The Big Soup

What’s This Podcast
About?

Greetings traveller, sit down and let me get you a bowl of The Big Soup where we dip the ladle into life’s simmering cauldron of ideas, concepts and conversations. This isn’t about sugar coating the challenges we face awakening and seeking an aligned life in a weird spacetime, where cretins pose as croutons. This is about savouring the nuances of life’s flavours and exploring their textures. Why ‘The Big Soup’? Life is the big soup, everything is an ingredient but not all flavours are meant to go together! Your base broth may be different, but sometimes you’ve got people insistent on throwing in their flavours where they don’t belong, especially if their taste buds are used to a dominion of bland, boring, beige and belligerent textures. We want flavour. Texture. Nuance. Balance and a delicate dance between influences to create a harmony that tingles the tastebuds of the mind. This isn’t about walking past the soup-pot simmering and taking a whiff then claiming you’ve got a measure of it. This is about taking a sip, a slurp, dunking the bread and saying YEAH BWOIS. (This is a technical term). What to expect: Open conversation - unscripted, no stale bread ideas forcing themselves into the bowl. Forward thinking openness - the past already happened, we are here to create an expansive future. Not one that is based on an imagined vision of a rose-tinted past. We have to move on. Big ideas in smaller portions - because we approach life and the world expansively but take things step by step. Tangents - what is life without its meandering strolls down the avenues of the mind?Your Soup Server (Host): Alastair Ballentyne - someone who got bored of bland chat, recycled ideas, driven by curiosity and a desire to create mischief for a higher purpose. Always on the search for the best ingredients, interesting flavour combinations and something stimulating to the senses. All of it underpinned by a desire to talk, laugh, examine and challenge the things we cling to in life. Why you’ll love (or at least claim to): Kickflip the table - not your table, that would be inadvisable, but the tables we were raised to desire a seat at are no longer fit for purpose or function in this world. So let’s flip them with style and panache. Joining the dots - the world is more interconnected than we are lead to believe, that is something at the heart of this podcast’s mission to dive into A license to weird - consider the big soup your power juice to unleash your inner weirdo, go against the grain, you may not have listened yet but we’re already your big cheerleaders. Subversive and suggestive - the world needs some new flavour shakers, and in times that lack nuance, a way through it all is to get right down into the tiny cracks others may choose to ignore. Who will enjoy ‘The Big Soup’? You are bored of echo chambers claiming to be upholding ‘free speech and ideas’ You are hungry for ideas You believe that most ‘deep talk’ is so shallow it may as well be a puddle You believe life is too short for anything without flavour You like the sound of my voice You are a cool person

Podcast Copyright

Alastair Ballentyne 2025