Ron Watermon: Filmmaking for All #113

In this episode, Pete Salsich III chats with Ron Watermon, the Founder and CEO of StorySmart. 

Don't miss this chance to delve into Ron's personal journey and discover his efforts to ensure that the world of filmmaking storytelling is inclusive for everyone.

StorySmart: https://www.getstorysmart.com/

Original Theme Song composed by Brent Johnson of Coolfire Studios.
Podcast sponsored by Capes Sokol.

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Transcript

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On this week's episode of the Screen Lawyer Podcast, my guest is Ron Watermon, founder and CEO of STORYSMART, a filmmaker's story telling service that helps people tell their stories on screens. It's pretty cool. Check it out. Hey, there. Welcome to the Screen Lawyer Podcast. I'm Pete Salsich, The Screen Lawyer. And my guest today is Ron Watermon. Ron is the Founder and CEO of STORYSMART, a filmmaker's storytelling service. It helps people tell their stories on screens. Ron, welcome. It's awesome to be here. Well, thanks, man. It's great to have you here. This is going to be fun. This is fun. You got a really cool set up here. Well, you know, we're trying here, but it's the real deal. Screen lawyer, studio. We're working on it, and it's great to have you here. And it's great to have somebody like you who has spent a lot of time behind the camera, in front of the camera and behind the radio mic. In front of the radio mic. And just all the different times you've spent sort of in this storytelling world. Tell us about that. You know, I mean, we're living in an exciting time where the communication landscape is is changing so quick. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you guys are really living sort of one of my fundamental values, which is that every every person, every organization really is their own media outlet that's taking one story and reaching their own audience directly. And that's that's actually why I founded stories, Mark, because I, I wanted to bring kind of what I learned when I was with the Saint Louis Cardinals and the insights I gained there. You know, I realized, like the Cardinals, I mean, they're they're a mega power in terms of marketing and communication and their ability to connect directly with their audiences. You know, it's it's it's incredible. There's 13.7 million people that go to their website every month during the baseball season. That's. Wow. And so, yeah. So you can be your own media outlet. And that's that's sort of what I learned when I was there. And I've tried to bring that to STORYSMART. Well, and what I think is really cool is that when we've talked about your business and we'll get more into this is that it? You don't have to be somebody that's got 13.7 million website visitors to do this right. You can have no website visitors and get started. Yes. Yes. Right. Yes, absolutely. You know, companies like yours make it more accessible where it used to be. You know, just it wasn't even available to most of the world. Well, where's the first place you go when you're curious about a person or a business? You go to Google. Right? Like you, you know, you you if you're interested in a business, you're going to go to their website. You're going to make some assessments based on what their website looks like and look at their social media and what are they saying about themselves. Right? Who's the ultimate authority on you? You. Right. Like, I mean, that's like that's like from my vantage point, that's always been it. And, you know, that was sort of the you know, I would make these, you know, arguments to Bill DeWitt with the cardinals. I'm like, look, you know, we were set up to help the media cover us so that our fans would know about us. But the reality is our fans were going directly to our website and our social media every single day. And what were we doing to put our story out there, Right? And to keep them fresh. To keep them. Yes. Yes. Not the same every time. Exactly. And people are interested in the bacon wrapped hot dog. Where are they going to go? Right. Like know. So, you know, I was a big proponent of yeah, it sounds good and everything's better with bacon. So, you know at the end of the day, that's that's really sort of what STORYSMART's about it And what, you know, my my personal mission is to is to help people tell their own story. I believe everybody matters and deserves to have their stories told in the most powerful way. And the reality is it's not just the story, it's the storytelling that is so important, right? Like anybody. So what do you explain that? What do you mean by that? The telling is because this the stories, the story. Right. These are the things that happen. Yeah. Well, it's it's the difference between my son Charlie. When I when he comes home from school, I ask him how his day was. He's good. I guess that's how much of a story. Right. But if he wants to tell me about what happened on Fortnite. Right. He'll go into great detail and embellish and really tell the story. And I see that in the world of publishing, Right. Like anybody can publish a book these days, and I've bought self-published books before and sometimes they're good. Yeah, but that's often not the case. The writing is not good. And I believe that, you know, when a celebrity writes a book, they usually hire a ghostwriter, right? Who knows how to write a book and they interview them and they develop the manuscript together. And when, you know, like I just read on vacation, Shoe Dog the story of the founder of Nike, Phil Night. Oh, yeah. And it was written by J.R. MOEHRINGER Sure. And the most gorgeous IT ghostwriters around. Yeah. And it's beautifully written and you know it's still under the copyright of Phil now. Yeah, it is. Yeah absolutely they had a nice work for hire contract Exact place for that. Right right Well and that's that's the premise with story smart is we want to be sort of the ghostwriter for your on screen story. We want to bring in a professional we think a professional filmmaker will do a better job telling your story on screen than you would doing it yourself. But it's still your story. It's still your story. It's a work for hire. You own the copyright on it. You know, one of the things that I believe fundamentally is everybody is their own media outlet and they need to think and act like a media outlet. And one of the look at all the major media players, they own the copyrights on their content. The New York Times does a story about you. They own that. Yeah, absolutely. Know, they take your photo. They own that photo. And, you know, that's that's one of the things that we realized that we weren't doing exactly right at the Cardinals. We needed to own that. You know, we would spend a lot of money on photography and we didn't have the right agreements in place. And we made sure that going forward we did so that we own those images and we flipped the relationship that typically exist, right? Like when my son gets his photos taken at school, it's the photographer that owns the photos and I have to get a release to take it. And you have to pay them. Yeah, right, exactly right. Well, and I think that's that's an interesting reminder that, you know, because we I see this in my practice all the time where businesses, people, professionals who have been very successful putting things on to screens for many years in various different ways or creating content, don't always get the copyright stuff right. There's some fundamental misunderstandings that just sort of are pervasive about the relationship between who? Well, I paid them well, paying them isn't the deal. Was there something in writing that said work for hire? Yeah, You know, and a lot of times people don't necessarily think through what are the implications of being the copyright owner. They just want to know if they can use this stuff. Right. But to your point, if you are approaching it as you are your own media outlet, you as an individual, you as a business or whatever, well, what does ownership mean? Is ownership something that you would value? Is there some way that this content has a market that you want to be able to participate in as the copyright owner? Correct. Things like that. Just, you know, sometimes it's not even about making money with it, sometimes it's just being able to use it, right. Like, without being in trouble. Or to say yes or no to someone else's ability to use it. Right, right, right. To be able to control that where it’s going to mean and and you know, from years of with the Cardinals working with Major League Baseball and the rights with license to get licensing rights to use team logos and even the picture of the stadium and things like that. Yeah, I'll never forget we did this I one of the things I love to do is these fan engagement campaigns. The first one that we did was Stan for Stan, which was an effort to try to get Stan Musial the Medal of Freedom. And we did a paper doll and the an off the paper doll and take a picture of yourself with it. I remember that it was all to try to get the attention of the president to to award him the medal. And it worked! Yeah, it was wildly successful beyond my imagination. And it was the third time was the charm. We had tried it two different times, sort of behind the scenes. So so that worked. And we would do these campaigns for our Hall of Famers. And what I really liked about that was trying to link these generations of fans, young fans like myself. You know I ever saw Stan Musial play. I mean, he so, you know, I was familiar with them, but, you know, so so we did this campaign for Whitey Herzog, and it was Cards Rat Pack, #cardsratpack. And we hired Line Forge Labs. Right? Sure. To do an animated series that told his story. It was a cartoon series. And our general counsel was like, neat idea. Ron, you're going to have to go get rights of publicity for every person you turn into a cartoon, Right? Right. And that was that was a big step. But we did it. Yeah. Well, and that's and that's another great example of how the idea because you've talked about like the copyright with somebody, if you hire someone, they're doing the video or they're taking your pictures. If you don't have something in writing, they own the copyright as the photographer, correct? Well, but that only gets half the rights if inside that picture are people. Those people have rights. Yes. Like I'll never forget. It was towards the twilight of my time with the Cardinals. There was a photographer who ended up having a great career as a fashion photographer, but he got his start with the Cardinals. Oh, wow. And Marty Hendon had hired him to take some photos at some games and he was coming back to sell us the collection. And it was one of these things where, like on his business card, he had a picture of Lou Brock. And I thought to myself, you know, he has the rights, you know, that's his photo. But if you're using it in marketing and Lou Brock has yeah, you're using Lou's name image likeness we got you reverted to the correct legal term, the right of publicity. Right of publicity. But in reality, now everybody knows NIL, Right. So but imagine, like things are you using somebody's name, image and likeness to for a commercial purpose to promote your business? Well, then you need his permission? Right. Because that's essentially an endorsement. Yeah. Well and it's funny, like I went to the Clayton Art Fair this weekend and I walked through one of the booths was this wonderful artist who did all of these, I guess takes on albums like music albums. And, you know, I think in the world of art, I mean, I was going to ask you this question, like if I if I redo an album and it's a one of a kind piece of art, I'm okay, right? But if I do prints, well, that it did and this is great and we are we are literally evolving through the era of fair use right now with the Supreme Court's decision earlier this summer in the Andy Warhol Prince paintings case photography case in which I thought this was going to be a fair use. And this court said no. But it did an interesting analysis of how you look at the same purpose, different purpose. And what it came down to was it in that case both the original photography and then Andy Warhol’s paintings had both been commissioned to promote magazine articles? Yeah. So the court focused on that. Yes, it was a commercial. Yeah, it was like both commercials. To sell a magazine. Exactly. And we're focusing. So it's given us new language to look at that. So to your question about, you know, an artist who's creating art, one off pieces inspired by maybe pulling elements of this album and that album and doing something maybe with different types of media or whatever that may all that may get back to the original, what we used to think of the very use language, which is that's a different purpose. It's it's changing it. It's maybe giving a different message, but you're into these weird arguments. Well, I would see this all the time with you, with the cardinals. You know, we like when we did the All-Star Game, we we there was a we created a district that was trying to think what the district was called, but basically you couldn't guerrilla market. Oh, right. I remember that. Sure. Yeah. And so so I kind of have to that.............. Okay, okay. I got it. Yeah. So, yeah, so I would have been on the other side of that working with Major League Baseball, and they're very careful about like, you know, you can't just rip off the mark, right? Like, you just can't take, you know, the Cardinal logo and put it on whatever you want and sell it without paying Major League Baseball. And so I would always go in to Mike Little's office. He was the general counsel. And I'd ask him, I say, Hey, you know, I saw somebody my purse or, you know, you would people would do all kinds of, you know, things with with the Cardinals logo and yeah obviously don't police, you know. Yeah right right. But when I see an artist that's doing things, I'm like huh. You know, like I bought a painting. There's a painting in my house that's of the. Of the ballpark. Yeah. And, you know, the painter came in the weekend of the art fair and just painted it, and I was like, Oh, cool. It was like it was on it was a side of the ballpark that, you know, somebody from Saint Louis wouldn't have painted. Right now. It's unusual statue, but it was the it was the view I had walking from our offices. Wow. Yeah. So it it meant it was particularly meaningful to me. Yeah. But Right but you know, if, if, if that person made prints of it and there were Cardinal logos in it, well then I see. Yeah. Then, then the artist might run into. Yes. And you're starting to get into that. So, so the original piece of art is the what gets it analyzed. So the painting, let's say if you're putting logos and things like that now you're you better be using those logos in some sort of commentary, some sort of set, whatever, something like that. But it's not, it's not that you can't ever do it, but the analysis of fair use goes on. The first painting. If the first painting is fair use, then selling copies of the first painting is still fair use. Okay. It's like I can write an unauthorized biography about somebody within certain things, a public figure. I don't need their permission. Right? Right. I may not have access to all their stories, but it could still tell what's available publicly. Interview other people. Facts. Those facts. And if I followed the rules there, then I have that. If I go and sell a lot of copies of that, it doesn't change the first analysis. Gotcha. But if my purpose for the original was not to tell this story, not to paint this picture, but to sell my company or sell my product or something like that. So you go back to what's the underlying what's the underlying cause of the creation of the new work. Yeah, and that's where it gets down to Now, someone makes a video, the artist is trying to make money. He doesn't want to have to, you know, paint houses. He wants to paint pictures, you know, So you get into these things and it's my one of my all in newspapers, right. Make money on selling the newspaper, of course. But of course, different categories within there. And mostly they're listing facts and things like that. So but yes, it's all this and this comes up regularly. A fair segment of my practice in our practice here in our entertainment group is reviewing particularly documentaries and reality TV for fair use. Can this show Yeah, what is the issue and how does it work? And obviously if you are staging a set right, you don't get any fair use because you chose everything that's in there. But in a documentary it's different because it's more it's treated more like journalism, right, than it is versus a scripted. Well, certainly there's a difference in documentary and scripted. But even in a documentary, often you can control the set to some extent. Yeah, but you are allowed to sort of take the world as you find it in the larger sense. Gotcha. And there are some things along those lines. But as as my friend, professor Yvette Liebesman at SLU Law always says fair use is expensive forgiveness. Yeah, you know, because it doesn't really come up until after you've been challenged, and you’re paying lawyers. You got a cease and desist letter to argue fair use. So the better practice, of course, is to understand clearly where those lines are and to stay inside of getting permissions and licenses and all of that for sure. Yeah, that's one of the things that, you know, as we've tried to expand stories around the United States, you know, I've been doing these work for hire agreements with filmmakers, and a lot of them are like, well, why are you doing this? Why don't we just do this when we work for the first time? And I'm like, you know, because I really want to cover off on I'm selling copyright to my client. I need to you need to have it lined up, then I need to get it from you. And you know, you'll get a portfolio license unless the client tells us otherwise. Right? Right, exactly. And at the end of the day, we've been doing a lot of stuff where the client doesn't want us to share. No. So it's like, okay, cool. Yeah, you're paying us for, you know, just for their use and. Yeah, yeah, yeah, whatever. That's cool. Well, this is So let's stop here for a second and go back to before you got into STORYSMART. You've talked a little bit about your time with the Cardinals, but lead us into that because you had a very interesting career in the public sector on the legislative side before getting in with the cardinals. Yes. And you like me, you got a law degree? I do. I do. So I've had career ADD... I grew up here in Saint Louis, went to Lindenwood College and graduated with a communications degree in 1989. Okay. Did a choral fellow. Yeah. Great program. Public affairs program landed on the Buzz Westfall for county executive campaign. I was the only person that knew how to use a computer. I, I did his campaign finance stuff and was his field director. He won. He became the county executive, and I then became his legislative aide. Okay. And I was his legislative aide. And I actually left to go to law school at Mizzou. Okay. And got married, came back, ended up going into the evening program at SLU, finishing while working for Buzz. Right. I was his. I would handle our Jefferson City lobbyist and kind of manage that process. And long story short, butterfly ballots in Palm Beach County changed my career plans. I had planned to be, you know, go be a U.S. attorney. And, you know, when you work in politics, it's not like, you know, baseball where you can get traded from the Cubs to the Cardinals. You're branded. And as luck would have it, the cardinals were looking for somebody with my skill set. They needed somebody that had a diplomacy skill set that could deal with, you know, we have unique politics in our you're right. So, you know, I had, you know, this diplomacy skills set I could work with anybody, regardless of their political beliefs. It's kind of a dead art actually. You know, it's unfortunate it did not apply. We we could get a lot more of that. Yeah. But, you know, they the Cardinals, Mark Lamping hired me. My first day was 9/11. I was hired to coordinate the lobbying effort to get the ballpark built. And it was only supposed to be a short term project. Right. And ended up being 17 years of my life, you know, And Mark left, went to work for the Giants and Jets and Bill DeWitt became president. And my career just evolved within the organization. And I at first I was very laser focused on, let's get this ballpark deal done. And then I was the in-house counsel on the Mitchell investigation. Into performance-enhancing substances. Which, by the way, there's a great documentary on Netflix that you should check out. I can't think of the name of it right now, but it's about the guy who ran BALCO. Oh, wow. Yeah. Yeah. I've been texting some of my friends at the Cardinals. I've got to check this thing out. Anyway, I did that for a while, and then Mo and Bill came to me. Well, Bill came to me and said, We want you to coordinate the All-Star Game. And after that.. Was that 2009? That was 2009. And that's when I really was introduced to all these people in Major League Baseball. And that was such a wonderful project for me because I was able to bring to bear kind of what I had learned over those years within the organization and then bring together my civic, you know, community background. And then after that, they said, look, we think, you know, there's this social media is emerging. You know, we really think you're good at PR and we're gonna move you over to baseball operations and we want you to learn the baseball communications. And at that point, you know, we were really set up to just do credentialing in game notes, but we really weren't we didn't have a strategy when it came to social media and certainly not, you know, with using our website. And and the team doesn't actually own the interactive rights. It's actually owned by Major League. Major League Baseball. Yeah. Which is in a way, it's a good thing because it's elevated all 30 clubs. Well, that's probably true. I hadn't really thought about that. I know that the professional sports leagues and they're all a little bit different. I know the National Hockey League, for example, works on a different type of joint ownership, but multiple licensee kind of model. Yes, and soccer's completely different. It's a collective. It's actually they’re shareholders. Yeah, actually it's real individual ownership. But I had a chance to work on some some naming rights deals a couple of years ago for some of the new MLS teams and trying to figure out all the carve outs of what, what what it means when they go over here in this league and that thing and this thing. And yeah, it was wild. It's hard to understand. It's so different than Yeah, yeah. The model of baseball or the NFL, right? So, so you had to learn that space and understand how that all works from a rights-holder perspective. Well, and you know, it's funny that things that sort of evolve like, you know, Bill became president and he handed off the photography to me to manage. And, you know, we would do these contracts and then, you know, nobody really managed the photographers. Right. They have credentials they go down they carry their big cameras where they're like, well, no, I'm talking about the ones that work for us. I mean, we we we had people that were photographing the game and the person who ran. So for the surface, sort of the team media side of things, not the network media, not the journalists. Yeah, yeah. So, so so you know, probably the thing that I'm most proud of that no one knows about it. The Cardinals, our fans don't know about us. We ended up building a digital archive which is now actually part of what I do with STORYSMART, ironically, and it was all born of this fact that we were spending a lot of money on photography, but we couldn't produce a photo to save our lives. Like if somebody from ESPN reached out. I'll never forget, after we built our archive, ESPN sent an email saying, Hey, do you have a picture Juaquin Andujar? And the team was out of town. And I, you know, I forwarded the message to our photography coordinator and he was able to send a digital image to, to ESPN for whatever story they were working on. And before we had an archive, somebody would have this was when the team was out of town. So I had to driven down to Busch Stadium, dug through like an old file cabinet, scanned the photo, and then it would never happened, right? Like and so we ended up putting, you know, really everything in this digital asset management system. And we were spending a lot of money on that. And at the same time, you know, I moved over to PR, started to build what is the communications department was promoted to VP and I was really into this idea of being a media outlet. And, you know, it would start with me when flip cams were a thing before the iPhone, I would shoot videos and some of my colleagues would shoot videos and we would we would post them to the website on social media. And that evolved into me producing a weekly television show - Cardinals Insider with Ozzie Smith. That was that we distributed to 18 over the air television stations. And that's also that's the one when I always know there's a rain delay because when I turn on yeah this is the title since I remember, it's like, okay, yeah, we're going to see several episodes of this until the rain clears. Yeah. And you know, it's funny like it was I never really set out to do a TV show, but it just sort of evolved. That was natural progression. Natural progression. It's like we need to be sharing our own story. We need to be sharing that, right? Facebook on our website, you know, we would post a video about Yadi on Facebook and get 500,000 views. I mean, it was crazy. And that's a real audience, right? Like, and you need to think about as a business, you need to think about all of your ways, channels of communications. And it's two ways like you're going to be listening to like, well, that's a huge part of it. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's, it's, you know, because a lot of times you think in like in my world, I, you know, I'm behind this truly behind the screens, like before the screens, you know, we're doing the contracts, right? We're getting the maybe it's the financing in place or the structure of the rights holders and then all of the contracts that deal with the process of capturing the copyright and then getting it ready for distribution. But so that's sort of a one we're delivering. You're the camera's going out that way. The screen is going out, right? I mean, nobody's talking back. But while that's happening, there's almost always a PA or somebody capturing behind the scenes footage. Yeah, there's other things and it's all part now of a coordinated publicity campaign to tease out this. And it's highly regulated in our contracts. We're very, very clear. Like you coming on set, you can't get your camera out and take pictures. Right? You're in you're appearing? Yeah. You can't do that, right? This is ours. But we are going to have people doing that. We had to do that with our employees. Oh, sure. I'm sure that like, hey, don't be, you know, exactly. Somebody would post something on their own social media and then suddenly our phone would ring and the PR department and retailers were following us. And that's something that that's what it obviously that's that's important and needs to be careful to be. Often you know in a lot of productions, you know there's a there's the audience is the whole point of it is to surprise the audience. When you have the finished product, you know, the audience is going to see something for the first time. Your beginning, middle and end your character, you know, whatever it is. And so people are leaking out, Oh, so-and-so dies, you know? And I had to say a little bit so, well, you know, it's funny, when we started doing Cardinals Insider, we had an internal debate within my department about sharing things. So like one of the things that I was, you know, very adamant about is whatever we would do, we would repurpose. Sure right. We we shared on Facebook, we shared on the website, we put it on TV, we put it everywhere. Right? Because mostly because I was wanting to justify our existence, you know, for the resources we were getting. Right. I could show our CFO. It's like, okay, this is how many viewers ever see you, right? But we debated whether or not like if a segment was going to be in the show. Do we wait until the show gets aired before we share it right on Twitter or Facebook or whatever? And, you know, you know, we there's robust debate about it. And I finally called a couple of the TV stations, the assignment editors, and they said they just laughed. They're like, we had those debates too different audiences. You know, it's like just get it out there. Don't worry about it. You're not going to, you know. Well, and I think that's it. At the end of the day, your goal is to let people know that Christian family night is coming up. Then get it out. Get it out there. And also, you know, some more people might be inclined to watch the show if they've seen a little clip. Ooh, I'd like to hear more of this interview or that's kind of cool or whatever. That little snippet, you know, that that sort of teaser. So come on in was yeah, check out the whole I mean, we'll do a version of this. We did a little few little teaser recordings and we'll repurpose some of that and we promote this episode, right? Because I want people to multiple chances to interact with it. And maybe you at least one of them, they'll click and watch the whole thing. Well, you know, it's funny, like the TV stations, you know, like, I don't really watch the news anymore, but I do check my apps. Sure. So I'm watching segments on my phone all day long. All day long. Right. Right. And on my computer. So, like, at the end of the day, that's you know, if you're thinking about it as a as a business, it's like, where? Where's my audience? Well, and yeah, and I would imagine for most of the stations, their audience is not sitting

on their couch at 10: 26:48

00 anymore. No, it's whatever. It's throughout the day. And you're right on the apps and everything. I think it's fascinating how it's how it's evolved. And now you've evolved again with STORYSMART and we kind of talked about the overall principles. But give us a little example, like how would someone like what's an example of do you have a project you can talk about? Sure, we're going to be doing a story for an 82 year old woman who we're going to help tell her story, her life story. And we have a shoot at her home on Monday. I have two journalists, a 32 time Emmy Award winner, who will interview her. And we'll produce basically a mini documentary for her family. Wow. And, you know, that's just a very personal very personal like, look, I lost my dad as a boy when I was five. And I was always haunted by not knowing him. And when family members would talk and tell stories, I would you know, I would be riveted. Right. And so all storytelling, you know, storytelling can be personal. It doesn't it's not always about reaching a big audience. So that's really that where my passion is with STORYSMART is that - I really want to help families and individuals tell their story in a powerful way that's relevant to their loved ones. So that's one area of our business. I started down the path of really trying to help businesses. Yeah, make take advantage of the internet and social media. And so I scaled STORYSMART so that we have great people and all look all across the you know you've got like a network of people and that was that's yeah very much the value driven affordable storytelling not video production but storytelling. There's a distinction between those two things. But the area that I'm really growing STORYSMART into is the longer form documentary filmmaking and going after celebrities and who have compelling stories that could be sold to a streaming service, right, and be distributed. And, you know, we're about to execute on a proof of concept with with a major League Baseball Hall of Famer. And I'm really excited about that because I look around and I'm like, you know, we've lost some of our hall of famers here in Saint Louis and I'll never forget this to bring it all together. Lou Brock was one of my favorite players like, and I remember the first time I went to a game, it was shortly after my dad had passed and it was my neighbor who took me and I thought the they gave out a they gave it a photo of Lou Brock stealing base 157. Right. And so like that he would be immediately he became my favorite. Anyway, flash forward I'm working for the Cardinals. Lou nearly dies during the off season. He has his leg amputated. Oh complications from diabetes and we design a campaign to honor him #STLisLou and we're going to raise money. We're going to tell his story. We're going to raise money for diabetes research. And it's the same year that we start producing Cardinals Insider okay, we took over what was the Cardinal Nation show on channel five, and rebranded it and I actually had somebody who did our social media. She hosted the show. She was fantastic. And that first season I reached out to his agent and said, Hey, can we go and interview Lou at his home? And Lou was going to throw out the first pitch. He didn't know that on opening day. And so we go to his house. We're in the man-room of his basement. Right? Picture like every inch on the wall is covered with memorabilia. I can imagine. We do this wonderful segment with him. And as we’re breaking down the equipment and stuff, I ask him, I'm like, Lou, how did you get into baseball? And he starts to tell this amazing story that I had never heard about how he talked too much in grade school and the teacher made him do a book report and pick from a book in the back of the classroom. And he picked a book about baseball. And that's actually how he learned about baseball. And he said he never heard that story. Yeah, I never heard the story either. He didn't play organized baseball, really, until college. He played a little bit in high school. He got an academic scholarship to college and was failing chemistry dropped chemistry, picked up PE, the PE teacher said, “Hey, you're a pretty good athlete. You should go out for the baseball team.” Right? He's telling the story. I'm like, I've never heard this story before. And you're like, “Are the cameras on?” You know, the cameras aren't on. And his wife was pulling pictures off the wall, you know, to illustrate this thing. I go back, I drive back to the ballpark. I go into Bill DeWitt's office, and I said, hear me out. And I'm sure he's like, “Okay, Ron with one of his ideas.” I'm like, I'd like to offer Lou Brock the ability for us to preserve his story. I want to I want to take all of the stuff that that's in his basement and digitally preserve it for our archive. He would own it. You know, you can own. Sure. The digital asset and sell the physical items, right when these athletes die. Well, that's exactly what happens, is their family sells this stuff. Right. Right. But at the end of the day, memorabilia is memories, right? It's it's memories attached to a thing. And that thing has value because a celebrity owned it. Right. And there's a market out there for that. But the story is really what's valuable to the family and to the world. And so, you know, I really wanted us to sit down with the athlete and get their life story because I had never heard that story before and Bill DeWitt was like, “Oh my gosh, I've never heard that story.” He's like, “Why have we never heard that story?” And I'm like,“I guess because no one had asked him!” Right? Right. Like, it's like tonight's game. They're not going to ask you about it. If you're going into the Hall of Fame, they're going to ask about your career. Right? They're not going to ask about your childhood. Right? But that's to me, that's that's compelling. People want to see those stories, you know. Ozzie Smith's story. Whitey Herzog’s story, you name it, right, people? You know, Bob Gibson’s - What an extraordinary story. Yes. And those stories can get lost in history. And and so what STORYSMART is really about is trying to help preserve those stories and share those stories. And to the extent that somebody can monetize it, monetize the story. Yeah, absolutely. That family may benefit from, you know, Grandpa's playing days because someone still wants the story and it should go to them and that’s what Grandpa would want. That's very cool. Yeah. And having worked in the world of politics, you know, this idea of controlling your narrative has been around forever. And when people reach out to me, you know, with whatever situation they're dealing with from a crisis communications standpoint, one of the things that I've learned is tell your own story first. Yeah. You know, and and when when Tony La Russa decided to have Mark McGwire be his hitting coach, I'll never forget we ended up hiring Ari Fleischer from the Bush White House and he helped us navigate getting Mark back in. And, you know, we wanted him to own his storytelling, you know, come clean. And and that that has really stuck with me is it's like, look, at the end of the day, you should be sharing your own story directly with your audience and working with the media. It's not like it's not an even or it's it's a both. But if you but if you get a chance to tell your story and someone gives you a platform to do it professionally and everything else, and it's you getting to do that, then you get a chance to have a counter-narrative. If somebody is attacking from another way or you give people a chance to get a full picture, correct, that sort of thing, Correct? Yeah. And it's funny because I would see this all the time, the media that would be dispatched to cover us, the first thing that they would do is they'd go to our website and our social media. They're they're doing it, of course. Right? Right. Yeah, right. And would be in a hearing at the Board of Aldermen. And I'll never forget this. There's, you know, the reporter sitting in front of me and he's tweeting, you know, sarcastic comments that would build a way to saying and I would I would pull Bill aside and say, hey, by the way, reporter, you know, tell him that. And so he knew that when he would do the interview, right? Like, yeah, you know, so like, that's the world we're in, right? It is very dynamic. It is the world we're in. Yeah. And it's, and it's something that's not going to change. Not going to change. Everybody is walking around. Everybody's a photojournalist right now, right? You know, as a podcaster. Well, if I can be a podcaster, anybody can be a podcaster, that's for sure. But yeah, I know. I mean, and so I think that's really that's very empowering. So. Well, Ron, first of all, thank you. This has been fantastic hearing your story here and more about STORYSMART. I definitely want to continue to follow to hear more as things development. But as you may know, we've talked about this before. One of the things I like to do with my guests here on The Screen Lawyer Podcast is to ask “What's on your screen?” And the reason I ask this is because I think in the world like you just described, where we all have screens, we're all filmmakers, were consumers. We're a little bit all of it. We're gamers, we have screens in our pocket, screens our walls on our laptops we’re working with. And so when I ask that question, I get different answers because the brain goes to a particular screen. Yeah, So, well, I think it depends on the screen. If it's the one at work right now, it's an Excel spreadsheet. If it's What am I watching? You know, it depends on who I'm with. Like, you know, my you know, my son Charlie and I have been watching “Rust to Riches”. It's a it's actually a show that was born out of a copyright dispute. Check it out. It's they they they buy these cars and they turn them into really cool things on Netflix. And I don't know the guy runs Gotham Garage, got into a copyright dispute with Warner Brothers because. Oh, that would be right. Right, right. Okay. I mean, Netflix should read an article in Variety and say that changed a lot. I know that. So yeah, yeah, yeah. That and last night with with the family we watched the Sandler you know you're not you're you're so not invited to my bat mitzvah. My wife and I are going to watch Virgin River just finished Lincoln Lawyer I'll watch anything documentary and anything. You know I binge watch shows. Yeah. So I have stuff that I watch myself. Yeah, well, they won't watch British television or for anything with subtitles. I like that. So, I mean, I think I hear that a lot of people and it's sort of the way in our house, you know, my wife and I, we have an open TV relationship right now. We have TV shows we need together. Yep, she's got hers and I've got mine. And every in a while they, they, they'll line back up or whatever. But yeah, I save things that I'm like, well will Charlie grace us with his presence. Right. And then three of us watch. Yeah. When you find something that maybe everybody, especially with kids I remember that too. Well, this is fantastic. Rob, thank you so much. Thank you. So we will everybody needs to check out STORYSMART. How can they find you? getSTORYSMART.com Just go to the website, getSTORYSMART.com Oh, a “Get Smart” reference. Yeah, exactly. I actually did a video with my son walking through a bunch of closing doors. I had him dressed up as Maxwell Smart. Yeah, that's fantastic. getSTORYSMART.com Do you have somebody named 99? No, I don't. Well, I have a dog named Story. All right, Well, that's okay. That's. That's. Well, I think there's a theme, a common theme here. Storytelling. Storytelling is magic. And we are so glad to be joined by Ron Watermon. Check out getSTORYSMART.com. And if you've enjoyed today's podcast, if you're listening on audio, find us and follow us wherever you get your podcasts. And if you're watching here on our YouTube channel, TheScreenLawyer.com, be sure to hit that like and subscribe button down there, so you'll get all the latest episodes of The Screen Lawyer Podcast. Take care, everybody. Check us out of TheScreenLawyer.com. See you soon.