EPISODE 732 - Rich Lyons - Life Is Sales, sales mastery includes self awareness and embracing the unknown

In this episode, Dave welcomes Rich Lyons, author of Life of Sales, entrepreneur, and former CEO of Lyons Consulting Group. From escaping the Chicago winter for the warmth of Zihuatanejo to reflecting on a career rich with lessons in integrity, leadership, and purpose, Rich shares an intimate look at his personal and professional evolution.

Now an author, speaker, and mentor, Rich discusses the twenty-year journey behind his book Life of Sales—a title that grew from a simple domain name idea into a full reflection on human connection, business growth, and the belief that everyone, in some way, is selling. Whether it’s convincing a client, inspiring a colleague, or encouraging a child, Lyons sees “sales” not as persuasion but as service. He emphasizes patience, persistence, and the willingness to ask good questions and truly listen.

Drawing on his background as an engineer turned entrepreneur, Rich recounts how he built a leading e-commerce consulting firm from the ground up. His leadership philosophy centered on culture—creating an environment where both employees and clients thrived. He tells a striking story about offering an unconditional money-back guarantee early in his company’s history, a bold decision that nearly cost him financially but ultimately defined the company’s reputation for trust and integrity.

Throughout the conversation, Rich touches on the changing world of sales in an AI-driven era, highlighting that while tools evolve, the fundamentals remain: authentic relationships, attentive communication, and ethical decision-making. He explores emotional intelligence in business, reminding listeners that awareness of fear, trust, and empathy transforms not only how we serve customers but how teams connect with one another.

Lyons also offers insight into leadership development and his focus on helping entrepreneurs grow as transformational leaders. His upcoming book, Business Is Culture, will expand on building purposeful organizations from the inside out—starting with personal awareness and alignment between values and actions.

Listeners will find wisdom in Rich’s calm, clear perspective on leadership, growth, and conscious success, as well as his ability to redefine what “sales” truly means in work and in life.

Key takeaway: True sales is service. When you lead with awareness, empathy, and integrity, you don’t just sell—you build trust, culture, and connection that endure.

https://www.lifeissales.com/

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EPISODE 494 - Donny Young - The 4MIDABLES, Inspector Gadget, The Cannonball Run Movie and Putting Yourself Out There

Author and screenwriter Donny Young shares an inspiring journey through a creative career built on persistence, curiosity, and a willingness to embrace opportunity. From writing episodes of Inspector Gadget on a Smith Corona typewriter to developing his newest young adult adventure series, The 4MIDABLES, Donny reflects on the experiences that shaped both his storytelling and his outlook on success.

Listeners are taken behind the scenes of the entertainment industry as Donny recounts how one opportunity naturally led to another. He shares stories from writing for one of television's most beloved animated series, appearing alongside legendary Hollywood stars in The Cannonball Run, and learning valuable career lessons through unexpected encounters with industry icons. Throughout the conversation, a common theme emerges. Creative careers are rarely built through a single breakthrough, but through consistently showing up, saying yes to new experiences, and remaining open to where those experiences may lead.

Donny also introduces The 4MIDABLES, a project that has evolved over many years from an animated television concept into an ambitious young adult novel series. Designed around teamwork, empathy, problem solving, and family friendly storytelling, the series reflects his belief that exciting adventures can inspire young readers without relying on violence or sensationalism.

For aspiring writers, Donny offers thoughtful advice drawn from decades of experience. He discusses the value of studying acting to better understand character, reading widely within your chosen genre, embracing rejection as part of the creative process, and continually improving your craft. Above all, he encourages writers to remain patient with themselves and to remember that every experience adds depth to the stories they will eventually tell.

This conversation is both a celebration of storytelling and a reminder that success often comes from perseverance, preparation, and the courage to keep creating, even when the next opportunity is still out of sight.

Key Takeaway

Creative success is rarely the result of one defining moment. By continuing to learn, putting yourself in places where opportunity can find you, and refusing to let setbacks define your journey, you give your work the best chance to reach the audience it was meant for.

Writer for the iconic “INSPECTOR GADGET” cartoon series.
Inspector Gadget: Volcano Island (Gadget Goes Hawaiian)
Season 1, Episode 15
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rlb-BKVhS3g

Extra in Cannonball Run
The Cannonball Run Final Scene and End Credits
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mUOaxwA5Wic

Excited to introduce 4 amazing Teens who solve major crimes anonymously!

https://www.instagram.com/the4midables/

Original Publish date: Friday, January 31, 2025

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EPISODE 731 - Lance Hillsinger - Child Welfare Social Worker to Author - Navigating Legal Documents to Authorship

In this thoughtful episode, author and retired social worker Lance Hilzinger joins us from San Luis Obispo, California, to reflect on a lifetime of service in the child welfare system and his journey into writing. With three decades of experience advocating for children and families in Los Angeles and San Luis Obispo Counties, Lance offers a candid look behind the courtroom doors of juvenile and foster care cases. He shares how both frustration and hope became the foundation for his writing, leading to several books that examine social policy, history, and faith.

Lance began his career with a master’s degree in psychology from Vanderbilt University before realizing that academia wasn’t his calling. A twist of fate led him to a social work position where he found his true purpose—helping families heal, understanding parents struggling with addiction, and advocating for vulnerable children. Over the years, he witnessed the evolution of the foster care system, including new programs supporting youth up to age twenty‑one, and the ongoing challenges of poverty, substance abuse, and a shortage of foster homes.

Discussing his writing, Lance explains how technical report writing in court shaped his clear, factual, and concise storytelling style. His first book captured the evolution—both progress and pitfalls—of child welfare practices, inspiring readers to consider becoming foster parents or court advocates. Later works broadened his focus: “Build a Better Bridge: Social Policy for the Twenty‑First Century” revisits America’s War on Poverty, calling for smarter, long‑lasting solutions to chronic social issues, while “Beyond Amelia: Lesser Known Women of Yesteryear” celebrates unsung female pioneers in science, leadership, and exploration. His newest book, “Matthew, Mark, Luke and John: A Court Investigator Examines the Gospels,” blends logical analysis and faith, exploring timeless biblical truths through a modern lens.

Lance also shares his experiences with publishing—its rewards, challenges, and lessons learned about contracts, editing, and choosing the right partner. Throughout the conversation, he returns to one unshakable theme: the importance of compassion, honesty, and consistency, whether in social work, writing, or personal faith. He reminds listeners that real change happens slowly but meaningfully, through persistence and integrity.

Key Takeaway:
Lance Hilzinger’s story is a testament to serving others with empathy and endurance. Whether guiding a family through hardship or crafting a book that bridges understanding, his work invites us to believe that steady, thoughtful effort can make systems—and lives—better.

https://www.lancehillsinger.net/

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EPISODE 730 - Dale L. Sproule - Gods of the New Wilderness Series that blends philosophy, AI, and myth

Author and long-time speculative fiction writer Dale L Sproule joins Dave to explore how the writing and publishing landscape has transformed over the past several decades and what that means for today’s authors. Speaking from Toronto, after years on Canada’s west coast, Dale reflects on how the shift from traditional print to online and self-publishing has forced writers to take ownership of every stage of the process. Writing, he says, is the fun part; what comes after is learning to assess if a manuscript is truly ready and finding the right people to help you make it better.

Dale shares practical, experience-based insights on the value of writers groups, both in person and online. He talks about how hearing your work read aloud exposes awkward phrasing, weak passages and moments that do not ring true, and how feedback must always be weighed against your own vision rather than automatically accepted. In his view, developing as a writer means learning to distinguish between advice that improves your story and suggestions that simply change it.

The conversation moves into Dale’s varied creative background as a painter, publisher and editor, and how those skills now allow him to manage cover art and book design himself. From there he tackles the tensions around AI in the arts, acknowledging the genuine anxiety in the creative community, especially among visual artists, while also recognizing that some AI-assisted work is producing astonishing, genuinely new forms of expression.

Dale’s science fiction series, Gods of the New Wilderness, which imagines a world devastated by an immense solar event that wipes out electronic technology. In its aftermath, a biological computer grown in the root network of a forest evolves into a society of sentient trees that rebuild their world using the remnants of human knowledge, mimicking human culture, philosophy and even individual historical figures inside a vast virtual space.

At the heart of his story is a deeply human, allegorical conflict: a girl overwhelmed by the flood of information from this forest intelligence learns to communicate through reworked lyrics of long-lost songs, while her powerful, psychopathic sister exploits that knowledge, torturing both sibling and forest to rebuild technology and consolidate control. Dale describes how the AI-like forest becomes the moral center of the tale, gradually developing empathy and emotional awareness, while some of the humans lose theirs, flipping the usual “AI as villain” trope on its head.

Dale closes by sharing where listeners can find his work, including his Gods of the New Wilderness series and earlier horror collections, and by reflecting on the urgency he feels, in his seventies, to get long-gestating projects onto the page.

Key takeaway: Writing today asks you to be both artist and architect of your own career. Community, careful feedback and ethical clarity around new tools like AI can help you protect your voice, tell more original stories and build worlds that still feel deeply, recognizably human.

https://godsofthenewwilderness.com/

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Episode 592 - Joe McClean - Screenwriter, Author and Director - Putting Yourself Out There and Into Your Story, That is Where the Opportunity Lies

Joe made a bunch of short films and one feature length movie with friends and no money. To this day, I enjoy watching those early attempts to craft a story, but essentially this era of on-the-job-training was my film school. Now it was time to take my first big swing.

I wrote a script I felt I could raise enough money to shoot myself, a found-footage film, and I spent a year begging for cash and favors. The star of a hit TV show, who had gone to the same high school as me, graciously agreed to act in it. An NBA player made a small investment. Actor, comedian, and Late Show with David Letterman regular, Jay Thomas agreed to make a cameo. The snowball was growing and eventually I scraped together enough cash to direct Life Tracker. The movie played over 20 science fiction conventions and got a digital distribution deal with Charter Communications (now Spectrum) and streamed into millions of American homes.

Life Tracker

Great! Now I needed a follow up to prove that my work ethic couldn't be mistaken for beginner's luck.​ Taking advantage of a group of talented actor friends and another who owned property outside of Fresno, I wrote and directed a super-low-budget homage to The Big Chill called The Drama Club which can currently be seen on Tubi.

The Drama Club

Looking back from that point, I could see the years of work I'd put in. Meeting people. Working with casts and crews. Going on adventures together. taking risks and building trust. Jobs started to fall into place. I signed my first manager. I joined the Writers Guild of America. I pitched big shot producers at legacy studios and powerhouse production companies. Always searching for that next opportunity. That's when I met Blair Underwood. A business lunch turned into an attachment (and a friendship), and soon I was hitting up everyone I'd ever done business with to see who wanted to join the team.

Viral was written and produced by me, it's directed by and stars Blair, and he shares the screen with Sarah Silverman, Jeanine Mason, and the incomparable Alfre Woodard! The movie is finished and we're actively working with our sales team to bring it to audiences.

In the mean time, I’m working with Amistad (an imprint of HarperCollins Publishing) on a two-book deal titled Sins of Survivors about the plight of a family who lived in the once vital African American neighborhood of Black Bottom in 1930s and 40s Detroit. The first book is currently available everywhere books are sold, and the second hits shelves in the summer of 2026... So, go to your local bookstore's website get your copy!

Why "Ginger Beard," you ask? My wife's maiden name is "Beard," and when our son was born he had a reddish tint to his hair. So, my company is named after my son, my "Ginger Beard"... It's only a bonus that I have red facial hair.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/joe-mcclean-6668b018

https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0565697/

https://www.gingerbeardfilms.com/

Wednesday, September 17, 2025

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Episode 525 - Richard DeVeau - Light's Out - We Paint a Picture of a special forces veteran, CIA officer, and leader of Boston's Homeland Security team

About the author

After majoring in marketing at Bentley University, Richard spent a career as a copywriter and creative director serving such clients as Red Lobster, Ducati Motorcycles, Marriott Hotels, and Clorox. He also brought his writing skills to bear for communications agencies that serve nonprofit organizations, including American Red Cross, Wounded Warrior Project, Toys for Tots, CARE, Special Olympics and many others. And he was a frequent editorial contributor to Fundraising Success Magazine.

In 2000, he helped launch acclaimed author Stephen King’s internet publishing debut and the world’s first mass- marketed e-book, Riding the Bullet. Richard wrote the online ad campaign that prompted more than 400,000 people to purchase and download the novella.

His screenplay, Graven Image, placed in the top twenty percent of the Academy of Motion Pictures’ Nicholl Fellowships international screenwriting competition in 2014.

Richard is also an accomplished fine art painter. Over the past thirty years, he has exhibited work in numerous solo and group shows. His work was represented by two commercial art galleries in his native Boston and is now represented by a gallery in Chicago, where he currently resides.

Richard and his wife have four adult children and two grandchildren.

Book: Light's Out

A retired couple are murdered in their Wisconsin home - art and other valuables are stolen. A Lake Michigan oil tanker explodes and sinks that same night.

Eve Taunt - special forces veteran, CIA officer, and leader of Boston's Homeland Security team - believes there is a connection between these two events.

She and her team quickly find themselves in pursuit of a domestic terrorist - an M.I.T. educated, military trained missile genius with Ted Bundy-like psychopathy - to stop him before he carries out his next devastating attack. This one is even more lethal than the overhwelming inferno he just unleashed on Boston.

As Eve closes in, she discovers these attacks are orchestrated by a US senator and a powerful cabal of highly placed leaders and lawmakers with a hidden agenda.

https://a.co/d/2yD92bj

Episode Date - Monday, April 14, 2025

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BONUS - Share Your Story, Poem and Writings Here on Living The Next Chapter

Thanks for supporting this podcast! I am putting in place a new way to support authors, writers and poets in their writing journey!

I want to feature your writings here on Living The Next Chapter. Share your poem, a portion of your chapter, something that you are working on - and do so right here on the podcast. The opportunity to share your work in progress with the world!

Go to my website, click on the "Speak Pipe" link right there on the website and record up to 5 minutes of audio (use it multiple times if need be) and read us your poem, snipit or portion of your work in progress for listeners of this show to hear.

If you want to avoid recording audio, then siimply email me what you want to have read and shared on a podcast episode featuring your work and don't forget to include how a fellow listener can connect with you - social media link, website, email - you never know who might hear your work in progress, your poem etc.

I will make an episode just about you, sharing your writings right here!

Looking forward to putting the spotlight on you!

https://poets.org/anthology/poems-your-poetry-project-public-domain

Original Date: Tuesday, December 10, 2024

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Episode 360 - Bob Young - True Golf - the story of Moe Norman and a new song with Bob's brother Neil Young

Our Guest - Bob Young was born in Toronto, Ontario, Canada in 1942. He was a member of the Canadian Professional Golfers’ Association for nearly three decades and first met Moe Norman in the early 1960s.

Like Norman, Young has always been intrigued by metaphysics and has had access to the leading trance mediums.

Young’s brother is Neil Young, the internationally recognized singer-songwriter.
Book: Mind Golf: The Troubled Genius of Moe Norman - At one of a series of clinics that former USPGA teacher of the year Craig Shankland staged, he asked Moe Norman in front of about 300 people, “What’s it like to hit perfect shots, Moe?” Moe paused and looked at the audience. Then, in jest, said, “You will never know.”

Mind Golf assembles and ignites the mental energy of the image of the shot-to-be. Moe “Pipeline Moe” Norman was a Canadian professional golfer and the best ball-striker the world has ever known. Author Bob Young met the eccentric golfer and traveled between Canada and Florida from the early 1960s to 2004, where he was able to observe Pipeline Moe for decades.

At the heart of the episode is Bob’s long relationship with legendary Canadian golfer Moe Norman. Drawing from decades spent practicing and playing alongside him, Bob offers rare insight into Moe’s extraordinary ability as a ball striker and his unique mental approach to the game. Moe’s concept of a “quiet mind” becomes a central theme, not as a mystical idea, but as a disciplined way of filtering out distractions and staying fully aligned with intention.

Bob explains how this mindset translates into a practical method for improving performance. By visualizing the full flight of the ball, from launch to apex to landing, and “feeling” the shot before executing it, golfers can create consistency and precision. He connects this process to a broader idea of energy, suggesting that the same creative force behind music, visualization, and peak performance is accessible when focus and awareness align.

The conversation also touches on Bob’s book, his experiences within golf culture, and the evolving ways he is sharing this knowledge through audio, video, and upcoming projects. Along the way, he reflects on Moe Norman’s life, his challenges, and the recognition he eventually received, painting a portrait of a misunderstood genius who stayed true to his path.

This episode ultimately explores the intersection of discipline, creativity, and awareness, showing how mastery in any field often comes from learning how to see clearly, think simply, and trust what you feel.

Key takeaway: Peak performance comes from aligning a clear mental image with a quiet, focused mind, allowing your body to execute naturally without interference.

https://bobyounggolf.com/

Published:

May. 01, 2024

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