Episodes

  • Design Legend Debbie Millman, On Ugliness and Manufactured Meaning

    Design Legend Debbie Millman, On Ugliness and Manufactured Meaning
    10 Nov 2026
    Recorded live at Clios on Culture, this week's episode features Seth's conversation with design legend Debbie Millman, who’s hosted the Design Matters podcast for 20 years and more than 700 episodes. Over the course of her brilliant career, Debbie’s designed the faces of more brands that have been on more shelves than perhaps anyone. Their conversation ranged from why she doesn’t think brands have souls, on the difference between ugliness and vulgarity, why waiting around for confidence is a trap when you really just need courage, our shared belief that brands are manufactured meaning — meaning that only becomes real when enough people agree it does, and what David Lee Roth said that changed the way she walks through the world. Create or Destroy: Reimagining Marketing with Seth Matlins is produced by The Wisdomous Company and the Vox Media Podcast Network. Follow the podcast on Instagram / TikTok @createordestroypod and on LinkedIn. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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    1 hr and 1 min
  • Waymo CMO Suzanne Philion and Walmart CMO William White | Trust at Scale, Trust from Scratch

    Waymo CMO Suzanne Philion and Walmart CMO William White | Trust at Scale, Trust from Scratch
    3 Nov 2026
    This week’s show is brought to you by The Lighthouse, a part of The Whalar Group, and was recorded live at the inaugural Create or Destroy Sessions in Napa, presented by Live Nation. Seth talked with two guests – Walmart CMO William White and Waymo CMO Suzanne Philion – whose companies are completely different and yet whose challenges are strikingly similar. They discussed the differences and commonalities between Walmart, where 150 million people walk through its doors every week, and Waymo, who currently operates its autonomous, ride-hailing cars in just 15 U.S. cities. Both shared stories about why they need to keep earning customer trust and how trust is earned by everything the companies do and say. They got into why meaning lives in the back seat of a car just as much as a checkout line, why perception lags change, and how a messy ride or a cluttered shelf destroys value faster than a bad ad ever could, what store design has to do with brand strategy, and why the Street is a marketing channel. Create or Destroy: Reimagining Marketing with Seth Matlins is produced by The Wisdomous Company and the Vox Media Podcast Network. Follow the podcast on Instagram / TikTok @createordestroypod and on LinkedIn. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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    58 min
  • Starbucks Global CBO Tressie Lieberman | When Convenience Killed Soul — and Value

    Starbucks Global CBO Tressie Lieberman | When Convenience Killed Soul — and Value
    20 Oct 2026
    On day two as Starbucks’ CEO, Brian Niccol published an open letter saying "there's a shared sense we've drifted from our core," and Tressie Lieberman, who Niccol hired to as Global CBO after the stock had dropped 38%, has spent the time since rebuilding what this drift cost them—and their customers. In this conversation with Seth, Tressie's extremely candid about how it happened, which wasn't through any one catastrophic decision but through convenience becoming so dominant that the craft, community, and connection that justified the brand's premium receded until the experiences felt transactional and the soul of the company was hard to find. Seth and Tressie talk about what it takes to get this back at a global scale that finds half of America walking through your door every year, why she thinks endlessly about integration and cohesion and all the little choices that can come and bite you, why the two-question test she's used since Pizza Hut is still the most honest filter she knows, and why her answer to what she'd create with all the power in the world, connection, and what she'd destroy, loneliness, aren't two answers but one. Create or Destroy: Reimagining Marketing with Seth Matlins is produced by The Wisdomous Company and the Vox Media Podcast Network. Follow the podcast on Instagram / TikTok @createordestroypod and on LinkedIn. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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    45 min
  • Streetwear Legend Jeff Staple on Why You Can’t Buy Your Way Into Culture

    Streetwear Legend Jeff Staple on Why You Can’t Buy Your Way Into Culture
    13 Oct 2026
    Seth’s guest is streetwear legend Jeff Staple who, in 2005, designed a Nike Collab—the Pigeon Dunk—that caused a riot, resells for thousands of dollars 21 years later, and gets the credit (or blame!) for bringing sneaker culture to the masses. It’s also a moment Jeff says opened a Pandora's Box he's still reckoning with. In this conversation, Jeff draws a line from the Pigeon Dunk to Nike falling off the S&P, arguing that the moment sneaker culture went mainstream, the brands that fed on it started asking the wrong people what they wanted, and stopped creating and innovating for the ones who'd made them great. It’s a great conversation that gets into why the bread-and-butter, Monday through Friday business is what actually builds a brand that lasts 30 years, why you can't buy your way into culture no matter how big the check, and why 40 hours of meetings a week and none of them about what the customer actually wants is the most common way he sees enterprises destroy value. And when Seth asked him what he'd destroy with all the power in the world, he said “likes and comments,” because if they'd existed when he started, he never would've made the next thing. Create or Destroy: Reimagining Marketing with Seth Matlins is produced by The Wisdomous Company and the Vox Media Podcast Network. Follow the podcast on Instagram / TikTok @createordestroypod and on LinkedIn. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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    1 hr and 7 min
  • Gymshark CBO Noel Mack | Find Out Who You Are and Do It on Purpose

    Gymshark CBO Noel Mack | Find Out Who You Are and Do It on Purpose
    6 Oct 2026
    This episode Seth sat down with his friend Noel Mack, Gymshark's Chief Brand Officer, for a conversation that became a masterclass in what it means to turn down money in service of meaning. Gymshark is one of only two bootstrapped unicorns in UK history, built by a pizza boy with a sewing machine and a hundred British pounds. The strategic discipline that runs through everything Noel describes, from refusing to make yoga pants because other brands do it better, to pulling product they were selling out of because they were making it less special, to canceling every order and refunding every customer when bots hijacked a product drop because the community deserved better—all are versions of value creation that runs entirely counter to how the market rewards most enterprises. Seth and Noel talk about why focus is limiting and why that's exactly the point, why he'd choose social sentiment over every other metric, why the moment he opened Gymshark's homepage and saw a soccer player and an NFL draft pick he knew the brand had lost itself, and what Rory Sutherland taught him about the foil on a San Pellegrino can that he had to sit in a dark room and think about for two weeks. Create or Destroy: Reimagining Marketing with Seth Matlins is produced by The Wisdomous Company and the Vox Media Podcast Network. Follow the podcast on Instagram / TikTok @createordestroypod and on LinkedIn. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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    55 min
  • Amazon Web Services CMO Julia White, on Why Earnings Calls Are Stories About Demand

    Amazon Web Services CMO Julia White, on Why Earnings Calls Are Stories About Demand
    29 Sep 2026
    This week, Seth Matlins talks with Amazon Web Services CMO Julia White, who’s spent 25 years inside enterprise tech, including a 20-year tenure at Microsoft, where she led product marketing for Office 365 and Azure, leaving to become Chief Marketing and Solutions Officer at SAP. Twenty-five years later, Julia says the features and functions she spent years believing were the most important things, actually don't matter if you're not hitting the deeper human need on the other side of the product and B2B desk. And this shift in her thinking, from product truth to human truth as the foundation of value creation, runs through the entire conversation – from why B2B decisions are emotional ones made by humans not "businesses," why she believes an earnings call is one of the most important brand building or brand destroying moments an enterprise has, despite most companies treating it as a financial reporting exercise, and why the way companies store and govern customer data is a marketing decision that nobody making it thinks of that way. Create or Destroy: Reimagining Marketing with Seth Matlins is produced by The Wisdomous Company and the Vox Media Podcast Network. Follow the podcast on Instagram / TikTok @createordestroypod and on LinkedIn. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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    49 min
  • LuluLemon CBO Nikki Neuburger | When Cracks in the C-Suite Become Craters at The Front Line

    LuluLemon CBO Nikki Neuburger | When Cracks in the C-Suite Become Craters at The Front Line
    22 Sep 2026
    Lululemon Chief Brand and Product Activation Officer Nikki Neuburger has been inside three enterprise realities that couldn't be more different: Nike at its peak, where brand was the business and everyone knew it; Uber Eats, where she helped build a brand from scratch inside a three-sided marketplace during a trust crisis; and now at Lululemon, where she's lived through both extraordinary revenue growth and significant value erosion. In this conversation she tells Seth something every CEO and product leader needs to hear, which is that the best product doesn’t always win, backing it up with a career's worth of evidence about what actually creates value when the product alone isn't enough. Nikki reveals why a crack between leaders at the top becomes a crater by the time it reaches the frontline, why proximity to the customer is an executive's ultimate power and what gets destroyed when that proximity disappears, and why she believes AI-driven search is about to make every business decision visible to consumers in ways that will fundamentally change how brand value gets created and destroyed. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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    1 hr and 6 min
  • 'Incorruptible' Author Eric Ries on Making Money But Creating No Value

    'Incorruptible' Author Eric Ries on Making Money But Creating No Value
    15 Sep 2026
    Entrepreneur and author Eric Ries wrote the seminal book "The Lean Startup" and spent years teaching founders how to build companies, before realizing he'd never taught them how to protect what they built. In an economy where profit and value are often conflated, too many companies allow what Eric refers to as “the ghost of the public markets” to sit in every strategy meeting, trading long-term customer trust for short-term stock price bumps. Seth and Eric dive into the themes of Eric's latest book, "Incorruptible," examining how shareholder primacy became an economic orthodoxy that can destroy enterprise value, how product quality can get sacrificed when quarterly targets drive strategy, and what exceptional companies like Costco understand about building a governance fortress that protects sustainable growth. Create or Destroy: Reimagining Marketing with Seth Matlins is produced by The Wisdomous Company and the Vox Media Podcast Network. Follow the podcast on Instagram / TikTok @createordestroypod and on LinkedIn. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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    1 hr