After the Pitch with Joanna Trojak

Successful men are often told to keep achieving, stay composed, and push through - but what happens when the version of success that got them here no longer feels like enough?Susan Popoola reveals why so many men hit a quiet breaking point: the career, status, and outward performance are all there, yet fulfillment, identity, and peace still feel out of reach. If you care about men’s wellbeing, leadership culture, or the hidden cost of “having it all together,” this conversation will shift how you think about success.Susan Popoola is the founder of Mosaic Fusions and Mosaic Harmony, an author, facilitator, and leadership practitioner who explores human value, identity, purpose, and meaningful work. Her work now focuses on the lived experience of men in today’s world, from pressure and loneliness to transition, belonging, and fulfilment.You'll discover:

• Why men are often trained to perform strength instead of express vulnerability
• How workplace and social expectations keep many men trapped in an exhausting image
• The connection between bottled-up emotion, loneliness, anger, addiction, and breakdown
• Why a safe space, whether with friends, a therapist, or a support group, can change everything
• How leadership cultures that reward only hard-edged performance can damage people and results

Susan also explains why this issue is bigger than men alone. When men are allowed to be honest, human, and supported, relationships improve, workplaces become healthier, and everyone benefits. She and Joanna also unpack the changing roles of men and women at home and at work, and why true progress depends on moving beyond stereotypes toward partnership.This is a thoughtful, challenging, and deeply human conversation about what men carry, what they hide, and what becomes possible when they no longer have to perform. Essential listening if you want a better understanding of men, modern identity, and the future of healthy leadership.

Perfect isn’t the goal—it’s the trap. Melinda Jacobs explores why the human qualities that matter most are often the first ones product teams, AI systems, and startup culture try to optimize away.If you’re building products, leading teams, or thinking about how to stay meaningfully human in an AI-shaped world, this conversation offers a fresh perspective on optimization, play, and accountability. Melinda, a product and operations leader, founder, and advisor with more than 15 years of experience helping early-stage companies, makes the case for designing systems around human agency—not just speed and efficiency.You’ll hear why play is more than a nice-to-have: it helps people learn belonging, social confidence, and judgment. Melinda shares how games helped her navigate complex systems and practice real-world decisions in a safe space—and why those same principles can make products more ethical and effective.The conversation also explores:

• Why startups can get stuck in a “build factory” mindset and confuse outputs with outcomes
• How gamification can backfire when it captures attention without creating value
• Why AI should support human thinking rather than replace it
• What can go wrong when accountability for a system is unclear
• How curiosity, philosophy, and imperfection can lead to better decisions and design

From loneliness in a hyper-connected world to Shakespeare, self-driving cars, and unexpected product use cases, this episode returns to one big question:

A thoughtful listen for anyone interested in AI, product design, startup strategy, or what helps people thrive in a world that keeps trying to flatten them.

What if the thing you spent your whole life trying to hide was the exact thing that finally made people pay attention? Joanna Trojak reveals how years of masking, rejection, and being labeled the weird one led to a shocking shift in status, visibility, and self-trust.After surviving a co-founder breakup, reclaiming her startup, a cardiology ward stay, and a complete identity reset, Joanna is closing one company to build something truer. She also shares what changed when she stopped pitching herself to be accepted and started telling the truth out loud - on the mic, in her work, and in the way she shows up now.You'll hear Joanna unpack:

• why being outside the room gave her the clearest view of how status actually works
• how masking becomes a full-time translation job between who you are and what other people can receive
• what a thousand real listeners means when you're used to expecting the door to be closed
• why the "weirdo," "UFO," and "alien" labels became part of her strategy instead of the end of the story
• how the audience changes when you stop performing for everyone and start resonating with the right people

This episode cuts straight into the emotional cost of trying to belong on someone else's terms, and the freedom that comes from building from the edge instead of chasing the center. It is a sharp, vulnerable reflection on identity, belonging, and the strange power of finally being seen without editing yourself down.If you've ever felt too much, too strange, or too late to the room, this one will land hard. Essential listening for founders, creatives, late bloomers, and anyone who suspects the thing they were pitching for may already be theirs.

What if the problem isn’t that you aren’t paying attention to your feelings—but that there’s too much happening at once to name any one thing?In this episode, Joanna explores alexithymia, the communication gap many autistic people navigate, and why AI has become a meaningful accessibility tool in her life. From drafting difficult messages to untangling overthinking and finding language for emotions, she makes the case that support isn’t the same as outsourcing yourself.It’s a personal reflection on connection, accommodation, and building the tools you wish you’d had all along.

In this episode, Joanna talks to Jürgen Allen, a filmmaker and creative director with sixteen years behind the camera on films, music videos, and commercials, now building Weird Protocol and Weird Cafe — an attempt at a different kind of infrastructure for creative work. Jürgen traces his path back to a childhood 16mm projector on his ninth birthday, through music videos in the golden MTV era, and into the commercial world where budgets are enormous, egos run the room, and the work itself rarely feels alive.

The conversation centers on what Jürgen calls the extractive economy of creative work: musicians who performed for royalty and still can't pay rent, actors a single role away from struggling, and the vast gap between the talent that exists in the world and the tiny fraction of it that ever gets access to a stage. He describes canceling a major music video shoot after watching a BBC documentary reframe the entire concept as exploitative, and what that taught him about the responsibility of anyone directing culture rather than just representing it.

From there, Jürgen lays out what Weird Cafe is actually building: a blockchain-based platform where creators keep ownership of their work and get paid instantly, every time it's played, with no labels, agents, or middlemen in between. He's blunt about where AI fits into this — a tool that removes cost and friction, not a replacement for human intent — and pushes back hard on the idea that access, not talent, has always been the real bottleneck in who gets to make culture. The conversation closes on what he hopes people recognize about the world he was trying to build: not a director pointing at what to do, but a conductor pointing toward where to go.

Themes covered: the economics of creative work, ownership and blockchain for artists, access versus talent, AI as a tool rather than a replacement, ego and collaboration on set, building alternative creative ecosystems.

In this episode, Joanna talks to Shaz Bhola, a strategy director and human-centered researcher whose work spans adolescent and caregiver research in Turkey, trauma-informed work in West Africa, and projects on child protection, vaccine hesitancy, and emotional support. Shaz explains why direct questions so often fail — asking someone "have you experienced abuse?" or "do you believe in vaccines?" invites judgment and shuts a conversation down before it starts — and how starting broad, with questions like "who do you trust?" or "how do you take care of your health?", builds the trust that eventually lets something true surface on its own.

They dig into a striking example: a weighted-swaddle company that thought it was solving a sleep problem for new mothers, until research revealed the real driver was bonding and skin-to-skin contact, not exhaustion. Shaz also walks through work with four-to-six-year-olds in child protection research, how she recognizes when a research process has quietly become extractive even with full consent, and language pitfalls like Turkish having no neutral word for "feedback," which forced an entire program to be rebuilt around different words.

I connect several of Shaz's points back to my own founder experience, including running interview-based research for my products and the limits of getting honest feedback across cultures. The conversation closes on where AI genuinely helps research (summarizing, transcription, pulling themes) versus where it can't substitute for human judgment and pivoting in the room, and on the single question Shaz thinks every founder and designer should start with: not what, but why.

Themes covered: human-centered and trauma-informed research, avoiding extractive research practices, designing for vulnerable and neurodivergent communities, the gap between stated and lived problems, trust-building across cultures, AI's limits in qualitative research.

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.