Episode #5: Learning about lightning, the fish that makes dreams and reflections on beautiful inexpertise

In this episode I tell the story of how getting trapped on an exposed beach in a lightning storm became the highlight of a disastrous snorkelling trip, explore how dreams can be a scary, intense but ultimately helpful healing process and reflect on the beauty and power of inexpertise through the lens of the Portsmouth Sinfonia.

TL;DL
3’ 32”   The disastrous snorkelling trip
13’ 13”   Live from "lightning beach" (contains swears!)
25’ 10”  The fish that makes dreams
36’ 53”  Reflections on beautiful inexpertise
50' 29”  Plug for (Not a) Lost Cat prints and open studio

Links to things I mentioned

My One Track Minds "LSD" talk about Daniel Johnstone
The Portsmouth Sinfonia play Also sprach zarathustra
My One Track Minds talk on the Portsmouth Sinfonia
The One Track Minds website
The Inexpert 2018 website
The Back Gaemen project
Buy (Not a) Lost Cat limited edition prints
Come to my open studio

The written substack version of this episode: Stevexoh’s substack thing

Comments, questions, requests and stuff to stevexoh@gmail.com

(Total listening time 53’ 01”)

Transcript

Welcome to episode 5 of Creative Adventures, an accidental podcast and as this is episode 5 I will probably say this for the last time because it'll become too formulaic but if you were wondering why this is an accidental podcast and want to know the backstory of it then listen to the first five minutes of episode 1 and you'll find out all of that information but I'll end up saying that every week and I can imagine you just fast forward in that bit

But then at the same time, I know that I like over explaining things and the thought that there will be one new listener on an episode going, why is it an accidental podcast? Will probably mean that I'll do it every episode. But my intention is that's it now. You don't need to know any of this. This is a good example of over explaining. But it's a cozy evening here in my flat as I'm recording this and it's dark and I'm liking recording an episode in the dark.

I mean, I think the last one, started to get dark, but it's properly dark now, which makes it even cozier because one of my few extravagant purchases was to buy a neon crab light. And if you've looked at my Instagram stories at all, might have seen it. It was a reward to myself for getting through some quite difficult stuff over the period of a few years. And I said to myself, when I finally get to the end of this period,

or at least it becomes a bit more stable. I'm going to buy myself a neon crab light and stick it up on the wall. Originally I was gonna put it in my studio, but then I wanted it close so it's on the wall. And this is bright red neon crab, but it's wearing a green cowboy hat, which I love because it's sort of a crossover of a couple of themes or motifs in my life, the interesting crabs, but an interesting cowboys. And I guess the interesting cowboys is,

is less like an actual interest in cowboys. I mean, I don't want to research cowboys or become one, but they became a really important thread in some of the art I've produced over the years. In particularly, art that explores masculinity. And there was a section at the Barbican exhibition that I did earlier this year with JD Woof, which was called Feelings Are Real. There's a whole section that I did which was about cowboys and

Cowboys in different situations that sort of cracked them open so you could see what they were thinking and feeling underneath the veneer of a tough tough cowboy So yeah, I'm sitting under the warming smiling red cowboy neon crab and It just feels cozy here, which I'm saying that because it's it's unusual for me. I'm often quite restless in this flat and like we'll need to get out or

want to get to the studio or just to do something. I can't sit around for too long. But I'm really enjoying being here lately. And I think part of that is because I had a bad trip at the end of September. And by bad trip, I don't mean the type of bad trip I had back in my early 20s when I was trying to be Sid Barrett and took too much LSD. I mean, a bad travel trip. Because I went away for a week and...

For the second half of this year I've been trying to do stuff that supports my mental wellbeing and at the same time just allows me to indulge my fascinations. And I went on a snorkeling trip to the Greek island of Alonissos and Alonissos is a marine nature reserve and I used to do lots of scuba diving years ago and I've no desire to start diving again but I thought I'd love a week in the warm.

to go away and just spend some time with sea creatures. So I booked it and that's what I did. And to cut a long story short, it absolutely did not work out how I imagined it would work out. The first thing was the weather in Alonissos was some of the worst they've seen in ages. Literally from the day I arrived, it was torrential rain, very cold. It was warmer in London than it was in Alonissos and really windy.

None of which is conducive to snorkeling. I mean, I know you get wet when you snorkel, but when it's not sun, the visibility is not as good. And when it's windy and rainy, it churns up the sea, so you can't see as much. And you also get cold. Or at least I get cold a bit quicker. I didn't have a wetsuit with me or anything. So that scuppered my plans of snorkeling for most of the time. I managed to get out maybe three occasions of about 40 minutes in between the rain when I wasn't freezing cold.

But because of the weather, the unexpected weather, the islanders of Alonissos just decided to shut early for the winter. The season was meant to go on for at least another three weeks, maybe four weeks. But I spoke to a couple of people and they just said, nah, it's not worth it. We'll call it quits now. So nothing was open and there were no boat trips that sort of needs to go to some of the less accessible snorkeling places. And there were no buses, were no coach trips to...

like go and visit somewhere and nothing was open apart from some restaurants, handful of restaurants. And so that meant that I was just stuck in my apartment, which would have been a good apartment. I didn't, I really don't need luxury. It's just a very basic holiday apartment. But because I was stuck in there and it was raining outside and it was cold and I had nothing to do, it started to feel really oppressive and really dark. And I had really noisy neighbors upstairs.

just these two guys, one of which had the loudest voice in the world and he wasn't speaking English which I think helped a bit because I couldn't understand what he was saying so I could sort of pretend he was telling these amazing tales of Greek mythology but that only lasted for a while and noise really bothers me so I was trapped in his apartment and every now and then for some reason the only English words I can understand that he would say really loudly would be yabba dabba doo and I don't know

It sounds funny now, but it was driving me absolutely insane. And then to top it all off, after the second day, I got a bug or food poisoning, which just completely floored me and meant that I just couldn't get out really. And I couldn't go out anyway, because of the rain and the wet and nothing to do. And so I just ended up being stuck and trapped and getting more and more anxious.

more more anxious that I was stuck in this situation for a week and trying to plot ways to come home early but because of the weather the ferries were disrupted and then there was a ferry strike and I couldn't move my flight so I sort had no choice other than to stay there but it was important to say that I'm describing this bad trip that I had that that type of bad trip is really a first world problem I appreciate that I mean I could be and there are people in much much

more horrific situations and at the same time for me as an artist with very little disposable income and as someone whose nervous system can get quite dysregulated in situations like that it felt like such a challenging time and in the end when the weather cleared and the ferry strikes had happened I had to get out of there so I just jumped on a ferry to Skiathos which is a bigger island where the airport is

And I want to add that Alonissos is a beautiful place. Absolutely recommend going there, particularly for the sea life. I mean, the couple of times that I got to I got to snorkel, I saw octopus, I saw all sorts of amazing things. It just wasn't my week. So I'm not knocking Alonissos. But I left Alonissos and got the ferry to Scaffos and thought I'm just going to spend my last two days here.

and I spent it in an Airbnb which was really bright and airy and it just felt therapeutic. But on the last day before I went back I woke up to brilliant sunshine, just a few scattered clouds but mainly blue sky and I thought ⁓ that's amazing it's like my gift for the last day and I even managed to eat breakfast outside on the little balcony and I didn't envisage doing that every day that week but instead I just snuffled something.

in my dark room with a cat, a cat called Gumbo and Gumbo would come in and keep me company and eat ham while I ate dry bread because I couldn't eat anything else. So I was sitting on the balcony and thought right I'm going to make the most of this last day and I'll see if I can hike to a remote beach somewhere to do one last bit of snorkeling and I had a look at my phone and I spotted a place called Nikotsara beach which was about six kilometers from my airbnb.

So I packed my stuff and headed off. And the walk was amazing. The scenery was so impressive. As soon as I got off the main road for about the next hour, I didn't see any more humans. There were like packs of goats and sheep. And then I'd come across an occasional scary looking farm with a guard dog that would bark at me, but no one. And it was just quiet. And the path to the beach sort of wound through a forest, I guess it was.

this amazing greenery and then up into a big hill and then down a valley with a stream running down it and then eventually the stream ran into the sea and I was on this amazing beach which was exactly what I was after very remote very quiet with no one on it. The only problem was the storm from the night before because the weather in Skiathos when I arrived was terrible even worse than the Lonesos but the storm from the night before had churned up the sea so there was no way I was going to snorkel.

It was a bit rough but also the visibility looked terrible. So I just thought I'm just going to sit and enjoy looking at the waves in this remote place and have a bit of food. I think I packed a couple of bananas or something and yeah enjoy myself before I had the 90 minute hike back. And Nicotsara beach was really impressive scenery, really sheer cliffs, like big grey jaggedy cliffs on each side of it with

smattering of trees and grass and I noticed some mountain goats like just running around up there and it's amazing it's like it's probably a surface that I wouldn't even be able to stand up on and there was these goats jumping around and playing and chasing each other and it was as I was watching the goats that I started to notice some really dark clouds coming down the valley towards the beach and thought hold on I'm just gonna get soaking wet here

Luckily I had a jacket with me. I'm very good at forgetting jackets, but I had a jacket with me, or at least a waterproof with me. And as I was sitting there watching the goats and the clouds, then all of a sudden out of nowhere was a massive flash of lightning and almost instantaneous clap of thunder. I mean, the gap between the lightning and the thunder was about three seconds at the most. And the goats just ran off.

and pack of hooded crows that I'd been watching just went and all flew off to safety and I thought ⁓ I'm not in a good place to be stuck in a lightning storm I was on this beach by the sea with these sheer wet cliffs because by this point it had started raining with trees and the only way back out was back up the hill so I thought I don't know what to do here and the lightning kept coming I've not seen lightning like it

so loud and so close. So I went to shelter in a little cave. I mean it wasn't really a cave it was just like an overhang and I went under there and I made a little tent out of my jacket and went onto my phone. Luckily I had a signal and thought maybe I'll do some research to find out if sheltering in a cave is a good idea and I read several articles that said no it's actually a very very bad idea don't shelter in a cave next to the sea whatever you do.

So I waited for a gap in the thunder and then quickly scuttled out and it's sort of like some brambles and I leant against this earth bank with some brambles above me and I thought maybe that's better but I did a bit more phone research and it was only marginally less idiotic than being in the cave. So I didn't know what to do. So in the end I just scampered over to like a ditch. The ditch seemed to be the lowest point and I assumed

being low down would be sensible and I went into the ditch and ended up crouched in this ditch for over an hour with the lightning crashing around me getting soaking wet and freezing cold and after a little bit of time the lightning sort of calmed down a bit I mean it was still there I couldn't move I thought I'd record live from Lightning Beach as it's now known for the podcast

So I'm going to play you a little recording that I did from Lightning Beach. The audio is not brilliant because I obviously didn't have my studio set up there, but it's audible. That the shhh you can hear isn't bad recording. That's the rain because the rain was torrential. And I listened back to it and it's actually quite sweary. I don't swear lots. I mean, I'm not anti swearing. And I actually think that a spontaneous and meaningful curse word

used in the right place can be quite impactful but I listen back and it's quite sweary but I like it because it sort of invites you into the experience I was in on Lightning Beach so here it is. So ⁓ I'm in Skiathos and it's the last day of my disastrous ⁓

snorkelling holiday basically and so for my last day I walked to this very remote beach took me like 90 minutes to get here and the brilliant blue sky but when I got here it's just this fucking massive thunderstorm that started and I'm in this really exposed area so I can't move ⁓

So I've been stuck here for like an hour now and it's still happening. So I'm getting cold and not bored, but I don't know what to do. So I thought it might be good to record some stuff about lightning because I remember reading, I had a book years ago that was called The Survival Guide and it how to jump out of a plane, how to survive a bear attacking you. And one of them was what to do.

when you find yourself trapped in lightning. And I don't want to record this and tempt fate like I'm some sort of expert because sheltering from a lightning storm that is like literally here doesn't feel like a good time to tempt fate. I'm not normally superstitious, but maybe I am right now. I went to shelter in a cave, like it's a little bit of cliffs and then...

read, because I'm researching this live on a phone that's way too wet, that that really wasn't a good idea because the cliffs near water and you hear that that's a bit further in the distance that's comforting that sound. But yeah, not sheltering in a cliff, not sheltering by cliffs, not touching cliffs, getting away from the sea and basically earthing yourself and there's a crouching position where you're on the balls of your feet

with your hands over your head. And I think the whole idea is that if you do get struck, it can pass through you easily without hitting your heart. And it just feels like a really horrible thing to record at the moment. So, and then, yeah, just don't, I think getting wet is probably the least problematic. You can dry off again, I guess. So,

This is jumbled, this is so fucking jumbled because I'm trying to record it and keep track of the lightning and the thunder. ⁓

I didn't see any lightning for that bit, so hopefully that's a bit further away. But that does mean I have to restart my fucking 30 minutes again. I wouldn't normally fuss about it this much, but I am so exposed and I've got at least an hour to get to any form of civilization and another half an hour to get back to my apartment to continue my sunny holiday. So yeah, in summary, ⁓ shit, that's really near.

⁓ So in summary, minute, 30-30 rule. You're caught, don't show it under a tree, don't show it in a cave.

try and earth yourself in the crouch position and on the balls of your feet, with your hands on your head, as low to the ground as possible. I don't know what sort of creature I'd be, like a constipated frog maybe, and just gotta wait it out. Which is really shit when you're so cold and wet and had such a bad week. And then count the time between the lightning and the thunder.

When that's longer than 30 seconds and there's been no thunder for 30 minutes, you can go on your merry way. So that's my tips for surviving thunderstorms. And if you hear this, then it worked. I hope it's an interesting recording. ⁓ fucking wind started now as well. That's cold.

⁓ I'd like to be in a nice hot bath now. The crows are doing something.

and birds have started singing. I know where the goats went. I mean they're in the worst position, they're up a fucking hill. I buy this really sheer cliff. Cliffs. Some more light in there so I'm back here for another 30 minutes.

I can hear some other weird noises. I know what that is.

But yeah, some beautiful cliffs that in other circumstances would be amazing to be near. Actually I should probably get away from these cliffs, shouldn't I? But I don't want start moving.

Yeah, there's fucking trees at the top of these cliffs. Okay, I'm gonna move. Ah, legs aren't working. I've been crouched for like, oh geez, I've been crouched for 45 minutes, I think. And I went for a run this morning, so my Achilles is really sore. So I'm sort of walking along like my dog does when she's stalking something.

walking up a stream that's probably not a good idea either is it? Oh fuck I don't know what to do. I'm gonna walk up this stream for a bit anyway it seems to be the lowest point. I just want to get away from these big cliffs it was just as I looked up to describe them and I was going to describe this beautiful trees on the top of these really tall cliffs. Probably not a really good idea. I don't think anywhere's a good idea to be honest right now.

The boot for the water bit sort of doesn't make any difference. Oh, this could be such a beautiful place in not as bad weather. That stream, imagine it's just blue and sunny, whereas the stream is actually brown from all of the...

It's like a fucking haunted house it feels like. I'm gonna get back up onto the path onto the road for a little bit. I'm keeping it really low like some weird creature.

I might be better off here.

There's a little bit I can see. Yeah, I'm to stop here for a little bit.

But yeah, this would be a very, it still is a beautiful place. It's just not much fun right now.

That's me on Lightning Beach and I should have said beforehand if you had children listening and didn't want to hear me swearing then, it's too late now and I point in saying that. But the thing was that even though that experience was dangerous, I guess, the weirdest thing about that experience on Lightning Beach was once I'd got out and I'd survived

and I wasn't huddled in this ditch I think it became the best part of that week away it eclipsed the little swim that had with an octopus and various other strange things but it became the best part of the week and I'm not exactly sure why really and I've told a lot of people about Lightning Beach and I think the more that I've told people I've realized that I found it an absolutely exhilarating experience

like maybe what someone would get on a roller coaster ride. And I think one of the important factors in finding it exhilarating was that it was a natural thing. The danger was just nature. I couldn't invent a story about human beings being inconsiderate and rude or uncaring and it feeling really unfair on me. This was just nature doing what nature has done way before human beings were around.

And here was I right in the middle of it. And not only was I in the middle of it, I was experiencing something that I'm really interested in. I am sort of nerdishly interested in crazy, weird weather. And experiences like that I've only really seen on videos or read about. But to be right in the middle of this really crazy weather whilst researching stuff about really crazy weather was...

was just amazing. I mean, I learned lots of different things. Like I said in a little bit of audio, I learned about the 30-30 rule of staying safe in lightning. I also learned about folgarites. I think that's how you pronounce it. Folgarites. I might be reading that in a weird dyslexic way, but they're like weird glass-like structures that's also known as fossilized lightning. And it happens when lightning strikes sand or sandy earth, like the earth that I was on.

One of the other things I learned about which was ⁓ sort of helpful but also made me a bit paranoid was that just before lightning strikes you can notice a buildup of static electricity and like notice the hairs on your arm stand up or the hairs on your head stand up and like a buzzing sound or a ⁓ smell of ozone and also this thing called St. Elmo's fire which is like

glowing shimmering around objects so while I was crouched in the ditch I kept on starting to think ⁓ my hair's standing up on end am I about to get struck by lightning and then thinking well no it's probably just because I'm so cold and it sort of blow my mind that that was such an amazing experience and maybe that just says something about the types of things that fascinate me

But another unexpected highlight of the Alonissos trip was learning some weird facts about a common and unremarkable looking little Mediterranean fish. So the fish is a Salamu porgy and it's one that I remember seeing loads in my scuba diving days when I dived in warm water. And they were such a common sight that I sort of mentally categorized them as underwater pigeons. Like there's so many of them they just fade into the background a little bit. And I have to say I love pigeons.

I'm big pigeon fan and I'm a big fan of Salamu Porgi so I'm not knocking them but you know when something's just so common that you don't notice it anymore and on the couple of times I got to snorkel in a Loneosos I saw them and remembered seeing them before and thought actually you they are as deserving of my curiosity as all of the other more exotic looking fish and because I had so much time in my room feeling ill and bored I thought I'd do a bit of research and find out a bit more about them

And was when I typed in Salamapurji into a search engine that a weird and surreal rabbit hole started to open up. I learned that in Arabic, these fish are known as the fish that makes dreams due to their hallucinogenic properties. And I went on to read that they were consumed as a recreational drug by the Romans and used in psychedelic Polynesian ceremonies. But the bit that really grabbed my attention was an account from the clinical toxicology journal.

about someone who ate one of the fish in 1994. And this is the extract that made me think, what? A 40 year old man felt nauseated about two hours after enjoying fresh baked salpa salpa, which is the Latin name for salame porgy. With symptoms like blurred vision, muscle weakness and vomiting persisting and worsening throughout the next day, he cut his vacation short and hopped in the car only to realize mid journey that he couldn't drive with all the screaming animals distracting him.

These giant arthropods, mere hallucinations of course, were the last straw. The man directed himself to a hospital where he recovered completely after 36 hours. He couldn't recall a thing. That's crazy, isn't it? And I went on to read other stories about people experiencing terrifying hallucinations, all of which seem to involve screaming creatures or screaming humans. But nobody knows why. Nobody seems to know why eating a salamu porgy

affects some people but not others and learning this stuff was making me feel better so I carried on. What other weird freaky fish food type stuff could I find and I learned that something called psychotoxin poisoning something you can get in reef fish like barracuda can cause a type of poisoning that has really weird effects things like you get phantom feeling so it will feel like someone's touching you when they're not

You can get weeks of mood disturbances for it but the thing that I found amazing was the phenomena of hot and cold sensations being reversed. So hot feels cold and cold feels hot. That's crazy. That's crazy isn't it? I also read that amnesic shellfish poisoning can cause short-term memory loss and it just made me think. Imagine if you had like shellfish and barracuda and salamapurji in like a fish stew or something.

and then you'd sit back and go, what the hell is happening to me? And whilst I was reading all of this, I was thinking, I'm really glad I'm vegetarian. I mean, I know that eating seafood is generally safe and I used to eat seafood before I became vegetarian. But I think one of my deepest fears, one of my few deep fears is suddenly experiencing a change in my perception and thinking that I'm going crazy.

and not knowing why. I think I've had that since I was a kid but it was definitely exaggerated by the Sid Barrett LSD experience that I mentioned at the start of this podcast. It was when I was trying to be more like Sid Barrett, when I was sort of searching for, I don't know, an external music icon to shore up my sense of self and I took too much LSD and broke my brain temporarily and I actually told

this story at Wilton's musical on stage as part of the brilliant one-track minds event. But that was a really scary time, not knowing when and if the experience of feeling completely mentally broken would end. And I think it went on for maybe two or three weeks, but at the time it just felt a lot longer. But the weird thing about that episode of temporary insanity was that it ended when I had a strange dream. And the contents of the dream are sort of irrelevant and I don't, I can't really remember what they were.

I remember waking up suddenly with my body full of adrenaline, feeling like something significant had happened to me and then noticing that my cognition and perception had just returned to normal and it never came back again. That strange, disorienting feeling of insanity. But it's still a fear that I'll have. I can only conclude that whatever happened in that dream was my body and my brain's way of processing or experiencing or synthesizing something that

I couldn't do consciously in order to return some sort of balance. And I had a similar dream experience recently, nothing to do with LSD, which I've not gone anywhere near since that troubling time, but a dream related to some stuff that I'd just been perpetually finding hard in day-to-day life. Stuff that sort of felt like really old feelings or thoughts or anxiety that were unresolved and would present themselves in lots of

difficult ways really and I woke from this recent dream in a much more dramatic way I mean I think I just jumped awake my body was in complete fight-or-flight mode and I just felt jumbled I remember thinking I feel destroyed by this dream and that sort of lingered for a couple of days it really felt like something very troubling and bad had happened to me and the feeling only started to dissipate when I started to think more about the dream

And unusually, I remembered so much detail in it. I don't normally remember dreams, but there's so much detail. I mean, it was an amazing bit of script writing that my brain did there. And so I started drawing pictures from the dreams and recounting the detail of it and the layout of the different scenes and what different people said and did in it. And I started telling other people about it. And the more that I did this, the more those unresolved challenging feelings seemed to

just dissolve or disintegrate or at least lessen in intensity. And I started to realize that what I'd initially experienced as a disturbing dream might have been some sort of spontaneous cognitive intervention. My brain and body just going, okay, he's ready for this now. Let's create this experience for him to experience because he's resourced enough to cope with it.

Gestalt psychology has been a big influence in a lot of my work and I've spoken about that on previous podcasts. And Gestalt talks about disorders arise from incomplete Gestalts. What it means by Gestalts are experiences really, units of experience often from childhood in which our needs weren't met and that incompleteness sits in an incomplete cycle somewhere in our psyche or somewhere in our body. And these incomplete Gestalts can manifest in all sorts of

physical and psychological ways and they often sit unresolved and sometimes they may resolve themselves naturally just through our life experience but often we need things like Gestalt therapy or other forms of therapy to help process them so I can only think that this horrible dream was my brain doing that work needed in order to complete these Gestalts and resolve something within me but beyond that hypothesis I really have little understanding of what happened and why it helped so much

And really I don't need to. I don't think I need to be able to logically explain why this weird dream helped. And I experience a similar thing if I'm working one-to-one with people using art and metaphor and rich pictures as a way of helping them make sense of themselves and the world and their place in it. And I'll often invite people to explore what they're grappling with by making a mark on a page or a blob of paint somewhere or squishing some clay or

making a movement of some sort. And this way of working has become an important part of the Inner Critic workshops that I co-facilitate with my friend, the psychotherapist Simon Kovic. And in these workshops, we're sort of helping people make sense of and integrate that self-critical superego part of themselves. And often in this work, or if I'm working one-to-one with people, I'll see people do something or make something and they'll sit back and go, wow.

that changes everything or ⁓ that makes so much sense and then run off and start journaling or making phone calls. Yeah I'm looking at what they've made and it's just like a load of lines on a bit of paper or a few blobs or a squished up bit of clay but the point is it only needs to make sense to them and sometimes they don't even need to know why. And I've started to appreciate that REM sleep like rapid eye movement sleep, deep dream sleep,

must serve a similar function in us re-experiencing and integrating and processing and resolving problematic stuff that normally sits outside of our conscious awareness. There's a number of strands of neuroscience that suggest that REM sleep allows us to replay and re-experience challenging situations but in a neurochemical environment that feels safer than our normal waking conscious environment.

And I came across a paper that's called Overnight Therapy, The Role of Sleep in Emotional Brain Processing. And in it, the authors had a brilliant phrase. said, REM provides an optimal biological theater within which can be achieved a form of effective therapy. And that made me wonder. I remember that challenging dream and the one from years ago that also helped. But I wonder how many other dreams I've had that have done this important work, but I've totally forgotten them. But also does it really matter?

that I forgot on them if the work they needed to do has already been done. And I wonder the same thing about making therapeutic art. Does it need to make sense to anyone other than the artist? And does it even need to make sense to them? Like the people that I was describing earlier, they don't seem to know why it helped, but it did. The Gestaltist Arnie Beiser came up with a thing called the paradoxical theory of change. And that's been another fundamental underpinning philosophy of my work. And a paradoxical theory of change in a nutshell basically says,

We change more by becoming more deeply aware of who we already are than striving to become something we're not. So instead of that very future focused, goal oriented, putting everything in the future, the very act of deepening awareness of who we already are causes transformation. And what I love about that concept is that it means there's never any homework to do or actions to complete. The work's done. The experience is enough. The experience is the work itself.

So we don't need to hand in our dreams for marking any more than we need to evaluate or understand our art. It's just for us, even if it doesn't make any sense to us. And that's particularly appealing to me because I enjoy stuff that doesn't make sense. I've probably said before about how I enjoy dissonance or something that isn't quite right. But not everything. I I don't like utterly confusing train journeys. But other things, I think dissonance can cause wonder and mystery and things like that.

And there's particular things that draw me in when they're slightly wonky or off-center. And one of the things that I've always found fascinated is music. Music that's not quite right or music that slightly defies the rules of music or goes wrong. I used to get in such trouble at school in assembly. When the music teacher, Mr. Eagles, who was a very strange man, he used to play the piano in assembly and every now and then hit a bad note and it'd be a wrong note.

and I'd be absolutely co-opsing with laughter. I wasn't laughing at Mr. Eagles, it was just, I couldn't help it. So dissonant music really fascinates me. It doesn't just amuse me, it's like, what is going on? This is amazing, can no one else hear this? And one of my favorite stories is about the Portsmouth Symphonia. The Portsmouth Symphonia was an orchestra that was formed by a group of students in the 70s at Portsmouth Art School.

and anyone could join this orchestra as long as you played an instrument you had little or no experience in. And other than that the only rules were shut for rehearsal, try your best and don't play deliberately badly. And the results were phenomenal. They recorded an album eventually called Portsmouth Symphonia Plays the Classics which I'll put a link to it in the podcast notes. Their version of Alsostrax Zarathustra is one of my favourite pieces of music.

In fact, I did another talk at One Track Minds about that piece where I was saying I'd love the Portsmouth Symphonias version of Elsostrax Arafustra to be played at my funeral. But what I find most fascinating about the Symphonias story is that the more they played, the more popular they became, the more concerts they got to play, they accidentally got better. Their beautiful, naive wonkiness slowly got replaced by experience.

And you can't fake, you can't fake this inexperience. And in the end, the symphony disbanded because they got too good. And that story of the symphony has inspired me in lots of ways. It's a cautionary tale of the dangers of becoming too expert or too accomplished in a way that that edge of not knowing and that naive wonder that I find so stimulating just disappears. And I think that's why I am very good at killing projects early. I'm very good at

stopping routines to my detriment as well. It's a terrible way to try and build a business and earn money but the symphony reminds me of that that expertise comes at a cost and the symphony have influenced me in direct ways also. In 2018 I did a project called Inexpert which came from the curious question of I wonder what the opposite of TED is like TEDxTalks, TEDxTalks and I've got a strange

somewhat contradictory relationship with TED Talks. I mean, I've done a couple of talks under that brand, but I also have come to believe that the whole thing has become a bit of a parody of itself. It's like this cult of TED seems to have created a type of overly formulaic public speaking that I can experience as anything from dull and boring to problematic. Problematic in this is the way we're consuming information. So an expert was an experiment in flipping the norms of TED just to see what happened.

And I've long thought that most conferences have it the wrong way round. mean, the norm seems to be that a speaker who's assumed to have a greater level of expertise in a particular subject than the audience is invited on stage to share that expertise in a very neatly laid out, tangible way. And the audience sit and listen to it and at the end, in a rather black or white way, decide was that any good or not. A bit like a gladiatorial thumbs up or thumbs down at the end of a battle.

So in other words, I've always thought the audience has too much of a passive role in these situations. So if I'm doing a talk, I consider it my job to make the audience do the hard work. I go out my way to try and not provide any answers or sense of concreteness, but just to tell and weave stories in such a way that it coaxes those listening into a space of not knowing, into a space of experience or confusion or surprise where they can maybe explore some big questions or...

challenge some norms or at least be entertained by the strange stories that I'm telling. Often people will leave talks that I've done with more questions than answers but I always hope that they're bigger and more expansive and more more fundamental questions. And by the way this explains why my talks are an acquired taste and I'd love to do more of them but they're not exactly mainstream things.

But if you'd like me to come and do a weird talk or bring my bingo machine talk, that's my favorite. If I could just do the bingo machine talk for the rest of my life, that would suit me perfectly. So yeah, me a note if you're interested in that type of talk. But anyway, back to Inexpert. May the 11th, 2018, Inexpert happened. This experimental conference thing. And I hired a hundred-seater theater in Covent Garden and recruited 16 speakers to give talks on subjects that

they were interested in but had no expertise or experience in. And the recruitment process for this was fascinating. I put out an open call and I had about 100 applicants for this open call for 16 slots. And the applications went into three different categories. The first category were people that just clearly apply for every single open call irrelevant of what it is. And I've made the brief very clear for an expert. I'd say that I want you to

give a talk on subjects that you're interested in but you have little or no expertise in. And I'd get applications saying people want to talk about their new process for B2B marketing or provide a critique of agile thinking or some new theory that they'd come up with about leading in complex times. So all of those applications went in the bin. I mean, I politely wrote to everyone and said, no, but they all went in the bin. The second category of applications was

was really fascinating. were lots, I mean, this must have been 60 % of the applications I got. Lots of people wanted to talk about not knowing or about the importance of inexpertise, but I didn't want them to talk about it. I wanted them to embody it live on stage in front of an audience. And aboutism, I might even do another episode where I more in depth about this phenomena of aboutism.

aboutism and creating this weird distance between talking in theory about something versus experience it that seems endemic in the creative stuckness that I come across in my work and then the third category of speakers were were brilliant these were the ones that got me really excited I remember one one guy said I've always loved robots I love robots but I know fuck all about them can I do a talk and it was like yes you are definitely in

And so I recruited him and 15 other speakers that gave talks on anything from calculus to looking after a baby to playing tennis and all sorts of weird stuff in between. And it was important to me that every element of Inexpert was Inexpert. I mean, I'd never done it before. The John Lyons Theatre in Covent Garden had never hosted anything like this before. And I set out to recruit some brilliant volunteers to do roles outside their level of expertise. So the person that filmed all of the talks had never operated a video camera before.

The stage manager had no idea of what a stage manager's role was and the people running the ticket office were like a brilliant author and an amazing psychotherapist but they'd never run a ticket office before. But my favourite inexpert contribution for me and one of the highlights of the whole thing was my friend Nick Parker who's a brilliant accomplished writer, an amazing guitarist, a great speaker. He told me that he'd been learning to play the trumpet for just six weeks and I said to him, Nick, you are my musical director.

I'd like you to play all the music live on stage for Inexpert. And the event sold out within a few weeks. It was all not for profit. And that afternoon, Nick took to the stage and opened Inexpert with his rendition of Alsostrax Zarathustra on his wonky trumpet. And it was the perfect opening. was a moment of embodying exactly what all of this was about. And then what followed was a beautiful and a bizarre afternoon.

There was tears, was laughter, there was confusion, there was awkwardness, people had big insights, people got grumpy, there was panic and mild pain because the person that was talking about tennis, I said to them, well do your talk on tennis that you know nothing about and you're not very good at, but I'd also like you to be playing tennis live on stage as you do it, because I thought that would make it even more inexpert, but it just meant that tennis balls kept getting whacked into the audience.

But what was most fascinating was that as all the norms of a conference had been flipped and exploded, new patterns emerged. New relational patterns, new social patterns emerged. And because those normal status dynamics between the speaker and the audience had dissolved, it's like everyone was in this weird space of not knowing together. In fact, at various points, the audience felt more anxious than the speakers. One person did a talk on nothing using no words, so just on the stage in a big theater doing nothing.

and one of the audience members felt so uncomfortable they got up on stage to give them a hug. And lots of people wrote blogs and articles about Inexpert but most said they couldn't sufficiently describe it other than it was a bizarre afternoon of being flawed but willing human beings together. And of course because everyone enjoyed it and it was a success in inverted commas people would say to me when's the next one? And I had to genuinely honestly say it can never happen again because I've got a sense of what it is now. I'd have a sense of what I'm doing.

So it never has happened again and it never will. And I learned from an expert that there's a bitter sweetness to doing something for the first time. And I think the sweetness comes from that edge of the sea excitement and adrenaline of working it out as you go along and learning an incredible amount as you do that. And the bitterness comes from knowing that you can never do that thing for the first time ever again. And all of this has come back to me this week because I've been reflecting on the experimental backgammon project that I've been doing for the last few months.

which I mention in maybe it's episode three or episode four, I'm not sure. But I'll put a link to the Backgammon project in the podcast notes anyway. But the intention of the project for me, I think was to find ways of meeting and interacting with new people that didn't feel as socially awkward for me. And it's been a great experience so far in that sense. I've met lots of people and made some new friends. But one thing I've noticed is I've accidentally got better at Backgammon. And that was never my intention.

At the start of the project I'd only played like four or five games with the old Iranian guy that taught me how to play it in a pub. But at the time of recording this I think I've played probably over 50 games with 18 or 20 different people and that meant my experience level has increased and I'm starting to win more games than I lose and I've come to realise I really don't like that. I really don't enjoy winning the backgammon games. And I think part of the thrill of the project at the beginning was my genuine lack of expertise in the game.

So therefore I was inviting people into a space of not knowing with me, especially if the other person hadn't played before. And even if my opponent beat me, I still got a thrill from losing and experiencing that sort of wonderful backgammon naivety. And I'm certainly not claiming that I am a backgammon expert or even any good at it after 50 games, but I know it's a sadness that I'm no longer a true beginner.

And this increase in experience and expertise has changed the nature of the project for me. It makes me wonder how much longer I'll actually carry on doing it for, which in itself is a fascinating discovery in the project. I never knew I'd be thinking about that. Malcolm Gladwell famously claimed that people need 10,000 hours of experience to achieve a level of world-class mastery. And I don't know how true that is. mean, 10,000 seems a bit too much of a convenient number for me. But I don't know how true that is.

Either way, I'm less interested in the 10,000 hours and I'm more interested in the 10 hours. The 10 hours of practice and experience that Nick had learning to play the trumpet before he stepped on stage as an expert. The 10 hours of the first 10 sessions of the Backgammon project where I was fumbling my way through it, not quite knowing what was going on. 10 hours being that...

beautiful sweet spot that exists between no expertise and just enough expertise to feel safe enough to fully commit to doing something while still experiencing that beautiful effervescent creative thrill of the beginner's mind. And I don't know if I can get that back with the Backgammon project, but what's exciting about that is it means that something else will emerge. So that's been quite a long podcast. I just realized, particularly with the

live stuff from Lightning Beach but I hope it's been of interest. A couple of plugs about stuff. One is to point you towards the limited edition prints of my not lost cat poster which are in my shop which you can get in A3 and A4 size and to cut a long story short I painted a fake lost cat poster put up 10 in London and then it went viral around the world. I mean 5 000 posters in 56 countries and every continent on the planet and the whole idea was I'd send these posters out for free

or really cheap and see where around the world they'd end up and people enjoyed them and people liked being part of it. But unfortunately, like baffling customs charges and US tariffs and postage costs have just made the whole thing untenable, which is a real shame because I wanted people to have cheap access. mean, postage was costing 10 times more than the poster itself would. So I've decided rather than let this project slowly die as...

tariffs increase and everything else that's going on in the world happens I've decided just to end it and I like my projects to end well intentionally and at a peak so I've stopped the Lost Cat poster project but you can still buy the limited edition prints which are in my shop A4 and A3 size and I actually make some money from them I might recoup some of the money that the 5,000 cheap and free Lost Cat posters that got sent out around the world cost me and maybe the last thing I'll mention I've got some markets coming up at Christmas

Christmas markets in London where you can come and buy stuff. But I think the thing that I'll finish with is I have an open studio coming up which is a chance to come into my world and visit my studio in Kingston upon Thames and that's on the 15th of November and I'll put a link in the podcast notes but yeah come along I'll have a little shop open there you can have look at the studio we can have a chat but not only is it me the building that I'm in is 38 studios of different artists and

I don't think everyone will be there but it's a great way to come and hang out in the world of lots of different artists and we've got hat makers, people that work in clay, people that studios always smell of strange solventsy things, there's painters, there's musicians, there's all sorts there. But yeah, if you'd like to come along then 15th November. If you want more information then send me an email. My email is in the podcast notes as well. But thank you so much for listening. Episode five, wow.

That's gone really quickly. I'll be back in four weeks time with episode six. Hope to see you there. Take care. Bye.