Positive Blatherings Podcast

Will Powell has been a motivational speaker, a voiceover talent, and the driving force behind The Player 1 Academy in Rochester, where kids work through math, reading, and social studies inside VR headsets and alongside personal robots. He automates his outreach to schools across the country, takes meetings in smart glasses that transcribe and fact check in real time, and juggles around 11 project...

Corey Keyes managed the college radio station at SUNY Brockport, worked as a spokesman for the Electric Cooperatives of South Carolina, and heard his calling while driving alone through the state after Hurricane Hugo in 1989. He finished seminary at Colgate Rochester Crozer Divinity School, and in 1996 he was called to West Bloomfield Congregational Church, the church he grew up in, where the cong...

Adrian Esposito is a Rochester filmmaker who has been writing, producing, and directing films for more than a decade, from Bury My Heart with Tonawanda, a family film about how the Tonawanda Seneca Nation cared for its own people with disabilities, to Greetings From Tromaville!, his documentary on Lloyd Kaufman and Troma Entertainment. He is on the autism spectrum, spent his whole life in special...

Kyle Napier is a human physiologist and health optimization coach, and the founder of Club Gevity in Rochester. His background is in kinesiology and human physiology, and he ran his own personal training business, putting clients through the workouts and the mobility work and the whole shebang while watching them stay on statins and blood pressure medication anyway. He lost three of his four grand...

Lydia Nightingale writes under the pen name L. J. Nightingale. She is an author, an actor, a playwright, and a public historian with a Master of Arts in History and a concentration in public history, and she has written plays about German women in the years right after World War II, including work drawn from her own family. Her father's biological mother was a German army nurse captured by the Rus...

Heather Saffer won Food Network's Cupcake Wars in 2012, used the prize money to write The Dollop Book of Frosting, and turned a Rochester cupcake shop into Dollop Gourmet, a low-sugar, vegan frosting brand that landed a deal with Barbara Corcoran on Shark Tank and put her products in Whole Foods and on QVC. She has a psychology degree from SUNY Brockport, two published cookbooks, and the kind of r...

Amy Hawley built Kinz because the part of her story she most needed to keep was the part she had no interest in performing for anyone. Everyone already has the birthday photos and the promotion announcements. Kinz is a private platform for the in between, the reflections and the pieces of a story that never make it to a feed. In this episode she joins Fitz at ROC Vox and gets into the comparison t...

Dean Lucas lost his son Lee to a heroin overdose on December 23, 2016. Ten years later, the motorcycle ride he built in Lee's name has raised close to half a million dollars and a wing of a Rochester advocacy center carries his son's name. This August is the last one. In this episode Dean joins Fitz at ROC Vox to walk through all of it. What the Wayne County Sheriff told him days after Lee died ab...

R. Greg Adams built a career out of turning niche ideas into national brands, self-publishing Firehouse Cooking three decades ago and landing on Good Morning America, QVC, and Random House along the way. Now he's turning his pen toward something far more personal: a memoir about surviving a 2015 sexual assault by his own doctor, and the years he spent watching police, a district attorney, and a ho...

What if the person with no superpowers, in a world where everyone else has one, turns out to be the most important character in the room? Michael Solis joins Fitz at ROC Vox to talk about Deficient, his YA sci-fi novel set in a near future where super-powered people are the majority and one 15-year-old boy is the last kind of outcast anyone saw coming. The conversation moves well beyond the book:...

Dave Mammano ran Next Step Magazine for 21 years — a print publication for high school students that grew to 17 editions and $5 million in revenue. When print died, he sold it, rebuilt from scratch, survived COVID wiping out his events business, and somehow ended up back on stage doing stand-up comedy. He now travels the country as a keynote speaker teaching businesses how to use humor and levity...

Marketing insurance agents nationwide sounds like a contradiction, but Uptown Marketing founder Martina Barley built a thirteen person, all female agency doing exactly that. Martina joins Fitz at ROC Vox to talk about her path from an unlicensed State Farm sales assistant to the self described "Michael Jordan of sales," and why the confidence that built her business almost got in the way of leadin...

Jon Goehring spent years behind the mic at Rochester radio stations before leaving it to build StoryTrust Media, a podcast production company built on one idea: your stories build trust with your audience whether you mean them to or not. He joins Fitz at ROC Vox to talk about what radio actually prepares you for, why collaboration beat competition in his business, and how two people running simila...

Sarina Morales spent years as an ESPN anchor and Los Angeles Rams sideline reporter before Bally Sports went bankrupt, she became a single mother, and everything she had built changed at once. She surveyed what came next, found WeTheHobby, and landed in the one place where every thread of her career finally connected. In this episode she gets into the psychological techniques she developed for dra...

Maria Pascucci-Maciejewski spent over 20 years helping others manage perfectionism and anxiety. She launched a national speaking business at 27, wrote a book, delivered a TEDx talk, and coached hundreds of students through the hidden costs of needing to be perfect. In the summer of 2024, it all caught up with her. In this episode she gets into the childhood bullying that became perfectionism, the...

(00:00:00) Welcome to ROC Vox — Introducing Coach Jim Johnson (00:01:03) Getting Cut and Getting Fired — A Humbling Start to Coaching (00:02:45) Becoming a Leadership Junkie — Zig Ziglar Jim Rohn and the Personal Growth Pivot (00:06:06) The One-Hit Wonder Problem — Staying at the Top Is Harder Than Getting There (00:07:03) Lead by Respect Not Fear — The Wrong Way to Lead (00:08:36) Relationships R...

(00:00:00) Cold Open: What is the Eclipse Effect? (00:00:45) Welcome Back and the Non-Conformist Oath (00:03:47) Ella's Five-Year Plan and the 2017 Missouri Eclipse (00:06:00) Building Rochester's Eclipse Task force: 750 Volunteers, No Budget (00:12:00) Co-Chairing the National Eclipse Task Force (00:14:27) The Dreadful Lack of Agency and What To Do About It (00:17:21) Bonding vs. Bridging: The Tw...

Melissa Suchodolski told someone once that getting into construction was "absurd." That was 25 years ago. Today, she runs USC Builds, a 140-person Rochester contracting firm, and a workforce development nonprofit that Governor Hochul wants to replicate across New York State. In this episode, she gets into what it actually looks like to build a company culture most firms won't even try, what it cos...

Chad Marks was sentenced to 40 years in federal prison at 24 years old — and from his cell, he wrote the legal argument that freed thousands. Chad Marks — Rochester native, published author, paralegal, and founder of Blood on the Razor Wire — joins Fitz at ROC Vox to tell the full story: growing up poor on Lyle Avenue, the drug dealing, the 40-year federal sentence, the First Step Act argument tha...

EFT tapping might be the most powerful business tool your competitors have never heard of — and Raeanne Lacatena has been quietly putting it to work with billionaires, burned-out founders, and entrepreneurs who've run out of runway on the grind-and-push model. Raeanne Lacatena — licensed clinical social worker, certified professional coach, reiki master, and five-time #1 bestselling author of The...

Before Peter Conners ran one of America's most respected poetry presses, he was following the Grateful Dead across the country in a van. Conners is the Publisher and Executive Director of BOA Editions — a Rochester-based nonprofit that has quietly won Pulitzer Prizes, national awards, and the respect of the entire literary world for 50 years, while most Rochesterians have no idea it exists. He joi...

Most conversations — at work, across the dinner table, across the political divide — are failing. Executive coach Keith Greer says the reason is simple: we're all addicted to being right. Keith Greer, Executive Coach and leadership development specialist, joins Fitz at ROC Vox for a return visit six years in the making. With 40+ years spanning clinical social work, family therapy, and executive co...

She heard a voice say "pain is coming" — and ten days later, her seven-year-old son was gone. Meg Fitzgerald joins her cousin Scott Fitzgerald at ROC Vox to talk about what happens when you decide grief is going to mean something. In this episode of Positive Blatherings, Meg shares the story behind her new book Don't Miss the Magic — a twelve-year journey through loss, spiritual awakening, synchro...

SoccerSam Fantauzzo built Salvatore's Pizza from a high school home economics project into 35 Rochester locations — then lost his memory and had to learn everything over again. Salvatore "SoccerSam" Fantauzzo, CEO and founder of Salvatore's Pizza, joins Scott Fitzgerald at ROC Vox for the season opener of Positive Blathering. Sam tells the full story: a grandfather who never stopped loving Rochest...

In this episode of Positive Blatherings, Scott sits down with Stacey Steinmiller, founder of Radical Evolution, to explore the power of personal growth and self-awareness. Stacey shares her inspiring journey from running her own therapy practice to launching a thriving coaching business. Learn how embracing self-responsibility, managing reactions, and overcoming resistance can transform your busin...