My name is Emily and I'm a psychologist and regular guest on The Imperfects.
I was proudly born and raised on Wurundjeri country and now live, work and raise my own children on the lands of the Wajak Nungah people.
I'm inspired by the strength and endurance of the world's oldest living culture.
We at The Imperfects pay homage to traditions of story and in particular its role in healing when we share and create space for stories on this podcast.
Together with The Imperfects I acknowledge the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin nation as the traditional owners of the land on which this podcast was recorded and extend my respects to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.
I acknowledge this land always was, and always will be, Aboriginal land.
Well hello all and young chaps and welcome to the Academy of Imperfection, where experts in their field share their wisdom on the subject of imperfection.
Today Julia Baird, an author who writes about awe.
An author if you like.
What is the most common way people experience awe?
And I would have bet on all nature, I would have said 100 % nature.
The number one way was seeing it in each other, was seeing acts of moral beauty, so acts of great decency, or kindness, or generosity, or courage.
So come be your sandwiches and join students you, Brian and Josh, for the Academy of Imperfection.
We do want to record this one?
Okay, we'll record this one, yeah.
May as well, got the technology, may as well record it.
People can listen to it.
So then people can listen to it after we finish, that's true.
That's actually a good point.
Well, well, well, well, no Josh today, so that's why I'm in charge of the...
Fading down the music, that went pretty well.
Yep. Wow. What didn't go well was that you forgot to press record.
Yeah. George had to pop his head out and say, Ryan, you should record this conversation.
I can't do everything here.
That's true. But I should press record, that should be top of the list.
Well, this is a very, very exciting episode.
Some might call it, and please read into this word when I say it, some might call it an awful episode.
Yeah. This will be awful.
This will be awful, because Hugh, please explain the incredible person who joins us today.
We have Julia Baird here today, and we'll talk about why it's going to be awful in a second.
But before we get to that...
I'll clarify when we're saying awful.
It is to do with awe.
Yes. That is why. It's full of awe.
Don't usually like explaining the jokes, but people might think it's a bit strange.
So when we, we were saying this other day, Ryan, and we feel like when we first came up with the idea of this podcast, Julia was one of the first people we wanted to have on the podcast.
And then when we came up with the format, the Academy of Infection, she was like the first person we thought of.
So this feels like it's coming of age, a good way to describe it.
Yeah. Long time coming.
Yeah, maybe that, yeah.
It could be a coming of age.
Who knows what will happen.
Julia, welcome to my prefix.
Oh, it's so good to be here.
A journalist, author, broadcaster, Walkley Award winner.
Yeah. In your first year as a journalist, you were a...
I was part of a team, can I say.
It wasn't just all me.
Well, I did that video.
Tell me. Well, we haven't got the team here.
We've got you. Well, true.
Yeah. Author of four books and we'll discuss them today.
Mm -hmm. I actually, so we chat on the phone a little bit today.
I was, and I called you yesterday, we kept missing each other.
And I got really nervous when I was calling you.
Yeah, I'm a very big fan.
I just start by saying that.
Oh, that's so nice.
I've been listening to you guys for quite a while now.
I love what you do.
That's mind blowing.
Yeah. It really is.
I mean, you have a, I think interest might be the wrong word, but resilience is something that is very close to your heart.
I mean, you've survived cancer four times now.
Yes. And so I guess it makes sense that you have gone down the path of not just coping, but thriving in really difficult times.
And I think that might be a really nice place to sort of jump off today because I read Phosphorus since, 2021, it came out, is that right?
Yeah, the year of the pandemic.
When it really started to get locked down, it came out.
And it won the, it was the book of the year.
RBL. Yes, that's it.
Which was no surprise because I was, I was in AWE reading it.
It's such a beautiful book.
You are an AWE hunter.
Like that's, you've spent a lot of time searching at AWE.
And I know from reading your book, for me, one of the main things for me was I have to say yes to adventures more often, all types of adventures, but certainly ones that might lead to AWE.
Yeah. Could you talk to us about what AWE means to you?
So all I see is it's something that, you know, stops you in your tracks.
So you're really just marveling at something.
And in that moment, I think you're likely to forget about yourself and you are likely to feel small in a really healthy way.
Like we talk so much about occupying space and having authority and like, you know, filling up rooms and filling up spaces.
But actually, we forget that being small is really psychologically a comforting thing.
And there's a whole body of research around it, which shows that the more exposure we have to AWE, the more calmer and content we are.
But also, the more we are likely to feel like inhabitants of the earth, we're more likely to feel more connected to each other and more altruistic as well.
So I just became absolutely fascinated with this idea once I realised the part that it was playing in my own life.
And how does it play a part in your life?
Like where do you find AWE most regularly?
Mostly through ocean swimming.
So I came back from living in the States and I decided to live near my family in a part of the city that I didn't normally live in.
And there's a protected marine park there in Sydney, which has really bounced back to life in the last 20, 30 years.
And there's cuttlefish which change colours so radically and beautifully.
And they just ripple around like they look so prehistoric.
They're amazing. And there's turtles.
And they're just big schools of yellowfish.
And you might see a little octopus down one end of the beach.
And I was going through some difficult times and I was asked to write about it was actually the New York Times was opening a bureau here.
They asked me to write about swimming.
And I kept thinking, what is it that this is doing to me?
Firstly, it's getting me out of bed, which is I don't naturally love early mornings and also obviously the exercise.
But it was carrying me through my days in a way that I was like, there's something else about this.
There's something that is lifting me up.
And I just realised that all was probably the best way to describe what it feels like to be small in this vast ocean, to be marvelling at all the things that I'm seeing and the sunrises and the sunsets.
And I realised something really fundamental, which was really life changing for me, which was it was not something kind of like, you know, joyful and happy and nice to do, but this was giving me strength.
This was making me strong.
This was something if I deliberately did it, would give me like mental, spiritual muscle to get through my days.
You noticed that very clearly, did you?
Like from as soon as you started swimming?
I don't think I clocked.
I just loved doing it and you just grow addicted to it.
It was more like when you had to write about it, you had to had to refine that word.
I kept going, what is what is that?
It was great to think about all because I was like, what?
Okay, so when you're sitting on a hillside and you're looking up or wherever and you're looking up with like a massive canopy of stars, like what is that feeling like?
You feel good, right?
You feel soothed and calm and you're like a tiny little speck and that's also great.
But what is it? I just kept going thinking, what is that feeling?
It's a strange thing, isn't it?
Because you often hear people say like, oh, wow, when you are like in the middle of the forest or you see a huge tree or people who go into space, you know, you hear them always say like it makes you realize how small you are and how insignificant you are.
And I whenever I've heard people say that, I think, well, that sounds shit.
I don't want to feel small.
But clearly there's like a scientific because I do feel good and it's whenever I go in.
Whenever my partner, Jam, like my jam, my jam, my girlfriend, Jam, she is an awe hunter.
No doubt. What does she do?
Well, she's a photographer and it is her fuel.
And it's like she was born into the wrong place and she was like she grew up in the city and was always sort of told that she was a quote unquote like city girl.
And it's only since we've been together really, and we've had a chance to travel a bit and see a few things that she's realized how important nature and awe is to her.
But it's harder to find when you're in a city.
But obviously you've found ways to find awe every single day.
Yeah, I think that we have to be careful not to think too like I have to go to the Grand Canyon, the Niagara Falls or the Taj Mahal.
Like you can you can see it in your garden.
You can see things to come to life in there.
You can watch sunrises and sunsets.
You can observe what I don't know the birds are doing.
There's been a bird like spin nesting in one of my local trees and producing little little chicks, which has been like so delightful.
You can see it in other human beings.
I think it's important to realize you don't need expensive trips away.
But yes, getting closer to nature.
Also things like music and architecture and sporting matches and, you know, Taylor Swift concerts.
So they talk about that experience is like collective effervescence, that high that you get.
Like, what is that high?
And that's joyful. And I think when we talk about being small, it's not like you are puny, you are foolish.
You are just like a pimple on the butt of the universe.
I don't think they're saying it's not about that, right.
Thank you. Yeah. And I meant that for you personally.
Yes, no, I understood.
You had that exact thought.
I was right all over my face.
It's about saying you are part of this wild and teeming and fragile planet that we need to take care of.
So when you mention astronauts, they call it the overview effects, the feeling of being far away from the Earth or having just a view from up high.
And they talk about the Earth disappearing behind their thumb and what that does to them and how a lot of them go up and their doctors and their engineers and their teachers and they come back and they are philanthropists and poets and philosophers and theologians.
They've realized our connectedness.
They realize the national boundaries don't matter at all.
You realize how important it is to protect and preserve what we've got.
So I think it's small in a really good way.
Almost like getting out of and I guess there are different experiences, but whenever we you know, sometimes you find yourself in a bubble of sorts and that might be like a work bubble or your house or your suburb and you that becomes your whole world.
And that world, whether it be your job or your suburb, it feels like the most important thing and it's only when you get out of it, do you realize, oh God, the world is so much bigger than that street of shops that I've spent my entire life going up and down.
And then it's like your brain is like broken open or something and your perspective just shifts.
That feels like awe to me.
I just wanted to ask you with awe and figuring out what that word was and how to describe that feeling.
If you weren't a writer, do you think it would have been as easy to access what you've discovered?
I think that's a good question.
I wouldn't be able to articulate it for other people, maybe.
And I wouldn't be as clear about all the other research and how it just ties into just such a common thirst that we have.
I was making sense of it when I was writing about it.
And my mind was boggling like I could have kept going on and on and on and on.
I didn't have a sectional sport and I didn't have a sectional music.
I didn't have a sectional architecture.
All of those things are amazing when you think about them in terms of awe.
I kept thinking, oh, wait, what about those people that chase storms?
And what about the the astronauts?
And I just kept thinking of all these different ways that we experience all but don't necessarily talk about it in that way.
But I think I had this really strong instinct that it was giving me strength.
And I was holding onto it very tightly at a difficult time.
And I do quote in Phosphorescence, a one called Rachel Carson.
So she wrote The Silent Spring in 1962 in the US, which is in many ways kick started the modern environmental movement there.
And she documented what pesticides were doing to the waterways, to the soils, to the birds.
Hence, Silent Spring because there were silences.
And she was so right.
I mean, there was poison going all the way through the landscape and having terrible impacts.
And she was under a lot of attack for that.
From the fertilizer and the pesticides industry and so on.
And what she did during that period while writing it and thinking through it to fortify herself was to pursue wonder and awe.
And she would take her nephew Roger walking through the forests of Maine and they would go along rock pools at night with torches and shine them in to see what's been happening.
But so she said the work she was proudest of, which was a few years before that.
In 1956, she wrote an essay on how to teach your children wonder.
It's really beautiful.
And I recommend it.
And she says in it, if I could whisper in the ear of the fairy godmother present at every christening of the children, I would wish them an inalienable sense of wonder, one that would last throughout their life and would fortify them against like artificial and sterile preoccupations.
And at the end, she says, so we not be alienated from the sources of our strength.
I was like, oh, that's it.
That's it. We forget this makes us strong.
And it's not about all these terrible things are happening in the world.
Don't worry. Lie under a tree or go for a swim or, you know, like this is about all these things are happening in the world in your local street, in countries, in battlefields and in your own heart and your own home.
You need to find out what makes you strong and you need to pursue that.
So that's really beautiful for people who are listening to this thinking, yeah, I probably need to seek out or a little bit more.
Where would you start?
So what scientists use now, they measure the impact of war on us in all different kinds of ways.
They'll get a bunch of students to walk through a park, see what happens to their heart rates, see what happens to all various different different measurements and have found, for example, with forest therapy that it's incredible what that does to your physical and your mental health.
Vision of green can even help being near a park.
Even having green plants around you, all these things really can help.
Sight of green and blue is very helpful.
One of the ways they measure it is through goosebumps.
So the good test for yourself is to think when did I last experience goosebumps?
Like the series of books.
Yeah, you wrote those as well.
I didn't realize that was such a big part of war.
But yeah, it was a great series.
Does anything spring to mind for you for like when you last heard goosebumps?
Goosebumps. Music. No, I do know.
I know. So my my Nana passed away a few weeks ago now and at the funeral, my mum was talking and I just felt this immense sense of like, I was so proud of my mum.
And and it was just so powerful and and I rarely get outwardly emotional, I think.
And I don't really know what that is, but I had to talk as well.
Had to I'm a one to do speaking on behalf of like all the grandchildren because I'm the oldest.
And and I was just like and I hadn't planned to say it because I didn't know how I'd feel, obviously, about mum speaking.
But mum has gone through a lot in the last year.
She lost her sister as well to cancer.
And knowing what she's gone through and how strong my mum is and seeing her talk so beautifully in front of like family and friends, I just got this overwhelming sense.
And when I was speaking, I couldn't I just couldn't help but cry.
But the goosebump, I don't know if that's goosebumps, but that it was just overwhelming feeling sitting in the seat watching her speak, feeling so proud and goosebumps and tingles.
And then I had to then go up and speak.
And it was just I just yeah, it was very, very powerful, very powerful.
That's beautiful. I don't know if I was going to give an example of mine, but it's not quite as No, but it's such a varied experience of all.
Tell us what, because I want to talk about that one.
But I want to come back to you.
I had two. I can think of two that spring to mind in the last few weeks.
Last night on the plane, actually, I sent you a photo from on the plane.
Last night I was I was sitting between two giants who are the biggest men I've ever seen in my entire life.
And I did look very squished.
They were taking up both of them are taking up half my seat.
So there wasn't I was completely sandwiched to a half hour flight.
I thought, gosh, this is going to be challenging.
And I was just listening to music and the song, All That Really Matters by Teddy Swims.
It's like a pop song.
I just and I had goosebumps, like just listening to the lyrics of that.
What was in the lyrics?
Find someone to love.
Find someone who'd die for you.
Find someone who'll be there for you.
And it was just repeated.
And it's such a beautiful song.
And I'm not really beginning to pop music, but I was just I really got me.
The other one about about a month ago now, Grace Tame, who we had on the podcast, asked me if I would run with it one morning and we met in East Melbourne at the Pullman Hotel where she was staying with a friend of hers, Phoebe.
And it was 645 in the morning and the sun hadn't come up yet.
And we ran towards the MCG and then we sort of turned right towards the city.
And you could see the reflection of the sun rising on the buildings completely still.
Wow. Not a breath of wind, not a cloud in the sky.
And Grace has this thing when she runs where when she runs past someone, she says hi to them.
She greets everyone that runs past her.
Well, I've got headphones on whether on a bike.
She says, morning to every single person.
And it was a combination of.
So I had goosebumps really because I was really cold.
And then just seeing the sunrise, reflection of the sunrise, the frosty morning being there with Grace and Phoebe and then and her greeting everyone, it was just it was so endearing.
And I got goosebumps.
So my goosebumps got goosebumps.
It was just double goosebumps.
It was just incredible.
I was on a high from that for the rest of the day.
Right. That's the high that you want to bottle.
I think I've had goosebumps from Grace.
Um, because I so admire her.
It's not it's her courage, but it's also the way she keeps trying to make things better for other people.
Like she fights so hard for other people of those kinds of things won't happen to her before.
And to your point, like, so the reason I then went on to write this book called Bright Shining, How Grace changes everything, was about because.
Not Grace time, not Grace.
Although you could write that book.
Grace changes a lot.
In fact, you've got Grace written above your front door.
Yes, it's been graffitied above the I don't know if Grace time did that, but it's been graffitied above it.
Right. I'd love it if we saw this footage of her tagging her name as she left.
I've put a sprocket.
Anyway, but um, so after looking at all the research on war, there's a man called Daka Keltner.
He's from the University of California, Berkley.
And he's done lots of work on a man who when I was doing regular therapy with my old psychologist, she recommended me to look into Daka Keltner's work.
And she said, I'm sure she'll be fine with saying this.
She said, she said, you should definitely look into Daka Keltner.
He's incredible and doesn't hurt that he's easy on the art.
Every therapist should have such things in mind.
Yeah, definitely. It's important to me.
It's true, actually, because he's got these like, tousle grey hair and he's always like, he speak to him.
He's like, I've just come back from a Himalayas, where I've been, like, you know, rafting or tracking or whatever.
So he did a study relatively recently, which was across countries, 26 countries, 2 ,600 people to try to find out what is the most common way people experience or is it through, you know, symphonies or waterfalls or architecture or big stadium concerts?
And he found that across all these countries, across all these different dialects and histories and cultures, that the number one way, and I would have bet on nature.
I would have said 100 % nature.
The number one way was seeing it in each other, was seeing acts of moral beauty, so acts of great decency or kindness or generosity or courage.
And that's what made me want to write this next book, which was like, OK, we don't even talk about that enough.
What does that look like?
What happens when you witness something like that?
And not an ostentatious like, I'm going to give X amount to this foundation and have my name written in large on a wall, but those quiet acts of devotion and selflessness that we see all around us that go beyond what is required, beyond being like, I'm a nice person who does nice things, like something
that when you're looking after someone who doesn't necessarily deserve it, when you're giving someone a break, when they've screwed up so many times, when you don't let them be defined by the very worst they've done.
When like Cindy McAuliffe, whose mother was murdered by a teenager in a in a Brisbane car park, just held a press conference a couple of days afterwards to say, do not use this to racially vilify a group of people that stood up there with a member of the African -American community in the middle of her
grief. Said my mother was about peace and she was about love and she wouldn't want this.
Michelle Turvy, you know, whose son Cassie is 10 years old.
He's got goosebumps then.
Yeah, full of so much joy.
His teacher said he was like the moral compass of his group of friends, just a beautiful kid, like killed.
And she came out and again called for peace and called for unity and is working with, you know, is working with police on the question of racism from the blood donors who go every two weeks.
And I spoke to blood donors who've been doing it for 50 years.
They take vacations and give blood in like all these glamorous spots around the world and can tell me all the different ways they extract blood.
When you think about it, we're used to the idea, OK, blood donation, that is such a profound act.
You don't know who it's going to, who it could be a complete dickhead, but there's a need and you as a human will give your actual blood so that they can walk or so that they can live another day.
So I found that really interesting.
So what you're talking about with your mother is a classic example of that.
A recognition of who she is and what she's overcoming and the fact that in even these moments of great grief or horror or pain or mourning, you can see beauty.
It's quite amazing because then, you know, you talked about being, you know, us as being or hunters and trying to seek out or but it actually kind of empowers us to be or spreaders totally in many ways, like the way that we behave and act around other people, you know, without being ostentatious about it,
without being performative about it necessarily.
But by just being gracious and forgiving when you need to be is, yeah, can be can spread all yourself.
Yeah. So a little while ago, my seven year old son and four year old daughter playing in her room and she's got a very springy mattress and they both worked out that if you jump in the air and land on it with your bottom, with your feet hanging off the edge, it sort of propels you forward.
And they can spend a long time playing that game.
It's great for me because I can literally lie in bed and watch them do it.
And my seven year old the other day he jumped really high and he just got the wrong angle and he went flying head first across the room.
It was like something from a cartoon.
But that he's going, he's like parallel to the ground head towards a cupboard and I could just say I was like, well, this is going to be I had time to think this is going to be really bad before it happened.
You had time to put really in the sentence as well.
Wow. Some would say you could have been more efficient.
But yeah, I had the time, I had the time.
So and so he he plummets head first into the cupboard and he's beside himself and very distraught and very upset and very stressed.
And I sort of forgot about Elsie, the four year old.
And I gave him a big hug and I took him downstairs, tried to find Penny so she could help.
And then I went back upstairs and I found Elsie.
She was literally in the fatal position on her bed sobbing.
And I said, what happened to you?
All right. And she said, 24, she said, what happened to Benji?
She said, I feel sad of him and she's trying to feel sad for him.
And I was just thinking, I gave me goosebumps because I was I was watching my four year old daughter display empathy like that was it was empathy.
She was feeling exactly what he was feeling.
She was so upset that he was upset that it made her cry.
But the sentence, I'm sad of him.
In such an awful moment when both my kids are crying, it filled me with so much joy and so much warmth.
And it it got me through.
He was really hurt and we're really worried about because it was head first into a wall.
But I just felt so good throughout the whole time because I was like, well, my daughter has just displayed a really strong sense of empathy.
And it's really beautiful.
Yeah. So can we talk about Christ then?
That really so going from awful to graceful with grace.
You hunting grace as well when you're getting about your day, you're looking for acts of grace or moments of grace as well.
Or is it something that you just definitely looking for it?
Because it's like, how do we encourage more of it?
Like genuinely like that remarkable goodness.
Like, how do you foster it?
Like, I was really consumed with that question because a lot of research that shows that it is actually contagious.
If we see it, we're more likely to do it.
There was one study of college students brains and they showed them funny videos and videos of people in distress and videos of people coming to help them.
Funny videos zero impact on their brain.
Just nothing, just no response.
And people in distress, you know, the fight or flight, they get worried.
And then there's a comfort to seeing something being done about it.
And it maps out it physically, they physically have a response to it and are more likely to go and do something for other people.
It's the same actually with studies around or if they had they had to control group just I don't know, going for some a walk somewhere boring.
They had another another group going through a grove of I think Californian redwoods.
And when they came out, the redwood group were more likely to help someone than the others when they were doing things like dropping pens or testing them in various ways.
So the thing about how we can foster it is also to identify when it happens, because if you just wake up and go, OK, the world is full of it is full of heinous acts.
There's this epic division.
People are lonelier than before.
There's a lot of negativity around and people feel incredibly overwhelmed before they've got out of bed.
And so how do we talk about the other moments when we only see presidents and politicians spit and brawl and like exploit each other's weaknesses?
How do we say this other stuff matters to us as well?
So you have to look for it and you have to talk about it and talk to your kids about when you see it and like applaud it when you see it.
Like and show that we do first, not just for someone who can say you should be scared and you should be angry and you should dislike these people.
And if you do, I'll get into power and I will do something about those fears.
You should be doing like what Paul Keating spoke about.
You should be pulling the golden threads in the community like which we saw after, for example, the same sex marriage debate.
Think about the joy after that vote went through.
Yeah, it spoke to a bigger spirit in us.
Now that you've written a book about grace and about forgiveness, essentially, because I know that we've done a lot of these episodes and I do.
I just love reading books about, I don't know, like philosophy and psychology and like just ways that we can be better people or we can be happier, all the spectrum of that.
But I get so much information and I have so much now like I'm lucky to have so much knowledge about it and how to be the best version of me.
But I still find it often very hard actually put that knowledge into practice.
And so I just wanted to ask you, so with grace and forgiveness, now that you know so much about it, do you still find it hard at times to forgive people in your own life?
Oh, my gosh, yes, absolutely.
It's funny, like my dad was teasing me about this recently because someone sent me a text message and was like, oh, I don't know, someone had been like quite a jerk to me and was like, oh, let me know if I can do anything to help you.
And I was like, yeah, you can get stuffed, you know, and dad was like, oh, put that in your book.
That's nice. So now I can't like flip some of the bird randomly.
Yeah, but forgiveness, I found incredibly difficult to write about, like all hunting is very obvious.
It's being like completely decent and like kind and courageous, all those things and being good in a way that really strikes or in other people that really makes you stop and think.
Forgiveness is tough when we have a culture where some things have historically always been forgiven.
For example, male violence against women.
Do you just say, OK, I'll just forgive that when there's just no consequences when people are barely reporting it, let alone going to jail?
Like what is what are we doing there?
And are we just asking people to accept a status quo?
So I think it's important to know that forgiveness is not separate to justice and consequences and those kinds of things because I've grown up with the value.
Like my mom was really strong on forgiving and I could see how it can change people's lives.
I can see how you can unburden yourself and really are doing something for yourself when you're cutting yourself off from things, bad things people have done to you.
But I've also reported a lot on sexual violence and also domestic violence and I've seen it be weaponized against those people.
This bad thing happened to you.
OK, now forgive, even when there's no remorse.
So when they go through, for example, restorative justice conferences, remorse has to be there before they'll even put those two people together.
So, yeah, I think about it a lot and I lean strongly towards forgiving.
But I think you also have to protect yourself when you've got toxic situations.
It doesn't mean being rolled over, you know, like.
And that's why that what makes that story you told before about the woman who asked everyone not to use this as a way to racially vilify a group of people.
It's incredible to have that perspective that soon after something tragic happening.
I can't imagine how hard that would be if someone has and I imagine it would take a lot of work to get to a point where you can forgive the person who's brought you so much pain.
Yeah. But I don't know, like this is a terrible comparison and I don't mean to compare the two.
But road rage, for example, they drive off and you're angry for an hour.
Yeah, it festers in you.
It festers in you. Yeah, exactly.
But if you were able to go, oh, well, let's assume it was an accident.
Right. I forgive the person.
Or was that person are they in a relationship of coercive control?
Yeah. Have they just been told by their partner?
They don't love them anymore.
Have they just got a terrible diagnosis?
I mean, who knows? Or they could just be a jerk, in which case they can continue being a jerk because those people exist in life.
But it is about like protecting your own heart in a lot of ways.
And a lot of people call it an unburdening, which I think is a really useful term to you.
So there was one woman I spoke to called Debbie McGrath and her brother was killed when he was 20.
She was 24 and it was like his best mate just shot him one night, never given a reason for it.
And literally were paying dark to the pub the night before, just shot him, killed him.
And he went to jail.
But she became possessed with such rage that it ate her up, her insight.
She got diabetes. She slept, walked.
She was insomniac, put on a lot of weight.
It affected the health of her father.
And she said to me, she couldn't even look at a sunset without thinking of murder.
How would she murder this guy?
And after 10 years, she sat down with him in this restorative justice session and said to him, this is what you did to me, and listed all of the things and what had happened to her.
This is what you did to my father and his health.
This is what you did to my brother's son who hasn't had his father for his whole life.
And she said there was a point during that conference where she just unconsciously just looked around because it felt like this weight had been lifted off her.
Just by sharing what she did to her.
By saying, yeah, by just getting it off.
And then she said she felt at the end as though she'd got the suitcases of what he had done to her and left it at his feet.
That was his and that was not to do with her.
And then when she left, the thing that she'd struggled with most is being able to love again because to her love was associated with loss.
But now after that moment, that moment changed her life.
And she has a grandson now and a grandkids and she's able to love them.
And she's so relieved about it.
Wow. Yeah. Was it purely just the simple act of like telling the story to him and this is what you've done?
Was that the thing that enabled her to be able to move past it to a certain degree?
I think so. I think a lot of it is almost in the symbolic sense of this is yours.
I'm not going to be defined by the horrible things you have done.
They are yours and I'm giving it back to you.
And I'm telling you what it meant because you have to know this isn't just about breaking a law.
This was about devastating a family and beyond that, let alone stealing someone's life.
And I really noticed that with the I interviewed a lot of people who'd been through significant trauma.
And that was a real thread when I spoke to Aunty Lorraine Peters, who's a stolen generation survivor.
And she's like, forgiveness.
I don't even understand that word.
You know, she said people often say to me, you know, like talk to me about forgiveness and I say, why that's that's your shit.
That's not mine. Why are you asking me to?
And I don't know if you remember that Scott Morrison on one sorry day gave a speech in which he said, you know, saying sorry is one thing, but now it's time to forgive.
Forgive is another thing to do.
And they were just like, get in the bin because you can't put that burden.
Like why is the burden on the victim to deal with the mess that has been made?
You know, that said, I do think that you can have profound moments of forgiveness.
But when I was thinking about Grace and I spent time with Aunty Lorraine, who would come, you know, been taken as a child to the Kudemundra girls home and had a horrific experience.
Yet I see in her the most astonishing Grace.
She is a person who's so kind of strong and kind and is continuing to walk alongside and hope that things can get better.
Like she just had such a striking spirit.
That I thought that to me was where the grace is in this situation, not coming down and saying, oh, this is over now, right?
We can all forgive this nonsense now.
So but forgiving personally, aside from like broader wrongs that are being done culturally can, I think, free you.
It just frees you. I was wondering if if you wouldn't, and maybe the maybe the answer is obvious, but I just don't ask anyway.
But you talked before about like before you went ocean swimming.
Yeah, this is going back.
Yes. But before you went ocean swimming, you were struggling with some tough things.
You're talking about your cancer, getting over cancer or is there other other things that you would?
I think, yeah, it was it was mainly cancer.
I did start when I would gone through.
I've moved back from the States.
I was going through a divorce and I was quite sleepless and I was really struggling with it.
And I would still just get up and do that first thing in the morning.
And that really gave me an anchor.
And was there a time before you found ocean swimming?
Was that I'm just I'm only asking this because I know so many people who, you know, that they're in like a really bad rut or they've got bad mental health, depressed, anxious, whatever it might be.
And they struggle to get out of bed and they struggle to do things.
The first time you went ocean swimming.
Like how did you like why did you do it?
I was living in New York and I was back visiting my family and my dad is a mad ocean swimmer.
And jet lag was so strange.
I'm like, yep, sure.
I'll do it. Like a little break from the kids for a little bit.
I think my son was maybe four months old or something.
And so my mom would look after him and I would dash down for my mental health session.
And I think then when I got my cancer diagnosis, I just couldn't wait to get back in the water.
And I started I wanted to write this book.
I started thinking this is something I have held on to that has just given me this strength and this comfort.
So I called my book Bright Shining because it's from a line in Amazing Grace.
When we've been there 10 ,000 years, bright shining like the sun because to me it's like the sun warms us, it comforts us.
It's also gritty and noisy and like you get up close and it's all a whole bunch of explosions going on.
I don't think you should ever see grace as an easy thing.
It's not just about being nice and polite.
It is hard to act this way in the world sometimes.
But I found that people often sing it when they have no words.
And I found that again and again.
Stories and studies of people in prison cells or after major public disasters them saying it.
And there was a time when Obama sang it.
He, can you remember this?
Yeah, I do remember.
And it was after the Sandy Hook shooting and all these kids, 26 year olds killed, gun down and Congress did nothing and he was at his wit's end and he thought I cannot go to another one of these funerals.
What can I say now?
What can I possibly say?
Because we've not done nearly enough to deal with this.
We've done nothing.
And then another Schmaier shooting and he's asked to come and speak because a friend of his, a reverend, was killed in Atlanta and he speaks on his podcast with Bruce Springsteen, the Renegades, about that moment and how coming down he just had nothing to say.
But he'd been corresponding with Marilynne Robinson, the author about grace, that reservoir of goodness which goes beyond the everyday ordinariness of things.
And he spoke about it.
It's like he was like, if we don't have that, what have we got if we don't have grace?
And there's kind of in a sense that there's a mystery to it.
And then he stops and he.
I think there's quite a long pause and he starts to sing it.
And you see the faces of people behind him.
They start to rise and they beam and people are crying.
I haven't seen this.
Oh, you have to check the show notes.
You'll put a link to it.
Thank you. But you can see what he did in that moment, which is to say, yes, we are grieving and we are mourning and life can be absolutely brutal and completely sark.
But this is why we go forward.
In the midst of all of this, we can be better and we can do better and we have each other and we love each other.
And we're mourning because we love.
And it's like it just completely blows me away.
It's a really long answer to your question.
But yes, I've had to hold on to those things.
Wow. So I'm really interested while we're talking about grace on the topic of grace, the link to spirituality, what spirituality is to you and has been to you along your journey.
Yeah. Well, that's a really big question.
Spirituality, I mean, I think when I'm talking about these subjects, I often think there's no word for that.
What is the word for what is the word for the way you feel when you experience or what is the word when you witness like a moment like really the kind of grace of of that kind of goodness that's undeserved of people who loving the unlovable, forgiving the unforgivable.
And actually, a lot of that can be those words and ideas within spirituality, like it's recognizing that we are not just, you know, lumps of flesh, but we have hearts and, you know, I love that experiment where the guy tried to, it was a doctor who tried to measure the human soul, you know, and he came
up and it was 21 .3 grams.
Oh, that's right. Even when he says 21, it's 0 .3.
And it was completely, it was just obviously was a nonsense of an experiment.
Like he was trying to get people at the point that they were dying and and and way like them before and just before and just after one of them died on the scales, which was completely awkward.
But I love, I love the I love the poetry of the idea.
And I just love the recognition.
We've talked a bit about, you know, giving people the benefit of the doubt and the person in the cart was not just someone who was being extremely annoying.
There was something going on in their life.
That to me is identifying there's a person next to you that's got a life, a heart, a soul.
That is what I saw in COVID, for example, when people couldn't be with their loved ones in hospitals when they were really sick and lot of nurses found that really traumatic because they were seeing these people really suffering and dying sometimes on their own.
And there were two women in Brazil that were nurses at Sao Paulo Hospital and they went and got these rubber gloves and filled them with warm water and knotted them together at the ends and then slid them over people's hands.
So they would have one warm water glove here and one warm water glove there.
And it felt like their hands were being held.
And they immediately noticed a change in their vitals, in their blood perfusion.
There was a physical response to that, which was from a stranger.
They didn't know them.
It's a rubber glove.
And yet it was an act of love in the midst of all of that reminding them that they were loved.
So that is to my point about needing to recognize we have a spiritual dimension, which is about love and a yearning for love and a yearning for the transcendent.
And the transcendent meaning that we are small and part of a big universe and it's about more than us and so much of it is about each other.
So definitely there's a lot of spirituality in what I think about and what I do about.
I've grown up in the church and my mother was a woman of really strong faith and I watched her forgive people.
I watched her work with women in prison.
I watched her give people always the benefit of the doubt.
And I saw what that did to people and that really had a very strong impact on me.
I'm probably very much in like the Nick Cave school of I'm not that interested in a lot of dogma, but I really strongly feel that we reach towards good and we reach towards love and that that's ultimately what we're kind of about.
I've... Wow. I mean, now with a Nick Cave reference, it's officially horrific that Josh isn't here.
Oh no, I'm sorry. Sorry, but yes.
I feel like I need to speak to Josh at another time.
So, yeah, but I think the church has had a lot of problems, which is a real shame because there's a lot of really good people in the pews just who are broken and vulnerable and just like the rest of us and trying to make a decent fist of life and trying to be a good human being.
But I think I've really wrestled with the church's attitude to women, to LGBTQI people.
And I think that's been really rough and really destructive.
And so that's been kind of where I've stood.
When I watch religion get knotted up with a conservative kind of politics, that to me is really taking away from loving better and looking after the widow and the orphan and the poor.
That's just, yeah. I remember when I...
There's a book called The Courage to be Disliked, which I read a while ago and really fundamentally changed my view on everything.
It sort of was one of those books that I read at the right time.
It absolutely answered all of the unconscious questions that I had about life.
And I was reading, I was like, this book.
I was like this, everything in this book, I want to live this book, all the sort of lessons, teachings, everything is like this is for me.
And I remember consciously thinking, God, it would be great if I could like go somewhere every week.
And it just like reminded me of all the lessons from the book.
And I realized like, that's why people go to church.
And I was like, and I'd never thought about like that.
But I was like, if there was like someone going like remember this bit from The Courage to Be Disliked, remember this bit.
And it is exactly the same for many people.
Yes. And it's obviously different for different people.
But that was like the first time I truly understood why someone would go to church every week.
And it's also even if like the person at the front is saying things which you don't even necessarily agree with or don't even connect with, it's a time to sit and reflect like, where am I at?
Like where else do we sit and congregate and think about character?
Like, am I a strong person?
Like, am I being in the right way?
Am I plagued with my own bollocks?
You know? But yeah, and I think I think that's the benefit of it.
Yeah, I think for a lot of people who are outside the church, it gets kind of distorted by the politics around it.
But at its heart, it has to be people getting together and just trying to try to get on by, I think.
The first time you swam in the ocean.
Yeah. When you go to the water, you think this is going to be really good for me or is it unfreezing?
I don't get changed.
I need a coffee. Or was it good straight away?
It was good. I'm not a great swimmer.
I'm not fast. I just love it.
It's the whole ritual of it as well.
You have a shower, you have a coffee, and then you're back and you're kind of buzzing.
And I identified that was something that I really loved.
And so I moved near there.
Like, I now live near that swim.
It's kind of so built into me.
It's I think there's a documentary called The Pool, which is all about icebergs.
And it's interviews with all the people who, the people who've been going there for years.
And essentially it looks like it's about the community around that particular pool.
But there are so many of them along that coastline.
The ritual of going to the ocean, to the beach or something, some sort of natural wonder with community every day is it changes people's lives.
It's wild. I've seen that time and time again.
And every time I travel, I'll look up who the local swim group is and kind of meet them.
And sometimes I'll be a group of octogenarians and I'm like feeling really fast that day.
And the same banter, the same chat, the weather, the jellyfish, the stingers, the whatever.
And it can be on any, it doesn't have to be in one of those ocean pools.
There's just, they're all around the country, people doing it.
There's a group in Melbourne called Phosphorescence.
Is it really? As in named after your book.
Yeah. And where did I swim?
I should have swum with them actually when I was down here.
What am I doing here?
Come back with us. You rocked up.
Wait a minute. Yeah, come and join the group Julia Band.
Do you like our name?
It's great to have a passion that you can do anywhere in the world.
Yeah, like you're running.
Yeah, I will look up the local Astrac and you just go there and there's just every track straight up its own personality, their own characters.
And you can see that they're all the time.
And when people come to the track that I trained at, they aren't usually there.
You're like, oh, this person's new.
And it's just exciting to have new people around and you all share a love of the same thing.
It's great. I was actually on the plane yesterday, I was looking through photos as well.
And I was looking through photos of this year.
And I did one of the, so we finished our live tour.
We were all over the country in 24 shows and I was just looking different photos that sparked different memories.
And one of the highlights, if someone's to say, what are the, one of the special moments of the tour?
One of them was when we're in Newcastle, you're writing your show.
So you can come, you're writing a TV show at the time.
But we arrived in Newcastle and it was cold and it was wet and it was blowing a gale.
And it was just really miserable outside.
And Josh and Bridget, our producer, myself, walked down to the beach, all rugged up, so cold and got there and there's no one there.
And it was, there was a storm coming over, it was dark clouds.
It was really windy.
Definitely wasn't safe in the ocean, but there's an ocean pool there.
Um, beautiful, which it didn't, it didn't even know it was there.
Yeah. And we got in there, it was really cold and we swam for a little bit and we went sat out on the edge of the pool and we took a photo of the throw of us there with a wave crashing over us.
Like it was just the most incredible moment that we had.
That sounds gorgeous.
I remember, I remember that day and you guys were going to go and I was like, and I was, I was on like a writing deadline.
And so I knew I had to get this thing finished, but now separated from it.
I regret not going with to that experience.
Yeah. And this, like I struggle with this all the time.
It's like prioritizing those things over work, but work always feels so important in the moment and feels so, and it, you know, and sometimes it is, sometimes that you are in a deadline and you have to do the thing.
Yeah. But I look back on it and I go like, it was too, like an hour maybe I should have just gone.
And it helps you work actually, but it doesn't feel like it at the time.
No, at the time, I cannot break to do anything fun, must work, must work.
And then you, you step away from it.
And months later, like I can only imagine how incredible that would have been.
And in my mind, in the moment, I was like, I can't go.
I can't afford to waste the time.
When in reality, it would have been this incredible experience and would have lifted me, you know, so high.
Yeah. And I would have had that memory forever.
So, yeah, it's, it's, it's such a good reminder to always, whenever those opportunities come along, like just take it, take it.
Do it. Well, it was like the influence of your book to me was say yes to adventures or say yes to slightly difficult things that you probably wouldn't usually do.
Yeah. Like I wouldn't usually jump in, you know, an ocean pool and when it's getting dark and it's cold and it's windy, I just wouldn't do that.
But that's the influence the book has I found for me.
Oh, that's so good.
I mean, I think the idea is people talk about happiness a lot and there's quite a bit of literature around and they measure which countries are happier.
And then there's the whole idea of the hedonic treadmill.
So the idea that you might get a promotion or a better house or the thing that you've always wanted, and then you will probably return to that same level of happiness.
This, that's a whole area of disputed research, whatever.
But I wanted to talk not about the smaller increments, but the times when you just think you can't go on, like the times when you're not sure you can swing your legs out of bed.
Like I really didn't want to put the burden on people riding phosphorescence.
Like not only do you have to survive, I don't know, an illness or whatever, you also have to sparkle when you're doing it.
Really like you can be sweary and cranky and grumpy and like none of this will change it.
But you'll find that if you build these things into your life and you do it with other people, because a big part of all is sharing, that it will slowly and strangely make a real difference.
And it's incredibly powerful.
The one of my favorite books I read during this time was called The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating.
And this one was really sick, confined to her bed.
She never really quite goes into what it is, but like for a good at least couple of years, she couldn't really leave her room.
But a friend gave her a plan that had a snail on it and she watched this snail over a period of time like have little babies and shoot, you could actually hear it.
They've got so many teeth.
They've got like thousands or something of teeth and she could hear it grinding at night.
And she just watched it and in a weird way, this snail like preserved her sanity.
She had a thing other than herself to look at and make sure the little babies were okay and whatever.
It's a very beautifully written book.
And I think to its point is sometimes when you go, everything in my life is like rubbish or I'm so fearful, so overwhelmed, or I've got this great loss and I'm not going to be able to feel that whole to just flip your lens and start looking around you.
On that, I'm pretty sure I read that you said could have been in phosphorescence, but you can't you can't receive or through a screen.
Yes. And I think like because I think often people in times of need, they'll turn to their phone, obviously, or they'll turn to TV as an escape as a way to.
But that that example, that story says it like, well, the you wouldn't get maybe you wouldn't get the same level of awe from seeing a documentary about that snail the plant that you know, from it being there.
So why is that? I struggle with that actually, because now in my feed on the gram, I just get so many like breaching whales and octopuses and funny little sea slugs.
The algorithm has you in its pleasures.
And I love it, but I also get exhausted by it.
And I go, I don't want to see that because normally to see a breaching whale would be ragging up and going down to the shore or going for a walk or like you would plan a whole trip around it and it would be like a journey.
And then seeing that would be unbelievable.
But just to slice it up and give it to you in 30 seconds without any of the anticipation and the hope and around it like I think robs it of something leeches it.
And we're not that that the Keltner study I was talking about earlier of the 26 countries, not one single one of those 2600 testimonies of stories of or mentioned a screen.
Not one. Not surprising.
And I think that's really revealing.
Yeah. There was a sunset.
I can't go back to this flight yesterday, but the sun was setting.
There was all everywhere.
There was sort of sun was flight numbers.
So some of the setting and I didn't notice it until very much the last minute.
I wish I'd been paying more attention because I was listening to music and looking at photos.
But when I looked out the window and I'm like, Oh my gosh, that's amazing.
And I looked at it for a couple of minutes and then I looked around to see how else I could look at someone to go, isn't this nice.
Yeah, every single person was on their screen.
And so I'm sure people were surrounded by a lot more before the advent of the smartphone.
I feel like we would see it all the time.
Yeah. Were you more open to it?
I think in the future we're going to go to places to pay for her for black spots where you can't access phones.
There is somewhat of a relief when you get somewhere and there's no phone coverage, isn't there?
I love it. And I went to, I took my kids to Ningaloo when I was writing this last book and to Swim with the Whale Sharks.
I loved, like Ningaloo is probably the best place I think I've ever been like just, just the beauty of it.
And the fact the reef is right off the shore so low tide, you'll see the coral like sticking up through it.
So you just take one step, two step, and then you're in and then there's just, it's teeming with life.
Like it's so, it sounds like a wind chime.
There's so much life on this reef and a big codfish and turtles smashing around.
They smash into like, they're really like drunken uncles at a party turtle.
They just like smash bits of reef off and all the rest of it.
Anyway, I was so excited to take my kids and Swim with the Whale Shark and they struggled so much because there was no wifi.
I was a bit like, yes, excellent.
I'm out. And they were like, no, like, like, like it was this trauma that they were without it.
And even I heard them speaking recently and one of them, my daughter was saying, I said, Oh, can you remember that time we went away and we didn't have wifi.
And I was like, guys, what about the whale shark?
And they were like, Oh yeah, that was great, but we're not doing that again.
Fascinate. I mean, I totally get it for that age.
Like, of course. That age is everything.
Penny, if you're listening, we, I promise we'll go there one day.
She wants to, she wants to go there.
There's nowhere else in the world she'd rather be.
And she brings it up probably once a month.
Oh, she's so right.
Yeah. We will get that.
And Jam, we will too.
All right. I'm coming as well.
Julia, there's a little boss.
Jam would love it if you can.
Can I ask about just you mentioned before, you don't need to go to the details of it, but I mean, just to there was a point in your life where you're going through a divorce and also you are unwell.
You had cancer. Is that was maybe like four years afterwards or something.
So, yeah, right. Yeah.
What's it like to, to know everything you know about.
Resilience. Yeah. To receive a diagnosis like that.
What, what happens in that moment?
Are you thinking, okay, I'm, are you pragmatic about it?
Are you, here's all the things I know that are going to help me or do you go to a pretty dark place for a while?
You go suddenly to another place, like the whole world changes.
Like for me, it felt like the stranger things, you know, when they suddenly get a flash and they're reminded of the underworld, it's like that, like a deathly place.
Like you're carrying it within you.
And that sense of your body betraying you is very, very intense.
The sense of uncertainty is really difficult.
It's like everything stills and slows and you've got a spotlight basically just on your feet.
You know what I mean?
Like nothing else matters.
It just strips away the in essentials.
In a way that gives you a clarity that's kind of beautiful and great, if you can hold on to it and you can get rid of whatever you're, you're sick with.
So yeah, it's dark and it's overwhelming.
I found even I think the time of diagnosis for me is so like electrifying and who knows what to head.
And I mean, terribly fearful for your children.
I mean, that's a difficulty just of like parent.
That's the number one pain and hurt and concern.
More sometimes it's more bleak afterwards when you're in so much pain and you're trying to rebuild and physically get back together again.
Like there's kind of a quite strangely isolating period.
So yeah, really the diagnosis is just it's it is a thunderbolt.
It's really shocking.
How long does it take until you start thinking to yourself, here's the stuff that I know I need to be doing right now.
Does that take a few days, a few weeks?
I did remember that there was this advice that I'd seen a psychologist when I was going through my at the end of my breakup and I said to him, I just don't know.
I just I do not know how I'm going to get through this.
I said to another one like, can I can I just accelerate this?
I just I know I'm upset.
Give me the shortcut.
Yeah, because I don't want to like waste time in this kind of zone.
And that's kind of the tricky bit of it.
But he said to me, look, that someone had said to him when he was a young man and going through some crisis, like this is the time, everything that you've ever been given in your life and everything you've ever been told, the books you've read, the affection you've been given, like your parents, your
friends, your movies, all the wisdom, all that love.
That's when you draw on that.
It's now. And I think that kind of put some steel in my spine when I remember that he'd said that you're like, I have to draw on that.
You do have a reservoir of all of that stuff.
And I developed a real thirst for awe and beauty.
I just, I just, it was a very strong instinct and I was still holding on to that.
Yeah. Knowing your story, I'm so fascinated by the tattoos on your inside of your arm, you don't need to go into detail if you're not comfortable.
I'm just interested.
Well, do you know I've not spoken about this?
This is brand new. Like, oh, we got a scoop.
We got a scoop. Okay.
So this one, there's this bit of script going down the middle and it says in French, un invincie ette, so an invincible summer.
And it's from that Camus quote, like, I found that there was within me in the depths of winter, an invincible summer.
Wow. And I wanted to have that here, which is this is, I'm holding up my left forearm because this is the bit where you get jabbed and you get all your cannulas and that's, that's often punctured and bruised.
And I wanted to mark that as my place.
And then, On, on invincible summer.
Yes. Well, because I don't know the quote.
I don't know where it comes from, but From the stranger.
Okay. So is, is that in terms of like, it's always summer for you, like you're always chasing a summer, or is it No matter what is pushing in on me, there'll always be something that is pushing back.
Oh, there'll always be that there is that kind of force and a light that no matter what you have, yeah.
Yeah. That's beautiful.
So, um, the new addition, brand new addition.
So that is a shell.
Yeah. And Like a spiral shell.
Yeah, I love the spiral shape.
And so it's an interesting story of awe.
So I was at Margaret River and a group of women I swim there.
I love this. Just so great.
Anyway, and we were going to narrow up and I'd actually been sick a couple of days beforehand, which was really boring, but I managed to do an event and then, um, go to narrow up, met my friend and my, and my best mate from Sydney came with me.
And Holly Ringlin was there as well.
She's a, she's an author and, um, wrote the Lost Flails of Alice Hart.
Just this delightful human.
Now she loves the water, but normally dips in it.
And she's had contact lenses since she was, um, a kid and has not just didn't compute that you could wear goggles to see underwater.
So she hasn't seen under the water for a long time.
So I gave her my goggles and I was like, come on.
She's like, I'm just a bit of a dip.
I'm like, just, let's just go around.
We went around a headland and she was lit up.
Like she couldn't believe it.
There was this beautiful lavender reef that we were going over and these tiny iridescent blue fish that were going in and out of little caves and these emerald green kelp, and it was really beautiful.
And I was so happy to be in the water.
Um, and she kept popping up and just brimming with the joy and the excitement of it and kept telling me in this kind of gargled tone about contact lenses and being a kid.
And I was trying to work out what she was saying.
And there was a point where I turned around and she just kind of went down and she came back up like this perfectly beautiful shell.
And as we were walking back up, there was a headland I said, I'd always wanted to get a tattoo of that, of that shell.
And she was like, Oh my God, me too.
Like, and we had this thing of like, it was like we were drunk, but we were drunk on like the oar, right?
This is just really beautiful experience on this wild edge of the coast.
So we stayed drunk in that sense for like a week.
And then when she came to Sydney and we just booked in and got one.
I know. That is cool.
Well, I wanted to, before we wrap up, I wanted to ask about your new podcast, which is the most obvious title of all time with you in it called Not Stupid.
It's like, yeah, obviously.
So can you tell us about this?
And Jeremy Fernandez as well.
Yeah, Jeremy Fernandez.
Yeah. Um, the delightful ABC anchor, you will have seen him.
He does like Mardi Gras and New Year's Eve.
Horrifically delightful.
Music. Isn't he right?
He's just like the nicest guy.
Absolutely awful. We wanted to do like, like, just, it can get so overwhelming.
Everything that comes through our feeds, I think, today.
So we just wanted to like hone in on a couple of stories that we think matter that, um, just kind of explain it to, um, just something we might have a different take on, some things that we're obsessed by.
Like we spoke about like Michael Mosley and, and how it almost got drowned on the weekend.
And so we wanted to like near death experiences and what that makes you realize about, about life and, and actually look for some of the joyful things in life as well and talk about them.
What an amazing perspective from you and Jeremy.
That would be incredible.
I will be subscribing.
Yeah, please. Can you tell us about that near death experience like that?
Oh yeah. So I went away with my family and we tried to go away once a year and this time we were staying well, this little Bay on the New South Wales central coast and I was like, let's just go down for a quick swim.
I was just going to dip.
My dad came down with his goggles and his bright pink cap and my brother, my younger brother came as well, but just with, with goggles anyway, and we would just, my dad kind of swam out and started to disappear.
But there's this really protected rock pool looking area and it's all kind of still except in one corner, which I now know has got like three currents going through it.
So it creates this kind of like feels like a whirlpool effect.
I went under a wave and I was just looking back at Shaw where I could see my nephews and suddenly boom, I was like dragged along into this roiling kind of patch of water and my brother was too.
And I was saying, I feel like I'm getting sucked under.
And he said, yeah, it's okay.
Let's, let's just swim up.
We'll swim across it.
So often you can get through a rip by swimming horizontal to the beach, right?
And he takes my hand and we're swimming and then we come up and I go, I know I'm not sure we're getting anywhere.
And this was our mistake to keep trying because we were swimming straight into it.
Into one of them, to one of those currents.
So we got exhausted.
After a couple more goes and he just turned to me and said, I can't do this.
I can't do this anymore.
And I was like, okay, cause we discussed, should we go out?
Should we float with it?
Cause that's what you do.
If anyone's listening, be calm and float with it.
Put up your hand. You need help.
But where we were looking, one of the currents was smashing onto the rock.
So we looked like if we're going to go with it, we would have got just sucked in.
So we were like stuck in this area.
Anyway. And he was like, okay, Joe, like just be calm.
Help. Like at the exact moment, he was telling me to just calm down and he puts his arm up and then, um, a local came running down.
His wife was on the beach and.
But didn't come out to us.
He literally said to me afterwards, you guys are obviously not locals.
People die in that spot.
Like he didn't want to, like people die.
There's a bunch of fatalities in that area because of the currents.
And anyway, I think at the moment at which he said we can't, he can't do it.
And we realized we were flagging and there was no obvious way out.
I was like, Oh, this is like, this is how it happens.
Yeah. This is it. It's happened to me a few times like that.
And with that really strange realization, I remember thinking, I'm so glad I've got my will in order, like, and then.
I just thought that.
But then I calmly was like, but where's dad?
My dad was like off like a lunatic out, like somewhere out there.
He said to me, they said the beach was getting like smaller and smaller.
And anyway, but as we were sitting there and he'd called to help, like a wave came from a random side of it.
It was coming over a reef and rocks and kind of pushed us towards some rocks.
So we would swim, swim, swim, swim.
So we just went furiously for it.
And then another wave got us.
So we clambered on and then smashed us onto it and smashed us onto it.
We just came back. They were all like dripping and bloody.
Um, dripping and bloody as well.
Yeah, we were really cut up.
Whoa. And then the problem was to get my dad.
And so a surfer had also hurt.
So he ran down. I just have never thought, man, that is just so attractive, this guy running down the beach.
Coming to save my dad.
It's so hot. Like, I'm sorry, I don't want to offend him because obviously I wasn't, but it was just like, there was something like a surfer coming down and he's in his wetsuit and he's going to save the day because my dad needed rescuing.
Like a lot of you offended him by saying that.
But just that I wasn't like meaning to like perv on him at the same time, but it was like respect for this King who's coming down.
So, um, anyway, and, uh, he got the, he didn't go straight in either.
And I found that really interesting and that's what a lot, the mistake, a lot of people make just jump in and get them, assess it, see what's happening with the currents.
He had one of those inflatable tubes we were trying to see and then dad got sucked into the bit we were in.
So what's an inflatable tube?
It's like a long, no, it's like one of those, you know, those yellow things?
They look like. Like a Baywatch the thing they have with them on Baywatch.
I'm not familiar, but they're about, I don't know, I guess 60 centimeters and it's inflatable, but one of my nephews had like, got into a lock box up the top and brought it down so it was somewhere near the beach because obviously locals know about this.
So he went out to dad and pulled him back in and then the problem was getting dead up on the rocks, which we got hammered on.
So they were like four people like pulling him up and again, he got, he had a scan to see if he had any breaks yesterday, but he got smashed.
Wow. We just came back to the house completely shredded and it was that, just that really wild sense of like, oh wow.
Like you think, you know, you know, basically rips, what to do.
You've reasonably confident as a swimmer and then yet so vulnerable in an instant.
And you think if you'd written phosphorescence, the ocean would look after you, like, it's the least it could do after giving it such a good rap for so long.
So much promo for it.
That's the weird thing for me is like such a place of joy, but to love it, you have to respect it and fear it.
Like, I think that's a big, it's terrifying thing.
Yeah, it's a terrifying but beautiful thing.
Yeah. And you know what, and the fact that we got out of it and also I do keep thinking about the fact of holding my brother's hand.
There was something really beautiful in that moment of us swimming to safety together.
Did you say anything to each other afterwards?
Oh my God. We have not stopped talking about it.
We've talked about strategy, like what we could have done, what we did right, what we, what we did wrong.
What about the emotion of it?
Oh, yeah. And I said to him, look, I felt I was thinking, I think we've got about one or two minutes here, and he said, I thought exactly the same.
And we felt that not everyone else could really entirely understand what had been the intensity of that particular moment.
We went down and looked at it that night.
I was trying to see, is there any signage?
It was like, why don't they tell people if there's been multiple fatalities in the area and all the rest of it.
But you know, again, become.
It's like, it's true of so many things in life, right?
Just become and Bob and hold on.
We'll definitely put a link in the show notes to your podcast.
Not stupid. I'm so happy that you didn't die.
It's been for so many reasons.
I've loved today. As I said, such a huge fan.
So it feels so exciting to chat to you and congratulations on everything you've done.
You have wonderful company.
I always love chatting to someone whose job it is to chat to someone.
It's been a joy to listen to you speak today.
Thank you. You guys are a joy to listen to as well.
Like someone asked me once, like, what is it about grace?
Like what is the emotion people experience when they see people like do really good things and like the things on behalf of the community and whatever.
And I was like, you know what, for me, it's comfort because you know that there's, this is why we're here.
You see the best of other people.
And you guys really do that too, because you're kind of sitting people down and like talking through their vulnerabilities and talking about and yet somehow we get through and yet somehow we continue to love and somehow we hold on to all the good stuff.
So thank you for what you guys do.
Oh, lovely. Look that up.
I'm just, I'm just, I'm so sad Josh isn't here for this conversation so much.
And we're saying before when Josh gets sick, he really gets sick.
So yeah, Josh, you listen to this in the edit.
We have missed you a lot.
Yeah. And Julia's great.
She's great. She's great.
You'd love it. She says hi.
I'll meet him another time.
When we're on Ingolue, we've got our Partridge family bus and we're all going there.
I'll be there. Yeah, brilliant.
Thank you, Julia. Thank you so much, Julia.
Thank you. The Imperfects is hosted and produced by Hugh van Carlenburg, Ryan Shelton and Josh van Carlenburg.
Our executive producer is Bridget North East, assistant producer, Bella North East.
This episode is edited by George Martin.
The Imperfects is not a licensed mental health service and is not a substitute for professional mental health advice, treatment or assessment.
The advice given in this episode is general in nature.
But if you're struggling, please see a health care professional or call Lifeline on 13 11 14.
The Imperfects is not a substitute for professional mental health advice.
