The show
Branch Out was a podcast from Connection Builders, hosted by Alex Drost. It ran from June 2020 to September 2023 across 112 episodes, interviewing professionals in accounting, law, private equity, wealth management, consulting and marketing.
The recurring subject, across three years and eight professional domains, was the unaccredited half of a professional career: how relationships are actually built, how work is actually won, how firms actually grow, and what it costs people to do all of it.
This site
This archive presents 99 episodes with full transcripts — roughly 741,131 words of conversation — with show notes rewritten from the transcripts rather than carried over.
Every episode carries three to five cross-links to other episodes, each with a stated reason. Links are typed: same theme for a different angle on the same problem, sequence where one episode is the foundation for another, and tension where two guests genuinely disagree.
The 25 tensions were the point of building this. Guests recorded years apart, who never met, turn out to contradict each other on questions that matter — whether first meetings should happen in person, whether to niche or stay broad, what diversity is actually for. Nobody had ever connected them.
How to use it
Search covers show notes and full transcripts. The 16 theme hubs are the best entry point — each says what the corpus collectively argues and where it splits. The guest directory lists everyone who appeared.
Credits
Audio is hosted on Buzzsprout and embedded here; it is not re-hosted. Episode pages canonicalise to their original URLs on connection.builders.