Welcome to Counter Culture, a talk show normally in a diner.

On tonight's show, my guests include the author of Who Rescued Who, Bucks County author Victoria Schade.

- While I imbue my characters with aspects of my personality, they're never me.

They're usually much, much nicer than I am.

And they're much better dog trainers than I am.

- The author of Autobiography of a Recovering Skinhead, Frank Meeink.

- We are all children of God and we need to all stand up for one another.

- And the author of Becoming a Humor Being and Motivate This, motivational speaker Steve Rizzo.

- Laughter really is the pit stop in the rat race of life that gives you enough emotional fuel and repairs to get back into the race again.

- All right here on Counter Culture.

Hi, folks, I'm your host, Grover Silcox, coming to you from Lehigh Valley Public Media Studio B while we wait for the go ahead to return to our original home, a Daddy Pops Diner, little old Hatboro, PA. - This is the small, which is great for my little rescue stray.

- My first guest is an author who writes fanciful tales about our tail-wagging friends and their humans.

Her stories bring people together through their pups, fate and fortune.

Please welcome the author of Life on a Leash and Who Rescued Who, the Bucks County author, Victoria Schade.

Hi, Victoria.

- Hi, Grover, nice to see you.

- Yes.

- In fact, we met in Doylestown, the county seat of Bucks County, at the Doylestown book shop.

- One of my favorite places, yeah.

- Yeah, yeah, exactly.

And I still have, hold on, my signed copy of Life on a Leash.

- I am honored that you have it.

That's wonderful.

I hope you enjoyed it.

- I did.

I loved it.

And I loved Who Rescued Who.

I just finished that one.

And but it all began, of course, with our canine friends.

You're also a trainer.

Is that how it started?

- That is how it started.

Yes.

So I've been a dog trainer for just over 20 years now, and writing about dog training was kind of a natural progression.

You know, I wrote I write for various pet websites and I've been featured in magazines and things.

And as I was working on my how-to dog training stuff, I realized, well, I kind of like the fiction angle of writing, too.

And that's how that came about.

And you can see one of my inspirations getting ready to bark.

See the tail end right there.

She's going to keep it spicy.

- Is that Millie or Olive?

- This is Olive.

She's on patrol.

Can you come say hello?

She's like, "Nah.

"I got to look for the squirrels."

- Oh, the squirrels.

You know, dogs have, of course, attention deficit disorder.

That that's what we love about them.

Isn't it really?

- One of the many things, one of the many charms, sometimes one of the many frustrations, depends on where you are on the pet parent scale.

I think it's silly.

- You wrote Secrets of a Dog Trainer.

You try to educate people to adopt trainer think with their dog.

What is trainer think?

- Well, it's looking at what you're dealing with and then kind of zooming out and looking at the big picture, a lot of times we get caught up in the minutia and the frustration of living with our furry best friends and with trainer think I think it's important to look at where these behaviors can end up.

And that's one of the things in that particular how to book that you mentioned.

I take scenarios, really common problems that pet parents deal with.

And I walk them through kind of a choose your own ending.

Like if you were to take this approach, this might happen.

And if you do this, this might happen.

And then, of course, I have the here's the best way to deal with it version of it.

So it's kind of like this is where you could end up and this is where you should end up.

And that's trainer think.

- Yeah.

What is the biggest problem people have when they come to you?

Are they really frustrated?

Well, there's a spectrum.

So we have my new puppy people, which I love.

They're the ones that are just like, let's do everything right.

Let's start off on the right paw.

And then we have the other end of the spectrum, which would be the oh, my gosh, my dog is driving me crazy.

He's pulling on the leash or he's barking at the neighbors.

My dogs are not perfect, you know, all of the little things that turn into big things if they're not addressed.

So luckily, there's always, you know, and then there's the in between people that are like, I just want to do the right thing and have fun with my dog and expand our common vocabulary.

- I just think it's marvelous that you were able to expand your horizons by going from training and working with dogs to writing, to writing novels.

- A lot of people mistake and think, especially my first one, Life on the Leash.

People assume that it's me.

And while I imbue my characters with aspects of my personality, they're never me.

They're usually much, much nicer than I am.

And they're much better dog trainers than I am.

But yeah, in my next, Lost, Found and Forever, this character actually has a rescue dog that gets cast on a Netflix type of TV show.

So she's not a professional dog trainer.

And she suddenly I mean, her dog is really talented and she's really talented, but she suddenly dealing with this whole new world of being on set and trying to figure out how to work with her dog in this completely new environment.

And I did pull from my experiences on the Puppy Bowl and working on various commercial shoots.

- Good.

- So, yeah, again, it's not me, but it's definitely some of the stuff I've lived through.

- It's always a feel good story.

- It is a feel good story.

But I will say that in Who Rescued Who, a lot of people were like, OK, does anything happen to the dog?

They're so worried that I don't know if you've seen the website, like, does the dog live?

So I always had to do disclaimers like I will never in a story will never put a dog in jeopardy.

All the dogs live happily ever after, I promise.

And the feedback that I got from that particular novel was just I mean, it brought me to tears because it was so heartfelt.

People really felt the story and they were moved by it.

And it's set in England.

And many of them said they felt like they were transported there, which during this pandemic, wouldn't we all love that.

- Right.

- So I'm just really just heartened by the feedback.

It's everything.

- Did you have a background in writing?

Did you go to school for English or whatever?

- No, I didn't have a formal background, but I've always loved reading, which I think is the core of being a good writer.

So that was kind of the backbone of it.

Loving since I was a child, just loving to read.

And then, yeah, I did do a lot of writing in college, but again, it wasn't my major and then just a natural affinity for it.

And I got lucky, I guess.

- When you're writing do your dogs, when you're writing do your dogs, like sit next to you?

I mean, do they give you inspiration?

- They always give me inspiration, again they are not perfect.

I am on the record, this dog trainer's dogs are far from perfect.

But what they're doing while I work is typically kind of, you know, drumming their paws going, are you done?

Can we do something fun?

This is really boring.

- She's at the 40.

- The 10.

Muffin takes it 99 yards to the house.

- Touchdown.

- You were, they call it a wrangler for the Puppy Bowl on Animal Planet?

- Puppy Bowl is an annual show on Animal Planet that is broadcast on Super Bowl Sunday.

It's kind of counterprogramming for the non sports people.

So I've been involved with the show for 15 years.

It's a 17-year-old program and I've been there for 15.

And it features adoptable puppies from shelters throughout the country that are playing football, not really, on a shrunken down field.

And my responsibilities are everything from ensuring puppy happiness on the field.

So I'm right at the side of the field the whole time during the game and then any of the special action that's on camera, like if the dogs are looking up at the camera, or even the kittens, I work with the kittens of the kitten halftime show.

We had a DJ.

I think it was like MC Scratch Cat and he was doing little like deejay stuff and that was me on the other end of the camera with the little treat bag making funny noises.

- So what's happening now and what's coming up?

You have the new book, right?

Just published?

- Yes, it'll be out on March 30th.

March 30th.

Lost, Found and Forever is definitely fun rom com.

Quite a romp.

And as far as what's next, it's more writing, more trying to keep our furry best friends as happy as we can make them.

- Well, they certainly do their part to make us happy, that's for sure.

Who doesn't really love a dog?

So I won't ask you about Cat.

That's a whole other subject.

- I'll come back, we'll do it again.

- All right.

Thank you so much for joining us.

Victoria Schade, an author who loves to bring people through their bewhiskered buddies in modern romance stories.

- Because deep down inside, I'm just a spiritually bankrupt, sick little boy who's scared of everything.

- If ever you want to compare the rigors of life's hurdles with someone else you might want to dive into Frank Meeink's Autobiography of a Recovering Skinhead.

It is riveting, true story of embracing hate, losing everything and finding redemption through the power of love.

Please welcome Frank Meeink to the counter.

Frank, welcome.

- Thank you.

And thank you for reading my story.

And it was in Philadelphia where it all started and happened to go all across the country being a neo-Nazi as a young teenager.

Had parents who were drug addict alcoholics who basically I was a mistake.

And my dad lived in one neighborhood.

My mom lived in another.

And had to try to survive on my own basically for a while there.

And I wound up having to transfer when I was 13 from one school to another.

And I went to an all-black school in Southwest Philly.

And my parent, my stepfather was abusing me.

You know, I went home every day before I got transferred to that school.

I went home every day when I lived in South Philly with my mom.

I went home every day between eight, when I was eight years old, to I was 13.

I went home with a bully in my home every day.

To where I used to plan to get hit by a car because then I wouldn't have to go home.

- So, Frank, you were first exposed to people who are either skinheads or neo-Nazis or white supremacists visiting your cousins in Lancaster?

- Yeah, I came out of the city.

I was not involved in any of that stuff.

But when I went up to go hang out with my cousin, he hung out with these other big, bad neo-Nazis who they wanted to always talk to me about what it was like going to an all-black school and living in a rough part of Philly.

And I'll tell you that my parents growing up never asked me when I came home with a black eye from school they never asked me how did I get it.

I played sports all the time.

They never said, how was school, how was sports?

How's that girl you like?

When these neo-Nazis would ask me, hey, what's it like growing up around black people?

It was someone saying, how's your day?

And then when I started to hang out with them, I noticed people feared them.

I'm 14 years old and now people fear who I'm standing with.

When I just went through the last five, six years of being afraid of everything, I was afraid of my school.

I fear my school.

I feared my parents.

I feared my step parents.

I feared if I was going to have enough food to eat today, sometimes.

Now someone fears me because I'm with these guys?

I loved it and I grabbed on to it and I never went back to school ever again.

I joined the movement and lived up in Pottstown, Pennsylvania.

I lived up in Lancaster.

I lived all over with these neo-Nazi group.

I grabbed on to every word these people said for survival.

And then you take that, when you take that same thing or that fear in this family.

But now they start teaching me through the Bible, teaching me how to hate through the Bible and teach us how to shoot guns and teach us that our job is to now be the angels that ruined Sodom and Gomorrah.

And that's what our job is.

Now you're taking this welfare kid from Philly and tell me that God wants me on his team.

Like someone actually wants me.

And it's the same exact trick and stuff they do to jihadist kids.

It's the same thing.

I wound up going to prison at 17 years old in the state of Illinois for kidnaping another human being and torturing him.

I was 17.

This guy was 19.

So it was like a child.

But that doesn't even matter.

It's a child of God.

And I kidnaped and I tortured this man.

And that was not my first time.

And so I finally got caught.

I went to prison.

When I was in prison, I started to just look at things, look at my life.

And I actually started playing sports in prison, I was a young 17-year-old, a big swastika on my neck.

I can do whatever I want.

And I played football.

I played basketball.

I just kind of was in a maximum security adult prison with John Wayne Gacy.

Of course, I'm going to play around and do what I can.

And I start to make some connections with some black kids and some Latino kids too, like, you know, we just played ball together.

When I was getting released from prison, I was just, I kind of changed on a lot of issues.

I was like, you know what, on the black, Latino and Asian, like, I'm still going to be a neo-Nazi.

That was my calling.

- Right.

- But I'm just going to hate the Jews now, because that's all I've been really trained for the last seven years, was to how to hate Jews and that mostly all of our talking points were against Jews.

So I come back to Philly and a guy at Cherry Hill, New Jersey mall, and no one would hire me, I had a swastika on my neck, aggravated kidnaping on my record.

I got skinhead written on my knuckles.

These ain't good people skills.

- Right.

- And a Jewish guy gave me a job carrying in and out antique furniture at the Cherry Hill, New Jersey mall.

And he taught me all about the antique business and he taught me all about myself.

Because he used to tell me whenever I would say I was stupid, because I had a thing in my head because my parents always told me I was stupid.

I would say things and then go, I'm so stupid.

And one time I broke a marble top table, said, yo, I'm so stupid.

And he said, Frank, stop saying you're stupid.

You're one of the smartest people I know.

And he did nothing but love on me.

He was just being a good human being to me.

- Right.

- And I finally just had enough, man.

I was beating my head against the wall to believe this stuff.

At the end, I was completely beating my head against the wall.

God was consistently putting people in my life to be like, who are you to judge?

- You also speak for the Anti Defamation League.

- Yeah, I worked with the Anti Defamation League and the Philadelphia Flyers back in 1996, right after I'd gotten out and the Oklahoma City bombing happened.

And I knew I wanted to make a difference now.

Right.

Because I would have been a Timothy McVeigh.

me with the Philadelphia Flyers, which for a Philly kid that like working for the Yankees in New York.

- Absolutely.

Yes.

- And I got to coach and get more black kids to play the game of hockey.

And now I've done that for over 25 years.

- Wow.

What's the name of the group now that you formed?

- Harmony Through Hockey.

- Was it the Anti Defamation League that helped you get rid of your swastika that was tattooed on your neck?

- It's kind of true.

They did a newspaper article about me in 1996 about the hockey program and the reporter said, hey, don't you get, ain't you kind of embarrassed, they said, isn't it kind of awkward that you coach all these black kids and you got a swastika tattooed on your neck?

Yes, it is very awkward.

And this is where in American History X where they get the story where he puts his hands over his chest.

Because I said in the article, I always cover my hand when I look in the mirror.

So I could see what I look like without the swastika on my neck.

And a doctor from the University of Pennsylvania hospital called me and said, Frank, we would like to talk to you.

She says, would you like the tattoo taken off?

And I said, ma'am, I'm a hockey coach and I have no money.

And she said, well, I'm the best in the world.

So you're insulting me by asking to say, I'll even do it for you.

She goes, I teach here.

And all the resident doctors that I have here have never shot a live person with the laser.

Would you be willing to be the first person they shoot?

- Wow.

- And I said, absolutely, you can use a belt sander.

So anyway, real quick, she does that for me.

I get done, the tattoo, comes off in a year and a half.

I go visit her to say thank you and she says, you don't have to thank me.

I have family members who died in the Holocaust.

It was my pleasure to get that off your neck.

- Wow.

- And now my job is to get other people out of this movement.

Hate is just a manifestation of fear.

It's all fear driven.

We got a whole big country of people right now that fear and storm our capital.

It's all the same stuff, guys.

It's manifest fear.

How does it manifest?

In hate or false pride and so you have to address those little fears first.

What's wrong with that person?

But when I come into a person who's already very hardcore into this, you just ask him about their lives.

Ask them about their life, and then you paint them into a corner to where you tell them, like, you can keep on living this life that I'm telling you is wrong because I've been there and you know what I'm saying is true.

So you're either going to continue being a negative person on this planet or you can make that change.

- What would be your final comment, like if this was you're giving a speech to a group of people, what would you like to leave us with?

- We are all children of God.

We are all children of God and we need to all stand up for one another, and when we see that there's a system where we have 2.4, no, it's actually 2.6 million people now in prison.

And when we have a system that has 1.4 out of three women in the world locked up in America.

They are children of God, and we need to start standing up for one another, and that's what I would want, be of service to other people.

It's not about my ego anymore.

It's not about my fears.

As long as I could be a servant to God by being a servant to everyone else.

And if I do that, if I live an altruistic lifestyle, I will feel God's love and I will know God's love.

That's what I would tell everybody.

- Frank, I think that's a perfect place to leave it.

I want to thank you for sharing your story with us.

Frank Meeink, a man who had to go through hell to escape it and become fully human and fully alive.

- Laughter is the pit stop in the rat race of life in that it gives you enough emotional fuel and repairs to get back into the race again.

- My next guest's story is motivating.

In high school, he was labeled least likely to succeed, but that ultimately didn't stop him.

He became a very successful standup comic, became a headliner himself.

But one day he switched gears and took all he knew about positive thinking through humor and attitude and became one of the nation's most successful motivational speakers and the author of three books to help rev people up.

It's a pleasure to welcome an old friend, Steve Rizzo.

Hi, Steve.

How are you?

- I'm doing wonderful, Grover.

How are you?

It's good to see you after so many years.

- Yes.

I knew you before you made the transition from comedy to motivational speaking and becoming one of the nation's top motivational speakers.

But let's go back to high school.

You talk about how a counselor told you that you don't have the intelligence to go to college.

- It was eighth grade.

He told me in front of my mom and dad that I didn't have what it takes to go to college.

And not only did I allow this person to tell me what I couldn't do, he suggested what I should do.

I took those negative labels into my adult life and they were the determining factors for many of the decisions I made.

It took me five years after high school before I did go to college.

It wasn't easy for me, but I did very well.

I excelled in high honors, had degrees in education, English, psychology and a master's in theater arts.

But those negative labels always came back, always came back every semester and I had to fight them, combat them.

I went back to the same high school that I graduated from where I was voted least likely to succeed.

And I was a counselor for kids with behavioral problems and I taught English for two years.

At that time I was doing stand up comedy part time.

- Right.

- And then I left the school system, did comedy full time, was doing very well, became a national headliner, did a lot of TV stuff.

And at the pinnacle of my career, I decided I wanted to do something else and I became a motivational speaker.

- Wow.

Where did you grow up, Steve?

- I was born in Brooklyn, New York, but raised on Long Island.

I use that, my growing up, as a foundation to become stronger and always had that little mantra going on in my head that your past doesn't equal your future or the present.

- Describe for me your comedy career.

- Well, I was very fortunate because I started comedy when comedy clubs started opening up all over the country.

I started in the late '70s and then all through the '80s.

And there weren't that many comedians at the time.

And I was really funny.

I did a lot of impressions.

I had the guitar then, I was doing song impressions.

I was thrown in as a headliner to do it right away because no one wanted to follow me, primarily because they couldn't.

So notice how my confidence level shot up.

- And by this time you were performing with some pretty big names.

- My opening acts were Chris Rock, Rosie O'Donnell, Seinfeld opened up for me.

This is before they were stars, of course.

My roommate was Drew Carey, but none of that really mattered.

I felt this major shift, this connection that this is what I'm supposed, it really was a calling.

This is what I'm supposed to be doing.

When I let go of the fear of making this transition because it's very hard to let go of something.

- Yes, it's a risk.

Right.

- Yeah.

How do you let go of this?

You know, because that big mouth inside your head is going, you can't be doing this.

You're ridiculous.

How could you be doing something you know absolutely nothing about when you're at the pinnacle now?

The industry is so interested in you, you could be doing sitcoms.

And I overrode that and I became very empowered as a result of doing it.

I was always well aware when I was doing standup, this is where another shift started taking place that there were people in the audience experiencing challenging times of some kind.

Maybe they were going through divorce, having financial difficulties, maybe they or a loved one were inflicted with some kind of illness.

But for those few hours at the comedy club, their challenges and their problems didn't own them because they allowed themselves to take time out to laugh.

And that's when I realized that laughter really is the pit stop in the rat race of life and that it gives you enough emotional fuel and repairs to get back into the race again.

And I started wondering the impact I was having and how on another level I was helping people not just to laugh, but to forget their problems.

- Right.

- And I came up with this coined phrase, unleashing the power of their humor being.

And everyone has a humor being within them, your humor being is of your higher self.

It is really the God part of you.

It's the part of you that brings out the best in you when times get really tough.

What your humor being can give you more than anything else is peace of mind and emotional stability.

And when I started getting into that and I started doing standup, I realized that the aspect of helping people on a more profound level was more interesting to me than just making them laugh.

And that's when I started really delving into these motivational seminars and I went to a Tony Robbins seminar.

I picked up my pen as I'm listening to him and I unconsciously I'm writing, I can do this.

And then I put the pen down.

Maybe ten minutes later, I picked it up again and I wrote, I should do this.

And then another couple of minutes went by and I said, dammit, I'm going to do this.

And I read what I wrote.

And I said, whoa.

I still have this paper hanging up in the wall in my office, by the way.

It's in glass.

And that's when I said, I'm doing this.

And I had no idea, had no idea on how to become a motivational speaker, but I knew that's what I was going to do.

- You talk about in your book common sense strategies.

- Common sense success strategies.

- Success strategy.

Yeah.

Explain what they are.

- They're innate.

We're all born with them.

We're all born with these strategies.

Everyone is born with them, comes from a higher part of yourself.

Principle number one, you are the creator of your success and happiness.

There are no ifs, ands or buts about it.

And what that means is it's not what happens to you that determines how successful or how happy you're going to be.

It's what you do about what happens.

It's the choices you make.

Number two, you need to understand without a doubt that you are the only problem that you will ever have.

And somewhere within you, there is always a solution, always a solution waiting to be discovered.

You just have to get the hell out of your way to find the answer.

And the third principle is, whenever you're confronted with a challenge or problem of any magnitude, it's never a matter of managing the situation.

It's always a matter of how you manage your mind.

And it's not a matter of right or wrong, fair or unfair or good or bad.

It's a matter of this is where your life is right now.

You just lost all your money.

What are you going to do about it?

Are you going to use all your energy wallowing in what just happened to you or are you going to use that same energy and transmute it and try to figure out how to get it back?

Who could you go to that can help you?

What strategies need to be taken for you to get from this step to the next step and say to yourself, I know I can turn this around.

It's just going to take time.

- You share your strategies and your own wisdom about them with audiences all over the country.

- Many of my clients are Fortune 100 companies, a lot of health care education groups, I speak to groups that are maybe 100, 200 or sometimes 10,000.

- Is there something you would typically say to a group to close out, to sum it all up?

- Yes, I can only give you the strategies, no matter what you read, no matter who you listen to, you could read it and listen to it and say in your heart, yes, this is good.

This makes sense to me.

It means nothing unless you make them a part of who you are.

That's up to you.

That's your choice.

That's your challenge.

That's something no one can do.

There's a saying and it's one of the most profound sayings, God helps those who help themselves.

That means you have to meet that person, that higher power, whoever that may be halfway.

You have to.

Otherwise it won't work.

- What's up next, Steve?

What's your...?

- Right now, after this, I have a conference call.

This was wonderful.

I love your show, Grover, and I wish you all the best.

- Same here, Steve, thanks so much.

Dave Rizzo, a man who believes you can do anything and is determined to help you believe it.

Well, that's all for this episode, I want to thank my guests, author of Life on a Leash and Who Rescued Who, Victoria Schade, the author of the very powerful Autobiography of a Recovering Skinhead, Frank Meeink, and the funnyman turned motivational speaker and author, Steve Rizzo.

And thank you for joining us tonight.

Don't forget to stop by next week for more amazing guests great conversation right here on Counter Culture.