Episode 6: Possums playing piano, regrets and post-humous trolling

Alicia and Cam have different ideas about socialising and work, Alicia has different ideas with herself about regret, and Callum takes us on a journey into public private lives and eccentric wills.

🤔 What's work actually for?

💡 Should you look back to move forward? A book review about regret

🎹 Possums playing piano

👶 Competitive birthing

And more!

And don't forget to check out our authors of the week...

Daniel Pink
The Power of Regret

Dan Sullivan
The Gap and the Gain

Audio

Video

Transcript:

Cam Fink:

So this is becoming my rant because I'm really upset about this. I've moved to a new city and I'm a really social person. And I find it really hard to make friends here because our society's set up in a way that isn't conducive to building those strong, healthy friendships with people we're focused way too much on spending too much time at work. And we don't get the social community nourishment that humans crave. We're social animals.

Alicia McKay:

Yeah. Speak for yourself. I'm glad. No, one's here this week. Hi, to other people.

Cam Fink:

Welcome to the Alicia Mackay show. We're talking performance art and noise rock in the beauty of posums playing the piano where Joe owned by Callum Valentine, who takes us on a rollicking journey of eccentric wills and trolling people from beyond the grave. Alicia talks about what she's reading and have two books with different ideas on regret have shaped her thinking. And we kick off with a rant from Alicia about whether or not we focus too much on work. Enjoy.

Alicia McKay:

So my rant this week, isn't a super certain one, cuz I'm not actually totally sure where I land on this, but I think we overvalue work in our lives fundamentally. And I'm using the Royal we here cuz I definitely overvalue work in my life. But like we know if we start using work as the outlet for everything, I had a client this week. So one thing I did do this week was I ran a workshop and we were talking about authenticity, which was great. And there was this really great question posed by one of the people in the group. And she goes, yeah, but I mean, how much of work is for self development? Should we be doing personal growth at work? Is that what we are here for? Cuz I'm not trying to say that we shouldn't, but I'm not sure that that's the job of this place and that's quite an unpopular opinion these days, but I reckon she's onto something and I'm not sure when we decided as a LinkedIn community.

Alicia McKay:

And let me be very clear. I'm speaking from the tiny little privileged, but that is people that follow Alicia in LinkedIn that work was this outlet where we could develop personally and learn all the skills we need in life. Like I know we spend a lot of time there, most of us and therefore it makes sense to put things there, but work is just a tiny component of our lives and the people that it serves for to use work as our primary outlet of self-expression and meaning finding is not us. I don't wanna get all like Marx as communist on it, but we're not the one that own the outputs of our labour most of the time. And so if we decide to use work as our primary channel of self-expression and time usage, then like, I don't know that for, oh see, I told you this was an uncertain rent. I've got halfway through it and I'm like, oh I really love work. I dunno how I feel about it. Cam cold throw is someone who also is not employed in a traditional job do over work.

Cam Fink:

I think work provides something for a lot of people that they don't get in other places because of how separated and isolated our lives have become and the experience of moving to a new city and not having the social network that I had in Melbourne work is one of the ways that you do that I've found it really difficult because as you just said, I don't have a Noel job. So the, the ways that you usually find social connection are basically by repetitively spending time with people and becoming friends with someone requires an investment of a whole lot of hours before you get a lot of value from their friendship. And as a kid to a teenager or a uni student, you don't recognise that as an adult moving to a new city, you definitely do. And so I think the value that work provides for a lot of people is a really like low effort, low input required way to feel your life with meeting substance and people to hang out with.

Alicia McKay:

Okay, that's a much better response than I was expecting. That is great. And also very on brand that your response would've immediately be related to like how can I get friends out of this? Which, which I think is great

Cam Fink:

To follow that up. I think it depends on how you like to validate yourself. What are the things that you find valuable? And for a lot of people doing meaningful work is super, super important. And for other people who have different priorities, well maybe socialising is higher on the agenda or the sense of community or both longing that some of us might grave

Alicia McKay:

Other people. One of the advantages though, to having clients I would've thought and not having to work with the same people all the time is that you've got like a bigger pull. You know, like if you work at a normal job, you've only got the six people that are in your team that you hang out with. If you've got clients and you're going from place to place, you can meet a hundred people in a year rather than six.

Cam Fink:

That is definitely true, but you need to spend a certain number of hours to solidify the friendship. And so I think what a lot of people, including myself, didn't realise a whole bunch during like the university years and spending basically all your free time hanging out with your mates is the number of hours required to solidify friend chip to the point that it becomes really valuable. And I was chatting about this to Trish trainer, I think the other day, a client of yours, who I was interviewing. And she was saying, she'd read a book that said, you have to spend 200 hours with someone before the friendship becomes valuable. Now, when you're a carefree student with nothing better to do you spend three or four nights a week hanging out with your mates. So you rack up those two and really, really quickly when you're working and busy and have a separate life that might involve kids or other things, it takes a long time to spend 200 hours with someone. And if that's what it takes to solidify a friendship, if you only see a client every now and then you're not gonna be friends with them for a year,

Alicia McKay:

Okay, this is explaining to me the theory we're really quickly why I don't have any friends. And that the only friends I do have are ones I've had for 20 years because I was not a carefree uni student who was out three or four nights a week. I had kids from 16. And so I've only had a limited amount of time to spend with people. And if I think about it, my best mates in the whole world are ones I've known since I was between 14 and 16 years old. And that all of a sudden makes a lot of sense, but like more broadly, I guess my point is that that's, that's the problem. Isn't it like work has taken up so much space in our lives that we are using it for a whole bunch of other purposes, like finding meaning and contribution in the world, forming social connections.

Alicia McKay:

And that's not what its job is. And so I like, I, I'm not really strong on this one. You know, I'm a strong opinion, held likely kind of a person I think. And I'm also a workaholic. I've gotta be a bit careful with this. Maybe the point is that if we are using work for all of these other kind of reasons that actually we should just do the work bit, which is probably only like 15 hours a week, she stays from the privilege of a knowledge job and, and put it over there. And then you've got lots of free time to go and actually source friends and hobbies and sense of meaning and contribution that might, might be slightly more fulfilling because what are the odds that the people you most wanna be mates with also happen to like work at your work or do the similar job to you? Like if you're an accountant, maybe you don't wanna be friends with other accountants, maybe hate accountants,

Cam Fink:

Well drift into the range of just social isolation generally and how backyards have fences. Some people don't even know their neighbours anymore. My brother lives in a house that's pretty much a commune. And I find that a far more appealing prospect than living in a place where you don't know your neighbours and don't have anyone immediately around you that you don't live with. I find that a really odd thing that Western cultures slid into. And if you chat to someone from an Eastern culture or possibly an Asian culture, and they ask you about what you do with your parents, when they get old, they are mortified. The idea of not spending your later years being looked after by your kids is absolutely appalling to them. And that's just completely normal accepted thing in our Western society. And I think it just points to an isolation more generally that I, for one, I'm not a fan of, so this is becoming my rant because I really upset about this. I've moved to a new city and I'm a really social person. And I find it really hard to make friends here because our society's set up in a way that isn't conducive to building those strong, healthy friendships with people we're focused way too much on spending too much time at work. And we don't, we don't get the, the social community nourishment that humans crave. We ocean animals.

Alicia McKay:

Yeah. Speak for yourself. I'm glad. No one's here this week. I hate other people. And on that note, cam, what have you got for us this week?

Cam Fink:

When I was a kid, we had a family dinner ritual, which was quite important, and this is very standard for a lot of families, I think. Yeah. Your time spent together as a family over the dinner table is a really important ritual. That matters a lot. And that's certainly the case with our little family here. And for probably most people listening, some people do it at breakfast time, which I find odd. Anyway, my mom would ring a little bell when it was time to come to the dinner table and we'd all troop in from wherever we were around the house or outside we'd sit down and have, have dinner together. It was a really nice time to bond. And one night we were doing that and suddenly someone started playing the piano in the living room. And I remember mom doing a quick head count for the number of kids in the house and we didn't have any visitors.

Cam Fink:

So we didn't know who was playing the, we had an open fire in our lounge room and it turns out that a posum had fallen down the chimney and wandered over and landed on the piano and had started playing it. And you can imagine that a posum isn't particularly melodically inclined, but it did work out that it enjoyed making the noise. So this posum was walking up and down the keyboard on the, on the piano, making a cocoons noise and enjoying that it could make a sound. Now I mentioned this because last night I went to a gig at Meow in Wellington, a lovely live music venue and heard a concert that was not completely dissimilar to that experience. The woman who was playing was basically just jumping, jumping down on the keyboard. At one point, she was elbowing it as she theatrically wrestled it.

Cam Fink:

Like you might an angry bag of squirrels. She was supported by two percussion Dramatists. I think that's what they call themselves. And between the three of them, it was a little bit like when you are behind three cars, turning left at a, an intersection and the indicators in front of blinking out of sequence for a while, then every now and then the phase of them brings them in. And so that they're, they're lined up and that's what it felt like. It felt like three musicians who were basically siblings fighting for attention, creating louder, louder noises, and just weaving in and out of sync with each other is they performed this concert. Now the part about it, that was amazing was that I was completely enrapture. And I think that's the beauty of a concert that you're not meant to understand the sound it was making was bizarre.

Cam Fink:

So the percussionist, one of them sounded like you'd got one of those ballerina trinkets that you wind and make those pleasant lullabys and attached it to a cordless drill and just cranked it to a, an absolutely at RPM or was bashing out noises at random. The other one that was, if anyone ever played a game called daily Thompson's Olympic challenge, which I think was under Commodor 64, the interface and graphics at the time didn't allow for much gameplay. So the thing they used to measure your ability was to see how quickly you could just bash two keys as fast as you possible. He could. And it seemed like the second percussion of just playing daily Thompson's Olympic challenge. Now this concert went for about an hour and a half. It was completely Cocos, but the hundred people in the room were completely enrapture by it as was I. So it was one of those bizarre moments of not understanding art in any way at all, but enjoying it very deeply. So yeah, I went to a live music show last night, linking it to the previous topic. I didn't talk to anybody. I did a crossword and I enjoyed the show very, very much. So if anyone wants to check out live music at Meow in Wellington, it's an absolute mixed bag, but you're probably gonna enjoy it. Amazing.

Alicia McKay:

And in a world of parallels and, and everything else, I was doing something similar last night, which is actually that I was learning a new song on the guitar and it sounded a bit like a posum jumping up and down across a piano because while I am an enthusiastic guitarist, it could not be said that I am a talented one. Oh, right. I wanna talk about books because that's my favourite thing to talk about. Can you give me the little do fit?

Alicia McKay:

Oh, I do like that. It makes me feel really special. Okay. So I've read a lot of books this year. And on a side note, I, I think it's time that I start tracking all the books I'm reading. And I think I'm gonna start at doing that publicly. So if anyone has any interest in following, along with what I've read and like a two line review on it, then I might start doing that and putting it out there. Cuz I do read an excess of a hundred books a year. So it it's yeah, it's, it's a mixed bag, but it might be an interesting thing. So if you're keen on that, do let me know and I will start doing that publicly, cuz I'm often frustrated at how I don't keep very good track of all the books I've read. But this week two of the books that I've read this week, I think are really interesting, cuz they're a little, they're a little fight.

Alicia McKay:

I've got a little paradox in front of me of the two and I read them one after the other. So I think this is quite good. So the first one I read was gap in the gain, which is a book by Dan Sullivan, the strategic coach guy and Benjamin Hardy, who does some really interesting work around psychology and organisational development. And he is a super clever dude and he has a cool YouTube channel. So you should go and see him. He's cool. He's a little bit like American positive thinking, you know, but anyways fine. So this book's quite good. And while it's not talking about the power of positive thinking, it's not far off. So it's kind of saying that when you are a person who is really focused on achieving something new and trying to get somewhere, it's really easy to focus on the gap between where you are now and where you wanna get to.

Alicia McKay:

And it's kind of a game you can never win because every time you assess your progress, you're like, well, I've still got a way to go. And if you are a high achiever, you're probably prone to focusing on what you haven't managed yet and not adequately celebrating your success as to that point. So the idea behind this book is that when you are faced with a choice between living in the gap and focusing on what you haven't achieved, yet you actually wind up achieving more. If you measure your success backwards and you're instead able to be really clear on the progress that you've made and use that as motivat to continue to move forward. So it's a, it's a great idea. It's really good. And it's, it's expressed really well. There's a lot of focus on how continually tracking and having gratitude for your progress and achievements creates a momentum that continues to develop that.

Alicia McKay:

And so every day you should write down the three things that were your wins for the day or your games for the day. And that every time you approach challenging situation in your day, you choose whether to approach it from the gap and focus on what's missing or focus on the game. So this is one perspective. Now there's a lot I like about it. And there's a bunch that I don't because I have some real scepticism about the kind of social toxicity of positive thinking and how encouraging people to just look on the bright side all the time. It is actually kind of shit and also untrue. So then the book I read after that is Dan Pink's new book and Dan pink. Oh honestly, when I read this man's books, I'm filled with a sense of needing to write immediately and feeling extremely inferior.

Alicia McKay:

He is such a good write like in a world of nonfiction in business books, he writes so clearly and so beautifully and I just cry about it. But anyway, I'm a nerd. So this book is called the power of regret, how looking backward moves us forward. And it's kind of a bit, same, same, but different. So gap in the game says, look at the great stuff that's happened and use that to achieve more in your life. Power of regret says, look at where you fucked up and that'll make you better. And so what's really cool about this book is that Dan pink has done some really good longitudinal qualitative and quantitative research on the role that regret played is our lives. And that actually we've got this really toxic and dangerous, no regrets, hashtag culture. That's completely untrue and unhelpful because regret plays a really important role in our lives.

Alicia McKay:

And that we use that as information for what we need to do differently and how to reflect differently on where we've been in our lives. And that actually we should have a bunch of regrets and that's really healthy and normal. And so these two books kind of butted up against each other in my brain because I read them both in the space of about two days. And I'm still, I'm still mulling over it really like they're both worth a read. So of all, if you're like, oh Alicia, just tell me if I should read them. Yes, you should. Particularly the Dan pink one, this one, the gap in the game uses too much capitalization unnecessarily. And that really upsets me as a person. The power of regret is extremely good. And what I love about Dan pink is he just picks a topic, becomes an expert on it and then writes the best book you've read about it.

Alicia McKay:

So he's like, I wanna know about regret. So he just learns everything there is to know about regret spends three years immersed in it writes the best book out there on it. But before that he's written about motivation and change and sales and time this ma can you tell, I've got a fan situation going on anyway, it is worth a read. And if you do read it, I'd be really interested in all of your reflections and thoughts about whether we should be regretting things that have happened in our lives. Whether we should be focusing on the positive, I don't come down one way or the other, like I've got space for both of these thoughts in my brain. What I do think is interesting is I guess this kind of meaning seeking that we just cannot help, but have, and that as people we can't just have experiences, can we like we can't just do stuff and then move on the, the existence of these two books is such a Testament to what meaning seeking animals we are, which I think is a Clifford Getz quote, who is an awesome anthropologist and also worth reading where we have to create a narrative in a story about our experiences in our minds.

Alicia McKay:

We can't just have the experience. It's a very human impulse. This is what our brains do. They search for justification and meaning in a way to make sense of the world. So whether you make sense in a positive fashion or in a negative fashion, I do have books that will fit that purpose for you. So I've got a great comment here in the chat. Are they mutually exclusive? Like, can we not celebrate growth and learn from what we've done? I mean, yeah, probably I'm not the expert here. And I swing between kind of this like nihilism where I'm like, nothing matters. Everything's a waste of time. Why are we trying to make people feel positive? And my own version, toxic positivity, which I guess is more stoic conversion, which is like, well, shit's happening anyway. If you get to pick your own story, it may as well be a good one on a side note before I move on from this segment inspired by Cam's brother Cole, I've started keeping a five year diary.

Alicia McKay:

And so I've bought this beautiful leak term five year diary and you don't have to buy beautiful L term one. I'm just a station nerd. And it's got, you know, each day of the year and it's got five spaces on each page. And so every day you fill in a few lines from what happened that day. And then once you get to the end of the year and you start again, get to see what you wrote last year and so on and so forth for five years. And my last three days, I'm already disappointed in myself. Like I'm already disappointed that next year, I'm gonna read those and be like, wow, did that really matter? Alicia, was that a good use of your time to just go down to work for and not talk to anybody for three days? Do you feel good about yourself? No, future me already doesn't feel good about myself. And I thought that I actually wrote in my entry last night, I'm not looking forward to reading back on this one. So

Cam Fink:

I think one of the really interesting things you can do on that front is how many individual days can you remember from last year, if you had to write down the number of days where something interesting enough happened, that you could specifically remember it, how many would there be? And the figure is often alarmingly low.

Alicia McKay:

Wow. I've got a book now and it is also so worth before I introduce the incredible call Valentine honouring cam in this conversation because I bought this five year diary and I had it sitting next to my bed for probably two months and I couldn't start it yet. Cuz I knew that once I started it, like you have to do it every day for five years. And so I, I just couldn't find myself to go quite started it yet. Cam picks it up one day, starts writing in it. He's like let's do today's and I just about threw the bloody thing in his head cuz I was like, thanks very much, cam you've just gifted me 1500 evenings of obligation because of this impulsive action that you've taken. But

Cam Fink:

You do remember that day now.

Alicia McKay:

Yeah. And it's in the, it's in the thing for, I look at that, all right. I don't know what's going on in the world and what's good about that is that I don't need to because I'm friends with the magnificent Callum Valentine who keeps me updated with his hot takes on what's happening out there in the world so that I don't have to know. And now you're welcome everybody. He can do this for you. Could we welcome C either the show, please

Callum Valentine:

I'll add to Cam's noise rock ran there with my own experience, which is I used to manage a music venue in Dunedin in, in port charms, which is a sort of half wary, half charmingly, artistic weirdos part of New Zealand. And it was a, an amazing place to be involved in a music venue. And at one stage they hosted a, a noise rock festival called the lines of flight. Yeah. It was quite an impressive three days to be working a bar on, I mean, noise rock is, is not my thing. I don't really understand it. And I'm a huge music fan and it's kind of, to me, it's more a, it's more of an art project than it is a, a musical enterprise. So is

Alicia McKay:

This a genre? CV is noise, rock a genre.

Callum Valentine:

Yeah. Noise rock. Or you can go even further into white noise. If, if you wanna have a sample of some, my uncle actually is the drummer and of one of the most fake, famous white noise bands. They're called the dead sea.

Alicia McKay:

Writing that down.

Callum Valentine:

Yeah. Right. That

Alicia McKay:

Write that down immediately.

Callum Valentine:

I, I don't think anyone in the band would be offended by me saying that that most regular civilian listeners will last maybe three or five minutes into a dead sea track,

Cam Fink:

A civilian listener. I love the idea that listen have to be segregated into levels of qualification to enjoy the music. That, to be beautiful.

Callum Valentine:

Well, three minutes into a dead sea track. You'll see exactly what I mean. So I, I was working bar over this, this three day period and one of the performances came up very solemnly and asked me if I could please turn off the dishwasher because it was disrupting the carefully orchestrated performance. This was at a different event, but somebody played a, an electronic rake that they had rig up to be able to play the building. That was actually pretty spectacular. And I genuinely enjoyed that one.

Alicia McKay:

I just wanna get behind dishwasher guy and be like, I'm a woman that will listen to extremely loud, heavy metal music, quite happily, and go about my day and work out and do what needs to be done. But if there's a ticking clock in the room or a drip or two people speak at once to me, I have a complete audio inspired mental shutdown. So I'm all for dishwasher guy.

Callum Valentine:

Yeah. I mean, the point is that, you know, you've carefully planned out how you want the room to sound and it's your performance that you're giving to people and you don't want anything to mess with that. And I, I wanna, I don't want this to come across. Like I am anti noise music at all. I think it's, it's a fantastic form of artistic expression. To me. It, it's not something I'm personally into, but you know, more power to you. It's fantastic. You go on a, a very different journey with sitting there listening to something like that. That's very discordant. That's so far out on the fringes of kind of that punk ethos, that it becomes something else entirely. It's amazing.

Cam Fink:

The experience that I had last night was that the room was enraptured. And part of the appeal for me was how much attention other people were playing. You could hear a pin drop in the room and the performance got to a quiet stage. And at the end of of it, there was rapturous applause. The audience absolutely loved it. And because I'm not a fan of that genre and haven't really been to all of those performances. I had no idea that they were appreciating that much. At one point it looked like the pianist who his literally elbowing the keys, started doing it so aggressively that the audience was hooping and hollering. Like they were at a WWE event. It was a, a completely different kind of performance in music than I was used to. And it was surprising and delightful and equal measure.

Callum Valentine:

Excellent. Well, that's my intro. What I really wanted to talk about was the Johnny deaf and Amber herd case, which has just been unavoidable this week. And my reflection on it is not any to have any kind of take or anything. It's just that we probably shouldn't be hearing this like that. That's my overall sense. There's so many intimate details that do not need to be in a courtroom and due to the nature of celebrity, it's just all coming out. There's a press release from court TV who are very excited about this whole thing. I mean, my first question, seeing this footage on the news was why are there cameras in this courtroom? We don't normally see live camera footage from courtrooms and court TV managed to get the rights. They syndicate out the pool footage to anyone that wants it, my reaction to it because I'm somebody who needs to know more, unfortunately as discussed on this show before, but because it's the sort of bite size nature of news. Now you get these stories about one aspect of somebody's marriage coming out of it. And it it's just bizarre. Like I read a piece in the independent, that was 500 words on Johnny DEP. A photo of him passed out with ice cream, spilling on his jeans that Amber heard took and him saying that this was a example of her making fun of him after he was passed out on opioids. And it's just overall, you have to, to get a step back and say, we should not be turning the leave of public attention on this.

Alicia McKay:

Filling in the view is including me who don't know what's happening here? Is this a divorce case?

Callum Valentine:

This is a death of me. So Johnny de is suing. Amber heard for, I think it's 50 million for a piece that she wrote in the new Yorker, not explicitly naming him as an abuser, but definitely indicating that and his cases that first of all, that wasn't true. And secondly, that his as career has been ruined by this. And so we have extensive public cross examination of both of them now, which is why we're seeing

Alicia McKay:

A million stories. Well irony where the case is that personal details was shared publicly. And that that's a problem. And that the process challenging that is a public interrogation of so much more of your private life than you could ever have imagined.

Callum Valentine:

And also that Johnny Depp has no longer appeared in films. And in order to rectify this, he's cast himself in a reality drama inadvertently that is, that has been, I'm going to stop reading stuff about it. Now, I think bridging back to one of my historical rants, a sort of similar exercise in things that have, should have never happened, ideally and should not have happened publicly in 1926, a very successful single lawyer would if no relatives who had amassed quite a fortune due to his Penant for investments died. So he killed over, died. His will was read in the will. He basically declared that he was trying to be the biggest legal troll in world history. He left shares in an alcohol company to an anti prohibition or a prohibition group, and they were allowed to keep the funds if they were actively involved personally, in the distribution of the alcohol, he left a holiday home in Jamaica to three lawyers who absolutely hated each other on the condition that they live there together. But the most effect that he had on the world from his will was starting something which was later dubbed by the press, the great stalk Derby. So he specified that the remainder of his fortune go to the woman who gave birth to the most babies within a decade period, starting the day of his death. And that's, that's a strange and bizarre piece of history. Fuck,

Alicia McKay:

I'm sorry for this, by the way, like, why get rich, if you can't fuck with people from the grave, this is good,

Callum Valentine:

But like most exercises that to somebody is a little hilarious prank. It got darker and darker and darker is of course it did. So possibly making it worth was the fact that this wasn't publicised for around six years after his death. So the immediate front runners were people that had just had the most babies anyway, and they tended to be from very poor unprivileged working class backgrounds. And once the sort of will clause came to light, these were people were thrust into the spotlight, not unlike what, not unlike what we've seen in court this week. And yeah, it wasn't very pretty.

Cam Fink:

Do you have a number for a CV? Is there a figure that the winner was able to achieve?

Callum Valentine:

The winners were tied on 11, but what had happened was the people that had been the front runners in the press, and that had been subject to all this attention and had their lives forensically examined. There was no rules set over whether these children had to be legitimate. And you can imagine in the, in the twenties, that was kind of a, that was a huge social story. I mean, it was the thirties by this point, but know things still weren't particularly progressive what ended up happening, which will appeal to your deep sense of class war. Alicia Mackay is that the sort of working class women who were going for this title to make their lives better for their many, many children, were we muscled out by middle class women who could afford to hire lawyers to challenge the will. And it was eventually shared by sort of, I think it was three or four people. The major legal battle was about whether legitimate as in a product of a marriage baby were the only ones that could be counted.

Cam Fink:

Was there a condition that the, the babies all had to survive?

Callum Valentine:

Well, this was one of the points of intrigue was that all of the newspaper articles were written in a kind of racing language rather than actually reflecting on the conditions that, that led to these children, not surviving.

Cam Fink:

What kind of commentary would that be?

Callum Valentine:

The more I read about it, the darker it gets, you know, this is the hunger games. Nobody knows his original intention with leaving. This will, you know, he was, he was a legal scholar with a sort of twisted trollish sense of humour. One of his, one of his main hobbies was leaving dollar bills on the side of the road and, and watching people pick them up because he, he, yeah, his famous quote was every man has a price and it it's. Yeah, you sort of pro to so capitalist philosophy, having a very awful impact on, on people's lives,

Alicia McKay:

But gap in the gain gap in the gain. What if out of all those massive number of babies that got born and I'd be interested in knowing how many got born as a result of that, but you probably can't exactly track that. How many went on to do wonderful. So in the world and were it not for this sick on as twisted sense of fuckery, we wouldn't even have them as people.

Callum Valentine:

Yeah. Well, part of the interview process as we went along was they would all say, well, I would've had this child anyway, but that was of course sort of part of the social code and everything we know about desperation and motivation tells you otherwise,

Cam Fink:

I'm just enjoying how much of this story went from being a delightful rejoice of absurdity into a fairly grim reflection on what has turned into squid games basically. But I thought, I thought this would be a challenge for Alicia to bring back into a, a positive frame of reference to spin it into the home stretch of this. Alicia, bring it home.

Callum Valentine:

Yeah. Thrust us home.

Alicia McKay:

Can you not use the word thrust on a cause I'm mature enough to,

Callum Valentine:

So this, this I have learned this week.

Alicia McKay:

All everybody, thank you so much for joining us again on the Alicia I on this beautiful Friday morning, we've had an excellent coverage of topics today, ranging from the bizarre nature of time, whether or not work actually matters, toxic positivity, whether we should look backwards or forwards posums and elbows, bashing, pianos, and electric rake, a lot of, and Johnny Depp who cannot help himself, but to pass out in the puddle of ice cream. I loved it quite frankly, what a chat.