Big Swings Only

Ron’s new book, Shop Different, is out now: www.ronjohnsonshopsdifferent.com

What does the man who built the Apple Store think is the secret to great business? Two words: love and kindness.

Ron Johnson worked alongside Steve Jobs to create the Apple Store and the Genius Bar, and he helped bring the iPhone to market. Before Apple, he changed Target by partnering with architect Michael Graves to bring great design to everyday prices. Then came his toughest chapter: CEO of JCPenney.

In this episode of Big Swings Only, Kwame Ch...

Most people will never learn what you're about to hear...

In this one-hour masterclass, Kwame Christian sits down with Mike Inman — the #1 negotiation trainer who has coached over 8,000 B2B negotiations and closed more than $1 billion in deals. Mike shares raw, practical, and battle-tested advice you can use immediately to transform the way you negotiate. No fluff. No theory. Just one straight hour of negotiation strategies that actually work.

If you’ve ever wondered how world-class negotiators stay calm under pressure, adapt to any situation, and win without destroying relationships, this is your episode.

You don't need to be rich or a finance expert to start building wealth. NerdWallet's Sean Pyles and Elizabeth Ayoola are living proof.

⁠Kwame's episode on NerdWallet’s Smart Money Podcast: https://open.spotify.com/episode/3JsoelBqytmMXRmcA2qtK7?si=-gs3-9uMR2aZ16PNaKX3bg⁠

In this episode of Big Swings Only, Kwame Christian sits down with the co-hosts of NerdWallet's Smart Money Podcast. Neither of them started out in finance. They learned it on the job, then used what they learned to transform their own lives. Elizabeth went from $0 saved for retirement as a newly...

You saw Kelly Chase say, "I don't." You saw the gasps. The tears. The headlines. What you didn't see is what happened moments before, when the officiant stopped everything and said: "I'm getting word from production." Years later, Kelly is finally telling her side. What really happened at that altar. Why the edit turned on her. The hate DMs telling her she'd "die alone." And the one part of the story the cameras caught… but never aired. But first, Kwame Christian makes her wait 26 minutes before even saying the words "Love Is Blind," because the woman you think you kn...

You’ve hit the goals, earned the promotions, and it still feels like it’s never enough. The problem isn’t your ambition. It’s where your ambition is coming from.

Former Googler Brooke Taylor, author of Healing the Success Wound, joins Kwame Christian to unpack the one addiction society applauds: the addiction to achievement. Brooke shares how a stack-ranked sales job at Google, her father’s terminal cancer diagnosis, staying silent about harassment to protect a promotion, and getting sober led her to identify the “success wound,” the pain of mistaking success, productivity, and achievement for self-worth.

Varun Sharma has spent years working in green energy and hydrogen. So why is he now taking on defense and oil & gas clients?

Kwame Christian welcomes Varun back to the show to unpack "pragmatic idealism": holding on to your ideals while staying honest about how power actually works. Drawing on a decade in Estonia on NATO's eastern edge, a father who served in the military, and his years in government, Varun explains why strength prevents conflict instead of inviting it, why doing nothing is still a choice with consequences, and why polarization is costing...

Vanessa Van Edwards once lost a dream TV deal over small talk. After 20 years of research, she knows how to turn small talk into real connection.

On this episode, Kwame Christian sits down with Vanessa Van Edwards, behavioral researcher, founder of Science of People and bestselling author of Captivate and Cues, to unpack her new book, Conversation: How to Connect with Anyone & Make Every Interaction Count. A self-described "recovering awkward person," Vanessa shares the science-backed conversation skills that changed her life, from escaping conversation dead ends to asking the questions that build deeper relationships.<...

Kwame Christian sits down with psychologist, marriage and family therapist, and founder of Growing Self Counseling & Coaching, Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby, and it quickly turns into two high achievers comparing notes on the hidden cost of always chasing the next win. Kwame opens up about skipping the celebration of his own graduations, walking away from a national competition award because it wasn't the championship, and turning his marriage into a competition his wife never signed up for. Dr. Lisa Marie explains the psychology behind it (the hedonic treadmill) and why stepping off it doesn't kill your drive. It might...

If you've been pushing hard but feeling empty, this episode will challenge everything you believe about high performance. DJ Vanas — Air Force veteran, member of the Ottawa Nation, and author of The Warrior Within (Penguin Random House) — brings centuries of tribal wisdom into a single, urgent message: you cannot be of service to anyone when you are falling apart.

DJ has spoken at Fuqua School of Business at Duke University and Yakima Tribal Jail in the same week. His work spans 574 federally recognized tribes, healthcare systems, military organizations, and Fortune-level business teams. He doesn't teach cutting-edge frameworks — he tea...

Nidhi explains why the biggest mistake leaders make is rushing from empathy into problem-solving, and why she never gives advice unless someone asks for it. She also asks a question worth sitting with: when we fix, share our own stories, or offer platitudes, whose comfort are we really prioritizing?

If you want to connect more deeply with the people in your life and at work, this one's for you.

Connect with Nidhi Tewari

www.nidhitewari.com

Connect with Kwame:

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You already know resilience matters. But what if everything you think about it is incomplete?

In this episode, Kwame Christian sits down with Dr. Marie-Hélène Pelletier — psychologist, executive coach, and author of The Resilience Plan — to break down why resilience isn't just a trait you either have or don't, and it's not just a muscle you build through grit alone. It's a strategy. One you can actually sit down and plan.

Marie-Hélène opens with a harrowing story from an 8-day mountain traverse in the Canadian Rockies — a river crossing gone wrong that nearl...

Fired at 43 with an 18-month non-compete, Heather Monahan had to rebuild her career from scratch — and it led her to her real purpose. In this episode, she and Kwame break down why confidence is a learnable skill, why "done" beats "perfect," and why firing the "energy vampires" in your life can change everything.

You'll learn:

Connect with Heather

www.heathermonahan.com

He...

Learn how to take control, reclaim your freedom, and build a business that works without you.

Get Codie's new book: Own Or Be Owned

codiesanchez.com

You've been listening to the wrong voice in your head for years — and it's cost you more than you realize.

Shirzad Chamine spent the first 30 years of his life in clinical depression — despite building a venture-backed company, attracting Silicon Valley's top investors, and landing Hewlett-Packard as his first customer. Then, at the height of his success, his own leadership team staged a coup and demoted him as CEO of the company he founded.

That devastating moment forced him to ask a question most high achievers never stop to consider: if I'm this successful and this mise...

Great leaders don't avoid pressure — they know how to think clearly inside it. In this episode, Kwame Christian sits down with Dr. Tracey Marks, a board-certified psychiatrist and one of the most trusted mental health educators on YouTube (with over 2 million followers), to break down what's actually happening in a leader's brain during a high-stakes conversation — and how to stay in control of it.

Dr. Marks explains why our brains treat criticism, tension, or a tough deadline the same way they'd treat a physical threat, shutting down the prefrontal cortex — the part responsible for rational thinking — right when lea...

Right now, someone is telling a chatbot about the guy she went on a third date with — and it's giving her a pretty good answer. That should worry you.

Stefanos Sifandos has spent 25 years coaching people through relationships face-to-face, in the room. In this episode, he explains why AI can make you feel self-aware without ever making you change — and why that satiation is quietly keeping people stuck.

We get into:

Scott Stirrett left a prestigious career at Goldman Sachs to build something from nothing — and it changed everything he understood about growth.

In this episode, Scott (founder of Venture for Canada, author of The Uncertainty Advantage) breaks down why comfort is actually the biggest threat to your growth, and how uncertainty — the thing most of us run from — is a skill you can systematically build.

Connect with Scott

www.scottstirrett.com

Take the Quiz: Discover Your Uncertainty Advantage

Buy the book: The Uncertainty Advantage

David JP Phillips reveals how to hack your internal chemistry—on demand—to show up with confidence, presence, and power when it matters most. Drawing from his best-selling book High on Life, David breaks down the six key neurochemicals that control your behavior (dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin, endorphin, testosterone, and cortisol), and shows you how to intentionally trigger the right “emotional cocktail” before a high-stakes conversation.

You’ll learn how to:

• Boost testosterone without acting aggressive

• Use oxytocin to build trust—without going soft

• Prime your brain for creativity, calm, and clarity<...

What if reading people wasn't a gift, but a skill you could actually learn?

Dr. Sabine Charles has one of the most unusual resumes you'll hear on this show — she's a former chief audit executive and fraud investigator turned hypnotherapist, and the founder of a leadership framework called MeQ (Mindset, Emotional Intelligence, and Leadership Qualities). As an auditor, her job was to walk into a room and convince skeptical executives to change their minds. As a fraud investigator, people would confess things to her in minutes that they'd hidden from everyone else for hours. Her colleagues started as...

What if the biggest thing standing between you and your next opportunity is the decision to reject yourself before anyone else can?

Leadership expert and bestselling author Selena Rezvani joins Kwame Christian to explore what it really takes to advocate for yourself, take bigger swings, and keep moving when fear, perfectionism, or self-doubt tells you to play it safe. Selena shares the bold ask that changed the course of her college years, the career rejection she turned into an unexpected opportunity, and why high achievers need to stop tying their worth to their accomplishments. They also unpack...

Everybody knows ChatGPT. Almost no one knows the person who took it to market. In this episode of Big Swings Only, Kwame Christian sits down with Zack Kass, who spent over a decade at the center of the AI industry and led go-to-market strategy at OpenAI — bringing the technology to hundreds of millions of professionals worldwide.

Zack walked away from that career at its peak, driven by a hard truth: technology promised to make life more affordable and instead made housing, healthcare, and education far more expensive, while making distraction and dopamine dirt cheap. In this conversation, he...

Your best ideas won’t go anywhere if you don’t know how to build the influence to make them happen.

In this episode of Big Swings Only, Harvard Business School professor Linda Hill and innovation leader Jason Wild, co-authors of Genius at Scale, reveal what it really takes to turn ambitious ideas into meaningful change. Their research shows that breakthrough innovation isn’t just about having the right idea—it’s about building the relationships, trust, and coalitions needed to carry that idea across the finish line.

Linda and Jason break down how to lead and i...

Why do some people seem addicted to conflict — and what can we actually do about it?

In this powerful episode, conflict resolution expert Bill Eddy breaks down the four key traits of high-conflict personalities and teaches us how to deal with them — without losing our minds.

-Learn Bill Eddy’s “BIFF” Response Formula-Discover the 4 types of high-conflict people-Understand why society is becoming more divided — and what to do about it

Connect with Bill

⁠www.highconflictinstitute.com⁠

⁠Bill Eddy's Bookstore⁠

Contact ANI

⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠...

Travel doesn’t just show you the world — it shows you yourself. And sometimes, what you discover is not what you expected.

In this powerful conversation, journalist and travel creator Nicole Phillip joins Kwame to explore the intersection of identity, race, storytelling, and courage. She opens up about her life-changing study abroad experience in Italy — the joy she imagined, the racism she didn’t expect, and the moment she realized she wasn’t alone when hundreds of thousands of people reached out to say, “This happened to me too.”

Nicole also shares the bold leap from ABC News...

Lisa Bilyeu shares the raw truth behind her journey — from shipping protein bars out of her living room to leading one of the most influential wellness brands in the world. Together with Kwame Christian, she unpacks what it really means to face failure, reprogram your inner critic, and choose your mission over your ego.

If you’ve ever struggled with fear, insecurity, or the pressure to be perfect, this episode will remind you that confidence isn’t something you’re born with — it’s something you build, one uncomfortable step at a time.

⁠⁠Buy the...

Your brain runs a persuasion campaign on you every single day — manufacturing certainty, defending beliefs that stopped being true years ago, and keeping you loyal to a version of yourself you never actually chose.

Owen Fitzpatrick has spent 25+ years studying how minds get changed — as a filmmaker, an NLP co-author with Dr. Richard Bandler, a persuasion consultant for companies like Google and Coca-Cola, and a researcher who has traveled to North Korea, Iran, and Afghanistan to study propaganda at its most extreme. But after all that, he says the most powerful propaganda machine he's ever encountered wasn't out...

He couldn't keep a job at Chick-fil-A. Then the founder personally hired him — and 44 years later, he retired as one of the company's top executives.

Mark Miller started as a teenager who kept getting laid off, until a strange twist of fate put him face-to-face with Truett Cathy, the founder of Chick-fil-A, for a job interview in the company's warehouse. In this episode, Mark shares how that unlikely beginning turned into a 44-year career, the mindset shift that changed everything — "your capacity to grow determines your capacity to lead" — and why he believes lifelong learning isn't just an act...

She was an Ivy League lawyer with the perfect résumé. Then she became a convicted felon — and says losing her freedom is what finally set her free.

Rashmi Airan built a career as an attorney, entrepreneur, and Wall Street banker — until one bad decision, made under pressure to succeed, led to an FBI investigation and a year in federal prison. In this episode, she opens up about the moment everything fell apart, what she calls the "invisible prisons" we build for ourselves long before any real consequence hits, and how owning her worst mistake completely became the fo...

How do you build a personal brand without quitting your day job? In this episode, former SWAT hostage negotiator Ryan Dunlap and sitting HR Vice President Njsane Courtney reveal how they each built massive, trusted personal brands while holding full-time careers.

Ryan shares the real story behind his viral balloon video — a TikTok post with zero followers that hit 100,000+ views overnight — and the personal branding strategy he used to scale it into a following of nearly a million, without chasing trends or dancing videos. Njsane opens up about building "My Friend in HR" into a top industry podc...

In this episode, you'll learn why "one quadrant success" — chasing money while your health, relationships, and inner life fall apart — is the biggest lie in the self-development world, and what the four quadrants of true prosperity actually look like. You'll learn how to identify the beliefs you inherited about money, work, and worth, and how to "blow up" that programming and replace it with something that actually serves you. You'll learn Randy Gage's concept of the sovereign operator — the mindset that makes you unable to be guilted, manipulated, or controlled by other people, institutions, or fear. And you'll learn why cr...

Dr. Kevin Basik — 24-year Air Force behavioral scientist, PhD in Organizational Behavior, and co-founder of the National Medal of Honor Leadership Institute — had a 3am panic attack while building a leadership program with a Navy SEAL-turned-astronaut. This episode breaks down his courage framework, validated by actual Medal of Honor recipients, for beating imposter syndrome, building behavioral integrity, and leading with values-driven leadership under pressure.

Connect with Kevin Basik

https://basikinsight.com/

https://basikinsight.com/connect/

334.467.6346
[email protected]

Connect with Kwame:

⁠⁠...

Most people don't fail because they lack talent. They fail because they disqualify themselves before anyone else gets the chance.

Patty Azzarello became HP's youngest-ever General Manager at 33, ran a billion-dollar business at 35, and reached Silicon Valley CEO by 38 — all while feeling like she didn't belong in the room. In her new book Why Is She Still Here?, she shares the real, unfiltered story of what it actually took to get there.

In this episode, you'll discover:

Most people think in binary — it will happen or it won't. A former CIA field officer says that mental habit is quietly destroying your decisions, your business, and your shot at the life you actually want.

Anthony Vinci spent years recruiting intelligence sources in active war zones, advising presidents and generals on high-stakes decisions, and then managing investments at Bridgewater Associates under Ray Dalio — one of the most disciplined decision-making environments on the planet. After leaving government, he built a company from the ground up without knowing what an LLC was, wrote The Fourth Intelligence Revolution, and laun...

Psychiatrist Dr. Suzan Song reveals why "just keep going" isn't resilience — it's a trauma response. After hiding from child soldiers in Burundi, she uncovered the hidden cost of high achievement that no one talks about.

In this episode, you'll discover:

Being told you're "the glue that keeps everything together" sounds like a compliment—until you realize it's the very reason they never considered you for the promotion. Dr. Ruth Gotian spent 15 years being perfect at her job, and it almost cost her everything.

Dr. Ruth Gotian is the Chief Learning Officer at Weill Cornell Medicine (recently retired), a Columbia University faculty member, and one of the world's foremost researchers on peak performance. She has interviewed Nobel Prize winners, Olympians, NASA astronauts, and NBA champions—not to report on their habits, but to decode the mindset patterns behind their grea...

Before we transition, we wanted to give you one more gift.

This episode wasn't originally planned for the Negotiate Anything feed — it's an interview Kwame did on Trent Shelton's podcast, and it might be one of the most personal conversations he's ever had.

Contact ANI

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I'm Ending Negotiate Anything. Big Swings Only Starts Now.

After 10 years and 1,800+ episodes, I'm closing the chapter on the world's #1 negotiation podcast — and betting everything on what comes next. This is the most honest, unscripted episode I've ever recorded.

I'm Kwame Christian — founder and CEO of the American Negotiation Institute, bestselling author, and the host who built Negotiate Anything from a solo credibility play at age 27 into the most downloaded negotiation podcast on the planet. My clients include Google, Apple, NASA, Microsoft, and the Department of Defense. I've trained hundreds of thousands of people to have...

Most people don't fail in difficult conversations because they lack knowledge — they fail because they lose control of themselves.

In this special episode, our host, negotiation expert Kwame Christian sits down with Ohio State Moritz College of Law Professor Katrina Lee to answer the toughest questions from her law students about negotiation, persuasion, emotional regulation, and conflict.

Together, they explore what separates great negotiators from everyone else—from mastering the empathy loop and building genuine trust to using storytelling, curiosity, and strategic listening to influence outcomes. Kwame shares practical tech...

What if the most powerful thing you're communicating is something you're never saying at all?

In this captivating masterclass on body language, world-renowned communication expert Linda Clemons reveals how your nonverbal signals can elevate—or sabotage—your influence, relationships, negotiations, and career. Drawing from decades of experience coaching executives, sales leaders, and organizations around the world, Linda shares the hidden cues that determine whether people trust you, listen to you, or tune you out entirely.

From the surprising power of presence to the subtle facial expressions that reveal what peop...

What if the secret to influencing people, uncovering the truth, and becoming a better leader isn't authority — it's emotional intelligence?

In this powerful conversation, Dr. Sabine Charles shares how her career as a fraud investigator and internal auditor taught her an unexpected lesson: people reveal their deepest truths when they feel understood. From interviewing fraud suspects who "spilled the beans" within minutes to helping professionals overcome performance anxiety and pass high-stakes certification exams, Sabine reveals the mindset and emotional intelligence strategies that transformed her approach to leadership.

Together, we ex...