Special · Josh Reid Jones & Stuart Cunningham: Vaccines, Protests, Earthquakes & the rest

"And in this moment, I swear, we are infinite." "Let's do this! Come on!" "Mountain!" "It's too damn hot for a penguin to be just walking around." "Three, two, one, eagle!" "Are these two doctors?" "I'm afraid so." "And here we go." G'day guys, welcome back to the VALOR podcast. This is also probably, possibly going to be the Virtus podcast, Loggy, yeah? Doubles. Yes, doubles. So, a bit of a bonus. I sort of just wrapped up season two of the VALOR podcast and I think this week's got the whole state of Victoria in a shambles, in a

disarray, that I just felt compelled, not that I'm a person of authority at all to discuss this, but I just needed a few level-headed people to sit down with and just chat it out in the hope that it will also help other people, especially people that are unsure or uncertain or a little bit persuaded or whatever, just to kind of sort all this mess out. Now, I'm not talking about COVID, Vax, I'm talking about the earthquake. Allegedly, alleged earthquake. Allegedly. Yeah, no, so I have Loggy Wallace, who's been on the Razor Bar Radio with me, he's been on the VALOR podcast with me.

Box owner in Mornington. Give us a quick little spiel about yourself, mate. Mate, that's all I need. I run a gym in Mornington. Like everyone, I've been perplexed with the last week and a half and subsequent 18 months, but here to do good things with good people, so really excited for the majority to get double back, so we can get back to drinking beers and lifting tin and doing the good stuff. Yeah, and that's why I wanted you on. I love your philosophy and stuff at your gym. A lot of what you do at the gym inspires me at my gym.

Mate, you're scraping the bottom of the barrel if I'm the voice of reason. No. Legit, I know you and I both have very common ideas and beliefs about what a gym should be and how it should be, and it's quite different to most gyms. And like you just said, doing good things with good people, I think that's really important. That's what this is all about. And Josh Reid Jones is fucking the best Instagram person. I love the logic. He pretty much says everything that I want to say, but just so much more eloquently. I think shit, I need to go back and relearn English.

It's hard, mate. You've got to catch up on a good 35 years of shit talking to tidy it all up. I've got a good head start. Yeah, but Josh, so of the Just Be Nice project, which we chatted about on Raise the Bar, if anyone wants to learn a lot more, listen to that. Again, you just explained it so well that I didn't even have questions. I just stared at you, just in awe of how cool this concept is. But yeah, give us a quick little spiel. Like the other two blokes here today, I also wear my own stuff on my clothing, so we're all in the boat with our brands plastered on our clothes.

Oh, there we go. I'm going to jump in. Oh, I love that. Yeah, that's great. Yeah, look, mate, I run the Just Be Nice project. Obviously, I had a gym for a long time. It was one of the COVID casualties as the gym. So I guess for me, my whole life has been about working to make sure people are housed, employed, have good mental health, and improve that sort of equality of opportunity for people. And it's probably as relevant now as it's ever been, but it's getting a lot more attention, that sort of concept, and what good supports look like.

So I certainly have made an effort to try and communicate some things, I suppose, from the perspective of someone who's been paying attention to this for decades as opposed to days. And I guess that's why we're here today, to have a bit of a yarn about it and see what we can cover. Yeah, absolutely. I think having a yarn is probably the best way to describe what this chat will be. We've kind of pinpointed some topics, but it's just going to be a lot of back and forth and sharing ideas and stuff like that. Like

we said, none of us are epidemiologists, we're not doctors, we're not nurses, but we're the kind of people that spend a lot of time listening, and I guess putting our trust and faith in the people that we probably should put our trust and faith in. And we want to discuss all of that. We'll go over some basic stuff like why we even need lockdown. And Melbourne's the longest lockdown in the world, apparently, and that obviously hurts. Can I just say on that, people have been saying that the whole time, and then I think officially yesterday or whatever was the time we actually became the longest.

I'm like, is anyone going to go back and delete every time, like undo all the time? I'm surely not the only person that's seen this post, oh the longest, the hardest, the longest. And then like officially yesterday or the day before was like, okay, officially now it's the longest. I was like, what's going on with that? So yeah, we'll go over some of that stuff and talk about that. We'll talk about the vaccine and why it's needed and rah, rah, rah. But I also want to acknowledge and discuss the hurt that everyone's feeling, like we've just had some chaos riding all week and I've never been so angry this week and we've all had some types of fury.

I think I used the word, language warning, I've used the word cunt online for I think the first time ever in text. And I instantly was like, oh shit, I hope I don't upset some of my members with my language. Yeah, I was pretty furious, so we'll discuss that, we'll get into it. But before we go any further, let's first, whoever wants to explain it probably best, we're in a big ass lockdown again, why do we need it? Why is it important? Let's clear it up. Yeah, I think one of the messages that I see

bandied around by people who are understandably frustrated, but there's a message from I guess what I would call agitators, I don't want to say they have a point, I feel like there are some people that are just out there agitating for the sake of agitating. You know, because it gets attention, they find the thing that's going to upset people that week and then they agitate on that point and then they move on to the next one. And one of the hallmarks of the agitators for me has been that they have been constantly saying that, and particularly in Victoria, there's this real animosity towards the Dan Andrews government from these agitators.

They want to point it at those people and so you see them saying, Dan has been moving the goalposts. As we talk about lockdowns, they talk about moving the goalposts. And I really struggle with that because since March 2020, the messaging has been we're vaccinating our way out and that we're locking down to prevent the spread from getting out of control and getting into an unvaccinated population, which is highly at risk of serious illness and death, which is preventable through the lockdowns and through a vaccination program. That's been the plan since the beginning. And people have said lockdowns don't work because we've had to do them a few times.

But that's like saying weightlifting doesn't work because you have to keep going back to maintain your strength and keep getting stronger. I haven't understood that. So we locked down to give the vaccination rollout a chance to get the vaccination of the population up to 80% plus. And that's to stop it whipping around and causing unnecessary death and serious illness and then overwhelming the healthcare system. The thing that really winds me up about the agitators rhetoric in that space is they are actually the ones who have moved the goalposts about what they're complaining about the whole time.

It's been this and then it's been this and then it's been this. And I just can't imagine how frustrating it must be to get up and say we're vaccinating our way out. That's the way out since before we had the vaccines. And then we've had a terrible vaccine rollout. It's taken forever and we didn't get them quick enough. And we didn't get them ordered in by the feds and distributed and whatever. But I think at this point in time it's pretty clear that it's to protect unvaccinated populations from illness and death. And it's incredibly effective at doing that.

Why don't a lot of people believe that? And they like to compare it to flu statistics and people have confirmation bias and all these sorts of things and like to pick things to choose to suit their narrative and that. You could come up with a million different ways but is it distrust in the government and politics? Which everyone has reason to distrust pollies because they're fucking grubs. But yeah, you could come up with a million reasons but why do people not believe this stuff? You could find 20,000 papers that tell you that this is the way to go.

But then there's one paper that says no, they're pulling the rug under your arm, the Pfizer ex-CEO blah blah blah. Why do people believe that one person? I think it's just a grass is greener on the other side scenario. And not great at stats so there's a precursor to that but I was looking at the US death rate and comparing the populations. I think if we followed there and the death rate was reflective in the per capita population size, we'd be at like 53,000 deaths or something along those lines. And I think we're maybe a little over 1,000 nationwide.

But can you just imagine the hate and the fear mongering that would be coming from the same people to the same people if that was the case? And we were open and be like, "Why didn't we shut down? Why didn't we do this? Why didn't we do this?" And I think you're damned if you do and damned if you don't. Where if we went the other way, you'd deal with a whole lot of unnecessary deaths. There'd be a lot of secondary and third order consequences because of the health care system being overwhelmed and because of the extra spread and the extra cases and all these kind of things.

So my view of it is just that these agitators, great way to put it, are going to be agitating regardless. 18 months ago, they were banging on about something else. I'm sure they were talking about keto or something else that doesn't really matter at the end of the day. Cross-field or something. Yeah, silly, silly. But at the end of the day, we need – and I guess it sucks, being in lockdown sucks. No one's pro-lockdown outside of doing what it needs to do. Introverts, by the way, introverts. Yeah, I've got some friends. Some of my introverted friends are like, "I just want to see people and I hate it."

Yeah, I've got one friend who's like, "I'm loving it. This is great." I'm really regretting not playing PS5 or whatever it is that people play now because I don't have that at all to just disappear into a game or anything like that. I'm still playing Mario Kart. But it sucks. So it's really easy to just sit here and go, "Well, this is rough." And people have got more time on their hands, more time to chew through my ship posting and all of the other crap that's out there and just to go down rabbit holes because of work and social life and all the other good things that people usually do.

They wouldn't have had the time and energy to go down. People are going down there now and losing themselves. And I think it's important and it's brilliant to have Josh on here because I think your PSAs are just exactly – it's like the antidote to chaos. It's exactly what we need right now. It's crazy that people say go down rabbit holes because I think one of the real symptoms to touch on what you were saying before, Stu, about how you can have this amazing body of verified data and then someone pulls out something that they think proves their point.

And I think so much of that is actually not going down the hole at all. It's just walking past holes and looking at the top of them, looking at a headline, and the number of times that I've seen – and I don't spend much time on Facebook. I don't have it on my phone and I just pop on every now and then because everything just automatically posts there anyway pretty much for me. But the number of times I've been on there and seen someone sharing articles that make the opposite point if you read the article to what they think it's making is unbelievable.

And these same people will scream at me for, "Oh, you've been brainwashed by mainstream media," or whatever. And I've got a couple of great examples that I remember. One was – the headline was, "Melbourne couple can't get back in – aren't allowed to see their baby in hospital." Melbourne couple aren't able to see their baby in hospital. And people were sharing it and they were like, "See, this joint's a prison, dictator down, blah, blah, blah." So I read the article and it was a couple that were from Melbourne that were living in Doha that were trying to get into Brisbane and it was the Palaszczuk government that wasn't letting them get to the hospital.

But it's such an inflammatory headline. There was another one where one of the World Health Organisation leadership team had said something about we don't think lockdowns are necessary all the time. So people were saying – even the World Health Organisation saying lockdowns don't work. What they're saying is to protect the incredibly below the poverty line – to protect people below the poverty line in countries where they're quite large and there's populations everywhere. Yeah, full countrywide lockdowns don't make sense, but localised lockdowns, all the social distancing, vaccination, wash your hands, we're absolutely about it. But to

protect the livelihood of the most vulnerable economically in these countries, you shouldn't lock the whole country down because a lot of these people are living day to day like subsistence living. And so the risk of them sort of falling well behind because of that is much higher. That's not the case here in Australia. And also we don't have countrywide lockdowns. We've had localised lockdowns. So people are posting this and saying, see, even the World Health Organisation's backing out. It's like they're not mate. They're making the point that what we're doing here is actually what we should be doing.

And that, again, we've got to vaccinate our way out, but we haven't had access to those vaccinations since the beginning. And I've got a drafted PSA because I understand these frustrations. Why trust the government? I understand mistrusting the government. I mean, the federal government has moved the goalposts quite literally a number of times. And there's plenty of people, you know, we're going to be fully vaccinated by October, miss the mark, we're going to have all these things with the front of the line, we weren't the front of the line, all these kinds of things just in relation to the vaccine rollout.

But what reason do Australians have to distrust our health care system? Like if you were born here, this is the system that got you out safely, that made sure you're OK, that got us through primary school, where we've always known we can call an ambulance and end up in hospital and get looked after for our broken bones, for our flus, for our, you know, whatever it is, our bashed heads, our tetanus shots, when we cut something off with a saw at work. And that's been enduring for all of our entire lives, an incredibly effective, wonderful system.

Don't trust the police, sure, I understand that. But why wouldn't you trust a health care system that has shown up for you your whole life and made sure that you and everyone here has basically got, you know, world class access to health care. And if we look at other health care systems across the world, the NHS, another very trusted and experienced organisation, they're telling us to get the vaccine as well. So I don't know, I understand the mistrust of politicians, but I don't understand why you, and even pharmaceutical companies, but I don't understand why you would dismiss the advice of a health service that's done nothing but everything it can do to earn your trust your entire life.

So that's where I'm kind of at the moment, like, acknowledge the anxieties of these people and go, but these guys are telling you what we should do and I don't see why we shouldn't listen to them. Yeah, absolutely. I think that's sort of what my message to people that are either on the fence or whatever has really started to become as my primary thing to sort of help people realise is, like, I'm not doing this for me, I'm pretty healthy, if I get COVID, likely I'll be okay. Likely the people I know closest to me will probably be okay too.

But I've got members who are nurses that work in ICU, that work at Monash Clayton, that work at the, you know, paramedics and that. And they're so nervous about what's to come next, because they know that even if we get, when we get to the percentage we need to get to, and then we sort of start opening the gates a bit, it's still going to get full, like, pretty hardcore, pretty hectic for them. And I'm like, if I can ease the stress off them and make their day a bit better by just getting some jabs,

then I'm happy, because I don't want those people who give more of themselves than probably almost any other person in this country for not really that great pay. They're phenomenal and if I can help them, then I'm happy. Absolutely. There's the selfless part of that conversation, like, sure, the vaccine helps you, but it helps them. It helps the, you know, like, we've got a couple of immunocompromised members that I, they're almost the, they almost make the conversation really easy for us to open with fully vaxed, because it's like, well, I've got to keep these guys safe and, you know, from them, our community.

It just fascinates me that, yeah, but it's my choice. The whole personal liberty conversation I find fascinating, because we, sure, we have personal liberties, but the flip side of liberty and what goes, what is married with liberty is responsibility. We need to make sure that with this liberty, we get responsibilities. The same why we don't drink and drive or have a car. And by the way, the last 18 months, it's been brilliant for analogies. It's been brilliant at just linking things up. If you like analogies, you've done one in the last 18 months. But, you know, your apartheid PSA the other day, it's brilliant.

Just links, people don't draw those links. The people who are agitating and who are posting, you know, the headlines aren't currently capable or able or don't have any desire to draw the links between the other rules and frameworks that we have within our lives to keep the society safe. Like, effectively, it's an agreement between everyone that we don't drive on the wrong side of the road or that we don't, you know. Or you get your white card when you work on a job site. Yeah, this is exactly it. It's like, you know, if I want to be a physiotherapist, I go to uni and I get a degree.

Like, these are the really clear steps and outlines that are part of our society that allow us to live safely and, you know, live effectively and live together harmoniously. And when someone breaks one of these rules, then there's consequences to that. But there's a lack of desire, I feel, for a chunk of our population to want to even have that conversation now. Food and vaccine, lockdown, masks. Can someone give me a nice convincing argument as to why this is not a human rights issue? It's more of a public health and safety issue. But can someone make that in a really clear and easy way to understand?

I think that there is a reasonable amount of rolling anxiety, as in the reasons can change. You know, the things that frustrate you can change. So a thing kicks off, we don't really know what's going on, we don't have a vaccine. So pump heaps of money, get everyone working on it. Essentially just throw everything on the planet at, like, righto, this is a big deal, let's sort this out. We've got some, we've got research over here, we've been doing, we've got work we've been doing, but let's just pump it in and get it done. So at the beginning, you've got this anxiety that's like, I don't know, like, has anyone got this before?

And I actually can understand how, if you're the first person to get it, you could be a bit like, all right, like, let's go, you know, like, I trust you, but okay, I'm the first one. Like, I think everyone can kind of sympathise a bit with that and go, all right, that's fair enough. And there's going to be people who, I mean, I've done way more reckless things in my life than worry about something that's been through the hands of all of these experts. So I mean, for me, I feel like it's disingenuous for me

to be too worried, even if I was the first one, but I do understand there's an anxiety about something that's new to combat something that's new. So we've got this anxiety at the beginning. Then we have this secondary kind of strange anxiety where the government saying we're vaccinating our way out and we have like, however long where people like us, because we're all too young, we're like, okay. And they're like, we can't give it to you. And you're like, well, that's so annoying, you know, like it's so that is so stupid. You're telling me here's the thing you need to do to get out and you can't do that thing.

So then you're getting annoyed at that and that frustration builds and it gives it gives the agitators time to wind people up and be like, see, it's, you know, whatever, just to make people upset. But now we're at this point where there's been like six billion jabs administered. So the evidence now, the data, not the like handful of unverified anecdotes, the data is clear that the risk to reward ratio is a thousand percent on the side of be vaccinated. We've got the A/B testing we are lucky, lucky sort of touched on before in the states where there's highly vaccinated populations with cases, of course, because COVID cases and hardly any deaths and no one had any people in hospital.

And then the unvaccinated populations where people are dying, children are dying, you know, adults dying, people dying all over the place. And you can see that immediately, like it's safe, it's safe to be in a community that's highly vaccinated. And so when it comes to this public health discussion and this sort of I want to do what I want to do, we know enough about how dangerous COVID is. And I can't walk around and punch someone in the head. I can't get annoyed at Stuart, punch him in the head. If he dies, I get in a lot of trouble.

We call it a coward punch. It's horrible. We get in heaps of trouble. But if I breathed on Stu and killed him because I knowingly didn't take the thing that we know is a risk, then what's the response to that? Stu's family just have to lump it. They have to be like, I guess someone breathed on him that didn't want to, you know, do the thing and that made it worse. And so you end up with this situation where what is your responsibility to that, which I couldn't punch everyone on a tram, but I could infect the whole tram if I coughed or whatever.

I can't do that. But if there's no way to deal with it, again, you've kind of got a reason to just be like, well, we don't have a responsibility to do anything because there's nothing that can be done. But you do have a responsibility. And if you knowingly or willfully ignore that responsibility, then at some level there's going to be some accountability for that. And I don't know at this point why you would be that hesitant now. Unless you're just carrying your anxiety for 18 months over, which again, it's not the same situation. Yeah. On that, a lot of people ask this if they're healthy.

If I'm healthy, what's the point? How is that going to help others? And that's a question that rocks up a lot. And I know you've sort of answered it just then, but let's go over it. The Lockie posted a really good The Family Guy quick little version. That was fantastic. Have you seen that, Josh? No, I haven't, no. Family Guy did a quick little download of what's COVID and what the Vax does and why it's safe. And it just explains it so good. If only Family Guy was a more like, you know, good source that people will accept.

And peer review, it would be great. But it was really good. So yeah, like to answer that question clearly, like, how is, how am I helping someone else by getting it when I'm really healthy? I posted one or something the other day and I think there were like four reasons on it and I'll probably butcher it. But the way I want, like breakthrough infections happen, right? You can get vaccinated and then get sick. But your massively decreased likelihood that you're actually going to get COVID. So there's first one tick, big win, less likely you're going to get it, less likely you're going to pass it on.

And if you do get it, the likelihood of you being hospitalised with severe illness is increased as well. So that eases the pressure off the hospital. So less likely you're going to put pressure on the hospital system, less likely that you're going to need to go to hospital. You know, you can just quarantine at home and look after yourself and likelihood you won't have to go to hospital. It gets cleared out of your system quicker. It gets cleared out of your system quicker. So, you know, whereas you might be symptomatic or asymptomatic and have the capacity to pass it on for, I don't know how long the life it is, two or three weeks.

It gets passed out of your system quicker and you have less viral load initially when you do get it, which limits how much you can pass it on. So at the end of the day, it's still possible to get it when you're vaccinated. But if you don't get it sick and you're not going to spread it as much and, you know, everyone wins from it. It just blows my mind that it's still an argument and people go, oh, well, that's not... I don't like arguing or having conversations on social media with people who are vehemently against any conversation with it.

But someone posted something the other day and it was just along the lines of like, if I can still get it, what's the point of me getting the vaccine when there's risks of getting the vaccine? And I sent this article that I'd found that had all of the citations from Canada and the US and all of the most recent data. And her response was something along the lines of any facts can be twisted to pseudo narrative. Well, good chat. We're obviously not going to we're not going to be agreeing on the same thing here. And I think it was a Neil deGrasse Tyson line.

So I asked these people what evidence they're willing to see for them to accept that that might be truth. And if they say there isn't any, well, then there's no point talking to them. And I guess we're having this conversation today to talk to the people that, OK, well, I want to hear the evidence. I want to see the evidence. I'm willing to adjust my belief or my current current thoughts and feelings around something if I'm presented with great information. Yeah, I think the I'm healthy argument is such a redundant one. I've seen so many like and unfortunately, like fitness people like, oh, I can't believe how scared you are wearing a mask.

Pal, you're scared of you're scared of putting a mask on. What are you talking about? Like I trust my immune system, but I can't I can't breathe my own air. And like the number of people that I know I've seen at the snow wearing masks like shut up. What are you talking about? I don't understand. Like you would wear a mask. You just want to walk around like, oh, I don't care. And I imagine some of them at least are making up reasons to try and get an exemption if they've even bothered to get one. But I heard this great analogy about vaccinated, unvaccinated people.

It was just like vaccinated people are like big wet logs and unvaccinated people like kindling. So when it rips through yet big wet logs can catch fire. But if they're surrounded by big wet logs, it's really hard. Usually the fire peters out. They're surrounded by kindling. It makes it worse and it whips through kindling easily. So if you are big and strong and healthy and you are in great nick and you think you've got a better chance of like battling COVID than then processing a vaccine. Like, I don't know what to tell you, but you've got your you're like, that's backwards.

You know, like if you're if you're big and strong, you also be able to deal with the vaccine. It'll be it'll go through. Tell your body what this looks like at a boy. Good job. Good work. Yeah. Just if you're so big and strong, just take it. That's the immune system. Like, I trust my immune system. Well, I trust my immune system to pay attention to what's in the vaccine and to go, oh, sweet. Now we know what to do. Give the vaccine a heads up, you know, give your immune system a heads up. Great. No worries.

Like, cool. Do you think that's just like a bit of lack of understanding from people that they don't understand exactly how the immune system works and how the even though that we've been told a million times over how these viruses were made and how they work and that people are there. People either maybe refuse to listen or refuse to understand that that's the point of the of a vaccine. Go watch Family Guy and we'll have it sorted and we can all carry on in our lives. I also think like why are people so obsessed with understanding it?

We are, quote unquote, understanding everything. Just because you don't understand it doesn't mean it's not somehow they fire people into the into space. I don't really understand all of that. I know it happens, you know, like we pay people to understand things we don't understand. We you know, what a blessing that people put their lives into this. Like the scientists that have developed all of these measures and work on these problems didn't just see COVID and then go, guess I better jump on Google and work out how to deal with this. They're like, man, I've been doing this for 30 years.

OK, this is a variation and a thing. And we've got to do this. I have a confession to make. I have absolutely no idea how an internal combustion engine works. And I am about to jump in my car to go get lunch after this. And who knows what could happen. But if something goes wrong, I'm probably going to go to a mechanic to fix it. Unfortunately, that's not the that's not the thought process for all of this stuff. I'm tired. I'm totally comfortable with not understanding everything about everything. I'm also comfortable to lean on expertise. And I think if you expect anyone to listen to your expertise about anything ever, then you should extend that respect to other experts.

And consensus and data are so much different to anecdote. The other thing, again, touching on what Shoui said, I've asked a number of people this and they've said, no, they don't agree. And I go, OK, then that means we can't really have a chat about it. But do you think it's easier to get 50,000 highly qualified people to agree on something? Or do you think it's easier to have to get one person looking for a bit of attention to go off the reservation and go, oh, I don't think that. I mean, sort of logic tells

you like it's a lot easier to get one person, but they'll parade around the same one or two people, misquote them, misrepresent what they're saying. And half the time, if you again, if you just read the article, you're like, this person isn't even what you think this person is, you know, like, I don't know why you're listening to them. But, you know, that's something that if people's expertise, literacy is suffering, that we probably need to really focus on improving that as much as anything else, just in general. Because when people don't trust experts in the fitness industry, people can, you know, scam people out of money.

In the supplements industry, people can scam people out of money. You know, snake oil salesman can scam people out of money. I don't know, whatever business empowerment, whatever thing, you know, they can scam people out of money like because they just say, you know, you know, you get it. I'm here. I get it. And it's and it's it's a dangerous path to go down. That's the thing, people aren't just turning their nose up at experts, they're turning their nose up at expert consensus. Like it's not, you know, it's like the 97% of scientists believe wholeheartedly in climate change, but they'll just they'll go, Oh, yeah, but these three know something that the other 97% don't.

Like, like, I'm very lucky that I've got a lot of health professionals and doctors that are caught like I'm close with and one of my best mates is a doc up in Royal Melbourne and, you know, pre AstraZeneca being available to us. I called him and I was like, in 10 words, tell me whether if you or me whether you get it or not. And he just he said, low risk, but not no risk. But yes, I get it. And for me, not like he's been one of his mates for years. It's a really easy follow up for me to have that one expert's opinion and then go and go and get it.

And obviously, not everyone has that relationship with someone who's in that field. But all of the consensus follows that same thought process is that this is safe. This is yes. Do people die for vaccines? Yes. But the the numbers are so, so far skewed the other direction that it's for me, it's a no brainer. And unfortunately, everyone else doesn't. A lot of other people. Most people do. I mean, most people most people getting, you know, that's and that's 50% double today. So that's a win. That's also it's I feel like that's also a letdown in that if it had happened quickly, then the people who were just hesitant didn't have to and you know, didn't feel attacked.

Because now people that have been hesitant from the beginning, but we haven't had we've only had access for a short period of time, but they've they haven't had a chance to say they're 15 closest mates get it and be fine and just chill out if it had all happened quite quickly and maybe even prevent this lockdown and all this kind of stuff that I don't think it would. The emotions would have run as high and then people wouldn't have dug their heels in as much and then people, you know, the agitators wouldn't have had as much to, you know, one one people up about.

And so there's also a bit of a failing in the speed of delivery. And you see that in the way that people talk to Dan Andrews. He was hearing the same stuff. Yeah, exactly. Like, so gets up at a press conference and he says the same thing every day and they get mad about it. So the plan doesn't change just because we're bored. That consistency that consistency is like, hats off to him because it's hard enough just to rock up and train train every day. You can tell why the liberals on the other side in Victoria aren't really saying that much because they don't want his job right now.

No way. No one wants that job. And I would challenge anyone that's ragging on him, like, take his job. I dare you. I dare you. Just pretend to have his job. You'll be tired after a week. The bloke's going to need ongoing counselling for decades after this. The idea that things would be drastically different if it was a liberal government is just bonkers to me. I guess, you know. I mean, it'd be worse. We can see what happened in New South Wales. It would be worse. Look at this. Exactly. This is exactly it. But, you know, for 12 months before we had that really clear example of why it would be worse, everyone everyone was pushing that, pushing that narrative.

But now that, you know, New South Wales not going great at the moment. And yes, we've been in lockdown a lot longer. But I feel as though, and I'm by no means an avid Dan Andrews supporter, but they haven't done a horrendous job. And a lot of people are going to be like, you're an idiot for saying that. But at the end of the day, it's an impossible situation. I feel as though they've made some horrible blunders along the way. But like you said before about goalposts, maybe the goalposts haven't haven't moved. We've just done better when we know better each kind of step along the way.

Yeah, better systems have come in over time. But yeah, no one's done this perfectly at all. Everyone's situation is different. Everyone, even like everyone's hospital system is different. Clearly, the biggest issue that might be something to discuss in Australia is the fact that we lack hospitals and ICU beds. And that's something that's not really getting spoken about. So when something of a magnitude of this big happens, we can't handle it and we can't look after it. And that's a whole other discussion that we probably don't need to get into. But this is, so you know, this is another thing that drives me nuts.

The Chief Health Officer's job is to is to comment on the system of health that we've got. And they do, they have. All the PTs going, why are they talking about health and diet? It's in their reports. It's in their reports. Every two years they say there's a lot of drinking, there's a lot of this. There's wild health inequalities for poor people. We need more resources. We need this. We need this. This isn't new to these people. And if you're involved in this system, if you work there like the ANMF, the nurses union, the doctors,

the hospitals, they'll be like, yeah, we have been reporting and asking and doing these things, but you know, it requires it requires citizens to put their hands in their pockets for each other. So another thing that you've got to make a sacrifice to do this thing, you've got to you've got to advocate for things that don't affect you directly. You've got to be politically engaged and literate enough to go. Don't vote in people who want to cut funding to hospitals and cut funding to schools and do those sorts of things, which means you've got to pay attention for a while.

Then you've got to pay attention to what they actually do. And it's just so much easier to stand back and go, oh, this is these guys are stupid. Where were these guys on this messaging? It's been around for ages. You just haven't seen it because you haven't paid attention because it hasn't affected you directly for however long. But there are literally people who do this every day for decades working on these things. Do you think we need like a rehash of that? Is it John F. Kennedy who said, ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country?

Is that kind of does that message need to be like, re re re given or, or I feel like people like to throw that one around, but not repurpose that quote for the vaccine rollout. Like it's a really clear, what can I do right now? Like, you know, three of us have probably more action driven than just talking rubbish. And the thing you can do right now is go out and get vaccinated. We're very quick to put our hand out and ask and say, I pay my taxes, rah, rah, rah. But the reality is we are in one of the most economically strong, gifted, phenomenally entitled countries in this entire world.

We are so lucky, us three. Imagine being three white Australian men. Like this is like, it doesn't get any more lucky than us three. And many of the people that write it to, you know, we, we won the jackpot by being born as white Australian men. And I don't think it's a big ask to just to go, Hey, how can I give back to this country? How can I give back to my community? How can you give back to my state? How can I give back to the people that are not as lucky as me to be, you know, white Australian men?

How can I give back to women, to the disabled, to the indigenous, to immunity, immune? I can't even say it. The people that can you know, compromised? Yeah. How can I give back to all of them? Because I'm so lucky. If you are so strong, and you are so healthy, and it isn't a worry, and you have such broad shoulders, use them to carry more people. Don't use them as an excuse to abrogate your responsibility to everybody else. Like it's a gift. Not everyone has it. Not everyone had the opportunity to develop that for whatever reason.

And, you know, if you have any respect for other people, and consider that you would step up and do those things, I think it's very difficult to make a case to not do something that's that's been done 6 billion times like, if there was a flood, these people walking around saying that they care about Australia, would you wade through the water knowing that there's poo in there and all these things to try and, you know, get someone's cat or get some and try and get on the news? Of course you would. And you have huge risk getting hepatitis or something.

Oh, it doesn't matter. You know, you got to roll up your pants and get in and do it. Cool, mate. Like, there's like, it's super high risk, you know, that happens all the time. So if you if you want to do one of those, like, big hero moment things, if you think you'd step up and do that, you know, well, this is the simplest, like, easiest thing to do. And yeah, I think we should give lollipops they should give lollipops a vaccination hugs or like gold stars or something. I remember getting that I think the

first time I had my tetanus shot in prep, I still remember lining up into the school office as we all lined up and got jabbed and medicine and lollied it was no one complained then. I think I watched the Australian Dream finally the other week. And someone had sort of it was obviously a comment on white Australia and, and the indigenous and that but what they said was that it's very often in Australia that us privileged white people we we want to the best for everyone. We want equality, we want to do all these things. But we don't want to have to sacrifice what we have in order to do it.

Yep. Yeah, I think we've got a pretty tenuous relationship with particularly with indigenous Australians and, and again that comes to a little bit of that truth telling the ability to look yourself in the eye and say where have we dropped the ball and if you are, if you're unable to conceive of the advantages that you've been given because of the environment we're in, and you want to take all the responsibility for all the good things in your life yourself. It's very easy to tell other people I just need to do better themselves. But if you

pay attention to all the opportunities that you've been afforded something that I'm constantly tell people and it's a really important thing in my work because it's quite complicated to takes a long time to understand all the things and all the various ways that people are negatively impacted by inequalities and things. Because I just say, align your aspirations for the things that you want for the people you care the most about with everyone else that's just whatever you want for your daughter, whatever you want for your mom, just want it for everyone else. And don't try

and farm off extra for you the people you care about most and leave less over here just because we're supposed to care more and don't shy away from the fact that it could be involved some difficult conversations and a bit of hard work. But if you align your aspiration you say what would you want for my daughter well I'd want her to be safe I wouldn't want someone to make her sick I'd hate for her to end up in ICU I'd hate for her to die of course from something that was preventable. And I want

that for everybody else so if I can contribute in some way to do that, then great, you know, and it's nice to be able to do things and think if there is a small risk or even a large risk, but I can help someone over here, I'd probably give it a crack. And, and have a chance to prove that to yourself without needing to walk past the burning building. Because you know touch wood we don't want to send people into those to try and pull people and dogs out but that's super high risk and I

think lots of people that are about personal responsibility and, you know, that sort of stuff would still go, I think I'd run in or give it a crack. Yes. So where's the gap, like where's the gap between something that's really simple and really easy to do, like getting a vaccine. And obviously, those same people who aren't willing to do that are very likely to do that like I'm sure if you got. I would like to think the vast majority of Australians, if there was someone in front of them needed help they just they'd go and do it because that's what we do.

That's it is, you know, that's a simple really simple thing you can do to help people, but why is there a gap between that, is it because there's so much to like information and understanding to digest or is it just because, you know, why do you think that is? Is it because it takes a little bit of that, I did this away if you're told to do it, I don't know like if you're told to do it, you can't say I did this like. You got the pad on the back, you want that, you want

to post it on social media, yeah you want that little ego stroker, that acknowledgement for doing the good thing, which so much better to do a good thing and we challenge our members to this sometimes to go do a good thing but not tell anybody. Don't tell anyone. Exactly. We did it last year, it was the best, I was like this is good deed day, you can do anything you want, you can just drop someone some food at the door, you can go pay for someone's petrol, you can do something, but you're not allowed to tell a soul.

And people find it hard, really hard, and then after we just digest it later and go fuck that was really awesome that we did that and then if you can keep doing that often over and over and do things without telling anyone, it makes you more humble, it gets rid of that need for people to acknowledge that you've done good things and it's just about being there for people, being there for someone else and then that person can feel good and then that person might go and do something for someone else. There is maybe a

concern I see from people saying this is an overreach and that the Government is trying to take away your freedoms generally speaking but I don't think there's any merit in that argument basically because there's precedent in pandemics, it's not normal, these are public health responses, they're not taking away your freedoms in this instance. Having said that, it's not to say that the Government doesn't actively try and strip things away from you, I know that again, there's also just a division of responsibility, power and opportunity between the state and federal governments and all the vitriol is pointed at the state government here in the media and from these people.

A government that doesn't hold the majority of the levers that you should be concerned about most of the time, that was handed this responsibility as part of a national plan, that is following a national plan but the federal government has done all kinds of things around communications and sort of being able to look into your messages and surveillance and counter-terrorism kind of legislation that absolutely I think is if not a direct overreach, it is bordering on overreach and something that we should be concerned about but this isn't the stuff that people are talking about, it's

got nothing to do with the public health crisis that we're in the middle of now and trying to avoid and again that political literacy and being able to have those conversations and say I get it, there's plenty to distrust, these are probably more of a concern, we've been given a number, we've been given a pathway, we've been given something to do, it's simple, six billion times this has been administered, people are okay. They're confusing in the messaging from the agitators, they're mixing things together just to try and find the thing that makes you upset. So

there is this messaging that it's an overreach but I don't think it is and at the end of the day you do have a choice which you're welcome to choose, that choice does have some consequences and will keep you out of some places but it's a choice, it's freely available, you can do it. And if you think vaccine passports are bad, wait till you hear about how you can't get a passport for any reason except for where you just happened to be born, like a literal passport, you can't even do anything about it, try and get a passport in the US.

Like that you couldn't have less to do with your actual passport, like it's completely out of your control, it's completely out of your hands and that passport will keep you out of countries and it will keep you out of places, you can't go wherever you want and do whatever you want. And as is the case for people from Afghanistan, they can't just come here and settle even though we should be settling them, we should be bringing over people, it's a nightmare and that's got nothing to do with anything they have a choice about, it's just because they were born in a particular place, just like our actual passports are about how we were born in a particular place.

Maybe because passports came in after World War I right, maybe that's an overreach, maybe we're 50 years late on that conversation. Yeah, again people have that conversation but some people do think it's an overreach, some people do think open borders is a good policy, you know, but they're discussions that have nuance and take time to get through and they don't lend themselves well to tweets and they don't lend themselves well to you, they're contextual and you have to pull on certain things and go okay that's an issue and I get that and this is why that's more or less bad than you think it is and the internet doesn't facilitate those kinds of conversations very well.

But it does really facilitate agitating really well. Let's quickly acknowledge that, I think the reason these people are agitators, we're calling them agitators but the thing that we all share in common is the fact that we're all hurting, would you agree? Yeah, and we're all just expressing it differently and the reason we probably do that could be because of our background, because of how we're brought up, how we're educated, the industries we work in, I don't know if anyone's sat around in a tea room that you're not allowed to sit in at the moment but there's some wild conversations going on in there.

But like, I don't know, just yarn with me, why do people blame others when some don't, why do people deflect responsibility, I know you guys are pretty avid readers of stoicism, I wish I could just throw meditations to everybody and just go read this. I've barely understood it, I've got to read it a few more times over but that's where my learning has come from to be able to go, okay, assess the situation, respond, don't react, rah rah rah, the shit that we all spiel off over and over, not everyone has the same learnings or

the same environments and backgrounds and it's not that easy to give everyone that same access to everything or people don't want to learn that sort of different stuff or know those different things. So how do we deal with people that are hurting and reacting in ways that we wish they didn't? To the point of the conversation, let's try and explain the human condition in 10 minutes. I really like the analogy, we're not all in this together, we're all in a storm, we're all in different boats, we're all trying to survive in different ways. It's such a hard one because I'm a big believer and this might be my eternal optimism shining through that when people know better, they do better.

I also believe that we have a responsibility to find ways to know better and to explore and to try and understand and to try and critically think and all these kind of things. And I don't know a better way for it, but obviously the social media is built around outrage and built around agitation and built around finding groups of people that believe what you believe already and just doubling down on that. So if Mark Zuckerberg is listening, just change your algorithms, let's just promote kindness and compassion and goodness and shift the online conversation away from what we don't have and what we can't do to how do we make the best with what we've got.

I think you make a good point there. People are looking for community in whatever form that it comes and that people get a sense of belonging and purpose from having that. But if you are an anxious person, if you are someone who is riddled with anxiety about the current circumstance, I ask those people to consider how constantly sharing chaotic sky is falling rhetoric helps other people who are also similarly vulnerable. And if Stu came to me and said, mate, I am in pieces about my work and we're just hanging in there and I don't know what's going on.

I said, yeah, mate, it's a nightmare. Everything's going to fall to pieces. You know, the world's falling apart like it's negligent. It's negligent to have those kinds of conversations. And so if I'm just putting that out all the time and only sharing those things all the time, people see that. And it's and it's you have that same I think you have that same responsibility to the brilliant way that I've heard it. And I've shared this plenty of times to share your calm and not your chaos if you do care about the anxieties, the very real anxieties that people have.

They're not improved by like a high temperature, chaotic discussion or screaming and yelling or throwing a tantrum. And so if that's what you're doing, I think people are co-opting the actual anxieties of people. There's always people just looking for a reason to spoiling for a fight and be disruptive for no real reason. Just they're angry and they want to have a go at something. And for some reason, they feel like it's a good idea to go and antagonize cops and desecrate the shrine and rip off windows on cars. And we got we got there for some for some reason, stand on the West Gate Bridge and sing horses.

I don't even understand how that became part of the thing. But legend has it, they're still going. They just they just hear the bowing heads and they're just wrapping themselves around until they get south. If I was Braithwaite, I'd be so upset. He's part of the vaccination campaign. Like Darryl Braithwaite is literally part of the vaccination campaign. So it's funny how like how these things have been like that, you know, he's a part of the vaccination campaign. And then they've gone down to the shrine where it's like, which is a place of people who sacrifice, may the ultimate sacrifice for the benefit of the whole.

And these guys are doing the opposite. It's like it's a it's a it's a wild time. On the shrine conversation, because we can bang on about how frustrating that is for traders. I love the question. Is this useful? Like it's kind of been a mantra for me for the last 18 months is if I start thinking about something or watching something or reading something or talking about something, I try and keep coming back to that. Is this useful? Is this helping me or others in some way, shape or form? And if it's not, let's just move on.

And I think, you know, this conversation, it's it's very much a self-awareness piece. It's how do we know ourself and how do we understand what our triggers are, what our what helps us promote good, good things and promote our calm versus what are the what are the loops, behavior loops we can get stuck in that promote chaos? And if we understand ourselves better, then it allows us to then bring that calm, bring that goodness to the rest of the world. You mentioned meditations. I had it sitting in front of me and while you were chatting before, I was just flicking through it.

The page I'm up to at the moment is for anyone who wants to know, book nine, number one, nature design rational beings for each other's sake to help not harm one another as they deserve. And I think that's just perfect. Like our job should be to help the people around us. If what we're doing, what we're saying, what we're sharing isn't helpful and isn't useful, then we shouldn't do it. It's not diminishing the fact that you can be mad still. No, you can still be mad and frustrated and get angry. But if I sit here and say, guys, yesterday, let me tell you, I was screaming and yelling in my apartment.

I was calling people names like to no one in particular. I was voicing my frustrations. And I and I say that I still got the chance to rant and rave. I still got it off my chest. I got a chance to observe what was annoying me and driving me nuts. And then I got to relay a story to you guys that was yesterday, I nearly lost my mind. You can still go, this is the fifth time this week you've told me you just raged for 20 minutes into your pillow or on the phone or whatever.

That's so much more productive, so much better, so much less anxiety inducing for everyone else because they go, oh, God, I felt the same way than me getting on the Internet, making a video of me screaming and yelling for 40 minutes, jumping in the comments section and screaming and yelling for 40 minutes, saying everything's, you know, I can I could just relay that I felt that way and I got off my chest before and I'm still kind of working out how to process it. And we and we can still go through all the necessary supports to make sure I get OK.

But I haven't raised the temperature of the conversation on the Internet and wound everybody up like it doesn't. You can it's not saying you can't be frustrated, annoyed, concerned, scared, worried, whatever. It's just saying this. There's much better ways to engage the world in that process and acknowledge it. Do it. Absolutely. I hope everyone has a couple of close friends or family members that allow them to rant to them offline and then be honest about your experience. Guys, I nearly lost my mind last week. I was so annoyed. But that's so much different to actually losing my mind and that being the thing that I'm spreading in the world.

And I think we need to be so much more cognizant of are we doing are we having our tantrums in front of people? Or are we taking a moment to have a tantrum and then go, all right, there's some stuff that's come up there. We don't need to. I need to ask some questions. I need to talk to some people about it. Absolutely. We teach our kids not to throw tantrums yet. Who would be in the lead at the moment growing up? And we teach our kids to if you've got nothing nice to say, don't say anything at all.

So just be nice. Be nice and all those things. So, no, absolutely brilliant message. One of the last things we've got to wrap it up soon. We've all got friends or loved ones or whoever that they're unsure or they've really gone into the conspiracy world or whatever. Look, I know this lovely couple, I absolutely adore them. They're such kind people, but they've gone in a direction where they, you know, severely convinced that the government is lying and there's a lot of untruths going on and things like that. And she shared me, you know, information and videos and articles and stuff.

And she's done it more genuinely to help me because she's concerned for me who's going to go get the vaccine because she's convinced that it's dangerous. I've not really responded too much about it because I don't want to get into an argument because I absolutely love it. How do we talk with one another without just saying just be nice? Because it's very easy to get into an argument with someone that you love who, you know, in my opinion, just doesn't understand, isn't educated about the situation yet and they're still firing up, but they think that they're right.

So how do I not have an argument with someone and just try my best to help them understand that they're going to be OK and that this is important? My advice is always to err on the side of keeping the conversation going rather than winning the conversation. So I know people that have views or do things I don't agree with, but I also know if I called them up and was like, mate, I'm in a bind. Can you come drop everything and come give me a hand? And I realise that there is a tension there, obviously.

Like we've said, you know, they'll wade into the river full of poo to grab a cat, but they won't go and do this thing, which is infinitely safer and less, you know. But if I just shut the door on them, then there's no chance of bringing them around. And if you believe you're correct, which I believe we're going to be on the right side of history, I have no problems with that at all. If you're wrong, what are you going to do? Well, the thing is, like later on, we've planted the flag so people can come back.

One of the things I love about what I do is I don't have to go back and edit my past. I don't have to go and delete things. It stands the test of time because I take the time to think about it. And so later on, if you were, you know, not that great with these people, then even if they want to engage the conversation, go, OK, you'd said this stuff. Where'd you get that from? And you go, OK, well, this came from here and this is what happened here. And you've got to leave if you leave the door open.

But if you're going to do that and you're going to keep the conversation going, you also have to protect your energy. So you like your emotional energy a little bit and not keep it going around other stuff. Let them know, look, I care about you and I'm here. I'm going to do this. You do your thing. I'm around. You know, if you want to have a chat about it, it's incredibly frustrating how much effort you have to put into debunking stuff that people can just say with reckless abandon. You know, did you hear the vaccine kills?

Pretty much everyone. So see you later. And then now I've got to go and get all the information that says that's not the case because some person over here, some unverified, you know, not on the hook person has just said this. And you've seen it and thought, this guy's a truth teller. So you just keep the conversation going. You try and keep the temperature low, keep it calm. And I think that's the way to deal with those people who need more time. Genuinely, if you treat them like people who need more time rather than people that are wrong and will be wrong forever, it's a little bit easier to just endure.

But at the same time, don't go all in trying to work it out on the spot and have these 65 million message conversations. Because you've got to find the stuff you agree on. You've got to start with the stuff you agree on and work from there. And if they go, so many people are like, well, if that's the data you're listening to, I'm like, OK, well, I don't know what data you're listening to. So if we can't even agree on that bit, we can't start there, then OK, that's fine. We don't have to talk about that.

You know, we can talk about something else. Yeah. Sometimes it becomes a bit of a link war, doesn't it? You just send links back and forth to each other of an argument. You've got this and you haven't actually read what they have. It's not getting anywhere. It's not going to help each other at all. One thing I found with agitated conversations is it's actually incredibly difficult to keep them on any one track until you get to the end of it anyway. So they go, everyone dies from the vaccine. Well, they don't. Here's the thing. They go, well, anyway, do you know about pedophiles?

What's that got to do with anything? Anyway. And then also, did you see this woman? She got the vaccine and now she's brain dead. And you're like, that's also been debunked. That's not a thing. So well, I heard. And also kids can't even go to playgrounds. And that's ridiculous. And you're like, well, they can go to playgrounds again. And they're like, well, why couldn't they for a bit? And it's like, OK, there's 16 totally separate things that have nothing to do with each other. But that's also part of the strategy of the agitators. You know, what about the kids?

What about the government? What about the New World Order? What about pedophiles? What about Big Pharma? What about. And it's like, yeah, it would take us half a day to pick each one of those things and get the end of it. But if you're just going to argue my vaccines are safe argument with what about pedophiles, how are we going to get anywhere in that conversation? Yeah, it was really sad the other day. You heard a tradie took his life on site the other day and people were really quick to politicise it and jump on and go, see, lockdowns, see, they've lost their jobs.

And you're like, wow, man, like that's really unfair. He's so multifaceted that there's no way like, you know, gross is a brilliant word for it. Yeah, it was really gross. Like what this guy's gone through, who knows the kind of crisis that he's been going through or the people, you know, even if he's sitting around people that have been saying that the sky is falling every day and then he starts to go, well, what about my future? It sounds like I don't have a future. And then all of a sudden this last thing happens and his work is taken away for two weeks.

And then the people he's working with are possibly saying, see, F this, F that. You know, you just can't blame that one thing. It's really unfair. And, you know, especially it's such a tragic thing to happen. It's not right to just use that to prove your point just so you can be right. And just be so gleefully sharing it, like, see, it's like that is so gross. It makes me want to throw up. It's not nice. It's really. And if it does start to become a point of I'm just doing it just because I want to be right, well, then you're not doing it for anyone else.

You're just doing it for yourself and your own ego. And that's really not helping anybody. And who does it help? Who feels better after that? After, you know, having to read and no context individual experience like that. It doesn't do anything. I say in our work all the time and when we're in vulnerable communities with working with vulnerable people, happy and sad isn't the measure of good mental health because happiness and sadness is going to happen. And we've got so many reasons to be frustrated and tired and over it at the moment. And that's actually

a good thing, because if you've got reasons to feel a bit crappy, then there's ways out that you can say, like, well, when we get out, we can have beers and we see our families, we do these things like that's going to alleviate a lot of that stress. But the thing that we always look at is we use a scale of agency to despair. This is something I developed because I just saw the inadequacies in how people were triaging these issues like in the community. Someone feels like they've got agency, like there's a point to what they're doing.

Then generally, they're pretty good. There's something you can do. You feel the point of it. You can get on with it. If you're despairing and you don't see the point of doing anything or why you're here or what's going on, you're like highly at risk of high-risk behaviours. And that's why you can have someone who looks like they're having a tough time, maybe living under a bridge, rough sleeping, and they're like, well, if I do this, I'll be okay. I'll get this. And they've got a sense of agency that people sometimes in really resource-rich environments, like in a private school kid who's like, it doesn't matter what I do.

Parents aren't going to be happy. I'm never going to be enough. I'm never going to get here. There's no point doing this. I don't see the point. That kid is at much higher risk of a high-risk behaviour than the guy under the bridge, even though if you just looked at him, you would think that seems silly because we've let him get to a place where he's despairing. Well, what kind of messages encourage despair? Not happiness or sadness, but make people feel like, what's the point? And there has been nothing in the messaging from the government, both governments, really, that has pointed towards despair.

It's pointed towards delay, frustration, uncertainty, of course, but it's always been like, there's a way out. We're on the path. We're going to get there. Let's do it. The people who are promoting this despair narrative, and I hate using the word narrative because people use it all the time, but that despair, that is so incredibly dangerous for people and so incredibly detrimental to the mental health of communities and individuals, particularly who are already vulnerable. So happy, sad, they're natural conversations. These are the conversations we should be encouraging and having. Where are you at? How are you feeling?

Frustrated, tired, shitty, whatever. OK, great. Wonderful. How are you feeling? Everything's pointless. What's the point? Everyone's against us. We're never going to get anything. We're never going to get anywhere. Literally the worst possible messaging you can share. And so if if people are auditing their own conversations, agency is always the answer. And the great thing about the vaccines is, is agency there. Make the choice. You get the choice. You don't have to despair. Things will change. The reason that the master builders and the unions have come out and said we're doing it is to keep the industry open, not to close it.

So there's a choice there. Most people are on board. We've already seen it in the first doses are almost at 80 percent anyway. So we're miles, massively in the majority of people who are keen to do it. So there is a there is a way forward. There is opportunity. We have agency in this situation. It is frustrating and taking too long. But don't share this despair information all the time, because it is. That is the most dangerous kind of messaging for anyone who is already on the edge, vulnerable, anxious, whatever. And so that's something that

I think people don't get put to account to and not held to account to enough on the Internet in particular, because it's disgusting behavior when that's the that's how people are portraying things. Yeah. I think if everyone can take have the capacity to take responsibility for like we talk about like we are what we eat, right? We are what we what we consume, both from a food hydration and information perspective. And we are what we do. So if we allow ourselves to go down that route, then we're probably going to end up in the despair and the doom scrolling and all that kind of thing.

Yeah. And make sure you're not listening to people who are complaining about stuff that hasn't happened. There's a lot of that in the in the in the in the sort of people that want to wind up people, those agitators. There's a lot of and guys, when this happens, oh, I heard this is going to happen. Oh, this is going down. Oh, this is going to happen. If it's not happening, if it's not if it's not on the table, if you've got a petition whipping around for legislation that's not even being tabled. Shush, just shush. Stop screaming about stuff that's not happening.

One of the worst things I hate hearing is a lot of the older generations say it is we're going to be paying for this for decades. And I'm like, oh, like, it's not that's a real doom thing to say. And it doesn't put a lot of a lot of hope in young people when you say that they just think, oh, I'm going to be all my money is going to tax. I'm going to have no job prospects, everything like like you said, what's the point? It's really something people should not say, especially when tell you what the economy is actually doing quite well, considering the situation.

So it's really not a nice or not a helpful or a useful thing to put out there. We've been we've been paying for the GFC and they didn't save anyone's life. So shush, you know, get a grip. I think we need to just sometimes you need to sort of just forget about the economy sometimes and all that and just think about people and let's just focus on people if we can all do the good things for good people, then we're going to be like, yeah, advocate for looking after people 100% get up the government for yanking job keeper job seeker get up and for not doing a good job there.

Hold them to account the next election. Absolutely. Again, that's a federal responsibility. It's not a it's not a political message from me who's got skin in the game either way. I don't I don't have skin in the game either way. But the feds have let us down time and time again. And I'm tired of seeing the messaging pointed solely at the state government who's made some mistakes like I cannot believe how long it took to get the bloody QR code thing for the state. What on earth were they doing? Like, get on with it. But we've also got that COVID app on the phone, don't we?

But they but there are responsibilities that there are federal responsibilities. And they have dropped the ball and just been quiet so many times. And people are still here screaming at the at the at the government that's doing the thing it said it was going to do the whole time. And I find that quite frustrating as well, because, of course, they're not going to listen to your random rantings because they've told you what they're going to do. They've been doing it the whole time. If you want job keeper that you yelling at the wrong person. If you want better support, you're yelling in the wrong direction.

And a political movement that advocated for better help for people might actually have some effect. But you've got to point it at the people who actually make that decision. Go yell at the treasurer, he's in Hawthorne. If you're going to yell at someone yell at the bloke who literally controls the money for the whole country. Yeah, absolutely. Let's finish it off. What's one thing or a few things you can do for yourself to cope to feel better to help another person to whatever? What's a few good things you can do? Like we're in lockdown again? What's been helping you?

What do you suggest people do? For me, it's pretty simple. And it probably isn't anything different to what I do outside, which I think is why it works so well. It's journal daily. I try and catch up with a friend every day or two to go for a walk, because there's the vent that doesn't get on social media, it doesn't need to go on there. I think it's to be able to critically analyse all the pieces of information that get shoved in front of your face. You do those three things and focus on what you can control versus, you know, not ignoring but acknowledging what you can't control and accepting it.

And, you know, things would be fine. Like, I don't like lockdowns. I don't like being in this position. But I feel as though I'm in a position and I'm very lucky, like big, big birth lottery part of that, but I'm in a position where I could do this for the next five years if we needed to. I don't want to, so don't get me wrong. But I feel as though those three or four things are what will continue to give you the capacity to put my best foot forward, regardless of what happens. It's got a lot of time to read books.

It's great. Yeah, it's true. Josh, what have you got? I think acknowledge your frustrations. You don't have to swallow them. For a little sort of pithy little thing that I did, which was part of my venting, I just wrote, I was like really annoyed at all the stuff I couldn't do. I think I was frustrated a lot of stuff. And I just was like, I'm going to write it down, because I think it's important to vent. And I just wrote down stuff I can't do. And I just wrote this list. And I looked at list, and it was pretty long, because we can't do much.

And I was like, yeah, it's so annoying. And I was furiously scribbling. And then I looked at it. And then I just, I literally just crossed the top of it out. And then I just wrote stuff I'm looking forward to, instead of stuff I can't do. And that just kind of changed the whole vibe of it. And then I looked at and then I looked at the list. And so much of it was just like, people stuff. So, you know, have a beer with my mate in a dove. I thought I haven't spoken to the doves in two weeks.

I'll just give him a call. You know, I mean, like I had this list of stuff. And you can't do the A grade version, but you can do like the D grade celebrity version of some of these things. Have a face beer, watch the footy with your mate on your phone here. You know, like, send a text, go for a walk, you know, go for a run or, you know, there's some push ups if you can't get to the gym. We're all probably pretty fortunate with the gym setup ourselves. But for you know, do the

do the Z grade version and know that it's like going to get you maybe 60% of the way there, but it's something and just having that list and having the knowing that people were such a big part of it and then just checking in with them and putting in that effort instead of sitting at home looking kind of a beer with him. And then just be like, just call him bro, like have a chat. So doing those things, I think it's kind of like one of those, we're really getting to the pointy end of just do the things that make you feel good now.

Like we're out of it. We're out of it. We're running out of ideas. We've been doing this for a long time. But that sort of thing, you know, that really that's that helped me at least for the last couple of weeks. That's good. Yeah, no, I'm similar. I always just try to acknowledge. Yeah, acknowledge my frustration and kind of Yeah, vent privately a little bit first. Think about what I say to people and or post or stuff like that, especially because sometimes you post something and regret it. You look like an idiot. Yeah, walk, walk so many walks, walk, get outside, get fresh air, but take it all in as well.

Don't just walk with your head on in your phone, you know, go look outside and the stuff you actually do get to see an experience along the way. Like I love saying, you know, lucky gets out and he's always put puts up a quick picture of the bay and you get to see the water and the waves. I just love it. And where I live, where I live, there's kangaroos, there's bandicoots, you know, every now and then there's some real like, and I just love saying that nature and that and that really just grounds you

a little bit and helps you just remember that, you know, there are, you know, some of these things, you know, like Josh said that you're worrying about, they're not that big of a deal. And you can do different diversions of them and, and they will come back eventually, but most of the things that you need, you've, you've got them, and you're going to be okay. That's it for me. That's enough to help people. Yeah, yeah, that's it. We've all we've all heard a lot of tips at this point in time. Yeah, just actually the last thing is don't keep trying to set a date for when we'll be out of this or whatever.

Like just acknowledge that this is you, this is your life and this is how it's going to continue to be for an undetermined, like there's no, there's, there's no timeline here. Probably think it's going to be longer than it's actually going to be. And then you can sort of cope a lot better. Like I'm kind of enjoying it now. Like I'm almost like, oh shit, we got to work. How am I going to manage all this? This is going to be hard. I find so many things that I can do and I'm loving doing so many different things I can do at home and all around.

But I think when you'd say, oh, maybe we'll be out by October and then it doesn't happen. You do you despair a bit. Maybe we'll be out by Christmas. And anyone that's read Man's Session meetings, Viktor Frankl, like he talked about that in the during the Holocaust, if they, the amount of deaths that happened after Christmas in Auschwitz was like significant just because of the despair because they went, maybe we'll be out by Christmas. And then because they weren't out by Christmas, they just like they despaired and they gave up. And that's right now you go into some some dark depression when you think you're going out on September 23.

And then they tell you the restrictions have not really changed. Even though you're expecting them not to change, you did. Oh, you despair. Oh, my God. When I get it's like, just focus on what you do have, which is a lot, which is plenty, which is more than most people that even when they're not in lockdown, they don't have the things that we have. Check your privilege, check your entitlement. I think if you want a real hero move as well as to plan to keep the good vibes and appreciation when we get out going as

long as possible, because the great analogy is from a runner where like when you're running into a headwind, you spend the whole time swearing at the headwind. And then you when you turn around the pin and you're coming back, you appreciate the tailwind for about 12 seconds. And then you just carry on like, but you've spent 40 minutes into a headwind swearing at it, you turn around, you get the tailwind and you forget about it in 10 seconds. And I just think if we, you know, if you want to make a commitment to do some

hero moves, it's keep everyone appreciating stuff when we finally get the tailwind when we get out so that we don't all get out, you know, really appreciate it for three days and then go back to normal gonna find some other stuff to complain about. I think that's something we can try and prepare ourselves for ahead of time as well. Absolutely. Yeah, yeah. If you just your habit now it's copper mate and tell me you love them. Don't stop doing that. Exactly. Yeah, 100%. Keep doing that. Keep doing all those good things that you've learned along the way.

Even when things are a little more normal. Anything left to add boys? We're good. Thanks. Last one. Get jab. Go chat to your GP. Don't listen to Facebook. Go chat to your GP if you're not sure. Fair enough if you're not sure. Go chat to your doctor. If you've got lots of really strong arguments against getting the VAX, go to your GP and present them to your GP and debate with him or her. And then see what happens. They're not paid by Big Pharma. This isn't the states. The prices are negotiated by the government. They have nothing to do with it.

The vaccines are ordered. There's no gain from a GP. They're not on the hook. They spend their whole life training to look after you. They care about you. Go talk to the GP. It is funny when people use the argument of Big Pharma in Australia. I'm like, hold on a second. It's a whole different kettle of fish in the States. I'm just I'm just worried about the fact that Richter scales are paid for by big earthquake. Wow, that was Yeah, well, yeah, that was that was an entertaining 30 seconds. And wasn't it? That's what she said.

That's it. That's the end of the podcast. Boom. Done. As as you listen to it, as Dylan friend says, it's been an honor and a privilege to have you boys on. Thank you so much for chatting me. I feel great just for chat talking that out with some reasonable humans. Thanks for having me, mate. I appreciate it. Thanks, guys. Always a pleasure to have a good yarn. And all our yarn again in the future. Hopefully around the table with a few pots. That'd be good. Yes, please. Absolutely. Thank you very much for listening to the valor fitness nutrition mind podcast.

My name is Stuart Cunningham. If you enjoyed the episode, please send us a like, send us a comment, share it with a mate, give us a rating on the iTunes or whatever you're listening to this on every little bit of support helps. Looking forward to bringing you some more stuff next week.