One Year of Love, Chaos and Podcasting: Martin & Julia’s Untold Stories

ENCan you believe it has actually been a year?

ENFifty-two weeks.

ENFifty-two Sundays of you asking me if the intro sounded "too enthusiastic."

ENIt always sounds too enthusiastic on the first take.

ENThat is the job, though.

ENEnthusiasm, then editing.

ENI genuinely did not think we would make it past episode ten.

ENI did.

ENI just did not say it out loud, in case I jinxed it.

ENThat is very you.

ENThat is very "anchor" of me, yes.

ENDo you remember our actual first session, before any of this existed?

ENDo not.

ENI am bringing it up.

ENYou froze, Martin.

ENCompletely.

ENFor almost a full minute.

ENIn my defense, I had never heard my own recorded voice used for something real before.

ENYou had a tape recorder as a child.

ENYou told our whole audience about it.

ENThat was different.

ENThat was me talking to myself in my bedroom.

ENThis was a microphone that other people would actually hear.

ENAnd now you record three or four times a week without blinking.

ENMostly.

ENSome weeks are still rough.

ENSome weeks Robert makes my whole week rough, and I bring that energy into the booth whether I like it or not.

ENRobert.

ENDo not get me started.

ENI will not.

ENToday is supposed to be a good day.

ENIt is a good day.

ENI simply reserve the right to complain about Robert on principle.

ENDo you remember the garden hose episode?

ENDo not remind me.

ENHalfway through a take, there is suddenly a flooding sound in the background, completely out of nowhere.

ENMy automatic watering system chose that exact moment to malfunction.

ENIn my own garden.

ENDuring an episode about staying calm.

ENWe kept the take.

ENIt is still online.

ENPeople love it.

ENPeople love chaos, Martin.

ENThat is the real lesson of this whole year.

ENDo you remember the week we recorded four episodes back to back because we were terrified of running out of buffer?

ENI do.

ENI could not feel my own voice by Thursday.

ENYou sounded like a completely different person by the end of that week.

ENI sounded like a man who had said "friends" so many times the word stopped meaning anything.

ENWe do not do that anymore, at least.

ENWe learned.

ENThat is the whole point of a year, isn't it?

ENYou stop making the same mistake twice, and you find three brand new ones instead.

ENHonestly, though, a year of doing this has changed something in me.

ENGo on.

ENYou know I never fully lost the stutter.

ENIt is still there, underneath.

ENIt just turned into slowness, mostly.

ENI know.

ENFor years I thought that was something to manage, or hide, or work around.

ENAnd now?

ENNow I stand in front of a microphone and get paid, essentially, to talk slowly on purpose.

ENThe thing I was most ashamed of as a child is the actual selling point.

ENThat is not nothing, Martin.

ENIt is not nothing.

ENI have changed too, you know.

ENNot just the Robert saga.

ENTell me.

ENI used to think being "the anchor" meant staying calm no matter what, absorbing everything, never showing a crack.

ENI do not think that anymore.

ENWhat do you think now?

ENI think being steady does not mean being silent about what is hard.

ENI say more now.

ENOn the mic, and off it.

ENThat is growth, Julia.

ENIt is terrifying, mostly.

ENBut yes.

ENLet's talk about the episodes, then.

ENThe ones that actually did something to us, not just to the download numbers.

ENGo first.

ENEpisode ten.

ENBack in October, last year.

ENThe childhood one.

ENThe tape recorder, the piano, all of it.

ENI almost pulled it the night before it went out.

ENWhy?

ENBecause it is one thing to talk about a method on this show, and a completely different thing to tell strangers that I used to stand in front of a classroom and stutter through four lines of poetry.

ENAnd then?

ENAnd then people wrote in.

ENNot about the vocabulary.

ENAbout the stutter.

ENAbout their own kid, or their own younger self, who never got a Danny whispering the poem back to them.

ENThat episode is the reason half our listeners trust us, I think.

ENNot because we are experts.

ENBecause we admitted we were not always fluent, in any sense of the word.

ENI remember reading your first draft of that script and thinking, Martin, are you sure you want to give people this much of yourself.

ENI asked myself that about four times a day for a week.

ENAnd?

ENAnd then I thought about Aunt Nora.

ENAbout "he doesn't struggle, he's just composing his sentences." If she could hand me that sentence when I was five, the least I could do was hand it to a few thousand strangers thirty years later.

ENLet's do the next one.

ENActually, before that, can I ask you something.

ENGo on.

ENCan I ask you about Claire?

ENClaire is my flatmate, Julia.

ENI know that, obviously.

ENI meant is something going on there.

ENNothing is "going on" with Claire.

ENWe split the rent on a flat near the studio, she leaves passive-aggressive notes about the dishwasher, and that is the entire relationship.

ENPeople heard episode one-oh-seven, from the start of this month, and assumed "partner." She is not my partner.

ENFine.

ENDuly noted, for anyone confused.

ENClaire: flatmate.

ENSo who has had you smiling into your coffee for a solid week straight?

ENHer name is Elena.

ENFinally.

ENEpisode seventy, back in May, was the first time I mentioned her at all, even in passing.

ENI had gone eighteen months without a single date, and then I met her at a jazz club, completely by accident, and I panicked the entire walk over there about whether my shirt was too formal.

ENYou, the guide of momentum, panicking over a shirt.

ENI coach people on taking action for a living, and I nearly did not walk through the door.

ENWhat was she like?

ENCalm.

ENDirect.

ENShe noticed things about me in the first ten minutes that I had not admitted to myself in years.

ENShe told me later that people spend so much energy trying to be interesting, and they forget that simply being observant is far more attractive.

ENI have thought about that sentence every day since.

ENAnd then episode seventy-three.

ENEpisode seventy-three, mid-May, the forest walk.

ENOur second date.

ENI left my phone recording by accident, and somehow we still published the whole thing.

ENThe bit where she tells you that you talk about the present moment all day and are only just beginning to live in one.

ENThat sentence nearly finished me.

ENAnd after that?

ENAfter that, we kept walking.

ENLiterally and otherwise.

ENWe have seen each other most weekends since May, Julia.

ENIt is slow, the way she likes things, but it is real.

ENMartin.

ENThat is wonderful.

ENIt is.

ENI did not want to make it into content again straight away, which is why I have been dodging you about it for weeks.

ENI noticed.

ENI was trying to be a good friend and not push.

ENYou were terrible at not pushing.

ENI know.

ENI am delighted I finally get to stop pretending.

ENThird one.

ENEpisode one-oh-two, back in July.

ENThe World Cup episode.

ENI still get emotional about the closing lines.

ENYou cried recording that, and pretended you had not.

ENYou noticed.

ENI noticed.

ENThat episode connected straight back to our Atomic Habits episodes, months earlier, the one-percent rule, the whole idea that you fall to the level of your systems.

ENWatching a national team prove that live, on television, while we had already told our audience the theory, it felt like the universe handing us a case study.

ENIt also brought in the most messages we have ever had about people's own ten minutes a day.

ENBoubacar.

ENPeople still write in asking how he is doing.

ENHe is not even a real person, and people ask about him like a neighbor.

ENThat is the job, though, isn't it?

ENMake something true enough that it does not matter if it happened exactly like that.

ENFourth.

ENEpisodes one-oh-six and one-oh-seven, just last week.

ENThe Four Agreements.

ENInteresting that you count them as one.

ENBecause I use them as one.

ENGenuinely.

ENNot as content.

ENIn my actual life.

ENGive me an example.

ENRobert sent me a one-line email last month that I read about eleven different ways before lunch.

ENAnd the eleventh time?

ENThe eleventh time I just asked him what he actually meant.

ENTurned out it meant nothing.

ENHe was in a hurry between meetings.

ENSo the assumption cost you a whole morning, and the question cost you one sentence.

ENExactly.

ENI am trying to remember that ratio.

ENSame, honestly.

ENEpisode one-oh-seven is actually where the Claire confusion started, come to think of it.

ENI told the Claire story to explain not making assumptions, and half our listeners assumed "partner" anyway.

ENWhich we have now, officially, cleared up.

ENOfficially cleared up.

ENClaire, flatmate.

ENElena, whatever this wonderful, slow thing actually is.

ENOkay, but seriously, thinking about all four of those together, the website has come a long way since we started.

ENIt really has.

ENWhat began as one interactive transcript is now dozens of episodes deep, with translations, vocabulary cards, flashcards, the whole system.

ENAnd I still think people underestimate what we are actually trying to build there.

ENSay more.

ENIt is not a podcast archive, Julia.

ENIt is a place someone can actually learn, properly, at their own pace, with the parts of language learning that usually get forgotten.

ENRepetition.

ENContext.

ENKindness, even.

ENThat word again.

ENKindness.

ENIt matters.

ENMost people who come to us have tried and failed at English somewhere else, and they arrive a little ashamed of that.

ENA lot of them moved countries, Martin.

ENThey are not sitting in a classroom for fun.

ENThey need this for a job interview, or a parent-teacher meeting, or just to order their own coffee without rehearsing it three times in the car.

ENThat is exactly why "slow" cannot just be a gimmick for us.

ENIt has to actually respect where people are starting from.

ENAnd our whole job is to hand them the piano instead of the exam.

ENThe piano instead of the exam.

ENI like that.

ENI am stealing it for the next outro.

ENAlready stealing it, clearly.

ENWhat I want, a year from now, is for someone to tell us the website is the reason they finally had a real conversation in English.

ENNot "finished a course." A real conversation.

ENThat is the whole thing, isn't it?

ENNot fluency as a trophy.

ENFluency as a door that opens.

ENYour English Toolbox, dot com.

ENFree.

ENGrowing every week, whether people notice it or not.

ENWhether people notice it or not.

ENHappy anniversary, Julia.

ENHappy anniversary, Martin.

ENNow go text Elena before we start recording properly.

ENI already did.

ENTwenty minutes ago.

ENOf course you did.