Thomas M. Wells spent his career as an attorney, built his own law firm, served on bank and nonprofit boards, and ran a small-town bookstore in Vermont. In 2005, his daughter asked if the family could help pay tuition for her host sister in Africa. That one scholarship became the Wells Mountain Initiative, which now supports a thousand scholars in 56 countries. Tom tells that story in Dream, Plan, Do! and tells his own in the memoir Naked on the Highway.

In this episode of Author Hour, Tom talks with Travis Stoliker about the high school standoff with his father that shaped how he raised his own kids, why he wrote his memoir as 40 stand-alone chapters, and the plaque on his mother's kitchen wall that became his philosophy of giving back. He also explains what working with Scribe added to his writing: why the team pushed him to include adversity, how he came to write publicly about depression for the first time, why he used no AI on either book, and how editors turned his twelve-clause lawyer sentences into readable prose. Tom is now at work on his third book.

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Most organizations don't set out to deliver broken experiences. It happens because brand, content, product, and service are built by separate teams that rarely talk to each other, and the customer is left to connect the pieces. Tedde van Gelderen, founder and president of the UX consultancy Akendi, laid out a framework for fixing that in Experience Thinking: Creating Connected Experiences. Eight years after the book came out, he argues the message matters more than ever.

In this episode of Author Hour, Tedde returns to the show to look at what has held up and what AI has changed. He explains why the brand, not the user, is the real starting point of design, why the book's most enthusiastic readers turned out to be practitioners instead of executives, and why AI still can't capture a human tone of voice. He also shares why chatbots frustrate customers, why prompting feels like a step back to the command line, and the simplest first step any siloed team can take next week: talk to each other.

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As a chief financial officer, Mike Woodmansee spent years around people worth tens or hundreds of millions of dollars, and he noticed they weren't especially happy. His own wealth came from somewhere else: a sub-2:50 marathon, an Ironman in Kona, a summit of Denali, every 30-mile-plus trail in Washington, and two trips to the South Col of Everest. In The Billionaire of Living: Building a Life Money Can't Buy, he shows how an ordinary, motivated person can build a life with near zero regrets.

In this episode of Author Hour, Mike explains what separates a life goal from a regular goal, why you have to risk "spectacular failure," and why telling strangers about your goals can backfire. He shares the story of meeting a bear alone in Olympic National Park, why the Everest climb he never finished is still the best experience of his life, and how a "Just Say Yes" mindset turned friends in their sixties into Kilimanjaro climbers. He also talks about the friends who call you out, the ones who hold you back, and why money had nothing to do with any of it.

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