Meet Douglas Clarke

We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Douglas Clarke a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Douglas, thank you for being such a positive, uplifting person. We’ve noticed that so many of the successful folks we’ve had the good fortune of connecting with have high levels of optimism and so we’d love to hear about your optimism and where you think it comes from.
My optimism flows from a deep well of gratitude within me, informed and nourished by the journeys I’ve taken around this earth.

From a young age I’ve felt a deep curiosity in the vastness and diversity of the world’s places and cultures. Since my family did not travel, my local library became my access to what existed outside of my own life’s perception. It delighted me to find a book about a country I’d never heard of, to take a glimpse into a way of life so different from my own. Every book I devoured and every foreign film I absorbed expanded my sense of wonder and deepened my hunger for an experience far away from home. I felt that the path to my own emotional development may lie in novel and enriching global experiences.

The very moment I graduated college, at 20 years old, I left the country. I took the opportunity to follow my girlfriend at the time on her college Junior year abroad in Germany. I found my own work there in media production and technology. While taking the time we could to explore Germany itself was enriching and extraordinary, its position in the center of Europe enabled us to also expand our travels. I found a boundless love for Europe and the wealth of cultures it had to offer but was especially drawn to Eastern Europe which was, at that time in 1998, just finding its footing after the fall of the Soviet Union just 7 years earlier. Even though I returned home to California in 1999, with each successive year I found myself returning to Europe, exploring deeper and deeper into the east, with some especially life-shaping experiences in Romania, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Poland, and Latvia.

In these countries, especially Romania which was experiencing the greatest poverty following its own Romanian Revolution in 1989, I witnessed a much broader range of human experience than I ever imagined possible in our modern time. Packs of dogs, descendants of the pets released by families when the soviets moved them from their private homes into block housing, roamed the streets of Brașov and Bucharest alongside the citizenry, unchecked by a non-existent animal control agency the country could not yet afford. One of the most impactful moments in my memory is seeing a child and dog fight for some scraps of food found in a trash pile.

In Zagreb, Croatia, where you could not take a step off of a paved surface for fear of unexploded land mines, it was extremely difficult to find a restaurant since no one there could afford to eat out and tourism and business had not yet been reinvigorated. Walking the only path into Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina from the bus terminal early in the morning was eerie and quiet as we realized we were in “Sniper’s Alley”, stepping over Sarajevo roses which were patterns of cracks in the sidewalk created by mortar shells. Walking alone by bombed out buildings riddled with bullet holes into the muslim-majority capital just to find a huge grave mound in the town’s center full of casualties from the city’s recent siege.

Since then, I’ve continued my travels into different continents; even into areas deemed off-limits. In 2012, I snuck into Cuba where I experienced a culture full of art, music, and fulfillment amongst a crumbled infrastructure, where the value of collective liberty is celebrated at the cost of personal freedoms. In 2013, I explored the Buddhist Kingdom of Bhutan, long closed to outsiders, and was struck by the refreshing absence of Christianity’s pervasive influence. In 2016, I explored North Korea, documenting some of the details of my impressions along with my photos here: https://observationsfromthedprk.com/.

With each of these, and countless other continuing adventures, I experience profound leaps in understanding. At first, every novel location feels impossibly foreign, almost unreal. But before long, I am carried into the rhythms of its residents; their patterns, their spirit; their very pulse of life moving through the streets and, in turn, through me. With time I unfailingly start to sense that this new place may offer me something more uniquely human than anything I could have expected, considered, or imagined before my visit.

With these feelings I always find myself returning home with the rumination that all human experience, especially hardship, is relative to the conditions under which that life is being lived. I feel that I’ve started to understand the vast range of living experience that all the people of our world endure. I am also an avid student of history and from a historical lens, that range of experience is given an entirely new and infinitely deep dimension. Thinking deeply about this, with reinforcement from my own experience, I realize that, while I am far from wealthy by modern western standards, the comfort and safety I experience in my own daily life is in the top .001% (at the least) of all humans who have ever lived. While I don’t think that perspective invalidates nor lessons the challenges, difficulties, nor pain experienced in my life, or any of our lives, the fundamental thought does keep me rooted in a deep state of gratitude.

I’m reminded of all that humankind has endured and continues to endure; of all that I and others around me have survived. As bad as things may seem, it will take so much more to approach the depths of what we are capable of handling. It has become a daily practice to reflect on this gratitude, and when I do, it tends to fill me with wonder, and I can’t help but to feel steeped in optimism.

Let’s take a small detour – maybe you can share a bit about yourself before we dive back into some of the other questions we had for you?
I am a lifelong technologist turned playwright & director, passionate about combining art, technology, and human connection. I’ve recently also expanded to become a published author and speaker, helping others to cultivate health and happiness as well as a leadership mindset. As my life and career have progressed and grown I am finding more aspects to my identity that I can bring forward and share with humility, creating unique value for others.

Having had spent my career creating new technologies for media and experience, with a mission of improving the translation of an artist’s vision and intention through digital media, I find I’m ever returning to the role of an artist myself. My preferred medium however is the air that separates me from my audience in real-time. Though live performance of my own original music, both solo and in an ensemble, has been my primary expression, I’ve more recently found a new and unexpected home in the theatre arts. What started as my writing and performing music for a 50 hour theatre festival in 2023 quickly blossomed into my taking on several acting roles, mostly leads, and the writing and directing of my own original play with my own original music, “Soulmate”.

“Soulmate” opened in January of 2025 in North Hollywood at Zombie Joe’s Underground amidst the fires devastating the area. The cathartic nature of the play, dealing with the tragedy of loss via a comedic and mystical journey, gave our Los Angeles community a place to gather and share an extremely vulnerable experience.

After selling out our initial performances and our extension, I decided to take “Soulmate” Off-Broadway in New York city where it opened in April of 2025 at the Actor’s Temple Theatre in the theater district of Manhattan, extending its run to the end of June. My lead for whom I wrote the play, Shannon Wong, joined me to reprise her role, as well as actress Sunn’e Ratcliff. The rest of the eight-person cast I auditioned and hired locally. This entire on-the-road adventure was documented via “The Soulmate Podcast” which I recorded and produced while doing everything else, available on YouTube and all podcast platforms. There, Shannon and I open up about our process and experience while interviewing members of the cast and production team. I also performed stand-up comedy to promote the play at St. Mark’s comedy club in the East Village, and produced several “Soulmate Shorts”; vertical video pieces that followed Soulmate’s characters on their adventures outside of the play’s primary narrative.

The most fulfilling innovation that we had brought to our New York city production however, was our talkback series, “Sex with a Soulmate”. Since “Soulmate” did contain nudity and many adult, taboo themes, including polyamory, Shannon and I took the opportunity to exercise a passion that we both share; open conversation and education around intimacy, communication, and sexual dynamics; especially consent. We invited the audience and the cast to an open-ended dialogue that I led directly after every other performance, where no subject was off limits. Some of the moments shared during these conversations became my absolute favorite of the entire three month excursion. Though it would sometimes take time for an audience to open up, when they did, we ended up with some of the most significant breakthrough moments of vulnerability, connection, and transformation. Everyone expressed so much gratitude for such an open and accepting environment, where they could finally express things that had weighed on their hearts and minds; but for me and Shannon, we were simply creating the world that we wanted to live in.

I am currently developing a multi-city “Soulmate” tour starting with the San Francisco bay area. My goal is to expand the production’s reach and impact by adding new music, new magical elements, and creating a greater wealth of associated discussions, workshops, and community events. In doing so I am actively seeking investors and partners who share the same passion for transformative art and open dialog. This would not only be an opportunity to support the expansion of what is already an impactful piece, but to build a greater culture of fearless openness, expression, and inclusion.

This month, I will be speaking as part of the online THRIVE Leadership forum on September 16 (https://1businessworld.com/event/2025-thrive-leadership-forum/). In an interview I will talk about “Culture by Design: Building the Future Through Values-Driven Leadership”. I look forward to sharing that, through our own values, we can seek to forge purpose from establishing shared understanding and objectives with our communities and with whom we work.

I will also be playing the title role in a new piece by the incredible writer/director Charlotte Cocker entitled “Phantom: An Immersive Horror Experience”. Based on French author Gaston Leroux’s original 1909 serial, The Phantom of the Opera, performances of this immersive theater experience will be September 19-27 at Zombie Joe’s Underground in North Hollywood. https://zombiejoes.tix.com/

If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?
Every quality that comes to mind conspires towards a common goal of learning.

For me, it all begins with open mindedness. We are comfortable with what we know and what we have already experienced. We innately tend to have more fear and hesitation around the unknown and therefore will tend to remain where we are more comfortable, creating attachments to what feels like security, and attempting to grow from there. However, by remaining in our comfort zone, our learnings will be limited. Yes, we can reflect on our lessons of the past, but the greatest leaps of knowledge, understanding, and progress come from stepping into the unknown. To do so with the least self-created resistance compels us to open our minds to entire undiscovered universes of knowledge and experience.

This leads directly to the next quality which I consider to be the very foundation of my journey. Humility is a practice that clears a path of curiosity, opening the mind to its greatest potential for learning and growth. What makes humility difficult is that it is often in direct, unconscious contention with our own ego. Ego is an essential part of our being and reinforces our understanding of all things, helping us to form our identity and world views; but it can also limit our ability to identify and subsequently open up to new ideas. We act from our egos involuntarily, as a default. Therefore a first step in practicing humility is by observing our own thoughts and building an awareness as to when our egos kick in. Eventually we can catch these moments and give ourselves a chance to choose humility as an alternative. In my own day to day experience I am constantly checking my impulses and desires, to see if they are driven by ego or borne of humility. This self-observation allows me to slow down and make a more conscious decision as to which I may favor.

I take a deeper examination of humility relative to our own ego in a contributing chapter that I wrote in July for the anthology book “Mindset Mastery: Unfunk Your Thinking, Rewire Your Brain, and Unlock Your Full Potential”, by publisher She Rises Studios (https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FPGRPRRL). In this chapter I share a few philosophies and practices that I have developed and had applied to enable me to take “Soulmate” from ideation to Off-Broadway in under 8 months. The lessons shared are intended to help others to live in their full integrity, evolve their thoughts, and shift their perspective towards abundance and fulfillment.

The third quality that enables us to journey further down the paths we establish is the ability to use our fears as our guide. I originally wrote “fearlessness” as the third quality, but quickly realized how arrogant and unhelpful that would be. Like many emotions, fear is not something that we can control. However, what we can do is to face our fears when we feel them, and examine them deeper with humility and compassion to see them for what they are. With an open mind we may find new meaning in our fears as they expose an intersection of the unknown with what may be an experience from our past that we do not want to repeat. What is helpful to understand is that with this awareness, we can step into our fear with intention and create a completely new result much more aligned with the growth we desire. Working through our fears in this way is so beneficial, I now tend to seek where I am feeling the most fear in any moment in order to turn and walk towards it.

Each of these qualities is a practice, and every practice is a slow and incomplete process that begins with awareness. For us early in our journey I would advise we first look at where we tend to limit our vision, where we are motivated by ego, and where we find ourselves discouraged by our fears. With this awareness we can slowly and intentionally start to make the choice to open our minds, discover and act from our humility, and when ready, start to use our fears as our compass.

One of our goals is to help like-minded folks with similar goals connect and so before we go we want to ask if you are looking to partner or collab with others – and if so, what would make the ideal collaborator or partner?
As I continue my voyage, I seek collaborators, both locally and internationally, who are inspired and excel in creative business, in finding investment, in drawing connections, and creating opportunities where expressive art and novel innovation can flourish and bring value to those who can benefit from it.

I seek angel investors and theatre venues who find resonance with the story and mission of “Soulmate” and can help us to grow the production and bring it to greater audiences.

I seek other creative technologist leaders in both startups and more established companies with whom I can partner and work; utilizing my skills and experience to cultivate significant technologies that continue to build on the goal of bringing greater integrity to the dissemination of impactful arts, culture, and life-enriching systems.

I feel my journey is only in its infancy and only through an open-minded and humble curiosity will we all find the greatest paths, especially those that we have yet to imagine.

For further information on “Soulmate”, visit https://soulmateofficial.com/. To explore my tech background experience please see https://www.linkedin.com/in/douglasaclarke/.

For any and all inquiries, I can be reached at [email protected].

Contact Info:

Image Credits
Primary photo with cat and Cello photo credit: Patrick Strattner
Soulmate Poster photo: Aaron McPolin

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