October 6, 2024 • 43 mins
I hope you love this chat with the warm and curious Dr. Karl Kruszelnicki. He's an infamous fixture on Aussie TV screens and he's jsut penned his 48th book; A Periodic Tale - My Sciencey Memoir which is an absolute delight to red. Karl writes like he talks so its engaging and a real pager turner!
In this chat we really get to know Karl, from his heritage, to his wonderful careers which mesh both science and art. And if you're a music nerd like me then wait til you hear what Karl learnt from working with Bo Diddley.
Thank you Dr.Karl, you are wonderful!!
If you'd like to get your hands on a copy of his book, its officially out across Australia and you can pick up a copy here too:
https://www.harpercollins.com.au/9780733340345/a-periodic-tale/
And Follow Dr.Karl on insta here: https://www.instagram.com/doctor_karl
An on TikTok here: https://www.tiktok.com/@drkarl
Big love!
Lola
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:02):
Get a. I'm Lola Berry, nutritionist, author, actor, TV presenter,
and professional oversharer. This podcast is all about celebrating failure
because I believe it's a chance for us to learn,
grow and face our blind spots. Each week, I'll interview
a different guest about their highs as well as their lows,
(00:26):
all in a bid to inspire us to fearlessly fail.
Today on the pod, we have the kind I'm gonna say,
quirky and genius brain doctor Carl such a warm soul.
He jumped on the pod because he has just written
his Weight for It, forty eighth book, and it's a
(00:49):
book all about him. It's called a Periodic Tale, my
science y memoir, and it almost didn't exist because he
didn't want to write about himself, but I'm so glad
he did. He covers so much ground and it's one
of those books you know when you're reading it and
it feels like someone's talking to you, like you're just
having a little catch up or a chit chat with
(01:10):
the writer. He's got that beautiful tone that is really
personable and open, and you can relate and understand everything
he's saying because he's just heay there's something like he
wears his heart on his sleep. He's one of those
kind of people. I hope you love this chat. I
feel like I made a mate in this chat. It
was one of those really genuine conversations. Thank you, doctor
(01:34):
Carl for jumping on the pod. You are wonderful. And
to you the listener, please go out and grab this book.
I hope you love this pod. He is like it's
gonna I hope it feels like listening to a warm hug.
But that is how he is to be around, all right,
PORU over to you go enjoy the pod, Doctor Carl.
(01:55):
Do you know that you have been on my dream
list for this pod? This POD's been going for four years,
and I reckon you've been on it since day dot.
Speaker 2 (02:02):
My friend, I'm not worthy, but thank you so much,
doctor Lola to tell me, I'm very thrilled. Thank you.
Speaker 1 (02:11):
I was sent this beautiful book of yours and it
got sent all the way to LA because that's where
I live in Los Angeles, and it took a little
while to get here, so I had to lean into
my speed reading skills, which I know you have also
taught yourself. And I have to say I've interviewed a
lot of authors on this pod, but no one has
(02:32):
written forty eight books. Holy Molly, how does it feel
forty eight books out in the world.
Speaker 2 (02:41):
It's a lot of time I've spent away from my family.
You see, writing is a solitary task, and it would
be really good if you could go for a way
for a weekend, get yourself absolutely ripped on every pharmaceutical known,
be very creative, and by Monday morning have one hundred
eighty thousand words of fully edited, completed text in grammatical beauty.
(03:02):
But it doesn't work like that. You have to sit
down by yourself. Oh my god, and I feel so
sad I've had to do that. But on the other hand,
it's the only way I know how to write. Maybe
Ai'll change everything.
Speaker 1 (03:15):
You need that limitless you know the Bradley Cooper movie
where he takes that limitless drug and he can write.
He writes his manuscript in one day. He was like
a failure writer. Yeah. Yeah, it was a movie called
It's called Limitless Limitless.
Speaker 2 (03:30):
Yeah, and I'm watching it. It's a way for me
to do better work.
Speaker 1 (03:36):
You and me both friends. It actually has a side effect.
So anyway, go watch it, and I'm sure your brain
will limitless.
Speaker 2 (03:41):
Thank you so much, doctor Loola.
Speaker 1 (03:43):
What I loved about reading this book is when I'm
reading it, I feel like it's me listening to you
on a pod, or me listening to you on radio,
or me watching you on TV. You write the way
you speak, and I think it's because you're a natural storyteller.
Is that part of your method?
Speaker 2 (04:04):
Well, I do tell stories. See, that's an ancient thing
that has been going around among humans in thousands of
years because it's a way of bringing the group to ggether.
On one hand, there's a whole big lump of your
brain at the back of your skull called the visual cortex,
which turns electricity into three D color vision and that's
(04:26):
all it does. And then in the same way, there's
a smaller part of your brain that turns elliptical impulses
into sound, and then you can store I'm hypothesizing that
you can store stories because if you think about it,
we humans spend a lot of time telling each other
stories and when we meet and we watch stories on TV,
and we hear stories on the radio, and storytelling is important,
(04:47):
I think because it brings us humans into a group
that is strong. See, individually, our skin sucks, our claus
and no good our clee can't rube your guts out
any of that sort of stuff compared to a dog
or a bear or a kangaroo. But as a group
where strong and stories helped bring us together. So I've
done almost story. I got taught this in my early
(05:09):
days at the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, and I got taught
that the story has three parts. A hook to drag
the audience in the meal, satisfies them emotionally or intellectually.
That's a little part, and finally finish off with a
joke yeah, and then repeat.
Speaker 1 (05:26):
There's something so comedic about you, even though you're sharing
what can be quite like seen as quite serious or
very science y topics. There's something so light about you.
And it feels like, just I've obviously been consuming a
lot of content about you in the lead up to
this pod, it feels like curiosity is like one of
your hallmarks. Is that is that true? To say?
Speaker 2 (05:50):
Oh? Yeah, So I first recognized curiosity as a kid.
When I'm walking back from school after the teachers had
told us about this thing called photosynthesis. I'm walking on
the black road, the black beachman, thinking, gee, it's hot.
That's obviously because black absorbs heat. And in something I thought, well,
if plants want to absorb energy from the sun, which
(06:10):
they do, how come they're not black, which absorbs heat.
Everything like crazy, And so that led into my feeling
of curiosity, and in fact curiosity has helped save my career.
On one occasion, I'm traveling on a plane to Canberra
and I say the guy next to me to go, hey,
you going, what's your name? Gavin? He was what I
work you? And he says, I'm a mathematician, quick as
(06:31):
a flash. I asked the questions which you ask every mathematician. First,
what is your favorite equation or identity? For some people
as Pythagoras's theorem, which is so simple. Other people go
navy a stakes, theyr stakes. But he said the oiler
equation e to the IPI plus one equals zero. Look
it up on Wikipedia e U L E R. And
(06:53):
then I say, what's your urdish number? And he looked
at urdish? Was this incredibly the most prolific sink mathematician
of all time who lived in the twentieth century? And
if you wrote a paper with urdige. Your urdige number
was one and he said, my urdish number is one.
I said, oh, bull tuze bull does bull does? No,
you can't and he said yeah yeah, And so we
(07:14):
got on famously like that. He was a real mathematician.
And then it turned out that various things happened at
the university. They're running out of money. I went to
see the vice chancellor to ask for some more money.
Was this guy amazing? And then he said, oh he
was Gavin Brown. He said, well, look, as vice chancellor,
know that's equivalent to the American president on Bosslor's university.
(07:34):
And I've got a few hollow logs of money. Here's
forty thousand dollars. So once you're never going to get
any more out of me, take it bringing these people,
and it's what you should do to make sure you
can keep going over the next couple of years. And
it did so. Curiosity actually helped save my bacon.
Speaker 1 (07:50):
Oh my goodness. I think also curiosity as just a
really beautiful trait to have. When you talk about storytelling,
and then couple that with being curious, then you're open
to stories as well and receiving stories. And I just
think I'm over here changing careers. And that's why I
loved your book so much. My whole twenties and thirties
(08:11):
is a nutritionist and I'm over here acting TV presenting,
voice acting, And for me, curiosity is what I'll always
come back to. If I get anxious doing a self tape,
or if I get doughty or in my head, I'll
just come back to being curious. And it just cures
any kind of like it grounds you or something. And
(08:31):
if you think about it as well from a storytelling perspective,
it takes the focus off yourself, Like when you're on
that flight, you were focused on the mathematician sitting next
door to you. You know, quite a superpower in a
weird kind of way. Curiosity.
Speaker 2 (08:45):
I think, well, how did you train for your nutrition career.
Speaker 1 (08:50):
I've got a Bachelor of Health Science from Australia, so
I did a whole all my nutrition stuff is all
in Australia.
Speaker 2 (08:58):
And so you've got a proper degree dietetics and all
that stuff.
Speaker 1 (09:01):
Yeah, nutritional medicine. Yeah yeah, yeah, so you've got.
Speaker 2 (09:03):
A real degree as opposed to somebody who's done two
hours every Tuesday night for four weeks. And now that
they know everything that there is know about the human
body and all the nutrition as well. Yeah. No, I
did a changing career.
Speaker 1 (09:14):
I did a Bachelor of Health science in Australia and
then came over here and just fell in love with creativity.
And I want to talk to you about this because
I think that you have this beautiful mishmash of science
and art and I feel like you've lived a little
bit of that out, not just in the way your
(09:34):
career has manifested in the media, but also I have
to ask you. I'm a massive Bo Diddley fan, and
pretty Thing is a song that I want played at
my wedding one day. So you have to tell me
what it was like hanging and working with Bo Diddley.
Speaker 2 (09:56):
Okay, so he was a famous blues singer and he
was coming to Australia for a tour, and so the
deal was that he would listen to a few sets
and then pick the band that he wanted. He picked
the band that I happened to be a roadie for
Wasted Days, or the and Band I had different names,
or the Magnetics. He picked them as his back up band.
(10:18):
So he turns up and he starts training them up,
and he says, hey, guys, you got to move around
on stage, get a bit of stage presents, give the
audience something one two three, kick address to be better,
don't wear torn jeans. And on one occasion I said
to him, because I was a roadie, my job was
to lay down the speakers and the cables and the
mixer and then pull all up at the end of
the night, bump in, bump out. And in one casion I said,
but I've heard you play that song about forty times.
(10:42):
How come you play it with such enthusiasm each time?
And he put one giant hand on my shoulder. He said, Hey, look, Carl,
it's called show biz, not show play or show fun,
show bizz. It's business. They give me money, I give
them a good time. We're both happy. And decades later,
the Indonesian so the Malaysian government invited me to do
(11:04):
a speaking tour about Malay on science to the schools
and universities, and we ended up on the island of Borneo,
where the audience size everywhere else had been fantastic, but
in this case the audience size was one.
Speaker 1 (11:17):
There was an earthquake or something wasn't there.
Speaker 2 (11:20):
There was a combination of an earthquake which destroyed some
of the buildings on the university and a monsoon hurrycan
cyclone which destroyed more of the buildings, and massive flooding
which blocked all the roads as well as a person
who was actually in charge had gone on holidays and
forgotten to tell everybody. And the reason there was one
person in the audience was because she had been following
(11:41):
me on Triple J on radio. So she turned up
in the audience and the words of Bo Diddley echoed
in my mind, and I gave to that one person
the same audience i'd give to an audience of one
thousand people. I delivered. I mean I wasn't being paid anything,
you know, I was just a part of the tour,
and so I learned a lot from He gave me
a good lesson, ah and what.
Speaker 1 (12:04):
A talented force to be around, like how beautiful energy.
Speaker 2 (12:09):
Oh. It took me a while to realize that blues
is virtually the only native born US form of music,
and I love blues to pieces starting off with Robert
Johnson going all the way through. I'm saying something funny though, Yeah,
most muso's most bands have a creative period of about
(12:31):
ten years, and then after that they go into playing
their greatest hits. And I love the Rolling Stones to pieces.
But their only new song has been Strange Game for
that series Slow Horse.
Speaker 1 (12:45):
Oh great series.
Speaker 2 (12:46):
Yeah, but did you pick Mick Jagger's voice on that song? No,
just think that that's Mick Jagger. I had surrounded by losers,
bruises and misfits. Blah blah blah blah blah. Yeah, anyway,
he's thing. Most musos have a creative period of ten years.
The blues singers keep on doing it all in lives.
(13:08):
I don't know why they are. I don't know why.
Speaker 1 (13:11):
Oh I love that. Oh my goodness, I love hanging
out with your brain. I have to ask something. So
you write so beautifully at the book about your parents,
like they spent time in concentration camps and there was
like a big period of time where it was about survival.
You also spent time in refugee camps, and you talk
(13:32):
about your dad's irrational optimism and you feel like that's
something that you have I guess also taken on as well.
What do you think and where do you think your
dad's optimism came from? Because like that. I love that
lucky number fourteen. I'm born on the fourteen, so I
was like lucky number fourteen. But I also like that
(13:57):
you write so visually as well, where you were saying
he was feeling depressed, and I think he was carrying
a dead body and.
Speaker 2 (14:07):
A freshly freshly killed dead body still warm. Okay, now
this is a fairly dark story, so I'll lighten it
up with my marriage proposal, which was the way I
got married, and then we'll give him the story. So
this is the light beginning, because it gets a little
bit heavy, all right. So the marriage proposal was after
(14:28):
three children, about twenty years, I ran Mary, to whom
I wasn't married, and said, Hi, honey, look, I'm in
a cheap hotel room in Southeast Asia injecting powerful opiates
into the buttocks of a young redheaded woman. Now, from
my medical training, I know I'm not supposed to inject
into the buttocks, but I've forgotten why because I'm so
tired and exhausted. Where are I supposed to inject him?
(14:48):
By the way, will you marry me? And that was
a wedding proposal. Okay, now we've got that light thing
out of the way and at least to a whole
thing of getting having a scientific wedding. But then the
heavy story is that my father was in concentration camp
and while he was young and strong, his job was
to pick up people who had just been gassed to
death and their bodies were still warm, and carry them
(15:10):
to another place where they'd be burnt. And he's carrying
this person male or female or child, I don't know,
naked because they're all naked, dead on his shoulders, and
he's thinking, this is not a very good line of
work to be in. And also he knew that once
you got too weak to carry a whole dead person
by yourself, they'd kill you. Nothing personal of the Nazis,
(15:32):
who was just part of the business, right And so
he's thinking, this is not the best line of work
to be in. Right now, I'm feeling it a bit depressed,
And he's carrying this dead person on his shoulders, and
the guy's or a man or woman or child's head
is next to his head, and suddenly he starts going
backwards and force backwards, and for my dad's limping a bit,
the head goes backwards and force, and in his head
he hears the words cuckoo as the head goes back
(15:55):
and forth like he's listening to a cuckoo, and he
starts laughing, and that sort of made it possible for
him to keep on surviving. Now, all the psychological studies
show that if you get people with a pessimistic or
an optimistic situation frame of my mind, if they look
at a situation, every time, the pessimists do badly and
(16:15):
the optimists do better. They pick the way out. So
if there's a way out of the situation, the pessimists
will go, oh, I'm screwed, mate, and the optimists go,
maybe I'll try this. And so my father was optimistic
and I was optimistic. I do not know why, but
I think you can change yourself. And if you've got
a choice and you're suddenly thinking, man, this is just crap,
(16:36):
and then you think, I will take the optimistic point
of view blow me down. According to all the psychological studies,
you'll do better on average, on average, not every time,
but on average.
Speaker 1 (16:46):
I mean, how cool. That's empowering to hear that, though,
Like that means that's a change that we or the
listener we get to make today if we want to
like it.
Speaker 2 (16:55):
Takes courage dumps. Yeah, so somebody dumps half a ton
next of chicken pool on your front lawn. You can
either think, oh, what a mess, or Hey, the roses
are going to grow really beautifully this year. Yeah, so
the same situation, but how you interpret it. And then
sometimes it involves keeping your big mouth shut and just
smiling a lot and making things better.
Speaker 1 (17:17):
Yeah, I love it. You have described yourself as a
shy child. But when I'm speaking to you here and
like every time I see you on the project or
on tally or on rape, there's such a warmth and
friendliness to you. Like how did you move through like
(17:37):
being shy to now being like so comfortable on a
pod or on tally.
Speaker 2 (17:42):
You know, it was a combination of spending a few
years as a drug craz hippie, which I would not
recommend because you do not want to do anything illegal,
because you can end up in jail with love and
hate tattooed on your knuckles and a bad future outcome
for you or pathway for life. And also so every
society takes drugs, but I was lucky that I took
(18:05):
them after my brain had matured in the early twenties,
and I was also lucky that I took them only
for a while, and also lucky that I did not
have that particular DNA variation that makes you prone to schizophrenia.
So it was a combination of being a drug crazy
be and a taxi driver, and so being a taxi driver,
suddenly I realized it was psychologically different. These people were
(18:28):
coming into my living room the back of the taxi,
and I was driving at night, so I had to
keep my eyes on the road and not make eye contact.
And so on one occasion, a couple got in and
they were just talking. They just ignored them and say,
we're two. Yeah, okay, I do to go there? And
I always asked the customers, are you in a hurry?
Are you do you want to go quickly? Do you
want to go? If they wanted to go quickly, mate,
(18:49):
I would drive them like the speed of lights, like
the speed of summer lightning. But otherwise I just say
which way do you want to go? And then they
kept on talking, and when there was a natural break,
I said, you know, you guys sound like you're talking
at right angles to each other and you're not connecting.
It almost seems like you should break up and simultaneously
the guy said, no, Deborah loves me, and she said, Richard,
(19:11):
I've been wanting to talk to you about this actually
for a while, and my brief career as a marriage
counselor came to an abrupt in when I realized I
actually did not get any tip at all, and so
she sort of scowled at me as he got out
of the cab. But that helped me stop being shy
so very as a result of that. At any party,
no matter what, I can go up to somebody and
(19:32):
stay up in my hand and say, gooday, my name's Carl.
I start off with, please allow me to introduce myself.
What my name is? Carl's your name? And I can
do that to anybody, right, and it gets such a
cool It's just so easy. But many people are shy,
and all I have to do is just say please
allow me to introduce myself and then wait and if
(19:54):
they say no, rack off, I hate you, then they
don't and then you continue with my name is in
certain name, what's your name? And then you start the conversation.
Speaker 1 (20:03):
So nice. I have to ask you have spent sixteen
years like studying university education, You've got a plethora of
education behind you. I feel like you're someone that's kind
of addicted to learning in a good way, which I love.
And you've got an IQ of one hundred and ten.
Speaker 2 (20:25):
Right, Yeah, I'm not particularly smart. I know smart people.
So with regard to IQ, the average IQ in a
population is always one hundred is to find that way
and the curve is squashed or expanded so that two
thirds of the population fit between eighty five and one
hundred and fifteen. And I'm about one hundred and ten.
I'm not particularly smart, but I am very well educated
(20:48):
because once upon a time, the Australian government thought that
education was a worthwhile investment in the future. Now it
thinks that it's a way to make short term money,
even though it's crippling our future. And we have to
in Australia import our plumbers and our psychologists because we
don't train them. Mike clo So I was very lucky.
Speaker 1 (21:06):
My question is for you though, obviously you have this
access to like a library of knowledge within you and
a lot of Like I've seen countless videos and interviews
where you're just put on the spot and someone will
be like, why are wombat poo's square and you can
just like straight away get so you must have it
might be back to that curiosity, but your brain must
(21:27):
be like, oh that's an interesting thing. I'm going to
file that away for later. Like you do have this
like gift of the gab as far as like retaining
fascinating information. It almost reminds me of did you ever
watch Steve Irwin videos?
Speaker 2 (21:40):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (21:41):
Do you know the way he could retain any bit
of information about any kind of animal and just like
and just on the spot know about And it could
be a marsupie, it could be a crock, it could
be some random type of spider that has never seen before,
and it's still no. And it's this I think. I
feel like you've got some definite gift around like having
(22:02):
curiosity for knowledge.
Speaker 2 (22:04):
Oh no, no, it's not a gift. This one's called
hard work. So any three minute bond mo or good
bit that I give has taken at least four hours
of reading and research and up to twenty hours. So
in one case, I did a story on the bitcoin
and it took me about forty hours to understand the
(22:25):
blockchain and turn it into English. So what I do
is I turn stuff into stories, and that four minimum
of four hours work that locks that thing in as
a story which has a beginning, a meaty part, and
a joke at the end in my brain, and providing
I access it once every couple of years, I can
remember the whole story as a single block of information,
(22:47):
and I can just bring it out as a single
block of information.
Speaker 1 (22:51):
So did you train yourself to do that? You just
that's how you know?
Speaker 2 (22:54):
I wrote forty eight books because so if you write
a book, each story is about four you know, you
little thousand words stories. Each story takes at least five hours.
This is the whole solitary thing. And after five hours,
I really understand how you use a spider way web
to make the world's best microphone. And that's taken me
(23:17):
four hours. I'll give it to you in under a minute,
and then the next thing, I'll give it to you.
An you say, gee, he knows a lot. Yeah, but
behind each one, that's four hours plus four hours plus
four hours spread out over decades, writing at least one
book a year. I was actually very embarrassed writing the
last book because I felt awkward writing about myself. I'm
very happy to say, did you know, the trees talk
to each other via an underground network of mushrooms that
(23:41):
we call the wood wide Web, and they give each
other drugs and knowledge and information and food. And I
feel really awkward on the other hand, saying, here's a
book about me. You've written by me, possibly biased. Please
buy this book, give me some money, and there will
be an exam in three weeks. We're expecting to get
eighty five percent or more about how good I am.
(24:01):
Is embarrassed it is it true.
Speaker 1 (24:03):
That you that you weren't super keen on writing a memoir? Like,
is it true that you were kind of like count?
Speaker 2 (24:08):
Yeah, I didn't want to do it, but it kept
on coming back to the publisher saying, see this contract
where you signed, You said you do a memoir? Oh
that one, Yeah, okay, you're gonna do it. But I
managed to delay them for three years. But on the
way I managed to read a whole bunch of other autobiographies.
So there's one by a famous musician for a band
(24:29):
out of Seattle where he has these incredible adventures along
the lines of, hey, I had just consumed enough ice
to stop global warming, and then walked into this place
with six kilograms of heroin to try and sell it
to the people behind the counter when it turned out
that I walked into a police station. Then then he
goes on through the adventure and then we managed to
(24:49):
dump it on some poor barista. And so it's incredibly
enthralling to really but the moral value that he leaves
behind a chain of broken people in jail. And then
there's the other style of auto biography, which is a
chronological I got it up at seven fifteen, and then
at seven thirty I had a shower, and then accordiate,
I had a couple of coffee, and then the other
sort of how bad my life is. I had a
relationship with this person that turned out bad, but then
(25:11):
I had a relationship with another person that turned out
even worse. And then there's the name dropping. You know.
So Prince Charles and Taita and I were backstage when
we saw mix, so we said, hey, let's go over
and see Eric Clapton. You know that style. And there's
all these different styles of autobiography, and I've tried to
do one that had a moral value but also was uplifting.
And I really didn't think that I had that in
(25:32):
my past life. They said, well, I do this story
and I gradually pushed myself into it and then ended
up doing it.
Speaker 1 (25:37):
Well, I love it, and I feel like it comes
back to this storytelling value, like this gift that you
have around storytelling. I do love what you just said
about hard work, though, because I love it when people
come on this pod and kind of like pull down
the veil a little bit and they're like, well, no,
at the end of the day, I work really, really,
really hard as well. So is it what you said before?
(25:59):
Is it four hours in prep for each bit? Essentially
minimum four hours?
Speaker 2 (26:05):
And the other side of the coin is when a
famous female celebrity gets pregnant and then it appears online
in the media eight weeks later and they've still got
the same body they had before they were pregnant. They
say what how do you do that? And say, oh,
it was just nothing. I just had my secret loler
berry juice and it just melted away. And then you
read an interview by a trainer who said, we bloody
(26:29):
trained with her six hours every day from the day
she was pregnant, and the breastfeeding was taken over by nurse,
a wet nurse, and she did nothing but training for
six hours every day, and she goes on and says, oh,
I just took my secret juice you can buy, and
the fact just melted away. Yeah, sometimes you have to
do the hard work. You have to do the hard yards.
Speaker 1 (26:49):
No, I love that. And another thing that I learned
from you that I love. So these are my pod
notes for this is some of my pod notes.
Speaker 2 (26:56):
Today's inter the color code they got circles for different
levels of importance and other lines as well. You talk
my language, sistuff.
Speaker 1 (27:04):
And I have to handwrite notes. I cannot type notes.
And I saw you talk about the difference with studying
if you handwrite versus if you type them on a keyboard.
Do you remember that?
Speaker 2 (27:15):
Yeah? Yeah, And what happens is that besides just simply
with a keyboard you just simply move your fingers up
and down, but with handwriting, you go through moving your
hand in delicate shapes. And that is that has a
really long history of when you were very young learning
how to write. And for whatever reason that might be
(27:36):
related to the reason, or we don't know why, but
we do know for sure that you have greater both
retention and comprehension. You understand as well as you remember
better if you handwrite rather than you type, which is
kind of sad because it means you've got a handwrite.
But on the other hand, now they've got the good
AI that can turn your handwriting into text that you
(27:57):
can then access really easily. And they've got the good technology.
Speaker 1 (28:00):
Oh I love handwriting, though, I love it. I write
letters home. Oh love it. I think it's the best.
I'm probably showing my millennialness.
Speaker 2 (28:09):
Inner is something from the heart. And I do remember
that line by Oscar Wilde who said, our dear insertin
name of friend del Ola Berry. I'm sorry this is
such a long letter, Comma, because I didn't have time
to write a short one. And when you write a
(28:30):
short letter, it is succinct that it is exactly. It
tells exactly what you're feeling. It does it in a
short period of time, and then they can respond on
goes a relationship.
Speaker 1 (28:39):
No, I love it. I mean also Oscar Wilde. Best
of the best?
Speaker 2 (28:43):
Oh, yes, best of the best.
Speaker 1 (28:45):
Is it true you have an asteroid named after.
Speaker 2 (28:50):
You, oh, darling, Yes, well, I'd like to call it
a planet one eight four one two Krystal Nitsky looking
up in Wikipedia one eight four one two. And what
happened was McNaught, who was one of the great comet
discoverers of this century, discovered comet McNaught back in two
thousand and eight or something, and in Sydney the newspaper said, oh,
(29:14):
there's not much to see. And we went to a
part of Sydney called the Gap where you could look
back across Sydney and you could see the entire skyline
of Sydney from one end to the other, the Sydney city,
and the comet extended one quarter of the way across
the sky. And yet the newspapers had seen it a
(29:36):
few days earlier and said, oh, no, there's nothing to see.
And we said, hey, that's comment, and I said no,
but the newspaper said there was nothing there. I said,
you said, it made us amazing, and you could see
it for weeks after. And so he decided that he
liked the work that I was doing on the radio,
and he named one eight four one two asteroid that
he discovered after me. I have since discovered it's about
three to six kilometers in diameter. It's in that asteroid
(30:00):
belt between Mars and Jupiter, and I really hope that
it doesn't undergo gravitational disturbance when it passes by another
asteroid and ends up landing on the Earth and killing people.
That'd be terrible to have comic Crystal Minsky or asteroid
chromostility being blamed for the destruction of the Earth.
Speaker 1 (30:19):
I've got to say I saw my first meteor shower
recently because we went out to Joshua Tree. Yeah, we
went out to Joshua Tree.
Speaker 2 (30:26):
Joshua Tree no light and the world's oldest tree. Is
it really felve thousand years old or something, the bristle
Cone Pine or something. I had no idea about the
asteroid to the media shower.
Speaker 1 (30:40):
Well, so we were all we had it. We were
sitting out around a fire and we let the fire
go out, and we turned all the lights off in
the house and we just looked up at the sky
because you could literally see the Milky Way. It was
like so clear and the sky was so dark. And
someone goes, oh, my goodness, there's a shooting star and
I was like, damn it, I missed the blacier start.
I wanted to make a wish on it. Five minutes later,
(31:02):
I'm like, hang on, I hang on, there's a shooting
star and in the period of an hour we saw
thirty five shooting start five Yeah wow. And I did
some googling the next day and we just accidentally happened
to be there when there was like a meteor shower
that went on for I think two days. Has a
two night peak usually is that in November. There is
(31:23):
one in November that I'm going to try and take
my dad too. The one we saw was in July.
Speaker 2 (31:28):
Okay, so the one in November train so first he
was a guard of meteor showers. The best place to
see the sky is the Southern Hemisphere because the southern
part of the world is pointed at the Milky Way
and there's three continents there. Africa's too cloudy, South America's
to cloudy, Australia's just right. So Australia is the best
place in the world to see media from. I've spent
(31:48):
a total of a few decades test driving four will
drive through the Australia outback. I've been through fifteen and
seventeen deserts and every night we spent two years sleeping
under the stars. Every night it was the same unless
it was raining. And what we do is we'd have
an early dinner, lay out the ground, shoot and lie
back with a little drink with an umbrella or maybe
a hot coco or something. And then with a laser pointer.
(32:11):
In the first hour and a half we look for
satellites and the laser pointer is to point out where
they are. I was just a week laser point to
point out the sky, and my daughter was really good.
My daughter Lola was the expert actually, and so then
we we'd normally see ten an hour, and then in
the next hour and a half we looked for the meteors,
and then we see another ten and we go to
(32:32):
bed happy. You're seeing thirty five and an hour is
a good meteor shower. The record was in the United
States between two and four am in early November for
the Leonids l eom IDs, and in that window across
the central USA people saw, wait for it, in one hour,
(32:53):
one hundred thousand, one hundred thousand meteors in one hour
or forty or one hundred one hundred thousand, and the
whole sky was just going bing bing, bing, bing bing.
They come around every thirty something years. Thirty something years later,
in ninety nine, the best place turned out to be
one of the Canary Islands really the Spanish Islands off
(33:16):
the coast of Antarctica. So in two thousand and thirty two,
flip a coin and make sure you're out there, and
you might be lucky to see over a thousand mediors
per hour. Every thirty three years. They come back big.
Every they're back every year, but every thirty three it's
really big. I don't know, and we get close to
(33:36):
twenty thirty two. People will be on the outlook for them.
Speaker 1 (33:38):
Oh, it's so it feels so magical as well, Like
from a hippie perspective, I'm like, this has got to
be good luck to just be amongst that.
Speaker 2 (33:47):
Yeah, cosmic man.
Speaker 1 (33:49):
Ah, I could have spent all flipping Like I was like,
how do we spend more time in josh auawdrey La
is great, but it's a grind, you know, And I'm like,
this is incredible. So you, my friend, have done so
much and I don't see any signs of you stopping.
You are just prolific in everything you do and you're
(34:12):
very inspiring and very warm. What's what's the goal? Like,
what like what is your mo is it to like
make science like attainable and understandable for people? Is it
to in part like because you're so joyous as well?
You know, people feel good when they watch you or
listen to you.
Speaker 2 (34:31):
Well, even though I did smash up six taxis in
one life to take the cops one hundred and forty k's, yes,
I am sort of joyous. So I kind of drift
through life like a popsicle stick in the gutter of
any day, with no real control of it where I go.
So I've had various hippie careers. I helped set up
Australia's first cable TV network in nineteen seventy two, and
(34:55):
that happened by accident, and my next project happened by
accident as well well. And so my next project is
to remove to rescue people from the rabbit hole of
disinformation comma by using the example of only fans full stop.
Let me explain now, okay, So do you want to
(35:18):
explain only fans to the audience or while.
Speaker 1 (35:20):
I do that, actually, do you know what? You can
go for it? My friend?
Speaker 2 (35:24):
So, I've never actually gone on too only fans, but
I think I might have stumbled across it accdentally on
TikTok on the way through. But I think Only Fans
is softcore porn, possibly mainly for males, but not exclusively,
and for about ten dollars a month, and that's not
where they make their money. So they make their money
by coming on and so Fred types in, Hey, Lo Laberry,
(35:47):
I love your work, have you got anything extra for me?
And then amazingly, at two o'clock in the morning, he
gets a reply saying, well, I went for a swim
in the swimming pool and you wouldn't believe it. My
whole buccinia just slipped off and accidentally we had the
camera going. And you can buy this for two hundred dollars.
Now that's two lies in one. The first lie iss
not recent footage. It's shot three years ago or five
(36:09):
years ago. Secondly, it's not Lola. It's rather a person
from either Venezuela or Philippines, because they've got the good
English language and they're poor enough as a country that
they will be there at your two o'clock in the
morning at five dollars an hour. So the basic concept
(36:29):
is that Only Fans really makes us money from the
extra sales that they make when somebody's learning you two
o'clock in the morning by having somebody there ready to
answer them at all times. And so my concept is
that I'm going to try and develop an AI chatboc
chatbot that looks at the psychology of the person and
(36:49):
engages them if they want, with a specific topic of
climate change to bring them back from the dark side
from the rabbit hole. Using the example of amily fans
with there's somebody available all the time, but I can't
off people by paying them five dollars an hour. So
instead of I thought, we developed a chat box instead.
That's my next plan. It'll probably take him a couple
of years.
Speaker 1 (37:09):
That sounds amazing. You're phenomenal. You as well have as
you said, have had many careers, like filmmaker as well,
like yeah, like you said, taxi driver, filmmaker, roadie, like.
Speaker 2 (37:23):
Driver for four drives, yes, university academic, T shirt maker,
a TV weather man. I was a TV weing. I
lost the job because I insisted that meat had fat
in it. Yeah. Well, so I had this job as
a TV weather man. We're besides being a TV weather man.
(37:43):
Every time I did a TV spot in the morning
on the weather, I'd also throw in a ninety second
science story like oh, here's a weather from Geelong. And
by the way, here's a weather on Saturn. And so
so I do all these different science spots. And he's
the world's first computer built two and a half thousand
years ago and we don't know who built it from
brass rings the anti kidther object. So I was doing
(38:05):
about half an hour of science a week, and on
one occasion I decided to do a funny little, a
stupid little joke story because it's the nature of morning
TV on the New England Journal of Medicine, which is
one of the top medical journals in Australia in the world,
the New England Journal of Medicine Burger. And they said, okay,
let's get rid of the bad fat by getting the mincemeat,
(38:28):
boiling it to get rid of the bad fat, and
then skimming it off and then frying it up with
a good fat of olive oil and not too high
a temperature so that that way you get the delicious
fatty thing. But it's a good fat. And so we
did a story on this, and then after I did this,
and we've got a place to make a special New
England Journal of Medicine Burger and how to sign out
(38:48):
the front and it was just a little one and
a half minute story. And then within half an hour
of that story going to air and the show ending,
I was caught up to see the suits the executives
on the top floor and they said, did you know
the executives a Channel ten said on Good Morning Australia
that we have a three million dollar a year advertising
contract with the Australian Meat Board and you've just gone
(39:10):
on air and said that meat has fat in it
and they'll be happy to keep on giving us the
contract if you go on tomorrow and repudiate that by
saying that meat actually has no fat in it. And
that's how come I got fired from. I said, see
you later. I'm out of here. Man, I'm not going
to tell lies.
Speaker 1 (39:30):
Good on you. Oh my goodness.
Speaker 2 (39:36):
So I've failed in a lot of careers. I've failed
in my academic career testing the steel for the Westgate
Bridge in Melbourne, so I found out it was not
strong enough and doing academic and you can hear it
in a way, failure is a kind of a lesson.
But you don't have too many failures because it kind
of ubsess you at the time. But if you can
learn from it. That's probably good. And you don't want
to make the same mistake more than once. If you
(39:57):
don't make a mistake, you don't make anything, but try
to different mistakes at least each time.
Speaker 1 (40:02):
I like that. I have to ask, why is tyrosine
your favorite amino acid?
Speaker 2 (40:08):
Oh mate? Tyrosine is involved with so many good chemicals
in your body, melanin and melotonin. And the thing with
newborn babies is that they're born three months too early
and their brain is not mature enough to know that
it has to start making melatonin, and so they sleep
(40:29):
at night like normal people and stay awake in the
day like normal people. So that's why the first three
months with babies can be just hell on wheels because
they don't make their own melanin melotonin. And I just
love melonon because it protects your skin, and melon also
gives you the color of your hair the color of
your eyes, so it's not as though you've got a
(40:49):
blue dye in your skin in your eyes or a
green dye. It's all the same die, but in different concentrations.
And it also makes the sky blue. So tyrosine is
my favorite a menage because it makes such a wonderful
chemical moment a.
Speaker 1 (41:03):
Time I did not know that. I always thought of
tyro scene in the thyroid. That's where my brain goes. Ah,
my brain, the nutrition brain. You, my friend, are so
so wonderful and I could talk to you all flipping
day long. Your book is wonderful. To all the Aussie
listeners out there, it's officially out, which is really really exciting,
(41:25):
so they can go out and get their hands on
a copy. And you, my friend, I cannot wait to
cross paths with one day, whether it's in Australia, whether
you're touring in America. I don't know when it'll be,
but I'm really excited for you in this book. And
I'm glad that you took the plunge and wrote about
yourself because you are so friendly and never change the
(41:47):
way you write. Because it really felt like I was
listening to you, like I could hear you in my
head when I was reading the book. So ten out
of ten from me, thank you.
Speaker 2 (41:57):
Oh you're awfully. I really tried to avoid the boring
type of autobiography but also the sad one.
Speaker 1 (42:04):
It was perfect and it's a great cover. Love it.
Look at you. You wonderful speaking with.
Speaker 2 (42:10):
Me on the back cover with disarming me high pants
with the jumper tucked into the pants as well.
Speaker 1 (42:14):
I like a high pant. I don't think there's anything
wrong with a high pant, my friend. Thank you so much,
and to the listener, please go ahead and get the book.
It's such a wonderful read. You're wonderful. That's a wrap
on another episode of Fearlessly Failing. As always, thank you
(42:34):
to our guests, and let's continue the conversation on Instagram.
I'm at Yumo Lollerberry. This potty my word for podcast
is available on all streaming platforms. I'd love it if
you could subscribe, rate and comment and of course spread
the love.
Get a. I'm Lola Berry, nutritionist, author, actor, TV presenter,
and professional oversharer. This podcast is all about celebrating failure
because I believe it's a chance for us to learn,
grow and face our blind spots. Each week, I'll interview
a different guest about their highs as well as their lows,
(00:26):
all in a bid to inspire us to fearlessly fail.
Today on the pod, we have the kind I'm gonna say,
quirky and genius brain doctor Carl such a warm soul.
He jumped on the pod because he has just written
his Weight for It, forty eighth book, and it's a
(00:49):
book all about him. It's called a Periodic Tale, my
science y memoir, and it almost didn't exist because he
didn't want to write about himself, but I'm so glad
he did. He covers so much ground and it's one
of those books you know when you're reading it and
it feels like someone's talking to you, like you're just
having a little catch up or a chit chat with
(01:10):
the writer. He's got that beautiful tone that is really
personable and open, and you can relate and understand everything
he's saying because he's just heay there's something like he
wears his heart on his sleep. He's one of those
kind of people. I hope you love this chat. I
feel like I made a mate in this chat. It
was one of those really genuine conversations. Thank you, doctor
(01:34):
Carl for jumping on the pod. You are wonderful. And
to you the listener, please go out and grab this book.
I hope you love this pod. He is like it's
gonna I hope it feels like listening to a warm hug.
But that is how he is to be around, all right,
PORU over to you go enjoy the pod, Doctor Carl.
(01:55):
Do you know that you have been on my dream
list for this pod? This POD's been going for four years,
and I reckon you've been on it since day dot.
Speaker 2 (02:02):
My friend, I'm not worthy, but thank you so much,
doctor Lola to tell me, I'm very thrilled. Thank you.
Speaker 1 (02:11):
I was sent this beautiful book of yours and it
got sent all the way to LA because that's where
I live in Los Angeles, and it took a little
while to get here, so I had to lean into
my speed reading skills, which I know you have also
taught yourself. And I have to say I've interviewed a
lot of authors on this pod, but no one has
(02:32):
written forty eight books. Holy Molly, how does it feel
forty eight books out in the world.
Speaker 2 (02:41):
It's a lot of time I've spent away from my family.
You see, writing is a solitary task, and it would
be really good if you could go for a way
for a weekend, get yourself absolutely ripped on every pharmaceutical known,
be very creative, and by Monday morning have one hundred
eighty thousand words of fully edited, completed text in grammatical beauty.
(03:02):
But it doesn't work like that. You have to sit
down by yourself. Oh my god, and I feel so
sad I've had to do that. But on the other hand,
it's the only way I know how to write. Maybe
Ai'll change everything.
Speaker 1 (03:15):
You need that limitless you know the Bradley Cooper movie
where he takes that limitless drug and he can write.
He writes his manuscript in one day. He was like
a failure writer. Yeah. Yeah, it was a movie called
It's called Limitless Limitless.
Speaker 2 (03:30):
Yeah, and I'm watching it. It's a way for me
to do better work.
Speaker 1 (03:36):
You and me both friends. It actually has a side effect.
So anyway, go watch it, and I'm sure your brain
will limitless.
Speaker 2 (03:41):
Thank you so much, doctor Loola.
Speaker 1 (03:43):
What I loved about reading this book is when I'm
reading it, I feel like it's me listening to you
on a pod, or me listening to you on radio,
or me watching you on TV. You write the way
you speak, and I think it's because you're a natural storyteller.
Is that part of your method?
Speaker 2 (04:04):
Well, I do tell stories. See, that's an ancient thing
that has been going around among humans in thousands of
years because it's a way of bringing the group to ggether.
On one hand, there's a whole big lump of your
brain at the back of your skull called the visual cortex,
which turns electricity into three D color vision and that's
(04:26):
all it does. And then in the same way, there's
a smaller part of your brain that turns elliptical impulses
into sound, and then you can store I'm hypothesizing that
you can store stories because if you think about it,
we humans spend a lot of time telling each other
stories and when we meet and we watch stories on TV,
and we hear stories on the radio, and storytelling is important,
(04:47):
I think because it brings us humans into a group
that is strong. See, individually, our skin sucks, our claus
and no good our clee can't rube your guts out
any of that sort of stuff compared to a dog
or a bear or a kangaroo. But as a group
where strong and stories helped bring us together. So I've
done almost story. I got taught this in my early
(05:09):
days at the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, and I got taught
that the story has three parts. A hook to drag
the audience in the meal, satisfies them emotionally or intellectually.
That's a little part, and finally finish off with a
joke yeah, and then repeat.
Speaker 1 (05:26):
There's something so comedic about you, even though you're sharing
what can be quite like seen as quite serious or
very science y topics. There's something so light about you.
And it feels like, just I've obviously been consuming a
lot of content about you in the lead up to
this pod, it feels like curiosity is like one of
your hallmarks. Is that is that true? To say?
Speaker 2 (05:50):
Oh? Yeah, So I first recognized curiosity as a kid.
When I'm walking back from school after the teachers had
told us about this thing called photosynthesis. I'm walking on
the black road, the black beachman, thinking, gee, it's hot.
That's obviously because black absorbs heat. And in something I thought, well,
if plants want to absorb energy from the sun, which
(06:10):
they do, how come they're not black, which absorbs heat.
Everything like crazy, And so that led into my feeling
of curiosity, and in fact curiosity has helped save my career.
On one occasion, I'm traveling on a plane to Canberra
and I say the guy next to me to go, hey,
you going, what's your name? Gavin? He was what I
work you? And he says, I'm a mathematician, quick as
(06:31):
a flash. I asked the questions which you ask every mathematician. First,
what is your favorite equation or identity? For some people
as Pythagoras's theorem, which is so simple. Other people go
navy a stakes, theyr stakes. But he said the oiler
equation e to the IPI plus one equals zero. Look
it up on Wikipedia e U L E R. And
(06:53):
then I say, what's your urdish number? And he looked
at urdish? Was this incredibly the most prolific sink mathematician
of all time who lived in the twentieth century? And
if you wrote a paper with urdige. Your urdige number
was one and he said, my urdish number is one.
I said, oh, bull tuze bull does bull does? No,
you can't and he said yeah yeah, And so we
(07:14):
got on famously like that. He was a real mathematician.
And then it turned out that various things happened at
the university. They're running out of money. I went to
see the vice chancellor to ask for some more money.
Was this guy amazing? And then he said, oh he
was Gavin Brown. He said, well, look, as vice chancellor,
know that's equivalent to the American president on Bosslor's university.
(07:34):
And I've got a few hollow logs of money. Here's
forty thousand dollars. So once you're never going to get
any more out of me, take it bringing these people,
and it's what you should do to make sure you
can keep going over the next couple of years. And
it did so. Curiosity actually helped save my bacon.
Speaker 1 (07:50):
Oh my goodness. I think also curiosity as just a
really beautiful trait to have. When you talk about storytelling,
and then couple that with being curious, then you're open
to stories as well and receiving stories. And I just
think I'm over here changing careers. And that's why I
loved your book so much. My whole twenties and thirties
(08:11):
is a nutritionist and I'm over here acting TV presenting,
voice acting, And for me, curiosity is what I'll always
come back to. If I get anxious doing a self tape,
or if I get doughty or in my head, I'll
just come back to being curious. And it just cures
any kind of like it grounds you or something. And
(08:31):
if you think about it as well from a storytelling perspective,
it takes the focus off yourself, Like when you're on
that flight, you were focused on the mathematician sitting next
door to you. You know, quite a superpower in a
weird kind of way. Curiosity.
Speaker 2 (08:45):
I think, well, how did you train for your nutrition career.
Speaker 1 (08:50):
I've got a Bachelor of Health Science from Australia, so
I did a whole all my nutrition stuff is all
in Australia.
Speaker 2 (08:58):
And so you've got a proper degree dietetics and all
that stuff.
Speaker 1 (09:01):
Yeah, nutritional medicine. Yeah yeah, yeah, so you've got.
Speaker 2 (09:03):
A real degree as opposed to somebody who's done two
hours every Tuesday night for four weeks. And now that
they know everything that there is know about the human
body and all the nutrition as well. Yeah. No, I
did a changing career.
Speaker 1 (09:14):
I did a Bachelor of Health science in Australia and
then came over here and just fell in love with creativity.
And I want to talk to you about this because
I think that you have this beautiful mishmash of science
and art and I feel like you've lived a little
bit of that out, not just in the way your
(09:34):
career has manifested in the media, but also I have
to ask you. I'm a massive Bo Diddley fan, and
pretty Thing is a song that I want played at
my wedding one day. So you have to tell me
what it was like hanging and working with Bo Diddley.
Speaker 2 (09:56):
Okay, so he was a famous blues singer and he
was coming to Australia for a tour, and so the
deal was that he would listen to a few sets
and then pick the band that he wanted. He picked
the band that I happened to be a roadie for
Wasted Days, or the and Band I had different names,
or the Magnetics. He picked them as his back up band.
(10:18):
So he turns up and he starts training them up,
and he says, hey, guys, you got to move around
on stage, get a bit of stage presents, give the
audience something one two three, kick address to be better,
don't wear torn jeans. And on one occasion I said
to him, because I was a roadie, my job was
to lay down the speakers and the cables and the
mixer and then pull all up at the end of
the night, bump in, bump out. And in one casion I said,
but I've heard you play that song about forty times.
(10:42):
How come you play it with such enthusiasm each time?
And he put one giant hand on my shoulder. He said, Hey, look, Carl,
it's called show biz, not show play or show fun,
show bizz. It's business. They give me money, I give
them a good time. We're both happy. And decades later,
the Indonesian so the Malaysian government invited me to do
(11:04):
a speaking tour about Malay on science to the schools
and universities, and we ended up on the island of Borneo,
where the audience size everywhere else had been fantastic, but
in this case the audience size was one.
Speaker 1 (11:17):
There was an earthquake or something wasn't there.
Speaker 2 (11:20):
There was a combination of an earthquake which destroyed some
of the buildings on the university and a monsoon hurrycan
cyclone which destroyed more of the buildings, and massive flooding
which blocked all the roads as well as a person
who was actually in charge had gone on holidays and
forgotten to tell everybody. And the reason there was one
person in the audience was because she had been following
(11:41):
me on Triple J on radio. So she turned up
in the audience and the words of Bo Diddley echoed
in my mind, and I gave to that one person
the same audience i'd give to an audience of one
thousand people. I delivered. I mean I wasn't being paid anything,
you know, I was just a part of the tour,
and so I learned a lot from He gave me
a good lesson, ah and what.
Speaker 1 (12:04):
A talented force to be around, like how beautiful energy.
Speaker 2 (12:09):
Oh. It took me a while to realize that blues
is virtually the only native born US form of music,
and I love blues to pieces starting off with Robert
Johnson going all the way through. I'm saying something funny though, Yeah,
most muso's most bands have a creative period of about
(12:31):
ten years, and then after that they go into playing
their greatest hits. And I love the Rolling Stones to pieces.
But their only new song has been Strange Game for
that series Slow Horse.
Speaker 1 (12:45):
Oh great series.
Speaker 2 (12:46):
Yeah, but did you pick Mick Jagger's voice on that song? No,
just think that that's Mick Jagger. I had surrounded by losers,
bruises and misfits. Blah blah blah blah blah. Yeah, anyway,
he's thing. Most musos have a creative period of ten years.
The blues singers keep on doing it all in lives.
(13:08):
I don't know why they are. I don't know why.
Speaker 1 (13:11):
Oh I love that. Oh my goodness, I love hanging
out with your brain. I have to ask something. So
you write so beautifully at the book about your parents,
like they spent time in concentration camps and there was
like a big period of time where it was about survival.
You also spent time in refugee camps, and you talk
(13:32):
about your dad's irrational optimism and you feel like that's
something that you have I guess also taken on as well.
What do you think and where do you think your
dad's optimism came from? Because like that. I love that
lucky number fourteen. I'm born on the fourteen, so I
was like lucky number fourteen. But I also like that
(13:57):
you write so visually as well, where you were saying
he was feeling depressed, and I think he was carrying
a dead body and.
Speaker 2 (14:07):
A freshly freshly killed dead body still warm. Okay, now
this is a fairly dark story, so I'll lighten it
up with my marriage proposal, which was the way I
got married, and then we'll give him the story. So
this is the light beginning, because it gets a little
bit heavy, all right. So the marriage proposal was after
(14:28):
three children, about twenty years, I ran Mary, to whom
I wasn't married, and said, Hi, honey, look, I'm in
a cheap hotel room in Southeast Asia injecting powerful opiates
into the buttocks of a young redheaded woman. Now, from
my medical training, I know I'm not supposed to inject
into the buttocks, but I've forgotten why because I'm so
tired and exhausted. Where are I supposed to inject him?
(14:48):
By the way, will you marry me? And that was
a wedding proposal. Okay, now we've got that light thing
out of the way and at least to a whole
thing of getting having a scientific wedding. But then the
heavy story is that my father was in concentration camp
and while he was young and strong, his job was
to pick up people who had just been gassed to
death and their bodies were still warm, and carry them
(15:10):
to another place where they'd be burnt. And he's carrying
this person male or female or child, I don't know,
naked because they're all naked, dead on his shoulders, and
he's thinking, this is not a very good line of
work to be in. And also he knew that once
you got too weak to carry a whole dead person
by yourself, they'd kill you. Nothing personal of the Nazis,
(15:32):
who was just part of the business, right And so
he's thinking, this is not the best line of work
to be in. Right now, I'm feeling it a bit depressed,
And he's carrying this dead person on his shoulders, and
the guy's or a man or woman or child's head
is next to his head, and suddenly he starts going
backwards and force backwards, and for my dad's limping a bit,
the head goes backwards and force, and in his head
he hears the words cuckoo as the head goes back
(15:55):
and forth like he's listening to a cuckoo, and he
starts laughing, and that sort of made it possible for
him to keep on surviving. Now, all the psychological studies
show that if you get people with a pessimistic or
an optimistic situation frame of my mind, if they look
at a situation, every time, the pessimists do badly and
(16:15):
the optimists do better. They pick the way out. So
if there's a way out of the situation, the pessimists
will go, oh, I'm screwed, mate, and the optimists go,
maybe I'll try this. And so my father was optimistic
and I was optimistic. I do not know why, but
I think you can change yourself. And if you've got
a choice and you're suddenly thinking, man, this is just crap,
(16:36):
and then you think, I will take the optimistic point
of view blow me down. According to all the psychological studies,
you'll do better on average, on average, not every time,
but on average.
Speaker 1 (16:46):
I mean, how cool. That's empowering to hear that, though,
Like that means that's a change that we or the
listener we get to make today if we want to
like it.
Speaker 2 (16:55):
Takes courage dumps. Yeah, so somebody dumps half a ton
next of chicken pool on your front lawn. You can
either think, oh, what a mess, or Hey, the roses
are going to grow really beautifully this year. Yeah, so
the same situation, but how you interpret it. And then
sometimes it involves keeping your big mouth shut and just
smiling a lot and making things better.
Speaker 1 (17:17):
Yeah, I love it. You have described yourself as a
shy child. But when I'm speaking to you here and
like every time I see you on the project or
on tally or on rape, there's such a warmth and
friendliness to you. Like how did you move through like
(17:37):
being shy to now being like so comfortable on a
pod or on tally.
Speaker 2 (17:42):
You know, it was a combination of spending a few
years as a drug craz hippie, which I would not
recommend because you do not want to do anything illegal,
because you can end up in jail with love and
hate tattooed on your knuckles and a bad future outcome
for you or pathway for life. And also so every
society takes drugs, but I was lucky that I took
(18:05):
them after my brain had matured in the early twenties,
and I was also lucky that I took them only
for a while, and also lucky that I did not
have that particular DNA variation that makes you prone to schizophrenia.
So it was a combination of being a drug crazy
be and a taxi driver, and so being a taxi driver,
suddenly I realized it was psychologically different. These people were
(18:28):
coming into my living room the back of the taxi,
and I was driving at night, so I had to
keep my eyes on the road and not make eye contact.
And so on one occasion, a couple got in and
they were just talking. They just ignored them and say,
we're two. Yeah, okay, I do to go there? And
I always asked the customers, are you in a hurry?
Are you do you want to go quickly? Do you
want to go? If they wanted to go quickly, mate,
(18:49):
I would drive them like the speed of lights, like
the speed of summer lightning. But otherwise I just say
which way do you want to go? And then they
kept on talking, and when there was a natural break,
I said, you know, you guys sound like you're talking
at right angles to each other and you're not connecting.
It almost seems like you should break up and simultaneously
the guy said, no, Deborah loves me, and she said, Richard,
(19:11):
I've been wanting to talk to you about this actually
for a while, and my brief career as a marriage
counselor came to an abrupt in when I realized I
actually did not get any tip at all, and so
she sort of scowled at me as he got out
of the cab. But that helped me stop being shy
so very as a result of that. At any party,
no matter what, I can go up to somebody and
(19:32):
stay up in my hand and say, gooday, my name's Carl.
I start off with, please allow me to introduce myself.
What my name is? Carl's your name? And I can
do that to anybody, right, and it gets such a
cool It's just so easy. But many people are shy,
and all I have to do is just say please
allow me to introduce myself and then wait and if
(19:54):
they say no, rack off, I hate you, then they
don't and then you continue with my name is in
certain name, what's your name? And then you start the conversation.
Speaker 1 (20:03):
So nice. I have to ask you have spent sixteen
years like studying university education, You've got a plethora of
education behind you. I feel like you're someone that's kind
of addicted to learning in a good way, which I love.
And you've got an IQ of one hundred and ten.
Speaker 2 (20:25):
Right, Yeah, I'm not particularly smart. I know smart people.
So with regard to IQ, the average IQ in a
population is always one hundred is to find that way
and the curve is squashed or expanded so that two
thirds of the population fit between eighty five and one
hundred and fifteen. And I'm about one hundred and ten.
I'm not particularly smart, but I am very well educated
(20:48):
because once upon a time, the Australian government thought that
education was a worthwhile investment in the future. Now it
thinks that it's a way to make short term money,
even though it's crippling our future. And we have to
in Australia import our plumbers and our psychologists because we
don't train them. Mike clo So I was very lucky.
Speaker 1 (21:06):
My question is for you though, obviously you have this
access to like a library of knowledge within you and
a lot of Like I've seen countless videos and interviews
where you're just put on the spot and someone will
be like, why are wombat poo's square and you can
just like straight away get so you must have it
might be back to that curiosity, but your brain must
(21:27):
be like, oh that's an interesting thing. I'm going to
file that away for later. Like you do have this
like gift of the gab as far as like retaining
fascinating information. It almost reminds me of did you ever
watch Steve Irwin videos?
Speaker 2 (21:40):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (21:41):
Do you know the way he could retain any bit
of information about any kind of animal and just like
and just on the spot know about And it could
be a marsupie, it could be a crock, it could
be some random type of spider that has never seen before,
and it's still no. And it's this I think. I
feel like you've got some definite gift around like having
(22:02):
curiosity for knowledge.
Speaker 2 (22:04):
Oh no, no, it's not a gift. This one's called
hard work. So any three minute bond mo or good
bit that I give has taken at least four hours
of reading and research and up to twenty hours. So
in one case, I did a story on the bitcoin
and it took me about forty hours to understand the
(22:25):
blockchain and turn it into English. So what I do
is I turn stuff into stories, and that four minimum
of four hours work that locks that thing in as
a story which has a beginning, a meaty part, and
a joke at the end in my brain, and providing
I access it once every couple of years, I can
remember the whole story as a single block of information,
(22:47):
and I can just bring it out as a single
block of information.
Speaker 1 (22:51):
So did you train yourself to do that? You just
that's how you know?
Speaker 2 (22:54):
I wrote forty eight books because so if you write
a book, each story is about four you know, you
little thousand words stories. Each story takes at least five hours.
This is the whole solitary thing. And after five hours,
I really understand how you use a spider way web
to make the world's best microphone. And that's taken me
(23:17):
four hours. I'll give it to you in under a minute,
and then the next thing, I'll give it to you.
An you say, gee, he knows a lot. Yeah, but
behind each one, that's four hours plus four hours plus
four hours spread out over decades, writing at least one
book a year. I was actually very embarrassed writing the
last book because I felt awkward writing about myself. I'm
very happy to say, did you know, the trees talk
to each other via an underground network of mushrooms that
(23:41):
we call the wood wide Web, and they give each
other drugs and knowledge and information and food. And I
feel really awkward on the other hand, saying, here's a
book about me. You've written by me, possibly biased. Please
buy this book, give me some money, and there will
be an exam in three weeks. We're expecting to get
eighty five percent or more about how good I am.
(24:01):
Is embarrassed it is it true.
Speaker 1 (24:03):
That you that you weren't super keen on writing a memoir? Like,
is it true that you were kind of like count?
Speaker 2 (24:08):
Yeah, I didn't want to do it, but it kept
on coming back to the publisher saying, see this contract
where you signed, You said you do a memoir? Oh
that one, Yeah, okay, you're gonna do it. But I
managed to delay them for three years. But on the
way I managed to read a whole bunch of other autobiographies.
So there's one by a famous musician for a band
(24:29):
out of Seattle where he has these incredible adventures along
the lines of, hey, I had just consumed enough ice
to stop global warming, and then walked into this place
with six kilograms of heroin to try and sell it
to the people behind the counter when it turned out
that I walked into a police station. Then then he
goes on through the adventure and then we managed to
(24:49):
dump it on some poor barista. And so it's incredibly
enthralling to really but the moral value that he leaves
behind a chain of broken people in jail. And then
there's the other style of auto biography, which is a
chronological I got it up at seven fifteen, and then
at seven thirty I had a shower, and then accordiate,
I had a couple of coffee, and then the other
sort of how bad my life is. I had a
relationship with this person that turned out bad, but then
(25:11):
I had a relationship with another person that turned out
even worse. And then there's the name dropping. You know.
So Prince Charles and Taita and I were backstage when
we saw mix, so we said, hey, let's go over
and see Eric Clapton. You know that style. And there's
all these different styles of autobiography, and I've tried to
do one that had a moral value but also was uplifting.
And I really didn't think that I had that in
(25:32):
my past life. They said, well, I do this story
and I gradually pushed myself into it and then ended
up doing it.
Speaker 1 (25:37):
Well, I love it, and I feel like it comes
back to this storytelling value, like this gift that you
have around storytelling. I do love what you just said
about hard work, though, because I love it when people
come on this pod and kind of like pull down
the veil a little bit and they're like, well, no,
at the end of the day, I work really, really,
really hard as well. So is it what you said before?
(25:59):
Is it four hours in prep for each bit? Essentially
minimum four hours?
Speaker 2 (26:05):
And the other side of the coin is when a
famous female celebrity gets pregnant and then it appears online
in the media eight weeks later and they've still got
the same body they had before they were pregnant. They
say what how do you do that? And say, oh,
it was just nothing. I just had my secret loler
berry juice and it just melted away. And then you
read an interview by a trainer who said, we bloody
(26:29):
trained with her six hours every day from the day
she was pregnant, and the breastfeeding was taken over by nurse,
a wet nurse, and she did nothing but training for
six hours every day, and she goes on and says, oh,
I just took my secret juice you can buy, and
the fact just melted away. Yeah, sometimes you have to
do the hard work. You have to do the hard yards.
Speaker 1 (26:49):
No, I love that. And another thing that I learned
from you that I love. So these are my pod
notes for this is some of my pod notes.
Speaker 2 (26:56):
Today's inter the color code they got circles for different
levels of importance and other lines as well. You talk
my language, sistuff.
Speaker 1 (27:04):
And I have to handwrite notes. I cannot type notes.
And I saw you talk about the difference with studying
if you handwrite versus if you type them on a keyboard.
Do you remember that?
Speaker 2 (27:15):
Yeah? Yeah, And what happens is that besides just simply
with a keyboard you just simply move your fingers up
and down, but with handwriting, you go through moving your
hand in delicate shapes. And that is that has a
really long history of when you were very young learning
how to write. And for whatever reason that might be
(27:36):
related to the reason, or we don't know why, but
we do know for sure that you have greater both
retention and comprehension. You understand as well as you remember
better if you handwrite rather than you type, which is
kind of sad because it means you've got a handwrite.
But on the other hand, now they've got the good
AI that can turn your handwriting into text that you
(27:57):
can then access really easily. And they've got the good technology.
Speaker 1 (28:00):
Oh I love handwriting, though, I love it. I write
letters home. Oh love it. I think it's the best.
I'm probably showing my millennialness.
Speaker 2 (28:09):
Inner is something from the heart. And I do remember
that line by Oscar Wilde who said, our dear insertin
name of friend del Ola Berry. I'm sorry this is
such a long letter, Comma, because I didn't have time
to write a short one. And when you write a
(28:30):
short letter, it is succinct that it is exactly. It
tells exactly what you're feeling. It does it in a
short period of time, and then they can respond on
goes a relationship.
Speaker 1 (28:39):
No, I love it. I mean also Oscar Wilde. Best
of the best?
Speaker 2 (28:43):
Oh, yes, best of the best.
Speaker 1 (28:45):
Is it true you have an asteroid named after.
Speaker 2 (28:50):
You, oh, darling, Yes, well, I'd like to call it
a planet one eight four one two Krystal Nitsky looking
up in Wikipedia one eight four one two. And what
happened was McNaught, who was one of the great comet
discoverers of this century, discovered comet McNaught back in two
thousand and eight or something, and in Sydney the newspaper said, oh,
(29:14):
there's not much to see. And we went to a
part of Sydney called the Gap where you could look
back across Sydney and you could see the entire skyline
of Sydney from one end to the other, the Sydney city,
and the comet extended one quarter of the way across
the sky. And yet the newspapers had seen it a
(29:36):
few days earlier and said, oh, no, there's nothing to see.
And we said, hey, that's comment, and I said no,
but the newspaper said there was nothing there. I said,
you said, it made us amazing, and you could see
it for weeks after. And so he decided that he
liked the work that I was doing on the radio,
and he named one eight four one two asteroid that
he discovered after me. I have since discovered it's about
three to six kilometers in diameter. It's in that asteroid
(30:00):
belt between Mars and Jupiter, and I really hope that
it doesn't undergo gravitational disturbance when it passes by another
asteroid and ends up landing on the Earth and killing people.
That'd be terrible to have comic Crystal Minsky or asteroid
chromostility being blamed for the destruction of the Earth.
Speaker 1 (30:19):
I've got to say I saw my first meteor shower
recently because we went out to Joshua Tree. Yeah, we
went out to Joshua Tree.
Speaker 2 (30:26):
Joshua Tree no light and the world's oldest tree. Is
it really felve thousand years old or something, the bristle
Cone Pine or something. I had no idea about the
asteroid to the media shower.
Speaker 1 (30:40):
Well, so we were all we had it. We were
sitting out around a fire and we let the fire
go out, and we turned all the lights off in
the house and we just looked up at the sky
because you could literally see the Milky Way. It was
like so clear and the sky was so dark. And
someone goes, oh, my goodness, there's a shooting star and
I was like, damn it, I missed the blacier start.
I wanted to make a wish on it. Five minutes later,
(31:02):
I'm like, hang on, I hang on, there's a shooting
star and in the period of an hour we saw
thirty five shooting start five Yeah wow. And I did
some googling the next day and we just accidentally happened
to be there when there was like a meteor shower
that went on for I think two days. Has a
two night peak usually is that in November. There is
(31:23):
one in November that I'm going to try and take
my dad too. The one we saw was in July.
Speaker 2 (31:28):
Okay, so the one in November train so first he
was a guard of meteor showers. The best place to
see the sky is the Southern Hemisphere because the southern
part of the world is pointed at the Milky Way
and there's three continents there. Africa's too cloudy, South America's
to cloudy, Australia's just right. So Australia is the best
place in the world to see media from. I've spent
(31:48):
a total of a few decades test driving four will
drive through the Australia outback. I've been through fifteen and
seventeen deserts and every night we spent two years sleeping
under the stars. Every night it was the same unless
it was raining. And what we do is we'd have
an early dinner, lay out the ground, shoot and lie
back with a little drink with an umbrella or maybe
a hot coco or something. And then with a laser pointer.
(32:11):
In the first hour and a half we look for
satellites and the laser pointer is to point out where
they are. I was just a week laser point to
point out the sky, and my daughter was really good.
My daughter Lola was the expert actually, and so then
we we'd normally see ten an hour, and then in
the next hour and a half we looked for the meteors,
and then we see another ten and we go to
(32:32):
bed happy. You're seeing thirty five and an hour is
a good meteor shower. The record was in the United
States between two and four am in early November for
the Leonids l eom IDs, and in that window across
the central USA people saw, wait for it, in one hour,
(32:53):
one hundred thousand, one hundred thousand meteors in one hour
or forty or one hundred one hundred thousand, and the
whole sky was just going bing bing, bing, bing bing.
They come around every thirty something years. Thirty something years later,
in ninety nine, the best place turned out to be
one of the Canary Islands really the Spanish Islands off
(33:16):
the coast of Antarctica. So in two thousand and thirty two,
flip a coin and make sure you're out there, and
you might be lucky to see over a thousand mediors
per hour. Every thirty three years. They come back big.
Every they're back every year, but every thirty three it's
really big. I don't know, and we get close to
(33:36):
twenty thirty two. People will be on the outlook for them.
Speaker 1 (33:38):
Oh, it's so it feels so magical as well, Like
from a hippie perspective, I'm like, this has got to
be good luck to just be amongst that.
Speaker 2 (33:47):
Yeah, cosmic man.
Speaker 1 (33:49):
Ah, I could have spent all flipping Like I was like,
how do we spend more time in josh auawdrey La
is great, but it's a grind, you know, And I'm like,
this is incredible. So you, my friend, have done so
much and I don't see any signs of you stopping.
You are just prolific in everything you do and you're
(34:12):
very inspiring and very warm. What's what's the goal? Like,
what like what is your mo is it to like
make science like attainable and understandable for people? Is it
to in part like because you're so joyous as well?
You know, people feel good when they watch you or
listen to you.
Speaker 2 (34:31):
Well, even though I did smash up six taxis in
one life to take the cops one hundred and forty k's, yes,
I am sort of joyous. So I kind of drift
through life like a popsicle stick in the gutter of
any day, with no real control of it where I go.
So I've had various hippie careers. I helped set up
Australia's first cable TV network in nineteen seventy two, and
(34:55):
that happened by accident, and my next project happened by
accident as well well. And so my next project is
to remove to rescue people from the rabbit hole of
disinformation comma by using the example of only fans full stop.
Let me explain now, okay, So do you want to
(35:18):
explain only fans to the audience or while.
Speaker 1 (35:20):
I do that, actually, do you know what? You can
go for it? My friend?
Speaker 2 (35:24):
So, I've never actually gone on too only fans, but
I think I might have stumbled across it accdentally on
TikTok on the way through. But I think Only Fans
is softcore porn, possibly mainly for males, but not exclusively,
and for about ten dollars a month, and that's not
where they make their money. So they make their money
by coming on and so Fred types in, Hey, Lo Laberry,
(35:47):
I love your work, have you got anything extra for me?
And then amazingly, at two o'clock in the morning, he
gets a reply saying, well, I went for a swim
in the swimming pool and you wouldn't believe it. My
whole buccinia just slipped off and accidentally we had the
camera going. And you can buy this for two hundred dollars.
Now that's two lies in one. The first lie iss
not recent footage. It's shot three years ago or five
(36:09):
years ago. Secondly, it's not Lola. It's rather a person
from either Venezuela or Philippines, because they've got the good
English language and they're poor enough as a country that
they will be there at your two o'clock in the
morning at five dollars an hour. So the basic concept
(36:29):
is that Only Fans really makes us money from the
extra sales that they make when somebody's learning you two
o'clock in the morning by having somebody there ready to
answer them at all times. And so my concept is
that I'm going to try and develop an AI chatboc
chatbot that looks at the psychology of the person and
(36:49):
engages them if they want, with a specific topic of
climate change to bring them back from the dark side
from the rabbit hole. Using the example of amily fans
with there's somebody available all the time, but I can't
off people by paying them five dollars an hour. So
instead of I thought, we developed a chat box instead.
That's my next plan. It'll probably take him a couple
of years.
Speaker 1 (37:09):
That sounds amazing. You're phenomenal. You as well have as
you said, have had many careers, like filmmaker as well,
like yeah, like you said, taxi driver, filmmaker, roadie, like.
Speaker 2 (37:23):
Driver for four drives, yes, university academic, T shirt maker,
a TV weather man. I was a TV weing. I
lost the job because I insisted that meat had fat
in it. Yeah. Well, so I had this job as
a TV weather man. We're besides being a TV weather man.
(37:43):
Every time I did a TV spot in the morning
on the weather, I'd also throw in a ninety second
science story like oh, here's a weather from Geelong. And
by the way, here's a weather on Saturn. And so
so I do all these different science spots. And he's
the world's first computer built two and a half thousand
years ago and we don't know who built it from
brass rings the anti kidther object. So I was doing
(38:05):
about half an hour of science a week, and on
one occasion I decided to do a funny little, a
stupid little joke story because it's the nature of morning
TV on the New England Journal of Medicine, which is
one of the top medical journals in Australia in the world,
the New England Journal of Medicine Burger. And they said, okay,
let's get rid of the bad fat by getting the mincemeat,
(38:28):
boiling it to get rid of the bad fat, and
then skimming it off and then frying it up with
a good fat of olive oil and not too high
a temperature so that that way you get the delicious
fatty thing. But it's a good fat. And so we
did a story on this, and then after I did this,
and we've got a place to make a special New
England Journal of Medicine Burger and how to sign out
(38:48):
the front and it was just a little one and
a half minute story. And then within half an hour
of that story going to air and the show ending,
I was caught up to see the suits the executives
on the top floor and they said, did you know
the executives a Channel ten said on Good Morning Australia
that we have a three million dollar a year advertising
contract with the Australian Meat Board and you've just gone
(39:10):
on air and said that meat has fat in it
and they'll be happy to keep on giving us the
contract if you go on tomorrow and repudiate that by
saying that meat actually has no fat in it. And
that's how come I got fired from. I said, see
you later. I'm out of here. Man, I'm not going
to tell lies.
Speaker 1 (39:30):
Good on you. Oh my goodness.
Speaker 2 (39:36):
So I've failed in a lot of careers. I've failed
in my academic career testing the steel for the Westgate
Bridge in Melbourne, so I found out it was not
strong enough and doing academic and you can hear it
in a way, failure is a kind of a lesson.
But you don't have too many failures because it kind
of ubsess you at the time. But if you can
learn from it. That's probably good. And you don't want
to make the same mistake more than once. If you
(39:57):
don't make a mistake, you don't make anything, but try
to different mistakes at least each time.
Speaker 1 (40:02):
I like that. I have to ask, why is tyrosine
your favorite amino acid?
Speaker 2 (40:08):
Oh mate? Tyrosine is involved with so many good chemicals
in your body, melanin and melotonin. And the thing with
newborn babies is that they're born three months too early
and their brain is not mature enough to know that
it has to start making melatonin, and so they sleep
(40:29):
at night like normal people and stay awake in the
day like normal people. So that's why the first three
months with babies can be just hell on wheels because
they don't make their own melanin melotonin. And I just
love melonon because it protects your skin, and melon also
gives you the color of your hair the color of
your eyes, so it's not as though you've got a
(40:49):
blue dye in your skin in your eyes or a
green dye. It's all the same die, but in different concentrations.
And it also makes the sky blue. So tyrosine is
my favorite a menage because it makes such a wonderful
chemical moment a.
Speaker 1 (41:03):
Time I did not know that. I always thought of
tyro scene in the thyroid. That's where my brain goes. Ah,
my brain, the nutrition brain. You, my friend, are so
so wonderful and I could talk to you all flipping
day long. Your book is wonderful. To all the Aussie
listeners out there, it's officially out, which is really really exciting,
(41:25):
so they can go out and get their hands on
a copy. And you, my friend, I cannot wait to
cross paths with one day, whether it's in Australia, whether
you're touring in America. I don't know when it'll be,
but I'm really excited for you in this book. And
I'm glad that you took the plunge and wrote about
yourself because you are so friendly and never change the
(41:47):
way you write. Because it really felt like I was
listening to you, like I could hear you in my
head when I was reading the book. So ten out
of ten from me, thank you.
Speaker 2 (41:57):
Oh you're awfully. I really tried to avoid the boring
type of autobiography but also the sad one.
Speaker 1 (42:04):
It was perfect and it's a great cover. Love it.
Look at you. You wonderful speaking with.
Speaker 2 (42:10):
Me on the back cover with disarming me high pants
with the jumper tucked into the pants as well.
Speaker 1 (42:14):
I like a high pant. I don't think there's anything
wrong with a high pant, my friend. Thank you so much,
and to the listener, please go ahead and get the book.
It's such a wonderful read. You're wonderful. That's a wrap
on another episode of Fearlessly Failing. As always, thank you
(42:34):
to our guests, and let's continue the conversation on Instagram.
I'm at Yumo Lollerberry. This potty my word for podcast
is available on all streaming platforms. I'd love it if
you could subscribe, rate and comment and of course spread
the love.
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