Defining Moments | A Podcast with JP and MK

The board had already decided Bullard's next CEO would come from outside the company, and Wells Bullard had mostly made peace with it. Then, over ice cream in her brother's kitchen, someone asked her why.In this episode, Wells Bullard joins us to reflect on leading a 128-year-old family company that never expected her to join it.Her great-grandfather made the first industrial hard hat in 1919 by steaming two canvas caps together. At eight, she voted with her family to leave San Francisco for Kentucky, with one condition: they could reconsider after a year. Years later, she tested whether she belonged at Bullard with a summer of ten-hour shifts on the production floor. She then spent a weekend at a whiteboard with her husband, planning how to run the company as a new parent. She became CEO when her son was three months old, and she was eight months pregnant when Kentucky's first COVID case showed up in Cynthiana.Some inheritances only count once you've chosen them.🎧 Listen everywhere: beacons.ai/definingmomentsDefining Moments is a podcast with JP Blevins and MK Wathen about the choices, risks, and realizations that shape a life.

For most of a decade, a cleared block in the middle of downtown Lexington sat open — backfilled, sown in grass, used for car shows and soccer games while the newspaper ran cartoons of the developer's children on bulldozers.In this episode, Dudley Webb joins us to reflect on what it takes to keep believing in something long after everyone else has stopped.He grew up in Hot Spot, Kentucky, a coal camp where his father was paid in script and eighty kids shared a four-room school. He delivered The Mountain Eagle by bicycle for a nickel a paper, tried his first murder case an hour after a judge handed him the file, and bought eighteen feet of a downtown block that turned into his first building. Fifty years later he lives on top of the project that nearly didn't happen, and says the reward was never financial. He just wanted to see the end result. Some things only get built by people willing to be laughed at for ten years.—Defining Moments is a long-form conversation series hosted by JP Blevins and MK Wathen. Each episode uncovers the decisions, risks, and quiet realizations that shape a life.New episodes monthly. Subscribe so you don't miss one.🎧 Listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and wherever you get your podcasts: beacons.ai/definingmoments#DefiningMoments #WillStein #Kentucky #BBN #KentuckyFootball #Leadership #Podcast

Will Stein grew up in Louisville watching Kentucky football from Section 128. He walked on at Louisville, backed up Teddy Bridgewater, and started thinking about coaching from the sideline.

What followed was one of the more unconventional paths to a head coaching job in college football — including a decision to step out of the game entirely and go call plays at a high school in Austin, Texas, when most people in his position would have kept climbing.

In this conversation, JP Blevins and MK Wathen sit down with the newly appointed head football coach at the University of Kentucky to talk about the decisions behind the trajectory. The ones that didn't look right from the outside. The ones that built everything that came after.

They cover the Lake Travis bet, what it means to coach the whole person and not just the player, the lesson Jeff Traylor gave him in four words, what he hopes his players carry out of Lexington long after the game ends — and what surprised him most about becoming a father.

In December 2025, he came home. This is the story of how he got there.

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Defining Moments is a long-form conversation series hosted by JP Blevins and MK Wathen. Each episode uncovers the decisions, risks, and quiet realizations that shape a life.

New episodes monthly. Subscribe so you don't miss one.

🎧 Listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and wherever you get your podcasts: beacons.ai/definingmoments

#DefiningMoments #WillStein #Kentucky #BBN #KentuckyFootball #Leadership #Podcast

For five episodes, JP Blevins and MK Wathen have been asking other people the hard questions. This time, they answered them.

In this episode of Defining Moments, JP and MK turn the microphone on themselves — each sharing five life lessons they'd go back and tell their younger selves, and what it actually cost to learn them.

MK sits with the wounds she almost passed on to her kids without knowing it, the fear that stepping away from her career meant falling behind forever, and what happened on a walk on the beach that quietly broke her open. JP traces the performance identity he built on basketball and business success, the four things he spent his life chasing, and what he had to reckon with after he caught them. Neither of them arrives at a clean answer. That's not an accident.

Ten lessons on identity, parenting, faith, and what it means to stop white-knuckling the life you planned — from two people still inside the questions they're asking.

When the Gold Glove finally arrived, Doug Flynn found himself more frustrated about the years he didn't win it than grateful for the one he did. It was the first time he admitted — to himself — how selfish he'd become.

In this episode, Doug Flynn joins JP and MK to reflect on a life built in the margins of expectation — a Lexington kid with no scholarship offers who signed his first pro contract for $2,500 out of a tryout he showed up to in cutoffs with a borrowed glove. He played eleven years in the Major Leagues, won two World Series titles with the Big Red Machine, and learned what it meant to know your role on a team that didn't need his ego. He also carries something heavier: his sister disappeared in January 1977 and was never found, a wound he has carried for nearly fifty years without closure. What unfolds is an honest account of achievement that didn't satisfy, grief that didn't resolve, and faith that held through both.

Some questions don't get answered on this side of heaven.

The FDIC told him to sell or liquidate. He took a breath and said no.

In this episode, Chip Mahan joins us to reflect on the handful of moments that quietly built one of the most remarkable entrepreneurial careers to ever come out of Kentucky — from a tobacco barn in Frankfort to a $15 billion bank in Wilmington, North Carolina.

The conversation moves through loss, loyalty, and the particular kind of courage it takes to keep going when the math says stop. Chip talks about losing his father at 11, the neighbor's words that landed too heavy for a child that age, and the way that morning shaped everything that came after. He traces the origin of Live Oak Bank's defining culture back to a single afternoon with T.W. Samuels of Maker's Mark — and the lesson in loyalty he carried out of that distillery. And he tells the story of sitting across from a federal regulator in Atlanta in 2008, being told the bank was over, and choosing obligation over self-preservation.

Through it all: a wife named Peggy who responded to every leap with "how much time do I have to pack?" — married at 22, still together 63 years later.

Some lives are built on ambition. Some are built on something quieter and harder to name.

#DefiningMoments #Legacy #Stewardship #Mentorship #Generosity #Entrepreneurship #Leadership #Kentucky #Banking #LiveOakBank

Each morning during the 2007 NFL season, Chad Pennington got on his hands and knees and asked God to take football away from him. His father told him to stay in the fire.

In this episode, Chad Pennington joins us to reflect on the moments that reshaped his relationship with the game, his identity, and the people closest to him. He speaks not as a former first-round pick or two-time Comeback Player of the Year, but as a son, father, and coach still learning what those titles mean.

The conversation moves through a childhood in Knoxville shaped by two public school educators, a chance throwing session that led to Marshall, and the self-awareness to turn down an SEC offer at 19 because he knew he wasn’t ready. It lands in a Cleveland hotel room at 11:30 PM, where a five-minute firing became a doorway to leading the worst team in the NFL to a division championship. Chad talks about the void football leaves, the difference between reacting and responding, and why his father’s hardest advice was also his most loving.

Some fires don’t destroy what they touch. They reveal what was always there.

In this episode, Jess Correll joins us to reflect on what it looks like when a life built around business has to be rebuilt around something more.

He talks about growing up in rural Kentucky with a father who believed he could do anything and charged him 50% interest for co-signing his first bank note. About selling Bibles door-to-door at 17, buying that first bank at 26, and building First Southern National Bank over 44 years without ever opening an account or attending a closing. About a divorce that cracked open his capacity for compassion. About a mentor he's called every Saturday for two decades — and how he doesn't spend $10,000 without checking in first. About reckless giving, the flip phone, and his father's antidote to greed.

Jess has been asked many times to explain his success. He still isn't sure it's his to explain.

Some lives are built quietly, from the inside out. This is one of them.

Before they ask anyone else, they go first.

In this inaugural episode of Defining Moments, JP Blevins and MK Wathen set the stage for what’s ahead: long-form conversations with Kentucky’s builders, leaders, and athletes about the few decisions that changed everything. But first, they share their own. JP reflects on his mother kneeling in the backyard when he was eight, telling him he could do anything if he worked for it daily and believed. Ten years later, he played for Kentucky. Then came a reckoning with performance-based identity. At 28, he left comfort for obscurity—Wilmington, North Carolina, knowing one person. Five months in, death and grief nearly sent him home. He stayed. MK talks about eighth-grade clarity that decisions matter forever, the choice to bet on family over career, and six months on her back deck in 2017 that stripped away everything trivial.

This is the pilot. The beginning. Two people who’ve walked through a lot together, now asking: what are the moments that actually define us?