Matt Reynolds, Prison Inmate #2014486 at the Great Plains Correctional Center, is quite possibly the most interesting man in Oklahoma. This former Marine, paint salesman, and toy store manager most recently worked as a groundbreaking animal trainer and behaviorist with giraffes, rhinos, and even an albino monkey. Now serving a 20-year sentence, Matt joins us via prison telephone to talk about the types of pen pals he hopes to meet, to share some of his life stories, and to describe one of the more memorable surgeries he assisted on. Spoiler Alert: It may involve a giraffe vomiting into his mouth!

Thanksgiving in prison is a plate full of mixed emotions. On one hand, there's excitement with the special holiday meal (often including real turkey, cranberry sauce, and pumpkin pie). It's a time for cellmates and friends to get together and create something unique and delcious, like Jovan Stewart's Famous Banana Pudding, Rachell House's Enchilada Bowls, or Angelina Omara's Vanilla Pancakes. But the Holiday also serves as a painful reminder of what these individuals don't have -- the chance to be surrounded (at least physically) by family and friends. The chance to be around kids, parents, grandparents, brothers, sisters, and childhood friends. The chance to share a meal with the people that mean the most to them. If they're lucky, they might get a phone call or a card or an email on their tablet as a reminder they haven't been forgotten. In this episode, we speak with some of the hundreds of inmates who called in to share their Thanksgiving stories, traditions, favorite foods, and who or what they're thankful for. It's an honest, raw, touching, heartwarming, sad, and sometimes humorous depiction of what Thanksgiving really means to someone incarcerated.

When Ryan Rice was growing up in Illinois, his parents let him do anything he wanted. Spoiled might be the word that comes to mind. The "freedom" he was granted as a young child ultimately sculpted him into a man with no direction, quitting most of the things he set his mind to...until, that is, he was sentenced to 35 years in a Dixon, Illinois prison. That's when things had to change. Tired of "going nowhere fast," Rice, a prison pen pal and member of PenPals.Buzz, shares why he made an "executive decision" about his life, and what that decision was. In the interview, we also discuss his over 60 tattoos, his love of women with accents, his propensity for telling corny dad jokes, and what he's seeking in a pen pal.