To see him now — making records for a major label and touring the world with a rock icon — you’d never guess how close musician and producer Jerry Fuentes came to missing out on his dream: four days and $400.

Dropping in via Zoom from his home studio in Nashville, the Last Bandoleros frontman walks us through the early days of Texas burger joints and tourist traps, his hardscrabble Brooklyn years, and the big break in Los Angeles that almost never happened.

He also explains how technology has changed the music-making process, what he’s learned from (and about) frequent collaborator Sting, and why his own band’s biggest blessing is also a curse. Enjoy.

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As Senior Director of Strategy and Partnerships for B Lab U.S. & Canada, Kara Peck has her hands in Business Development, Community Development, Strategy, and Partnerships for companies of all shapes and sizes -- which is no accident, since B Lab's mission is built around the idea that the power of business should be used for good.

Globally there are more than 4,000 certified B Corporations in 77 countries, each of which opens itself up to be tracked and evaluated on things like environmental performance, public transparency, and legal and social accountability. The idea is to redefine success as a more comprehensive metric that includes not just bottom-line profit, but also the level of positive impact companies have on employees, communities, and the environment.

Kara dropped in (via Zoom) from her home in Colorado to talk about women in leadership, the cost of true innovation, and what it means to be a conscious consumer. (For good measure, we also cover climate change, cookie dough, and the carbon footprint of her running shoes.) Enjoy.

Get the full show notes, including links and videos, right here.

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In his second term as Bexar County (TX) Commissioner, Tommy Calvert's list of accomplishments is dizzying: He's the youngest Commissioner of the 16th most populous county in America, and also its first African-American Commissioner. He's negotiated multi-million dollar deals and chaired committees overseeing everything from Cyber and IT to the land usage of a major Air Force base. He's served on the National Committee for US-China Relations Young Leaders forum. He once led an organization that raised $50 million to fight human trafficking. He's flown a fighter jet.

In this installment of Something To Look Forward To, Calvert shares his unique insight into several front-page issues he’s intimately connected with — from energy to immigration to law enforcement and beyond.

Get the complete show notes here.

Connect with Tommy Calvert here.

As frontman for bands like Drakulas and The Riverboat Gamblers, Mike Wiebe is known for a theatrical, no-holds-barred style of performance — famously, he once broke a rib and collapsed a lung while playing a gig at South by Southwest, but finished the set anyway.

But there’s more to Mike than being, in the words of the Austin Chronicle, a “shirt-wearing Iggy Pop.” He also has roots in comedy and filmmaking, and he seems, at any given time, to have about half a dozen projects in play.

In this installment of Something To Look Forward To, Mike walks us through all of that — along with digressions into the "Baptist-y microaggresions" of his childhood hometown, how death-metal bands allocate their corpse-paint budget, and the time he blew Springsteen a kiss. Enjoy.

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Ben Roy is a comedian, actor, and musician. He’s perhaps best known for Those Who Can’t, the TV show he starred in, co-created, and co-wrote with long-time collaborators Andrew Orvedahl and Adam Cayton-Holland.

But Ben has also been fronting bands since he was 15 years old, and his interests run the gamut from the poetry of punk rock to obscure American history to the petty larceny of manipulating Columbia House’s ill-fated mail-order CD business. He also loves movie Westerns, Cat Stevens, and the joys of finding the exact right word to take a joke from good to great. It’s safe to say we cover a lot of ground here.

And just like that, it's another episode of Something To Look Forward To. Enjoy.

Get the full show notes here -- including songs, standup, videos, and more.

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Dom Testa is the bestselling author of more than 20 books, including six installments of the Galahad series -- the first of which (The Comet's Curse) garnered an International Grand Prize from Writer's Digest. 

His new adventure series follows super-spy Eric Swan -- a happily married, deeply covert agent whose consciousness can be uploaded from one body to another when he dies. 

We discuss the big ideas behind the Swan books, what life was like as an Air Force brat moving from Texas to Italy to Alaska every two years, the best one-sentence book review of all time, and which long-running TV series tops the list of all-time great spy stories. Plus, Dom shares some under-the-radar book and band recommendations.

And just like that, it's the first-ever episode of Something To Look Forward To, with author (and my father) Dom Testa. Enjoy.

Get the full show notes here -- including videos, links to Dom's books, and more.

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