Shows
Flying the Coop#08 Elijah Zimmerman: Compassion as resistance in a culture of optimization
Elijah Zimmerman is an interfaith minister, nonprofit leader, and PhD in communication whose work lives right at the intersection of compassion, transformation, and leadership. As executive director of the Center for Mindful Self-Compassion, he helps people and organizations use compassion as a real, practical tool for meeting change, whether that means leading through uncertainty, making space for discomfort, or calling a pause when things get tense.
We talk about why compassion is more than a feeling, how it can act as a quiet form of resistance to the culture of optimization, and what it looks like to...
2025-11-2642 min
Flying the Coop#07 Brandon Reid & Andrew Jacob: Co-ownership is the future of workBrandon Reid and Andrew Jacob are longtime friends turned co-founders of Heirloom, a platform for collaborative ownership that helps builders find their team, share equity, and actually get passion projects off the ground. We talk about why the future of work should feel more like weaving than hustling, what it takes to create something worth passing down, and their best mushroom foraging hauls.
Flying the Coop is brought to you by Strange Birds, a messaging co-op that gives a flying duck. From websites to onboarding flows, launches to long-term strategy: if you want your brand, offers, and...
2025-11-1327 minFlying the CoopAnnouncement: Why Flying the Coop is saying bye-bye to Spotify
In two weeks, on 26 November, we’re going to delist our podcast Flying the Coop from Spotify.
It'll still be available on just about every other podcast platform, plus streaming on our own website.
If you’re one of the 20% of Flying the Coop listeners who prefer to listen on Spotify, we are truly sorry for the inconvenience. We’ll continue distributing the podcast everywhere else: Apple Podcasts, Pocket Casts, Pandora – basically everywhere our publishing platform Castos connects us to, plus video versions on YouTube as well. We encourage you to give one of these a go.
2025-11-1205 min
Flying the Coop#06 Nancy Disbrow: Rethinking work for different kinds of brainsNancy Disbrow is the sharp and deeply empathetic brain behind Neuro-osity, where she helps high-achieving professionals (especially those with ADHD or dyslexia) stop forcing themselves into broken systems and instead build ones that actually work for their minds. We talk about what it means to put the right brain in the right seat, how teams can support neurodivergent folks without falling back on stereotypes, and why curiosity might be the most powerful workplace tool of all.
Flying the Coop is brought to you by Strange Birds, a messaging co-op that gives a flying duck. From websites to...
2025-10-3029 min
Flying the Coop#05 How we make difficult decisions: A business frameworkOh hey, a mini-episode on how we do business differently at Strange Birds!
This decision-making framework works magic because:
It invites you to rep the viewpoint of the other person
It transforms the conflict from you vs me to us vs the problem
It clarifies the difference between a principled objection and a preference
It kicks things off and wraps things up with [brief] feelings
It's inspired by the Quaker model of consensus. We met at a Quaker uni (Earlham College) way back in the day. Despite neither of us being Quaker, the way we...
2025-10-1613 min
Flying the Coop#04 Jacqueline Radebaugh: The legal side of doing business differently“The cooperative model is healing the way we interact and relate to each other… and it allows us to practice law in a healing way.” – Jacqueline Radebaugh
From corporate tax law to co-ops, Jacqueline has been on quite a journey as a lawyer.
Now she’s the best dang coop lawyer around (spoiler alert: she’s ours).
Jacqueline is a managing partner at Jason Weiner, a firm that provides legal and business consulting for mission-driven companies, social impact, and environmental enterprises. Jacqueline assists mission-based, values-forward entrepreneurs and businesses in identifying and...
2025-10-0223 min
Flying the Coop#03 Alfred García: Business should care for the people within it“People work better when they believe in what they are working for.” - Alfred Garcia
Alfred is a member of Jamgo, a developer co-op based in Barcelona that has been around for nearly 15 years. On top of that, he lives in a housing co-op. We spoke with him about how a co-op’s structure should be just enough to flex around the complexity of the people within it.
In a co-op, you are an active decision maker. You don’t get to externalize decisions to a boss. You are all the boss, sharing the load together...
2025-09-1832 min
Flying the Coop#01 Janel and Anna: Why we’re doing business differentlyIt made sense to kick off our podcast in conversation with each other.
What the heck are we doing?
Why should anyone listen?
Who are we?????
In this episode, we share our origin story, fail at Avril Lavigne lyrics, and dig into why we care so dang much about cooperatives.
Make sure you stay until the end to hear random animal facts!
Action items from this conversation:
What does growth mean to you?
What is your business structure (hierarchical, horizontal, cooperative) and why did you pick...
2025-09-0431 min
Flying the Coop#02 Haley Boehning: The relationship between purpose and profit“Purpose without profit is a dream. Profit without purpose is meaningless.” - Haley Boehning
Every time we have a call with Haley, we always think “wow, we should have recorded that.”
Well, lucky you!
We finally recorded a conversation.
Haley was the perfect first interview for Flying the Coop.
She is an expert at purpose.
In this episode, we cover juicy questions like:
What even is purpose, beyond the buzz-word definition of it?
And how does that purpose help make every single decision easier and more efficien...
2025-09-0431 minFlying the CoopFlying the Coop debuts on 4 September 2025!Flying the Coop will debut on 4 September, 2025!
We share great convos with with founders, co-op creators, legal advocates, and the best kind of business geeks about evolving business models, shared ownership, long-term trust, and the tradeoffs that come with building something more honest, longer-lasting, and real-deal human.
If this sounds like your jam, sign up for our podcast newsletter to be the first to know when it hits the feeds:
https://strangebirds.kit.com/podcast
Chapters
(00:00:00) - A placeholder episode for Flying the Coop
2025-08-0900 min
Nodes of DesignNodes of Design#51: Words as Design Tools by Janel TorkingtonJanel Torkington is a professional content strategist, two-time content team manager, digital marketing dabbler, and occasional poet/ukulele-plucker. She is presently working at Facebook as a content designer. She specializes in mobile ad platforms, the ad creative experience, designing and building ecosystems of tools to help advertisers create ads that look and perform great everywhere they show up.
In this episode, Janel had shared great insights on using words as design tools. She helped us describe what a content strategy is and how designers can use the power of words in designing beautiful experiences. We later discussed ho...
2021-01-2922 min