Podcasts about gen xers

D&P Highlight: Gen Xers...Boomers...you guys okay? full 591 Wed, 30 Sep 2026 18:58:00 +0000 ZChkKXYYzEiaR19RSeEcNLMaSrE8OhqQ news The Dana & Parks Podcast news D&P Highlight: Gen Xers...Boomers...you guys okay? You wanted it... Now here it is! Listen to each hour of the Dana & Parks Show whenever and wherever you want! © 2025 Audacy, Inc. News https://player.amperwavepodcasting.com?feed-

When Vanessa Hutchinson-Szekely and Raina Mast aren't going bananas about the Golden State Valkyries, they're teaching kids in San Francisco. In this episode, meet and get to know Vanessa and Raina, cohosts of the Valkyries, Say Less podcast. We begin with Vanessa. Her parents met in San Francisco in 1970. Her mom came here the year before from her home country, France. In her mom's first month in The City, she met the man who became Vanessa's dad. She had just finished photography school back home, and planned to return to France. But fate wanted a word with her. Vanessa's dad grew up on the East Coast. Before he settled on creating stain-glass works, getting to know his own artistic bent, he came to San Francisco to explore that side of himself. He met Vanessa's mom. They were young artists, they were in love, and the rest is history. About a decade later, in 1979, they had a kid—Vanessa, their only child. She talks about being on the cusp between Gen X and Millennial, but considers herself mostly Californian/French. With her parents, Vanessa spent (and still often spends) summers in the French Alps. Both being artists, Vanessa's mom realized that between herself and her husband, one of them needed a job that offered health insurance. And so she went to a temp agency. That allowed her dad to pursue his stained-glass art. He later designed the stained glass in the Mrs. Doubtfire house. A lot of his glass art still exists around North Beach. Vanessa grew up amid all that art here in SF. But at the time, she might not have appreciated it like she does today. Eventually, she moved to New York City for college. She was drawn in by the romantic version of NYC depicted in movies and shows. After her time at Columbia University, Vanessa moved to LA to teach. She always knew she would come home, but wasn't sure when. After 11 years away (four in New York and seven in Los Angeles), she came back. She was 30 and had met the man she would later marry. It was time. Riffing off her seven years of teaching middle school in LA, which she started when she was 22, Vanessa came back and found work with the SFUSD, where she's been since 2008. We go on a sidebar about raising kids in San Francisco, something I didn't do but Vanessa did and wants more people to do. She and her Valkyries, Say Less cohost, Raina, met through a mutual friend. Vanessa's version of their meeting 10 years ago is that they were both invited to a party at that mutual friend's house. Vanessa saw Raina and thought, Damn, that is one cool-looking person. We'll hear Raina's version of that story later in Part 1. We end Vanessa's segment by hearing about her SF schools, a must for born-and-raised folks. She's quick to note that she only went to one school for K through 12—the French-American International School. Then we turn to Raina. They grew up in Pennsylvania Amish country, where they played basketball and ran track. They're from Easton, the town where Crayola crayons are made. Raina says the company would often survey town folks to help name new colors. Easton is 1.5 hours away from both New York City and Philadelphia. Both cities called to them, they say. They lived in New York City, Puerto Rico, and Upstate New York. Then they joined friends on a cross-country road trip, looking for a place to call home. After 13 years of Catholic school, they never really felt like the fit in back home. I ask if, like me, Raina is a recovering Catholic. They say they are fully recovered, in fact. Remarkable, especially for a queer woman. Brava! Being one of five kids in their family, with three brothers, was another challenge. Raina's oldest brother was the artist among them. Eventually, they took another trip across the US. New Orleans tried to grab Raina, and possibly almost did. The other choice was San Francisco, but they didn't move here right away. When it came time to move here, their family was shocked not at all. The first visit happened in 2001. There's a really funny story they share about driving through SF and ending up in Sacramento before they realized it. With no GPS and only paper maps, they circled back and this time, exited off the bridge to San Francisco. A few years later, now pregnant, they started thinking, Where do I wanna raise this kid? That's when SF really drew them in. Their younger brother lived here already, with an apartment in the Marina. There are stories about getting bested by The City's hills and wearing sandals and wondering why they were so cold—classic newcomer to San Francisco stuff. Despite all that, they loved it. In 2014, they made the leap. Since arriving to live here, they've lived in the Mission, the Haight, and nowadays, they call the Richmond home. Before their move here, they applied for art school and teaching fellowships at the same time. The teaching gigs they got offered health insurance and more stability, so they chose that path. Today, they are able to walk parallel paths of art and education. They've taught art, but these days, it's Spanish classes. Going back to their meeting story, Raina and Vanessa are both creative folks who also teach. As creative people with not a lot of money, a DIY mindset set in for them individually and together. It's what propelled and inspired them to start their podcast—Valkyries, Say Less. Vanessa speaks to being on the same "teacher rhythm," meaning time off at the same time, stuff like that. Raina adds that, both being Gen Xers, they grew up without women's sports being what it is today. We end Part 1 with Raina's version of meeting Vanessa, who would later be their podcasting partner. Right away, Raina thought Vanessa was very stylish, mostly owing to her French heritage, as they later learned. In May 2025, channeling Raina's music-recording background, Vanessa's podcasting knowledge (she has a meditation show), and both of their love of women's sports, and with the kickoff of the first WNBA team in The Bay, Valkyries, Say Less was born. Check back Thursday for Part 2 with Raina and Vanessa. We recorded this podcast Rikki's Women's Sports Bar in August 2026. Photography by Jeff Hunt

Recorded LIVE at Black Matt Studios, THE BOOMXERS are four friends too young to be Baby Boomers but too old to be GenXers. We get together every week to Jibber Jabber about music, entertainment, rural news, crazy inventions, portmanteaus, and so much more. Featuring the phenomenal music quiz known as JIMMY READS. The BoomXers: Unfiltered, Unpolished, Unapologetic, and Unsponsored.

I'll admit it. I came into this conversation ready to talk about "those damn kids." They give me the blank stare. They call me bro. My friend in staffing says they show up for one day of work and never come back. Phil Putnam walked me back from the ledge. (Mostly. The bro thing still bugs me.)Phil Putnam is a workforce behavior strategist and keynote speaker who spent 20+ years as a team member and executive at Apple and Adobe. Now he helps associations and companies like PCMA, Bloomberg, Slack, and Salesforce understand how different generations work and give. He's a Gen Xer with two Gen Z mentors, ages 26 and 22, and he is unapologetically pro-Gen Z.In this episode, we get into why safety is the North Star for this generation. They've never known life without school shootings, and many of them believe the planet won't outlast them. Phil maps what each generation wants from work: loyalty for boomers, excellence for Gen X, value exchange for millennials, safety for Gen Z. Most fundraising strategies are written by boomers and Xers, through a boomer and Xer lens.For EDs managing Gen Z staff, Phil explains why "bring me a first draft" can feel terrifying to someone raised on teaching to the test. His advice: never lower the job requirements when a Gen Z fundraiser says they hate the phone. Pair the requirement with safety instead. Try it, and I won't punish you for the draft. And if they still won't do the job, find them another role or let them go. Replacing an employee costs roughly 150% of their salary.Then we tackle loyalty. Phil's take: Gen Z is loyal, just not to employment as we know it. The oldest Gen Zer has been working for six years. Layoffs, COVID, AI, more layoffs. Top performers get an average raise of 3.7%. The math doesn't math.On the donor side, Gen Z is 27% of the workforce today and will be 31% by 2035. Forbes 30 Under 30 is almost entirely Gen Z. Phil's approach starts with values alignment: ask what they care about and what they're afraid of, then take their answers at face value. For retention, keep the first gift easy, put your Gen Z donors in the room with your boomers, and connect them to each other.My favorite moment is Phil's welcome email test. You pay an association hundreds of dollars, and the first email asks you to join a committee. It's like ordering dinner and getting handed an apron. His point lands hard for fundraisers: your donors are your customer, not your resource.If your donor strategy only speaks boomer, this conversation is for you.Important Links:Phil Putnam SpeaksEmail Phil: booking@philputnam.comMy Big Ask Gifts ProgramMy Book, Get That Money HoneyMy NewsletterJoin the Free Webinar

Recorded LIVE at Black Matt Studios, THE BOOMXERS are four friends too young to be Baby Boomers but too old to be GenXers. We get together every week to Jibber Jabber about music, entertainment, rural news, crazy inventions, portmanteaus, and so much more. Featuring the phenomenal music quiz known as JIMMY READS. The BoomXers: Unfiltered, Unpolished, Unapologetic, and Unsponsored.

Jimmy had the absolute honor to interview the legendary John Cusack! Cusack wrote a fantastic new graphic novel called MOMO. Set in 1972, it's a wild road-trip full of satire, criminals, conspiracies, aliens, the supernatural, a French silent film star, Howard Johnson's, explosions, laudanum, Jackie Gleason and more! Yeah, wild! Jimmy and John talk about the book, some of the real life characters, how true the story is, his chemistry w/ the book's artist Ignacio Noe, growing up as a Gen Xer, a silly fan interaction, how he feels about that Peter Gabriel song, his next graphic novel w/ Noe and beyond. Jimmy also pitches a genius idea for a GROSSE POINT BLANK sequel. An utterly delightful and fun chat! Many thanks again to Cusack for taking the time. 

Recorded LIVE at Black Matt Studios, THE BOOMXERS are four friends too young to be Baby Boomers but too old to be GenXers. We get together every week to Jibber Jabber about music, entertainment, rural news, crazy inventions, portmanteaus, and so much more. Featuring the phenomenal music quiz known as JIMMY READS. The BoomXers: Unfiltered, Unpolished, Unapologetic, and Unsponsored.

Paano ba yung Gen Z mindset? What can millennials and Gen Xers learn from them about dealing with imposter syndrome, love and relationships, feeling stuck, and even childhood bubog?! And what is something they struggle with that we might not understand so well? We continue our #ProudPinayPodcasts series where we spotlight our incredible Filipina podcasters, and for our 14th episode, we sit down with the creator of the Gen Z cult fave podcast Yani's Room, Yani Villarosa!Follow #PaanoBaTo on our socials!IG: www.instagram.com/paanobatoFB Group: www.facebook.com/groups/paanobatoTiktok: www.tiktok.com/@askpaanobato To know more about the work of Bianca Gonzalez, check out her pages on IG/FB/X/YouTube/Tiktok: @iamsuperbianca Paano Ba ‘To?!Created by Bianca Gonzalez Est. 2014

AI has become the the latest boogeyman in a history of boogeymen, what do you remember the government telling you throughout history will kill us all? Mario says, "Say no to drugs," because it could cost you your soul! Beavis and Butthead offer a Gen-Xer like Jake a proper "chortle," find out why. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This week on Drinking from the Gardenhose, OB and Ed take on Iron Maiden, Megadeth, Anthrax, and the worst possible way to attend a concert on crutches. What should have been a night of heavy metal becomes an epic accessibility adventure involving 21 rows of stairs, wheelchairs, elevators, crowds, bridge closures, a questionable Uber pickup, and ED essentially becoming OB's personal roadie/wheelchair crew. Along the way, they revisit discovering heavy metal in the 1980s, marvel at Iron Maiden's performance of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, meet a guy named Sergio with an increasingly unbelievable Iron Maiden origin story, and debate what exactly happens when two Gen-Xers discover that their metal heroes are getting old too. It's part concert review, part mobility challenge, part transportation disaster, and part Weekend at Bernie's. Rock 'n' roll doesn't stop for a bad foot. It just gets considerably harder to get out of the building.

Recorded LIVE at Black Matt Studios, THE BOOMXERS are four friends too young to be Baby Boomers but too old to be GenXers. We get together every week to Jibber Jabber about music, entertainment, rural news, crazy inventions, portmanteaus, and so much more. Featuring the phenomenal music quiz known as JIMMY READS. The BoomXers: Unfiltered, Unpolished, Unapologetic, and Unsponsored.

In this week's episode, I take a look back at the movies and streaming shows I watched in Summer 2026 and rate them. This coupon code will get you 25% off the ebooks in the Ghost Armor series at my Payhip store: FALLARMOR The coupon code is valid through September 21, 2026. So if you need a new ebook this fall, we've got you covered! TRANSCRIPT 00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 319 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is September the 4th, 2026, and today I'm looking back at the movies and streaming shows I watched over Summer 2026. We will also have Coupon of the Week and an update on my current writing, publishing, and audiobook projects. So let's start off with Coupon of the Week. This week's coupon code will get you 25% off the ebooks in the Ghost Armor series at my Payhip store. That coupon code is FALLARMOR. As always, you can get the coupon code and the links to my Payhip store available in the show notes for this episode. This coupon code will be valid through September 21st, 2026, so if you need a new ebook for this fall, we have got you covered. Now an update on my current writing, publishing, and audiobook projects. I'm pleased to report that the rough draft of Blade of Visions is done. It came to 99,000 words. It'd be kind of cool if it came to 100,000, but as I've learned in the 15 years I've been doing this, it's not a good idea to pad things for length. Editing is underway. I'm about 15% through the first pass of edits. I'm working on the cover design, so I'm on good track to have the book out before the end of the month. I also wrote a tie-in short story called Winter Crown and don't forget that [newsletter] subscribers will get a free ebook copy of that short story when Blade of Visions comes out later this month. So this makes a very excellent time to subscribe to my new release newsletter. I am also 12,000 words into Elven-Warlock, which will be the seventh book in the Half-Elven Thief series. Hopefully that will be out in October, if all goes well. In audiobook news, I think Blade of Thieves (as narrated by Brad Wills) and Cloak of Worlds (as narrated by Hollis McCarthy) are now finally available at all the usual audiobook stores, which includes Audible, Apple, Amazon, Kobo, Google Play, Chirp, and all the others. So if you want to listen to those if you are going on a Labor Day road trip, you can check those out. A reminder that Stealth and Spells Online: The Complete LitRPG trilogy (narrated by C.J. McAllister) is also available on Audible, so check that out. That's 32 hours long and that would also cover all your Labor Day travels. So that is where I'm at with my current writing, publishing and audiobook projects. 00:02:22 Main Topic of the Week: Summer 2026 Movie Roundup So let's move on to our main topic this week. Our main topic this week is the Summer 2026 Movie Roundup and I always enjoy doing those. These episodes are a little less serious than some of the other episodes and it's fun to talk about things I enjoyed and that you might enjoy as well. And I did see a lot of new movies this summer. In fact, I went to the actual theater four times for Masters of the Universe, The Odyssey, Spider-Man, and Coyote vs. Acme, which is probably more than I've gone in a single season since before COVID times. So as usual, here are the movies I saw this summer (rated from least favorite to most favorite). The grades are totally subjective and based on nothing but my own thoughts and opinions. First up is The Breadwinner, which came out in 2026. This is basically standup comedian Nate Bargatze's act come to life as a movie. If you've seen Bargatze's standup, his usual routine is to portray himself as the dumb husband and bumbling Girl Dad, which is actually quite clever from a comedic standpoint since you're unlikely to have outraged mobs calling for your head if all you're doing is making fun of yourself. Anyway, Bargatze portrays Nate Wilcox, the best Toyota salesman in Nashville. (Don't worry, this is the first of only many product placement moments.) He lets his wife Kate manage the household and do the bulk of the work with their three daughters. When Kate's invention takes off on Shark Tank, she has to go to South Korea for two weeks to oversee manufacturing, leaving Nate in charge of the kids. Comedic chaos ensues. On the positive side of this movie, I did approve how this movie showed a married couple trying to work through a rough patch and do what's right for their kids and each other in a semi-productive way rather than blowing up their lives over nonsensical trivialities in the style of Eat, Pray, Love. On the downside, there was a lot of product placement, to the point where it at times felt like an extended commercial with bits of plot jammed in between product endorsement. No doubt most of the production budget came from product placement money. Will Forte was funny as an eccentric roofing contractor and Martin Herlihy as a shifty DoorDash employee. Kumail Nanjiani was funny as Nate's rival salesman at the car dealership. So overall, I would say this was blandly amusing and inoffensive with some funny slapstick moments. Overall grade: C- Next up is Supergirl, which came out in 2026. This movie really was sort of a strange combination of John Wick and the human trafficking subplot from 2020's Black Widow. The end result wasn't quite as good as Superman from 2025, alas. I did like this movie's interpretation of Supergirl. Kara Zor-El's departure from Krypton was way more traumatic than Superman's, so she's dealing with her unresolved emotional issues by traveling from planet to planet with red suns and getting hammered since the same yellow sun that gives Kryptonians their superpowers on Earth also keeps them from getting drunk because their bodies process alcohol too efficiently. However, Kara comes to a planet where a girl named Ruthye lives. Ruthye's family has been slaughtered by ruthless brigands yet led by Krem of the Yellow Hills and she's going on a quest for revenge. When Ruthye tries to recruit Kara for the quest, she's not interested, but then Krem steals Kara's spaceship and poisons her dog Krypto. Krem carries the antidote on his person, so now Kara and Ruthye team up to get vengeance on Krem and to heal Krypto. Krem is a nasty piece of work and he and his space gang travel from planet to planet abducting women to be their wives. I think the problem was that Krem was kind of a boring but nasty villain, but he was still boring. He was basically a space thug with too many piercings. Lex Luthor from 2025 Superman, by contrast, was a really interesting villain, this malignant narcissist who knows that his obsession with Superman is over the top, but he's going to act on it anyway. Additionally, I don't think this version of Supergirl is quite capable of being a lead character on her own. She'd make a superb secondary character, but I don't think she could quite carry a movie on her own. And Jason Momoa was pretty good as Lobo. Overall grade: C- Next up is Troy, which came out in 2004. I wanted to see this either before or after I watched The Odyssey this summer and ended up watching it the day before I went to see The Odyssey. I would say this movie was slow and ponderous, but I did enjoy watching it. This is an adaption of The Iliad and has the sort of slow stateliness of epic films from the '60s. It had good performances and good battle scenes. Brian Cox was enjoyable as a scenery chewing Agamemnon and Brad Pitt worked as Achilles. Interestingly, his version of Achilles reminded me of the interpretation of Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen from Dune 2 as sort of a violent psychopath with his own twisted sense of honor. Oddly, despite the fact that this was rather a long movie, the ending seems a bit rushed, like we needed to hurry up and get to the Trojan Horse. It was amusing how Achilles' relationship with Patroclus was changed to "cousin" for the modern audience, but Greek views on sexuality would definitely be unpalatable with both right-wing and left-wing versions of the modern mind, which is a good thing because while the Greeks contributed a great deal to the development of civilization, they were into a lot of unsavory stuff. So overall, I would say this was a fun, epic movie, but I think this walked so the 2026 version of The Odyssey could run. Amusing fact: Christopher Nolan was apparently supposed to direct this, but the deal fell through and he got Batman Begins as a consolation prize instead. Overall grade: B- Next up is The Dink, which came out in 2026. This is an Apple TV comedy movie about pickleball of all things. I feel like this was made because some Apple executive got made fun of by some tennis players for playing pickleball and then decided to take revenge through media. Jake Johnson plays Dustin Boyd, a washed up former child tennis star who now works at his father's tennis club. The club has difficulties because of a growing influx of pickleball players who the hardcore tennis players hate. Dustin's father decides to use the club's bylaws to force a duel match to decide the issue, in the grand tradition of wacky comedy stakes. Dustin really wants to play the duel match, but his wrist is injured in an accident. To get his wrist mobility back, the doctor suggested he play some pickleball and Dustin views this as beneath him, but he really wants to play again, so he signs up for pickleball. This ends up being a wacky sports company/buddy movie as Dustin gradually befriends an eccentric older pickleball player. Ed Harris should really do more comedic roles. He was great as Dustin's stern, yet unscrupulous father. I do admire Apple TV's dedication to making random stuff. Overall grade: B- Next up is Green and Gold, which came out in 2025, and this is a melodrama about a farmer and his granddaughter dealing with the grim economic realities of farming. This is set in 1992/1993 era Wisconsin. Buck refuses to modernize his dairy farm in Door County, Wisconsin. His granddaughter Jenny is a talented musician and also a skilled farmer, and Buck wants her to take over the farm one day, but Jenny's ambitions are looking elsewhere. Events come to a head when Jenny realizes that Buck is deeply in debt to the bank, which is about to foreclose on the farm. However, Buck and the chief banker have a personal animosity, so they settle on a bet. If the Green Bay Packers win a Super Bowl title in 1993, the banker will give Buck one more year to turn things around on the farm. Meanwhile, Jenny begins to wonder if her music ambitions might generate the money to save the farm. Of course, if you are familiar with the history of the Packers, you know that they won a Super Bowl in 1996, not 1993. The movie has carried on the back of the very strong performances of its actors. It also has an ambiguously happy ending, as is true with so many things in farming. I like this movie because I've spent a lot of my life in the American Midwest, [and] I did appreciate how it shows the difficulties of the farming life. Also, this is important: a fall from a ladder is a plot point. Ladder safety is important, people! If you are going up a ladder, for heaven's sake don't climb the ladder in high heels like the character in question does. Wear sensible, well-fitting shoes with good soles. A very long time ago, I used to work with a guy who would climb extension ladders in cowboy boots. It is nothing short of the mercy of God that he didn't fall off and shatter half the bones in his body. Overall grade: B Next up is Grumpy Old Men, which came out in 1993. Apparently this is set in Wabasha, Minnesota, which is amusing because filming actually took place in several areas in the Twin Cities in Eastern Minnesota, but not actually in Wabasha. I found that personally amusing because I'm quite familiar with the area and so I recognize several filming locations. Anyway, the movie is about two retirees, Max and John, who are enemies and have been enemies for years, but Max is lonely and wants to get married again, and John is about to lose his house to the IRS due to tax problems. Things come to a head when an attractive literature professor moves across the street and both Max and John take an interest in her and start competing for her affections. However, it turns out that Max and John are actually best friends whose love language happens to be hatred and practical jokes, kind of like Wile E. Coyote and Road Runner, but more on them below. This was a good character comedy/drama. It was interesting that the professor was an early version of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl trope, albeit several decades before someone came up with the term. This is worth watching both as a character and comedy drama and a time capsule of the 1990s. Sometimes a movie ages a bit badly (Airplane and the Thomas Crown Affair from the Spring Movie Roundup come to mind), but this didn't. The sequel Grumpier Old Men from 1995 is basically the same movie, but with the characters acting about 20% dumber so a sitcom style plot can happen. Still entertaining, but not as good as the first one, so Grumpier Old Men only gets a B-, but Grumpy Old Men gets a B+. Next up is Masters of the Universe, which came out in 2026. It was amusing to read reviews of this movie because people thought way too hard about a movie that is essentially about battling action figures. Anyway, this was pretty good. It was nice to see a movie about a science fiction property that doesn't actually hate the source material. Basically it's a live action version of the cartoons from the '80s, albeit with somewhat more thoughtful moments. I heard someone suggest that it was close in tone to Thor: Ragnarok, and that seems accurate. The plot is that Skeletor conquers Eternia and 10-year-old Prince Adam is sent with the Sword of Power through a magical portal to Earth to keep him and the sword out of Skeletor's reach. However, Adam loses the sword while passing through the gate and 15 years later is working in human resources. He's still seeking for the sword despite his therapist trying to convince him that it was a trauma-induced fantasy. However, his persistence pays off and he does find the sword. Teela, who is one of the resistance leaders against Skeletor's rule, comes to Earth to find him and bring him back, but Skeletor's minions arrive to claim the sword as well. Adam and Teela escape back to Eternia and it's up to Adam to find a way to use the Sword of Power to become the hero that Eternia needs. Dolph Lundgren's cameo was great. Overall, I would say this is a fun movie to watch, especially if you're a Millennial or Gen Xer who saw the cartoons or the live action movie back in the '80s. Jared Leto has something of an increasingly questionable reputation these days, but he did a good job as Skeletor, played him halfway between the solemn gravitas of the 1987 version and the malevolent comedic cornball of the cartoons. Of course, in my opinion, the Frank Langella version from 1987 is the best version of Skeletor since he placed it with all the seriousness of a Shakespearean villain monologue at the Royal Shakespeare Company. In hindsight, it wasn't terribly surprising that this underperformed at the box office. It felt like it was made for guys my age, not for kids. I would've been comfortable bringing an eight-year-old to see The Mandalorian and Grogu or Super Mario Galaxy, but I would've been less certain bringing a kid that age to see Masters of the Universe. Additionally, it seemed very Marvel in tone, and I think the overall mood of the US these days is less "Marvel Cinematic Universe quips and banter" and more sort of the grimness of The Odyssey, which we'll talk about shortly. Overall grade: B+ Next up is Young Washington, which came out in 2026, a biopic of the early life of George Washington, covering how he more or less accidentally started the French and Indian War and how he recovered his reputation at the Battle of Braddock's Field. To be fair, the international situation at the time meant that someone was going to start the French and Indian War. It just happened to be Washington, who was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Overall, I liked this. It was reasonably historically accurate, though some of the emotional and family dialogue at times was a bit clunky. Additionally, Washington was portrayed as having revolutionary leanings much earlier in life than he actually did, since when he was a young man, he had no thoughts of being anything but a British subject and officer. That said, some of the most implausible stuff in the movie actually happened in real life. Like if I were to write in a novel that the future president of the United States personally rallied the army's rear guard to save as many men as possible from an ambush, and in the process had two horses shot out from under him and ended up with bullet holes in his hat and coat (all while fighting continuously), you would probably find that a bit implausible, but it actually happened that way. Washington's daring actions during that battle were one of the reasons he was appointed commander of the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War, that and there weren't many other colonials with as much experience of military command as Washington. In that vein, the battle scenes were the best part of the movie. They captured the brutality and messiness of 18th Century warfare without being especially graphic. Anyway, I'm glad this is getting a sequel. Maybe we'll end up with a Young Washington Cinematic Universe. Overall grade: B+ Next up is Meet the Parents, which came out in 2000, and this is probably one of the apex forms of cringe comedy. Ben Stiller plays Greg Focker, a nurse who's in love with schoolteacher Pam Burns. Greg wants to marry Pam, but overhears a phone call with her sister where she says her fiancé asked permission of her traditional father first. Greg decides that he's going to ask Pam's father's permission first to get off on the right foot, and so accompanies Pam to her sister's wedding and her parents' house to, as the title says, Meet the Parents. However, Pam's father is the former CIA counterintelligence officer Jack, and he and Greg immediately get on each other's nerves. To make things worse, the airline has lost Greg's luggage. From these two starting premises follow a cascading series of hilarious disasters that accumulate in a septic tank fire on the lawn. I'm not sure, but I think I saw this one in the theaters when it came out in 2000, and I thought it was funny then. With 26 years of additional life experience under the belt, I still think it's pretty funny, though you could still tell that this movie was filmed before 9/11 because if Greg had his airport meltdown seen today, the consequences would've been much worse. Overall grade: B+ Next up is O Brother Where Art Thou, which came out in 2000. This is a very, very, very specific adaptation of The Odyssey directed by the Coen brothers. George Clooney plays Everett, a convict who escapes from a chain gang in Mississippi during the Great Depression. He wants to find a treasure and he recruits fellow convicts Delmar and Peter to assist him. Along the way, Everett and his team encountered 1930s era versions of the Sirens, the cyclops, the blind prophet Tiresias, and other characters and foes from the original Odyssey myth. Everett and his friends end up running a scam where they pretend to be a Christian music group, but as it turns out, they're actually pretty good at singing, so this leads to unexpected hilarity and opportunities. This was also a very funny movie. Imagine The Odyssey is a comedy with a lot of singing set in the Deep South during the Depression, and you're there. If you're a fan of bluegrass music, this is worth watching. If you've seen Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey, it's worth watching this just to ponder how the same source material can produce such wildly divergent interpretations. If you don't care about The Odyssey, then this is still a fun movie to watch. Proof: I mentioned to someone that I had seen this and she responded that she both loved the movie and was surprised to learn that he had in fact been inspired by The Odyssey. Overall grade: A- Next up is Hoppers, which came out in 2026. Like most Pixar movies, this was very high concept. Unlike many recent Pixar movies, it wasn't too depressing and didn't disappear up its own tailpipe. In the city of Beaverton, hot tempered girl Mabel bonds with her grandmother in their favorite place, a woodland grove favored by beavers. Years later, Mabel is a biology student under Dr. Fairfax, but is neglecting her studies to face off against her nemesis, the popular yet sketchy Mayor Jerry of Beaverton. Mayor Jerry wants to build an expressway that will wipe out the woodland grove, and he's perfectly within his rights to do it since no animals have been found living there. Since Mabel's grandmother has died, she's unwilling to give up the grove. However, Dr. Fairfax's research might give her a way. Dr. Fairfax has worked out a way to temporarily transfer human consciousness to a robotic beaver capable of speaking to real beavers, much like the plot of Avatar. In a funny scene, Fairfax angrily denies that it's just like Avatar. Mabel gets the idea to use this to convince real beavers to settle in the grove, thereby thwarting Mayor Jerry's plans. This touches off both a wacky yet poignant adventure. The plot was very well structured and it followed the proper rules of story structure, which I've talked about before. Mabel definitely is a protagonist who takes action, but experiences setbacks and problems of her own creation. It was pretty good. I say it was a return to form for Pixar after some of their weaker movies in the 2020s. Overall grade: A Now it's time for my three favorite movies of summer 2026, all of which I actually saw in the theater. First up is Coyote versus Acme, which came out in 2026. This movie had an extra surge of popularity from the fact that Warner Brothers canceled it as a tax write-off, but distributor Ketchup Entertainment revived it. That makes it a plucky underdog since Warner Brothers senior executives are kind of like the apex version of soulless corporate bug men. Like if I wrote characters in my books who acted like Warner Brothers senior executives, people would think I was being didactic and heavy-handed. Anyway, after decades of failures in efforts to capture the Road Runner, Wile E. Coyote decides to sue Acme Corporation for its numerous defective products. Coyote teams up with a lazy strip mall lawyer named Kevin Avery, who specializes in getting small settlements from Acme. However, Avery and Coyote end up filing a massive lawsuit against Acme, which means they'll face the full wrath of Acme Corporation, including its ace lawyer Buddy Crane and its ruthless CEO, Foghorn Leghorn. What follows is a comedic courtroom battle as Coyote and Avery try to defeat Acme Corporation, defeat its sinister plans, and Coyote starts to realize that Road Runner might actually be his best friend. Both quite amusing and touching, and I'm glad this was rescued from the tax write-off vault. Overall grade: A Next up is The Odyssey, which came out in 2026. This wasn't quite as good as Oppenheimer in 2023 in my opinion, but it was still very good and very much worth seeing. It was weird that The Odyssey was briefly a football in the never-ending US culture war scrum because the movie isn't really political and doesn't really have a message beyond "war is destructive and bad", which every sensible person would agree with, and a lesser message of "violating the law of morality has unforeseen cascading bad consequences, including the destruction of civilization", which is also quite true and was one of the themes of Oppenheimer. Nolan himself dismissed the controversies as "irrelevant" and "part of the territory" since no one had actually seen the movie yet, and given that The Odyssey has made a billion and a half dollars as of this recording, I think that may have proved his point. I imagine the scrutiny from Batman fans back in the 2010s was way more intense since in the modern era, many people care more deeply about the accuracy of Batman than The Odyssey. I do think the debate over the historical accuracy in The Odyssey is pointless because the Odyssey is myth, not history. The Iliad and The Odyssey are a lot like Arthurian myth in terms of their actual historicity. Even when Arthurian legend was massively popular with English kings and nobles in the late medieval and early modern period (for example, Henry VIII's older brother was named Arthur in imitation of King Arthur), the version of Arthurian myth they celebrated and wished to emulate had virtually no connection to the reality of Britain in the 500s AD and was instead a sort of fantasy version of their own time in the 14th and 15th centuries. By the time The Odyssey was written down, no doubt a similar process was underway. Both The Iliad and The Odyssey and the Arthurian cycle probably have a kernel of historical truth buried underneath the tales of magic swords, sirens, cyclopses, and vengeful witches with magic islands. There likely was a Romano-British warlord who might have been named Arthur (or possibly Ambrosius Aurelianus) who held off the Saxons for a while before he was overwhelmed and killed. Likewise, Heinrich Schliemann was a highly eccentric and very sketchy crazy rich guy, but he did prove that there really was some version of the city of Troy that was destroyed at the end of the Bronze Age. But everything beyond those basic details came from thousands of years of embellishments and flourishes from later poets and writers. So arguing about the historical accuracy of The Odyssey is a bit like arguing if Star Wars portrays faster than light travel in an accurate way. That kind of argument is just missing the point entirely. It's also interesting to see how modern standards clashed with the ancient mindset. You know how I always say that everywhere in the United States is exactly the same right until it really, really isn't? I think ancient people are just like us until they really, really weren't. Like ancient people would have been superstitious to an extent that even the most credulous crystal and aura influencer on TikTok would find horrifying and frequently violent in a way that the most strident self-defense advocate would find shocking. The Odyssey's version of Odysseus feels guilt and remorse over his actions in a way an actual ancient Greek probably wouldn't have, but so what? This is The Odyssey viewed through the lens of the 21st century, just as those English nobles viewed the myth of King Arthur and his knights through the lens of their time. As I mentioned with Troy above, the ancient Greeks were often quite brutal and would celebrate sacking an enemy city. One side note before we get to the movie, I probably found it funnier than I should have how Nolan favorably cited classicist Emily Wilson's translation of The Odyssey as a source, and Wilson then had an extended and unintentionally comedic multi-article crashout about how much she hated the movie and of course how much she hated the commemorative Trojan Horse popcorn bucket. Apparently Wilson hated the movie so much she's going to do a new translation of The Odyssey, much to her publisher's baffled dismay. No one does offended huffy petulance quite like an academic. Anyway, back to the movie. It follows the familiar story of Odysseus through Christopher Nolan's preference for non-linear storytelling and practical effects. I did think it was interesting how in this interpretation, Odysseus explicitly connected the ruse of the Trojan Horse with the collapse of the Bronze Age and the rise of the Sea Peoples. It's also probably the most supernatural film Nolan has ever done with actual fantasy and supernatural elements as opposed to science fiction like Inception, Tenant, and Interstellar. Odysseus talks to Athena throughout the movie and it's left up to the viewer's interpretation whether or not he's actually talking to Athena or his own guilt-ridden hallucinations. That said, Odysseus encounters a witch with actual magic powers and travels to the underworld to speak with the shades of the dead, so it's entirely possible he's talking to the actual Athena. In this version, as I mentioned, Odysseus is guilt-ridden over the ruse of the Trojan Horse, which is shown as a violation of the sacred hospitality of Zeus's law and as great a crime as the creation of the atomic bomb in Oppenheimer, which of course is similar to Oppenheimer, where Oppenheimer's creation of the atomic bomb is treated similarly. There are also some genuinely scary sequences in the movie. The bit with the underworld is very spooky, the cyclops is actually quite frightening, and the character of Circe reaches the level of scary previously attained by Heath Ledger's version of The Joker in The Dark Knight. If Nolan ever decides he wants to do a horror movie, it will probably be one of the scariest ones ever made. To sum up, The Odyssey has great performances, great spectacle, great cinematography, and great action sequences. As an interesting interpretation of the original myth, definitely worth seeing. I think you can tell it was a great movie because of all the arguments on the Internet about "what does it really mean?" Great art often has that effect. Overall grade: A The final of my three favorite movies of [Summer] 2026 is Spider-Man: Brand New Day, which came out in 2026. There's a rumor, and I don't know if it's true or not, that Tom Holland found the experience of working with Christopher Nolan on The Odyssey so eye-opening that he insisted that if they made another Spider-Man movie, it had to have a reason for existing other than "make a lot of money". If this story is true, it clearly worked. Previously, I though the two best Spider-Man movies were Spider-Man 2 from 2004 and Spider-Man: No Way Home from 2021. I must now amend that opinion to say that there are three best Spider-Man movies and Spider-Man: Brand New Day is one of the three. It is pretty good. I would've trimmed it here and there, but I thoroughly enjoyed it and is an excellent Spider-Man story that totally captures the essence of the character within a good story. It takes place four years after the events of No Way Home erased everyone's memory that Peter Parker was Spider-Man. Peter has now been crime fighting full time, but it is taking a severe toll on his emotions and personal life that he's deliberately ignoring. Meanwhile, Spider-Man has become the beloved crime fighter of New York, trusted by both the NYPD and the Federal Department of Damage Control, which is a reoccurring frenemy for superheroes from other movies. When someone launches an attack on the headquarters of Damage Control, the director recruits Peter to fight their new enemy, a mysterious figure who uses telepathy to possess people from a distance. Peter is the only one who can sense it thanks to his spider sense, and he's also the only one able to resist the telepath's possession abilities. But despite his resistance to possession, fighting a telepath is a dangerous proposition for someone with as many emotional issues as Peter, and things start to spiral out of control when the telepath starts digging into his life. But there's another lesson Peter has to learn. People (and especially superheroes) who take the federal government at its word tend to regret it. For that matter, ignoring his emotional issues is causing Peter's spider powers to start acting in strange ways. But of course, at the end of the day, Spider-Man always follows his conscience, no matter how high the cost to him personally. Definitely an enjoyable movie. All the scenes with Spider-Man and Punisher were great, and the two of them had a great dynamic together. A few other Marvel Cinematic Universe people show up, but this is probably one of the most standalone movies the MCU has done in a while. Of course, the risk of MCU Continuity Lockout is always there (which is one of the reasons I started writing Half-Eleven Thief in 2023). Overall grade: A So I would say it was a pretty good summer for movies. It's also valuable lessons in not taking the Internet too seriously, which too many people do nowadays. There are all these dedicated analyses on X, Threads, and Reddit in June and May explaining why The Odyssey was going to fail for whatever reason, and instead it made $1.5 billion. So I think that's a good lesson in not taking everything you read on the internet a little too seriously. So that's it for this week. Thanks for listening to The Pulp Writer Show. I hope you found the show enjoyable. A reminder that you can listen to all the back episodes at https://thepulpwritershow.com. If you enjoyed the podcast, please leave a review on your podcasting platform of choice. Stay safe and stay healthy, and we'll see you all next week.  

It's no secret that we Gen Xers like our cartoons! Today we dive into some of the classics and review the new movie, “Coyote vs Acme.” And for good measure, we tell you a traditional Cheyenne Coyote story.

Send us Fan MailBack to the Golden Age of toy shopping. Welcome to the sixth Hidden Track Podcast!For this show, we are looking at a pair of classic toy stores that so many Gen Xers frequented in the 70s, 80s, and 90s. Child World and Kay-Bee Toys were staples growing up in those bygone decades. Walking the aisles, trying out some of the toys, and likely left a mess in our wake. It was the best of times. However, times can and do change. Today, both of these stores are mere relics of the past, consigned to the clearance bin of history. We will look at them both, good, bad, and everything in between.These are short-form shows, clocking in at roughly 10-15 minutes. They will cover one or two topics, likely ones previously covered on the In My Footsteps Podcast. These are subjects that were part of Top 5s or other list-form segments and deserve a more in-depth look.Enjoy this podcast snack and make sure to check your attic for anything with the logos on them, as they fetch some cash on eBay!Support me and the show by becoming a member on Patreon. Or you can support my work and Buy Me A Coffee!Helpful Links from this EpisodeBuy My New Book, In Their Footsteps!Searching For the Lady of the Dunes True Crime BookHooked By Kiwi - Etsy.comDJ Williams MusicKeeKee's Cape Cod KitchenMSFTS CommunityKingfisher Hotels Cape CodChristopher Setterlund.comCape Cod Living - Zazzle StoreSubscribe on YouTube!Initial Impressions 2.0 BlogCJSetterlundPhotos on EtsyGoodbye DollyListen to Episode 259 hereSupport the showSupport the show

Travels With Randy Route 66 In The Fall of '26 Episode 2 is here! Wisconsin Ya Sure You Betcha Randy and Bubba's Casual Updates Randy and Bubba discussed Randy's recent travels in Wisconsin, including stories about mosquitoes, Wisconsin Dells, and visiting during biker week. Bubba shared challenges with hot weather affecting his book business warehouse, including issues with sweat damaging packages. They briefly discussed football season and streaming service upgrades, then concluded with Randy sharing news about Stan Kroenke's $4 billion purchase of the Los Angeles Angels baseball team. Sports Franchise Valuation Discussion Randy shared information about a team owner's background, including details about his wife who is worth around $11 billion and owns 1% of Walmart. They discussed the recent $3.9 billion sale of the San Diego Padres, making it the most expensive MLB team sale to date, which influenced the higher price paid for the Angels. The conversation also touched on sports betting scandals and the rapidly increasing value of sports franchises, with Randy noting how million-dollar values have lost significance as billion-dollar values approach that threshold. Movie Performance and Re-Release Discussion Bubba and Randy discussed recent movie performances, with Bubba noting that Avengers: Endgame is projected to become the first film to earn $3 billion, while Spider-Man and other movies have performed well despite COVID-19's impact on theaters. They also discussed the success of independent films like "Obsession," which cost under $1 million to make and earned over $200 million. The conversation then shifted to the upcoming re-release of Cars, which Randy viewed as an opportunity to introduce Route 66 to a new generation, expressing concern about the road's future and the importance of road trips in understanding America's diverse landscapes. Generational Decline in Road Trips Randy expressed concerns about younger generations' lack of interest in road trips compared to previous generations, attributing it to their heavy digital lifestyle. Randy also discussed how modern car manufacturers lack the style and variety of older cars like muscle cars and 1950s vehicles, with most new cars appearing similar in black, white, and maroon colors. Randy recommended that grandparents take their grandchildren to see the Route 66 movie and suggested that Gen Xers should take their children to refresh their memories of the route. Travel and Family History Updates Randy shared updates about recent travels, including doctor visits in South Dakota where costs were significantly lower than in Washington for car registration, insurance, and Medicare. He discussed his current Lake Michigan Circle Tour trip, encountering challenges with hot weather and mosquitoes while camping in Wisconsin. The conversation ended with Randy explaining his family history research in Wisconsin, specifically mentioning his great-grandfather's birthplace and efforts to trace ancestors who disappeared after the 1860 census. Family History and Wisconsin Travel Randy shared his research into his family's history, particularly focusing on how his great-grandfather changed his surname from Smith to Smythe around the 1860s. He visited Wisconsin Dells and observed Bike Week, describing the scene of older motorcyclists with their partners. Randy is currently traveling around Lake Michigan, staying at different wineries and farms as part of a harvest host program, and expressed strong appreciation for the people and scenery of Wisconsin. Wisconsin Travels and Route 66 Bubba and Randy discussed Randy's recent travels around Wisconsin, including his experiences in Sheboygan, Milwaukee, and Door County. They talked about Wisconsin's unique cultural aspects, including supper clubs and the state's reputation for beer production. Randy shared plans for his upcoming Route 66 trip, which will take a different direction and include interviews with local people. Bubba mentioned the success of their Route 66 calendar sales and discussed potential future content, including a paid subscription option for Randy's photography on Facebook.   SO. MANY. PHOTOS - Come join the conversation on Facebook with our 37,000 friends! https://www.facebook.com/travelswithrandypodcast Have a great idea for the guys?  Want to sponsor us?  Want us to sell something National Park or Route 66 related? Want to be a guest? Want to pay for both of us to go to Alaska? Want me to stop asking questions?   bubba@travelswithrandypodcast.com !! LISTEN TO THE OFFICIAL TRAVELS WITH RANDY SOUNDTRACK! Available on all streaming music platforms such as Apple:  TWR Full Soundtrack GET YOUR COPY OF THE TWR OFFICIAL ROUTE 66 CENTENNIAL 16 MONTH CALENDAR! ONLY $19.99 Now Shipping!   https://travelswithrandy.com/

Wes Wheless got laid off twice inside a few years. COVID, then the tech downturn. He wasn't angry about the second one. He just didn't have the energy to go attach himself to somebody else's mission again and wait for it to get taken away.He didn't have a plan. He took a couple months, picked up some contract work to hold him over, and then a light bulb went off: if he could find enough of these, he might never need a full-time job again.Four years later he's got a practice serving independent consultants and a book, The Expert's Privilege, that I told him he should have written before I left corporate.The core idea is three stacked pieces:You've built real, transferable expertise over your decades in corporate.That expertise has been inefficiently deployed inside the corporate machine.You can deploy it far better on your own.His metaphor for point two is the one that stuck with me. Imagine running a cruise line with a hundred ships and fifty of them permanently tied up in port. That's what corporate does with what you know.We also get into the stuff nobody tells you. Why hourly pricing punishes you for being good. What happens when a client pigeonholes you before you open your mouth. How he figured out which part of his own service people actually valued, and then sold only that. And the thing I keep running into with Gen Xers: deeply experienced people who sit down, look at twenty-five years of work, and say "I don't know what I know."In this episode:Two layoffs, and the one that changed his mind about going backClient zero, and why hourly was the wrong modelGetting pigeonholed as "a writer" and the pricing that comes with itThe coach question that triggered his pivot: do you actually like doing this work?Writing daily for two years before there was a bookWhy he deliberately left AI out of the bookThe Expert's Privilege, definedIntellectual headshots, and how asking former clients one question reshaped his businessInvesting in yourself when corporate always paid for it beforeTIMESTAMPS00:00 — Intro01:43 — Two layoffs, and why he didn't want another corporate role03:26 — Why almost nobody who gets out wants to go back04:32 — He didn't know solo consulting was even an option06:43 — What the work actually was: executive ghostwriting and content strategy08:22 — Client zero, and the first lesson about hourly rates09:18 — Project fees, and putting guardrails on your availability10:44 — Getting pigeonholed as "a writer" before the conversation starts12:14 — When the business model started breaking13:11 — The coach's question: do you actually like doing this work?13:41 — The pivot to serving independent consultants14:59 — Brett's own winding path out of corporate15:53 — The three-tier offer, and why clients almost always pick the middle16:50 — Helping people map their lane while they're still employed17:47 — "I never gave serious thought that I could take the reins myself"20:18 — Building authority from zero, and writing daily for two years21:44 — You turn around and there's a library there22:34 — The self-doubt going into the book23:10 — Not the book. A book. Your first book.26:11 — Brett's stuck manuscript problem26:33 — The North Star workshop and the parachute metaphor27:44 — Why he left AI out on purpose30:04 — The Expert's Privilege, the three stacked ideas30:53 — A hundred ships and fifty of them tied up in port32:10 — In the corner four months ago, desperate for his brain today34:00 — Most businesses need level one help, not level three36:28 — "I don't know what I know," and why that trap is so common37:34 — Start with the problem, not with yourself38:48 — Need-to-solve versus nice-to-solve39:26 — Brett on chasing energy as the compass40:31 — Intellectual headshots, and the one question that created them42:08 — Saying no, and the add-on that killed Brett's margin43:18 — Investing in yourself when corporate always covered it45:39 — Laid off tomorrow: square one, or a head start?48:05 — You're a business with one client. Is that a good deal?49:28 — Where to find Wes and the bookQUOTES"I wasn't angry. I just didn't have the energy to attach myself to someone else's mission again, just for it to get taken away in a couple of years." — Wes"Imagine you had a cruise line with a hundred ships and fifty of them were tied up in port permanently. That's how we are in corporate." — Wes"I was that person four months ago that was getting put in the corner. And here, in a different context, they're desperate to know what I know." — Wes"If you're good at something, an hourly rate doesn't do you any favors." — Wes"Don't think of it as the book. Think of it as a book. Even easier, your first book." — Wes, on the advice that unstuck him"I don't know what I know. I've done so many things that I feel like I can't do any of them." — Wes, on what he hears constantly"Think of your current job like you're a small business owner with one client. Is that a good deal for you?" — Brett"If you were laid off tomorrow, do you want to start from square one, or do you want to feel like you had a head start?" — WesABOUT THE GUESTWes Wheless is the author of The Expert's Privilege: A Self-Deployment Guide to Leaving Corporate and Going Solo (July 2026). After two layoffs, including one from the tech education company Reforge, he built an independent practice helping solo consultants pull their expertise out of their heads and turn it into visual frameworks, something he calls intellectual headshots. He now also works with people still inside corporate who want to map and pressure-test a consulting lane before they need one.LINKSThe book The Expert's Privilege: A Self-Deployment Guide to Leaving Corporate and Going Solo https://theexpertsprivilege.com/ Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Experts-Privilege-Self-Deployment-Leaving-Corporate/dp/1788464028Wes's site and services https://bio.site/weswhelessWes on LinkedIn — https://www.linkedin.com/in/wwheless/The Collective https://trp-collective.circle.soQuestions or guest ideas? bt@bretttrainor.com

Recorded LIVE at Black Matt Studios, THE BOOMXERS are four friends too young to be Baby Boomers but too old to be GenXers. We get together every week to Jibber Jabber about music, entertainment, rural news, crazy inventions, portmanteaus, and so much more. Featuring the phenomenal music quiz known as JIMMY READS. The BoomXers: Unfiltered, Unpolished, Unapologetic, and Unsponsored.

Beat Migs! We go Straight To The Comments to find out.

This one's a step back to look at the big picture, because a lot of the Gen Xers I talk to are too busy living life to see it.Three things are colliding at once.Corporate is chaos. It's not your age, it's your expense. Somebody can do half your job for half the price, and that's who gets picked. Getting laid off is one thing. Getting back in is the real problem. Look around your own network if you don't believe me.The savings math. The generation before us had pensions. We got a 401k and a how-to video. Roughly half of Gen X has nothing put away, and the typical household isn't close to what 30 years actually costs.Longevity. This is the good news. If you take care of yourself there's a real chance you're looking at 30 or 40 more years, healthy and active.Put those three together and it doesn't add up.I'm not doing this to scare anybody. It's not a prediction, it's already happening. But there are two ways to react. You can treat it as a sunset and ride it out. Or you can treat it as the start of a second adult lifetime, which is the way I'm choosing to look at it.The back half of this episode is the part that matters: you already have everything you need to generate income on your own. The skills, the experience, the problem solving. What's in the way is unlearning what corporate taught you, and the fact that we make making money way more complicated than it needs to be.In this episode:Why it's your expense, not your ageThe musical chairs problem, and why the chairs aren't coming backPensions versus the 401k handoffWhat 30 or 40 more years actually costsWhy gig work is the wrong answerLow friction, high margin income, and what that actually looks likeWhy the first dollar outside corporate changes everythingTIMESTAMPS00:00 — Welcome, and why I'm zooming out this week01:20 — Naming it: Gen X has a math problem01:42 — Two ways to react: sunset, or jumpstart02:05 — Musical chairs, and why they're pulling five at a time02:25 — Part 1: It's not your age, it's your expense03:40 — Getting laid off isn't the problem. Getting back in is.04:20 — The professional athlete parallel04:46 — Part 2: How prepared are we, really05:05 — They got pensions. We got a how-to video.06:00 — The savings numbers nobody wants to look at07:05 — How few of us actually have a pension07:45 — Part 3: Longevity, and why it's genuinely good news08:45 — Putting all three together09:15 — This isn't a prediction. It's happening now.09:55 — The good news: you already have what you need10:30 — Seventeen income streams, and why I'm not special11:05 — Why it's not Uber and it's not DoorDash11:45 — The real blocker: unlearning corporate12:45 — Low friction, high margin income13:40 — Go sell that first dollar14:05 — Don't bet on another 20 years in corporate14:45 — The opportunity sitting in your own backyard15:05 — Don't replace your job with a worse version of it16:00 — What changed inside the community16:25 — Nobody's judging you (my TikTok debut says hi)17:35 — The better you are, the more at risk you are18:20 — What the 20-somethings figured out that we didn't18:45 — How to reach meLINKS AND CTAThe Collective Now focused entirely on the thing most people are stuck on: making money outside of corporate. A group of Gen Xers figuring it out together. https://trp-collective.circle.soEverything else https://BrettTrainor.comQuestions or episode ideas? Email me: bt@bretttrainor.comIf the show's useful to you, hit follow wherever you listen.GenX, laid off over 50, ageism at work, corporate layoffs, retirement math, 401k, longevity, second act, making money outside corporate, career change over 50, side income, Gen X retirement crisis

"So, this is it. We're going to die." -- Arthur Dent That felt a little bit appropriate. Sorry if it freaked you out. It's the very last episode, y'all. Am I sniffling as I type this? You better believe it. This has been one hell of a ride. We love you. So long. Farewell. Auf wiedersehen. Goodbye. POLITICAL AND PETTY DESIGNS ON SHIRTS, HATS, MUGS, AND MORE! https://bitchenboutique.dashery.com Profits support this ol' retired podcaster right here!   We love you for listening! Please take a moment to rate and review us, and earn a STICKER! (Everyone loves stickers!) And please subscribe or add us to your favorites list on your favorite platform so you never miss a show! And share us with your cool friends, not the lame ones. Questions? Comments? Complaints? Write to us at PitneyAndAmelia@gmail.com! Check out our various socials etc at https://linktr.ee/bitchenboutique WEBSITE AND EMAIL AND SOCIAL MEDIA ACCOUNTS WILL STILL BE ACTIVE SO SAY HI SOMETIME!   Who the heck are Pitney and Amelia? A gay guy and his fat friend talking about everything! We've got over 40 YEARS of stories to share about stuff we love, stuff that annoys us, people we've known, places we've been, and things we've seen. Geeky, silly, and always opinionated. NAMES ARE CHANGED TO PROTECT THE GUILTY!   We may be awful, but we're right! Here, queer, and in your ear. Every other Friday for over ten years.   The Bitchen Boutique is all about mental health and openness and honesty and if you're in crisis and in the US, call or text 988, or go to 988lifeline.org to reach the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline.  And if you just need some friends, you've got two right here.   As always... edited, engineered, produced, and promoted by Amelia.   LGBTQIA+ | Comedy | GenX | Fandom | Horror | Spirituality | Mental Health  #finale #timcurry #goodbye #fyp #LGBTQIAplus #Comedy #GenX #Fandom #Horror #Spirituality #MentalHealth o o o o o o o o o o KEYWORDS: Pitney and Amelia, Pitney & Amelia, Bitchen Boutique, Bitchen Boutique podcast, Pitney, Amelia, Generation X, Gen X, GenX, GenXer, GenXers, comedy, comedy podcast, current events, current events podcast, pop culture, pop culture podcast, talk show, chat show, us politics, progressive, progressive podcast, queer stories, lgbtqia+ stories, queer podcast, lgbtqia+ podcast, gay, gay podcast, trans rights, horror, horror fans, horror community, fandom, spirituality, coven, secular coven, pagan, paganism, tarot, tarot cards, witchy, antifa, anti-trump, anti-maga, cancer, breast cancer, breast cancer treatment, fat acceptance, haes, mental health podcast, mental health, scifi, science fiction, geek, geek culture, nerd, nerd culture, fyp, vlog, dayinthelife, pet peeves, dashery, teepublic, tim curry, dolly parton, day drinking, final episode, last episode, end of the road, SO LONG, FAREWELL, AUF WIEDERSEHEN, GOODBYE    

We're joined by Jim Vinoski, a Gen Xer who spent over three decades on factory floors before turning to writing about American manufacturing. He wrote for Forbes for seven years and is releasing a book profiling 22 of the best American manufacturers, built on stories he collected from a career spent inside the industry rather than looking at it from the outside.We talk about how manufacturing has been unfairly written off for decades, and why the companies that actually thrive tend to share the same handful of traits: they treat people as individuals rather than resources, they think in decades instead of quarters, and the people running them genuinely love the work. Jim shares some standout stories from the book, including a Wisconsin company that built a K-12 STEM program from scratch to solve its own labor shortage, and a Michigan manufacturer that hires people straight out of halfway houses and built its own affordable housing subdivision for employees and the surrounding community.One of the most surprising finds in his research was Revere Copper, a company founded by Paul Revere himself that's still running strong today, and now positioned well for the AI and grid infrastructure boom because of its focus on copper.HighlightsJim's three-decade manufacturing career and what led him to start writing about the industry.The common traits behind the standout companies in his upcoming book.A Wisconsin company that built its own K-12 pipeline to solve the skills gap.A Michigan manufacturer's approach to second-chance hiring and affordable housing.The surprising history behind Revere Copper, founded by Paul Revere himself.Jim's book on America's best manufacturers is out now, links in the show notes. Make sure to subscribe to the show so you never miss episodes. We appreciate you being here.Get in touch with Jim:WebsiteLinkedInYoutubeJim's BookGet in touch with us:Check out the Blue Collar BS website.Steve Doyle:WebsiteLinkedInEmailBrad Herda:WebsiteLinkedInEmailThis podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis: Podtrac - https://analytics.podtrac.com/privacy-policy-gdrpOP3 - https://op3.dev/privacy

Most churches don’t start thinking about leadership development until a key person resigns. By then, the only real option is to post the role and hope someone qualified applies. In this special compilation episode, we’ve pulled together four conversations with leaders who have built the habit of developing people long before the seat opens up. The churches growing fastest right now are rarely the ones with the best job postings. They’re the ones who already know who’s next. Don’t miss the four critical lessons every church should consider as they head into fall hiring and budget planning. From the leadership model that quietly keeps benches empty to a mindset shift about where leaders actually come from to a challenge you could give your team on Monday to the structure that produces people you can genuinely put on payroll, each conversation offers a practical step forward. The Model Nobody Names Out Loud Tim Foot explains what he calls hero-driven leadership: the habit of relying too heavily on standout individuals to carry the mission. It produces short-term results, but it creates burnout, unrealistic hiring expectations, and fragile systems. What makes it so hard to escape is that it feels good. It feels productive to be the person who solves the problems and holds the answers. Foot also names the “shiny object trap,” where churches chase talent from larger organizations only to discover that the leader arrives with a playbook that doesn’t fit and no systems to support them. Key Takeaway // Hero dependence is a staffing strategy, whether or not anyone chose it on purpose. Healthy teams are built when leaders get comfortable saying they don’t know what to do next, because that’s what opens the room for collaboration. Listen to the Full Episode // Hero Dependence Is a Terrible Growth Strategy with Tim Foot (June 18, 2026) The Leaders Are Already in Your Building Spence Shelton draws a parallel most church leaders have never made. We all agree that growing a church by reaching lost people beats growing it by transfer from other churches. Then, when it comes to leaders, we reverse the logic and look for someone who’s already trained elsewhere. Shelton makes the case for the shoulder tap: intentionally asking someone whether God might be calling them into ministry. At Mercy Church, both executive pastors and two of three campus pastors came out of the marketplace, from banking, plant management, and physical therapy. None of them would have applied. Somebody had to ask. Key Takeaway // Many future ministry leaders never consider vocational ministry because no one ever raised the possibility with them. Developing from within takes longer than hiring from outside, and it produces leaders shaped by your church’s culture rather than someone else’s. Listen to the Full Episode // Stop Plucking Talent, Start Developing It with Spence Shelton (August 6, 2026) The Challenge That Costs Nothing Chris Vaught faced the constraint every growing church knows well. Connection Point was growing fast, but budget always arrives last, and southeastern Missouri isn’t a place people relocate to for a ministry position. So the church started looking at its own congregation and treating volunteers as unpaid staff with real roles and responsibilities. The starting point was a single challenge to every staff member: go find your Timothy. One person you invest in deeply enough that if you were out on a Sunday, the ministry would still run. Key Takeaway // A leadership pipeline doesn’t have to begin with a budget line. It can begin with one question asked of every staff member about who could carry their ministry if they weren’t there next weekend. Listen to the Full Episode // From 300 to 2,500: Building a Leadership Pipeline That Fuels Growth with Chris Vaught (September 25, 2025) Training Is Not Development Dave Miller draws a distinction that reframes what most churches call leadership development. Churches are excellent at training: the sermon, the class, the book of the month, the small group discussion. All of it is content delivery, and content has never been more available. Development is something else. Miller’s team identifies seven ingredients: training, spiritual formation, soft skills, ownership, mental wellness, and developmental conversations. He also challenges leaders on where accountability sits. When a sports team wins, we talk about the players. When it loses, we replace the manager. Church leaders should apply the same standard to the people they’re developing. Key Takeaway // If content were the key ingredient, leadership development would already be solved. What emerging leaders need is proximity, ownership, and someone willing to slow down and have the conversation. Listen to the Full Episode // Who’s the Next You? Building a Gen Z Residency Pipeline with Dave Miller (September 11, 2025) These four conversations form a ladder, and you don’t have to start at the top. Most churches never start at all because they assume the only real option is a residency program they can’t yet afford. Tim named the model keeping your bench empty. Spence gave the mindset shift and the shoulder tap. Chris gave the first move that costs nothing. Dave gave the structure that produces people you can hire. As you head into this fall, the question worth bringing to your next staff meeting is simple: who on our team has never been tapped on the shoulder, and what would it take to have that conversation this month? Thank You for Tuning In! There are a lot of podcasts you could be tuning into today, but you chose unSeminary, and I'm grateful for that. If you enjoyed today's show, please share it by using the social media buttons you see at the left hand side of this page. Also, kindly consider taking the 60-seconds it takes to leave an honest review and rating for the podcast on iTunes, they're extremely helpful when it comes to the ranking of the show and you can bet that I read every single one of them personally! Thank You to This Episode’s Sponsor: TouchPoint As your church reaches more people, one of the biggest challenges is making sure no one slips through the cracks along the way.TouchPoint Church Management Software is an all-in-one ecosystem built for churches that want to elevate discipleship by providing clear data, strong engagement tools, and dependable workflows that scale as you grow. TouchPoint is trusted by some of the fastest-growing and largest churches in the country because it helps teams stay aligned, understand who they're reaching, and make confident ministry decisions week after week. If you've been wondering whether your current system can carry your next season of growth, it may be time to explore what TouchPoint can do for you. You can evaluate TouchPoint during a free, no-pressure one-hour demo at TouchPointSoftware.com/demo. Episode Transcript Rich Birch — At the beginning of 2026, we surveyed executive pastors like you and nearly one in four named that staff health and structure, how we get our teams to work together was your top fear going into 2026. You know and I know it, you probably have an open role at your church that you’re trying to fill, or you’re maybe about to have an open role. When a key person leaves your team and your instinct is just to post it, what can we do?Rich Birch — Finding, releasing, equipping leadership is critically important. Welcome to the last compilation episode of summer 2026 here on the unSeminary podcast. Super excited about today’s conversation, all about developing leaders within our organizations.Rich Birch — I know that in many churches, we think of this as a season where new staff are hiring or we’re hiring them into new roles. We’re working on budget planning for next year. There’s all the fall ramp up.Rich Birch — All four of these conversations are going to be helpful for you. The first one, we’ve got Tim Foot. He is the CEO of Slingshot, has nearly 30 years in ministry leadership, and his team has literally worked with thousands of churches on staffing.Rich Birch — Listen to this kickoff to today’s conversation, really setting up the tension that we find ourselves in. He names the leadership model that most of us have absorbed without anyone talking about it out loud, and it could be derailing your church and my church. Let’s listen in to what Tim has to say about developing leaders. [Clip 1 Begins]Tim Foot — Yeah, I mean, the model we see is hero-driven leadership. It’s when we rely too much on individuals to actually carry the mission. And I think the cracks have happened.Tim Foot — I mean, we’ve seen it, Rich. You and I are similar ages. I think the cracks are happening generationally.Tim Foot — The builders and boomers were wired differently for a different time and culture. And us Gen Xers, we can code switch. I mean, we see that happening all the time.Tim Foot — And as we stepped into leadership, the cracks started to appear. I mean, we see it every week, another leader burning out, doing stupid things because of too much pressure. Then Millennials and Gen Z are now leading in a new way that we need to embrace.Tim Foot — And so I think we’re seeing those cracks around that hero dependence, and we’re starting to see the need more than ever to have a team awareness, a holistic approach, or we’re just going to have leaders continue to burn out. And we see it around unrealistic hiring expectations, lack of support for great leaders when they’re hired, a lack of development. Hero dependence is a terrible staffing and growth strategy and becomes a massive trap when it comes to a number of the key focus areas or patterns we’ve seen that healthy teams focus on a move mission forward.Rich Birch — Yeah, see, this is the thing when you I heard you say that once and it literally I sat up and I was like, oh, man, I’ve seen that in my own, you know, my own hiring. I’ve seen that in the way I’ve talked with, you know, I see the leaders around me. You see these people who they’ve kind of built the entire ministry around themselves and they’ve built it’s like it doesn’t work if they don’t. It’s like they’re such a unique individual. They have to lift it all. Rich Birch — Like, why do we keep coming back to that? Why? Even if we know like intellectually in our heads, yeah, that’s not a good idea.Rich Birch — But what makes that model so sticky? It feels like we just keep coming back to this same thing time. In fact, we actually reward it. We’ll be like, wow, isn’t that great? This person’s amazing. And we just kind of keep moving on. Why is that?Tim Foot — It’s the shiny object trap. I mean, the shiny object, aka the talented leader that we think is going to catapult the ministry. Often we see it in hiring conversations when a particular organization wants to go after somebody that’s been in a much bigger organization than them.Tim Foot — And often that person, if they can attract them, will come in with a playbook that isn’t uniquely suited to the organization they’re stepping into. Or there aren’t systems to support that new leader and the growth that’s going to happen. And burnout happens at every level.Tim Foot — But we both know, Rich, busy work makes us feel productive. But is it the right work? And we know that we can be ourselves the shiny object. It feels good to be the hero. It feels good to be the one that’s solving problems. It feels good to be the one that has all the answers.Tim Foot — And I think that’s one of the biggest threats in healthy leadership today, is feeling like you have to have all the answers. Because I think one of the most powerful statements from healthy leaders and healthy teams is, Hey, we don’t know what to do next. Because it actually opens up the room for new thought. It opens up the room for collaboration. And it opens up the room for teamwork. Tim Foot — But it’s easier to move quick. It’s easier to move quick and be surrounded by people who agree and play it safe. And then down the road, we realize that we weren’t growing in every sense of that word. And the mission was stalled out.Tim Foot — We know we often have to slow down, re-strategize, look at who’s around the table, work out how we work together to move faster in the long term. We have to be vulnerable to make a team work. And sometimes it requires us to actually help others win than focus on heroes.Tim Foot — I mean, you think about a winning sports team. It’s not about just one person out there doing all the work. We’ve got to work together as a team.Tim Foot — You know, it’s how do we work together and have less dependence on that shiny object, those standout leaders or those heroes. [Clip 1 Ends]Rich Birch — Oh, so good. You know, Tim named something there. Man, it feels good to be the person with all the answers.Rich Birch — Can I have a little confessional time with you, friends? Earlier parts of my ministry career, I have really struggled with that. I wanted to be the person who had all the answers, but it’s a trap. And most of us find ourselves in it. Rich Birch — We’ve got to move beyond hero dependence, either wanting to be the hero or to find heroes. It’s not a character flaw. It’s a system that ultimately rewards the wrong thing. Rich Birch — So the question that I have is what is the alternative? Where do we go if we’re not just trying to hire the next shiny object?Rich Birch — The thing that will, the person that will, you know, plug in like a thing, where do leaders actually come from? I love this conversation coming up with Spence Shelton as the lead pastor of Mercy Church in Charlotte, planted in 2015, now three campuses online, plus launching a family of churches. I want you to listen for a few things.Rich Birch — First of all, Spence parallels, makes a parallel that I really have not heard many people say between how we think about reaching people who are far from God and how we think about finding leaders and how these two are connected. Listen carefully for the shoulder tap that he talks about. You know, oftentimes one of the things I find most revealing about podcast interviews is people say things just in the sides that really do under that, that give you a sense of what’s actually going on under the hood and pay attention to where his executive pastor campus pastors come from.Rich Birch — Let’s listen in to what Spence Shelton has to say. [Clip 2 Begins]Spence Shelton — I think that mentality starts all the way down to the idea of reaching people that don’t know Christ versus just sheep swapping from one church to the other church, right? So you can grow your church by transfer growth, which I actually am one who, hey man, if somebody’s on the sideline in one church and then they plug into your church, I’m all for it. And if the same thing happens with Mercy, all for it.Spence Shelton — But our aim, what we all know as pastors and ministry leaders is our aim is, man, let’s reach lost people and then disciple them, right? The same thing I think should be true with leadership development. For some reason, when it comes then to developing leaders, we tend to go a different direction and think, well, let’s just go find where some leaders are and get them to plug in.Spence Shelton — It’s like, we don’t do that even with discipleship. Why are we switching our mindset? And so I want to just kind of, I have to, I was convicted and wanted to call our church and I would call others to the same mindset that you have with discipleship.Spence Shelton — Let that carry over into your leadership and your leadership development as well. And I think that’s how we’re going to grow, just as how we’re going to grow the kingdom by reaching lost people, how we’re going to grow the leaders in the kingdom, the number of leaders we have, it’s going to be developing them in our church. And I just, I don’t know that we’re even thinking that way and asking the question, is the guy who’s a 27-year-old physical therapist in my church, has anybody ever bothered to tap him on the shoulder and ask, Hey man, could God be calling you into ministry because I watch you?Spence Shelton — And no, we’re not doing the shoulder tap, man. And so, um, our right now, I just, I love it. I’m just a little bit of the story of our church. Our exec, both of our executive pastors and two of our three campus pastors were all in the marketplace. Spence Shelton — One of our executive pastors was in banking. Another was a plant manager. We have two campus pastors who were both, I use physical therapists cause they’re both former physical therapists. And you know, we’re sitting there having these conversations. You know, what makes a great pastor is someone who has sat with person after person, told them, Hey, you should do this to feel better.Spence Shelton — And then they come back to you later and say, Hey, I don’t feel better. And you say, did you do the thing I told you to do? And they say, no. And you say, well, you should have done that. Spence Shelton — And a patient long suffering physical therapist turns out to be a great pastor, but somebody has got to tap him on the shoulder and say, Hey man, I think God might be calling you into this. Spence Shelton — And so my, my encouragement to anybody who’s in ministry right now, kind of in that leadership development role. And you’re like, I don’t know, we’re going to have to go outside to find some talent. I promise it’s going to take longer the way I’m talking about. But if you will seek the Lord, ask the Lord, and then start shoulder tapping and giving some opportunities for guys to lead for men and women to lead there in your ministry and whatever the leadership roles might be. I think there might be more people in there than you realize, because I believe that God provides for the church that he’s growing, that he’s called you to lead. And so I think that’s true with leaders as well. [Clip 2 Ends]Rich Birch — Hey, friends, 9 out of 10 campus pastors, they do come from within. So if you are launching new locations in the future, man, we got to start developing campus pastors today. Rich Birch — But I know some of you are saying, listen, listen, listen. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That all sounds good. Shoulder tapping. Great, great, great. Rich Birch — But how, how do I do it? How do I train my team to do it? How do we motivate, stay focused on this? Rich Birch — The gap that my, what I have found, it’s not desire. It’s not even understand that people don’t understand that that’s how we do it. It’s not a resistance to those things. It’s none of that. It’s just that nobody owns it because you see development is everyone’s job, which means that it’s nobody’s job.Rich Birch — It’s easy for this to fall through the cracks. Aren’t we all supposed to be developing leaders? So if we’re all developing leaders, my experience has been that means that really none of us are or we’re not doing it in a systematic way.Rich Birch — Super excited to have Chris Vaught with us. He is the lead pastor of Connection Point Church in Missouri. Listen, it grew from 300 people in 2011 to 2,500 today across multiple campuses.Rich Birch — And he outlines one challenge that Chris gave every staff member. And I really want you to listen carefully for this, because to be honest, this is pure unSeminary magic. This is like what I love about our podcast.Rich Birch — You could take this out of this interview today and put it into your next team meeting on Monday. Apply it to your church. Let’s listen in for what Chris wants to say to you about how we train people to shoulder tap, find leaders and release them. [Clip 3 Begins]Chris Vaught — You can only hire out so much, right? Because even though our church has grown fast, budget always comes up last. But you have to look at other avenues other than just, oh, I’ll hire another position.Chris Vaught — So we started looking at congregation. We began to develop our own leadership pathway or pipeline to develop not only volunteers, but our future staff. We knew we grew really fast. We need to hire from within, but we still couldn’t hire every position. Chris Vaught — So we started looking at our volunteers as almost as non-paid staff positions. And so we have an atmosphere of expectation of roles and responsibilities and also the value of what they’re doing.Chris Vaught — That the kingdom is dependent upon all of us using our gifts and talents. And so we started this pathway. And at first it was simply a challenge to every staff member. You go find your Timothy. You go find one other person that you can invest yourself into, a volunteer. Chris Vaught — So that if on Saturday night, and here was kind of the criteria for us: if on Saturday night, something were to happen and you catch COVID. Okay. We’re at that time. Could this ministry run the next day because of the person you have personally equipped… Rich Birch — I love that clarity. Chris Vaught — …to hold the ministry.Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s so good.Rich Birch — We began to put those pieces together. That’s right. You go ahead. I cut you off there. Chris Vaught — No, no. I was just saying that’s what we began. We began this pipeline and that was really the basic level at first. Every staff member finding that one Timothy, if you will, if you want to use that terminology, that could run that ministry if you were out. [Clip 3 Ends]Rich Birch — See what I told you? The Saturday night test is literally the cheapest leadership development tool in this entire episode. If you do nothing else out of today’s episode, do that.Rich Birch — But I know, listen, there can be a gap on that, a ceiling. Finding your Timothy fills gaps, but it does not produce people necessarily kind of week-in, week-out that you could put on print a payroll. You need to also do some development. You need to have some intentional leadership development.Rich Birch — Most churches, again, think that they’re developing leaders, but they’re really just handing out books or running a monthly team meeting, that sort of thing. I want to introduce you, reintroduce you to my friend Dave Miller. He’s a former worship and creative arts pastor in Las Vegas, in Kentucky, in Michigan, and he and his team have worked with over 150 churches and over 160 residents.Rich Birch — What do we mean by residents? These are people that are in the pipeline for thinking clearly in their lives about joining your staff team or staff teams of another church somewhere across the country. He defines seven ingredients.Rich Birch — Listen, I had the honor of writing the foreword to Dave’s book, Who’s the Next You? I would highly recommend you pick up a copy of that and think through that. But let’s listen in a little bit of what Dave has to say today. [Clip 4 Begins]Dave Miller — Well, we would say there’s seven ingredients. There’s a chapter in the book, seven ingredients. You can get it on our website right now.Dave Miller — Seven ingredients of what we would say is leadership development. So what you’re talking about, really, a sermon is training, if you think about it, like in a, in a market sense, I’m going to talk at you for 35 minutes. There’s four points. It’s very good. It’s inspired. It’s like Ted, Ted, long Ted Talk every 52 times a year, plus Christmas Eve and whatever.Dave Miller — And I would just say, we call that training. Churches for a long time have done really, really well with training, right? It’s either it’s the sermon or it’s Sunday school. It’s even the AI delivered small group questions I get from my men’s group, right? Dave Miller — It is staff. When I say, do y’all do leadership development? Yeah. Tell me about that.Dave Miller — And they start talking about your book or Carey's book or Craig Groeschel's book. It’s a book of the month. It’s conversation. Even now, now we’ve taken training and we’re still delivering the content, but we’re discussing it and we’re filling in blanks. Right. And we do that. Dave Miller — And, or spiritual formation. I had a well-known keynote kind of person. We just need to disciple these kids and get out of their way. And I was like, Oh, neat. Actually we don’t. Dave Miller — We did that once. It’s called the Jesus movement. I think that was the Jesus movement or the Jesus people in the early seventies, which kind of mirrors what’s going on on college campuses, you think. Dave Miller — We don’t need to just disciple them and get… We got to go with them. So, so training, spiritual formation, soft skills, which is the pain point of all the bosses, the emotional lack of intelligence of things. Those would be the three core ones.Dave Miller — And then we have to provide best practices. We have to, we have to provide ownership, which is a big thing for us in our small business, small church world at the 12 month mark. When we’re saying, well, she just doesn’t get it. She didn’t get, Oh, what doesn’t she get? Dave Miller — He just doesn’t understand what… We talk about our downline people as if they’re executive leaders with 20 years of experience. It would be totally fine for someone to accuse me of something like that.Dave Miller — But like when we think of sports, we don’t talk about individual players. We talk about the coaches. When the team’s losing, whose fault is it? As a lifetime Cincinnati Reds fan we change the manager. We don’t talk about number 78 and 14. Dave Miller — When the team’s doing amazing, it’s about the player.He’s killing it. She’s killing it. He’s killing it. When the team is losing, we have to own it similarly.Dave Miller — This is on us. Rich Birch — Wow. Wow. Dave Miller — Mental wellness. One of the seven things, mental wellness. If you can’t prove to me that you know, I’m not, I’m not here giving you even a theological construct. Cause we work with all sorts of churches that believe all sorts of things, right? But mental health, if you can’t prove to me that you have a plan, at least, or you’ve thought about it, that’s gonna be a problem. We’re checking it on. Dave Miller — And then finally developmental conversations. This is not delivered only through training to your point. [Clip 4 Ends]Rich Birch — What a fantastic group of conversations. Just a thin slice of so many of the conversations we’ve had over the last year in this whole area. Rich Birch — Tim, he named the model that can keep your and my bench empty. Spence gave us the mindset shift and the shoulder tap. Chris gave us the simplest form of the really first move that costs you absolutely nothing. And Dave finally gave you the formal structure that produces people you could hire, put on your team long-term.Rich Birch — Listen, you do not need to start at the top. Most churches never start at all because they only think the real option is just going out and hiring people externally. Listen, really the question I want to leave you with is where Tim started us at the beginning.Rich Birch — Maybe dear listener, you are listening in today and you have the hero mindset. Maybe you need to start with you and figure out what you can do in your area to pass it all along. Listen, we’ve got links for all these four episodes in the show notes here at unSeminary.Rich Birch — We’re on a mission to help 100 churches grow by a thousand people. We do that through these free podcasts, courses, coaching, cohorts. We do a lot to try to get in your corner.Rich Birch — We’ve got so much coming up this fall. Stay tuned. Some great stuff coming your way to see your church be more effective.Rich Birch — Thanks so much, friends. Take care.

Recorded LIVE at Black Matt Studios, THE BOOMXERS are four friends too young to be Baby Boomers but too old to be GenXers. We get together every week to Jibber Jabber about music, entertainment, rural news, crazy inventions, portmanteaus, and so much more. Featuring the phenomenal music quiz known as JIMMY READS. The BoomXers: Unfiltered, Unpolished, Unapologetic, and Unsponsored.

For most GenXers, going to the beach in the 70s and 80s meant jumping waves, building sandcastles, and getting sun poisoning so bad you and your siblings would take turns peeling each other's skin off. For Heidi K. Brown, it was her job to put a stop to all that beach fun. Her summers were spent pounding the hot sand passing out flyers trying to convince parents to hand their kids over to her parents' Vacation Bible School. Bitchin' summer? NOT! In this episode, Eileen talks with Heidi about her memoir THE MAP I DRAW, the path that led her from law and legal writing into travel memoir, and how Rome became a turning point in her life. They dig into family, faith, fear, rebellion, and the idea of “aging powerfully” instead of quietly accepting limits.Heidi shares how travel became a form of healing from some of the dysfunction she carried from her conservative fundamentalist Gen X childhood, how she built a writing practice around journals and Morning Pages, and why she sees memoir as both storytelling and self-advocacy.Heidi is a Law Professor and Associate Dean for Upper Level Writing at New York Law School. She earned her master's degree in Applied Positive Psychology from the University of Pennsylvania in 2021. She crafted a life of flourishing through teaching, writing, boxing, jumping up and down at U2 concerts, studying Italian, and traveling the world solo. You can find out more about Heidi at:https://www.heidikristinbrown.com/Follow Heidi Here IG: https://www.instagram.com/introvertedlawyerIG: https://www.instagram.com/heidiographia/ Substack: https://heidiography.substack.com/For information about Heidi's books and speaking engagements please email her at: heidi@theintrovertedlawyer.com.  Support the showStrangers With Kittens is a podcast created by Eileen Kelly and Produced by Ashley Aker. Original music composed and performed by Chris Hajian. You can listen to full podcast episodes on Spotify, Amazon, Audible, and Apple Podcasts. Follow Strangers With Kittens On Social Media Facebook InstagramTikTokYouTubeKeep The Conversation Going https://www.strangerswithkittens.com/

Big announcement in the show intro. Huge. Ya gotta listen to find out!   How to be more present and purposeful in your life instead of floating along and just reacting to the shit that happens to you, using a few witchy YouTubers as inspiration! Links for them both below.   Peeves: Big box stores appropriating "Summerween" and "Code Orange." Bushes blocking the view of traffic.    Promos: Chatsunami  https://www.chatsunami.com/ 2 Skeptical Chaps http://www.2skepticalchaps.libsyn.com/ (Want to swap show promos? Email us!)   Kelly-Ann Maddox talks basic, everyday witchery: https://youtu.be/IHViPTGS7tA?si=oNvW8owVXVg-v4rt   Grumpy Old Crone yells about spoons:  https://youtu.be/bAL0IVLQjEc?si=_6wliqKYPHSeDyXx    POLITICAL AND PETTY DESIGNS ON SHIRTS, HATS, MUGS, AND MORE! https://bitchenboutique.dashery.com Profits support this podcast right here!   We love you for listening! Please take a moment to rate and review us, and earn a STICKER! (Everyone loves stickers!) And please subscribe or add us to your favorites list on your favorite platform so you never miss a show! And share us with your cool friends, not the lame ones.   Questions? Comments? Complaints? Write to us at PitneyAndAmelia@gmail.com! Check out our various socials etc at https://linktr.ee/bitchenboutique   Who the heck are Pitney and Amelia? A gay guy and his fat friend talking about everything! We've got over 40 YEARS of stories to share about stuff we love, stuff that annoys us, people we've known, places we've been, and things we've seen. Geeky, silly, and always opinionated. NAMES ARE CHANGED TO PROTECT THE GUILTY!   We may be awful, but we're right! Here, queer, and in your ear. Every other Friday.   The Bitchen Boutique is all about mental health and openness and honesty and if you're in crisis and in the US, call or text 988, or go to 988lifeline.org to reach the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline.  And if you just need some friends, you've got two right here.   Edited, engineered, produced, and promoted by Amelia. LGBTQIA+ | Comedy | GenX | Fandom | Horror | Spirituality | Mental Health #witchery #petpeeves #fyp #LGBTQIAplus #Comedy #GenX #Fandom #Horror #Spirituality #MentalHealth _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ KEYWORDS: Pitney and Amelia, Pitney & Amelia, Bitchen Boutique, Bitchen Boutique podcast, Pitney, Amelia, Generation X, Gen X, GenX, GenXer, GenXers, comedy, comedy podcast, current events, current events podcast, pop culture, pop culture podcast, talk show, chat show, us politics, progressive, progressive podcast, queer stories, lgbtqia+ stories, queer podcast, lgbtqia+ podcast, gay, gay podcast, trans rights, horror, horror fans, horror community, fandom, spirituality, coven, secular coven, pagan, paganism, tarot, tarot cards, witchy, antifa, anti-trump, anti-maga, cancer, breast cancer, breast cancer treatment, fat acceptance, haes, mental health podcast, mental health, scifi, science fiction, geek, geek culture, nerd, nerd culture, fyp, vlog, dayinthelife, pet peeves, dashery, teepublic, witch, witchiness, living with purpose, mindfulness, acting with intention, vegetarianism, kelly-ann Maddox, grumpy old crone, fyp

Dallas Cowboys and New Orleans Saints' six explosive fights, today's holidays and celebrity birthdays, National Radio Day, “Robert Plant vs. Animal” comedic game, ways to get Gen Xers to come to concerts again — plus the latest news and sports. 

Improvements to concerts that could get Gen Xers to attend again, alarms and waking up family members, Menards stores, bear stories, Jokes with Will — plus the latest news and sports. 

Brett Trainor Unplugged is for Gen Xers who want to get one step closer to living the life they want—on their terms. After six years of building life beyond the default corporate playbook, thousands of conversations with Gen Xers, entrepreneurs, and ex...

Recorded LIVE at Black Matt Studios, THE BOOMXERS are four friends too young to be Baby Boomers but too old to be GenXers. We get together every week to Jibber Jabber about music, entertainment, rural news, crazy inventions, portmanteaus, and so much more. Featuring the phenomenal music quiz known as JIMMY READS. The BoomXers: Unfiltered, Unpolished, Unapologetic, and Unsponsored.

It's Tuesday, August 18th, A.D. 2026. This is The Worldview in 5 Minutes heard on 140 radio stations and at www.TheWorldview.com.  I'm Adam McManus. (Adam@TheWorldview.com) By Kevin Swanson and Timothy Reed Arizona pastor murdered by crucifixion Demonically inspired opposition to the Christian faith is on the rise here in the United States as well as overseas.  A Christian pastor in Arizona was subjected to a crucifixion-type murder last year. The perpetrator, Adam Sheafe, confessed he did it because the pastor would not compromise on his teaching on the Biblical doctrine of the Trinity and the deity of Jesus Christ.   The murderer, in this case, has been sentenced to life in prison. “For this reason, the Jews persecuted Jesus, and sought to kill Him, because He had done these things on the Sabbath..  . but also that He said that God was His Father, making Himself equal with God.” That's John 5:16 and 18.   Ukraine has achieved an 8-1 casualty ratio with Russia since January Ukraine is back on top in the Russia-Ukraine conflict.  The Center for Strategic and International Studies reports that Ukraine has achieved as much as an 8-1 casualty ratio since the beginning of the year — up from a 2-1 ratio since the beginning of the war.  The report also notes that the war is taking a toll on the Russian people. They suffer from a “sputtering economy, higher prices on groceries and other expenses, tax increases, significant internet restrictions, and an oppressive crackdown on freedom of speech.” Russia has suffered an estimated 450,000 fatalities in the conflict. That compares to the United States losing 102,000 men in military conflicts since World War II. Dramatic increase in military budgets in the Far East Sabers are rattling in the Pacific. Japan's military budget is up 5% year-over-year. South Korea's budget is up 7.5%. The Philippines' budget is up 9%.  And Taiwan's is up 16%.  China's build-up began 25 years ago and is now averaging 7% per year. China's budget is running at $283 billion compared to Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan which are spending $150 billion combined.  America's deficit up 11% Here in America, for the first 10 months of the fiscal year, the U.S. deficit registered an 11% increase year-over-year. That's 31% above the average deficit produced by the Biden budgets between 2021 and 2025. Proverbs 28:22 reads, “A man with an evil eye hastens after riches, and does not consider that poverty will come upon him.” Gen Z investors believe sports betting is good investment An online survey of 1,000 U.S. retail investors conducted in late March and early April, which was released this week, found that 52% of Gen Z investors were planning to shift money originally set aside for stocks or other investments into sports wagers over the past year.  Only about one-third of Gen Z participants reported no involvement in sports betting at all, compared with 63% across all age groups in the survey. Specifically, 26% of Gen Z respondents -- those born between 1997 and 2007 -- said they view sports betting as a deliberate, ongoing part of their wealth strategy. That figure drops sharply with age: 14% of Millennials, 6% of Gen X, and just 1% of Baby Boomers reported the same outlook. Overall, U.S. sports betting has increased from $2 billion of waging to $166 billion in waging since 2018 - just eight years ago, according to Research Ground.   Gen Z also loves cryptocurrency In addition, Motley Fool's recent survey found that Gen Zers are the most likely to invest in cryptocurrency at 49% compared to other demographics including 46% of Millennials, 26% of Gen Xers, and 11% of Baby Boomers.   Plus, 57% of cryptocurrency purchasers think it's an investment, and 26% use it for a monetary exchange. But crypto is losing favor with American investors. Gallup's recent poll found only 2% of Americans favor crypto for a long-term investment which is down from 8% four years ago.  Real estate, stocks, and gold are the favorite choices for investors now. The birth dearth in America The National Center for Education Statistics reports that public schools in America have lost almost two million students since 2019.  This is partially due to the birth dearth – or the decline in America's fertility rate. Since 2015, it amounts to a loss of about one million children. Births to women in America topped out in 2007 at 2.12 or 2,122 births per 1,000 women aged 15–44.  Today, the birth rate is hovering around 1.57 or 1,570 births per 1,000 women. By contrast, the average birth rate for homeschooling families is 3.5 children per family. The Centers for Disease Control reveals that total U.S. births fell off during the first quarter of 2026  — a 2.1% drop off from the previous year. There were 4.3 million births in America in 2007, but only 3.6 million births last year. And we're looking at another drop of about 700,000 students this year.  This data points to an 18% drop in American births in 18 years.  Based on these recent numbers for American births, by 2031, the public schools will lose another 2.44 million students due to birth decline alone in this country. That's not counting the number of students who drop out. Shocker: Canadian male cyclist beating women in the sport And finally, men, pretending to be women, are once again proving that they can beat women in women's sports.  A Canadian cyclist, by the name of “Mr. Ivy,” claimed to have transgendered into a woman; after which he won a women's cycling championship. More recently, “Mr. Ivy” has gone on to win the Inter-Provincial Team title at the Canadian Women's Mid-Amateur Championship golf tournament.  This is actually the third time that he has won the women's Canadian golf tournament. Not surprisingly, he has dominated in other recent golf competitions for woman as well. Close And that's The Worldview on this Tuesday, August 18th, in the year of our Lord 2026. Subscribe for free by Spotify, Amazon Music, or by iTunes or email to our unique Christian newscast at www.TheWorldview.com.  Plus, you can get the Generations app through Google Play or The App Store. I'm Adam McManus (Adam@TheWorldview.com). Seize the day for Jesus Christ. Extra print U.S. Senate still has not passed Safeguard American Voter Eligibility The United States Senate continues to drag its feet on the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility, or SAVE America, Act. The Senate has now adjourned for five weeks, and has no formal plans to try and pass the SAVE Act before fall.  President Donald Trump has repeatedly called on the Republican led Senate to secure American elections and to pass the SAVE Act, but to no avail. Republican Senator Mike Lee of Utah said, “We did our best, left no stone unturned. I wish the outcome had been different, both as to adjournment and as to these votes. This fight's not over. We're just getting started.” Contact your two U.S. Senators by phone or email and ask them to vote for the SAVE Act. 1,000 fake marriages to Chinese nationals in New York The Department of Justice charged 11 individuals in New York last week in a massive marriage fraud scheme. Per the Justice Department, more than 1,000 fake marriages were conducted, mostly between Chinese nationals seeking to obtain green card status in the United States. The operation had been running for more than 10 years.

When Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez laughed off Woke 1.0, she attempted to distance herself from a movement she not only helped build but also led. Because the DSA is ascendant, they're hoping to pivot to kitchen table issues just long enough to trick otherwise sane people into voting for them.Hasan Piker started wearing suits. Abdul El-Sayed is attempting to draw in Trump supporters by showcasing his white grandparents.And out in Texas, James Talarico is making ads with his Paw Paw. They're just regular folks, like you and me. Well, except that they want to tear America down to the studs and rebuild it as a woked-up socialist paradise. But shsh. Nothing to see here, move along, move along.Woke 1.0 wasn't just some silly thing that happened to them one time. It is a deeply held belief system that has been passed on through the generations and mandates conformity across all institutions and culture. It is not an ideology so much as the biggest cult in American history.As we've watched their power weaken after Trump's second win, we see them now more clearly than ever trying to cling to it. Calling white people racist gets louder. Ordering women to obey the rules of language, like the refusal to use the word “cis” or whether or not dating bisexual men, makes you homophobic. Cults must always control the women, separate them from their children. True for Charles Manson, Jim Jones, or Scientology. It's so bad on the Left now that the only right women fight for now is the right to kill their own babies.From White Fragility to protecting women in sports or locker rooms, not to mention children, the once and former feminists are MIA. Many of them are so desperate to be led and dominated by men that they are becoming Muslim reverts:Back in the 1970s, women were also vulnerable and impressionable because the Counter Culture revolution was all about leaving traditional values, like family and religion, behind to “find yourself.” Women were suddenly free, yet all they seemed to want was to find someone to follow. All of those white college girls of privilege were either sucked into cults, moving into vans, or shooting up banks.Meanwhile, the black community was vulnerable, too, and that is how cult leaders like Jim Jones took advantage of them. He was selling things not that different from today's Left. The Origins of Woke 1.0I'll never forget May 25th of 2016. I decided to splurge for my daughter's 18th birthday by taking her to see Hamilton on Broadway, with nearly the entire original cast. The tickets, flight, and hotel were too expensive, but we'd never get this moment back, so why not? It was the same year my daughter would visit the NYU campus, have her prom, and I would be doing everything I could to elect Hillary Clinton as the first female President of the United States, with the doomed hashtag #imwithher.I was part of a generation of parents who wanted to not just be better but to perfect ourselves, our children, and our world. I can't pinpoint exactly when we transformed from anti-establishment Gen-Xers to helicopter parents. But I know it had to do with the therapy culture of the 1990s, capped off by Columbine in 1999, 9/11, and the two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that followed. Something was wrong, not just with all of us, but with our country too.The person elected to heal us from all of this collective, multi-generational trauma was Barack Obama, who became our spiritual leader and our male role model. 2012 was the moment Obama and the millennial do-gooder establishment that surrounded him sought to make our country better through indoctrination in public schools and universities.Hillary Clinton was chosen as the torchbearer, but she lacked Obama's charisma and had nothing to sell the public that they wanted except one thing: identity politics. It wasn't enough. Our cult over-reacted to Trump's win, as though it was the FBI showing up outside the Koresh compound. It was Doomsday and that dark cloud would cover everything we controlled, from Hollywood to the legacy media to book publishing to fashion to influencer culture. We drew a line, and if you wanted in, you could not cross it. If you wanted out, all you had to do was question authority.But it was what we weren't watching that would be our biggest problem later. We weren't watching the kids. Teenage WastelandWhat happened to the nation's young people, having been indoctrinated in the oppressor/oppressed mindset, where they saw racism, homophobia, transphobia, and Islamophobia everywhere they looked, even before Trump won, kicked into motion an apocalyptic fantasy that would justify everything they did, from protests to violence to assassinations. The internet was their fantasy world, which gave many of them absolute power. This was true whether it was social justice warriors who ultimately led the transgender contagion among young girls, or the boys who gravitated to 4-chan and would eventually lead to the rise of the mass shooter influencer, like Tyler Robinson, Matthew David Crooks, or Luigi Mangione. The first real sign of trouble happened nine years ago at Evergreen College. When I first saw this story, I was already pulling away from the cult, but even then, I was afraid to put it on social media because I knew it would be seen as “racist.” And yet, by burying this story, the Left set itself up for much worse down the road.Violence showed up as early as 2015 during Woke 1.0, when Trump supporters were often beaten, kicked, and spat on. The protests at Trump's inauguration seemed to be a natural extension of the mass hysteria that consumed the Left in 2016. It would only get worse.The violence we're seeing on the Left only escalated, culminating in a full-blown revolution on the streets in 2020, a mob demanding diners raise their fist for Black Lives Matter, and authoritarianism rising from a generation raised to believe they have the right to tear down what they didn't build and make the whole country pay because of it.That put power briefly back in the hands of Joe Biden, who pandered to the mob. They believed the false narratives around January 6th, decided MAGA was the cult, and walked away from this story. They barely even talk about it now.The entire Democratic Party became the administrators at Evergreen, too crippled by white guilt to provide the necessary leadership and discipline these kids needed before they graduated and joined the workforce. But even still, the most dangerous legacy Woke 1.0 leaves behind isn't what it's done to kids or to culture, to our sense of history or to our unity as a country. No, in dividing us into the oppressed and the oppressor, it opened the door to America's enemies to exploit the sitting ducks on the Left and name Islam as the most oppressed and thus hand it the most power.Then the enemy walked through the door we left open.Woke 2.0My daughter was three when the planes hit the towers. I remember waking up to the news. Imagine the days before we all had cell phones, or even social media. I had to call my friend and tell her to turn on the news. This was the first time America had been attacked on this level since Pearl Harbor.But terrorism accomplished very little for Islam. It turned the US and the world against them. They were feared and even hated. Our country would transform into a surveillance state, and there's an argument to be made that everything we're living through now is not because of COVID but because of 9/11.Changing hearts and minds would be the way the Islamic world would rise from the ashes. Before long, there was a new word that controlled our thought and speech: Islamophobia.I didn't realize how deep it all went until 2017, the same year as Evergreen. Wonder Woman had come out. My daughter really loved it, but she was afraid to say so online. Why? Because Gal Gadot was an Israeli who trained with the IDF.I was as shocked by this development as I was when she told me her friend was becoming a “he” and wanted “top surgery.” What on earth were they teaching our kids? Idiot liberals like me had no idea. And by the time many of us figured it out, it was too late.Palestine joined the wheel of oppression and took its place in the hierarchy long before October 7th. Hamas attacked Israel, and Putin invaded Ukraine with Joe Biden in power. They clearly saw him as a weak and addled president who would not be able to manage these wars, so what better time to test the hearts and minds campaigns and the way our enemies had begun to destroy us from within.October 7th wasn't a random attack. It was an act of such extreme violence that Israel would have no choice but to go to war, and in so doing, a worldwide campaign to defend the oppressed in Palestine could turn the entire world against Israel. But it wasn't until the rise of Zohran Mamdani, Hasan Piker, and now Abdul El-Sayed and the entire DSA that we could see how fruitful the decades-long hearts-and-minds campaign really was. The Holocaust, to these young people, barely matters. They have no idea what Stalin did, what Mao did, or even really what Hitler did. And they know better than to criticize Islam because that would make them a racist. There was only one place left to go.Just like the leap from World War I to World War II, so too would the jump from Woke 1.0 to Woke 2.0 land on the eternal scapegoat: the Jews. It's like shooting fish in a barrel. Islam and Socialism. Islam and Black Lives Matter. Islam and Medicare for all. These two movements have so much in common, from controlling thought and speech to controlling women and children. But really, it's all about their shared enemies, Israel and the US.Woke 2.0 isn't just the Left, however. It's also a large portion of the Right who have named Israel as the ultimate evil as well, so much so that they are following Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson down the rabbit hole to deflate any offense against the rising radicalism — terrorism - on the Left.Both Nick Fuentes and Hasan Piker have chimed in to declare Candace is helping to defeat the Right and absolve the Left. They can't believe their luck. What unites all of them is their conclusion that Israel and the Jews are the problem.China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea know us better than we know ourselves. Who needs bombs when you have white fragility? Who needs censorship when you have cancel culture? But Islam that wants more. They seek to overtake and convert the United States the way we once feared the Communists might. With the oppressor/oppressed ideology and the rise of Islamo-Marxism, there is no stopping them now. A TikTok user quoting Sharifa Alkhateeb and an Iranian.They just needed the right script, and they found it with helpless resistance libs who have run out of options and Gen-Z, raised on convenience culture who are lured in by the promise of free stuff. Who needs suicide vests and box cutters when you have TikTok?We would start two failed wars after 9/11 called the “War on Terror.” People like me were convinced we were wrong. Now, just as with Joseph McCarthy and the Red Scare, considering how it all turned out, I have to wonder. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.sashastone.com/subscribe

What happens when two Gen X parents sit down with one of their Gen Z daughters to talk about Olivia Rodrigo? You get two generations, three perspectives, and plenty of opinions.In this episode, Giff, Brad, and Brad's daughter Isla dive into Olivia Rodrigo's you seem pretty sad for a girl so in love, talking about the songs, the sound, the lyrics, and what makes Olivia such a massive star with a younger generation. Along the way, we look at how she has also connected many Gen Xers as well by following in the footsteps of many 80s and 90s hitmakers like David Byrne, The Cure, Smashing Pumpkins, Madonna and others. Listen now to hear where our musical tastes overlap and where they definitely don't!Support our show and join our Patreon!If you enjoy the show, please rate and review us on the iTunes/Apple Podcasts app or wherever you listen. Or better yet, tell a friend to listen!Follow us on your preferred social media:TwitterFacebookInstagram

(00:00 - 2:36) It's Monday! No LBF today, she took the day off to root on her husband Dave who was running the Falmouth Road Race, we asked her to send us his finish time, but she forgot! (2:36 - 6:11) Today's Supah Smaht player is Kathy from Lowell. Find out if they were Supah Smaht! (6:11 - 13:57) Travel & Leisure Magazine just published “These Are the Rudest Things You Can Do at a Hotel, According to Travelers and One Is Shockingly Gross. We go over the list to see how many of these we have done! (13:57 - 20:39) There are five cars that won't be around next year, according to the latest report from Edmunds. We wanted to flip the script and talked about what cars we'd like to bring back. (20:39 - 28:43) The movies of John Hughes defined the ‘80s, and even ‘90s kids grew up watching them. Adam 12 is an ‘80s kid (Gen Xer), Aaron's a ‘90s kid (Millennial). Let's see who's seen more John Hughes movies. Plus Dave Mcgrath from New Hampshire Motor Speedway calls in to talk about the big NASCAR race this weekend! All this and more on the ROR Morning Show with LBF & Adam 12 Podcast. Find more great podcasts at bPodStudios.com…The Place To Be For Podcast Discovery! Follow us on our socialsInstagram - @rormorningshowFacebook - The ROR Morning ShowSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Faith joins Ben this week to discuss the premise of the latest book she has been writing, which involves a pandemic-era social media scrolling phenomenon. The two Gen Xers talk about her origins in an assortment of social need-based therapy disciplines, her career development and research activities, and how she is working with Microcosm Publishing to help amplify neurodiverse voices and perspectives. They wrap up the episode with an exploration of the game Ultimate Grandma Simulator, a quick chat about how games have the potential to subtly teach in addition to providing entertainment, and a couple book recommendations. *** 00:00:20 - Twelve-year-old boy humor, Faith's introduction, promises made, and promises kept 00:04:34 - Back when we funded things, conversion, community services potpourri, and books 00:09:46 - Connecting with Andrew, lived experience, ragtag band, and focus of the new book 00:12:43 - Moral injury forms, betrayal, indigenous ancestral origin, and liberation psychology 00:17:49 - Supporting community as a coping strategy, and focusing on what you can change 00:21:04 - The Intimacy Doctor, reframing shadow work, and keeping San Antonio quietly cool 00:26:25 - Dictionary choices, airplane fears unlocked, the 90s were amazing, and ticket costs 00:33:09 - Echo and the Bunnymen, angry philosophers, and the nuclear war fear of the 1980s 00:40:43 - Finding hope, piles of books & cats, and does doom get better or worse with age?  00:45:06 - A fond memory of critical thinking, simulating grandmothers, and avoiding vacuums  00:48:34 - Therapist feedback, a joke in a joke, learning from games, and a book suggestion 00:52:44 - Fiction is lying, Ben remembers, there IS cussing, people know, and a BONUS bit *** Follow Two Vague on… Our website: https://www.twovaguepodcast.com On Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/two_vague_podcast On YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@twovaguepodcast On Substack: https://twovaguepodcast.substack.com/ On Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/twovaguepodcast.com For show appearance and other inquiries, contact us at: twovaguepodcast@gmail.com -AND-  …for all of your PRI and 2VP merch, check out the Partly Robot Industries store at TEEPUBLIC! https://www.teepublic.com/user/partly-robot-industries Follow Andrew / Partly Robot Industries on… His website: https://partlyrobot.com/ On Instagram: https://instagram.com/partlyrobot On TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@partlyrobot On Substack: https://partlyrobot.substack.com/ On Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/partlyrobot.com On Ko-fi: https://ko-fi.com/partlyrobot On Microcosm Publishing: https://microcosmpublishing.com/catalog/artist/andrew-coltrin On Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/partlyrobot And his TREE o' LINKS: http://linktr.ee/partlyrobot *** References, Links, and Tags For more information about Faith Harper and her wonderful books (wherein she isn't afraid to drop an f-bomb or twelve)… https://www.faithgharper.com/ https://microcosmpublishing.com/ For more information about Ultimate Grandma Simulator, developed by Circo and PlumPointTwo and published by We Don't Have A Studio…  https://store.steampowered.com/app/3511870/Ultimate_Grandma_Simulator/ https://youtu.be/A8fKlNNy_vM?si=ewSwZAcf8ARopOG9 #Podbean #DIYPodcast #ApplePodcast #VideoGames #Trivia #Comedy #Talkshow #2VP #TwoVaguePodcast #PodernFamily #InterviewShow #GamersofThreads #Gamer #PartlyRobot #PartlyRobotIndustries #TeePublic #MicrocosmPublishing #TheIntimacyDoctor #FaithGHarper #UltimateGrandmaSimulator #Circo #PlumPointTwo #WeDontHaveAStudio

Listen to today's podcast... What does the makeup of your team look like? Are they mostly from the Baby Boomer or Generation X era? Do you have any Gen Y's or even Millennials working for you? For the first time in contemporary history, there are four generations in the workforce — Baby Boomers, Gen X, Millennials and Gen Z. With employees ranging in age from their late teens to their 70s, leaders must tailor their management styles to fit their multi-generational workforce, who work with different value sets and expectations of each other. This age difference can make it a bit more challenging for leaders to handle. Take One Action Today To Build Your #Resiliency!  Here are today's Tips For Building Resiliency and Celebrating our diverse workforce on Baby Boomer Recognition Day Don't confuse your teams by phrasing orders as suggestions: Boomer managers are often reluctant to give clear, direct, specific instructions. Although you really mean “Do it,” often we use phrases such as “You might want to consider…”, or “Have you thought about…” Gen Xers and New Millennials (Gen Yers) hear these as suggestions. They're caught off guard when you're later surprised to find out they didn't carry out your directive in they way that you intended. Talk with them about more than just work. Be a leader, not a friend: Knowing and being interested in your employees isn't the same as becoming their friends. What they're looking for is a role model, a mentor, and a leader—not a buddy. Reward good work quickly: Gen X and Y employees are used to instant feedback and gratification. Think knowledge exchange, not knowledge transfer. As technology changes, your younger generations have the upper hand and experience. Allow them to shine as they show others how to adapt. With 4 generations in the workplace, a strong leader can juggle these vastly different expectations, communication needs, and views about the workplace. If you like today's wellness tips, let me know. You can leave me a review on amazon or through your #alexa app. Looking for more ways to build your resiliency? Take my free on-line resiliency test at worksmartlivesmart.com under the resources and courses tab. #mentalhealth #hr

Recorded LIVE at Black Matt Studios, THE BOOMXERS are four friends too young to be Baby Boomers but too old to be GenXers. We get together every week to Jibber Jabber about music, entertainment, rural news, crazy inventions, portmanteaus, and so much more. Featuring the phenomenal music quiz known as JIMMY READS. The BoomXers: Unfiltered, Unpolished, Unapologetic, and Unsponsored.

What happens when a morning show turns brisket, parenting, trade schools, and a very unlucky black eye into one fast, funny, Austin-flavored conversation? This episode brings the laughs, the local stories, and a few surprisingly relatable takeaways that make it easy to keep listening.From the jump, the hosts lean into the kind of easy chemistry that makes a show feel like a hangout with friends. They kick things off with Austin chatter, weekend food envy, and the eternal struggle of turning random ingredients into a meal. Along the way, they unpack everything from second marriages and parenting déjà vu to why some careers may be more resilient in the age of AI. If you like lively banter with a local edge, this one delivers.Here are a few standout moments from the episode:“Brisket on a baked sweet potato.”“We're Gen Xers. We don't know how to do stuff like our moms did.”“What do you mean there's nothing to eat?”The conversation keeps moving with a mix of humor and real-life commentary, including a cautionary local crime update and a playful round of trivia in Minute to Win It. It's the kind of episode that feels both entertaining and familiar, with just enough Austin-specific flavor to keep it fresh.If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to like, follow, and subscribe so you never miss a new conversation with JB and Sandy.

I guess you had to be there. And by there we mean the 1970s. Smells and textures that you just can't understand if you were born after 1980. And if you're old like us, enjoy this very weird walk down memory lane!   Peeves: People who park on the street and post bullshit comments!    Promo: Octoberpod https://www.octoberpodvhs.com/   (Want to swap show promos? Email us!)   POLITICAL AND PETTY DESIGNS  ON SHIRTS, HATS, MUGS, AND MORE!  https://bitchenboutique.dashery.com  Profits support this podcast right here!      We love you for listening! Please take a moment to rate and review us, and earn a STICKER! (Everyone loves stickers!) And please subscribe or add us to your favorites list on your favorite platform so you never miss a show! And share us with your cool friends, not the lame ones.   Questions? Comments? Complaints?  Write to us at PitneyAndAmelia@gmail.com!  Check out our various socials etc at https://linktr.ee/bitchenboutique     Who the heck are Pitney and Amelia? A gay guy and his fat friend talking about everything! We've got over 40 YEARS of stories to share about stuff we love, stuff that annoys us, people we've known, places we've been, and things we've seen. Geeky, silly, and always opinionated. NAMES ARE CHANGED TO PROTECT THE GUILTY!   We may be awful, but we're right! Here, queer, and in your ear. Every other Friday.   The Bitchen Boutique is all about mental health and openness and honesty and if you're in crisis and in the US, call or text 988, or go to 988lifeline.org to reach the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline.  And if you just need some friends, you've got two right here.   Edited, engineered, produced, and promoted by Amelia.   LGBTQIA+ | Comedy | GenX | Fandom | Horror | Spirituality | Mental Health #1970s #sensememory #pinksawdust #lunchbox #thermos #aspergum #epilady #petpeeves  #LGBTQIAplus #Comedy #GenX #Fandom #Horror #Spirituality #MentalHealth      .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  KEYWORDS: Pitney and Amelia, Pitney & Amelia, Bitchen Boutique, Bitchen Boutique podcast, Pitney, Amelia, Generation X, Gen X, GenX, GenXer, GenXers, comedy, comedy podcast, current events, current events podcast, pop culture, pop culture podcast, talk show, chat show, us politics, progressive, progressive podcast, queer stories, lgbtqia+ stories, queer podcast, lgbtqia+ podcast, gay, gay podcast, trans rights, horror, horror fans, horror community, fandom, spirituality, coven, secular coven, pagan, paganism, tarot, tarot cards, witchy, antifa, anti-trump, anti-maga, cancer, breast cancer, breast cancer treatment, fat acceptance, haes, mental health podcast, mental health, scifi, science fiction, geek, geek culture, nerd, nerd culture, fyp, vlog, dayinthelife, pet peeves, dashery, teepublic, sense memories, sense memory, pink sawdust school vomit cleanup, vinyl lunchboxes, epilady, buggy race toy, summer house, aspergum, baby aspirin 

Description In this episode of The Odyssey and Beyond, Craig scares Jay just to be mean after watching The Odyssey, and we dive into a few conversations that hit home for our generation. We talk about kids' obsession with analog media, the wild characters you run into at the gym, and why growing up as a Gen Xer might make us the last generation that truly gets it.Watch the full episode here: https://youtu.be/HF51iUWxaXUIf you enjoy podcast conversations about nostalgia, generational differences, funny real-life stories, and unfiltered opinions, this episode is for you.Tagsthe odyssey and beyond, gen x podcast, analog media, gen x nostalgia, last analog generation, kids obsession with analog media, funny gym stories, wild gym characters, podcast drama, comedy podcast, real talk podcast, nostalgia podcast, generational differences, craig and jay, podcast episode, unfiltered podcast, storytelling podcast, human interest podcast, podcast discussion, the odyssey podcastHashtags#TheOdysseyAndBeyond #GenX #AnalogMedia #PodcastEpisode #Nostalgia #FunnyPodcast #GymStories #PodcastDrama #StoryTime #UnfilteredPodcastd⏰TIMESTAMPS :

Careers were once built for a stable world, but today's tech disruption and economic pressures call for a new level of resilience. Job seekers of all levels now seek careers with purpose and impact, no longer defining success around credentials or prestige. Leading tech investor-turned-Georgetown professor Arun Gupta is an expert in emerging technology, venture finance, entrepreneurship, and the future of work. In THE MISSION GENERATION: Rewrite Success, Reclaim Your Purpose, Rebuild Our Future, a USA Today bestseller, he explores a new generation not bound by age or demographics – striving for careers with impact and meaningful change. Arun is CEO of the NobleReach Foundation, which works to recruit young people (like Teach for America) into the public sector and tackle the nation's challenges. He is a venture capitalist, entrepreneurship professor at Georgetown University, lecturer at Stanford University, and bestselling author.Without further ado, let's launch into this special episode of the Career Warrior Podcast!Here's what I asked Arun:Resilience and adaptation is needed in our careers more than ever. We're here in the summer of 2026. Why now?In the past, we were told to pick a career and stick with it. Now we encounter multiple career changes in our lifetime. What is the bright side of this? Can you give an example of how a career can change in a non-linear way?Your advice on career change: How would you tailor that advice differently for someone who is a Gen Xer vs. someone who is just graduating college?What does the word resilience mean to you? Can you tell a personal story?In the book, you talk about Compass Capital. What are they at a high level?Why do you believe that AI won't threaten long-term success?I love your story on why you wrote the book. Can you share it with listeners?Here are the resources from the show:Check Out Arun's Website: https://www.themissiongeneration.com/Order The Mission Generation from Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Mission-Generation-Reclaim-Purpose-Rewrite/dp/139440817X Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Story of the Week (DR):Cracker Barrel CEO is out after MAGA backlash to "Uncle Herschel" logo change MMBefore Julie Masino was brought in, Cracker Barrel was facing a slow-moving existential crisis:Their primary core customer base (older generations and rural highway travelers) was naturally shrinking, and younger diners were simply not replacing them.Kitchen tech, supply chains, and digital ordering lag behind competitors like Texas Roadhouse or Olive Garden.Some great fake populism from Fox: Cracker Barrel to pay for outgoing CEO's security, $4.6M severance after failed rebrandCracker Barrel names David Deno CEOBurger KingYum! Brands and Pizza Hut for 15 years, including serving as CFO and COO.Quiznos CEO.Best Buy: Served as President of Asia and CFO for Best Buy's International DivisionBloomin' Brands for 12 years: CEO, CFO and Chief Administrative OfficerOutback Steakhouse, Carrabba's Italian Grill, and Bonefish GrillBoard MembershipsCracker Barrel Old Country Store (2016-)Panera Brands (2024-): Audit Committee ChairKrispy Kreme (2016-)Bloomin' Brands (2019–2024)Peet's Coffee (2006-2012)Macalester College: Former Chair of the Board of Trustees (1998-2022).From Cracker Barrel to Boeing, Companies Are Turning to Retired CEOsThese retired CEOs are being hired to be "fixers." They are brought in to cut costs, repair supply chains, restore investor confidence, and act as a stabilizing force rather than reinventing the brand.Exxon and Chevron profits surge on rising oil prices due to Iran warChevron posted its highest profit in six years as the Iran war boosted oil pricesBig Oil Is Getting Sued for Heat Deaths. It's Fighting Back With an Army of Immunity LawsMore than a decade after investigations found that Exxon Mobil had known about the dangers of global warming since the 1970s but publicly downplayed the threat, lawsuits against oil companies have proliferated. There are nearly 40 of these cases pending across the countryIn the meantime, the industry has been mobilizing a counterattack against the lawsuits with the help of the Trump administration and Republican politicians.Republicans are trying to pass laws to grant oil majors immunity to these kinds of lawsuits, with success in several states so far.Utah, Iowa, Tennessee, Oklahoma, and Louisiana have recently signed laws shielding fossil fuel companies from lawsuits related to greenhouse gas emissionsOil executives have also gotten help from the federal government, following an executive order from President Donald Trump last year directing the attorney general to prioritize blocking climate lawsuits by states.This May, the Justice Department responded to Minnesota's climate lawsuit against Big Oil with a lawsuit of its own, just as the state's case was moving into the discovery phase. It said Minnesota was undermining “American energy dominance” and attempting to regulate greenhouse gases, which should fall under the purview of federal law—echoing the oil industry's well-known argument.Elon Musk Is Quietly Turning to This Fossil Fuel to Power His AI AmbitionsSam Altman Announces That the Singularity Has Arrived: a hypothetical future point in time when technological growth becomes autonomous, uncontrollable, and irreversible, fundamentally transforming human civilization“We are now, like, in the singularity ... Now we're actually in the moment that we used to talk about at the lunch table in a very not-serious way ...I've been waiting for this my whole life, and I think it's going to be incredible, hugely positive, awesome for the world.”Sam Altman says one of his biggest fears is that a small number of companies will control AI: 'That'd be very, very bad'Sam Altman says the Hugging Face hack is a reminder that an AI power monopoly could lead to 'long-term disaster'OpenAI says its rogue AI tried to hack other companiesMark Zuckerberg is urging the U.S. to accelerate AI development, not restrict it'No Way to Stop It': Elon Musk Warns Humans Will Lose Control of AI and Face Extinction by 2036Microsoft CEO Warns That Companies Embracing AI Could Drive Themselves Out of BusinessAI hackers are getting faster. The government may not be readyAnthropic says its Claude models 'gained unauthorized access' to other organizations' systemsAnthropic says its models went rogue and hacked 3 companies during testing'It Will Happen Frequently': Musk Warns of Rogue AI Threat After Anthropic Breached Three FirmsElon Musk Commits Up to $120M to Republican Midterms: Sets Feud With Trump Aside for Major Election PushGoodliest of the Week (MM/DR):DR: Gen Z women are having an entrepreneurship boomOf all women who started businesses in 2025, 47% of Gen Z women did so, compared with 38% the previous year. Gen Xers followed close behind at 46%. Then came millennials at 43% and baby boomers at just 23%.Overall, in 2025, 69% of new Black-owned businesses were started by women. The survey also found that women business owners are less likely than their male counterparts to depend on AIMM: Delaware judge rules public benefit corporations exempt from maximizing value in sale DRFiduciary duty is different - OpenAI, AnthropicAssholiest of the Week (MM):Fake man apologies MM‘I'm sorry ... but': Apologetic Alan Joyce tells his side of the Qantas storyJoyce has expressed some regret“So with the information we had at the time, I still don't think there was any other decision you could make,”“Hindsight is a great thing.”“I'm actually very, very proud of the fact that I'm not sitting here and apologising for Qantas going bankrupt, [something] that many airlines around the world did,”Australian Competition and Consumer Commission fined Qantas $120 million for selling tickets for 8000 already cancelled flights“I apologise for the angst that was generated [for] the customers on it, but the reality was we had 22 million bookings in the system [and] the system wasn't designed to do an automatic refund,”“Stop us!”More than 1,200 AI workers across Anthropic, DeepMind, OpenAI, and Meta are asking for Washington's help building an AI slowdown plan‘No Way to Stop It': Elon Musk Warns Humans Will Lose Control of AI and Face Extinction by 2036Elon Musk's new 5-year warning to Americans: AI will beat human brains by 2032 (then go wild). Get rich or get crushed?Sam Altman says the Hugging Face hack is a reminder that an AI power monopoly could lead to 'long-term disaster'It Will Happen Frequently': Musk Warns of Rogue AI Threat After Anthropic Breached Three FirmsBut also, DON'T stop us, obviously…Palantir CEO warns US against Europe's AI regulation path, urges Trump admin to not ban open modelsElon Musk's xAI sues Minnesota over law to ban 'nudify' appsMark Zuckerberg is urging the U.S. to accelerate AI development, not restrict itElon Musk Commits Up to $120M to Republican Midterms: Sets Feud With Trump Aside for Major Election PushIgnoring boardsHims & Hers mission:“Hims & Hers is the leading health and wellness platform on a mission to help the world feel great through the power of better health. We believe how you feel in your body and mind transforms how you show up in life. That's why we're building a future where nothing stands in the way of harnessing this power. Hims & Hers normalizes health & wellness challenges—and innovates on their solutions—to make feeling happy and healthy easy to achieve. No two people are the same, so the Company provides access to personalized care designed for results.”Hims & Hers board:CEO: Andrew Dudum, tech VC bro investor “serial entrepreneur” with deep health experience from Bungalow (airBnB knockoff in the UK), Homebound (a “homebuilding platform”), TalkIQ (an AI startup, duh), and Terminal (something about scaling engineering?)TWO directors from DoorDash (Kofi Amoo-Gottfried from Marketing, previously of Facebook, and Christopher Payne the COO, previously of eBay, MSFT, and Amazon)TWO pharma execs (one lawyer, Deb Autor, one with an econ degree, Kare Schultz)One guy from Netflix (David Wells) and one lady from Urban Outfitters (marketing/brand, Andrea Perez) and one pure law firm lawyer (Anja Manuel)ONE DOCTOR EXCLUSIVE: US FTC sues Hims & Hers for sending user health info to Meta, SnapUsers' sensitive health information was shared with online advertising companies including Meta ​Platforms and Snap despite the company leading customers to believe their ​data was private, the FTC alleged in the lawsuit filed along with Los ⁠Angeles County and Utah.Hims & Hers also started charging users for prescriptions before ​they have ⁠had a chance to meet with healthcare providers, the FTC alleged. Most customers do not receive a consultation with a provider, and instead are charged for ⁠prescriptions ​soon after filling out an intake form, ​according to the agency.Headliniest of the WeekDR: CEO apologizes for offering interviews to people who got tattoos of his AI company logoSan Francisco tech CEO Jordan Zietz, co-founder of an early stage AI startup called LemonLime. Stanford grad.“LemonLime learns your business and then automates your team's busywork in a single click, no coding or manual setup required.”Former Qantas CEO reflects on tenure, issues apology to passengers over post COVID chaos AND ‘I'm sorry ... but': Apologetic Alan Joyce tells his side of the Qantas storyMM: Amazon received $600 million in tariff refunds and will pass some back to customersMM: Trump Staff Cuts Blamed After Watermarked OpenAI Map Mislabels Africa at AIDS ConferenceIt's the fact that we have less staff that meant we couldn't bother to figure out which country was whichWho Won the Week?DR: Kohls: For getting some much-needed female influence on board: Kohl's Appoints Wendy Arlin as Chair of the BoardCurrently only 2: Robbin Mitchell (7%) and Wendy Arlin (1%)John Schlifske (27%) stepping downMM: The phrase “not due to any disagreement with the Company”Anne Sweeney Resigns From Netflix BoardOn July 26, 2026, Anne Sweeney notified Netflix, Inc. (the “Company”) that she was resigning from the Board of Directors of the Company effective as of that date. Ms. Sweeney's resignation is not due to any disagreement with the Company1,660 8-Ks in the last 5 years have the exact phrase “not due to any disagreement with the Company”So we're saying that 1,660 c-suite and board members resigned in 5 years - more than 300 per year - and NONE were due to a disagreement with the companies? That's only THAT phrase - no other details are given for most of them except occasionally:To pursue another jobPersonal reasonsFor scale, in the last 5 years, the term “was due to a disagreement with the Company” appears… 5 timesPredictionsDR: Qantas CEO Vanessa Hudson apologizes that it took former CEO Alan Joyce to apologize for something she already apologized for despite not being CEO when any of it happenedMM: Damion resigns from Free Float due to a disagreement with the zero dollars he gets paid, but Free Float puts out a statement saying it's “not due to any salary reason related to the company”

Well, look who's back! The Summer Bash is upon us! A bunch of GenXers having fun their way! This week's conversation was quick and to the point! And is a ghost always 'straight'. GenXmom returns this week and beats Dad up right away! LOL

Podcast Episode Description "A successful exit isn't about leaving your business. It's about leaving the world a better place after you leave it." Host Laurie Barkman welcomes back Scott Snider, President of the Exit Planning Institute — the organization behind the Certified Exit Planning Advisor designation and the Value Acceleration Methodology — for a return conversation four years in the making.  Since their last episode in 2022, EPI has grown from 3,000 to 11,000 CEPAs, Scott has navigated his own leadership succession from his father Chris, and the exit planning profession has undergone one of its most significant evolutions yet.  Scott and Laurie unpack what has changed — and what hasn't — about how business owners think about exit planning, why personal planning remains the weakest leg of the stool, and why exit strategy and business strategy are not two separate conversations. Key Insights: The leadership transformation nobody talks about is the internal one. Scott went from a militant, gritty leadership style — forged running a landscape construction company — to leading a 56-person team of highly educated, motivated professionals who needed to be led completely differently. His biggest surprise? Discovering he was capable of leading with empathy, grace, and love. The style that built his first business would have destroyed this one. Decades of success does not equal transferable value. Business owners can have profitable products, great people, loyal customers, and a lifestyle they love — and still have nothing a buyer actually wants. Scott draws a sharp line between income and value, between success and significance. The gap between the two is exactly why exit planning exists — and exactly why owners keep kicking the can. Baby Boomers, Gen Xers, and Millennials are asking completely different exit questions. Baby Boomers — who own 51% of privately held companies at an average age of 67 — are navigating a 50-year identity crisis. Gen Xers want out early so they can actually live, with 38% between 45 and 59 planning to exit earlier than their predecessors. And Millennials have grown up inside value acceleration thinking — they're already building to sell. Personal planning is still the weakest leg of the stool — and that needs to change. Despite all the evolution in exit planning since 2005, personal planning remains the area most business owners defer, dismiss, or avoid entirely. Scott's challenge to the profession: stop treating it as the soft stuff. Who am I with and without my business is the most important question a founder can answer — and most never do. Exit strategy and business strategy are the same conversation. Every decision a business owner makes today is already affecting their future exit value. Scott reframes the entire conversation: instead of positioning exit planning as something you do when you're ready to leave, position it as what makes your business stronger, more financeable, and more valuable right now. The foot in the door is helping owners grow a better company — the exit conversation follows naturally. The profession is growing — but awareness is still the biggest gap. With 11,000 CEPAs and a path to 20,000, EPI's CEPA credential could become the second largest professional credential in the country. But even at 20,000, it would still be a fraction of the 250,000 CFPs. The next five years are about activation — helping advisors start the conversation with owners earlier, and meeting owners where they are before a triggering event forces their hand. Chapters: 00:04 Introduction and Four Years Later — What's Changed 01:56 Welcome Back: Scott Snider Returns to Succession Stories 02:57 What Scott Did When He Got the Baton at EPI 04:10 First Year Priorities: Structure, People, and Culture 05:58 The Challenge of Succeeding a Founder — Even a Non-Traditional One 09:28 The Biggest Personal Surprise of Scott's Leadership Journey 10:55 Head, Heart, and Wallet: The Balance of Leadership 12:16 How the Exit Planning Conversation Has Evolved Since 2022 14:34 Are Business Owners Asking Different Questions Today? 17:00 Gen X, Baby Boomers, and Millennials: Three Different Exit Mindsets 19:18 The Biggest Misconception About Exit Planning That Still Frustrates Scott 22:19 Personal Planning and the Card Sorting Exercise 25:13 Decades of Success But Zero Significance — Why Owners Kick the Can 26:15 What Needs to Happen to Make Exit Planning Mainstream 29:50 How Advisors Should Start the Conversation With Business Owners 30:32 Exit Strategy IS Business Strategy 32:42 Lightning Round: Books, Advice, and Finishing the Sentence 34:13 What Scott Hopes His Dad Would Say About the Last Four Years

https://youtu.be/IQoIp4pY_bM Mailani Veney, CEO of Kana Systems, is driven by a mission to help people and organizations flourish through the aloha spirit by delivering trust and speed while transforming complex government data into actionable intelligence that empowers better decisions. By combining advanced AI-powered data solutions with a people-first culture rooted in trust, curiosity, and service, Mailani has built Kana Systems into a trusted defense technology company that helps government organizations solve mission-critical challenges faster while enabling employees, customers, and partners to thrive.  In this conversation, Mailani introduces The Aloha Way Framework—Know Who You Are & Why You Are The Prize, Aim for the Bullseye, and Co-Build with Speed. She explains why leaders must first understand their unique identity and value before attracting the right people and opportunities, how curiosity and empathy uncover customer needs while building lasting trust, and why collaborating with customers accelerates innovation and delivers measurable business outcomes. Mailani also shares how decades of service built the trusted reputation that led to government recruitment and enabled Kana Systems to transform siloed data into AI-powered solutions that strengthen long-term partnerships and dramatically improve operational efficiency. — Deliver Trust & Speed with Mailani Veney Good day. Steve Preda here with the Management Blueprint Podcast, and my guest today is Mailani Veney, the CEO of Kana Systems, a company changing the future of defense technology by transforming siloed, messy data into usable information to drive better insights for government customers. Mailani, welcome to the show. Aloha.  Aloha. You sent me a link this morning with the correct terms that I should be using for a Hawaiian native on the podcast, and I read the article. It was very long. But I figured that there are some terms that I may be able to use on this podcast as well. So thanks for doing that.  Yes, absolutely. So you have a very interesting background. You’re from Hawaii, but you studied in Central Europe, in Slovenia. You run a company in Nebraska, but right now you’re calling from Florida, so it’s a little bit confusing. So tell me, how did you fall into government contracting, and why not do it from Hawaii? So I actually was recruited by the largest customer in the world, our U.S. government, to help modernize technology, and it was in the area of nuclear weapons technology. So I actually didn’t choose this particular career path or this domain. I was running another technology company at the time, and our government found me and recruited me to help with this very important initiative. And this was pre-generative AI.  I had a platform that I was using in my other company to help small businesses make better decisions using data, and that was using machine learning and artificial intelligence. So I’ve since expanded the scope of what we’re doing across the department and spreading aloha spirit, which is helping others flourish. We help people be heroes at work. And when they do their work well, our country stays safe.  Wow. That is very cool. One of the terms that I noticed in your article was ʻohana.  Yes.  We’ve been staying in a beach house in Sandbridge Beach for the last few years called Ohana Bay, and we always thought it was something to do with Omaha Bay. I never thought it meant family, community, that kind of stuff. So that was super interesting. This is a super-secret project.  I don’t know if we are allowed to talk about it on the podcast. Your nuclear technology and machine learning, that’s probably highly confidential. So what I’d really like to ask you is, what is your personal ‘Why’, and how are you manifesting it in Kana Systems? Yes, and I want to relate this to the people who are watching. 348: Deliver Trust & Speed with Mailani VeneyShare on X That’s how I was raised. That’s how my ʻohana is. That’s how I run my businesses. That’s how I serve. It’s that mentality. It’s that service above self, which is the Rotary motto. I’m a fervent Rotarian. That is really the ‘Why’.  But let me dive into that a little bit more. I’ve taught fitness for 30 years. I still do. I run a defense intelligence company that the U.S. government recruited me to build. People don’t expect those two things to go together, but to me, they’re the exact same job because what I’ve done my whole life is one thing. I find people, and I help them flourish. So in a fitness class, that’s obvious. I help them feel good about themselves and their health.  In the businesses that I’ve started, when I was a professor, when I was the president of one of the largest Rotary clubs in the world, doing good across the world and in our own local communities, all of those things. And then the most important job I’ve ever had, which is raising three children, two of whom now help me run this company. I never did that to build a reputation.  Although when I was a professor at the University of Nebraska and we got to meet with Warren Buffett—he’s a pretty successful businessman—one of his famous quotes is about reputation. But what he told us in person was, “Your reputation is really the only asset you have.” People who chase building a reputation rather than authentically building it up—I think that’s the big difference.  So for me, we build reputation, and I build my personal reputation by doing good for others over and over and over for years.Share on X So when the government, I get asked this question all the time: “How did they recruit you?” They went looking for someone to trust—an entrepreneur to trust—in a very specific domain. They researched. They found me. They found 30 years of that. I didn’t chase that largest customer.  They came to me because of the service. And I build a business the same way I build a strong body—not with one big move. You can’t do it in one big move. You show up day after day, and you do good reps for a very long time. So that’s my ‘Why’. And that’s what I do for the world, for my ʻohana, and just in life in general.  I love it. Very inspiring. It’s very reassuring. So thank you for having that ‘Why’. That’s very powerful. I didn’t realize that you got recruited because of your reputation. I mean, they say they hire people for who they are and then train them for the skills. That’s basically what they did, I guess, on a big scale when they recruited you. Yeah.  And I specifically… At first, when they recruited me and I was running another company, I was getting ready to be president of Rotary 14, and I told them no because I don’t like to do a job that I can’t do well. So then, for about six months, they impressed on me the importance of bringing in small businesses with innovation, speed, and a different outlook. They’re called non-traditionals.  Originally, when they said they wanted me because I was non-traditional, I was thinking, “Well, it’s because of my gender, my ethnicity, or my age. I don’t know.” And they said, “No, no. It’s that you have not had a cost-based contract with the government.” So “non-traditional” has a very specific meaning. The government is very smart in recognizing that, “Hey, we need to bring in those waves of new ideas and entrepreneurs.” That’s what they were looking for when they found me.  And my reputation, they told me, I said, “What is the reputation you’re hearing?” And they said they heard that I was a good person, that I had a really strong culture, and that I got really good results. That’s the reason they recruited me. The technology that I brought over is a byproduct of those things, but they didn’t recruit me just for the technology. Okay. So now I’m very, very curious about your system. I know that it’s based on your personal identity, your ethics, and all that stuff, but I love to turn things into systems. And you say that your secret sauce is finding people and helping them flourish. So how do you do that? Do you have a framework that you can share with me and with our audience about the steps to finding people and helping them flourish? Sure. So we have our own Kana Operating System, and it's something I highly encourage companies to do—to really spend the time and create their own operating system.Share on X It’s not one-size-fits-all. But within that Kana Operating System, we have a system called The Aloha Way. So ha is breath, and aloha is, of course, the way we say hello, goodbye, and greetings. But it’s also a time to exchange good energy and compassion.  So really spending the time on The Aloha Way to think about what that operating system is—all of it stems around our values. And this will tie back to what you’re asking me as far as recruiting. There are three steps in this. One, you have to know who you are and know that you’re the prize. I think this is an area… I’ve been an angel investor for 20 years. I’ve been in the entrepreneurship world for decades now. Those companies, founders, and entrepreneurs who don’t know who they are, don’t know why they’re the prize, and cannot articulate that are at a severe disadvantage. So that’s step number one.  Number two in The Aloha Way is Aim for the Bullseye. And I can tell you how I do that a little bit later. But it’s finding that bullseye because it’s a two-way street. This is never about pushing on somebody, pushing on a company, or pushing on someone you want to hire. So, Aim for the Bullseye. How do you know what’s in the bullseye? And then number three is Co-Building with Speed. That is really what we’rezon AWS and Microsoft.  We’ve literally had meetings this morning and yesterday where, again, they’re emphasizing how fast we work as a company—with good results and trusted results. So those three things make up The Aloha Way: Know You’re the Prize, Aim for the Bullseye, and Co-Build with Speed. And where do people fall into this? They’re at the very top. People always come first in what we’re doing. When we know who we are, what our mission is, and the fact that we're here to make an impact in a good way, we have a terrific track record of recruiting the right people. People know they're going to flourish. People know we're going to treat…Share on X  And in turn, they become excellent partners with us. We just got off the phone with our 401(k) provider. We are one of the very few companies they know of where, when they ran the data, we give a 5% match to every employee, whether they’re part-time or full-time. We don’t call them interns in our company because everybody has value. Part-time and full-time employees get the 401(k) match from day one. For us, that’s investing in our people because we know we’re the prize. We know our people are going to be doing really good, impactful work, and we need to treat them very well. So that’s just one example. People like to be paid well.  They do. So, Mailani, please explain to me exactly what it means. Why are you the prize? Is this something because your mission is more attractive, or what does it mean?  This goes back to some mentoring that I had from Oren Klaff. Oren Klaff has a whole system on teaching companies and people how to pitch and raise money. Although we’ve never raised money, our cap table is completely clean. But the reason why this is important is it goes back to who you are and what your identity is. So that’s the very first thing that I do whenever I start a company or start an organization.  We have a lot of thoughtful discussion about who we are. When you know who you are, and you know why you're unique, and you know why you can do something better than almost anybody else, that makes you the prize for the right people, for the right organization, and for the right circumstance.Share on X We’re the right company right now because we invested early on, saying, “Hey, people making decisions with this overload of data.” Our core product is called Kana Wave.  So instead of getting crushed by the wave, we help them ride it. It’s a little surfing analogy. But we were ahead of our time with that, and we knew that in the future this was going to be more and more important. Obviously, when GenAI jumped on the scene, it became vastly apparent. So knowing we’re the prize in this area is very important because then you’re able to attract the right people, you attract the right opportunities, and really not pay attention to those that don’t fit.  One of the best things that we do is we get to no fast. That is something we chase. Getting to a no is a gift. It’s a gift because then that opens you up to the right yes. I see this too often. People want to hold on. It’s the wrong thing. It’s a little bit of yes, but it’s not enough. So get to no.  Yeah, I love it. This is very smart. It’s very wise. Okay, so knowing who you are and why you’re unique, why you’re the prize, I love it. I love the sentiment behind this, the pride behind it. It’s fantastic. So what is number two? Aim for the bullseye. What does that mean? What do you mean by that?  I love that question. There’s a very famous “sell me a pen” in The Wolf of Wall Street, and when I do this, I do it differently. So I ask people to sell me a pen. If they try and just tell you about the features of a pen, “Here’s my pen. You should buy this pen because of this,” or, “Do you need something to write with?” there’s so many assumptions in your background that go into those things. The easy button that most people don’t do is they just ask.  You can do all the research. I researched you, Steve. I listened to a whole bunch of the podcasts when you guys reached out wanting to have me on this podcast. But at the end of the day, all I have to do is ask, “What’s most important to you, Steve, for having me as a guest on your podcast?”  I’d like to learn your framework. Okay.  And I’d like to learn about you and see why you’re the prize.  “See why we’re the prize.” So that very thing right there is the bullseye. A lot of times people miss the bullseye, and it doesn’t do anybody any good. That’s the “get to no fast” as well. So if I’m trying to tell you about the Kana Wave platform and you’re doing something completely different, we’re just wasting each other’s time, right? I don’t want to do that. There is a lot more than I can cover in this podcast, but that’s what we do when we train our people.  A lot of it starts with empathy, and it starts with that aloha spirit.Share on X So when you go into something not trying to push or sell or win something, but you’re genuinely curious, and when people ask me, “What’s the one quality that everybody in my company, everybody that we contract with, and our major vendors and partners all have?” We all are curious. A lot of that curiosity is in the form of intelligence, but it’s that curiosity first.  When you’re curious, you ask the right questions. So I have two magic questions for your audience. One, “What are you looking for?” Two, “What’s important to you?” Sounds so simple. I see it happen so rarely in business, and I see it happen so rarely in relationships. People would just get along a lot better if we could just have upfront, honest, transparent conversations around those two things. Right off the bat, what they’re telling you is a guide as far as, “Do you want to continue this conversation? Is there a way that we can help?”  If their bullseye matches up with your value, or the value of your company, your product, or your service, then you’re off to the races to have a conversation. But you can’t do that without that foundation. It really flips it on its head from when I was trained in corporate sales at the beginning of my career. I like this a lot better because then we really genuinely get to know what somebody else wants. At the end of the day, businesses, organizations, and the military are a bunch of people. So treat people like people. That's the Hawaiian part. That's where the aloha spirit really comes in.Share on X  So when you’re explaining this, I’m thinking that “know who you are” and “why you’re the prize” is basically the way to build trust. Then “Aim for the Bullseye.” Then you’ve already built the trust. Maybe I’m getting this wrong, but then you can ask those questions that require some level of vulnerability from the other person to actually tell you what they’re really looking for.  They’re not going to tell it to a stranger they don’t trust because they might feel sensitive about it or they might not want you to know. So is there something to do with trust and trust allowing you to aim for the bullseye?  One hundred percent. That is one of the two things that we deliver. We deliver not just speed, but we deliver trust. For us, trust is solving one problem, and it expands, and it becomes the next and the next. That’s what I’ve seen in my corporate career, my other companies that I started, and especially in this company. Trust begets trust. Again, it’s like, “Well, how do you build trust?” You start with your mindset. “I want to help you flourish, Steve.” “I want to help my customers flourish.” “I want to help our bank flourish.” We’re paying our bank, but I want to help them flourish too.  If you have that mindset first, those are the reps I’m talking about that build your reputation, that build your trust, and then people start referring you. It’s such a beautiful flywheel when it’s done well. The other famous Warren Buffett quote is, “It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it.” So just doing good over and over again. For me, trust starts with the mindset first.  Yeah. I always believe that you can only create trust by trusting first because people cannot trust someone who doesn’t trust them. I think it’s a very dangerous place to trust someone who doesn’t trust you, right?  Yeah.  Because they won’t have your best interest at heart. So I love it. Go first. The aloha spirit. Look for ways to help the other person, then be curious and learn what the bullseye is so that you can aim at it. Then what do you mean by Co-Build with Speed?  Thank you for asking. That’s the final step. In the three steps that we do, that’s the final one. What we deliver is a solution that makes people’s lives better. One of the key psychology pieces is that most people want to feel important in whatever job they’re doing, in whatever aspect of life they are. So let’s empower people to feel important and to be heroes at work, regardless of what the job is.  With that mentality, we came in and said, “Okay, we’re really, really, really good and experts at developing advanced technology solutions.” But here’s what we’re not really good at. We’re not really good at everything outside of that. That’s where we have to have a partner. So we do not sell commercial off-the-shelf software. We do not sell custom software. We're in this really awesome, scalable center where we have Kana Wave, which is a very powerful data and intelligence platform that can be used like Lego.Share on X  What we don’t have is the front-end piece that matches everybody’s workflow. But this is where the speed comes in. We can quickly build that, and the way we do that is we partner with our customers. They know their domain. They know their workflow. They know the problems and challenges. So we do a little bit of tweaking on that, and that’s how we’re able to generate products so quickly that really are unique and maximize the value to the customer in the work they’re getting done.  As an example, our very first project was the “Can I Fight Tonight?” Dashboard. Our country has nuclear weapons. Underpinning those nuclear weapons is the technology to make sure everything is running. The philosophy behind nuclear weapons is strategic deterrence. But in order to deter, you have to have the credibility that everything works. So every two weeks, five people in an underground location were pulling together all of this information manually, putting it into spreadsheets upon spreadsheets, massive horse blankets of spreadsheets, PowerPoints, and manually handling all of this data.  It was taking five people two weeks. We came in, we worked with them, we built the solution. We worked with them to co-build what they actually needed, and we brought that down to where one person could do it in 30 minutes. We’ve done that over and over and over again. We’re working with another government customer right now where it’s taking them 150 hours to get a project done, and we can do it in one hour.  So when I’m talking about co-building with speed, we’re building the last little bit that they actually need on top of this really powerful engine. That has proven to be such a successful model because they’re the ones who care about getting the problem solved, and we’re turning them into the heroes at their own job. It’s so gratifying. It’s the most fun I’ve ever had in my career because we see the impact every single day of what we’re doing.  That’s fascinating. So the Kana Wave platform—you said it’s like Lego. It’s a data engineering platform, and then you take the workflow of that customer and adapt it to this, or somehow interface it with this platform, or use the knowledge of that workflow to essentially streamline the process and go from 150 hours to one hour? Love it. That’s very interesting. So what’s one thing that you’re trying to figure out in Kana Systems right now?  The thing that keeps me awake is not optimizing the opportunities we have. So we’re trying to figure out who the right partners are. We’re a small business, and we know we’re a small business. That’s our superpower, but it also holds us back in some regards. So the thing we’re trying to figure out right now is which companies to partner with. Like I told you, we’ve partnered with Microsoft and Amazon.  They’ve been phenomenal partners in the technology-enabling area. There are other partners out there that we’re considering right now. Again, the only metric I care about—I run the company off one metric. For me, it’s about aloha spirit. How much aloha do we deliver? The way that we look at this is how many people find what we’re helping them with to be useful. Everything else derives from that, right? The growth. The revenue. We make millions, but that’s not the metric I’m chasing.  So what I’m looking for with these new partners is who can help us improve that one metric so we can deliver more aloha. Naturally, we’re looking at larger companies. There are a few small companies that we’re looking at that have interesting edge AI use cases where we can help out. Those are the things that are really challenging me right now as CEO and founder.  So is it about how you measure the deliverable aloha quotient of those target partners that’s the challenge, or is it reaching the target partners to have the opportunity to provide the aloha for them, or is it about something else?  I think it’s a matter of choosing the right partners in a fast, trusted way. It’s a process. With us working so quickly, being able to choose the right partners, but we also don’t choose the wrong partners. So it’s less about the aloha metric. If we’ve qualified them enough that we’re interested in partnering with them, we can figure that part out pretty quickly. But it’s getting over those last few. Do you have any answers?  Yeah. I wonder if it’s something to do with the judgment, whether the judgment to choose those partners is scalable in the company or not. And to what degree your growth is constrained by your ability to transfer the ability to judge the partners to the rest of the organization. So it’s no longer a constraint at your level. What would it look like for the growth of Kana Systems if you didn’t have to be part of the partner selection process anymore because the judgment would be equivalently good at lower levels in the organization?  Well, in that case, then I would think it would be faster.  Okay.  We’re in incredible times right now. As an example, our platform can ingest all kinds of data, tag it, chunk it, organize it. There are entire companies worth billions of dollars just doing one segment of that. The fact that we can do all of that at a fraction of the time and a fraction of the cost—that’s why we’re situated very well right now for growth, and that’s why we’re having so much fun right now. It’s a really fun time in our company.  We have a lot of people who are interested in not just partnering with us and investing in us and acquiring us. We’re getting inundated with a lot of requests for that. Trying to stay focused on who are the right people and companies to be speaking with right now, in addition to our customers, of course. So I think that’s a challenge that companies dealing with factors of scale have to deal with.  Okay. So what makes a potential partner, listening to this podcast, know that they’re the one, that they should give you a call because they would be a big recipient of aloha?  Yeah. Actually, that’s a great question. The things that we look for, number one, they don’t have to call it aloha spirit. It goes by different names. But at its heart, they are people or organizations that are here to do good. What we’re doing right now in the world of defense are things that absolutely can carry over into any line of commercial work. The fact that we can work with sensitive data in some of the most trusted environments in the world means that we can do that in other areas.  We’ve talked to people in finance, capital structures, and energy. There’s a lot of interest in those kinds of other areas to carry over some of our best practices and learnings. We absolutely want someone who is helping us be the best version of ourselves. There is an opportunity for us to sell all or part of the company in the next few years to a strategic partner. That’s something that we would entertain as well.  But really it’s that idea that, hey, together we can build something that’s more impactful than what we currently have. So we can sniff out pretty quickly if people are aligned with the same kind of reasons that we are.  But what I understand is that your two ideal companies, the clients you mentioned, were AWS and Microsoft. These are both huge companies, which means there are huge opportunities to create value, Aloha, perhaps. And you mentioned energy. You mentioned defense. So are these big infrastructure-type platforms where aloha can best be manifested or delivered? What are the commonalities?  Because we don’t know on the face of it whether those companies have the kind of people that you’re looking for. Sometimes you can know that a company has a lot of good people, but for larger companies, it’s harder to know. So what are the commonalities?  At its stake, of course, these are large companies. We’ve been really fortunate that we work with small groups within these very large companies. Those small groups, we can tell right away whether or not they’re a fit. Both of those companies have been very good. We’ve partnered with other much, much smaller companies than that. Well, let me tell you one of my personal ways that I determine ethics.  It’s the Four-Way Test from Rotary. Of the things we think, say, or do: Is it the truth? Is it fair to all concerned? Will it build goodwill and better friendships? Will it be beneficial to all concerned? I run through that all the time, and I hold my team and myself to that very standard. We’re always looking to do things that are beneficial to all concerned. They don’t have to be equally beneficial, but they cannot benefit only one party. So as we’re looking at partners, those are some of the things that we’re considering too.  The other piece… We’re in a capitalistic society. We totally embrace that. But you can do good and still be a capitalist. That’s what we’re proving over and over again. I lost my train of thought with what the last part of your question was, Steve.  No, I think you answered it. Basically, it’s not a size issue.  No.  It’s an attitude issue. You’re looking for win-win partnerships. If you find the right kind of people, then the chance of successful collaboration is going to be great. Obviously, as you grow the company, you want to leverage yourself more with your people, which means that you’ll tend to do business with larger companies as well, I believe.  Yeah. You know what’s been so fun about this? I’m one of the 3% of women who own a defense technology company, according to the Small Business Administration. There aren’t very many women in this space. It’s been really interesting because I lead with the soft skills first. A lot of people ask me if I have a background in computer science or artificial intelligence. I have a background. My number one Gallup strength is Strategic. But what I really care about is helping people flourish, optimizing people, and bringing people together for a common mission—not only to accomplish it, but to have fun doing it.  I think that’s something that gets lost. I’m a Gen Xer, and I was taught that you’ve got to put in your chops, you’ve got to sacrifice, and it’s got to be hard. I don’t believe in that. I like to have fun. I like things that are easy. Everybody likes easy things. If I’m good at something, it’s really easy. So trying to give people the opportunity to do those things. This is where it’s been so much fun. Business can be super fun, and I think that’s something we lose out on. In Hawaii, there’s an ancient way of fishing called the Hukilau.  It’s one of our product names. In the Hukilau, instead of fishing by yourself, there’s a hula with this. Instead of fishing by yourself, where you only catch fish for yourself, as a community you come together and fish. You throw out a big net, then you pull the net in together. Here’s the really cool part. Everybody can be different. A little kid next to a big person next to an older person.  But together you’re bringing it all in. Then the part that’s really great—and Hawaiians are known for this—we have the luaus. We party. We eat. We drink. We have music. We dance. We enjoy it. That makes you want to do it again. So why can’t we do that in business too? Why can’t we do this in a super-serious, top-secret environment? Most of our team have Top Secret clearances. We have our facility clearance. It’s pretty unheard of, as small of a business as we are, to have all of these things. But we still have fun.  We still have fun doing all of this. I think that’s something with the Aloha Way that I didn’t call out. How do we actually get to that? If you have the mentality, then people want to show up and continue doing good work. Even our customers will say, “Oh, this is my one fun meeting of the day with Kana Systems.” We just had a meeting with one of our partners, and they said, “This is the one meeting that we look forward to all week because we have a good time.” So I think that needs to be highlighted as well.  No, I agree. People can learn, absorb, and buy in when they have fun much more than if they’re forced to do something. That’s obvious, and I totally relate to it. All right. So if someone is listening to this and they say, “I might be a company that could create these impacts with Kana Systems,” then how do I find out? How do I get in touch? How do I learn more? How do I connect with you guys?  They can email us at aloha@kana.systems. K-A-N-A dot systems. That’s one way. They can reach out to us on LinkedIn. I can be found pretty easily. There’s nobody else with my name on there. They can go to one of the events. We’re going to be speaking at the Amazon DC Summit at the end of the month. We’ll be in San Diego next month for the War Hackers Hackathon. We’re out and about at quite a few defense- and technology-related events. Yeah, that’s about it. Don’t send smoke signals. We can’t see those.  Fantastic. So if you’re looking for a partner who brings a technology platform that could leverage you, and you want lots of good vibes, good results, and a fun work environment, then check out Mailani Veney, who’s the CEO of Kana Systems. She’s on LinkedIn. She’s easy to find. The website has an interesting domain, kana.systems. Check her out speaking around the country. Mailani, thank you for coming and sharing your wisdom and your frameworks. Super fun. If you’re listening and enjoyed this, then make sure you tune in because twice a week we come out and share with you an exciting story from a unique entrepreneur. So thanks for coming, Mailani, and thanks for listening.  Aloha, everybody.  Aloha indeed.  Important Links: Mailani's LinkedIn Mailani's  website Mailani’s Email: aloha@kana.systems

Beauty retail whisperer Alison Hahn is one of the industry's most sought-after experts, with a track record of identifying major players like Patrick Ta, Kayali, and Makeup by Mario. On this episode of Fat Mascara: Business Desk, Hahn talks about selling to Gen Alpha, reengaging Gen Xers, beauty dupes, the big mistake celebrity founders often make, tough vendor conversations, and more. More from Fat Mascara Instagram: @fatmascara @jessicamatlin Shop the products mentioned on Fat Mascara: https://shopmy.us/shop/fatmascara Private Facebook Group: Fat Mascara Raising a Wand Submit a Raise a Wand product recommendation, guest suggestion, or just say hello: info@fatmascara.com Production for this Podcast Provided by Redd Rock Music IG: @reddrockmusic www.reddrockmusic.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Save 10% on your next Fleshlight with promo code PRIVATE10 at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠fleshlight.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. For the 269th episode of Private Parts Unknown, host Courtney Kocak welcomes writer and podcaster Dana DuBois. Through her Substack I Write Out Loud and podcast The Daily Whatever Show, Dana has become a thoughtful, nuanced voice on culture, relationships, parenting, politics, and feminism. In this conversation, Dana discusses midlife dating as a post-divorce Gen Xer, how dating apps have reshaped relationships, what she learned parenting through her child's gender exploration journey, her inclination toward demisexuality, why she draws a distinction between identity and preference, her take on attachment styles, and her thoughts on motherhood later in life. For more Dana DuBois: Subscribe to Dana's Substack I Write Out Load Watch Dana's podcast The Daily Whatever Show (Check out Dana's interview with Courtney on Fine Feminist Hour) Get your copy of Girl Gone Wild from ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Bookshop.org⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ or ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Amazon⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. Psst, Courtney has an 0nIyFan$, which is a horny way to support the show: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠onlyfans⁠.com/cocopeepshow⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Private Parts Unknown is a proud member of the Pleasure Podcast network. This episode is brought to you by: VB Health offers doctor-formulated sexual health supplements designed to elevate your sex life. Their lineup includes Soaking Wet, a blend of vitamins and probiotics that support vaginal health; Load Boost, which promotes male fertility and enhances semen volume and taste; and Drive Boost, formulated to increase libido and sexual desire for all genders. Visit ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠vb.health⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ and use code PRIVATE for 10% off. Our Sponsor, FLESHLIGHT, can help you reach new heights with your self-pleasure. Fleshlight is the #1 selling male sex toy in the world. Looking for your next pocket pal? Save 10% on your next Fleshlight with Promo Code: PRIVATE10 at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠fleshlight.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. STDCheck.com is the leader in reliable and affordable lab-based STD testing. Just go to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ppupod.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, click STDCheck, and use code Private to get $10 off your next STI test. Explore yourself and say yes to self-pleasure with Lovehoney. Save 15% off your next favorite toy from Lovehoney when you go to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠lovehoney.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ and enter code AFF-PRIVATE at checkout. ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://linktr.ee/PrivatePartsUnknownAds⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ If you love this episode, please leave us a 5-star rating and sexy review! Psst... sign up for the Private Parts Unknown newsletter for bonus content related to our episodes! ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠privatepartsunknown.substack.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Let's be friends on social media! Follow the show on Instagram ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@privatepartsunknown⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ and Twitter ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@privatepartsun⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. Connect with host Courtney Kocak ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@courtneykocak⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ on Instagram and Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

After twenty-six years in the Coast Guard and a hard-earned retirement in a Margaritaville-branded community in Daytona Beach, Florida, Emily thought her next chapter was set. Then she noticed her husband's niece had vanished from his brother's Facebook page. What followed was a discovery that the seven-month-old had been placed in Florida's foster care system, and the beginning of an eighteen month legal battle that included a three day custody trial, allegations of fraudulent adoption paperwork, and a fight against a state system that seemed determined to keep her with a foster caregiver rather than family. Emily and her husband ultimately adopted both the niece and, months later, her newborn brother, becoming parents to two young children in their fifties after raising a son who is now thirty. Emily talks about the toll of the legal process, what she learned about family adoption cases in Florida, the isolation of feeling like her family was fighting the system alone, and what it has been like to parent toddlers as a retired Gen Xer, decades after raising her first child. Reality Life with Kate Casey Summer Reading List: https://katecasey.substack.com/p/books-i-cant-stop-talking-about-this Vanity Fair Article: https://www.vanityfair.com/culture/story/martha-moxleys-diary What to Watch List: https://katecasey.substack.com Patreon: http://www.patreon.com/katecasey Instagram: http://www.instagram.com/katecaseyca Tik Tok: https://www.tiktok.com/@itskatecasey?lang=en Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/113157919338245 Amazon List: https://www.amazon.com/shop/katecasey Twitter: https://twitter.com/katecaseySee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Fireworks are already flying, Missouri is apparently competing for the national championship of "Things You Shouldn't Light With Your Hand," and somehow that's only the beginning.The crew kicks things off trying to figure out whether it's Wednesday, Thursday, or simply the longest week in human history before diving headfirst into Fourth of July survival tips that probably won't save anybody's fingers. Backyard fireworks, neighborhood explosions, and some horrifying statistics make everyone question whether buying fireworks by the shopping cart was ever a good national tradition.Meanwhile, Moon relives the story of becoming "that weird guy in the neighborhood" after climbing a massive tree to rescue his son's drone and accidentally introducing himself to strangers as "Moon." Unsurprisingly, the neighbors were left convinced a celestial being...Road rage, unbearable heat, geese holding up traffic, Gary Busey somehow becoming Gary Goosey, and an absolutely ridiculous debate over whether honking at geese is ever acceptable all collide into one giant conversation that somehow still makes perfect sense on this daily comedy show.Just when everyone thinks the episode has peaked, along comes the legend of the mysterious Mexican Batman—a real-life vigilante allegedly duct-taping motorcycle thieves to light poles before leaving police to clean up the mess. The crew immediately begins casting Alfred, Robin, and debating exactly how Batman's alter ego translates into Spanish.As if that wasn't enough, Dry July officially begins, prompting discussions about drinking culture, whether wine has ever actually been healthy, bizarre proposals limiting alcohol sales, and the eternal struggle of surviving social events while staying sober. It's heartfelt, ridiculous, and exactly what you'd expect from people who can somehow turn alcohol policy into comedy.Ancient pinball laws finally disappear, bizarre yearbook pranks make national news, forgotten movie trivia takes over the studio, and somehow the gang finds itself laughing through one completely unbelievable story after another. The result is exactly what longtime listeners expect: organized chaos disguised as a radio show.If you love weird news, sarcastic humor, pop culture commentary, ridiculous debates, and a daily comedy show that somehow finds comedy hiding inside every headline, you're in the right place. Whether you're listening during your commute, pretending to work, or recovering from your own backyard fireworks adventure, we've got you covered.This daily comedy show dives headfirst into the weird power of 80s advertising as the gang discovers they somehow remember every lyric from Mentos, Big Red, Toys "R" Us, Crossfire, Mousetrap, Mountain Dew, and just about every commercial that interrupted Saturday morning cartoons. Apparently your brain forgets passwords but permanently stores gum jingles from 40 years ago.Then things take a surprisingly emotional turn as news breaks that St. Louis broadcasting legend Joe Buck is officially moving his family to Colorado. The crew debates whether the city should feel betrayed, whether Denver's mysterious airport conspiracy finally claimed another celebrity, and why St. Louis residents can be hilariously possessive of anyone they consider "one of us."Of course, it wouldn't be The Rizzuto Show without diving into celebrity chaos. The crew discusses Nikki Sixx reigniting an old feud with Godsmack, Tommy Lee proving he's somehow still the same guy after all these years, Rush postponing tour dates, Lizzo opening up about disappointing album sales, Bam Margera continuing his recovery journey, and the internet somehow finding a reason to get angry about Fiona's appearance in the new Shrek movie.Then comes one of the funniest conversations of the day as everyone debates the greatest comedy movies ever made. Does Monty Python and the Holy Grail deserve the top spot? Should Bridesmaids replace The Hangover? Is Dumb and Dumber secretly a perfect comedy? Naturally, absolutely nobody agrees.Finally, the show debuts a brand-new game that perfectly captures the generational divide. Teenagers are handed a list of legendary 80s and 90s band names and asked to pronounce them out loud. The results are exactly as gloriously awkward as you'd hope, leaving everyone wondering whether classic rock history has officially become another foreign language.If you've ever looked at the spelling of Queensrÿche, INXS, Kajagoogoo, Björk, Hüsker Dü, Portishead, Chumbawamba, Oingo Boingo, or Yngwie Malmsteen and wondered who lost a bet naming these bands... this episode is for you.Rizz recruits his kids and their friends for what seems like a simple challenge: read a list of famous artists from the '80s and '90s out loud. Easy... until they actually see the spellings.What follows is an absolutely glorious game of confidence, confusion, lucky guesses, and pronunciations that make every Gen Xer simultaneously laugh and feel incredibly old. The crew debates every answer before callers place their bets on whether today's teenagers can figure out names that older music fans have spent decades taking for granted.Some artists turn out to be easier than expected. Others become instant comedy gold. Hearing "Inks" instead of INXS, watching everyone overthink Depeche Mode, the surprising victories with Chumbawamba and Oingo Boingo, and the complete surrender when Yngwie Malmsteen enters the chat all make for one hilarious ride.Along the way, Moon, King Scott, Rafe, and Rizz roast each other almost as much as they roast the contestants, making every guess funnier than the last. It's nostalgia, music trivia, generational chaos, and live game-show energy all rolled into one episode.Whether you're screaming the correct answers from your car, discovering some of these bands for the first time, or realizing your favorite artists have names that make absolutely no phonetic sense, this comedy podcast delivers nonstop laughs from start to finish.If you grew up watching MTV, collecting CDs, or arguing over whose dad had the better record collection, you'll love seeing how today's generation handles these iconic names. And if you're Gen Z... don't worry. We promise we're laughing with you.Follow The Rizzuto Show → https://linktr.ee/rizzshowConnect with The Rizzuto Show Comedy Podcast online → https://1057thepoint.com/RizzShowHear The Rizz Show daily on 105.7 The Point | Hubbard Radio in St. Louis, MO.1 killed in shooting after altercation on I-64 exit ramp in O'Fallon, MissouriSuspects face charges after car break-in spree in Maryland HeightsMexican ‘Batman' vigilante wanted for chasing down suspected motorbike thieves, taping them to lamppostsCambridge bar owner fights proposed 30-minute drink rule and other restrictions: "It's kind of wild"SC law legalizes pinball for youth, ending decades-old prohibitionAdolf Hitler baby photo in New Jersey middle school yearbook sparks investigationMissouri St. Louis spot earns title of ‘Best Sandwich in America'Joe Buck, family moving to Denver, with 'partial home base' in St. LouisSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

If you've ever looked at the spelling of Queensrÿche, INXS, Kajagoogoo, Björk, Hüsker Dü, Portishead, Chumbawamba, Oingo Boingo, or Yngwie Malmsteen and wondered who lost a bet naming these bands... this episode is for you.Rizz recruits his kids and their friends for what seems like a simple challenge: read a list of famous artists from the '80s and '90s out loud. Easy... until they actually see the spellings.What follows is an absolutely glorious game of confidence, confusion, lucky guesses, and pronunciations that make every Gen Xer simultaneously laugh and feel incredibly old. The crew debates every answer before callers place their bets on whether today's teenagers can figure out names that older music fans have spent decades taking for granted.Some artists turn out to be easier than expected. Others become instant comedy gold. Hearing "Inks" instead of INXS, watching everyone overthink Depeche Mode, the surprising victories with Chumbawamba and Oingo Boingo, and the complete surrender when Yngwie Malmsteen enters the chat all make for one hilarious ride.Along the way, Moon, King Scott, Rafe, and Rizz roast each other almost as much as they roast the contestants, making every guess funnier than the last. It's nostalgia, music trivia, generational chaos, and live game-show energy all rolled into one episode.Whether you're screaming the correct answers from your car, discovering some of these bands for the first time, or realizing your favorite artists have names that make absolutely no phonetic sense, this comedy podcast delivers nonstop laughs from start to finish.If you grew up watching MTV, collecting CDs, or arguing over whose dad had the better record collection, you'll love seeing how today's generation handles these iconic names. And if you're Gen Z... don't worry. We promise we're laughing with you. Mostly.This comedy podcast proves that some band names were never meant to be read by human eyes. The pronunciations may be questionable, but the laughs definitely aren't.Thanks for listening to another comedy podcast from The Rizzuto Show—where every day somehow turns into organized chaos, and somehow that's exactly how we like it.Follow The Rizzuto Show → https://linktr.ee/rizzshowConnect with The Rizzuto Show Comedy Podcast online → https://1057thepoint.com/RizzShowHear The Rizz Show daily on 105.7 The Point | Hubbard Radio in St. Louis, MO.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.