Authority in the Wild

Every internship said no, so Henry Jia stopped applying and built something instead. The platform he ended up engineering later booked him onto this very show. He got there with a business degree and six months of teaching himself to build, and today he is the founding engineer at PodPitch, the AI platform behind roughly 5% of podcast guest bookings worldwide. In this conversation, we get into: Wh...

Kate Assaraf built DIP into a seven-figure haircare brand with forty thousand dollars from her kitchen table, with no Amazon, no investors, and no paid influencers. Her case is that the standard playbook most founders are handed is a trap, and the money you supposedly leave on the table by skipping Amazon is money you keep circulating with your own customers and retailers instead. I brought her th...

The people who are quietly checking out at work usually hide it well. They still show up. Something has just gone quiet. Martin Lesperance is a keynote speaker who delivers around 100 talks a year in more than 20 countries; his audiences started calling him the Simon Sinek of Quebec. In this conversation we get into: Why so many people have "quietly quit" & burning out The four simpl...

The most polished marketing is the marketing nobody remembers. Ada Wardzala started in the call center of the company that publishes Harvard Business Review in Poland and was directing its marketing by age 23. Today she runs SUUR, a B2B agency where clients wait for her availability. In this conversation, we get into: - Why 80% of your effort belongs on the part most teams treat as an afterthought...

Vaughan Broderick has worked on more than 300 innovation projects and trained over 350 leaders across 20 industries. In all of it, he kept seeing the same thing: good ideas dying before they ever reached the people they were meant for. Not because the ideas were weak. Because of the part of innovation almost nobody teaches. In this conversation, Vaughan breaks down why organizations jump to soluti...

Carolyn Haeler spent nine months losing her hair, going gray, and wasting away before anyone figured out what was wrong. Then she bit into a gluten-free cookie that was barely edible, and decided to fix it herself. Carolyn is the founder and CEO of Mightylicious Gluten Free, nationally distributed across 43 states, available at Whole Foods, Walmart, Costco, and 2,600+ specialty stores. She was als...

In 2026, the smartest person in the room is losing. Not to better ideas. To better packaging. Brian Miller built a 3.7M-view TEDx talk using a framework that fits on one page. He spent twenty years figuring out why brilliant people fail on stage, and it has nothing to do with charisma, voice, or slides. In this conversation, we get into: Why asking "what do I want to say?" is the question that kil...

The founder who seems fine is often the one who needs this most. I sit down with Dr. Margaret Rutherford, clinical psychologist, author, and TEDx speaker, to walk through Perfectly Hidden Depression, the form of depression that doesn't look like depression at all. It hides behind high performance, emotional control, and the identity of being someone who handles things. And it's disproportionately...

Andrej Persolja built a product with a 4.9-star rating and real clinical proof it worked. He launched in one market and it took off. He then launched to the US and nothing happened. No customers. No conversions. Four years and tens of thousands in ad spend with almost nothing to show for it. He eventually figured out why. Then he ran a structured test. One thing changed. Revenue went up 200%. His...

This is not a "do less" conversation. Erika Coleman built a million-dollar company, lost her mother, and then collapsed on her couch the day she finally finished her to-do list. Then she went to Harvard to figure out what went wrong. In this conversation, we get into: - Why effort is not the same as achievement, and how that confusion creates burnout - The Olympian who won gold by stepping back, a...

Scott Proposki spent 28 years photographing the White House, National Geographic shoots, and celebrities like Sylvester Stallone and Robin Williams. Then COVID hit, and a 28-year career disappeared in 24 hours. In this conversation we get into: What actually happens when your identity dies overnight Why $1 million in sales paid him less than $200K solo The 3 words from Bill Belichick that restarte...

Miriam Katz coaches executives at Google or Deloitte on public speaking. She also hosts Ex Appeal, a podcast where she interviews every person she's ever been romantic with. In this conversation, we get into: Why the real fear behind speaking has nothing to do with being polished How improv exercises expose defense mechanisms we've carried since childhood What interviewing her exes taught her abou...

Mike Montague got fired by Billy Idol on stage in front of thousands of people. He now runs  Avenue9  a human-first AI marketing agency that has worked with LinkedIn, Uber, and the Kansas City Chiefs, and his podcasts have 3.7 million combined downloads. In this episode:- Why producing more AI content can actually weaken your authority- The three types of work and which one AI makes worse when you...

Greg Heilers recounts spending nearly seven years on organic farms and conservation projects worldwide before abandoning a planned culinary internship in Rome to move to Beijing after meeting his now-wife in Guatemala, shifting from “voluntourist” nomad life to building a home and transitioning into digital work. He describes adapting to China as a foreigner, starting with English and cultural loc...

An AI expert with a confession: nobody has figured this out, including her. Marinela Profi builds machine learning models for banks and financial services and advises enterprises on navigating AI agents. In this conversation, we get into: - Why large language models predict rather than reason, and why that gap matters - How outsourcing decisions to AI may feel like control while quietly removing i...

The top 1% of AI users save 31 hours a week. The bottom 50% save six. That gap does not come from smarter tools. It comes from how people build their context, codify their processes, and put agents to work on their behalf. Iwo Szapar co-created the AI Maturity Index, a Harvard-validated diagnostic used in 75 countries with 400,000+ data points. It was acquired by ISG, a Nasdaq-listed company, in J...

A gas delivery YouTube channel with 5,000 subscribers controls 80% of his country's market and charges the highest prices. His clients don't switch suppliers because no other supplier has a face they recognize. That's Anastazja (Nastia) Debowska's client. She spent six years inside YouTube and Google managing over 800 channels. What she discovered contradicts most of what creators are told about g...

What if the biggest problems are the ones everyone's ignoring? In this episode, I sit down with Andy Ellwood, Founder and CEO of Stretch, to talk about building companies that solve real human problems, not just convenient tech problems. Andy shares how he went from selling life insurance and private jets to building startups acquired by Facebook and Google, why his pandemic-era company Basket...

Most podcasters burn $2000/month duct-taping 30+ tools together. Nathan Gwhilliam felt that pain, had an exit in his pocket, and instead of retiring, invested $5.8 million to solve it. This isn't a comeback story. It's a deconstruction of what happens when an entrepreneur chooses systems over the beach and why that decision reveals more about building authority than any exit multiple ever...

She's coached 24 TEDx speakers across Europe, India, and the US. She's worked with 400+ leaders from 47 nationalities. And she spent her first six months teaching communication skills hoping every class would be canceled. Ioana (Jo) Jongsma breaks down why everything you've been told about managing stage fright is backwards and what actually works when the stakes are high. We cover: Wh...

Tyler Wagner reveals how he guarantees bestseller status for any book. After dropping out of college at 19 with $80,000 in debt, he built Authors Unite into an 8-figure book marketing agency that has helped 5,000+ authors sell millions of books. In this episode, Tyler deconstructs the invisible mechanics behind bestseller lists, explaining why Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Wall Street Journal, USA T...

Most salespeople give prospects the ick. They check boxes, recite scripts, and reek of commission breath. April Palmer does the opposite and closes enterprise deals by saying no, asking kindergarten-level questions, and letting clients talk 80% of the time. In this episode, April breaks down the invisible mechanics of sales that actually work: why telling prospects "this isn't right for y...

Jonathan DeCollibus built 16 companies from the ground up. Most of them failed. But those failures taught him something most investors miss: business is just math plus courage. Now, as an investor in over 30 companies, he reveals the counterintuitive frameworks that separate entrepreneurs who scale from those who stay stuck. This conversation strips away the pitch deck theater. Jonathan explains w...

Why creative entrepreneurs who make money often burn out faster than those who don't and the profitability framework that solves both problems simultaneously. Christian Brim, author of Profit First for Creatives and host of The Profitable Creative podcast, deconstructs the false paradigm that creativity and profit oppose each other. This conversation reveals the operational mechanics behind su...

Over 1 billion people globally have disabilities. 60 million in the US alone. And 95% of the internet is completely inaccessible to them. Maxwell Ivey, digital accessibility advisor known as the Blind Blogger, breaks down why accessibility isn't just a compliance checkbox—it's a revenue driver, an SEO multiplier, and a gateway to the most loyal customer base you'll ever build. In this...