April 30, 2024

Living the dream with author, documentary film maker, and health expert Anthony Carter

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Dive into the inspirational journey of Anthony Carter, a man on a mission to revolutionize black

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> Speaker A>Welcome, um, to the living the dream podcast with curveball. Um, if you believe you can achieve Chee Chee, welcome to the living a dream with Curveball podcast, a show where I interview guests that teach, motivate and inspire.

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> Speaker A>Today we're going to be talking to creative and innovative leader Anthony Carter. Anthony basically focuses on writing, podcasting, and documentary filmmaking.

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> Speaker A>When he writes, he writes about black male mental health and relationships and money. So he's really successful.

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> Speaker A>We're going to be talking to him about everything that he's up to and his films and, and books and stuff like that and what he's got coming up. So, Anthony, thank you so much for joining me today.

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> Anthony Carter>No problem. Thank you for having me. Good evening. How are you doing?

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> Speaker A>Well, why don't you start off by telling everybody a little bit about yourself?

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> Anthony Carter>Sure. Um, my name is Anthony Carter. I am a, um, Detroiter.

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> Anthony Carter>Um, raised in motown. My parents moved to, back to Detroit. I was about a year old, so I grew up in Detroit. Went, um, to college in the south, went to Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee. I majored in English. Um, what have I been doing since then? That was many, many years ago.

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> Anthony Carter>I have been since then. I've lived all over the world.

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> Anthony Carter>I've lived in Japan, I've lived in new, uh, York City. I've lived in Brixton, in Atlanta.

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> Anthony Carter>I've toured. I've been in beauty and the beast. I've done a lot of writing. What I'm focusing on these days is saving black men. And what I mean by that is, um, helping them eliminate hypertension without medication and the use and the addition of a whole food plant based diet.

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> Speaker A>Yes, since you mentioned that, a, uh, plant based diet, go ahead and explain to your journey why you got started on that.

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> Anthony Carter>Sure. Uh, so I'm a vegan. I'm a whole food plant based, uh, vegan. I've been that now for, I would say I started four years ago, right before the pandemic. And I was kind of a junk food vegan.

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> Anthony Carter>Initially. I was eating a lot of, um, junk because there's a lot of junk you can eat that's vegan. You know, like Fritos and Oreos. That's vegan and people don't know it.

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> Anthony Carter>I was eating a lot of stuff that was not necessarily that great for me. Then I started working with a wonderful coach by the name of Lisa A. Smith, who runs the black health Academy. And she.

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> Anthony Carter>I did a twelve week restart with her. Right.

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> Anthony Carter>And it was twelve weeks. It was no all, no salt, no sugar, and a lot of whole foods. And so, you know, we had to try different foods every week. We were trying a different, uh, m. Like, I didn't even know. I like turnips, right? So that was one of the things I love now that I didn't know then. But I started eating a lot of things, eating things differently. I, uh, started, um. And it turned my health around because I had had a health scare. I had been given the diagnosis. The doctor never said I had hypertension. She just said my blood pressure was extremely high. She had given me the blood pressure test four times in a row, and she was like, I can't believe you haven't had a stroke. I can't believe nothing's happened to you. So they immediately put me on pills, and I immediately tried to. Tried to get off the pills. It took me two years to get off of them, and I got off of them by using a whole food plant based diet and a really great, caring, compassionate community that I surrounded myself.

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> Speaker A>So you say we can't. We cannot moderate ourselves to a healthy life. Why do you feel that way?

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> Anthony Carter>Oh, uh, no. You brought up the dreaded n word. You can.

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> Anthony Carter>No, no, you cannot. This is why, you know, moderation is typically how we get in these situations, right? So, for example, let me tell you a little bit about what I used before I got sued, before I committed to being healthy and turning my life.

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> Anthony Carter>You know, I used to eat the pizza and the hot wings and the, um, chili cheese fries and all that. Now, when my pressure went to have my pressure checked, I went in because I wasn't feeling well. And when I went to have my pressure went in to have my pressure checked, it was about 145, 140 something over 90, which is hot, right? That's super high.

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> Anthony Carter>Now, that didn't just happen with one meal and one french fry. That was years of eating that kind of stuff, right? So it was years of me, quote unquote, moderating, like, okay, I'll just have a few french fries, or I'll order this. These, these, uh, I'll go to wingstop, and I'll get the six piece, but maybe I'll only eat four. Right? So I moderated myself into being unhealthy, and you cannot do this. I cannot do the same thing I did that got me unhealthy. I can't turn around and do the same thing and then expect to turn it around. That doesn't work. So, no, we're not about the moderation.

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> Anthony Carter>We're about, you know, abstinence. And giving up the junk.

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> Speaker A>So, uh, one more question on that junk, then I want to get into your amazing. Your amazing career and all that good stuff. Um, I know that a lot of people talk about the junk. Like, you say that that is put into the food and stuff. Uh, and I know you have a plant based diet. Do you think if that junk was removed from the foods that, uh, it would be okay, or do you just feel like, uh, it's a no go?

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> Anthony Carter>When you say removed, how? What do you mean?

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> Speaker A>Like, you know, all the. All the toxins and stuff. You know, you got toxins in the soil, you got the different things that are put in foods, you know, like the antibiotics and different things that.

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> Anthony Carter>Right.

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> Speaker A>You know, you know, all that stuff.

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> Anthony Carter>Is put into the food so that you get addicted and you like it. Right. There's a reason people like salty, greasy foods. So if you take that out, you know, that would definitely change your diet, and, um, you probably, you know, and it'll change your diet, and it also changed your palate. Right. So, for example, um, I used to be really big on sweets. I grew up eating. I grew up with a grandmother from Texas, and she was always pound cakes and cobblers and cookies and that kind of stuff going. Um, so I got it on is, you know, when, um, I went. When I started with this journey with the no salt and all. No sugar, and I took the sugar out of my diet after. Not. After not having sugar in my diet, I would say 14 days. It usually takes 14 to 15 days. My palate changed, so I didn't, you know, you crave what you consume, and I didn't want that. So I think if you. When you start talking about taking the things out of the food, my thing is, rather than try to find stuff that has stuff taken out, why not just go for the good food anyway, right?

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> Anthony Carter>Why not go for the fruits and the vegetables? I was eating, um, when I lived in California, I had a big mango tree in the front of my house, right? I had two pomegranate trees.

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> Anthony Carter>So I would get. I would pluck mangoes right off the tree in my front yard, and they were just as sweet and just as satisfying as any cookies. So, yeah, you can do it. But that. Ah, you tried to get me on that one. I got you, Curtis.

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> Speaker A>Yeah. I was just kind of curious on it, and great perspective. Let's jump into your career. You know, your documentaries. Tell us about your documentaries, and you've also been up for semifinalists, so kind of take us through that and how we can check them out.

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> Anthony Carter>Okay, so, um, I'm gonna. I'll take you back to the. I guess the quote, the beginning, which is about 30 years ago. Um, I started off as an actor, right? As a singer, then an actor, then a singing actor, and then telling jokes and being on stage. And I moved to New York, and the goal was just to stay on stage as much as humanly possible. And I kept writing and I kept performing. And then at some point, um, during the pandemic, I remember sitting on my couch and thinking, what do I want to do next?

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> Anthony Carter>Like, what? For me, the pandemic.

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> Anthony Carter>Now, I don't know. I can't speak for everybody, but for me, the pandemic, COVID, was a huge reset for me. Right when COVID hit, I looked at my health, I looked at who I wanted to be in the world and what I wanted to have.

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> Anthony Carter>And I started asking myself some hard questions like, well, do you want to live this way? You know? And I started asking myself questions like, well, how do you. What dreams have I put on the back burner that, okay, well, this is the apocalypse, uh, and the end of the world. I don't want to, you know, I don't want them to put me in the pine box without having gone after certain things, right?

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> Anthony Carter>So one of the things I wanted to go after was documentary filmmaking. I always loved documentaries.

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> Anthony Carter>I'd watched a ton of them. Um. Um, I'd met people who made documentary films. I kept saying, one day, I'm gonna do that. One day.

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> Anthony Carter>One day. One day. The pandemic hit in March, and I was in California. And then I would say in August or beginning of September, I was sitting on my couch one Friday, and I said, you know what? I want to dedicate my life to making documentary. Curtis. I didn't know what that meant. I didn't know who I was talking to. I was on my couch one day in Long Beach, California. One Friday. I put that on the universe. And I swear, Monday, three days later, I got a text from a friend of mine who used to be a, um, um, she was a co worker of mine. She'd gone to USC, University of Southern California. He sent me this text with a flyer. And the flyer said, um, do you want to learn filmmaking? Documentary filmmaking. And on the flyer, the class was called documentary filmmaking for social change. So it was a class that was designed for people to make who had been in social work, who wanted to move into using film as another medium to heal, to move the community forward, to get people, um, to have great lives.

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> Anthony Carter>Right? This came in on Monday to my phone. I went to the, um, information meeting two days later, on Wednesday, before we even went to potty break, I gave my credit card. I was like, I'm in. I'm doing this. You know what I was signing up for. Um, got into it, started learning an incredible amount of information about documentaries and how you tell stories and how do you frame shots and how do you do, you know, how do you set moves? And, um, out of that, I did. I ended up doing three documentaries. I did one on, um, black men. And it was. And there was a lot of stuff in that one about. From, um, Bell hooks and James Baldwin and, um, Paul Robeson and, um, Jimi Hendrix. Like, they were all in this short, like, quirky, um, experimental film. The big one that really took off was the one you're talking about, which is ask the old guy. And it's all about my journey going from having, um, this high blood pressure and this awful diagnosis to turning it around. Um, and in turning it around, me going on to Twitter and meeting all these wonderful black vegans, these people who I didn't know, I just met people on Twitter and I said, hey, I'm, um. You know, I'm doing. I have a podcast and I'm doing a movie. Can you do both? And he said, everybody I talked to said, absolutely. So then I was able to shoot, um, different interviews with them from the podcast. We shot this film. We shot the film using zoom, um, my kitchen and the garden in front of my house. And that was back in the end of 2020, the first half of 2021. And it sat on YouTube for a while and kind of languished. And then all of a sudden, last, um, September, September of 23, it just exploded. So it's gone from being like, you know, kind of like out there, another film to now I'm up to 13 awards for this film. I just got one today from Tokyo. I got an email today from Tokyo saying, congratulations. You're an official selection in Tokyo film Festival. So he keeps going and going, man, that is sweet.

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> Speaker A>Congratulations on that.

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> Anthony Carter>Thank you. Thank you.

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> Speaker A>Tell us about the counternarrative project. Uh, tell us what that's all about and what.

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> Speaker A>Why you decided to work on that and what you did with it.

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> Anthony Carter>Counternarrative project is a group of really wonderful m black gay men. And it's all about, um, using all kinds of content, marketing and presentation to tell our stories. Right? A lot of times people tell, I know as a black gay man, people will tell my. There are many people who've told my story, tried to tell it, are trying to tell it now, and they get it all wrong. It's just they. I don't know what. I don't know who, where they're pulling this information from, and. But it goes out into the world. And as you know, with the Internet and everything else, something goes out into the world you don't have any control over. And now with the Internet, um, everybody can have a platform. So with the counter narrative project, it's all about, let's tell our own stories.

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> Anthony Carter>Let's create some narratives that we orchestrate, that we tell from beginning to end, that we tell from soup to next, that we tell from our story.

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> Anthony Carter>From our standpoint, we don't need anybody to tell our story. Um, we can tell our own story. So, with them, I've done, um. I did a podcast for black. I think it's Black World aids day. I think it's in February. I did a podcast for them. Um, on that topic, I'm in a class now that's all about being a content creator. So learning about editing and, um, you know, using TikTok and social media to get the message out. So, yeah, they're a great group.

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> Speaker A>Okay, where you've also self published seven books. So tell us what you write about and how you got into that.

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> Anthony Carter>Okay. I got into that the time I got into everything, I just made a decision. This is what I'm going to do. Right. Um. Um, books came about because I have a website, and I have a wonderful partner in crime who lives in England, who, um, manages it for me. He set it up for me. When we first met, we met in February or March of 2011. I was just writing and putting stuff out there. I wrote something. It ended up on Elton John's website in England. He saw it.

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> Anthony Carter>He reached out to me. He said, hey, we should do some stuff together.

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> Anthony Carter>I was like, sure, why not? So I started publishing stuff. I started publishing blog posts. Then he said, you need a website. I said, sure, why not? So we did that. Then after I got the website up and running, he said, you really should be putting this stuff into books. Like, you really should be making collections, uh, you know, essay collections and putting stuff. So I was like, you think so? So he said, yeah. So we published the first one, self published. It was 21 essays.

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> Anthony Carter>And it's all about his unfettered mind, the importance of black male mental health. And it was all about, um, all the things that I've learned and seen and experienced and watched my friends experience in terms of the fight, the ongoing commitment to be mentally healthy, a world that I feel many times does not want us to be. Mendeley.

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> Anthony Carter>And what I would do is I. That was the first book, and then I put out another book about, you know, reinventing yourself for the 21st century in terms of a job market. That's called strong stuff. Um, we just kept, you know, I kept writing and doing essays, and every so often, he would get an email from him. He would say, you know what?

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> Anthony Carter>Time for another book, right? And we put together the COVID We did the table of contents, and we publish them. And we published them through, I think the first time you published them through Lulu. And then the other ones, we just kind of published ourselves. You can get them on the website, and we're giving them away for free. But now we were charging. But now we're charging for them.

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> Speaker A>Okay. Speaking of the job market, you do a lot with the youth, with the youth readiness workshops. So kind of explain to tell the listeners about those, and, you know, are they virtual or, uh, local?

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> Anthony Carter>Um, they are both. It's a hybrid. I love working with young people.

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> Anthony Carter>I've worked with a lot of them. I do a lot of things with young people around, um, getting job ready. Right. And what does that look like? And what does it look like now? A lot of the things that I'm teaching young people and coaching them through are things that, I don't know your age, but I know I'm 56. So the things that I. That I learned from the time I could, like, walk, you know, in terms of presentation, how do you talk to older people? How do you address people? You know, that a lot of. We've lost a lot of that. A lot of my time has been around coaching. Like, okay, this is how you approach somebody in an appropriate manner.

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> Anthony Carter>This is how you follow up. This is how you stand out. So that if you go in a situation and they may have seen 300 people, why are they going to call you back? Right. So I do a lot of things, tips and tricks around. Okay. This is how you make that happen. This is how you follow up.

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> Anthony Carter>This is what you do. If, you know, they ghost you and you went and you want to find out what's going on, but you don't, but you still want to keep it professional.

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> Anthony Carter>Right? So I do a lot of that with young people. A lot of things around financial literacy, a lot of things around budgeting, a lot of things around short and long term goal planning.

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> Speaker A>Okay, well, you're also on a mission to get 100,000 black men to commit to their health.

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> Speaker A>Tell us about that mission.

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> Anthony Carter>Okay. That mission is all a part of. I mentioned the film earlier. Ask the old guy. I have. I've started a movement, and I'm on Facebook Live.

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> Anthony Carter>I do a Facebook live every Tuesday and a Facebook live. The title of is that plant life. T h a t p l a n t. Life. Life. And it's all about me. Um, supporting black, um, men, 40 to 60, who are committed to combating hypertension without the use of medication and the addition of a whole food plant based lifestyle. That was a long winded way of saying that my goal is to get 100,000 of us off the medication and get 100,000 of us black men healthy and productive.

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> Speaker A>And where's your number right now? Where yet? Right now.

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> Anthony Carter>What'd you say?

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> Speaker A>Where yet? Right now. What, in terms of numbers?

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> Anthony Carter>Yeah, I don't have my numbers yet. I don't know. That's why I gotta. I gotta figure that out. I don't have my numbers as of yet. That's the. That's the vision. That's. That's where I'm headed. And that's where I'm heading. But I don't have the. I don't have, um. I got no numbers for you right now. I wish I did. I wish I did.

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> Speaker A>Absolutely. Well, tell us about any upcoming projects that you're working on that listeners need to be aware of because you got a lot of irons in the fire.

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> Anthony Carter>Um, upcoming projects. I'm going to be doing a workshop, and I will, um, if your listeners want to contact me, they can definitely reach out to me on Twitter. Anthony L. Carter. They can reach out to me on Facebook. My name is anthony Carter. It's on Facebook. I do a Facebook live every Tuesday. What's coming up? I'm going to do a two hour workshop. You know, taurus is 100,000. Uh, legion of black men. I'm going to be doing a two hour workshop to introduce, um, black men to the plant based lifestyle. Introduce them to how they can use that to eliminate stress, chronic stress. How they can use that to get their blood pressure, you know, um, eliminate high blood pressure. We're not trying to manage it. So the workshop is how we're going to eliminate certain things. Not manage. Not manage situations we don't want to manage and we don't want to have. So that's what the workshop is about.

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> Speaker A>Okay. You mentioned your website. That was going to be my next question. Uh, throughout your contact, on social media, throughout your website.

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> Speaker A>Okay.

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> Anthony Carter>The website is Anthony Dash carter.com. A n t h o n y. Dash Carter carter.com. I've got books. I've got podcasts on there. I've got, um, essays. There's tons of stuff on there because it's about. Yeah, it's 13 years old, so there's tons of things on there.

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> Speaker A>Shout out to JC and pod breed. I'm really glad he hooked us up. Uh, you are doing a lot, and it's amazing. So close us out with some final thoughts. Maybe if that was something that I forgot to touch on that you would like to talk about, or any final thoughts you have for the listeners.

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> Anthony Carter>Um, I think we touched on a lot in a very quick, in a very quick amount of time. I just want to remind people that, um, they are in charge of their own lives. Right. We get to decide, like, you're talking about the counter narrative project. So all the things that I do, the writing, the speaking, the, um, um, blogging, the podcast, making movies, everything is, for me, is about reminding us that we're in charge of our own lives.

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> Anthony Carter>We get to dictate how we live, how well we live, who we become, what we do, how we show up in the world. Don't let anybody tell you, um, you can't do that or why you're doing that. So my suggestion would be keep, um, fighting, you know, keep standing up for yourself.

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> Anthony Carter>Check out my work. If you're interested in working with me, reach out. You can reach out to me on those, the mediums that I mentioned. Um, I'm always looking for a partner in crime, a place to speak, a place to show my film, uh, which is on YouTube, by the way. Ask the old guy by Anthony Carter is on YouTube. So you can. Your listeners can check that out.

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> Speaker A>Absolutely. Definitely. Go check that out. And, yeah, I try to keep the shows as short, as sweet as I can so people don't have an excuse to turn it off, but get as much information as they can so they can learn, be motivated and inspired.

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> Speaker A>Anthony Carter.com, y'all go check him out. Check out his live facebook. Check out his YouTube. I'm definitely gonna be reaching out to him. I got, I got a little short documentary up there collaborating with somebody as my cybersecurity job.

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> Speaker A>But I want to try to get a documentary about my life. But listen, absolutely, listeners, if you have any guests or suggestion topics, see Jackson 102 is the place to send them.

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> Speaker A>Jump on your favorite podcast app.

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> Speaker A>Hit that follow button. Leave us a review. Thank you for listening. Thank you for supporting the show. And Anthony, thank you for joining us.

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> Anthony Carter>Thank you. I'll talk to you soon.

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> Speaker A>For more information on the living the Dream podcast, visit www.djcurvefball.com.

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> Speaker A>Until next time, stay focused on living the dream.

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> Anthony Carter>Drink.