It's still spooky season. My decorations keep growing, and costumes have found their way onto my body — last weekend I was an unnamed masked superhero with a cape, then Peter Pan. This weekend I'm a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle. Cowabunga, dude. I swear I didn't even put that ghoul up in the studio though. How did it get here? Did it just move? Headly — did you do this?
Yeah. He's not a great co-host.
This week I listened to a ton of podcasts — and a lot of them are buzzing about the same shiny stuff: Tesla's flying car, the Elizabeth Holmes documentary, the midterm debates. All very interesting. But we're not talking about any of that today. Instead, this week's episode is about Eric Weinstein, Tristan Harris, and Marina Cooley. Who the heck are they? Three humans who had very interesting things to say about the state of the world — and they all seemed to come together to form a theme, one overarching message, really: conversations about humanity. My goal here is to lay out all three of these seemingly different discussions and show you how they're all related.
Quick reminder of the rules: I don't rate or review podcasts, and I couldn't possibly cover everything happening out there. I'm a truck driver who listens to a lot of them each week. I find the themes that interest me, do some further research or add my own introspective thoughts, and record it all here — partly in hopes it's interesting to you, and partly because this is how I learn best: listen to it or read it, write it, teach it, boom, it's solidified.
What's Going On With Me
Halloween is my favorite holiday, if you can call it that. My wife doesn't get it — she could care less. But here's the thing: my 8 totes of Halloween stuff pale in comparison to her 12 totes of Christmas decorations, foldable Christmas trees, and inflatable yard decorations. I like Christmas, don't get me wrong — but I'm fine with a tree and a few strands of lights. Whatever. I put up and take down all the decorations for every holiday anyway, so it's my fault really. I'm an enabler. Ha.
My boss left me alone last week for his vacation — and now he's having surgery in two weeks with a 3-to-6-month recovery. So that vacation was just a test run to see if I can run things by myself. Yay me — I guess I did well, because now I'll be doing it through all of November and December, maybe longer. I like the challenge and the extra responsibility. I just expect some tough months.
And my younger sister is about to have her second baby — due any day now — so I'm going to be an uncle again. She lives in the next state over, about 10 hours away, so I'm waiting for the birth and then heading over for a weekend. I'm excited for that new-baby smell. There's something about holding a newborn that just leaves me awe-struck at the wonders of procreation and the fragility of life. My mom and step-dad live near her too, so I'll get to visit them.
What's Going On With the Podcast
The new website is up and running, and I secured the domain: thisweekinmyheadphones.com. Links to every platform hosting the podcast, links to the Protocols Study Group videos I'm doing on YouTube, and a companion blog for every episode.
And the big news: I'm now offering the Headphones-to-Action Workbook — born from Episode 1. I was listening to a podcast, got inspired to start my own, went home, wrote down a plan, and put it into action. That's exactly what this workbook is. How often are you listening to something, get an idea or an inspiration to change or try something new, and it flutters away into the abyss? This workbook challenges you to reflect on what you hear, then gives you tools and tips for identifying a goal and turning it into a 7-day action plan. I know it works because I used it to create this podcast — and I keep using it every week as I try to grow it. And it's not just for podcasters: any aspiration works. Being a better person, parent, spouse. Health and fitness goals. Starting a business, changing careers, going back to school. Whatever you hear in your headphones, this helps you turn what you hear into what you do.
It's $9, and it's available now — hit the Shop tab in the menu at the top of the site, and it's downloadable immediately after purchasing. Maybe you'll hear something in this episode that leads to your next 7 days of action.
Old Business: The Gypsy Rose Update
Last week we talked about Gypsy Rose and the death of her husband, Ken Urker — and the clips got a lot of attention on Instagram and TikTok.
I'll be honest: I was hesitant to give my real thoughts and speculations, because I honestly thought she'd have a reality-show fan base that would back her up. Turns out everyone thinks the same things I do. Many thought worse. So I feel compelled to give an update.
A lot of comments said the same thing: "You have to listen to the phone calls." What phone calls? Well, I found them. There's been a wave of FOIA requests to the prison that housed Gypsy, and all the recorded phone calls have been uploaded to the internet. Internet sleuths are going crazy digging through them — calls between Gypsy and her first husband Ryan, with Ken, and with multiple other men. After the documentary Mommy Dead and Dearest aired, guys started writing her in prison, and a lot of those letters turned into phone calls — probably even visits, like with Ryan and Ken. The calls expose private details on both sides. And here's the part that kills me: the calls periodically cut in with "This phone call is being monitored and recorded" — and they still go on with flirty, vulnerable conversations. Nobody stopped to think that maybe this woman is so interesting to people that it won't stop at the documentary, and that these "private" calls, recorded by the state department of corrections, would someday be released to the internet for everyone to gawk at and judge.
I'm not interested in reliving and picking apart why her first marriage ended. Only one call caught my attention: a recent one between Gypsy and Amelia Bird, a friend she made in prison who's still inside. It sounds like Gypsy is describing exactly the same situation from last week's episode — the texts about being drunk and mad, stabbing the headboard after Ken split and threatened to get full custody of their daughter. That's confirmation the texts were real. She did get drunk and stab the headboard because she was jealous and insecure. Not flattering behavior — but not evidence she had anything to do with his death, either.
In fact, we have some evidence pointing in a totally different direction. Preliminary toxicology findings have been released by his family and law enforcement — mostly reported on social media — and here's the interesting part: the preliminary screen came back clean. That's strange, because the scene had drug paraphernalia — syringes, a spoon, a brown powdery substance, shot glasses, even a handgun on the nightstand. That's why it was suspected to be a suicide by overdose. But the tox screen so far is clean.
Here's why that's not as simple as it sounds. A preliminary toxicology looks for broad classes: alcohol, amphetamines, opiates, benzos, cannabis, cocaine. If the brown powder or syringe contained a synthetic opioid like fentanyl — frequently mixed into or substituted for street drugs — a standard preliminary opiate screen will not detect it. And natural heroin breaks down in the body almost instantly: it converts to 6-MAM within minutes, which quickly breaks down into morphine. In a postmortem setting, if a person survives even briefly after exposure, or the sample degrades, the 6-MAM can disappear. And even the resulting morphine has to beat the test's cutoff levels — below the threshold, it registers as a negative. So he could have taken the drugs and still tested clean.
Then there's the autopsy. Ken had an enlarged heart, and his main coronary artery was 90% blocked, with two or three additional arteries roughly 60% blocked. That's advanced coronary artery disease — likely unknown to him or anyone else before his death. His heart was essentially a ticking time bomb. So here's another way to read it: with everything going on — the online bullying, the breakup, the mental health struggles — all that acute emotional stress, plus an unknown heart condition, and maybe he was going to have some drinks, do some drugs to chill out, and died of natural causes — a sudden fatal arrhythmia, a heart attack — before he ever got the chance. He likely didn't know about the heart condition, which also suggests it wasn't an intentional overdose or a suicide.
Gypsy has said publicly that while Ken died amid a "suspected overdose," nobody knows the true circumstances yet, and she's urged people to focus on the severe cyberbullying he experienced rather than spreading rumors. And honestly? I owe her an apology for my prior speculations. I'm not usually the type to judge people based on past behavior, and I don't want to start. People can change. She released a 5-minute video saying she truly loved Ken, that no one knows the real details of their marriage, and that she's trying to grieve while raising her child alone. She seemed sincere. And I feel bad for feeding into this online frenzy — it's gotten out of hand. I saw a livestreamer with an endless scroll of Gypsy videos and 200,000 followers, and it made me feel gross. That's not what this show is about. I'm not a judge, and I'm not a priest. People make mistakes. People make horrible choices and pay a price for them. Breakups happen. None of that means she had anything to do with his death, and it was wrong of me to assume so.
So I'm wiping my hands of this. I'm out. I'm done.
Unless I get to come back and say "told you so." Ha. Okay — that's the only way.
No, seriously. I'm out… probably.
Notable Mentions
The Hidden Third — a newer podcast hosted by Emmy winner Marianna Van Zeller. The episode "I Was Set Up by a Cartel. Now I'm Going to Federal Prison" follows Niki Burke, who's literally two weeks away from turning herself in to serve a federal prison sentence. She met a man in Vegas, became friends, believed he was a businessman, used his investments to open a distribution center in Texas — then found out he was running drugs for a cartel through the company under her nose. When the cops came knocking, he ghosted her. A compelling, edge-of-your-seat story I could totally see as a movie. Highly recommend.
Flagrant — Andrew Schulz's show had on 50 Cent: "50 Cent on Diddy's Life in Prison, Eminem, & Street Fighter Reaction." Both of them are actors in the new live-action Street Fighter movie out this weekend. 50 talks about his recent TV/movie ventures, his P. Diddy documentary, and behind-the-scenes stories about rap beefs, Tupac, and Jay-Z. If you're a fan or just interested in the culture, worth a listen.
New Business: Conversations About Humanity
There are a lot of conversations we could have about humanity — but in our ever-changing world, it's important to stay on the up-and-up about what's changing, and how we can change to adapt, grow, and thrive. Here are three conversations I heard this week that made me stop and think.
1. Marina Cooley on The Mel Robbins Podcast: "How to Stop Being Overlooked & Start Getting What You Want." Cooley is a marketing professor at Emory University's Goizueta Business School. Her message: the fear of rejection, criticism, and even being ignored can keep us from pursuing opportunities, sharing our ideas, and showing people what we're capable of. Being good at something isn't always enough — we also have to learn to communicate our value, advocate for ourselves, and get comfortable with the possibility that not everyone will notice or approve.
Her class is wild: it starts by making a social media account, splitting into groups — Group A posts a video, Group B analyzes and improves it, and so on — with the goal of getting a million views by the end of the class. But it's not about going viral. It's about overcoming your fear of putting yourself out there. The clip I played stops at her line: "You actually won't die."
There's something interesting about being human. We can spend hours imagining the things we want to do — starting that business, applying for that job — and in our minds it all makes perfect sense. But then comes the moment we actually have to do something about it. Suddenly there's a chance we might fail. Someone might criticize us. Or worst of all: we put our work out into the world and hear… nothing.
Being ignored can be worse than failing. At least when you fail, you tried — you took your shot. But hearing nothing back? That can make you question whether you should have tried in the first place. And I think that's why so many of us spend more time preparing than doing. We research, we plan, we wait until we're ready. But sometimes, if we're being honest, we're not waiting for the right time — we're waiting for a guarantee that we won't get hurt. And life doesn't offer those.
Maybe the point isn't to eliminate the fear. Maybe it's to stop letting the possibility of embarrassment make our decisions. Because the truth is, most of the time the worst thing that happens when we put ourselves out there isn't the end of the world. It's a feeling — an uncomfortable feeling that eventually passes. And on the other side of that feeling is a possibility we never would have discovered if we'd stayed where we were comfortable.
Her second clip hit me too. There's a particular kind of disappointment in putting something out into the world, waiting for a response, and hearing nothing. When we put a piece of ourselves out there, we're really asking a question: does anybody care? And when the answer appears to be no, it's easy to turn that into a judgment about our own worth. But those two things aren't necessarily connected. Maybe the timing was wrong. Maybe we haven't figured out how to communicate what we're trying to say. Or maybe it simply wasn't very good — and you know what? That's okay, too. Because if it wasn't good, we can learn. We can get better. We can try something different. We just can't do any of that if we quit the moment we don't get the response we were hoping for.
So here's the question I'm sitting with: if nobody applauded — if nobody noticed, if nobody even knew how hard I tried — would this still be worth doing? And if the answer is yes… maybe that's reason enough to begin.
2. Tristan Harris on The Tucker Carlson Show. Harris starred in Netflix's The Social Dilemma — former Google design ethicist, co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology. He's talking about the early days of social media, when the idea was to make the world more open and connected. But the incentives behind the technology mattered. If your business makes money by keeping people's attention, then the more time people spend staring at a screen, the better it is for the business. And that creates a conflict — because what keeps us engaged isn't always what's good for us.
The things that make us angry, the things that make us afraid, the things that keep us comparing our lives to everyone else's — those keep us scrolling. There's a difference between building something that helps people connect and building something that profits from their attention. Both might be successful businesses. But they aren't creating the same kind of world.
This gets bigger than technology. We're talking about human nature — what motivates us, what we're vulnerable to. We want connection. We want acceptance. We want to belong. Those are normal human needs. But what happens when those needs become the very things a business learns to exploit?
Here's the part that really made me think: you don't need bad people to produce a bad outcome. Sometimes you just need a system that rewards the wrong things. People can have good intentions, make individually rational decisions, and still contribute to something harmful. And that question applies far beyond social media. When we're building our careers, our businesses, our relationships — how do we build systems that reward the right things? Because success and progress aren't always the same thing.
3. Eric Weinstein on Diary of a CEO — my podcast of the week. The episode made me feel the most this week: it made me excited, it made me mad, I paused and replayed. If you don't know Weinstein: Harvard-trained mathematical physicist turned finance executive and public intellectual, known for his theory of Geometric Unity — an unpublished attempt to unify general relativity and the Standard Model.
A lot of people have strong feelings about AI, and I don't blame them — most coverage is doom and gloom. But AI isn't going away. It's only getting better. And you know what scares me even more than AI? People. Throughout history, people have been behind every major catastrophe and horror inflicted on other human beings.
So what can we do? One conversation worth having: AI companies are being trained by people through our use of their systems. On top of that, we could create policies that require AI companies to compensate people — different ways to do that — and that income could supplement what we earn rather than AI simply replacing us. Maybe AI lets us work fewer hours and do more of what we love. I don't know the best ideas, but we're not having enough of these conversations.
Then came the clip where the speaker says 100% of the population has gone insane. I pushed back on that. First: if 100% of the population is insane, then he's part of the population too. Second: I disagree, because I think the majority of people are actually pretty smart. We're living our daily lives — families, responsibilities, keeping the boat afloat. Yes, we see insane things happening and we want them changed. But how? Conversations like the first one — actual policy conversations about the AI problem — need to happen more often. And I'd argue that the person invited to the table, the person with a platform and friends in high places, is exactly who should be having them.
That led to my favorite moment: "You want to have a conversation about humanity? Then be more humane." If you want the real conversation — not some abstract frontier talk that goes nowhere — then care about people and do something real. We spend a lot of time talking about how everyone else is insane. The question nobody answers is: what are you actually doing about it?
We also can't ignore the practical side. AI is already here, and the conversation worth having is how we use it to make our lives better: talking through ideas like a free counselor, drafting documents and spreadsheets, planning projects and working with contractors, digital work and marketing. I use these tools myself — I want to stay competitive and do good work. And the question hanging over all of it is the one worth asking out loud: how do I make sure I don't get replaced by AI? One answer: demonstrate your value by learning to use these tools well. As Rick Rubin put it, creativity is in the prompt. You have to give AI direction — it won't automatically know what you want. But if you learn to direct it, you can work faster, do better work, and free yourself up for the things only you can do.
So here's where the three conversations land for me. Cooley says: stop letting the fear of rejection make your decisions — put yourself out there. Harris says: look at the systems around you, because the incentives decide what gets rewarded. Weinstein's conversation — filtered through my disagreement with him — says: if you want to talk about humanity, be more humane, and learn to live alongside the tools instead of just fearing them. Fear of rejection. Systems that reward the wrong things. The choice to be more humane anyway. Same question from three different directions: what does it mean to be human right now — and what are we going to do about it?
That's the episode for this week. Please like and follow — it's the best way to support the show. Share it with someone you think would enjoy it. And comment — I do read them.
I'm Kevin T., wishing you a safe but oh-so-creepy October… and if you grabbed the workbook this week, get it open — maybe today's episode just gave you your first 7-day action plan.
Thanks for tuning in. See you next week in my headphones.
Show notes
- Theme: Conversations About Humanity — Marina Cooley on fear of rejection and being overlooked (Mel Robbins Podcast); Tristan Harris on attention, incentives, and systems that reward the wrong things (The Tucker Carlson Show); Eric Weinstein on AI, people, and what it means to be humane (Diary of a CEO — podcast of the week)
- Old business: Gypsy Rose update — FOIA prison phone calls confirm the headboard texts; preliminary toxicology clean (fentanyl wouldn't show on a standard screen); autopsy found an enlarged heart and 90%-blocked artery; Kevin issues a formal apology and says he's out — "probably"
- Notable mentions: The Hidden Third (Marianna Van Zeller) — Niki Burke: "I Was Set Up by a Cartel. Now I'm Going to Federal Prison"; Flagrant — 50 Cent on Diddy, Eminem & the Street Fighter movie
- Podcast business: Website live at thisweekinmyheadphones.com; Headphones-to-Action Workbook now on sale ($9, Shop tab, instant download) — launch week this week
- Personal: TMNT costume this weekend (masked superhero + Peter Pan last weekend); wife's 12 totes of Christmas decor vs his 8 of Halloween; boss's upcoming surgery = Kevin running things Nov–Dec; sister's second baby due any day
- Full list of podcasts: in the episode description on YouTube
- Episode 9 script: Kevin scripted the full episode — no AI transcription needed this week
- Closing: like, follow, share, comment — "a safe but oh-so-creepy October"