Stop Letting Other People Wreck Your Finances
Rachel Cruze and George Kamel take calls from listeners dealing with financial stress that often stems from other people's decisions or expectations: predatory car loans, low church salaries, expensive houses, parental pressure, and in‑law demands. They walk callers through concrete next steps like selling cars, picking affordable colleges, setting boundaries with family, aligning spouses on money, and escaping financial abuse. The episode closes with a debt-free scream and guidance on what to do with an unexpected six‑figure bonus.
The difference between healthy and unhealthy love | Katie Hood (re-release)
Relationship expert Katie Hood explains that while love is a powerful instinct and emotion, the ability to love well is a skill that must be learned and practiced. Drawing on her work with the One Love organization, she outlines five clear markers of unhealthy love-intensity, isolation, extreme jealousy, belittling, and volatility-and shows how these can escalate into abuse if left unchecked. She emphasizes using shared language to recognize unhealthy dynamics in all types of relationships and encourages daily practice of open communication, respect, kindness, and patience to build healthier connections.
Selects: How Mail Order Marriages Work
The hosts examine the history, mechanics, and ethical debates surrounding so‑called mail-order marriages, from colonial America and frontier settlements through 19th‑century matrimonial ads to the modern international marriage brokerage industry. They discuss how these arrangements have at times expanded women's agency and legal rights, while also creating serious power imbalances, immigration-related vulnerabilities, and potential overlaps with human trafficking. The episode also covers contemporary legal safeguards, data limitations, and evolving forms such as LGBTQ mail-order marriages, before closing with a listener email about losing a parent to COVID-19 and the importance of vaccination.
The Alabama Murders - Part 1: The True Church
Malcolm Gladwell opens a seven-episode series by introducing psychologist Kate Porterfield and the death row client "Kenny," whose botched execution and focus on love after trauma lead Gladwell into an Alabama murder case decades in the making. The episode then shifts to northwestern Alabama and explores the culture and theology of the Church of Christ, including its strict rules, lack of grace, and practices like disfellowshipping, and how that environment shaped the life and unraveling of preacher Charles Sennett. Through interviews with Church of Christ members and ministers, Gladwell sets up the idea that a rigid, shame-driven religious system helped create the conditions for a moral and legal catastrophe that will unfold in the series.
SYSK's Fall True Crime Playlist: The Strange Unsolved Murder of Ken McElroy
Hosts Josh and Chuck recount the history of Ken Rex McElroy, a violent criminal who terrorized the small town of Skidmore, Missouri for decades through theft, assault, sexual abuse of minors, and systematic intimidation of witnesses and officials. They describe how repeated failures of the legal system and law enforcement to stop him culminated in a daytime vigilante killing in front of dozens of townspeople, none of whom ever cooperated with investigators. The episode explores McElroy's background, his pattern of coercive marriages to underage girls, the shooting of grocer Bo Bowenkamp, the town meeting that preceded his death, and the unresolved questions around who pulled the trigger.