“So I tell my teacher, “I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what to do. I’m actually crying. What do I do?” And she was of course upset that I stopped in the middle of the scene, but she was definitely understanding that it was my first time and something weird is happening. And she told me that I had a breakthrough. And I remember thinking, in that moment, like slowing down, looking around at all the other students, and they’re like on the edge of their seat and like they’re all completely silent and they were all experiencing it with me, and it was just an incredible feeling. And I think it’s that feeling I just love so much and I’ve been wanting to chase ever since.”

I had the pleasure of talking with Gavin Goudey, whose first acting class went spectacularly off script. He was 13, sitting across from another student, performing a scene in which a boy describes a nightmare about his mother’s death. Goudey had experienced a similar nightmare in elementary school. As he began telling the story, something unexpected happened. He started sobbing. Frightened by his own reaction, he stopped the scene and turned to his teacher. “I’m actually crying. What do I do?” he asked. He had come to learn how to act. He hadn’t expected acting to reach so deeply into his own life.

His teacher called it a breakthrough. The other students had fallen silent, watching from the edges of their seats. Goudey remembers the extraordinary feeling of having an entire room experience something with him. What began as a moment of panic became the discovery that would shape his future. He wanted to experience that connection again.

His childhood had prepared him for a life of change, although not necessarily the Hollywood variety. Growing up throughout Southern California, Goudey moved frequently as his father, a contractor, purchased houses that needed extensive repairs. The family would renovate them together, then move on to the next project. His parents had him and his older sister when they were young, and raising the children became a collective undertaking involving grandparents, aunts, and uncles. Goudey speaks about that upbringing with considerable affection. He was at his grandmother’s house during our conversation, a reminder that the family network that helped raise him remains central to his life.

Acting, meanwhile, was already part of the family history. His grandfather had worked as an actor after immigrating to the United States, while his mother and her siblings had performed as children. Their stories fascinated him enough to ask his mother for acting lessons. But knowing people who had performed was different from building a career of his own. For years, being an actor meant studying, auditioning, and continuing to work without much visible evidence that the industry was paying attention.

One of his earliest teachers gave him a philosophy that helped make sense of those years: “An actor acts.” Goudey remembers the awkwardness of telling people he was an actor and immediately being asked what he had appeared in. The implication was that the work didn’t count until someone else recognized it. His teacher’s advice offered another definition. Taking classes, rehearsing, and practicing the craft were enough to make him an actor, regardless of whether he had booked a role.

His first commercial booking came in 2023. National advertising campaigns, student films, and theater work followed. Then came James Gray’s Paper Tiger, a substantial leap from the smaller productions he knew. Suddenly Goudey was working alongside Scarlett Johansson, Miles Teller, and Adam Driver, established performers whose careers he had admired from a distance. He describes the transition as jumping into “the deep end,” learning to operate on a major film set while surrounded by people with decades of experience.

What he remembers most vividly, however, is the generosity of that environment. Gray jokingly described the production as “a nauseatingly happy set.” Goudey learned by observing the actors around him, absorbing lessons that years of classroom training could not entirely replicate. Despite the scale of the production, he found a surprisingly personal connection to the material.

In Paper Tiger, Goudey plays Scott, a young man whose family relationships are tested by circumstances beyond his control. Before filming, Gray discussed blurring “the line between Scott and Gavin,” encouraging the young actor to bring elements of his own experience into the character. Goudey recognized the pressures of adolescence, particularly questions about college, the future, and the gradual movement toward independence. The character’s complicated relationship with his family resonated with someone who had grown up surrounded by relatives who helped shape his identity.

Gray also offered him a deceptively simple acting lesson: “The camera’s got you. All you have to do is think.” For someone whose first experience of acting involved an uncontrollable eruption of emotion, the instruction represented another way of understanding the craft. He was learning that a camera could capture something powerful without an actor having to demonstrate every feeling.

Following its premiere at Cannes, Paper Tiger opened the New York Film Festival in September 2026. Goudey found himself standing before a packed theater as Gray introduced the cast. When he initially booked the role, he had been concerned primarily with doing justice to the screenplay. He had barely considered where the film might take him. “How did I get here? This is insane,” he remembers thinking. Even now, he seems reluctant to treat the occasion as proof that he has arrived. “I’m just getting started,” he insists.

Away from the cameras, Goudey’s habits are refreshingly ordinary. He enjoys an elaborate skincare routine, finds comfort in walking outdoors, and values the mental clarity of fresh air and running water. He also believes that actors must resist allowing their work to consume every part of their lives. Experiences beyond rehearsals and auditions, he argues, are what eventually give performances their substance.

There is something revealing about the distance between the frightened 13-year-old who interrupted his first scene and the young actor now finding his footing alongside some of Hollywood’s most recognizable names. Goudey has already experienced a professional opportunity that many performers spend years pursuing, yet he remains preoccupied with how much he still has to learn. The boy who once wondered what to do with an unexpected emotion is discovering how to bring those feelings to the screen, and how much of himself he is willing to reveal along the way.

Yitzi Weiner: Gavin, it’s so nice to meet you. Before we dive in deep and talk about your great work, our readers would love to learn about Gavin’s personal origin story. Can you share the story of your childhood, how you grew up, and the seeds of all the amazing creativity that’s come since then?

Gavin Goudey: Yeah. I mean, I grew up all around Southern California. My parents had me and my sister when they were very young. So it’s been really interesting growing up, because my mom was my age now when she had me, and my sister’s two years older than me. So, growing up and kind of becoming closer to that age, it puts into perspective what that must have been like, because I couldn’t imagine having two kids right now. That’s insane.

So it’s just given me a lot more appreciation for them and what they went through, because they made it work and I’m very, very grateful for them. My dad is a contractor and we would buy the biggest fixer-upper on the block, the one that needed the most love, and we would just renovate it ourselves and we’d move on to the next. And we did that for years. And we’re finally now settling down, which is nice.

But yeah, with my parents being young, it kind of took a village, which I love. Like at my grandma’s house, I’m at my grandma’s house right now. My grandparents helped raise me and all my aunts and uncles helped raise me. So it’s just been, I’m very proud to be a member of my family because I love them all so much.

Yitzi Weiner: That’s great. Amazing. So tell us the next chapter. Tell us how you entered the entertainment industry.

Gavin Goudey: Yeah, I mean from a young age I was always really interested in acting. When my grandpa moved to the States, he worked as an actor, and my mom did too when she was a kid and all of her siblings. Growing up, I would always hear stories about it and just be very, very intrigued. So when I was 13, I wanted to act on that. So I asked my mom if I could take an acting class and she found a studio close by, and it was from that first class. I remember it very, very vividly where I fell in love.

I just knew that this is what I need to do for the rest of my life. I need to keep doing this. I need to keep learning more. The story I remember very vividly: I had gotten assigned a scene about a best friend telling his best friend about a nightmare he had where his mom had died. And I had had a nightmare where my mom died when I was like in the fourth grade. I remember that very vividly as well.

So when we were in those two chairs in the middle of the room, and I got to explaining the nightmare, describing it, I just completely bawled my eyes out. And I was so caught off guard by that too, because I wasn’t expecting that to happen, because going into this I had no idea what acting really was. So I didn’t know that was kind of the goal, right? So I stopped in the middle of it because I’m bawling my eyes out and I’m kind of scared, like, what the heck’s happening?

So I tell my teacher, “I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what to do. I’m actually crying. What do I do?” And she was of course upset that I stopped in the middle of the scene, but she was definitely understanding that it was my first time and something weird is happening. And she told me that I had a breakthrough. And I remember thinking, in that moment, like slowing down, looking around at all the other students, and they’re like on the edge of their seat and like they’re all completely silent and they were all experiencing it with me, and it was just an incredible feeling. And I think it’s that feeling I just love so much and I’ve been wanting to chase ever since.

Yitzi Weiner: That’s amazing. So you probably have some amazing stories from your career and I’m sure this is difficult to single out. Can you share with our readers two stories that stand out in your mind from your professional career?

Gavin Goudey: Yeah. I mean, this is like the very early steps of my career and it’s been insane the steps I’ve taken so far. Really has. But I think the actual act of filming Paper Tiger was just beyond incredible to me. It was a dream. It was really perfect. James called it a nauseatingly happy set and it was exactly that. I learned a tremendous amount from each person on that set. They’re giants in their craft. And it’s still kind of hard to believe that I was there, but so incredibly grateful for all of it.

And I think, another story is when I went to the New York Film Festival because, when I first booked this, I did not look that far in the future to see where this would be going. I was really just worried about getting my job done and doing the script justice and the story justice. So that was just an incredibly lovely surprise and it was such an amazing experience. We were the opening night selection for the New York Film Festival and it was so surreal. James introduced me and the cast on stage and it’s a huge theater. It’s just completely packed. And it was just an incredible moment of like, how did I get here? This is insane. And it’s just been, the gift that keeps on giving. I’m just so deeply grateful and so excited to see what’s next.

Yitzi Weiner: Amazing. There’s a saying that sometimes our mistakes can be our greatest teachers. Do you have a story about a funny mistake that you made when you were first starting in entertainment and the lesson that you took away from it?

Gavin Goudey: Oh my gosh. I mean, it’s kind of difficult to point to one. I mean, I’ve made so many mistakes and that’s a good thing because you do learn a lot from your mistakes. But I think it’s just like, you know, I recently watched one of my very, very first auditions and I immediately had to turn it off because oh my god, it was definitely something.

And I think looking at myself now and seeing like the progress that I’ve made since, it’s just been really cool because each mistake you make leads you to it like it’s like a pinball machine. Like you bounce off of it and you learn from it and you keep going. I feel like I keep every mistake I have with me, because it’s important to remember that and to not want to make those mistakes again. But I think it’s, there’s just so many. I don’t know if I can point one out specifically.

Yitzi Weiner: There’s a related idea that no is not rejection, but redirection. Do you have a story like that where you got a no to an opportunity, but that led to an even better opportunity?

Gavin Goudey: Yeah. Like pretty much almost every self-tape that is put out into this what feels like an abyss because you work so hard on doing your tape. You put so much into your audition and then all the lighting and whatnot, cameras. It’s a lot of work that goes into it, and then you send it out there and a lot of the times you don’t hear anything back, and that can be really difficult because it does feel like rejection.

But I think you have to take each one of those as fuel to keep going, and like you said earlier, each one of those moments leads to what you’re sort of meant for. So I think everything that I’ve done, you know, every tape, every rejection, every no has led me to where I am now. And it’s just really cool. Yeah.

Yitzi Weiner: That’s great. What’s been the most challenging project or role you’ve taken on so far and why?

Gavin Goudey: Yeah, I mean I think it’s obviously Paper Tiger. Like I said earlier, I’m in the very early steps of my career and that’s my first film. So it was very difficult to kind of jump in the deep end on a set of that caliber with these giants in their craft and in their field, and to learn to keep my head above water and to operate on that level.

Because before Paper Tiger, I’d done a handful of commercials, I did a few student films, and that’s obviously very different from a set of this magnitude. So it was incredibly challenging, but also so incredibly fulfilling. Like I said earlier, I learned a tremendous amount from each one of these people on set and I just couldn’t be more grateful.

Yitzi Weiner: That’s great. So let’s talk about Paper Tiger. Tell us why, in your unbiased opinion, why our readers have to watch it.

Gavin Goudey: It’s just an instant classic. It really is a really special story and I don’t think there are stories being told like this anymore, or not as often, I should say, because Scarlett described it as a big story inside of a small story. And I thought that was beautiful because it’s like this almost epic tragedy, but also a really intimate personal story about love ultimately, and kind of impossible choices and family bonds.

Gavin Goudey: It’s just an instant classic. It really is a really special story and I don’t think there are stories being told like this anymore, or not as often, I should say, because you know, Scarlett described it as a big story inside of a small story. And I thought that was beautiful because it’s like this almost epic tragedy, but also a really intimate personal story about love ultimately, and kind of impossible choices and family bonds.

And it’s like I’m having a difficult time explaining it because it’s just so incredible. I’ve seen it two times now and each time it just hit me more, and it’s something I think a lot of people will really love. And do yourself the favor and go see it for yourself and form your own opinions on it. It’s really something special.

Yitzi Weiner: How do you compare and contrast your personal character, Gavin, with the character you play in Paper Tiger? How are you similar and how are you different?

Gavin Goudey: Yeah, I think there’s a few things that stand out, but I do think we’re kind of similar on a lot of levels. Before we started filming, I had a meeting with James, Miles, and Roman, who played my brother. And James said he wanted to blur the line between Scott and Gavin. And I thought that was really, really interesting because this is also a story that’s very personal to James.

It was supposed to be a sequel to Armageddon Time, which is a very autobiographical story for James. It became its own thing, but still obviously drawing from experiences from his life. So, I would be playing like James’ older brother. And I think James didn’t want to have a recreation of his family. I think he wanted to avoid that. He wanted to make something, you know, really authentic.

And I think the way to do that is, especially for a young actor, and he’s aware that this is my first time on a set of that caliber. So, I think he has a very good understanding of how each actor operates, because each actor operates very differently and he has an incredible understanding of that. And I think he wanted to kind of help me out by blurring the lines between these two people to make them that much more authentic. So I think we do share a lot of the same qualities, like we’re around the same age, those pressures from parents about college and school and future and that sort of drifting away a bit, but something intense happens and it brings you together ultimately because of it. I think there’s more similarities than there are differences.

Yitzi Weiner: That’s great. What do you hope society can take from the motifs and themes of Paper Tiger?

Gavin Goudey: I like that question. I think they can just take the idea that at the end of the day, love is really what is most important. I think this film is about love and the strength of those family bonds, because in this film this family is put through so many tests and each relationship has its own unique reaction to what’s happening. But in the end, they are stronger because of it, what they go through. And I think that’s really, really special.

It kind of puts these characters, or at least my character specifically, it gives him, you know, the perspective and context and the realization of what’s really, really important to him, and that’s his family and that’s how much he loves his family. And I think that’s just a really lovely and beautiful message that everyone can definitely learn from.

Yitzi Weiner: Amazing. So, this is our signature question. Gavin, you’ve been blessed with a lot of success now and you must have learned a lot from your experiences. Can you share five things that you’ve learned since you started? Five things you’ve learned that someone starting out today can really benefit from.

Gavin Goudey: Yeah. I think one of the first things that my very early teachers instilled into me was that an actor acts. And I mean like, growing up, first starting to train as an actor, there’s always those worries of, you’re telling people that you’re an actor and they say, “Oh, what have you been in?” And you haven’t necessarily been in anything. So they’re like, “Oh, you’re not an actor. What do you mean?” But that’s just not the case. That’s completely wrong. And if you’re going to classes, if you’re actually doing the thing, you’re an actor. Like a painter paints. Whatever you do on the side for money or to live or school, that’s just what you’re doing on the side, right? An actor acts. So if you’re acting, you’re an actor. And I think that was, for me, very liberating. So that’s the first thing.

And then number two is to just trust yourself and your own instincts. I think working on Paper Tiger really instilled in me the importance and power of your instincts and also your thoughts, because James had told me, this is one of the many things he taught me, he said that “the camera’s got you. All you have to do is think.” He really instilled in me the power that the camera has in capturing your thoughts. So all you have to do is think. And it’s really simple, but it’s really powerful, and I’ll take that with me, throughout the rest of my career.

And the third, I’d say don’t take rejection personally. I mean, there’s like a million reasons that you might not book something, and so many of them have nothing to do with your actual ability. And yeah, I think like that pinball analogy, I think it’s like you keep, you know, bouncing off of each no and using it to get you to your next thing. And I think at that point, it’s only a matter of time, because that’s what I tell myself is it’s only a matter of time. Because if you put your all into what you’re doing, you’re really passionate about it, you nurture that passion, it only becomes a matter of time after that.

And I would say the fourth would be to never stop learning. There’s something to learn from absolutely everywhere. And, one of the greatest gifts from working on Paper Tiger was getting to observe artists who I’ve spent years admiring, getting to witness them hone their craft, and actually do the work in front of you. And, the more I learn, the more I realize just how much there is left to discover. So, I hope I never lose that curiosity. That’s really important.

And that leads into my fifth, which is to not forget to live your life, because I think that’s especially important as actors, because our work ultimately comes from the human experience and it’s about the human experience. So, you can spend every waking moment studying your craft, but you also have to get out there and just live life, because, the more you can put in your toolbox and draw from is just the more you can use for your work. And it’s incredibly important and powerful when you have that. So, yeah.

Yitzi Weiner: Amazing, amazing answer. Can you share some of the self-care routines that you do to help your body, mind, and heart to thrive?

Gavin Goudey: Yeah. I have a pretty extensive skincare routine. I love skincare, like cleansers, toners, essence, serums, moisturizer, all of it. I love skincare and I love doing the act of doing it. It’s very relaxing, and I think anything you can do to kind of make yourself all the more confident is go for it. Really go for it. And if it makes you just relax, go for it.

And for my mind, I would say just to get out in nature. I’m a really big believer in the power of, the power that nature has. It’s very therapeutic. And to just go on walks. The power of walking and thinking at the same time is really invaluable to human beings. Fresh air, sunlight, and like to hear running water, it’s really good for your brain. So to just be in touch with nature as much as I can, it’s really important to me.

Yitzi Weiner: Amazing, amazing answer. This is what we call our matchmaker question, and sometimes it works. We’re very blessed that prominent leaders in entertainment read this column and maybe we could connect you. Is there a person in the world or in the US with whom you would like to have a power lunch with, or to collaborate with, or to have a coffee with? Because we could tag them on social media and maybe we could connect you.

Gavin Goudey: That would be incredible. I think the first person that comes to mind is Paul Thomas Anderson. I just am a huge fan of everything he does. I think his filmography is just beyond incredible. I think each one of his films is just, for me, it holds a really special place in my heart. And like Phantom Thread is one of my favorite films ever, The Master. I just think he’s just an incredible storyteller, and I would love to have just a simple conversation with him about it. That would be a dream.

Yitzi Weiner: We’ll try our best to get his attention, and even if he doesn’t respond, it’ll be out there permanently on the internet and it’ll slowly percolate one day.

Gavin Goudey: I love that.

Yitzi Weiner: Well, Gavin, how can our readers watch Paper Tiger? How can our readers watch any of your work? How can they support you and your work in any possible way?

Gavin Goudey: Yeah. I mean, go watch Paper Tiger in theaters, select theaters November 13th, nationwide on the 25th. And yeah, go see that thing. Really, you’re not going to regret it.

Yitzi Weiner: Well, Gavin, it’s been a joy to meet you. Congratulations on all your great work. You’re a rising star and I’m sure we’ll be seeing a lot more of you.

Gavin Goudey: It’s been an absolute pleasure.

Gavin Goudey’s Emotional Breakthrough: From First Acting Class Tears to ‘Paper Tiger’ Star was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

“You’re interesting until you become the character, and then you lose who you are.”

I had the pleasure of talking with Nate Bynum, an actor who remembers his first television acting job for a mistake rather than a triumph. On the set of In the Heat of the Night, Bynum stumbled over a line. Carroll O’Connor, the show’s star, approached, put his arms around him, and said, “Now, Nate, you can do this. I chose you. We’re all ready to go home now. Just do it, and I trust you.” Bynum completed the scene without another mistake. What stayed with him was the realization that O’Connor had personally chosen him for the role and was willing to trust his judgment.

For someone who would go on to appear in Iron Man 3, Outer Banks, and Grey’s Anatomy, that lesson was deceptively difficult. Bynum had trained to be precise, and he would spend much of his career teaching aspiring performers to prepare meticulously. Yet he eventually discovered that his pursuit of perfection could become the very thing preventing him from doing his best work.

In Columbia, South Carolina, where Bynum grew up, five people shared a two-room house with one large bedroom. Raised by his grandparents and an aunt, he remembers the household as loving despite its modest circumstances. Neither grandparent had finished elementary school, but both insisted that he receive an education. His aunt, a high school band member and homecoming queen, introduced him to another world. She made sure he played the clarinet, attended theatrical productions, and encountered people working in the arts. Boy Scouts and civic organizations broadened his experiences further. He remembers being “the only little Black kid in the neighborhood doing all that.”

His introduction to performance came almost accidentally. Older cousins, teenagers who babysat him during summer vacations, entertained themselves by playing teacher. They taught Bynum to read before he entered elementary school. His teachers noticed his ability and invited him to read the lunch menu over the school intercom. Soon he was reciting poetry, introducing visiting artists, and performing in school productions. Leading roles and scholarships followed. Bynum still credits those teenage cousins for setting everything in motion, recognizing how a childhood game opened opportunities nobody could have anticipated.

He eventually earned a Master of Fine Arts in acting from Southern Illinois University Carbondale, where he was a Graduate Deans Fellow, and built parallel careers in entertainment and higher education. He taught at Mississippi State University before joining the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, where he established the acting-for-the-camera program and developed its curriculum. His professional biography records several institutional firsts, including becoming the first Black tenured professor in both Mississippi State’s and UNLV’s theatre department, and the first Black tenured professor in the College of Fine Arts at UNLV, as well. He has also received the Nevada System of Higher Education’s Regents’ Creative Activity Award and recognition for his screenwriting.

Yet his early experience as a professor revealed an uncomfortable contradiction. Bynum believed that being an authority figure meant appearing impeccable. He wore a suit and tie, monitored every word, and felt obligated to have the correct answer to every question. “It made life miserable because I wasn’t having fun,” he recalls. His students found him difficult to approach, and he was equally uncomfortable. Eventually, he discovered that admitting “I don’t know, I’ll find out” could be more valuable than pretending to know everything. Humor, spontaneity, and ordinary conversation became part of his teaching.

The same adjustment proved essential to his acting career. His theatrical training had emphasized precise diction and carefully articulated speech, qualities that could seem artificial on camera. One casting director told him, “You’ve got to release the language. You’ve got to just talk.” Another delivered an even more revealing assessment: “You’re interesting until you become the character, and then you lose who you are.” For a professionally trained actor, it was a peculiar problem. He had become so concerned with creating convincing characters that he sometimes concealed the qualities casting directors found interesting about him.

Other performers helped reshape his understanding of the profession. During a film production alongside Bernie Casey, Phylicia Rashad, Isaac Hayes, and Richard Roundtree, Bynum expressed how honored he felt to work with actors he had admired growing up. Casey reminded him, “You’re one of us now,” and urged him to extend the same generosity to others. The exchange echoed O’Connor’s encouragement years earlier and offered a model for the respect Bynum would bring to his own work with students.

His recent experience filming Benny Safdie’s Lizard Music, starring Dwayne Johnson, brought those lessons into sharper focus. Cast by the Oscar-nominated, Jennifer Venditti, Bynum spent approximately forty days working in Atlanta and New York on a physically demanding production that sometimes required improvisation. The experience pushed him beyond familiar techniques, but he noticed something important about his audition: this time, he had brought “me” into the room. The actor who once struggled to appear natural before casting directors now felt comfortable relying on his own instincts, even while confronting unfamiliar demands.

Away from the camera and classroom, Bynum finds pleasure in quieter routines. He walks to clear his thoughts, enjoys watching wildlife, and cooks meals he cheerfully suspects nobody else would particularly appreciate. His wife, children, and grandchildren provide the grounding that makes his professional travel worthwhile. He also retains his grandmother’s insistence that people treat others with the consideration they would want for themselves, although his generosity comes with boundaries. “I’ll take three steps to be your friend before I ask you to take one,” he explains.

There is something fitting about an actor who has spent decades inhabiting other people’s lives discovering that his most valuable professional skill may be the ability to remain himself. Bynum continues to pursue demanding roles, develop stories, and teach younger performers, without suggesting that experience has eliminated uncertainty. The boy who once read lunch menus over a school intercom has traveled a remarkable distance. Yet the lesson he keeps returning to is surprisingly simple: he no longer has to pretend to have every answer before he can begin.

Yitzi Weiner: Nate Bynum, it’s such an honor to meet you. Before we dive in deep and talk about your great work, our readers would love to learn about Nate Bynum’s personal origin story. Can you share with us the story of your childhood and how you grew up, and particularly the seeds and the genesis of all the amazing creativity that’s come since then?

Nate Bynum: I live in Las Vegas now, but I grew up in Columbia, South Carolina. I was raised by my grandparents and an aunt. It was a two-room house, five people, one big bedroom, everybody sleeping where they can, that kind of thing. But it was a very loving house. Neither my grandmother nor my grandfather finished elementary school, but they were very committed to me getting an education for sure. And there were a lot of teachers who lived in the community, so educators and supporters of education were always around me.

My aunt was in high school at the time, and she was in the band, and she was also voted Miss Homecoming. She was very much involved in the arts. So those two worlds clashed for me. She made sure I played the clarinet. She made sure I saw theatrical productions and engaged with people who were artistic, those kinds of things. And I look back on it and I realize it was a foundation for what has evolved in my life: the emphasis on education and, of course, the emphasis on the arts, and Boy Scouts, and civic organizations.. And to be honest with you, Yitzi, I was the only little Black kid in the neighborhood doing all that. So, it was a different world for me.

Yitzi Weiner: Well, that’s amazing. So, please tell us the next chapter. Tell us how you first started, your first entrée or first breaks. I’d love to hear about it.

Nate Bynum: Well, I had learned to read before I got to school, really, because my babysitters during the summer were my older cousins next door. They were teenagers and they wanted to play teacher. So yeah, they taught us how to read. When I got to school, the teachers, I think, were a little surprised at how well I read, and they let me read the lunch menu on the intercom at the elementary school, and they let me read it in the class.

And that evolved into whatever events we would have, they would let me do tongue twisters or read poems or introduce guest artists. And that evolved into getting into leads in plays in junior high and high school, and then scholarships and all that. So, I have to give my cousins who taught me how to read credit for that, because one thing led to another, and I didn’t know that at the time either.

Yitzi Weiner: Unbelievable. So you probably have some amazing stories from your career, and I’m sure this is difficult to single out, but can you share with our readers two stories that stand out in your mind from your entertainment career?

Nate Bynum: In my career as a performer, one I have told many of my students is when I got my first acting gig. It was on a show called In the Heat of the Night. And the lead actor for that show was a guy named Carroll O’Connor, who was made famous by All In The Family.

Carroll O’Connor, a New Yorker, was playing a Southerner in In the Heat of the Night. And there I was. When we started the take, I flubbed my line. And he came up to me, put his arms around me, and he said, “Now, Nate, you can do this. I chose you. We’re all ready to go home now. Just do it, and I trust you.” And he walked away. That’s all he did. It calmed me down. I did the scenes, no more flubs, and I realized he was saying, “I chose you. I trust you. You can do this. Don’t put pressure on yourself. I’ve already put the pressure on me to take it off you.” It meant a lot. That’s one, because I didn’t know him. I didn’t know that he personally had cast me, but he told me that.

A second one would be when I was doing a movie, a feature film, with a number of stars that I grew up watching. And here I am, just acting like a little kid, or feeling like a little kid, because I was around Bernie Casey. Phylicia Rashad was in this particular movie. Isaac Hayes, the singer, was in this particular movie. And Shaft, the original Shaft, Richard Roundtree, was in this movie.

There was a moment where we were between setups, and I said to them, “Guys, I’m just so happy to be here, so proud.” And Bernie Casey looked at me and he said, “Well, that’s good, but you’re one of us now. We’re not stars to you. You’re our scene partners, and there are people looking at you. So, if you appreciate what we’ve done, please pass it on and let others appreciate it as well for what you’ve done for them.” And again, it meant the world to me, because what he was saying was, “Don’t treat us like stars, treat us like equals.” Anyway, it meant a lot to me at the time.

Yitzi Weiner: That’s an amazing story. That’s so beautiful. There’s a saying that sometimes our mistakes can be our greatest teachers. Do you have a story about a funny mistake that you made when you were first starting in acting?

Nate Bynum: Yeah. When I first started, I had to be the perfect teacher, man. I had to look the part, act the part, be the role model, something that they had to aspire to. So, I wore a suit. I had a tie. I could not be reproached. because I had to be perfect. I had to speak well and say the right things and have all the right answers. It made life miserable because I wasn’t having fun. I wasn’t enjoying them, they were not enjoying me, and I wasn’t enjoying myself.

And then I realized that I didn’t have to do all that. I was allowed to make a mistake. I was allowed to say, “I don’t know, I’ll find out,” or “I’m not sure,” or just have a conversation with them. Just be me. Tell jokes. Laugh. Be open to information as opposed to having everything planned out perfectly well and feeling like it had to happen that way or it wasn’t right. So that was the first mistake I made as a teacher that I learned from when I first started teaching.

In acting, I think my biggest mistake was the same thing: just trying to be too perfect. When you go from stage, which was my initial training, to screen, you learn a certain speech pattern. My program emphasized Standard American English, and focused on clear and precise pronunciation.

When you get to film, that doesn’t work as well. It can come across as fake.

And so, the first thing a casting director told me was, “You’ve got to release the language. You’ve got to just talk. We don’t need you to be word-perfect or sound perfect, just talk.” And that was the first thing, going from one medium to another, one genre to another. And the same thing with teaching: you don’t need to be perfect. You need to be real and effective

Yitzi Weiner: There’s another saying that’s related, that “no” is not rejection, it’s redirection. Do you have a story like that where you got a “no” to an opportunity that led to an even better opportunity?

Nate Bynum: Yeah. When I first came out West from New York and I was auditioning for some major dramas, there was a casting session where the assistant had called me in because she really liked my work. But the head casting director just didn’t think much of it. Still, she obviously thought something of me. So after the audition, she said, “Listen to me. This is what you did.” And she showed me on the tape

She said, “It just looks false. You’re not going to get cast this time, not because you can’t act, you’re not going to get cast because you’ve not learned how to be who you are on camera yet.” This was my second time hearing that. So, she was saying, “Go away. We’re going to bring you back another time, probably in the near future. We don’t know when.” And they did. But she was saying, “I just want you to just be you. You’re interesting until you become the character, and then you lose who you are.”

So, it wasn’t a “no” where they were rejecting me. It was a “no” where they were saying, “We just can’t accept the person that you brought in, because we thought you were bringing a different person: you. And you left you behind.” So, I learned, and it worked out in the end.

Yitzi Weiner: So please tell us about any exciting new projects you’re working on now. Anything you’re working on, we’d love to hear all about it. Please feel free to be as elaborate as you’d like.

Nate Bynum: Projects I’m working on now. So, I just wrapped a feature film with director Benny Safdie starring Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, and I was cast by the Oscar-nominated Jennifer Venditti. For a career, that means a lot because you’re working with some of the top people in the industry. I can’t say a lot about the project because there’s an NDA, but it’s called Lizard Music. I can say that.

Working with Benny, who is one of those young directors who likes the gritty-style, improvisational, creative actors, I learned a lot again, and I realized that I was ready for it. I wasn’t intimidated, and he was easy to work with in that sense. And also, auditioning for Jennifer, from the earlier lessons I had learned which I talked about working with casting directors, I brought “me” in there. I’ve gotten to the point where I know how to be me in a casting session, and it worked, because Jennifer is also known for saying you have to be real — don’t bring in acting schools and all those lessons. So it was a great experience. Forty days on a set in Atlanta and in New York, and it should be a good film.

Yitzi Weiner: Sounds amazing. Okay, amazing. What’s been the most challenging project or role you’ve taken on so far, and why?

Nate Bynum: Well, I think this was it. I think this was it. Again, the NDA limits what I can say, but it was very physically challenging. It was improvisational at times; even though we did have the script, you had to create there in the moment. Physically, it was exhausting, and it challenged a part of my actor training that usually I don’t focus on as much for a role–my fitness.So to be able to go back to the foundation of what acting is, in front of these high-profile people in this high-profile situation, was educational for me in that respect. Acting is a whole-body art.

Yitzi Weiner: It’s great. Amazing. So, this is our signature question. You’ve been blessed with a lot of success now, and you must have learned a lot from your experiences. Looking back all the way to the beginning when you first started, can you share five things you’ve learned over the years that someone starting out today can really benefit from?

Nate Bynum: Five things. All right. Not in any particular order:

First, “to thine own self be true” is important, because depending on the people you meet and the situation you’re in, you can change to make them feel better or make the situation easier. But if you’re not happy with it at the end of the day, then it’s not right for you. So, to thine own self be true.

Second, treat people the way you want to be treated. I come from a Southern background, a small town, and I’ve traveled out of the United States, all over the world, that kind of thing. But still, the basics are: treat people like you expect to be treated. Most of the time you get that in return. But even if not, at least you go home knowing you’ve done what you think is the right thing.

Third, I guess the opposite of that is you can’t trust everybody. You can give everybody a chance, but sometimes you have to back off and realize that this isn’t worth it. It’s not working. That’s three things, right? I have two more to go.

Fourth, I think also what I have learned and what I try to live by is that things aren’t the most important things in your life. People are. My wife, kids, and grandkids motivate me. They keep me focused. They remind me of why I do what I do. Yes, I like doing it, but I realize I don’t have to do it. The pleasure I get from coming back and talking to them and seeing them makes it all worthwhile. Going away is fine. Coming back and knowing they’re there gives me the foundation to leave and come back again. I need the joy and happiness they give me.

And fifth, I will say: enjoy life. It’s a marathon; it’s not a sprint. You don’t have to do everything all in one day or one week or one year. You learn from the experiences that you have, and you keep moving forward. As long as you have a day, then you have another opportunity to correct a wrong that went bad the day prior or the hour prior. There’s a life to live.

Yitzi Weiner: Can you share some of the self-care routines, things you do to take care of yourself to help your body, mind, and heart to thrive?

Nate Bynum: Oh, yeah. Well, I try to be positive, and I try to be around positive people.

I love nature. If I can get to an ocean, then life is good, watching dolphins jump up and down, and the sound of the waves. I just shot in Atlanta where my hotel window opened to a forest, and in the morning, if I got up early enough, I could see the sun coming up, and I could also see the squirrels and the other animals walking around, starting their day or ending their day. There was also a lake and a creek by this particular hotel. So nature inspires me. It keeps me whole and healthy.

I like to walk. I like to walk and just think; it clears my head from the writing that I’m engaged in most of the time. I relax by reading certain authors that I follow. I cook — not well, but it satisfies me. I eat it, and I don’t think anybody else would care for it that much.

And also just basic things: I go to the gym. I have trainers who look at me and work on my body,. And I also believe that it’s okay sometimes to just lock yourself in or away and not do anything with anybody or talk to anybody. I believe in wholeness being what works for you, not necessarily what people say has to work for them.

Yitzi Weiner: Amazing answer. This is our final aspirational question. Nate, you’ve been blessed with a lot of success, and because of your great work, you’re a person, honestly, of great influence. If you could spread an idea or inspire a movement that will bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be?

Nate Bynum: I think I said it earlier: to treat people the way that you want to be treated. I live with that. My grandmother always said that. And even if it’s not you, treat them the way that you would want the person you love most to be treated. Because some people don’t mind being mistreated, but they don’t want the people they love to be mistreated. You know what I mean?

I try to do that, and I do have a rule: I’ll take three steps to be your friend before I ask you to take one, but when it goes south and I’ve retreated, I’m probably not coming back again. But yeah, I’m going to stick with that one. Treat people the way you or the people you most love want to be treated.

Yitzi Weiner: How can our readers continue to follow your work? How can they watch any of your films or shows? How can a reader support you in any way?

Nate Bynum: Well, they can follow me on social media at @natebynumactor (Nate Bynum Actor). That’s one way. I think with most things that we do, you can give a response some kind of way, if you want, on your own social media. If you appreciate what you’re seeing and want to support me some kind of way, then put on your own social media, “I enjoyed watching Nate Bynum,” or that kind of thing. But as long as they enjoy it, whether they do it publicly or not, I guess I can feel it through the love that emanates through the universe.

Yitzi Weiner: That’s great. I love that answer. Well, Nate, it’s been a joy to meet you. I wish you continued success and good health, and I’d love to do this again next year.

Nate Bynum: It’s my pleasure. I’ve enjoyed talking to you.

Nate Bynum: Drop the Act, Find Your Truth was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

“So, my advice to somebody starting out is: go into biz dev and get good at sales. Because if you think about what it takes to build a company, you have to raise money, you have to hire people, and you have to get customers. Three things. They all involve selling, right? So you have to get good at selling. If you get good at selling, you can do anything.”

I had the pleasure of talking with Chris Hessler, a serial entrepreneur who has spent much of his career building companies, raising capital, and negotiating deals, but whose most consequential business lesson came from admitting he didn’t know how to solve a problem.

It was 1992, and Hessler’s company had just landed an extraordinary contract with the United States Postal Service. The plan was to replace the familiar change-of-address form with an advertising-supported Mover’s Guide, distributed through 29,000 post offices. There was one rather significant obstacle: the company needed to print 84 million copies, and Hessler knew little about printing on that scale.

The solution arrived at a cocktail party. A college friend introduced him to Dick Holliday, a veteran salesman of Heidelberg printing presses who had spent decades working with major commercial printers. Over gin and tonics, Hessler explained his predicament. Holliday understood the problem immediately. Hessler recognized something else: here was a man whose experience could spare his company from expensive mistakes.

“How about if you join the advisory board I’m building?” he asked.

There was just one complication. The advisory board didn’t exist yet.

Holliday agreed anyway. He eventually helped Hessler’s company negotiate with RR Donnelley, which became its printer. The business, Imagitas, grew into a substantial enterprise and was ultimately acquired by Pitney Bowes. Hessler had stumbled onto a principle that would eventually become the foundation of his fourth company: sometimes the smartest thing a CEO can do is find someone who has already solved the problem.

It is an interesting philosophy coming from someone whose career has been defined by an unusual appetite for independence.

Born in Lima, Peru, Hessler grew up moving between countries as his father’s corporate career took the family from South America to Minnesota, Ontario, Germany, and Switzerland. He spent eight years in Geneva, attending an American international school before returning to the United States for Dartmouth College. By then, he was already experimenting with entrepreneurship.

One of his college businesses involved selling irreverent Dartmouth hats at football games. During a game against Harvard in Cambridge, an elderly Dartmouth alumnus approached Hessler and his partner, declared their merchandise “despicable,” and questioned their conduct as Dartmouth men. Moments later, the man’s wife bought two hats. The couple walked away wearing them.

The incident captures something of Hessler’s personality: an appreciation for the absurdities of selling, and a willingness to approach customers who may not initially appreciate the pitch.

After Dartmouth, Hessler secured a coveted position at Procter & Gamble. He lasted 11 months.

“I was a very little cog in a very big machine,” he recalls. He admired the company’s people, products, and values, but the corporate structure was not for him. He regarded the experience as a compressed MBA program, one in which his employer had paid him to learn.

He soon became a venture-backed CEO in his early twenties. Over roughly two decades, he helped build and sell three companies in marketing services, working across industries including healthcare, retail, and telecommunications. His career included raising more than $80 million in venture capital, according to his professional biography, and working with investors ranging from Bain Capital to Spark Capital.

He subsequently spent seven years as an operating partner at Alpine Investors, serving on company boards and helping oversee investments. The work offered a different perspective on businesses he had previously experienced from the founder’s chair. Eventually, however, Hessler recognized an uncomfortable truth about his professional preferences.

“I want to be the guy selling the business,” he says, rather than the employee of a private equity firm buying someone else’s.

That realization helped bring him back to entrepreneurship. Together with Cathy Fischer, a former Procter & Gamble colleague who went on to senior marketing positions at major consumer companies, he founded The Advisory Bench.

The company builds advisory boards for CEOs, typically recruiting five experienced executives with expertise tailored to the company’s specific challenges. The advisors receive equity rather than cash compensation, giving younger or growing businesses access to people they might otherwise struggle to afford.

For one recent client, Momento3d, which creates jewelry incorporating impressions of pets’ paw prints, the challenge was finding expertise across three distinct fields: jewelry, pets, and consumer marketing. Hessler’s team recruited specialists from those industries, including former senior executives from Signet Jewelers and Petco. At the time of the interview, the advisory board had only recently begun meeting, making it an example of the model’s potential rather than a proven turnaround.

Hessler is equally particular about the CEOs he works with. He believes they must be intelligent, possess a growth mindset, and, perhaps most importantly, be “humble and coachable.” It is a revealing requirement from someone who has spent decades selling his own ideas. He believes confidence matters, but recognizes that a leader’s willingness to listen can determine whether outside expertise accomplishes anything.

And for all his emphasis on expert advisors, Hessler remains an unabashed salesman. He argues that raising capital, recruiting employees, acquiring customers, and even fundraising for nonprofits depend on the same fundamental ability to persuade people. His advice to aspiring entrepreneurs is characteristically concise: “If you get good at selling, you can do anything.”

There is a productive tension running through Hessler’s career. He has repeatedly left established institutions to regain control of his own work, yet the company he is building now rests on the conviction that even accomplished leaders cannot succeed entirely on their own.

The entrepreneur who once found his printing expert over a gin and tonic is still making connections. Only now, connecting people who have problems with people who know how to solve them is the business itself.

Yitzi Weiner: Okay, Chris, such a delight to meet you. Before we dive in and talk about your amazing work, our readers would love to learn about Chris Hessler’s personal origin story. Can you share with us the story of your childhood and how you grew up, and particularly the seeds of all the amazing creativity that has come since then?

Chris Hessler: Okay. I was raised all over the world. My dad worked for a US corporation that had operations everywhere. I was born in Lima, Peru, and lived there for five years. When I turned five, there was a revolution in Peru, and my dad came home one day and said, “This is how they change governments in Latin America.”

So, we were getting kicked out. We went to Minneapolis, lived there for two years, went to Ontario for a year, went to Düsseldorf, Germany, for a year, and then spent eight years in Geneva, Switzerland. So I was in Switzerland from grade five to grade 12. I went to an American international school and then came to the US to go to college.

Yitzi Weiner: So, let’s hear the next part. You’ve done so many amazing things. Let’s hear the next chapter.

Chris Hessler: I went to Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, and I was one of those students who had little businesses in the dorm. The two best businesses I had — actually, I had three good businesses. One was a hat business. My buddy and I sold hats at football games, and Dartmouth’s big rival was Harvard. So we would make a thousand “Go Dartmouth, Harvard Sucks” hats, and we sold them outside of the football stadium.

My best story is one time we were in Cambridge selling because the game was in Cambridge, and this old alum came up to us wearing this little green jacket — a Dartmouth alum. And he says, “Are you Dartmouth men?” We were selling them for three bucks, two for five. We said, “Yes, we’re Dartmouth men.” And he says, “I think what you’re doing is despicable.” And then his wife comes up to us and says, “We’ll take two.” And they walked off with their “Harvard Sucks” hats on.

Anyway, that was a lot of fun. That’s how I got through college: little businesses. And then I went from college — well, actually, I applied to five MBA programs as a senior. I got into two, and I was rejected at three. Then I got a job at Procter & Gamble, which was a great job and was highly coveted. Out of our class of a thousand students, they took two. So myself and my friend Mimi Riley had the two jobs.

I did not go to business school; I went to Procter & Gamble. What I figured out was: great company, great values, great products, great people, but not for me. I was a very little cog in a very big machine. So I lasted 11 months. I left after 11 months, but I viewed it like an MBA program where they paid me, and I was in the accelerated cohort of only 11 months. I could learn it all. Some people stay 10 years, 20 years. I thought, “I don’t need that. This is enough. I’ve learned a lot.”

So I then went off to be a venture-backed CEO in my early 20s, and I built and sold three companies, all in the marketing services space, selling new marketing solutions to big Fortune 500 buyers. I did that for about 20 years, raised a bunch of venture capital, hired a lot of people, and got a lot of customers. In the first company, our customer base was in pharma. In the second one, our customers were in retail and telecom primarily. The third one was in healthcare. That was the first two-thirds of my career.

In the last third of my career, I worked in private equity. I got recruited by a middle-market private equity firm to be an operating partner. I sat on multiple boards and was a steward of their money. That was a lot of fun, too. But what I realized at the end of seven years in private equity was that I really liked being the founder whom the private equity firm buys from. I don’t want to be an employee of private equity allocating capital to buy somebody else’s business. I want to be the guy selling the business.

So I left. One of the things I did along the way was build advisory boards. I built 12 advisory boards in my venture and PE careers because I found it was an excellent way to get talent and experience I often couldn’t afford to hire. I would go out and find five advisors who met the criteria I had and put them on a board. I gave them stock in the company, and it was a light lift. I was on the phone with them one or two hours a month, and then two hours a quarter, and maybe once a year in person. Advisors loved doing it, and we got great value out of it.

When I left private equity, I started another company, my fourth company, called The Advisory Bench. I teamed up with a friend of mine from the Procter & Gamble days. Her name is Cathy Fischer, and she had been at P&G for 14 years, and then she became a super CMO at Newell Rubbermaid, Goodyear, and Signet Jewelers. What we do now is build advisory boards for CEOs.

It’s a super interesting business because the advisory board model works regardless of vertical or regardless of the age and stage of the company. It really comes down to three attributes that the CEO needs to have: they need to be super smart, they need to have a growth mindset, and they need to be humble and coachable. If the CEO checks those three boxes, an advisory board can really help them.

Yitzi Weiner: That’s actually a brilliant idea. I love how you phrased it: you have access to talent that you couldn’t afford to hire, but they will join a board in exchange for equity. It’s really a brilliant idea. So please tell us more. Can you tell us a story about a company that took on a board of advisors and, because of that, went to the next level and really shot off?

Chris Hessler: The best example I can give is from my own experience of how I invented the advisory board model. In my second company, I was building it with my partner, and we got a contract with the US Postal Service. This was around ’92, so it was pre-internet, pre-everything. It was a very low-tech world.

We got a contract to commercialize the change-of-address form that sits in 29,000 post office lobbies. In 1992, 42 million people a year would go into a post office, pick up a change-of-address form — actually, they’d pick up two — fill it out, and bring it back. That’s how your first-class mail got forwarded, and that’s how the little yellow stickers followed you around. Remember those?

We got that contract, and our idea was super low-tech. It was: we’re going to replace your change-of-address form with a Mover’s Guide. The Mover’s Guide will have advertising related to the move and content related to the move, and it will have the change form in it. So any consumer who wants to move has to pick up our Mover’s Guide from a post office lobby.

Then we had the challenge of having to print 84 million Mover’s Guides and get them into 29,000 post offices. What I’ve learned today is that CEOs don’t wake up and say, “I want to build an advisory board.” They wake up and say, “I’ve got this problem,” or they were up all night thinking about the problem.

I was thinking about this problem day and night: “How do we print 84 million of this thing?” I was invited to a cocktail party, and as we know, a lot of good things start at cocktail parties. At the cocktail party, my college buddy introduced me to his father-in-law, Dick Holliday. Wonderful man. Dick had spent a career selling Heidelberg printing presses to big printers like RR Donnelley and Quad/Graphics.

Dick and I were at the bar having a gin and tonic, and I was telling him about the post office and 84 million Mover’s Guides and all that. He started analyzing the problem because he understood it. He’d done this his whole life; he’d done this for 30 years.

I looked at him and said, “How about if you join the advisory board I’m building?” I had the idea right there at the bar. And he said, “I’d love to.” The next week, Dick and I went to lunch, and I explained this whole fledgling advisory board idea. Then we got more advisors to complement his skills. He really became central to our success because he trained us on how to buy print in large quantities, and he went with us to negotiate with RR Donnelley. They became our printer. He was great. He was a wonderful guy.

Yitzi Weiner: That’s an amazing story. And he got equity in the company?

Chris Hessler: Exactly. Yep. And then eventually we sold the company, so he made money.

Yitzi Weiner: Can you tell us another story, aside from yours — let’s say one of your clients — about how they got an advisory board and were then able to grow?

Chris Hessler: Yeah. There’s one example right now where we just built and launched an advisory board for a company called Memento 3D. What they have developed is a technology that lets you take a pet’s paw print and turn it into a piece of jewelry. So whether your pet is living or deceased, you can commemorate the pet. You can turn it into a necklace if you want.

The founder is really an inventor, and he needed marketers, he needed pet people, and he needed jewelry people. So we got a senior VP from Signet Jewelers. We got a former merchandising chief from Petco, the big pet company. And we got several marketers who understand marketing to pet owners. We kicked off two weeks ago, and the amount of knowledge in the room was incredible. This is really the intersection of pets and jewelry, and the amount of knowledge we had in the room was amazing. It really comes down to one simple thing, which is getting the right voices in the room and bridging experience gaps for the CEO or the C-team. That’s one example.

I’ll give you another example. We have a client called BP Logix that is a software company, and they have developed software to automate the regulatory process for new drugs. The FDA process is very complicated. When you introduce a new drug, you have to follow a lot of steps and fill out a lot of forms. They developed software to automate this process and speed it up, and they wanted to pivot into a new space, but they didn’t have the knowledge. So they hired us to go find them five advisors from the new space who could really decode it. The advisors are also thought leaders, so they’re content creators who can build credibility for the software solution in the industry.

I think the real theme here is that every advisory board is different in the vertical it’s in because, as you know, every business is a niche of a niche. It’s super specialized, so we have to go out and get thought leaders from that niche. They’re all out there; you just have to do the work and find them.

The model also works regardless of the age and stage of the company. Our ideal customer profile is the CEO of a company in the $5 million to $100 million revenue space, but we have built an advisory board for a billion-dollar company and for a million-dollar company. Again, it really comes down to three attributes that the CEO has to have: they have to be super smart, they have to have a growth mindset, and they have to be humble and coachable. They have to listen to the advisors.

Yitzi Weiner: Unbelievable. So, what’s your business model? Do people pay you a fee or a retainer, or does your business also get equity?

Chris Hessler: Good question. Our business model is that we charge $75,000 to build an advisory board, and we’re paid over three years. It’s not all at once or all in year one. It’s front-loaded, and it’s in three payments over three years. And then the advisors get equity in the company.

Yitzi Weiner: And they don’t get paid cash at all? They just get equity?

Chris Hessler: They just get equity. Correct.

Yitzi Weiner: Wow. And where do you get advisors from? Do people apply to be advisors on your bench?

Chris Hessler: Yes. There are three ways we get advisors. Way number one is Cathy and I may know them from our own networks. Way number two is we have a database. People apply to be advisors all the time, so we have hundreds and hundreds of advisors in a database. And way number three is, after we check our own network and our own database, if we don’t find the advisors or the keywords in the spec, we then go to places like LinkedIn and just find people and reach out to them.

The thing about advisors is that people generally want to be advisors. They are at the tail end of their careers; they’re recently retired or “failed retirees.” We actually get a lot of failed retirees. They’re tired of playing golf, they’re tired of cocktails at four, and they want things to do. They want to stay involved, and they have things to give back. So generally, advisors get involved because, number one, they want to give back; number two, they want to network with the other advisors; and number three is comp. So comp isn’t really number one.

Yitzi Weiner: Okay, so this is our signature question. Chris, you’ve been blessed with a lot of success, and you must have learned a lot from your experience. Looking back all the way to the beginning when you first started selling hats, can you share five things that you’ve learned over the years as a business leader that someone starting out today can really benefit from?

Chris Hessler: Okay. I’m going to take your question and boil it down to one thing. Because as a rule in life, there’s one thing that we can do that will generally make everything else easier or make problems go away.

Early in my career, I figured out that most people don’t like doing biz dev. So I said to myself, “I’m going to get really good at biz dev,” because there seems to be a big void there. As I went into these companies to build them, the other partners generally either didn’t like biz dev or weren’t that good at biz dev.

Later on, I built two nonprofits, and what I learned is that nonprofit fundraising is just a brutal thing. I would get 10 people on my board of directors, and they would all hate fundraising. One of the 10 was good at fundraising, so she and I became the fundraisers, and the other nine did nothing.

So, my advice to somebody starting out is: go into biz dev and get good at sales. Because if you think about what it takes to build a company, you have to raise money, you have to hire people, and you have to get customers. Three things. They all involve selling, right? So you have to get good at selling. If you get good at selling, you can do anything.

Yitzi Weiner: Chris, because of your amazing work, the platform that you’ve built, and the businesses that you’ve built, you’re honestly a person of great influence. If you could spread an idea or inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? Because you never know what your idea can inspire.

Chris Hessler: I’m working on it right now. What Cathy and I have done is build a webinar that encapsulates everything I’ve learned about business development so we can share it with people. It’s called “Did I Offend You?”

The reason it’s called that is because one of the things that happens in business development is you go in, you have a good meeting, and the prospect is excited. They tell you they want a proposal, and they’re going to get more people involved. They have the budget, they’re the right person, and they have the need. And then they go dark — they disappear. You email and call them, and nothing happens.

Two months later, you’re wondering what happened. What I’ve learned is you have to send them an email, and the subject line is, “Did I offend you?” And in the email, you have to apologize. You say, “Hey, we had a great meeting. You wanted to buy what we’re selling. I have not heard from you in two months, so I have to believe you’re either very sick, you’ve left your job, or I offended you. And if I offended you, I’m really sorry; that was not the intention.”

That email will get a response, and invariably the response is, “Oh, no, no, you didn’t offend me. My boss gave me a project, and I’m working 24/7 on this thing. I have no time. But please call me in a month and we will get going again.” The whole point is you have to unstick this situation. And the best way I’ve learned over time is to send a “Did I offend you?” email. Now you learned something today, right?

Yitzi Weiner: Amazing. Chris, how can our readers continue to follow your work? How can they reach out to you to engage your services? How can our readers support your work in any possible way?

Chris Hessler: The best way is just to email me. It’s chessler@advisorybench.us — one word, C-H-E-S-S-L-E-R at advisorybench.us.

Yitzi Weiner: Chris, it’s been an honor to meet you. I wish you continued success and good health and blessings, and I’d love to stay in touch and do this again next year.

Chris Hessler: Well, thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it.

Chris Hessler’s Golden Rule: Master Sales, Unlock Any Business Goal was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

“In the same way, that you would teach someone, maybe your grandma, to navigate a web browser and sit next to them and point things out to them and correct them as you go, that’s also how we want to train models to be able to do things that they can’t do already, including very pixel-precise scientific tasks.”

I had the pleasure of talking with Claire Swadling, whose path toward founding an artificial intelligence company began with a rather unsettling observation in a college research lab. The undergraduate interns were spending hours labeling images, drawing boxes around objects, and performing painstaking visual tasks. That was expected. What surprised her was that the postdoctoral researchers, people who had invested years in advanced scientific training, were doing much the same thing. Swadling began asking herself an uncomfortable question: Why spend another seven or eight years pursuing an academic career if so much of the work would remain manual?

That frustration eventually became the foundation of Visual Intuition, the AI company she co-founded to teach machines something considerably more difficult than recognizing pictures: how to look at visual information and reason through it the way a trained human expert might. Yet there is an interesting contradiction at the center of her ambitions. Swadling wants to automate some of the most tedious work performed by scientists, while remaining deeply convinced that human judgment, expertise, and what she calls “taste” are qualities machines still struggle to reproduce. Her vision for AI depends, in some respects, on understanding precisely what makes human intelligence different.

Growing up in southeastern Michigan, Swadling was already pursuing scientific research while most of her peers were navigating high school. She worked in computational biology laboratories analyzing DNA and RNA sequences, opportunities she credits partly to an early willingness to contact professors without introductions. Looking back, she describes herself as ambitious and perhaps insufficiently conscious of the possibility of embarrassment. Her attitude was simple: “who cares if I embarrass myself in front of one more professor?” The willingness to send an unsolicited email would become one of the habits she carried into entrepreneurship.

At Harvard, where she studied physics and economics, Swadling initially hoped physics would give her a broad intellectual foundation. Yet she found herself returning to computational biology, where her growing dissatisfaction with repetitive research tasks began to take shape. Around the end of her undergraduate years, she met Ishaan, her future co-founder, who was serving as a teaching assistant in her wave mechanics course. They shared a physics adviser, who encouraged them to talk. Ishaan had encountered similar frustrations in connectomics, a branch of neuroscience concerned with mapping the brain’s intricate network of neurons. Their conversations gradually suggested a possibility neither could pursue as effectively from inside a single laboratory: building technology that might help many researchers at once.

They began forming Visual Intuition in May 2026. By the time of our conversation, the venture had grown into a three-person team with an office in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and had raised $3.2 million in funding that summer. Swadling also reported that the company’s machine-learning research had received an award at ICML, a major conference in the field. Those are meaningful early milestones, although she is careful to acknowledge that the company is still validating its approach. Its first customers will likely be academic laboratories, with much potential for expansion to large enterprises.

The underlying problem is remarkably concrete. In connectomics, a researcher may have to follow a single neuron through thousands of microscopic images, identifying its boundaries and determining where it continues from one image to the next. A mistake can compromise the accuracy of the reconstruction. Visual Intuition’s approach involves learning from the behavior of human specialists, including where they point, what they click, and how long they hesitate before making a decision. Even a momentary pause may contain information. An expert who slows down upon encountering an unusual white area, perhaps an imaging artifact or air bubble, is demonstrating a judgment that an AI system might learn to recognize.

For Swadling, this is part of the difference between pattern recognition and genuine visual reasoning. She remembers earlier computer-vision models that appeared capable of distinguishing dogs from wolves, only for researchers to discover that the systems had learned to rely on environmental clues rather than the animals themselves. Modern models have improved enormously, but the problem of recognizing the right signals remains. Her goal is to develop systems that can learn from the way experts approach unfamiliar situations, rather than depend exclusively on patterns in their original training data.

Turning that research ambition into a business introduces another challenge. Swadling has to move between the language of neuroscientists and physicists and the priorities of investors and prospective customers. She recalls attempting ordinary small talk with a scientist, asking about the weather and local sports, only to encounter what she describes as a “blank wall.” Some people, she learned, would rather skip the pleasantries and get straight to the science. The experience offered a small but useful lesson in adapting her communication to the person across from her.

More consequential is the daily tension between pursuing intellectually interesting research and delivering a practical product. An unexpected technical question might deserve weeks of investigation, but a potential customer may need a working result sooner. Swadling describes that balancing act as one of the company’s central challenges. For someone drawn to science by curiosity, the discipline of deciding when research is sufficient may prove as important as the research itself.

Beyond the laboratory and the company, Swadling speaks openly about the importance of faith, humility, and human connection. Prayer is a regular part of her mornings and evenings, providing time for gratitude and reflection. She does not pretend to have perfected the routines of a busy founder, acknowledging that there are days when she neglects her health more than she should. And when asked what kind of movement she would most want to inspire, she chooses empathy, the ability to understand another person’s needs and perspective before trying to move forward together.

There is something fitting about that answer. Swadling is building machines that learn by paying closer attention to what human beings do, while arguing that the human capacity for discernment and understanding remains essential. The question running through her work is how much intelligence can be transferred to a machine without losing the qualities that make expertise valuable in the first place. For a young founder attempting to give scientists more time to think, it is a question with consequences far beyond the laboratory.

Yitzi Weiner: Claire, it’s a delight to meet you. Before we dive in deep and talk about your amazing work, our readers would love to learn about your personal origin story. Can you share with us the story of your childhood and how you grew up and the genesis of all the amazing, we could say, genius that has come since then?

Claire Swadling: I grew up in southeast Michigan, and I was always interested in science and had some early interest in entrepreneurship. In high school, I started working for a few labs doing computational biology research mostly at the gene sequencing level, which meant that I was looking at lots of DNA or RNA sequences and then also doing some data analysis.

But when I came to college, I wanted to learn something new. So I studied physics, but somewhere along the way I still found myself back in a computational biology lab. Something I realized halfway through college is that undergraduate interns weren’t the only ones assigned manual tasks like labeling, segmenting, or drawing boxes around images. Postdocs were doing the same work.

At some point I thought, why would I invest another seven or eight years in an academic career if I’d be doing the same thing? So I became a little frustrated with a lot of the manual tasks that aren’t able to be automated in science. Towards the end of my undergrad, I also met my co-founder Ishaan, who had a similar frustration coming from connectomics, which is a field of neuroscience. Ultimately, that’s how I came to realize that you can probably do more for science by automating some of those more tedious steps along the way.

Yitzi Weiner: Can you clarify a bit what you mean by automating science?

Claire Swadling: What we hope to do is put productive hours back into the hands of scientists. Nowadays, scientists are doing a lot of data processing, especially when they work in a visual field. There aren’t models right now that are able to do some of these annotation tasks.

An example is a radiation oncologist looking at a tumor and being precise about the boundaries of that tumor so that healthy tissue isn’t being shot with radiation. Similarly, in other fields of biology, if you have to classify cells or track them through different images, a scientist has to do that. It’s very tedious for them and they’re one of few that are able to do that, and it takes away from time away from designing experiments or thinking about the future of science and other productive work.

Yitzi Weiner: So, let’s jump for a minute. Let’s jump to the present. Just tell us about the amazing things you’re doing today. But then I’d like to go back to the story that led to all this amazing work. So, tell us what you’re doing today.

Claire Swadling: Visual Intuition is an AI company that aims to teach machine learning models how to visually reason. When I say visually reason, I mean it in the same way that you and I, when we see an image, aren’t just looking left to right across the New York skyline and trying to categorize every pixel. We are looking for heuristics, for example, noticing the Empire State Building. That’s how I know I’m in New York. In the same way, we want to teach machine learning models to think about images like a human, to catch on to different hallmarks in order to be more efficient and accurate.

In the same way, that you would teach someone, maybe your grandma, to navigate a web browser and sit next to them and point things out to them and correct them as you go, that’s also how we want to train models to be able to do things that they can’t do already, including very pixel-precise scientific tasks.

We are coming from a field of neuroscience called connectomics, which is broadly concerned with mapping the human brain neuron by neuron, which has a very high degree of precision that’s needed. What was traditionally done in this field is you would have a graduate student go image by image and track, maybe a neuron starts on slide one and it spans all the way to slide, 4,556. And it would be a real person who’d have to make that decision.

Because we’re coming from this field, we realize that when you have this really long time horizon, humans do a lot of thinking: in what they’re doing with their eyes, where they are pointing on a website, and the timestamps between the clicks that they’re making. We train our models on this holistic approach of how human experts think about these visual processes and how we teach our models to do something similar to that. We’re starting in neuroscience and automating some of those pesky tasks and hoping to expand to other biological sciences and other industries.

Yitzi Weiner: That’s fascinating. So you’re saying your technology could help instead of having a scientist go slide by slide to map the human brain, you could have an AI do that. Am I understanding it correctly?

Claire Swadling: That’s correct.

Yitzi Weiner: That’s amazing. Wow. So can you explain to our readers what you mean that AI doesn’t see things the same way we do? Because a person could argue, and again of course I agree with you, people argue that if I upload a picture, it sees the picture, you know, even if I upload a whole video, it could kind of understand the video, so maybe it sees it. So what do you mean that it sees differently than that?

Claire Swadling: This is a fun question because computer vision models, the models that are able to comprehend images and understand them the way we hope to, have come a very long way. I still remember a time where you would try to teach a machine learning model to distinguish, “is this a dog or a wolf?” And then over time, you would figure out that the model was just training on if the background was sunny or if it was at night.

We’ve come a very long way from that. Some of these models still pick up on the wrong signals. If you were to change context, they’re not able to do transfer learning very effectively. In other cases, they weren’t trained on the right data for that task.

What we’re interested in is teaching models the thought process behind seeing an image, so they pick up on the right signals.

Yitzi Weiner: So you mentioned that human beings, our brains work with heuristics, right? It sounds like you’re saying there are certain mental shortcuts. Am I understanding you correctly?

Claire Swadling: That’s correct.

Yitzi Weiner: So what kind of heuristics would, let’s say, be programmed for an AI to have like a shortcut and be able to see and process visual information quicker?

Claire Swadling: This relates to our method of training models based on actual human processes. This would depend on the context of a task. Let’s go back to labeling neurons. A heuristic that a model could learn is: this human annotator is realizing that whenever there is this large white area, that represents an artifact, or an air bubble. A human, whenever they encounter that, spends extra time labeling that image.

That teaches the model in a way to be careful and to slow down when they’re dealing with a similar situation. It’s mostly context-dependent, but it can take signals based off of the data that you feed it. And the more times you give examples of humans thinking through a similar problem, it’s able to reproduce that.

Yitzi Weiner: Okay. So, let’s talk a little bit more about your work. What’s your business model? Like how do you make money? Who are your customers? Who are your clients?

Claire Swadling: We are a venture-backed company. We raised $3.2 million over the summer. We have a machine learning paper that won an oral award at ICML, which is a large machine learning conference. Our first customers will likely be academic labs that are in these immediate spaces of neuroscience and biology, but we’re hoping to expand to larger enterprises.

What we hope to do is provide our model to scientific customers across industry and academia. People would be able to give our model a chance to see their data. Then we can learn from their workflows and then fully automate those parts that are tedious.

Yitzi Weiner: That’s amazing. I’ve experienced this. It’s not pixel by pixel, but it’s reminiscent of it. I tried translating a 700-page book with Argon. Argon is a very strong, you know, very powerful model, and it did a decent job, but it wasn’t perfect. Every time I asked, “Is it perfect now?” Oh, I found another mistake and another mistake. I didn’t realize that. And it says, “I’m reading it with a human eye,” you use those terms. It was eye-opening to me how it reads differently than we do. As much as you try to validate it, it’s never 100%, you know, so I need like, that’s not pixel by pixel, but I need a letter-by-letter validation. And it’s hard.

Claire Swadling: I think LLMs especially are very good at having really strong working memories. You can tell it something in like hour one and it’ll remember it, three or 100 days later, but it still doesn’t quite have the taste that humans do. And I think they’re still working out ways in their reward architecture to make sure that they have taste. For now, I still think humans are the best person to do that final review.

Yitzi Weiner: So can you tell us a story? Tell us the story of how you started this company. Tell us how it started.

Claire Swadling: As I mentioned a bit before, around the time that I got frustrated with a lot of the manual work in science, I met my co-founder, who was the teaching assistant for a wave mechanics course I was taking. We also found out that we had the same physics advisor, who is now the chair of the department, who encouraged us to talk more. He knew that I was unsure about my next career steps and that I was exploring more areas of business. I had done a banking internship and wasn’t sure if that was where I should end up since I was also really interested in science.

He knew that Ishaan, my co-founder, had also been seeing these similar problems in science, and this field of neuroscience. The more Ishaan and I started talking, the more that we realized that, at some point we can impact a lot more than just our immediate labs if we turned it into a business. We started the company in May of this year, and since then it’s grown. We’re a team of three, rapidly expanding. We now have an office in Cambridge.

Yitzi Weiner: So there’s a saying that sometimes our mistakes can be our greatest teachers. Do you have a story about a humorous mistake that you made when you were first starting and the lesson that you took away from that?

Claire Swadling: That’s a good question. I will say something that I’m still learning is how much I have to change how you communicate with different people. Because of the nature of my job, I communicate with a lot of neuroscientists and physicists, but also a lot of business stakeholders.

I’ve been learning over time how to better switch contexts. I remember at the beginning of this journey, I was talking to a scientist and I made the mistake of going in with some of the classic small talk questions, like asking about the weather and the sports teams in the area, and I was met with a blank wall. So I thought, okay, note to self, some people prefer me to go straight to the science. That’s something that’s been part of the learning process.

Yitzi Weiner: That’s great. Amazing. What’s been the most challenging role or project or sub-project you’ve taken on so far and why?

Claire Swadling: One thing that I can say is that we’ve been thinking a lot about how to intentionally balance our research aims along with our product focus. Our ultimate goal, of course, is to put useful time back into the hands of scientists and be able to speed up productive research, and hopefully especially in this area of biology that we’re coming from as well.

Because of that, we make a lot of decisions on the day-to-day of, should we go down this extra research rabbit hole because maybe it’s interesting for X, Y, or Z, but on the other hand, maybe it could lead to a product that’s more accurate or faster. We try to balance that with how quickly we want to deliver the initial result.

Yitzi Weiner: That’s great. Amazing. Okay, so this is our signature question. Claire, you’ve been blessed with a lot of success now and you must have learned a lot from your experience. Looking back all the way to the beginning when you first started, can you share five things that you’ve learned over the years that someone starting out today can really benefit from? Five things you’ve learned over the years that someone starting out today can benefit from.

Claire Swadling: Okay, this is a great question. I think the first thing, which is probably the thing that helped me the most growing up, is never be afraid to send that first cold email. In high school when I started doing research, that was also through me just being ambitious and not socially aware enough just to think, you know, who cares if I embarrass myself in front of one more professor? I think that helped me into my professional life in terms of not being afraid to knock on the first door. So I think that’s number one.

A second one is to have some practice of humility. For me that happens through my faith, but I think other people are able to achieve that in other ways, whether through meditation or reflection. That’s been helpful in terms of not letting yourself go to any extreme, but also to be able to process both the highs and lows well.

A third piece of advice is anytime you have a major life event that happens and you are trying to process it, to really give yourself the time to let your emotions run their course, but then afterwards be honest about if there’s something you could have changed, and if there wasn’t, to really do your best to be forgiving with yourself and let it go.

Another thing I would note is that at the end of the day, what I believe machines will never be able to take away from us are our human relationships. That’s something to really prioritize. Also, I’d probably go back and tell myself in college to, not have watched the extra episode of Hulu and to have gone outside and talked to more people.

My last piece of advice would be really to surround yourself with the good that you want to be. We often talk about this in terms of the people that we surround ourselves with, but for me this also means the type of media that you consume. If you’re, let’s say, always scrolling on one particular negative side of X, or if you’re always listening to sad music, you’re setting yourself up for the type of day that you want to have. Throughout college, I realized that if I start the day on the right note, that sets me up for success.

Yitzi Weiner: That’s beautiful. Can you share some of the self-care routines that you do to help your body, mind, and heart to thrive?

Claire Swadling: I make prayer a large portion of my life. In the morning, taking time to be thankful, and in the evening, taking time to account for some of my actions and think about them, as well as to have a gratefulness practice. Then in terms of the rest of my routine as a founder, it’s up in the air. There are some days I prioritize my health less than I should, but a spiritual practice is the only one that I’m routinely doing.

Yitzi Weiner: Beautiful. This is our final aspirational question. Claire, because of your amazing work and the platform that you’ve built and the company that you lead, you’re honestly a person of great influence. If you could spread an idea or inspire a movement that will bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? Because you never know what your idea can spread.

Claire Swadling: I’ve never really thought of myself as a person of influence, but if I had to say something, the movement I would want to start is one probably centered on empathy, and really just getting a chance to think through not only your immediate needs, but those of others. That’s something that continues to help you whether you think about your personal or your professional life, because whether you’re trying to sell a product or even just talk to a friend about something, you can’t really go anywhere until you start on common ground.

Yitzi Weiner: Amazing. How can readers continue to follow your work? How can they reach out if they want to learn more or engage your services? How can our readers support your work in any possible way?

Claire Swadling: The best way to reach us now is through my LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/claire-swadling/

Yitzi Weiner: Claire, it’s been an honor to meet you. I wish you continued success and good health and blessings, and I’d love to do this again next year.

Claire Swadling: Thank you for the wonderful interview. It’s my first one of this kind, so I appreciate how great you’ve been.

Visual Intuition’s Claire Swadling on Teaching AI to ‘Visually Reason’ Like Humans was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

“I think sometimes the hardest technology problems aren’t really technology problems at all; they’re human problems.”

At 13, Jill Bruning was already working two jobs. During the day, she detasseled corn in rural Illinois. At night, she worked as a carhop at a Dog n Suds. The money was going toward something she had come to regard as essential: a college education and the ability to support herself. Growing up about 80 miles outside Chicago with two sisters and a mother whose marriages had often been difficult, Bruning had seen what financial dependence could mean for women. “I wanted a career, and I wanted to be able to earn my own money,” she recalls. She did not yet know what that career would be. She knew why she needed one.

Four decades later, Bruning is the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of Amentum, an advanced engineering and technology company with approximately 50,000 employees working across complex government and commercial programs. Her responsibilities now include managing one of the most consequential technological questions facing large organizations: how to integrate artificial intelligence into the way people work. Yet the engineer who built her career solving technical problems has arrived at a somewhat unexpected conclusion. Some of the most difficult challenges in technology have very little to do with technology itself.

Her route into engineering began with a high school math teacher who recognized her aptitude for science and problem-solving. Bruning earned a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Illinois and a master’s from MIT, entering a profession where women were still conspicuously outnumbered. She remembers trying to accommodate the prevailing corporate culture, right down to her wardrobe. “I even wore the little bow ties on my blouses in the man suits, as if that would work,” she says. The experiment in fitting in proved less valuable than the realization that followed. She found that becoming more comfortable with her own leadership style brought greater success and considerably less strain.

There were formidable technical assignments along the way. Early in her career, Bruning specialized in cryogenic engineering, developing expertise in the extremely low temperatures required for sophisticated scientific equipment. She recalls collaborating on cooling technologies associated with efforts to restore capabilities to the Hubble Space Telescope. The work gave her a connection to one of the world’s most recognizable scientific instruments, even if the engineering behind its operation was largely invisible to the public.

Another defining assignment came in the aftermath of September 11, 2001. Working in information technology, Bruning was called to Washington, D.C., to help redesign networks that would allow intelligence agencies to share information more effectively. The experience shifted her professional geography and reinforced the importance of the work itself. “I really felt like I was working on something that made a difference,” she recalls. She never left Washington.

Over the following decades, Bruning moved through senior technical and operational leadership positions at companies including CSC, NJVC, URS, and AECOM. Her responsibilities expanded from specialized engineering to large government programs and organizational management. At Amentum, she led major business operations before becoming CTO. That combination of technical depth and operational experience matters in her current position, where an important part of the job involves finding connections between engineering expertise in one part of the company and an entirely different customer’s problem.

Artificial intelligence has made those connections both more promising and more complicated. Bruning sees enormous potential in technologies that can shorten design cycles, retrieve engineering knowledge, and help technical teams evaluate their work. She describes engineers writing AI scripts to check drawings against mechanical and electrical design codes, allowing them to identify problems and improve designs more quickly. The possibilities keep expanding as employees discover what the tools can accomplish.

But speed creates its own management problems. At Amentum, enthusiasm for AI initially encouraged employees to compete over how extensively they used it. Bruning describes a shift toward recognizing the people who use computing resources most efficiently. The distinction is revealing. A technology capable of generating more work, more experimentation, and more consumption does not automatically create more value. Someone still has to decide what matters.

For Bruning, that responsibility belongs firmly with people. “I think sometimes the hardest technology problems aren’t really technology problems at all; they’re human problems,” she says. She is particularly concerned with how leaders establish accountability when work is shared between employees and increasingly capable AI systems. Which decisions can reasonably be delegated? Who checks the results? How does an organization preserve judgment, trust, and cybersecurity while changing familiar processes? She favors an approach her company calls “human in the lead, as opposed to human in the loop,” emphasizing human oversight and authority as technology assumes more tasks.

There is an interesting continuity between that position and the independence she sought as a teenager. Bruning’s early ambitions centered on acquiring the education and economic security necessary to make her own decisions. Her present work involves helping organizations decide how much authority they can responsibly give to machines. In both cases, the underlying issue is control, although the scale and consequences have changed considerably.

Education remains personal to her. Through a family foundation named for her late husband, she supports community development and educational opportunities in rural Missouri. Having grown up in a small community herself, she knows that access to education cannot always be taken for granted. Asked what initiative she would most like to expand, she returns to that work without hesitation.

For someone whose professional life now revolves around artificial intelligence, Bruning remains unusually attentive to the capabilities technology cannot supply on its own: trust, relationships, judgment, and the willingness to learn. Her career has taken her from Illinois cornfields to space technology, intelligence infrastructure, and the executive leadership of a global engineering company. The next challenge may be less about what machines become capable of doing than what their human counterparts choose to do with that capability. And for Bruning, who spent her early career learning to stop conforming to other people’s expectations, the question of how people retain their agency has a particular resonance.

Yitzi: Jill, it’s an honor to meet you. Before we dive in and talk about your great work and AI transformation, our readers would love to learn about Jill Bruning’s personal origin story. We’d love to hear about your childhood, how you grew up, and particularly the seeds of all the amazing leadership that has come since then.

Jill: Well, I grew up outside of Chicago. I don’t know if you can pick that up from the accent or not, a little small town about 80 miles outside Chicago. I grew up with two sisters and a mostly single mom in between a bunch of marriages that didn’t go well for the most part. What I will say is, in that era, women looked to their spouses for their financial security. I learned a lot from my mom, and one of those lessons was that I wanted a career and I wanted to be able to earn my own money. I didn’t know what that looked like as a child, but I remember talking to people about what that would take, and they said, “Well, you’d have to go to college.” Okay, how do I do that? “Well, you have to really work hard, get good grades, and save your money.” So I was always working multiple jobs. For my first jobs at 13, I detasseled corn during the day and then worked as a carhop at a Dog n Suds at night. I did achieve my goal and went to college, and my two sisters did too. Strong females that broke the chain there.

Yitzi: Wonderful. Can you tell us a bit about how you became one of the C-level leaders of Amentum? Tell us a bit about the story.

Jill: Amentum is an advanced engineering and technology company and I am a mechanical engineer. I actually didn’t know much about engineering when I went to high school or even when I first started my college career. But I had a high school math teacher who said, “You’re good at math and science and problem-solving. You should be an engineer.” And I do love to solve problems. So I grew up in engineering. I started my career and got into the government contracting community, working on U.S. government contracts, and have spent my 40-year career working for engineering and technology companies in the government contracting space.

Yitzi: Amazing. You have to tell readers a bit about what your day-to-day looks like and what it actually is that you do. Not classified.

Jill: As the Chief Technology Officer, I’m responsible for the technology strategy for the company, developing technology solutions, and integrating technology connections across the company. We have 50,000 employees and some absolutely fantastic technical work that goes on. So a lot of times it’s, “Hey, did you know there’s this cool thing going on over here that we can connect to a customer need, maybe in a different part of the business?” I’ve been with the company almost 14 years, so I’ve been through a lot of the growth. I was on the engineering and operations side, so I know a lot about the business. It’s a lot of fun at this point to be able to connect the technical work we do in order to meet the solutions our customers need.

Yitzi: Amazing. You probably have some amazing stories from your leadership in your career, and I’m sure it’s difficult to single out. Can you share with our readers two stories that stand out in your mind?

Jill: World events often shape our careers, and certainly that was the case with me during 9/11. I was working in IT at the time, and I was asked to come to DC to help with re-architecting the network that the intelligence community needed to be able to share information with each other. That was something where I really felt like I was working on something that made a difference. And guess what? I’m still in DC, so it got me here where all the action is!

I think another one that comes to mind for me is I worked on cryogenic technology when I was a mechanical engineer. That was my technical specialty. Cryogenic technology is used to cool space sensors, like in the space telescope, like Hubble. If you recall, that wasn’t working when it first went up, and I had the opportunity to work with a lot of colleagues on developing solutions for cryogenic technology that ended up fixing the Hubble telescope.

Yitzi: Wow, that’s so cool. Amazing. That’s a great story. It’s been said that sometimes our mistakes can be our greatest teachers. Do you have a story about a humorous mistake that you made when you were first starting out and the lesson that you took away from that?

Jill: When I think about mistakes we made, and especially me, I’m a female engineer. I grew up in a career where there were mostly men, and I think I spent a lot of time trying to fit in with a male culture. I even wore the little bow ties on my blouses in the man suits, as if that would work. I think what it taught me over the years is to just be who I am, and the more authentic I became as a leader, actually the more success I had. That lesson of stop trying to bend — it also creates a lot of stress when you are not being who you really are. So that initial career of trying to look like a guy didn’t really work too well.

Yitzi: Amazing. So let’s talk about your work now. You have so much impressive work. Whatever you’re allowed to share, can you share some of the most interesting or exciting projects that you’re working on now and what you hope to be working on in the near future?

Jill: I think the thing that is consuming most of the conversation in technology today is around artificial intelligence. That certainly is a challenge. We get the opportunity to look at AI and how AI can help us not only solve problems, but change the way that we do work. When I first started this role, oh gosh, a little over two years ago, AI was not consuming the conversation that it is today. I actually asked ChatGPT, “How long are we going to have to talk about AI?” ChatGPT told me 2028. Then it’ll just be part of how we do business, hopefully! It certainly plays a role in a lot of the transformative projects that we’re doing at Amentum.

Yitzi: Amazing. So let’s get more granular. The topic of our interview is AI transformation. Let’s start on some basics from your perspective, and also just as a simple definition, how do you define AI transformation?

Jill: Being able to think about AI transformation isn’t just about deploying the technology. When you say AI transformation, it’s really redesigning the business around new ways of working. When you just deploy the technology, that’s like a project. The other is really looking for how we can use that for value and competitive advantage. I think it’s re-looking at ways of working and also that AI culture where we all have to let go of the way we have been doing things, to learn new skills, to adapt, and to change as leaders for how we lead in the AI era.

Yitzi: Amazing. How is AI transformation different than the buzzword of the past decade, digital transformation?

Jill: Well, I think AI is a part of digital transformation. We still have a ways to go. But now there are opportunities for AI to accelerate. If you think about AI like a curve going up, it’s like a rocket ship right now. There’s a lot of energy, and it goes faster. I think AI is a subset of overall digital transformation, but it’s certainly one that’s going faster and gives us the opportunity to really change how we work. So I think leaders have to adjust not just to the capability, but to how we redesign work. How do we define authority? How do we manage the human part of the AI-human interface? It’s a whole different world.

Yitzi: People have very strong emotional reactions to AI, and I imagine it’s stronger reactions than people had to the introduction of the computer. Maybe not, but I feel like there’s a particular emotional reaction people have to AI, and I’m sure there’s resistance to AI transformation. How have you been able to engage and overcome the resistance to AI?

Jill: Well, I’ll share a story. When I was in high school, we took typing classes on typewriters. The keyboard and the computer were just starting to come out, and people said, “Nobody’s ever going to use that. You can’t trust it. We’re going to keep teaching with the typewriter and typing skills.” So I think part of the fear is just the unknown.

It’s also a very powerful technology that requires us to learn new things and to be able to challenge how we do work. It’s not simply what AI can do, but what should be delegated to a digital AI worker. What authority are we giving that as leaders to be able to now have this blended human and AI workforce, and then how do we have confidence in that? I also feel like AI is giving us the opportunity to embrace our human side a lot more. There are things that technology, whether it’s AI or other tools, will never do. They won’t have the human elements. The ability to trust, to have judgment, to work with each other, and to have relationships are the things that are uniquely human. So we’ve got to get better at the human stuff so we can delegate the things that AI does better than us.

Yitzi: Amazing. With 50,000 employees, I probably can’t even conceive of the obstacles that are in your way to implement an AI transformation. What are the biggest obstacles, aside from resistance, and how do you implement that? How do you overcome them?

Jill: I think sometimes the hardest technology problems aren’t really technology problems at all; they’re human problems. Responsible adoption, especially for AI and AI transformation, is focusing on that human element, making sure we have clear responsibility and accountability. Then, innovation just requires that we see that possibility and sometimes act before we’re certain. We have to decide how we’re going to work differently to be successful. It’s not all about the algorithms; it’s about creating an organization that can continuously learn and adapt and reinvent itself. I think some of the most successful projects aren’t necessarily the ones that have the most advanced AI; they’re the ones that are combining the AI tool with that human potential, so that you’re making the human — we call it human in the lead, not in the loop — and using that human leadership and judgment.

Yitzi: Wow. Have you found that using AI has made it easier to ideate and engineer new products and new things? Have you found that once you introduce AI, everything’s much quicker and maybe more advanced, more robust, or more successful?

Jill: There are a lot of questions in that question, but let me start with the beginning. It certainly is going faster. We are seeing much shorter development times. What that allows you to do is try something, and you can iterate a lot faster if you didn’t get it right. You can use AI to check AI. I think a lot of the normal development time that somebody would take for a new technology is really accelerated because AI is very quick to iterate with.

I think that AI also allows us to build solutions and try them, and what we’re seeing is when we put those solutions into a customer environment, particularly, the very next thing they say is, “Oh, this is great. Now can it do more? How about this? Can we add that?” So it’s not stagnant. It’s not like, “Here’s a typewriter and you’re done.” It really is an opportunity to keep adding more and seeing more possibilities, and asking, “Oh, how about if we connect this to something else?” So we see it as an ongoing thing. It doesn’t seem to stop, which gives it a lot of positive energy.

Yitzi: Let’s say you’re on the engineering floor or engineering desk. What does it look like to use AI to engineer a safety feature for a nuclear power plant?

Jill: Oh, I’m glad you asked that one because we have a lot of engineers, and some of our smart engineers start to say, “I don’t like to bring my engineering drawings to my boss without them being checked.” So they write a little AI script to check their drawings, and then they write a script that brings in the design codes from electrical and mechanical automatically against the drawing set. People are innovating what to do with this technology every day. Then they’re saying, “How can I look at past engineering designs and drawings that we’ve done, and how can I learn from those and bring that into my design space?” It’s really about being able to make data accessible in a way that it hasn’t been before, to really reduce the cycle time of design as well as improve the quality of what’s done, to make sure you’re always having those checkpoints. You can use AI to give you information at your fingertips that you didn’t have before — or you did, but it was in books on your shelf.

Yitzi: Wow. When AI first came out, every seat had unlimited compute and now things are different. How does it work? Do you give every employee a certain budget, like you can spend X amount? What does a huge company do with that?

Jill: Well, for our company, we have a lot of people who are out with our customers. They work in the government space, and they have access to government computers and government AI. Then we have people who are in the Amentum space, and we have our own governance and responsible use policies. Yes, we give them tools, but we’re very clear about guardrails, oversight, especially cybersecurity compliance, and making sure that we’re doing it in a safe and responsible way.

Then what you pointed out starts to happen. We have those people at the very top who are doing all the programming, and they want all the latest tools, and they want all the tokens unlimited, and then you start to rack up the dollars. So we’ve started to recognize people who are leading efficient use of AI. We used to just have the leaderboard of who’s doing it the most, and now it’s who’s doing the very clever, efficient things with their tokens, and then sharing what those people are doing with their agents and how they’re doing it with each other. I think there’s this competitive gaming element with AI that we see where people like to share what they’re doing, and they love to be up on the leaderboards, and being able to combine those with the tasks that they’re doing and the efficiency with which they’re doing it.

Yitzi: Amazing. Okay, here’s the centerpiece of our interview, our signature question. Jill, you’ve been blessed with a lot of success and you must have learned a lot from your experience. Based on your experience, can you share five things every Fortune 500 leader needs to know to successfully lead their organization through an AI transformation?

Jill: To successfully lead in the AI era, it’s not just all about just the AI, the tools, and the algorithms. It’s about leading within an organization that can adapt and learn.

1. My thoughts are, first, leadership involvement. We saw it initially with AI: the leaders who were using AI themselves, who would talk about it with their teams, and who would share what they’re doing, good and bad — “What did I learn?” — really had teams that accelerated and transformed.
2. Second, as leaders, we also have to redesign how work gets done. We don’t want to take a manual process and automate pieces of it with AI, or a broken process, or where we have process debt, instead of rethinking and reimagining how the work gets done.
3. The third thing I would say is about leadership and leadership changes: thinking about and being able to manage this combination of digital and human work, and what can be delegated and what should be delegated — not just can AI do it, but is that the right place and the right process? Then, where is that human oversight, and where does that need to be? Where’s that human decision-making? It’s being able, as leaders, to delegate and manage for both the human side and the digital worker side.
4. Fourth, you have to build confidence with your team and within your organization. Having best practices, ways to share, and inviting feedback. This is an iterative technology, so to be successful, you have to be able to be agile, to move, and to share that learning, inviting feedback and collecting that data.
5. Lastly, number five — though I would say maybe it’s number one, even if I put it at number five — is that you have to be responsible and accountable. You have to make trust and accountability part of the execution. You have to provide the guardrails, the cybersecurity, and the responsible use to make sure anything you’re doing in your transformation is on a trusted foundation.

Yitzi: Amazing, fantastic. This is our final aspirational question. Jill, because of your amazing work and the company and platform that you’re leading, you’re a person of enormous influence. If you could spread an idea or inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? Because you never know what your idea can inspire.

Jill: Oh, well, thank you for that question. I am a big believer in education. I grew up in a small rural area, and sometimes we take it for granted that people have access to education, especially in rural areas. So definitely I would focus on something to support education. My family actually does have a foundation named after my late husband that does community development and education in rural Missouri. I’m very proud of that work, and man, if that could go bigger, I’d be all over it.

Yitzi: Really? That’s wonderful. Well, Jill, how can our readers continue to follow your work? How can they learn more about what Amentum is doing? How can our readers support you in any possible way?

Jill: Well, you can certainly go to our website at amentum.com. You can get in touch with our Marketing & Communications team, or you can follow me. I’m on LinkedIn, and happy to take more followers and connect with anybody on that platform.

Yitzi: Jill, it’s been a delight to meet you. I wish you continued success and good health, and I’d love to do this again in the near future.

Jill: Well, thank you so much. I would love to do it too. It was a real pleasure talking with you, Yitzi. Thank you.

Amentum CTO Jill Bruning: Why AI’s Toughest Challenges Are Human Problems was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

“Right now, with the dawn of AI in the music industry, I think lyrics are the last battleground for real human involvement in music. ChatGPT hasn’t figured out lyrics yet, and great lyrics are still one of the stamps of real songwriting.”

I had the pleasure of talking with Sam Drysdale, a musician who has learned to measure certain successes without a chart position attached. One of his proudest recent accomplishments involved five days traveling around Los Angeles with two friends, shooting a music video for his song “A Place.” Working with Helder Matias and Rod Hezi, Drysdale brought an idea from his imagination to the screen with a crew of just three people. The finished video looked exactly as he had envisioned it. “That very rarely happens in the arts world,” he admits.

For Drysdale, the satisfaction was about more than making a video. It was another small victory in a career increasingly defined by his determination to do things himself. The Toronto-based singer-songwriter has spent years learning to navigate an industry that regularly tells independent musicians what they cannot do. Along the way, he has become his own project manager, content creator, and occasional videographer. The irony is that mastering the business of being Sam Drysdale sometimes leaves him less time to practice the music that made him want a career in the first place.

His latest project, Purgatory Cove, was released on October 23, 2026, and reflects a similar contradiction. It is an album about withdrawing from the world to understand a painful relationship, made by a musician whose career depends on putting increasingly personal parts of himself before an audience.

Growing up in Puslinch, Ontario, about an hour outside Toronto, Drysdale had every reason to become a musician. His mother was a touring performer who later worked in radio. His father, a robotics engineer, built guitars and played in a band. Music was everywhere in the house, though young Sam wanted little to do with it. That changed around 16, when he began exploring his father’s collection of Neil Young and Pink Floyd records. John Mayer and Death Cab for Cutie followed, and he became fascinated by musicians who could build an entire song around a guitar and a voice.

He eventually moved to Los Angeles to study independent artistry at Musicians Institute. At the time, he wasn’t convinced the education would be particularly useful. A decade of making music changed his opinion. Learning to operate without a record label’s machinery turned out to be remarkably practical preparation for the career he would build.

There were early signs of ambition. He remembers organizing his first major performance at Toronto’s Mod Club, now known as the Axis Club, while still in his twenties. He remains proud of having pulled it off, though his assessment of the musical performance is considerably less flattering. “I’m sure I wasn’t very good that night,” he says.

“You get almost all nos in this industry,” he says. Rejection pushed him toward developing skills that made him less dependent on other people’s approval.

The approach began producing wider recognition. His 2024 song “Only The Strong Survive,” written with his mother in mind, surpassed 10 million global streams and received a 2025 Folk Music Ontario Song of the Year nomination. “Cold Water” subsequently brought him Canadian radio attention. In April 2026, he signed with ONErpm Nashville, an important development for an artist who had spent much of his career handling his own business.

Yet the music bringing Drysdale this attention was increasingly stripped of the pop production he had once embraced. His return to folk-oriented songwriting coincided with a more deliberate examination of his values, relationships, and sense of identity. He had come to believe that finding an authentic artistic voice required first understanding the person behind it.

That thinking runs through Purgatory Cove. Drysdale and producer John Fellner converted his mother’s cabin in Northern Ontario into a recording studio. The cabin sits on a small inlet called Purgatory Cove, which gave the album its title. But the location became something more substantial than a geographical reference.

The record emerged from roughly three years of processing heartbreak, solitude, and change. Drysdale describes its emotional setting as a metaphorical camping trip, a retreat from ordinary life following a relationship that had brought him profound love and considerable pain. The album follows the attempt to make sense of both, without pretending that understanding arrives quickly.

Its final advance single, “Love You into Loving Me,” captures the particular sadness of believing that enough devotion can change another person’s feelings. Drysdale conceived it as a response to Bonnie Raitt’s “I Can’t Make You Love Me,” imagining the youthful conviction that precedes the older song’s painful recognition. What sounds superficially hopeful becomes a portrait of someone refusing to acknowledge what is already happening.

Such contradictions interest him more than easy resolutions. Asked what connects his songs, Drysdale returns to the meaning of love, which he has increasingly come to associate with sacrifice. “Love is mostly defined by sacrifice,” he says, extending the idea beyond romance to relationships with one’s craft and ambitions.

He is equally outspoken about the importance of lyrics in an industry increasingly shaped by artificial intelligence. He calls them “the last battleground for real good human involvement in music,” arguing for songwriting that rewards close attention and repeated listening. He wants listeners to work through his words rather than understand every line immediately.

There is a revealing contrast between this philosophical approach and the way Drysdale restores order to his everyday life. A dedicated gym-goer, he appreciates weightlifting precisely because progress can be measured. A weight lifted this week can become a slightly heavier one next week. Music offers no comparable guarantee. Rehearsals, administrative work, rejection, creativity, and audience response refuse to obey such predictable rules.

Perhaps that is why his most interesting ambition extends beyond musical success. When asked what idea he would like to spread, Drysdale advocates something considerably less fashionable than certainty: the willingness to admit ignorance. He wishes more people were comfortable saying, “I’d like to learn more. I don’t know.”

For a musician who has spent years teaching himself how to control nearly every aspect of his career, it is a revealing admission. Drysdale has learned how to make more things happen on his own terms. His newest music, however, concerns the experiences that no amount of effort can fully control, particularly whom we love, what we lose, and how long it takes to understand either.

Yitzi Weiner: Sam Drysdale, it’s such an honor to meet you. Before we dive in and talk about your amazing work and your album, readers would love to learn about Sam Drysdale’s personal origin story. Can you share with us a story of your childhood, how you grew up, and particularly the seeds of all the amazing creativity and ingenuity that has come since then?

Sam Drysdale: I grew up in a town called Puslinch, Ontario, which is just an hour outside of Toronto, Ontario. And I grew up with two musical parents. My mom was a touring musician and then a radio DJ. My dad is a robotics engineer, but he builds guitars and plays in a band for fun. So I always grew up with music in the household. I actually was not interested in music at all as a kid. I had no interest in pursuing music. And then when I was about 16, I started listening to a lot of my dad’s old records, a lot of Neil Young, Pink Floyd, and then I got into some of the more modern singer-songwriters. John Mayer was the big one that really grabbed me as a kid, and I listened to a lot of him and Death Cab for Cutie, and just anyone that played guitar and sang, I was listening to. I went to music college in Los Angeles for the independent artist program, and I’ve been writing and singing songs ever since.

Yitzi Weiner: Amazing. I’m sure you have some amazing stories from your successful career and I’m sure this is difficult to single out. Can you share two stories that stand out in your mind from your career?

Sam Drysdale: A lot of the moments from my career that make me the most proud are the little things we’ve built as an independent artist. I went to college for independent artistry, which was essentially a crash course in navigating the music business without the help of a label and learning to do everything on your own. At the time, I never really thought that degree would matter all that much, but looking back, that’s exactly what I’ve spent the last 10 years doing — pursuing this dream as somebody who likes to do everything themselves.

One of my favorite recent memories was shooting a music video for “A Place,” a song off the album. I wrote and produced the video alongside two close friends, Helder Matias and Rod Hezi. We spent five days traveling around Los Angeles filming, and it came together exactly how I’d imagined it. That very rarely happens in the arts, where an idea starts in your head, somewhere up in the clouds, and you have to do the work to bring it down to ground level. The finished video was exactly what I’d envisioned, and I’m really proud of what the three of us created. I think it looks like it had a much bigger budget than it actually did.

Another moment I’m really proud of, looking back, is my very first show. I put on a pretty big show at a legendary Toronto venue called the Mod Club. I was around 24 at the time, and even looking back now, I’m proud of what I was able to pull together. That was a big accomplishment for me.

Those are two moments that immediately come to mind.

Yitzi Weiner: There’s a saying that “no” is not rejection, but redirection. Do you have a story like that where you got a “no” to an opportunity or to a gig that led to an even better opportunity?

Sam Drysdale: As an independent artist, you get nos all the time. I used to have a deal with a major label that I wouldn’t say went poorly, but it didn’t go as well as I had hoped it would go. And I would say that was a no that then turned into the opportunity for me to really pursue independent music in a way that I never thought I would. So I would say that’s a big one.

You get almost all nos in this industry. Most people are saying no to you most of the time. So the biggest thing that’s come from people saying no to me is I’ve learned how to do a lot of things myself, which has turned out to be pretty valuable.

Yitzi Weiner: That’s a great answer. What’s been the most challenging project or role you’ve taken on so far and why?

Sam Drysdale: The most challenging for me, particularly, has now become managing all of the different facets of this industry. I shoot a lot of my own music videos now. I bought a camera this year, and I shoot everything myself. Learning how to manage the content side of music and then all of the administrative stuff that goes along with the boring parts of music that nobody wants to hear about, that’s been really challenging.

And then even today, I was just in a rehearsal, and I realized now that I’m overseeing everything from a project management standpoint in my career; it’s been hard to spend as much time as I’d like focusing on the live show and playing with the band and prioritizing making sure things sound great. It’s been hard for me to find my feet in the live arena. And I love playing live, but it’s been very hard there.

Yitzi Weiner: Great answer. Let’s talk about your latest album. Tell us all about it, Sam. And tell us why, in your unbiased opinion, our readers have to listen to it.

Sam Drysdale:

The new album is called Purgatory Cove, and the title has two meanings. The first is where it was inspired. I made most of this record at my mom’s cabin, which my producer John Fellner and I converted into a studio. It’s located on Purgatory Cove, a small inlet of water north of Toronto.

The second meaning is that the whole album is about escaping your life after heartbreak, seeking solitude, reflecting, and going through a season of change, learning, and hopefully refining. To me, Purgatory Cove embodies that. It’s like going on this metaphorical camping trip for years of my life, getting over someone who caused me a lot of pain but also gave me profound love and taught me great lessons, and coming back as somebody new. In my mind, Purgatory Cove is where I went for those three years while I was working on getting over this person and moving on.

As for why you should listen to this album, I think it’s a really complete project. Right now, with the dawn of AI in the music industry, I think lyrics are the last battleground for real human involvement in music. ChatGPT hasn’t figured out lyrics yet, and great lyrics are still one of the stamps of real songwriting. I’m really proud of the lyrics on this album. Some might not make sense on the first listen, but I’ve always liked songs where you have to get your shovel out and dig a little before you realize the gold that’s in them. I think this album has a lot of that.

If you’re somebody who likes listening to full bodies of work, especially more than once, I think this is a good album for you. I think it’ll age well, and I really hope it does.

Yitzi Weiner: That’s amazing. If you could take all of your music, all of the lyrics, all the melodies, all the album covers, put it in a blender, and mix it up, what would the message be from that mixture?

Sam Drysdale: I’m going to take my body of work post-transition into the folk singer-songwriter world, because, at first, there was a brief period of time where I was putting more poppy music With that in mind, I think a lot of my music has to do with the exploration of what real love is and what it really means.

hat I’ve started to learn as I’ve gotten older is that love is mostly defined by how much you are willing to sacrifice to protect love. Whether that be love for somebody or a love for your craft or whatever it is, sacrifice will end up dictating the density of that love. And to me, that is what a lot of my music embodies: me having spent all this time trying to figure out what real love is. What does it mean? Why do we use it in so many different applications? And that’s the best I’ve been able to come up with so far as a — we’ll call me an adult, I guess.

Yitzi Weiner: Okay, amazing. So this is our signature question. You’ve been blessed with a lot of success now, and you must have learned a lot from your experiences. Looking back all the way to the beginning when you first started, can you share five things that you’ve learned over the years that someone starting out today can really benefit from?

Sam Drysdale:

1. Find out who you are as a person before you find your sound as an artist. You hear a lot of great artists talk about how important it is to find your sound and trust who you are. But something that’s become clear to me is that you need to have a baseline of who you are as a person first. The music I made before I really understood my values doesn’t stand up the same way. Since becoming more rooted in who I am, my music has become more authentic, and people resonate with it more. Ask yourself questions like: What’s the one pair of jeans you’d never get rid of? Where’s your favorite place to listen to music? If you could make music for one person, who would it be? Those are the kinds of questions that help you find your authentic self.
2. Trust your gut. It’s an old one that’s repeated all the time, but my gut has proven me right more than it’s proven me wrong. Even if you’re right 60% of the time, that’s still better than ignoring your instincts and only being right 40% of the time. Trusting your gut is a big one.
3. Learn as many skills as you can. The more you learn how to do yourself, the less you’ll have to pay other people for, and that’s incredibly valuable in today’s music economy. Putting effort into learning different tricks of the trade doesn’t necessarily take away from being a musician. I’ve learned a whole bunch of things along the way that have been really helpful and really fun.
4. Work on your lyrics. From an artistic perspective, really focus on writing good lyrics. I genuinely believe lyrics are the one thing that AI is never going to be able to touch.
5. Surround yourself with good people. There’s that old saying that you’re the accumulation of your five best friends, and I really believe that. Keep good people around you, find good friends, and drown people in honey, not vinegar. Being disagreeable might get you some short-term gain, but in the long run, just be good to people and choose your friends wisely.

Yitzi Weiner: This is our final aspirational question. Sam, because of your amazing work and the platform that you built, you’re a person of enormous influence. If you could spread an idea or inspire a movement that will bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? Because you never know what your idea can inspire.

Sam Drysdale: You know what? I’d have to think about this a little more to give a really proper answer, but I think if more of us were willing to admit that we don’t know as much as we think we do, the world would be a better place. A lot of people have caused violence and problems in this world by thinking they know a lot more than they actually do, simply because it makes them comfortable to think that.

I don’t think a lot of us really know what’s best for the person next to us, despite the fact that we’re all a lot more similar than we sometimes acknowledge. If more people were willing to simply say, “I don’t know,” or “Can you tell me more about your opinion?” I think that would go a long way, especially with the state of the world these days.

So yeah, I think people being more comfortable saying, “I’d like to learn more. I don’t know,” could make a real difference.

Yitzi Weiner: That’s brilliant. Amazing. Sam, how can the readers purchase the album? How can they listen to your music in general? How can the readers support you in any possible way?

Sam Drysdale: You can purchase my album through my website at samdrysdalemusic.store or find it on Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, or wherever you prefer to listen! You can also follow me on Instagram and TikTok at @samdrysdalemusic to keep up with everything we’ve got going on. And if you really want to come show some love, come find me at a show! That’s all we can really ask for, and I appreciate every bit of support.

Yitzi Weiner: Sam, it’s been an honor to meet you. I wish you continued success, good health and blessings, and I’d love to do this again next year.

Sam Drysdale: Absolutely. Hey, appreciate you, man. Thank you so much for having me.

Sam Drysdale: Why Authenticity and DIY Skills Are Key to Independent Music Success was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

“Just recognizing that you can’t build a spacecraft and plug people in later — you have to integrate your thinking, which would also help us here on Earth.”

I had the pleasure of talking with Dr. Mark Shelhamer, a scientist who has spent decades studying what happens to the human body in space and who has remarkably little patience for the idea of colonizing Mars. Even under the worst imaginable conditions on Earth, he argues, living here would be vastly easier than surviving on the Red Planet. “You’ve got to be crazy. Really, it’s untenable,” he says. Yet Shelhamer believes humans absolutely should go to Mars. He just wants us to understand what we’re getting ourselves into.

For Shelhamer, the greatest danger in a mission to Mars may come from something less spectacular than a rocket failure or a radiation storm: our habit of treating the human body as a collection of separate parts. A former Chief Scientist of NASA’s Human Research Program and a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, he has spent much of his career investigating how the brain and body adapt to spaceflight. His latest work, explored in his book Are We Ready for Mars?, challenges a fundamental assumption underlying modern medicine and engineering: that understanding every component of a complicated system individually means we understand how the entire system functions as an integrated whole.

His fascination with complicated systems began long before NASA entered the picture. Shelhamer grew up in a household where education was an expectation, despite neither parent having completed college. His mother was a nurse, his father worked as a clerk in a steel mill, and the family home was filled with books. An uncle who had surveyed coal mines and performed codebreaking for the government during World War II became another important intellectual influence. By age ten, Shelhamer was captivated by the Apollo moon landing, but he was equally fascinated by shortwave radio and the invisible signals traveling through the air. He became an amateur radio operator, an interest he maintains to this day.

Electrical engineering seemed the natural career. Then, during his freshman year of college, his father received a pacemaker. With his mother and two aunts working as nurses, Shelhamer had already been exposed to medicine, but the intersection of electronics and human physiology now became particularly compelling. He began gravitating toward biomedical engineering, while his interest in space exploration resurfaced with the emergence of the Space Shuttle program.

In 1982, while searching for graduate programs, he discovered MIT’s Man Vehicle Laboratory. Researchers there studied how the brain interprets sensory information, particularly the signals responsible for balance and spatial orientation, and how those processes change in weightlessness. For Shelhamer, it was an extraordinary convergence. He could pursue, as he puts it, “my vocation and my avocation at the same place.”

He supported experiments aboard two Space Shuttle missions, earned his doctorate in 1990, and moved to Johns Hopkins, where he worked with researchers David Zee and David Robinson to deepen his understanding of the neurological mechanisms governing eye movements and balance. For years, his research combined fundamental neuroscience with occasional spaceflight projects.

Then, in 2013, he took a three-year leave of absence to become Chief Scientist of NASA’s Human Research Program at Johnson Space Center. The assignment transformed his perspective.

Suddenly, his responsibilities extended far beyond the balance system. He was overseeing research involving cardiovascular function, muscles, bones, immunity, psychology, and the many other ways prolonged spaceflight can affect human beings. He began noticing that these systems, although intimately connected inside the body, were often investigated independently. Each field had its specialists, its measurements, and its proposed solutions. But what happened when several systems changed simultaneously?

Shelhamer became convinced that this compartmentalized approach could have deadly consequences. In a mission where medical resources are severely limited and rescue may be impossible, he warns, failing to understand the interactions among physiological systems could end up “killing somebody.”

His concern extends beyond astronauts. Modern medicine frequently sends patients from one specialist to another, with each physician concentrating on a particular organ or condition. Shelhamer wonders whether a more integrated approach could identify problems earlier by examining how physical health interacts with psychological stress, relationships, working conditions, and the surrounding environment.

The ambition is considerable, and he acknowledges the scientific difficulties. His emerging field of multi-system resilience attempts to model those relationships using principles from engineering and complexity science. Much of this research remains developmental. The goal is to recognize when an interconnected system is beginning to deteriorate before an obvious crisis occurs.

One of Shelhamer’s favorite illustrations of resilience comes from the film The Martian. What impresses him is the constant procession of unexpected problems, which he summarizes as “just one damn thing after another.” He is less convinced by the ease with which the fictional astronauts agree to extend an already exhausting mission by years. Spaceflight, he points out, has psychological costs that heroic narratives can underestimate.

That skepticism gives his work a distinctive character. He admires astronauts and the engineers who make their missions possible, but he resists the temptation to treat extraordinary people as immune to ordinary human limitations. If he could advise Elon Musk, one of his central messages would be simple: “you can’t build a spacecraft and plug people in later.”

There is a certain irony in the direction Shelhamer’s career has taken. The boy fascinated by signals and electrical systems has become a scientist arguing that our most sophisticated systems are still inadequate unless they account for the unpredictable complexity of human life. He wants the same interdisciplinary thinking applied to medicine on Earth, where the consequences may be less dramatic than a failed Mars mission but are no less personal.

When asked about his influence, Shelhamer responds with characteristic modesty: “I wish I had more influence than I do.” What he hopes to change is the way researchers approach complicated problems, beginning with his own students. His challenge to them, and ultimately to the people planning humanity’s next great expedition, is to look beyond the individual pieces and understand how everything works together.

Getting humans to Mars will require extraordinary rockets. Keeping them healthy, capable, and resilient once they arrive may require an equally extraordinary change in how we think about ourselves.

Yitzi Weiner: Dr. Shelhamer, it is such an honor to meet you. Before we dive in and talk about your amazing work, our readers would love to learn about Dr. Shelhamer’s personal origin story. Give us context. Can you share with us a story of your childhood, how you grew up, and particularly the seeds of all the amazing ingenuity and leadership that have come since then?

Mark Shelhamer: Oh, you humble me with that question, but okay, if you insist. This is actually in the introduction or prologue to the book. We have some material in there, and I’ll give you a version of it.

I was a typical young, nerdy kid interested in doing well in math and science in school, things like that. So that sets the background for this. I had parents who were extremely encouraging about that, though they did not go to college themselves, or at least did not finish. My mother was a nurse, and my father was a clerk in a steel mill. So they were not highly educated in intellectual pursuits, but they made it very clear that me and my three brothers would go to college. The house was full of books and very encouraging. I also had an uncle who I talk about in the book. He was a surveyor in coal mines for a while and a very intelligent guy. He never went to college and never drove a car, but I got to know him very well. He was a very big influence on my life, and he did codebreaking for the government during World War II.

Like a lot of kids interested in that sort of thing, I was fascinated by the space program. I was 10 years old when we first landed on the moon, so that dates me in 1969. I was interested in that, and then didn’t really pay that much attention to it after that. I moved on to other things, did math and science in school, and went to college for electrical engineering. In the meantime, also around that time when I was about 10 years old, I started to get fascinated with what we call signals and systems — how systems manipulate signals of various kinds, and radio communication. I became an amateur radio operator. Shortwave radio and all that stuff just fascinates me to this day.

So I figured I would be doing something like that professionally. Then I got interested in the biomedical engineering aspects of electrical engineering. My mother and two of my aunts were nurses, so that was an influence. My father had a pacemaker implanted when I was a freshman in college, so I started to get more interested in that. At the same time, just coincidentally, the Space Shuttle program was starting up in the early 1980s. I got interested in that once again and really learned a lot about the history of the early American space program. I just became fascinated by that — the heroics and the audacity of it. Still, I always thought that would be a hobby and that I would go on and do my electrical and biomedical engineering work.

Then I was looking for places to go to graduate school in 1982 and found written material, back when it was all on published books and pamphlets, about a laboratory at MIT called, at the time, the Man Vehicle Laboratory — since then called the Human Systems Laboratory. They studied how the brain processes signals from the sensory systems, including the vestibular system, the balance system, which I didn’t know anything about at the time, and how that processing is altered when you send people into space. This was like a miracle to me because I could now do both. I could do my vocation and my avocation at the same place.

This laboratory had experiments that were going up with astronauts on the Space Shuttle. I got involved with that and supported two of those missions. It was incredible, just an amazing experience. MIT is an amazing place, as you can imagine, especially for people with an engineering orientation. I finished my doctoral degree in 1990 and came to Johns Hopkins as a postdoctoral fellow. For all of the really rigorous quality of my education at MIT, which was fantastic, I felt that there was a lot of basic neurobiology that I was missing because we were doing a lot of applied research. So I came to Johns Hopkins and worked with some real world authorities, David Zee and David Robinson, on eye movements driven by the vestibular system and balance coordination. I didn’t do any spaceflight work for several years, and then started to get back into it. I was doing about half basic fundamental research — what we call NIH and NSF type research, because those are the groups that supported it — and a little bit of spaceflight research.

Thirteen years ago, in 2013, I took a leave of absence for three years to serve as the Chief Scientist of the NASA Human Research Program at Johnson Space Center in Houston. That had a significant impact, as you might imagine, in changing the course of my career — not completely, but changing it in a really significant direction. It was my job to oversee the entire portfolio of all the research that they do to maintain health and performance in long-duration spaceflight: psychological, bone, muscle, cardiovascular, immune system, things that I didn’t know anything about.

I really came to recognize the complexity of the situation and the fact that these systems are all changing together, yet they’re being addressed research-wise independently and separately. There are some legitimate reasons for that, but this is going to end up killing somebody — literally — by not looking at the combinations and the interactions of body systems. This is a problem for everything. This is a problem in medicine on Earth. What do you do? You see a series of specialists if you have a problem. If you’re really lucky, you have a primary care doctor who pulls it all together and sees the big picture. Otherwise, it’s just a series of one person and one thing after another, and it’s not integrated. We can’t afford to do that on a Mars mission. It’s too risky. The medical care is not there, and it’s a very challenging situation for the body.

So this now has become one of my lines of research: figuring out what to do about that. Hence the book. About half of my research endeavor now is what we call multi-system resilience, or a form of integrative physiology in medicine. From my point of view with an engineering background, we’re trying to figure out how we quantify this, how we model it, and how we systematize these interactions — including the interactions with other people and with the environment. When is the last time your doctor asked you about that? Are you getting along with the people in your life? Do you have a reason to live? Are things going well at work? Is your work style, your house, and your office arranged in a manner that is conducive to you living a good, healthy lifestyle or not?

It takes a pretty forward-thinking doctor to get into all this stuff. My colleague Bill Queale, who is mentioned in the book, does do this. We’re collaborating right now on trying to take those lessons that we’re trying to implement in the spaceflight domain — we’re not there yet — and also implement them in medical practice on Earth, starting with his practice. So there you go. I think that’s the whirlwind version of how I got to be where I am right now.

Yitzi Weiner: You’re an amazing storyteller, Dr. Shelhamer. So let’s talk about the main pieces of your work. Have you seen the movie The Martian?

Mark Shelhamer: Of course, I’ve seen the movie The Martian and read the book.

Yitzi Weiner: I think our readers may be familiar with the concept that the author in the movie tries to provide solutions for people to live on Mars. Off the top of your head — and I’m sure there’s a lot — what part of the book did he get right, and what part did he not get right?

Mark Shelhamer: Yep, I saw that one coming. Now, I can’t speak to the agriculture part of it. I don’t know potatoes, and potatoes played a big role in that movie. What I can say resonated with me is the main theme of that movie, which is — pardon my language — it’s just one damn thing after another. You thought you had something solved, and then it’s something else, and then it’s something else.

Sometimes the solutions involve struggling with the way the equipment was designed, because it was designed to do something else and was designed to prevent you from doing something that you really need to do now to solve an unforeseen problem. So it’s inhibiting the resilience that’s necessary to address the issues. Resilience plays a large role in my thinking. I think that’s one thing it got right: it’s going to be crazy time in space. Maybe not that extreme, but there are going to be unexpected things happening. We can count on that.

As a little side note, we know that definitely in terms of the human body, we are regularly taken by surprise by new medical things, just on the medical side, not to mention the technology. For example, there was a first-ever medical evacuation from the International Space Station earlier this year. Deep vein thrombosis was seen for the first time ever in space three or four years ago. Like, wow, what’s going on here? This isn’t fair. We thought we’d seen it all. We thought we mitigated the major problems, and that for the problems we haven’t mitigated, at least we know what they are and we’re working on them. And then something completely new happens. We don’t know how to deal with that, and that’s what we’re going to have to deal with.

Now let me tell you one thing that I thought was maybe not so realistic in that movie. That is when the rest of the crew that had left Mars and left Mark Watney behind are told, “Guess what, your crewmate is still alive there.” They have just finished undertaking this very demanding, very long, very dangerous mission and are about to come home, and NASA says, “Well, would you mind extending your mission for another several years?” “Sure, no problem, we’re on board.” That strikes me as unrealistic. Not that they would not do it. Astronauts are amazing people. Absolutely, they’re mission-driven and they do amazing things. There was the crew on the Boeing Starliner ship that went up a couple years ago. They thought they would be up there for three weeks, and they ended up staying for six or eight months — whatever the numbers are, that’s what astronauts do. So they would say yes.

But in the movie and the book, it was just no question at all: “Of course we will do it.” This is an aspect that I got to learn much more about during my time at NASA, especially the psychological aspect. One of the things that we do know is a common feature to stressful situations is something called the third-quarter effect. It’s the idea that if you’re in some stressful situation — it could be a one-hour lecture, a three-month mission to the space station, a three-year mission to Mars, or six months in Antarctica — around the third quarter, if people know how long it’s going to be, is when the problems start to set in. The novelty has worn off, and the end is not yet in sight. This is when mood, motivation, and depression start to take their toll.

It just goes to show you that there are psychological cycles that people go through. They’re natural, well-studied, and well-characterized. So the idea that a crew would have gone through that and be so close to coming home, and then you say, “You’ve got to turn around, it’s time to do it all over again” — astronauts are extraordinary, but that’s asking a lot. Otherwise, I thought the movie was great.

Yitzi Weiner: That’s really interesting. You thought all the other solutions were realistic?

Mark Shelhamer: Well, I think so. Andy Weir really did his homework. He was a trajectory analyst or computer programmer before he wrote or while he was writing the book, so he knew people that he could call on to get the information. It seems to me that none of those solutions — except maybe the potatoes, I don’t know if you could live on potatoes that long — violated the laws of physics. There’s nothing that I looked at and said, “That’s physically impossible.”

That includes things that are very relevant to what crews on Mars are going to have to face, like the issue of autonomy. You’re on your own when you’re this far away from Earth. Communication is even a problem because of the time delay. They captured that in the movie very well, where he had this complicated system of pointing to letters and things like that, and he couldn’t get the answer until much later. Those kinds of things are realistic. It captured the existential difficulty of: Earth is out there, they want to help me, but they just can’t help me. They can’t do anything; they can only provide moral support.

Yitzi Weiner: When I was in high school — and I’m sure it came out earlier — there was a trilogy called the Mars trilogy. Are you familiar? For our readers, it’s a trilogy where the first one is called Red Mars, then Green Mars about how they’re able to change the ecology of Mars, and then Blue Mars where they are able to make water and atmosphere. Those are obviously much broader thinking than The Martian. Are those notions realistic, to change the ecology like that?

Mark Shelhamer: Well, now I’ve got to come clean: I haven’t read them. They’re downstairs in the space section of my home library, and I’m going to go downstairs and pull them out again. You’re well-read, because not too many people have mentioned them to me, and it’s a natural connection, so I need to read them.

Strangely enough, I’m not a big science fiction fan, but The Martian and the Mars series that you just described are exceptions because those are authors who really did their homework. They allow you to explore conceptually what might actually happen when you’re on Mars, which I think is a really valuable experience for people who are trying to make the actual plans. Because we haven’t done it yet, you need to think outside the box.

Yitzi Weiner: Amazing. Someone might ask: why are we putting all this energy into going to Mars and colonizing Mars? First of all, we have places on Earth that are uninhabited, and also, how about the moon? Why are the moon or other celestial bodies not the primary considerations?

Mark Shelhamer: Well, we have to define the scope of your question. It depends. We are going back to the moon, obviously. Artemis II went around the moon, and future Artemis missions are planned to land on the moon in a couple years, so people are seriously considering going to the moon.

I am not promoting — and the book does not promote — settling on Mars or living on Mars. I think in any reasonable timeframe, that’s really far-fetched. If you don’t believe me, there’s another book that I recommend called A City on Mars, which points out how daunting that prospect would be. Among other things, even under the worst-case scenarios you could imagine happening to Earth that would make it challenging to live here, it’s still a thousand times better than trying to live on Mars. You’ve got to be crazy. Really, it’s untenable.

However, I definitely think we should go there, explore, and spend more and more time there. Doing it on the moon first depends on if you’re a glass-half-full or half-empty type person. When I was at NASA 10 to 13 years ago, Mars was the next priority; that was where the design reference missions were driving us. Since then, we’ve changed it so the priority is the moon first. Still, NASA has an office called the Moon to Mars Program Office to look at how what you’re going to do at the moon can give you the information you need to go to Mars, explore, and do all those operations. Mars is orders of magnitude harder, more challenging, more dangerous, and more expensive.

I want to make the point that it’s not one or the other. Saying we should go to Mars, explore Mars, and consider how we might live on Mars for a year at a time doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t be doing it on the moon. We should be doing it on the moon. It’s going to be extremely challenging, dangerous, and expensive to do it on the moon — make no mistake — but it’s relatively easy to do it on the moon because it’s so much closer.

Why would we do it anywhere, for example on Mars? Certainly there are issues of national will and national policy. Sometimes those are for the better, and sometimes those are for the worse. The Apollo program was a battle in the Cold War, no question about that. Kennedy was upfront about that; he wanted to beat the Soviets, and that is why it was done. NASA built a wonderful engineering and science infrastructure based on that, much to their credit. That’s wonderful, and hopefully we will continue to do that kind of thing.

There are also good scientific reasons for sending people to other places, especially Mars, because of the things that you would find there. I’m not a planetary geologist or an astrobiologist, but my understanding is you could potentially learn some very interesting things about the evolution and development of the solar system, how planets evolve, and whether or not there is life outside of the Earth — very primitive life or at least precursors to life.

If you accept that there are other reasons to go to Mars like those, I’m also saying that we shouldn’t send people to Mars as an experiment in itself. That’s not ethical: “We’re just going to send you to Mars to study sending people to Mars.” No, that doesn’t make any sense. But if we’re going to do that for other reasons, we should make it an experiment, and we should recognize that this is going to be really challenging. There’s a lot more we need to know before we design the mission, train the crews, and build the spacecraft.

Once they’re doing that mission, we should treat it as an experiment. We should be extensively monitoring physiology, medical conditions, psychology, crew interactions, and their performance along with their interactions with the spacecraft. Not to be Big Brother, not to impose, “We’re watching you constantly, don’t you dare screw up.” Quite the contrary. It’s to provide the crew, using the proper onboard intelligence, with the information that they would need to understand when something is about to go off the rails. “Let’s see what the computer says about this. Yes, the computer detects an anomaly, some change in the configuration of this network of all these interacting systems. Maybe the computer has never seen this before, but it’s telling us that something is weird. Guys, let’s all get together as a crew and see what is happening here. Is there something we can do about this?”

And by the way, that kind of thing could be really useful for us here on Earth. You wake up in the morning, open up your laptop, and check your personal dashboard. It says, “You’ve been a little down lately, or you’ve been sluggish, and we notice your social network — your calls, emails, and texts — is starting to decay a little bit.” Which one came first? Are you feeling bad and therefore you’re not making phone calls, or are you feeling bad because people aren’t contacting you? Whatever it might be, that’s just a small subset. It’s something that just says, “Here is the status of your life. Act accordingly, or do nothing.”

It could also say things like, “We’ve got four years of information on you, and we factor this into our aging models for what people with your particular demographics look like. There are some things we know to expect. For example, around this time every year you get a little sluggish — maybe seasonal affective disorder, or maybe it’s the stress of going back to a school environment. Whatever it is, we factor that in. You’re good to go, but it’s an increasing stress level. Maybe you want to reduce the stress in some other parts of your life to help you get through this.”

It’s not a popular idea, but I’m saying we can’t afford not to do something like that on a Mars mission because it’s so complicated and pushing the limits for the crew so much. Why don’t we give them all the support we possibly can? And I think that could also be a spin-off for human health and performance on Earth. I don’t even remember your original question, but I hope I got it!

Yitzi Weiner: Next question: if you were able to sit in front of Elon Musk and say, “These are the top three things in order that you have to focus on if you really want to achieve your vision,” what would you say?

Mark Shelhamer: Wow. The scene itself boggles my mind. Limiting it to spaceflight conversations, it would be variations on a theme.

First: please do not repeat what I believe has occurred in most early space programs, which is putting so much emphasis on the rockets, the technology, and the spacecraft that you just treat people as an engineering component that you can plug in later. “I know how much food they need, how much water, how much oxygen. I know how much excrement they produce. I know how much room they need physically to live. That’s fine, I’ll take it from here. I’ll engineer that into my system, plug them in at the end, and they will be fine.” Astronauts are special people, and so far they’ve been fine with that mentality. That should be changed. The astronauts, the doctors, the engineers, and the mission planners should be talking to each other a lot more.

By the way, I’ll put in a plug for an organization here — you can include this in the interview or not — called OSMED, the Organization for Space Medicine, Engineering, and Design. My good friend and colleague Erik Antonsen started this just a couple years ago, and it strives to start breaking down those barriers, starting with the younger people who are still in training. Let’s have the doctors talk to the researchers, talk to the designers, talk to the planners. That doesn’t happen systematically enough.

Second, along those same lines: you’ve got all the money in the world, almost literally in his case. Why don’t you invest some of it in the research that would help us understand humans in a complex setting as part of a complex system? In the sense of complexity theory — like the Santa Fe Institute — there are mathematical tools that you could be looking at, though they are not sufficiently developed to address this problem yet. You’ve got enough money to build rockets; no question that’s an expensive and risky undertaking. Why not spend some percentage of that to make sure that the humans are capable of taking full advantage of the technical capabilities that you’re going to give them? By the way, that will also make them resilient enough so that they can help maintain the performance of the technological side of things. It’s about recognizing that it’s a human and technical endeavor at the same time.

And if there was a third thing: start encouraging these conversations. That’s what he does. He makes it possible for people like us to sit here and talk seriously about sending people to Mars without being figuratively laughed off the stage. That’s significant progress in my domain. So if he could do the same for the human side of things, that would help us. Just recognizing that you can’t build a spacecraft and plug people in later — you have to integrate your thinking, which would also help us here on Earth.

Yitzi Weiner: Now, this is our final aspirational question. Dr. Shelhamer, because of your amazing work and the platform that you’ve built, it’s not an exaggeration to say that you’re a person of great influence. If you could spread an idea or inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be?

Mark Shelhamer: Ah, well, I will grudgingly accept your compliment. I appreciate it. I wish I had more influence than I do, but I would say it’s what I was just talking about. I think people should recognize that modern problems — the things that we’re facing now and are going to face in the future — are going to require new ways of thinking about things, which means new ways of dealing with complexity.

I’m not the first person to say this, but I mean specifically in the domain of the complexity of someone’s daily life. I’m not talking about the complexity of medical care in the standard sense, where you go into a hospital for “complex care” because a person has a lot of coexisting conditions. That’s fine, but that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about how your life is complicated, my life is complicated — our lives are complicated. Let’s help people deal with the complications of their lives, which will keep them healthier by, among other things, getting them to medical care early rather than waiting until something goes wrong, and by detecting stresses in their lives that they might be able to deflect.

So if I’m going to have any influence, it would be to encourage this kind of thinking. I try to promote this with my students in my lab. If they come in and say, “We want to do an experiment on this system,” I say, “Okay, that’s fine, but you’re also going to include a psychological component and a physiological component as well, because these things are connected.” I get it — there’s a limit to what you can do before the complexity becomes intractable. There’s a reason why science is reductionist, to remove confounds. But we have to start reversing that trend and being more broad-minded.

Yitzi Weiner: Dr. Shelhamer, how can our readers purchase your book, and how can they support your work in any possible way?

Mark Shelhamer: They can find the book at their favorite bookseller, or Amazon, of course. They can also go to the publisher, which is the Johns Hopkins University Press; it’s in the Wavelengths series. There is a discount code: HSHEL26. I don’t know where that came from, but clearly my name is in there, the year, and an H in front of it. That’s the discount code for that, and it’s widely available.

I also have a website at the Johns Hopkins University Human Spaceflight Laboratory, which is www.jhuhsl.space—for Johns Hopkins University Human Spaceflight Lab. Not .edu, not .org, it’s .space. There they will find some idea of the kinds of things that we’re doing, the papers that we publish, and the work that we do.

And if you really love what we do and want to make a philanthropic donation to our research, which Johns Hopkins will gratefully accept, contact me on that — seriously, because for research funds for this kind of forward-thinking work, the community is not quite there yet. Anything we can get to help us support this research would be appreciated, though it will continue nonetheless.

Yitzi Weiner: We’ll try our absolute best to get Elon Musk’s attention to read this interview.

Mark Shelhamer: Yeah, I’m not sure I want his attention, but we could use it in this case!

Yitzi Weiner: Very good. It’s been a true honor to meet you. I’m really grateful for your time, and I wish you continued success, good health, and blessings. I’d love to do this again in the future.

Mark Shelhamer: You know where to find me. I’m always happy to talk about this. I really enjoyed this. Thank you — you gave me a lot of room to talk, and the questions were great.

Yitzi Weiner: Really appreciate it. It means a lot. Thank you so much. See you soon.

Mark Shelhamer: Thank you.

NASA Scientist Mark Shelhamer: Why You Can’t ‘Plug People In Later’ for Mars was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

“It’s not so much about your looks. It’s not so much about your talent. It is about who you know, but it’s about how accessible you are to everyone, how approachable you are, how kind you are, how understanding you are, and how completely at their disposal you will be.”

Eric Roberts was standing on the set of Star 80 when he made a mistake that belonged to the director. He called “Cut.” Bob Fosse, who was directing the 1983 film, summoned him across the soundstage and delivered an unexpected piece of acting advice. “You’re playing me if I weren’t successful. Do you understand?” Roberts understood immediately. Walking back to the set, he began imitating Fosse’s distinctive walk. The character, a manipulative man whose relationship ends in murder, suddenly made more sense to him. Decades later, Roberts remembers the encounter with admiration rather than embarrassment. “It enlightened me,” he says.

The story reveals something about an actor whose career has stretched from acclaimed dramatic performances to an extraordinary volume of independent films. Roberts has spent much of his professional life playing complicated, occasionally dangerous men, yet his explanation of success is surprisingly modest. He talks about kindness, accessibility, and treating everyone on a production with respect. Those convictions connect him to two people whose careers have followed very different paths: his wife, actress and casting director Eliza Roberts, and screenwriter and producer Mike Tove. Their collaboration on the short film Yard Saleing offers an unusual meeting of Hollywood experience, professional reinvention, and the less glamorous mechanics of getting a movie made.

For Eric, acting began with a problem he needed to solve. As a child, he struggled with a severe stutter and discovered that memorizing dialogue allowed him to speak without stumbling. Performance became a means of communication long before it became a profession. At 19, he moved to New York, endured several difficult years, and eventually attracted professional attention through a stage performance. His breakthrough in King of the Gypsies led to a series of demanding roles, including The Pope of Greenwich Village, Star 80, and Runaway Train, which earned him an Academy Award nomination. His later work has ranged from major studio productions to smaller independent pictures, reflecting an enduring appetite for being on a set.

Eliza’s introduction to entertainment was almost the opposite. She grew up in New York City before moving to California at 12, surrounded by a family whose professional interests extended from labor law into television writing. Relatives worked on programs including Bewitched, Get Smart, and All in the Family. She attended the United Nations International School, learned French, and spent time in England as a teenager working as an au pair for an Israeli family. Acting eventually brought her into films such as National Lampoon’s Animal House, but her professional life expanded well beyond performing. She became a casting director, talent manager, and acting coach, developing a perspective on the industry that incorporates both the performer seeking an opportunity and the people responsible for creating one.

That breadth of experience remains central to her work. Eliza manages Eric’s career while maintaining her own projects, and the couple frequently collaborates professionally. At the time of the interview, she was casting six feature films, working with her daughter, and teaching actors through TVI and Working Actor, both online and in person. For someone who grew up around established television writers, the work now involves helping other people find their way into an industry she has known for much of her life. Her enthusiasm for Yard Saleing extends beyond her part to the props, sets, cast, and crew, an appreciation that reflects the many sides of filmmaking she has experienced.

Mike Tove arrived by a considerably less direct route. Born and raised in Raleigh, North Carolina, he grew up in an academic family and earned a Ph.D. in biology. When suitable employment proved difficult to find, his professional direction changed. A casting call for the 1990 film adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale introduced him to the world of movie production, and he was immediately captivated. Tove, who jokes that he is bilingual because he speaks “English and Southern,” describes the film business as an incurable virus. He continued writing stories while building a career outside entertainment, including work as a financial adviser.

The idea that eventually became Yard Saleing first took shape approximately 36 years before the film was completed. Tove pitched it to casting director Shari Rhodes, who encouraged him to make it, but encouragement was not the same as production. Years passed before he connected with director Tom Logan, who helped turn the story into a workable project. Their resulting 2025 short follows a couple whose discovery at a yard sale leads to dangerous consequences connected to hidden treasure. Eric and Eliza joined the production in supporting roles, with Eric playing Senator Devon and Eliza portraying Sylvia King. For Tove, who had long approached movies primarily as a writer and occasional performer, producing the film brought another education entirely.

Logan had warned him that participating in production would be “film school.” Tove discovered how much the phrase understated the experience. He watched the coordination required among actors, technicians, production staff, and the people responsible for continuity. One incident particularly stayed with him. On the final shooting day, a script supervisor missed a single continuity detail and was distressed despite the mistake being caught in time. Tove saw her reaction as evidence of the extraordinary care that often goes unnoticed by audiences. The experience reinforced a belief he shares with Eric: a film depends on people whose names rarely appear in its publicity.

Eric expresses that conviction even more emphatically. “The best people on the planet are crews,” he says, describing their knowledge, dedication, and camaraderie. His advice to younger actors similarly challenges the familiar notion that extraordinary talent guarantees a lasting career. Professional courtesy, reliability, and generosity matter just as much. “I’m not a bad actor, but that’s not what made me successful,” he says. Tove offers a parallel memory from The Handmaid’s Tale, when he showed up on set without being called, simply because he was available to help. That willingness led to further opportunities and taught him the value of being someone a production could count on.

Yard Saleing has since attracted recognition on the film festival circuit, bringing together an established Hollywood couple and a writer whose first produced short emerged decades after its conception. Their circumstances differ, but the conversation reveals a shared refusal to treat filmmaking as a solitary accomplishment. Eliza continues to balance performance with the work of developing and supporting other actors. Tove is pursuing a creative ambition that survived years outside the industry. Eric, despite an extensive career and major accolades, remains attached to the simple pleasure of working with people who know how to make movies. Asked why audiences should watch Yard Saleing, he dispenses with grand claims about artistic significance. “For fun,” he says. “Just pure effing fun.” After everything these three have invested in getting stories onto the screen, perhaps that uncomplicated pleasure is worth taking seriously.

Yitzi Weiner: Eliza, Eric, and Mike, it’s really an honor to meet you. Before we dive in deep and talk about your amazing work, readers would love to learn about each of your origin stories. I’ll start with Eliza because you have to go. Eliza, can you please share with us the story of your childhood and how you grew up, and particularly the seeds and genesis of all the amazing creativity that has come since then?

Eliza Roberts: Thank you so much. I grew up in New York City and lived there till I was 12 years old, and then we moved to California. First, my family were labor lawyers, and they were from Brooklyn and Boston, but primarily initially from Ukraine. Then they got into showbiz. The next group wrote sitcoms like Bewitched, All in the Family, Get Smart, and all of that.

I went to the United Nations International School, which was fantastic, so you read, write, and speak French. I speak French, and very few words in Hebrew, but a few. In fact, I was an au pair for an Israeli family that was part New York and part Israel when I was 16, living in England. Five sons and me, and it was amazing, and we’re still very close.

Then I became an actress and went from there to doing all kinds of things. I’m a manager, I’m a casting director. (Eric: Tell them some of your movies.) Animal House is one of the well-known ones, and then there’s a lot of different fun stuff. You can find it all on IMDb. So that’s the origin story, if that answers your question.

Yitzi Weiner: Please tell us about the exciting work you’re doing now.

Eliza Roberts: Okay. Well, first of all, talking about Yard Sailing is great because I loved that part and loved that movie, and loved everything from the props to the set to, of course, the cast and the crew and Mike and Tom and everybody.

Right now I’m casting, and we’re coaching a lot. We teach through TVI and also through Working Actor, and we teach online and in person. And I’m casting six projects now. It was five, now it’s grown to six — just some charming little feature films that are really a lot of fun. I’m having a great time doing it with my daughter.

Yitzi Weiner: So Eric, how about you? Can you share with us your origin story and the seeds of all the amazing work?

Eric Roberts: Well, my origin story is not so platinum. Hers is very cool. Mine’s a little rougher. I was a kid with a bad stutter, and I found out if I memorized stuff, I could speak without stuttering. So that started me as an actor as a very little boy, and that’s all I’ve ever done. I’ve always been an actor. I’ve always loved good actors, and so I married one.

I moved to New York at 19 and had a hard couple of years, and then was discovered doing a play at the American Academy — a really not very good acting school — and got a manager. From there I got work and just got lucky over and over again, and I’ve had a great life.

Yitzi Weiner: Amazing. How about you, Mike?

Mike Tove: Oh my god, do I have to follow that? Well, I’m a native of Raleigh, North Carolina, born and raised. And no, I don’t sound like it. I always say I’m bilingual: I speak English and Southern. Eric will know what I’m talking about.

My family was in academia, and so I started off life following the academic pathways and ended up actually getting a PhD in biology, but unfortunately there were no jobs.

So I came back to the Raleigh area trying to figure out what I wanted to be when I grew up, and answered a cattle call to be in a film, The Handmaid’s Tale. I got in and just fell in love with it. Those of us in the industry know it’s a virus. It’s incurable. Once it bites you, it never leaves your body. And I just loved it.

I’ve been a storyteller my whole life and I wanted to write, so I was writing ideas, stories, and short stories, and Yard Sailing was one of those. Thirty-six years ago, when I first came up with the thing, I had a chance to pitch it to Shari Rhodes. I was taking acting lessons, and Shari was this phenomenal casting director — she cast Jaws and Close Encounters for Spielberg and so forth.

I pitched the whole thing to her and she was going, “Oh my gosh, you must make this film. It’s just an incredible story.” Then I met Tom Logan — I have no idea how long ago now, 10 or 12 years ago, who knows — and Tom and I just collaborated on the thing. One thing led to the next and whammo, we have this marvelous, fun little short that I was blessed to have Eric and Eliza join in.

Everybody says, “How did you get Eric and Eliza?” And it wasn’t me, it was Tom. But it was one of the best aspects of the whole thing. I say this all the time: everybody on that set just became super, super good friends, and that to me is as important as anything.

Yitzi Weiner: It’s amazing. Eric, you probably have some amazing stories from your career, and I’m sure this is difficult to single out, but can you share with our readers one or two stories that stand out in your mind from your career?

Eric Roberts: Ah, man. Well, let me give you one from my favorite director, Bob Fosse. I was doing a scene one day for Star 80. It was a true story we were doing, a biography of a relationship and a murder, and I was the bad guy, of course. I was doing a scene one day and I made a mistake, and I said, “Cut.” Well, you don’t say “cut” on a Fosse set unless you’re Fosse.

He said, “What are you doing?” I said, “I messed up.” He said, “Come here.” And he walks away from me and walks across the sound stage — a big old sound stage — to the other side of it. “Come here.” I’m in my underwear, so it’s kind of weird, and I’ve got a crew behind me. I walk over there: “What’s up?”

He goes, “Look at me.” I said, “I’m looking at you.” He goes, “No, look at me.” I said, “Okay, I’m looking at you. What’s up?” He goes, “You’re playing me if I weren’t successful. Do you understand?” And I did. On the way back to the set, I started to imitate his walk. I just played him, because that’s why he was so passionate about the project. He understood the dynamics and the mistakes and the tragedy.

Yitzi Weiner: That’s a funny story. Did it hurt your feelings, or were you cool with it?

Eric Roberts: No, not at all. It enlightened me. I understood exactly what he was after. “Okay, I get it.” Yeah, and he was a cool-ass cat.

Mike Tove: Eric, I’m going to have to go back and watch the film again now knowing these little details. It’s been a while since I’ve seen it.

Eric Roberts: You don’t want to watch the film for that. You want to watch the film because it’s the best docudrama ever made, and I’m proud to be in it.

Mike Tove: Well, there’s that. I saw it once and it was dark, as I’m sure it was supposed to be, but yes.

Eric Roberts: But it’s good. It’s so good. And what’s great about it is every frame is perfectly accurate to the story, to the point where even the locations — every location from the Dairy Queen to the place that they both died — is where it actually happened. The mansion, his apartment, all of it is where it all happened in the whole movie. So it’s like a documentary done with actors. It’s the best docudrama ever made. It’s so good. Bob Fosse was so into it.

Mike Tove: Wow. Now I do have to go see it again. I did not know that. I saw Star 80 a long time ago. Wow. Okay, thanks for that.

Yitzi Weiner: How about you, Mike? Do you have any stories from your career that really stand out in your mind?

Mike Tove: Oh my god, let me think about that for a sec. For me, I’m so much the new kid on the block in this arena. Sitting here with the likes of Eric and Eliza — they are legends.

One of the things that Tom told me when we were getting ready to make the film, and he was so right, is that being on the set like I was — I’ve been on film sets as an extra or even as an actor, but being on a film set in a production capacity — was film school. Man, boy, that was an understatement.

You watch the process and all of the components that went in behind it, and you see this thing coming together, and you get a sense of just what it means to be part of a perfect collaboration. Nothing good would have happened except for the fact that everybody on that set, from cast to crew, from the leads all the way to the background talent and everybody in between, was just hitting on all cylinders. We had an amazingly good time, and the quality of the project shone through. It was the result of this extraordinary collaboration, and I just can’t say enough about it.

Yitzi Weiner: Okay, cool. So this is our signature question. Eric and Mike, each of you have been blessed with a lot of success now, and you must have learned a lot from your experiences. Looking back all the way to the beginning when you first started, can you share five things that you’ve learned over the years as an actor that someone starting out today can really benefit from?

Eric Roberts: Well, my brain is not big enough to hold five answers to one question, but I can tell you one thing. It’s not so much about your looks. It’s not so much about your talent. It is about who you know, but it’s about how accessible you are to everyone, how approachable you are, how kind you are, how understanding you are, and how completely at their disposal you will be.

Those things are what make you successful. Not the looks, not the talent, but all the other little stuff. All the thank yous, all the you’re welcomes, all the “may I”s — that’s what makes you successful. It is not being a brilliant actor. I’m not a bad actor, but that’s not what made me successful.

Yitzi Weiner: That’s a great answer. What would you say, Mike?

Mike Tove: Well, I don’t know that I’m going to follow that either, but I think that one of the things that I run into a lot is the idea that you have to respect the industry. You have to just understand — again, I go back to the collaboration thing — that everybody around you is there for a purpose.

It’s funny, I can tell one anecdote. When I was doing The Handmaid’s Tale, it was the very first film thing I did. (Eric: I’ll be right back.) One day, just because I didn’t have anything else to do, I just drove to the set. The production office was at one of the central locations, so I just drove there. I was essentially an extra or featured extra, and they said, “What are you doing here?” I said, “Well, I just showed up in case. If you need me, great, and if not, that’s fine, I’ll leave.” And they went, “Well, no, stick around. We might.” Later they said, “Hey, yeah, there’s a scene that we want to shoot and we’re glad you’re here, and you can do it.”

What transpired from that — and I think this is the lesson — is that I got a reputation of being someone they could count on, of someone who was there for the benefit of the project, and that I was a team player. I was willing to work. Because when that film wrapped, I was able to literally pick up the phone and call casting and say, “Hey, is there anything for me to do?” And they would go, “Yeah, we can do A or you can do B, what do you want?” And that was it. So I think my advice would be: respect the industry, and a lot of what Eric said — just be available, be a team player, be someone that production can count on, and the rest flows.

Eric Roberts: I want to add something to all that, because we’re talking about a movie. The best people on the planet are crews. I’m in movies all over the world, and the only thing in common with all movies are the crews. They’re the same type of person. They work their asses off, they want to be there, they’re fun to know, and they know everything about making a movie. So get in with the crew and you’re in.

Mike Tove: Yeah, they’re the greatest unsung group — people that are behind the scenes that nobody ever sees, and quite frankly nobody knows who they are. Try making a movie without one. It doesn’t work. They’re the glue.

And oh my gosh, the level of professionalism on Yard Sailing! Eric, you weren’t there on this day, so Noelleignoh, our scripty — amazing, amazing, amazing. The last day we were shooting, she missed one continuity thing. One. And it didn’t matter because we caught it in time, and the truth is that the light was better to reshoot it anyway. It was no big deal. But she was beating herself up all day long and all the way into the night because she missed one. Tom was telling her, “Hey, it’s fine,” and I was saying, “Hey, it’s fine.” She said, “I don’t care.” And of course, now what happens is she’s the scripty on almost any Tom Logan picture from now on because of that — just because she had the integrity and attention to detail that was necessary.

Yitzi Weiner: Amazing. This is our final aspirational question. Eric and Mike, each of you in your own way are honestly people of great influence. If you could spread an idea or inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? Because you never know what your idea can inspire.

Eric Roberts: Well, The Beatles said it best: “All you need is love.” And if you have love, everything is going to follow suit.

They said it best. It’s in a song, it’s the title of a song, and it’s the way everybody should live. All this hate going on in the world is really unproductive, dude. Come on.

Mike Tove: Yeah, I was going to say the exact same thing. Exactly.

Yitzi Weiner: Amazing. In your own words, why do you think our readers have to watch Yard Sailing?

Eric Roberts: For fun. Just pure effing fun. It doesn’t have to be heavy-handed or profound or meaningful. It can be fun, and be meaningful just to be fun. That’s why I make movies, because I have fun making them.

Mike Tove: I will add, it’s easily seen. Go to my website, www.emeraldoakproductions.com, and up in the upper right-hand corner there’s a little link. You can click on it and watch the movie. So, crass commercial.

Yitzi Weiner: Eric and Mike, how can our readers continue to follow your work? How can they support your work in any possible way?

Eric Roberts: Thank you, brother. Thank you so much.

Mike Tove: EmeraldOakProductions.com.

Yitzi Weiner: Amazing. Thank you so much. It’s really been a joy meeting you. I hope we can do this again in the future, and I wish you both good health and continued success.

Eric Roberts: Thank you, brother. Peace out.

Yitzi Weiner: My pleasure.

Mike Tove: Yeah, see you.

Eric Roberts, Eliza Roberts, and Mike Tove: Hollywood Success Isn’t Just About Talent, It’s About… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

“Honestly, if I could wave a wand and change one thing, I would wave the wand that makes artists essential workers, period, so that we wouldn’t be thinking about that anymore.”

I had the pleasure of talking with Rob Bailis. After nearly four years of planning, the Santa Monica International Jazz Festival was approaching its debut, and Bailis was still chasing the final $50,000 needed to make it happen. There were last-minute phone calls and a question he remembers asking: “What are we going to do?” The festival went ahead, bringing established jazz artists, emerging musicians, and audiences together across Santa Monica and Los Angeles. But that close call says something about the man behind it. Bailis has spent much of his career trying to create extraordinary artistic experiences while confronting the decidedly ordinary problems of money, logistics, and institutional survival.

As artistic and executive director of BroadStage in Santa Monica, Bailis occupies a position that demands both imagination and financial discipline. There is an interesting contradiction in how he arrived there. He once devoted himself to mastering a single instrument, pursuing the kind of permanent orchestral position that would allow him to concentrate almost entirely on music. Instead, he became responsible for an institution where the success of any performance depends on the contributions of countless people. “No one does this work alone,” he says. For Bailis, that conviction comes from experience, including years when he was trying to make a living as a musician himself.

He grew up in San Francisco, where his parents had relocated from Philadelphia in the early 1960s. He remembers the Bay Area as a place where artistic experimentation, progressive politics, technological reinvention, and the natural world existed in unusually close proximity. That atmosphere influenced his understanding of creativity. His first instrument, however, was partly a practical choice. His older brother already played piano and trumpet, so when an after-school music program offered clarinet lessons in fourth grade, Bailis gave it a try. He discovered an aptitude for the instrument and soon became absorbed in mastering it.

At Northwestern University, he pursued classical music while finding himself equally drawn to theater. The university’s drama program offered access to artists whose work interested him, and he sought opportunities to learn alongside them. By graduation, he was considering two different futures. He had arranged to study directing and playwriting through an international program at London’s Royal Court Theatre and was contemplating staying in London to pursue theater. Then came an opportunity to attend the Yale School of Music. A clarinet mentor warned him that the physical demands of becoming an accomplished instrumentalist created a limited window for advanced training. Bailis chose Yale.

What followed was the professional life he had hoped for. He spent years performing with regional symphony orchestras throughout Northern California, a network of ensembles affectionately known as the “Freeway Philharmonic.” He played symphony, opera, ballet, musical theater, and contemporary music, toured with his Mirage Ensemble, and taught at the East Bay Center for the Performing Arts and San Francisco Community Music Center. The work was rewarding, but the practical demands were considerable. He remembers assembling his annual tax forms and marveling at the number of engagements he had accepted. His Honda Civic accumulated well over 200,000 miles, a tangible record of the distances required to sustain a freelance musical career.

He continued auditioning for permanent orchestra positions, hoping to find a more settled professional life. Yet the collaborative theater work he had explored in college kept drawing his attention. By his early thirties, he was ready to pursue it seriously. That decision eventually brought him to ODC in San Francisco, where he entered arts presenting and theater leadership. He later held senior artistic positions at Cal Performances at UC Berkeley before joining BroadStage in 2019, shortly before the pandemic disrupted the performing arts industry.

At BroadStage, his responsibilities extend beyond the organization’s 535-seat main theater and smaller performance spaces. He is thinking about the institution’s approaching 20th anniversary, the future of its international jazz festival, and plans for programming connected to the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics. These projects require the kind of coordination that once drew him away from an exclusively performing career. They also demand decisions about who gets access to artistic opportunities and how institutions support the people creating the work.

His collaboration with Stanley Clarke provides perhaps the clearest expression of that philosophy. During a three-year residency at BroadStage, which became the foundation of the Jazz Festival, the celebrated bassist worked closely with music students at Santa Monica High School and Santa Monica College. Bailis was struck by Clarke’s distinction between teaching and mentoring. The students already had teachers. What Clarke offered was the experience of playing beside a musician of his stature, without the usual barriers of reputation or hierarchy. Bailis describes their everyday exchanges with affectionate humor: “In between potato chips, pearls of wisdom.”

According to Bailis, three participating students became professional musicians during the residency. More consequential for his own work was the example Clarke set. The festival they developed sought to extend that spirit of invitation to the relationship between performers, emerging artists, and audiences. Its inaugural edition included ticketed performances and free public programming. The logistical difficulties were real, but Bailis remembers the experience principally for the way Clarke’s generosity changed his understanding of artistic leadership.

His philosophy of persistence has its own peculiar sense of humor. Faced with rejection, Bailis developed a private refrain: “Embrace the ‘no’ and chisel on, Michelangelo.” He sees refusal as an unavoidable feature of creative work, sometimes even a useful way of clearing away distractions. His other guiding phrase, “fearlessly make, bravely listen, and wisely adapt,” reflects the balance he believes artists must maintain between conviction and openness to criticism.

Beneath these practical lessons is a more demanding argument about the place of art in society. Bailis wants artists, particularly independent artists, to be recognized as essential workers entitled to a living wage. It is a position shaped by someone who remembers the crowded performance calendars, the tax forms, and the miles driven between jobs. Now, as he builds larger platforms for other performers, the question of how artists can sustain their lives remains inseparable from the work itself.

Yitzi Weiner: Rob Bailis It’s really an honor to meet you. Before we dive in deep and talk about your amazing work, our readers would love to learn about Rob Bailis’s personal origin story. Can you share with us a story of your childhood and how you grew up, and particularly the seeds of all the amazing creativity and genius that has come since then?

Rob Bailis: Oh heavens. Well, first of all, it is a pleasure and an honor to be with you and to spend this time, truly.

Boy, childhood. Well, I was very fortunate that my Philadelphian parents decided to move to the San Francisco Bay Area in the early ’60s and have a really good time until the early ’70s before they decided to have me. I was very lucky in my time and place of birth in San Francisco, just an incredible place to grow up. It was certainly both a complex and wonderful time.

What I love the most about the Bay Area, apart from, of course, its dedication to the very progressive edge culturally, politically, and artistically, is that it’s also very much immersed in the natural world. In particular, it is where the natural world comes crashing up against booms and busts, innovation, and this whole sense of constant reinvention. I think when you’re bathed in that or swaddled in it as a child, you absorb a degree of that in your own sensibility. That just stuck with me from the very beginning, and it is just part of being from there that you absorb a bit of that.

From the jump, that just got into my bones and in my blood. The drive for innovation and that drive for creativity, to do it in a very self-propelled fashion, and to look for the furthest edges of it, was really there from the beginning. I was lucky to grow up in a place where that was fostered, in a family where that was fostered, and to have a community around me that really embraced those same values was quite fortunate.

Yitzi Weiner: Could you tell us the story of how your career developed? Tell us about your first breaks or first entrée into the music industry. I’d love to hear how you first broke into it.

Rob Bailis: Breaking into it is such a phrase, isn’t it? How did you break into it?

It’s a little bit like we’re all cat burglars, right? Somehow we got out our kits and we picked the lock, or what is it that we did? Or maybe we broke into it with a battering ram. Whatever it is, it’s quite a thing to crack open.

I’m not sure that the gates swing wide for anyone, no matter how talented, brilliant, or how much perseverance you apply. It’s going to be a journey for everyone, no matter what your condition is coming into it.

For me, I started off as a performer. I started off as a classical clarinetist, and that was pretty much my obsession going back to childhood. I started off in an after-school class in the fourth grade. My parents had to find something to do with me. My brother was already playing the piano and the trumpet, so I couldn’t exactly do that.

I picked up the clarinet and just happened to be pretty good at it from the very beginning. It became my ambition to figure that instrument out. When I really did truly and honestly fall in love with it, it became my career passion from very early on. Off to music school and on my way. That was the deal, and I pursued that life and got it going as fast as I could. I went into life as a concert musician.

I got my first jobs in symphony orchestras. I played for about 10 years on what we lovingly in the Bay Area refer to as the Freeway Philharmonic, which is a term for the many great regional orchestras that populate the nearly 200-mile stretch from the Napa Valley all the way down to Carmel-by-the-Sea, all the way out to Modesto and Sacramento. There were quite a number of really good, smaller symphony orchestras.

That was where I spent most of the first decade of my professional life and teaching really actively in two different schools: one at the East Bay Center for the Performing Arts and the San Francisco Community Music Center. I was also playing an insane amount of musical theater gigs, opera gigs, ballet gigs and so really doing my time in theaters as well.

I did a fair amount of touring, a fair amount of playing in contemporary music ensembles, and I had a really beloved trio at the time, The Mirage Ensemble, that was a soprano, clarinet, piano trio. We did a lot of performing and some touring as well, and we built a truly unique and beautiful repertoire for that configuration. I loved doing that. It was my dream to have a full-time life as a clarinetist, and I got there — I had a really lovely life doing that.

Of course, when you’re a musician, you’re putting your life together, especially in those earliest years, from so many different sources. I remember I’d get my 1099s together at the end of the year, “Did I do this many gigs? How did I do this?” You’ve got your trusty, road beaten Honda Civic, looking at the odometer and thinking, “Yeah, that was a busy time,” knowing what it took to do all of that.

There was a period there where I was flying around the country taking every audition I could, doing really well with those auditions but just not winning. And I was really taking very seriously my approach to trying to find a single permanent job that was going to keep me in a really great symphony orchestra and find my way to something that could be a little bit more focused on one place that I could concentrate on just playing and less hustling. And this is just hard to sustain in both directions.

At some point along the way, a number of the things that I was doing more collaboratively as a musician were beginning to really strike me as incredibly, intoxicatingly interesting. I think this really spoke to earlier parts in my education, particularly in college and in parts prior to that, where I’d had just as much focus on training in theater, training in multimedia performance, and collaborating across those fields, where I thought, “This is a place I really want to return to. This is something I want to come back to.” Perhaps there is another way.

There was a real turning point in my life where, at the end of my undergraduate career in college, I had managed to somehow, magically, because I happened to be at Northwestern University, which at the time had a really phenomenal music school that was basically a conservatory within the university, and also had one of the best theater schools around in the school of speech. I had managed to talk the theater school into letting me find my way in there as best I could. These were the days of Frank Galati and Mary Zimmerman making such game changing innovations in theater. I just wanted to be alongside that at the time, even though I was in the music school. I thought, “How can I get a toe in there and learn from these guys, and how can I exercise this curiosity?” Because it was Northwestern’s philosophy, they encouraged that kind of student-driven aspiration, which was a big part of why I thrived there, even amid the intense conservatory constrictions.

I came out of NU really not sure if I was going to try to be a theater director or if I was going to try to be a clarinetist. That summer, I had actually gotten myself into an international training program at the Royal Court Theatre in London, where I was going off to study theater directing with Max Stafford-Clark, Stephen Daldry, and a number of other equally intimidating luminaries. I was actually planning to stay in London and sort of figure out, “Okay, I’m just going to make the break; I’m going to see if I can make something happen in theatre.”

In the middle of that, I got into the Yale School of Music to finish my training as a clarinetist and get started on that career. I had this conversation with my clarinet mentor at the time, who said, “There’s a physical reality in your life and in your body, there is a timeline where you either get this stuff really into your bones and really into your muscles at a certain age, or it just doesn’t happen. Now is the time. If you’re certain that you don’t want to play the clarinet for a living, then by all means go do what you need to do.” which he absolutely supported me to do. “But if you’re thinking you want this career as a performing classical musician, which you absolutely can have, now is the time to finish this. Otherwise, the window will close.”

On that advice, I went to Yale, finished my Masters, and got started on my career as a performer.

Some eight years later, I was really hungry to get back to what other worlds awaited me in combining my passions and my loves for all of that. That’s really what started me in this transition to what I do now, which is this whole other realm of theater making, producing, and arts presenting.

It’s a circuitous path, but that’s a bit of how it all came together. I got to the end of those years of playing, and I was thinking, look, again, kind of like it was at the end of my undergraduate career, “Are you going to play the clarinet for the rest of your life, or are there other things that you really have to do?” Somewhere right there in my early 30s was the answer. That was: let’s figure out if you can talk somebody into giving you a different opportunity.

That’s what led to my first job as a theater director and administrator in arts presenting and producing, and that took me to ODC in San Francisco, where I had the opportunity to catch up, learn, retrain, and thankfully settle in and stay and grow with the organization for the better part of a decade while I learned a new career. It’s been an amazing, nonstop, 23 year learning curve since my first day on that job!

Yitzi Weiner: Please tell us about the exciting new initiatives or programs you’re working on now. Please feel free to be as elaborate as you’d like.

Rob Bailis: Right now, BroadStage is such an interesting place to be and to work. It’s a fantastic institution. We’re so fortunate to be nestled in Santa Monica, California. It’s a destination city, the end of Route 66. We’ve got this perfect weather, these beautiful beaches, and this incredible California population. We’re also literally the epitome of the beach communities of LA. It’s a little bit of everything. It has all the magic of what you think of when you think, “Oh, it’s LA. It’s Hollywood,” and that is a bit ironic as Santa Monica is neither LA nor Hollywood — but it is an iconic, transformational place, calling dreamers to this day.

We’ve got this beautiful jewel box of a theater. It’s a wonderful 535-seat venue that also has a gorgeous 120-seat black box and a beautiful indoor-outdoor space for about 250 folks. It really has incredible flexibility to do all kinds of things on a medium and small scale. It gives us a lot of flexibility to play. We’re able to get outside of these venues as well and present at whatever scale speaks to us.

As we’re looking at what’s coming up for us in the next two years, we’ve got our 20th anniversary at BroadStage. We’re reflecting on 20 years of arts presenting and producing in this community and on an international scale.

We’ve just launched the Santa Monica International Jazz Festival, which is a massive new project, a brand-new international jazz festival that leapt fully formed at a really large scale into the world last year, which we’re producing with Stanley Clarke as the artistic director and all of the things that go along with that. That project is going into its second year.

Sort of the pièce de résistance is that LA has the Olympics coming in ’28. We’re envisioning our international performance festival for the summer of ’28, and thinking about what that would be for how you capture the international power of Los Angeles, the international implications of what people think LA is or think Santa Monica is, and the fact that Santa Monica will be hosting, as of now, 11 different international houses during the course of the Olympics. How do we turn that into a warm embrace for visitors and also articulate a platform for the vast depth, diversity and history that is here — the incredible culture that is LA and all the international connections that already come with that?

Between the Jazz festival, the Olympics festival, and the 20th anniversary of BroadStage, it’s a lot to consider. All of those things will have a lot to say to each other about how you think about performance festivals, how you think about celebration, and how you mark time, particularly at a moment now five years out from the pandemic, which was the largest global interruption of time that we are collectively familiar with. It’s a lot to look at, but these are beautiful opportunities to reorganize, reimagine, and reinvent.

Yitzi Weiner: You probably have some incredible stories from your career, and I’m sure this is difficult to single out, but can you share with our readers two stories that stand out in your mind from your amazing career?

Rob Bailis: Because it continues to teach and shape me, I’ll go back to the Santa Monica International Jazz Festival as a defining experience of recent years.

One might wonder how we pulled off a large-scale international festival in its first year out of the blue. The answer is that we didn’t. The answer is that it was actually three and a half years in the making, working very closely with Stanley Clarke, hand in hand with a living legend — just sort of in your daily life. It’s kind of like you think you will never get used to sharing a sandwich with Stanley Clarke, and then you do get used to it — but you still have to kind of check in with yourself and make sure.

I think for me, as someone who has been in leadership for a while and has been thinking about organizations, populations, budgets, audiences, and all the inner workings of institutions, to get to experience this level of inspiration again on a daily basis, and not just going to a show and admiring that an artist is great — because, of course, they are, and we get that all the time in the theater — but here just in the daily humanity of exchange, finding that so many pearls of wisdom are coming from this individual on a daily basis. In between potato chips, pearls of wisdom. Just the most mundane ways in which someone can utterly change your life. That was such a gift to have over these three years.

The Jazz Festival was the end product of a three-year artist residency BroadStage developed with Stanley. The essence of the residency was that Stanley was working very closely with our local high school, Santa Monica High, and also with the students who were here on our home campus of Santa Monica College. He had identified a group of students that he had basically promised, “Listen, you guys are our top talented kids. If you stay with me for the three years of this residency, I promise you that I’m going to find a place for you when this festival debuts, and you’re going to be on those stages. Just work with me, stay with me, and something great is going to happen.”

The way that he separates teaching from mentoring is that all these kids had teachers. They’re all in jazz programs, they all have teachers, and they don’t need another teacher. They needed a mentor. The way he separated mentorship from teaching was that he would just be a peer, and give them the sensibility when he was alongside them in the music that they belonged alongside him. He took away that barrier of “I’m a Jazz great and you’re not,” and simply said, “This is what it feels like when you’re in the groove or really in the pocket — this is exactly how these changes go, exactly how this feels when it’s locked — here is what to listen for in this harmony — here comes the part where you listen across.”

People would just rise to his level instantly and have their first moment of feeling, “Oh, that’s how this is supposed to go.” They just continually pushed themselves back up to that level, with or without him. Sure enough, over the course of three years, three of those students went pro. It wasn’t as if he was opening career doors for them or calling up agents; he was just literally meeting with them a couple times a month, playing with them at a high level, and saying, “This is the level; come on up.” He put no barrier between himself and them, no ego barrier, no “you can’t be me,” just “come on up.” And he only ever stayed laser focused on the fundamentals of music.

I think that humanity, both the act of it and the outcome, and watching that gave us the inspiration for how to build the festival. The whole thing, as producers, we were like, “The whole thing has to feel like this. It has to feel like, let’s build a platform on which everybody feels like it’s made for them and they get to feel this absolute connection of spontaneity. It’s crisp, it’s clean, it’s clear, and everybody feels like they’re having that experience that we got to watch happen here with these students…come on up.” That’s actually what artistic direction looks like when it’s good, right? That’s what it looks like. It looks like there’s no barrier between the idea, the artist, the audience, and the community getting to say, “Here is the transformational power.” It’s the absence of ego in that space and the presence of genuine invitation and care.

We really decided to build from that place and try to get it to happen. There were many things along the road that made that really hard and challenging, including the fact that the funding came through at the very last minute. We were just white-knuckling it to the very end. I mean, it was literally last-minute phone calls for the final $50,000, where we were thinking, “What are we going to do?”

It was a trick. As we often say in this business, it all works out in the end, but you just don’t know how sometimes until the 11th hour, and if you give up before you get there, you’re doomed.

In the end, we put on four days of performance across a staggering number of artists in venues as different as the Orpheum in LA; Tongva Park, which was our headline space — it’s the first time that a six-acre park in Santa Monica had ever been turned into a ticketed venue; to the Third Street Promenade in Santa Monica, that was a full day of free performances open to the public. I think we had at least 3,000 seated people and probably 10,000 people passed through that day. Of course, at BroadStage, an amazing evening of performances. That was the inaugural year, which also happened to fall on the centenaries of both Miles Davis and John Coltrane. We had plenty to work with.

That was the essence of it. There’s more to say, but that stands out to me as one of these times in life that you so rarely get, when someone has been so utterly who they are that the generosity is unmistakable. It just realigns everything about your practice and changes how you think about what you want to do, how you perceive your purpose.

At the end of the day, the thing that is born is of a different kind. It just has a different glow, a different shine, a different feel, and somehow it just clicks into place and works. And it did. We’re looking forward to a successful second, third, fourth, fifth year ongoing, and to carry the spirit forward as it continues to grow.

Yitzi Weiner: Rob, this is our signature question. You’ve been blessed with a lot of success now and you must have learned a lot from your experiences. Looking back all the way to the beginning when you first started, can you share five things that you’ve learned over the years that someone starting out today can really benefit from? Five things you’ve learned over the years that someone starting out today can benefit from.

Rob Bailis: Okay, yeah. I’ll start with the thing I say the most to anybody who will listen, which is: no one does this work alone. That’s the first thing I will say to anybody who asks. When I say that, of course, what I mean by that is that this field is entirely predicated on collaboration. Everybody needs somebody. There’s nowhere where you’re not going to need to work with other people, there’s nowhere where you’re not going to need a community, and there’s nowhere where that community isn’t going to need you!

There is no such thing as the mythology of the lone genius who’s somehow going to ride in and save the day, or these images we have of stardom, the magically arriving person who’s somehow just a lightning strike of unique difference in the world. It does not exist. It might appear that way, but it certainly doesn’t exist. I think those images, as much as we love to create them because they’re part of mythology, are really dangerous for people who are actually going to pursue a career.

No one does this work alone. No one. The most important thing to realize is when you really think about it, the entire field of the performing arts is a calculation of risk and reward. The entire field, everybody’s in it for some level of risk and some level of reward. There is nothing else involved. You have to take risks; there’s nothing without that. If you’re risk-averse, don’t bother. Some level of that ratio is required.

Because that’s there, the underpinning of the whole enterprise is vulnerability and trust. You have to be willing to be vulnerable, and vulnerability breeds and requires trust. The stock-in-trade of this industry, believe it or not, is vulnerability, trust, risk, reward, and that demands community.

These things are sometimes very combustible when you put them together and not always friendly in the same room or in the same fishbowl. But the reality of it is that this is what binds us together. It is the requirement of trust and the requirement of risk that makes this work what it is.

Number two is kind of an offshoot of that, but I would say that everybody at some level is going to be thinking at some point career-wise, or at least professionally, about power, money, influence, and all that kind of stuff. Your relationships will sustain you more than any of those things will, and your relationships are likely your best path to those things, period. Unless you happen to be that inventor, unless you happen to be that odd scientist, your relationships are your path to everything and anything. Everything else is an illusion.

The need to care for yourself in the very act of caring for other people is the baseline of all things in this career. It’s acts of generosity, acts of simple kindness, acts of awareness that involve caring for those around you, those you endeavor with. Seeing that as an act of self-care is absolutely essential.

What’s at the baseline there is that your integrity is all you have. Your integrity is it. If that’s impugned, what do you have? Above all else, integrity, authenticity, and real intentionality with your choices — that will keep your relationships burning clean, and keep your trajectory focused.

Number three and another favorite phrase of mine: of course you’re going to get “no” a lot more than you’re going to get “yes,” right? I have a phrase that I used to say to myself all the time, which was: embrace the “no” and chisel on, Michelangelo. I used to say that to myself all the time. If we’re on the way to “yes,” “no” is how we get there. “No” is not just rejection; “no” is incredibly helpful too. “No” is: “this isn’t helpful to me, this isn’t getting me anywhere, this isn’t right.” “No” is all the clutter you have to get out of your way.

There’s so much we have in our heads and so much that just gets in our way. Every actor will tell you this, every director will tell you this, every maker will tell you this: they’ll tell you the biggest problem you have, probably, is you, and the things that you invariably do to complicate your own self and/or your own process for no good reason. There are so many wonderful ways in which “no” does not have to indicate something negative. It actually can be a blessing that removes things. It’s an incredibly sharp tool that can do wonders for you in improving and clarifying your life.

Number Four: The other catchphrase I have for myself is: fearlessly make, bravely listen, and wisely adapt. Those are pretty straightforward. You’ve got to listen, and you’ve got to change based on what you hear, no matter what. But the fearlessness it takes to get your work in the world is paramount. You’ve got to be brave about getting out there and doing it; there’s no other way.

If the fear of listening to critique is worrisome, then there’s got to be a way to figure out how to work on that or find your way through it. On the other hand, disappearing into critique is the worst thing that could ever happen to you; don’t ever do it.

Adapting wisely is something only you know. You’re here to do your work; you’re here to be you. You’re not here to be anybody else. Make your choices. But do listen. If you find yourself isolated, there might be a reason why you’re there, so take a good listen. It is true, no one does this work alone. So if you’re alone, you absolutely do not have to be. Maybe start by listening. Sometimes, the courage or fearlessness it takes to make something overwhelms every other sense. And for a time you can’t listen. Or perhaps you can listen but you cannot adapt. One can’t always do all of these things all of the time, or all in a row, or at the same time. That is why they are three separate pieces of advice and not one.

Number Five: The last thing is stay curious. We’re all constantly reinventing ourselves. We’re all self-made creatures of our own design. The minute you think you know something, you don’t. It’s constantly going to change on you. Always being at the beginning of something, where you can remind yourself that, no matter what you think you know, being humble in front of something that is much bigger than you is a good practice for every day. Curiosity is the key.

Yitzi Weiner: Rob, this is our final aspirational question. Because of your amazing work and the platform that you lead, it’s not an exaggeration to say that you’re a person of enormous influence. If you could spread an idea or inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? Because you never know what your idea can inspire.

Rob Bailis: Honestly, if I could wave a wand and change one thing, I would wave the wand that makes artists essential workers, period, so that we wouldn’t be thinking about that anymore. Artists don’t need a reason for being that has to somehow be defined by a transactional nature around their work.

The arts themselves, particularly the performing arts, are the most powerful materials known to humankind. We accept this. We know that if you take away dance, you take away music, you take away language, you end culture. It cannot self-replicate, regenerate, or evolve without those things.

The arts literally move mountains, not figuratively. Arguments over ideas move boundaries, move rivers, move nations, and move seats of power. Ideas do that. Let’s not pretend that the anthems that carry those ideas and the vehicles of these points of view are not the most powerful materials known to humankind. Let’s not pretend. And yet, as a career — for almost all working artists — completely unsustainable.

If I could radicalize any one notion, it would be that one: that if we’re having conversations about essential workers, include artists. Particularly independent and self producing artists that have no other direct means of affiliation — they absolutely need to receive a living wage to support their creative process time. That would be it.

Embedded within that would be the somewhat more universal notion: perhaps it’s time that we acknowledge these are indeed the most powerful materials known to humankind. More powerful than the tools of annihilation. In fact, these would be the things that would provoke our use of the tools of annihilation, or enable us to create the tools of annihilation in the first place, so perhaps they’re even more powerful. This is the stuff that dreams are made on, so let’s get real. This is the real transformational stuff.

If we have that awareness, then we also have the radical power to deploy it for all the best purposes. Those best purposes are also available to us, not just the scary ones, but all the really good ones. That’s where I am so hopeful for the kind of change that we can all make. That’s the kind of thinking that we’re all about at BroadStage; that’s what we’re trying to get done, that’s the work that we want to bring into the world, and the relationships that we’re trying to foster across this incredibly wild west that is Los Angeles.

Yitzi Weiner: It’s truly been an honor to meet you. How can our readers continue to follow your work? How can they come see a performance? How could they support you and your work in any possible way?

Rob Bailis: Of course, go and see a show: broadstage.org. Go and see a show; that’s the best way, because then you also get to support the artist, and that’s really where it’s at. That’s the best possible way. There’s so much to see, so much to enjoy, and so much to take in.

As we come up on institutional milestones, there’s also going to be so many different ways in which we’re going to be reaching out into the world. Keep your eyes out there. There’s going to be a lot coming out of BroadStage nationally and internationally about how we’re trying to make change. Maybe if you’re reading this, you might find yourself in a corner of the world that’s nowhere near Santa Monica, but as you’re thinking about ’28 and what’s going to be going on internationally with the Olympics, or even with the Super Bowl in ’27, if you find your way to LA, come and check us out. Or if you are intrigued by our trajectory and would like to get involved or support a project, please get in touch — we have plenty of room for you! Get in touch through our Development Team or our Programming Team and share your voice.

Yitzi Weiner: Rob, it’s been a joy to meet you. I wish you continued success and good health. I’d love to do this again in the near future.

Rob Bailis: Absolutely. Any time. Thank you so much. It’s a real pleasure.

Yitzi Weiner: It’s my pleasure and an honor. Thank you. Have an amazing day.

Rob Bailis: Take care.

BroadStage’s Rob Bailis: Why Artists Are ‘The Most Powerful Materials Known to Humankind was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

“We got close to 100 people here in Boulder, and we spent the whole day from 8:00 to 5:00 really talking about nervous system regulation, emotional intelligence, founder wellness, founder mental health, and how to ask for help. We even modeled on stage four coaches in a room full of founders, and we helped those founders practice asking for help. One of them even stood up and she just broke down in tears and she said, “I never knew it was okay to ask for help.”

I had the pleasure of talking with Arron Mansika. At Conscious Entrepreneur’s first fall Deepening in Boulder, Colorado, nearly 100 founders gathered to discuss subjects that rarely make it onto a traditional business conference agenda: emotional intelligence, nervous system regulation, mental health, and the difficult act of asking for help. During a coaching exercise, one woman stood up in tears. “I never knew it was okay to ask for help,” she said, according to Mansika. For him, that moment suggested something a roomful of business strategy sessions might never accomplish.

The question behind that gathering is the question Mansika has been pursuing for much of his career: Can a company grow without its founder becoming narrower, harder, or less attentive to other people? He has spent years helping businesses expand. Now he is also asking their leaders to examine what expansion does to them. At Conscious Entrepreneur, where he recently succeeded founder Alex Raymond as CEO, he describes himself with the less conventional title of “steward.” He owns a business with a profit-and-loss statement, he says, but he also bears responsibility for a community.

As a boy in South Jersey, he did not imagine himself this way. His childhood, which he remembers as unusually happy, took place among a Jewish mother, a Catholic father, Christmas trees, menorahs, and relatives living close enough for regular visits. He excelled at math and science, and adults encouraged that identity. Yet his early attachment to nature was less analytical than protective. When friends picked leaves off trees, he protested that the tree was alive. Only later did he recognize how much of himself had been left outside the label of scientist.

At Naropa University in Boulder, he found language for the part of his experience that resisted measurement. In the environmental leadership master’s program, he says, students devoted their first year to inward study before turning to outward action. The sequencing stuck. Business, he came to believe, could be an instrument of social change, but its leaders would need to do some inner work of their own. The idealism was sincere, though his next chapter would test how well it survived contact with an industry built to sell things.

After Naropa, Mansika helped create Naturally Boulder, an organization that connected entrepreneurs in the natural products industry with peers, capital, expertise, and opportunities. Over roughly 15 years, he helped it grow into a model for affiliated communities across the country. He worked with thousands of founders and watched the industry gain the attention of major investors. That success produced an uncomfortable observation. As venture capital and private equity entered the industry, he believed some companies were putting margins ahead of the missions that originally defined them. He gave the trend an unforgiving name: “industrial-sized mission drift.”

It is a revealing phrase from someone who has spent much of his life advocating for entrepreneurship. Mansika is enthusiastic about markets, but he is not inclined to treat every market outcome as beneficial. He wants companies to be profitable and their leaders to notice whom their decisions affect. His argument risks sounding abstract until he tells a story about a sales training in Boulder. One attendee sat with arms crossed, staring out the window. By the end of the session, after a discussion of empathy and what customers actually hear, the man was asking questions and followed Mansika to the parking lot, still talking.

Mansika has had his own lessons in the gap between intention and reception. He once named a training company Mindful Your Business, a bit of wordplay he enjoyed more than its usefulness as a business name apparently warranted. People appreciated the training once they experienced it, he recalls, but the name made the offering harder to understand. He can laugh about it now. His insistence on awareness includes the ordinary entrepreneurial requirement of communicating clearly.

More disruptive was the period when he tried to leave entrepreneurship behind. After years of being answerable largely to boards, he decided to find a conventional job with a boss. He spent much of a year applying, sometimes enduring interview processes that stretched through five rounds, only to watch opportunities disappear. His wife offered a diagnosis of the situation without much ceremony: “Hun, this just isn’t your thing.” The eventual opportunity to lead Conscious Entrepreneur arrived by a less predictable route. Mansika describes the contrast with characteristic intensity: “I am on purpose.”

Founded in 2022, Conscious Entrepreneur had already built an annual summit focused on scaling companies. Mansika added a second gathering focused on deepening the people running them. His image for the two is hiking: look up to see where you are going, then down to find secure footing. It is a neat metaphor for a messy assignment. Founders face payrolls, investors, and decisions that cannot be solved by breathing exercises alone. Mansika is betting that awareness belongs in those decisions, rather than outside them. The boy who carved toy acorns for neighbors and spent his quarters on ice cream remembers enjoying the carving as much as the purchase. Decades later, he is still trying to make growth answer to something beyond the reward at the end.

Yitzi Weiner: Arron, it’s an honor and a delight to meet you. Before we dive in deep and talk about your amazing work, our readers would love to learn about your personal origin story. Can you share with us a story of your childhood and how you grew up, and particularly the seeds of all the amazing creativity and leadership that has come since then?

Arron Mansika: Yeah, and that question both feels spacious and somehow also very specific, and I welcome that experience so far. I had a very joyful childhood. I don’t think I appreciated just how joyful and fortunate I was as a child until I got to college and started to witness my friends’ stories of their childhoods. Loving mom, loving dad — Jewish mom, Catholic dad. I welcomed the Christmas tree and the menorah. And then they also had friends who were more mystical. That’s why I was really surrounded by multiple perspectives that had a unified receiver. I didn’t feel conflict in a lot of this. Older sister, aunts and uncles who lived an hour away — this is all in South New Jersey. Grandparents that lived an hour this way, another set of grandparents that lived an hour that way.

So it was really a very charmed, loving childhood. I was very good in math and science and that was celebrated. As I got a little older, people started to label me as the scientist. I had this innate love of nature. I would see friends picking leaves and I would say, “No, no, no, the tree is alive.” So I had this in me, and I think partly because I was this smart white boy, I was labeled a scientist. Not until I got to Naropa University here in Boulder, Colorado, did I really reclaim other parts of myself — not just the white scientist appreciating nature through what you can measure and integrate, but really the more spiritual and contemplative aspect of environmental awareness and ecological appreciation.

So thankful to Naropa, the whole first year of the environmental leadership master’s program was studying internally, and then the second year was actual external action. And I came out of that really recognizing I’m an entrepreneur. I want to use the business world as a tool for positive social change. Moreover, I want to use the business world as a tool for positive personal change. The more I can refine my own beliefs and integrity, the more I’m going to actually be able to impact others with that. So that, in a very abbreviated manner, is how I feel like I really matured and evolved into the person I am today. Very strong foundation, privileged with the opportunity for education, and then a willingness to just be brave and jump into the entrepreneurial endeavors.

Yitzi Weiner: Unbelievable. For the benefit of our readers, can you please share with us about the amazing work that you’re doing today? And then as an add-on to that, tell us a bit about the story of how you came to this and how you started it.

Arron Mansika: Yeah, for sure. Actually, before I talk about Conscious Entrepreneur, the organization that I started before this really teed us up. So it would feel not thorough to start from Conscious Entrepreneur. Right out of Naropa, I co-created an organization called Naturally Boulder. It’s an entrepreneurial support organization. We really helped grow the entrepreneurial ecosystem out here. What might take someone six months, we could help them learn in six weeks through relationships — you need access to capital, you need a social media influencer.

So we created this small organization that ended up growing tremendously, and we ended up going national. We created Naturally Chicago, Naturally LA, Naturally New York, Naturally San Diego, and there are about a dozen of them now around the country. I say it’s one big community with different neighborhoods. Now, what plays well in New York might play differently in the Bay Area, but still, it’s one giant North Star, and that is to use the natural products industry to build conscious companies and conscious leaders. I was there for 15 years and really studied the entrepreneurial mindset and worked with thousands of entrepreneurs. That very much informed what I’m doing now.

I am currently — I say I’m the owner and steward. I’m the owner because yes, it’s a business and there’s a P&L, but I’m also a steward because there’s a community, and I nurture and care for that. The organization is called Conscious Entrepreneur. And boy, I tell you, just putting those words together, when I tell people the name of the organization, there’s already this energetic inquiry: “Conscious Entrepreneur. That’s intriguing.”

And really, the upshot of what Conscious Entrepreneur is: I define a conscious entrepreneur as someone who recognizes — actually, they discover — that scaling and deepening their business typically coincides with scaling and deepening themselves. It really all starts with the founder. So we convene founders twice a year: once in the spring for a summit where we grow your company — 10x is easier than 2x — and we also have an annual deepening where we deepen our company, we deepen our leadership, we deepen our ethos. So those two events each year really provide a nice rhythm.

Like when you’re on a hike, you got to look up, you got to look down. We provide that rhythm, and then throughout the year, training and coaching.

Yitzi Weiner: Unbelievable. I’m sure you get this question a lot. There’s an organization called Conscious Capitalism. Does that align? Is it different? Is it overlapping?

Arron Mansika: It aligns, it certainly aligns. Yeah, for sure. And the whole Conscious Capitalism — the book, the mindset — was really popularized by John Mackey coming out of the natural products industry. I’ve gotten to meet John several times, of course, and as we grew Naturally Network around the country, John was very engaged and supportive, often giving our entrepreneurs their first shot on a shelf. So yes, I think if we track the origin, we may see that there is similar DNA.

Yitzi Weiner: You probably have some amazing stories from your career and your successes. Can you share with our readers two stories that stand out in your mind from your work today?

Arron Mansika: I trained a team here in Boulder, Colorado, and it was a sales team, and they had sales leaders from all around the country. They were all converging for their annual team meeting, and they invited me in to just give a two-hour training — awareness training: self-awareness, interpersonal awareness, market awareness. And there was one person from LA who just was not receiving anything that I was saying. They sat there with their arms crossed and staring out the window the whole time. They were there because they had to be. The rest of the group, we were engaged and it was a good experience, but this person just was really tuned out.

And I’m so proud to say that by the end of the two hours, they had started to ask a few questions and they started to realize, “Hey, this isn’t just a bunch of make-believe. This is a skill.” Self-awareness is a pragmatic skill and you can get better at it if you practice. And I got to the part where we’re talking about empathy, and it’s not just what you say as a salesperson — it’s what your recipient hears. It’s what they can actually receive. That’s what matters.

Boy, this really turned him around. He ended up following me into the parking lot, carrying my goods, helping with the gear, still asking me questions. And that felt so uplifting to me. He started to really expand his perception as to who he is, and what he can do, and how he presents himself to people. So that felt like a win. It’s great when people show up and they’re already in love with my content, but it’s even better when someone really cracks open and I can witness the growth on the fly. That felt really wonderful. Yeah.

Yitzi Weiner: Sure. There’s a saying that sometimes our mistakes can be our greatest teachers. Do you have a story about a humorous mistake that you made when you were first starting and the lesson that you took away from that?

Arron Mansika: Oh boy. Yeah. Okay. Before Conscious Entrepreneur, I had another business doing very similar trainings. This is really where a lot of the curriculum got practiced and really refined, but the name of that company — I liked it — was Mindful Your Business. It’s a little whimsical. It makes you think for a second: instead of “mind your business,” which is a little rude, this is “mindful your business.” This is encouraging you to become more mindful.

I learned the hard way that packaging sells product, even if the packaging is just the name and the branding. The product, people loved it. Once they tasted it, they loved it and they came back every year. The packaging, the name of the company, needed to be not just something that I lit up about, but it needed to be a little more understandable. So I look back at it now and I chuckle. Compare the names Mindful Your Business to Conscious Entrepreneur. It’s just so much more enlivening, if you will. So yeah, the name of the business really does make a difference.

Yitzi Weiner: It’s great. There’s this related idea that a “no” is not rejection, but redirection. Do you have a story like that where you got a “no” to an opportunity, but that led to an even better opportunity?

Arron Mansika: Yeah, for sure. In fact, Conscious Entrepreneur is the better opportunity. Because before I did this, I’ve never had a boss. The closest I ever came was I ran an environmental center in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and my regional director was in DC. Besides that, it’s always been a board of directors of my own entrepreneurial endeavor.

I decided I’m going to just have a boss, have a regular old job. So I spent the better part of a year really doing the application process and the interview process. And some of those interview processes went 10 weeks, five different rounds of people. And I thought I’d land one, and then it evaporated. And I was getting more and more frustrated. My wonderful wife is the one who consistently said, “Hun, this just isn’t your thing. You’re trying to fit into these positions, and you would do a great job, but that’s not really your vibe.”

Then the whole opportunity with Conscious Entrepreneur really just emerged, and it took patience, some frustration, some bravery, and a willingness to just let trust lead the way. And boy oh boy, I never have felt more on purpose than I do now. Not just on task or on point — I am on purpose. And I don’t know that I would have landed here if it were a linear direction.

Yitzi Weiner: That’s great. That’s a great example. So let’s now turn to Conscious Entrepreneur. Tell us about any exciting new initiatives, campaigns, or projects you’re working on. We’d love to hear about it, and please feel free to be as elaborate as you like.

Arron Mansika: Oh, thank you for that. Yeah, and this is an easy one because Conscious Entrepreneur in some ways is brand new, and in some ways it’s already very well established. What I mean by that is it was formed in 2022, and we’ve had an annual summit — big beautiful ballroom, 150 to 200 founders convening. In fact, one of the expressions that came out of the Conscious Entrepreneur summits for all these years is “the room where founders collectively exhale.” So the summit has been very strong. We’ve had some incredible speakers come across the stage, really visible keynotes, and it was all about scaling up.

It’s the summit; it’s all about scaling up. So for four years there was that very predictable gathering. People would come in from mostly the US, but even parts of Europe, people would fly in. Real relationships were formed, real business growth happened, real breakthrough happened once a year. And I would go, I loved them. This is where I would meet my people, and it was very uplifting and it was very genuine. And then I would say, “Bye everybody. I’ll see you in 11 and a half months.”

So when I started as the CEO steward, the first thing I did was complement the summit with the Deepening. So now instead of just a once-a-year downbeat, there is this twice-a-year downbeat. We just had our first one last week. So I feel fulfilled by that and also a little bit still wiped out by that because it was a lot of effort.

We got close to 100 people here in Boulder, and we spent the whole day from 8:00 to 5:00 really talking about nervous system regulation, emotional intelligence, founder wellness, founder mental health, and how to ask for help. We even modeled on stage four coaches in a room full of founders, and we helped those founders practice asking for help. One of them even stood up and she just broke down in tears and she said, “I never knew it was okay to ask for help.”

So I feel really proud of the container that I created, and even more proud of the people who showed up and really provided the content. I could get the room and the stage and the posters, but it’s up to the people to really make it meaningful. So we curated some of the crowd and we just said, “Anyone else who wants to join, you’re welcome to join.” And of course now on social media, it’s all chatter about how deep it got. The very next day, about 12 of us actually went up into the woods and we spent another full day together. Different type of experience with a similar intent — building deep relationships, actually learning how to be vulnerable. So it was a success, the very first one, and I would absolutely say there’s momentum to continue it annually.

Yitzi Weiner: Can you articulate, if you were completely successful in the mission of Conscious Entrepreneur, what would the business landscape in the United States look like in 20 years?

Arron Mansika: Yeah. Every business school would have a segment on empathy. Every business school would acknowledge that awareness is a fundamental business skill. It’s not something nice to add on along the way. It is a fundamental skill in being a decent human, which I would hope a business leader wants to be. So really emphasizing the qualities of what awareness can provide: self-awareness, and then of course interpersonal awareness, and that can ladder up to systems intelligence and market awareness.

Marketing more from integrity and less from noise. I think that was really my mission in the natural products industry. And the internal intent of growing Naturally Network — which last year impacted over 55,000 businesses — was to inoculate the industry of greed. And that’s a big undertaking. When you’re talking greed, you’re not just talking market forces, you’re talking fundamental human traits. The natural products industry got to the size where private equity was coming in and venture capital was coming in. It really fundamentally changed the whole landscape. Margin was more important than mission. And I started to use the expression “industrial-sized mission drift.” Not just one brand drifting away from its mission, the whole industry: industrial-sized mission drift.

So the motivation for me to take this small nonprofit here in Boulder that was really having great effects — so many brands are coming out of Boulder, all these wonderful natural products — I wanted to really get to the bigger companies, the largest of the large CPG companies, and educate them. Authenticity is sniffed out by the consumer. We can tell at the shelf: this one has a brand story, and this one’s just out to take my dollars. This one is catering to my dietary needs; this one is exploiting my dietary needs. So the whole intent was to try to inoculate this industry of greed and corruption.

That’s a hard undertaking, but I found a lot of meaningful colleagues.

Yitzi Weiner: Is the idea of a B Corp something that you’re aligned with, or is it distinct?

Arron Mansika: Very much aligned with the B Corp, and really proud to say that a lot of the earliest adopters of the B Corp movement were natural products companies. That ethos was just ready and primed for that. And in fact, the whole notion of B Corp — one of the founders of that is from Boulder. So I like to think that the spirit of Boulder helped influence that, and I really do have a lot of enthusiasm and optimism for what the B Corp mindset is approaching. It’s working within the system to improve the system.

Yitzi Weiner: Is conscious entrepreneurship distinct from ESG and more particularly DEI?

Arron Mansika: Obviously they might bubble from the same spring, but I would say that conscious entrepreneurship is more the mindset. ESG and other things might be outcomes of a conscious entrepreneur mindset, just like B Corps are an outcome of a conscious entrepreneur mindset. And I really feel like that’s our territory: to say yes to that manifestation of conscious entrepreneurship, yes to that manifestation of conscious leadership. What I often say is I aggregate and elevate. I think that’s really ultimately how I want to contribute to the ecosystem — helping amplify what is already beautifully happening out there. That’s why we’re just Conscious Entrepreneur.

Yitzi Weiner: It’s amazing. To a critic — to the straw man out there, I don’t believe in this — who says the purpose of a CEO is to maximize profits for the shareholders, and social impact you could do on your own time and your own dollar; that’s not the purpose of a CEO, you have a responsibility to the shareholders. How do you respond to that straw man?

Arron Mansika: Yes, of course that mindset is very prevalent. That’s still, I’d say, the expectation of a business leader — thinking in terms of stockholders rather than stakeholders, or reverse that, you get it: stakeholders rather than the shareholders. It depends on what you’re trying to build and where the integrity lies.

I feel like there’s a threshold that an evolving human psyche crosses through where they recognize that “myself” is not just limited to my literal self, but also my spouse, or my kid, or my best friend, or my ailing parent. Wonderful. That’s a keyhole into recognizing that “self” is somewhat an illusion. So with a larger sense of self, then the kind of work that we’re talking about comes spontaneously, and that’s what’s inspiring to me.

We see what has happened to the planet. We see what has happened to our collective psyche, our collective souls, when the ambition really is profit at all costs. And I know that’s baked into corporate charters, and I know that’s mandated legally. I’ve seen boards take legal action to eject board chairs who had too much integrity in their body to cut the corners. And that’s a shame, and it’s a sin, I feel. So yes, I recognize it’s still out there, and yes, it’s very prevalent, and perhaps there’s even a purpose and a point to it for sure. But I really am excited that the business community is starting to evolve and transcend beyond that limited thinking.

Yitzi Weiner: To what degree do you want this to be more of a voluntary adoption by companies versus the government taking on these frameworks and enforcing them? What’s your long-term vision? Do you see this as more voluntary, or do you see this as a template for laws to be passed?

Arron Mansika: Yes and yes. I really think we’re making a very strong business case for it. And because there’s a strong business case for it, it may not have to be mandated through a governmental agency. The example I use: remember when the funny squiggly light bulbs first came out? I was like, “That’s weird. Light bulbs are already totally fine. Why do I want to spend so much more money on a funny squiggly light bulb?” Well, of course, if that was a government-mandated thing, we’d all say, “You’re making us get rid of…” It was a business proposition. The companies who first adopted that found a market opportunity and they were the first to seize it, and before you know it, they don’t even make the old-fashioned light bulbs anymore.

Government did not need to come in. Eventually the government came in and created some policy around that, but first it was a market opportunity. And I really do think economic, ecologic, and social ills can meaningfully be addressed — maybe not entirely, but largely — through market forces, where we are making social impact profitable. So much so that the younger generations are expecting their brands to do more than just sell you stuff. They’re expecting the brands to be meaningful.

So perhaps there’s a government role to play, but I don’t think it’s a leadership role in that.

Yitzi Weiner: Let’s take a persistent problem like homelessness. Does your framework solve or address that? If more real estate companies and more building companies would adopt conscious entrepreneurship, would that impact or reduce homelessness?

Arron Mansika: Well, “solve” is a significant word. I’d like to think it would have a positive effect across all aspects of society, homelessness included — heck, violence of all sorts included — because it is a more meaningful way of going through life. Not just, “I’m this kind of business leader, but when I go home, I’m that kind of father.” It’s like, no, it’s the same me. It’s the same person. I have integrity here, I have integrity there. So I’d like to not just single out any one thing, like domestic abuse, etc. It truly is a mindset through which all activity is fair game to be impacted.

Yitzi Weiner: Amazing. Okay, this is our signature question. Arron, you’ve been blessed with a lot of success now and you must have learned a lot from your experiences. Looking back all the way to the beginning when you were a young boy selling toy acorns, can you share five things that you’ve learned over the years that someone starting out today can really benefit from?

Arron Mansika: First of all, I love that you referenced the acorn. You did your research, my friend. That is wonderful.

I almost spoke those words and I didn’t — he already knows those words!

• I would say that entrepreneurship often is a compelling internal calling. It’s not like you either have it or you don’t. I think people can be taught entrepreneurship, absolutely. But I do think the traits that often benefit an entrepreneur are an internal calling. It’s an internal experience. And I would say it’s a hard calling to suppress. So if you have that inkling, if you have that nudge, explore it. I know that’s easier said than done in some circumstances, but entrepreneurship doesn’t have to look like what we see out there in the world. It can be a small or a large endeavor, but it’s an urge that is hard to suppress. Give me a second, I want to think your question through.
• I would also say that joy is an essential component to success. I enjoyed carving those acorns for my neighbors, and I enjoyed getting 25 cents for them and saving up my dollars and getting an ice cream cone. But the joy didn’t get delayed to the ice cream cone. The joy came from the carving of the acorns. And that was to me — my grown-up language would be a driver. That was a real driver to my motivation. To a little kid, I would just say I had fun with it. And that’s when I see the greatest success: when the founders actually have that — you can almost see the little kid inside them, that joy still shows up on their face when they walk into their business and talk to their colleagues.
• I’ll share another one: that awareness is an advantage. One of the things I talk about in my training — and it really is the core of the training — is that awareness is an advantage, and in fact, it may be the only sustainable advantage. First to market, that can be an advantage, but only for a while. A new innovation, or a new teammate, or access to capital — those can all be replicated. But one person or one team’s acute awareness to meet a moment, how the moment can best be met — wow, that is an advantage that continually unfolds in real time. So the brands that are most nimble, the brands that are most intelligent — which mandates diversity, because then your blind spot is different than her blind spot, so diversity is just a fundamental aspect to greater intelligence — all of that bubbles up to awareness actually being a person’s, a team’s, a whole company’s opportunity for an advantage.
• I would say that how a business is built matters just as much as what the business is building. I’ve seen really amazing products, but they were created from this ferocious greed, and the whole thing just folded eventually. It was imbued with an energy that was not sustainable. So how a person builds is just as important, if not more important, than what a person builds.
• And the final one I would say is, having gotten to work literally with hundreds, if not over a thousand different teams, the pedigree doesn’t really forecast success. I’ve seen companies on paper where I’m like, “I don’t know any of these people. They’re all brand new.” And a year later, they are rocking it. Conversely, I’ve also seen companies and their business plans where, “Everybody here is amazing. This one’s already founded three companies. This one’s already founded two companies.” And at six months, they’re gone. So it really is often an inner game. The outer success is very often an inner game.

Yitzi Weiner: Unbelievable. I feel like I should be talking to you about AI and data centers, but I know that’ll take another hour.

Arron Mansika: It’s hard not to have a conversation these days without AI coming into it. And you saw our Deepening keynote came from the AI world, partly because everybody’s like, “We got to have AI.” I was like, “I guess I do, but if I do, I’m going to have a Zen monk be my representative of that.” And what a person — he just embodies the whole notion of scaling up and also going deep. So if you want to talk AI, I don’t know that I could do it very well, but I’m happy to.

Yitzi Weiner: That’s okay. This question will touch on that, and the truth is this question really touches on everything we’ve spoken about, but I ask this in all of our interviews. Arron, you’ve been blessed with a lot of success, and to be honest, you’re a person of enormous influence. If you could spread an idea or inspire a movement that could bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? Because you never know what your idea can inspire.

Arron Mansika: I would make it as simple and personal and fundamental as I know how to do. And that really is that we are all truly one larger self. And when people start to appreciate the larger sense of self, it will spontaneously change their decisions.

Yitzi Weiner: Yeah, I love it. I love it so much. Okay, I can talk to you for a long, long time, but I want to respect your time. Arron, how can our readers continue to follow your work? How can they attend any of your summits? How can they engage your services? How could they support your work in any possible way?

Arron Mansika: Yeah, and thank you. Before I even answer that, I just want to say thank you. It feels strange, and I know it’s appropriate, but it’s one-sided. I want to talk to you. I want to ask you questions. How did you get into this? I admire your work and the caliber of people that you connect with, and I’m just like, “Oh my goodness, how did that come about?” I’m so intrigued by that. So perhaps we can do that again.

Yitzi Weiner: I would absolutely love it. It would really be my honor if we could do it next week. That would truly be my honor.

Arron Mansika: Yeah, truly, I would love that. I recognize a person pulling in the same direction — we truly want to have a more peaceful world on our exit than we had on our arrival.

So staying in touch with us is easy: consciousentrepreneur.us, traditional LinkedIn profiles, and sign up to our newsletter, things like that. But really, what we do that’s unique — because there are a lot of wonderful organizations supporting founder mental wellness, supporting entrepreneurship, small business development — is we convene. I think there’s a lot of wonderful content out there; we don’t want to add to it. We want to elevate what’s already out there, and we do that partly by convening.

So my stage is our stage, and I had at one point 12 different people on stage. So yes to follow us on LinkedIn and read our newsletter, etc., but actually experience it in person. I can describe an apple pie, but until you taste it, all you have is the imagination of tasting it. Be in the room with us and really feel what it feels like to be there.

Yitzi Weiner: Unbelievable. Arron, it’s truly been an honor to learn from you. I wish you continued success and good health and blessings, and I’d love to do this again soon.

Arron Mansika: Yitzi, I appreciate it.

Arron Mansika: Why Conscious Leadership Is the Key to Sustainable Business Growth was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.