What is the curious?

When we first started working on the curious, the idea was actually quite simple: we wanted to know more about how people got to where they are.

Not just the version you usually hear, where someone started somewhere, did a few things, made a few decisions and eventually ended up where they are today, because once you know the ending, it’s very easy to make everything that happened before sound like it was somehow leading there.

We were more interested in everything around that.

The mistakes, unexpected turns, people they met along the way, ideas they followed, things that didn’t work and those moments when they genuinely had no idea what would come next. That idea eventually became the curious, a platform created by paper republic for podcasts, stories, conversations and events, where we get to explore people, their ideas and the experiences that shaped them.

So, who will you meet?

There isn’t really one particular type of person we’re looking for, and we want to keep it that way.

You’ll meet artists, musicians, designers, writers, entrepreneurs and other curious people whose stories we simply want to understand a little better. Of course, we talk about what they do, but we’re just as interested in everything that happened around it. How did they start? Who did they meet? What went wrong? What changed their mind? Which opportunities came along unexpectedly? And what are they still trying to figure out?

Because usually, the more you talk to someone, the more you realise that the path between where they started and where they are now wasn’t particularly straight and that’s usually the part we find most interesting.

What can you expect?

Right now, the curious takes a few different forms.

There’s the podcast, where we sit down with people and have longer conversations about their lives, work and ideas. There are written stories, which give us the chance to explore people and subjects in a different way, and there are events where we can bring some of those conversations into a physical space and, hopefully, get more people involved in them.

The subjects will change depending on who we meet and what we become interested in. There will be conversations about creativity, culture, music, design and ideas, but we don’t want to define too strictly what belongs here and what doesn’t.

Part of creating the curious has been figuring that out as we go, and we want to leave enough space for it to become things we haven’t thought of yet.

And where does paper republic come in?

The curious is created and supported by paper republic, a Vienna-based company making leather journals and notebooks designed to be used, refilled and made personal over time. The platform has its own space, its own voice and, hopefully, plenty of room to become something we can’t entirely predict yet.

For us, the connection lies in what happens beyond the notebook. paper republic makes the physical object, but what eventually fills its pages belongs entirely to the person using it: thoughts, drawings, plans, unfinished ideas or observations.

Over the years, we became increasingly interested in that part of it. Rather than only talking about the products we make, we wanted to create a space where we could explore the people, ideas and creative processes those products are ultimately there to support.

That became the starting point for the curious. It gives us the freedom to meet people from very different worlds and talk about what they create, but also how they got there, what shaped them, what went wrong and what they are still figuring out. In a way, it takes the idea behind a notebook and opens it up: a place to explore ideas without needing to know exactly where they will lead.

For now, there are conversations to listen to, stories to read, people to meet and quite a lot more we want to explore.

Start wherever you like and see what makes you curious.

- Claire