From Happy Hour to Future Hour: The Evolution of a Podcast Brand

The DJ Sessions welcomes a powerhouse trio from Lifestyle After Five—an evolved podcast platform diving deep into futurism, AI, and tech-powered lifestyle education. Formerly known as After Five the Podcast, the show now helps audiences gear up for tomorrow’s opportunities.

From writing books like “Keys to the Island” and “Lay Off the Liftoff” to using Discord to run live Python coding meetups, the group delivers real-world value. They share how AI tools like ChatGPT revolutionize workflows, why partnership beats solo hustle, and why small businesses need to claim space in digital landscapes. Their passion for forward-thinking content and community engagement sets them apart.

Takeaways:

• Use AI tools for research, content, and SEO
• Build podcast consistency and brand identity
• Leverage community and partnerships
• Stay future-focused in a tech-driven world

Where we feature the best DJs, producers, and industry professionals from around the world. I’m your host, Darren. And right now, we’re testing out some new stuff here on the DJ sessions.

First and foremost, having the guys come in from the Lifestyle After Five podcast series. We have Lord Shu, Ali, and Mershodd coming in. How you doing today, guys?

What’s going on, man?

All right, audio test is going good. New glitches happen in this studio all the time. Lost a little bit of the transmission there, but it looks like we are on meta.

We’re on Instagram, we’re on TikTok, we’re on the TheDJsessions.com. And we’re going out today, we’re gonna talk with these guys. Haven’t caught up with them for a hot minute.

You know, good to be talking with you guys. You know, the last time we talked was probably a couple of years ago. Heard your show has gone through a little bit of a transformation.

Who wants to take the note on that top right-hand corner here? Go ahead and you take it. Just tell what’s been going on with Lifestyle After Five so far.

So first and foremost, I appreciate everybody who’s watching right now. Shout out to The DJ Sessions for showing love. So first thing first, we are now a totally new rebranded channel called Lifestyle After Five.

Originally, we were called After Five The Podcast. We made the change probably about a year, two years ago. And basically what we are, we still are like a, basically like a in your pocket happy hour.

That’s the best way to describe it. And basically you can catch us live in the streets. You know, we still do events, but most of our content now is focused around futurism and we still Lifestyle Four, but we’re focusing now on the future and getting more people up to speed with what’s going on.

So that’s the main thing that’s been happening with us lately. We also have been making these new T-shirts, these new Lifestyle After Five T-shirts. If y’all rocking with these.

Swag is always good.

Right. So, you know, getting more into our fashion game with, you know, being a Lifestyle Podcast it’s only right. So that’s pretty much where we’ve been at within the past couple of years.

You know, I was talking with y’all a little bit before the show began and, you know, how I took a futurism class in ninth grade and I’ll date myself here. I’m not ashamed of it. In 1989, ninth grade in 1989.

Yeah, I do the math. I turned 50 last year. Congratulations.

But no, I mean, it always was an awesome class. You know, it was a first of its kind class that was introduced. The teacher was a really great teacher.

I think I had him for debate class too, maybe. But, you know, we talked about stuff like, you know, it was basic stuff, but like, I remember watching the movie, The Time Machine. I think the Orson Welles Time Machine for the first time, the old school one, you know, back then.

And, you know, one of the questions back in the time, back in then was the teacher had asked us, or at the end of the movie, there’s a scene where all his friends are there and he’s like, oh, he disappeared. Where’d he go to? Well, he went back to the future to meet the girl.

And they looked around and said, what’s missing? And they noticed there were three volumes from his library that were missing, but they didn’t know which ones. And our futurism teacher asked us, if you could go into the future, or was it in the future or the past?

I can’t remember which way it was. But if you go one direction either, what three books would you take with you? You know, what, you know, so that’s a good question.

You know, like which three would be the most important that would be game-changing that you take? I can’t remember what I answered, man. That was some years ago.

But, you know, if you could give advice, I mean, I know this is on the spot, but what, Lord Shu, what would be the first book you would take? And then we’ll bounce and go back to Ali for the next book.

First book, this is kind of a no-brainer, but I wrote a book. This is a shameless plug, but I wrote a book called Keys to the Island. The beginning of this year, I finished it and put it out.

But that would be the book, because pretty much every like hardship or any type of like trial, tribulation I ever went through in my life, I put in that book and also put how to basically overcome, but also just set yourself up to be like in the future, like see yourself in the future and kind of just align with that future version of yourself. So definitely that book.

All right, Ali, what book would you take? Well, I’m gonna go ahead and shamelessly plug myself too. I also wrote a book on Amazon called Lay Off the Liftoff.

And there’s several books, but you asked, well, I think it’s a quote I would take with me that would summarize all the books, that would dictate all the books that I would read in the future. And that is when you really break things down and get to the grand scheme of thing of everything in life, whether you wanna be a doctor, engineer, an astronaut, the only thing that makes you that is practice in the books you read and the company you keep. That’s it, a doctor practice.

They read medical books and they practice. And that’s it, an engineer read engineering books and they practice. And I was focusing on what I wanna achieve.

And I would do that early. I mean, if I did this, you look at a Jeff Bezos or the Facebook Mark Zuckerberg, they were fixated on tech at early ages, 10, 11, 12, the billionaires now, and they are experts at what they do. So I would have definitely probably around 10 try to be an expert at whatever I focus and put my mind onto.

And it definitely would have changed my future now. But it’s still never too late to pick up and go. This is what we talk about on our podcast.

When you tune in, we started doing Python coding classes, courses where we would meet up and discuss in our Discord, Python. So it’s never too late to focus on something and become an expert.

Yeah, yeah, I know exactly what you’re talking about. I grew up, I guess you could say tech savvy. My father always lavished the toys of the household upon me to play with.

Darren, hook up the VCR. Darren, connect the stereo. Darren, how do you do this?

Darren, I go, dad, can’t you read the manual? He’s like, no, I had kids so I didn’t have to learn this stuff. But I kind of got really technical and got into video production in high school at a young age and played with video cameras at the age of six years old.

This is 1979, 1980. I was making films and making videos because you could film it and it was right there on a VHS tape. So I’ve always had technology surrounding me in some way, shape or form.

And you hear a lot of people that wanna get into podcasting or get into this realm and they can get overwhelmed now with the amount of information that’s out there. I’ve hosted a number of, I’ve been on a number of interviews and people say, how do you get started in podcasting? I’m like, well, do you have a phone?

Okay, start right there. You don’t need to invest thousands and thousands of dollars and have everything set up. But really just going back and doing the basics.

I mean, they make, I always quote people on these books, or not quote, but always recommend these books. It’s the dummy series. There’s a dummy series for pretty much every single thing that’s out there.

Get the podcasting book for dummies for $34.95. Read one chapter, go through it. Read the next chapter, go through it. And you’ll be just that much more ahead of the game than somebody who’s holding their phone going, look at me, I got a show.

But then as a teacher, I gotta say that is so early 2000s. Now you have chat GPT. That is your new dummy series.

There’s your new dummy series, exactly.

I mean, I am- There is no excuse to not know how to do anything.

I’m taking some courses right now, just basic courses. I’ll give the company a plug because I like them. It’s Curse of AI.

And for 20 bucks for the first month, they take you through the basics of like chat GPT. They give you like little basic courses. Then you’d spend, if you went through all of them, if you went through a whole chat GPT course, I’d say maybe 30 minutes, maybe 40 minutes, hour tops.

And it goes through the main AI stuff out there. Cause they say a lot of people over the age of 40 are using chat GPT like it’s Google. And they aren’t really understanding the power of what AI can do when you go in.

And I mean, I just had to go, I went and did a, I can pull it up right now. I had to do a full SEO report for one of my websites, for SEO management. It’s all the stuff that I know what to do, but just taking the prompts that I got from Curse of AI and putting those prompts over to chat GPT and saying, do this for my website, do this for my competitors, give me a strategy plan and did it.

It does that the whole damn thing for me. And it’s just check by check playlist. Here you go.

It will even create the content for you. And you know, there’s that whole debate right now is using AI for content creation ethical. And it really comes down to, is the information that you’re using from AI, the truth?

You know, I said, make my, write me an article and make it look like I’m doing $10 million a year in business and give me these financial projections and falsify records and all that and have it do that. It’s gonna do that for me, but it isn’t real. But you know, I had chat GPT help me out with my silent disco website, you know, and said, create me a page and everything you put in there was factual about silent disco headsets.

I’m like, use it. They’re talking about though Google, it’s been mentioned about it scanning for AI and deranking sites that are using AI to build content. But then there’s also the other side of the camp that says they won’t do that because Google’s also pushing its own AI stuff.

So, you know, if it’s factual information, then yay.

You know, if it’s not- You still gotta deliver the content though. And that’s the thing, whether AI write it or not, you still gotta be able to deliver it. I mean, it’s just like there’s a thousand podcasts out there, but, and a lot of them are talking about the same thing, but some are just better than others.

Correct. That’s one suggestion I give to a lot of podcast people too is what are you doing that’s unique, that is different than the other people out there? If you say, I wanna do a podcast about cars.

Okay, great. That’s a pretty big topic.

Yeah.

What do you wanna do? Domestic cars, old cars, classic cars, new cars, you know, Fred Flintstone cars. I don’t know, whatever, conceptual cars, whatever that, you know, you break it down to your category and then you can kind of research that and get into that.

But a lot of people get this general topic and then they’re all over the place and there’s no consistency. And that’s the other thing is making sure that you’re consistent with what you do. If you’re gonna be consistent, if a show comes out on Thursday, it comes out every Thursday.

You know, you gotta be consistent and content is king and you gotta make sure you’re dedicated to this. A lot of people I say not to like, I don’t wanna sound conceited or nothing, but it’s like, you wanna do a podcast? Great, come to me when you got a hundred episodes under your belt.

You know, if you do one episode a week, that means you’re keeping it up for two years. You know, I mean, that’s when you really can say, okay, man, but if you got five episodes and you haven’t done anything for six months, do you really have a podcast? You don’t have a podcast that is not very long.

If you wanna get, I mean, and some people are doing it just to talk. Now are you doing an online diary or are you trying to get viewership? And my take in entertainment is, you are trying to put content out that’s gonna engage with an audience and that audience is gonna wanna then share that information they learned with other people that are in that community or share it with people that aren’t in the community to get them interested in that community.

You know, and if you’re not creating or researching, doing your due diligence, you know, you’re gonna not have a podcast that’s gonna be very successful. And some simple backdrops, get a ring light for 15 bucks from Ross, get a microphone for 35 bucks. Don’t buy your stuff off Timu necessarily, no offense, Timu, love y’all.

But you know, okay, Mike, you really don’t have to spend more than 100 bucks to get a decent studio up and running for podcasting. But anyways, enough on that. How long y’all been doing After Five for?

The three, over three years.

We go way back. I mean, if they go through, I don’t know if it’s on our website, but they go through our YouTube. You were one of our guests in the infancy days.

I wanna say back in 2002. You were actually kind of like the father of one of the forefathers of After Five. That’s why this is kind of a special moment because you not only, you came on, you did the podcast, but you shared the restream and the back.

You shared a lot with us as far as podcasting go. And I don’t even know if we even had 20, good 20 episodes when we interviewed you.

Yeah.

I’m not conceited about this stuff. My mission with all this has always been to help out other podcasters. I used to have the 98% rule.

I give about 98% of the information I will away for free. Once the “pandi” hit and everyone was asking me for questions on how to do this, I kind of took it back to 97%. I think I might’ve mentioned that to y’all.

It’s like, come on, there’s researchers online out there. You’re not paying me as a consultant, but no. I mean, I’m trying to help out podcasters where I can because I started out the same way.

I started out in public access or started out making movies at home, public access, broadcast television, podcasting, live streaming. Now I’m in virtual reality with nightclubs and stuff and just going and pushing it.

That sounds fun.

So congratulations on sticking through with it, keeping it going. Glad to hear about the evolution of things that are happening there. You know, we didn’t get a chance.

Mershodd, I want to talk with you just quickly. Tell us about Soul Addict. What is that all about?

Soul Addict is my brand. It started out as a store. And it’s funny, if you look at the logo, the name was supposed to be Soul Addict, like a drug addict.

So if you look at the logo, you’re likely to crack that on something. So that goes for my shoe addiction. I have an addiction of shoes.

That’s why the name Soul Addict. So, but I couldn’t spell it the way I wanted to, so I had to change it to Addict to make it sound the same. But Soul Addict is my baby, man.

It started as an assignment store and turned into a whole full-fledged brand. But now, you know, I’m now designed for others.

Nice. Congratulations on that. Always awesome.

Another thing that I also do, like having conversations with people about is not only just podcasting and video production and distribution, is entrepreneurship. I’m huge on small business and innovating small business. You know, my original series started out with featuring small businesses.

You know, we had, ITV was putting small businesses on broadcast television. You know, and I really always had a heart for that. My advertising company, iAlternative Media, the I stands for independent.

So we work with small businesses to get them a big bang in advertising where they normally, you know, only Fortune 500 companies really spend money on what we do for our advertising medium, but we try to cater it to get small businesses on and get them out there and stuff. More on that later. I’m not trying to toot my own horn, but yeah, I always am a huge fan of people going into business for yourself.

We’re one of the few countries in the world where you can really do that in, you know, well, sort of a free market, kind of a market, you know, where you can get a license and start something up and go for it. So that’s pretty awesome. You know, as far as switching over from the lifestyle after five and the future or the futurism of after five, what made your, what was the decision to just go in that direction?

Well, did you want to take it? Lawrence, do you want me to take it?

No, you got it, bro. I’ll follow up on that.

As you can see, we kind of started off in the early days when you back in, back in 2022, we want, because we always wanted to bring value because that’s what lifestyle after five is about. Typically you spend your nine to five working whatever you do, doing your drill and going to school, but it’s what you do after five that dictate. And that’s why, as Lloyd, she alluded in his introduction, we were something like a virtual, we were like a virtual happy hour where I would tell people the bar is different at Rue Christ and Applebee’s.

You get in on those conversations and who you spend your time with dictates your future. And it can change your future, just being in the right conversation with the right person. So as time went on and we used to have guests in there, we decided that it was just better and we start carrying our show on our own.

You know how it is when you start trying to bring a different guest. It was too much controversy and one of the growing pains that we had to learn as a podcast, the only people that’s gonna be assistant show up and be there is us. So we’ve got to carry our own content and our own podcast.

And so we wanted to bring, we wanna always educate you, but bring a little bit of our authentic self. And we’re techies, we’re future people. And with this move in AI, this is a big opportunity that is coming.

And I compare it to the 1990s when the internet first took off and first came on scene and there was a lot of fear, but it was also a lot of opportunity there. So we wanna educate people, hey, this is what’s coming in the future. Some of it is so unbelievable.

I’ve had people call me up after they hear one of our shows and be like, is this real? Or did you know? No, this is actually real stuff.

We’re talking about this in the works. This is really happening. This is what you got to look for.

And it’s not about fear-based necessarily. It’s you know what’s coming, so you can prepare for it or you can get in and be a part on it. You know, we were talking about Coinbase and Bitcoin back in 2017.

And I wish I had, I didn’t get into it, but I wish I had got even more heavier into it. And you look at Bitcoin was what? Maybe $5,000 a coin.

Now it’s $105,000 a coin or so. So stuff like that where you can prepare. Two being of color, a lot of times we don’t even think about the future and a lot of future things doesn’t have us in mind.

It’s like, you know, we will be in the future, but we don’t plan and we’re not taking into consideration into the future. So education and it just became a passion of ours.

Yeah, definitely.

I love the future.

To piggyback off of that too, I just wanted to say- Go ahead, yeah, go ahead. Well, I just wanted to piggyback off of what he was saying. Just the fact that a lot of what we’re doing, like you said, is based in our passion, but more or less like people need information all the time.

I mean, that’s pretty much why we’re all here podcasting. So I think giving people like an opportunity to be aware of stuff really kind of came from, I think personally, just from our travels, doing interviews with people at cigar lounges. I mean, these people are like super wealthy, successful people.

And it just like, I don’t know if that like, to me it was like kind of the catalyst for real of like triggering us to become futurist in a way because we started seeing like, oh, these people are, they’re doing these types of things, but really they’re just like kind of normal. They just, they seen the future and they took advantage. So we kind of want to give people that chance to do our shows.

Yeah, that’s something I see, looking back and you were going back to 2017 and I’ll take it back. People thought, I’ve always kind of been a little bit ahead on things when it comes to technology or been a forefront. And so I remember, I’ll give you a little story here.

When I was using, when I got into QR codes, now everyone knows what a QR code is, right? I was at 2010 and I was telling people about QR codes and how they’re going to change the future. And people thought I was crazy.

They’re like, what are you talking about? You can’t, I’ll just type in the website. I don’t want to take my, you have to download a QR code reader as an app to your phone.

It wasn’t built in. Once Apple, and I don’t know if Android was an early adapter or they did after Apple did this. Once Apple built it into their camera app, I knew I was like, yep, it’s going to come.

And then it took a pandy for everyone to realize these things are powerful. And most people use them to send to like a web link. There’s so much more you can do with a QR code.

I can have it pop up with a special commercial message and a website link or telephone number as well. And the people go, hey, thank you very much for downloading my QR code. You’ve been the 50th, you’ve entered into this awesome contest.

Click here or call this phone number today to get your day. And people don’t know you can do that with a QR code. They think it’s send them to a website.

It’s like, nah, you can do a lot more. People don’t know that QR codes were developed by Toyota and it stands for quality recognition code. So they could track the packages of where things were coming from, what factories and know exactly where it came from, what date, what times, all that.

It wasn’t just a regular barcode. It contained all this information inside of it. There were a few other brands, there were a few other companies that were out there trying to get their own version of QR codes going.

But the generic QR code was what finally got mainstream, which is awesome. So, always being ahead of the curve, ahead of the game there. If there was one piece of advice that you three could give, you all maybe sit back and talk in the studio.

I don’t know who would be the voice to culminate this. Let’s go with Lord Shu. Let’s try this out.

What would be the one piece of advice you give to an inspiring, to look forward to the future of things, to an inspiring podcast or entrepreneur?

Go with the flow. I mean, that’s probably my mantra for life is go with the flow. When you out of flow, everything goes wrong.

Yeah, yeah. Holly, what about you? What piece of advice would you give to new podcasters and people looking towards the future of things?

Partnership. You can’t do everything alone. Podcasting, although it seems fun because they see you on YouTube and they see you on the show, this is not fun.

Sometimes there are long nights. You’re editing, you’re trying to get content, you don’t always- What are you talking about?

What are you talking about? I got the party going on right next door. It’s always- It’s about to crash down.

I got to keep the door closed because I can’t let you know what’s going on over here. Right.

Yeah, I mean, you don’t always feel like doing this, but you got to make content. It’s not about what you feel. This is not about you.

It’s about your audience. And you got to keep pumping the content out. Two, you’re in luck.

Because with futurists, there’s a lot of technology that exists that can help you out with a lot of this. So this is why I think we brought, Lord Shu came and joined us. Same thing with, we call him, y’all call him Ma, we call him MD Red on the podcast.

They came and they’ve been great access. And like I said, Lord Shu is the brains of the operation. He’s younger, so he’s bringing new ideas and bringing stuff like Substack and everything.

Things that I wouldn’t know to do. I’m getting an education from him and he’s helped launching us and pushing us forward. So get the experts that know.

Don’t try to be a jack of all trades, because you’re not an expert and a master of everything. Get the people and let the experts be experts. And it may cost you, but the quality and the return is well worth it.

Awesome. Mershodd, what piece of advice would you give for people looking out for the future in the industry and business and entrepreneurship?

I would say, trust the process. Believe in you. Your journey is not gonna be like somebody else’s.

So don’t listen to what nobody else say, how they did it. I mean, take their advice, but apply it to your situation. And just keep rolling, dawg.

Don’t take no for an answer.

All right, guys. Well, thank you very much for coming on The DJ Sessions today. Always a pleasure talking with you.

We’ll catch up with you here in the future. Looking forward to getting on your show too, where you can pick my brain and then find out what I’ve been up to. Where’s the best place people can go to find out more information about y’all?

www.aliafterfive.com.

Right there. Lower left-hand corner. Boom.

All right, aliafterfive.com. Well, thank you gentlemen very much for coming on the show today. Got a jam, got other appointments, got other stuff to do, because I got to control my future.

I got to go. You know, got to get stuff done before five, not after five. After five.

After five, where you’re going to find out all the information. All right, thank you, Lord Shu, Ali, and Mershodd Redmon for coming on the show today. It was a pleasure having you.

Likewise, man. All right, man.

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At thedjsessions.com. I’m your host, Darren. For The DJ Sessions, that’s Lord Shu, Ali, and Mershodd Redmon for Lifestyle After Five on The DJ Sessions.

And remember, on The DJ Sessions, the music never stops.