Cofounder of Syntopic and one of the podcast's two hosts. In episode 01 he does most of the talking, explaining where the company came from: becoming the steward of a spoken-word archive in late 2023, the failures that shaped the pipeline, and the talk he gave at SEMANTiCS in Ghent. Start with episode 01 at about six minutes.
Across the episodes
Enters as the one who tells the story: steward of an archive, builder of the pipeline, and witness to how the European conferences see the problem
Establishes where he is speaking from: just back from two European research conferences, one on the cyber humanities and one on the semantic web.
"Venice and in Ghent in Belgium last month at two different conferences."Chad Nantais, Syntopic, Episode 1 (11 Oct 2026), 1:58
His case for long-form audio rests on a listener's experience first and a builder's second: two decades of listening, then the archive work.
"And one of the things that I learned by, look, I've been consuming podcasts for 20 years, but also by working with this large corpus of thousands of hours of intellectual conversations,"Chad Nantais, Syntopic, Episode 1 (11 Oct 2026), 14:04
The personal motive under the business case: his own listening was not retaining what he heard.
"i thought i i listened to all these podcasts and i realized like it's going in one ear and out the other i need some way to freeze that and so that i can explore it"Chad Nantais, Syntopic, Episode 1 (11 Oct 2026), 24:40
Connections
He tells the company's origin story.
His talk at SEMANTiCS in Ghent.