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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. Welcome to the Living the Dream with Curveball podcast, a, show where I interview guests that teach, motivate and inspire. Today I am joined by Paul, Tramiel.
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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>He is an author who lives a nomadic life on a sailboat. He has written three novels, five sailing narratives, and two self help books. So we're going to be talking to him about his life and wonder if he's on his sailboat now. Paul, thank you so much for joining me.
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> Paul Tramiel>Thanks for having me. It's an honor to be here.
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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>Why don't you start off by telling everybody a little bit about yourself?
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> Paul Tramiel>I am, an author and I live on a sailboat. I'm on my boat right now. in fact, I don't own anything on land anymore. Since, 2019, I've been sailing, full time. And, right now I'm in Panama. I'm in Bocas del Toro, Panama. And, yeah, I love it down here. I love live alone on the boat, so it's a perfect place to write. I've been writing screenplays lately and I'm writing another novel right now. I write short stories. I write poetry.
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> Paul Tramiel>And when, I'm not working, I'm either surfing or spearfishing. So that's about what I do right there.
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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>What made you decide to, give up everything on land and live on a sailboat? And what is that life like?
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> Paul Tramiel>Well, it's sort of always been a dream to, to sail, you know, to sail long distances was, was sort of always a dream of mine. And in 2015, I had been for 20 years, I had been a musician, a gaming musician. And anyway, in 2015, I quit drinking. It was a big time partier. You know, I was a big beer drinker and pot smoker, playing, playing, you, know, guitar, in a band, in a reggae band, having a great time. But, anyway, in 15 I got sober and that sort of changed everything and I started writing and I started sailing and I just thought like, this is what I want to do. I want to, I want to, I want to be a writer. I want to be a writer and a sailor. And I just, you know, you know, after, over the course of a few years, I made that dream happen. and that's what I've been doing for the past, How many years? It's about six years now. I've been living on this boat for eight years. I've been sailing and it's just a dream that I made happen. And it is fantastic. You know, what is it like living out here? It's. It's wonderful. I. I love it. It's. It's living out in nature, off grid, mobile, able to go wherever I want, able to do whatever I want, essentially. And it's, it's also kind of like, you know, kind of like camping too. It's not. There's no creature comforts, you know, but I mean, I do have a bathroom and a refrigerator and a, and a nice kitchen, sort of, you know, and, But it's a 40 foot boat. It's a small place. it's sort of like about the same amount of space you might have in a, in a school bus or something, you know, so it's, it's not like luxury living, but it's. But it's fantastic. I absolutely love it. Yeah. And it's a great place to write. It's a great place to be creative and to, write well.
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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>Why, why did you decide to become an author?
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> Paul Tramiel>I have always been an artist of some sort. I was a painter for a long time. I did oil paintings. And I've always been. Not always, but for a very long time. I was a musician. And it was always a dream.
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> Paul Tramiel>It was always my plan. Not just a dream, but a dream I was chasing for most of my life to, to make a living as an artist. And I started writing because, I. Well, like I said, I quit drinking.
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> Paul Tramiel>And people were asking me for advice on how I quit and remain sober for a year without going to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. And anyway, that was my first book. I wrote a book about that. the method that I sort of developed to quit drinking.
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> Paul Tramiel>I wrote a very short, very simple book called Alcoholics Not Anonymous. And when I saw that selling and when I started getting reviews and people were telling me that it helped them and that they had quit drinking and my book helped him out. I mean, it was, it was wonderful. I was like, wow. Like I, I did something real here. I did something that actually makes the world a better place. And not only that, I wrote a book and people are buying it. So I decided to write another book. And that was. That one is called Becoming a Sailor. And it was about what I was doing to learn how to sail, buy a sailboat, sail.
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> Paul Tramiel>My first journey, which was getting the boat home.
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> Paul Tramiel>I had to sail it a thousand miles to get it home.
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> Paul Tramiel>And it was a. Just a, you know, a big adventure, A Big unrepeatable adventure. You know, a novice sailor sailing alone on the open ocean for a thousand miles to get the boat home. I mean it was a huge adventure. And I wrote that book and it's, and it sold. And at that point I was like, wow, that this is what I'm going to do. This is great.
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> Paul Tramiel>You know, I love writing. It's, it's extremely creative. It's something that I can do at home or, or anywhere. You know, I don't, I can be anywhere in the world. As long as I have a pen and paper or a computer and I can write, I can be at work. And I think that's a fantastic concept. If you can be at work anywhere in the world, you, can really got something cool going on. You can travel, you can live on a sailboat, you can live in a van. You can, you can just travel wherever you want. and in writing is extremely creative. You're creating worlds, you're creating thoughts inside of people's heads, you're creating characters, you're influencing the way people think. it's really an astonishing, extremely interesting thing to do writing. I love it. It's fascinating. It's fascinating.
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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>Well, where do the ideas for your stories come from?
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> Paul Tramiel>okay, so the, the three. Let's talk about the three novels I've written. The first is, ah, called Dead Flowers on Wednesday. that's about a band on tour. So I was, I was in a band that toured a little bit. our first tour was then a bus, a school bus that had been converted to a tour bus and it ran on used vegetable oil. So it was like a biodiesel, you know. And our bus driver hired himself and the bus out for like $100 a day or something. You know, it was very affordable.
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> Paul Tramiel>And all the fuel came from restaurants. We would go to. He would, he would go to restaurants while we played our gigs. He would go to restaurants at night, you know, late at night while we were playing and take their used vegetable oil that was out in a bin they stored in tanks out behind restaurants. It's waste, you know, it's waste oil.
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> Paul Tramiel>They have to pay to throw it away. So he goes out there with his bus and takes the oil and you know, and drives us to our next gig. And those were some really good times in my life. And I decided to write. I thought I was going to write a non fiction book about that, but I quickly realized it'd be much more fun to write fiction. So my first book Was inspired by our first tour on the veggie bus. And that's, that's Dead Flowers on Wednesday is the name of that book. my second novel is called the Gold Box. And I wrote that, after a few years of sailing. A lot of my time spent sailing in the Bahamas. Anyway, I'm spear fishing, you know, which is basically snorkeling and free diving and looking for fish with a spear in your hand. And I always wonder like, am I ever going to find treasure? There's, there's treasure in the Caribbean. A lot of pirate ships went down, a lot of boats sank in the Caribbean that had gold on them. And so there, there is still treasure out there and people find it occasionally. So I'm always looking for it. And that makes me think, what are you going to do if you find something?
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> Paul Tramiel>You know, what you. It's basically, it's illegal to take treasure that you find in a foreign country. It's, it's, it belongs to that country.
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> Paul Tramiel>It doesn't belong to you. So there's the first, there's the first problem, second problem. What if you're diving with a buddy? What if you're spearfishing with a friend and you find a piece of gold on the bottom of the ocean? Are you going to show it to them? You know, you got it. You got to think about that, like, what happens if you show that person gold, you know, and what happens if they tell someone else? It, could lead to some serious problems. So these are just, there's just a lot of things to think about if you find treasure. And I got to thinking about that and I thought, well, why not write a book about it? And that, that's, that was the, the inspiration for that story. And then, you know, the next story was inspired by just riding in the car with my dad.
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> Paul Tramiel>He, he and my mother had an apartment in a building in, in Florida. And I was, they were, they were renting this apartment so they could be near my sister to help her drive her girls around just so they could be with their grandchildren basically during the school year. And they pointed out this black SUV that was double parked and it was also covered in dust. So here you are in a, in a parking building in Maitland, Florida. And here's, you know, then there's a double parked black Hummer covered in dust, like it's been there. And they said it's been there for months.
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> Paul Tramiel>Double parked. Like it's literally taking up two spaces a. In a parking garage. You know, you never See that? So I start thinking like, oh, what could that be? What if it's a, what if the. That's a CIA spies truck and he double parks it and he pays for both spots. Double parks it. So he has like, always has like, quick access to it and he's got a safe house here. That was like the beginning of the idea. And that, that idea just rolled into something, where that, where that truck played a small role in the story. But, you know, stories just sneak up on you like that. But anyway, that book became, that story became Until They Bury Me, which is a thriller based in a, in a city where, where, college sweethearts meet later in life and fall in love quickly and get, and get married right away. You know, they basically elope. Like one night they're out. They're out, you know, with, with friends one night and just to say, let's just get married right now, you know, and they elope and, and, and then they find out each other's dark sides. That book is called Until They Bury Me. But that's how it started. You know, that's kind of the thing with the right being a writer. You get these ideas just from daily life, just from seeing things. And you got to write them down and they might turn into a short story, they might turn into a novel, they might turn into nothing. But that's what we do. We, we observe and we write. And, and that's one of the keys to doing it is to, is to write your ideas down immediately so you don't forget them. And sometimes they turn into novels and that might turn into a movie because I also wrote it. a couple of actors I know asked me to adapt that novel to a screenplay. And I have. And it might become a movie. So just that, just that riding around in the car with my dad, you know, while I was visiting, might, turn into a movie. So that's, Yeah, that's a long answer to your question.
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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>Well, talk about how you became sober and, and give any advice you have for other people trying to become sober.
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> Paul Tramiel>All right. Yeah. Greatest decision I ever made in my life was to quit drinking. I, I knew I've quit drinking three times in my life. The first, the first time didn't last long at all. that was in high school. High school of all early. Pretty early to realize you have a drinking problem. the second was in college that lasted about two years.
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> Paul Tramiel>And, I fell off the wagon because a friend of mine put a beer in my hand and said, you've Been sober for two years. You have control now, you know, well, when you're, when you're an alcoholic, you don't, you can't go back. You can't, you can't trick yourself into thinking that you have control now and you can just have one, because it doesn't work that way. The majority of the population can have one beer and not, not, you know, become a problem drinker. But when, once you are a problem drinker, it's kind of a genetic issue. we're different. We can't just have one. And you can't ever go back. Unfortunately, you can't gain control of your problem and then go back. at least the majority of alcoholics can't. Maybe there are, maybe there's exceptions to the rule, but that's basically the rule. You can't go back. Anyway.
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> Paul Tramiel>Third time I quit drinking stuck. I, knew I had a problem. I was drinking way too much. My life was getting worse instead of better. My health was getting worse instead of better. I was 44 years old at the time. I saw a friend of mine at a party who was a little bit older than me, and I just remember thinking, like, yeah, he looks, there's Jim. He looks sharp. You know, he's well dressed, clean cut looking. He looks happy. He looks healthy, looks fit. He just had, just had like an aura about him that looked, he looked, he looked sharp. And, he did not have a beer in his hand. I think his hands were in his pockets at a Super Bowl Sunday party. Super Bowl Sunday, 2015. Jim, you want a beer? And he said, no, I quit drinking a year ago. And I said, oh, wow, you got to tell me, you know, I'm curious, like, how'd you do it?
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> Paul Tramiel>Why'd you do it? And he said, my brother died.
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> Paul Tramiel>Younger brother's dead. from, from a lifetime of hard drinking, from a lifetime of liquor drinking.
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> Paul Tramiel>his internal organs were. Failed, you know, over, over the course of a few years. his, all of his internal organs just slowly failed. And that's, that's what happens when you're, when you're, a hard liquor drinker. You're poisoning your whole body. You're poisoning every CE in your body.
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> Paul Tramiel>Jim's brother's dead. And Jim's brother was 40 when he died. I was 44. When Jim's telling me the story, and I thought, damn, that's going to be me.
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> Paul Tramiel>I don't, I, I don't want to go out like that.
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> Paul Tramiel>That's not, that's not who I am. And something just sort of switched in my head and. And the next day I was severely hungover. I skipped work. I stayed home and watched Netflix and I ordered Domino's Pizza and I felt like a loser. And I had two beers in the fridge from the night before, and I drank them. And then when I finished the last beer, a friend of mine was there and I said, john, I am going, this is the last beer I'm ever going to drink right here. This one right here in my hand, this is it. I finished it, I put it down, and it was the last beer I ever drank. I actually called Jim's ex wife, who's a psychiatrist, and booked, a meeting with her. And just to make myself accountable to someone. Just to make, just to make it real, to make, you know, so I didn't just, like, you know, give up the very next day, which is typically what happens when you think I'm going to quit drinking. Like, by the next day, you're back at it. in order to prevent that from happening, I booked a meeting, scheduled a meeting with a psychiatrist. I put it out on Facebook. You know, public, public notice. Paul Trammell's quitting drinking. Here we are on day one. I called my brother and I said, sam, I'm quitting drinking. And I want you to text me every single day just with the simple message, are you still sober? Are you still sober? Are you still sober?
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> Paul Tramiel>Every day? Every day. That way I knew that every single day, you know, tomorrow my brother's going to text me and ask me if I'm still sober and if I drink, I've got to tell him, no, I failed. So now I'm accountable to somebody else. and that really helps. If nobody knows that you quit drinking, there's no penalty, there's no immediate penalty to going back to it, to falling off the wagon. So now I've got a penalty set up. Everybody on Facebook knows I'm trying to quit. My brother knows I'm trying to quit. I've got penalties in place. I'm paying for this psychiatrist that I'm going to start, that I'm seeing every week. making it real, making yourself accountable, and, other methods that, that really help. I mean, first off, most people are going to go to aa, and that's a great thing. Like, that's, if that's your deal, go. Because that, that their system works. If you're not a group therapy kind of person, then, then you're going to have to Come up with a different method. I wrote about it in my book Alcoholics Not Anonymous.
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> Paul Tramiel>if anybody gets in touch with me, I'll give. The book's available on Amazon. It's cheap, but I'll give it to them to. I'll send anybody who asks for it a PDF. You can go to my website, Paul trammel.com, my emails at the bottom, and, I will send you a free PDF, because that book is not about making money. That's about spreading the message, getting people to quit drinking. But, anyway, some of the basic things that I came up with, you got to make substitutes. drinking and partying was a big part of your life. You're going to need substitutes. for me, the day one substitutes were chocolate chip cookies and Lacroix. You know, Lacroix is like sparkling water that's slightly flavored. I drank those, like, beers. I put down as many as I wanted. You know, they're, they're cheap, they're cheaper than beer, and it's basically just water. So I was, I was drinking six of those at a time. Just why and why not? I'm not drinking beer. It doesn't matter. How many cookies can you have all you want, all the chocolate chip cookies you want, because you're not drinking. and then other substitutes were working out. running, swimming, hitting the punching bag. You get angry. Your, your emotions go crazy on you when you're, when you're getting sober, you get angry, you get depressed. I'd hit the punching bag. I'd lift weights, I would jog. I started swimming. I started ocean swimming. And then I realized I needed adventure. And I bought a canoe and I started canoeing. And then I realized I needed bigger adventure. So, I bought myself a sailing class and I became a sailor. so those were some of the, some of the substitutes, that, that I, that worked for me. But you need, you need to replace, all you, you lose your entire social life too. So you're going to need new friends. You're going to need new hobbies, new activities. You're, gonna need, you're gonna need to get out in the early morning and run into other sober people, you know, because sober people tend to get up early and do stuff, whereas, you know, drunks are still in bed hungover. They're not out there on the.
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> Paul Tramiel>Walking on the beach in the early morning. So, yeah, getting out and doing things in the early morning, developing new. Ha. New habits, new hobbies, changing everything, changing the. Just changing the route you drive to work might be important because maybe, maybe on the old route you drive past the liquor store where you bought beer and maybe you don't want to drive by that liquor store anymore. Change the route, the route to work, change, you know, grow a beard, shave your beard, get a new hairstyle, move, you know, change as much as you can because you're a new person when you quit drinking. And all those changes are going to remind you that you're a new person. So yeah, those are some of the things, off the top of my head that I can think about that I can come up with right now.
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> Paul Tramiel>To advice for drinkers, people who want to get sober. Biggest, biggest advice is just do it.
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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>What advice would you give somebody who wants to live off the grid, nomadic, ah, lifestyle like you're doing.
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> Paul Tramiel>you know, it takes a lot of planning. So start by just thinking about it. start by thinking where, where you're going to live. Are you going to live on a boat? You're going to live in a van, Are you going to live out in the woods in a hut? But it takes a lot of planning. need to take baby steps.
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> Paul Tramiel>You can't just dive into it, you know, you can't just dive into it right away. it's, it's easier done in baby steps, you know. For me it was reading books about sailing. That was number one.
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> Paul Tramiel>Reading books, taking a class, learning, learning how to sail properly. I took a one week class from the American Sailing Association. It was huge, hugely beneficial. I then found people who wanted crew. There's there's websites like Crewbay.com where you can, where people who need crew on their boats, will take you on, will take on strangers.
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> Paul Tramiel>I, found a guy who was sailing from St. Lucia to Puerto Rico and he said he was capable of doing it alone, but his insurance required him to have two people on board and he couldn't find anyone. So he, he put an ad out on Crew Bay. So I sailed with him and got some experience and. so yeah, learn, read, books, get experience.
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> Paul Tramiel>And then figure out how you're going to make a living. you're going to, you're going to need to learn about solar panels and a way to get water.
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> Paul Tramiel>You know, on a boat. I catch my water. I also live on the water. So most, most sailboats have desalinators. You know, we call them water makers but they're, it's essentially a desalinator. It takes the salt out of seawater. You got to figure all that stuff out. But I take it, take baby steps towards it. Start, start figuring out what the steps are and start taking them. you know, once, once I learned how to sail, bought a boat. I bought a small boat first and learned and got a bunch of experience on it. And then I realized, like, I want to live on the boat. I'm going to sell my house and, buy a bigger boat. So it takes a lot of education and it takes baby steps. Those are the, that's the short answer would be education and baby steps.
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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>Well, tell us about any upcoming projects that you're working on that listeners need to be aware of.
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> Paul Tramiel>I am always publishing, writing and publishing short stories. Once a month I publish a short story on Substack. that's like a mailing list.
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> Paul Tramiel>Substack is kind of like a writer's, mailing list service, and it's free. Anybody who wants to, read my work and go to Substack, go to, ah, paultrammel.substack.com or the link that it's called. It's the newsletter link on my website on paultranmel.com and you can get a free short story every month. I'm also writing a novel right now, called Identity Crisis. It's a, a nautical thriller taking place on a sailboat. And that will be out. I don't know when it'll be out. I keep thinking it's going to be out in a few months and it keeps not being out. I keep working on it, but, I am, I am hoping to have that out by the end of the year. Identity Crisis, that's my, that's my latest project. I'm also writing that as the screenplay. So if I get really lucky, it'll be a movie. But yeah, those are my latest projects.
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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>So your website is Paul tramiel.com. close us out with some final thoughts. Maybe if that was something I forgot to talk about that you would like to touch on or any final thoughts you have for the listeners.
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> Paul Tramiel>you know, I would, I would just encourage everybody to step outside of their comfort zone and, do something incredible. You know, there's so much cool stuff to do out there in the world. Get out there and do something incredible. Chase your dreams, whatever they are. Take, you know, come up with a dream, figure out how you're going to do it, and start taking steps in that direction.
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> Paul Tramiel>That's my advice. Chase your dreams.
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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>All right, ladies and gentlemen, Paul tramiel.com.
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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>check out his website, his books, and get in touch with him. Follow Rate Review Share this episode to as many people as possible. If you or someone you know would like to be a guest on the Living A Dream with Curveball show, or to leave a review, please visit www.craveball337.com thank you for listening and supporting the show. And Paul, thank you for all that you do and thank you for joining me.
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> Paul Tramiel>Thanks for having me on. It's great meeting 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 Time Keep living the dream.