From The Culture

The way we use AI reveals more than our relationship with technology. It reveals what our workplaces reward, the roles we learn to play, and the parts of ourselves we leave at the door.Bestselling author and collaboration expert Erica Dhawan joins Marcus Collins and Amanda Slavin to explore the human questions behind the AI conversation. Her book, Use Your Brain, makes the case for independent thinking, discernment, and agency in an increasingly automated world.Together, they unpack the costumes we wear at work, the pressure to perform rather than be ourselves, and what we risk when we outsource our judgment and creativity. At the heart of the conversation is a question about culture: are we creating workplaces where people can think for themselves, contribute what only they can, and show up as who they are?

What if fear could help us find our way to joy? In this episode of From the Culture, Amanda Slavin and Dr. Marcus Collins sit down with author, filmmaker, and advocate Tanya Selvaratnam to explore the difference between fear that protects us and fear that keeps us from living fully.Drawing on her experiences of intimate violence, illness, and rebuilding her life, Tanya shares how she has learned to trust herself, stay open to serendipity, and make room for joy without denying pain. From knowing when to pause to finding people we can trust, the conversation explores the tools that help us reclaim our agency.Together, they ask what it means to be shaped by our experiences without being defined by them, and how those in power can create cultures where people feel safe, heard, and free to thrive.

Rejection, loneliness, heartbreak, stress, and disappointment don’t stay contained to one part of our lives. They shape how we think, how we relate to other people, and how present we’re able to be.Dr. Guy Winch is a psychologist, bestselling author, and one of the world’s leading voices on emotional health. Through books including Emotional First Aid, How to Fix a Broken Heart, and Mind Over Grind, he has helped millions of people understand how to care for the emotional injuries we all experience.In this episode of From the Culture, Marcus Collins and Amanda Slavin explore the emotional lives we bring into everything we do. They talk about rejection and rumination, loneliness and heartbreak, the ways work follows us home, and how learning to care for ourselves changes the way we show up for the people around us.

Success rarely follows the version of the story we imagined at the beginning. Sometimes growth means persevering. Sometimes it means letting go. And sometimes it means creating an entirely new table when the one you were trying to reach no longer fits who you are becoming.Dhar Mann is an entrepreneur, creator, and founder of Dhar Mann Studios, one of the world’s largest digital storytelling companies. His path has included extraordinary success, major failure, reinvention, and the experience of building again from moments that could have looked like endings.In this episode of From the Culture, Marcus Collins and Amanda Slavin explore how we know when to keep going and when to release an old version of the dream, what failure can reveal about who we are becoming, and how our definition of success changes over time.Because sometimes the most important thing we can do is keep going. And sometimes it is realizing we are allowed to build a different table.

Adam “Smiley” Poswolsky is a bestselling author and speaker whose work explores friendship, belonging, purpose, and human connection, including Friendship in the Age of Loneliness and The Quarter-Life Breakthrough.In this episode of From the Culture, Marcus Collins and Amanda Slavin explore the relationship between connection and agency. They talk about the people and communities that help us trust ourselves, what it means to create the conditions for someone else to grow, and how workplaces and relationships can expand our sense of what we are capable of becoming.Because agency may begin within us, but the conditions that allow it to grow are often created together.