Challenging Podcasts

Hi, thank you for taking your time. I'm really happy to be here, and quite excited.

I run an agency for innovation and entrepreneurship, and I'm a missionary for entrepreneurial thinking. I like bottom-up processes: they should work as decentralized as possible and involve people. I also love crowdfunding as a method to raise independent funding and test ideas in the market. I think it's a very sustainable way to test ideas and start an innovation. And I do a lot of teaching and training in the fields of crowdfunding, and also on how to start a business. I teach at universities and stuff like that.

But most of all, I love to call myself an enabler of radical connectedness. This is a new term that I came up with. I love it. I love the word radical, because I guess people start to listen when they hear it. What do I mean by enabler of radical connectedness? It's another term for community builder.

I'm also a feminist missionary for SDG 5. SDGs stands for the Sustainable Development Goals of the UN, to be achieved by 2030, and number five is to achieve gender equality. I really work towards this. This is an impact that I want to have.

And one way to achieve that is that I built a secret community of experts, women experts, and the brand of it is EXPEERTS.club. It's a mixture between experts and peers: the peers inside the expeerts. Nobody knows how to pronounce it correctly. That's bad, but okay. So it's EXPEERTS.club. We build small accountability teams of five or six women who meet on a regular basis, and they [learn] how to be vulnerable, how to talk about their goals and how to talk about the challenges they are facing. We help each other grow, help each other shine and help each other move forward faster, towards a fair future for us, for all, for everyone. So this is what we do.

And I also like to call myself a time millionaire. Because I work as little as possible, and I always start with myself when it comes to conserving resources. I also like the phrase "define your enough", in so many ways. This is somehow a mantra. I love to say: define your enough, and think about how much do I really need to be happy? How much do I really need to sustain my business? I'm selfish. And still, I think if we all work less and we all use fewer resources, then we can really change the [world]. That's a phrase that I really like: define your enough.

And why do I say that I am a time millionaire? I think that we all own equal time in life, and lots of it. And I think that's fair. That's a fair premise. We all start from the same point, somehow. We all own millions of minutes, if you assume, for example, a normal lifetime of 80 years.

If people asked me: what do you want to become? I always said: I want to be rich and famous. Not rich? Yeah: rich and famous, I always said. I mean, it's just nonsense, it doesn't mean anything. But I guess that I'm already a little bit famous, because I'm on your podcast now. And I defined rich. What does it mean, rich? I defined it for myself: I'm rich in time. I'm a time millionaire, and you too, basically. And I love it.

I think it's pure luxury also to spend time together here on that podcast now. It's a great pleasure to be here. You said: it's your stage, Cloed. It's your stage, say whatever you want and do whatever you want. And I thought about: what could I tell you? Or what could I tell our possible audience?

You know, I listen to a lot of podcasts. I love to learn every day, it really inspires me. But everything is already said. So what can I possibly tell you? What can I say? I think it's nothing. Just nothing. Basically, I want to talk to you about nothing today. About time and nothing. And what does it mean when you combine this in the podcast?

We have a certain time here. We said the podcast will take maybe 15, 20, 30 minutes. And the stage is mine. So I think that I want to challenge your podcast. I want to challenge the paradigm that a podcast is about telling people how wise you are and what you did in your life and everything. I want to challenge that, and just be quiet with you, and talk about nothing.

Are you with me? Are you [okay with it]?

I think that I would love to take the time here and just be quiet, and not do parallel work or deep work. I think one of the axioms of [Paul] Watzlawick is: you cannot not communicate. So basically I do communicate something here. I want to prove something, I want to show something.

I want to give us time to digest what we heard in the last year, or what we experienced, what we learned. I think it's so valuable to just stay silent and take the time, and feel the time, how the minutes drop, you know?

And I'm also a little bit nervous, because I don't know how long I can stand it, to be quiet and to say nothing. We will see, right? And then I'm also curious if the listeners will stay with us. So I would love to know how they feel about it later, in the reactions or in the comments. I would really love to get some feedback on that: if they stayed with us, if they were curious to know whether we really stand the silence or not.

If you are okay with it, I would say let's just start. And since we already talked for a few minutes, maybe 20 minutes of silence. 20 minutes of not saying anything. Okay?

You too: if you want to, if you have an input, if you feel like you want to add something to this silence, just feel free, right? I mean, it's not a law here. But I will [not] eat and drink. It's not about [that]. Yeah, this is [it].

[Silence of about 18 and a half minutes.]

It's hard to break it. I really liked it. I really, really like to do that, sit here and just be silent. I really like it.

I define my enough: that it's enough. And I think it's not really enough for me now, I could stay longer. But I also think about our audience somehow. And I think for the first try, we can finish the challenge, and maybe discuss later on what we found out or something. It's really interesting.

I really like to be here with you, and I really liked it. I enjoyed it a lot. I think I could do it longer. Maybe we do an experiment once, how long we can really do it.

Oh, as I said, I really liked it. I liked it a lot. It's super awesome, and really short. How did you feel?

Oh, you can meditate. I can't, but I have a lot in my head. I can stay with myself for long. There's a lot going on in my head, so it's never boring. And I hope that for our audience it's the same, and they enjoy the time that we give them to just think about whatever they want.

Okay, thank you. Thank you very much.