Marissa Ruehle is a serial entrepreneur from Wilmington, North Carolina. Her ventures have helped shape Wilmington into one of the most desirable beach towns on the east coast. We discuss her life as early entrepreneur - starting at the age of 15. Since then, every venture of hers has improved people’s lives.

Her current venture, Casa Blanca Coffee, is Wilmington’s only roaster. Additionally, it doubles as Wilmington’s premiere coffee shop.

Mike Lewis is the first federally permitted farmer to grow hemp in the United States since its prohibition in 1937.

We talk about how is path to farming started with a few books on political philosophy, his love for hemp as America’s first true crop, and the promises it holds for the future of farming.

'm on vacation this week! But I didn't want to leave you with nothing to listen to.

This episode I share my three favorite podcasts from Gimlet, Wondery, and MIT that you can tune into in the absence of Resilient us not releasing an episode this week.

Additionally I remind all listeners to subscribe/follow, rate, and recommend the show! And if you want to get really involved head to nateeckman.blog to subscribe to my monthly newsletter.

It wasn’t until high school that S.L. McKinley knew he was fat. His cure, he thought, was bulimia. After that morning in the mirror when he saw his flaws he’s never been able to unsee them, even now, as a beast of a human and special operator in the U.S. Marines.

As a poet and photographer, S.L McKinley truly embodies every characteristic of a poet-warrior.

Kendrick Eckman is an actor, comedian, and entertainer studying dramatic arts at the NYU Tisch School of Arts. He embodies the adage that beautiful art is the product through hard times. As a tap dancer growing up in a blue-collar home, Kendrick was often harassed for his love of dance. Today he’s envied for it. We talk about his journey from wanna-be-creative to Air Force TAC-P and the battle for self-worth and against alcoholism that’s occurred since then and now.

As a symbol of monarchal oppression, tea was rejected, defiled, and as we all know, thrown into the sea. Americans needed a new beverage, one stimulating to the mind and tastebuds, something as exotic and flavorful as, say, coffee.

Phil Jordan is a former infantry Marine turned disaster relief agent.

We talk about the debilitating and mysterious illness that left him unable to walk and how confronting his own mortality led him Costa Rica, where he drank an elixir that practically cured him in an instant. Phil is brutally honest about the lingering effects of his drug abuse after he got out of the military and we talk about how and why he finally started to live clean(er). & MUCH MORE

To jump right into the action, start at 5:30. 

In the first HISTORY EPISODE of Resilient Us, I take a look at the resilience of Captain James Riley. Captain Riley and his crew were enslaved in Morocco in 1815 after his ship capsized off Cape Bojador, near Morocco. After him and his crew went ashore, local berbers took them as slaves, stripped them naked, and forced them to march across the desert to be sold to the highest bidding tribe.

Brasko is a glam-pop artist from Nashville, Tennessee. His music and aesthetics muddle the lines of gendered norms and challenge notions of masculinity. Despite his often shocking lyrics or looks, in this episode Brasko reveals these absurdities are just a reflection of the norms that already exist.

We discuss a myriad of topics in this episode: how he found his voice as Brasko after a lifetime of playing music, how uncomfortable he was when he first started embodying this character, and what “making it” means to him now that he’s making and playing music he’s always wanted to hear.

His most recent single, lipstick stains, is available everywhere music is heard.

Some links to topics and ideas discussed in this show:

• That word I forgot. . . sapiosexual: finding intelligence sexually attractive or arousing
• Kurt Vonnegut
• Prince
• David Bowie
• Glam-pop
• Brasko: An Artist You Should Get to Know

In this first episode, I sit down with Christopher Reed Jones. Chris is a freelance journalist that covers Afghanistan, US politics, and the VA for a variety of outlets. His work has been featured in the New York Times, Pacific Standard, USA Today, The Washington Post, and the Village Voice. If he’s not in NYC, you can probably find him in Kabul, Afghanistan. Chris and I talked about the trajectory of his life, from growing up in Missouri, to joining the Marine Corps after a freak car accident convinced h