At the Podium with Patrick Huey

Send us Fan Mail McCord Henry takes us deep into his struggles with alcohol addiction. At one of his lowest points, he woke up alone in a dark room on twin a mattress with vomit in the corners and empty bottles everywhere.  His family and friends pushed away. He says that he needed it to get that bad in order to wake up. In that dark room he had come to a crossroads. He could either get better and...

Send us Fan Mail I have often felt odd in my life. Well, more accurately I have often been declared odd or queer by those outside looking in on my life. In my mind and lived experience, however, I have just been me. Reflecting on my journey I can see why others applied the odd or the queer moniker to me. At 14 years old I became the only male cheerleader on the high school Junior Varsity Squad in...

Send us Fan Mail “I can with almost 99.9 percent certainty that we’re looking at a malignancy.” Now what do you do? Fight. Survive. Win. Cynthia Besteman straightforwardly recalls this highly personal moment in her life – when she knew she had breast cancer. She describes feeling all the blood in her body dropping into her stomach. Like she was suspended on a rollercoaster right before it plunges...

Send us Fan Mail I met Ryland Engelhart at a Deepak Chopra wellness retreat in South Carolina. If you are a food person, his name may or may not be familiar to you, but his family’s two restaurant brands in Southern California ( Café Gratitude and Gracias Madre ) are synonymous with healthy, highly tasty vegan dishes that are not named after ingredients or a chef’s daughter but are instead positiv...

Send us Fan Mail In our lives, we can look back and see how the influence of one person has impacted our life’s trajectory. Throughout the journey of this podcast and video podcast, numerous guests have chronicled the importance of that one teacher, that one mentor, that one friend who had the ability to see past the current circumstances of their present lives, to a greatness within them that was...

Send us Fan Mail You have to be courageous and set boundaries. How often have we heard that? It is a common theme in today’s vernacular. It’s common and really hard to achieve. We live in a nonstop world of 24/7 news, TikToks and Snpachats. We are governed by a voracious media machine that must be fed a steady diet of celebrity, political and faux breaking news bytes that is often predicated on tr...

Send us Fan Mail Google describes Gowanus in these terms, “In a former industrial zone around Brooklyn's Gowanus Canal, Gowanus is a developing area with a mix of classic rowhouses and converted warehouses. Hipsters and creative types head up studios and cool art galleries. After dark, the neighborhood livens up as young professionals spillover from the nearby Barclay’s Center Arena and head...

Send us Fan Mail When the students from Parkland High School held their rally in Washington D.C. to memorialize the lives taken and the lives forever altered in the shooting that took place at their school in 2017, it was the first time a group of students so visibly rejected the notion that they were powerless in the face of overwhelming gun violence that had gripped the country. The line-up that...

Send us Fan Mail Delia McLinden and her family own Farmhouse Fresh, one of the most successful product brands in the global spa industry. Built into the mission of the company is their living, breathing passion for farm animal rescue. When a client buys a product, Farmhouse Fresh allocates funds to rescue abused or neglected farm animals. The animals are sheltered at the company’s headquarters in...

Send us Fan Mail The necessity and relevance of art is a conversation needed today given that we live in tumultuous times. And if we are going to have this conversation, Lisa Channer is a voice that must be heard. She is a director, producer, dancer, performer, educator, wife and mother. She’s created new work around the world even in Russia using hidden Russian texts that didn’t see the light of...

Send us Fan Mail What’s the hard truth of Nora Zelevansky's latest novel, Competitive Grieving , you ask? You have to force yourself to break old patterns and develop into a different person again and again in your life. You must reinvent yourself over and over again. You also must do all the things you aren’t allowed to do; laugh at a funeral, take the bucket-list trip now, pursue the imposs...

Send us Fan Mail Cassandra Worthy is a global keynote speaker, author and consultant who is the CEO and optimistic mind behind Change Enthusiasm. Her three-step method of “Signal. Opportunity. Choice.” provides a blueprint for organizations in transition as they help their employees accept inevitable changes by embracing what she calls the growth mindset. What distinguishes Cassandra’s approach is...

Send us Fan Mail Joshua Banbury’s work and personal narrative are a tapestry of rich textures influenced by the wide range of music (Jazz, Folk Music, Classical, Carnatic Music and Art Songs) that he has been a student of and performed at the highest levels. He is also artistically and intellectually inspired by Surrealist artists like Leonora Carrington, his Texas roots, and the folk songs of App...

Send us Fan Mail In our conversation, Bryan and I discuss expected topics like overcoming our self-imposed barriers to build thriving careers, the recipe for effective leadership and even his own improbable, faith-driven ascension to success. But the jewel in this conversation is Bryan teaching us that if we are going to be successful as a human species on this planet, we must learn to see the val...

Send us Fan Mail Tembi Locke is a TV producer, actor, New York Times bestselling author and screenwriter. In addition to her excellent accomplishments, she is also a life-long friend with whom I have spent hours too long to measure in conversation with her. She has written a memoir titled From Scratch. The book recounts the painful death of her husband and how she and her daughter literally had to...

Send us Fan Mail In my conversation with Claudia Zelevansky, she asks unsettling questions – What happens when you get the thing you want and it still doesn’t make you happy? Does art and the theater, the very things that she has spent the majority of her life creating and thinking about, really matter? How do you handle the shame of when your dreams, the things you believed in you don’t believe i...

Send us Fan Mail Talking with Hugh Huffaker reminded me of what life looks like when a person can embrace the notion of being open and not feel bound by an idea of who they are supposed to be. Life becomes rich and expansive. Hugh is a modern-day renaissance man. Defying labels and categories, he is at the same time a jazz guitarist, thrice a business owner and serial entrepreneur, and of course a...

Send us Fan Mail As a mother, wife, educator, artist and executive coach, Jane pulls from all facets of her life and experience to remind us that it is up to us to clarify our stories and that indeed we get to write our own narratives. She encourages us to get rid of faulty notions of success and failure and replace them with those things that satisfy and fulfill us on a spiritual and emotional le...

Send us Fan Mail Do you remember back in the day when you took pictures, you would have to take the film to the drugstore and wait an eternity for the pictures to be developed? There was no quick snap, throw on a filter and post on Instagram situation. Days later the pictures would finally show up in a little paper envelope. At the very bottom of the envelope would be the negatives from the film t...

Send us Fan Mail The statistics show that the majority of our fellow Americans took stock of their lives during the fevered days of the pandemic. As it turned out we were using the time of lockdown to reevaluate what mattered to us. How could we not? Almost every system we relied upon prior to March 2020 was rendered moot against a virus we could not see. So as the world reopened, it may have look...

Send us Fan Mail Keiko Anderson is one of the smartest, most successful people I know. She is a trained social worker and a respected attorney. She runs her own thriving family law practice, and you can also find her in the pulpit at her church some weekends leading a women’s conference. But the role she is most proud of is that of wife and mother. She freely states that the nurturing of relations...

Send us Fan Mail Skyler Maxey-Wert unlocks what greatness looks like through the lens of his life as a dancer at the SemperOper Ballet in Dresden, Germany. His recipe is quite concise:  Developing strong technique and technical acumen ingrained in your body through years of training. Understanding the specific vocabulary of dance. Sticking it out even when you doubt yourself or face the ridicule o...

Send us Fan Mail Bloody Mary is a childhood game we’ve all played on sleepovers. A brave soul goes into a darkened bathroom and says the Tudor Queen’s name three times and she is supposed to appear in the mirror. The sightings of Mary are legendary. She comes complete with broken medicine cabinet mirrors and wide eyed, terrified junior high school kids shaking with fear as they wait for the appari...

Send us Fan Mail Too often today black neighborhoods are graveyards for exploded dreams as drug addiction, poverty and low expectations take root in the people and institutions of the neighborhood. In most of the world’s eyes, the souls who live in these food deserts, healthcare deserts, and educational deserts are merely statistics, not three-dimensional people with deep, real and valuable humani...

Send us Fan Mail Kathryn Hahn has played them all. From her critically acclaimed roles of Mrs. Fletcher on the eponymously named HBO series to Agatha/Agnes on Disney +’s WandaVision, and soon in her latest series Agatha: Coven of Chaos , Kathryn has left the idea of typecasting and pigeonholes in her formidable dust. At the core of her ability to shapeshift into a variety of roles is her Yale Scho...