In this episode, Joanna traces a pattern through a lifetime of special interests she never thought to connect: Shakespeare's Rosalind, more herself in disguise as Ganymede than as herself. Gombrowicz's argument that the masks others press onto us become the self. Sherlock Holmes, who "sees but does not observe" the way everyone else does, and processes the world without the social editing that makes his conclusions land as rudeness. Leonardo da Vinci, obsessed with what's underneath the surface, who wrote his real thoughts in mirror script and painted the world's most famous unreadable face.

She walks through Harry Potter's letter — there's a name for what you are — and how her own diagnosis, arriving at 33 instead of 11, told her the same thing: the strangeness was always information, never the problem. She revisits Audrey Hepburn's constructed elegance built over wartime famine and deep anxiety, and Jane Austen writing in secret, hiding the manuscript whenever someone entered the room, performing invisibility to protect the actual work.

Joanna connects this directly to her own path — turning down a Shakespeare PhD, an early obsession with architecture's gap between facade and interior now showing up in the apps she builds for neurodivergent nervous systems — and lands on a reframe of what special interests actually are: not an escape from connection, but the most direct self-description a person has. The problem was never the interest. It was that most people never knew they were being shown something.

Themes covered: special interests as self-knowledge, autism and masking, late diagnosis, literary and historical figures read through a neurodivergent lens, the gap between public performance and private self.

In this episode, Joanna opens with a story: someone once asked if she was hot right now. She said no, there's a window open. It was the correct answer to the question they asked, and completely the wrong answer to the question they meant. From there, she walks through a lifetime of missing double meanings — and, just as often, accidentally producing her own. A man tasting her name in his mouth on a call. An Uber driver in Portugal told to "just go towards the light." Her own mother, in a hospital corridor, offered a line about a "lift to heaven" instead of a simple yes to a wheelchair ride.

Joanna unpacks why flirting runs almost entirely on deniability — hints, subtext, plausible innocent readings — and why that entire channel is one she's never had reliable access to. She describes what flirting actually looks like for her instead: sharing something real, fast and directly, and finding out immediately whether someone can handle the whole of her, rather than performing indirection and hoping it lands.

The episode also moves into a harder moment: coming out to her parents as autistic the night before a hospital stay, and her mother's response — confusion, comparison to a difficult grandmother, an eventual, partial acknowledgment that something true had just happened. Joanna connects the two threads — the flirting she can't catch and the diagnosis her mother can't quite receive — as the same shape of double meaning, running in both directions, her whole life.

She closes without treating any of it as a problem to fix: comfortable in her own solitude, still answering questions about temperature with facts about windows, waiting for someone who'll find directness restful instead of terrifying.

Themes covered: autism and missed social subtext, flirting and deniability, late autism diagnosis and disclosure to family, masking and directness, solitude as a chosen state rather than a deficit.

In this episode, Joanna talks to Adrien Sala, founder of WikiSleep, about what happens when standard sleep advice — clear your mind, do a body scan, breathe — simply doesn't work for a brain that won't stop running. Adrien built WikiSleep out of his own insomnia during a period of overlapping crises: a breakup, a job change, a project ending badly. What worked for him wasn't meditation apps or melatonin, but curious, story-driven narration — literally, cleaned-up Wikipedia pages read over meditation music — engaging enough to pull his mind off a spiraling thought, but calm enough to let his body fall asleep anyway.

The two talk through why sleep tools built for an "ideal user" so often fail real ones: the difference between a podcast built for curiosity and one engineered for sleep (volume spikes and ad breaks included), why cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia can be hard to access in your most anxious moments, and why audiobooks with full sound design and voice acting can backfire at bedtime. Joanna brings in her own experience — a recent hospital stay, hypersensitive hearing, needing a very specific spot in her bed — and the two dig into why one-size-fits-all sleep advice tends to ignore both sensory sensitivity and neurodivergence altogether.

Adrien also talks candidly about the founder side of building WikiSleep: the gap between organic podcast growth and paid app growth, eleven quiet months before real traction, and why sticking with something you know works matters more than chasing fast results. They close on a genuinely useful reframe — stop trying to fall asleep, try to stay awake instead — and a broader conversation about sleep as the foundation under every other pillar of health.

Themes covered: cognitive diversion and sleep, building a product to solve your own problem, sensory sensitivity and neurodivergent sleep needs, founder patience and slow growth, the limits of meditation-app sleep advice, sleep as a health barometer.

In this episode, Joanna sits down with Joanna Montgomery, founder of Little Riot and creator of Pillow Talk — a device born as a university project that lets you hear a loved one's heartbeat through your pillow, wherever they are. What started as an exploration of how technology could feel more like real human presence than a scheduled Skype call went viral overnight and, almost accidentally, became a company.

The two Joannas talk about what it actually took to move from a viral 60-second video to a real consumer product; how Pillow Talk's use cases expanded far beyond long-distance couples into parents saying goodnight to kids from a work trip, elderly people in care homes, and hospitals and palliative care wards; and why ordinary calls and messages so often fail people in the moments they need connection most. Joanna Trojak shares her own recent experience in intensive care, including a fellow patient stimming through hospital anxiety by singing psalms all day, and the two connect it back to how physical, embodied our need for closeness really is.

The conversation also goes into some of the more unexpected and quietly devastating ways people have used the product — including a heart transplant recipient who let a donor's mother hear her son's heartbeat again, and a bride who "walked down the aisle" with her late father's heart. They close on where AI and technology should draw a hard line around real intimacy, the specific loneliness of the early founder years, and Montgomery's advice for anyone sitting on an idea that feels too small or too strange to build.

Themes covered: designing technology for human connection, going from university project to company, loneliness in hospital and care settings, the limits of video calls and AI intimacy, the early loneliness of founder life, permission to build "small" meaningful things.

In this episode, Joanna traces three men who moved through her founder life performing the same role: the warm, generous connector who disappears the moment generosity requires an actual Tuesday afternoon. A former athlete turned tech influencer who confesses "I'm pretty lonely, guy" mid-consulting-call, then ghosts after two sessions. A LinkedIn podcaster who praises her "personal brand" and vanishes for a year, resurfacing with "how's the podcast going?" the day she's sitting in a hospital bed. A retired Wall Street man who promises introductions, vetted contacts, and tells her "you have so much light" — then never replies to the pitch deck he asked to see.

Joanna breaks down the pattern common to all three: warmth arrives first and costs nothing, a promise follows and costs nothing, and then reality — an actual file, an actual ask — breaks the circuit every time. From there she turns to Andy Warhol, and Robert Greene's framing of him as a "cold coquette," to think through what it means to stop chasing recognition and instead become a mirror people project onto — and why that kind of magnetism, however enviable from outside, is its own particular loneliness. Warhol built a factory as a refuge for misfits and still went home to write "I just have to feel something."

The episode lands on a distinction Joanna's made peace with: some people can only handle the performance of you. That's not a verdict on your worth — it's information about how far they still have to go. She's done performing for people who can't meet her as a person instead of a reflection.

Themes covered: performative warmth vs. follow-through, being autistic and reading (or over-reading) social signals, Andy Warhol and the psychology of detachment, jealousy and comparison in founder culture, choosing realness over being useful to someone else's self-image.

In this solo episode, Joanna walks through three "proposals" she received from people who had already cast her in a story before she ever agreed to a role — a LinkedIn stranger looking for a technical co-founder, growth specialist, and fundraiser all in one; a classmate promising to "make a difference" in an industry she never named; and a manifestation coach who diagnosed her demons as a backpack blocking the summit of Everest. All three, Joanna argues, were selling the same thing: a performance dressed up as an opportunity.

From there she traces the pattern back further — to a women's accelerator in Porto she talked her way into with a fluent, empty application; to being crowned a "samurai of business" at a gala where nobody asked what her product actually did; to €250,000 in EU grant funding that validated her paperwork, not her business; and to an ex co-founder who promised a network of contacts, including a introduction to a well-known Polish NGO founder, that never materialized.

Joanna gets specific about the founder-world mythology of "delusion as prerequisite" — the belief that you have to dream bigger, manifest harder, project certainty — and where that shades into something else for her personally: a lifetime of practiced social masking that made her very good at performing conviction, and very good at getting rewarded for the performance instead of the substance underneath it.

The episode lands on a working test she's since adopted: not whether someone believes, but whether they deliver. Promises cost nothing. Watch what happens when the promise meets reality — and act on what you see the first time, not the fifth.

Themes covered: founder delusion vs. substance, co-founder red flags, accelerators and grant culture, masking and performance, learning to trust pattern-recognition over hope.

In this episode, Joanna sits down with David Ault — voice actor, science communicator, and self-described lifelong lover of numbers and stars — to explore what happens when a childhood fascination becomes a lifelong compass. David traces his path from mental arithmetic and backyard stargazing through an astrophysics degree, a stint teaching in university labs, and eventually into voice acting and science storytelling — including six months performing Shakespeare in India.

Together, David and Joanna dig into why special interests matter so much, especially for neurodivergent people: how they shape identity, how they can feel safer and deeper than small talk, and how society tends to celebrate curiosity in children while stigmatizing it in teenagers, only to reward it again in adulthood. They talk about what supportive (and unsupportive) parenting and teaching looks like, why children ask better questions than adults, and how storytelling can make even the most complex ideas — physics, engineering, the universe itself — feel like something you can hold onto.

The conversation closes with David's advice to anyone who's been told their interests are "too much": keep going. What the world calls strange is usually just where the good stuff lives.

Themes covered: special interests & neurodivergent identity, masking, science communication, imagination, parenting and teaching curious kids, friendship and belonging beyond small talk.

www.davidault.co.uk

linktr.ee/thedavidault.

Kate Assaraf built Dip, a seven-figure haircare company, without pitching to Amazon, without VC money, without paid influencers — and she intentionally sends customers away from her own website to small, women-owned refill shops, even when it costs her sales.

In my very first interview for After the Pitch, Kate and I talk about why VCs will never love a product designed to make people buy less, what it took to build a company between 4 a.m. and school drop-off during COVID, and why she created exclusive scents that only one small-town store in the world can sell. We also get into fragrance-free products as a love letter to people going through chemo, IVF, and sensory overwhelm — and what we lose when the algorithm replaces the shopkeeper who knows your name.

If you've spent years pitching gatekeepers (I have), this conversation is a quiet argument that there was another door the whole time.

https://dipalready.com/

IG: @dipalready

Tiktok: @dipalready

A child gets a cello instead of a diagnosis, learns to perform "normal," and spends two decades getting good at it — through a needy friend, a co-founder who ran textbook love-bombing and gaslighting, and a body that eventually refused to keep up the act with headaches, vomiting, and asthma it couldn't explain. This episode traces one founder's path from masking to an autism diagnosis to a redefinition of loneliness itself: not a lack of people, but a lack of belonging — the ability to be fully yourself even when no one's watching. Drawing on customer interviews, polyvagal theory, and a hundred-year-old Jung quote that beat every modern theory to the punch, it argues the cure for loneliness was never "go outside and make friends."

A new season, a new name, and a completely different reason to record. Joanna Trojak — autistic founder, hospital patient, serial restarter — explains why she quit scripting herself into someone acceptable and what it costs to spend years pitching your way into rooms that were never yours.