Explore every episode of the podcast Well Said

For over a year, former colleagues have been sending Kelly and Pia the same questions. How did you actually start Cuore? How did you land your first client? How did you know it was time to leave a stable career and bet on yourself? In this Q&A episode, they turn the mic on themselves and answer all of it.

What comes out is an honest look at the leap most people only think about. Kelly shares the "stop being half in" conversation with Dave Clark that pushed her to commit, and Pia retells the breakfast-taco talk with her dad, who called corporate stability "a false sense of security" and warned that the right partnership comes once. They get specific about the parts nobody warns you about too: the comp and HR expertise you undervalue until it's yours to build, learning taxes across two states, setting boundaries when the work never technically ends, and doing every single task yourself, right down to the printer paper.

If you're a mid-career professional wondering "could I do this?", this is the episode that answers. You'll walk away with a clearer picture of what starting something actually looks like, why side quests matter more for achievers than they think, and what it means to raise the next generation to see more than one path. Listen now, and subscribe to Well Said so you don't miss what Kelly and Pia get into next.

Timestamps:

• 0:00 — Two years in: why old colleagues keep reaching out

• 2:17 — Landing the first clients before you had any proof points

• 5:22 — The "stop being half in" push from Dave Clark

• 7:08 — Pia's dad, breakfast tacos, and "a false sense of security"

• 9:33 — What nobody prepares you for: comp, equity, and HR

• 13:27 — Running your own business means you do all the tasks

• 16:11 — Learning to set boundaries when the work is yours

• 19:02 — What their kids are learning from watching them bet on themselves

• 21:26 — Side quests, and why drivers and achievers need them most

• 25:24 — The gift of being naïve: Pia's one-way ticket to New York

Before Shadi Bakour ever framed a message for a customer, he engineered the one he told himself. Driving Uber and waiting tables through three years of making $0, he listened to Tony Robbins on every commute. "I looked at it like I was brainwashing myself." The message worked. Today PATH Water is in more than 75,000 locations and has eliminated over 700 million single-use plastic bottles.

Shadi joins Pia and Kelly for a conversation that flips the show's premise inward. For a founder whose brand lives or dies on communication, the highest-stakes communication of his career happened in his own head: the nightly journaling, the "that's so easy" reframe, the decision to go looking for struggle on purpose. Along the way he unpacks why "follow your passion" is bad advice, how a $2,000 going-away party turned into his first funding round, and why people never really buy a product… they buy who it says they are.

This is a masterclass in the story you tell yourself first.

In this episode:

- Why Shadi treated Tony Robbins like deliberate "brainwashing" and what it did to his confidence

- The reframe that got PATH off the ground: why "that's so easy" beat every expert who said it wouldn't work

- How "take every meeting" turned $2,000 and a party into a funding round, a board member, and Guy Fieri

- Why he'd fire an advisor before he'd skip a meeting he "wasn't ready" for

- The case against following your passion (and the photography experiment that proves it)

- Why people buy identity, not products and the stranger who pitched Shadi his own company until he cried

- "A company can only be as big as its leader": the bottleneck rule every founder should hear

Follow Well Said for new conversations on connection as a human skill. Watch on YouTube, and listen on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

Christopher Bryan has spent his career proving something most communicators only sense intuitively: the words we choose don't just describe behavior, they build identity, and identity is what actually moves people. As a behavioral scientist at UT Austin's McCombs School of Business, Bryan has run randomized experiments on voters, cheaters, teenagers, and teachers, and the results keep pointing to the same conclusion. Calling someone "a voter" instead of asking them to "vote" can swing real turnout by double digits. Telling someone "don't be a cheater" eliminates dishonesty; telling them "don't cheat" does nothing at all.

For Pia Arthur and Kelly Cheeseman, two communicators who spent over a decade inside one of the world's most disciplined corporate comms operations, Bryan is the guest who puts hard data behind what they've always felt: that framing isn't a soft skill, it's a lever. The conversation moves from the psychology of political slogans like "Morning Again in America" and "Audacity of Hope," to why most managers motivate their teams all wrong, to the one word every leader needs in their vocabulary.

In this episode:

- The coin-flip experiment that proved one word can eliminate cheating

- Why "be a voter" outperforms "vote" by double-digit points at the polls

- How a status crisis explains why certain political slogans land and others don't

- Why your gym transformation video is quietly lying to you about motivation

- The real reason talented employees disengage (it isn't laziness)

- What separates persuasion that works from advice that gets ignored

- The two words Bryan thinks every leader should adopt, and the one to drop

Subscribe to Well Said for new conversations on the science and craft of communication. Find us on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts. Learn more about Christopher Bryan's research at McCombs School of Business, UT Austin.

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

On Well Said, Pia and Kelly get him to trace that philosophy all the way back to a pawnshop saxophone in a small-town Texas church, where he learned to play by ear and started hearing every conversation as a song. They go from how he prepped for months of Trump rallies (and why the voters there were often kinder than he expected) to the question he says ends any argument: do you want to be right, or do you want to win?

It's a conversation about how to actually talk to people again, how we’re all yearning for community, when to go slow, and why letting things stay unfinished might be the most freeing thing you can do.

In this episode:- Why Sam treats every conversation as music, and what playing saxophone by ear taught him about communication

- How a decorated journalist made peace with being "background noise," and why that set him free from perfectionism

- What months of covering Trump rallies taught him about listening to people you disagree with

- The reframe he uses to defuse any argument: "Do you want to be right, or do you want to win?"

- His practical, non-emotional system for breaking phone addiction (it starts with the back seat of his car)

- The "be a duck" thesis for living in a world that moves too fast

- Why he'd teach every American classroom how credit works

New episodes of Well Said drop weekly. Subscribe on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts so you never miss a conversation.

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

Amy grew up in a strict Seventh Day Adventist household and then fell into the orbit of her aunt, an Oscar-nominated actress who said whatever she wanted, however it landed. Six months before she died, her aunt wrote: "I demand my death be joyful." That sentence became the foundation of everything Amy built, from a company she started by stapling flyers around Austin to one of the largest woman-owned businesses in Texas.

This conversation strips communication down to what survives when performance is impossible: saying what you actually want, asking what someone actually loves, and naming the thing you keep postponing.

In this episode:

- Why Amy says we should plan for death the way we plan for birth

- The single question that can create the most meaningful day of someone's life

- What her aunt taught her about saying the hard thing without fear

- How honesty, not hope, gave one couple their trip to Costa Rica

- Why "I don't want to be a burden" is the wrong place to start

- How she trains nearly 1,000 caregivers to connect, not just to care

- The Montessori school she's building next to elder care, and why

Follow Well Said for more conversations about connection as a human skill. Listen on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.

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

They trace the shift from the Oprah-era town square to a world where a Dairy Queen employee's TikTok is worth more than a press release, journalists are leaving mastheads to build their own audiences, and the people you trust most are curators you've never met. The throughline is a warning for any founder or exec still running the old "company to PR firm to journalist to audience" pipeline: that pipeline already broke.

It's a candid, road-tested look at what two decades in the room taught them about the next two, and the one move every company should make now.

In this episode:

- Why attention is becoming the ultimate currency, and why people are paying to escape it

- How "inside-out" narrative control gave way to "outside-in" reality management

- Why your best brand ambassador might be an hourly employee with a phone

- What the journalist-to-Substack migration means for who you should actually pitch

- How fragmented realities (see: Tylenol) make crisis comms about belief, not facts

- The new PR job: mapping the micro-trust ecosystems that can make or break you

- Why old-school tactics like the press release are quietly making a comeback

Follow Well Said for honest conversations on communications, reputation, and trust.

Tune in on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube.

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

AI can write the press release, build the media list, and draft the pitch faster than any junior staffer. Elaine's argument is that none of it touches the part that actually moves the needle: the relationship you built years before you ever needed anything.

In this conversation with Pia and Kelly, she makes the case for the human in the loop, and gets honest about what it costs to keep betting on it.

Inside the episode:

- Why Elaine pitches stories she gets nothing from and why that's the strategy

- How she rebuilt the entire agency when earned media alone wouldn't survive ten years

- The instinct-over-spreadsheets philosophy behind never writing a business plan

- What an account coordinator's quiet Slack post taught her about leading younger staff

- The day a breaking war killed a client's Wall Street Journal story and what she told them

- Her one rule she'll break on purpose: going off the record for a journalist she trusts

- The morning-reading habit she says is non-negotiable in communications

If you build things on relationships (in any field), this one will land. New episodes of Well Said drop weekly. Follow on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.

Chef JJ Johnson built a fast-casual rice bowl restaurant on an idea most investors called crazy: that a single grain of rice could carry the story of the entire African diaspora. He priced it at $10 using the same Carolina gold rice that fine dining charges $40 for, because the story of Black and Brown food shouldn't cost more just because a white chef wasn't cooking it. He's a James Beard Award winner, a six-season TV host, and a founder who donated 220,000 free meals during a pandemic. He calls himself the Rice God.

But before all of that, JJ was cooking French and Italian cuisine… the food he was told to cook. Then a trip to Ghana changed everything.

In this episode, JJ joins Pia and Kelly to unpack what happens when someone stops asking "what should I say?" and starts asking "what do I actually stand for?" and then builds an entire business from that answer.

Highlights:

- The three questions JJ asks before anything goes on a menu and why most brands skip all three

- The pricing move that became a cultural statement: charging $10 for the same rice that fine dining charges $40 for

- What Trader Joe's understands about representation that most corporate institutions still don't

- The specific meal in Ghana that gave JJ what he calls "his marching orders" as a chef

- Why JJ believes food media's storytelling blind spots reflect a much bigger cultural double standard

- What 220,000 free meals actually communicates and why JJ says it was never about PR

- What it means to own the table, not just a seat at it

Follow Well Said on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.

David Kirsch passed the bar exam. Then he called his parents and told them he was going to be a fitness trainer. Dead silence.

That call (and the 40 years that followed) are what this episode is really about. David trained J.Lo, Heidi Klum, Kate Upton, Gigi Hadid, and Naomi Campbell. Not by telling them what they wanted to hear, but by being the one person in the room who wouldn't. He's spent decades watching people fail to change and finally figured out why: the conversation in their head never shifted. Now the fitness director at The Core Club in New York, his philosophy is the same as it's always been: sound mind first, sound body second. The physical work is almost secondary.

In this episode, David sits down with Pia and Kelly to talk about what it actually takes to communicate with someone who has made themselves completely vulnerable and why the trainers, leaders, and caregivers who do it best have always been in the people business, not the fitness business.

Highlights:

- Why David quit law and how his parents reacted

- The moment a client burst into tears mid-ab work and what it changed about how he trains

- Why 40 years of expertise is something AI cannot replicate, and what it actually feels like to be truly seen by a professional

- How a conversation with Kate Upton helped his teenage daughter through body dysmorphia

- His honest take on GLP-1s: when they work, when they don't, and the one thing people on Ozempic need to be doing more of

- Why longevity has nothing to do with supplement stacks or biohacks (and the three things that actually matter)

- What it means to be a single dad by choice and how nearly dying in 2006 clarified everythingIf you want to catch all future episodes, subscribe to Well Said by Cuore on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.

From ages four to twenty-two, Ben Gleib had a stutter and a vocal disfluency so severe that his chords would lock down mid-sentence. He'd sit in class dreading being called on to read aloud, convinced it was a kind of execution. And he wanted, more than anything, to be a comedian and a TV host.

He became one.

Twenty-five years of standup later, Ben has performed to arenas, hosted an Emmy-nominated game show (Idiotest, 210 episodes across Netflix and Game Show Network), appeared on Chelsea Lately, starred in a Showtime special now on Amazon, and is building the internet's first late night talk show (Goodnight with Ben Gleib) backed by Nikki Glaser and Scott Galloway. He also coaches executives on their TED Talks and wedding speeches. And yes, those are the same skill set.

Pia first saw Ben perform at a comedy club in Austin. Pia was front row, not by choice, watching him navigate a guy in a cowboy hat who wouldn't sit down and kept trying to make himself the show. Ben didn't flinch. He made the cowboy the funniest part of the night.

Watching it happen, Pia realized this is exactly what crisis communications looks like.

This episode is a masterclass in owning a room, staying composed under real pressure, and saying things that actually land. It applies whether you're in a comedy club, a boardroom, a media interview, or an all-hands meeting where your whole team is watching to see how you show up.

In this episode:

- Why comedians have become the last honest voices in public life and how truth is baked into every real laugh

- Crowd work as a communications framework: how Ben reads a room, finds the right people, and knows exactly how far to push

- The math that proves speaking to a thousand people is less risky than speaking to one

- What a childhood stutter that lasted eighteen years taught Ben about public speaking anxiety

- Why silence is the single most underused communication tool in business

- The coaching techniques Ben uses with executives on TED Talks and high-stakes presentations

- How building a late night show from his house on YouTube became the perfect format for an attention economy that rewards real over polished

- The idea-capture habit he shared with Chris Rock and has used for twenty-five years

- Why the moments that go most wrong are often the ones that build the most trust

If you’re an exec or founder looking to level up your communications skills, this episode is for you.

Ben Gleib is launching his new weekly late night show ‘Good Night With Ben Gleib’ on YouTube on Thursday May 28 and every Thursday at 10 pm EST / 7 pm PST. People can join his interactive worldwide virtual audience the night before and every Wednesday by getting a ticket at makeitagoodnight.com. You can follow along on his socials on all platforms @makeitagoodnight.

And make sure you subscribe to Well Said on all platforms to get new episodes every Wednesday.

TIMESTAMPS

02:12 — Front row in Austin, cliffhanger compliments, and comedians vs. politicians

05:00 — What is crowd work and why it's a masterclass in real-time communication

07:45 — "Stay in the pocket"

10:00 — The math of crowds

13:30 — Self-deprecation + admitting mistakes

17:30 — A childhood stutter

20:00 — The power of silence

24:00 — Coaching executives: timing, motion to stillness, and how to make a moment land

29:40 — "Goodnight with Ben Gleib"

39:30 — When things go wrong: the DJ, the muted audience, and Scott Galloway's mic

What does a celebrity hairstylist know about communication that most executives don't? More than you'd think.

Alex Pardoe has done hair for Paris Hilton at 3am, worked red carpets and film sets with some of the most recognizable names in Hollywood, and built his LA career from scratch after leaving a successful salon in Michigan with no clients and a three-month trial period. He's worked with Lindsay Lohan, Camila Cabello, and a roster of A-listers he mostly can't talk about. Five years into his LA chapter, he's one of the most sought-after hairstylists in the industry and the founder of hair extension brand The Anti Co.

But the reason we brought Alex on Well Said is because he thrives in high-stakes and fast moving communication environments. He just happens to work with hair.

In this conversation, Alex breaks down the philosophy that's driven his entire career: that he's not in the hair business, he's in the relationship business. Everything flows from that. How he asks questions before he ever picks up the scissors. How he reads a room under pressure. How he shows up in one of the most intimate settings imaginable, someone's home, their most vulnerable state, and makes every single person feel like the only person in the room. There's more practical communication wisdom in this episode than in most leadership books we've read.

In this episode:

- Why the hair industry is really the relationship business, and what that means for anyone whose job involves people

- The 50-question consultation method, and why Alex would rather spend 20 minutes asking than five minutes assuming

- How to stay grounded and calm when everything around you is chaotic

- What it means to walk into a room blind and still show up prepared

- How Alex thinks about fame, access, and keeping perspective around people he genuinely admires

- The transparency shift happening across beauty and media, and why the industry's dirty little secret is becoming a selling point

- What betting on yourself actually looks like when you've left everything behind to do it

- Why Alex believes nothing is really that serious, and how that belief makes him better at his job

If this episode resonates, please subscribe and leave us a review. And share this one with someone who needs a reminder that communication is always, at its core, about making people feel seen.

Dr. Calvin D. Sun is an emergency room physician, author of Monsoon Diaries (HarperCollins), and founder of the Monsoon Diaries travel community. He has visited every UN-recognized country in the world and is ranked among the ten most traveled Americans. During COVID, while most hospital doctors were silenced by media clauses, Calvin was working per diem across four New York City boroughs, free to speak to anyone who called. He did 10 to 20 interviews a day.

What makes him a natural fit for Well Said: he has spent his career in the hardest communication situations that exist. Delivering devastating news. Deciding what to tell his partner after a brutal ER shift. Speaking truth to the public when his colleagues legally couldn't. He has thought harder than most about the difference between honesty and truth, when withholding protects the people you love, and what it actually means to read the room.

In this episode:

- Ubuntu: the philosophy that says a person is only a person through another person, and what that means for how we show up in every conversation

- Why authenticity isn't a fixed trait but a relational one — who you are depends entirely on who you're talking to

- How Calvin's father's journal, written for the wrong son, shaped his entire relationship to writing and vulnerability

- Why changing your environment, whether that's a foreign country or a different cafe, is one of the most underrated communication tools there is

- The three communication principles Calvin has lived by: read the room, show your cards with intention, and stay consistent

Subscribe to Well Said everywhere you get your podcasts so you never miss an episode. Thanks for listening!

Thank you for an incredible first month of Well Said. The questions, the feedback, and the support have meant everything to us.

We (Kelly and Pia) are the co-founders of Cuore Communications and former Amazon PR executives with more than 20 combined years advising C-suite leaders, managing global communications teams, and guiding companies through some of the highest-stakes moments in business. In this episode, they sit down to answer the questions that came in most during Well Said's first month: the ones about trust, apologies, hard news, and finding your voice.

In this episode:

- How to start a trust-repair conversation without making it more awkward

- What real apologies actually require, and the one step most people skip

- How to deliver hard news with honesty

- How to know when a message you keep rewriting is ready to send

- What taking ownership for a team mistake looks like, step by step

- The communication lesson Kelly learned outside of corporate life that changed how she leads through crisisMake sure you subscribe to Well Said on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube so you never miss an episode. And if you have a question for our next Q&A, send it our way. DMs are always open.

PJ Calapa is the Brand Executive Chef of Marea, one of the most celebrated Italian seafood restaurants in American fine dining, with locations in New York, Beverly Hills, and Aspen. He got there through twenty years in New York's most demanding kitchens, including Bouley, Eleven Madison Park, and Nobu 57, a Michelin star and three NYT stars at Ai Fiori, two restaurants of his own, and one he lost during the pandemic. He came back. Marea's regulars include the Obamas, Beyoncé, and Lady Gaga. Anthony Bourdain called the pasta the best he'd ever tasted.

PJ's entire career has been built in environments where communication isn't something you prepare. It's a reflex you build. That's why he's on Well Said. And: Pia has known him since high school in Brownsville. In fact, he was her prom date.

In this episode:

- The week at Bouley that became the foundation of his entire leadership philosophy

- Why giving his team ownership of a dish produces higher standards than demanding them

- How he keeps a team calm during the most chaotic service, even when he knows it's rough

- His system for reading any table or entering any difficult conversation

- What a Fortune 500 CEO would learn in one week of kitchen service

- Why growing up bilingual on the Texas-Mexico border gave him a communication edge he still uses every day

Subscribe to Well Said on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts so you never miss an episode.

TIMESTAMPS00:00 — Growing up in Brownsville

08:00 — Landing at Bouley

13:00 — The week that almost broke him

17:00 — The conversation that changed how he leads

27:00 — Ai Fiori and earning the Michelin star

36:00 — Losing Scampi: "I'm a free agent, not a failure"

44:00 — Why lifting your team is the only leadership that works

52:00 — How a Michelin star chef reads a table

58:00 — Talking to a billionaire and a dishwasher in the same motion

1:04:00 — Where to find PJ

Natassia Miller is a Brazilian-American sexologist (AASECT-certified), the founder of Wonderlust, a sexual wellness brand, and the writer behind the Lust in Translation newsletter on Substack. She studied political science at Columbia, worked in finance, and pivoted to sexual wellness after co-founding and exiting a prior wellness startup during COVID. In 2022, she launched Wonderlust with the Mindful Intimacy Card Deck after surveying 500+ couples and finding that communication was their #1 barrier to a better sex life. Her work has been featured in Cosmopolitan, Glamour, GQ, and NBC.

What makes Natassia such a natural fit for Well Said: her entire career is built on teaching people how to say the thing they've been avoiding. And the skills she coaches couples on, asking for what you want, creating safety, being intentional, repairing when something breaks, are the same skills every great communicator and leader needs.

In this episode:

- Why communication, not chemistry, not compatibility, is the #1 barrier to a better intimate life, and how that maps directly onto leadership and teams

- How to apply SMART goals to your relationship and sex life (and why it doesn't kill the mood, it builds the foundation)

- Kelly's lesson from managing 100+ people across 17 countries: if you only have 30 minutes with someone who matters, show up with intention

- The Wheel of Consent framework and how couples (and teams) can use it to negotiate what they actually need

- Pia's 24-hour rule: take a breath, don't react, come back with your best self

- Why bedroom confidence and boardroom confidence are built with the same muscles

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 — Meet Natassia Miller

00:02 — What a sexologist and two PR execs have in common

00:07 — SMART goals for your sex life

00:11 — Boundaries at work and at home

00:18 — The salty lemonade study

00:20 — Why new experiences keep relationships (and teams) alive

00:23 — Vulnerability as a communication superpower

00:28 — Planning sex doesn't kill the mood, it creates it

00:29 — Spontaneous vs. responsive desire

00:31 — The Wheel of Consent

00:33 — How to make someone comfortable talking about the hardest things

00:36 — Knowing what you want (and learning how to ask for it)

00:41 — Talking about sex makes talking about everything else easier

00:44 — Where to find Natassia and Wonderlust

Nyle Washington has spent 20+ years in entertainment communications.

She started as an intern in The Oprah Winfrey Show's publicity department, spent four years at an agency handling campaigns for artists including Usher, Ne-Yo, and Keyshia Cole, and then built a reputation as one of the sharpest publicity executives in the television industry across eight years at VH1, and later at HBO, Starz, and Netflix. At Starz, she ran press for Power, the show that became one of cable's biggest hits of the decade. At Netflix, she has led awards campaigns for The Crown, Squid Game, Stranger Things, and When They See Us. In 2025, she won a Primetime Emmy Award as a producer on a short-form Netflix documentary.

What sets Nyle apart, beyond the resume, is what she cares about most. After two decades of red carpets, 24/7 crises, and all-night awards pushes, the topic she most wants to talk about is this: taking better care of yourself makes you a better communicator.

In this episode of Well Said:

• The specific discipline Nyle developed to stay genuinely connected to press contacts in an industry famous for transactional relationships (and why she knows her journalists' pets' names)

• Her "monthly intention list," a practice she created with her therapist after realizing she couldn't answer the question "What do you do for fun outside of work?"

• What running the Squid Game awards campaign taught her about building communications that connect across cultures

• The Rose, Thorn, Bud check-in she uses with her Netflix team, and her argument that comms teams need more humanity in their own rooms

• The pandemic burnout moment that led to a 5 AM workout routine and a different relationship with the work

• Why she believes a good story has to pull at something universal in the person hearing it, and how that standard shaped her entire approach to entertainment PR

• What it felt like to be nominated for a Primetime Emmy without seeing it coming

Subscribe to Well Said on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts so you never miss an episode.

TIMESTAMPS

00:00 — Kelly and Nyle's origin story

01:17 — How you spot a comms person from across a room

03:34 — Bringing humanity back to comms

06:04 — The monthly intention list

08:27 — Becoming a morning person on purpose

10:30 — Running the global Squid Game campaign

14:28 — The reporter spreadsheet Pia used to keep

16:17 — What the pandemic clarified about human connection

22:01 — Best red carpet moment

25:25 — The Emmy nomination

29:21 — What makes a great story: the heartstrings test

36:16 — The Oprah internship origin story

40:01 — "Persistence breaks resistance"

Adam Delehanty has spent his career helping famous CEOs and investors find the language their ideas deserve. He's the founder of Ghost, a content agency that works with some of the most recognized companies in tech, including Hinge, Google, Duolingo, e.l.f. Beauty and dozens more.

This is the launch episode of Well Said. We chose Adam as our first episode because he sits at the center of writing, communication, founder psychology, and culture. Everything this show is about.

In this episode:

• Why Adam calls ghostwriting "journalism times therapy" and how long-term relationships with founders become something closer to confidant than contractor

• The “VGPS” framework for introducing yourself to new people in a way that helps them remember you, and generates curiosity (Vision, Gratitude, Profile, Service)

• Why culture books are becoming essential tools for organizations to scale their culture and clarify their specific way of working

• The AI "steroids" analogy and the gap between sloperators (publishing at scale with nothing to say) and hermits (deep expertise, zero output) - (check out https://ghostagency.substack.com/p/sloperators for more context)

• Why he believes the founder should always write or speak the first draft, and what happens to a message that goes through too many layers of approval

• Why quality of readers matters more than quantity, and how five inspired people can change a company more than going viral

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 — "The wrong people have the steering wheel of content creation"

02:49 — AI is steroids

09:06 — Ghostwriting = journalism × therapy

09:53 — How to tell the truth when you have lawyers and a board

13:47 — Companies are religions

18:28 — The origin story that separates funded founders from everyone else (Hinge + Duolingo)

20:19 — The VGPS method to introduce yourself

33:20 — LinkedIn do's and don'ts

38:00 — Rapid fire: Patrick Radden Keefe, the word "dude," and the worst advice in content