Many Hats, One Mission: What Two Magazine Interviews Left Out

Two interviews came out recently — Voyage LA's "Daily Inspiration: Meet Mr. Bill Berry" and Bold Journey's "Meet Mr. Bill Berry" — and if you read them back to back, you'll notice they're circling the same handful of things: the reinvention story, Off Course on Purpose, The Residency at the St. Pete Micro Farm. Good pieces, both of them. But a Q&A format only gives you so much room, and there was a lot on the cutting room floor.

So here's the longer version — the stuff nobody asked me yet.

Where "Off Course on Purpose" Actually Came From

People assume you sit down and decide on a book title before you write the book. In my experience it's the opposite. You don't name a dog or a cat the day you bring them home — you live with it a while, and eventually they tell you their name. That's how this one went. I cycled through something like fifty potential titles while I was deep in the material, and Off Course on Purpose kept resurfacing, over and over, until it was obviously the one.

It also happens to be the truest possible description of what the book is about. After high school I worked a string of dead-end jobs, and at some point it became clear that the road I was being handed wasn't going anywhere I actually wanted to be. If I wanted to get somewhere new, I couldn't tweak the road — I had to leave it entirely. There's a moment in the book where I quit every part-time job I had to pursue entertainment full time. I wasn't ready. I wasn't good enough yet. I didn't even know how. I just knew that going off course, on purpose, was the only way to end up somewhere worth being.

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Teaching Rachael Williams to Sword Swallow in 28 Days

This one still catches people off guard, so let me be precise about it, because the number is the least interesting part of the story.

A mutual friend connected us. I've had dozens of people over the years ask me to teach them to sword swallow, and I'd never seriously taken one on. But Rachael's story stopped me — she'd survived a serious accident that left her in a wheelchair for months, and had to relearn how to walk, how to do things her body once did without thinking. That's what sword swallowing actually is: relearning your own body and mind from the ground up. She'd already been through that process once, involuntarily. I was curious what would happen if she went through it on purpose.

We got on the phone. I expected a fifteen-minute call where I'd probably tell her it wasn't a fit. But four hours later we were still talking — philosophy, art, life. The first week of actual training was almost entirely meditation and breath work. There's no curriculum booklet for this. It's too individual a journey; I don't think you could write a "how to sword swallow" manual if you tried, which is probably why so few people ever learn it. We never met in person. Just daily training and notes back and forth. Twenty-eight days later, she swallowed a sword.

I want to be very clear about something, though: don't read that as a benchmark. It normally takes years. For the tiny fraction of people who are genuinely going to chase this, you cannot put a timeline on it — it happens when your body and mind are ready, and you should expect that to take years, the same way you'd never expect to earn a black belt in Brazilian jiu-jitsu in a month. Rachael's timeline was rare because of who she was and what she'd already survived, not because there's a shortcut.

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From Mentor to Partner: How the Distinguished Daredevils Started

Noah Royak was already a driven, skilled, working professional entertainer when I met him — but he was capped by the local market. And the local market has a hard ceiling on what you can charge per event. The moment you start flying to gigs — colleges, corporate events, cruise ships, theater tours — that number can jump four times over or more.

One of my core philosophies is that artists shouldn't spend their whole lives struggling. The goal is financial stability: buy a home, pay it off, build what I call "the good life," something a lot of artists have quietly given up on somewhere along the way. It's easy to grind for decades and hit your fifties with nothing put away. I explained all of this to Noah, and we started reworking his show and marketing to put him on the path.

I introduced him to my college booking agent — someone I'd worked with since 2004, after hundreds of shows with Jonathan Root as Rootberry. She wasn't ready to book Noah solo. So I asked if she'd work with him if we performed as a duo, and she said yes, because our track record together gave her confidence in what we'd bring to the stage. That's how a mentorship turned into an actual working partnership, not just advice given from a distance. And that's how the Distinguished Daredvils were born.

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Building the St. Pete Micro Farm From Sand to Community

My wife and I bought a plain 1950s house in South St. Petersburg in 2018. When we moved in, there was nothing alive on the property — a few scattered weeds in mostly sand, not even ants. For the next four or five years, nearly every weekend went into mulch, irrigation, and hunting down exotic fruit trees, which became something of an obsession.

Then in 2020, two friends lost their apartment lease in downtown St. Pete with only months to find somewhere new, right as prices in the area were spiking. I'd talked for years about building an ADU in the backyard — originally with the idea that it could house my or my wife's parents someday, or friends and family in between. I believe we have to start living differently than we did thirty years ago: more collaboratively, using land and resources — gardens, trees, shared space — instead of everyone isolating on their own separate plot. I called a friend who's an architect and another who's a contractor, and we built it in time for my friends to move in the day they had to leave their old place. They stayed about eighteen months, saved enough for a down payment, and bought a home of their own — which is exactly the outcome I want to see. I'm a strong believer in homeownership as one of the most stabilizing things a person, and especially an artist, can build toward. Move every two years and you never get to build real systems for creative work.

Case in point: The Prop Shop (my garage). I've spent three decades building custom props for our shows, and I've slowly turned my garage into a real workshop — now I build for other performers too. There's a specific philosophy behind it: if you buy something off the shelf, any performer with fifty dollars can put the same thing in their show. Build it yourself and it's the only one in the world. Nobody can just buy their way to your act — they'd have to understand how it works and be willing to go down the same rabbit hole you did. The farther down that hole you go, the more original you get, and the more original you get, the more likely you are to show an audience something they've genuinely never seen.

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Today, the farm now has over 80 varieties of fruiting trees and shrubs, eight friendly chickens who'll walk right up for a treat, and — with a second ADU now built — room for the community to keep growing.

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What a Day at The Residency Actually Looks Like

Don't think of it as a program or a class. Think of it as an environment. You can stay a week or a year. There are quiet grounds, a hammock, fresh eggs you can gather yourself, fruit that's almost always in season, and a handful of warm, creative people around.

Some of it is scheduled: every third Wednesday is the Performance Lab, an open-mic-style night where performers workshop new material and get real critique. A few times a year we host larger gatherings — the most recent one drew 63 people. But day to day, it's calm. It's a genuinely good place to sit and write a book, whether independently or alongside me — I'm usually working on my own writing, so residents are welcome to use me as an accountability partner. If you're building a show, you're surrounded by other performers with real experience to draw from. And if you've got an idea for a prop, we schedule time in the workshop and build it.

Residents also get folded into my Patreon as part of the rental arrangement, and can layer on specific offerings if they want to go deeper — a mind-body mastery workshop, a 10-hour act development intensive, or a 1-on-1 fire handling session. But the baseline is simpler than any of that: it's a ticket into the environment itself, and a community of people building toward something similar.

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The Principle That Connects All the Hats

Performer, author, yoga instructor, urban farmer, coach — the honest answer for how those fit together isn't "I just like doing a lot of things." It's the good life.

I think about the generation that came home from World War II having actually lived through scarcity — no power, no clean water, real shortages — and came back wanting something simple: a modest home, a green lawn, steady work, enough. Somewhere along the way we lost that middle path; now people seem to assume they're either going to be a multimillionaire or perpetually broke, with nothing in between. I think there's a version of "enough" that can be rebuilt for right now, and that's what I'm actually doing at the farm.

Yoga isn't separate from any of this — it's meditation and physical control, and it's directly linked to how I approach sword swallowing and fire handling. The farm teaches the same skill in a different form: you learn to read what a plant needs by looking at its leaves and its soil, without it ever telling you directly. I think that's a skill worth building generally — learning to notice what's needed around you without waiting to be told.

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If You Just Lost Your Stage

If your job, your identity, the thing you built your life around, just disappeared out from under you — here's the honest, immediate thing I'd tell you to do: read Off Course on Purpose.

Not eventually. This week.

More than anything else I could say to you directly, that book will show you which kind of person you are. Some readers are going to finish it and think, "thank God that's not the life I want" — and that's a completely valid answer. Others are going to read it and think, "give me all of it." If that's your reaction, you already have your answer, and you need to go after it.