Most leaders say they're building a community. Most of them are building an audience.

In this episode of Connected Conversations, recorded in Denver, Elena Petrova sits down with Sam Swindler of Sword and Spark, and James Pelz of Stack to draw the line that almost everyone blurs. An audience is people you talk at. A network is people you trade with. A community is people who show up for each other, on the good days and the hard ones, and who get to change where the whole thing is going.

Sam and James make the case that belonging can't be manufactured. It has to be built, through curiosity, shared purpose, participation, and trust, and then maintained, because community carries a cost most organizations never budget for. And as AI gets better at making us feel connected, they ask what happens when the feeling is all we're left with.

In this episode:

• Why belonging shows up on the ordinary and hard days, not the highlight reel
• Audience, network, community: the difference, and where leaders get it wrong
• The four conditions of belonging, and why curiosity is the one that unlocks the rest
• What James learned from 45 minutes across a political divide at a buffet table
• Why people buy on feeling first, and call it the smart choice later
• Community's maintenance cost, and why you can't set it and forget it
• How AI can scratch the itch for connection while leaving us connected to nothing

Plus both guests answer the question we ask everyone: what conversation do more people need to be having right now?

Tell us in the comments: are you building a community, or an audience?

Subscribe wherever you listen. YouTube and Spotify are the main homes; Apple Podcasts and Amazon Music also carry the show.

Hosted by Elena Petrova. Connected Conversations is produced by Ad Astra, Inc.

She was eight years old, handed back a test covered in corrections, and told that her dyslexia was her reason to be better than everyone else, because she would have to work harder for it. She didn't have the words for why that felt wrong until years later.

In this clip from Connected Conversations, Camilla Halford, founder of Artega and co-founder of The Homing Call, traces a line from that classroom to the question she now asks of everything: who is this system actually built for? Her argument is that education is structured to rank rather than to help people succeed, because a system with winners requires losers. From there she follows the same logic into housing, and then into payments, where she draws a distinction most of us have never stopped to notice. Cash is a private agreement between two people. A card payment is not.

In this clip:

- The classroom moment that made her start questioning systems

- Why she says a system built to rank people is built for some of them to fail

- The overlooked difference between paying with cash and paying by card

- What your spending reveals about you, and who benefits from knowing it

Watch the full episode with Camilla Halford for the village we lost, the origin of the five-day week, and where a leader starts rebuilding community on purpose.A note on historical context: Camilla discusses how the Netherlands' population registration system contributed to the high death toll among Dutch Jews during the Holocaust, the highest proportion in Western Europe. Historians treat registration as one of several significant factors.

Hosted by Elena Petrova. Connected Conversations is produced by Ad Astra, Inc.

What if loneliness isn't something you feel, but something that was built?

In this episode of Connected Conversations, Elena Petrova sits down with Camilla Halford, founder of Artega and co-founder of The Homing Call, who makes the case that isolation is a design outcome. It is built into our housing, our payment systems, and the shape of our working week. And because it was designed, it can be redesigned.

Camilla's test for any system you live inside is a single question: is this built to serve people, or to serve power?

In this episode:

- Why she says community comes from needing your neighbors, not from being nice to them

- How buying our way out of that need quietly dissolved the village

- The origin of the five-day week, set at the point workers stopped rioting, and why it was never about your happiness

- What our data actually costs us, and why "I have nothing to hide" misses the point

- Where a leader starts: have a party, rotate a paid captain social, and build flexible hours on trust

The question to keep asking your own organization: what are you optimizing for?

Plus Camilla answers the question we ask every guest: what conversation do more people need to be having right now? Her answer is about fear, and about making friends with it rather than conquering it.

A note on historical context: Camilla discusses how the Netherlands' population registration system contributed to the high death toll among Dutch Jews during the Holocaust, the highest proportion in Western Europe. Historians treat registration as one of several significant factors. Further reading:

- Anne Frank House: https://www.annefrank.org/en/anne-frank/go-in-depth/netherlands-greatest-number-jewish-victims-western-europe/

- United States Holocaust Memorial Museum: https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/the-netherlandsTell us in the comments: what are you optimizing for?

Subscribe wherever you listen. YouTube and Spotify are the main homes; Apple Podcasts and Amazon Music also carry the show.

Hosted by Elena Petrova. Connected Conversations is produced by Ad Astra, Inc.

What if belonging isn't only something you feel when you walk into a room, but something you help build for the people who walk in after you?

In this episode of Connected Conversations, Elena Petrova sits down with Claudia Menendez, an equity and inclusion officer for the City of Fort Collins, whose work comes down to a single thing: making people feel understood, in their own language, in their own community. Claudia has lived on every side of belonging, as the visible outsider in northern Uganda, as a teacher who recognized a student's home village on sight, and as a public servant who nearly had to rename her own office to protect the work, and decided to keep going.

Together they get into:

• Why belonging is a two-way street, something you receive and something you contribute to
• The difference between translating information and actually making someone feel heard
• What it costs to live in a language that is not fully your own
• How a community built its own communication network when the official channels fell short

Plus Claudia answers the question we ask every guest: what conversation do more people need to be having right now?

Hosted by Elena Petrova. Connected Conversations is produced by Ad Astra, Inc.

Subscribe wherever you listen. YouTube and Spotify are the main homes; Apple Podcasts and Amazon Music also carry the show.

When Yik Yak matched thousands of students for a three-week experiment, the team expected almost everyone to want romance. What people actually reached for says something about all of us.In this clip from Connected Conversations, Kyle Venn, CEO of Yik Yak, walks Elena Petrova through a friendship-and-dating matching feature the team ran across a platform of about two million students. The part people used most was not the romantic match. It was the search for friends. One group matched on a shared love of baking, and by Kyle's account sent a thousand messages in two hours, revealed who they were, and started planning to meet in real life.In this clip:- Why the friendship matches beat the romantic ones- What one thing in common does to get a conversation started- Why lower stakes let people be more honest versions of themselves- What a matching experiment across two million students reveals about how we connectWatch the full episode with Kyle Venn for the honest look at anonymity, belonging, and the platform's difficult history.Hosted by Elena Petrova. Connected Conversations is produced by Ad Astra, Inc.

When no one knows your name, do you tell the truth, or do you show your worst?

In this episode of Connected Conversations, Elena Petrova sits down with Kyle Venn, CEO of Yik Yak, for a serious look at what an anonymous-by-design platform can teach the rest of us about belonging, trust, and the cost of being seen. This is not a founder profile.

It is an honest conversation that includes the platform's difficult history and the campus bans it is still working against, alongside what a group of strangers matched on baking reveals about connection you don't have to perform, and the difference between technology built to hold your attention and technology built to help you belong.

Plus Kyle answers the question at the heart of the show: what conversation do more people need to be having right now?

Hosted by Elena Petrova.

Connected Conversations is produced by Ad Astra, Inc.

Lisa Mae Brunson was born hard of hearing. For years, she says, it was just a fact of her life, until she started building for her community and saw how many rooms that call themselves accessible aren't.

In this clip from Connected Conversations, Lisa tells Elena Petrova what changed when a colleague who is a CODA, a child of deaf adults, opened her eyes to the barriers Deaf and hard-of-hearing people face in tech and the workforce. What started as a town hall in her living room grew into one of the largest Deaf-in-tech communities around, and a hard lesson came with it: most companies simply aren't built to hire Deaf talent, and the people locked out are the ones who pay for it.

In this clip:

• Why it "was just a thing" until she started building for others
• How a colleague who is a CODA reframed the whole problem
• The bias Deaf professionals still run into in hiring
• What every room that calls itself "accessible" should ask first

Watch the full episode with Lisa Mae Brunson for the human-first reframe, the free-hugs campaign, and how to tell real inclusion from theater.

Hosted by Elena Petrova. Connected Conversations is produced by Ad Astra, Inc.

What if the most inclusive team you could build starts with one reframe: the human first, the role second?

Lisa Mae Brunson has spent a decade building Wonder Women Tech, the conferences, hackathons, and STEAM programs for the people the tech industry left out, as someone who knew exactly what being left out felt like. She and Elena get into how belonging actually gets designed, why so much "inclusion" is theater, what designing access for the Deaf and hard-of-hearing taught her about every "accessible" room, and where technology that includes people can quietly begin to surveil them.

New episodes of Connected Conversations every week on YouTube and Spotify. Apple Podcasts and Amazon Music also carry the show.

Hosted by Elena Petrova. Connected Conversations is produced by Ad Astra, Inc.