Pioneers of Possibility

He Spent 30 Years Building Races. What He Actually Built Was a Community. | PoP. Ep. 25, Ron Horn

Ron Horn will tell you himself: he doesn’t like running. Never has. From the first step to the last, it has never felt natural. He’s done it for almost fifty years. He’s run thirteen marathons, eight ultramarathons, and directed or timed more races than he can easily count. He cried at the finish line of every major race he’s ever done. Five of the seven people at his wedding were runners. His wife has worked every Pretzel City Sports race for thirty years. So when Ron says he doesn’t like running, you have to understand what he means — because what he likes, and what he’s spent half a century building, is something else entirely. Ron grew up in York, Pennsylvania, playing football, baseball, and softball. He was a decent athlete with a big frame and a love of food he has never once apologized for. In 1980, a teammate named Jerry Smith went to Houston for two years and came back looking, in Ron’s words, like the Scarecrow from the Wizard of Oz. When Ron asked what happened, the answer was simple: I took up running. Ron started jogging after softball games. Weight dropped off. Two miles felt like an achievement. Then a 10K, then a marathon. Then another, then another. He ran his first at the Shamrock Marathon in Virginia Beach, missed four hours by eight minutes, and was too stubborn to accept that. He ran five marathons before he broke it. What really hooked him, though, wasn’t running — it was the community. He joined the Pagoda Pacers, the smallest and friendliest of the three running clubs in Reading at the time, became its president, and started directing races for the March of Dimes when he was on their board in 1987. He had a background in corporate marketing — nearly thirty years in senior positions — and he knew how to read what motivated people to show up. By 1996, Pretzel City Sports was officially a company. This July will mark thirty years. Today, Pretzel City Sports times roughly 250 races a year across southeastern Pennsylvania and beyond. Ron’s signature events include Labor Pain, a twelve-hour endurance race on Labor Day that sends every finisher a custom sweatshirt printed with their exact finishing distance weeks after the race — something no other race he knows of does; March Madness, a ten-hour timed loop event; the Dirty Bird trail race; the night run series Ghouls & Fools; the summer Thirsty Thursday series; and, notably, two clothing optional races at nudist camps, which Ron describes as his two happiest days of the year. Labor Pain is his favorite — a race that functions more like a festival, where people show up not knowing what distance they’ll run and leave with a number that belongs to them alone. There are runners who haven’t missed it in seventeen or eighteen years. In this episode, Kareem and Ron discuss: * How a transformed softball teammate became the unlikely catalyst for a fifty-year running career * The galvanizing moment of being beaten in a 10K by a 67-year-old woman — and what it lit in him * Why running is one of the few honest measures of progress in life * How Pretzel City Sports was born from a March of Dimes board meeting and a race that was about to disappear * The art of the race application — and why Ron’s read more like essays than entry forms * Labor Pain: the twelve-hour race where your sweatshirt is waiting for you six weeks later, with your exact distance on the sleeve * Why the trail running community will stop and carry an injured stranger on their back * The business of remembering names — and what it means to a runner at mile 18 Ron Horn built something people come back to for two decades. Not because it’s the toughest, or the fastest, or the most prestigious — but because it’s fun, and because he never forgot that’s why people lace up in the first place. Listen on Spotify: Subscribe on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@pioneersofpossibilitypod #RonHorn #PretzelCitySports #TrailRunning #RunningCommunity #RaceDirector #LaborPain #Ultrarunning #PennsylvaniaRunning #MarathonTraining #ReadingPA #PioneersOfPossibility #PioneersPodcast #EnduranceRunning #LocalLegend #Running This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit pioneerspod.substack.com [https://pioneerspod.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]

He Built the World's Hardest Race. Only 20 People Have Ever Finished It. | Lazarus Lake | PoP Ep. 24

He goes by Lazarus Lake. His real name is Gary Cantrell. He built a race in the Tennessee wilderness that has broken some of the toughest endurance athletes on earth — 100-plus miles, no GPS, no aid stations, no marked trail, and in nearly forty years of running, only twenty people have crossed the finish line. He also invented a completely different kind of race — one that’s since spread to 98 countries and produced thousands of finishers who never thought they could run 100 miles in their lives. And at 71 years old, he’s about to walk 1,100 miles from the Colorado-Utah border to San Francisco, because he hasn’t finished yet. Gary grew up in a sports-obsessed family in Tennessee, too small at five feet tall and seventy pounds to play the football he dreamed of. Cross country became his sport — not because he was fast, but because he could tolerate more than almost anyone else. He never stopped. He ran his first ultramarathon when there were almost none to find, started directing races when he realized he was better at building them than running them, and spent a lifetime in the woods with a topo map and a willingness to go further than made sense. He founded the Barkley Marathons in 1986 — named after a politician whose escape from a nearby prison inspired the course — and has been refining its particular brand of beautiful cruelty ever since. The Barkley is not like other races. There are no mile markers, no crew support, no GPS allowed. Runners navigate by paper map through some of the most punishing terrain in the Eastern United States, collecting pages from books hidden on the course to prove they’ve been there. Each of five loops covers roughly twenty miles — though the actual distance, with thousands of feet of climbing and descending, is something else entirely. The time limit is sixty hours. In nearly forty years, only twenty individuals have finished. Most years, no one does. The race has no official website. Entry requires a letter of intent, a small fee, and an essay — the criteria for which Gary declines to share. He also invented something else entirely: the Backyard Ultra. The concept is disarmingly simple. Run a 4.167-mile loop every hour on the hour, until you can’t. The last person still running wins. No distances, no age groups, no gender categories. Just a bell at the start line that any runner can ring when they’ve gone further than they’ve ever gone before — and a crowd that stops what it’s doing and cheers, every time. What started as a small fundraiser on his farm now has over 700 affiliated races, runners from 98 countries, and a world record of 119 hours — nearly five continuous days of running. This season alone, more people completed 100-mile efforts through Backyard events than through every other race format in the world combined. In this episode, Kareem and Gary discuss: * Why the Barkley Marathons has only ever had twenty finishers — and what separates them from everyone else * The three categories of finisher: the magical day, the pipeline, and the superhuman * How the Backyard Ultra was born from a high school interval workout and a 150-acre farm * Why GPS atrophy may now be the biggest obstacle facing Barkley applicants * Walking 3,700 miles across America at 65 — and why he’s about to do another 1,100 at 71 * The little boy on the steps with two baseball gloves — and the decision he never regretted * Why running is, in his words, “good training for getting old” * The real story behind the name Lazarus Lake Gary Cantrell has spent a lifetime building things that push people past what they think they can do — not by making it easier, but by making it matter. The bell at the Backyard start line rings for anyone. That’s the whole point. Listen to Pioneers of Possibility on Apple Podcasts: Listen on Spotify: Subscribe on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@pioneersofpossibilitypod [https://www.youtube.com/@pioneersofpossibilitypod] #LazarusLake #GaryCantrell #BarkleyMarathons #BackyardUltra #Ultramarathon #TrailRunning #Endurance #RunningCommunity #UltraRunning #RaceDirector #PioneersOfPossibility #PioneersPodcast #Running #AdventureRunning #FrozenHead This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit pioneerspod.substack.com [https://pioneerspod.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]

He Sketched Energy Star on a Napkin. It's Changed the Planet. Feat. Sol Salinas | PoP Ep. 23

That little blue star is on your refrigerator, your dishwasher, your laptop, your office building. You've probably seen it ten thousand times. What you almost certainly don't know is that it was sketched on a cocktail napkin at a dive bar on the Potomac River, after three glasses of wine, by Sol Salinas, a Nicaraguan-German kid who grew up on the streets of Managua and stumbled into environmentalism by accident. Sol was born in Managua to a father who was rarely present and a mother who was never supposed to be there at all — a 19-year-old East German woman who had been swept out of East Berlin by a Nicaraguan diplomat with a flair for charm and a set of false diplomatic papers. When the family found itself with no home and no stability in Nicaragua, his mother packed up her three boys and took them on a merchant ship through the Panama Canal, bound for Germany. They eventually made it back to the United States on what was meant to be a two-week visit — and then stayed, quietly extending their visas until they could figure out what came next. When an 8.2 earthquake destroyed Managua in 1972 and made returning impossible, the decision was made for them. They landed in Washington, DC. Sol was a kid with no English, no footing, and a turbulent home life — until a boy spotted him kicking a soccer ball against a wall and everything changed. His coach picked him up every single day. The sport gave him confidence, friendships, and a refuge none of the chaos at home could reach. He went on to play at George Mason, then earned a joint graduate degree in business and journalism at UNC, and took a job at an advertising agency in Baltimore. He was good at it. Then a pro bono assignment from the World Resources Institute landed on his desk — a public service campaign about the greenhouse effect — and in the process of making it, he became an environmentalist. He walked away from advertising and called his contact at the World Resources Institute: can you help me find something different? She connected him to a small, obscure office inside the EPA's Climate Change Division, run by a visionary named John Hoffman. Hoffman hired Sol without knowing exactly what for, and told him: I don't know what it is yet, but you're going to make it a household word. What followed were years of happy hour sessions at riverside dive bars, rogue conversations with industry leaders, and repeated rejections from EPA's own lawyers — until one night Sol picked up a napkin and sketched a logo. Six months later, Energy Star launched. They started with desktop computers, expanded to appliances, then buildings, then entire industries. Today, the cumulative greenhouse gas reductions from the Energy Star program are equivalent to removing roughly 5 billion cars from the road — more than twice the size of the entire US vehicle fleet, annually. Sol calls it his seventh child. He now serves as Americas Leader for Sustainability at Capgemini, where he is leading the development of a global Net Positive framework — a maturity model built around the idea that sustainability cannot remain a separate discipline, and that the real goal isn't net zero but regeneration. The coalition he co-chairs with author Andrew Winston includes chief sustainability officers from Cisco, Logitech, AT&T, Intel, and over 250 organizations worldwide. In this episode, Kareem and Sol discuss: * Growing up without a home in Managua — and what that kind of instability does to a child * How soccer became his first real community, and what possession-style play taught him about organizational strategy * The pro bono campaign that turned an advertiser into an environmentalist overnight * The rogue, rule-defying team inside the EPA that built Energy Star from nothing — and their mantra: easier to ask forgiveness than permission * The near-death of Energy Star under the current administration, and what it took to save it * The concept of Overshoot Day — and why July 25th should alarm all of us * What Net Positive means, why net zero isn't enough, and what a truly regenerative business model actually looks like Sol Salinas is proof that the most consequential things sometimes start on a napkin, in a bar, with a question nobody's thought to ask yet. What if we just made it a household word? Listen on Spotify: Subscribe on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@pioneersofpossibilitypod #SolSalinas #EnergyStar #Sustainability #ClimateAction #NetPositive #EPA #EnergyEfficiency #ClimateChange #EnvironmentalLeadership #GreenBusiness #Capgemini #ImmigrantStory #NicaraguanAmerican #OvershootDay #Regenerative #CleanEnergy #EnvironmentalPolicy #PioneersOfPossibility #PioneersPodcast #PublicService This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit pioneerspod.substack.com [https://pioneerspod.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]

From a Bangladesh Village to the Governor's Cabinet. At 35. | Akbar Hossain | PoP Ep. 22

In this episode, Kareem sits down with Akbar Hossain, Secretary of Policy and Planning for Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro — one of the highest-ranking Muslim officials in any state government in the entire country. He is 35 years old. Akbar was born in a remote village in Bangladesh to parents who never finished high school. His father left — the only person in his family to do so — and eventually made his way to Saudi Arabia as a welder, where he brought the family to join him in Jeddah. The journey to America started at a mall kiosk in Saudi Arabia, where Akbar's parents jokingly signed up for the diversity visa lottery. Six months later, a white envelope arrived at his grandparents' village. Nobody could read English, so they brought it to a local schoolteacher, who told them: I don't know much English, but I can see the words "congratulations" and "visa." That seems like a good thing. Their flight to America was booked for September 11th, 2001. They left three days early because the apartment lease expired and his parents didn't want to pay for an extra month. They landed at JFK on September 9th. Two days later, the world changed — and a family of Bangladeshi immigrants in a New Jersey motel, scammed out of their savings by the contact they'd trusted to help them resettle, found themselves in a country that suddenly viewed people who looked like them as the enemy. What saved them was a Pakistani man running an Indian restaurant on a random street corner, who called his brother-in-law in Norristown, Pennsylvania. That man drove from Norristown to New Jersey, picked them up, found them an apartment, got Akbar's father a job, enrolled the kids in school, and didn't ask for a penny. Three years later, Akbar's father died of a heat stroke while mowing a lawn. His mother chose to stay and see the dream through. She went to work in a light bulb factory. Akbar got a job at a Sunoco station. He had no plans to go to college until a guidance counselor sat him down, put a map on the table, drew a circle one hour out from Norristown, and made him apply to every school inside it. He ended up at Franklin & Marshall, interned at the Obama White House, clerked for a federal judge in Philadelphia, got ten rejections in a row trying to leave corporate law, and landed as the first hire on Josh Shapiro's gubernatorial campaign — on the strength of a job interview that never called him back. Listeners will also hear about: * What the Secretary of Policy actually does — overseeing 22 cabinet agencies and the implementation of the governor's entire agenda * The I-95 collapse — how a six month repair estimate became 12 days through three-shift union labor, recycled glass fiber fill, and a live webcam that drew 200 viewers around the clock * Pennsylvania as the only growing economy in the northeast — $40 billion in private investment and 22,000 new jobs in three and a half years, more than the prior 15 years combined * Free breakfast for every child in Pennsylvania regardless of income — $50 million a year of state money filling the gap the federal program leaves behind * Why Akbar thinks echo chambers are the single biggest threat to functional government — and why a little tension in politics is actually healthy - Two principles he lives by: people are policy, and policy is personal * His advice to young people, especially immigrants and children of immigrants: be the hardest worker in the room, and never be afraid to ask for help He closes with something that stays with you — that within a two or three block radius of where his mother still lives in Norristown, he is probably the only lawyer. Not because he is smarter than the kids he grew up with. Because he had opportunities they didn't, and he asked for help. Listen on Spotify: Subscribe on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@pioneersofpossibilitypod #PennsylvaniaPolitics #AkbarHossain #GovernorShapiro #ImmigrantStory #Bangladesh #PublicService #PolicyAndPlanning #AmericanDream #MuslimLeaders #FirstGeneration #Norristown #DiversityVisa #I95Collapse #Pennsylvania #PioneersOfPossibility This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit pioneerspod.substack.com [https://pioneerspod.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]

The Music Industry Ate Itself. Here's How Artists Can Win Anyway. | PoP Ep. 21 ft. Mike Glaser

Next in the art series: the music industry. Kareem sits down with Mike Glaser, founder of Earth Program — a Brooklyn-based music distribution, publishing, and artist consulting company — and co-host of the Music to Industry podcast. Mike's path wound through Detroit rock bands and techno clubs, a classical piano degree, seven years teaching piano while dreaming of New York, and eventually a leap of faith that involved selling his car, loading a budget rental van, and moving into a 150 square foot apartment to figure it out. What followed was years of grinding through the city's studio world, learning that talent alone doesn't pay $2,000-a-month rent, and slowly building the network that became his career. Today Earth Program helps independent artists navigate a music landscape that has been turned completely upside down — one where 120,000 new songs are distributed every single day, a million monthly Spotify listeners earns an artist roughly $4,000, and AI deepfakes are flooding the system fast enough that a man in North Carolina just got arrested for scamming $8 million out of it. Listeners will also hear about: * How Detroit's industrial history shaped its techno scene — and why that sound still runs through everything Mike makes * The difference between a funnel and a pipeline, and why the death of the music industry gatekeeper has made breaking through harder, not easier * How Mike took Paul McCartney's son James from 1,000 monthly listeners to nearly 500,000 streams in three weeks using user-generated content and a song co-written with John Lennon * Why live performance is making a comeback — and why record labels now require it before taking an artist seriously * The playlist hack that can game Spotify's algorithm, and where the line is between clever and fraud * Why vinyl sales are surging and Japanese kids are buying cassette tapes again - Music catalog as an asset class — buying fractional rights like stocks and watching them appreciate * East Coast vs. West Coast: why New York is scrappier, more open, and still where Mike would tell any young musician to go He closes with advice to his younger self: say yes to New York sooner, keep learning, and don't be afraid to talk to anybody. In this industry, your network is your net worth — and the gatekeepers are mostly gone. Listen on Spotify: Subscribe on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@pioneersofpossibilitypod #MusicIndustry #IndependentMusic #MusicDistribution #EarthProgram #MikeGlaser #Brooklyn #DetroitMusic #MusicBusiness #SpotifyAlgorithm #IndieArtist #MusicProducer #AIMusic #MusicPublishing #NewMusicIndustry #PioneersOfPossibility This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit pioneerspod.substack.com [https://pioneerspod.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]