Podcasts about midwestern

THE DEVIL'S LEDGER — Week of November 17th Featuring: The Creepiest Thing I Heard This Week — “The Empty Place Setting” Welcome back to The Devil's Ledger, your weekly tour through everything happening across the Evio Creative Network. With Thanksgiving around the corner, we begin—as always—with The Creepiest Thing I Heard This Week. This time, we're telling a story pulled straight from Midwestern legend: The Empty Place Setting — a Thanksgiving tradition kept alive by a family haunted by loss, ritual, and three slow knocks that return every year without fail. From there, we travel across the Evio network for a packed week of new episodes, deep dives, historical reckonings, and true-crime investigations.

This Growth ETF Manager Loves Finding High Growth Stocks With A Twist (Nasdaq: AOTG)GuestJohn Tinsman, Founder of AOT Invest LLC and Portfolio Manager of the AOT Growth and Innovation ETF (Nasdaq: AOTG).About John:John blends Midwestern pragmatism with global financial expertise. He grew up in his family's Iowa fertilizer business, studied economics at Northwestern and Oxford, and cut his teeth as a Chicago market maker. In 2022, he launched the AOT Growth and Innovation ETF, which has scaled from $20M to almost $100M AUM, focusing on profitable, tech-driven companies that compound growth.• Company: AOT Invest LLC• Website: http://aotetf.com/• Tickers: $AOTG, Launching $ AOTS SoonMethodologyAOT Invest selects innovative companies which seek to significantly grow their revenues and earnings. AOT also believes companies whose products or services have low marginal cost attributes will be able to achieve above average growth and profit margins in the future. AOT targets industries projected to grow significantly over the next 5 to 10 years. Within those industries, AOT seeks to invest in innovative market leaders who are growing their revenues or earnings and whose products or services could be described as having low marginal cost qualities. Marginal Cost is defined as the cost added by producing one additional unit of a product or service. By having a low marginal cost, a firm may be able to sell its product or service at a much higher price than the cost it took to produce the additional product or service, achieving a significant profit on new sales. Thorough fundamental analysis is made to weigh valuation metrics with growth of each company so that the greatest investment opportunities in AOT's opinion are selected. Thus, AOT selects innovative companies well positioned in expanding industries, that are both reasonably valued and have low marginal cost qualities. AOT expects that such companies will not only significantly increase their revenues, but that their earnings will increase at even greater rate than revenue. Over time, AOT believes this revenue and earnings growth will ultimately lead to above average share price appreciation for these companies and the AOT Growth and Innovation ETF.

Welcome to the Video Store Podcast.It's Turkey Time! The leaves are changing and the air is crisp. As the jack-o-lanterns turn into pumpkin pie I love to sit down and watch Thanksgiving movies. Some people will tell you there's only one Thanksgiving movie to watch this time of year, I disagree. I'm going to recommend four other Thanksgiving movies that will get you in the holiday spirit and hopefully become a permanent part of your Thanksgiving watch-list.First up we have Son in Law, the 1993 Pauly Shore movie. Becca, a small town Midwestern girl moves to Los Angeles to attend college. She meets Crawl (Shore) an eccentric surfer dude filled with chaotic energy. When Becca brings Crawl home for Thanksgiving the family and town aren't prepared for teh antics.John Hughes wrote two movies about Thanksgiving, one in 1987 and Dutch in 1991. Dutch is a road trip movie about a blue-collar and his spoiled, soon to be stepson. Along they way they each learn to view the world different and accept each other for who they are. The third movie on out Thanksgiving list is Home for the Holidays, directed by Jodi Foster. Home for the Holidays is a raw, unfiltered look at Thanksgiving through the lenses of a dysfunctional family. The Thanksgiving dinner scene alone is worth the price of the rental. It's not your normal ‘everyone hug and say I love you' happy ending. It's a fantastic movie and highly underrated.The final film on my list is Scent of A Woman from 1992. It's about the unlikely friendship between a prep school student and a retired Army officer. It stars the great Al Pacino and it is his movie through and through. From start to finish, he gives a master class in acting. In the end it reminds us that no matter what our situation there's always something and someone to be thankful for. No matter how you spend the holiday, with family, with friends or something else, have safe, enjoyable and relaxing holiday.We're thankful you stop by The Video Store Podcast, please come again for more great movies to add to your list.Thanks for reading Video Store Podcast! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.videostorepodcast.com

In this episode of Just Another Tin Foil Hat with Zelia Edgar, we uncover one of the most extraordinary UFO cases in Midwestern history. On a quiet night in Elmwood, Wisconsin, police officer George Wheeler was on routine patrol when something incredible interrupted the calm. Spotting an orange glow near the Tuttle Hill quarry, Wheeler assumed it was a fire — until he got closer. What he saw would shake him to his core. As he reached higher ground, his voice crackled over the radio with a chilling message: “My God, it's one of those UFOs again.” This episode dives deep into the 1976 Elmwood UFO incident — a case that baffled law enforcement, captivated local residents, and left behind strange physical evidence that remains unexplained to this day. From Wheeler's first sighting to the aftermath that turned Elmwood into a UFO hotspot, Zelia explores how one man's encounter helped shape Wisconsin's lasting fascination with the unknown.

In this moving conversation, we speak with Alisha, a therapist and Korean adoptee, about her lifelong search for identity and home. She shares the story of being adopted from Korea as an infant, growing up in a small Midwestern town, reuniting with her birth mother in her thirties, and navigating motherhood herself. We explore the myths of adoption, the grief that lives in the body, and what it means to come into community and consciousness as an adult adoptee.You can learn more about Alisha Bennett here. We also recommend this Frontline documentary, “South Korea's Adoption Reckoning.” LOVELINK is hosted by Brooklyn-based therapists Dr. Signe Simon and Dr. Simone Humphrey. If you'd like to contact us directly, send us an email to info@modernmind.co. 

Ever crank a delay plugin, hear a swamp of echoes, and think, “Cool… but what am I actually doing here?” Chris & Jody are here to rescue you from your own knob-twisting crimes. This week, they break down delay the way mix engineers wish someone had explained it when they were fumbling around in their first apartment studios. First, the math (don't panic). They show you how to calculate delay times that actually fit the tempo, no more “that kinda sounds right, maybe” energy. If you're using hardware with zero DAW sync, this segment alone may save you from hurling your favorite box across the room. Then they unleash the fun stuff: slapbacks that make vocals swagger, ping-pongs that dance across your headphones, tape delays that drip nostalgia, and multi-taps that basically let you play Tetris with your audio. They'll even show you how to use delay to make guitars wider than your rent bill and vocals thicker than a Midwestern milkshake. Expect jokes, expect nonsense, and expect a few “wait… seriously?” tips you'll immediately want to try. Stick around for Friday Finds, because who doesn't love new plugins and gear you didn't know you needed? #MusicProduction #HomeStudioGear #MixingEngineer #DelayEffects #RecordingSetupTips #StudioGearSecrets #AudioEngineering #ProAudioTech

In today's episode, I'm pleased to welcome mother–son cookbook author team Jyoti and Auyon Mukharji, authors of Heartland Masala: An Indian Cookbook from an American Kitchen. Before we dive in: If you are ready to start your own cookbook project with clarity and direction, The Creative Cookbook Blueprint is available for a few more days. This resource provides a structured path to begin organizing your recipes, shaping your stories, and moving toward a publishable cookbook. Details are linked in the show notes section below. Heartland Masala is a vibrant, richly illustrated celebration of Indian home cooking, written from the heart of the American Midwest. Rooted in both tradition and diaspora, the book blends recipes from Punjab, Bengal, and throughout India with the lived experience of a family that has called Kansas City home for decades. In this conversation, we explore: Inspiration — How Heartland Masala was born from years of Joyti teaching, family heritage, and the desire to preserve Indian home cooking in a Midwestern context. Process — Their collaborative mother–son workflow, recipe testing, adapting regional dishes, and shaping the book's structure. Storytelling — Why they included essays, cultural notes, culinary history, memories, and narrative elements to deepen the reader's connection to Indian food. Legacy & Impact — What they learned from writing across generations and what they hope the book will contribute to readers, family, and culture. The book features beloved classics such as Saag Paneer and Vindaloo, lesser-known gems like Bengali Murgh Rezala and Anglo-Indian Spiced Liver Toast, as well as inventive new creations, including Masala Brussels Sprouts and Spiced Watermelon. Jyoti and Auyon even include a handful of cocktail recipes, adding a playful touch to the collection. Their work is a testament to the richness of Indian cuisine, the power of family collaboration, and the vibrant interplay between heritage and place. Things We Mention in This Episode: The Creative Cookbook Blueprint Heartland Masala HQ on Substack

Betsy Fore is a serial entrepreneur, CEO, and investor with nearly 20 years of leadership experience. She's the author of Built on Purpose: Discover Your Deep Inner Why and Manifest the Business of Your Dreams, founding partner of Velveteen Ventures, and a trailblazer in consumer products for children and the planet. Notably, Betsy scaled Tiny Organics past $13 million in revenue in just 24 months, took Wonder Woof! from scrappy startup to Oprah's Favorite Things, and was the first Native American woman to raise a Series A for a consumer food startup. On this episode we talk about: Growing up in a small Midwestern town, working every day since 13, and becoming a leading business creator Turning a garage-tinkering childhood into a career as a toy inventor, then product startup founder How relentless optimism, reinvention, and standing atop “a mountain of failures” led to big wins Advice for founders: building with community, manifesting vision, securing funding, and the importance of thinking big—even if you're starting small Behind the scenes of Tiny Organics' explosive first-year growth, building a cult following, and scaling product through grass-roots founding families Top 3 Takeaways Every breakthrough product stands on a mountain of failed attempts; grit and adaptability win. Community-first feedback loops create true brand evangelists and drive authentic scale. Dreaming big isn't just mindset—it's a practical approach to manifesting opportunity and wealth wherever you start. Notable Quotes “For every success, there's a mountain of failures you're standing on.” “You have to feel your deep inner ‘why' to reveal it and build on it.” “Not every company needs to be venture-backed, but every founder can build generational wealth by manifesting their vision.” Connect with Betsy Fore: Website: betsyfore.com ✖️✖️✖️✖️

TrulySignificant.com presents Tom Osborne, one of our favorite leaders of all time discussing Beyond the Final Score. Learn about Tom's parents and his Grandfather that was tragically killed by a bolt of lightning. Hear about Midwestern values...don't spend money if you don't have it, you can't count on prosperity and affluence lasting forever, be married through thick and thin.Tom Osborne is more than a Coach, Congressman and friend. He is a mentor for life.Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/success-made-to-last-legends--4302039/support.

Listen to JCO's Art of Oncology article, "The Man at the Bow" by Dr. Alexis Drutchas, who is a palliative care physician at Dana Farber Cancer Institute. The article is followed by an interview with Drutchas and host Dr. Mikkael Sekeres. Dr. Drutchas shares the deep connection she had with a patient, a former barge captain, who often sailed the same route that her family's shipping container did when they moved overseas many times while she was growing up. She reflects on the nature of loss and dignity, and how oncologists might hold patients' humanity with more tenderness and care, especially at the end of life. TRANSCRIPT Narrator: The Man at the Bow, by Alexis Drutchas, MD  It was the kind of day that almost seemed made up—a clear, cerulean sky with sunlight bouncing off the gold dome of the State House. The contrast between this view and the drab hospital walls as I walked into my patient's room was jarring. My patient, whom I will call Suresh, sat in a recliner by the window. His lymphoma had relapsed, and palliative care was consulted to help with symptom management. The first thing I remember is that despite the havoc cancer had wreaked—sunken temples and a hospital gown slipping off his chest—Suresh had a warm, peaceful quality about him. Our conversation began with a discussion about his pain. Suresh told me how his bones ached and how his fatigue left him feeling hollow—a fraction of his former self. The way this drastic change in his physicality affected his sense of identity was palpable. There was loss, even if it was unspoken. After establishing a plan to help with his symptoms, I pivoted and asked Suresh how he used to spend his days. His face immediately lit up. He had been a barge captain—a dangerous and thrilling profession that took him across international waters to transport goods. Suresh's eyes glistened as he described his joy at sea. I was completely enraptured. He shared stories about mornings when he stood alone on the bow, feeling the salted breeze as the barge moved through Atlantic waves. He spoke of calm nights on the deck, looking at the stars through stunning darkness. He traveled all over the globe and witnessed Earth's topography from a perspective most of us will never see. The freedom Suresh exuded was profound. He loved these voyages so much that one summer, despite the hazards, he brought his wife and son to experience the journey with him. Having spent many years of my childhood living in Japan and Hong Kong, my family's entire home—every bed, sheet, towel, and kitchen utensil—was packed up and crossed the Atlantic on cargo ships four times. Maybe Suresh had captained one, I thought. Every winter, we hosted US Navy sailors docked in Hong Kong for the holidays. I have such fond memories of everyone going around the table and sharing stories of their adventures—who saw or ate what and where. I loved those times: the wild abandon of travel, the freedom of being somewhere new, and the way identity can shift and expand as experiences grow. When Suresh shared stories of the ocean, I was back there too, holding the multitude of my identity alongside him. I asked Suresh to tell me more about his voyages: what was it like to be out in severe weather, to ride over enormous swells? Did he ever get seasick, and did his crew always get along? But Suresh did not want to swim into these perilous stories with me. Although he worked a difficult and physically taxing job, this is not what he wanted to focus on. Instead, he always came back to the beauty and vitality he felt at sea—what it was like to stare out at the vastness of the open ocean. He often closed his eyes and motioned with his hands as he spoke as if he was not confined to these hospital walls. Instead, he was swaying on the water feeling the lightness of physical freedom, and the way a body can move with such ease that it is barely perceptible, like water flowing over sand. The resonances of Suresh's stories contained both the power and challenges laden in this work. Although I sat at his bedside, healthy, my body too contained memories of freedom that in all likelihood will one day dissipate with age or illness. The question of how I will be seen, compared to how I hoped to be seen, lingered in my mind. Years ago, before going to medical school, I moved to Vail, Colorado. I worked four different jobs just to make ends meet, but making it work meant that on my days off, I was only a chairlift ride away from Vail's backcountry. I have a picture of this vigor in my mind—my snowboard carving into fresh powder, the utter silence of the wilderness at that altitude, and the way it felt to graze the powdery snow against my glove. My face was windburned, and my body was sore, but my heart had never felt so buoyant. While talking with Suresh, I could so vividly picture him as the robust man he once was, standing tall on the bow of his ship. I could feel the freedom and joy he described—it echoed in my own body. In that moment, the full weight of what Suresh had lost hit me as forcefully as a cresting wave—not just the physical decline, but the profound shift in his identity. What is more, we all live, myself included, so precariously at this threshold. In this work, it is impossible not to wonder: what will it be like when it is me? Will I be seen as someone who has lived a full life, who explored and adventured, or will my personhood be whittled down to my illness? How can I hold these questions and not be swallowed by them? "I know who you are now is not the person you've been," I said to Suresh. With that, he reached out for my hand and started to cry. We looked at each other with a new understanding. I saw Suresh—not just as a frail patient but as someone who lived a full life. As someone strong enough to cross the Atlantic for decades. In that moment, I was reminded of the Polish poet, Wislawa Szymborska's words, "As far as you've come, can't be undone." This, I believe, is what it means to honor the dignity of our patients, to reflect back the person they are despite or alongside their illness…all of their parts that can't be undone. Sometimes, this occurs because we see our own personhood reflected in theirs and theirs in ours. Sometimes, to protect ourselves, we shield ourselves from this echo. Other times, this resonance becomes the most beautiful and meaningful part of our work. It has been years now since I took care of Suresh. When the weather is nice, my wife and I like to take our young son to the harbor in South Boston to watch the planes take off and the barges leave the shore, loaded with colorful metal containers. We usually pack a picnic and sit in the trunk as enormous planes fly overhead and tugboats work to bring large ships out to the open water. Once, as a container ship was leaving the port, we waved so furiously at those working on board that they all started to wave back, and the captain honked the ships booming horn. Every single time we are there, I think of Suresh, and I picture him sailing out on thewaves—as free as he will ever be. Mikkael Sekeres: Welcome back to JCO's Cancer Stories: The Art of Oncology. This ASCO podcast features intimate narratives and perspectives from authors exploring their experiences in oncology. I'm your host, Mikkael Sekeres. I'm Professor of Medicine and Chief of the Division of Hematology at the Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center, University of Miami. What a treat we have today. We're joined by Dr. Alexis Drutchas, a Palliative Care Physician and the Director of the Core Communication Program at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, and Assistant Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School to discuss her article, "The Man at the Bow." Alexis, thank you so much for contributing to Journal of Clinical Oncology and for joining us to discuss your article. Dr. Alexis Drutchas: Thank you. I'm thrilled and excited to be here. Mikkael Sekeres: I wonder if we can start by asking you about yourself. Where are you from, and can you walk us a bit through your career? Dr. Alexis Drutchas: The easiest way to say it would be that I'm from the Detroit area. My dad worked in automotive car parts and so we moved around a lot when I was growing up. I was born in Michigan, then we moved to Japan, then back to Michigan, then to Hong Kong, then back to Michigan. Then I spent my undergrad years in Wisconsin and moved out to Colorado to teach snowboarding before medical school, and then ended up back in Michigan for that, and then on the east coast at Brown for my family medicine training, and then in Boston for work and training. So, I definitely have a more global experience in my background, but also very Midwestern at heart as well. In terms of my professional career trajectory, I trained in family medicine because I really loved taking care of the whole person. I love taking care of kids and adults, and I loved OB, and at the time I felt like it was impossible to choose which one I wanted to pursue the most, and so family medicine was a great fit. And at the core of that, there's just so much advocacy and social justice work, especially in the community health centers where many family medicine residents train. During that time, I got very interested in LGBTQ healthcare and founded the Rhode Island Trans Health Conference, which led me to work as a PCP at Fenway Health in Boston after that. And so I worked there for many years. And then through a course of being a hospitalist at BI during that work, I worked with many patients with serious illness, making decisions about discontinuing dialysis, about pursuing hospice care in the setting of ILD. I also had a significant amount of family illness and started to recognize this underlying interest I had always had in palliative care, but I think was a bit scared to pursue. But those really kind of tipped me over to say I really wanted to access a different level of communication skills and be able to really go into depth with patients in a way I just didn't feel like I had the language for. And so I applied to the Harvard Palliative Care Fellowship and luckily and with so much gratitude got in years ago, and so trained in palliative care and stayed at MGH after that. So my Dana-Farber position is newer for me and I'm very excited about it. Mikkael Sekeres: Sounds like you've had an amazing career already and you're just getting started on it. I grew up in tiny little Rhode Island and, you know, we would joke you have to pack an overnight bag if you travel more than 45 minutes. So, our boundaries were much tighter than yours. What was it like growing up where you're going from the Midwest to Asia, back to the Midwest, you wind up settling on the east coast? You must have an incredible worldly view on how people live and how they view their health. Dr. Alexis Drutchas: I think you just named much of the sides of it. I think I realize now, in looking back, that in many ways it was living two lives, because at the time it was rare from where we lived in the Detroit area in terms of the other kids around us to move overseas. And so it really did feel like that part of me and my family that during the summers we would have home leave tickets and my parents would often turn them in to just travel since we didn't really have a home base to come back to. And so it did give me an incredible global perspective and a sense of all the ways in which people develop community, access healthcare, and live. And then coming back to the Midwest, not to say that it's not cosmopolitan or diverse in its own way, but it was very different, especially in the 80s and 90s to come back to the Midwest. So it did feel like I carried these two lenses in the world, and it's been incredibly meaningful over time to meet other friends and adults and patients who have lived these other lives as well. I think for me those are some of my most connecting friendships and experiences with patients for people who have had a similar experience in living with sort of a duality in their everyday lives with that. Mikkael Sekeres: You know, you write about the main character of your essay, Suresh, who's a barge captain, and you mention in the essay that your family crossed the Atlantic on cargo ships four times when you were growing up. What was that experience like? How much of it do you remember? Dr. Alexis Drutchas: Our house, like our things, crossed the Atlantic four times on barge ships such as his. We didn't, I mean we crossed on airplanes. Mikkael Sekeres: Oh, okay, okay. Dr. Alexis Drutchas: We flew over many times, but every single thing we owned got packed up into containers on large trucks in our house and were brought over to ports to be sent over. So, I'm not sure how they do it now, but at the time that's sort of how we moved, and we would often go live in a hotel or a furnished apartment for the month's wait of all of our house to get there, which felt also like a surreal experience in that, you know, you're in a totally different country and then have these creature comforts of your bedroom back in Metro Detroit. And I remember thinking a lot about who was crossing over with all of that stuff and where was it going, and who else was moving, and that was pretty incredible. And when I met Suresh, just thinking about the fact that at some point our home could have been on his ship was a really fun connection in my mind to make, just given where he always traveled in his work. Mikkael Sekeres: It's really neat. I remember when we moved from the east coast also to the Midwest, I was in Cleveland for 18 years. The very first thing we did was mark which of the boxes had the kids' toys in it, because that of course was the first one we let them close it up and then we let them open it as soon as we arrived. Did your family do something like that as well so that you can, you know, immediately feel an attachment to your stuff when they arrived? Dr. Alexis Drutchas: Yeah, I remember what felt most important to our mom was our bedrooms. I don't remember the toys. I remember sort of our comforters and our pillowcases and things like that, yeah, being opened and it feeling really settling to think, "Okay, you know, we're in a completely different place and country away from most everything we know, but our bedroom is the same." That always felt like a really important point that she made to make home feel like home again in a new place. Mikkael Sekeres: Yeah, yeah. One of the sentences you wrote in your essay really caught my eye. You wrote about when you were younger and say, "I loved those times, the wild abandon of travel, the freedom of being somewhere new, the way identity can shift and expand as experiences grow." It's a lovely sentiment. Do you think those are emotions that we experience only as children, or can they continue through adulthood? And if they can, how do we make that happen, that sense of excitement and experience? Dr. Alexis Drutchas: I think that's such a good question and one I honestly think about a lot. I think that we can access those all the time. There's something about the newness of travel and moving, you know, I have a 3-year-old right now, and so I think many parents would connect to that sense that there is wonderment around being with someone experiencing something for the first time. Even watching my son, Oliver, see a plane take off for the first time felt joyous in a completely new way, that even makes me smile a lot now. But I think what is such a great connection here is when something is new, our eyes are so open to it. You know, we're constantly witnessing and observing and are excited about that. And I think the connection that I've realized is important for me in my work and also in just life in general to hold on to that wonderment is that idea of sort of witnessing or having a writer's eye, many would call it, in that you're keeping your eye open for the small beautiful things. Often with travel, you might be eating ramen. It might not be the first time you're eating it, but you're eating it for the first time in Tokyo, and it's the first time you've had this particular ingredient on it, and then you remember that. But there's something that we're attuned to in those moments, like the difference or the taste, that makes it special and we hold on to it. And I think about that a lot as a writer, but also in patient care and having my son with my wife, it's what are the special small moments to hold on to and allowing them to be new and beautiful, even if they're not as large as moving across the country or flying to Rome or whichever. I think there are ways that that excitement can still be alive if we attune ourselves to some of the more beautiful small moments around us. Mikkael Sekeres: And how do we do that as doctors? We're trained to go into a room and there's almost a formula for how we approach patients. But how do you open your mind in that way to that sense of wonderment and discovery with the person you're sitting across from, and it doesn't necessarily have to be medical? One of the true treats of what we do is we get to meet people from all backgrounds and all walks of life, and we have the opportunity to explore their lives as part of our interaction. Dr. Alexis Drutchas: Yeah, I think that is such a great question. And I would love to hear your thoughts on this too. I think for me in that sentence that you mentioned, sitting at that table with sort of people in the Navy from all over the world, I was that person to them in the room, too. There was some identity there that I brought to the table that was different than just being a kid in school or something like that. To answer your question, I wonder if so much of the challenge is actually allowing ourselves to bring ourselves into the room, because so much of the formula is, you know, we have these white coats on, we have learners, we want to do it right, we want to give excellent care. There's there's so many sort of guards I think that we put up to make sure that we're asking the right questions, we don't want to miss anything, we don't want to say the wrong thing, and all of that is true. And at the same time, I find that when I actually allow myself into the room, that is when it is the most special. And that doesn't mean that there's complete countertransference or it's so permeable that it's not in service of the patient. It just means that I think when we allow bits of our own selves to come in, it really does allow for new connections to form, and then we are able to learn about our patients more, too. With every patient, I think often we're called in for goals of care or symptom management, and of course I prioritize that, but when I can, I usually just try to ask a more open-ended question, like, "Tell me about life before you came to the hospital or before you were diagnosed. What do you love to do? What did you do for work?" Or if it's someone's family member who is ill, I'll ask the kids or family in the room, "Like, what kind of mom was she? You know, what special memory you had?" Just, I get really curious when there's time to really understand the person. And I know that that's not at all new language. Of course, we're always trying to understand the person, but I just often think understanding them is couched within their illness. And I'm often very curious about how we can just get to know them as people, and how humanizing ourselves to them helps humanize them to us, and that back and forth I think is like really lovely and wonderful and allows things to come up that were totally unexpected, and those are usually the special moments that you come home with and want to tell your family about or want to process and think about. What about you? How do you think about that question? Mikkael Sekeres: Well, it's interesting you ask. I like to do projects around the house. I hate to say this out loud because of course one day I'll do something terrible and everyone will remember this podcast, but I fancy myself an amateur electrician and plumber and carpenter and do these sorts of projects. So I go into interactions with patients wanting to learn about their lives and how they live their lives to see what I can pick up on as well, how I can take something out of that interaction and actually use it practically. My father-in-law has this phrase he always says to me when a worker comes to your house, he goes, he says to me, "Remember to steal with your eyes." Right? Watch what they do, learn how they fix something so you can fix it yourself and you don't have to call them next time. So, for me it's kind of fun to hear how people have lived their lives both within their professions, and when I practiced medicine in Cleveland, there were a lot of farmers and factory workers I saw. So I learned a lot about how things are made. But also about how they interact with their families, and I've learned a lot from people I've seen who were just terrific dads and terrific moms or siblings or spouses. And I've tried to take those nuggets away from those interactions. But I think you can only do it if you open yourself up and also allow yourself to see that person's humanity. And I wonder if I can quote you to you again from your essay. There's another part that I just loved, and it's about how you write about how a person's identity changes when they become a patient. You write, "And in that moment the full weight of what he had lost hit me as forcefully as a cresting wave. Not just the physical decline, but the profound shift in identity. What is more, we all live, me included, so precariously at this threshold. In this work, it's impossible not to wonder, what will it be like when it's me? Will I be seen as someone who's lived many lives, or whittled down only to someone who's sick?" Can you talk a little bit more about that? Have you been a patient whose identity has changed without asking you to reveal too much? Or what about your identity as a doctor? Is that something we have to undo a little bit when we walk in the room with the stethoscope or wearing a white coat? Dr. Alexis Drutchas: That was really powerful to hear you read that back to me. So, thank you. Yeah, I think my answer here can't be separated from the illness I faced with my family. And I think this unanimously filters into the way in which I see every patient because I really do think about the patient's dignity and the way medicine generally, not always, really does strip them of that and makes them the patient. Even the way we write about "the patient said this," "the patient said that," "the patient refused." So I generally very much try to have a one-liner like, "Suresh is a X-year-old man who's a barge captain from X, Y, and Z and is a loving father with a," you know, "period. He comes to the hospital with X, Y, and Z." So I always try to do that and humanize patients. I always try to write their name rather than just "patient." I can't separate that out from my experience with my family. My sister six years ago now went into sudden heart failure after having a spontaneous coronary artery dissection, and so immediately within minutes she was in the cath lab at 35 years old, coding three times and came out sort of with an Impella and intubated, and very much, you know, all of a sudden went from my sister who had just been traveling in Mexico to a patient in the CCU. And I remember desperately wanting her team to see who she was, like see the person that we loved, that was fighting for her life, see how much her life meant to us. And that's not to say that they weren't giving her great care, but there was something so important to me in wanting them to see how much we wanted her to live, you know, and who she was. It felt like there's some important core to me there. We brought pictures in, we talked about what she was living for. It felt really important. And I can't separate that out from the way in which I see patients now or I feel in my own way in a certain way what it is to lose yourself, to lose the ability to be a Captain of the ship, to lose the ability to do electric work around the house. So much of our identity is wrapped up in our professions and our craft. And I think for me that has really become forefront in the work of palliative care and in and in the teaching I do and in the writing I do is how to really bring them forefront and not feel like in doing that we're losing our ability to remain objective or solid in our own professional identities as clinicians and physicians. Mikkael Sekeres: Well, I think that's a beautiful place to end here. I can only imagine what an outstanding physician and caregiver you are also based on your writing and how you speak about it. You just genuinely come across as caring about your patients and your family and the people you have interactions with and getting to know them as people. It has been again such a treat to have Dr. Alexis Drutchas here. She is Director of the Core Communication Program at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Assistant Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School to discuss her article, "The Man at the Bow." Alexis, thank you so much for joining us. Dr. Alexis Drutchas: Thank you. This has been a real joy. Mikkael Sekeres: If you've enjoyed this episode, consider sharing it with a friend or colleague, or leave us a review. Your feedback and support helps us continue to save these important conversations. If you're looking for more episodes and context, follow our show on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen, and explore more from ASCO at ASCO.org/podcasts. Until next time, this has been Mikkael Sekeres for the ASCO podcast Cancer Stories: The Art of Oncology. The purpose of this podcast is to educate and to inform. This is not a substitute for professional medical care and is not intended for use in the diagnosis or treatment of individual conditions. Guests on this podcast express their own opinions, experience, and conclusions. Guest statements on the podcast do not express the opinions of ASCO. The mention of any product, service, organization, activity, or therapy should not be construed as an ASCO endorsement. Show notes: Like, share and subscribe so you never miss an episode and leave a rating or review. Guest Bio: Dr. Alexis Drutchas is a palliative care physician at Dana Farber Cancer Institute.

Legendary Chicago singer/songwriter Steve Goodman once sang of riding the rails on a train known as the City Of New Orleans. We have no idea how Chicago-based UBP listener, friend, and journalist/author Mark Guarino (Country & Midwestern, Chicago Sun Times, ABC-TV) got to the world's greatest arena, the Smoothie King Center, to see Sir Paul rock NOLA. But, if Mark is a real Chicago guy, he's probably still been there since the Bears won Super Bowl XX in January of 1986; unarguably the single greatest day in American history unless you hate excellence and joy. #PaytonIsTheGoat But all that matters is that Mark did manage to see Macca in one of America's most incredible cities, and he generously reported back on the show and the scene for the rest of us. At an extremely exorbitant fee, I might add. $12,000 for an audio field piece? In this economy, Mark??? Tony & T.J. will give their highly anticipated (editor's note: by whom?) recap after they see McCartney in Chicago over Thanksgiving week, you turkeys; but in the meantime we're excited to share another in our continuing series of the UBP Hive seeing Sir Paul live in 2025. We also ask the tough questions that only OAN has the balls to ask, because they're also insane, just not in a healthy and fun way:

She felt coerced into sex throughout your marriage. You woke to her initiating without consent. Both victims? Both guilty? Welcome to Feedback Friday!And in case you didn't already know it, Jordan Harbinger (@JordanHarbinger) and Gabriel Mizrahi (@GabeMizrahi) banter and take your comments and questions for Feedback Friday right here every week! If you want us to answer your question, register your feedback, or tell your story on one of our upcoming weekly Feedback Friday episodes, drop us a line at friday@jordanharbinger.com. Now let's dive in!Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/1236On This Week's Feedback Friday:It's our 400th Feedback Friday! But if you want to bypass Jordan and Gabe's reflection on this landmark that may only be important to us, skip on ahead to about 12 minutes and 20 seconds [00:12:20] into the episode!You're going through a divorce and during a heated conversation about past wrongs, your ex-wife accused you of pressuring her into sex throughout your marriage. But then you remember times she initiated intimacy while you were asleep. What does consent really mean in a complicated marriage like yours?You're a 19-year-old studying in the UK who finally discovered your passion for entrepreneurship after years of directionless procrastination. But your student visa explicitly prohibits starting a business. Do you transfer back to Switzerland and disappoint your parents, or suppress this newfound drive for two more years?Your younger millennial girlfriend is brilliant, but her communication style at work — complete with sing-song sarcasm about boundaries and not checking emails on weekends — is rubbing her Gen X boss the wrong way. You can see both sides. How do you tell her without crushing her authentic self?Recommendation of the Week: Star Projector (More options in the resources at the bottom of the show notes!)You retired at 48 after running a successful business for 20 years and now live comfortably off investments. But when people in your Midwestern town ask what you do, their reactions range from awkward silence to outright skepticism. How do you handle conversations about your unconventional early retirement?Have any questions, comments, or stories you'd like to share with us? Drop us a line at friday@jordanharbinger.com!Connect with Jordan on Twitter at @JordanHarbinger and Instagram at @jordanharbinger.Connect with Gabriel on Twitter at @GabeMizrahi and Instagram @gabrielmizrahi.And if you're still game to support us, please leave a review here — even one sentence helps! Sign up for Six-Minute Networking — our free networking and relationship development mini course — at jordanharbinger.com/course!Subscribe to our once-a-week Wee Bit Wiser newsletter today and start filling your Wednesdays with wisdom!Do you even Reddit, bro? Join us at r/JordanHarbinger!This Episode Is Brought To You By Our Fine Sponsors: BiOptimizers Magnesium Breakthrough: 25% off November 23rd to December 3rd: bioptimizers.com/jordan, code JORDANBetterHelp: 10% off first month: betterhelp.com/jordanAirbnb: airbnb.com/hostDeleteMe: 20% off: joindeleteme.com/jordan, code JORDANFunction Health: $100 credit: functionhealth.com/jordan, code JORDAN100Tonal: $200 off: tonal.com, code JORDANSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

On today's “Tech Bytes: Week in Review,” we discuss federal cybersecurity cutbacks that affected this week's elections and a caucus of Midwestern states pushing to join the AI boom. Plus, Sens. Josh Hawley and Mark Warner introduced a bipartisan bill requiring some companies to report when AI replaces workers. Marketplace's Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Axios tech policy reporter Maria Curi about these headlines and more.

On today's “Tech Bytes: Week in Review,” we discuss federal cybersecurity cutbacks that affected this week's elections and a caucus of Midwestern states pushing to join the AI boom. Plus, Sens. Josh Hawley and Mark Warner introduced a bipartisan bill requiring some companies to report when AI replaces workers. Marketplace's Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Axios tech policy reporter Maria Curi about these headlines and more.

What happens when a shy farm kid from rural Wisconsin who never dreamed of being a writer becomes one of America's most beloved storytellers? Michael Perry joins Infinite Loops to share his remarkable journey from cleaning calf pens to pitching scripts at Universal Studios, all while maintaining his day job as a volunteer firefighter and EMT in his hometown. This conversation is a masterclass in authentic storytelling, practical wisdom, and the power of staying true to your roots while navigating an industry that often values credentials over character. Perry shares unforgettable stories about turning down Oprah (yes, really), why he sells hundreds of books to "people who don't read" at firefighter conventions, and how his nursing background taught him the most important skill for any writer: human assessment. We explore his philosophy of "kindness is not weakness," the difference between cash and cachet, and why sometimes the best career move is knowing when not to move at all. Whether you're a writer, entrepreneur, or simply someone who believes in the power of authentic storytelling, this episode will remind you that sometimes the best way forward is to embrace your own improbable path and never stand behind a sneezing cow. I hope you enjoy the conversation as much as I did. For the full transcript, episode takeaways, and bucketloads of other goodies designed to make you go, "Hmm, that's interesting!", check out our Substack. Important Links: Michael Perry's website Substack - Michael Perry's Voice Mail Michael's X / Twitter LinkedIn Instagram Michael Perry's Mailing List Show Notes: Connections with Mark Twain The NFL Friend & First Investment Mark Twain's European Fame & American Diplomacy Blue Collar vs. Capital 'A' Art Flying Under the Radar Midwestern Wisdom & Family Stories Charity, Humility, & Fundamentalist Upbringing The Positive Side of Imposter Syndrome Happy Tangents vs. Detailed Blueprints Publishing Industry Frustrations EMT Requires Pulse & Driver's License The Oprah Story First Mover Disadvantage Brothers, Guns, & Material Sources Mortality & Perspective The Gimlet-Eyed Drive Visiting Tom The Reality of Writing Today Pragmatism & Adaptation Voltaire & Historical Perspective Mike as Emperor of the World Books Mentioned: A Tale of Two Cities; Charles Dickens Mark Twain; Ron Chernow Improbable Mentors and Happy Tangents; Michael Perry Population: 485; Michael Perry Visiting Tom; Michael Perry Truck: A Love Story; Michael Perry Million Billion; Michael Perry 40 Acres Deep; Michael Perry Montaigne in Barn Boots; Michael Perry The Peter Principle; Laurence J. Peter What Works on Wall Street; Jim O'Shaughnessy Invest Like the Best; Jim O'Shaughnessy How to Retire Rich; Jim O'Shaughnessy Greatness Cannot Be Planned; Ken Stanley The Bible All Quiet on the Western Front; Erich Maria Remarque Tao Te Ching; Laozi Gone With the Wind; Margaret Mitchell Serpico; Peter Maas Candide; Voltaire  

This week is another special More Than Maple episode focused on food and culture in Canada. Our guest is Karen Baxter, executive director of Taste Canada, a nonprofit organization that celebrates Canadian-authored cookbooks by showcasing the diversity and richness of Canada's culinary landscape.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

In the swirling vortex of MLB free agency speculation, few names ignite Ohioan hearts quite like Kyle Schwarber's. The burly left-handed slugger, fresh off another cannonball season with the Phillies—where he mashed 47 homers and drew walks like a magnet—has suddenly become the belle of the Reds' rumor ball. As the 2025-26 offseason heats up, Cincinnati's front office, under Nick Krall's steady hand, is reportedly eyeing a seismic shift: luring Schwarber home to the banks of the Ohio River. Born in Middletown, just a stone's throw from Great American Ball Park, Schwarber's Midwestern roots make this feel less like a signing and more like a homecoming barbecue. The chatter kicked off in late October, fueled by anonymous whispers from "NL Central insiders" at the Winter Meetings prelude. Picture this: Schwarber, the ultimate three-true-outcomes beast (home runs, walks, strikeouts), slotting into the Reds' revamped lineup alongside Elly De La Cruz's fireworks and Matt McLain's grit. Great American, with its short porches and hitter-friendly confines, could turn Schwarber into a 50-homer demigod, boosting a rotation still smarting from Hunter Greene's injury woes. Rumor has it the Reds are dangling a five-year, $125 million pact—player-friendly opt-outs included—to outbid suitors like the Cubs (ironic family reunion?) or Yankees, who crave his October thunder. But oh, the caveats! Schwarber's defensive "adventures" in left field—more adventure than acumen—might clash with the Reds' youth movement. And at 33, is he the long-term anchor or a bridge to contention? Fans in Cincy dream of him launching moonshots over the river, channeling Pete Rose's fire with modern power. Yet skeptics point to Philly's reluctance to let him walk, given his clubhouse glue role. If it happens, it's poetic: the Middletown Hammer returning to swing for the fences in red. For now, it's all smoke and mirrors—delicious, Reds-tinted smoke. Will it ignite? Stay tuned; the hot stove's just warming up. Music from #InAudio: https://inaudio.org/ Track Name Holy (Trap). Music from #InAudio: https://inaudio.org/ Track Name Exercise (Rock). #Bengals #NFL #OffTheBench

State and federal authorities make more arrests of undocumented drivers.An Oklahoma fugitive gets caught after 13 years on the run.Hot temperatures are taking a toll on Midwestern farmers and the food they harvest.You can find the KOSU Daily wherever you get your podcasts, you can also subscribe, rate us and leave a comment.You can keep up to date on all the latest news throughout the day at KOSU.org and make sure to follow us on Facebook, Tik Tok and Instagram at KOSU Radio.This is The KOSU Daily, Oklahoma news, every weekday.

In this episode of the Suzi Chicago podcast, I sit down with Jamie Shriner, a brilliant musical comedian I met at a comedy club in San Diego. We dive into her fascinating journey from musical theatre student to writing and performing her own musical comedy songs. Jamie shares how the pandemic helped her find her authentic voice and why she's no longer trying to impress "five guys in the back" but instead creating content for her true audience.Jamie opens up about her childhood as the class clown, her creative process for writing comedy songs, and even reveals her embarrassing "worst gig" story involving a hot-boxed 420 show and an accidentally recorded rant! We also bond over our shared Midwestern roots, our love of chocolate and sweets, and why having your own unique voice is essential in comedy.TIMESTAMPS00:00:33 - Welcome to the Suzi Chicago podcast00:03:06 - Jamie's journey from musical theatre to musical comedy00:07:49 - Finding your authentic voice in comedy00:12:13 - Knowing you're funny as a kid00:17:10 - Jamie's current projects and upcoming album00:21:49 - How Jamie writes comedy songs00:29:24 - Our shared love of sugar and sweets00:34:28 - Jamie's comedy influences00:37:38 - The worst gig Jamie ever had00:41:46 - Jamie's favorite performances and growth as an artistCONNECT WITH JAMIE

Send us a textMarcus Newstead — one of the most passionate and enduring figures in the St. Louis music scene. From his small-town roots in Iron County and Farmington to playing in powerhouse bands like Last Flight Home, Fister, Path of Might, Daybringer, and Past Life Tiger, Marcus has spent decades building, supporting, and shaping the sound of Midwestern underground music.They dig deep into:

Kyle Worley is joined by Dr. Travis Montgomery to discuss how technology impacts spiritual formation.Questions Covered in This Episode:What is one blessing and one burden that technology provides on the journey of spiritual formation?Guest Bio:Dr. Travis Montgomery is the Assistant Professor of Christian Studies and Assistant Dean of Global Campus at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. He holds a B.A from Ozark Christian College and an M.Div. and Ph.D. from Midwestern. He is husband to Lauren, and a dad of three boys—twins Ebenezer (Ben) and Hezekiah (Ki), and Boaz (Bo). Resources Mentioned in this Episode:Colossians 3, Genesis 1Deep Discipleship Program Follow Us:Twitter | Instagram | Facebook | WebsiteOur Sister Podcast:Tiny TheologiansSupport Training the Church and Become a Patron:patreon.com/trainingthechurchYou can now receive your first seminary class for FREE from Midwestern Seminary after completing Lifeway's Deep Discipleship curriculum, featuring JT, Jen and Kyle. Learn more at mbts.edu/deepdiscipleship.To learn more about our sponsors please visit our sponsor page.Editing and support by The Good Podcast Co. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

I've long imagined a world where people wake each morning inspired, feel safe wherever they work, and return home fulfilled by what they've created. That vision once felt like a dream - until I met Bob Chapman, CEO of Barry-Wehmiller, who quietly built it into reality. Over five decades, Bob has grown a humble Midwestern manufacturing company into a global business success story, proving that leadership grounded in humanity can scale across the world.Bob sees the people in his company not as line items, but as human beings within his span of care -  individuals he feels responsible to help become healthy, fulfilled, and whole. His belief is simple yet profound: when people are cared for at work, they create happier families, stronger communities, and a better world. He captured this vision in his book Everybody Matters -  which I'm proud to have published -  inspiring leaders everywhere to imagine a kinder form of capitalism.In this episode, we return to BW Papersystems in Phillips, Wisconsin where Bob first brought me fifteen years ago where he showed me what his Truly Human Leadership movement looks like. There, I speak with Amber Meyers, Randall Fleming, Lance Johnson, and Jared Nelson, each at different points in their journey with Barry-Wehmiller - some just three years in, others more than twenty-five. Through their eyes, we see the company's evolution and the lasting power of care in action. What I once thought was idealism, I now know is possible: proof that capitalism can, in fact, be kind.This Is A Bit of Optimism. For more of Bob's work check out: Bob's book, Everybody Matters https://www.barrywehmiller.com/bobchapman/bChapman & Co. Leadership Institute: https://www.ccoleadership.com/Barry-Whemiller: https://www.barrywehmiller.com/

Hugh Douglas clearly needs a geography lesson. After stumping people for hours with the Hugh's clues with the answer being Philadelphia. Joe and Kyle want to put Hugh on trail for claiming Philadelphia is a midwestern city?!

FAN MAIL TEXT HOTLINE A quiet Midwestern boy once did the unthinkable. Decades later, in the Florida Keys, that same man built a life so ordinary no one saw the darkness beneath it, until it finally came roaring back. Recorded in Jamestown, ND in support of Safe Shelter. Episode title submitted by: Alyssa T. Location: Indiana, FloridaVictims: Isle Brandt, Michelle Jones, Teresa Helfrich, Sherry Perisho, Darlene TolerSupport the showhttps://linktr.ee/midwestmurderpod

Three Israeli women, their lives altered by immigration to the United States, seek to overcome crises. Ilana is a veteran Hebrew instructor at a Midwestern college who has built her life around her career. When a young Hebrew literature professor joins the faculty, she finds his post-Zionist politics pose a threat to her life's work. Miriam, whose son left Israel to make his fortune in Silicon Valley, pays an unwanted visit to meet her new grandson and discovers cracks in the family's perfect façade. Efrat, another Israeli in California, is determined to help her daughter navigate the challenges of middle school, and crosses forbidden lines when she follows her into the minefield of social media. In these three stirring novellas—comedies of manners with an ambitious blend of irony and sensitivity—celebrated Israeli author Maya Arad probes the demise of idealism and the generation gap that her heroines must confront. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

Three Israeli women, their lives altered by immigration to the United States, seek to overcome crises. Ilana is a veteran Hebrew instructor at a Midwestern college who has built her life around her career. When a young Hebrew literature professor joins the faculty, she finds his post-Zionist politics pose a threat to her life's work. Miriam, whose son left Israel to make his fortune in Silicon Valley, pays an unwanted visit to meet her new grandson and discovers cracks in the family's perfect façade. Efrat, another Israeli in California, is determined to help her daughter navigate the challenges of middle school, and crosses forbidden lines when she follows her into the minefield of social media. In these three stirring novellas—comedies of manners with an ambitious blend of irony and sensitivity—celebrated Israeli author Maya Arad probes the demise of idealism and the generation gap that her heroines must confront. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Three Israeli women, their lives altered by immigration to the United States, seek to overcome crises. Ilana is a veteran Hebrew instructor at a Midwestern college who has built her life around her career. When a young Hebrew literature professor joins the faculty, she finds his post-Zionist politics pose a threat to her life's work. Miriam, whose son left Israel to make his fortune in Silicon Valley, pays an unwanted visit to meet her new grandson and discovers cracks in the family's perfect façade. Efrat, another Israeli in California, is determined to help her daughter navigate the challenges of middle school, and crosses forbidden lines when she follows her into the minefield of social media. In these three stirring novellas—comedies of manners with an ambitious blend of irony and sensitivity—celebrated Israeli author Maya Arad probes the demise of idealism and the generation gap that her heroines must confront. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/van-leer-institute

Welcome back to Elk Horn, Iowa – a small Midwestern town that became the heart of Danish America. In this episode, we hear a remarkable coincidence about the first Danes to arrive here, visit the historic Danish Windmill with manager Lisa Steen Riggs, and explore The Museum of Danish America. I also get a personal tour of "Bedstemor's Hus," built in 1908 by the colorful local legend known as Prince Otto. From documentaries that made locals famous in Denmark to preserved heritage homes and cultural festivals, Elk Horn continues to celebrate its Danish roots with pride. See pictures and read more on https://www.theradiovagabond.com/338-elk-horn-iowa/

This week, I welcome author, filmmaker, and pie baker Beth Howard to the show. Beth has authored four books and has recently released a full-length documentary entitled PIEOWA: A Piece of America. We talk about grief, loss, love, career changes, and how pie has been a guiding force throughout Beth's life.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Bars, restaurants and social gathering spaces are beer's "moneyball" opportunity, National Beer Wholesalers Association VP of analytics and chief economist Lester Jones shares during the latest edition of the Brewbound Podcast. Jones is the first of two interviews this week. Adam and Amanda Kroener, the founders of spirits-based cocktail brand Carbliss, also join this week's podcast to share their slow approach to brand building and goal of becoming a national brand. First, Jones explains why the on-premise channel remains the key to unlocking wins for brewers. "We can go looking for home runs all day long, but at some point, you've got to have the base hitters," Jones said. "You gotta have the guys when they step up to the plate, you're gonna move the game forward." While placements in off-premise chains such as Walmart, Kroger, HEB, 7-Eleven and others are analogous to home runs, getting a tap handle is a solid base hit on the way to scoring, and brewers shouldn't lose sight of those singles. Jones also discusses why he believes craft beer's funk is potentially ending, why the ethanol pie was cut too many ways, how beer is competing for dayparts and why beer needs to bring fun and socializing back. Then, the Kroeners discuss their methodical approach to brand building and why it has worked for the family-owned and run Midwestern-based canned cocktail brand. They also dish on Carbliss' entry into warm weather markets such as Florida and being one of the most successful brands that people have never heard of. "The fun part is, when we come out to places like Vegas, if you're not in the industry, you've never heard of us," Adam says. "But at the same time, if you're looking at the Circana or Nielsen data, we're a top three, four, five brand in dollars. So it is a fun, cool thing to be this biggest thing that some people have never heard of." Before the interviews, Justin, Jess and Zoe recap the latest industry news, including Brooklyn Brewery outsourcing sales to U.S. Beverage, BeatBox's forthcoming Chillitas line, Surfside's lawsuit against Anheuser-Busch InBev over Skimmers hard tea and George Clooney joining the non-alcoholic beer game.

Vince recaps his trip to Minnesota. We get the full rundown on his Midwestern adventure. Our sacred mission of betting on hot quarterbacks continues to line our pockets, and we're not sorry about it. We also get into the first few days of the NBA season, which is really just The Wembanyama Show (and we're obsessed). To cap it off, Brad offers his theatre reviews, so get ready to hear what he hated.

Probing the flatness of his Midwestern landscape, Roy Scranton challenges us to peer beyond what meets the eye to engage more thoughtfully with a place's ecological, geological, and cosmological dimensions. What first appears to him as farmland, highways, and worn industrial sprawl in his new home of South Bend, Indiana, begins under sustained attention to disclose rich layers of physical and temporal meaning. Roy invites us to practice this same attentiveness, allowing ourselves to be changed by the stories that make a place new and strange, and the mundane alive with resonance. Read the transcript. Artwork by Nico Krijno. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

"  Think of it as a wild Midwestern version of the MIT mystery hunt  for a slightly different crowd where people drink quite a bit more." For three whole days, over 10,000 trivia challengers descend on the tiny town of Stevens Point, Wisconsin, for The World's Largest Trivia Contest. The contest runs on the local college radio station at the University of Wisconsin- Stevens Point for 54 hours straight, asking eight questions per hour. Teams have only the length of two radio songs to call in their answer. Yup, that's right. You call into the radio, old school style. It's a madcap frenzy of teams frantically searching through bins of catalogued items spanning from cereal boxes to DVD covers, or racking their brains to remember an obscure cartoon reference. For 43 years Jim “Oz” Oliva was ringmaster of this trivia circus. He wrote most of the questions and organized the contest. Jim revels in finding the most obscure bits of trivia to throw at his players. In response, teams have amassed entire rooms filled with snack packaging, atlases, and the booklets from CDs, among other items. With the advent of the internet, Jim had to change how he formatted the questions to stay ahead of searchable keywords. You can hear the glee in Jim's voice when he talks about all the techniques he devised to outmaneuver trivia players. He even had to hold onto all of the garbage from the question writing room otherwise players have been known to go through the trash, attempting to gain an edge over the competition. Jim is blunt, funny, and mischievous. I really enjoyed hearing all his stories from his many years of running this crazy trivia contest and learning about the wild culture surrounding it. In our Bonus Aftershow, REA contributers Heather Burns and Theresa Piazza join us to share their perspective on the trivia contest. Heather has been involved in the trivia contest for over 20 years, and Theresa joined Heather for the first time last year. It was wild to hear all about how they prepare for three crazy days of trivia with a revolving door of team members marshalling to rifle through bins of material and sleeping in shifts. I hope you enjoy this episode about The World's Largest Trivia Contest.     Episode Sponsors We are immensely grateful to our sponsors this season: REA Patreon Backers, PG's Playhouse, Buzzshot, and COGS. We truly appreciate your support of our mission to promote and improve the immersive gaming community.   Support Us On Patreon Today Love escape rooms as much as we do? At Room Escape Artist, we've been analyzing, reviewing, and exploring the world of immersive games since 2014. We help players find the best experiences, and push the industry forward with well-researched, rational, and reasonably humorous escape room and immersive gaming content and events. By becoming a Patreon supporter, you're not just backing a blog — you're fueling a mission to make the escape room and immersive gaming community stronger, more thoughtful, and more connected. Access exclusive Patreon content such as: The Bonus Aftershow The Spoilers Club Early access to escape room Tour tickets and REA articles. Your Patreon support goes toward our mission: paying our contributors, funding our infrastructure, and supporting deep research and industry advocacy.   PG's Playhouse If you love wordplay, puzzles, and trivia, this is the podcast for you! PG's Playhouse recreates a fun game night, all in a short, 30-minute format. Of course, what's game night without making new friends? We bring on different guests for the different episodes. Each episode features a puzzle packed with wordplay and trivia, a short chat with the guest, and a segment exploring an interesting topic. I hope you'll take a listen and play along with us at PG's Playhouse.   Buzzshot Buzzshot is Escape Room Software, Powering Business Growth, Player Marketing, and improving the Customer Experience. They offer an assortment of pre and post game features including robust waiver management, branded team photos, and streamlined review management for Yelp, TripAdvisor, Google Reviews, and Morty. Buzzshot now has integration with the other REPOD sponsors: Morty and COGS. Special Offer for REPOD Listeners: REPOD listeners get an extended 21-day free trial plus 20% off your first 3 months, with no set-up fees or hidden charges. Visit buzzshot.com/repod to learn more about this exclusive offer.   COGS COGS by Clockwork Dog is an easy to use software/ hardware platform for running interactive events, including escape rooms, and other immersive experiences. They have plug & play hardware that seamlessly integrates with their software so you can create a show with lighting and sound cues without having to write a single line of code. Map all kinds of inputs to outputs by building up simple logic steps which determine what you want to happen and when. Special Offer for REPOD Listeners: REPOD listeners can get the COGS Starter Set for only $130 + free shipping to the USA. This bundle is usually valued at $257. You can learn more and purchase your Starter Set at cogs.show. Use code REPOD at checkout.   Production Credits Hosted by David Spira & Peih-Gee Law Produced by Theresa Piazza Supported by Lisa Spira Edited by Steve Ewing Music by Ryan Elder Logo by Janine Pracht  

Jeremy Wendt sits down with Dr. James Akenson to reflect on his remarkable 50+ year career at Tennessee Tech. Born in Minneapolis and raised with deep Midwestern roots, Dr. Akenson shares how his early teaching experiences in Wisconsin and inspiration from his historian brother led him into higher education. He recalls his first days on campus, meeting President Derryberry, and watching Tech evolve while remaining grounded in its student-centered spirit. With a passion for engaging students, Dr. Akenson emphasizes the importance of personal connection in the classroom—often using music, especially country, to make learning memorable. His reflections highlight the lifelong influence of great teachers and the power of caring deeply about your students. Listen To The Local Matters Podcast Today! News Talk 94.1

In this episode of Medium Lady Talks, Erin sits down with poet, grief coach, and tarot reader Anna Jollymore to explore what it means to slow down, feel deeply, and create from the fire within. Anna is the author of Words for Becoming, a stunning debut collection that gazes unflinchingly at the shadow side of personal transformation. Together, Erin and Anna unpack how poetry can help us process grief, rest our overworked minds, and reconnect with our inner voice in a world that rewards constant doing. This conversation continues Erin's Phone Free Fall series, inviting listeners to put down their phones and pick up something slower, quieter, and infinitely more real — reflection, creativity, and the sacred art of becoming. Key Topics Discussed How poetry makes space for emotions we usually rush past Using writing and creativity as tools for grief and transformation What happens when we stop numbing uncertainty with our phones The connection between metaphor, mindfulness, and real rest How poetry and tarot can ground us in embodied self-awareness The beauty of sincerity, authenticity, and imperfection in creative work Guest Bio Anna Jollymore (she/they) is a Midwestern-based author, teacher, grief expert, and professional tarot reader. Her debut poetry collection, Words for Becoming, explores the sacred tension between loss and renewal — and the ways grief can shape us into something new. Anna is also a certified Grief Recovery Method coach and facilitator who helps others make meaning through creative and spiritual practice.

Kiera joins the Raving Patients Podcast to talk about obtaining that CEO mindset to systematize your practice. This mindset does not mean doing it all yourself, but leaning on others to maximize their skillsets. Kiera also discusses with Dr. Len Tau how to separate yourself from having your entire identity associated with dentistry. Episode resources: Subscribe to The Dental A-Team podcast Schedule a Practice Assessment Leave us a review Transcript: Speaker 1 (00:00) Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of the Raving Patients Podcast. As you know, I'm your host, Dr. Len Tau, and I am super excited today for multiple reasons. Well, first, before I get there, I want to first thank my sponsors, both Dental Intelligence, CallRail, and a new one, Net32. You'll be hearing their commercials as well, so check out those companies. And again, the only reason I'm able to do this every single week is because of their support. I also want to remind everybody about   my event, is only one week away. One week from now we'll be gathered in Fort Lauderdale for Supercharge with Dental Practice 2025. If you wanna be a come out last minute registrant, you can reach out to me. I will be glad to add you as a guest of me. So please reach out to me. You can check out the content at SuperchargeYourDentalPractice.com So I said I was super excited and I'm super excited because of our guest today. And she's been a guest before and I just recorded an episode with her on her podcast. ⁓   We're talking about Kiera Dent, who is from the Dental A Team, and we're gonna be talking the CEO mindset systematizing your practice for freedom and growth today. So before I let ⁓ Kiera take it off, I'm gonna go ahead and introduce her. So she is the founder and CEO of the Dental A Team, an entrepreneur, consultant, speaker, and podcast host dedicated to helping dental professionals reach their highest potential. Through customized in-office and virtual consulting,   She empowers dentists and their teams to cultivate an ownership mindset and achieving lasting growth. With experience spanning every role in the dental practice, front office, dental assistant, regional manager, and even practice owner, here brings unique first-hand perspective to her coaching. Alongside her team of expert consultants, she has partnered with hundreds of practices nationwide, leading them to greater efficiency, profitability, and fulfillment. As she often says, we don't just understand you, we are you.   So please welcome to the Raving Patients podcast, Kiara Dent. Kiara, thank you so much for being a guest on my podcast today.   Speaker 2 (02:03) Oh, Len, thank you so much. so excited to be here. I loved our podcast we did together. I love the podcast we did in the past together. I'm super excited about Supercharge. Everybody should go. We're going to like sneak peek, be there in 2026. Like Len, huge fan of you guys. Just excited to be here with you. So thank you. Thanks for having me. And yeah, it's always a little weird and fun to hear your bio read right before you get on. So just grateful to be here and just like have a good time with you. It's always a great time when we podcast together.   Speaker 1 (02:30) Well, I'm excited to spend the next 30 minutes or so with content from you. So I always like to ⁓ start off for people that don't know who you are. I obviously read your bio. Can you just tell dentists and other people reading or listening and watching this episode how you help dental practices?   Speaker 2 (02:50) Yeah, absolutely. So with the bio you heard, I started out as a dental assistant and then went throughout and I've owned practices. My first practice I took from 500,000 to 2.4 million in nine months and opened our second location. And that was with a Midwestern grad. I worked at the dental college there. And so helping practices, what I learned was   I've been a team member, I've been in so many of the team roles. And then in addition to that, I've owned dental practices and I understand the business and I've run multimillion dollar practices and businesses. so bringing that perspective, I feel like there's the dentist perspective, there's the owner, the CEO of the practice, and then there's the team perspective. And both are necessary for practices. And so Dental A Team, say like, it stands for dentist and team. So what we really do for practices is whether it's virtual or in person, it's...   I call it the yes model line is what I like to say is number one, you as a person, we're going to focus on your vision, where you want to go as a doctor. Like what is your vision? The practice should serve your life. ⁓ because I believe that when you're supported, you're actually a better owner, a better boss, a better dentist. And then we go to E stands for earnings and profitability. We've got to make sure it's a profitable practice. And then we use those things, the vision and the numbers to then tell us what systems and team development we need to put into place. I'm really much a custom.   Let's see kind of like dentists do with patients. Like let's do a comp exam. Let's see where we're at. And then let's go for what's going to make the biggest impact with the least amount of effort. And being team members ourselves, I really think that we're able to like, Hey dentists, we want to hear your vision. We need to know where you're going and then go do your like favorite thing. It's dentistry. And then let's help your team be empowered to learn how to run the practice. So it truly is like a self-managing team, utilizing every single player in the team to their highest potential, but doing it with a ton of fun and ease. Like as a team member, I didn't want more hard work.   As an owner, do not want you to give me more homework. I'm already busy. So I feel like we really come in and bridge that gap of like where we are to where we want to go and do it in the easiest, most efficient and most fun way possible to help like team and patient experience be the top that it can be.   Speaker 1 (04:48) So I guess someone's listening to this podcast and they say, you know, want to, I want to change the culture in my practice, but I'm very much a micromanager.   So which means they're not focused on their dentistry, they're focused on managing the team. Do you help with that? Because there are so many micromanagers out there. I always wanted them for a very long time. And honestly, wasn't until I gave up that micromanaging and I just did the things I was going to do that my practice excelled. So ⁓ that's something, if someone's a micromanager, do you get them off doing that? Or how do you deal with that?   Speaker 2 (05:19) Yes, and I'm so glad you said that because I think most   Founder owners are micromanagers. think leadership we believe I I think so many there's this belief out there that we just come into this world as great leaders and we should just know it like you went to dental school you should just know how to be a leader and leadership is a journey and so for those micromanagers I think it's really fun to have the doctor and the team perspective and to be able to help both of them say like no doctor like these are the things but what I found is doctors micromanage because there's a lack of communication feedback loops so it's a lot so it's either a lack of communication and feedback   loop, a lack of knowledge, or they just like genuinely want to be a manager and they don't want to be an owner. And I'm like, great, let's just figure out what the the reasoning is. And then let's find the solution to that. So if team members have doctors that are micromanaging, first question I'm looking at is like, where's the feedback loop and what are we missing? Next is like, hey, doctor, I understand that this is where we're at. This is where I need you to be for the growth of the practice. What do you need to feel confident to be the dentist, to be the like not micromanaging like   there's a lack. And when I realize there's a lack and when teams can realize that there's a lack, like there's just something missing, we fix that, dentist is now able to be happy, team's able to flourish, everything starts to move in in a good motion. absolutely. I think being team members ourselves, we're not doctors, we're not dentists. Like, Len, I'm gonna lean on you for clinical. Like, that's not my world. I'm not here to even discuss it for one minute. But what I am here to do is to bridge that gap between doctors and teams.   Because ultimately it's same team, like everybody wants the best experience for the patient. We want the practice to flourish. So if we're all same team, let's help get people right seat, right person, help them understand what they should and could be doing. But also like office managers, there's this whole weird world for them too, where they've never been taught to be managers. They've never been taught what they should or shouldn't be doing. They've never been taught like what the difference between an office manager is and a biller and a scheduler and a treatment coordinator and how all those roles are different. And so helping people understand even what their job entails.   I think really can cut that micromanagement passion project. It's just a lack of knowledge and so teaching teams and teaching people, but we're very hands on. I really don't like fluff. That's why think when you and I get along well, I want it to be tactical. I want it to be practical and I want it to be something that's sustainable as well.   Speaker 1 (07:34) And that makes a lot of sense. And that was a great answer, by the way.   We're talking about, obviously you're very systematized. You put systems in place, the team follows, everybody knows what they're doing, runs like a well-oiled machine. Okay. And that's how my practice was when I left, when I was traveling. ⁓ I knew things, I didn't worry. I knew that things were going to be done like this. They knew the roles, team members didn't need to be scolded. They just knew what their role was in the practice. So, ⁓ I know there are things, I like a term here you use the chaos creators. So there are chaos creators in the, in the office. So what are some of these, these common chaos creators?   ⁓ that actually can be helped by putting systems in place.   Speaker 2 (08:13) Yes, and I love that you brought that up because that's the ultimate goal. That's why I wanted this to be called like the CEO mindset. Like doctors, like you should be a dentist and you should own your business. You should not be the one managing. And when you recognize that this actually can be one of the biggest chaos creators in the practice of doctors trying to be the doctor, the dentist, the CEO visionary, plus the manager, plus all the other parts of the practice. Like that is a chaos creator, not knowing right person, right? See is a massive chaos creator. Number one thing I hear every time I go into an office or I work with someone,   is it's communication. And communication is again just a system that needs to be put into place. So how do team members know? Like what is our true morning huddle? It's not a time for us just to hang out. Like why do football players huddle? Why do basketball players huddle? They huddle to win the game. So what does winning on our practice even look like? Making that very clear for our team. Other things like handoffs. That's another communication drop that's a chaos creator. What doctor says to the patient, to the hygienist, to the front office,   It's such fun. I feel like we play a game of telephone. So putting in a little simple system there where we've got a great communication handoff and a process. I know Len, you and I are very big on this case acceptance process of just really having a great clean experience for the patient. These are chaos creators. Also, team members even knowing what their job should be, understanding how they go from where they were hired to how they can get raises. Those are chaos creators. The scheduling. How do we schedule? Let's have block schedules in there. Let's have   a way that we do this in our practice. I remember when I was a scheduling coordinator, my office manager said, Kiera, do not even think about scheduling outside of the blocks until you learn why we schedule the blocks the way we do. And you're right, like when team members know the rules of the game, so much chaos gets eliminated from the practice. like quick things are have great meetings and truly great meetings. If you don't know how to run a great meeting, Traction by Gina Wickman.   It's a little bit of a dull book. However, there are so many paramount pieces in that book and great meetings could be in there. Doctors and OMS have a same page meeting where we're looking at it. Get our KPIs in place where we know where is the practice even going? What is each person's number that they can like impact and improve in the practice? Have like set job descriptions, have protocols of how we treat a patient. What's our hygiene period protocol? Let's just have like really simple systems and I'm big on I don't like to remember things.   Like I love holidays, holidays are on a cadence. So how can we actually get cadences within your practice to where things really can run on more of an autopilot rather than trying to constantly like catch all the balls and remember things? That's the chaos. The chaos comes from the like not knowing and trying to scramble and being in reactive rather than proactive modes.   Speaker 1 (10:53) But that's really good, that's really great. So another question I have for you, there are dentists who are just dentists, and I don't mean that negatively, but they go in with the expectation that they're either gonna be an associate forever, or they're just going to practice and let everybody run the practice and they're just gonna come and do the dentistry, okay? Versus having the mindset of and acting like the CEO, okay? And there's a big difference. One, I believe, has a lot more stress.   I like to talk about it because I was the CEO of the practice. I handled everything. I handled the marketing. I handled the HR. I handled all of the things that makes it different than just being a dentist and putting your hands in the mouth and treating a patient. So if someone wants to act and think like a CEO, what does it really mean to do that versus just practicing dentistry and doing the dental work?   Speaker 2 (11:51) Yes, I'm so glad you brought this up. I've been like crushing on this idea. We actually just ran a three day CEO dentist workshop. like.   obsessing on this right now because there is nothing wrong. And I think that there's a few hats that people wear. I wear a consultant hat. I also wear a CEO hat. And they're actually and I think about big companies like let's look at Google. I know that CEO is not coding. They're not. They're not building it. They're truly in a CEO realm. And so when we look at like what does a CEO do, they are the chief executive officer. Like their job is to execute. Their job is vision. Their job is culture.   and their job is to like really steer and guide the ship and to come up with great ideas. And so when I look at that, I think that there's two hats for CEO dentists to wear. There's the true clinical dentistry, if that's what you want to do and continue to do. And then we really do need somebody who's guiding and leading this business. And I think when dentists, I know this can be a little like not favored, ⁓ dental practices are multimillion dollar businesses and they are. when we realize that they're   They are businesses and like you said, the HR and the marketing. But when you look at large businesses outside of dentistry, they have other players in the realm and in the rink with them to make it actually run as a very successful business. And so I believe that when we understand the business portion of dentistry and we have great clinical care, that's when we're able to serve and help more patients and more team members. And so helping these dentists realize what does a CEO do? And I actually pulled from Dan Martel.   the author of Buy Back Your Time, like obsessed with his book, met him in person, like raving fangirl. It was like slightly embarrassing, like how big of a fan I was of him. ⁓ But he has his delegation ladder in there for businesses and actually created a delegation ladder for dental practices of when CEO dentists go from like your right line, a lot of them do it all. And that's, think, where the burnout is and the chaos is to where when can we start to delegate? Like, do you have a personal assistant who answers all of your emails for you? And if not,   Administrative tasks are one of the best things to delegate. Then we move into like our scheduling and then into our customer service and the patient experience. And then we move into treatment planning. A lot of doctors do that on their own. And I'm not here to say you have to give up anything, but I am here to say that when you truly take on the role of CEO, trying to do it all actually creates chaos. And you actually, you're the bottleneck of the business. And so then we start to delegate out the case acceptance if you want to. You're allowed to keep whatever you want, whatever you're great at.   Then we delegate out the marketing, then we delegate out the, actually, me and my operations manager were talking that I believe that there's two spaces within leadership. There's the executive side, that's these big picture visionary pieces. And then there's the management side, which is the HR, the protocols, the accountability of the team. And when we had that like, and I believe that there's, it's like a black and a white, yin and yang, perfect whole, you need both sides of this leadership within that CEO realm.   But when you're trying to do all the pieces as a CEO, you need to know every aspect going on in the business. But that does not mean you need to do every aspect of the business. And so I think it's like figuring out which colors you like to paint with, which ones really are your zone of genius and then starting to then delegate in strategic manners, delegate and elevate, not abdicate ⁓ really are how you can make this where you become truly the CEO of your business and your practice. And you're able to have great players around you that are able to then.   Make sure every other part of your business is thriving and flourishing too.   Speaker 1 (15:19) Got it.   Speaker 2 (15:20) So   much line, I hope it wasn't lying.   Speaker 1 (15:22) No, that was great. That was great. I mean, they should replay that because I think there was some really good nuggets and pearls that they can take back. So, you know, I want to talk about delegation. ⁓ you know, Invisalign is a great product ⁓ to bring into the practice or aligners in general. doesn't have to be Invisalign, just aligners. And aligners are really good, but they become really profitable ⁓ when a dentist is willing and able to delegate the tasks to other team members.   And personally myself, I used to do it all. And then I took a class by somebody, can't remember who it was, but it was all about giving the empower your team to do things and delegate the services to them where you're literally kind of just doing the initial consultation and whatever is required by your license in the realm of the things. But the team is able to do mostly everything else. And once you do that, ⁓ Invisalign becomes a very, profitable procedure.   So what advice do you have about delegation to somebody, to a dentist who really feels like they need to do it all and does not want to give up control of anything?   Speaker 2 (16:28) Len, I'm so happy you asked me this question and I'm so happy that I'm a team member and I'm gonna put on a team member hat, not a CEO hat on this one. ⁓ Number one, I really, really hope, and dentists, if you need to pause, replay, record this and listen to it every single day, I really hope you do. ⁓ As a team member, my number one job, genuinely speaking, and doctors have told me so many times when they've heard me say this, it...   hopefully will strike you to your heart as well. As a team member, my number one, like genuine number one objective was to make my doctor happy and to make their life easier. And that was honestly what I did every single day. As a dental assistant, I'm looking ahead. I want to be seven steps ahead of you and I want to make sure that you're truly like set up for success. I want to make sure that patient's back on time. I want to make sure that hygiene exams are on time. And I think that while yes, you might have some team members that make you question this statement.   I think 95 % of the population is genuinely good and they want you to thrive and they want the patient experience to be great. So when you hear that and you truly honor that and you respect that and you trust that, you then will realize that one of the best things you can do is, I don't believe in delegating. So like I can empower, but if I empower and don't hold accountable, then I've created entitlement within my practice. So I want to empower through delegating of this like.   As a dental assistant, do know how happy I'd be if you gave me, can fit a line. I understand I'm going to make a few mistakes, but oh my gosh, the growth, growth equals happiness. So for your team to be happy, give them opportunities to progress. Like that's what creates the happiness and the sparkle and the zest in life. And so really when you empower your team and hold accountable, you don't get this entitlement. When you empower and don't hold accountable, that's when we get these entitled teams that genuinely then it just becomes mayhem in your practice.   So like you said, delegate these tasks that one, either you're not good at, or I do think about everybody should be working at the top of their license. What are you able to produce per hour? If there's a task that I can hire somebody for less than you can produce an hour, it's probably something that we shouldn't be using your time for. And I know as a CEO, as an owner, this is actually hard for me because you strip me of things that I'm actually really good at, but reality is there's better uses of my time. And when you can recognize   giving everybody the best use of their time. Me as a dental assistant being able to do Invisalign, you've now just lifted and elevated me to the highest level of my license as well. And so I really do believe like doctors, one, believe that your team is truly here to support you. And if they're not here to support you, they're not your right team players. they like, great, let them graduate to somebody else and you bring somebody else in. Two, empower them and hold accountable to ensure that it's like how you want it done. And team members like,   You can share this with your team. I'm happy to share this one reason I like to do this. Team members, give the feedback to your doctor. They are going to trust you so much more when you come back to them and you show them the things you listen to what they say, you create the protocols, you do it exactly how they want you to do it. That will build trust and confidence so quickly. Team members lose doctor's trust so quickly when they like lacked to follow through and like truly do what the doctors have given them like stewardship and ownership over. So for those doctors and like you said, Len.   You won't understand until you try. And when you do try, you will make mistakes. But I believe, this is my philosophy, anything that I've delegated never gets to come back to me. And I think when you have that notion and that idea, well, I know it could never come back to me. You actually make it really, really great. You train your team. You help them have this. ⁓ And I then believe everybody's able to flourish so much higher. So hopefully that answered of like, one, you need to delegate and you should delegate.   Two, what are the tasks that you can be doing that are like helping you work to the highest level of your license? Everybody working at that is going to make a better team experience, a better patient experience, and all around a better practice for you as well.   Speaker 1 (20:20) I think you, I mean, the content you're providing, the listening and viewing audience is spectacular. you know, one of the, I guess, negatives about being a dentist is a feeling of being overwhelmed. A lot of stress. You know, that's part of the reason why I think you've got, you know, dentists with the highest, one of the highest suicide rates out there is that, you know, it's a very stressful job. I mean, you've got a lot of debt, you've got a lot of, you know, people relying on you for income as well. So what mindset   do you think exist ⁓ that or traps do you mindset traps do dentists fall into that that keep them feeling overwhelmed and and what do do about that?   Speaker 2 (21:00) Yeah, this is something so real to me. My first practice, I mentioned it briefly at the very beginning of we took our practice from 500,000 to 2.4 million in nine months. And when I present and I speak, I often will bring up like the success story and I list off my stats of our practice. I asked the audience, said, who wants this practice? And like hands go up and people are like shouting like, yes, I want this.   And then I say the other side of success is that this person, is me, like, spoiler alert, I was 98 pounds and I'm 5'8". I ⁓ had divorce papers on the line. I remember like I walked out of my practice that like one day and I remember just like standing on the sidewalk and being like one step and all this could be over. Like it was, and I'm not a dentist. I didn't even have the pressure of having to be in the exam rooms, but I do understand the pressure of business. And that's actually what's like fueled my passion in consulting is.   Because I thought like if this is how so many of us feel to get to success, Tony Robbins has a quote that success without fulfillment is the ultimate failure. And that was curidant in a nutshell. We had success on paper, but fulfillment was lacking and my entire life was falling apart. And so when you ask like, what are some of these zones that keep people in this mindset is one, I think that we believe that to get to success, we have to grind it out. We have to hustle. We have to do it all. Like it's this hustle mentality that I believe is so false.   Yes, I do believe that hard work is required, but I don't believe you have to do all of the work. Just like we talked about before, also think delegations paramount. I think so many of the doctors that I see there in this burnout are just, it's like grippy. Like they want to hold on to everything and they're not willing to let go and they're not like, also you're telling your team that you don't trust them and you don't believe in them when you do that as well. So you're actually causing like this double-edged sword on it. And then third, I think ⁓ we just don't take time to stop and pause and realize like what really is necessary.   I think so much like when I sold out of the practices, my whole identity was associated with that. if we have our identities associated with these practices and with the success, well, I can imagine that that feels like chopping off your arm and your leg if you were to fail. therefore, if it's literally my physical body and I feel like it's my whole identity, I literally remember the day that I sold out of the practices. I felt who is cura dent, who is she? Like I have no purpose in this world anymore. Nothing is important. Like I don't even have a family. I have no practice.   I felt nothing and I think when people's identities are associated with this rather than having something else. So I talk about like what makes all of you up and I remember like like looks like this weird little doll. Like it's such a weird outline that I make people do but I'm like draw to me like how your life is and when I do this usually it's like from your neck to like your ankles that's work and if that much of your identity is associated with work in your practice.   What could we shift this to more so your whole identity is not associated with that? So that's like we go work out, we have time with family, we book the vacations and when you start to realize that there's more life outside of the chair, more life outside of it and you being a well-rounded human that truly and I don't like the word balance, I just love the word well-rounded and fulfilled. When we start to add some of those pieces in which again feels contradictory, it feels like if I give this up that I'm not making money. I used to say I don't want to sit on the couch and watch TV with my husband because I'm literally not making money.   That's one of the the grossest statements I've ever said, but Len, it's truth. I really truly felt this way. Like the only purpose is to be producing and to be productive. But I didn't realize that. Like you look at that athletes have to take a break and they have to reset. They have to recharge. They have to like the best time is actually the recovery off season. ⁓ no, no person can continue operating at 110%. And when they are operating, they're actually not their best self. So there's just as much beauty in the recharge off time.   as there is on the productive on time. So when we can delegate, when we have more purpose beyond just our practice, and it's okay, work to me is very fulfilling. It's such a big part of my life. I love it. ⁓ But it's not all of Kiera's identity. So if I were to lose work, Kiera and hopefully you can still exist outside of that. ⁓ And then truly having shut off time. A lot of clients when they come on board, I tell them, I'm like, I'm giving you the greatest gift. You're out of work today at 4.30 and I don't want you to talk about work. Close the laptop, walk out and literally leave it at work.   And what's crazy is people don't realize that you can actually get a lot done within your four or five hour, like four or five day a week work week. And to be home with your kids, to be home with your family, to go to the gym, to replenish your bucket that gives out so much every single day ⁓ really is what you actually need to be doing rather than trying to produce more. And it sounds contradictory, but it's true. You will actually produce more and be a better producer and happier business owner if you will do that.   I know that was a long-winded answer, Len, but I really hope that people can see there are two sides of success. The word itself of success has a portion of suck. Like there is a side of business that is really hard that does require that grind and that hard work, but there's also a beautiful side. And I think when people can dance in that, can see that their whole identity is not the practice. It's not all dependent on that and they fill themselves and fuel themselves. Literally, I feel like the burnout can be dissipated very quickly.   If you've been going on it for a long time, it will probably take a little bit longer, but these small, simple steps will make you so much more fulfilled. And honestly, I hope nobody listening to this podcast hit success without fulfillment. I hope all of us commit that while we're giving the great patient care, we're giving back to all these people, we equally get to deserve and we should deserve to have a beautiful life of our own as well.   Speaker 1 (26:39) So nicely said, very eloquent in way you said that as well. last thing I want to cover is, we talked about being overwhelmed. stress is also part of being overwhelmed. very stressed. What are some ways that you think a dentist can reduce the stress on a day-to-day part of his practice? If someone said, hey, I'm so stressed, I don't know what I'm going to do. And you hear it a lot. I I talk to dentists all the time. And one of the common denominators is that they're   You know, when I sold my practice, I was never truly, truly stressed out. The stuff that stressed me out, honestly, was stupid stuff. But since I sold my practice and retired, I don't really have much stress in my life anymore. It's very interesting. But what are some things that dentists could do to reduce those stress they see on a day-to-day basis?   Speaker 2 (27:29) Yes. Okay. And I said, yes, because I'm to go back to the S model. The S model is literally like my stress booster buster for you. Number one, where do you want to go and why? Like figure out you that truly if you don't have a North star, you don't know what you're going for and reassess to make sure that's really where you want to go. So many people put this like, I want to have four practices and I want to have this. And I'm like, why? You got to be able to tell me why I'm making sure it's your dream, not the dream you think you should be living.   That's like number one to get rid of stress, like truly living your dream. And I will tell you, you're allowed to like, it's in pencil, it's not in permanent ink. You can erase it, you can recraft it, you can recreate it. That's going to cut stress. I was chasing after a mountain, I didn't want to climb anymore. And when I realized that, that was a pivot shift. So number one is like, make sure you're actually truly going where you want to go. And that's the you. Earnings like profit, like Len, so much stress comes from not knowing the numbers.   And I know people sometimes want to avoid it. They don't want to look at it. Like I'm just going to go do production. I want to do ethical dentistry and I will tell you both exist. It's not an or like you will you as a human are going to naturally do ethical dentistry. Like you can't go against that. That's who you are at your core. And by knowing the numbers, you're not going to go and overdiagnose like I promise you it will not happen. But knowing the numbers and actually like looking at your cash, what are you spending money on? What do you need to produce to be able to afford the business?   Doctors learn the numbers and they actually use the numbers to make their decisions. Stress dissipates. I have so many doctors that reach out to me because they're cash flow poor and I'm like, you're producing 200,000 a month, how are we broke? ⁓ So actually understanding how to use numbers and not to be used by numbers and knowing how you actually can get money and like what can you live on and understanding tax brackets and savings like that discipline might seem constrictive, but I will tell you it is the most freeing stress free piece that you can have.   And then third, our systems and team. Like I'm going to like just really keep like painting this picture for you. Delegate to your team, use your team, put the systems into place. And we don't go for the whole elephant. We don't do the entire thing in one night shift. What we do is we look at the numbers. Where are numbers low on the KPIs? Let's go fix a system over there. So we fix that part of the leaking bucket. Just that alone, like even myself, I felt it like the hoosh of reducing that stress for you. ⁓ Start with your vision.   know your numbers and then put systems into place and team delegation and elevation ⁓ that will immediately reduce stress. And then like just quick, what is the one or two hot pain points right now causing the bulk of your stress? Let's figure out how we can eliminate those right now. And I want to, everybody always says, Kiera, there's no way like I can't do this. The answer is yes, you can. Yes, you can. And when we get out of this, I can't get that, I can't do this. We actually find the true core of what we can solve. Usually the answer is pretty simple and it's pretty immediate.   if we're willing to just let go and take action. So those would be kind of my like four little steps to reduce stress quickly and easily. And if you can't see it, sometimes having an outside voice and outside perspective, sometimes you're too far in the weeds, that can be very beneficial for you as well to like take you by the hand and say, here's step one, two, three, four, and they're there to guide you as well, rather than you trying to figure it out yourself.   Speaker 1 (30:35) amazing. This is great. ⁓ I want to shift for the final few minutes that we have together. I want to shift to my lightning round Q and a that I like to do with guests. We're going to get through eight to 10 of these. Okay, ready? The rule of thumb for this one, you like long winded answers, which is great. But for this one, it's very, fast. No long, no long winded. We'll never get through this.   Speaker 2 (30:47) So   You got it, Len.   Speaker 1 (30:58) So I opened my app up. First question, what book do you want to go back and reread as it's made a great impact on you the first time you read it?   Speaker 2 (31:07) I would go back and reread Bye, Your Time by Dan Martell. I feel like there's a lot that I could relearn from that where I'm at today.   Speaker 1 (31:14) repeat that one more time.   Speaker 2 (31:17) Yep, buy back your time by Daniel.   Speaker 1 (31:19) Buy back your time. I'm just writing it down. All right. Who has been your greatest inspiration?   Speaker 2 (31:25) Gosh Tony Robbins hands down. I love Tony so much. I look up to him a lot. I've been in his Lions group ⁓ the reason I look up to him is because He said one time the Tony you see in front of you is the Tony I created it's not from my parents It's not from business. It's not from anybody else It's who I want to be and who I esteem to be and he said life is always happening for you and not to you and those two pieces have Resonated with me so much in my life ⁓ truly one of the like   biggest, greatest mentors and I've been really blessed and lucky to have him directly mentor me, which have truly changed the trajectory of my course, of my life as well.   Speaker 1 (32:04) Awesome, amazing. ⁓ If you could take a class to learn anything, what would it be on?   Speaker 2 (32:10) marketing. Len, hate marketing. Call my Achilles heel. I learned so much and I think I know more. But man, if I could like understand it on a really high level easily all day every day and I take a lot of them. But man, one like magic one that would teach me everything. Yeah, it'd be amazing.   Speaker 1 (32:26) Amazing. Do you believe there is some sort of pattern or formula to becoming successful?   Speaker 2 (32:33) Yes, I do. It sounds like cliche. I didn't like, I think the yes model came from what I believe success is like you having a vision, looking at your numbers and then putting systems into play and using your team ⁓ and surrounding your yourself with people that are living and doing the life you want. I really do believe we become like the people we surround ourselves what we listen to. So that's what I would say is the path to success.   Speaker 1 (33:01) Amazing too. Has anyone in your network other than Tony Robbins, has anyone in your network been important in your journey or to your journey?   Speaker 2 (33:09) Absolutely. There's a lot of people. think my husband, that's a huge support for me. He believes in me, even though maybe he shouldn't believe in me, but having that rock. And then also my team, truly, I look at all the variations of Dental A Team and where I've gone as me as a person, they've evolved me as a human and they've also evolved our company and the good and the bad that have gone through.   They have truly shaped me, every single one of them, and I'm very, very grateful for the trust they put in me to create what we've built.   Speaker 1 (33:42) amazing. How do you develop how have you developed key partnerships?   Speaker 2 (33:47) Ah, that's fun. You go to events, you talk to people, you look to see how can you add value to their world, to their life. And I think partnerships, partnerships to me, I don't try to figure out like how to do something. I look to see like, who do I know that knows how to do this? That's how I use partnerships in life and vice versa. Like bring more to the table than you take from people. But I look at people have just like, what's their secret sauce? How can I like, like connect them to other people? To me, it's a fun connect the dots of just getting great people together. That's how I believe that like.   To me, that's how all boats rise is through partnerships like hands down. One of the best things was networking and meeting people. You will learn more from the minds of men than you will be able to like mine out of this world. Like there is more gold there than anywhere else in this world.   Speaker 1 (34:32) Got it. What has been your most satisfying moment in business?   Speaker 2 (34:39) Most satisfying moment? There have been a lot. I think recently my most satisfying moment was when I wanted to give up and I really was so burnt out and I was exhausted and I was tired and I hit that breaking point again in my life. And for the first time in my entire career, I took an entire month off and I reset and it was the most scaring. There was a lot of really bad backlash that came from it.   But me as a human, re-centered, refocused, re-prioritized. And I think that that was one of the most satisfying moments to realize, at the end of the day, CEOs and business owners have to show up for themselves first to be able to give to their entire team. And I'd never, ever, ever, ever done that. So like me personally, that was one of them. But man, like the hundreds and thousands of clients lives, Glenn, you and I both know, I think as consultants, when you hear people's lives changing,   like clients who are broke and literally had no money and now they're buying their kids their dream lives, that to me will always be the clincher of everything but like beautiful and why I show up every single day to do it. So there's a personal and a professional win that was like just super satisfying.   Speaker 1 (35:47) That's really great. All right, three questions left. Let's get through these quickly. What deserves all your attention but seldom gets it?   Speaker 2 (35:57) I would say probably my body like working out.   Speaker 1 (36:00) Okay, what three adjectives describe your strengths?   Speaker 2 (36:06) Adjectives. ⁓ I would say grit. would say fun. And I would say passion.   Speaker 1 (36:16) Great answers. Last question I ask is to everybody. So it is one subscription, either business or personal, so something you pay for either monthly or annually, that you simply cannot live without.   Speaker 2 (36:33) ⁓ Len.   I would say I can't live without, honestly, boomerang. That sounds so ridiculous. I would not be able to follow up with all the millions of things that I do day in and day out without boomerang as a person, like professional. Like I would pay for that all day every day. ⁓   Speaker 1 (36:53) I haven't heard that one before, that's a good one. you go. ⁓ So Kiera, how can people learn more about how you can help them if they want to learn more about your consulting agency? What's the best way for them to reach out and find out more?   Speaker 2 (37:03) Yeah, thank you so much Len. Best way is listen to the podcast, the Dental A Team podcast. Reach out on our website, TheDentalATeam.com. You can book a call with us or you can always reach out. You can text us directly, 775-243-5100. Like we will get back to you. I'm happy to share any tips, any insights. Find us on Instagram, Dental A Team. Truly, we try to be just like you are Len, available in all aspects and just really, really grateful for this opportunity today.   Speaker 1 (37:30) Well, this was great. Thank you so much for ⁓ spending 30 plus minutes with me, really educating the audience on things you're passionate about. And just like I did on yours, you can see the passion when you talk, you can see the passion in how you answer the questions. So I truly appreciate you kind of giving it all to us. So thank you again for being part of the Raving Patients podcast. ⁓ Guys, if you like the episode, please like us, please review us. If you think you or yourself or one of your colleagues can use what the Dental A Team can do for your practice, please reach out.   let them know you heard about them through the podcast that I just did with Kiera. ⁓ And as I end ⁓ every single one of my episodes, remember your reputation matters until the next episode. Thank you so much for joining me and we'll talk to everyone soon.  

Learn how Seipp became Chicago's beer baron and why his name is back on shelves now. Plus: corner bar culture at Archie's Iowa Rockwell Tavern.Conrad Seipp Brewing Co. owner Laurin Mack joins the podcast at Archie's Iowa Rockwell Tavern to trace how she resurrected the family brewery, which was founded in 1854, survived the Great Chicago Fire, and once ranked among America's largest. She tells the wild story of her great-great-great-grandfather Conrad Seipp, an immigrant carpenter turned beer baron, and how his brewery rose to become one of the top-producing operations in the U.S. Along the way, she explains how 19th-century brewery fires and the Great Chicago Fire reset competition, how the World's Columbian Exposition shaped beer branding, and how Prohibition shuttered Seipp despite pivots like cereal beverages and ginger ale. She also discusses the Black Point Estate & Gardens in Lake Geneva—the preserved Seipp summer home you still reach by boat—and how it influenced her decision to revive the Conrad Seipp Brewing brand as a living link between Chicago's past and its present beer scene. After the beer break, Laurin discusses Seipp's Columbia World's Fair Bock (a crisp 6% dark lager) and unpacks brewer Doug Hurst's role in translating tradition into modern lagers. She explains what their detective work revealed about why the first American Pilsners didn't work and how small adjuncts like flaked corn helped pre-Prohibition Pilsners achieve the snap people craved. Plus: 19th-century “strength” vs. today's ABV, Seipp's early refrigerated boxcar distribution, and how the revived brand landed with drinkers. To wrap up, Archie's Iowa Rockwell Tavern owner Katrina Arthur joins the conversation to share Archie's origin story, why a giant Hamm's sign still glows over the intersection of Iowa and Rockwell, the free cheese balls, wooden drink tokens, and what it's like to grow up in a tavern — all before the Final Toast (featuring… the Tamale Guy?!).About Conrad Seipp Brewing Company: Seipp's beer is Chicago's beer. Founded in 1854, the Conrad Seipp Brewing Company tells the story of the city's history. The times have changed, but the principles of Seipp remain: accessible, well-crafted beer made from high quality ingredients. Learn more on their website at https://www.seippbrewing.com/ About Archie's Iowa Rockwell Tavern: This longtime neighborhood watering hole with funky decor offers board games, free pool, and a jukebox. Follow Archie's at https://www.instagram.com/archies.chicago —You can learn more about Crafty Brewers and get in touch with us on our official website, https://craftybrewerspod.com Crafty Brewers is a production of Quantum Podcasts, LLC. Is your brewery or business looking to capture a loyal audience to drive business results with the power of podcasting? Then visit https://quantum-podcasts.com/ to learn more.Our executive producer and editor is award-winning podcaster Cody Gough. He insists that we tell you that in this episode, you'll learn about: Seipp's Extra Pale, Pre-Prohibition Pilsner, Bavarian Hefeweizen, Seipp Hollander, 1893 World's Fair, Chicago brewing history, Bohemian hops, Lake Michigan water, six-row barley, rice adjunct, lager yeast, adjunct lager history, Pilsner brewing techniques, American lager history, Pilot Project Milwaukee, Metropolitan Brewing Chicago, Beer Culture Center, Ukrainian Village Chicago, Cottage Grove brewery site, Pabst Brewery complex, refrigerated boxcars history, Chicago saloon history, immigrant brewer Chicago, Chicago corner taverns, archival beer labels, historical beer ephemera, Chicago beer heritage, pre-Prohibition beer styles, Seipp brand revival, Chicago lager renaissance, historic tavern culture, neighborhood bar Chicago, beer detective work, Conrad Seipp legacy, German-style lagers, Chicago World's Fair beer, historic brewery resurrection, and Midwestern beer history.

When my ears heard the first moments of the song "Rivers" by Daisychain, everything stopped.  It was one of those moments.   I knew we were in "nextfavband" land.  A deeper dive in to their catalog reveled countless bangers - all tracks stay true to a core dripping with psych rock blues, but they often take a moment to try on other genres, all to a great success.Daisychain is a femme-fronted psych/blues rock trio from Chicago made up of Nickole Regala (bass, vocals), Frankie Sripada (lead guitar) and Sophia Williams (rhythm guitar, vocals). Formed in 2017, Regala and Williams met at a local open mic night, and weeks later they were jamming. Sripada was invited into the mix, and the trio began rehearsing as Daisychain in the basement of their neighborhood coffee shop. Since then, the trio has toured the country, including playing Chicago's legendary Metro and now with their brand new full-length album, aims to cement themselves further within the rising Midwestern indie psych rock landscape.Be sure to check them out and catch them play live when they perform near you!Text us your thoughts on this episode, and who should be OUR #NextFavBand...As always, our hope is to bring you "your next favorite band". If you tuned in today because you already knew this musician - thank you very much! We hope that you enjoyed it and would consider following us and subscribing so we can bring you your #nextfavband in the future. And check out nextfavband.com for our entire catalog of interviews!If you have a recommendation on who you think OUR next favorite band should be, hit us up on social media (@nextfavband everywhere) or send us an email at nextfavband@stereophiliastudio.com.Thank you to Carver Commodore, argonaut&wasp, and Blair Crimmins for allowing us to use their music in the show open and close. It makes everything sound so much better! Let's catch a live show together soon!#nextfavband #livemusic #music #musicinterview #musician #singer #guitar #song #newmusic #explorepage #instamusic #bestmusic #musicismylife #musicindustry #musiclife #songwriter #musiclover #musicfestival

Retired agent and former FBI art crime team leader Tim Carpenter reviews his case where 5,000 illegally collected cultural artifacts and two thousand human burial remains were seized from the Midwestern home of grave robber Don Miller. Many of the pieces in Miller's illicit collection of over 42,000 items were looted from sacred burial and cultural heritage sites around the world. Tim and his team repatriated these items of historical and cultural significance back to Native American and other indigenous communities from which they were stolen. Tim, the author of The Grave Robber, a book about the meticulous work involved in the FBI's investigation, served in the FBI for twenty years.  Check out episode show notes, photos, and related articles: https://jerriwilliams.com/374-tim-carpenter-grave-robber-stolen-artifacts-and-burial-remains/       Join my Reader Team to get the FBI Reading Resource - Books about the FBI, written by FBI agents, the 20 clichés about the FBI Reality Checklist, and keep up to date on the FBI in books, TV, and movies via my monthly email. Join here. http://eepurl.com/dzCCmL      Buy me a coffee - https://www.buymeacoffee.com/JerriWilliams   Check out my FBI books, non-fiction and crime fiction, available as audiobooks, ebooks and paperbacks wherever books are sold. https://jerriwilliams.com/books/

FAN MAIL TEXT HOTLINE **This episode will be available to all listeners on Midwest Murder Monday, November 3rd.**A quiet Midwestern boy once did the unthinkable. Decades later, in the Florida Keys, that same man built a life so ordinary no one saw the darkness beneath it, until it finally came roaring back. Recorded in Jamestown, ND in support of Safe Shelter. Episode title submitted by: Alyssa T. Location: Indiana, FloridaVictims: Isle Brandt, Michelle Jones, Teresa Helfrich, Sherry Perisho, Darlene Tolerhttps://linktr.ee/midwestmurderpod

Notes and Links to Myriam Gurba's Work       Myriam Gurba is a writer and activist. Her first book, the short story collection Dahlia Season, won the Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction. O, the Oprah Magazine ranked her true-crime memoir Mean as one of the “Best LGBTQ Books of All Time.” Her recent essay collection Creep: Accusations and Confessions was a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle award for Criticism, and won the Lambda Literary Award for Bisexual Nonfiction. She has written for the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Harper's Bazaar, Vox, and Paris Review. Her next book, Poppy State: A Labyrinth of Plants and a Story of Beginnings, published by Timber Press, is out today, October 21. Buy Poppy State: A Labyrinth of Plants and a Story of Beginnings   Myriam's Website   Los Angeles Daily News Review of Poppy State: A Labyrinth of Plants and a Story of Beginnings At about 1:50, Myriam discusses her mindset as the book is to be published, and she shares early feedback and reviews At about 4:05, Myriam talks about being inspired a bit by Borges' short story collection, Labyrinths, and more so from mythologies for Mesoamerica and the Minotaur At about 5:20, Myriam defines an important term At about 6:30, Myriam talks about writing from the perspective of a child and connections to The Secret Garden At about 8:30, “halycon” talk! At about 9:20, Myriam talks about the book's epigraph/opening saying, which comes from Myriam's grandfather Ricardo Serrano Ríos, as well as an early message/challenge to the reader At about 12:30, Myriam responds to Pete's questions about the differences between carefree childhoods and an encroaching world of homes and development, and nature being pushed aside At about 14:55, Myriam provides background on the book's main locale, Santa Maria, and its changes in her lifetime At about 15:45, The two talk about “claiming” of land and “renaming” and its connection to colonization  At about 18:20, Myriam discusses "indigeneity imposed from outside” in relation to a profound quote Pete notes from the book At about 20:20, Myriam talks about Western terms and ideas that make it difficult to describe and document Chumash and other indigenous contemporary life and geographical boundaries  At about 22:15, Myriam shares the story from the book about Deborah Miranda and a young child's shocked realization  At about 24:15, Pete notes some great puns, and Myriam expands on multiple meanings of “hoja” and connections between literacy and botany and the At about 26:05, Myriam talks about her use of The Santa Maria Times and its archive in building a history of the “settler town through the perspective of settlers”  At about 28:00, Myriam highlights Santa Maria-born Ida Mae Bochmann as an example of a certain time of progressive and colonizing woman  At about 30:20, Myriam reflect on the “communal garden” that was pre-European California At about 32:00, Pete and Myriam discuss the importance of paper and indigenous practices and priorities  At about 35:10, Myriam responds to Pete's questions about how she balances the macro- and the micro-, the allegorical and literal At about 36:45, BARS At about 39:30, “allegorical memoir” and “botanical criticism” are two possible genres that Myriam imagines for her "kaleidoscopic" book; she also talks about her love of writing and solving puzzles At about 42:00, Corn talk! Myriam shares some frightening stories about encounters with Midwestern cornfields  At about 45:50, The two discuss a resonant homecoming scene  At about 47:10, Myriam reflects on how local travel and local appreciation inform her argument about “[our] homes hav[ing] multitudes” At about 48:45, The two discuss the humungous industry that is agriculture, and Myriam talks about focusing in on Santa Barbara County's strawberry industry At about 51:30, Myriam talks about the history of Japanese-American farmers dispossessed by the internment camps of World War II At about 53:45, Myriam makes salient points about catharsis, emphasizing its conditionality-she cites “conditional catharsis”-and chats about susto and “cleansing” At about 58:50, Myriam talks about “the ethos of the local” and recommends Octavia's Bookshelf and The Theodore Payne Society , and she also shares book tour events      You can now subscribe to the podcast on Apple Podcasts, and leave me a five-star review. You can also ask for the podcast by name using Alexa, and find the pod on Stitcher, Spotify, and on Amazon Music. Follow Pete on IG, where he is @chillsatwillpodcast, or on Twitter, where he is @chillsatwillpo1. You can watch other episodes on YouTube-watch and subscribe to The Chills at Will Podcast Channel. Please subscribe to both the YouTube Channel and the podcast while you're checking out this episode.       Pete is very excited to have one or two podcast episodes per month featured on the website of Chicago Review of Books. The audio will be posted, along with a written interview culled from the audio. His conversation with Hannah Pittard, a recent guest, is up at Chicago Review.     Sign up now for The Chills at Will Podcast Patreon: it can be found at patreon.com/chillsatwillpodcastpeterriehl      Check out the page that describes the benefits of a Patreon membership, including cool swag and bonus episodes. Thanks in advance for supporting Pete's one-man show, DIY podcast and extensive reading, research, editing, and promoting to keep this independent podcast pumping out high-quality content!    This month's Patreon bonus episode features an exploration of flawed characters, protagonists who are too real in their actions, and horror and noir as being where so much good and realistic writing takes place.    Pete has added a $1 a month tier for “Well-Wishers” and Cheerleaders of the Show.     This is a passion project, a DIY operation, and Pete would love for your help in promoting what he's convinced is a unique and spirited look at an often-ignored art form.    The intro song for The Chills at Will Podcast is “Wind Down” (Instrumental Version), and the other song played on this episode was “Hoops” (Instrumental)” by Matt Weidauer, and both songs are used through ArchesAudio.com.     Please tune in for Episode 306 with Shea Serrano, an American author, journalist, humorist, and former teacher. He is best known for his work with the sports and pop culture websites, The Ringer and Grantland, as well as his books, including The Rap Year Book, Basketball and Movies, all of which charted on The New York Times best-sellers list.      The episode drops on  Pub Day, October 28, the date the episode airs.    Please go to ceasefiretoday.org, and/or https://act.uscpr.org/a/letaidin to call your congresspeople and demand an end to the forced famine and destruction of Gaza and the Gazan people.

It is peak pumpkin season. From pumpkin spice lattes to pumpkin pies… the obsession with this orange gourd is enormous…almost as big as the pumpkins raised by a passionate group of Midwestern growers. Harvest Public Media contributor Peter Medlin has their story.

When it comes to the goals you're setting as a practice, it's important to establish a strategy to reach them. In this episode, Kiera walks listeners from wishful thinking to goal-driven execution. Email hello@thedentalateam.com for your goal-projection calculator today! Episode resources: Subscribe to The Dental A-Team podcast Schedule a Practice Assessment Leave us a review Transcript: Kiera Dent (00:00) Hello, Dental A Team Listeners, this is Kiera. And today I like to get out of the hopes, the wish, the like, my gosh, are we gonna be able to hit our goals or not? ⁓ To actually set you and your team up to hit goals. this is just a true like, is your team set up to hit what you guys have set up? Or are we hoping, wishing, wishing on stars, doing all the like magic dance? ⁓ Let's truly, truly, truly help on this. We even have...   a goal projections calculator. So you guys can use that. And something email is Hello@TheDentalATeam.com. I'm gonna go through a bunch of these pieces today, but truly this is something that I think is gonna be so helpful for you guys. Let's not hope, wish, pray, like do that, but let's have it be a bit more predictable. ⁓ We've got to get it to where it's real. Somebody asked me like, I just wanna hit this amount. And I'm like, cool, why? And do you have a plan to get there? Every single piece. I don't care if you wanna hit.   2 million, 5 million, 20 million, all of it's doable. Let's just figure out the strategy. Let's figure out the plan. Let's create it. And then let's execute. Let's not just talk in hopes. Let's actually execute. ⁓ But it has to actually be founded actually. It has to be foundational. Otherwise, no matter how hard they try, they will not hit it. So we're gonna go from like wishful thinking to goal-driven execution. That way you guys can execute consistently.   Dental A Team's obsessed with this. Our mission is to positively impact the world of dentistry in the greatest way possible and to help you have every possible amazing life opportunity that you possibly have ever dreamed of. ⁓ We want you to lead with numbers, not just motivation. We want you to be confident in your decision-making. I want you to be able to say yes to more things in your life and that's focused on you as a person, earnings and profitability and systems and team development. The yes model, making sure that you are truly set up for success.   We're gonna teach you guys how to actually reach goals that you've set, how to be more consistent. It ties into quarterly. We talk about that on podcasts. Like really it's tracking, it's measuring, but it's like foundational. We've got to make sure that we've got step one is clear, measurable, visible and realistic. So, often offices I'm like, what are we even working towards? Like, I don't know. It does not have to be number centric either. It can be patient centric. It can be whatever it is. And I help offices see that like,   the numbers equate to the number of patients. And so when we look at this back and forth, it's really gonna help us like drive these things forward. And so whatever it is, you just have to make a goal clear, measurable, visible and realistic. So I'm talking like have a thermometer in your back room and we like fill it in every single month to see how close we are.   I do not want you just to be talking about it just as noise. It's got to be visible. It's got to be specific and it's got to be realistic. And then it's broken down into daily, weekly, monthly goals that are going to help us with benchmarks on it. So, so many times you're like, it's so hard care to add an extra 20 grand. And I'm like, but is it? If we're working 20 days a week, a month, that's an extra thousand dollars. Let's talk about how easy is it to add a thousand dollars a day? Like just rattle off, what could we do?   We could do fluoride. We can make sure our X-rays are there. We could add one extra, a couple extra fillings. Like that's all it is to add an extra 20 grand to a practice, but that's broken down into a daily realistic goal. This is going to help people also know what's their number that they actually can influence to drive the goal forward. So I'm very specific. If our goal is X, Y, or Z, we're going to then make sure every single department has something that they're driving this goal forward with that they can influence. And then we have a scoreboard.   Like truly teams do not win games by hoping, wishing that they got enough baskets in the hoop. They have the scoreboard there. They see, are they behind or they on track? Are they above goal? Are they behind goal? The entire game. It's not like, well, we're going to just like look at it once a month and hope like one time during the game, we're going to just throw that score up there real fast. Hope nobody really looks at it. Cause you know, we just want them to play ball.   No, we're here to win. We're here to make sure your practice is thriving. We're here to make sure that your systems are in place to make sure that you give the best patient and team experience. We need that scoreboard visible. Otherwise, how does the team know if we're winning, losing, or if we're on track? So break it down, monitor it. And I will tell you when practices implement this, they instantly grow 10 to 25 % consistently. Like it's a no brainer because we're like what you focus on, you achieve what's in your mind's eye. It's like when you want to go buy a car,   Well, instantly you start seeing that car everywhere and like, my gosh, there's that car again. Well, Toyota don't just like pump out a bunch more cars. You were focused on it. So you started to see it more. And what this is doing is it's focusing all of us on the goal and it's going to make it visible. So step one is you need to have your goal clear, measurable, visible, and realistic. And you need to post it this week. That's step one. Get it in there, physically post it and start measuring on it. Now every goal needs to have   the role tied to the goal. So this is going to what we talking about, like you have to train each role, what metric they can control. So hygiene reappointments, that's a big portion, hygiene fluoride, hygiene production per day, having it visible, having them have their own metrics so they can see what should my daily goal be. You just give a hygienist this information, your hygiene production will go up naturally. If they start looking at it, you have them turn in their end of day production reports, they check it off compared to where they're supposed to be.   Even if you have nothing tied to it, no pain, no gain, no nothing other than telling them what it is, you will increase because now they know for an office, your billing, it's our AR needs to be X amount. This is our goal. This is our standard scheduling. We need to have our schedule filled 80 % or 90%, whatever it is. That's less than one opening per day. We track it. We measure how many days do we not have? It's like how many accident free days did we have? Doctors hitting their dollar production per hour goal.   And checking out like literally I've helped associates increase their associate production goal just by giving them a little calendar where they check on how many days they hit their goal. That's it. That's it. People love like I used to work at the dental college at Midwestern. If you don't know that, well, welcome. Hi, I'm Kiera Dent. I used to work in Arizona's dental college and it was crazy. Our endo buckets were a hot mess. I had made these pictures. I had protocols. had it. The number one thing that worked for me to get those endo buckets back clean.   was giving out gold stars to students. I kid you not, these are dental students. I had 140 of them in two different classes. So 280 and I had to get these buckets in. You can only imagine the amount of work I had to do and that we're talking gut a purchase, like the whole nonsense of these things. And the piece was if I gave them a gold star and then what people started doing was putting those gold stars on their name tags. And believe it or not, people were obsessed with getting those gold stars and tracking and measuring just with a simple gold star.   And if their bucket wasn't perfect, they got a red or green. They did not get the gold or they had to go back and fix it to get the gold star. And it's crazy. Cause when you do this, what it does is it connects the dots for team members. And then we're reinforcing good behavior of what we want more up. So when you start to have like every single role having their goals. So hygienists know what their metrics are. Dental assistants know their metrics. Front office knows their metrics. Doctors know their metrics. And we're tracking it.   They're closing, like we are hitting our goals with so much more ease and continuity. This is how I take practices from producing 150 to 500,000. Like it's not sexy, it's not crazy, it's not hard, it's just consistent and being focused on the right things. So in your next meeting, like we've got the goal posted, it's visible. In the next meeting, ask each department like.   I break this down quarterly usually with departments and I say like, all right, build your quarterly goal. What are we gonna focus on? What are gonna be the metrics that are going to help us get to this mountain over here, this big goal that we're focused on? What does your department need to do? Where are we lacking? Where are the gaps and where can we improve? And then we start tracking it every single week. We review it every single month and we start to help them exponentially grow. This is how we do it and you can have that as a piece. And then third is we need to...   track the progress and adjust it weekly. we're literally like I said, you've got the goals, we're tracking it weekly. It's on there. And when a goal is read, we talk about it that week and we say, all right, this was off. What do we need to do? If hygiene teams are behind, the hygiene team gets together and we calibrate on how we do perio. If the doctors are not hitting their hourly goal, well, let's look, what are they diagnosing? What's our case acceptance close? What are our block schedules? When high gents aren't able to hit enough perio, let's go look to see, do we have enough perio spaces within our schedule? ⁓   but we start to identify these gaps early on, of course, correct quickly so that we were able to hit the goals consistently. And then like we celebrate those wins. So when you look at these things and you have your departments, this is where you have your department meetings every single week. People are like, what am I supposed to talk about? You talk about this. You talk about like, how can we win? We've got our scoreboard there. We're looking, are we behind, are we ahead? And if we're ahead,   Great, how can we calibrate the whole department? How can we look for other things that would drive it forward? And it's not driving the practice forward so much as it is great team experience, great patient experience, great practice experience. It's not one is better than the other. All three of those are interconnected. And so start doing this, start tracking every single week, start having each team member tied to a goal, start having it because when you do this, you're not just hoping and wishing.   You literally know the score every single week. Owners, you will be so obsessed about this because now you know like, are we going to win the game or are we going to lose the game? You're not hoping and wishing. You literally know at any given moment so you can fix it out like at halftime. Can you imagine, like my family, we all played basketball. So can you imagine for one second a basketball team that's like, well, it's halftime. We don't know if we're winning. We don't know if we're losing, but we're just going to go in there and we're going to pep talk.   No, they're like, all right, we're behind. need to go strategize. We need to go figure it out. Like, how are we changing this? Let's look back at our plays. What have we done? Well, what do we need to change? And they fix it to win the game. That doesn't mean we win everything, but it does mean that we're more consistent. It does mean that we're more focused on it. It does mean that we're more aligned because honestly, what you focus on, you achieve. So go post your goals, make sure they're realistic. We do have a whole projection calculator, which is really awesome. And it helps you figure out   who's gonna be off, how many providers you have, what their dollar per hour is, you can figure out what it is now, you can project out what next year's goals should be. At a minimum, every single office, if you're not in massive growth mode, should be growing at a minimum of 10 % every single year. That's just healthy business. So you have that. If you want to look at this to help you set up your realistic goals, by all means, reach out, Hello@TheDentalATeam.com. I'm happy to share it with you. This is a great time of year also to be doing it. So you can get our free goal projections calculator. It's something that you guys can do.   You guys can easily, easily set this up to now have every role have their role tied to the goal that they need to do. And we start to measure it. And then we're able to check it every single week in course correct quickly of what do we need to do? Are we tracking the right things? Are we not? Are we set up to win the game? And I think about like, let's again, go back to basketball. If you don't watch basketball, we'll change it to football. In all of them where they're going to win, when they're looking at the score, if they're behind, it's not like   keep doing defense guys. No, what they do is they change it. They change the strategy. They say, we're going to do X, Y, or Z. We're going to switch out these players. We're going to course correct faster and see if we get a different result. So for you and your team, have this as a rhythm, have it to where people own their roles, have it to where it's realistic. And I will say when we're setting up goals, don't go so hard that people feel they can achieve it. Make sure it's realistic and achievable and attainable for people. I'm not going to go from   I give you your hit 75 % overhead. I'm not gonna be like, let's get you to 50%. Ultimately, yes, I want you to get to 50%. But I'm gonna go, okay, we're at 75. Let's get to 70 this quarter. You're like, here, that's 5%. Like, of course I can do that. Great, because what I'm trying to do is build massive momentum for you to where you hit these things with ease and you build the momentum rather than it being so hard that you give up before you even start. So with your team.   commit to this, reach out for that projections calculator so you can set up a realistic goal for your practice of number of providers, when you're gonna hire new ones, all the pieces. It's really awesome. I'd love to help you out with that. Or if you're like, gosh, like I cannot figure this out. I cannot get my team bond in. I feel like I'm so scattered. Reach out. We're here to help you. Hello@TheDentalATeam.com. This is what we do. You guys, this is where we wanna help you lead with confidence and not chaos. And honestly, if you know a practice struggling with this, you're not struggling, send this podcast to them, help them out.   because I believe that the success platform, I think all of us are climbing the mountain to success, it's huge. Everybody's welcome and we want everybody there because we want to ultimately help more patients get great dentistry and help more dentists and more practices thrive. So share this, give it to somebody, help them lead with confidence, not chaos. And as always, this is what we do. So reach out and as always, thanks for listening and I'll catch you next time on the Dental A Team podcast. ⁓  

In this episode of Gangland Wire, retired Kansas City Intelligence Unit detective Gary Jenkins sits down with Tim Richards, a former St. Louis intelligence officer and author of Crook's Kill and Cops Lie. Tim brings a wealth of firsthand knowledge from his years investigating the mob and navigating the thin line between law enforcement and organized crime. We dive deep into the history and dynamics of the St. Louis crime families and their ties—or lack thereof—to Kansas City and Chicago. Tim reveals how the St. Louis mob and the Syrian mob were into labor racketeering, ghost workers, and union control, profiting off federally funded projects. Click here to buy Crooks Kill and Cops Lie and to see all of Tim's books • Listeners will hear gritty stories about: • The interplay between Kansas City, St. Louis, and Chicago mob families. • The “Syrian” mafia's role in local unions, vengeance, and violence. • St. Louis mob figures like Paul Leisure, Mike Trupiano, and Jesse Stoneking. • An unforgettable encounter with Trupiano during a traffic stop. • The challenges police faced without legal wiretaps, relying instead on FBI intelligence. • The ripple effects of mob influence reach as far as Las Vegas gambling operations. From bloody reprisals to uneasy alliances, Tim shares not just history but lived experience—vivid accounts of hit jobs, betrayals, and the complexities of policing organized crime. As he reflects on how law enforcement strategies and technology have evolved, Tim leaves us with a powerful reminder of the mob's enduring mark on Midwestern history. If you want an insider's perspective on St. Louis mobsters and the Midwest underworld, you won't want to miss this one. Subscribe to get more stories every week. This is a must-listen for true crime fans, Mafia historians, and anyone fascinated by how organized crime once ruled the Jersey Shore. Listen now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or your favorite podcast app. Hit me up on Venmo for a cup of coffee or a shot and a beer @ganglandwire Click here to "buy me a cup of coffee" To go to the store or make a donation or rent Ballot Theft: Burglary, Murder, Coverup, click here To rent 'Brothers against Brothers' or 'Gangland Wire,' the documentaries click here.  To purchase one of my books, click here. 0:03 Welcome to Gangland Wire 1:02 Exploring Kansas City and St. Louis Mob Ties 4:19 The Influence of the Chicago Mafia 8:56 The Aladdin Hotel and Skimming Operations 11:41 A Deep Dive into Paul Leisure's Fate 15:12 The Old Italian Mafia and Its Tactics 23:09 Changes in Policing and Mafia Control 24:54 Personal Stories from the Streets 27:43 The Rise and Fall of Jesse Stoneking 33:05 Reflections on Organized Crime and Histor [0:00] Well, hey, all you wiretappers, good to be back here in the studio, Gangland Wire. I have another former intelligence unit detective, Tim Richards. Now, you know, and if you don't, I didn't introduce myself. I'm sorry, guys. Some of you all may be new listeners. I'm Gary Jenkins, retired Kansas City Police Intelligence Unit detective. Got this podcast, Gangland Wire. We deal with the mob. And I worked a mob in Kansas City, and Tim Richards worked in it in St. Louis, just across the state. So welcome, Tim. Thank you. Thank you, Gary. I'm really glad to have you. I was really glad to find this book. I've been working on a book myself. So I'm looking at your book, seeing how you did certain things and then going back to mine. And my story is a little bit different, I guess, but different, but the same. You know, we had very similar experiences, guys. When Tim and I first started talking on the phone, you know, it was like, oh, my God, that's like I was talking to another guy in the same unit, you know, because we had the same kind of experiences. [0:59] Some of them we'll talk about, some of them we won't talk about on here. But we're going to talk about the mafia primarily. And Tim,

This episode slithers into the murky world of American cryptids. From the bayous of Louisiana to Midwestern riverbanks, we hunt three legendary beasts that refuse to stay folklore.Rougarou – The Cajun werewolf curse lurking in Louisiana swamps.Loveland Frogman – A wand-waving, glowing-eyed amphibian that left Ohio police stunned.Muddy Monster – A towering, mud-caked terror that threw an Illinois town into panic.We explore eyewitness sightings and ocal legends. Monsters may hide in the dark—but they also live in our minds.Don't forget to hit that Spotify SUBSCRIBE button so you don't miss out on bonus content, ad free listening and MACABRE after DARK shenanigans. SPOTIFY Subscribers get early access and bonus episodes. Patreon members get ad free content, early access and exclusive bonus episodes and more!Send in your stories for a future listener episode!Email us at thatssomacabre@gmail.comJoin our private Facebook Group at :⁠⁠⁠⁠ MacabrePodcast⁠⁠⁠⁠Get Macabre Exclusive Merch @ www.gothiccthreads.com

In episode 465 of The Reformed Brotherhood, hosts Tony Arsenal and Jesse Schwamb explore Jesus's parable of the wheat and tares (weeds) from Matthew 13. This thought-provoking discussion examines Christ's startling teaching that good and evil will always coexist within the visible church until the end of time. The brothers carefully unpack the theological implications of Jesus's command not to separate wheat from weeds prematurely, challenging our natural tendency to judge others while offering wisdom about God's sovereign plan for final judgment. This episode wrestles with difficult questions about church purity, assurance of salvation, and how believers should approach the reality of false professors within Christ's church—providing biblical guidance for faithfully enduring in a mixed communion. Key Takeaways The Coexistence of True and False Believers: Jesus teaches that the visible church will always contain a mixture of genuine believers and false professors until the final judgment. The Danger of Premature Judgment: Christ explicitly warns against attempting to completely purify the church before the harvest (end of age) because doing so would damage the wheat (true believers). Proper Biblical Interpretation: Unlike some parables, Jesus provides a detailed allegorical explanation of this parable—the sower is Christ, the field is the world, the good seed represents believers, and the weeds are the sons of the evil one. The Challenge of Discernment: One of the most difficult theological pills to swallow is that it's often impossible to perfectly distinguish between true and false believers. Final Judgment as God's Prerogative: The separation of wheat from weeds is reserved for the angels at the end of the age, not for current church leaders or members. The Reality of False Assurance: Some professing Christians may have false assurance of salvation while genuinely believing they are saved. The Importance of Theological Integrity: Public theologians and pastors have a moral responsibility to be transparent about their theological convictions and changes in their beliefs. Deeper Explanations The Difficult Reality of a Mixed Church Jesus's teaching in the parable of the wheat and weeds directly challenges our natural desire for a perfectly pure church. By instructing the servants not to pull up the weeds lest they damage the wheat, Christ is establishing an important ecclesiological principle that will hold true until His return. This means that no matter how rigorously we apply church discipline or how carefully we examine profession of faith, we will never achieve a perfectly pure communion this side of eternity. The visible church—which can be understood as those who profess faith and are baptized—will always include both true and false believers. This reality should cultivate humility in how we approach church membership and discipline. Jesus isn't suggesting that all attempts at church purity are wrong (as other Scripture passages clearly call for church discipline), but rather that perfect purification is impossible and attempts at achieving it will inevitably damage true believers. This teaching directly refutes movements throughout church history (like Donatism) that have sought absolute purity in the visible church. The Problem of Discernment and Assurance One of the most challenging aspects of this parable is Christ's implicit teaching that true and false professors can appear nearly identical, especially in their early development. Like tares growing alongside wheat, false believers can profess orthodox doctrine, participate in church life, and exhibit what appears to be spiritual fruit. This creates profound implications for how we understand assurance of salvation. As Tony notes, while "assurance is the proper and rightful possession and inheritance of every Christian," there's also the sobering reality of false assurance. Some may sincerely believe they are saved when they are not, raising difficult questions about self-examination and spiritual discernment. This doesn't mean believers should live in perpetual doubt, but rather that we should approach assurance with both confidence in God's promises and healthy self-examination. True assurance must be grounded in the finished work of Christ rather than merely in our experiences or behaviors, while false assurance often lacks this proper foundation. The brothers wisely note that final judgment belongs to God alone, who perfectly knows who belongs to Him. Memorable Quotes "The visible church is set before us as a mixed body. Maybe everybody else's churches, but certainly not my church, like the one that I actually go to on the Lord's day. So it seems like there might be this shocking statement possibly that he has for us, whether you're Episcopalian or Presbyterian or independent or Baptist or Christian life assembly, whatever it is, that no matter what we do to purify the church, our churches, we're never gonna succeed in obtaining a perfectly pure communion." - Jesse Schwamb "I think that's what I find shocking. It is like a massive statement of reality that is at equal points totally sensible. And other times we would think, 'well, surely not in the church Lord, like of all the places, like aren't we talking about a kind of purity of your people?' ...and what I think he's striking at, which I do find a little bit wild, is that Jesus is essentially saying, at least to my ear, anything we try to do, even the purest preaching of the gospel, is not gonna prevent this in every age of the church." - Jesse Schwamb "I'm affirming that assurance is the proper and rightful possession and inheritance of every Christian." - Tony Arsenal Full Transcript Jesse Schwamb: Welcome to episode 465 of The Reformed Brotherhood. I am Jesse. Tony Arsenal: And I'm Tony. And this is the podcast with ears to hear. Hey brother. Jesse Schwamb: Hey brother. Guess what? It looks like you and I are taking another trip back to the farm on this episode. Tony Arsenal: Yes. For a couple episodes. Jesse Schwamb: For a couple episodes. Yeah. [00:01:01] Exploring Jesus' Parables in Matthew 13 Jesse Schwamb: Because what, Jesus will not stop leading us there. We're looking at his teachings, specifically the parables, and we're gonna be looking in Matthew chapter 13, where it seems like, is it possible that Jesus, once again has something very shocking for us to hear? That is for all the ages. 'cause it seems like he might actually be saying, Tony, that good and evil will always be found together in the professing church until the end of the world. Like in other words, that the visible church is set before a mixed body. I mean. Maybe everybody else chose churches, but certainly not my church, like the one that I actually go to on the Lord's day. So it seems like there might be this shocking statement possibly that he has for us, whether you're Episcopalian or Presbyterian or independent or Baptist or Christian life assembly, whatever it is, that no matter what we do to purify the church, our churches, we're never gonna succeed in obtaining a perfectly pure communion. Could that possibly be what Jesus is saying to us? I don't know what we're gonna find out. Tony Arsenal: We are. We are gonna find out. Jesse Schwamb: It's gonna be definitive. And if now that makes sense. If you don't even know why we're looking at Jesus' teachings, you could do us a favor even before you go any further. And that is just head on over in your favor, interwebs browser to or reform brotherhood.com, and you can find out all of the other episodes, all 464 that are living out there. There's all kinds of good stuff, at least we think so, or at least entertaining stuff for you to listen to. And when you're done with all of that in a year or two, then we'll pick it up right back here where we're about to go with some affirmations or some denials. [00:02:39] Affirmations and Denials Jesse Schwamb: So Tony, before we figure out what Jesus has for us in Matthew 13, in the parable of the weeds, or the tears, or the tears in the weed, what gets all of that? Are you affirming with, are you denying against, Tony Arsenal: I am denying. First of all, I'm denying whatever this thing is that's going on with my throat. Sorry for the rest of the episode, everyone. Um, I'm denying something that I, I think it is. How do I want to phrase this? Um, maybe I'll call it theological integrity, and maybe that's too strong of a word, but maybe not. So the listener who's been with us for a little while will remember that a while back. Um, you know, we've, we've talked about Matthew Barrett and he was a Baptist, uh, who's heavily involved in sort of the theology, proper controversies. He wrote Simply Trinity, which is just a fantastic book. He was a teacher or a professor at Midwestern, um, Baptist Theological Seminary. And he recently, um, uh, converted is not the right word. I hate calling it a conversion when you go from one faithful Bible tradition to another. But he recently, um, changed his perspective and joined the Anglican Church. And at the time I kind of, you know, I kind of talked about it as like, it's a little bit disappointing, like the reasons he cited. [00:03:57] Theological Integrity and Public Disclosure Tony Arsenal: Where I'm bringing this into a matter of sort of theological integrity. And it's not, it's not just Matthew Barrett. Um, there's other elements of things going on that I'll, I'll point to too is it's often the case when someone who is in some form of professional theological work or professional vocational ministry, that as they start to change perspectives, um, there comes to be like an inflection point where they should notify whoever it is that they are accountable to in that job or vocation, uh, uh, and then do the right thing and step down. Right? And so with Matthew Barrett, um. He continued to teach systematic theology at a Baptist Theological Seminary, which has a faith statement which he was obligated to affirm and hold in good faith. He continued to teach there for quite some time, if, you know, when he, when he published the timeline and he's the one that put all the timelines out there. So it's not like people had to go digging for this. Um, he continued to teach under contract and under that, that faith statement, um, for quite some time after his positions changed. I remember in college, um, sim very similar situation, one of my professors, um, and I went to a Baptist college. It was a General Baptist college. Um, one of my professors became Roman Catholic and for quite some time he continued to teach without telling anyone that he had converted to Roman Catholicism. Um. And I think that there's a, there's a, a level of integrity that public theologians need to have. Um, and it, it really makes it difficult when something like this happens to be able to say that this is not a moral failing or some sort of failure. Um, you know, James White has jumped on the bandwagon very quickly to say, of course we told you that this was the way it was gonna lead. That if you affirm the great tradition, you know, he was very quick to say like, this is the road to Rome. And I think in his mind, um, Canterbury is just sort of one, one stop on that trip. Um, it becomes very hard after the fact to not have this color and tarnish all of your work before. 'cause it starts to be questions like, well, when, when did you start to hold these views? Were you writing, were you, were you publicizing Baptist theology when you no longer believed it to be the truth? Were you teaching theology students that this is what the Bible teaches when you no longer thought that to be true? Um. Were you secretly attending Anglican services and even teaching and, and helping deliver the service when you were, you know, still outwardly affirming a Baptist faith statement. And the reason I, I'll point out one other thing, 'cause I don't want this to be entirely about Matthew Barrett, but there's a big, uh, hub glue going on in the PCA right now. Um, a guy named Michael Foster, who some of our audience will probably be familiar with, um, he and I have had our desktops in the past, but I think he and I have come to a little bit of a, of a uneasy truce on certain things. He, uh, went to work compiling a, a list and there's some problems with the data, like it's, it's not clean data, so take it for what it's worth. But he compiled a list of. Every publicly available church website in the PCA. So something like 1800 websites or something like that. Huge numbers. And he went and looked at all of the staff and leadership directories, and he cataloged all the churches that had some sort of office or some sort of position that appeared to have a, a woman leading in a way that the Bible restricts. And that more importantly, and starting to say it this way, but more importantly, that the PCA itself restricts. So we're not talking about him going to random church websites and making assessments of their polity. We're talking about a, a denomination that has stated standards for who can bear office and it's not women. Um. So he compiled this and people in the PCA are coming out of the woodwork to basically defend the practice of having shepherdess and deacons. There was one that he cataloged where, um, the website actually said, uh, that was the pastor's wife and the title was Pastor of Women. Um, and then as soon as it became public that this was the case, they very quickly went in and changed the title to Shepherd of Women or Shepherdess of Women or something like that. So it's, it's really the same phenomena, not commenting, you know, I think we've been clear where we stand on the ordination of female officers and things like that, but not that all that withstanding, um, when you are going to be a part of a body that has a stated perspective on something and then just decide not to follow it, the right thing to do the, the upstanding morally. Uh, in full of integrity move would be to simply go to another denomination where your views align more closely. PCA churches, it's not super easy, but it's not impossible to leave the PCA as an entire congregation and then go somewhere like the EPC, which is the Evangelical Presbyterian Church, which still on the spectrum of things is still relatively conservative, but is in general is in favor of, uh, female officers, elders, and diegans. So I, I think, you know, and you see this with podcasters, there was the big, there was a big fu and Les became a Presbyterian, and then when Tanner became a Presbyterian on the pub, I think it is, um, incumbent on people who do any form of public theology and that that would include me and Jesse when our views change. There comes a point where we need to disclose that, be honest about it, um, and not try to pretend that we continue to hold a view that we don't be just because it's convenient or because it might be super inconvenient to make a change. I don't even want to pretend to imagine the pressures, uh, that someone like Matthew Barrett would face. I mean, you're talking about losing your entire livelihood. I, I understand that from an intellectual perspective, how difficult that must be, but in some ways, like that kind of comes with the territory. Same thing with a pastor. You have a Baptist pastor or a Presbyterian pastor. It can go both ways, I think. I'm more familiar with Baptist becoming Presbyterians. I don't, I don't see as many going the other direction. But you have a, a Baptist pastor who comes to pay to Baptist convictions and then continues to minister in their church for, I've, I've seen cases where they continue to minister for years, um, because they don't, they don't have the ability to now just go get a job in a Presbyterian context because there's all sorts of, um, training and certification and ordination process that needs to happen. Um, so they just continue ministering where they are, even though they no longer believe the church's state of, you know, state of faith statement. So that's a lot to say. Like, let your yes be yes and your no be no, and when we really all boil it down. So I think that's enough of that. It, it just sort of got in my craw this week and I couldn't really stop thinking about it. 'cause it's been very frustrating. And now there are stories coming out of. Doctoral students that, um, that Barrett was teaching who have now also become Anglican. Um, so, you know, there starts to be questions of like, was he actively pros? I mean, this is like Jacob Arminius did this stuff and, and like the reform tradition would look down on it, where he was in secret in like sort of small group private settings. He was teaching convictions very different than the uni. I'm talking about Arminius now. Not necessarily Barrett. He was teaching convictions very different than the, the stated theology of the university he taught for, and then in public he was sort of towing the line. You have to ask the question and it is just a question. There's been no confirmation that I'm aware of, but you have to ask the question if that was what was going on with Barrett, was he teaching Baptist theology publicly and then meeting with, with PhD students privately and, and sort of convincing them of Anglican theology. I don't know. I'm not speculating on that, but I think it, the situation definitely right, brings that question to mind. It forces us to ask it. Um, and had he. Been transparent about his theological shifts sooner than that may not be a, a question we have to ask. Um, the situation may not be all that different, but we wouldn't have to ask the question. Jesse Schwamb: Yeah, that's totally fair. I mean, disclosure is important in lots of places in life and we shouldn't think that theological dis disclosure, especially like you're saying among our teachers, among our pastors, it is a critical thing. It's helpful for people to know when perspectives have changed, especially when they're looking to their leaders who are exhibiting trust and care over their discipleship or their education to express that difference. If there's been a mark, change it. It's worth it. Disclose, I'm guessing you don't have to over disclose, but that we're talking about a critical, we're talking about like subversive anglicanism, allegedly. Yeah. Then. It would be more than helpful to know that that is now shaping not just perspective, but of course like major doctrine, major understanding. Yeah. And then of course by necessary conviction and extension, everything that's being promulgated or proclamation in the public sphere from that person is likely now been permeated by that. And we'd expect so. Right. If convictions change, and especially like you're talking about, we're just talking about moving from, especially among like Bible believing traditions, just raise the hand and say loved ones, uh, this is my firm conviction now. Tony Arsenal: Yeah. Yeah. I think if someone walks up to you and says, do you think that we should baptize babies? And you're like, yeah, I think so. Then you probably shouldn't be teaching at a Baptist seminary anymore. Like, seems like a reasonable standard. And that seems to be what happened, at least for some period of time. Um, you know, and, and it, that's not to say like, I think, I think there are instances where the church, a given church or um, or a university or seminary or, or whatever the situation might be, can be gracious and recognize like, yeah, people's perspectives change and maybe we can find a way for you to continue to finish out the semester or, you know, we can bridge you for a little while until you can find a new, a new job. Um, you know, we'll, we'll only have you teach certain courses or we'll have a guest lecturer come in when you have to cover this subject that is at variance and like, we'll make sure we're all clear about it, but it doesn't seem like any of that happened. And that's, um, that's no bueno. So anyway, Jesse. What are you affirming and or denying Tonight? [00:13:43] Music Recommendations Jesse Schwamb: I'm just gonna go with something brief. I suppose this is an affirmation of me. I'm saying that like somewhat tongue in cheek, but maybe it's, wait, I'll rephrase. It's because this will be more humble. I'm affirming getting it right, even more than I thought. So I'm just gonna come back to the well and dip it into something that I mentioned on the last episode. So the keen listener, the up-to-date listener might remember. And if you're not up to date, uh, just let this be fresh for you. It'll, and I, it's gonna be correct because now I have posts, you know, I'm on the other side of it. I've clear hindsight. I am affirming with the album Keep It Quiet by Gray Haven, which I affirmed last week, but it came out on the same day that the episode released. And since you and I don't really like record in real time and release it like exactly as it's happening, I only did that with some, a little bit of reservation because I only heard they only released three songs in the album. And I thought I was overwhelmed that they were, they were so good that I was ready to jump in and loved ones. Oh, it, it turns out. I was so correct and it was, it's even better than I thought. So go check it out. It's Grey, GRE, YH, and they are, this is the warning, just because I have to give it out there and then I'll balance it with something else for something for everybody here today. So, gr Haven is music that's post hardcore and metal core. You're getting two cores for the price of one, if that is your jam. It has strong maleic sensibilities. It's very emotional, it's very experimental. But this new album, which is called, um, again, keep It Quiet, is like just a work of arts. It real like the guitar work is intricate haunting, lovely, and it's bold, like very intentional in its structure and very el loose in its construction. It's got hook driven melodies and it's got both heart and soft. It really is truly a work of art. So if you're trying to, to put it in your minds, like what other bands are like this? I would compare them to bands like, every Time I Die, Norma Jean, let Live Hail the Sun. If you just heard those as combinations of words that don't mean anything to you, that's also okay. No worries. But if you're looking for something different, if you're looking for something that's maybe gonna challenge your ear a little bit, but is like orchestral and has all of these metal core post hardcore, melodic, textured movements, there's no wasted notes in this album. It's really tremendous. If that's not your thing. I get, that's not everybody's thing. Here's something else I think would be equally challenging to the ear in a different way. And that is, I'm going back to one other album to balance things out here, and that's an album that was released in 2019 by Mark Barlow, who I think is like just. So underrated. For some reason, like people have slept on Mike Barlow. I have no idea why he put together an album with Isla Vista Worship called Soul Hymns, and it's like a distinct soul and r and b album of praise with like these really lovely like falsetto, harmonies. It's got these minimalistic instrumentation, warm keys, groove oriented percussion, like again, like these false soul driven melodies. It's contemplative. It's got a groove to it. This is also equally a beautiful album for a totally different reason. So I think I've given two very book-ended, very different affirmations, but I think there's something for everybody. So my challenge to your loved ones is you gotta pick one or the other. Actually, you could do both, but either go to Gray Havens, keep it quiet, or go to Mike Bellow's Soul hymns. I do not think you will be disappointed. There's something for everybody on this one. Tony Arsenal: Yeah, I, it was funny because as you were saying the names of those bands, I literally was thinking like Jesse could be speaking Swahili and I wouldn't know the difference. And then you, you, you know me well, yeah. Uh, I haven't listened to Gray Haven. Uh, I probably will give it a couple minutes 'cause that's how it usually goes with songs that meet that description. Uh, I can always tell that the music that Jesse recommends is good from a technical perspective, but I never really, I never really vibe with it. So that's okay. But I mean, lots of people who listen to our show do so check that out. If, if you ever. Want a good recommendation for music. Jesse is the pers so much so that he can recommend amazing music before it's even available and be a hundred percent correct, apparently. That's right. So Jesse Schwamb: affirm with me everybody, because turns out I was right. Uh, it was easy to be correct when of course I had all of that fair sightedness by being able to listen to those. Yeah, those couple of songs, it, this is a kind of album. Both of these, both of these albums. When I heard them, I reacted audibly out loud. There are parts of both of 'em where I actually said, oh wow. Or yeah, like there's just good stuff in there. And the older you get, if you're a music fan, even if you're not, if you don't listen to a lot of music, you know when that hook gets you. You know when that turn of melody or phrase really like hits you just, right. Everybody has that. Where the beat drops in a way. You're just like, yes, gimme, you make a face like you get into it. I definitely had that experience with both of these albums and because. I've listened to a lot of music because I love listening to music. It's increasingly rare where I get surprised where, you know, like sometimes stuff is just like popular music is popular for a reason and it's good because it's popular and it follows generally some kind of like well established roots. But with these albums, it's always so nice when somebody does something that is totally unexpected. And in these, I heard things that I did not expect at all. And it's so good to be surprised in a way that's like, why have I never heard that before? That is amazing. And both of these bands did it for me, so I know I'm like really hyping them up, but they're worth it. They're, they're totally worth it. Good music is always worth it. Tony Arsenal: Yeah. Yeah. I, uh, I think that is a good recommendation. I will check those out because, you know, you're a good brother. I usually do, and I trust your judgment even though it, you'll like the second one. Yes. Hopefully. Yeah. Yeah. Jesse Schwamb: You'll like the second one. Second one is like, just filled with praise and worship. And like, if, if you're trying to think, like say, here's how I'd couch the proper atmosphere for Mark Barlow's soul hymns you're having, you know, it's, it's a cold and chilly. A tal evening, the wind is blowing outside. You can hear the crisp leaves moving around on the pavement and the sun has gone down. The kids are in bed, the dinner dishes are piled up in the sink. But you think to yourselves, not tonight. I don't think so, and you just want that toneage to put on. You want that music as you dim the lights and you sit there to just hang out with each other and take a breath. You don't just want some kind of nice r and b moving music. You don't want just relaxing vibes. You want worshipful spirit filled vibes that propel your conversation and your intimacy, not just into the marital realm, but into worship and harmony with the triune God. If you're looking for that album, because that situation is before you, then sol hymns is the music you're looking for. Tony Arsenal: See, I'm gonna get the, I'm gonna get the recommendations backwards and I'm gonna sit down with my wife with a nice like evening cup of decaf tea and I'm gonna turn the music on. Yes, it's gonna be like, yes. That was me screaming into the microphone. That was not good for my voice. Well, the good news is it's gonna, it's gonna wake the kids up. That's, I'm gonna sleep on the couch. That's, it's gonna be bad. That's, Jesse Schwamb: honestly, that's also a good evening. It's just a different kind of evening. It's true. So it's just keep it separated again, uh, by way of your denial slash affirmation. Tony disclosure, I'm just giving you proper disclosure. Everybody know your music KYM, so that way when you have the setting that you want, you can match it with the music that you need. So it's true. Speaking of things that are always worth it. [00:21:30] Parable of the Weeds Jesse Schwamb: I think the Bible's gotta be one of those things. Tony Arsenal: It's true. Jesse Schwamb: And this is like the loosest of all segues because it's like the Sunday school segue into any topic that involves the scriptures. We're gonna be in Matthew 13, and how about we do this? So this is one of these parables and in my lovely ESV translation of the scriptures, the, we're just gonna go with the heading, which says the parable of the weeds. You may have something different and I wanna speak to that just briefly, but how do we do this, Tony? I'll hit us up with the parable and then it just so happens that this is one of the parables in the scripture that comes with an interpretation from our savior. It's true. How about you hit us up with the interpretation, which is in the same chapter if you're tracking with us, it's just a couple verses way. Does that sound good? Tony Arsenal: Let's do it. Jesse Schwamb: Okay. Here is the parable of the weeds. Jesus puts another parable before them saying The kingdom of heaven may be compared to a man who sewed good seed in his field. But while his men were sleeping, his enemy came and sewed weeds among the weeds and went away. So when the plants came up and bork rain, then the weeds also appeared, and the servants of the master of the house came and said to him, master, did you not sow good seed in your field? How then does it have weeds? He said to them, an enemy has done this. So the servant said to him, then, do you want us to go and gather them? Then he said, no. Lest in gathering the weeds, you root up the wheat along with them, but let them grow together until the harvest and at harvest time, I will tell the reapers, gather the weeds first, and bind them in bundles to be burned, but gather the wheat into my barn. Tony Arsenal: Alright, so then jumping down. To verse 36. We're still in Matthew 13, he says, then he left the crowds and went into the house and his disciples came to him saying, explain to us the parable of the weeds of the field. He answered, the one who sows the good seed is the son of man. The field is the world, and the good seed is the sons of the kingdom. The weeds are the sons of the evil one, and the enemy who sowed them is the devil. The harvest is the end of the age, and the reapers are the angel. Just as the weeds are gathered and burned with fire, so will it be at the end of the age, the son of man will send his angels and they will gather out of his kingdom, all that, all causes of sin in all lawbreakers and throw them into the fiery furnace. It is that in that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. Then the righteous will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their father. He who has ears let him hear. Jesse Schwamb: So let me start with just like a little bit of language here, which I've always loved in this passage because where else in like the contemporary context, do you get the word tear? Yeah. Aside if you're like using a scale, and that's a totally different definition. I like this. I like the word tear. It force, it forces to understand that what's common to our ear, why that's being used, it often is translated weed. Here's just like my, my little like linguistic addition to the front end of our discussion and is the reason I like it is because here does have a specific definition. If like you were to look this up in almost any dictionary, what you're gonna find is it's like a particular type of weed. It's actually like an injurious weed that is indistinguishable in its infant form from the outgrowing of green. So I like that because of course that is exactly why. Then there's all this explanation of why then to not touch anything in the beginning because one, it causes damage to it looks like everybody else. I just thought I'd put that out there as we begin our discussion. Tony Arsenal: Yeah, yeah. You know, I, um, I am a homeowner and I don't own the land that I'm on, but I'm responsible for the land that I'm on. And we have this really gnarly weed problem. There's this, uh, sort of floor growing, uh, carpeting weed called, uh, I think it's called like a carpeting knob, head weed or something like that. Some really descriptive thing. And I went out there the other day and there's really nothing you can do about this other than to rip it up. But I went out there the other day to start to pull some of it up and it totally wrecks the yard. Like it totally pulls up the grass, it destroys the sod. And when you're done, this is why it's kind of nice that I don't have, I'm not responsible for the land as I'm not gonna have to pay to resod the land. But when you're done pulling up this weed, you have to resod the whole place. You have to regrow all the grass because it, first, it takes over for the grass, and then when you rip it up, it rips the roots of the grass up as well. And so this parable, um, on one level is immediately obvious, like what the problem is, right? The situation is such. That the good, uh, the good sower, right? He's a good sower. He knows what he's doing. He understands that simply ripping up the weeds. Even if you could distinguish them right, there's this element that like at an early stage, they would be very difficult, if not impossible to distinguish from, uh, from wheat. Even if you could distinguish them, you still wouldn't be able to pull up the weeds and not do damage to the grain. And so we, we have this sort of like, um, conflict if you wanna follow like literary standards, right? We have this conflict and as we come to sort of the climax of this, of this plot is when all of a sudden we see that, that the problem needs a resolution and there is a resolution, but it's not necessarily what we would think it would be. Jesse Schwamb: Yeah, I think that's what I find shocking. It is like a massive statement of reality that is that like equal points or equal times totally sensible. And other times we would think, well why surely not in the church Lord, like of all the places, like aren't we talking about a kind of purity of your people, the very people that you're assembling together, the chief of which is Christ and the apostles being the building stones and Christ of course being the cornerstone. And I, I think that's what I find and I wonder the people hearing this, if they thought like, well, surely Lord, that not be the case like you are bringing in and ushering in this new kingdom. Isn't this new kingdom gonna be one of absolute purity? And, and what I think he's striking at, which I do find a little bit wild, is that Jesus essentially saying, at least to my ear, anything we try to do, even like the purest preaching of the gospel, is not gonna prevent this in every age of the church. The same state of the things that's existed in that is in the time of the early fathers. In the first century, and the church as it stands right now in the land and the time of the reformers, and of course with the best ministers at this hour right now and on your next Lord's day, and everyone after that, there is always and ever will be a visible church or a religious assembly in which the members are not all wheat. Yeah. And then I like what you're saying. It's this idea that. There's a great harm that's gonna come about if you try to lift them up because you cannot tell. So, and this is what's hard, I think this does influence like how we interact with people online. Certainly how we interact with people in our own congregations, but we are going to have no clear convicted proofs. We might only have like probable symptoms if we're really trying to judge and weigh out to discern the weeds from the weeds, which at most can only give us some kind of conjectural knowledge of another state. And that is gonna sometimes preemptively judge cause us to judge others in a way that basically there's a warning against here. It, it's, it's not the right time. And ba I think mainly from the outside where I find like this parable coming together, if there's like maybe a weird Venn diagram of the way Christians read this and the way unbelievers hear this, the overlap between them is for me, often this idea of like hypocrisy and you know. When people tell me that the church is full of hypocrites, either like Christian or non-Christian, but typically that's a, a, you know, statement that comes from the non-Christian tongue. When people say that the church is full of hypocrites, I do with a little bit of snark, say it's definitely not full of hypocrites. There are always room for more in the church and, and there's like a distinction of course between the fact that there is hypocrisy in the Christian or whether the Christian is in fact or that person is a hypocrite. So like when I look through the scriptures, we see like Pharaoh confessing, we see Herod practicing, we see Judas preaching Christ Alexander venturing his life for Paul. Yeah, we see David condemning in another, what he himself practiced and like hezeki glorifying and riches Peter. Doing all kinds of peter stuff that he does, and even all the disciples forsaken Christ, an hour of trouble and danger. So all that to say, it goes back to this like lack of clear, convicted proofs that I think Jesus is bringing forward here, but only probable symptoms. And I'm still processing, of course, like the practicality of what you're saying, Tony, that in some ways it seems like abundantly clear and sensible that you should, you're, you're gonna have a problem distinguishing. But our human nature wants to go toward distinguishing and then toward uprooting sometimes. And the warning here is do not uproot at the improper time. And in fact, it's not even yours to uproot because God will send in the laborers to do that at the time of, of harvest. And so there will be weeds found among the wheat. It's just like full stop statement. And at the same time it's warning, do not go after them now. Tony Arsenal: Yeah, I, I'm sure this, um, I, I'm sure this will spill over into a second conversation, but we, I think we have to talk a little bit about the interpretation here before we, before we even like talk more about the parable itself, because if you're not careful, um, and, and. I need to do a little bit more study on this, but it, it's interesting because Matthew almost seems to want you to sort of blend these parables together a little bit. Jesse Schwamb: Yes. Tony Arsenal: Right. These, these, there's three, um, there's three, maybe four if you count the parable of the treasure in the field. But there's three agricultural parables that have to do with sowing seed of one, of, one way or another. And in each one the seed is something different. And I, it almost seems to me. And then on top of that, the parables are like interwoven within each other. So like right smack in the middle of this, we have the parable. Uh, is given. Then the next parable of the mustard seed, which we're gonna talk about in a future episode, is given, and then the explanation of this parable of the tears is given. Um, and so we have to talk a little bit about it and sort of establish what the seed is, because we just spent three weeks talking about the seed in the par of the sower. Um, or the parable of the, of the soils. And in that parable, the seed was the word of God in this parable. And this is where I think sometimes, um, and again, this is like the doctrine of election in parable form, right? Yes. I think sometimes we read this and we, we misstep because the seed is not, uh, is not the word of God in this. The seed is the believers. Jesse Schwamb: Yes. Tony Arsenal: Right. So the good seed is sewn into, uh, into the field, which, you know, I think maybe there'll be some, we, we can save this for, for next week. But a little sneak peek is, it's not always clear exactly what the field is. Right. And I think we often, we often talk about the field as though it's the church that doesn't necessarily align a hundred percent with how Christ explains the parable. So we'll have to, we'll have to talk through that a little bit. I affirm that it is the church in, in a, a broad sense. Um, but, but the, the way that Christ explains it slightly different, but the, the seed is sewn into the world. The sons of the kingdom of heaven are sowed into the, into the world. And then the seed of the enemy, the bad seed, is the sons of the devil that's also sewn into the world. And so these two seeds grow up next to each other. If we think about the seed here as though it's the word of God, rather than the, the actual believers and unbelievers that elect in the ate, we're gonna make some missteps on how we understand this because we're not talking about, um, the, the seed being, you know, doctrine being sewn into the world. And some of it grows up good and some of it grows up bad or good doctrine and bad doctrine. We're talking about the believers themselves. Sorry, Jesse is mocking my rapid attempt to mute before I cough, which I, I did. That was pretty good. Jesse Schwamb: Yeah, that was, that was pretty good. Listen, this is real. Podcasting is how it goes. Yeah, I'm with you. Thank you for pulling out that distinction. 'cause it is critical. We, we have some overlap of course, with Jesus being really ascribed as the farmer, the son of man, right. He's sowing this good seed, but not the word. It's believers or the sons of the kingdom. And it is into his field, which is the world. Part of that world of course, is necessarily the church, right? But while everybody's sleeping, this enemy, the devil, he comes, he sows weeds or unbelievers, the sons of the evil one among this weed, they grow, go up together. And of course, like if I were servants in this household, I'd ask the same thing, which was like, should we get the gloves out? Yeah. Just pull those bad boys out. Like and, and so again, that's why I find it very so somewhat shocking that. It's not just, you could see like Jesus saying something like, don't worry about it now because listen, at the end of all time when the harvest comes, uh, I'm gonna take care of it. Like it's just not worth it to go out now. Right. That's not entirely The reason he gives, the reason is lest they uproot the wheat by mistake. So this is showing that the servants who are coming before Jesus in the parable, in this teaching here to really volitionally and with great fidelity and good obedience to him to want to please him to do his will. He there, he's basically saying, you are not qualified to undertake this kind of horticulture because you're just not either skilled enough or discerning enough to be able to do it right. Tony Arsenal: Yeah. Yeah. And you know, I think, um. Maybe just a word of meth methodology too. Um, this parable also flies in the face of all of the, like, parables are not allegories, kind of kind of people. Um, and this is, we talked about this in our introductory episode. You have to take each parable for what it's worth, this parable very much is explained like a traditional allegory, right? Right. [00:35:39] Understanding the Parable's Symbols Tony Arsenal: It's got, it's got several different elements and Christ goes through and the first thing he does is tell you what each element represents, right? The sower is the son of man, the field is the word. The good seed is the sons of the kingdom of the weed. It's like, he's like clicking down all of the symbols and then he explains how all of it works together and like a good, all like a good allegory. Once you understand what each element and each symbol is, the rest of it actually is very self-explanatory, right? When you understand who's what in the parable. The outcome and the sort of the punchline writes itself as it were. And I think this is one of those parables that we would do. [00:36:18] Challenging Our Sensibilities Tony Arsenal: I think we would do well to sort of let marinate a little bit because it does challenge a lot of our sensibilities of what, um, what is real in the world, what is real in terms of our interaction with the world, right? What's real in terms of the role of unbelievers in the life of a Christian, um, whether we can identify who is or isn't an unbeliever. Um, I think we, you know, I, I'm not one of those people that's like, we should assume everyone's a Christian. And I'm certainly not one of those people who's like, we should assume nobody is a Christian. But I think there are a lot of times where we have figures either in public or people in our lives. Like personal acquaintances that have some sort of outward appearance. And, and that's like the key here that that distinction between weeds is a, is not a great translation as you said. Right. Because right. That distinction between wheat and weeds, to go to my analogy, like it's very clear what is grass and what is this like carpeting, knob weed. Like there's no, there's no doubt in my mind, which is the weed and which is the grass. Um, that's not what we're talking about here. And so it does, it does say here, I mean, it implies here that it's not going to be easy to distinguish the difference between exactly. The, a son of the kingdom and a son of the evil one. And I think that's a, that's a. A theological pill that is very difficult to swallow. Yes. [00:37:43] Personal Reflections on Identifying Christians Tony Arsenal: Because a lot of us, um, and this goes back to like what I, what we were saying in the last, the last parable, A lot of us were reared in our Christian faith on sort of this idea that like, you can check your fruit or you can check other people's fruits and you can determine, you can easily identify who's a Christian and who's not. I remember when I was in high school, you know, I got, I was converted when, when I was 15 and, um, I got to high school and it felt very easy to me to be able to identify the people who were play acting Christianity and the people who were real Christians. That felt like the most natural thing in the world to me. Um, it, it's an interesting story, but one of the people that I was absolutely sure was not a Christian. That he was just doing kinda civic Christianity. He was in confirmation 'cause his parents wanted him to. Um, and I had good reason to believe that at the time he was very worldly. He, he, um, did not seem to be serious about his faith at all. There was good reason to make the assessment that I did. And then I ran into him on Facebook like 15 years later and he's a pastor at the Lutheran Church and he's, you know, he loves the Lord Jesus Christ. And he would not explain it as though he had a later conversion story. It's not as though he would say like, well yeah, in high school I pretended to be a Christian. And then, you know, I got through college and uh, I really became like I got converted. He would, would grow this, or he would explain this as slow, steady growth from an immature state that knew the facts of the gospel and in a certain sense trusted that Jesus was his savior and didn't fully understand the ramifications of that. I mean, who did at 15 years old? Mm-hmm. Um. And, and that it was a slow, steady growth to the place that he's in now. [00:39:21] The Difficulty of Distinguishing Believers Tony Arsenal: So I, I think we should take seriously, and maybe this is the takeaway for this week at least, and we can, we can talk about it more, is we should take seriously the fact that the Sons of the Kingdom and the Sons of the evil one in this parable are not only inseparable without doing damage, but in many ways they are not easily distinguishable. Jesse Schwamb: Right. On. Tony Arsenal: Um, and that, that's a baked into the parable. And I think we do spend a fair amount of time and I, I'll. I'll throw myself on on this. You know, this, we, I'm not just saying we, um, we as a genuine statement, like I have participated in this. I'm sure that I still do participate in this sometimes intentionally. Other times, uh, subconsciously we spend a fair amount of time probably in our Christian lives trying to figure out who is a Christian who's not. And it's not as though that is entirely illegitimate, right? The, the, as much as we kind of poke at the, the, um, workers in this who sort of are kind of chumps, right? They're sort of like the idiots in this. They, they don't seem to know how this happened. They propose a course of action that then the master's like, no, no, that's not, that's not gonna work. They can tell the difference, right? They can see that some are weeds and some are are weeds, and they're asking, well, what do we do about it? But at the same time he is saying like, you're not really competent to tell the difference, Jesse Schwamb: right? On Tony Arsenal: a good, uh, a good. Competent farmer could probably go out and take all the weeds out. Just like a really good, I dunno, landscape technician, I'm not sure what you would call it. I'm sure someone could come into my yard and if I paid them enough money they could probably fix this knobby grass, weed, whatever it is. Um, infestation. They could probably fix it without damaging the lawn. Like there are probably people that could do it. I am not that competent person and the workers in this are not that competent person. And I would say by and large in our Christian life, we are not that competent person to be able to identify who is and who isn't, um, a Christian who is or isn't a son of the kingdom versus a son of the devil. Jesse Schwamb: And there's sometimes like we just get history reprised, or it's like, again, the same thing microwaved over and served to you three or four times as leftovers. So it's also gonna remember like any as extension that like any attempt to like purify the church perfectly, and this has happened like donatism in the fourth century I think, or even like now, certain sectarian movements are completely misguided. Yeah. And Jesus already puts that out ahead of us here. It's almost like, do not worry what God is doing because God again is, is doing all the verbs. So here's a question I think we should discuss as we, we move toward like the top of the hour. And I think this is interesting. I don't know if you'll think it's interesting. I, I kind of have an answer, but I, I'll post it here first. [00:42:01] Visible vs. Invisible Church Jesse Schwamb: So the setup like you've just given us is two things. One, we got the visible church, we talk about the visible church. I think a lot across our conversations. Yeah. And we might summarize it, saying it's like the community of all who profess faith, maybe even the community of all who are baptized. Right. Possibly. Yeah. And it's going to include then necessarily as Jesus describes it here, true and false believers. So that's one group. Then we've got this invisible church, which as you said is the elect. Those who are known perfectly to God. So the good seed is those elect true believers. The weeds, then the weeds to me, or the tears, even better, they sound a lot like that. Second and third soils that we talked about previously to some, to some degree. I'm not, I'm not gonna lump them all in because we talked about receiving the word and it taking root, all that stuff, but to some degree, and also probably like a soil one. But here's, here's the way I would define them up and against or in contradistinction to the elector believers. They're the reprobate. They're false professors or they're children of the evil one. Now here's the question, Doni, Alex, I, I think this is very interesting. I'm trying to build this up for like more dramatic effect. 'cause now I'm worried it's not that good. The question is, I'm going to presume that this good seed, the elect, true to believers, the confidence of perseverance of the saints, the justification in sanctification of God's children is in fact though we at some points have our own doubts, it is made fully aware and known to the good seed. That is, we should have, as you and I have talked about before, the confidence that God has in fact saved his elect. So the question that on the other side is for the ta, do the tears always know that they are the tears? Tony Arsenal: Yeah, I mean, you know, I think, um, I've said this before and I, I mean it, and I think it takes probably more. More discussion than we have time for tonight. And and that's fine because we can do as many episodes on this as we want to. 'cause this is our show and you can't stop us actually. Jesse Schwamb: Correct. [00:43:56] Assurance of Faith and False Assurance Tony Arsenal: Um, I've said before that assurance is the proper and rightful possession and inheritance of every Christian. Jesse Schwamb: Amen. Tony Arsenal: Right. So I, I am not one to say that the technical terminology is that assurance is not of the essence of faith. Um, I think we have to be really careful when we say that it's not, but we have to be equally careful when we say that it is. Because if we say that assurance is of the essence of faith, then what that means is someone who doesn't have assurance, doesn't have faith. Um, the reason I say that we can say that is because there's a sense that that's true, right? If you don't believe you're saved, then you don't believe you're saved and you don't trust that you're saved. But that doesn't mean that you always have full awareness of that confidence. And, you know, I think, um, I think. I think you're, you're right that, um, it may not always be, let me put it this way. I, I think that we have to consider the entire life of a Christian when we're, when we're making that analysis. And in a certain sense, like, I'm not even sure we should be making that analysis. That's kind of the point of the, the, um, the parable here, or at least one of the points. But, um, when that analysis is made, we'll, we'll channel a little bit of RC sprawl. It's not as funny when he's actually, uh, gone. I don't really mean channel RC sprawl. We will, uh, speak in the tradition of RC sprawl, um, in the final analysis, whatever that means. Whenever that is. You have to consider the whole life of a Christian, the whole life of a believer. And so there may be times in the life of a believer where they don't possess that full assurance of faith or that that full assurance is weak or that it seems to be absent. But when we look at the entire life of a believer, um, is it a life that overall is marked by a confident trust, that they are in fact children of God? Um, that a confident, uh, a confident embracing of what the spirit testifies to their spirit, to, to borrow language from Romans, I think in, in the life of a true elect Christian, um, that with the perseverance of the saints, uh, with the persistence of the saints and the preservation of the saints, um, I think that yes, those who are finally saved, those who are saved unto salvation, if you wanna phrase it that way. They finish the race, they claim the prize. Um, that assurance will be their possession in their life as a Christian. Jesse Schwamb: Right on. Tony Arsenal: All of that to say, I think there are, are, there's a good case to be made for the fact that there is also people who have false assurance, right? And this is where it takes a lot more, you know, finagling and jockeying and theological explanation of how can we know we have true assurance versus false assurance. You know, it's kinda like that question, like, does an insane person know they're insane? Well, does a false, does someone with false assurance know that their assurance is false? I don't think, I don't think so. Otherwise, it wouldn't be false assurance. Um, if they knew it wasn't real assurance, then they wouldn't have any kind of assurance. So I, I think I agree with you at least where, where I think you're going is that we do have to, we do have to make some judgements. We have to look at our own life, right? Um, there is an element of fruitfulness in this parable, right? We'll talk about that. I, I think we'll get into that next week. But it's not as though this is entirely disconnected from the parable of the soils. Both of them have a very similar kind of. End point. [00:47:20] Final Judgment and Eschatology Tony Arsenal: At the end of all things, at the end of the harvest, when the end of the age comes, and the reapers, the angels are sent, what they're gathering up are fruitful Christians, right in the parable, he sends out the, it's funny be, I love my dispensational brothers and sisters, but in this parable, like the rapture is the rapture of the unbelievers, right? The angels go out and reap the unbelievers first. The, the weeds are bundled up and thrown into the fire, and then the, the fruitful wheat is gathered into the barns. Um, there is this delineation between the fruitless weeds and the fruitful wheat or the, the grain that has borne, you know, borne fruit. That is part of what the, the outward. Elements of this parable are, so we should talk about that more, of what is this trying to get at in terms of not just the difference between weeds and wheat and how that maps up to those who are in Christ versus those who are not in Christ, but also like what is this telling us about the, the end of the age eschatology. All of that's baked in here and we haven't even scratched the surface of that Jesse Schwamb: yet. Yeah, we, we, I, and we just can't, even on this episode, probably, you're right, we're gonna have to go to two so that, I guess it's like a teaser for the next one. I'm told they're with you. It's interesting. I've been thinking about that, that question a lot. And I do like what you're saying. You know, at the end here, it's almost as if Christ is saying at the time of harvest, things become more plain, more evident In the beginning. The chutes are gonna look really, really similar, and you're gonna go in and you're gonna think you're guessing properly or using your best judgment, and you're gonna get it wrong in the end when he sends out those who are harvesting. I liken this passage here in the explanation as you read to us starting in verse 36, how there's this comparison of heat and light. And so there is the heat and light of the fiery furnace into which, as you said, all of those who are the children of the enemy will be gathered up and burned. And then there's that contrast with in verse 43, then the righteous will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their father. So there is like a reward that comes from the bearing of the fruit and that made evidence by a different type of heat and light. So I do struggle with this question because. It's easy to answer in some ways if we're defining the weeds in pirate or the tears in pirates as false professors typically. Let's say false professors of a nefarious kind, then it seems pretty plain that somebody, right, that the enemy has implanted certain people to stir up trouble with the intention to stir up trouble that is in fact their jam. Or they know that even if they're putting on heirs, that they're in fact play acting that the hypocrisy is purposeful and that it is part of like the missional efforts that they're doing to disrupt what God is doing in the world. So I might think of somebody like when we go, when we're looking in, um, Exodus, and we find that at least to some degree, all of Pharaoh's magicians can replicate everything that Moses is doing. Moses doing that by the power of God. But the magicians are so good and whatever means they're using, but they know, I presume they know they're not, they're not using Yahweh, they're not drawing their power or their influence from Yahweh. Tony Arsenal: Right? Jesse Schwamb: But it's so convincing to the people that Pharaoh is like, eh. Obviously I've seen that before because we just, we just did that here. Come back with your next trick until God flexes his mighty muscles in a really profound way, which cannot be replicated. And at some point there's a harvest that happens there. There's a separation between the two, those who are truly professing, the power that comes from God, the one true God, and those that are just replicating the cheap copy, the one that's just pure trickery and smoke and mirrors. So. That's an easy category. I'm with you. And I'm not saying that this is an invitation to bring the kind of judgment here that we've just spoken against. I'm not condoning this. What I do find interesting though is if the enemy is crafty, is it possible that they're always going to be forms of terror in the world that do feel that they have very strong conviction and belief about biblical things? Maybe there's, there's strong hobby horses or there are misguided directions here that pull us apart, that become distractions. Or maybe it's just even attitudes, uh, things that can be divisive, disruptive, derogatory that again, pull us away. For making the plain things, the main things and the main things, the plain things, which in some ways draws us back to like the whole purpose of you and I talking every week, which is we wanna get back to what the scripture teaches. We wanna follow the our Lord Jesus Christ very, very closely. I'm gonna clinging to the hymn of his rob as we walk through life so that we do not fall to those kind of false convictions. So I'm not, please hear me, loved ones. I'm not trying to call into question your faith as Tony just said. I am saying that there, this is kind of scary, just like we talked about. There are elements of the parables of the, of the soil that were equally scary. And so it's just in some ways to say, we gotta keep our heads not theological, swivel. We, we gotta be about the Lord's business, and we gotta be about understanding through prayer and study and communion with him, what it is that he wants to teach us in the purest way, knowing that the church itself and the world, of course, is never going to be entirely pure. At the same time, it is our responsibility to, as you already said, test for ourselves to understand what is that true gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ. Because some tears are going to be maybe easy to identify and with without, you know, throwing too much shade or. I was gonna say spilling the TI don't think that works here, but I'm not young anymore, so I'm trying to use or or put on blast. Yeah. I'm looking at you Mormons or Jehovah's witnesses. Like it's, it's easier there to be like, yeah, right, this is wrong. It is a false profession, but we've just gotta be careful even in our own hobby, horses not deviates into ground. I think that doesn't preclude us from being children of the light and children of the kingdom, but can still be disruptive or uh, you know, just distracting. But either way, yeah. I think what's scary to me about this is exactly what you said, Tony, is, is could it be that there are people that are very sincere about the Christian faith, but are sincerely wrong? Tony Arsenal: Yeah. Jesse Schwamb: And what does that mean for God's elected purpose? What does that mean for our understanding of how to interact in our churches in the world? Does that make sense? Tony Arsenal: It does. And I'm not sure whether you were trying to set up the, what might be the first genuine reformed brotherhood cliffhanger, but you did. Because we're on minute 54 of a 60 minute podcast, and, uh, there's no way we're gonna get into that and not go for another 60 minutes. So, Jesse, I, I'm, I'm glad that we are taking our time. Um, I know that sometimes it's easy when you put out a schedule or you put out a sort of projected content calendar to feel like you have to stick to it. But I wanna give these parables, the time they deserve and the effort and the, uh, the, uh, study and the discussion that they deserve. And I think the questions you're posing here at the end of this episode are really, really important. And they are questions that this parable forces us to ask. Right, right. It's not as though we're just using this as a launching pad. Um. If the workers can't tell the difference between the, the seed and the, or the, the weeds and the weeds, it's reasonable to think that the weeds themselves may not be able to tell the difference. Right? The sons of the evil one, um, are probably not in this parable, are probably not the people like in the back, like doing fake devil horns, right? And like, you know, like there's, there's probably more going on that we need to unpack and, and we'll do that next week. Jesse Schwamb: I love it. So we've got some good stuff coming then, because we've gotta, this is like, do you ever remember when you were in, uh, you know, doing your undergraduate postgraduate work, you'd get like a topic or an assignment or a paper and you'd be super stoked about it and you start reaching it, be like, okay, researching it. And you'd be like, all right, I've got some good topics here. And then you get into it, you're like, oh, but I'm gonna have to talk about this. And Oh, like before I could talk, I'm gonna have to explain this. Sometimes when we get into these, as you and I have been talking, that's what it feels li

The police knew their suspect was a sexual sadist – one who had trapped a young boy for days and took great pleasure in slowly, methodically, snapping every bone in his legs. What they didn't expect was that this ghastly resident of Baraboo, Wisconsin was still just 17 years old. And it wasn't his first time.H&S spin the sinister tale of a twisted young psychopath, hiding in plain sight in an unassuming Midwestern town.Exclusive bonus content:Wondery - Ad-free & ShortHandPatreon - Ad-free & Bonus EpisodesFollow us on social media:YouTubeTikTokInstagramVisit our website:WebsiteSources available on redhandedpodcast.comSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Our guest this week is Jer Gregg — a powerful storyteller whose music blends the heartland grit of Springsteen and Petty with the soul of Buckley and Mellencamp. From his stripped-down acoustic album OTIS to his electrifying live performances across Nashville, London, and even Australia, Jer has built a reputation for writing songs that cut deep with honesty and heart.In this episode, Jer shares the stories behind his songs, the inspiration from his Midwestern roots, and how family, love, and loss shape his music. You'll hear about his journey from recording in his living room to connecting with audiences around the world — plus, he treats us to some unforgettable live performances.Grab a coffee, sit back, and join the connection with Jer Gregg.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/songwriter-connection/donationsAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Betsy Fore is a serial entrepreneur, CEO, and investor with nearly 20 years of leadership experience. She's the author of Built on Purpose: Discover Your Deep Inner Why and Manifest the Business of Your Dreams, founding partner of Velveteen Ventures, and a trailblazer in consumer products for children and the planet. Notably, Betsy scaled Tiny Organics past $13 million in revenue in just 24 months, took Wonder Woof! from scrappy startup to Oprah's Favorite Things, and was the first Native American woman to raise a Series A for a consumer food startup. On this episode we talk about: Growing up in a small Midwestern town, working every day since 13, and becoming a leading business creator Turning a garage-tinkering childhood into a career as a toy inventor, then product startup founder How relentless optimism, reinvention, and standing atop “a mountain of failures” led to big wins Advice for founders: building with community, manifesting vision, securing funding, and the importance of thinking big—even if you're starting small Behind the scenes of Tiny Organics' explosive first-year growth, building a cult following, and scaling product through grass-roots founding families Top 3 Takeaways Every breakthrough product stands on a mountain of failed attempts; grit and adaptability win. Community-first feedback loops create true brand evangelists and drive authentic scale. Dreaming big isn't just mindset—it's a practical approach to manifesting opportunity and wealth wherever you start. Notable Quotes “For every success, there's a mountain of failures you're standing on.” “You have to feel your deep inner ‘why' to reveal it and build on it.” “Not every company needs to be venture-backed, but every founder can build generational wealth by manifesting their vision.” Connect with Betsy Fore: Website: betsyfore.com ✖️✖️✖️✖️

Send us a textHave you ever wondered what it takes to go from being a nature-loving Midwesterner to a pivotal figure in wildlife law enforcement? Discover how Tim Santel's unique career path led him to fight against big cat trafficking and rhino and elephant poaching as he become a champion for wildlife conservation.Episode Summary: This episode is personal for me. I recently returned from a conservation trip with CBCC and Wild Tomorrow where the enormity of poaching, as well as the inspiring stories of the many, many people working to make the planet a better place had a huge impact on me. On Episode 157, we sit down with Tim Santel from Focused Conservation. Tim shares his remarkable journey from his Midwestern roots to becoming an undercover agent dedicated to combating wildlife trafficking. Through captivating stories like the adrenaline-pumping Operation Snowplow and Operation Crash, Tim offers insights into the challenges and triumphs of dismantling animal trafficking networks. We also discuss diverse career paths in wildlife conservation available to today's students, focusing on the power of education, storytelling, and persistence. This episode is packed with guidance for aspiring conservationists and inspires hope for the future, encouraging the next generation to follow in the footsteps of icons like Diane Fossey and Jane Goodall. Timestamps & Chapter Titles:00:02:39: Tim Santel's Wildlife Conservation Origin Story00:12:23:What does a wildlife inspector/special agent do?00:23:34:Undercover Helping Wildlife00:35:55:Wildlife Trafficking Fueling Impactful Conservation00:49:45:Using Your Voice to Build Awareness, Impact, and Influence to Protect Wildlife00:51:26:Exploring Wildlife Conservation Career Paths 01:02:54:Inspiring Hope through Conservation with the Next Wildlife Heroes Links:Focused ConservationWild TomorrowCBCCZululand Conservation TrustSupport the showSubscribe & Follow: Stay updated with our latest episodes and follow us on Instagram, LinkedIn, and the Adventures in Learning website. Don't forget to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts! *Disclosure: I am a Bookshop.org. affiliate.