A podcast ยท Season one in production
Different Logos, Same Mission
Practitioners in consequential work, on what it actually takes. The conversation you have in the car park after the event, on the record.
The show
Work That Has To Be Right
Consequential work is work that has to be right, because when it goes wrong someone pays for it. Defence, security and resilience are the home ground, alongside the regulated industries that live under the same pressures: finance, insurance, energy, health. The people who do it are rarely allowed to talk about it. Here they do.
The most useful thing anyone in this kind of work hears in a given month is usually said informally, to someone they trust, off the record, and then lost. Here someone who has done the work says what happened, what they got wrong, what they would do differently, and what it took out of them.
The logo on their polo has no bearing on whether it is worth hearing.
Who it is for
By Peers, For Peers
For people who do consequential work, at whatever stage, and for those recently out of service. The same people who would be standing in the car park after the event.
Guests and listeners are the same people. Where the shorthand would lose someone from a different industry or discipline, the host opens it up. Where it would not, he stays out of the way.
The test for every episode: did someone who does this kind of work hear something they can use on Monday.
An episode
A Conversation, Not An Interview
One Host, One Guest
Forty five to sixty minutes. Occasionally three people, when a subject genuinely needs more than one perspective, and never just for variety.
No Script
No fixed segments and no set questions. Guests get the themes in advance and nothing more, because prepared questions get prepared answers.
Released In Seasons
Eight to ten episodes a season, released fortnightly. Audio first, with video only where a guest chooses it.
No Pitches
No sales pitches, no mission statements, and no promotion of anyone's employer, products or services, in the episode or in the notes.
Be a guest
The Bar Is Having Done The Work
Not rank and not seniority. Someone who has done the work and is willing to say something true about it.
Guests come from industry: the people who deliver the capability, run the programmes, fix what breaks and carry the commercial risk. If you spent three years on a programme that went wrong and you know exactly why, you are more interesting here than someone who can describe the threat picture. Retired military now working in industry are industry. Serving personnel and civil servants appear occasionally.
Most guests come from defence, security and resilience, and every season includes people from finance, insurance, energy and health, because the lessons travel in both directions.
- A call of about twenty minutes. We agree the themes and anything you would rather not go near. If you need your employer's sign off, we sort that out then, before recording rather than after.
- About an hour of recording, from wherever you are, through your browser. Nothing to install and no account to create.
- Anything struck goes. If you want something taken out during the recording, say so and it is gone, with no discussion.
- You review the edit for anything factually wrong or anything that should not have cleared. Nothing is published that you did not know was coming.
Criticism has a written rule. You can pick apart anything you were personally part of, and anything already public, such as a National Audit Office report. Anything else stays general, and named individuals are never criticised. That protects you at least as much as it protects the show.
There is a short briefing pack and a one page release in plain English, so that when your communications team asks what you have agreed to, you have something to send them.
The host
Seb Matthews
Nine years as a commissioned officer in the Royal Marines, then engineering: maritime systems for the US Navy, defence and aerospace at Microsoft, and spaceflight software at NASA and SpaceX. He founded a cloud hosting business and sold it inside five years.
After that he was chief technology officer for the Ministry of Defence's ATLAS programme for six years, accountable for platforms serving a quarter of a million users. Since then he has worked on the commercial side, most recently leading growth for an artificial intelligence business in defence and national security.
He is asking because he has been on the other side of most of these conversations, and the useful ones almost never happened on a stage.
Sponsorship
Sponsors Welcome
We're looking for sponsors, for a whole season or a single episode. Your name is on the episode and in the show notes.
What a sponsor can't buy is a sales pitch. That's what keeps the conversations worth listening to, which is the whole reason anyone would want their name on it.
Stay posted
Tell Me When It Is Live
An email when the first episodes are out, with where to listen, and now and then after that when there is something worth knowing. Reply at any time to come off the list.