Jeff & Mindy
Master Press
Jef Kippel and Mindy Blackstien are a husband-and-wife team of more than 25 years who have built movements, media platforms, global events, community systems, transformation experiences, and recognition cultures across fitness, wellness, publishing, media, and entertainment. Their work has consistently turned participation into belonging, visibility, and meaningful action.
Primary Website
https://doridiculous.com
Official home for Jef & Mindy’s current storytelling and participation work.
Full Founder Story
https://doridiculous.com/jef-and-mindy/
Read the full Jef & Mindy story, from transformation movements to The Ridiculous.
25+ Years
Husband-Wife Team
175+ Events
Produced Worldwide
22K+
Athletes & Performers
250K
Audience & Expo Visitors
1,500+
Sponsors & Exhibitors
5 Continents
TV & Event Reach
#1 TSN
Fitness TV Series
4,500/day
BodyPROUD Visitors
Brands We’ve Worked With
Media Featured On
Television Distribution & Productions
1. Founder Story at a Glance
Decades of trust, execution, community, and transformation.
1Jef Kippel & Mindy Blackstien
A husband-and-wife team of more than 25 years who have repeatedly built communities, movements, platforms, events, media properties, recognition cultures, and transformation ecosystems. Their story reflects durable partnership, long-cycle execution, relationship capital, trust-building, and the ability to create cultures that people join, share, and help grow.
Full story https://doridiculous.com/jef-and-mindy/
2From Physical Transformation to Whole-Life Participation
Their earlier work focused on helping people transform physically through fitness, natural bodybuilding, modeling, expos, media, and community platforms. The deeper pattern was always larger: helping people feel proud, seen, capable, connected, and ready to participate in something meaningful.
3The Current Chapter
The Ridiculous is the next evolution of that founder pattern. It uses story, laughter, creativity, experiments, recognition, and participation to help people think differently, feel differently, and engage more meaningfully with themselves and others.
2. Brands, Movements & Platforms Built
Repeatable brand creation, media development, and community execution.
1World Natural Sports Organization (WNSO)
A global governing body and membership-based organization supporting natural bodybuilding and physique events, helping establish standards and credibility across international competitions. Governance, standards, international structure, natural competition, athlete trust, and industry credibility.
2FAME World Tour
A global series of events, expos, workshops, seminars, competitions, media moments, and community experiences spanning five continents, 12+ countries, and 50+ cities. Global event production, international culture-building, audience engagement, brand partnerships, and scalable participation.
Video FAME World Tour
3FAME: Fitness And Model Expo
One of Canada’s largest consumer fitness expos, scaling from 30,000 to more than 150,000 square feet within three years, with 1,000+ competing athletes, 450 exhibitors, five stages, two industry conferences within the event, and large-scale audience engagement. Expo production, sponsor activation, audience development, live experience design, and category leadership.
4Canadian Active Lifestyle Festival
The Canadian Active Lifestyle Festival was an inaugural fitness, consumer, and lifestyle expo event built around the broader lifestyle of being healthy, fit, and active. The event was sponsored by leading Canadian brands, with Shoppers Drug Mart as title sponsor, and featured more than 100 exhibitors alongside large-scale consumer participation.
The festival also featured the first Canadian National Junior High School Cheerleading Championships, with more than 10,000 people participating in that event experience, which was also produced for television. The event concept was later developed by Shoppers Drug Mart into its national annual health expo programming, LifeFest.
5Fit Connections
Fit Connections was a fitness-focused dating and connection platform created in collaboration with Robert Kennedy of the MuscleMag magazine empire. It extended the community-building work into relationship, lifestyle, and niche social connection inside the fitness industry.
6BodyPROUD Social Initiative
A global social initiative focused on self-expression, confidence, and transformation beyond appearance. BodyPROUD was about body, mind, heart, and spirit, helping people go beyond the physical and love better how they think, function, look, feel, and dream. Community engagement, recognition, participation, identity, personal growth, and challenge-based transformation.
7FAME Lifestyle Magazine
An internationally distributed magazine featuring rising stars, key influencers, athlete stories, brand partners, wellness content, and the culture behind FAME, with a 7 to 12 times pass-through rate that reached beyond industry standards. Media creation, editorial positioning, influencer development, audience retention, and brand-supported storytelling.
8Recover Magazine
Canada’s first environmental magazine, created through early community-building initiatives and recognized by the Mayor of Toronto, the Premier of Ontario, and the Minister of the Environment, with an editorial piece provided by environmentalist Farley Mowat and a cartoon provided by Calvin and Hobbes. Cause-based media, community organizing, public-interest storytelling, and purpose-driven publishing.
9Legacy Media Network & Community Assets
Beyond the events, expos, television productions, publications, and communities they built, Jef & Mindy retain a significant archive of media, relationships, and community assets developed across multiple decades.
30,000+
Archived Photos
1,000+ Hrs
Video & TV Footage
20K+ / 50K+
Email & Social Reach
Archive Assets Well over 30,000 photographs, well over 1,000 hours of television, event, interview, competition, and behind-the-scenes footage, along with rights-controlled media from FAME World Tour, WNSO, BodyPROUD, FAME Lifestyle Magazine, and related initiatives.
Community Reach A legacy database of 20,000+ email contacts and 50,000+ social media followers and community members developed through fitness, wellness, transformation, and media initiatives.
Strategic Value A unique archive of industry history, transformation stories, athletes, speakers, sponsors, influencers, television appearances, media interviews, and community moments that may be leveraged for storytelling, documentaries, nostalgia campaigns, interviews, recognition initiatives, and future community engagement.
3. Standards, Judging & Credibility
Built around fairness, professionalism, and trust.
1FAME Fitness Model Rules & Standards
The FAME Fitness Model Rules & Standards helped define expectations, categories, judging criteria, presentation standards, competitor preparation, and professional credibility within the fitness model search movement.
2Natural Bodybuilding & Drug Testing Standards
Through WNSO and related platforms, Jef & Mindy helped promote natural bodybuilding and fitness competition environments that emphasized standards, athlete trust, fairness, and credibility.
3Recognition Infrastructure
The judging, stage, media, and award systems were more than operations. They created structured recognition, giving participants a reason to prepare, show up, improve, and feel seen.
4. Media, Television & Public Visibility
Turning participation into media moments and broad public awareness.
1#1 TSN Fitness Show
Jef & Mindy’s fitness and transformation platforms expanded into television, including a #1 fitness show on TSN. This demonstrated their ability to translate live participation, competition, and community energy into broadcast media.
Video TSN Fitness Show
2Television Distribution Across 5 Continents
Their fitness media properties reached audiences internationally through television distribution, strengthening the founder proof that they have built content, community, and event systems with global visibility potential.
3Press Conferences & International Media
Their work included media appearances, interviews, public speaking, international event coverage, and press activity connected to fitness, wellness, transformation, and community-building initiatives.
5. Community Building & Participation Proof
The core founder strength is turning attention into action.
1Challenge Marketing Before It Had a Name
Jef & Mindy built systems where people did more than watch. They joined, trained, transformed, competed, shared, returned, referred others, and built identity around participation.
2BodyPROUD Engagement Pattern
BodyPROUD showed early signs of what today would be understood as community-driven engagement: repeat participation, identity reinforcement, peer visibility, transformation stories, and recognition-based motivation.
3Sponsor & Brand Activation
Their event and media platforms created opportunities for brands to participate in a living ecosystem rather than simply advertise beside it. Sponsors could sample, exhibit, speak, support competitors, appear in media, and become part of the community experience.
4The Pattern That Continues
The Ridiculous now applies that same pattern to storytelling: invite people through the book, activate them through experiments, connect them through community, and recognize them for meaningful participation.
6. Advisory, Research & Innovation
Founder-created incubators, advisory work, research, systems, and market validation.
13D World Group
A founder-created incubator owned by Jef & Mindy, built to explore AI, immersive 3D environments, virtual events, community spaces, commerce, and experiential engagement. It served as a founder-owned vehicle for experimentation, market learning, strategic partnerships, and system design around the next generation of immersive participation.
Noted collaboration Worked with Napster, formerly Infinite Reality, on immersive 3D events, communities, and environments for event and expo organizers, podcasters, immersive storytelling, and community engagement.
2RethinkFIT
A founder-created incubator owned by Jef & Mindy, designed to explore a more complete approach to fitness and wellness, moving beyond outside appearance only and toward a holistic model, mind to heart, inside and out, head to toe. Through RethinkFIT, they explored the next generation of wellness participation with leaders across nutrition, natural medicine, body mechanics, emotional intelligence, and mental health.
3Skylab USA & Dean Grey
Jef & Mindy worked with Skylab USA founder Dean Grey, a behavioral scientist and technology entrepreneur, co-designing gamified communities, community architecture, research pathways, market studies, testing models, and reward-engine concepts. The work strengthened their experience in behavioral participation, recognition design, gamification strategy, and community systems.
4Startup Advisory & Market Validation
Advised startups in technology, nutrition, direct sales, online training, and community building, helping them expand market share and validate their systems with the fitness and wellness community. Practical market testing, positioning, growth strategy, audience development, and industry access.
5The Social Universe (TSU)
Led community outreach, gamification models, programming, and engagement strategies as the platform grew from a few hundred members to more than one million within 18 months. Large-scale community growth, engagement strategy, social platform activation, and behavioral participation design.
6Personal Training & Professional Coaching
Jef & Mindy trained and coached professional athletes in bodybuilding, fitness, figure, and fitness model divisions, along with Olympic athletes in rowing, boxing, bobsled, and extreme sports. Hands-on expertise in performance, mindset, preparation, assessment, transformation, and athlete development.
7Canadian Authors Association (CAA)
Jef & Mindy sat on the Board of Directors for the Canadian Authors Association, helping guide, advise, and implement gamification and community engagement strategies, along with pathways for recognition and awards. Publishing community leadership, author engagement, recognition strategy, and organizational advisory experience.
7. Evolution Into The Ridiculous
The doorway changed. The mission continued.
1Why The Ridiculous Exists
After decades helping people transform their bodies, Jef & Mindy discovered something surprising: looking better wasn’t the same as feeling fulfilled.
True transformation came from within: improving how one thinks, functions, and feels.
So after years of research, Jef & Mindy created The Ridiculous.
While it leads as a laugh-out-loud sci-fi comedy mini series, it also invites people to rethink, explore perspectives, and see life, the universe & everything differently. In fact, fans don’t just read about the ridiculous ideas. They get to live them:
The Do Ridiculous Experiments are fun, real-world challenges where ordinary people transform into their extra ordinary: taking new action, returning to their passion, or creating the music used for The Ridiculous on screen.
Along the way, participants share their stories, breakthroughs, ahas, and triumphs. Their experiences inspire others to do the same. As a result, individuals, brands, and creators get recognized, celebrated, and discovered.
2What The Ridiculous Is
The Ridiculous is a storytelling and participation ecosystem sparked by a bestselling sci-fi comedy mini-series and expanding beyond the page into experiments, challenges, activations, collaborations, recognition, community moments, media, and entertainment.
Core line Laugh First. Think Deeper.
Founder mantra Dream Big. Do Ridiculous. Achieve Remarkable.
3The Ridiculous Series: Reader & Market Proof
The Ridiculous began as a sci-fi comedy mini-series by Jef & Mindy and has grown into a broader entertainment and participation universe where laughter opens the door to perspective, creativity, community, and meaningful action.
Recognition The series has achieved #1 Amazon bestseller recognition in Comedy, Science Fiction, and Happiness, with additional category recognition including #2 Humorous Science Fiction, #2 Metaphysical Science Fiction, and #5 Audible Humorous Science Fiction.
Amazon snapshot The Ridiculous reached the top 0.03% of Kindle Store books during a ranking snapshot, based on an estimated Kindle catalog of roughly 12 to 15 million books.
Goodreads snapshot The series generated 1,676 Goodreads adds, with campaign performance measuring approximately 6x the industry benchmark used for sales and reader-acquisition evaluation.
Experience Book 1 The Ridiculous: Book 1 on Amazon
4Reader Reviews & Reactions
Reader responses highlight the series as funny, imaginative, thoughtful, and unexpectedly meaningful, reinforcing the brand promise: laughter first, then something deeper.
Reviews Reader reviews and reactions
5The Participation Layer
The Ridiculous turns audiences into participants through real-world social challenges, creative experiments, fandom contributions, quests, community activations, and recognition for meaningful action. Throught this a living Life Guide is created featuring wholesome products, proven methods, and authentic role models… all based on the findings of the community via the Ridiculous Experiments. This is the next evolution of Jef & Mindy’s founder experience: build culture, activate participation, recognize contribution, and create shared momentum.
6Recognition Through VRS
The Ridiculous connects recognition through VRS, a patented Value Reinforcement System created by behavioral scientist Dean Grey and designed to capture and reinforce meaningful action, authentic participation, and positive contribution.
Patent link US Patent 12,205,176
Dean Grey press link https://deangrey.org/press
7Brand & Ecosystem Overview
The broader brand and ecosystem overview connects the books, reader pathway, participation layer, VRS, media growth, partnerships, and long-term franchise opportunity.
Launch Partner Media Kit doridiculous.com/launchpartners
8. Opportunities & Contact
For interviews, media, partnerships, sponsorships, collaborations, and strategic conversations.
1Media & Interview Angles
Jef & Mindy can speak to building movements before algorithms, challenge marketing, transformation communities, husband-wife entrepreneurship, fitness-to-franchise evolution, laughter as a doorway to wellbeing, recognition systems, and why The Ridiculous is being built as more than a book series.
2Partnership & Sponsor Conversations
The Ridiculous offers aligned partners opportunities to participate in story-driven campaigns, reader discovery, experiments, community missions, recognition moments, media, events, and future franchise expansion.
3Launch Partner Media Kit
The media kit for organizations, communities, brands, and early supporters interested in becoming part of The Ridiculous ecosystem and experiments.
4Contact Jef & Mindy
For partnerships, investor or advisor conversations, media, interviews, speaking, sponsorships, and strategic collaborations connected to The Ridiculous, the best starting point is a direct conversation with Jef & Mindy.