Every day, human stories disappear. A person dies, and with them goes a lifetime of experience. The decisions they made. The mistakes they survived. The people they loved. The things they believed that later turned out to be different. The moments that changed everything. Some of those stories are written down. Most are not.
That is one of the reasons we built a professional podcast studio inside the Transformation Nomads Institute in Haarlem. Not simply because we wanted to produce another podcast. We wanted to create something closer to a living archive of human experience.
“NOW, THAT'S A CHANGE! captures what a life can teach us — before those stories disappear.”
— Ronald Heister
The story behind the résumé
We live in a time in which almost everything can be stored. Data. Photographs. Documents. Emails. Videos. Entire digital lives. But some of the most valuable human knowledge still disappears remarkably easily. Experience.
Ask someone what they have achieved and you will probably get their résumé. Ask them what changed them, and an entirely different story begins.
A loss. A decision they still think about. An unexpected encounter. Success that wasn't what they expected. Failure that turned out to be valuable. Love. Illness. Fear. A realization that made them question something they had believed for years.
Those are the conversations we want to preserve.
A living museum of human experience
That is the idea behind NOW, THAT'S A CHANGE! Our guests come from very different worlds. Music. Fashion. Science. Business. Public life. Entrepreneurship. Some are well known. Others have stories that deserve to become better known.
But this is not primarily a podcast about careers or achievements. I am interested in the person behind them. What happened in your life that changed the way you see yourself? When did you discover that something you had always believed was no longer true? What did life teach you that no education ever could? And what do you know today that you wish you had known earlier? Episode by episode, those conversations become part of something larger. An exposition in which the exhibits are not objects, but human experiences.Those are very different conversations.
The person behind the story
For many years, I worked in communications, media and what I sometimes call my former life in the PR of the Stars. I met many people whose public image was known by millions. But I became increasingly interested in the person behind that image.
Because titles disappear. Careers change. Companies are sold. Success comes and goes. And sometimes life interrupts everything we thought we knew. What remains is the human being.
That same curiosity eventually became part of Transformation Nomads. We believe that people make better choices when they can see more of reality. But reality isn't found only in reports, data and systems. It is also found in experience. Especially in the experiences we didn't ask for.
Now, that's a change
That is why the title matters.
NOW, THAT'S A CHANGE! is about those moments when something genuinely shifts. A decision. An encounter. A loss. An unexpected success. A realization. Sometimes an experience that cannot easily be explained. Our guests don't need to agree with us. In fact, that would make for rather boring conversations. They bring their own reality. We listen.
The first conversations have already brought very different worlds into our Haarlem studio from music and fashion to science, entrepreneurship and Human Sustainability.
Different lives. Different perspectives.
But eventually the conversation tends to arrive at the same place: what changed you? That's why we built the studio. And that's why we are looking forward to the conversations still to come.
NOW, THAT'S A CHANGE!
Honest conversations in changing times.