Thoughts, discoveries and breakthroughs w/c 8 July

This is a long one. Consider enjoying it with a cup of tea.

Photo/ Babiche Martens; crop by Jesse

This week Viva published my piece on the 20th anniversary of the Grove restaurant. The story mostly hangs off an interview I did with owner Michael a couple of weeks ago. I used to avoid writing stories like this, mostly out of laziness - you had to not only do the interview but record and then transcribe it in something much slower than real time so that you could go through and find the exact quotes you needed. No thanks.

Now there are a couple of services that will listen to your audio then transcribe and summarise it for free - you tell it whose voice is whose and it fills in the rest. You can click on any part of the transcript and it will play you that piece of audio too.

I try to avoid writing about AI - I find it either very boring or very scary or an unlikely combination of the two - but if the above sounds like it would be useful in your job, try out Otter.ai and Fireflies.ai. Between them they’ve taken away the most time-intensive, low-skill parts of my job and left me to focus on the high-skill creative stuff, which is the best of what AI promises.

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I recently got a newsletter from a big New Zealand brand which had clearly been written by Chat GPT. It was horrifying enough that I told another writer about it then forwarded her the email:

“Wow” she replied, “It's actually worse than I was expecting. They didn't try to hide it at all.”

This is a brand built on a particular tone of voice. I couldn’t believe they would expect GPT to come up with something that would match that voice and, when it failed, send it out to their entire database anyway.

It’s a good reminder that if you need outstanding writing, models like Chat-GPT can’t help you. They are great for many things, particularly for people who find a blank page difficult or who know what they want to say but can’t find the words to say it - they’re also good for the boring final proof read before you send something out into the world. But if you need to create something which could only have come from you (or your brand) you need to write it yourself.

Outstanding writing is surprising, and disruptive, and new. Even if you backed yourself to create a prompt that could do all that, you need a writer’s brain to recognise when you’ve got it right and if you haven’t, what’s gone wrong.

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Speaking of surprising, disruptive and new, I loved Batya Ungar-Sargon in the Free Press yesterday talking about the media’s quick switch from defense to attack on Joe Biden:

I wonder how President Joe Biden, our aging, failing, sometimes ailing commander in chief, for so long protected by a host of media, political, and Hollywood elites, is feeling as his closest lifelong allies throw him to the wolves. 

The same people who raised tens of millions of dollars for the president’s reelection campaign just four weeks ago; the same people who three weeks ago called unflattering video footage of the president “cheapfakes” and silenced those questioning his fitness with mockery and censure; the same people who told us the president is running rings around them on policy and is the smartest guy in the room, are now lining up one by one to stab him in the back and in the front, calling him unfit to run, demanding he step aside.

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With super friends like this, who needs enemies? We should have nothing but disgust for his lifelong allies watching and hoping he will humiliate himself beyond repair.

I find this sort of writing electrifying - a truly fresh, non-partisan take on a topic the whole world is talking about. Maybe you agree with her, maybe you don’t - I just enjoy hearing someone argue hard for an angle I’d never thought about.

Increasingly those are the voices I seek out on the internet: people without tribal allegiances critiquing whichever side is being the most ridiculous.

There’s an argument that not having tribal allegiances is itself a form of tribalism (ie if you don’t use every breath to speak out against everything the bad guy does, you’re part of the problem) but I think that’s too cute a way of avoiding engaging in good faith debate.

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“The opposite of resilience isn’t weakness. It’s loneliness.”

Last week I talked to Soraya Chemaly, who thinks we’ve got the concept of resilience all wrong. Increasingly we talk about it as a measurement of individual strength, power and self sufficiency. She says that’s a myth.

People who’ve lived through grief and trauma might argue that the secret of resilience lies in community and connection.

“Toxic individualism is a good way to sum up our cultural obsession with the power of one person to persevere against all odds,” says Soraya. “That model means we have created a survival of the fittest ideal of resilience that impoverishes us all, both as individuals and as a society.

”The danger of thinking that you and you alone are responsible for adapting positively to crisis is that you will almost certainly fail to meet your own expectations. No one is resilient alone, at all times, and in all situations. Resilience is a dynamic process and it is healthier and more accurate to say that we take turns being resilient for one another.”

So many of my interviews return to this theme. The modern world incentivises you to believe that it's "all about you"; every expert tells me that the opposite is true.

You can hear my interview with Soraya here.

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If you recognise that last snippet it’s because I also shared it on Linked In. You never quite know what is going to take on that platform but this became one of my most viewed posts of all time. Clearly something is resonating among the 80 thousand people who saw it.

I wonder, having liked or shared this post, how hard it would be for you to go out and make a meaningful change to your life as a result of it.

Perhaps the change doesn’t even need to be meaningful. Perhaps it’s just a matter of turning the dial a tiny bit at first so you’re saying yes to a few invitations you might have said no to - and starting to put some of your own invitations out into the world.

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Speaking of individualism, something stood out while I was listening to Toby Manhire’s “Juggernaut” podcast about the Labour Government of 1984 and the political and economic revolution that came with it.

One of the episodes recalls a quite complicated situation where the New Zealand dollar needed to be devalued and Rob Muldoon, by then just the caretaker PM, refused to do it.

The PM’s assurance that he wouldn’t act gave a strong signal to the nation’s moneymen that they could shift their cash out of New Zealand and be pretty much guaranteed a big payout when the inevitable devaluation happened and they brought it all back. Some of them (including John Key? one of my listeners seemed to think so though I haven’t found any evidence of this online) did indeed do this, and made a killing.

What struck me was David Lange’s comment about their behaviour:

“That episode really taught me just how evil the minds of New Zealanders could be when it came to self interest against the national interest. When given tips by Roger they went and conducted their affairs accordingly, reckless as to the consequence to other people, unmindful of the burden on the taxpayer, concerned only with their awful, vile, mercenary advantage.”

I think we’ve changed enough that a Prime Minister wouldn’t say that in 2024. The idea that a business person should use every market signal and legal loophole possible to maximise their own financial position isn’t shameful these days, it’s expected - even respected. For all the changes that came after 1984, this shift in perception may be one of the biggest.

[For what it’s worth, Toby reckons Lange’s statement is more about his naivety and hostility toward Roger Douglas. But what would Toby know? He’s just the series creator.]

You can hear my Juggernaut interview here.

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This newsletter was always intended to find its own way and I think I’m at a point where I’ll let the idea of food as a primary topic slip away and instead write about what interests me. This will sometimes be food.

So the new model is that this will be a place to log thoughts, discoveries and breakthroughs. No problems if that’s not for you! The joy of substack is that I’ll write what I want to write, and it’ll find whoever it’s going to find. I have a list of things I wanted to cover today but we’re already pretty deep and I’m only through five out of fifteen. So let me finish with a little food for those who’ve been patiently waiting.

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Cuisine magazine is looking great right now. We stumbled upon their Japan issue as our Air New Zealand flight to Tokyo was literally boarding, then yesterday morning in my Tauranga hotel room they had the July - curry- issue which I browsed with a coffee.

One of the things the magazine does well is treat restaurateurs as stars - something that has been missing in New Zealand apart from the odd handful of celeb chefs with TV profiles. In this latest issue Chand Sahrawat (Cassia, KOL, Sid at The French Cafe, Anise) shares her favourite places to eat Indian food and I couldn’t resist following her trail when I got back to Auckland in the afternoon.

Chand recommends Shubh in Sandringham for a place to try home-style Indian cookery, and while the service vibe there was a bit too much like I’d walked into somebody’s home and demanded they make me lunch, the food was good and the selection of dishes and snacks intimidatingly large. I ate a tray of three delicious vege curries with rice, raita and roti for $17.

On the way back to the car I popped my head into “Healthy Bites”, an unusual looking room with one (much friendlier) woman sitting at a counter towards the back. I love the street eat “vada pav”, a sort of spiced mash potato burger, and when I saw they were offering it I couldn’t resist.

I thought I’d be waiting for my food right there with her but after I’d paid my $9.99 she gave me a ticket and pointed me to a corridor. It went right to the back of the building where two mobile kitchen units form a courtyard with light decorations and seating for around 40 people. The music was loud and vibey (it sounded a lot like a man with a deep voice singing Cliff Richard’s “Young Ones” in Hindi, but I decided that this couldn’t have been possible) and after a few minutes one of the young guys in the truck handed me this.

It was simple and delicious and very spicy. Try Healthy Bites for a truly Sandringham experience.

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If you haven’t been to the Sandringham shops before, entrepreneur Perzen Patel advises you to “keep driving until you start seeing Indians jaywalking”. I had Perzen on the radio this week talking about how immigrant spice levels translate to Kiwi palates. Like me she finds the whole Kiwi-Hot phenomenon a bit confusing and advises, if in doubt, to ask for your food “Indian-medium”.

You can hear us discuss all aspects of Indian food in New Zealand here.

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Thanks for reading through this marathon post!