The Loud Quiet - Empty Nest Living

Busy, or full? Rick and Clancy started using that second word on purpose this episode, and it changes how the whole conversation flows.

Rick names a trap he's been stuck in for years: believing that once you get through the next big thing, life will finally calm down. It never does. He's not convinced he'll fix that either, because he knows who he is.

Clancy comes up with a different word for the whole thing. Full still has room in i...

Move-in day never quite goes the way you expect, even after doing it more than once.

Rick and Clancy walk through what actually shifts each time, from how much to help unpacking a dorm room to when to step in on a rough roommate situation. "Help them, but only as much as they want to be helped" comes up early, and it holds up through the rest of the conversation.

Budgeting gets its own segment, including the ten days of DoorDash duri...

How is the nest empty if you're still living in it? That question from Hanna Bankier is why we brought her on this week. Hanna runs Birdie Launcher, helping parents navigate launching their kids, and themselves, into whatever comes next. Her focus isn't the packing list. It's the relationship that has to get rebuilt once the packing's done.

Hanna's website is a great place to start if any of this sounds familiar: https://www.birdyla...

We went into a marriage conference this weekend thinking we didn't really need it. Decades of marriage will do that to you. That assumption got proven wrong fast, especially in a breakout session on parenting adult children. Then we capped the weekend off with something completely impulsive that had nothing to do with marriage advice and everything to do with a nineteen dollar ticket.

If you want to look into your own love languages...

We set an alarm for five forty this week. After a night out. Nobody made us do that.

We keep saying we have more freedom than ever, so why does this summer feel busier than any before it.

Turns out the empty nest doesn't erase old habits, it just removes the excuse for them. We're still keeping a schedule neither of us actually needs anymore.

"We have this productivity addiction that we just can't turn off even when we can." By the en...

Rick and Clancy are both mid-recovery and mid-appointment season, and this one gets into what that's actually like in our fifties.Between the two of them, this year alone brought a procedure Clancy had been putting off for years, a colonoscopy, and more skin checks than either of them expected to need yet. Some of it was elective. Some of it wasn't.Neither of them feels their age, but their test schedules keep suggesting otherwise....

Communication breaks down in the same few places for almost every couple. This episode is about finding those places before they turn into a fight.

Rebecca Mullen joins Rick and Clancy to talk about the three roles inside a marriage, partner, lover, and friend, and how easily one of them gets neglected once kids leave the house. The conversation moves into why couples assume their partner can read their mind, why apologies so often ...

The stadium they've seen a hundred times looks completely different through a stranger's eyes.

Rick and Clancy talk World Cup fever in Dallas, from Rick's first match in 1994 to watching tourists fall for ranch dressing and a screen they stopped noticing years ago.

The conversation moves through ticket prices, FIFA's reputation, and how different the sport felt before the US started hosting. It lands on something simpler: hosting gav...

Three years into running a podcast together, Rick and Clancy are together constantly. That didn't stop them from arguing about cottage cheese, a dinner reservation in Spain, and a birthday gift for their son.None of those arguments were actually about the thing they were about.In this episode, Rick and Clancy walk through three real arguments unrehearsed, raw, on mic, in real time. What comes out underneath all three is the same: t...

Rick and Clancy just got back from ten days in Spain with both kids. This episode is about what family travel actually looks like when the kids are adults.

The shared memories are still the point. They always have been. But the logistics are different now. The scheduling is a negotiation. The kids have opinions about destinations. And somewhere between the Sagrada Familia and the Picasso Museum, you realize their personalities have ...

Almost sixty percent of Michelle Puccinelli's virtual assistant students are empty nesters. She didn't design it that way. They just kept showing up.Michelle runs Virtual Work Studio, a marketing agency with a training program that prepares women to work as specialized virtual assistants. When she built the program, she was thinking career changers and moms returning to the workforce. What she found was a wave of empty nesters who ...

10 Travel Tips...This is a Greatest Hits episode. It originally aired as Episode 87 in May 2025 and we're bringing it back because the tips hold up.Ten travel tips from our trip to Germany. Not a general list. Specific things we did, tools we used, and habits that made the trip work. A lot of it applies well beyond Germany.The thread running through all of it is flexibility. The empty nest changed what's possible when you travel. T...

Every summer, the kid who comes home is not the kid who left. And the house they're coming back to isn't the one they remember either. Rick and Clancy have navigated this seven times across two kids. This episode is what they've learned.They recorded this one mid-drive to Tucson, on their way to help Teagan move out of her apartment for the summer. Transition season in real time.The adjustments around time, roles, friends, and expe...

This episode is a flip. Rick and Clancy are in the guest seat, interviewed by Paul Basden, their pastor of nearly 20 years. He knows their kids. He knows their story.

A question Clancy asked Rick in the car sits at the center of everything. So does the sadness both of them felt, the identity shift Clancy navigated, the dad connections Rick had to relearn from a distance, and how their faith guides them through all of it.

Paul also di...

Lisa Guzman didn't come to the empty nest the usual way. She came through foster care, homelessness at 17, building a life from scratch, 25 years as a wife and mother, and then losing her husband and her last kid leaving home within a year of each other.

When the roles are gone, who are you? Lisa had to find out. This is that conversation.

Rick and Clancy talk with Lisa about what it actually feels like to redefine yourself after dec...

Graduation week has a way of swallowing you whole if you let it. Rick and Clancy have been through it and they're headed into it again.

The logistics are real. Multiple ceremonies, ticket limits, restaurant reservations, parking, accessibility for grandparents. Get that handled early and you can actually be there when your kid walks across the stage.

Because what can get lost in the chaos... your graduate is saying goodbye to four ye...

Rick and Clancy listen to a lot of podcasts.

In this episode they run through their current favorites, from Bravo recaps to business professors to flight attendants spilling what they actually think about passengers. And they get into why people listen to podcasts in the first place.

Convenience. Escapism. The strange intimacy of a voice in your ear for hundreds of hours. And maybe something specific to this stage of life, when the m...

Some Mondays just arrive with a layer of meh. No obvious reason. This is what Rick and Clancy did about it.

They get into why stuck feels different in the empty nest, why wallowing feels strangely satisfying even when it doesn't feel good, and why the empty nest version of a low day can feel louder than it should.

They also walk through what actually moved them out of it... recognizing self-imposed pressure, saying the real thing to ...

Teagan's 21st birthday trip to Tucson turned into something neither of us expected. A wheelchair basketball national championship. Online friends who flew in from California. A signed book. It was a weekend that kept handing us things we didn't know to look for.

That's the thread running through this episode. Not just Teagan. Tanner too. The music he's pulled back into our orbit, the video game symphonies, the EDM nights. Our kids k...