Author Hour

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...

Cameron Herold never wanted to be an author. As he tells Travis Stoliker, his wife signed him up for a three-book package with Scribe as a birthday present — "You're doing three books with them over the next five years" — because she'd noticed that his first book was landing bigger speaking events and building his credibility. Seven books later (four with Scribe), Cameron has one of the clearest v...

Gino Barbaro joins Travis Stoliker to trace the full arc of a single book — from getting an idea "out of your head and down on paper" to building a seven-figure business on top of it. Once "the pizza guy," Gino and his partner Jake Stenziano left the restaurant and pharmaceutical worlds for multifamily real estate, and after getting "pretty good at what we did," they wrote Creative Cash to teach t...

Atul Minocha joins Travis Stoliker to talk about Lies, Damn Lies, and Marketing — the book an engineer wrote to fix marketing's trust problem. Atul explains the idea that became the seed of the whole project: "Fake ROI," the chapter (number 14) that argues that demanding an ironclad return on every marketing dollar can actually force good marketers to "make up some numbers" to get funded. From the...

Dr. Thom LeBeau joins Eric Jorgenson to talk about The Black Sheep Advantage — a book he'd been "talking about for 20 years" before he finally sat down to write it. A practicing physician seeing 250 patients a week, Thom describes the very ordinary reason the book kept not happening ("I would start and I would stop") and the very human thing that finally made it happen: a team he didn't want to di...

Dr. Stephen Rue joins Travis Stoliker to talk about Must: Becoming the Person You're Meant to Be — a personal-development book born from profound loss and built around a single idea: that each of us has a "must," a non-negotiable purpose, and that most people stay stuck simply because they don't know where to begin. Stephen opens with the story at the heart of the book — his stepfather's suicide,...

Dr. Michael Hittman joins Eric Jorgenson to tell the story behind The Brooklyn Paramount Theatre: An Intimate Portrait — and it is unlike most Author Hour conversations. Michael is an anthropologist who spent 46 years teaching at Long Island University, played pickup basketball for half a century in the Paramount's auditorium (the Guinness people once called to confirm it), and hosted 174 jazz rad...

Kristin Birdwell joins Travis Stoliker to talk about Sex, Drugs, and Soul — the memoir she wrote through COVID and published in 2022 — and everything it has set in motion since. Kristin traces the book from its first spark ("I always knew I was going to write a book"), through the writing-coach-and-accountability decision in 2019, to the emotional work of putting grief, abuse, and self-discovery o...

Steve Susi joins Travis Stoliker to talk about Brand Currency — the 2019 book that grew out of his years as an executive creative director at Amazon — and where its four currencies stand now that AI has rewritten the rules. Steve traces the thesis back to a standing ovation in Tokyo, where he realized "there's something universal here... What matters most to all people? Money, information, loyalty...

Five years after his first Author Hour appearance, Chris Belchamber returns to talk with Travis Stoliker about what has and hasn't changed since he wrote Invest Like the Best — and what he's learned watching the market since. Chris walks through the case for compounding over chasing returns, tells the story of turning down a seat at Long-Term Capital Management in the 1990s, and lays out why he be...

David Burkus joins Eric Jorgenson to talk about Best Team Ever: The Surprising Science of High-Performing Teams — his fifth book, and the first he published professionally after four traditional deals. David lays out the math he gives every author weighing the two paths: still write the proposal, and if the traditional offer comes in between $75,000 and $100,000, take the money — but if it’s “20,...

Matt Moyers joins Eric Jorgenson to talk about The Venture Capital Alternative: A Blueprint for a Better Patent System — a book idea he sat on for the better part of a decade before deciding, in 2023, that "now is the time." Matt explains how a career spent valuing intellectual property — including the Nortel bankruptcy, where a patent portfolio first bid in the hundreds of millions sold for $4.5...

Nick Capman joins Eric Jorgenson to talk about The Passionate Workforce: How to Create and Maintain Maximum Employee Engagement , the book he wrote from a four-page Word doc called "book notes" that he'd been keeping in Calibri 11. Nick explains the theory behind the book: we all sit on a spectrum from resentment to passion, the same person behaves completely differently at each end, and if you hi...