Beyond the Draft

What if every spoonful of vanilla, every drop of honey, or every piece of chocolate carried a human story you've never heard? In this episode of Beyond the Draft, Imma sits down with culinary explorer, author, and Flavors Unknown podcast host Emmanuel Laroche to uncover the remarkable people behind Madagascar's world-famous ingredients. What began as a business trip became a mission to tell the st...

What if one lost dream became the beginning of your life's greatest story? In this episode of Beyond the Draft, Imma welcomes aerospace engineer, Air Force veteran, and author Jeff Kildow, whose passion for aviation and history became the foundation for gripping alternate-history thrillers. After poor eyesight ended his dream of becoming an Air Force pilot, Jeff found another runway, serving in th...

Some writers begin with a blank page and a dream. Robert O. Bowers began around a campfire. For decades, he collected stories the old-fashioned way, by living them. Forty-three years working for ODOT. Countless days hunting. Countless nights fishing. Miles of wilderness, quiet woods, dark lakes, and remote places where most people never go. And where, according to Robert, not everything can be exp...

He had a career most people would spend a lifetime building. Professional ice hockey coach. Director of Hockey Operations for Team Canada West. Scout for the Los Angeles Kings. A life lived in arenas, traveling the world doing work he loved. And then he walked away from all of it. Into a jungle. Into a war zone. Into one of the longest-running and least-reported conflicts on earth. David Small has...

Most of us know we need to let go. We just don't know how. We carry conversations that happened years ago. Criticism that never left. Regret, resentment, embarrassment, loss. And over time, these experiences do not simply live in our minds. They settle into our bodies. Into our posture. Into the way we move through the world. Melanie Smithson believes freedom begins the moment we learn to release...

What does it look like to spend more than half your adult life living in someone else's country, and still not feel lost? Jodi Cowles has called seven countries home. She spent eight years in Istanbul, navigating culture, collecting stories, and discovering that human connection speaks a language deeper than words. She became an entrepreneur, a publisher, a champion for independent authors, and th...

What happens when Hollywood tells you your stories aren't marketable? For Kay A. Oliver, it became the beginning of a whole new career. After more than three decades producing, writing, and directing in Hollywood, Kay was repeatedly told that female-driven stories wouldn't sell. Instead of giving up, she turned to novels, and built an award-winning writing career that now spans fifteen books. In t...

Can a cybersecurity executive become one of the world's most prolific ghostwriters? Richard Lowe did exactly that. After spending thirty-three years in enterprise technology, cybersecurity, logistics, and leadership, including two decades helping run operations behind the scenes at Trader Joe's, Richard walked away from corporate life and reinvented himself as a full-time writer. Today, he has wri...

Some books are planned. Others are written because survival demands it. In this deeply moving episode of Beyond the Draft, host Imma welcomes award-winning author and speaker Richard Ballo, whose memoir Life Without Lisa began as a private journal after the devastating loss of his wife to cancer. A published writer for more than five decades, Richard never intended to write a book about grief. But...

What if the life you're searching for begins the moment you stop chasing who you think you're supposed to be? In this episode of Beyond the Draft, host Imma sits down with actress, coach, Reiki practitioner, retreat leader, and co-author of Landing on Your North Star, Brigitta Dau. After leaving Canada at 21 to pursue acting in Hollywood, Brigitta discovered that true transformation isn't about ch...

He did not research his characters. He watched them for eighteen years. R.L. Carpentier spent nearly two decades in law enforcement, watching human beings at their most vulnerable, most desperate, and most revealing. He watched the ones who did the right thing and the ones who did not. He watched the ones who surprised him and the ones who broke his heart. And the voices of all of them stayed with...

He has spent decades in book publishing. He has worked with hundreds of authors. He has watched books succeed, watched books fail, and spent his career trying to close the gap between what writers dream will happen when their book comes out, and what actually does. Terry Whalin is one of the top 27 content producers in the entire world, with over 1,700 entries on his blog, The Writing Life. Six hu...

What if becoming a number one bestselling author changed absolutely nothing? In this eye-opening episode of Beyond the Draft, Imma sits down with author, book launch strategist, and Biz Book Pub Hub founder Robbie Samuels to challenge one of publishing's biggest myths. After achieving #1 bestseller status in 37 categories across four countries and collecting more than 900 Amazon reviews across fou...

She spent more than twenty years studying what happens inside the human body. Then she started imagining what happens when everything goes wrong. Deven Greene is a pathologist with a PhD in biochemistry who spent decades solving medical mysteries inside one of the most intellectually demanding professions on the planet. She examined disease. She found answers nobody else could find. She lived insi...

It started in a library. A little girl. Her mother beside her. A bag overflowing with books. That little girl fell in love with reading before she could fully sound out the letters. She won a young author's competition in fifth grade and made a decision she never walked back. At fourteen she was published in her hometown newspaper and received her first check for something she wrote. And then Maya...

For fifteen years she had a front row seat to one of the most important and most broken systems in human civilization. Tiffany Smith is a registered nurse who worked across critical care, emergency rooms, hospice, home health, and long term care. She watched patients and families become overwhelmed, financially strained, and emotionally exhausted trying to navigate a healthcare system that feels i...

What happens when a bestselling business author stops writing for the marketplace and starts writing for his grandchildren? In this heartwarming episode of Beyond the Draft, Imma sits down with Bret Ridgway, entrepreneur, publishing professional, business author, and creator of the children's book Games Animals Play. After building companies, writing bestselling books, and helping countless author...

He led a state through the most contested elections in recent American history. And the whole time nobody knew what it was actually costing him. David Maeda served as the Director of Elections for the Minnesota Secretary of State from 2019 to 2024. He navigated the machinery of democracy at the exact moment when that machinery was being questioned, attacked, and defended in ways that tested everyo...

What if financial freedom wasn't the destination? What if it was the beginning of your real work? In this episode of Beyond the Draft, host Imma sits down with debut novelist Lukas Gaines, a former Big Tech professional who pursued Financial Independence not to retire early, but to build the freedom to write. After years of disciplined saving, strategic planning, and intentionally building his own...

What if some of the most important conversations of your life have already happened? What if God has been speaking to you all along, and you simply didn't know how to recognize it? In this powerful episode of Beyond the Draft, host Imma sits down with Rev. Dr. David Chotka, Founder and Director of Spirit-Equip Ministries, international speaker, theologian, prayer leader, and author who has spent m...

What if the reason your book isn't finished isn't a lack of time? In this episode of Beyond the Draft, host Imma sits down with Liam Begley, Vancouver film industry crew member and author of Broken Interstellar, an epic science fiction novel written while working sixty-hour weeks in one of the world's most demanding creative industries. Liam shares how a story that began as a simple adventure evol...

He took thirty hours to come into this world. And has been wreaking havoc ever since. At six years old, Zac Baldwin watched Fred Astaire on a black and white television and leapt up with everything a child has and said I want to do that. He never stopped wanting it. And he never stopped doing it. What followed was one of the most wildly, gloriously, impossibly full lives ever brought to Beyond the...

Pull up a chair. Pour yourself a glass of iced tea. And get ready to smile. Because today's guest is going to remind you that the best writing lives are not always built in quiet studies and writing retreats and carefully curated creative routines. Sometimes they are built in classrooms full of students who needed someone to believe in them. On blind dates in high school that turn into four decade...

Every morning you open your wardrobe, pull something out, and walk into the world. You probably never stopped to think about what just happened. Courtney Barriger has. And after this conversation, neither will you. She is an award-winning artist, published author, founder of ReFashion Workshop, and the founder and designer of Holding Court Inc, a sustainable luxury fashion brand built on the radic...

Most brands do not have a strategy problem. They have a story problem. They know what they sell. They know what they do. But when they sit down to say who they are and why it matters, the words come out flat. Generic. Like someone else entirely. And no amount of marketing budget or content strategy fixes a story that was never really found in the first place. Madeline Sargent has spent her career...