Pork Pond Gazette

Send us Fan Mail The weird thing about elections is how loudly we treat them like an ending, even though real life keeps moving the very next morning. Wednesday still comes. The coffee still needs to be made. The boss still expects you to show up. And the person who voted differently is still standing next to you in the grocery line, coaching your kid’s team, or waving from across the street. So t...

Send us Fan Mail “Those people” is a tiny phrase with a huge blast radius. Once I start talking that way, I’m not describing real human beings anymore, I’m describing a category I can judge, mock, or hate from a safe distance. This Kindness Matters conversation is a reset for anyone worn out by political polarization, online outrage, and the constant pressure to sort the world into teams. We walk...

Send us Fan Mail Being wrong hits a nerve for most of us, and it’s rarely about the small stuff. It’s about what it feels like to be corrected when a belief is tied to our pride, our relationships, or our sense of identity. I’m Mike Rathman, and I want to make a case for something that sounds simple but can change the way you live: getting more comfortable changing your mind can be one of the kind...

Send us Fan Mail We’re surrounded by disagreement, but what’s unsettling is how quickly it turns personal. A different opinion used to be just that, a different opinion. Now it often becomes a verdict: stupid, ignorant, selfish, evil. I’m wrestling with a question that sits under so many tense conversations at home, at work, and online: are we losing the ability to talk to people we disagree with,...

Send us Fan Mail AI can write a beautiful apology, a perfect condolence message, and a calm response when you’re furious. The real question is not whether artificial intelligence is “good” or “bad” it’s whether we’ll use it to become more compassionate, more thoughtful, and more connected, or whether we’ll use it to avoid the hard work of being human. We talk through the everyday moments where AI...

Send us Fan Mail Someone walks out of a federal detention facility into a Minnesota winter with no phone, no coat, and no clear idea what comes next. Then a small crowd of strangers is waiting with hot chocolate, spare coats, cell phones, and rides. That moment captures the question I can’t shake: what makes ordinary people decide that a stranger shouldn’t have to face the cold alone? I trace how...

Send us Fan Mail Somebody should do something. We all say it, we all mean it, and then life moves on. But there’s a moment when that sentence turns into a mirror, when a problem keeps tugging at you and the next thought lands hard: what if that somebody is me? That’s the heartbeat of Kindness Matters, and it’s where this conversation begins.  We walk through how meaningful community change actuall...

Send us Fan Mail Capitalism gets talked about like a cage match: winners on one side, everyone else on the other. I’m not an economist, but a single line stopped me cold: capitalism actually works better when it’s built on a foundation of empathy and equity. So I follow that thread where it really matters, not in charts or jargon, but in people’s lives and the systems that shape their chances. We...

Send us Fan Mail The loudest room in a school can be the most honest one. We’re talking about the cafeteria, that daily moment when kids carry a tray into a crowded space and have to answer a deceptively hard question: where do I sit, and what does that choice say about me? We map the “ecosystem” almost every lunchroom develops; the confident table with its hidden hierarchy, the quiet table adults...

Send us Fan Mail This is the Number One downloaded episode of the Kindness Matters Podcast. You can feel the country pulling apart in tiny, personal ways: the friend you stop texting, the family group chat you mute, the coworker you avoid because one comment could turn into a fight. We want a different path, so we sit down with Bill Groner, a longtime trial lawyer who represented more than 10,000...

Send us Fan Mail This is the second most listened to episode of The Kindness Matters Podcast. A tent city on the news can be easy to scroll past. For Rob Bergfalk, it became the moment he could not ignore, and it grew into Compassion Church and Compassion Coffee in Anoka, Minnesota. We talk with Rob about what it really looks like to feel “called” to something, and how purpose becomes tangible whe...

Send us Fan Mail This is the third-most-listened-to episode of The Kindness Matters Podcast. A craft night with a few moms, a pile of extra gloves, and a simple desire to stay connected somehow turns into two coach buses packed with winter gear and volunteers. I’m joined by Michelle Christensen from Golden Valley, Minnesota, the founder of One Good Deed, to tell the story behind Scarf Bombing, a d...

Send us Fan Mail The hardest kind of kindness is often the kind we refuse to give ourselves. I’m Mike Rathbun, and this is one of the most personal conversations I’ve ever shared, because it’s about men’s mental health, the pressure to stay “tough,” and what happens when we turn pain into silence. I talk through the messages many of us learned as boys: walk it off, boys don’t cry, handle it yourse...

Send us Fan Mail One careless sentence can make someone shut down for years. One kind sentence can pull them back from the edge. That’s the tension we live in every day, and it’s why I wanted to bring on Shannon Roy, a veteran trial attorney and the founder of Roy Law Firm in Denver, Colorado. She spends her life inside emotionally charged, high-stakes conversations, where communication, tone, and...

Send us Fan Mail I can't believe it's been nearly 25 years. 7,000 people step off diverted planes into a town they’ve never heard of, carrying fear, exhaustion, and the sickening uncertainty of 9/11. Gander, Newfoundland a place of moose, cold weather, and a quiet airport suddenly becomes the safest spot in the world, not because it has more resources, but because it chooses to treat strangers lik...

Send us Fan Mail A kid isn’t “being difficult” in a vacuum. Most of the time, they’re broadcasting a need they don’t have words for, and the adults around them are deciding what that behavior means. I sit down with Bobbi Chegwyn, an Australian-born life coach turned children’s author, to talk about the hidden power of everyday language, and why the way we speak to kids becomes the way they eventua...

Send us Fan Mail You can feel it before you can explain it: you show up, you speak, and it’s like the decision was made before you walked in. Now zoom that feeling out from a meeting to an entire neighborhood and you start to see what civic alienation and political powerlessness do to real human lives. I wanted a quiet, solo conversation about what happens to a community when large groups of peopl...

Send us Fan Mail A lot of people say they want to support veterans. Jon King is building systems that actually do it, one mentor match and one shared meal at a time. John spent over 20 years in the Air Force and Army, flew medevac missions, and lived the kind of pressure most of us can’t fully picture. After leaving the service and navigating disability, career shifts, and a major layoff, he put h...

Send us Fan Mail Human trafficking can feel like a distant headline until someone explains what it really is and how it actually works. We talk with Stephanie Page , co-founder and executive director of Stories Foundation , to break down the definition in plain language: trafficking is driven by force, fraud, or coercion, and it includes both sex trafficking and labor trafficking. Stephanie explai...

Send us Fan Mail A sober living home can be more than a roof. It can be a turning point. We sit down with Amber Miller , the founder of Angels House of Healing , to hear how she turned grief, addiction recovery, and a promise to break a generational cycle into a real transitional living community for women. Her story starts with losing her mother to alcoholism at 44, and the clarity that the deepe...

Send us Fan Mail  *This episode includes open and honest discussion about suicide, suicide loss, and mental health struggles. We talk about lived experiences, prevention myths, language that reduces stigma, and ways to seek help when safety is at risk. If these topics are difficult or activating for you, please listen with care. You may want to pause, step away, or skip this episode entirely if it...

Send us Fan Mail One bad stretch can make you believe you’re stuck as the worst thing that happened to you, and that’s exactly what we push back on with Jesse Lewis. Jesse is a professional stage hypnotist whose live shows vanished during Canada’s COVID shutdowns, and the fallout hit fast: lost income, a divorce, and a season of life where he lived in the cab of his truck on the side of a mountain...

Send us Fan Mail A car overheats on a scorching Sunday in 1969. No phones, no call boxes, no easy way out. What happens next is the kind of true story that quietly rewires your brain: a young cowboy pulls over, tows a stranded father and son into town, recruits a mechanic after church, and turns a miserable breakdown into one of the best days of their lives. That’s the heart of my conversation wit...

Send us Fan Mail The moment you realize “the system” can’t carry this for you is the moment you become your child’s advocate. I sit down with Ashlyn Thompson , co-founder and executive hope director of Parent Empowerment Network , to unpack the kind of courage that gets built in hospital rooms at 2 a.m. Ashlyn shares the story of her daughter Emery’s rare congenital condition, bladder exstrophy, a...

Send us Fan Mail A lot of us know the feeling: you’re doing your best, your kid needs you, and inside your own head the weather turns. I sit down with Kendall Consini Moore, the writer behind Cloudy Day Chronicles and the author of Mom’s Cloud and the Beach Adventure , to talk about a simple idea that can change family communication: giving big feelings a name kids can actually use. We get specifi...