SPEAKER_01: 1:32

Hi, I'm Malcolm Stern, and in conjunction with my friends John and Sandra Wilson from Online Events, we're creating a series of podcasts called Slay Your Dragons with Compassion. My book of the same name was conceived and inspired by the suicide of my daughter Melissa and the journey that took me on and the internal resources that I found. All of my guests will have a story to tell around overcoming and ultimately thriving through adversity. Special thanks to the band Stairway, Jim McCarty, and Louis Chenamo for the use of theme music from their album Medicine Dance, and my engineer Owen Santiago. I hope you enjoy this series, and thanks for listening. Welcome to my podcast, Slay Your Dragons with Compassion, done in conjunction with my good friends John and Sandra Wilson at online events. This is an exploration of how people overcome adversity and become who they are as a result of the experiences they go through. And I'm uh very blessed to have a uh a range of really interesting and um entertaining guests as well to try and explore this this very interesting subject. So um today I'd like to welcome a good friend who lives quite close to me, actually, Tony G. And Tony, we're going to talk about your experiences. Tony's a master puppeteer and uh has has done shows all over the world, but we'll come to that in a bit. But let's start off with your your early days, Tony. So I I understand that when you were very young, your your dad died, and these things have an effect on us, obviously.

SPEAKER_00: 3:13

Yeah, my my I I was um I was living in Singapore because my father was a surgeon in the RAF, which he'd had to do a certain amount of service in order to pay for his education at Cambridge University. And we'd gone out there when I was 10 months old. And we were due to come home soon. And in fact, in a letter that my mother wrote on the night my father died, she said we were we would they'd been thinking of moving to Canada, so I wouldn't have been so close to you then. I'd have been living in Canada, so life changes on these sort of these moments. But my dad contracted polio just before the vaccine. My mother was seven months pregnant, and he he sort of knew he was gonna die, and he died fairly quickly. Uh, I think he was in an iron lung, which is an image that sort of haunts me a bit. But and uh yeah, my mother was an incredible human being, and we flew back. Apparently, we went through a typhoon. My sister was uh was my mum was seven months pregnant, so my sister was newborn, and yeah, I think it was the the sort of volcanic eruption in all our lives, really, for my dad's parents and for myself and my mum and for my sister, and I think it possibly affected the way I've lived my life, but yeah, I'll say no more about that now, because you're the question master.

SPEAKER_01: 4:59

Right. Um, and of course, although that wasn't wouldn't have been a conscious thing at two and a half, you wouldn't have consciously known your dad had died, um, or that we wouldn't consciously remember it. These things have have long-lasting effects on us, even though we don't really know that. So you'd have been holding some of the trauma that your mum would have been holding. Your mum would have been that it would have been sort of flowing around, and somehow you you you've managed to make a life since then. What happened um when you got back when you got to the uh to the UK?

SPEAKER_00: 5:33

Uh yeah, well, I will talk about that, but I'd just like to say that I think I was pretty conscious. I I watched my kids as they all three of them got to two and a half, and in particular my youngest child, Robbie, you know, I thought that's how I was when my dad died, you know. And uh, but all three of them, uh, do you have a I think I I think it, yeah, you're right. I mean, I don't, I still don't know what death is, but I mean I didn't know what that was. But my mother wrote and said that um I extraordinarily, Anthony seems to have grasped what's happening. So, and yes, I do think it's kind of had long, far-reaching effects on me. Um, when we got back, we moved about a lot. We lived uh with my father's parents, we lived with my mother's mother, who was a refugee from Germany before the war, and we lived in Swiss cottage, and we lived with some friends for a while, um who were friends of my mum and my dad. But I don't think my mother went to Rada, and she was a very good-looking woman, and she was a single woman then. I don't know what happened, but I kind of assuming that life wasn't always straightforward for her living in other houses, and those were the 1950s, and yeah, they were well, they're still not different times for a lot of people, but they were different times.

SPEAKER_01: 7:20

So um uh did you didn't have a father figure in your life?

SPEAKER_00: 7:26

Um well for one thing I I I I felt the presence of my father, and I lived in uh in ad room, and people would say, Look, he's got all Matt's mannerisms, he looks just like Matt. So there was that. So that I think that it you do internalize a lot of who your father was and things by two and a half. You've kind of the rate of change in your first two and a half years, is huge. My mother tried to be both mother and father, and in a way she was the most successful. I had an uncle who uh took me under his wing a lot until he died. Uh my grandfather, who was a Polish refugee, uh, tried to teach me cricket, which Poles haven't got a really good, I don't think he understood the game at all. But he, you know, I had him in my life. So I didn't have a kind of father figure. And then later on, when I was about nine or ten, my mother got together with her first boyfriend, who she met when she was in repertory theatre, who was quite a well-known actor at the time. So, no, I didn't really, I didn't have a conventional father figure, uh, but yeah, I haven't. I've got pictures of a father who was barely 30 years old.

SPEAKER_01: 9:00

Yes. That's interesting because I even though I've I've known you a long time and our sons are our best friends, which is quite interesting as well. I hear the the the fabulous amount of creativity that's gone into your background as well, that and and sort of um accomplishments, and and you have been um a sort of a creative pioneer pretty much with with your puppetry work, and and I know that you're you're widely respected. And I just wonder if you could tell us a little bit about what drew you into the work that you you took up.

SPEAKER_00: 9:31

That's a question. Um, so what drew me in, I can clearly remember. So when I was about 14 or 15, a family moved upstairs from us. By then we'd moved to uh West End Lane in northwest London and in a block of flats, and the people who moved in upstairs uh were family who I've remained friends with, and the mother was very radical. And I started reading A. S. Neil, John Holt, and all sorts of books about education. I got the Little Red School book, and um and I kind of I decided I remember sitting in a classroom in my sixth form and thinking, this isn't the way school should be. I want to change the education system, that's what I'm gonna do. And at the same time, in that train of thought, I don't know which lesson it was, but I wasn't listening. Um, I thought, well, what's the object of this? Because I'm given to thoughts like this. This is not to do with my father. I just write that might be genetically, but just um musings like this. I thought, well, the object of life is to die happy. And I thought, well, how do I do that? And I thought I want to experience as much as I can. Uh I don't care about money, which is a little bit difficult now. I'm on a state pension, uh and uh and uh yeah, I just want to die happy, experience as much as I can, and my happiness lies in the happiness of others. So so it that's where it kind of started, and that's the memory I've got where it really started. But then so I work with young people. Um I did I did philosophy and uh philosophy and sociology almost by accident at university. Well, completely. I I think my life is an accident and a very happy accident, I have to say, too. I don't I don't believe that I think choice is overrated. I think we make a few serious choices in our lives, but the rest are happening to.

SPEAKER_01: 11:53

I think we're born, Tony, with I think we're born with with an innate leaning towards what it is we can offer in the world. I've just been listening to um an audiobook of Francis Weller's The Wild Edge of Sorrow. And and what he says is that we we often say to people, what do you do for a living, or how do you earn your money? When actually what we should be saying is, What gifts have you brought to this earth in this particular incarnation? And and I've seen that you've brought, well, first of all, you were very impacted by seeing that the education system stunk. I didn't realise it stunk until after I'd left school and all of that sort of stuff, but that you actually from a very early age realized that you had the capacity to be an educator, and and what you've done is is is educated in a very specific way. So um, so tell us about the the puppetry and how that emerged.

SPEAKER_00: 12:46

Well, um, so I worked as a youth worker in Clapham and I ran Cresh's and uh and in 1979 uh my future wife who I'd met two years ago and me went to Peru, and we were sitting in a cafe in in Seichin, which is in the middle of nowhere, and there was an English guy raving on about, I mean, we hadn't met any English people up until we'd been there for three weeks, weren't they? It was there weren't that many tourists in those days. Um and he was raving on about how Margaret Thatcher was going to change the world, that was gonna be great. She did change the world, it wasn't it, I don't think it's great, but um, and I thought I haven't come to Peru to do this, and then I got involved, and he said, if you want to do something, I'll help you. And he worked in uh as a stockbroker, and he did help us, and we started a daycare nursery in Brixton called Brixton Cares for Kids. I'm getting away from the man isn't it's interesting to go with you. Yeah, so we opened a nursery called Brixton Cares for Kids, uh, and the reason it opened was that there were riots in Brixton, and Brixton Council didn't have anything else ready to go, so they just said, Tony, write what you need on the back of an envelope, we're gonna give you three years' money. But we were young, white, and we weren't really part of Braylon Road at that point. Um, it was a very political hotbed, and we were in deep water, and we were idealistic, and we knew what we wanted to do educationally. The long and the short of it is the nursery had to shut down. It were there was all sorts of tensions around it, it became a focal point for all it even had questions asked about it in the Houses of Parliament. It was nasty. We got death threats. Um, and there was a Chilean guy working there, and I'd said to Claire, if this ever affects our relationship, I'm getting out first. And I did, and I went to visit Enzo one day, who's from Chile, he was a Chilean refugee. Refugees seem to be a theme here. Uh and um I said, What are you doing, Enzo? And he said, Well, I started this public company, I went to this see this public show. He was an actor as well, and uh he said, you know, I I got I got three gigs, but I haven't properly translated the script yet, and uh and I could I don't know what to do about the admin. I said, I'll help you with admin. He said, That will be great, Tony. You'll turn up at this hall tomorrow, and I'll tell you what to do. And I turned up at this hall in Stockwell. He said, Tony, you will be the narrator in the show, and you will make this puppet the condor. So the show was called The Tomato and the Condor. It was a political allegory for what was happening in Chile. It was a wonderful show and completely unrealistic. And I was the narrator, I became a puppeteer overnight. So just to make it clear, puppets are the kind of main focus for me. They're the top level of me that people see as a thing. What matters is young people, imagination, story, and puppets have allowed me autonomy across my life to do that. And I there and a lot of things have ensued from that.

SPEAKER_01: 16:37

That's that's that's very good, Tanya. I don't I really like how you've you've you've encapsulated that as well. Um, you know, when I look at uh at what I do in in therapy, I my main tool is psychodrama, where I'm actually um using a very creative means to work therapeutically with groups. But it's not the main thing, but it is the it's the it's the thing that's got the fizz, the buzz around it. And I think the main thing is my fascination with the human psyche. And what I'm hearing is that you had a strong fascination that kids needed something and that you were going to do what you could do, and and life led you to a number of different things. Puppetry, of course, which uh became quite a big thing for you, but other ways of of working with children as well. And perhaps you could sort of tell us some of the other ways in which you've been an educator.

SPEAKER_00: 17:27

Well, first of all, I have to say that puppetry has kind of like I it won't let me go. I mean, like I kind of I kind of arrived. So, what happened to me? I mean I will talk about puppetry. I will I look I will answer your question, but what happened to me with puppetry was that one day I had the idea, uh, due to my eldest son writing an essay on what people did in Tot Ness, um, that there were a lot of puppeteers in town, and if I got them all together, we could set a world record for the biggest puppet show on earth. And so I rang up uh the guy who then ran Dartington Arts and said, I want to do the biggest puppet show on earth and set a world Guinness World Record. And he said, Yeah, let's go for it, Tony. It was called Guests of no idea what was going to happen, uh, because William Wordsworth randomly opened a poem by William Wordsworth with those words, and I like them, we are the guests of chance. We are the guests of chance. So um that day opened my eyes to something else, uh, because I saw 200 people make something amazing, and I suddenly became aware about the I became started becoming aware of the form that I was using, which yeah, it was puppetry, but what it was was workshop. So shortly after that, so it does it. I haven't I'm still making the huge puppet shows. I've only just retired from that. I made I have set a world record twice. I have made shows with three, four, five, six hundred children in, and they change the kids, they change the school, they have a massive effect, and it's been the main I I can't stop doing it, and I love doing it, and I've written books on it and things. So um, but I saw that workshop was a form, so that's the other thing that I pursued, and I end up teaching workshop at the university. Yes, workshop. And you wrote a book called a workshop hand. Three books on workshop, and uh yeah, and and uh I've ended up working with a lot of artists. We set up the Moveable Feast, and that's that handbook, and we we ran events for artists to develop their workshop practice, and uh I wrote yeah, so that's what I've used. I work with with them, I've worked with kids to run uh helping kids run workshops, and I don't think I mean, and actually last week I ran a session at Extra University about a sort of art, the art of workshop. So that underpinning what I do, it's participatory. I stopped performing in the early 2000s, except for I couldn't get them to understand that that I'd stopped in Taiwan. So I ended up performing in Taiwan rather randomly in 2000, as you do. Yes, and so there you go, Malcolm. Does that slightly answer your question?

SPEAKER_01: 20:55

It does, it does. I mean, I'm I'm certainly getting a fuller picture. And I think something you said earlier has also impacted on the dialogue we're having, which is that money isn't you didn't say it in these words, but money's not your driver. And I think for many people, money's their driver. So often people say to me, Well, I'm I really want to do it, and I want it I want it to make dot dot dot dot. And that's never been the way that you've gone. The way you've gone is I want to offer what I can offer, and that in some ways, yeah, as you say, it's it's it's it's tighter now, but actually you've allowed life to respond to you because you've responded to life. Like that sounds not too sort of uh weird and wonderful, but I think there's something about not doing it to try and say, This is how I can earn my living, rather, this is who I am, and this is the gift I've brought to this earth.

SPEAKER_00: 21:45

Well, I I mean that sounds a little grand, but I mean that's exactly what's happened. I I I spent a quite a long time with my mum trying to find a job for me and people trying to fit me in, and I just couldn't do any of them. And I did enjoy uh work youth worker and working with kids, but I found it was all about process. And when Enzo, who I the Chilean guy, introduced me into puppetry, I felt like there was something that I could make. So the two things came together: my need to work with the imagination. Well, that's the that's the sort of third thing, really. My need to be imaginative was something that just wouldn't die. The fact that I wanted to work with people's imaginations, that I kind of had a strong affinity with that, and I had a need to actually create and make things. And I couldn't, I didn't have a choice really. You know, again, I don't think that was a choice. I kind of just kept hitting me over the head, and I get totally miserable. I still get miserable if I don't make something across kind of if two or three weeks ago, and all I'm doing is housework doing the gardening, and I need to do I need to write, I need to make things, you know.

SPEAKER_01: 23:11

Well, it's interesting because um James Hillman, the the uh psychotherapist, um, wrote uh wrote a book in which he said um that inside every one of us is a diamond, D-A-E-M-O-N, and that diamond will drive us nuts until we do what it is we were born to do with this this precious life we have. And it feels to me as though your diamond has actually followed you along and and allowed you to um honour what you were born with and to to bring some gifts, and I don't it doesn't sound too grand to me, but to bring some some of your gifts to the world, and and and that's where you've done.

SPEAKER_00: 23:52

Yeah, well, I it it that makes sense to me. I mean, James Hillman makes quite a lot of sense to me, since you know he also wrote wrote a book about how we fiction our lives, in other words, how we kind of write ourselves, and I and in terms of a daemon or diamond, you know, I'll be there thing. Uh that's kind of we go back to my father because uh it feels like I feel inhabited in some way by him still, even at 71, you know. But I certainly kind of certainly for the first 10 years of my life, I felt an extraordinary presence at times, and I feel like I do feel like I've been looked after. I don't know how people say, Well, how did you get a job working with the First Nations in Canada for five years? I don't know, these things happen, and people think of the arts, they think of artists as creative people, but the as the I Ching points out, the receptive and the creative are inseparable. And it uh and if I've got a problem, it's the problem that I'm looking for invitation the whole time and seeking it out almost, and it's become it's slightly obsessive. I don't know that I'm doing it, I can I can articulate it, but I don't know that I'm awaiting the next invitation, which uh I don't think it works like that, does it really?

SPEAKER_01: 25:26

I think it's almost like, well, Jung said that everything is synchronicity, and so something will come across our path. Well, we we may ignore it or not notice it, but actually the things that are there that come across our path, and I'm hearing that your path was strewn with with lots of synchronicities that led you in particular direction. And I love by the way what you just said about your your dad as well, because I and I've often felt odd when I've sort of said that when I when I wrote my book, Slay Your Dragons with Compassion, which was about the suicide of my daughter, or was inspired by the suicide of my daughter Melissa. Um, I often felt that she was behind me as I was writing it. I felt like I was her spirit was in the process, and it made me feel incredibly close to her. And I also felt very moved that I was actually honouring something that was clearly bigger than I could describe in worldly terms, but something was there. So I really hear that you're not being mystical and sort of and sort of fanciful. I'm hearing that the spirit's there.

SPEAKER_00: 26:26

It's not mystical at all. I mean, it's it's fairly obvious that you know if you if you write in both in both senses of the word, not just kind of W-R-I-T, but W-R-I-G-H-T as in a maker, you write something. You you do kind of you do allow something of a spirit to come into you. And you you know, a friend, a person we both knew, but I knew very well was Ken Beagley, and I I wrote a novel that to honour his thoughts about the Cretan Labyrinth recently called Stardreamer Pathmaker. And all the way through that, you know, I could feel I mean, I talked to him across his kind of dying, which lasted 18 months, and I could feel kind of his presence, and I still do, even, you know, and I don't know how much he how much of that is imagined and how much is real. It doesn't matter. It does not matter. I mean, it it and there is this big sense in when you lose somebody that a bit of yourself goes with that person. So you cannot have that relationship anymore. You can uh you the relationship lives on in your memory and you live live through that memory, but you can't actually kind of sit down and have a cup of tea, which uh is worth a lot, you know. If you're going to be reincarnated, come back for a cup of tea with your friends, you know, because that's yes, it was very well said, yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 28:14

Yeah. Um the the the theme of of this of these podcasts is is how we have how we evolve through adversity. And I really hear the adversity of of being a two and a half-year-old boy, no matter how you say there was some consciousness and there would be, but no matter how much you were able to embrace that. But are there other things in your life that have set you on your way that have that have triggered you by by being personal struggles, tragedies, difficulties?

SPEAKER_00: 28:42

Yeah, that you know, like you can't really live for 70 kinds. Well, you can't live without there being possible. So uh, well, I think one kind of unconscious challenge is that I am the son of a woman who got out of Germany when she was four, and and uh and that's true of all my cousins as well, that they had parents who did that. So there's the intergenerational sort of trauma that we're not aware of. Uh I I don't know how I don't know that much about it, but I think that is a is a challenge because you, as you know, being Jewish, uh I don't know if this is true, but my lot just did not talk about the past a lot. It was move on. My mum's kind of my mum's motto was we've just got to coat with this. And she'd had incredible things to go through. So that and then she got back with her first boyfriend, as I said, who is quite a famous actor, and he was an alcoholic, and he he had a very traumatic childhood, and there are reasons, but he was he was also a sick bastard, you know, like it was kind of it was nasty, there was abuse, and um it's something that as well has kind of I think it's a sort of between the ages of I mean it went on right up to my mum's death that there was abuse there, and my mum also left my stepfather several times across his life, but somehow they always, you know, like I don't know. And uh so that was a challenge, and I don't think neither me nor my stepfather were comfortable with each other. I think I I'm I'm a memory of my father to all those who remember him. Um I went to see my mother's old school friend who was kind of transport, a lovely woman, and she had dementia, and uh I went to see her with her son, and he said, Do you do you know who it is here? And she said, Yes, it's Anthony. Um Rennie, my best friend's my best friend, and and had and our Nat. He was so lovely, lovely Nat. And I hadn't heard my father's name. I don't know where I can't even remember, maybe 60 years uh uh since. Kind of I used to go to my grandparents, and their friends would be there and going, He doesn't he look like that. So it's 60 years since I've heard my dad's name, and it it you can imagine it just was like a bolt of lightning, really. And but my stepfather hugely resented me, I think. I mean, underneath it all, he he did a lot of good things too. It wasn't just bad, and he was an actor and he was funny, and uh I'm sure that and he took me to Tottenham, which and he um he encouraged me in a lot of ways. And he said to me one day, he said two things that made a big impression on me. He said, and I'm sure you'll relate to this, Malcolm. He said, if you ever find anything in theatre that works, use it because you're very lucky, and it's uh it is part of it, it's finding something that works, and I did, and I that stayed with me. When I find things that work, then I I got I gotta use that, I gotta use that. And the other thing he he said to me is you are a teller of tales. Uh and I think that's what I think that that's what I am, really. And so he's given me gifts too, but he also was a horrible drunk, and even when he gave up the drink, he was still what they call a dry drunk. He'd lose it big time, and that was pretty challenging. And and in the in the end, he sort of disinherited me and my sister, so that wasn't good because it was our inheritance, and it doesn't feel great, but he gave uh money to a theatre impresario who I won't name on this podcast.

SPEAKER_01: 33:35

Right. Well, that must have that must have been really tough as well. So that was your your inheritance effectively got stolen from you.

SPEAKER_00: 33:44

Yeah, it was tough. I mean, I've got an awful lot, and I'm complaining. I ain't complaining. I've uh you know, like yes, um it's it's okay, and life deals you you these cards, you know, you can't haven't got that's not the things, yeah. Okay, that was all my mother's death was hugely traumatic because and I'd say to my mum, if you die before him, I'll just keep it like that, before him, he'll it it's gonna be a mess, and it has been an unholy mess since then, and I find it hugely challenging, and it is that thing of reconciling yourself to however hard I try, I cannot put it right. It is outside my agency, and that is a really difficult thing to live with. They're quite so there are a lot of challenges like that because there is. I mean, I was I was thinking about it the same. It's like the birds come home to roost when you get to a certain age. All that's all that shit is going to arrive on your head, and you've got to reconcile yourself to the fact that there you you know had a lovely life, but there's also some shit, you know, and it's in it's something that is part of the die dying doesn't happen on the day you die. Dying happens as those things that you've had all your life start disappearing from you.

SPEAKER_01: 35:23

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 35:24

And you've got to reconcile yourself to that journey, and it's not easy.

SPEAKER_01: 35:30

I think that is that's true. I mean, I think uh it's so much about it's not what happens to us, it's how we manage what happens to us. So you can have two people in the same room, both of whom gone through very similar circumstances, and one of them will be bright and shiny, the other will be depressed and hung down and hung over. And and I think there's something about that as we get older, and this is what I'm hearing you say underneath what you're saying, is we have to find ways of managing the stuff that occurs in our lives and to come to terms with things, not to get hooked on it's so easy to get hooked on resentments and and blame for other people. But at the end of the day, what happens externally is what happens externally, what happens internally is actually what we need to find.

SPEAKER_00: 36:16

Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. Um, yeah, I mean, two things on that. Uh, and and both these things had a huge big effect with me, and is um so in in another coincidence that happened was that uh I had a in a tea break at a convention of artists, I chatted to a woman, she said, What are you interested in? And I said, I'm I think that workshops are formed. And she said, Oh, well, I think that too. Why don't you come and see me in my office? And she was the head of policy and research at the arts council, and I got a grant to research workshop, and one of the best things I ever did was interview 21 people, including your good self, if you remember. And uh another guy I interviewed was people would say, You've got to talk to so-and-so. So I go and talk to John Moat, who started the Arvon Foundation with the help of Ted Hughes, John's wife Antoinette, and John Fairfax, and it's it's quite a big organization for writers. And me and John became good friends. And he he said to me one day, um, Tony, we all have our insolubles, it's just how we deal with them. And I think that that's right. You know, you've got your insolubles, you ain't gonna solve it all. You can't solve my dad's death, it's there, you know, and I'm not gonna solve it. It's just it is how you manage it. And the other thing was when my granddaughter was two or three years old, we used to play hotels, um, which was slightly divisive of me. I used to sit in a big box, she'd make me pretend cups of tea, and uh I'd watch, I'd say, Have you got Wi-Fi here? And uh she'd say, Yes, we've got Wi-Fi in our hotel. I said, Well, can I watch the Tottenham game? I'd say they're watching, and uh she'd say, Well, what do you want? Do you want chocolate cake or cherry cake? I say, chocolate cake. And while she was in flow, because she's quite extraordinary, really. She said, Grandpa, is the world inside us or outside us? Wow. And I said, What? And she's oh, it doesn't matter. Do you want chocolate or cherry?

SPEAKER_01: 38:42

So it's so lovely to see that that young people, before they've been sort of their minds have been sort of brainwashed in certain directions, have this incredible creativity as well. And that's very much what you focused on. So we're coming towards the end of our of our podcast, and the question I always ask at the end is what particular dragon have you had to slay? What's the hurdle you've had to overcome to be who you are?

SPEAKER_00: 39:09

Limey. What's the hurdle I've had to overcome? I find that really difficult to know. Uh, have I overcome a hurdle? Well, I think we go Matt to, I think losing my dad really is the hurdle that I've had to overcome. And uh I don't I think overcome maybe not, but I think it's the thing that's inhabited my life and had a kind of had a sort of uh was like an earthquake through the family and the reverberations have gone on forever. So I think that's it. Uh it's difficult. I think maybe I just kind of I know I'm supposed to give one answer, but you're finding out that I can't. I think that the uh other thing is that I the more I've engaged with groups, and I have there been literally hundreds of thousands, the more I've become a human sponge, and I find that that's a hurdle I've got to overcome. I I'm overly affected now by just about everybody I ever meet.

SPEAKER_01: 40:28

It's interesting because these things always have uh two sides to them. One side, it's like, yes, you're overly affected and you're sort of swamped by it, but another side you've developed a deep empathy as a result of doing all of that. And so that's part of the cost of it as well. But it's not neither negative nor positive, it carries both facets within it.

SPEAKER_00: 40:48

It's just things are there, things are as they are, and we patch them as we can.

SPEAKER_01: 40:53

We do. And that's a great way to end, Tony. Thank you so much for uh dialoguing with dialoguing with me here. And I've learned loads more about you than I knew beforehand as well. So that's great.

SPEAKER_00: 41:04

Thank you.

SPEAKER_01: 41:05

Cheers, Patrick. Okay.