4d ago

Go Big or Go Home with Gianluca

Three and a half years ago, a guy named Gianluca won the green card lottery, quit his job in Luxembourg, and moved to Los Angeles with no plan, no job, and — his words — “go big or go home.” We met in the Italians-in-LA Facebook group, back when he was panicking, surrounded by Americans, hunting for anyone who’d speak Italian with him. This week he came on the show to tell the whole story… in English. The thread that runs through all of it is a mentality clash he keeps bumping into. In Europe, he says, you work for a stable salary — you sign the contract, you’re safe, you’re maybe a little mediocre forever, but you don’t panic. In America, people work for passion — they’ll grind in the field they love even when it’s not paying, enthusiasm through the roof, because they actually love the thing. He landed with the European operating system installed, and the whole episode is him slowly, reluctantly switching over. It cost him something to get there. Three months burning through savings. A job he found (partly thanks to a $45 round of three spritzes with me — a price that now sounds like a bargain). Watching coworkers disappear one by one until he got laid off himself — and the strange relief of it, because sometimes it’s easier when someone else makes the decision for you. A car-rental business with a friend — three Fiat 500s, three Mustangs, a Volkswagen — that turned out not to be profitable. And, finally, finanzamille — the finance platform he built with his business partner Amedeo, where people can actually learn how money works. Here’s what I want to flag, because he was careful about it and so am I: finanzamille teaches — it breaks down the news, analyzes a stock a week, shows you their reasoning — but as he said himself, plainly, they don’t give financial advice, because they can’t. This episode is his story, not a stock tip. Nothing here is advice; it’s one immigrant’s road from accountant to aspiring financial planner, studying at UCLA, chasing a genuinely big dream. I also asked him whether showing your face online actually matters. He didn’t hesitate. In an age when everything’s made by AI, he said, showing your face, being visibly human, is more important than ever. People don’t follow a product. They follow a person, they want to feel your emotion. The human factor wins over everything else. I keep saying it, episode after episode, and my guests keep saying it back to me. His advice to the version of himself who started with no audience and no proof it’d work? Be consistent. Follow the passion. You’ll find your people eventually. Grazie, Gianluca. From a $45 spritz to a 50-million-dollar dream — go big, my friend. — L. Buona notte. You can find Gianluca here This Substack is reader-supported. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Thanks for reading! This post is public so feel free to share it. Get full access to Laura G. at nightnightatlauras.substack.com/subscribe

Aug 19

Learning a Language vs. Living it with Gian

Years ago, I taught a serious, intense, wildly motivated Italian soldier how to speak English. This week he sat across from me in California and told me — in that English — that learning it didn’t just change his job. It changed who he is. That’s the whole episode, really. The teacher, interviewing the student who took the lesson somewhere the lesson never imagined. Gianluigi is an Italian Army Sergeant Major with almost three decades of service. His specialty is being the voice between two worlds that move at completely different speeds — the ground, where everything is chaos and adrenaline, and the air, where everything is exact. He’s one of the few people who can do that job, and a huge part of why is the language. Right now he’s in Coronado, training with the US military, nine hours from home, the only Italian in the room. We got into the thing this whole show is secretly about: the difference between learning a language and living one. He said classroom English is safe — you can pause, rewind, correct yourself, make mistakes with no consequences. But operational English, the real thing, is fast and compressed and unforgiving. “In the classroom, English is a subject. In the field, English is a weapon.” And the moment he understood that was standing on a radio with US pilots talking so fast there were no pauses, no “say again,” just pure flow — and realizing that if he couldn’t keep up, he wasn’t part of the solution, he was part of the problem. He talked about landing in America and discovering that fluency wasn’t enough — that his humor didn’t survive the crossing, that his timing was off, that jokes which would kill in Italy came out flat or serious or confusing. “It’s like having the instinct, but not the tools.” Like a part of your personality is locked behind a door that only opens in your first language. Nobody warns you, he said, that learning a new language means temporarily losing yourself — your humor, your spontaneity — and slowly rebuilding it in a new form. I told him: 100%. Same. Because that’s the thing I’ve been circling for fourteen episodes, and here was a soldier saying it back to me from the inside of a military base. He talked about the accent as a filter — “people hear it before they hear YOU” — how his directness got read as anger, how being taken for “less” until the language proved otherwise is its own quiet battle. And how English didn’t just open doors for him; it changed the way people listened when he walked through them. And the line I can’t stop thinking about is “In English, I can be clear. In Italian, I can be me.” We always get to that “human factor”… every single time, my friends. This is why this podcast exist. Emotions. Everywhere. He doesn’t think the second language replaced who he is. He thinks it expanded it — gave him access to new versions of himself. More adaptable, more patient, more open. After ten years, he said, this is the man I became. His one regret this trip: his wife couldn’t be here to see it. Grazie, Gianluigi. The last time you needed me, I was correcting your grammar. Now you correct the space between two languages for a living. I’m so proud of you I could cry. — L. Buonanotte. Get full access to Laura G. at nightnightatlauras.substack.com/subscribe

Aug 12

Little Laura meets Little Sarahi

I met Sarahi at the front desk of the wellness place I go to: Arc Of Life, in Redondo Beach. She and Liz were the two who’d look up when you walked in — smiling, warm, glad you were there. The light at the door. I remember thinking, the first time: these two always welcome me with a smile on their faces, like a friend, or family. And Dr.Ivan and Dr.Sabrina do the same, and they are the column of this big Arc of Life family. Amazing people. What I didn’t know is that she’d been thinking the exact same thing about me. That’s how this episode unfolds: two people confessing they each walked in and saw light in the other. And then it goes somewhere I’ve been circling this whole season without ever landing on it: the girl who always smiled who is, obviously, little Laura, my inner child. That warm, bubbly, light-at-the-door thing? For both of us, it’s partly a mask, the face you put on so the person in front of you doesn’t feel uncomfortable. And I told her the thing I’ve never said on here: that somewhere along the way, someone taught me the girl who smiles like that gets read as dumb. Silly. Superficial. Not a deep person. So the girl who always smiled… eventually stopped. And Sarahi looked at that same smile and saw the opposite: she saw light. Sometimes it takes a stranger at a front desk to hand you back the very thing you were taught to be ashamed of. We got into all of it. Chosen family — she said “with my family, I can’t be myself,” which is the exact inverse of what I always say, that with family you don’t hide. And we found the place where both are true: sometimes you have to build the family you get to be yourself with. Inner-child work, and the thing I figured out literally the day before we recorded, which is that little Laura never needed me to visualize her. She needed to see me take action, to watch me do the thing. We talked about Internal Family Systems, the online community I joined to help with a difficult time, about the book No Bad Parts, about the parts of us that take over when we get flooded. And about Into the Wild — the line that kid wrote at the very end: happiness real when shared. She’s from Mexico, four years into LA, building a whole new chapter — social media, plans, design — and doing the brave thing of getting to know herself in real time. She also told me I should finally show my face and do video. We’ll see about that. (There’s an illustrated me now. Baby steps.) This one’s tender. Two women who lead with a smile, figuring out loud what’s underneath it. The universe put us at the same front desk for a reason. I’m keeping her. — L. Buonanotte. Music by Robert Miles — Children Gracias, Sarahi. Keep shining bright and remember my inner child says: hi!! To yours. Find Sarahi on Instagram * Sarahi’s Insta Page Mentioned in this episode Books * No Bad Parts: Healing Trauma & Restoring Wholeness with the Internal Family Systems Model — Richard C. Schwartz — publisher page * Into the Wild — Jon Krakauer — publisher page — the source of “happiness is only real when shared.” Watch * Into the Wild (2007), dir. Sean Penn — the film adaptation — IMDb Learn about * Internal Family Systems (IFS) — the “parts” model of therapy we kept referencing — IFS Institute * Inner-child work — a good plain-language overview — Cleveland Clinic Catch up on the podcast on Spotify * Episode 1 and Episode 11 (the two Sarahi listened to). Get full access to Laura G. at nightnightatlauras.substack.com/subscribe

Aug 5

Ode to Music

Let me start at the very beginning. Not my beginning — the beginning. Roughly fourteen billion years ago, everything that exists was compressed into a single point, and then it began. And here’s what they don’t tell you at school: it didn’t begin with light. Light came later. It began with a sound. A vibration. We are, all of us, the echo of that note still traveling. I didn’t make that up to sound deep on a podcast barely anyone is listening to — I wrote it in my early twenties, as the first line of my university dissertation. I walked into the room, sat in front of the examining board, and played them the sound of the Big Bang. Because I already believed that sound isn’t something that happens to us. Sound is what we’re made of. So this one is an ode to music. But when I say music, I don’t just mean a playlist. I mean the thing the universe is built out of, and the thing that, at one point in my life, was the only thing that could still reach me when nothing else could. I have a treble clef tattooed on my shoulder even if I’m not really a musician. It’s there because it’s the symbol of what saved my life, and keeps saving it, day after day. Yes. Really. This episode exists because of that and because of the song I wake up with every single morning, different every day, that I’ve decided to treat as a message instead of a malfunction. The gift I have for chasing a fragment of melody until I find it. The people who each left me pieces of music — my brother, my friends, the ones I loved, the ones I lost — so that music is the language of our souls, that keep talking to each other even when we, humans, don’t. Coldplay and my grandmother. Linkin Park finding me in a rental car in the middle of nowhere in Australia. Oh and a patent I filed for a tool I invented, because if sound can heal a person, maybe it can be built into something that heals more of them. You are made of vibration. Which means you are tunable. On the days the arrangement goes wrong, there’s a sound out there that can move through you and set it right. It won’t fix everything. But it’ll sit with you in the dark and stay until it passes. Our song isn’t over. It will never be. Stay for this one, or I’ll see you in the next. Good night. —L. music by: Cellist jenny - Vivo per lei (instrumental) Mentioned in this episode: * The Music of Life — Hazrat Inayat Khan “What makes us feel drawn to music is that our whole being is music: our mind and our body, the nature in which we live, the nature that has made us, all that is beneath and around us, it is all music. We are close to all this music, and live and move and have our being in music.” * Divine Attunement: Music As a Path to Wisdom — Yuval Ron * My Thirty Seconds to Mars “Closer to the Edge” fan video * Blackbirds - Linkin Park (fan video) * Cages (DTLA) (OMG I found the recording too!) This episode touches, gently, on being in a very dark place. If you’re there right now: please reach out to someone you trust, or a local crisis line — you can find one for your country at findahelpline.com. Your song isn’t over. Get full access to Laura G. at nightnightatlauras.substack.com/subscribe

Jul 29

Pleased to meet you...

Eleven episodes in, and I’ve told you about my accent, my grandmother, my coffee order, my bone marrow match, my brother, my letters — and I have never once actually introduced myself. So this one’s my résumé with some zest of… feelings. Eleven is my number, by the way. Eleven and twenty-three, which is just eleven wearing a different outfit, and before I list anything, I have to tell you about a magnet I bought years ago that says: “Sometimes on the way to a dream, you get lost and find a better one.” I hated it because I believed there was one dream, and if you ended up somewhere else, you’d failed. It took me a long time to learn the other thing: that dreams do come true, they just change, because we change. So here’s what I’ve actually done, and you can decide whether it’s a woman who couldn’t stick to anything or a woman whose dreams kept getting better: north of fifteen books in two languages, a thriller trilogy, poetry, a children’s book, a road-trip memoir, philosophy, an Italian textbook. Eight screenplays. Songs. And a day job writing the words inside the machines you interact with… A few things in here I’ve never said out loud before: one of my books is published under a pen name. Another one is credited to my dog, who gets top billing over me, correctly; or why I have “…what a smile can hide;” tattooed on my shoulder. There are also two books on my shelf that aren’t mine. One I translated as a promise to a friend after he died. One I edited for a friend, because it deserved to exist. If you got lost on the way to your dream, don’t get scared. You’re changing, you’re evolving, and your dream is changing with you. You’ll find your way back to it, just trust the process. — L. Everything’s in one place: laura-storyteller.carrd.co — the books, the screenplays, the lyrics. * 📚 Books — Amazon * 📖 Goodreads * 📷 Instagram — @lauraandella · @angelikasarts * 💼 LinkedIn * 🌿 Whole·istika Mentioned in this episode: The Aleph by J. L. Borges. “A point in space that contains all other points. Anyone who gazes into it can see everything in the universe from every angle simultaneously, without distortion, overlapping, or confusion.”— from "The Aleph". This Substack is reader-supported. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Thanks for reading! This post is public so feel free to share it. Get full access to Laura G. at nightnightatlauras.substack.com/subscribe

Jul 22

Michela, Michela, Michela - wish it worked like with Beetlejuice

Tonight I wanted to talk about …something. Ghosts? Spirituality? Something. So naturally I invited the one person who told me flat out she doesn’t believe in any of it — no God, no religion, no ghosts, nothing. And she was the right guest for a very specific reason: her name is Michela. The kindest people I’ve ever known have, over and over, been named Michela and that name has come to mean grace to me. So this episode is a roll call of my Michelas: the English teacher from second to fifth grade who made me love the language and taught me to grade in every color but red, because red is for wounds. The dear friend who read the Bible with me, never to convert me, just because she knew I was thirsty for knowledge. And the Michela I lost at seventeen, whose presence I felt for years afterward — the one whose song came on in a bowling alley on a school trip, and a classmate said, “Michela’s here,” and he was right. Then I handed the mic to the living Michela across from me and asked my skeptic friend the real question: do you think they’re sent to me for a reason? I won’t give away her answer. I’ll only say she turned the whole thing around on me in a way I didn’t see coming and that her name, it turns out, means “who is like God,” which is a very funny thing to land on the one guest who doesn’t believe in one. Whether the Michelas are a message from the universe or just a name that kept landing on kind people, I notice it. And I’ve come to think the noticing is the whole thing. Paying attention to the grace that keeps showing up in your life, giving it a name, and saying thank you to it, I guess that’s my spirituality. At the right time, those you’ve lost may come back to say hi, and let you know they’re still with you. Who knows. — L. Buona notte. Grazie mille, Michela — for the pushback, the grace, and the reminder that sometimes the skeptic is the kindest one in the room. Get full access to Laura G. at nightnightatlauras.substack.com/subscribe

Jul 15

There’s Coach and Coach

Two kids. Same house. Seven years apart. And somehow both of them grew up to do essentially the same thing with their lives: help other people become the best version of themselves. He does it with young athletes. I do it with… whatever it is I do. Same instinct, pointed in two directions. (Maybe we got it from our mother, a nurse. Go figure.) So tonight I finally got my brother on the mic. Francesco coaches volleyball, from local youth teams all the way into the Italian national team pathway, and he has a gift I’ve watched my whole life: he can take a kid and build them into someone. Someone who tries. Someone with purpose. I wanted to pull that gift out into the open. What he said is better than anything I could have written for him: “Talent gives you possibilities. Learning turns those possibilities into reality.” “I don’t want them to avoid failure. I want them to understand that failure is information, not identity.” “The goal is never to make them depend on me. The goal is to help them become independent and to need me less and less. That’s when I know I’ve done my job well.” And the reason this episode exists at all: I went looking at the research on what sport actually does for a developing kid, and the magic isn’t the sport — it’s the coach. One steady adult who believes in you is one of the strongest protective factors a child can have. It doesn’t just make them better at the game. It makes them resilient, and it follows them out of the gym and into the rest of their life. I got to grow up watching my brother become that adult, for hundreds of kids by now. Go be someone’s steady adult this week. — L. The research I mention * Holt, N. L., Neely, K. C., Slater, L. G., Camiré, M., Côté, J., Fraser-Thomas, J., MacDonald, D., Strachan, L., & Tamminen, K. A. (2017). A grounded theory of positive youth development through sport based on results from a qualitative meta-study. * Zhang, N., Du, G., & Tao, T. (2025). Empowering young athletes: The influence of autonomy-supportive coaching on resilience, optimism, and development. Frontiers in Psychology, 15, 1433171. Broader picture, if you want to go digging: there’s a substantial literature on sport as a protective factor for kids facing adversity — building self-esteem, self-efficacy and belonging, buffering against stress and burnout, and carrying life skills into adulthood. The recurring finding across all of it is that the coach–athlete relationship is the active ingredient. Grazie, Franci. And to every coach who understood that it’s a game, and games are played for fun. Get full access to Laura G. at nightnightatlauras.substack.com/subscribe

Jul 11

The Perfect Match

Seven in the morning, on my mother’s birthday, I got a message telling me to call a clinic back because I was a match, a bone marrow match, for a fifty-two-year-old woman with leukemia I’ve never met. Out of everyone in the registry, my particular little genetic fingerprint was the one that fit. I could save her. I said yes with my whole heart, instantly. And then, the next morning, my own body took it back. They found the Ehlers-Danlos in my file, and it took me off the list. The perfect match who couldn’t. This episode is about being handed the chance to save a life and then having it pulled away, not because I said no, but because a condition I didn’t choose made it too risky. It landed in an already-brutal week, and for a full day I decided it was proof of something cruel. Then I found the truer version: being discarded again was not a confirmation or a sign of anything, really. It was the system protecting me for once, a woman who thinks she can do everything had to be told, “not this time.” And I decided I’ll keep showing up to help anyway, because that’s what makes me, me. If someone out there needs me, they only need to reach out. Most importantly: somewhere out there is a woman who still needs a match. She doesn’t need me, she needs a match. And it might be you. Joining the registry is a cheek swab. That’s the whole first step — swab the inside of your cheek, mail it back. And if you’re ever called, most donations aren’t even surgery; it’s closer to a long blood draw, and it’s all paid for. A few hours in a chair to hand a stranger the rest of their life. Look up the registry where you are — in the US it’s the NMDP (formerly Be The Match), much of the world has DKMS, and in Italy there’s ADMO. Find yours. Swab your cheek. Get on the list I got pulled off of. Be the match I’m not allowed to be. If you’ve got a cheek and a heart, you’ve got everything it takes. — L. No studies this time. Just unconditional love and support sent your way. Get full access to Laura G. at nightnightatlauras.substack.com/subscribe

Nightnight at Laura's

Go Big or Go Home with Gianluca

Learning a Language vs. Living it with Gian

Little Laura meets Little Sarahi

Ode to Music

Pleased to meet you...

Michela, Michela, Michela - wish it worked like with Beetlejuice

There’s Coach and Coach

The Perfect Match

About

Information

Nightnight at Laura's

Episodes

Go Big or Go Home with Gianluca

Learning a Language vs. Living it with Gian

Little Laura meets Little Sarahi

Ode to Music

Pleased to meet you...

Michela, Michela, Michela - wish it worked like with Beetlejuice

There’s Coach and Coach

The Perfect Match

About

Information