I’m both excited and reluctant to share The Futures Workshop podcast with you. Excited because it’s my wife Victoria’s new project - I love my wife and love telling people about what she does; excited because I have “produced” the podcast, though that verb oversells the level of technical ability I have offered throughout.
I asked comedian and pod-tsar
for advice on hardware, then pestered for some help getting it all working on Substack. In between times I leaned on Chat GPT to solve the odd technical problem or two, and learnt to live with the sometimes glaring audio mistakes I made while recording that no form of post-production intelligence could fix.It seems like it would be pretty easy to record someone interviewing someone else then put it on the internet but it’s been a lot of work. The good thing about doing a lot of work is that, when you finish it, you’re rewarded with a flood of pride that can’t be matched by any of our 2024 dopamine go-tos. By definition, there are no shortcuts to a feeling of genuine accomplishment.
So why would I be reluctant to share all this with you? Because it is not a general audience podcast: Victoria has aimed it very narrowly, at global futurists like her - her goal is to equip them with new work tools that can be difficult to access without some expert help.
I think the interview episodes are listenable and interesting, and there’s nothing I’d like more than to see her listener numbers tick up quickly, but the goal is to reach particular people in a particular profession, not to try and trick as many people as possible into subscribing like we do here at I Ate Auckland.
Cal Newport is hot on the idea of slow-build, highly-engaged audiences. In his podcast “Artists Revolt Against Social Media” he talks about how having 5,000 people follow you on facebook is not as useful or meaningful as it sounds. It took those people almost nothing to click the ‘like’ button, and the chances that what you as a creator are doing online will make it through the algorithm to reach them is low. If you’ve worked out how to make your art thrive in the social media popularity funnel that’s great, but even then there are downsides: there’s a good chance what you’re creating has become less representative of your unique originality in the process.
Unlike mass social media, says Cal, things like podcasts and newsletters encourage deeper relationships with your audience. High trust, word-of-mouth recommendations drive these formats. It mean the people who sign up are more likely to be engaged in what you’re doing though, sadly, it takes much longer to build your audience. I’ve enjoyed learning how this all plays out via my own Substack and am looking forward to learning a whole new bunch of lessons as we put this exciting, very niche podcast out into the world.
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I was given four paua steaks by a friend who harvested them round Stewart island then flew them back to Auckland in a zip lock bag so that I could have a rare treat.
I didn’t want to stuff the cooking up so I texted chef Al Brown for some advice. He replied quickly:
“This is a bit messy but it should make the paua super tender … like really tender.
Take one, dry it with a paper towel, place it on a chopping board and take a carving fork to stab the paua and hold it in place. Flat side down.
using a mallet or rolling pin, beat the paua forcefully, like five to ten wacks. you will feel the muscle let go or feel soft. Even if they split a bit it’s all good.
Cook in a hot skillet as steaks. Two or three minutes on either side max. Flavour as you please.”
This all seemed straightforward so last night, two margaritas deep, as Victoria was putting Scout to bed, I followed these instructions on our kitchen bench. I had smashed at the first paua steak about half a dozen times with the rolling pin when I thought I’d better stop and survey my work. I picked it up and proudly noted it had indeed “let go”.
Then I saw it. A few feet from my thumping station was a custom-made sheer, pale-grey curtain which had cost us a great deal of money we didn’t have, as a “finishing touch” to mask the ranchslider in our new kitchen. The curtain is about six metres long and two metres high - if you’ve done a renovation recently you might have an idea how much we spent on it.
The black, inky paua juices had completely covered it. They’d clearly been ejected from the muscle at such a velocity that they’d had no trouble covering the metre or so required to collide with the delicate, finely netted curtain. There was paua spatter everywhere. It looked like a scene from The Staircase. I estimate there were around one hundred bright black marks, and as I tentatively dabbed at one I could see that the dark juice had already penetrated the weave of the fabric.
There is a certain horror to realising just how deeply you have fucked up, and that you will now have to interrupt your five year old’s story time to ruin your wife’s week.
I had already mentally thrown the curtains - all 12 square metres of them - into a miniskip and gone shopping for a replacement but Victoria kept a calm head. She called the girls out of their rooms and the four of us took to those curtains like washerwomen, saturating the material, rubbing each spot with sunlight soap then dunking it into a bucket of clear water to wash away the suds.
Those margaritas were long forgotten. It was a sober, humiliating experience. But we got those damn spots out. And though I was sure the paua would now be fouled with the acrid taste of human failure, it was actually pretty delicious.
Nice Jesse.......you are a good man.
You are safe (or at least your wife is) from me randomly following the podcast, which sounds fascinating in it's own right, but wouldn't help ME, so ...
As for the paua "incident" - thanks for sharing, & BTW sunlight soap is my go-to for cleaning just about everything except the toilet!