23 min read

Episode 5: Disarming

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📽️ Hypocrisy and projection

📗 What the word sonder means

🐙 How to walk with and without your arms

🏉 What the AFL of personal growth is like

💀 What reliable, cheerful narcissists we all are.


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Transcript
 

Producer Cam:       Going in for the hug, in what most people I think would describe as the default. If you're a similar size to the person you're hugging, you go left arm down, right arm up and you embrace in an interlocking, symmetrical way. Our friend is so aware and conscious of her arms that she didn't know what to do and I have no idea how to reenact this, but she said, "my arms both accidentally ended up on the same side of his body". She goes in for a hug and is so unfamiliar with what to do with her arms, that both her arms ended up on one side of this dude. He's in the normal hug position. He grabs her, squeezes her tight in the oomph that you give a hug to show someone that you really love them and she dislocated her shoulder. She said her shoulder had an audible pop and they had to immediately go to the emergency room.

Alicia:                   Good morning everybody. Morning and welcome to the Alicia McKay Show on this Friday, the 8th of April. It is eight o'clock in the morning. I'm in Wellington and autumn has officially hit. We're talking long sleeves, we're talking sweatshirts, we're talking disappointment, but we're also talking crunchy leaves. I don't know about you guys, but Producer Cam mentioned to me the other day that when Facebook first was a thing, I don't know, I'm just showing my age here, but do you guys remember that when Facebook was first a thing, one of the things you would do to show how quirky and unique you were, were to join Facebook pages that had a funny name. Cam, what was the name of the Facebook page that you joined about crunchy leaves?

Producer Cam:       I will go slightly out of my way to step on that particularly crunchy looking leaf.

Alicia:                   When you joined that page, Cam, do you feel like it said something about your personality that you were proud to share with your Facebook friends and connections?

Producer Cam:       I think Facebook groups were a time when people could really first discover that other people had shared quirky interest in a safe way. A lot of the time, these things just don't come up, but when someone has a way of phrasing something that represents your emotion about it and calls a Facebook group that, then you jump on straight away. The other group that I particularly love was a group called "join this group, invite all your friends and immediately leave".

Alicia:                   Big fan, but I don't think anyone under the age of 30 is even on Facebook now and certainly my children, who are all quite keen on social media, have no desire to be on grandma Facebook. I don't know, is that a personal attack on some of you, are you now regretting your choice to be on the book face? Am I going to have like some goons from Mark Zuckerberg knock on the office door here to try and shut me down like that episode of The Simpsons, where Bill Gates comes and bashes Homer Simpson's new internet startup. I don't know. Maybe, but I'm prepared to take that risk because that's what we're all about. This week, once again, I've got very minimal visibility over what's been happening in the outside world. I can't tell whether that's because I'm too insular in my work and stuff this week or whether the news just hasn't been even remotely compelling.

                           I would be really pleased if those of you who are tuning in live are prepared to add in the comments whether the news is boring or I'm ignorant, because I would quite like to know that. As I got prepared for this show this morning, I was trying to think about what I wanted to cover and I don't know how many of you listening or watching have engaged with much of my content before, but I'm going to give you a bit of a sneak peek into the backstage process of how I create content. Whether I'm about to write an article or whether I'm about to go live to deliver a keynote speech or I've got a webinar or a workshop, my process is generally quite narcissistic. Here's how it goes.

                           I go, what have I been bothered by, or thinking about out, or struggling with right now? I bet other people are probably struggling with that too. I'm going to go try and make sense of it, and then that's what I do. I had a conference keynote earlier this week for the Dairy Women's Network, which was a really good time, by the way. We were supposed to all be hanging out [inaudible] and in person. COVID wrecked stuff. These guys, as you would expect being incredible rural woman, immediately just got shit done and put it online. They didn't even quiver. They weren't like, should we wait, like some people were? These are rural people, they're like, very good, we've got to change how we're doing things. It's all on the line, don't worry about it, mate. I went into my Dairy Women's Network conference keynote, doing the same process, thinking what have I been battling with this week? I wonder how that's useful for them.

                           I thought, I've been battling with dropping balls and you might remember two weeks ago on the Alicia McKay show, I tuned in from Taupo and monumentally got things up. We had a 30 second clip of the Alicia McKay Show, which was the opening credits, and then me going, "Hi everyone. Oh, there's an echo. Oh, shit" and then pushing a button and then going black screen and I just disappeared, which was mortifying by the way. In the three minutes that Cam and CV were then back on screen, managing the show for you and I wasn't there yet, I was having a cry in the bathroom because I was like, oh man, everything's turned to shit. I led to the conference with that keynote and was like, are you guys dropping balls? Do you have cognitive overload? Do you want to talk about how big your lists are? And it was a hit.

                           For the most part, that process of just digging into my own experience, seeing if I can make sense of it and presenting it to others to go, "is this you too?", usually works, but I've been thinking a lot this week, let's see how this works, about hypocrisy and about judgement . I think I'm particularly aware of it, because we've been doing a bunch of brand work here in the office and we've got an awesome agency who are digging into our brand identity so we can jazz it up and put a cool logo on and speak to this new phase of our business, which is going to have a whole lot of other people in it and stuff. It's all really cool. It's really exciting, but part of that process has been research and those of you who follow me on LinkedIn or on my mailing list will know that, as soon as the agency said that they had to go and do some expensive, long analytics about how people perceive the Alicia McKay brand, I was like, no, you don't need to do that.

                           You just need to ask people, hang on a tick, I'm going to jump on LinkedIn and I'm going to send an email out and I'll see what we can get and sure enough, between the email and the LinkedIn, we now have 600 responses of how people perceive the brand, so that was really cool. It's really weird reading through hundreds of descriptions of yourself, through the eyes of somebody else and it's really challenging not to then turn that mirror inward and be like, is that how I really am? I wouldn't go as far as imposter syndrome, but it definitely inspires a bit of self examination. One thing I know I'm really prone to, and I'm really aware of at the moment, is hypocrisy.

                           I reckon everybody has a bit of this. I reckon there's a spectrum. There's no way that everyone in the world is totally aligned with what they believe and what they value and how they act. Everyone's a bit shit. I think that's totally cool, we're just all a bit shit, but I reckon there's a spectrum of being a bit shit of a human and being a total hypocrite. There's a whole lot of grey areas in between that I'm trying to figure out. I've been on a bunch of things this week, where I've been talking about strategic alignment and are you walking the talk on your values? If you are in education, but you are not providing professional development for your staff, that's not flash. If you have an organisational mission to make people's lives easier, but your internal processes or your procurement system or your IT actually makes people's work really hard or your supplies have a really crappy or difficult experience, you're not walking the talk.

                           I'm trying to look at my own life at the moment and wonder what I'm not walking the talk on, because I did a bit of Googling about hypocrisy. Apparently what hypocrisy is all about is, first of all, it's rooted in a Greek word, like most things are, that means something about playing a theatrical role. There's this immediate element of are you a bit of an actor? We all are, right? We all are and I'm like, okay, well I must be definitely a bit of an actor, because I'm always on the camera talking to people, so I'm a bit theatrical, it must be a bit of that.

                           Then I dug into psychology.com or something and it was talking about our hypocrisy is this projection defence mechanism where you're like, there's something in myself that I feel a bit weird about, so I'm going to project that onto others and see if I can find fault in it, in them, to try and, I don't know, protect myself from judging my own stuff. I know this is a bit deep to kick off a Friday morning, but I guess what I'm really interested in knowing from you guys, is what you think you might be a hypocrite about and what that is. I'm really pleased now to hand to, not just Producer Cam, but my partner Cam and ask a really relationship dodgy question, which is why am I hypocrite? What am I hypocrite about?

Producer Cam:       That is what's known as a very hard throw, as an introduction for setting someone up to have their head bitten off. A plus. Brilliant stuff.

Alicia:                   Not on camera, though. I'll do it later, because I'm a hypocrite like that.

Producer Cam:       Absolutely. I think this stems from an idea that I heard Lisa O'Neill, our good friend and amazing speaker. There's a book, I can't remember the title, but the theme is you're the only person in the room and whatever you are feeling about other people, is what you feel about yourself. That idea was mind blowing for me. In our relationship we've often talked about projection. When you feel an emotion, you attribute it to someone else instead, because that's a bit more palatable than feeling it for yourself. That's really awkward and difficult and confronting. If you have a doubt or a fear or something that's going on for you, that's causing you discomfort, it's much easier to just see it in someone else and project whatever angst you've got going on, onto them. As you're about to describe with your word of the week, everyone's doing that.

                           There's a really fascinating dynamic of trying to separate what's your own emotion and something that you have to process for yourself, be it a policy at work or a feeling about how a relationship could be conducted, or the way you handle yourself, is that coming from me or is it from someone else and how do I make the distinction between whether or not my behavior's okay or am I being treated poorly? That line I think is the hard one. When the hypocrisy comes in, I think it's when, in my experience, I hope, you become attuned to something that you are sensitive to, but haven't recognised in yourself.

Alicia:                   Cam, did you miss your calling as some kind of psychologist or something?

Producer Cam:       I'm just glad we've got this recorded so that I can fall back on this when things get shit later.

Alicia:                   I love that, because as soon as you were talking, I was thinking, what am I judgey about? What am I sensitive about, even, not even judgey about, but what am I sensitive about? I've got a bunch and some of them are really little ones, like I hate being interrupted. That really pisses me off. It's one of my biggest triggers, is when I'm interrupted mid talk, but man, I'm an interrupter. I'm such an interrupter. Thinking about how that works, we've got Chris Wallace, who's turning in on LinkedIn, who's made the comment that his hypocrisy is that he's always encouraging others to be generous in how they view others' behaviours, assume positive intent, but he doesn't always do that and often actually assumes the worst in people.

                           I think that is such an insightful and self-aware share that I really appreciate, because I think we all do a bit of that, don't we? If we use Cam's framework, which I'm down for, by the way. This is a book just waiting to happen, Cameron. If I'm finding it difficult to assume the best in others, does that mean I'm finding it difficult to assume the best in myself or does it mean I think others are not assuming the best in me? Because surely, they are the two projecty angles that you can come in it from, if that's what's happening for you.

Producer Cam:       This is a risky thing to say now, but for the example you brought up. You are incredibly sensitive to being interrupted. If, in a conversation around the table, your kids, me, whoever it is, if you get interrupted halfway through an idea that is danger time and you are a chronic interrupter and so there can't not be a huge link between those two things or there's something at play there, which is fascinating and dangerous to be near. Having your hypocrisy pointed out, for anybody, is hard. If it's something you're particularly passionate about in policing in other people, presumably that means your own reaction is correspondingly high, and so that's what happens. You end up creating an environment where people have to just sit on it. When the hypocrisy is in play for someone who you've learnt to be sensitive or aware of, you get trained or conditioned or however you want to describe it, into absorbing. It no longer becomes worth pointing it out and what that results in, if you're not careful, is a resentment that doesn't get expressed.

Alicia:                   But not in your way.

Producer Cam:       No, absolutely not. No, [crosstalk] I'm being interrupted and no, I have no issue with it that at all. It's completely fine.

Alicia:                   Actually, this is a bit me, because I feel like when I got all my brain stuff back, it was like, oh, here's what we think about you, Alicia McKay. One of the most overwhelming things was what we like about Alicia McKay brand or Alicia McKay, as a person, is that she's really genuine, authentic and honest. I think to get [inaudible] on this, this is what's triggered me about the hypocrisy thing, because I hope I am. I hope I am genuine, authentic and honest or as much as a person can be when people are looking at them and they're trying to be useful and in service to other people.

                           I've probably gone down a totally unproductive rabbit hole with this, but I feel like I'm going to be walking around for the next couple of weeks, thinking about that survey and just going, am I really being real? Am I really saying what I think? Am I hiding something? Am I trying to look cool? Am I trying to look smart? Am I trying to look more successful than I am or something like that? I've got this whole layer of it now, that is going to be a really interesting filter to just get through the day with, I think.

Producer Cam:       The interest part for me, about the feedback that you got, was the things that people like about you are the same things they don't like about you and [crosstalk]. If you're someone who enjoys the reaction of being provocative or making people think or doing it in a really honest and warm way, so you do that brilliantly. There's absolutely no question that you do that very, very well. It's why people are attracted to the way you do things. That's why there's an authenticity to your content, because you're so open and honest about where it's coming from.

                           The way you create in the moment of saying, what's the idea I'm trying to have and why can't I have it? The idea becomes why I can't have it. The process becomes so real and so accessible, because it's in real time, it's not scripted, it's spontaneous. That's really appealing for people and if it's consistently done in the same way, it becomes familiar and you can like it and you can attach yourself to it, so the hypocrisy, I think, is so consistent that it becomes something that's reliable and maybe that explains why the traits that people like are the same ones they don't like, because it's a known quantity. It's so predictable.

Alicia:                   OK. I'm genuinely thinking about updating my LinkedIn tagline to "The reliable hypocrite".

Producer Cam:       If you're consistent, at least people know where they stand. They might not like it, but it's reliable.

Alicia:                   I reckon we've got as much out of that as we can and I don't know that I made any important points and that's the point. I was like, can't really come on and be wise about this, because I think I'm just sucky about it, so I wouldn't mind a chat, but what I've done...

Producer Cam:       Before you go on, there's one last thing that I'd like to do, which is just interrupt you.

Alicia:                   Oh.

Producer Cam:       No, not really. Steve Carey has said, actions speak louder than words and your bias towards action is so strong that it overrides other things that are frustrating or inconsistent or hypocritical. There's a momentum and a traction towards action that people have, because so many people spend so much of their time being the "I'm going to". I'm going to do this or I wish I'd done that and it's really appealing being around someone who is so biassed towards action, that the momentum carries you along and much can be forgiven of someone for that or you'll just absorb other traits about someone that are harder to swallow, or hypocrisy, or whatever it might be. The bias towards someone who gets shit done, is huge.

Alicia:                   I'm not really qualified to make a sporting analogy, but this makes me think about a very non-expert observation about the difference between Rugby Union and AFL. One of the first dates you took me on was to an AFL game at the MCG, which was all very exciting, but the one thing that I clicked to really, is I tried to understand that bizarre game and how all the rules worked was that everything just comes out in the wash. There's no stopping every three seconds to be like, "are we all right? Shall we have a scrum? Let's have a think about this", which is how Rugby Union works. In AFL, it's like "we dropped it. Oh, well just keep going mate. Keep going, keep going, keep going and then we'll see if we can get it over at the end", which I think is quite nice.

                           It's like, are you the Rugby Union of personal growth or are you the AFL version? What's cute about AFL is you get a point for trying. You try to get the thing over the doofers, and if you don't, they're like, "oh, but you gave it a good crack" and then you get a point for that, which I think is bloody adorable. If you're picking a sport to be, when you're trying to grow as a person, be the AFL. Also, their players are way hotter. [crosstalk]

Producer Cam:       I think AFL football's got a few unique qualities. One of them is they have the best ratio of fitness to muscle, very aerobic players who are very strong. Big shoulders, small waist, unlike your big rugby players, but the point you raised before is one of my favourite aspects of taking a visitor to a game of Australian football. I'm Melbourne through and through. Love going to the football, been a fan my whole life and for a tourist, if anyone's ever visiting Australia, going to a massive football stadium in a city, is a great way to share the experience. The number of people who have first, trouble understanding the scoring system and then, a beautiful disbelief that you get a point for trying. In this giant football, you get six points for a goal kicking it between the two sticks in the middle. If you miss, but not by a lot, you get one point. There's so few sports where there's this sliding scale of accuracy.

Alicia:                   It's so good, but what this leads me into is, I ran a workshop this week with a really, really cool company called Optimal Workshop, they're based in Wellington. You guys should totally check them out, because they are cool movers, man. I automatically was like, these people they're my people. One of the dudes in that workshop was talking about a word that he had just discovered. It was his word of the week and I have immediately seized this word and ran with it, because I think it's so good. The word is called sonder and what sonder means and what it describes is the realisation that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own. I just sat in this for the rest of the week. It's come up in almost every conversation I've had this week, because it is such an utterly beautiful description and to have a word for that, which I did a little bit of research on it this week and discovered, but that you could either find its root, in German sonder means special.

                           In French, it's got something to do with probing or analysing or looking things through, but it makes me think of one of our favourite activities game, which is to sit in a cafe or in town and people watch and see people walking past and see them with their friends or taking selfies or with their partner, and just wonder about what their relationship is like, what do they do for a job? Where are they going today? What is that selfie going to be for? How do they feel about themselves? I just love this idea that it's really unhelpful to think that we are the only ones that are a tangled knot of insecurity and inconsistency, when actually, everyone's got a lot of shit going on and it's much more helpful to assume that everyone you encounter has got this really loud inner track that's playing all the time, that's going to be influencing how they act.

                           Actually, what I really like about this, on the projection or hypocrisy note, is that it means it's not worth assuming that people's behaviour has to do with you as a first assumption. The other week, before we went to school, Harriet, my beautiful seven year old daughter, was really grumpy, and because we'd had a tussle about, I don't know, shoes or something before she went to school, I just assumed that she was really grumpy at me. I was brushing her hair and I was like, "you're really grumpy, Harriet" and she was like, "yeah, we're grumpy". I was like, "are you angry at me? Feels like you're angry at me" and she never corrected me, because she was too angry to find her words, but on the way to school, in the car, when she'd calmed down a bit, she was telling me that she was angry about something else completely.

                           I can't even remember what it was now and I just had this dawning of going, "oh you bloody narcissist this, it's not about you, she's got her own inner world, which has got so many things going on thinking about her siblings and her school and her friends and her birthday party". She didn't give a shit what her mum [crosstalk].

Producer Cam:       The factor there is, you can't remember what she was upset about. The lens that you've interpreted her behaviour, the thing that was the most important thing to her hasn't even featured in your memory. While you're busy telling her, it's not about her, it's not about her. You can't even remember.

Alicia:                   No. Good observation.

Producer Cam:       I think that's where the hypocrisy thing comes in. It's when you can't see the complexity of what someone else's behaviour is based on, because you're the only person in the room to [crosstalk].

Alicia:                   Hang on, is the "you" here, Alicia McKay or just people?

Producer Cam:       For the safety of myself, people in general.

Alicia:                   All right.

Producer Cam:       No, but that's the thing. It's the inability for humans to really appreciate how complex and how difficult things are for other people and that things are going on in their life. Your seven year old daughter's life has a complexity in it that has nothing to do with you and you're 90% of her life and you can't remember what it was. It's not meant to be an attack. It's just a focus of how hard it is to act in alignment and consistency the whole time when the focus you've got is so narrow [crosstalk].

Alicia:                   Well, there, and I didn't want to throw Ms. Wilson under the bus, but actually, I think it's because Ms. Wilson ran out of Moving March tickets and Harriet walked to school and didn't get credit for it with a Moving March voucher and she was real upset about it, but I didn't want to throw Ms. Wilson under the bus here. Just putting that out there.

Producer Cam:       I unreservedly apologise.

Segue, segue. I would like to talk about one of the funniest things that has happened in recent memory. We are out for dinner last night, Alicia and I and a couple of friends and we're going to do our best to keep names out of this, to protect the innocent. We were chatting about affection and how you show your affection and what it's nice to do as a couple. Our friend said, "I don't like holding hands when I'm walking" and we're like, tell us a bit about that and she said, "it's not that I don't like the hand holding, it's that when someone's holding my hand, I lose concentration, lose my balance and sometimes fall over.

                           We are laughing at this. This is one of the most bizarre confessions I've heard from anyone for a long time. Then she says, "I had to learn how to walk with my hands" and we didn't really know what that meant at the start, but she was like, "my arms just stick by my sides. They don't swing normally when I walk" and she didn't know that she did this. This friend has been to acting school and one of the parts of 101 acting school is that you have to walk with a certain type of character or demeanour.

Alicia:                   I need to be a hypocrite and interrupt you there. It was described as, and I quote "walking class, where every week we're going to walking class, like the foundations of walking and you walk and that's what you're doing".

Producer Cam:       Your fellow acting students, noticing what it is about you walk and someone in her class said, "you don't walk with your arms" and until then, she didn't know. She discovers that she doesn't use her arms when she walks. We're like, this is one of the most bizarre realisations to have about yourself that I've heard for ages and she said, it shows up in all these weird ways, because she's mindful of where her arms are all the time. The position of them doesn't come naturally so she discovered that a lot of people, including her mother, thought she didn't like being touched or affection, because when she was being hugged, her arms just sat by her sides and didn't do anything and it wasn't because she wasn't enjoying the hug or didn't love the embrace, it was because she didn't know what to do with her arms.

                           Then she was describing this beautifully awkward hug with her partner, who she loved dearly, who loved expressing his physical affection. Going in for the hug, in what most people I think would describe as the default. If you're a similar size to the person you're hugging, you go left arm down, right arm up, opposite each other and you embrace in an interlocking, symmetrical way. Our friend is so aware and conscious of her arms that she didn't know what to do and I have no idea how to reenact this, but she said, "my arms both accidentally ended up on the same side of his body". She goes in for a hug and is so unfamiliar with what to do with her arms, that both her arms ended up on one side of this dude. He's in the normal hug position.

                           He grabs her, squeezes her tight in the oomph that you give a hug to show someone that you really love them and she dislocated her shoulder. She said her shoulder had an audible pop and they had to immediately go to the emergency room. How did you dislocate your shoulder? I was being given a hug by my boyfriend, so the doctors immediately go into, as they should care mode, "are you safe? Do we need to keep you separated". They wouldn't let her partner into the emergency room, because they were worried she was a victim of domestic violence. We were crying with laughter. This poor guys administered what he thought was an affectionate hug, dislocated his girlfriend's shoulder, because she's so uncoordinated, both her arms ended up on the same side of his body during what was meant to be a normal hug. Absolutely amazing.

Alicia:                   I'm going to think about this for a long time and partly, in an unhelpful way, because now I'm wondering where my arms are when I'm walking around. I remember when I learned to run, to start with, I was an inside child and so I didn't really learn about how outside was not bad and exercise was a thing people liked. Until my mid twenties, it wasn't something that I learned early and reading an article about running, because if there's an any more Alicia McKay thing in the world, when you learn to run, rather than just running, you read an article about running.

Producer Cam:       I need to interrupt here and say that when you were a bit unwell about a year and a half ago, you were instructed to rest, so you went to the couch, lay down to rest. The rest of us in the other room, shut the door, made sure you were in a quiet, safe space to have a migraine or rest or whatever you needed to do. Someone came in to check on you and you were reading your third article on how to rest.

Alicia:                   It was very interesting. There's a really interesting ideological history or tradition with rest. It's got its roots in religion. I was reading this article about how you run with your arms, because there's power that comes from doing this and I was blown away by it. Then every run I went on after that, I was like, check this out, it's not just my legs, this is great. I totally empathise with what it must be like to be aware of your arms all of a sudden. You know when you're new on camera, Cam, you know this, because you film people all the time. In person, they're really expressive and engaging and interesting people and their hands do things and their faces do things and it's marvellous. Then you point a camera lens at them and they go like, their arms go down and their face stops moving and they're like, Hello, I am a professional person. It's really hard not to do that when you first learn camera.

Producer Cam:       Absolutely. Whenever you're in a foreign environment and you become aware of something, it becomes overpowering, like when a word becomes repeated so often that you can't think of it as a word anymore, it just becomes a nonsensical syllable. To segue out of this part and to bring us into the home stretch, an interesting thing about senses. The different senses you have as a human - sight, touch, smell, hearing, there's a half extra sense that you don't know you have and it's the knowledge of where your limbs are. It's not touch as such, but your brain knows where your limbs are, in a completely different system to touch, so that's a half sense, that's something, as soon as you're aware of it and start thinking about it, you're like, I do know where my limbs are. How and why, I don't know that.

Alicia:                   And why you don't fall off the bed at night. A, because you're aware of where your arms and legs are, so you don't fall off the end of the bed, because you've got this awareness, even when you're asleep, of what the edge of the bed is. We didn't plan this, but one of the most interesting conversations that we've had in a friend group over the last few years, which just delights me every time it comes up, is the ranking of senses. You just reminded me of that when you talked about senses and I am consistently amazed at the spread of difference and how important people find various senses and what it says about them as a person. You've got your, what are they all, Cam, sight, touch, sound, smell, and hearing. That's five. The sixth one was a bad movie, that's not a real thing, so I was getting confused. Mine go touch and then taste.

Producer Cam:       Just to be clear, in order of preference though, if you had to lose your senses, which sense would you lose first?

Alicia:                   I'd be keeping touch first and then I would want taste, because what's the point of being alive if you can't taste. Sorry, if you've got weird taste buds. I would go with touch and then taste, as my top two.

Producer Cam:       Then, you'd be bumping into things the whole time.

Alicia:                   Yeah, and then hearing and then seeing and then whatever the other one is. I'm always up for a fight with our smell. Nobody cares about smell, except for CV, who's not here today, and it's his number one sense, I think. What are yours?

Producer Cam:       I thought vision was easily the most important one and I hadn't really thought about it, so as always, any discussion becomes more interesting when someone brings something up, you're like, I hadn't thought of that. For me, seeing and hearing are the two most important senses. They're the things that allow you to get about your day, function as a general human and make sure you don't die. Those are the things that keep you alive. The idea that touch is critical to living, I hadn't really thought of and when you brought it up, the importance of being able to hold things, feel human connection, it's really important how you go about your tasks. As an exercise, it's really hard to separate, which sense is providing what percentage of your enjoyment or functionality. I hadn't thought about it that way, but as soon as you said, touch was important, I was like, I might have to rethink. Still, I'm going to go with keeping my vision.

Alicia:                   Yeah, but you didn't rank taste very highly either and my favourite interaction we had after we first started ranking our senses was when you asked me to chuck you an apple and I was like, no, why don't you just look at it, because clearly that's the most important thing about an apple.

Producer Cam:       I'm really enjoying this side of this apple. This apple looks great.

Alicia:                   Exactly. What is life, if you can't touch things and stick your mouth on it.

Producer Cam:       Here we go. Bringing it into the home stretch Alicia.

Alicia:                   All right, everybody. I had a rant and I'm going to save it till next week, because it's already 8:33. To be quite frank, I don't run out of them, but what I've really enjoyed about our show today is that we've really peeled back some of the layers on what it means to be a person, which as it turns out, is a fairly tangled mess of self unawareness. Is that a word? Ignorance, hypocrisy, neurosis, insecurity and general narcissism, which is just lovely, but the most important thing is that we can touch and taste it. I hope that you'll spend the rest of your day thinking about where your arms are and what you're doing with them. Cam, closing comment?

Producer Cam:       I think what we've learnt too in the discussion is that you can be any combination of traits so long as you're consistent.

Alicia:                   If you're going to be an asshole, be an asshole every day. Totally. I'm down for that. All right, everybody go out there, enjoy your Friday. It is the last day of the week. You are nearly into the weekend. Life is good. Go and have a wonderful day and we will see you back here next Friday. Good day, everybody.

Producer Cam:       Thanks everybody. Thanks for your comments. See you next time.