Lebanon County native and Las Vegas resident Brad Szollose’s work as the host of the Awakened Nation podcast has led him to interview guests who have persevered through life’s challenges, including several fellow Lebanon County residents.
Szollose was raised in Lebanon County, attending Harding Elementary School, Lebanon Middle School, and Lebanon High School before graduating in 1981. While he was a student in the district, Szollose was a member of the drumline in the band and was a member of the jazz band.
After graduating high school, Szollose enrolled in the Art Institute of Pittsburgh. He earned an associate’s degree in design and visual communications, graduating with honors in 1984. Szollose went on to take courses at New York University between 1998 and 2007.
“I wanted to be an illustrator and a designer,” Szollose told LebTown. “And I wound up in New York City being a graphic designer and working in a very niche part of the industry, which was, I did, large-scale meetings and events.”
Szollose went on to become a founding partner of K2 Design that was taken public on NASDAQ in the 1990s. It was for this work that he became a distinguished alumnus at Lebanon High School.
He soon became a familiar face, or voice, on podcasts, having been featured as a host or a guest on an estimated 100 podcasts over the span of 10 years in addition to his other business ventures, events, and features. The TedX speaker also made the time to write a 264-page book titled Liquid Leadership 2.0.
“I just got so bored with that conversation of, ‘Do you know how successful I am?’ I was so tired of hearing that,” Szollose said. “One day, a friend of mine asked me to be on a panel discussion on the phone. He was recording it.
“These two business gurus get on, and the first one talks about going back to work after his son was killed. I was like, ‘Whoa!’ The second guy comes out and talks about losing his job and getting skin cancer in the first week. And then not being able to find any work for 18 months. I thought, ‘This is the conversation I’ve been looking for. This deeper dive with a kind of a no B.S. zone where people really tell the truth.'”
After the panel discussion, Szollose was inspired to create the Awakened Nation podcast to return to his roots of being a Boy Scout at Camp Bashore in Jonestown in the 1970s and sharing stories around the campfire.
Read More: Clothes salesman, civic leader, Boy Scout patron: the life of John Sherman Bashore
For his podcast, he seeks “to find people who have fallen down mentally, emotionally, spiritually, or physically, and when they got back up through tenacity or grit or life just giving them a blessing, they saw life differently. They kind of woke up, you know, awakened to a different life and had to, you know, just live life differently.”
Szollose uses his “extensive network” of friends from his time living in New York City and fellow podcasters to acquire guests for his podcast and do guest swaps with other podcasts. And sometimes, agents reach out to Szollose about the prospect of getting their client featured on the podcast.
“I think where I’m a game changer in the podcasting arena is you will never get a boring interview out of me,” Szollose said. “I do my homework, and I make sure my guests are the kind of guests that make you lean forward.”
Awakened Nation has featured Dov Baron, Brian Smith, Panache Desai, Stephen M.R. Covey, Dog the Bounty Hunter and his wife Francie Chapman, and hundreds of other societal outliers.
“Growing up in a small town, I actually pinch myself every day that I can reach out to some of these people and get a chance to really interview them, know what some of the most painful things they’ve been through, they share with me on my show,” Szollose said. “I don’t know what that is. I guess I have a certain ability to get people to open up.”
Szollose has also interviewed several professionals with Lebanon roots:
- Matt Busch was born in Lebanon County. He is an official Star Wars artist who works with George Lucas and has also worked for Stranger Things, Lord of the Rings, and Indiana Jones properties.
- Fred Glick attended Lebanon High School and was in the band with Szollose. He was the president of operations of OMG Hospitality Group and former vice president of operations of Phil’s BBQ as of his July 2023 interview.
- Tom Newmaster also attended Lebanon High School and was in the band with his now wife and Szollose. He owns FORCEpkg and teaches at the Pennsylvania College of Art & Design.
Szollose said he hopes to have whistleblower and environmental activist Erin Brockovich, businessman and investor Daymond John, commentator Dinesh D’Souza, and other public figures as guests on his podcast in the future.
When asked about his process of recording, editing, and releasing episodes, Szollose said, “Well, what happens is to book people, a lot of times I block book. What does that mean? Block booking means when I first started this in 2019, I scheduled [18] interviews from Monday through Friday for two weeks.”
Szollose recorded this first set of conversations from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. each weekday, with some days having multiple interviews and some days only having one interview scheduled. He was able to record 18 conversations with guests within that two-week period.
Then, there was a several-month window in which the recordings waited to be edited and released as the Awakened Nation podcast sought an editor for a reasonable price before Szollose finally settled on editing the recordings himself.
“I have a background as a creative director and a graphic designer. I’ve done some editing in my life, so I said, ‘How hard can it be?’ So, I jumped in and started editing my own podcast,” Szollose said. “It’s actually been a labor of love because I already was ahead of the curve for most people because of having a career doing this already.”
Szollose does not shy away from asking his guests deep questions and discussing topics that traditional business podcasts might consider to be taboo, such as addiction, mental health challenges, and the struggles that come along with being an entrepreneur.
Szollose credits his small-town upbringing to his appreciation for people, his ability to have deeper conversations, and his success at large. He also mentioned that he enjoys having conversations with people from the Lebanon-Lancaster area because of their shared background and knowledge of Pennsylvania Dutch food.
In what he calls the “lightning round,” at the end of each episode, Szollose asks his guests a rapid-fire set of questions. The set is a mix of prepared questions and questions that come to his mind through their conversation.
“I try to keep the questions different, but there’s one question I always, always ask, and that is ‘What’s your favorite memory?'” Szollose said. “It’s one of those questions that I asked probably two years ago by accident. I was rewording a question, and it came out like that, and it literally made them stop for two minutes. It’s a powerful question.”
Szollose aims to release a new episode each week on Tuesdays. The Awakened Nation podcast is available on Amazon Music, Apple Podcasts, Audible, iHeart Radio, Pandora, Rumble, Spotify, YouTube, and other streaming platforms.
“I think if anybody wants to get into podcasting, just be yourself,” Szollose said to aspiring podcasters. “This is an ability that I seem to have polished over the years. But I really have to thank my mom [and dad] and my grandfather [and grandmother] because they not only were people persons, they knew everybody in town. … So, I think I got that from them.”
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