Big Fish in the Middle Kingdom

This week’s guest is stage and screen actor Gregory Joseph Allen. Greg brought a lifetime’s worth of acting training and experience with him when he moved here some years ago from California, and in addition to his own work he now uses his skills and background to teach young actors in Beijing. Good times.

“I used to introduce myself in the wrong way, and I used to talk about the mechanics, because I felt like that’s what people needed to know, and that that’d make me appear to be an expert. But I don’t need to know how my 4G works for me to buy a smartphone. I want to know: what are the results I get? And so I realized by my mistakes, I need to show the audience in my message. So my message went from WHAT I do, to WHY I do it.” - Martin Barnes

This week’s episode features Jesse Weiner. Jesse is an entertainment lawyer with 10 years experience living and working in China. And although he is based back in Los Angeles now, Jesse expects to spend much more time coming back to China now that the entertainment business here is reaching a new stage of maturation.

This week's guest is Augusta Xu-Holland. Augusta is from New Zealand, and like many foreigners before her, she found herself presented with opportunities to appear in film and television. Augusta found success attaining larger and larger roles fairly early into her career here, and she is now a very busy professional actress. She also continues her work in the energy field and can increasingly use her growing profile in the arts to serve as an ambassador for her scientific interests.

This week’s guest is Jeff Powell: owner and chef of Frost here in Beijing, but that only scratches the surface of his impressive career. In the interview, he’s incredibly open about the challenges and the downsides of his time here as well as generous with sharing valuable business information that will be applicable to almost anyone trying to build or launch an endeavor of their own here, too, so there’s lots to enjoy and learn from.

Hi everyone! This weeks’s FULL regular episode will be online late tonight as I type this, but first, I wanted to send a quick message of THANKS to everyone for listening to the show. This is a super short post, also available in video on YouTube, of me saying basically that, just in more detail.

This week’s episode features Troy Sandford plus Myra Mala and Mayela Magrou, who are core members of Troy's Team. Troy's Team is a martial arts and stunts team here in Beijing who also offer training in what they practice. Troy and his team members have distinguished themselves in many ways with their contributions to action filmmaking in China, and their work is really fantastic.

Today’s show has a special twist. Usually our guests have anywhere between 5 and 30 years of China experience under their belts, and those conversations yield information and insights that you can only get with a lot of time spent on the ground. But my guest this week is unique in many ways, and only one of them is that she just got home from her very FIRST China trip...

Rob Cain has worked for more than 25 years in Hollywood and the global entertainment industry. He is one of the original “old China hands” in the entertainment business, and his insights into the Hollywood-China experiment are as good as they get. There is loads of both executive-level thinking and on the ground, practical advice in this episode, so I really encourage anyone who is either working in the entertainment business or who aspires to to check this one out.

“I’m a Swiss mountain girl coming from a village with 300 people. I arrived in China in 2008 with two suitcases full of wine samples and a will to rock the dragon.” - Claudia Masueger