Transcript of AE 1320 - The Goss: What Are Our Hobbies?

G'day, you mob! Pete here. And this is another episode of Aussie English, the number one place for anyone and everyone wanting to learn Australian English. So today I have a Goss episode for you where I sit down with my old man, my father, Ian Smissen, and we talk about the week's news. Weather locally Down Under here in Australia, or non locally overseas in other parts of the world, okay. And we sometimes also talk about whatever comes to mind, right. If we can think of something interesting to share with you guys related to us or Australia, we also talk about that in The Goss.

So these episodes are specifically designed to try and give you content about many different topics where we're obviously speaking in English and there are multiple people having a natural and spontaneous conversation in English. So it is particularly good to improve your listening skills. In order to complement that, though, I really recommend that you join the podcast membership or the Academy membership at Aussie English, where you will get access to the full transcripts of these episodes, the PDFs, the downloads, and you can also use the online PDF reader to read and listen at the same time. Okay, so if you really, really want to improve your listening skills fast, get the transcript, listen and read at the same time. Keep practising and that is the quickest way to level up your English. Anyway, I've been rabbiting on a bit. I've been talking a bit. Let's just get into this episode guys. Smack the bird and let's get into it.

How's it going, dad?

Good, Pete. What's the goss? Don't know? Hang on. I've got to do it. Ready? Oh.

You have to learn. It's not, um. It's it's, um.

That's what I said.

Yeah. Just don't say the M. Yeah. So, anyway, um. Hobbies. Let's talk about hobbies.

Hobbies?

Mhm.

Yes.

What? What hobbies do you have, dad? What do you mean to- have they changed over your life? Have you always had the same hobbies? Is hobby hobbying?

Hobbying? The verb to hobby.

That's it. I like to hobby. Do Australians have loads more hobbies, you reckon than other nationalities?

I don't know. Well..

Let's chat about hobbies.

Yeah, it'll be a bit different, I suspect, because for my life, most of my childhood, through to young adult and even sort of, well, not quite well, it's really middle aged, but people don't call 35 middle aged but.

Feels like it.

Yeah, sort of mid 30s. I most of my spare time was spent doing sport.

Mhm.

Um and depending on where you live in the world um, there'll be either culturally and environmentally different sports.

What do you mean by that?

Uh, well we have games and, you know, games and sports in Australia. That would be unusual, in fact, unique in terms of other places like Australian football has only played in Australia. Yes, there are a few ex-pats who play it in other countries, but it's really only played in Australia.

It's starting to take off in the US, isn't it?

It is. Yeah. And in Canada there's a I've got a friend who plays in a league in Toronto. So.

I was..

In Toronto.

To go off. On a side note, I always wonder with sports like footy it's, it's like. Is this only popular because it's been played by Australians for a long time and so we care about it. Or if you were to introduce it to everyone in the in the world. Objectively, would it be taken up as, as much as it has been in Australia? And I always wonder this about other sports that are big, like cricket or like football, soccer, football. You know. A bunch of these ones. Tennis, you know, are these is there a cultural aspect to it which makes it way more popular than it would otherwise be, because of the fun or lack of fun that is derived from playing the game?

Mhm. Yeah. Well yeah I speculate..

I feel like, I feel like soccer there probably is. People are gonna hate me for it. But I feel like.

But soccer is the easy. The best thing about soccer is you, you need you need two things. You need a bit of ground and a ball. If your kids let's go out and play football and most football is like that. But soccer is the simplest game you can imagine.

True.

A round ball and a bit of ground that you can kick it around in, and kids can go out and have fun doing that.

Yeah.

Uh, in Australian football you can do the same. It's obviously an oval ball, but it's not quite the same is that you can't sort of play it. You practice it effectively. We when we were kids..

To kick. Kick to kick. Yeah. Kicked. The kids the same thing. And kick to kick. For those who don't understand, what we're talking about is basically you get two groups of people, you know, a handful of people separating from another handful of people by whatever distance people think they can kick it. And you, one person will grab the ball and they'll kick it to the other group, and they will try and catch the ball or wrestle each other to get it or whatever, and then kick it back.

Wasn't that marks up? I remember marks up where you would have a group of people. Someone starts up and they've got the ball, say 20m away from you and they kick the ball to you and you with everyone else standing in that group, compete to try and mark the ball.

Yeah.

And then.

Mark as in catch it.

Yeah. And then if you mark the ball you get to go up. So it's marks up or marker's up I can't remember.

Yeah. Don't know. We didn't. That's a new one to me.

That was what we played in primary school.

We were just straight kick to kick.

So you played the equivalent but you had two groups of people.

Two groups of people. Yeah. And the kick to kick thing was really just an excuse. Firstly, to see if you could kick it over the other group. So if you could kick it further than they expected to.

So they have to try and anticipate..

They've got to. Yeah, exactly. And then the second thing was if you're in that group of people trying to mark the ball or catch the ball, men who can jump on somebody else's shoulders to try and get the ball.

Yeah.

So you used to practice those spectacular or specky marks all the time. But.

Yeah, lots of good vocab in here for footy..

Yeah, specky. Go and take a specky.

Yeah.

And look. Yeah. Even the word mark, people go, how do you get a mark out of catching the ball. And it was that, you know originally and now it's notional. But originally if you caught the ball you would kick the ground to make a mark on it. And that's where you would kick the ball from. That's where somebody could come and stand to defend you taking that kick.

I guess we also use that verb to like..

You get on the mark.

Mark a player too, right. He's your mark. Would be like someone you have to follow.

Yeah, exactly. So it's, you know, different terminology, but same word. Um, yeah. So I think there is that element of easy games are things that people will will do. But getting back to your question about would something like Australian rules take off somewhere else? Um, obviously a new sport has to compete with existing ones.

Yeah.

And so if you go to North America, you're competing with baseball, basketball, American football, soccer, uh, and so on that are already well established.

That's the interesting experiment that you could play, right. Say, you you know, it's incredibly unethical and would never happen, but you can raise a million children.

Without any sport.

And not let them play any sport.

And then at 15 years old, you take..

No, then you introduce to subgroups, you know, you get a group of a thousand kids and you introduce different sports, and you find a way to work on, work out how much popularity there is for each sport, and then compare and contrast, because it would you would imagine that not all sports of all types would be equally taken up by a given population. You would think there must be ones that for inherent reasons as to how the sport is played, there's more pleasure that's derived. Perhaps it's more social, less social. So it would be so interesting to know what are what would be the if you were to find a group of people who had never picked up a sport and you introduced a sport to them, which would be the least popular and which would be the most popular, that would just absolutely take off.

Well, funnily enough, I think the most popular would end up being soccer or football, as it is called around, because it's the simplest game.

Yeah. You know, a handful of rules. Um, and it's just kick a ball.

I guess you do see that, right when you watch, um, you know, the news or docos or anything about people in impoverished countries, you know, say you go to Africa.

Yeah.

If you see kids out, out and about playing, it's likely they've got a ball and they're going to be playing soccer, right. If they're playing a sport.

Because it's simple.

Yeah, well that's it. And you need two people and a round object to kick.

Yeah, but but then like Australian football. Um, there's a friend of mine that's Canadian. Um, and he was, uh, out here in Australia. I took him to a football game, an AFL game, and and he fell in love with it. He just said, this is the best thing I've ever seen. Um, and started to watch it on TV when he got home, finding a way of watching games on TV and stuff, and then looked for a local competition and started to play and he just got addicted to it.

What what about Australian rules footy sparked such an interesting.

Well, I think what he really enjoyed about it is that it's just continuous.

Yeah. Okay.

That the game, the game only stops if there's a foul or a score.

Yeah.

Um, you know the game can go for five minutes.

Yeah.

Without any stoppages. Um, and so he really I think enjoyed that. And it's just a different skill set. You know the kicking, marking, catching. Handballing, running, as well. There's very few games that run as much as Australian football.

I think the midfield is, right. Some of them..

They're running 14, 15 on average.

More than that..

The 14, 15km a day, in a game, in two hours.

Yeah. It's, because they're stuck there in the midfield. They're halfway between either end, right. And they're going backwards and forwards.

Exactly.

Whereas if you have people in the defence or offence, they tend to be stuck in their end and they're still going to be running around but nowhere near as much. Mhm. I guess on both axes. Or no it'll be on the single axis, but both directions. Yeah. So hobbies.

Mhm. So other than that.

So you had sports growing up, your..

Sport was mainly, you know what I spent most of my time doing.

Were there other kids that, like in your era, were there certain hobbies that kids or people like went towards a lot more than, um, you know, say if you looked at the people this these days? Of the same age?

Yeah, I don't know. Um..

Like, was sports way more popular because you didn't have video games? You didn't have..

Yeah. There was no..

You didn't have all these this..

Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. And we, you know, we had a TV in the house when, yeah, first TV we got. I think I was about five years old.

Yeah.

So we had a TV in the house, but it was only allowed on. You could watch TV for an hour a day if you were lucky. The rest of the time was go outside. And what are you going to do..

Because your parents forced you to? Or there wasn't much to watch?

There wasn't the a, I was being forced to, but b there wasn't a lot to watch. Um, you know, back in those days, there were three channels when I was a child. Um.

What? ABC?

ABC. Seven and Nine.

Yeah. Okay.

Um. And then Ten came in later, and then. Now we've got multitude of channels, obviously.

But no one watches.

Nobody watches. Yeah, it's the old Bruce Springsteen song. 57 channels and nothing on. Um, but so it was go outside and play. And what are you going to do if you're outside playing? You'll make up games, but often it'll be, oh, I've got a ball or we've got bikes, let's race them around the block. You know, there was always you'd make up sports to do. Or we used to used to play cricket and loosely tennis, mostly hitting a ball and running to catch it because you weren't very good at it. Out on the road in the middle of the road, in front of our house.

I can imagine that must be something that's somewhat going to the wayside, because there's just so much traffic these days compared to back in your day. I would imagine that there was, what, one car per family. And..

If you were lucky.

The roads were quite often not sealed. They didn't have bitumen, so they were..

Yeah. Well, our the reason we played in front of our house is because when I was a young child, up until I suppose it was about 7 or 8, um, our little strip of about 200m of road was the only bit of bitumen road in the whole area.

Oh, wow. Okay. Why had they just done 200m? Isn't that like..

I have no idea why they did that, our end of that. I lived in number 12. So from about number 1 to about number 20 something was bitumenised.

If someone rich lived there and was like..

Who knows..

What the Council's arm..

Going to do it? The intersecting road. Its parallel for a while, and then one of the roads sort of cuts across diagonally to meet the bottom of our street. That was a larger, more main road and that was bitumenised. I suspect when they made that, they went, Oh, we've got a bit left over. Let's just go as far as we can.

I have in my head that it was just like the middle of your street was bitumen and then either side was dirt.

Oh no, no, no, it was..

Like, what?

No, it was bitumen..

That makes more sense..

There were footpaths.

That makes more sense.

But excuse me, but most of the streets in that suburb when I was a kid were were dirt roads. Um, and now that was unusual, um, because we lived in a suburb in sort of middle suburbia. Now it's sort of almost inner suburbia. It's about 14 or 15km from the city. Um, but it was this little sort of isolated, um, sort of middle class ghetto, uh, in a sense that it didn't have. There was a bus that ran there, but there was no train, no tram, um, no major commercial development. We didn't even have a supermarket. You know, there were little grocery stores and things. Even when supermarkets became more standard as a shopping way, we didn't have one. Um, in the whole suburb. So it was this sort of really interesting little place that was sort of dragged out of the 19th century and hung on until the 1960s. But, um, now, of course, it's well, it's very similar in a sense. Obviously, all the roads are made and now, you know, you couldn't buy a house for under $3 million there, but it's, um, but the it is still a little sort of middle class ghetto in that sense that there's no major commercial development. The tallest buildings in the whole suburb are three storeys high.

Yeah.

Um, and their houses, there's no office blocks or anything. Um, there isn't a major supermarket. There's an IGA, which is an independent one. There's none of the big, supermarkets in the whole suburb.

What does IGA stand for again? Independent grocer..

Independent Grocers of Australia.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah. Okay, so hobbies wise, it was mostly sports.

Yeah. Mostly sports. Um. Physical activities. Did a few of the usual things, you know, collected stamps, badly. Um, mostly because my father gave me his stamp collection, um, which was not a he didn't collect Australian stamps because he had them when he was younger and came to Australia when he was an adult. So he didn't have Australian stamps. But there was, you know, so I collected those a bit.

Are they still in the family?

Uh, your mum's got them. I just hand them to her and she just subsumed them into her collection because she took it way more seriously than I did. Um, I don't think there was much else, really. Most of my hobbies were. And then once I was an older teenager, I sort of took up photography and started doing that, and that stuck. And.

Yeah. On and off your entire life, right?

Yeah.

Have you had periods, though, where that's been a very intense interest and then it's slowed down?

No, it just sort of stayed there the whole time.

Yeah. Okay. So were there any interest? Were there any hobbies you had that you, like took up, stopped and then took up again years later?

No, not really. No, no, it was just well, the sport just continued on until I sort of ran out of time and energy.

Well, you were doing tennis?..

Yeah, I played tennis into 55. I stopped playing tennis when I was 55. But, um, and that was mostly because I had arthritis in the feet. It was just too painful. But.

Yeah.

Um, but no, I suppose I was unusual. Lots of other people had other sort of hobbies, but, um, for me, it was just sport.

Do you think there's a generational gap of, like, um, the prevalence of hobbies in different generations? Do you think millennials have more hobbies than people who are Zoomer boomers..

Zoomers?

And Gen Z's.

Yeah.

Yeah yeah. Like, is it something that..

I think just different..

Ones has died off, changed?

I don't I don't think, you know, kids these days. Um, I don't think your generation and younger, um, were as into sport as we were because sport was free.

Yeah.

It was just go outside and play.

Um..

Video games were free. Well, to some extent. Playing them was, buying them wasn't, but.

Yeah.

Yeah, but once you had them or your friends had them. Yeah. You would just sit in the room and.

Yeah. Exactly.

Be very anti-social.

Yeah.

I think that was so. Yeah. Growing up from, from my memory I would have always been there's always been like a lot of indoor type hobbies. I guess for me, I remember hanging out with my friends across the road. Dan, Daniel Baker, I think his name would have been, right? Across the road, when I was only five or so. First started at primary school I imagine I met him, maybe a bit earlier.

Yeah, he lived across the road..

And I remember we were playing, um, Games on his IBM.

Yeah.

One of those. And also like some with some of those figurines, you know, Pocket Monsters or whatever they were called. And and then, yeah, all through primary school, there were things like collecting the tazos.

Yeah.

Those little plastic circles out of, um, chip packets.

Yes.

For for like, what would it have been? It was like Bugs Bunny.

Yeah.

It was what? What is that again? What brand is that? Was it just called Bugs Bunny? I've forgotten.

Hanna Barbera?

Looney tunes..

Looney tunes.

Looney tunes..

.. Barbera. Yeah.

Yeah. And then we had Pokemon cards and yo yos, and we definitely play footy and cricket at school. It was always that sort of outdoor thing, but for me at least, I was never. I always enjoyed playing it, but not really watching it. Sport, I don't know.

Were you still the same?

Yeah. You and I are very different. I think in that to that extent it's it's always been, um, for me at least, I'm much more interested in being involved than spectating. But then. Yeah, well, like, I've taken up guitar I guess more recently, as you're well aware.

Yeah. Well, that was that was a teenage thing with you and then into your sort of early 20s and then just start it again.

Yeah. Well, and that was why I was asking, I guess. Have you stopped something and then taken it up again years and years later? Because I think for me, it was I had, you know, done music all my life and then did band stuff and then just sort of had falling outs with certain bands and just got sort of sick of it and was just like, don't want to think about music like, screw this. And then, um, I can't remember what happened. I got my old you guys gave me one of my guitars back, the electric, the first electric guitar I ever got in that Squire.

Yeah.

With white stripes on it. And, um, I just was like, you know what? I should try and get back into this and just play some songs for fun. And then, as I'm one to do, I went a bit hard and bought a lot of different guitars and really took went on the journey.

Yes.

And then what have we done? Plants as well. A lot of, yeah, a lot of fun hobbies. But yeah. What do you think it's going to be like for my kids? Like, because there's obviously that big generational gap between you and me where video games were a big thing. And I think you would have been probably in your 20s when they became an arcade game. Games became a thing, right? And you may have just sort of missed the boat in terms of that peak.

Yeah, early 20s, late teens, early 20s because and they were pub games. Yeah. You'd go to the pub and they'd, there'd be a pong machine.

Ah okay. You're really..

A pinball was obviously older, but they didn't have those in pubs and things but.

I guess that doesn't really count.

Every now and then in a bar you'd get. Well, it was the very earliest of those.

But it's still..

Kind of mechanical..

But it was a whole machine that you had just to have a video screen.

Yeah.

Um, so, um, and then I think the first Atari was the first of those, which was, uh, you know, it was basically a computer, but it was a computer designed to play games on. You could still do it. It had a word processing program, and, that was about it. This is all, of course, pre-internet. So. Um, and then IBM computers started to, um, take off in the mid 80s right as homes. Yeah, mid 80s, early to mid 80s as home computers. And then Apple came in. Um, and, and then of course after that there was that generation of uh the, the dedicated Sony and.

Yeah, the consoles.

The consoles.

Yeah. That would have been 90s.

Which you plug into your television.

God, that would have been like 91, 92. I think that.

The mid 90s..

It would have been, the earlier ones would have been was it NES, SNES like before Nintendo? There were a few like, um, Sega, Sega, Sega and and there were some other ones. Yeah..

A few of those..

Because I remember, I think some of my earliest memories with games at least would have been on the Apple, playing some of those scrolling sideways games where you go from left to right and you're running along..

Yeah the adventure type things.

Yeah, or shoot things and stuff. I think there was 1 or 2 of those that you had on the one of that really old Macintosh.

Yeah, the original Mac.

That you had. That.

Yeah.

Lode runner. That was still there.

There's a few that was..

Lode Runner. Lode runner is still my favourite game. You can't get it anymore.

Yeah.

But it's still my favourite computer game. Um, for two reasons. One, it was very simple. So. And this is before handsets, you know, that you get in.

Yeah. You would just play it with the keyboard.

Yeah. You just play it on the keyboard and you only needed four keys to do it.

Yeah.

Um, well five because you had to pick something up, but you could go up, down, left, right and then pick things up or shoot things.

Yeah.

Um, and but the thing I liked about it is because it just very briefly, it's, it's a virtual person running around a..

Map.

A map. Well, it's a two dimensional maze so you can go up and down ladders and backwards and forwards across.

Yeah, that's right.

Across levels.

And there's baddies!

And there's bad guys that you've got to dodge. And there's stuff you've got to collect.

Yeah.

And so you just keep going and you can, you know, level up and stuff. But you could also design your own. The game allowed you to build to build your own, you know, ladders and slides and platforms and those sort of things and putting 1 or 2 or more bad guys in. And that was really good fun for you kids when you first started, because you used to spend more time building something than actually playing it.

Well, I imagine this would have been probably the generation of my cousins who are about, what, 15 years younger than me. More than that. 20 to 15 years younger than me. And and Minecraft. I imagine that's why Minecraft went absolutely berserk. And a big part of it was that it was a game that you could play, like you had levels and everything like that, or space.

You can build your own world.

And that's what took off, I think, online. It was people would get together and specifically because they were building things.

There was an era of those games when I was a high school teacher back in the late 80s and 90s, that just started to come out, um, that were that, you know, build your own city or build your own farm.

Oh that would have been like Sims.

Yeah, they were the sim sim..

Sims. Sims city. Yeah. That's right.

Um, and that was the entertainment, you know? Yes. You'd go and play it and, you know, but it was the actual building of it that was fun.

Well, that's why I play the only PlayStation game I play at the moment, besides some of the games with my son, like Star Wars, Lego and Spyro the Dragon and a few of these others, Ratchet and Clank is, um, Civilisation 6, and it's a strategy game where it's effectively chess, right? But it's just way more advanced in terms of, um, all of the accoutrements, everything that's added on, like you're effectively a civilisation, you pick. I usually at the moment I play as Rome. They have certain features that they can do that other places other civilisations can't. And you have to go through time. You know, I think you started about 3000 B.C. and you it's like a board game where you effectively build out your civilisation and compete with other civs, civilisations, to win. And you can win via science where you build up your science, your civilisation's scientific. I don't know what you would call it, but- ability, to the point that you can launch rockets and get to Mars. You can win via culture, influencing other civilisations. You can win via conquest, where you effectively dominate everyone else militarily. You can win via religion, where you convert everyone to your religion. So it's just it's really complex. But I love strategy games.

Yeah.

Growing up. That was always I love playing Red Alert. Um. God, yeah. Red Alert. Back in the day, that was one of those games that I think I sunk endless hours into. I've always loved strategy games. Did you ever get into, did you miss the boat on gaming? Or did you..

Yeah no. Well, missed the boat in a sense that I was a..

It wasn't in your development years..

No. I was an adult by the time those things came in.

Yeah.

And there's a there's also a, um, I think a part of your brain that if you get into it as a child, you just sort of get it. Whereas if you start as an adult..

You get more obsessed with it.

Yeah. But I think as an adult, you have to sort of unlearn your experience of the world to actually take these things on at face value. Um, because I remember, um, well, you you watch your son play a video game, he will intuitively know what to do because he doesn't know how to work it out. Whereas you or I would sit there and go, all right, now, what's the strategy here? What are they trying to do? What are they trying to achieve? He just does stuff to see what happens. And then that immediately locks in and goes, oh, that's a thing to do and you keep moving. Whereas..

That has been one of those things..

Unlearn all that ability.

That has been one of those things that's really impressed me with him learning these video games, because he's only five years old. And initially he sucked. He suck.

Of course he did!

He's got tiny little hands. He's holding his controller. And again, I'm not giving him a hard time, but he just totally sucked. But then the other day, I sat down and I realised that he'd been playing Lego Star Wars and hadn't asked for help for like an hour or two. And I was like, fuck, you know, like he's just. And he could do it. All of a sudden he could do that. He had the coordination. He was moving. The hardest part, I think about playing some of these games, these, um, like world, uh, adventurous type games is that you have to use the two different joysticks on the controller simultaneously.

Yeah.

To move.

And you gotta be pressing two buttons to do something and, well, there's multiple..

But the joystick thing is hard because one joystick, like on the left will be the backwards forwards sideways.

Yeah.

Moving around on that kind of like 2D scale, right. And then you have to move the other joystick to change the change the camera angle so you can see what you're looking.

It's like flying a drone. Have you?

Yeah.

You're flying a drone..

You got camera on it.

You've got, you've got..

That'll be even more..

Two controllers.

Yeah. Which is, you know, one is controlling, you know, direction and the other one's controlling which way the thing is facing. But then you've also got the camera that you're trying to control in it as well. And so learning that from the start is really clumsy. But once you get it it's just it's muscle memory. You can just do it. And like I haven't picked up my drone for probably six months. I know when I first pick it up again I'll be going, Oh, what do I do here? And then ten minutes in, I'll be going, Oh I'm fine. And then the battery will run out and I'll put a second battery in and I'm okay again.

But isn't it funny how these games, like, I remember playing Battlefield and Call of Duty? These are like first person, first person shooters. Like, yeah, yeah, whatever it is and you get, after you play them for 100 hours or 200 hours, you get to a point where you are just in the zone. It's like fluency.

Yeah.

You're no longer thinking about what you're doing. And you know, these these games, usually when you play online against other people like, say, 20 other people, 50 other people, there'll be a set number of maps that you're fighting on and you end up learning those maps where to go, what to expect, what to anticipate, where people hide, where they don't hide. Where you can hide.

Yeah.

And shoot everyone and everything like that. And I think part of the fun of playing those games, that leads to loads of hours just disappearing is that you end up getting into the zone where..

Yes.

And I think that's what we all search for with hobbies. This is where I wanted to sort of bring it to, were you search for that point where you can do something competently, but it's sort of subconscious. You're not actively battling with the thing to to achieve what you're trying to achieve..

But you can also concentrate on it that you don't think about anything else.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah. That's it. You get lost in it.

Yeah, exactly. And I find that with photography.

Yeah.

And I do wildlife and landscape, but it's all outdoor photography. But if I'm shooting a landscape, I can spend an hour planning and looking for a photograph.

Yes.

And it feels like five minutes.

Yeah.

But I can also, if I'm photographing birds, for instance, I can. I'm going to go for a walk. And then you look at it and you go, I've walked 500m in an hour. Yeah.

This is like when you take the cat for a walk.

Yeah, exactly. Um, because you just get into that zone, you just get into the the mindset of concentrating on the things that you need to concentrate on. And it's you. It's automatic, but it's intensive. And so you don't get distracted with the rest of the world going on. I remember photographing some birds at a pond, um, a few years ago with a friend, and we were there just, you know, having a little chat every now and then, but mostly looking to photograph these birds. Um, and eventually she said, Oh, I think I'm going to move on. And I looked at and I said, do you know how long we've been here? And she went, what? I said, two hours.

We've been seeing many birds. We've said to one another..

I know, but we've been standing by this pond for two hours and it felt like 15 minutes, you know, because nothing else in the universe interfered.

What do you think it is about that? That we enjoy? The fact that you are getting into a state where time passes so fast and you are not actively..

It's meditation!

Yeah, but why is it enjoyable? Why do you think we enjoy that?

I think we enjoy it because the world is stressful.

Do you think we just get out of our own heads?

Yeah, we get out.

A, Get out of our own heads. But 90% of the time, I reckon I'm just making a number up. But a large proportion of our time is spent filtering the bullshit.

But also..

All the noise..

.. solve problems.

Yeah, the noise that just going on in the background, and it's just interfering with what we are trying to do. Like you imagine in 2 or 3 hours time when your mum brings the kids back here, you'll be going, all right, I'm going to go and get them dinner. But getting them dinner is not you just go and get them dinner. Getting them dinner is breaking up the fight, turning the TV on. And Joey's running up and down the hallway going, dad, I want this.

This is why people don't understand how exhausting kids are. And I have to keep giving myself a break because like yesterday, I had the kids at home and I literally played.

Yeah sorry about that. I was ill.

Yeah, my my parents usually take the kids on Thursdays, but they they were they were ill. I wasn't giving you a hard time, but.

No, no.

I, um, just played. I played um, Civilisation 6 for most of the day and just let them do their thing.

Yeah.

Because after a few hours in the morning, I was just so spent.

Yes.

And part of me is like, there's a lazy side to me where I'm like, I'm just tired. I want to sit down and I just don't want to think. And I also don't want them badgering me for the TV. So if I'm using the TV.

They're not fighting over the TV, because they just they're not going to pick on you.

I don't want, it's one of those things. Do as I say, not as I do. I say I don't want them spending an entire day in front of the TV. It's funny, I've gotten into this habit now where everyone wins. I get to play my PlayStation game..

And they just go and chill out to play.

And they come up with their own games. Kel's always like, How do you do it?

Yeah, because you ignore them.

Yeah. And I'm like.

You're supervising them, but you're not interfering..

.. from her, my wife Kel, where she's much more hands on and likes to be involved in the games they're playing. And I think she just has that she's inherently more interested in just like, Let's play mums and dads, Let's play these games. Whereas I don't mind being around the kids, but I'm not as much like a, I'm going to pretend to be the baby and you put a nappy on me and put a cover. Like I just it doesn't stimulate me. Like I can do it for about 20 minutes and then I'm kind of like, yeah, I'm tapping out. Whereas Kel can do it for hours! And I say to her, I don't know how you can do it.

Yeah, exactly.

She's always like, how do you get them to just play by themselves? And I'm like..

Ignore them.

I just ignore them and let them like it's free range, you know? I just and they come up with their own games. And but it's funny how much if I try and get her to do that with them, they don't do it.

Because they respect her.

Yeah.

And because you're at home with them, they are not as engaged in getting your attention because they get that all day, every day, whereas they only get to see her for, you know, two hours a day.

In the morning and in the evening, yeah.

And that's.

But I guess the thing I was coming back to is. Yeah, like, I just keep thinking, like, why am I so fucking tired? All the time?

Because you're on.

And it's weird that it's not..

The whole time.

It's not physical. Like, you're right. Like it's the mental side of it that's fucking exhausting.

Oh I know.

Well it was..

Because you're like, where's danger? What are they doing? Dad, I need this.

Yeah.

Joey's just done a wee on the floor. Oh, for fuck's sake. No, I slipped over in it. I've got to get food. I'm hungry. I don't want that food. This. Ohh! Wahh! And you're just like..

Yeah I know. Because as you said, we have them on Thursdays. But we also have their cousin.

Yeah. You're animals. Yeah.

And then after they've all gone home, we usually have the older cousin after school.

Yeah.

So, you know, sometimes 6:00 on a Thursday night, I just go blah. I've done nothing all day, and I'm exhausted.

Yeah. Gluttons for punishment. Yeah. But it's. Yeah, it's it's just one of those things I always wonder, like, as I've got friends who don't have kids and they're always like, what's it like? And I'm like, can I hang out with you for a day? And I'll just stand behind you going, Dada, dada, dada, dada, Dada. I'm hungry, I'm hungry, I'm bored. And you're like, it's literally that. And you can't tap out like, there's no, I can't. Besides, if my wife is here saying I need a five minute, ten minute break.

Yeah I'm going to the toilet, I'll be back in an hour.

There's no just, like, turning it off. You can't just snuff your kids out. It'd be like.

Like you just turn the volume down to zero.

That's it. That's it. Lock them up in a soundproof room. There's no. It's like you can't get away. There's no escape. It's just. This is what life is now.

Yeah. I know.

For better or worse.

Yeah. And then they grow up, leave home and have their own children and leave them with you.

You know what the most torturous thing is? Looking back at old photos and thinking, God having that, Man, they were so nice. They were so lovely. Look how happy they are. And it's like, yeah, no shit. You weren't taking photos of them when they were losing.

Exactly.

So it's like history and memory is such a bitch where you look back with nostalgia and you remember the. You used to be so good, and then you really analyse it and you're like, no, wait, it was hell.

Yeah, exactly.

But yeah. Oh my God. It's definitely, um, not for the faint of heart. It's one of those funny things, right? We all seem to want to have kids, but apparently when they look at the sort of science of happiness, your happiness takes a massive hit for a long time after you've had kids.

Oh, look, I think I was reading something a while ago and I didn't read the primary literature. It was just a some journalist summarising um about the happiest people in the world are middle aged single women.

Probably, yeah.

Because..

It'll be middle aged single women who have never wanted children.

Yeah, but. But they they've never had the problem. They might have had relationships along the way, but they don't have the problem now of, of keeping a relationship. And it seems that middle aged women are far happier being alone than middle aged men are.

Yeah.

Um, and they don't have children. And so they haven't had the stress for half their life of having children, so.

Oh, it's nuts. I have a whole bunch of friends who are like in relationships, married and don't have kids and don't want to have kids. And I'm just like, you guys do not understand how like this. It's one of those things. It's almost like, um, forbidden knowledge. You guys have no idea about how the how the level of of happiness and lack of stress that you currently have.

Yeah. And look, it's flexibility and freedom and. Yeah, don't get me wrong. Yeah. The best thing in my life by far, was having children. A very close second is having grandchildren.

Yeah.

Um.

Oh, there's positives to it. It's.

There are! But the, the things that you give up.

Yeah.

Well, firstly, you know, the affordability of things. Children just cost money. Um..

It's so funny how much that's the case where you people tell you that and you're like, yeah, okay, buddy. Like I can afford to buy an extra loaf of bread a week. Harden up, you know. And then you actually have kids and you're like, oh no. Yeah. It's like, it's so much shit you gotta buy.

Yeah. And and it just keeps getting worse. Um, but but it's also that, um, I mean, I've got friends who just go, Oh, we're going to go to Queensland for a holiday.

I know.

Next week we'll take a week off, go to Queensland.

The worst is when you have friends like that and they say, Did you want to come? And you're like, Are you cooked? Yeah. Like, yeah.

You take my kids and I'll stay home.

Like, what? Do you remember who I am? Do you remember what I have? Like. I have these little gremlins that live in a dungeon that I can't leave at any time. Because they will burn the house down.

I'm in the dungeon with them! That's the worst part.

Yeah, I know. It's always so funny. They're like, well. But can't you just. And you're like. Dude! I'm like. I'm always offended that you think I could. Like, I have one of my mates who's, um, living in Europe at the moment. He's like, Oh, we're just going to move to France. You guys should come over sometime. And I'm like yeah, do I shit gold? Like, do I, do I, do I have private nannies?

Yeah.

Like.

I know. Well but it's money is one thing, but it's just access to time.

But even if I, even if I had the time. Even if I had the money. Okay, I bring the kids over. What are you going to be doing? What am I going to be able to do, buddy?

Yeah. I know. What are you going to do? You'd just be babysitting your children in another country!

Exactly. I'm just stressing..

And at $500 a night in a hotel to do it!

Yeah. So I'm like, I know you get to that point where you're like, God, at what point? What age are they are they going to be at where I can actually start thinking about those things. Where I'm like, You know what?

18 when they leave school and go to university in Melbourne.

You can leave them in your house alone and you'll be like, I'm going to France.

See yah! That's it.

Don't burn the house down. If you have a party and trash the place, you're fucking disinherited. Anyway, we've gone off topic so we can probably finish up there..

.. Having children.

Yeah, I know you wouldn't have it any other way, but.

No. Exactly.

It is definitely not easy. Anyway, thanks for joining us, guys.

Thanks!

We'll see you next time.

Bye!