I’ve spent years in marketing, watching trends rise and fall like quick summer storms, but somewhere along the way I realized I’d missed something older and truer, the natural rhythm of things. Not the algorithm, not the campaign cycle, but the quiet laws of life: seed, germination, flower. That realization pulled me back to Growing Up Aspen - Adventures of the Unsupervised, a story rooted in experience rather than spectacle. It felt like planting something real after years of tending plastic gardens.
From there came the leap into a YouTube podcast, Growing Up Aspen, a place to wander through memory and meaning, to ask what comes next when you stop chasing noise and start listening to the wind. And what I found was a strange hunger in the culture: kids lining up to be influencers without the soil of experience beneath their feet. Influence, I realized, isn’t something you declare, it’s something you earn by living, by stumbling, by paying attention long enough to have something worth saying.
We’ve drifted a long way from keeping up with the Kardashians, or maybe we’ve just grown tired of the chase. There’s a deeper story waiting now, one shaped by people who’ve lived a little, who’ve seen both the sunrise and the storm. That’s when I started looking back to voices like Hunter S. Thompson and John Denver on Substack, two sides of the same mountain, really. One wild and electric, the other grounded and clear as a Colorado sky. The yin and yang of Aspen parenting in the ’70s and ’80s, where freedom and responsibility danced together in a way that shaped a generation.
And somewhere in that balance, the next step revealed itself, not as a product, but as a purpose. In the spirit of those voices, we decided to create something that gives more than it takes: crowd-funded, politically positive, gonzo-style Flaming Justice music videos that any 2026 campaign can use for free. Not attack ads, not empty slogans, but stories and songs that remind people what they’re fighting for, not just what they’re fighting against.
Because the future, like a garden, grows best when it’s shared. If we can bring a little harmony back into the noise, blend the honesty of lived experience with the creative spark of new tools, then maybe we can help something better take root. Not just in politics, but in the way we tell our stories, raise our voices, and remember who we are when the cameras are off and the mountains are still.