So how do you bring those two together? And what does faith-based leadership mean, if I'm using that term correctly? How do you kind of weave that into the work that you're doing?

For me, there's not a difference.

I mean, I think it's one of those pieces when we say, you know, faith-based leadership, I think a lot of that comes through, like, what are the biblical principles behind leadership? Are we staying, you know, without, to me, without the lessons and the stories and the scriptures, you know, what is contained in the Bible, we don't have a solid moral compass to go by.

No, and I'm not talking like 10 commandments stuff.

I'm just saying like, there's so many different principles in there that it's, you know, love your neighbor as yourself.

Like it is important.

And I've said this to people and I've said it on podcasts.

And speaking frankly, not to get way off on a tangent or down a rabbit hole,

kidding.

And so we were able to relocate those cats, and that was a happy ending.

And then another large colony... uptown on 48th Street on the railroad tracks.

That piece of property, well, they built over the railroad tracks, and so there would have been no more access.

But we had gotten that colony to 100% spay-neuter.

So knock on, touch anything.

I haven't seen kittens in almost 10 years, a litter of kittens born on the street in Hell's Kitchen.

minutes.

Crazy.

So, like, hip-hop was... being birthed and monetized and really being contemporary right on literally my block when I saw Heavy D's Jeep watching him do the Sprite commercials.

There was nobody that ever did a hip hop artist did a commercial and I see Heavy D talking about, I like the Sprite in you, right? It allowed me to authentically dive into the Unwrapped series that I did with Hidden Beach and hip-hop without it being transactional.

So that was the difference.

When Mike Lee came out, he was spitting bars and he was doing it.

It was literally a part of my DNA.

And one thing that I'm very proud of is that I didn't chase anything for a transactional result.

were all

I've never really heard you talk very much about it, actually.

Well, we do have a video on our YouTube channel, which you referenced earlier.

And I just might point out that our purpose of our YouTube channel, which you can access from our website, UrbanCatLeague.org, or just search Urban Cat League on YouTube.

We wanted to fill in the blanks of things that we felt weren't out there.

There are hundreds, if not thousands of videos about trap, neuter, return, and rescue, and there's some different ways to do it.

But our few videos we feel were the things that we thought were missing.

One of them is about our rescue after 9-11.

There's many.

But since Earl, he's going to be one of the real leaders of the team next year.

He's going to be, I believe, on his last year in We would always have this conversation because we knew we were going to be co-captains.

We were trying to solve all these.

Okay, how about this? How about being on time, doing this, doing this, doing this? How about this value? And I remember he told me, he looked, he said, Mike, I think we're overthinking it.

What happened to us? How did we get like this? And he told me, and this is where I said my entire mindset shift.

He said, Mike, if we can just lead them to Jesus, a life with Jesus, that's the ultimate goal.

So

Yep.

And you'll, he'll hear all about it.

He's, it's a terrifically interesting, um, interview.

I wanna jump into, uh, advocacy if you're okay, but I wanna tie it into that thing of, like, starting an affordable clinic in your area.

We were very slow at Urban Cat League.

We didn't realize that we should've been going after our local politicians and stressing the need for their assistance and their voting and support.

And recently having a, um, city council member special election, and, uh, Voters for Animal Rights pulled the candidates together and interviewed each one of them, only s- talking about animals.

Um, and that has phased out unfortunately, but I still have the dream that we could come back to that at some point, too.

You do every football, you do every NBA game

...

so, so here, here's the crazy thing, um, this year, yeah, I, I did Thanksgiving last year for the Lions, like 40 million people looking.

I said, "I wanna be home with my family this year."

Yes.

So as, as you know, I can stand on the 50 yard line and s- and you got people with one jersey on and people with another jersey, different political affiliations-