The Honest Mic

Richard Cook has spent over 17 years helping B2B technology companies get coverage in the publications their buyers actually read. He's worked with brands at every stage, from early-stage disruptors to companies going through major moments like acquisitions and global expansions. And he's seen the same thing happen over and over: most B2B companies are invisible to their own buyers. The pe...

Mark Newsome — aka Mr. Marketing — specializes in helping small to mid-size business owners and service providers uncover and monetize what was once considered dead assets or resources. Most marketing advice aimed at small business owners right now points straight to social media. Post more. Engage more. Run more ads. But what if there are more effective and far cheaper ways to generate referrals...

Jim Marshall has devoted over 50,000 hours to the study and practice of human potential and development. Classical education. Jesuit Military Prep. Engineering school while still a junior. A 40-year career treating and training hundreds of clients. He's integrated the best aspects of the most advanced techniques on the planet, and expanded their limits through his own research and discovery. H...

Jessie Hannah hid her hair-pulling disorder from almost everyone in her life for 25 years. She spent years believing her behavior was something to be ashamed of rather than understood. Then in 2025, she shaved her head publicly and started investigating her own brain. What began as personal frustration became a deep self-directed study of the neuroscience underlying Body-Focused Repetitive Behavio...

Eddie Mac says people don't leave bad jobs. They leave bad leaders. He calls it the Relationship Gap — the distance between what a leader is supposed to be and what they actually show up as. Eddie is a #1 Amazon best-selling author, leadership strategist, and a 20-year law enforcement veteran who was a SWAT Commander and also oversaw a Bomb Squad and Crisis Negotiation Team. He led in environm...

Debbie Longo says lasting transformation doesn't come from learning new strategies. It comes from changing behavior. For more than 24 years, she's helped executives, business owners, and leaders identify the behavioral patterns that drive communication, leadership, decision-making, and business performance. That's a long time to keep a coaching practice alive and evolving — which tells...

Danny Carpio has spent 13 years building operating systems for businesses and networks that raised eight figures in capital and hit nine-figure valuations. Across startups, venture, services, and decentralized organizations. Without a playbook. In situations where the outcome actually mattered. He's never followed the standard path. And he's spent his career asking one question: how do you...

Peter Boolkah says most business owners don't own a business. They own a job. A demanding, exhausting, all-consuming job that just happens to be wrapped inside a company with their name above the door. He's spent more than two decades helping founders discover that uncomfortable truth. Over 60,000 hours inside businesses across five continents. Hundreds of founders transformed. He's th...

Ransom Kong has spent 27 years facilitating anger management and domestic violence groups with court-mandated men — violent, in denial, sometimes dangerous. And underneath almost every one of them, he found a man who was worn out, hurting, yet still curious and capable of love. Ransom is a former perpetrator who broke his own cycle. At 33, he looked within and found his father. From that moment, h...

Peter George grew up with a lisp and a stutter. He spent his childhood avoiding communication as much as possible. And then he entered the business world and realized the thing he had spent years hiding was exactly what was holding him back. He didn't become a public speaking coach because it was a good market. He became one because he had to solve the problem himself first. Today, he's tr...

Tyler McAdams grew up without a consistent father. His dad left when he was 8. And from a young age, he knew he wanted to be the kind of father his kids would never have to question. But life got complicated. Divorce. Relationship struggles. Business stress. Financial pressure. Trying to co-parent and rebuild while staying emotionally steady. And one of the hardest parts of being a single father i...

The corporate game was not designed for women to win. Not maliciously. Not intentionally. But the rules were written by and for people who didn't have to ask permission to be in the room. And most women spend years trying to play by rules that were never meant to serve them. Catherine Lang-Cline spent 20 years learning exactly how the game actually works. She bootstrapped a company from nothin...

Yosi Kossowsky spent over 30 years in executive leadership, including a role as Chief Technology Officer and Senior Director of Talent Management. Then he made the shift into executive coaching. Most people who make that transition do it because something they saw or experienced from the inside changed how they thought about leadership. Today, Yosi helps leaders across the globe navigate complex c...

Yogi Mueller says most leadership development changes nothing. Not because the ideas are bad. Because nobody teaches leaders how to actually face the hard truths that make growth possible. He's spent more than 25 years designing leadership and talent development programs for organizations including Disney, Hilton, and Bluegreen Vacations. He's the founder of Craft Leadership, creator of th...

Willie Blake was diagnosed with dyslexia in first grade. For years, he believed he was broken. He spent most of his life trying to catch up, trying to hide, and trying to be someone he wasn't. But eventually, he got tired of surviving. He made a decision: if he was going to live with this, he was going to lead with it. Today, Willie is a high-performance coach who helps dyslexic professionals...

We're all already living inside a story. Whether we wrote it on purpose or not. The question isn't whether you have a story shaping your choices. It's whether you're aware of it — and whether you're ready to rewrite it. Tanya Thompson is a transformation strategist who teaches people how to reinvent their lives by understanding and rewriting the stories driving their choices. S...

Stephen Moss was a four-time Chief Marketing Officer in his corporate career. Three successful runs. And then the fourth one only lasted 18 months. A bit of PTSD followed, and he swore off corporate life entirely. That kind of honesty about your own failure is rare. And it's exactly what built Executive Springboard. Today, Stephen is the founder and president of Executive Springboard, a compan...

Sheila Krygsheld has three degrees in Biblical Studies and Apologetics. She's taught religion to 90 college students a semester. She's traveled to Malawi to develop a leadership curriculum for young women. And she wrote a book not for scholars, but for everyday people who want to share what they believe without needing to have all the answers first. Her heart is for the person who believes...

Ron Cooper describes an early life of feeling dumb, awkward, and undatable. Low confidence. Low self-image. And somehow, that same person went on to fly fighter jets and lead organizations of 200+ people over a 30-year Air Force career. That gap is the whole story. Today, Ron is the founder of The Cooper Culture, a human behavior consultant certified through Personality Insights and PeopleKeys, an...

Rob Tracz says burnout isn't a workload problem. It's a clarity problem. The high performers who burn out aren't doing the wrong amount of work. They're doing the right amount in the wrong direction. Rob is a TEDx speaker, founder of Prime Performance Coaching, and host of the Surviving the Side Hustle podcast with over 180 episodes. In this episode of The Honest Mic, Rob talks abo...

Leanne Linsky spent seven years performing, producing, and hosting weekly comedy shows in New York. She moved to LA, only to find herself on the freeway more than any stage. And she decided the answer wasn't to find better shows — it was to build an entirely new platform. In August 2019, months before the rest of the world was forced to figure out online entertainment, she began experimenting...

Kristan Swan spent years coaching independent business owners. And she kept noticing the same pattern: talented, visionary people held back because they didn't truly know themselves. And then she realized she was doing the exact same thing in her own life. That's not a tidy insight from a workshop. That's something you have to catch yourself doing in real time, after three marriages an...

Ken Dupar is a retired Colonel who uses humor to balance descriptions of really traumatic stuff. He writes love stories where Covid is the villain. Makes YouTube videos about how to poop at night in the military. And he's currently working on a novel set twenty thousand years ago involving evil space aliens and God shaking the Earth's Etch-A-Sketch. The line that caught me was this: having...

Kenneth Chester built most of his companies while holding down a full-time job. Thirty-five years of building real ventures — not as a side hustle story, but as a documented method that became his book, Two-Hour Entrepreneur: Build a Real Business in Two Hours a Week. Ken is a nationally syndicated automotive journalist, tech communicator, and CEO of TechMobility Productions. In this episode of Th...

November 9, 2024. Julia Lindenthal's father, seemingly healthy and in great shape, died suddenly. Only after the autopsy did she and her family learn what happened: aortic dissection due to arterial plaque calcification. Within months, Julia had turned that grief into action. A fundraiser in her father's name through The Heart Foundation. A campaign for arterial plaque awareness. A TEDx ta...