Sarah is one of the few people I know who can talk about Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) without getting flustered. An endeavour that has inspired so much passion and such bitter resistance can be hard to even discuss, but she approaches it with thoughtfulness and empathy for everyone involved in the work of integrating DEI considerations into the challenging business of running an organization.

We talk about what each of the letters actually stands for, and how those principles interact with broader questions of management style and priorities. Sarah is a strong proponent of DEI aspirations, and she’s also a pragmatic thinker who wants us to get past the weaponization of acronyms, back to the first principles that most of us can agree on.

Sarah is the author of “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion - How to Succeed at an Impossible Job”. She is currently Strategic Advisor to StartSteps, an organization that helps people start a new career in the world of tech.

People have always gathered to dance.

It’s a peculiar feature of Western modernity that we don’t anymore; or rather, that we limit the opportunities for dance into such contained and private subcultures. In doing so, I think we deprive ourselves of some pretty brilliant social tech.

Soroa Lear is a professional dancer and co-creator of Vibrant Body, a popular dance practice in Berlin Kreuzberg. We talk about how dance can be a playful take on traditional roles, a collective ritual of identity transcendence, or a very private pleasure practice. We also speculate about why straight white men seem to struggle so much more than everyone else with this deeply human form of self-expression.

Also, Soroa articulates why we should all go clubbing, in case anyone needs an intellectual framework for that.

This is a conversation between three German-American siblings about the most German of Germans.

Undeniably a Great, I’m not aware of Mann being particularly fashionable at the moment, though his writing is a creative benchmark for anyone who enjoys his language. I only just learned a little about his life in exile, and his journey from Germanic monarchist to passionate democrat. Which seems timely to consider.

Thomas Mann made much of how good art had to be aloof. He was adamant it could have no political agenda, couldn’t be moralizing or “school teacherly”. Even beyond that, he seemed obsessed by the artist’s predicament of detachment - how having any skin in the game was antithetical to the ruthless eye required to observe, and the perfect pitch needed to create.

But when the time came he took a stand, at real personal cost. In 1933, he might have imagined his reputation and privilege would cushion him personally against Nazi persecution, had he spoken out less. And yet he persevered, and exiled himself from the “Fatherland” with which he was so deeply identified. He was completely clear, and scathing in his opposition to the regime. He never hedged his bets.

With thanks to my brothers, whose love of Mann has been a touch point of connection between us for two decades.

Audrey and I had great fun doing this one. As usual when we set out to co-create something, the result is a little different than I had anticipated. It is more interesting.

My plan had been to talk seriously about co-leadership—when does it work, what are the trade-offs, what’s the difference to job sharing a role with less open-ended deliverables than “somehow make this startup fly.”

We did a bit of that. But then we got giddy, and what you will hear if you listen is a pretty intimate chat, shot through with the what-the-actual-f*ck-actually-just-happened incredulity of someone who recently gave birth, and their friend who also still bears the scars of that experience. Listening back, it seems to me to boil down to a conversation mostly about relationship across different domains of life; what mechanisms we have to make thinking and acting better together, and the limits of sharing. Also, reflections on running a consumer medtech startup, and how becoming a parent can both completely explode your faculties and somehow make them sharper, as well as somehow broader, than you ever thought was possible.

What Ragnhild does feels, on the receiving end, like a clinical psych X-ray followed by some very non-clinical voodoo magic.

She is one of Germany’s best-known coaches and one of the sharpest people I’ve met. This is her first ever podcast in English 👏

We discuss the difference between coaching and therapy, the importance of early childhood experiences in adult failure modes, and whether there is a psychologically healthy way to be obsessed with your work (spoiler: the proof is in the pudding - are you happy).

Her passion is to coach people into more authentic alignment with their work — recognising that however much we edit our self-image professionally, the actual Self will demand its due at some point. For better or worse. So, best to coax that thing out of the primordial forests of the unconscious, and into the Clearing.