INTRODUCTION

Hi. I’m Ken Sheetz. That’s me on the right with client Oprah Winfrey and her president of the time Jeffery Jacobs. My photo opp with Oprah commemorated the successful completion of the $28 million Harpo Studios project that my firm managed the development for on time and on budget. 

I’m recalling things as accurately as possible here. But please take it all with a grain of salt because we’re all biased heroes when it comes to our own auto-biographies. With this caveat in mind, enjoy this highly compressed telling of my journey from cold-hearted real estate mogul to open-hearted movie maker accordingly.

Look me up on IMDB sometime. It’s hard for even me to believe that this son of a blue-collar Milwaukee welder has been making movies now for over 25 years. All kinds of movies on all kinds of topics, from politics to the coolest tech and meditation ever. Over this creative quarter of a century, I’ve crafted 4 feature docs, thousands of short films with well over 30 million views on the web, as well as 2 successful theatrical runs.

But it was a long and winding road to my film career. A hybrid Bachelor’s of Fine Arts degree from Layton School of Art and Design and Northwestern University, a knack for marketing I gained earning my way through college in direct sales to fill out the balance of my partial scholarship, plus working 5 years as an ace corporate interiors architect at the #1 firm in Chicago, RMM, all combined to propel this Wisconsin born artist into an illustrious career as one of Chi-town’s top commercial real estate players.

BTW, I am not going to name too many names from my past. Because after doing a lot of hard work on myself, I happily have zero lingering resentment towards anyone from any of my “good” failures of my past. Nada. Zip. Well, nothing a cool meditation with my ET spirit guide or a workout with my multi-talented wife, business partner and private yoga coach Elizabeth England can’t soothe.

CHICAGO REAL ESTATE MOGUL

From 1979 to 2003 I was blessed by a highly profitable and prolific 24 year span of virtually unbroken success. But no successful person is an island. And I had several great mentors and two synergistic real estate brokerage stars, one male and one female, who I trained from pups, that turbo boosted my career.

During these salad days, I completed over a billion dollars in transactions for dozens of giant corporations like AT&T and Chase Bank, while leasing 4 downtown skyscrapers. In 1987 I won the prestigious Chicago Sun-Times award as the Commercial Real Estate Broker of the Year. And in 1991 I again won the  Sun-Times award. This time as Rehab Developer of the Year for the $28 million Harpo Studios project for the great Oprah Winfrey.

Add to this biz bliss, a marriage to a brilliant and beautiful college sweetheart from our home town of Milwaukee, two delightful kids, a new million dollar custom home in tony Lake forest, and a thriving real estate firm that I established in 1987, featuring the talents of some of the best real estate brokers that I recruited in the city. I branded my firm Oxford Realty after the college because, well, it sounded cool and prestigious. Everything was going so incredibly well for this first person in the Sheetz family to ever graduate college.

One sunny 1988 day as I gazed out the window of my corner office in the 303 West Madison building, I looked down on a ten story parking structure across the street thinking, ‘This would be an awesome site for a skyscraper.”  It had always been my dream to combine all my skills in marketing skyscrapers and managing world headquarter interiors from space programming to move-in, so I decided to check out the owner of the garage at Franklin and Madison. After getting the owner’s name from a parking attendant within hours I had secured an option on the site and $250K bridge loan that would become my masterpiece One North Franklin.

I found the equity partners while my new finance partner, who went out of his way to say over steaks, “I’ll never screw you, Ken,” meaning he would one day, found the debt. As the venture’s managing partner I retained the world renowned architect Skidmore Owings & Merrill to create a marketing scale model of my vision for the site. This was familiar turf to me because during my days as an interior architect I consulted on the design, budgeting and construction of many office buildings and their floor plate design, elevators and mechanical systems. And I made sure the building I dubbed One North Franklin, as the first developer in Chicago to choose a Franklin Street address, was totally state of the art.

Some tense months later, deep in the middle of getting One North Franklin (ONF for short) designed, budgeted and built, I was low on cash because the loan funding was still not in place. Then I got a phone call out of the blue from Oprah Winfrey’s president. Jeffery Jacobs (center in pic above) explained that referred to me by the same lawyer that I luckily had met in the elevator one day when my ears perked up, hearing, “My Canadian client is chomping at the bit to find a Chicago real estate project to invest in.” And that’s the amazing way I not only found our $22 million equity partner but began work the most famous client I’ve ever had.

Cut to 1991 and my long blissful stretch of unbroken success hits a brick wall at 70 miles an hour when an unexpected commercial real estate crash hits and drops my 38 story $162 million ONF development on my ego-swollen head. Overnight, the Oxford real estate dynasty I planned to leave to my two kids evaporates. It was in these dark hours, as the first Sheetz to venture into the big business world in my blue-collar family, that I slowly realized that I had no one who I trusted to turn to for advice in these times of high stakes trouble.

Meanwhile, my ONF partners, two wealthy Canadian families and three local Chicago players, decided the falling real estate market was the perfect time to turn on me like a pack of wild dogs. The local press, to whom I’d been a media darling for over a decade, now portrayed me as an abject failure. I endured one epic public humiliation after another. Oddly, my unbroken string of success had left me totally unprepared for failure. Filled with rage and frustration, working 15 hours days to keep my empire afloat, my storybook marriage crumbled.

No Fred Trump to bail me out, I fell to earth like a modern-day Icarus. Little did I realize, just a year later I’d have lot of company in the real estate cellar, when it became painfully clear that my fall was was only the first drop in an ocean. An ocean that became the national real estate tidal wave of ’92. A tidal wave of falling rents and defaulting loans that bankrupted many of the industry’s biggest players, including Trump. On the bright side, I was now small potatoes and the two-faced media went onto make more established real estate brethren… miserable.

The smoking crater where my life used to be, however, remained. The silver lining in that mess, one I was trapped in through no fault of my own, aside from my lack of experience in knowing how to avoid personal guarantees on a $162 million loan and a total lack of skills for coping with bone-crushing levels of stress, stress that cost me most of my hair, did serve to painfully show me who my real friends and loyal employees were. Something I’d not bought a ticket for consciously, the real estate crash of ’92, triggered in part by big changes to the US tax codes, nonetheless gifted me a box seat to the dark side of fakers, banks, certain disloyal partners, brutal lenders and, worst of all, ruthless divorce lawyers.

Take my word for it, the daily interest on a $162 million loan, that you’ve personally guaranteed a multi-million dollar chunk of, is soul crushing. Partners, contractors and employees were becoming more panicky everyday. Bill collector sharks were coming after me now too. One impatient vendor threatened to personally beat “the living crap out of me” up if I did not make payments on furniture that I no longer needed as my staff had to be cut in a desperate effort to stay afloat.

Plummeting Chicago rents, nowhere even close to our proforma, put the loan severely out of balance, triggering all of the construction loan’s onerous default provisions. So even though I’d done a great job of pre-leasing and overseeing the elegant state of the art design and development of the building, one that literally has my personal signature on the final I-beam, I was soon forced to give the keys back to the lender.

Part Two of Five

One winter sunset walk, after telling my divorce attorney to give away all my assets to my soon to be ex-wife, to help her make a good home for our kids, kids I could now only see every other weekend, I stared into the ice choked waves crashing onto the Oak Street beach concrete abutment, thinking, ‘One step and the pain is all over.’

Then I heard myself shout to the raging lake, “No fucking way!” I walked off that icy pier, swearing I would walk away from real estate one day. Walk away to become the artist I went to art college to be, perusing a life as a filmmaker.

But in order to pay steep alimony and child support, calculated on my 6 figure income when I was on top of the world, and get my two kids through their college years, I would need to straddle both the film and real estate worlds for over a decade.

Landing on my feet from the wreckage of my real estate firm, I brought along the core of my best brokerage people and nabbed the Executive Vice President spot for a national real estate firm’s Chicago commercial real estate brokerage arm. My new employer had a vulture fund. And so I made a play to acquire ONF at fire sale prices that the bank was gathering offers on. But the bank chose the offer of “the grave dancer” Sam Zell. One North Franklin was finally over, along with my marriage of 18 years.

I had not realized how hard this would be, to keep my income high while fighting lows depression over all I had lost. After some help from some of Chicago’s finest therapists I believe I came out of this disastrous time in life better than when things had begun falling apart. I highly recommend therapy if you’re ever going through anything even remotely close to what I was going through.

HOLLYWOOD OR BUST

SPOILER ALERT: Mostly Bust. But making big money was no longer my goal. Having fun making the ten transition to life as a filmmaker was what I was all about now, baby.

Planning my slow motion escape from the real estate world, I began by reading every screenwriting, producing and directing book I could get my hands on. As well, I made many frequent trips to Hollywood to learn at the feet of the same eccentric teacher that helped launch Tarantino and Spike Lee.

My first film and TV success was a show that I co-produced with an amazing Canadian partner. We co-directed the shoot across all 50 states. That is except Alaska because, well, we ran out of money. We shot it In 1996 over my summer vacation from my real estate day job.

Little known fact, PBS producers must find their own sponsors and this turned out to be a tortuous 4 year process. Eventually, through sheer willpower and determination, we finally secured our airing date on PBS for one of the 2000 Bush/Gore presidential debates.

Titled A KID’S VIEW OF THE US, the critically acclaimed show was sponsored by Kellogg’s Frosted Flakes, United Airlines, Budget Rent-a-car, and Payless Shoes.

This first hard won success inspired me to move to Hollywood in 2003 at the tender age of 50 to make movies full time. I made this bold move to the west coast via U-Haul, even though I was told by pros that pushing 50 was ancient by Hollywood standards and that I’d likely be shut out. You know, in all honesty, if I had known how crazy tough cracking Hollywood was going to be, well, I might just have stayed home in Chicago making big money and doing the art thing on the side. Careful dreamers, Hollywood is not for the faint of heart.

To fund my Hollywood dream I raised half a million dollars in 2003 for a 5 year venture I playfully called Three Sheetz to the LLC. I already had 5 finished screenplays, written in Chicago that were now in my quiver by now. So the goal was to seed production of three of those screenplays via the studio route. My hilariously overly optimistic hope being that one of three might be a hit.

One of my mentors, a tough Brooklyn born real estate genius whose claim to fame was leasing the world’s tallest building, taught me that if you are going to fail, fail big. And so I set out fail as big as I had in the real estate world where I had overcome the epic failure of the One North Franklin building. The lesson here, dear reader, is not to fear failure but embrace it and grow from it. And so six of my wealthy real estate pals and one family member, a rich uncle, at least by Milwaukee standards, invested in my new film venture. 

Supported by my newly formed LLC I relocated to Hollywood, Studio City to be precise. Still one of best door openers in the world, I managed to visit with nearly every major studios with the goal of producing the three films. Alas, aside from my best screenplay getting optioned for one year to an Oscar winning producer, with the help of my best partner Rick Cavenaugh, selling screenplays was a total 5 year face plant.

Hindsight being 20/20 I’d say this was more about never being able to master the “which came first the chicken or the egg dilemma” of attaching name stars to my scripts, rather than the studio ageism I had been warned against. Still, it was a blast meeting on the studio lots and hanging with the cool kids of Hollywood.

Here’s my heart wrenching 2005 short that I single-handedly produced, wrote, scored, directed and catered. I even voice acted two of the characters. This 9/11 tragedy is about a puppy, played by my little baby Sophia, whose master goes missing in the World Trade Center. My mostly voice-cast, calling in on an answering machine, was headlined by multiple Golden Globe and Emmy winner Ed Asner.

Confident after making this festival darling solo, I decided to do an end-around on the Hollywood suits in order to make a profit for my dear friends and family backer. I pitched PBS my popular independent 2000 show again for Obama’s 2008 run as KIDS TALK POLITICS. Things were looking groovy until PBS unexpectedly (there’s that word again) turned down the show that had been a 2000 hit.

Strangely, I was never given a reason from PBS as to why they walked away from my show that would track the historic rise of America’s first and only Black president. Today, after Trump’s time in office has laid racism bare in America, I have a sneaky suspicion race may have played a factor in the PBS rejection. A mystery that will never be solved. That’s showbiz.Audio Playee.

Part Three of Five

TINSEL TOWN IS A TOUGH ACT

How tough is catching a break in Hollywood? Think climbing Mt. Everest without oxygen. Even better, think tough as having an incredible young partner, one who I trained fresh out of college and whose talents I nurtured for years, become so bitter over my having no choice but to shut down my company — after the bank threatens to cut off funding a few months shy of ONF’s completion — that he feels compelled by his new newfound “love/hate ambivalence” towards me — to visit me one day at my new shelter from the storm offices to personally dis-invite me to his wedding. Yeah, Hollywood is that gut wrenching heartbreakingly TOUGH to catch a break in.

Tough even with my great billionaire buddy connections and easy access to money from the biggest American city to ever invest in film, Chicago. Heck, not even with Oprah’s help via a referral from her talented president Jeffery Jacobs to the giant talent agency CAA, meant they would read my scripts. CAA basically telling Oprah according to Jeff, “Stick to making TV shows and your own films, Ms. Winfrey. We’re the experts on finding new Hollywood talent.” Arrogance like I’d never expected. It’s a business with lots of customs even Oprah President could not breach for me.

Here’s the 35MM short film that my feature screenplay STEPS grew from.  Michael Wilmington, film critic for the Chicago Tribune, attended my screening and mentioned the  film in his column, about the growing market for short films, writing, “New film director Sheetz’s family drama STEPS, that takes place in real time aboard a moving train!”

But STEPS took a fall down a concrete flight of steps when, I shit you not, my money man unexpectedly died at his Rodeo Drive office at his desk, just a few weeks before the money was supposed to hit my bank account. When I heard the news from his bereft widow of how my film STEPS imminent funding was therefore sadly canceled… I felt that tug to the icy pier in Chicago again.

Had my skeptical backers back home attended my STEPS money man’s LA funeral like I did, they would have have realized from the huge crowd of Hollywood players, mourning this lovable mini-mogul, that he was in fact the real deal. I talked to many fellow producers at the funeral and all of them were heartbroken that this man who had funded some of their first films had died at only 50 years of age.

My STEPS executive producer and new friend dead, my partners tired of waiting on a profit and of me, money starting to run dry, I had make something big happen keep the venture moving and my life in Hollywood afloat.

Despite the unexpected PBS rejection, I knew that the 2008 KIDS TALK POLITICS show was gold. And so with the help of my one remaining loyal backer, Rick Cavenaugh, plus some new blood, we rolled the dice to make the hit show again as a web series on the new fangled tool for independent producers known as YouTube.

Sure enough, the web series gathered rave reviews from the likes of Reuters and Education Magazine, along with 11 million Google and ad revenue generating views. Best of all, when I edited the solo videos into a one hour film, it went on to stand as the #1 movie for kids and politics as an Amazon DVD for 5 years straight. Plus I had enough footage to make a second DVD about Obama’s first 100 days in office.

Now, two of the 3 films I promised my backers I’d make were done! And done even after the investor money had run out. I was determined to make a profit for good people back home who’d backed my Hollywood dream. Especially for my favorite uncle.

Here’s a video straight from the 2008 web KID’S TALK POLITICS series that’s been seen by over 6 million people as a stand-alone across several platforms. (Can you spot the state my little star Cameron misses?)

In 2008, desperate to find work to keep a roof over my head, let alone a hit to save my wobbly film adventure, luck turned for the better when an Emmy winning top-ten line producer invited me to drop by his hip Studio City abode. I’d met this Hollywood heavyweight through my Canuck partner in A KID’S VIEW OF THE US. My Hollywood pal is best known for his great work on ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT.

Happily, my one and only Hollywood pal, still alive, was a fan of my ZACK’S MACHINE hit short, and he loved a pilot we wrote together called EVERYTHING I NEEDED TO KNOW ABOUT LIFE I LEARNED FROM SITCOMS. And so over an egg salad sandwich and a seltzer water my pal offered me a directing/co-producer gig he would fund and I would be his equal sweat equity partner.  I gladly said yes to working for four years on his project without a regular paycheck.

We called this cautionary pilot about the struggle of actors to make it in Hollywood DISCOVER ME!  Enjoy the whole film right here.

Unfortunately, despite a serious nibble from Spike TV, a TV network did not pick up DISCOVER ME! That’s Hollywood folks. It’s often a long haul without a profit. For everything you see on the big or little screen there are  thousands of failures. But I am grateful my withdrawing pal and partner let me take the footage to make the footage into a stand-this alone doc you saw above. 

But working years without pay and no investor dough left meant I had become now officially a starving artist. How broke was I?  So broke I ended up evicted from my lux apartment. Tragically, even though I had now officially completed all three films of the LLC independently, but because I had no profits to show for my backers, my investors were no longer interested. So I had no choice but to toss the Three Sheetz to the LLC to the winds. No one from the LLC ever said I’d not tried my best to make their investment pay.

Well, at least not to my face. And at least my wealthy pals had a tax write off. My retired uncle, who despite my finding a way to pay him back 20% of his investment, was another story. Pro-tip: Never take investor film money from a good friend or relative because it generates far too much pressure that’s self-defeating.

But all was not a total loss because for me, individually, in making the DISCOVER ME! In fact, I was thrilled and honored to meet and interview over struggling 400 actors — many of whom I’d later cast in my short films, like DESERT SILHOUETTES right here.

Part Four of Five

NEVER GIVE UP! NEVER QUIT! – Winston Churchill

At 2009’s low point in my film career, I could have easily quit and simply gone back to real estate to make big money back in Chicago. Nope. Even after getting evicted from my lux Agoura Hills apartment for missing the rent, I was far from done trying to crash the Hollywood gates. Gates that I was having dreams of blasting open with lightning bolts from my hands.

To keep a roof over my head, and to stay in movie making shape, I began filming the LA conscious community under the banner BuzzBroz.com. My pay — besides a lot of free film work that I miraculously found ways to donate to charities — was room and board as barter for about 25% of my time and talent making social media videos.

Unfortunately, the zero cash component to this survival scheme left me more broke than I was after the 1991 real estate crash. I was caught in a bind that the more I did more corporate films the less time to keep my Hollywood dream alive to make independent films.

Ah, but don’t feel too sorry for me. You see, while I was trying to figure all this mess out, I lived in a white privileged poverty heaven. Complete with gorgeous rooms and gourmet food served up in some of most beautiful places in LA and Malibu.

A highlight of this time of artistic struggle came when I was granted not one but two paid filming invites. One from Don Miguel Ruiz, author of the best-seller THE FOUR AGREEMENTS to film him in Mexico and the other from Connie Miller, a disciple of the great John Bradshaw, to film her in dazzling Pulia Italy.

And before I knew it, I’d forged cool new connections in the conscious community. Connections that led to my taking up meditation at the age of 57 to help me reduce the high blood pressure that I’d acquired along my rocky road from stressful real estate mogul to an even more stressful filmmaker’s life. Unexpectedly — drum roll please — this all led to a far-out spiritual awakening of seeing ET angels in a yoga hall in Italy… build a force field around the earth. No drugs, I swear.

Fact is, after I got back to Hollywood from the Italy shoot, I thought I’d lost my God damn mind. So did my two grown kids when I shared this vision with them on a visit back home over a Lou Malnati’s deep dish Chicago pizza. I’ll never forget the shocked look on my son and daughter’s sweet faces.

In 20-20 hindsight I should have kept my big mouth shut. My daughter has stopped talking to me since 2011. We were very close as she grew up. She’s an artist like me. There’s seldom a day that passes that I don’t hope that she’ll magically reappear in my life again. Seven disappointments a week wears on the soul.

Indeed, it would take a couple years of intense soul searching, therapy, mediation and talking to some of the brightest creative minds in Hollywood, like Barnet Bain producer of the Robin Williams hit film WHAT DREAMS MAY COME, before I finally realized that I wasn’t even close to nuts. You see, deep meditation simply sets my mind, or any mind for that matter, free of conventional thought and formulaic storytelling. The key is to never take one’s visions LITERALLY. That is the stuff of conspiracy theories and idiocy.

I shared my ET angelic vision — one that I playfully never take too seriously as I discuss in my Antarctica film, but that nonetheless broke upon me like a nuclear explosion of enlightenment — on a series of LA New Age talk shows. From this social media I gained the international fan base that follows me to this day. To anchor in all this meditation magic I created over a thousand cool ultra-low meditation videos you can see at my Coolest Meditation Ever YouTube channel, with nearly 2 million views. This in turn drew New Age audiences to large live meditation events that I hosted.

Then, out of the blue, came a game changer. A new website called INDIEGOGO (IGG for short) was born to raise money for film and gadgets. Farewell to the need for studio and inventor cash! Using IGG to raise the dough, I entertained and shared my awakening with my new fan base across the planet.

Heading out on the road to Antarctica in the fall of 2012 from my bartered Mercedes RV in Malibu, under guidance gained in meditation, I moved my base for the funding my journey all the way south to the red rocks of spiritual Sedona. While I worked on the Antarctica funder I filmed 40 New Age stars of Sedona for a local company that specializes in packaging healing journeys for room and board.

During that amazing 60 days, while hiking some of the then pristine pre-Covid 200 miles of red rock trails, I was introduced via cell phone by one of my LA clients to New Age super-scientist Dr. Patrick Flanagan. On this phone call that would change my life, I found out Dr. Flanagan was based near me Sedona. I was so new to the community I’d never heard of the doctor Deepak Chopra calls “A gift to humanity”.

We met to watch the new Bond movie at the Sedona Harkins and hit it off like we had been pals for years. In return for Pat’s generous donation to my Antarctica project I promised to film him in Chichen Itza Mexico on my way back from Antarctica to LA.

And so after making many new friends in Sedona, I set off on the road for Antarctica on a one-way ticket. But so far I had only raised enough money to make it only as far as Buenos Aires. After ten hours of flights and airports, I didn’t have the energy or taxi fare to travel all the way downtown. So I found a lovely spot to stay on the outskirts of Buenos Aires that I’d found on the web.

Once I settled into the lux hotel resort I only had one month left to raise the $5000 boat ticket cost, and so I worked 15 hour days on my Mac. No time for sight-seeing! Meantime, I managed to strike a deal with the hotel owners to film the hotel for a 50% discount on my long stay.

Unexpectedly (there’s that pesky word again), one of my contributors who was going to put my shoot funding over the top to get me all the way to Antarctica pulled out at the last minute. I only caught the expensive Ushia boat tour to Antarctica by the skin of my teeth with a last minute crowd funding donation from an LA wellness pal who I paid back when I got back to LA in January.

A N T A R C T I C A

After a huge amount of crowd funding work that almost made me nostalgic for the LLC fund raising days, I arrived on the rocky shores of Antarctica on 12.12.12. at 12:12 PM, exactly as planned. I performed all 24 of the 2012 Antarctica meditations with lots of penguins getting in on the meditations.

I shot on a cheap, but amazing good quality picture and audio for it’s under $100 cost Flip camera sticker price, that was gifted by my LA radio host former roomie Bradley who you met above in the video. This was quite sentimental a camera for me, you see, because Bradley had passed of cancer just as I left for Antarctica.

I shot the ultra low budget Antarctica film shoot off a tripod. I performed this feat by running behind the tripod mounted Flip camera to switch it on, then running back in front of the camera to film myself and then running back behind camera to turn it off. Later I edited my running behind the camera work out.

See and hear the movie which has played to raves in a limited 2016 theatrical run. Offered here in it’s entirety free of charge.

Part Five of Five

MY PERFECT MATE

Once you watch the film you’ll learn the amazing story of how my ET spirit guide Ohom, who I first encountered in a healing session in Italy. Ohom, short for Open Heart Open Mind) played ET matchmaker.

I was on my way home from Antarctica and ready to get into back relationship again after a ten year dating hiatus. And ready at last to settle down again, I asked Ohom for dating advice. The ET’s words reached me telepathically and said as I sailed the crystal clear the aqua blue Antarctica waters, “Elizabeth England is the perfect mate for you.”

Spoiler alert: Even though it would take us nearly 3 more years to begin a short dating period before starting a life together on Thanksgiving 2015, my ET guide was 100% right! Elizabeth and I balance and ground each other perfectly. Her help in editing the story of my 24 Antarctica meditations, one for each time zone of the world, helped me immensely in post-production, where the real magic happens in low-budget films. Her advice was as superb as it was invaluable. You see, Elizabeth, a book editor among her renaissance skill set that includes 17 years of military experience, honed the film’s simple yet potent message:

Even just one person’s meditations make a difference in setting quantum intention to help chart the course of the planet to a better tomorrow.

Here in 2021, amidst the still raging Covid, Elizabeth and I are both freshly vaccinated, and in pre-production on a sequel the coolest meditation ever. This time we’ll head as far north to the arctic circle as possible. I am looking forward to the journey to the Arctic circle with Elizabeth at my side. It was pretty lonely going all the way down to Antarctic by myself.

Subscribe to the blog for coming attractions to the coming crowd funder!

But before Elizabeth would finally accept my long standing invite to come to Sedona — as you see in the movie, and bring a joyous end my lonely days as a film making monk — I was invited to visit Sedona by Dr. Flanagan to create a slate of 50 YouTube videos about the genius. I went to work immediately filming the great scientist — featured in the 1968 in LIFE MAGAZINE as one of the most promising young scientists on earth. I filmed him on a green screen set that I built in his warehouse in Cottonwood Arizona, near Sedona, to make it more convenient to get him on set. It was still hard to do and it took six months even with that. And by that time I was living in Sedona.

The Flanagan film tells the stories behind the coolest tech ever of this world-famed inventor. At Pat’s suggestion the film also features his amazing wife Stephanie, who surprisingly turned out to be a powerful co-star of the film. 

I titled the web series THE FLANAGAN EXPERIMENTS. And thanks in part to proper advertising — Pat always had a way of doing things right – his international fan base discovered the videos and gathered over 25 million YouTube views and still counting. Three years later, I would edit the 50 videos into a 70 minute feature documentary that’s available on Amazon and pay per view commercial free on Vimeo.

So here’s my film about the man Deepak Chopra calls “A gift to humanity,” Dr. Patrick Flanagan. Sadly, Pat passed in 2019. So making this film about him is a historic gift to those who will never be lucky enough to meet him. Enjoy and learn free of charge here on the blog.

In early 2017 something amazing in my already amazing film adventures happened. The same ET spirit guide, Ohom (short for Open Heart Open Mind) who so accurately told me in 2012 that Elizabeth England was my perfect mate, suggested in meditation one night that Elizabeth and I attend the Trump inauguration. My reaction? Ugh!

No surprise to my longtime fans and friends, I’ve disliked Trump ever since reading his ugly book THE ART OF THE DEAL, way back in 1987 when I was still a budding real estate mogul. Indeed, I find Trump’s best-selling ghost written book to be laced with unethical and cruel business practices. Practices he’s continued of deceit and manipulation to this day of the BIG LIE that’s still ripping at the fabric of America.

I tend to listen to Ohom’s suggestions — like going all the way to Antarctica in 2012 on a one-way ticket — and so, after Elizabeth agreed, we headed for DC after raising the dough on IGG. Despite all our misgivings about Trump, compounded by his red capped inauguration crowd, booing angrily anytime the Jumbotron screens showed Obama, Hilary, Pelosi or Schumer, we did as Ohom advised on meditated amidst the raucous crowd in our penguin hats.

Together, Elizabeth and I performed a fine series of DC meditations we named LOVE TRUMPS HATE. Our mission: Set the intentions in the DC meditations that Trump’s presidency be the best possible for the planet… even if that was not by Trump’s chaotic design.

In any case, as you can see in the video, we sure as hell gave Trump a much kinder welcome than he and his Trumpers gave Biden on January 6th with the insurrection.

For two lovers of democracy like Elizabeth and I, the Trump honeymoon was the shortest of both our lives. You see, before Elizabeth and I left DC to return to Sedona, Trump gleefully green lit the Dakota Access pipeline.

And so for the next 4 years, the entire 2020 election cycle and up to today’s shaky but slowly improving world in 2021, Elizabeth and I have donated many hours a day of our talent, time and energy to keep democratic American spirits up.

Inspired by our gentle activism and flat out angst has come my new TRUMP FEVER DREAM blog series. It’s designed to scare some sense into people by imagining an alternate timeline where Trump’s harebrained insurrection succeeded. Here’s a link to the overview. Read all 11, and counting, of the chapters from the pull down menu top of the page. I am in the process of adding old school radio show style audio to the blog. Subscribe to get the new audio and new chapters as they are posted.

Elizabeth and I are still reeling from the all out mind-control attack on the New Age community that we love and where we first met in 2010. So far it’s proven impossible to wake up any of our friends who are lost to the four pronged attack run by Trump, Russia, the GOP and Q. Indeed, the yoga and New Age community’s mostly white privileged, formerly evangelical in many cases, community has proven quite vulnerable to the massive cyber attack designed to use the community’s anti-masking and anti-vaxing philosophies to make converts to the racist leaning Republican Party.

Here’s a new — what I’ve dubbed “Speculation Meditation” — video. Enjoy. 

In closing, there are no stats available on how many people in the New Age community have bought into the GQP political fold by the divisiveness of anti-mask and anti-vax manipulation. But it’s sad and alarming to observe on social media just how many people in the spirit community have fallen for what is essentially, in it’s various forms like Q, Russian propaganda meant to divide, degrade and destroy America via a race war.

Turns out the New Age community’s largely white percentage of racial makeup means its white privilege is showing. Siding with Trump’s agenda of spreading a virus — one that he secretly vaccinated himself against — that kills 3 times more Black people than whites, is quite frankly a deadly hypocritical form of denied racism.

If you believe, as my wife Elizabeth and I still do, that the best of New Age/Spirit/Mediation/Yoga community is really is about progressiveness, oneness, peace and love but still don’t want to be vaccinated, for all our sakes at least please error on the side of caution and compassion for others more vulnerable to Covid and wear a damn mask until the virus is wiped out.

And here’s where Elizabeth and I gather the coolest tech on earth. A biz that grew from my filming the world-famed Dr. Patrick Flanagan, CoolestTechEver.com.

Stay cool. I’m Ken Sheetz and it’s been a pleasure. I hope you enjoy the rest of the blog. There’s a lot of fun here. Thanks