In this episode, you'll hear from Brandon Drake, a relationship-driven CRM consultant who's built a 7,000+ person networking system that scores people on how genuinely reciprocal they are — not how useful they might be. Becky and Brandon dig into why "networking" makes so many of us cringe, the difference between go-giver and go-getter mentalities, and the exact red flags (and green flags) Brandon listens for in a first conversation. Brandon breaks down how he gamified his CRM with an engagement scoring system, why he refuses to work with CRMs that use "stair-step pricing," and how automation actually freed him up to be more human with the people who matter. If you've ever felt weird about networking, or you're drowning in a LinkedIn list of 4,000 names you barely remember, this conversation offers a genuinely different way to think about relationship-building in business.

Topics Covered:
• Why the "used car salesman" version of networking feels so bad, and what relationship-driven networking looks like instead
• The go-giver vs. go-getter mindset, and why corporate conditioning trains people to ask "what can I get from this person?"
• The one question Brandon asks to instantly reveal whether someone is relationship-driven or purely transactional: "Who are your strategic partners?"
• Red flags Brandon watches for in a first meeting, jumping straight to "target audience," rattling off accomplishments, not respecting calendar/time boundaries
• Green flags that tell Brandon someone is a match, asking how they can help him before he asks them, admitting a mistake and correcting course
• How Brandon gamified his CRM with a points-based engagement score built from both human judgment (tags like "community oriented" or "salesy") and hard data (email opens, replies, referrals)
• Why he has over 7,000 people in his CRM and how the engagement score helps him prioritize who to reconnect with
• His argument that automation and AI, used well, don't replace human connection, they buy back time to actually have it
• How his automated 60-day nurture sequence still routes back to real human follow-up (reconnection calls, updated bios)
• Why he refuses to recommend CRMs with "stair-step pricing" and what he looks for instead
• Who he actually works with: service-based businesses across industries, filtered by values alignment rather than niche
• His closing advice: lead with a go-giver mentality, and go read "The Go-Giver"

Find Brandon Drake at https://healthydataguy.com/

Resources Mentioned:
• "The Go-Giver" by Bob Burg and John David Mann: https://amzn.to/4gHD86z

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Podge Thomas is a queer, neurodivergent, multiracial creative entrepreneur who teaches people how to use Notion — not as another productivity hack, but as a tool for reclaiming curiosity that traditional education flattened. In this episode, Podge walks Becky through the concept of "digital gardens": a pre-algorithm way of collecting, synthesizing, and sharing what you're curious about online, without letting platforms like Facebook or Instagram dictate what you consume. They talk about why Podge refuses to use AI automation inside Notion even though it's available, how educational trauma shaped their fiercely anti-productivity-culture stance, the difference between "efficiency" and genuinely meaningful process, and how anyone can build their own "master's program" of self-directed learning using free tools and a little structure. If you've got 800 open tabs and no system, or you've felt disconnected from your own curiosity, this conversation offers a real alternative to algorithm-driven scrolling.

Topics Covered:
• What digital gardens are, where the concept originated in early-2000s blogging and programmer culture, and why it's resurfacing now
• Podge's input → synthesis → output process: collecting content, processing it in Notion, and turning it into newsletter and blog output
• How educational trauma and being punished for asking questions in school shaped Podge's anti-productivity, curiosity-first philosophy
• Why Podge intentionally avoids algorithm-driven platforms (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter) but embraces YouTube and Reddit for discovery
• Podge's decision to email Notion and request AI automation features be removed from their own account
• The difference between using tools for genuine efficiency versus getting trapped in a capitalist productivity mindset
• How Notion forces metacognition, thinking about how you think, arrange, and process information
• Teaching Notion specifically to neurodivergent people, marginalized entrepreneurs, and adult learners who were failed by traditional education
• The idea of building your own "master's program" through free online resources and self-directed curiosity
• Podge's practical workshops and free resources for learning Notion, including a DIY YouTube-in-Notion system

Podge Thomas:
• Website: https://www.podgethomas.com/
• Podge's digital garden

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Bree Nachelle isn't anti-tech; she's a NASA-trained digital strategist, mindfulness facilitator, and AI practitioner who's also brutally honest about what happens when productivity tools stop serving us and start running us. After a mini stroke at 43 forced a total reset, Bree wrote Aligned, Not Automated to draw a hard line between automation for its own sake and automation rooted in purpose. In this conversation, she and Becky dig into why "I hired five AI employees" often just means you've created five more jobs to babysit, how capitalism turns time-saving tools into productivity traps, the specific mental-load relief AI has given her as a Black woman managing chronic illness, and why real guardrails — used books, a paper planner, weekly credit audits, matter more than which app you download. If you've ever felt exhausted despite "automating everything," this one's for you.

Topics Covered:
• Why hiring "AI employees" often just creates more unpaid oversight work instead of real time savings
• The difference between alignment and automation, and why Bree's book exists to name that gap
• How Bree's 2024 mini stroke at age 43 forced a reckoning with burnout, corporate ladder-climbing, and self-neglect
• Using AI tools to fill cognitive gaps during recovery from brain fog, ADHD, and perimenopause
• The environmental and labor costs of AI (water usage, data centers, farmland) held alongside its personal benefits
• Why women, especially Black women, carry disproportionate mental load, and how that shapes both AI adoption and AI skepticism
• Bree's personal guardrails: buying used books, auditing AI credit usage weekly, printing and fact-checking AI output by hand
• Using AI to manage chronic migraines via pressure-change alerts, and to manage caregiving check-ins for her kids
• The "23 minutes to reset your brain" research on task-switching and why multitasking doesn't work
• Rejecting AI-generated art specifically, while still using AI tools for workflow and admin support

Connect with Bree Nachelle:
• "Aligned, Not Automated" by Bree Nachelle: https://amzn.to/3RwVoFl
• Bree's website: https://baronessbree.com/

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Keita Wangari is a tech founder and former Google product researcher who spends her off-hours collecting something most people don't know exists: 3D viewers and stereoscopes dating back to the 1800s. In this episode, Keita traces her collection back to a $2 thrift-store find inspired by The Devil in the White City, explains the actual science of stereoscopy, and walks through the surprising 150-year history of 3D viewing devices — from Holmes-style stereoscopes to View-Master's 1939 debut. She also gets into something far heavier: how Black people were almost entirely erased from 3D photography's history, except in derogatory depictions, and her ongoing mission to find and preserve non-derogatory images of Black life and history. Along the way, she talks about being one of the only Black collectors in a mostly white hobby space, what it means to be a "caretaker" rather than a hoarder, and the legacy plan she's already written for her collection — including a museum earmarked for African-American history.

Topics Covered:
• What 3D viewers and stereoscopes actually are, and the real science (stereoscopy) behind how two slightly different images create depth in the brain
• How a thrifted 1933 "Century of Progress" World's Fair viewer, sparked by reading The Devil in the White City, launched Keita's collection
• The surprising 150-year history of 3D viewing devices — from 1880s Holmes-style stereoscopes to the True View company to View-Master's 1939 debut at the New York World's Fair
• Why stereoscopy is still functioning technology today — used in lunar missions and modern surgery — even though the viewing devices themselves feel delightfully analog
• The near-total absence of Black people in 3D photography and stereo cards from the 1800s through the 1950s, and the handful of derogatory exceptions that did exist
• Keita's mission to find and preserve non-derogatory 3D images connected to Black history, including Howard University's opening, Black soldiers, a Tuskegee classroom, and a candid photo of Hank Aaron
• What it's like being one of very few Black collectors in a predominantly white collecting community
• Why Keita sees herself as a caretaker rather than a hoarder — researching, organizing, and documenting every piece instead of just accumulating them
• The legacy plan already built into her will, specific pieces going to her husband and collector friends, with the rest earmarked for a museum focused on African-American history
• Her advice for anyone wanting to start collecting: find one object that sparks curiosity, research it, then deliberately keep your focus narrow

Book Mentioned:
• "The Devil in the White City" by Erik Larson: https://amzn.to/44ZXBw1

Connect with Keita Wangari:
Vintage Viewers website: https://vintageviewers.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/3dcollector

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Ava Carter never expected a school cell phone ban to turn her into a vintage electronics repairwoman, but here we are. In this episode, the graphic designer, single mom, and self-described "green lady" walks us through how a hand-me-down Discman spiraled into a house full of restored vintage hi-fi radios, cassette decks, and receivers. Ava talks about the meditative pull of tinkering with capacitors and transistors, why "joy is rebellion" is her mantra for 2026, and how a mostly-online Discord repair community became an unexpected refuge as a trans person living in a conservative, isolated area. She also digs into planned obsolescence (and France's new law banning it), the professional confidence she's rebuilt through hands-on problem-solving, and why listening to one album start to finish beats any algorithm-fed playlist.

Topics Covered:
• How her son's school going "hard no" on cell phones sent Ava from Discman to Walkman to cassette deck to a house full of vintage hi-fi gear
• Why old radios are often shockingly cheap to fix (30–50 cent capacitors and transistors) compared to today's disposable, chip-based electronics — and how she taught herself with YouTube, a Discord community, and a little AI help
• The meditative, almost therapeutic pull of tinkering — how repairing radios became her "safe place" and an escape from a world that feels "horrible" right now
• Ava's 2026 words to live by, "joy is rebellion," and why choosing joy on purpose feels like an act of resistance
• Finding unexpected belonging as a trans person in an online radio-repair Discord — where the only thing that matters is whether you love the machines
• Why '70s-era audio gear was built to be repaired, not replaced, and how that connects to France's new law penalizing companies for designing products to fail
• Rebuilding professional confidence after a rough stretch in her career — and how the problem-solving skills from radio repair are bleeding into parenting, client work, and everyday troubleshooting
• The science (and personal experience) behind why a radio you find beautiful can make music sound better to you than one that's technically superior
• How every restored radio carries a story, from a stranger's "are you sure you want to buy this, it's broken?" eBay message to a friend's inherited 1960s build-it-yourself radio kit
• Ava's business, The Crafted Cauldron, the boutique creative studio she and her sister run together

Connect with Ava Carter at https://www.thecraftedcauldron.com/

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In this episode, you'll hear from Derek Beyer — writer, utopian thinker, and creator of the Substack newsletter Otherworlds Catalog — about what actually happened when he spent a full year deliberately auditing and dismantling his relationship with technology. Derek didn't go off the grid. He made a spreadsheet. And what emerged was something far more honest and sustainable than any detox challenge: a tool-by-tool reckoning with which technologies were serving him and which had quietly taken the wheel. You'll hear about the difference between feeling disconnected from life and being over-connected to tech, why dedicated devices like digital cameras and iPods are making a comeback, what utopian thinking has to do with reclaiming your attention, and how a little bit of traction — applied regularly — adds up to radical change.

Topics Covered:
• Why "disconnected" was Derek's word of the year — and what he discovered it actually meant: Derek set a New Year's theme around connection, only to realize that what was making him feel most disconnected was technology itself — the constant mediation of reality through apps and platforms.
• The technology entanglement problem: Even people who want to quit can't fully escape — soccer leagues use apps, kids' activities require check-ins, boarding passes live on your phone. Derek argues the goal isn't perfection but reclaiming agency.
• The spreadsheet method for tech auditing: Derek built a massive spreadsheet cataloging every technology in his life, including how it made him feel, what he wished were different, and what alternatives existed — then worked through it slowly, one or two items at a time, for a full year.
• Dedicated devices as a form of resistance: Pulling individual functions out of the smartphone — a separate camera, an iPod for music — reduces the phone's opportunities to control your attention. It's not nostalgia; it's deliberate disarmament.
• The surprising feeling of disconnecting: Derek expected enlightenment. What he found was mostly just... the absence of a bad feeling. Like not being hungry — it doesn't feel like much, but it's a lot better than the alternative.
• Utopian thinking and speculative fiction as tools for imagining different futures: Derek pushes back on technological inevitability. Science fiction, he argues, doesn't predict one future — it reveals how contingent everything is. Things were different. They can be different again.
• The individual vs. systemic action trap: Neither "nothing I do matters" nor "it's all individual choices" is the full picture. Derek holds both — personal action and systemic awareness — as necessary and non-contradictory.
• AI and the challenge of staying intentional with new technologies: Derek is neither a booster nor an alarmist, but does think AI is different — it's already entangled in everything, and the real work is applying the same circumspect, introspective evaluation to it that he brought to the rest of his tech audit.
• Why boredom is actually the point: Creativity, presence, and genuine connection require unstructured space. Learning to be bored again — without reaching for a device — is not a regression. It's the practice.
• The novel, disappointed idealism, and where real hope lives: Derek has been working on a retro sci-fi novel about a one-time utopian beaten down by the world. Writing it changed him — and brought him to a place where he genuinely believes that the most hopeful thing we have is the simple fact that we do not know what the future holds.

Resources Mentioned:
• "How I Disconnected from Tech in 2025": https://medium.com/@derek_beyer/how-i-disconnected-from-tech-in-2025-4c4300b11ac4
• "Positive Obsession" by Susanna Morris: https://amzn.to/4oq7YlS
• "Parable of the Sower" by Octavia Butler: https://amzn.to/4gfLguD
• "Sky Full of Elephants" by Cebo Campbell: https://amzn.to/442A9xJ

Connect with Derek Beyer:
• Substack: https://otherworldscatalog.com/

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In this episode, you'll meet Sojourner White (the self-proclaimed Train Travel Queen and founder of Sojourneys) a travel blogger and full-time content creator who has made train travel her life's work and her entry point back to a slower, more intentional way of being in the world. What started as a midnight YouTube rabbit hole and a pandemic-era urge to move without flying turned into a cross-country, cross-continental journey through Amtrak sleeper cars, Indian railways, Uzbekistan high-speed trains, and a tequila train in Mexico. Sojourner and Becky talk about what trains teach you about America's complicated history, how solo travel transforms introverts, why she's fine with wifi-less trains, and what it looks like to be a content creator who has genuinely learned to put the camera down and just be.

Topics Covered:
• How a midnight YouTube rabbit hole started everything. Sojourner discovered Amtrak's scenic mountain routes over wine at midnight in 2021, booked a ticket the next morning, and never looked back, including how a single Instagram post about that first trip revealed there was an audience hungry for exactly this kind of content.
• Train travel as analog antidote. What happens when you give yourself permission to slow down (junk journaling, word searches, painting, reading, and looking out the window) and how train travel reintroduced Sojourner to activities she used to love that have nothing to do with a screen.
• The unexpected history lesson in every train ride. From the Chinese immigrants who built the Western railroads, to the Pullman porters of the Midwest, to hearing her godmother describe sitting in a segregated train car in Detroit, how obsessing over trains became a surprisingly deep education in American history.
• Being a Black solo female traveler on trains and internationally. What it's like to "gauge" a fellow traveler before engaging, to be a constant source of curiosity in Japan and Vietnam, and how train spaces—low-stakes, temporary, neutral—have helped Sojourner stretch her trust in strangers.
• People are genuinely good, and train travel keeps proving it. From sharing snacks with strangers on a train in India via Google Translate, to casual dining car conversations, to the Japanese man offering her snacks on the Shinkansen, what a decade of train travel has taught her about humanity.
• Traveling homebody: how trains replicate home. Why Sojourner loves trains specifically, they give her a room, bring her meals, let her watch movies, call her mom, and do her junk journal while technically going somewhere. The sleeper car as the ultimate slow-travel experience.
• Being a content creator who protects the experience. How Sojourner has built systems—shot lists, themes, filming boundaries—that let her actually enjoy her trips instead of documenting every second. Plus: the places she deliberately doesn't film, and why she doesn't want to.
• Practical train travel advice for beginners. The top scenic US routes (California Zephyr, Coast Starlight, Empire Builder), when to book, what to bring, how to navigate the dining car as a solo traveler, and why your sleeper car attendant is your secret weapon.
• From introvert to extrovert, by way of the rails. Sojourner's brothers joke that she used to stare at the menu instead of talking to servers. Now she'll strike up a conversation with anyone on a train. What that shift has meant for how she moves through the world.
• Millennials, burnout, and the quiet return to analog. Sojourner on her friend group's growing preference for tech-free hangs, photo albums over Instagram dumps, and the difference between documenting for social versus documenting for yourself.

Resources:
• Sojourner White on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thesojournies/
• Sojourner White on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@Sojournies
• Sojourner White on Threads: https://www.threads.com/@thesojournies

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