I should probably declare an interest here. I’m not a great consumer of ‘self-help’ - seminars, webinars, any-ars, or books. There seem to be an awful lot of people prepared to tell us how to be happier, richer, calmer, more productive, more resilient, better leaders, better parents and presumably better at loading the dishwasher. So I started flicking through Simon’s book like it was half time at Airdrie FC and we were, of course, 2-0 down. But then something slightly annoying happened. I quite liked it (there endeth any comparison to Airdrie FC).

That’s because I don’t really think it’s a coaching book. It’s a book about Simon, about the stuff that’s happened to him, the people he’s met, the things he’s got right and the things he’s got spectacularly wrong. Work, relationships, resilience, vulnerability, and the various bits of baggage we all accumulate while pretending we’ve got everything under control. It’s funny in places, and then later it’s uncomfortable in a way that makes you squirm. Simon isn’t showboating in any of it. There’s no sense of a man performing his own vulnerability for effect.

It reads like someone genuinely opening up, which is a rarer thing than the coaching shelves would have you believe. Somewhere amongst all of that are ideas that might actually be useful, which feels a lot more interesting to me than someone standing at the front of a room telling us the seven habits we need before breakfast.

It also feels very Third Half. Most of the conversations I’ve enjoyed over the past year haven’t really been about what somebody does, they’ve been about how they got there. The diversions. The cock-ups. The people who changed things. The moments when life didn’t follow the PowerPoint…..

So when Simon suggested launching the book at Wokingham Theatre and asked if I’d sit down with him and have one of those conversations in front of an audience, I said yes.

On 20th November, that’s what we’re going to do. No presentation, no 47 slides on unlocking your potential, just Simon and me talking about the book, the life behind it, and this rather provocative idea that none of us are broken. Because I’m not entirely sure I agree with him. What does “broken” mean anyway? Are there things that happen to us that actually do break something? Is resilience something we possess, something we learn, or something we only discover when life gives us no alternative? And when you write a book based heavily on your own experiences, how comfortable is it when someone else starts poking around in them? I’d guess the evening will have the same shape as the book. Some things to laugh at, and one or two moments where the room goes quiet.

We’ll find out. We’ll also open it up to the audience, so I won’t be the only one asking questions, and we’ll record the whole thing as a special edition of The Third Half.

None of Us Are Broken: The Launch 20th November 2026 Wokingham Theatre, Cantley Park

Reserve a place here:

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/none-of-us-are-broken-the-launch-tickets-1993916349476

Come along. You don’t have to agree with Simon. I’m not promising I will either. That might be the interesting bit.

People. Planet. Progress. The Third Half

But…. I started to think.

We know the signs. We’ve probably all thought about putting one up.

Don’t knock on my door. Don’t put stuff through my letterbox. Don’t try to sell me something I didn’t ask for.

Fair enough.

Except we spend the rest of our lives being sold things we didn’t ask for.

The new SUV that suggests our perfectly serviceable car isn’t quite good enough anymore. The watch that signifies success. The kitchen that suddenly looks dated. The holiday everyone else seems to be having. Deliveroo when there’s food in the fridge. A £1,200 phone that’s fractionally better than the £1,000 phone we already own. Klarna making something we can’t afford feel strangely affordable. Dating apps quietly suggesting there might always be someone better if we just keep swiping.

Upgrade your phone, your car, your house, your teeth, your body, your holiday. Upgrade your life.

(I’ve gone a bit Trainspotting again).

An awful lot of modern advertising isn’t really selling us products. It’s selling us dissatisfaction with what we already have, and we barely notice it anymore.

But put a badly photocopied circular through the letterbox and it’s outrage.

Except who’s actually sending those circulars? The local Indian restaurant. A window cleaner. Someone who’s just started a gardening business. A plumber. The village fete. A charity shop looking for donations.

And those dreaded “hawkers” we want to avoid? Yes, sometimes they’re flogging rubbish. But quite often they’re asking us to give a few quid a month to a charity, and we’ll slam the door or cross the road to avoid them while drinking a £4 coffee we’ve just been persuaded 20 mins earlier we needed.

Then there are Jehovah’s Witnesses. For the avoidance of doubt, I’m not religious and I don’t want converting. But strip away whether you agree with them and consider what they’re actually offering: their version of meaning, faith, community, a better way to live. You can completely reject their answer while acknowledging that those aren’t inherently terrible things to advocate for.

Which leaves us with a rather weird hierarchy of acceptable persuasion. Someone knocks on our door and says you might be happier if you found God, and they’re an irritating nuisance. A multinational corporation, armed with an extraordinary amount of information about us (bloody algorithms), whispers you might be happier if you bought this, and that’s just everyday life. One asks for five minutes of our attention. The other has built an entire economy around capturing as much of it as possible.

Perhaps there’s a consequence. We have more possessions, more convenience, more choice and more ways to consume than any generation before us. Yet we talk endlessly about loneliness, debt, anxiety, disappearing communities, struggling local businesses and the nagging feeling that somehow our lives don’t quite measure up.

I’m certainly not suggesting the answer to modern society is Jehovah’s Witnesses and a bloke selling dusters at the front door. But I do wonder whether we’ve spent decades shutting the door on people selling community, causes and local enterprise, while leaving it permanently open to people selling us dissatisfaction.

Maybe we’ve got the sign on the wrong door.

Scott

People. Planet. Progress. #TheThirdHalf #Community #Consumerism #PPP

I shared a little of Heather Manson’s story the other week. Now here’s the whole conversation.

The bit I hadn’t really understood before we spoke was just how much sits behind the words Street Soccer Scotland. Yes, there’s football, but Heather describes it as the engagement tool: a reason to turn up, a bit of structure, somewhere to belong. From there can come help with housing, education, mental health, employment, finances, or simply having someone there who understands.

Heather describes their Change Centre in Dundee as “Dundee’s biggest living room.” A place where someone can have a game of football, a cup of tea, and, when they’re ready, get some help without being sent off to another appointment in another building.

And then there’s Sarah. She first came to Street Soccer facing addiction and everything that came with it, became a player, progressed through the organisation, and eventually became its women’s lead. After more than a decade, Sarah recently left Street Soccer, and they celebrated, because she didn’t need them anymore. That probably tells you more about this organisation than any set of impact statistics could.

We also talk about the realities of fundraising, why people support people, the extraordinary story of founder David Duke, the importance of lived experience, Scotland’s diaspora, and what might happen when Heather takes all that energy across the Atlantic. And because this is The Third Half, we eventually get onto Barrowland gigs, jive dancing, Scottish cheese, bourbon, and whether America can ever compete with Loch Lomond.

This was supposed to be work. After 40-odd years, it felt much more like a catch-up.

Listen The full conversation with Heather Manson is here.

https://player.captivate.fm/episode/87b62c2a-4295-45db-85a2-3c0d47de5466/

Scott

People. Planet. Progress.

#ThirdHalf #HeatherManson #StreetSoccerScotland #Community

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Ken Deeks had an idea. Twenty-eight years later, he’s still sleeping on the floor.

I should say upfront: there’s no impartiality here. I sit on the Glasgow committee for Boycott Your Bed, and I want more people to get involved. So rather than making the case myself, I asked the man who started the whole thing to make it instead.

Ken Deeks.

He’s funny, self-effacing, one of the best storytellers I’ve had on this show, and in a few unexpected moments, quite moving. We talked about what nearly three decades of doing this has taught him about people, about the assumptions we make when someone finds themselves in trouble, and about the extraordinary people who show up every day to help.

There’s football, snoring, a surprising acting career, and an on-camera promise from Ken that I fully intend to hold him to.

But running underneath all of it is one simple question: could you give up your bed for one night?

Boycott Your Bed takes place on 2 October, with events in Glasgow, London, Manchester and Leeds.

Listen the conversation with Ken.

https://player.captivate.fm/episode/3f97bfdb-238c-4af3-867f-b47536a6ab00/

Then, perhaps, we’ll see you there. We need your help,. Homeless kids need your help.

People. Planet. Progress.

#ThirdHalf #BoycottYourBed #ActionForChildren #PPP

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“Let’s end youth homelessness by the year 2000.”

He decided to do something about it.

Twenty-eight years later, what started with 34 people sleeping out for one night has raised more than **£14.6 million** for Action for Children.

Ken joined me on The Third Half to tell the story of Boycott Your Bed, the people it has helped, why he still does it, and why one uncomfortable night can make a very real difference.

Full transparency: I’m on the Glasgow organising committee, so yes, I’m selling this one. Shamelessly.

Here’s a little taste of our conversation.

Full episode coming soon.

2nd October 2026 - London-Leeds-Manchester-Glasgow.

Here’s how to get involved: https://www.actionforchildren.org.uk/support-us/boycott-your-bed/

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I’d been following her from afar for a while, even before Street Soccer Scotland. She helped lead fundraising at the Prince & Princess of Wales Hospice in Glasgow, part of the team that raised £21 million to build the new hospice, and it was obvious even then that this wasn’t just a job for her. It’s who she is. Plenty of people talk about giving back as though it’s another line for the CV. Heather just gets on and does it, and she doesn’t seem to know how to do anything by halves: she dances competitively, she’s completed an Ironman, and she’s built an entire career around helping charities change lives rather than simply supporting them from a distance.

I came away from the conversation properly in awe of her energy, her humility, and her commitment to making a difference.

Here’s a short trailer. The full conversation lands soon.

People. Planet. Progress.

#ThirdHalf #Reinvention #Purpose #Community

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“Fancy coming along?”

That’s the easy bit. It’s everything after it that’s given me weeks of grief, because every time I try to explain what “it” actually is, I hear the same voice in my head: “Oh really? Sorry, I’m washing my hair.”

Not because I don’t want people to come. Quite the opposite. It’s because I know exactly what those words can sound like: another networking event, another room full of people introducing themselves with their job title before they’ve told you anything that matters, another evening where everyone claims they’re just there to meet interesting people while quietly working out who might become a client.

If that’s what this is, I’ve completely misunderstood what The Third Half is trying to do.

We’ve spent more time thinking about this than almost anything else we’ve done this year: how do you bring interesting people together without creating one of those events? Somewhere along the way we’ve managed to commercialise nearly every human interaction going. Networking breakfasts, networking coffees, networking walks, networking runs, networking drinks, and now, God help us, networking padel, because apparently even hitting a small yellow ball with your regional sales director needed a value proposition. The implication is always the same: every conversation has to earn its keep, every handshake needs an ROI, every coffee should lead somewhere.

That leaves me cold. I’d rather finish the game, have a pint afterwards, and find out what actually makes someone tick. Not what they do. Who they are.

There’s an irony in all this that isn’t lost on me. Some of the most important people in my life arrived through what you’d technically have to call networking. Clients became collaborators, collaborators became friends, ideas became businesses, conversations changed careers. But none of it started because either of us turned up intending to network. It started because we had a conversation worth having.

Here’s another confession: I’m not organising this because I need more friends. I’m lucky, I already have more good friends than I deserve. What I want is for good people to find each other. For someone wrestling with an idea to meet someone who’s wrestled with it before. For an entrepreneur to meet an artist, a teacher to meet a technologist, a campaigner to discover they’re not shouting into the void. For someone to leave thinking they hadn’t looked at it like that before.

That’s why we’re having an anniversary gathering. There’ll be live music, good cheese, and a glass of something if that’s your thing. And I hope there’ll be the sort of conversations that remind us why getting people together still matters. No speed networking, no awkward icebreakers, no pressure to work the room. Just a bunch of curious, decent people spending a couple of hours together.

If you leave with a new client, great. But if you leave having discovered a brilliant charity, a new band, a fresh perspective, or simply a bit more faith in people, I’d call that a far better return on your evening.

So here’s the actual invitation. Third Half Live is happening on 25 August, at The Flēot, just off Fleet Street. It’s a green skills hub, which felt right for what we’re trying to do. We’ll have around fifty people there. The Ferm are involved somehow, there may be samples, there may even be doggy bags, honestly the whole thing is organic and still evolving as I write this. Tickets are on Luma, and if you’ve been part of this from the start, you’ll hear from us first.

Come for the music. Come for whatever food situation we land on. Come because it’s the first time we’ve all been in a room together after a year of this being mostly a thing you read or listen to. Just don’t come to work the room.

If all we’ve created is another networking event, we’ve failed.

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Every vendor has an AI strategy. Every consultancy has an AI practice. Every board paper has an AI roadmap. And it is, without exception, the most boring content being produced anywhere in business right now, recycled slide decks wearing a new acronym, sold with the confidence of people who know you won’t ask what it actually delivered last time.

Nobody is getting rich off this except the people selling it to you. The hyperscalers want more compute burned. The vendors want more licences signed. The consultancies want a transformation programme, three years, seven figures, and a steering committee that meets monthly to discuss why the benefits haven’t landed yet. The SIs want the implementation contract that follows. The hardware people want you to bin infrastructure that still works because AI apparently needs a bigger box to run a chatbot nobody uses.

And the whole industry has the nerve to call this innovation. It isn’t. It’s the same trick played four times in twenty years, cloud, digital transformation, blockchain, the metaverse, now AI, and every time the pitch is identical: buy this or get left behind. Nobody ever gets left behind. They just get poorer and more confused, with a platform to show for it that someone will quietly decommission in 2029.

What’s missing is anyone in the room paid to say no. Not paid to say “let’s explore a phased pilot.” No. Don’t build it. Don’t migrate it. Don’t replace what’s still doing its job. The reason nobody says that isn’t because it’s wrong, it’s because restraint doesn’t have a day rate. The entire consulting model runs on selling you more, so the honest answer, the one that saves you money and carbon and two years of your life, is structurally unavailable from the people you’re paying to give it to you.

Here’s the bit everyone conveniently skips. Every serious voice in the industry now agrees the AI bubble bursts. Fine. When it does, who’s left holding the client relationship, the write-offs, and the awkward board conversation about the platform nobody finished paying for? Not the vendor. Not the consultancy that’s already three logos further down the hype cycle. It’s whoever sold you the thing and is nowhere near the room when the invoice for it comes due. Somebody always catches the phlegm. It’s never the person who coughed.

The most sustainable server is the one you don’t replace. The most sustainable AI model is the one you don’t run. And the most useful person in the room still isn’t the one shouting “AI-first,” it’s the one willing to lose the fee and tell you the truth instead.

Scott

People. Planet. Progress.

#AI #Sustainability #TechStrategy #ThirdHalf

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When I came across a recent Positive News article about community football helping young people stay out of trouble, I nearly skimmed past it as another feel-good story about football saving the world. Then I read it properly, and realised it wasn’t really about football at all. It was about belonging.

I saw a version of this myself last year. My Boycott Your Bed sleep-out was meant to happen at Hampden Park in Glasgow, but the storms put paid to that. Reading FC Community Trust had no involvement in the campaign at all, but when I got in touch, they kindly let me sleep out on their grounds instead. It wasn’t the discomfort of a night outdoors I remember most. It was a reminder of what clubs like Reading do for the people around them, week in, week out, long after anyone’s watching.

We’ve become very good at talking about the cost of youth crime, antisocial behaviour and poor mental health. We debate policing numbers, sentencing, school exclusions and social media. Important conversations, all of them. But perhaps we spend far less time talking about what young people are actually saying yes to. Very few teenagers wake up wanting to get into trouble. Many simply don’t have anywhere better to be.

A floodlit football pitch on a Wednesday evening sounds almost laughably ordinary, until you realise what it represents. Someone expected you to turn up. Someone notices if you don’t. Someone knows your name, and you matter to a group. That isn’t just football. That’s community.

The sport itself almost becomes incidental. You could replace it with boxing, music, theatre, basketball, dance, gardening or coding. The activity matters, but the relationships matter more.

We often underestimate the extraordinary value of ordinary adults: coaches, volunteers, youth workers, the people who quietly give up two evenings a week because they believe young people deserve somewhere safe to grow. They’ll never make the front pages, and they’ll probably never receive an honour, yet they are preventing problems that society later spends millions trying to fix.

It’s an odd economic model. We’ll happily fund the consequences. We struggle to fund the prevention, perhaps because prevention is wonderfully invisible. You can’t easily measure the fight that never happened, the arrest that never took place, the addiction that never developed, the life that quietly took a different path. None of these make headlines.

Sir Anthony Seldon has spent years arguing that wellbeing needs to be treated as seriously as attainment, not as an add-on but as the foundation everything else is built on. It’s a case he made about education and society more broadly when he joined me on TTH last month, but it holds just as well on a Wednesday evening five-a-side pitch. Community football makes that argument without needing a single slide or statistic. It just turns up, every week, and lets young people belong to something.

What I found myself thinking about afterwards was how community football increasingly looks like everything many people say they miss about professional football. It’s local, inclusive, affordable, multicultural, less interested in winning at all costs and more interested in making sure everyone has somewhere to play. The real victory isn’t lifting a trophy. It’s turning up again next week.

I’ve been writing a lot recently about purpose, community and what holds us together. Whether it’s social enterprises, local food projects, music festivals, environmental groups or grassroots sport, I keep coming back to the same conclusion: people don’t flourish because someone tells them to make better choices. They flourish because they find somewhere they belong. Football just happens to be one of the oldest and simplest ways we’ve ever invented of making that happen.

It’s why I’m looking forward to speaking with Heather Manson from Street Soccer Scotland soon. A charity built by someone who lived through homelessness himself, using the same idea on a bigger scale: give people somewhere to belong, and everything else starts to follow.

Perhaps the question was never how do we stop young people getting into trouble. Perhaps it was always how do we create more places where they feel they belong.

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There are moments when The Third Half makes me smile as much and as wide as I ever smile (and I smile a lot!)

I’m absolutely over the moon, and hugely grateful, to say that My Girl The River will be playing live at our little shindig at the end of August.

When Kris and Joe joined me on The Third Half last December, I came away thinking that these wonderfully talented brilliant musicians (I’d already seen the live) were also genuinely lovely people too. We talked about music, purpose, creativity, and the realities of making a living in the industry, plus Joe’s extraordinary story of co-writing “No More I Love You’s” before Annie Lennox turned it into the worldwide hit we all know.

Since then I’ve been lucky enough to hear snippets of their forthcoming album, Manifest Good Things, out 4 September. From what I’ve heard so far, it’s going to be something special, and I can’t wait for the finished record.

If you want to hear them, they’re on Patrick Kielty’s Saturday morning show (1 August) at around 10.45am, amongst other things, taking on the football chant challenge.

I’ll link our original conversation below. If you haven’t listened before, give it a go.

Kris and Joe, thank you for saying yes. It means a huge amount to us, and everyone joining us at the end of August is in for a real treat.

CLICK THE LINK BELOW TO JOIN THE EVENT

https://luma.com/hdyshk64

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When I first read that Scotland had become the first nation in the UK to require swift bricks in appropriate new buildings, I smiled.

A brick for birds?

My mind immediately wandered into all the usual places. Bird mortgages. Luxury penthouses. “Prime nesting opportunities.” The kind of daft post that gets a few laughs before disappearing into the algorithm.

But I didn’t.

Because the more I read, the less funny it became.

Not because there’s anything sombre about a brick with a hole in it. Quite the opposite. It’s genuinely ordinary. It costs around £30, disappears into the fabric of a building and will probably never be noticed by the people who live there.

That’s exactly why it’s interesting.

Swifts have evolved alongside us for centuries, nesting in the nooks and crannies of our buildings. As we’ve become better at constructing warm, airtight, energy-efficient homes, we’ve inadvertently designed those spaces away. No villain. No conspiracy. Just thousands of sensible decisions that, together, had an unintended consequence.

This isn’t really a story about birds.

It’s a story about design.

How often do we optimise for one thing while quietly making something else worse?

Whether it’s technology, workplaces, public services or our own lives, we can become so focused on efficiency that we forget to ask who, or what, we’ve left behind.

The beauty of the swift brick is that it doesn’t ask us to choose between people and nature. It says perhaps we can be clever enough to accommodate both.

For the cost of a decent lunch, a new home can provide a home for something else too.

I like that.

It feels hopeful.

The sustainability conversation is often dominated by eye-watering numbers, impossible trade-offs and reasons to feel overwhelmed. Then along comes a humble brick that quietly reminds us progress isn’t always about doing more.

Sometimes it’s about thinking a little harder before we pour the concrete.

I nearly wrote a joke.

I’m glad I didn’t.

Because this little brick says something much bigger.

It reminds us that the world isn’t only shaped by grand gestures. More often, it’s shaped by thousands of small, thoughtful decisions that nobody notices at the time.

And perhaps that’s the point.

The best ideas are often the ones that simply become part of the wall.

So… to end.

Why did the swift refuse to move into the new-build?

‘No brickwork’ references on the estate agent’s listing.

(Told you it’d be bad.)

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Friends have been trying to persuade Katie and me to go for the best part of two decades. Every summer there was another excuse - too busy, wrong weekend, maybe next year.

This year we finally went. They were right.

I expected good music, interesting food and a few memorable performances. I didn’t expect to spend three days quietly restoring my faith in people.

It wasn’t the music that got me first, it was the atmosphere. Thousands of people - families, teenagers, older couples, campers, volunteers, musicians - and no edge to any of it. No pushing, no tension. Everyone simply seemed happy, relaxed, present.

Then I noticed something else. Every version of humanity seemed to be there: families with young children, people who looked like they’d been coming since the first WOMAD, goths, hippies, every shade of LGBTQ+, every imaginable style, background and age. Nobody seemed remotely interested in judging anyone else.

It wasn’t diversity as a slogan. It was diversity without commentary - people simply turned up as themselves. It felt surprisingly rare.

The weekend also reunited two families who hadn’t spent proper time together for years. Watching our children, now adults, fall effortlessly back into conversation was a good reminder that some friendships don’t disappear. They just wait for the right moment to carry on where they left off.

A few other things have lodged in my head since.

I’d never heard of Migrateful. Their idea is simple: refugees, asylum seekers and migrants become cookery teachers, sharing the food, traditions and stories of their home countries. Not because it changes anyone’s political views, but because it changes conversations. A meal becomes a story, a story becomes understanding, and suddenly someone isn’t “a migrant” - they’re the person who taught you how to make an incredible meal their family has cooked for generations. The shortest distance between two people is often a shared table.

Then I wandered over to CARE4Basket. At first glance, a stall selling beautifully woven baskets and bags. Then you hear the story. Plastic waste collected in Ghana is transformed into weaving material. Traditional weaving skills are preserved. Local artisans earn a fair income. Waste becomes opportunity.

It’s easy to think of sustainability as carbon targets and net zero. CARE4Basket is about people - it creates livelihoods, preserves skills, restores dignity. The environmental impact follows because someone started by asking a better question.

Then there was Butane Skies. Young musicians, proper guitars, proper drums, proper songs. Maybe I’m showing my age, but they were the real deal - no gimmicks, no backing tracks doing the heavy lifting, just musicians who’d clearly put in the hours. Delighted they’ll be joining The Third Half soon as one of our Music of the Month guests.

Ukrainian artist GANNA was another highlight, making traditional pancakes while singing completely unaccompanied. Sounds almost surreal written down, yet somehow it made perfect sense - food, music, culture, memory, identity, all shared in one performance. At a time when Ukraine continues to fight for its future, it said something about how culture isn’t just preserved in museums. Sometimes it’s passed on through a recipe, a song, and the generosity to share both with strangers.

And something also happened that nobody would have predicted, including me. I found myself in a Northern Soul pop-up - not watching, dancing, for twenty minutes. I’ve never danced Northern Soul before and nobody was mistaking me for an expert. Nobody cared. Nobody was watching or judging. People were simply dancing because dancing made them happy. I walked away grinning like an idiot.

Looking back, that’s probably what connected the whole weekend. Nobody was trying to impress anyone. Migrateful weren’t trying to win an argument. CARE4Basket weren’t simply selling products. Butane Skies weren’t manufacturing an image. GANNA wasn’t simply performing. The Northern Soul dancers weren’t worrying about how they looked. Everyone was simply sharing something they loved.

In a world that often encourages us to judge first and understand later, WOMAD quietly asks us to do the opposite. Be curious. Taste something unfamiliar. Listen to music you’ve never heard before. Talk to someone whose life is completely different from yours. Dance, even if you’re convinced you can’t.

Maybe that’s why it felt so different. Maybe that’s also what The Third Half has always been trying to create - not a place where everyone agrees, but a place where everyone belongs.

After twenty years of saying “maybe next year”, I suspect we’ve just started a new family tradition.

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Ian McNabb has a theory about why nobody’s ever known what to do with him, and why that’s exactly what’s kept him going for forty years. Record companies, marketing people, even his own fans, none of them have ever quite landed on a box that fits, not since the Icicle Works days.

Most people expect an hour of Love Is A Wonderful Colour. We got some of that of course, but mostly we talked about his new album, 65, which is brilliant, and which took up most of our hour for good reason. About making records the way people used to make mixtapes, and why he thinks that art’s been lost. About a Dylan story he tells against himself that changed how I think about lyric writing. About Stanley Kubrick, working men’s clubs, and a joke about prog rock that got more serious the longer we sat with it. It’s an exclusive (ish).

And about his mum, Sinatra, and the hoovering. That one I wasn’t expecting, and it’s a real life, real people moment. I’ve been thinking about it a lot.

None of it went where I thought it would really.

Which I bloody love.

Full conversation up now on The Third Half.

Watch on YouTube | Listen on your favourite audio streaming platform:

https://player.captivate.fm/episode/0acece10-29d2-4f06-b9d8-1f239a69a4d4/

Scott

People. Planet. Progress.

#TheThirdHalf #IanMcNabb #OnTheTurntable #Reinvention

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We’re now over 60% full for Third Half Live on Tuesday 25 August in London.

Just a heads up that we’ll be opening things up to the wider public at the end of this week, so if you’re a subscriber or follower and fancy joining us, best to register now rather than risk missing out.

Quick reminder of what this actually is: an informal evening, nothing more than drinks, food and good conversation with people who’ve been part of this journey. No agenda, no stage, no lanyards. Just a chance to put faces to names and see where the conversation goes.

Details and registration here:

https://luma.com/hdyshk64

Hope to see you there.

Scott

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You’re invited!

One of the unexpected joys of starting The Third Half has been discovering that it’s never really been about the podcast.

It’s about the conversations those episodes have created. The emails. The introductions. The comments. The moments when someone says, “I listened to that on the train,” or “That episode made me think differently.”

In other words, it’s become a bit of a community. Something like over 19,000 views and listens, and over 450 subscribers and followers across the platforms, which still amazes me given we’ve never once tried to compete with dancing pandas for attention. Just proper conversations about things that actually matter, with enough irreverence to stop them getting too pleased with themselves, and people kept sharing them with each other.

So it feels only right that, as we approach our first anniversary, we get some of that community into the same room.

On Tuesday 25 August, we’re holding the first Third Half Live in London.

Not a conference.

Not a networking event.

Just an evening for good people, good conversation, food and drink, and a chance to spend time together.

We’ll be gathering at The Flēot, a Community Coworking Green Skills Hub just off Fleet Street. Like many of the stories we’ve featured over the past year, it’s a place with purpose, a building that’s been given a new lease of life as a space for learning, collaboration and community.

I’ll share a few thoughts on the journey so far and where I think The Third Half might be heading. Beyond that, we’ll just let the conversation take over. If you’ve followed us for a while, you’ll know that’s usually when things get interesting.

We’re keeping numbers deliberately small so before we open invitations more widely, I wanted subscribers and followers to have the first opportunity to join us.

I’d genuinely love to see you there.

You can find all the details and reserve your place here:

https://luma.com/hdyshk64

Whether you’ve listened to one episode or twenty-five, thank you for being part of this.

I hope we can raise a glass together in August.

Scott

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There are moments that instantly change the tone of a conversation.

We recorded this in the middle of the World Cup, with Britain glued to football and politics changing almost by the hour. Sir Anthony Seldon had a new book out, The Brexit Effect, and Andy Burnham looked set to become Britain’s next Prime Minister.

You might imagine we’d dive straight into all of that.

Instead, within seconds, Anthony was making jokes about Jimmy Greaves and Thomas Tuchel. Yes. And I didn’t start the jokes (for once).

It was a reminder that behind the historian, biographer and educator is someone with a wonderfully playful sense of humour and a genuine curiosity about people, and that warmth runs through the whole conversation.

Of course we talk about leadership, education, AI and Britain. You’d expect nothing less. But we also wander into music, theatre, nature, community, happiness, Shakespeare (and Burns), cheese and the people who have shaped Anthony’s life. It’s thoughtful, occasionally provocative, frequently funny and, for me, revealed a side of him that doesn’t always come across in television interviews or newspaper columns.

When we hung up the call, I wasn’t reflecting on politics so much as humanity. Anthony’s enthusiasm for life is infectious, and whether he’s talking about beauty, belonging or the future of young people, there is a quiet optimism that feels both refreshing and badly needed.

And don’t skip the quick-fire at the end! Some of Anthony’s answers came instantly, others took me completely by surprise, and one in particular prompted the only moment in the interview where I felt I had to challenge him (having been warned a number of times not to! Oh well….)

If you would rather listen to the full conversation while driving, check the audio streaming platforms below.

https://player.captivate.fm/episode/121cb50f-92e9-4342-a881-2464a79ecf08/

I hope you enjoy it as much as we enjoyed recording it.

People. Planet. Progress.

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Most people know Ian through The Icicle Works and that brilliant 80’s track, Love Is A Wonderful Colour. But behind the nostalgia is a songwriter still driven by the next lyric, the next melody, the next album.

In this short clip, Ian talks honestly about the reality of making music today: thousands of followers, but only around 10-15% of them buy a new record. It’s a challenge facing countless independent artists.

Then he gets to the heart of why he keeps going. “Unless I’m trying to find the right lyric... the right melody... I don’t feel alive.”

Creativity isn’t about looking backwards. It’s about the joy, and the frustration, of making something new.

The full conversation, where we dive into his brilliant new album 65, lands soon on The Third Half. Worth your time whether you’re a music fan or just someone who’s ever felt compelled to create.

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When we released the trailer a few days ago, plenty of people picked up on Tina Wilson’s three ingredients for success: confidence, curiosity and courage. The full conversation goes much deeper than that.

Over 45 minutes we talk about leadership, ambiguity, sponsorship, building teams, making difficult decisions and why the best leaders don’t always have all the answers. Tina describes herself as at her best when the path isn’t clear, and she means it. This is someone who got a call asking her to set up company operations in a war zone and found a way to do it.

We laugh a lot too, about Madonna on the running playlist, getting lost while running in unfamiliar cities, and turning up to guitar lessons alongside the three-year-olds. She makes a serious point through that last one: it’s perfectly okay to be rubbish at something when you’re learning, and the further you get in a career, the fewer chances you get to feel that.

If the trailer gave you Tina’s CV, the full conversation gives you her generosity. She talks openly about imposter syndrome, the sponsors who backed her, making decisions when nobody else in the room will, and why creating opportunities for others has become the most rewarding part of her career. Her proudest achievement is building a team that no longer needs her.

There’s a lovely moment towards the end when I ask what she hopes people will remember about her work in twenty years’ time. I’ll let you hear her answer for yourself.

If you’re interested in leadership, people, organisations, or simply how someone builds an extraordinary career while staying relentlessly curious, I think you’ll enjoy this one.

As always, thank you for listening, reading, sharing and supporting The Third Half.

Listen to Scott’s full Blueprint conversation with Tina Wilson here.

https://player.captivate.fm/episode/af9f9c71-af84-4b32-9d86-694e324323c4/

Scott and Happy

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Anthony kept coming back to three simple ideas. Education as preparation for life rather than a set of exam results. Community as something we build together rather than a political slogan. And purpose as meaning beyond ourselves rather than success or status.

It was thoughtful, optimistic and at times surprisingly personal.

One more thing worth mentioning: Anthony’s new book, The Brexit Effect, is out now. Given how much of our conversation touched on where Britain finds itself today, it’s a natural companion piece to this episode. You can find it here: https://amzn.eu/d/04spsxRB

Watch his full conversation here

#TheThirdHalf #Leadership #Education #Purpose #Brexit

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