Biz-Souls

We’ve been told to celebrate failure. Fail fast! Fail forward! Fail better! Fail gloriously! Apparently, failure has become the participation trophy of business. What if failure is just… failure? In this episode of Biz-Souls, Rona Lewis and Jeffrey Hansler take on a surprisingly uncomfortable idea that failure is not always your friend. And for Rona, that’s saying something, because her work with...

Should your employees work from home? In the office? In a hybrid arrangement? From Italy? Switzerland? Botswana? Apparently, the modern workplace has become less about where you work and more about how many countries you can name when asking for permission to work remotely. In this episode of Biz-Souls, Rona Lewis and Jeffrey Hansler wade into one of the workplace’s favorite arguments remote versu...

Welcome to Biz-Souls, where two people sit down to talk about business and somehow end up discussing the WNBA, soap operas, hockey fights, social media, dictatorships, Canadian violence, Hollywood explosions, potato chips, and Jeffrey’s apparently magnificent legs. Basically, a normal episode of Biz-Souls. This time, Rona and Jeffrey tackle ‘the business of outrage’ and the uncomfortable possibili...

There are two kinds of people in the world: people who walk into a movie theater and order a reasonable amount of popcorn… and people who look at the largest bucket and think, ‘Well, obviously.’ Welcome back to Biz-Souls, where Rona Lewis and Jeffrey Hansler once again set out to discuss business and somehow end up questioning our entire relationship with capitalism, marketing, food portions, crit...

You would think being smart would protect you from making dumb decisions. You would be wrong. In this episode of Biz-Souls, Rona Lewis and Jeffrey Hansler take on one of the great mysteries of human behavior: Why do intelligent people sometimes make spectacularly stupid decisions? And, because this is Biz-Souls, the discussion begins with Jeffrey limping into the conversation with an injured foot....

Networking. Everybody says they’re good at it. Then you go to a conference, and someone walks up, hands you a business card, says, ‘Hi, I’m in real estate,” and immediately begins explaining the 14 things they sell’. Congratulations. You have just experienced ‘show up and throw up.’ In this episode of Biz-Souls, Rona Lewis and Jeffrey Hansler tackle the strange, wonderful, occasionally horrifying...

You can put ‘People First’ on the wall. You can put, ‘Our people are our greatest asset!’ on the website. You can even give everyone a company mug that says, ‘Teamwork Makes the Dream Work’. Eventually somebody must actually create a culture where people want to work. In this episode, Rona Lewis and Jeffrey Hansler take on five warning signs that your company culture may be heading south. And Jeff...

Leadership has landmines though not the cool kind from an action movie. Rona Lewis and Jeffrey Hansler get into a conversation about the things that can quietly derail leaders and teams and, as usual, manage to wander into Apple, NASA, Steve Wozniak, JCPenney, ego, fear, cash flow, poker faces, and why sometimes the best thing a leader can do is get out of their own way. The conversation starts wi...

What happens when artificial intelligence gets really, really good at reading people? Well, apparently, poker is about to become a lot less fun—and Jeffrey Hansler is about to become a lot poorer. In this episode of Biz-Souls, Rona Lewis and Jeffrey Hansler dive into the fascinating, and slightly creepy, world of AI analyzing facial expressions, body language, breathing and those tiny involuntary...

Congratulations! You're the best employee in the company. Your reward? A brand-new job you're completely unprepared for. What could possibly go wrong? This week on Biz-Souls, Jeffrey Hansler and Rona Lewis tackle one of business's oldest traditions: "You're amazing at your job, so let's immediately stop letting you do it." It's the corporate equivalent of saying,...

Ever worked for someone whose leadership philosophy could be summarized as, ‘Because I'm the boss.’ How'd that work out for them? This week on Biz-Souls, Jeffrey and Rona tackle the value of sales skills for leaders. No, we're not talking about cold calls, quotas, or convincing your Aunt Linda she needs another timeshare. We're talking about selling ideas. Selling vision. Selling c...

This episode begins with one simple agreement, "We're not going to talk politics." That agreement lasts... approximately 37 seconds. Fortunately, this isn't really an episode about politics. It's an episode about innovation. This week on Biz-Souls, Rona Lewis and Jeffrey Hansler stumble into one of those conversations that starts over coffee, wanders through political strateg...

What if your biggest business problem isn't your business... it's your energy level? This week on Biz-Souls, Rona Lewis and Jeffrey Hansler welcome Bill Quaterman, a man who's spent more than three decades helping people reclaim their health, optimize performance, and ask one deceptively simple question: "What do you want your life to look like?" Of course, before we get ther...

Some speakers are born with "natural talent." The rest of us accidentally clear out conference rooms, get compared to fire hoses, improvise ourselves right off the stage, and somehow survive long enough to become keynote speakers. Guess which category Jeffrey and Rona belong to? In this delightfully honest episode of Biz-Souls, Jeffrey and Rona pull back the curtain on decades of speakin...

Have you ever walked into a room and forgotten why? Forgotten an actor's name? Couldn't find your glasses... while wearing them? Congratulations! You're already qualified for this week's episode of Biz-Souls where Rona Lewis and Jeffrey Hansler tackle one of the biggest business questions of 2026, ‘Is AI making us more productive... or just professionally lazy?’ Along the way they...

What makes people happy? Money? Success? Contrast? Getting promoted? Buying a boat? On second thought, scratch that last one. This week on Biz-Souls, Rona Lewis and Jeffrey Hansler dive headfirst into one of the biggest misconceptions floating around social media—that happiness is something you earn after enough success. Spoiler alert: The research politely disagrees. Between arguing over dopamine...

Rona Lewis and Jeffrey Hansler explore the battle between confidence and intelligence, and why organizations sometimes reward the person who sounds the most certain instead of the person who is actually the most knowledgeable. Our Biz-Souls’ hosts ask the question every workplace has secretly wondered, “Is confidence the secret ingredient to success or just the loudest person in the room getting t...

Cancer changes everything—but it doesn't have to steal your confidence. In this heartfelt and surprisingly funny episode of Biz-Souls, Jeffrey Hansler and Rona Lewis welcome back longtime friend and internationally recognized cancer hair-loss expert Amy Gibson, founder of Created Hair and the new Cancer Comfort Corner. Amy has spent more than 26 years helping thousands of women navigate one of...

If you've ever called customer service and ended up questioning your life choices, your sanity, and possibly the existence of organized civilization, this episode is for you. This week on Biz-Souls, Rona Lewis and Jeffrey Hansler tackle a business problem so common it has practically become its own department: the giant communication gap between sales and technical teams. What starts as a simp...

Remember when Windex was suggested as the solution to cleaning a clapboard? Neither do we. Well, actually, Jeffrey does. Repeatedly. This week's episode of Biz-Souls begins with household confusion, questionable cleaning advice, and a closet door that apparently became an escape room challenge. Naturally, this leads directly into one of psychology's most fascinating concepts: cognitive dis...

Color is emotion. Gray is a mood. This episode is a whole palette. Somewhere along the way, the world went gray. Not metaphorically — literally. Scroll through a parking lot photo from 1980 and you'll see yellows, blues, reds, a green car someone clearly loved. Scroll through a 2025 parking lot and you'll think your screen broke. It didn't. That's just… the vibe now. Black, white,...

Somewhere between Willy Wonka, Silicon Valley wellness culture, and two entrepreneurs stubborn enough to spend a year making mushrooms taste luxurious, Episode 222 of Biz-Souls was born. Well, Welcome back, Kotter and Room 222. In this delightfully smooth episode, hosts Rona Lewis and Jeffrey Hansler sit down with Graham Bailey and Lee Ribeiro, the masterminds behind Mana Bars (https://manabars.co...

Rona Lewis and Jeffrey Hansler welcome back recurring guest and hospitality insider Nick Morton to unpack a story that rocked the culinary world - centered on famed chef René Redzepi of Noma. This isn’t just another ‘celebrity chef gone rogue’ story. It’s a full-on reality check about internships, unpaid labor, and the culture of ‘abuse-as-education’. Redzepi’s empire didn’t crumble overnight. It...

If you’ve ever wondered what happens when a former would-be radio DJ, a philosophy major, body builder, and a “professional button pusher” walk into a podcast… this episode is your answer. This week on Biz-Souls, Rona Lewis and Jeffrey Hansler sit down with Alex Fredricks, a growth strategist who has done everything short of becoming Wolfman. From mixing records with oscilloscopes to scaling brand...

This episode of Biz-Souls is what happens when business strategy meets… booze with a backstory. Recorded on location at Hollywood Distillery, Rona Lewis takes the mic solo (don’t worry, Jeffrey is lurking off-camera like a true executive producer ninja) and dives headfirst into a story that proves entrepreneurship is equal parts vision, timing… and apparently, several thousand pounds of dates. Bec...