Sunset Sets and Small Business Activism

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What's good, Freedom Builders.

Summer rolled into Bellingham this week with full 70s heat. Sunshine, bursting green trees, kids outside until dusk.

The DJ summer schedule is locked. Five sunset sets over Bellingham Bay. Park permits secured, sponsorships in place, volunteer staff lined up.

Back in the day, we ran renegade sets. Show up, plug in, play till the cops shut it down. That part of my life is done.

These days my priority is family events. So I learned how to pull the levers of power, the conventional ones, parks and rec, permits, insurance, the whole stack.

Why You Should Give All the Cares:

• Permits, sponsors, and parties: how I built a summer of free community DJ events instead of just complaining there weren't any

• Endurance Jiu Jitsu grand opening: this Saturday in Bellingham, drop in for free training, music, and lunch

• The Viral Content Kit is live: the marketing system I used to charge $10K for, now packaged so you can run it yourself

Pulling the Levers of Power

I wanted to DJ at the park for years. Bellingham has beautiful parks. Summers here are short and worth showing up for.

Nobody was making it happen. So I made it happen.

Reached out to parks and rec (with the help of AI no doubt). Filled out the paperwork. Got the insurance figured out. Drew the map. Recruited volunteer staff for security and crowd flow.

You gotta pay to play, literally. So I lined up local business sponsors. They get shoutouts during the sets. The community gets a free family-friendly party.

Five sunset sets this summer overlooking the bay. Nostalgic remixes, old school favorites, fresh cuts from this past year. Mixed for kids, parents, and everyone who still loves to move.

Kicking it off at Boulevard and Maritime Park. Then July 4th. Then festivals starting next month.

I can't just be heads-down in survival mode. Work, worry, repeat, no breath in the lungs. That's not living.

This is my way to give back. Build community. Fill my cup so I can keep filling other people's.

If you're in Bellingham this summer, come through.

Endurance Jiu Jitsu Grand Opening

My buddy's gym is opening this Saturday, May 9th. Cordata neighborhood, Bellingham. 10am to 2pm.

If you've been curious about jiu jitsu, this is your low-pressure on-ramp.

70% of physical fights end up rolling around on the ground and I want to know what to do if I ever needed to protect my family.

Come watch, try a roll, eat some food.

The Viral Content Kit Is Live

I hit publish on the Viral Content Kit this week.

Years of work compressed into one easy setup. The marketing systems, brand frameworks, and AI-leveraged workflows I used to charge $10K for at my old agency.

We used to need a small army to deliver this stuff. Strategists, copywriters, graphic designers, web developers, project managers. Months of meetings and revisions.

AI changed the math. What took a team of contractors three months can now be done by one person in a weekend with the right system. That's the kit.

A client wrote me this week:

That's the point.

I'm a small business advocate, especially for the solopreneur. It's my form of activism.

Every person who finds their purpose and builds a revenue stream around it is one less person feeding the corporate gobbling machine that wants you shopping at Walmart and renting your existence.

The Viral Content Kit is how you represent yourself online. Cleanly, consistently, in your own voice, without paying agency rates.

The best newsletter I've sent. The social posts I'm publishing. The writing on the landing page itself. All of it came out of the systems inside this kit.

Check the new site page. See if it's for you.

Claude as a DJ Assistant

Quick one for the music nerds and AI tinkerers.

I've been using Claude to rewrite my MP3 metadata. The AI analyzes a track, identifies the genre, scores the intensity, drops a rating, and writes searchable comment tags.

Now I can pull up "low-energy chill house for sunset" or "high-intensity peak time" in seconds. No more scrolling through five thousand tracks trying to remember what fits.

This is the homestead mindset applied to music. Self-reliance, leverage technology, get off the screen, get into the real world doing what you love.

If you've been hesitant to pick up AI tools, take this as your nudge. Push through the fear, friction, learn the mechanics, build systems that give you your time back.

Tech Corner

• New ChatGPT Codex Experience: OpenAI rolled out an updated Codex coding interface. They are essentially rolling out the agent features of Open Claw and if you're still a die hard ChatGPT fan this is the direction you want to go.

• Mikeoss.com: open-source legal AI you can self-host. Chat with documents for verbatim citations, draft contracts, run spreadsheet-style reviews across hundreds of files. Big deal for solo lawyers, paralegals, and anyone who reads contracts for a living. Link: https://mikeoss.com/

Today’s Takeaways:

1. Build the thing yourself: if your town doesn't have what you want, learn the system and make it happen

2. Community is a practice: show up to mats, parks, gyms, and front porches, relationships compound like investments

3. AI is leverage, not just a threat: use it to compress months of work into hours so you can spend more time off the screen

I love reading the responses to these newsletters. Hit reply and tell me what's landing this week.

What action are you taking? What clicked? What's getting in your way?

If you're in Bellingham, come find me at the Endurance Jiu Jitsu grand opening Saturday, or at one of the summer park sets. Real life beats Netflix every time.

Stay grounded, stay weird, stay free,

Joshua | The Holistic Tech Wizard

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