The Story

🎭 The Performer (30+ Years)

Magician. Speaker. Storyteller. Comedy performer. Cruise ships. Corporate rooms. After dinner. Anywhere with a room full of humans who need waking up.

30 years making people laugh — and occasionally making them think. The training ground was brutal and honest. The stage is wherever it needs to be.

The receipts: Learned from Tarbell Course in Magic, studied Strong Magic by Darwin Ortiz for presentation theory, and The Royal Road to Card Magic until the pages fell out. That's how you earn the right to call yourself a magician.

But performance was just the beginning.

✨ The Origin: GlowGadgets (1999-2003)

Bristol rave scene. Lakota. Trinity. The underground venues where PLUR wasn't a slogan - it was survival.

Selling glow sticks, light toys, poi. But really? Building community. Looking after each other. Making sure everyone got home safe. Revenue circulating, not extracting.

I invented influencer marketing before social media existed. I just didn't know that's what it was called. I was just making sure the massive was taken care of.

That's where this all started. The FeelFamous ecosystem is GlowGadgets energy scaled to the entire internet.

Read the culture: Energy Flash by Simon Reynolds documents what we lived. Last Night a DJ Saved My Life explains why it mattered. But you had to be there to really know.

🎤 Hip Hop Culture (1982-2003)

Blackburn 1982-84: Breaking on lino in the town centre. Popping. Robotics. Memorized every move from the film Breakdance. This wasn't a hobby - this was identity.

1997, Newport, South Wales: Beatboxed on stage for DJ Kool Herc. THE founding father of hip hop. I was just a junglist magician from Bristol with a mic - he gave me the nod. That moment validated everything.

2003: Met Daryl DMC (Run-DMC) backstage. Talked hip hop culture, the crossover between breaking and magic, performance as art form. Legends recognize realness.

The receipts: Can't Stop Won't Stop by Jeff Chang documents the culture we lived. Hip Hop Family Tree shows the origins. But the real education? Being there. Earning respect on the floor, not from a book.

🌍 The Survival Years (1989-1999)

Club 18-30 entertainment (1989+): Mediterranean resorts. Greece. High-energy performance for drunk holidaymakers. You learn to read a room FAST when your audience is 200 people who just want to party.

Stripogram/Kissagram work: Survival economics. Did what needed doing. Performance is performance - whether it's a birthday party, a hen do, or a corporate event. No shame in the hustle.

Abandoned in Italy: Partner left me stranded. Had to figure it out. Sailed alone to Piraeus, Greece. You learn resourcefulness when there's no backup plan.

Table Mountain fire (South Africa): Literally escaped a wildfire. When you've survived actual fire, corporate "fires" don't phase you.

12 years homeless in London: Not all homelessness looks like you think it does. Couch surfing. Insecure housing. Making it work. You develop grit, empathy, and an understanding of adversity that no book can teach.

This isn't trauma porn. This is context. When I train corporate teams on resilience and performance under pressure, I'm not quoting theory. I'm teaching lived experience.

🧠 AuDHD (The Superpower)

Autistic. ADHD. Neurodivergent. My brain works differently and that's exactly why this works.

I see patterns others miss. I connect dots that seem unrelated. I build systems that make sense to brains like mine - which means they make sense to EVERYONE.

"If Ian can use it, anyone can use it." That's the design principle. Reduce cognitive load. "I got you" energy. No dark patterns. Kind humans only.

Understanding the brain: Scattered Minds by Gabor Maté explained my entire childhood. ADHD 2.0 gave me the science. Unmasking Autism by Devon Price gave me permission to stop pretending.

🎪 The Specialist Skills

Punch & Judy: Traditional British slapstick — one of the last working Professors keeping it alive. Cultural heritage. Crowd reading at its most raw. You either hold the room or you don't. There is no safety net.

The craft: Punch & Judy: A History by George Speaight documents the tradition. Traditional scripts from the Professors who came before. But the real skill? Reading the crowd. Knowing when to lean into chaos and when to pull back.

DnB Santa (35+ languages): Personalised Christmas videos, community project, free at its core. Because kindness scales. Built the same way as everything else: accessible, no dark patterns, make it work for the people who need it.

🐭 The Partnerships

Ian (Holy Mole): Pattern recognition genius trapped at Iceland supermarket with chronic back pain. Writer of Strange Mole Show political satire. We did Doc Strange & The Dude in 2020 lockdown - predicted everything that's happened. He's my inspiration. I built this entire ecosystem because he deserves escape infrastructure.

malum: Bristol magician with 24 years experience. Autistic. Masks too much. Needed permission to be himself and professional infrastructure he didn't have to build. Now he's got it.

The others coming: More people stuck in jobs that don't fit them. More neurodivergent creatives who need permission to work their own way. More people with something to say who haven't had the platform for it yet.

🌟 The Ecosystem (What We're Building)

Not charity. Infrastructure.

• Hamlets - Self-contained villages for anyone who needs one
• Kudos System - 1 coffee = 1 review = equal value across all villages
• Dealer Network - Performers, creators, community builders earning passes
• Bridge Walkers - Connect communities, circulate revenue
• EntertainCMS - Booking system for entire performer network
• MeshCB - Offline networking for community resilience
• SpicyLister - AI tools that actually help people
• -Oid apps - Identification tools for collectors (Magic, Cannabis, etc)

💼 The Speaker

Doc Strange: After dinner speaker. Conference keynote. Corporate rooms. Cruise ships. Anywhere that needs a talk that earns its laughs by telling the truth.

Not therapy. Not a TED impression. Real stories from a real life — failure, reinvention, homelessness, neurodivergence, and the specific experience of being the smartest person in the room who everyone thought was the problem. Told with enough humour that the people paying £150 a plate don't notice they're being changed.

"A tear in their eye, a lump in their throat, and a pay rise for their team." That's the goal. Every time.

The science behind it: Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman for understanding decision-making under pressure. Influence by Robert Cialdini for reading people. Peak Performance for sustainable high performance without burnout.

📡 The Tech DNA

CB radio (1970s): Learned mesh networking before it was cool. Community communication. Helping strangers. That ethos never left.

Age 8, teaching neighbors to set up their CB rigs. "Breaker breaker, this is Christian Base calling." Building networks when most people didn't even have home computers. That's where I learned: technology serves community, not the other way around.

Bristol rave scene (1999-2003): PLUR in action. Revenue circulation. Community care. Looking after the massive.

FeelFamous (2024-2026): Same energy. Different technology. Bigger scale. Just trying to be useful.

The education: ARRL Handbook for Radio Communications is the bible. Off-Grid Communications for when the grid goes down. MeshCB.com is teaching this to a new generation - because community resilience matters.

🚀 What's Live & What's Next

LIVE NOW - The -Oid Villages:

🎩 Magic-Oid • 🌿 Cannabin-Oid • 📻 Radi-Oid • ⛵ Sail-Oid • 🏠 Miniature-Oid

Spannabis Spain 2026 (Bilbao, April): Major Cannabin-Oid launch. Cannabis education for UK legal patients.

Blackpool Magic Convention 2026 (Feb): Magic-Oid dealer launch. First 50 dealers @ £97.

Corporate Wellbeing: First 2-3 companies get Doc Strange training FREE (pilot program). Then £100k-150k bookings.

More -Oids Coming: Guit-Oid, Vinyl-Oid, Coin-Oid, Watch-Oid, Camera-Oid, Stamp-Oid, Designer-Oid

Vanlife: Location independence. Work from anywhere. Live the mission.