Before emojis, there was Dad — handwriting letters from Beirut with little doodles instead of words. This week Rob and Munir open up the actual family letter archive (typewriter and all) to talk about why a handwritten note is so much better than a text: a real UPS run to mail a birthday card, a pitch for a post-office-meets-gift-shop business, the Santa note that gave away an aircraft carrier at age 9, and the letter Munir found near the end of his dad's life that just said “smile more often.”

Plus a Ross Gay reading on joy and dueling mixtapes about letters, from The Cure to Bruce Springsteen.

New episodes every Monday. Yo Munir is a weekly conversation celebrating creativity and practice, hosted by “the happiest guys on the internet.”

Follow the show so you don't miss next week's conversation — and if this one moved you, a rating helps more people find it.

The happiest guys on the internet welcome their most universal guest yet: cooking. Brothers Munir and Rob Haddad grew up in a Lebanese home where an abundant table was everything — and in this episode they explore cooking as a creative practice: improvisation vs. process, learning to release control, and why feeding people is a love language. Expect first food memories from Beirut to the Russian Tea Room, their late father's mujadarra recipe read aloud, a José Andrés detour ("I try to be a storyteller"), and a mixtape built for the kitchen. New episodes weekly — follow so you never miss one.

The guest this week is a theme: Summer Travel.

Munir and Rob trace it back to childhood summers between London and a wartime Beirut — standby flights and the 747 bar, packing two months into one suitcase, flashlight tag interrupted by snipers, Galaga tournaments and a backgammon sponsorship that turns out to be a family advertising story.

The throughline: constraints don't kill creativity, they make it. It all rolls into a road-trip mixtape, a Noah Kahan show, a solo night with Bleachers, and a little Mark Twain.
Two brothers, the open road, and the case that travel rewires how you create.

Tom Rome is many things. Emmy Award-winning cinematographer. Stand-up comedian. Drummer. Inventor. And now, a media teacher shaping the next generation of storytellers at Bergen Tech in New Jersey.

He spent years as a Director of Photography at MLB Productions — bringing baseball to life on film, at a time when everyone else had gone to video — and earned an Emmy Award doing it. Before that, he was doing "bringer shows" at NYC comedy clubs, auditioning for the Blue Man Group, and once ran down a hallway in Yankee Stadium to accost a stranger carrying a Bolex camera. (That stranger got him the job.)

In this episode, the happiest guys on the internet sit down with Tom for a wide, warm, genuinely funny conversation about what it looks like to follow creativity across decades — from drumsticks on a couch watching Van Halen's Panama on MTV, through the golden years of sports filmmaking, and into a high school classroom where the work now has a different kind of stakes.

Tom shares three pieces of advice for young creatives — and the best medical school joke you've heard in years. He also drops a mixtape featuring House of Pain, Spin Doctors, and The Divinyls.

If you work in media, teach anything, love baseball, or are figuring out what the next chapter looks like — this one is for you.

Subscribe. Share. Tell a friend. New episodes weekly on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube.

Episode 40 | Barbara Gorder: Top Gun, Cannes Lions & Saving the Wine Industry

Barbara Gorder has spent 30+ years solving marketing problems at the highest level — and she's not done yet.

She started at Leo Burnett Chicago, rising to SVP and working on Super Bowl campaigns for Reebok, GM, P&G, Hallmark, and Toys R Us, winning Cannes Lions along the way. After Burnett, she spent two decades as a fractional CMO for entrepreneurial companies — including SommSelect, where she hired Munir's agency Kiosk to help build the brand. These days, she's the Managing Partner of the Direct to Consumer Wine Symposium, the country's largest D2C wine conference, working to make direct-to-consumer wine legal in 48 states. She's still working on Utah and Delaware.

Oh, and her father co-authored the Ault Report — the white paper that led to the creation of Top Gun.

In this conversation: growing up military, a legendary Reebok pitch that shocked the room, presenting to 90 international sports executives in the Bahamas with broken AV and singing the Flintstones theme to close the deal, what AI really means for creative people, three principles for staying creative, and the mixtape — songs that pair best with a great glass of wine.

Barbara's three creativity principles: Stay open. Knowledge is power. Take the pause.

Connect with Barbara:

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/barbara-gorder-7a27a4

DTC Wine Symposium: dtcwinesymposium.com (early bird tickets on sale now for January 2026 in Monterey)

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Yo Munir! — "The happiest guys on the internet" celebrate creativity and practice in their weekly conversation. Hosted by Robert Haddad and Munir Haddad.

Subscribe on YouTube: youtube.com/channel/UC9yFb_jTqo4sXoTxJ1-YpTw

Instagram: instagram.com/yo.munir

Ruth Hubbard has spent her career connecting dots most people don't even see are on the same map. As a product and partnership leader at Fiserv, she works with billions of transaction data points, turning how people spend money into stories about who they actually are. She's a Fellow of the Economic Club of New York, a 2026 Semafor World Economic Summit principal, and hosts the NY Public Library's Trailblazer Series, where she sits down with founders, authors, and cultural leaders.

In this episode, Ruth, Rob, and Munir trace the thread from her childhood debates in Stamford, CT (her parents are a lawyer and an HR executive — argument was basically a team sport) through Martha's Vineyard summers, Model UN at Harvard and Penn, and a career arc from Google to JP Morgan to one of the world's largest payment companies.

They talk about why the words "Experience Abu Dhabi" on a Knicks warmup jersey tell a more interesting story about global investment strategy than most financial news coverage. They get into why your credit card statement might be the most honest portrait of your values that exists. And Ruth breaks down the three-part storytelling framework she's developed through years of interviewing some of the most interesting people in business and culture.

It ends with a mixtape of songs about business — nine songs, three people, zero overlap, and somehow both Pink Floyd and the Isley Brothers feel completely at home together.

What happens when a stranger at a yoga festival gives you the nudge that changes your entire life?

For Elizabeth Arnold, it meant quitting a soul-crushing bank job, leaving her apartment lease (and her cat) behind, and moving solo to the Costa Rican jungle — where she built an oceanfront yoga and surf hotel near the longest warmest wave in the world, ran women's travel retreats, and marketed the whole thing over borrowed wifi from a neighbor's house.

That was just one chapter. Elizabeth has also founded a women's travel company, built a sports hobbyist app, written a children's book on maternity leave, run campaigns for Fortune 100 brands like Adobe and GoDaddy, and served as Chief Growth Officer at ViralMoment — turning AI video intelligence into an enterprise revenue category.

In this episode, Munir and Rob dig into the philosophy that connects all of it: how yin yoga rewired Elizabeth's approach to difficulty, why quitting strategically beats grinding blindly, and why the most powerful career question isn't "what do you want to do?" — it's "who do you want to be?"

She also weighs in on AI tools democratizing creativity (she built a full app on Lovable's free plan), what "translating" complex technology actually looks like in practice, and how to lean into a disruptive moment with grace instead of fear.

Plus — the mixtape goes viral historian. We trace the arc from Britney Spears and MTV to Gangnam Style to Kate Bush's Stranger Things moment to the TikTok woman looking for a man in finance. If you work in social, video, or growth, this conversation is for you.

Yo Munir! — the happiest guys on the internet — celebrates practice and creativity every week. Subscribe wherever you listen.

Lane Soelberg started in a Sears Craftsman red vest and ended up in rooms where deals between The Trade Desk, Pinterest, and Yahoo got shaped. Along the way he produced an indie film for $100K, scaled Madhive from $25M to $100M, pitched the first AMA-style online talk show with AOL, and learned the lesson that has defined his entire career: metrics beat no metrics.

In Episode 37, Lane joins Robert and Munir for a Chicago-rooted conversation about curiosity as a creative engine, doing the jobs nobody else wants, why the pendulum is swinging back toward analog and small tight teams, and the three pieces of advice he'd give anyone trying to build something now. Plus a 1961 Leo Burnett quote that still holds up, a Joe Pytka story you have to hear, and a Chicago mixtape that runs from Cheap Trick to Gang Starr to Uncle Tupelo.

The happiest guys on the internet are back. Yo Munir.

Andrea Greer is Senior Advisor for Strategy & Research at Project Row Houses in Houston — the Third Ward institution behind the recent restoration of the Eldorado Ballroom.

In Part 2 of our conversation, Andrea walks us through the founding story of Project Row Houses — seven Black artists in Houston in the late '80s, a bus tour where city leaders called Third Ward's shotgun shacks "the most dangerous block" and proposed razing them, and Rick Lowe's now-famous response: "this is the bones of our culture and our community." We get the influences behind PRH (artist John Biggers, Joseph Beuys's concept of social sculpture), the wild coalition of funders who made it happen (the Menil Collection, Chevron, the NEA), and what 33 years of social practice in one neighborhood has actually produced — a grocery distribution that started in the pandemic, the Eldorado Ballroom rehab, and a generation of Black artists (Theaster Gates, Mark Bradford, Amanda Williams) whose work traces back to PRH.

Andrea also gives us three things to remember about creativity, an honest moment of self-reflection, and her karaoke fantasy playlist — which kicks off a freewheeling mixtape segment that links Curtis Mayfield, Joe Strummer's "Johnny Appleseed," Beuys's 7,000 oaks at Kassel, and a Jason Moran instrumental medley.

If you haven't heard Part 1, don't worry, Part 2 stands alone. But you'll like this even more if you do.

Chapters

00:00 — Social sculpture, defined

01:30 — Fundraising as sales ("I sold abortion rights to men")

05:00 — The seven founding artists of Project Row Houses

09:00 — "The bones of our culture": how PRH began

16:00 — "You gotta eat, man": pandemic pivot

19:00 — The Eldorado Ballroom: held in trust for the community

24:00 — Three things to remember about creativity

26:30 — Mixtape: Andrea, Rob, and Munir's picks

Mentioned

Project Row Houses, Eldorado Ballroom, Rick Lowe, John Biggers, Joseph Beuys (and 7000 Oaks at Kassel), Amanda Williams, Theaster Gates, Mark Bradford, the Menil Collection, Texas Southern University, Emancipation Park (Houston), the Lulu Foundation, the Ford Foundation

On the mixtape

Freda Payne · Scarface · Jason Moran · Robert Glasper · Jackson Browne · Jimmy Cliff (The Harder They Come) · Erykah Badu · Living Colour · Natalie Merchant · Curtis Mayfield · Joe Strummer & The Mescaleros · Rodriguez (Searching for Sugar Man) · The Avener

Yo Munir! is a weekly podcast about practice and creativity, hosted by Munir Haddad (Kiosk) and Rob Haddad.

🔗 Andrea Greer: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andreacgreer/ · Project Row Houses — https://projectrowhouses.org/ · The Eldorado Ballroom (PRH restoration) — https://projectrowhouses.org/our-work/neighborhood-development/eldorado-ballroom/ · Munir / Kiosk: https://www.linkedin.com/in/munirhaddad/ · Rob Haddad: https://www.linkedin.com/in/robert-haddad-88670/ · Yo Munir! Ep 36 playlist on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/2LQyCmk5cCPiXr6yRzTBUX?si=yTsUp-CcR9ukgo7LeswXOA

Andrea Greer's career has been shaped, start to finish, by artists, activists, and the places they build. A lifelong Houstonian, she started out interning for Houston's Art Car Parade and is now Senior Advisor for Strategy & Research at Project Row Houses, the Third Ward institution behind the recent restoration of the Eldorado Ballroom.

In Part 1, Andrea takes us back to the beginning: the kid who picked her own boarding school out of a library brochure, the Dartmouth coxswain who coined the term "kinetic communication," the art-history major who spent decades convinced she wasn't creative, and the law student who once nearly ditched it all to join a traveling circus with an artist named Chicken John.

Part 2 goes deep on Project Row Houses, Rick Lowe, and the Joseph Beuys lineage that shaped it.

Yo Munir! is a weekly podcast about practice and creativity, hosted by Munir Haddad (Kiosk) and Rob Haddad.

In this episode: boarding-school survival, the coxswain's seat, kinetic communication, hidden creativity (needlework, karaoke, morning pages), almost joining the circus, and going back to law school during a pandemic — on purpose.

🔗 Andrea Greer: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andreacgreer/ · Project Row Houses: https://projectrowhouses.org/ · Munir / Kiosk: https://www.linkedin.com/in/munirhaddad/ · Rob Haddad: https://www.linkedin.com/in/robert-haddad-88670/