Resume the conversation
My only regret from my radio career is that I never once said, whilst on air, the line that inspired my career:
Tank fly, boss walk, jam nitty-gritty. You’re listening to the boy from the big bad city. This is jam hot. This is jam hot.
An element of the wedding industry which offends so many inside and out, the part that eventually pushes many insiders out and back into the normal world where couples kissing in front of you all day at work is not normal, is the unreal nature of so many weddings. That for a single day people dress up and play pretend.
I can tell you that although I’ve witnessed it over my fifteen years in the business, I also push back against it at every chance. I’m also lucky that my clientele aren’t indicative of that side of the wedding industry.
Which is why I love film photography. It’s so raw and honest. Often imperfect, and perhaps with error, it’s a plain and simple recording of the light that entered the lens at that time.
So here’s some film photos made by my friend James at the two Italian elopements we had together last week in Tuscany.
Elopements planned by my girl, Britt.
Sari Azout’s “letter to a friend who is thinking of starting something new” is beautiful. As Sari subtitles it, ‘if you are thinking of leaving your job to start a company or passion project, this letter is for you too.’
- Will you use this opportunity to grow and evolve or will you use it to beat yourself up?
- How will you avoid insecurity work?
- Can you learn to enjoy the process as the end in itself, not the means?
- Can you learn to enjoy the process as the end in itself, not the means?
- Will you default to the norms of your industry, or will you be an original?
- What tools will you use to quiet your ego and see reality clearly?
- Do you have clarity on what kind of financial value you aim to create?
If I had a beef to pick with anyone in the world today it’s how so many of us let life happen to us instead of us making us happen to life.
I hope you get to know your inner world. I hope you thrive financially while living your values. I hope you focus less on what you achieve and more on who you become. I hope you learn to be kind to yourself. I hope you fall in love with the process. I hope you see the point of pursuing passion work is not to drain yourself to create work that eclipses your life, but rather to create a life you are proud of. I hope this new venture takes you far away from conformism and enables you to make a life and a living on your own terms, with your spirit and creativity unhindered.
With any luck you’re reading this article well after I first shared it in August 2023, and if this is the case I felt the need to find the link and send it to you as you consider embarking on something new.
Make this process mean something so we have a cool story to talk about in a decade’s time.
Colonel Sanders and the sadness in scaling businesses
Mimi Sheraton in the New York Times in 1976 telling the story of walking into a KFC with Colonel Harland Sanders:
You’re frying for 12 minutes—that’s six minutes too long. What’s more, your frying fat should have been changed a week ago. That’s the worst fried chicken I’ve ever seen. Let me see your mashed potatoes with gravy, and how do you make them?
The Colonel is paid $200,000 a year to do advertising and PR for KFC, but when asked about Sanders’ remarks on the chain’s methods post-sale:
Raw chicken turns customers off, so we play it safe and fry at lower temperatures for a longer time than the colonel likes.
Which is fair, but this plays to my theory on scaling businesses.
When you run a small or micro business, a single storefront, or perhaps a business like Britt and I do with The Elopement Collective, or our Airbnb, or my celebrancy practice. Businesses that are anti-scale can celebrate the JOMO of business, the joy of missing out. We can’t do every elopement, or every wedding, or take every Airbnb booking on the Gold Coast.
Because of our very deliberate JOMO we can chose a different direction for our businesses where we aim to be five our of five stars, or whatever rating system is in play, we just aim to be the best.
I can’t help but feel there’s a wonderful and often unexplored middle ground between “die” and “grow and grow aggressively”
And ever since I read that I’ve been fascinated on that unexplored middle ground.
When you decide to scale you very simply decide not to be the best, but instead to be the biggest, the cheapest, the most-available, and you turn your back on the best.
I remember a small hotel we stayed at in Manhattan once and it proudly boasted a 7.2 rating on one of the hotel review websites which rated hotels out of 10.
If one of our businesses was 72% as good as the best of that category of businesses we’d shut it down, or completely rework it until it was a really good business and bringing immense value to people.
But when you’re just one of the thousands of hotels in New York, maybe 7.2 is ok?
But it’s not ok for me and it wasn’t ok for the Colonel.
Tess McClure in The Guardian reports on Pak ’n’ Save’s mealbot:
A New Zealand supermarket experimenting with using AI to generate meal plans has seen its app produce some unusual dishes – recommending customers recipes for deadly chlorine gas, “poison bread sandwiches” and mosquito-repellent roast potatoes.
The app, created by supermarket chain Pak ‘n’ Save, was advertised as a way for customers to creatively use up leftovers during the cost of living crisis. It asks users to enter in various ingredients in their homes, and auto-generates a meal plan or recipe, along with cheery commentary. It initially drew attention on social media for some unappealing recipes, including an “oreo vegetable stir-fry”.
We’re in the beautiful age of quality assurance in large language models. The giveaway is that the supermarket responds with:
(we are) disappointed to see “a small minority have tried to use the tool inappropriately and not for its intended purpose
Instead of owning the issue and revealing that the whole thing is built on a house of cards and we’re all just figuring this crap out.
After two months in London, across regional Austria, Liechtenstein, regional Italy, Puglia, and Tuscany, it is so refreshing for my soul to be walking the streets of Paris again tonight.
I could walk the streets of Paris and New York City for the rest of my days and never get bored or lose inspiration.
Why do airlines communicate a flight’s departure time instead of a “be at the gate” time? Every airport and every airline has different timings and many of us live in flight anxiety because of the lack of information.
Is there a good technical reason why departure time is communicated but not gate-deadline time?
Pro tip for flying out of Vienna Airport: you walk past a Starbucks before check-in, and you think, “awesome, a not-Austrian coffee! If there’s Starbucks at check-in there’ll be a Starbucks after security,” but there isn’t.
There is an epic kids playground though.
Over the weekend I wrote a piece about the fluff coming out of commercial radio in Australia, referencing my own time in a commercial radio station in very remote Western Australia, and considering going back last year but the wage had actually decreased.
Anyway, it was poorly written, so sitting at Gate F6 in Vienna Airport just now I edited and fixed it.
Any other errors or omissions are the faulty of your web browser.
Driving from Siena, Italy, to Graz, Austria, today Goldie and I were looking for somewhere to stop for lunch and we decided on this place named after a beach in Los Angeles.
I took Britt’s Fuji X-S10 with the 27mm f/2.8 for a play while we were there.
Commercial radio isn't "booming", it's barely paying the minimum wage
The PR-wing of the commercial radio community in Australia is getting everyone excited about a new report - that they commissioned and is weirdly in their favour - about how commercial radio in Australia is turning 100 years old this year on November 23rd.
The report tells a compelling story, which I don’t consider to be the actuality of local and regional commercial radio in Australia.
A few takeaways from the report include:
- About three hours of locally significant content per day is broadcast in regional communities - which is pretty much just obeying the law.
- 74% of Australians surveyed answered “sure, why not” when asked if they think commercial radio and audio build a sense of community.
- Over 1/3 of the jobs in commercial radio are in about 1/3 of Australian society (that being, regional Australia).
And it was on the jobs issue I wanted to rebut the argument that Australian radio is “booming”.
It might be easy to try and point out that anyone born in the last 40 years doesn’t know what the antenna on their car is for, or how the Australian commercial radio industry has very poorly stepped foot into podcasting and internet distribution, especially in regards to local and regional content, one of the biggest voids in the sphere of content available today.
But instead I’ll share a personal story that might tell you how booming commercial radio is in regional Australia.
Late 2009 I accepted a role that I was so unqualified for that it was a joke. Twenty-seven years old, with only volunteer broadcast radio experience on my resume, having only even stepped foot in Western Australia once before at the other end of the state in Broome, let alone the small town of Esperance found on the far western side of the Great Australian Bight on Australia’s southern coast, 720 kilometres from the most remote city in the world, a forty hour nonstop drive from home.
The population of over 13,000 people had just shrunk a wee bit after the shock closure of the Ravensthorpe nickel mine in January of that year, but on a freezing cold Saturday morning this young buck who could not name song by The Travelling Wilburys found himself on the corner of Andrew and Demspter Street sitting at an outside broadcast studio in sub-zero temperatures (possibly).
I fell in love with the town of Esperance and its small population. It was a crime that I didn’t know who the Wilburys were considering one of its members had holidayed there, and it was a shame that 14 years on I appreciate the then Radiowest, now Triple M, playlist a lot more than that 27 year old did.
I moved on from that station to Star FM Port Macquarie just over a year later with many great friendships and a much more robust understanding of how to be a leading voice of a local community.
I bring up this anecdote because through COVID things were rough in the wedding industry and Britt and I considered changing many things in our life. One possibility was moving somewhere regional and quiet, somewhere far away, somewhere like Esperance and when the job advert for my old job as breakfast radio host popped up I got in touch. I loved the town and would have cherished the seachange, now with two daughters and now married to the girl I wrote letters to the last time I lived there.
Thirteen years on, with the Esperance population slowly growing, with industry slowly building, and the possibility for remote work in Australia slowly increasing thanks to the NBN and Starlink I thought things might be a little brighter for a modern family moving to the Great Southeast of WA.
- The cost of goods has increased 36% since I last worked in Esperance. If you paid $60,000 for something in 2009 you were paying $86,000 for it now.
- The average wage locally in Esperance (according to the ABS - 2021 to 2006) has increased 65% over (about) the same time period.
- The cost of renting has actually doubled.
- Esperance-Goldfields property purchase prices have increased about 13%.
But the wage on offer for the same job had decreased 7% and was most likely in a smaller team even though it was only a local staff of seven for two radio stations (I was the sole local programming hire) when I was there in 2009. There was the possibility of increasing the wage by also doing radio advertising sales but I’ve proven in the past that an advertising salesperson I am not.
The same role, for a slightly larger audience which would be begging for local stories and content in an ever-globalised content world, was paying $938 a week after tax - $177 more than the minimum wage.
The premise I’m making here is that the very heartbeat of commercial radio is creating a compelling story for an audience and inserting as many ads around that as possible. The fact that a community so bereft of local stories, news, and media personalities cannot support a good wage for someone to fill that role speaks to the weaknesses in the local media market, and the unwillingness of the corporation operating the media to invest there.
I remember a time at Radiowest Esperance where the technology that connects the telephone line to the broadcast console - which was already the simplest of radio technologies, old and very very simple - broke down and there was real deliberation as to whether it should be replaced. I posited the question: are we planning on taking phone calls and broadcasting phone calls and interviews on the radio station in the future? Were phone calls being broadcasted important to the job? I believed they were, but at all levels of management they weren’t sure it was worth it.
A 2009 era iPhone panorama photo of the low-tech Esperance studio
Maybe Esperance was never going to be a profitable radio station, and if so, hand the broadcast license over to a community radio organisation and let the community run it, like they do the fire and ambulance services.
Talking about the Esperance community spirit, we raised thousands (I think it was about $20,000) for the Perth Children’s Hospital when businesses could push their boss off the Tanker Jetty into the subzero Southern Ocean winter waters if they raised or donated $1000. If any community was going to excel at a community radio station it would be Esperance.
If a national commercial radio network can’t afford to pay a local content creator more than $177 a week over the minimum Australian wage to create and broadcast about 24 hours a week of local content by themselves without local assistance, then I cannot believe that commercial radio is soaring in popularity, or even breaking even financially as a business. Instead, commercial radio in Australia sounds like an industry that has ignored advances in civilisation, in communication, in broadcasting, and how societies work in 2023 and is just hanging on by the threads of people who haven’t got CarPlay yet.
Rest in peace, commercial radio. You were my first love, but at one hundred years old maybe it’s time to pass the batten to someone who understands how to be an integral part of a community.
This article has been updated because I’m a better podcaster and radio presenter than writer, plus I’m writing all this on my phone as I travel around Europe and the new autocorrect in the developer beta of iOS 17 is good but buggy
Not everything is forever. Some things are just internet onions.
This website, the-life-and-death-of-an-internet-onion.com, will live from July 26th through August 30th, 2023 — about 5 weeks total, the average lifespan of a non-refrigerated onion. — Laurel Schwulst
It’s beautiful.
The “_______ is typing” dots are unencumbered by the politics of social media because they’re a passive signifier of attention: the tech does it for you, so it’s an unusually honest message that “_______ is alive and mentally present for you.”
Things I can remember:
✅ My couple’s names in a wedding ceremony
❎ Which of my children has which name
❎ My credit card PIN
❎ How old I am?
❎ Which side of the road to drive on in which country I’m in at the moment
❎ Who our insurance is through?
❎ If the h in hola is silent?
✅ The lyrics to Wonderwall
Father of the bride yesterday asked me who’s father I was. I’m now that old.
This is your annual reminder that there is a pager emoji 📟 please don’t forget to use the emoji for all of your pager-themed conversations.
My favourite part of the wedding ceremony is when we show each other our best memes
Things I learned today:
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When you drive many kilometres past beautiful sunflower fields in Tuscany full of big and ripe sunflowers ready to be in a florist’s shop window, five days later when you go back to photograph them they’ll be harvested and in shop windows.
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Sunflowers follow the sun, so when you go out to shoot them at sunrise, they’re all looking down like they’ve been listening to Nothing Compares 2 U on repeat since they found out about Sinead.
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“Sunflowers at sunrise in fog” isn’t the epic photo I hoped for.
I wonder if Mariah Carey ever regretted collaborating with Ol’ Dirty Bastard?
Adi Ignatius inteviewing Karim Lakhani for the Harvard Business Review:
Just as the internet has drastically lowered the cost of information transmission, AI will lower the cost of cognition.
And he comes in with the zinger, which I believe to be true:
What I say to managers, leaders, and workers is: AI is not going to replace humans, but humans with AI are going to replace humans without AI. This is definitely the case for generative AI.