Sparks are Flying! | The Friday Update

Welcome to this week’s edition of the Friday(ish) Update, in which I give a little insight into what I’ve been up to for the past seven days.

What have I been up to this week?

Progress on the next video has continued on apace this week!

I’ve primarily been hammering away at my keyboard, writing a section about the privatisation of the UK's gas and electricity transmission and distribution grids (the bits that actually carry these fuels to your home). I'm particularly focussing on how the logistics of these particular bits of infrastructure have allowed companies such as BlackRock, Mitsubishi and Berkshire Hathaway to turn a basic utility into a wealth-extraction machine. I don’t want to spoil too much for the video but there’s some pretty staggering statistics in this section!

I also filmed a further section of the video this week, donning a particularly fetching jumpsuit pictured below...

But, my main filming activities this week have been in relation to the ongoing podcast project. I don’t want to give away too many of the guests we’ve got lined up, but this week we recorded two episodes of the podcast, both of which involved really fascinating conversations that I can’t wait to share with everyone.

While it’s slightly frustrating to not be sharing the podcast episodes with you straight away, I am really enjoying getting slightly ahead with filming episodes before we actually launch it. Hopefully it’s going to make filming, editing and releasing them once we do launch a less stressful experience than making the “main channel” videos sometimes feels.

And outside of work?

Outside of work, it’s been another wedding-heavy week for me. Sorry if that means this section of the Friday Update is turning into a wedding blog!

Last weekend, my partner and I went to the venue we’re having our reception in and tasted some food and wine that were contenders for our meal on the day. Luckily, the food was gorgeous and the wine we preferred happened to be the cheapest (although I wonder if our budget guided our tastebuds a bit there…).

We’ve also been choosing flowers with our friend’s mum who is going to be doing those for us. This wasn’t something that I knew anything about before but I think we’ve planned some pretty nice table decorations!

What have I been reading/watching/listening to?

This week I’ve been indulging in what I think of as “critical reading” but others might label “hate reading”.

I’ve got an idea for a future project about the inescapable presence of grifts, grifters and grifting in contemporary culture. It feels like we’re increasingly surrounded by folks either trying to make a quick buck with the least effort possible or trying to scam us personally. In an attempt to try and scope this potential project out, I’ve been dipping into a book which I think can be given some credit for at least popularising some of these trends: The 4-Hour Work Week.

The book is often pitched as a self-help book or a productivity manual. But, it’s as much a guide to making “passive income” through various questionable online business endeavours. What I hadn’t realised was that the guy who wrote it got rich selling brain pills. While it tries to give a positive spin to many of its ideas, beneath the surface, it’s a fairly cynical book, which rejoices in practices that many of us would consider grift-adjacent.

It’s certainly providing some interesting insight into the early years of the current wave of online grifts!

That brings us to the end of this week’s edition of the Friday Update. I hope you’ve found it mildly insightful.

Thanks as ever for your generous support and I’ll look forward to updating you more next week!!