Topaz Adizes On How To Ask Questions (And Sell Them, Too.)

The Unspeakable Podcast

Meghan Daum

Society & Culture

4.8 • 784 Ratings

🗓️ 9 January 2025

⏱️ 72 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This week, Meghan is joined by filmmaker, YouTuber, and “experience design architect” Topaz Adizes. He is the founder of The Skin Deep, an experience design created to foster connection in human relationships, often through innovative products and curated live events. In this conversation, Topaz discusses the evolution of relationships in the digital age, the importance of asking the right questions, and how he built a sustainable business model around his project, The And, a video series in which two people sit face to face and engage with a series of simple yet surprising questions. He also explains the concept of experience design and how it shapes human interactions in a technology-driven world. Finally, he and Meghan talk about building a business, the meaning of “intimacy,” the changing rules of the dating market, and why he’s (theoretically) willing to accept that his grandchildren might never meet their spouses in real life.

GUEST BIO

Topaz Adizes is an Emmy Award-winning writer, director, and the founder and executive director of the experience design studio The Skin Deep, which has a popular YouTube channel. Topaz studied philosophy at UC Berkeley and Oxford University. He speaks four languages and currently lives in Mexico with his wife and two children.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	I don't like humans, but I love humanity, but I don't believe humanity is in us.
0:07.3	I think it's between us, and that's what the and is, because the and is a space between.
0:11.1	Like a relationship is not you or I, us or them, it's you and I, it's us and them.
0:17.5	It's the and that connects us.
0:19.0	That's space between the conjunction is the end, and that's where humanity the and that connects us. That's based between the conjunctions, the end. And that's
0:20.9	where humanity lives, in my opinion. Welcome to the unspeakable podcast. I'm your host,
0:29.0	Megan Down. We are back from the holiday break. I hope you had a happy and relaxing and healthy
0:36.0	holiday season.
0:42.6	I'm really excited to kick off the new year with this guest.
0:50.6	My guest is a guy named Topaz Adises, and I have never interviewed someone quite like him.
0:53.0	Let me tell you a little bit about him. He started off as a film director and even
0:56.3	to the Cannes Film Festival back in 2011. But after that, a serendipitous turn of events made him
1:04.2	start to think about how creativity could thrive on the internet in ways he had never imagined.
1:11.3	And back in 2011, people weren't necessarily thinking about the internet as the default
1:16.5	medium for artistic expression.
1:19.6	And he began to think about this and really radically altered his vision.
1:24.0	He started thinking about how seeking answers was really a process of seeking questions
1:29.5	and not necessarily the obvious questions. He went on to found something called the Skin Deep,
1:36.7	which is an experience design studio that has many different components, the best known of which
1:42.7	is a project called the end. Okay, so the
1:46.9	end encompasses more than 1,200 videos featuring two people sitting face to face, talking to one
1:54.2	another, and using a series of questions that Topaz has developed over time as a way of bringing
	...

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