Shane Murphy (Season 1: Episode 1)
Shane is an old friend of mine, a high school era acquaintance with whom I have many things in common, including our age, the number and ages of our kids, many of our interests. For that reason, perhaps it’s a bit narcissistic to have him on as the first guest, but folks – he’s an amazing fella I’m privileged to have had on the show.
Julie Gause (Season 1: Episode 2)
Julie is an ex-coworker, was once a running buddy (I quit, she didn’t), is involved in several really worthwhile causes and after a 20 year career in enterprise community content strategy and SEO came to a close, launched her own business as a content strategist. We had a great show despite the thunder and lightning.
Sam Graves (Season 1: Episode 3)
Sam is an ex-coworker and friend of mine who juggles family, work and play with grace, a smile and awful dad jokes. He works at Siemens Healthineers helping develop high-end molecular imaging hardware and software, and shares his experiences growing into the role, knocking out a master’s degree by avoiding Netflix, and abiding by his values.
Jody Collins (Season 1: Episode 4)
Jody Collins is a Knoxville born and bred creative with a background in old-school visual design and printing. He’s equally comfortable maintaining and operating a giant press or figuring out how to make his clients look good with designed collateral, social media savvy or even copywriting.
Tyler Hays (Season 1: Episode 5)
Tyler Hays first came to my attention when he and his team worked with the KEC as one of the startup groups building their company/product/pitch (Evolvr) for a competition working to attract investment dollars. Tyler’s gone on to found his own company and has grown it steadily while somehow finding a balance between family, work and his values.
Dan Patton (Season 1: Episode 6)
Daniel Patton is a Knoxville-based videographer, director and 3D modeling/animation guru bent on producing amazing work and creating a friendly video community here in town. With a background in engineering that segued into modeling and animating some really neat mechanical components, he’s been shooting video since childhood and really hit his stride after his second boom/bust video production kit/crew cycle – there’s no stopping him now!
Tom Schultz (Season 1: Episode 7)
Tom Schultz is a veteran content creator with a deep focus on instructional and curriculum design in the agriculture space, from planning through capture, development, design, and delivery.
In short, the boy can write, shoot and code.
Mark Larsen (Season 1: Episode 8)
I met Mark when he brought me on as a web designer with one of his companies, Digital Media One, back in 2005. I have personally learned a lot from the man, about video production, client handling, and kindness.
Mark’s career, his battle with Parkinsons, and his continued terrific attitude and energy in the face of adversity are an inspiration – I think you’ll enjoy this one!
Russ Orlowski (Season 1: Episode 9)
Unlike most of our guests, Russ didn’t have a winding career path – he was fortunate to have found his niche early on and has stuck with it through several boom & bust cycles, in both self-employed and employee modes.
His specialty and preference is helping first time home buyers, so I really appreciated his insights on the housing market these days (and how unfair it is to those first time buyers).
Richard Lee (Season 1: Episode 10)
This episode features my friend Shane Murphy taking the reins while I step into the role of podcast guest – sharing my own personal road to through my role, my values and goals.
Danny Wilson (Season 1: Episode 11)
Danny Wilson is a Knoxville-based illustrator I became aware of as a senior in high school. It was a blast catching up with him and hearing about his personal road to the role of seasoned illustrator. Definitely lots to dig into here. Enjoy!
Donna Spencer (Season 1: Episode 12)
Donna Spencer is a talented designer, author, conference organizer & speaker based in Australia whom I had the pleasure of meeting first in 2013 at Midwest UX. She is incredibly gracious and smart as a whip, so I was thrilled she agreed to join me to chat about her experience navigating the world of design, tech and training.
Joe Vangieri (Season 2: Episode 1)
Joe is a very interesting fellow. A cool cat…a serial entrepreneur and innovator in the field of sound and music, and one of the few folks (let alone ones over 60) I’ve heard sling around terms like NFT, blockchain and ledger who knew what they were talking about.
Bryan Garvey (Season 2: Episode2)
Our guest this episode is Bryan Garvey, a local designer, musician and all around really nice guy. I met Bryan a few years ago at Scripps Networks, when Bryan was a designer and I was running a team in Ad Operations.
Sunday Boling (Season 2: Episode 3)
Our guest this episode is Sunday Boling, a Hollywood casting director and a friend of mine from another life – circa high school, in the last decade of the prior millennia.
It was fascinating to hear about her journey from somewhat shy, mostly broke high school student to accomplished, confident casting director, and to hear how her values played into that.