Your Waco Weekend

Your Waco Weekend isn’t about FOMO. It’s a weekly field report from a small American city in motion, where old storefronts become condos, urban master plans promise relevance, and the past never quite leaves the room. Part cultural dispatch, part civic analysis, each episode examines how places change and what holds them together. Because what happens in Waco, Texas, is happening everywhere.

Your Waco Weekend is a society podcast hosted by Mark Long | Waco Insider, with 52 episodes on record and a Required Pod Score of 80. PitchCentric scores this show on Booking Probability, Listen Score, and live audience signals refreshed every 24 hours.

Mark Long | Waco Insider hosts Your Waco Weekend, a society show with 52 episodes published.

Our AI reads these to draft pitches. Use them as grounding for a pitch that cites a real guest and a specific topic.

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  Episode #2

  The Honky Tonk Happy-Hour Wedding

  Aug 18, 20269 minS2

  The wedding industry operates on the sound financial principle that anything involving love should cost roughly three times what it did before somebody said “matrimony.” This episode considers what actually turns a room into a wedding venue—and whether authenticity, personality, and cold beer might matter more than endless meetings with an event planner named Madison. Last October, host Mark Long and his then-fiancée Angela put those ideas into practice at Papa Joe’s Texas Saloon, a gen-u-ine Texas honky-tonk that charged them nothing as long as its two Saturday regulars could continue drinking beer in peace. Somewhere between the eight-liner machines and Saturday night karaoke, the bar became a sacred space—and then the band closed with Floyd Cramer’s “Last Date” because apparently even perfect endings need a little melancholy. ----- Hit subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode of Your Waco Weekend —and visit ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠wacoinsider.stubstack.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ to sign up for The Weekly Dispatch newsletter.

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  Episode #1

  You Know, We're Lucky to Be Alive

  Aug 11, 202610 minS2

  The people closest to us can look at the same situations and see entirely different worlds. A lasting relationship does not necessarily resolve those differences; sometimes it just puts two people together and asks them to keep moving. In this episode, host Mark Long and his wife Angela take a drive along Austin Avenue through Waco’s Uptown, where two mini-roundabouts reveal their opposing assumptions about everyone else on the road. She sees ordinary people cooperating to reach their respective destinations; he sees a series of high-stakes showdowns that can only be won by refusing to lose. ----- Hit subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode of Your Waco Weekend —and visit ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠wacoinsider.stubstack.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ to sign up for The Weekly Dispatch newsletter.

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  Episode #52

  What You Calling a Renaissance?

  Aug 4, 20268 minS1

  Nothing gets local lifestyle influencers humming like glossy renderings of a tired shopping center being refurbished with somebody else’s money. But before everyone starts ordering fancy coffee drinks on a patio that doesn’t exist yet, it’s worth asking who’s already there—and who the shiny new version is meant to attract. In this episode, host Mark Long revisits a well-meaning Waco Insider social media post in 2020 about Elm Avenue that earned a deserved rebuke from East Waco residents, then turns to the proposed makeover of Brookview Hills Shopping Center at 34th and Bosque. He isn’t rooting against the renovation; he just wonders which members of the existing community the developers imagine sitting on those new patios. ----- Hit subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode of Your Waco Weekend —and visit ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠wacoinsider.stubstack.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ to sign up for The Weekly Dispatch newsletter.

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  Episode #51

  Old School Texas Barbecue: The Same Kind Jesus Ate

  Jul 28, 20268 minS1

  Restaurant openings are often treated as evidence that a city is becoming the place its boosters always promised it would be. Closures receive less attention, quietly disappearing from the civic narrative even if a restaurant earned acclaim and became part of people’s routines. But permanence isn’t the only measure of whether a place succeeded—or whether it mattered. Guess Family Barbecue began in a little red trailer outside Bare Arms Brewing before moving into the former Michna’s building on Franklin Avenue, appearing on television, and earning a place in Texas Monthly ’s statewide Top 50 barbeque joints. Then, in 2025, the restaurant suddenly closed without publicly explaining why. In this episode of Your Waco Weekend , host Mark Long remembers the jalapeño-cheese sausage, the Farmer’s Breakfast, and a restaurant whose disappearance complicates Waco’s comforting story of uninterrupted upward progress. ----- Hit subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode of Your Waco Weekend —and visit ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠wacoinsider.stubstack.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ to sign up for The Weekly Dispatch newsletter.

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  Episode #50

  Dollar Dollar Sign, Y'all

  Jul 21, 20267 minS1

  Craft breweries didn't invent chalkboards with beers listed on them, but over time what began as a practical way to keep up with constantly changing beer selections became shorthand for something else entirely: local ownership, independence, personality, and the sense that someone was making decisions one pint at a time. But what happens when those visual symbols are separated from the culture that created them and reused somewhere else? In this episode of Your Waco Weekend , a beer list at a downtown Waco restaurant where every dollar sign on the chalkboard is exactly the same leads host Mark Long down an unexpected rabbit hole. That small detail turns into a reflection on why businesses appropriate familiar visual cues, how ordinary objects accumulate meaning, and why one conversation over hot dogs convinced his wife Angela she might never want to eat there with him again. ----- Hit subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode of Your Waco Weekend —and visit ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠wacoinsider.stubstack.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ to sign up for The Weekly Dispatch newsletter.

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