Abstract Essay

George Little

I design, build, and tinker. Always for fun, sometimes for money.

I'm George, a designer, tech entrepreneur, and outdoor enthusiast! I have an equal love for tinkering with AI as I do hiking with my dogs.

Here's a little backstory on who I am and what makes me tick...

Originally from the Philly area, I studied architecture at Syracuse and thinking I was going to be a black turtleneck wearing new york architect, moved to Brooklyn to work for one of the big name firms.

After a few years, I realized this wasn't for me. It dawned on me that the part of my job I liked the most I was doing the least of: graphic design & technology. I found I was much better at pitching building designs, marketing the company's brand, and tinkering with technology to improve our efficiencies and workflows.

So I pivoted my career to "graphic design" which lead me to an AI company where I learned about startups, remote-work, SaaS marketing, and building a business that serves the tech community.

Years later, I now run my own remote-only consultancy that aims to work with startups and venture-backed companies to build/improve their brands and websites.

I spend my workdays balanced between client work, marketing my own business, and tinkering on projects I find interesting... like VetResumes.com, Archive51.art, Stacked.camp, to name a few. More recently I've been trying to slash my AI company subscriptions by building my own system on the back of a bunch of used mac minis.

Outside of work, I'm a big nature lover. I've hiked, camped, kayaked, trailered, overlanded, and backpacked all over this country (and a splash of Canada). My wife and I recently moved our family to Oregon to purse a long-time dream of running a PNW flower farm (which i will, of course, find a reason to apply technology).

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Kelly Gagalis

Online Dating Safety Expert and Dating Coach

I have been a dating coach for over 15 years. A few years ago I realised that my clients don't have the same horror stories as other people I talk to do because I bake safety into their dating training.

A year ago in the same 24 hour period I heard from two friends that their children had just experienced horrific sexual assault... gang rape on a young gay man naively picking up someone for a 1st date on tinder and the rape of my friend's daughter hosting a dinner on a second date while my friend was in the house.

In both of these instances when I heard the circumstances I KNEW that these horrible assaults could have been prevented if these young people had only had the skills and tools I teach to date safely online.

From there I created Swipe Safely, the first course aimed at increasing internet dating safety.

It is now my mission to make people safer dating online, shifting them from prey behavior to confident deterrance.

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Mark Astor

Attorney Saving Families at the Intersection of Law, Mental Health & Addiction

I didn't set out to build a law firm. I set out to save families.

Early in my career, I was a prosecutor inside the criminal justice system. I saw firsthand what happens when addiction and untreated mental illness collide with law enforcement: people don't get better — they get processed, warehoused, and traumatized. Families are left powerless, confused, and grieving someone who is still alive.

Years later, after leaving government service, I found myself sitting across from parents, spouses, and siblings who all said the same thing:

"We don't know what to do anymore."

Their loved one wasn't asking for help. Treatment had failed. The system had failed. And "waiting" felt like a death sentence.

So I co-founded a law firm with a singular mission: to give families lawful, compassionate tools to intervene when a loved one's mind has been hijacked by addiction or severe mental illness.

Since then, I've helped thousands of families navigate crises involving substance use, psychiatric instability, medical complexity, and resistance to care — using legal frameworks most people don't even know exist. I've watched families move from chaos and despair to clarity and action. And I've seen lives saved not by handcuffs or hope alone, but by informed intervention.

What makes my voice different is this:

I live at the intersection of law, mental health, addiction, and family dynamics — and I'm not speaking in theory. I'm speaking from the trenches.

On podcasts, I don't offer platitudes. I explain:

Why "waiting until they're ready" can be deadly

Why the system often reacts after irreversible harm

Why families are not "controlling" — they are responding to cognitive impairment

And why legal intervention, when done correctly, can be an act of love, not punishment

Hosts book me because I bring clarity to uncomfortable conversations, challenge popular myths around addiction and recovery, and give audiences something rare: a framework for action when compassion alone isn't enough.

If your show tackles mental health, addiction, family trauma, personal growth, leadership, or hard truths — I won't just fill time.

I'll give your audience something they'll remember, wrestle with, and share.

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Ryan Matthews

2x TEDx Speaker | Former Army Combat K9 Handler | Trauma-to-Transformation Leadership Expert

I'm Ryan Matthews — former Army combat K9 handler, 2x TEDx speaker, published author, and founder of World of Dog Training. By age 30, I had survived combat PTSD, cancer, a serious car crash, and a heart attack. Those experiences forced me to rebuild from the inside out.

Today, I help people and leaders turn trauma into transformation using practical frameworks rooted in resilience, communication, and relationship leadership — lessons drawn from real life, elite K9 work, and human-animal behavior. I've worked with 6,000+ dogs and their owners, celebrity clients, and high performers who needed calm, clarity, and control under pressure.

I'm not here to offer motivation fluff. I bring honest stories, tactical tools, and immediately usable strategies your audience can apply to lead themselves, their relationships, and their teams more effectively.

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Candi Keffeler

Author of Never Too Far Gone | Helping Women Rise from Survival to Hope

'm Candi Keffeler, author of Never Too Far Gone, and I share my story to help women who are exhausted from surviving remember that they're not broken — they're becoming.

I've lived through abuse, medical trauma, overwhelming debt, and starting over from rock bottom. For years I looked strong on the outside while quietly falling apart inside. Writing Never Too Far Gone was part of my healing — and now I use my story to help other women, especially in midlife, find hope, resilience, and the courage to begin again.

On your podcast, I love having real, honest conversations about survival burnout, rebuilding after trauma, and what it actually looks like to start over when life doesn't go as planned. My heart is for women who feel stuck, overwhelmed, or "too far gone," and I help them see that their next chapter is still possible.

Listeners walk away feeling seen, understood, and encouraged with practical hope they can carry into their own healing journey.

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Margo Mcclimans

Midwest-born, Zurich-based; second-time founder of a 20+ year coaching firm (Coaching Without Borders); lived in 6 countries, speak 4 languages, helping global executives and teams lead with courage.

Margo McClimans is the founder of Coaching Without Borders (CWoB), a Zurich-based leadership coaching and team development company. For 20+ years, she has helped leaders and teams build courage and confidence. She and her team work with c-suite and managing directors and global leadership teams from Fortune 500 companies and high-growth start-ups. She has lived in 6 countries on 3 continents and speaks 4 languages. Born in the midwest, she now lives in Switzerland with her family of 6.

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Tom Anderson

Tom Anderson — Author, God-pursuer, collector of friends. Helping people rediscover who they are through grace, belonging, and a relational view of God.

I'm Tom Anderson, author of "From Sinnership to Sonship: The Story of Becoming", and my message was born out of a long, imperfect, grace-filled journey of marriage, fear, healing, and discovering who we truly are in God.

My wife Nancy and I married young — and we were a mess. I was afraid of life. I lived inside a very small comfort zone, and when my world felt threatened, I would literally curl into the fetal position. Nancy struggled with clinical depression and felt trapped in a marriage that wasn't giving either of us the life we hoped for.

Early in our marriage, we committed ourselves to Jesus because we knew what we were doing wasn't working. For eight years, we hung on by our fingernails, trying to survive while quietly wondering if real change was even possible.Then one day, as we prayed together, a Scripture from Isaiah came forcefully to us:

"Consider not the former things… Behold, I am doing a new thing."

We sensed God was not just offering comfort — He was making a promise. And over the decades, we have watched Him faithfully "perform that word" in our lives.

Like Abraham, our journey has been a slow process, going through predictable stages, from brokenness to wholeness, from striving to belonging, from not being enough to being sufficient. What started as a survival mentality gradually became growing relationship. What started as religion gradually became sonship, and we rest in the place of "It is finished."

More than fifty years later, Nancy and I are still married, still growing, and — even in this past year — have entered a deeper level of relational ease and shared pursuit of what God has called us to: ministering the grace of God. We're the grateful parents of a son and daughter, with spouses, who are walking with the Lord, and grandparents to six grandchildren.

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Yasmin Chebbi

Biological and holistic dentist

Dr. Yasmin Chebbi, DMD is an accredited dentist and graduate of Harvard School of Dental Medicine. Her practice incorporates whole body health, prevention, and conservative dentistry. Dr. Chebbi is the founder of The Flossery dental office in Boston, Massachusetts. She also practices dentistry with a focus on sleep apnea in Abu Dhabi, UAE. Dr. Chebbi is also the author of Sleep, Eat, Breathe Oral Health: Why your mouth matters available on Amazon.

Dr. Yasmin Chebbi, DMD is an accredited dentist and graduate of Harvard School of Dental Medicine. Her practice incorporates whole body health, prevention, and conservative dentistry. Dr. Chebbi is the founder of The Flossery dental office in Boston, Massachusetts. She also practices dentistry with a focus on sleep apnea in Abu Dhabi, UAE. Dr. Chebbi is also the author of Sleep, Eat, Breathe Oral Health: Why your mouth matters available on Amazon.

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Shermain Melton

Accomplished, Black, Gay, Christian, and Done Hiding. Author of The Loneliness of the Accomplished Black Man.

Shermain Melton is a truth teller. He is also Black, accomplished, gay, and Christian. For a long time, he thought God had played a trick on him by giving him a big heart to love people while subjecting him to rejection from the church for living his truth of being gay. He has lost friends and business for owning who he is. Shermain rose from a childhood of poverty, gunshots, and drug dealers to become a self-made and debt-free millionaire. He carries survivor guilt because not all his friends made it out alive. At age twenty, he became the general manager of an underperforming Pizza Hut and led his team of forty to generate over one million dollars in revenue. While his peers were learning business theory, he was running a real business. He eventually walked away from a lucrative technology career as a senior network engineer at American Express. He spent years optimizing broken networks but realized the most critical network that needed fixing was the connection between leaders and their authentic selves. We are currently battling a loneliness epidemic that is killing accomplished Black men in silence. Shermain is on a mission to end this isolation by demanding deep connection, unapologetic belonging, and raw courage. He is the author of The Loneliness of the Accomplished Black Man and he is here to challenge you to stop playing small. Please welcome Shermain Melton.

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Alexia Hoffman

Success you can live with! 60 hours/week to 10 hours with 4 kids in 2.5 years while maintaining income and starting new businesses! Hire & onboard a VA in less than 10 hours

Alexia Hoffman had four daughters in 30 months, a rental portfolio of over 80 doors, a coffee shop, and a real estate business she'd built from the ground up since she was 19 years old.

And she was doing almost all of it herself.

At her peak she was working 60-hour weeks — not because she didn't know better, but because she hadn't yet built the system to get out. She was the bottleneck in her own business, and she knew it.

So she built a framework. A repeatable, no-fluff process to hire and fully onboard a VA in under 10 hours — and she used it to get her weeks down to 10 hours without losing income, clients, or control.

Eight months after having her fourth baby, she ran her first half marathon. Nine months postpartum, she completed her first triathlon. That's what the time back actually meant.

Alexia is a TEDx speaker, 2024 Entrepreneur of the Year, and the creator of the Delegation Clarity Framework. She's not teaching theory — she's teaching exactly what she did, in the season of life your listeners are probably in right now.

If your audience is full of high-achieving women who are building something real but running out of runway to do it alone, Alexia is the guest that moves them from stuck to actually doing it.

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