Adam Stoner

I’d be lying if I said that this affected me in quite the same way as this makes it sound but also it must have affected me in some way because I’m making an entire podcast about it. A few months ago, you might remember that I went on morning walks and whilst I was on these morning walks, I saw some deer. The story basically was that the deer, whenever I looked for them, weren’t there. When I stopped looking, they sort of appeared every time. I’ve just come back from a walk… I saw one of the deer on the side of the road this morning. It’s eyes, eyes that had once sniped me from ferns on the hillside, were glazed over. It’s autumn now and those ferns are dying too. I guess the deer is a symbol. It’s fragility. It’s us encroaching on their home. We continue to push the limits. This estate continues to grow. We continue to force creatures like these into ever shrinking habitats where encounters with humans, with me, with cars, become increasingly perilous. There’s a second deer. As I walked, the remaining deer watched me from the woods. It was a silent exchange. The deer didn’t move. Startled, maybe… Used to me, maybe. Am I to blame? Am I the reason the other one got so close to a car? Bit of a weird one for you. I’m still not sure how I feel about it.

It’s August 31st 8023 – six thousand years in the future – and you are in a mountain in Nevada. It has taken you several days to get here. You’ve had to hike, you’ve had to endure the harsh heat – the thorns – and you’ve stumbled upon a set of metal doors. This is what you’ve been looking for. The doors are a kind of crude airlock, keeping out dust and animals. You head into the darkness of a long tunnel. There’s the mildest hint of light ahead that you slowly find your way to. You look up. A faint light filtering down now through giant gears, illuminating the beginning of a spiral staircase. You start climbing. It winds up the outer rim of the tunnel, rising towards the gears and faint light overhead. The stairs are carved out of the rock. After climbing about 100 feet you encounter a large bronze egg filled with concrete. It’s about the size of a small car and weighs 5,000 kilograms. After you pass the weights you keep climbing, pass more giant gears, some over 8 feet in diameter – and then you find it. The world’s slowest computer. And it plays a chime for you. Simple bells, but a unique combination nobody in living memory has ever heard, nor will ever hear again. This is a clock. I started just thinking about, just as a project for myself, the idea of building a very slow clock that would last for 10,000 years. Sometime in the 1990s, I started noticing the year 2000 was kind of a mental barrier for people. It was hard for them to think past it. And so I started just thinking about, just as a project for myself, the idea of building a very slow clock. And 10,000 years being a kind of nice number because our history is kind of 10,000 years old. So we ought to have a future that’s as big as our history. It’s not a work of science fiction. It’s real. Danny wanted to design a symbol of the future in the same way the Pyramids of Giza are a symbol of the past. If you go to the pyramids in Egypt and you touch those stones, I mean those are stones that human hands touched thousands of years ago. Is there anything we can put into the world where you would be touching this thing and this thing would endure and you would know that people in the year 7000 or something might also touch that same thing and think about you and does that build some kind of a connection across time? The 10,000 Year Clock, or the Clock of the Long Now, is the work of the Long Now Foundation. The Long Now Foundation is a nonprofit here in San Francisco that’s trying to help people think about the next 10,000 years. And the way we want to do that is by also helping them think about the last 10,000 years. When we’re thinking about the future, there’s so many organisations or cultural narratives that want to convince people or talk about how we’re at the end of the civilisational narrative. That’s the idea is that you’re really looking out at a multi-thousand year time horizon. You’re thinking about how the decisions that you’re making today affect people in 400 human generations. You’re going to do things a little bit differently. And that might actually be really important. This clock really encapsulates everything that I love. It’s oddly obsessive about something that’s impossible to predict. It’s incredibly philosophical and I think it’s really important. It’s all about fostering long-term thinking. It’s all about projecting further into the future than the financial year or your five-year plan or dare I say it – you. It’s all about hope and about the possibility that that there might be a future and that’s so refreshing in a world where we’re constantly told that the clock is ticking…

Sea Monkeys are brine shrimp. They’re tiny – about half a centimetre wide and about the same length as your small fingernail – but the magic comes from a state of suspended animation known as cryptobiosis. The inventor, a chap named Harold von Braunhut. He was trying to come up with some sort of pet that he could sell through the mail and he was at a pet store and he saw some brine shrimp that were in an aquarium or a bucket or something. But he thought that that might be the perfect pet because their eggs or cysts are dry and they don’t become activated, they don’t hatch until they’re wet. This is bonkers, right? You can hatch a living animal from a packet that’s been sat on the shelf for months… Harold packaged these eggs into kits. You get a plastic tank and several different packets. Packet one is labeled as water purifier and it’s mostly salts. So you’re supposed to put that in, wait 24 hours, then you put in packet number two and packet number two is labeled instant live eggs and through the science you see Sea Monkeys hatch instantly before your eyes. There’s a little more happening here than you might realise and it’s a bit of a sleight of hand. Part of the marketing genius behind this is there’s actually a lot of eggs in packet number one as well they’re in both packets so by waiting that 24 hours after you put in packet number one the eggs it’s giving the eggs time to hatch and the little babies time to grow a tiny bit. You think package one is just salt. It’s not. When you add packet two, which contains dye, you see what’s already hatched from packet one, giving the illusion of instant life. It’s genius. It’s also what’s now called cognitive priming, that is the deep cerebral desire we all have to see what we expect to see. There was this huge lawsuit about licensing; Harold’s widow, supposedly held the Sea Monkey secret formula in a vault in Manhattan, there was an argument over who owned the company, and values in the tens of millions being thrown around Harold von Braunhut was an entrepreneur but he was also a con artist. His previous inventions include Invisible Goldfish and X-Ray Specs. He also had associations with white supremacy. And this is really uncomfortable. The marketing is genius. It’s also based on lies. The product has entertained millions of people over the world for nearly 70 years. It’s also made by a man who supplied firearms to the Ku Klux Klan. I’m not sure how to reconcile those things, I don’t think you can. But they’re also kind of what the story is about: a dark history that you might not associate with a children’s toy. Sea Monkeys pretty much went the same way that most crazes do, they fidget-spun out of the limelight. But these creatures, the animals themselves, are fascinating (and entirely oblivious to the drama surrounding them). Dried to this day, in packets on shelves across the world, waiting for some curious kid to return them to life. And that, I think, is the real magic.

Do you remember last week when one war criminal tried to march to Moscow to kill – or chat to, I don’t really know – the other war criminal? What a bonkers Saturday that was! I spent the whole day, a beautiful summer’s day, in front of the telly – and BBC were bloody brilliant, delivering half hourly updates of how far down the road the Wagner forces were… And then, by 7pm here in the UK, the entire thing was over. The events of last weekend just left me with this horrid, empty feeling… The most important stories in the world are non-stories because they happen over a period of time that most of us can’t comprehend. They’re slow, powerful movements. The real news isn’t that somebody decided to bum rush the Russian capital one day in June. It’s a tale of private military companies like Wagner and their dramatic rise all over world right after the Cold War. It’s a tale of mercenary groups, of guns for hire and renegade soldiers. It’s the story of secret government funding, of switching allegiances and of the tensions that brings to foreign policy. Sure, it might have bubbled to the surface for 24 hours last weekend, but it’s a story that’s 30 years in the making. The real stories take decades or more to be told. The world and what happens in it is not just a series of attention-grabbing headlines. It’s a huge tapestry of things that are deeply interconnected. These long-term stories are the ones that truly shape our world. They’re the threads that create the fabric of society. But by focusing solely on the immediate, rolling news headlines, we miss the bigger picture. We fail to see underlying patterns and deep-rooted issues that shape our world. It’s like watching the two minute highlights of a football match without understanding the tens of thousands of hours of coaching, training and history that led up to those few goals or even the other 88 minutes where both teams try and fail time and time again to score. And it leaves me feeling empty. In a recent study with over 600 respondents, only 8% of people thought that following the news had no impact on their mental health. Most thought the effect was negative and I think this is the crux of why last weekend felt so bad. I was caught in a vicious cycle, perpetually chasing the latest updates without ever gaining a true understanding of what was actually happening and why. It’s a situation I find myself in time and time again, this relentless focus on the immediate, an inability to see the bigger picture and the disregard for those deeper threads leaves me regretting – regretting the loss of my time, regretting the nice summer day I wasted in front of the telly watching BBC News. Over four-fifths of respondents to that study that I mentioned just now had actively switched off from the news in order to protect their headspace. And I’m one of them. I’ve not read or watched the news all week. I have no idea what’s going on. And I like that! It’s not ignorance or apathy. It’s seeking a more considered approach. It’s hunting the long-term narratives and appreciating the gradual transformations that shape our society. See news is to the brain what sugar is to the body. You can swallow limitless quantities of news flashes, tidbits like jelly beans, but these jelly beans don’t nourish you. They don’t give you understanding. Events, news events are just things happening flickering on the world surface. But to make better decisions you want to understand what drives these events, what generates these events. And news stories don’t tell you that. News give you the illusion of understanding and that illusion is dangerous. I came to realise, the more news you consume, the less you understand the world.

I turn 28 today. I always get really weird around my birthday. I think it’s because I am acutely aware of time passing in a very personal way. Like, New Years and Christmas and all of that, they’re all shared holidays – a birthday is quite isolating, isn’t it? I’ve been going for morning walks every day. They’re about 5k. They start just around the corner from where I live, in a little forest and when I exit that forest, I end up in a clearing, on the side of a hill… The very first day I did this walk, there were two little deer on the side of the hill. I wandered out the next day and there they were again! I started calling them my ‘deer friends’ – I don’t know if that’s weird or not – but on day three, they didn’t show up. I turn 28 today. Every year I do one of these little introspective calling cards; this is my third. The first was at 26 – I basically retreated back into myself. The second, at 27, was all about getting out there and experiencing this wonderful world we live in – I feel like I’ve certainly made good strides in that direction; every day I’m filled with awe. Now, at 28; it’s to stop looking. The second I stopped looking for the deer and stopped expecting them to be there was the same second they showed up again. It’s not just my deer friends. There are so many things in life like this. We embark on journeys and traverse paths and delve into the realms of possibility, all in search of that which we seek but – like deer darting through the forest the second they hear me – our aspirations can elude us the more we chase them. When we settle down, when we cease the hunt, in a weird way the world around us takes notice – I guess it’s a kind of surrender – and with a gentle gesture, it unveils its hidden treasures. Opportunities that once evaded our grasp now find their way to us. Every year I think about what I’ve learned the last and what I yearn for the next… I want serendipity. I want to feel like the universe conspires in my favour. It sounds so woo-woo – and I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again: I am not a religious or spiritual person. But I do love when the daunting labyrinth reveals a path illuminated by surprise. I turn 28 today.

A story that I have been working on for years has finally come to an end. In 2021, I came up with the idea of sending a radio programme to space. In 2022, we did it. It was called Mission Transmission. Two nights ago, in 2023, at what is known as the ‘Oscars of the radio industry’ – the ARIAS awards – I picked up not just one but two awards for it... One was Silver for ‘Moment of The Year’ making Mission Transmission the second best radio moment last year –– and the other was Gold for ‘Creative Innovation’. And with that, this beautiful project I spent months developing and years talking about is complete. The story is over. There are more people to say thank you to – KIDZ BOP and the team at Universal Music, DevaWeb – specifically Chris Stevens, the team at Carver PR, astronaut Tim Peake, Jon Lomberg, Peter Beery, everyone at the Royal Observatory Greenwich in London but specifically Victoria, the very talented people at Create Productions, the tens and tens of people that came onto the radio and podcasts to talk about the project, the lovely people at The Week Junior and Science and Nature magazine for talking about it so much, and obviously my close personal circle of partners and family and friends too. You and I will never know the destiny of that radio programme – we’ll never know whether it manages to reach alien life or whether it’s defined forever to float between the stars – but I think it says a huge amount about humankind that we dared to send it in the first place. And you – whether you were here from the start or are only just finding out about it – thank you for being a part of it too.

A story that I have been working on for years has finally come to an end. In 2021, I came up with the idea of sending a radio programme to space. In 2022, we did it. It was called Mission Transmission. Two nights ago, in 2023, at what is known as the ‘Oscars of the radio industry’ – the ARIAS awards – I picked up not just one but two awards for it… One was Silver for ‘Moment of The Year’ making Mission Transmission the second best radio moment last year –– and the other was Gold for ‘Creative Innovation’. And with that, this beautiful project I spent months developing and years talking about is complete. The story is over. There are more people to say thank you to – KIDZ BOP and the team at Universal Music, DevaWeb – specifically Chris Stevens, the team at Carver PR, astronaut Tim Peake, Jon Lomberg, Peter Beery, everyone at the Royal Observatory Greenwich in London but specifically Victoria, the very talented people at Create Productions, the tens and tens of people that came onto the radio and podcasts to talk about the project, the lovely people at The Week Junior and Science and Nature magazine for talking about it so much, and obviously my close personal circle of partners and family and friends too. You and I will never know the destiny of that radio programme – we’ll never know whether it manages to reach alien life or whether it’s defined forever to float between the stars – but I think it says a huge amount about humankind that we dared to send it in the first place. And you – whether you were here from the start or are only just finding out about it – thank you for being a part of it too.

I have a coin on my desk... It's a Roman denarius, about the size of a five pence piece (or about a dime in the US) and it's 1,800 years old. Holding this coin leaves me filled with a sense of awe. It's a feeling I've been searching for for as long as I can remember and only so often do I get to glimpse it. I guess I can only really describe it as a feeling of historical connectedness. I keep the Roman denarius on my desk and whenever I feel a bit bummed out about the state of the world I pick it up and I think about the person on it – stoic Emperor Marcus Aurelius – and I think about the stories this coin has and the other people, just like me, that have held it these past 1800 or so years... I feel like it's a bit of a faux pas to tell people on the internet where you live but you and I are friends and so – Graven Hill is this amazing self-development community. You can basically buy a plot of land and then build your own home on it. It's also the site of Alchester. "Alchester, which is now completely abandoned, was the largest town in Roman Oxford here. But what's perhaps even more exciting is that it started off as a fairly major military base" I live in modern-day Alchester. On my desk is that Roman coin. In all likelihood not, but perhaps the very same Roman coin that someone that once lived here once held. It's possible – there were people making their homes right here at the same time that these coins were in circulation. "Yes there certainly would have been coins of Marcus Aurelius in circulation in the later town. We do have coins right to the late 4th century. Marcus Aurelius obviously was emperor from 161 to 180. And silver denarii tend to have a fairly long circulation. So in Alchester we have silver denarii going back to roughly 150 BC, which was around 200 years before the Romans arrived at Alchester. They circulate for much longer than the base metal coins." What we do in life echoes through eternity... Okay, that's a quote from Gladiator – but I do feel the ripples of time echoes from the past reverberating into the present. Everyone I show this coin to is kind of amazed by it. Most people have never touched anything this old about 1,800 years as I say and it seems an almost impossibly large amount of time, doesn't it? I still don't know what that feeling is. That feeling of historical oneness, of connectedness, of feeling somehow personally addressed by the coincidences of history. This coin was a gift. Somehow, potentially, back where it belongs. I suppose it's a sense of sublimity. I'm still searching for the right word. But I do know that this tiny coin, a passive witness to almost two millennia of history, suddenly feels a whole lot heavier.

I have a coin on my desk… It’s a Roman denarius, about the size of a five pence piece (or about a dime in the US) and it’s 1,800 years old. Holding this coin leaves me filled with a sense of awe. It’s a feeling I’ve been searching for for as long as I can remember and only so often do I get to glimpse it. I guess I can only really describe it as a feeling of historical connectedness. I keep the Roman denarius on my desk and whenever I feel a bit bummed out about the state of the world I pick it up and I think about the person on it – stoic Emperor Marcus Aurelius – and I think about the stories this coin has and the other people, just like me, that have held it these past 1800 or so years… I feel like it’s a bit of a faux pas to tell people on the internet where you live but you and I are friends and so – Graven Hill is this amazing self-development community. You can basically buy a plot of land and then build your own home on it. It’s also the site of Alchester. Alchester, which is now completely abandoned, was the largest town in Roman Oxford here. But what’s perhaps even more exciting is that it started off as a fairly major military base… I live in modern-day Alchester. On my desk is that Roman coin. In all likelihood not, but perhaps the very same Roman coin that someone that once lived here once held. It’s possible – there were people making their homes right here at the same time that these coins were in circulation. Yes there certainly would have been coins of Marcus Aurelius in circulation in the later town. We do have coins right to the late 4th century. Marcus Aurelius obviously was emperor from 161 to 180. And silver denarii tend to have a fairly long circulation. So in Alchester we have silver denarii going back to roughly 150 BC, which was around 200 years before the Romans arrived at Alchester. They circulate for much longer than the base metal coins. What we do in life echoes through eternity… Okay, that’s a quote from Gladiator – but I do feel the ripples of time echoes from the past reverberating into the present. Everyone I show this coin to is kind of amazed by it. Most people have never touched anything this old about 1,800 years as I say and it seems an almost impossibly large amount of time, doesn’t it? I still don’t know what that feeling is. That feeling of historical oneness, of connectedness, of feeling somehow personally addressed by the coincidences of history. This coin was a gift. Somehow, potentially, back where it belongs. I suppose it’s a sense of sublimity. I’m still searching for the right word. But I do know that this tiny coin, a passive witness to almost two millennia of history, suddenly feels a whole lot heavier.

Vote: https://www.radiotimes.com/audio/radio/arias-vote-2023/ I have a favour to ask of you. Of all the days and weeks and months of radio broadcasting last year, a very small piece I made has been shortlisted as one of the best. As you probably know – because I’ve spoken about it quite a lot, last year – I sent the first ever radio programme into deep space. It was called Fun Kids Mission Transmission and it has been shortlisted as a Radio Times Moment of The Year. Now, you might think the Guinness World Record for ‘first radio programme beamed into deep space’ would be enough – and it is – but the Moment of The Year trophy does look beautiful and so… would you vote for me? Voting’s super simple, it’s literally one click – there’s no need to fill in a load of personal data. You just need to head to the Radio Times website and tap ‘Fun Kids Mission Transmission’ to vote. That’s it! Not only would you make my day but you’d also make the day of thousands of children around the world who trusted us to send their precious cargo – their hopes, dreams, and stories – to space. Voting’s open until April 18th, so don’t delay – go ahead and do it right now. Thank you.

There's a lot of AI stuff out there at the moment – a lot of gushing about whether AI is a good or a bad thing – a lot of amazement, and a lot of fear too. In amongst all of that noise, there's a whole world of quirky, fun uses for artificial intelligence – ones that perhaps leave us feeling slightly less threatened than ChatGPT. And so, since everyone's talking about AI, meet Endel. Endel is a company that creates an app and a technology that allows for people to experience functional, scientifically proven soundscapes. They're working on generative music; on music for functional means – music for relaxation, music for sleep, music for focus – but also using the power of sound as a medium. I've been using Endel for a few months and I love it. Endel is a good example of the ways in which artificial intelligence can help flesh something out. It's not entirely powered by AI, but AI fills in the gaps. "It's a very interesting topic because we use kind of a hybrid approach and we're not afraid of saying that. I know it's a buzzword to say that 'everything is powered by AI', but both the tech and the sound, we found that the best results come from being a bit more mindful about what tools we are using. We implement AI in crucial places. For example, we cannot create enough melodies, so we use AI in creation of some layers, for example melodies, for example chords, and some harmonic parts which are always evolving, which are always unpredictable, but still they are placed in a set of rules." Artificial intelligence feels relatively new. I understand the hype. It's fun, it's mysterious, and I think that's also what makes it somewhat frightening; it feels uncanny. AI is a black box that most of us don't understand and that's scary. It is scary when your intelligence is threatened by something you can't quite comprehend. AI's unknown is the moral panic of the moment. Are the robots coming for my job? "It's too radical to say big words about AI will replace everything. All those talks about singularity... let's put them aside." Humankind has been here before. People have always feared new developments in technology. Last century, technophobia somewhat weirdly manifested as a fear of free time. We're perpetually obsessed with our own obsolescence. Maybe it's a survival instinct – I don't know – but the prediction that the robots are coming is at least 60 years in the making. We keep making the same prediction – and sure, we're closer to that than ever before, but also pretty far away. "The more you work with AI, the more you understand that it's very stupid in a sense. It doesn't really understand what you're saying. And those linguistic models, which are a booming thing right now, it doesn't understand what you're saying to it, what you're typing to it. It understands a succession of symbols and it works according to those succession of symbols. We are very, very far away from actually replacing us human beings and the future of AI music is still further away because music is much much more than visual data." In all of this excitement and panic, we all seem to have forgotten that AI stands for artificial intelligence: artificially intelligent. A lot of the exports of AI that you and I are seeing today are kind of like magic tricks. They're a sleight of hand, an amusement ride, an oddity, and a brand new digital commodity.

There’s a lot of AI stuff out there at the moment – a lot of gushing about whether AI is a good or a bad thing – a lot of amazement, and a lot of fear too. In amongst all of that noise, there’s a whole world of quirky, fun uses for artificial intelligence – ones that perhaps leave us feeling slightly less threatened than ChatGPT. And so, since everyone’s talking about AI, meet Endel… Endel is a company that creates an app and a technology that allows for people to experience functional, scientifically proven soundscapes. They’re working on generative music; on music for functional means – music for relaxation, music for sleep, music for focus – but also using the power of sound as a medium. I’ve been using Endel for a few months and I love it. Endel is a good example of the ways in which artificial intelligence can help flesh something out. It’s not entirely powered by AI, but AI fills in the gaps. “It’s a very interesting topic because we use kind of a hybrid approach and we’re not afraid of saying that. I know it’s a buzzword to say that ‘everything is powered by AI’, but both the tech and the sound, we found that the best results come from being a bit more mindful about what tools we are using. We implement AI in crucial places. For example, we cannot create enough melodies, so we use AI in creation of some layers, for example melodies, for example chords, and some harmonic parts which are always evolving, which are always unpredictable, but still they are placed in a set of rules.” Artificial intelligence feels relatively new. I understand the hype. It’s fun, it’s mysterious, and I think that’s also what makes it somewhat frightening; it feels uncanny. AI is a black box that most of us don’t understand and that’s scary. It is scary when your intelligence is threatened by something you can’t quite comprehend. AI’s unknown is the moral panic of the moment. Are the robots coming for my job? It’s too radical to say big words about AI will replace everything,” says Dmitry from Endel. “All those talks about singularity… let’s put them aside.” Humankind has been here before. People have always feared new developments in technology. Last century, technophobia somewhat weirdly manifested as a fear of free time. We’re perpetually obsessed with our own obsolescence. Maybe it’s a survival instinct – I don’t know – but the prediction that the robots are coming is at least 60 years in the making. We keep making the same prediction – and sure, we’re closer to that than ever before, but also pretty far away. “The more you work with AI, the more you understand that it’s very stupid in a sense. It doesn’t really understand what you’re saying. And those linguistic models, which are a booming thing right now, it doesn’t understand what you’re saying to it, what you’re typing to it. It understands a succession of symbols and it works according to those succession of symbols. We are very, very far away from actually replacing us human beings and the future of AI music is still further away because music is much much more than visual data.” In all of this excitement and panic, we all seem to have forgotten that AI stands for artificial intelligence: artificially intelligent. A lot of the exports of AI that you and I are seeing today are kind of like magic tricks. They’re a sleight of hand, an amusement ride, an oddity, and a brand new digital commodity.

This is a story about how one of the US’s most iconic writers created a recipe for one of the most iconic US meals. My quest for this recipe has all the hallmarks of a Hemingway novel packed full of mystery and is set against the backdrop of war. And it all began with a single question. What’s the best burger ever? I’d found this burger recipe online, supposedly one from Ernest Hemingway and with the help of Hemingway Home and the JFK Presidential Library, got to the bottom of it. Hemingway spent a lot of his life divided between different homes. He lived in Cuba at this home, La Finca Vigia, from about 1939 to 1960. Hemingway shot himself in 1961. Relations between the US and Cuba weren’t too great at that time and his wife, Mary, needed help getting back into Cuba to reclaim some documents, some papers, some memorabilia. The Kennedy administration helped Mary get a special visa to get into Cuba and strike a deal where she would take as much as she could from the Finca in exchange for donating the house and what was left in it to the Cuban people. This recipe was among the documents left behind. She typed this recipe out for the Women’s Day encyclopaedia of cookery whilst Hemingway was still alive. You can find it at adamstoner.com/burgers. It’s a long and complex process, as you might imagine, featuring red wine and piccalilli, capers, and a bit of chemistry to mix up some discontinued ingredients. But it’s not hard to imagine, tucked away in his Cuban home and sheltered from the harsh sun, Hemingway and his wife and his young staff, all of whom called him Papa – that’s where the name of the recipe comes from – tucking into these burgers. These are the best thing I’ve ever eaten. And I am not kidding. This recipe, this burger, captures his journeys around the world, his ritzy personality, and the context in which it came to be, abandoned in the middle of a war-torn country, is incredibly Hemingway. Whilst these burgers humanise a man who’s become a legend, even the most mundane aspects of his life, like what he ate for dinner, have helped turn Hemingway into an icon. He was a master storyteller. And this unassuming sheet of yellowing paper is, in some weird way, yet another of his stories…

This is a story about how one of the US’s most iconic writers created a recipe for one of the most iconic US meals. My quest for this recipe has all the hallmarks of a Hemingway novel packed full of mystery and is set against the backdrop of war. And it all began with a single question. What’s the best burger ever? I emailed Hemingway Home and Alexa got in touch with me… So as we know, Ernest Hemingway is a well-known American author. But beyond that, he was an adventure seeker. He was a war correspondent. He tried every type of sport, fishing, boxing, checked out bullfighting, traveled all over. He really lived life to the fullest. I’d found this burger recipe online, supposedly one from Ernest Hemingway. Atlantic Constitution. 12th February 2014. Boston. Associated Press: Materials from the Nobel Prize winning author Ernest Hemingway’s Cuban home were available to researchers for the first time at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum. The collection includes car insurance for a 1941 Plymouth station wagon, a license to carry arms in Cuba, bullfighting tickets, and even a recipe from his fourth wife, Mary Hemingway, for Papa’s favourite hamburger. The recipe is in the archive of the JFK Presidential Library and one of the archivists, Stacey, was kind enough to answer my questions: You know, Hemingway spent a lot of his life divided between different homes. He lived in Cuba at this home, La Finca Vigia, from about 1939 to 1960. Hemingway shot himself in 1961. Relations between the US and Cuba weren’t too great at that time and his wife, Mary, needed help getting back into Cuba to reclaim some documents, some papers, some memorabilia. - (Alexa) Yeah, so like the story I’ve also heard to piggyback on that was she had to make a deal with the Cuban government, like give me the contents of our safe and I will give you the house. (Stacey) Hemingway’s widow, Mary Hemingway, needed to get back to Cuba to get all of Hemingway’s stuff out. He’d left his manuscripts, his correspondence, his book collection, a lot of his material was there. And the Kennedy administration actually helped her get a special visa to get into Cuba. She was able to kind of strike a deal where she would take as much as she could from the Finca, their home there, in exchange for donating the house and what was left in it to the Cuban people. This recipe was among the documents left behind. I was searching for something in their voice, in the voice of Ernest or Mary Hemingway, something that told me that this was their recipe rather than just something that they owned and used. And then I found it. Mary, his wife, wrote that they ate the hamburgers to fortify them for tramping through the sage-bush after pheasant, partridge or ducks in Idaho or Wyoming which they visited every autumn. She typed this recipe out for the Women’s Day encyclopaedia of cookery whilst Hemingway was still alive. It’s a long and complex process, as you might imagine, featuring red wine and piccalilli, capers, and a bit of chemistry to mix up some discontinued ingredients. But it’s not hard to imagine, tucked away in his Cuban home and sheltered from the harsh sun, Hemingway and his wife and his young staff, all of whom called him Papa – that’s where the name of the recipe comes from – tucking into these burgers. (Stacey) It’s kind of a unique recipe, but also it’s just such a way to humanise this person who can seem really sort of untouchable and how much the legend and myth has sort of overshadowed the man. And like, here’s, you know, he ate hamburgers like everybody else. So I think people find that really interesting and the recipe itself kind of makes you want to try it. These are the best thing I’ve ever eaten. And I am not kidding. This recipe, this burger, captures his journeys around the world, his ritzy personality, and the context in which it came to be, abandoned in the middle of a war-torn country, is incredibly Hemingway. So whilst Stacey is...

I have Andy Warhol: Polaroids on my shelf. Andy was obsessed with celebrity, he used to take photos of people all the time. As I was flicking through this the other day, I stumbled across a photo of Pelé, the footballer, who died at the end of last year. I don’t really know why but I thought that they lived in entirely different time periods. Maybe it was because Andy died younger than most or that Pelé simply lived into my own time period – or that I wasn’t expecting the world of an American artist and Brazilian footballer to collide on the pages in front of me. Warhol would take these pictures and later turn them into portraits. He said of Pelé that instead of having 15 minutes of fame, he’d “have 15 centuries” of it. When he was 7, Pelé purchased a radio and it was on that radio in 1950 that he heard the World Cup final. Brazil lost to Uruguay. Pelé’s father cried and Pelé promised him that he would win a World Cup. Eight years later, Pelé scores in the ninetieth minute. Brazil win the World Cup. Pelé’s love for the beautiful game inspired his legacy which lives on in the form of statues, documentaries, and in museums. You can see that radio set – perhaps the very thing that set him on his journey to becoming ‘The King’ – in Museu Pelé in Santos, São Paulo. ‘Polaroids’ is a time capsule, these photographs half of an incredible diary that Andy Warhol kept. The other, phoned in to his assistant every day for just over a decade. For over a decade, I’ve kept an audio diary – a journal – in the Voice Memos app on my iPhone. I’ve captured the voices of friends and family, of relationships past and present, of people no longer alive, of places that no longer exist, moments of frustration and genuine joy too. Keeping a journal is an amazing form of delayed gratification. You get very little from the process as you actually create entires – in fact, I probably look like an absolute nutcase, blabbing some thought into the record as I stroll down the street or waving my phone in front of people’s faces – but the magic comes from the legacy you leave yourself. This past month, I’ve been moving all of my journal entries from Voice Memos into Day One. They now carry the weather and their location, paired with photos and videos too. Now I’ve got a multimedia diary – audio at its core – spanning the past ten years; a map of my life over the last decade. As much of an achievement as diarising a decade is, I know the contents of those entries are probably of very little relevance to you. Pelé’s got a museum to commemorate him, Warhol’s got the same. This is a museum of the self – a personal time capsule – and listening back to these entries, there’s a theme. Diversity. Action. Adventure. Growth. Perhaps the most important theme is love. I can hear where I was years ago and experience again pure, innocent love for the life I lead and the incredible things I get to do… Like this month, I’ve been on private tours of the Musical Museum in London, the Oxford Castle and Prison, and the Story Museum too. I’ve been to a football game, I saw the latest Avatar film, and gone climbing in Bicester as well. On October 1st 1977, Pelé retired from football. Andy Warhol was at that game. Towards the end of that diary entry, he says this: Pelé played on one side, then on the other. When it started to rain, they passed out raincoats to the VIPs. And it was nice in the rain, it made it more exciting. 75,000 people there. Minutes after the final whistle, Pelé stood up in the Giants Stadium in New Jersey and gave his farewell speech: Ladies and gentlemen, I am very happy to be here with you in this greatest moment of my life. I want to thank you all, every single one of you. Love is more important than what we can take in life. Everything pass. Please say with me, three times — Love! Love! Love!

I have Andy Warhol: Polaroids on my shelf. Andy was obsessed with celebrity, he used to take photos of people all the time. As I was flicking through this the other day, I stumbled across a photo of Pelé, the footballer, who died at the end of last year. I don’t really know why but I thought that they lived in entirely different time periods. Maybe it was because Andy died younger than most or that Pelé simply lived into my own time period – or that I wasn’t expecting the world of an American artist and Brazilian footballer to collide on the pages in front of me. Warhol would take these pictures and later turn them into portraits. He said of Pelé that instead of having 15 minutes of fame, he’d ‘have 15 centuries’ of it. When he was 7, Pelé purchased a radio and it was on that radio in 1950 that he heard the World Cup final. Brazil lost to Uruguay. Pelé’s father cried and Pelé promised him that he would win a World Cup. Eight years later, Pelé scores in the ninetieth minute. Brazil win the World Cup. Pelé’s love for the beautiful game inspired his legacy which lives on in the form of statues, documentaries, and in museums. You can see that radio set – perhaps the very thing that set him on his journey to becoming ‘The King’ – in Museu Pelé in Santos, São Paulo. ‘Polaroids’ is a time capsule, these photographs half of an incredible diary that Andy Warhol kept. The other, phoned in to his assistant every day for just over a decade. For over a decade, I’ve kept an audio diary – a journal – in the Voice Memos app on my iPhone. I’ve captured the voices of friends and family, of relationships past and present, of people no longer alive, of places that no longer exist, moments of frustration and genuine joy too. Keeping a journal is an amazing form of delayed gratification. You get very little from the process as you actually create entires – in fact, I probably look like an absolute nutcase, blabbing some thought into the record as I stroll down the street or waving my phone in front of people’s faces – but the magic comes from the legacy you leave yourself. This past month, I’ve been moving all of my journal entries from Voice Memos into Day One. They now carry the weather and their location, paired with photos and videos too. Now I’ve got a multimedia diary – audio at its core – spanning the past ten years; a map of my life over the last decade. As much of an achievement as diarising a decade is, I know the contents of those entries are probably of very little relevance to you. Pelé’s got a museum to commemorate him, Warhol’s got the same. This is a museum of the self – a personal time capsule – and listening back to these entries, there’s a theme. Diversity. Action. Adventure. Growth. Perhaps the most important theme is love. I can hear where I was years ago and experience again pure, innocent love for the life I lead and the incredible things I get to do… Like this month, I’ve been on private tours of the Musical Museum in London, the Oxford Castle and Prison, and the Story Museum too. I’ve been to a football game, I saw the latest Avatar film, and gone climbing in Bicester as well. On October 1st 1977, Pelé retired from football. Andy Warhol was at that game. Towards the end of that diary entry, he says this: Pelé played on one side, then on the other. When it started to rain, they passed out raincoats to the VIPs. And it was nice in the rain, it made it more exciting. 75,000 people there. Minutes after the final whistle, Pelé stood up in the Giants Stadium in New Jersey and gave his farewell speech: Ladies and gentlemen, I am very happy to be here with you in this greatest moment of my life. I want to thank you all, every single one of you. Love is more important than what we can take in life. Everything pass. Please say with me, three times — Love! Love! Love!

January: I launch Mission Transmission – a project to send a radio programme to space. The UK KIDZ BOP Kids cover Coldplay’s My Universe – which has since been streamed 1.2 million times. Tim Peake lends his support to the project. I’m interviewed by countless journalists across the nation as they cover it and thousands of children head to the Fun Kids website to send us their hopes, dreams, and aspirations for the future. The 1975 and Greta Thunberg give us permission to use their song in the project which we intertwine with children’s voices… February: I write a piece for The Week Junior’s Science+Nature magazine all about multiverses and whether this universe might be one of many. In an event at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, six kids, KIDZ BOP, a host of Fun Kids presenters and astronaut Tim Peake slams a big red button and we send that radio programme to space. That same night, Russia goes to war in Ukraine. March: The US and UK announce a ban on Russian oil, while the EU announces a two-thirds reduction in its demand for Russian gas. April: Podcast Mysteries of Science wins Best Science & Medical Podcast and Best Launch at the Publisher Podcast Awards. May: I head to Copenhagen with Paul and Meg and spend three days in Malmo in Sweden for Radiodays Europe – my favourite talk from Jonas, the presenter of Songwriter. June: I move. The Queen’s Platinum Jubilee takes place. I watch a Whitney Houston tribute concert. July: The British Podcast Awards swing into town and Activity Quest picks up bronze in the very grown-up sounding Arts and Culture category. The first operational image from the James Webb Space Telescope, the highest-resolution image of the early universe ever taken, was revealed to the public. It shows thousands of galaxies in a tiny sliver of the universe – an area of sky with an angular size approximately equal to a grain of sand held at arm’s length. Looking at that image, we look back in time. A wave from the universe – light only just reaching Earth – from four billion years ago. August: I went to see Coldplay. I discover the work of Ryan Holiday and become engrossed in philosophy and stoicism. September: Queen Elizabeth II dies. We launch Mysteries of Science season four and kick off by chatting to an old pal, Tim Peake, and illusionist Derren Brown. Liz Truss is appointed Prime Minister of the UK. October: Rishi Sunak is appointed Prime Minister of the UK and inherits a burgeoning cost of living crisis. I got to feed giraffes. November: I got to pet a rhino! The world population reached an estimated 8 billion people. NASA launches Artemis, the most powerful rocket ever into orbit. The Orion capsule makes a close pass at the Moon, venturing further into space than any previous habitable spacecraft. James Webb looked outwards but Orion pointed home, capturing stunning photos of Earth from afar, our tiny blue planet suspended in the immensity of space. Like a grain of sand at arm’s length. Nothing but us. You and me. And the largest family portrait ever taken. The World Cup kicks off… December: I go to so many Christmas lights trails that I’ve entirely lost count… I take the technology we used to launch our radio programme into space in February and turn it into a business: sendamessagetospace.com I write a piece on the abominable snowman and end up on the cover of The Week Junior’s Science+Nature magazine. And I finish the year, right here, where I started it – home, with my parents, my family, full of gratitude (and food) and ready to go again...

January I launch Mission Transmission – a project to send a radio programme to space. The UK KIDZ BOP Kids cover Coldplay’s My Universe – which has since been streamed 1.2 million times. Tim Peake lends his support to the project. I’m interviewed by countless journalists across the nation as they cover it and thousands of children head to the Fun Kids website to send us their hopes, dreams, and aspirations for the future. UK radio station sending our voices into spaceRadio programme beamed into space for first time breaking recordEastbourne pupil helps launch radio show into space – and sets a new Guinness World RecordTim Peake sends radio show to spaceKIDZ BOP’s “My Universe” Is The Official Soundtrack For Fun Kids Radio’s ‘Mission Transmission’ Broadcast Into SpaceWe spoke to @funkids producer Adam Stoner about Mission TransmissionNever mind broadcasting to the nation, Adam Stoner prepares to broadcast to the UniverseAdam Stoner is set to become the first person in the world to send a radio programme into deep spaceAdam Stoner is hoping to make history and inspire the next generation of dreamers The 1975 and Greta Thunberg give us permission to use their song in the project which we intertwine with children’s voices… February I write a piece for The Week Junior’s Science+Nature magazine all about multiverses and whether this universe might be one of many. In an event at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, six kids, KIDZ BOP, a host of Fun Kids presenters and astronaut Tim Peake slams a big red button and we send that radio programme to space. Right now, it’s just shy of six trillion miles from from Earth; a quarter of the way towards Earth’s next star. It’s a programme about hope, about love, and about making a difference together. It’s a programme about being united, about making a change, about taking care of one another. It’s a programme about how amazing it would be if we found life somewhere else in the universe, about human accomplishment, achievement, and triumph against adversity. That same night, Russia goes to war in Ukraine. March The US and UK announce a ban on Russian oil, while the EU announces a two-thirds reduction in its demand for Russian gas. April Podcast Mysteries of Science wins Best Science & Medical Podcast and Best Launch at the Publisher Podcast Awards. May I head to Copenhagen with Paul and Meg and spend three days in Malmo in Sweden for Radiodays Europe – my favourite talk from Jonas, the presenter of Songwriter. I turn 27. June I move. The Queen’s Platinum Jubilee takes place. I watch a Whitney Houston tribute concert. July The British Podcast Awards swing into town and Activity Quest picks up bronze in the very grown-up sounding Arts and Culture category. The first operational image from the James Webb Space Telescope, the highest-resolution image of the early universe ever taken, was revealed to the public. It shows thousands of galaxies in a tiny sliver of the universe – an area of sky with an angular size approximately equal to a grain of sand held at arm’s length. Looking at that image, we look back in time. A wave from the universe – light only just reaching Earth – from four billion years ago. August I went to see Coldplay. I discover the work of Ryan Holiday and become engrossed in philosophy and stoicism. September Queen Elizabeth II dies. We launch Mysteries of Science season four and kick off by chatting to an old pal, Tim Peake, and illusionist Derren Brown. Liz Truss is appointed Prime Minister of the UK. October Rishi Sunak is appointed Prime Minister of the UK and inherits a burgeoning cost of living crisis. I got to feed giraffes. November I got to pet a rhino! The world population reached an estimated 8 billion people. NASA launches Artemis, the most powerful rocket ever into orbit. The Orion capsule makes a close pass at the Moon, venturing further into space than any previous habitable spacecraft. James Webb looked outwards but Orion...

I've been taking it easy in November (and will be doing the same in December) but that doesn't mean I've not been up to a lot. I've mainly been working on Send a Message to Space which uses the same technology we used to send Fun Kids' Mission Transmission programme into space in February. Get 50% off a message into space or a gift pack at sendamessagetospace.com until December 31st by using the code PODACST.

Get 50% off at Send a Message to Space by entering code PODCAST at checkout until December 31st 2022.