Hello Monday with Jessi Hempel

Earlier this year, just before the COVID-19 pandemic shut down so much of the world, Jessi traveled to Tupelo, MS, to interview the founders of Blue Delta Jeans, Nick Weaver and Josh West for an episode of Hello Monday. Nick and Josh are small business owners with a twist: Their base of operations is in Tupelo, but their business - selling bespoke jeans - happens online and around the world. A bunch of MLB and NFL athletes swear by their jeans. So does Nicole Kidman. In the first half of this interview, they talk about how they got started and what it means to build industry in their hometown.When the pandemic hit after the first part of this interview, Blue Delta Jeans figured out a way to keep the lights on and be of service to their community. In the second half of this episode, they share their experiences as SMB owners during the pandemic, and how they augmented their business to supply PPE to first responders in Mississippi.

Each week on Slate's How To! podcast, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Charles Duhigg, author of The Power of Habit, takes on his listeners' toughest problems. He calls up an expert, and together, they find answers. This week's question: How to Find a New Career Before it's Too Late. And that expert Charles called? It's our own Jessi Hempel. We're excited to welcome Charles to the Hello Monday family with this special bonus airing of How To! and look forward to welcoming him back later this month.

A lot of people are between jobs right now. In the past, “go network” would have been Jessi’s first advice on how to change that. But there is no “let’s grab coffee” right now. And even if you can meet in person, the help is often less immediate and tangible. So many companies are just not hiring. So...how do we network now? Entrepreneur and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman joins Jessi to help her and the Hello Monday audience make sense of virtual networking. He offers tangible, actionable tips for how we can all be better at it, right now. 

It's a holiday Monday in the United States, so this week on Hello Monday we're featuring a favorite conversation from last fall. Host Jessi Hempel sits down with Roxane Gay - the author of NYT bestsellers Bad Feminist and Hunger - for a conversation that touches on persistence in the face of rejection, discipline when honing a craft, and the power of being mentored, mentoring others, and creating opportunities to pass the mic

More than two months into working from home, we've settled into some new routines. But the uncertainty of "what now, what next?" can feel intolerable. To learn how we can all build up some resilience, Hello Monday host Jessi Hempel welcomes psychotherapist and author Lori Gottlieb to the show. Lori is the bestselling author of Maybe You Should Talk to Someone, a frank and entertaining account of her life as therapist and patient. It's now being developed into a new TV show. Lori's also an expert on emotional resilience. She and Jessi dialogue on the importance of boosting our "psychological immune systems" to weather the uncertainty in the era of COVID-19, and discuss why it's important to be able to both cry and laugh in times like these.

Guy Raz got his start as a reporter and host on NPR. Then he left news to become one of podcasting’s earliest megastars with The TED Radio Hour. He launched one of the most popular podcasts in existence, How I Built This. It’s about to become a book. He has a kids’ show called Wow in the World. And he has a new show on Luminary, Wisdom from the Top. Guy is an expert interviewer, and in this episode, he sits down with Hello Monday host Jessi Hempel to share how much he’s learned by coaxing founders to share the risks that didn’t pan out.

FOMO Sapiens host Patrick McGinnis joins Hello Monday's host, Jessi Hempel, for a conversation on how to spend less time on small decisions that don't really matter. McGinnis is familiar with FOMO and FOBO - He was in business school when he coined both terms. He's gotten very good at spotting Fear of Missing Out, and Fear of a Better Option - even in the midst of a pandemic. He's also very, very good at helping people get through decision fatigue with practical hacks and advice - so good, he's written a new book about it. It's called Fear of Missing Out: Practical Decision Making in a World of Overwhelming Choice. You can catch the other half of their conversation on Patrick's podcast, Fomosapiens.

This bonus episode of Hello Monday is a coda to our look at the lost art of 2020. We hear about three incidences of performing arts moving from physical landscapes to digital ones, and learn about what gets lost - and found - in the transition. Featuring playwright Ren Dara Santiago, artistic director Rob Neill, dancer Anke Veens, and composer/musician Wim te Groen.

Today we're bringing you the podcast version of our very first Hello Monday LIVE, featuring Jessi in conversation with investor and author Arlan Hamilton. Hamilton shares her journey from homelessness to head of her own VC firm, Backstage Capital. She answers listener questions on how to overcome underestimation, and she and Jessi both speak on the importance of the leadership group Out in Tech to their journeys in the tech world.

In this, the second of our two part series on the lost art of 2020, we look at what's being created that didn't - and maybe even, couldn't - exist in the time before physical distancing practices made gathering for art and music impossible. Jessi speaks to producer Kabir Sehgal about his Quarantine Concert Series. These nightly online living room concerts are paying gigs - critical for homebound professional musicians. We also hear from Laura Benanti, the star of our 4/16 bonus episode, on how her tweet offering to be an audience of one for students with canceled musicals went viral, and what comes next.