Gisele was born in Rio de Janeiro and immigrated to the U.S. at age eight with her mother and was undocumented for many years. Growing up in the cities, she was acutely aware of the vast inequalities between Brazil and the United States, and between the working-class community that she lived in and the more affluent communities where her mother secured work as a housekeeper. These days, you can probably find her at the Free Store – a brightly painted converted storage container that Gisele Fette...
Sep 12, 2016•26 min
Squonk has created and toured our outdoor spectacles around the world, with reviews that include “insane majesty" from The Scotsman, “surreal and poetic” from USA Today and “ingenious, hallucinatory, hypnotic" from The New York Times. Squonkwork is fast, funny, and shameless: our first show was performed in a Pittsburgh junkyard, with choreographed cranes and roaring earthmovers. Squonk creates post-industrial outdoor performances for major civic venues and festivals and have toured to 39 states...
Sep 07, 2016•28 min
Sean Douglas is a veteran of the United States Air Force, a certified Master Resilience Trainer, and a professional Motivational Speaker. He enlisted in the Air Force in 2001 right after 9/11, has been deployed to multiple locations, and performed a multitude of duties all over the world. Sean gives many speeches throughout the year on various topics, such as Developing Leaders, Leadership Principles, Team Building, Stages of Team Forming, Self-Defeating Behaviors, Decisions, and much more. As a...
Sep 06, 2016•32 min
Larry Gioia’s philosophy “Always Be Connecting the Dots” infects all of his relationships. In this episode, we discuss how to grow and connect a network with actionable tactics that he’d recommend to anyone. Larry and Aaron’s Challenge; Join Connection University on Facebook to continue to learn and grow. Connect with Larry Twitter LinkedIn...
Sep 01, 2016•46 min
Ray Gastil is currently Director of City Planning for Pittsburgh. Previously, he was an urban designer in Seattle, where his work was focused on connecting innovative program and design concepts to the pragmatic challenges of making extraordinary projects and places, grounded in their communities. Expertise includes comprehensive city and regional planning, with a focus on planning and urban design guidelines and arts, housing, and public realm incentive frameworks for campuses, mixed-use distri...
Aug 31, 2016•31 min
Found a gem that I wanted to share with you.
Aug 30, 2016•9 min
Radiant Hall founder Ryan Lammie was born in Pittsburgh and educated at the Pratt Institute in New York. In 2011 he was selected for the Yale / Norfolk Summer Residency in Connecticut and graduated in 2012 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts. Lammie’s sculptural work often assembled from found materials (discarded furniture, old radios, and the like), is driven by two tendencies in tension with one another: a skepticism of exchange value and a love of maximalism. As an entrepreneur, Lammie has built Ra...
Aug 24, 2016•23 min
James Andrew Miller is an award-winning journalist who has worked in politics, media, and entertainment in a career spanning more than 20 years. In 1985, he wrote the bestselling book RUNNING IN PLACE: Inside the Senate . Later, he and co-author Tom Shales wrote LIVE FROM NEW YORK: an Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live , which spent more than four months on the New York Times bestseller list and was named by Fortune as one of the top 75 “Smartest Books We Know.” In 2011, he co-authored wi...
Aug 22, 2016•20 min
Derrius Quarles makes things happen. Having grown up in a financially humble background and as an alumnus of foster care, his journey to becoming an award-winning entrepreneur and a globally recognized social change maker has been complex. His turning point came when as a high school student and he made the decision that he wanted to become the first in my family to go to college. Living in poverty at the time, scholarships were an invaluable resource to his pursuit of higher education. Before e...
Aug 17, 2016•29 min
Dan Gilman is currently serving his first term as City Council member for the 8th Council District of Pittsburgh. Gilman has been very active in his first year on Council, having passed two pieces of legislation and a resolution aimed at reducing the discrimination and stigma pregnant women and nursing mothers continue to face. He has also been active in imploring the PA legislature to support the PA Women's Health Agenda . The Councilman worked extensively with the Mayor’s office to implement s...
Aug 15, 2016•33 min
Baron Batch is a cultural icon, community builder, dot connector, conceptual multimedia artist, and entrepreneur based out of Homestead, PA. He rose to fame through his street art and currently serves as Creative Director of Studio AM. Studio AM is a multifaceted creative collective that specializes in guerilla marketing, unique private events, and is a production facility for his “Angry Man Salsa”. He has an extensive background in public speaking is a graduate of Texas Tech. Baron’s Challenge;...
Aug 10, 2016•36 min
Tucker Max is an American author and public speaker. He chronicled his drinking and sexual encounters in the form of short stories on his website TuckerMax.com , which has received millions of visitors since Max launched it as the result of a bet in 2000. I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell was a New York Times #1 Bestseller and made the Bestseller List each year from 2006 to 2012. It has sold over one million copies worldwide, including 400,000 copies in 2009 alone. In 2010, he released a book title...
Aug 08, 2016•35 min
Kris Reid is the founder of Ardor SEO and Media Factory. He founded the company after losing his job as a software engineer, opening offices in Cambodia and the Philippines. Ardor Media Factory is a multi-national backlink building company. They help businesses achieve success in their respective niches by offering a wide range of services including search engine optimization, search engine ranking, and link building. They also produce high-quality content for business websites through informati...
Aug 03, 2016•22 min
John Thornton is the CEO of Astrobotic, a company aspiring to be the logistics company for Space. Astrobotic delivers lunar payload and services to government and commercial customers. The company’s first Moon mission will carry customer payloads, win the $20M Google Lunar XPRIZE, and explore a possible cave entrance on the surface of the Moon. Astrobotic has 17 prior and ongoing NASA contracts, strong partnerships, and world-leading staff and technology for the development of robotic landers. J...
Aug 01, 2016•23 min
Robin Hanson is a professor of economics at George Mason University and a research associate at the Future of Humanity Institute of Oxford University. He is an expert on idea futures and markets, and he was involved in the creation of the Foresight Institute’s Foresight Exchange and DARPA's FutureMAP project. He invented market scoring rules used by prediction markets and has conducted research on signaling. Hanson received a B.S. in physics from the University of California, Irvine in 1981, an ...
Jul 27, 2016•31 min
Kevin Kelly is the founding executive editor of Wired magazine and a former editor/publisher of the Whole Earth Review. He has also been a writer, photographer, conservationist, and student of Asian and digital culture. Kelly stepped down as executive editor of Wired in 1999; his current job title is Senior Maverick. Partially due to his reputation as Wired's editor, he is noted as a participant in and an observer of cyberculture. His books include; Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, S...
Jul 25, 2016•30 min
Isaac Morehouse is an entrepreneur, thinker, and communicator dedicated to the relentless pursuit of freedom, and an advocate of self-directed learning and living. He is the founder and CEO of Praxis, an intensive nine-month program combining a paid apprenticeship at a startup with personal coaching, professional development projects, and interdisciplinary education leading directly to a full-time job offer for those who want more than college. Isaac previously worked at the Institute for Humane...
Jul 20, 2016•1 hr 1 min
Dan Bull is the Founder of Zero Six Eight , an organization dedicated to developing entrepreneurs with ideas into companies that solve real problems in a socially responsible manner. 068 is one of the top resources in the city for employing ex-offenders and offering second chances. Dan’s Challenge; Forgive. Connect with Dan Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Website If you liked this interview, check out episode 2 with Michael Van Ness where we discuss 068 and Michael’s social work....
Jul 13, 2016•25 min
Todd is an author who helps creative people find their untapped potential. He is the author of The Creative's Curse , a book about the pains of being creative at every phase - Discover, Discipline, and Destiny. He is also the founder of Snap Swipe Post, a site which creates custom SnapChat geo-filters. His goal in business is to create things people enjoy, whether that means a well-crafted document, a funny video, or just a simple acronym. He loves his redhead, Chacos, and sweet potatoes. We ref...
Jul 11, 2016•30 min
Kash Dhanda is an entrepreneur. He is currently the founder and CEO of Ezra Digital (his digital marketing agency), previous co-founder of Upside Sounds (a concert promotion company). Kash is also an avid Virtual Reality enthusiast. We discuss a number of resources to learn more about VR including; Google Cardboard NYT VR app Oculus subreddit Twitch VR Writers like Ben Thompson (Stratechery) and Benedict Evans Needless to say, we both think it’s a big deal. Kash is a tech lover, Pittsburgher, tr...
Jul 06, 2016•31 min
A brief essay on the current state of the internet. Over the past two decades, global internet users have increased from 35 million people to an astounding 3 billion today. More than three-quarters of all internet advertising revenue is split between Google and Facebook. What’s next? Stay tuned to this podcast for interviews with Robin Hanson and Kevin Kelly .
Jun 30, 2016•7 min
Oren Klaff is the Managing Director of Intersection Capital and a #1 Bestselling Author for his book Pitch Anything. With over $400M in deals on his resume, Oren is well-qualified to cut through sales guru BS and give it to you straight. His secret? Neuroeconomics. A single field of study that sorted out the different motivation and economic responses of the human mind and shows how the brain responds to pitches. Neuroeconomics combines neuroscience, economics, and psychology to study how people...
Jun 29, 2016•24 min
Bill Peduto was elected to the office of Mayor of the City of Pittsburgh in November 2013. Prior, he worked for 19 years on Pittsburgh City Council. A self-described “Reform Democrat”, Bill Peduto wrote the most comprehensive package of government reform legislation in Pittsburgh’s history. During Pittsburgh’s ongoing financial crisis, Bill Peduto has been the consistent voice of fiscal discipline. Decades of financial mismanagement and antiquated policies have left Pittsburgh with the highest d...
Jun 27, 2016•19 min
Declan is an author of the recently released “The Millennial Way: Step Up, Step Out, Step Forward”. Declan originally set out to write a book to debunk the misconceptions and stigma surrounding the Millennial generation. After interviewing Millennials doing “awesome things” with their lives, Declan noticed a recurring pattern among all their personal journeys, including his own. The pattern of Stepping Up, Stepping Out, and Stepping Forward became what Declan calls The Millennial Way. It’s not a...
Jun 22, 2016•25 min
This is a story of evolution. Or maybe revolution is more accurate. Mike Vacanti left his cushy corporate gig to pursue a life of fitness entrepreneurship. For the last 12 years, he has been studying nutrition and training for fat loss and muscle gain and wants to pass this knowledge on to anyone who needs it. He has trained hundreds of clients in the gym and thousands on the internet. He has helped a woman trim 150 pounds of body fat, countless men overcome bedroom issues, and teenagers use the...
Jun 20, 2016•32 min
Hassan Osman is a PMO Manager at Cisco and a Carnegie Mellon and Harvard University graduate. My main area of expertise is in leading large and complex technology programs – particularly in a virtual team environment. At Cisco, he is responsible for leading and managing a team of 20+ project & program managers on delivering projects to Cisco's Enterprise clients in the eastern United States. Previously at Cisco, he was a Senior Program Manager, where he was responsible for scoping, negotiati...
Jun 13, 2016•28 min
I’ve been doing this less than a year. So much is happening for me and this is just the beginning. I want you to learn from my story and start aiming higher. I’ve got big things on my horizon, and I'm positive that you do, too. Aaron’s Challenge; Reach out to @AntonioBrown84 and ask him to come on the show. Connect with Aaron Twitter Snapchat...
Jun 09, 2016•14 min
Brian helps enterprise technology companies utilize new technology such as Social, Mobile, Analytics and Cloud Computing to be more productive and become more involved in their communities as a social business. He hosts Twitter Hangouts #SbizHour & #CloudTalk & weekly Podcast Host: SMACtalk and iSocialTalks. His passion for change and people is evident as in every keynote he delivers, covering a range of topics including employee advocacy, social selling, personal branding, and his perso...
Jun 08, 2016•44 min
Saba Sedighi is a Marketing Strategist and Video Content Creator. She takes on an innovative approach towards social selling to connect brands with their audience. Tech savvy, with a broad understanding of social media, influencer and email marketing, Saba is focused on leveraging her expertise in digital marketing combined with strategic insights. Founder of iStream Social, she consults and collaborates with up-and-coming SMBs to help them establish, grow and manage their social presence, profi...
Jun 06, 2016•24 min
There is one mistake I consistently see people making on Snapchat. It was happening 2 years ago, and it continues to happen today. Be considerate, understand your context, and practice good Snap etiquette. Thanks to Ashley for helping! Follow her; Snapchat = ahh_chuu Instagram = achu739
Jun 05, 2016•3 min
