Do you ever have daydreams about leaving the world behind?  Leaving the stresses and anxieties of the modern world and moving to a rural piece of land where you’re surrounded by the people that you love and some animals.  Today’s guest is working towards that goal.  Kevin is a part-time cattle rancher, working towards living the cattle ranching life all year round.  Kevin is a true inspiration to me as he embodies setting your own goal and then patiently, diligently, working towards it.  He’ll tell us all about the farm life, and the day to day of being a cattle rancher.

How we feel as we enter a space is a pretty complex thing.  Smells, sounds, spacing, art, furniture, plants, lighting - it all melds together in our minds to make us feel a certain way.  Do we feel relaxed, energized, uneasy?  The interesting thing is, most of us won’t even know why we feel a certain way in a home or building, we’ll just feel that way.  Today’s guest is a trained interior designer, which means that it’s her job to create a space that not only looks appealing, but one that makes you feel a certain way.  Want to feel relaxed and care free when you’re at home?  Mackenzie can do that for you.  Want to feel energized every morning when you look around your bedroom?  She’s got you covered.  Today we explore the intricate ins and outs of the interior design world.

Growing up and making your way in the world can be hard.  That’s kind of what this show is about, see what people choose to do as they forge their path in this world.  Most of us, and nearly every person I’ve had on this show, choose a path that has been walked by someone before us.  That doesn’t change the fact that we need to be brave to do it, might have to leave something behind to pursue it, and need to give a lot of ourselves to succeed.  It just means that we got the idea to walk down said path because someone else walked down that path before us.  Today’s episode is with a truly unique person that had no such blueprint for his career.  For that reason it’s hard to even explain what Michael Cirino does.  Art, marketing, logistics, and one-of-a-kind experiences are all in a days work when you create your own blueprint.

When most of us think of getting audited we think of the IRS and our taxes, and a big not fun process. When most of us think of accounting we simply thinking of numbers, boring repetitive numbers. Today we will hear from an auditor that works for a major accounting firm, and his job has nothing to do with taxes, or numbers for that matter. Tim is an IT auditor, which means that when it comes down to it, he’s using his accounting degree to work in the tech world. He’ll explain IT auditing to us and why it’s so important as companies grow in size.

The landscape of marijuana in the United States (and many other areas of the world) is changing. Thanks to that changing landscape it is not only not as taboo as it used to be, it’s also a possibly serious, legal business venture to get started with. Despite the shift it’s still a great place to make a lot of money depending on where you live. Today’s guest, Alex, manages a full scale weed growing operation in Los Angeles. He’ll tell us all about the legal ways to make money working with and growing weed in California.

In today’s episode I interview my stepbrother, Matt Templin.  Matt, as you will hear, is smart as a whip, and undertakes the difficult task of trying to explain some really complex chemical engineering concepts to us.  Grab a pen, paper, and a cup of coffee, and get ready to learn.

Ahhhh beer, how I love thee.  Is there anything more refreshing than a Mexican beer with a lime on a hot day?  Is there anything more satisfying than a dunkelweizen in the fall?  Anything more perfect than a complex IPA or red ale?  The answer to all of these questions is of course, no. If only we could be surrounded by beer all the time. Most beer aficionados have considered how amazing it would be to open up a brewery and make beer for a living. Few people have actually done it. Today’s guest, Drew Pool, followed through on the dream and opened up Wren House Brewing Company in Phoenix, AZ.

Life, more specifically modern life in the modern world, puts a lot of stress on our minds and bodies.  For 99% of human existence on this planet people did and didn’t do things quite differently from how they do or don’t do them now.  They did have long portions of every day where they got to be quiet, and just listen to nature.  They did follow the natural cycles of the sun and the moon.  They did not eat processed or made in a lab food.  They did not sit at a desk using their brains at max capacity for the majority of their day.  They did not put strange man-made chemicals on their skin to make themselves smell better or look more attractive.  Some of these things have really only started to change in the last 50-100 years.  While last century we thought we were making everything ‘better by science’, this century we seem to be seeing more and more people that are sick and tired with no concrete answer as to why.  I would venture to say that there is more than just a correlation there.  Today’s guest noticed the same correlation for herself, while suffering a slew of health complications in her 20s, and decided to do something about it.

The younger generations of today are unfairly saddled with a myriad of judgements and prejudices.  They’re obsessed with technology.  And yet they're the ones who brought back vinyl, film, and are still interested in print.  They’re self absorbed.  And yet they’re the ones who above all else just want to have a job with a purpose that helps the world.  They’re too busy with their technology to pay attention to what’s around them.  And yet they’re the ones that look at life through an artistic lens and see the things that most of us miss.  Today I interview two young women who showcase all of these points.  They created a beautiful magazine called Slope & Swell.  They’ll explain their inspiration for the magazine and their desire to not just make another blog.

There are a lot of things in this world that I don’t understand.  I guess that’s why I started this podcast.  You'd think that I would usually be awed and baffled by new technology, but it’s typically stuff that wasn’t made in this millennia that has me looking like that super cute thinking emoji 🤔.  Fax machines? Get outta here.  Radio broadcasting?  Basically witchcraft.  Commercial flight?  You can talk about drag and lift until you’re blue in the face, but I still can’t wrap my head around a 500 passenger plane when I look at one.  And then there are things much, MUCH further back that I still can’t grasp.  Today we learn about a really amazing one of those things, acupuncture.  Acupuncturist Joyce Kawalchuk will educate us about the 2,000-3,000 year old art.

Starting your own business can be quite the undertaking.  You have to learn about SO much in order to get your business off the ground.  One of those things that is increasingly taking up entrepreneurs’ time is simply trying to look good.  Nice design, tight branding…things that give the appearance that you actually know what you’re doing.  Things that show the world that you belong here.  The problem is that most entrepreneurs have no idea how to make great design or great branding, so they either spend a lot of money to hire someone to do it for them or they spend time and frustration trial and erroring their way to something decent.  Today’s guest, Jenn Murray, is here to put an end to that.

Let’s play a game.  I want you to imagine that you are confronted by a nefarious magical being and said NMB says to you, “I am going to take one of your five major senses, but you may keep the other four”.  So first you try to remember what your five senses are, and you remember that you have sight, hearing, taste, touch, and smell.  Next you go down the line and think of how each one has been a part of your life in recent and distant memory, trying to asses which would be the most live-withoutable.  Which do you land on?  Which is the sense that you are okay with leaving behind?  I have a pretty good feeling that today's guest just might change your answer to that question.  Dawn is an olfactive expert and helps develop scents for companies all over the world.  And not just scents to make you think, “oh that smells nice”, but scents to make you have a particular experience.  She’ll explain just how impactful scent is in your life, and the hidden ways it’s probably impacting you right now.

‘A penny for your thoughts?’  An interesting question, isn’t it?  It sure doesn't place a whole lot of value on your thoughts.  Our thoughts, feelings, experiences, people just don’t care that much about them.  Everyone’s got their own problems and they definitely don't want to hear mine.  Yet somehow, some people are paid for their thoughts, more than a penny in fact, and it’s not just famous people.  Thanks to the internet regular people just like you and me are sharing their lives and finding that people value what they have to share.  Today’s guest, Geraldine DeRuiter of The Everywhereist, shares her award-winning-blog-book-deal-getting journey with us.

Have you ever considered how difficult it must be to be a live stage performer?  You have to brave getting up on a stage, bright lights abound, all eyes focused on you.  You have to remember your lines, so many lines.  Life for the actor or actress can be pretty scary.  And if you’re an opera performer like today’s guest thats only the start of it.  The lines that Chelsea needs to memorize are typically in a foreign language that she doesn’t know.  Then, when she gets on stage, she has to sing her lines in perfect pitch, and in such a booming way that without amplification it fills the entire theatre.  It takes a lot of training to be able to do what Chelsea does, and she’ll tell us all about it.

SEO.  Search. Engine. Optimization.  Not exactly the three sexiest words in the English language.  In fact, I’d be willing to bet that if you checked your own internal ‘search engine’ those words are barely registering as something that you want to learn about.  However, you might be, like me, saying to yourself, “It is a really big part of the world though, so maybe I should at least learn about it, as boring as that will be.”  All I can say is, you’ve taken the first right step, and you are in AMAZING hands with today’s guest, Britney Muller.  I can assure that what Britney has to say is far from boring, and it might even have you messing with the internet by the end of the episode.  It’s time we take SEO from geek to chic.

Buildings (and all sorts of other structures) can be pretty darn cool.  The Eiffel Tower, the Taj Mahal, The Sydney Opera House, the list of incredible buildings goes on and on.  Usually we praise these buildings for their aesthetics, like a bunch of shallow people whose moms never told them that beauty is on the inside.  Today’s guest is here to remind us that without the inside, there would be no outside.  She makes sure that the value of a building is more than skin deep, and helps save plenty of lives in the process.

I don’t know about you, but I sure do love animated movies.  The worlds that the artists and directors create are so full of wonder and magic.  Animation is also the modern day home of the allegorical tale.  Many live-action movies have forgone having a moral or some deeper story to tell, in favor of just being a straight shot of ‘action’ or ‘romance’.  Somehow, movies for “children” have become the best place for complex, deep stories that are deeply profound no matter your age.  Today’s guest, Leo Matsuda, is a director of one such very deep and profound Disney short, Inner Workings.  He has also worked as a story artist on many other big name films.  We’ll discuss the animation industry, the magic of Disney, and the philosophical messages in Inner Workings.

I don’t know about you, but I sure want to have a job that I love.  Isn’t that a pretty universal goal in life?  To be one of those lucky people who says, “It doesn’t even feel like work to me”.  Until you get that job you just pretty much hate people like that, but you really, really want to be one of them.  Today’s guest thought she found that job.  It’s an amazing job, and you’ll hear all about it.  You might even decide that it’s your dream job.  For her it turned out to be fool’s gold.  She’ll explain why and how she went about fixing it…and she’ll tell us some pretty good celebrity stories too.

Most of us do not achieve all the things that we want to in life.  We see this as a given, that’s life.  But if we sit down and really analyze the things we fall short on, we might start to understand more about ourselves and what it is that is holding us back from what we want.  How do we talk to ourselves about losing weight?  How do we see ourselves when we have achieved the success we are going after?  How do we feel when we think about our life being completely different than it is right now?  Neuro-linguistic Programming is an approach to communication, personal development, and psychotherapy that aims to know these things.  Unlike many forms of therapy, NLP doesn’t need to know WHY you have problems with your mother, NLP just wants to know HOW you think about your mother and will help you reshape that thought.  For this reason it has made quite a splash in the personal development / self help scene.  Today we speak with a true expert on the topic, founder of iNLP, Mike Bundrant.

We’ve gotten to a point as a species where we are pretty damn wasteful.  Gone are the harmonious days of us living and working in conjunction with nature.  Today we get massive portions of food and then throw away our leftovers.  We fill landfills with packaging and the byproducts of manufacturing.  There is no circle of life, there is simply waste.  Luckily, some amazing new companies have been created that aim to tackle this problem.  Today’s guest repurposes used beer grain from urban breweries to make delicious and nutritious grain bars.  As they say, one man’s trash is another man’s treasure.