Well Said

Sam Sanders has spent two decades learning that the best conversations aren't the polished ones. After years at NPR cutting five seconds off a segment because "the clock doesn't play," the host of The Sam Sanders Show now does the opposite: improvised, imperfect, unfinished talk that he insists is "just vibes." On Well Said, Pia and Kelly get him to trace that philosoph...

Most advice about communication is about control: managing a room, softening bad news, performing under pressure. Amy Sweet works where all of that falls away. As the founder and CEO of Halcyon Home, she has spent more than a decade at the bedside of people in their final days, and she has learned that the clearest, most honest communication of a person's whole life often happens in their last...

For twenty years, Pia Arthur and Kelly Cheeseman watched the single megaphone of mass media shatter into a million independent microphones. In this solo episode of Well Said, the Cuore co-founders and former Amazon PR executives make the case that the comms job flipped with it: you no longer control the narrative from the inside out, you manage a fragmented set of realities from the outside in. Th...

Elaine Garza spent 12 years in New York running PR for Spin, Vibe, and Outside before she put a baby in the backseat, drove to Austin, and started a PR agency out of her garage with a Blackberry and one client. Twenty years later, Giant Noise is roughly 80 people across four Texas cities. And her competitive edge is the same thing it was on day one: she doesn't pitch The New York Times. She ca...

Chef JJ Johnson built a fast-casual rice bowl restaurant on an idea most investors called crazy: that a single grain of rice could carry the story of the entire African diaspora. He priced it at $10 using the same Carolina gold rice that fine dining charges $40 for, because the story of Black and Brown food shouldn't cost more just because a white chef wasn't cooking it. He's a James B...

David Kirsch passed the bar exam. Then he called his parents and told them he was going to be a fitness trainer. Dead silence. That call (and the 40 years that followed) are what this episode is really about. David trained J.Lo, Heidi Klum, Kate Upton, Gigi Hadid, and Naomi Campbell. Not by telling them what they wanted to hear, but by being the one person in the room who wouldn't. He's sp...

From ages four to twenty-two, Ben Gleib had a stutter and a vocal disfluency so severe that his chords would lock down mid-sentence. He'd sit in class dreading being called on to read aloud, convinced it was a kind of execution. And he wanted, more than anything, to be a comedian and a TV host. He became one. Twenty-five years of standup later, Ben has performed to arenas, hosted an Emmy-nomin...

What does a celebrity hairstylist know about communication that most executives don't? More than you'd think. Alex Pardoe has done hair for Paris Hilton at 3am, worked red carpets and film sets with some of the most recognizable names in Hollywood, and built his LA career from scratch after leaving a successful salon in Michigan with no clients and a three-month trial period. He's worked with Lind...

Dr. Calvin D. Sun is an emergency room physician, author of Monsoon Diaries (HarperCollins), and founder of the Monsoon Diaries travel community. He has visited every UN-recognized country in the world and is ranked among the ten most traveled Americans. During COVID, while most hospital doctors were silenced by media clauses, Calvin was working per diem across four New York City boroughs, free to...

Thank you for an incredible first month of Well Said. The questions, the feedback, and the support have meant everything to us. We (Kelly and Pia) are the co-founders of Cuore Communications and former Amazon PR executives with more than 20 combined years advising C-suite leaders, managing global communications teams, and guiding companies through some of the highest-stakes moments in business. In...

PJ Calapa is the Brand Executive Chef of Marea, one of the most celebrated Italian seafood restaurants in American fine dining, with locations in New York, Beverly Hills, and Aspen. He got there through twenty years in New York's most demanding kitchens, including Bouley, Eleven Madison Park, and Nobu 57, a Michelin star and three NYT stars at Ai Fiori, two restaurants of his own, and one he l...

Natassia Miller is a Brazilian-American sexologist (AASECT-certified), the founder of Wonderlust, a sexual wellness brand, and the writer behind the Lust in Translation newsletter on Substack. She studied political science at Columbia, worked in finance, and pivoted to sexual wellness after co-founding and exiting a prior wellness startup during COVID. In 2022, she launched Wonderlust with the Min...

Nyle Washington has spent 20+ years in entertainment communications. She started as an intern in The Oprah Winfrey Show's publicity department, spent four years at an agency handling campaigns for artists including Usher, Ne-Yo, and Keyshia Cole, and then built a reputation as one of the sharpest publicity executives in the television industry across eight years at VH1, and later at HBO, Starz...

Adam Delehanty has spent his career helping famous CEOs and investors find the language their ideas deserve. He's the founder of Ghost, a content agency that works with some of the most recognized companies in tech, including Hinge, Google, Duolingo, e.l.f. Beauty and dozens more. This is the launch episode of Well Said. We chose Adam as our first episode because he sits at the center of writing,...