Advertise on podcast: Positive Blatherings Podcast

Will Powell has been a motivational speaker, a voiceover talent, and the driving force behind The Player 1 Academy in Rochester, where kids work through math, reading, and social studies inside VR headsets and alongside personal robots. He automates his outreach to schools across the country, takes meetings in smart glasses that transcribe and fact check in real time, and juggles around 11 projects at once. Fifteen years ago he shelved an idea for a puppet show because it needed a puppet builder in Canada, puppeteers in Nebraska and California, and a ton of money. Now he builds it on a laptop. In this episode he talks about why ChatGPT is just the beginning, the AI agent that reaches out to 20 school leaders every morning at 8:00 and books the Zoom call without him touching a keyboard, and his warning that anyone who doesn't know AI in three years is done. He and Fitz get into layoffs and universal basic income, the environmental cost of data centers, whether college is still worth it, AI slop and the one sentence that fixes it, and why so many local AI experts don't hold up to a real question. He also shares how he learns (YouTube, a stack of notebooks, and one big new tool every 90 days), why AI is a tool and not a second brain, and how he's putting it to work on ROC Recode and the Hip Hoppets, before dropping Fitz into his own AI-generated studio for the closing segment. CONNECT The Player 1 Academy → https://www.player1academy.org Will Motivates → https://willmotivates.com ROC Vox → https://rocvox.com New episodes every Tuesday. Recorded at ROC Vox Recording & Production in Bushnell's Basin, NY. Learn more at https://rocvox.com Recorded at ROC Vox Recording and Production Studios, Rochester, NY.

Corey Keyes managed the college radio station at SUNY Brockport, worked as a spokesman for the Electric Cooperatives of South Carolina, and heard his calling while driving alone through the state after Hurricane Hugo in 1989. He finished seminary at Colgate Rochester Crozer Divinity School, and in 1996 he was called to West Bloomfield Congregational Church, the church he grew up in, where the congregation grew like gangbusters. Then the pandemic had him preaching to an empty sanctuary, with photos of his congregation taped into their favorite pews so he wouldn't be alone, and it burned him to a crisp. In this episode he talks about why a call isn't something that suddenly arrives but something you finally uncover enough to hear, how stepping away to lead the Haden Institute brought him back to the pulpit, and the five-day window that led him to Mountain Rise United Church of Christ in Fairport, recorded on his 21st day as pastor. He and Fitz get into ego and self-care, gratitude and grief after losing his brother in 2017, regret, why it's harder to forgive yourself than someone else, and why he keeps both a therapist and a spiritual director in his corner. He also shares why he believes faith doesn't require a church, and where to find his writing on Substack. CONNECT Corey Keyes on Substack → https://coreykeyes.substack.com Mountain Rise United Church of Christ → https://mtriseucc.org ROC Vox → https://rocvox.com New episodes every Tuesday. Recorded at ROC Vox Recording & Production in Bushnell's Basin, NY. Learn more at https://rocvox.com  Recorded at ROC Vox Recording and Production Studios, Rochester, NY.

Adrian Esposito is a Rochester filmmaker who has been writing, producing, and directing films for more than a decade, from Bury My Heart with Tonawanda, a family film about how the Tonawanda Seneca Nation cared for its own people with disabilities, to Greetings From Tromaville!, his documentary on Lloyd Kaufman and Troma Entertainment. He is on the autism spectrum, spent his whole life in special education, and makes a point of putting people with disabilities in the kinds of movies you would never expect to see them in. His latest, Special Needs Revolt!, took six years to get made. In 2023, with the cast finally secured and the crowdfunding still short, he and his mom decided to pay for it themselves. In this episode he talks about the action comedy at the center of Special Needs Revolt!, a Rambo style hero with Down syndrome who takes down a dictator who has sent people with disabilities back to institutions, and the Troma, South Park, and Josh "The Ponceman" Perry influences behind it. He gets into the SAG-AFTRA complications that kept Perry out of the cast, why he believes ableism shaped how some of his crew treated him, the cue cards that helped lead actor Nolan Tierce deliver the film's closing speech, and the day he broke down and cried when an actor threatened to walk off halfway through production. He also shares where he stands on AI in filmmaking, the disability language he is comfortable with and why only the villains use the R word, and his next projects, Campfire Stories and a horror film called Wrong Town. Special Needs Revolt! screens Thursday, October 1 at 7:30 PM at The Little Theatre in Rochester. #SpecialNeedsRevolt, #DisabilityRepresentation, #IndependentFilm, #AutismSpectrum, #PositiveBlatherings, #ROCVox, #DownSyndrome, #RochesterFilm, #Troma Recorded at ROC Vox Recording and Production Studios, Rochester, NY.

Kyle Napier is a human physiologist and health optimization coach, and the founder of Club Gevity in Rochester. His background is in kinesiology and human physiology, and he ran his own personal training business, putting clients through the workouts and the mobility work and the whole shebang while watching them stay on statins and blood pressure medication anyway. He lost three of his four grandparents to chronic disease before he was 15. By the time he and his high school sweetheart, now his wife, got to college, she had had a full thyroidectomy for thyroid cancer. He has spent the last ten years on a single question: why. In this episode he gets into the 13 DNA methylation pathways he reads, what a panel tells him about a person before they say a word, and why he tests DNA, gut, and blood together. He covers the 38 trillion bacteria that decide what you crave, the mold in cheap coffee, the grass-fed labeling loophole, why he calls blood sugar the root of all disease in this country, and the case for Alzheimer's as type 3 diabetes. He also gets into why strength training matters roughly twice as much as cardio, what dopamine has to do with addiction, and how to pick a supplement in an industry the FDA does not regulate. Then he talks about what he is building now, and why the mission is getting this education to the people who cannot afford the programs. CONNECT Club Gevity → https://gevityclub.com Club Gevity on Instagram → https://www.instagram.com/gevityclub ROC Vox → https://rocvox.com New episodes every Tuesday. Recorded at ROC Vox Recording & Production in Bushnell's Basin, NY. Learn more at https://rocvox.com  Recorded at ROC Vox Recording and Production Studios, Rochester, NY.

Lydia Nightingale writes under the pen name L. J. Nightingale. She is an author, an actor, a playwright, and a public historian with a Master of Arts in History and a concentration in public history, and she has written plays about German women in the years right after World War II, including work drawn from her own family. Her father's biological mother was a German army nurse captured by the Russians who escaped the camp and made it back to Germany. Her debut novel Drawn began as a pandemic project in March 2020 and became book one of the Lovett and Swire series. For years before that she believed alcohol made her more creative, and she used to get drunk on purpose to write. In this episode she gets into the January 2019 sober date that changed how she works, the bipolar Type 1 diagnosis she talks about openly because a high school friend she had not spoken to in fifteen years found her old podcast episode and said it gave her hope for her nine year old son, and the two hour writing blocks she asks her husband to end because she will otherwise write until midnight. She also talks about the indie publisher that shut down a couple of months after Drawn came out, the first editions still sitting in the trunk of her car, the second edition she re-released on July 7, and why she will not let AI touch any part of her process. Book two is underway, with no publisher and no deadline except the ones she sets herself.  CONNECT Drawn, second edition → https://shop.ingramspark.com/b/084?params=cg8ZjG38q6BNf9TVpYfCUzkHXlIqUsaYoMyRfC0QWGo  L. J. Nightingale →https://lj-nightingale.squarespace.com/ L. J. Nightingale on Instagram → @ljnightingale ROC Vox → https://rocvox.com New episodes every Tuesday. Recorded at ROC Vox Recording & Production in Bushnell's Basin, NY. Learn more at https://rocvox.com  Recorded at ROC Vox Recording and Production Studios, Rochester, NY.

Heather Saffer won Food Network's Cupcake Wars in 2012, used the prize money to write The Dollop Book of Frosting, and turned a Rochester cupcake shop into Dollop Gourmet, a low-sugar, vegan frosting brand that landed a deal with Barbara Corcoran on Shark Tank and put her products in Whole Foods and on QVC. She has a psychology degree from SUNY Brockport, two published cookbooks, and the kind of resume most entrepreneurs in this city would trade for. Today she advises startups from Canandaigua and lives with her dog Donald. In January her husband died, and she started posting unfiltered videos about grief to an audience that had only ever known her for frosting. In this episode she gets into the toxic positivity she has been fielding ever since, the decade of therapy that stopped working, why every group therapy session leaves her feeling worse, and the theory about new souls and old souls that almost nobody but her husband knew. She talks about bailing on a cruise a week before it sailed, booking a one-way ticket to Portugal to find out if she could move there, and disliking nearly every place she landed. She and Fitz also get into her husband's death by suicide, why she thinks people are so afraid of negativity, and what a person does with themselves after admitting they have no professional ambitions left. She is not selling anything, which is exactly why the conversation goes where it goes. CONNECT  Heather Saffer on Instagram → https://www.instagram.com/realheathersaffer Heather Saffer on LinkedIn → https://www.linkedin.com/in/heathersaffer ROC Vox → https://rocvox.com New episodes every Tuesday. Recorded at ROC Vox Recording & Production in Bushnell's Basin, NY. Learn more at https://rocvox.com Recorded at ROC Vox Recording and Production Studios, Rochester, NY.

Amy Hawley built Kinz because the part of her story she most needed to keep was the part she had no interest in performing for anyone. Everyone already has the birthday photos and the promotion announcements. Kinz is a private platform for the in between, the reflections and the pieces of a story that never make it to a feed. In this episode she joins Fitz at ROC Vox and gets into the comparison trap, why progress is almost impossible to see while you are inside it, and how she replaced research and outside opinions with alignment as her decision filter. She also talks about making choices as the person who already has the outcome, the trademark detour she now laughs about, why the idea was never the asset, running founder and stepmom and senior manager on one operating system, and why forcing action when your body is asking for rest costs more than it produces.  CONNECT Kinz → https://www.bekinz.com ROC Vox → https://rocvox.com Salvatore's → https://www.salvatores.com New episodes every Tuesday. Recorded at ROC Vox Recording & Production in Bushnell's Basin, NY. Learn more at https://rocvox.com  Recorded at ROC Vox Recording and Production Studios, Rochester, NY.

Dean Lucas lost his son Lee to a heroin overdose on December 23, 2016. Ten years later, the motorcycle ride he built in Lee's name has raised close to half a million dollars and a wing of a Rochester advocacy center carries his son's name. This August is the last one. In this episode Dean joins Fitz at ROC Vox to walk through all of it. What the Wayne County Sheriff told him days after Lee died about bags deliberately made strong enough to kill. Why he puts his arm around the people selling the drug that took his son. What a decade of turning grief into a fundraiser actually costs, including the crash that comes every year the week after the ride. He also lays out exactly what happens on ride day, where every dollar goes now, and what the line on the back of this year's shirt means.  CONNECT Lee Lucas Memorial Poker Run → https://leelucasride.com/ Father Tracy Advocacy Center → https://www.fathertracycenter.org  ROC Vox → https://rocvox.com New episodes every Tuesday. Recorded at ROC Vox Recording & Production in Bushnell's Basin, NY. Learn more at https://rocvox.com Recorded at ROC Vox Recording and Production Studios, Rochester, NY.

R. Greg Adams built a career out of turning niche ideas into national brands, self-publishing Firehouse Cooking three decades ago and landing on Good Morning America, QVC, and Random House along the way. Now he's turning his pen toward something far more personal: a memoir about surviving a 2015 sexual assault by his own doctor, and the years he spent watching police, a district attorney, and a hospital system look away. In this episode he walks through what happened, why the Brighton Police Department, Rochester Police Department, and Monroe County's then-district attorney declined to act, and how a recorded admission from Dr. Gareth Warren eventually helped him win in court and expose that his doctor was never actually board certified. He also talks candidly about the data on male sexual assault survivors, and why he sees survival as a lifelong process rather than a finish line. CONNECT  Strong Survivor (preorder) → https://thestrongsurvivor.com Salvatore's Pizza → https://salvatores.com ROC Vox → https://rocvox.com New episodes every Tuesday. Recorded at ROC Vox Recording & Production in Bushnell's Basin, NY. Learn more at https://rocvox.com Recorded at ROC Vox Recording and Production Studios, Rochester, NY.

What if the person with no superpowers, in a world where everyone else has one, turns out to be the most important character in the room? Michael Solis joins Fitz at ROC Vox to talk about Deficient, his YA sci-fi novel set in a near future where super-powered people are the majority and one 15-year-old boy is the last kind of outcast anyone saw coming. The conversation moves well beyond the book: Michael's coming out story, Fitz's experience raising a trans son, what it takes to get your book rights back and build your own press from scratch, and what 20 years responding to Ebola outbreaks and floods in West Africa has to do with writing fiction. In this episode, Michael walks through the ability hierarchy he built for the novel and why he made it as brutal as he did, the personal experiences woven into the characters without ever appearing by name in the text, what happens when the only person who responded right to a coming out said just three words, and why he walked away from humanitarian work and moved to Rochester to run Writers and Books and release his books on his own terms.  CONNECT Michael Solis: https://michaelsolisauthor.com Writers and Books: https://wab.org ROC Vox: https://rocvox.com Salvatore's: https://salvatores.com New episodes every Tuesday. Recorded at ROC Vox in Bushnell's Basin, NY.  Recorded at ROC Vox Recording and Production Studios, Rochester, NY.

Dave Mammano ran Next Step Magazine for 21 years — a print publication for high school students that grew to 17 editions and $5 million in revenue. When print died, he sold it, rebuilt from scratch, survived COVID wiping out his events business, and somehow ended up back on stage doing stand-up comedy. He now travels the country as a keynote speaker teaching businesses how to use humor and levity to grow leadership, culture, and retention. He's also entrepreneur-in-residence at the Golisano Institute and the U of R Simon School's Ain Center for Entrepreneurship. In this episode he gets into selling Next Step after 21 years and what it really feels like to let go of something you built, how he launched the Avanti Entrepreneur Network from nothing, why COVID knocked him down twice, how reviving his stand-up comedy roots turned into a full-time speaking career, what he sees in today's young entrepreneurs that gives him real hope, the value of truly disconnecting (lessons from three weeks in Sicily with no Wi-Fi), and his next big idea, a road trip TV show called The Good Business Tour. CONNECT  The David Mammano Show → https://davidmammano.com ROC Vox → https://rocvox.com New episodes of Positive Blatherings drop every Tuesday.  Recorded at ROC Vox Recording & Production in Bushnell's Basin,  NY. Learn more at https://rocvox.com  Recorded at ROC Vox Recording and Production Studios, Rochester, NY.

Marketing insurance agents nationwide sounds like a contradiction, but Uptown Marketing founder Martina Barley built a thirteen person, all female agency doing exactly that. Martina joins Fitz at ROC Vox to talk about her path from an unlicensed State Farm sales assistant to the self described "Michael Jordan of sales," and why the confidence that built her business almost got in the way of leading her team. In this episode, you'll learn how Martina grew Uptown Marketing from three founders to thirteen employees, why she believes sales and leadership are two completely different skill sets, how she convinces insurance agents to actually invest in their online presence, and what she tells clients about AI replacing, or not replacing, their jobs. CHAPTERS CONNECT Uptown Marketing → https://uptownmarketing.com The Marketing Girl (book) → https://www.amazon.com/Marketing-Girl-Trusting-Intuition-Confidence/dp/1956464484 ROC Vox → https://rocvox.com Salvatore's → https://salvatores.com New episodes of Positive Blatherings drop every Tuesday. Recorded at ROC Vox Recording & Production in Bushnell's Basin, NY. Learn more at https://rocvox.com  Recorded at ROC Vox Recording and Production Studios, Rochester, NY.

Jon Goehring spent years behind the mic at Rochester radio stations before leaving it to build StoryTrust Media, a podcast production company built on one idea: your stories build trust with your audience whether you mean them to or not. He joins Fitz at ROC Vox to talk about what radio actually prepares you for, why collaboration beat competition in his business, and how two people running similar races figured out they weren't really competing at all. In this episode, Jon explains why he tells his Brockport students not to marry radio, the moment he stopped auditioning for everything and started referring work to other talent, how faith shapes the way he runs StoryTrust, and what he'd tell his 15-year-old self about ignoring everyone else's formula for success.  CONNECT  StoryTrust Media (Jon Goehring) → https://storytrust.media Limitless Leadership Lounge → https://limitlessleadershippodcast.com ROC Vox → https://rocvox.com New episodes every Tuesday. Recorded at ROC Vox Recording & Production in Bushnell's Basin, NY. Learn more at https://rocvox.com Recorded at ROC Vox Recording and Production Studios, Rochester, NY.

Sarina Morales spent years as an ESPN anchor and Los Angeles Rams sideline reporter before Bally Sports went bankrupt, she became a single mother, and everything she had built changed at once. She surveyed what came next, found WeTheHobby, and landed in the one place where every thread of her career finally connected. In this episode she gets into the psychological techniques she developed for drawing out reluctant NFL players, the framework she built for grieving without getting stuck, why she argued at Newhouse in 2004 that content belongs on YouTube and Facebook before either platform supported video, the near-death experiences that explain why she still has what she calls zest for life, and the Bronx baseball story she used to get into Syracuse, where a 15-year-old girl showed up to practice on Monday after an entire opposing team sat down on the field to protest her. CONNECT Sarina Morales on Instagram → @moralesmorales WeTheHobby → https://wethehobby.com ROC Vox → https://rocvox.com Recorded at ROC Vox Recording and Production Studios, Rochester, NY.

Maria Pascucci-Maciejewski spent over 20 years helping others manage perfectionism and anxiety. She launched a national speaking business at 27, wrote a book, delivered a TEDx talk, and coached hundreds of students through the hidden costs of needing to be perfect. In the summer of 2024, it all caught up with her. In this episode she gets into the childhood bullying that became perfectionism, the 3.92 GPA that came with panic attacks in college bathrooms, and why none of it was enough to stop a complete nervous system breakdown, a suicide attempt, and 34 days in a psychiatric hospital over the holidays. She also talks about what actually pulled her back, why nutrition belongs in every mental health conversation, and what she is building now. CONNECT You Can Bounce Back → https://youcanbounceback.com Campus Calm → https://campuscalm.com ROC Vox → https://rocvox.com New episodes every Tuesday. Recorded at ROC Vox Recording & Production in Pittsford, NY. Learn more at https://rocvox.com Recorded at ROC Vox Recording and Production Studios, Rochester, NY.