Authority in the Wild

What happens when you walk away from a business you spent 13 years building? Alan Underwood opened a car dealership in May 2007, right before the market crashed, borrowed against his house to do it, and grew it to more than $16 million in annual sales, then in 2020 let it go for about $100,000 without a contract. In this conversation he talks openly about leaving a business at the worst possible m...

You know what to do, it's even on your list, and it still doesn't get done. Dre Baldwin spent nine years as a professional basketball player and now works with companies on execution, making sure things get done the same way every time, even as people and teams change. In this conversation he explains where procrastination and missed priorities actually start, and how to build the kind of...

You can be very good at what you do, with a real track record, and still have nobody calling. Carey James of Brand Alchemy spent years selling to doctors and scientists, some of the smartest people in the world, and kept seeing the same thing happen to them. In this conversation he explains why capable experts stay invisible, why your personal brand matters more now that AI can copy a resume, and...

Shane Lukas teaches organizations how to hold onto what they believe under pressure, and he built that method in a jail cell, in isolation, with a short pencil and a scrap of paper. Years of activism had put him in front of a system that wanted him to explain his values away, and he had to decide on the spot which of them he would keep. One question carried him through the days that followed, and...

In 2015, Aaron Golub snapped a successful extra point for Tulane against UCF and became the first legally blind person to play in a Division I FBS football game. His coach never told the other team. Aaron did not want them to know. He got there by finding a narrow role he could win, repeating one motion thousands of times, and later pursuing NFL free agency. Today he works with companies and leade...

Most podcasters fail because they copy the wrong strategies. Learn why your podcasting mistakes are holding you back and how to fix them. Chris Jordan, former key member of the Lewis Howes Podcast team, joins me to break down the most common podcasting mistakes. Many creators spend their time trying to replicate the exact blueprint of top-performing shows, only to find that it does not work for th...

Jermane Cheathem has spent more than 20 years in commercial equipment finance and his referral partners made him over $50 million in closed deals. He's the only guest that appeared on this podcast 3 times. And for a good reason. I always learn something new from him and I bet you will too. At his peak he made 300 cold calls a day. Today he works the same four hours and makes none of them, and one...

In January 2026, Florian Kaspar was setting up Clay and other go-to-market tools inside someone else's startup. By September he had taken his years in recruiting and bet them on a single job title: GTM engineer. He now runs Pipebuilders, a headhunting business that places only that role, and he hosts the Pipebuilders podcast, where he interviews the people who do the work. Florian sits between...

Being funny is a skill, and Andrew Tarvin has the data showing most of us never practice it. He studied computer science and engineering, managed projects at Procter & Gamble, and joined his first improv group only because his best friend needed someone organized enough to run the meetings. He was terrible at it. Today he runs Humor That Works, has trained 250+ organizations and his TEDx talk...

Lauren Pires was born with a rare neuromuscular condition that leaves her with roughly 33 percent of the physical strength of an average person. She hid it for more than 30 years, and during those years she built an 11-year career in event production at one of the largest music festivals in Canada, a job made of long days on your feet. At 32 she stood on a stage and spoke about it in public for th...

Thibault (Tibo) Louis-Lucas burned 500,000 euros of VC money and spent four years on ideas that never generated revenue. Then he rebuilt from zero, sold Tweet Hunter and Taplio to Lempire for $8 million, and now runs a bootstrapped SaaS products portfolio that makes over $1 million per month. Not one of those products started as an original idea. Every single one entered a market that was already...

Personal branding changed: expertise is now table stakes, and people buy who you are before they check what you do. Personal brand strategist Magali De Reu breaks down the personality first content system she used to rebuild from zero on LinkedIn, land a Netflix client seven days after one post, and turn content into discovery calls and paying clients. After walking away from a startup that owed h...

How to grow your personal brand when you have no content team, no budget and 20 minutes to learn it. Caleb Ralston was an integral part of the team that helped grow Gary Vee's TikTok from 300,000 to over 3.5 million followers in 3 months and helped take Alex and Leila Hormozi from about 1 million to over 11 million followers. Then he left, started his own firm Ralston Select and put a six-hour...

Posting good content stopped working the moment everyone could make it. Katelyn Bourgoin knows both sides of that shift: Forbes hyped her startup as the next LinkedIn for women entrepreneurs, it went bankrupt anyway, and she rebuilt from zero into a one-woman business built on a single ownable idea, buyer psychology, now read by more than 63,000 marketers. This episode is about the move that made...

What happens when the person behind a country's most listened to podcast steps away from it for a year? In this episode, I sit down with Paul Olteanu, Master Trainer, coach, and the voice of Mind Architect, Romania's most listened to educational podcast, to talk about what that success was quietly costing him and how he rebuilt his work around meaning. Paul shares how the show reached the...

Anastasija Lynch pushed back the moment this episode was pitched to her as a burnout conversation. She is an executive coach and co-host of Beyond the Noise who spent a good chunk of her career in technology before moving into coaching senior leaders, and her correction was specific: the people she works with are capable, successful, and perfectly able to power through almost anything, which is ex...

The number your wrist shows you each morning is deciding how your day goes, and it is closer to a guess than a measurement. Chester Maglo spent years inside the sleep research and now runs a 90-day one-on-one sleep system for business owners who cannot rebuild their lives around a two-hour wind-down routine. The question driving this episode: if the score and the eight-hour target are both the wro...

Forty million people watched Michelle Delamor get eliminated from American Idol. What happened next changed the direction of her li In this episode, I sit down with Michelle Delamor, co-founder of Sonic Gods Studios and creator of 60 Day Hustle, to talk about public rejection, reinvention, and what it takes to build your own stage. Michelle shares why she disappeared for three months after America...

Every internship said no, so Henry Jia stopped applying and built something instead. The platform he ended up engineering later booked him onto this very show. He got there with a business degree and six months of teaching himself to build, and today he is the founding engineer at PodPitch, the AI platform behind roughly 5% of podcast guest bookings worldwide. In this conversation, we get into: Wh...

Kate Assaraf built DIP into a seven-figure haircare brand with forty thousand dollars from her kitchen table, with no Amazon, no investors, and no paid influencers. Her case is that the standard playbook most founders are handed is a trap, and the money you supposedly leave on the table by skipping Amazon is money you keep circulating with your own customers and retailers instead. I brought her th...

The people who are quietly checking out at work usually hide it well. They still show up. Something has just gone quiet. Martin Lesperance is a keynote speaker who delivers around 100 talks a year in more than 20 countries; his audiences started calling him the Simon Sinek of Quebec. In this conversation we get into: Why so many people have "quietly quit" & burning out The four simpl...

The most polished marketing is the marketing nobody remembers. Ada Wardzala started in the call center of the company that publishes Harvard Business Review in Poland and was directing its marketing by age 23. Today she runs SUUR, a B2B agency where clients wait for her availability. In this conversation, we get into: - Why 80% of your effort belongs on the part most teams treat as an afterthought...

Vaughan Broderick has worked on more than 300 innovation projects and trained over 350 leaders across 20 industries. In all of it, he kept seeing the same thing: good ideas dying before they ever reached the people they were meant for. Not because the ideas were weak. Because of the part of innovation almost nobody teaches. In this conversation, Vaughan breaks down why organizations jump to soluti...

Carolyn Haeler spent nine months losing her hair, going gray, and wasting away before anyone figured out what was wrong. Then she bit into a gluten-free cookie that was barely edible, and decided to fix it herself. Carolyn is the founder and CEO of Mightylicious Gluten Free, nationally distributed across 43 states, available at Whole Foods, Walmart, Costco, and 2,600+ specialty stores. She was als...

In 2026, the smartest person in the room is losing. Not to better ideas. To better packaging. Brian Miller built a 3.7M-view TEDx talk using a framework that fits on one page. He spent twenty years figuring out why brilliant people fail on stage, and it has nothing to do with charisma, voice, or slides. In this conversation, we get into: Why asking "what do I want to say?" is the question that kil...