When it Mattered

Ep. 12 — A brain cancer diagnosis leads a 27-year old mental health worker to use photography to help parents of critically ill children reconcile with death and dying /  Caroline Catlin, writer, photographer.

Caroline Catlin knew something was really physically wrong with her after she graduated from college in 2015. But despite repeatedly reaching out to multiple doctors about her daily fevers, joint and muscle pain, fatigue, memory loss and cognitive issues, no one believed her.

After numerous incorrect diagnoses and only because of her persistence, Catlin finally got an MRI and the bottom fell out of her life. She was told she had Grade 3 Anaplastic Astrocytoma, the same class of cancers as Glioblastomas, which killed Senator Edward Kennedy, Senator John McCain, and Beau Biden, son of presidential candidate and former Vice President, Joseph Biden.

Catlin was devastated and had a difficult time wrapping her head around her serious illnesses. Since then, the artist and mental health expert has volunteered to photograph families with critically ill children, including shooting end- of-life photos, in order to help them and herself come to terms with death and dying.

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Chitra Ragavan:   Hello and welcome to When it Mattered, a podcast on how leaders are forged in critical moments and how they deal with and learn from adversity. This episode is brought to you by Goodstory, an advisory firm helping technology startups find their narrative. My guest today is Caroline Catlin. She's a writer and photographer, and a brain cancer patient and survivor. Caroline's research and work in behavioral health and developmental trauma has inspired her to incorporate art into the process of caregiving and therapy, and reforming the way health, illness and disability are portrayed in the media. Her work has been featured in the New York Times, Boston Globe, Huffington Post, and other media outlets. Caroline, welcome to the podcast.

Caroline Catlin:   Thank you. I'm so glad to be here.

Chitra Ragavan:   Tell us a little bit about yourself and when and how you first realized that you had cancer.

Caroline Catlin:   So I graduated from college in 2015, and by that August, I was very sick. I woke up with fevers every day for two weeks. I had joint pain, and muscle pain, and intense fatigue, and that sort of started the process of trying to figure out what was going on for me. I went to urgent care, I went to local doctors, and everyone dismissed me and said, "We think you have a mild cold." I eventually was diagnosed with acute Lyme disease and pneumonia and began treatment for Lyme disease that we believed had continued and kind of become chronic. And that continued for three years, of trying to figure out what was wrong and treating me with antibiotics and different things, until my cognitive symptoms, so memory loss and word finding issues, became worse. And I asked multiple doctors and finally got one to agree to do an MRI, and that was when they found the tumor.

Chitra Ragavan:   And how old were you then?

Caroline Catlin:   I was 27, and I am 27. It was right after my 27th birthday actually, that the first doctor agreed to do an MRI.

Chitra Ragavan:   And what was the tumor and where was it?

Caroline Catlin:   So the tumor was in my right parietal lobe. It was about golf ball sized, and it is an anaplastic astrocytoma, a grade three out of four. It's in the same class as glioblastomas, which quite a few people that have been in the news have passed away from, and it is the type of cancer that will likely return as a glioblastoma.

Chitra Ragavan:   Glioblastoma is the same cancer that killed Senator Edward Kennedy, Senator John McCain, and also Beau Biden, son of former Vice President and now presidential candidate Joseph Biden.

Caroline Catlin:   Yeah, that's correct.

Chitra Ragavan:   The right parietal lobe is one of the four major lobes in the human brain,

Ep. 11 — A reluctant beauty pageant winner finds a unique path to a Harvard education and develops a passion for public service / Erin Walczewski, Attorney, Cooley, LLP.

When Erin Walczewski first entered the Miss Iowa beauty pageant, she never expected to win. Her goal was simply to win some scholarship money for college. To her surprise, the skeptical contestant won the Miss Iowa crown.

Walczewski wouldn’t realize for a long time what the true prize was from that competition.

Still a reluctant participant, Walczewski went on to the Miss America contest, which she lost. But it would prove to be the best loss of her life, giving her the opportunity to do a year of public service in her home state and develop confidence, poise, and invaluable public speaking skills plus enough scholarship funds to get her into college.

Competing in those early beauty pageants continued to have a profound effect on Walczewski’s life and career. She won a prestigious scholarship with powerful mentoring, which eventually got her into Harvard Law School; later, a job on the 9/11 Commission’s Public Discourse Project (PDP) where her public speaking skills from her beauty contest days helped her play a key role in educating the American public about the terrorist attacks; and the opportunity to teach law at Georgetown University and later at Harvard.

As a pro bono counsel at Cooley law firm, Walczewski recently had the chance to go to the U.S. Mexico border to provide legal advice to women seeking asylum.

There, in the process of counseling these emotionally, physically, and psychologically traumatized women, Walczewski truly understood how the Miss Iowa and Miss America contests, in teaching her to communicate with and help those less fortunate than herself, had become gifts that keep on giving.

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Chitra:   Hello and welcome to When it Mattered, a podcast on how leaders are forged in critical moments and how they deal with and learn from adversity. This episode is brought to you by Goodstory, an advisory firm helping technology start-ups find their narrative.

Chitra:  My guest today is Erin Walczewski. She's a former Miss Iowa who competed for Miss America and went on to earn a law degree from Harvard Law School. She works as an attorney and a lecturer on law at Harvard. Before law school, Walczewski worked in national security notably on the 9/11 Public Discourse Project and she also taught high school English in Japan.

Chitra:   Walczewski currently serves as pro bono counsel at Cooley where she counsels non-profits and earlier this year traveled to the US/Mexico border to provide legal counsel to women seeking asylum. She also is a frequent public speaker and presenter. Erin, welcome to the podcast.

Erin Walczewski:   Hi Chitra, thanks so much for having me.

Chitra:   It's great having you. What led you to compete for Miss Iowa?

Erin Walczewski:   It's a funny question. I was just thinking about that in preparation to do this interview with you. And it almost, the fastest way to explain it is that I accidentally won a beauty pageant. We don't actually call them that. The Miss America organization is very clear that it's not a beauty pageant, it's a scholarship competition. That's actually a joke in the movie, Miss Congeniality, if you ever saw that, which I found hilarious.

Erin Walczewski:   But really I was looking for scholarship money. And at the time I was looking for ways that I could help finance my own college education and found out, found out through a recruiter about the, a local competition for Miss Iowa. And in a nutshell, I said, "No, no, no. I don't do pageant things." And they said, "Well, if you compete all five phases of competition, you win a minimum scholarship of $50."

Erin Walczewski:   And I thought, "Well, I could complete five phases of competition." And I did. And very surprisingly to me, I ended up winning the local competition. And they said,

Ep. 10 — A father’s death from a medical mistake propels his son to tackle the most serious problems in our healthcare system / Dr. Robert Pearl, former CEO, Kaiser Permanente Medical Group.

Dr. Robert Pearl went to college to learn philosophy. But when his favorite professor was denied tenure, Dr. Pearl veered towards a career in cardiac surgery, naively believing it was devoid of politics.

But his naivety was short-lived. Pearl says he quickly became disillusioned by the inequalities he discovered in his specialty and profession. He shifted course again and became a plastic surgeon, finding a renewed passion for medicine after he went to Mexico to help children with cleft lips and cleft palates.

Later offered a chance to lead Kaiser Permanente, Dr. Pearl describes how he sacrificed his love of surgery to rescue the nation’s largest medical group from its dire predicament (when he took over as CEO, the group had just two days left of cash reserves, in violation of California regulations, which required three).

In the process of turning the company around, Pearl realized with a shock just how broken the U.S. healthcare system really is today and how much effort it will take to set it right.

Pearl’s disillusionment came full circle when his father died from long-term complications from an easily preventable medical mistake. And he began to grasp the financial, emotional, and social toll that medical mistakes cause, including 200,000 deaths annually.

Pearl shares how he took his father’s death to heart and vowed to spend the remainder of his time as CEO of Kaiser Permanente and beyond solving some of these seemingly intractable problems.

In concluding this compelling saga of the education of an American doctor, Pearl mentions some striking examples of companies such as Amazon that are trying to solve the healthcare dilemma. And he describes how he is continuing his mission and passion to transform U.S. healthcare today in his third career as an author, professor, and public speaker.

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Chitra Ragavan:   Hello, and welcome to When it Mattered. I'm Chitra Ragavan. On this episode, we will be talking to Dr. Robert Pearl. He's the former CEO of the Kaiser Permanente Medical Group, the nation's largest medical group. He also serves as a clinical professor of plastic surgery at Stanford University School of Medicine, and is on the faculty of the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

Chitra Ragavan:   Dr. Pearl is the author of the bestselling book, Mistreated: Why We Think We're Getting Good Healthcare – and Why We're Usually Wrong. Robert, welcome to the podcast.

Robert Pearl :   Thank you very much for having me.

Chitra Ragavan:   How did you enter the field of medicine? Did you always want to be a doctor?

Robert Pearl :   I went to college to become a university professor. I expected to be a teacher of philosophy, but the professor that I thought was the best didn't get tenure, not because he wasn't excellent at the field, he ultimately became the chairman at Reed, but because of his political views. And I decided I didn't want to go into something that would be based on politics; and in the naivety of a 20-year-old, I thought it would be medicine.

Robert Pearl :   When people learn about my career, the CEO of actually the nation's largest medical group, and thinking that I was going into it to avoid politics, they often laugh. But that's how I saw it; it was life and death, and why should politics come into the middle? And so I went to Yale Medical School to become a doctor.

Chitra Ragavan:   And what was your specialty that you wanted to pursue?

Robert Pearl :   That's also interesting, because not wanting to get caught in political crossfires, I thought that cardiovascular surgery would be the best. At the time, the mortality rate was moderately high, and those surgeons who could get the best results, the lowest mortality,

Ep. 9 — A teenager suffers his small-town’s wrath and scorn when his house burns down. He grows up to become a privacy and cybersecurity lawyer with a passion to protect victims of bullying, both by countries and criminals

Bryan Cunningham will never forget the day his Norman Rockwellian childhood in a small town in Ohio came to a cruel end. It was the day when the family’s small wooden rectory burned to the ground and he was falsely accused of causing the fire. 

Cunningham shares the trauma of the ensuing bullying and excoriation by the town’s small-minded residents. A trauma that he overcame when he stumbled upon his love and talent for playing drums. He talks about how becoming a professional drummer from age 14 on up helped him regain his confidence and pride and helped him pay his way through college.

Even as music helped him restored his self-confidence, Cunningham says the most important career development move he made was the two years he spent in the Iowa Fiction Writer’s Workshop, which gave him lifelong skills and confidence in writing and helped him throughout his career in government, law, and academia. 

Cunningham examines how the life-altering crisis over the house fire deepened his empathy for victims and shaped his career as a privacy and cybersecurity lawyer. He reflects on the dangerous trends in cybersecurity warfare and the implications for governments and citizens around the world. And he shares some valuable advice on how to protect oneself against cyberattacks.

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Chitra:   Hello and welcome to When It Mattered. I'm Chitra Ragavan. On this episode we will be talking to Bryan Cunningham. He's an international advisor to companies and governments about cyber security law and policy, emerging technology, surveillance and privacy issues. As a senior CIA officer and federal prosecutor, Cunningham worked closely with the 9/11 Commission and provided legal advice to the President, National Security Advisor, and the National Security Council in the Bush and Clinton administrations. He was a principal contributor to the first national strategy to secure cyberspace. Bryan, welcome to the podcast.

Bryan:   Thank you. Thank you for that generous introduction. Another way to think about that as I can't hold a job.

Chitra:   Well, you have been a globetrotter for the past decade as an international man of mystery and cyber security expert. I usually catch you at airports between flights, but where are your roots?

Bryan:   They could not be more Norman Rockwell. I grew up in a small town in northern Ohio population 12,000, give or take. My father was an Episcopal minister in this little town and my mom was the librarian. So it was very Norman Rockwell. But as behind every Norman Rockwell painting, there was a lot of undercurrent that was happening in the town. There's actually a novel by Sherwood Anderson called, Winesberg Ohio, which a lot of folks read in middle school and it tells the behind the scenes story of one of the small towns and all the crazy stuff that was going on and that real town was about 30 miles away from the town I grew up in. It's not actually called Winesberg, but the book is fairly accurate about the kind of emotional and small-minded stuff that goes on in those little towns.

Bryan:   And I was a bit of a victim of that when I was about 12 or 13, we lived in a wooden house rectory provided by the church and my dad was somewhat controversial. He had a large parish in Cleveland a few years before this, invited Dr. King to speak from the sanctuary and he didn't get the permission of his boss at this very white, very conservative church and so he suffered a lot of repercussions for that. And eventually, the Bishop sent him to the small town in Ohio, where he continued with his agitation for race rights as the locals would have called it, his agitation.

Bryan:   So there was a lot of scrutiny on him in this small town. And when I was 12 or 13,

Ep. 8 — An award-winning reporter struggles with balancing a demanding job and managing a family crisis and learns the true meaning of duty and family / Nina Totenberg, Legal Affairs Correspondent, National Public Radio (NPR)

In this episode, NPR’s Nina Totenberg confesses that her youthful admiration for teen fictional detective Nancy Drew played a formative role in pursuing journalism as a career in an era when female reporters were a rarity. Totenberg reveals how she broke free from the confines of fashion and wedding news reporting via press releases and became one of the most acclaimed and celebrated legal reporters in the country. And she compares the challenges she and other working women of her generation faced to how women are handling sexual harassment today in light of the #MeToo movement.

Totenberg describes what it’s like to have covered the U.S. Supreme Court for decades, and she reads the tea leaves on where this increasingly conservative court may be heading in the coming months. And she walks us through her difficult days holding down a high-profile job and taking care of her late first husband, Senator Floyd Haskell (D-Colorado), after he suffered a serious head injury from a fall and battled for his life for months in an intensive care unit.

Totenberg shares with us the advice that Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg gave her to help her through those trying times. And she talks about her own survival from a snorkeling accident when she was hit by a power boat during her honeymoon with her second husband, who just happened to be a trauma surgeon. Through these crises, Totenberg reveals how she came to have a renewed appreciation for friends and family and the importance of duty in life’s journey.

Last but not least, Totenberg ends the conversation with a heartwarming anecdote about her virtuoso violinist father Roman Totenberg’s stolen Stradivarius.

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Chitra Ragavan:   Hello, and welcome to When It Mattered. I'm Chitra Ragavan. On this episode, we will be talking to Nina Totenberg, National Public Radio's award-winning legal affairs correspondent. Totenberg's coverage of the Supreme Court and legal affairs have won her widespread recognition and acclaim and earned many awards. She's often featured in Supreme Court documentaries, most recently in RBG. As Newsweek put it, quote, "The mainstays of NPR are Morning Edition and All Things Considered. But the créme del la créme is Nina Totenberg." Nina, welcome to the podcast.

Nina Totenberg:   It's my pleasure, Chitra.

Chitra Ragavan:   What was your path to becoming a reporter?

Nina Totenberg:   Well, when I was a girl, really a girl girl, I was a great fan of Nancy Drew, and Nancy could do everything. And, of course, she had no mother. Her mother was dead, so she didn't even have to compete for her father's affections. And she had a boyfriend, Ned, and a roadster, and she solved all kinds of mysteries and could do a jackknife dive. And I wanted to be Nancy Drew, and I thought the mystery part was something that I could do. And so I think that that made me, at first, interested in journalism.

Nina Totenberg:   And then later, when I was teenager, I read Theodore White's, The Making of a President, 1960, and I thought, "That's really what I want to do. I want to be ... " The elegant way of saying it is, "A witness to history." The inelegant way of saying it is, "I want to be a gossip," in the most regal sense. I mean, my colleague, Cokie Roberts, often says that, "Historians get it wrong. They make it boring." But history is gossip. It's what's going on and the story behind the story as well as the story in front of the story. And that's what I wanted to do from the age of about 16 on.

Chitra Ragavan:   So how did you go from being a fan of Nancy Drew to actually becoming a real reporter?

Nina Totenberg:   Well, it was very difficult when I started out because people just told you they didn't hire women or,...

Ep. 7 — A pudgy British youth gives up a life of wealth and privilege to enlist for a punishing stint in the U.S. Special Forces / James Boyd, CEO and Co-Founder of Adyton

In this episode, software entrepreneur James Boyd describes how he spent his childhood cocooned in wealth and privilege, frittering his time away in expensive schools and shuttling between homes in London and California. But the September 11, 2001 attacks happened on Boyd’s first week at Stanford University and shocked him out of his complacency. Boyd shares how he made the decision to give up his British citizenship and enlist in the U.S. Special Forces. He talks about the rigors of serving in the Army’s elite and demanding Green Beret 18X (18 X-Ray) program and the leadership lessons he learned along the way.

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Chitra:   Hello and welcome to When It Mattered. I'm Chitra Ragavan. On this episode we will be talking to James Boyd. He is CEO and co-founder of the tech startup Adyton. The September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks happened in Boyd's first week at Stanford university and led him upon graduating with honors to enlist in the elite army special forces Green Beret 18 X-ray program. As a Green Beret, Boyd was deployed in multiple counter-terrorism and counterinsurgency operations. James, welcome to the podcast.

James:   Good morning, Chitra.

Chitra:   Good morning. Was there anything in your childhood or youth that showed a predisposition for a physically punishing career like joining the US Special Forces?

James:   I think it would be the absolute opposite. When I think back to my 11 year old self, I was frankly a rich kid living a comfortable life, going to a good school, and I spent a little bit more time eating pizza and eating candy and watching TV than I probably should have. And I think my parents, they tried to get me to go get some exercise. They tried to get me to stop playing around with the computer. And it was definitely, it was a comfortable lifestyle for an 11 year old to just have toys and games and all the candy you could want.

Chitra:   I imagine you weren't particularly physically fit either.

James:   No, absolutely not. I was a little bit pudgy as an 11 year old. in fact, I think I remember my dad had asked one of my teachers, he's like, "Hey, is this going to burn off at some point?" And he would take me on cycling trips. And so there was this sort of a push to try and get a little bit more exercise as a pudgy 11 year old.

Chitra:   So what happened next?

James:   Well, I remember at one point I was going through this great school. It was a feeder into one of the top high schools in the country, and you're around a whole bunch of other smart kids, and it was very competitive to get into it. But I was coasting, we had all of these fantastic courses available to us, study Latin and Greek and things like that. And I was kind of shooting for about middle of the road on things, getting fairly average to below average scores. And one day my mother saw my report card and she was absolutely livid and she told me that if you aim for 70 you're going to get a 60 and she threw me out of the house. And this was before school. So I remember sitting on the steps of my house in London at 11 years old. I have been told that what I was doing was not good enough. I sort of wondered what I'm supposed to do next. And that was a very, very visceral moment that let me know that I was wasting what was in front of me.

Chitra:   And you were living in London, but you had dual homes, you had a wealthy lifestyle. Your mom was American, your dad British. So you were going between countries, between homes, and it was just amazing till you had that realization.

James:   Absolutely. I think my parents had met in California and so we actually had a house in California and a house in London, and able to spend vacations in California and there was nothing that we wanted for.

Ep. 6 —  A martial arts competition goes awry in Thailand and teaches this polymath a lesson for life  / Dr. Shawna Pandya, Physician, Citizen-Scientist Astronaut & Aquanaut, and Martial Artist 

In this episode, Canadian physician, Dr. Shawna Pandya, describes how she combined her childhood passion for space and medicine into a unique and rewarding career as a citizen-scientist astronaut and aquanaut.

Dr. Pandya talks about what it takes to be a polymath and near-superhuman and excel in multiple fields.

And she describes the rigor and rewards of becoming a Black Belt in Taekwondo and shares an invaluable lesson from competing in an amateur Thai boxing/martial arts competition in Phuket, Thailand.

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Chitra:   Hello, and welcome to When It Mattered. I'm your host, Chitra Ragavan. On this episode we will be talking to Dr. Shawna Pandya. She's a Canadian physician, citizen scientist, astronaut and aquanaut, and pilot in training. She's a martial artist with a black belt in Tae Kwon Do, and she also practices the Thai martial arts, Muay Thai. Dr. Pandya currently serves as the life sciences team lead for the Association of Space Flight Professionals, and she's the life sciences chair for the Canadian Space Society. Dr. Pandya holds a bachelor's degree in neuroscience, a master's degree in space studies, and a medical degree. She's licensed as a general practitioner and is an accomplished public speaker. Dr Pandya, welcome to the podcast.

Shawna:   Thank you so much for having me.

Chitra:   I believe you fit the definition of a polymath, one who excels at many things. How old were you when you began to define your goals and ambitions?

Shawna:   I was always an ambitious kid. When I was four, I wanted to be a superhero, or a Transformer, and save the world, and fight crime. And then I realized that that's not something you could actually go to school to do. And so I set my ambitions a little bit lower, and said I'm going to be a billionaire, and I'll be the world's richest person, and use my wealth to solve all the world's problems. And that was when I was seven.

Shawna:   And then I realized that you can't exactly go get a degree in billionaire-ologies. So then I set my sights on the next ambition, which was becoming an astronaut and going to space. And that really set the trap for everything that came next, especially in my adult life as in my professional career. And so everything I did as a child, whether it was what I was reading about my homework assignments, it was all about going to space and becoming an astronaut. And that laid the foundation for my professional life.

Chitra:   You were an avid reader, and you said it caused your mom a little bit of concern.

Shawna:   Yeah, that's a really funny story. So when I was in the second grade, I loved reading. All I would do would be reading. So at recess, regardless of whether it was the middle of winter, or rain or shine, I would just have a book, and I would just read in a corner to the point where my teacher called my mom about it. And one day my mom was listening to a child psychologist on a radio talk show, and they were talking about problems with raising children. And my mom called into this child psychologist, and she said, "My kid reads too much. What do I do about that?" And that was kind of emblematic of the kind of child I was.

Chitra:   Was there a moment when you realized your passion for space?

Shawna:   I think it was always a fixture for me growing up. Some of my fondest memories are camping with my family, going to these beautiful locations, away from city lights. Just seeing the dark night sky and the stars leap out at you. I remember on one camping trip when I was seven, it was the Leonides meteor shower, and all we did was stay up till 2:00 AM watching shooting stars through the sky. And it was just this wonderful moment where you're truly aware of how beautiful, and mysterious,

Ep. 5 — A Dangerous Biker Bar Encounter Teaches a Teenage Musician a Lesson for the Boardroom / Aaron Warner, Founder and CEO, ProCircular

In this episode, Aaron Warner, Founder and CEO of ProCircular describes how he and his teen metal band inadvertently provoked a bunch of drunk bikers to violence with an ill-chosen song. 

Warner shares how the band defused the scary stand-off and how the decision they made in the face of danger taught them an invaluable lesson on what it takes to succeed in the corporate world and in life. 

And he describes what that experience taught him about risk management and how it has helped shape his career in cyber security.

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Chitra:    Hello and welcome to When it Mattered. I'm your host, Chitra Ragavan. I'm also the founder and CEO of Goodstory Consulting, an advisory firm helping technology startups find their narrative.

Chitra:   On this weekly podcast, we invite leaders from around the world to share one personal story that changed the course of their life and work and how they lead and deal with adversity.

Chitra:   Through these stories, we take you behind the scenes to get an inside perspective of some of the most eventful moments of our time.

Chitra:   On this episode we will be talking to Aaron Warner, the Founder and CEO of ProCircular. The Iowa-based cyber security firm helps companies confidently manage their cybersecurity risks. Aaron started ProCircular after a 22-year background as a CIO and CTO in the biotech world.

Chitra:   Aaron, welcome to the podcast.

Aaron:   Thank you, Chitra.

Chitra:   You have a really fun job. Basically, companies pay you to hack into their systems so that you can show them the holes in their security fabric and then you help patch up those holes. It's a bit of an edgy counterculture type of job. How did you get into it?

Aaron:   That's a good question, Chitra. I actually come from a very academic family. There are a number of different people in our family that have PhDs and this, that and the other thing.

Aaron:   My grandfather actually was one of the people who was involved in creating standardized testing at the University of Iowa, so the work that they did led to things like the SAT and the ACT.

Aaron:   I actually went sort of a different direction. I spent a lot of time as a kid on my Commodore 64. I never really went the academic direction. In fact, the fact that I don't have my doctorate, my grandfather sort of went to his grave disappointed about.

Aaron:   I was always interested in computing. I'm always interested in music. Ended up in high school playing in a metal band, actually. Found ourselves as the sort of house band for a biker bar before bikers were all lawyers and hedge fund managers. It led to some really interesting situations. I learned a lot from some of those experiences.

Chitra:   Tell us about, what was your band called, first of all, and what were some of the experiences you had, and what convinced you to create a metal band of all things?

Aaron:   The naming of the band actually was one of the things that I've carried into business world and that's a really bad name, if you don't think it through, can follow you for the rest of your career.

Aaron:   So our band was called Noise Ordinance. The group actually went a variety of different directions. My guitar player's now the president at a global biotech firm, drummer is a professor of optometry, other guitar player works for a fairly large food organization on the East Coast, and our bass player went on to the Marines and then ended up working in the defense intelligence world. So they're pretty nontraditional approach, our band.

Aaron:   So Noise Ordinance, we were this house band at a bar in a very small town in Riverside, Iowa, called the Iron Horse. The first night that we played, I was 16 years old. I don't know what my parents were thinking,

Ep. 4 — A Single Dad’s Quest for Parenting Advice Positions him to Expose Russian Interference in U.S. Elections / Jonathon Morgan, CEO and Co-Founder, New Knowledge

In this episode, Jonathon Morgan, CEO and Co-Founder of New Knowledge describes how the social media skills he acquired as a young single dad on the quest for parenting advice and online community gave him the skills and tools 15 years later to uncover the Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. Presidential elections. 

Morgan talks about the difficult period in his life when he and his cyber security company were accused — he says mischaracterized — of using social media manipulation tactics similar to the Russians, to influence 650,000 likely voters in an Alabama Senate election to vote in favor of the democratic candidate. And he shares what that experience taught him about leadership. 

And Morgan looks at what it will take for society to move from what he describes as online mob rule towards an authentic Internet and the price society will pay if we fail in those efforts.

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Chitra:   Hello and welcome to When it Mattered. I'm your host, Chitra Ragavan. I'm also the founder and CEO of Good Story Consulting an advisory firm helping technology startups find their narrative. On this weekly podcast, we invite leaders from around the world to share one personal story that changed the course of their life and work and how they lead and deal with adversity. Through these stories, we take you behind the scenes to get an inside perspective of some of the most eventful moments of our time.

Chitra:   On this episode, we will be talking to Jonathon Morgan. He is CEO and co-founder of New Knowledge, one of the first organizations outside the US intelligence community to identify Russia systematic campaign to influence the 2016 presidential election a social media and counter terrorism expert. Jonathon has advised the State Department and Congress and he and his team produced the Senate intelligence committees extensive report that revealed the scope of Russia's effort to sway the 2016 elections. Jonathon, welcome to the podcast.

Jonathon:   Thanks so much for having me. Excited to be here.

Chitra:   Tell us a little bit more about yourself and how you first became involved in social media and understanding its importance.

Jonathon:   Well, I mean I guess it goes back kind of a long way. So when I, I lived outside the US when I was younger, especially in high school. And one of the ways that I stayed in touch with all the friends that I had back home was this was the early days. So this was AOL Instant Messenger and it was kind of like a social network at the time. And it really got me into, I don't know, just how much personal connection people could make online and then got into coding and building websites and it's kind of really early days. I was a super geeky. I mean this was almost 20 years ago now, and then I think ultimately I thought my career was going to go a different direction, but kind of stumbled back into social media in the early days of online communities. Like just kind of pre Twitter to properly date myself in early adulthood, kind of right after I'd had a had a baby.

Chitra:   So how old were you then?

Jonathon:   Well, so it would have been 21 which was daunting at the time, and actually I think that was, that was a big part of it. I think that's why, again, I was kind of in a weird situation where I had a kid at a really young age. For me anyway, very unexpected, it was an odd time. I think now it's pretty commonplace for young parents to retain some sense of their identity that's like outside of being a parent. There was that whole, you know, hipster parenting movement 10 years ago. And so now it's kind of normal. But I think at the time it was, it still felt to me like the only model that I had for parenting was, was my parents, which again, at 21 felt really weird.

Ep. 3 — A Home Invasion Trauma Leads to a Law Enforcement Career / James Comey, Former Director, Federal Bureau of Investigation

In this episode, James Comey describes how, as a high school senior, he and his brother were held at gunpoint in their New Jersey home by a serial rapist and robber and how that confrontation with death ultimately influenced his decision to go into law enforcement. 

Comey talks about how attending a bail hearing in a Mafia case as a young law clerk in New York convinced him to become a federal prosecutor and help bring down some of the most powerful Mafia families in Gotham. 

He then shares stories of how his experience in dealing with the Mafia helped him understand and deal with President Donald Trump. Comey has testified under oath that Trump first sought to secure his blind loyalty, and when Comey refused, fired him as the FBI Director in an attempt to shut down the Bureau’s investigation into the Russian interference in the 2016 Democratic election. 

Comey also shares his views on the Special Counsel’s final report on the Russian interference. He discusses his handling of the Hillary Clinton email investigation, which many attribute to Clinton’s loss in the 2016 Presidential race. And he describes how he learned the greatest leadership in life from a personal tragedy.

Transcript

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Chitra:   Hello and welcome to When It Mattered. I'm your host Chitra Ragavan. I'm also the founder and CEO of Goodstory Consulting, an advisory firm helping technology startups find their narrative. On this weekly podcast we invite leaders from around the world to share one personal story that changed the course of their life and work, and how they lead and deal with adversity. Through these stories, we take you behind the scenes to get an inside perspective of some of the most eventful moments of our time.

Chitra:   On this episode, we will be talking to James B. Comey. He has spent four decades in law as a federal prosecutor, a business lawyer, and working closely with three US Presidents. We served as Deputy Attorney General under President George W. Bush. In September 2013, President Barack Obama appointed Comey as the seventh director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. In that role, Comey came under fire for his handling of the bureau's investigation into the Hillary Clinton email controversy in the lead-up to the 2016 US elections. Comey's 10 year term was cut short in May 2017 when President Donald Trump summarily fired him as the FBI Director. Statements from the president and the White House indicated that the firing was intended to ease the pressure over the FBI's investigation of the Russian interference in the 2016 US elections. Comey currently teaches ethical leadership at William & Mary College and is the author of the book Higher Loyalty. Jim, welcome to the podcast.

James:   It's great to be with you, Chitra.

Chitra:   Tell us a little bit about your background and how you got into law and law enforcement.

James:   Well, I was a science focused kid in high school and thought that I would become a doctor. Looking back through the lens of now as an old person, I think an event that happened to me as a senior in high school steered me in a way that even I couldn't see at the time. A serial rapist and robber kicked in my parent's front door one night at their home in Northern New Jersey and ended up in a terrifying evening holding me and my brother captive. We escaped, he caught us again, and at least twice during that night I thought he was going to kill us, and that had an enormous effect on me. It helped give me some perspective on life that was useful, as painful as it was, and I think again, without me even knowing, it steered me in a way towards law enforcement and thinking about what victims experienced. I still thought I was going to be a doctor, and then figured out that wasn't for me late in my college career about three years later.