I love meeting people who beat the odds. Anthony Vennare was supposed to be a “dumb jock”. He wasn’t supposed to open a gym and find profitability within 2 months. He wasn’t supposed to raise millions of dollars to get more people working out. He wasn’t supposed to sign deals with massive healthcare companies and turn the world of digital content writing on its head. Luckily, no one told him. Today, Anthony is the co-founder and CEO of Fitt – a media and technology company that connects people t...
Apr 10, 2025•35 min•Ep. 260
In this episode, Aaron Watson speaks with Dale Copeland about the likelihood of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. Dale Copeland, a professor at the University of Virginia, specializes in trade, war, and economic interdependence. Known for his theory of trade expectations , he explores how future trade expectations shape war and peace, challenging conventional views in works like Economic Interdependence and War . Copeland argues the risk is lower than some believe, citing military, economic, and geo...
Mar 04, 2025•44 min•Ep. 577
Akshar Patel is the founder of The Emissary , a media platform that explores India's history, politics, and societal dynamics. He aims to provide nuanced insights into topics like caste, Hindutva, and economic growth, highlighting India's conservative social fabric and rapid economic rise. Patel has been featured on various podcasts discussing India's evolving landscape. In this episode, we explore why India and the U.S. aren’t closer allies, who India’s primary adversary is, and how its global ...
Feb 26, 2025•48 min•Ep. 576
Henry Olsen is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and a former opinion columnist for The Washington Post . His writing focuses on American politics, populism, foreign affairs, and conservative thought. He has authored The Working Class Republican and The Four Faces of the Republican Party. In this episode, we discuss the future of U.S. foreign policy in light of Donald Trump’s re-election and examine J.D. Vance’s emergence as a significant political figure and his potential t...
Jan 22, 2025•36 min•Ep. 575
Jacob Shapiro is a geopolitical analyst who helps investors and businesses navigate the complexities of a multipolar world. Jacob oversees geopolitical analysis at Cognitive Investments and hosts the Jacob Shapiro podcast. In this episode, we question longstanding alliances, explore the intricate balance of power in the Middle East, and contemplate the future of U.S. foreign policy in the region. We begin by tracing the historical roots of the U.S.-Israel alliance, primarily forged during the Co...
Jul 18, 2024•43 min•Ep. 574
Alan shared an hour of his time to explain how he was able to retire at 35 and lays out the principles by which he lived. Alan’s three core principles Keep your spending in check so you save a lot - preferably by automating your savings Seek out ways to increase your income through education, hard work, and challenging careers Implement a sound investment strategy that keeps fees low and generates high rates of return early on Alan discusses the merits of going back to school to get a graduate d...
Jan 12, 2024•37 min
Shane Parrish is the founder, curator and wisdom seeker behind Farnam Street. He is also a bestselling author and entrepreneur known for his popular podcast The Knowledge Project and Brain Food newsletter. Originally a personal blog where Shane could explore the discoveries made by others about decision-making, purposeful living, and the mechanics of the world, it swiftly transformed into a leading website for personal development. Shane Parrish just released his book Clear Thinking. It is a boo...
Oct 03, 2023•40 min•Ep. 573
David McCormick is the former CEO of Bridgewater Associates, one of the world’s largest hedge funds. He has also previously worked in the Bush White House and as President of FreeMarkets, a Pittsburgh-based startup from the early 2000s. He accomplished the sale of FreeMarkets to Ariba in 2004 for an estimated sum of $500 million and ensured that his team retained their jobs after the acquisition. McCormick ran in the GOP primaries for Pennsylvania senator against Dr. Mehmet Oz in 2022. It is spe...
Aug 20, 2023•49 min
Chris Powers is the Founder & Executive Chairman of Fort Capital. Fort Capital is a Fort Worth, Texas-based Real Estate Private Equity firm. In 2016, Chris made the decision to focus on Class B Industrial full time and that is where the firm has dedicated the majority of its resources since. After graduating in 2008, Chris started a leasing and property management business and flipped houses on the side. Wells Fargo gave him a $250,000 line of credit, and the plan was to keep flipping homes ...
May 23, 2023•46 min
David Tobin is the Founder and Managing Partner of TobinLeff, where they help clients convert business value into family wealth. David is a serial entrepreneur who has founded, grown, and sold four companies. David has worked with over 100 businesses to build value, retain key employees, and achieve profitable exits. TobinLeff is an M&A advisory and exit planning firm that assists business owners in maximizing enterprise value and converting it into personal wealth. They offer consulting ser...
May 14, 2023•40 min
Kevin Kelly co-founded Wired magazine in 1993, served as its Executive Editor for its first seven years, and was a pioneer from the early days of the internet. He is an author of several bestselling books and is a return guest on this podcast . Kevin’s book Excellent Advice for Living is a small book of wisdom, in a pocketable format with 450 tweetable bits of advice that he wished he had known earlier. Kevin was prompted to collect these thoughts after a recent birthday caused him to reflect on...
Apr 30, 2023•41 min
Jason Wolfe is the definition of a serial entrepreneur. He sold MyCoupons.com for roughly $23 million in 2000, shortly before the DotCom bubble burst. Jason rolled over his proceeds into successive wins with his companies Direct Response Technologies (acquired by Digital River for $22 million), Jambo Media (for $15 million) and Giftcards.com (by Blackhawk Network for $120 million). Pretty impressive. Even more so when you consider how he grew up. After growing up in the Milton Hershey School, an...
Apr 16, 2023•44 min
Lyn Askin is the founder and CEO of Raxxar Digital Marketing, a leading digital marketing agency based in Louisiana. Lyn has over 20 years of experience in digital marketing and has expertise in SEO, PPC, social media, and content marketing to create comprehensive campaigns that drive results. Recently, Lyn’s agency has hit a new level, thanks in large part to implementing the Entrepreneur Operating System (EOS) outlined in the book Traction by Gino Wickman. His revenue triple, team size doubled...
Apr 09, 2023•44 min
Jordan Ross is the founder and CEO of 8 Figure Agency. He is a systems expert with over 15 years of experience advising startups, mid-sized companies, and Fortune 500 organizations. 8 Figure Agency is a consultancy specializing in helping agencies scale their revenue and profitability. He and his team help agencies specializing in search engine optimization (SEO), pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, social media marketing, and website design and development. In this episode, Aaron and Jordan talk a...
Apr 02, 2023•38 min
Simon Huntley is a farmer and entrepreneur who is passionate about helping small farmers succeed. He is the founder and CEO of Harvie, a company that helps farmers sell their products directly to consumers through a customizable subscription service. Harvie is a software platform that connects small farmers with consumers in their communities. The platform allows farmers to create customizable subscription services that offer weekly or bi-weekly deliveries of fresh, locally grown produce and oth...
Mar 27, 2023•38 min
Spencer Krause is founder & Director of Product Development for SKA Custom Robots and Machines. With over twenty years of experience in executing electrical and mechanical projects, Spencer has worked on some of the hardest problems in the world of technology and led teams tackling novel and thrilling projects. SKA Custom Robots & Machines is a contract-engineering firm that utilizes their expertise in mechatronics and hardware to solve robotics, mechanical systems, electrical engineerin...
Mar 20, 2023•47 min
Andy Berman is the co-founder of Vowel, a software that allows dynamic remote teams to inject artificial intelligence into their calls. In 2021, Vowel secured a venture round of $13.5 Million to pursue the goal of making meetings more useful. Their virtual meeting platform has an embedded set of tools that aid in the planning, preparation, execution, and follow-up of meetings. Smart summaries, transcriptions, and search are already live for their users. Andy is an experienced entrepreneur who pr...
Mar 12, 2023•30 min
Anthony Constantino is the co-founder of Sticker Mule, one of the most popular custom sticker websites in the United States and Europe. Sticker Mule was founded after Anthony was asked by his 72-year-old friend, his cofounder, how to use the internet. More than a decade later, Sticker Mule is one of the most popular custom sticker websites with over 100 employees world-wide and printing operations in the United States and Europe. Anthony oversees an operation that spans 16 countries in 4 contine...
Mar 06, 2023•45 min
Adriane Schwager is the co-founder and CEO of GrowthAssistant, a global talent solution helping marketing teams focus on brand, strategy and results. They help startups and direct-to-consumer brands accelerate the growth of their businesses by offering full-time offshore employees to handle the manual tasks of marketing campaign management, design and reporting. GrowthAssistant was founded in February 2021 and has already scaled to over $7 million in annual recurring revenue. More impressively, ...
Feb 20, 2023•43 min
Daniela Osio is the Founder and CEO of the procurement-focused start-up Kloopify. Daniela is a former supply chain specialist for DuPont and was a CPIM certified and ISM 30 under 30 rising corporate start. Today, she uses her expertise in logistics procurement, supply chain management, and risk management to run Kloopify, a data platform aimed at the global supply chain. Kloopify introduces sustainability to the procurement process with the data, analytics, and visibility into the environmental ...
Feb 15, 2023•31 min
Steve Jobs was deeply influenced by Edwin Land, the founder of Polaroid. He took many of the top strategies that Land employed and used it to build Apple. If you're interested in this video essay, watch the full video by clicking on the link provided: https://youtu.be/1byJCn3sPhc
Feb 07, 2023•55 sec
John Jonas is the Founder of OnlineJobs.Ph. His company has helped more than 100,000 companies successfully hire Filipino talent by simplifying the outsourcing experience. John was extremely early to the trends of remote work, international hiring, and niche job boards. His reward has been more than 15 years in business and a day-to-day in the present that is low stress and highly impactful. In this episode, Aaron and John talk about the origins of OnlineJobs.Ph, what he’s learned about delegati...
Jan 08, 2023•32 min
Kevin Gibbon is the CEO and cofounder of Airhouse, an end-to-end operations and logistics platform for modern e-commerce companies. Airhouse works with companies to make distribution of their consumer goods products easy. They use a platform that is an all-in-one, cloud-based warehouse that maintains itself, helping direct-to-consumer companies get orders from factory to front-door. This company is informed by Kevin’s previous experience founding Shyp, a verticalized startup tackling the same pr...
Dec 11, 2022•43 min
Tucker Brown is the 6th generation rancher of the R.A. Brown Ranch. He has grown his followers on TikTok to 199k+, and garnered 3.7 million likes on his videos. He went viral overnight by sharing a video on TikTok of him lassoing a cow. Since then, he’s been constantly sharing tidbits of their ranch operations content in the said platform that help grow his business. R.A. Brown Ranch is a progressive family ranching business that has been producing some of the most superior cattle and Quarter Ho...
Dec 04, 2022•26 min
Shawn Allen is the co-founder of M@C Discount. Previously, he was President and GM of Asset Auctions, COO of AssetNation and Senior Product Manager of Giftcards.com which were all successful internet marketplace businesses. M@C Discount stands for Merchandise at Cost. The company buys truckloads of closeouts merchandise and customer returns from major retailers. They receive "New" and "Used" items that are sold individually at aggressive discounts, in-store and online. What’s great is that all...
Nov 27, 2022•34 min
Justin Welsh is a solopreneur that has made more than $3 million running from a collection of digital products. He has leveraged a large boutique advisory firm for entrepreneurs and creates digital products for creators. He has a decade of experience building two $50M+ ARR businesses, teams of 150+, and helping raise over $300M in capital from VC firms like HLM Ventures, Leerink Transformation Partners, Vivo Capital, Toba Capital, and athenahealth. Over that period, he played the role of Chief R...
Nov 20, 2022•49 min
In 2019, Joe Cardosi founded Free Market Health to tackle the complicated specialty pharmacy marketplace. In less than four years, the firm has raised over $13 million, grown to 50+ team members, and scaled revenue into the millions. Free Market Health is a healthcare technology platform focused on fixing the company dedicated to improving the specialty pharmacy ecosystem with a care-driven marketplace platform. They support forward-thinking payers and specialty pharmacies of all sizes who need ...
Nov 13, 2022•51 min
Austin Rief is the CEO and cofounder of the Morning Brew. In 2020, the Morning Brew was majority acquired for a $75 million dollar valuation, just five years after being founded by two University of Michigan students. Morning Brew is a media company with an email list of over 3 million people. Their content informs, educates and empowers readers on the business world, money and their career. They bring informative and digestible daily news and information about businesses from Wall Street to Sil...
Nov 06, 2022•34 min
Dr. Shiv Rao is the CEO and cofounder of Abridge. He was previously a senior executive at UPMC Enterprises and serves as a cardiologist at the Heart and Vascular Institute at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. Abridge is an Artificial Intelligence app that listens to the doctor-patient conversations, provides a transcription, and categorizes specific details such as medications, symptoms, diagnoses, procedures, and the care plan. Dr. Rao and his team have cataloged more than five milli...
Oct 30, 2022•40 min
Bill Hauser is the CEO of SMB Team, the Fastest Growing law firm growth company in the US. The firm currently has more than $20 million in annual revenue and a team of 60 full-time employees. SMB team uses digital marketing, staffing, and coaching, to help law firms grow. Their mission is to help 10,000 law firms double their revenue and grow to $256 million in revenue within 10 years. Bill also shares how (and why) he spends over $600,000 annually on personal development. From personal coaches ...
Oct 24, 2022•44 min