In this end-of-year episode of Flying the Coop, we’re looking back on what it’s actually been like building Strange Birds (and the podcast!) in 2025. We talk about: What it really means to move toward becoming a worker-owned co-op How open books and shared decision-making have reshaped our relationship to business Why we define full-time work as 25 hours The systems and “containers” we’ve built to handle big feelings, hard conversations, and real life Our “Bird Brain Summit,” where we mapped how our very different brains, speeds, and working styles actually complement each other (curious? here are the question prompts we used for this) Why showing up consistently sometimes means showing up for ourselves before the business 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

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

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

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

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.--- CORRECTION: Spotify CEO Daniel Ek actually has donated $700 million to AI defense company Helsing (not $60 million as we say in this recording).

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

Oh 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 structure our co-op is heavily influenced by the (very smart) way they make group decisions. Get yerself a ready-to-roll version of this decision-making framework here: https://strangebirds.kit.com/decision-making-frameworkIf you take it for a spin, please please please let us know how it goes!! We're super curious if it helps you make your way through tricky biz conversations.

Jacqueline Radebaugh is (in our humblest opinion) the best dang co-op lawyer around, and the legal mind behind Strange Birds’ own cooperative transformation. We talk about what makes a business truly cooperative (it’s not just the paperwork!!!), why consensus doesn’t have to mean unanimous enthusiasm, and how the way we do business can be a healing act. 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

“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: Why is it so hard to ask for help and how can we change that? If profit isn’t just about money, what else can it mean? What does it look like for a business to honor the whole person, not just honor their productivity? What does ‘transparency’ look like in practice? How does equitable compensation work at Jamgo? How does the concept of ‘speed’ change when you look at co-ops? What is slower, what is faster? What is the difference between community-based support and support based in capitalism? 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: What does profit mean to your organization? What does ‘transparency’ look like in practice in your organization? How do you celebrate the messiness of life?   Listen anywhere podcasts roost.   Watch on YouTube. See Alfred’s web for more about him. Learn more about Jamgo. See all episodes.

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: What does growth mean to you? What is your business structure (hierarchical, horizontal, cooperative) and why did you pick it? Does it align with your values? Have you ever considered building a bat house? 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.

“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 efficient? How do you know if your purpose is muddled… even if it’s written down super clearly? 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: What is your purpose? What is one way you could better embed your purpose in your work days? If you have a team: have an open discussion about your purpose in your next stand up. What does it mean to them?   Here's where to find more from Haley: Storyforge website Haley Boehning on LinkedIn   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

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