EP805: Martha Byrne - From Soap Star To Justice Advocate

Nicky Billou

"They put a bullet mark on my husband's head as a traitor to this country. Our Department of Justice put our lives in danger. We're American."

Martha Byrne spent decades as one of daytime television's most recognizable faces. Then the FBI showed up at her door.

In October 2020, her husband — retired NYPD Sergeant and 9/11 first responder Michael McMahon — was arrested for work he had done four years earlier as a licensed private investigator: routine surveillance, documented daily with local police, on a subject who turned out to be a former Wuhan official living in the United States illegally. No police reports from the subject. No video evidence. No photos. Witnesses at trial who could not identify him. And yet a federal conviction, 18 months in a general population prison 600 miles from his family, and five and a half years of legal warfare that cost the McMahons millions of dollars, their safety, and their peace of mind.

What followed was a masterclass in refusing to quit. Martha went to Congress. She secured the support of Congressman Michael Lawler. The GOP Oversight Committee used her husband's case as a central example of DOJ failure in its full investigation of CCP infiltration across federal agencies. And when President Trump was elected, she pressed until a full and unconditional pardon landed — followed by the Second Circuit Appellate Court vacating the entire case and returning their fines. A complete legal victory that less than 0.1% of federal cases ever see.

She also wrote the book. All of it. In six weeks.

Martha Byrne is a two-time Emmy Award-winning actress best known for her long-running role as Lily Walsh on As the World Turns, a television writer and producer, and the author of In the Interest of Justice — a firsthand account of her family's legal ordeal and the federal misconduct behind it. She has become one of the most prominent independent voices on prosecutorial abuse, CCP infiltration of American institutions, and the fight to restore accountability inside the Department of Justice.

Learn more & connect:
In the Interest of Justice — available on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com

Resources mentioned:
In the Interest of Justice by Martha Byrne — https://www.amazon.com
GOP Oversight Committee Report on CCP and DOJ — search via https://www.congress.gov
Congressman Michael Lawler (NY-17) — https://www.lawler.house.gov
Phelim McAleer (filmmaker, Gosnell, My Son Hunter) — https://www.phelimmcaleer.com
Post Hill Press (publisher) — https://www.posthillpress.com

Visit https://www.eCircleAcademy.com and book a success call with Nicky to take your practice to the next level.

EP804: Kris Hregdovic - Seeking Service

Nicky Billou

"You think you've won today? You haven't won nothing. Your country will burn from the inside, and we will have victory."

That's what a flex-cuffed Taliban fighter said to Kris Hregdovic's face in Afghanistan in 2012. He still thinks about it, fourteen years later.

Kris spent two decades as a Navy SEAL — the latest in a family line that answered the call every time the country asked. A great-uncle survived a POW camp in Korea. An uncle was killed in Vietnam. A brother deployed to Iraq. Kris lost his own father to cancer right after high school graduation, and lost his mentor and his direction along with him — until service gave him both back.

Now transitioning into speaking and executive coaching, Kris lays out the operating principle that's carried him through two decades of hard places: before you point the finger at a broken system, point the thumb at yourself. He's not interested in outsourcing responsibility to the news cycle or to politics. What actually changed his life was narrowing his focus to what he can control — his home, his community, his own choices — and building outward from there.

Learn more & connect:
Instagram and Facebook — Pushing Back Chaos: https://www.instagram.com/pushingbackchaos

Resources mentioned:
Pushing Back Chaos (Kris's speaking, coaching, and consulting practice): https://www.instagram.com/pushingbackchaos

Visit https://www.eCircleAcademy.com and book a success call with Nicky to take your practice to the next level.

EP803: TL Nuggets #241 - Francesco Totti And Loyalty

Nicky Billou

“He picked meaning over transactional maximization. And because of this, Francesco Totti has become the stuff of legend.”

— Nicky Billou

Francesco Totti could have left. Real Madrid wanted him. AC Milan wanted him. Manchester United wanted him. They offered more money, more trophies, more of everything the modern game rewards. He said no every time — not because he lacked ambition, but because he understood something most high performers never do: that full, permanent commitment to one thing can produce a kind of greatness that mobility never can.

Totti played 25 years for AS Roma, the club he grew up supporting, and became its all-time top scorer with 307 goals. He won the World Cup with Italy in 2006. He was named the world’s greatest player by Pelé. And when he played his final match at the Stadio Olimpico, the stadium wept. They called him the Emperor — not just a footballer, but a symbol of Rome itself.

Nicky uses Totti’s story to make a case that cuts straight to the bone: the best of you is the most loyal part of you. Modern entrepreneurship, like modern football, rewards mobility — the pivot, the rebrand, the next opportunity. But loyalty to a place, a person, a mission, or a vision is rarer and, when held, more powerful. Totti chose meaning over transactional maximization. That choice is what made him a legend rather than just another great player with a trophy cabinet.

Visit https://www.eCircleAcademy.com and book a success call with Nicky to take your practice to the next level.

EP802: Lisa Kavanagh - The Great Books Discussions - Anthem By Ayn Rand

Nicky Billou

"Individualism without a sense of unity is just as dangerous as the hive mind."

Nicky Billou put down the interview questions and picked up a book club instead. He handed his longtime energy-healing mentor a copy of Ayn Rand's Anthem, cold, with no priming, then sat down to find out what someone who'd never touched Rand before made of a novel about a world with no word for "I."

Lisa Kavanagh's take surprised even Nicky. She tore through the story of a man born into a collective so total it abolished mirrors, private thought, and the pronoun "I," and found it insightful and unsettlingly timely — then pushed back hard on the ending. Rand's hero escapes the hive mind only to swing, in Lisa's read, toward the opposite extreme: an identity built entirely on self. Individualism without a sense of unity, she argued, is just as dangerous as the collectivism Rand spent the whole book condemning. That tension, between Rand's own history fleeing Soviet collectivism and the uncompromising philosophy she built in response, became the real subject of the conversation.

Lisa Kavanagh is a Certified Reiki Master Teacher, Hypnotist, and Past Life Regressionist, and Nicky Billou's longtime energy-healing mentor. Her practice, Natural Healing Reiki, draws on a clinical background in addiction studies and blends hypnosis with energy work to help clients build inner strength and clear limiting beliefs. This was her first time reading Ayn Rand.

Learn more & connect:
Lisa Kavanagh — Natural Healing Reiki: https://www.naturalhealingreiki.ca
Anthem by Ayn Rand — available on Amazon for under $10: https://www.amazon.com/Anthem-Ayn-Rand/dp/0451191137

Resources mentioned:
Anthem by Ayn Rand: https://www.amazon.com/Anthem-Ayn-Rand/dp/0451191137
The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand (up next for a future episode): https://www.amazon.com/Fountainhead-Ayn-Rand/dp/0451191153
Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand: https://www.amazon.com/Atlas-Shrugged-Ayn-Rand/dp/0451191145
The Fountainhead (1949 film starring Gary Cooper)

Visit https://www.eCircleAcademy.com and book a success call with Nicky to take your practice to the next level.

EP801: Rick Rosenfield - The California Pizza Kitchen Story

Nicky Billou

"It's not the concept that got us there. We were blessed to have created barbecue chicken pizza. But if we didn't know how to trust and empower and manage people, we would have died with one restaurant."

Two federal prosecutors walked away from their careers, mortgaged their homes, personally guaranteed a Beverly Hills lease, and borrowed a quarter of a million dollars — all to open a pizza restaurant. They had never run a business. Their first chef lasted one month. And yet California Pizza Kitchen became one of the most recognizable restaurant brands in American history.

Rick Rosenfield, co-founder of California Pizza Kitchen, built something that most entrepreneurs never do: a company where the culture was the product. The barbecue chicken pizza got people through the door. What brought them back — and what kept 14,000 employees loyal for an average of 14 years — was something harder to copy.

Rick and his partner Larry Flax distilled that culture into four letters: R.O.C.K. Respect. Opportunity. Communication. Kindness. It sounds simple. But they made it operational — through hiring decisions, firing decisions, training standards rigorous enough that one server famously said he studied harder for his CPK knowledge test than for his Harvard finals, and a commitment to doing the right thing even when it was costly. CPK became the first national chain to go non-smoking — not because of a marketing study, but because Rick and Larry walked outside during a management meeting, looked at each other, and asked: what right do we have to ask anyone to work in a smoking section?

Their partnership lasted 40 years, built on a principle neither of them violated: they never said "I told you so." Once a decision was made, it was theirs — not his or mine. That discipline, rare enough in any relationship and extraordinary among two trial lawyers with strong egos, may have been the invisible architecture behind everything else.

Rick Rosenfield is the co-founder of California Pizza Kitchen, which he built with partner Larry Flax from a single Beverly Hills location in 1985 into a national and international chain with over 14,000 employees before selling in 2011. Before CPK, Rick spent 13 years as a federal prosecutor and defense attorney. He is a lifelong friend of Larry Ellison and the author of The California Pizza Kitchen Story: How Two Federal Prosecutors Changed the Way America Eats Pizza, with a foreword by Jack Carr, number one New York Times bestselling author.

Expert Action Steps:

1. Live by R.O.C.K. — Respect, Opportunity, Communication, Kindness. Let these four values guide your hiring, your culture, and your daily decisions, not just your mission statement.
2. Commit to perseverance over momentum. The path is rarely a straight line — it stalls, crashes, and restarts. Stay true to your vision through the cycles rather than abandoning it when circumstances get hard.
3. Do the right thing. It is not always easy to do, but it is almost always easy to identify. Build the habit of acting on that knowledge even when it is costly.

Learn more & connect:

Rick Rosenfield: https://www.rickrosenfield.com

The California Pizza Kitchen Story (Amazon): https://www.amazon.com/California-Pizza-Kitchen-Story-Prosecutors/dp/B0GKQYH37H

Resources mentioned:

The California Pizza Kitchen Story by Rick Rosenfield — https://www.rickrosenfield.com

The War of Art by Steven Pressfield — https://www.stevenpressfield.com

The Legend of Bagger Vance by Steven Pressfield — https://www.stevenpressfield.com

Jack Carr (foreword author, number one New York Times bestselling thriller writer) — https://www.jackcarrusa.com

R.O.C.K. culture framework (Respect, Opportunity, Communication, Kindness) — discussed in The California Pizza Kitchen Story

Visit https://www.eCircleAcademy.com and book a success call with Nicky to take your practice to the next level.

EP800: Susan Winchester - The Heart Of Healing

Nicky Billou

“I would have to say that at least 30 of those years, my success was fueled by my underlying belief that I wasn’t good enough. And that’s a really dysfunctional way to live a career.”

— Susan Winchester

Susan Winchester built one of the most decorated HR careers in corporate America — 36 years in the field, 16 and a half of them as a chief HR officer at Fortune 150 and Fortune 500 companies. She did it while quietly believing, for most of those decades, that she was not good enough. That contradiction is the foundation of her book Healing at Work, co-authored with Martha Finney, and it is what makes her perspective so unusual: she has seen this dynamic from the inside of the C-suite, from the coaching chair, and from her own life.

The conversation moves from the ACEs research — a landmark Kaiser Permanente and CDC study showing that nearly two-thirds of adults experienced at least one adverse childhood event — to the practical reality of what that means in professional settings. Winchester introduces the concept of “bumper car crashes” at work: those jarring moments of conflict or upset that feel disproportionate, because they often are. They are old wounds being activated by present circumstances, and most people going through them have no idea that is what is happening.

Nicky brings his own experience to this one, sharing a moment from a recent men’s overnight retreat where a trusted peer offered him Viktor Frankl’s insight on the space between stimulus and response — and what it meant to actually sit with it. It is a candid exchange, and Winchester handles it with both precision and grace.

Susan closes with three concrete steps anyone can start this week — including one deceptively simple question that can interrupt a reactive spiral before it takes hold.

1. Ask yourself “Am I sure?” the next time you feel upset at work. When a colleague seems cold or critical and the story starts building in your head, stop and question whether you actually know that to be true.

2. Start a journal and track your own bumper car reactions. Note your limiting beliefs, your behavioral patterns under stress, and where you tend to land — fight, flight, freeze, or fawn. Awareness of your hardwiring is the first step to changing it.

3. Practice self-compassion over the next five days. Choose one concrete act of kindness toward yourself each day — not as a reward, but as a discipline.

   Learn more & connect: https://www.susanwinchester.com

   Resources mentioned:

   Healing at Work — Susan Winchester and Martha Finney

   A Changed Mind — David Bayer

   The Language of Letting Go — Melody Beattie

   Man’s Search for Meaning — Viktor Frankl

   The ACEs Study (Kaiser Permanente and CDC) — https://www.cdc.gov/aces

   Visit https://www.eCircleAcademy.com and book a success call with Nicky to take your practice to the next level.

EP799: Terri Lonowski - What Is Soulful Listening

Nicky Billou

“One deeply connected conversation can change the trajectory of a life and the world forever.”

— Terri Lonowski

Most frameworks for communication tell you to speak more clearly, ask better questions, or manage your body language. Terri Lonowski’s Soulful Listening does something different — it starts with how you listen, not how you talk. And after 14 years of developing, testing, and teaching it, the results she can point to are hard to dismiss.

Terri traces the framework back to her grandmother Helga, who had a rare quality — a quiet, solid presence that made everyone around her feel completely seen. Growing up above a chaotic family restaurant, with a high school guidance counselor who told her she’d never leave her small Nebraska town, that presence was a lifeline. It became a model. After coaching human-centered design teams whose work was presented at the White House, and after months of sequestering herself to understand what made deep connection work, Terri arrived at five elements: self-care, full presence, quantum listening, inspired action, and circling back.

The framework is grounded in neuroscience as much as intuition. Gallup’s most recent global engagement data shows 80% of employees feel disengaged at work — a $10 trillion annual problem that Terri argues traces directly to the breakdown of genuine listening. What happens in the body when you don’t feel heard isn’t just emotional. It’s physiological. Her TEDx talk, “Nobody’s Listening and It’s Killing Us,” names the stakes directly.

The most vivid proof point is her son Jacob — raised inside the culture of Soulful Listening as a single mother, who at fifteen stood in a cornfield and articulated a vision. Terri listened. She took inspired action. Before the end of his junior year, he had earned a full scholarship to Georgia Tech as an offensive lineman. He is now a doctor of physical therapy working exclusively with Navy SEALs.

Guest Bio:

Terri Lonowski, M.Ed., is the creator of Soulful Listening, a 5-element framework for human connection developed over 14 years and delivered through keynotes, workshops, and coaching. Her TEDx talk “Nobody’s Listening and It’s Killing Us” makes the case that the erosion of genuine listening underlies the disengagement crisis at work and at home.

Expert Action Steps:

1) Take a breath and listen. Before entering any conversation, take a few intentional breaths — in through the nose, out through the mouth — to arrive present rather than distracted.

2) Get quiet and listen to yourself. There is a wisdom within you that can guide you toward your next step and your highest path. Give it silence to speak.

3) Be there for others. Show up fully for the people in your life. Human connection isn’t a luxury — it is foundational to who we are and how we thrive.

Learn more & connect:

Terri’s website: https://www.soulfullistening.com

Connect with Terri on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/terrilonowski

Resources mentioned:

Gallup Global Workforce Engagement Study — https://www.gallup.com/workplace/349484/state-of-the-global-workplace.aspx

TEDx Talk: “Nobody’s Listening and It’s Killing Us” by Terri Lonowski — search YouTube

EP798: Kevin 'The Connector' Thompson - The un-AI

Nicky Billou

“There is not a person on the face of this earth that gets too much appreciation. We all crave more genuine appreciation.”

— Kevin Thompson

Most people walk into a networking event with a strategy. They scan the room, calculate who’s worth talking to, and spend the next two hours pitching themselves at anyone who makes eye contact. They leave with a stack of business cards and zero real connections. Kevin Thompson has spent decades doing the opposite — and built a business that generated over $16 million in course sales almost entirely through relationships.

Kevin’s path to becoming one of the most respected connectors in entrepreneurial circles is anything but linear. It starts on Alaska’s Bering Sea, where he spent six years as a commercial fisherman after leaving the Army. He nearly lost his life to a rogue wave in 1995, came home, and started a cleaning and restoration business that promptly cost him $300,000 before he found his footing. A mentor named Joe Polish helped him rebuild it into a referral-only operation. A mold-remediation website he built on the side started generating $15,000 a month. One 50-minute talk at an industry event produced $35,000 in course sales. He sold the cleaning business the following year and never looked back. Over the next 12 years, he ran nearly 600 strategic partnerships. The relationships were the business.

What Kevin discovered — and what someone eventually had to point out to him explicitly — is that he had been practicing a distinct approach to human connection his entire life. He calls it the intersection of four things: trust in competence, trust in character, alignment of interests, and alignment of values. When all four are present, business happens easily, effortlessly, and fast. When any one is missing, even a technically good deal tends to fall apart.

The conversation also turns to something Kevin and Nicky are quietly building together: an in-person event they’re calling the Un-AI Conference — a deliberately curated gathering of entrepreneurs who believe that real human connection is not a soft skill but a competitive advantage. No ads, no open registration, no algorithmic targeting. Just two people calling the people they trust and asking: are you in?

Kevin Thompson is a relationship strategist, speaker, and connector. He spent six years commercial fishing on Alaska’s Bering Sea before building a cleaning and restoration company that he transformed through mentorship and eventually sold. His publishing business, built on nearly 600 strategic partnerships over 12 years, generated over $16 million in sales. Today he works with entrepreneurs on the art and strategy of building right relationships — the kind that produce trust, alignment, and business that flows.

Expert Action Steps:

1. Send appreciation texts to 10 people today. Pick family, friends, or business contacts and text each one a single thing you genuinely appreciate about them. Ask for nothing in return — not even a response. Notice what comes back.

2. 2. Ask questions you actually want answered. In every conversation, listen for the real answer and ask a follow-up based on what you heard. The experience of being seen, heard, and understood is rare — and it builds more relationship capital than any pitch.

3. Open yourself to receiving. Being a generous giver is a strength, but closing yourself off to receiving — or refusing to ask for help — limits how much you can ultimately give. The two sides of generosity need each other.

Learn more & connect:

Connect with Kevin Thompson on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/kevintheconnector

Resources mentioned:

Joe Polish — marketing mentor and creator of the Piranha Marketing system for the cleaning industry: https://www.joepolish.com

Get Mold Solutions — Kevin’s original content and mold remediation resource site (referenced as the foundation of his online publishing business)

Visit https://www.eCircleAcademy.com and book a success call with Nicky to take your practice to the next level.

EP797: Jesan Sorrells - How Great Books Can Make You Smarter & Better

Nicky Billou

“You are made in the glorious image of Jesus Christ and the Son of God — you have that in you, so don’t hide your light under a bushel. Tell people what you have learned through the process.”

— Jesan Sorrells

Jesan Sorrells has been reading great books and drawing leadership lessons from them for five seasons now. His podcast, Leadership Lessons from the Great Books, covers the full spectrum — Augustine, Homer, Jane Austen, Joan Didion, Carl Hiaasen — because his view is that you can learn something from almost everything, and that the books business culture tends to dismiss often contain the most honest insights about how human beings actually behave.

In this conversation, Sorrells and Nicky go deep on why fiction matters for leaders, what reading biographies of McKinley and Kennedy reveals about the present moment, and how the long game in jiu-jitsu rhymes with the long game in business. There’s a recurring thread: real progress takes time, optimization can be the enemy of meaning, and the people most ready to receive help are rarely the ones who seem to need it most.

Nicky brings his own journey into the room — 58 pounds lost, a bodybuilding competition at 57, and a four-year commitment to earn his IFBB pro card at 60. Sorrells brings a 15-year jiu-jitsu plan and a grandmother who had no patience for poor thinking. The result is a conversation that is warm, honest, and genuinely hard to skim.

Jesan closes with three concrete steps anyone can start today — none of them require a library card, though one will probably lead you to get one.

Expert Action Steps:

1. Turn off Netflix and stop doom-scrolling. Put the phone down and redirect that attention toward the people and things in your household that actually matter.

2. 2. Engage with discipline in the small things. Do one hard thing every day — start small, then build. You do not need to be an athlete to practice this; you just need to be consistent.

3. 3. Stop hiding your light. Share what you have learned through the process — first with your family, then with your community. You were made to contribute, not to quietly accumulate.

Learn more & connect:
Connect with Jesan Sorrells on LinkedIn — search Jesan Sorrells and mention you heard him on this show.
Leadership Lessons from the Great Books — Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube
https://www.leadershiptoolbox.net

Resources mentioned:
Slouching Towards Bethlehem — Joan Didion
The Optimist’s Daughter — Eudora Welty
Emotional Intelligence — Daniel Goleman
The Dip — Seth Godin
Undisputed Truth (autobiography) — Mike Tyson
Kennedy — Ted Sorensen

Visit https://www.eCircleAcademy.com and book a success call with Nicky to take your practice to the next level.

EP796: Geanina Popent - How To Build Muscle After 50

Nicky Billou

“Don’t be lazy. Don’t make excuses. If you want changes, you have to make the change.”

— Geanina (Nina) Popent

Building muscle after 50 is possible. It is not, however, easy — and anyone who tells you otherwise has probably never done it. Nina Popent started her fitness journey in 2017, won a boot camp challenge, and used the prize money to hire a personal trainer. Then COVID closed the gyms, and she built a serious physique in her living room with resistance bands, a bench, and a few dumbbells. When someone at the gym suggested she compete, she almost said no. She said yes instead — and stepped on stage for the first time five years ago, nervous, wearing a mask, without a coach, at a show called Cold Ball. That day changed the direction of her life.

What she has built since is a testament to structure over motivation. Nina wakes at 5:30 a.m., commutes an hour downtown to her job at the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Dentistry, packs four meals every day, and is in the gym by 6 p.m. — staying until 9:30 or 10. She eats the same breakfast she has eaten for five years. She does not believe in balance, at least not as most people use the word. She believes in discipline, patience, and a life structured deliberately around the outcome you want.

The through line from her twenty-plus years as a dental assistant to her work as a fitness coach is the same skill: meeting people where they are emotionally, earning their trust, and transferring hard-won expertise. When coach Amor Nikic watched her compete — without him — and then called her the next day, she knew she wanted him as her coach. A few shows later, he hired her onto his team at Hammer Fitness. The standard for that hire, as Nina explains it, is demanding: you need a story, a genuine passion for clients, and a willingness to invest in yourself first.

Her message to women who look at her physique and want what she has is direct: she has been where they are. The difference is not genetics or youth. It is that she showed up, repeatedly, when she did not feel like it. At 51 — turning 52 — she is still building, still competing, still proving that the work compounds if you let it.

Guest Bio:

Geanina (Nina) Popent is a competitive fitness athlete and personal trainer based in Toronto, where she coaches clients under the umbrella of Hammer Fitness alongside coach Amor Nikic. She immigrated from Romania to Canada in 1996 and spent over twenty years as a dental assistant, including a significant tenure at the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Dentistry, before transitioning into fitness coaching full time. She began competing in bodybuilding five years ago and has built a reputation for helping women — particularly those over 40 — develop strength, muscle, and physical confidence through disciplined training and nutrition.

Expert Action Steps:

1. Stop being lazy. Show up to the gym even when you do not feel like it — treat your training time as a non-negotiable second job, not an optional activity.

2. Stop making excuses. Every obstacle has a workaround; the decision to change has to come first, before the circumstances become convenient.

3. If you want changes, make the change. Waiting for the right moment, the right season, or the right motivation is the strategy that keeps people stuck.

4. Be patient. Muscle at this stage of life builds slowly and compounds over years — the results are real, but they require time that most people are not willing to give.

Learn more & connect:

Hammer Fitness: https://www.hammerfitness.ca

Nina on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/coach_janina

Resources mentioned:

Hammer Fitness (Toronto gym and coaching): https://www.hammerfitness.ca

Amor Nikic (head coach, Hammer Fitness): https://www.hammerfitness.ca

University of Toronto Faculty of Dentistry: https://www.dentistry.utoronto.ca

Visit https://www.eCircleAcademy.com and book a success call with Nicky to take your practice to the next level.