I get a team, welcome to another installing the U projects. Sadly for David Gillespie, Tiffany and Cook is not here for any reason. He fronts up one's a Fortnite is for her, It's not for me, And.
Yeah, I know, I know. I could hear the disappointment in your voice.
People say, why don't you see the disappointment in his face, because he's just a black screen when we chat, which I reckon if it if you turned on your camera after two years of no camera, it would freak me out.
I wouldn't know what to do. So keep that off. I find it.
I actually was interviewing someone the other day and nearly everyone has their camera on, but this who is an academic from the States, and he wanted to have his camera off.
So we're in.
We're about forty minutes into what turned out to be a sixty minute conversation, and then without any warning, he turned on his camera. And then it kind of threw me because I was so used to anyway, how have you been, mate? What's News's news on planet? You?
Not a lot?
I'm just at the moment too busy to write, which is irritating me. So I've just got a lot on. So I find that frustrating when I, you know, look at a look at something that I'm working on and it's and I look at the date that it's been last edited and it's.
Like three or four weeks ago. That really irritates me.
So what keeps you?
So, I mean, I know this is a dumb question, but from my listeners who go who think that this is your main job, which clearly it is, what keeps you busy?
Like, what what do you do?
Mostly, you know, it's not my work. My day job as a lawyer is pretty neatly confined to work hours because I work for the government. So it's mostly my time consuming hobby of running a handball of European handball.
So I have, that's right, I have.
I have four children who play European handball and.
We run well.
I'm the president of the biggest probably the biggest club in Australia and sometimes when there's a lot on that can that can take up a lot of time. And over the last couple of weeks we've had a couple of teams touring in Italy and that has taken a lot of out of ours time. You know, because they're in the opposite time zones.
To us, you are the gift that keeps on giving. Like you are hilarious. I remember, I remember when you one day, after knowing you for a couple of years or a year and a half, you just wheeled out free schools dot org. Yes, if you don't know anything about that, we don't have time everyone, but free schools one word dot org.
Go check it out.
David and a bunch of other inspirational and amazing people have built this phenomenal thing that's just a gift to the world. But have a look at that. But then, after I don't know how long I've known you, maybe three, is you go. I'm the president of the biggest European hand club in Australia, and we've got what this was. We'll probably go where we spoke about going, but fuck
who knows? Tell Like I kind of know what it is because of my sporting background, but if I'd probably fuck some of it up, Tell our listeners what it is.
So European handball is probably the second biggest sport in Europe after soccer. It's their sort of off season to soccer sport, so it's the one they play indoors. It's played on a futsal sized court, so twenty meters by forty meters.
With footsal sized goals.
And the difference between it and futsal is that you throw the ball rather than kick it, and so it's a smaller size. It's still a soccer ball, but it's a smaller size so you can hold it in your hand.
Very exciting sport, Unlike soccer, lots and lots of goals scored, you know, so in a typical game, each side will score thirty goals, so very very high speed, and they're running like it's like basketball in the sense that it's played at either end of the court, so there's a lot of running forty meters in very very short bursts.
And look, everyone's going to get a chance to see it, you know, as they do in Australia once every four years in the Olympics in the next couple of weeks, and I'd really recommend you seek it out and take a look at at It is a very exciting sport. And as I said, we've currently got two teams competing at a competition in Italy and the girls team just won overnight and the boys team came.
In second, so wow, pleased with that. Yeah, So it's.
It's a rare, rarefied sport here in Australia, so it makes it pretty easy for kids here to get into the Australian team. But it's an exciting sport. And you know, I've never played it, but I love watching it and I love seeing the kids play it.
Wow.
What is the the duration of the Is it quarters or just two hards?
Two halves, two half hour halves? A team of seven players on court and unlimited constant player rotation often between plays you need. So each team really usually has fourteen to sixteen players in it and they're just constantly going on and off court because that much running you need
to be able to take people off courts. So the average average professional player, like a male, will throw the ball at about somewhere between one hundred and twenty one hundred and forty kilometers an hour at a goalie where they as theoretically as close as they can get a six meters away because that's the goal circle.
But they're allowed to throw it from anywhere if they're in the air and no part of their bodies touching the floor.
So obviously a lot of people jump a long way into the air to get those shots.
Into the goalie.
So it's look like I said, I recommend if you don't know what it is, take a look at it in the Olympics.
It's a pretty exciting sport.
And if you've got kids who want to play it then you're in Brisbane, then send them along to Brisbane Handball Club, which is the club I run.
Have we ever had a team in the Olympics playing handball?
Oh yeah, we did in the Sydney Olympics, and of course they came dead last. You know, there's thirty million people playing this game in Europe. We've got they've got a bit of a head start on us. But you know, we're doing our best as we can to develop local talent and those kids that we're training today, hopefully by twenty thirty two will be good enough to be competitive in the Olympics. Has an Australian ever gone overseas and not necessarily become a superstar, but just you know, played at.
A yeah yeah, yeah, yeah. No.
One boy from our club's just returned from doing semi pro in a German club. It happens, happens every few years, you know, a particularly talented individual go over and play in Germany, France somewhere like that.
This wasn't where we were going to go. But fuck, and I'm just thinking about it. When when you like, because you work with or you you know, you built this amazing aforementioned resource for kids for students, and you work with athletes, and you work with a lot of different people. When we think about people who and your son, is it James that I spoke with? Yeah, James, yep, James, who's a fucking superstar as well, who's built an amazing resource for people?
What what do you think are the variables other than talent and intelligence that make people succeed or that makes people persistence.
It's not giving up, you know, the difference between people who succeed and people who don't, you know, the people who don't give up just before they do. You know, that's and it's hard. Look, it's really hard in my experience to be to stand alone and keep going right, And I think you've probably I think we've talked about this before with you. You know that's you you do something like start this podcast and and have three dogs, you know, and their next door neighbor listening to it
and everyone telling you you're a bloody idiot. Well that's that's the way it is at the start of everything. And it's persistence that you know, persistence and an eye on quality, no compromise, do it the way you want to do it, you know, and and persist in that way, having the confidence that you you know what you're doing and you're onto something that that'd be my rule of some no guarantees, of course.
But yeah, I mean, I mean, yeah, it's like I could be persistent forever, but I'm never going to run one hundred meters in nine and a half seconds or sing on brod.
Yeah.
Yeah, you've got to. You've got to.
You've got a temper the persistence with realism. I guess I've been watching over the last few weeks because one of my sons suggested I at a show that completely passed me by in the early naughties called Friday Night Lights. I don't know if you've ever seen it.
Is that about the college football kids or.
High school football kids.
So it was a five series thing that in sort of two thousand and six through twenty eleven, and I find it really interesting for a number of reasons. One of them is just some of the sayings that come out of the coach's mouth, because it sort of focuses on the coach of this football team who's repeatedly successful, and he focuses on, you know, the idea that the team is always greater than the sum of the parts, which is something a theme I pick up in in one of my psychopath books.
Because it's an important thing. We can talk about that some other day.
But one of the things he said, one of the sayings he said this really caught my ear, was you know, success is not the goal, it's a byproduct.
And I think that really captures it.
You know, if you set out with the aim of succeeding at whatever it is, and that's where you're driving the whole time, then you probably will fail. If you set out with the aim of doing everything the way you want to do it, in the way you think it should be done, in the way no one else is doing it, then success will be a byproduct. And yeah,
that was just one of the things coming out. The other reason I find that showed really interesting is because it's about high schools in America between two thousand and six and twenty eleven, which they wouldn't have known it at the time, but is really really a shocking view for someone from today. A high school student looking at
that show today would not recognize it. Not a single person has a mobile phone, and if they do, it is a you know, it's a flip phone where the most sophisticated thing you can do on it is you know, type of text using the nine numbers in the correct order. It's a really interesting insight into the way the social dynamics of that high school work. Where there are no phones, where no one is an addict, where.
You know, no one is anxious and depressed.
It's for a show that covered lots of social themes at its time, that can cover teen pregnancy and violence and gang warfare and drugs and alcohol and all that stuff all covered in that show. Not a single thing about the vice addiction, not a single thing about anxiety and depression.
It's a real insight.
It's like a time capsule, isn't it That.
Absolutely and at a critical time, like just before the iPad was was released into the market, and towards the end of the show in the fifth series, which was filmed in twenty eleven, a few of the kids are starting to have Apple phones, and you see the effect of them taking photographs of things as starts to become a theme in the show.
But it's just the start. And when you compare it to today.
One of the things you notice about lots of extraordinary things happening in this show that normally were happening today every kid would have their phone out.
Yeah. Yeah.
What do you think is the relationship between the idea of success? You know, people like a lot of people, especially that I've worked with over the years, Like, one thing that everybody has in common when they come to a gym, or they come to a trainer, or they come to talk to someone like me, is that they want to create some kind of change, you know, thinking, habits, behaviors, outcomes, and they you know, so we talk about what they want to do be create change, We talk about what
their version of success is. And for me, an observation and an experienced hundreds of times is I helped people get where they wanted to go, only for them to discover that that wasn't really where they needed to be. Right In other words, very few people got to their ideal weight or size, or shape or bank balance or position, and when I'm content, very few people.
What do you think that's about? That success?
Idea of success and the experience of contentment or satisfaction.
Because you can never be the top of the tree no matter what in this world. If I were to say to you, Craig, I'm just going to drop a billion dollars into your account, you know, as I would, because I like you. Do you think that would make you happy? I think what it would do is make you start, make you start comparing yourself to people who have two billion dollars in their bank account. And if you had two billion dollars, as you might start comparing
yourself to people who have three billion dollars. It's a natural human thing, and this is not a bad thing. But humans have ambition. Humans always want to be better than they are, And even when they get to the place where they think they are better, there's always someone better than them. There's always someone richer than them, there's always someone better built than them, there's always someone younger than them. You know, there's always someone better looking than them.
It doesn't matter what you do. If you're on that treadmill of the only thing motivating you is to be better than the guy next to you. There'll always be a better guy than the guy next to you that you've got to aim for. And it's a self defeating way of approaching life, you know. It's I don't know how to do it. I know I have done it, I know, and I don't know that I could give a guidebook on how to achieve it. But I know
that I'm very zin about stuff like that. I don't look at other people's cars, phones, bank balances, you know, whatever it is, and I find it a very peaceful way to live, if you like.
Yes, yeah, well, comparison is the thief of joy or whatever they say.
But I remember, I don't want to bore my listeners, but just quickly.
I don't think I've ever told you this, but I kind of woke up metaphorically when I was in my mid thirties and I had all these businesses and one hundred staff, and things were going great, and all my businesses were making money, and I was writing for the Herald Son in Melbourne, I was working on radio, and it was maybe the most miserable time in my life.
And I'm not saying that all of those things caused the misery, but it was such an interesting place for me to be, and I remember having an epiphany thinking essentially, what's wrong with me?
You know?
Yeah, look, I wish I wish I could explain. You know, maybe I'd have to study some psychology or something. It's a bit, but there's definitely some power in the I guess the Zen notion of not comparing yourself to others. Compare yourself to yourself by all means. I would say, always compare yourself to yourself. Always be better but in everything than you were yesterday. But but that'd be the limit of comparison in my view.
Are you ambitious?
Not necessarily in a money grabbing, fucking megla maniacal kind of way. There's a word I don't use that often, but are you ambitious?
I like growing things. I like.
If I look back over my life, when I've always been happiest is when I'm starting at the bottom of something and making it bigger than it was the day before. So with the handball club, the thing I like about that is growing it, growing it from nothing and making it bigger. With free schools, it's growing that, you know, with the books and the message is there it's about spreading that word and getting as many people on board with it as I possibly can. So I guess my
motivation is growing things. Yeah, I guess so in that way. Yeah, I am ambitious.
What's your Sorry to interrupt, but as you're talking about all these awesome things that you've built, it occurs to me that none of those, other than maybe the books, made you any dough. Although I know you're not going broke anytime soon. But this is a weird question. But what is I was going to say, what's your relationship with money? Or how do you you not not as a construct for everyone, but how do you view money?
As long as I am making enough to not have it limit what I want to do, yeah, then that's enough. That's my view of it. So you know, it's not about having a giant pile of money. It's about making sure that if my kids, I don't know, I want to do X, Y or Z. You know, we're getting beyond the point that of that with these kids. Now they're all, you know, adults and can look after themselves. But when they were kids, if they wanted to do something,
I never wanted to be the answer. I can't let you do that because I don't have the money for it. So I always worked to have enough money that that was never the case, and that if that man having three jobs at meant having three jobs, you know, which I've done.
So it's you know, but that's the motivator.
Are you work aholic?
I don't like not working. I find I find I get bored really really really quickly if I'm not got something to do. So if that's a workaholic, then yeah, I guess I am.
But I think also you and I probably similar in that I'm well, very different obviously in many ways, but similar in that, like I don't, I don't know about you, but for me, nearly everything that I do, that that is, you know, falls under the banner of work or career or income or whatever.
It doesn't. And I know this is cheesy, but it's just true. For me. It doesn't feel like work.
Like I've had jobs when I was young, like real jobs that were just like the whole purpose was too.
Oh. Yeah, I agree with you. Look, I absolutely agree with you.
I've definitely had many jobs, particularly when I was young. You know, when I was doing two or three jobs, one of them was working in a night out, and you know that felt like work. Its entire purpose was to earn money, you know, and nothing I.
Do today feels like work. You know. The things I'm doing today are things that I don't mind doing. Some of them I prefer to others. And if I have a choice, I'd do some things more than others.
Well, you and I were chatting before we went live, and I'm a sixty three baby, I'm still sixty I'm sixty one later in the year, and you're a sixty six baby.
As you get older, how.
How do you manage your Maybe you don't think about this, but I don't mean mental health in I really mean more mind health.
And cognitive function.
Like, do you consciously do things to keep your mind and your brain.
High performance?
Or is that just a byproduct of constantly creating, you know, working, learning, evolving?
Is that just an outcome or is that something that you think about.
I don't think about it until you just asked me. But now that you have asked me, I am thinking about it, don't I don't intentionally do anything other than sleep. Sleep is vitally important to brain function, right, absolutely vitally important to cognitive function. By the end of the day, you're basically drunk in terms of your capacity of your brain to function.
And that's the way.
That's just a byproduct of the way our brain works, which is it burns poly unsaturated fats to work. You know, That's why it takes twenty five percent of our energy. You know. It's like also, I don't know if you know this, but how our eyes work is the first time I discovered the way our eyes work, I was amazed at the system which is essentially to burn poly unsaturated fats for them to work at all. And we have all these complex systems in our eyes to sweep
away the garbage. And interesting thing, by the way, is because we've significantly increased the amount of amiga six fat in our diet and evolution designed our eyes to work on a balance between Amga three and amega six fats.
The systems designed to sweep away the garbage don't work on the garbage from amiga six fats, which means that that garbage builds up in our eyes, which is why macular degeneration is such a major problem in Australian society today because the outcome of consuming too much amiga six fat, which is in seed oils, which we've talked about ad nauseum is that your eyes don't work because they can't
be cleared of the garbage. A similar thing occurs in your brain, by the way, So having a diet relatively low in a Mega six fat, which means keeping seed oil out of your diet, improves cognitive function because the systems designed to clear your brain built by evolution on the assumption that you're going to have about the same.
Amount of Amiga six and am a Mega iie fats in your diet.
And so when a modern Australian with about twenty five times as much amigas as they have a Mega three tries to operate a brain on that fuel mixture, bad things happen. And the bad things I'm talking about are Parkinson's and Alzheimer's. Yeah, so, and that's why we're seeing
those things accelerate at epidemic proportions. So I guess the shorter answer to your thing is, if you're looking at day to day cognitive function, sleep is vitally important because it's the only time your brain gets to clean out all the garbage. If you're looking at longer term cognitive function, get a Mega six out of your diet.
And also we know, i mean, your brain's whatever it is, eighty percent or ninety percent water, So being dehydrated fucks up cognitive function. Booze as you alluded to sleep of course.
Well, it's not so much the dehydration from booze as the aldehyde. So alcohol is very effectively turned into a really dangerous aldehyde in our bloodstream, and we've got systems designed by evolution to deal with that in relatively low quantities, the kind of quantities you might get from showering down on fermented fruit. But at the kind of quantities you're consuming when you binge drink, you're really overloading that system
to the point where you really are doing serious aldehyde damage. Now, the interesting thing is that aldehydes are bad for us wherever they come from. So we get them from smoking or inhaling any kind of anything that's burned. So that's acroleine, which is an aldehyde. We get a settle aldehyde from alcohol, and we get four hne the deadliest of them, all from consuming seed oils, and all of them screw up our brain. So it's not people when they talk about it alcohol and say why it's bad for you.
The dehydration often comes up, but that's not really the point. It's the aldehyde really screwing up our brain and killing off brain cells at really stupendous volumes.
Yeah. You know what else is bad for our brain, Stress and anxiety, isn't it? Yeah?
Absolutely, Yeah, not as bad as aldehydes, but yeah, you put yourself in a high dopamine state, which is what stress and anxiety is. And yeah, that's not a good thing for your brain either.
Yeah. Yeah, and what about an addiction.
By the way, Yeah, I feel like in it. I use this term before we went live, and I use it with some trepidation around you.
But it's essentially the psychology of aging. And by that all I mean is, you know.
How people think about aging and how people talk about their possibilities and potential at a given age, which is almost like this cultural programming of oh, well, you know, he's in the golden years now, or like I take my dad to the months a week, he trains with the next those physiologist another time, and he goes once by himself and he's eighty five and you know his you know, he's not running one hundred meters in ten seconds or a marathon in three hours, but his level
of physiological function and strength and balance and coordination, and I would think all of that is similar to someone who's maybe sixty five to seventy what we would loosely call biological age. And I don't know, I just feel like there's a mentality that people get, or a point at time, point of time where people get where they essentially go, Well, you know, father time or mother time or whatever has caught up with me.
What do you think about that?
Well, they're probably right. I mean, your sort of muscle mass is declining after thirty as a consequence of normal.
Aging with it without an intervention.
Without an intervention.
Yeah, and bone mass, you know, is you know, on a similar trajectory, and there's probably not a lot you can do about bone mass.
But the.
I guess there's a reality there that people have to accept, which is that there are two ways of doing life. The dominant form of it on this planet is what I would call it. You know, I think we've talked about this before, the big Vira approach, which is, if you were the you know, the ultimate I guess pen maker in the sky and you had to decide how you're going to invest your resources. If you wanted to ensure that there were pens around on your planet.
You could.
You could take the approach of saying, you know what I'm going to do. I'm going to spend thousands of dollars per pen. I'm going to make a mont Blanc pen that never wears out. It's going to be absolutely fabulous, this thing it is. You know, it'll last one thousand years, there's no trouble whatsoever. Or I'm going to take the same amount of money and I'm going to and I'm going to churn out ten thousand big biros. Well, for most forms of life on this planet, evolution chose the
big Biro approach, which is shit happens. You're going to lose some big biros, but it doesn't matter because we're producing ten thousand a minute, right, So yeah, exactly.
And they all get there in the end.
You know, either way, stuff gets written and so it's perfectly viable. By the way, and I've read books about this. The mathematics is viable, and in fact, I think I can't name them off the top of my head, but there are life forms that pursue this approach where you do go the mont Blanc pen approach, which is this thing it never dies, right, it just continuously regenerates. It's enormously resource intensive, it has to be fed the entire time,
takes a lot of endge, but it lasts forever. Trouble is, if a truck runs over it, it's just as dead as the as the big biro is or you know. So, evolution has taken the approach that numbers win every time. So if you're going to produce a ten thousand things a minute, that means, unfortunately, that we go the less
intended energy intense route of these things age. So once you hit reproductive the end of reproductive usefulness, which is about forty, which by the way is a significant extension on what evolution programmed into us anyway, which is about thirty, there's really no point keeping you alive as far as evolution is concerned, as long as you're capable of producing
the next generation. So everything after that is a bonus, and your body is in system decline at that point where you know there's no real need from an evolutionary perspective for you to stay alive, but you know you can't.
Oh god, if you're feeling flat, everybody right, But you're not. I mean, if you if you're my age, you're definitely not needed.
Same with absolutely you just dead. Wait, No, we're just kidden. We're just kidding.
So, I mean, we talk a lot. We'll just we'll wrap up in a few minutes. But we talk a lot about, for one a better term or a more specific term, the relationship that we have with technology in the potential impact of the way that we individually use technology. We talk a lot about young people. You're kind of you're intertwined with tech. What's your relationship with technology? Do you ever get Do you ever do like doom scrolling where you wake up and you've been looking at bullshit for an hour?
Oh?
No, I used to do it with Twitter, and I was doing it when I started writing I think teen brain and when I understood what was going on there.
But you were trying to get a teen brain so that you could understand it.
No, No, I was using I'd been using Twitter since it started, and I'd always found it a fairly interesting and real time access to news makers, and that's what it was at the start, and so I'd used it a fair bit and I had definitely noticed when I was starting to write in Tin Brain about the tools the programers were using to addict us to things like that, and the way the doom scroll worked, and the psychology that it was based on, and the experiments it was
based on, which is the uncertainty principle, which essentially doubles the dopamine hit, where you don't always get the thing you want to see, You get a bunch of things you don't want to see, then something you do want to see, then some things that you don't want to see, And that uncertainty is how a doom scroll works and makes the app addictive. When I sort of was sanding back and looking at myself and saying, you know what, this is working on you. This is actually working on you.
You've got to stop doing it. So I did, but it's yeah, it's there. And that's probably the closest I've come to interacting with social media in that way I've but now that I'm very aware of the techniques that are being used to do it. And look, people who've read Team Brain and Brain Reset, my books that focus
on this, say the same thing. About two thirds of people who give me feedback about it, I would say say that now that they know what is going on and how they are being manipulated, they're able to stop it. About the other thirds say, don't be ridiculous. I'm not addicted to that, and I could quit any time and then proceed never to quit.
Yeah.
So my last question is around We've spoken a little bit about your job, my job, and your potential addiction to work or workaholicness and mind, but neither of us really experience it as work per se. With all the things that demand your attention, from kids, to family, to projects, to lawyering to hanging out with me once fortnite, how
do you decide what to give your attention? Like, there's more things that you have more options of where to invest your time, focus, energy and skill than you have time to actually allocate.
Same with me.
I say no to about nine things for everyone that I say yes to. What's the deciding factor for you in terms of where you will invest your energy, focus and time.
Yeah, that's a really good question.
I sort of do it automatically, so I'm not certain what the answer to that is. I'd have to say curiosity.
Is.
I mean, one of the reasons I keep doing this with you is because we never talk about the same thing. So you know it's interesting, you know, I believe it or not, Craig, you're an interesting bloke to.
Chat to, So cut that bit out.
T take that bullshit out.
But you know that that's That's one of the things. If it's if it's interesting, I'm more likely to do it than not. If it's something I've done a hundred times before, then it's going to be it's going to be something that I'm going to have to force myself to do, which sometimes I might do depending on why I'm doing it. If it's I like, I like benefiting others. I like if there's something that I can do that I know it's that would help. Especially what's the word
for that, It'll be leverage. If there's a simple thing that I can do that I know a lot of people will benefit from, then I'll then I'd be more likely to do that, even if it's something that I'm not really keen on doing.
Yeah. Yeah, that's very magnanimous as mine.
And it makes me sound like some sort of saint. No it isn't.
I know, you're a prick, it's all right, but you're a prick that does good things, and it's okay.
No, it's I'm not even thinking about it in that way, but it is now that I think about it, because you forced me to.
I'd say, that's that's something that does motivate me.
Yeah, I'm with you. I'm of course I'm fucking with him. Everyone don't send me an email.
I actually like him, But I like my version of that is having a purpose bigger than me is like doing shit where you know, I like you, I can make someone else's journey or life or a bit better, or I can help them help themselves or open a door that they can't open.
And I think the stuff that.
Like what I like about you is you or like you are probably more excited about the things which are philanthropics not the right word, but but where you are just giving. You know, it's like the European Handball Club. What's it called that you run the Brisbane.
The Brisbane Handball Club.
Yeah, right, So you don't get paid anything for that. That's that's costing you definitely time.
A lot of time and money.
Yeah exactly.
So you know you are single handed, We'll not single handedly, but you're one of the driving forces and it's something that you don't need to do. You know, and I think that's you know, let's not start complimenting too much.
Yeah, we'll just make everyone makes it a bit.
It makes me a bit queasy, you know, maybe say goodbye affair and we'll go affair and insult each other a bit, so we feel Thanks mate, Thanks for your time, La,