Project Candor: Ordinary People. Unexpected Stories

“Stop talking about replacing people with AI and instead let’s talk about empowering people with AI.” — Ted Yang 

Episode Summary 
What if the best years of your professional life aren’t behind you — they’re just waiting for the right amplifier? Ted Yang is an MIT-trained engineer who built a career spanning Wall Street finance, a dozen-plus companies and nonprofits, and Connecticut’s Regent for Higher Education. His latest work, the book Ageless Peak Performance, makes a case that cuts against every headline: AI isn’t here to replace experienced professionals — it’s here to extend their pri...

"Pressure doesn't build character — it reveals it. The moments when things go wrong are the moments when leadership and credibility are truly tested."
— Silvia Rizzo

Episode Summary
Silvia Rizzo was born in Italy and has built a life that refuses to stay in one lane. Dressage rider, model, actress, entrepreneur, and founder of Hof Marabunta — her private performance yard in Germany — Silvia competes at Grand Prix level while running a leadership coaching practice that draws everything it knows from horses, motorcycles, and the discipline of not reacting emotionally when everything is on the line. <...

"Every independent reader is the result of a visionary educator who refused to give up on a child." 

— Delia Peruyera 

Episode Summary
Delia Peruyera arrived in the United States from Cuba as a teenager who couldn't reliably read a sign — letters jumping and reversing, compounded by a visual tremor she carries to this day. What followed was a 37-year career inside Miami-Dade classrooms, the last seven of which she spent at a struggling middle school, helping move it from an F to a B using five clinical reading strategies she'd spent decades refini...

“Nobody cares what you know, until they know you care.”  — Eric W. Hommel 

Episode Summary 
Eric Hommel doesn’t sound like a man who spent thirty years in uniform guarding his own reputation — and that’s the point. A Cold War Navy submariner turned Air Force lieutenant colonel, he commanded a Provincial Reconstruction Team in Afghanistan’s Panjshir province, where the job was to build roads, governance, and a police force the Afghans could run themselves. Instead he found himself halting a major road project because his own side was seizing farmland from 541 families without paying a...

"A man does not lose his life all at once. He loses it every time he calls the truth inconvenient and chooses the warm lie instead." — Arky Jones

Episode Summary
Arky Jones has spent most of his life doing what most people avoid — looking closely at himself and asking hard questions about why people think, react, and live the way they do. That curiosity led him to build PersonalityPeek, a platform that blends personality insights, Stoic philosophy, and practical tools to help people understand who they are and lead themselves better. In this conversation, Arky...

"The Cheat Code of life is finding Order in Chaos." - Lee Freeburg 

Episode Summary
Lee Freeburg spent eight years as a Navy Corpsman — embedded with Marines, deployed to Iraq, trained to keep people alive in the field when there's no clinic to run to. He came home with his body intact. What followed was quieter and harder: seven years of drift. No mission. No structure. No one to tell him what to do next. 

 In this conversation, Lee walks through what really happens when military identity gets stripped away overnight — the freedom...

"Rejection is monotonous and solitary. Acceptance is to be sung in the streets and infinitely echoed." — Nicole Zwolinski

Episode Summary
Nicole Zwolinski has wanted to be a writer since before she could read — she'd memorize stories and announce that she was reading. But life, geography, and motherhood took turns pulling her away from the page. On this Ship's Log, she traces the path from a Minnesota girl falling in love with poetry in fifth grade, through a cross-country move to Florida that quietly reignited everything. 

Nicole reads two poems live during the conve...

"The unique role of the CEO is facilitating the creation, communication, and enforcement of a widely held purpose, vision, values, and strategic intent for the organization. All else can and should be delegated."  — Robert White 

Episode Summary
Robert White calls himself an average man. He's also the founder of three companies that have trained 1.4 million people across more than a dozen countries, a mentor to executives in Tokyo, Hong Kong, and Shanghai for over two decades, and the author of Living an Extraordinary Life. The gap between those two descriptions is the whole point. 

...

“Does your story serve your future?” — Kristen Crabtree

Episode Summary
After 22 years in a psychologically abusive marriage, Kristen Crabtree did the thing most people only talk about — she left. Not with a plan, not with a strategy, not with clarity. On her bathroom floor in the middle of a panic attack, with the bear behind her finally scarier than the abyss in front of her. In this episode she walks Jeanne through what it actually took to rebuild — and why she calls the work self-recovery, not self-help. 

Kristen is a Certified Divorce Coach, the...

"Most people don't fail because they're doing too little... They fail because they're doing too much of what doesn't actually move the needle." 

- Amy Lenius 

Episode Summary 

Amy Lenius didn't set out to become a personal development coach. She became one because, for years, no one could tell her what was wrong with her own body. Growing up with endometriosis before the internet existed, she navigated years of pain, dismissal, and failed treatments before deciding to take her health into her own hands. That decision - to stop being a vic...

“I have never regretted going into an interaction with a victim, informant, or criminal, and employing curiosity.” — Eric Robinson 

Episode Summary 
For 12 years, Eric Robinson stood in a pulpit. For the next 24, he carried a badge. In this episode he tells Jeanne how a Baptist pastor from western New York walked into the FBI Academy having never held a gun — and spent the next two and a half decades working white-collar fraud, public corruption, counterterrorism, and crimes against children, all while serving 15 years on SWAT. The throughline that connects both lives turns out to be a singl...

“Plant seeds, wherever you can, that will grow into trees that you will never sit under.” — Andrew Brummer

Episode Summary:
Andrew Brummer grew up in South Africa knowing early that the world wasn’t going to hand him anything. Born with a medical anomaly that set him apart, he learned from his mother that he couldn’t change what he looked like—but he could decide, every single day, who he’d become. That lesson became the operating system for a life built with no degree, no safety net, and no map.

In this conver...

"The greatest good you can do for another is not to share with him your riches, but to reveal to him his own."  — Benjamin Disraeli 

Episode Summary 

David Ask has lived several lives at once — and somehow they all rhyme. He's a Nashville inventor who, with his brother-in-law, built the world's first thermostat guard, StatGuard Plus, now carried in more than 3,700 Home Depot and Lowe's stores — and he'll be the first to tell you the road there was anything but glamorous. He's also a singer who has performed the National Anthem more times than he c...

“Somewhere between surviving and achieving, you forgot you were born sacred. Your soul has been waiting in the stillness of your heart for you to remember.” 

Episode Summary 

Sharon Madsen has spent 30 years doing work that's hard to put on a business card. She's a regulated health professional, a Reiki Master Teacher, and a self-described psychic medium — and the people who find her are usually the ones who look most put-together from the outside. The house, the marriage, the career, the success. And a quiet, confusing emptiness underneath it all. 

In this conv...

“Through mindful touch, we reconnect and restore our wholeness and health.” — Dr. Greg Yuen 

Episode Summary 

When Dr. Greg Yuen was twelve, his grandmother died — and at the funeral, placing paper money on her coffin and touching her pillow to say goodbye, he was hit by the realization that one day he would die too. He handled the fear the way a kid does (a lot of Snickers bars) and made himself a promise: he was going to find the secret to living forever. That vow launched a forty-year voyage between two worlds of healing...

“Home is where the bike is!” — Chris Donaldson 

Episode Summary 

In 1979 a 21-year-old Chris Donaldson pointed a café-racing Moto Guzzi out of Belfast—a city of checkpoints and bomb scares, where his family’s furniture shop got blown up on the regular—and aimed it at Australia. He never got there. The Iranian revolution closed his road east, and what was meant to be a four-month, 10,000-mile ride became a year and a half and more than 50,000 miles the “wrong” way: across the Sahara on a road bike never built for it, down through Africa...

“Don’t limit yourself with your past experiences. Every challenge is happening for you, not to you. Each experience carries a life lesson, once you’ve learned it, it’s served its purpose.”  — Joanna Zhang 

Episode Summary 

Joanna Zhang didn’t set out to become a consultant. As a self-employed financial planner drowning in back-office work, she cycled through virtual assistant after virtual assistant and couldn’t find a model that fit — so she built one. That became The Operations Genius and what’s now recognized as the world’s first Fractional VA Service: a whole team of specialists...

Pets don’t respond to titles; they respond to consistency. Turns out, people aren’t much different.” — Andy Neillie 

Episode Summary 

Dr. Andy Neillie has a doctorate, a bestselling book, and five million frequent-flyer miles spent coaching leaders across Fortune 500 firms — but he’ll be the first to tell you his real education came from a string of rescued dogs. In this conversation, Andy traces his leadership philosophy back to two early bad bosses (one with an anger problem, one with an ego problem) and forward to The Golden Principles, the book a boutique publi...

"Live in such a way that you would not be embarrassed to sell your parrot to the town gossip." 

 EPISODE SUMMARY 

Jim Sabellico built businesses at a level most people only read about — seven figures, eight figures, the cars, the house, the bank account. Then one night he came home late to find his son's birthday cake already half gone. His six-year-old wasn't devastated. He wasn't even surprised. That was just normal. And that quiet, ordinary moment cracked something open. 

In this conversation, Jim talks honestly about the gap between external succes...

“Do it right or don’t do it at all.” 

- Dr. Alphonso Buie

Episode Summary

Becoming an interior designer “wasn’t on my bingo card,” Alphonso Buie says. Yet here he is in his 40s, building a new career in Atlanta, running Place of Peace, and loving it.

The name came from his grandmother, who always told him that a home should be a place of peace—“and if it’s not, you need to figure it out.” For years, Alphonso didn’t fully understand what she meant. Then he created a home...

Guest Quote

“Some men see things as they are, and say why. I dream of things that never were, and say why not.”

(Originally attributed to George Bernard Shaw; frequently cited by Senator Robert Kennedy. Ken received this quote inscribed on a glass paperweight from Senator Edward Kennedy following his Senate testimony.)

Episode Summary

In 1970, Ken Kunken was a junior at Cornell University, studying engineering and playing lightweight football. A single tackle during a kickoff play broke his neck, leaving him paralyzed from the shoulders down. He spen...

“Sweat dries, blood clots, and broken bones heal. Suck it up.”  — Jay Setchell 

Episode Summary 

Jay Setchell grew up on a working farm where nothing came free — up before sunrise mixing powdered milk to feed calves, sorting eggs by lantern for the candling plant, learning that time is money and a job left half-done isn’t done. That foundation of urgency and responsibility is the thread through everything that followed: the Marine Corps, a string of businesses, and a life that kept testing him. 

And it tested him hard. Jay has died more than...

“I am FEARLESS, willing to take on any project and get it done. I’ve lived by this my whole life (92 years old), whether I knew it or not.” — Jim Paulk 

Episode Summary 

At 92, Jim Paulk has lived enough lives for several people — Naval Academy graduate, submarine engineering officer, 26-year Procter & Gamble executive, marine conservationist, and published author. In this Ship’s Log, he traces a path that started in Depression-era Brunswick, Georgia, where a teenager who loved hunting, fishing, and golf set his sights on Annapolis — and got in only after two years of trying...

“Every disappointment is for the better.”  — Stephanie Sylvestre 

Episode Summary 

Stephanie Sylvestre builds digital twins — AI versions of real people that can keep talking, teaching, and advising long after a conversation ends, and even after a life does. In this episode she walks Jeanne through what her company actually does: AI agents and digital twins grounded in a private “data vault” so they stay accurate and resist hallucination, all built to amplify people rather than replace them. 

From there the conversation ranges wide — preserving history “so your grandchildren's grandchildren can still interact with you,”...

"Be the change you seek in the world." - Gandhi (paraphrased, as submitted by guest) 

 Episode Summary 

Kerisma Vere didn't arrive at her work in holistic wellness coaching through a degree program or a tidy career pivot. She arrived through the long way — through a full nervous breakdown in 2018 that left her unable to remember who she was, unable to cook, unable to leave the house. She describes it like a brain injury: the person who had relied on her mind to get through everything suddenly had no access to any of it. 

What f...

"A man is what he makes of himself." — Peter Gunn 

Episode Summary 

What happens inside the mind of someone who builds entire mythological universes? In this Ship’s Log, Jeanne sits down with Peter Gunn — a U.S. Air Force veteran who served twenty years, a bodybuilder, the lead guitarist of The Angellics, and a poet on a mission to bring epic poetry back from the past. Peter reveals that he writes every story backwards, starting from the ending he’s already seen in his mind. 

The conversation dives into why the hero’s...

“I was taught at a very young age that I could cope with life and deal with almost anything – one step at a time.” – R. Timmerman

Episode Summary 

Rand Timmerman enlisted in the Marine Corps in 1966 after hearing a radio report in an upstate New York bar — and nine months later found himself in a rice paddy in Vietnam. Decades later, four years into recovery from alcoholism and carrying an artificial knee, he stood on top of Springer Mountain, Georgia in a blizzard at age 72, setting out to hike the Appalachian Trail with his 71-year...

"The most important promotion you will ever earn is the one no one can give you. It begins the moment you stop waiting to be chosen and start choosing your own growth." 

— John Reaves 

Episode Summary 

John Reaves spent decades doing everything the corporate world told him to do — building the resume, earning the credentials, staying late, and checking every box. And still, something was missing. In this episode of Project Candor, John shares the moment he realized he had outsourced his own definition of progress — and what happened when he took it b...

"Uncertainty and chaos aren't something to avoid — It's where freedom lives, and possibilities multiply." 

— Regina Huber 

Episode Summary 

Regina Huber has lived and worked across five continents — Germany, Spain, Brazil, Argentina, the US, and France — picking up languages, partner dances, and hard-won leadership lessons along the way. In this episode, she sits down with Jeanne Andersen to talk about what it really means to make a bold move, why "reinventing yourself" is a myth, and why your next chapter is already inside you. 

 Regina talks about leaving a BCG career to ope...

"They may not recognize your face. They may not know your name — depending on the day. But they will remember for a long time how you made them feel." — Lisa Skinner 

Episode Summary 

What does it actually mean when a doctor says 'Alzheimer's'? Lisa Skinner has spent 50 years answering that question — first as a teenage granddaughter watching her grandmother describe birds living in her mattress, and later as one of the world's leading dementia behavioral specialists. In this episode, she cuts through five decades of myth and fear with the clarity that only comes fr...

"The biggest lie in business is that leaders are born that way."
 - Jim Carlough

Episode Summary

What makes someone a leader? According to Jim Carlough, it isn't talent, title, or personality. It's a skill that must be developed over time. In this candid conversation, Jim reflects on the mistakes that shaped him early in his career and the lessons that eventually led him to identify six principles that have guided his leadership approach for decades.

As the discussion unfolds, Jeanne and Jim explore what integrity, empathy, and compassion look l...

Education is valuable, but execution is priceless.” - Danny Brassell

EPISODE SUMMARY 

 Danny Brassell has delivered more than 3,500 keynotes across four continents, but he didn't start on a stage. He started in the classroom — teaching inner-city kids to love reading in South Central Los Angeles. In this episode of Ship's Log, Danny and Jeanne trace the unlikely journey from Capitol Hill journalist to kindergarten teacher to one of the most in-demand speaking coaches in the world. 

 Along the way, Danny shares the five lessons he took from a catastrophic real estate loss, wh...

"Accounting is the heartbeat of business and the key to personal finance success."  — Albert Butler 

Episode Summary 

Albert Butler is a CPA, MBA, and Resident Partner-in-Charge of a national accounting firm — but the conversation in Ship's Log #24 isn't really about accounting. It's about what happens when you treat your own life like a balance sheet. Albert walks Jeanne through the frameworks he's lived by for 25 years — Plan, Act, Review and Train, Practice, Work — and lands on a deceptively simple idea: you have to scale yourself before you can scale anything else. 

From there t...

Episode Summary 

In this episode of Project Candor, host Jeanne welcomes Mickey Fitch-Collins, PhD — leadership facilitator, speaker, and host of The Learnit Lounge — for a candid conversation about what it takes to lead with both joy and depth. Mickey's story is anything but linear: she was a professional bass fisherman at 14, a college student leader when 9/11 happened, and someone who turned getting fired into a professional turning point. 

 Mickey and Jeanne dive into the hidden exhaustion of middle managers, the trap of "productivity theater" and the Busy Olympics, and what it really means to buil...

"It is a true honor and gift to be able to assist those people at that moment, at that very time. I believe in divine timing... that always will stay with me - knowing how important it is to always stay in gratitude whenever a person is vulnerable with you, because they don't have to be." 

Episode Summary 

Kameelah Howard has spent her entire adult life in service to others - as a Child Protective Specialist on the front lines of Brooklyn, as an international flight attendant navigating chaos at 35,000 feet, and as a...

“Business is worth nothing because I literally have to find another you to be able to do this business. You who wants to buy this to do it? And that was such a massive wake-up call for me.”

Episode Summary 

Louis Swart went to sell his plumbing business and got a wake-up call he’s never forgotten. The broker told him straight: the business was worth nothing. Because everything ran through Louis. If you want to buy it, you have to find another Louis first — and good luck with that. That moment cracked open a li...

Guest Quote

"Have undying faith at all cause and at every junction of your life. Through all hardships are many lessons to learn from."

- Racquel Foster

Episode Summary
Racquel Foster has always moved to her own rhythm. Born in Jamaica and raised on music, she was dancing at four years old and making up songs before she could read. That love of movement and voice grew into a life that spans musical theater, choreography, cabaret performance, fitness training, and yoga - each thread woven into a...

“Whatever the mind of man can conceive, and bring himself to believe, he can achieve.” - Napoleon Hill

Episode Summary:
In this episode of Project Candor, Jeanne Andersen sits down with Joel Salomon, a former hedge fund manager turned prosperity coach known as the “Money Doctor.” Joel shares his journey from managing hundreds of millions of dollars on Wall Street to helping people transform their relationship with money through mindset and belief.

He explains how he noticed a direct link between his emotional state and his financial performance. Inspired by books like Think an...

Guest Quote

"Instinctual thinking is great when you're on a savanna running from a lion. It's not so great in the 21st century."

— Nick Jain 

Episode Summary

Nick Jain came to this conversation carrying credentials that would make most people nervous — Harvard MBA, top of his class, a decade in private equity, three company turnarounds including one he scaled past $100 million. But what comes through immediately is that the math never stays abstract with Nick. It shows up everywhere: in how he proposed to his wife, in how h...

“If you don’t stay relevant, you will become irrelevant.” - Freda Brazle

Episode Summary:
In this episode of Project Candor, Jeanne Andersen sits with Dr. Freda Brazle, a global leadership strategist and transformation coach, to explore what truly drives effective leadership. With over 30 years of experience across corporate and nonprofit spaces, Freda shares why mindset, not just strategy, is the key to performance, culture, and long-term impact.

She highlights the importance of empowering people, building strong relationships, and leading with self-awareness, especially in today’s fast-changing and demanding environment. From addressing disengag...