Leadership stories slowed into useful lessons.
The Flex is a measured interview series built around people learning leadership through real workplace pressure. Its strongest moments come when a career story slows down into a usable lesson about communication, accountability, values, or team culture.
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The Flex is a leadership conversation series built around people who have had to learn management in the middle of real work. Its episodes usually begin with a career origin story. From there, the conversation follows the pressure points: difficult feedback, new authority, clinical standards, hiring, burnout, mentorship, and the challenge of making values visible inside an organization. The show has a patient rhythm. Scott Herbst gives guests room to explain how they got somewhere, then pauses over the moment where a story turns into a leadership lesson. Amanda Cox’s account of stale feedback on a fitness class becomes a practical argument for timeliness and accountability. Dr. Rachel Taylor’s discussion of transparency turns values into something employees can actually hear and evaluate. Ryan Jones’s story about using humor during feedback opens a careful look at intention, impact, and the work of changing a default communication style. Courtney Murawski’s leadership path is framed through empowerment and perspective taking. Holli Beth Clauser brings hiring and recruiting capacity into the conversation as an expression of organizational identity. Dr. Becca Tagg’s episode connects self-care, behavioral health services, and the weight of running an organization. Jamie Currie’s story ties leadership to family experience, developmental disability services, and the creation of Hope, Inc. Cody Cerny brings performance, teams, and military background into a business leadership frame. Across these conversations, The Flex is most interested in how leaders become more usable to the people around them. It is warm but not soft. It treats leadership development as something grounded in specific conversations, repeated choices, and the willingness to look again at how one’s behavior is being received.
Made for: The Flex is for managers, founders, clinicians, coaches, and team leads who want practical leadership reflection without corporate polish. It especially suits people in behavioral health, ABA, autism services, and people-centered organizations.
What sets it apart: The show’s edge is its patience: guests are allowed to tell the long version, and the conversation keeps translating lived experience into management practice. It treats leadership as feedback, perspective taking, values, and follow-through rather than as charisma or slogans.
Welcome to The Flex podcast with host Scott Herbst!
Based on 5 episodes we listened to · September 2026
Leadership becomes practical through candid accounts of feedback, delegation, communication and growth inside service organizations.
Scott Herbst builds each conversation around a guest's path into leadership, then stays with the moments when managing people stops being abstract.
Leadership gets practical when a fitness-class complaint becomes a lesson in giving feedback before next May.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A grounded talk about timely feedback, accountability, and better leadership.
This episode turns a simple complaint about a class being "boring" into a wider look at leadership: feedback that arrives late, stays vague, and does little to help anyone grow.
A grounded discussion about making leadership intent clearer for teams.
Dr. Rachel Taylor and Scott Herbst spend the conversation on leadership, values, and the need to translate intent for a team. At its core, it argues that people work better when direction is clear and leaders leave enough transparency for others to carry the message forward.
Leadership is learned in the gap between intent and impact.
This episode treats leadership as something learned in motion, not handed down with a title. It moves from boards and training protocols to the messier work of giving feedback across two clinics, where a joke meant to soften the message lands badly instead.
Mission-driven leadership, with an honest look at the cost of carrying everything yourself.
Scott Herbst comes across as someone who has carried a lot for a long time. Rina gives him room to trace the path from a psych major and an operant-chamber rat lab to founding Spark Center for Autism, and then into the harder realities of running a mission-driven company serving…
A steady leadership conversation about scaling well without losing sight of clinical outcomes.
The episode follows leadership, growth, and the uneasy balance between mission and business. Rick Lowenstein, founder and CEO of Team Game Partners, talks about helping mostly ABA companies, and others too, scale in a way that does not lose sight of clinical outcomes.
Rob Walling on bootstrapped SaaS growth, plateaus, and exits — with founders who lived them.
Abbey Ashley's playbook for turning your job skills into a virtual assistant business.
Naval Ravikant on epistemology, startups, and crypto, from David Deutsch to Vitalik Buterin.
Alex Theuma interviews SaaS founders and investors on scaling to $10M-plus ARR.
Guy Raz traces founders' origin stories and fields live advice-line calls from entrepreneurs.
Alex Blumberg interviews guests like Megan Phelps-Roper and Shane McAnally about failure and reinvention.
Amanda Cox starts with leadership, not the polished resume version.
Scott Herbst welcomes Dr.
Scott Herbst opens The Flex by keeping the intro short and letting Ryan Jones tell his own path into leadership.
This episode features an interview with Courtney Murawski, clinic director of LifeSpeed Behavioral Support Services, discussing her leadership journey in behavior analysis and services for individuals with autism and disabilities.
Scott Herbst interviews Holly Beth Clauser about her unique approach to helping organizations develop their recruiting capacity and talent pipeline, particularly in behavioral health.
Scott Herbst interviews Dr.
Jamie Currie shares her personal journey from being a school teacher to founding Hope Inc., an agency serving individuals with developmental disabilities, inspired by her son with severe autism.
Scott Herbst interviews Cody Cerny about how his military background and team experiences shape leadership and performance for business leaders seeking an extra gear.
Scott Herbst keeps the setup short.
Elise Brown, founder of Focus Consulting, describes leaving a California school district role, where she grew a behavior team by pitching the Board of Education, and starting her own consulting company in Illinois as COVID began.
Scott Herbst welcomes Rick Lowenstein, founder and CEO of Team Game Partners.
April Vian, owner of Eastside ABA in Redmond, Washington, distinguishes cultural humility from inclusivity, saying the field sets norms from "largely upper middle class white male children." She manages 16 employees from nine countries, offers floating paid holidays, and celebrates the non-religious parts of holidays such as Holi and Diwali in the clinic.
Mia Belsky shares her journey from being a special educator and parent of a child with autism to founding an early intervention center, highlighting resilience and business insights.
Scott Herbst interviews Jessica Belokas about her journey into leadership, her role as president of the Arizona Association for Behavior Analysis, and how she overcame challenges during the pandemic.
This episode features an interview with Brittany Rader, a board-certified behavior analyst and president of clinical services at Behavioral Framework, discussing her 15-year career journey and how she and the company have grown together through leadership and alignment with quality care.
Scott Herbst interviews Adrienne Ketchum, founder of Goals for Autism, about her journey starting the company and the role of resilience in leadership.