Well Said

Maytha Alhassen is a scholar, journalist, poet, and TV writer who has spent her career studying how words carry meaning, and how they get bent. She grew up between Arabic and English in West Covina, wrote Haqq and Hollywood, a 100-year audit of how Hollywood has portrayed Muslims, and went on to work in the writers' room of Hulu's Ramy. Maytha joins Well Said to dissect the words we use wi...

Cori Close is the head coach of UCLA women's basketball. In her 15th season, she led the Bruins to their first NCAA national championship with a 37-1 record, and six of her players are now in the WNBA. She learned how to lead from legendary UCLA coach John Wooden, and she still runs her program on his reminder that a coach is shaping people's hearts before their jump shots. What makes Cori...

Every brand crisis ends with a statement, and the internet grades it within hours. Pia and Kelly pulled real statements companies put out over the last few months and ranked them on a tier list, from S for supreme all the way down to F. Pia and Kelly are the co-founders of Cuore and spent years running communications at Amazon. Dollywood earned the only S with five words that sounded exactly like...

At seven years old, Erick Galindo was translating for his parents at the bank, at the hospital, and in front of police and immigration officials. His Spanish wasn't great, so he had to take official language written for highly educated people and break it down into the simplest words he knew. He's been doing some version of that ever since. Erick has written for The New York Times, the LA...

Most mornings, Pia and Kelly catch up over coffee and trade hot takes on whatever brand moment is blowing up online. This episode puts that conversation on camera. Each brought scenarios the other hadn't seen, and they react cold: Disney opening its IP to TikTok creators, the wave of nostalgia menus, a golf collab ad that went sideways, the "sold out in 15 seconds" drop, and Liquid D...

Dr. Melina Abdullah grew up in Oakland, where her mother's front porch doubled as a classroom for the neighborhood. She's been organizing ever since, and she teaches, writes a weekly column, hosts a radio show and has spent two decades studying how people actually lead. She sits down with Kelly Cheeseman and Pia Arthur on the difference between leaderless and leader-full, why she quotes El...

A speech and a film score are built the same way. You hook early, you earn the emotional moment before you spend it, you let the silent parts stay silent, and you get one crescendo. Composer Amanda Jones spends her career making those decisions in sound, and this conversation is about what writers, speakers and communicators can take from the way she does it. There's also the problem she solve...

The first PR firm Kelly ever worked for had a mantra: the best PR is invisible. Then, Pia and Kelly built a decade at Amazon on it. In this episode, they say it out loud one more time and come to the conclusion: it isn't true anymore. Pia and Kelly are the co-founders of Cuore and spent years as communications executives at Amazon, the people writing the words nobody sees. Now chief comms offi...

Ryan Wood spent sixteen years deciding what hangs on the rack at Urban Outfitters and The North Face, and he'll tell you plainly that a lot of it ended up in a landfill. He walked into the Well Said studio wearing a beat-up trucker hat. Ryan is an apparel designer and merchant, most recently the founding head of men's product at Quince, and he's in the early stages of building athletic...

Dr. Robert Cho operates on children's spines with Pearl Jam playing. When the monitors show the electrical signals between a child's brain and spinal cord starting to drop, the first thing that happens is not medical. The music goes off. That is the signal to everyone in the room that a checklist is coming, read out loud, together, off the wall. And one of the steps on that checklist is fo...

Steve M. Cullen has presented roughly 200 times a year for two decades. He'll tell you privately that a pitch is warfare, that his mother's retirement is riding on it, that the fundamental job is to be the freshest person in the room. Then he walks in and refuses to pitch at all. Steve is a creative director and the founder of All Together Now, a studio whose entire tagline is "good i...

For 30+ years, Angela Reddock-Wright has sat between people who cannot stand each other. First as an employment litigator, then as a workplace investigator during the reckoning that followed MeToo, and now as a full-time mediator. Her conclusion after thousands of cases: almost every workplace dispute is a communication failure wearing a legal costume. In this episode, Angela shows Pia and Kelly t...

Ryan Weiss learned the most important thing he knows about communication while dangling from a 40-foot rope in a monkey costume. He was a swing in Wicked , handed a track he'd had 45 minutes to learn. So before the curtain rose he told the entire cast the truth: I don't know what I'm doing. If you find me lost, grab me. The stage manager called it unprofessional. Ryan calls it the begi...

For 14 years, Naz Perez has done the near-impossible: getting the most famous, most media-trained people on earth to drop the script. She landed Will Smith's first sit-down after the slap. She made Steven Spielberg laugh in ten seconds. She asked an NFL star a question no one had asked him in nine seasons. On Well Said, the person who interviews everyone gets interviewed, by two communications...

For over a year, former colleagues have been sending Kelly and Pia the same questions. How did you actually start Cuore? How did you land your first client? How did you know it was time to leave a stable career and bet on yourself? In this Q&A episode, they turn the mic on themselves and answer all of it. What comes out is an honest look at the leap most people only think about. Kelly shares t...

Before Shadi Bakour ever framed a message for a customer, he engineered the one he told himself. Driving Uber and waiting tables through three years of making $0, he listened to Tony Robbins on every commute. "I looked at it like I was brainwashing myself." The message worked. Today PATH Water is in more than 75,000 locations and has eliminated over 700 million single-use plastic bottles...

Christopher Bryan has spent his career proving something most communicators only sense intuitively: the words we choose don't just describe behavior, they build identity, and identity is what actually moves people. As a behavioral scientist at UT Austin's McCombs School of Business, Bryan has run randomized experiments on voters, cheaters, teenagers, and teachers, and the results keep poin...

Sam Sanders has spent two decades learning that the best conversations aren't the polished ones. After years at NPR cutting five seconds off a segment because "the clock doesn't play," the host of The Sam Sanders Show now does the opposite: improvised, imperfect, unfinished talk that he insists is "just vibes." On Well Said, Pia and Kelly get him to trace that philosoph...

Most advice about communication is about control: managing a room, softening bad news, performing under pressure. Amy Sweet works where all of that falls away. As the founder and CEO of Halcyon Home, she has spent more than a decade at the bedside of people in their final days, and she has learned that the clearest, most honest communication of a person's whole life often happens in their last...

For twenty years, Pia Arthur and Kelly Cheeseman watched the single megaphone of mass media shatter into a million independent microphones. In this solo episode of Well Said, the Cuore co-founders and former Amazon PR executives make the case that the comms job flipped with it: you no longer control the narrative from the inside out, you manage a fragmented set of realities from the outside in. Th...

Elaine Garza spent 12 years in New York running PR for Spin, Vibe, and Outside before she put a baby in the backseat, drove to Austin, and started a PR agency out of her garage with a Blackberry and one client. Twenty years later, Giant Noise is roughly 80 people across four Texas cities. And her competitive edge is the same thing it was on day one: she doesn't pitch The New York Times. She ca...

Chef JJ Johnson built a fast-casual rice bowl restaurant on an idea most investors called crazy: that a single grain of rice could carry the story of the entire African diaspora. He priced it at $10 using the same Carolina gold rice that fine dining charges $40 for, because the story of Black and Brown food shouldn't cost more just because a white chef wasn't cooking it. He's a James B...

David Kirsch passed the bar exam. Then he called his parents and told them he was going to be a fitness trainer. Dead silence. That call (and the 40 years that followed) are what this episode is really about. David trained J.Lo, Heidi Klum, Kate Upton, Gigi Hadid, and Naomi Campbell. Not by telling them what they wanted to hear, but by being the one person in the room who wouldn't. He's sp...

From ages four to twenty-two, Ben Gleib had a stutter and a vocal disfluency so severe that his chords would lock down mid-sentence. He'd sit in class dreading being called on to read aloud, convinced it was a kind of execution. And he wanted, more than anything, to be a comedian and a TV host. He became one. Twenty-five years of standup later, Ben has performed to arenas, hosted an Emmy-nomin...

What does a celebrity hairstylist know about communication that most executives don't? More than you'd think. Alex Pardoe has done hair for Paris Hilton at 3am, worked red carpets and film sets with some of the most recognizable names in Hollywood, and built his LA career from scratch after leaving a successful salon in Michigan with no clients and a three-month trial period. He's worked with Lind...