Episodi

  • Adrian Esposito | Filmmaking on the Spectrum

    Adrian Esposito | Filmmaking on the Spectrum
    Sep 25 2026
    Adrian Esposito is a Rochester filmmaker who has been writing, producing, and directing films for more than a decade, from Bury My Heart with Tonawanda, a family film about how the Tonawanda Seneca Nation cared for its own people with disabilities, to Greetings From Tromaville!, his documentary on Lloyd Kaufman and Troma Entertainment. He is on the autism spectrum, spent his whole life in special education, and makes a point of putting people with disabilities in the kinds of movies you would never expect to see them in. His latest, Special Needs Revolt!, took six years to get made. In 2023, with the cast finally secured and the crowdfunding still short, he and his mom decided to pay for it themselves. In this episode he talks about the action comedy at the center of Special Needs Revolt!, a Rambo style hero with Down syndrome who takes down a dictator who has sent people with disabilities back to institutions, and the Troma, South Park, and Josh "The Ponceman" Perry influences behind it. He gets into the SAG-AFTRA complications that kept Perry out of the cast, why he believes ableism shaped how some of his crew treated him, the cue cards that helped lead actor Nolan Tierce deliver the film's closing speech, and the day he broke down and cried when an actor threatened to walk off halfway through production. He also shares where he stands on AI in filmmaking, the disability language he is comfortable with and why only the villains use the R word, and his next projects, Campfire Stories and a horror film called Wrong Town. Special Needs Revolt! screens Thursday, October 1 at 7:30 PM at The Little Theatre in Rochester.

    #SpecialNeedsRevolt, #DisabilityRepresentation, #IndependentFilm, #AutismSpectrum, #PositiveBlatherings, #ROCVox, #DownSyndrome, #RochesterFilm, #Troma

    Recorded at ROC Vox Recording and Production Studios, Rochester, NY.
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    33 min
  • Kyle Napier | Your DNA Already Knows What's Wrong

    Kyle Napier | Your DNA Already Knows What's Wrong
    Sep 22 2026
    Kyle Napier is a human physiologist and health optimization coach, and the founder of Club Gevity in Rochester. His background is in kinesiology and human physiology, and he ran his own personal training business, putting clients through the workouts and the mobility work and the whole shebang while watching them stay on statins and blood pressure medication anyway. He lost three of his four grandparents to chronic disease before he was 15. By the time he and his high school sweetheart, now his wife, got to college, she had had a full thyroidectomy for thyroid cancer. He has spent the last ten years on a single question: why.

    In this episode he gets into the 13 DNA methylation pathways he reads, what a panel tells him about a person before they say a word, and why he tests DNA, gut, and blood together. He covers the 38 trillion bacteria that decide what you crave, the mold in cheap coffee, the grass-fed labeling loophole, why he calls blood sugar the root of all disease in this country, and the case for Alzheimer's as type 3 diabetes. He also gets into why strength training matters roughly twice as much as cardio, what dopamine has to do with addiction, and how to pick a supplement in an industry the FDA does not regulate. Then he talks about what he is building now, and why the mission is getting this education to the people who cannot afford the programs.

    CONNECT
    Club Gevity → https://gevityclub.com
    Club Gevity on Instagram → https://www.instagram.com/gevityclub
    ROC Vox → https://rocvox.com

    New episodes every Tuesday.

    Recorded at ROC Vox Recording & Production in Bushnell's Basin, NY.
    Learn more at https://rocvox.com
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    59 min
  • L. J. Nightingale | Drawn to Story Telling

    L. J. Nightingale | Drawn to Story Telling
    Sep 1 2026
    Lydia Nightingale writes under the pen name L. J. Nightingale. She is an author, an actor, a playwright, and a public historian with a Master of Arts in History and a concentration in public history, and she has written plays about German women in the years right after World War II, including work drawn from her own family. Her father's biological mother was a German army nurse captured by the Russians who escaped the camp and made it back to Germany. Her debut novel Drawn began as a pandemic project in March 2020 and became book one of the Lovett and Swire series. For years before that she believed alcohol made her more creative, and she used to get drunk on purpose to write.

    In this episode she gets into the January 2019 sober date that changed how she works, the bipolar Type 1 diagnosis she talks about openly because a high school friend she had not spoken to in fifteen years found her old podcast episode and said it gave her hope for her nine year old son, and the two hour writing blocks she asks her husband to end because she will otherwise write until midnight. She also talks about the indie publisher that shut down a couple of months after Drawn came out, the first editions still sitting in the trunk of her car, the second edition she re-released on July 7, and why she will not let AI touch any part of her process. Book two is underway, with no publisher and no deadline except the ones she sets herself.

    CONNECT

    Drawn, second edition → https://shop.ingramspark.com/b/084?params=cg8ZjG38q6BNf9TVpYfCUzkHXlIqUsaYoMyRfC0QWGo
    L. J. Nightingale →https://lj-nightingale.squarespace.com/
    L. J. Nightingale on Instagram → @ljnightingale
    ROC Vox → https://rocvox.com

    New episodes every Tuesday.

    Recorded at ROC Vox Recording & Production in Bushnell's Basin, NY.

    Learn more at https://rocvox.com
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    1 ora e 4 min
  • Heather Saffer | Stop Telling Her to Be Grateful

    Heather Saffer | Stop Telling Her to Be Grateful
    Aug 25 2026
    Heather Saffer won Food Network's Cupcake Wars in 2012, used the prize money to write The Dollop Book of Frosting, and turned a Rochester cupcake shop into Dollop Gourmet, a low-sugar, vegan frosting brand that landed a deal with Barbara Corcoran on Shark Tank and put her products in Whole Foods and on QVC. She has a psychology degree from SUNY Brockport, two published cookbooks, and the kind of resume most entrepreneurs in this city would trade for. Today she advises startups from Canandaigua and lives with her dog Donald. In January her husband died, and she started posting unfiltered videos about grief to an audience that had only ever known her for frosting.

    In this episode she gets into the toxic positivity she has been fielding ever since, the decade of therapy that stopped working, why every group therapy session leaves her feeling worse, and the theory about new souls and old souls that almost nobody but her husband knew. She talks about bailing on a cruise a week before it sailed, booking a one-way ticket to Portugal to find out if she could move there, and disliking nearly every place she landed. She and Fitz also get into her husband's death by suicide, why she thinks people are so afraid of negativity, and what a person does with themselves after admitting they have no professional ambitions left. She is not selling anything, which is exactly why the conversation goes where it goes.

    CONNECT
    Heather Saffer on Instagram → https://www.instagram.com/realheathersaffer Heather Saffer on LinkedIn → https://www.linkedin.com/in/heathersaffer
    ROC Vox → https://rocvox.com

    New episodes every Tuesday.
    Recorded at ROC Vox Recording & Production in Bushnell's Basin, NY.
    Learn more at https://rocvox.com
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    1 ora e 18 min
  • Amy Hawley | Figuring Out The How Is What Limits You

    Amy Hawley | Figuring Out The How Is What Limits You
    Aug 18 2026
    Amy Hawley built Kinz because the part of her story she most needed to keep was the part she had no interest in performing for anyone. Everyone already has the birthday photos and the promotion announcements. Kinz is a private platform for the in between, the reflections and the pieces of a story that never make it to a feed.

    In this episode she joins Fitz at ROC Vox and gets into the comparison trap, why progress is almost impossible to see while you are inside it, and how she replaced research and outside opinions with alignment as her decision filter. She also talks about making choices as the person who already has the outcome, the trademark detour she now laughs about, why the idea was never the asset, running founder and stepmom and senior manager on one operating system, and why forcing action when your body is asking for rest costs more than it produces.

    CONNECT
    Kinz → https://www.bekinz.com
    ROC Vox → https://rocvox.com
    Salvatore's → https://www.salvatores.com

    New episodes every Tuesday.

    Recorded at ROC Vox Recording & Production in Bushnell's Basin, NY.

    Learn more at https://rocvox.com
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    43 min
  • Dean Lucas | 10 Years of Rides, And This Is The Last One

    Dean Lucas | 10 Years of Rides, And This Is The Last One
    Aug 11 2026
    Dean Lucas lost his son Lee to a heroin overdose on December 23, 2016. Ten years later, the motorcycle ride he built in Lee's name has raised close to half a million dollars and a wing of a Rochester advocacy center carries his son's name. This August is the last one.

    In this episode Dean joins Fitz at ROC Vox to walk through all of it. What the Wayne County Sheriff told him days after Lee died about bags deliberately made strong enough to kill. Why he puts his arm around the people selling the drug that took his son. What a decade of turning grief into a fundraiser actually costs, including the crash that comes every year the week after the ride. He also lays out exactly what happens on ride day, where every dollar goes now, and what the line on the back of this year's shirt means.
    CONNECT

    Lee Lucas Memorial Poker Run → https://leelucasride.com/
    Father Tracy Advocacy Center → https://www.fathertracycenter.org
    ROC Vox → https://rocvox.com

    New episodes every Tuesday.

    Recorded at ROC Vox Recording & Production in Bushnell's Basin, NY.
    Learn more at https://rocvox.com
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    50 min
  • The Strong Survivor | R. Greg Adams

    The Strong Survivor | R. Greg Adams
    Aug 4 2026
    R. Greg Adams built a career out of turning niche ideas into national brands, self-publishing Firehouse Cooking three decades ago and landing on Good Morning America, QVC, and Random House along the way. Now he's turning his pen toward something far more personal: a memoir about surviving a 2015 sexual assault by his own doctor, and the years he spent watching police, a district attorney, and a hospital system look away.

    In this episode he walks through what happened, why the Brighton Police Department, Rochester Police Department, and Monroe County's then-district attorney declined to act, and how a recorded admission from Dr. Gareth Warren eventually helped him win in court and expose that his doctor was never actually board certified. He also talks candidly about the data on male sexual assault survivors, and why he sees survival as a lifelong process rather than a finish line.

    CONNECT
    Strong Survivor (preorder) → https://thestrongsurvivor.com
    Salvatore's Pizza → https://salvatores.com
    ROC Vox → https://rocvox.com

    New episodes every Tuesday.

    Recorded at ROC Vox Recording & Production in Bushnell's Basin, NY.

    Learn more at https://rocvox.com
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    57 min
  • Michael Solis | The Most Powerful Have No Powers

    Michael Solis | The Most Powerful Have No Powers
    Jul 28 2026
    What if the person with no superpowers, in a world where everyone else has one, turns out to be the most important character in the room? Michael Solis joins Fitz at ROC Vox to talk about Deficient, his YA sci-fi novel set in a near future where super-powered people are the majority and one 15-year-old boy is the last kind of outcast anyone saw coming. The conversation moves well beyond the book: Michael's coming out story, Fitz's experience raising a trans son, what it takes to get your book rights back and build your own press from scratch, and what 20 years responding to Ebola outbreaks and floods in West Africa has to do with writing fiction.

    In this episode, Michael walks through the ability hierarchy he built for the novel and why he made it as brutal as he did, the personal experiences woven into the characters without ever appearing by name in the text, what happens when the only person who responded right to a coming out said just three words, and why he walked away from humanitarian work and moved to Rochester to run Writers and Books and release his books on his own terms.

    CONNECT

    Michael Solis: https://michaelsolisauthor.com
    Writers and Books: https://wab.org
    ROC Vox: https://rocvox.com
    Salvatore's: https://salvatores.com
    New episodes every Tuesday.

    Recorded at ROC Vox in Bushnell's Basin, NY.
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    58 min