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Michael Connor on 1,000 Lessons From His Daughters
Good morning Reader! What if the wisest teachers you will ever meet are three feet tall? My guest this week is Michael Connor. In the 1990s, he helped open Russia and Eastern Europe to personal growth seminars, leading trainings on five continents, and once defended his work in a Siberian courtroom. At 41, his first daughter was born, and he came home. Six years as a stay-at-home dad became more than 1,000 recorded lessons, and 60 of them became his book "Insights of a Father: Ordinary Days,...
It's never too late to become who you really are
Hey Reader! My guest this week is Caroline Bergeron, the painter known as ARO. She ran her family's restaurant business in Quebec for 15 years until one creative workshop changed everything. She sold it all to paint. Within six weeks of her first exhibition, her work traveled from Quebec to New York to the Carrousel du Louvre in Paris, and by 2019 she had created a painting for Michelle Obama. Connect with Caroline: Website: https://www.aroartiste.com/ Instagram (art):...
Turning unimaginable loss into a canvas for healing
Hey Reader! As creators and entrepreneurs, we know our deepest pain often inspires our most powerful work. My guest this week is Pat Armitstead. Pat survived the loss of her child, life-threatening illness, and financial collapse. Instead of giving up, she transformed her grief into a practice of profound connection and became the world's first Joyologist. We discuss everything from her time touring Russian orphanages with Patch Adams to the simple act of sending daily gratitude letters. It...
Watch the replay! Terry Tillman: From Miserable Millionaire to Dinner with Gorbachev
Hey Reader! If you missed last night's show, this one is worth your time. Terry Tillman was running six companies at 30 with all the trappings of success and felt bankrupt inside. A day spent in a retirement home, listening to person after person talk about their regrets, changed his course. He closed all six businesses and spent the next 48 years helping people in 101 countries wake up enthused about the day and go to bed fulfilled. We talked about touring as a folk singer with Jimmie...
Watch the replay! Ecuadorian by Birth, Hispanic by Heritage, American by Choice
Hey Reader! Last night's conversation traced all the way back to a soccer field in Quito, Ecuador. My guest was Rosie Paulsen. As a girl she was told she couldn't play soccer because she was a girl, until she met an American girl who told her that in America, girls can do whatever they want. She decided then and there that she would come to the United States. She arrived as a teenager, moved in with a family where no one spoke Spanish, and learned the language fast. As she put it, after three...
Katharine Franco | From Biblical Mothers to a Mob Boss's Daughter
Hey Reader! Last night I sat down with actor Katharine Franco, and what stays with me is that none of this was the plan. She was a shy kid who never performed growing up and came to acting later in life, almost by accident. Then she built a career on range. In one year she played Elizabeth, mother of John the Baptist, in the K-LOVE film Virgin Birth, and Suzy in a dark thriller called Kill Trip. She has led a western, played a mob boss's daughter in Red Stone, and brought real warmth to an...
Watch the replay with Claire Brown: How 5 friends became a movement of 34,000 women
Hey Reader! Last night I sat down with Claire Brown, and it became one of the most honest conversations we have had on the show. After a divorce in 2015, Claire called five women she barely knew and started a small Facebook group. Today that group is more than 34,000 women strong and has grown into PowerWomen: a podcast, a book, a brokerage, and a nonprofit. What stayed with me was why she keeps going. Claire has turned everything she has lived through into a platform for other women,...
AMA Replay (must-watch!)
Hey Reader! Last night I did an AMA, no guest, just an open hour with whoever showed up. I started with a question I've been sitting with all week: how happy are you, on a scale of five stars, right now in this moment? I ended up pulling things off my shelves for an hour. Two books Pearl Bailey inscribed to me back at Georgetown. My mother's ring from the Seychelles Islands (the one that gave me the title of Black Pearl). Book after book from past guests. And somewhere in the middle, I said...
Watch the replay: she found The Toxic Avenger on Netflix as a kid, now she edits Lloyd Kaufman's first noir
Hey Reader! Last night's episode is one I am still grinning about. My guest was Sabrina Mendoza, filmmaker, editor, and the self-described "Editing Gremlin" of Troma Entertainment. She is the editor and assistant director on Lloyd Kaufman's first film noir, The Power of Positive Murder, and she runs the Tromadance Film Festival. Lloyd has called her the next big thing. After last night, you understand why. A Queens kid who taught herself film through her dad's DVDs and the discovery of The...
53 years of Troma, The Toxic Avenger, and a full-circle 40-year reunion
Hey Reader! Last night was an amazing full-circle moment for me ❤️ My guest was Lloyd Kaufman, the president of Troma Entertainment and the man behind The Toxic Avenger. The last time Lloyd and I were on a set together was 1984 in Hell's Kitchen, where I was being chased down a hospital corridor by Toxie (with real rats they had spray-painted black for the scene, by the way). Four decades later, we finally hugged in person again at Creature Feature in Gettysburg this year, and getting him on...
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