Kindness Matters Podcast

Send us Fan Mail You order a hamburger steak and someone brings you gyoza. Your first instinct might be to correct the mistake, but what if the mistake isn’t the most important part? I’m Mike Rathbun and I’m taking you to Japan’s Restaurant of Mistaken Orders, a real place built around a radical idea: when we make room for imperfection, we make room for people. The staff members are living with dementia, and yes, orders get mixed up. But the deeper story is about dignity, inclusion, and the ...

Send us Fan Mail The easiest kindness to miss is the one that shows up every day. We’re surrounded by small, steady acts that make life work: the friend who checks in, the coworker who makes you laugh when you don’t feel like it, the neighbor who quietly helps, the person who always answers the phone. When those things become dependable, they also become invisible, and our gratitude turns into an unspoken assumption. I’m Mike Rathbun, and I’m inviting you to treat gratitude less like a list ...

Send us Fan Mail The weird thing about elections is how loudly we treat them like an ending, even though real life keeps moving the very next morning. Wednesday still comes. The coffee still needs to be made. The boss still expects you to show up. And the person who voted differently is still standing next to you in the grocery line, coaching your kid’s team, or waving from across the street. So the real question isn’t only who wins. It’s how we live together afterward. We talk about p...

Send us Fan Mail “Those people” is a tiny phrase with a huge blast radius. Once I start talking that way, I’m not describing real human beings anymore, I’m describing a category I can judge, mock, or hate from a safe distance. This Kindness Matters conversation is a reset for anyone worn out by political polarization, online outrage, and the constant pressure to sort the world into teams. We walk through why our brains love labels and how easily they become loaded stories: Trump voters, Demo...

Send us Fan Mail Being wrong hits a nerve for most of us, and it’s rarely about the small stuff. It’s about what it feels like to be corrected when a belief is tied to our pride, our relationships, or our sense of identity. I’m Mike Rathman, and I want to make a case for something that sounds simple but can change the way you live: getting more comfortable changing your mind can be one of the kindest things you do for yourself and for the people around you. We dig into the psychology behind ...