Early Beginnings, a Career in Tech & never becoming a Teacher (Foundation Episode 01)

[00:06] Podcasting is not a discipline of absolutes. There are answers to be had and things that apply generally across the medium, especially when we start, but context is important. Your story is important and where your journey began to lead you to where you are today is

[00:25] important. This is the first of five episodes that will give you an introduction to me, Matthew Bliss, as the host of Rethinking Podcasting, by sharing with you my career, a bit of my life, and how my thinking has changed on my podcasting journey so far. If you've met me before,

[00:43] it's incredibly likely I haven't mentioned a lot of what you'll hear in these episodes. I used to think my background was largely irrelevant, but I've since realised that it's our unique talents and stories that lead to the epiphanies and emergent realisations

[00:57] that carry us to the next step on our journey. And this being my next step, I thought I should share it with you too. In this first episode, you'll hear an early childhood memory, my background in technology and education,

[01:14] and as usual, I sneak a video game reference in there as well. My parents originally lived on the Mornington Peninsula in, I think technically it was Tootgarook, but it was close to Rosebud and Rye

[01:35] and those areas for the Australians who know what I'm talking about. And when I was four, we moved closer to Melbourne. So this was probably like at the time, maybe an hour and a half drive to get to the Melbourne

[01:49] suburbs before you got to the CBD. In the living room of that old house, that was a central room where the bedrooms came off on one side and then the kitchen and another living area was on the other.

[02:02] We used to build tunnels out of the couch cushions. So the big sofa squares that you can imagine you'd pull off and the remainder would be the frame of the couches.

[02:15] We pulled those off and created tunnels and crawled through them and that was a very fun time. I also loosely remember sitting in front of the television too and it's a good reference for me as a starting point for technology,

[02:26] because it was one of those TVs that didn't have a remote. It had a little dial on it for you to change the channel. And this isn't a capacitive knob. It's like a turn to click to change to the

[02:40] next channel. I'm sure a very convex kind of glass screen on what would have been probably something very explosive behind it. I'm not sure how structurally sound the technology was. The kind

[02:54] of TV that you can press your eyes up to and you can measure the size of the pixel. My father was a secondary teacher at a very prestigious all boys grammar school in Melbourne, CBD. And my mother

[03:11] was a kindergarten director in the Eastern suburbs of Melbourne, but both of them previously worked as teachers in that time that I mentioned living in Tutkerook. So my mother was a primary school teacher before she became a

[03:27] kindergarten director. For the longest time, the longest being from maybe when I realized they were teachers and that they needed to know stuff from me about technology in order to do the teaching they do, which was probably 11 or 12 years old, all the way up to 2016. So what's that? 10, 15 years. I said, no,

[03:48] I don't want to be a teacher. I know what it's like. I'm introverted for the most part. I don't like getting in front of big groups of people in high school up to the point of year 10 at least. And teaching wasn't going to be for me. I know what teachers are like, and that wasn't going

[04:03] to be me. It was a very steadfast negation of a potential career path. The thing that was always my baseline skill that I was good at innately, I didn't have to try hard to do was with technology and with computers. That was always

[04:20] natural, came natural to me. The carry through from that, finishing the degree was that I got a job in a school doing IT support. When you do IT support and you're someone like me, who is a generalist, who likes to fit in all of the cracks and the crevices in a workflow

[04:40] or a system and do the jobs that no one else is doing, you become a person who is great doing the things people need. And when someone asks you enough times whether you've done a thing yet,

[04:55] it can feel like you are either A, very good at it, or B, they need it. And those two things were true to some degree. A, I was good at it. I am good at teaching

[05:06] people concepts and constructing a lesson and doing all those things. But B, they were bereft of digital technologies teachers. And a lot of schools were at the time. The subjects had emerged, no one was around to teach them. So other teachers who had other subjects stepped in to do the

[05:24] subject themselves, but obviously had to upskill to be able to do that. And so as an IT classroom assistant, you can imagine that most of my time was spent in the digital technologies classroom, because that's where they required the most IT support. So that meant not only was I familiar

[05:40] with the technologies they used, but also the curriculum that they were putting out. Towards the end of that seven-year stint, I was helping them build curriculum and activities. And there was even components of subjects in different year levels that I was running myself.

[05:54] I'd started a video games club for students to play along with and played around with that. It was an all girls school, the school I was in at the time. I don't think I mentioned that. So, you know, they were just playing games on a lunchtime and ran away and were like,

[06:07] okay, we had lunchtime, we played video games, bye. Like, I don't think I knew how to structure it in a way that made sense. But for this particular game, I created a set of challenges, had a $20 voucher for someone who would achieve these challenges.

[06:21] The game is called The Stanley Parable. The Stanley Parable is a first-person game where a man wakes up in an office by himself, tapping away on a computer, following instructions, realizing that the instructions have stopped.

[06:38] He hasn't done anything for a couple of hours, and he's like, what's going on? Steps out of his office. There's no one there. And you walk around an open plan office environment, walking through doors. And as you do so, you find a

[06:51] narrator speaking to the actions you take or presenting you with choices and responding to whatever choices you make. So the first challenge of the Stanley Carable is you approach a door,

[07:04] you open it, walk through it into a room, the door behind you closes, and the narrator says, and Stanley was presented with a choice. He can choose to go through the red door or the blue door. And of course, he chose the blue door. And at that point, you can choose to either follow

[07:20] the narrator's instruction and take the blue door, or you walk through the red door. And if you walk through the red door, the narrator goes, and Stanley followed the instructions that he knew in his head to be true.

[07:34] And he tried again and walked through the blue door. So the game is set up based on choice, a narrator that responds to whatever choices you make and can adjust the game environment to suit those choices.

[07:50] Now it's definitely not emergent. It's the kind of game that someone creates with a bunch of decision trees that like fan out into probably 20,000 different endings that could potentially be there. There are times where the narrator has punished Stanley so much,

[08:09] Stanley being the operant character that you're playing, punished him so much that he's in a room in an apartment with, you know, it's very lavish, it's quite small, but he's got a wife and he gradually talks away the wife who becomes like a mannequin and then a mannequin without a head. And then the

[08:26] door disappears and then the couch and the television disappears and it becomes white. You know, it's a, it's a very interesting game. So for the games club, I set 10 challenges for them to see or achieve or answer certain questions related to the game. And whoever got all 10,

[08:45] they got the voucher. I was having a conversation with my wife about a new subject that she's going to be teaching in her school here next year. And immediately my thought was, well, hey, if you're thinking of bringing in these people that you know from the television industry, because she worked

[09:02] in television after or before she taught, she's also done a master's in reality television. That's what her thesis was in. So she's kind of broad like I am, but yeah, create a podcast for that. That's like on-demand content for the kids.

[09:20] Doing a podcast in the learning context makes sense. And yeah, I think if you're not learning something or you're not entertained from a podcast, then there's going to be very few instances that don't meet those two criteria. I hope you enjoyed that insight into my background, my career, and how podcasting has changed my life. If you'd like to find out more about this podcast,

[09:42] check the show notes or head to rethinkingpodcasting.com. You'll also find the ways that you can support the show, including affiliate links to any products I use in my daily podcast production. If you've got a podcast revelation to share or would like to

[09:58] respond to anything I've mentioned on the podcast, send an email to business at mbpod.com or head to speakpipe.com forward slash RTP and record a voice message. Thank you for listening, and I look forward to seeing you in

[10:21] the next one. You might be wondering what compelled me to create this series of introductory episodes. The truth is, I couldn't do it on my own. Activate Your Podcast is a service I offer with Peter Daly-Dixon and Rob Drummond, where we help you launch your podcast with a marketable

[10:37] set of five introductory episodes built from a 90-minute conversation with a conversation partner. These five activation episodes will help you get started on your podcast, give you a foundation to build your marketing from, and the provided transcripts will give

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[11:09] process, you can choose to continue with the service ongoing for your podcast. It's basically done-for-you marketing with everything included. All you need to do is have a conversation. If you're interested, head to activateyourpodcast.com to schedule an introductory call and make

[11:26] sure to mention Rethinking Podcasting when you get there.