Live Like a Leader with John Bates

Today, I sit down with Tracey Ivanyshyn, a serial entrepreneur, culture builder, corporate grief educator, death doula, and co-founder of Kindness at Work. After more than 25 years leading purpose-driven businesses and a team of over 100 people, Tracey has turned her attention to helping organizations build trust, belonging, and the capacity to meet loss with greater humanity.

Tracey and I met on Necker Island, where a remarkable group of people came together around Richard Branson and the work of Virgin Unite. We begin with some joyful memories from that time, but our conversation soon becomes deeply personal. I share what it was like to lose my father while I was struggling with clinical depression and anxiety following a serious infection. Tracey offers a thought that’s stayed with me: grief tends to wait. When we can’t face it immediately, it doesn’t disappear. It waits until we’ve got the capacity to feel it.

That understanding leads us into Tracey’s work helping companies learn how to support grieving employees. Most leaders haven’t been trained for these moments. They feel responsible for finding an answer, yet grief can’t be fixed. Tracey explains that often, our task isn’t to solve anything. It’s to witness, listen, and build systems that prevent a grieving person or overwhelmed manager from having to invent a response in the middle of a crisis.

We also explore her work as a death doula and the “goodbye year” she shared with her mother. Tracey helps families ask the questions we tend to avoid, preserve their love stories, and thoughtfully shape the final days of a person’s life. Her reflections raise two questions worth asking long before the end: Am I loved? Have I loved well?

What really stands out to me is how naturally this connects to leadership. Tracey draws a sharp distinction between being nice and being kind: niceness avoids friction, while kindness tells the truth with care. She saw that principle create loyalty, strengthen culture, and increase the value of the companies she eventually sold.

Now she and co-founder Fiona Stevenson are bringing that mission to the inaugural Workplace Kindness Awards, hosted at Nasdaq MarketSite in New York City on November 12, 2026, with Claude Silver as keynote speaker.

I was struck by Tracey’s insight that grief tends to wait. When other circumstances prevent us from processing a loss, the grief often returns when we’ve finally got room to feel it.

I learned that leaders don’t need to fix grief. They need the courage and presence to witness it, ask caring questions, and stay with someone in an experience that doesn’t have a simple answer.

Tracey’s framework moves organizations through three stages: grief awareness, grief literacy, and grief readiness supported by training, policies, and practical systems.

I loved her idea of creating an employee “operating manual” before a crisis, including how each person prefers to communicate and be supported during difficult times.

Small signals can remove enormous uncertainty. A blue or white flag on a desk or video-call background can tell colleagues whether a grieving person needs space or welcomes connection.

Tracey showed how remembrance can become part of workplace culture through the story of a two-sided memorial bench: one side for quietly connecting with a colleague’s legacy, the other for signaling a need for companionship.

Her work as a death doula demonstrates that thoughtful questions about sights, sounds, people, stories, fears, and unfinished conversations can bring greater intention to the end of life.

The questions “Am I loved?” and “Have I loved well?” aren’t just questions for our final days. Asking them now gives us time to change the answers.

I came away with an even clearer distinction between niceness and kindness. Niceness avoids discomfort; real kindness means telling the truth with care.

Tracey’s business experience shows that a people-first culture isn’t separate from performance. The loyalty and trust her companies created contributed directly to their value when she sold them.

This conversation matters because grief enters the workplace whether or not our policies, managers, or cultures are prepared for it. People don’t stop being human when they arrive at work, and loss doesn’t remain neatly outside the office. When leaders avoid grief because they’re afraid of saying the wrong thing, grieving employees can experience that silence as isolation.

Tracey offers a more capable model of workplace leadership. We can prepare managers, create humane bereavement practices, learn how people want to be supported, and give colleagues simple ways to communicate their emotional capacity. None of this requires lowering standards or avoiding difficult truths. It requires greater skill.

The same principle applies to kindness. I don’t see kindness as politeness or conflict avoidance. Real kindness makes honest communication possible while preserving another person’s dignity. In an era of strained trust, uncertainty, and constant organizational change, that’s not a decorative cultural value. It’s part of how strong leaders and resilient organizations function.

This episode matters to me personally. My father’s death has continued to teach me about love, grief, and the stories we carry about losing someone. Tracey gave me a way to see that grief with more patience and less judgment. It waits for us, and when it arrives, our job isn’t necessarily to make it go away.

I also care deeply about Tracey’s work because it connects humanity with effective leadership. She isn’t talking about kindness from the sidelines. She built companies around it, saw it create extraordinary loyalty, and watched it contribute to their value.

The Workplace Kindness Awards give us an opportunity to recognize people already leading this way and help make their example more visible. I hope this conversation encourages you to support that mission and to ask some of life’s important questions while there’s still time to act on the answers.

• Tracey Ivanyshyn on LinkedIn
• Kindness at Work
• Workplace Kindness Awards — November 12, 2026, at Nasdaq MarketSite in New York City
• Life Review and Love Story Questions
• Reimagine Goodbye
• Tell Love Stories
• Kindness.org — charity and science partner for the Workplace Kindness Awards
• Claude Silver on LinkedIn — Chief Heart Officer of VaynerX, keynote speaker, and author of Be Yourself at Work
• The Five Invitations: Discovering What Death Can Teach Us About Living Fully by Frank Ostaseski
• Centre for Sacred Death Care

• 100% Human at Work and Virgin Unite

   

If this conversation made a difference for you, please subscribe to Live Like a Leader, follow the show, and share this episode with someone who’d appreciate it. I’d also be grateful if you left a five-star review, along with a short comment about what you enjoy about the show. Reviews help more thoughtful leaders discover these conversations, especially on Apple Podcasts.

You can find the show and more episodes at livelikealeader.show.

Take a few minutes to explore Tracey’s life review questions. Choose one person you love and ask a question you’ve been postponing. Record the answer if they’re comfortable with that. The conversation may become part of your family’s lasting story.

I also invite you to learn more about Kindness at Work and the inaugural Workplace Kindness Awards. Consider who deserves to be recognized for telling the truth with care, creating belonging, or showing up for people when it mattered most.

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Tracey Ivanyshyn has spent her life building things that matter—companies, cultures, communities—and most of all, belonging.

For over 25 years, she led a group of purpose-driven businesses known as much for their award-winning performance as for the people-first culture she cultivated within them. Leading her team of over 100 employees was a great joy in her life and an incredible teacher. And when approached to sell the companies to a larger aligned competitor, she found her own transition to spaciousness and a new chapter.

Now Tracey transforms workplace cultures through the power of kindness. She helps organisations build trust where it's been lost, culture where it's been strained, and emotional safety where it's most needed. As a corporate grief educator, she is also quietly pioneering a new model for how we show up for one another in times of loss—at work, and beyond.

She and her co-founder Fiona Stevenson have created the Workplace Kindness Awards - hosted at NASDAQ in NYC in November.

Ready to make your communication a match for how good you really are?

John K. Bates provides private executive communication coaching and leadership development for accomplished leaders and teams. His programs have earned 92+ Net Promoter Scores with organizations including NASA, Johnson & Johnson, Google, Intuit, and Boston Scientific.

Explore private coaching and leadership programs:
https://executivespeakingsuccess.com/

Build your communication practice with John’s free weekly mini-trainings:
https://johnbates.com/mini-trainings/

Today I sit down with my dear friend Sebastian Bates. Seb and I first met when he was a client of mine, and from the beginning, I was deeply impressed by him—by his drive, his heart, his courage, and the sheer scale of what he is building in the world. He is one of those rare people who combine intensity with purpose, and ambition with service. I respect him tremendously.

In this conversation, Seb shares the extraordinary story of a wingsuit BASE jumping accident in the Dolomites that nearly killed him and left doctors telling him he would never walk again. He takes us inside the physical agony, the long rehabilitation, the identity shift, and the fierce defiance that helped him come back from one of the lowest points of his life.

From there, we go back into his childhood, including years of bullying and the role martial arts played in helping him develop the confidence, discipline, and character to stand up for himself. That early pain became part of the seed for what would later become Warrior Academy—now the largest martial arts academy in the Middle East, serving more than 10,000 children every week.

We also talk about fatherhood, purpose, and the moment Seb realized he could no longer live only for adrenaline and adventure. After becoming a dad, he redirected that same intensity into business, leadership, and service. Out of that journey came not only Warrior Academy, but also the Bates Foundation, which now serves thousands of vulnerable and at-risk children each week in some of the toughest environments on earth.

One of the most powerful parts of this conversation is Seb’s conviction that everything is downstream from character. If you can help a child build confidence, emotional intelligence, resilience, focus, and self-respect, you can help change the decisions they make—and in many cases, change the course of their lives. That philosophy is now reaching children in slums and deeply impoverished communities, where the Bates Foundation is combining martial arts, mentoring, nourishment, and hope in ways that are deeply moving and profoundly practical.

We also spend time talking about communication and storytelling—how Seb refined his message, what happens when a great story is truly shaped to land with an audience, and why the smallest details in delivery can create a nonlinear leap in impact. That part of the conversation meant a lot to me personally.

Most of all, this episode is about what can happen when pain becomes purpose, when adventure becomes service, and when leadership becomes something much bigger than personal success.

This conversation touches on several issues that matter deeply right now: childhood bullying, mentorship, ADHD and identity, emotional resilience, absent support systems, fatherhood, vulnerable youth, and the importance of building strong inner character in a world that often fails children who need support most. It also speaks to a bigger leadership question: how do we turn our pain, our setbacks, and our gifts into something that serves others?

I really, really like Seb, and that comes through here. He has become a dear friend, and I support his mission tremendously. What he is doing through Warrior Academy and the Bates Foundation is not theoretical. It is practical, courageous, compassionate work that is changing real lives. If this episode moves you, I hope you’ll do more than listen. I hope you’ll check out the Foundation and consider contributing to the work.

Learn more about Sebastian Bates, Warrior Academy, and especially The Bates Foundation.

And if you’re in a position to support meaningful work in the world, I encourage you to take a serious look at what Seb and his team are doing.

Connect with Seb on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sebastian-bates-4b70412b/

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@Seb_bates

Warrior Academy: warrioracademy.ae

Visit livelikealeader.show for more episodes and resources.

Ready to make your communication a match for how good you really are?

John K. Bates provides private executive communication coaching and leadership development for accomplished leaders and teams. His programs have earned 92+ Net Promoter Scores with organizations including NASA, Johnson & Johnson, Google, Intuit, and Boston Scientific.

Explore private coaching and leadership programs:
https://executivespeakingsuccess.com/

Build your communication practice with John’s free weekly mini-trainings:
https://johnbates.com/mini-trainings/

Today, I sit down with Matt Hunter, executive coach and co-author with John Baird of Tough Enough: How to Lead a Team to Greatness Without Being a Jerk. Matt and I met several years ago on Necker Island, and I’ve liked and respected him ever since. When I saw what he and John were taking on with this book, I wanted him on the show.

Because they’re walking straight into a leadership question I care about enormously.

We’ve all seen the examples: founders and executives who produce extraordinary results while leaving a trail of exhausted, intimidated, or unhappy people behind them. Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and others have reinforced an uncomfortable idea for generations of ambitious leaders: maybe being extraordinarily demanding, even brutal, is simply what greatness requires.

Matt doesn’t dismiss that evidence. That’s what makes this conversation interesting.

His argument is that toughness really does matter. Bold missions require conviction. High-performance teams require standards. Leaders sometimes need to make difficult decisions, push people beyond comfort, and remain steady when everyone around them is scared.

But toughness and cruelty are not the same thing.

Matt and John Baird have identified seven habits intended to help leaders become what they call “tough enough”: highly demanding while retaining compassion, respect and humanity.

That leads us into one of my favorite parts of the conversation: vulnerability.

I’ve spent years thinking about the difference between indiscriminate vulnerability and what I call Insightful Vulnerability™. A leader blurting out every fear before the team charges up the proverbial hill may technically be “authentic,” but that doesn’t necessarily make it good leadership. Vulnerability becomes valuable when it serves the people listening, builds trust, and creates Emotional Credibility™.

We also get very personal about the cost of toughness. Matt and I both experienced serious health consequences after intense startup chapters. That takes us into a much more useful question than work-life balance: How do you lead relentlessly without destroying your capacity to keep leading?

This conversation isn’t an argument for being softer.

It’s an exploration of how to become tougher in the places that matter, compassionate in the places that matter, and intentional enough to know the difference.

• I think we have to stop treating toughness and compassion as opposites. Matt’s central argument is that leaders can set extremely high standards, pursue bold goals, and make difficult decisions without treating people badly.
• I came away appreciating the distinction between being “tough” and simply being aggressive. Toughness can mean conviction, endurance, accountability, and an unwillingness to abandon the mission when things get uncomfortable.
• I believe vulnerability only works in leadership when it serves a purpose beyond relieving the leader’s own emotions. That’s the distinction I make with Insightful Vulnerability™: share something because it helps other people trust, learn or act, not simply because you happen to feel it.
• I think admitting a mistake can increase rather than diminish a leader’s authority. Saying, “I screwed this up, here’s what I learned, and here’s what I’m changing,” can create trust that defensiveness never will.
• I was struck by Matt’s framing of relentless leadership as an endurance problem rather than simply a work-life balance problem. Ambitious people will push. The question is whether we understand our capacity, recovery, and rate of exertion well enough to keep going.
• I know firsthand that there is a danger zone. During my startup years, years of extreme stress and inadequate sleep contributed to a serious autoimmune illness. Matt shares a remarkably similar experience.
• I think every leader has to choose where they want to operate on the toughness spectrum. There is no requirement that you build your company, career, or life the way Elon Musk does, simply because his approach produces certain kinds of results.
• I like the high-performance sports team analogy for culture. People can be treated extremely well while still being expected to perform at the level the team requires.
• What really stands out to me is the false choice Matt is trying to eliminate. Compassionate leaders should not have to choose between being good human beings and being formidable competitors.

One reason I think this conversation matters right now is that leaders are receiving contradictory messages.

We’re told to be empathetic, emotionally intelligent, vulnerable, and human. We’re also surrounded by highly visible examples suggesting that extreme demands, relentless pressure, and even fairly awful behavior can produce spectacular business results.

I don’t think pretending that contradiction doesn’t exist helps anyone.

The more useful question is: How do I lead a high-performance team without becoming someone I don’t respect?

That means thinking more precisely about accountability, resilience, trust, executive communication, burnout, and how to lead through pressure without transferring all of that pressure indiscriminately to everyone around us.

It also means recognizing that there are costs at both ends of the spectrum. Too little toughness can undermine the mission. Too much can undermine the people, the culture, our families, and eventually ourselves.

I invited Matt onto the show because I want this idea in the world.

I work with extraordinarily capable leaders. Many of them are already compassionate, thoughtful people. What they sometimes need is not permission to become softer. They need permission and practical tools to become tougher without believing that toughness requires arrogance, cruelty, or disregard for other people.

I also know what happens when relentless pursuit crosses a line. I’ve lived some of those consequences myself.

What Matt and John Baird are attempting with Tough Enough is important because they’re not asking good-hearted leaders to lower their ambitions. They’re giving them another way to pursue those ambitions.

If we can succeed without becoming jerks in the process, that seems like a considerably better deal to me.

• Tough Enough: How to Lead a Team to Greatness Without Being a Jerk — Matt Hunter and John Baird
• Tough Enough Leaders — toughenoughleaders.com (spoken by Matt during the episode; verify URL before making it a live link)
• Tough Enough leadership assessments — Matt describes two assessments designed to evaluate overall toughness and toughness across the book’s seven habits
• Tough Enough workbook — Free companion resource mentioned by Matt
• Hachette — Publisher of Tough Enough, as identified in the conversation
• Founders Pledge — Organization Matt previously helped lead
• Cannery Row by John Steinbeck — Source of the Steinbeck passage discussed near the beginning of the conversation
• Take Breaks Work Better — Book mentioned during our discussion of performance and recovery; the transcript renders the author’s name as “John Briggs,” so I would verify the title and author before publishing a link
• Connect with Matt Hunter on LinkedIn and X

If this conversation made you think differently about how you lead, I’d love it if you subscribed to Live Like a Leader and shared this episode with somebody who would appreciate it.

And if you enjoy the show, please take a moment to leave us a 5-star review and write a sentence or two about what you enjoy. Those comments genuinely help other people find the conversations we’re having here.

Most importantly, keep listening, keep experimenting with what works, and keep becoming the kind of leader people genuinely want to follow.

If this conversation hit home, take a look at where you currently sit on the toughness spectrum.

Where are you avoiding a difficult conversation, lowering a standard, or protecting comfort when the mission requires more from you?

And where might you be pushing so hard that you’re creating unnecessary costs for yourself or the people around you?

Matt’s Tough Enough assessments and workbook could be useful places to continue that examination. And if someone immediately came to mind while you were listening, send them this episode. I suspect this is one of those conversations that gets even more useful when two leaders discuss it together.

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Matt Hunter is an executive leadership coach and co-author of the forthcoming book Tough Enough: How to Lead a Team to Greatness Without Being a Jerk. He has two decades of experience founding, leading, and coaching companies, most notably cofounding Turnstyle (acquired by Yelp) and serving as president and US CEO of Founders Pledge, a community of entrepreneurs that has pledged over $13.6 billion to charity, with more than $1.9 billion already deployed. Today, he coaches C-suite executives at Fortune 50 companies as well as founders and CEOs of high-growth tech startups backed by firms such as Andreessen Horowitz, Accel, and NEA, with a combined valuation in the tens of billions. He is also expanding his work to include elite sports teams. He lives in Boulder, Colorado.

Ready to make your communication a match for how good you really are?

John K. Bates provides private executive communication coaching and leadership development for accomplished leaders and teams. His programs have earned 92+ Net Promoter Scores with organizations including NASA, Johnson & Johnson, Google, Intuit, and Boston Scientific.

Explore private coaching and leadership programs:
https://executivespeakingsuccess.com/

Build your communication practice with John’s free weekly mini-trainings:
https://johnbates.com/mini-trainings/

Today I sit down with Dr. Nicole Butts, best-selling and award-winning author, speaker, and organizational culture strategist and expert, whose new book is SHIFT: A Transformational Journey from Playing Small to Unapologetically Thriving.

This conversation is a masterclass in what happens when high-achieving leaders (especially women) finally stop outsourcing their worth to other people’s approval—and start leading from alignment.

Nicole opens up about something almost every great leader experiences, but few say out loud: that moment right before a big opportunity where the old story shows up—I’m not worthy. I don’t belong here. She literally started drafting me an email to back out… and then caught herself in the act. That “shrinkage story” (her words) became the doorway into the deeper work—and the reason she wrote SHIFT.

We go into:

If you’ve ever felt like your work should “speak for itself,” this episode will challenge you—in the best way.

Nicole breaks it down into three forces:

I share a pattern I see constantly: the whole department rides on someone’s back… and then they’re shocked when they’re passed up.

Why? Because leadership isn’t only output—leadership is visibility, positioning, and presence.

I call it “leadership me time”—stepping back from nonstop doing so people can actually see you leading. Nicole agrees and names it “reactive doing”—being busy, carrying everything, but not intentionally showing up as the leader.

And then she drops a line I want you to remember: “By design, the work isn’t the leader. You are the leader.”

Nicole shares the backbone of her book as an acronym:

S — Set your North Star

H — Here

I — Illustrate your path forward

F — Forge ahead

T — Thrive

And she didn’t just write a roadmap—she made it real. After each step, she includes a section called “Follow My Journey” where she shows how she personally moved through that step.

Nicole explains why transformation requires two things:

Her distinction is sharp: Awareness sets the course. Courage fuels the journey.

Dr. Nicole Butts (website + books): NicoleButts.com

Connect with Nicole on LinkedIn

Book: SHIFT: A Transformational Journey from Playing Small to Unapologetically Thriving

Dr. Nicole Butts is a best-selling and award-winning author, speaker, and organizational culture strategist who helps individuals and institutions unlock transformation.

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If you enjoyed this episode, please leave a 5-star rating, write a few kind words about the show and our guest, and share it with someone who’s ready to stop shrinking and start leading.

Ready to make your communication a match for how good you really are?

John K. Bates provides private executive communication coaching and leadership development for accomplished leaders and teams. His programs have earned 92+ Net Promoter Scores with organizations including NASA, Johnson & Johnson, Google, Intuit, and Boston Scientific.

Explore private coaching and leadership programs:
https://executivespeakingsuccess.com/

Build your communication practice with John’s free weekly mini-trainings:
https://johnbates.com/mini-trainings/

Today I'm joined by Joel Steele, co-founder of Steele Financial Solutions and author of the powerful new book Life Switch. Joel’s journey from owning a failed healthy fast food restaurant to building a multi-million-dollar financial firm is inspiring, vulnerable, and packed with leadership gold.

We dive into how devastating failures can unlock hidden potential and why Joel refused to declare bankruptcy, even when he was drowning in nearly $500,000 in debt at just 24 years old. He shares the exact mindset shift that reignited his fire—and the three “P”s that form the backbone of his book: Potential, Passion, and Purpose.

This conversation is for anyone who’s ever felt stuck, wondered if they’re enough, or questioned whether their dreams are still possible. Joel is proof that when you flip the switch inside, everything outside begins to change.

In this conversation, Joel and I explore:

Whether you’re leading a team, building your brand, or climbing back from a setback, this episode is a masterclass in resilience, reinvention, and real leadership. Find Joel on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joel-steele-9685888/

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Joel Steele is an entrepreneur, financial expert, and co-founder/owner of a successful financial firm. He has over 22 years of experience helping people build wealth, along with peace of mind. He’s passionate about enhancing health and wealth, the business of sports, and building meaningful relationships, starting at home with family.

Steele’s journey — from massive setbacks to personal reinvention and professional success — fuels his mission to inspire others to win in all aspects of life. He is part of the ownership group of two professional sports teams (NBA G-League and USL Championship League), and has inspired thousands nationwide to achieve personal and professional growth.

Joel is a former certified personal trainer and created a small chain of healthy fast-food restaurants in the early 2000s. Find his book Life Switch here: https://bookjoelsteele.com/book/

Ready to make your communication a match for how good you really are?

John K. Bates provides private executive communication coaching and leadership development for accomplished leaders and teams. His programs have earned 92+ Net Promoter Scores with organizations including NASA, Johnson & Johnson, Google, Intuit, and Boston Scientific.

Explore private coaching and leadership programs:
https://executivespeakingsuccess.com/

Build your communication practice with John’s free weekly mini-trainings:
https://johnbates.com/mini-trainings/

Today I sit down with Freddie Pullen—founder of The Healthy Entrepreneur Podcast and the founder of Recognized (recognized.global)—and we go straight at a problem I care about deeply: There are too many truly capable experts who stay invisible… while louder, less-qualified voices dominate the conversation.

Freddie helps experts become recognized for the value they already have—and then monetize that attention in a way that actually feels aligned. We talk about the practical strategies (podcast guesting, LinkedIn, positioning), but we also go deeper into the psychology: what it really takes to earn credibility, build trust, and show up with authority without playing the “look at me” game.  

We also start the conversation by honoring the work of Sebastian Bates and the Bates Foundation—because leadership isn’t theory when you’re feeding kids and building character in the toughest environments on Earth. Freddie has been a trustee since the foundation began, and he shares what it was like to see the impact firsthand. 

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Freddie has worked with 200+ founders to build demand, waiting lists, and revenue directly through LinkedIn.

Along the way, one thing became impossible to ignore... All buyers do this one thing before they buy:

That’s how modern B2B buying actually works.

But this didn’t come from theory.

After leaving his role as Head of Product at the world’s largest media company serving 500M monthly users and generating $300k per day, Freddie built two 6-figure businesses in 8 months and helped 200+ founders do the same. The results:

Which is why the goal of content is to be obvious.

Freddie helps clients position themselves as the authority people already trust before they ever speak to them.

Today, AI is accelerating this, but only if it’s trained on the right positioning. Freddie and his team use AI to:

You need a new ocean on LinkedIn - where you’re undeniable to your ideal clients.

That’s why Freddie and his team built a positioning first, AI powered approach to LinkedIn.

https://freddiepullen.com/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/freddie-pullen/

https://www.instagram.com/freddiepullen

Ready to make your communication a match for how good you really are?

John K. Bates provides private executive communication coaching and leadership development for accomplished leaders and teams. His programs have earned 92+ Net Promoter Scores with organizations including NASA, Johnson & Johnson, Google, Intuit, and Boston Scientific.

Explore private coaching and leadership programs:
https://executivespeakingsuccess.com/

Build your communication practice with John’s free weekly mini-trainings:
https://johnbates.com/mini-trainings/

Today I sit down with Camden Francis—a 21-year-old founder in the Boston area who’s already lived a few lifetimes worth of leadership reps.

We talk about the real story behind the highlight reel: how Camden co-founded a pandemic-era food distribution charity that moved $100,000 worth of food and resources, how that experience became a launchpad into the startup world, and why his newest projects—NomadAI (AI-assisted travel planning) and Universe (a career/network platform “for Gen Z,” currently under wraps)—are rooted in something deeper than ambition: service, meaning, and the long game.  

A big thread in this conversation is something I care about a lot: your origin story—not as marketing, but as emotional credibility. Who you are. What shaped you. What you’ve survived. What you’re here to build—and why people should trust you enough to follow. 

Camden Francis is a Gen Z founder based in the Boston area. He co-founded:

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Camden Francis, a dynamic 21-year-old currently pursuing a degree in Finance and Business Management, seamlessly blends academic prowess with an entrepreneurial spirit. Beyond the confines of his desk, Camden revels in the exhilaration of sports, cherishes quality moments with family and friends, and takes leisurely strolls with his beloved Goldendoodle, Brooks. His summers are often punctuated with escapes to Cape Cod, where he finds solace and inspiration.

Ready to make your communication a match for how good you really are?

John K. Bates provides private executive communication coaching and leadership development for accomplished leaders and teams. His programs have earned 92+ Net Promoter Scores with organizations including NASA, Johnson & Johnson, Google, Intuit, and Boston Scientific.

Explore private coaching and leadership programs:
https://executivespeakingsuccess.com/

Build your communication practice with John’s free weekly mini-trainings:
https://johnbates.com/mini-trainings/

Some conversations arrive exactly when they’re needed.

This is one of them.

In this episode, I sit down with Ryan Edwards, my friend and the co-founder of Camino5, for a conversation that’s been years in the making. Ryan and I first met at one of my live events in Los Angeles, and ever since, he’s been one of those people who quietly shifts how I see the business landscape. He has a rare vantage point: deep experience working with startups, global brands, and billion-dollar companies, and the pattern recognition that comes with it.

Ryan’s work centers on white space strategy... finding the overlooked opportunities where real growth lives, and there couldn’t be a more relevant moment for this conversation. The pace of change has accelerated dramatically, especially with the rise of AI, and many leaders are trying to move faster without losing control.

This episode exists because the rules of business strategy have changed faster in the last year than they did in the previous decade. And most leaders haven’t recalibrated yet.

What we explore here isn’t fear-based. It’s grounded, optimistic, and practical.

Three Operating Principles from This Conversation

1. White space is now dynamic, not static

White space used to be analyzed every 18 months. Today, Ryan is seeing strategy cycles compress to quarterly—or even monthly—reviews. Not because leaders love churn, but because technology and culture are moving too fast for set-and-forget thinking.

White space isn’t always a massive blue ocean. More often, it’s a small, highly specific intersection of your value proposition, your customer’s real needs, and what you can actually execute well, right now.

2. AI works best when it supports judgment — not when it replaces it

Ryan offers one of the clearest, most useful frames I’ve heard for AI and small business:

Don’t ask AI for big, sweeping answers.

Ask it a series of small questions you can common-sense check, and let those answers ladder up.

This takes longer. It requires thinking. And it keeps humans in the loop.

That matters because for a small business, one AI mistake isn’t annoying; it’s expensive. One missed email, one misrouted opportunity, one wrong automation can cost real money.

Interestingly, Ryan is also seeing large corporations pull back from “AI everywhere” toward controlled automation and fixed workflows. The lesson? We’re not at the point where we can responsibly turn everything over, and pretending we are is risky.

3. Community is now a strategic advantage

Ryan makes a compelling case that small business owners should be in their local business community at least once every two weeks, not to network performatively, but to gut-check reality, compare notes, and stay human.

Some of the most valuable insights right now are coming from people with just a few years of experience, because they’re in it, learning fast, and willing to share what’s actually working.

You never stop learning. And you don’t need decades of experience to contribute. You just need a clear point of view and an open mind.

The Bigger Picture

Despite uncertainty, Ryan is seeing more optimism in business than he has in years. Not blind optimism, earned optimism.

As he puts it, we have more control than we realized last year. But control only matters if we use it.

This is a conversation about:

We’re the ones we’ve been waiting for.

Connect with Ryan Edwards

Connect with John Bates

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Ryan Edwards is the co-founder of Camino5, a strategy consultancy built on a simple belief: insights create strategy and strategy creates growth.

With more than 15 years of experience across digital, brand, and customer experience, Ryan’s career began in web design and programming before evolving into creative and CX leadership roles. Over the last decade, his work has focused on understanding how people actually engage with brands across platforms, moments, and decisions, turning that understanding into strategies that move businesses forward.

At Camino5, Ryan leads work through Paired Perspective™, the firm’s approach to connecting customer behavior across a fragmented landscape. The goal isn’t channel optimization in isolation, but strategic clarity that enables speed, alignment, and action.

Ryan has partnered with global brands including Disney, P&G, NBCUniversal, Unilever, Chase, Nike, and Kaiser Permanente, as well as high-growth startups and emerging category leaders. His work has supported multiple unicorns, driven category-defining launches, and contributed to research that led to $20M-per-month business turnarounds.

Ryan works with companies that believe strategy should create momentum and that growth starts with seeing the customer clearly.

Ready to make your communication a match for how good you really are?

John K. Bates provides private executive communication coaching and leadership development for accomplished leaders and teams. His programs have earned 92+ Net Promoter Scores with organizations including NASA, Johnson & Johnson, Google, Intuit, and Boston Scientific.

Explore private coaching and leadership programs:
https://executivespeakingsuccess.com/

Build your communication practice with John’s free weekly mini-trainings:
https://johnbates.com/mini-trainings/

Today I sit down with Pete Sacco—entrepreneur, technologist, “modern-day mystic,” and a 30-year veteran of designing, building, and operating serious data centers. Pete is also the founder of Gray Wolf Data Centers, and he has a front-row seat to what AI is about to demand from our infrastructure—and from us as leaders.

What I loved about this conversation is the range: we go from the brutally practical realities of leadership (cash flow, culture, motivating people) to the big human questions AI forces into the open: Who are we when our “work” no longer defines our value? And how do we stay grounded, connected, and useful in the middle of a technological hockey stick?

In this episode, we covered:

1) Pete’s 4-part framework for modern leadership

Pete lays out what he sees as “endemic” to great leadership today:

2) Storytelling as culture-engineering

We dig into why stories are more than “nice to have.” Stories become the myths that create the mythology of a company—how values become behavior at scale. And if you want to influence culture, yesterday was easier than today.

3) The next AI infrastructure shift: from training to inferencing

Pete breaks down the difference between:

Then he takes it further: the next wave isn’t human inferencing—it’s machine inferencing. Robots, cars, devices, sensors… constantly asking “what do I do next?” at massive scale.

4) Why “edge” data centers are coming back

Pete predicts we’ll move away from only massive, centralized “mega” campuses toward distributed, high-performance data centers near the edge—“in every town,” similar to telecom “points of presence” in the 1990s. That’s the strategic thesis behind Gray Wolf Data Centers.  

5) The modern mystic: mind, body, and the inner game

Pete shares a candid chapter of his own life—anxiety, therapy, CBT, and a pivotal lesson: don’t make the events you can’t control your “problems.” He connects this to resilience through sleep, health practices, and the belief that we can reshape the mind through neuroplasticity—and even how he sees us as “quantum beings,” responsible for how we observe and choose our reality.

6) A hopeful thesis: “good AI” vs “bad AI” + post-scarcity

We touch the fear many people carry (yes, I mention growing up in the Terminator era), but Pete offers a provocative counter: the way we beat bad AI is with good AI—models designed around human flourishing and shared broadly as a public service. He believes we’re headed through disruption toward post-scarcity, and that our descendants will wonder why we didn’t support each other sooner.

7) The closing leadership message: “we are all one”

Pete’s final note is the one that matters most to me: we’re all connected—and we’re here for each other. In my book, that’s not just a spiritual idea; it’s a leadership standard.

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Resources Mentioned:

Pete’s company: Gray Wolf Data Centers

Pete’s book: Living in Bliss: Achieve a Balanced Existence of Body, Mind and Spirit

Pete’s site: PeteSacco.com (signed copies + meditation materials)

Dr. David Burns: The Feel Good Handbook

Dan Sullivan: Who Not How (and other referenced works)

Peter Diamandis: longevity reference

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If you want to apply this immediately:

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https://petesacco.com

Pete Sacco is a visionary entrepreneur, technologist, and modern-day mystic who blends conscious leadership with breakthrough innovation. As the founder of multiple ventures—including PTS Data Center Solutions, INTUVA, GRID7, InstaGuardIP, and Gray Wolf Data Centers—Pete has led transformative initiatives across AI, energy, blockchain, and digital infrastructure. His journey from electrical engineer to spiritual author and advisor reflects a rare fusion of high performance and inner awakening. Pete is the author of Living in Bliss: Achieve a Balanced Existence of Body, Mind, and Spirit, a guide for high achievers seeking fulfillment beyond success. A finalist for Ernst & Young’s Entrepreneur of the Year, Pete holds a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Fairleigh Dickinson University, and serves on the advisory board of its School of Computer Sciences and Engineering. Based in New Jersey, he helps purpose-driven professionals unlock clarity, vitality, and purpose—one system, one person, and one moment at a time. 

Ready to make your communication a match for how good you really are?

John K. Bates provides private executive communication coaching and leadership development for accomplished leaders and teams. His programs have earned 92+ Net Promoter Scores with organizations including NASA, Johnson & Johnson, Google, Intuit, and Boston Scientific.

Explore private coaching and leadership programs:
https://executivespeakingsuccess.com/

Build your communication practice with John’s free weekly mini-trainings:
https://johnbates.com/mini-trainings/

Today I sit down with Kelly Abbott, one of my absolute best friends and someone I have known for more than 20 years, and we get into a conversation I think all of us need to be having right now. Kelly is one of the most talented CIOs, internet entrepreneurs, and technology minds I know, and what I appreciate most about him is that he does not approach AI like a hype man. He approaches it like a builder, an artist, a strategist, and a deeply curious human being. That combination is rare.

What really stands out to me in this conversation is that Kelly is not using AI in a shallow, gimmicky way. He is exploring how it can become a genuine creative partner. He walks me through a project he has built called Writer’s Room, a tool designed to simulate the collaborative energy of a real writers room so people can develop long-form fiction with multiple AI personas, story structure, quality control, continuity, and creative tension built in. It is a fascinating example of what becomes possible when you stop thinking about AI as a shortcut and start thinking about it as a thought partner.

We also talk about the AI-generated video he created for Seven CTOs, and this part of the conversation opens up something deeper than tools alone. Kelly shares how he used AI to translate an inner idea into a full creative artifact by scripting with ChatGPT, shaping voice in ElevenLabs, experimenting with music, and embracing imagery, archetype, and non-deterministic outputs along the way. One of the most powerful parts of this conversation is hearing him describe why he chose an unexpected narrator voice and how he thinks about the relationship between text, emotion, music, image, and trust. It is a masterclass in taste, not just tech.

We also get honest about the tension many people feel around AI. I say in the episode that I am less worried about AI destroying the world by itself than I am about people using it stupidly and at scale. Kelly does not brush that off. He agrees that the concern is real, and he makes a strong case that the answer is not avoidance. The answer is learning. He talks about why he teaches Claude in particular, why he respects Anthropic’s stance on safety, and why becoming capable with these tools puts you in the driver’s seat instead of leaving you vulnerable to being outpaced by them.

Another piece I love is that this conversation is not just about AI in the abstract. It becomes personal. Kelly starts exploring what it could look like to use tools like NotebookLM to understand my body of work more deeply, surface the real pain points my clients face, and eventually help build something like an on-demand “Johnny brain” people could interact with for coaching and insight. That is where this episode gets especially exciting to me, because it moves from fascination to application. We are not just asking what AI is. We are asking how to use it in service of real communication, real creativity, real usefulness, and real human connection.

And then, because life is funny and friendship matters, we close by telling the story of how Kelly and I first met on a flight to South by Southwest. It starts with him defending an empty seat, me walking back up the aisle in a too-tight Flash T-shirt, and Kelly greeting me with, “I don’t like you very much right now.” What followed was a conversation, a weekend, and a friendship that has lasted for decades. Honestly, that ending says a lot about this whole episode. Beneath all the tools and ideas is something more important: curiosity, candor, play, and the willingness to engage what is right in front of you.

This episode matters because AI is not coming someday. It is here. And like it or not, all of us need to get familiar with what it can do, where it helps, where it misleads, and how to use it without giving up our judgment, our values, or our originality. That is why I expect this to become a semi-regular part of the podcast.

This conversation touches a nerve that a lot of people are feeling right now. We are living through a moment where AI is moving faster than most people can comfortably track, and that creates a strange mix of excitement, intimidation, skepticism, and risk. This episode speaks directly to that.

We get into leadership, creativity, communication, entrepreneurship, technology, safety, and discernment. We also touch the deeper issue underneath all of it, which is whether we are going to let technology flatten our humanity or help us express it more powerfully. To me, that is the real issue. Not whether AI exists, but whether we develop the judgment, character, and skill to use it well.

This episode matters to me personally because Kelly is not just a brilliant technologist. He is someone I trust. That matters a lot in a space where there is so much noise, so much hype, and so much confident nonsense.

What really stands out to me is that Kelly brings both depth and play to this conversation. He understands the technical side, but he also understands voice, story, aesthetics, and what makes something actually resonate. I think listeners will come away with something rare here: not just more information about AI, but a healthier and more useful way to think about it.

And honestly, I care about this because I do believe we all need to start getting familiar with what these tools can do. The people who learn thoughtfully are going to be in a much stronger position than the people who ignore this and hope it goes away.

If this conversation gave you something to think about, subscribe to Live Like a Leader, leave a review, and share this episode with someone who is trying to make sense of AI, leadership, creativity, or where communication is headed next.

A good next step is to spend a little time with Kelly’s work and then actually try one of the tools we discuss. Don’t just have an opinion about AI from a distance. Get your hands on it. Explore it. Test it. See where it helps, where it falls short, and where your own judgment needs to get stronger. And if this conversation resonates, stay with us, because this is going to be an ongoing part of the show.

Kelly Abbott is Chief AI Officer at BOL Agency and founder of K-State LLC, where he helps organizations stop talking about AI and start operating with it. A two-time exit founder (Match.com, Adobe), Kelly now builds AI-native systems for marketing agencies, law firms, and enterprise teams. He trains teams on Claude, designs agentic workflows, and creates products at the intersection of AI, music, and creative technology. He lives in Washougal, WA with his family. Ohio State alum. Still writing stories.

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John Bates provides 1:1 Executive Communications Coaching, both in-person and online. He also gets 92+ Net Promoter Scores for his large and small group leadership development trainings at organizations like Johnson & Johnson, NASA, Google, Intuit, Boston Scientific, and many more. Find more at https://executivespeakingsuccess.com.

Sign up for his weekly micro-trainings for free at https://johnbates.com/mini-trainings and create a great leadership communications habit that makes you the kind of leader who inspires trust, loyalty, and connection.