Best Ken Esquire Podcasts (2024)

1
Pursuing Your Passion In Life With Special Guest Ken L. Polk 1:06:57

1+ y ago1:06:57

1:06:57

The Importance of Pursuing your Passion with Ken L Polk Are you pursuing your passion in life? Meet Ken L Polk. One of the people who pursue their passions with all they are. Ken is a husband, father, a preacher, teacher, chef, a caterer, counselor, and culinary chef. Ken grew up in Chicago. From childhood, he was always involved in the kitchen. He…

1
Free to Be Me with Special Guest Candace Meredith 1:05:54

1+ y ago1:05:54

1:05:54

Free To Be Me with special guest Candace Meredith Today’s episode is exceptional. We are speaking to a guest whose career journey sounds like a story from a novel or a movie on Netflix or Hulu. Please allow us the opportunity to introduce you to Candace Meredith - a true POLYMATH. In this episode, you will learn how Candace carved out a way in this…

1
Finding Your Sweet Spot with Guest Patrick Sutton 58:06

1+ y ago58:06

58:06

Finding Your Sweet Spot with Patrick Sutton Have you found your sweet spot yet? Patrick Sutton has found his sweet spot and he joins us on the show to share his journey to finding his sweet spot. From a tender age, Patrick knew the screens were meant for him. He even made it to the movie ‘A Time to Kill.’ It was such a moment for him, but he never …

1
Evolution of an Esquire - with special quest Natasha L. Robinson, Esq. 1:12:20

2y ago1:12:20

1:12:20

Are you a law lover? If yes, you are in for a sweet treat! Today we have Natasha L. Robinson, Esq joining us on the show. She is a retired attorney who is passionate about the law, practicing it, and teaching it to others. She is committed to championing the criminal justice system’s legal rights. Also, she is dedicated to teaching and exposing our…

1
Running for my life..A Marathon to find me - with special guest Stephanie McSwine 57:26

2y ago57:26

57:26

Running for my life..A Marathon to find me - with special guest Stephanie McSwine. Have you ever committed to everyone else besides yourself? Chances are you have especially if you are a mother. Mothers tend to be the worst culprits when it comes to taking care of others and forgetting themselves. Stephanie McSwine was a stay-at-home mom, and she h…

1
"Up in Smoke" with Special guest Joffrey Holloway 41:49

2y ago41:49

41:49

In this episode of The Shift and Pivot Podcast - Erika welcomes guest Joffrey Holloway to share his story about life - and how it has steered him down paths he never thought he would journey. His humble roots are firmly connected to Mississippi and the South in general, but life also had plans for him that took him away from the comfort of his mode…

1
"Living in America" with special guest Nomtha Makhosana 1:05:50

2y ago1:05:50

1:05:50

This week's episode of the Shift and Pivot Podcast - Elliot and Erika interviews Nomtha Makhosana. Nomtha shares with us several critical life events that shaped the most instrumental shifts and pivots of her life, the secrets to her happy life, and most importantly, the unbeatable power of perseverance, which she holds on to even today. Nomtha als…

1
"Coming of Age" with special guest AL Williams 1:00:03

2y ago1:00:03

1:00:03

Growing up is never easy…trying to navigate from being a boy to a man is an epic feat. Closing the chapter of childhood and embarking on the next stage of life as an adult comes with many physical, mental, and emotional challenges. In today’s episode, Erika and Elliot interview Al Williams, whose own unbelievable shift and pivot led him from a life…

1
"A Dream Deferred" with special guest Marta Gwyn 1:03:14

2y ago1:03:14

1:03:14

Many of us have heard the saying "A Dream Deferred" (if you haven't, please pause this Podcast and go check out Langston Huges' powerful poem entitled "Harlem.") and we take that to mean dreams that go unmet, unbaked, unactualized - but what if that dream was not deferred but detoured? What if you had an epiphany and realized that your visions, pla…

1
"Love under new management" with special guest Lauren A. Morgan 49:04

2y ago49:04

49:04

Lauren A. Morgan has accomplished a lot in life; she is an entrepreneur, author, and attorney. In addition, she has a solid spiritual foundation and an insatiable desire to travel and experience the world. But one key component was still missing from her life – LOVE, after several dating mistakes, misjudgments, and some heartache. Finally, Lauren r…

1
"I AM" with special guest Tasha Edwards 1:17:50

2y ago1:17:50

1:17:50

Today's episode of the Shift and Pivot podcast with Tasha Edwards will teach you how to look for opportunities in trying times. Her story is a testament to overcoming obstacles, leaning into your passion, and making your way no matter the circumstance. From being bullied at school to getting married and pregnant at college, fighting financially for…

1
"He Aint Heavy, He's My Brother" with special guest Jarred Denzel 43:14

2+ y ago43:14

43:14

In today's episode, Erika and Elliot welcome Jarred Denzel, a man on a mission to speak up and speak out to break the stigma society has around depression and other mental health issues. With his upbeat personality, passionate energy, and comedic style punchlines and jokes, one cannot resist engaging with Jarred Denzel. But he will quickly inform y…

1
“J'ai Deux Amours” with special guest Dawn M. Belisle 43:58

2+ y ago43:58

43:58

For this episode of the Shift and Pivot Podcast, we take it overseas to Europe off the coast of France. Elliot and Erica share the microphone and speak with the multitalented, accomplished, and outspoken Dawn Belisle. Dawn captivates us as she describes the many Shifts and Pivots her personal and professional life has delivered. As she identifies i…

1
"A Brand-New Day" 57:16

2+ y ago57:16

57:16

Ever think about the fantasy of packing your bags and leaving behind everything, to move across the world and live in a new foreign country. The excitement of surrounding yourself with something different and exciting. All while you leave your former life, your comfort, challenges, stress, and struggles behind. In this week’s Shift and Pivot Podcas…

1
"Trust Your Gut Feeling" 56:28

2+ y ago56:28

56:28

We all have five senses (taste, smell, touch, hearing and vision) that are used constantly in our lives; but what about that sixth sense….You know the sense of intuition or as it is commonly referred to our “Gut Feeling”. This week’s episode we speak with Kalato Holts and she shares with us her life story of lost, fear, determination and her abilit…

1
"The Renaissance Man" 45:39

2+ y ago45:39

45:39

For this Shift and Pivot Podcast episode, Erika and Elliot share the microphone with guest Terrance “Terry” Bates. Terry shares how LIFE has made him take several Shifts and Pivots in love and relationships, career, and family. Terry’s story is fascinating, to say the least – from growing up in Europe as an African American child – to his time as a…

1
"A Woman's Gold" 44:57

2+ y ago44:57

44:57

An inspiring new episode of the Shift and Pivot Podcast – your hosts Elliot and Erika welcomes guest Davida Selby into the studio. Davida shares with us her bold-audacious life story of failure, self-reflection and soul searching that led her to tap into the resiliency and strength she needed to grow. Betting on oneself and “figuring it out” was th…

1
"My Brother's Keeper" 53:53

2+ y ago53:53

53:53

Relationships are complex, hard, and at times difficult to balance and maintain in healthy shape. In this compelling episode of the Shift and Pivot Podcast, hosts Erika and Elliot speak with Maurice Ingram; and he shares with us a very personal and challenging life story.By Elliot Gamble & Erika Williams

1
“Truly a DIFFERENT WORLD" 1:02:06

2+ y ago1:02:06

1:02:06

This week’s episode of the Shift and Pivot Podcast, Erika, and Elliot welcome guest Dr. Raishell Adams. Join us as Raishell shares her personal Shift and Pivot around relationships; and how faith, education and resilience guided her through some unexpected life circumstances.By Elliot Gamble & Erika Williams

1
"My BREAST Years Ahead" 58:01

2+ y ago58:01

58:01

For the first episode of the Shift and Pivot Podcast, Elliot and Erika welcomes My Style Matters Co-founder, community leader, and “HOPE” dealer - Tiah Tomlin. Listen in as Tiah shares her personal Shift and Pivot around health; and how she responded when an unfathomable life challenge presented itself. Her strength, faith and fortitude is a wonder…

1
Intro to the Shift and Pivot Podcast 1:55

2+ y ago1:55

1:55

The Shift and Pivot podcast is all about sharing people’s stories about life and leveraging how they were able to come out better every time. As Elliot puts it, “life isn’t always perfect, but stories are always better with a touch of imperfection.” Join Erika and Elliot’s weekly podcast, Shift and Pivot, and also check them out on Instagram, Faceb…

1
Esquire’s World Ep #1 17:07

5y ago17:07

17:07

Ken Esquire goes in on current events and whatever he wants!!!

1
Couch Confidential - Ep 1 33:02

5y ago33:02

33:02

Couch Confidential is my video series. This weeks podcast is audio from my session with Bree from the Bree Lolly show. You can view the interview on the Ken Esquire YouTube, Facebook and Tumblr page.

1
All we have to do is stand up! 21:36

5+ y ago21:36

21:36

Sports., food and Spirits. Meeting of the minds at Portland sports bar.

1
Don’t Mess With Roy Cohn, by Ken Auletta 26:04

7+ y ago26:04

26:04

If president-elect Donald Trump learned anything from his mentor Roy Cohn, it was this: punch first and never apologize. Cohn was notorious for going on the attack—as counsel for Senator Joseph McCarthy during the communist witch-hunts of the fifties, and later as a pugnacious attorney for whom the only bad publicity was no publicity. With hooded e…

1
The Plane at the Bottom of the Ocean, by Bucky McMahon 26:26

7+ y ago26:26

26:26

The question is astonishingly simple: In the year 2015, with GPS and satellites and global surveillance everywhere all the time, how does a massive airplane simply go missing? To find the answer, writer Bucky McMahon boarded one of the vessels searching for Malaysia Air 370 in one of the most isolated and treacherous stretches of ocean on the plane…

1
The Price of Being President, by Richard Ben Cramer 23:50

7+ y ago23:50

23:50

Published in 1992, Richard Ben Cramer’s What It Takes: The Way to the White House remains the richest and most unvarnished account of the personal price of running for president. The irony, as Cramer pointed out to C-SPAN shortly after the book came out, is that to become president a candidate must sacrifice the entire life that had prepared him or…

1
The Old Man and the River, by Pete Dexter 22:39

7+ y ago22:39

22:39

Norman Maclean published A River Runs Through It when he was seventy-three, and only after his children implored him to write down the stories about fly-fishing, brotherhood, and the wilds of Montana that he’d told them for years. The resulting novella is a classic of economy and clarity. A few years later, Pete Dexter visited Maclean in Montana an…

1
The Days of Wine and Pig Hocks, by Jim Harrison 24:08

7+ y ago24:08

24:08

Jim Harrison, the novelist and poet who died earlier this year at the age of 78, had a gargantuan, fearless appetite that would make both A.J. Liebling and Anthony Bourdain proud. He wrote about food—about eating, really— in a woolly, baroque style for Esquire’s “The Raw and the Cooked” column. He began one piece with this Hors d’oeuvre: “Distraugh…

1
Martin Luther King Jr Is Still on the Case! by Garry Wills 30:16

7+ y ago30:16

30:16

In 1968, just hours after Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, the future Pulitzer Prize–winning author Garry Wills—then a young writer for Esquire—rushed to Memphis, Tennessee, where he watched as King’s body was embalmed at the mortuary; later, Wills traveled twelve hours by bus with mourners to King’s funeral in Atlanta. Nearly fifty years a…

1
Love in the Time of Magic, by E. Jean Carroll 29:23

7+ y ago29:23

29:23

On November 7, 1991, Magic Johnson held a press conference announcing that he had contracted the HIV virus, effectively ending his Hall of Fame career with the Los Angeles Lakers. The news sent shockwaves through popular culture, as well as the more narrow subculture of millionaire athletes and the woman who pursue them. Magic Johnson was not only …

1
The Tinkerings of Robert Noyce, by Tom Wolfe 25:41

8y ago25:41

25:41

It was a meeting of two American masters: Robert Noyce, who, in inventing the integrated computer chip and founding Intel, willed Silicon Valley into being, and Tom Wolfe, who, in holding a magnifying glass over the social and class currents that shape America, rewrote the laws of what it meant to be a journalist. Their resulting Esquire story from…

1
The House That Thurman Munson Built, by Michael Paterniti 26:41

8y ago26:41

26:41

Reggie Jackson once called himself “the straw that stirs the drink” but there was no question that Thurman Munson was the pride of the Yankees—like Lou Gehrig before him and Derek Jeter after. For Michael Paterniti, consistently one of the most inventive and entertaining magazine writers going—Munson, the gruff All-Star catcher, was the perfect chi…

1
The Crack-Up, by F. Scott Fitzgerald 33:09

8y ago33:09

33:09

In 1936, F. Scott Fitzgerald, then a struggling writer battling depression and alcoholism, published “The Crack-Up,” a radical series of essays in Esquire about his mental breakdown. Celebrated poet and memoirist Nick Flynn discusses with host David Brancaccio Fitzgerald’s mindset at the time, the ridicule he faced from friends like Ernest Hemingwa…

1
The Brain That Changed Everything, by Luke Dittrich 34:41

8y ago34:41

34:41

In 1953, a twenty-seven-year old factory worker named Henry Molaison, cursed with severe epilepsy, underwent a radical new version of the lobotomy that targeted the most unexplored structures of the brain. The operation was performed by Dr. William Scoville whose brilliance as a surgeon was only tempered by an adventurousness that bordered on reckl…

1
“I, Stalkerazzi” and “Angelina Jolie and the Torture of Fame,” by John H. Richardson 27:39

8y ago27:39

27:39

It’s hard to think of a profession more maligned than the paparazzi, but in 1998 Esquire writer at large John H. Richardson decided to find out for himself what it feels like to hunt celebrities for money in “I, Stalkerazzi.” Two years later, he learned what it was like to be the hunted when he profiled a still-rising and very vulnerable Angelina J…

1
Nureyev Dancing In His Own Shadow, by Elizabeth Kaye 28:38

8y ago28:38

28:38

Rudolf Nureyev was one of the most dynamic performers of the twentieth century. “He was Mick Jagger before Mick Jagger,” remembers Elizabeth Kaye, who specialized in writing in-depth profiles of men in power for Esquire in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. Kaye spent a full year with the famously volatile dancer, who unbeknownst to the public was dying…

1
Frank Sinatra Has a Cold, by Gay Talese 31:58

8y ago31:58

31:58

Fifty years after it was first published, “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold” remains the most influential and talked-about magazine story of all time. Author Gay Talese joins host David Brancaccio to discuss how this groundbreaking work of New Journalism came about, the evolution of celebrity, and why his story remains as resonant as the day it was first p…

1
Styron’s Choices, by Philip Caputo 25:01

8y ago25:01

25:01

When journalist Philip Caputo set out to profile William Styron in 1985, it was something of a dream assignment: Styron, then at work on the novel The Way of the Warrior, was one of the towering figures in American letters. The two men’s shared experience as Marines—Styron himself praised Caputo’s 1977 Vietnam memoir, A Rumor of War—formed a connec…

1
The Falling Man, by Tom Junod 33:55

8y ago33:55

33:55

Do you remember this photograph? In the United States, people have taken pains to banish it from the record of September 11, 2001. The story behind it, though, and the search for the man pictured in it, are our most intimate connection to the horror of that day. Thus begins Tom Junod’s “The Falling Man,” which over the past fourteen years has becom…

1
The American Male at Age Ten, by Susan Orlean 26:32

8y ago26:32

26:32

In 1992, writer Susan Orlean was sick of celebrity profiles. Instead, she wanted to do something bigger and much harder: She wanted to profile the inner life of an average American boy. After convincing her editor, Orlean spent more than a week going to fifth grade and hanging out with Colin Duffy, a ten-year-old from Glen Ridge, New Jersey. The re…

1
My Father, the Bachelor, by Martha Sherrill 28:43

8y ago28:43

28:43

Martha Sherrill’s father, Peter, rakish and handsome, was an irrepressible charmer and natural raconteur; when he died, she was flooded with calls from his ex-girlfriends who wanted to pay their respects and share their stories about this man who adored women. This week Sherrill joins host David Brancaccio to discuss her intimate 1999 Esquire essay…

1
A Few Words About Breasts, by Nora Ephron 41:46

8y ago41:46

41:46

“A Few Words About Breasts,” from May 1972, is Nora Ephron’s comic lament about how her late onset of puberty and earliest sexual experiences gave her a lifelong obsession with her breasts. Jessi Klein, head writer for “Inside Amy Schumer,” joins David Brancaccio to discuss Ephron’s famous Esquire story and its lasting influence on the way women pe…

1
Edwin Moses, by Mark Kram 25:37

8y ago25:37

25:37

Between 1977 and 1987, Edwin Moses won 122 consecutive races in the men’s 400-meter hurdles—including his second Olympic gold—in a streak as fantastic and improbable as Joe DiMaggio’s fifty-six-game hitting streak. In his 1987 interview with Moses, Mark Kram, known for writing penetrating and lyrical boxing profiles, probes the champ’s cool, implac…

1
What It Takes, by Richard Ben Cramer 24:48

8y ago24:48

24:48

Published in 1992, Richard Ben Cramer’s book What It Takes remains the richest and most detailed account of the personal price of running for president. The irony, as Cramer pointed out to C-SPANN when the book was first published, is that to become president a candidate must sacrifice the entire life that prepared him or her for office in the firs…

1
My Father’s Life, by Raymond Carver 26:36

8y ago26:36

26:36

In Raymond Carver’s masterful short stories, what goes unspoken between characters—what can’t or won’t be articulated—carries more weight than what they say. In the 1984 essay “My Father’s Life,” Carver turns his unforgiving eye on his own life, and with heartbreaking frankness he examines the seemingly unbridgeable gap between him and his own fath…

1
Superman Comes to the Supermarket, by Norman Mailer 25:13

8y ago25:13

25:13

Before anyone foresaw a time when a television celebrity could become president—hello, Cleveland—Norman Mailer wrote in Esquire that John F. Kennedy was a mythical hero who could finally unite the business of politics with the business of stardom. His legendary 1960 reported essay, “Superman Comes to the Supermart,” about J.F.K. and the Democratic …

1
America’s Most Powerful Lunch, by Lee Eisenberg 22:11

8y ago22:11

22:11

For two decades, the Four Seasons was the epicenter of culture in America. Jackie Onassis, Henry Kissinger, and Nora Ephron were just some of the regulars at the New York City restaurant, but the real stars were the creative power brokers in publishing, fashion, architecture, and advertising who convened in the massive, elegant bar room to make the…

1
Michael Bay, by Jeanne Marie Laskas 20:04

8y ago20:04

20:04

In 2001, director Michael Bay was one of Hollywood’s most successful commercial filmmakers when he took on the daunting task of directing an epic about Pearl Harbor. How would his testosterone-laden, explosive-style adapt to a serious subject? (Hint: the critics hated it but the movie made $450 million at the box office.) Jeanne Marie Laskas joins …

1
The Old Man and the River, by Pete Dexter 22:50

8y ago22:50

22:50

Norman Maclean published A River Runs Through It when he was seventy-three, and only after his children implored him to write down the stories about fly-fishing, brotherhood, and the wilds of Montana that he’d told them for years. The resulting novella—published forty years ago last month—is a classic of economy and clarity. A few years later, Pete…

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