Relational Cognition Episodes

Kay Sargent leads neuroinclusive workplace design at HOK and wrote Designing Neuroinclusive Workplaces, the field's first comprehensive guide to sensory processing in the built environment. She explains the six modalities of work, why most open offices fail on execution, and what to change first when you work from home. Wisepreneurs explores how independent professionals turn accumulated expertise into sustainable practice.

Successful independent consulting depends on understanding your expertise and choosing the right consulting role for each engagement. Johanna Rothman, independent consultant since 1994 and author of 21 books including Successful Independent Consulting, uses the Consulting Role Grid from Champion, Kiel and McLendon (1990) to draw a sharp distinction between consultants and contractors: hands-on experts who take no responsibility for client growth are really contractors, not consultants. For experienced professionals building independent practice, this episode maps the practical mechanics of moving from hands-on work to trusted advisor engagements, structuring project-based pricing, and using content marketing through speaking and writing to attract clients who value what you know. Johanna argues that the brand new thing is usually a tactic, not a principle, and that a consultant's real value lies in framing problems and converging on unique solutions, not in processing speed or informa…

Darren Waldron grew up on a farm near Hamilton, Victoria, qualified as a carpenter and joiner, and built a successful trade business before meeting his wife in Hawaii and eventually settling in Switzerland. He still works full-time as a senior construction manager while running his own AI automation company on the side, building custom chatbots that re-engage cold leads through SMS and WhatsApp. Darren's core insight came from being a frustrated customer: he would submit enquiry forms and never hear back, or receive three quotes and never get a follow-up call. He realised that businesses spend heavily on lead generation and then let those leads sit untouched in a database. His service, which he delivers on a pure performance basis — no results, no fee — mines that dormant database and converts forgotten contacts into qualified sales meetings. The conversation covers his two main offerings: database reactivation campaigns and speed-to-lead automation that engages new enquiries within…

Anna Burgess Yang returned to the podcast after a summer that changed everything: she was diagnosed with a benign brain tumour and underwent surgery in July 2025, pausing her business for two months. She had prepared for this without knowing it — years of financial discipline, a deeply systemised workflow, and a network of friends and colleagues who stepped in with guest posts and logistical support. Anna is a FinTech writer and solopreneur operations expert who builds automation pipelines connecting ChatGPT, Zapier, Airtable, Trello, and Buffer. Her blog posts feed into a system that generates LinkedIn drafts, categorises content, and pre-schedules social media — all with her editing touch at the end. During recovery she used dictation-to-blog automation so that all she had to do was speak into her phone and the rest happened through a chain of tools and people. The conversation covers what a resilient solo business actually looks like: cash reserves, critical-vs-non-critical tool …

Sönke Ahrens wrote How to Take Smart Notes, the book that introduced Niklas Luhmann's Zettelkasten method to a global audience of writers, researchers, and knowledge workers. He left academia to work as an independent writer and course creator, focusing on the practical craft of turning reading and thinking into sustained written output. Sönke explains the Zettelkasten as an external thinking space — not a filing system for highlights, but a structured environment where ideas confront each other and generate insight through writing. He draws a clear distinction between the archivist who collects and the writer who processes: a highlight that never gets recontextualised into your own thinking is effectively lost, regardless of how good the capture system is. The conversation moves from Luhmann's analog index cards to a practical digital setup using Obsidian, Readwise, and Zotero. Sönke describes how he keeps his system from becoming overwhelming (show only the last 30 days of unp…

Tomáš Baránek returns to Wisepreneurs for his second appearance. He runs Melvil, a Czech publishing house that publishes only 12 to 20 nonfiction books a year — but each one is chosen with the care of a curator selecting for a specific audience. His readers trust the imprint so completely that many buy every title, and some have asked for a subscription. Tomáš explains how Melvil operates in a country of 10 million people with a deep book culture and 16,000 new titles annually. The strategy is counterintuitive: publish fewer books, translate them to an exceptionally high standard, and build enough trust that readers will wait six months for the Czech edition rather than buying the English original. Melvil licenses from the world's most influential thinkers — Harari, Kahneman, Grann — and recently relaunched Sapiens in Czech after the previous publisher lost the rights. The conversation covers Yuval Harari's Nexus, which Melvil published at the same time as the global launch, and Tom…

Filip Drimalka is a Czech digital innovation expert and the author of The Future of No Work. He studied law but never practised, instead spending two decades helping organisations adopt new technologies. On the day ChatGPT launched, he did two things: bought NVIDIA stock and registered the domain futureofnowork.com, because he understood immediately that work was about to change at the structural level. Filip's core concept is symbiosis with AI — not using AI occasionally as a separate tool but integrating it into every step of every process, the way you would use your own memory or judgment. He describes building an AI consultant called Amy that now handles the initial diagnostic conversations his human consultants used to conduct, and how uploading hundreds of pages of client conversations to NotebookLM produced better insights in 15 seconds than a two-hour team workshop. The lesson, he says, is that thinking as we knew it has ended: the skill now is orchestrating AI to do the thin…

Anna Burgess Yang shares her solopreneur workflow for building independent professional practice with lean thinking, automation, and AI. After leaving a FinTech executive career, Anna built a content writing business around Zapier, Airtable, and ChatGPT Pro. She explains why operations is the part of solopreneur practice nobody talks about and how authenticity beats generic AI content. Wisepreneurs explores how independent professionals turn accumulated expertise into sustainable practice.

Eliška Šestáková is a Czech academic, note-taking expert, and Zettelkasten practitioner who teaches at the Faculty of Information Technology at Czech Technical University in Prague. She discovered the Zettelkasten method through Sönke Ahrens' How to Take Smart Notes while struggling to write her PhD dissertation, and it transformed both her academic work and her personal knowledge management. Eliška distinguishes between two uses of notes: professional development (reading, courses, absorbing knowledge that compounds) and project execution (capturing where you left off so you can resume in minutes after weeks away). Her approach to deciding what to read is counterintuitive: she does not start from a reading list but from her current problems and questions. She links potential sources to those questions in her system, and when a problem becomes urgent enough, the sources linked to it become the priority. This ensures motivation because taking notes on the wrong material is what makes …

Leanne Shelton ran a copywriting business in Sydney for nearly a decade before AI began eating her pipeline. When prospects started saying 'why would I pay you when ChatGPT is free,' she did not dig in — she pivoted. She founded Human Edge AI Training to teach professionals how to use AI with the human touch, drawing on every lesson from her copywriting career about what makes writing work. Leanne's core argument is that most people use ChatGPT the way they use Google: shout a demand, accept the output. This produces generic, surface-level content that lacks facts, stories, and brand voice. Her method treats AI as an intern who needs a thorough brief: first train it on your business, your audience, and samples of your writing, then have a conversation. She teaches people to say please and thank you, to ask 'is anything unclear?' before generating, and to treat prompting as iterative dialogue rather than a one-shot command. The conversation covers how she built her copywriting busine…

Peter Hatherley is the founder of Authored Intelligence, a New Zealand-based AI company that builds custom GPTs designed to remove the prompt barrier for professionals who want AI to write like them, not like a machine. He came to AI through SEO, where he discovered a letter-pattern algorithm in 2012 that launched sites to number one within weeks — and those same sites, untouched since, still rank in the top three. Peter's core distinction is between generative AI (one-prompt-and-done) and interactive AI (a conversation where the machine asks you questions, offers rationale, and collaborates). His products — Semantic Author, Conceptuality, Storyline Author, and the All-in-One Editor — are built on this latter approach. Semantic Author, his most popular, embeds semantic entity optimisation beneath the surface while explaining its reasoning, effectively teaching the user SEO as it writes. Conceptuality functions as a virtual advertising agency, handling copywriting, campaign planning, …

Michael Greenberg helps independent professionals stop adding hours and start adding systems. His practice covers AI workflows, automation, and strategic outsourcing — not as three separate tools but as one integrated approach to digital operations. He explains how to choose the right combination of tools rather than adopting every new application, and why outsourcing works when you hand off the right work to the right people rather than the cheapest. The conversation covers practical note-taking systems, workflow automation that removes repetitive tasks from your day, and how to think about AI as a force multiplier for the work only you can do. Wisepreneurs explores how experienced independent professionals position accumulated expertise and build sustainable practice.

Knowledge management tools for independent professionals who need to curate information without burning out. Tomas Baranek is a Czech publisher who rebuilt his working practice around tools like Readwise and Roam Research after experiencing burnout himself. He explains practical approaches to managing knowledge sustainably and why self-care matters for professionals without organisational support systems.

Gabrielle Sun explains how AI is reshaping expertise building in corporate learning, from instructional design principles to the tools every knowledge worker should explore. She covers what makes training effective, why alignment between learning goals and practice activities is the foundation of good course design, and four AI capabilities to explore: text generation, text to audio with voice cloning, text to image, and text to video. Wisepreneurs explores how independent professionals turn accumulated expertise into sustainable practice.

Lisa-Marie Cabrelli turned expertise from acting, eCommerce, and a PhD in Creative Writing into a location-independent coaching practice spanning four countries. She shares how story structure informs her Heroine's Adventure course and how ChatGPT became an essential thinking partner for developing course concepts. The conversation covers how AI fluency is becoming essential for career independence and what Lisa-Marie sees coming in the future of independent work. Wisepreneurs explores how women over 50 monetise expertise and build sustainable solopreneur practice.