Episode 166 - Razel Jones, MBA

Dan Sterenchuk and Tommy Estlund are honored to have as our guest, Razel Jones, MBA.

Razel Jones is a Diversity and Inclusion professional, speaker, and the Director of Equity and Inclusion at Tennessee State University. In 2016, he released his first book, See What You Hear, a piece about actualizing vision. Jones has a BA in English Language and Literature from Grand Valley State University and an MBA from Northwood University. He has professional certifications in Cultural Intelligence, HR, Strengths, Civil Rights, and Affirmative Action. He and his family reside in the Greater Nashville, Tennessee area.

Purchase Wounds: A Collaborative Memoir in Stories by Razel Jones and Daniel Abbott: https://www.indiebound.org/book/9781735363738

Note: Guests create their own bio description for each episode.

The Curiosity Hour Podcast is hosted and produced by Dan Sterenchuk and Tommy Estlund.

Please visit our website for more information:thecuriosityhourpodcast.com

The Curiosity Hour Podcast is listener supported! To donate, click here: thecuriosityhourpodcast.com/donate/

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Disclaimers: The Curiosity Hour Podcast may contain content not suitable for all audiences. Listener discretion advised. The views and opinions expressed by the guests on this podcast are solely those of the guest(s). These views and opinions do not necessarily represent those of The Curiosity Hour Podcast. This podcast may contain explicit language.

The Public Service Announcement near the beginning of the episode solely represents the views of Tommy and Dan and not our guests or our listeners.

Episode 165 - Steven Webster, PhD.

Dan Sterenchuk and Tommy Estlund are honored to have as our guest, Steven Webster, PhD.

Steven Webster holds a PhD in political science from Emory University. He is an assistant professor of political science at Indiana University—Bloomington. His research focuses on the role of anger in American politics. His book, "American Rage: How Anger Shapes Our Politics," was published in 2020 by Cambridge University Press. He has also written extensively on the growth of "negative partisanship" in the American electorate, as well as the growing amount of polarization between Democrats and Republicans.

Book, American Rage: http://www.stevenwwebster.com/americanrage.html

Note: Guests create their own bio description for each episode.

The Curiosity Hour Podcast is hosted and produced by Dan Sterenchuk and Tommy Estlund.

Please visit our website for more information:

thecuriosityhourpodcast.com

The Curiosity Hour Podcast is listener supported! To donate, click here: thecuriosityhourpodcast.com/donate/

Please visit this page for information where you can listen to our podcast: thecuriosityhourpodcast.com/listen/

Disclaimers: The Curiosity Hour Podcast may contain content not suitable for all audiences. Listener discretion advised. The views and opinions expressed by the guests on this podcast are solely those of the guest(s). These views and opinions do not necessarily represent those of The Curiosity Hour Podcast. This podcast may contain explicit language.

The Public Service Announcement near the beginning of the episode solely represents the views of Tommy and Dan and not our guests or our listeners.

Episode 164 - Amaryllis Fox.

Dan Sterenchuk and Tommy Estlund are honored to have as our guest, Amaryllis Fox.

Following her CIA career in the field, AMARYLLIS FOX has covered current events and offered analysis for CNN, National Geographic, Al Jazeera, the BBC, and other global news outlets. She speaks at events and universities around the world on the topic of peacemaking. She is the cohost of History's TV series American Ripper and lives in Los Angeles, California, with her husband and daughter.

Amaryllis Fox was in her last year as an undergraduate at Oxford studying theology and international law when her writing mentor Daniel Pearl was captured and beheaded. Galvanized by this brutality, Fox applied to a master's program in conflict and terrorism at Georgetown's School of Foreign Service, where she created an algorithm that predicted, with uncanny certainty, the likelihood of a terrorist cell rising in any village around the world. At twenty-one, she was recruited by the CIA. Her first assignment was reading and analyzing hundreds of classified cables a day from foreign governments and synthesizing them into daily briefs for the president. Her next assignment was at the Iraq desk in the Counterterrorism center. At twenty-two, she was fast-tracked into advanced operations training, sent from Langley to "the Farm," where she lived for six months in a simulated world learning how to use a Glock, how to get out of flexicuffs while locked in the trunk of a car, how to withstand torture, and the best ways to commit suicide in case of captivity. At the end of this training she was deployed as a spy under non-official cover--the most difficult and coveted job in the field as an art dealer

specializing in tribal and indigenous art and sent to infiltrate terrorist networks in remote areas of the Middle East and Asia.

"Life Undercover" Book: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/586385/life-undercover-by-amaryllis-fox/

"The Business of Drugs" on Netflix: https://www.netflix.com/title/80199963

Photo Credit: Jesse Stone

Note: Guests create their own bio description for each episode.

The Curiosity Hour Podcast is hosted and produced by Dan Sterenchuk and Tommy Estlund.

Please visit our website for more information:

thecuriosityhourpodcast.com

The Curiosity Hour Podcast is listener supported! To donate, click here: thecuriosityhourpodcast.com/donate/

Please visit this page for information where you can listen to our podcast: thecuriosityhourpodcast.com/listen/

Disclaimers: The Curiosity Hour Podcast may contain content not suitable for all audiences. Listener discretion advised. The views and opinions expressed by the guests on this podcast are solely those of the guest(s). These views and opinions do not necessarily represent those of The Curiosity Hour Podcast. This podcast may contain explicit language.

The Public Service Announcement near the beginning of the episode solely represents the views of Tommy and Dan and not our guests or our listeners.

Episode 163 - Lucas Land

Dan Sterenchuk and Tommy Estlund are honored to have as our guest, Lucas Land.

Lucas Land is constantly learning and growing and starting things he might not finish. He lived and worked in Bolivia for the past two years with his family where he started the podcast We Don't Talk About That with Lucas Land. He once started a sustainable landscaping company. He lives in Waco, TX and is part of an intentional community and no, he's not a Branch Davidian.

Podcast website: https://wdtatpodcast.com

Note: Guests create their own bio description for each episode.

The Curiosity Hour Podcast is hosted and produced by Dan Sterenchuk and Tommy Estlund.

Please visit our website for more information:

thecuriosityhourpodcast.com

The Curiosity Hour Podcast is listener supported! To donate, click here: thecuriosityhourpodcast.com/donate/

Please visit this page for information where you can listen to our podcast: thecuriosityhourpodcast.com/listen/

Disclaimers: The Curiosity Hour Podcast may contain content not suitable for all audiences. Listener discretion advised. The views and opinions expressed by the guests on this podcast are solely those of the guest(s). These views and opinions do not necessarily represent those of The Curiosity Hour Podcast. This podcast may contain explicit language.

The Public Service Announcement near the beginning of the episode solely represents the views of Tommy and Dan and not our guests or our listeners.

Episode 162 - Bryan Jones, Ph.D.

Dan Sterenchuk and Tommy Estlund are honored to have as our guest, Bryan Jones, Ph.D.

Bryan Jones is an Assistant Professor at the Austin W. Marxe School of Public and International Affairs at Baruch College. Additionally, he is an affiliate of the City University of New York Institute for Demographic Research (CIDR), and consultant with the World Bank. Bryan has a Ph.D. in Geography from the University of Colorado-Boulder, and M.A. in Geography from the University of Connecticut. His research interests include population dynamics and migration, climate change impacts, risk/vulnerability assessment, and spatial statistics/GIS.

Bryan’s current research explores the relationship between human population dynamics and climate change in driving human vulnerability to climate-related hazards with a focus on sustainability and climate-resilient policy. Much of his current work addresses climate-induced migration. Bryan served as lead modeler for the World Bank's 2018 flagship report Groundswell: Preparing for Internal Climate Migration, and remains engaged with the World Bank, the Center for International Earth Science Information Network at Columbia University (CIESIN), and the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) in preparing a series of follow-up reports. In addition to this work, over the past decade he has developed novel methods for producing spatially explicit, high-resolution population scenarios, a crucial input to the assessment of potential climate impacts. Data products developed as a function of this research are currently in use across the global change community, and have informed research cited in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Assessment Reports and the US National Climate Assessment.

To find out more about Dr. Jones and his publications, please visit:

https://baruch-cuny.academia.edu/BryanJones

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Bryan_Jones14

Please also check out these pieces we refer to during the interview:

The Great Climate Migration: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/07/23/magazine/climate-migration.html

About Our Climate Migration Model: https://www.propublica.org/article/2020-climate-migration-part-1-methodology

Modeling Climate Change-Induced Migration in Central America & Mexico Methodological Report: https://assets-c3.propublica.org/Climate-Migration-Modeling-Methodology.pdf

Note: Guests create their own bio description for each episode.

The Curiosity Hour Podcast is hosted and produced by Dan Sterenchuk and Tommy Estlund.

Please visit our website for more information:

thecuriosityhourpodcast.com

The Curiosity Hour Podcast is listener supported! To donate, click here: thecuriosityhourpodcast.com/donate/

Please visit this page for information where you can listen to our podcast: thecuriosityhourpodcast.com/listen/

Disclaimers: The Curiosity Hour Podcast may contain content not suitable for all audiences. Listener discretion advised. The views and opinions expressed by the guests on this podcast are solely those of the guest(s). These views and opinions do not necessarily represent those of The Curiosity Hour Podcast. This podcast may contain explicit language.

The Public Service Announcement near the beginning of the episode solely represents the views of Tommy and Dan and not our guests or our listeners.

Episode 161-Bandy X. Lee, M.D., M.Div.

Dan Sterenchuk and Tommy Estlund are honored to have as our guest, Bandy X. Lee, M.D., M.Div.

Dr. Lee is a forensic psychiatrist at Yale School of Medicine. She is President of the World Mental Health Coalition. She served as Director of Research for the Center for the Study of Violence and co-founded Yale’s Violence and Health Study Group, a member of the World Health Organization Violence Prevention Alliance. Lee has consulted with governments on prison reform, including of New York City’s Rikers Island Correctional Center. She has published numerous scholarly articles and academic books, and has authored the textbook Violence (Wiley-Blackwell, 2019). The ethics conference she convened in April 2017 led to The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President (Macmillan, 2017 and 2019).

https://bandylee.com

https://twitter.com/BandyXLee1

https://worldmhc.org/

Note: Guests create their own bio description for each episode.

The Curiosity Hour Podcast is hosted and produced by Dan Sterenchuk and Tommy Estlund.

Please visit our website for more information:

thecuriosityhourpodcast.com

The Curiosity Hour Podcast is listener supported! To donate, click here: thecuriosityhourpodcast.com/donate/

Please visit this page for information where you can listen to our podcast: thecuriosityhourpodcast.com/listen/

Disclaimers: The Curiosity Hour Podcast may contain content not suitable for all audiences. Listener discretion advised. The views and opinions expressed by the guests on this podcast are solely those of the guest(s). These views and opinions do not necessarily represent those of The Curiosity Hour Podcast. This podcast may contain explicit language.

The Public Service Announcement near the beginning of the episode solely represents the views of Tommy and Dan and not our guests or our listeners.

Episode 160 - Garrett Owen.

Dan Sterenchuk and Tommy Estlund are honored to have as our guest, Garrett Owen

Instead of Little League and sleepovers, Texas-born Garrett Owen’s earliest memories involve frequent trips across the Serengeti and backyard wildlife most of us only experience at our local zoos. The son of church-building missionaries, he grew up in Tanzania and Kenya, riding on the luggage rack of the family’s Nissan Patrol, with vast clear skies above him and gazelles running beside. After leaving Africa, the family completed a stint in Ecuador before Owen’s parents moved the family back to Texas. Life as he knew it became a difficult endeavor; rimmed with the sharp edges of reality in an unfamiliar place, his attempts to settle into a culture he didn’t understand resulted in distress and a suicide attempt - a far cry from the idyllic landscape of his upbringing. “Getting to the point where songs could even come out of me at all again took some time,” he remembers. However, Owen’s decision to step up to the mic at a songwriters’ night in Fort Worth changed his trajectory and reminded him that the goal of pursuing music was no longer at home on the backburner.

Now, the award-winning artist, who calls to mind legends like Paul Simon, Jackson Browne, Elliot Smith, and Jesse Winchester, is gearing up to release his second full-length album, Quiet Lives, on September 18th. Though he revisits familiar subject matter such as the push-pull of relationships, love, and loss, Quiet Lives is about growth, informed by the perspective gained from life experience. The diverse 10-track collection delves into more experimental musical territory, as Owen toyed with complex chord changes, melodic dissonance, and intriguing storylines.

“At its core, all art is based on a ‘true story,’ and by true, I mean the version we carry in our head and heart - the one that can lift or crush your spirit with equal capacity,” the golden-voiced troubadour, who has shared stages with artists like Parker Millsap, Charlie Sexton, and Marty Stuart, explains. “Some suggest that your upbringing explains quirks of personality like my shyness, a tendency for introspection, and streaks of perfectionism. Maybe. I’m not so fatalistic as to believe our earliest experiences necessarily determine the arc of adult life, but my slightly foreign childhood never leaves my music or me. Everybody’s got a story to tell,” he adds. “I’m no different.”

http://garrett-owen.com/

https://www.facebook.com/GarrettOwenTX

http://instagram.com/garrettowentx

https://twitter.com/garrettowenTX

https://open.spotify.com/artist/7y2CyDlhMd1el8HDgyYuTD

Note: Guests create their own bio description for each episode.

The Curiosity Hour Podcast is hosted and produced by Dan Sterenchuk and Tommy Estlund.

Please visit our website for more information:

thecuriosityhourpodcast.com

The Curiosity Hour Podcast is listener supported! To donate, click here: thecuriosityhourpodcast.com/donate/

Please visit this page for information where you can listen to our podcast: thecuriosityhourpodcast.com/listen/

Disclaimers: The Curiosity Hour Podcast may contain content not suitable for all audiences. Listener discretion advised. The views and opinions expressed by the guests on this podcast are solely those of the guest(s). These views and opinions do not necessarily represent those of The Curiosity Hour Podcast. This podcast may contain explicit language.

The Public Service Announcement near the beginning of the episode solely represents the views of Tommy and Dan and not our guests or our listeners.

Episode 159 - Cana Uluak Itchuaqiyaq, PhD candidate

Dan Sterenchuk and Tommy Estlund are honored to have as our guest, Cana Uluak Itchuaqiyaq, PhD candidate.

Cana Uluak Itchuaqiyaq (KAY-nuh OOH-loke itch-OH-key-yuck) is a tribal member of the Noorvik Native Community. She is also a PhD candidate in technical communication and rhetoric at Utah State University. An Iñupiaq (IN-you-pack) from a rural village above the Arctic Circle in NW Alaska, Cana Uluak was concerned that she had only two BIPOC instructors in all her years of education and was often subject to course readings lists written entirely by white authors. She was also concerned about how researchers visiting her home community represented her people and their experiences, capacities, and needs. Her research works to reveal how academic practice often perpetuates the marginalization of underrepresented scholars and communities and interferes with institutional and societal diversity and inclusion efforts.

Her academic website—the one that has my decolonial methods course on it: https://www.itchuaqiyaq.com

The Caleb Scholars Program supporting Alaskan Inuit scholars named for her Dad, Caleb Lumen Pungowiyi (Pun-gow-wee): https://www.calebscholars.org

Note: Guests create their own bio description for each episode.

The Curiosity Hour Podcast is hosted and produced by Dan Sterenchuk and Tommy Estlund.

Please visit our website for more information:

thecuriosityhourpodcast.com

The Curiosity Hour Podcast is listener supported! To donate, click here: thecuriosityhourpodcast.com/donate/

Please visit this page for information where you can listen to our podcast: thecuriosityhourpodcast.com/listen/

Disclaimers: The Curiosity Hour Podcast may contain content not suitable for all audiences. Listener discretion advised. The views and opinions expressed by the guests on this podcast are solely those of the guest(s). These views and opinions do not necessarily represent those of The Curiosity Hour Podcast. This podcast may contain explicit language.

The Public Service Announcement near the beginning of the episode solely represents the views of Tommy and Dan and not our guests or our listeners.

Episode 158 - Rob Bilott, JD.

Dan Sterenchuk and Tommy Estlund are honored to have as our guest, Rob Bilott, JD.

Rob Bilott, Partner, Taft Law, Taft Stettinius & Hollister LLP, Cincinnati, OH. Rob is a partner in Taft's Environmental, Litigation, and Product Liability and Personal Injury groups. For more than 29 years, Rob has handled a wide variety of highly complex environmental matters and related toxic tort litigation for a diverse array of clients, including the nation’s first cases involving PFAS drinking water contamination. To date, Rob has secured benefits in excess of $1 Billion for clients impacted by PFAS contamination, including through key leadership positions in the nation’s first class action, personal injury, medical monitoring, and multi-district litigations and trials. In 2017, Rob received the international Right Livelihood Award, also known as the “Alternative Nobel Prize,” for his decades of work on PFAS issues. Rob is the author of the book, “Exposure: Poisoned Water, Corporate Greed, and One Lawyer’s Twenty-Year Battle against DuPont,” and his story is the inspiration for the motion picture, “Dark Waters” from Participant Media and Focus Features, starring Mark Ruffalo as Rob. His story is also featured in the documentary available on Netflix, “The Devil We Know.” Rob is a graduate of New College in Sarasota, Florida and has a Juris Doctor degree from the Ohio State University Moritz College of Law.

LINKS:

https://www.taftlaw.com/people/robert-a-bilott

https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Exposure/Robert-Bilott/9781501172823

https://www.focusfeatures.com/dark-waters

https://thedevilweknow.com/

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/10/magazine/the-lawyer-who-became-duponts-worst-nightmare.html

https://www.rightlivelihoodaward.org/laureates/robert-bilott/

Note: Guests create their own bio description for each episode.

The Public Service Announcement near the beginning of the episode solely represents the views of Tommy and Dan and not our guests or our listeners.

The Curiosity Hour Podcast is hosted and produced by Dan Sterenchuk and Tommy Estlund.

Please visit our website for more information:

thecuriosityhourpodcast.com

The Curiosity Hour Podcast is listener supported! To donate, click here: thecuriosityhourpodcast.com/donate/

Please visit this page for information where you can listen to our podcast: thecuriosityhourpodcast.com/listen/

Disclaimers: The Curiosity Hour Podcast may contain content not suitable for all audiences. Listener discretion advised. The views and opinions expressed by the guests on this podcast are solely those of the guest(s). These views and opinions do not necessarily represent those of The Curiosity Hour Podcast. This podcast may contain explicit language.

Episode 157 - Rachel Bitecofer, PhD.

Dan Sterenchuk and Tommy Estlund are honored to have as our guest, Episode 157 - Rachel Bitecofer, PhD.

Rachel Bitecofer is a nationally recognized election forecaster and a senior fellow at The Niskanen Center in Washington D.C. where in addition to her groundbreaking election analysis and election forecasting research on the presidential and congressional elections, she conducts pro-democracy research. Rachel’s work appears in a variety of the nation’s leading media outlets including The New York Times, The Washington Post, Politico, MarketWatch, The Guardian, The BBC, MSNBC, Sky News, CBC, and Realtime w Bill Maher. She’s been a guest on prominent and diverse podcasts including Rumble with Michael Moore, The Michael Steele Podcast, Cape Up with Jonathan Capehart, The New Yorker, and the The Bulwark Podcast, to name just a few. She is the host of The Election Whisperer, a data-based politics & elections show she describes as an “election nerd Disneyland for wonks with a good sense of humor” and serves as a senior adviser to The Lincoln Project.

https://twitter.com/rachelbitecofer

https://twitter.com/electionwsphr

https://www.niskanencenter.org/author/rachel-bitecofer/

http://amciv.com/electionwhisperer

https://www.270towin.com/maps/niskanen-center-electoral-college-predictions

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/02/06/rachel-bitecofer-profile-election-forecasting-new-theory-108944

https://newrepublic.com/article/156402/hate-ballot

Note: Guests create their own bio description for each episode.

The Curiosity Hour Podcast is hosted and produced by Dan Sterenchuk and Tommy Estlund.

Please visit our website for more information:

thecuriosityhourpodcast.com

The Curiosity Hour Podcast is listener supported! To donate, click here: thecuriosityhourpodcast.com/donate/

Please visit this page for information where you can listen to our podcast: thecuriosityhourpodcast.com/listen/

Disclaimers: The Curiosity Hour Podcast may contain content not suitable for all audiences. Listener discretion advised. The views and opinions expressed by the guests on this podcast are solely those of the guest(s). These views and opinions do not necessarily represent those of The Curiosity Hour Podcast. This podcast may contain explicit language.

The Public Service Announcement near the beginning of the episode solely represents the views of Tommy and Dan and not our guests or our listeners.