Sam Wollaston
speaker
167 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2026
last heard 29 Jun
Sam Wollaston’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.
Appearances
He had no training as a journalist, but he wrote about tech for business mags in Sweden and went to like tech conferences and things like that.
And this is in the 1980s, so.
This was in the 1980s, so whatever the tech was in those days.
But then he got interested in gardening and not just interested, but he decided to learn all about it.
So he took himself to Edinburgh.
So he didn't finish his course, and there's a bit of a pattern there.
He quite often starts things and doesn't finish, but he didn't finish his course, and he went to America.
And in California, he met John Markoff, who was a New York Times tech writer, and he started doing some work for him.
While he was there, he met the Economist's correspondent in California who told him that there were some jobs going in London, and he agreed.
came to London and ended up getting a job as a fact checker at The Economist.
It wasn't a permanent job and he was working remotely and he was living on a small sailboat in an Essex estuary in a place called Malden.
Around about the same time, his boat was damaged in a storm and things sort of started going wrong for him.
He went freelance, but he describes himself as a freelancer with no commission and no desk.
He ended up living in a tent in North London, which was the kind of beginning of his homelessness.
Yeah.
He wasn't.
He wasn't doing anything about it himself.
But someone, he was actually living on a cricket ground and someone else got in touch with Streetlink, which is the organisation that kind of puts people who are sleeping rough in touch with people who can help him.
What, you mean as soon as you went in, you were evicted?
Yeah.
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