Torie Smith: Where Hospitality, Human Connection, and a Different Kind of Consciousness Meet 

How two decades on the frontline led Torie to Empathic Gangster® and a new way of thinking about leadership, communication and human connection. 

Some lives make sense in retrospect. Torie Smith’s makes sense only when you stop trying to put it into a straight line. An artist became a hospitality professional. A bartender became a bridge between people and leadership. A mother became a student of consciousness. A woman drawn to design, psychology, human behaviour and spirituality eventually built a world that could hold all of them. Her journey has rarely followed a single direction, yet every turn seems to have left something behind for the next one. 

Today, Smith is the founder of Empathic Gangster®, a hospitality keynote speaker, Spirit Advisor, artist and creator whose work brings together human connection, mindful consumption, leadership, creativity and her deeply personal interpretation of consciousness. 

Her story begins long before the brand. 

“I was born into a party,” she says. 

Her father and grandfather were jet boat racers, and speed, adventure and risk were familiar parts of her childhood. Growing up in the country gave her another influence entirely: motorcycles, nature, sports, exploration and the quiet freedom of being outdoors. Between those two worlds, she developed an unusual combination of intensity and observation. 

She grew up quickly and became fiercely independent. Music, art, design, technology, psychology, entertainment and friendship all captured her imagination. By the time she left her hometown for college, she already had a strong sense that her life would eventually circle back to her community. 

She remembers leaving for college with a thought that stayed with her for years: one day, she would return to speak to teenagers about the raw, formative years that shape so much of who we become. 

That instinct to turn lived experience into something useful would become one of the defining threads of her career. 

A Life Built Through Experience 

Smith graduated with a degree in Visual Communications and entered adulthood carrying a background that had already exposed her to experiences many people encounter much later in life. 

Therapy and recovery became part of her early journey. She learned to confront difficult chapters directly, while discovering that creativity was essential to her sense of identity. 

Her professional life eventually led her to the mountains, where she became a bartender. 

What could have looked like a departure from her creative education became another form of education entirely. 

Hospitality taught Smith how people behave when their guard is lowered. It taught her communication, responsibility, consumption science, conflict resolution and the subtle dynamics between customers, employees and leadership. Her TIPS certification gave her a formal foundation in responsible alcohol service, while years behind the bar gave her something no certification could provide: thousands of real conversations with people from different backgrounds and walks of life. 

She began to understand hospitality as a human system. 

For two decades, she worked close to the frontline, frequently occupying the space between management, corporate leadership and employees. She challenged practices she believed were harmful, pushed for change and became increasingly interested in the reasons teams struggle. 

A recurring pattern caught her attention. 

Managers were frequently spending their days solving problems, managing turnover and putting out fires. Frontline employees often felt disconnected from leadership. The resulting cycle affected culture, performance and retention. 

Smith eventually decided she wanted to do more than point out the problem. 

She wanted to help change the system. 

When the Unexpected Became the Foundation 

In 2018, Smith experienced what she describes as a profound spiritual awakening after reading The Untethered Soul. She describes entering an immersive period of channeling, during which she explored consciousness, spirituality, quantum concepts and what she describes as Galactic Law. 

Her interpretation of that experience became the foundation for the next chapter of her work. 

For several years, she stepped away from conventional professional life and devoted herself to writing, listening, creating and examining her own experiences from radically different perspectives. 

She describes the period as living between two worlds. 

The experience also forced her to solve a practical problem: how do you translate an intensely personal internal experience into language another person can understand? 

That question became central to her work. 

Smith began examining ideas from multiple perspectives, having what she describes as extensive internal conversations about a concept before communicating it. She would also discuss ideas with other people, listening for patterns in how different individuals interpreted the same experience. 

The objective was simple: find language that could travel. 

Then add what she calls the “Torie twist.” 

The Birth of Empathic Gangster® 

Empathic Gangster® emerged from this period organically. 

Smith describes the brand as a reflection of her personality, worldview and experiences rather than a conventional business concept built from a market template. It brings together hospitality, art, consciousness, self-expression and her interpretation of spiritual principles. 

At its centre is a philosophy that challenges the assumption that strength requires emotional distance. 

Empathy, in Smith’s view, can coexist with confidence, boundaries, directness and decisive action. 

That idea is reflected in the name itself. 

Empathic Gangster® represents a person who can care deeply while remaining grounded in their own power. Someone who can listen without losing themselves, lead without domination and remain authentic without performing a carefully constructed identity. 

Her broader philosophy includes concepts such as Harmonic Living™, Galactic Attunement™ and Galactic Law, terminology Smith uses to describe her framework for understanding consciousness, energy, human behaviour and the relationship between inner experience and physical life. 

One of the principles she repeatedly returns to is neutrality. 

Her interpretation is that circumstances carry the meaning people assign to them. Change the lens, and the experience can begin to change with it. 

This idea runs through much of her work: observe, question, extract what is useful, integrate it and then decide how to move forward. 

From Spirit Advisor to Hospitality Keynote Speaker 

Smith’s work has gradually brought two seemingly different worlds together. 

One is deeply personal and spiritual. The other is grounded in the practical realities of hospitality. 

She calls herself a Spirit Advisor, while also positioning herself as a hospitality keynote speaker and workshop facilitator. Her goal is to bring the insight gathered through her personal journey into conversations about leadership, workplace culture and human connection. 

After years of being the person who identified problems between management and frontline teams, she decided to become part of the solution. 

Her leadership philosophy centres on intentional hiring, stronger communication, employee empowerment and the creation of collaborative teams. 

She describes her approach as dissolving energetic hierarchy and introducing more human-centred ways of operating. 

The language may come from an unconventional place, yet the question underneath it is familiar to almost every hospitality leader: 

What happens when the people responsible for serving others feel disconnected from the people responsible for leading them? 

Smith believes the answer begins with leadership. 

A workplace carries the emotional tone of the people running it. The way managers communicate, listen, respond to mistakes and treat employees eventually becomes part of the culture. 

For Smith, this is where hospitality becomes much bigger than restaurants, bars and hotels. 

It becomes a study of people. 

The Walking Confessional 

Perhaps the most distinctive element of Smith’s work is her relationship with conversation. 

She describes herself as having spent much of her life as a “walking confessional.” People tell her things. Sometimes things they have never said aloud before. 

She sees that openness as a responsibility. 

Smith listens for what sits underneath the words. She considers the speaker’s perspective, emotional state, history and language before responding. Her aim is to communicate in a way that the other person can actually receive. 

Sometimes that means compassion. 

Sometimes it means a difficult truth. 

She has learned that the ability to make people feel safe enough to reveal themselves can become a form of leadership in its own right. 

Her definition of impact reflects this belief. 

She measures success by the version of themselves people feel comfortable becoming around her. 

That perspective also explains why visibility has always been complicated for her. 

Smith has spent much of her life being known within communities while remaining relatively private herself. She has little interest in conventional celebrity. What she wants is something more intimate: to remain Torie, simply on a larger scale. 

She wants people to know the person behind the ideas well enough to understand the intention behind her words. 

Art as Another Language 

Art has remained a constant throughout her life. 

Smith describes herself as someone who thinks visually and has long been fascinated by three-dimensional art, design and imaginative environments. Her work now extends into visual interpretations of the experiences she describes through her spiritual practice. 

Her artwork, including Ethereal Magik, has become part of that exploration. 

She sees art as a way of communicating experiences that conventional language can struggle to capture. 

That same philosophy informs her plans for a physical Galactic Attunement™ space in Las Vegas, where she envisions bringing together art, experiential design, conversation and her approach to consciousness. 

The ambition reaches beyond creating another office or consultation room. 

She imagines an environment people can experience. 

Something playful. Immersive. Artistic. Unexpected. 

Very much like the woman behind it. 

The Person Behind the Brand 

For all the terminology surrounding Smith’s work, her deepest motivations appear remarkably human. 

Her greatest accomplishments, she says, are her relationship with her husband and her two daughters. 

Motherhood changed her pace. Marriage changed her understanding of patience, compassion and vulnerability. Both experiences forced her to encounter parts of herself that independence and ambition alone could never reveal. 

Her definition of leadership grew alongside those relationships. 

She became increasingly interested in listening, sitting still and allowing other people’s experiences to expand her own perspective. 

Her father remains one of her strongest influences. She describes him as someone who taught through trust, gave her responsibility early and approached life with confidence, competence and humour. 

From her mother, she learned to look for the silver lining and to maintain faith in something larger than herself. 

Together, those influences shaped a woman who values independence while increasingly understanding the power of connection. 

A Different Definition of Success 

Smith has received professional recognition, including an honorary doctorate in Advanced Studies of Psychology, and has been recognised as a Spirit Advisor and Thought Leader. 

Yet traditional accolades hold limited significance for her. 

She measures her success through relationships. 

• Did someone feel heard? 

• Did a conversation change their perspective? 

• Did an employee leave an interaction with greater confidence? 

• Did someone feel free enough to become a fuller version of themselves? 

Those are the metrics she remembers. 

Her philosophy toward failure follows a similar logic. 

“We attempt, we learn, we pivot, we attempt again.” 

For Smith, experience becomes useful when it is examined rather than simply endured. 

That belief may be the clearest thread connecting every chapter of her life. 

The bartender became an observer of human behaviour. The artist became a communicator. The hospitality professional became a leadership advocate. The woman who experienced an unexpected spiritual awakening became a Spirit Advisor. The mother and wife discovered another dimension of vulnerability. The entrepreneur eventually found a way to bring all those identities into one ecosystem. 

She calls the journey a rollercoaster. 

She also knows how to ride. 

Building a Life Which Feels Like Her 

Smith has spent years collecting the people, experiences, lessons and creative instincts that would eventually inform her vision. 

She keeps a black binder containing the names of people she has met over two decades whose energy, character or talent made an impression on her. Many are people she hopes to collaborate with as her work develops. 

Her long-term dream is equally personal: a boutique hospitality establishment for her community, designed to inspire people and provide space for artists. 

It makes sense. 

After spending much of her life studying what happens when people gather, she wants to build a place where they can gather differently. 

A place where hospitality becomes art, where leadership feels human, where creativity has room to breathe and where people can simply be themselves. 

That has always been the larger idea behind Torie Smith. 

She has little interest in becoming a polished version of someone else. 

Her philosophy is almost the opposite. 

Bring the whole person. 

The messy chapters. The ridiculous ones. The difficult ones. The creative ones. The spiritual questions. The hard-earned lessons. The laughter. The contradictions. 

Smith believes a person’s individuality is their greatest source material. 

And after a life spent moving through worlds as different as hospitality, art, psychology, entrepreneurship and spiritual exploration, she has arrived at a surprisingly simple conclusion: 

Who you are, how you treat people and the experience you create around you become the real legacy. 

For Torie, the work now is bringing that philosophy into the rooms where it can create the greatest ripple: hospitality teams, leaders, founders, creatives and individuals searching for a more authentic relationship with themselves. 

She has spent years gathering the pieces. 

Now, she is building the place where they fit.