Podcasts about interstate

Just in time for the 40th anniversary of the 1985 World Series, Marshall Garvey, author of Interstate '85: The Royals, The Cardinals, and the Show-Me World Series, joins the boys to talk about how videogames help with his writing process, interviewing umpiring great Don Denkinger, whether or not Dan Quisenberry should be in the Hall of Fame, if Bo Jackson ruined the Kansas City Royals and, yes, that time an All-Star outfielder threatened to kill his general manager. This week's podcast was brought to you by  Teambrown Apparel, Old Fort Baseball Co and Patrick's Custom Painting.

A Florida couple is charged with child neglect after allegedly leaving a 16-year-old boy on the side of Interstate 75 with a bag of guns and cash. A federal judge dismisses Drake’s defamation lawsuit against Universal Music Group, ruling that Kendrick Lamar’s “Not Like Us” was protected artistic opinion rather than fact. Drew Nelson reports.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

WhoStephanie Cox, CEO of the National Ski PatrolRecorded onJune 3, 2025About National Ski PatrolFrom the organization's website:The National Ski Patrol is a federally-chartered 501(c)(3) nonprofit membership association. As the leading authority of on-mountain safety, the NSP is dedicated to serving the outdoor recreation industry by providing education and accreditation to emergency care and safety service providers.With a primary focus on education and training, the organization includes more than 30,000 members [Cox says 32,000 on the pod] serving 650 patrols in the U.S., Canada, Europe and Asia. Our members work on behalf of local ski/snowboard areas and bike parks to improve the overall experience for outdoor recreationalists. Members include ski and bike patrollers, mountain and bike hosts, alumni, associates, and physician partners.The National Ski Patrol operates as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, deriving its primary financial support from membership dues, donations, user fees, and corporate sponsorships. …The national office is located in Lakewood, Colorado, and is staffed with full-time employees that handle administrative duties.Why I interviewed herThe Storm focuses unapologetically on the lift-served variety of skiing. I'll often reinforce that point by teasing Uphill Bro for skiing in the wrong direction or making fun of myself for being a lazy U.S. American happy to ride a machine up the mountain. That, mostly, is a shtick to express my preference for an ordered ski experience over the wild variety. Acres of glades twisting down the mountainside – yes, please. But I'll also take that groomed run-out back to the six-pack. This all-you-can-eat variety of skiing feeds the adrenaline monster, stows energy for the bristling explosive down. The fun part. But my hyperbolic preference for the down is also a sort-of cover-up. Because what really glues me to the trail-labeled and lift-laced bumps is that gigantic and ever-present panic button floating alongside me: ski patrol.Oh I just ran into a tree? Well that's inconvenient because now I can't remember how to speak English or why I have eight empty Miller Lite cans in my backpack. But no need to fret. Within five minutes a corps of uniformed professionals specifically trained in the idiosyncratic art of piloting an injured moron down an ungroomed hillside on an eight-foot-long sled will materialize with crackling radios and stabilize me. It's kind of amazing. Like who thought of this? I guess the same person who came up with lifeguards at the beach. When a squirrel misses its branch and falls 75 feet to the forest floor there is no Squirrel 911. Just a variety of bobcats and coyotes who are about to find an easy dinner. Humans are quite amazing animals in this way, setting up systems both highly effective and borderline invisible that grant us wide margins of error to in most cases survive even catastrophic misjudgments.Depending on your view of human nature, the existence of ski patrol is either the most or least predictable miracle layer of organized commercial ski centers. The cynical may interpret this network of makeshift shacks and their occupants as liability shields, a legal hey-we-tried taskforce vaguely taming the chaos inherent in an impossible and awkward activity. But a more generous interpretation might view ski patrol as the most benevolent component of a ski area, the only piece not intended to generate income, an acknowledgement that any one of us, on even the gentlest slope, could in an instant need someone who knows exactly what to do.I prefer that latter interpretation, but the truth is of course a complex blend of the cynical and the generous viewpoints, interlaced with a million other factors. We are all vaguely aware of this, which doesn't mean we can explain it. I mean, why is ski patrol at every ski area? The question is both simplistic and baffling. Well of course there's ski patrol because there always is. OK. But shouldn't there be some live-free-or-die exception in the rowdy ski world of backwoods trails axe-cut by misanthropic good ole' boys putting two middle fingers to society's nine-to-five, collared-shirt expectations? Like “hey man, look at the waiver, if you break your leg it's not my goddamned problem.” But there they are, anyplace there's a ski lift, wearing that same plus-symbol uniform, enforcing that same yellow-signed skier code, blanketed with that same aura of stoic unsurprise and readiness: ski patrol. Is this omnipresence simply custom and tradition? State or federal law? Insurance requirement? Do patrollers work for the ski area or for some agency or entity? An imposition like restaurant food inspectors? Enforcers like a city's police department? Attendants like stadium ushers? It's hard to say without asking, so I asked.What we talked aboutTouring ski patrols across America; #SkiVirginia; Ski Patrol's philosophical evolution over time; patrol saving my butt in Maine; how NSP ensures that patrollers are prepared to deal with the worst injuries at even the smallest ski areas; evolving and adapting over time; “this organization is by and large run by volunteers”; Avy dogs; why ski patrol is everywhere; organizational history; the relationship between NSP and individual ski areas; who funds NSP; paid versus volunteer patrollers; “one of my big goals for the organization is to make sure that all patrols fall under the NSP shield”; a couple of major ski area patrols that are not part of NSP; the general public “is not going to notice the difference” between a paid and volunteer patroller; where most of the paid patrollers work, and why; the amazing number of years the average volunteer patroller commits to the work; the rising cost of living in mountain towns; why NSP does not involve itself in pay or benefits conversations between patrollers and resorts; staying neutral on unionization drives; what it means to modernize NSP; and applying tech to help police on-mountain collisions.What I got wrong* I referenced a recent snowless winter at Wintergreen, Virginia, and said it was “in 21/22 or 22/23.” It was the winter of 2022-23, which, according to Snow Brains, was the ski area's third snowless winter in a decade, after the 2016-17 and 2018-19 campaigns.* At one point in our conversation, I mentioned “voluntary volunteers.” Which I don't know Man talking is hard I guess.Why now was a good time for this interviewI'd initially reached out to Cox as a follow-up to my podcast conversation with United Mountain Workers union President Max Magill, conducted in the wake of the December-to-January Park City patrol strike that leveled the ski area and sent owner Vail Resorts spiraling:National Ski Patrol, it turns out, has no involvement in or position on unionization. That was a bit of a record scratch but also clarifying: patrol union drives, at least for now, lack a national sponsor that could propel the movement to critical mass. Still, it seemed odd that a national organization's most visible umbrella would stand neutral on the trajectory of a tectonic movement flexing against consolidating, ever-more-distant management and escalating mountain-town affordability crises. So we talked about it a bit anyway.What I've learned, 212 episodes into The Storm, is that organizations and entities are rarely – maybe never – what you expect them or want them to be. In episode 11, recorded in January 2020, just a few months after The Storm's launch, I asked Win Smith, then National Ski Areas Association board chair and onetime owner of Sugarbush, the now very-innocent-seeming question of what the organization was doing to subsidize small or independent ski areas. Smith patiently explained that the NSAA was a trade organization, not a charity (I'm paraphrasing), and that their mission was education, lobbying, and helping to establish uniform operating standards and best practices, not a U.N.-style stabilizing force money-cannoning resources where necessary. I get that now, and have developed, through extensive interaction with the group, a deep appreciation for what the NSAA is and does, even if it is not the thing 2020 Stu thought it was or should be.I guess that's the point of The Storm Skiing Podcast: a dumb guy asking dumb questions like “so when are you going to build a gondola over Interstate 90 to connect Alpental to the rest of Summit at Snoqualmie?” and letting the nice smart people say “well wouldn't that be nice but we have other priorities,” when they mean, “sure let me pull $100 million out of my back pocket to build a more-or-less useless lift that would also spark two decades of environmental litigation and has as much chance of clearing airspace over a federal road as a Russian stealth bomber.” Luckily I don't mind asking dumb questions. They emerge from an impulse to sort reality from fiction, to tell the story of modern lift-served skiing by tapping the brains who understand some little corner of it. Podcast NotesOn recent Ski Patrol leadershipThis could maybe go under the sometimes-included “questions I wish I'd asked” section, but really I don't wish I'd asked about it, as I have inherently little interest in organizational human drama, or the appearance of such. In this case, that maybe-drama is the rapid recent turnover in NSP leadership, aptly described by Jason Blevins last year in The Colorado Sun:The former executive director of the nonprofit World Child Cancer heath organization arrived at the National Ski Patrol two years ago, becoming the fourth director of the organization in only five years. The former bosses reported conflicts with the group's member-elected board of directors. An online petition was calling for an overhaul of the venerable organization that formed in 1938. Staff were bailing after years of turmoil that included board members twice suing their own organization. The group was losing its relevance in a quickly shifting ski resort industry.Cox landed with a plan. She started visiting ski patrols across the country. She shepherded an overhaul of the organization's training programs. She enlisted staff and kept them onboard. She mended fences with her board.Whatever happened before, Cox just hit her third anniversary with the organization, and I was mostly interested in her efforts to modernize the 87-year-old NSP.On skier visit numbers nationally and in ColoradoColorado annually accounts for nearly one in four U.S. skier visits. Here's the breakdown from last winter, according to the Kotke end-of-year survey, the definitive statistical ski industry report published annually by the NSAA:On breaking my leg at Black Mountain of MaineMost of you are tired of hearing about this, but if you're new here, this is my big ski-patrol-saves-my-ass story:On federal chartersAn important piece of the NSP why-does-it-exist puzzle is its status, since 1980, as a federally chartered nonprofit organization. Congress charters such organizations “to carry out some regional or national public purpose,” according to a 2022 report on congress.gov. As with just about anything, a comprehensive list is frustratingly difficult to find (that's why I moonlight as ski area spreadsheet mad scientist), but federally chartered organizations include such vaunted entities as the American Red Cross, the Boy and Girl Scouts of America, and Disabled American Veterans. Here's a probably-not-entirely-accurate list on Wikipedia, and a government list from 1994.On “14 patrols unionizing across the west”Here's a list I compiled of unionized ski area groups back in January. I haven't updated it, so there may be a few additions since:On Snow AngelsThis is a pretty good gut-check conversation for the Speed Gods among us:On Wachusett's anti-theft systemSki theft sucks, and some ski areas are better at fighting it than others. One of the best I'm aware of is Wachusett, Massachusetts, which has installed a comprehensive system of ski-rack-to-parking-lot cameras that has reduced thieves' success rate to near zero. “A lot of times, the police will be waiting for them when they get home with the stolen board,” longtime Wachusett President Jeff Crowley told me on a 2022 visit to the ski area.The Storm explores the world of lift-served skiing all year long. Join us. Get full access to The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast at www.stormskiing.com/subscribe

I'm sitting on a bench at the nearby city park listening to Creek & Raven. It comes out in a few days, as I write this. I haven't listened to it for many months now, so it's both surprising and unsurprising how it opens. Unsurprising is the trilling Pacific Wren, a distant Common Raven and the faint sound of a creek. Surprising is the mournful synthesizer lead that resembles a French horn.The vibe is meeting me where I am today, on this last overcast day of another extended Portland Indian summer. Winter is coming, literally and figuratively. I feel it; stark, curious and foreboding.The environmental audio was captured in one of the deeper canyons of Forest Park in early June of this year. The creek that carved this deep canyon is named Rocking Chair Creek after the discovery of a rocking chair in its waters. I'm visualizing it now like the heirloom bentwood rocker in my living room, half sunk with gold-green moss growing on it, illuminated in a sunbeam. I returned to the canyon a few weeks ago and made more sketches. It's interesting to me how the palette shifted, on return, to bluer hues of green. This brings to mind how the observer influences a scene; how interpretations and tone can shift. About 8 miles away from this canyon is a different scene that has captured the imagination of the nation, and beyond, in the recent news cycle.Here, a nondescript beige multi-story federal building stands between Interstate 5 and the Willamette river on the margins of downtown Portland, Oregon. It is ground zero for a political Rorschach test. A lot has been written about it. I'm not interested in trying to summarize that here. If you know, you know…you know?But the idea that there is any debate about facts on the ground; that there is any set of conditions that presently call for US military intervention in my home town is unnerving. It is deeply strange and seemingly animated by a dark fantasy. Most here poke fun at the absurdity of it all; the disconnect between truth and image-peddling. A few have their own reasons to support some hazy notion of a “crackdown”. The city is not without problems, after all. Anyone can tell you that. It's been a tough run over the better part of a decade, here and most everywhere. On that score, there have been plenty of indications that the city turned a corner. I travelled to four capital cities in Europe over the summer and they didn't strike me as better or worse, any more or less livable on the whole.The fever-pitched finger pointing is what makes my stomach churn. The notion that educated people cannot in good faith arrive at a consensus on whether a city is “war-ravaged”, “under siege”, even “burning to the ground” or about average for its size is like a chapter out of George Orwell's 1984. “Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else.”“2 + 2 = 5”-Party doctrine from 1984 by George OrwellIn the finale of Creek and Raven we hear ravens croak and rattle with gusto. What are they saying?Ravens have long been cast as messengers in the symbology of First Nations. As a communicative carrion bird, their associations with prophecy, insight, and playing intermediary between life and death are long held. Do these ravens have any prophecies or insights to share about their home in Portland, Oregon? Recent studies have identified at least 30 to 40 distinct vocalizations in ravens' repertoire. They vocalize for the same reasons humans do: talking about food, keeping track of family members, socializing, bonding, playing, warning, and identifying each other specifically. Ravens even use “emotional” prosody; they convey urgency or calm through tone. They can learn new vocalizations, mimicking human speech and other sounds.I think we could all benefit by taking time to actively listen to what Bernie Krause coined the “biophony”, the layer of the soundscape made by living organisms. We would do well to listen to each other as well; us human animals. I believe estrangement from the biophony, can lead to less empathy, and that can lead to all sorts of unfortunate outcomes.We have some mending to do. We have holes in our social fabric left over from the pandemic; splits aggravated by social media and the tribalism of news media empires. Maybe we can take a lesson from ravens and just remember to talk to each other; to shoot the breeze about food and family.A raven's warning call is a sharp, urgent Kawk! Kawk! Kawk! But what happens when one of the flock spreads alarm when there is no real threat? We know from the old folk tale how Chicken Little—the sky is falling!—learns a lesson about spreading alarm without evidence…in the sanitized version of the tale. In most versions, the characters (Chicken Little, Ducky Lucky, Goosey Loosey, and Turkey Lurkey) encounter Foxy Loxy who uses the panic to trick them into his den and eat them all. What I think we are facing in this country is leadership that is acting like Chicken Little while also behaving like Foxy Loxy. It's not normal. It's not okay. I think it needs to be called out. I think we—all of us—deserve more from elected leaders. I'm not typically an outspoken person, but now doesn't feel like the time to sit back and say nothing.Thank you, as always, for joining me here, and for listening to my point of view. Creek & Raven is available on all music streaming services October 17th, 2025. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit chadcrouch.substack.com/subscribe

Welcome to Dev Game Club, where this week we begin a new series on 2010's Deadly Premonition. We first set the game in its time, and talk a bit about Japanese creators breaking out and establishing more auteurist inclinations, before turning to the first part of the game. Dev Game Club looks at classic video games and plays through them over several episodes, providing commentary. Sections played: Up to/through the police station Issues covered: announcement of our October schedule, singing reviews, 2010 in games, horror games or things in the space, the place in the console cycle, Tim's understanding of the game going in, an indie-developer feel, amortizing investment to earn out, a shift in Japanese development, a surprising game coming out of nowhere, the blogosphere, American pop culture, a difficult creator to follow, Dark Cooper, the HD transition and switch to widescreen, making UI for HD, the victim in the tree and all its symbology, the discipline of the first scene, quick cutting in cinema, York and Zach talking about Tom and Jerry, holding on uncanny valley faces with the la la song, chasing photorealistic faces, stereotypes, the long table beautifully framed, the difficulty of sustaining a Lynchian show, an open world game with driving, a schedule of events and a populace with routines, the connections between characters, a "yes" game, a town being a character, the frustration of the schedule, an open world town vs an open world forest, something being best as a game, making choices and the feelings you have making them, walking simulators and systemic richness, Brett and Tim differ, portals being aligned for you, level and systems design not talking. Games, people, and influences mentioned or discussed: Erik Wolpaw, Portal/Portal 2, Defeating Games for Charity, Alan Wake (series), Resident Evil 5, God of War III, BioShock 2, Halo: Reach, Super Mario Galaxy 2, Fallout: New Vegas, Civ V, Dead Rising 2 (and series), Metal Gear: Peacewalker, Starcraft II, Amnesia: Dark Descent, Limbo, Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood, Mass Effect 2, Red Dead Redemption, Darksiders, Heavy Rain, Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc, Battle Royale, Swery65, Hidetaka Suehiro, Access Games, David Lynch, Twin Peaks, Aksys Games, Stephen King, Control, Remedy Entertainment, Fatal Frame, Suda51, Grasshopper Manufacture, 2K Games, Ken Levine, The Elder Scrolls (series), Neo Geo SNK, Hideo Kojima, Konami, Hironobu Sakaguchi, Shenmue, Clover/Platinum, CapCom, Killer 7, Viewtiful Joe, Gathering of Developers, Ion Storm, Shinji Mikami, Ninja Gaiden Black, Giant Bomb, PlayStation, Interstate '76, Naomi Watts, Beyond Good and Evil, Crystal Dynamics, Tom and Jerry, Quentin Tarantino, Top Gun, Sleep with Me (obliquely), Gilmore Girls, The Last of Us, Ashley Johnson, Juno, Elliot Page, The Shining, Batman, Northern Exposure, Mark Frost, The X-Files, Ashton Herrmann, The Red Strings Club, LucasArts, The Walking Dead, Gone Home, Dear Esther, No Man's Sky, Mike, Quake, Spelunky, Calamity Nolan, Kirk Hamilton, Aaron Evers, Mark Garcia.  Next time: More of Deadly Premonition! Twitch: timlongojr and twinsunscorp  YouTube  Discord  DevGameClub@gmail.com 

On today's episode of NCSEA On Location, host Scott Eder explores the county-driven child support program in Minnesota. He is joined by David Ramroop, a child support worker with the Ramsey County Attorney's Office, who shares his personal motivation and comprehensive approach to his enforcement caseload. He is joined by James Wittling, a child support professional from Washington County specializing in complex Interstate cases that cross state lines. The conversation emphasizes the importance of relationship building, client empathy, and overcoming bureaucratic hurdles inherent in Minnesota's localized structure. Bothunderscore the need for continuous client education to dispel common public misconceptions and ensure all parties understand their rights and responsibilities within the child support system.  This is part 1 of a 2-part episode.

It's been more than 60 years since the construction of Interstate 94 destroyed much of the historically Black St. Paul neighborhood known as Rondo. Minneapolis writer Debra J. Stone remembers visiting her grandparents as a child in Rondo every Sunday without fail. She even remembers playing in an enormous dirt pit from I-94 construction growing near their house. It was only when her grandparents' house was demolished that she realized the effect the interstate would have. Debra wrote a novel about a little girl, not unlike herself at the time, grappling with the destruction of the Rondo neighborhood in 1963. The book is called “The House on Rondo,” and it is out Tuesday. She spoke to MPR News host Nina Moini about her experience growing up visiting Rondo and her new book.Debra will read from her new book at Black Garnet Books in St. Paul for a book launch event on Oct. 11.

Soybean farmers are getting hit by the U.S. trade war with China. They could catch a break if the federal government moves forward with plans to send out billions of dollars in aid. We talked with an agricultural economist about what a bailout would mean for Minnesota growers.It's been two years since the Hamas attack on Israel and the onset of war in Gaza. In the U.S., college campuses have been central to clashes in public opinion. We talked to a rabbi who is working for the University of Minnesota to support Jewish students who hold a wide range of views of the conflict.We met a Minneapolis writer with roots in St. Paul. As a child in the 1960s, she watched Interstate 94 tear through her family's historically Black neighborhood. Now, she's out with a new novel about a little girl having that same experience. It's called “The House on Rondo.”Our Minnesota Music Minute was “No Water” by Libianca and our Song of the Day was “Never be the Same” by Sarah Morris.

Sun, Oct 5 6:11 PM → 6:42 PM Unsure Radio Systems: - Arlington VA Trunked System

"This has to be meaningful to you. It has to be a story that won't leave you alone, a story that you're willing to rearrange your calendar for," says Masha Hamilton, whose Atavist Magazine story is titled "I've Gone to Look for America."Today we have Masha Hamilton, a journalist, a novelist, a fan of the show, a fan of Pitch Club. You'll want to visit mashahamilton.com to learn more about her wide-ranging career covering the world. She's the author of five novels and trying to sell her sixth. She was at one point the director of communications and public diplomacy at the US embassy in Kabul.Her story for the Atavist is about her driving the entire length of I-95 with her photographer son Cheney, and stopping at just about every rest stop to speak with strangers about how they feel about our country. “Conversations and revelations about an ailing nation along Interstate 95.” Man, those Atavist editors sure can write the hell out of a dek.Guess who's back!? Seyward Darby! Do your best Kermit the Frog dance. Very nice to hear her and this piece challenged Seyward in ways I didn't see coming: Meaning, she didn't share Masha's optimism or hope. Seyward, for lack of a better word, disagreed with it, so there was an interesting tension she brought to the edit.For Masha's part, we talk about: Novels as complimentary to her nonfiction Covering societies in change Healing through story How this was piece was a therapy session Accelerated intimacy Endings Middles Finding the meaning Writing you rearrange your calendar for And belonging as practiceOrder The Front RunnerNewsletter: Rage Against the AlgorithmWelcome to Pitch ClubShow notes: brendanomeara.com

If you enjoy this podcast and look forward to it in your inbox, consider supporting it by becoming a paid yearly subscriber for $60 or you can buy me a cup of coffee for $8Welcome to another episode of "Dishing with Stephanie's Dish." Today, I interview acclaimed food writer, wild foods expert, and self-described hunter-gatherer Hank Shaw. Hank is the author of the brand new cookbook, "Borderlands: Recipes and Stories from the Rio Grande to the Pacific," an exploration of the flavors, cultures, and stories that define the borderlands between the United States and Mexico. He also has a Substack that's wonderful, called Hank Shaw “To The Bone” and a website full of recipes.In this episode, Hank and I dive into everything from his early days as a restaurant cook and investigative journalist to his passion for foraging, preserving, and hunting wild foods. Hank discusses the vibrant mix of culinary traditions that thrive along the border, debunks myths about iconic ingredients (like acorns!), and shares the fascinating histories behind beloved dishes such as chimichangas and parisa.They also touch on practical advice—like the art of drying herbs, the joys and challenges of single-person food preservation, and the ins and outs of self-publishing cookbooks at a high level.Get ready for an episode filled with storytelling, culinary wisdom, and inspiration for your next adventure in the kitchen or the great outdoors. Whether you're a curious home cook, an aspiring cookbook author, or simply a lover of good food, there's something here for everyone. Let's get started!Original Episode Transcript Follows:Stephanie:Hello, everybody, and welcome to Dishing with Stephanie's Dish, the podcast, where we talk to fun people in the food space and sometimes they have cookbooks. And today's author is an author. He's an author of great magnitude, Hank Shaw. His new book is Borderlands Recipes and Stories from the Rio Grande to the Pacific. And Hank, you are such a prolific, beautiful writer. This book, I feel like, is just so you. Do you love it?Hank Shaw:It's been a long journey to make this book, and I'm pretty proud of it. And it's. It's been probably the biggest project of my adult life in terms of time, commitment, travel, really unlocking understanding of things that I thought I knew but didn't necessarily know until I got there. And it's just been this. This crazy, fantastic journey and a journey that you can eat.Stephanie:Can you talk a little bit about your history? Like, I think many people know you as the hunter, forager, gatherer, type, and Borderlands obviously has a lot of those elements to it. But can you just walk readers that are listeners that might be new to your journey kind of through how you got here?Hank Shaw:Sure. Many, many years ago, when I was still fairly young, I was a restaurant cook. So I worked first as a dishwasher and then as a line cook and then as a sous chef in a series of restaurants, mostly in Madison, Wisconsin. And I left that job to be a newspaper reporter. And I ended up being a newspaper reporter for 18 years. And I cooked all throughout that and traveled and learned more about food and did fishing and hunting and foraging and such. And then I left the News Business in 2010 to do my website, which is hunter, angler, gardener, cook. And I've been doing that full time since 2010.So, yeah, my entire kind of current incarnation is wild foods. But Borderlands is kind of an outgrowth of that for two reasons. The first is I've been basically written all of the fishing game books you can possibly write already. I've got one for every kind of quarry you can imagine. And then the other thing was, oh, well, you know, a lot of that travel for those other books was on the border on both sides, on the American side and on the Mexican side. And that kind of grew into this. Wow, you know, God, the food is so great and God, this area is just so neglected, I think, by most, you know, the. The food, or radio, for lack of a better term.Yeah, because all of the, like, everybody seems to love to hate Tex Mex without really fully knowing what Tex Mex actually is. And people say that the Southwestern cooking is so very 1987. And. And, you know, the people who know Mexico are like, oh, all the good foods in Oaxaca or Michoacan or Mexico City or Yucatan. And really that's not the case, as over and over and over again, I was discovering these amazing just finds. And a lot of them had to do with wild foods, but not all of them. And so that borderlands became my diary of that journey.Stephanie:And quite a diary it is. What's interesting to me is I didn't actually ever know that you were in the newspaper business.Hank Shaw:And that makes a Pioneer Press graduate.Stephanie:Oh, you work for them. How did I not know this?Hank Shaw:Yeah, I was a St. Paul Pioneer Press investigative reporter from 2002 to 2004. And if you're of a certain age and you remember there was a big story about some Republican operatives getting involved with a telecommunications boondoggle. And yeah, that was probably. That was us. That was our story.Stephanie:Well, and it makes sense because the book is so like. It's the storytelling that's so good. And, you know, cookbooks are cookbooks with beautiful recipes and different people's point of view on recipes. But what I love about your book, too, is it really goes into ingredients a little more in depth. It tells the story of the terroir, of where the recipe's from and why it's the way it is. And it makes sense now to me that you're a journalist because it's so beautifully written.Hank Shaw:I really appreciate that. I mean, I tried in this particular book. There are essays in all of my books, but in this particular one, I really, really wanted people from the rest of the country to get a flavor of what it's like to was really honest to God, like on the border. Everybody has thoughts and opinions about immigration and about the border and about blah, blah, blah. And it's like, well, how much time have you actually spent on the border? Do you actually know what it feels like, what it smells like, what it tastes like? Chances are you probably don't. And I really wanted this book to shine a light on that in ways that go well beyond food.Stephanie:When we talk about the borderlands, can you talk about it without talking about immigration and the close connection between the United States and Mexico? I mean, we share this border. People have this idea that it's like this gated, fenced situation, and really there's tons of the border that's just. You'd only know it was a border if someone told you you were crossing it.Hank Shaw:It's very true. In Fact, one of my favorite moments to that was in south southwest Texas there's a beautiful national park called Big Bend. It's one of the biggest national parks in the country. It's fa. It's famous, it's amazing. But you're going to drive and hike and hike and drive and hike and drive a gigantic park. So one place that you can go to. And it's actually, if you open up a copy of Borderlands and you see this huge vista right at the beginning of the book, there's this huge vista and it's on a cliff. That is exactly it. That is. That is Big Bend National Park. And if you're looking right in the back end of that back center, a little to the left, you'll see a canyon in the background. In that canyon is St. Helena Canyon. And St.Helena Canyon is created by the Rio Grande. So you can go to that park and you can walk across the border literally to Mexico and not have the Rio Grande come up over your ankles. And there's Mexicans on their side, there's Americans on our side, and everybody's crossing back and forth until their families are there and having a fun time, blah, blah, blah. And it's just, it's one of these great moments where it shows you that, yeah, that border is really just sort of a fiction.Stephanie:Yeah. Yes, in many ways. Right. Figuratively. And also, I don't know, we seem to be in a global food economy whether we want to or not. When you look at the individual ingredients that you're using here in Borderlands, obviously there's very different things because of temperature in Mexico than you might have here in the Midwest. But is it really different from like say, Texas to Mexico in.Hank Shaw:Yes, there, there are definitely different. So the food you'll get in Nueva Leon or Coahuila or Tamaulipas, which are the three Mexican states, that border Texas is going to be different from what you would think about as Texas food. However, on the Borderlands, that. That change really is minimal. And I talk about in the book the idea of Fronteraisos, people who are neither fully Mexican nor full. They're. They're border people and they can slide between English and Spanish in mid clause. And it's really the, you know, the, the pocho or Spanglish or whatever you want to call it that you'll hear there is very different from what you'll hear from a bilingual person from, say, Mexico City, where typically those people will speak in full sentences or paragraphs in one language and then maybe switch to another language in the next sentence or paragraph.Hank Shaw:Well, on the border, it's a mishmash. So the structure, the words, the adjectives, like, it's everything. It's like no function. And so it's like. It's like this whole kind of amalgam of what's going on. And that kind of translates into the food where you've got some Texas, you know, some very Texas. Texas. Things that don't cross the border, like yellow cheese doesn't really cross the border.Stephanie:Right.Hank Shaw:The idea of, like, rotel queso. So it's. It's like Velveeta cheese melted with rotel. That's queso. That's the bad queso in North Texas. Like, you'll get that in, like, Amarillo. But the real queso is south of Interstate 10. And that is a white Mexican cheese.That it where you get, you know, roasted fire roasted green chilies folded into it and a little bit of Mexican oregano and salt and a little bit of crema to thin it out. And it's is to the rotel queso what a match is to the sun.Stephanie:Yeah.Hank Shaw:And, you know, I mean, that said, I'm not gonna poop all over the Velveeta one, because that while I don't think it tastes great, what I realized is that particular version of queso, which I personally don't like, is really heavy with cultural significance.Stephanie:Yeah.Hank Shaw:And. And so that's. There's a place for it. It's just not. That's not really as border food as you might think. That's a little bit more North Texas, and that's an example of where things don't cross. But a really great example of where things are damn near the same is Arizona and Sonora. So that there's almost no difference between Arizona Mexican food and Sonora Mexican food because they're one and the same.The burritos are pretty similar. The flour tortillas are similar. The carne asada is pretty similar. And so that. That's a case where the border's really. I mean, yes, it's a border, but I mean, it's like the. It's. There's no food border.Same thing with Southern California and Tijuana and Northern Baja. There's almost no. No functional difference between the two of them. Now, New Mexico and Chihuahua has a difference. And, like, north of Interstate 10 in Texas and the border in Texas are quite different.Stephanie:There's a recipe in here that I didn't even really know existed called Parisa.Hank Shaw:Oh, yeah.Stephanie:And, you know, you we will order steak tartare or make tartare. And I didn't realize that there was a. In many cultures, you sort of see similar foods or similar food groups, and they're just treated differently with herbs or spices. This looks delicious.Hank Shaw:It really is. It's the best way to describe it if you. If you're not familiar, because it's very. It's. It's super regional in Texas. Like, you can't even really get barista in Dallas or in. Or in El Paso. It's not a thing there.It's sort of a south central Texas thing. But the best way I can describe it is really accurately describe it. It is steak tartar meets aguachile. Because most people will say it's steak tartare meat ceviche. And yes, you absolutely can get it like that, but the. The acidity and the citrus will turn the. The raw beef gray, which I think looks gross. Yeah, I mean, it.It tastes fine, but it just kind of looks like, meh. So my recipe and what I do is I. I mix the steak tartare with the. Essentially, pico de gallo is really what it. What it's being mixed with, and a little bit of cheese, and I. I'll mix it and serve it right away so that when you eat it, the meat is still pink.Stephanie:Yeah, it looks really good. And then also in the book, so you're a hunter, obviously, we established that. But in many of these recipes, you have substitutions of different animal proteins that can be used. So whether it's elk or bison or sheep or duck, I think that's cool.Hank Shaw:Yeah, I mean, I think I. I started that process. It's done with icons. So if you look at a recipe for. Oh, there's a stew that's very popular. They're called puchero. And I'm just to that page, so I'll. So.Oh, that's a sour puerto. So always pork, but, like, no. Babies will die if you use something else from that. But that is traditionally a pork dish. Buchero is traditionally beef or venison, but really, you know, you're gonna be fine if you put damn near anything in it. It's a big, giant stew, a lot of vegetables, and it's fantastic. And to. To really make the book more versatile, because I.The two things that I always do in my books. Number one is I'm going to give you the recipe as faithfully as I can to what it actually is, wherever it's from, and then I'm going to give you all these substitutions so that if you live in, you know, Bismarck or Crookston or, you know, rural Iowa, you're going to be able to make it. And that's important to me because it's more important to me that you make some version of it than to be exactly proper and specific. I hate cookbooks where it's like, especially with cheese, where you'll see someone be like, it must be the, you know, Cowgirl Creamery point raised blue from 2012. Otherwise this recipe won't work. I'm like, come on guys, this is a stupid recipe. Like it's blue cheese. It'll be fine.Stephanie:I was surprised that you have a chimichanga in the book. Can we talk about chimichangas? Because people that grew up in the Midwest, Chichis was like the first Mexican restaurant besides El Burrito Mercado. And El Burrito Mercado was authentic and chichi's was like the Americanized what they thought Mexican food was. Which also I will say I have taste memories of chi cheese. I say this not dogging on them and they're actually coming back. And the chimichanga is something that like, if I actually go to the new restaurant, which I'm sure I will, I will order a chimichanga. It's like a taste memory for me. What is the origination of chimichanga?Hank Shaw:It's shrouded in mystery. So there's a couple different theories. And then I'll tell you what I think the general story is that a woman was making burritos in Arizona and either dropped, which I don't believe because that would create a splash that would, you know, send 350 degree oil everywhere, or placed a burrito in the deep fryer. And the, the legend, which I don't believe this is true at all, is she drops the burrito in the deep fryer and you know, says something like, you know, ah, chingo to madre or whatever, like just like swears something bad and. But then sort of does what you would do in a kind of a mom situation. And if you instead of saying the F word, you would say oh, fudge. And so she goes, oh Jimmy changa. And which is sort of vaguely reminiscent of some Mexican swear words.And so that thus the, the dish was born. But I think that's not true because there is a fantastic resource, actually. I mean, I found it in some of my older Mexican cookbooks that I own. But there's a fantastic research that the University of Texas at San Antonio of Mexican cookbooks. And some of these Mexican cookbooks are handwritten from the 1800s, and so they're all digitized and you can. You can study them. And so there's a thing in Sonora. Remember I just got done saying that, like, there's almost no difference between Sonora and Arizona.There's a thing from Sonora many, many, many, many years ago, you know, early early 1900s, for a chivy changa. C H I V I C H A N G A ch and it's the same thing. So I'm convinced that this is just a thing, because if you have a burrito and you fry things, there's zero. There's zero chance that at some point you be like, I want to. I wonder if frying the burrito will make it good? You know, like, the answer, yes, yes, all the time.Stephanie:And.Hank Shaw:And so, you know, I, like you, came into the chimichanga world just thinking with a definite eyebrow raised, like, what is this? And when it's done right, and if you see the picture in my book, it is dressed with a whole bunch of things on the outside of the burrito. So it's crema, it's a pico de gallo. It's shredded lettuce or cabbage, limes. The thing about a properly served chimichanga is that you have to eat it as a whole because the chimichanga itself is quite heavy. You know, it's a. It's a fried burrito with, like, rice and beans and meat inside it. Like, it's a gut bomb. But when you eat it with all these light things around it that are bright and fresh and acidic, it completely changes the eating experience. And I was sold.Stephanie:I can imagine. The one you have in the book looks really good. I'm going to. I keep asking about specific recipes, but there were, like, some that just jumped out at me, like, wow. Another one that jumped out at me was from that same chapter about the acorn cookies. I've always been under the impression that acorns, and maybe it's from just specific to the oaks, but that they're poisonous. I didn't think about making acorn flour.Hank Shaw:So, number one, no acorns are poisonous. Zero, period. End of story. It's a myth. You were lied to. Sorry.Stephanie:Yeah. I mean, it helps me because my dog eats them.Hank Shaw:I mean, acorns have been a source of food for human beings forever, you know, all the way. I don't know how long ago, but way more than 10,000 years. Way more. Okay, so what the myth comes from is most acorn varieties, so most especially red oaks, are full of tannins. And tannins are not poisonous. Tannins are not toxic. Tannins will make you constipated if you eat too many of them. And I suppose it would be possible to poison yourself with tannins, but I mean, good luck.Yeah, good luck eating enough of that astringent stuff to be able to get yourself poisoned. But tannins are water soluble. So for millennia, the people who eat acorns, and especially in. In northern California, where, you know, acorn. Acorns were their main starch, the idea of leaching the tannins out in a stream or wherever is as old as time. And so you make the. You make a meal. It's really a meal is probably a better way to put it.I call it flour, but there's no. There's no real gluten in it. In fact, there's no gluten in it, but there is some starch in it that will help the flour stick to itself. So that's true everywhere. In fact, it's a very good acorn year here in Minnesota this year. And I found some bur oaks in a. In a place that I'm going to go back and harvest them to make some more acorn flour this year. And I'll have to leach them here.But this is a very long walk up to this cookie recipe, because in south Arizona and in Sonora, there's an oak called an emery oak. And the emery oak is in the white oak. It's in the white oak clan. And it is sweet in the sense that you can roast those acorns and eat them. And in fact, you can get roasted acorns as a snack on some of the reservations down there or really wherever. I mean, it's a thing like it's. It. It.They could just roast it. Roast the acorns? Yeah. It's just like a chestnut. Very good. That's exactly with the. Because it's the same kind of a texture as well. And so that particular oak is unique in. In North America.The cork oak in Europe is the other one that doesn't have any tannins to it. So you can just sit there and eat them. And that's why they make flour out of them. It's an indigenous thing. You don't really see it too much among the Hispanic Sonorans. You see it a lot more with, like, Yaqui or Pima or Tono O', Odham, those indigenous groups.Stephanie:It's so Cool. I also subscribe to your substack, which I would encourage people to subscribe and. And yes to the Bone, it's called. And you just had a post about herbs and how important herbs are in your cooking and in your yard. And I know that you have kind of a small St. Paul yard because we've talked about it. What are you doing with your herbs now that we're at the end of the season? Are you. Do you have anything that's special that you do with them? Do you dry them? Do you mix them with salt?Hank Shaw:I do all of the above. I am a preservation fanatic. I could talk for hours just about various ways to preserve things for our Minnesota winners. Maybe that's another podcast for sure. But the short version is, yes, all of the things. I mostly will do things like make pesto with basil, because I love pesto. But I do dry some and there are tricks to drying herbs. The trick is low heat for a long time, so the don't use your oven and try to get them dry within 40, 48 hours, but also try to do it at less than 110 degrees, otherwise they turn brown.Stephanie:Do you use it like a dehydrator, then?Hank Shaw:Yes, I use a dehydrator. And most herbs dry really well. In fact, many herbs are better dried because it concentrates their flavor. Basil's iffy. Parsley's kind of terrible. Dried parsley's one of those ones where eat it fresh, make pesto. I suppose you could freeze it. I mostly will.I will gather big scabs of it because I grow a lot and I will freeze it. And even though it's going to suffer in the freezer, it is one of the most vital things I use for making stocks and broths with the game I bring home. So freezing, drying, you can, you know, I just mixed a whole bunch of. Of lovage with salt. So you go 50, 50 the herb and. And coarse salt, like ice cream salt almost. And then you buzz that into a food processor or a blender, and then that creates a much finer kind of almost a wet salt that is an enormous amount of flavor. And if you freeze it, it'll stay bright green the whole winter.And sometimes I like to do that, but the other times I kind of like to. To see it and progress over the. Over the months. And it's kind of a beautiful thing to see that herb salt kind of brown out and army green out as we get to like, late February, because it really is. Is sort of also indicative of how of our Harsh winters and feels a little bit more of the time and place than pulling something out of a freezer.Stephanie:Yeah. So let's talk about that because you're a single man, you are a recipe writer and developer, so you're also cooking and testing recipes. You're preserving all these things. I mean, my freezer right now is kind of a hellscape. I just closed up my summer and I came home with so much food. I have, like, canned and pickled and preserved. And I just literally feel overwhelmed by all of the food in my home right now. And I realize this is a real first world problem.So, you know, my daughter's kind of in her young 20s and sort of poor, so I've loaded her up with stuff. But do you just feel overwhelmed sometimes by all of the abundance of food?Hank Shaw:Absolutely. It's one of the things that's been really remarkable about it, about sort of single life, is how less I need to hunt or fish. So I find myself. I mean, I still. I. Because. So, side note, background backstory. I don't buy meat or fish at all.I occasionally will buy a little bit of bacon because I love bacon. And I'll occasionally buy pork fat to make sausages with game, but that's it. So if I'm eating red meat, it's going to be venison. If I'm eating white meat, it's probably going to be grouse or. Or pheasants. If I'm eating fish, I've caught it. And so that's what I find is that I eat. Hey, I don't eat that much meat anymore.Like, I eat plenty. But I mean, it's not like I. I don't gorge myself on giant steaks anymore. And it's just me. So, you know, a limit of walleyes can last me a month. And before, it was definitely not like that. And so, yes, I can feel the overwhelm. But what's, you know, I have neighbors that I give things to.I have friends that I give things to. Like, I. I had two deer tags last year, and I shot the second deer because I had a whole bunch of friends who didn't get a deer and needed medicine. So it was really cool to be able to give to. You know, I butchered it all and gave them an all vacuum seal. It was like all ready to go. And. And that was really satisfying to be able to help people like that.And then, you know, I like, you know, have a dinner party here and there.Stephanie:Yeah, I want to come to a dinner party. Not to invite myself. But please, I'll. I'll reciprocate in the. I have a cabin in the summer, so I'm sort of like between here and there. But once sets in, I really like to entertain and have people over. I find that it's a really easy way to gather new people too. Like, I like collecting people because I just think people are so amazing and I love putting like, new people at the table that people don't know yet or making those connections.I think I'm actually kind of good at it. So I can't wait to have you over this fall.Hank Shaw:Yeah, likewise. We'll. We'll do a home and home.Stephanie:Yes, I would love that very much. Your book is available, Borderlands on. I found it because obviously I. You sent me a copy. But also it's on Amazon and you self publish. So there's a lot of people that listen to this podcast that are cookbook writers themselves or people that maybe are trying to get published or find publishing. Can you speak to that a little bit and why that's been your route. You've been doing this a long time.Hank Shaw:Yeah, this is my force. Fourth self published book. And self publish is really kind of a misnomer in a way because the books that I put out are of Random House quality. Like, they're for sure. There's no way you're gonna be able to tell this book is apart from a gigantic publishing house, because what I ended up doing is creating a publishing company. So the books are published in big, big runs at Versa Press in Illinois. I'm very happy to say that these books are entirely made in America. And that's kind of important to me because most cookbooks are made in China and not a fan.So the books are printed in Illinois and they are stored and shipped at a, at a, a warehouse in Michigan. So the best ways to get the books are to either buy them from my website or buy them from Amazon. Those are probably your two best avenues for it. The thing about self publishing, if you want to do it at the level that I'm doing it, which is to say, make a book that, you know, even a snooty Random House person will be like, damn, that's a good book. You have to go big and it's not cheap. So I do, I, I don't ever do runs less than 5,000. And a typical run for me is between 10 and 15,000. And because your unit costs go way, way down.Stephanie:Right.Hank Shaw:And we can get in the weeds of it, but I have some Advantages in the sense that my sister has designed books for a living for 30 some odd years and her husband has edited books for 30 some odd years.Stephanie:Oh, so you got like family business going.Hank Shaw:Yeah, and my ex, my ex does most of the photos like this. Borderlands is the first book where the majority of the photos are mine. They're nice, but the. But even she's cheap. She photo edited this book. And so like I have people with very good skills. And so what I would say is if you have a kitchen cabinet where you have people who have those skills. And I have to kind of stress that, for example, copy editing, copy editing or proofreading or indexing a book are entirely different from copy editing or proofreading something in businessIt's just not the same skill. And I found that out. So if you have that ability to put together a dream team, then you can make a really, really beautiful book that will, that will impress people and that you will actually love. The print on demand system is still not good enough for cookbooks. It's fantastic for like a memoir or something without a lot of pictures, but it is not good for, for cookbooks still.Stephanie:All right, I'm just making notes here because people ask me questions about this all the time. All right, well, I appreciate that you've done all this work, and the book is beautiful, and I love talking to you about food. So hopefully we can call you again and just wrap it down.Hank Shaw:Yeah, let's talk about preservation.Stephanie:Yeah, I. Because I've never met anyone that only was eating what they killed.Hank Shaw:Well, you could go up north. I bet you'd find more people who do.Stephanie:But yes, yes. And I just, I find that to be fascinating and also just the idea of preserving food and how you use. Use what you preserve. So yeah, that's a great topic to get into at a later date. The book is Borderlands. I'm talking with Hank Shaw. Recipes and Stories from the Rio Grande to the Pacific. You can find it at Amazon or at his website.I always say this one wrong. Hunt, Gather. CookHank Shaw:So. So the best way to get to my website is just go to huntgathercook.com okay.Stephanie:And you have lots of recipes there too. I want people to just explore thousands. Yeah, it's incredible the mon recipes that you have there. And you know, if you think about protein as being interchangeable in a lot of these instances, it's definitely a really well done website with tons of recipes.Stephanie:Thanks for your time today, Hank. I appreciate it.Hank Shaw:Thanks a lot. Thanks for having me on.Stephanie:We'll talk soon.Hank Shaw:Bye.Stephanie:Bye. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit stephaniehansen.substack.com/subscribe

If you enjoy this podcast and look forward to it in your inbox, consider supporting it by becoming a paid yearly subscriber for $60 or you can buy me a cup of coffee for $8Welcome to another episode of "Dishing with Stephanie's Dish." Today, I interview acclaimed food writer, wild foods expert, and self-described hunter-gatherer Hank Shaw. Hank is the author of the brand new cookbook, "Borderlands: Recipes and Stories from the Rio Grande to the Pacific," an exploration of the flavors, cultures, and stories that define the borderlands between the United States and Mexico. He also has a Substack that's wonderful, called Hank Shaw “To The Bone” and a website full of recipes.In this episode, Hank and I dive into everything from his early days as a restaurant cook and investigative journalist to his passion for foraging, preserving, and hunting wild foods. Hank discusses the vibrant mix of culinary traditions that thrive along the border, debunks myths about iconic ingredients (like acorns!), and shares the fascinating histories behind beloved dishes such as chimichangas and parisa.They also touch on practical advice—like the art of drying herbs, the joys and challenges of single-person food preservation, and the ins and outs of self-publishing cookbooks at a high level.Get ready for an episode filled with storytelling, culinary wisdom, and inspiration for your next adventure in the kitchen or the great outdoors. Whether you're a curious home cook, an aspiring cookbook author, or simply a lover of good food, there's something here for everyone. Let's get started!Original Episode Transcript Follows:Stephanie:Hello, everybody, and welcome to Dishing with Stephanie's Dish, the podcast, where we talk to fun people in the food space and sometimes they have cookbooks. And today's author is an author. He's an author of great magnitude, Hank Shaw. His new book is Borderlands Recipes and Stories from the Rio Grande to the Pacific. And Hank, you are such a prolific, beautiful writer. This book, I feel like, is just so you. Do you love it?Hank Shaw:It's been a long journey to make this book, and I'm pretty proud of it. And it's. It's been probably the biggest project of my adult life in terms of time, commitment, travel, really unlocking understanding of things that I thought I knew but didn't necessarily know until I got there. And it's just been this. This crazy, fantastic journey and a journey that you can eat.Stephanie:Can you talk a little bit about your history? Like, I think many people know you as the hunter, forager, gatherer, type, and Borderlands obviously has a lot of those elements to it. But can you just walk readers that are listeners that might be new to your journey kind of through how you got here?Hank Shaw:Sure. Many, many years ago, when I was still fairly young, I was a restaurant cook. So I worked first as a dishwasher and then as a line cook and then as a sous chef in a series of restaurants, mostly in Madison, Wisconsin. And I left that job to be a newspaper reporter. And I ended up being a newspaper reporter for 18 years. And I cooked all throughout that and traveled and learned more about food and did fishing and hunting and foraging and such. And then I left the News Business in 2010 to do my website, which is hunter, angler, gardener, cook. And I've been doing that full time since 2010.So, yeah, my entire kind of current incarnation is wild foods. But Borderlands is kind of an outgrowth of that for two reasons. The first is I've been basically written all of the fishing game books you can possibly write already. I've got one for every kind of quarry you can imagine. And then the other thing was, oh, well, you know, a lot of that travel for those other books was on the border on both sides, on the American side and on the Mexican side. And that kind of grew into this. Wow, you know, God, the food is so great and God, this area is just so neglected, I think, by most, you know, the. The food, or radio, for lack of a better term.Yeah, because all of the, like, everybody seems to love to hate Tex Mex without really fully knowing what Tex Mex actually is. And people say that the Southwestern cooking is so very 1987. And. And, you know, the people who know Mexico are like, oh, all the good foods in Oaxaca or Michoacan or Mexico City or Yucatan. And really that's not the case, as over and over and over again, I was discovering these amazing just finds. And a lot of them had to do with wild foods, but not all of them. And so that borderlands became my diary of that journey.Stephanie:And quite a diary it is. What's interesting to me is I didn't actually ever know that you were in the newspaper business.Hank Shaw:And that makes a Pioneer Press graduate.Stephanie:Oh, you work for them. How did I not know this?Hank Shaw:Yeah, I was a St. Paul Pioneer Press investigative reporter from 2002 to 2004. And if you're of a certain age and you remember there was a big story about some Republican operatives getting involved with a telecommunications boondoggle. And yeah, that was probably. That was us. That was our story.Stephanie:Well, and it makes sense because the book is so like. It's the storytelling that's so good. And, you know, cookbooks are cookbooks with beautiful recipes and different people's point of view on recipes. But what I love about your book, too, is it really goes into ingredients a little more in depth. It tells the story of the terroir, of where the recipe's from and why it's the way it is. And it makes sense now to me that you're a journalist because it's so beautifully written.Hank Shaw:I really appreciate that. I mean, I tried in this particular book. There are essays in all of my books, but in this particular one, I really, really wanted people from the rest of the country to get a flavor of what it's like to was really honest to God, like on the border. Everybody has thoughts and opinions about immigration and about the border and about blah, blah, blah. And it's like, well, how much time have you actually spent on the border? Do you actually know what it feels like, what it smells like, what it tastes like? Chances are you probably don't. And I really wanted this book to shine a light on that in ways that go well beyond food.Stephanie:When we talk about the borderlands, can you talk about it without talking about immigration and the close connection between the United States and Mexico? I mean, we share this border. People have this idea that it's like this gated, fenced situation, and really there's tons of the border that's just. You'd only know it was a border if someone told you you were crossing it.Hank Shaw:It's very true. In Fact, one of my favorite moments to that was in south southwest Texas there's a beautiful national park called Big Bend. It's one of the biggest national parks in the country. It's fa. It's famous, it's amazing. But you're going to drive and hike and hike and drive and hike and drive a gigantic park. So one place that you can go to. And it's actually, if you open up a copy of Borderlands and you see this huge vista right at the beginning of the book, there's this huge vista and it's on a cliff. That is exactly it. That is. That is Big Bend National Park. And if you're looking right in the back end of that back center, a little to the left, you'll see a canyon in the background. In that canyon is St. Helena Canyon. And St.Helena Canyon is created by the Rio Grande. So you can go to that park and you can walk across the border literally to Mexico and not have the Rio Grande come up over your ankles. And there's Mexicans on their side, there's Americans on our side, and everybody's crossing back and forth until their families are there and having a fun time, blah, blah, blah. And it's just, it's one of these great moments where it shows you that, yeah, that border is really just sort of a fiction.Stephanie:Yeah. Yes, in many ways. Right. Figuratively. And also, I don't know, we seem to be in a global food economy whether we want to or not. When you look at the individual ingredients that you're using here in Borderlands, obviously there's very different things because of temperature in Mexico than you might have here in the Midwest. But is it really different from like say, Texas to Mexico in.Hank Shaw:Yes, there, there are definitely different. So the food you'll get in Nueva Leon or Coahuila or Tamaulipas, which are the three Mexican states, that border Texas is going to be different from what you would think about as Texas food. However, on the Borderlands, that. That change really is minimal. And I talk about in the book the idea of Fronteraisos, people who are neither fully Mexican nor full. They're. They're border people and they can slide between English and Spanish in mid clause. And it's really the, you know, the, the pocho or Spanglish or whatever you want to call it that you'll hear there is very different from what you'll hear from a bilingual person from, say, Mexico City, where typically those people will speak in full sentences or paragraphs in one language and then maybe switch to another language in the next sentence or paragraph.Hank Shaw:Well, on the border, it's a mishmash. So the structure, the words, the adjectives, like, it's everything. It's like no function. And so it's like. It's like this whole kind of amalgam of what's going on. And that kind of translates into the food where you've got some Texas, you know, some very Texas. Texas. Things that don't cross the border, like yellow cheese doesn't really cross the border.Stephanie:Right.Hank Shaw:The idea of, like, rotel queso. So it's. It's like Velveeta cheese melted with rotel. That's queso. That's the bad queso in North Texas. Like, you'll get that in, like, Amarillo. But the real queso is south of Interstate 10. And that is a white Mexican cheese.That it where you get, you know, roasted fire roasted green chilies folded into it and a little bit of Mexican oregano and salt and a little bit of crema to thin it out. And it's is to the rotel queso what a match is to the sun.Stephanie:Yeah.Hank Shaw:And, you know, I mean, that said, I'm not gonna poop all over the Velveeta one, because that while I don't think it tastes great, what I realized is that particular version of queso, which I personally don't like, is really heavy with cultural significance.Stephanie:Yeah.Hank Shaw:And. And so that's. There's a place for it. It's just not. That's not really as border food as you might think. That's a little bit more North Texas, and that's an example of where things don't cross. But a really great example of where things are damn near the same is Arizona and Sonora. So that there's almost no difference between Arizona Mexican food and Sonora Mexican food because they're one and the same.The burritos are pretty similar. The flour tortillas are similar. The carne asada is pretty similar. And so that. That's a case where the border's really. I mean, yes, it's a border, but I mean, it's like the. It's. There's no food border.Same thing with Southern California and Tijuana and Northern Baja. There's almost no. No functional difference between the two of them. Now, New Mexico and Chihuahua has a difference. And, like, north of Interstate 10 in Texas and the border in Texas are quite different.Stephanie:There's a recipe in here that I didn't even really know existed called Parisa.Hank Shaw:Oh, yeah.Stephanie:And, you know, you we will order steak tartare or make tartare. And I didn't realize that there was a. In many cultures, you sort of see similar foods or similar food groups, and they're just treated differently with herbs or spices. This looks delicious.Hank Shaw:It really is. It's the best way to describe it if you. If you're not familiar, because it's very. It's. It's super regional in Texas. Like, you can't even really get barista in Dallas or in. Or in El Paso. It's not a thing there.It's sort of a south central Texas thing. But the best way I can describe it is really accurately describe it. It is steak tartar meets aguachile. Because most people will say it's steak tartare meat ceviche. And yes, you absolutely can get it like that, but the. The acidity and the citrus will turn the. The raw beef gray, which I think looks gross. Yeah, I mean, it.It tastes fine, but it just kind of looks like, meh. So my recipe and what I do is I. I mix the steak tartare with the. Essentially, pico de gallo is really what it. What it's being mixed with, and a little bit of cheese, and I. I'll mix it and serve it right away so that when you eat it, the meat is still pink.Stephanie:Yeah, it looks really good. And then also in the book, so you're a hunter, obviously, we established that. But in many of these recipes, you have substitutions of different animal proteins that can be used. So whether it's elk or bison or sheep or duck, I think that's cool.Hank Shaw:Yeah, I mean, I think I. I started that process. It's done with icons. So if you look at a recipe for. Oh, there's a stew that's very popular. They're called puchero. And I'm just to that page, so I'll. So.Oh, that's a sour puerto. So always pork, but, like, no. Babies will die if you use something else from that. But that is traditionally a pork dish. Buchero is traditionally beef or venison, but really, you know, you're gonna be fine if you put damn near anything in it. It's a big, giant stew, a lot of vegetables, and it's fantastic. And to. To really make the book more versatile, because I.The two things that I always do in my books. Number one is I'm going to give you the recipe as faithfully as I can to what it actually is, wherever it's from, and then I'm going to give you all these substitutions so that if you live in, you know, Bismarck or Crookston or, you know, rural Iowa, you're going to be able to make it. And that's important to me because it's more important to me that you make some version of it than to be exactly proper and specific. I hate cookbooks where it's like, especially with cheese, where you'll see someone be like, it must be the, you know, Cowgirl Creamery point raised blue from 2012. Otherwise this recipe won't work. I'm like, come on guys, this is a stupid recipe. Like it's blue cheese. It'll be fine.Stephanie:I was surprised that you have a chimichanga in the book. Can we talk about chimichangas? Because people that grew up in the Midwest, Chichis was like the first Mexican restaurant besides El Burrito Mercado. And El Burrito Mercado was authentic and chichi's was like the Americanized what they thought Mexican food was. Which also I will say I have taste memories of chi cheese. I say this not dogging on them and they're actually coming back. And the chimichanga is something that like, if I actually go to the new restaurant, which I'm sure I will, I will order a chimichanga. It's like a taste memory for me. What is the origination of chimichanga?Hank Shaw:It's shrouded in mystery. So there's a couple different theories. And then I'll tell you what I think the general story is that a woman was making burritos in Arizona and either dropped, which I don't believe because that would create a splash that would, you know, send 350 degree oil everywhere, or placed a burrito in the deep fryer. And the, the legend, which I don't believe this is true at all, is she drops the burrito in the deep fryer and you know, says something like, you know, ah, chingo to madre or whatever, like just like swears something bad and. But then sort of does what you would do in a kind of a mom situation. And if you instead of saying the F word, you would say oh, fudge. And so she goes, oh Jimmy changa. And which is sort of vaguely reminiscent of some Mexican swear words.And so that thus the, the dish was born. But I think that's not true because there is a fantastic resource, actually. I mean, I found it in some of my older Mexican cookbooks that I own. But there's a fantastic research that the University of Texas at San Antonio of Mexican cookbooks. And some of these Mexican cookbooks are handwritten from the 1800s, and so they're all digitized and you can. You can study them. And so there's a thing in Sonora. Remember I just got done saying that, like, there's almost no difference between Sonora and Arizona.There's a thing from Sonora many, many, many, many years ago, you know, early early 1900s, for a chivy changa. C H I V I C H A N G A ch and it's the same thing. So I'm convinced that this is just a thing, because if you have a burrito and you fry things, there's zero. There's zero chance that at some point you be like, I want to. I wonder if frying the burrito will make it good? You know, like, the answer, yes, yes, all the time.Stephanie:And.Hank Shaw:And so, you know, I, like you, came into the chimichanga world just thinking with a definite eyebrow raised, like, what is this? And when it's done right, and if you see the picture in my book, it is dressed with a whole bunch of things on the outside of the burrito. So it's crema, it's a pico de gallo. It's shredded lettuce or cabbage, limes. The thing about a properly served chimichanga is that you have to eat it as a whole because the chimichanga itself is quite heavy. You know, it's a. It's a fried burrito with, like, rice and beans and meat inside it. Like, it's a gut bomb. But when you eat it with all these light things around it that are bright and fresh and acidic, it completely changes the eating experience. And I was sold.Stephanie:I can imagine. The one you have in the book looks really good. I'm going to. I keep asking about specific recipes, but there were, like, some that just jumped out at me, like, wow. Another one that jumped out at me was from that same chapter about the acorn cookies. I've always been under the impression that acorns, and maybe it's from just specific to the oaks, but that they're poisonous. I didn't think about making acorn flour.Hank Shaw:So, number one, no acorns are poisonous. Zero, period. End of story. It's a myth. You were lied to. Sorry.Stephanie:Yeah. I mean, it helps me because my dog eats them.Hank Shaw:I mean, acorns have been a source of food for human beings forever, you know, all the way. I don't know how long ago, but way more than 10,000 years. Way more. Okay, so what the myth comes from is most acorn varieties, so most especially red oaks, are full of tannins. And tannins are not poisonous. Tannins are not toxic. Tannins will make you constipated if you eat too many of them. And I suppose it would be possible to poison yourself with tannins, but I mean, good luck.Yeah, good luck eating enough of that astringent stuff to be able to get yourself poisoned. But tannins are water soluble. So for millennia, the people who eat acorns, and especially in. In northern California, where, you know, acorn. Acorns were their main starch, the idea of leaching the tannins out in a stream or wherever is as old as time. And so you make the. You make a meal. It's really a meal is probably a better way to put it.I call it flour, but there's no. There's no real gluten in it. In fact, there's no gluten in it, but there is some starch in it that will help the flour stick to itself. So that's true everywhere. In fact, it's a very good acorn year here in Minnesota this year. And I found some bur oaks in a. In a place that I'm going to go back and harvest them to make some more acorn flour this year. And I'll have to leach them here.But this is a very long walk up to this cookie recipe, because in south Arizona and in Sonora, there's an oak called an emery oak. And the emery oak is in the white oak. It's in the white oak clan. And it is sweet in the sense that you can roast those acorns and eat them. And in fact, you can get roasted acorns as a snack on some of the reservations down there or really wherever. I mean, it's a thing like it's. It. It.They could just roast it. Roast the acorns? Yeah. It's just like a chestnut. Very good. That's exactly with the. Because it's the same kind of a texture as well. And so that particular oak is unique in. In North America.The cork oak in Europe is the other one that doesn't have any tannins to it. So you can just sit there and eat them. And that's why they make flour out of them. It's an indigenous thing. You don't really see it too much among the Hispanic Sonorans. You see it a lot more with, like, Yaqui or Pima or Tono O', Odham, those indigenous groups.Stephanie:It's so Cool. I also subscribe to your substack, which I would encourage people to subscribe and. And yes to the Bone, it's called. And you just had a post about herbs and how important herbs are in your cooking and in your yard. And I know that you have kind of a small St. Paul yard because we've talked about it. What are you doing with your herbs now that we're at the end of the season? Are you. Do you have anything that's special that you do with them? Do you dry them? Do you mix them with salt?Hank Shaw:I do all of the above. I am a preservation fanatic. I could talk for hours just about various ways to preserve things for our Minnesota winners. Maybe that's another podcast for sure. But the short version is, yes, all of the things. I mostly will do things like make pesto with basil, because I love pesto. But I do dry some and there are tricks to drying herbs. The trick is low heat for a long time, so the don't use your oven and try to get them dry within 40, 48 hours, but also try to do it at less than 110 degrees, otherwise they turn brown.Stephanie:Do you use it like a dehydrator, then?Hank Shaw:Yes, I use a dehydrator. And most herbs dry really well. In fact, many herbs are better dried because it concentrates their flavor. Basil's iffy. Parsley's kind of terrible. Dried parsley's one of those ones where eat it fresh, make pesto. I suppose you could freeze it. I mostly will.I will gather big scabs of it because I grow a lot and I will freeze it. And even though it's going to suffer in the freezer, it is one of the most vital things I use for making stocks and broths with the game I bring home. So freezing, drying, you can, you know, I just mixed a whole bunch of. Of lovage with salt. So you go 50, 50 the herb and. And coarse salt, like ice cream salt almost. And then you buzz that into a food processor or a blender, and then that creates a much finer kind of almost a wet salt that is an enormous amount of flavor. And if you freeze it, it'll stay bright green the whole winter.And sometimes I like to do that, but the other times I kind of like to. To see it and progress over the. Over the months. And it's kind of a beautiful thing to see that herb salt kind of brown out and army green out as we get to like, late February, because it really is. Is sort of also indicative of how of our Harsh winters and feels a little bit more of the time and place than pulling something out of a freezer.Stephanie:Yeah. So let's talk about that because you're a single man, you are a recipe writer and developer, so you're also cooking and testing recipes. You're preserving all these things. I mean, my freezer right now is kind of a hellscape. I just closed up my summer and I came home with so much food. I have, like, canned and pickled and preserved. And I just literally feel overwhelmed by all of the food in my home right now. And I realize this is a real first world problem.So, you know, my daughter's kind of in her young 20s and sort of poor, so I've loaded her up with stuff. But do you just feel overwhelmed sometimes by all of the abundance of food?Hank Shaw:Absolutely. It's one of the things that's been really remarkable about it, about sort of single life, is how less I need to hunt or fish. So I find myself. I mean, I still. I. Because. So, side note, background backstory. I don't buy meat or fish at all.I occasionally will buy a little bit of bacon because I love bacon. And I'll occasionally buy pork fat to make sausages with game, but that's it. So if I'm eating red meat, it's going to be venison. If I'm eating white meat, it's probably going to be grouse or. Or pheasants. If I'm eating fish, I've caught it. And so that's what I find is that I eat. Hey, I don't eat that much meat anymore.Like, I eat plenty. But I mean, it's not like I. I don't gorge myself on giant steaks anymore. And it's just me. So, you know, a limit of walleyes can last me a month. And before, it was definitely not like that. And so, yes, I can feel the overwhelm. But what's, you know, I have neighbors that I give things to.I have friends that I give things to. Like, I. I had two deer tags last year, and I shot the second deer because I had a whole bunch of friends who didn't get a deer and needed medicine. So it was really cool to be able to give to. You know, I butchered it all and gave them an all vacuum seal. It was like all ready to go. And. And that was really satisfying to be able to help people like that.And then, you know, I like, you know, have a dinner party here and there.Stephanie:Yeah, I want to come to a dinner party. Not to invite myself. But please, I'll. I'll reciprocate in the. I have a cabin in the summer, so I'm sort of like between here and there. But once sets in, I really like to entertain and have people over. I find that it's a really easy way to gather new people too. Like, I like collecting people because I just think people are so amazing and I love putting like, new people at the table that people don't know yet or making those connections.I think I'm actually kind of good at it. So I can't wait to have you over this fall.Hank Shaw:Yeah, likewise. We'll. We'll do a home and home.Stephanie:Yes, I would love that very much. Your book is available, Borderlands on. I found it because obviously I. You sent me a copy. But also it's on Amazon and you self publish. So there's a lot of people that listen to this podcast that are cookbook writers themselves or people that maybe are trying to get published or find publishing. Can you speak to that a little bit and why that's been your route. You've been doing this a long time.Hank Shaw:Yeah, this is my force. Fourth self published book. And self publish is really kind of a misnomer in a way because the books that I put out are of Random House quality. Like, they're for sure. There's no way you're gonna be able to tell this book is apart from a gigantic publishing house, because what I ended up doing is creating a publishing company. So the books are published in big, big runs at Versa Press in Illinois. I'm very happy to say that these books are entirely made in America. And that's kind of important to me because most cookbooks are made in China and not a fan.So the books are printed in Illinois and they are stored and shipped at a, at a, a warehouse in Michigan. So the best ways to get the books are to either buy them from my website or buy them from Amazon. Those are probably your two best avenues for it. The thing about self publishing, if you want to do it at the level that I'm doing it, which is to say, make a book that, you know, even a snooty Random House person will be like, damn, that's a good book. You have to go big and it's not cheap. So I do, I, I don't ever do runs less than 5,000. And a typical run for me is between 10 and 15,000. And because your unit costs go way, way down.Stephanie:Right.Hank Shaw:And we can get in the weeds of it, but I have some Advantages in the sense that my sister has designed books for a living for 30 some odd years and her husband has edited books for 30 some odd years.Stephanie:Oh, so you got like family business going.Hank Shaw:Yeah, and my ex, my ex does most of the photos like this. Borderlands is the first book where the majority of the photos are mine. They're nice, but the. But even she's cheap. She photo edited this book. And so like I have people with very good skills. And so what I would say is if you have a kitchen cabinet where you have people who have those skills. And I have to kind of stress that, for example, copy editing, copy editing or proofreading or indexing a book are entirely different from copy editing or proofreading something in businessIt's just not the same skill. And I found that out. So if you have that ability to put together a dream team, then you can make a really, really beautiful book that will, that will impress people and that you will actually love. The print on demand system is still not good enough for cookbooks. It's fantastic for like a memoir or something without a lot of pictures, but it is not good for, for cookbooks still.Stephanie:All right, I'm just making notes here because people ask me questions about this all the time. All right, well, I appreciate that you've done all this work, and the book is beautiful, and I love talking to you about food. So hopefully we can call you again and just wrap it down.Hank Shaw:Yeah, let's talk about preservation.Stephanie:Yeah, I. Because I've never met anyone that only was eating what they killed.Hank Shaw:Well, you could go up north. I bet you'd find more people who do.Stephanie:But yes, yes. And I just, I find that to be fascinating and also just the idea of preserving food and how you use. Use what you preserve. So yeah, that's a great topic to get into at a later date. The book is Borderlands. I'm talking with Hank Shaw. Recipes and Stories from the Rio Grande to the Pacific. You can find it at Amazon or at his website.I always say this one wrong. Hunt, Gather. CookHank Shaw:So. So the best way to get to my website is just go to huntgathercook.com okay.Stephanie:And you have lots of recipes there too. I want people to just explore thousands. Yeah, it's incredible the mon recipes that you have there. And you know, if you think about protein as being interchangeable in a lot of these instances, it's definitely a really well done website with tons of recipes.Stephanie:Thanks for your time today, Hank. I appreciate it.Hank Shaw:Thanks a lot. Thanks for having me on.Stephanie:We'll talk soon.Hank Shaw:Bye.Stephanie:Bye. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit stephaniehansen.substack.com/subscribe

Nelda Hardwick disappeared in 1993 after leaving her home in Lake Charles, Louisiana. What was supposed to be a quick trip to the store turned into devastating mystery for her family that is still on-going.Nearly five years after Nelda left home, an unidentified woman was struck and killed along Interstate 10 in Hancock County, Mississippi. Many believe that Jane Doe was Nelda, and the similarities were striking—but when her body was exhumed years later, the truth revealed something no one expected. Please join returning guest Elaine Erickson and I for a discussion on this compelling case--which involves a missing person, a jane doe, a courtroom battle, and even a natural disaster.Check us out on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@143mysteriesFor sources and episode information: http://143mysteries.comFor photos: https://www.instagram.com/143mysteries/One Minute and Forty-Three Seconds is dedicated to my number one fan. Thank you, Dad. I love you, and I miss you. 

Ett mörker hänger över motorvägen Interstate 45 i Texas. Om och om igen försvinner flickor och kvinnor, för att senare hittas mördade, eller aldrig ses igen. Tre vågor av mord skakar delstaten: en på 70-talet, en på 80-talet och ännu en på 90-talet. Trots åratal av utredningar står polisen maktlös. Vem är monstret som ligger bakom morden och hur ska de få stopp på honom? Men så händer något viktigt. En kvinna lyckas fly, och snart är polisen en seriemördare på spåren. Fall: Texas killing fields & I-45 [REKLAM] Länk Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/spoktimmen Källor: https://www.spoktimmen.se/205 KontaktInstagram: @spoktimmen@linnek@jennyborg91 Facebook: Spöktimmen Mail: spoktimmenpodcast@gmail.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Three Milwaukee-natives who have visited the Israeli-occupied West Bank share their experiences. We learn about the very first film festival happening in Sheboygan. We help you plan a trip to Wisconsin's oldest state park. Plus, we visit Alice's Garden to learn about the fall growing season.

On today's newscast: Sedona Mayor Scott Jablow resigns, updated 911 system gives cell phone users more reliable access to emergency services, troopers detain a 13-year-old allegedly driving the wrong direction on Interstate 40 while drunk, and more.

Sycamore and Kaneland clash in a big Interstate 8 showdown, DeKalb face pivotal test against undefeated Lincoln-Way Central, G-K faces winless Rockford Lutheran and Hiawatha will get a forfeit win.Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/friday-night-drive--3534096/support.

In the conclusion of this two-part series, Obscura turns from the formative years of Kelsey A. to her final, devastating night.On April 1st, 2025, calls began flooding into dispatch: a wrong-way driver on Interstate 275. Officers pursued a gray Ford Escape, ultimately forcing it to a stop. What unfolded in the following minutes was chaos, fear, and tragedy—ending with gunfire that would claim Kelsey's life.Part 2 captures the raw audio from the dash cams, radios, and body mics that recorded her final moments. Beyond the incident itself, we examine the aftershock: the grief of her family, the official investigation, and the long shadow of untreated mental illness that had haunted her for years.This episode is not only about what happened on that highway—it's about how a life shaped by hardship, resilience, and trauma reached its breaking point.What You'll Hear in This EpisodeEmergency calls describing a wrong-way driver on I-275.Police radio and dash cam audio from the pursuit and confrontation.Kelsey's final words, captured in tense exchanges with officers.First-hand accounts of officers securing the scene and her dog.News reports and witness perspectives on the officer-involved shooting.The moment her family was notified and their reflections on her struggles.Insights into the paranoia, fear, and mental health battles that consumed Kelsey in her final year.Content WarningThis episode contains graphic audio of a police shooting, discussions of mental illness, and descriptions of death. Listener discretion is strongly advised.Closing NotePart 2 closes the story of Kelsey's life—a life marked by resilience and collapse, triumph and tragedy. Thank you for sitting with her story.Our Sponsors:* Check out Chime: https://chime.com/OBSCURA* Check out Mood and use my code OBSCURA for a great deal: https://mood.com* Head to https://homeaglow.com/OBSCURA to get your first 3 hours of cleaning for only $19. Thanks so much to Homeaglow for sponsoring this episode! Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/obscura-a-true-crime-podcast/exclusive-contentAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Overnight, Cal Trans crews closed all northbound lanes on Interstate 5 from Interstate 8 to Mission Bay Drive. In City Heights, investigators are still trying to figure out what caused a smell so bad and so strong that two people had to be hospitalized and a school had to be evacuated. Thousands of people are expected to visit MCAS Miramar this weekend for the Miramar Air Show.   What You Need To Know To Start Your Saturday. 

Steve interviews Marshall Garvey (00:22:44) the author of a new book about the 1985 World Series called, "Interstate '85." Marshall debuts to discuss the 1985 World Series and explains why, despite living in Sacramento, he decided to write a book about two teams from Missouri. Marshall talks about Jack Buck and Denny Matthews and explains why Al Michaels called the series and not Howard Cosell. Marshall also explains the differences and similarities between the Kansas City Royals and the St Louis Cardinals, the rivalry between the two teams, and the iconic missed call that sent the series to a seventh game. Also, MeMarcog (01:08:35) debuts for the first of a two part summit on Italian football (calcio). Marco and Steve debate club vs. country, the current state of the Italian National team, and the problems facing Italian football. Marco explains how he fell in love with AC Milan and tells us his origin story as a fan of calcio. Steve talks about falling in love with the National team and gives his origin story. The guys debate the future of Francesco Camarda and discuss what changes need to improve the future of Serie A, the Nazionale, and Italian footballers. This is part one of a two part series. Part 2 appears on Season 15 Episode 23. Steve starts the show with First Things First and talks about the Saints clown show in Seattle, the 2025 Braves are stat padding, and debuts a new feature called the sports media story of the week. The show ends with one last thing about getting some swag back. For more information follow the podcast on twitter @sports_casters Email: thesportscasters@gmail.com

Caed Curran and Mick Smith each ran for a pair of touchdowns and quarterback Brady Varner ran for a score and threw for another as Morris beat Kaneland, 42-21, during Friday night's Interstate 8 Conference matchup of unbeatens in Maple Park.Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/friday-night-drive--3534096/support.

Have you ever talked up the taste of Louisville's water to someone visiting the area? If so you wouldn't be alone.On this week's Access Louisville podcast, Editor-in-Chief Shea Van Hoy speaks with Spencer Bruce about the reasons behind that — including the marketing effort that aims to make Louisvillians feel proud of the water. Bruce shares a story about a time that he overheard a restaurant waiter bragging about the taste of the water to a tourist — music to his ears, of course."It's important that the community, that our customers trust us," Bruce said on the show. He added that there's an educational effort underway as well, rather than just pure marketing."We like to say we want to raise next the generation of children to understand the value of water." Bruce also shares some updates on a few milestones from the Louisville Water Co., including a bond it just took out to fund some new infrastructure projects. In August, Louisville Water announced it sold $233 million in bonds, the largest sale in the company's 165-year history. This bond sale was the first issuance since 2022 and more than 75% of the funding supports four projects: upgrades to the Crescent Hill Water Treatment Plant (the largest treatment plant in Kentucky), installing new residual lines for water treatment, supporting regional growth along the Interstate 65 corridor and relining the Crescent Hill Reservoir."Like every utility it's critical that we reinvest in ourselves," he said.Louisville Water supplies drinking water to nearly one million people in Louisville Metro and surrounding communities. On average, the company produces 131 million gallons each day.Access Louisville is a weekly podcast from Louisville Business First. It's available on popular podcast services including Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

Alex, Randy, and special guest Beck sit down to shoot the breeze. They talk about buying a 100k-mile German car from New York, Beck's upcoming auction of the German car it replaced, and the inevitable German car oil on Alex's garage floor. Everyone has hair-raising brake failure stories and opinions on "how much hot rod" is appropriate for driving 2,000 miles. They talk spats vs. skirts and other British crossover terms, drive slow cars on the Interstate, and give brief a review of BaT White Glove service.The trio wrap by discussing favorite recent sales, marveling at the brand new 2k Sellers Club, and dabbling in some popular Questions of the Week about road trip stops, oil change disasters, and stick shiftsLinks for things mentioned in this episode:1:10 2014 Mercedes-Benz E350 4MATIC Wagon BaT listing18:56  1939 Ford Deluxe Coupe BaT listing20:42  28-Years-Owned, 302-Powered 1950 Ford Custom Deluxe Club Coupe BaT listing20:52  1950 Mercury Eight Convertible Grease Movie Car BaT listing25:53  1964 Porsche 904 Carrera GTS, 1968 Porsche 910, and 1,800-Mile 2005 Porsche Carrera GT BaT listings27:00  1959 BMW 507 Series II BaT listing27:53  392 Hemi Stroker-Powered 1930 Ford Model A “Wade Coupe” 4-Speed BaT listing28:27  Original-Owner 2012 Lexus LFA , Arrow Blue 2024 Porsche 911 GT3 RS Weissach, and 2024 Porsche 911 Dakar BaT listings30:23 The 2k Seller's Club Roundtable, Featuring Wob, 1600veloce, and 911r BaT storyGot suggestions for our next guest from the BaT community or One Year Garage episode? Let us know at podcast@bringatrailer.com!

Plus Donald Trump recently expressed skepticism about the effectiveness of the diabetes drug Ozempic, Texas Democrats are moving their state office out of Austin and into Dallas, hundreds of thousands of dollars are headed to Addison Airport for safety improvements, and more!

In this episode of Julia's Trucking Cafe-Trucking News Hour, I discuss what happened that a semi plows through 20 vehicles on Interstate 95 in Miami-Dade. I also discuss a bunch of other stories that have made the news in the trucking industry. Check out my new book Power of Perseverance: Achieving Goals Despite The Odds on Amazon. (Click on the picture) If you are enjoying the show, please consider making a donation to keep the show going. You can make a one-time donation here: (Click the picture)   Music provided by: Heyday Highway @EpidemicSound.com

In this episode I explore the history of Interstate 94, and the Interstate Highway system. I-94 is unique as it is the only Interstate that has a numbeer not divisible by 5, and it is also the only one running West to East that connects with another country, Canada. For more information on Michael Delaware, visit:https://michaeldelaware.com

The Roads to Research Road, The Interstate, and your questions....

Jalen Carter and Carter Grabowski paced Kaneland to five first quarter touchdowns to help it kick off Interstate 8 play with a 56-7 victory over OttawaBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/friday-night-drive--3534096/support.

Jalen Carter and Carter Grabowski paced Kaneland to five first quarter touchdowns to help it kick off Interstate 8 play with a 56-7 victory over OttawaBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/friday-night-drive--3534096/support.

Jalen Carter and Carter Grabowski paced Kaneland to five first quarter touchdowns to help it kick off Interstate 8 play with a 56-7 victory over OttawaBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/friday-night-drive--3534096/support.

Jalen Carter and Carter Grabowski paced Kaneland to five first quarter touchdowns to help it kick off Interstate 8 play with a 56-7 victory over OttawaBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/friday-night-drive--3534096/support.

Lionel wraps up the show talking to callers about wartime folk music, the nature of sin and moves on to talk about driving, complexities in marriage and more. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Between 2003 and 2006, four sex workers disappeared from Las Vegas. Three of the girls are were confirmed to have been murdered after various pieces of their body's were found at various locations in or near Las Vegas, besides one woman whose legs were found in Springfield. The Vegas Four:Lindsay Marie Harris: On May 4, 2005, Harris disappeared from her home in Henderson, Nevada. She was last seen making a bank deposit at the bank near her home. Her rental car was found abandoned in the desert at the southern end of the valley and her credit cards had not been used. Later that November, America's Most Wanted aired a segment on Harris' disappearance.On May 23, 2005, a group of children discovered human legs in a grassy field a couple hundred yards away from Interstate 55 in Divernon, Illinois, 15 miles south of Springfield. After performing DNA tests on both of the legs, it was determined that they both belonged to the same person.In May 2008, the FBI was able to match the DNA of the unidentified woman that was sent in by Illinois authorities to Harris' DNA sent in by authorities in Henderson. After comparing the two DNA samples, the woman's legs were identified as Lindsay Harris.Harris had moved to the valley in 2003 with her boyfriend, whom she had met in New York. Harris had a history of being a sex worker, as Harris had been arrested 5 times for prostitution from the time she had moved to the valley to the time of her disappearance.Misty Marie Saens:Misty Marie Saens, who was 25 when she disappeared from Las Vegas the same month as Brewer. Partial remains were found in the desert on a road leading to Red Rock Canyon National Conservation Area near Las Vegas.Jessica Edith Louise Foster:Foster was one of four sex workers who disappeared in Las Vegas between 2003 and 2006. The bodies of the other three have been found. The Las Vegas Police Department launched an investigation of a person in question, bringing in a forensic scientist to spray luminol onto surfaces at crime scenes to detect invisible blood stains; but found nothing at his property, nor has he been interrogated on her disappearance. The documentary Trafficked No More, features her story and led to some tips to her whereabouts.Jodi Marie Brewer:The last time Pamela Brewer saw her 19-year-old daughter Jodi Marie, the teen's newly dyed blonde hair glowed like a halo around her head.Standing at the top of the stairs in their southwest Las Vegas condominium, she told her mother she was going out for the evening."She was so radiant, so beautiful that night," Brewer said. "She said, 'I love you mom' ... I told her I'd see her tomorrow.' "But Jodi Brewer didn't come home.After filing a missing person report with Metro and enduring several agonizing weeks of waiting and wondering, she learned Aug. 29 that the body of a woman had been discovered in San Bernardino County, Calif.The description of the tattoos on the body matched her daughter's. It was Jodi.In this episode, we begin our comprehensive look at the Las Vegas Four and their tragic tale as we explore the possiblity that they might be related to Rex Heuermann. (commercial at 13:02)to contact me:bobbycapucci@protonmail.comsource:Prostitutes share tragic fate | Las Vegas Review-Journal (reviewjournal.com)

Authorities had to execute a PIT maneuver to get Kristian Beall to stop driving the wrong way on a Florida interstate. Even though she was the only one in the car, she told the cops her "husband was driving" her home. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Interstate News EP 51

21 year old North Carolina Central University student, Latrese Curtis was found murdered on Interstate 540 in Raleigh in 2008. She had been stabbed at least 40 times. There were several suspects in her murder before one unlikely person was arrested. What happened to Latrese?Instagram: @caffeinatedcrimespodTwitter: @caffcrimespodEmail: caffeinatedcrimespod@gmail.comFacebook: Caffeinated CrimesSupport the show

Send us a textRebekah Neeley from Neeley Family Distillery joins us to share their latest innovations and a tasting of uniquely finished whiskeys from their Sparta, Kentucky distillery. From their upcoming three-chamber still to award-winning experimental finishes, Rebecca demonstrates why small, family-owned distilleries are at the forefront of bourbon innovation.• Neely is installing a three-chamber still, becoming only the fourth operational one in the world• Cypress fermenters impart the distinct "Neely funk" that distinguishes their flavor profile• Their absinthe has won three consecutive double golds and a platinum medal• Rebekah guides us through tastings of sake-finished bourbon, sauternes finish, tequila finish, and acacia wood finish• The distillery offers quarter and half barrel picks to make barrel selection more accessible• Rebekah's first official blend showcases her blending skills and understanding of everyday bourbon drinkers• Visitors can fill their own bottles and personalize labels at the distillery• Located at Exit 55 off Interstate 71 between Louisville and CincinnatiRemember to stop by Neeley Family Distillery when traveling - they have rocking chairs, a cigar area, and some of the cleanest bathrooms around. Live your life uncut and unfiltered.Venture into the heart of Kentucky bourbon country as we sit down with Rebekah Neeley at the speakeasy of Neeley Family Distillery. This episode uncorks the fascinating evolution of a craft distillery that's balancing tradition with bold innovation.Rebekah shares exciting news about their upcoming three-chamber still installation—set to make them only the fourth distillery in the world with this equipment. The "Icon," as it's officially named, will produce heavier, more viscous distillate that opens new possibilities for their whiskey portfolio. We explore why Neely maintains cypress fermenters when many have switched to stainless steel, and how these wooden vessels create what Rebekah calls "the Neeley funk"—that distinctive character that makes their spirits uniquely theirs.The heart of our visit features an extraordinary tasting journey through Neely's experimental finished whiskeys. Rebekah guides us through their sake barrel-finished four-grain bourbon with delicate melon notes, an award-winning sauternes finish, a complex tequila-finished expression with chocolate and berry characteristics, and perhaps most surprisingly, an acacia wood-finished bourbon with barbecue-like qualities. We also sample Rebecca's first official blend—a carefully crafted seven-barrel marriage designed as an approachable daily sipper.What makes Neeley special extends beyond the liquid. Their quarter and half-barrel options make single barrel selections accessible to smaller groups, while their fill-your-own-bottle program creates meaningful personalized experiences for visitors. Rebekah shares touching stories of how this simple offering has created powerful moments—from future 21st birthday gifts to heartfelt thank-you presents for hospital staff.Whether you're planning your Kentucky bourbon trail adventure or simply seeking inspiration from craft distilling innovation, join us for this deep dive into what makes small, family-owned distilleries the creative heartbeat of American whiskey. Subscribe now and discover your next bourbon adventure! Add for SOFL If You Have GohstsSupport the showhttps://www.scotchybourbonboys.com The Scotchy bourbon Boys are #3 in Feedspots Top 60 whiskey podcasts in the world https://podcast.feedspot.com/whiskey_podcasts/

Nicholas Tsagourias - The Peaceful Settlement of Interstate Cyber Disputes

After AES requested permission to charge customers more for electricity, one state office is recommending the exact opposite. Indianapolis schools have far more classroom seats than students to fill them. It's a sign of declining and shifting enrollment and possible changes ahead. About 11 percent of Indiana's early childcare providers say they may CLOSE in the next year, according to a new survey. The latest version of an ongoing interstate study includes information on possible ways to improve Indianapolis infrastructure. Want to go deeper on the stories you hear on WFYI News Now? Visit wfyi.org/news and follow us on social media to get comprehensive analysis and local news daily. Subscribe to WFYI News Now wherever you get your podcasts. WFYI News Now is produced by Zach Bundy and Abriana Herron, with support from News Director Sarah Neal-Estes.

Our guest this time is Aaron Wolpoff who has spent his professional career as a marketing strategist and consultant to help companies develop strategic brands and enhance their audience growth. He owns the marketing firm, Double Zebra. He tells us about the name and how his company has helped a number of large and small companies grow and better serve their clients.   Aaron grew up in the San Diego area. He describes himself as a curious person and he says he always has been such. He loves to ask questions. He says as a child he was somewhat quiet, but always wanted to know more. He received his Bachelor's degree in marketing from the University of California at San Diego. After working for a firm for some four and a half years he and his wife moved up to the bay area in Northern California where attended San Francisco State University and obtained a Master's degree in Business.   In addition to his day job functioning as a business advisor and strategist Aaron also hosts a podcast entitled, We Fixed it, You're Welcome. I had the honor to appear on his podcast to discuss Uber and some of its accessibility issues especially concerning access by blind persons who use guide dogs to Uber's fleet. His podcast is quite fascinating and one I hope you will follow.   Aaron provides us in this episode many business insights. We talk about a number of challenges and successes marketing has brought to the business arena. I hope you like what Aaron offers.     About the Guest:   Aaron Wolpoff is a seasoned marketing strategist and communications consultant with a track record of positioning companies, products, and thought leadership for maximum impact. Throughout his career, Aaron has been somewhat of a trendspotter, getting involved in early initiatives around online banking, SaaS, EVs, IoT, and now AI, His ability to bridge complex industry dynamics and technology-driven solutions underscores his role as a forward-thinking consultant, podcaster, and business advisor, committed to enhancing organizational effectiveness and fostering strategic growth.   As the driving force behind the Double Zebra marketing company, Aaron excels in identifying untapped marketing assets, refining brand narratives, and orchestrating strategic pivots from paid advertising to organic audience growth. His insights have guided notable campaigns for consumer brands, technology firms, and professional service providers, always with a keen eye for differentiating messages that resonate deeply with target audiences. In addition to his strategic marketing expertise, Aaron hosts the Top 20 business management podcast, We Fixed It, You're Welcome, known for its sharp, humorous analysis of major corporate challenges and missteps. Each episode brings listeners inside complex business scenarios, unfolding like real-time case studies where Aaron and his panel of experts dissect high-profile decisions, offering insightful and actionable solutions. His ability to distill complex business issues into relatable, engaging discussions has garnered widespread acclaim and a dedicated following among executives and decision-makers.   Ways to connect with Aaron:   Marketing company: https://doublezebra.com Podcast: https://wefixeditpod.com LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/marketingaaron     About the Host:   Michael Hingson is a New York Times best-selling author, international lecturer, and Chief Vision Officer for accessiBe. Michael, blind since birth, survived the 9/11 attacks with the help of his guide dog Roselle. This story is the subject of his best-selling book, Thunder Dog.   Michael gives over 100 presentations around the world each year speaking to influential groups such as Exxon Mobile, AT&T, Federal Express, Scripps College, Rutgers University, Children's Hospital, and the American Red Cross just to name a few. He is Ambassador for the National Braille Literacy Campaign for the National Federation of the Blind and also serves as Ambassador for the American Humane Association's 2012 Hero Dog Awards.   https://michaelhingson.com https://www.facebook.com/michael.hingson.author.speaker/ https://twitter.com/mhingson https://www.youtube.com/user/mhingson https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelhingson/   accessiBe Links https://accessibe.com/ https://www.youtube.com/c/accessiBe https://www.linkedin.com/company/accessibe/mycompany/ https://www.facebook.com/accessibe/       Thanks for listening!   Thanks so much for listening to our podcast! If you enjoyed this episode and think that others could benefit from listening, please share it using the social media buttons on this page. Do you have some feedback or questions about this episode? Leave a comment in the section below!   Subscribe to the podcast   If you would like to get automatic updates of new podcast episodes, you can subscribe to the podcast on Apple Podcasts or Stitcher. You can subscribe in your favorite podcast app. You can also support our podcast through our tip jar https://tips.pinecast.com/jar/unstoppable-mindset .   Leave us an Apple Podcasts review   Ratings and reviews from our listeners are extremely valuable to us and greatly appreciated. They help our podcast rank higher on Apple Podcasts, which exposes our show to more awesome listeners like you. If you have a minute, please leave an honest review on Apple Podcasts.       Transcription Notes:   Michael Hingson ** 00:00 Access Cast and accessiBe Initiative presents Unstoppable Mindset. The podcast where inclusion, diversity and the unexpected meet. Hi, I'm Michael Hingson, Chief Vision Officer for accessiBe and the author of the number one New York Times bestselling book, Thunder dog, the story of a blind man, his guide dog and the triumph of trust. Thanks for joining me on my podcast as we explore our own blinding fears of inclusion unacceptance and our resistance to change. We will discover the idea that no matter the situation, or the people we encounter, our own fears, and prejudices often are our strongest barriers to moving forward. The unstoppable mindset podcast is sponsored by accessiBe, that's a c c e s s i capital B e. Visit www.accessibe.com to learn how you can make your website accessible for persons with disabilities. And to help make the internet fully inclusive by the year 2025. Glad you dropped by we're happy to meet you and to have you here with us.   Michael Hingson ** 01:20 Hi there, and welcome to another episode of unstoppable mindset. Today, we get to chat with Aaron Wolpoff, who is a marketing strategist and expert in a lot of different ways. I've read his bio, which you can find in the show notes. It seems to me that he is every bit as much of an expert is his bio says he is, but we're going to find out over the next hour or so for sure. We'll we'll not pick on him too much, but, but nevertheless, it's fun to be here. Aaron, so I want to welcome you to unstoppable mindset. I'm glad you're here, and we're glad that we get a chance to do   Aaron Wolpoff, ** 01:58 this. Thanks, Michael, thanks for having me. You're gonna grill me for an hour, huh?   Michael Hingson ** 02:04 Oh, sure. Why not? You're used to it. You're a marketing expert.   Aaron Wolpoff, ** 02:08 That's what we do. Yeah, we're always, uh, scrutiny for one thing or another.   Michael Hingson ** 02:13 I remember, I think it was back in was it 82 or 1982 or 1984 when they had the big Tylenol incident. You remember that? You know about   Aaron Wolpoff, ** 02:25 that? I do? Yeah, there's a Netflix documentary happening right now. Is there? Well, yeah,   Michael Hingson ** 02:31 a bottle of Tylenol was, for those who don't know, contaminated and someone died from it. But the manufacturer of Tylenol, the CEO the next day, just got right out in front of it and said what they were going to do about removing all Tylenol from the shelves until it could be they could all be examined and so on. Just did a number of things. It was a wonderful case, it seemed to me, for how to deal with a crisis when it came up. And I find that all too many companies and organizations don't necessarily know how to do that. Do they now?   Aaron Wolpoff, ** 03:09 And a lot of times they operate in crisis mode. That's the default. And no one likes to be around that, you know. So that's, I guess, step one is dealing even you know, deal with a crisis when it comes up, and make sure that your your day to day is not crisis fire as much as possible,   Michael Hingson ** 03:26 but know how to deal with a crisis, which is kind of the issue, and that's, that's what business continuity, of course, is, is really all about. I spoke at the Business Continuity Institute hybrid conference in London last October, and as one of the people who asked me to come and speak, explained, business continuity, people are the what if people that are always looking at, how do we deal with any kind of an emergency that comes up in an organization, knowing full well that nobody's really going to listen to them until there's really an emergency, and then, of course, they're indispensable, but The rest of the time they're not for   Aaron Wolpoff, ** 04:02 sure. Yeah, it's definitely that, you know, good. You bring up a good point about knowing how to deal with a crisis, because it will, it, will you run a business for long enough you have a company, no matter how big, eventually something bad is going to happen, and it's Tylenol. Was, is pre internet or, you know, we oh, yeah, good while ago they had time to formulate a response and craft it and and do a well presented, you know, public reassurance nowadays it's you'd have five seconds before you have to get something out there.   Michael Hingson ** 04:35 Well, even so, the CEO did it within, like, a day or so, just immediately came out and said what, what was initially going to be done. Of course, there was a whole lot more to it, but still, he got right out in front of it and dealt with it in a calm way, which I think is really important for businesses to do, and and I do find that so many don't and they they deal with so many different kinds of stress. Horrible things in the world, and they create more than they really should about fear anyway,   Aaron Wolpoff, ** 05:07 yeah, for sure, and now I think that Tylenol wasn't ultimately responsible. I haven't watched to the end, but if I remember correctly, but sometimes these crisis, crises that companies find themselves embroiled in, are self perpetuated? Yeah?   Michael Hingson ** 05:23 Well, Tylenol wasn't responsible. Somebody did it. Somebody put what, cyanide or something in into a Tylenol bottle. So they weren't responsible, but they sure dealt with it, which is the important thing. And you know, they're, they're still with us. Yeah?   Aaron Wolpoff, ** 05:38 No, they dealt with it. Well, their sales are great, everyday household product. No one can dispute it. But what I say is, with the with the instantaneousness of reach to your to your public, and to you know, consumers and public at large, a lot of crises are, can be self perpetuated, like you tweet the wrong thing, or is it called a tweet anymore? I don't know, but you know, you post something a little bit a little bit out of step with what people are think about you or thinking in general, and and now, all of a sudden, you're in the middle of something that you didn't want to be in the middle of, as a company well,   Michael Hingson ** 06:15 and I also noticed that, like the media will, so often they hear something, they report it, and they haven't necessarily checked to see the facts behind it, only to find out within an hour or two that what they reported was wrong. And they helped to sometimes promote the fear and promote the uncertainty, rather than waiting a little bit until they get all the information reasonably correct. And of course, part of the problem is they say, well, but everybody else is going to report it. So each station says everybody else is going to report it, so we have to keep up. Well, I'm not so sure about that all the time. Oh, that's very true, too, Michael, especially with, you know, off brand media outlets I'll spend with AI like, I'll be halfway through an article now, and I'll see something that's extremely generated and and I'll realize I've just wasted a whole bunch of time on a, you know, on a fake article, yeah, yeah, yeah, way, way too much. But even the mainstream media will report things very quickly to get it out there, but they don't necessarily have all the data, right. And I understand you can't wait for days to deal with things, but you should wait at least a little bit to make sure you've got data enough to report in a cogent way. And it just doesn't always happen.   Aaron Wolpoff, ** 07:33 Yeah, well, I don't know who the watch keepers of that are. I'm not a conspiracy theorist in that way by any means?   Michael Hingson ** 07:41 No, no, it isn't a conspiracy. But yeah,   Aaron Wolpoff, ** 07:44 yeah, no, no, I know, but it's again. I think it goes back to that tight the shortness of the cycle, like again. Tylenol waited a day to respond back in the day, which is great. But now, would you have you know, if Tylenol didn't say   Michael Hingson ** 07:59 anything for a day. If they were faced with a similar situation, people would vilify them and say, Well, wait, you waited a day to tell us something we wanted it in the first 30 seconds, yeah, oh, yeah. And that makes it more difficult, but I would hope that Tylenol would say, yeah. We waited a day because we were getting our facts together. 30 seconds is great in the media, but that doesn't work for reality, and in most cases, it doesn't. But yeah, I know what you're saying,   Aaron Wolpoff, ** 08:30 Yeah, but the appetite in the 24 hour news cycle, if people are hungry for new more information, so it does push news outlets, media outlets into let's respond as quick as possible and figure out the facts along the way. Yeah, yeah.   Michael Hingson ** 08:46 Well, for fun, why don't you tell us about sort of the early era and growing up, and how you got to doing the sorts of things that you're doing now. Well, I grew up in San Diego, California. I best weather in the country. I don't care what anyone says, Yeah,   Aaron Wolpoff, ** 09:03 you can't really beat it. No, I don't think anyone's gonna debate you on it. They call it the sunshine tax, because things cost a lot out here, but they do, you know, he grew up here, you put up with it. But yeah, so I grew up, grew up San Diego, college, San Diego. Life in San Diego, I've been elsewhere. I've traveled. I've seen some of the world. I like it. I've always wanted to come back, but I grew up really curious. I read a lot, I asked a lot of questions. And I also wanted, wanting to know, well, I want to know. Well, I wanted to know a lot of things about a lot of things, and I also was really scared. Is the wrong word, but I looked up to adults when I was a kid, and I didn't want to be put in a position where I was expected to know something that I didn't know. So it led to times where I'd pretend like I need you. Know, do you know? You know what this is, right? And I'd pretend like I knew, and early career, career even, and then I get called out on something, and it just was like a gut punch, like, but I'm supposed to know that, you know,   Michael Hingson ** 10:13 what did your parents think of you being so curious as you were growing up?   Aaron Wolpoff, ** 10:17 They they liked it, but I was quiet, okay? Quiet, quiet, quietly, confident and curious. It's just an interesting, I guess, an interesting mix. Yeah, but no, they Oh, they indulged it. I, you know, they answered my questions. They like I said, I read a lot, so frequent trips to the library to read a lot about a lot of things, but I think, you know, professionally, you take something that's kind of a grab bag, and what do I do with all these different interests? And when I started college undeclared, I realized, you know, communications, marketing, you kind of can make a discipline out of a bunch of interests, and call it something professional. Where did you go to college? I went to UCSD. UCSD, here in San Diego, yeah,   Michael Hingson ** 11:12 well, I was just up the road from you at UC Irvine. So here two good campuses,   Aaron Wolpoff, ** 11:18 they are, they are and UCSD. I was back recently. It's like a it's like a city. Now, every time we go back, we see these, these kids. They're babies. They get they get food every you know, they have, like, a food nice food court. There's parking, an abundance of parking, there's theaters, there's all the things we didn't have. Of course, we had some of it, but they just have, like, what if we had one of something or 50 parking spaces, they've got 5000 you know. And if we had, you know, one one food option, they got 35 Yeah, they don't know how good they have it.   Michael Hingson ** 11:53 When I was at UC urban, I think we had 3200 undergraduates. It wasn't huge. It was in that area. Now, I think there's 31,000 or 32,000 undergrads. Oh, wow. And as one of my former physics professors joked, he's retired, but I got to meet him. I was there, and last year I was inducted as an alumni member of Phi, beta, kappa. And so we were talking, and he said, You know what UCI really stands for, don't you? Well, I didn't, I said, What? And he said, under construction indefinitely. And there's, they're always building, sure, and that's that started when I was there, but, but they are always building. And it's just an amazing place today, with so many students and graduate students, undergrads and faculty, and it's, it's an amazing place. I think I'd have a little bit more of a challenge of learning where everything is, although I could do it, if I had to go back, I could do it. Yeah, UCI is nice. But I think you could say, you could say that about any of the UCs are constantly under, under development. And, you know, that's the old one. That's the old area. And I'm like, oh, that's I went to school in the old area. I know the old area. I remember Central Park. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. So you ended up majoring in Marketing and Communications,   Aaron Wolpoff, ** 13:15 yeah. So I undergrad in communications. They have a really nice business school now that they did not have at the time. So I predated that, but I probably would have ended up there. I got out with a very, not knocking the school. It's a great, wonderful school. I got out with a very theory, theoretical based degree. So I knew a lot about communications from a theory based perspective. I knew about brain cognition. I took maybe one quarter of practical use it professionally. It was like a video, like a video production course, so I I learned hands on, 111, quarter out of my entire academic career. But a lot of it was learning. The learning not necessarily applied, but just a lot of theory. And I started school at 17, and I got out just shortly after my 21st birthday, so I don't know what my hurry was, but, but there I was with a lot of theory, some some internships, but not a ton of professional experience. And, you know, trying to figure it out in the work world at that point. Did you get a graduate degree or just undergrad? I did. I went back. So I did it for almost five years in in financial marketing, and then, and I wear a suit and tie to work every day, which I don't think anyone does anymore. And I'm suddenly like, like, I'm from the 30s. I'm not that old, but, but no, seriously, we, you know, to work at the at the headquarters of a international credit union. Of course, I wear a suit, no after four and a half. Years there, I went back to graduate school up in the bay the Bay Area, Bay Area, and that's when I got my masters in in marketing. Oh, where'd you go in the Bay Area? San Francisco, state. Okay, okay, yeah, really nice school. It's got one of the biggest International MBA programs in the country, I think. And got to live in that city for a couple years.   Michael Hingson ** 15:24 We lived in Novato, so North Bay, for 12 years, from 2002 to the end of June 2014 Yeah, I like that area. That's, that's the, oh, the weather isn't San Diego's. That area is still a really nice area to live as well. Again, it is pretty expensive, but still it   Aaron Wolpoff, ** 15:44 is, yeah, I it's not San Diego weather, a beautiful day. There is like nothing else. But when we first got there, I said, I want to live by the beach. That's what I know. And we got out to the beach, which is like at the end of the outer sunset, and it's in the 40s streets, and it feels like the end of the universe. It just, it just like, feels apocalyptic. And I said, I don't want to live by the beach anymore, but, but no, it was. It was a great, great learning experience, getting an MBA. I always say it's kind of like a backpack or a toolkit you walk around with, because it is all that's all application. You know, everything that I learned about theory put into practice, you got to put into practice. And so I was, I was really glad that I that I got to do that. And like I said, Live, live in, live in the Bay. For a couple years, I'd always wanted   Michael Hingson ** 16:36 to, yeah, well, that's a nice area to live. If you got to live somewhere that is one of the nicer places. So glad you got that opportunity. And having done it, as I said for 12 years, I appreciate it too. And yeah, so much to offer there.   Aaron Wolpoff, ** 16:51 The only problem I had was it was in between the two.com bubbles. So literally, nothing was happening. The good side was that the apartment I was living in went for something like $5,500 before I got there, and then the draw everything dropped, you know, the bottom dropped out, and I was able to squeak by and afford living in the city. But, you know, you go for look, seeking your fortune. And there's, there's, I had just missed it. And then I left, and then it just came back. So I was, I was there during a lull. So you're the one, huh? Okay, I didn't do it, just the way Miami worked out. Did you then go back to San Diego? I did, yeah. So I've met my wife here. We moved up to the bay together, and when we were debating, when I graduated, we were thinking, do we want to drive, you know, an hour and a half Silicon Valley or someone, you know, somewhere further out just to stay in the area? Or do we want to go back to where we where we know and like, and start a life there and we, you know, send, like you said at the beginning, San Diego is not a bad place to be. So as it was never a fallback, but as a place to, you know, come back home to, yeah, I welcomed it.   Michael Hingson ** 18:08 And so what did you do when you came back to San Diego?   Aaron Wolpoff, ** 18:12 So I have my best friend from childhood was starting as a photography company still does, and it was starting like a sister company, as an agency to serve the photography company, which was growing really fast, and then also, like picking up clients and building a book out of so he said, you know you're, I see you're applying for jobs, and I know that you're, you know, you're getting some offers and things, but just say no To all of them and come work with me and and at the time it was, it was running out of a was like a loft of an apartment, but it, you know, it grew to us, a small staff, and then a bigger staff, and spun off on its own. And so that's, that's what I did right out of, right out of grad school. I said no to a few things, and said there's a lot, lot worse fates than you know, spending your work day with your best friend and and growing a company out and so what exactly did you do for them? So it was like, we'll call it a boutique creative agency. It was around the time of I'm making myself sound so old. See, so there was flash, flash technology, like web banners were made with Flash. It had moved to be flash, Adobe, Flash, yeah. So companies were making these web banners, and what you call interactive we got a proficiency of making full website experiences with Flash, which not a lot of companies were doing. So because of that, it led to some really interesting opportunities and clients and being able to take on a capability, a proficiency that you know for a time. Uh was, was uh as a differentiator, say, you know, you could have a web banner and an old website, or you could have a flash, interactive website where you take your users on an experience with music and all the things that seem so dated now,   Michael Hingson ** 20:14 well, and of course, unfortunately, a lot of that content wasn't very accessible, so some of us didn't really get access to a lot of it, and I don't remember whether Adobe really worked to make flash all that accessible. They dealt with other things, but I'm not sure that flash ever really was. Yeah, I'm with you on that. I really, I don't think so.   Aaron Wolpoff, ** 20:38 What we would wind up doing is making parallel websites, but, but then mobile became a thing, and then you'd make a third version of a website, and it just got tedious. And really it's when the iPhone came out. It just it flash got stopped in its tracks, like it was like a week, and then action script, which is the language that it runs on, and all the all the capabilities and proficiencies, just there was no use for it anymore.   Michael Hingson ** 21:07 Well, and and the iPhone came out, as you said, and one of the things that happened fairly early on was that, because they were going to be sued, Apple agreed to make the I devices accessible, and they did something that hadn't really been done up to that time. They set the trend for it. They built accessibility into the operating systems, and they built the ability to have accessibility into the operating systems. The one thing that I wish that Apple would do even a little bit more of than they do, than they do today, although it's better than it used to be, is I wish they would mandate, or require people who are going to put apps in the App Store, for example, to make sure that the apps are accessible. They have guidelines. They have all sorts of information about how to do it, but they don't really require it, and so you can still get inaccessible apps, which is unfortunate,   Aaron Wolpoff, ** 22:09 that is Yeah, and like you said, with Flash, an entire you know, ecosystem had limited to no accessibility, so   Michael Hingson ** 22:16 and making additional on another website, Yeah, a lot of places did that, but they weren't totally equal, because they would make enough of the website, well, they would make the website have enough content to be able to do things, but they didn't have everything that they had on the graphical or flash website, and so It was definitely there, but it wasn't really, truly equal, which is unfortunate, and so now it's a lot better.   Aaron Wolpoff, ** 22:46 Yeah, it is no and I hate to say it, but if it came down to limited time, limited budget, limited everything you want to make something that is usable and efficient, but no, I mean, I can't speak for all developers, but no, it would be hard. You'd be hard pressed to create a an equally parallel experience with full accessibility at the time.   Michael Hingson ** 23:16 Yeah, yeah, you would. And it is a lot better. And there's, there's still stuff that needs to be done, but I think over time, AI is going to help some of that. And it is already made. It isn't perfect yet, but even some graphics and so on can be described by AI. And we're seeing things improve over, over, kind of what they were. So we're making progress, which is good,   Aaron Wolpoff, ** 23:44 yeah, no, I'm really happy about that. And with with AI and AI can go through and parse your code and build in all you know, everything that that needs to happen, there's a lot less excuse for for not making something as accessible as it can   Michael Hingson ** 23:59 be, yeah, but people still ignore it to a large degree. Still, only about 3% of all websites really have taken the time to put some level of accessibility into them. So there's still a lot to be done, and it's just not that magical or that hard, but it's mostly, I think, education. People don't know, they don't know that it can be done. They don't think about it being done, or they don't do it initially, and so then it becomes a lot more expensive to do later on, because you got to go back and redo   Aaron Wolpoff, ** 24:28 it, all right, yeah, anything, anytime you have to do something, something retroactive or rebuild, you're, yeah, you're starting from not a great place.   Michael Hingson ** 24:37 So how long did you work with your friend?   Aaron Wolpoff, ** 24:42 A really long time, because I did the studio, and then I wound up keeping that alive. But going over to the photography side, the company really grew. Had a team of staff photographers, had a team of, like a network of photographers, and. And was doing quite, quite a lot, an abundance of events every year, weddings and corporate and all types of things. So all in, I was with the company till, gosh, I want to say, like, 2014 or so. Wow. Yeah. Yeah.   Michael Hingson ** 25:21 And then what did you go off and do?   Aaron Wolpoff, ** 25:25 So then I worked for an agency, so I got started with creative and, well, rewinding, I got started with financial marketing, with the suit and tie. But then I went into creative, and I've tried pretty much every aspect of marketing I hadn't done marketing automation and email sequences and CRMs and outreach and those types of things. So that was the agency I worked for that was their specialization, which I like, to a degree, but it's, it's not my, not my home base. Yeah, there's, there's people that love and breathe automation. I like having interjecting some, you know, some type of personal aspect into the what you're putting out there. And I have to wrestle with that as ai, ai keeps growing in prominence, like, Where's the place for the human, creative? But I did that for a little while, and then I've been on my own for the past six or seven years.   Michael Hingson ** 26:26 So what is it you do today? Exactly?   Aaron Wolpoff, ** 26:30 So I'm, we'll call it a fractional CMO, or a fractional marketing advisor. So I come in and help companies grow their their marketing and figure themselves out. I've gone I work with large companies. I've kind of gone back to early stage startups and and tech companies. I just find that they're doing really more, a lot more interesting things right now with the market the way it is. They're taking more chances and and they're they're moving faster. I like to move pretty quick, so that's where my head's at. And I'm doing more. We'll call em like CO entrepreneurial ventures with my clients, as opposed to just a pure agency service model, which is interesting. And and I got my own podcast. There you go. Yeah. What's your podcast called? Not to keep you busy, it's called, we fixed it. You're welcome. There you   Michael Hingson ** 27:25 go. And it seems to me, if my memory hasn't failed me, even though I don't take one of those memory or brain supplements, we were on it not too long ago, talking about Uber, which was fun.   Aaron Wolpoff, ** 27:39 We had you on there. I don't know which episode will drop first, this one or or the one you were on, but we sure enjoyed having you on there.   Michael Hingson ** 27:46 Well, it was fun. Well, we'll have to do more of it, and I think it'd be fun to but so you own your own business. Then today,   Aaron Wolpoff, ** 27:53 I do, yeah, it's called Double zebra.   Michael Hingson ** 27:56 Now, how did you come up with that name?   Aaron Wolpoff, ** 27:59 It's two basic elements, so basic, black and white, something unremarkable, but if you can take it and multiply it or repeat it, then you're onto something interesting.   Michael Hingson ** 28:13 Lots of stripes. Yeah, lots of stripes.   Aaron Wolpoff, ** 28:17 And it's always fun when I talk to someone in the UK or Australia, or then they say zebra or zebra, right? I get to hear the way they say it. It's that's fun. Occasionally I get double double zero. People will miss misname it and double zero. That's his   Michael Hingson ** 28:34 company's that. But has anybody called it double Zed yet?   Aaron Wolpoff, ** 28:39 No, that's a new one.   Michael Hingson ** 28:41 Yeah? Well, you never know. Maybe we've given somebody the idea now. Yeah, yeah. Well, so I'm I'm curious. You obviously do a lot to analyze and help people in critique in corporate mishaps. Have you ever seen a particular business mistake that you really admire and just really love, its audacity,   Aaron Wolpoff, ** 29:07 where it came out wrong, but I liked it anyway, yeah, oh, man,   Michael Hingson ** 29:13 let's see, or one maybe, where they learned from their mistake and fixed it. But still, yeah, sure.   Aaron Wolpoff, ** 29:23 Yeah, that's a good one. I like, I like bold moves, even if they're wrong, as long as they don't, you know, they're not harmful to people I don't know. Let's go. I'm I'm making myself old. Let's go back to Crystal crystal. Pepsi, there you go for that. But that was just such a fun idea at the time. You know, we're the new generation and, and this is the 90s, and everything's new now, and we're going to take the color out of out of soda, I know we're and we're going to take it and just make it what you know, but a little unfamiliar, right? Right? It's Crystal Pepsi, and the ads were cool, and it was just very of the moment. Now, that moment didn't last very long, no, and the public didn't, didn't hold on to it very long. But there's, you know, it was, it let you question, and I in a good way, what you thought about what is even a Pepsi. And it worked. It was they brought it back, like for a very short time, five, I want to say five or six years ago, just because people had a nostalgia for it. But yeah, big, big, bold, we're confident this is the new everyone's going to be talking about this for a long time, and we're going to put a huge budget behind it, Crystal Pepsi. And it it didn't, but yeah, I liked it.   Michael Hingson ** 30:45 So why is that that is clearly somebody had to put a lot of effort into the concept, and must have gotten some sort of message that it would be very successful, but then it wasn't,   Aaron Wolpoff, ** 31:00 yeah, yeah. For something like that, you have to get buy in at so many levels. You know, you have an agency saying, this is the right thing to do. You have CD, your leadership saying, No, I don't know. Let's pull back. Whenever an agency gets away with something and and spends a bunch of client money and it's just audacious, and I can't believe they did it. I know how many levels of buy in they had to get, yeah, to say, Trust me. Trust me. And a lot of times it works, you know, if they do something that just no one else had had thought of or wasn't willing to do, and then you see that they got through all those levels of bureaucracy and they were able to pull it off.   Michael Hingson ** 31:39 When it works. I love it. When it doesn't work. I love it, you know, just, just the fact that they did it, yeah, you got to admire that. Gotta admire it. They pulled it off, yeah. My favorite is still ranch flavored Fritos. They disappeared, and I've never understood why I love ranch flavored Fritos. And we had them in New Jersey and so on. And then we got, I think, out to California. But by that time, they had started to fade away, and I still have never understood why. Since people love ranch food so   Aaron Wolpoff, ** 32:06 much, that's a good one. I don't know that. I know those because it does, it does that one actually fill a market need. If there's Doritos, there's, you know, the ranch, I don't know if they were, they different.   Michael Hingson ** 32:17 They were Fritos, but they they did have ranch you know they were, they were ranch flavored, and I thought they were great. Yeah, I don't know. I don't know that one didn't hit because they have, I think they have chili flavor. They have regular. Do they have anything else honey barbecue? I don't know. I don't know, but I do still like regular, but I love ranch flavored the best. Now, I heard last week that Honey Nut Cheerios are going away. General Mills is getting rid of honey nut cheerios. No, is that real? That's what I heard on the news. Okay, I believe you, but I'll look it up anyway. Well, it's interesting. I don't know why, after so many years, they would but there have been other examples of cereals and so on that were around for a while and left and, well, Captain Crunch was Captain Crunch was one, and I'm not sure if lucky charms are still around. And then there was one called twinkles.   Aaron Wolpoff, ** 33:13 And I know all those except twinkles, but I would if you asked me, I would say, Honey Nut Cheerios. There's I would say their sales are better than Cheerios, or at least I would think so, yeah, at least a good portfolio company. Well, who knows, who knows, but I do know that Gen Z and millennials eat cereal a lot less than us older folks, because it takes work to put milk and cereal into a bowl, and it's not pre made, yeah. So maybe it's got to do with, you know, changing eating habits and consumer preferences   Michael Hingson ** 33:48 must be Yeah, and they're not enough of us, older, more experienced people to to counteract that. But you know, well, we'll see Yeah, as long as they don't get rid of the formula because it may come back. Yeah, well, now   Aaron Wolpoff, ** 34:03 Yeah, exactly between nostalgia and reboots and remakes and nothing's gone forever, everything comes back eventually.   Michael Hingson ** 34:10 Yeah, it does in all the work that you've done. Have you ever had to completely rethink and remake your approach and do something different?   Aaron Wolpoff, ** 34:24 Yeah, well, there's been times where I've been on uncharted territory. I worked with an EV company before EVs were a thing, and it was going, actually going head to head with with Tesla. But the thing there's they keep trying to bring it back and crowd sourcing it and all that stuff. It's, but at the time, it was like, I said it was like, which is gonna make it first this company, or Tesla, but, but this one looks like a, it looks, it feels like a spaceship. It's got, like space. It's a, it's, it's really. Be really unique. So the one that that is more like a family car one out probably rightly so. But there was no consumer understanding of not, let alone our preference, like there is now for an EV and what do I do? I have to plug it in somewhere and and all those things. So I had to rethink, you know what? There's no playbook for that yet. I guess I have to kind of work on it. And they were only in prototyping at the point where we came in and had to launch this, you know, teaser and teaser campaign for it, and build up awareness and demand for this thing that existed on a computer at the time.   Michael Hingson ** 35:43 What? Why is Tesla so successful?   Aaron Wolpoff, ** 35:48 Because they spent a bunch of money. Okay, that helps? Yeah, they were playing the long game. They could outspend competitors. They've got the unique distribution model. And they kind of like, I said, retrained consumers into how you buy a car, why you buy a car, and, and I think politics aside, people love their people love their teslas. You don't. My understanding is you don't have to do a whole lot once you buy it. And, and they they, like I said, they had the money to throw at it, that they could wait, wait it out and wait out that when you do anything with retraining consumers or behavior change or telling them you know, your old car is bad, your new this new one's good, that's the most. We'll call it costly and and difficult forms of marketing is retraining behavior. But they, they had the money to write it out and and their products great, you know, again, I'm not a Tesla enthusiast, but it's, it looks good. People love it. I you know, they run great from everything that I know, but so did a lot of other companies. So I think they just had the confidence in what they were doing to throw money at it and wait, be patient and well,   Michael Hingson ** 37:19 they're around there again the the Tesla is another example of not nearly as accessible as it should be and and I recognize that I'm not going to be the primary driver of a Tesla today, although I have driven a Tesla down Interstate 15, about 15 miles the driver was in the car, but, but I did it for about 15 miles going down I 15 and fully appreciate what autonomous vehicles will be able to do. We're way too much still on the cusp, and I think that people who just poo poo them are missing it. But I also know we're not there yet, but the day is going to come when there's going to be a lot more reliability, a lot less potential for accidents. But the thing that I find, like with the Tesla from a passenger standpoint, is I can't do any of the things that a that a sighted passenger can do. I can't unless it's changed in the last couple of years. I can't manipulate the radio. I can't do the other things that that that passengers might do in the Tesla, and I should be able to do that, and of all the vehicles where they ought to have access and could, the Tesla would be one, and they could do it even still using touch screens. I mean, the iPhone, for example, is all touch screen. But Apple was very creative about creating a mechanism to allow a person to not need to look at the screen using VoiceOver, the screen reader on the iPhone, but having a new set of gestures that were created that work with VoiceOver so that I could interact with that screen just as well as you can.   Aaron Wolpoff, ** 38:59 That's interesting that you say that, you know, Apple was working on a car for a while, and I don't know to a fact, but I bet they were thinking through accessibility and building that into every turn, or at least planning to,   Michael Hingson ** 39:13 oh, I'm sure they were. And the reality is, it isn't again. It isn't that magical to do. It would be simple for the Teslas and and other vehicles to do it. But, you know, we're we're not there mentally. And that's of course, the whole issue is that we just societally don't tend to really look at accessibility like we should. My view of of, say, the apple the iPhone, still is that they could be marketing the screen reader software that I use, which is built into the system already. They could, they could do some things to mark market that a whole lot more than they already do for sighted people. Your iPhone rings, um. You have to tap it a lot of times to be able to answer it. Why can't they create a mode when you're in a vehicle where a lot more of that is verbally, spoken and handled through voice output from the phone and voice input from you, without ever having to look at or interact with the screen.   Aaron Wolpoff, ** 40:19 I bet you're right, yeah, it's just another app at that point   Michael Hingson ** 40:22 well, and it's what I do. I mean, it's the way I operate with it. So I just think that they could, they could be more creative. There's so many examples of things that begin in one way and alter themselves or become altered. The typewriter, for example, was originally developed for a blind Countess to be able to communicate with her lover without her husband finding out her husband wasn't very attentive to her anyway. But the point is that the, I think the lover, created the this device where she could actually sit down and type a letter and seal it and give it to a maid or someone to give to, to her, her friend. And that's how the typewriter other other people had created, some examples, but the typewriter from her was probably the thing that most led to what we have today.   Aaron Wolpoff, ** 41:17 Oh, I didn't know that. But let me Michael, let me ask you. So I was in LA not too long ago, and they have, you know, driverless vehicles are not the form yet, but they we, I saw them around the city. What do you think about driverless vehicles in terms of accessibility or otherwise?   Michael Hingson ** 41:32 Well, again, so, so the most basic challenge that, fortunately, they haven't really pushed which is great, is okay, you're driving along in an autonomous vehicle and you lose connection, or whatever. How are you going to be able to pull it off to the side of the road? Now, some people have talked about saying that there, there has to be a law that only sighted people could well the sighted people a sighted person has to be in the vehicle. The reality is, the technology has already been developed to allow a blind person to get behind the wheel of a car and have enough information to be able to drive that vehicle just as well, or nearly as well, as a sighted person. But I think for this, from the standpoint of autonomousness, I'm all for it. I think we're going to continue to see it. It's going to continue to get better. It is getting better daily. So I haven't ridden in a fully autonomous vehicle, but I do believe that that those vehicles need to make sure, or the manufacturers need to make sure that they really do put accessibility into it. I should be able to give the vehicle all the instructions and get all the information that any sighted person would get from the vehicle, and the technology absolutely exists to do that today. So I think we will continue to see that, and I think it will get better all the way around. I don't know whether, well, I think they that actually there have been examples of blind people who've gotten into an autonomous vehicle where there wasn't a sighted person, and they've been able to function with it pretty well. So I don't see why it should be a problem at all, and it's only going to get   Aaron Wolpoff, ** 43:22 better. Yeah, for sure. And I keep thinking, you know, accessibility would be a prior priority in autonomous vehicles, but I keep learning from you, you know you were on our show and and our discussions, that the priorities are not always in line and not always where they necessarily should   Michael Hingson ** 43:39 be. Well. And again, there are reasons for it, and while I might not like it, I understand it, and that is, a lot of it is education, and a lot of it is is awareness. Most schools that teach people how to code to develop websites don't spend a lot of time dealing with accessibility, even though putting all the codes in and creating accessible websites is not a magically difficult thing to do, but it's an awareness issue. And so yeah, we're just going to have to continue to fight the fight and work toward getting people to be more aware of why it's necessary. And in reality, I do believe that there is a lot of truth to this fact that making things more accessible for me will help other people as well, because by having not well, voice input, certainly in a vehicle, but voice output and so on, and a way for me to accessibly, be able to input information into an autonomous vehicle to take to have it take me where I want to go, is only going to help everyone else as well. A lot of things that I need would benefit sighted people so well, so much.   Aaron Wolpoff, ** 44:56 Yeah, you're exactly right. Yeah, AI assisted. And voice input and all those things, they are universally loved and accepted now, yeah,   Michael Hingson ** 45:07 it's getting better. The unemployment rate is still very high among, for example, employable blind people, because all too many people still think blind people can't work, even though they can. So it's all based on prejudice rather than reality, and we're, we're, we're just going to have to continue to work to try to deal with the issues. I wrote an article a couple of years ago. One of the things where we're constantly identified in the world is we're blind or visually impaired. And the problem with visually impaired is visually we're not different simply because we don't see and impaired, we are not we're getting people slowly to switch to blind and low vision, deaf people and hard of hearing people did that years ago. If you tell a deaf person they're hearing impaired, they're liable to deck you on the spot. Yeah, and blind people haven't progressed to that point, but it's getting there, and the reality is blind and low vision is a much more appropriate terminology to use, and it's not equating us to not having eyesight by saying we're impaired, you know. So it's it's an ongoing process, and all we can do is continue to work at it?   Aaron Wolpoff, ** 46:21 Yeah, no. And I appreciate that you do. Like I said, education and retraining is, is call it marketing or call it, you know, just the way people should behave. But it's, that's, it's hard. It's one of the hardest things to do.   Michael Hingson ** 46:36 But, you know, we're making progress, and we'll, we'll continue to do that, and I think over time we'll we'll see things improve. It may not happen as quickly as we'd like, but I also believe that I and other people who are blind do need to be educators. We need to teach people. We need to be patient enough to do that. And you know, I see so often articles written about Me who talk about how my guide dog led me out of the World Trade Center. The guide dog doesn't lead anybody anywhere. That's not the job of the dog. The dog's job is to make sure that we walk safely. It's my job to know where to go and how to get there. So a guide dog guides and will make sure that we walk safely. But I'm the one that has to tell the dog, step by step, where I want the dog to go, and that story is really the crux of what I talk about many times when I travel and speak to talk to the public about what happened in the World Trade Center, because I spent a lot of time learning what I needed to do in order to escape safely and on September 11, not ever Having anticipated that we would need that kind of information, but still preparing for it, the mindset kicked in, and it all worked well.   Aaron Wolpoff, ** 47:49 You You and I talked about Uber on on my show, when you came on, and we gave them a little ding and figured out some stuff for them, what in terms of accessibility, and, you know, just general corporate citizenship, what's what's a company that, let's give them a give, give, call them out for a good reason? What's a company that's doing a good job, in your eyes, in your mind, for accessibility, maybe an unexpected one.   Michael Hingson ** 48:20 Well, as I mentioned before, I think Apple is doing a lot of good things. I think Microsoft is doing some good I think they could do better than they are in in some ways, but they're working at it. I wish Google would put a little bit more emphasis on making its you its interface more more usable to you really use the like with Google Docs and so on. You have to hurt learn a whole lot of different commands to make part of that system work, rather than it being as straightforward as it should be, there's some new companies coming up. There's a new company called inno search. Inno search.ai, it was primarily designed at this point for blind and low vision people. The idea behind inner search is to have any a way of dealing with E commerce and getting people to be able to help get help shopping and so on. So they actually have a a phone number. It's, I think it's 855, shop, G, P, T, and you can go in, and you can talk to the bot and tell it what you want, and it can help fill up a shopping cart. It's using artificial intelligence, but it understands really well. I have yet to hear it tell me I don't understand what you want. Sometimes it gives me a lot of things that more than I than I'm searching for. So there, there's work that needs to be done, but in a search is really a very clever company that is spending a lot of time working to make. Sure that everything that it does to make a shopping experience enjoyable is also making sure that it's accessible.   Aaron Wolpoff, ** 50:08 Oh, that's really interesting. Now, with with my podcast, and just in general, I spend a lot of time critiquing companies and and not taking them to test, but figuring out how to make them better. But I always like the opportunity to say you did something well, like even quietly, or you're, you know, people are finding you because of a certain something you didn't you took it upon yourselves to do and figure out   Michael Hingson ** 50:34 there's an audio editor, and we use it some unstoppable mindset called Reaper. And Reaper is a really great digital audio workstation product. And there is a whole series of scripts that have been written that make Reaper incredibly accessible as an audio editing tool. It's really great. It's about one of the most accessible products that I think I have seen is because they've done so well with it, which is kind of cool.   Aaron Wolpoff, ** 51:06 Oh, very nice. Okay, good. It's not even expensive. You gave me two to look, to pay attention to, and, you know, Track, track, along with,   Michael Hingson ** 51:16 yeah, they're, they're, they're fun. So what do people assume about you that isn't true or that you don't think is true?   Aaron Wolpoff, ** 51:25 People say, I'm quiet at times, guess going back to childhood, but there's time, there's situation. It's it's situational. There's times where I don't have to be the loudest person in the room or or be the one to talk the most, I can hang back and observe, but I would not categorize myself as quiet, you know, like I said, it's environmental. But now I've got plenty to say. You just have to engage me, I guess.   Michael Hingson ** 51:56 Yeah, well, you know, it's interesting. I'm trying to remember   Michael Hingson ** 52:04 on Shark Tank, what's Mark's last name, Cuban. Cuban. It's interesting to watch Mark on Shark Tank. I don't know whether he's really a quiet person normally, but I see when I watch Shark Tank. The other guys, like Mr. Wonderful with Kevin are talking all the time, and Mark just sits back and doesn't say anything for the longest period of time, and then he drops a bomb and bids and wins. Right? He's just really clever about the way he does it. I think there's a lot to be said for not just having to speak up every single time, but rather really thinking things through. And he clearly does that,   Aaron Wolpoff, ** 52:46 yeah, yeah, you have to appreciate that. And I think that's part of the reason that you know, when I came time to do a podcast, I did a panel show, because I'm surrounded by bright, interesting, articulate people, you included as coming on with us and and I don't have to fill every second. I can, I can, I, you know, I can intake information and think for a second and then maybe have a   Michael Hingson ** 53:15 response. Well, I think that makes a lot of sense, doesn't it? I mean, it's the way it really ought to be.   Aaron Wolpoff, ** 53:20 Yeah, if you got to fill an hour by yourself, you're always on, right?   Michael Hingson ** 53:26 Yeah, I know exactly what you mean. I know when I travel to speak. I figure that when I land somewhere, I'm on until I leave again. So I always enjoy reading books, especially going and coming on airplanes. And then I can be on the whole time. I am wherever I have to be, and then when I get on the airplane to come home, I can relax again.   Aaron Wolpoff, ** 53:45 Now, I like that. And I know, you keynote, I think I'd rather moderate, you know, I'll say something when I have something to say, and let other people talk for a while. Well, you gotta, you have a great story, and you're, you know, I'm glad you're getting it out there.   Michael Hingson ** 53:58 Well, if anybody needs a keynote speaker. Just saying, for everybody listening, feel free to email me. I'd love to hear from you. You can email me at Michael H i@accessibe.com or speaker at Michael hingson.com always looking for speaking engagements. Then we got that one in. I'm glad, but, but you know, for you, is there a podcast episode that you haven't done, that you really want to do, that just seems to be eluding you?   Aaron Wolpoff, ** 54:28 There are a couple that got away. I wanted to do one about Sesame Street because it was without a it was looking like it was going to be without a home. And that's such a hallmark of my childhood. And so many, yeah, I think they worked out a deal, which is probably what I was going to propose with. It's like a CO production deal with Netflix. So it seems like they're safe for the foreseeable future. But what was the other I think there's, there's at least one or two more where maybe the guests didn't line up, or. Or the timeliness didn't work. I was going to have someone connected to Big Lots. You remember Big Lots? I think they're still around to some degree, but I think they are, come on and tell me their story, because they've, you know, they've been on the brink of extinction for a little while. So it's usually, it's either a timing thing, with the with with the guest, or the news cycle has just maybe gone on and moved past us.   Michael Hingson ** 55:28 But, yeah, I know people wrote off Red Lobster for a while, but they're still around.   Aaron Wolpoff, ** 55:35 They're still around. That would be a good one. Yeah, their endless shrimp didn't do them any favors. No, that didn't help a whole lot, but it's the companies, even the ones we've done already, you know, they they're still six months later. Toilet hasn't been even a full year of our show yet, but in a year, I bet there's, you know, we could revisit them all over again, and they're still going to find themselves in, I don't know, hot water, but some kind of controversy for one reason or another. And we'll, we'll try to help them out again.   Michael Hingson ** 56:06 Have you seen any successes from the podcast episodes where a company did listen to you and has made some changes?   Aaron Wolpoff, ** 56:15 I don't know that. I can correlate one to one. We know that they listen. We can look at the metrics and where the where the list listens, are coming from, especially with LinkedIn, gives you some engagement and tells you which companies are paying attention. So we know that they are and they have now, whether they took that and, you know, implemented it, we have a disclaimer saying, Don't do it. You know, we're not there to give you unfiltered legal advice. You know, don't hold us accountable for anything we say. But if we said something good and you like it, do it. So, you know, I don't know to a T if they have then we probably given away billions of dollars worth of fixes. But, you know, I don't know the correlation between those who have listened and those who have acted on something that we might have, you know, alluded to or set out, right? But it has. We've been the times that we take it really seriously. We've we've predicted some things that have come come to pass.   Michael Hingson ** 57:13 That's cool, yeah. Well, you certainly had a great career, and you've done a lot of interesting things. If you had to suddenly change careers and do something entirely different from what you're doing, what would it be?   Aaron Wolpoff, ** 57:26 Oh, man, my family laughs at me, but I think it would be a furniture salesman. There you go. Yeah, I don't know why. There's something about it's just enough repetition and just enough creativity. I guess, where people come in, you tell them, you know you, they tell you their story, you know, you get to know them. And then you say, Oh, well, this sofa would be amazing, you know, and not, not one with endless varieties, not one with with two models somewhere in between. Yeah, I think that would be it keeps you on your feet.   Michael Hingson ** 58:05 Furniture salesman, well, if you, you know, if you get too bored, math is homes and Bob's furniture probably looking for people.   Aaron Wolpoff, ** 58:12 Yeah, I could probably do that at night.   Michael Hingson ** 58:18 What advice do you give to people who are just starting out, or what kinds of things do you would you give to people we have ideas and thoughts?   Aaron Wolpoff, ** 58:27 So I've done a lot of mentoring. I've done a lot of one on one calls. They told I always work with an organization. They told me I did 100 plus calls. I always tell people to take use the create their own momentum, so you can apply for things, you can stand in line, you can wait, or you can come up with your own idea and test it out and say, I'm doing this. Who wants in? And the minute you have an idea, people are interested. You know, you're on to something. Let me see what that's all about. You know, I want to be one of the three that you're looking for. So I tell them, create their own momentum. Try to flip the power dynamic. So if you're asking for a job, how do you get the person that you're asking to want something from you and and do things that are take on, things that are within your control?   Michael Hingson ** 59:18 Right? Right? Well, if you had to go back and tell the younger Aaron something from years ago, what would you give him in the way of advice?   Aaron Wolpoff, ** 59:30 Be more vulnerable. Don't pretend you know everything. There you go. And you don't need to know everything. You need to know what you know. And then get a little better and get a little better.   Michael Hingson ** 59:43 One of the things that I constantly tell people who I hire as salespeople is you can be a student, at least for a year. Don't hesitate to ask your customers questions because they're not out to. Get you. They want you to succeed. And if you interact with your customers and you're willing to learn from them, they're willing to teach, and you'll learn so much that you never would have thought you would learn. I just think that's such a great concept.   Aaron Wolpoff, ** 1:00:12 Oh, exactly right. Yeah. As soon as I started saying that to clients, you know, they would throw out an industry term. As soon as I've said I don't know what that is, can you explain it to me? Yeah? And they did, and the world didn't fall apart. And I didn't, you know, didn't look like the idiot that I thought I would when we went on with our day. Yeah, that whole protective barrier that I worked so hard to keep up as a facade, I didn't have to do it, and it was so freeing. Yeah, yeah, yeah,   Michael Hingson ** 1:00:41 I hear you. Well, this has been fun. We've been doing it for an hour. Can you believe it? Oh, hey, that was a quick hour. I know it was a lot of fun. Well, I want to thank you for being here, and I want to thank you all for listening. Please give us a five star rating wherever you're listening or watching. We really appreciate it. We value your thoughts. I'd love to hear from you and get your thoughts on our episode today. And I'm sure Aaron would like that as well, and I'll give you an email address in a moment. But Aaron, if people want to reach out to you and maybe use your services, how do they do that?   Aaron Wolpoff, ** 1:01:12 Yeah, so two ways you can check me out, at double zebra, z, E, B, R, A, double zebra.com and the podcast, I encourage you to check out too. We fixed it. Pod.com, we fixed it.   Michael Hingson ** 1:01:25 Pod.com, there you go. So reach out to Aaron and get marketing stuff done and again. Thank you all. My email address, if you'd like to talk to us, is Michael, H, I m, I C, H, A, E, L, H, I at accessibe, A, C, C, E, S, S, i, b, e.com, and if you know anyone else who you think ought to be a guest on our podcast, we'd love it if you give us an introduction. We're always looking for people, so please do and again. Aaron, I just want to thank you for being here. This has been a lot of fun.   Aaron Wolpoff, ** 1:01:58 That was great. Thanks for having me. Michael,   **Michael Hingson ** 1:02:05 You have been listening to the Unstoppable Mindset podcast. Thanks for dropping by. I hope that you'll join us again next week, and in future weeks for upcoming episodes. To subscribe to our podcast and to learn about upcoming episodes, please visit www dot Michael hingson.com slash podcast. Michael Hingson is spelled m i c h a e l h i n g s o n. While you're on the site., please use the form there to recommend people who we ought to interview in upcoming editions of the show. And also, we ask you and urge you to invite your friends to join us in the future. If you know of any one or any organization needing a speaker for an event, please email me at speaker at Michael hingson.com. I appreciate it very much. To learn more about the concept of blinded by fear, please visit www dot Michael hingson.com forward slash blinded by fear and while you're there, feel free to pick up a copy of my free eBook entitled blinded by fear. The unstoppable mindset podcast is provided by access cast an initiative of accessiBe and is sponsored by accessiBe. Please visit www.accessibe.com . AccessiBe is spelled a c c e s s i b e. There you can learn all about how you can make your website inclusive for all persons with disabilities and how you can help make the internet fully inclusive by 2025. Thanks again for Listening. Please come back and visit us again next week.

Bruce and Gaydos explain how Buckeye firefighters helped deliver a baby on I-10.

Interstate News EP 50

In this episode, we're travelling the world, we're so late and Matt's no longer fancy. We're trying a smash hit from Australia, the Raspberry Smash Mars bar, which has a raspberry nougat and caramel. The Creeps also finally decide to try Dubai chocolate, the viral sensation of pistachio cream and crispy little kadayif strands inside of a chocolate bar. The Editor enjoyed, tune in to see what your favorite hosts thought. Note: we bought our Dubai chocolate at Hanlan's Meat Market and it was affordable if you just want to try some for the first time. Tune in to our 100th main episode for more on the market's killer menu!Trigger Warning: from about 5:00 on, Matt talks about fire, homicide involving a vehicle, and the loss of teen/young adult children. Graphic detail, discretion advised. This week, Matt is covering a local story of recent conviction and sentencing for a reckless driving and vehicular homicide case from 2024. The driver, Thomas Horner of PA, struck a car in road rage on Interstate 79, causing the vehicle to go off into the other lane, killing both passengers inside. Nothing else to say other than what Kelsey said "We don't do enough to end road rage, it's stupid, there's no point. We're all going to get there at the same time" Credit to Sam Kirk at wboy for covering the story wboy.com/news/crime/driver-found-guilty-in-monongalia-county-road-rage-incident-that-killed-2/

Parts of Interstate 15 remained closed overnight after law enforcement shot a driver. Encinitas councilmember Luke Shaffer is facing several criminal charges from an incident that happened last month. This is the final weekend of NBC 7 and Telemundo 20's Clear the Shelters campaign.   What You Need To Know To Start Your Saturday. 

//The Wire//2300Z August 27, 2025////ROUTINE////BLUF: TWO MASS SHOOTINGS STRIKE MINNEAPOLIS. CONCERNS WITHIN TRUCKING COMMUNITY GROW AS FOCUS ON TRAFFIC INCIDENTS INCREASES.// -----BEGIN TEARLINE------HomeFront-Arkansas: A truck driver was arrested after driving the wrong way across the Memphis-Arkansas Bridge yesterday, causing a large traffic disruption. Traffic was halted for some time as the driver was detained and his semi-truck removed from the roadway.Analyst Comment: This case is interesting as this was very likely an intentional act. The driver, who was driving for Raj Transport, had to be forcibly removed from the truck's cab at gunpoint by police.  There is also a bit of confusion regarding this case, as multiple individuals have been arrested under similar circumstances, with nearly the same name, over the past few weeks. Two weeks ago, another Indian driver was arrested in the same area. The driver's booking details revealed his name to be Harvinder Singh, not to be confused with the Harjinder Singh who caused the deaths of three people in Florida two weeks ago. In this case, the Arkansas Singh was highly intoxicated at the time of his arrest, with a BAC of 0.15%. So far, the wrong-way driver from yesterday has not been identified.As a brief summary, the following is a description of recent events which may be confusing due to the similarity of the names of those involved, and the circumstances of each incident:Harjinder Singh: Arrested on August 18th in California after causing the deaths of three on the Florida Turnpike.Harneet Singh: Passenger in Harjinder Singh's truck (and also his brother). Arrested on August 21st by ICE for being in the US illegally.Navjeet Singh: Arrested in Canada on August 22nd, after remaining a fugitive almost 9 months after causing a fatal crash in Manitoba.Harvinder Singh: Arrested on August 14th on I-40 near West Memphis for drunk driving.Unknown Raj Transport Driver: Arrested on August 26th after driving the wrong way on the Interstate 55 Bridge near West Memphis.Minnesota: Two mass shootings have been reported in Minneapolis over the past 24 hours. Yesterday a drive-by shooting was reported in the vicinity of Cristo Rey Jesuit High School on 4th Avenue. 1x person was killed and 6x others wounded during the attack. The suspect has not been identified and remains at large.This morning, a separate mass shooting was reported at the Annunciation Church on W 54th Street. One gunman targeted the Church during the all-school morning Mass for the Catholic School co-located with the Church. Local authorities report a total of 2x children killed, and 17x others wounded during the engagement. The suspect has been identified as Robin Westman (formerly Robert Westman), who was reported deceased at the scene.-----END TEARLINE-----Analyst Comments: At the moment, all evidence points to this Church shooting not being a random act, but a deliberate and targeted act of terrorism. A manifesto created by the murderer was posted online shortly before the attack, which (along with other content) confirms the shooter was a mentally ill transgender man who attacked his old Church.It is usually best to wait a few days for information to settle down after a major shooting. However in this case it is important to be aware that while the crime scene was still active, gun control activists were observed demonstrating at the scene, harassing parents who were trying to pick up their children from the school after the shooting. Horrific murder scenes are already a nightmare to manage...staging areas have to be established for reuniting families, media has to be kept from contaminating the crime scene, and further security concerns must be considered as well (just in case of secondary attacks). Any time a mass shooting like this occurs, it takes great skill to (on

Interstate News EP 48

Interstate News EP 47