Firestarters with Shannon Watts

Shannon Watts
  • 4.7 (25)
  • Personal Journals

Firestarters is a podcast filled with inspiring interviews of women living audacious lives and encouraging others to do the same. shannonwatts.substack.com shannonwatts.substack.com

  1. Sep 3

    Heidi Rose Robbins on learning how to ask

    Heidi Rose Robbins has been a professional astrologer for 25 years and is the author of Everyday Radiance: 365 Zodiac Inspired Prompts for Self Care and Self Renewal. She is a guest faculty member at Esalen in Big Sur and twice a year leads Radiant Life Retreats in Ojai for people wanting to go deeper into her work. Heidi has written several books of poetry, has been a featured poet at two TedX events, and has written a daily Moon Note about the astrology and poetry of the day on Instagram and Substack for the last eight years. She hosts The Radiance Project podcast and co hosts Chart Your Career with Ellen Fondiler. Her newest poetry collection, Ask Me, is out now. Heidi read from her new book and talked about what it means to say she has collected these poems rather than written them, gathering them over a lifetime rather than sitting down to produce a manuscript. This collection came together in the years after her father’s death, and she walked through how the book moves through five sections, beginning with departure and grief and ending in what she calls a downpour of grace and self compassion. We also talked about how twenty five years of reading cycles and seasons for other people did not make her own season of loss any easier to move through, and why she believes poetry, read aloud and shared with others, is still one of the most powerful tools we have for connection. Connect with Heidi: Website | Instagram | Substack | Buy the Book If you’re looking to unleash your potential, find your personal, professional, or political fire, and to connect with a community who is doing the same, click here to learn more. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit shannonwatts.substack.com/subscribe

  2. Sep 2

    Audrey Francis on learning to fail in public

    Audrey Francis is a Tony Award winning producer and the Artistic Director of Steppenwolf Theatre, where she has been an ensemble member since 2017. As part of the executive leadership team, she has played an integral role in the company’s post pandemic turnaround, producing five of the top ten best selling shows in Steppenwolf’s fifty year history. Audrey is also the co creator of Steppenwolf IMPACT, which brings Steppenwolf’s ensemble ethos into the corporate world, and the co-founder of Black Box Acting, where she built a curriculum rooted in the study of human behavior. She has worked on nearly twenty productions at Steppenwolf as an actor and director, and coaches performers and executives alike at companies like Amazon, HBO, and NBC. In this conversation, Audrey traced her winding path from aspiring film editor to Artistic Director, and how a teacher’s offhand advice sent her from Colorado to Chicago and into an ensemble built around treating art as a team sport. She talked candidly about learning to fail in public, why she built an entire school around the practice of taking risks and celebrating each other for trying, and how she redefined failure for herself as walking away from a situation without being honest or brave rather than simply losing a role. We also got into what it took to lead Steppenwolf through the pandemic, why she coaches executives to stop performing command and start showing up as themselves, and what it felt like to stand on the Tony Awards stage watching Purpose, a play she and her co-artistic director greenlit with only forty pages written, win Best Play. Connect with Audrey: Steppenwolf Theatre | Black Box Acting | Substack If you’re looking to unleash your potential, find your personal, professional, or political fire, and to connect with a community who is doing the same, click here to learn more. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit shannonwatts.substack.com/subscribe

  3. Aug 27

    A conversation with Carrie Scharbo about how to handle your kids leaving home

    Shannon and Carrie sat down for an honest, warm conversation about one of the most significant transitions in a mother's life: the empty nest. Carrie is right in the thick of it, with her daughter back at college for her sophomore year and her 17 year old son preparing to leave for a cultural immersion program in Europe. Shannon opened up about navigating this transition five times over, sharing candid stories about kids who came home unexpectedly, the balance between staying connected and giving space, and why, as she wrote in you don't have to be miserable when your kids leave, she found herself more excited than devastated when the last child left. They talked about the grief that sneaks up on you not at the goodbye but in everything that shifts afterward, and about redefining your relationship with your kids without clinging or disappearing. As Shannon put it, you don't have to be miserable when your kids leave, but a rich next chapter doesn't happen by accident. You have to prepare for it, and you have to choose it. Connect with Carrie: Instagram | Substack | Website If you’re looking to unleash your potential, find your personal, professional, or political fire, and to connect with a community who is doing the same, click here to learn more. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit shannonwatts.substack.com/subscribe

  4. Aug 25

    Nicole Locklin on turning outrage into a campaign

    Nicole Locklin for US Congress is an attorney with more than a decade of legal experience, most recently serving as Lead Commercial Legal Counsel for Healthcare and Life Sciences at Databricks. She grew up in a town of about a thousand people in rural Oklahoma, where her parents ran a crop dusting business. A first generation college graduate who relied on student loans to earn her law degree, Nicole is now running as a Democrat for U.S. Congress in Florida's 26th District, challenging a twenty plus year incumbent and making the case that working families in South Florida deserve a representative who actually works for them.We talked about what it has actually felt like to leave a legal career and step into a congressional race with no political background, the affordability crisis Nicole keeps hearing about on doorsteps across South Florida where homeowner's insurance averages $8,000 a year and a one bedroom apartment can run nearly $3,000 a month, and why Nicole believes corruption and corporate money in politics is the root cause blocking progress on every other issue families care about. We also discussed the gerrymandering that reshaped FL-26, why Nicole sees the seat as genuinely flippable, and what it means to run a grassroots campaign in a state where the political establishment has spent years trying to erase Democratic votes.Connect with Nicole: Website | Instagram | Substack If you’re looking to unleash your potential, find your personal, professional, or political fire, and to connect with a community who is doing the same, click here to learn more. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit shannonwatts.substack.com/subscribe

  5. Aug 24

    Melissa Jun Rowley on how changing the story can change what’s possible

    Melissa Jun Rowley is an author, journalist, and global communications strategist whose career has taken her across some 75 countries, from the startup ecosystems of Silicon Valley and Beirut to the front lines of climate activism and conflict reporting. She has produced business news for CNN, reported for BBC News, co-founded a humanitarian tech platform with Peter Gabriel called The Toolbox, and most recently served as Director of Communications at the environmental nonprofit REVERB, leading campaigns with artists including Billie Eilish and Dave Matthews Band to mobilize fans around climate action. She is currently pursuing a Mid-Career Master in Public Administration at Harvard University, and her new book, Beyond the Mic Drop: How Our Stories Shift Culture, Power and Policy, is a call to every person to recognize the storytelling power they already carry.Our conversation moved from the origins of the book to the deeper question of why so many of us, women especially, have quietly surrendered control over our own narratives. Melissa traced that surrender back to childhood, describing how the stories handed to us by families, institutions, and systems can calcify into what feels like fixed fact until we learn to question them. She talked about what her time in Lebanon, Puerto Rico, and across the Middle East taught her about the gap between the story a place is assigned by mainstream media and the stories actually being lived on the ground, and how that gap mirrors what happens to individual people who let others do their narrating for them. Connect with Melissa: Website | Instagram | Substack | Buy the Book If you’re looking to unleash your potential, find your personal, professional, or political fire, and to connect with a community who is doing the same, click here to learn more. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit shannonwatts.substack.com/subscribe

  6. Aug 20

    Preparing kids for a high tech world by giving them a low tech childhood with Dr. Dana Suskind

    Dr. Dana Suskind is the Founder and Co-Director of the TMW Center for Early Learning and Public Health, and the Founding Director of the Pediatric Cochlear Implant Program. She has dedicated her research and clinical work to optimizing foundational brain development, with an emphasis on helping parents and caregivers understand their power as brain architects. Her new book, Human Raised: Nurturing Connection, Curiosity and Lifelong Learning in the Age of AI, explores how families can stay grounded in human connection as AI becomes part of how kids learn, socialize, and think. In this conversation, we went beyond the usual questions about screen time and app safety to ask what we risk losing if we outsource too much of childhood to systems built for optimization rather than connection. We talked about how the way children are raised today intersects with the future of democracy, misinformation, and civic life, and why it matters that many of the people building these technologies keep their own kids away from them. We also talked honestly about how parents can hold the tension between preparing their children for a high tech future and protecting a meaningful, deeply human childhood, without falling into fear or fatalism. Connect with Dr. Dana: Website | Instagram | Substack | Buy the Book If you’re looking to unleash your potential, find your personal, professional, or political fire, and to connect with a community who is doing the same, click here to learn more. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit shannonwatts.substack.com/subscribe

  7. Aug 19

    Following your inner compass with Sarah Aviram

    Sarah Aviram is a bestselling author, keynote speaker, and leadership coach who helps people navigate uncertainty and activate their own sense of agency. In 2019, she left her job as head of talent development at a New York tech company and spent 12 months living and working across 12 countries, from Latin America to Asia to Europe and South Africa, as part of a global research project on the future of remote work. Her new book, The Scenic Route: Following My Inner Compass Across 12 Countries in 12 Months, tells the personal side of that journey. In this conversation, we talked about how Sarah planned a year of travel with a cohort of 30 professionals, what it was like to leave behind everything familiar without any guarantees of what would come next, and the lessons she carried home, from a flamenco show in Spain to a stay with monks to a wild night at a drag performance. We also discussed her broader message: that there's no one right way to live your life, that you're allowed to change course at any time, and that experience can be a source of power at any age. Connect with Sarah: Website | Instagram | Substack | Buy the Book If you’re looking to unleash your potential, find your personal, professional, or political fire, and to connect with a community who is doing the same, click here to learn more. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit shannonwatts.substack.com/subscribe

  8. Aug 3

    Beyond the Prescription with Dr. Lucy McBride

    Dr. Lucy McBride is a primary care physician and co-founder of the Ackerly McBride Group in Washington, DC. For over 25 years, she has practiced evidence-based, relationship-centered medicine. A graduate of Princeton and Harvard Medical School, with a master's degree in Pharmacology from Cambridge as a Fulbright Scholar, she completed her internal medicine residency at Johns Hopkins Hospital. She writes the weekly newsletter Are You Okay? and hosts the podcast Beyond the Prescription. Her work has appeared in The Atlantic, The Washington Post, and USA Today. She has contributed to CNN, MSNBC, and PBS, advocating for a holistic, patient-centered approach to health. Her upcoming book Beyond the Prescription will be released August 11, 2026. In this conversation, we discussed how health isn’t just about getting answers but about asking the right questions, what primary care physicians are doing for their patients in an ideal world vs. what is actually happening, why doctors should treat the whole patient and not just a set of symptoms, and her upcoming book Beyond the Prescription which includes a 5 step process for taking charge of your health. Connect with Lucy: Instagram | Website | Substack | Buy the Book If you’re looking to unleash your potential, find your personal, professional, or political fire, and to connect with a community who is doing the same, click here to learn more. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit shannonwatts.substack.com/subscribe

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4.7
out of 5
25 Ratings

About

Firestarters is a podcast filled with inspiring interviews of women living audacious lives and encouraging others to do the same. shannonwatts.substack.com shannonwatts.substack.com

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