Well, hello! Life has stabilized a bit and I've begun to develop a routine again, so the Jordan Urbs newsletter is back!
This message is loaded with updates on my family, personal & professional lives, and the fresh content that yours truly spends his time creating.
So what's new? Our little family of 4 has started a homestead in Hawaii. We built a house that we are turning into a home, planting trees and raising two toddlers. We're slowly creating our own life here. More on that on our new YouTube channel, which I introduce below.
Meanwhile, Hawai'i living has got me ready to finally start up my unique brand of fitness and health, which I call Jordokon. He's a bit of a weirdo but his moving embodiment can be an inspiration. Without the support of my partner Lau, he would never exist. You can read more about him below.
Professionally ("Professionally"), I've decided to go full-time content creator. After failing to find a job suited to the value I offer without sacrificing my own peace and well-being, it dawned on me that making videos for people to watch is the only thing that fills me with purpose and gets me out of bed in the morning. Who'd have guessed? Now it's my mission to turn that into a livelihood. More on that later.
Finally, I find myself exploring Jordan Urbs himself as a voice to share with the world. Say, who is that guy that did all that traveling, learned all those things from meeting all those people and made all those videos? What's that guy have to say?
It turns out he has a lot to say, and he's finally figuring out that the common thread between nomadic bachelordom and off-grid parenting is simply "be who you are... just do it." I am excited to at long last be integrating "me" into my online persona(s), concentrating on the stories, and turning that process into my "business."
My goal for this new stage of the newsletter is to release a weekly digest of my creative work for you to follow from a bird's eye view. Naturally, it will feature my insights and meta observations on my experience or process. You may also receive erratic blog posts or an update on a new creative project here and there.
If those kinds of things don't interest you, it's easy to unsubscribe. After several years of exploring open-source alternatives to content publishing as autonomously as possible, these posts have ended up on my own self-hosted Ghost blog (which you may recognize as the same backend as Substack).
Anyway, if you're interested in going deeper into any of the following content in particular, you can! Just click the links to follow on whichever platform.
So what is Jordan Urbs working on lately, anyway?
A Family in Paradise has launched on YouTube. It documents our off-grid homestead parenting adventures in Hawaii with videos like "10 things we learned moving off-grid with 2 toddlers" or "I built a house with no one's permission."
I'm starting from scratch: not just as a new YouTube channel, but as a new filmmaker. I've humbled myself to the research I always refused to do before, and finally see the aspects of online video media that I'd always preferred to ignore. I've been studying up on audience engagement, storytelling, niche sub-genres, and this whole vertical video thing that the kids are doing these days.
The technical aspects like editing is no problem for me--it's formatting the story in the ways that will grab a 2023's audience attention that proves to be my challenge. It's quite a fun way to explore ideas, however, and I'm enjoying every minute.
On this channel, you'll hopefully watch me develop in the realm of attention-grabbing, while catching the most entertaining bits of my beautiful family growing up. I promise I'm not a sell-out.
If you'd like to collaborate with us in some way, be in touch!
An extension of A Family in Paradise, the Sovereign States of Mind podcast showcases conversations exploring personal sovereignty and what it means to develop more autonomy and independence in one's life. We talk about community building, boundaries, relationships, money, sexuality, and more.
In episode #3 , I speak with friend Naga Nataka, an author, thinker, dancer, and ordained teacher of Buddhist meditation.
You can find the Sovereign States of Mind podcast on any major podcasting platform (Apple, Spotify, Fountain), or watch episodes right here on the A Family in Paradise YouTube channel.
If you'd like to be a podcast guest or early sponsor, be in touch!
Jordokon is the jungle health & fitness brand I've transitioned towards as I leave my strict yoga days behind me. He's a playful movement enthusiast whose premiere goal is to find comfort and solace in his body. He is relaxed and is concerned more with harmony in his body than discipline in his life. Jordokon content includes his children and private moments of his daily practice.
This week, I posted a "reel" (one of these dirty vertical video things) of Jordokon working out naked at the beach with an aroused eggplant emoji censoring my private parts. Having to cross some comfort boundaries to post it, I found it extremely liberating. Isn't showing skin what social media is about?
Equal parts movement, philosophy and creative art, Jordokon content gives me an opportunity to express myself with my body, with the hope of providing inspiration to those wishing to re-connect with themselves.
Last but not least, Jordan Urbs is back on Instagram with the standard fare. Like I mentioned, I'm going full-on creator, so these various channels are going to feature quite the variety of flavorful content.
As Jordan Urbs, I'll also be supporting others on their own content creation and storytelling journeys until I get my own passive income streams flowing. Part of that is through my new company called Spirals, which I'll introduce in a later update.
If you've been looking for a producer-coach-teammate to work with you on getting your content out the gate, get in touch!
Oh, I've also been playing around with a lot of AI tools. It's crazy how fast the technology is moving and how much easier it makes a lot of things.
This music video was a fun way to mess around with AI image generation. The next version will be animated in a consistent art style.
I've got more fun clips that I'll share with you here, stuff that probably won't make it anywhere else because it's out of brand and out of touch (but nice and weird, the way I like it).
In conclusion, I'm living in the best of all worlds right now! Hitting the beach daily to feel the sun and let the ocean humble me; constantly activating my creative spirit to provide some sort of value to others; and learning to be more patient, present, and lighthearted with the kids.
Oh hey, we're planning a trip back down to Argentina this fall! Lau hasn't seen her family in almost 3 years, and most of her family has never even met our baby girl yet.
As you can imagine, the whole trip is a self-inflicted stress on our imaginary finances. But money can't buy family, so we believe we should buy time to spend with family instead.
Anyway, if you're feeling generous, you can help support our little family's big trip on GoFundMe. Thank you all to have donated so far, every little bit helps ease the burden of what it costs to take a travel of 4 across the world on a 20-hour journey to visit one's own blood and kin.
Thanks for reading and catching up a bit with me! Do be in touch if we haven't spoke in a while (or never have!), as I'd love to hear from you.
