Every kid is a natural storyteller. Somewhere along the way, most of us lose our nerve for it. Joe Lazer believes rediscovering that skill may be one of the most powerful ways to connect with other people, especially in an age of AI.

A writer, marketing executive, and AI strategist, Joe has spent his career studying what makes stories work. He sees storytelling as a human ability that starts early in life, and one most of us simply talk ourselves out of as we get older.

In this week's Power & Impact, Joe and I explore why stories capture our attention, make ideas memorable, and create a shared emotional experience between people. Those qualities make storytelling especially valuable in business, and we talk about how leaders can use stories to communicate a vision and build trust.

And then there's AI.

As technology gets better at producing content and analysis, Joe believes our ability to form relationships and create emotional connection only becomes more valuable. He sees AI less as a replacement and more as a tool for thinking, an "intellectual sparring partner" that can challenge our assumptions.

Money can complicate even the strongest family relationships. It can bring to the surface questions about trust, loyalty, responsibility, and the roles everyone thought they understood.

Those are questions Emily Bouchard has spent more than 20 years helping families work through. Her conversations often begin with wealth, inheritance, philanthropy, family businesses, or succession, but quickly get to the relationships underneath them.

Her interest in family dynamics grew out of her own experience with loss. Emily was 14 when she suddenly lost her mother, and that loss has shaped how she thinks about resilience and about what holds a family together.

In this week's Power & Impact, Emily and I explore what happens when money enters the family dynamic — and why the real challenges are rarely about the money itself. Trust is built in some moments and broken in others. Certain conversations get avoided, generation after generation.

We also talk about what gets passed from one generation to the next, from wealth and responsibility to values and family stories. Emily's work is a reminder that what holds a family together can't always be measured on a balance sheet.

What happens when you notice an opportunity hiding in plain sight?

Shawn Porat has built his career around that instinct. He started a technology company while in law school and later created a marketplace for buying and selling legal judgments. His next idea came while sitting in a Chinese restaurant, watching diners open their fortune cookies. They read the messages, laughed, talked about them, took pictures, and tucked the fortunes into their pockets. Shawn recognized the value of that attention and began building a media platform around it.

Today, his company reaches roughly 135 million Americans a month and works with some of the world's biggest brands. In this episode of Power & Impact, shawn tells me how he built the business, why cold outreach has opened so many doors, and how he kept going through $200,000 in credit card debt and moments when he was ready to quit. We also talk about AI, the future of advertising, the value of real-world experiences, and how shawn's unconventional approach has shaped the way he sees opportunities.

His advice for anyone with an idea is simple: start by sending the email or making the call, because you don't need to know the entire path before taking the first step or getting that first response.