With Hat and Cattle

You can spend years chasing success without ever stopping to ask a surprisingly important question: Whose definition of success am I using?

This month, host Dani Raschel Chou, Nicki Ketcham, and Wes Hoblit brought three very different books to the With Hat and Cattle table: Robert Cialdini’s Influence, Dan Sullivan and Dr. Benjamin Hardy’s The Gap and The Gain, and Tim Powers’ supernatural pirate novel On Stranger Tides.

Somehow, they all led to the same place.

How much of your life is being shaped by other people?

Dani digs into the psychology of persuasion, including why liking someone can make you more likely to believe them, buy from them, or give their ideas more credibility.

Nicki challenges the way high achievers measure progress. If your definition of success keeps moving every time you get closer to it, you may be accomplishing a lot while still convincing yourself you’re behind.

And Wes brings pirates into the conversation with a character who leaves home expecting one life and gradually becomes someone completely different.

Together, the books raise a bigger question: Can you want more for yourself while still appreciating how far you’ve already come?

They also get into social comparison, first impressions, ambition, personal standards, failure, persuasion, identity, targeted advertising, second refrigerators, Tupperware parties, and whether you’d rather be a samurai, pirate, or cowboy.

You do not need to have read any of the books.

But if you’re ambitious, in transition, questioning what comes next, or tired of measuring your life against everybody else’s highlight reel, there’s something at this table for you.

And to quote previous guest Dallas Cothrum: "Don't Let Someone Else Grade Your Paper."

CHAPTERS

00:00 Pirates, persuasion, and success
01:20 Meet Nicki and Wes
02:12 On Stranger Tides: Why Wes chose fiction
06:35 The Gap and The Gain: Why Nicki picked it up
08:35 Influence: Why Dani finally read Cialdini
11:00 Why liking someone changes our decisions
13:30 The problem with fighting emotion using facts
16:00 Tupperware parties and the psychology of selling
18:30 Appearance, attractiveness, and first impressions
24:20 Measure backward, not against an imaginary future
27:30 The hour before bed that Nicki can’t stop thinking about
30:20 Stop borrowing other people’s definitions of success
35:20 When “find the gain” goes too far
37:20 Recognizing progress without lowering expectations
40:00 What a pirate novel teaches about changing your life
43:00 Permission to become someone different
46:15 When fiction sends Wes down a history rabbit hole
48:15 Why we root for pirates, cowboys, and outlaws
51:00 When a driven person suddenly stops
57:00 The surprising idea connecting all three books
58:15 Does understanding influence give you more freedom?
1:00:30 What the books taught us about human nature
1:02:10 Who should read each book
1:04:00 What’s on our nightstands next
1:05:25 Don’t let somebody else grade your paper

That's the With Hat and Cattle promise: Bringing you stories from people who walk the walk and leave you better off for listening.

Connect with Dani Raschel Chou on Instagram @withhatandcattle or via email at [email protected]. 

Subscribe to our YouTube channel for more conversations that leave you better off for listening: With Hat and Cattle I Hosted by Dani Raschel Chou - YouTube! 

Go to www.withhatandcattle.com to sign up for our mailing list so you don't miss weekly insights. Be sure to check out our affiliate links!

Sharon Flatte once walked into one of Dallas’ best-known tattoo shops looking for work. The owner told her he didn’t hire women.

Two years later, she owned the shop.

But that might not even be the most important part of Sharon’s story.

Sharon built her career without a business degree or a carefully mapped-out plan. She and her husband learned as they went, eventually building multiple tattoo shops and becoming part of the fabric of Deep Ellum.

Then her husband died, and the business they had built together became hers to carry forward.

People expected her to fail. Did she? No, she kept going.

In this conversation, Sharon talks with host Dani Raschel Chou about teaching herself business, navigating Dallas regulations as an industry changed around her, learning the value of relationships before she knew she would need them, recognizing talent other people overlooked, giving up micromanagement, surviving mistakes, and leading through enormous personal loss.

There’s a lesson here for anyone who has ever wondered whether they’re qualified enough for the next thing.

Sharon didn’t wait until she had all the answers. She learned the answers because the work required them.

And perhaps her most important business lesson has nothing to do with tattooing at all: Culture is something people can feel.

For more than 30 years, Taboo Tattoo has remained in the same Deep Ellum location. Sharon says it was built on love, and that belief shaped the people she hired, the customers who returned, the artists she mentored and the business that survived.

Whether you lead a company, manage a team, are building something of your own or are trying to figure out what comes next, this is a conversation about trusting yourself enough to keep becoming the person the moment requires.

Chapters

00:00 “I don’t hire females to tattoo for me”

00:41 Why we’re replaying this one

01:26 Same show, same table, new name

03:32 35 years, and the only thing she’s ever done

04:11 Her dad’s black panther, and a piece of Juicy Fruit

06:36 “Let’s do it. We’ll figure it out as we go.”

07:38 Four shops on Main Street — and then 2006

09:57 “I’m from Dallas, and we don’t do business this way”

12:41 Oklahoma, back when tattooing was still illegal

13:52 Her son’s accident, and letting the shops go

15:21 The shop that wouldn’t hire her

18:21 Business school, by way of the Dummies books

19:23 The secret plan she walked in on

22:14 Her mother’s GED

24:00 The kids who were her why

26:49 The right people on the bus

28:15 “I wanna talk to you first”

32:55 The night they locked eyes

35:07 The psychic’s cassette tape

38:49 The $100 tattoo she ran out on

43:13 “I just outlasted them”

45:05 “Taboo was built on love”

46:44 About that book club episode

That's the With Hat and Cattle promise: Bringing you stories from people who walk the walk and leave you better off for listening.

Connect with Dani Raschel Chou on Instagram @withhatandcattle or via email at [email protected]. 

Subscribe to our YouTube channel for more conversations that leave you better off for listening: With Hat and Cattle I Hosted by Dani Raschel Chou - YouTube! 

Go to www.withhatandcattle.com to sign up for our mailing list so you don't miss weekly insights. Be sure to check out our affiliate links!

What do you do when you can't afford therapy? When host Dani Raschel Chou said that out loud at work, an intern (younger than her, junior to her) knew something she did not: Ask for a clinician who is still accruing supervised hours. The person she found working on hours became her counselor for seven years. It's one of five lessons in this episode, and they all point in the same direction.

With Hat and Cattle is hosted by Dani Raschel Chou, an executive assistant and a strategic communications graduate student at Syracuse University. She started this podcast to help people reach success a little faster by asking the people who had already done it. After more than a year of interviews, she noticed something the show had been teaching her, and this first solo episode is a reflection on that.

Five guests with five lessons but one thing underneath all of them: Nobody gets anywhere alone.

The first comes from Jim Futrell, an amusement park historian and author, and from AJ and Colescott Rubin, AKA the Rubin Brothers, musicians raised on vaudeville. Jim's parents thought his fascination with amusement parks was an unusual hobby and backed it anyway; his father spent family vacation days driving him to parks and coming back for everyone else. The Rubin Brothers were told many times to grow up and pick something serious, but never by their parents, who raised them on the art and the activist artists who came before them. 

The second comes from Dallas Cothrum, owner and CEO of Masterplan Consultants, talking about his son's ambition to pitch in college and the handful of things inside his control. On tape he builds the line himself and then says, “that's a pretty good line.” And it's this: People spend a lot of time making excuses instead of making progress. 

The third comes from Chaplain John Betz, who joined the With Hat and Cattle AI panel. The panel covered disruption across history, like the printing press, industrialization, the internet, artificial intelligence, but he reframed the danger. The question is not whether machines get more capable, because they will. It is whether people lose clarity about what it means to be human. 

The fourth comes from Mike Nurre, a business broker and the unofficial mayor of Casa View in East Dallas, a title given to him by the neighborhood he helped organize. His line is the sharpest in the Episode: everybody wants a village, but nobody wants to be a villager. Dani unpacks what a villager actually does through her run club, where somebody has to load water jugs into a car and drive them out to the mile markers before anyone runs a step in a Texas summer. Community isn't something you find. It's something you help maintain.

The fifth comes from Heath Hilliard, founder and CEO of EQHR Consultants, telling the story of the high-value sales call his mentor disqualified him from for showing up dressed for a club. The leadership principle underneath it: Recognize the good someone already brings, then identify the missing good and help them develop it.

Listen today to level up your success!

Mentioned in this episode: Jim Futrell, the Rubin Brothers, Dallas Cothrum and Masterplan Consultants, Chaplain John Betz, Mike Nurre and Casa View, Heath Hilliard and EQHR Consultants, Darin Newbold, Nicolle “Nicki” Ketcham, the City of Arlington, Stephen King, the Enneagram, The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, and Influence by Robert Cialdini.

FIND THE GUESTS

•  Jim Futrell — amusement park historian and author — Find His Books on Amazon

•  AJ and Colescott Rubin, the Rubin Brothers — musicians and vaudevillians — Rubin Brothers | Boston's #1 All-Ages Entertainers & Circus Musicians!

•  Dallas Cothrum — Owner and CEO, Masterplan Consultants, Dallas — Masterplan Consultants | Zoning and Land Use

•  Chaplain John Betz — from the With Hat and Cattle AI panel — The Chaplain's Compass - Podcast - Apple Podcasts

•  Mike Nurre — business broker; the unofficial mayor of Casa View, East Dallas — LinkedIn profile

•  Heath Hilliard — Founder and CEO, EQHR Consultants; ZERORISK assessments — EQHR Consultants

•  Darin K. Newbold — referenced at 20:50 — Your Bold Solutions

•  Nicolle “Nicki” Ketcham — back next week — Small Business Marketing | Big Future Consulting

THE FIVE LESSONS, WRITTEN DOWN

Free PDF: withhatandcattle.com/notalone

FINDING A THERAPIST YOU CAN AFFORD

•  Ask for an associate, pre-licensed clinician, or intern (someone accruing supervised hours). In Texas, LPC-Associate or LMFT-Associate. Supervised, real, and a fraction of a full private rate.

•  Open Path Psychotherapy Collective — sessions run roughly $40–$70 after a one-time membership fee, for households earning under about $100,000 a year. openpathcollective.org

•  A university training clinic in your area.

•  Your county's community mental health center.

•  Your employer's EAP.

This is one person's experience, not medical advice. This episode also includes a personal discussion of depression; if you are struggling, the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline is available 24/7 by call or text in the US.

DISCLOSURE

Heath Hilliard is a friend of the show. He ran my ZERORISK assessment at no charge, and I may earn a commission if you take one.

CHAPTER LIST

0:00   Welcome, and what I thought this chair would teach me

1:15   Lesson 1: Don't be the first person to call a kid's dream ridiculous

1:30   Jim Futrell: the vacation days his father spent driving

2:25   The Rubin Brothers: raised on their parents' and grandparents' media

3:15   A silly obsession at 10 becomes the vocation at 50

5:30   Lesson 2: Stop making excuses, make progress

5:40   Dallas Cothrum on what his son can actually control

6:40   When a legitimate explanation becomes an excuse

7:10   “I probably should be in therapy. I just couldn't afford it.”

7:35   What an associate or pre-licensed clinician actually is

7:55   University clinics, community mental health, and the EAP you've never used

9:20   Lesson 3: When the world changes, don't surrender your humanity

9:40   Chaplain John Betz: love your neighbor

11:15  Enneagram 4, and the sophisticated answer that isn't sophisticated

12:15  Lesson 4: If you want a village, be a villager

12:25  Mike Nurre, the unofficial mayor of Casa View

13:05  Pizza party behavior

14:15  Water jugs, barbecue, and what run club taught me

16:10  Lesson 5: See the good, then bring the missing good

16:45  The sales call Heath Hilliard got disqualified from

18:50  Last Friday, and the friend who wouldn't let me decide

20:10  Mentors don't have to be older than you

20:50  Parents protect the dream. Mentors prepare the dreamer.

22:50  Before you go, let's recap

24:15  Subscribe and until next time

That's the With Hat and Cattle promise: Bringing you stories from people who walk the walk and leave you better off for listening.

Connect with Dani Raschel Chou on Instagram @withhatandcattle or via email at [email protected]. 

Subscribe to our YouTube channel for more conversations that leave you better off for listening: With Hat and Cattle I Hosted by Dani Raschel Chou - YouTube! 

Go to www.withhatandcattle.com to sign up for our mailing list so you don't miss weekly insights. Be sure to check out our affiliate links!

What do you do when a surgeon tells you to schedule four joint replacements? Dan Esposito, a former NFL running back diagnosed with fibromyalgia and degenerative arthritis in his early forties, declined all four, spent the next four years reading studies, and is now a two-time USA Track and Field Masters National Champion at 54. This is how he got there.

Dan Esposito did not play a down of football until his senior year of high school. He was a baseball catcher in Florida, third in line behind two prospects, one of whom was Jason Varitek. He moved to Philadelphia to live with his father, went out for the team, was told he was not a tailback, and walked on at Millersville University in Pennsylvania.

Three days before his first game as a junior he was told he had won the starting job. On the morning of the game he was third on the depth chart. After two games without a carry he went to his position coach and said he needed the truth or he was done. The truth was that every coach wanted him starting and the head coach had vetoed it, because he was a walk-on and the two men ahead of him were on scholarship. His answer: "Well, I'm a man of my word." He stayed. The next season, the third game they finally played him, he ran for over 300 yards.

He ran a 4.3 forty at 215 pounds, went undrafted, earned a contract at a free-agent tryout with Washington, and broke his jaw in two places on the first play of his NFL career — running down on the opening kickoff, against Rich Gannon's Kansas City Chiefs. He told nobody and played the rest of the half. He was later signed by the New Orleans Saints after a gumball machine full of mini helmets dropped their logo at a pizza place in 1996, a week before his agent called. A linebacker who could not cover him in practice broke the same jaw again, and that was the end of it. He turned down an offer from a team in Ancona, Italy at 24, and calls it his one regret.

Then the second half of the story. He got into banking, then started an energy brokerage with no experience that became one of Philadelphia's hundred fastest-growing companies two years running, all while eating two pizzas a day, three days a week, in front of a computer. In his early forties came fibromyalgia, then degenerative arthritis. Surgeons told him he would need four joint replacements and that they could not begin until he turned 50, because the implants would degrade and he would have to do it all again. After seeing a skeleton with the hardware in it at a museum body exhibit, he decided against it.

The turn comes three months before his second son was born. At 265 pounds, unable to lift his shoulders, he was standing in a gym thinking that his partner would leave him and he would not be a good father. Then he said out loud: "I'm going to figure this out." He says that saying it aloud is what made it real.

What followed was four years of self-education: podcasts, then the studies behind them, then the biochemistry. He talks about cellular hydration, about sitting in front of near-infrared light and hearing his own body click for the first time, about fasting and enzymes, and about the day he decided that "biochemistry" and "mechanisms of action" were the two most useful phrases available to anyone trying to understand their own health. He now gives away a free Chronic Pain Playbook and a free World's Greatest Shopping List at undu.me, which is the playbook he compiled after his research, and consultants told him to charge $3,000 for it.

Dan is not a doctor and says so in the episode. What he shares is his own experience and his own research, not medical advice. If you live with chronic pain, take it as encouragement to ask better questions and talk to your own physician before changing anything.

Mentioned: Millersville University; Jason Varitek; Rob Thomas and Matchbox Twenty; Rich Gannon and the Kansas City Chiefs; the Washington and New Orleans franchises; the XFL; Ancona, Italy; Dr. Zach Bush; near-infrared light therapy; Undu and undu.me; the Undo Method Chronic Pain Playbook; the World's Greatest Shopping List; and Flexibility Fuel.

CHAPTERS

0:00   "I said it out loud"

0:18   Welcome — who Dan Esposito is

1:05   A catcher in Florida, behind Jason Varitek

2:35   Three high schools, and no football until senior year

3:05   Walking on at Millersville

3:30   "You're the starter" — then third on the depth chart

3:55   The veto: because you're a walk-on

4:35   A role player, and the 300-yard game

5:20   A 4.3 forty and a free-agent tryout

6:05   Rich Gannon, and the first play of his NFL career

6:35   Finding faith halfway through

7:25   "Did the benching fuel you?"

8:15   "I was already fueled inside"

9:20   The half he finished with a broken jaw

10:50   After the injury: DJs, McDonald's, and a body starting to slip

11:25   The gumball machine that picked the Saints

12:20   A punch in practice, and the end of a career

13:55   The one regret: Ancona, Italy

14:25   The pivot — banking, and an energy brokerage

16:25   Two pizzas a day, and limping home

16:55   What we were told to eat, and who told us

18:00   Micros, macros, and being 54

19:20   Fibromyalgia and degenerative arthritis

19:45   Four joint replacements, starting at 50

20:15   The skeleton at the museum

20:35   265 pounds, and what it means to be useful

21:15   The gym, three months before his son was born

22:15   "There's the reel and the title"

22:25   Why he refused the surgeries

22:55   Super glue in the joints

24:10   "Did you have any help along the way?"

25:15   Hydration at the cellular level

25:45   Near-infrared light — and the first click

26:50   Fasting, enzymes, and building a supplement

27:45   "I have a brain and I can read"

28:50   Advice for anyone starting at ground zero

29:50   The playbook he was told to charge $3,000 for

31:55   The World's Greatest Shopping List

34:00   Rice Krispie treats and fat-free everything

34:45   Flexibility Fuel

35:40   A box of sweet potatoes

36:55   The line I'm keeping

That's the With Hat and Cattle promise: Bringing you stories from people who walk the walk and leave you better off for listening.

Connect with Dani Raschel Chou on Instagram @withhatandcattle or via email at [email protected]. 

Subscribe to our YouTube channel for more conversations that leave you better off for listening: With Hat and Cattle I Hosted by Dani Raschel Chou - YouTube! 

Go to www.withhatandcattle.com to sign up for our mailing list so you don't miss weekly insights. Be sure to check out our affiliate links!

TL; DR: Is vibe coding safe to use in a business? Host Dani Raschel Chou asks Dr. Yeshwant Muthusamy, a thirty-year AI veteran with seven U.S. patents, and his answer is yes, with one condition: somebody has to read the code before it ships. Then he tells the story of what happened when nobody did.

Dr. Yeshwant Muthusamy is the owner and principal of Yeshvik Solutions in Allen, Texas, and a fractional Chief AI Officer. He trained his first artificial neural network in 1989, spent thirty years across Texas Instruments, Nokia, Samsung and Immersion Corporation, holds seven U.S. patents, chairs an AI governance working group, and was named a 2025 Dallas Innovates AI 75 honoree. He is also, as it turns out, a gourmet chocolatier.

This episode is part of the With Hat and Cattle AI Literacy Series, and it starts where the hype does not. Dr. Muthusamy has watched artificial intelligence go out of fashion and come back, so he is unusually hard to impress. The refrain he rejects outright is "AI is coming for your jobs." The version he accepts is sharper: the person who learns to use these tools well will take your job if you do not.

The center of the conversation is vibe coding, which is describing what you want in plain English and letting a large language model build the code. He is completely comfortable with the model doing the heavy lifting. He is not comfortable with shipping code nobody has read. He reviews every line his own firm produces, because the client receives something with his company name on it and he knows whose head is on the line if it is wrong.

Then he tells the story of the Tea app: an application built so women could share information about people they had dated, which required every user to upload a selfie holding their driver's license. It was built fast, it was a great advertisement for vibe coding, and the founders never checked the security on the database. Within a week those photographs and driver's licenses were on the dark web. His reaction: "nobody in your start-up company took the time to read the code?" is the argument of the whole episode. Dani takes it a step further, asking what it means for a woman on that platform who was hiding from someone.

From there they get practical. Dr. Muthusamy walks through the EU AI Act and why he leans closer to Europe's approach than to the American appetite for unfettered innovation, covering deepfake labeling, algorithmic bias in hiring, and why model audits are onerous and necessary anyway. Dani asks the question most listeners actually have: if she downloads her health data from her Garmin, is it safe to paste into a chatbot? His rule of thumb is simple enough to use tomorrow: keep any information that can be traced back to a specific person out of the model.

The back half of the episode is his life, or how he earned the right to have the hat and cattle. The Nokia years inside standards bodies, which he describes as a heady mix of politics and technology, learned by shutting up for the first few meetings and watching the room...and which involved far less sightseeing in Nice and Seoul than anyone assumes. The move from corporate to his own practice in 2012. Teaching more than a hundred non-technical business professionals, including a tax advisor in his seventies, fifty years into his career, who is now writing a book with AI. Why so few companies that adopted AI agents have dared to put them into production. And the phrase the episode turns on: humans at the helm, not just in the loop.

It closes on the two things he built that nobody would predict from the résumé: The Blissful Gourmet, a small-batch chocolate business he is deliberately not scaling yet, and his favorite of seven patents, which is about keeping students safe in school parking lots.

The following are mentioned in this episode: Texas Instruments, Nokia, the Khronos Group and the OpenMAX working groups, Samsung, the EU AI Act, the Anthropic fair use ruling, OpenAI and Hugging Face, Descript, Seedance, the Texas Cottage Food Law, UT Dallas, and Paul Byrne, previous guest and author.

Be sure you're subscribed so you don't miss out on future episodes and conversations that help you level up your sucess!

Links:

•     Yeshvik Solutions — AI consulting and training: https://www.yeshvik.com/

•     The Blissful Gourmet — handcrafted chocolate: https://theblissfulgourmet.com/

•     Stop Prompting, Start Delegating: No-Code Agentic AI for Business — Friday, August 28, 2026, in person at The Meeting Place. Register: https://t.ly/sjVA0 

CHAPTERS

0:00  Cold open: nobody read the code

0:25  Welcome, Dr. Yeshwant Muthusamy, Yeshvik Solutions

0:55  Thirty years in AI, and a working distrust of hype

2:55  The hype that makes him roll his eyes

3:05  "AI won't take your job — the person using it will"

4:20  Training a neural network in 1989

5:15  What to expect from a large language model

6:05  Be at the helm of everything you do with it

6:40  Are AI agents still the thing to learn?

7:00  Agents are cool. Do you have a governance framework?

7:15  Seedance, Descript, and an hour of work in seven seconds

9:15  So what is vibe coding, actually?

10:00  Where he has serious problems with it

10:10  Why he reads every line of code himself

12:00  "ChatGPT's a little liar"

12:10  Can you read the code it wrote?

12:20  "You can't build strategy on hope"

12:35  The Tea app: a selfie, a driver's license, and trust

13:40  Shipped fast. Great advertisement for vibe coding.

14:00  A week later, it was all on the dark web

15:00  "Nobody in your startup took the time to read the code?"

15:20  The Rainbow Bridge, and when it stops being abstract

16:15  Is AI governance moving fast enough?

16:40  The EU AI Act vs. the American wild west

18:10  Deepfake labeling and what has to be disclosed

19:00  Bias, audits, and why governance is onerous but needed

20:15  "Does my Garmin data put me at risk?"

20:35  The one rule: keep anything traceable out of the model

22:10  Inside the Nokia standards years

23:00  Khronos, OpenMAX, and who is really in the room

25:00  "A heady mix of politics and technology"

26:45  What IP actually stands for

27:15  Seven patents meets generative AI

28:00  Where the Anthropic fair use ruling landed

29:05  Leaving corporate to start Yeshvik Solutions

30:50  Teaching 100+ non-technical professionals

34:00  The question everyone asks now: "what next?"

34:35  Agentic AI, and why so few have shipped it

35:40  Humans at the helm, not just in the loop

37:00  When OpenAI's models escaped and reached Hugging Face

38:15  The chocolatier: The Blissful Gourmet

39:00  "Creating something from scratch — it's a high"

39:30  The ceiling built into a cottage food business

41:40  Why North Texas and not the Bay Area

42:35  His favorite of the seven patents

43:10  One office action, and Dani's trademark filing

44:20  Safe parking for students, explained

46:10  Thank you

46:45  Outro

That's the With Hat and Cattle promise: Bringing you stories from people who walk the walk and leave you better off for listening.

Connect with Dani Raschel Chou on Instagram @withhatandcattle or via email at [email protected]. 

Subscribe to our YouTube channel for more conversations that leave you better off for listening: With Hat and Cattle I Hosted by Dani Raschel Chou - YouTube! 

Go to www.withhatandcattle.com to sign up for our mailing list so you don't miss weekly insights. Be sure to check out our affiliate links!

Do networking events terrify you? And what do you actually say at a networking event when you don't know anyone? In this episode, host Dani Raschel Chou and Nicolle Ketcham walk through one start to finish what to bring, where your name tag goes, which question to open with instead of “What do you do?”, and how to leave a conversation without apologizing for it.

Nicolle "Nicki" Ketcham, co-founder of Big Future Consulting, helps professional service firms look more polished and communicate their brand online. She is also Dani's best friend, a returning guest, and, by Dani's description, a top-tier connector. This episode came directly from listener response to Ely Delaney's conversation about networking as an introvert, so Dani and Nicki set the usual format aside and built a practical networking 101 out of their own wins and misfires.

They start before you leave the house: what belongs on a business card, why you should print on stock you can write on, and why Nicki never goes anywhere without a pen. They cover the LinkedIn QR code workaround for the day your cards are still in the car, what to do when there's no cell service, and why scanning the guest list and finding the host in the first five minutes changes the whole evening.

In the room, the advice gets specific. Your name tag goes on your right shoulder so the other person's eyes travel up your arm as you shake hands. Your drink goes in your left hand so your right one is dry. Approach the person standing alone — they will be relieved. And stop opening with “So, what do you do?” Nicki's alternatives include “What are you working on that you're excited about?” and her favorite, “Who would be a helpful person for you to meet?” Dani's, when the banter is already good, is “How did you fail this week?”

The middle of the conversation is about listening: asking the follow-up question instead of pivoting to your own story, mirroring as a practiced technique, and Nicki's husband, who never tells anyone a thing about himself and still leaves every party as the most interesting man there. Dani shares a recent event where an introduction went badly enough that she went home, and what she would do differently. Nicki answers with Kacey Musgraves: "You are not everybody's cup of tea."

They close on the exit and the follow-up. Three exit lines that don't require an apology, the 24–48 hour follow-up window, why an obviously AI-generated email undoes the entire evening, and Dani's “human first, AI forward” take on using it well anyway. Nicki's metric for a good event is deliberately small: three real conversations, one helpful introduction, or one person you genuinely want to follow up with.

Items/topics specifically mentioned throughout the conversation: Ely Delaney's episode on networking as an introvert; the Rubin Brothers episode; The Go-Giver by Bob Burg and John David Mann; Dallas Meetup; Chicks with Stix, a women's golf networking event at PGA Frisco; Big Bend; the AEC (architecture, engineering and construction? community in Dallas–Fort Worth; and the North Texas casting call for Frisco King that came out of one compliment at one event.

Chapters

0:00   Cold open: you're already networking

0:15   Why we're doing a networking episode

1:52   There's no wrong way to start

2:26   Run clubs, Gen Z, and the pull toward community

3:34   Introducing yourself when you're brand new

4:11   Nobody remembers but you

4:40   Pre-work: what belongs on your business card

5:49   Carry a pen — and write on the card

7:01   Forgot your cards? The LinkedIn QR trick

7:55   No signal? The workaround

8:33   Scan the guest list, arrive early, find the host

10:02   Name tag on your right — and why

11:51   Drink in your left hand

12:21   Who to approach first

13:34   Working the drink station

14:05   Stop opening with “what do you do?”

15:03   Better questions — including the best one

15:40   “How did you fail this week?”

16:37   Ask the follow-up, don't make it about you

17:53   The best networkers are connectors

18:43   Mirroring — and the party trick

21:23   How to introduce two people

21:54   When someone doesn't want to meet you

23:48   Grace, and not being everybody's cup of tea

26:17   The trip question that opened a door

27:44   The elevator pitch: who do you help?

28:20   Names: using them, and forgetting them

30:32   Eye contact and what people notice

31:23   Three exit lines that don't feel rude

32:30   Follow up in 24–48 hours

33:40   Why AI-generated follow-ups fail

34:44   Three conversations, not thirty

35:12   A compliment, Dallas Meetup, and a casting call

37:57   When networking gives you “the ick”

38:30   Be a go-giver

39:15   Showing up bad at golf

41:28   Phone a friend, and shoot your shot

42:49   Thank you and close

43:35   The takeaways, all in one place 

That's the With Hat and Cattle promise: Bringing you stories from people who walk the walk and leave you better off for listening.

Connect with Dani Raschel Chou on Instagram @withhatandcattle or via email at [email protected]. 

Subscribe to our YouTube channel for more conversations that leave you better off for listening: With Hat and Cattle I Hosted by Dani Raschel Chou - YouTube! 

Go to www.withhatandcattle.com to sign up for our mailing list so you don't miss weekly insights. Be sure to check out our affiliate links!

Episode note: This episode includes a brief reference to sexual assault (~18:00). A content note is included in the audio.

What happens when two brothers from Portland, Oregon decide to build a vaudeville career in the 21st century with no roadmap, no safety net, and "well-meaning" people telling them it won't work?

AJ and Colescott Rubin, known as The Rubin Brothers, are Berklee College of Music alumni, circus musicians, and vaudeville entertainers who juggle, unicycle, and perform acrobatics while playing trumpet and upright bass. They've appeared on American Idol, shared the stage with John Legend, played 24 shows in 19 days in Thailand with one gig booked, and recorded an album on pre-1926 acoustic equipment at one of only two such studios still operating in the world! In fact, Colescott's great-grandfather played with Louis Armstrong in New Orleans on that same technology, 100 years ago.

In this episode, Dani Raschel Chou and co-host Nicolle Ketcham sit down with AJ (23) and Colescott (nearly 30) for one of the most honest conversations With Hat and Cattle has recorded. And through it all, they discuss how to build something real when there's no career ladder to climb, what it looks like when the path breaks down, and how joy can be a discipline rather than a destination.

What you'll take away from this episode:

• On radical self-trust: AJ describes the practice of trusting yourself when the path has no map: "It's radical self-trust, and that is a lesson and is a practice as well."
• On the long way being the short way: Colescott shares a Wayne Shorter quote he's lived by since he was 14: "The long way is the short way." Every time they've doubted their direction, this has been the reset.
• On the hardest chapter: Colescott details the tendonitis that cost him 9–12 months of playing while on a Berklee scholarship, and how being forced to stop led him to tap dance, improv comedy, songwriting, and the front of the stage for the first time. "I had to be just Colescott rather than Colescott the bassist. And it turns out there was a lot more to me than I thought."
• On building a career with no set of directions or blueprints and deciding what's important: AJ shares the Quincy Jones rule they live by: Follow the goosebumps. When Quincy was asked how he chose projects when he had more offers than days in the year, his answer was simple: Trust your intuition.
• On being a fish out of water: "If you feel like you don't fit into your industry, that's not a weakness. That's your leverage. That's your opportunity to bring something that isn't there otherwise." —Colescott
• On nurturing the partnership: They hold monthly communication improvement meetings, and they don't discuss the act. They're discussing the partnership itself. "Make sure you leave time to talk about the partnership, not just what you're doing." This one habit, they say, is what makes collaboration sustainable.

The episode closes with a question Dani and Nicolle crafted for the arc of the show: 100 years from now, when another pair of siblings decides to revive a lost art form, what do you hope they're borrowing from the Rubin Brothers? Colescott's answer says it all. 

Have you been told that your path doesn't make sense? Or making you're taking the safe path and wondering if there's more? Give this a listen today.

─── GUEST LINKS ───

The Rubin Brothers on Instagram: @rubinbrothers

Patreon: patreon.com/rubinbrothers

 ─── WITH HAT AND CATTLE ───

Hosted by Dani Raschel Chou

Co-hosted this episode by Nicolle Ketcham

That's the With Hat and Cattle promise: Bringing you stories from people who walk the walk and leave you better off for listening.

Connect with Dani Raschel Chou on Instagram @withhatandcattle or via email at [email protected]. 

Subscribe to our YouTube channel for more conversations that leave you better off for listening: With Hat and Cattle I Hosted by Dani Raschel Chou - YouTube! 

Go to www.withhatandcattle.com to sign up for our mailing list so you don't miss weekly insights. Be sure to check out our affiliate links!

Can you actually recover from sex and love addiction, and build a life you’re proud of? Host Dani Raschel Chou says yes, and this week she tells her own story of living as a high functioning addict. After years of asking guests to be honest about the hardest parts of their lives, Dani hands the microphone to friend of the show Jeff Mercier and takes the guest seat herself.

Dani Raschel Chou is the host and producer of With Hat and Cattle, a Dallas–Fort Worth podcast built on honest conversations with people who’ve put in the miles. In this episode, she shares that she is a recovering sex and love addict, and explains why that experience is the reason the show exists.

In this conversation: growing up in Freer, Texas, and the 1,200-calorie dieting trap of the ’90s; the high school hallway moment when attention got wired to weight loss; three marriages and the pattern underneath them; the 2012 journal entry that read, “If I don’t change my ways, I’m going to end up dead in a hotel room”, whick finally acknowledged the problem; the therapist who gave the addiction its name; seven years of the real, unglamorous work; co-parenting done right; meeting Bryan; and the bad cup of coffee that proved the work works. 

Told without graphic detail and without a tidy bow.

It’s for anyone who has been told they are “just a” something, anyone carrying a past they think disqualifies them, and anyone who needs to hear that where you have been is not the ceiling on where you can go.

Resources: 

Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous (S.L.A.A.) — free meetings worldwide, slaafws.org. 

National Alliance for Eating Disorders — free therapist-staffed helpline, Mon–Fri 9am–7pm ET, 1-866-662-1235, allianceforeatingdisorders.com. 

In crisis, call or text 988 or chat at 988lifeline.org.

Chapters

00:00 — Cold open: the journal entry

00:30 — A note from Dani before we begin

01:20 — Jeff takes the host chair

04:00 — Freer, Texas: grass and central air

07:00 — Childhood wounds and numbing the void

13:30 — Dieting in the ’90s: the 1,200-calorie trap

15:00 — The hallway: when attention became a drug

16:30 — Married at 18

19:00 — Losing 100 pounds — and the first affair

21:30 — The second marriage and the chat rooms

23:30 — “Dead in a hotel room”: the journal entry, in context

26:00 — Six years, a separation, and a move to Dallas

29:00 — Getting the label: sex and love addiction

30:30 — Where was my kid? Co-parenting done right

32:00 — The third marriage: “I’m battle-tested”

35:00 — Women, shame, and double standards

38:00 — Trading one addiction for another

39:00 — “No, we’re not doing this”

40:30 — The relapse

42:00 — Seven years with the right therapist

43:00 — What I chose not to share

44:00 — 2021: running vs. DoorDash

45:00 — Breaking the pattern

48:00 — Meeting Bryan

48:45 — The knife tattoo: “It’s not your job, it’s mine”

49:30 — The three-minute reset

52:00 — Honest from the first date

53:30 — Faith, grace, and a kinder God

56:00 — We are not prisoners to our past

57:00 — When you can’t make amends

58:45 — The woman at the well

59:30 — Next week: the Rubin Brothers

Guest Host Information

Connect with motivational speaker and DTM Jeffery Mercier on LinkedIn and follow him on Instagram.

Find his episodes on With Hat and Cattle and listen now!

• Building a Personal Brand on Buzzsprout and Spotify
• Framing the Future on Buzzsprout and Spotify

That's the With Hat and Cattle promise: Bringing you stories from people who walk the walk and leave you better off for listening.

Connect with Dani Raschel Chou on Instagram @withhatandcattle or via email at [email protected]. 

Subscribe to our YouTube channel for more conversations that leave you better off for listening: With Hat and Cattle I Hosted by Dani Raschel Chou - YouTube! 

Go to www.withhatandcattle.com to sign up for our mailing list so you don't miss weekly insights. Be sure to check out our affiliate links!

What does an 800-year-old samurai code have to do with your inbox? More than you’d think. In Part 2 of this conversation, marketing strategist Ely Delaney explains how the seven virtues of Bushido shaped both his business and his life, and why respect and kindness are practical skills, not soft ones.

If you're finding us on Part 2, start with Part 1 for networking as an introvert, archery as meditation, and going deep on one skill.

And please note: This episode includes a brief discussion of suicide. If you’re struggling, or worried about someone who is, call or text 988, the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, or chat at 988lifeline.org.

Ely Delaney is a Dallas–Fort Worth email-nurture marketing strategist, the founder of Meet Cool People, and the author of The Seven Virtues of Email Marketing. In Part 2 of his conversation with host Dani Raschel Chou on With Hat and Cattle, the discussion moves from how to connect with people to why it matters.

Ely explains how he found Bushido (the code of the samurai) in 2020, and how its seven virtues, including honesty, integrity, respect, kindness, and loyalty, became the framework for his book and his daily life. He calls it “ancient intelligence, or the other AI,” and argues that Buddhism, Stoicism, and Bushido are all answering the same question: how do you think, speak, and act well? Along the way he shares the three questions he asks before sending any email, why Stoicism teaches you how to react while Bushido teaches you how to act, and how to give someone hard feedback without becoming the jerk in the story.

Dani shares the Google review she left years ago and still hasn’t deleted, and the moment at a World Cup match when someone told her to pick a side, and what she did instead of reacting. The episode closes on purpose, belonging, and Ely’s next project.

Mentioned to help you find us: Bushido and the seven virtues, Stoicism, Dale Carnegie, T. Harv Eker’s Secrets of the Millionaire Mind, and Ely’s Seven Fold Projects. 

This is the With Hat and Cattle Promise: Stories from people who walk the walk and leave you better off for listening.

Chapters:

0:00 Cold open: kindness & respect

1:00 Bushido: the code of the samurai

2:00 You don't have to like someone to respect them

3:00 Ancient intelligence — "the other AI"

4:00 The seven virtues of email marketing

6:00 Why he finally wrote the book

8:00 Halloween announcement to April launch

10:00 The best feedback he's ever gotten

12:00 Which virtue matters most

13:00 Three questions before you hit send

14:00 The samurai's prayer on his wall

16:00 It was never really about email

17:00 The Google review she still hasn't deleted

18:00 Giving hard feedback without being a jerk

20:00 Stoicism reacts, Bushido acts

21:00 Trolls, hecklers, and disagreeing well

26:00 The pause: Dani's World Cup jersey story

29:00 Chaos energy and what stress costs you

32:00 The kitchen table

33:00 What's next: Seven Fold Projects

36:00 On men, belonging, and purpose

37:00 Thank you and close

About the Guest

Ely Delaney is the creator of the Follow Up Rockstar System, helping entrepreneurs build a 24/7 automated system and go from surviving to thriving in any economy.

He’s a three-time Amazon bestseller, including his latest book, "The Follow Up Code: 7 Virtues for Building Trust Through Email" & his programs have over 1424 students globally. 

Connect with him on LinkedIn.

Learn more about him online here.

That's the With Hat and Cattle promise: Bringing you stories from people who walk the walk and leave you better off for listening.

Connect with Dani Raschel Chou on Instagram @withhatandcattle or via email at [email protected]. 

Subscribe to our YouTube channel for more conversations that leave you better off for listening: With Hat and Cattle I Hosted by Dani Raschel Chou - YouTube! 

Go to www.withhatandcattle.com to sign up for our mailing list so you don't miss weekly insights. Be sure to check out our affiliate links!

Can introverts actually be great at networking? Marketing strategist Ely Delaney says yes and proves it. In Part 1 of this conversation, Ely joins Dani Raschel Chou to unpack how to build real business relationships without faking extroversion, why mastering one skill beats dabbling in ten, and how archery became his meditation.

Ely Delaney is your Email Marketing Architect and is also known as "The People Whisperer. He's the creator of The Follow Up Rockstar System, teaching entrepreneurs how to go from surviving to thriving in any economy through the art and science of building strong relationships and following up for LIFE."

He's an Amazon bestseller with his three books "Marketing Tidbits", "Networking Tidbits", and his latest book, "The Follow Up Code: 7 Virtues for Building Trust Through Email".

With a passion for connecting people, his best-selling training course "Networking Like a Rockstar" has over 1,424 students registered globally.

And in Part 1 of this two-part conversation on With Hat and Cattle, host Dani Raschel Chou and Ely dig into the quiet skills that actually build a business: showing up, connecting, and getting deeply good at one thing.

Ely explains how an introvert can work a room by leading with "who can I help?" instead of "who can help me," why he'll spend hours at an event without stepping inside, and why a cold shoulder is never worth taking personally. He shares how archery became a form of meditation, and how becoming the #1 longbow archer in the Northwest mirrors the focus behind his work. Then he and Dani turn to mastery: Jim Rohn's rule to spend five years getting great at one thing, what ghostwriting really means (pulling out your stories, never inventing them), and why "know, like, and trust" only works when loyalty comes with it.

Mentioned in this episode: Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People, Bob Burg's The Go-Giver, and marketing writers Bob Bly and Dan Kennedy. This is Part 1. Part 2 goes deep on the seven virtues Ely built his life and business around, and that's dropping next week.

You can find Ely on LinkedIn and on his site. Listen to his podcast here: Meet Cool People.

And you can also buy his book The Follow Up Code: Seven Virtues for Building Trust Through Email on Amazon today!

With Hat and Cattle: Stories from people who walk the walk, and leave you better off for listening.

That's the With Hat and Cattle promise: Bringing you stories from people who walk the walk and leave you better off for listening.

Connect with Dani Raschel Chou on Instagram @withhatandcattle or via email at [email protected]. 

Subscribe to our YouTube channel for more conversations that leave you better off for listening: With Hat and Cattle I Hosted by Dani Raschel Chou - YouTube! 

Go to www.withhatandcattle.com to sign up for our mailing list so you don't miss weekly insights. Be sure to check out our affiliate links!