We're Pia and Kelly, co-founders of Cuore. We met at Amazon new-hire orientation 13 years ago, sitting at different tables, and ended up desk neighbors on the communications team. We've spent our careers obsessed with how words change what happens next, in boardrooms, in hallways, in the text you reread three times before sending. Well Said is our podcast about connection as a human skill. We talk to coaches, chefs, journalists, and founders about what actually helps people reach each other when it matters. If you care about trust, communication, and saying things that land, this is for you.
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How to Communicate Like a National Champion: 6 Rules From UCLA’s Coach Cori Close
Tuesday, October 27, 2026 • Duration 48:30
Cori Close is the head coach of UCLA women's basketball. In her 15th season, she led the Bruins to their first NCAA national championship with a 37-1 record, and six of her players are now in the WNBA. She learned how to lead from legendary UCLA coach John Wooden, and she still runs her program on his reminder that a coach is shaping people's hearts before their jump shots.
What makes Cori such a natural fit for Well Said: she leads almost entirely through language. From the words her team picks to define a season to knowing when to stay quiet and let her players talk, nearly everything she does in a locker room carries over to a boardroom, a press briefing, or a crisis call.
In this episode:
• Why her players pick seven key indicators they can control at the start of every season
• How Amazon's working backwards press release lines up with the way she builds a team's identity
• Why winning is a byproduct, and the John Vallely story that shaped her mission
• Why she skipped the big Ted Lasso speech and let her players talk first
• Truth tellers, balcony people, and building psychological safety on a staff
• "Talent is the floor and character is the ceiling": recruiting, the transfer portal, and a reload year
• Her go-to team-building exercise: hero, highlight, hardship, hope
Make sure you subscribe to Well Said everywhere you get your podcasts, so you never miss another episode. Thanks for listening!
CHAPTER TIMESTAMPS
00:00 Intro
01:19 Welcome Coach Cori Close
02:13 Mindset work and seven "I am" statements
04:19 Amazon's working backwards press release
07:01 Why winning is a byproduct
10:49 The John Vallely story and Coach Wooden
14:57 Knowing when to be quiet
19:51 Truth tellers and balcony people
22:48 Clarity is kind: recruiting for character
25:24 Failing forward in the transfer portal era
28:18 Why women need to celebrate each other
39:05 Her dad on the greatest honor in life
40:47 Rapid fire
46:23 Hero, highlight, hardship, hope
How to Get an A on Your Next Crisis Statement
Tuesday, October 20, 2026 • Duration 07:22
Every brand crisis ends with a statement, and the internet grades it within hours. Pia and Kelly pulled real statements companies put out over the last few months and ranked them on a tier list, from S for supreme all the way down to F.
Pia and Kelly are the co-founders of Cuore and spent years running communications at Amazon. Dollywood earned the only S with five words that sounded exactly like Dolly Parton. Target, Neutrogena, and FIFA landed a lot lower, and for each one they get into what the brand should have written instead, or whether it should have said anything at all.
In this episode:
• Why Dollywood’s “the show must go on” earned the only S on the list
• Target’s costume apology, and why sorry stops working when the same mistake comes back every year
• Neutrogena’s statement after Hayden Panettiere’s death, and why it may have been a no-win from the start
• When saying nothing is the more respectful choice
• What Neutrogena could have said about young people growing up in the spotlight
• FIFA’s answer to the World Cup ticket backlash, and why Pia called it a big middle finger
• The fan stories FIFA could have used to get real people into stadiums
• Why a boring statement beats a bad one
New episodes of Well Said every other Wednesday. Subscribe on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.
Seen a statement you want us to grade? Drop it in the comments.
Timestamps:
00:00 Intro
01:01 Dollywood: “The show must go on”
Award-Winning Journalist Reveals How To Get Anyone To Open Up | Erick Galindo
Tuesday, October 13, 2026 • Duration 43:44
At seven years old, Erick Galindo was translating for his parents at the bank, at the hospital, and in front of police and immigration officials. His Spanish wasn't great, so he had to take official language written for highly educated people and break it down into the simplest words he knew.
He's been doing some version of that ever since.
Erick has written for The New York Times, the LA Times and NPR, led L.A. Taco to a James Beard Award as its founding managing editor, and made Ídolo, a podcast that went to No. 1 in Mexico. Today he's the Community, Culture and Arts Editor at The LA Local, where reporters hold coffee hours in neighborhood shops and the newsroom's first question in a crisis is how to help the people living through it.
Pia and Kelly ask him how he earns trust so fast. His answer starts with going first. He once got a guarded celebrity to open up about the time she lived in her car by telling her he'd lived in his car too.
This episode is about trust, plain language, and showing up for people before you need something from them. It applies whether you're running a newsroom, a corporate comms team, or a thousand-person warehouse floor.
In this episode:
• What translating hospital bills and immigration paperwork as a kid taught him about plain language
• The vulnerability move that gets guarded people talking
• How his newsroom covered a toxic warehouse fire: moving beyond sensationalism by helping people first
• Why local news is still the most trusted source, and what's lost as it disappears
• Why "community" is the most overused word in comms right now
• Getting laid off in a room full of people, and the one-on-one call every layoff deserves
• What his dad told him at the kitchen table that became his superpower
• His advice for young communicators in the age of AI: take a beat
PR Pros Call Out the Brand Mistakes Everyone Fell For | Pia Arthur & Kelly Cheeseman
Tuesday, October 6, 2026 • Duration 29:50
Most mornings, Pia and Kelly catch up over coffee and trade hot takes on whatever brand moment is blowing up online. This episode puts that conversation on camera. Each brought scenarios the other hadn't seen, and they react cold: Disney opening its IP to TikTok creators, the wave of nostalgia menus, a golf collab ad that went sideways, the "sold out in 15 seconds" drop, and Liquid Death asking fans to donate their pee to cool AI data centers.
Pia and Kelly are the co-founders of Cuore and spent years as communications executives at Amazon. Their verdicts keep landing on the same line: the moves that work trust the audience, and the ones that backfire try to manage it. Along the way they get into what they'd actually say to a CEO in the room, and what a better apology would have sounded like.
In this episode:
• Why Disney handing its IP to creators is a lesson in knowing who already loves you
• Nostalgia marketing, and when a throwback turns into a cheap trick
• What Kelly would do if she ran comms for a fast food comeback item
• Target, Delia's, and why a collaboration doubles your exposure and your risk
• The Callaway x Good Good ad, and why "this doesn't reflect our values" fell flat
• Manufactured scarcity, bots, and resellers, and why it erodes trust
• What to say when a CEO wants to make only 500 so they sell out fast
• Liquid Death's "We Want Your Pee" campaign: gross, or genius?
New episodes of Well Said every other Wednesday. Subscribe on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.
Timestamps:
How to Talk to People Who Disagree With You | Professor Dr. Melina Abdullah
Tuesday, September 29, 2026 • Duration 45:48
Dr. Melina Abdullah grew up in Oakland, where her mother's front porch doubled as a classroom for the neighborhood. She's been organizing ever since, and she teaches, writes a weekly column, hosts a radio show and has spent two decades studying how people actually lead.
She sits down with Kelly Cheeseman and Pia Arthur on the difference between leaderless and leader-full, why she quotes Ella Baker's line that strong people don't need strong leaders, and what she calls womanist leadership, which she wrote her dissertation on.
Then the conversation goes somewhere else. What AI can't do, why she thinks spirit, love and art are the things that make us human, why she stopped being quiet about the voice that guides her work, and what she learned from her mother about talking to your kids for three hours at a time.
In this episode:
• Group-centered leadership instead of leader-centered groups, and where the idea comes from
• Alice Walker's purple and lavender line, and why one image does more than a paragraph
• Why she asks what her intention is before she agrees to speak to a hostile room
• The oppositional student who emailed her four years after graduating
• What she does when the work gets heavy, including the dominoes in her bag
• How a story travels now, and why independent media and social changed who gets covered
• Bullhorn, microphone or keyboard, and which one she'd pick
New episodes of Well Said. Watch on YouTube, listen wherever you get your podcasts.
Chapter Timestamps
The Emmy-Winning Composer Who Says All Sound Is Music | Amanda Jones
Tuesday, September 22, 2026 • Duration 44:42
A speech and a film score are built the same way. You hook early, you earn the emotional moment before you spend it, you let the silent parts stay silent, and you get one crescendo. Composer Amanda Jones spends her career making those decisions in sound, and this conversation is about what writers, speakers and communicators can take from the way she does it.
There's also the problem she solves before writing a single note: figuring out what a director hears in their head. She gets one creative call, sometimes with months of silence after it, so she's built a method for getting inside someone's imagination fast.
Jones is an Emmy-winning composer and the first African American woman nominated in the Primetime Emmy score category. Her recent work includes Apple TV+'s Murderbot, National Geographic's Hurricane Katrina: Race Against Time, and Tyler Perry's The Gospel of Christmas. She sits down with Pia and Kelly to break down how she reads a story, builds a sound from scratch, and knows when to get out of the way.
In this episode:
• The question she asks every director to find their "cultural focal point"
• Why she chose a temperamental 1970s synthesizer to play a sentient robot
• How she scored Hurricane Katrina survivor interviews without crowding them
• The easiest emotion to write music for, and the one that's actually hardest What temp music does to a composer's work, and why it's a trap
• The organizational system she learned working under Hans Zimmer and John Powell
• Her advice for composers coming up, including why perceived proximity decides who gets hired
Subscribe to Well Said for conversations with the people shaping how stories get told.
Listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or watch on YouTube. Find Amanda at amandajonescomposer.com and on Instagram @amandajonescomposer.
Why "The Best PR Is Invisible" Just Stopped Being True, with Pia and Kelly
Tuesday, September 15, 2026 • Duration 19:29
The first PR firm Kelly ever worked for had a mantra: the best PR is invisible. Then, Pia and Kelly built a decade at Amazon on it. In this episode, they say it out loud one more time and come to the conclusion: it isn't true anymore.
Pia and Kelly are the co-founders of Cuore and spent years as communications executives at Amazon, the people writing the words nobody sees. Now chief comms officers are reporting directly to CEOs, executives are expected to be digitally native, and the frontline employee has become the face of the brand. They walk through what that shift actually costs the people living it, and what it means if you're deciding when to bring a communications partner into your own business.
They also answer the questions listeners keep sending them, including the one nobody warned them about: what changes in you when you start putting yourself on camera.
In this episode:
• When to bring in a comms partner for a crisis, and why "early, early, early" isn't a cliché
• Why pulling comms into a product launch too soon can waste everyone's time
• The "good judgment police" role Kelly's Amazon teams played, and the cost of playing it too well
• What the WSJ's reporting on comms leaders in the C-suite gets right about the last twenty years
• Why the Kardashians are a masterclass in being everywhere all at once, and what brands should take from it
• The line almost every guest on this show has repeated, in different words
• What Pia learned about her own limiting beliefs from a year of filming
New episodes of Well Said every other Wednesday. Subscribe on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.
Timestamps:
00:00 Intro
Clothing Allows You to Communicate Before You Say a Word | Ryan Wood, Apparel Designer
Tuesday, September 8, 2026 • Duration 34:09
Ryan Wood spent sixteen years deciding what hangs on the rack at Urban Outfitters and The North Face, and he'll tell you plainly that a lot of it ended up in a landfill. He walked into the Well Said studio wearing a beat-up trucker hat.
Ryan is an apparel designer and merchant, most recently the founding head of men's product at Quince, and he's in the early stages of building athletic wear that doesn't look like everyone else's. Kelly and Pia get him into the mechanics of clothing as communication: what a hidden zipper and a cheeky line on a care label actually do for a customer three months after the purchase, why he takes inherited military jackets apart and stitches them into something wearable, and how vintage became his grown-up version of hunting for buried treasure.
The hat turns out to be his father's, from his years on the Blue Angels design team. It's one of the few fond memories he has of a complicated relationship, and it's the first of three things he'd grab in a fire.
In this episode:
- Why clothing is the front line, and what it says before your mouth opens
- The Boston Red Sox hat test for anyone who insists they don't care about fashion
- What he does with the clothing people inherit and can't wear or throw out
- Why individuality disappears the second you walk into a gym
- The case against polyester from someone who spent a career selling it
- How Urban Outfitters stays relevant forever and why J.Crew couldn't
- Where to start if you've never thought of getting dressed as communication
New episodes of Well Said every week. Subscribe on YouTube, and follow on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.
The Checklist That Tells the Surgeon to Ask for Help | Dr. Robert Cho
Tuesday, September 1, 2026 • Duration 48:33
Dr. Robert Cho operates on children's spines with Pearl Jam playing. When the monitors show the electrical signals between a child's brain and spinal cord starting to drop, the first thing that happens is not medical. The music goes off. That is the signal to everyone in the room that a checklist is coming, read out loud, together, off the wall. And one of the steps on that checklist is for Cho, the most senior person present, to pick up a phone and admit he needs help.
Cho is an orthopedic spine surgeon with offices in Beverly Hills and Brentwood who has done over a thousand scoliosis surgeries on kids and adults. His argument to Pia Arthur and Kelly Cheeseman is that calm under pressure is not a personality trait, it is something you script in advance, and that trust works the same way. He reads the t-shirt before he reads the chart. He gives every patient his cell phone number. He opens every operation by telling the room that anyone can stop him at any point, because he knows the story of the copilot who could not bring himself to tell the pilot they were flying into a mountain.
In this episode:
• Why the phone-a-friend step is the most valuable part of the checklist, and what an outside voice with a low heart rate can see that the room cannot
• The ego burden of asking for help, and how putting it on paper removes it
• Reading the t-shirt: earning a child's trust in the few moments you get
• Why most patients he sees never get operated on, and how telling them so builds trust
• The surgeon who threw a scalpel into the wall, and what that does to everyone else in the room
• What actually happens in a parent's head the second they hear the word surgery
• The one word he thinks should be banned from every doctor-patient relationship
• Why a confidently wrong AI reminds him of an old-guard surgeon
• What "well said" means in an operating room, and the pet peeve about reading the scan first
How to Pitch Without Trying to Win the Room | Steve M. Cullen @ All Together Now
Tuesday, August 25, 2026 • Duration 49:57
Steve M. Cullen has presented roughly 200 times a year for two decades. He'll tell you privately that a pitch is warfare, that his mother's retirement is riding on it, that the fundamental job is to be the freshest person in the room. Then he walks in and refuses to pitch at all.
Steve is a creative director and the founder of All Together Now, a studio whose entire tagline is "good ideas and sunny vibes." His work is turning companies into stories, which mostly means convincing people that something that doesn't exist yet should exist. Kelly and Pia get him into the mechanics of how that actually happens: the craft skills he built by taking apart campaigns and films line by line, the Eminem lyrical-construction exercise he ran on advertising for years, and why the difference between winners and almost-winners is that winners write it down.
The back half turns inward. Steve talks about trigger journals, memento mori, the stoic virtues he actually uses, and the nightly 6pm debrief he gives his cat, which is how he discovered he'd been telling himself he'd failed 12 days in a row.
In this episode:
Why creative direction isn't salting the soup, it's deciding what to make with everything in the kitchen
How Steve prepares a competitive pitch so the outcome is decided before he arrives
The reason he runs a working session instead of a presentation
What a trigger journal is, and how to start one this week• Why winners write their goals down
The signature question he's asked clients for ten years, and where it came from
The one word he's banned from his vocabulary
New episodes of Well Said every week. Subscribe on YouTube, and follow on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.
Find Steve's studio, All Together Now, on Instagram.
01:42 Target’s costume apology
02:10 Neutrogena and Hayden Panettiere
03:23 What Neutrogena could have said
04:03 When saying nothing is the respectful choice
04:43 FIFA and World Cup ticket prices
05:10 “It’s like a big middle finger”
06:07 The fan stories FIFA missed
06:37 Why a boring statement would have worked
07:04 Send us a statement to grade
If you're an exec or communicator who wants people to actually trust what you say, this episode is for you.
You can support Erick's work at The LA Local and find him on Instagram under his name, Erick Galindo.
And make sure you subscribe to Well Said on all platforms to get new episodes every Wednesday.
TIMESTAMPS
01:30 Welcome Erick Galindo
01:48 Translating for his parents as a kid
04:51 Living in two worlds at once
08:49 Dolly Parton and the coat of many colors
11:23 How a local newsroom covers a crisis
14:48 Know your people before the emergency
16:16 Why local news is the most trusted
19:23 What's lost when local news fades
22:27 Laid off in a room full of people
26:06 The one-on-one call every layoff deserves
29:34 Choosing convenience over being human
31:03 The beauty of a typo
32:15 What his dad told him at the kitchen table
39:03 Owning who you are
44:21 The most overused word in comms
45:14 Go first: the vulnerability move
46:08 The best communicator he knows
48:32 Advice for young communicators: take a beat
52:36 Where to find Erick
00:00 Intro
00:50 Disney opens its IP to TikTok creators
04:41 "Hell hath no fury like a Disney adult"
06:53 The lesson: know who already cares about you
