What's the Big Idea with Andrew Horn

In this episode, we speak with Raz Ingrasci, the Chairman of the Hoffman Institute, about the life-changing impact of the Hoffman Process.  Andrew just completed the week long training on the day this podcast was recorded.  With over four decades of experience in human development, Raz explains how early childhood conditioning deeply affects our adult behaviors, often leading to patterns that no longer serve us. These patterns, rooted in the need to mirror our parents to secure love and survival, are referred to as "Negative Love Syndrome." Raz's personal insights into the Hoffman Process and his decades-long experience working with thousands of individuals shine through as he shares practical tools for emotional healing and personal growth. He talks about how compassion, especially toward oneself, is the bridge to deeper self-understanding and long-term behavioral transformation. For anyone interested in emotional growth or those looking to break free from limiting beliefs, this episode provides an introduction to the power of compassion-based personal development. Raz breaks down the core of the Hoffman Process, emphasizing the importance of self-awareness, self-compassion, and healing the relationship with our parents to unlock emotional freedom. Through practical techniques and exercises, individuals can break free from these negative patterns and begin to live more authentically.

Today's guest is Annie Lala. Annie is one of the top relationship experts and coaches on the planet. I am very fortunate to have called her my relationship coach through my 11 year marriage, my recent divorce, and now with my new partner Melissa. I would not be in the happy co-parenting relationship I currently an with Miki (my ex) without her love and support. She is truly world class at helping people to work through really difficult challenges and conflict in their relationships. She's a master at the technical and the practical.... the rituals, communication techniques that help people to stay in love and cultivate inspiring partnerships. She's also just plain brilliant. She's able to talk about the esoteric and the mental models of love and relationship, with a fluidity and mastery that is interesting and deeply inspiring. She is one of my favorite people on the planet. She's a genius when it comes to creating and sustaining a love filled relationship. So ,whether you are already in the relationship of your dreams, or you want to build one in the future, Annie can help.

These days, I only fire up the podcast for people who I believe to be truly world-class at what they do.   @jaysongaddis is one of those people.   His book “Getting to Zero” provides a practical framework to master conflict resolution in our important relationships.   Jayson offered up a ton of practical wisdom about how we can approach conflict consciously, tips for effective communication, and how to navigate the inner turmoil that challenges our personal fulfillment and growth.   Here are

Valter Longo is an Italian-American biologist and gerontologist who is a professor of gerontology and biological science at the University of Southern California. He is the director of the USC Longevity Institute and the Program on Longevity and Cancer at IFOM (FIRC Institute of Molecular Oncology) in Milan, Italy. Longo is known for his research on the biological mechanisms of aging, and for his work on fasting-mimicking diets, which he claims can promote health and longevity. He has written several books on the subject, including "The Longevity Diet" and "The Fasting Diet". Longo advocates for periodic fasting as a way to promote overall health and prevent disease. He believes that intermittent fasting, which involves limiting food intake to certain times of day or certain days of the week, can help reduce inflammation, improve metabolic health, and promote cellular repair and regeneration.   In today's episode, we focus on intermittent fasting. 

Jim McCann is the business leader, author, and philanthropist who founded 1-800-Flowers.com and grew the business from its roots as a single flower shop in Manhattan into the world's largest florist. With a passion for helping people deliver smiles, Jim transformed the flower and gift marketplace to help customers express themselves and connect with the important people in their lives.    Devoted to helping others, Jim founded the nonprofit organization Smile Farms to provide meaningful jobs to young adults and people with developmental disabilities. Jim also started the Connectivity Council, which brings together therapists, researchers, and thought leaders to share ideas and trends around human connection and community.

How have your friendships changed since COVID began?    How did your community shrink or expand?    Do you have more depth with less people?    If you want some help exploring these types of questions and the power of friendship in the age of loneliness, this is a great one.    - We explore the stats that break down the loneliness epidemic we are currently facing in America. - Tangible strategies for building friendships and community - Intro to facilitation and meaningful gathering - Two friends talking about the power of human connection  

Michael Hebb is an innovative and influential cultural figure, entrepreneur and activist, described by the New York Times as an “underground restaurateur, impresario and provocateur.” He believes that the dinner table is one of the most effective (and overlooked) vehicles for changing the world. After teaching a University of Washington graduate course titled Let’s Have Dinner and Talk About Death, Michael started Death Over Dinner. This project was created as a gift, an invitation and a simple set of tools to help families and friends address the basic human fact that we are all, at some point, going to die. We suffer more when we don’t communicate our wishes, we suffer less when we know how to honor the wishes of our loved ones.  -- Michael is a partner at RoundGlass and the Founder of Deathoverdinner.org, Drugsoverdinner.org, EarthtoDinner.org, WomenTeachMen.org and The Living Wake. He currently serves as a Board Advisor at the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts; and in the recent past as Senior Advisor to Summit Series, Theo Chocolate, Learnist, Caffe Vita, CreativeLive, Architecture For Humanity, and Mosaic Voices Foundation .  In 1997 Hebb co-founded City Repair and Communitecture with architect Mark Lakeman, winning the AIA People's Choice Award for the Intersection Repair Project. In 1999 Michael and Naomi Pomeroy co-founded Family Supper in Portland, a supper club that is credited with starting the pop-up restaurant movement. In the years following they opened the restaurants clarklewis and Gotham Bldg Tavern, garnering international acclaim.  After leaving Portland, Hebb built Convivium/One Pot, a creative agency that specialized in the ability to shift culture through the use of thoughtful food and discourse based gatherings. Convivium's client list includes: The Obama Foundation, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, TEDMED, The World Economic Forum, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Clinton Global Initiative, X Prize Foundation, The Nature Conservancy. Michael is the founding Creative Director of The City Arts Festival, the founder of Night School @ The Sorrento Hotel, the founder of www.seder.today and the founding Creative Director at the Cloud Room. He served as a Teaching Fellow at the Graduate School of Communication at University of Washington. His writings have appeared in USA TODAY, GQ, Food and Wine and numerous other publications. Michael can often be found speaking at universities and conferences, here is his TEDMED talk. 

The Art of Charm Podcast is one of the most popular lifestyle podcasts on the planet with nearly 2.5M monthly downloads. You'll learn our top strategies to improve your career, confidence, lifestyle, and love-life from top experts like life and business-hackers. Andrew has always loved the AOC podcast because of their focus on communication, confidence and relational dynamics. On this episode he focused on emotional mastery techniques from his men's work facilitation, as well as his proprietary social flow framework for clear communication and unshakable confidence. 

Thom Bond is a thought leader, author, peace educator and mediation consultant. He is best known as the creator and leader of The Compassion Course, a comprehensive online training, that has served over 20,000 participants in over 130 countries, in four languages. Thom is a founder and the Director of Education for NYCNVC, The New York Center for Nonviolent Communication (a United Nations Civil Society Organization). He is the author of The Compassion Book, the founder of The Engineering Peace Project, and a former member of the Advisory Board for the Communications Coordination Committee for the United Nations (CCCUN). He is the author of "Shifting Toward Compassion" (theexercise.org), and "64 Days for Peace" an open source, online, self-led small-group curriculum.

Eldra Jackson III is a spiritual warrior who lives a passion of "saving lives one circle at a time." After living most of his life devoid of emotions and coming face-to-face with the reality of dying behind bars, he came to a point of self-inquiry, seeking answers as to how his life had spiraled into a mass of destruction set upon self and others. From this point, the space was made to save his life. Today, Jackson works to bring his spiritual medicine into the world while simultaneously guiding others to tap into their own internal salve and help identify wounds. Through his intensive awareness work, he is on a mission to show the world what's possible as each person does their own internal examination to begin the path towards emotional and psychic health.

Jackie Knechtel, M.A., is an executive coach/consultant, behavioral therapist, international speaker and pioneer in the area of flow. She is the co-founder of the Flow Consciousness Institute which holds cutting edge trainings, retreats, leads workshops and delivers transformational experiences worldwide. Jackie is also the co-author of the forthcoming book Flow: The Art of Effortless Living and is actively shifting consciousness on a global scale through her speaking, coaching practice and by blending science and spirituality into practical tools for living an enlightened life. Jackie has a background as an autism specialist with clients in NYC, Beverly Hills, Dubai and Saudi Arabia. She serves as an advisor for the Eve Branson Foundation, NomadX and AutismCodes and is currently working to revolutionize the therapy delivery model for special needs children and their caregivers with her vision, Spectra. Justin Faerman is an international speaker, serial entrepreneur and consciousness researcher working to create large-scale shifts in human consciousness, integrate high-level intuitional skills more deeply into the business world and everyday life and deliver solutions-focused media to a global audience. He is the co-founder of Conscious Lifestyle Magazine and the Flow Consciousness Institute and a sought after teacher, known for his pioneering work in the area of flow and the mechanics of consciousness. He has a diverse entrepreneurial background that includes pioneering exponential growth at green tech companies and building some of the world’s top conscious media publishing platforms and he currently serves as an advisor to a number of social-impact driven growth stage companies and is actively involved in multiple large-scale projects to re-imagine and re-engineer human sociocultural systems to create a sustainable, enlightened future for all life. 

Co-Founder of Evryman, Dan works with men to help them connect with those in their lives and help them lead more successful, fulfilling lives. Dan’s career has been wide ranging, but his core of adventure and human growth has always held steady. After college, Dan spent over 600 days as a wilderness therapy guide and led groups of struggling young men up mountains, down rivers, and across frozen lakes.  Along the way he absorbed and learned a ton about the process of mentoring and what it means to be a man in our culture today. Following Montana, Dan moved to New York City where he started teaching public high school in the Bronx while completing his masters degree, further strengthening his drive to help guide young men. From writing novels to assisting in the production of Netflix’s MeatEater, Dan is as his core a guide looking to assist men in becoming more emotionally honest. 

Houston Kraft is a professional speaker, leadership consultant, and kindness advocate who speaks at schools, conferences, and events internationally. He has spoken to nearly a half a million people at 500 engagements and counting. He is the co-founder of CharacterStrong - trainings and curriculums that create more compassionate cultures in schools and communities. He has been featured on the Huffington Post and highlighted by the Random Acts of Kindness Foundation. His messages about character, leadership, compassion, and kindness resonate with audiences age 5-95.

Justin McLeod is Founder and CEO at Hinge, the immensely popular dating app  that is designed to be deleted. He grew up in Louisville, KY and studied at Colgate University. After a few years in management consulting, he attended Harvard Business School and decided to follow his passion for connecting people. Justin founded Hinge in February 2011 with a mission to create real-life connections. As a romantic and the protagonist of a real-life love story, he was upset by the negative hookup culture dating apps had created so in October 2016, he relaunched Hinge to create a culture of thoughtful dating. Justin’s vision for a more thoughtful experience resonated with millennials and led to the company's user base growing 400% in the last year.  

John O’Connor is a father, husband, Executive and Performance Coach living in New York. Many people think of him as the Fortune 500's best ket secret. Professionally, John has worked with thousands of clients over the past decade, working with top-performing CEO’s, entrepreneurs and people on a mission to create change in the world. He is a Certified Master Coach and Certified NLP and Brain Based Leadership Trainer. He leverages his unique multi-disciplined approach utilizing the unconscious mind to help people activate their potential and reach the next level in both their personal and professional lives. John offers 1 on 1 coaching, 1 day in-person deep dives, corporate workshops and is a lead facilitator of Men’s retreats for EVRYMAN. John actively competes in BJJ, is an avid snowboarder, has a meditation practice for the past 20 years.

Priya Parker is helping us take a deeper look at how anyone can create collective meaning in modern life, one gathering at a time. She is a master facilitator, strategic advisor, and acclaimed author of The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why it Matters. Parker has spent 15 years helping leaders and communities have complicated conversations about community and identity and vision at moments of transition. Trained in the field of conflict resolution, Parker has worked on race relations on American college campuses and on peace processes in the Arab world, southern Africa, and India. Parker is a founding member of the Sustained Dialogue Campus Network, a member of the World Economic Forum Global Agenda Council on Values Council and the New Models of Leadership, and a Senior Expert at Mobius Executive Leadership. She studied organizational design at M.I.T., public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, and political and social thought at the University of Virginia. Parker’s The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters (Riverhead, 2018) has been named a Best Business Book of the year by Amazon, Esquire Magazine, NPR, the Financial Times, 1-800-CEO-READS and Bloomberg. She has spoken on the TED Main Stage, and her TEDx talk on purpose has been viewed over 1 million times. Parker’s work has been featured in numerous outlets including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, NPR, TED.com, Forbes.com, Real Simple Magazine, Oprah.com, Bloomberg, Glamour, the Today Show and Morning Joe. She lives in Brooklyn, NY with her husband, Anand Giridharadas, and their two children.

Emily Fletcher is the founder of Ziva Meditation and the leading expert in meditation for extraordinary performance. Her book Stress Less, Accomplish More debuted at #7 out of all books on Amazon. The New York Times, Good Morning America, The Today Show, Vogue and ABC News have all featured Emily’s work. She’s been named one of the top 100 women in wellness to watch, has taught more than 20,000 students around the world and has spoken on meditation for performance at Apple, Google, Harvard Business School and Barclays Bank. Ziva graduates include Oscar, Grammy, Tony & Emmy award winners, NBA players, Navy SEALs, Fortune 500 CEOs and busy parents The Ziva Technique is a powerful trifecta of mindfulness, meditation and manifesting designed to unlock your full potential. It’s benefits include decreased stress, deeper sleep, improved immune function and extraordinary performance.

Peter Singer is an Australian ethical and political philosopher best known for his work in bioethics and his role as one of the intellectual founders of the modern animal rights movement, as well as the Effective Altruism movement. Author of Animal Liberation and The Life You Can Save, Singer has devoted much of his time and effort (and a considerable portion of his income) to social and political causes, most notably animal rights but also famine and poverty relief, environmentalism, and reproductive rights. By the 1990's his intellectual leadership of the increasingly successful animal rights movement and his controversial stands on some bioethical issues had made him one of the world’s most widely recognized public intellectuals. Peter joined us on the show to celebrate the 10 year anniversary and republishing of his seminal work, "The Life You Can Save."

Barry Zito is a Cy Young Award winner and two-time World Series champion who pitched primarily for the Oakland Athletics and San Francisco Giants throughout his Major League Baseball career. After retiring from baseball, Barry settled in Nashville with his wife, Amber, and their two sons. Already well into his second career as a musician and songwriter, Zito recently released his debut EP, “No Secrets.”

Bob Roth is one of the most respected and sought after meditation teachers in America. Bob is the author of the New York Times bestseller, “Strength in Stillness: The Power of Transcendental Meditation,” the CEO of the David Lynch Foundation, which has provided scholarships for over 1 million at-risk youth to learn to meditate, and president of the Center for Health and Wellness which brings TM to companies, government organizations, and nonprofit charities. 

Rich Litvin runs a leadership consultancy for world leaders, celebrities and the extremely successful people in Los Angeles and London. The methodology is deep coaching. Bespoke. Not time-based. Ultra-successful people – people you would assume don’t need a coach – are the ones who call Rich. His clients include Olympic athletes, Presidential candidates, Hollywood film directors, Special Forces operatives and serial entrepreneurs. Rich is also the author of a best-selling book on coaching and he runs a program for 40 of the world’s most successful consultants and coaches. In my opinion, he is the smartest voice out there on how to coach for maximum impact, while also maximizing your bottom line.  Whether you are already "successful" or on the way there, this episodes is MUST listen. Full of insight on what you can do to avoid the pitfalls and "traps" of success.     

Cindy Gallop is the founder and CEO of www.makelovenotporn.com, which she launched with a viral TED talk in 2009 – ‘Pro-sex. Pro-porn. Pro-knowing the difference’. In 2013 she turned MakeLoveNotPorn into the world’s first user-generated, human-curated social sex video sharing platform https://www.makelovenotporn.tv/ socializing and normalizing sex in order to make it easier to talk about, to promote consent, communication, good sexual values and good sexual behavior. MakeLoveNotPorn is spearheading the Social Sex Revolution https://socialsexrevolution.com/ (the revolutionary part isn’t the sex, but the social). Cindy is raising the world’s first sextech fund http://www.alltheskyholdings.com/ . She speaks at conferences globally and consults, describing her approach as ‘I like to blow shit up. I am the Michael Bay of business.’

Dr. Wednesday Martin is a feminist cultural critic and #1 NYT bestselling author. Her latest book, UNTRUE: Why Nearly Everything We Believe About Women, Lust, and Infidelity Is Wrong and How the New Science Can Set Us Free was a Kirkus Review “Best Books of the Year” selection. Wednesday is also the co-host of the iTunes top-100 podcast "True Sex and Wild Love."

With the soul of an advocate and the mind of an entrepreneur, James Maskell has spent the past decade sparking debate innovating at the cross section of functional medicine and community. To that end, he created the Functional Forum, the world’s largest integrative medicine conference with record-setting participation online and growing physician communities around the world. His organization and best selling book of the same name, Evolution of Medicine, prepares health professionals for this new era of predictive, preventive medicine. He is also the Founder of KNEW Health, and affordable alternative to health insurance. He is an in demand speaker and impresario, being featured on TEDMED, HuffPostLive and TEDx, as well as lecturing internationally. He lives in Sacramento, CA with his wife and daughter.

Sara Ness is the Founder and Chief Instigator of Authentic Revolution. She began teaching Authentic Relating in 2012, founding a thousands-strong learning community in Austin, Texas and going on to train over 350 leaders and help found 30+ other communities worldwide. Sara is passionate about exposing the joy of human connection and exploring our creative potential through relationship. She has facilitated at schools, companies, yoga studios, a funeral, Burning Man, and more, bringing playful social technology into the mainstream and the non-mainstream.

Aaron Rose is a transformational coach for public figures, inclusive culture consultant, motivational speaker and human being committed to changing and enjoying the world at the same time. He is devoted to healing our crisis of separation and political polarization by designing radically inclusive community cultures, facilitating individual recovery from trauma and isolation, and empowering the next generation of changemakers to lead the way. Aaron has facilitated cultural transformation across multiple industries, from wellness and spirituality to tech and finance, using a unique mix of restorative justice, neuroscience, metaphysics, and meditation. His clients have included McKinsey & Co, Columbia University, Greenpeace, T-Mobile, and more. As a transformational coach and energy worker, Aaron helps public figures transcend their fears of criticism and embrace their unique role in building a better world. Having experienced both violent discrimination and unfounded privilege during his journey as a transgender man, Aaron is a champion of a world where we are celebrated for our unique incarnations while also transcending the labels that keep us divided.

Arjuna is a writer, public speaker and executive coach, who has trained more than 2000 coaches over the last 25 years.  He is the author of nine books, including the 2005 #1 National Bestseller The Translucent Revolution. His latest book, Radical Brilliance, is the anatomy of how and why people have original ideas which change the world.  He has been a speaker at conferences all over the world, including at Google and the United Nations. He lives with his wife, Chameli in Nevada City, California. They have two grown sons and two mischievous kittens.

Michael Ventura is the CEO and founder of Sub Rosa, a strategy and design firm that has worked with some of the world's largest and most important brands: from Johnson & Johnson, Pantone, and Adobe to the TED Conference, Delta Airlines and The Daily Show. While he wears many hats in his professional life, Michael can boil all his roles down to helping people and corporations overcome their most vexing challenges when it comes to personal development and understanding the obstacles when connecting with other people. Michael has served as a board member and advisor to a variety of organizations, including Behance, the Burning Man Project, Cooper-Hewitt, and the U.N.'s Tribal Link Foundation. He is also a visiting lecturer at institutions such as Princeton University and the United States Military Academy at West Point. In addition to these pursuits, Michael leads a thriving indigenous medicine practice, where he helps patients address illness and injury of all types on the road to better well-being. Applied Empathy, his first book, was published by Simon & Schuster in May 2018.

Nir Eyal is one of the leading behavioral design experts on the planet. Nir is best known of author of the bestselling book Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products, which sold over a quarter million copies and is a Silicon Valley must-read. After writing the book and consulting for some of the top tech companies in the world (twitter, facebook etc) he realized that he had helped to create a monster. Technology companies were using these strategies so effectively that people were losing the power to control their attention, time and energy online. So, he wrote another book to help people reclaim one of the most fundamental skills of the digital age... Nir's new book recently launched and is called, Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life. Nir’s perspective is very unique since he understands distraction from the inside out. In this episode he shares some incredibly novel, practical insights, including: - Why the root cause of distraction has nothing to do with our phones. - Why we’re not actually “addicted” to our phones and why saying so is hurting us. - How to finally focus and do what we say, in business and in life. - How to create an indistractable workplace.   You can read what some very prominent people are saying about Indistractable here: NirAndFar.com/Indistractable.

For over a decade, AJ Harbinger has been helping people build confidence, deepen relationships, and create social capital. AJ has become one of the world’s top relationship development experts, and his company, the Art of Charm has become a leading training facility for top performers that want to overcome social anxiety, develop social capital and build relationships of the highest quality. Following the path set out for him by his family, AJ studied biology in college and went on to pursue a Ph.D. in Cancer Biology at the University of Michigan. During this time, AJ realized he was struggling with social interactions and began exploring his interest in self-development. From this, The Art of Charm Podcast was born as AJ started recording episodes in the evenings. After seeing an opportunity to grow The Art of Charm, AJ made the difficult decision to leave the laboratory and graduate school and take a risky leap into the world of entrepreneurship. The Art of Charm Podcast would go on to become one of the largest and most successful lifestyle podcasts in the world. What started out as two graduate students conversing and laughing in a basement in Ann Arbor has turned into a top-rated podcast and highly sought after coaching business. Today, AJ and his co-founder at The Art of Charm teach people from all over the world how to create, develop, and maintain top business and personal relationships.

Nyla Rodgers is an activist, futurist, and non-profit leader with a passion for merging social impact with technology. She creates and runs organizations that transform communities, foster social entrepreneurship around the world, and advocates for greater generosity and partnership between the tech and non-profit worlds. Nyla began her non-profit work in 2007 when she founded Mama Hope, a grassroots training program that equips social entrepreneurs with the tools to raise funding and build sustainable communities. The group has since built schools, health clinics, children’s centers, clean water systems and food security projects that have improved the health and economic standing of over 813,000 people throughout Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Ghana, Ethiopia, Guatemala, India and the U.S.Nyla was inspired to create Mama Hope after her mother passed away of ovarian cancer. Before her death, she had raised $1,500 for a village in Kisumu, Kenya, and her gift made a massive impact, creating a bank that helped local women start their own businesses. Nyla is also is a Co-Producer of the Stop The Pity campaign aimed at shifting the stereotypes of the global poor. Its videos have garnered over 14M views and were featured on CNN and Al Jazeera as well as at the Sundance Festival and SXSW. In 2015 she was a finalist for the Global Citizen of the Year Award. In 2017 she was honored for her work as a Female Leader in Eileen Fisher’s Fall campaign “Power: In the Words of Women” and was profiled in Forbes under the headline: The Business of Hope: What It Takes and How One Woman Inspired it. Recently, her work in fundraising has led her to become an activist and philosopher in the cryptocurrency space where she is a speaker and advocate for greater generosity and altruism in the crypto community.

Lauren Billie is a force. She is currently designing an unprecedented future of racial, gender and economic equity through enterprise - instead of non-profits.She spends most of her time building and leading Allbodies, "the new way to do healthcare." Through a digital platform, they make make the patient experience easy, informative, holistic and empowering. They are starting with reproductive and sexual health, one of the most underserved and relevant health sectors; and serving millennial womxn, who have the largest spending power in US history.She gives her free time to progressive political and social justice organizing and plan to run for office in the next 15 years. She is interested in building coalitions with individuals, organizations and investors committed to doing things differently. On top of Allbodies.com, she is a parter at the mass meditation movement called The Big Quiet and also leads community for the Arena Summit, where she is convening, connecting and supporting the next generation of civic leaders.  

Radha is a community building savant. She is the co-Founder, CEO and Chief Community Architect of Daybreaker, the early morning dance and wellness move-ment that currently holds events in 25 cities and over a dozen college campuses around the world with a community of almost half a million people. She is a successful entrepreneur (Co-Founder THINX, LiveItUp), author, globe trotting speaker, DJ, inventor, and investor. Her new book BELONG answers the questions, "how the heck do I find my people?" and "How do I create large and meaningful communities in the real world?". She spent 18 months synthesizing her key methods for community building, peeling back the curtain on exactly what she and her team did (and continues to do) at Daybreaker so that anyone interested in creating their own community could have a blueprint for how to do it. She was named by MTV as “one of 8 women who will change the world.” Radha lives in Brooklyn NY with her love Eli and her twin sister Miki – and lots of family and friends within a few blocks. You can most often find her tinkering with new social experiments, community and experience design projects, speaking around the world, or on the dance floor at Daybreaker in New York City (if she’s not dancing at sunrise in another part of the world.)

Sam has trained the world’s top entrepreneurs (e.g. EO, YPO, TLC) and executives (e.g. Intel, Cisco, Boeing) how to communicate more clearly, compellingly and convincingly. Her pioneering POP! book, endorsed by Seth Godin, Ken Blanchard, Mark Sanborn and marketing guru Jeffrey Gitomer (who calls it “a rocket ship to your success”) introduces an innovative step-by-step system for creating first-of-their-kind titles, taglines, pitches, brand messages, positioning and marketing copy that get your products and services noticed, remembered and bought. Sam’s expertise is frequently featured in major media outlets including the New York Times, BusinessWeek and FastCompany.  She has presented to more than a half million people worldwide (London, Geneva, Amsterdam, Dublin, Toronto, Berlin), was twice the top-ranked speaker for the International Platform Association, and a top-ranked speaker at the 2008 INC 500/5000 convention (with Jim Collins, Tom Peters and Tim Ferriss). She’s served as Pitch Coach for the USA Today Perfect Pitch and British Airways Face2Face competitions, and for Springboard Enterprises – which has helped entrepreneurs receive $8.8 billion in funding. She is the former Executive Director and Emcee of the world-renowned Maui Writers Conference (1992-2009) and has helped hundreds of people (i.e., Denise Brosseau, Founder of the Thought Leadership Lab) to crystallize their message into quality books that scaled their influence, income, and impact.

Biet is this completely unique Spiritual Teacher with a rare Rock & Roll sensibility who was raised by an awakened Shaman who cured himself from near death in the woods of Russia. With that said, I think what makes her story even more special is the amount of adversity she has overcome. Losing most of her family to death as a young child growing up in NYC, tragedy turned into music and she got signed to Sony Records at 18, after that she had a near death experience, lost her 4 month old daughter Ula to S.I.D.S, had her house burn down, lived in the burned down house doing heroin for 4 months, her best friends hung himself and then her awakened teacher father died. After 5 years of heroin and cocaine addiction Biet got sober nearly 11 years ago and founded a meditation experience that she guides globally and scores with her own music. Her work is just as warm and intimate with a group of 12 people in a living room as it is with thousands of people on a stage. She has been called the "David Bowie of Meditation" by Television Host and Activist, Stacy London. She has been written up in FORBES, ELLE, Harper's Bazaar, TIME & The New York Times.. just to name a few. She has partnered with Lululemon, Adidas and Sony to name just a couple. She has just released her first book with Simon & Schuster based on the 44 laws that prevent someone from enlightenment and is speaking all over the globe to spread the message of awakening and doing it in a down to earth way!

Max Stossel is an award-winning poet + filmmaker named by Forbes as one of the best storytellers of the year. His performances across five continents, from Lincoln Center in NY to the Hordern Pavilion in Sydney, have been described as mind expanding, profound, emotive, and hilarious all at once. His work has been translated to fourteen languages, won multiple film festivals, and has been viewed over 20 million times online. Max Stossel is also the Head of Education for the Center for Humane Technology, an organization of former tech insiders and CEOs dedicated to realigning technology with humanity’s best interests. Before joining CHT, Max was a media strategist with an extensive background in social, spending more time learning the ins and outs of the facebook algorithm than any human should. He ran social for multinational brands, and later worked for a social media company where he designed some of the same notification structures to distract students that he now criticizes. He provides a unique and much needed critical perspective on the role of technology in the classroom.  The merging of these fields allows Max to provide a fascinating perspective on modern content and culture. He is currently performing Words That Move in theatres, speaking or performing at schools, corporations & events, and helping select brands tell their stories in his style via video.

LAUREN HANDEL ZANDER is a life coach, university lecturer, public speaker, and the Co-Founder and Chairwoman of Handel Group®, an international corporate consulting and private coaching company based in New York City. Lauren is also the author of Maybe It’s You: Cut the Crap, Face Your Fears, Love Your Life (Published by Hachette Book Group, April 2017), a no-nonsense, practical manual that helps readers figure out not just what they want out of life, but how to actually get there. She has spent over 20 years coaching thousands of private clients: entrepreneurs, couples, families, professors, politicians, Emmy, Peabody and Academy Award-winning artists, Grammy-winning musicians and Fortune 500 CEOs. Her corporate clients have included executives from Sony BMG, The New York Times, News Corp, J. Walter Thompson Agency, Citibank, Dropbox, LinkedIn, Uniworld, The Gap Inc., BASF, NYU Langone Medical Center, and Vogue. She has fixed corporate business relationships, mediated contract negotiations, reconciled marriages, and helped resolve complex family issues. In the early 2000s, Lauren created a groundbreaking methodology, The Handel Method®, which is supported by top educators and psychologists, and has been taught in over 35 major universities and institutes of learning across the country.

Jesse is a social entrepreneur, community builder and meditation teacher on a mission to light up the leader in everyone. As a sophomore at NYU Jesse co-founded Cantora Records, where he signed multi-platinum bands like MGMT, advised The Wu Tang Clan’s GZA and spearheaded the label’s tech investment fund. After experiencing debilitating anxiety and panic attacks, Jesse discovered meditation. The practice was so transformative for him that he went on to found The Big Quiet - a movement that gathers thousands of people for mass meditations at legendary locations like Madison Square Garden and the top of the World Trade Center, and features performances from some of today’s most iconic musicians. Jesse speaks about community building and mindful leadership at organizations like Adidas, Ford, Google and Parson’s School of Design, and teaches meditation to next-generation leaders from around the world. Jesse’s work has been featured in the New York Times, Vice, Vogue, Fast Company, WIRED and the Wall Street Journal.

Connor Beaton is the founder of ManTalks, an international organization focused on mens health, wellness, success and fulfillment. Connor is also an international speaker, podcast host and works 1-1 with men who are looking to deepen their purpose, radically improve their intimate relationships, and regain confidence. Since founding ManTalks, Connor has spoken on stage at TEDx, with Lewis Howes, Gary Vaynerchuk, Danielle LaPorte, taken ManTalks to over a dozen cities internationally and has been featured on platforms like Forbes, Huffington Post, HeForShe, The Good Men Project, UN Women, CBC and the National Post. In this episode we discuss how facing our darkness is a path to purpose, freedom, and peace. 

Daniel’s central interest is civilization design: developing new capacities for sense-making and choice-making, individually and collectively, to support conscious sustainable evolution...to bring about a world commensurate with our highest potentials. He blogs on these topics at https://civilizationemerging.com. He’s also the director of Research and Development at Neurohacker Collective https://neurohacker.com/ethos

Thomas Gilovich is the Irene Blecker Rosenfeld Professor of Psychology at Cornell University and co-director of the Cornell Center for Behavioral Economics and Decision Research. He specializes in the study of everyday judgment and reasoning, psychological well-being, and self-assessment. In addition to his articles in scientific journals, Dr. Gilovich is the author of How We Know What Isn’t So (Free Press), Why Smart People Make Big Money Mistakes (Simon and Schuster, with Gary Belsky), Social Psychology (W.W. Norton, with Dacher Keltner, Serena Chen, and Richard Nisbett), and The Wisest One in the Room (The Free Press, with Lee Ross). Dr. Gilovich is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a Fellow of the American Psychological Association, the Association for Psychological Science, the Society of Experimental Social Psychology, and the Society for Personality and Social Psychology. He received his B.A. in Psychology from the University of California at Santa Barbara and his PhD in Psychology from Stanford University. In this episode we dive into the psychology behind why people are happier when they invest in experiences over material possessions. Being one of 4 principles to live by to advance personal happiness, we focus on things people can simply DECIDE to do today, to make themselves happier.

There are relationship experts...and then there is John Gray. The author of Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus – and sixteen other books on relationships and personal growth, John’s wisdom about the inherent differences between men and women as well as what it takes to build lasting, loving relationships have now influenced two generations of men and women. With his books now translated into approximately 45 languages in more than 100 countries, Dr. Gray has appeared many times on Oprah, as well as on The Dr. Oz Show, TODAY, CBS This Morning, and Good Morning America. Profiled in Time, Forbes, USA Today, TV Guide, and People, he was also the subject of a three-hour special hosted by Barbara Walters. With his new book, Beyond Mars and Venus, John explains why being a man or woman in today’s society is more nuanced and complex than ever. Yet, despite the changes, men and women remain fundamentally different on a hormonal level. In this episode, we dive into what these differences mean in today's ever-evolving relationships.

Alex Ebert is a musician, filmmaker, and activist. He founded the band Edward Sharpe and The Magnetic Zeros in 2008 and won a Golden Globe for best original score in 2014. He founded Big Sun Foundation, which specializes in facilitating Community Land Trusts. He currently CEO’s the crowd-sourced social radio app Tuners, is writing a book called 'Kingdom Cool', and resides in New Orleans, Louisiana.  To find out more about Alex and his work, visit https://www.5amedude.com/

Miki Agrawal (www.mikiagrawal.com) is a serial social entrepreneur. She was the recipient of The Tribeca Film Festival’s “Disruptive Innovation Award”, she was named “2017 Young Global Leader by World Economic Forum”, “Social Entrepreneur of the Year” by the World Technology Summit, she was one of INC Magazine’s “Most Impressive Women Entrepreneurs of 2016”, Forbes’ “Top 20 Millennials on a Mission”, and made the cover of Entrepreneur Magazine in 2016. Most recently, she was named Fast Company’s Most Creative People in 2018. She is the founder of the acclaimed farm-to-table, alternative pizza concept called WILD (www.eatdrinkwild.com) with 3 locations in New York City, one in Guatemala and more on the way. She co-founded THINX (www.shethinx.com), a high-tech, period-proof underwear brand and led the company as CEO to a valuation of over $150 Million and to Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies of 2017, all while helping tens of millions of women period better. She also co-founded Icon, a high-tech pee-proof underwear brand that helps women manage light bladder leakage. She most recently founded TUSHY (www.hellotushy.com), a company that is revolutionizing the American toilet category with a modern, affordable, designer bidet attachment that both upgrades human health & hygiene as well as the environment from wasteful toilet paper consumption. She and her team are also helping fight the global sanitation crisis by bringing clean latrines to underserved communities in India through their partnership with Samagra. Harper Collins published her first book entitled "DO COOL SH*T" on entrepreneurship and lifestyle design and Hay House is publishing her second book “Disrupt-Her” which just came out this March!  Miki is an identical twin, half-Japanese, half-Indian French Canadian, formerprofessional soccer player, graduate of Cornell University and proud new mama of Hiro Happy.

Sexuality both fascinated and scared Layla Martin from a very young age and she’s always been obsessed with it. She studied human sexuality at Stanford and then spent the next 10 years in the jungles of Asia working with Tantric masters. Layla now blends ancient Tantric wisdom with modern science to help detox people's unhealthy relationships with sex. Her Youtube channel has more than 65 million views, Cosmopolitan calls her a ‘sexpert extraordinaire’ and Women's Health Magazine has dubbed her the ‘headmistress of pleasure’. On top of making scientific research accessible, she is a master at providing tangible practices and activities that we can integrate into our lives to become more sexually fulfilled.

Alex Banayan is a USA Today bestselling author and global keynote speaker who dropped out of USC at the ripe age of 18 to track down some of the most successful people on the planet. Out of sheer curiosity and purpose, he spent the next 7+ years seeking out and asking these people (Spielberg, Lady Gaga, Maya Angelou, etc.) how they got their first big break. His book titled The Third Door is the culmination of his research on how anyone can turn their dreams into a reality...regardless of where they are starting out. In this episode, we focus on the #1 thing that gets in the way of people taking that first step, and pursuing their dreams.

Dr. Warren Farrell is an educator, activist, and NYT best-selling author author, who has been described as the intellectual father of the men’s movement. While he has been concerned about men and "gender liberation" for well over 30 years, in his most recent book titled The Boy Crisis, he has shifted his attention to the youngest among us.