just out of the room.
- 1:14:26Keri Croft: No, but how you like have those conversations?
- 1:14:28Keri Croft: I don't know.
- 1:14:29Keri Croft: Like you're just very, everything just is like floweth.
- 1:14:33Joe: Well, you've cultivated that space for this, but it's also like that's the work.
- 1:14:38Joe: Is like, how do we I want this to be my job.
- 1:14:42Joe: I mean, I admire you because of it, because it's like, how do we create more space to exist like this?
- 1:14:49Joe: Yeah, because it makes all the other stuff so much more worth it.
- 1:14:52Joe: Yeah.
- 1:14:53Keri Croft: And uh Well, I'm just taking a page out of Joe's book because I just really like you.
- 1:14:58Joe: Well, same.
- 1:14:59Joe: You know, and you know, you'll be dancing in a Knox County forest with some lights and a bonfire in no time.
- 1:15:07Keri Croft: I don't know what I'll do when if I have you and Benji in the same room, though.
- 1:15:10Joe: But the excitement Benji's gonna source all of our food.
- 1:15:14Keri Croft: The excitement for me, you know.
- 1:15:16Joe: Talk to people about and editing.
- 1:15:17Keri Croft: It's gonna be so great.
- 1:15:18Keri Croft: Thank you, in all seriousness.
- 1:15:20Keri Croft: This has been lovely.
- 1:15:21Keri Croft: Thank you.
- 1:15:21Keri Croft: I appreciate it.
- 1:15:22Keri Croft: And if you're still out there following your girl, follow me on YouTube, Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcast.
- 1:15:28Keri Croft: And until next time, go visit Baker Road, look it up, get curious about it, and keep moving, baby.