The Hosts
Companions in the Common Room
The friends in the room.
The Room of Requirement may have brought us together, but friendship is what built it.
Long before there was a podcast, there were two people who kept finding themselves in the same conversations.
Conversations about stories.
About being human.
About why certain moments in life seem to find us at exactly the right time.
We met through a Harry Potter discussion group in Chicago, but our friendship quickly grew beyond the books. Even after life pulled us in different directions, the conversations never really stopped. We coached one another through career changes, celebrated victories, sat with disappointments, and kept returning to the same question:
How do we live more fully human lives?
Eventually, we realized we wanted to invite other people into those conversations, too.
That’s how the Room came to be.
Karl
Karl has spent his life wondering how people become more themselves.
Whether working with students, leading teams, mentoring colleagues, or reading tarot, he’s always been drawn to moments of transformation: those quiet shifts where someone begins to see themselves differently.
His background in education, anthropology, and adult development gave him language for that curiosity. His work with restorative practices taught him that growth rarely happens through shame. It happens through relationship, compassion, and the courage to stay curious.
In the Room, Karl loves connecting ideas that don’t seem like they belong together at first. A scene from Harry Potter. An insight from psychology. A tarot card. A conversation from everyday life.
Somewhere in the space between them, new meaning begins to emerge, helping all of us feel a little more at home in our humanity.
Kristen
Kristen has spent her whole life wondering why stories change us.
As a kid, she didn’t just love books and movies. She wanted to live inside them. Whether she was directing reenactments of Disney films with her friends or disappearing into a novel for an entire afternoon, stories were never simply entertainment. They were places to belong.
Meeting Hermione Granger at eleven years old gave her something she had never experienced before: the feeling of being seen.
That curiosity eventually led her from a career in UX design into coaching, somatics, and parts work. Along the way, she began to understand that the stories we tell ourselves—and the ones we return to again and again—have the power to shape how we experience our lives.
In the Room, Kristen brings a deep trust in intuition, a love of symbolism, and an uncanny ability to notice the emotional thread running beneath a conversation. She reminds us that stories don’t just help us escape reality.
We can get lost in the stories and find ourselves.
Why We Work Together
The Room exists because our perspectives are different.
Kristen instinctively notices what’s happening beneath the surface.
Karl instinctively asks how those insights can become something we live.
One tends to begin with experience.
The other often begins with questions.
Together, we challenge one another, learn from one another, and regularly surprise one another.
That’s part of the fun.
Every episode is a real conversation. We don’t script our reflections or pretend to have all the answers before we begin. We enter the Room with genuine curiosity, trusting that the practice will reveal something neither of us could have discovered alone.
If you’ve ever wished you could pull up a chair and join two thoughtful friends in a conversation about stories, meaning, and what it means to be human…
We’re really glad you’re here.
Now that you know the perspectives we practice with, discover why we chose to apply them to this specific story, or meet the companions walking beside you on the path.
See You in the Room
Join us each week as we read one chapter at a time and discover what the story might reveal about the lives we’re living.
Crafted with intention. © 2026 All rights reserved, because the stories we return to belong to the hearts that inhabit them.
