Happy Friday, first of all. I hope this weekend brings you joy. If you’re down for some minor (or major) musing, these are below. If you stick to the end, I hope you will share your thoughts with me.

If you don’t care about any of this, then I am just happy you opened the email 🥳 and hope you have a delightful day.

Third Space Indy Episode Emails

You may be surprised to be receiving this message; I haven’t sent any in quite a while, and certainly not since many of you joined the list. If you’re keeping up, the podcast is going well and my most recent guest, Lily Groot, is my most-listened-to episode yet. I hope you take the time to listen - it’s a great conversation, and Lily is worth your attention, as all of my guests are.

I am still behind on my show notes and have been catching up because I enjoy writing them out and then writing a blog post to go with them (so much so that I mention this at the end of every podcast episode), but my brain only likes doing so in the moment of podcast release, so getting behind was a mistake yet to be fully undone. I’m getting there, I promise, and the weekly episode emails will resume soon™.

Third Space Indy in Essence

The Podcast vs The Idea

Third Space Indy is not a podcast, but an ideal to work towards in an effort to make the places we live more intertwined with the values of creating safe, comfortable, and livable spaces for everyone.

I wrote the above paragraph over a year ago. Third Space Indy (the podcast) has always been a vehicle for learning for me (and hopefully for others), not only to understand this city but also to form connections across Marion County and beyond. I am fortunate to have had a strong start to this journey, and I may have even garnered some niche, local celebrity-level notoriety. But I think about this all the time: what is next? How do I leverage the momentum of a podcast, Instagram page, and people whom I admire to build a better city we all deserve? Not just for me, but for all of us - Third Space Indy is, ideally, never about me alone. Another question I think about often is how do I make that more true now than it is today.

For a long time, I have had a vision of Third Space Indy (the idea) beyond the podcast. I want to be open about my ideas and gather feedback, or for you to help me riff, grow, and succeed.

If you want to have a more effective and real conversation, please reply to this email or send a separate message to thirdspaceindy@gmail.com

It is not

It is often easiest to define something in the negative. To help understand my guiding principles on the other end, Third Space Indy is not:

• Promotional (for myself or otherwise)

• Wealth-seeking

• Inherently Transformational

• A Political Platform (lol)

Other than the project's origins in finding me full-time employment, it isn't promotional. Many social media influencers can show you local businesses, new and old. Many of them are my friends, and they make great content that helps people find new things to do around Indianapolis. This is a service this city greatly needs.

But if a company reaches out looking to promote themselves, they need to understand there are people out there for that, and they may need to seek them out instead. And if I host a non-profit organization, they need to understand the purpose is to share their story. Any monetary outcomes are purely a byproduct, not necessarily the intent, and not guaranteed.

The purpose is also not to generate wealth for myself or anyone involved. This is different from thinking I deserve payment or compensation, or that this is not valuable work. I must simply be able to distinguish between doing something to make money and doing something sustainably; otherwise, I will keep working myself into destitution.

Besides that, I have been thinking deeply about what it means to achieve “success.” When is Third Space Indy complete or finished? This is frankly an impossible question for me to answer as I type. I also think that it is important to set milestones. I have goals which I will talk about later in this blog post in more specifics, but importantly, I need to understand that there is a world where maybe Third Space Indy is just what it appears to be on the tin: another podcast with an ok-sized listener base that is not actually achieving the broader structural change I so crave. It is not and cannot be inherently transformational; I mean, how it could be, I’m just another white male podcaster among legions 😂.

Also - the last bullet point. No plans to run for any office. I’ve gotten some of these messages and questions. Though who knows what the future holds.

Infrastructure for Community Building

My good friend, Keaun Michael Brown, gave up on something he loved. Keaun runs a book club called Paper Airplanes. The group “flies to a country,” reads a book based in that country, written by an author from that country, and then comes together to learn about it (often, or always, with someone of that nationality present and presenting).

This is a free community event with food, strangers who become friends, and education that I think represents ‘real’ community in a way that small markets, which are very common here locally, can’t easily achieve. Paper Airplanes aims to bring people together for an afternoon or evening of joy in literacy and personal identity—and to eat food while doing it. The last Paper Airplanes is on November 21st, 2026; come if you can.

Keaun is ending this project because he hasn’t felt supported. He’s taking the time to research books, build a presentation, source food, find a presenter, rent a space, market, invite, and read. He also has to show up, and if he doesn’t, the event doesn’t happen.

Imagine doing all of this alone, for free, just out of love of the game. Some organizations have entire marketing teams for the work that Keaun does alone. Our society isn't built to support people who want to bring others together for something other than profit. What could someone like Keaun achieve if he had the infrastructure behind him to support bringing people together?

This is the crux of what I want to work toward with Third Space Indy (the podcast) as the “product” to be sold, so the infrastructure for community builders and community building can be built on its back.

Space or Place

There are many issues with my vision, many of which are easier to share in person so I don’t have to type an additional 1000 words beyond this point (ask me to coffee). The one at the forefront of my mind is that even with a slush fund to provide unconditional support for people like Keaun to hold community events, the highest cost will always be the space that event is held in.

Does that mean the end goal here must be to obtain a building specifically for this purpose? I think so, but that comes with many needs. This PLACE must be:

• owned - not only by Third Space Indy (the idea), but by the people who go there and/or the community it exists within to make it harder to displace

• accessible - physically and emotionally; otherwise it will fail. ‘Third spaces’ don’t exist any longer in part because of a lack of accessibility for the people who need them most

• sustainable - monetarily and without someone like me in the lead, giving people personal ownership in the space and in the decision-making process of how it evolves is important to whatever this space’s indefinite existence is.

This is what I have been thinking about. It’s full circle; if you talked to me after I was laid off in early 2025, you would have heard me describe a similar thing, but I am much clearer now on what it must be as opposed to what I thought it should be then.

I want to build something that does not seek to serve me. Ideally, it will do that simply by existing. Instead, I want to deconstruct our preconceived notions of what a third space is today: not just a business, but a space of community ownership that serves the neighborhood or city it exists in and can evolve with the needs of the people it serves. Right now, I think we just need to figure out how to make it exist in the first place. Third Space Indy (the idea) is nowhere near complete or successful, but I spend much of my time thinking through the steps and taking them one at a time, and hopefully I can pull you along for the ride.