About Grey Matter with Declan Kelly: Inside the Minds of the People Who Move the World
Grey Matter is a groundbreaking podcast and broadcast series that takes you inside the minds of the people who move the world.
Hosted by Declan Kelly, Founder, Chairman and CEO of Consello, each episode features rare conversations with the most accomplished and influential CEOs, professional athletes, cultural icons, and other global leaders. Not the usual talk about profits and products, but how their minds work and the way they process, decide, and lead.
It’s about the art of exceptional leadership that sits between instinct and intelligence—a space many rarely get to see.
This is Grey Matter.
About Consello
Consello is an Advisory and Investing Platform with offices in New York, Miami, Atlanta, Dublin, Belfast, London, Barcelona, Abu Dhabi and Riyadh.
Consello’s distinct advisory practices provide the complete strategic counsel today’s leaders need to grow and transform their organizations. Consello’s advisory expertise spans Corporate Advisory; M&A; Management Consulting; Talent; and Sports and Entertainment. Dedicated teams operate in each practice, led by a leadership group with deep operational experience across industries, business growth stages and market cycles and with an expansive set of global corporate relationships.
Consello’s investment business, Consello Capital, identifies high-potential mid-market companies and invests capital and expertise to transform their growth.
Danny Meyer: How Do You Scale Excellence? | Grey Matter with Declan Kelly
Twenty years after Setting the Table, restaurateur Danny Meyer has written a new book about the experience of growing Union Square Hospitality Group. In What Could Possibly Go Right?, he reflects on the years when the philosophy of hospitality that shaped his early restaurants had to become something a much larger organization could understand and put into practice. The book follows the success of Union Square Cafe, Gramercy Tavern, and Shake Shack, but it is also an account of the lessons t...
10 Sept 2026
Sarah Friar: What is Experience Worth in the Age of AI? | Grey Matter with Declan Kelly
Every CEO is being asked to make decisions about AI before there is a reliable playbook for what comes next. Where to invest. How to create business value. Which risks to take. What to automate. And what should remain fundamentally human. That makes experience a more complicated asset. The past may offer fewer obvious answers, but the judgment built through years of operating across different environments may become even more valuable. Few executives embody that challenge better than Sarah Fr...
10 Aug 2026
Larry Fitzgerald: The Mindset That Built a Hall of Fame Career | Grey Matter with Declan Kelly
Larry Fitzgerald is an 11x Pro Bowler and now a first-ballot Pro Football Hall of Famer. Since retiring, he's built a second career as a successful investor, with a portfolio spanning more than 160 companies. Despite being one of the greatest wide receivers in the modern era, what often gets overlooked is how much his inquisitive mind played in his success, and the discipline to treat the moments that tested him most as turning points for his evolution. That endless curiosity showed up in the...
15 Jul 2026
Mark Messier: The Art of Reinvention | Grey Matter with Declan Kelly
Over the course of his remarkable 26-year career, Mark Messier won six Stanley Cups and remains the only player in NHL history to captain two different franchises to a championship. Few elite athletes have been asked to reinvent themselves as often or as successfully. In Edmonton, he spent a decade alongside Wayne Gretzky as the team's indispensable second star. When Gretzky was traded in 1988, Messier stepped into the captaincy and led the Oilers to another Stanley Cup two years later. Then ...
11 Jun 2026
Steve Kerr: The Inner Game of Leading | Grey Matter with Declan Kelly
Steve Kerr has spent a lifetime studying his own mind. As a player, he was an overthinker with a fierce competitive drive who had to learn how to channel those qualities rather than be ruled by them. As a coach, that inner work became the foundation for one of the most successful dynasties in NBA history. That journey was shaped by years spent inside the cultures of Phil Jackson and Gregg Popovich, two of the most exceptional leadership minds the game has ever produced. When he became head co...
21 May 2026
Ruthie Rogers: The Heart Behind One of the World's Most Beloved Restaurants | Grey Matter with Declan Kelly
For nearly 40 years, Ruthie Rogers has run one of the most celebrated restaurants in the world on the banks of the River Thames in London. The River Cafe has held a Michelin star for decades, launched the careers of some of the most acclaimed chefs in the world, and drawn a loyal following that spans generations and continents. And yet, what its guests most often describe is not just the exceptional food. It is how the restaurant makes them feel. That quality begins with Ruthie. She is self-t...
30 Apr 2026
Ken Burns: Finding America’s Source of Truth | Grey Matter with Declan Kelly
For nearly half a century, Ken Burns has been the keeper of America's story and the filmmaker who has done more than perhaps any other single person to help a country understand where it came from and who it has been. Throughout his career, he has returned to the same question: Who are we? He has asked it through the Civil War and jazz, through baseball and the American Revolution, through the lives of Lincoln, Muhammad Ali, Jackie Robinson, and George Washington. He has never ans...
9 Apr 2026
Tony James: From Signal to Scale - The Foresight that Shaped Modern Finance | Grey Matter with Declan Kelly
Tony James has spent over four decades seeing what was coming next and acting on it long before anyone else. He built DLJ from a mid-sized brokerage into one of the most influential platforms on Wall Street by creating the leveraged buyout and private capital businesses that became the model the rest of the industry eventually adopted. He joined Blackstone as COO and constructed an entirely new set of investment businesses, helping transform the private equity firm into the world’s largest al...
10 Mar 2026
Brian Moynihan: Steady at the Helm | Grey Matter with Declan Kelly
When Brian Moynihan became CEO of Bank of America in January 2010, he inherited an institution that had grown rapidly through six major acquisitions in six years in the wake of the worst financial crisis in a generation. From his first days in the role, he moved decisively to simplify what had accumulated, clearing away what no longer served the institution so its greatest strengths could be brought to bear. What followed was fifteen years of sustained transformation, driven by the same stead...
11 Feb 2026
Carl Lewis: The Business of Being the Fastest Man in the World | Grey Matter with Declan Kelly
Carl Lewis is widely regarded as one of the most dominant athletes of the modern era. For more than a decade, he was the fastest man in the world, winning nine Olympic gold medals, going undefeated in the long jump for ten years, and becoming one of the most recognized athletes on the planet. Over the course of his career, Lewis came to understand that dominating track and field had a dual effect. It brought extraordinary visibility and influence, allowing him to challenge the sport’s amateur...
29 Jan 2026
Mike Wirth: Pragmatism Above All | Grey Matter with Declan Kelly
For more than four decades, Mike Wirth has built his career at Chevron, rising through an organization where major decisions are expected to stand up over long periods and where leadership judgment is assessed through enduring outcomes rather than immediacy. When he became Chairman and CEO, the company was operating in an environment that placed a growing emphasis on capital discipline and on the durability of long-dated investment decisions. That context sharpened the importance of pragmatic...
8 Jan 2026
James Quincey: Stewarding an Iconic Brand Through Change | Grey Matter with Declan Kelly
For nearly 140 years, The Coca-Cola Company has grown by building one of the most enduring and recognizable brand systems in the world, expanding across markets and categories while maintaining a level of global consistency. That scale and reach became a defining strength, but it also required a new approach as consumer behavior, technology, and expectations evolved. When James Quincey became Chairman and CEO, he approached that moment with a mindset shaped by engineering and operationa...
3 Dec 2025
Jimmy Dunne: Pressure in Perspective | Grey Matter with Declan Kelly
Jimmy Dunne is often described as a legendary figure in the finance and sporting world. But he'd describe himself more simply—as someone who shows up, relentlessly, for the people who stood by him and the moments that define what matters. For over a decade, he built Sandler O'Neill into one of Wall Street's most respected investment banks. On September 11th, 2001, the firm lost 66 colleagues, nearly one-third of the company, when the South Tower collapsed. He attended every funeral. Committed...
17 Nov 2025
Ed Bastian: The Values That Redefined the Airline Industry | Grey Matter with Declan Kelly
Ed Bastian, CEO of Delta Air Lines, embodies a rare kind of leadership—the ability to balance empathy with a deep sense of conviction when the stakes couldn’t be higher. In 2005, he stood alone in bankruptcy court when 180 airlines had filed before him and only a few survived. At the height of COVID, with Delta’s business literally grounded globally, he refused to furlough a single employee. He blocked middle seats for over a year because protecting his people mattered more tha...
27 Oct 2025
Larry Culp: The Discipline Behind One of the Greatest Business Turnarounds | Grey Matter with Declan Kelly
Larry Culp is one of the most private and respected CEOs in the world. Over seven years, he orchestrated what many call the greatest turnaround in modern business, rescuing GE from $140 billion in debt and splitting it into three independent world-class companies—GE Aerospace, GE HealthCare, and GE Vernova. In this rare conversation, Larry reveals how he did it: by slowing the game down, embedding a culture of continuous improvement, and choosing ruthless focus over comfortable synergy. In th...
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