The Curiosity Dividend Podcast

Kent Bray is a counsellor and mentor who draws on a 35 year career in elite rugby, the intense world of City of London trading, and recovery from a serious cocaine addiction, to support others in need. He works with individuals, teams and corporations, particularly men struggling with a loss of identity, structure or confidence after life in professional sport. This conversation was such a blessin...

Here’s my conversation with Jane Davidson, the former Minister for Environment, Sustainability and Housing, and Assembly Member for Pontypridd in the Welsh Assembly, known as the Welsh Assembly/Senedd Cymru. Jane’s stated mission is to mainstream sustainability and she lives this with conviction on her smallholding in West Wales. We get behind her stellar list of achievements as a politician, to u...

This conversation about childhood and play was deeply personal and an absolute joy. Jesse Coffino is the CEO of Anji Education, Inc. He has spent the last decade developing the theory and practice of Anji Play on the world stage. Anji Play is a beautiful philosophy for childhood flourishing founded by Ms Cheng Xuequin in Anji County, China. A fluent Mandarin speaker and interpreter, Jesse has taug...

Henry Oliver is a writer, thinker and critic. He writes the popular literary Substack The Common Reader and his excellent 2024 book Second Ac t is a study of late-blooming talent. We discuss why the humanities matter, stoicism, separating great writing from the writer, routes to truth, and reading literature as a great way of thinking. Henry reads some poetry beautifully and I mangle some Chaucer....

Todd Kashdan is insatiably curious. He is also a fabulous conversationalist with a mischievous, maverick streak. Todd is a Professor of Psychology, and the founder and director of the Wellbeing Lab at George Mason University in Virginia, USA. Todd is the most highly cited psychologist working in the field of curiosity research in history, with over 56,000 citations. He is in the top 1% of global s...

Josh Connolly is a coach who uses embodiment practices, breath-work, and his own deeply personal experiences, to help build resilience in others. Josh is a passionate supporter of those affected by parental alcohol issues, an advocate for tapping into, and connecting profoundly with, our emotions and intuition as a way to heal trauma, and he’s a wonderful conversationalist. We connected over a sha...

My conversation with John Pardey, an architect of unparalleled skill in the field of housing design. A serial winner of the UK’s most respected architecture awards, John has been a Chair and member of the RIBA Awards Group and CABE's National Design Review Panel, and has held lecturing posts at the London South Bank, Westminster, Canterbury and Portsmouth Schools of Architecture and is an external...

Marc A. Ross is a geopolitical strategist and communications expert. He’s the founder of Caracal Global and Brigadoon, and a passionate advocate for his home City of Detroit, its sports teams, its music scene, its architecture and its urban renaissance. A current resident of Washington DC, Marc is at the sharp end of the political shenanigans of US politics and advises companies around the world o...

My second conversation with the lovely Anna Koska. This one is all about space, creativity, the natural world and where we draw inspiration from. Anna is an artist specialising in fruit, vegetables and the natural world, and alongside her book illustration work, Anna is regularly commissioned by chefs and restauranteurs for food and botanical art. Working in egg tempera, watercolour, pen & ink and...

Ben Derbyshire is a Past President of the Royal Institute of British Architects. He is the Chair of the acclaimed architecture practice HTA Design LLP and a Commissioner of Historic England. A wonderfully erudite, engaging and deeply thoughtful man, Ben shares his principles for good architecture and place-making and a wide array of valuable insights, relevant not just to those active in the forma...

James Malone is a filmmaker, photographer and former Royal Marines Commando. His production company, Palpa Films, specialises in crafting compelling, extraordinary documentary work. His elite military background has provided a robust foundation for meticulous planning, seamless adaptation, and the creation of powerful stories in the most demanding environments. This is a deeply personal conversati...

Episode 15: Elaine Carnegie This was a special conversation with the wonderful Elaine Carnegie originally recorded during lockdown in February 2021. Elaine is a workplace health, mental health and wellbeing consultant, and the founder and Managing Director of beingworks . A former Senior NHS Physiotherapist and Fortune 500 executive, Elaine talks to me about her journey to doing critically importa...

Murray Kerr is an architect and founder of the design practice Denizen Works. Winners of the Stephen Lawrence Prize, The Grand Designs Home of the Year, and Building Design Architect of the Year, Denizen Works projects are characterised by an articulate approach which taps into local history, landscape, microclimate and community. We start our discussion with the golden question “what is architect...

Hugh MacLeod is a pioneer. He was one of the first two bloggers that I followed on the internet, back in about 2001, the other being Seth Godin. His blog gapingvoid.com, featuring his doodles on the back of business cards and creative advice for young entrepreneurs, was a huge inspiration to me as I started out on the lonely journey of starting my first company. A cartoonist, linguist and marketer...

Rob Poynton is a deep and creative thinker and author, whose life and work straddle eclectic fields. He teaches strategic leadership at the University of Oxford, and acts as a facilitator, consultant and coach to a host of companies and clients. His work is at the intersection of leadership, creativity, innovation and branding. He draws on multiple influences including improvisational theatre, pla...

Sadie Morgan is the co-founding director of multi award-winning international architecture and design practice dRMM. She was appointed OBE in the Queen’s 2020 New Year’s Honours List and is a Professor at the University of Westminster. She is the youngest ever President of the Architectural Association, the Design chair for HS2 and is a Commissioner for the UK Government’s National Infrastructure...

I manage to coax Clare Hieatt, co-founder of Howies, The Do Lectures and Hiut Denim*, out of the shadows during the build up to the 2019 Do Lectures event on her farm in Wales. Clare shares personal insights into her professional life and business partnership with her husband David, writing her book Do Curious, and creating the unique, transformative space which facilitates the magic of the Do Lec...

I meet Michael Owen, the founder of Always Wear Red, an uncompromising menswear brand utilising only the very best materials and makers around the UK. Amongst other things we riff on growing up, turning 50 - an occasion that led Michael to start a blog which has grown into a searingly honest, witty and wise look at life through Michael's glasses - and the creative process. We end with a very perso...

On the eve of the 10th Do Lectures, I discuss the genesis of the event with co-founder David Hieatt. David shares the ideas and inspiration behind the Do, why and how it came into being, and what he hopes to achieve with it. He also shares rare insights of his life with his wife Clare, and their process in building their much admired first brand Howies, and their second - Hiut - a specialist hand-...

I meet the talented and multi-faceted artist Anna Koska in her rural studio after a joyous walk in the woods. In our first conversation* we talk about painting, writing, bee-keeping, rearing pigs, charcuterie, feeding a family on home grown vegetables, and cooking. Anna is deeply curious about the world, adventurous, unafraid to fail, and her beautiful little studio, sitting as it does on the edge...

I meet acclaimed singer-songwriter Luke Sital-Singh at his studio in Bristol to discuss his journey from teenage music fan to universally respected professional musician described by no less than Lauren Laverne as ‘unbelievably good’. We discuss Luke’s searingly honest, haunting and mournful songs and the creative process behind writing and recording them. We share a fascination with melancholy an...

Jack Adair Bevan exudes soul. He’s an author, director and craftsman. Jack co-founded The Ethicurean - a multi award winning West Country restaurant straight out of University. He developed an award-winning artisan vermouth, The Collector, selling it successfully to the best bars and restaurants in the land. But driven by his innate curiosity Jack gave it up to follow a new-found passion - to use...

In this episode I meet Tim Strange in his beautiful beach hut on England's South Coast. Tim is an artist, photographer, educator and, notably, one of only 1,881 people to have completed a solo swim of the English Channel (as at 31st January 2025). Tim talks with great clarity about how he came to take on the challenge of the Channel swim. To put this achievement into perspective as at December 202...

A conversation with all round New York City cool cat Shana Dressler, about art practices, unrequited love, family tragedy, rebounding from failure, Jaques Cousteau, patenting McDonald's Golden Arches and Hugh Heffner's Playboy logo, and social impact. Shana gives a very personal, visceral and searingly honest insight into her life, her love of travel and cultural exploration and how she has switch...

Dan Kieran is a writer, entrepreneur, lecturer, speaker and mentor. The start of my meandering podcast journey was an eclectic conversation with Dan Kieran around the office kitchen table at Unbound, the crowd funding publishing platform that he co-founded to liberate writers - putting them and their readers into a direct relationship. Like a physical Substack of sorts. At the time Dan was growing...