#41 - Christopher Treble: Gather with People Who Notice the Richness of Life

In this episode, Sam Bell speaks with Christopher Treble about the richness of long conversations, the generosity of curious communities, and what it means to keep reinventing throughout life.

Chris reflects on Network School breakfasts, a poetry session that opened unexpected depth, business timing, mentoring young people, chief of staff roles, hiking, travel, and food. This is a conversation about staying open, gathering with people trying to do good, and noticing what becomes possible when we arrive without too much fixed intention.

This episode explores:
• Network School as an antidote to bad news
• Breakfast conversations, poetry, first languages, and unexpected vulnerability
• Reinvention, curiosity, and refreshing the “pot-bound” parts of life
• Mentoring, business timing, and helping ideas find their moment
• Chief of staff / operator-partner roles, stakeholder patience, and moving ideas through organisations
• Hiking, wild places, India, France, Bistro Livi, and gastronomic stories

Guest bio:
Christopher Treble is Principal at Fiducial Equities L.L.C. He has built a long career across business, real estate, investment and contribution in California, and brings the perspective of a grandfather, traveller, reader, and lifelong learner originally from the UK.

Guest links:
• Chris Treble: https://www.linkedin.com/in/christopher-treble-59590116/

Chris' suggestions for you:
• CEO Express "lists everything for business so makes a great dashboard": https://www.ceoexpress.com/
• "John Cochrane is an economist who makes sense": https://www.grumpy-economist.com/
• "Apollo is a fantastic Art Magazine": https://www.apollo-magazine.com/
• "Louise  is really knowledgeable about [India] the country which she loves... the Wellness tab that has a plethora of places to go": https://www.louisenicholsonindia.com/
• "King of Kings" by Scott Anderson
• "The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom 1750-1925" by Herbert Gutman
• "The Night Manager" by John le Carré
• "1929" by Andrew Ross Sorkin
• "Breakneck" by Dan Wang

Conversation mentions:
• Network School: https://ns.com/samanthaleebell/invite
• Ivan Maltsev: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ivanxmaltsev/
• Corinne Proske's Natural Genius: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6kQg33UU62I
• VNTR Capital: https://www.instagram.com/vntrcapital
• Adam Tomas Pangelinan's Natural Genius: https://youtu.be/obwbhba3Y_g
• Bistro Livi: https://www.bistrolivi.com/
• Learn about the Chief of Staff role: https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/strategy-and-corporate-finance/our-insights/chief-of-staff-anatomy-of-the-role-in-eight-charts

Chapters:
00:00 Welcome and Chris intro
01:10 Network School breakfasts and big-hearted people
05:05 The poetry session and speaking in first languages
08:02 Curiosity, reinvention, VNTR and new contribution
11:48 The seven-year reinvention idea
15:14 Hiking, ageing, statistics and wild places
18:20 Mentoring, business, being yourself and timing
22:18 Chief of staff roles and helping ideas land
29:15 Food, travel, India, France and Bistro Livi

Explore further:
Explore Natural Genius: https://naturalgenius.com.au
Learn more about Sam: https://samanthabell.com.au
Subscribe to hear future episodes.

Credits:
Hosted by Samantha (Sam) Bell in Violet Town and Marin County, California, 24 February, 2026.
Produced at the Violet Town and Kiama offices, 24 February - 8 May, 2026.

Natural Genius Podcast https://naturalgenius.com.au

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:02

Welcome to the Natural Genius Podcast. We're here to help you tap into your natural genius. Let's go. There's so much to love about Chris from California, originally from Britain. He was a very charming and dear friend to see every day when we were at network school together last year. He's got a massive CV. He's been very successful in business and in real estate. He turned up to network school with an openness to learn about new initiatives and tech. I just found that so inspiring. To be like that in later years of life is impressive. To have that openness and that sweetness and excitement around others' lives. Enjoy hearing from Chris. Chris, it is an absolute pleasure to welcome you to the Natural Genius podcast. Thank you so much for your time.

SPEAKER_02 0:55

Well, it's my pleasure to be here. And uh it's strange not to have seen you or talked with you for so long that it's absolutely wonderful to renew the acquaintance.

SPEAKER_00 1:10

How lovely it was to hug each other first thing in the morning when some of us had just rolled out of bed and others had just gone to fitness and we met at the buffet breakfast at network school, and that sense of familiarity and family that we created by being together and the long, lovely conversations that we had. And how you managed to create that, and this view of tech bros is often not very attractive, but but the people that we met in this tech bro land was so many big-hearted people, and as we were talking before, it it started at the breakfast table for me, those morning hugs.

SPEAKER_02 2:17

Yeah, I agree. And the breakfast meetings were absolutely wonderful. Although I think what you sort of wind up bringing up in that is really in that cadre of people we met there, there were a lot of really beautiful people. Right? There were kind people, they were generous people, they were gracious people. But there was nobody who was actually rude or difficult, right? I mean, maybe there were a couple people who were careless, whatever. But uh, you know, we weren't perfect, but it was really a good atmosphere. And uh for me, coming in as the oldest person in the room and sort of acing out a couple of you um middle-aged people who thought you were old, it was like I had a bit of fun with with that, obviously. Uh but uh yeah, I I think I what should I say, it was to me the the good thing about it, it was the uh the antidote for the bad news about the world. Okay, because there were a lot of people there trying to do something good. Now, maybe what they're doing isn't good, maybe it's a dead end, maybe it's not but it doesn't matter, they were all focused on trying to do something worthwhile, and some of it you could see um remembering your own youth, how you you sort of saw something as being really amazing that really wasn't we can make jokes about that, right? But it didn't matter, it was it was good, and so the breakfast stuff was lovely, and you and I talked there about intentionality, and it was like for me a big part of it. It was good to turn up without intention, so you would hear a lot about other people and their intentions, and you even got a sense with quite a few people that they were speaking for how they saw themselves in the world or where they fit. Okay, that turned up a bit in the poetry thing. I mean, I was staggered, particularly by one person with a very, very intense poem. And you thought, oh my gosh, this person is they they seemed a bit severe when you met them in the hall, right? But then you're saying, wow, this is somebody with some real depth. Yeah, right. There were other people who were rather enigmatic, right? So, yeah, all kinds of things like that were wonderful, right?

SPEAKER_00 5:05

Oh, well said, and to give context about the poetry session, let's jump into that. So this was towards the end of your months there, Chris. I remember you going through sort of moments of going, oh, I must put this poetry session on. And as we arrive at Network School, the invitation is there to run workshops on anything that you're interested in, any topic. And this poetry session, you put on and you attracted quite the crowd of people, largely I I think largely men, from what I remember. And you started out, I think, with a poem of your own, and then people started doing their poems, and they had to declare if it was Chat GPT or another agent had helped them out. Then it came out from the group that people should do their poem in their native, in their first language, and it created such incredible depth of conversation and vulnerability and atmosphere. It was absolutely profound. I was so, so moved by it.

SPEAKER_02 6:09

Well, thank you for saying that. And it's it's funny. I mean, I thought it was lovely. I'm I'm not sure I um would have expressed it quite as uh as powerfully as you have there. But I I did think for a couple of people, because obviously I do remember I that a couple of people said they were just there to listen, they didn't want to express themselves, right? But in the end, I think absolutely everybody did sort of surprise me. A couple of people who you thought were going to be too shy or too constrained to actually get up. So it I that was interesting to me, and I think it is a sort of liberating form. I mean, some had that told me that way. I I haven't felt that necessarily for myself, but I suppose it it is somewhat, you know.

SPEAKER_00 7:00

There's the form, Chris, that we could spend time talking about, and there's also the the sweetness that came from people encouraging others to speak in their first language, and the pleasure, even not understanding certain languages, to hear people emote in their first language, and then to say it in English, and then to give even more flesh out a bit more as to what was missing in English. It felt fascinating. It didn't, it felt really just so so beautiful the way that cross-culturally people were sharing themselves. And you created that.

SPEAKER_02 7:46

Well, thank you. I mean, I I enjoyed it. I sort of wish I'd maybe done it earlier where we could have done it, you know, because we just did it once, right?

SPEAKER_00 7:53

But it's it's that's how I think it's I think and I think it's one of those workshops that will have stayed with people, Chris. I think it didn't matter when it was.

SPEAKER_02 8:02

Yeah, maybe. Well, we're almost up on a year now. I mean, April was when we were there last year, right? And you asked about sort of my motivation in going at all. Okay. And so, yeah, it was about curiosity, and but as much as anything, it was about uh reinvention. Okay, I mean I felt need to um uh what should we say, uh create uh new energy, new vision of how I move forward in life, right? So I've been looking for that. So I got a little bit of an impetus there, and then funnily enough, I so here's the what I think about intentionality. Okay, so while I was there, one of the Ukrainian lads there invited me to go to the GitX, a big tech conference a bit. And then he also wanted me to go to a meeting with an organization that was called I'm gonna say it was called Venture, but it had the vowels taken out of it, V N T N R. Okay. So I did, and it was a very interesting conference, and I went to the VNTR meeting, and that was basically an opportunity for people who were found as an invest investors to get together. Okay. I didn't feel powerfully moved by, but was sort of okay. And so I went to a couple more since I've been back in San Francisco, and increasingly I wasn't feeling positive about them. I I don't want to criticize it, I mean, but it wasn't working for me, let's just put it that way, very well. But then uh here in San Francisco in January, you have the JP Morgan Healthcare Week. Okay, so the VNTR guys had arranged a joint meeting with another organization called Building Legendary Professionals in Healthcare or something like that. Okay, so I went to this other meeting at a very nice club, and this other thing was it just hit a chord for me. Their notion is uh ask somebody if you can help them and then repeat. Okay, it was just it it's like not about pitching deal so much as are there connections that you have in that field where you can connect and you know help somebody in some way that you don't even realize at this point. So I uh so there we go. So that has got me launched on my new path because I wanted in the area, you know, I I've been involved in this biopharma stuff, and I don't know, I'm not well connected in that, okay? And so this I thought, okay, this is good. I'm gonna get myself more connected into that and be more useful in that. Yeah, I could have had a whole strategy of here's how I'm gonna do it, and I maybe wouldn't have happened. So sometimes you've got to let things come to you, right? And sometimes it's it's unpredictable, right? But interesting.

SPEAKER_00 11:16

You gave me goosebumps, actually, because you talked to that through the turn of events in the last year, you've opened up how you can have bigger ripple effects, perhaps, by being able to introduce people and connect people and also fill in more learning for yourself around biopharmaceuticals or biohealth. And I I think that's amazing that you were looking for inspiration or a different way of contributing in a work capacity.

SPEAKER_02 11:48

You know, you never fully know, right? I mean, but on the other hand, one thing that always made an impression on me was there was a dean of the business school I went to, okay. His name was Ernie Arbuckle, okay. And Ernie had this no this notion, he said, and he'd done it in his career. Every seven years, literally, he changed his career, okay. And he that was what he referred to as being reinvention. He said, This is just like we're all plants in a pot, right? And the plant grows and thrives for a while, but then after a while, you have to rip it out by the roots, you know, chop it all up and start it all over again, right? That's you you've got to do that every once in a while, or you become completely popbound. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, become pop-bound, exactly. Sorry. That's for the gardeners out there. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I mean, I think it's sort of a good analogy, right? It's like because it's it's not like you have to kill the plant and have a new one, right? It it is about reviving the fertilizer, breaking up the roots, getting different inputs, maybe moving it to a bigger pot, putting it in a different place. All those things are what we have to do with ourselves. We don't have to do them, is the truth, right?

SPEAKER_00 13:08

But every seven years we don't have to, but that's an interesting model that he had.

SPEAKER_02 13:13

Yeah. Well, that that I think probably related back to the movies from the human God, you're too young to know about that. There's a great movie called The Seven Year Itch. You've never heard of the Seven Year Itch? I have heard of it.

unknown 13:26

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 13:27

I've seen it though, Chris. Perhaps I should put it on my watch list.

SPEAKER_02 13:30

It it's a wonderful movie with Marilyn Monroe. And I forget who else, uh I forget the male.

SPEAKER_01 13:37

That's not the point. She stole that show, didn't she? Yeah. Or led that show at least.

SPEAKER_02 13:45

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 13:45

Yeah, keep telling me. So in Seven Year Each, you think that's that uh it was an ode, Ernie's ode back to the seven-year-each, was it?

SPEAKER_02 13:54

Well, I mean, I obviously that's just a marker, isn't it? It doesn't matter, it could be what I mean. You you learn a lot in your life. I mean, you have great skills at building organizations, being chief of staff, right? So it's like, okay, you you can't just say, oh, I'm now going to go and be um uh an artist doing this and forget about all that, because you've you've got that skill and that ability, right? But on the other hand, you do need to have some new inspiration. You can't just be doing well, is that I mean, you could just be doing exactly what you did before. And maybe for different people that works for different periods of time, but the world does change around us very dramatically, and we change and need to it makes sense to me that you have to go through those things.

SPEAKER_00 14:49

But and Chris, I want to talk a little bit about how impressive you were in the gym at network school. Now you were recovering, recovering from an injury and an accident, I think it was, and but yet you do you still run, you hike a lot. Tell me what you love about running and hiking and your history if you feel like I'm still getting out and hiking, right?

SPEAKER_02 15:14

I can't say um I'm running, I had a a meeting with a pal this morning, and we were he he keeps all the statistics, which I think is a mistake. So he was saying, Oh, I went and did this hike this morning I hadn't done for five years, and he I thought I was doing well, so I looked at what my time was doing it five years ago. You know what I mean? It's like, well, okay, why punish yourself like that, right? So um I mean, I can't, I you know, I used to be able to run whatever three miles or five miles, and and you know, not fast, but pretty decent. I can't do sustained running now. Um I am doing intervals. I'm hoping to get back to where I can do a bit more distance, but I'm uh now I'm mainly more hiking, walking than running, you know.

SPEAKER_00 16:02

And is there beautiful trails like that keep calling you back, Chris? Do you love certain trails around you there?

SPEAKER_02 16:09

Yeah, the trails are beautiful. We've got big there's a local mountain, Mount Tamil Pius, and a big part of it's the property of the water district, you know, because they collect the water for the you know use in the district. And so there's a couple of beautiful reservoirs, and uh, you know, they have good uh beautiful tree cover and parts and open parts with meadows, and there's lots of birds, and uh sometimes like one day we were up there hiking and we we came across a pack of coyotes, like five or six of them. Kind of scary actually, but a lot of times you'll see like a single animal. But one time we actually came across a of them meeting up, they seem and they were howling at each other, and then they sort of wandered off. But it's all it's always beautiful, you know, just beautiful.

SPEAKER_00 16:56

Chris, one time when I've I spent a bit of time in the south or southeast of Victoria, which is southeast in Australia. Um and I I oftentimes going to the same property would hear the wild dogs, and I never saw the wild dogs, and then one time I was in my car driving north and I saw the wild dogs and they looked wild. And then another time I was driving through the high plains or the sort of I mean, we call them mountains here, but they're not mountains compared to other places in the world, and I saw the Brumbies, the wild horses, and those moments like with the coyotes, uh, they're just I think I saw a cougar out of the corner of my eyes when I was in Canada one time, but those moments with wild animals, they're so magical.

SPEAKER_02 17:44

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I I actually I I just had a wonderful trip to India with my granddaughter and her guardian, okay? And we went to an area of India where the Abali Mountains, which are up in Rajasthan, where they have leopards. And so we got wonderful leopard viewing with uh two different mothers. One had three cubs and the other had two cubs. And the cubs were playing around, they climb up in the trees, they flop down, fall off, you know, catch up on another branch, all this kind of stuff. And it's just fantastic to watch these beautiful creatures, you know, doing this stuff.

SPEAKER_00 18:20

Oh Chris, how lucky we are. And tell me, if we talk about business for a moment there, Chris, you've been successful in many ways in business and in real estate. What do you find yourself passing on to people these days? What are the things that make such a difference that you might be passing on regularly to people? Wow.

SPEAKER_02 18:44

I've had a couple of young guys who I'm sort of I I don't like the term mentor, but I'm mentoring. Um, so it sort of depends where they're at, doesn't it? I've got one young guy who um Hispanic young man, and he's really I think he's smart. He doesn't have strong uh, you know, sort of education in terms of business law, what have you, but he's really you know good, and he's interested in uh real estate. And so I've been uh like what I've been encouraging him is like, you know, because you just get a lot of turn down. I mean, that's the worst thing, right, in business. You get rejected a lot, right? So it's mainly about okay, you gotta keep going, you can't take no. Um, okay, uh, and instead of responding on the internet, it's good to go to somebody's office and put your head in, even if they tell you no, you you can't have an appointment with anybody. The fact that you've gone in and done something, uh sometimes it gets you somewhere. So this young man has has actually got a couple of uh interviews that have come out of doing that. And I think it's different than just you know being on internet stuff, right? Um so a a lot to me is just I don't think it's about really it's not about trying to teach people, it's just encouraging them to keep doing things, right? You know, because they're gonna do it differently than you do it. And they have to find their own their own métier somehow, right? And of course, there's a couple of things you can say, like you certainly say, well, okay, you know, there's a lot of luck, right? And certainly, hey, it's helpful to go improve your skills. Uh you can say stuff like that, but in terms of getting really specific. One of the big things though I'm into right now is saying to people, hey, don't be homogenized and pastoral. I mean, they all look at the the stuff on the in like like you know, the you're supposed to use these hand gestures. No, no, no, no. You've got to figure out who you are and how you present yourself. Okay. So I've got a great story about that that I do tell young kids. Okay, it's like, okay, when I was early on in my career working for a real estate investment trust advisory company, I went on a trip to Washington, D.C. to meet with some people, you know, do some business, okay? Suit, tie, the whole you know, thing, right? Stay in the fancy hotel. I forgot to take dress shoes. So I turned up at my meetings in my tennis shoes, my trainers, right? Well, I mean, kind of embarrassing, but actually, of course, everybody who I dealt with back there remembered me because I was a person who turned up in the fancy suit and had bloody tennis shoes. Right?

SPEAKER_01 21:54

Well differentiating yourself without meaning to.

SPEAKER_02 21:58

Yeah, right. So that's I mean I think i i that so that's the whole point. You don't have to be uh you just gotta be a gotta be you. Don't you think?

SPEAKER_00 22:12

Well, I wouldn't be running a podcast called Natural Genius if I didn't agree with that, Chris.

SPEAKER_02 22:18

Oh, okay. So here you are, madam chief of staff. I never had a chief of staff.

SPEAKER_01 22:24

You didn't you I would have loved being your chief of staff there, Chris.

SPEAKER_02 22:28

I do you know, I think I would have resisted you horribly. You wouldn't have wanted because I think I I did once have a really good personal assistant who uh wanted to screen my calls and know what I was doing and where I was going and who I she was fantastic, right? But I realized I bridled against that sort of having somebody organize my life, right? And I think a good chief of staff, you do have to organize that life, right?

SPEAKER_00 23:04

I think well, uh if I can interject, the chief of staff roles that I've played have been a combin, like I like to look for where the gap is and where the value can be. So how does a business grow by filling the gaps or filling what I sense into around what it needs? And when you were talking about differentiation before, it was reminding me of I've never called myself a marketer, but I've done growth activities. And sometimes they have been walking into an office rather than doing stuff online, or deliver thinking about a special package to deliver somebody senior that's like so amazing that they want to take a meeting. So thinking broadly around how to actually grow a business, and so as a chief of staff, it's this beautiful combination of what you experienced of me at network school where it was building culture and building community and having people listened to and heard and felt loved, and sensing into the activities that the business needs to do and doing strategy and tactics. So sometimes it's projects, sometimes it's supporting leaders like yourself to get their flights organized. It depends on the size of the business it is. But it's yeah, it's always they're always been they have always been really fascinating, interesting, and diverse roles for me where I can jump in and do all kinds of things.

SPEAKER_02 24:43

Yeah, I I I have to imagine, I mean, I can't I I don't know I can really imagine how you navigate that role. Because you have to be working with people who have significant, uh let's say they have significant egos, be polite about it. Right.

SPEAKER_00 25:02

I've worked in management consulting for a lot of years. So yes, Chris.

SPEAKER_02 25:06

Yes, right. And so you're there, I mean, because obviously you are also somebody who has intelligence, you have experience, you have ideas, you have uh really you've got network, you've got all those things. And sometimes that I would think they have to be really strong disagreements with the person for whom you're chief of staff, right? And you've got to uh even if you've got you know typically a positive relationship, there would be times now, wouldn't that?

SPEAKER_00 25:48

And at the end of the day, sometimes uh we had a podcast recording recently with Corinne, who's this beautiful woman who's working now, she did a lot of work in social impact around finance, and now she's working in land restoration and uh doing amazing things in nature and with a whole group of interesting people. And she was reiterating that an idea has its time, and sometimes it's not meant to come to be. So, as you're talking just now, I'm thinking of a number of moments where strategically, and the start of the pandemic was one of those. Uh, I was working with a startup and I was trying to encourage the senior leaders to change a face-to-face, big rollout, big sales conference across India and Asia. I was trying to change their minds about changing it to face to sorry, to online rather than face-to-face. And I couldn't win that argument, and then in weeks to come, we ended up by changing it to online, which is not to say I was right, they were wrong. It was actually just people needed to come it, come to it in their own time. And as a chief of staff or as a support through a business, uh um whatever the role is called, there is that moment of having to like put your case forward, do it as best as you can, do stakeholder management and keep explain to people in different forums if needed, and catch them for a coffee or send them more information, those sorts of encouragements. But at the end of the day, sometimes an idea comes and sometimes it doesn't.

SPEAKER_02 27:26

Yeah, and I think the same is true, by the way, with investment opportunities. There's a time and the the timing thing is impossible to time, and yet timing is important. Ah, yeah, there's so many mysteries and no, it's really good conversation, right?

SPEAKER_00 27:44

I mean, well, and also, Chris, the wonderful thing about your and my discussions, as we know well from the breakfast table at Network School, they're far and wide ranging. And part of the impetus for this podcast is many initiatives that I've done through my career, which and many moments I've had in life, where I've had so many great conversations and walked away going, I wish they were recorded. And then also a number of elders that I've sat with, and sometimes indigenous uh elders in different parts of the world, and I've always been wishing that their wisdom was spread. And it's the same for you, it's the same for our friend Adam from Network School, it's the same for anyone of any age, where I wish that their wisdom and their natural genius, their the essence of who they are, is shared. So I think it's like whatever comes into these conversations is perfect, and the depth that you and I have reached already in a very short um moment in time is exactly what people are giving me great feedback about. They're saying that they're they want to just keep listening and then they'll say, Oh, I loved hearing about Chris's um perspective on hiking and statistics. And then, like, so anyway, do you want to talk about favorite food at the moment? Tell me about it.

SPEAKER_02 29:15

Well, you know, um uh food is really easy. I'm omnivorous. There are very few things I do not like. Now, I the the things I really do like. I mean, but you know, I I'm I'm real I like a very varied diet. Like I told you, I just got back from India. I love Indian food, right? Particularly South Indian. I'm not so much into the ghee and heavy stuff, but South Indian. And I'm not typically a vegetarian, right? And South is far more vegetarian. So, you know, how do you how do you deal with this? Okay, when I was in India this time, I went to one of my favorite places to go is is a place called Maheshwa on the Narmanda River, okay? And uh so there there's a beautiful uh uh old fort that uh belongs to the Holkar family, who were originally the rulers in that area, and Namandra is a sacred river, and there's a beautiful gatch there below the the fort. And uh so um while I'm there this time, there's an Irish couple there, which I can remember their name. Okay, she is like the Julia Child of Ireland, apparently, she's there. So she picked a couple of the desserts that we had with the meals, and it was she made a beautiful orange sort of uh flan kind of thing, okay? How did the point of baby did she end up in the kitchen? She I mean, because she she somehow they they have a an a natural farm in Ireland and they have a cooking school there, they're they're hot stuff in Ireland, and then so it's like, oh, okay, so this is great. I mean, so anything like that happens. Absolutely fabulous. I am not um that the only thing I'm not really keen on, things like refried beans and baked beans and stuff like that. But I like lentils, I like maybe some other kind of beans. I like, I really love, of course, French food. I love the sophistication of that. I love cheese. I could live on cheese, you know, not American cheese. There's hardly a decent cheese in the whole of America. I don't know about Australia. There are a couple of decent cheeses here.

SPEAKER_00 31:17

And I'm that reminds me, Chris, of your origin being from the British Isles and then coming across to California. So I guess living on a couple of different continents in your life, you would have the best of all, and loving the food from the Indian continent that you would have a wide-ranging palate.

SPEAKER_02 31:39

My my beautiful Kate, who I'll take you in to meet her shortly, um, because I don't know if you want to meet her in the podcast or off the podcast. We have you to just tell me whichever is best for you. So we'll do that.

SPEAKER_01 31:50

But the one depends on Kate, really. Well uh if you want to be on the podcast, I would love to meet Kate.

SPEAKER_02 31:58

Well, you you you can X her off if she doesn't want to be on there. But basically, um I I would say this partly in jest. She only has one shortcoming in life, and that is she's not really a foodie. Okay, so I'm a lot more into the food. Now, actually, she's quite a good cook. She can make some really wonderful meals, especially casseroles and things like that, which are really wonderful in winter, okay? And I have taken her to a couple of fancy restaurants, which she's really liked, but she would sort of just eat whatever was there, you know, and it's not important to her, right? For me, I like to go for something that is well presented and you know, on just good service, something like that. That's big for me, right?

SPEAKER_00 32:46

Chris, what is the most amazing, what are the most amazing dishes that you might have had?

SPEAKER_02 32:52

The best dish I ever had in my whole life was a Navarrin of Lamb.

SPEAKER_00 32:57

What's a Navaran of Lamb?

SPEAKER_02 33:00

It's it's like a one you can look it up on Google. It's a wonderful rich lamb sort of stew dish. Okay. And uh I had it at um the vineyard that uh uh that belongs to the Ross Isles, Chateau Mouton Rochilde. Okay, that's what they served for lunch when I went there. And I had it with a fantastic uh bottle. It was it, I forget what it was mouton or the other one. Anyway, fantastic lunch with this Navarin served, and it was extraordinary, okay. And the other thing I had one place in France, another place in France, I went where we had uh did you have black currants in Australia? Yes. Well, they don't have them in the USA. They have them in England and Australia. I love black currants. So one meal in France, I remember we had a dish that was just stewed, stewed black currants with cream. Ah, that's heaven.

SPEAKER_01 34:07

Do you you must have quinces there, Chris?

SPEAKER_02 34:10

Quinces are too mild for me.

SPEAKER_00 34:12

I think I'll tell you this. I had uh talking about simple dishes, I had stewed quinces in stewed in rose water with Greek yogurt on top that had some sugar put through it, and it was absolutely extraordinary.

SPEAKER_02 34:30

Yeah, so I I mean, see you didn't invite me when you were doing that.

SPEAKER_00 34:35

Well, I'll tell you another one. Sorry, Chris, sorry I didn't invite you. I'll tell you another one actually that just came to mind. There's a beautiful place called Bistro Livy, one of the most wonderful paradises in the world. And they had to create a new award for regional uh a regional venue because these guys were doing such great food, and they do it with local ingredients. And I had a deconstructed cream caramel, and it was local cream honey, and I had to ask the chef about what was in the honey, and it was balsamic vinegar.

SPEAKER_02 35:12

Oh, really? Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 35:13

And it just looked beautiful. It was basically it just looked like somebody had got a spoon into the cream, slopped it on their plate, and then drizzled it with this local honey that had the balsamic vinegar through it. And it was absolutely it looked beautiful. It tasted delicious. It was Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 35:32

So there we go. So maybe we'll um maybe we'll have a gastronomic uh uh um uh meeting at some point.

SPEAKER_00 35:40

Meetup. I just wanted to say a huge thank you. To be reunited is such a trait.

SPEAKER_02 35:46

Yes, it too, it was absolutely fabulous. I really enjoyed our session and I hope we have another one.

SPEAKER_00 35:53

Thanks for listening to the Natural Genius Podcast. Please share this with anyone who come to mind and visit us at naturalgenus.com.au. Thanks so much.