What happens when you lose everything you thought made you who you were and discover that maybe none of those things were your identity in the first place?

Austin Rampt’s story sounds almost impossible: addiction beginning at a young age, multiple arrests and overdoses, eight trips to rehab, nine years of sobriety followed by relapse, fleeing the United States for Mexico, living among people connected to the Sinaloa Cartel, and eventually finding himself homeless in Mexico City. He returned to the United States having lost nearly everything, but still alive. Today, Austin is an entrepreneur, husband, father of five, recovery advocate, host of the One Last Hit podcast, and author of One Last Hit: The Remarkable True Story of an Addict’s Journey to Find Himself. His memoir chronicles the chaos of addiction and the difficult, imperfect path toward recovery, purpose, and connection.

But this conversation on Stories from Everywhere goes beyond the dramatic details of Austin’s past. Austin and Jill talk about what was underneath the addiction in the first place: childhood anxiety and shame, the desire to quiet the noise inside his head, and a deeply rooted belief that love and acceptance had to be earned through achievement. Austin describes the moment in treatment when a therapist challenged that belief with one simple question: What does a baby have to do to deserve love? His answer ultimately forced him to reconsider something he had believed for most of his life—that his worth depended upon what he could accomplish or provide.

They also explore relapse without romanticizing recovery. Austin explains why sobriety, for him, isn't simply about abstaining from drugs and alcohol; it requires continued connection, spirituality, honesty, service, and the willingness to keep doing the work even when life appears to be going well.

The conversation moves into fatherhood and the lessons Austin has learned while rebuilding relationships with his children. He talks candidly about learning the difference between simply parenting and truly being a father and why being emotionally present may matter more than almost anything else he accomplishes.

Austin and Jill also dig into intuition, identity, social media, self-judgment, and the labels we collect throughout our lives. What happens when we compare our internal struggles with everyone else's carefully presented exterior? And what becomes possible when we stop believing we have to achieve something extraordinary before we deserve love?

Austin's story may be extreme, but the questions underneath it are universal: Who are you when the things you use to define yourself disappear? Can you learn to trust yourself again after repeatedly betraying your own instincts? And what if your value as a human being was never something you had to earn?

This is a raw, surprisingly funny, deeply vulnerable conversation about addiction, fatherhood, faith, authenticity, connection, second chances and finding yourself after almost everything else has been stripped away.

Learn more about Austin Rampt, One Last Hit, and the One Last Hit podcast at his official website.

What happens when the world stops paying attention, but the bombs keep falling?

In Episode 71 of Stories from Everywhere, Jill L. Ferguson sits down with Ukrainian American opera singer, educator, and cultural advocate Irina Petrik for a deeply personal conversation about Ukraine, identity, grief, resilience, and what it means to keep caring long after a cause has disappeared from the headlines.

Born and raised in Kyiv, Irina immigrated to the United States at 21, but Ukraine remains woven into the foundation of who she is. Since Russia's full-scale invasion in 2022, she has watched from America as streets filled with childhood memories have been attacked, while friends, colleagues, and family—including her sister—continue living and working amid war.

That experience led Irina to ask a haunting question: What is the cost of indifference?

Because indifference can look deceptively harmless. We get tired. Our attention moves elsewhere. The hashtags disappear. The flags come down. Life gets busy. But for the people living through war, there is no logging off.

Irina has chosen to fight on what she calls the “cultural front lines.” She founded the Ukrainian Classical Voice Project to preserve, restore, perform, and introduce audiences to Ukraine's centuries-old vocal tradition, music that has too often been suppressed, censored, altered, or absorbed into Russian cultural narratives. Today, the organization provides Ukrainian diction coaching, IPA transcription resources, hard-to-find scores, workshops, concerts, and educational programs designed to bring underrepresented Ukrainian composers to singers and audiences around the world.

Irina also shares another story of profound loss: the death of her husband and fellow opera singer, Kevin Kees. After an initial misdiagnosis, Kevin was found to have stage-four prostate cancer, and the couple had only ten months after his diagnosis. Irina speaks movingly about continuing to love someone who is no longer here and the truth that grief is inseparable from having loved deeply.

Yet this isn't an episode about despair. It's about what survives. Music survives. Culture survives. Love survives. Memory survives. And people can choose to stand for something even when standing becomes inconvenient.

Irina and Jill explore the unconquerable Ukrainian spirit, the extraordinary resilience of artists who continue teaching and performing during wartime, the danger of cultural erasure, the difference between public displays of support and genuine conviction, and why protecting a nation's music can itself become an act of resistance.

At its heart, this episode asks something much bigger than what we believe about Ukraine: When the world grows tired of caring, who do we choose to be? Because eventually our values aren't measured by the things we supported when everyone was watching. They're measured by what we were still willing to stand for after everyone else looked away.

Learn more about the Ukrainian Classical Voice Project and Irina Petrik's work.

What if the most important business skills of the future aren't technological at all, but deeply human?

In Episode 70 of Stories from Everywhere, Jill L. Ferguson sits down with internationally bestselling author, Hall of Fame keynote speaker, customer-experience expert, and business consultant Richard Weylman for a conversation that begins with an extraordinary personal story and ultimately asks what it really means to make another human being feel valued.

Richard was orphaned at six years old. He spent his childhood moving through 19 foster homes and 11 different schools, often being deliberately relocated before he could become too attached to a foster family. Then, on his 18th birthday, a social worker arrived, packed everything Richard owned into a cardboard egg crate, drove him to a boarding house in Rochester, New York, handed him $20 and told him he had officially aged out of foster care.

Richard could have allowed those experiences to define what wasn't possible for him. Instead, he made a different decision. As a boy sleeping on a cot in a foster family's basement, Richard looked across the street at neighboring homes decorated for Christmas and decided he would not become a victim of his circumstances. He would keep moving forward.

What followed is a remarkable journey. Starting adulthood with three jobs in a single day just to support himself, Richard eventually moved into sales, helped build a major Porsche-Audi operation, became general sales manager for a Rolls-Royce dealership network, and helped transform a small specialty newsletter into Robb Report magazine.

Today, Richard has delivered thousands of presentations and has been inducted into the Customer Experience Hall of Fame. His most recent book, 100 Proven Ways to Acquire and Keep Clients for Life, focuses on turning customers into long-term advocates through relationships and exceptional experiences.

But this episode isn't simply about selling more. It's about why people choose to trust us, stay with us, and tell other people about us.

Richard argues that in an increasingly automated, AI-driven marketplace, information itself is becoming less of a competitive advantage. What can't be commoditized so easily is the way another human being feels when interacting with you. The opportunity, he says, is to personalize and humanize relationships and create experiences strong enough to turn customers into champions.

That leads to one of the central ideas of the conversation: satisfied customers aren't necessarily loyal customers. Satisfaction is merely the starting point. Businesses need to create delighted advocates and that happens through consistent experiences, genuine relationships, and attention to details that are easy to overlook.

Jill and Richard explore why customers—not companies—ultimately define a brand, why businesses should listen before redesigning the customer experience, why lifetime customer value matters more than many entrepreneurs realize, and why even seemingly insignificant language choices in emails and conversations can either strengthen a relationship or quietly weaken it.

And Richard shares the four qualities his research suggests create emotional security in our interactions with others: Kindness. Thoughtfulness. Caring. Empathy. Caring means listening to someone else's story before rushing to tell your own. Empathy requires more than seeing another person's perspective; it means making an effort to truly understand it. Those principles may sound simple. But perhaps that's exactly the point.

In a world racing toward automation, efficiency, self-service, and artificial intelligence, our greatest competitive advantage may turn out to be something technology can't easily replicate: Making another person feel that they matter.

This episode is part remarkable life story, part business masterclass, and part reminder that whether we're talking about customers, colleagues, friends, or strangers, the strongest relationships begin the same way: Be human.

What if the most important business skills of the future aren't technological at all, but deeply human?

In Episode 70 of Stories from Everywhere, Jill L. Ferguson sits down with internationally bestselling author, Hall of Fame keynote speaker, customer-experience expert, and business consultant Richard Weylman for a conversation that begins with an extraordinary personal story and ultimately asks what it really means to make another human being feel valued.

Richard was orphaned at six years old. He spent his childhood moving through 19 foster homes and 11 different schools, often being deliberately relocated before he could become too attached to a foster family. Then, on his 18th birthday, a social worker arrived, packed everything Richard owned into a cardboard egg crate, drove him to a boarding house in Rochester, New York, handed him $20 and told him he had officially aged out of foster care.

Richard could have allowed those experiences to define what wasn't possible for him. Instead, he made a different decision.

As a boy sleeping on a cot in a foster family's basement, Richard looked across the street at neighboring homes decorated for Christmas and decided he would not become a victim of his circumstances. He would keep moving forward.

What followed is a remarkable journey. Starting adulthood with three jobs in a single day just to support himself, Richard eventually moved into sales, helped build a major Porsche-Audi operation, became general sales manager for a Rolls-Royce dealership network, and helped transform a small specialty newsletter into Robb Report magazine.

Today, Richard has delivered thousands of presentations and has been inducted into the Customer Experience Hall of Fame. His most recent book, 100 Proven Ways to Acquire and Keep Clients for Life, focuses on turning customers into long-term advocates through relationships and exceptional experiences.

But this episode isn't simply about selling more. It's about why people choose to trust us, stay with us, and tell other people about us.

Richard argues that in an increasingly automated, AI-driven marketplace, information itself is becoming less of a competitive advantage. What can't be commoditized so easily is the way another human being feels when interacting with you. The opportunity, he says, is to personalize and humanize relationships and create experiences strong enough to turn customers into champions.

That leads to one of the central ideas of the conversation: satisfied customers aren't necessarily loyal customers. Satisfaction is merely the starting point. Businesses need to create delighted advocates and that happens through consistent experiences, genuine relationships, and attention to details that are easy to overlook.

Jill and Richard explore why customers—not companies—ultimately define a brand, why businesses should listen before redesigning the customer experience, why lifetime customer value matters more than many entrepreneurs realize, and why even seemingly insignificant language choices in emails and conversations can either strengthen a relationship or quietly weaken it.

And Richard shares the four qualities his research suggests create emotional security in our interactions with others: Kindness. Thoughtfulness. Caring. Empathy. Caring means listening to someone else's story before rushing to tell your own. Empathy requires more than seeing another person's perspective; it means making an effort to truly understand it. Those principles may sound simple. But perhaps that's exactly the point.

In a world racing toward automation, efficiency, self-service, and artificial intelligence, our greatest competitive advantage may turn out to be something technology can't easily replicate: Making another person feel that they matter.

This episode is part remarkable life story, part business masterclass, and part reminder that whether we're talking about customers, colleagues, friends, or strangers, the strongest relationships begin the same way: Be human.

What if paying attention to what's going right in the world is just as important as understanding what's going wrong?

In this episode of Stories from Everywhere, Jill L. Ferguson talks with writer, journalist, climate communicator, two-time TEDx speaker, and lifelong environmental advocate Rachel Lincoln Sarnoff about sustainability, storytelling, optimism, and the wonderfully "squiggly" paths our lives can take.

Rachel's career has been anything but linear. Armed with a master's degree in journalism, she moved from magazine publishing into public relations, environmental advocacy, nonprofit leadership, climate communications, podcasting, and, more recently, fiction writing. Along the way, curiosity has remained her compass. As Rachel explains, she doesn't want to get stuck doing just one thing; she wants to keep learning and evolving.

That curiosity also helped put Rachel at the forefront of conversations that much of the world is only now beginning to have. As executive director of the 5 Gyres Institute, she worked on the problem of plastic and microplastic pollution as public awareness was beginning to grow. Research from the organization identifying microplastics in the Great Lakes helped propel the movement that ultimately resulted in federal legislation banning plastic microbeads in rinse-off cosmetics. Rachel later brought the issue to the TEDx stage, asking whether one straw could change the world and, in a second talk, challenging the way we think about trash and recycling. Her 2019 TEDx talk specifically argued that solving plastic pollution would require far more than simply eliminating straws.

Today, Rachel is Senior Director of Communications at global nonprofit alliance Cascale, where her work centers on sustainability leadership and collective action. She also hosts Cascale's Source of Good podcast, which brings together leaders across the consumer-goods industry to discuss climate change, decent work, transparency, circularity, and sustainability.

But this conversation isn't about telling people to recycle more. Rachel and Jill dig into a much bigger question: Who is actually responsible for creating environmental change?

Consumers matter. Corporations matter. Governments and legislation matter. And, Rachel argues, real systemic progress happens when all three exert pressure on one another. The conversation explores extended producer responsibility, supply-chain transparency, fast fashion, plastic, recycling, emerging technology, and a future in which consumers may be able to scan a piece of clothing and discover where and how it was made.

Yet perhaps the most powerful part of Rachel's work today is her refusal to surrender to despair. After years of writing about environmental issues through projects including EcoStiletto and Mommy Greenest, Rachel realized that the constant stream of frightening climate news was becoming overwhelming. She also knew something the headlines weren't always showing us: Good things are happening, too. That's why she transformed her long-running newsletter into The Good Newsletter, where she connects the dots among positive developments in climate, sustainability, technology, policy, and community. Researching it changes her own outlook each month—and she hopes reading it does the same for everyone else. Her August 2026 edition describes the newsletter as a nearly 20-year "labor of love" devoted to finding fact-based silver linings amid difficult news.

Rachel and Jill also talk about her return to creative writing, completing an MFA and multiple novels, and her belief that fiction can change us without preaching to us. And then there's one of Rachel's most charming community-building projects: the Santa Monica Silent Book Club, an "introvert's alternative" to the traditional book club where everyone brings whatever they want to read, spends 30 minutes quietly reading, and then talks about their books—if they feel like it.

Ultimately, this is a conversation about what happens when curiosity meets action and realism meets hope. Because knowing what's wrong with the world matters. But knowing that people are working every day to make it better may be what gives us the energy to join them.

What if paying attention to what's going right in the world is just as important as understanding what's going wrong?

In this episode of Stories from Everywhere, Jill L. Ferguson talks with writer, journalist, climate communicator, two-time TEDx speaker, and lifelong environmental advocate Rachel Lincoln Sarnoff about sustainability, storytelling, optimism, and the wonderfully "squiggly" paths our lives can take.

Rachel's career has been anything but linear. Armed with a master's degree in journalism, she moved from magazine publishing into public relations, environmental advocacy, nonprofit leadership, climate communications, podcasting, and, more recently, fiction writing. Along the way, curiosity has remained her compass. As Rachel explains, she doesn't want to get stuck doing just one thing; she wants to keep learning and evolving.

That curiosity also helped put Rachel at the forefront of conversations that much of the world is only now beginning to have. As executive director of the 5 Gyres Institute, she worked on the problem of plastic and microplastic pollution as public awareness was beginning to grow. Research from the organization identifying microplastics in the Great Lakes helped propel the movement that ultimately resulted in federal legislation banning plastic microbeads in rinse-off cosmetics. Rachel later brought the issue to the TEDx stage, asking whether one straw could change the world and, in a second talk, challenging the way we think about trash and recycling. Her 2019 TEDx talk specifically argued that solving plastic pollution would require far more than simply eliminating straws.

Today, Rachel is Senior Director of Communications at global nonprofit alliance Cascale, where her work centers on sustainability leadership and collective action. She also hosts Cascale's Source of Good podcast, which brings together leaders across the consumer-goods industry to discuss climate change, decent work, transparency, circularity, and sustainability.

But this conversation isn't about telling people to recycle more. Rachel and Jill dig into a much bigger question: Who is actually responsible for creating environmental change?

Consumers matter. Corporations matter. Governments and legislation matter. And, Rachel argues, real systemic progress happens when all three exert pressure on one another. The conversation explores extended producer responsibility, supply-chain transparency, fast fashion, plastic, recycling, emerging technology, and a future in which consumers may be able to scan a piece of clothing and discover where and how it was made.

After years of writing about environmental issues through projects including EcoStiletto and Mommy Greenest, Rachel realized that the constant stream of frightening climate news was becoming overwhelming. She also knew something the headlines weren't always showing us:

Good things are happening, too. That's why she transformed her long-running newsletter into The Good Newsletter, where she connects the dots among positive developments in climate, sustainability, technology, policy, and community. Researching it changes her own outlook each month—and she hopes reading it does the same for everyone else. Her August 2026 edition describes the newsletter as a nearly 20-year "labor of love" devoted to finding fact-based silver linings amid difficult news.

Rachel and Jill also talk about her return to creative writing, completing an MFA and multiple novels, and her belief that fiction can change us without preaching to us. And then there's one of Rachel's most charming community-building projects: the Santa Monica Silent Book Club, an "introvert's alternative" to the traditional book club where everyone brings whatever they want to read, spends 30 minutes quietly reading, and then talks about their books—if they feel like it.

Ultimately, this is a conversation about what happens when curiosity meets action and realism meets hope. Because knowing what's wrong with the world matters. But knowing that people are working every day to make it better may be what gives us the energy to join them.

What happens when storytelling isn't simply what you do, but the way you understand the world?

In Episode 68 of Stories from Everywhere, Jill L. Ferguson sits down with actor, voice artist, and prolific audiobook narrator Maria Marquis for a lively conversation about creativity, connection, curiosity, and the surprising places a life in storytelling can lead.

Maria's love affair with performance began when she was five years old—not as the princess, but as the pea in The Princess and the Pea. From children's theater in Wisconsin to award-winning stage performances in California, voiceover work, and roughly 170 audiobook narrations, Maria has built a career around bringing characters and stories to life. But for Maria, acting is about much more than applause. She describes storytelling as an exercise in "radical empathy," the willingness to step inside someone else's experience, understand why they make the choices they do, and perhaps open our own hearts a little wider in the process.

Jill and Maria explore what it takes to transform an audiobook into what feels like a one-person radio play, why Maria meticulously develops distinct voices for her characters, and how listening to audiobooks turned long drives through Bay Area traffic into the inspiration for an entirely new branch of her career.

They also venture far beyond the recording booth. Maria shares how Dungeons & Dragons created "accelerated friendship" during the pandemic and brought people into her life who ultimately became dear friends and creative collaborators. She talks about why audience reactions mean more to her than awards, the unexpected power of romance fiction, and why creativity belongs to everyone, not only people who call themselves artists.

And then there is Ned—formally Eddard Bark, Paw of the King—Maria's enormous, fluffy golden retriever, whose relationship with Maria's young daughter and a tiny dachshund named Penny provides some of the episode's funniest and sweetest moments.

The conversation also reveals another fascinating way Maria uses her acting skills: working as a standardized patient to help medical students practice empathy and the human side of medicine. For Maria, whether she's onstage, behind a microphone, around a D&D table, or helping a future doctor learn how to communicate with someone on one of the worst days of their life, the common thread is unmistakable: stories help us understand one another.

Funny, warm, thoughtful, and delightfully nerdy, this episode is a celebration of imagination, friendship, books, dogs, and the extraordinary connections that can happen when we stay curious about other people.

And Maria leaves listeners with one final proclamation worth remembering: Audiobooks count as reading.

What happens when adventure isn’t something you take a vacation to find, but a way you learn to live?

In Episode 67 of Stories from Everywhere, Jill L. Ferguson sits down with entrepreneur, author, marketer, traveler, mountaineer, husband, and father Tim Christiansen for a conversation about what can happen when we deliberately step beyond the familiar.

For Tim, that started early. Raised in an entrepreneurial family where turning 16 meant starting a business, Tim took a slightly different route: he decided he wanted to write a book. The result was Even If Your Toes Turn Purple, co-authored with his father, Rich Christiansen, when Tim was still a teenager. Today, he is the founder of digital marketing agency Adventure Yeti—a company he launched while attending Southern Utah University during the COVID era. Southern Utah University later recognized Tim and Adventure Yeti as the $10,000 winner of its 2024 S4 Competition.

But entrepreneurship is only part of Tim’s story.

He grew up in a family that believed in rites of passage, difficult experiences, service, travel, and intentionally exposing children to a world much larger than their own. At 10, Tim traveled to Nepal for the wedding of the Nepalese woman he considers his older sister and stood in the Everest region—an experience that profoundly altered the way he viewed other people and cultures. He still remembers watching a Sherpa guide kick rocks from the trail simply so the next traveler wouldn’t stumble.

At 14, Tim climbed Mount Kilimanjaro with members of his family, learning firsthand that some of the hardest challenges are as mental as they are physical. Later, at 18, he left home for two years to serve as a missionary in Argentina, learning Spanish, living among people whose lives looked very different from his own, and discovering that service can take many forms—from helping build houses to helping someone change the direction of his life.

Now 27 and raising a young daughter of his own, Tim is thinking about which family traditions he wants to preserve, which ones he wants to adapt, and how to give the next generation the same sense of curiosity, resilience, responsibility, and connection that shaped him.

This wide-ranging conversation explores entrepreneurship, parenting, faith, travel, cultural differences, hard things, family legacy, service, and why the labels we put on ourselves and others can keep us from recognizing how much we share.

Because beneath different countries, religions, traditions, languages, and circumstances is the same human experience. As Tim puts it, life is a grand adventure. Meet people. Dance. Smile broadly. And live it fully.

What if the greatest legacy you'll ever leave isn't your career, your bank account, or even your name, but a single idea that quietly changes someone else's life?

In this thoughtful episode of Stories from Everywhere, Jill L. Ferguson sits down with award-winning author, speaker, and leadership expert Richard V. Battle to explore the stories that shape nations—and the quieter stories that shape families. Best known for his AmeriCANS Who Made America series, Richard shares why he believes history is less about famous names and more about ordinary people who chose courage, responsibility, and action when it mattered most. Together, Jill and Richard move far beyond dates and historical facts into a conversation about legacy, gratitude, honor, and purpose. They discuss forgotten figures like Mary Katherine Goddard, whose courageous decision to print her own name on the Declaration of Independence carried enormous personal risk, and the remarkable influence of Sam Houston's mother, whose single word—honor—helped shape the character of one of Texas' most influential leaders.

But some of the most moving moments come from Richard's own life.

He shares the heartbreaking loss of his infant son, how writing through grief became an unexpected source of healing, and the extraordinary encounter more than twenty years later with a grieving father who heard one radio interview at exactly the moment he needed hope. It's a story that reminds us we rarely know when our words, our kindness, or even our pain may become someone else's lifeline.

Jill and Richard also explore questions that feel especially relevant today:

• What does honor really mean in modern life?

• Are we teaching history—or merely memorizing facts?

• Why do so many people lose their sense of purpose after retirement?

• How can grandparents, parents, teachers, and mentors shape lives they'll never live long enough to see?

• And what responsibility do we have to future generations?

Whether you're fascinated by history, passionate about leadership, navigating loss, or simply wondering what kind of difference one ordinary person can make, this conversation is ultimately about the ripple effects of a life well lived.

As Richard reminds us, quoting Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes: "A mind stretched by a new idea cannot return to its previous dimension." By the end of this episode, yours just might be one of them.