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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>Welcome to the Living the Dream podcast with Curveball. If you believe you can achieve.
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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>Welcome, to the Living the Dream with Curveball podcast, a show where I interview guests that teach, motivate, and inspire. Today's guest is Chris Rivers. Chris is a former US army officer and combat veteran. He enlisted when he was 17 and served in Iraq and Afghanistan. After his first deployment, he received a, degree at West Point.
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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>Then he returned to serve again, and after that he got his graduate degree at Georgetown. Chris career spans military leadership, US Diplomacy, corporate strategy, and also a run for state office where he knocked on 9,000 doors. He is also the author of the book, you shouldn't have to Kill to Get Ahead. So we're going to be talking to Chris. And by the way, Chris, thank you for your service.
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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>And why don't you start off by telling everybody a little bit about yourself.
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> Chris Rivers>Yeah, and thanks for having me on the show, and thanks for that introduction. So I think the introduction gets most of it, but what isn't in there is sort of what's been animating all of those life choices along the way. And at the end of the day, when I was a little kid, I just really loved what it felt like to help other people. And as I made my way through the army, through my diplomatic time, through my time in the private sector, it just seemed like more and more people need help. And the mechanisms that we have to help is politics. And it's kind of broken right now.
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> Chris Rivers>And so that's my current mission, is to help fix the systems that really should be here to help us all, but haven't been working for quite some time.
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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>Well, let's talk about what got, you into the military in the first place.
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> Chris Rivers>Yeah, that, you know, I grew up in a sort of forgotten factory town in Connecticut. It's called Naugatuck. To imagine that, just imagine the War of the Worlds movie that Tom Cruise was in, the sort of, like, 2005, I think, remake of it. And that scene where the aliens come out and it's supposed to be destroyed. Boston, that scene was filmed in my hometown. And that was just. The life we were living is kind of just a destroyed old factory town. And I was in School when 911 happened, and I saw the attacks on TV and just realized that, hey, we're about to enter into this environment where we need people to protect other people. And I knew I wanted to do that. I also knew I wanted to go get a college education. And I kind of figured when I was graduating high school, hey, why not do both at the same time. And it just turned out that enlisting in the army in 2003 also meant deploying to Operation Iraqi Freedom before I got to go to college. But at the end of the day it was really 9, 11 and just the desire to help people and also a desire to go get a college education were really the two guiding forces that led me to college in the first place.
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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>Well, talk about the experiences in your early life in military service, that shaped the way that, that you see leadership and opportunities in America today.
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> Chris Rivers>Yeah, I think the biggest things that I got to see, especially in the early days of my military service was, and this is one of the things that most people don't understand about the military is that we have people who join the military from all 50 states, we have people from all the territories, we have people who aren't even American that sign up to join the military. And the military is this ultimate melting pot where you get to see and meet people from all over the country. And all the stereotypes that we grow up with just kind of disappear. Because you are all a part of this organization trying to do one mission in a sort of unique culture. And then you take that and you go put some 18 year old kid who grew up, never really traveled more than 15, 30 minutes away from the town he grew up in and go put him in the middle of a country like Kuwait or southern Iraq. And yeah, there's a language barrier, there's a cultural barrier, but you know what, at the end of the day, like we're all human beings and the people who were in those environments, who were local, were doing the same sorts of things that you or I would do if we were in that same situation. They're trying to survive to the next day, they're trying to provide for their family, they're trying to forge some sort of path out.
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> Chris Rivers>They want to keep working, they want to have a life of meaning. And so at the end of the day, the thing that I really, when I look back in my early days, my military service, whether it's a country, combat tours or the training and the people I got exposed to, the thing I remember most is just how much at the end of the day, when you strip away the things that we all tend to look at, accents, culture, language, we have so much more unites us as just human beings all around this planet than divide us, but yet we tend to focus on what divides us.
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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>Well, I know, what do you mean when you say people are doing the right thing, but still falling behind. Explain what you mean by that and why that's happening.
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> Chris Rivers>Yeah, so the right thing, I, write about this a lot in the book is, hey, we're a meritocracy. And the only thing you have to do to get ahead in this country is sort of put your head down and work hard and you will make it. And if you're not working or if you're not making it, then the answer is just work harder. And we hear about this all the time from pundits, from the extremely wealthy, from a whole bunch of folks all throughout our society. And I really believe that growing up, I really believed if you just put your head down, work hard, and you have, just a little bit of talent, you can make it. And the reality is we are working more hours today than almost any time in American history. On, terms of the average worker. We are producing way more per hour than, than any time in American history. And workers are getting paid less. And so the idea that you could just put your head down and work and everything will just work out, that you'll spend 20 years at a company, that you'll have a pension, that you'll be able to retire at a reasonable time and have a decent living, just isn't true anymore. And it's not true because we made it not true. Decisions that we made back in the 1980s to reorient the entire economy towards one goal, and that's maximizing corporate profits. And that has had this sort of second and third order effects where if you really want to maximize profits as a large multinational corporation, most companies, a huge part of their expenses are salaries. And so you have to find ways to hold them flat, or you have to find ways to reduce headcount, or you have to find ways to do more with less. And they've been doing that now for four, four decades. And so we're at a point where corporate profits have never been higher, but the people who actually get to share in that wealth has never really been fewer as a percentage of the overall country. And so that's what I mean when we say people are doing the right thing. People are working hard, people are putting their head down and putting the work in, but they're not getting the sort of basic benefits out of it. And I'll just leave you with one stop for this one answer. The sort of median household income right now is about $55,000 for the entire country. It might be 60,000 by the time we're talking about it right now versus last year when the data was processed. If worker productivity would have kept up with, or if wages would kept up with productivity of the workers, then the median household income should be well over $90,000. That's per household. So per couple or even per person, if you really want to think about it that way. That's how much we have taken from sort of your average worker who's working incredibly hard, and that money is going somewhere. We have doubled corporate profits in the same timeframe. So that's what I mean when I say you could do all the right things. You can put down, you can put your head down and work incredibly hard, but it doesn't mean anymore that it's going to just work out. Definitely true for my grandparents generation, sort of true for my parents generation, not true for everyone else.
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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>Okay, well, I know that you ran for state office, knocked on 9,000 doors, so tell the listeners about that experience. And how did knocking on 9,000 doors, you know, get you to see, you know, how Americans are feeling right now?
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> Chris Rivers>Yeah, so the two races I ran were in 2022 and 2024. And 2024 was one of the most wild political campaigns in American history. And getting to go knock on doors in the middle of all that, one of the things I realized, and I am a registered Democrat who lives in a very sort of conservative state House district I was running for. What I realized is, again, when you actually go talk to people face to face, not engage with them, on social media, not just pretend like, you know, what they automatically believe when you actually go talk to them face to face, the actual concerns that most people have, regardless of what political label they put on themselves, is overall affordability. There isn't like the second and third ones on their list are so far behind that it's not even close. And yet the sort of national debate and how our, national media and our national campaigns cover what they think people want to hear is totally different than that. They tend to cover the horse race, they tend to cover the gaffes that people make. The sort of coverage that Biden's debate appearance got versus what people were actually saying at the doors, totally different. And his appearance on that debate and his performance in that debate was objectively bad. But what most people were saying at the doors was, I can't believe we have to choose between these two. And yet the national conversation was just all the who's talking to who about whether or not you should drop out or whatnot. Most Americans just want a better choice than either of them. And so at the end of the day, I think most Americans, when you go talk to them at the doors, which, by the way, is a sort of awkward conversation, you go talk to strangers, most people think you're selling solar panels or something. And then out of your mouth is, hey, I'm running for office, trying to represent you in the state capitol. What problem do you think you need solved? Most people haven't had that question asked to them in 20 years. And then when they do start talking, their concerns are not at all typically reflected in the sort of news of the day that you hear on national media outlets. And that was part of one of the aha moments that, like, something is broken in all of this that led me to writing the book in the first place.
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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>Speaking of the book, you shouldn't have to kill to get ahead. talk to listeners about what inspired you to write it, what we can expect when we read it, where to get it, and, you know about why you chose the title.
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> Chris Rivers>Yeah. So there's a lot to unpack there. I chose to wrote it because coming out of the 2024 election, after having knocked on thousands of doors like I was just talking about, I was just thinking, I can't believe we chose to go down this direction again. And it was interesting, standing at the polls on election day. The first half of the day as a Democrat felt fine. And then as the second half of the day went on here in Connecticut, it's just people who are genuinely angry and angrier and angrier started showing up. And my wife was activated. She's on active duty right now, or she was at the, time. And I was just me at home along with the dog. I was just figuring, man, I need to try to get the ideas of how I think we got to now out of my head and down on paper. And I started out as genuinely a mental health exercise. And that took the shape of basically three sections in the book that you can expect. The first section is my life story. So you can understand the sort of upbringing I had and where I'm coming from, because we all have our biases. And the point I try to make in that part is as proud of my military service as I am, it shouldn't have been the primary path people had to get out of the economic situation that I was born into. You shouldn't have to go to war in order to get ahead, is the first point. The second part of the book really gives what I think every American should understand about the decisions that have been made. And there's plenty of Blame to go around for both major parties, for major political figures we all know the names of, but decisions that have been made and reinforced for 40 years that get us to now explain in a way where you don't have to have a background in political science to understand it, you don't have to have a background economics to understand it. And I just wanted to get it all out there so people can see behind the curtain. And once you realize that, hey, we have more economic inequality now than what led to the French Revolution, and yet that level of inequality typically leads to something bad. And I'll get to that, I guess, in a second. But the second point I'm just making is really, people shouldn't have to work themselves to death to get ahead. And that's the second meaning of the overall title of the book, you shouldn't have to kill to get Ahead. And then the third part of the book is really the hope part. It's a whole series of solutions to the problems that are identified to make the point. Not to say it's end all, be all have to be my agenda, but I just wanted the reader to understand there are solutions. But it also boils down to we have to get more people involved.
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> Chris Rivers>We have to get more people educated in what is really going on. And if we got more people involved, more people educated, more people participating, then the opportunity to actually fix the underlying broken systems is there in spades, and we can do it. It's not rocket science.
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> Chris Rivers>It's actually relatively simple in concept, hard execution sort of stuff. And so the problem I'm seeing in the country is when I first started writing the book, one in five Americans thought we needed to use violence to correct our political course. And that was true along the left and right. By the time I finished writing the book, it was one in three. And so the last part of you shouldn't have to kill to get ahead is this level of inequality, this level of systems being broken tends to lead to something bad. And more and more people are feeling like we should just go do the bad thing of civil strife, of using violence or whatever to try to fix our problems. And I just tried to make the point that nothing good comes out of that. I've been to war a couple times.
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> Chris Rivers>Violence is not the answer. Fixing the underlying problems is. And we could just choose to do that.
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> Chris Rivers>We don't have to let it get so bad. So that's the sort of book part background mmr, part political analysis, part what I hope that people really cling on to is a hope for a better future in a real set of solutions. And you can get it anywhere. Books are sold online. It's available paperback, hardcover and audiobook. Now.
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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>Well, talk about what we can do to rebuild trust in our community's institution and each other when people are feeling so disconnected.
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> Chris Rivers>Yeah, I actually think that the answer is in the question in this one. So the biggest problem I think we have is how disconnected people feel. We invented all these social media platforms and all these other platforms in theory at first to get people to be more connected. And people have never been more lonely than they are today. And I really think the ultimate antidote to all of that is to put the phone down and go talk to each other as human beings once again. It will take some time.
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> Chris Rivers>It takes basically intervention. It'll take us all swallowing our pride a little bit. But I think we all have family members or friends that we sort of lost touch with over the last 10 or 15 years because of politics. And that wasn't the way it used to be. And so if we really want to start healing as a country, we have to start as average everyday Americans, start connecting with each other again offline and then take that and be able to. And I have pro tips for this all throughout the book. How to re engage with each other in a meaningful way. But take that approach. And don't just reconnect with your friends and family, but start there. But then reconnect with your neighbors, reconnect with community members, reconnect with folks that you disagree with, and start having meaningful conversations again. And then more importantly, I think, or just as importantly is find people. If you're politically engaged and you have friends or family members that just aren't that, they're just tuning it all out and they don't vote. Well, in the 2024 election, more people didn't vote than voted for either candidate. And if you want to change politics for an entire generation, convince 1 in 10 of the 93 million Americans that didn't vote to vote or that there's something to vote for and you are changing politics inherently. And so I guess there's really two answers to this question. The first one is reconnect with your loved ones, reconnect with your family members, reconnect with community members in a face to face human sort of way. And then secondly, don't be afraid to engage in politics. Use those connections to say, hey, if you're on the sideline, get off the sideline, get involved. And if you're on alternate sort of sides of the teams that we all pick for political reasons. Ignore that for a second. Just talk about what actually each of you want and why you want it. And I think you'll find a lot more common ground. If we start there, then I think we have a really good chance of healing.
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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>You talk a lot about belonging. Why is belonging a leadership issue and how does it shape the future of this country?
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> Chris Rivers>So I think belonging is a leadership issue because one of the fundamental things that leaders, good leaders do is they make the safe or they make the place safe for people to be able to feel empowered, to go out and live to their true capability, to be able to take some risk. Because we as human beings, we want to belong to groups.
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> Chris Rivers>This is just part of what it meant to be early human beings. It's built heavy into our psychology and physiology makeup. We want to belong and good leaders will find ways to encourage us all to belong and to allow other people to belong. And terrible leaders can get short term benefits, but long term it hurts. You can still make a group and have a sense of belonging that is about exclusion, but that's a losing sort of paradigm because if you start making about exclusion instead of inclusion, then you have to get really fine about making it, a tier, making it hierarchical about who's in, who's out of every level of that. And you never feel safe, you never feel secure when you do that. And unfortunately, our politics over the last especially 10 years has been very much about what group are you in and what group is your enemy, for lack of a better word, I hate to use that word. And that's just a recipe for ripping ourselves apart. And so if you want to go find really good leaders, I don't care what political party they identify with, but look for the ones in politics who are building bigger tents, who aren't saying, here is the group that you have to blame, here's the group that you have to look at for all of your problems. Those are, when leaders start doing that, they aren't offering solutions anymore. They're just offering identity based on everything that is wrong instead of focusing on identity based on what we actually have in common.
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> Chris Rivers>And so that's why it's really just a huge part of what leadership means is to build that safe place for us all to come together. And it's something that we all, I think, need to really keep on top of and only support leaders who are doing that.
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> Chris Rivers>When we start supporting leaders who are excluding other people, then it's a recipe for us ripping ourselves apart at some point, because that line will forever be moving.
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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>Well, talk, about the best, the biggest misconceptions about the American dream. You see, today I think the
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> Chris Rivers>biggest misconception, I hate that this is one, but it's that America is meant to be a land of opportunity. It's meant to be a melting pot. It is meant to be truly a land where you can work as hard as you want to and, make whatever you want of yourself. Unfortunately, today, the most important indicator of how much money you will make or how far you will make it in your career is however much money your parents had. We have less social and economic mobility in our country today than other countries that still have caste systems and aristocracies have. And the Data is just 180 degrees, contradicting the sort of myth and that can only stand for so long. And I think the more people that know that, I think we all feel it in some way. I think we all feel that we don't have as many opportunities as previous generations had.
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> Chris Rivers>I think we all feel that we all are working incredibly hard and that the system isn't quite fair, especially as certain billionaires are very much in your face about how much they're spending money and how much money they have to spend. And so at the end of the day, the biggest myth is the myth of meritocracy. And that just ignores all the benefits that people who are born in more wealthy communities have versus people who are born in less wealthy communities. The better schools, the better networks, the more opportunities, the more opportunities to be wrong and still be okay. It is a real difference maker, far more important than actually how much talent and work ethic you have.
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> Chris Rivers>And that's unfortunate.
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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>Where you've lived at the extremes of American, life, from combat zones to corporate strategy to diploma and politics. What is the common thread you see across all of those extreme forms of life?
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> Chris Rivers>I think the commonality across all of them is that, ah, everything is basically a human centered business at the end of the day. Whether it's warfare, whether it's diplomacy, whether it's corporate strategy, at the end of the day, each of those things are just a way of sending human beings working together to achieve some goal. And the more that you can strip the complicated down to make it understandable, the more you can empower the people around you to be on your team.
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> Chris Rivers>And the more you can take people from crazy different backgrounds that maybe have crazy different value systems and actually get them working together to achieve a common goal. And that's something that I think we used to have more of in the United States than we have today, but it's something we definitely need more of in the future. And so you're right that living out extremes offers you a, lens into what's important and what's not. And I'm here to tell everyone that basically what's not important is what we spend most of our time focused on. What is important is whatever goal we're trying to achieve and who we're trying to achieve it with. And when you can unlock that, when you can build a team out of anyone that you have around you, because people believe in the goal and they believe in each other, then you have something truly special that can survive any of the chaos that is coming to you, whether it's corporate chaos, international relations chaos, or even chaos on the battlefield.
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> Chris Rivers>It's really those bonds of human connection and having a overarching North Star goal, that's what keeps you moving through it.
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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>Well, for listeners who are listening right now that might feel overwhelmed by the state of the country, what's one practical step, you recommend they take to feel more agency and clarity?
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> Chris Rivers>Yeah, I think the biggest practical step people can take is take a deep breath. Usually when people start feeling overwhelmed, and there's reasons, there's genuine reasons to feel overwhelmed right now. I will start there. But whether it's social media, whether it's news coming your way, whatever it is, the best thing you can do is just pause for a second. Our brains love constant dopamine hits and other things that happen chemically in the brain. The way to slow it all down is take a deep breath and give it some time, and then decide what to do. And that is true whether it's politics, social media, something going on in your face. The, what I used to do in lifeguard training way back in the day is part of the reason why people panic when they're in the water is because they're in an environment that they're not comfortable in. If you're feeling overwhelmed, you're in an environment you're not comfortable in, whether that's mentally, physically, whatnot. Get out of that environment just for a few seconds, for a few minutes, then regroup, then go back at it. You will be a lot less overwhelmed and able to see a lot more clearly.
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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>Tell us about any upcoming projects that you're working on that listeners need to be aware of.
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> Chris Rivers>Yeah, so I have a YouTube channel that's I'm really calling the Beginning of a Change Maker Initiative. So the whole point where I write the book is really to get people inspired to become part of the change, to build a better version of the country than what we've had for the last couple decades. And the book is a good starting spot. but there's more information that people need to know or there's more info, of what's going on that people probably need to know. And so I start a YouTube channel to help describe that. And I eventually want to get that to a place where I can help train people how to engage, how to be informed citizens, how to engage in the sort of civic way that our country was built on, in a way that doesn't judge. Because we have done a terrible job of teaching civics in our country for a very long time. And I'm not here to judge anyone. I'm not even here to tell you what values you should have. I'm not here to tell you what you need to believe politically in order to be part of that change. I'm just here to empower people. And so all of those updates, whether it's where to find the book, how the latest and greatest of the Changemaker initiative, all of that lives on my website, ChrisRivers.com so. So everyone can kind of keep up with what I'm doing there.
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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>Well, that was gonna be my next question. Your website. So close us out with some final thoughts.
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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>Maybe if that was something I forgot to talk about that you would like to discuss, or any final thoughts you have for the listeners.
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> Chris Rivers>I think my biggest final thought is two things.
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> Chris Rivers>One, I just wanna thank you for hosting this. I love your podcast and I'm happy to be on it. Two, is really everyone listening to this? You can be part of the change. I think for too long, us Americans have tried to find some other group that will help fix things, whether it's the corporate CEOs, the corporate leaders, or the court system, or some other group in the military to step in or whatnot. And I just want to kind of empower everyone to say, you are absolutely a part of the change. And don't let not knowing what to do about that stop you. There's a lot of good educational material out there. There's a lot of things that you can learn, pick up, engage with, and don't be afraid to say you don't know, because we all started there at some point along the way. So get educated, get informed, and be part of the change.
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> Chris Rivers>Everyone can do it tomorrow. Is there for anyone to change?
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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>Absolutely. And I love everything that you're doing. Once again, thank you for your service and listeners. Please pick up that book. Visit chrisrivers.com follow rape review Share this episode to as many people as possible. Also, drop us a line. Leave us a review. Sign up for the newsletter. If you haven't done so, you could do that@www.craveball uh.337.com thank you for listening and supporting the show. And Chris, thank you for all that you do. And thank you for joining me.
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> Chris Rivers>Thank you.
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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>For more information on the Living the Dream with Curveball Podcast, visit www.craveball337.com until next time, keep living the dream.