S2E8 - Neurodiversity and Individuality

This episode, Host Chauncey Zalkin sits down with friend and British Futurist Melissa Sterry who combines a passion for fashion and art with multiple degrees in sustainability, architecture and science.

The two met through the A Small World network in the mid 00s while Chauncey lived in Paris and Melissa in the UK. A lot has changed since then. They discuss the modern paradox of homogeneity in a diverse world. Melissa explains how hope is around the corner in our quest to champion human creativity and individuality.

Take a listen.

Mentioned in this episode

• Neurodiversity
• Journalistic Standards
• Fashion Then & Now
• HBO's  "Industry"
• The Nepo Baby Problem
• The State of The Indie Press in the UK
• and more

Written, directed, and executive produced by Chauncey Zalkin. Intro/Outro sound engineered by Eric Aaron. Photography by Alonza Mitchell with Design Consulting by Paper + Screen.

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Transcript

I am in the midst of my pre-Christmas illness. So, you can hear that in my voice. It is good timing to have a pre-Christmas illness because Christmas is a huge production in my house. An even bigger production than most. here is why. I have twins. And my twins share their birthday with Christmas and I'm a single mom. So, we have the advent calendar. Santa Claus is still in full effect. I have quit elf on the shelf and revealed his true identity as a creepy stuffed piece of felt. And of course, we have Christmas presents and then we have the big birthday present, which requires a scene change from red and green to birthday colors. And it's a lot. Their dad comes to town on Christmas Eve this year a bit like Santa. And he's going to be staying around for a whole month. The whole month of January, he'll be staying nearby, which will shift their routine a lot. So, it's good to get the sickness out of the way now. I've avoided getting sick all season as my kids have gotten one thing after another, including walking pneumonia, which where we live has become like a huge epidemic. speaking of seasons in my sick state, I watched the entire first season of the show Industry on HBO. And oh my goodness if this isn't the most joyless soulless group of young people. It's pretty grim. 
 
I've never seen a more unsympathetic protagonist, but I can't stop watching. It's like that car wreck effect, you can't turn away which is strange for me because I have an allergy to corporate offices. I also have an allergy to watching people take hard drugs but somehow, I'm watching, watching, watching this show and I'm sure I will watch season two to get to season three, which is supposed to be the best season, so don't tell me what happens in season two and three, but it's utter masochism. In an earlier episode of actual people, we discussed Eat The Rich ... programming and Industry was an example along with Succession and Triangle of Sadness and many other shows, but I don't see Industry in the same camp as those shows. I'm not sure where I'm landing with this one. It doesn't have that shiny veneer that those other shows have, this vicarious thrill of that level of indulgence and waste. This is the opposite. This is like, Ughhh. It's kind of makes your stomach turn.
 
 I never aspired to a career in finance. And I didn't know there was any mystique or appeal to a finance job. I never thought of that as a glamorous job or a job anyone would ever want. In my world, it was editorial jobs at magazines, fashion and art gallery jobs those were the jobs my peers were after. Finance was the anathema to all that we held dear. It showed in our wallets as well. But I realize now it's a privilege to turn your nose up at wall street jobs. Um, well, well that's what we did. I couldn't have done it. Anyway, because like I said, I'm allergic to those environments. I'm also bad at math. 
 
Anyway. I'm still always looking for shows that skewer the status quo incisively. And speaking of incisive ways to critique society. I have to mention Luigi Mangione. I understand the folk heroism of this guy. It's easy to disassociate yourself from the cold-blooded murder he committed. And focus on the carefully inscribed bullets and the general poetry of his act, but he killed a man and I'm going to just get that out of the way. He killed a man who we are starting to learn did some pretty okay. Things. relative to his role. He helped people get medical care during the pandemic. Um, yada yada, yada, but you know, it doesn't really matter. You don't kill anybody, that's just, that's just the social norm. You don't commit murder. But the public is so numb to gun violence and murder because we glorify it on television. We hear it on the news every single day. That the comeuppance for financial predators overrode the general sense of morality about murder. Basically, the moral weight of the injustice of our healthcare system rose above the immorality of murder. Leaving behind the details. It speaks more to our growing unrest about wealth, inequity and lies in general. On today's episode, we don't discuss this specifically, but we discuss our current culture and attitudes, including the consequences of decisions made by out of touch people with a lot of power. 
 
Today's interview is with transdisciplinary design, scientists and complex systems theorist with a PhD in resilient architecture technology who's also renowned futurist, a lot of words there. her name is Melissa Sterry and she's here to discuss the modern paradox. We talk about how we have both more technology and convenience, platforms that theoretically level, the playing field, but somehow have ultimately not elevated the unique, the creative, the high value, but instead have put capitalism and cheap materialism on hyper-speed and nepotism on overdrive. We discuss the fact that we are de-stigmatizing mental health, but somehow mental health is just getting worse. That we are championing diversity, but somehow over-simplifying people into flat caricatures that annihilates diversity and erases humanity. It's sort of like we've created an intolerant padded cell while outside the cell of our making things get worse, but she sees a light. We talk about neurodiversity, the power of small sincere networks, an embrace of the analog and more take a listen. 
 
Welcome to Actual People, a podcast hosted by me, Chauncey Zalkin, dedicated to meaningful conversations about the evolving landscape of our lives and the power of our own creativity and imagination to make magic. 
 
There are a whole generation of people our age. We're just realizing we're probably not neuro normal because it was never a thing, was it, when we were kids? Though, okay, there were people that struggled a bit with this or that, but I was just the quiet, arty girl. I mean, that was, that was the extent of the diagnosis. The fact that people think differently it doesn't have to be a disorder people just think differently from one another. I think I'm ADHD You feel diverse. I think your folio, you know, you've mastered many communication crafts. You said that ADHD they don't focus on anything but some forms of it you do hyper focus on one thing with ADHD Oh, that's interesting. The people with ADHD that I know. They're all creative people and they can be very passionate about things, but I tend to notice that they'll get really into something and then they'll have distractions and then they'll need to refocus again is the pattern I've noticed. I do that. What you're saying. But it's not like I can't complete any task. No. I go deep into something, and I don't want to stop doing it. Like my podcast or writing or editing. I can get really into it and then I have a hard time switching tasks. Ah, yeah, I'd get diagnosed. I think it's useful and it's amazing. At the moment I'm house and dog sitting for a friend of mine who is a Psychologist. She'd be great for you to interview. She's fantastic. She is an absolute guru of relationship dynamics. She herself has been in abusive relationships. One of them was definitely on the spectrum. He worked for Elon Musk as an engineer. That's spectrum central and I'd be highlighting to her, you know, that behavior is not acceptable. Yes, when people are on the spectrum, there are certain things they might struggle with, but it's absolutely not acceptable to treat people in the way that he was treating her in ways I've seen some women are treated. I think there are a lot of people that are undiagnosed because number one, you know, mental health traditionally had loads of stigma around it, didn't it? You know, and, and these conditions, so they did, whereas the next generation behind us, millennials are down with this. We have so much more awareness of our differences whether it be gender, race, this entire spectrum of our neurological processing, and yet, we have so much more bullying. We have so much more wealth inequality, and less opportunity for people to cross over. They seem like diametrically opposed things going on at the same time. In a lot of ways, this chaos that we're in right now is maybe just a necessary place while we shift into a different reality. As much as we talk about innovation and progress like, why can't we just do X, Y, Z to fix everything that we know we need to fix. I think it's because society needs to catch up, human beings need to catch up. We cannot shift that quickly. So maybe this is a necessary period where some people are resisting difference or performing difference all these different things. It's a process. These are in many ways very paradoxical times, the conditions that we're now experiencing have been building over a long period of time and I think there's a lot of distractions and red herrings. Fundamentally, if we look at the world, we've got a couple of major trends. We've got the fact that social inequality and wealth inequality have been building, building, building to the point where we've got a very, very small community of people who are so extraordinarily wealthy that they are insulated from the problems of the populace at large. This small community of people are very powerful. They are people that are deciding policy. They're deciding how we live our lives. There was a shift towards globalization. There was a shift towards homogeneity, towards everybody doing the same thing for a period of time. And now we are seeing a very sharp reversal of that. Historically, we've always had a lot of diversity. We've always had a degree of heterogeneity. For the majority of civilization, we saw many different architectural styles, many different fashions, many different ways of expressing yourself. And when we traveled around the world, or when they traveled around the world, our ancestors expected heterogeneity. And then of course, we had the advent of the industrial revolution and it's child, in effect, modernism, which ultimately is an approach to design and to living that suggests that one size fits all and that you can produce cultural artifacts from the scale of an accessory all the way up to a building to a city off a production line, wherein everything is made to a spec that is universal and it's made of materials that are used all over the planet. And that model is falling over. It's falling over at the level of practicality, at the level of the built environment. Modernist buildings are very poor in the face of weather extremities unlike the indigenous and the vernacular architectures, which are always, every indigenous, every vernacular architecture around the world has evolved over time in the community, and it's been R&D'd in effect, and so that it's fit for purpose whereas modernist architecture, when we look at these big disasters, these big catastrophes on the media, what we see are these homogenous architectures, these industrialized concepts in some cases, just literally getting washed away or blown away or burnt away and at the level of culture, we're seeing many, many people respond to homogeneity by an increased sense that they need to embrace individualism. And in some cases, within the more traditional communities, we see a rejection of contemporary ideas and of globalization quite generically. And you see that very much within the sort of the right-wing narratives. But that's not the only place. I mean, the irony of this is that you could go to the other end of the political spectrum and you could look to the left and you could look to communities that like to sort of imagine that they're very diverse and doing things in very new ways and actually we're struggling at the moment to try and reconcile the differences across humanity. And that might actually be something that ultimately, we can't overcome that one size does not fit all, and you have to have individuality, you have to have diversity that has to be expressed at the physical level, at the intellectual level, and so we've got to find a way to live with difference. The question is, where do you draw the lines? That's not for me to answer, that's not for any other individual on Earth to answer. But one thing I do know is that for as long as you've got power situated within a very, very tiny community of people that are very much remote from everybody else in terms of their behaviours, 📍 we've got individuals, I won't name names, but we've got some people that say, save the planet, save the planet, everybody stop flying, stop doing this, that and the other from the comfort of their super yacht or their private jet. And of course, the mass popular says, well, hang on a minute, walk your talk. What we actually need is many more people engaged in the conversation. And we need a lot more humility. I think we need to accept the fact that it's not gonna be an easy process, but what's the option if we don't? We all go to war. That doesn't sound very appealing to me. 📍 We're talking about this pushback on globalization. You go to most cities on earth, and you see they have a Louis Vuitton they have, a McDonald’s, there's 10 or 15 retail outlets or food chains that are pretty much universal. That's not stopping. Are you saying that we are dialing back? Yeah, I absolutely think there is a pushback. We reached the stage where across multiple markets you had companies that would frame success through globalization, through trying to get into as many markets as possible and to gain dominance in those markets. That is obviously particularly easy in the new areas that have opened up like technology. You know, there are a handful of technology companies that completely dominate worldwide, or at least at the moment they do. Now that's not where technology started. If we take social media platforms, as an example, in the very early days there were a number of very interesting variations on that concept but because of the fact that within the commercial investing market, the idea is that you'll get the biggest bang for your investing buck if you get behind a concept with mass application. That was the idea. Now we've obviously seen that that concept can be flawed because if you look to technology markets, you'll find that many ideas have been overhyped, their potential has been exaggerated and what that's meant is that at some point in the history of that company, it's gone from being massively valuable to a big fall off. I'm thinking about Meta, Apple, Microsoft, all the Microsoft applications. TikTok everyone uses all of these platforms everywhere. It should be bringing people together, but it's creating a lot of division and angst and stress and tension, but they do bring people to this kind of mediocre center around the world. We have seen, I mean, if we take TikTok as an example, TikTok was seemingly too big to fail, the reality is that nothing is too big to fail, and we are starting to see quite a lot of movement within the social media space. We're starting to see, old ideas, analog ideas reemerge, and they are a direct response to the trends that we've seen in social media. There is a problem on social media wherein people become polarized. They become polarized. We see it becomes, you know, divide to conquer there are many people that don't feel that they could be completely honest and transparent. This is something that has now in effect become omnipresent. The unfortunate thing about social media is because the audience is so massive, within of the sort of the wider context that we're now in, it has created a scenario where a lot of people feel they can't necessarily be upfront, be honest, and they're worried about the implications of that. 📍 Everything that you say is frozen as a soundbite that you stand behind forever everything is so sanitized that people can't have real conversations or it's just a lot of grandstanding. they're afraid to say anything so we have a much less sophisticated form of rhetoric that's why I named this podcast, Actual People, it's a great litmus because so much is now censored and, you know, many of the British classics. comedy series, Little Britain, the BBC, UK's major broadcaster, not playing Little Britain anymore because some people might find it offensive. Love Actually, one of the biggest hits out of a British film studio in decades. There are people commenting that that is triggering in this or that way. Actually, arguably, comedy has always been triggering to some people. There have always been some people that have not found the joke funny, but it's where do you draw the line? I'm thinking about this Mark Twain prize that comes up every year in comedy and Mark Twain was racist, Dr. Seuss was also racist and, anti-Semitic and, nobody that I would want to associate with would agree with those kinds of attitudes, but you can't throw away a whole body of literature. You have to look at the whole cultural contribution and also the time period. And if we just throw all that away, then we're not going to have any sort of sense of continuity or chronology or absolutely retro retrospective. You can't sanitize the past. Aspects of the past, they are challenging and in our own lives. I think back to the kind of company culture. For example, one of the consultancies I was in in my late twenties the kind of shenanigans that went on there would never happen in this day and age. But, you know, that was the 90s. This is 2024. To have a balanced perspective on things, you've got to be able to contextualize things. And I think it's context. I have a question about analog. I pitched the idea of a print newspaper. So, I went down this rabbit hole looking into the resurgence in print. I don't know if it's a huge trend, but there's this and that article about things coming out in print again and this backlash against social media so where are you seeing a return or integration of analog? Absolutely. I mean, I'm very much with you on the print thing. Look at the mainstream press and media arena, and we haven't seen any innovation in some considerable while we're seeing mediocrity because of falling journalistic standards, falling editing standards, the click bait model has fallen over essentially all the mainstreamers. will publish what are all the same stories essentially with very little differentiation and to a very low bar what we don't see today in all, but a few titles is a critique, an intelligent, analyses of what press story has actually been presented. In some cases, you can read press, and you understand that what you're reading is essentially a press release that is pretty much being published verbatim. So, the mainstream press I think has lost its agency and I think it lost it a long time ago. And we're seeing a couple of reactions to that. I think the alternative media has grown across a number of different markets. One of the early things was like Joe Rogan taking off. The States is really where that type of alternative media, incubated and where it's still biggest, but markets like the UK have followed, not with the same traction, but that was one part of the community saying we are not satisfied with the mainstream narrative, so we're looking for alternatives. Now in the UK, for example, we do have a couple of independent titles that are digital. We've got Byline Times, which is to the left, and we've got Unheard, which is to the right. And actually, whether you're left or right, the standard of the journalism and the standard of the editorial, For the text content, not necessarily the podcast stuff, is I would say generally higher than most of the mainstream press. So that's on the digital. But then within the independent print media, that's where I think culturally, we find the best examples for creativity. So that's where if you want to find the sexiest fashion magazines of the moment, you look at the Indies. If you want to find the most interesting, stuff on architecture, urban design, you definitely want to look to the Indies. I have to point out, this is definitely true in in the UK. I think it's way more true over there than it is over here. I always look to the UK for better journalism than we always had. I don't know, maybe that's changed somewhat. I've always found it to be a little bit more middling over here in general, but the Atlantic does a great job. Slate does a pretty good job. I really want to write for the Atlantic. I think that they're one of the saving graces. it seems like the very far left and right are almost, bullying mainstream journalism out of having any sort of critical voice. They're so afraid of being offensive. There's no stand being taken in the mainstream media. It's like with the Democrats, they're so careful that there's no substance to anything, so that the fringes become much louder. Absolutely. Yeah. And I think the big mistake of the mainstream is that they've been so initially consumed with profit and now kind of scrambling to retain relevance that they've essentially already lost the race because a number of the Indies have grown to the point where even if they don't have the readership yet, they've got pretty solid models, and they are gaining traction. I see the future of press and media as being more fragmented. I think it will be more localized and although the sort of the print newspaper hasn't really come back in the UK, certainly the zine market is booming. I mean there are whole festivals about this. Lots of really interesting micro, publishing companies. All kinds of subjects. Small readerships, but, you know, they do what they do really well., In that small scale publishing arena, you normally have quite a few publications that might only make it to, let's say, edition three. In the UK, as I think is the case in the States, we've got a booming print and make on demand arena. If you want to make a magazine or a book you can create very small orders. If you've got an indie publication, you can get just a batch out there. You can see how it's doing. And if it's a quarterly, then you can just publish another batch so you're not needing to raise the same levels of capital. And if you've got a decent cover charge maybe 15, 20, 25 pounds. for a quarterly edition and advertising. on a publication, then it's taking out some of the risk. one of my favorite things about, the UK, I was going to say London, but all the UK, is that there is such an emphasis on beauty and creativity that's something that I absolutely love and I don't feel like it's ever existed in my lifetime, you know, maybe, you know, the days of, you know, interview magazine with Andy Warhol. we had paper, we had details, we had a few publications. The big glossies and the very niche visionary type of fashion magazines, but we've never had the level of creativity and, the attention paid to creativity in the United States that there is in England. But all that said these things are still niche. It's not a big market force. Where do you see the appeal of analog happening in a way that would actually shift the economy shift attention? Do you see that being a major economic or cultural force? I've definitely seen a rise in the number of Indies and a reversion, not just in terms of print. Another thing that's really starting to take off in the UK is smaller events, in person events. Now we've always had that, but the idea of like the secret society. So not a private members club as such, although Britain, that's a place where the private members club model of certainly the now was very much pioneered. I mean, if you look at Soho House, Soho House, as you will remember, was once just a tiny little club on Dean Street, and now it's a global brand but the newer model, if you like the sort of the, the thought leaders, and certainly within the creative industries today, many of them are members of these much smaller collectives and societies that you're invited to as an individual because of your ideas, to convene, to exchange. And so, it's a bit of a shift from, if you like, we have the kind of the LinkedIn model became dominant. And lots of people connecting via that. And it became massive. And I don't know how many people populate it, but it's huge. But we've seen a reversion to things that, are much smaller, but are more beautifully crafted and actually. When you look at the return, it might not on the surface of it seem to make as much impact. But I mean, for example, if I think about my work and, and how I've made traction, has it really been things like LinkedIn that made the difference? No, it hasn't. It's been word of mouth and it's been old style networking. And actually, the press that I've done, the stuff that's been most impactful has actually been with the Indies. It's been with those titles that put together really quality content and are not trying to be reductionist. They're not trying to get a soundbite out of you because of course anyone can give a soundbite. But to actually give a deeper analysis requires a bit more expertise. So, we're seeing a definite trend in the UK towards this. Will it be universal in terms of impact? No, but I think there is a definite movement away from these kind of big global operations towards things that are smaller. One of the coolest magazines that I think you would love; it's called Clot Magazine. I know the founders. It started off literally as little more than a blog very much focused on the arts. It's got absolutely fantastic content. It's been able to become what it is today because of that slow growth, because it's been growing now for several years, gaining momentum, and it's actually at a stage now where I think probably within the next 24 months, it could go to that next level because it's got enough of a readership, and it's got enough evidence to prove the business case. And a lot of these businesses are led by women. Clot magazine is co led by women., is it clock like on the wall? The CLOT. Yeah clot. It's led by women when they were in the early days, and we were talking about how it might move forward. I said, I know that you want to raise investment, but it's going to be a hard sell because you've got to have the metrics if you go out and you land a big investment, that instantly means you're under a massive amount of pressure to turn a profit. And when you're trying to craft something that is original, experimental, and beautiful, that's not always going to work to your advantage. And I think that they're at just the right level. And if you look against the mainstream, look at Vogue. Vogue today has lost its agency. I mean what a tragedy I've got literally a couple of decades worth of Vogue carefully stored at home. I used to buy that magazine religiously. I wrote my thesis on Vogue magazine was called 104 years of fantasy, a cultural studies examination of Vogue magazine, and I got an A. Wow. Wow. It's a hundred-page paper I went to the new school. It was called the New School for Social Research then, and the dean of the undergraduate program, which was called Eugene Lane College, was my supervisor. We had a thesis. My focus was on semiotics she said, I don't believe that fashion has that much of an influence on culture, so you have to prove it to me. And then she gave me an A's. I thought that was just the beginning of this glorious career of success after success. I sat in the Conde Nast library in the old Conde Nast building that was near Grand Central. I did all my research pulling magazines off the shelf doing color photocopies of things I still have a picture that is a vanity fair cover that I love so much. I have it framed even though it was a color Xerox. but anyway, I did all my research in the Conde Nast library, which was on the top of the building I still have the paper In print form lying around , but that's what I spent my senior year doing was talking about the way we constructed American female identity through the different editors and the different decades the wars and how we separated from European ideas and ideals It was birthed in America, wasn't it? And then it came to Britain and became hugely, hugely successful and an incredible start as well. I mean, when we think about the beginning of Vogue, it was concerned with society events, wasn't it? It wasn't explicitly focused on fashion. Yeah. But then within a short amount of time, it was the fashion Bible. It was the maker or the breaker for the designers. The first editor was Edna Woolman Chase. I'm just pulling that out of my head. The first editor of Vogue magazine. I interviewed at Conde Nast when I got out of school and the woman, in HR said, well, you're not a vogue girl. You're a glamour girl or an allure girl, but you're not a Vogue girl. And what that was code for was and I was wearing, um, not Jill Sand, I was wearing a designer suit, and I had the pearls, but she was decoding me looking at my resume I grew up in Miami I didn't go to school in New York in high school, I went to Bennington. she's like, you might know more about Vogue than any of us. But you're not a Vogue girl. So, I started to build resentment towards Conde Nast and towards Vogue. I never worked at Conde Nast. I worked at Seventeen Magazine. I worked at Harper's Bazaar after Liz Tilberis died. She was the editor of Harper's Bazaar. I was the assistant to the editor in chief who was the interim editor in chief because she was the Harper's Bazaar editor from Australia, and she came in and I was her assistant for that time period. But I never worked at Condé Nast. So, I started to build resentment towards those kinds of magazines, and I never liked Anna Wintour, I've critiqued her a fair bit myself over the years. She displaced craft with celebrity. Under her watch, we saw all of the talents in the fashion world those people that whether they're on the cutting room floor the couturiers the photographers she displaced all of that for Individuals that though talented in other respects are not necessarily very talented with respect to fashion. Fashion is an art form, as you know. It's really the most visible expression of human culture. It tells us so much in an image. You like me, we're trying to decrypt an outfit, the psychology of the outfit, the cultural origins of the outfit. We know it's you're part of a tribe, and we know that what you wear says a lot about you, whether or not you realize that or not. And she stripped away the craft of fashion and she replaced it with celebrity and yes, it might have meant that many, many copies of Vogue magazines sold, and sold well for a long amount of time. But what did we end up with? Well, we ended up with a number of fashion brands that are so homogenous, so devoid of creativity. Absolutely. honestly, I haven't been interested in fashion in over a decade really. Other than I like to get dressed. Yeah. I'm wearing a, um, it's like a, it's like a sweat. I'm wearing a, um, I was so attracted to this. Vintage, it's so ridiculous, but I, I love it. Is that the Mirage in Las Vegas? Yes, I, I, I don't know why, I must have this. It's not even something I would normally wear, I love it. Anyway, I do have a very specific sense of style I love, beautiful things, but my interest moved from fashion to home design. I'm much more interested in the object, the designed object I think fashion is boring and about money and status. That's not necessarily true in the UK, but it always has kind of been like that in New York. I like Jean Paul Gaultier, and I like the Diana Vreeland era of fashion. Yeah. I like the independent designers more of a mood and a vibe. And, you know, I, I just don't see that very much. It's really about celebrity. She was very successful in making it all about celebrity and it's never really gone back. Vogue is a boring magazine. It's a dull magazine. It really has nothing. There's nothing at the heart of it anymore. There are no opinions. It's just bland. There is a lot of exciting work out there. It just doesn't feature in Vogue. There is a definite gap. There's certainly an appetite for this. So, let's go back a little bit. Tell us about your career path just an overview. How do you encapsulate your career path I was equally compelled by academia and by the arts, but I was in school in an age you were either expected to go up the arty route or up the academic route, and I decided to go the arty route. But then my career path didn't turn out as I expected. I was shortlisted for a master's at the Royal College of Art, but I didn't quite get it. And that was turning point. You know what? We have that in common. When I applied to Parsons School of Design, which is owned by the New School, my idea was I was going to be a dual major in fashion design and cultural studies. And I didn't get into Parsons and so I went completely into cultural studies. And that's how I ended up writing about Vogue magazine because I loved fashion, but I realized that it made sense because I was more of a writer. I was in denial that I was a writer, and I thought, oh, I want to be a fashion designer. People's rejection of you or society's rejection well, it shapes you, right? It shapes where you go. And I think, I think what you and I both have in common throughout our careers is that we have never been the kind of women that. When people try to contain us and hold us back from being creative and from innovating and from actually working with ideas that have meaning to us, we'll be satisfied. We are not the kind of women that would sit in a corporation for 30 years, no matter how much you paid us. throughout my career, there's always been a process. of hitting a barrier and realizing that I have two choices. Either I stop doing what I'm doing going in the direction that I go, or I have to find a solution. And often that solution is a novel solution. And I don't know where that's going to take me. And sometimes it succeeds. Thankfully, sometimes it succeeds, and sometimes it doesn't. And I guess at this age, I've learned to take the rough with the smooth. I used to have enormous panics and crises when I would reach a point at which something wasn't working, and I would have this fear. Oh my goodness. You know, is this the end? Am I not going to be able to carry on doing this? And after many kinds of trial-and-error processes, I've realized, if you stick with it and if you're creative enough, then you can usually get there. Just not necessarily the way that you originally thought you would. This is an ongoing thing for me throughout my life too. Last year I tried to start an Etsy shop, which was a colossal failure. It was a distraction. Where this podcast is something I truly believe in, and I know it's the right thing for me, along with writing. I don't want to do marketing anymore. I have no interest in marketing. I never did. And it's been a deviation, and I've just kept going down that road. And because of ageism and because of the performance marketing stuff, it's no longer that viable. And I'm thinking, it's so viable. don't like equals not time to pivot. But I do know that feeling of like being very, you know, determined that you want things to be a certain way maybe society is not set up for you to succeed in that way, but you are determined you are so right I could never go work a corporate job for 30 years. I get myself out of those situations. I absolutely despise it. I feel like I'm suffocating. I hate it so much. And part of what this podcast is about is figuring out what the hell is going on in society and how we can become creatively integrated individuals, succeed creatively. I think it's very difficult to succeed creatively. Another thing that caught my attention, you were saying in my voicemail what would you tell your younger self about succeeding? And you said, I would not say go out and just be brave and just try to do something. That really hit me. I would never encourage my kids to go to a school like Bennington, an experimental liberal arts school, because I have suffered and struggled enormously from going to schools like that. I wish I'd gone to a Harvard or Yale or Princeton where I had a network of people that all could sort of give me a hand up into their ranks. I know it is not an even playing field and that you can do anything if you just pull yourself up by the bootstraps. I know that that's not true anymore if it ever was, but that this is a persistent myth that if you work really hard and you're really creative and you're true to your vision that eventually you'll succeed. And it's been heartbreaking to see that's not how it works. What would you tell your younger self and why do you feel like these old ways of working which were more about individual spirit why they don't work so much anymore and what can we do about it? Well, I think things do change over time and that's the kind of paradox, isn't it? Things that were very hard of past are much easier today. So for example, like you, I have a side hustle in terms of a shop., I accidentally designed several hundred textile designs during the pandemic lockdowns of an evening. television on. And then I asked some friends, what do you think of these designs? I was just going to design myself some curtains, but I think some of these textiles are quite nice. What do you think? And they said, yeah, we love them. So, I then used a platform where you can put your textile designs onto various white goods, and you position the prints and what have you, and then I built the shop, and I created the shop. And I know from having run my own label, that the costs involved in doing that were many, many, many times less than back in the day when to design something. I not only had to do everything by hand, but I had to physically pick up all of my samples. And I had to then show my samples We didn't have internet showcases then. So, I had to go and do shows in London and at a massive expense. So, in that sense, there are some things that are massively easier, but the difference between today and back then is that I didn't feel back then there was, I was competing with the whole world. It wasn't the case that I felt that I had to be successful on one particular platform and that I had to get a million and one likes for something to work. So, I think the pressures are different. But what I would say is that my younger self, like you, I imagined that if you had a talent and if you work really hard and if you were diligent enough and you made enough sacrifices, that led to success, and I've not just seen with me, but I have seen with many, many people that that is not necessarily true. Networks do count. It does matter who you know. And I think one of the things I've realized over time, I've had the advantage of mixing with people from a very, very broad spectrum of society. I've known people that have really had nothing. Every last thing that they've had in their life, they have worked really hard for. And then I've known people that have had everything on a plate that have inherited tens of millions of pounds and if there's one thing that I have learned, it's that most people, most people, whether you're working class, lower middle class, or, you know, middle class to kind of use those traditional demographic groups. They come from families where you have a worth that is the living wage, or just a bit above that. And it doesn't matter where you kind of go in life, you will always be aware of that fact. Whereas you've got people that come from great privilege and these people never have a perception that they're worth the living wage or just a buck. There is the perception that they are innately worth more. This is what the nepo baby thing, I mean we've seen the nepo baby thing come to dominate not just fashion, but film and everything. The idea that, you know, you can be born a supermodel because your mum is Kate Moss. Let's be honest, Kate Moss’s daughter would not be a supermodel. She would not be on the cover of Vogue or any other magazine if her mother was not Kate Moss. No way. But that's the age we're in. And I think one of the lessons that I would have told my younger self, I learnt this the hard way, is your value has nothing to do with your historic value. It has nothing to do with the fact that you've really had to labor hard to earn a crust. It's nothing to do with what your mum earned or what your grandparents earned. And it has everything to do with what you know and how you're able to apply that. And when people know their value, when they know what they're worth, that's the biggest game changer. Because at that point, it equips them to know when to work away. And one of the things I laugh about now, I didn't find this very funny a few years ago, But I still have people coming to me. They are always, sorry chaps to put a label on a cliche, but they are middle aged white males I often have these chaps come to me thinking that I need to do something to get a foot in the door. Like they're not going to pay you? ……. And one of these emails came in. The guy wanted me to give a keynote at an event, didn't say in that first email that they wanted my services for free, but I just knew because I've learned, I know the language and I knew what was coming and we sat there on the sofa and I showed, I sort of moved my laptop over and I showed my boyfriend and I said, I bet this guy is trying for a freebie. And sure enough, and we were just laughing about it as the, as the email exchange came in, we were laughing about it. But that, although we laugh about it for someone to be going to a senior, and really think that you need to do something for the experience and the profile. It speaks to arrogance, and it speaks to undervaluing other people's experience. He needed me more than I needed him. And so, I just got back with a very polite, thanks, but no thanks. And the audacity of this individual, when they put their event together and they didn't actually clearly get the footfall they were hoping for, because funnily enough, people weren't running for tickets. The guy actually asked me a week before if I could promote his event to my network at which point I thought to myself, Yeah, if you need to do that, then clearly you need to make sure that the next time you organize an event, you create the budget to pay people, proportionate to whatever the ask is, or frankly, you just don't host it. Simple as. It speaks to the fact that we don't live in a meretricious society and people don't value quality, you don't get paid what you're worth. how can creative people who have experienced massive layoffs from all creative industries, how can they navigate their way back and also make manifest the things that are in their vision without compromising to that mediocre middle. What do you think is the solution for that? I think the first thing is to have self-belief and confidence, particularly if you're a creative, know that you are not just as good as your last deal. There are going to be a lot of people that if you're a creative, are not really going to understand where your value is situated. and they won't understand some of the things that you do. I mean, you could say that's true of lots of different professions, but I think it's particularly so with the creative industries but retain your own sense of confidence and remind yourself of what you know and of what you've achieved. Also, you don't need a big network, but you do need a small network of people that you can turn to for a second opinion on things. If you're in a situation where, and I think this often happens to creatives, you actually don't know how to navigate an approach. It might be that, you know, someone has come to you, and they do have some funds. They, they do want to hire you, but you're, you're not quite confident about the overall offer. How do you navigate that? If you're a junior, junior to mid-level, you are going to have to do some pro bonos, you are going to have to build your resume simple as. But when you get to about mid-level, and you've got that sort of experience that's at the point at which you really need to be stepping back from doing freebies. Unless it's a charity job. If it's a charity job, then that's a different gig, but I think just having a few solid people and know your weaknesses know the things that you struggle with And so you can get a second opinion because sometimes that second opinion can be the game changer It can be the thing that can turn a situation that you know could have gone one way another way and it also So we'll help you to know when to walk away and walk away with confidence because the biggest waste of your time is going to be getting involved in something that you think is going to be promising and that you think might take you to X when in actual fact, it turns out to be an absolute nightmare and it can actually be harmful to you. It can be detrimental. Someone who is a bit more experienced will have learned the hard way. I've learned the hard way. Normally my little radar is pretty switched on. I have a good sense of who I should be working with and not, but I've made mistakes, and I've learned from those mistakes. And what that means is that if I'm advising others, then I can draw on those mistakes to try and make sure that they swerve them.