Episode fifty is unplanned. It’s unfiltered.
Nearly every Thursday morning Stefanie and I have a standing meeting 6 AM ET in Raleigh (Noon in Prague). It’s scheduled for an hour. Most of the time, we go three hours.
I’ve recorded nearly every one figuring one day, when we’re famous, someone is going to have have a field day with all that footage.
Abby and I got home from our eleven week journey on a Wednesday afternoon. We unpacked the Airstream in record time and then met up with my son and his girlfriend for dinner at Gussie’s.
When we got home, we crashed. It was the first night sleeping in our home in nearly three months.
I woke up a few minutes before 6 AM on Thursday.
That meeting Stefanie and I have every week. Episode fifty. That’s the show. She didn’t know it when she came on the Zoom. I decided on the spot.
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This journey of starting Authbition has been a wild ride. I’ll admit, I’ve been stuck for awhile. It felt good to finally pop that cork.
There’s a number of reasons for all the pressure that had built up in the unopened bottle.
One. Abby and I were on an eleven week journey in our Airstream. I did publish and record a little bit while on that trip, but, for the most part, I was focused on the experience. Authbition the podcast slowed down. Our authbitious lives ramped up.
Two. I wanted to do something special for episode fifty. I’m not sure why, but the idea of scripting the episode made it less real for me. Abby was game to be the host and do an “ask me anything” kind of a show. At the end of the day, the staging of episode fifty was something I was avoiding.
Three. Talk about staging. I got talked into doing show openers that introduce my guests. But it just never felt authentic to what I was doing. My favorite podcasts have no introductions. Nothing canned. Nothing to skip. When the episode starts playing, it brings me to the 1990s, walking into my garage to work on my motorcycle, and flipping on ther radio for an episode of Car Talk with Click and Clack.
Back then, the show was just on. People were talking. There was no rewinding.
My favorite podcasts today emulate that live, uncut, walk into a conversation spirit.
Stefanie and I baked that language into the Authbition website copy.
“Some episodes will meet you exactly where you are. Others will find you later. There's no right order, no required listening. Just pull up a chair and stay as long as feels right.”
You can expect that episode fifty-one and into the foreseeable future will start somewhere in the middle. No canned openings planned anytime soon. Want to know more about the guest, they’ll be in the show notes.
Vermont wrecked me in the best way. No big box stores. No traffic. Everyone outside, everyone healthy. New Hampshire, a few miles over, felt like its evil twin: empty trails, jammed grocery stores, and a highway meltdown that ended with me swearing off Dunkin' Donuts for good.
Then it got heavier. I traced a lifelong fear of abandonment back to being sent to live with my grandmother as an infant, and admitted I've repeated that pattern my entire adult life, all the way down to the daughter I'm now estranged from. Stefanie shared her own version: twelve years living abroad, close to her family and almost never there for it.
Abby's and my own daydream about moving to Vermont ran headfirst into that same question: is a healthier, more beautiful place to live worth the family we'd leave behind?
Then the show flipped. Stefanie took the wheel.
Convenience & Struggle, Stefanie's topic, and she ran the whole thing.
It started easy: convenience is fortunate, efficient, accessible. Then the shadow showed up: dependency, atrophy, lazy, rigid. Struggle started rough: survival mode, discomfort, overstimulated, afraid. Then it turned: adaptability, resilience, growth, appreciation.
We landed on Fortunate Resilience: convenience stays good as long as we know why we're choosing it and what it's replacing. Lose that awareness and it curdles into what we ended up calling Insecure, Overstimulated Rigidity. My own gut-punch admission: my shadow side is Lazy and Afraid, whether that's an air conditioner, a guitar I'm scared to detune, or a relationship I haven't risked since the last one ended.
Fifty episodes in, I said it out loud: Authbition isn't just a podcast. It's becoming a publication, something you can hold in your hand, with Stefanie designing the notecards and journals to prove it. It’s a movement. This episode is the rawest evidence of what that actually looks like: two people, one long call, no script, arriving somewhere neither of us expected.
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Thanks to Stefanie Morejon for designing the first Authbition notecards, for leading the game, and for helping build whatever this journey is turning into.
And thanks to everyone following along with Authbition as this show continues to grow into what it’s becoming.
If you like what Stefanie and I are building, please like, subscribe, and share.
I appreciate you!
Thank you for reading and listening.
Health, happiness, kindness, respect
for every being and all things.
— Andrew