My friend Geoff and I started a podcast about two months ago and I wanted to officially promote it. It’s called Toast & Roast, and we talked about it for all of two days before deciding we’d actually give it a try and put in the effort. Lockdown in Sydney has lasted about two months, and it’s been extended for at least another month, and I guess this was our way of putting our time to creative use while staying connected.

The inspiration for the podcast came from Geoff and I having conversations that are characteristically Geoff and Georgie. Our friendship has always included a lot of “roasting”, and trolling and joking at the expense of the other person. We see eye to eye on a variety of social matters and are sometimes outspoken about trends, odd social behaviours, and the industry we work in (tech/software engineering/user interface engineering). The podcast became our space to rant about strange things and just generally talk crap and have a good laugh.

The podcast direction is largely unknown. We started with a list of topics to discuss, then decided that some of our regular unscripted conversations were entertaining material. I guess you never know what you’ll get with our episodes. The first one was a deliberate introduction, and across the eight episodes we’ve done since then, we’ve also talked about ill-fitting clothing, analysed an article about minimalism, and gotten nostalgic about food. We have a couple of quips in the podcast, like our outro including “stay chilly”, and my joke about “the big ____”, off the back of Geoff saying “you’ll find us on all the big ones”.

You will find us on all the “big ones”. 😀 We’re on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, and other platforms I largely don’t know the name of because I’m not well versed in the podcast world.

I guess that’s the funny thing – I’m not into podcasts myself. The only podcast I listen to regularly is Becoming Better, and I only really got into that because I was really into Chris Bailey’s work. That podcast has new episodes every two weeks, which is not as frequent as many others. Although I know of some podcasts being quite ad-hoc. I used to listen to Reply All and My Favorite Murder. I like podcasts in theory, but I just don’t enjoy them. I find that enjoying them really depends on how much I enjoy the podcast hosts’s speaking, and that honestly just varies depending on personal taste. 😅

The name Toast & Roast started as a group chat that Geoff and I had with a couple of other friends many years ago. The group chat became kind of inactive, and we sort of chat to each other individually but not as a group anymore. Geoff and I kept in touch over the past year before we started the podcast. We frequently saw each other in person because we used to run the codebar meetup in Sydney – but it unfortunately kind of dissolved with the way the pandemic affected the tech scene in Sydney, and we were not able to create the same environment virtually/online. The name for the podcast was no real question – we decided to go with Toast & Roast since it felt somewhat true to what we wanted to talk about and how our friendship is.

The graphics we used for the podcast were just things we threw together. Neither of us have current professional experience in graphic design. Just a bit of experience from back in the day, you know how it is. I basically put together a couple of images from free image sites. I suppose you could think of it as clipart but slightly upgraded. I think the idea has always been about toast or bread and being on fire, which, frankly, works. 🤷🏻‍♀️

Geoff joked that when we hit a hundred downloads he would pay a friend to make a better logo. Well, we’re genuinely surprised at having hit a hundred downloads already. 😅 I think the most baffling thing is that people want to listen to us “talking shit”. Like, sure, I personally rate our conversations as entertaining material, and I can assume other people find it interesting, but that is only an assumption and I can’t determine people’s taste for sure. For us, it was just about having fun creating the podcast, not so much about trying to please the audience. We don’t even have a proper target audience – all we know is that our podcast has explicit content because of some profanity, haha. I suppose the most important thing is that we’re doing this out of enjoyment, which is more than I can say for… maybe some people… tune into the podcast for more of this unapologetic roasting. (I have no idea who I was roasting there, but there you go.)

A couple of the episodes have messed up audio, but since this is just a “passion project” and honestly not something we’re doing extremely professionally, I didn’t fork out money on a proper microphone. It could be a possibility in the future, depending on how the podcast goes. We have been recording with Apple’s Voice Memos, and that actually works really well for me because the sound quality is quite good. 👀 I guess I advocate for Voice Memos because I actually recorded my music EP on my iPhone back in 2012 and even that was fantastic, given that it was almost a decade ago now, and you can guarantee that recorded audio quality is much better in 2021. I think that what we have suffices for now.

The podcast has been fun. We have been trying to release an episode every Monday. Weekly works kind of alright for us since we don’t have too many other commitments to worry about, but we’re still ironing out hiccups as we learn things along the way. We’re not always good about editing or transcribing on time, or even using social media properly. 😂 For the most part, we have a regular recording schedule, so I guess we’ll just take it one thing at a time, huh?

I hope you enjoy our rambles, banter, and talking shit. 😆🍞🔥 We’re on Instagram and Twitter as well, but Twitter is where you can best reach us to give any feedback. That’s about all I wanted to plug for today. I don’t think there’s much point forcing or explaining more – but I do hope you check out our podcast! We are proud to have hit ten episodes as of yesterday. I’ve plugged the latest episode below. 💖