JJ Blair - Music Producer and Engineer!

I tried to match Julie’s legendary energy in this podcast. You’ll have to be the judge of whether I was successful or not. She’s famous from her team’s history changing Women’s World Cup Title in 1999. Learn how as athletes they were the best in the world, but also how they took upon themselves to ensure that the Women’s World Cup in the US would be successful and that they could fill the 92,000-seat Rose Bowl. She talks about the We versus Me mission of the team and passing that baton from one generation of players to the next as they continue to win titles, raise the level of women’s sport, and shape the world into one with equal rights for all. As she’s done since she was still a player in 1998, Julie will cover this year’s USWNT in New Zealand and Australia as they go for an unprecedented third World Cup in a row. 

John was a professional rugby player and aspiring triathlete during the off-season when an eight-ton truck hit him as he trained on his bike. Medical experts set his chances at “pine or mahogany” and told the family not to expect him to make it through the day. John made it through that day. When he emerged from the coma, he asked about his bike, which had lost significance since he’d now use a wheelchair. Months of treatment and therapy eventually brought him to rebuilding his former self. As he lifted weights with his mate, his father asked, “How far can you go?” Far went well beyond pine box or mahogany. In over twelve hours of swimming, cycling, and wheelchair racing, John became the first paraplegic to meet all the cut-off times as an official finisher of the Kona Ironman. Then he swam the English Channel, the world’s busiest shipping lane, in twelve hours and fifty-five minutes. Olympic Games, Paralympic Games, a Paralympic Medal, and learning to walk again well enough to finish the original triathlon for which he was training when the truck met his bike. And there’s another challenge on the horizon. 

Dan followed his brother John, six years older, into Warren Miller movies. They skied the steepest and gnarliest, but also went where the news was happening. Dan said, if it’s happening on CNN, that’s where I want to be, which meant skiing the Berlin Wall, sneaking into Lebanon, and almost dying in a storm on Europe’s tallest mountain, Russia’s Mt Elbrus. He hitchhiked with his skis strapped to his back, slept on couches, and made good on the relationships that he forged as a young teenager turning screws for the Ski Market. This boy from Boston has seen it all, skied it all and now his written it down in Thirty Years in a White Haze: Dan Egan's Story of Worldwide Adventure and the Evolution of Extreme Skiing.

Lori played Division I tennis player even though she couldn’t hear the racket hit the ball. Relying on lipreading to communicate, COVID’s masks rendered the world quiet and alone. She was the first person in the world to receive an Esteem implant (an invisible hearing device) with her Cochlear implant. Suddenly the song of the world came alive then she went deaf after ten years. She fights the fight for  those who’ve been left on the outside by letting you walk in their shoes and by demonstrating how their buying power can transform your business. As the CEO of Ready or Not Media she’s changing the world.

Those of you of a certain age, will definitely remember him as Bailey from Party of Five. He has tons of acting credits in film and television and has been part of some long running shows like the aforementioned Party of Five, Everwood and now Nancy Drew. He made his directorial debut on Nancy Drew during the third season with the “Voices in the Frost” episode. He’s also a friend and a Park City resident. 

It was Arthur Ashe, who made Ivan recognize the power of the athlete. Arthur had just been diagnosed with AIDS as a result of a tainted blood transfusion during heart by-pass surgery. He was dying and he could have hidden, but he asked, how can we use this? The resulting widely viewed, highly attended televised event the day before the US Open in what would eventually become Arthur Ashe Stadium put a face on the AIDS epidemic. After twenty-five years in the agent business, Ivan started Athletes for Hope to help athletes leverage their unique skills the way that Arthur had. Muhammad Ali, Mia Hamm, Jeff Gordon, Warrick Dunn, Andre Agassi, Alonzo Mourning and Jackie Joyner-Kersee remain the founding members of an organization that now numbers more than 12,000 athletes. 

Laurel might enjoy her job, some of which includes colonics, which she cheers, more than anyone I know. Her passion is to heal and to help and her motivation is both personal, she had to take charge of her health after numerous surgeries, antibiotics and opioid painkillers, and it’s rooted in the historical, the traditional and the spiritual. As she says, the most common refrain from her patients is, “that makes sense.” And it does make sense on a personal, emotional and cellular level. 

Storytelling consumed Stephani as a film student at USC, but one of her professors told the class that they didn’t know anything because they lacked life experience. When a car careened out of control and trapped her against her boyfriend’s car in his driveway, she lost her legs, gained life experience and turned the camera on the journey from a near death experience. That journey became a love story that led her to the top of the Paralympic skiing world. 

Marc jokingly says that he’s been the one to ask the difficult questions from the time that he got kicked out of Sunday School as a kid for questioning why we as oppressed people would oppress others? Equity and agency have only grown in priority throughout his career as a Pediatric ICU Doctor and leader in the healthcare space. In addition to his role as CEO, Marc has confronted cancer twice, the second of which is incurable, but in remission. Despite or possibly in spite of job and health demands, he’s also an Ironman triathlete, the CEO, who runs bikes and swims before he goes to work.

Jill spent nine years building trust, friendship and the story of Cora’s escape from an abusive, polygamist marriage through her artwork. Snowland will be Jill’s first feature length film. Her journey has gone from shooting stills as a middle-schooler, to being a Mountain Dew girl in a series of commercials that paid her college tuition, to running the film projector in what she called a truly great job, to premiering Sister Wife at Sundance and winning the Jury Award at SXSW, to the adventure that Snowland will soon take.