GUT Podcast

Clarke Pennington spent a decade in finance: investment banking, Columbia MBA, a consumer hedge fund. Then he left to build Lasso, a better-for-you gelatin cup with protein and fiber that no one had been able to manufacture before. He gave himself 12 months. He did it in 11 — with six failed production runs, a co-manufacturer who wouldn't return his calls for four months, and stress so severe his hair started falling out.We talk about what it's like to leave a career everyone envies, what happens when the people who raised you to always perform your best become your investors, and the line between relentlessness and self-destruction."As long as you don't kill yourself in the process."@eatlasso on Instagram and TikTokClaim Your Complimentary Career Clarity Session: https://www.wellthbykirsten.com/booking-calendar/complimentary-consultation?referral=book_button_widget

She walked into her boss's office crying and came out smiling. For years, Sabrina was the Law Associate everyone thought was fine. Her firm literally put "high pain tolerance" in her performance review. She took it as a compliment. Her body was telling a different story.This is GUT's first anonymous episode. Sabrina is still close to the world she left behind, so her voice and identity have been disguised. What hasn't been disguised is what she went through: a childhood spent performing composure, a career in big law that rewarded her for never needing anything, and the moment she finally saw what everyone around her had been watching all along. This episode is for the change-curious folks out there.Topics: big law burnout, performing calm, identity and achievement, immigrant parent expectations, the cost of competence, anonymous interview

Vanessa Mitchell has been a professional performer since she was a teenager: musical theater, national tours, cruise ships, aerial acts. From the outside, she was living the dream. On the inside, her perfectionism and anxiety were running the show. When her body started breaking down on a luxury cruise ship and a doctor told her she should consider leaving, it was the first time anyone had given her permission to quit.In this episode, Vanessa talks about what it's like to audition every single day and find out you didn't get the part at a friend's birthday party. She talks about crying every day during aerial training because she couldn't climb the rope. About having a panic attack because she was too scared to sing into a microphone. And about the moment she realized the thing she loved most was also the thing destroying her.Topics: performing arts career, musical theater, anxiety and perfectionism, quitting, cruise ship life, COVID impact on performers, audition culture, mental health, the swing role

Geri spent six years in the legal field doing everything right, taking on extra work, building new skills, waiting for the moment she'd earned enough to ask. When she finally walked into that room and advocated for a promotion, it didn't go the way she expected. Instead of moving up, she got iced out. No one gave her work. No one talked to her. She sat at her desk in a quiet office with nothing to do. And one afternoon, she opened TikTok and started filming.That video went viral. Strangers she'd never met showed up with more support than her own friends and family. She failed a certification exam, left her job on a Monday, and got engaged on a Ferris wheel in Montreal five days later. She cried on that Ferris wheel, not just because she was happy, but because everything was happening at once and she wasn't allowed to grieve before the next thing arrived.This is a conversation about what happens when you finally use your voice and it costs you the thing you were building, about finding community in the last place you expected, and about learning to believe you're good enough after the place that was supposed to prove it told you that you weren't.Find Geri at @SincerelyGeri on TikTok.

Madie Wilson-Walker became a double-leg amputee from meningitis at age three. By 18, she'd made the Canadian Paralympic track and field team, the youngest in her category, competing against athletes a decade older. Then she missed Rio by one spot on the list and found out through Instagram.This episode covers the summer she couldn't watch her own sport on TV, the teammates she still texted good luck while gutted inside, two injuries that nearly ended her career back to back, and what it took to fall back in love with the sport that had become a chore.Madie is one of the most honest athletes we've had on the show. She talks about what it's like to be yelled at weekly for parking in handicap spots, why she's spent her whole life proving she belongs, and the quiet moment she decided she was done being miserable at the thing she loved most.

Kirsten Breidenbruch spent a decade at BlackRock. She made VP. She was making great money. From the outside, she had everything figured out. From the inside, she was waking up two hours early every day just to calm herself down enough to walk to work. Her feet felt like cinder blocks. Her body was rejecting the life she built.In this conversation, Kirsten takes us inside the war between the identity she spent years constructing and the person she was becoming underneath it, the panic attacks she masked, the mindfulness sessions she led at work while quietly falling apart, the spreadsheet she made to see if she could afford to quit (and then ignored for months), and the walk on the beach with her dad where she finally said it out loud.She talks about what it actually feels like to dismantle a life that looks perfect, why she wore a white Anthropologie dress to her quitting meeting, and the moment her boss called an hour after she resigned and said "I'm kinda jealous."This is for anyone who has everything they're supposed to want and still feels like something is fundamentally wrong.

George Foreman built an identity the way entrepreneurs build empires, with brutal focus and no room for weakness. But the man he constructed to dominate was deeply sensitive underneath, and that fracture nearly destroyed him. This is what happened when the persona he'd engineered to survive his childhood became the cage that broke his championship, his marriages, and his relationship with his daughter. Then he spent 30 years rebuilding, not just as a fighter, but as a father, preacher, and businessman who understood something most ambitious people never do: the identity that got you here might be exactly what stops you from going further. For anyone building something big and wondering if the foundation is actually solid.

Abby Walker was a driven kid. Competitive soccer, prestigious business school, investment banking. Work hard, get the approval, be good at something, and then you're good enough.Then the eating disorder took the wheel.She calls the voice of the Eating Disorder “Ed”. At its worst, Ed consumed 95% of her bandwidth. Every thought was about managing her body. Ed made promises: lose a little more and the stress goes away, the relationship works out, you become lovable. The promises never came. Ed just became more harsh.In this episode, Abby takes us inside the exhausting labor of managing an eating disorder. The double bind of being trapped in patterns you can't escape. She walks us through the rock bottom at her university library, staring at food, unable to read her own textbooks, realizing: this can't be my life.And then her story took a counterintuitive turn. She didn't need to fight Ed. She needed to befriend him.Now Abby works with youth in mental health recovery, helping young people through the same darkness. It’s the same drive that fueled the disorder, pointed somewhere else. The question that kept her going: How do I make sure this struggle means something?This is a story about misdirected ambition, the lies we tell ourselves, and what happens when you stop fighting the voice in your head and ask what it's actually afraid of.Content note: This episode discusses eating disorders and mental health struggles. Please see the following public resources if you or a loved one are struggling. https://www.thementalhealthcoalition.org/resources/, https://www.nationaleatingdisorders.org/, https://www.crisistextline.org/topics/eating-disorders/. 

Winter, 169 AD. The most powerful man on earth is sitting in a freezing tent on the battle frontier, covered in mud, surrounded by dead soldiers.Rome is collapsing. A plague is killing 2,000 people a day. The economy has crashed. Marcus Aurelius has just buried his co-emperor. He's watching his own children die. By all accounts, everything is falling apart.That night, by torchlight, he dips his pen in ink and writes a single sentence: Death smiles at us all. All one can do is smile back.This episode is a case study in survival. We deconstruct the mind of a man who stared into the abyss for two decades. War, plague, betrayal, death, and came out not bitter, not broken, but something else entirely. The meditations weren't written in a marble library. They were written in a war zone, by a man trying to hold it together.What stands in the way becomes the way. The obstacle is the curriculum. Fire feeds on obstacles.This is the story of how Marcus Aurelius built a mind that could take the worst life had to offer and turn it into something useful.Content note: This episode contains mentions of death, war, and mature themes.

Arsh Toor's dad moved from India to Canada as an engineer and ended up taking whatever work he could find to support a family on a single income. The message was clear: work hard, get good grades, get a steady job. Arsh did exactly that. She got into an impressive school, landed in investment banking, and spent five years at two different shops in New York. Then she quit to make pistachio butter.Arsh talks about what it felt like to look at the seniors on her team and realize she didn't want their life. About logging back on at 9 p.m. and knowing that was never going to change. About telling her parents she was leaving the career they would have done anything to have. And about what it's actually like to go from building financial models to tracking inventory, running Instagram, and putting everything on the line for a product she and her partner made in a blender.Arsh is the co-founder of Stesh, a pistachio butter brand built on the idea that what you eat should bring you a second of joy in your day.Topics: investment banking, quitting corporate, first-generation immigrant, entrepreneurship, food startup, pistachio butter, Stesh, career change, burnout, founder lifeGUT is hosted by Christianne. New episodes weekly.

In 1824, Beethoven stood on a podium conducting a symphony he couldn't hear. The orchestra had been told not to look at him. He was flailing at a tempo that existed only in his mind, several bars behind when the music ended. A singer had to walk over and turn him around so he could see the five standing ovations. He heard nothing.We tell the story everyone skips past. The abusive father who beat music into him as a child. The six years he kept his deafness a secret, terrified someone would speak to him and he wouldn't answer. The night he almost ended his life in a quiet village outside Vienna. The nephew he tried to control so completely that the boy put a pistol to his own head. And the final years, when Beethoven stopped writing for the crowd and started writing music so strange that critics called it incomprehensible — music it took the world a century to catch up to.This is a historical deep-dive episode of GUT, examining what grit can build, what brute force can destroy, and what happens when the tools you spent your life mastering break.Content warning: this episode includes descriptions of childhood abuse, suicidal ideation, and a suicide attempt.Topics: Beethoven, classical music, deafness, Ninth Symphony, Heiligenstadt Testament, grit and resilience, perfectionism, trauma, late string quartets, historical biographyGUT is hosted by Christianne. New episodes weekly.

At three years old, Maya Angelou was put on a train to Arkansas with a tag on her wrist and no adult to watch her. At eight, she was sexually assaulted. She believed her voice killed a man, and she stopped speaking for nearly five years. The woman who read a poem at a presidential inauguration in front of 20 million people spent her childhood in silence.This episode traces the full arc: the abandonment, the assault, the years of silence, and the woman who smashed fine china to get herself fired, lied her way into a Creole cooking job she'd never done, invented herself as a Cuban calypso singer, and eventually wrote one of the most important memoirs in American history. Maya Angelou didn't wait for permission or credentials. She just kept moving.This is a historical deep-dive episode of GUT, exploring how the worst things that happened to her became the raw material for everything she built.Content warning: this episode includes descriptions of childhood sexual abuse, racism, abandonment, and violence.Topics: Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, childhood trauma, post-traumatic growth, resilience, performing arts, civil rights, memoir, survival, historical biographyGUT is hosted by Christianne. New episodes weekly.