Episode 12: Phil Steger

In this episode of Creativity on Tap, host Frank Sentwali sits down with Phil Steger, founder and CEO of Brother Justus Whiskey Company, to discuss the art of whiskey-making, innovation, and the deeper philosophy behind his work. A former attorney, activist, and theologian, Phil’s path has been anything but conventional—his journey includes smuggling humanitarian aid into war zones, preserving endangered manuscripts, and redefining the craft whiskey industry.

Phil shares how his reverence for Minnesota’s land and whiskey history inspired him to create something truly unique. Under his leadership, Brother Justus has developed patent-pending whiskey-making techniques, launched the first unaged single malt whiskey in the world, and built a whiskey brand that blends tradition with bold reinvention.

Throughout the conversation, Frank and Phil explore themes of thoughtful innovation, storytelling in business, and what it means to align personal values with entrepreneurship. Whether you're a whiskey enthusiast, a creative entrepreneur, or just love a good story, this episode will give you a new appreciation for the craft behind the bottle.

About COMPAS
COMPAS (compas.org) is a nonprofit with 50 years of experience delivering creative experiences to millions of Minnesotans of all ages and abilities, particularly those from historically marginalized communities. COMPAS connects professional teaching artists with students, older adults, and other community members to inspire creativity and empower voices.

About Creativity on Tap
Creativity on Tap is produced by COMPAS. In each episode, Creativity on Tap brings together educators, entrepreneurs, elected officials, parents, and other community leaders to discuss creativity and answer the question: What is creativity, and how can it solve the unique challenges facing today's world?

Creativity On Tap is part of Creativity Saves the World, an initiative led by COMPAS to explore, celebrate, and emphasize the pivotal role creativity can and must play in shaping a world that prioritizes equity, justice, and inclusivity.

Theme music, "Krank It," was produced by COMPAS Teaching Artist Bionik.

#COMPASCreates #CreativitySavesTheWorld #CreativityIsForEveryone

Transcript

Creativity on Tap - Phil Steger 

Welcome to Creativity on Tap. Creativity on Tap is a series of conversations produced by Compass about the value and importance of creativity. For a half century, Compass has put creativity into the hands of millions of Minnesotans.

We are working really hard to ensure we'll be doing this for 50 more. For more information about Compass, visit compass.org. That's C-O-M-P-A-S dot O-R-G. Our guest this week is Phil Steger, the founder and CEO of Brother Justice Whiskey Company.

Today, Phil is going to be joining us in conversation. He is an entrepreneur, inventor, attorney, and activist, redefining the craft of whiskey. His journey spans from smuggling humanitarian aid into war zones to helping businesses decarbonize, always driven by innovation and conviction, producing award-winning whiskey and challenging traditions along the way.

My name is Frank Centrale. I'll be your host. And with no further ado, please welcome to Creativity on Tap, Mr. Phil Steger.

Good afternoon to you, sir. Good afternoon, Frank. Thanks so much for having me on, man.

I appreciate it. I'm excited for our conversation. Yeah.

Thank you for joining us. This is going to be good. Humanitarianism and whiskey.

You already have my heart, brother. That's what it's all about, right? It's about feeding the human soul. That's right.

That's right. So your background is obviously incredibly diverse, as I mentioned in the intro, law, theology, humanitarian work, and now whiskey making. Right out the gate, man, how has creativity been a common thread throughout your career in all of those ventures? I think it's been the driving force.

I really think that human beings are, we're made to be creative. We're made to create. We're made to think and to shape and to take the incredible beauty and vastness of the world around us, all its complexity, all its variety, and reflect and recast it into something that the human mind and the human body can ingest, and can experience, and reflect on, and inform just who we are and what we're doing in life.

So it's been the driving force for me. Where are you from? Let's go backtrack into the life of young Phil Steger. Where are you from and maybe how did that, what were your influences that kind of pushed you in that innovative direction? I think for me, I grew up out in western Minnesota, southwest Minnesota in Marshall, which is way out on the prairie.

It's the eastern prairie of the Great Plains, tall grass. And I grew up on the edge of town. So looking out my backyard, I would see a little bit of lawn, a little hedge my mom planted, and then alfalfa, and then soybeans, and then corn, and then Sioux Falls, and then the Rocky Mountains.

That's kind of it. And so the sense of vastness of the world, like when you're on the prairie, there's nothing to hug you, to make you think that, oh, this world is made for you. No, this is a big, big world, and you're a little part of it.

And so that made a big impression on me. The other thing that really was significant for me is two things. One, very close to Pipestone, Minnesota.

Pipestone is the place of the national monument where Lakota Sioux can maintain this sacred place where a particular stone, ancestral stone, is quarried and used for ceremonial items by not just Lakota Sioux or Plains tribes, but actually really by tribes from all over the continent. And my parents would take me out there, and I could see these incredibly beautiful artistic objects that clearly had more than just, hey, take a look, isn't it neat-looking? But it had really deep cultural meaning that wasn't accessible to me, but I could tell that it meant a lot to somebody. And I don't need to know what that is, and I don't need to get into the depths of that to be moved by it and to say, oh, okay, this is a culture, this is a people.

And that made me, going back and forth from Pipestone to Marshall made me look at this land that I live in differently. I was like, okay, well, I experienced this land, I experienced the world my way through the culture I grew up in, but there's lots of cultures, and there's cultures before my people came here, and there were cultures before the people who were before my people came here. You know, there's layers and depths to this, and that really made me understand that we're always, even when we're doing things that we think are normal, everyday things, there's actually a creative, interpretive process that's happening.

We're interpreting the world around us about what's right, around what's true, about what are the ways to do things. And so that had a huge influence on me. And then the other thing was my mom taught English as a second language to people from Vietnam who arrived in the U.S. as refugees.

And so you can't, it's hard to find a greater cultural difference between growing up, you know, a white German guy on the ferry, and people who had just come from Vietnam with their rich traditions, and we would get invited to weddings and funerals. And so I could see these really, really powerful, rich, cultural, creative practices that were very different than anything that I grew up with. And that all of these things can be living in the same place at the same time.

I think that was a huge part of shaping how I think about, you know, creativity, how I think about what my role is, how I think about how to, you know, how to live in Minnesota and in the U.S. I think that's fascinating, because I went to school at what was then known as Southwest State University. Are you kidding? That's where I played basketball at my college days. So I know Martha very well.

Yeah. My best friend on the team was from Pipestone. So I know Pipestone well enough also.

Yeah, small world, right? And being Marshall, I was like, okay, he's leaving out the tumbleweed, because as a... That's not the most interesting part of the story. Yeah. I was like, okay, as a 6'3 urban black basketball player, imagine my shock when I looked out my dorm room and saw like tumbleweed blowing across the prairie.

I can't, man. Yeah. You were out there.

It's different out there. Yes. But, you know, I love that you say that, because that, you know, I think that's one of the great advantages Marshall had in the area is SSU, right? The college.

So there were also people coming from other places. And it was a place that, you know, people who were creative wanted to go, because there was a university that could support them. So, you know, my parents, you know, my dad was actually a psychologist and did counseling for people who couldn't afford private counseling.

So he was all publicly funded, people from the jails, people from, you know, who were going, coming through the jails or the juvies or, you know, other place, you know, or even the state hospitals. So, but, you know, he had some connections with some of the professors at SSU and my mom did through her German, you know, through her ESL. And so he had those connections.

And so I got to meet just incredible people like Bill Holm, who is, was a poet that lived out in a farmhouse, but taught at SSU. And Bill Holm is one of, you know, not a lot of Minnesotans know him, but he's one of the greatest people of letters, essayist, poet, musician that I think in American letters, really. So, you know, SSU brought people, you know, and then people who were studying, you know, from other countries, and definitely like people from the city, you know, coming down to play sports, coming down to get their education.

So it just created those senses of contrast, which to me are what drive creativity. Absolutely. It brings it full circle for me, because as I sit here, you know, hosting this podcast, and I have another sports podcast that I host.

I was a TV radio broadcast major down there. But I started in psychology. I started with psychology.

And I went to TV radio. Amazing. That's incredible.

Right? Yep. I love it. Yeah, well, you said, Southern Minnesota.

And he said, Marshall's like, Oh, yeah, I know that very well. Spend years with my life. I mean, and you got to get creative, too, because there's nothing around you to entertain you if you aren't doing it yourself.

Absolutely, correct. I did a lot of writing of songs. I would record years later down there, because of course, I don't know where to record.

And I'm in my dorm room. And I started as a rapper before I went to college. School, I was part of a rap group.

And so writing has always been my thing. And you know, I'm in Marshall, Minnesota in 1991. So there's not a whole lot for hip hop artists down there in 92 93.

But I so that's where I did my writing. And then, and then once I came home, I was able to kind of transition that into spoken word and into recorded word. But that was that's, that's what kept my sanity down there on the prairie when I wasn't, you know, being yelled at by basketball coaches.

Yeah, I love that. Yeah, it's a crucible. That's incredible.

So I was I just left in 1991. So I didn't spend my I didn't spend my senior year there. I didn't graduate from that high school because I decided I needed to go somewhere else.

My senior year of high school at a at a in northern England, outside Manchester. Yeah, actually right in the city. So I did that in 91 92.

Otherwise, I might have seen you when I was going to swim practice because we used to we used to swim at the at both high school and for when I was doing kind of youth swimming was would be at SSU. Wow, wow. Yeah, definitely small world.

How long were you in man? Or were you in England for in Manchester? I've been to Manchester, by the way. But yeah, you have. Yeah, I performed.

Yeah, I was on tour. And we toured Manchester, Leeds, London. And then I went and did some educational workshops up in Sheffield.

I think 2006 2007. That was all my stopping grounds. Yeah, it's crazy.

We needed like parallel parallel lives. Yeah. Yeah.

So I was there fully for a full year, my last year of high school. And I wanted to get out. I wanted to go deep into another culture.

And so I chose an English speaking one, even though I was studying, you know, French or whatever in high school. What I mainly wanted was a cultural experience that I could go deep into right away without a language barrier. And I was really fortunate to go to Manchester, because especially in the 90s, nobody cared about Manchester.

I mean, it's, it was a rough, rough working class. Yeah, very blue collar. You know, very blue collar blue collar there is is is a fierce thing.

Right? It's no joke. It's almost dairy after the after after urban, you know, manufacturing moved after they shut down the factory. That's exactly right.

It is this it's it's the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution. It's where it started. But then it moved on.

But then the manufacturing moved on to other places. And so you have these ruins of factories and smokestacks dotting the moors. And and it's just you do feel like there's there is an eeriness to it.

But I found that people were absolutely incredible. And I actually got myself into a performing arts program at a you know, because in England, they have a difference between you know, they have a, you know, it's not high school, and it's not college, they have this what they call college is like, kind of a cross between a, you know, a technical college, a community college, where you can, you can be on the path to a technical career, or you can be on the path to an academic career or a business career, which I think is amazing, because it throws lots of different people together from lots of different backgrounds with lots of different things that they want to try to do, and in different ages. So just like the diversity of people that are coming through is incredible.

And I wanted to be with the people where I thought the most fun was happening, as well as just the most creativity was happening. And that was the performing arts program. And I have to tip my hat and give credit to compass because I was actually a compass camper.

In high school, they were doing week long writers camps. Back in the 80s, late 80s and early 90s that I went to and that was a really, you know, for a kid out in the prairie where there weren't a lot of creative, you know, there wasn't a lot of creativity in my, in my elementary school and in my middle school and my high school, there were some but it was tough. Like it wasn't the kind of thing that you got celebrated for.

I'm just saying that way. So the idea that I could get together with other kids from that from other parts of the state that cared about things like writing that cared about things like writing songs, right, cared about things like, you know, trying to, you know, write a short story or whatever it was, was incredibly cool. And a big part of my life.

So that encouraged me to then jump in with these performing arts folks in England. And it was it was absolutely incredible. That was a time in England where the stone roses and the happy Mondays had created rave culture that's about to, you know, just take over the world.

Yeah, it was just before Oasis came. So it was just absolutely unbelievably creative period in Manchester history that me this kid plucked from the prairie was seeing, like, everybody you can imagine glam goths, right, you know, the kind of baggy trousers, severe haircut, you know, you know, really like, you know, hoods, you know, I mean, hoodlums, you know, hooligans. Yeah, who are hard in a way that I hadn't seen hard.

As well as the, you know, the Molly and the Molly dosing. Yeah, you know, it was smiley face t shirt, folks, everybody was all mixed up and everybody was and it was all around music. It was all around creating culture through music and the way you dance and the way you experience just who you were in your life.

And that was absolutely the best year I could have ever, ever spent anywhere. Yeah, maybe that is fascinating. Yeah, I am.

I'm a fan of Northern England, especially, you know, I London is like New York East or whatever. It is totally is. Yeah.

And even all the way up. My daughter recently performed at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Oh, yeah, that's a big deal.

Congrats was a big deal there for the 75th anniversary of the fringe. And yeah, for a four person youth cast wrote this original production called The Beautiful Ugly and they got invited by the National High School Theatre Arts Association to go and perform four shows out in Edinburgh at the Fringe Festival. And they got four standing ovations.

Phenomenal play, but incredible. It all up and down that area. Yeah, it's it's I love that, you know, you know that it's it's such a in a way it's like this is really rough and it's not a great analogy, but I love that you're saying, you know, like London is the New York.

It's almost like, you know, the the North Manchester's like the Chicago of England. Yeah, it's it's big. It's gritty.

But the creativity is off the charts. Absolutely. It's just it doesn't get the same attention.

The creativity is off the charts. And we were just I just brought my family to Manchester and Edinburgh over this last summer for the first time. And our daughters, 15 and 12.

And one of them's a singer. She absolutely went and the others a dancer went nuts over Edinburgh and Manchester and just the scene, just walk around the city and just being like, I've never seen people who dress cooler than what I've seen here. And it's because none of them is following a particular fashion.

It's like every single person has their own individual clothing line is their own designer. And it was just, yeah, she really, she really was amazing. Where's your daughter go to school? But she she's she's now at the time.

Yeah, at the time she was at Minnetonka High School. But the cast was from four different schools. Tomiko French, who's a wonderful she's a dancer and she's a youth worker.

And she was working at North High and then COVID hit. And so everything they did at North kind of fell apart, but they still had this invitation. And so she's in open auditions.

And these four kids finished a play that North High kids had started. And the whole play is basically centered around what it was like to be a black youth in Minnesota in 2020 between George Floyd and COVID and distance learning and all of that. It was it's a really powerful tearjerker.

And my daughter, she sings, plays piano, she wrote all the music for the play. She dance solo. So yeah, she's pretty.

She's pretty talented. You'd like her. Yeah, without a doubt.

I can't I'm gonna have to follow. I'm gonna have to get her name after this so that I can kind of follow her performances. And I'd love it possibly to introduce my daughter to her because she wants to, you know, she wants to do that.

I think she would find in your daughter someone to admire and, and see, hey, this is what you can do. We will make that happen. Is there going to be any other performance? Is this the kind of show that will ever be done again? Or it's really hard on that cast specifically? Yeah.

I mean, they had a couple offers from some local theaters to then do a run of the performance. It's just really hard because all four of them are now in college. And they're different colleges.

And like, my daughter just she just finished doing cabaret for the University of Minnesota theater production. And then she's taken 20 credits and working and she's one of those kids. So and in the studio working on her album.

So so it's just hard using together. Yeah, so we'll see what happens. But Oh, and one side note, if you can take your daughters to Edinburgh during the fringe, you think is great regularly, go during the fringe, you've never seen anything like it, I guarantee you, it's fun.

And your daughter would be like, she'd be in heaven. I'm moving forward. I told you we're going to be conversational.

We just go. No, this is I'm enjoying it. So you studied theology and lived with monks.

I hear about that experience and how that experience shaped your approach to both business and creativity because that had to be phenomenal. Yeah, it was, you know, it's, I realized it's unusual, but it's, it's feels so much a part of my life in a strange way. Because, you know, I said, I grew up in Marshall, but I was actually born in Buffalo, New York.

And I only lived there for, you know, first three years of my life. But my uncle, my dad's brother, my dad's from St. Paul went to Creighton, his brothers went he had five, but the ones just to me, he was the baby, but the two ones just above them, both went into religious orders. So his, his second daughter, you know, his third oldest brother became a Trappist monk and lived in a monastery out in New York.

And so when I was born, I was actually baptized at this monastery by my uncle. And then we would take trips to visit my uncle. And, you know, we would have family gatherings at the monastery when, you know, my dad's side of the family would have reunions, they would be at the monastery in New York, because my uncle is when part of one of those monastic orders where they don't trap, right? They're not, they're not, they're really there to pray and seek God.

And, you know, they're not, they're not shutting the door on the rest of their life. They still have their, their family and everything that they came from. But the point really is to be single-minded in their pursuit of, for them, the greatest thing that could be achieved in, in life, which is union with God.

And so having an example of something like that in my family with that kind of a commitment and that kind of a life was really profound. And I, and I visited there several times. And then when I was in college, I went to St. John's, I took a year out and said, you know, I wanted to get anchored.

I was like, okay, the world is really big. It's bigger than I ever imagined. It's moving faster and faster.

I need to be anchored in something. I need to be grounded in something so that I can, so that I can relate to this world and not just be blown around by it, but actually have something to contribute to it. So I asked him if I could spend a year living at that monastery and, and following the prayer life and the rhythms of its prayer life, the rhythms of its work life, have access to the library.

So I could kind of study some of the, the old, the ancient texts on spirituality that I'm like, well, if, if people are still doing it, you know, for after 1600 years, there must be something to some of these old practices and old approaches to spirituality rather than, you know, whatever, whatever new new age thing or whatever new sort of trend is there. You know, people have been living a particular way after a couple of, you know, off of some spiritual practice for this long, there must be something to it. And I, and I discovered along the way that, you know, roles that monasteries have played because of that stability, that anchoring, the way they played and driven creativity and innovation forward.

We kind of think of monasteries as these sort of like places trying to anchor in the past, but that's not actually what I found there. And that's not what the history shows. The history shows monasteries are just places where people would gather together under a common purpose of work and prayer and a kind of transcendent purpose.

But they always understood that there's no transcendent purpose without this world work, you know, you gotta work for it. You gotta, you gotta, you gotta support yourselves. You have to do something useful for your society and for the, you know, so that you have the means to keep going.

And but monasteries were, you know, for at least a thousand years or so, the only literary, you know, the only literate places in Western culture. So in Europe, the only places where people knew how to read and write were monasteries and maybe some of the courts, but you know, some of the, you know, the princely courts and things like that. And so a lot of the technology that we have around farming and agriculture in the West and knowledge that we have about medicine and the sciences in the West came out of monasteries.

The printing press wasn't invented by a monk, but monks were the first people to buy a whole boatload of them and start putting them to work because they needed to print lots of books for their monasteries. So they were early adopters of technology and change, even though they were holding a center and a root of what life is about. Life changes, but its purpose doesn't.

Foundations. Yeah, and its foundations. So that, that was a big part of actually my approach to whiskey and why I ultimately, as strange as it sounds, got into whiskey.

So yeah, it's, you're, you're right to kind of highlight that and say that's gotta, that's had to have played some role. Do you still meditate? Because I'm assuming meditation was a part of the practice. For sure.

Yeah, I do. And, you know, a lot of monks actually were, you know, especially in the mid 60s, 50s and 60s, Thomas Merton was one really influential on me. We're in, and a lot of Benedictines even today are in dialogue with people from other traditions.

So Zen traditions, other Buddhist traditions, Hindu traditions, Islamic traditions about what are the, you know, what can we, as we, if we share our notes about prayer, and if we share our notes about meditation, we're not going to argue theology. We're not going to argue religion. We're just going to share notes of the experience of being people and what kind of prayers and meditations work for you.

What does that do for you? How does that work? Let's, let's get together and share notes and see if we can find some common ground. I was, I was really interested in a lot of those movements. And so a lot of my spiritual practices are deeply anchored in very traditional monastic, just reading psalms for me is one of the, is one of the key pieces, the key practices.

But meditation actually is very universal. And it's just, you know, for me in the, you know, not to go on the religious side, but just for me, the religion, the scripture that says it is, be still and know I'm God from, from the psalms. And so that's, you know, you can find the, you know, a version of that in Zen, you can find a version of that in, in Hindu and yogic practices, but just that being still, being aware, being open, without clamping your mind onto the way you think the world is supposed to work, but to be open to the way it actually works.

Absolutely central to my spiritual practice in my creative life. I figured as much, my father was heavy into psychic healing, meditation. Yeah, Yoji, all of that.

He had, he had his long robe that he would wear, and he'd go into his den into his office and, and go into his space with all of his books surrounding. And he very much believed in the power of energy transference and psychic healing. And he made me a believer very early on.

I remember there was a time I dislocated my big toe playing basketball and the doctors couldn't get it back into place. And so they were worried, you know, they did x-rays and they're like, it's not broken, yada, yada, yada. They gave me three shots of Novocain.

I got this little doctor pulling on my toe, trying to get it back in place to the point where the Novocain is wearing off. I couldn't feel anything. And, um, he leaves and he's getting ready to write me a, um, to go see a specialist the next day.

So they're going to send me home with basically, I mean, you can see this through the listener's camp, but basically, if you imagine your toenail touching the back, the top of your foot, that's how far back my toe is going to send me home that way. And, uh, and my, my, he left the doctors, he left the office to go write it up. And my dad goes, Mr. Miyagi, but the clap and the goes into deep breathing.

And, and he did that for about two minutes. And then he touched my toe and it was like fire touched my toe and gave it the slightest little pull. And it went right back into place.

And I was after that, I was like, dad, I need you need to teach me this. Whatever, you know, I need to know this. And so when I was in high school, he would, um, he invited me into his den and he would talk me through meditation practices.

And so I would meditate before games, um, when I was in high school. And so my dad was, you know, very, very spiritual person. His father was a fire and brimstone Baptist preacher.

I call him Reverend, everybody's going to hell. My father was very rebellious against that. And so off on a spiritual journey that was, um, um, you know, as far away from that as he could get.

And it was all about calm and peace and, and those practices. And I'm sure that you went through, um, when you were practicing with the monks and my father was also very creative person. And I think that, you know, imagination stems from finding that peaceful center.

I think you're right. And that's where the creativity flows out of imagination. So I had, that's why I asked that because I was like, I bet you still meditate.

I love that. Thank you for sharing the story of your dad like that. That's, that's very inspiring.

And, and, and I, and I loved how you'd say it was like, you'd see you, you pursue it because it works, right? Is if you see something about the understanding of centering, like, and you don't have to get very, you don't even have to get very mystical about it. It's just the world works in a way it's, you know, it's, it's evolved for millions, billions of years. We have a lot of that in memory of, you know, every one of us is here because our ancestors didn't die before they, right.

Exactly. Every one of us is, is the descendant of survivors that figured out how to live and how to survive in this world. And so I think, I think a lot of times creativity gets, gets confused for complication.

We're being creative when we make things complicated, when we, oh, we're going to add an idea, we're going to add an idea, we're going to add an idea, we're going to add a thing, we're going to add this, we're going to add, we're going to add, we're going to add. And I really think that creativity is as much subtractive as it is additive. It is subtracting the layers of things that we think are true and going to simplicity, right? What is, what is the root of who we are as people? What is the root of this moment I'm in? What is the root of the times, larger times we're in? It can be economic, it can be, it can be political, it can be cultural.

What is the heart of it? What's the root of it? And I think meditation practice is so related to creativity because, you know, in Zen they call it the beginner's mind, right? The uncluttered mind. You, you stop, you stop seeing the world through your preconceived notions about how it's worked, which we got to admit is a hodgepodge of a lot of nonsense. You know what I mean? Right.

So instead you're just like, all right, what is the world actually, how is it actually appearing to me? How does it actually working? A scientist has to have that uncluttered mind, that beginner's mind. They can never go into an experiment with an assumption about how it's supposed to work. They have to go to the roots of how does it actually work? How do you get a reliable knowledge of reality? And so I think creativity is about that.

It's, it's about going to that simple, simple route. And then complexity happens by itself. You don't need to invite chaos in the door.

It's, it's coming in one way or the other. Whether you want it or not. Whether you want it or not, but if you can stay simple, then you can understand what's chaos and what's creative.

But if you're complicating everything, then how can you tell the creative from the chaos is one way to look at it. So I think, and I think that's, and I think that's disruptive. I think that when you are simple, it doesn't mean you're just copying.

You know, you go to traditions like your dad did. You know, he's looking at his own traditions that his dad raised him in. He's looking, but he's also looking at other traditions and he's saying, well, what's at the foundation of all these traditions? Well, that's going to be real.

And if I go under that foundation and I build solidly from the root up, that's going to disrupt some folks. You know what I mean? That's going to disturb some folks because it doesn't fit. It shifts, it shifts the playing field, right? To, and you know, it's like a different style of play when, you know, Steph Curry came on the court, everybody had to change.

Yes. Everybody had to change because, oh, he shifted. He went simple.

Three points is more than two. Yeah. So, and then he, so by going simple, he actually shifted the foundation of how the game was played.

Everybody had to adapt to him. So I think the same thing happens in innovation and in business or technology. When you go simple, you have the, it's the most disruptive thing because it can shift the foundations that the whole thing is built on.

As so eloquently put, and really you just answered my next question, right? I was going to ask it. I was going to ask you, and I'm still going to ask it because it's got, it's a little twist to it. But you just kind of, it's a perfect segue because you referenced it, which is, what's the most unexpected way creativity has shown up in your work at Brother Justice? Hmm.

I think, you know, to talk about Brother Justice, you know, what we do is make whiskey, right? So whiskey is old. It's a thousand years old. And interestingly, monks invented it.

Irish monks invented it about a thousand years and for about at least 600 years. What's that? But of course they did. Irish monks.

No, it's true. It fits, it fits the stereotype and it's true. And for 600 years, the monks were the only ones who made it.

And then it didn't become something that was made secularly or for commercial purposes, you know, secularly until probably the 1600s, 1700s, and then commercially not until the late 1800s and 1900s. And then in the US, you know, I mean, Scotland, there's distilleries that have 300 year traditions. And in the US there's distilleries that have nearly 200 traditions.

So to go into the whiskey business is a foolish thing, right? If you think that I'm going to go in and think that I'm going to compete and I'm going to do something that they're not already doing as well as, you know, as well as can be done and much cheaply, much more cheaply than I can do it because they've been working on their efficiencies for however many years. That's a foolish thing unless I have something new to say and not new to say because I've added it and papered it over the top. So it's not, oh, flavored whiskey or whatever.

It's can I get to the foundations of what whiskey are and do something different and do something new by going to the root of it, not by kind of messing around at the branches of it. And so whiskey, the purpose, it's about first for creativity is simplicity, but you have to have purpose behind the simplicity. What are you trying to do for stuff? It's trying to win games.

Right. And to win games, you have to, all you got to do is have more points than the other team. Yes.

So that's, that's all you have to do to win. So I'm going to, he's going to shoot threes because three is more points than twos. Right, right.

And so, and so what was my, you know, what was my version of that was thinking, okay, well, what's new? What new can I say? Well, what's new about my whiskey and what we can do is Minnesota. There isn't a Minnesota whiskey out there. Well, why is that special? Well, because Minnesota is the only place where every ingredient for whiskey can be sourced in like, and not just every, but the best.

So Minnesota, the upper Mississippi, right? We're the headwaters of the Mississippi. Yeah. The Mississippi runs over 642 miles of limestone between Itasca and St. Anthony Falls.

St. Anthony Falls exists because it's where the limestone ends and drops down to sandstone. So the only waterfall on the entire Mississippi. Well, limestone's really great for brewing water and distilling.

Okay. So, okay. Check.

We're on the edge of the great plains. Like I mentioned, I grew up out there. We grow some grain, you know, whiskey's made.

And the soils are deeper than any soils on earth. So I bet we can grow some really good grain for whiskey. And then we're also where the hardwood forest, you know, the leafy forest, maples, oaks, and all of that that started the Atlantic ocean.

Well, that goes all the way to Minnesota, where it ends. So we have the oak, we have white oak that you need for barrels. And then Minnesota is also the only place where the boreal forest that runs around the entire globe, you know, the spruce, the fir forest dips down into Minnesota, into the U.S. apart from Alaska, right? And that's where peat bogs form that you can use for peat.

And so I thought, well, Minnesota, no one has made a Minnesota whiskey here. Scotch, people have made scotches to taste like the Scottish landscape and bourbons to taste like the Appalachian landscape, but no one's made a whiskey to taste like this unique place where all of North America meets. And I thought, that's what I'm going to do.

And then in going to it, how to do it was simplicity. It was going to the ingredients themselves. And I learned this from the artist and potter, Richard Bresnahan, who's the artist in residence at St. John's University.

He did a four-year apprenticeship with Nakasato Takashi, who is a 14th generation living national treasure of Japan ceramicist and potter. And Richard did this four-year apprenticeship. And then I worked for Richard when I was in college, and he taught me that the Japanese approach, which is not exclusive, but they just do it extremely well in an extremely refined way, to creativity is to say nature, nature is the most creative thing there is.

Absolutely. And so human creativity is not so much to shout over nature, but to use our ingenuity and our mindfulness to get nature itself to speak. And that will tell a story that will be richer than anything that you could make up in your head.

And that will have colors, and it will have flavors, and it will have textures, and it will have drama, and it will have everything that revs us up and makes us feel alive in greater and greater degree than anything that we could kind of try to invent ourselves. So his approach to pottery was, I took his approach to pottery, which was, what does the clay want to say? What does the clay come from? What does it want to do? And I took that to our ingredients. So what does the water want to say? What does the grain want to say? What is the oak? That's a 160-year-old plant.

It contains its own biography of growing seasons, and hard winters, and gentle summers, and all of these things. What are its flavors? What does it want to say? How do I use my craft and the fermentation and the distillation to create a whiskey that's going to go inside a barrel and tell that barrel's story, unlock its flavors? And then the same thing with Minnesota's 8,000-year-old peat. We have more peat in Minnesota than Scotland and Ireland combined.

It was formed since the Ice Age, when the glaciers melted 10,000 years ago. I want to know what that tastes like. The traditional Scottish way is to use it as a fuel to smoke the barley before making the whiskey.

That's why Scottish people think, that's so sharp. It tastes like band-aids, bike tires, and fires. That's because they're only using the smoke.

And I thought, well, what if we use the ingredient as an ingredient? What if we use peat as an ingredient? What story could I tell of 8,000 years of growing in Minnesota? So I think the most surprising thing to me about Creativity and Brother Justice is that you can push these very simple ideas, and in an industry that's 1,000 years old, actually do something new that people haven't done before. So our whole peated whiskey, which is filtered through whiskey, it seems unbelievable to me, but we are the first and only people in 1,000 years to do that, to use peat as an ingredient, as opposed to a smoking agent. And it just blows my mind every time I think about it, because it seems so obvious that, wait a minute, we're doing something here in Minnesota at Brother Justice that no one in 1,000 years has done in whiskey, despite all of those generations of people experimenting.

And so that always surprises me in a pretty delightful way. That is phenomenal. And just listening to you describe it as a poet and spoken word artist, he just made poetry out of whiskey.

Listening to the way you describe and the adjectives you use to describe the ingredients and the plant culture, the culture of each ingredient and their connection to the planet. I thought that was a beautiful description. I'll be a Brother Justice whiskey drinker, because if you can make whiskey into poetry, which you just did, I'm sold.

I appreciate that very much, Frank. That means a lot to me. And to simplify something to the point where, like you said, 1,000 years and nobody's thought of this, because once there's a process that works, people, like you said, are just kind of like, okay, how can I add a new paint to the process, as opposed to how can I strip this down to its individual parts and, in essence, create a new process that produces, by moniker, the same beverage, but really its own unique entity.

You created a new whiskey. That's phenomenal. I appreciate it.

You really get it, too. That's cool. I really appreciate the way you could crawl inside of what that's about and understand how it's both new and yet nothing new.

That, to me, is the most exciting thing, when you can step inside the traditions, because the traditions are there for a reason. You know what I mean? Like, traditions are what people have done over thousands of years to figure out and preserve what works, because life is hard. You know what I mean? Life challenges you all the time, and you think you have it sorted out, and you think you've done everything right, and you think that you've figured it out, you've made all the right calls, and you've made all the right reads, you know what I mean? And you think you have the right play to run, and something happens, and it doesn't work, and it's a bust.

That happens all the time. It has nothing to do with merit. It just has to do with the world is a big, complicated place, and chaos comes through the door.

And so traditions, to me, are nothing to... And I know you're the same way, right? Traditions aren't absolute truth, but you're foolish to think that they don't contain important truth, and that you can just, on your own, flying around, think that you can come up with just a different way, a better way. I need to do it that way. That's all silliness.

No, you've got to go inside those traditions to understand what are they actually trying to solve? How do they solve it? And is that still the best way to solve it today, or is there a way to shift the foundation in a way that does better? And to me, that's the heart, that's what the most exciting innovation is to me in creativity. Yeah, and that's art. You know, and the students I teach, I tell them all the time that you have to know how to use language before you can change language.

And so, you know, I tell them, before you guys can spell dialogue or dialect, I'm sorry, in your poems, you have to know the proper spelling and usage of a word, right? Oh, that's a great example. And so I always bring up Zora Neale Hurston. I'm like, you know, when she wrote Eyes Were Watching God, she knew how to write proper English.

And then she wrote how people spoke using the laws of proper English phonetics. You have to know that you knew whiskey first. And then you said the artist and you came out.

Yeah, that's it, man. That's it. It's about, you know, with your students and then your playing career, you can have all the ideas you want about what you to do, but if you don't, what you want to do, but if you don't put the reps in your body, your mind, your tongue, whatever it is, is not going to make it, it's not going to work.

So I learned that from Richard, you know, the Potter, because in his apprenticeship, he would get taught one form, like, let's start with like, basically a hockey puck. And he had to throw 1000 perfect hockey pucks in a day that met his teacher's standards and measurements before his teacher would teach him another form. Oh, he wants to go on and make the big pots, you know, and make the you know, the big phases and everything.

No, no, first, you're gonna throw 1000 hockey pucks. And when you can do 1000 hockey pucks, then your hands are ready for throwing the disc, you know, making the disc and when you can do 1000 of those discs, then it's ready for the plate. And then it's ready for the bowl.

And then it's ready, all these things build to the point where once you have an idea, your, your brain, your body knows how to make it happen. Yeah, I think, you know, I think there's so much, I think, particularly in basketball, for me, I was never a player, I was, I was six, four on the prairie. Everybody thought I should be a basketball player, but I just didn't have it.

I didn't have the mental speed. Yeah, I couldn't process I'm not as I'm not a quick processor. So I couldn't process what was happening around me quick enough.

And that to me is the biggest difference between players is the athletic ability is one thing, but it's who's quick enough to process what's happening. That's where the real greatness is. So I can see like, so but I love to watch because I can see players, you know, like a staff, or, you know, LeBron, right? There's literally nothing on the basketball court that LeBron cannot do.

If he makes the read, and he thinks it's the right thing to do. So I see some of that's because of the reps. Yeah, you know, that means he's, you know, he can see what's happening in his body knows exactly what to do.

But that's because of the reps. So I, I think the same thing we did with our with our whiskey was, I didn't then think, okay, I've got this new idea. Let's, let's launch out there.

No, I've built an apprenticeship for myself in a basement 1500 square feet smaller than this room I'm in. And I set the goal for me and my head distiller now or my master distiller, my master blender, James Jefferson, and I got to this was like, we're gonna do 1000 fermentations, we're gonna do 1000 reps. We have to do the reps before we go commercial before we come out of the basement.

Because we have to know what we're trying to accomplish. But we have to know how the actual ingredients work. We have to know how the technique affects the flavors we have to, we have to recapitulate in a couple of years, generations worth of land learning and understanding.

So we can be audacious, and we can be cocky, we can be arrogant to think we're going to do something new in 1000 year old industry. And I have that I believe that I'm, I'm here to I'm here to disrupt this thing. But I have to have the humility, which is not a false, like, Oh, self deprecation, humility is just being real.

Yeah, you know what I mean? That's all humility is just being real. And saying, I need to learn if I might have this great ambition, but I don't know anything. And the other people know a lot more than me, and they're more skilled than me.

So I have to build my skills and my knowledge to be able to then go out and compete. So to me, that's the other side of creativity. And the one that everybody, you know, even myself, most likely want, you know, you most want to skip.

You don't want to learn how to, you know, structure your sentences and learn your phonetics and understand the way, you know, grammar works. You just want to go out and spit bars. Yeah, you know, but, but the one who can understand and master all that is going to do things with the language that nobody thought was possible.

And it's going to make sense, it's going to click in a way, whereas if you're just doing nonsense, it doesn't click, because it's not rooted to who we are, and how we actually use language. Yeah. And the masters, Kendrick or whoever, like, they, they know exactly how everybody's using language, and then they're purposeful, when they're going to subvert.

Absolutely, absolutely, that we could get into a whole nother conversation about that. Not here in my wheelhouse. Yeah, here, I am definitely an acolyte, you know, a novice at the gates of your monastery of learning, where I'm like, teach me, wise master, your way.

Hip-hop is, yeah, and now, and when you get into lyricism, when you, you eliminate the, the industry, and you eliminate what gets, for marketing standpoints, and get straight into the, the root of the lyricism, the foundation, the fundamentals of the poetry of it. It's, you know, Kendrick is part of a lineage. Yeah.

What makes him great, which you already alluded to in your venture, is the study, and also the meditation, and the commitment to physical and mental conditioning. I mean, the principles, they're all the same, you know, even with Steph Curry, it's all the same. His dad took him out of AAU, and said, no, you are going to spend a summer refining your shot, because you are learning bad habits, so let's get to the fundamentals, right? And so, you can't go play organized team basketball, we're gonna put you in a gym, or in a room, or, you know, we're gonna put you by yourself with your device, and you're gonna learn how to master these mechanics.

It, those fundamentals, everything we're talking about, you know, go back to the root of, you got to learn how to make a thousand pucks. You know, like, my dad, we talked about meditation, he showed me one basic footwork series, and he didn't, he showed it to me, he didn't even teach it to me, he showed it to me, and he said, when you come back having mastered that, I'll teach, I'll show you something else. So, I spent a summer learning one footwork series.

It's the same footwork series that, you know, Michael Jordan made famous, and Kobe Bryant, you know, duplicated, and it really goes back to Lou Hudson, it goes all the way back to the 60s. Yeah, and so, and Michael Jordan will tell you, yeah, Lou Hudson, you know, this footwork series, they know who originated that footwork. So, I gotta ask you, as we move from, so you created that thing, you used, I'm just, I'm playing all that what you're just saying in my head right now, and I'm just loving it.

Yeah, yeah. So, I didn't know the Lou Hudson thing, but now I'm kind of, like, creating a picture in my mind of seeing this, like, oh my gosh, yeah, and now I, like, you see, you know, you hear LeBron talk about it, because he's such a good spokesperson, he's always crediting who learned what from whom, and how the lineage of these things go. Yeah, and, and, and, yeah, I, and, and, and what's so cool about when you create that is, I'm never gonna, I mean, there was never any version, you know, of this universe where I was gonna have anything like the skill of a LeBron, right, or a mastery of a LeBron.

Me neither. But, but I can, and this to me is art and creativity, and at the heart of it, I can, as a person, learn and appreciate and feel something of the joy and something of the exhilaration and something of just the pleasure that he has to be able to experience and feel when he's on, when he's doing what he does, and he knows he's part of this whole tradition, and it's not something he's thinking consciously about, it's something his body, he's, he's trained into his body. I think that's, that's one of the great human gifts, is our ability to vicariously experience that and appreciate that and love that, and I think that's what art and in sports in its own ways, as in art, we get to do, and, and, and what creativity is all about, is to package these things in a way that, yeah, we get our own pleasure from being able to do it, but that others can experience it in a way that gives that same joy and something of that same joy to them.

You know, that's got to be that LeBron-ish feeling, like when you've created something and, you know, you can hear the, the commentary without them even knowing you're the, man, this is smooth, or man, this is really good, or this is really, this is my new whiskey, you know, that's got that feeling that LeBron gets when he's like, you know, game winner, like every, every smooth dip from some unsuspecting whiskey enjoyer or connoisseur, that's like, man, this brother justice is, this is, this is that new whiskey right here, you're like, you know, Thor. I love that, yeah, that's exactly it, it, I mean, it's nothing like that, but yeah, it's an analogy, right, it's, it's, it's, it is that analogy, it's that same feeling that he, you know, something of what he must feel, I mean, that's, I think, what we're always striving for, you know, I think there are some artists and there's some creators who really are just, and you can start to hear it, it's like, we're going basketball now, but like KD, right, Kevin Durant, I have the feeling that he doesn't need an audience, I have a feeling from him that he doesn't, he doesn't need anybody in the arena, no, to watch or see what he does, he gets something from just his ability to play the game and do things in the game, he doesn't need anybody else, and you don't, yeah, and you notice, and so I, so I'm not like that, I do like to have people, you know, I like that, you know, there is pleasure from the side, but you're right, like, so I'm not to his level, like, in some ways, he's like the perfect monk, you know what I mean, he's like the perfect monk basketball player and creator, because he, he could be in a hermitage, he just needs nine other people on the court in the dynamics of that for his artistry, for him to really be able to experience his own artistry of this, of this craft, and so he didn't need them, I have a feeling he'd be just fine. Remember the COVID year when, when all the games were canceled, who was the guy showing up on your social media feed in New York playing in the park, in a gymnasium in California, another gymnasium in Atlanta, it was Kevin Durant, just showing up, just getting runs in for, you know, we don't need an arena, we don't need TV, we don't need a announcer, we just gonna hoop, because that's what I do.

So I can't, so he's a better monk than me, because I do like to hear, I do like to hear when somebody says, oh that's that brother Justin, how are they getting these flavors, well that's the smoothest thing, and my favorite, you know, my favorite thing to do is, is, especially when they don't know who I am, is kind of slip into, you know, scotch tastings, or whiskey tastings, where everybody brings their best, what they think is the best bottle, and, and, and everybody's kind of sipping these things, they got these big names, these big brand names, the big, you know, lineages, and, and I'll just sit and watch, and the thing that matters most to me is at the end of the night, yeah, those big brands, everybody talked about them and everything, but which bottle is empty? Yeah, yeah, but they kept coming back, brother Justice, my bottle's the one that's empty at the end of the night, that's all I need to know, yeah, yeah, oh yeah, that other whiskey's really great, but what they're pouring, and refilling, right, that's, that's got to be an amazing feeling, that, that's, that's cool, I, I gotta ask you, so we talked about the, the, the creativity that went into the process of creating this whiskey, but, you know, Minnesota, like you said, there was never an original Minnesota whiskey, so how did you creatively sell people on the idea that a world class whiskey could be made from Minnesota, was it just these ingredients that are so unique to whiskey are also very unique to Minnesota, like how did you creatively get the story out and the branding for, for brother Justice? Man, it's a good question, um, one was, I dig, I dug into history first, I said, so I don't know, I was like, okay, I don't know of any Minnesota whiskey, and, and there isn't any legacy whiskey brand, right, there's no Jim Beam of Minnesota, there's no Jack Daniel in Minnesota, but I did have this hunch that, well, if we have the ingredients, I bet somebody made whiskey here sometime, and, and then I was at St. John's, uh, up in Collegeville and St. Ben's, and those are Benedictine monasteries, right, that founded those colleges, and I kept hearing stories, particularly from this guy, Francis Schellinger, uh, who was an old-time woodsman in Avon, uh, which is in the, in the hills there, telling me about moonshining in the 1920s, and I was just like, there's no moonshiners in Minnesota, this, this never happened, you know what I mean, because there's no evidence of this, but he was like, yeah, no, man, he's like, there's somebody's cooking moon this weekend, you know, someone's cooking moonshine right now, I remember that on a Saturday, it was a sunny Saturday in, in August, and he, and I was working for him in the woods, and he sniffed, and he's like, I smell smoke, and then looked up at the sky, I don't see a plume, my neighbors are cooking moonshine, I'm like, what, it's like, oh yeah, I smell the smoke, so someone's cooked, so someone's burning something, right, but they're hiding the smoke, they're, they're, they're hiding the smoke, which means they're cooking something they're not supposed to, right, that's whiskey, oh, and, and so I was like, what are you talking about, how can this, how can this be, so we just have to find out about it sometime, but so he would leave me with these little mysteries, and then another time, we were driving past a lake, and he points at it, and he says, you know, Phil, there's a Model A Ford down there, I'm like, what, yeah, Model A Ford, in the lake, the drivers, the driver's down there too, and he's like, what, this took a dark turn, what are you talking about, well, yeah, remember how I told you, back in prohibition days, and, and Great Depression days, every farm in this county, Stearns County, had a moonshine still, wow, and that Model A Ford, and that driver, that was when Capone sent some of his goons up here to try to muscle in on them, and ran into a bunch of, bunch of ornery Germans, and never got back to Capone, apparently, and never made the trip home to Chicago, so I would hear these sorts of stories, and, and so it, the combination of Francis's stories, and then other things, and other ways that just kind of made sense, made me want to investigate, so I dug into it, and learned that, you know, Minnesota did have a whiskey, in the 1920s, it was called Minnesota 13, and what made it unique, and, and unique in American history, is it wasn't one farmer's whiskey, it wasn't one distiller's whiskey, it was the name given to all the whiskey produced by all of these different farmers, which only happens if all of those farmers are making such high quality whiskey, yeah, that it doesn't matter who the individual is that making it, yeah, that's making it, and that didn't happen anywhere else in the country, it was Jim Beam's whiskey, Jack Daniel's whiskey, right, it was the specific distiller, and, and so I, I was absolutely, you know, just wonder struck by that, like, so curious, how does that happen, how do you get, and there was no distilleries before Prohibition, and there were no distilleries in Minnesota after Prohibition, except for one in Princeton, but it's not part of this lineage, and I thought, what, how do you get, and, and I started to dig in, there was Elaine Davis was a professor at St. Cloud State, and she wrote a book called Minnesota 13, the Wet Wild Days of Prohibition, that gave the documentary and the oral history evidence that all of this really, really happened, and she may put the count at over 1,200, 1,200 distilleries, whiskey distillers in Minnesota during Prohibition, and all of them making this high-quality whiskey, and I was like, how does that happen, you don't just wake up one morning being, right, it's lineage, I was, we, we just talked about lineage, you don't just wake up one morning know how to do this, how do 1,200 families that have no family history of doing this suddenly wake up and make whiskey so good, it doesn't matter who made it, it's being advertised, it's being sold in nightclubs in New York City, in Chicago, in San Francisco, it's even being sold, or at least advertised in nightclubs in Paris in the 1920s, it's Minnesota 13, and I discovered that they learned it from somebody who learned it from somebody who learned it from somebody who learned it from somebody, and the person they learned it all from was Brother Justice, wow, he was a monk, his name is, he was born William Trettle on a small farm outside St. Cloud, he entered the monastery at St. John's, and, you know, he's about 17, 18 years old, sometime in the late 1800s, and he took the name Justice, because when you become a monk, you get a new name, because you leave your old life behind to begin a new one, and he was the Abbey blacksmith and the Abbey distiller, and when Prohibition rolled around, the thing that was happening at the same time was the farm depression, so people in Minnesota were poor, they were starving, they grew all this grain to feed Europe during World War I, and to feed US armies during World War I, and they leveraged everything, they borrowed everything against that, and then the war ended, grain supply, you know, the food supply in Europe went back to normal, and suddenly they're leveraged, they're mortgaged, they've borrowed against their future earnings, and they can't sell their grain for what it costs to grow it, so they're dealing with deep poverty and desperation, and so they turn to moonshining to make a living, and Brother Justice, he's, what's that? Collectively. Yeah, collectively, it's just individual decisions, right? You've got a farm, you've got all this grain, you've got a bank that's saying, pay me back, or I'll take your farm, and you're homeless, or, and you've got to come up with the money. How do you get the money? And the only option was either sell animals, but it takes a year.

It takes a year and thousands of pounds of grain to feed an animal until the point where you can sell it for 10 bucks, 20 bucks at that time, but because of prohibition and the illegalization of whiskey, you could put 30 pounds of grain into a whiskey still, and in an afternoon, come up with a jug of something you could sell for 10 to 20 bucks. You don't need an economics course or an MBA. Simple survival skills, I'll tell you that one.

Simple survival skills, I'll tell you. Exactly, and so that's what people did, but they didn't know how to do it, and so they were making dangerous whiskey. They didn't know how to remove the toxins from the whiskey.

They were using metals that were dangerous because they were poor. They could only afford metals that they could afford, and they had neurotoxins in them, lead and zinc, and they couldn't refine the alcohol into something that had that whiskey warmth. They called it the bourbon hug or the whiskey hug, and so they would add lye at the end, which is a caustic in order to give it that hug so they could sell it.

Yeah, dangerous stuff. Brother Justice says, no, no, stop all that shenanigans. You can't hurt your neighbor.

You have a right to support yourself, but not at your neighbor's expense. You can't take your neighbor's life to give life to yourself and your kids. You have to find a way that would be a blessing to both, and I'm not going to just lecture you.

I'm going to help you, because he was the Abbey blacksmith and distiller, so he built whiskey stills. He could get all this copper, good, clean copper. The feds are never going to think twice about him ordering a bunch of copper, and he just made copies of the traditional Benedictine whiskey still or brandy still that they've been using for generations, and then he actually went to farms and delivered these stills to the farmers and then ran them through distillers boot camps to show them how to make good, clean, flavorful cuts, and his only demand was, you do it the right way every time, and you teach your neighbor what I taught you.

You don't keep nothing back, and that is how you get to neighbor teaching, neighbor teaching, neighbor teaching neighbor, all with a kind of a sacred obligation, right? Not just, you know, you're under a charge now. This is just about you and your family. You got a spiritual demand that you're meeting, too, and that's how you get there.

So, you know, the question of how to sell Minnesota, you know, people outside Minnesota on Minnesota whiskey goes back to me discovering we actually have that history, so we're going to put that as our brand, Brother Justice. I met his family. I tracked down his family.

I got the permission of his next of kin, nieces and nephews in their 80s and 90s, great nephews and greatnesses. I got, I met with them. I told them who they were, who I was.

I talked to them. I gathered oral history, and I got their permission to then use the name Brother Justice to tell their family member's story in order to tell this larger Minnesota story, and then we talk about, and so then that's one piece. We have that history.

We have, and then you, you were already on it. We have this language, you know, we have the landscape and the ingredients that's unique, and then there is this other thing of Minnesota that people do recognize, and in fact, you know, there's a movie right now that's up for the Oscars, you know, that's, we have, we produce these artists every now and again. Bob Dylan, Prince, these aren't just bit players, right? You know, Bob Dylan and Prince are Mount Rushmore level artists.

Icons changed the game. You know, Prince, the only other person that belongs in Prince category is Michael Jackson, right? I mean, those are the only, we're talking about the most rarified air, and so there is a recognition there's something about Minnesota, and it's the land, or it's the weather, or it's a combination of all these things that some pretty rock and roll things happen up here. You know what I mean? We, and game changers come from Minnesota.

Disruptors come from Minnesota. We're not worried about chasing the trends on the coasts. We're not worried about, you know, trying to be cool.

We're not worried about that stuff. We're just, we're just drilling down and making art, and we're doing it from the ground up, and then we emerge, and people are like, what the hell are they doing over there? It's changed the game, so I think the combination of those three things is how we get the story out about Minnesota. Well, it's definitely an intriguing story.

You know, as I'm listening to you talk, and I'm like, man, we're talking whiskey, but we've talked poetry. We've talked spirituality. We've talked, you know, genealogy.

We've talked, you know, tradition and ancestry, and so there's so much more than just, you know, an alcoholic beverage that goes into this story, and I can see why it's made you so successful, because there's so much of the elements that go into good creativity and good art creation that has gone into this process, and so much, you know, conscious thought about creativity and artistry that's gone into this process. We're winding down. I could talk with you all day, but then Sam would be like, okay, we have like two hours of editing.

And so I, man, and so many of the questions I was going to ask, you've already answered, but as we segue, you talked a little bit about how Brother Justice used his creativity to help struggling farmers during Prohibition. What role do you think creativity plays in solving the unique economic and environmental challenges of today? I think it's fundamental, and I think Brother Justice is actually a really great example and guide for creators today, the human being, right, the person, because number one, it's about what is the need, right? What do the people need? What are the hungers? What are the thirsts? What are the oppressions? What are the, you know, what are the things that are holding human beings back from a creative life and a full life, a dignified life? I think that's where it starts. I think every creator has an obligation to root themselves in that, that this isn't about self-aggrandizement.

It's cool to have swagger. It's cool to be, you know, and I love that. I think hip-hop shows us how this works in a really incredible way, like how you can have individual swagger but still be about something bigger and not being limited to just self-aggrandizement.

So I think that's where it starts. You have to, you know, be anchored in who people are and what they need, what they really need, what they're struggling with, and then I think go simple, you know, to simplify and say if that's a simple need, human beings, human cultures change, human language changes, right? All these things change, but human nature doesn't change nearly as fast. And so anchoring in what do we really fundamentally need and how can we deliver that in a way that augments their humanity, that enforces their humanity instead of strips it away, you know, be satisfied with less, you know, that's the alternative way of going.

So I think that's where I think it starts is like start with the fundamental human need and then go to the roots, the traditions of how those needs have been met. You let go of the preconceived notions of, you had a beautiful way of saying it earlier, and I'm not able to grasp it right now, but, you know, the way we layer on things, you they're supposed to be solved. What do we really need? What's the root of how to solve it? And then how do we grow from there and build from there in ways that can open up new possibilities and shift the foundations? I think that's the role that can be played on solving all of our core problems, you know, starting with the environment, our relationship to land and water and air, right? Every other thing that we do, every other thing we want to do for ourselves, hope to do for ourselves or need to do for ourselves as human beings, as families, as communities, as countries, as nations, all depends on this little place of earth, water and air and the way things grow and live in it.

Without that, everything else ties back to that. And it's one reason why I went to whiskey instead of tech or into other things as an entrepreneur. I admire what they're doing, but you can start to lose track of like you can think about AI and think that AI isn't anchored in earth.

It is like the most powerful AI engines that are being run right now are being run off of materials taken out of the ground, right? They're built out of minerals. They're built out of plastics that were, you know, that used to be plants 60 million years ago. They're running on electricity that was is being generated by wind or solar, or it's being generated by coal or something else like everything we have touches ground.

And so if we don't get if the living system of earth isn't set up to keep us alive, nothing else we work on matters. Yeah. So so that's where I really think, you know, you know, with our with our business, even though we make whiskey, you know, everything that we do is about trying to find a way to connect people to the earth.

And and like our pitted whiskey, for example, you know, it tastes cool and it's new, but it also doesn't burn that Pete. So that Pete, which is 8000 years of carbon taken out of the air and stored in the ground in the Scottish and traditional way of doing you light that on fire and all that carbon, then it took that plants were taking up for 8000 years. Right.

Goes right back into the air. Yeah. But our way it stays solid.

And when we're done using it as an ingredient, it goes back into the ground. The carbon stays in the ground. And we're actually harvesting that not from living bogs, but from dead bogs that were killed 100 years ago for agriculture.

And in the excavation areas, we're actually allowing the natural water to fill the hole and planting with our partners. Our partners are planting native wetland species. So we're actually increasing the amount of living wetland because that's such an incredible, critical, critical environment to keeping Earth livable.

So that's to me where I think we need to be like I think all of our energy seem to be about creatively providing for human need and want in the context that fundamentally it has to be about keeping this earth livable. Yeah. And that's it.

That's that's the task. Yeah. Because the earth creates what the humans need.

So if we take care of the earth, it takes care of us. A novel idea. It's so new.

Brand new idea. I just think it's like I just you know, and I think about windows, right? I think there's a really, really important thing. I think for any creator, any entrepreneur, you're always you know, any athlete, right? You're always thinking about the window, the window in which what you want to do will work is narrow.

Yeah. It is natural. Yeah.

To get the sense, you know, you know, if you're doing a step back, if Lucas doing a step back three, he's trying to create, you know, an inch of space. Yeah. For him to put the dagger in.

Yeah. And if he gets that inch, you're done. It's over.

But it's exactly. But if you can't, then then he it's you. Good.

You're going to survive. So so, you know, in business, you're looking for your window of opportunity, your window into innovation. So the earth itself has a window.

The earth itself has a window in which everything works. It's a temperature window. It's a you know, it's a biodiversity window.

It is and you know, it is a weather window where all of it works for you for the project of humanity to have a chance. And so we have to keep the earth for us to be able to work all our other windows. We have to keep the earth in.

It's in the window that keeps us alive. Well, I can tell you the middle schoolers and the fifth graders that I work with would love hearing you say that, because I would probably say 35 percent of the poems and I don't tell them what to write about, but five percent of the poems that they write about for my classes are about their fear about what we're doing to the planet, you know. And so and I have a poem called The Child Understands that basically the purpose of the poem is that if we want the answers, we need to look toward the children because they they are living breathing examples of the answers that we seek because they haven't been tainted long enough to know any differently than what is natural and pure.

And the older they get, the more tainted they get. But, you know, you drop a group of three year olds from all over the world, every culture, every looking any type of way that, you know, the human mosaic can look in. I always tease.

I say as long as they're fed, because nobody's a good human when they're hungry. So as long as they're fed, they're only going to want to know two things. That's right.

And do you want to play? That's it. And if you're nice and want to play, they don't care about any of the other things that we grow up to become separating factors. And they're not going to harm the earth.

They're going to dig up a pile of dirt, dig a big old dirt pile, and they're going to play in the hole. And then they're going to put the dirt back in the hole and play on top of the dirt back in the hole. You know, exactly.

So, you know, beautiful. They're the answer. Nobody's more resilient than children.

It doesn't matter what they've lost. They're going to bounce back in the moment the coast is clear. They're going to laugh.

They're going to play. And so, you know, we can learn a lot from them. So many of the questions I was going to ask, we literally answered in conversation, which is, I think, the best way to conduct a podcast.

And I do have two more for you. One, if Brother Justice himself could see what you're doing now, what do you think Brother Justice would say about Phil Steger and Brother Justice whiskey? Hmm. I think he would say, it looks good so far.

Keep working. That sounds about right. That sounds very much of, you know, the mindset of the very hard people, no matter how gentle they were, that existed 100 years ago.

That's right. That's what I'm really putting my mind, German, not a lot of flowery language or extra affection that, you know, I came from a similar background. So, yeah, yeah, that's good.

You know, and I would feel very good about that. I'll say the closest that I can come to that is his nephew, Lawrence, who passed away in April of 2022. And, and Lawrence was 90 years old.

And he was the one that I learned everything, you know, all the main oral tradition about Brother Justice. He was close. He was the closest living person to Brother Justice that was alive when, when I was trying to find about this.

And all I can say is like, when, when, when Lawrence finally had a chance to drink our whiskey, he said what I hope Brother Justice would say. And as his representative on earth, that's the good stuff. There you go.

I know that feeling. I know that feeling. That's the good stuff.

Yes. Yes. I, I did.

I hope he would say that you hope he would echo that, that sentiment. Like, good job. Yeah, exactly.

I was gonna say, I, when Gordon Parks was alive, I had the honor of performing for him at the Fitzgerald Theater and during a tribute back to St. Paul. And the audience gave me a standing ovation. Mr. Parks gave me a simple, that was it.

I always say, I said, Mr. Parks, I'm here to escort you to the stage. And, and he looked at me and he said, okay. And then he did a double take and he, and he gave me the, the okay.

But that's all I need. That's all you needed. I love it.

What said it's who said it. It's who said exactly. He didn't go, he didn't give me that.

Never mentioned my name in a poem again. The gag approval. Your journey has included advocacy, legal work, innovation, so many things as we've discussed.

What advice would you give to someone trying to harness creativity to make an impact, a meaningful impact in their own field? I'll ask that as our closing question. What would you, what's your advice to someone else trying to make an impact in what they do? It's, it's the advice I'm sure that they'll get from a lot of people. Fail gloriously, but fail affordably.

Noted. That's it. Go out, try, you know, go try.

Be aware that you're going to fail. If you're going to do something new, by definition, you're doing something that hasn't been done before. So there's no guarantee it will be done right the first time.

It's probably not going to be. To do something new means, you know, to copy, you know, to do something where you have 100% chance of success, by definition, means you're copying what somebody else did. And yeah, and that's fine.

If that's that, I mean, in this, I mean, it's okay. If that's who you are, and that's what you, it's fulfilling, and you find fulfillment in other places. That's an honorable way to live.

That's, it's, that can be good. But if you want to venture out into the creative path, you're going to do things that there hasn't been done exactly the same way before. And it's going to go wrong.

Yeah, it's not going to turn out the way you wanted it. And, and so it's going to fail. And you got to be ready for that.

And you got to embrace that and feel good about that. Especially if it's something where you think you have to do something new, because the old way of doing something is causing harm. Right.

And I think that's where a lot, especially now kids, you know, their creativity isn't just about themselves, personally, it's about, I don't want to keep doing what I know is causing harm to these people over there, this generation in the future. These animals, they don't want to do harm anymore. So if you're going to find new ways, by definition, you're not going to be successful the first time.

And there's going to be people who because you weren't successful the first time, they're going to tell you, see, you're an idiot. See, you're stupid. See, you're an idealist.

You don't know the way the world works. They're going to come up with all sorts of reasons why you should stop trying to find new ways to do things that don't hurt people as much. You know, and so don't let them understand as part of the process, understand that what you're doing is you're learning skills and you're developing techniques that are going to click into place.

So failure is inevitable. It can be glorious. But then the other thing that I do think is important, just know where your failure is.

You can keep failing as long as your failures are affordable. Pay attention when your belly tells you, if I fail this way, I might not be able to afford it. Right.

Do you know what I mean? Your belly is going to tell you. Your belly is going to tell you what risks are the risks that are going to move you forward and that if you fail from it, you can recover. And your belly is going to tell you what risks if you take them and it doesn't work out, you're not going to be able to recover from.

It's going to be unaffordable for you. So develop a discernment of understanding how to read your own gut around that, because that is trying to keep you safe and move you down the path towards creating something new. So that's what I would tell them, because that's what has worked for me.

Found words. Phil, thank you so much for this wonderful conversation, man. This has been a great episode.

Yes, indeed. You've been listening to Creativity on Tap. I am Frank Cintuale.

Our guest today is Phil Steger. He is the founder and CEO of Brother Justice Whiskey Company and so much more as we've learned from our conversation today. Creativity on Tap is a series of conversations produced by Compass about the value and importance of creativity.

For a half century, Compass has been putting creativity into the hands of millions of Minnesotans. We are working really hard to ensure we'll be doing this for 50 more years. For more information about Compass, visit compass.org. That's C-O-M-P-A-S dot org.

Thank