In Silicon Valley, there is a group referred to as the PayPal Mafia — the founders and employees of PayPal who later started their own successful tech companies. In Charlotte, we have the Passport Mafia which springs from a company called Passport, which provided employees with experience in building a business and helped birth more than a dozen startups. Is Charlotte an entrepreneur’s kind of place?

Since 2020, large public safety training centers have been cropping up around the country. Last summer, Central Piedmont Community College announced plans to build a facility in Matthews to provide training for police, fire and Medic personnel. These projects have faced opposition nationally and locally.

This week on SouthBound, host Tommy Tomlinson talks to Annelise Mennicke, a UNC Charlotte professor whose federal grant was canceled as part of the Trump administration’s cost-cutting program. And also because her research involved trans people.

This week on SouthBound, host Tommy Tomlinson talks to Jim Barger Jr., author of a new book called “Rivers and Dreams,” on former President Jimmy Carter’s life as a fisherman — and how he often used fishing to cast the lines of diplomacy.