Tracing back the roots of an odd story about a missing congresswoman

Rep. Kay Granger, R-Texas, at a reception in her honor last month in Washington. Photo via the House Appropriations Committee.

I wasn’t necessarily planning to write today, but I want to call your attention to an odd story that broke out over the weekend, and why I initially thought it was fraudulent.

On Sunday, I saw a post on Bluesky claiming that a Texas congresswoman named Kay Granger had disappeared for six months without anyone in the media taking note:

I started tracing it back, and I saw that the story had seemingly come from WCBM, a right-wing talk station in Baltimore, which is rather far from Texas. The headline: “‘Missing’ GOP Congresswoman Not Seen For Six Months Finally Found Living at Dementia Care Home.”

The WCBM article, in turn, linked to a news outlet called The Dallas Express. I started doing some due diligence and found a 2023 article from the Texas Observer 2023 headlined “The ‘Dallas Express’: Your Go-To Source for Right-Wing, Astroturf News.” That’s where I learned that the Express may or may not be linked to Metric Media, a notorious chain of pink-slime websites — that is, websites that purport to offer local news but that are actually engaged in political propaganda. (The Observer noted that it’s not clear whether the Express is part of Metric Media or not, and that there have been threats of legal action.) I also learned that Carlos Turcios, the reporter who broke the story for the Express, is “a Young Latino Conservative Activist in the Dallas Fort Worth area.” In other words, not a journalist.

Finally, I discovered that there was a tribute to Granger held in Washington in November to mark her pending retirement from Congress. House Speaker Mike Johnson was among those on hand. Granger was definitely there, as you can see from the above photo. That would certainly contradict the assertion that Granger had “disappeared” for six months. Game, set, match — right?

Wrong. As news about Granger continued to spread, I went back and read Turcios’ story in The Dallas Express more carefully. It turns out he did not assert that Granger hadn’t been seen in six months — rather, he reported that she hadn’t taken part in any House votes for six months. The “not seen for six months” line was an exaggeration added by WCBM. Everything else has subsequently checked out. Granger is, indeed, in an elder-care facility in Forth Worth, and, in a follow-up, her son told The Dallas Morning News that she has been experiencing “dementia issues.”

So the biggest remaining question is this: Why was it left to The Dallas Express to uncover Granger’s disappearance from Congress? The Texas political scene, after all, is well-covered. Granger’s district is served by two major daily newspapers, the Morning News and the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. The Texas Tribune, one of the largest nonprofit news organizations in the country, has a presence in Washington.

I began this item with a post by journalist and historian Garrett Graff calling this an “incredible testament to the loss of local news coverage.” Not quite. I’d say the coverage was in place, but for some reason it failed. While editors are celebrating the holidays this week, I also hope they take a few moments to ask themselves a time-honored question: Why we no have?

Meanwhile, kudos to Carlos Turcios and The Dallas Express. I hope people start taking them more seriously. I know I will.

Update: Damon Kiesow trod similar ground.

The Globe’s Sandra Birchmore story is a shocking tale of depravity, expertly told

Photo (cc) 2008 by Torley

I feel like I ought to offer something uplifting this holiday week, but what I’ve got this morning is the opposite of that. Last week The Boston Globe published a two-part story (here and here) on Sandra Birchmore, the young woman who, we were originally told, died by suicide after years of a sexual affair with a Stoughton police officer. She was pregnant, and the officer, Matthew Farwell, may have been the father.

Following an investigation by federal authorities, Farwell has since been charged with murder. The Globe story, by Laura Crimaldi and Yvonne Abraham, unfolds in narrative style, telling a horrendous tale involving allegations that Farwell and Birchmore began having sex when she was just 15 (which would be statutory rape) and that she also had sex with Farwell’s brother, William, and another officer, Robert Devine; Devine denies the allegation. Crimaldi and Abraham write:

The immense power imbalance that Birchmore endured in her life persisted long after she was gone. Time and again, investigators gave the benefit of the doubt to the police officer now accused of killing a young woman who was rarely, if ever, granted the same consideration.

It’s a story that alleges shocking depravity on the part of the officers. It’s hard to come away from it with anything but despair over the human condition. But a Globe editorial accompanying the story does manage to find some heroes: Birchmore’s family and friends, who never gave up their conviction that Sandra had not killed herself.

“If it weren’t for the friends and family of Sandra Birchmore who pushed and prodded for justice after her death, there’s a good chance that Matthew Farwell, the man accused of killing her, would still be walking free,” the editorial says, adding: “The fact that Farwell was a police officer raises disturbing questions about whether police are capable of investigating themselves.”

The story appears in yesterday’s Sunday magazine as well as online. The Sandra Birchmore saga has received an enormous amount of coverage during the past few years, but Crimaldi and Abraham’s account will make you see it in a new light, through Birchmore’s eyes and those who believed in her. Depressing and upsetting though it may be, it is also a triumph of narrative journalism.

We’re back online

Media Nation was down for about eight hours Friday, and my apologies if you were trying to access the site but couldn’t. The explanation is a cliché: I was messing around in places where I shouldn’t have been and our son, Tim, bailed me out.

Fighting back against official harassment; plus, Biden’s fitness, and more on that Everett libel case

An idyllic scene in Lancaster, Penn. Photo (cc) 2018 by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Reliable and comprehensive local news can help ease the polarization that has infected our national discourse. But it’s not a guarantee — and when MAGA-drenched politics pervades community life, the result can be that the press is attacked in a manner that’s similar to the cries of “fake news” from Trump supporters.

Which is exactly what is happening right now in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. In a lengthy article for The Washington Post, Erik Wemple tells the story of Tom Lisi, a reporter for the newspaper LNP who’s become the focus of relentless attacks (gift link) from the Republican chairman of the county commission.

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That chairman, Joshua Parsons, has his eye on a state senate seat, and he is evidently using his crusade against Lisi in order to build support for his campaign. Among other things, Parsons has accused Lisi of lying about harassment he’s been subjected to, making up stories “out of whole cloth,” and of having “skulked around waiting to ambush County staff.” As Wemple wryly observes: “‘Reporter’ is an appropriate term for someone who skulks around ‘waiting to ambush County staff.’” Wemple adds:

[T]he events in Lancaster County bear … on a question that has vexed leaders in journalism in recent decades: Just how should they respond to the frequent, strident and often flimsy attacks from Republican politicians? Should they stick to the industry’s default mode of turning the other cheek? Or should they speak up to challenge the gripes?

LNP and its associated website, Lancaster Online, are not part of a corporate chain or owned by a hedge fund. Rather, the media outlet was saved in 2023 by public radio station WITF and has a newsroom of 70 journalists — impressive for a medium-size daily. That transaction, though, has resulted in an enormously complex ownership structure involving three separate nonprofit boards along with all the potential conflicts of interest that entails.

As for Lisi, Wemple writes that he has started to push back publicly on Parson’s falsehoods and exaggerations about his reporting, and that on one occasion he left his tormenter momentarily speechless. The lesson, according to Wemple: “Confront the media bashers wherever they practice their profession.”

Biden’s fitness

The Wall Street Journal today published an investigative report (gift link) on attempts by President Biden’s inner circle to control access not just throughout the past four years but during the campaign that preceded it as well.

There are some harrowing details but also some problems with the reporting, including this, in which an anonymous aide quotes an anonymous official:

If the president was having an off day, meetings could be scrapped altogether. On one such occasion, in the spring of 2021, a national security official explained to another aide why a meeting needed to be rescheduled. “He has good days and bad days, and today was a bad day so we’re going to address this tomorrow,” the former aide recalled the official saying.

Despite such hazy sourcing, the Journal’s story is a valuable addition to what we are learning about Biden’s age-related problems during the past half-dozen years. In retrospect, a Journal story (gift link) in early June of this year was the big breakthrough, although it was marred by its overreliance on Republican sources. A few weeks later, Biden met Donald Trump on the debate stage, and that was the beginning of the end of his re-election campaign.

A few points are now obvious: First, Biden’s inner circle covered up the president’s fading mental acuity for years — which makes you wonder why they went along with the June debate, which led directly to Kamala Harris’ candidacy and at least gave Democrats a fighting chance of holding on to the White House. Second, Biden should have pledged to serve just one term when he ran in 2020; at the very least, he should have declared victory and pulled out after Democrats did unexpectedly well in the 2022 midterms.

That we still don’t know exactly how impaired Biden was and is speaks to how difficult it is for reporters to pierce the veil. As the Journal’s story makes clear, members of Congress and even Cabinet secretaries were kept in the dark. This was not a failure of journalism so much as it was a failure of the president and the people around him to level with the public.

Everett update

Earlier this week, I noted that neither of Everett’s two remaining weekly newspapers had published anything about the demise of the Everett Leader Herald, which shut down and agree to pay Mayor Carlo DeMaria $1.1 million in order to settle a libel suit. Publisher and editor Joshua Resnek had previously admitted he fabricated stories and quotes aimed at making DeMaria appear to be corrupt.

Well, now both papers, which are owned by small independent chains, have been heard from. The Everett Advocate has an especially tough headline, “A Victory Over Journalistic Dishonesty,” with reporter Mark E. Vogler detailing the Advocate’s own role in exposing the Leader Herald’s fictions about DeMaria.

One aspect of the settlement that I was wondering about is clarified in Vogler’s story. He quotes a lawyer for DeMaria, Jeffrey Robbins, as saying that the demise of the Leader Herald was in fact a stipulation of the settlement rather than simply a side effect of suddenly having to come up with $1.1 million. “All a jury would have decided to do in this case would be to decide whether to award damages and how much in damages,” Robbins told Vogler. “But a jury could not have ordered a newspaper to close down. That was one of the things that made the settlement unusual.”

The Everett Independent has a shorter article, written by reporter Cary Shuman, headlined simply “DeMaria Vindicated.”

Finally, the Leader Herald’s former website now consists of a WordPress page that says, “You need to be logged in as a user who has permission to view this site.”

Social media and its discontents; plus, Trump’s war against the press, and the Globe’s latest Steward stunner

Photo (cc) 2017 by Lucabon

Almost from the beginning of the social-media age, I’ve been too deeply immersed for my own good. So I appreciated this recent essay (gift link) in The New York Times Magazine by J Worthen, who tells us that Bluesky might look like the better, kinder place at the moment but that it’s probably destined to turn into a vortex of sociopathy like all the rest. Here’s the nut:

We have officially arrived in late-stage social media. The services and platforms that delighted us and reshaped our lives when they began appearing a few decades ago have now reached total saturation and maturation. Call it malaise. Call it Stockholm syndrome. Call it whatever. But each time a new platform debuts, promising something better — to help us connect better, share photos better, manage our lives better — many of us enthusiastically trek on over, only to be disappointed in the end.

As someone who used to get into fights on Usenet back in the 1990s (look it up), long before anyone had ever thought of using algorithms to drive content that engages and enrages, I agree that it’s hopeless. Bluesky might prove to be the exception. Among other things, you get to choose your own algorithm, or none at all. But it really doesn’t matter. The real problem is that, no, you can’t have meaningful conversations with strangers, and social media is inimical to the way we’ve evolved.

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The post-Musk social-media landscape has also been defined by the incredibly annoying practice of platform-shaming — a hopeless chase after the least-evil alternative, accompanied by bitter criticism of anyone who would dare keep using those platforms that are deemed insufficiently free of harmful entanglements.

Continue reading “Social media and its discontents; plus, Trump’s war against the press, and the Globe’s latest Steward stunner”

Did ABC News settle with Trump to avoid pre-trial discovery?

E. Jean Carroll in 2006. Photo (cc) 2006 by julieannesmo.

Like most observers, I figured that ABC News’ decision to settle a libel suit with Donald Trump for a total of $16 million had more to do with the network’s desire to make a public relations problem disappear than it did with any chance that the network would actually lose the case.

After all, when anchor George Stephanopoulos said on the air that Trump had been found “liable for rape” in a lawsuit brought by the writer E. Jean Carroll, he was merely quoting a federal judge, who said a civil-court jury had indeed found that Trump “raped her” [Carroll] using the everyday meaning of the word rather than the strict legal definition.

But CNN media reporter Brian Stelter raises another intriguing possibility: that ABC’s lawyers wanted to avoid pre-trial discovery. As Stelter reports, ABC didn’t even wait for the judge to rule on whether to grant summary judgment in the case — a routine proceeding in which the defendant asks the judge to find that the plaintiff’s case is so lacking in substance that it ought to be immediately dismissed. Stelter quotes Ken Turkel, a trial lawyer who is representing Sarah Palin in her revived libel case against The New York Times:

“In my experience, when media defendants are unsuccessful at the dismissal stage,” which was in July, “they focus on preparing for summary judgment to challenge the legal sufficiency of a plaintiff’s claim,” he said. “It begs the question as to why ABC settled before the summary judgment stage.”

Turkel also said “you would have to consider” whether the discovery process unearthed emails or other internal ABC data that damaged the network’s case.

Stelter also observes that right-wing media figure Erick Erickson, who’s a lawyer, wrote on Twitter: “No, a $15 million settlement is not the cost of doing business. It is avoiding discovery.”

This makes a great deal of sense. Based on what Stephanopoulos said on the air, his comments were clearly not delivered with actual malice (that is, they were not knowingly false nor reckless), and they were arguably not even false given the judge’s comments. The judge, Lewis Kaplan, went so far as to say that the verdict “establishes against him [Trump] the substantial truth of Ms. Carroll’s ‘rape’ accusations.”

But pre-trial discovery may have revealed internal animus toward Trump from Stephanopoulos and/or others, which Trump’s lawyers might have been able to conflate into actual malice. Combined with Stephanopoulos’ failure to describe the verdict against Trump with 100% precision, ABC’s lawyers may have genuinely feared that Trump had a case he could win in front of sympathetic jury that loathes the media.

Did Stephanopoulos libel Trump? Based on facts that are on the record, the answer is “no.” And I still wish ABC had fought back. But the settlement may have been for a more complicated reason than ABC’s and parent company Disney’s desire to toady to the once and future president.

A tale of two libel suits: ABC News’ shocking abdication, and the end of the line in Everett, Mass.

George Stephanopoulos earlier this year. Official White House photo by Carlos Fyfe.

For this morning, a tale of two libel suits, one national, one local. The national case threatens to undermine protections for journalism that have been in place since 1964. The local case will result in the closure of a weekly newspaper that started publishing 139 years ago.

First, the national lawsuit. On Saturday, ABC News agreed to pay $15 million to Donald Trump in order to settle a libel claim over repeated on-air assertions by anchor George Stephanopolous that a jury had found Trump “liable for rape” against the writer E. Jean Carroll. The money will be paid to Trump’s presidential library and foundation, and Katelyn Polantz report

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The problem is that what Stephanopoulos said was substantially true. The CNN story put it this way: “In 2023, a jury found that Trump sexually abused Carroll, sufficient to hold him liable for battery, though it did not find that Carroll proved he raped her.” And here’s the big “but”: In August 2023, U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan found that Trump had, in fact, raped Carroll under the everyday meaning of the word if not under the legal definition. Here’s what Lewis said at the time in the course of ruling on one of Carroll’s defamation proceedings against Trump:

Indeed, the jury’s verdict in Carroll II establishes, as against Mr. Trump, the fact that Mr. Trump “raped her,” albeit digitally rather than with his penis. Thus, it establishes against him the substantial truth of Ms. Carroll’s “rape” accusations.

I’ll give you a moment to throw up. Now, then, let’s parse this, shall we? A jury found Trump liable for “sexual abuse,” which Judge Lewis ruled was tantamount to being found liable for rape. What Stephanopoulos said was inaccurate only under the most hypertechnical interpretation of what actually happened — and, as I said, Stephanopoulos’ assertions were substantially true, which is supposed to be the standard in libel law. But ABC and its parent company, Disney, decided to appease Trump rather than continue to fight.

And what’s with Stephanopoulos? At 63, he has made many millions of dollars. If he had resigned and continued to fight rather than go along with his corporate overlords, he could have been a hero. Who knows what opportunities would have opened up for him? Instead, he’s content to continue as a highly compensated apparatchik. It’s sad.

By settling with Trump, ABC is following in the path of other corporate titans, a number of whom have donated $1 million apiece to Trump’s inauguration festivities. The donors include Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who owns The Washington Post.

Under the 1964 Supreme Court ruling of Times v. Sullivan and subsequent refinements, public officials and public figures like Trump need to show that statements they find harmful are false, defamatory and made with actual malice — that is, with knowing falsehood or with reckless disregard for the truth — in order to win a libel suit.

What Stephanopoulos said arguably wasn’t even false, and surely it didn’t amount to actual malice. A deep-pockets defendant like Disney ought to stand up for the First Amendment lest its cowardly capitulation to Trump harm other media outlets without the wherewithal to fight back.

Coming at a time when two of the Supreme Court’s justices, Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch, have publicly signaled that they would like to weaken Times v. Sullivan, ABC’s behavior is shockingly irresponsible.

Local paper to close

Now for the local case. On several occasions I’ve written about an explosive libel suit brought against the weekly Everett Leader Herald by that city’s mayor, Carlo DeMaria.

Unlike the matter of Trump and ABC, you will not find a clearer example of actual malice, as Leader Herald publisher and editor Joshua Resnek testified in a deposition that he’d made up facts and quotes in a campaign aimed at impugning DeMaria’s integrity. That news was broken in January 2023 by Boston magazine’s Gretchen Voss. Indeed, eight months later, Middlesex Superior Court Judge William Bloomer froze assets belonging to Resnek and one of the paper’s owners, Matthew Philbin, because he believed DeMaria was likely to win his case.

The denouement came Sunday when The Boston Globe reported that the suit would be settled for $1.1 million and that the Leader Herald would be shut down as part of the settlement. Globe reporter Maddie Khaw writes:

Resnek, who writes and edits most of the Leader Herald’s articles, has frequently used the nickname “Kickback Carlo” to refer to DeMaria, a moniker representing Resnek’s claims that DeMaria had received illegal payments in real estate deals.

Records show that Resnek has admitted to knowingly reporting falsehoods and fabricating quotes.

“Mr. Resnek wrote what he wrote because he believed Mr. DeMaria was bad for the City of Everett and he was motivated by the fanciful notion that he could bring about Mr. DeMaria’s defeat in the [2021] election for Mayor,” the defendants’ lawyers wrote in court documents.

In fact, DeMaria was re-elected in 2021.

DeMaria and his lawyers will hold a news conference later today. Meanwhile, there is nothing up at the Leader Herald’s website about the settlement, which features several stories that were posted  as recently as this month.

Incredibly, Everett is also the home of two other weekly newspapers, the Everett Independent and the Everett Advocate, both of which are part of small, locally owned chains; neither of them has anything on the settlement, either.

A deep dive into the Eastern Mass. media; plus, WBUR cuts again, and Alden rattles the tin cup

Map of Plymouth, Mass., in 1882. Via the Norman B. Leventhal Map Center.

Mark Caro of the Local News Initiative at Northwestern University’s Medill School has taken a deep dive into the media ecosystem of Eastern Massachusetts — the wreckage left behind by Gannett’s closing and merging many of its weekly papers, and the rise of independent startups, many of them digital nonprofits.

As Caro observes, the Gannett weeklies and websites that still exist are “ghost newspapers,” containing little in the way of local content.

The 6,000-word-plus piece focuses in particular on the Plymouth Independent, The Belmont Voice and The New Bedford Light, although a number of other projects get name-checked as well. Caro writes:

What’s happening in New England is being echoed across the country as the local news crisis deepens. While the nation’s ever-widening news deserts have drawn much attention, the ghost papers represent another dire threat to a well-informed citizenry. Many areas don’t meet the definition of a news desert, but residents have been left with newspapers so hollowed out that they’re bereft of original local news reporting.

I was especially interested to see that Caro interviewed K. Prescott Low, whose family sold off The Patriot Ledger of Quincy and its affiliated papers in 1998 only to see their legacy torn apart in less than a generation. The Ledger was once regarded as being among the best medium-size dailies in the U.S.; today it limps along with a skeleton staff and no newsroom.

As Low tells it, he thought he had found a trustworthy buyer, but his former papers soon ended up in the hands of GateHouse Media, a cost-cutting chain that in 2019 merged with Gannett. “Conceptually it was a good idea,” Low told Caro. “Practically it didn’t work out because of the subsequent purchase by GateHouse and what has happened across the media.”

Caro and I talked about the lack of news coverage in Medford, where I live, after Gannett merged the Medford Transcript and Somerville Journal. He also interviewed my “What Works” partner, Ellen Clegg, about Brookline.News, the digital nonprofit she helped launch after Gannett closed its Brookline Tab.

As I told Caro, there are reasons to be optimistic, but affluent suburban communities are doing better at meeting their own news needs than are urban areas, and there’s a certain random quality to all of it. “You can have a community that has something really good,” I told him, “and right next door is a community that has nothing.”

Caro has written a good and important article, and I hope you’ll take a look.

WBUR cancels ‘Radio Boston’

There was some sad news on the local public radio front earlier today. WBUR is ending “Radio Boston,” a locally oriented program that airs on weekdays from 11 a.m. to noon and is repeated from 3 to 4 p.m.

It is WBUR’s only local news show and follows cuts at both of Boston’s major public broadcasters this years, as well as downsizing across the country. Earlier this year GBH News canceled three local television shows, “Greater Boston,” “Talking Politics” and “Basic Black.” That last program will return next month, possibly as a digital offering.

GBH Radio continues to offer four hours of local programming each weekday — “Boston Public Radio,” a talk and interview show hosted by Jim Braude and Margery Eagan, from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m., and “The Culture Show” from 2 to 3 p.m.

The end of “Radio Boston” won’t result in any layoffs, according to the station, as the folks who worked on that show will be reassigned to pumping up the local segments on NPR’s two national drive-time programs, “Morning Edition” and “All Things Considered.”

Alden’s tin cup

Alden Global Capital, the hedge-fund newspaper owner that has decimated community journalism from Lowell, Massachusetts, to Denver to San Jose, is trying something new: asking readers to give them money in order to offset some of the newsroom cuts they’ve made.

An alert Media Nation reader passed along an appeal sent to readers of Alden’s South Florida Sun Sentinel, asking for tax-deductible gifts to the nonprofit Florida Press Foundation‘s Community News Fund. The foundation appears to be legit, but it’s hard to imagine why they would agree to help prop up a paper that’s been slashed by its hedge-fund owner.

“Alden Capital is surrounded by small independents that continue to eat into their circulation area,” my informant says. “Key Biscayne Independent, the Bulldog Reporter, Florida Phoenix, Coastal Star … are just a few of the ‘independents’ started by former journalists to fill the news desert. Everyone competes for donations. So when a Wall Street PE [private equity] firm solicits for limited resources, they are actually starving their competition. I think this is sad and something that may be a harbinger of what’s to come under the new transactional administration.”

If you see any other examples of rattling the tin cup at papers owned by corporate chains, please let me know.

Jeffrey Schwaner tells us how the nonprofit Cardinal News covers rural western Virginia

Cardinal News executive editor Jeffrey Schwaner with education reporter Lisa Rowan

On the latest “What Works” podcast, Ellen Clegg and I talk with Jeffrey Schwaner, executive editor of Cardinal News, a nonprofit digital news outlet covering Southwest Virginia. It also covers something called Southside Virginia, which is an area south of the James River, near Richmond. Since we taped this in Boston, we asked him to explain their coverage area in more detail.

Jeff joined Cardinal News in September after nine years as a storytelling and watchdog coach — including five years as editor — of Gannett’s two Virginia newsrooms, the News Leader in Staunton and The Progress-Index in Petersburg.

I’ve got a Quick Take that explores a key question: Does a lack of local news correlate with support for Donald Trump? A new study by the Local News Initiative at Northwestern University’s Medill School finds that it does, although they caution that correlation is not causation. I discuss what the study found — and why it matters even if you don’t believe that the role of local news ought to include persuading people to change their voting patterns.

Ellen’s Quick Take is on a mysterious website that popped up in Oregon after a 147-year-old paper called the Ashland Tidings folded. Called the Daily Tidings, it recently published story after story by a reporter named Joe Minihane, who supposedly skiied, hiked and ate his way through Southern Oregon. Except Minihane is based in the U.K., visited Oregon for a week on vacation, and doesn’t know how his byline got hijacked. The stories are made up, perhaps by AI. Ryan Haas of Oregon Public Broadcasting has the story.

You can listen to our conversation here, or you can subscribe through your favorite podcast app.