Explore every episode of the podcast Flying the Coop
| Title | Pub. Date | Duration | |
|---|---|---|---|
| #19 We did the thing and you can too: We're a co-op! | 05 Aug 2026 | 00:37:18 | |
"We're optimizing for a sustainable container to take care of the people within it — and to do some cool work while we're at it." - Janel Torkington Most businesses optimize for growth. Scale as much as possible, make as much money as possible, get as big as possible. It seems like the only option in the playbook. But that path has never called to us. Strange Birds has been operating as a cooperative for three years, and six months ago we made it official. This episode, we take a beat to stop and ask, wait, why did we do that? What are we optimizing for instead? Is it working? Also, what are you wearing? We get into:
---- Flying the Coop is brought to you by Strange Birds, a worker owned cooperative. Strange Birds helps purpose driven companies say out loud what makes them worth choosing. We build stronger connections between audiences and brands with the right messaging. Then we implement it across the board. Find us at http://strangebirds.land | |||
| #18 EMMA Technology Cooperative: Businesses need more verbs | 04 Jun 2026 | 00:36:28 | |
"When you take infinite growth off the table, this entire world of possibilities opens up." — Ramsey Nassar, EMMA Technology Cooperative We make this show to learn things, ask good questions, and let really cool people shine (and maybe occasionally get a little clever ourselves). This conversation did something different: it reminded us that what we're building isn't just a business model. It can be radical. And maybe it should be. Ramsey Nassar, Gwen Pasquarello, and Andy Wallace at EMMA Technology Cooperative have spent five years as a worker-owned co-op building software and hardware for video games, theater, public installation, and media arts. And theme parks. And custom programming languages. And a nonprofit arcade collective. They're thriving. This one gets into:
---- Flying the Coop is brought to you by Strange Birds, a strategic marketing cooperative. We help small yet mighty teams figure out what actually needs to happen — and then we go do it with them. Most partners bring only thinking or doing. We bring both to your big idea, and we stay until it's shipped. Find us at http://strangebirds.land | |||
| #17 Jessica Lackey: You can't move faster than the speed of your own growth | 07 May 2026 | 00:39:17 | |
"If they teach you how to build a business, you stop buying their stuff. That's not what they want." — Jessica Lackey A lot of business advice is a slot machine dressed up as a strategy. Jessica Lackey's book Leaving the Casino lays it out cold: the entrepreneurial industrial complex isn't, in fact, designed to help you build a sustainable business. It's designed to keep you spending money on the PROMISE of one. She and Anna get into:
When the opportunity is clear and the doing feels impossible, we get inside your hardest project, find what needs to happen, and follow it all the way through. Find us at http://strangebirds.land | |||
| #16 Nilou Khonsari: Collectivism isn't radical, we just forgot how to do it | 02 Apr 2026 | 00:39:04 | |
"Collective care feels like an exhale — like finally being able to breathe at work." – Nilou Khonsari Most organizations that say they value collective care don't actually build for it. They write values statements, flatten a few org chart lines, and hope the culture follows. (spoiler: it doesn't.) Nilou Khonsari spent ten years co-building Pangaea Legal Services, a nationally recognized immigrant justice nonprofit, into a model of what collective governance actually looks like in practice. Through her book The Future Is Collective, she helps organizations build structures that truly reflect their values. Anna and I did a full winter book club around this one. This conversation gets into hardcore collective scaffolding:
And woven throughout: Strange Birds' own messy, ongoing, in-progress attempt to enact a lot of this fun stuff ourselves. -- Flying the Coop is brought to you by Strange Birds, a worker-owned co-op. When the opportunity is clear and the doing feels impossible, we get inside your hardest project, find what needs to happen, and follow it all the way through. Find us at http://strangebirds.land | |||
| # 15 Meg Rye is redesigning recruitment from the inside | 19 Mar 2026 | 00:33:40 | |
"If you want to take the time to really understand every human being you're working with — that takes more time. And time is money. And that's inherently anti-capitalistic." — Meg Rye Hiring is a power system. Most people on both sides of it (candidates and companies alike) have just accepted that as a fact of life. Meg Rye hasn't. Meg is the founder of Good Maven, a design recruitment and career coaching business built on a pretty radical premise: that recruiters can function as guardians rather than brokers. That the job isn't to scoot humans through a pipeline as efficiently as possible; it's to understand what each person actually needs, and make connections that honor that. In this conversation, we get into the mechanics of what that looks like in practice: how Good Maven approaches underrepresented talent, why diverse pipelines don't happen by accident, and what it actually takes to redesign hiring around care rather than conversion. We also go deep on the structural side — B Corp certification, Employee Ownership Trusts, EMI shares — because Meg is building the values into the bones of the business itself, not just the pitch deck. (Janel will be the first to admit this part of the conversation made her head spin a little. Anna loved every second of it.) We explore:
-- Flying the Coop is brought to you by Strange Birds, a worker-owned co-op. When the opportunity is clear and the doing feels impossible, we get inside your hardest project, find what needs to happen, and follow it all the way through. Find us at http://strangebirds.land | |||
| # 14 Tarzan Kay has the antidote to hustle culture (and it’s not simply "slowing down") | 05 Mar 2026 | 00:44:10 | |
“We’ve been sold such a narrow idea of what a business can be — like you either coach or sell a course. But there are so many ways to build something rich and beautiful, something that’s actually yours. A business can give you so much more than just money — it can give you community, relationships, growth, and experiences.” - Tarzan Kay What would work look like if designed it around real humans, real relationships, and real choice? In this episode of Flying the Coop, we’re joined by Tarzan Kay, a leader in consent-based business design and marketing. Tarzan shares how her thinking has evolved from traditional online marketing into a much deeper exploration of power, persuasion, autonomy, and responsibility. This episode was extra special to me as I've been following Tarzan for the last decade, watching her evolve from self-dubbed "email marketing diva" into something much more expansive and inspiring (who still tells a mean story or three 'round the fire). What a total honor to have her on the show to explore:
This convo smashes to smithereens the prefab version of success we’ve all been handed, replacing it with hope: expansive, relational, creative, and alive. -- 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 experience to tell the same story, we can help. Find us at http://strangebirds.land | |||
| #13 Sara Otto: Supply chains that center the people within them | 18 Feb 2026 | 00:37:04 | |
“Supply chains are made of people, not just products or paperwork.” – Sara Otto Supply chains touch almost everything we buy — clothes, home goods, gifts, art — yet most of us never really see how they work, or who they rely on. In this episode of Flying the Coop, we’re joined by Sara Otto, Chief Supply Chain Officer at Nest, a nonprofit working globally to make artisan supply chains more equitable, transparent, and sustainable, especially for home-based and small-workshop makers who are often invisible to traditional oversight. Sara shares how Nest operates at the intersection of ethics, compliance, logistics, and real-world commerce, translating “we want to do business better” into systems that actually protect workers’ rights and dignity. Drawing on years of experience living and working alongside artisan communities, she offers a look at what real-deal ethical sourcing looks like. Together, we explore:
This conversation is a grounded, compassionate look at how complex global systems can be redesigned to respect humanity at every level. -- 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 experience to tell the same story, we can help. Find us at http://strangebirds.land | |||
| #12 Chloe Poynton: Human rights as a business responsibility | 04 Feb 2026 | 00:39:27 | |
“Human rights aren’t things that happen over there. They show up in everyday business decisions.” – Chloe Poynton
Chloe Poynton is the co-founder of Article One Advisors, a global consultancy that works with companies to put people and human rights at the center of business, from supply chains and product design to emerging technology and AI governance. They have partnered with organizations ranging from major consumer brands to tech platforms and manufacturers, helping them move beyond surface-level compliance towards real change. Chloe shares her path from humanitarian work in refugee camps with the UN and why she shifted to working with businesses. We talk about what actually changes when businesses stop treating human rights as a compliance exercise and start treating them as a lived responsibility.
What we talk about:
Join us to talk about how care, accountability, and dignity can be implemented inside large, messy systems, and why centering people in business is often about designing better structures to hold them and their work. This interview covers a lot of ground with a lot of heart. -- 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 experience to tell the same story, we can help. Find us at http://strangebirds.land | |||
| #11 Lauren Edwards: Building businesses that do good from day one | 21 Jan 2026 | 00:47:00 | |
"Every business could be a social enterprise if they wanted it badly enough." – Lauren Edwards Lauren Edwards has spent her career helping businesses stop treating "doing good" as an afterthought, and start building it into the core of how they operate. As Executive Director of SeaChange and owner of NextStep Business Consulting, Lauren works with entrepreneurs, nonprofits, and corporations to prove that profit and purpose don’t have to be in tension. In this conversation, we dig into what social enterprise actually means (and why the label matters less than the intention), why nonprofits and for-profits are both constrained by broken systems, and how trust (and the lack of it) shapes everything from wage gaps to public policy. We also cover:
This episode was a beautiful reminder to us that how we structure our business is one of the loudest ways we can show up in the world. -- 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 experience to tell the same story, we can help. Find us at http://strangebirds.land Chapters
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| #10 An honest year-in-review of (almost) building a co-op | 07 Jan 2026 | 00:32:35 | |
“Capitalism is all about squeezing every last bit of value you can… and what we are trying to do is explore a model that allows us to exist within a capitalist hellscape, but takes care of us as a fundamental driving mechanism instead.” - Janel Torkington
We talk about:
This episode is part retrospective, part behind-the-scenes, and part planting our flag for building a business that’s for-real human first... especially in a year that basically tried to eat us alive. --- 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 experience to tell the same story, we can help. Find us at http://strangebirds.land Chapters
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| #09 Noah Scalin: The ROI of creativity in the age of AI | 11 Dec 2025 | 00:41:40 | |
“What’s the ROI of creativity? That's like asking, what’s the ROI of electricity?” - Noah Scalin Noah Scalin is a multidisciplinary artist, author, and co-founder of Another Limited Rebellion, where he helps individuals and organizations unlock their creative capacity through practice, play, and a wildly approachable philosophy: that creativity is a universal human skill you can train. We talk about why creativity is a muscle, how limitations can actually expand what’s possible (get back in the box!), and what happens to organizations when they treat creativity as infrastructure instead of decoration. We also get into the age of AI, the difference between human expression and machine output, and why doing creative work for yourself might be the secret to showing up better everywhere else. 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 experience to tell the same story, we can help. Find us at http://strangebirds.land Chapters
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| #08 Elijah Zimmerman: Compassion as resistance in a culture of optimization | 26 Nov 2025 | 00:42:38 | |
“If you’re forgetting the basic fundamentals of how we can be here together, that’s not optimization — it’s an illusion.” - Elijah Zimmerman 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 bring a little more breath, pause, and presence into how we work together. 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 experience to tell the same story, we can help. Find us at http://strangebirds.land Chapters
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| #07 Brandon Reid & Andrew Jacob: Co-ownership is the future of work | 12 Nov 2025 | 00:27:51 | |
“Collaborative ownership and collaborative governance is a vessel to make our mission happen.” - Brandon Reid Brandon 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 experience to tell the same story, we can help. Find us at http://strangebirds.land Chapters
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| Announcement: Why Flying the Coop is saying bye-bye to Spotify | 12 Nov 2025 | 00:05:55 | |
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.
BUT. We also understand if that won’t fly with you. We’re in a place where we feel we have privilege of choice; not everyone is in such a place. We choose to hold these powerful corporations responsible for their choices. With you, we choose to share what’s on our minds and open a conversation. | |||
| #06 Nancy Disbrow: Rethinking work for different kinds of brains | 29 Oct 2025 | 00:29:41 | |
“The way that my brain didn’t fit was also the reason for my success.” - Nancy Disbrow Nancy 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 onboarding flows, launches to long-term strategy: if you want your brand, offers, and experience to tell the same story, we can help. Find us at http://strangebirds.land Chapters
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| #05 How we make difficult decisions: A business framework | 15 Oct 2025 | 00:13:10 | |
“The goal is to reach mutual understanding and agreement, not to win.” - Janel Torkington Oh hey, a mini-episode on how we do business differently at Strange Birds! This decision-making framework works magic because:
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 structure our co-op is heavily influenced by the (very smart) way they make group decisions.
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| #04 Jacqueline Radebaugh: The legal side of doing business differently | 01 Oct 2025 | 00:23:29 | |
“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 addressing their legal needs, from start-up phase through financing rounds, to conversion and exit strategies.
On top of the three things everyone should kind of already be doing before they begin discussions in creating their coop (open books, decision-making practices, and sharing profit), we also cover:
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 experience to tell the same story, we can help. Find us at http://strangebirds.land Chapters
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| #03 Alfred García: Business should care for the people within it | 17 Sep 2025 | 00:32:28 | |
“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. It’s like a bunch of entrepreneurs got together, put their hands in, and created Captain Planet (when will they make a Marvel Universe around him? Please bring Captain Planet back). This interview goes deep. We get philosophical. We ask deep questions like:
We also answer fun questions like “Why is Barcelona so full of co-ops? Is it… the anarchists???” Oh yeah, this is a good one.
Action items from this conversation:
Listen anywhere podcasts roost.
See Alfred’s web for more about him. Chapters
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| #01 Janel and Anna: Why we’re doing business differently | 04 Sep 2025 | 00:31:15 | |
“Truth is multifaceted and always shifting. So let’s talk to lots of people and find out lots of stories.” - Janel Torkington It 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:
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 experience to tell the same story, we can help. Chapters
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| #02 Haley Boehning: The relationship between purpose and profit | 04 Sep 2025 | 00:31:04 | |
“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:
And our personal favorite question: How do you make the business case for ‘purpose’ without sounding too ‘woo woo?’ We loved this conversation. In fact, after this convo we had a full hour session to rework Strange Birds’ purpose, which then turned into a 6-email series in our newsletter of how we unclucked our messaging.
Action items from this conversation:
Here's where to find more from Haley:
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 experience to tell the same story, we can help. Find us at http://strangebirds.land Chapters
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| Flying the Coop debuts on 4 September 2025! | 09 Aug 2025 | 00:00:29 | |
Flying the Coop will debut on 4 September, 2025!
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