How do you break free from your patterns?Meet Doug Fleener!Doug helps people overcome the gap between knowing better and doing better. His powerful story of recovery and being challenged to ask, "What If" led to him developing a transformational framework that he now uses to help his clients.Doug's "What If" framework and the differences when using it in the past vs using it for future scenarios.Key Points:how interrupting automatic habits can lead to growthwhy nothing is always an option when people feel trappedfocusing on one task at hand, rather tackling multiple issuesthe significance of the pausehow the pause influences our decision-makingthe differences in outcomes when applying "What If"how autopilot takes the backseat with the "What If" frameworkwhy we obsess over clarity and the impact thereof...and so much more!Listen to the Podcast, subscribe, leave a rating and a review:Apple: Spotify: YouTube: https://youtu.be/goyl0Mn9MmU

In this episode,  Rachael Thrash — educator, author, and Senior Director at Big Bad Boo Studios — joins Mike Caldwell to challenge the gap between student voice and student ownership. With 25+ years in education, Rachel argues that GPA-gated student councils and empty surveys exclude the students who need to be heard most. Through real examples of students solving real school problems, she shows what happens when kids are given genuine agency. She also walks through her new book Let the Learners Lead, a practical toolkit for educators ready to co-create school culture with students — not just for them

Dr. Brandon Bentz spent over two decades as a Head and Neck Surgical Oncologist — training at Northwestern, fellowshipping at Memorial Sloan Kettering, serving as a Naval officer on September 11th, and building a career that most physicians only dream of. Then, in his final year of practice, his mother was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, his father with Alzheimer's — and his hospital posted his job without a single conversation.In this episode, we unpack Dr. Bentz's story: the residency nights, the moral injury, the emotional weight of cancer care, and the moment he made the hardest decision of his career. This is not a burnout statistic. This is what burnout actually looks like from the inside of a surgical career.If you work in healthcare — or love someone who does — this one is not optional.

Schools are under enormous pressure to produce outcomes—test scores, graduation rates, and college readiness indicators. But what happens when those outcomes become the primary lens through which we see young people?In this conversation, Alexander Kopelman, founder of the Children's Art Guild and author of For Real: Helping Children Remain Their Authentic Selves in a Limiting World, explores the messages children receive about who they're supposed to be, why authenticity matters in learning, and how educators can create spaces where students are valued not just for what they achieve, but for who they are becoming.

In this episode, Priten speaks with Brad Bushman, professor of communication at The Ohio State University and a leading researcher on human aggression, about what children learn from violent media and why the same questions now extend to AI and robots. Bushman has spent decades studying how violent television, video games, music, and even scripture shape behavior. The conversation works through the mechanics of how children absorb behavioral scripts from role models, what parents can realistically control, how to weigh the evidence, and what happens as chatbots and companion robots become part of children's lives.Key Takeaways:Children learn behavioral scripts from rewarded role models, including media characters. Bushman explains that kids retrieve "scripts" for how to act in a given situation, and violent characters in media are almost always rewarded and rarely punished. Whether content is active (video games) or passive (TV) matters less than the content itself.The most effective parental mediation is the one parents do least. Restricting content and time helps, but watching alongside a child and actively discussing what they see is the most effective approach. Passive co-viewing is the worst option, because silence signals that the violent content is acceptable.Content matters more than the medium, but more senses amplify the effect. Reading violent text, hearing violent lyrics, and watching violent music videos all increase aggression, with effects growing as more senses are involved. In one study, scripture passages describing sanctioned killing increased aggression, especially among believers and especially when God was said to approve.Media violence is a modest risk factor, but the one we can actually change. Aggression is almost never caused by a single factor. Unlike low IQ, poverty, addiction, or being male, exposure to violent media is controllable, which Bushman frames like a media diet. In lab studies, just 20 minutes with a violent game produces measurable differences.Aggression toward robots and AI is a new and open question. Bushman cites HitchBot, a hitchhiking robot destroyed in the US after surviving trips abroad, and notes people are more aggressive toward robots framed as objects than as companions. Whether companion bots that never push back distort young people's expectations of real relationships is, in his words, something theory predicts but the data has not yet tested.