Ten Months of The Giovanne Show: What Real Conversations Taught Me About Leading
Updated: 9 hours ago
We launched The Giovanne Show in King County, Washington, with an episode I still think about often. Kent Hay, a community leader in the City of Auburn, told a story about a man living in the woods, shooting up in his neck, and the outreach work that kept him alive. I built the show around a simple idea: homelessness isn't a headline, it's human. Kent's episode set that tone in the first conversation, and I said at the time this show isn't about politics, it's about people, purpose, and proven change. Ten months and several guests later, that's still exactly what it is.
The frontline teaches you things the org chart can't
Every guest on this show does work that doesn't show up cleanly in a quarterly report. Jazmyn Brown, CEO of 211 Alameda County and Executive Director of Eden I&R, sat down with me to talk about what 211 actually is: not just a referral line, but a frontline entry point for people looking for shelter, food, safety, transportation, and stability. Her team manages a resource network covering more than 2,800 programs across over 1,100 partner agencies. That scale only works because of leadership and community trust built over years, and she's spent more than 17 years building exactly that kind of trust.
You don't learn that kind of leadership from a case study. You learn it by putting a microphone in front of someone who's lived it and getting out of the way.
The through-line across every episode is the same
Whether it's Kent Hay talking about street outreach, or a conversation about imposter syndrome in leadership, or Jazmyn Brown explaining how a 211 line becomes a lifeline, the guests on this show keep proving the same point from different angles: real solutions come from people who stayed close to the problem instead of managing it from a distance. That's the whole premise of the show, and ten months in, I haven't found a counterexample yet.
Every guest who's sat across from me has taught me the same lesson from a different angle: proximity to the problem is the only credential that actually matters.
What hosting has changed about how I lead my own teams
Interviewing people for a living, even part-time, forces a discipline I didn't have before: you have to actually listen before you respond. I've caught myself in my own meetings at Mysti's doing what I try never to do on the show — jumping to the answer before someone finishes describing the problem. The show has made me a slower, better listener at work, which sounds like a small thing until you realize how much of leadership is just that.
It's also reinforced something I wrote about in my own Entrepreneur essay: influence without integrity doesn't hold up. When the show started gaining traction, it would have been easy to book guests purely for reach. I kept the bar the same instead — does this conversation serve the mission of leadership, healing, and social reform, or doesn't it. Every guest so far has cleared that bar because I didn't lower it.
Where to actually watch it
Every episode streams at schachere.com/thegiovanneshow. Clips are free to everyone. Full episodes are reserved for Inner Circle members, and the trial is free for 30 days if you want to go deeper than the highlight reel.
What's next
Ten months in, the format hasn't changed and it won't. Real people, real stories, no script that gets in the way of the truth. If the first ten months are any indication, the next batch of conversations will keep teaching me things I couldn't have learned staying behind a desk.
Keep going
When Helping Hurts — and Healing Saves: The Giovanne Show Launches in King County
Read more from the blog at schachere.com/blog, or book me to speak at schachere.com/contact-giovanne.
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