Independent Voices, Spiritual Truth, and the Future of Media

Speaker Identification

Speaker 1 – Sasha: Identified by the opening and closing host language, the guest repeatedly addressing her as Sasha, and her role asking the interview questions.

Speaker 2 – Douglas Newsom: Identified by the uploaded file name, the guest’s self-description as co-founder with twin brother Donald Newsom, and later references to “Doug.”

Speaker 3 – Donald Newsom: Identified when Douglas asks to bring in his twin brother, and the next speaker introduces himself in relation to Doug, BBS Radio, and Sasha.

Speaker 1 – Sasha:
Welcome back to Sasha Talks.

Speaker 2 – Douglas Newsom:
Well, thank you, Sasha. I appreciate the fact that I’m on your show. Thank you kindly.

Speaker 1 – Sasha:
So, you are an entrepreneur, the founder of BBS Radio Inc., and you are a creator of different sorts. I do recall that you appeared several years ago, and you shared a brief story of how BBS Radio came about. Can you revisit that?

Speaker 2 – Douglas Newsom:
Sure. Well, I’m a co-founder with my twin brother, Donald Newsom. We’ve always worked together since the very beginning of time, actually.

I was working with a cosmetic company at the time, helping build it into a natural or organic-ingredient product company. My brother found that he had time, so he was working with a blog site. Initially, BBS Radio was known as Blog-In Service, because it was blogs back in 2000, 2001, and 2002, when he was doing blogging.

He was having such interesting conversations that he decided, “Hey, why don’t we record these conversations?” He was speaking to a gentleman by the name of Dr. Fred Bell, and he was one of those individuals who worked, I guess, in clandestine sorts of environments with government agencies to analyze spacecraft. It was such interesting subject matter, especially after 9/11 as well. I mean, a lot was going on there at that time, and they decided to record it.

Then they thought, “Wow, maybe we can not just record it. We could put it on the internet and do that live.” From there it was, “Well, maybe there are other people who could join in the conversation.” So it developed very quickly into a blog, then a phone conversation, then a taping of it, then a streaming of it, then adding people into the conversation in a live environment.

We may be one of the first, if not possibly the first, though I do know of another company that started ahead of us in name, to be able to do new media in this way. So it was really my brother’s brainchild, and I came along afterwards around 2008. Then I wore the hat of developing out the website and creating a structure for the company in different ways. But it’s really his brain that came up with this.

I’ll tell you where the name came from. Blog-In Service then became Blog-In Broadcasting Service. So that’s where the B, the B, and the S came from. We got the website, we incorporated around 2005, and we got the BBS Radio domain name.

Another entity out there did go out of business after 25-plus years. Some of the companies that began online went out of business. So many, Sasha, went out of business. A few companies that did well really became aggregators and distributors of other people’s information, because everybody wanted to get their information out there, right?

So a website would pop up and say, “Hey, you can give us your content, and we’ll send it elsewhere.” Then everybody would sign up to give them their content. These portals became aggregators and distributors of information, and they literally took over. Then they became the gatekeepers, like Apple does for their Apple Store, and Google in the same manner. They became the big boys because they had all this content, and they became gatekeepers. They literally bought out everybody else.

They control the market in such a way that, if they didn’t really like your content, you wouldn’t really get anywhere. We saw that a few years ago when people tried to say, “Hey, maybe I don’t believe in the elections,” or “Maybe I don’t believe in the COVID shot,” or “Maybe I don’t believe in a religion in particular,” and they were either driven out of the business they were in, or they were ghosted online.

There are so many ways to literally make it so your information doesn’t move. You might think it does, but it doesn’t. Of course, during those times, there were a lot of games too, where people were buying for clicks. You had bots starting to be created, and they were clicking. People would buy a million clicks and say, “Look how big I am.” In the beginning, it fooled a lot of people. A lot of people became very well known as a result of buying all these bot-related, fake eyeballs.

Companies over time were taken over by the distributors, and the distributors, almost in every industry, become the powerhouse and the dominant players. One of the things that drove a lot of these companies out of business was not just the information they wanted to divulge, or allow others to divulge, and how they were limited or put out of business, but also because they dealt with a model that my brother and I turned upside down.

What I mean by that is, initially, even in terrestrial radio, you have AM and FM markets where those networks paid their hosts. You pay the person who’s your anchor on TV. If you had a magazine, you’d pay your writers for the magazine content.

Well, Donald and I thought, and we may be the first who did this, and there are so many firsts for us it’s hard to put them all down, but we thought, “No, we want to charge the hosts because it’s our distribution capability.” If it’s my magazine and I’ve got 100,000 eyeballs, and you want to write for it, great. Now you pay me, and I’ll give you a little space in that, along with your article, that gets you more attention.

So it’s kind of an upside-down model, right? Rather than paying for the content, you’re charging for the content, which, back 25 years ago, who would have done it? Then everybody started to use that model.

The other thing that really impacted networks was the people who came on and advertised on their networks. If you’re a network, you have to have revenue. If you didn’t get host revenue, the only other way was to get advertising revenue. If you got advertising revenue, now you are limited to what they want you to talk about.

So you have a very top-down approach with information in media today. They dictate to their anchors and their hosts what you can talk about and what you can’t talk about. That’s mainly due to the advertising dollars behind those networks. A lot of companies, if they weren’t toeing the line, or they weren’t speaking in the truth that these people thought was truth, were limited with the capital. Once you become dependent on a stream of capital, where that makes up all of your capital, then you either do what they say or you go out of business.

That really limited this industry in many ways. Your independent companies out there struggled, and we’re, of course, in that boat where we’ve struggled. But we’ve never changed our methods of doing business. In fact, quite the opposite. We just became more resolute in our idea that people should have a platform to bring forth the knowledge they believe in.

There are a lot of belief systems out there, a lot of understandings. If you’re a communist, great, tell me why. If you’re a socialist, great, tell me why. Here’s a place where we want information to grow from the bottom up, not from the top down. If I were a think tank and a business, I’d want a thousand opinions around the table, not a thousand people with the same opinion. It doesn’t make sense.

That’s the same thing with information today, when we’re bringing it out to the people. But maybe they just don’t want to allow for that. But we do. My brother and I truly do. So we’re one of those few voices that have been able to survive. We didn’t bring on advertisers and sponsors. We just never went there.

But we had to make a personal sacrifice. The sacrifice is that, over 25 years, my brother and I haven’t really been able to take a salary. Over the past few years, it’s been my brother’s and my money that has kept this business afloat. So not only do we not make any money, and we work constantly, we’re constantly giving the company money.

But to compete, let’s say that you were in this industry and you decided, “Well, I’m going to get in this industry and create a new media company.” Well, you’re now going to have to compete against people like ourselves, who don’t derive a benefit, keep their costs very low, and work forever. That’s tough to compete against, right?

Models that do that usually have hundreds of millions of dollars behind them, like Amazon. That’s an example where they went out there and sold products at losses for half a decade in order to take over market share, and then they started to raise their prices. Then everybody started to fall in line because they had such huge distribution. So it’s kind of, “I’m going to lose a lot of money in the beginning to make money in the end,” but they had a lot of money backing them. My brother and I don’t.

There comes a point where you need assistance, and that happens every few years in this industry because it’s a technology industry. It’s kind of like a bar. If you had a bar, and you don’t change the look and feel of it every few years, people start to leave. I don’t really like to use that analogy because I don’t go to bars. It’s been a long, long time, but just as an example.

In technology, there are things that you have to change: the look, the feel of the website, how it operates, the speed of it, the new technologies. I can give you examples of that all day long. AI, for example. If you’re not integrating AI right now, or in the next couple of years, you’re not going to be around. Software companies are getting hammered in the stock market. Why? Because we think that AI is going to make creating software almost instant and on the fly.

There might come a point where you’re watching a TV show, and the TV show is being created instantly while you’re watching it. While you’re watching it, the code is being written to create the TV show that’s entertaining you. It knows you so well that it’s going to keep you entertained, and that code is literally writing itself in real time. That’s all coming.

Things that AI can do for a company like ours: it could give you accurate transcripts, keywords, summaries, images around your show, tie all your information together with all the different information you had, make it searchable, categorize it instantly, and feed your information to all your social sites. No problem. All of this can be done automatically. It could literally write newsletters on the fly.

There are a lot of things that we know can help our hosts take their audio content and make it written text, and really get it out there in a lot of ways: visually, through audio, through video, through text, through graphics, and distribute it smartly.

If you had a guest on your show, wouldn’t it be wonderful if you had programs that would tell the guest and collect information from the guest about your show? Like, “What did you think of the show? Would you give it a different title? What do you think the key aspect of the show was? Would you like to come back on the show? What’s your next topic for the show? Did you promote your show to your social sites? Is there a way we could collaborate on this? Maybe more emails? What do you think of this show’s content?”

What I’m saying is, it could help the people you work with and interview to gain information from you about the show and move the momentum forward. It could also drive ideas and understandings. That could all be done automatically, without the host going, “Oh boy, I’ve got to sit back and write this email. What do I do? It just takes so much time.” All these things can be handled through an AI structure.

Also, websites. I mean, you have cloud-based data. If you had a video show, to stream video live to a lot of people simultaneously is expensive. It’s expensive, I’m telling you. You might be able to stream your video to four or five websites, but if you had 500 people pulling from your video stream, if you’re a small Joe, you couldn’t pull it off. If you have your own server, you probably couldn’t pull it off. You need the systems in place, or you’re using somebody else’s system.

So whose system do we all use? We all use YouTube. Why? Because it can go into that information, crunch that information, pull that information in segments, and push it out there. It can analyze that information. All of that is being done, not because there’s somebody behind a computer doing it. That’s all being done literally by a kind of AI system or code.

So it’s really leaving us in the background going, “Oh my God.” Then they put rules in place like, “Well, now you have music in your show, but we don’t pay royalties.” We do. We pay royalties. I mean, we pay ASCAP, BMI, and SESAC. But if I distribute your show to an outlet that doesn’t pay royalties, then they’ve got a problem. So what do they do? They just deny your show.

“Well, I wrote, I have a piece of music that I bought for $50, and I talked over it, and it’s my intro.” Well, how do they know? All they hear is a piece of music. They don’t have any software that’s capable of analyzing your show and saying, “No, it’s royalty-free,” or “It’s not,” or “Somebody owns it,” or “It’s not.” The more and more rules they have, and the more capable they are of doing that, the more rules they make, which only they can satisfy.

It’s an industry that’s evolving. It’s changing, and it requires you to be at the top of your game in order to survive. My brother and I are very good at this. We’ve overcome the changes and advancements. But since we started this company, we’ve been involved in two fires and one flood where we lost everything.

You can imagine, in the technology business, where you actually lose everything. Your home gets burned to the ground. You don’t even have data. You have nothing. You literally are starting from scratch, and then you’ve got to deal with the lawyers and the insurance. By the way, that doesn’t take months. That takes years, if you can fully get over it. And technology advances.

So we’ve been in three hardship positions while building this company, and we’ve overcome them, the same with other challenges that we’ve had to face. We’re in it for the long haul. There’s nothing that’s going to slow us down. We can stretch a dollar a long, long way. If we have a dollar, it’s going to work in the company. It’s not going to feed my brother and me. We’re not going out there buying cars. We love what we do. I wouldn’t want to be in any other industry. I know my brother thinks the same way.

We feel that there are a lot of positive things that come out of a media company that has a mission to provide a platform where all opinion can discuss what they believe, share that belief with other people, and let the world decide without a top-down approach, but a bottom-up approach. I think it’s more necessary now than ever.

I’m afraid that it might be limiting into the future, because as these companies become more and more dominant, fewer and fewer companies represent ownership of almost everything. I could give you examples in almost every industry. Still, you never give up your attempts to try to make a difference, to help people see another way.

If we didn’t have good hosts, it wouldn’t be worth it. What’s the use, right? But we have hosts who are truly beautiful souls. They have soul wealth, and to me, soul wealth is everything. They have information that really allows people to feel those aha moments. Aha. Sometimes you have to feel those aha moments many times before you actually “aha” at a bigger level. Our hosts can do that for people.

Every day, I’m learning something, I’m feeling something, I’m growing. I would challenge anybody to get involved in something where they have an impact on the world like this industry does. That’s really everything in a nutshell, Sasha.

Speaker 1 – Sasha:
The radio station does connect with many countries out there. I do know it’s in the triple figures. How many countries is it today?

Speaker 2 – Douglas Newsom:
Good question. Every single country and province in the world has come to our website over a period of a year or less. You might only have one in the smallest province in the world, which might not be a country per se, because they do have land masses they don’t consider countries, but they are kind of sovereign, right? Or they have their own independence.

Everybody in the world can access our information, and at some point they do. It might only be one or two in those very small land masses, but we find that it’s everywhere in the world.

Speaker 1 – Sasha:
The station does host different types of entertainers, creators, musicians, and writers. You also write on the website, and I came across one of your pieces where you talk about the truth and preserving the individual truth. Do you feel that we’re living in times when the business world is trying to standardize what the truth should be?

Speaker 2 – Douglas Newsom:
Oh boy, you’re getting into some heavy subject matter. Yes, I believe history is being revised. I believe words are being used in such a way that they change the meaning of things, and that also changes historical works based on how we feel about those words today. That’s a battle that’s ongoing, and I think, into the future, that’s going to become more problematic. There will be such a revision of what we know in order to create the backstory for individuals who want to control the masses.

But on a spiritual level, I truly believe information is written into your DNA. Everybody wonders where gravity comes from. I believe information is gravity, and that’s what creates the force of attraction. Either you like something or you dislike it, and so you’re pushing and you’re pulling like a computer that’s on and off, on and off. It’s constantly doing that: light on one line, and on the opposite end of that same line is dark, up and down. It’s all one line. It’s on the line. But you pull that line toward you by liking or disliking, and that creates the angle.

So the information is in all the angles, the on-and-offs, which is written within our cells. I don’t think information is ever lost, and I think it’s recorded permanently. But information in a broader sense, what we don’t experience, but can only experience through the words and works of others, and that revision, also has its impact.

That’s a tough question. I wish we all could see truth by just viewing it, and it would appear to us. Like if I looked at a human being and you had 10 bands of colors radiating from your body, each color representing a certain understanding, maybe I could read you without having to go, “Wow.” Then the truth is there, and I can make the correct judgments moving forward with what I see and know, rather than dealing with somebody with a helmet or something on that I can’t see.

I’d rather truth be obvious than not obvious. But today, power gains its power from secrets. It doesn’t gain its power from truth. There have been many experiments that are done based on that. If they can keep something hidden, they can use information that you might not have.

I don’t know if I feel that’s good. You could say to me, “Well, geez, let’s say there’s a company that spends $100 billion creating something. It has the right to keep that information secret and not share it with the world, and charge the world for that.” Yes, and that makes a capitalistic machine work.

I, on the other hand, am just the opposite. If you came to me and I spent all my life putting together a piece of information, and I knew it could benefit you or the world, I’d give it to you freely, even knowing that you could make it better, take off, and make a great deal of money with it. To me, that’s the great thing of life, being able to do that for other people. Companies don’t have that. They don’t get rewarded for that, which is kind of sad.

So we, as individuals, don’t operate on that level of truth so much. I wish that weren’t the case. But I’m a very spiritual man, Sasha, and I really would like everything to be upfront and known.

Speaker 1 – Sasha:
The station is hosting a GoFundMe campaign, and I’m aware that it shines light on the new endeavors that will help develop the station more. How can the benefactors of change and contributors participate?

Speaker 2 – Douglas Newsom:
Thank you for that question, Sasha. Really, I appreciate that. My brother and I are going to continue to put our money forward in this company. The only drawback is, again, the speed at which things can occur. If we do it ourselves, then the technology we try to incorporate might start to get old, and then we get behind the eight ball.

We can do it. It might take me five years to do it with my own money, versus a few months if we could do it with other people’s money. In five years, that might be obsolete. But with a little bit of help, we can create systems, utilize technologies, implement them fairly quickly, not get behind the eight ball, move rapidly, and build ourselves to get a lot more awareness to our network.

People who have ever listened to BBS Radio and had a moment, or been changed by what a host says, or been motivated or uplifted, that’s the sort of information we bring to the table, and we’re going to continue to. To support that, we’ve created a GoFundMe account. It’s easiest just to go to BBS Radio, bbsradio.com. There’s a little icon just to the right on the homepage that says GoFundMe. Every little bit truly helps.

When my brother and I went through the last fire, it was the biggest fire in California’s history at the time. Eighty-seven people died. We had two acres of land, a creek, a three-story home. My brother, I, four children, and my brother’s wife were all residing in there with our offices. It was just a couple blocks from the town of Paradise. It was a harrowing experience, even getting out of there.

When we lost everything, a friend of ours put up a GoFundMe account. A friend, can you believe? There was such an outpouring of giving, where people wanted to give us checks of $25,000. We looked at them, and we said, “No, we can’t.” We just said no to the money. We reached our goal, where we could buy the equipment we needed and be up and running again, which didn’t take as long. We were literally up and running within a month, hard to believe, but we were.

That experience of kindness from everybody who wanted to help us get through that very difficult moment in our lives, and that one was probably the most difficult because there was so much tragedy, I couldn’t stop crying. I couldn’t believe it. I’m still kind of emotional when I think about it.

Everybody wonders if there are people out there who care, if there are people out there who are affected by the things that they do. You wonder sometimes, “Will anybody show up? If I’m no longer here, will they remember me well? Was there anything I did that affected them in such a way that they think about that?”

It was so emotional because I realized there were so many people who really were impacted by BBS Radio. It changed so many lives. So that experience gave me more than what I lost, by far. I got to feel the energy and the love from so many people in society, so overwhelming, and my heart exploded. I just want to thank everybody even for taking the time to listen. I’m very thankful. Thank you, Sasha. Thank you, and thank you to your listening audience.

Speaker 1 – Sasha:
Now, because we start to wind down, do you have any words of wisdom for the BBS Radio audience?

Speaker 2 – Douglas Newsom:
I’d love my twin brother to say hi, if that’s possible, Sasha. Here’s Donald.

Speaker 3 – Donald Newsom:
Wow, Sasha, it is a pleasure. Thank you. Thank you for allowing both of us on the network, on your talk show. That really is a privilege. I say that because I mean it. I’ve listened to your programming. I think I know you. I feel you, the kind of energy that you encompass, and I appreciate you allowing us on your program. I just don’t have words for it. So thank you. Thank you.

Speaker 1 – Sasha:
Well, it is my pleasure, and I am embarrassed to admit that to this day I cannot distinguish both of your voices, so it’s very difficult.

Speaker 3 – Donald Newsom:
We’re both kind of monotone, right? We do have the same voice. We are twins, although we are fraternal twins. Or is that fraternal? I can never tell. But we do look identical. In fact, we’re a peculiar set of twins who look identical even though we’re not.

I couldn’t tell our pictures apart when we were young boys. I couldn’t tell our baby pictures and younger pictures apart, nor could my brother. We could switch places at will, although we never did that. Our mother was a profound individual, and she wouldn’t allow those kinds of games to be played. So we never did that. But we could have. We looked that much alike, and we think alike, work alike, and act alike. It’s strange. It really is strange.

I wish I had pictures to show people, although I had six boxes of pictures from relatives from the Newsom family, but they ended up being burned up in the Paradise Fire. Unfortunately, I don’t even have a picture of my mother or father, sad as that is. And it is. I really wish I did. So we kind of have to go off memory.

But we still look quite similar today. Sometimes he grows a little facial hair. Sometimes I do. Sometimes he wears little different clothes. But if we decided to dress up the same and cut our hair the same, it would probably be difficult for many to tell us apart.

Speaker 1 – Sasha:
Beautiful to know.

Speaker 3 – Donald Newsom:
And I want to say one more thing. My brother is the articulate one. He has a way with words. He studied under some extremely brilliant people at Pacific Lutheran University and studied music and composition, the arts, and finance. He has a very articulate way of saying things and writing. Most of what you’ll see throughout the internet, if it’s done well, you can pretty much assume that my brother did it. He has quite a flavor about him for that.

I appreciate that because my artistry stops at a stick figure. But when it came to these campaigns for informing others of our situation and our needs, he’s put most of that together, and I have to commend him for it. Like he said, the people, the fans, the hosts, the guests, our entire audience stepped up to the plate, and they showed us what real compassion and real kindness are.

Gratitude is kind of a very demure word for how we felt because they literally changed our world, our circumstance, and our future. Here we are today, living the dream, so to speak. We’re still in business. We’re looking to expand. We have a wonderful future and wonderful people now a part of our program. We need a little help because we have credit lines that we have had to take out in order to facilitate the next step in our evolution.

We depend on our hosts, our listeners, and our fans, not only to keep the community, which is so important to us, but also to keep us afloat. So far, we have been able to manage that ourselves, and we could continue to. I mean, Doug won’t say this, but we’re not poor. We’re not rich. We don’t have all the trappings that many people love to have. We just don’t find that appealing.

But we have enough means that we could make this company work. Making it thrive is something quite different when it comes to media and technology, and we happen to be in both. We happen to be in the techno-media industry, and the landscape changes so fast, especially right now. It’s changing so fast that we understand that if we don’t change aspects of our software and our hardware and how we do things, we’re going to fall behind.

If we try to keep pace with our own money, we’re going to fall behind, and we don’t want to. It’s a robust network with a community that’s been developed with love, and our listeners and fans prove that with the emails and correspondence we get.

We really want to do a first-rate job for them and keep it so that independent voices can be heard, and can be heard all over the world without being stonewalled, blacklisted, or ghosted. A diversity of opinions can get out there, can be relevant, and can make a difference in the lives of others. To us, it’s extremely important that we step up to the plate and make this happen, because right now, everybody knows that with AI changing the industry, it really is a necessity for us to do so.

So we’re appealing to everyone. We started a little GoFundMe campaign, and if people want to go there, they can go to our website. They can click on the GoFundMe and help us that way. Many people have elected to just click on our website, and at the bottom right, there’s a little donate button. They can donate with us via PayPal, Venmo, credit card, or even subscribe to the BBS Radio system itself. Others have been doing that. We truly appreciate it.

Thank you, Sasha. I’m going to swing you back to Doug. He’s actually the one who’s been engineering your show and working with you a lot, and I must say he’s tickled by you, and I am too. So thank you. I appreciate your time and allowing us on your show. Thank you, Sasha. I’m going to swing you back through.

Speaker 2 – Douglas Newsom:
Now, your last question was to impart words of wisdom. I do have one. I’ve believed this all my life, which is funny. If you asked me if there was an aspect of me I wanted to grow, and if I was like a light that shined out infinitely into the stars, at the end point, who would I be? Why would I be valuable to everything else?

I would want to be the definition of kindness, which I believe is love in action. I almost think kindness is more powerful than love. Isn’t that odd? In the spiritual community, love is a very powerful word. But love in action, kindness, is something that we should all seek to bring forth within our own being. Even to ourselves, I think that action of kindness is really the most important thing one can do.

Speaker 1 – Sasha:
Very wise, Doug. I agree with you.

Speaker 2 – Douglas Newsom:
Thank you.

Speaker 1 – Sasha:
Thank you for joining us on Sasha Talks.

Speaker 2 – Douglas Newsom:
Thank you, Sasha, with so much love and big hugs.

Speaker 1 – Sasha:
Thank you. And everyone is welcome to go to bbsradio.com to check out the radio station, and you’re welcome to consider a contribution. It is going to a wonderful cause that keeps on paying itself forward. Thank you for joining us tonight.

Welcome to Writers Series, Doug.

Speaker 2 – Douglas Newsom:
Well, thank you, Sasha. Thank you kindly for inviting me. I appreciate that.

Speaker 1 – Sasha:
You are the founder of BBS Radio Inc. You are a ghostwriter and an author. How were you introduced to the craft of writing?

Speaker 2 – Douglas Newsom:
When I was young, I wrote poetry. It was probably the easiest way for me to put into words some of my feelings and thoughts, and also to tantalize people who knew me. I wanted them to think. I wanted them to kind of go to a different place with where words could take you. So I found poetry was a way to do that.

When I was younger, I would read works by so many people, Robert Frost, for example. I would take his poem and rewrite it in my own words using the same meter, the same sort of nuances, tone, the lines, how many lines, how it was written, almost everything. If they used a lot of similes, great. I would try to duplicate that. I did this with a lot of people who wrote poetry, and that led to more instances of writing down my thoughts.

I had a very interesting life. My brother and I, when we were young, actually since we were knee-high to a grasshopper, we worked. If you were old enough to stand up, you were old enough to hold a paintbrush. We grew up on a farm, and everybody worked.

When I got a little bit older, I was about 15 years old. I graduated fairly young from school. I skipped a year ahead. I went to university at a young age. But even before that, while I was in high school, I was working in finance with my twin brother, and high finance. The sort of thing that you’ve seen in the movie Wall Street, that was my brother’s and my life, where you had 10 people in a room trying to build companies and sell stock.

At the age of 15 and a half, I was dealing with brokers, desk traders, and major partners of over 30 brokerage firms that traded worldwide. It was a very heady experience, and the characters who were a part of that experience were hard to forget. A lot of things occurred that I wanted to put down on paper. I just needed to do that because it was so painful.

We went from making a lot to losing everything, to making a lot to losing everything, to making a lot to losing everything, in very brief periods of time. I can’t say too much. I’m sorry, Sasha. I can’t. That’s why I never published the book, because I dealt with a lot of very powerful people. I couldn’t use the names of the people, and it was too scary. Too scary.

You don’t want to know what I think about large companies and the people, how they made their millions, and what they do. If you get into their machine, how you literally can be ripped apart, and how disingenuous and corrupt the system really is, it would just shock you to your core.

But I had to write this. I had to write this and use fake names and tell the story. I did, and I called it Doom the Deal. I could never publish it, and I could never share it. I must have written a couple hundred pages, but I don’t even encompass the first couple of months I was in business, by the time I was 15 and a half to 16 years old. I just had to stop. I couldn’t do it.

I showed it to a couple of people who were in business with me, and they wanted me to finish it. But I knew I just couldn’t because there were too many powerful people who would have known who they were, and it might have been a very bad thing. So I put that aside.

Then years went by, and my brother and I built a few companies, again with very powerful people, some of the biggest names people have heard of on this continent at the time. Once again, my brother and I would spend all our time and energy building these companies, and at the end of the day, literally, we were screwed out of the deal.

I can remember once where a company went public. We created the business plans. We raised all the money. We did everything from A to Z. All they did was spend the money, and then they went public for almost a billion dollars. It was payday time. I thought we were going to make $33 million, my brother and I. I thought, “Boy, this is payday. That’s why the lawyers want us to come on in.”

I remember sitting there at the boardroom table, and the lawyers just looked at us from across the table and said, “We’re going to screw you out of this money, and there’s nothing you’re going to be able to do about it.”

That wasn’t just one instance where that occurred to my brother and me. There were three instances where my brother and I literally took ideas from the napkin level, funded the corporations, put together the business plans, brought the deals to the table, and ended up at the end of the day with nothing, even losing because we put our money where our mouths were. We put whatever we had into it as well. It was horrific.

Then I had a person fly in who just kept on giving money, Sasha. I was able to raise, in the course of a decade, so much money. These people kept wanting to give money to the projects that we put forward because they knew that we believed in them. But what I didn’t know, because I was young, is that you might believe in the deal.

Let’s say you have a product, and the product is going to create an all-natural way of treating your skin. Your skin is just going to glow, and it’s going to change the cosmetics industry, and it’s the greatest product in the world. I believed in that. But the people are more impactful on the company’s trajectory and its outcome than the product. It took a long time for me to understand that.

If I had a one-carat diamond that a company could make and they were selling it for $10 a carat, but the management was bad, it still would go nowhere. But if the management was good, it could literally take dung and sell it for a profit. So it was all about the people. It wasn’t the product. When you’re young, you don’t realize that. You don’t understand the value of the people. You kind of see the product value, and that’s what you run based on. That was a big mistake.

I had a gentleman fly in, and he flew in about four or five months after he got caught in a fishing boat accident. The day he was going to retire with a fleet of fishing boats, he got his legs and his arms caught in the winch, and they flattened, literally flattened, his arms and his legs. He was in a wheelchair. He constantly had pain, neuro pain. It was just terrible.

He flew in. I can remember him getting off the plane. I took him to his hotel, and then we went to a restaurant. He just started staring into my eyes, and he said, “Doug, I have this gift where I can look at your iris and the areas around your eyes, and I can basically look into your soul and tell you if you’re sick, or if there are certain parts of the body that are problematic.” He said, “I would give to you, and I would continue to give to you, because I love you.” He just said so many beautiful things.

Afterwards, I thought, “Here I am. I’ve lost him money now three times, and he wants to continue to give to me.” It broke me, Sasha. It broke me. The kindness, knowing that he still wanted to give even though he knew I trusted the wrong people with his money. By the way, all those companies are alive to this day, and they made the founders a lot of money. It’s just the initial shareholders who lost with me and my brother.

That overwhelming kindness had such an impact on me. I went into hiding. I said, “I’m done. I need to hole myself up in a studio apartment. I don’t want to see the world. I don’t want to interact with it anymore.” Literally, for two years, all I did was meditate. I mean, literally, that’s all I did. I would meditate from morning to night. I might have a drink of water, have a bite, and go right back into meditating.

Things occurred. I didn’t know anything about meditation. I didn’t have any expectations. All I wanted to do was revisit the people who showed such kindness, thank them, say I’m sorry, and try to find forgiveness and forgive all the people who created so much loss for so many good souls. It was a process.

From there, that process led to such overwhelming feelings inside that I wanted to share that. So I imagined taking in all this energy from all that is, and then blowing it out over the world, kind of like sharing all the good that could come from within me to the rest of the world. From there, I started to feel different and reach levels of peace, even inner awareness on some level.

That migrated into feelings that I wanted to expand on. The feeling might be, let’s say, I give you a hug. Well, I can give you a hug. How does that feel? Can I, in the next hug, make it a little deeper feeling? How does that feel? Just like a breath. How many times do you think you could make a hug feel even stronger? Well, now do that on every breath for 10 hours. So every breath, you’re trying to take that feeling higher. Once you do that, feeling starts to release chemicals through your body, and things started to really occur.

From there, I started to see energy. I’d always do this in a dark room with my eyes open. Unlike a lot of meditators today, I did it with my eyes open. Then I’d fog them up a little bit and have a sliver of light coming into the room. I’d imagine that light being God’s beautiful energy. I’d imagine that coming into my forehead and filling me up.

You do that for six months, and I almost guarantee you will see that light become a golden rod. You’ll think it’s real now, and it’ll move into you. Sooner or later, it starts happening without you even doing it. Rods of light flying through the walls, hitting you in the head, and there are moments of instant ecstasy. Bam. Ecstasy. Ecstasy. Every once in a while, it starts to affect you that way.

One day, I was towel drying. I was literally in my shower. I got out, and my back was to the mirror where I brushed my teeth. I was towel drying with my towel moving from my left to my right, from my shoulder to the upper portion of my right shoulder. I just started pulling it up, and bam, a big golden rod went right through the back of my neck, down my body, torso, into the ground, and immediately expanded into a circle. Bam. Outward.

All I could see was white energy, filament. Then, from there, amazing things. It was just instant peace at a level that’s indescribable, instant connectivity on a level that’s indescribable, instant Christ consciousness at a level that’s indescribable. I reviewed almost every moment of my life. I was able to forgive, and love, and peace, and all of it.

When I came out of it, I was screaming. My fingers were trying to reach the ceiling. I was on my tippy-toes, and I was crying. I was screaming in ecstasy. I couldn’t believe it. I can’t describe it. There’s no description for something like this.

For the next three months, I experienced things that are impossible to duplicate, almost impossible to believe. But they occurred, and I can’t duplicate them. I was shown many different things. One day, I was given kind of like a Rain Man brain. You see the movie Rain Man, where you throw up a thousand toothpicks, and you wonder why he could count them all so fast? Because your brain is capable of seeing them all individually with the same attention.

Right now, if I look at something, I can try to give the attention to the thing I’m focusing on, but the thing beside it, I can’t. It’s separate. I need to focus on these things separately. Well, your brain is capable of doing that.

Other things, music. I was shown a time where I created a piece of music where there were 17 layers to the music. Energy beings. What do they look like? Have you ever seen the movie Star Trek, when they phase in and out? Imagine that energy being translucent. You can see through it. It takes a shape of you or me, and the outer rim of it all looks like it’s sparkly. So translucent, with a kind of energy flow from it.

I saw beings walk around me, which was the strangest thing, because they never talked to me. They never talked to me. I did have a little dog at the time. This squid came out of the wall. It looked like a squid. I don’t know what else to call it. It came out of the ceiling, hovered around my finger, and my finger started to turn into a vortex of energy molecules. My arms started to disappear and went green and brown, and the vortex of energy, like a whirlwind, my arm just disappeared.

Then, boom, it was back, and I couldn’t believe it. I was like, “This is impossible.” I went to touch my dog’s ear. I started touching the dog. I couldn’t stop grabbing its ear. I touched the dog’s tail. I just had to get verification with some other being that this was occurring, and my dog was the only thing there. So that was the only proof I got.

I can’t give you proof that it occurred. I couldn’t even tell you, was it my own energy? I don’t know. Was I in some way creating this kind of energy structure that was doing this? Maybe. I don’t know. I can’t explain so much of what occurred because I was at a level where my mind was dealing with high thoughts.

I kind of understood the idea of Christ instantly. When he said, what I believe he said, which would be the most impactful because it’s the highest level of thought, “Forgive them, Lord. They know not what they do.” At a higher level, you forgive everything. Why? It’s like an ant comes to bite you. It’s not looking to harm you. It doesn’t know it’s going to harm you per se. It’s just doing what it does naturally.

Human beings, in many ways, are like that. You’ve got to forgive them. If they knew that they were connected with everything, like a spiderweb, you’re an angle, you’re connected to the whole web. So if you destroy somebody else’s web, you’re going to fall off. You might not think so, but that’s only because you’re an angle. You see yourself differently.

It’s kind of like being in a piece of paper where you’re floating out of it, and you’ve got a little light bulb on your head, and you’re out of the paper, and you’re like, “Hmm, look at me. I can’t see it. I must be alone here.” No, you’ve still got the string connected to the paper, which is part of everything. You might not know it, but once it becomes a part of your being, it is.

If you knew that at that level, you wouldn’t harm other people. You wouldn’t lie to yourself. You wouldn’t do it because you’d know. You’d know it only affects you at some level. It affects them, but it affects you. So lies would become a thing of the past. You would help the world because I knew this. I knew this was where we needed to go as a society.

I wanted to write this down in a book, and I wrote The Bible to Self-Awareness. Another thing I have not published. Why not? There are a couple reasons, but the main reason is that the word karma has a meaning to it that also says that you’re going to have a balance that’s going to occur because of your being. Okay, you do something wrong. There’s going to be a reaction.

But at the highest level, I don’t know whether that’s true or not. Once I understood that I didn’t know whether that was true or not, I then had to question everything else. I didn’t want to put out anything until I had more awareness, and I’m still gaining awareness.

I wrote that in 2004. I had my Kundalini in October of 2004. I’m still gaining awareness. I take things deeper. I don’t want to be the focal point of the world when I’m not absolutely 100% sure. I’ve always dreamed of, at some point, going in and being able to take a couple years off again and meditate to that degree.

That’s insane talk because, literally, you give up your life at that point. But the rewards are so vast that it’s worth it. Believe me. But I don’t know if you can acquire that twice. I don’t know if you’re supposed to acquire that twice, or if there’s a level of, once you’ve acquired it, you can maintain that.

I’ve heard that there are masters out there who are able to maintain those levels. I don’t know. I haven’t spoken to other people to the point where I believe what they’re saying is true at that level. People talk about a Kundalini and awareness today, and I’m sure there are. That’s different for all of us because we all have bridges to that, right? And this all day in each of us is going to have a little different bridge to that level of awareness or higher levels of awareness.

So I don’t really know. For example, we talk about dimensions. I can give you way more dimensions than the dimensions that we talk about today. Does that mean there are more than three or four dimensions? Are there more than 10 dimensions? Some people are talking automatically, there might be 12 dimensions, 17 dimensions. I don’t know.

But here’s a dimension. What if in one dimension God exists, and in another dimension God doesn’t exist? Here’s another dimension. What if in one dimension God cannot separate its parts into pieces, and in another dimension God can separate its parts into pieces? I’m just giving you an example. So dimensions, to me, are kind of infinite in possibilities.

Maybe those possibilities, and how we’re going to evolve into infinity, will exist on some level. So I don’t want to believe that karma is a yay or nay. It’s kind of like the idea of a dimension. Maybe in one dimension there is karma, but maybe in one dimension there is no karma. Who’s to say I’m the great teacher who can tell you anything? I’m just not that smart, Sasha.

Speaker 1 – Sasha:
Or maybe you’re a humble writer. Given all of your writing experiences, is there one major lesson learned that stands out in your lifetime today?

Speaker 2 – Douglas Newsom:
Is there anything that stands out in all my writings?

Speaker 1 – Sasha:
Right, a lesson learned. One thing you touched upon was that you don’t want to appear to be the authoritative source on a topic. At the same time, that ties into research, and you’re talking about it from your perspective.

Speaker 2 – Douglas Newsom:
I always wanted to help others bring their authority to the table. There were many opportunities in my life where I could have stood on stages. One was in music. I was interviewed to be on television on three different mediums where they really wanted to do something with me. But I never really wanted that limelight per se, Sasha.

My goal has been to create a system where you become a limelight, because I think that changes a person. I didn’t want it to change me, where my focus wasn’t about building something for everybody, without me really being the dominant theme. It works for me.

But what have I learned? What’s the greatest thing I learned in all my writing? That’s a good question, because I’ve never thought about that before. And now we have AI, right? It does so much, so much of the writing and the thinking for people, and that scares me a little bit because I see society waning as a result if people allow something else to do a lot of the work.

I think that’s how societies fail, really. Ultimately, if we have a society where we create a tool that then creates itself, or becomes so nuanced that we can’t figure it out and develop it any further, then we really kind of fall behind. The tool then takes over. As we fall behind, we become more prone to allowing things to occur.

Like a culture: if you’re dominant, you take over another culture, through war or whatever, and then there’s peace for a long, long time. You kind of forget the tactics of war, and then something comes in, attacks you, and takes your world away. Well, this might be the same with knowledge. If you don’t continue to expand that, and you allow something else to do the work for you, then just like a society that has maintained peace for so long that it doesn’t understand war, you get taken over by those who find the barriers that aren’t in place, or ways in because you aren’t ready for it, because you had such a long period of sleep.

It might be the same with information. That’s a worry, that society is going to go that route. But then it goes in cycles. In one million-year period, maybe it’s supposed to go like that, where you have a society that grows up, goes through these patterns, then falls away. Then another one comes up, takes its place, learns something, and falls away. We might have had many civilizations before the ones they report about to us in our education system. There might have been civilizations that lived 50,000 years ago, a million years ago, 50 million years ago, that might have gone through the same sorts of experiences. It’s just that they’re so old we can’t see the remnants of that information.

Is there any dominant theme, any important thing that comes from my works? Not really. I don’t reread them. I don’t go into those works again. They’ve been put away for a long, long time. I kind of keep the past to the past. I’m not one of those people who lives in the past. I live in the future.

I’ve just been through so many difficult moments in my life. I don’t want to think about the past. I have for periods of time, but it doesn’t do you really any good. So I’m either living here now, or my mind is worrying about something that’s possible in the future. The past is gone. I just don’t reside there.

Speaker 1 – Sasha:
For a writing tip, do you have a writing tip that you were given or that you discovered along the way of writing?

Speaker 2 – Douglas Newsom:
Interestingly enough, my brother and I aren’t the kind of people who read directions. You’re not going to find me reading the directions on how to put together a shelf. My brother was the same way when he built BBS Radio. That’s why it’s so uniquely different. He didn’t go into radio networks and analyze them so he could build BBS Radio. It all kind of came about organically.

Donald and I are very much like that. We don’t really read the words and works of others to come to an overall understanding. We kind of evolve it ourselves. It’s fun that way. It can be challenging that way, because the best way to learn is to find a mentor who’s been there and done that, and takes you through the pitfalls, and you probably get ahead much quicker. But my brother and I haven’t utilized mentors, instructions, or things like that to move ahead.

Speaker 1 – Sasha:
Well, you’re a wonderful orator. As for writing, do you have a favorite word?

Speaker 2 – Douglas Newsom:
The last book I read, even though this is through and out there, is called The Bible to Self-Awareness. Hey, look at The Disappearance of the Universe by Gary Renard. Interesting book. A lot of interesting books are out there, but that’s an interesting read.

Speaker 1 – Sasha:
Tying back all of the blogging, article writing, and other types of writing you do, you also feature your work on bbsradio.com. Can you talk about how writers and authors could benefit by contributing, and then the GoFundMe initiative that you’re hosting at the moment?

Speaker 2 – Douglas Newsom:
Sure. We’re right now developing out a new website. We have five servers, and it’s going to really allow us to feature information and make that information available in search parameters across a lot of websites and feeds. So we’re going to expand into not just audio and video, but also writing, and feature that information on bbsradio.tv because it’s important. That’s just a medium we want to utilize to get information out to the public.

Anybody who likes to write articles would be very welcome on bbsradio.tv. It’ll take us a while to develop this new website. It’s going to be very good. It’s going to be very appealing. We’ve got some phenomenal people working on it. I think it’s going to bring a lot of attention to anybody who wishes to write articles and put them on BBS Radio’s website. There’s going to be a whole section that features just writers, but that’s all something that’s coming. So just check back on bbsradio.com as we move forward.

We could use your support. We really could. It’s a difficult thing to ask for support. We do need help financially to expand this network in a time when AI is really the driving force behind the new developments. If we don’t match that pace, or if we don’t start utilizing those technologies, we’re going to be kind of left behind.

Every company has to, every few years, really invest in upgrading. We’re at that stage. It’s costly. It’s more money than my brother and I can give to the company. My brother and I have given this company probably just in the past couple of years $100,000 out of our own money, just to make sure it continues to survive.

But there comes a point where you just can’t do that, and you need outside help. The pace to implement change can’t take years. If it were to take two or three years because we were doing it ourselves, we would once again be behind the eight ball, and we would probably fail.

My brother and I have been doing this for 25 years, and we don’t intend to fail or go the way of the dodo bird like most of the companies in this industry have. So we’re really reaching out to our audience and people who love the network, who have been inspired by our hosts, who have had information help them or help their friends.

We encourage you to please go to bbsradio.com. There’s a little GoFundMe image on the right side of the homepage of bbsradio.com, like in boy, boy, Sam. Click on the GoFundMe link and help us if you can. We would appreciate it.

If you can’t support us, just go to the website. Maybe write a host. Just acknowledge you’ve heard information that you like. That is the most impactful support we can get. We really love it when you email our hosts and encourage them. We want to thank you just for listening, just for being a part of our community, for taking the time just to listen to the show and me ranting. We truly appreciate that.

Speaker 1 – Sasha:
Doug, we’re going to end with a recreational question. When you’re writing, is there anything that you do while you’re writing? Do you have a ritual? Are you having a cup of coffee, music in the background? What do you do?

Speaker 2 – Douglas Newsom:
I usually have noise around me. Isn’t that interesting? A lot of people want a quiet space when they write. I kind of like activity around me because I’ve always been where there are a lot of people and a lot of things happening. I really couldn’t escape. There was a period when I could escape, which I told you about.

So I put myself in a writing kind of offshoot where all that activity is happening around me. Then I would just start to put thoughts in my head, ideas, and I’d make bullet points. So I’d usually have a cup of coffee, absolutely. I’d think of a theme, an understanding, or a phrase that could move the information forward. Then you’ve just got to write. You’ve just got to go at it.

Afterwards, you’ll go back through it. You might go back through it a lot of times. Unlike most people who put together an outline, and I know you’ve heard this a lot, the outline, who are the characters? What are their parts? What is their mission? Where are they going? What is the end result of this whole thing? You have it all mapped out. I’ve never been one of those people who did that. I always wanted the information to kind of flow from me.

So it would just be an environment where there was noise, maybe a Denny’s restaurant. I did most of my writing at Denny’s restaurant. Can you believe that? I got a cup of coffee. There was noise around me, and I could just write. Yeah. Done.

Speaker 1 – Sasha:
Thank you for sharing your story and your writing insights.

Speaker 2 – Douglas Newsom:
Well, thank you. Thank you, Sasha. I truly appreciate you allowing me to be a guest on your show. Thank you. Thank you very much. I truly appreciate you and your audience. Thank you. Thank you for taking the time to listen.