Murder 101 - The XQ Institute

Episode Date: March 20, 2024

The original project in 2018 had stemmed from a grant students had won from the XQ Institute. Find out more about the nation's leading nonprofit organization.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Bring a little optimism into your life with The Bright Side, a new kind of daily podcast from Hello Sunshine, hosted by me, Danielle Robay, and me, Simone Boyce. Every weekday, we're bringing you conversations about culture, the latest trends, inspiration, and so much more. I am so excited about this podcast, The Bright Side. You guys are giving people a chance to shine a light on their lives, shine a light on a little advice that they want to share. Listen to The Bright Side on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Open your free iHeart app and search The Bright Side.

I'm Johnny B. Goode, the host of the podcast, Creating a Con, the story of Bitcoin. This podcast dives deep into the story of Ray Trapani and his company, Centratech. I'll explore how 320-somethings

built a company out of lies, deceit, and greed. I've been saying since a very young age that I was going to be a millionaire. If someone's like, oh, what's your best way of making money? I'm like, oh, we should start some sort of scheme. Listen to Creating a Con, the story of Bitcoin, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I used to have so many men. How this beguiling woman in her 50s.

She looked like a million bucks. Scams a bunch of famous athletes out of untold fortunes. Nearly $10 million was all gone. It's just unbelievable. Hide your money in your old rich man because she is on the prowl. Listen to Queen of the Con, Season 5, The Athlete Whisperer, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. A group of high school students.

High school students. Elizabethan high school students started a project to research a string of unsolved murders. Their research led to the identification of the killer. Investigators now have an answer to a 34-year-old question. Once you start getting a few tips or a few leads or a few identifications, then the cold case isn't so cold in the north. There's a pretty good chance he's still alive. Everything that the students predicted through their profile turned out to be accurate. Redhead killer profile. Male. Caucasian. 5'9 to 6'2. 180 to 270 pounds. Unstable home. Absent father and a domineering mother. Right-handed. IQ above 100.

Most likely heterosexual. There is no profile of this killer except for the ones the students created. Just because some of these women no longer have people to speak for them does not mean that they deserve to not be spoken for. What if this guy's still alive? Like, what if he comes after us? I said, are you going to kill me? And he said, yes. This is Murder 101, Episode 11, The XQ Institute. Institute. I'm Jeff Shane, a television and podcast producer at KT Studios with Stephanie Lidecker, Courtney Armstrong, and Andrew Arnault. In 2020, I came across a story about a group of high school students who set out to investigate a series of unsolved murders in their community.

It was an incredible story that here at KT Studios we felt needed to be explored further. As you've heard, the original project in 2018 stemmed from a grant students had won from the XQ Institute. Founded in 2015, XQ Institute is the nation's leading non-profit organization dedicated to improving schools across the country. We thought it would be important to showcase the incredible work XQ is doing and give listeners a chance to figure out how they themselves can get involved. I had a conversation with Anne McKinnon, a senior advisor, and Carrie Schneider, who works as head of editorial and publishing at XQ. You previously heard Carrie in episode three. My name's Anne McKinnon. I work in Brooklyn. I live in New York, but I work

for XQ. I'm a senior advisor now at XQ. I've been with XQ since before we even had a name and have been part of designing and executing on a whole lot of ambitious plans that we've had from the start, including the original challenge, which is where we met our friends from Elizabethton. I'm Carrie Schneider. I'm head of editorial and publishing at XQ. I'm a former second grade teacher turned writer who gets to cover and talk about and learn from educators and students all across the country who are doing really cool things to change schools and their communities. XQ is completely dedicated to transforming high schools. Our purpose is to help the entire country understand that high school transformation is necessary and that it's possible and that it's underway. And we try to accelerate and amplify what it means to be

underway. And so as a result, we are supporting schools that are doing very innovative things. We're working on learning experiences that will transform learning. And we have developed a design process that is community-led that brings many, many more people into the process and the work of transforming high schools. Yeah. And Anne, I would just add to that too. I think when we talk about transformation, you're exactly right that it's necessary from an equity standpoint that high schools have never worked for everyone. They've always worked for certain populations of students or some more than others. But we really believe that from an equity standpoint, from a preparing students for all the future has to offer standpoint, and from communities really knowing

what's best for the students that they serve, that folks can come together and get a big vision for what they hope high schools can be for those kids so that they come out with everything you remember from high school, but also a whole lot more. So they come out as generous collaborators and original thinkers and critical thinkers. And in order for high school to accomplish those things beyond just, you know, good grades on a test, learning has to look a lot different while students are there. So when we talk about transforming high school, it's really transforming teaching and learning, getting educators, the agency and the freedom to design lessons that really engage students,

giving young people a voice and shaping what and how they learn, and then really having the school match what the needs are of young people when they come out of high school and go on to their future. Explain to me, like, what are the tangible things that you try to get schools to implement? What we did in the original competition was create materials that helped schools think much more originally and much more ambitiously about how to create schools where there was a really coherent culture and sense of purpose, really meaningful and engaged learning, youth voice and choice, community partnerships, and schools that use time, space, and technology in expansive ways. More recently, we've run similar competitions in the state of

Rhode Island, all across the state of Rhode Island, with select schools in New York City, and most recently in the District of Columbia. And what we've done in those areas is take schools where there was a critical mass of people who felt that they were ready to change their high schools and make them more engaging and more modern so that students would graduate ready for the future and with a sense of what the future might hold for them. And school communities that felt they were ready decided to engage with us and went through a really, really rigorous design process. There's a lot of knowledge out there about how high schools can and should change. It just isn't permeating necessarily to all the places where it's most needed. So we've made those materials and the whole process

available across the District of Columbia and in Rhode Island and have helped people come to a greater understanding of what they can do. And they are doing extraordinary things. There are two schools in the District of Columbia that we selected as a result of the most recent process. And one of them is taking the concept of Afrofuturism, an incredibly important intellectual and cultural concept, and making Afrofuturism the very center of the school and the theme around which the school is organized. The other has organized itself around the theme of entrepreneurship and financial independence for students who graduate. So what that means is that in both of those schools, educators, young people, and community partners are designing learning experiences, reshaping the culture of the school. and get the transformed high school.

I think it's much more we create the space for those community conversations to be held and convene people and bring them together around guiding questions. And then they come to their own, you know, articulation of what that might be in their community, whether that's Afrofuturism or whether that's community partnerships with industry in the area,

or whether that's a school inside of a museum or a school that serves housing unstable students. It really is very different depending on the local context, but that's really the beauty of it. It's about really giving kids a voice in what they think they need to thrive in their communities after they finish, and really looking at bigger contextual factors, too, like workforce development. There's a school in Indianapolis that really that whole high school was created out of knowing that the state was going toward renewable energy and wind and solar and a lot of things that they weren't graduating enough high school students to fill really high tech STEM, high paying jobs. So I think it's just a lot of what we do is create the space and create

the guides for those conversations to be had so that each community can form their own vision. And then we help them along the way with access to experts and other design tools and research and all of those pieces so that they can make those visions a reality. Which is not to say that anything goes. A design team works through this series of questions and challenges and does a whole lot of research on their own and does a lot of reading, has a lot of hard conversations, and they answer the questions that are part of the design process that come together into a school design. And then we and other experts look really closely at that school design and give feedback and rate them for quality. So every one of our schools, as different as they look, has been through a test for quality of their idea and

their quite detailed proposal. So because there are certain common things that every school needs to do well. They don't need all to be done the same way, but they all need to be done well. Let's stop here for a break. We'll be back in a moment. kind of daily podcast from Hello Sunshine hosted by me, Danielle Robay and me, Simone Boyce. Every weekday we're bringing you conversations about culture, the latest trends, inspiration and so much more. Thank you for taking the light and you're going to shine it all

over the world and it makes me really happy. I never imagined that I would get the chance to carry this honor and help be a part of this legacy. Listen to The Bright Side on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Open your free iHeart app and search The Bright Side. My name is Johnny B. Good, and I'm the host of the new podcast, Creating a Con, the story of Bitcoin. Over this nine-part series, I'll explore the life and crimes of my best friend, Ray Trapani.

I always wanted to be a criminal. If someone's like, oh, what's your best way of making money? I'm like, oh, we should start some sort of scheme. You see, Ray has this unique ability to find loopholes and exploit them. They collected $30 million. There were headlines about it. His company, Centratech, was one of the hottest crypto startups in 2017. It was going to change the world.

Until it didn't. I came into my office, opened my email, and the subject heading was FBI request. It was only a matter of time before the truth came out. You can only fake it till you make it for so long before they find out that your Harvard degree is not so crimson. How could you sit there and do something that you know will objectively cause more harm in the world? Listen to Creating a Con, the story of Bitcoin on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. I used to have so many men. How this beguiling woman in her 50s.

She looked like a million bucks. with zero qualifications She had a Harvard plaque. tricks her way past a wall of lawyers and agents. She's got all of these Maseratis and Bentleys all in the driveway. Is it like a mansion?

Yes, it's a mansion. that this queen of the con uses to scam some of the biggest names in professional sports out of untold fortunes. About six million. Approximately 11 million dollars. Nearly 10 million dollars was all gone.

Employing whatever means necessary to bleed her victims dry. She would probably have sex with one of her clients. Hide your money in your old rich man, because she is on the prowl. Listen to Queen of the Con, Season 5, The Athlete Whisperer, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your

podcasts. Murder 101. The purpose of XQ is to connect with schools all across the country. I grew up in a small town in Ohio with a high school that a lot of people would say wasn't the best place to learn. A high dropout rate and, you know, a lot of opportunities that some high schools around me had that I didn't have. And I think one of the things that really drew me to XQ as a former teacher and as someone who came up through that school system is that high school transformation can actually happen anywhere. not just something that happens in big cities or something that happens with a ton of support from people right in the community or just on different parts of the country. It really is happening everywhere in small pockets. And a big part of the work that we get to do is to find those examples and connect with them and learn from them so that we can tell others what they're doing and

inspire more work and more changes across the country from their examples and from their stories. So I was really drawn to Elizabethton for that exact reason. Small town, a lot like the one I grew up in that proves that this kind of work can happen anywhere. Exactly, Carrie. And I came from a town like that myself. And I was on the original, the people who were originally looking at all the proposals. And I looked, I came from a very small town in far upstate New York that's a lot like at the proposals that came in from rural areas. I was really struck by Elizabethton. I may even have been the person who brought Elizabethton to the attention of our final assessors because they scored well in their proposal. Their proposal scored well, but it was not in the very top, top ones. But

there was something just so special, so unusual about the way they put their proposal together. It was 2015 in the fall, we issued the challenge. And the challenge was, if you're interested in redesigning your high school, raise your hand, send us a quick concept, and we'll get back to you. So we were surprised. We got 700 concepts. We were thinking we would get 20 or 30 or maybe 70 or maybe 100. They came pouring in. We got 700 concepts, and we screened them really quickly for those that wouldn't be possible. You know, we were only funding in the United States. We weren't funding parochial schools. So a few got told, you know, sorry, but we don't want to just point you later. Most of those concepts got a green light from us to go forward and create a design. So then they rapidly created a design, mostly through early 2016. Some of them got started

earlier, but they came back from their holiday break and worked really hard and put their proposals in. We got those in 2016. They went through a very rigorous judging process and a selection process, and we were able to make the announcements in September of 2016. Some of the proposals were for brand new schools. Some of the more intriguing ones were for redesigns. They were existing schools where community people had come together and said, we want to change the way we do school. So no, it wasn't try to win millions of dollars to build, to put a new wing on your school. It was take this money and think about what you'd really do to transform teaching and learning. Students really did the work. And those teachers,

Mr. Campbell and Mr. Hensley, opened the door for students to do something really original. And they really did. They worked through every detail of our competition process and wrote really, really original and interesting answers to all of the questions that made up the proposal. They were really the only ones who did that. And that was entrepreneurial teachers who had a vision for a different, better way of learning. They had been talking about it theoretically among themselves for quite some time. And when one of them saw our call for proposals, our original challenge, well, the story that I've heard is that Dustin Hensley was looking for grants because he needed new carpet for the library.

And he came across the XQ opportunity and showed it to his friend, Alex Campbell. And the two of them had been reading and talking together about the need to change high school for quite some time. And they said to each other, well, is it time to stop talking and start doing something? Should we give this a try? And so they put this little concept in to just raise their hands and say they wanted to be part of it. And then when they heard back from us that their concept had been accepted, that's when they got really inspired. And they said, if we really, really mean what we've been saying, we would bring students into this process. And that's what they did.

They organized, I think it was mostly Mr. Campbell, organized a spring semester course, an entire course, an elective for a group of students around the XQ proposal. And so they dug into the history of public education, what education is supposed to do, what high schools are supposed to do, how you could create a high school that really met all of their expectations. And they called it, confusingly for many people, they called it the Bartleby School after the character in the Herman Melville story, the one who famously says, I would prefer not to, over and over again to his boss. And so

they had kind of connected this idea that students had and that they felt was present in their students that they would prefer not to have a boring education. They would prefer not to just learn out of textbooks and take quizzes and tests. They would prefer to do more. And they produced a really good school proposal. They learned a lot about education at the same time. And so we were really pleased with what they'd done and felt proud of them and wanted to recognize the work that they had done and give them some money and some leeway to try to do more, which is exactly what they did. They're very entrepreneurial bunch. They will take what's available and turn it into gold over and over again. Yeah. A big part of what we believe in and what we see happening in schools across the country

connects to what we all know about what motivates and inspires each of us when we were young and today, right? Following your curiosity, getting intrigued by something, all of this stuff that like you have a hobby or you want to learn something that you do as an adult in schools, that's often really stifled. So a big part of what we mean when we say high school transformation or what this, the original challenge in our ongoing work over the years intends to do is help people create the space for that curiosity and that passion and following interest and learning to be actually meaningful and engaging and attached to real life for young people. So I think it's really an example of where we know what young people need. They know what they need, but the way schools are structured with kids in classrooms and kids following a bell schedule just isn't conducive

to that. So you have teachers like those at Elizabeth's end, but all over the place, really getting creative about the way that they organize the day or the way that they organize classes or they teach things in a more interdisciplinary way or they have projects. And that really does create the space for kids to actually drive their own learning in a way that follows their curiosity, their passions, and lets them explore who they are, which is ultimately what high schools can be. Yeah, there are two things that I think are important to bring out. One is we know that the job of high school for high school students is to build their identity. As an adolescent, brain science tells us that one of the most important jobs to be done is to build an identity. students have learning experiences where they discover who they are and imagine who they might be. That's what prepares them for college and for adult lives. And routine high school learning often doesn't let students develop identities that are lasting, that are authentic

to who they are. The other is that we know that it's important for teenagers to have caring, trusting relationships in their schools. And many, many schools, and large ones obviously, but even some smaller ones, are pretty anonymous places for students. And one of the features of our schools and one of the elements, the design principles that we stress a lot is the importance of our schools and one of the elements, the design principles that we stress a lot is the importance of caring, trusting relationships and organizing the school so that adults really know students and care about them and can help them build their identities. That's one of the things that Elizabethan is most outstanding at doing. They really know their students well, and they also create learning experiences where

students can discover themselves, discover what they can do. Let's stop here for another quick break. Bring a little optimism into your life with The Bright Side, a new kind of daily podcast stop here for another quick break. I never imagined that I would get the chance to carry this honor and help be a part of this legacy. Listen to The Bright Side on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Open your free iHeart app and search The Bright Side. My name is Johnny B. Good, and I'm the host of the new podcast, Creating a Con, the story of Bitcoin. Over this nine-part series, I'll explore the life and crimes of my best friend, Ray Trapani. I always wanted to be a criminal.

If someone's like, oh, what's your best way of making money? I'm like, oh, we should start some sort of scheme. You see, Ray has this unique ability to find loopholes and exploit them. They collected $30 million. There were headlines about it. His company, Centratech, was one of the hottest crypto startups in 2017. It was going to change the world. Until it didn't.

I came into my office, opened my email, and the subject heading was FBI request. It was only a matter of time before the truth came out. You can only fake it till you make it for so long before they find out that your Harvard degree is not so crimson. How could you sit there and do something that you know will objectively cause more harm in the world? Listen to Creating a Con, the story of Bitcoin, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Abusers in Hollywood are as old as the Hollywood sign itself. And while fame is the ultimate prize in Tinseltown, underneath it lies a shroud of mystery.

Binge this season of Variety Confidential from Variety, Hollywood's number one entertainment news source, and iHeart Podcasts. Six episodes are waiting for you right now to dive into what lies beneath the glitzy image of Hollywood's golden age and all the sex, money, and murder that's been swept under the rug for decades.

Using the Variety archives, each episode offers a rare glimpse into little-known casting couch stories that have long lived in the shadows. So join us as we navigate the tangled web of Hollywood's secret history with host Tracy Patton, along with expert Variety reporters and correspondents

as they discuss the secret history of the casting couch to explore the scandalous history of Hollywood's casting process. Listen to Variety Confidential on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Murder 101. What's XQ's ultimate goal?

XQ's ultimate goal is to see transformation happening in every high school. One of the reasons that we're doing high school is because we think it's the hardest thing to change. We also think it's the most important thing to change. High schools are infinitely more complicated than K-8 schools. They have departments. They have grade levels. They do tracking. They do a million things. And as a result, they have developed some standard routine status quo ways of getting the work done that have calcified the system. That's why the typical bell system that sometimes exists in middle schools, but is absolutely the standard in high school, where the day is broken up into blocks, where student learning is divided

vertically into certain subject matter areas where they have to develop their capacities. High schools are very complicated. Expectations associated with standardized testing and with being ready for college, all of those things create deep structures in high schools that are just difficult to budge. A lot of people want to make change, but they are working within a structure that's rigid and it's very hard to change. exist right at the center of K-8 and then everything that comes after that too. So for most young people, it's sort of the last stop before adulthood, right? And it's not too late. As Anne has mentioned, the science of learning and of adolescence at that time, it's the perfect time to really expose young people to new and different experiences so they develop who they are and they come out into the world as young adults, really equipped to thrive instead of having just gone through the slog of high school and going, oh, check that box. I've

got a diploma on to the next thing. But if you change high school, then that puts pressure on K-8 to make sure that students are coming in prepared for what the new high school experience will be. And then that puts pressure on the higher education system and the workforce to make sure that people are coming into jobs and careers and higher education with a whole new set of skills and experiences so that higher ed will have to change to accommodate that too. We say high school is a fulcrum for change, but really high school at the center, if you focus there, then that impacts K-8 and higher ed and across the system too. We discussed what XQ had coming up next. So a year ago, we launched a really important partnership with the Carnegie Foundation for

the Advancement of Teaching. They're a hundred-year-old organization, probably older, and their name is the name associated with the Carnegie Unit. The Carnegie Unit is the organizing unit for all of high school and most of higher education as well. It's also known as the credit hour. And what the Carnegie Unit did and what it continues to do is equate learning with the amount of time that a student has sat in a class. So that's why we talk about the credit hour, which is also called the Carnegie unit. So this partnership with Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching gives us an opportunity to think about what would be a more appropriate way to measure an accredited learning that would be more flexible, that would measure learning as opposed to time in a seat. And it sounds simple, but it's

actually quite complicated to make change in this area because so much of our system is built around this unit that is probably invisible to many people called the Carnegie Unit. But it is an assumption that is baked very deep into the way high schools are organized. We think that it's holding high schools back from the kinds of change that they need to make. It really is time. It's possible and it's time for us to be measuring student learning and attainment and not just how much time they've sat in a seat learning biology or learning world history. So there might be a learning experience where students learn about the Harlem Renaissance, but because of the project that they're doing, they would also learn a great deal about collaboration and original thinking and research and other skills that

are not necessarily covered by the academic standards, but that are equally important in the development of a whole human. And so we're exploring what it means to create learning experiences that do all that. We're simultaneously supporting people as they do the work of high school transformation in their schools and districts in the ways that we've talked about by creating the spaces and providing the resources and tools for those community conversations and student focus groups and digging into the data about how students are doing in high school. So we're doing that. And we're also showing people what's possible and giving them examples of the work that's underway to inspire other high schools

to take up this work in their own communities. So I think when you ask what's next for us, it's continued work in both of those areas, supporting people doing the work and showing people what's possible so they can join us. One of the things that we see over and over again through our work with XQ is that students really can do anything if they're given the opportunity. And it also helps to organize a team. It helps that they are not necessarily working alone, that one of the things that is special about Elizabethton is that they design projects where students can put their heads together, solve problems together, figure out a way to get things done as a team and also as individuals. And they have a spirit and a desire to get work done that has an impact in the world. They bring a lot of empathy

to their work. And actually, most students have a lot of empathy for the people in the world around them and want to put their creativity and their hard work to work on problems that matter. It's one of the things that we hear from students all the time, that they want to be engaged in work that's really relevant and that's authentic and that is not just practice for the real world. They want to be engaging with the real world right now. They did that in 2016 when they put together a proposal for a school that really caught the attention of XQ.

And they've done it over and over again in Elizabethton. Actually, that's what we gave them the grant to do. That's what they said they wanted to do most of all was create opportunities for students to do community projects to serve their community. And they have found a multitude of ways to do community projects to serve their community. And they have found a multitude of ways to do that. And it's a very inclusive process. It's all the students in that school are part of this effort to have a different kind of experience in their high school years. One of the things that really drew me to XQ when I was first learning about it was there all of the technical details around

high school redesign and design principles and learn outcomes and all of those, you know, really specific things that support educators and leaders in doing the work. But I remember having early conversation with Anne and the way that Anne, you broke it down to me was XQ believes in the potential of young people. We're not cynical about teenagers. We don't roll our eyes like, oh, they're just kids. We really do believe in the potential of every young person and believe that high school can be a place to unlock that instead of a place to stifle it. So I think that's something that the Elizabethan story really illuminates because they were able to do things that adults weren't able to do. And

they were able to accomplish things that went well beyond what you would ever think would happen in the context of learning. And at the same time, pick up all of the skills that are important coming out of high school, writing and researching and advocating for yourselves and learning and all of that, but at the same time, really grow as individuals and as people. And that is an example from Elizabethton, but that's playing out in high schools all over the country, not just XQ schools, everywhere. How would the listeners get involved if they want to? Yeah, we actually hear from everyone, which is really important because we do believe in community-led work that has a seat for everyone around the table.

So whether you're a student or a family member or a school board member or a teacher or someone who owns a business or someone who works in a community, there's a place for you in this work in your town and as part of this national movement. We use the phrase Rethink High School across all of social media.

That's an easy way to find us, at XQ America across all socials too. We invite everyone to find a at XQ America across all socials too. We invite everyone to find a seat at the table with us. We do host challenges in districts and other communities based on some of those conversations. And really our work just continues to evolve to meet the needs of people in their communities and defining who they are and how we can help. If you're interested in learning more about XQ, you can find us on all the socials at XQ America. You can visit our website, which is xqinstitute.org, or you can use the hashtag Rethink High School across all the social platforms to find content and resources,

not just from us, but from educators and students all over the country that are sharing examples of the ways they're rethinking high school in their own communities. and me, Jeff Shane. Additional producing by Connor Powell and Gabriel Castillo. Editing by Jeff Twa and Davey Cooperwasser. Music by Vanacore Music. Murder 101 is a production of iHeartRadio and KT Studios. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Listen to your favorite shows. This is Alex Campbell, co-host of Murder 101. We hope you're enjoying Season 1. We ask that if you know anything that could help police solve these cases,

that you contact the appropriate agencies with any information you feel can help with their work to bring justice to these women and their families. But we also ask that if you feel you can help us continue to tell these stories, that you reach out to us with any of the following information. Number one, if you have any personal experiences with these victims that could help us tell their stories as real people, maybe you grew up with them, worked with them, or are even related to them. If you can shed light on the investigations going back to the 1980s, then maybe you worked with the cases, such to the 1980s, then maybe you worked

with the cases, such as a police officer, or maybe you were a witness, or even a journalist. That would also be very helpful. And finally, if you have any information on our suspect, maybe you grew up with him, you were in the military with him, incarcerated with him, or maybe involved with him through law enforcement, such as his jailer, guard, or parole officer. All those things can be helpful. We would love to hear from any of you. You can reach us at info at kt-studios.com or message us through Instagram at kt underscore studios. Bring a little optimism into your life with The Bright Side, a new kind of daily podcast from Hello Sunshine, hosted by me, Danielle Robay, and me, Simone Boyce. Every weekday, we're bringing you

conversations about culture, the latest trends, inspiration, and so much more. I am so excited about this podcast, The Bright Side. You guys are giving people a chance to shine a light on their lives, shine a light on a little advice that they want to share. Listen to The Bright Side on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Open your free iHeart app and search The Bright Side. I'm Johnny B. Goode, the host of the podcast, Creating a Con, the story of Bitcoin. This podcast dives deep into the story of Ray Trapani and his company, Centratech. I'll explore how 320-somethings built a company out of lies, deceit, and greed. I've been saying since a very young age that I was going to be a millionaire. If someone's like, oh, what's your best way of making money?

I'm like, oh, we should start some sort of scheme. Listen to Creating a Con, the story of Bitcoin, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Abusers in Hollywood are as old as the Hollywood sign itself. And while fame is the ultimate prize in Tinseltown, underneath it lies a shroud of mystery. Binge this season of Variety Confidential from Variety, Hollywood's number one entertainment news source and iHeart podcasts. Six episodes are waiting for you right now to dive into the secret history of the casting couch

to explore the scandalous history of Hollywood's casting process. Listen to Variety Confidential on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.