Going Deep with Aaron Watson

Gisele was born in Rio de Janeiro and immigrated to the U.S. at age eight with her mother and was undocumented for many years. Growing up in the cities, she was acutely aware of the vast inequalities between Brazil and the United States, and between the working-class community that she lived in and the more affluent communities where her mother secured work as a housekeeper.   These days, you can...

Squonk has created and toured our outdoor spectacles around the world, with reviews that include “insane majesty" from The Scotsman, “surreal and poetic” from USA Today and “ingenious, hallucinatory, hypnotic" from The New York Times. Squonkwork is fast, funny, and shameless: our first show was performed in a Pittsburgh junkyard, with choreographed cranes and roaring earthmovers. Squonk creates po...

Sean Douglas is a veteran of the United States Air Force, a certified Master Resilience Trainer, and a professional Motivational Speaker. He enlisted in the Air Force in 2001 right after 9/11, has been deployed to multiple locations, and performed a multitude of duties all over the world. Sean gives many speeches throughout the year on various topics, such as Developing Leaders, Leadership Princip...

Larry Gioia’s philosophy “Always Be Connecting the Dots” infects all of his relationships. In this episode, we discuss how to grow and connect a network with actionable tactics that he’d recommend to anyone.   Larry and Aaron’s Challenge; Join Connection University on Facebook to continue to learn and grow.   Connect with Larry Twitter LinkedIn

Ray Gastil is currently Director of City Planning for Pittsburgh. Previously, he was an urban designer in Seattle, where his work was focused on connecting innovative program and design concepts to the pragmatic challenges of making extraordinary projects and places, grounded in their communities.   Expertise includes comprehensive city and regional planning, with a focus on planning and urban des...

Found a gem that I wanted to share with you.

Radiant Hall founder Ryan Lammie was born in Pittsburgh and educated at the Pratt Institute in New York. In 2011 he was selected for the Yale / Norfolk Summer Residency in Connecticut and graduated in 2012 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts. Lammie’s sculptural work often assembled from found materials (discarded furniture, old radios, and the like), is driven by two tendencies in tension with one anoth...

James Andrew Miller is an award-winning journalist who has worked in politics, media, and entertainment in a career spanning more than 20 years.   In 1985, he wrote the bestselling book RUNNING IN PLACE: Inside the Senate . Later, he and co-author Tom Shales wrote LIVE FROM NEW YORK: an Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live , which spent more than four months on the New York Times bestseller l...

Derrius Quarles makes things happen. Having grown up in a financially humble background and as an alumnus of foster care, his journey to becoming an award-winning entrepreneur and a globally recognized social change maker has been complex. His turning point came when as a high school student and he made the decision that he wanted to become the first in my family to go to college. Living in povert...

Dan Gilman is currently serving his first term as City Council member for the 8th Council District of Pittsburgh. Gilman has been very active in his first year on Council, having passed two pieces of legislation and a resolution aimed at reducing the discrimination and stigma pregnant women and nursing mothers continue to face. He has also been active in imploring the PA legislature to support the...

Baron Batch is a cultural icon, community builder, dot connector, conceptual multimedia artist, and entrepreneur based out of Homestead, PA. He rose to fame through his street art and currently serves as Creative Director of Studio AM.   Studio AM is a multifaceted creative collective that specializes in guerilla marketing, unique private events, and is a production facility for his “Angry Man Sal...

Tucker Max is an American author and public speaker. He chronicled his drinking and sexual encounters in the form of short stories on his website TuckerMax.com , which has received millions of visitors since Max launched it as the result of a bet in 2000.   I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell was a New York Times #1 Bestseller and made the Bestseller List each year from 2006 to 2012. It has sold over o...

Kris Reid is the founder of Ardor SEO and Media Factory. He founded the company after losing his job as a software engineer, opening offices in Cambodia and the Philippines.   Ardor Media Factory is a multi-national backlink building company. They help businesses achieve success in their respective niches by offering a wide range of services including search engine optimization, search engine rank...

John Thornton is the CEO of Astrobotic, a company aspiring to be the logistics company for Space.   Astrobotic delivers lunar payload and services to government and commercial customers. The company’s first Moon mission will carry customer payloads, win the $20M Google Lunar XPRIZE, and explore a possible cave entrance on the surface of the Moon. Astrobotic has 17 prior and ongoing NASA contracts,...

Robin Hanson is a professor of economics at George Mason University and a research associate at the Future of Humanity Institute of Oxford University. He is an expert on idea futures and markets, and he was involved in the creation of the Foresight Institute’s Foresight Exchange and DARPA's FutureMAP project. He invented market scoring rules used by prediction markets and has conducted research on...

Kevin Kelly is the founding executive editor of Wired magazine and a former editor/publisher of the Whole Earth Review. He has also been a writer, photographer, conservationist, and student of Asian and digital culture.   Kelly stepped down as executive editor of Wired in 1999; his current job title is Senior Maverick. Partially due to his reputation as Wired's editor, he is noted as a participant...

Isaac Morehouse is an entrepreneur, thinker, and communicator dedicated to the relentless pursuit of freedom, and an advocate of self-directed learning and living. He is the founder and CEO of Praxis, an intensive nine-month program combining a paid apprenticeship at a startup with personal coaching, professional development projects, and interdisciplinary education leading directly to a full-time...

Dan Bull is the Founder of Zero Six Eight , an organization dedicated to developing entrepreneurs with ideas into companies that solve real problems in a socially responsible manner. 068 is one of the top resources in the city for employing ex-offenders and offering second chances.   Dan’s Challenge; Forgive.   Connect with Dan Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Website   If you liked this interview, check...

Todd is an author who helps creative people find their untapped potential. He is the author of The Creative's Curse , a book about the pains of being creative at every phase - Discover, Discipline, and Destiny. He is also the founder of Snap Swipe Post, a site which creates custom SnapChat geo-filters.   His goal in business is to create things people enjoy, whether that means a well-crafted docum...

Kash Dhanda is an entrepreneur. He is currently the founder and CEO of Ezra Digital (his digital marketing agency), previous co-founder of Upside Sounds (a concert promotion company).   Kash is also an avid Virtual Reality enthusiast. We discuss a number of resources to learn more about VR including; Google Cardboard NYT VR app Oculus subreddit Twitch VR Writers like Ben Thompson (Stratechery) and...

A brief essay on the current state of the internet. Over the past two decades, global internet users have increased from 35 million people to an astounding 3 billion today.   More than three-quarters of all internet advertising revenue is split between Google and Facebook.   What’s next? Stay tuned to this podcast for interviews with Robin Hanson and Kevin Kelly .

Oren Klaff is the Managing Director of Intersection Capital and a #1 Bestselling Author for his book Pitch Anything. With over $400M in deals on his resume, Oren is well-qualified to cut through sales guru BS and give it to you straight.   His secret? Neuroeconomics. A single field of study that sorted out the different motivation and economic responses of the human mind and shows how the brain re...

Bill Peduto was elected to the office of Mayor of the City of Pittsburgh in November 2013. Prior, he worked for 19 years on Pittsburgh City Council. A self-described “Reform Democrat”, Bill Peduto wrote the most comprehensive package of government reform legislation in Pittsburgh’s history.   During Pittsburgh’s ongoing financial crisis, Bill Peduto has been the consistent voice of fiscal discipli...

Declan is an author of the recently released “The Millennial Way: Step Up, Step Out, Step Forward”. Declan originally set out to write a book to debunk the misconceptions and stigma surrounding the Millennial generation.   After interviewing Millennials doing “awesome things” with their lives, Declan noticed a recurring pattern among all their personal journeys, including his own. The pattern of S...

This is a story of evolution. Or maybe revolution is more accurate. Mike Vacanti left his cushy corporate gig to pursue a life of fitness entrepreneurship. For the last 12 years, he has been studying nutrition and training for fat loss and muscle gain and wants to pass this knowledge on to anyone who needs it.   He has trained hundreds of clients in the gym and thousands on the internet. He has he...