Talk, Unleashed

Jen Consalvo and Frank Gruber are what I like to think of as Master Entrepreneurs. Not only are the entrepreneurs in their own right having launched and successfully sold their own ventures, they also spend their time identifying and getting visibility for tech startups all across the US. They’re very much the yin to each other’s yang – and which of them is which, shifts. It’s one of the truly ama...

Ahhhhhh. Technology. The sheer magic unleashed by the various and sundry technological marvels in today’s world have transformed our society. The very fact you’re listening to this week’s episode is one of those marvels. It used to be that communicating on anything other than a one to one or one to small group level was relegated to the select few. Elite access to mass communication. Today’s world...

We live in a world more hyper-connected than ever, courtesy of any number of digital leashes, but is that really a good thing? Many studies show that the incessant connectivity, exposure to light, messes with humans in more ways than one. Which is what makes this episode so interesting. A conversation with someone who advocates disconnecting – regularly – and has been doing so for 12 years. What’s...

What would the world look like if everyone operated truly on the concept of a win/win? Impossible, right? I mean, at some point someone has to lose. Like in sports. One team wins. The other doesn’t. But if you ask Las Vegas Aces President Nikki Fargas about that, she says that winning isn’t just about the team on which you play, it’s about the bigger team. You may think that a former NCAA basketba...

I’m going to go out on a limb and maybe tick some folks off. So buckle up. In my experience, there are few people more judgmental in the world than those who are so deeply saturated in their beliefs that no other beliefs are valid. What I refer to, mostly, are people of “faith”. This applies to pretty much any religious dogma I’ve ever encountered – including the Jewish faith of my own upbringing....

Today’s world is one of silos and divided communities. A place where selecting a single article or topic online can pre-determine any and all information then served to you by one algorithm or another. We are, as a species, designed to live in groups (tribes) and unfortunately as with so many things, taken to an extreme it becomes a bad thing. It all comes back to identity. Who are we? Where do we...

Elizabeth Blau’s sense of leadership is one steeped deeply in responsibility. It’s the sense that being responsible for a business, for a team, is an all-encompassing, 24-hour thing. It’s an ethic instilled in her early – as is so often the case for those whose roots come from New York and New England. From her very first taste of leadership – managing a team of high school kids at a candy store t...

Most people spend their lives trying to figure out their path. Some people, like De Ann Letourneau , land on that path early and then spend the rest of their lives navigating how to make that journey bigger … better. Growing up in the Midwest, De Ann was indoctrinated to music young, first playing the piano by ear picking up sonatas that her mother would play. It was the violin, though, that captu...

For someone like me who grew up on classical music it’s always been super approachable. That is not, however, the experience for many. For most folks, classical music carries an air of something elite, unapproachable and, let’s be honest, stuffy. Donato Cabrera – the Music Director of the California Symphony and Las Vegas Philharmonic – busts up these myths and expectations in many ways. For start...

Dr. Kiki Sanford had a choice. Continue with what felt like an increasingly frustrating path in academia, or pivot and turn her passion into power. She chose the latter. With a degree in Conservation Biology and a Ph. D in Molecular, Cellular and Integrative Physiology, she’d spent her undergraduate and graduate studies exploring learning and memory – specifically through research on birds. She lo...

In a world beset on all sides with tribalism and “othering” more people than not desperately seek fitting in. The idea of standing out, being conspicuously unique, it’s harder and harder to come by. Al Mancini has never been someone who just goes along, who just fits in. In fact, he’s spent his whole life doing exactly the opposite. Most of the time when someone is the sort who proactively drives...

Julie Wainwright is one of the most influential and successful players in the world of on-line commerce. She was the face of the colossal growth of this space in 1998 and became the poster child for the industry crash when Pets.com tanked less than a year after its IPO. Seizing this failure and flipping it around, Julie came back with a vengeance in 2011 with The Real Real and now sits on top of t...

In the world of dog training, there are some who have opted to do the really hard work – focusing entirely on the dogs that everyone else rejects. For many dogs, these dedicated individuals are the last house on the block. If their work doesn’t “take” these are the dogs that end up being euthanized. Going in to this work is not for the faint of heart. In fact, it requires a kind of heart and empat...

Accidental influencer – that might be one way to think about Genevieve Bell a one-time professor of Anthropology at Stanford University turned futurist and technology soothsayer for Intel Corporation. While still a “blue badge” employee at Intel, Genevive is now back in her native Australia and back in academia. She operates from a simple and very powerful place – that we all have a deep responsib...

It all began with a fourth grade field trip. Traveling to Jones Hall in Houston, TX, Myron Martin was exposed to the world of performing arts, and his world changed. Moving to Las Vegas to work with the Liberace Museum, Myron’s journey would wend through a number of Las Vegas institutions, ending up with his being part of the team spearheading the effort to build a world-class, state-of-the-art pe...

What motivates people? Why do they do what they do? What does leadership actually mean in today’s world? Good questions, right? That’s what Cathy Brooks, thought. And it’s why she created Talk, Unleashed – a new podcast of entirely candid conversations with fascinating people doing remarkable things. This weekly podcast will feature guests from arts and entertainment to business to technology to f...