Project Candor: Ordinary People. Unexpected Stories

"Every independent reader is the result of a visionary educator who refused to give up on a child." 

— Delia Peruyera 

Episode Summary
Delia Peruyera arrived in the United States from Cuba as a teenager who couldn't reliably read a sign — letters jumping and reversing, compounded by a visual tremor she carries to this day. What followed was a 37-year career inside Miami-Dade classrooms, the last seven of whi...

“Nobody cares what you know, until they know you care.”  — Eric W. Hommel 

Episode Summary 
Eric Hommel doesn’t sound like a man who spent thirty years in uniform guarding his own reputation — and that’s the point. A Cold War Navy submariner turned Air Force lieutenant colonel, he commanded a Provincial Reconstruction Team in Afghanistan’s Panjshir province, where the job w...

"A man does not lose his life all at once. He loses it every time he calls the truth inconvenient and chooses the warm lie instead." — Arky Jones

Episode Summary
Arky Jones has spent most of his life doing what most people avoid — looking closely at himself and asking hard questions about why people think, react, and live the way they do. That curiosity led him to build PersonalityPeek, a platform that blend...

"The Cheat Code of life is finding Order in Chaos." - Lee Freeburg 

Episode Summary
Lee Freeburg spent eight years as a Navy Corpsman — embedded with Marines, deployed to Iraq, trained to keep people alive in the field when there's no clinic to run to. He came home with his body intact. What followed was quieter and harder: seven years of drift. No mission. No structure. No one to tell him what to do next. 

 ...

"Rejection is monotonous and solitary. Acceptance is to be sung in the streets and infinitely echoed." — Nicole Zwolinski

Episode Summary
Nicole Zwolinski has wanted to be a writer since before she could read — she'd memorize stories and announce that she was reading. But life, geography, and motherhood took turns pulling her away from the page. On this Ship's Log, she traces the path from a Minnesota girl f...

"The unique role of the CEO is facilitating the creation, communication, and enforcement of a widely held purpose, vision, values, and strategic intent for the organization. All else can and should be delegated."  — Robert White 

Episode Summary
Robert White calls himself an average man. He's also the founder of three companies that have trained 1.4 million people across more than a dozen countries, a mentor to e...

“Does your story serve your future?” — Kristen Crabtree

Episode Summary
After 22 years in a psychologically abusive marriage, Kristen Crabtree did the thing most people only talk about — she left. Not with a plan, not with a strategy, not with clarity. On her bathroom floor in the middle of a panic attack, with the bear behind her finally scarier than the abyss in front of her. In this episode she...

"Most people don't fail because they're doing too little... They fail because they're doing too much of what doesn't actually move the needle." 

- Amy Lenius 

Episode Summary 

Amy Lenius didn't set out to become a personal development coach. She became one because, for years, no one could tell her what was wrong with her own body. Growing up with endometriosis before the internet existed, she navigated years of pain, di...

“I have never regretted going into an interaction with a victim, informant, or criminal, and employing curiosity.” — Eric Robinson 

Episode Summary 
For 12 years, Eric Robinson stood in a pulpit. For the next 24, he carried a badge. In this episode he tells Jeanne how a Baptist pastor from western New York walked into the FBI Academy having never held a gun — and spent the next two and a half dec...

“Plant seeds, wherever you can, that will grow into trees that you will never sit under.” — Andrew Brummer

Episode Summary:
Andrew Brummer grew up in South Africa knowing early that the world wasn’t going to hand him anything. Born with a medical anomaly that set him apart, he learned from his mother that he couldn’t change what he looked like—but he could decide, every single day, who ...

"The greatest good you can do for another is not to share with him your riches, but to reveal to him his own."  — Benjamin Disraeli 

Episode Summary 

David Ask has lived several lives at once — and somehow they all rhyme. He's a Nashville inventor who, with his brother-in-law, built the world's first thermostat guard, StatGuard Plus, now carried in more than 3,700 Home Depot and Lowe's stores — and he...

“Somewhere between surviving and achieving, you forgot you were born sacred. Your soul has been waiting in the stillness of your heart for you to remember.” 

Episode Summary 

Sharon Madsen has spent 30 years doing work that's hard to put on a business card. She's a regulated health professional, a Reiki Master Teacher, and a self-described psychic medium — and the people who find her are usually the ones w...

“Through mindful touch, we reconnect and restore our wholeness and health.” — Dr. Greg Yuen 

Episode Summary 

When Dr. Greg Yuen was twelve, his grandmother died — and at the funeral, placing paper money on her coffin and touching her pillow to say goodbye, he was hit by the realization that one day he would die too. He handled the fear the way a kid does (a lot of Snickers bars) and made himself a p...

“Home is where the bike is!” — Chris Donaldson 

Episode Summary 

In 1979 a 21-year-old Chris Donaldson pointed a café-racing Moto Guzzi out of Belfast—a city of checkpoints and bomb scares, where his family’s furniture shop got blown up on the regular—and aimed it at Australia. He never got there. The Iranian revolution closed his road east, and what was meant to be a four-month, 10,000-m...

“Don’t limit yourself with your past experiences. Every challenge is happening for you, not to you. Each experience carries a life lesson, once you’ve learned it, it’s served its purpose.”  — Joanna Zhang 

Episode Summary 

Joanna Zhang didn’t set out to become a consultant. As a self-employed financial planner drowning in back-office work, she cycled through virtual assistant a...

Pets don’t respond to titles; they respond to consistency. Turns out, people aren’t much different.” — Andy Neillie 

Episode Summary 

Dr. Andy Neillie has a doctorate, a bestselling book, and five million frequent-flyer miles spent coaching leaders across Fortune 500 firms — but he’ll be the first to tell you his real education came from a string of rescued dogs. In this conversation, And...

"Live in such a way that you would not be embarrassed to sell your parrot to the town gossip." 

 EPISODE SUMMARY 

Jim Sabellico built businesses at a level most people only read about — seven figures, eight figures, the cars, the house, the bank account. Then one night he came home late to find his son's birthday cake already half gone. His six-year-old wasn't devastated. He wasn't even surprised. That was just n...

“Do it right or don’t do it at all.” 

- Dr. Alphonso Buie

Episode Summary

Becoming an interior designer “wasn’t on my bingo card,” Alphonso Buie says. Yet here he is in his 40s, building a new career in Atlanta, running Place of Peace, and loving it.

The name came from his grandmother, who always told him that a home should be a place of peace—“and if it’s not, you need...

Guest Quote

“Some men see things as they are, and say why. I dream of things that never were, and say why not.”

(Originally attributed to George Bernard Shaw; frequently cited by Senator Robert Kennedy. Ken received this quote inscribed on a glass paperweight from Senator Edward Kennedy following his Senate testimony.)

Episode Summary

In 1970, Ken Kunken was a junior at Cornell University, studying engineering and playing l...