Malika Andrews and Taylor Rooks have two of the most visible jobs in sports media. Malika is the face of ESPN's NBA coverage, hosting NBA Today and NBA Countdown. Taylor hosts NBA on Prime and is a major presence across Thursday Night Football. Between them they're speaking to millions of people every week — and interviewing some of the most famous athletes in the world.

They’ve also had a front-row seat to each other’s rise. And while they’re both incredibly ambitious and competitive, they’ve learned how to let someone else’s success push them without allowing it to diminish their own.

Emma sits down with both of them to understand what it actually takes to become that trusted at that scale — the preparation nobody sees, how you get an athlete to tell you the truth, and what it costs to do a job where every word, every question and every mistake gets picked apart in real time.

In this episode:

• Why preparation gives you the confidence to perform under pressure
• Trust as a daily deposit: accurate, honest, and fair
• How healthy competition can raise your own standard
• Why asking for what you want can change the trajectory of your career
• How to negotiate from a place of knowing your value
• Why credibility is built through small, consistent actions
• How to tell the difference between feedback worth hearing and noise
• Why longevity, not the next job, is the real ambition

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Everyone has an opinion about Nara Smith. Very few people have asked her how the business works. At 24, with four kids under six and one of the most recognizable formats on the internet, Nara is running a company she plans to keep growing for the next 50 years.

Emma and Nara get into the moment a viral format turned into income, and why she left the modeling agency that had represented her since she was 14. Nara explains how she uses brand partnerships to test what her audience will buy before launching her own consumer goods brand, and why she still films and edits every video herself. They also talk about the money rules her dad drilled into her and what it takes to stop letting the comment section decide who you are.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

• How Nara turned a recognizable content format into a multimillion-dollar business
• Why knowing when to lean into what’s working can be more powerful than starting with a perfect strategy
• How she and Lucky approach money, shared wealth, and maintaining their own individual businesses
• What the internet gets wrong about the “tradwife” version of Nara Smith
• How she stops other people’s assumptions from becoming her identity
• How Nara is planning to build an empire that lasts well beyond social media

Vanessa Van Edwards has spent nearly twenty years studying what makes some people easy to talk to. Her argument is that conversation is a skill rather than a personality, and that most of us are simply out of practice.

She joins Emma to talk about how to prepare for the conversations that matter, what to say when you meet someone who could change your career, and how to handle feedback and disagreement without damaging the relationship. She also explains what happened early in her own career, when she lost a television deal during the small talk before the pitch and nobody ever told her that was why.

In this episode:

• How to prepare for conversations that could change what happens next
• The three questions you should always be ready to answer
• Why talking about how busy you are makes people think you're less competent
• How to raise a problem with someone more senior than you
• What the way someone tells their own story reveals about them

Vanessa Van Edwards's new book, Conversation: How to Connect with Anyone & Make Every Interaction Count, is out now.