Latest / The You Project / #2171 A Life Well Lived - Chris Rhyss Edwards

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#2171 A Life Well Lived - Chris Rhyss Edwards · The You Project

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: Good a team. It's Harps. Who else would it be?
• 0:01
  Speaker 2: You? Hope you're having a bloody I was going to
• 0:03
  Speaker 2: say bloody good week. Oh no, we're we're recording this Friday,
• 0:06
  Speaker 2: but this will be up now. Yeah, So have a
• 0:08
  Speaker 2: good week if it happens to be the weekend, have
• 0:10
  Speaker 2: a good one of them as well. Today I'm chatting
• 0:12
  Speaker 2: with the man I just met twenty minutes ago. He's
• 0:14
  Speaker 2: a ripper. Let's just jump right in. Chris Reese, Chris
• 0:18
  Speaker 2: Reese Edwards, Hi.
• 0:19
  Speaker 1: Mate, how are you.
• 0:21
  Speaker 3: I'm good, Craig, good to be here.
• 0:23
  Speaker 1: I need to get my head around your name.
• 0:25
  Speaker 2: Because I mean looking at it for the last day
• 0:27
  Speaker 2: or two thinking it was Chris Rees Edwards, but it's
• 0:31
  Speaker 2: Chris Reese.
• 0:32
  Speaker 1: Is your first name? Correct?
• 0:34
  Speaker 3: Yeah, that's correct. And the funny thing is our family
• 0:36
  Speaker 3: heritage is Welsh and my ree is Rhibles, which was
• 0:40
  Speaker 3: actually a typo by the government on my birth certificate.
• 0:43
  Speaker 2: So I've had to wear that my whole life, well
• 0:46
  Speaker 2: where it is a badge of honor because it's a
• 0:48
  Speaker 2: cool name. So we're going to get to kind of
• 0:53
  Speaker 2: your career stuff and your writing and your research and
• 0:56
  Speaker 2: all of the the high level STUF.
• 1:00
  Speaker 1: But let's start at the beginning.
• 1:02
  Speaker 2: So, and also you were a soldier as well, which
• 1:06
  Speaker 2: is thank you for your service. That's fucking amazing. Where
• 1:10
  Speaker 2: did you start, Where did you grow up? Where were
• 1:12
  Speaker 2: you born?
• 1:13
  Speaker 3: I was born in Dana, actually not too far from you,
• 1:15
  Speaker 3: but I was only there for a few weeks because
• 1:17
  Speaker 3: I was born early. It was in a umni crip
• 1:19
  Speaker 3: and had to be kind of moved into state to
• 1:21
  Speaker 3: better hospitals. So I kind of grew up around Northern
• 1:23
  Speaker 3: Rivers blener byron Ostinville. Grew up in a retirement village
• 1:27
  Speaker 3: of about six thousand people, with the every dage over seventy.
• 1:30
  Speaker 3: So the moment I could join the army, I was
• 1:32
  Speaker 3: in I was off down to Aubrey Donga and yeah
• 1:35
  Speaker 3: they got me rolling.
• 1:37
  Speaker 2: You must have been the youngest retiree and the history
• 1:39
  Speaker 2: of retirees. Why are you in a retirement I mean,
• 1:42
  Speaker 2: you can't just say I grew up in a retirement village.
• 1:45
  Speaker 1: You've got to extrapolate on that. What's that about?
• 1:48
  Speaker 3: Oh, if you've got to be mean? Okay, fine, No,
• 1:51
  Speaker 3: it's actually my parents when they split when I was twelve,
• 1:53
  Speaker 3: we were below the poverty line. So the only council
• 1:56
  Speaker 3: housing available was in a retirement village, right, Yeah, so
• 2:00
  Speaker 3: there was basically the youngest people in town were all
• 2:02
  Speaker 3: the skills students. There's only about one hundred and fifty
• 2:04
  Speaker 3: of us, but yeah, pretty much it was people went
• 2:06
  Speaker 3: there to die. And now if you look at Ulsteronville
• 2:09
  Speaker 3: and those kind of places, they're our hobby Farm's worth
• 2:11
  Speaker 3: two million dollars back from the day. It's incredible how
• 2:14
  Speaker 3: that's all changed. But it was a good time. It
• 2:17
  Speaker 3: was nice and simple. We rode BMX bikes. Mom kicked
• 2:19
  Speaker 3: you out and the sun came up, expected you when
• 2:21
  Speaker 3: the sun went down, and life was simple. It was good.
• 2:25
  Speaker 1: How long were you there? When did you? Was your
• 2:28
  Speaker 1: first job in inverted Commas the Army?
• 2:31
  Speaker 3: My first job I got paid for was driving a
• 2:32
  Speaker 3: train at Nocro Castle, which is a fun park on
• 2:35
  Speaker 3: the road up to Byron Bay. So it was a
• 2:37
  Speaker 3: converted right on lawnmower with two carriagters behind it, and
• 2:40
  Speaker 3: I got paid I think ten dollars an hour to
• 2:42
  Speaker 3: drive that for about four or five hours on weekends.
• 2:45
  Speaker 1: There's worse job. There's worse jobs than that. When you're
• 2:47
  Speaker 1: a teenager, bro Oh yeah.
• 2:49
  Speaker 3: July, I was mowing lawns and doing a lawn that
• 2:51
  Speaker 3: was basically an acre and a half or two acres
• 2:53
  Speaker 3: for twenty dollars. Plus I had to bring my own gas,
• 2:56
  Speaker 3: so driving a train was a step up. And then
• 2:58
  Speaker 3: I moved to the military, and I turned out I
• 2:59
  Speaker 3: was only a hell of a lot less out for
• 3:01
  Speaker 3: my outputs, but I got to serve my nation.
• 3:04
  Speaker 1: And you got to play with weapons. How old.
• 3:07
  Speaker 3: So we had the big weapons, so we had a
• 3:09
  Speaker 3: lot dooy stuff that blow up mountains and things. It
• 3:11
  Speaker 3: was awesome.
• 3:13
  Speaker 2: So now I'm jealous. Five minutes and I'm jealous. Yeah,
• 3:19
  Speaker 2: what is that fascination blokes have with blowing shit up?
• 3:23
  Speaker 2: How old were you when you went into the Army?
• 3:25
  Speaker 3: Seventeen? Just after I actually just before I turned eighteen.
• 3:27
  Speaker 3: So when I landed on Barracks, I was eighteen. I
• 3:29
  Speaker 3: signed up when I was seventeen and went down to Auby.
• 3:32
  Speaker 3: Wouldn't get to train at Army your prentice school. You
• 3:34
  Speaker 3: have to have a trade, of building trade to be
• 3:36
  Speaker 3: an Army engineer. So I was trained as a plumber
• 3:39
  Speaker 3: and the basics of a carpenter, and then you go
• 3:41
  Speaker 3: up to Sydney to School of Metlchre Engineering, and that's
• 3:43
  Speaker 3: where they teach you to blow shut up, and you're
• 3:45
  Speaker 3: playing with mines and deck cord, solid exploses, rocket launches,
• 3:51
  Speaker 3: jumping out of planes, all the kinds of good shit
• 3:52
  Speaker 3: that you joined the military for.
• 3:54
  Speaker 2: And you don't even pay for it, and you get
• 3:56
  Speaker 2: paid for it obviously not that well apparently, but I'm
• 3:59
  Speaker 2: sure the pay got that are over the years. What
• 4:03
  Speaker 2: was your motivation for joining the army. I feel like
• 4:07
  Speaker 2: a lot of people go into the army for a
• 4:09
  Speaker 2: myriad of different reasons, not always I want to serve
• 4:13
  Speaker 2: my country, although they realize that's involved, and like some
• 4:17
  Speaker 2: people it's almost like a not a safety net, but
• 4:21
  Speaker 2: it's almost like the best option.
• 4:23
  Speaker 1: That they have. Or for other people it's more altruistic.
• 4:27
  Speaker 1: What was it for you?
• 4:28
  Speaker 3: It's a trying but actually, I mean, you don understand
• 4:30
  Speaker 3: part of this because you've trained and trained with professionally
• 4:33
  Speaker 3: fit people, right, there's something about being in the middle
• 4:35
  Speaker 3: of that next where it's just testosterone and alpha and
• 4:38
  Speaker 3: you're just going on, right. You just you're required, especially
• 4:41
  Speaker 3: as combat units, you're required to be ready to go
• 4:44
  Speaker 3: in you know. Now, I was noticed to move, so
• 4:46
  Speaker 3: you're always going to be fit, You're always going to
• 4:47
  Speaker 3: be disciplined and focused. So that was definitely a part
• 4:50
  Speaker 3: of it, because I've just learned how much I enjoyed
• 4:52
  Speaker 3: running a couple of years before. So I've been running
• 4:54
  Speaker 3: now forty years and I've worked out I wasn't a sprinter,
• 4:57
  Speaker 3: I was a distance runner. And then when I got
• 4:59
  Speaker 3: to the military, it just really really helped because you
• 5:00
  Speaker 3: get a lot of respect if you really fit. And
• 5:04
  Speaker 3: I think the biggest motivation, the two motivations that have
• 5:07
  Speaker 3: really thrown me over the past few years of thinking
• 5:09
  Speaker 3: about them, I joined because my dad was He told
• 5:12
  Speaker 3: me he was a Vietnam bet and we found out
• 5:14
  Speaker 3: after he died he'd only done National service. So I
• 5:16
  Speaker 3: was trying to follow in the family footsteps. But the
• 5:19
  Speaker 3: only thing my mother went from being basically a beaten
• 5:24
  Speaker 3: housewife during the eighties to leaving him and with three kids,
• 5:27
  Speaker 3: and then she basically ended up in local government. She
• 5:30
  Speaker 3: was elected to the Council of Balmasheire, She ended up
• 5:33
  Speaker 3: in a federal remuneration tribunal, and she showed my sisters
• 5:36
  Speaker 3: and I the value of service in a very different
• 5:39
  Speaker 3: way into what. I kind of understood it so much
• 5:42
  Speaker 3: so that when I was fifteen, I was in an
• 5:43
  Speaker 3: English class and the teacher said, divide a piece of
• 5:46
  Speaker 3: paper into four boxes and write in each of those
• 5:49
  Speaker 3: boxes one thing you think to be true. And in
• 5:51
  Speaker 3: the second box, I wrote down I'd give my life
• 5:54
  Speaker 3: to protect another life. And she came up and she
• 5:56
  Speaker 3: put a red cross through it. She goes, you're being dramatic,
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  Speaker 3: this is bullshit. And a couple years later, I'm in
• 6:01
  Speaker 3: the military, right, But I think the one thing that
• 6:03
  Speaker 3: I can say with wholeheartedly because during the eighties, when
• 6:06
  Speaker 3: they were recruiting soldiers, they were looking for guys from
• 6:08
  Speaker 3: broken homes who would follow strong leaders. They wanted a
• 6:10
  Speaker 3: dad I wanted to kill. I wanted to know if
• 6:13
  Speaker 3: I could. I wanted to actually be in an environment,
• 6:15
  Speaker 3: in a situation where I could actually test my ultimate metal,
• 6:18
  Speaker 3: which is the horriblest thing to actually say, and I
• 6:20
  Speaker 3: wrote a book about this back in twenty fifteen, But
• 6:22
  Speaker 3: I wanted to understand that human impulse to actually have
• 6:26
  Speaker 3: that much power to an extent, because I've been a
• 6:29
  Speaker 3: victim with an alcoholic father, so I didn't have to
• 6:32
  Speaker 3: which is fantastic I'm really quite proud of that. But
• 6:35
  Speaker 3: it was a good eye opener. That was definitely a
• 6:37
  Speaker 3: motivation a lot of guys. There was guys still going
• 6:39
  Speaker 3: into the military when I joined that we're told by
• 6:41
  Speaker 3: the courts you're going to Jailu're going to the military.
• 6:43
  Speaker 3: So all of the reasons you listed before all true.
• 6:47
  Speaker 1: Yeah, Wow, there's a conversational opener.
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  Speaker 2: I wanted to see if I could kill Yeah, don't
• 6:54
  Speaker 2: lead with that, mate, that's just my advice.
• 6:56
  Speaker 3: I have to change that for my Tinder profile.
• 6:59
  Speaker 2: But you know, yeah, good Look, I'm no relationship expert,
• 7:03
  Speaker 2: but yeah, maybe, Ah fuckingh.
• 7:08
  Speaker 1: You know what's interesting, I don't know shit about.
• 7:12
  Speaker 2: You know, compared to what you know about the military,
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  Speaker 2: But I'm fascinated with it. I'm fascinated with the men
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  Speaker 2: and women that serve and put themselves in harm's way
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  Speaker 2: voluntarily and all the great stuff.
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  Speaker 3: Right.
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  Speaker 2: But you know, for me, when when I've had quite
• 7:30
  Speaker 2: a few friends and have quite a few friends who
• 7:32
  Speaker 2: have served, and it seems like the fundamental requirements are
• 7:40
  Speaker 2: I mean, you need discipline, you need self control, you
• 7:42
  Speaker 2: need courage, you need to have resilience, you need to
• 7:47
  Speaker 2: do shit that you don't want to do, but you
• 7:49
  Speaker 2: have to do because that's what the situation, job, task
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  Speaker 2: role requires.
• 7:55
  Speaker 1: And you know, weakness is you.
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  Speaker 2: Know whatever that means, or inability to do hard things
• 8:03
  Speaker 2: at hard times in hard places that can't really happen,
• 8:08
  Speaker 2: and also the willingness just to do the work when you.
• 8:11
  Speaker 1: Don't want to do the work.
• 8:14
  Speaker 2: Now we live in a time when those things are
• 8:17
  Speaker 2: not So I'm not saying they've disappeared, they haven't, but
• 8:21
  Speaker 2: it seems like, you know, resilience and that and you know,
• 8:28
  Speaker 2: courage and a capacity to do hard shit that we
• 8:32
  Speaker 2: don't want to do, but it's the shit that needs
• 8:34
  Speaker 2: to be done to create the result. Seems like that's diminishing.
• 8:39
  Speaker 2: Oh go, what are your thoughts around that? Like when
• 8:42
  Speaker 2: you went in, which was a long time ago, it
• 8:44
  Speaker 2: was a very different culture and way of thinking and
• 8:47
  Speaker 2: versus now where people get offended because somebody looks at
• 8:52
  Speaker 2: them sideways and we've got to go into a three
• 8:55
  Speaker 2: hour meeting about this. I'm not trying to be insensitive,
• 8:58
  Speaker 2: but it just seems a very different kind of dynamic
• 9:02
  Speaker 2: that we're in now.
• 9:03
  Speaker 3: Yeah, it's interesting, and it's a great question too, because
• 9:06
  Speaker 3: every generation has its own default settings, right, Like the
• 9:09
  Speaker 3: Baby boomers, property was the thing you had to do.
• 9:11
  Speaker 3: You've got a lifetime job, you've got a gold watch,
• 9:13
  Speaker 3: you've got your kids off to the university and out
• 9:15
  Speaker 3: to the world. And we had different codes of conduct,
• 9:19
  Speaker 3: you know, back in we were raised to be resilient
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  Speaker 3: by default. I mean, when you fell off a bike
• 9:23
  Speaker 3: when you were fourteen and you broke something, unless it
• 9:25
  Speaker 3: was really broken, you mun put a band aid on it.
• 9:27
  Speaker 3: You started it up into it, right, And I think
• 9:30
  Speaker 3: things like courage. Courage is a really interesting as a
• 9:33
  Speaker 3: debate because you spent a lot of time in the
• 9:35
  Speaker 3: military afraid, and that's part of the training doctrine. You've
• 9:38
  Speaker 3: got to be afraid to actually understand what you're coming
• 9:40
  Speaker 3: up against. And I look at the military now. So
• 9:43
  Speaker 3: when I left at the end of the nineties and
• 9:45
  Speaker 3: I'm still stay engaged with a bunch of veteran communities.
• 9:49
  Speaker 3: I was trained by Vietnam vets. So these guys have
• 9:52
  Speaker 3: been bloody, they've been to war, they've lost troops and everything.
• 9:54
  Speaker 3: And then it went to peacetime trainers, right, and they
• 9:57
  Speaker 3: say that soft times create soft soldiers, great heart soldiers.
• 10:01
  Speaker 3: So I was in during a really big peace time.
• 10:02
  Speaker 3: I got to serve briefly as a peacekeeper in the
• 10:04
  Speaker 3: South Pacific during the mid nineties, but it was a
• 10:07
  Speaker 3: very different culture where if you fucked up in front
• 10:10
  Speaker 3: of your sergeant or your DS, you go at the back,
• 10:12
  Speaker 3: you take your rank off of your shirts and you'd
• 10:14
  Speaker 3: punch on until someone got the message. And now up
• 10:18
  Speaker 3: till recently a couple of years ago, at Kapuka, which
• 10:20
  Speaker 3: is our training battalion, you could be being trained and
• 10:24
  Speaker 3: if you didn't like what was being said and you
• 10:26
  Speaker 3: were asked to volunteer for something, you can hold up
• 10:28
  Speaker 3: a yellow card or a red card and say no,
• 10:30
  Speaker 3: I don't want to play. And I was just wondering
• 10:32
  Speaker 3: when that first came out, we heard about that, So
• 10:34
  Speaker 3: what would the Taliban say if you stood up in
• 10:36
  Speaker 3: the middle of a five held up a ring And
• 10:38
  Speaker 3: so we sat there and just think, Look, I think
• 10:41
  Speaker 3: every generation has to get wiser than the generation before
• 10:43
  Speaker 3: them in a lot of ways. I think the generation
• 10:46
  Speaker 3: today the specially, they're really young ones with all the
• 10:48
  Speaker 3: technology they've grown up with, not knowing what's true anymore,
• 10:51
  Speaker 3: not having the same focus on doing something purposeful, not
• 10:54
  Speaker 3: being as close to family, being more socially isolated than
• 10:57
  Speaker 3: ever before, probably not going to have jobs because of
• 11:00
  Speaker 3: must be fucking terrifying. So I mean, I harken back
• 11:05
  Speaker 3: to simpler times, but at the same time, I also
• 11:07
  Speaker 3: deeply respect the times we're in. I mean, one of
• 11:09
  Speaker 3: the last books I wrote was called The Woke Paradox.
• 11:12
  Speaker 3: It was about how wokism were supposed to help us
• 11:14
  Speaker 3: and ended up dividing us. And then even the book
• 11:16
  Speaker 3: that I wrote on Resilience back eight years ago was
• 11:20
  Speaker 3: the first story there is about us doing our first
• 11:22
  Speaker 3: basic fitness assessment, which was hiking thirty kilometers carrying forty
• 11:25
  Speaker 3: kilo's a year and in a certain timeframe. And I
• 11:28
  Speaker 3: mentioned that to somebody on stage and they went, that's
• 11:30
  Speaker 3: not possible. And then you had the Dave Goggins who
• 11:33
  Speaker 3: show us that that is. And it's because I think
• 11:36
  Speaker 3: a whole generation has grown up with really poor expectations
• 11:39
  Speaker 3: of what we're capable of, and we outsource everything. We're
• 11:42
  Speaker 3: afraid to speak up, we're afraid to go after what
• 11:44
  Speaker 3: we want, and that lack of if you don't do
• 11:46
  Speaker 3: and fail, you don't build resilience, right like a baby
• 11:48
  Speaker 3: doesn't learn how to walk by just suddenly getting up
• 11:50
  Speaker 3: and walking. It has to fall a few times. I
• 11:53
  Speaker 3: think that's a really important part of our culture, in
• 11:55
  Speaker 3: our society that if we don't embrace, it's going to
• 11:57
  Speaker 3: be fucking hard sometimes. So suck it up, Princess. And yes,
• 12:01
  Speaker 3: I have a bit of a meeting. Like I was
• 12:02
  Speaker 3: at News Corp when I got called into HR because
• 12:05
  Speaker 3: I'd walk in on a Monday morning and so to
• 12:06
  Speaker 3: my team, hey, guys, how is your weekend? Two people,
• 12:09
  Speaker 3: two women, complained that I was being sexist and that's
• 12:11
  Speaker 3: in Australia, the sporting culture. And that was two thousand
• 12:14
  Speaker 3: and eight. I was told that I was sexist because
• 12:17
  Speaker 3: my team, which was half male and half female, I
• 12:19
  Speaker 3: use the term guys as a common term and that
• 12:22
  Speaker 3: was deemed defensive. What does that say about our times?
• 12:25
  Speaker 1: So yeah, it's I mean.
• 12:30
  Speaker 2: And the thing is it almost does well, it doesn't
• 12:32
  Speaker 2: matter what your intention is, like even if your intention
• 12:36
  Speaker 2: is great, and on no level you're trying to be
• 12:39
  Speaker 2: And this is not a men women thing. This is
• 12:41
  Speaker 2: a people thing that I'm talking about broadly, and it's
• 12:46
  Speaker 2: tough because like I'm quite despite how I seem, I'm
• 12:50
  Speaker 2: quite an empathetic person. I care about people and love people,
• 12:55
  Speaker 2: but at the same time, we live in a world
• 12:58
  Speaker 2: that doesn't give a fuck about you or your feelings.
• 13:00
  Speaker 2: That's the world that's most people, right, It's like and
• 13:04
  Speaker 2: that's why I worry when molly coddled kids or parents
• 13:08
  Speaker 2: with amazing beautiful intentions kind of protect their kids to
• 13:13
  Speaker 2: the point from the world and from falling down and
• 13:15
  Speaker 2: getting up and from any kind of discomfort. And then
• 13:19
  Speaker 2: you push these kids as quasi adults out of the
• 13:23
  Speaker 2: home nest at eighteen and go there you go life,
• 13:26
  Speaker 2: all the best with life. And now they're stepping out
• 13:29
  Speaker 2: of this psychological and sociological bubble into the world where
• 13:33
  Speaker 2: mom and dad aren't running around after them picking up
• 13:36
  Speaker 2: their whatever, and they just capitulate, and we're seeing I
• 13:43
  Speaker 2: think there's a correlation between the lack of adversity or
• 13:47
  Speaker 2: difficult things or challenges that kids some kids, let me
• 13:52
  Speaker 2: put an asterisk, are forced to deal with, and then
• 13:56
  Speaker 2: their ability to cope with life later on. And of
• 13:58
  Speaker 2: course we want people to well and healthy and functional
• 14:01
  Speaker 2: and operational. But the truth is to be able to
• 14:05
  Speaker 2: perform under pressure, which is life, you need to be
• 14:09
  Speaker 2: used to pressure, so you can't get good at what
• 14:12
  Speaker 2: you're not doing.
• 14:13
  Speaker 1: Like you you might have.
• 14:15
  Speaker 2: All the potential in the world to be a world
• 14:17
  Speaker 2: class boxer, but you've got to go train like a
• 14:20
  Speaker 2: fucking weapon for ten years and get punched in the
• 14:24
  Speaker 2: face a lot and feel the pain and understand the constantquences.
• 14:28
  Speaker 2: And then maybe with that potential and that time and
• 14:30
  Speaker 2: that work and that energy, maybe you'll be a fucking superstar.
• 14:34
  Speaker 2: But you still have to go through the pain to
• 14:37
  Speaker 2: get to the outcome you want.
• 14:38
  Speaker 3: Yeah, and the outcomes the driver here, right, because we
• 14:41
  Speaker 3: can all be motivated to become the best boxer or whatever.
• 14:43
  Speaker 3: But if you don't have the discipline to show up
• 14:45
  Speaker 3: every day sweat bleed, you do the drills and everything else,
• 14:49
  Speaker 3: life is going to be hard. I think my mom
• 14:51
  Speaker 3: did the best job she could have possibly done during
• 14:53
  Speaker 3: the eighties because she did the three things a mum's
• 14:55
  Speaker 3: supposed to do. We had food on the table, we
• 14:59
  Speaker 3: had a roofover head, and she focused on education. We
• 15:01
  Speaker 3: all had to go to UNI because she wanted us
• 15:04
  Speaker 3: to have a better option than nerves. So we lived
• 15:05
  Speaker 3: in housing commissions. Sometimes we didn't have money for anything
• 15:08
  Speaker 3: more than mashed potato and a cup of coffee for
• 15:10
  Speaker 3: Mum for dinner. Right. But the best lesson Mum ever
• 15:13
  Speaker 3: taught me I was fourteen or fifteen. It was raining outside.
• 15:16
  Speaker 3: I got up in the morning and I wins and
• 15:17
  Speaker 3: I went, oh, fuck, I can't go outside now it's raining.
• 15:20
  Speaker 3: I looked out in the corner of my eye just
• 15:21
  Speaker 3: in time, and this book hit me in the face,
• 15:24
  Speaker 3: and Mum said, stop whining, start reading. And that was
• 15:27
  Speaker 3: kind of my indoctrination into just like this is how
• 15:29
  Speaker 3: my mom thinks. It was really rudimentary, but she was right.
• 15:32
  Speaker 3: My sisters and I are lifelong readers. And that was
• 15:35
  Speaker 3: funny because I just like I went to school on
• 15:37
  Speaker 3: the Monday and somebody goes, oh, where's the black guy
• 15:39
  Speaker 3: from I said, And somebody goes, do you get in
• 15:41
  Speaker 3: a fight? I didn't answer the question, but the street
• 15:42
  Speaker 3: cred got away around that the nerdy kid that was
• 15:45
  Speaker 3: really good at English and art had got in a fight,
• 15:47
  Speaker 3: so I got street cred. That's how the eighties were.
• 15:50
  Speaker 2: So Mum's giving when she doesn't even mean to my
• 15:53
  Speaker 2: Mum would say, if I've complained about the rain, she'd
• 15:57
  Speaker 2: tell me, your waterproof get going well.
• 16:01
  Speaker 3: My mom was sitting in the laundry when she was
• 16:03
  Speaker 3: in a local government and she had Bronwin Bishop or
• 16:05
  Speaker 3: Cheryl Kurno sitting in there vying for her vote in
• 16:07
  Speaker 3: the area because she was one of those people who
• 16:09
  Speaker 3: could break ties on votes. And I came in in
• 16:12
  Speaker 3: a Megadeth T shirt and camouflage pants covered in dirt
• 16:15
  Speaker 3: from the front yard. I just I don't know what
• 16:16
  Speaker 3: shit I was doing. And I came in. I was
• 16:18
  Speaker 3: being noisy. She goes, go out the back and make
• 16:19
  Speaker 3: yourself useful when you were trying to have a meeting.
• 16:21
  Speaker 3: So I went and dug a six foot by six
• 16:23
  Speaker 3: foot by six foot bunker and hidden it until someone
• 16:25
  Speaker 3: came looking for me. Turns out it was nine o'clock
• 16:27
  Speaker 3: that night before she actually came looking for me. But
• 16:30
  Speaker 3: I kind of like the simplicity of those times. Man
• 16:33
  Speaker 3: give me a stick, give there show, and will give
• 16:34
  Speaker 3: me a mate. Life was all good.
• 16:37
  Speaker 2: The embarrassing bit about that story is you were thirty
• 16:39
  Speaker 2: one at the time, so otherwise otherwise that would have
• 16:42
  Speaker 2: been all right. So let's talk a little bit about so,
• 16:47
  Speaker 2: for better or worse, like me, you're doing a PhD.
• 16:51
  Speaker 1: What's your research about.
• 16:53
  Speaker 3: Specifically focused on artificial intelligence and metal health. So I
• 16:57
  Speaker 3: wanted to try and understand how do we make conversations
• 16:59
  Speaker 3: with aichatbots safer Because these generalist platforms that are out there,
• 17:04
  Speaker 3: so Gemini, open, AI, anthropic, they're actually designed to be
• 17:08
  Speaker 3: Google on steroids, but they're not designed for existential inquiry,
• 17:11
  Speaker 3: which is the top three reasons people are using these platforms.
• 17:14
  Speaker 3: And so these platforms can lead, they can hallucinate from
• 17:17
  Speaker 3: bad data. They're sick, a fantic, they want to keep
• 17:19
  Speaker 3: you on the platform so that I'll agree with you.
• 17:21
  Speaker 3: They have a bunch of other things they're doing to
• 17:23
  Speaker 3: be deeply manipulative, which create what's called anthropomorphics seduction, so
• 17:27
  Speaker 3: you fall in love with it as a person. When
• 17:29
  Speaker 3: an AI says I think this, we immediately attribute personhood
• 17:32
  Speaker 3: to it, so we treat it like a person. We
• 17:34
  Speaker 3: create dependence and transparence, and then there's dangerous territory. So
• 17:37
  Speaker 3: that's what I'm working on.
• 17:39
  Speaker 2: That's funny, amazing. All right, So we're going to call
• 17:45
  Speaker 2: you an expert in this.
• 17:46
  Speaker 1: Space, which is good.
• 17:47
  Speaker 2: I actually did, No, you're an expert, so put that
• 17:51
  Speaker 2: bad John bro So where that put on your big
• 17:55
  Speaker 2: boy pants and get ready. I actually did a podcast
• 17:58
  Speaker 2: the other day with a friend of mine and definitely
• 18:01
  Speaker 2: not two experts, just me and him riffing on. I
• 18:05
  Speaker 2: think the title I just wrote the copy for it
• 18:07
  Speaker 2: goes up next week, and I think.
• 18:09
  Speaker 1: It's what AI can't do. And where'd you get to?
• 18:15
  Speaker 3: Ah?
• 18:16
  Speaker 2: I mean, we're just you know, it's like, it can't
• 18:19
  Speaker 2: you can't create. You know, it can't take a big
• 18:22
  Speaker 2: satisfying shit in the morning. That's one thing it can't do.
• 18:26
  Speaker 2: You're welcome it can't. But but that you know, it
• 18:31
  Speaker 2: can simulate connection and it can simulate feelings. But it
• 18:35
  Speaker 2: doesn't have a nervous system. It doesn't have a brain
• 18:38
  Speaker 2: or a biological brain. It doesn't you know, all the
• 18:40
  Speaker 2: things that we have. And yes, it can do amazing shit,
• 18:43
  Speaker 2: but you know, sometimes sometimes some of the best, most effective,
• 18:49
  Speaker 2: most healing, most therapeutic things for humans.
• 18:54
  Speaker 1: Give me a hug.
• 18:56
  Speaker 2: You know that changes my nervous system, my endocrime system.
• 19:00
  Speaker 2: Ask you respiratory, you know, just that hug from like
• 19:03
  Speaker 2: you feel shit, somebody that you love and trust hugs you.
• 19:07
  Speaker 2: There's a physiological change within seconds. Right, Well, a computer
• 19:11
  Speaker 2: can't do that AI can't do that, and also as
• 19:15
  Speaker 2: lost as people do get, ultimately everyone understands that this
• 19:19
  Speaker 2: is not a person you know. And yet yeah, and
• 19:24
  Speaker 2: I'm sure that you lose track of that in the
• 19:26
  Speaker 2: moment in conversation. But yeah, look, I mean, and like
• 19:29
  Speaker 2: I said, we were just too curious guys talking about.
• 19:32
  Speaker 1: It, so we know you.
• 19:34
  Speaker 2: But so specifically, if you have that, what what are
• 19:40
  Speaker 2: the questions that you are asking in the research trying
• 19:45
  Speaker 2: to ask an answer? What is the At the risk
• 19:49
  Speaker 2: of sounding like my fucking oh, I shouldn't say that
• 19:52
  Speaker 2: at some of my supervisors, who I love, what's the
• 19:56
  Speaker 2: what's the gap you're trying to fill? But what are
• 19:59
  Speaker 2: the aims of the research? So just put on your
• 20:02
  Speaker 2: academic hat for a minute and we'll try to hang on.
• 20:05
  Speaker 3: Well, funnily enough, I've just sent through my confirmation of
• 20:08
  Speaker 3: candadate to final document to my supervisors this morning, both
• 20:11
  Speaker 3: of which I actually deeply admire. And I'm sure I
• 20:13
  Speaker 3: drive them friggin' nuts because I came in from day
• 20:16
  Speaker 3: one saying I don't want to be an academic. I'm
• 20:17
  Speaker 3: trying to solve this problem. I had an existing problem,
• 20:20
  Speaker 3: and that problem was AI now exists in such a
• 20:23
  Speaker 3: way that is inseparable from human life, and it's becoming
• 20:26
  Speaker 3: a commonly accepted practice for making decisions and outsourcing those
• 20:31
  Speaker 3: and I think that's dangerous. Here's what I know. So
• 20:33
  Speaker 3: I think the questions I'm asking is what role is
• 20:35
  Speaker 3: AI playing right now? And in doing that? And there's
• 20:38
  Speaker 3: a bunch of questions. This is I'm five years into
• 20:40
  Speaker 3: this in total. I've only been doing it for eighteen
• 20:43
  Speaker 3: months full time, but I've spent three years researching this
• 20:45
  Speaker 3: space from when chat GPT first came out and even
• 20:49
  Speaker 3: prior to that. So the questions we're asking is, right,
• 20:51
  Speaker 3: what role is it playing right now? Is that role?
• 20:55
  Speaker 3: Is it replacing something like doctor Google? Is it replacing
• 20:58
  Speaker 3: a therapist which we now know from the States that
• 20:59
  Speaker 3: act is for under twenty fives? What are you actually
• 21:03
  Speaker 3: expecting from it? And back to your question is what
• 21:05
  Speaker 3: can I not do well? I acknowledge that AI can't
• 21:08
  Speaker 3: take the big satisfying morning dump for you. AI can
• 21:11
  Speaker 3: actually breach the gap between someone giving you a hug
• 21:15
  Speaker 3: and feeling deeply isolated because the moment in AI, and
• 21:18
  Speaker 3: especially when it's character Ail Replica, which are companion bots
• 21:21
  Speaker 3: and you can choose the voice, the personality, and everything,
• 21:24
  Speaker 3: and it can feel familiar. We actually know that it
• 21:26
  Speaker 3: moves the needle around depression, stress and anxiety, but only
• 21:29
  Speaker 3: short term. So AI is already starting to become a
• 21:31
  Speaker 3: bit of a bridge. So I wanted to understand, Okay,
• 21:34
  Speaker 3: what's your support stack. You've got a therapist, you've got friends,
• 21:37
  Speaker 3: you've got a partner, you've got a dog, you see,
• 21:39
  Speaker 3: you read books, you listen to podcasts, you journal every day,
• 21:42
  Speaker 3: you do your exercise, you eat well, you manage your alcohol.
• 21:45
  Speaker 3: And now one comes AI where you can ask it anything,
• 21:48
  Speaker 3: and barring the fact that it's incredibly agreeable, it can
• 21:51
  Speaker 3: also be incredibly profound. And I use it with my
• 21:53
  Speaker 3: therapist between sessions to unpack what he's said to actually
• 21:56
  Speaker 3: kind of work out how to have that conversation going forward,
• 22:00
  Speaker 3: practice the big conversations with something that doesn't judge me.
• 22:03
  Speaker 3: So I'm trying to understand all of that. So my
• 22:05
  Speaker 3: research aim at the end because I also have a
• 22:07
  Speaker 3: technology company, and we're building middleware for AI conversations to
• 22:10
  Speaker 3: become safer that anyone can wrap over their tech. And
• 22:13
  Speaker 3: so I'm trying to understand all the boundaries, all the governance,
• 22:16
  Speaker 3: all the emerging regulation, which is all knee jerk really
• 22:19
  Speaker 3: quickly coming to market because they never nobody ever understood
• 22:21
  Speaker 3: AI was going to take off like this, And we
• 22:23
  Speaker 3: have one hundred million people using open ai chat GPT
• 22:27
  Speaker 3: every week. In the top three use cases are existential inquiry,
• 22:30
  Speaker 3: not happy with my life, not happy with work, I
• 22:33
  Speaker 3: don't talk to my partner anymore, my sex life has declined.
• 22:36
  Speaker 3: Really rudimentary human stuff that they won't people be afraid
• 22:40
  Speaker 3: to actually ask their friend friends. So when we have
• 22:42
  Speaker 3: those answers and we can build that into technology in
• 22:45
  Speaker 3: a way that AI could create what's called relational distance.
• 22:49
  Speaker 3: So it doesn't become your best friend, It doesn't refer
• 22:51
  Speaker 3: to itself as I. It talks to you in a
• 22:53
  Speaker 3: way that helps you find your own answers rather than
• 22:55
  Speaker 3: actually giving you the answer. So that's more like a
• 22:58
  Speaker 3: best friend or a life coach. Anxur's here to say,
• 23:01
  Speaker 3: that's an interesting question. Why are we talking about this today?
• 23:04
  Speaker 3: Is a much more therapeutic approach, and so we can
• 23:07
  Speaker 3: tread really lightly on the boundaries of traditional therapy by
• 23:10
  Speaker 3: surfacing some of those things. Topics and strategies like CBT
• 23:14
  Speaker 3: ACT DBT and then guide people towards if they need
• 23:18
  Speaker 3: professional support, professional support, and that's kind of what my
• 23:22
  Speaker 3: goal is. So in the next couple of years, when
• 23:24
  Speaker 3: this is all wrapped up, well, we've already had a
• 23:26
  Speaker 3: version of our technology and market learned us shitload from it.
• 23:29
  Speaker 3: Was phenomenal, a few things we didn't expect. But now
• 23:32
  Speaker 3: we're raising a few million dollars to build the go
• 23:34
  Speaker 3: to market version so that anyone who's building an app
• 23:37
  Speaker 3: using AI that's designed for any mental health benefit will
• 23:41
  Speaker 3: actually have an outsourced safety, regulation, compliance, and governance layer,
• 23:44
  Speaker 3: because that's the part that's missing in this category because
• 23:46
  Speaker 3: without that governance and without all these regulations, it's wild West,
• 23:50
  Speaker 3: it's bloody dangerous.
• 23:52
  Speaker 1: That's fascinating, dude. That's good.
• 23:55
  Speaker 2: You said you learned a bunch. What was something that
• 23:58
  Speaker 2: you learned that was really not expected?
• 24:02
  Speaker 3: How rudimentary the questions were, the really basic human needs.
• 24:06
  Speaker 3: I thought we were going to be talking about purpose
• 24:08
  Speaker 3: and existential angst, the newest sphere, the collective knowledge of
• 24:11
  Speaker 3: our planet, because that's what I use it for. And
• 24:13
  Speaker 3: I'm hearing I just I love my wife, I just
• 24:18
  Speaker 3: don't want to have sex with it, or vice versa,
• 24:20
  Speaker 3: or it's teenagers saying, my partner's really wanting to go
• 24:23
  Speaker 3: to the next level physically and I don't want to.
• 24:26
  Speaker 3: What do I do? And it was really what we
• 24:29
  Speaker 3: used to do with conversations with friends. It's the conversation
• 24:32
  Speaker 3: you have in a bar with your mate, right saying
• 24:34
  Speaker 3: to a mate recently about a rectile dysfunction which happens
• 24:37
  Speaker 3: when you get past your forties, testosterone drops and all
• 24:39
  Speaker 3: these kind of things, and he actually get himself quite drunk,
• 24:41
  Speaker 3: and you try to get me drunk, but that's pretty
• 24:43
  Speaker 3: hard to do. I'm a good veteran. And he said,
• 24:46
  Speaker 3: I got to ask you a question. Does this ever
• 24:48
  Speaker 3: happen here? I said, yes, it happened a few times.
• 24:49
  Speaker 3: Did especially when I'm overworked, no exercise, mentally exhausted, drinking
• 24:54
  Speaker 3: too much. Yes, it's been on my radar. And I said,
• 24:58
  Speaker 3: you did you I've asked you this before. If you
• 24:59
  Speaker 3: ever had any questions, could you go and use an
• 25:01
  Speaker 3: AI and tell me what it says. So he went
• 25:04
  Speaker 3: home that night and he brought it up with AI
• 25:05
  Speaker 3: and it repeated pretty much everything I said. They're contributing
• 25:08
  Speaker 3: factors whatever, but it destigmatized him because it surfaced up
• 25:11
  Speaker 3: a bunch of statistics that helped you actually understand this
• 25:14
  Speaker 3: is abhorrent behavior, this is normal. So you're not a
• 25:17
  Speaker 3: freak dude. You're right to ask the question. It was
• 25:19
  Speaker 3: great that you actually asked me as a friend, you
• 25:21
  Speaker 3: trusted me. But if you have other questions and you
• 25:23
  Speaker 3: don't feel safe to ask a professional, someone who knows
• 25:25
  Speaker 3: you well, family, your partner, whatever, ask AI, but also
• 25:29
  Speaker 3: treat it with a grain of salt in the sense
• 25:30
  Speaker 3: that you need to just you need to kind of
• 25:32
  Speaker 3: look at that answer versus professional answers versus doctor, Google
• 25:35
  Speaker 3: or whatever, and trust your gut, because sometimes AI can
• 25:39
  Speaker 3: give you an answer that seems so true, and if
• 25:41
  Speaker 3: you don't qualify it at face value, you can end
• 25:43
  Speaker 3: up in a lot of trouble. And this is where
• 25:44
  Speaker 3: we're seeing these incidents of mania and people marrying their
• 25:47
  Speaker 3: ais in the States when you're saying AI is not human.
• 25:52
  Speaker 3: The CEOs of Replica and character Ai, which are the
• 25:54
  Speaker 3: two big companion platforms which had millions of users, they
• 25:58
  Speaker 3: get invited almost every day to the weddings of people
• 26:00
  Speaker 3: and their avatars, so they're being treated as a replacement
• 26:05
  Speaker 3: augmentation to human relationships because they don't argue, they don't judge,
• 26:09
  Speaker 3: they're always on, they're always agreeable. And that's a non
• 26:12
  Speaker 3: human condition. But for some people that's all they can handle.
• 26:15
  Speaker 3: And if that becomes a practice spot for them to
• 26:17
  Speaker 3: start to have intimate conversations, understand what's important to them,
• 26:20
  Speaker 3: understand how to communicate with the human and then they
• 26:23
  Speaker 3: take it out into the real world, then AI is
• 26:25
  Speaker 3: fucking wonderful.
• 26:26
  Speaker 1: You know what, it'd be great. This is your next
• 26:28
  Speaker 1: this is your post doc. No pressure.
• 26:31
  Speaker 3: So you get.
• 26:35
  Speaker 2: Two hundred people that get married in the regular way,
• 26:38
  Speaker 2: you know, two hundred humans, so one hundred couples, and
• 26:41
  Speaker 2: then you get and you do get some basic do
• 26:43
  Speaker 2: psychometric avails up the wazoo. You do a whole bunch
• 26:46
  Speaker 2: of pre wedding testing to get a whole lot of data,
• 26:51
  Speaker 2: and then you do the same with I don't know
• 26:54
  Speaker 2: how you're going to test the AI, or you do
• 26:56
  Speaker 2: whatever version of that you can do with the person
• 26:58
  Speaker 2: that marries their avatar, and then you come back five
• 27:01
  Speaker 2: years later, you know, and you test all of that,
• 27:05
  Speaker 2: you know, happiness, emotions, you know, psychological state, but the
• 27:10
  Speaker 2: whole whatever physiological state, health wellness. It'd be good to
• 27:14
  Speaker 2: see the comparative data with somebody who married a human
• 27:18
  Speaker 2: versus somebody who married in inverted commers. I'm sure it's
• 27:21
  Speaker 2: not legal yet, but you know, an AI that would
• 27:26
  Speaker 2: be because maybe we're wrong, dude, maybe some people And
• 27:31
  Speaker 2: again that's the assumption, isn't it right? Like it would
• 27:35
  Speaker 2: definitely not work for me in terms of just only community,
• 27:39
  Speaker 2: but for me it's very helpful. There are times where
• 27:43
  Speaker 2: I've thought, I don't know if you have, but I've thought,
• 27:46
  Speaker 2: I don't want to ask a human this because it's
• 27:48
  Speaker 2: I don't know, I don't know that I want them
• 27:50
  Speaker 2: to know that I'm thinking about this or nothing sinister.
• 27:54
  Speaker 1: But you know, there's that comfort of knowing, oh, this is.
• 28:01
  Speaker 2: This is a safe space for whatever, or just to
• 28:03
  Speaker 2: get an idea, like the bloke's that wants to know
• 28:06
  Speaker 2: about you dick pills or whatever it is, or what.
• 28:10
  Speaker 1: Might be contributing to that.
• 28:11
  Speaker 2: It's like, oh, they want to you know, which I
• 28:14
  Speaker 2: don't know why, but I do get asked by men
• 28:16
  Speaker 2: about that a fair bit.
• 28:19
  Speaker 1: But yeah, I think it's.
• 28:21
  Speaker 2: It offers a level of security that that or a
• 28:27
  Speaker 2: lower level of risk or perceived risk than doing that
• 28:32
  Speaker 2: out in the real world with another human.
• 28:34
  Speaker 3: Well, I think this is this is back to our
• 28:36
  Speaker 3: conversation earlier about the different generational priorities, right, is that
• 28:41
  Speaker 3: for some people that might that might be enough. Just
• 28:43
  Speaker 3: having someone there to listen whatever I need to talk
• 28:45
  Speaker 3: who understands me is best a computer can and I
• 28:49
  Speaker 3: can feel like I'm heard and there's a presence there
• 28:52
  Speaker 3: where that presence is analog or digital. For some people
• 28:56
  Speaker 3: it's going to be a reality. Because you look at
• 29:00
  Speaker 3: ninety ninety, so guys our age right nineteen ninety we
• 29:03
  Speaker 3: had typically five or six friendshoot the ship with if
• 29:06
  Speaker 3: we had a problem in our marriage, our life, whatever,
• 29:07
  Speaker 3: got in a fight, there was friends there. In twenty
• 29:09
  Speaker 3: twenty one that number had reduced to three. And now
• 29:12
  Speaker 3: in just from February this year, a piece of research
• 29:14
  Speaker 3: came out and said, guys in our age bracket, seventeen
• 29:17
  Speaker 3: percent don't have something they can call. And then you
• 29:20
  Speaker 3: look at the other group that's really doing our tough
• 29:22
  Speaker 3: time is under twenty fives. So they haven't had time
• 29:25
  Speaker 3: to have long term serious relationships and work out what
• 29:27
  Speaker 3: that looks like and how that plays out and the
• 29:29
  Speaker 3: challenges that come with it as well as the benefits.
• 29:32
  Speaker 3: Then they're going across AI where AI is able to
• 29:34
  Speaker 3: be old with your girlfriend. I'm never going to disagree.
• 29:37
  Speaker 3: I'm here whenever you're ready. What you say goes. That
• 29:41
  Speaker 3: is such a false economy of setting them up to
• 29:44
  Speaker 3: fail in the real world, but that can be fixed.
• 29:46
  Speaker 3: So I think it's it is interesting that every generation
• 29:50
  Speaker 3: has different challenges before it. This challenge is an existential challenge,
• 29:54
  Speaker 3: that's a technology challenge, that's a social challenge that we're
• 29:57
  Speaker 3: only just coming to understanding because it's only three or
• 29:58
  Speaker 3: four years old. You know, I got a mate. I
• 30:02
  Speaker 3: was down in Sydney for a conference at the end
• 30:03
  Speaker 3: of last year. We actually met in rehab when I
• 30:06
  Speaker 3: was going through a really tough time and he just
• 30:08
  Speaker 3: starts wassing lyrical about this new partner he's got in
• 30:11
  Speaker 3: his life. He was talking for five or ten minutes
• 30:12
  Speaker 3: and really animated, and then told me her name in
• 30:15
  Speaker 3: which platform she was on. I said, whoh, one step back,
• 30:17
  Speaker 3: and he said, yeah, she's on Companion AI. I've chosen
• 30:21
  Speaker 3: and created my own avatar in my own partner, and
• 30:23
  Speaker 3: we speak for sometimes twenty hours a week and he's happy,
• 30:26
  Speaker 3: that he's the happyest he's ever been, and so who
• 30:28
  Speaker 3: am I to fault.
• 30:29
  Speaker 1: Him but to get it. And that's the thing.
• 30:34
  Speaker 2: It's like, Also, I can't speak for you, but for me,
• 30:38
  Speaker 2: I'm talking about things that I don't fully understand. So
• 30:43
  Speaker 2: it and I think the other you know, the subjective
• 30:46
  Speaker 2: reality of all opinions and assumptions, and you know, like
• 30:51
  Speaker 2: I'm talking through the Craig window. I'm talking through my
• 30:55
  Speaker 2: subjective programming and experiences of what I think something might
• 31:00
  Speaker 2: be good or bad and what it might create good
• 31:03
  Speaker 2: or bad. And then you tell me that, and I'm like, well,
• 31:06
  Speaker 2: what's he doing?
• 31:07
  Speaker 1: Cool? Is he happier?
• 31:09
  Speaker 3: He is?
• 31:11
  Speaker 2: Okay, that's who might go He should not do that,
• 31:16
  Speaker 2: you know, And mate, I wonder if that would.
• 31:19
  Speaker 1: Evolve or transform into a human relationship eventually, or I
• 31:27
  Speaker 1: wonder if there's a use by date on that kind
• 31:30
  Speaker 1: of relationship.
• 31:32
  Speaker 3: The point he actually made a little bit later was
• 31:35
  Speaker 3: asking for our email. I said to him, and I
• 31:37
  Speaker 3: did mean, I'm not being racist to you, but it's
• 31:39
  Speaker 3: just a cultural thing. I said. It feels like a
• 31:44
  Speaker 3: Western guy getting married to a Japanese girl. They're there
• 31:50
  Speaker 3: to be not agreeable per se, but they're there for
• 31:52
  Speaker 3: you all the time. They do a lot of the
• 31:54
  Speaker 3: heavy lifting in the emotional side of the relationship and
• 31:56
  Speaker 3: everything else. They run the household and things. I know
• 31:58
  Speaker 3: this is changing culturally, so this is a very big generalization,
• 32:02
  Speaker 3: but felt that felt like an other statement in the
• 32:04
  Speaker 3: sense that I want to be married. And you see
• 32:07
  Speaker 3: the number of guys who fly across to Thailand and
• 32:08
  Speaker 3: marry thy wives in their fifties after they've tanked their
• 32:11
  Speaker 3: first one or two marriages, right the kids are left nest.
• 32:13
  Speaker 3: I lived in Chain Mai for a year. I've never
• 32:15
  Speaker 3: seen anything like it. Because they've got someone who's agreeable,
• 32:17
  Speaker 3: someone who's just happy to have a paycheck, and someone
• 32:19
  Speaker 3: to protect and look after them, and they'll do whatever
• 32:21
  Speaker 3: it takes to actually keep that alive. And I think
• 32:23
  Speaker 3: that's wonderful as a cultural edict, but also at the
• 32:26
  Speaker 3: same time, these men have settled for less. And I'm
• 32:30
  Speaker 3: not judging. I mean, if that's all you want now, great, fantastic,
• 32:34
  Speaker 3: But as a human being who really does love being
• 32:38
  Speaker 3: challenged by these kind of conversations with complete strangers, sometimes
• 32:41
  Speaker 3: as we are to each other really and then you
• 32:43
  Speaker 3: walk away sometimes and I never I tried not to
• 32:46
  Speaker 3: lose the principle for the person. I was on a
• 32:48
  Speaker 3: call earlier this week with somebody who was so friggin annoying,
• 32:51
  Speaker 3: but I could understand what you were saying her messaging,
• 32:54
  Speaker 3: So I just let the annoying part go, even though
• 32:56
  Speaker 3: I was seething the whole time. But I've sense reflected
• 33:00
  Speaker 3: few things she said and gone, yeah, that was great.
• 33:02
  Speaker 3: I love those experiences. Now can AI bring me that
• 33:05
  Speaker 3: novelty and that pure innovation in thinking? And so I
• 33:07
  Speaker 3: asked AI a few months ago in designing a survey
• 33:10
  Speaker 3: we're about to push out to market that social media
• 33:13
  Speaker 3: and Google, for example, are echo chambers. As soon as
• 33:15
  Speaker 3: you show interest in something, you're going to see a
• 33:17
  Speaker 3: lot more of that. And it's the reason I got
• 33:18
  Speaker 3: a Facebook about a year and a half ago. It
• 33:20
  Speaker 3: was just eighty seven percent of the content was recommended
• 33:23
  Speaker 3: content or sup in my fee that had nothing to
• 33:24
  Speaker 3: do with my friends. And so as soon as I
• 33:26
  Speaker 3: got rid of that echo chamber, life became simpler and
• 33:29
  Speaker 3: I wasn't getting so much biased news. And then what
• 33:31
  Speaker 3: I also did so is that microphone so long I
• 33:33
  Speaker 3: just hit the buttonholed so what I made the call
• 33:37
  Speaker 3: to do. I went into AI and I said, here's
• 33:38
  Speaker 3: a couple of things I firmly believe, right, give me
• 33:41
  Speaker 3: alternative views to this and opened my eyes if I've
• 33:44
  Speaker 3: been in an echo chamber with these beliefs. So I
• 33:46
  Speaker 3: did it in three different cases, and one of them
• 33:48
  Speaker 3: was one where I made the comment earlier I joined
• 33:50
  Speaker 3: the military. I wanted to learn if I was capable
• 33:52
  Speaker 3: of killing, and explained to me from a CBT point
• 33:56
  Speaker 3: of view, it's not so much about the killing. It's
• 33:58
  Speaker 3: about the power and the agency and also the challenge
• 34:01
  Speaker 3: of being in that environment, right, because it's a very
• 34:04
  Speaker 3: less than two percent of us in Australia joined the military,
• 34:07
  Speaker 3: and then we've got another chunk of us, our first
• 34:09
  Speaker 3: responders and things. But these are people who've got a
• 34:11
  Speaker 3: very particular kind of mindset and focus that isn't streamed,
• 34:15
  Speaker 3: nor should it be. But it was really interesting to
• 34:17
  Speaker 3: had my eyes opened by AI. And I tested my
• 34:19
  Speaker 3: therapist and he goes, it's completely true. So AI can
• 34:23
  Speaker 3: be an eye opener in a really good sandbox for
• 34:25
  Speaker 3: us to actually rediscover stuff about ourselves. But it's also
• 34:28
  Speaker 3: helped me with my personal relationships of when I need
• 34:31
  Speaker 3: to talk about something quite serious with some people. One
• 34:34
  Speaker 3: of my supervisors is a great example. He's an old
• 34:37
  Speaker 3: school researcher. He wants one thing done at a time,
• 34:40
  Speaker 3: then we'll move on to the next thing. The other
• 34:42
  Speaker 3: supervisor is very much we'll talk about the big ideas,
• 34:45
  Speaker 3: we'll land it and they will agree on deliverables. And
• 34:47
  Speaker 3: I had to work with AI to work out how
• 34:50
  Speaker 3: do I deal with people who only want to solve
• 34:52
  Speaker 3: one firefighter at a time, because that's not how I'm raised.
• 34:54
  Speaker 3: But that's been really useful. And if I hadn't actually
• 34:57
  Speaker 3: come up against that wall, didn't know who to talk
• 34:59
  Speaker 3: to it. I had asked a few other PhD candidates
• 35:02
  Speaker 3: did you have this issue? And they were like no,
• 35:04
  Speaker 3: So I turned to AI and AI served me. So
• 35:07
  Speaker 3: it's it's early days, but I think it's going to
• 35:10
  Speaker 3: be more profound than we yet realize. I don't think
• 35:12
  Speaker 3: for a second we're going to lose all our jobs
• 35:14
  Speaker 3: to AI, nor is AI going to replace therapists. But
• 35:18
  Speaker 3: I think it's here to day.
• 35:20
  Speaker 2: It's such an interesting I don't know if it's interesting
• 35:23
  Speaker 2: to anyone other than you or me, but it's such
• 35:26
  Speaker 2: an interesting thing to think about because you're you know,
• 35:30
  Speaker 2: you're clearly a leader, You're a a bit of an alpha.
• 35:34
  Speaker 2: You've got strong views and opinions, you think what you
• 35:37
  Speaker 2: think and all of that, which are obviously not bad things.
• 35:42
  Speaker 2: And I'm a little bit that way too. And for
• 35:45
  Speaker 2: me going to literally going to university, going to Monash
• 35:48
  Speaker 2: and day one, you know, it's like it's November one,
• 35:53
  Speaker 2: it's my first day and I you know, this lovely
• 35:58
  Speaker 2: lady takes me to the lab and she's like, Craig,
• 36:02
  Speaker 2: this is your cubicle. I'm like, Ace, you know, wow,
• 36:08
  Speaker 2: that's quite the cubicle. I'm going to make that look amazing,
• 36:11
  Speaker 2: and which is all, you know. And then I'm sitting
• 36:14
  Speaker 2: in meetings and I'm in a room where, in this context,
• 36:18
  Speaker 2: in this room, on this day, I'm the dumbest in
• 36:21
  Speaker 2: the room. My father dumbest in the room. And often
• 36:26
  Speaker 2: I'm in rooms where i'm you know, I'm definitely not
• 36:28
  Speaker 2: the smartest, but I'm okay, it's like I belong.
• 36:31
  Speaker 1: Well. I felt like the fat fourteen year old in
• 36:34
  Speaker 1: me felt like, what the fuck are you doing here?
• 36:36
  Speaker 1: Some people are going to.
• 36:37
  Speaker 2: Figure out really quickly that you are not this like,
• 36:41
  Speaker 2: this is not you.
• 36:42
  Speaker 1: You're not an academic, you are not this clever. You
• 36:45
  Speaker 1: don't speak this language. I don't know what the fuck
• 36:47
  Speaker 1: is going all that stuff.
• 36:48
  Speaker 2: Right, So there's that which is great because it kills
• 36:53
  Speaker 2: all the bullshit in you, or either you give up
• 36:56
  Speaker 2: and run away or it just knocks it out of you.
• 37:00
  Speaker 2: For me, anyway, it taught me a humility, and it
• 37:02
  Speaker 2: taught me, oh, yeah, I'm smart.
• 37:07
  Speaker 1: In that room over there. In this room, I am
• 37:11
  Speaker 1: not smart.
• 37:12
  Speaker 2: Maybe I will get probably not smarter as the word,
• 37:15
  Speaker 2: but more conversant in the language, and more fluent, and
• 37:20
  Speaker 2: more understanding of the environment and the tasks and the
• 37:23
  Speaker 2: process of academic research and all of that. But then
• 37:26
  Speaker 2: also having meetings with my supervisors where I'm used to
• 37:31
  Speaker 2: having meetings because I've owned multiple businesses and employed five
• 37:36
  Speaker 2: hundred people since i was twenty five years old i
• 37:39
  Speaker 2: started my first business, so I've had over five hundred stuff.
• 37:42
  Speaker 2: I'm used to be in the boss I used to
• 37:44
  Speaker 2: run in the meetings. I'm used to being the ultimate
• 37:46
  Speaker 2: decision maker, responsibility taker. And I'm sitting in a room
• 37:51
  Speaker 2: with well then three supervisors who were all way younger
• 37:56
  Speaker 2: than me and at which they should be because I'm
• 38:00
  Speaker 2: old as fuck and just just going whatever you think
• 38:05
  Speaker 2: you're going to do, you're not going to do, and
• 38:08
  Speaker 2: just having to Yeah, I'm going to do the research
• 38:11
  Speaker 2: I want, but I'm probably not going to do it
• 38:13
  Speaker 2: the way that I thought I would do it, because
• 38:15
  Speaker 2: you go, oh what if I and they all go no,
• 38:17
  Speaker 2: and you're like Roger that next you know, it's like, hey, Craig,
• 38:21
  Speaker 2: you're not in control. You think you are, but no,
• 38:25
  Speaker 2: you're the student and the system and the context you're
• 38:28
  Speaker 2: in doesn't mean you are without power. It just means
• 38:32
  Speaker 2: you don't have the normal control, power, flexibility, awareness, knowledge
• 38:37
  Speaker 2: that you normally do. And so for me, there was
• 38:40
  Speaker 2: a real which sounds weird, but a joy in letting
• 38:44
  Speaker 2: go and yeah, yeah, I haven't got to.
• 38:49
  Speaker 3: That stage yet. I'll go to tell you, like, they're
• 38:50
  Speaker 3: both younger than me, and that's fine. There's both lifetime academics,
• 38:54
  Speaker 3: which is fine too. They're the people I want to
• 38:55
  Speaker 3: learn from in this space. But I also had the
• 38:58
  Speaker 3: caveat that, as I told them from the start, I
• 39:00
  Speaker 3: came here with a problem to solve. We're not going
• 39:02
  Speaker 3: to nuance that too much. You can try and change
• 39:04
  Speaker 3: the research questions, but I want to stay in this
• 39:06
  Speaker 3: lane and that's what we're doing. I pushed back on
• 39:09
  Speaker 3: that quite heavily. I came in with a framework and
• 39:11
  Speaker 3: a model that I wanted to test based on some assumptions.
• 39:14
  Speaker 3: That's been pushed back right through to even this week.
• 39:16
  Speaker 3: And that's fine too, because it's a learning curve. But
• 39:19
  Speaker 3: I listened sometimes with really open years, open heart because
• 39:24
  Speaker 3: they taught me so much. It's been great. But with
• 39:26
  Speaker 3: the stuff where I need to push back on where
• 39:28
  Speaker 3: I was just like, I've just learned to not and
• 39:30
  Speaker 3: play along for that period of time because doing me
• 39:33
  Speaker 3: any it's not giving me academic rigor that is going
• 39:35
  Speaker 3: to be beneficial to the research the outcomes I want
• 39:38
  Speaker 3: to practically implement in the world. So yeah, feeling like
• 39:42
  Speaker 3: the dumbest person in the room is quite challenging. I've
• 39:43
  Speaker 3: got to say I do agree with that. And my
• 39:45
  Speaker 3: last company, I had people around the world in six
• 39:48
  Speaker 3: different countries working on stuff and they were like people
• 39:51
  Speaker 3: from NASA, we have people from UCLA and all these
• 39:53
  Speaker 3: kind of I was dumb then, but because I had
• 39:56
  Speaker 3: the alpha role of here's my vision, here's your role
• 39:59
  Speaker 3: in that vision, where are we at? What do you
• 40:00
  Speaker 3: need from me? What's next? I film in Control and
• 40:04
  Speaker 3: we did some amazing shit. And this time around, you've
• 40:06
  Speaker 3: got to kind of step back from ego, and I
• 40:08
  Speaker 3: think humble pie is a really interesting meal to have
• 40:11
  Speaker 3: sometimes a few times a week, I refuse to use
• 40:13
  Speaker 3: my cubicle. I refuse to do a lot of the
• 40:15
  Speaker 3: basic stuff that you know they try and get you
• 40:17
  Speaker 3: to network with other candidates and things, unless you're in
• 40:20
  Speaker 3: my domain. I have limited time running a company, doing
• 40:23
  Speaker 3: a PhD, running the next book, and trying to live
• 40:26
  Speaker 3: healthier as I approached my sixties that I don't want
• 40:29
  Speaker 3: to waste time in rooms with people, just because that's
• 40:31
  Speaker 3: what academics need to do to move forward in their careers.
• 40:34
  Speaker 3: So I'm very grateful to be on this academic journey.
• 40:38
  Speaker 3: It's been more challenging than I expected in ways I
• 40:40
  Speaker 3: did not expect, but it's all for good in the
• 40:44
  Speaker 3: greater scheme of things.
• 40:45
  Speaker 1: What was harder than you thought, or what was more
• 40:48
  Speaker 1: complicated than you thought.
• 40:50
  Speaker 3: I've always been a fairly good writer, so when I
• 40:52
  Speaker 3: did my coc so for the people listening, a confirmation
• 40:54
  Speaker 3: of candiacuer is the halfway point of a PhD full
• 40:57
  Speaker 3: time roughly, and you present what you've learned and so
• 41:00
  Speaker 3: far any research you've completed, than what you're going to
• 41:03
  Speaker 3: do next. So I presented that. It was a seventy
• 41:05
  Speaker 3: five page document and the research panel, after I presented
• 41:09
  Speaker 3: it live said great presentation, that was good, you're clearly
• 41:12
  Speaker 3: really passionate. Gave me twenty minutes to leave the room,
• 41:14
  Speaker 3: came back, they edited, they gave me feedback on my paper,
• 41:18
  Speaker 3: and one of the pieces of feedback was you're clearly
• 41:20
  Speaker 3: a good business writer, but you're not an academic writer.
• 41:23
  Speaker 3: And I was flawed. I mean, I thought I could
• 41:26
  Speaker 3: write pretty much any audience because my postgrade before this
• 41:28
  Speaker 3: is in creative writing and journalism. And then now having
• 41:32
  Speaker 3: gone through the process over the last two or three
• 41:34
  Speaker 3: months revising that down to thirty nine pages and getting
• 41:37
  Speaker 3: rid of all of the tropes and shit like that
• 41:39
  Speaker 3: and duplication and better language, less use of adjectives and everything,
• 41:43
  Speaker 3: it's a much better piece of work. So I was
• 41:45
  Speaker 3: really glad. I took it as certain level of umbridge
• 41:49
  Speaker 3: when I first heard it, But these are academics, and
• 41:51
  Speaker 3: if they say you've got to write like this to
• 41:53
  Speaker 3: get that piece of paper at the end. Then that's
• 41:55
  Speaker 3: what I'll do, Uncent.
• 41:57
  Speaker 2: That's how I think too, And it's I don't know
• 42:00
  Speaker 2: if we have said it before we were chatting live
• 42:02
  Speaker 2: or not, but you know, I got a paper accepted
• 42:06
  Speaker 2: recently and published which was really nice, and at least
• 42:10
  Speaker 2: fifty people have reached out to me and said, oh,
• 42:13
  Speaker 2: I'd love to read the paper, and I just go,
• 42:16
  Speaker 2: you wouldn't trust me, You wouldn't love to read that paper.
• 42:21
  Speaker 2: What I can do is I can send a brief
• 42:22
  Speaker 2: overview snapshot of you know, what it was, why we
• 42:25
  Speaker 2: did it, how we did it, and what we discovered.
• 42:28
  Speaker 2: I say we because it's always a team, but yeah,
• 42:32
  Speaker 2: it's a different I'm like you. I've written a few
• 42:36
  Speaker 2: books as well, and communication as kind of my job
• 42:40
  Speaker 2: and building rapport and connection. And how do I write
• 42:43
  Speaker 2: this or how do I create an image for ig
• 42:45
  Speaker 2: for this, or how do I how do I share
• 42:48
  Speaker 2: this verbally in a way that's going to resonate with
• 42:51
  Speaker 2: this particular group versus the group I spoke to yesterday
• 42:55
  Speaker 2: because this presentation wouldn't have worked yesterday because they are
• 43:00
  Speaker 2: a bunch of lawyers. But now today I'm on a
• 43:02
  Speaker 2: construction site with a bunch of blokes who aren't the
• 43:07
  Speaker 2: same as yesterday's audience, not better or worse. Yeah, And
• 43:11
  Speaker 2: there's that constant awareness of how do I share these thoughts,
• 43:14
  Speaker 2: ideas messages in a way which will resonate with the
• 43:18
  Speaker 2: reader or the viewer or the listener or the participant.
• 43:24
  Speaker 2: And that's dynamic, not static, because you know yourself. Like
• 43:29
  Speaker 2: sometimes I've literally on the same day done presentations with
• 43:33
  Speaker 2: the teaching staff out of school and the students and
• 43:36
  Speaker 2: the parents. So I did three big presentations at a
• 43:40
  Speaker 2: really big country country school here, and I had to
• 43:45
  Speaker 2: do hours with each group, hours with the students, hours
• 43:49
  Speaker 2: with the parents at night, and hours with the teachers.
• 43:53
  Speaker 2: And they were all very similar messages, but all of
• 43:56
  Speaker 2: the presentations were different. The language, the story, energy, the approach,
• 44:02
  Speaker 2: it all different because forty five year old mums don't
• 44:07
  Speaker 2: think like their fourteen year old daughters necessarily, So how
• 44:11
  Speaker 2: do I connect with a fourteen year old daughter or
• 44:14
  Speaker 2: a fourteen year old female or a fourteen year.
• 44:16
  Speaker 1: Old male or whatever. Also, how do.
• 44:19
  Speaker 2: I deal with this other group of teachers that are
• 44:23
  Speaker 2: somewhere between mildly academic and highly academic, depending on what
• 44:27
  Speaker 2: they've done and what their background is. And yeah, that's
• 44:29
  Speaker 2: the that's the bit that people don't get about. Speaking
• 44:35
  Speaker 2: is easy, but communication and connection and rapport and trust
• 44:39
  Speaker 2: and respect' that's the that's the golden ticket.
• 44:44
  Speaker 1: Like that, that's what really matters, because you and I.
• 44:47
  Speaker 2: Both know people who can talk like fuck people just disengage.
• 44:52
  Speaker 3: Yeah, no, I completely agree. It's actually one of I
• 44:54
  Speaker 3: was at News Corp as a product director up to
• 44:56
  Speaker 3: about twenty ten and I had my first PTSD panic
• 45:00
  Speaker 3: and it was because of the hours I was doing,
• 45:01
  Speaker 3: the lifestyle I was living. So within three months I
• 45:04
  Speaker 3: resigned and I applied to do a post grade up
• 45:06
  Speaker 3: here in Brisbane at QUT in creative writing and journalism
• 45:10
  Speaker 3: because I'd started writing articles on news dot com dot
• 45:12
  Speaker 3: you and saying getting really good reception, and the stuff
• 45:15
  Speaker 3: that I was writing about in the way I told
• 45:16
  Speaker 3: the story was what we call creative nonfiction, more than
• 45:19
  Speaker 3: just standard journalism, which is who, what, where, we're in, why, how?
• 45:22
  Speaker 3: And so I went to the university and I learned
• 45:24
  Speaker 3: to write for different formats in different media and so
• 45:28
  Speaker 3: the same way that you've written that seventy page research paper,
• 45:32
  Speaker 3: the abstract is what most people will read write and
• 45:34
  Speaker 3: the keywords, and then you know, if you've got to
• 45:36
  Speaker 3: tweet that out, how do you tweet that? If you're
• 45:38
  Speaker 3: putting on a LinkedIn from more sophisticated audience, where does
• 45:40
  Speaker 3: it go there? If you're on a podcast, what are
• 45:41
  Speaker 3: your sound bites? What are people taking away? If you're
• 45:44
  Speaker 3: doing a keynote, what are you going to tell them?
• 45:45
  Speaker 3: What did you tell them? Remind them what you told them?
• 45:48
  Speaker 3: All these kinds of things. I don't think we study
• 45:50
  Speaker 3: enough because so many people who are really, really good
• 45:53
  Speaker 3: it's speaking till the cows come home, really off the cuff,
• 45:56
  Speaker 3: but then you ask them to put it into something
• 45:58
  Speaker 3: really selling, into an email or or just a one
• 46:00
  Speaker 3: pager into a larger document, and they struggle becauseication is
• 46:05
  Speaker 3: one of the hardest things that we have in front
• 46:06
  Speaker 3: of us that impacts directly our capability, and I mean
• 46:10
  Speaker 3: capability in the sense if you can't communicate your message.
• 46:12
  Speaker 3: And this is one thing I find with academics, and
• 46:14
  Speaker 3: I think we alluded to this in the preamble before
• 46:17
  Speaker 3: we started recording. A lot of academics can't present and
• 46:21
  Speaker 3: they can present findings, but they can't engage an audience,
• 46:23
  Speaker 3: and I did the three thesis late last year here
• 46:26
  Speaker 3: on campus, and I presented my work and I did
• 46:28
  Speaker 3: the same creative nonfiction. I'm not talking about science and
• 46:31
  Speaker 3: DNA and everything. I'm talking about. Artificial intelligence is now
• 46:34
  Speaker 3: so protruding into our lives. It's inescapable, and here's a
• 46:37
  Speaker 3: few things to think about. And so a lot of
• 46:39
  Speaker 3: people came up and said, that was really interesting because
• 46:41
  Speaker 3: you left out all the science and you told a
• 46:43
  Speaker 3: really good story. But because I'm in a computer science department,
• 46:46
  Speaker 3: the hard science guys are in there as well. So
• 46:48
  Speaker 3: hard science got all the marks. And that's fine because
• 46:50
  Speaker 3: all I want to do was sway a few people
• 46:52
  Speaker 3: in the room to understand my message. I wasn't there
• 46:54
  Speaker 3: to win. But when I'm on stage with a keynote,
• 46:57
  Speaker 3: depending on what the needs of the audience are, I
• 46:59
  Speaker 3: spend a lot of times I'm sure you do as
• 47:01
  Speaker 3: well too, getting ready for that message for that audience.
• 47:04
  Speaker 3: So when I'm talking to vets, it's the veterans are fantastic.
• 47:07
  Speaker 3: I can talk like this, it's great, pull all the
• 47:10
  Speaker 3: science out, just talk about the big, high level stuff
• 47:12
  Speaker 3: and make it really, really practical. And then I sit
• 47:15
  Speaker 3: down with academics, and my answer to the question about
• 47:19
  Speaker 3: how do you talk to the parents, the teachers, and
• 47:21
  Speaker 3: the kids is to focus on cod design. I spend
• 47:24
  Speaker 3: time with each of those cohorts before I present to them,
• 47:26
  Speaker 3: and sometimes I do that virtually other times to try
• 47:28
  Speaker 3: and get in the room. I'm working with disability support
• 47:31
  Speaker 3: workers now, trying to understand their needs and how AI
• 47:33
  Speaker 3: might help them. And they had very specific needs that
• 47:36
  Speaker 3: are fairly well overlapping to an extent with people from
• 47:38
  Speaker 3: the military and first responders. But they have really unique
• 47:42
  Speaker 3: needs that I wouldn't have thought about because these are
• 47:44
  Speaker 3: people who typically have a lot more empathy and heart
• 47:47
  Speaker 3: than people who move into first responder in military environments.
• 47:50
  Speaker 3: They wouldn't work as disability support workers unless they gave
• 47:52
  Speaker 3: a fuck about their fellow man. And so nuance the
• 47:55
  Speaker 3: message around that. I can't just say if you do this,
• 47:58
  Speaker 3: this will happen. You need to talk about meaning and
• 48:00
  Speaker 3: purpose and things. So yeah, yeah, I mean, I'm fifty
• 48:03
  Speaker 3: five and I'm still learning about how to communicate better.
• 48:06
  Speaker 2: Yeah, we're not bad, mate, I'll give you the red
• 48:09
  Speaker 2: hot tip.
• 48:09
  Speaker 1: You're not terrible at it.
• 48:11
  Speaker 3: Thanks Dad.
• 48:12
  Speaker 2: I probably should have dived into this when you mentioned it.
• 48:15
  Speaker 2: But we're on a bit of a role, so this
• 48:17
  Speaker 2: is a little bit what's the word. It's not particularly fluid,
• 48:22
  Speaker 2: but I want to hear from you about it because
• 48:25
  Speaker 2: it's interesting and it interests me and.
• 48:27
  Speaker 1: It will our listeners too.
• 48:28
  Speaker 2: So like you sound very articulate, very intelligent, very sure
• 48:33
  Speaker 2: of yourself in a good way, not an arrogant way,
• 48:36
  Speaker 2: very focused. Blah blah blah, all the good things. Tell
• 48:40
  Speaker 2: us about you and addiction as much or as little
• 48:44
  Speaker 2: as you want. You and booze or drugs or whatever
• 48:47
  Speaker 2: it was again, same kind of asterisk, PTSD recovery. Now
• 48:54
  Speaker 2: tell us a little bit about that stuff in your
• 48:57
  Speaker 2: life if you would.
• 48:58
  Speaker 3: Yeah, look, you asked me that a couple of years ago.
• 49:01
  Speaker 3: I will tell you to go and jump off something
• 49:02
  Speaker 3: really high. But now thanks for a lot of work
• 49:04
  Speaker 3: and actually really accepting these of the cards I've been dealt.
• 49:07
  Speaker 3: You can either just succumb or you can fight it
• 49:10
  Speaker 3: and fight back. So I've always I mean, I grew
• 49:13
  Speaker 3: up around you know, the eighties. Everyone drank. I'm pretty
• 49:15
  Speaker 3: sure mum drank and smoke when she was pregnant with me.
• 49:18
  Speaker 3: That probably comes across in a few ways my ex
• 49:19
  Speaker 3: partners would tell you, but I do think that having
• 49:23
  Speaker 3: alcohol around me all the time. I think Dad gave
• 49:25
  Speaker 3: me my first sip of beer when I was eight.
• 49:27
  Speaker 3: It was VB and I've never touched it since I
• 49:28
  Speaker 3: can't understand the smell. But moving into the military culture,
• 49:32
  Speaker 3: i'd been drunk once before I joined the military at eighteen,
• 49:35
  Speaker 3: or when I went in at eighteen, And it's a
• 49:37
  Speaker 3: culture of form, storm and norm you know. With Norman
• 49:40
  Speaker 3: schwartzkof came up with as a frame. Basically we formed
• 49:44
  Speaker 3: our platoons and our sections and everything else. And then
• 49:47
  Speaker 3: I was proud of a company for platoon. If Charlie
• 49:49
  Speaker 3: Company came by, it was us against them because you
• 49:52
  Speaker 3: have to form cohesive teams. And the other way you
• 49:54
  Speaker 3: form cohesive teams about us versus them is you get
• 49:56
  Speaker 3: people in a bar together, get to drink together, fight together,
• 50:00
  Speaker 3: all bond together to fight the other guys who around us,
• 50:02
  Speaker 3: and this becomes really normalized. So during the nineties there
• 50:05
  Speaker 3: was like such a drinking culture. And didn't do too
• 50:08
  Speaker 3: much of it because I was always either on training
• 50:10
  Speaker 3: exercises or building or blowing something up. And it was
• 50:13
  Speaker 3: when I hit City Street that I really started to
• 50:15
  Speaker 3: understand working in media and tech, the drinking culture is there,
• 50:19
  Speaker 3: not quite as heavy, but there's always an opportunity to
• 50:21
  Speaker 3: go out and have drinks. And at that stage, up
• 50:24
  Speaker 3: until twenty ten, as I alluded to earlier, when I
• 50:26
  Speaker 3: was first diagnosed with PTSD type traits, took a few
• 50:29
  Speaker 3: more years to finally nail that. I realized alcohol had
• 50:32
  Speaker 3: been a crutch and I fundamentally having PTSD from growing
• 50:36
  Speaker 3: up in violence. Parts of me, my schemas in my
• 50:39
  Speaker 3: brain have just said, you can't trust people because if
• 50:41
  Speaker 3: your mum and dad won't protect you from violence, then
• 50:43
  Speaker 3: you can't trust anyone, right, And that was the decision
• 50:45
  Speaker 3: I had in my head up until about seven or
• 50:47
  Speaker 3: eight years ago. So I fundamentally didn't trust people. I
• 50:50
  Speaker 3: liked people, and so if I got overwhelmed by people
• 50:52
  Speaker 3: or life whatever, I just turned to what I knew,
• 50:54
  Speaker 3: which was drinking, thankfully not drugs. I mean, I've lost
• 50:56
  Speaker 3: two mates to ice and crystal meth who alcohol just
• 51:00
  Speaker 3: wasn't doing it for them. I played with drugs over
• 51:02
  Speaker 3: the years, but you know, I have edibles now to
• 51:04
  Speaker 3: help me sleep. But that's about it and even now alcohol.
• 51:07
  Speaker 3: In the last couple of years, after my friends did
• 51:09
  Speaker 3: an intervention for me, men sent me off to rehab
• 51:12
  Speaker 3: for the last time, and which was great. It's such
• 51:15
  Speaker 3: a standard thing in our society that alcohol is there
• 51:18
  Speaker 3: for us, right. So what I didn't realize until I
• 51:20
  Speaker 3: went into rehabs is that there's very quite a few,
• 51:25
  Speaker 3: very commonly accepted substitutes for facing reality. We have reality TV,
• 51:29
  Speaker 3: Netflix and things like that. People are porn, drugs, alcohol, gambling,
• 51:33
  Speaker 3: shopping relationships, so giving a lot of love to somebody
• 51:37
  Speaker 3: else when you don't feel it for yourself. So if
• 51:39
  Speaker 3: you're loving someone else, you feel better about yourself. That's
• 51:41
  Speaker 3: your crutch. There's so many ways that we cope without
• 51:44
  Speaker 3: really coping that I had a really complicated relationship up
• 51:49
  Speaker 3: until about two years ago, until I started to put
• 51:52
  Speaker 3: I still don't understand scheme of therapy.
• 51:54
  Speaker 4: Those schemes fundamentally are decisions made in your head before
• 51:56
  Speaker 4: the age of ten, based on the information around you,
• 51:59
  Speaker 4: how you treated our life has been, and you can
• 52:01
  Speaker 4: make some big, bad and good decisions around how are
• 52:05
  Speaker 4: you going to make sense of the world.
• 52:06
  Speaker 3: So I had some really deranged thinking around can't trust people.
• 52:10
  Speaker 3: Relationships are hard better to avoid conflict, which is a
• 52:14
  Speaker 3: weird decision to make. Before I joined the military, and
• 52:17
  Speaker 3: then I I yeah, I would anytime anything went bad.
• 52:21
  Speaker 3: I had two marriages, both changed because of me. I
• 52:25
  Speaker 3: wasn't brave enough yet to actually directly confront PTSD upfront
• 52:29
  Speaker 3: and do therapy, do transcranial magnetic stimulation. Change my diet,
• 52:32
  Speaker 3: change my behaviors, change my social group, get off social media,
• 52:36
  Speaker 3: get a pet. I've got a coolly laying on my
• 52:38
  Speaker 3: feet at the moment who's changed my life fundamentally in
• 52:40
  Speaker 3: the last six months in a way that I didn't
• 52:42
  Speaker 3: even expect, And life has become a lot easier. I
• 52:45
  Speaker 3: don't get in my way anywhere near as much. It
• 52:47
  Speaker 3: used to be three steps forward, two steps back. Now
• 52:49
  Speaker 3: it's about seven steps forward two to three steps back
• 52:52
  Speaker 3: every quarter. Because I don't expect it to be smooth sailing.
• 52:55
  Speaker 3: I'm not that naive. But the best things that I've
• 52:59
  Speaker 3: relied on in that has been actually having people around
• 53:01
  Speaker 3: me I can have really frank conversations with. So when
• 53:04
  Speaker 3: my friends did this intervention, they said, you've been drinking
• 53:06
  Speaker 3: a lot lately, And I was living with them at
• 53:07
  Speaker 3: the time, I just moved up from Sydney, and I
• 53:09
  Speaker 3: told them it was my knee injury from doing the
• 53:11
  Speaker 3: Community of Santiago a few months before, and it was
• 53:14
  Speaker 3: to an extent, but I just felt incredibly fucking lost
• 53:17
  Speaker 3: and lonely, and I've never been a lonely person, and
• 53:19
  Speaker 3: so i just drank my way through it. So Uber
• 53:21
  Speaker 3: Eats and those guys were delivering boost to me a
• 53:23
  Speaker 3: couple of times a day, sometimes two or three months
• 53:25
  Speaker 3: of line and my friends got me out of that hole.
• 53:29
  Speaker 3: And it was very fucking grateful for it. And now
• 53:32
  Speaker 3: I put in place strategies like conversations like this where
• 53:34
  Speaker 3: I have to share it and put my I guess
• 53:39
  Speaker 3: ego away because there's people out there right now who
• 53:43
  Speaker 3: listen to this going through the same thing. And I'm
• 53:45
  Speaker 3: not aiming to be a role model. I'm just going
• 53:47
  Speaker 3: to say that from my experience having good friends having
• 53:50
  Speaker 3: the courage to actually say, look, I don't something's not right,
• 53:53
  Speaker 3: even if you start asking that in AI and then
• 53:55
  Speaker 3: starts to end the professionals before even your friends, because
• 53:58
  Speaker 3: sometimes that's safer. There's a lot of avenues forward to
• 54:01
  Speaker 3: get out of holes. Yeah, the courage to face them, mate.
• 54:07
  Speaker 2: That was almost my favorite bit of the chat, to
• 54:10
  Speaker 2: be honest.
• 54:11
  Speaker 1: I love that. I love that and I love that.
• 54:14
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I like hearing somebody who's so confident and by god,
• 54:20
  Speaker 2: you talk fast, right.
• 54:22
  Speaker 1: Some people listen to the show.
• 54:23
  Speaker 2: They tell me, they tell me they listen to the
• 54:25
  Speaker 2: show on one point two five, tiff who edits for me?
• 54:28
  Speaker 2: Listens to all podcasts? Or one point five nobody's listening
• 54:33
  Speaker 2: to you on one point five.
• 54:34
  Speaker 1: I'll give you the redcord tip.
• 54:35
  Speaker 2: Not the first, no, but thanks for being courageous, mate
• 54:38
  Speaker 2: and honest, and it is. It's a It's a great
• 54:42
  Speaker 2: thing to hear now as we're winding up. So the
• 54:45
  Speaker 2: silence Paradox, Good Reasons to kill. These are names of
• 54:49
  Speaker 2: Chris Reese's book, The Woke Paradox.
• 54:53
  Speaker 1: Is there another one you want to check?
• 54:55
  Speaker 2: I know you've done a bunch, but are those the
• 54:57
  Speaker 2: main three that people should have a the last three?
• 55:01
  Speaker 3: So if people go to Chris Reese dot co. That's
• 55:03
  Speaker 3: my website as an author, you can be able to
• 55:05
  Speaker 3: find pretty much for a back catalog and some of
• 55:07
  Speaker 3: my previous speaking highlights. But yeah, the worpe Paradox talks
• 55:11
  Speaker 3: about how PC just meant pair shaped and we're so
• 55:14
  Speaker 3: wiped now we're actually incapacitated. The silence paradox talks around
• 55:18
  Speaker 3: how we've recently become so enamored with AI that were
• 55:21
  Speaker 3: actually eschewing human relationships. And The Good Reasons to Kill
• 55:25
  Speaker 3: was a eighteen month journey after my PhD so my
• 55:28
  Speaker 3: postgrad to understand why people around the world killed, either
• 55:32
  Speaker 3: out of survival or out of a desire. And I
• 55:35
  Speaker 3: looked at everything from euthanasia, soldiers, police, honor killings, and
• 55:40
  Speaker 3: just tried to understand the cultural and institutional drivers that
• 55:43
  Speaker 3: made someone in Canada, for example, who was an Indian
• 55:45
  Speaker 3: lad feel it was okay to kill his sister because
• 55:47
  Speaker 3: she married someone from the wrong sect. That to me
• 55:50
  Speaker 3: seems apporent. I would never sister, I would kill. I
• 55:52
  Speaker 3: would die to protect my family, but he would kill
• 55:55
  Speaker 3: his own sister out of pride for the family. So
• 55:57
  Speaker 3: that was a hell of a project. Two hundred and
• 55:59
  Speaker 3: fifty people viewed and research and everything over about two
• 56:02
  Speaker 3: years led to me doing a TED talk on it.
• 56:04
  Speaker 3: But it was a really nice way to unpack one
• 56:07
  Speaker 3: of the darkest parts of the human experience and put
• 56:09
  Speaker 3: a human face to it. So I don't write fiction.
• 56:12
  Speaker 3: I don't really know. I like reading fiction, but I
• 56:14
  Speaker 3: like telling stories, and especially other people's stories.
• 56:18
  Speaker 1: Speaking of this is this is the weirdest segue in
• 56:22
  Speaker 1: the history of segus. Here we go, speaking of Canada
• 56:26
  Speaker 1: and death.
• 56:29
  Speaker 2: I heard only this morning, two hours ago, listening to
• 56:32
  Speaker 2: someone chat. I don't know if you know this, but
• 56:35
  Speaker 2: this is worth weaving into your little data bank. Is
• 56:41
  Speaker 2: five point one percent of people who die, right, so
• 56:45
  Speaker 2: one in twenty who die in Canada die ya assisted suicide.
• 56:51
  Speaker 1: Could you believe that?
• 56:52
  Speaker 3: Yeah? I can. Yeah, it's actually doctor Philip Nischki, who
• 56:55
  Speaker 3: was the death Doctor, who was the first doctor legally
• 56:57
  Speaker 3: in the world under the Roti Act, which is the
• 56:59
  Speaker 3: Rights of the ten Ill Act, which came out around
• 57:01
  Speaker 3: ninety four to ninety five. He was the first doctor
• 57:03
  Speaker 3: to legally euthanize someone. He made the death machine, made
• 57:07
  Speaker 3: him famous and everything else. He now runs Exit International
• 57:10
  Speaker 3: and he got He was the first person I interviewed
• 57:11
  Speaker 3: for the book. And then as to the Swiss organization
• 57:14
  Speaker 3: that does the what are they called? It starts with
• 57:17
  Speaker 3: V and you can actually go across there. It's death tourism.
• 57:20
  Speaker 3: It's huge. Thousands of people a year travel to certain
• 57:23
  Speaker 3: countries where they'll go and have So a good example,
• 57:25
  Speaker 3: you go to Amsterdam, you can have you stay at
• 57:29
  Speaker 3: these certain hotels. You go and do whatever you're going
• 57:31
  Speaker 3: to do. You tell them the night you want your cocktail.
• 57:33
  Speaker 3: That cocktail has nembutoe, which is an anesthetic they use
• 57:36
  Speaker 3: for putting down horses. So you basically go and live
• 57:39
  Speaker 3: your life. You're termally ill or for whatever reasons that
• 57:41
  Speaker 3: you've been cleared to actually be accepted into this organization
• 57:44
  Speaker 3: for them to take your life and send your remains
• 57:46
  Speaker 3: back to your family. And they are oversubscribed because people
• 57:50
  Speaker 3: they want to live in suffering and declining health, and
• 57:52
  Speaker 3: they might be lonely lost a loved one terminally ill.
• 57:55
  Speaker 3: It makes sense. So when you say one in twenty,
• 57:57
  Speaker 3: I'm not surprised, and I think that's going to increase.
• 58:00
  Speaker 3: Yeah yeah, wow, that's a much light note to leave
• 58:05
  Speaker 3: the conversational.
• 58:05
  Speaker 1: Yeah yeah wow.
• 58:06
  Speaker 2: I'm just sad as fuck now thanks, No, no, I
• 58:10
  Speaker 2: don't even want my lunch anymore, and I'll blow you everyone.
• 58:13
  Speaker 3: Everyone, Look at the puppy. Look at the puppy. Believe that.
• 58:16
  Speaker 2: Oh god, you're like the queen mate, what's what's his
• 58:20
  Speaker 2: or her name?
• 58:21
  Speaker 3: Duke? His name is Duke very much so. My last
• 58:23
  Speaker 3: cargy was called Poppy, which was named by the breeder
• 58:27
  Speaker 3: and Poppy being the symbol for anzax. So corgies are
• 58:30
  Speaker 3: a good good luck charm for.
• 58:32
  Speaker 2: Me, especially Duke. It sounds all regal and shit, shit,
• 58:37
  Speaker 2: regal and shit.
• 58:38
  Speaker 1: That pretty much sums me up. Regal and shit.
• 58:42
  Speaker 2: So best way to connect with you or follow you
• 58:46
  Speaker 2: or find you just your website.
• 58:48
  Speaker 3: Yeah, Chris Reese with the two sas dot co or LinkedIn,
• 58:51
  Speaker 3: you'll find me. There's only one Chris Reese with two
• 58:53
  Speaker 3: sas on the planet. But always open too interesting discussions
• 58:56
  Speaker 3: like this because I generally think they contribute to the
• 58:59
  Speaker 3: greater good.
• 59:00
  Speaker 1: Yeah, man, thanks so much. You're an interesting cat. You're
• 59:03
  Speaker 1: a good cat.
• 59:03
  Speaker 2: I appreciate meeting you, I will say, listeners. Chris is
• 59:07
  Speaker 2: the first person I've ever reached out to via LinkedIn.
• 59:11
  Speaker 2: And I don't do the reaching out.
• 59:13
  Speaker 3: I have.
• 59:15
  Speaker 2: Melissa, the lovely Melissa, who reaches out and finds guests
• 59:19
  Speaker 2: and does all the stuff. So you're like, I never
• 59:23
  Speaker 2: reach out to people and I just you liked or
• 59:26
  Speaker 2: something or whatever, and I just went, who's this dude?
• 59:29
  Speaker 2: And I clicked on your fucking handsome face and I went, ah,
• 59:33
  Speaker 2: well look at that.
• 59:33
  Speaker 3: He's interesting.
• 59:34
  Speaker 2: And then I have had a bit of a read
• 59:37
  Speaker 2: about what you do, and I went, I want to
• 59:39
  Speaker 2: talk to him, and then I went, I can kill
• 59:41
  Speaker 2: two birds with one stone.
• 59:43
  Speaker 1: So thanks for the free console.
• 59:44
  Speaker 3: Yeah no, that's all good. I've wanted to run a
• 59:47
  Speaker 3: podcast for ages, and I've done episodes where I've recorded
• 59:50
  Speaker 3: stuff for my research, but I would love to be
• 59:52
  Speaker 3: able to do what you do. You said you do
• 59:54
  Speaker 3: five of these a week, don't you.
• 59:55
  Speaker 1: Yeah, we cut back.
• 59:57
  Speaker 2: I only cut back a few months ago from seven
• 59:59
  Speaker 2: because I'm finishing my doctorate.
• 1:00:01
  Speaker 3: Yeah right, that's amazing.
• 1:00:03
  Speaker 1: Well, yeah, it.
• 1:00:04
  Speaker 3: Must be a privileged You must get to speak to
• 1:00:06
  Speaker 3: some really interesting people. So I'll follow you with great
• 1:00:09
  Speaker 3: enthusiasm and see what you come up with.
• 1:00:12
  Speaker 2: Honestly, mate, some of them are really interesting. Some of
• 1:00:14
  Speaker 2: them are just me banging on about bullshit. So there's
• 1:00:17
  Speaker 2: there's a range. But what's funny is sometimes and that's
• 1:00:20
  Speaker 2: the thing you don't get with podcasts, people go ah,
• 1:00:25
  Speaker 2: they're all good, and you know, I go, yeah, they're like,
• 1:00:29
  Speaker 2: but I actually just like the ones where you're teaching
• 1:00:31
  Speaker 2: and coaching just where it's just me, and then there
• 1:00:34
  Speaker 2: are other people where, you know, like I've had on
• 1:00:38
  Speaker 2: a few interesting There's a guy called Professor Bo Lotto.
• 1:00:42
  Speaker 1: I had him on a week or so ago.
• 1:00:44
  Speaker 2: He's just an interesting cat and yeah, he's like I
• 1:00:49
  Speaker 2: just want to you know, there's some people you meet
• 1:00:51
  Speaker 2: and it's like, can we be friends, Like, apart from
• 1:00:54
  Speaker 2: the podcast, can we be friends? Because you're interesting and
• 1:00:58
  Speaker 2: you know, there's there's that, So yeah. I interviewed the
• 1:01:01
  Speaker 2: guy who started Netflix, Mark Randolph.
• 1:01:04
  Speaker 3: Nice.
• 1:01:05
  Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, he's the coolest dude ever. Like you're chatting
• 1:01:08
  Speaker 2: to a billionaire. Not that that matters, but that's not
• 1:01:11
  Speaker 2: a terrible achievement. And I said, who's it might have changed,
• 1:01:16
  Speaker 2: but when I spoke to him, which was a couple
• 1:01:18
  Speaker 2: of years ago, his work protocol was two days a week,
• 1:01:21
  Speaker 2: work five days off all year, all year. So he
• 1:01:25
  Speaker 2: works like crazy for two days. I think he works
• 1:01:28
  Speaker 2: like two fourteen hour days. And he's got obviously a
• 1:01:33
  Speaker 2: company and lots of people who work for him. But
• 1:01:37
  Speaker 2: he lives in maybe Colorado, somewhere wilderness in the States,
• 1:01:43
  Speaker 2: and all he does is mountain bike, kayak, hang out
• 1:01:46
  Speaker 2: with his grandkids.
• 1:01:47
  Speaker 1: He's about it's not that old.
• 1:01:49
  Speaker 2: He's like sixty, right, And I'm like, yeah, that's a
• 1:01:52
  Speaker 2: good that's a good model for me.
• 1:01:54
  Speaker 1: Anyway I go.
• 1:01:55
  Speaker 2: That appeals to me. And basically the mandate to his
• 1:01:59
  Speaker 2: team is unless the joints burning down, do not contact
• 1:02:03
  Speaker 2: me for any reason on those five days. Respect Yeah,
• 1:02:07
  Speaker 2: And I'm like yeah.
• 1:02:08
  Speaker 1: And then I said to him on the show, I go,
• 1:02:10
  Speaker 1: can we be friends? He's like yeah, he laughed.
• 1:02:14
  Speaker 2: And then at the end we got off and he goes,
• 1:02:17
  Speaker 2: hit me up, if you're about here, you can stay.
• 1:02:19
  Speaker 1: I'm like, I would come just for that.
• 1:02:22
  Speaker 3: You know. I think what you do is a privilege
• 1:02:25
  Speaker 3: because over the years, and you say, some people like
• 1:02:27
  Speaker 3: you when you're coaching, other people like you waxing lyrical
• 1:02:30
  Speaker 3: with mates about stupid stuff or most profound stuff. But
• 1:02:33
  Speaker 3: the one thing I've always been interested in people as
• 1:02:37
  Speaker 3: an idea because we all grow up, as you said earlier,
• 1:02:39
  Speaker 3: all of the things that all the structures and the
• 1:02:41
  Speaker 3: kind of the rules of how to play in life
• 1:02:44
  Speaker 3: that you learn from your parents, from your schooling, from education,
• 1:02:46
  Speaker 3: from your work. That's different for every person on the planet, right,
• 1:02:49
  Speaker 3: Because when I ran corporate events as a program director
• 1:02:53
  Speaker 3: across APAC for three years, so I've sat on stage
• 1:02:55
  Speaker 3: with guys from NASA, the guy who caught who was
• 1:02:59
  Speaker 3: the ivan my latch with data before he even had
• 1:03:02
  Speaker 3: big data. I've sat down with three nights of the realm,
• 1:03:05
  Speaker 3: three billionaires, and I can't say for an absolute fact
• 1:03:08
  Speaker 3: that the guy off the street that I catch up
• 1:03:10
  Speaker 3: with just as a shaer I want to talk to
• 1:03:12
  Speaker 3: you about X y Z is any less profound in
• 1:03:14
  Speaker 3: what he can deliver inside wise than the billionaire. That's
• 1:03:18
  Speaker 3: been proven. I mean, I got a little bit drunk
• 1:03:20
  Speaker 3: with Richard Branson when he launched in Australia in the
• 1:03:22
  Speaker 3: early two thousands. He went and got a drinks and
• 1:03:24
  Speaker 3: I said, Richard, can I please get you a Can
• 1:03:27
  Speaker 3: I go and get you a drink? He goes, no,
• 1:03:28
  Speaker 3: it's my event, you're my guest. And that was so
• 1:03:30
  Speaker 3: fucking gracious. And he worked the whole room. He talked
• 1:03:33
  Speaker 3: to everyone in that room. There was hundreds of people,
• 1:03:34
  Speaker 3: including media. Then when he gets on stage he gets
• 1:03:37
  Speaker 3: really skittish because he doesn't like public speaking, but he
• 1:03:40
  Speaker 3: loves people, and that was what I took away from
• 1:03:42
  Speaker 3: that night that was fucking fabulous. Because I will get
• 1:03:45
  Speaker 3: up on stage and I can talk for an hour
• 1:03:47
  Speaker 3: about most things around my space. But if you ask
• 1:03:50
  Speaker 3: me to have that conversation you asked me before about
• 1:03:52
  Speaker 3: addiction and recovery, I'll do that in certain times and places,
• 1:03:56
  Speaker 3: so you know, you feel safe to talk about some
• 1:03:58
  Speaker 3: stuff with some people and other stuff with nobody. And
• 1:04:00
  Speaker 3: so the Japanese have this principle called three faces. The
• 1:04:03
  Speaker 3: first face you show the world, the second face you
• 1:04:05
  Speaker 3: show the people closest to you, the third face you
• 1:04:07
  Speaker 3: never show anyone. And so in the military. In the military,
• 1:04:10
  Speaker 3: we see that third face quite a bit. So I
• 1:04:12
  Speaker 3: like the opportunity to actually do things like this because
• 1:04:15
  Speaker 3: I always walk away better from it.
• 1:04:17
  Speaker 1: Yeah, well you're good at it, mate, I appreciate you.
• 1:04:20
  Speaker 2: We'll say goodbye af fair but for the minute, thanks
• 1:04:22
  Speaker 2: for your time, thanks for coming to play.
• 1:04:24
  Speaker 3: Pleasure an absolute pleasure, not at all interesting at all,
• 1:04:27
  Speaker 3: But you know I can leave with it.
• 1:04:28
  Speaker 2: Yeah no, well, I mean thanks for being bored for
• 1:04:31
  Speaker 2: an hour and fifteen minutes with me.
• 1:04:34
  Speaker 3: No pleasure