Chapter 1: What unique perspective does Zoe Scaman bring to the conversation?
My guest today is Zoe Skaiman, a strategist, entrepreneur, writer, and one of the most intellectually fearless people working in our industry. Zoe has built her career by questioning systems and rejecting linear paths.
From being expelled twice at school for pushing back against rigid institutions to becoming a trusted advisor to global leadership teams, her story is one of curiosity, critical thinking, and refusing to fit into a box. Zoe is one of the few people I know who's actually doing the work on AI.
She's sitting in boardrooms with the biggest brands in the world to help them understand what's real, what's hype, and what's at stake. This is a conversation about courage, curiosity, and hope, and about building a career by asking better questions. This is Zoe Skaman. Zoe, thank you so much for joining me. It is honestly such an honor to have you. I know your time is extraordinarily valuable.
Am I right in saying that your partner husband is serving abroad at the moment and you're looking after two young kids alone with an insane client roster? How are you doing that all? I'm not quite sure. I'm coping. I would say that's probably the best word to use at the moment. But yeah, entrepreneurialism, two kids under the age of two and a half and my husband away is quite a lot.
I think just the life admin alone is enormous. And then trying to juggle it all with work is, it's a lot. But I think if anything, it just really helps me to focus on where my priorities are and what juggling it all. You are a supermodel woman. And I'm excited for in this episode to explore like how that came to be, how you are the woman you are.
And I think we could go on so many tangents because you and I have, you know, worked together for the last, I remember I was thinking back on our first call, which was like over five years ago now, and me being like blown away by you immediately. Yeah. So I love to focus our conversation on kind of three areas.
Firstly, that entrepreneurial journey, like annual mindset, because I think that is so unique and so rare. And that feeds into the second point in like how your work is so distinctive and rare and brilliant. And then obviously looking ahead, you're at the forefront of the AI. There's so many bullshitters when it comes to AI, but you are actually doing the work.
You spent your career at the forefront of emerging technologies and innovation. And I want to get your perspective of like what's ahead for us and what we should be excited and hopeful for. Let me kick off and just ask you, where did it all begin? I think I've always felt like I didn't fit in any kind of system that I was in.
So whether that be education, sometimes that would be, you know, kind of cliquey friendship groups. And it was definitely the workplace as well. So I think I've kind of had that rebellious lens to everything that I do from the very beginning. I was expelled twice when I was at school. First time I was 12, second time I was 15. For what?
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Chapter 2: How did Zoe's early experiences shape her career path?
What do you think was the barrier for you? I think I felt like, and I still do in many instances, that education and the way that we run it in most institutions today is a bit of a straitjacket. And I didn't want to learn the way that they wanted to teach me. I didn't believe in, you know, only reading one book for the better part of a year within English, for example.
I had different questions that I wanted to ask in maths as opposed to just learning Pythagoras theorem. And I kept pushing. And every single time I kept pushing, I was, you know, booted out the room and told to kind of meet them in detention after school or to stop asking questions. You know, I was seen as a problem child.
And there was one particular instance where I refused to read Lord of the Flies again because it's a fucking depressing book. And so they said, fine, you can sit on the step of the English class and you can read, you know, whatever you want. I was like, sweet. I read loads of books and the deputy headmistress was setting me essays on like the color purple and the Marilyn Monroe obituary.
And it was amazing. And that just kind of expanded my mind. I was like, I want to do more of this. And so I think what the problem was, was not that I was naturally rebellious, although I think maybe I was a little bit, but it was more that I felt stuck within the system. And I think that that then translated into the world of work as well, because I felt stuck in a similar system.
And I never felt entirely fulfilled or comfortable in any of the sort of traditional jobs that I went into. And I bounced around a lot, not necessarily just in terms of different agencies, but also different career paths, innovation, organizational design, different countries.
And I just wanted to kind of experience it all and find a way of connecting the dots across different ways of thinking and working. I think for a really long time, that was seen as a negative. And I think now it's starting to be seen as a positive. But for the better part of 20 years in the early stage of my career, it was that I was unreliable.
No one wanted to invest in me because I was just going to take whatever they'd invested and bugger off in a couple of months, which was true. But I don't think that they saw me as adding any value or cross-pollinating in an interesting way. And I don't think they really understood this idea of being a polymath or a generalist. And they didn't see value in it.
And I think now our cultural conversation around that is shifting. and also critical thinking. We have been conditioned since birth, essentially, not to critically think. You are one of the very few people who have done that from the early onset, and that has transcended your career. And that, for me, is very unique.
The critical thinking thing, is that something that was obviously prevalent from early days and right through to your career? Did that come naturally to you? I think it did, but I didn't know how to channel it. And so I think a lot of it came through in rage, in frustration, in pushing back against things, but I didn't quite know what I was pushing back against or why or how, just with maturity.
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Chapter 3: What insights does Zoe have about the creator economy?
And one of the big things that she told me, which I've taken through, is that you don't owe everyone everything just because you light a match. You are not then supposed to be the leader of the army to solve all of the world's ills. And I think I really struggled with that in the first instance, which is, oh, shit, you know, I've lit this match.
I now need to solve sexual harassment and rape and NDAs and all of this kind of stuff in the entire industry. And that's heavy. And so, you know, when she said, maybe your role is literally to use your rights to light the match and then let other people come in and fill that void and do that work. And that just made me kind of go, oh, and I can breathe again.
And so I think since then, I've seen that as my role. But obviously, when you like the match, you will see a lot of people coming at you. You know, you put yourself up on that kind of pedestal. And they said, this is what I stand for. And people kind of come for you. So with Mad Men, Furious Women, I was targeted, you know, a lot.
So there was a platform called 4chan at the time, and they've got a huge in-cell community. And the in-cell community pick a target each day, mostly women, and they will come after you. And I was one of them after that. And so every single inbox, you know, every single DM is rape threats, death threats, threats of doxing, you know, all that kind of stuff.
And it's 24 hour hardcore hit to try and knock you over and scare you into ever speaking publicly ever again. I obviously wasn't necessarily as scared. It was horrible to go through. What I also got, which I thought was really odd, is loads and loads and loads of dick pics. And what's interesting is the incel community see dick pics as like a power move.
And I just thought, this is really interesting. What can I do with this? And weirdly, a lot of men send photos of micro penises, which I thought was an interesting psychological thing. And so the, you know, penalties and stuff were blowing up at the time. And I was like, well, what if... Because we didn't have the cyber flashing laws at that time. They were still being debated in parliament.
What if I create a website where I can actually link these micro penis dick pics as NFTs onto the blockchain? If they want me to take them down, they have to pay me to do so. And then that got loads of coverage as well. You know, that was in Input Magazine and, you know, a bunch of others. And then obviously that got me even more dick pics and even more threats. I just thought it was hilarious.
It's reclaiming your power. It was just nuts. That's how I try and play it, which is when I get those threats, I'm not just going to sort of sit there and absorb it all. I'm going to find a way to, you know, turn it in a direction that is better or that can change something or that can start, you know, a new conversation. And I think the same is true of, you know, the mother load.
When I put that out, you know, I had one particular guy who came after me. for no particular reason, and kind of like threatened my livelihood and said, I didn't know anything about motherhood, despite having just had my second child, you know, and he threatened to sue me. And all because I wanted to write something about mothers, which is bonkers.
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Chapter 4: How can writing help freelancers succeed in their careers?
How do we think about world building and gaming and all that kind of stuff? So it was just this kind of vast space, you know, to dive into. And I got really interested in lots of different areas. And fandom was obviously one of them.
And the deeper that I went into fandom and the more I started looking at actually how they were operating and where they were showing up and, you know, the different spaces that they held as their own home. So, you know, from Tumblr through to Discord, et cetera, through to kind of like weird messaging boards that had been around since, you know, the internet first began.
And also, you know, the rituals that surround it. And I saw them kind of growing. in terms of their resonance with lots of people in terms of just like, you know, you've got the hardcore fans, which you've always had, but it was kind of growing those adjacent fans that were starting to go into it. The co-creation practices were increasing. Fan fiction was increasing.
The creation of fan businesses, so like merchandise, for example, was also increasing. I was like, why is this happening? Because we've had fandom for God knows how long. And it was this really weird confluence of a couple of different factors, one being the tools. So suddenly we started having, you know, Shopify's, we had Etsy's, we had Discord servers.
different co-creation tools, which, you know, AI generation was starting to come in. And so the ability for fans to create and express themselves and to connect with one another was growing exponentially. And at the same time, we had this kind of crisis of belonging.
And we also had this real challenge with context collapse in social spaces, which is essentially the fact that we had this experiment with this idea of having a global town hall, you know, like Twitter, for example, and being like, wouldn't it be wonderful if we all came together around the world and just had a chat in one place? And obviously that was a fucking terrible idea.
And so what was happening was this context collapse, which felt horrible and uncomfortable and violent to some people, which is, you know, you tweet something out and someone else with the opposite viewpoint would come back and give you a death threat. And everyone's like, yay, internet. And so more and more people were moving away from that as an experience and saying, I don't want this.
You know, I want a feeling of safety and security and belonging and I want to find my tribe. And more and more so, they were gravitating towards fandoms because they've already kind of had that community space.
And then obviously, you know, COVID hit and we saw an explosion in the need for virtual communities who people could actually feel like they weren't alone in their front rooms for 24 hours a day. Discord came at the right time. Twitch came at the right time. And more and more, we started actually seeing the birth of these huge passion-based communities or interest-based.
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Chapter 5: What are the challenges facing the creator economy today?
So for example, you know, AI drug discovery, even in the last couple of months, for example, the drug discoveries that AI has been able to make because it has the ability to crunch
millions and millions of data points, which our previous systems and our own human brains isn't capable of, is massive in terms of the leaps that can now make on, you know, solving, you know, health conditions that may not exist, you know, in 20 years time, which is amazing. We should be leaning into that.
The productivity gains that you can potentially get from outsourcing transactional work, again, utopian thinking, but that should mean that frees us up for kind of higher order thinking. There's so many different examples of where AI can really help us to leap forward. At the same time, AI is... awful at the moment when it comes to climate. And it is basically just absorbing all of our energy.
And we're having to build entirely new energy grids to be able to basically keep this thing running. It is constantly hungry for energy, constantly thirsty for water. I watched a video a couple of weeks ago of an older couple that live next to one of Meta's data centers, and their life is hell. Their water supply is just non-existent.
They're terrified of actually drinking any of it because of what's potentially in it. They've got these massive lights that are on and shining through their windows 24-7. They're not really sure what the ramifications are from their health. And we're not talking about this stuff. This is huge. Ethics is another thing as well that we're not talking about.
Governance decisions, people losing their jobs. Everyone's kind of going, isn't it amazing? We're going to get X percentage of efficiency uplift and therefore We're going to need 25% less graduates. Like, great, but what's going to happen to those graduates? How do they actually make a living? How do they function in this world, which requires rent and food? People need purpose.
And if there is that, you know, fulfillment, if there's opportunities to that, OK, but I just can't see it working. I don't know. Also on that environmental piece, this is probably ridiculous, but I've stopped saying please and thank you to my AI chatbots because apparently being polite causes a ridiculous amount of cost to the environment.
So now I feel awful when I'm like, give me information on this. And it's just blunt. I'm like, well, it's saving something. But yeah, the environmental factors, I don't know how we're going to solve them, but we'll see. Those are big questions that we need to ask ourselves as organizations as well.
You know, I was doing a talk this morning for a group of chief HR officers across a range of different organizations, huge organizations. And these are the conversations that we need to be having. So it's not just about efficiencies. It's not just about which partners to go with or which systems to connect or how to roll out adoption or how to increase training capabilities.
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