The Human Advantage: Wally Feresten | Born To Build Ep. 3

For more than 35 years, Wally Feresten has helped guide live television through thousands of sketches, hosts, musical performances, and moments that audiences never realize depend on the cue cards in his hands. As the longtime cue card supervisor for Saturday Night Live and Late Night with Seth Meyers, Wally has spent decades operating in one of the highest-pressure creative environments imaginable, mastering a craft so specific, so human, and so pressure-dependent that technology never replaced it. In Episode 3 of Born to Build, Sarafina Mancuso sits down with Wally Feresten to discuss his journey into television, building a career at SNL, operating under pressure, mastering a highly specialized craft, adapting alongside technology, turning decades of expertise into a business of his own, and what it means to build a life around becoming exceptional at one thing. The conversation explores craftsmanship, live television, pressure, reputation, entrepreneurship, human connection, legacy, and what it means to make the impossible possible, week after week, for more than three decades. Guest: Wally Feresten, @cuecardwally_official 02:03 Meet Wally Feresten04:38 Getting His Start at SNL09:47 How Saturday Night Live Actually Works16:07 Spending Decades Inside One Creative Family22:44 Operating Under Pressure29:49 What Makes a Great Cue Card?35:52 Working with Celebrities & Building Trust39:07 Why Cue Cards Survived Technology42:07 Turning a Craft into a Business47:32 From Labor to Leverage52:43 What Students Need to Know About Building a Career57:08 Ideas Are Easy. Execution Is Everything.59:35 Were You Born to Build?Listen & Subscribe: Website: borntobuildpodcast.com Apple Podcasts: https://tr.ee/1HcLXID7Ht Follow Born to Build: Instagram: @borntobuildpodcast TikTok: @borntobuildpodcast Music: https://tinyurl.com/3pepwnc