GUT with Christianne

Venus Rose, Founder: Haus of Creators Every weekend she boarded a 12-hour night bus from Greensboro to Chinatown. Her grandfather had no idea. Venus Rose grew up in a family of teachers and was on track for medicine. In high school she rode one bus to a medical school program while the art kids rode another. Staying felt like living a lie. When she dropped the classes her grandparents had paid for...

The night before Good Greed's launch party, Alana Picov tasted the first production run. It was too sour, and the cherry flavour came out wet and sticky. Her parents had flights booked. Friends were flying in from Toronto and London, and 125 people were on the guest list. The candy was supposed to hit the shelves at Pop Up Grocer the next morning. Two years earlier, Alana was at the top of the...

He cold emailed the Olympic committee with no connections and no reply for weeks. Three months later, his company had exclusive rights as Team Canada's official wellness recovery partner through 2028.Cam Stajer started Kala with 5,000 dollars, a 20 dollar Fiverr logo, and a product he found through a podcast because he couldn't afford the real thing. He turned down a deal on Dragon's D...

Ilias Anwar is the founder New York's startup world can't stop talking about; the one who throws 16 events in a week, treats every room like a king, and once faked a $28 million sale on April Fool's just to get investors to call him back. What almost nobody knew: months before the crowds, he was broke, subleasing from a roommate about to be evicted, and borrowing money from his younger sister, swe...

He was 24, eating at Michelin-star restaurants in New York. He'd never been more miserable. Brian Schardt was Director of Engineering at Warner Music Group; parties, money, everything he thought he wanted. Then he flew to Argentina for a wedding and watched people with nothing laugh harder than anyone he knew in Manhattan. He quit from a dinner table that night. No two weeks notice. Just an email:...

Sabih Siddiqi had the golden handcuffs: big law, the prestige, the paycheck, and walked away to build Irys (formerly Iqidis), a legal-AI company he calls "Palantir meets Bloomberg." A cancer diagnosis at 18 blew up the pre-med identity he'd built his whole life around. He rebuilt it as a litigator, spent nearly seven years in the law, then gave up the safe, charted track for the uncharted one. On...

If you've been telling yourself you'll start the thing "when you're ready," this episode is for you. Rei Lalo had a stable job at McCann — one of the biggest ad agencies in the world. He'd been promoted twice in three years. He had a clear ten-year trajectory, a real salary, and the kind of resume that opens doors for the rest of your career. He walked away from it. With no college degree, no cred...

Clarke Pennington spent a decade in finance: investment banking, Columbia MBA, a consumer hedge fund. Then he left to build Lasso, a better-for-you gelatin cup with protein and fiber that no one had been able to manufacture before. He gave himself 12 months. He did it in 11 — with six failed production runs, a co-manufacturer who wouldn't return his calls for four months, and stress so severe his...

Kirsten Breidenbruch spent a decade at BlackRock. She made VP. She was making great money. From the outside, she had everything figured out. From the inside, she was waking up two hours early every day just to calm herself down enough to walk to work. Her feet felt like cinder blocks. Her body was rejecting the life she built. In this conversation, Kirsten takes us inside the war between the ident...

George Foreman built an identity the way entrepreneurs build empires, with brutal focus and no room for weakness. But the man he constructed to dominate was deeply sensitive underneath, and that fracture nearly destroyed him. This is what happened when the persona he'd engineered to survive his childhood became the cage that broke his championship, his marriages, and his relationship with his daug...

Winter, 169 AD. The most powerful man on earth is sitting in a freezing tent on the battle frontier, covered in mud, surrounded by dead soldiers. Rome is collapsing. A plague is killing 2,000 people a day. The economy has crashed. Marcus Aurelius has just buried his co-emperor. He's watching his own children die. By all accounts, everything is falling apart. That night, by torchlight, he dips his...

Arsh Toor's dad moved from India to Canada as an engineer and ended up taking whatever work he could find to support a family on a single income. The message was clear: work hard, get good grades, get a steady job. Arsh did exactly that. She got into an impressive school, landed in investment banking, and spent five years at two different shops in New York. Then she quit to make pistachio butt...

In 1824, Beethoven stood on a podium conducting a symphony he couldn't hear. The orchestra had been told not to look at him. He was flailing at a tempo that existed only in his mind, several bars behind when the music ended. A singer had to walk over and turn him around so he could see the five standing ovations. He heard nothing. We tell the story everyone skips past. The abusive father who beat...

At three years old, Maya Angelou was put on a train to Arkansas with a tag on her wrist and no adult to watch her. At eight, she was sexually assaulted. She believed her voice killed a man, and she stopped speaking for nearly five years. The woman who read a poem at a presidential inauguration in front of 20 million people spent her childhood in silence. This episode traces the full arc: the aband...