GLEN MEAKEM: Forever

Published Aug 23, 2022, 7:00 AM

Family is what today's podcast guest stands for. Glen Meakem, Founder and CEO of a brilliant company called FOREVER shares how he was inspired to find a solution to his family's quandary of precious photos, film, and video that was stored haphazardly, inaccessible, and in danger of being lost. (Sound familiar?) 

His solution spawned a whole new business venture. FOREVER provides PERMANENT digital storage for all our precious memories and memorabilia so they can be enjoyed by friends and family now - and generations into the future.  Intrigued? So was I! That's why I invited him to tell the story. Join us! ~ Delilah

Hey, how is August treating you? It's been long and hot, hasn't it. Have you taken any vacations? Have you spent any days by the pool or by the side of a lake. August, with it sometimes almost unbearable heat, invites us to slow down, to relax, to take a few moments, to check out of the hustle, the bustle, the crazy making, and soak in everything that makes life wonderful and worth living. I've spent many an hour watching my kids playing the big plastic pool we set up every summer. They splash, they shriek, the giggles come lifting out of the water and drift across the yard like effervescent bubbles of joy. Whether it's your kids or grand kids or the neighbors kids. I hope you've been witnessed to this type of unfair, uttered glee this summer. If not taken afternoon and head to your local park, a child's laughter works like a powerful infusion of happiness. That's today's medical advice from dr to Lilah. A dose of happiness just one kitty park away, one splash pool away. I've also taken a whole lot of photos this summer hundreds of photos to the ad to the tens of thousands of pictures I've taken over the years. I love my pictures of summer, Shenanigan's first day, last day of school, concerts, performances, new babies, birthdays, celebrations, kids jumping in the pool. I love my pictures of my farm, the flowers, the critters, the changing seasons, and I keep all of them in a jumbled mess, in boxes, tucked into corners of my closet, up in the attic, on my phone, on my laptop. There has to be a better way, and in fact, there is a better way. I've discovered a service that's going to solve my problems of too many photos and not enough organization. It's called Forever. Forever is an online company that provides permanent storage of all your digital memories permanent as in Forever. Unlike cloud services or other photo services, there are no monthly or yearly subscription fees to pay at Forever, so you don't have to worry about missing payments and losing access to all your digital memories. I know you're intrigued, just as I was, so I invited CEO and founder of Forever, a brilliant guy named Glenn meekom out to my farm today to have lunch in the garden and then give us the rundown on how this all works. Before we are talking about forever, though we already ate our lunch outside, let me first share a little bit more about one of today's podcast sponsors. Did you know that right after water tea is the most popular beverage. As a long time tea drinker, that doesn't surprise me. I start every day with a cup of tea and always have a mug with me in the recording studio. One of my favorites is Bigelows constant comment it even comes in decaffeinated in the heat of the summer. Nothing beats a tall glass of Bigelows perfectly mint over ice. It's so refreshing after a morning out in the garden. To stay hydrated, the Bigelow Botanicals cold water infusions are incredible lightly infused water with nothing artificial, caffeine free and zero calories. Try their blueberry citrus basil, the BlackBerry raspberry hibiscus, or any of their numerous flavors. You'll find Bigelow t s in the t I'll at your local grocery at Amazon dot com or at bigelow Te dot com. Cups up my friends with me in the studio for today's edition of Love Someone. Is a fascinating man that I've had the opportunity to have lunch. I think it to know a little bit better, and now you're going to get to know him a little bit better. Glenn Meekom, welcome to the Delila Studio to Love Someone today, and uh and to my farm. Well great, hey, Delia, it's great to be here with you. You have you have yet to meet the emos. But did you see them over your shoulder while you were dining? I did. I saw some sort of animal like that in the distance and just beautiful. Delila's farm is amazing and it's an honor to be here. Thanks so much for having me. I used to do a weekend radio show, so I kind of like having the sound of my ears. You used to do a weekend radio show where I did, and uh, well it was it was in Pittsburgh and it was the FM News Talk one or four point seven and then Katie Ka because FM News Talk, so it was a serious program. I talked. I talked politics and economics and history and stuff, and it was funny. You know, I never went into talk radio as much as I love talking and as much as I love because you have to know stuff like you have to be educated and informed. I would much rather be out playing in my garden. I would much rather be, you know, building volcanoes with my six year old than like actually being informed. I mean, the things I'm passionate about. I know a little bit you do. I think it's funny. We listen to you on my member myself, members of my team, we listened to you. We listened to Delilah, and you give great advice. I've been I've been listening to you in the last two weeks a lot, and you give and I've listened for years, but just recently because we've we're working together, I've been listening. And you give great advice to people. Thank you. When you've made many terrible life choices as I have, I can say I don't really know what you should do, but I can tell you what you shouldn't know. You should not marry somebody just because they're cute and funny. Cute and funny got me into a lot of trouble. Glenn. Yeah, but you've been married. So first let's talk about who you are and Wicker here on this podcast with me and love someone today. UM, and then we're gonna go back to you've been married forever, but you are the founder of Forever dot com cor. When I had this idea, was the whole idea was I thought that, you know, I'm a family guy. I've been married all these years. I've got five kids, my wife and I and we have and I love, as I told you at lunch, I love family history. I love history in general. And I have all this stuff video tapes to my grandparents video tape. But before my father died, I got a great video tape of him talking about his life and his experiences and what do you do with all that? And I and I realized, if it's sitting in a on a tape or something in a box, no one's enjoying it. No is experiencing it now, and it's gonna get lost. So I said, okay, it's got to be in the cloud. It's gotta be in the Internet cloud. But I started reading all the terms of service, so all these different you know, cloud storage places, and they're gonna delete it if you stop paying every month, they're gonna try to get you back for a year, then they're gonna delete. If it's social media and they're basically data mining your stuff and then using that information to sell access to you to advertisers, Okay, that means it's you know, it's not really free because they're data mining you. But um, but even if you're not, if you think about it, you get old, you get Alzheimer's, you die. Everybody's gonna die someday. Right, you're no longer valued valuable to an advertiser. Well if if if the whole economic model for keeping your stuff is because you're valuable to advertisers, when you're gone, you're not valuable, So they're gonna delete your stuff. And I was reading all the terms of service to all these different services and realize that this is not what I need. I want to I want to place. I want a cloud storage and sharing service where I know all these photos, all these videos, audio files, special documents, special precious memories are going to be there, not just for today and tomorrow, but for generations into the future. It didn't exist. So I said, okay, I'm going to start a company. That's right, I'm an entrepreneur. I've started a number of companies, and so you started forever dot com because you told me this at lunch, and I'm going to bust you on it. Because you had a video tape of your grandparents that you gave to family members and they all lost them but one, and you said, wait a minute, this is they're gone. Now you know our grandparents are gone. We need a better way to store and share these great memories and these great traditions, traditions. So who was the one that actually kept the videotape of your grandpa? It was my uncle. Your uncle kept the video table. Yeah, my brothers asked them and they didn't know where they when I shared this years ago now, but I shared the VHS tape And people people lose things all the time. And that's the thing. The people who really care about the family memories, that would be my sister. My sister is the keeper of our family memory, right, and your sister Dianna. Right. So Dianna needs a permanent digital home where she knows that just that that if she organizes and keeps all the family memories in that place, it's gonna be there and it's never gonna be lost because not every one of the children, not every one of the grandchildren is going to really care, but there will be some who really do. There will always be those family memory keepers in every generation who want that stuff, who want to have the photos and want to have the videos. And how good of my sister is. If I say, do you remember that picture blah blah blah, do you remember that time? She says, yes, I have that. Can I have that? No, No, you cannot because you will lose it, she says, which I will. Well, and this is what and forever solves that problem because now she can make she can be the keeper, and she can share the digital file with you, and you can lose the digital file all you want. She's still got the core her digital home intact, it will never get lost. So back to your relationship, because you said you've been listening to my show and to my advice, and clearly you don't need my advice because you've managed to stay married for more than three decades. Yeah. Well, Um, I'm lucky. I I've I've met a wonderful woman. Um, we had both had our you know. One of my favorite, um, one of my favorite country songs is that song and you're the you're the music expert, not me, but God bless this broken road, broken road that led me straight to you. And I think that love that song. I love that song because you know, and this is the thing. Everyone's got a broken road. Oh some of us have really broken roads. Some of us took the off road ramp. You know. I've never been one to stay on a freeway. I don't want to stay on a freeway. I want to take the back road. I want to take the off road. I want to go on the road last travel. But that's oftentimes a really broken road. Yeah, yeah, it's good, it's fun. Me. I think it was um. I forget what famous poet wrote about that. You know, there was that they were on the road and there was a fork in the road and they took the road less travel than that made all the difference was that. I think it was Robert Frost, But I think about that recently. I was driving it was COVID. I was driving from my home I live outside Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. I was driving on the highway and there was nobody in the highway. It was just completely empty because I was like the only one in the city. Going to going to work, and of course the safest place to be was it the office because no one was there. But I'm there and I'm driving, and I'm thinking to myself, well, you know the nice thing about going And I've gone my own way too. I'm different from you. Maybe I haven't um had as many um obvious stumbles, but um, but everybody has their stumbles. And but I've definitely gone my own way. I don't I don't copy anybody else. And the great thing about going your own way and choosing your own road is you don't spend much time in traffic. And I noticed that about here. You know, here at your farm, there's not a lot of traffic here, no traffic, my traff I laughed, because people talk about the me that commute home was miserable, and I always laugh. Say, but you know, if you want to make, if people want to make a find real meaning in life. And of course you know, you and I are both churchgoers, and um, you know there's real meaning and believing in God and trying to find your purpose of God and having faith. But in terms of your professional activities or your life making a living, it really helps to go your own way. It helps to really say what what do I want to do? What do I love to do? And if you can find a way to earn a living doing what you love to do, life is just so much better and you make such a bigger contribution, so much better. I call it the sweet spot. You know where you find that spot where your great passion. For me, it's connecting, it's connecting. My great passion. I love to connect people. I love to introduce people. I love to play matchmaker and introduce people that fall in love. I love connecting people. So when I took that passion and married it with the world's great need, which is people are lonely at night. You know, radio reaches different people at different times for different reasons. You know, if you're listening in morning drive, you want to know where the traffic mess is, unless you're taking a back road like you and I do. But people, you know, want to know what happened in the news, or they want to know where the traffic problems are, and they want to be entertained. But at night, people want to slow down and they want to process the day, and a lot of people are desperately lonely. Especially it's so Funny, people in big cities are the loneliest people I've ever talked to. The bigger the city, the lonelier the soul. And so when I can take my passion, which is connecting, and share it on the radio to meet that need of reminding people that they have great worth and great value, then it works. Your passion is being an entrepreneur, but your real passion, you know, out outside talking over lunch, is your family. Family. Every two seconds, who would come back to your son, Matthew, every you know, or your wife or this or a ski trip or so you took that passion, yeah, and and and figured out that there's a need families have. And if as I told you, and I think a lot of entrepreneurs do this, they see a need that they identify themselves. It's a need in their own life. And then you say, well, gee, do other people have this need to when you do a little research and realize yeah, a lot of people have this need and that's a business opportunity. And that's that's a great thing about the free market, right My first company was called free Markets, And the great thing about that economic freedom is, hey, I have the freedom to go start a business and meet a need and hopefully I can create a lot of jobs and create a lot of value and create a great service for people. But it's it's it's creating that UM, it's it's helping society by meeting a need people have. And in our case with Forever dot Com, it's how many how many people do you have that that are now being able to support themselves or their families because they work with you. Seventy five full time employees at Forever and UM we also have twenty seven hundred UM affiliate salespeople, so people who earn a commission as being a Forever ambassador. And these are the people that I need, because the ambassador actually comes and hand holds you through the process of collating and putting together the videotapes the VCRs. Absolutely, and yeah, there are there are we have ambassadors. So we have some in Australia, some in New Zealand, some in England, but mostly in the US, and quite a few in Canada. And so yeah, there are people in pretty much every community out there, every major metro certainly who can come and help and uh, and many of them are organizers, will help you organize your stuff and get it digitized with you know, with Forever, because we digitize everybody's old stuff and we also VCRs. You can digitize this. We can dig ties anything, old family movies, my sister, I know, I know she's hoarding themselves, movies, everything. We can digitize everything. And then of course, you know, you create your photo books, you create holiday cards. You don't need to go when people are going to this service for their holiday cards, their Christmas cards, and they're going over here to print a photo book, and then they've got stuff in storage over here, and then they've uploaded stuff over there, and they've got a bunch stuff on their phone, and then they got stuff at home and boxes. That is the mess, that's the photo or the memory mess most people have. And my life, that's my life. It's everywhere, it's everywhere, and it's nowhere, like I don't have a spot where everything is. And that's and it's a process, right, it's it's it's not like anybody's going to click their fingers and all of a sudden they have all their memories organized. But what people really need what I identified as a problem ten years ago, and the solution is people really need a permanent digital home a place where they can over the months, in years, with the help of an ambassador or on their own, they can you know, sink their phone and get all their photos and videos that are new. You saw how many are on my phone? How many? Isn't that insane? We need to get that all on your new forever account. Isn't that insane? And they're not really organized to They're probably just all a huge, massive photo role. Yeah. So I do have a lot of albums because you know, I put pictures of you know, baby Paul in this one, and Little Delilah this one, and goats. I have just an album of goats, just goats. Yeah, that's good. Goats are important in my life. They're very important. Why ask me, why what do I do with my goats? What do you do with your Absolutely nothing but love on them. Sometimes we have milk goats. I was gonna say, no goats milk. I love goats, making goats cheese and lavender soap out of goat's milk. But right now I don't even have a goat in milk, so we're not milking any goats right now. So No, they're just adorable and I just loved them. One thing I've learned in life, and I've been around long enough to have learned a few things, is what makes life so rich in the world so rich, is that everybody is different, and everybody has different interests. And when you get into the detail of anything, it's like, I had no idea you could make lavender soap out of goat's milk. There's just a lot of smart people working really hard and making a contribution and and and worrying about all different kinds of things. And that's what makes society go around. And your part right now is helping. Especially. It's got to be like moms. Yes, yeah, we we always say it's something because dads have one picture in their wallet. Right, it's moms and grandma's are are primary, that's right. Our primary clients are mothers and grandmothers. Um not a lot of teenagers. Because we we find once once a woman's had that baby, now she's thinking about twenty years, thirty years, forty years ahead of her before that. She's not thinking so long term. But once, no, no, not even once she has the baby. It's once they start school and and they have the kindergarten graduation and they have their first recital, and they learned to play the little recorder, and then they learned to play the horn, or they go into choir. All of a sudden, you've got pictures and videos and and you need something to do with them, right, And you also know as a mom, as a parent, you know, because we have a few good we have a lot of great moments. We have, you know, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of fabulous women. We have a few good men. We always kid about that that, you know, the old Marine Corps tagline, A few good We definitely have a few good men at Forever who really care about the family memories too. But yeah, you know, there's an expectation now that hey, that rehearsal dinner party is going to be coming up in twenty five years, and you're going to need the baby pictures. Where all the baby pictures go, where all those videos go? Where are we gonna get all that? You know? Where do you keep all that stuff for my sister? Isn't that horrible? How I just I naturally a zoom that Anna is just going to handle all that. She's always been the one to handle not just the family memories, but the family business. You know, the family get together as, the family trips, the family stuff. She's like always been even before mom and Dad passed. They were really young when they died, but even before they passed, somehow she stepped into that role either she decided she wanted to or by default that that she is the keeper of our family traditions, our family stories. Yeah, that's important, and that's I would say that I have this I have this chart where you have some people are really big memory keepers, like Deanna, and they're the ones who really really need to have that permanent digital home at forever dot com and organize all the family memories and keep it. But then you have other people who are the satellite people. They need to be able to have an account to, they need to be able to share and see, but maybe they're not as in to the really being the big organizer. But we we want to provide that permanent digital home for that big organizer person and all of her family around her, and that's that's what we do. So back to your story, is in your family your wife the keeper of all this or have you always? I would say Diane and I my wife is Diane. We both how many years how many years together. God were this summer? Thirty three years we've been married. Good? Yeah, we've kept it together. It's a it's a it's a work in process, you know, it's not I think keep having a successful long marriage is about UM marrying well, you know, you gotta find somebody who's compatible and who you really love, and but it's also a question of UM really loving each other, respecting each other, and listening. That's one thing I've learned to do. I mean, there were I think every marriage has its really tough moments, and a lot of marriages blow apart when those tough moments come. But um, I think I gotten a lot better at listening than I used to be. And that's been one thing that's been important in keeping our marriage together. Is that because you've just naturally evolved into this better listener? Or did Diane say you never listened to me and I am so sick and tired of this? Like did she actually lay it out there or did you just come to a realization? Oh no, I think that, Um. One of the keys is communications. So no, we one thing about our marriage is we we communicate. That means sometimes we fight and sometimes you know, we we we we can weather all the time. You need to be able to fight with your your spouse or your significant another so long as you fight kindly. When you have a disagreement or a problem that arises and you become mean, mean spirited or say mean spirited things, you just you just destroyed the fabric of your your marriage. Agree with your union. But if you can disagree kindly, like still respect the other person, but veheimately disagree. Um, that's that's how you work through things. I agree with you, And I think that where so many relationships go off track is that people just can't talk and can't be honest with each other. And you're totally right. I always this is the way I like to run a company too, Is you think about it, It's the same in the marriage, same in apparent child relationship, same in a company relationship where you gotta be honest if you're not gotta be honest, and you gotta respect one another. And I call it, you know, it's like honesty and then graciousness. If you can be honest with each other and gracious with each other, and by the way, that takes this thing called courage. I really think in our society today We don't talk enough about courage that it it takes courage to actually speak the hard truths and be honest. It takes courage to confront your own past, be honest with yourself. And that's the way it is in life. In marriage, if you can actually speak the truth, have the courage to speak the truth, and then speak it in a great as you're saying, in a gracious way, then you can have a conversation and and respect each other and work through whatever the issues are and keep a marriage together. If if you can't speak the truth and you're not gracious to each other, it's gonna blow apart. Glenn and I could chat for hours and hours about our pictures, about our photos, about our families, the recipe for success relationships. But I'm going to pause here for a moment to tell you about another one of my podcast sponsors that makes having these conversations possible. One of our podcast sponsors is inviting you on a fun, fun cruise next year. It is the ultimate disco cruise. This is five incredible nights of the greatest dance music ever. Whether you want to relive the days of Studio fifty four, it's up to you. But with live per formances by Cooling, the Gang, Billy Ocean, Taylor Dane's Sister Sledge, Evelyn Champagne King and so many others late February through early March next year with stops and key West and Cosomel to go online for all the details Ultimate Disco Cruise dot Com slash Delilah. The Ultimate Disco Cruise dot Com is the website, and then use my name Delilah to get special pricing on your accommodations. It's funny. So I served in the First Call four. I used to had a military scholarship in college, and I was an officer in the army. And I went and served, and I was a reserve reserve officer, So I've been on active duty after college. Then I was in the reserves, working normal job and met my wife, I got married. Um I was, I was in graduate school and then I volunteered went back on active duty to serve in the First Call four. This is and I was a combat engineer officer. I served was over there for six months. I came back. Well, my wife, we've been only married about a year year and a half when I went, and I had no idea going into this. You know, I thought I was the one who was serving, right. I had no idea how um, how much the spouse or the mother or father or brother and sister who are left behind, how much they're serving too. I mean, it's really something. It's a really it's a huge burden. And yeah, because it's not like you're out of sight, out of mind. They're worrying, praying, trying to figure out where you are, what's going on? Are you safe, are you fed? Are you too hot? You know, exactly exactly. So she Diane was very supportive of me doing this volunteering and serving, and she's very patriotic as em I, and she was very supportive. But you know, then I'm gone for all this time and I got back and it was wonderful coming back, oh or you know. But but also, you know, when you've been gone a long time, it's like it's like a finger and a bucketful of water. You know, you pull the finger out. You know, it's kind of like people learned to kind of live without you, and then all a sudden you're back in and it's it's very stressful. So we went and did some counseling. So We've been married thirty three years, and we've done counseling at various points in our marriage, and this was the first time. And we went and uh, and I remember we sat down for the first time with this counselor and and he looked at me and said, well, why are we here? And I said, well, you know, Diane's been very upset and this and that and the other thing. And and of course he physically moved, because the three of us were sitting kind of, you know, like a triangle, he physically moved his body, shifted away from Diane, looked straight at me and said, Glenn, let's talk about you. So he wanted went right for the heart of the matter, right, And I think that that, um, you know, when this gets back to what keeps relationships together, what keeps family together, is when we when we are aware of ourselves. I think, when if you're blaming other people for the problems, maybe you're the problem. It's it's such a it's such a pleasure to talk with you. It's a real honored to be here at your farm. And so you've got five kids, how many grandkids? We have one on the way, one on the way. So now Forever dot com is really gonna kick in because every picture Grandma takes of the baby, when the baby gets here, her phone is going to have as many pictures on it as mine does, just of one granding yeah and well and then of course, but they'll all be in her Forever account. So it's all backed up and saved, triple backed up and secured, and it won't get lost and it won't get you know, won't get dropped in. It's amazing how many people's phones, uh get lost because they dropped them like they're at a bathroom, and then they're confused about maybe they have some kind of cloud storage back up, but they don't even understand what it is and it's not permanent. And then it's just so we we are really into solving that problem and it's good. So forever dot com that's all they have to know. If people want to get more information on what I do, yeah, just go to forever dot com. Just the word we own it. We I started. We when we started the company ten years ago, we paid for that domain and we've owned it ever since. We are to have the brand name Forever, and it's all about keeping those precious precious family memories, the videos and the photos, and the documents and the audio files. Some audio files sometimes it's the last message someone left before they died, that that that message is so important to people. You can save all of that in your permanent digital hemet Forever dot com and if you want more information to go to Forever dot com. Lynn. Thank you, thank you for spending time with us today, and thank you for being so delightful. God bless you. Thank you, Delia. Permanent digital storage for all your precious memories, share able for generations to come. That's what Forever offers you when you buy storage space on their platform. Create your library with all the photos and scanned documents you want to keep safe, then sort to your hearts content, making albums that you can share with family, albums you can share with friends, making photo books for each one of your grandkids so they can have access to great Grandma EULA's photographs or her recipe for fried peach pies. Forever even has ambassadors scattered all across the country, even in Canada, and they'll match you up with an ambassador to help you with the process, as well as additional services like photo negative and film scanning and digitizing to get all those dusty old movies, old videos, old slides out of boxes and being looked at once again. And then think of the possibilities framable prints, memory books, calendars, greeting cards. Yep, Forever does that too. See why I'm so excited about this. I've welcomed Forever into my world, and I'm sure I'll have much more to say about them in the coming months as I begin to build my digital library. If you're curious, visit them at Forever dot com. Glenn and his wonderful ambassadors I met about three d and fifty of them are waiting to welcome you aboard. August is coming to a close soon, back to school, cooler weather, falling leaves, and the apple harvest approaches, a whole new season to be excited about, and with many, many, many picture taking opportunities that lie ahead. Make the most of it, and I'll be right here cheering you on with every time you say say cheese. Join me nightly on the air, daily on my short form podcast, Hey it's Delilah, And in another two weeks be back here on Love Someone, when I'll have another fascinating guest to sit down with. I love spending time with you, and do me a favor in your busy, busy summer schedule, slow day, and love someone to

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In a world that can feel divisive and bleak, it's easy to get caught up in feelings of hopelessness, 
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