My new podcast

Gah! This is scary, but it’s happening, so I’m going with it…

Last autumn, my friend Timotheus Vermeulen and I kind of randomly decided to do a podcast together. Tim is a professor of media, culture and society at the University of Oslo. He’s also one of the guys who came up with the idea of Metamodernism (here’s their first paper on it), which I’ve been going on about for a while now.

From the start we knew we wanted to talk about our current cultural moment. We came up with a bunch of titles - quite a few along the lines of ‘What The Fuck Is Happening?’, ‘What The Fuck Is Going On?’, ‘What The Fuck Does It Mean?’

We enjoy swearing.

In the end we settled on The Cluster F Theory - we realised we’d not get listed on Apple Podcasts if we had the ‘-uck’ in the title - and off we went.

I phoned up one of my friends, Julian Mayers, for some advice. He was my first producer at the BBC when I did a technology radio show (The Big Byte) in the mid-90s, he was also the executive producer of the technology tv show I presented with Charlie Brooker at the BBC (The Kit), he produced The CERN Podcast with Brian, we did a video about Einstein at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem (they have Einstein’s archive)… He started his podcasting company Yada Yada a billion years before normies had even heard the word ‘podcasting’. He knows what he’s doing… Anyway, I wanted some advice on how best to record remotely and how best to distribute the podcasts and all of this stuff I don’t know anything about… and he offered to edit our discussions!!

Then I asked my friend DC Turner if he’d be able to do a logo for us cos he’s a shit-hot designer and animator (I first met him around the time he animated Tim Minchin’s Storm)… He, of course, had brilliant ideas… and THEN he offered to do the music for us, too!!!

These guys…

Anyway, we’re releasing our first batch of episodes tomorrow via Substack (though it will be on Apple, Spotify and all the other places that scrape Apple and Spotify, as well) and I’d love it if you’d subscribe and enjoy the awesome stuff all these lovely people have done…

https://theclusterftheory.substack.com/