Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.
One of my best friends contacted me a month back and shared that he was unwilling to allow the status quo to continue. He wanted to form a small band of sentient people who would collectively work to take on the current onslaught of our Constitution and asked would I be willing to join.
My first reaction was, how would we ever make a difference? Would our efforts have value and bear fruit? Could we establish a basis that would take hold and truly make that difference. He and I have been brainstorming on numerous iterations of this for several years now. Our biggest endeavor was single-handedly destroyed before it could go live with the spread of Covid last year. We had spent the last several years putting pieces of the puzzle to make that project come to life, and it will still happen, once we are all able to go back into the world and attend large concerts again.
During the lead up to that project, we had brainstormed and developed a complete alternate use of Sizzle, in which we had invented a system that enables every person who is feeling incapable of being instrumental in the acts of change necessary to save humanity from dying in our own environmental waste, to join specific local groups that would continuously generate volunteer events in which humanity could rise up and do things with incremental significance and facilitate larger change by starting on a granular level.
This program has been thought through, invented and sits waiting for us to find the right capital to enable us to take Sizzle technologies, and put them to the service of humanity. After spending the entire year before Covid dreaming this up, and readying to implement our actions, and then a subsequent 1.5 years sitting out Covid, waiting to bring the project to life, we were both just chomping at the bit to accelerate headfirst into the future. I cannot elaborate more on this topic publicly, but if you wish to reach out to me privately, I will be happy to share with you how the Sizzle tech and our methodologies will facilitate such an important grassroots change. The timing is so critical. All it would take is one very large brand that would embrace this project and help us to take it to the mountain top.
In the meantime, as Sizzle is just tidying up flaws in our current apps, and readying our new tech to release later this month, this particular aphorism continued to haunt me. In the last 6 years, I have personally sacrificed on so many levels and my team has sacrificed on levels that others would have most certainly run away from. We have all done this because we believe we are a viable instrument of change. We believe that we can implement change in an order of magnitude that will be felt on all continents of this planet, Antarctica, included.
As we start to open the Sizzle platform, we are quietly discussing opportunities with sponsors, merchants, promoters, producers, CEOs, and socially-conscious activists that are desirous of joining forces with Sizzle and The Illusion Factory to become an instrument of change.
Impatient little child that I am, I was not content to wait for Covid to end, for our Machiavellian plans to materialize. I wanted to start something right now. Use what I have, ignore what is still in the works and start proving that our ideas are valid and that we can make that difference.
So I took inventory of my meager holdings and ideas and zeroed in on one that I believe would succeed. I recognized how many views and compliments the aphorisms that I produce have received over the years and made a decision and acted upon it. I realized that if I could take these aphorisms and redesign them as wall art that is gorgeous and eye-catching, that they would be very salable. And that was the final crystallization.
Sizzle has a store inside that is capable of expansion with merchants to the size of Amazon. You might currently find only ten merchants or so in there now, but that is only because we have not started to solicit them. Each merchant will have their own storefront in the Sizzle marketplace at http://sizzle.shop
So in our marketplace, we created a store to start selling these posters. We took the hard cost that covers the printing, shipping, sales tax and merchant transaction fee and doubled it. Using that 100% mark up on hard cost, we are able to donate all 100% of that profit to the Storm Aid Foundation that my friend operates. With those funds, Storm Aid is able to deliver all of the cash we raise to the operations that are verified, boots on the ground, helping victims of natural disasters… floods, fires, hurricanes, tornados, earthquakes, tsunamis, sand storms, volcanoes, etc.
We started to calculate how much money we could raise for these victims and the lightbulb was luminous. If we got traction, this would create millions of dollars that goes directly to those who have just been rendered homeless and are scrambling for any sense of normalcy in a time of extreme devastation.
Storms do not care if you are red or blue. They are an equal opportunity destruction system. Our climate change is accelerating this at a rate that is exponential and if a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens do not act, the devastation will only grow worse. I remember Aaron Sorkin leveraging Margaret Mead’s sentiment in the West Wing. It touched me then, and has never left me. The Illusion Factory is one of this small groups. We are determined to make a difference. We have patiently built a technology platform that surpasses expectations in capability, elasticity, functionality, and ingenuity.
We are determined that our work will not only bear fruit, but more importantly, will be a viable instrument of change. Change that enables people to learn, grow, experience, develop, share and improve our global society. We have risked our lives (literally) to give birth to this, weathering skepticism, scorn, doubt and false promises from people whom we once trusted. None of that has shaken us. It only added wind under our wings to make us more resilient, more determined, more passionate to achieve our goals than ever before.
SO HERE IS MY ASK.
Will you please repost our video in your social media? Will you please help us get the message out? Sizzle was honed in fire with a sole purpose of complete disruption of the status quo. Our first mission is to help people who have just lost everything. Can you begin to imagine waking up in the middle of the night and running for your life, knowing everything in your home is about to be destroyed? It is truly unthinkable.
We can make that difference, and we will make that difference.
This is a first small baby step for Sizzle in that direction. A small program that can allow us to make mistakes, learn, grow, improve. Our new version of our apps will go to the App Store end of next week. At that point, Sizzle will finally after 5 years of development, be ready for the big leagues, and we are coming!
Right now we have our first chance to make a debut by proving that we are motivated by far more than profit, we are disruptive on an order of magnitude because we are dedicated to the proposition that all people are created equal. We are never yielding to political pressure, societal pressure, or institutional pressure to compromise our morality, our belief, our focus and our dedication.
We greatly appreciate you taking the time to read this. We also say thank you in advance for helping us to share our message.
Sizzle is here to revolutionize. The revolution starts today.
The posters make a great gift for a friend, someone you love, your office or your classroom.
Take a look at http://sizzle.shop. and at http://StormAid.live
Love you all,
Brian and the IF team and the StormAid team!
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