BC Radio Live is the flagship program of the BC Magazine station on BlogTalkRadio. It's hosted by Phillip Winn, Eric Olsen, and Lisa McKay and airs weekly on Wednesday evenings at 9:00 p.m. Eastern. Shows are archived and available for streaming or download after the live broadcast. Our guests on May 14 were author Gary Siegel, author Leander Kahney, Brandon Phillips from The Architects, and Seth Whitney from The Band of Heathens.

Ever wish you could take back something you said? Do you feel like you can use some help communicating with your co-workers, your boss, your spouse? Author Gary Siegel joined BC Radio to discuss his recent book, The Mouth Trap: Strategies, Tips, and Secrets to Keep Your Foot Out of Your Mouth. If you thought that communication skills were beyond your reach, Siegel would like to you to shed that notion and understand that those skills, like nearly everything else, can be learned. Although the book is largely geared toward the workplace, Siegel says that these skills are generalizable to one's personal life and can help facilitate those communications as well. As he notes, confusing "personal" language with the language that should be spoken in the workplace can get anyone in trouble, and if you need help being appropriate and keeping that size 9 out of your mouth, The Mouth Trap will surely provide you with some direction. As Siegel shared with us, assumptions can lead us down the wrong conversational road, so learning to probe and listen are important, too. Listen to the show archive to learn more about the book and pick up some helpful pointers.

Author Leander Kahney visited with us next to take us Inside Steve's Brain, which is the title of his new book about iconic Apple CEO Steve Jobs. Kahney has been writing about all things Apple for quite some time and has covered Jobs since the early 1990s. Noting that it's difficult to write critically about Apple without drawing the ire of the devoted, Kahney discusses with us the challenges of writing fairly about a topic that often serves as a lightning rod in the tech community. One of the more fascinating figures on the contemporary business scene, Jobs is widely known as a bundle of contradictions and Kahney's book attempts to get to the bottom of these and look at them in the light of Jobs' extraordinary business success. Kahney discusses the fact that Apple is, in his words, "a remarkable manifestation of [Jobs'] character traits," including some negative ones that would seem not to be desirable on the surface but nonetheless have contributed to the company's success. He discusses whether Apple would be the same company without Jobs at the helm, and concludes that the culture he's built at Apple will live on after his tenure. This interesting conversation is worth a listen regardless of whether you're Mac or PC.