Everyone thinks copywriting is about the words. Olivia Dunn will tell you it's about the thinking, and that most of hers happens before she writes a thing.

Olivia is a brand messaging strategist and copywriter who runs Profound. She comes from a family of writers and has built her practice on plain English and a refusal to hide behind jargon. Her argument is simple: good words require good thinking, and the words themselves are just the tool.

We talk about:

• Why you can't read the label when you're inside the jar, and why brands can't see themselves clearly
• The strategic thinking that comes before a single word is written
• How she uses a client's biggest critic to get to the real message
• Surviving the AI dip by using it to run the business, never to write or think
• Why "we love a typo these days" and what it says about staying human
• Her Substack giving senior, retired women the digital footprint their achievements pre-date

Find Olivia
Website: https://beeprofound.co.uk
Substack: [SUBSTACK NAME + URL]
LinkedIn: [OLIVIA LINKEDIN URL]

Links
Quoted is brought to you by Antiquoted: https://antiquoted.com
A Kleiner Studios production: https://kleinerstudios.com
In partnership with Spinning Red: https://spinningred.com

We spend a fortune trying to build better teams. Elizabeth Gowing thinks we're chasing the wrong thing entirely.

Elizabeth splits her life between Britain and Kosovo, where she was granted citizenship by the president and founded a charity, the Ideas Partnership, working with the country's most excluded communities. She spent three years advising Kosovo's Prime Minister on exactly this: how communities really work, and what happens when we forget. Her through-line is deceptively simple: we all know how to make a community function, and then we leave that knowledge at the door the moment we walk into the office.

In this episode:

• Why the corporate obsession with "teams" gets it backwards, and what a community does that a team never can
• How the smallest daily habits became the thing that saved lives when war came to Kosovo
• Reciprocity as the operating system of any community, and why you never hand back an empty plate
• The pay-it-forward model behind her charity, and the generational change she's watched it produce
• Her challenge: forget clicking follow on LinkedIn, and go thank the person who once gave you a chance

Find Elizabeth
Website: https://www.elizabethgowing.com
Substack, Communities at Work: https://communitiesatwork.substack.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/elizabeth-gowing1/

Her new book, The First Bllok: The Lives of a Kosovan Neighbourhood, is out by the end of 2026.

Quoted is brought to you by Antiquoted (https://antiquoted.com). A Kleiner Studios production (https://kleinerstudios.com), in partnership with Spinning Red (https://spinningred.com).

You are not one thing. Sydney Elaine Butler thinks forgetting that is at the root of a surprising amount of what's going wrong.

Sydney is the founder of Accessible Creates, where she works as a consultant, coach, trainer and speaker to make workplaces and the wider world more accessible and inclusive for people with disabilities. She comes at it from lived experience across a whole set of identities at once, and the idea she keeps returning to is intersectionality: that every one of us carries privilege and oppression at the same time, and that the trap most of us fall into is being pushed to pick just one part of ourselves and lean on it completely.

In this episode:

• Why leaning on a single part of your identity is a trap, and what it costs us
• How the pull to belong can heal you and drain you at the same time
• Whether questioning what you're told is itself a privilege
• What the mainstream keeps getting wrong when it treats people as one-dimensional
• Her ask: know yourself well enough that the world can't shake you

Find Sydney
Accessible Creates: https://www.accessiblecreates.ca
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sydney-elaine-butler/

Quoted is brought to you by Antiquoted (https://antiquoted.com). A Kleiner Studios production (https://kleinerstudios.com), in partnership with Spinning Red (https://spinningred.com).

Quoted | Alexander Bell: The messy middle of technology

We keep arguing about whether technology is good or bad. Alexander Bell has spent his career in the far more interesting place in between.

Alexander is a keynote speaker and thought leader on technology and our relationship with it, and his whole message sits in what he calls the messy middle: technology is neither good nor bad, it's what we do with it that decides. He's watched the hype cycles up close, from inside Google's Street View team to the rise and fall of the metaverse, and he's learned to trust the quieter question underneath the noise.

We talk about:

• Why technology is neither good nor bad, and the messy middle the media keeps skipping past
• The moment he walked away from VR, when the pitch shifted from enriching classrooms to replacing them
• Why convenience is quietly eroding our closest relationships, and the group-chat test he sets his audiences
• Why AI, unlike the metaverse before it, isn't going to fail, and what the coverage keeps getting wrong
• His scepticism about smartphone bans, and why he thinks we're wrong to send kids out to fight that battle for us
• The story he tells on stage: a 1997 school talent show, a pair of tiny red pants, and the question "when did capturing the moment become more important than being in it?"

Find Alexander

Website: https://www.alexanderbell.co

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexanderpbell/

Links

Quoted is brought to you by Antiquoted: https://antiquoted.com

A Kleiner Studios production: https://kleinerstudios.com

In partnership with Spinning Red: https://spinningred.com

The world you're looking at isn't broken. Dominique Riviere argues it's working exactly as designed, on a logic of predator and prey. And she thinks a romance novel might explain it better than the news does.

Dominique is based in Toronto, where for the past six years she's run the Fictive Kin Equity Lab, a consultancy that grew, improbably, out of a pandemic layoff. Her academic background is in equity and social justice in education, and she's worked across schools and government. But the thread running through all of it is one slightly unexpected idea: that fiction, and romance in particular, is one of the sharpest tools we have for understanding power, equity and justice in the real world. She runs a reading group called Impolite Society, writes widely on Substack, and cheerfully describes herself as a book person who prefers books to most people.

We talk about:

• Why the world we're looking at isn't an aberration, but the logical end point of a system built on predator and prey
• Why facts and evidence keep losing to worse arguments
• Why she thinks AI is really just human intelligence handed back to us
• How a romance novel can tell you more about power than the news does
• Her one instruction for a better world: read more romance. She'll explain.

Find Dominique

Fictive Kin Equity Lab: https://fictivekinlab.ca
Substack: https://fictivekin.substack.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dominique-riviere-phd/

Links

Quoted is brought to you by Antiquoted: https://antiquoted.com
A Kleiner Studios production: https://kleinerstudios.com
In partnership with Spinning Red: https://spinningred.com

Quoted | Paul Armstrong: Why technology explains surprisingly little

We're told technology is the story. Paul Armstrong has spent two decades arguing that the technologuy is not as important as the incentives behind it.

Paul runs TBD Group, which stands for Technology, Behaviour and Data, and he's one of the UK's last genuinely independent tech advisors. His route in wasn't the obvious one: a psychology degree, a spell interviewing celebrities on red carpets in the States, child protection work at MySpace, then heading up social innovation at Mindshare, where his team talked HSBC into becoming the first bank on social media. He now advises on disruption, runs a community and a monthly event series called The New Normal, and puts out a briefing with a title that captures how fast his world moves: What Did OpenAI Do This Week. His central claim, after all of it, is that the tech itself is rarely the thing worth watching.

We talk about:

• Why technology explains surprisingly little, and why the real story is always the incentives, the behaviour and the power around it
• Why most bad corporate behaviour won't be fixed by outrage or by deleting the app, but in the law courts
• What the media keeps getting wrong about AI
• Why he's sceptical of banning teenagers off social apps
• Why, despite all of it, he thinks we should be more optimistic than we are, without ever becoming a cheerleader

Find Paul

TBD Group: https://www.thetbd.group
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/paulstephenarmstrong/
What Did OpenAI Do This Week: https://whatdidopenaidothisweek.beehiiv.com

Links

Quoted is brought to you by Antiquoted: https://antiquoted.com
A Kleiner Studios production: https://kleinerstudios.com
In partnership with Spinning Red: https://spinningred.com

Quoted | Dr Gillian Marcelle on high finance with people at the centre

What if finance wasn't a machine for making a few people rich, but a tool designed, on purpose, to serve the many?

Dr Gillian Marcelle has spent more than sixty years, across four continents, proving that question isn't naive. She's integrated a local credit union into a private equity fund, raised millions for clean energy across the Caribbean and Central America, and introduced the first listed telecoms company in Sub-Saharan Africa to global capital markets. In this conversation she makes the case that finance and technology are socially shaped, which means they can be shaped differently.

We talk about:

• Why the mainstream story that pits financial returns against serving society is a choice, not a law of nature
• The myth that "there is no alternative to capitalism", and who benefits from us believing it
• Why the same narrow pool of Global North economists keeps getting the call, and what they consistently miss
• The Global Majority: how demographic shifts are set to reshape business, finance and investment
• Blended finance done with intention, directing capital to where it's needed most
• Standing on the shoulders of the ancestors who fought oppression and won

The essay

Dr Marcelle has also kindly written an essay expanding on the key points from our conversation, organised around the Six Questions we put to every guest. It's a piece of thinking in its own right, and well worth your time. Read it here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/11ZDMSdlKNuL2RAFyGpMmPU8ps0WTw5h2/view?usp=sharing

Find Dr Marcelle

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gillianmarcelle/
Resilience Capital Ventures: https://www.resiliencecapitalventures.com/

Links

Quoted is brought to you by Antiquoted: https://antiquoted.com
A Kleiner Studios production: https://kleinerstudios.com
In partnership with Spinning Red: https://spinningred.com