14 "The Shop Foreman Built Ukelele's" and "If You Don’t Leave, You're Never Gonna Leave, So Leave, So I Left"

Guest 1

I'm definitely not seeking to be promoted. I, I know that for a lot of people in design, the aspiration is to eventually become like a design manager and to like run your own firm. And while that sounds nice, I actually just really enjoy designing things. So you think that while they like making money, and while that's always a factor, definitely enjoy being a grunt worker as well, like, there's trying not to

I've built stuff since I was really young, and I thought I was going to be an engineer. And then I realised pretty quickly that I had failed nearly every math class I had ever taken. So that wasn't going to work. And I found product design as a discipline that had the parts of engineering and making that I was really drawn to, without the scientific rigour that I wasn't really well suited for.

So I did that for a little while, and eventually realised that I was drawn to all sorts of design. And I think one of the things that I love most is to be a multidisciplinary person who can apply these sorts of core skills, the soft skills, to all sorts of different formats. And so sometimes I'll work on spaces. And sometimes I'll work on objects and packaging, and other times all like do brand. And I like getting to apply the core skills of figuring out what people are resonating with and what the user needs. When I was a teenager, I was a part of FIRST Robotics, which is something that I wholeheartedly recommend to absolutely, anyone who's interested, it was a competition around building robots that competed with one another.

But more than that it was geared around, making you feel self sufficient and capable. And you know, within the teams, there were people who worked on the business side and fundraising and people who worked on the brand side, and I was on the, like engineering and build side. And so that was a really nice segue in my life from making things in my parent's garage to learning how to build things a little more technically, and definitely led me to where I ended up. I have memories of like, looking at guitars as a kid and like, trying to pick apart how they were made and all of the like intricate inlays. And the pieces that were necessary to create the sound, you know where it's able to vibrate most and where it needs to be more sturdy. And eventually, I was really lucky to work at a design firm. That was it was a furniture studio. But the shop foreman built ukuleles in his free time for his grandkids and I would stay after work with him and watch him work on his instruments. And eventually, I felt inspired to build an acoustic guitar. And I was the first instrument I ever built. And ever since I've been making somewhere around one to two instruments a year. I've done acoustic instruments I've done at this point, quite a few electric guitars, I built a series of eclipses as well.

And it is something that helps me feel really connected to myself and to the natural world I find that is likeone of the more meditative experiences for me at least I find that when I'm in a flow state working on an instrument and taking shavings from Blade trying to make curves feel fair, and to transition really beautifully from one to another, I lose myself and I'm able to escape my thoughts a little bit and enter a place that feels a little bit more pure. And I love that. It's something that I've thought many times about taking a little more professionally. But I think part of what draws me to it is the small scale. The fact that like they take months to finish and they're more of I don't know, a long haul journey. And I think that if I wanted to make it like a primary living sort of situation, I'd have to sacrifice a lot of the things that I really love about building instruments and so for me, like, I like to build them for my loved ones and you know, maybe once the RSL find a client and who wants a custom guitar and I'll make them on my acoustic guitars start at $6,500 they take nearly a year to finish. And I find that they're a process that I just can't rush. Also it means that it's really really difficult to like make a living and pay bills with those kinds of projects. The money just isn't quite there for crafts and that's something that I find particularly heartbreaking because crafts are a part of who I am and I think that they're part of what makes the world feel so soft. In contrast to that. In my design job I making round 110,000 US dollars, which is a really comfortable living.

Naty

Hey, folks, it's nothing. We'll be back with more right after this break.

Guest 2

Because my job, I didn't really get my together until, like, I'd been working in this industry before I accidentally got pregnant with, but not for very long. And I definitely hadn't kind of made a name for myself or even like figured out exactly what I wanted to do or be in that industry. So it wasn't until much later when I'd had as well. And then I stopped working again for like, six years because various things happened to one of my kids and my marriage broke down and lots of stuff happened in my birth family and I sort of had this on one tear wanted hiatus.

I was a really terrible PA, babysitter, route teacher cleaner, a hospital caterer, oh, I was a big man or a bad waiter bar person times about 400 different iterations of that terrible pa it many iterations is language. Oh, yeah, language Genie, which was an online language learning platform, like in the 90s, it was very ahead of its time, was really lots of art stuff, then I guess this, this sort of non art side hustles really started up again, in a pandemic, I was the manager of the North Lambeth food hub in the pandemic. And I was also an emotional literacy tutor at Brixton prison and visit centre lady as well, there was a transitional period where we stopped doing emergency food parcels, and it became like a low cost food shop. And it was really fun. I loved running that. But I was like, I can see that this if I don't leave now, I may never, never leave. But then I have to kind of have another word with myself about the prison and go, if you don't leave, you're never going to leave. So leave. So I left, because that was kind of a comforting, I have a pension now. I've got 78 quid, the prison gives you a pension, I've got 78 quid. So that takes us up to last year. And then last year, I was just like, I need to see whether showbiz will have me back or not.

I'm still like, veryhomey, since the pandemic, and it's partly because of having my kids back, and partly because of my mom. And partly because my cats are insane and need a lot of management. So it's like multifactorial, but I definitely like before the pandemic, I was going to see like three, four shows a week. And like I haven't got like loads of time and energy to, to kind of make something happen from the ground up. So I need things to kind of arrive a little bit. I'm not saying that in like a deeper Irish way. But like, I need a little bit of like opportunity to come my way in order to capitalise on it. I still haven't broken TV, I stopped comedy. As soon as the pandemic happened, and I haven't taken it up again. And I'm not going to but you know, it all feeds in because I dramaturg a lot of comedians, and I love comedy, and I think I'm a comedic writer, I think my writing has a lot of humour in it. So it all kind of feeds the beast in some way. That's never been my experience with anything that I've done that it's just been a straight arrow. And the thing is, I think it's kind of rich, isn't it? It's not rich financially, but it is rich experientially. And then it wasn't until relatively recently that I sort of relaunched myself and started over again. So there's been I'd say more fallow times than not, or more times where I've had to, like take a board than not.

So although I've I'm fairly elderly now, and I've been ostensibly working in this industry for over 25 years. It's actually not true. Because I haven't consistently been working for 25 years. It's quite hard to make ends meet. And I'm still at this point having to do quite a lot of unpaid work in certain areas, I have to be really careful not to pathologically mother, everybody that I need. And so it's like a boundary thing for myself. So on my email signature, it says, for artistic collaboration, please check out my rate sheet on my website, and then contact me. I get people approaching and then they're like, how much do you want a day, and it's literally nothing, but they expecting to pay me like 100 quid a day or nothing growth. But I think that's for me. Listen, you cannot afford like, no matter how talented this person is, and how much you love their backstory. You cannot afford to be working for 100 quid a day, so don't get sucked in. I'm protecting myself. It was hard learned as well. Ha. I mean, money's insane, isn't it? I don't understand it really. But well, it just wasn't working, how I was doing it before.