“Why helping others matters”? | Peter Samuelson

What do you do when you see someone hurting?

In this powerful episode, Frank Zaccari sits down with filmmaker and serial pro-social entrepreneur Peter Samuelson, a man who doesn’t just feel empathy… he builds solutions.

Peter shares how one act of kindness for a seriously ill child sparked the creation of Starlight Children’s Foundation, now supporting children and families across hundreds of hospitals. From there, his mission expanded to foster youth through First Star, helping students move from overwhelming odds to college-bound futures through housing, mentorship, life skills, and belonging.

This conversation goes beyond inspiration. It’s a call to action: stop walking past the need and start doing something, small, practical, repeatable, and human.

You’ll also hear why Peter believes storytelling moves hearts, why lasting happiness is rooted in service and contribution, and how he’s exploring a safety-first AI companion concept called Village Owl designed to support teens, especially those who are underserved.

Bottom line: kindness isn’t a personality trait. It’s a decision.

Connect with Peter Samuelson

• Website: samuelson.la
• Email: info@samuelson.la

Guest: Peter Samuelson (CEO, Filmco Media LLC • Producer/Executive Producer • Founder of multiple nonprofits)

#BounceBackInBusinessAndLife #FrankZaccari #PeterSamuelson #Leadership #Kindness #ServiceLeadership #PayItForward #RandomActsOfKindness #PurposeDriven #SocialImpact #NonprofitLeadership #Philanthropy #Community #Humanity #Storytelling #Mentorship #FosterYouth #ChildWelfare #GiveBack #MakeADifference #PositiveRelationships #Resilience #Podcast

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Have you ever felt stuck in pain, loss, or failure? Wondering how to rise when life knocks you down again? Then Bounce Back is for you. So gather your resilience, hold tight to hope, and get ready to reimagine what's possible in your life. So here's your host, Frank Sakari.

SPEAKER_01 0:28

Welcome to Bounce Back in Business and Life. I want to ask y'all something. When you see something wrong, what do you do? Let me give you three situations. You go to Starbucks very early in the morning and you see a couple huddled on a bench and they're holding up a blanket. It appears that they're homeless. What do you do next? You see the same cute commercials with children suffering from cancer. What do you do next? When you see a person being bullied, what do you do next? Many people will think it doesn't impact me and they'll do it. I'll pray for them. And then there are people like my guest Peter Sanderson who steps up and actually does something. He's a CEO of Film Call Media LLC. He's a producer and executive producer of 25 motion pictures over 25 years. And these include Arlington Road, Revenge of the Nerds, Tom and Liv, Libertine, and Stormbreaker. So he's also a serial pro social entrepreneur. Peter, welcome to Bounce Back in Business and Life.

SPEAKER_02 1:42

I'm so happy to be with you and thank you for the kind words. I try.

SPEAKER_01 1:47

And you do, and you succeed. Share a little bit about your journey up to this point. How did you where did you come from? How did you get here?

SPEAKER_02 1:54

Well, as you can tell from the peculiar accent, when I'm in England, they say I sound Americanized, and when I'm here, they say I sound English. Grew up in London, first big pivot. Mr. Lund, my 10th grade English teacher, he said, uh, see me after school, which, as you well know, is never a good thing. I remember he poked me in the chest and said, you know, if you worked about twice as hard, you could go to a really good university. And I laughed at him with all the ego of a 15-year-old. And I said, you know, no one in my family has ever been to university. And my dad left school at 14, so no, I don't think I am going to university. He said, Well, it'll be even better then because you'll be the first one. I did what he said. I got myself a full scholarship, a good thing, to Cambridge University. Wow. And there I was. And I got my bachelor's, I got my master's in English, and then I came out of that and looked around and said, Oh, there appears to be no work whatsoever discernible anywhere that I can get at it for someone who knows an awful lot about medieval English literature and absolutely not a damn thing about life, any particular skill in the present moment. However, I had earned pocket money during my time at Cambridge by working as an interpreter. French English, English, French, and one of the things I had done was to interpret for the producer, the American producer, Tony Bushing, on a huge television commercial where it seems inconceivable today. It's paid for by Chevron. And we started in Marrakesh and we followed the route of the Monte Carlo rally up through Spain and across into France and so forth. And when we got to Monte Carlo and we finished, and he was very happy, and so were the agency, and so were the Chevron people, he said, Do you want to come back to LA? And I said, Well, would I have a job? And he said, Yeah, I'll give you a job. We'll have to get you a visa. And I said, Would I earn enough money to have somewhere to live? And he said you would. And I said, and need to rent a car, right? He said, Yes. And he said, in fact, you know, first month or so, why don't you just stay in our family home and we have an extra car and get, you know, find your feet and find somewhere to live. And thus began my American life. And I he was the only person I knew, really, and it turned out sensationally well. There's this thing that has existed for years. Certainly it was there when they wrote the phrase, the poem on the base of the Statue of Liberty. Give us your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. I guess thought at the time, I can certainly be a huddled mass, maybe a bit more than that. So my life in America, it's actually now up from the 25 films. It's closer to 30. And that's how I've earned a living and put four kids through school and paid the mortgage and all those good things. But the other side of my life, and frankly, the more important side, is the same toolkit of being a professional film producer, turns out to have another use. And that use is to identify some massive unaddressed social problem, and to be impertinent enough to think that you're the guy who might be able to put a dent in the problem by actually doing something about it. So I'm the founder of seven nonprofits, seven 501c3 charities. And the first of those was the Starlight Children's Foundation, where the single premise was seriously ill children are very sad. And furthermore, they focus on their pain and it hurts more. What if we made them happy? And we did one sample wish where we flew a little boy. It was my cousin's idea. We flew him and his mum from London, and he was very seriously ill. And the cousin and the mum and the son moved into my apartment on Wilshire Boulevard here in LA. It was back when I was single. And uh we did two weeks of everything you shouldn't do with a dying child. And after he went home and he died, it was both sad and not sad because everybody knew what was going to happen. But we realized that it hadn't been that difficult to do, and that his mum, most of all, was left with a memory of her kid laughing at Disneyland and not dying in a hospital bed. That felt like a really good thing. So I called a meeting after work. I was running a film company back then called Interscope, and I invited, you know, one of the things film producers do is we staff stuff, we crew stuff. We're the leader, but we realize we don't know how to do accountancy, so we get an accountant. We're not lawyers, so we get a lawyer, and so on and so forth. So I said, you know, this is what we just did. Here are the pictures. Maybe we could do five, six of these a year. And everyone said, yeah, that'd be absolutely fantastic. And the lawyer said, So I need to form a charity, get the 501c3, what do you want to call it? And I said, I have no idea. And there was a very pretty young lady there who I had invited. So functionally, this was our second date. And it was she who said, you know that children's rhyme? Starlight, star bright, first star I see tonight. I wish I may. I wish I might. Have this wish I wish tonight. She said, Why don't we call it the Starlight Children's Foundation? And we all said, Yeah. And the graphic designer said, I can see the in my mind's eye, the logo. It's a child reaching for a star. That was 43 years ago. I won't tell you any of the middle, but Starlight is one of the two or three leading children's charities across the United States, where we're in 800 hospitals. We're in Canada, Australia, and the United Kingdom. In all of the years of Starlight, we've raised over$1.3 billion. We've helped millions of seriously ill kids and their mums and dads and siblings heal, make the best of it, have something happy to focus on. And after that, but while still running it, somebody introduced me to Steven Spielberg. And I went and had what was supposed to be 20 minutes with him. And we talked about how we could use this new fangled thing. The year was 1990, and the internet was a brand new thing. It was back then what AI is now. Oh, what can we do with this? And we decided, well, why couldn't we link audiovisually in real time kids who are immunosuppressed in a hospital room who can't be touched, and the nurse has to wear a spacesuit to go in and all that kind of thing. Why couldn't we link them with kids in other hospitals who are in the same situation? Wouldn't that be grand? So we called it Starbright World. We launched it in 1994 at Digital World. We pressed a big green button with General Norman Schwarzkopf there and Stephen and me. And it was long before Second Life or Facebook or any of them. We were the world's first fully interactive, real-time, avatar-based social network. I actually looked up when we launched it, Mark Zuckerberg was 11 years old. But of course, in one sense, he was smarter than us because he did his for profit, made himself a mega billionaire. We did ours as a 501c3 to try and help seriously ill kids, and none of us have ever made a nickel from it. I then moved on, staying on the board of Starlight, Starbrite. We merged them together. And my next focus was why don't foster kids go to college? If you apply logic to it, these are children who have been abused or neglected through no fault of their own. They are in a bad place, they have PTSD, they feel as though pretty much accurately nobody loves them, they're living with strangers. And I thought, what do we do? Why do only 9% of them, which is about five times less than the general population of twelfth graders, why do only 9% go to college? College would be really good for them. They could not only learn a skill, they would meet wonderful people, they could find their surrogate family, maybe. I took myself up the road and I met with the Chancellor of UCLA and I said, here's the bottom line, I'd like you to allow me to house, educate, and encourage high school aged foster kids for a four-year period, grades nine, ten, eleven, and twelve, with the goal of getting them ready academically and in life skills and in encouragement. We won't just give them a UCLA t-shirt. We will also, you know, we say to them, it's a ladder. If you fall off, don't worry, we'll put you back. But in the end, you're the only one who can move your feet up the ladder. You heard me say 9% of American foster kids with no help go to college. Our most recent stat at our 12, actually, it's 13 now, because we just added Humboldt in Northern California. So we're up to 13 of these academies in the United States, and we have three in England and one in Scotland, I'm happy to say. That's brand new at Napier. Across all of them, this most recent June, 89% of our foster kids into college, uh, zip zap. And that's the same as the previous year, and we also held it steady pretty much through COVID. So it's a winning game. So I did that. And along the road, I realized I have mentored hundreds of foster kids. I mean, we have a thousand in First Ar at the moment, a little bit more now, adding the couple of them that are brand new. I thought I've learned what they want to be mentored through. You know, what do I know now that I wish I knew when I was 18? And I realized I've kind of got pattern recognition. I have chapter headings for a self-help book. Why wouldn't I write it? So I got up for a year. This is 18 months, two years ago. I got up at five o'clock in the morning, six days a week, and I wrote the damn book. And I used those as the chapter headings, and it's called Finding Happy. And it is literally a user's guide to your life with lessons from mine. And what I did is I analyzed the word prevalence of the nouns, the substantives in the book. And the more often something was mentioned, hopefully in a helpful way, the bigger the font. But as well as the big words, there's also the little words.

SPEAKER_01 14:06

Tiny ones.

SPEAKER_02 14:07

Yeah. And all of that is in the book. I then realized while I was writing it, what I can do to kind of punch this up a bit, make it more exciting for teenagers, which is, you know, one needs to to get them to use the book. I thought I've made every mistake that a young man could make. You know, there's a chapter in the book, what is a good risk? What is a bad risk? How can you tell the difference? And I thought, well, I nearly killed myself twice through absolute 18 or 19-year-old stupidity. And those are exciting, awful stories. And also, as a film producer, I've worked with some pretty mad people, and some of those are hilarious stories. You know, going around on the set of the Pink Panther film that I made before the arrival of the star Peter Sellers and saying to people, Do you mind going to wardrobe, change your socks or change your t-shirt? Because you know Peter won't work if anyone's wearing green. True stories. So I wrote the book. I thought I would have to self-publish it. I got a brilliant book agent through an introduction at a place called Folio Literary. And the next thing I know, there's a bit of an auction going on in the bidding war. Simon and Schuster Regalo won. And it's out there on Amazon and Barnes and Noble and this and that as a physical book and an e-book for Kindle. And also, we got an offer that we said yes to from Tandor for an audio book. And I said, Well, who's going to read it? And they said, Well, not you. You aren't a professional reader. And I said, But how do you know I'm not good? And they said, Well, we don't know that you're not good. You want to audition? I said, I do want to audition. So I got hired to be read my own book, which is reading an entire book aloud, let me tell you. It took a week sitting in a glass booth in Burbank with a guy called Paul on the other side with all the little slidey things. And it's out there, it's doing extraordinarily well. It was number one nonfiction on bulk books, which is significant because that means multiple copies, you know, boxes with more than 25 copies to one address. So that's kind of cool. I'm beginning to work on the second edition because I want to beef up the AI chapter and do a few other things. There are some chapters in the book where I brought in, I felt it was not my privilege to write about the one where the chapter heading is How to Be Arrested Without Being Killed. So what I did is I got a young man of color, uh fantastic guy, uh, who had been arrested three times. And I got him to contribute some paragraphs for that, and I got stuff from the ACLU and so forth. I think it's pretty definitive. What I'm working on at the moment, and it doesn't exist yet, you'll see behind me there is a rather la large owl. And the reason that that is there, rather conveniently, they sell uh 14-inch owls, which are supposed to go on your roof to scare away predatory birds or something. I asked myself the question with some experts in AI, could we create and safely number one word safety, an AI friend we've called it village owl, which could be used by an especially an underprivileged kid, but frankly any teenager, same grouping as First Star, which would be the wisdom of 3,500 years of humanity, but distilled down into advice. Where we are in the process is we're building what they call the libraries. So the first library was the 20 biggest religions in the world, what is in common among them in terms of life hacks, advice, not the spiritual stuff, because they will disagree about that, but common wisdom about, you know, blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit social justice kind of stuff. And we've also now, we just the most recent library that we pulled in was Indigenous wisdom, which I love because everything begins with come and sit by the fire with me, look into the flames, feel their warmth, look around you, we are your family, look beyond to Great Mother Nature. Here long before we arrived, and we'll be here long after. We are in her, she is in us, and so forth. But it's very pragmatic stuff, same territory as my book, which we also dragged in, but using AI to focus it. We won't be releasing it until we are absolutely crystal clear that it will do no harm. We've got a second AI to second guess the safety of the first AI and all that kind of thing. It's a whole new world for me, but I love leading it because I've got these amazingly dedicated, we've got an AI expert whose company only works for nonprofits. He only wants to make the world a better place. And we'll do it as a 501. Either it'll be part of first time, maybe, dunno, or we'll do it as a standalone 501c3. So if anybody out there in the big wide world, if that rings your bell, I'd love to hear from you because we'll take help wherever we can get it. And it's early startup, which is where my particular passion is. I love identifying a challenge and an opportunity, but a lot of this is also where I get my happiness. And this is the biggest piece of advice in the book, and it'll be in the village owl as well. Is you have a problem, get outside yourself, find someone worse off than you, help them. That's too scary, okay. Go and volunteer for somebody else's charity. You know, I say to the kids, oh, you want to love and be loved? Seriously, you're gonna go to a bar and meet someone while drunk and they're drunk too. Good luck with that one. Oh, you're gonna use one of these swipe left, swipe right based on 0.2 of a second of looking at someone's face. Do you realize that's not really their face? It's been run through an AI algorithm, and that's who they wish they could look like. You're gonna be disappointed over the coffee. But what I've learned from First Star, and honestly, what I've gained from Firststar is much more than I will ever contribute, is that when you get outside your zone, and remember, foster kids are in a worse place than the rest of us put together.

SPEAKER_01 21:20

Yes.

SPEAKER_02 21:21

I teach a class there called Random Acts of Kindness and Pay It Forward. It's wonderful. First class, I say you're walking down the sidewalk, there's an old woman in rags lying face down, fast asleep on the sidewalk in front of you. You have three choices. Tell me which you take, and why do people do each of the three choices? Choice one, stop, slip a dollar under her arm. Choice two, wake her up, give her the dollar. Choice three, don't give her anything, look the other way, cross the street, don't engage with her. And it ends up being a conversation about. The golden rule. It's in every world religion. But then I say, okay, so social justice is something that lives genetically in our heart. What about an atheist? Would they never stop? And they say, no, no, no. They would absolutely feel the same thing. They could, and they could stop and do something about it. And I say, okay, who can tell me scientifically what is the second law of thermodynamics? And there's usually like two kids in a class of 30. And they say, well, you know, it's the entropy thing. It's the one that says that in any closed system, if you don't apply external energy, it'll all turn to crap. Just leave it alone and you'll have nothing. You'll have random chaos. And I say, okay, what's a closed system? And they usually say something like, Oh, if you don't oil the engine in your car, it won't go round. And then I say, What if it was something more abstract? What about a family? Yeah, if you don't nurture a family, you won't ask us. We're foster kids. We don't have families. Yeah, if if you don't pay attention to it, you won't have one. Then I say to them, come to the class tomorrow, something magnificent is going to happen. Every single one of you is going to receive$200. And there's like a stunned silence. And they say, We get$200. And I say, Well, you can't keep it. We're going to go. You have to write a little essay, 300, 350 words, to whom or to what you wish it to go. And then we're going to go and give it. It can be a charity, it could be an individual. And then we're going to go back two weeks, three weeks later. We're going to see, did the homeless guy, the unhoused guy, did he buy the shoes that he needed, or did he buy an enormous bottle of brandy? Because philanthropy doesn't always work. Right. Doing this, the kids are inches taller as a result of the process. It's the first time in their young lives that they've realized, oh, I thought I was the worst off in the universe. I guess I'm not. There's someone worse off than me. They get agency, they get power personally by helping someone. And these essays are extraordinary. My name is Jose. I'm adding$10 because that makes$210, which is three times$70. And$70 down at the Humane Society is what you have to pay them for them not to euthanize a dog. So I'm going to save three puppies. And the reason I'm going to do that is when I was down there, I looked into the eyes of a puppy they told me had been very, very badly beaten. And I saw my own eyes because I was very badly beaten as well. And so I'm saving three puppies, love Jose. Or how about this one? One more. My name is Sheila. My mum is in prison for another two years, seven months, and three days. They always know exactly the remaining length of the customer. I love her very much, even though she did bad things, including some awful things to me. But I know she hates the toiletries, and I'm going to put the money in her prison account because I love her and I want her to be able to buy better shampoo. Love Sheila. So I mean, what I take from that, and there there are three chapters in the book: The Meaning of Life Part One, Part Two, and Part Three. Meaning of Life short term, near the front of the book, I think, me personally, selfishly, is a big tub of chocolate ice cream, a spoon, something to watch on the screen in front of you, and no one to bother you. I think medium term meaning of life, finding happy in the middle of the book, is more of that on different days. But long-term happiness is completely different. And my thesis is help someone else. You want to find someone that you can have a meaningful relationship with who will love you and you can love them, volunteer. Look to your left, look to your right. Who are these people? They care about what you care about. Furthermore, you have something to talk to them about. You are fellow volunteers. Try dating one of them. Your success rate will be much, much higher. And I know of what I speak because the accountant in that very first meeting of Starlight, who I asked to be there because I had dated her once, and I knew she was an accountant, and she was the one who dreamed up the name. That was our second date, and we carried on dating. And then there was a beautiful moment. We ran a children's holiday party at Christmas that year at County UFC Medical Center, and I had had Marineland donate their used adult fish costumes. One of them was a dolphin. And inside the dolphin was the young accountant, and we were there in the auditorium at County USC, and some of the kids were so ill that they had had to be wheeled in in their beds, and they couldn't get out of their beds. And we had a live band, and there were kids dancing, and there was one kid in a bed, a little girl, dancing horizontally in her bed. And I looked into the grill in the belly of the huge dolphin thing, and there was our young accountant, and all the mascara had run down her cheeks, and I thought, oh, I think I love this person. And that led to, you know, we dated, we fell in love, I went down on one knee, she laughed at me, but we got married anyway, and we've raised four kids together, we've been together 40 odd years, a little more, and she's my wife. So there you go.

SPEAKER_01 28:13

What a story. There's a chapter in the book, Peter. Chapter three. See, it's it's you can titled uh Tell Your Story with Empathy. It's it's the little girl who throws. And this thing put me to tears and how these children come together and bond. When we spoke before, you said there has to be unconditional love. Share that story about this cat. I think her name is Catalina. Do you remember that?

SPEAKER_02 28:38

I do remember it. My thesis as a film producer, and I I consider it a privilege that I've been forced to learn how to do this. Success in life starts with storytelling. And the key to storytelling is you have to get someone's attention by moving their heart. You have to make them laugh, or you have to make them feel empathy, or you have to make them feel vulnerable, or you have to make them feel danger. You have to have them. There's a literary critic, Victorian literary critic called A. C. Bradley, and he had this phrase, the willing suspension of disbelief, which is that you have to grab someone by their emotions and hold their attention. You have to know how to do that as a film producer, because think of the enormity of the challenge. Even when you have a script, you have to persuade the actress or the director or the money, you have to persuade them to read the script. And often you haven't even got the script yet. You've got a notion. You have to be able to pitch something compellingly from your mind's eye into their mind's eye that doesn't exist yet. And your ask is direct my film, agree to attach as the star of my film, or could you please distribute my film and give me$30 million? It's a pretty high hurdle. The way you do it is by moving someone's heart. And I put one of those stories into the book. I think I might not ruin it by, you know, maybe by the book, but it's about a little girl who gets herself into trouble on a tight rope and there isn't a net underneath. And it's my metaphor for a kid in a bad place. I had a whole long conversation yesterday morning with the CEO of First Star who found an underage prostituted girl wearing just a bra and panties on Figueroa Street in downtown LA, and felt compelled, obviously, to do something about it. It's a pretty cruel old world. You have to, I mean, I spend so much time begging for money for the seven charities, and now there's the eighth with village AI. How do you do it? How can I pitch Village AI? It doesn't exist yet. I have to be able to say what it will be and why it will be safe, and I have to move people's hearts. I don't attack a problem unless I feel that the idea is big and replicable enough that if I can make it work and keep it alive and find the money and find the team and we do it, and it turns out that it has value. For me, Starlight, it wouldn't be useless if it was only in County USC Medical Center. But no, just in the United States, we're in 800 hospitals. First star, yeah, it would have value if it was only at UCLA, but I believe in replication. We do replication all the time in business. If Howard Schultz has said, well, I opened this wonderful Starbucks coffee bar in Seattle, I'm declaring success. This is a living. But he didn't do that. Now, Starbucks, how many have they got? 12,000 or something across the country? I think it's one of the mad things that entrepreneurship doesn't often inhabit established charities. You know, I say to someone, you're doing the most wonderful work here in Chicago. Have you thought of doing it in Cincinnati or you know, Memphis or something like that? And they say, No, no, I just do it here. And I say, Well, why? And they say, Well, because I live here. And I say, Yeah, but there's other people who live there. You could either bring one of them here and train them, or here's an idea, it's the way I did it, take the number two who is really skilled, send them off to be the number one and start up, and then supervise a lot until it, you know, finds its footing. And sometimes that works, sometimes it doesn't work. But I think these are huge social challenges. You know, the United States, by measured by the welfare of its children, it ranks dead last of the developed nations. And that's despite the fact that we spend more per capita on children's welfare. Go figure. Who are they? Are they not our weakest link? Exactly. Why are we not putting them first or in, you know, I would take, let's make them one of our top ten. If I was president of the United States, I'd have a cabinet member who would be my children's czar, who were responsible for making sure that every child in the next generation, because who are we? We're all going to be dead, but the next generation will include the leadership of the country. We need to take care of them. And I I this is my life goal. It's also my joy. No one wants on their tombstone, died a billionaire. Nobody puts that on their tombstone. What you want is for it to say lifted up the lives of children, house the unhoused, did some wonderful things, put some ripples on the pond of life, was close to the life force, put themselves out, paid it forward. I I made a speech yesterday at Rotary in Long Beach, and people were trying to buy my book. I have books there, and they kept saying, What do I need to give you to get a book? And I said, Well,$20, but I don't want you to give it to me. I'm going to give it to you. Go out there and find two people and donate$10 to each of them. And tell them to pay it forward. Doesn't matter who they are. Tell them, here's the$10. I'm in the grocery line behind you. I don't want you going through your change trying to find the last few cents to get you groceries. Here, I'm buying you your groceries. Go forth and help someone who's worse off than you. If we could do that, and if one led to two, led to four, led to eight, sixteen, thirty-two, yabba yabba, you know, maybe we could make it go viral. I mean, it's an idea that I've had. There was a film several years ago. I remember Haley Joe Osmond was in it, and it was called Pay It Forward. I tried to actually make a real-world pay it forward back then, and it didn't quite catch fire, but it was before the internet. And now I think the way you do it is you give people little business card-sized things with a QR code, and when they pay it forward, they give some of those to the person, and you're encouraged to go on the QR code, go on the site and say, What did you do? Who did you help? You're gonna have to put their name, and have them do it too. My sense is we could use a bit more kindness, Frank. I think it doesn't matter what your politics are, there's this appalling, you know, internet social media fueled hatred thing, tribalism thing going on. Hard right, hard left. I I the more I read what these people say, the more I think it's not actually a straight line politically. I think round the back the fascists gather from both ends. And I don't like it at all. And if you say, well, what's the underpinning human need that's being met by these abrasive, rude, uncouth, undereducated, overhating leaders? It is they're saying, fear, don't feel too good, stick with me, I'll give you hatred instead. They wear different clothes, uh, or they're a different color, or they worship a different god. Stick with me, and I'll make you feel proud to be a hater. And I'm not saying that politically, I'm saying it bilaterally. And I think it's BS and the antidote, if there is one, please, God in heaven, there is a solution to this polarization. Who knows? I think you could go either way. I think the solution is that we have to teach kindness and encourage it and reward it.

SPEAKER_01 37:32

Absolutely. Any act of kindness, you don't know what what I love about what you do is you don't know when that act of kindness is gonna come back or who it impacts, and it could be 10 years down the road. But these children that you're working with are gonna say, Peter taught me this when I was at UCLA, when I was 13, and now I'm 33, and I'm now in a position to give.

SPEAKER_02 38:01

It's exactly right, and the other thing is that in an act of kindness, in some minimal way, you get to know the person a little tiny bit. I just gave one of my single-user housing shelters on wheels, they're called Edar, E D A R edar.org is the website. I had a little conversation with the gentleman that I was giving it to in LA, who was unhoused, and he was so delighted. And I said, Tell me about you. And he said, Well, I used to play the trumpet, and I said, Really? Were you any good? And he said, Yeah, I that my trumpet was stolen, but way back I played trumpet with BB King. Wow. I thought, seriously, we're living in a country where you can play trumpet with BB King at that level, and you end up living in a cardboard box. What, you know, come on, let's do something about this. And we can. That's what's so absurd. Is it's not even that difficult. I mean, to grant a wish or provide some other psychosocial service for a seriously ill child in hospital. One of the things that we've done, which is now a complete revolution, is what seriously ill children in hospital in this country in Canada wear. Used to be they wore size small of a crappy laundered smock, the kind where your bottom's sticking out the back because it doesn't tie up properly, and the nurses, it turns out, hate them because it's difficult to get an IV in. So what we did is we went to Disney and we went to some other IP owners and we said, can you give us your IP? Because we want to do a range of famous celebrity figures on children's smocks. And we've got a manufacturer, we've got a procurement agent, and it's now a thing. It's now prevalent in children's hospitals across the country. Uh, you get three, the one you're wearing, the one that's in the laundry, and the third one that's somewhere between the two. And when you're discharged, hopefully, to home, you take them with them. They belong to you. They write their name in the back. So, you know, that's not very complicated. It's a very good idea. It wasn't my idea. But implementing and following through, something we learn in business, there's not a lot of it in early stage startup entrepreneurship. And it's a con making it work is you have to put one foot in front of the other. What do we need to do next? Where is this money coming from? How do we pitch this? Whom do we pitch it to? Who is our team? And how do we tell the story? And I think weirdly, those are the skills that a film producer learns, because frankly, you're not a film producer very long if you don't master them. And you make the world a better place. And in making the world a better place, I mean it sincerely, almost all my joy. There's a little bit of joy that comes from being a film producer, you know, make a comedy, stand at the back of the auditorium, listen to the audience laugh, hopefully in the right places. Yep. Sometimes in the wrong places, but that's good too in a comedy. And then the much more prevalent joy is go help someone, start something that will do some good. And I think your podcast focused on those kind of revelations. You know, I meet people who are extraordinarily good at doing something, but they never do it for charity. If they volunteer, the person who is a genius at AI, they and their children go down and help stuff envelopes. Well, that's not nothing, but go and help them with AI. I have a friend called Darien Rodriguez Heyman, just to give him a plug. And he wrote this book. How great is this? AI for Nonprofits. It's an amazing book, and he's now run seminars for Starlight and First Star, and he doesn't know it yet, but he's going to do one for EDAR as well. And he's all over helping me with introductions for the Village Owl project. He's using his skills that he got professionally to help make the world turn. And that ought to be a thing, but it tends not to be. I agree. That's what the book's about. It's called Finding Happy. You can get it on Amazon. If you ever find yourself in the same place as me, I'll sign it. And that's my life, really. It's an incredible story.

SPEAKER_01 43:01

How do people get a hold of you, Peter?

SPEAKER_02 43:04

Well, the website is www.samuelson.la. And on there you will find me, and you can send me an email. I think it's info at samuelson.la comes directly to me. It's also in the book. Publisher said, You're raving mad. You're going to get thousands of emails if you put it in the book. And I said, well, then I'll have to hire people in order to answer them. Haven't had thousands, but I've had many hundreds, and we've answered every damn one. And they're wonderful because most of them are from a kid in a bad place. And we try and be helpful. And, you know, they've helped me focus on what can I do bigger, better, bolder in the second edition, you know, what needs punching up and so forth. Finding happy. I mean, actually. what is the meaning of life long term? If you don't find happy, what was it for? But the trick is the subtlety, finding happy is not just chocolate ice cream. The biggest and most permanent come from helping other people.

SPEAKER_01 44:17

Exactly. I love this. Well we are just about out of time, folks. I want to thank my guest Peter Samuelson who showed us that acting with kindness and generosity lifts hundreds and hundreds of people who in turn will make a positive impact in the world. And that's something you want to be part of. Get a hold of Peter. Make sure you connect with him and find a way to help in one of his environments. Now let me leave you all with this none of us are in this alone. And the secret to walking on water is to know where the rocks are. And today Peter showed us where many those rocks are and together in this podcast we're going to find more rocks and bounce back better than ever. Thank you so much.

SPEAKER_00 45:09

So that's it for today's episode of Bounce Back. Head on over to Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen and subscribe to the show. One lucky listener every single week who posts a review on Apple Podcasts or iTunes will win a chance the grand prize drawing to win a$10,000 private VIP day with Frank himself. Be sure to head on over to bouncebackpodcast.com and pick up a free copy of Frank's gift and join us on the next episode