Nathan Wrigley

  • What makes you a podcaster?

    I saw a post on X the other day which basically asked the question, when can you / should you call yourself a podcaster? I’ve been creating podcasts for about 9 years now, and although there might be some vanity metrics in the use of the word, the definition of ‘a podcaster’ is pretty clear to me. If you have a podcast RSS feed, then you’re a podcaster. That’s it. An RSS feed (stands for Really Simple Syndication) is a text document which you will likely never see, but it’s what allows your podcast players to ‘see’ the episodes you…

    , ,

  • Nice weekend

    Some weekends are better than others. I’m sure that you can agree. This one was exceptionally cool.

    ,

  • I went to see Hogwarts

    I turned up, got my trolley ready, but it would appear that Hogwarts is only open during office hours.

  • Wi-Fi always

    Many years ago, I was the first person I knew to purchase a Wi-Fi router. I remember people coming over to the house and asking how I could get on the internet without wires plugged into my laptop. Fast forward to 2025 and Wi-Fi, where I live at least, is more or less ubiquitous. The first sentence I so often hear uttered by people when they go to somewhere new is… “do you have Wi-Fi?”, or “can I get the Wi-Fi password?”. We seem to be increasingly unable to cope without access to the intravenous drip of information coming at…

  • Early morning

    I wrote the other day about the fact that I cannot seem to stay asleep. Turns out that this has some wonderful consequences. One of the best parts of the day is the time in the house when there’s nobody else around. I don’t want to sound like some old curmudgeon, but I suspect you know what I mean. If you’ve got a family, then you’ll know all about the craving that you get to be left alone once in a while – just for a few minutes. Not being able to sleep means that I’m often up hours before…

  • No sleep

    Over the last 9 months or so, my body has decided that a life long experiment with more or less perfect sleep was a waste of time. It decided that instead of falling off to sleep easily, and then staying asleep reliably for 7-9 hours, what was needed was a new regimen of lying awake and repeated episodes of prolonged waking up. I have told my body that this experiment is just silly, and that the old way of executing sleep was much better. Thus far my body has failed to read the memo. My body appears to regard this…

  • I had kids, now I have adults

    I have kids, well, I did have kids. Now I have adults. One of the trickiest moments to navigate as a parent is when your kid, the one that you fed, picked up when they fell, soothed when they worried, no longer need you in that way. It’s a strange transition. It’s not unwelcome, in fact it’s what you want. You want them to be independent, to move freely in the world with confidence. But, you think fondly of all the ‘kid moments’, and perhaps even want those moment again, if only briefly. I’ve never had a conversation with anyone,…

  • People who are certain

    I see this quite a bit in the industry I work in. People come along and talk with great certainty. Great certainly about their ability. Great certainty about how you should run your business. Great certainty that they have some magic insight which makes their opinion more valid than others. These people of great certainty also seem to thrive upon the humiliation of anyone who does not agree with them. They claim they’re ill informed, they’re not clever enough. Sometimes they’re just idiots (replace that with a multitude of words filled with more venom). I find that, given enough time,…

  • The algorithm of intolerance

    Most people will encounter a breadth of opinions and viewpoints about almost every issue. You think one thing, and it turns out that many of the people you know think differently. Over time, I think that this exposure to alternative points of view causes you to question the certainty you have about your own thoughts. You may still believe things, but you’re inclined to realise that other people differ from you, and that that’s okay. It’s not perfect and it certainly does not work all the time, or for everyone, or for every issue. People will disagree, but you get…

  • Being important

    It’s nice to be important, but it’s more important to be nice. No idea who said this first, but follow it, and I suspect that you’ll have a jolly fine life.

  • Morning sunshine

    In the UK, we’re really quite far north. If you live in North America, take out a map and trace a line horizontally from London to your part of the world, you might be surprised just how far north we are. This means that in the summer we have long days and short nights. In the winter short days and long nights. There comes a point when you really want the long nights to become long days. A craving for the sun; a wish to be warm and to see without the aid of electrical lights. We move the clocks…

  • Empires

    I’m sure that if you were a citizen of any of the following empires at the height of their power, you’d have had no idea that it was possible that the empire would one day come to an end. “We are too powerful”. “There’s no adversary in sight which can match us”. “We’re too important to fall”. You can imagine dozens more proclamations like that, I’m sure. However, they all do fall. Slowly at first, and then suddenly, all at once. Historians do the job of joining up the dots and fitting the whole jigsaw together, because the people in…