Jake Gamsky is not a rocket scientist.

“I’m actually an aerospace engineer,” he corrected me when I asked if he could be called a rocket scientist. I both appreciated his nuance in the nomenclature of his job, and chuckled at the idea of someone smart enough to turn down the opportunity to be classified as that which we use as cultural shorthand to classify really smart people.

On this week’s show, Jake talks about his day job of working in the aerospace industry, talks about the future of commercial space travel, why he sought this career, and a ton more. It’s tremendously interesting stuff learning about the nuts and bolts of what goes into a field built upon what we often think is impossible.

In the second half of the episode, Jake shares with me his “side-preneur” gig as the founder of Universal Achievement, which provides in-home, holistic tutoring and coaching services that empower students to succeed inside and outside the classroom.

What is holistic tutoring? Well, in addition to providing students the coaching they need that directly improves their academic performance, Jake and his team of tutors incorporates exercise, nutrition, and positive psychology into his programs. It’s a unique system Jake has built from the ground up, and had remarkable success with since its founding three years ago.

He walks me through what a holistic coaching session is like, where he hopes to take his business, what he’ll do once he can’t do both his aerospace engineering job and his “side-preneur” gig (which, by the way, I love this term), and provides insight for anyone looking to start their own business.

Jake Gamsky is a genuine guy with a good heart and a great sense for business. This episode is well worth your time.

Download it on iTunes, stream it on Stitcher, or listen at the Jon of All Trades homepage.

Suzi Q. Smith is a slam poet, an artist, an activist, the Executive Director of Poetry Slam, Inc., and yet another escapee from the corporate world. And this episode is once again loaded with fascinating insights from across Suzi’s life, her work, her achievement of her childhood dream of becoming “a superstar poet,” her former career, and a ton more.

Suzi is good enough to indulge me in a little bit of Poetry Slam 101. She explains how a competition works, what you can expect to see and hear at one, the history of poetry slams, and how the judging works. It’s an interesting world, and one in which I was not terribly familiar. It’s not surprising Suzi is such a great ambassador for this art form considering her role as executive director.

We spend the bulk of this episode talking about the poetry world, which is as it should be. We cover everything from how much one rehearses a piece (since we both work in coaching in this world, it was fun to geek out over the minutia of coaching techniques and rehearsals), to Suzi’s life on the road as a traveling act, to how she brought the National Poetry Slam to Denver, to how working with students will humble you and help ground your art. This is all fantastic.

About 2/3 of the way through the episode, we go way back into Suzi’s history as an account executive for Shamrock Foods and talk about the unbelievably stressful world of selling large quantities of food to restaurants. And this part of the episode is killer because I knew nothing about this world either. Suzi goes into detail about the incredible demands of this horrifically cutthroat job, recounts a manager’s insanely idiotic motivational tactic, and discusses my favorite topic on this show: finally making the leap.

Needless to say, I’m over the moon with this episode. It’s fantastically informative, endlessly interesting, and thoroughly entertaining. Suzi Q. Smith is someone I could easily listen to all day, and it was a thrill to feature her and her work on the show.

For more info about the National Poetry Slam, click here.

To see more from Suzi Q. Smith, check out her Facebook page.

This episode is available on iTunes, Stitcher, or the Jon of All Trades homepage.

I intended to talk to DJ Erin Stereo about her career and work as a DJ and turntablist – which I did, at quite length too – but I ended up asking her a ton of questions about her former career as a 911 dispatcher. So this episode is like a double shot – you get insight into what it’s like being a female DJ and turntablist in a male-dominated industry, and an incredible inside look into the stressful and thoroughly vital work of a 911 dispatcher. This episode is truly remarkable because of it.

Let’s start with 911 dispatch, because holy shit, what a job! In Erin’s own words, “You are dealing with everyone’s worst day, every single day of your life.” She talks about how her sensitivity helped her excel at the job, the rigors of the training program, and why she ultimately walked away from this job (despite its trappings of financial security and surprising level of notoriety it brought her). If this were the whole episode, it would be exceptional on its own.

Fortunately, that’s only half. In the back half of the episode we talk music, both about her gig as a DJ for KGNU, and as a DJ and turntablist. Erin is not a music freak, she’s a music superfreak. We talk about her scouring SoundCloud for new stuff, digging in obscure crates of vinyl for old gems, and how to curate a playlist that mixes stuff people know and love with new stuff they’d never find otherwise. She embraces her role as curator and tastemaker, and that’s really cool.

We also talk about her kicking down doors as a “Female DJ” as we get into discussion about what that phrase means and how maybe she’s co-opted it to undermine the implied sexism and use it to make the road easier for those that come behind her.

In short, this episode is LOADED with fascinating content about music, feminism, and emergency dispatch. Download it and enjoy! And then check out Erin Stereo on Mixcloud, Soundcloud, and YouTube.

This episode is available on iTunes, Stitcher, or the Jon of All Trades homepage.

It’s been awhile since I’ve forced myself to talk into a mic and talk stream-of-consciousness for half an hour, so let’s do that.

I went into this week’s episode with only one pre-determined question I wanted to address. It’s a question I get frequently both from parents and norms alike – “Is it harder going from zero children to one; or from one child to two?” And in my own circuitous, free-flowing way, I answer just that. And since there was a microphone in front of me, no one else around (a real rarity these days given my extensive professional obligations on top of my parental duties), and a style that takes me seemingly wherever the wind blows, here’s a snapshot of some of the things covered in this episode:

I’m sure there’s more, but that’s all I can recall off the top of my head. And I’ll be honest with you… I haven’t re-listened to this episode. I recorded it, tacked on the intro and outro, and left it alone. So let’s all be surprised together at my all-over-the-map style and see what shakes loose. Hope you enjoy it.

Available for download on iTunes, stream on Stitcher, or at the Jon of All Trades homepage.

Scoop Siemsen is producer and co-host of Your Morning Show on 106.7 KBPI fm in Denver. He’s also an alumnus of Colorado State University, and former radio star at KCSU fm. And that’s how I met him.

Radio is near and dear to my heart. I don’t know what it is about this medium, but I cannot shake it, or stop thinking about it. So it’s fun to get to do an episode that’s a bit inside baseball about it as we talk both about its future (Spoiler: Radio is supposed to have died like 10 times already, it’s going to be just fine.), and about our past with it.

One of the most compelling things in this week’s chat is Scoop’s recollection of the great flood of 1997 that destroyed huge parts of the CSU campus. He was working at KCSU before and after that flood, so he gives us a firsthand account of how the culture changed thanks to that event.

Also in this episode:

There’s even more, but you’ll just have to listen to see what’s inside. It’s a tremendously fun show – as you’d expect from a guy whose job is to have fun conversations and keep people entertained every single morning – and you can download it on iTunes, stream it on Stitcher, or listen at the homepage.

Also, watch this: