ACT 1: Welcome to the Fire
Don’t Depress… Express
I’d been living vicariously through the characters in my head—some darker than I dared put on the page. I was in East L.A., making a living as a screenwriter, but in my struggle to craft a Hollywood ending, I was barely surviving, let alone thriving.
I’d written a few scripts that sold to major production companies, but nothing ever got made. Productions stalled. Financiers bailed. And hope?
That left too.
It felt like creators were at the mercy of a market they didn’t create. Faceless executives—who’d never picked up a pen—were writing our endings for us. They bought our dreams, sold them, and sold us along with them.
Writing is a solitary endeavor to begin with. But in my one-tracked pursuit of success, the life I’d authored had become a vacuum. No community. No family. And the family I dreamed of starting felt increasingly out of reach.
At my lowest point—spinning stories not just on the page, but in my own life—a new character entered the scene: Songa.
A mysterious collective of artists, entrepreneurs, clinicians, and families based in St. Louis who claimed to be building the world’s first social TV and radio super-studio.
They invited me to document their story. To make a film. To cover their quest to solve the very problems I was drowning in—only with something I didn’t have.
Money.
And I mean a lot of money.
But they weren’t chasing more of it. They were after something money couldn’t buy.
They were building something bold: a startup that used immersive musical theater as a social-change game. Its mission? To transform families with generational wealth through the healing power of art—with the help of artists like me.
It had started with Emerson Spelling’s own family. They reported increased happiness, better health, and stronger bonds—outcomes that had the potential to rival the effects of SSRIs.
So they asked me to tell their story.
They were searching for true wealth.
Social wealth. Emotional health.
And they claimed to have found it.
Emerson believed that if the right community could form—if artists and patrons could co-create rather than transact—then maybe, just maybe, something new could take root.
That belief would later become the spark behind The Billionaire’s Campfire, a companion story that traces the cultural, financial, and emotional fault lines beneath the Songa movement—told from the other side of the flame.
Emerson had a radical idea forming. One that could flip the script on wealth and power. But it was still just that—an idea.
That was their answer.
But to be honest, I didn’t care. Not yet.
I was still chasing the old kind of wealth.
I met my agent and manager for a working lunch in Brentwood. They warned me against taking the deal. I had a studio offer on the table.
“L.A. is where the action is,” they said. “Why would you go to St. Louis?”
Truthfully, I wasn’t sure. But something inside me knew things had to change—not just in my life, but in the way art and business relate to one another.
Who was the system working for? And who was it leaving behind?
I told my reps about Songa’s idea for Culture Capitalism: a community-first, conscience-driven capitalism powered by pay-for-performance philanthropy. An economic model that asks the ultra-rich to:
Invest less in companies,
and more in the
company they keep.
What if art had more value than what fit on a balance sheet?
They weren’t impressed. The lunch ended early.
That night, the commissioning agreement from Songa hit my inbox.
By the next morning, I was mid-air, en route to St. Louis, when I got the news:
Songa—the startup pioneering therapeutic entertainment—had collapsed.
I wasn’t amused. But I had to make it work.
Before Songa, I’d met a prolific journalist who went on to ghostwrite ten New York Times bestsellers (a quick Google search will tell you who). I became his ghostwriter. A ghost of a ghost.
Not this time.
This story was mine. I couldn’t turn back—not yet.
I landed and took a cab to Songa Studios—headquartered in a Victorian-era mansion in the heart of Tower Grove.
The startup might have crumbled, but the music never stopped.
From the open windows, I heard her voice before I ever saw her. A young woman—Sage Storries, I’d later learn—was singing from somewhere upstairs. The words hit strange, like prophecy disguised as melody:
“The fire is calling us in / And we are the ones who begin…”
🎧 “Welcome to the Fire” is free to hear below. To unlock the full catalog of original music, become a paid subscriber.
Musicians filled the house, fusing funk and soul into improvisational soundscapes—creating lyrics out of thin air. Lyrics that didn’t just speak to me. They broke something open in me.
There, in the Family Room, I met Songa’s lone patron. He’d chosen to continue funding the project for three more months—after failing to convince other families to join him.
We’ll call him Emerson Spelling. He asked to keep his identity private, and I’ve honored that here.
Other prominent St. Louis families had flirted with licensing Songa’s therapeutic entertainment model, but none had signed on the dotted line.
Emerson couldn’t get them to believe in the idea the way he still did. Not even his own family was fully bought in.
And that was the part that stung.
He wasn’t the plugged-in, twenty-something tech whiz he once was. He was in his fifties now—a father, out of the game for a while. The tools had changed: AI, social media, the speed of attention. He wasn’t chasing unicorns anymore. He just wanted to build something that mattered.
But they weren’t following the vision.
Or maybe they weren’t following him.
“I don’t know if I still have it,” he told me.
He was struggling—not just to save the company, but to believe he was still the kind of man who could lead one.
Still, he kept showing up. His family was on the line.
Emerson had sold his first business for $20 million.
After the exit, he and his wife, Erin—a smart, intuitive woman whose emotional labor had kept their family afloat for years—decided to start something new together.
Their marriage was already fraying at the edges.
A husband-wife team, launching a business to save their own family. What could go wrong?
But it was Wyoming—a man worth untold billions, from one of the richest families in America—who had approached Emerson with the idea for his second act.
They’d first crossed paths at an invite-only 'Future of Capital' summit in Jackson Hole. Those with a more salacious curiosity—like many a tabloid journalist before them—may wonder which family empire I’m referring to. But truthfully? Even I don’t know."
Wyoming told Emerson:
There are two kinds of
successful people in this world—
those with something to prove and
those with something to serve.
Be the second kind.
So Emerson tried.
Wyoming became Songa’s elusive architect, giving Emerson the blueprint for a franchiseable, turnkey community-building startup—"Community-as-a-Service” they called it—and a manuscript for a legal, financial, and technological revolution.
But he didn’t give him the funding.
That would have been too easy.
He knew that in order to get a company of this magnitude into the world, Emerson would have to get the people of the world to believe first.
It was to be a company not built to scale fast or flip for a profit, but to heal something closer to home. If it worked for his family, maybe it could work for others too.
But starting something new in your fifties—something so personal—brings with it a different kind of fear. He wasn’t just risking money. He was putting his purpose, his fatherhood, his identity on the line.
And when it didn’t take off like his first venture, that fear became something else: self-doubt.
But it worked—at least at first. His family began healing in ways expensive therapists hadn’t delivered.
Although not entirely.
His wife was still considering divorce.
His daughter’s anger issues hadn’t gone away.
And his son was still suicidal.
Emerson himself battled depression—and carried the guilt that comes with the inheritances we don’t want to give to our children.
He asked me:
What’s the point of passing
wealth onto future generations,
if we haven’t healed
the wounds we passed on too?
His kids had stopped coming to Songa. And their mental health was slipping again.
Because what teenager wants to hang out with their parents?
Still, he was determined to keep going. To build something that would impact not just his family, but families around the world.
Because if his family—with all its resources—couldn’t find healing… what hope was there for the rest of us?
That question stayed with me like a quiet chorus:
“The fire is calling us in / And we are the ones who begin…”
What follows isn’t just the story of one family’s revival.
It’s the story of a city.
And the rise of a new model of community, capitalism, and creation.
It’s the story of what happens when one of the wealthiest families in St. Louis realizes they can’t buy their way out of a broken home.
The Spellings had been living in the dark. So they lit a match — a startup — hoping its flame would guide them home.
What followed was a fire with the power to spark a movement—if it didn’t consume them first.
“Everyone has a spark inside —
Just waiting to be lit. Ignite yours.”
Listen to “Welcome to the Fire”.
Free below 👇
Meet and follow some of my collaborators on Substack:
Musical producer Lewis Blews creating a new form of social entertainment over at
Mysterious millionaire Wyoming pulling back the curtain of wealth over at The Millionaire’s Campfire
Former Tech CMO manipulating the algorithms to fix society over at Confessions of an ex-Billionaire
ACT 2: Belong, Be Strong, Reach Far.
What if the only way to fix your family… was to stop trying to fix them at all?