Joel Goodman has been a client, a collaborator, and a friend for more than 15 years. And yet I learned about his origin story I never knew before. The part about growing up around the hospitality industry — a great-uncle who owned a hotel corporation, friends who worked the restaurant floor — reframed everything I thought I understood about where Hospitable Design actually came from. It didn't start as a web framework. It started as a way of being in the world.

Jen Lonchar told me this industry is "150% built on relationships." I've spent 30 years finding out how right she is...

I've taught eight roles of storytelling in workshops for thirty years. Then Jack Martin said something on tape that handed me a ninth — and quietly changed the framework I'll use from here on out.

Terry Flannery has been the first person to hold her job three times over. The campaigns everyone remembers — Fear the Turtle, Wonk — looked bold from the outside. What you don't see is the discipline underneath. A conversation about the work behind the work.

Three theologians walk into a bar. It actually happened. AMA 2025. Devin Purgason, Mallory Willsea, and me. And the thread we pulled on — about what seminary trains you to do that marketing school doesn't — changes how you hear everything Devin has to say about his work. He'd never put it together before. Neither had we.

If you work in higher ed advancement today, there's a very good chance you are running plays written by Ashley Budd. But while the industry happily copied her digital tactics over the last 15 years, they almost entirely missed her underlying argument.