Flannel People Podcast
Anatomy of Conflict
A podcast about what happens when people get stuck, what helps them move, and how conflict actually works in relationships, mediation, negotiation, business, family, and everyday life.
Conflict is a skill set, not a personality trait
Anatomy of Conflict looks at the mechanics underneath hard conversations: nervous systems, repair, apology, fear, power, impasse, negotiation, and the small moves that help people think clearly again.
Latest Episodes
I Use Tarot Cards in Mediations. I Can't Tell You Anything Spiritual Is Happening.
I bought an Oracle deck and I've started pulling cards in mediations. I can't tell you anything spiritual is happening. That's not why I use them.When two people are stuck — really stuck, the kind where they've said the same sentence to each other four times — a card puts an image in front of both of them that neither one owns. Nobody has to defend it. Your brain goes from one groove to another groove, and sometimes that jump is the spark you needed.I've been careful about it. I don't want to be seen as a freak. I want to be taken seriously. So I've done it lightly, and I wanted to talk to somebody who does it all the way.Brennan O'Connor — Soul Coach OC — has been meditating since his early twenties and picked up tarot a few months ago. He's certified in several energy-healing modalities. He also says this: "the biggest thing I know is that I don't really know anything." He's watched people in his own field decide everything is true, and he won't do it.We get into where "spiritual" starts and where it stops. Priming versus synchronicity — my mom died on October 27, so my sisters and I clock 1027 everywhere, and I still can't tell you whether that's meaning or manufacturing. Say "red motorcycle" three times and you'll see red motorcycles tonight. He tells me about waking up and seeing the spirit of a baby lying between him and his wife, and finding out a week later she was pregnant.Then he pulls a live reading for me, on a week I wouldn't describe on tape. Justice. Card 11.The part I keep chewing on: it didn't give me an answer. It gave me a question. Before that I didn't have a question — I had "how do I get through this week."Brennan O'Connor — Soul Coach OC Email: Brennan.OC@gmail.com Instagram: @soulcoach.oc Web: soulcoachoc.com Tarot readings, past-life regression, energy healing, 1:1 soul coaching.Ryan McLaughlin — Flannel People Mediation Divorce and family mediation in Minnesota. 250+ five-star Google reviews. Web: flannelpeoplemediation.com Email: flannelpeoplemediation@gmail.com Phone: 763-316-8323 Free 15-minute consult: calendly.com/flannelpeoplemediation/free15consult
Nobody Leaves Because of the Fighting
Steph Paquin is an LMFT in Minneapolis who mostly sees couples. Her claim: the marriages that end aren't always the loud ones.Not explosive, not infidelity, not one event — but emotionally quiet. Her description of the evening: manage the kids, make dinner, sit on the couch, scroll. No micro-connections, no greetings, not a lot of curiosity. Her line is that it's the absence of connection, not the presence of fighting, that predicts who initiates.Women are usually the ones who call. Men call when there's been an ultimatum. And women's tolerance for inequity, she says, has changed a lot faster than the marriages have.I floated a $30,000 two-week couples intensive at her. She said "yes, and" — then said two weeks of tools is close to oversaturation, because humans need repetition and application is the part that decides it.Steph Paquin, MA, LMFT — thetissueclinic.com. The research she's drawing on is nearly all heterosexual couples; she names that early, and part two is our next convo.
We Got Divorced, Then Started a Company Together
Chris Koepsel and Rebecca Tierney met in law school, got married, had two kids, and got divorced. They now run a company together, with the mission of helping families waddle and wiggle through some of the edgiest hard stuff humans navigate: divorce. I went in wanting the secret sauce. How are y'all managing to work together post-divorce? What I got was a diagnosis. When you split up, everyone tells you to just be good co-parents — but the only relationship you've ever had with that person is the one that was unhealthy enough to end. You're being asked to run a functional partnership on a foundation that already failed.What they describe instead is a conversion: from a relationship built for intimacy to one built for boundaries. Ally is where they like to land. Not friends. Not family. Ally.We also get into why litigation land teaches you the exact behavior you're trying to unlearn, why men white-knuckle a divorce while women project-manage it, and whether any of this work survives AI.Chris and Rebecca run Redefining Family — divorce coaching, co-parenting coaching, and mediation, entirely out of court. redefiningfamily.comFollow Ryan and check out Flannel People Mediation at flannelpeoplemediation.com for future collabs in and around divorce mediation.
Women Have an Invisible Line in Their Marriage. Most Men Don't Find Out Until It's Too Late.
Women have an invisible line in their marriages — and most of them don't even know exactly where it is. But once they cross it, it's over. Dr. Sonja Benson has spent nearly 30 years watching the same pattern play out: she's been saying something's wrong for years, he hasn't moved, and one day she stops pursuing. Ryan McLaughlin and Dr. Benson break down why women initiate roughly two-thirds of all divorces, what "burned-out pursuer" actually means, and what discernment counseling is — the decision-making process designed for couples where at least one person isn't sure they want to stay.
Can Astrology Make You a Better Mediator?
Your sun sign is the least interesting thing about you. Your moon sign is how you actually feel. Your Mars sign is how you conflict. Emmy Jane Carden — mediator in Minnesota and Texas, astrology student for two decades — shows us live how to read a natal chart and what it tells you about a person before they say a word. This one changes how you think about intake.
Why the Next Generation of Experts Won't Stay in Their Lane
Think doubling down on a single niche is the only way to perfect your craft? In this episode of Anatomy of Conflict, we completely flip the script on traditional professional advice for mediators, therapists, and facilitators. We dive into the massive competitive edge of becoming intentionally "poly-skilled"—proving that adjacent obsessions, from building custom AI tools to studying neuropsychology, are actually the secret weapon for sharpening your core practice. By breaking out of rigid professional silos, we expose how a broad, interdisciplinary surface area of knowledge gives you a compounding advantage in empathy, pattern recognition, and high-stakes problem-solving. Stop letting conventional wisdom keep your expertise in a box, and discover why expanding your world is exactly what makes you the most valuable person in the room.
The Question That Ends Most Founder Fights
Attorney Cody Blades has one question she asks every client before any negotiation starts: if there were no restrictions, no court, no opposing party — what would you actually want to happen? It sounds simple. It isn't — most people answer it once, then spend the next three conversations contradicting themselves, and catching that contradiction becomes her actual job. Ryan and Cody dig into why that's the real product, not the asset purchase agreement, not the negotiation math — the part where a client says "I don't care about owning the business" and two weeks later won't let go of it. It's the same move a good therapist pulls, naming your own inconsistency back to you, which is exactly why a calculator that does 150%-down-to-the-middle math was never going to be the whole job. Cody Blades represents founders and business owners in Minnesota at blades.law.
Why Being Human Has Never Mattered More
AI can replicate Sam Ardery's five-finger risk framework. It can summarize his talks better than he can. So what does a mediator actually do that a language model can't? Ryan and Sam explore the irreducible human work at the center of conflict resolution — and why, in 2026, emotional intelligence isn't competing with AI. It's the only thing AI can't (yet) replace.
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New episodes explore the practice, science, and lived experience of conflict so the ideas can move from theory into real conversations.
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