THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING Podcast
Amy Daroukakis on Difference & Signal
Descripción
Amy Daroukakis [https://www.linkedin.com/in/amydaroukakis/] is co-founder of Culture Connectors [https://thecultureconnectors.com/], a global cultural intelligence collective linking brands to 100+ locally embedded experts. Over 20 years across 60+ countries, she has built strategy for Google, LVMH, Airbnb, and Unilever. Her Trend Galaxy Framework challenges the industry’s habit of mistaking ten cities for the world. She helped the Young V&A win Museum of the Year in 2024, and has spoken at Cannes Lions. She splits her time between Brighton, Athens, and Berlin. So I start all of these conversations with the same question. I use this in my work too. It’s a question I borrowed from a friend of mine who helps people tell their story — it’s such a beautiful question, which is why I borrow it. But it’s really big. So I over-explain it the way I’m doing right now before I ask it. I want you to know that you are in absolute control and you can answer or not answer any way that you want to. And the question is: where do you come from? It’s such a great question. And actually, I saw the conversation you did with Katie Dreke and loved it. So practically — I come from Vancouver, Canada. But I come from a father who was an immigrant who fell in love with what Vancouver was and literally jumped ship and ate pie for too long. Because that was what he could point to until some Greek guys in the kitchen were like, do you want anything else? I think that’s the roots of my roots, because working hard was indoctrinated young. I started working young within the realm of a restaurant. And it’s still the roots of the roots today because the reason I can talk to anyone and dive into a conversation was from waitressing. From growing up and being able to read a table, anticipate a need, bridge a conversation, help with a lull. All of that stuff came from waitressing. So that came from working with my father. Not to say that this was a joyous experience — I got fired as many times as I quit. But I can tell people, and I actually look for people who have worked in service. There’s a different level of humanity for people who have had to serve others. And you can tell those who cannot. I’ve ended friendships in a cab once where someone talked to the taxi driver the wrong way. Even in a restaurant, I’ve stopped a friendship. It becomes a real validator of the type of human someone is by how they treat someone else. So I guess I come from service. Yeah, that’s beautiful. Can you tell us a story about the restaurant where you started — your first job? So I talked about this initially when I launched Cultural Connectors, because my father was a trapped creative in the realms of the classic Greek restaurant. And that’s what you do as an immigrant, right? You land in things that are known. He landed into that. But he never just served souvlaki. He started tapas in the 90s — he had this Greek dim sum menu where you would pick out different tapas. But people were like, what the hell is this? They would walk out. Or he started whole wheat pizza in the 80s and thought it was the best pizza. So there was always an entrepreneurial edge to this restaurant. It was always served up differently. Experimental. Different. And I saw this trapped artistic creative within the realms of sameness. I realized in this heightened dizzy when building something at 4 a.m. — how your brain is at its best and worst — that he had given me all the tools to do different, but I had chosen same and started to work away from that. And what do you mean when you say the different and the same? What were you pointing at? So I started this thing called Cultural Connectors. In our industry, there’s a sameness and homogeny that’s always been really sold and really sought after. And it tends to be very global north in perspective. There’s a homogeny that comes when cars look the same and hotels look the same and voices look the same. So I did a love letter ask globally and 68 countries responded. And then there are 55 human truth specialists — in grief, loneliness, rest. We’re inside ingredients, and everyone is paid the same postcode rates. It’s community as much as commerce. And our industry hasn’t always been known for that. So the sameness comes from just getting really tired of hearing things like, this is great for your portfolio, or, well, they’re based in this country, so we should pay that rate. Challenging systems. And my father did that too in his own way, but in a Greek restaurant. That’s awesome. And I’m so excited to talk more about your work. Before we get to the adult professional stuff, I’d love to ask — do you have a recollection of what you wanted to be, young Amy as a waitress? What did you want to be when you grew up? Oh, my gosh. I really wanted to design drag queen clothing. I was just obsessed. I would sketch and draw. And I loved Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. I’m now 46, so that was that moment in time when there was this immense creativity. I loved fashion design, all of those things of expression. I remember making hats, designing shirt colors. Just playfulness. But then I grew up with a very traditional father. If I had said, hey, I want to go to fashion school, he wouldn’t have supported it. But I went for fashion business. And that was supported. Yeah. So catch us up — where are you now? Tell us a little bit more about the work that you do. So I’m calling in from Brighton. Postcodes matter in this work because I live between Brighton, Berlin, and Athens. And it gives me this beautiful triangle. Brighton — I live right across from a nude beach. So I can’t take anything too seriously in terms of work. There’s a joyousness right now of how many naked people are out in May. But Greece matters because it’s the home of where my aunt now lives, in the house that was my grandmother’s. So I don’t talk about flying cars, because that contextually isn’t the edge of everyone’s conversation in a Greek home. Or in any home, to be honest. AI is not the lifeblood of every dinner conversation. And I think we need that realisticness — the importance of that. And then Germany is my husband. So I like to see him. He works for one of Germany’s largest cruise companies, so I’ve gotten to go on all these German cruises, randomly. So when I get asked by a German client, I’m like, I’ve been with 10,000 Germans — I know Germany better than you do. It peaks. All of this — the thorough thread and the red thread — is one foot in and one foot out. Acknowledging that. Knowing the limitations. I’m not the best expert for Germany, but I know somebody. I think you should always speak to lived experience. Mine is just a little more multicolored. Multi-postcode at the same time. I have a question — I want to ask about the origins of your cultural connection. But first, I want a little more information about the tradition of nude bathing in... oh my gosh. Do not think this is the norm and societal norm of the UK. There is still a layer of decorum. But in this one pocket that happens to live right outside my window, there’s this freedom. And the fact that I can see an ass pretty much at all temperatures of the year — I just think it’s really something that roots you in humanity. I once had this really important presenting call, and I heard all this noise. I couldn’t show anyone, but I said, I just have to stop and tell you — there are about a thousand people on bikes. They’re all naked in front of my yard. It adds laughter to the elements. And I think we can get so deep in our heads that — I don’t know, it’s my view of nature. It’s like touching grass, but in a form of nudeness that I really appreciate. Yeah, that’s remarkable. It must be quite something to preserve this space for people to do that. Everybody’s in agreement that this is... Yes, there’s an agreement to it. It’s one of those quirks of culture — these microcultures that live within, with written rules. There’s an organic border where people start to wear clothing. And sometimes another favorite hobby — this is the worst — I’ll see more conservative families start to go on the beach, and the kids are running to the ocean. And then there’ll be this turn back. And it’s this moment where you see the families retreating. So what’s the story of Cultural Connectors? Where did it come out of? What’s the origin story of the work you’re doing now and the network you’ve built? So I’d been described as having played outside for 20 years — two decades outside. I’d worked across 25 categories and been to 60-plus countries, but only in the form of Baskin Robbins. There’s only so much of a flavor you can get. The best example I can give: I was in Lisbon with a friend and she said, I’m going to take you to my favorite restaurant, but you can never tell anyone we’re going. Nobody can know where this is — we have to keep it local. Fair enough. And on that day, there were so many men with children taking them out for ice cream. They were out for dinner. It was this magical scene. And if I had just parachuted in without knowing anything about cultural identity, I would have thought, oh my God, the progressiveness of Portuguese culture, that men are so involved in children’s lives. It turned out it was Father’s Day. So this very special moment was just a moment. And that’s why we have to be careful with our cultural assumptions — parachuting into a market and saying, well, this is what it is, you start to lose the edge. So I’ve looked for voices in each of those markets that represent their local reality. Not just by country — though country is important because you start to learn what it means. Mapala, based in the Philippines, talked about the evolving identity with music and how a Filipino band was at Coachella for the first time. This is a musical culture, but for the longest time it’s always been in English. So what does that mean for change? You don’t learn these stories until you actually have a conversation. But just as important: categories. An expert in loneliness completely shifted a project I was working on — the future of work for 2030. If you’re thinking about Gen Z and workforce, what are the interconnection points you need to build in for a UX experience of onboarding? Where are the places of safety where we don’t necessarily have those moments? These experts — that’s why the insight ingredients are so important. When we were onboarding 25 people in the first year — it’s a new class every year, but some remain — there was this amazing woman, Ludo from Botswana, and she said, I don’t know if I’m supposed to be here because we move so slow. We’re a much slower culture. And the entire Zoom group globally went, oh my God, you’re supposed to be here. We all want to move slower. So where we’re getting lessons from — there are places in the world we haven’t necessarily looked for insight that are gold mines of imagination and rethinking. And the joyous part: I have a podcast too, where I interview them. I’ve done 53 now, which is insane. But it’s also the way I can do a culture casting for a client — similar to model casting. Here’s their thinking within the sensory signals. I have this framework called the Trend Galaxy — shooting stars, constellations, new planets, and unexplored universe — and each has a business implication. One’s for behavior change, one for campaigns, one for new product development. I need to test and see how they think, because the thinking part is so important. And then I send the podcast with the culture casting: forget the CV, I want you to see how they look on a project. That’s what I’ve been doing for a year and a half. Nice, congratulations. What’s an example of the kind of question that clients come to you with? One we worked with was an entertainment brand that had hired a UK-centric agency. And the client said, you won. But we do think you’re going to have homogeny in how you put messaging out, and we’re worried about sameness. So they came to us and we did a 10-market piece across the senses. What’s the journey from somebody in Italy compared to Finland when unlocking what could seed their creative concepts and campaigns? One amazing thing that came up from Italy was the WhatsApp message — because that’s a lifeblood of communication. How one person gets invited to a movie and then six show up but only three seats were booked. So they could use that as a seed. Or I asked everyone: what’s the film genre of your market right now? And for Finland, it was dark. Very dark. All the things you’d expect of Scandi. But then they could speak to that in a campaign — it’s dark outside, we’ll come in for darkness too. You move away from popcorn. Not everyone has the same journey to how they spend time together. That was one of the projects we worked on. And when did you first discover that you could make a living doing this kind of thing? This one is a work in progress. Building out a network, selling yourself — I describe it as there’s a me and a we element. I know how to sell me, for the most part. The we is a whole new journey stage, because I’m by no means an agency. Agency energy is a different type of body and being. The me was the start, but it got boring. I still like it, but it’s been nicer to play with other people. The first gig I ever did was an amazing thing — I got to travel the world for Target, meeting in secret rooms every three months and bringing back what we’d found. This was pre-Pinterest. Pre online trend tools. You still had to go out in the world. And the point of difference, the reason our team was special: when others would go to a city, they’d get a recce budget, stay in the great hotel, go to the top restaurants. A very company-wide experience of traveling to find cool-hunting, however you want to call it. But I would stay with my friend’s friend in Sydney — pre-Airbnb — take local transportation. And on a bus there was this graffiti-type pattern. They’d taken what people do on buses and made it a fabric. I took pictures of it and it became sheets. I always check things like that. Take the back alley. I will sometimes still stay at a hostel — you may question my life choices on that one. I mean, I still stay at Lux sometimes. But when it’s more uncomfortable, the insights are richer. There was somebody whose name was Seven, and he asked people to put things in Petri dishes — something that represented their place in the world. And this woman scraped off a subway handle and put it in. She goes, I live in LA, I only touch my things — and how weird it is to be in a place where everyone touches the same things. I live in an everyone-touches-the-same-things world. Those insights land differently in storytelling to a client because it’s not just saying, my Four Seasons was amazing. It’s: at the hostel, we talked about fill-in-the-blank. You have the weird conversations with the woman in her 80s traveling for the first time. Or I woke up one time to a room filled with 15 people for a bachelorette party. I need better life choices. It’s deeply uncomfortable work. But it’s fun. I’m curious about — and you said it yourself — that you’ve been at this for a very long time, so much that it feels, as you said, that we’ve come full circle. We’re back in this place of appreciating the analog and the tangible and the fringe. And I’m wondering: what are your reflections on how the practice of cultural intelligence — or whatever you call it — has changed? And how do you describe where we are now? I think we’re at an apex. A real tipping point. And I deeply worry about the skill set of people just coming into this work. I can give you an example — I was doing a breakfast club in Berlin that brings people together, and someone said: I just hired a junior recently and she brought back everything with AI. And he goes, I could do that myself. I hired her for her opinion. The her-ness was missing. That cultural exploration work is the her. It’s the you. And that muscle takes longer to build. Let me give you a peek at something I’m going to write. I’m going to write about in-real-life erotica. Because I’ve just had four magical days where erotica showed up in different ways. I went to the Chelsea Flower Show and there was this long line for this Garden of Eden. It turned out it was sponsored by a sex toy company — and it won the gold medal. The sex industry is something like six times smaller than the garden sector in the UK. So that flip was amazing. I had never seen anything like it in that space. Then I went to a sensory event on Friday by this amazing woman called Sarah Heinemann. She brought in a speaker who made us look at our hands and said: the cup of your hand is your bowl, the top of your hand is your plate, and your fingers are your forks. She designs dinner sensory experiences, sensual experiences using your hands. And she walked us through a five-course meal. Flipping amazing. And then Dr. Bridget spoke at Futurist Friends on Friday and talked about slime and bubbles. Slime was representative of sex, of not touching each other enough. All the elements, the semiotics of what slime means in culture. See how I don’t know where any of this is going to live yet. It’s the gathering. It’s the signal hunting. The joy of playing outside without a sense that it has to be a contained idea. And I worry about this industry needing to tie bows on everything — like, this is the latest trend. I’m not going to say this means we’re heading toward a more erotic cultural landscape when people are not actually having sex. The signal doesn’t necessarily match, but it will linger. Those lingered in my mind specifically, and I know they’ll end up somewhere in a report or a conversation with a team at some point. If you’re only looking at this from a virtual world, it’s a bit hollow. Because I can’t tell you — the gasps in that room when slime was introduced told me more about how achingly we crave connection than the slime itself. The people literally licking their fingers like they thought it was food, because they craved intimacy. You did that in person. That’s the analog part. And so what’s the ability you’re pointing at — this thing the story came out of? This concern about the state of the industry and young people coming in? How would you describe what you’re doing when you’re having all these experiences and holding them open? What are you doing? I call it getting lost on purpose. It’s not just wandering aimlessly, because you have to put yourself in the right rooms. There is strategy for where you place yourself — being selective about going out of the boxes and bubbles you’re already in. So I try to break my own algorithm, either through bringing speakers together or holding breakfast clubs. I love the term brain dance because it’s when the neurons light up. It’s a muscle. And I’m worried about that — a lot of people are starting to just look at the TikTok of vacation. I can see it. I can see it in media. There’s a laziness to just looking in one form and one space for insight. I’ll call it what it is. This is a theme, just listening to you talk. But you’ve talked about working against sameness, about breaking the algorithm. Can you say more about what you mean when you say breaking the algorithm? And how do you stay away from sameness? I identify with that a lot. I recognize in myself that sometimes if I find myself spending time with things that feel too common or popular or big, I have some sort of an aversion. There’s some piece of me that’s trying to navigate in the same way you’re describing. I don’t think I’m anywhere near as disciplined as you. So what does it mean to break the algorithm? And how do you avoid sameness? Well, with full gratitude for Cultural Connectors specifically — I can give you an example. I was in Bangkok for the wedding of Tregg from UAE. An Indian wedding in Bangkok. In itself, that was a view into luxury. Forget the traditional wedding — it was the most glorious thing I’d ever attended. Top 10 of my life. Did it change perception? There was a moment in the elevator where I was talking to one of the guests and I went, are you here for the wedding? And they looked me up and down and said, are you? And it was this minutia of judgment — like, who is she? And I was like, oh my god. That’s what it felt like to be othered as a white woman. How many times in my lifetime has that ever happened to me? Almost never. So to just have even the tiniest glance into what it feels like to be judged like that — I was like, this is amazing. So that’s an algorithm burst. A bubble burst. I felt that judgment that so many cultures feel — the ripple beneath of who are you, where do you belong? I had never experienced that before. And it came from just placing myself in a different algorithm — of wedding. But in that experience too, there was a huge lineup in Chinatown for gold. I’d never seen anything like it — on a Sunday, massive lines. So I asked Romanthea, our Thailand voice: is this unusual? It feels unusual. And she goes, this is very unusual. I looked in the news — it was the day that gold had indexed higher than ever. The peak of gold sales. So then I put it in the WhatsApp group for Cultural Connectors, and eight people weighed in and talked about what gold means in their culture. It was escapism. Gifting. Ritual. Being in close proximity to so many different opinions made me go, oh my god — it’s not just about wealth creation. It’s not just about identity. It’s also about escape. Safety for some women in some cultures. The fact that you save away a little bit for when you’re buying groceries — and what does that mean? So there’s an activeness to joyfully and respectfully not just using it as consumable — because then you’re just running a buffet of one. Being in spaces where I go, well, who else wants some cake? It’s a shared experience. I only get a ticket to my own brain. You’ve got to share the Ferris wheel. I’m telling you, it’s so much fun in here. Wait, I feel like there was a mixed metaphor somewhere in there. It went from my brain and then there was a Ferris wheel... Oh — I meant that it’s so much fun to play. I get such stimulation that if I could give Ferris wheel tickets, I’m telling you, it’s a ride you want to go on. But because we can’t, it’s better to do this out in the open with other people and give them the experience too. Beautiful. How do you describe the people, the members of your network? How do you discover them? What are you looking for? How do you describe them to clients? What’s the role they play? Locally nuanced understanding is core. Can you speak to a truth that matches your postcode or your identity? That’s really important. The ability to be a community member first, commerce second — those are really important. Right now, 48 people are sending postcards to each other. We’ve done a pen pal exchange. Because if we’re going to talk about analog, let’s do it. Once a month, we come together, and for the April session, each person picked a color and then unpacked their culture or category through that color. These are internal groupings of sharing. There was this amazing garbage bag share from Taiwan — she chose hot pink. In Taiwan, you pay for utility services through buying the garbage bag. I wouldn’t have known that. And Finland for blue: we have Blue Thursday instead of Black Friday, and it’s about supporting waterways. I wouldn’t have known that either. So it gives them an opportunity not only to learn from each other, but to even learn from their own knowledge. The podcast itself is — I don’t spell this out loud because I don’t think it’s fair — but it’s my testing ground. If someone can speak beyond the category they’ve written about, they’ve got it. Deep curiosity. And the majority have collectively worked with every Fortune 50 in the world. But new talent like Mustafa, who just joined from Somalia — he’s new in the game, but he’s got real sharpness. And Ethiopia Blend is also an amazing music producer. At first she said, well, I’m not a trend person. Guess what? She has all the muscle. The Trend Galaxy framework just enabled her to contain her thinking. But how they unweave and unpack stories — I’m deeply dazzled. And then there are occasions where I go, I don’t know. That’s part of curating. And why it’s important for this to be a living black book — there are too many agencies that say, we have over 100 people in our network, and then when you really dig down, they’ve never worked with them. So it’s important to be able to say: have you had enough time on the Ferris wheel? Do we hand it over to somebody else? I’m going to instigate something for next year where it’s a two-year max sitting, and then there’s a whole refreshment of new voices. That’s how we shift the industry forward. It can’t be a closed society. That’s really important. Yeah. What do you love about the work? Where’s the joy in it for you? Peter, I could cry, I love this work so much. I’ve never, ever gone to a grocery store and just bought anything. I look at behavior in the store. I look at the new end aisle. I look at new flavor profiles. I look at what somebody’s bought, I ask the cashier what people are buying, I look at shifting behavior, I look at what’s missing. To have places where this can go is so important. I don’t just ride on a bus — I listen to every conversation. I’m awful. Work enables a container for deep curiosity to live in. And working across 25 sectors means I’ve gotten to shape a brand new neighborhood that needed a completely new identity. I worked on a museum moving into a new space and had to be honest with them that their legacy wasn’t going to just shift — they had to become a new neighbor in that particular instance too. Or the cultural zeitgeist of AI: for a year I brought in porn and crime signals because those are the earliest adopters, and that’s so much more interesting when talking to AI technologists who only look at it from a technical angle. To be like, okay, well September we’re talking about sperm. To wake people up. Or a favorite: understanding the future of true crime for a streamer. What is the new lexicon and identity around murder and victimhood? How far can we go and how much responsibility do we have for bringing in our armchair sleuths? Sometimes it’s ice cream flavors. It’s always wildly different. Which means I have to look endlessly — but that’s a hobby. The problem is there’s no off switch, and that’s the challenge. I watch terrible, terrible television. Law and Order, 90s crime, on repeat, just to stop my brain. There has to be a place of rest — probably a meditation app is healthier than murder — but the off switch is never totally off. I’m curious, returning to something you were talking about earlier. In these conversations I always like to give people an opportunity to explain or justify qualitative research — the insight or understanding that comes from the kind of work you do. What is the thing you’re delivering to the client, and what does it do for them that they wouldn’t have otherwise? Do you feel like what you’re doing is qualitative and fits into that world of nuance and qualitative research? I’m always advocating for: we should be talking face to face, and qualitative is the science of description — which you’ve talked about. I’m always trying to build the argument that we need more of that. I see what you’re doing in that way. But I’m wondering — do you identify with that tradition of qualitative and ethnographic? I can give you two examples. Once I was working with a luxury speaker company. I was in Mayfair doing a site visit to one of their premium stores, and there was literally their dream target market walking by as I was walking in. And he goes, one day I’d love to go in there. He did not feel like he belonged. And they were shocked — like, he is who we want. But the layers of their communication were off the mark. And that kind of story could give them some teeth, some meat on the bone, as to why they weren’t landing. Another example: I worked with a sneaker head community — people with massive collections of sneaker culture — and I did all these interviews to reframe their brand strategy. The core center point that became the unlock: they became a sneaker head the minute they opened a sneaker box. Because for so many, especially men — and it over-indexes with men — the commonality among the biggest collectors, the pure aficionados, was that at a core point of identity, they couldn’t afford the shoe. There’s a reclamation and a real pride in being the 40-year-old who has the shoes the 13-year-old version of themselves never could have gotten. Their family couldn’t afford it. So the insight: they became part of your community 25 years ago. Yeah. That’s amazing. Or once I worked with a massive streamer. And the last, hardest person to get in the interview room is always the most senior person in any company — it’ll always be your last interview. For this company, it was the chairman of the board. If you’ve ever seen The Morning Show, he was that guy — that level. I had interviewed his entire HR teams. I was working on an employee value proposition, reframing how they would attract people — specifically within the era of massive tech hiring — to work for them. So at the very end, he interviewed me. I’ve never seen that. This is now my gold standard of what a leader looks like. Because he knew I had interviewed his entire team, every multi-layer from the onboarding person to the benefits person. He’d come in to transform the company. And I could tell him at the end: guess what — you’ve done it. You’re on the road. This is where I saw it. This is where I heard it. This is where it still needs work. And I saw pride in this man. It was so amazing to be able to first be asked the right questions to unpack what he needed — and that’s our role. It’s the knowledge. But to be able to hear that it was working, and working in the layers he didn’t necessarily know about. Because I’m an outsider, there’s an honesty that comes from that. There’s an anonymity — I get to hear all the good and the bad, and I have absolutely no problem saying both. I’ve once had to tell a museum that the neighborhood they were moving into, they had never welcomed into their own neighborhood. And they were like — oh! From a cultural perspective, they just hadn’t. And so that’s our job: to bring in the honesty and the voice of others. That’s what’s so beautiful about qualitative research and storytelling — the red threads of many have felt this way and have never told you, because you don’t have a safe space for this particular thing to be said. Or you all feel this way but you’re not saying it out loud, so I’m going to say it for you. Yeah. That’s beautiful. We’ve got a little bit of time left and I want to talk about our shared experience. We met in person in Athens three weeks ago at the House of Beautiful Business World Forum. It was my first experience in Athens. It was my first experience at the House of Beautiful Business. It was lovely to meet you. I liked the afternoon refreshment with Zoe Scaman, who was there. What are your reflections on that whole experience? Joyous. Again, we’re talking about the grocery store and the bus. This is like Disneyland of brain thinking. I just kept gathering things that people were saying that really struck me. One was they were talking about how as a room we operate at 120%. Which is true. But what if you went down to 80? What would you welcome in if you weren’t trying to control and lead and do so much? I’m trying to lean more into the 80. I love that somebody said she’s trying to add more life into her life. I’m starting to do that more. Those are the lessons. But also the experiences. Because I hosted a dinner the day before it kicked off and 35 wonderful people came. It was with Monica Jang, our Cultural Connectors expert on loneliness. And on the very last day, on the rooftop where I saw you, I saw five people standing together and I thought, oh my gosh — yeah, we met at the dinner. To me, that’s a marker. Talk about the clichés of KPIs — that was success. They had met each other, found each other through the rest of it, and there they were standing together at the end. That was really special. And Zoe knows this, so it’s not a secret — she stayed with me for five days. I’ve known her for 12 years, but I know the kitchen and I know the dining room, meaning her content and the things she puts out in the world. I had never seen the graft of what it looks like to be a supreme sous chef. The practicing, the listening — because her talk was one of the most mentioned and most beloved from the experience. I cannot tell you how that transformed how I want to do speaking in the future. To see the Olympian nature of it — okay, that’s where you put in the hard work. Really honor that. That was an unexpected, transformational career highlight. But then also this really unexpected thing. Athens is home, but I don’t speak enough Greek. And there’s always been a layer of deep guilt. So much guilt for not speaking more Greek. Family layers of guilt. My aunt and I try — and sometimes I get defensive. I’ll say, would you like me to build an airport for 2050? Once I retire I’m really going to lean into Greek. But at the very end, Tim and Till said, okay, all the Greeks come up and dance. And again I wanted to cry. Because I thought, I’m not Greek, quote unquote. I’m not Greek enough to go up. And then I got over myself. I thought about it for this millisecond — how fast your brain moves with this stuff — and I was like: I live in the house that was my grandfather’s. My aunt lives in the house that was my grandmother’s. I cook with the lemon trees. I welcome like a flipping Greek. I cook like a Greek. I live in Greece. My last name is as Greek as you can get. I have a Grego. I have all the elements of a Greek, but language. And identity is hard. I went up and danced, and it was a reclamation. I say this because I’m not the only one who struggles with multi-identity — when you have parts of a culture but not all of it. I grew up in the Greek kitchen, but that Greek kitchen only taught me how to swear in Greek. My dad didn’t teach me how to be a good Greek citizen. I can swear like a sailor because of him, but that’s not enough. That was a healing part of the experience. And I want to put the baton to you — what was a really special moment for you? Oh man. I remember the culmination of the event, the final keynote in that beautiful theater. They just called everybody up and I remember seeing you ascend the stage and join the dance. My experience overall — what came to mind listening to you talk was that going to the House of Beautiful Business was, for me, an effort to try to belong. I don’t really do conferences. I’ve always been a little allergic to that. But it was a real moment of saying, these are absolutely my people and I want to go spend time with them. So for that reason it was significant to make a big trip like that. And then — I think we talked about this on that Sunday — I had a visit to the Agora and the Pnyx. I’ve been thinking a lot about democracy and civic engagement and civics, and I was surprised at how moved I was by being there. Connecting with the origins of that practice of self-governance. That was really powerful. There was a philosopher, Christoph Koch, who I’m going to interview as well, and what he did to bring it to life for me was really powerful. So I returned to that as the thing I was most touched by. And it was amazing to meet you in person, to meet Zoe in person. Some of those keynotes were just really powerful — messages and ideas done beautifully. I felt really grateful to just be in the presence of very smart people trying to bring some coherence into this very strange time we’re in. I love that. There’s one — I wonder if this one struck with you. Do you remember the student, the young woman who came on stage to speak and then left? Oh my god. Heartbreaking. Peter, we’ve got to talk about this one. There was a youth delegation sitting on stage — about a hundred of them — and she was speaking, and she wasn’t speaking loud enough. There was this moment where she got a little jolted and she left, ran off stage. And we all went — oh, you know that moment. But that’s where it could have ended. That’s where most of the time it ends. But half an hour later — and the back story came later — there were a lot of professionals in the back, people who had spoken many many times, and they ran and got her. They talked to her. They told her about all the experiences they’d had, the mess-ups. And when she came back: no shoes, hair down, had taken off the heels. Very much herself. I cannot tell you — and I heard this enough times from others — there was a deep healing for all the second chances that we didn’t always get. The recognition of how vital it was. That experience could have debilitated her entire speaking career. But it elevated her. She will be an amazing speaker because of that experience. I’m moved just recalling it. She really just had a full panic in the moment she was meant to be delivering. Stopped and ran backstage. And I felt like everybody had the same instinct — oh no, we’ve got to help. And they really did rally around her and made sure she had another chance. She came out and she delivered. And the fact that there were more than a couple of dozen young people on stage the whole time was also a real signal — how smart and how sensitive the design of that whole experience was. So touching. Deeply human. And the unlock — where it starts to unpack things. I once had a boss who told me I was a terrible writer. He was specifically talking about package design writing — like, these potatoes were kissed by grandma, whipped and golden — and I can’t do that. But he cloaked it in writing. And I didn’t write for five years. Writing has since transformed my whole life. So if I hadn’t gotten over it — but it took years to give myself that second chance. Though ultimately I gave it to myself. I think there was something in that student’s moment where the beauty of these experiences is they create shared space for contemplation. New neurons and brain pathways open up. And I know what you do, Peter. I don’t know what most people who went to that conference do. And I think that’s pretty great. It’s true. That’s awesome. Well, Amy — we’ve run to the end of the hour. Thank you so much. It was wonderful to spend time with you, and this has been so much fun getting to know you and your work better. Thank you so much. With pleasure, Peter. Always. Get full access to THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING at thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe [https://thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]
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