My guest today is Alexis Gay. While on the rise in her career in tech, Alexis took to the internet to lampoon her own industry as her social alter ego, @yayalexisgay. With razor sharp comedic instincts and magnetic screen presence, she pokes fun at the absurdity of a new professional class that’s trying to put a dent in the universe while navigating petty personal problems. After 25 million video views, countless industry conference keynotes, and over a hundred episodes of her podcast...

Years ago, I made a pilgrimage up the Hudson river to visit a guru. Conscientious, soft spoken, and sporting a shiny bald head, he had the profile of a wiseman in eastern philosophy. But in fact, he was a guru in the secular (yet mystical) philosophy of marketing. Towards the end of our meeting, as I asked for advice on growing our startup Sir Kensington’s, he wrote a note on a piece of torn paper and slipped it across the table. I picked it up and read it: “People Like Us Do Things Like...

Sometimes you’ll meet someone, and halfway through the conversation it dawns on you: This person is different. This is a person doing their life’s work. Nicholas Coleman is undeniably one of those people. And with eloquence to match his passion, the more he shares the more interesting he becomes. Nick is one of the world’s foremost experts on olive oil. He is an educator, speaker, and co-founder of Grove and Vine, a full service bespoke olive oil merchant and producer. Nick chases the harvest...

A decade ago, Gabe Whaley figured out how to light the internet ablaze and has been leading a relentless scorched earth campaign ever since. Gabe is CEO and co-founder of MSCHF, a Brooklyn-based high-output for-profit art collective behind hundreds of radical and delightful projects. These range from shoes filled with holy water, to anime tax software, to forged picassos, to the mega-viral Big Red Boots. He’s been dragged into court for ticking off big companies, sold a laptop full of...

So far, Kareem Rahma has packed more into his 38 years than most people do into a lifetime. Egyptian? Yes. Midwesterner? Yes. New Yorker? Yes. Brooklynite? Yes.  Corporate employee? Yes. Post-exit founder? Yes. Media entrepreneur? Yes. Comedian? Yes. Musician? Yes. Published author? Yes. Film producer? Yes. Pizza gallerist? Improbably, yes Is there anything that isn’t a “yes” for Kareem? Well, tune into his viral Instagram series @subwaytakes and indeed, he’s not afraid to blast “100%...

Cool, calm, and collected, you’d never peg Food52 founder Amanda Hesser as having an insatiable appetite for risk. Self-described as “impulsive” and described by others as “frighteningly ambitious,” Amanda comes off as conscientious and considered as she does intelligent and industrious. So what makes her tick? After following her sense of adventure and love of food to a chateau in Burgundy where she wrote about seasonal cooking, she went on to unexpectedly land a job writing for the food...

For someone who’s ridden the highs and lows of life’s roller coaster, Shane Heath comes across as remarkably grounded.  Between the death of a college roommate, the unexpected chapter of fatherhood, and leading a hypergrowth company in an ultra-competitive industry, there are plenty of challenges that most people would be overwhelmed by. Shane doesn’t easily get overwhelmed, but he isn’t exactly easygoing. As charismatic as he is introverted, his cool demeanour belies a deep-seated intensity...

Most people just dream of going viral. Michael Dubin has actually pulled it off. Mike went from being rejected from every business school he applied to and being laid off from Sports Illustrated to revolutionizing how razors are sold in America with Dollar Shave Club. Beyond operational ingenuity and opportunity spotting, Mike made use of his talents in sketch comedy and improvisation to create a video in 2012 that lit the internet on fire and birthed a generation of “direct-to-consumer”...

This week, Scott turns the tables by serving as guest on his own show. The adept interviewer Kyle Thiermann graciously hosts this episode so listeners can better get to know Scott as the host of At Large. Kyle is a journalist, copywriter, activist, humorist, and a professionally sponsored big wave surfer. On today’s episode, we discuss the moment that sparked the idea for Sir Kensington’s, the power of play in business, and threading the needle in product design between novelty and nostalgia....

Is there any greater responsibility than educating and entertaining children?  Our guest today is an inspiring, creative, and formidable television screenwriter and producer who created Doc McStuffins. Her show went on to be a global sensation and Disney’s longest running series other than Mickey Mouse, featuring a Black girl who looks up to her mother, a doctor, and cares for her many ailing stuffed animals. Working with both Disney and Netflix, Chris has created a fleet of shows, both...

Sooner or later, we needed to do a show about film.  With its potential for scale, resource intensiveness, and power to transfix the viewer, film is in many ways the ultimate creative business.  Fabien Riggall is the founder of Secret Cinema, a London-based immersive theatrical experience that puts the audience at the heart of the story. He is the inventor of a hybrid genre between film and theater, creating inhabitable cinematic worlds in which participants are both members of the scene and...

Silicon valley used to be the domain of the fringe. Wild ideas of social experiments, merry pranksters, and pioneering technologists building tools for imagined utopias. Somewhere along the line, this maverick spirit gave way to SaaS playbooks, an alphabet soup of soup of venture financings, and regimented productivity routines.  Today’s guest Danielle Baskin keeps the experimental instinct of Silicon Valley’s past alive. Danielle has been called an artist, provocateur, businesswoman, and...

Where do art and commerce collide if not at auction?  Episode four of At Large brings us Alexander Gilkes, a serial entrepreneur and former chief auctioneer for Philips. At the world’s third largest auction house and as founder of Paddle 8, he hammered in over $1B of art, and adapted what he learned there to the craft of marketing. We’ll hear how his Etonian upbringing and passion for contemporary art led him to a career selling such rarities as a one of a kind album by Wu Tang Clan, and...

She’s been called Martha Stewart meets the Royal Tenenbaums, and the facts of Susan’s life story rival characters from fiction. After schooling in a Scottish castle and gaining a toe-hold as a journalist, she founded Best PR, representing technology companies through the rise and fall of the first dot-com bubble. That put her at the center of technology, business, and culture, and an offline matchmaker in an increasingly online world. A natural and generous connector, Susan led a renaissance...

For John Fiorentino, finding creative ideas is like hunting big game. It’s unpredictable, requires innate skill, and is an all-consuming quest defined by feast and famine. John’s hunt for ideas led him to create a product inspired by nights sleeping on the New York City subway which invented a category: the Gravity Blanket. Since launching this product, John has founded a collection of other product-driven businesses which have generated hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue since...

Today we sit down with Eric Ryan, founder of Method Soap, OLLY Vitamins, and a growing collection of new brands. We discuss Eric’s creative practices when originating companies and the leadership lessons he’s learned over 25 years as a serial entrepreneur and marketing strategist. 📸 @swhnorton 🐦 @swhnorton 🖥️ www.atlargeshow.com ……. This podcast is made available solely for entertainment and educational purposes. The information presented here does not constitute investment, legal, or...

Join Scott Norton for conversations with world-class creatives who have achieved commercial success and lived to tell the tale. At Large explores the many ways the creatives that have shaped our world navigate business and use commerce to scale their craft.  Whether guests are artists, actors, designers, authors, or inventors of their own genre, this show illustrates that there is no one way for a creative to make a living. A creative entrepreneur behind Sir Kensington’s condiments, Scott...