DON'T WASTE I: CAPSULE TALKS

Bastiaan van der Sluis

CAPSULE TALKS I hosts honest, in-depth conversations with creative pioneers about work, pressure, doubt, discipline, and growth. Designers, founders, athletes, and cultural leaders reflect on the choices behind their careers. What shaped them, challenged them, almost broke them and how they kept moving forward. No marketing machine. No growth agenda. Just conversations driven by curiosity and care. Episodes appear without a schedule. Random encounters, intentional stories. Hosted by Bastiaan van der Sluis. Part of DON’T WASTE I — a platform for clarity, craft, and long-term performance. Follow on Instagram, Apple Podcast, or Spotify to catch episodes when they surface. instagram.com/dontwaste_i

  1. EP35: Rene van Dijk On Live Worlds: Scenography, Scale, and Decisions Under Pressure

    12/17/2025

    EP35: Rene van Dijk On Live Worlds: Scenography, Scale, and Decisions Under Pressure

    René van Dijk is the founder of Rene.Studio, and a scenographer and visual artist, working at the intersection of music, light, and large-scale live experience. Based in Amsterdam, he creates visual and lighting shows for electronic music artists and festivals, including Camelphat, Charlotte de Witte, Adriatique, and Tomorrowland, as well as for fashion brands like Louis Vuitton and Moncler — from intimate clubs to stages holding tens of thousands of people. What happens when learning takes place in real time — without the safety of pause, reset, or a second take? René’s path moves from a rural childhood in the north of the Netherlands, through gaming and early animation experiments, into Amsterdam’s nightlife — where projection, music, and space collided for the first time. Without formal mentors, he learned by doing, failing, and slowly earning responsibility. A personal breaking point led him away from commercial work and into months of solitude in the Himalayas, where stillness, walking, and self-observation reshaped his approach to creativity and ambition. In this episode, René speaks about intuition over planning, learning through mistakes, and why growth often arrives later than you expect — but stronger because of it. We talk about live decision-making under extreme pressure, trust within teams, losing clients to make space for better ones, and why beauty, emotion, and shared experience still matter in a world obsessed with optimisation and speed.

    50 min

Ratings & Reviews

5
out of 5
2 Ratings

About

CAPSULE TALKS I hosts honest, in-depth conversations with creative pioneers about work, pressure, doubt, discipline, and growth. Designers, founders, athletes, and cultural leaders reflect on the choices behind their careers. What shaped them, challenged them, almost broke them and how they kept moving forward. No marketing machine. No growth agenda. Just conversations driven by curiosity and care. Episodes appear without a schedule. Random encounters, intentional stories. Hosted by Bastiaan van der Sluis. Part of DON’T WASTE I — a platform for clarity, craft, and long-term performance. Follow on Instagram, Apple Podcast, or Spotify to catch episodes when they surface. instagram.com/dontwaste_i