Author Hour

Trevor Hanson spent his career managing money. His cousin Caleb Pinegar spent his repairing bodies. For years, they kept having the same conversation: what good is wealth without health, or health without the freedom to enjoy it? In Unsplode: The Bold New Approach to Reconstruct Your Wealthspan and Healthspan , they answer it in a flip book, with Trevor's wealth side on one cover, Caleb's health s...

The youngest of 12 children, a teenage mother, and now the CEO of a growing assisted living business, Atiyah Nichols wrote Trials and Tribulations to make sure her mother's story, and her own, would never go untold. Five years later, readers still stop by her business asking for a signed copy, and women still email to say her book gave their story a voice. In this episode, Atiyah joins Teddy Smith...

After more than 20 years as a family doctor, Dr. Joey Rotella kept seeing the same thing: patients show up with nothing, leave with nothing, and can't remember what the doctor said. When his own daughter called him confused after an appointment, he sent her a one-page care plan, and it worked. In The Illusion of Care: Why Patients Leave Confused and the Clinical Operating System That Fixes It , Jo...

Christopher Day grew up poor on a farm believing the stock market was for other people. It wasn't until he was about 40, after building businesses across seven industries, that it clicked: small amounts of money, invested consistently over a long period of time, can make almost anyone a millionaire. In The $25 Millionaire: The Million Dollar Lesson Most People Learn Too Late and its companion, The...

When every car was streaming west out of New Orleans ahead of Hurricane Katrina, Chad Perez was the only one driving east, cutting his vacation short to get back to his post. In Treading Water: A New Orleans Police Officer's Memoir of Survival and Service During Hurricane Katrina , Chad tells the story of the five days after the storm that he believes has never been told: officers who lost their o...

Jake Kheel took a job inside a major Caribbean resort company expecting to learn how to fight the private sector. Instead, he discovered its enormous untapped potential to solve environmental problems. In Waking the Sleeping Giant: Unlocking the Hidden Power of Business to Save the Planet , Jake shares 20 years of lessons from Punta Cana, from restoring coral reefs to turning 15 tons a day of orga...

Dr. Mike Simpson spent 32 years in the U.S. Army, most of it in special operations as a Ranger, Green Beret, and physician, before writing Honed , a men's health guide for staying sharp after 40 that he published with Scribe. When a pandemic layoff left him with three unexpected months off, he finally wrote the story that had been in his head for decades: The Last Dungeon Crawler , the first book...

Shep Hyken has spent his entire career on one question: what makes customers come back? As Chief Amazement Officer at Shepard Presentations, he has worked with companies like American Airlines, AAA, and AT&T, and he has written eight books, including The Convenience Revolution , Amaze Every Customer Every Time , and Be Amazing or Go Home , which he published with Scribe. In this episode, Shep...

Robert Saik grew up on a mixed family farm, the grandson of Ukrainian farmer immigrants, and went on to build one of North America's largest agriculture consulting firms, lead a robotics company, and launch his latest venture in AI. In Food 5.0: How We Feed the Future , he takes readers from the genesis of agriculture through the eras of muscle, machine, chemistry, and biotechnology to today's con...

What if basketball and music aren't just similar, but the same thing? Ryan Bisio has spent two decades as a coach and as a lead singer, and somewhere between a gym in Copenhagen and a recording studio he started hearing the game. The point guard is the lead singer. The ball is a note. And the NBA, it turns out, runs at exactly 120 beats per minute. In Musicality of the Game: The Artistry of Basket...

Most leaders tell a success-only story. Maranda Dziekonski decided to tell the rest of it. She grew up in rural Michigan in a house that didn't always have heat or running water, moved west as a young single mom, and built a career that took her to the C-suite in Silicon Valley, with plenty of missteps and hard exits along the way. In Saying the Hard Parts Out Loud: Backbones, Boardrooms, and Grac...

Most of what we call problems are really symptoms. Timothy Arrigo learned that the hard way, through childhood trauma, addiction, homelessness, and divorce, and then again from the inside of the clinical world, where he watched clients get treated as if they couldn't change. In The Inside Out Method: Take Control of Your Mind, Break Free from Toxic Patterns, and Transform Your Life , Timothy lays...

Six years at City College. Thirteen restaurant jobs. Calculus III three times. By 23, Joy Lane was lying in the grass, ready to walk away from her last final and everything she'd worked for. In F College: A Memoir of Doubt, Self-Discovery, and Resilience , Joy goes back to that breaking point and walks readers through her final semester, building her story the way an engineer builds a system, with...

For 16 years, writing a book sat on Greg Hiebert's goals list. Deep down, he was afraid no one would read it, and if they did, they wouldn't like it. He finally confronted that fear, and the result was You Can't Give What You Don't Have , a book about the self-care leaders need before they can give love, patience, kindness, and insight to others. In this episode of Author Hour, Greg joins Travis S...

What makes an experience extraordinary? Paul Zak has spent more than a decade answering that question in his lab, measuring what he calls the brain's "give a damn" signal and building a company, Immersion, that movie studios, theaters, educators, and brands now use on six continents. In Immersion: The Science of the Extraordinary and the Source of Happiness , Paul turns that research into stories,...

Getting a Black woman into the leadership seat is a milestone. Keeping her there, supported and thriving, is the real work. Dr. Monifa McKnight spent more than two decades rising from the classroom to the superintendent's office, and along the way she ran into challenges no preparation program had warned her about. In Full Flight: Lessons in Leading as a Black Woman in Education , Dr. McKnight tur...

Every day, roughly 10,000 baby boomer business owners hit retirement age, and most of them have no exit plan. The conventional wisdom says they have two choices: sell or shut it down. Richard Shaull, founder of Exit Without Selling, says there's a third. In Exit Without Selling: Build a Dream Team, Keep Your Business, and Get Your Life Back , Richard lays out how owners can stop being the "chief e...

On this episode of Author Hour, Matthew Ray Scott joins us to talk about Physician Brand Rx , the book he co-wrote with orthopedic surgeon Dr. Scott Sigmund. Drawing on his background as an Army psychological warfare officer, Matthew explains how patients make decisions under duress, why trust is a surgeon's currency and reputation is their bank account, and why most surgeons are not invisible, ju...

On this episode of Author Hour, gym owner and former schoolteacher Carrie Cox joins us to talk about her new book, The Self-Care Dare: 25 Habits for Lasting Wellness . What started as daily text messages to members of her Crew Fitness challenge grew into emails, blog posts, and finally a book built around five factors of wellness: mindset, nutrition, fitness, sleep, and connection. Carrie explains...

After more than 30 years leading stores for some of America's biggest brands, Ron Thurston realized no one had ever written a book for the 55 million people who work in retail. So he wrote one. Retail Pride: The Guide to Celebrating Your Accidental Career came out in 2020 and still sells around the world. His second book, Human Pride: Optimizing Your Human Potential in a Digital Job Market , follo...

Rock Your Business: Navigating the Road from $50 Million to $500 Million and Beyond is the offensive follow-up to Rock the Recession , the 2019 book Autobahn Consultants founder Jonathan Slane co-wrote just months before the 2020 shutdown. Where the first book was about protecting a business in a downturn, this one gathers 21 voices from the Autobahn network, from a founder who sold to a Fortune 5...

What if you could market without marketing? After more than 30 years in marketing, advertising, and strategy, Scott A. Martin set out to solve that "unsolvable problem," and the answer became his book, Groundswell . Built around his formula of build, give, grow, transform, the book now sits at the center of everything Scott does: his consulting firm, his podcast, and his community all share the sa...

Julie Newman wrote Pull Don't Push to fix a message she had watched go wrong at more than 50 Girls in STEM events: well-meaning speakers telling girls they don't belong in STEM, then asking them to join anyway. Her book, written for the educators and outreach coordinators who shape kids' choices, makes the case for "pull" messaging instead, explaining what engineers actually do and why it's one of...

In 2018, Cesar Perez was on the rise. He had acted opposite Daniel Radcliffe in Beast of Burden , filmed with Clint Eastwood, and landed an audition for Venom . He never made it to that audition. On the drive to Savannah, a drunk driver hit him head-on, followed by a semi truck. What came next was five years in and out of hospitals, more than 30 procedures, a traumatic brain injury, and relearning...

Alec Roth grew up in Hollywood — the son of screenwriter Eric Roth, watching his father adapt books into films from a home office — and he’s now doing the same thing from his own side of the table. In this Author Hour conversation with Lex Statzer, Alec talks about what it actually takes to turn a book into a movie, why he believes “great intellectual property, your stories, they win the day, no m...