Lance Gould on Hope as a Renewable Energy

What do you do when the story that falls apart is your own?

Lance Gould is the CEO of Brooklyn Story Lab, a media strategy firm that helps purpose-driven organizations tell their stories. Before that came thirty years in journalism, ending with an executive editor's chair at HuffPost and a layoff one week after the 2016 US Presidential election.

What set in, he tells Renay, was "sheer panic." He was 51, with two daughters, in a field that was shrinking under him, and he had never wanted to be an entrepreneur in the first place — he liked insurance and a paycheck. 

This is not an episode about losing a job. It's about what a storyteller does when his own story comes apart, and what he learns about hope on the other side of it. Not hope as a feeling that arrives, but hope as something you generate and protect: "the more that we prop that up and don't let it dissipate and don't let it disappear, the more hope that we have."

Lance and Renay cover the layoff and the panic underneath it; the 270 elephants he helped move a thousand miles from one reserve to another and what a matriarchal species has to teach a moment shaped by male ego; why storytelling is part art and part science — "without the artful delivery, it's just an abacus," and "without data, it's just conjecture"; and how to wear blinders and take them off at the same time.

Through the Noise is about the inner capacities that let leaders sustain themselves and the work. This one is about treating hope as something you generate — and refusing to let it disappear.