A New Angle

Sarah Calhoun is the founder of Red Ants Pants, a venture borne of a determination to find a better way. Tired of working in uncomfortable men’s pants, Sarah saw the need for women’s workwear. With no experience in apparel design or business, Sarah built Red Ants Pants into a multi-platform brand dedicated to making great products and encouraging self-reliance among women.

Michelle Weaver Knowles is a nurse practitioner who recently established her own practice – Ava Health. She helps patients navigate cancer and understand the genetics associated with many cancers. This conversation surfaces some incredibly complex questions about genetics, ethics and family communications. If you haven’t thought about this stuff, you’re not paying attention.

Justin’s monthly conversations with Bryce Ward continue, and as promised, our series now has a name: Incentives & Instincts. In this installment, Bryce and Justin discuss material (in)security and how the dynamics of accumulating wealth have changed over time and have affected various age cohorts in different ways.

John Pierce grew up in Billings, studied at the University of Montana and is now crushing it as a songwriter in Nashville. In the last several years, John has written hit songs for the likes of Zac Brown, John Pardi and Reba McEntire. He recently visited UM to perform at the inaugural Grizzly Songwriters Showcase, produced by our Entertainment Management students. It was a fantastic event and we were lucky to get time with John during his visit. In this conversation, we learn all about the business and process of songwriting and some great lessons that generalize to other creative pursuits.

When you think of Western art the name Monte Dolack is surely top of mind. Monte’s work is currently on exhibition at the Montana Museum of Art and Culture. In this conversation we learn about Monte’s development as an artist and how he approaches the various media in which he works. It’s a story of grit, hustle and experimentation.

Jim Elser is the Bierman Professor of Ecology at the University of Montana and Director of the Flathead Lake Biological Station. Jim is a world class scholar, evidenced by his recent election to the National Academy of Sciences. In this conversation we learn all about limnology, why it’s important, and why Montana is the best place on earth for Jim’s research.

This week Justin Angle and Bryce Ward appeared on Home Ground Radio with Brian Kahn. They discussed their new monthly series on A New Angle. Home Ground was kind enough to let us drop that episode in our feed.

This week we bring you #10 in the S.E.A. Change series, an interview with the amazing Joyce Dombrouski. Joyce is Chief Executive for the Montana Service Area for Providence Health & Services. She’s also a newly appointed member of the Montana University System Board of Regents. Joyce and Justin have a far-ranging conversation and ponder the parallel challenges facing health care and higher education in Montana.

Today’s episode is a special preview of this year’s Big Sky Documentary Film Festival, which runs February 14-23. Executive Director Rachel Gregg (UM 2009, 2011) previews what to expect from this year’s selections and tells us all about the many other great things happening at the Big Sky Documentary Film Institute.

In this second edition of our new monthly series, Bryce and Justin discuss the Future of Work and digest what we’ve learned on the podcast over the last two weeks. We reflect on Justin’s conversations with Scott Latham (12/31/19) and Michael Punke (1/7/20) and postulate some principles for thinking about our rapidly changing relationship to work and education. Justin also makes a bold promise – that this series will have a name...starting next month.

Today we bring you a shining example of a #TomorrowProof person – Michael Punke. Michael’s career includes private law practice, a trade policy position in the Clinton administration, an ambassadorship to the WTO under President Obama, and now VP of Global Public Policy for Amazon Web Services. And we haven’t even mentioned the thing for which Michael is perhaps most known – writing the Revenant, among several other great books and screenplays.

If you’re not concerned about the Future of Work, you’re not paying attention. UMass-Lowell Professor Scott Latham is an expert on the topic. No one can predict what jobs will be lost, created, or transformed by automation, artificial intelligence and other technologies, but Scott helps us understand how we should be thinking about the disruption we’re in.

In this ninth edition of the S.E.A. Change series, we interview an amazing student. Kat Cowley earned her undergraduate degree from the University of Montana in Women’s Gender & Sexuality Studies in 2018 and is now working toward her master of public administration. We discuss her pioneering leadership to establish the Food Pantry at UM as well as her personal experiences with food and housing insecurity.

Today we click the century mark – 100 episodes of A New Angle – and in so doing, we bring back one of our favorite guests, economist Bryce Ward. In a new monthly series Bryce and Justin will investigate a broad theme: there’s lots going right in our society but something is clearly wrong. We’ll talk about economics, education, technology, health, media, happiness, and occasionally politics. We’ll debate and we’ll learn and hopefully you will too.

Growth in Western Montana and its effect on our community are recurring themes of A New Angle. In this week’s episode we chat with Grant Kier, Executive Director of Missoula Economic Partnership. Grant’s job is to think hard about this stuff every day. His challenge is to guide, facilitate, and articulate a vision for growth that balances progress with character.