Answer Me This! - AMT382: Ice Skating Music, Monks' Hairdos, and Life Coaching

Episode Date: February 6, 2020

In AMT382, we hear from questioneers concerned about their friend's expenditure on life coaches, the ethics of placing fake animals on wildlife tours, disposal of an unwanted Book of Mormon, and scattering a grandparent's ashes on someone else's property. Find out more about this episode at . Send us questions for future episodes: email written words or voice recordings to [e-mail]. Tweet us Facebook Hear AMT episodes 1-200, all five of our special albums including AMT Love, and our Best Of compilations at . Hear our other work: Helen Zaltzman's podcasts The Allusionist at and Veronica Mars Investigations at ; Olly Mann's five podcasts including and The Media Podcast at ; and Martin Austwick's music at and his Tom Waits podcast Song By Song at . This episode is sponsored by Squarespace. Want to build a website? Go to , and get a 10% discount on your first purchase of a website or domain with the code 'ANSWER'. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Do you like pina coladas getting caught in the rain? Do you know the muffin man who lives under a real lane? It's fun that we're in our listeners' lives for a long enough time that we can see how many events are happening to them over the years and we're just still here doing the same old shit yeah you may not realize it but this whole project was set up actually not as a podcast but as a developmental psychological exercise to see how you change over the years it's not about us about you it's like seven up basically yeah exactly boyhood so i was very pleased to receive the following email from andrew in melbourne he says in answer me this 360 and 361 which came out in 2018 i believe it i think uh he says you answered my questions regarding living

in my grandpa's empty house and whether my mother's old doll collection therein was creepy i do remember that andrew. Unforgettable doll collection. Unforgettable. That's what his dolls were. While your answers were much appreciated, as it turned out, I never put your advice into practice because soon afterwards I got a job and was able to move into a place that wasn't cold, damp or full of sinister dolls. That's probably best, isn't it? It sounds like a place that's not cold, damp or full of sinister dolls would have a lot going for it. Yeah. I everyone listening to this i think that's a useful rubric in life just think do you live in a house that's cold damp and full of sinister dolls no then you're winning well my parents are listening to this thinking well yes yes but no dolls

the shitty clocks do you not have any dolls in your parents house they weren't a big doll family we do have uh sculptures they're like expensive dolls made of bronze did you have a doll a childhood doll i had a plastic doll called Betty, which was weird because that's also my grandmother's name. And Betty, I think, had been a cheap doll because one of her legs was a different colour to the other leg. She was alright. I wasn't that interested

in dolls. I was more interested in animal-shaped toys. Fine, but what happened to Betty? Humanoids. You don't know. We lost touch. She wasn't sinister though. Sounds pretty sinister. Right, dolls are. That's why I don't like them. Anyway, Andrew says, my grandfather died in November last year at the age of 91. I'm sorry to hear it, Andrew, but 91, fair play.

Good, good innings. It's been decided that some of grandpa's ashes should be scattered under a crepe myrtle tree in the front garden where my grandmother's ashes were scattered. I sense a new dilemma coming. The problem is the house has been sold and rented out to new occupants. Mum has got a little ash scattering kit prepared,

consisting of a small jar with some ashes in it and a spoon to dig a little hole to put them in. A spoon? I would have assumed shovel, wouldn't you? Or at least a trowel. Because he also says she's got a small jar with some ashes in. Maybe it's not all of Grandpa. It's just the highlights. It's her favourite bits.

It's just some seasoning rather than the full meal. That would be good, wouldn't it? Like on Big Brother. Here's your best bits. Just Grandpa's hands. He loved his hands. However, says Andrew, we're struggling with how to do it. Ollie, answer me this.

Do we tell the current occupants or do we try to do it. Ollie, answer me this. Do we tell the current occupants or do we try to do it without them noticing? Without you noticing, turning up the two of you with a jar full of ashes, digging a hole with a spoon and filling it in their garden. Who would notice that?

I suppose if it's the front garden as well, you don't have to go through the house or anything. You claim to be from the council. Sure. Just investigating a water pipe. Actually, he does say front garden. You're right, he does. I hadn't noticed that detail.

That does possibly change how I feel about this. Possibly. And if we go for the latter approach, trying to do it without them noticing, is it better just to sneak in or to knock on the door first to check if anyone's home? I would appreciate your thoughts

on the best way to sneak into someone's front garden to scatter ashes without causing a scene. I think you have to start by asking why it is that you don't want to have the conversation about why you want to do this. Is it because you genuinely think that someone who in any case doesn't own the house, they're renting the house, would really say, oh, for generations your family owned it and your grandma's there. No, absolutely. You can't put a spoonful of ashes in our front garden it's certainly an unorthodox request that you would think would give them enough pause that they

wouldn't immediately just slam the door or is it that you just don't want to have that conversation in which case i think you know the answer to this in your heart don't you i mean do you really think sneak in like really if they're determined to put grandpa here no no but okay it's a multiple choice thing isn't it or at least one thing leads to another right Oh, if they're determined to put Grandpa here. No, no, no. But OK, it's a multiple choice thing, isn't it? Or at least one thing leads to another, right? It's that thing of, you know, if you answer this, go to this. If you answer that, go to that.

Right, right, right. Right? So, I mean, if you knock on the door and you explain the situation and they turn out to be arseholes, then yes, sneak in and do it in the front garden anyway. But don't go with what is the emergency plan as your plan A. What if the people who live there are out? Can they then just go ahead and do it in your mind yes unless they've got a ring doorbell and you've got identifying marks when they check their video footage they will not know what the hell that is

i think maybe put a note through their door and say you've done it but that's really weird because then you take an agency away from them to say no which they wouldn't like if someone knocked on my door and said my grandmother lived here for 50 years and i'd like to be able to it's a bit weird actually it is quite it is quite weird isn't it i think some people just the idea of death would be unpleasant to them and they would say no i think that's the danger i think maybe i've come around to your view of this ollie knock and ask and then if they say no or they aren't in subterffuge. Yeah, fine. Okay. But one thought I do have is that your family no longer owns this property. Therefore, it's not assured that the new owners won't just dig up the whole front garden,

including the crepe myrtle and your grandparents' ashes. Would it therefore be maybe a more prudent idea to place grandpa somewhere that you do have access to and will have access to for a long time rather than on someone else's private property? Well, this is why people do it in public spaces, isn't it? Because they think that's less likely to change. But ultimately, everything becomes a giant fucking Tesco or something, doesn't it? I mean, like, you can't really stop someone developing it in the future. People scatter ashes at sea. I mean, it's effectively, it's just symbolic, isn't it? It's a nice event for the people that are doing it, but you know it's about to get eaten by a fish, shat out, you know, and washed up on a beach.

That's how I want to be remembered, through fish shit. Sarah is from, she's from Minnesota. She says, I'm currently on a work trip to Toronto from Minnesota. I'm a nervous traveler when alone, and I'm away from my five-month-old son for the first time. She is going to be drinking. And hopefully sleeping. I'm actually, I've taken a job next week, primarily because they would pay for a premiere in, so I could be away from my five-month-old son for a night.

In an attempt to combat my anxiety, I bought some banana muffins with chocolate chips. Lovely combination. Yes, isn't it? And ate one while sitting on the bed, which has very white sheets. You might guess where this is going. A chocolate chip fell onto the bed,

and before I could retrieve it whole, it melted into the sheets. Ah, familiar with this scenario. Now I'm afraid the housekeeper is going to think it's something other than chocolate so helen answer me this should i leave a note for the housekeeper letting them know that they need not fear maybe with a tip or do i do nothing what is the best way to handle this embarrassing situation do hotel staff care the stuff they have seen they see all sorts, don't they?

I imagine anyone with any degree of experience in cleaning hotel rooms has learnt to tell the difference between chocolate and a dirty protest. Yes, but... The smell would be a giveaway. Yeah, I think that's right, yeah. But the tip, I mean... Yes, definitely give a tip. Exactly.

I think if it was one of your bodily excretions, then they do kind of deserve a heads up in case it's somewhat dangerous to them. I mean, that must be so embarrassing. People actually have incontinence and can't control it. Don't know it's going to happen. Wake up and have a shower at the bed. That does happen to people. I wonder what they do do in that scenario.

You could take the sheet off yourself and kind of roll it up so that the offending part is not on the outside. Yes. I think the amount of chocolate from a chocolate chip might barely even be visible to them well this is it like if they've got to do dozens of rooms in a work day they're not going to like come in and just scrutinize the room they're like pulling those sheets off before they've even had a look i stayed in a b&b once on a farm with my now wife and for some reason we balanced some um nail polish on the top of the bed.

I see where this is going. And it did a huge trajectory of red nail polish all down the centre of the bed and the bedstead. Yep. That's not going to come out. That's indelible, isn't it? Yeah. What was so embarrassing about it was it didn't seem conceivable that you could accidentally knock it over so elaborately as to mark the bedstead, the head, the pillow, the mattress, the sheet in red.

They were like, Jackson Pollock stayed here. It's such a viscous liquid. I'm impressed that it managed to cover so much ground before you rescued it. Did it look like you had slaughtered something in there? No, it looked exactly like what it was. It looked like some dickhead had managed to spill an entire bottle of nail varnish all over the bed.

What did they say? Well, never mind what they say. What my girlfriend at the time said was, it was my fault because I knocked it off. I counted, it's your fault for leaving it open on a bedstead. No? I mean, at least we take joint responsibility there. Yeah, I think that's her fault, actually, I would say.

Like, if you do something where it's like, one of us is going to knock this off, and it turns out to be the other person rather than you, then that's on the person that... She does the same thing with cups of coffee. She leaves cups of coffee on the floor and then when i walk into them and knock them on the carpet she shouts at me for damaging the carpet yeah get a table i just remembered when we were doing uh our tour through minneapolis we stayed in a hotel which had a sort

of hunting scene fabric for the headboards so there were like lots of pictures like people in hunting wear and dogs i wish this had me, but someone else had got a pencil and drawn all over the fabric and just written male next to every male figure, which was all of them. Wow. Male, male, male. It was some kind of protest against sexism and fabric design, right? Yeah, I think so.

But I mean, bearing in mind the scene is a hunting scene, were they protesting against the lack of females in hunting generally? Maybe they could have chosen a fabric that depicted a more pan-gender activity. Hello, this is Annie from Canada. So I worked for a few summer seasons as a guide in the Rocky Mountains. I would take guests on horseback through Jasper National Park. And pretty early on, myself and the other guides that I worked with, we noticed that we'd get significantly higher tips from our guests

when they saw wildlife on the trail. And now we can't guarantee that we see grizzlies or elk. They kind of do their own thing. Most of the time it's better if we don't see them because they charge the horses and make our lives a little bit more complicated. And now when we do see wildlife, the animals often in the bushes a little ways away, you know, easily mistaken for a rock or more complicated. And now when we do see wildlife, the animals often in the bushes, a little ways away, you know, easily mistaken for a rock or a stump. And honestly, most of the time,

you kind of just pretend that you saw it. You say, yeah, it looks like a grizzly. Good job, guys. And so Helen, Ollie, and Martin the sound man answer me this. Would it be wrong if we were to hide cardboard cutouts of bears just a little ways off our trails so that people see them, think that they see a real bear, and give us a little more money at the end of the ride? You know, it's nice at this stage of the podcast, 13 years in, to get questions we've never had before. We've never had that specific question about cardboard cutouts of bears. We've had cardboard cutouts of Kylie Minogue and Specsavers, but not bears. Why don't you put some cardboard cut up to kylie in the canadian wilderness because then you're not actually stealing anything away from the real experience

of seeing a bear in the wilderness you know if a bear pops up along the trail people will be delighted as they would have been but they'll be equally delighted by the surprise of kylie wearing a pair of spec savers or a bear costume yeah in fact could you get people to dress as bears and roam around is that morally better or worse? It's morally worse because on an ongoing basis, you're paying someone presumably to be wearing that costume. Whereas at least once you've done the cardboard cutouts, it's done. And what if Annie had some sound effects

that she triggered every so often of a bear growling? So she's like, look out, look out. So she's not deceiving the eyes. She's just hinting at the presence of a bear. What you're describing is Jungle Cruise at Disneyland. And that's fine because everyone knows she's not deceiving the eyes. She's just hinting at the presence of a bear. What you're describing is Jungle Cruise at Disneyland. And that's fine because everyone knows it's not real. Yes. I do think it's, I mean, it's actually like legally fraud, I'm fairly sure,

if you're charging tourists and then giving them an experience that isn't real. I mean, it's not like a ghost tour where it's on like some grey area, like, oh, we say there's ghosts there, but you can't prove it. And there either is or isn't a fucking bear there. If you say you will see a bear and then they think they've seen a bear and remunerate you for that i'm fairly sure you've committed a crime right isn't the problem here then tipping culture because if you go on one of these wildlife tours like martin and i have been on boat trips to spot whales and sometimes there aren't any because nature is unpredictable and you can't

guarantee the presence of wildlife and that is not annie's fault or her colleague's fault true but they're only getting paid sufficiently if the wildlife's there and that's out of their control as well yes so isn't tipping culture the problem i think it would be fairer to charge people like 20 more in the ticket and then say it's a no tipping experience. This is what is great about the Ngorongoro crater in Tanzania, which is one of the places I went when I was 19 and went to East Africa, because it's a natural phenomenon, a crater hole. But because it exists, all of the nature that you want to see on a safari in Tanzania exists within that crater. So if you descend into that in a safari in tanzania exists within that crater

so if you descend into that in a jeep it's like going to a zoo it's basically like a natural zoo the animals can't get out the zebra can't get out and obviously the birds can but the zebra the elephants the lions their generations of their families have lived within this crater which is big enough for them to have a diverse ecosystem wow small enough for you to drive around for an hour yeah well it probably is but small enough for you to drive around an hour and genuinely be guaranteed that you will see something a lot of giraffes with six fingers down there yeah yeah but that is i mean that's what you want isn't it you want to find i did actually i went on a dolphin cruise in florida and they did advertise as we guarantee you will see dolphin yeah and we did but then maybe it is a case that you get your

money back if you actually don't i mean they can't guarantee it can they there's a trip i saw when we were in new zealand there was a trip they offered which was an albatross experience oh yeah it was apparently amazing everyone like pecking with albatrosses it's not the thing people want to see maybe they want to see seals or sea lions uh they want to go swimming with dolphins maybe they want to see whales but like who who is trumpeting their albatross experience it's like exotic though isn't it so i guess the equivalent would be like a robin experience in the british countryside i don't know if i want to be up close to a bird that has like a six foot wingspan anyway despite never having been a dolphin person i was moved in

some strange way yeah i think it's because it was so clear that the dolphin wanted to be by the boat because it makes them different to other animals isn't it they were playing they were in their wild habitat they wanted to come and see what we were doing they were chasing the boat and seeing us maybe they've been domesticated by tourists throwing them fish or something i don't know or tips yeah they're in it for the cash as well it's possible i mean in north america i would not rule anything out maybe if you shake some coins near a bear they'll come and prance i've got a question. Email your question. To answer me this podcast at googlemail.com. To answer me this podcast at googlemail.com. To answer me this podcast at googlemail.com.

So retrospectives, what historical events are we ticking off on this week's run of Today in History? On Monday, we bring you the real story of the mutiny on the bounty. On Tuesday, the anniversary of the day somebody invented the meatball, but who? On Wednesday, the iconic British car that ripped off an iconic American car. On Thursday, how American airlines invented air miles. And on Friday, the UFO sighting that gripped colonial America. We discuss this and more on Today in History with The Retrospectors. 10 minutes each weekday, wherever you get your podcasts. Here's a question from Zoran who says, I love figure skating.

Who doesn't? And I love watching it in the Winter Olympics. Who doesn't? I mean, if you love figure skating, that's the best place to watch it. Excellent. That being said, I've noticed over the years that the music the skaters do their routines to is often extremely boring or a bit cheesy. I'm not sure Tchaikovsky would agree with you, but fine. But it's often very tinny sounding pop because it's reverberating around a big ice rink, isn't it?

Right. It's coming out of a stadium speaker. That's not Gershwin's fault. They need to crank up the bass. Get them to feel it through the rink. Ollie, answer me this. Who chooses the dancing music? Are there requirements from the Olympics committee?

Do songs ever get vetoed? Do the dancers ever insist on a certain song? Why don't they ever pick anything exciting and fun to dance to? Why not the Vengabus or something? Can we just check if anyone has ever danced at the Winter Olympics to Vengabus? I know for a fact no one has. Any Vengaboy songs? No.

Not even Boom Boom Boom Boom? I'm afraid not. Oh. But I disagree that they don't pick exciting and fun tracks. I mean, at the last Winter Olympic Games, choices included Back in Black by ACDC. Wow. Run the World Girls by Beyonce.

That's... And a big band jazz version of Wonderwall by Paul Anka. I mean, I know that those tracks aren't the most fun and exciting carnival songs, but if you're thinking about figure skating, which is, as I say, traditionally Tchaikovsky and Gershon, that's mixing it up, isn't it? Yeah, I was thinking ice dancing. Maybe there's a bit more

variety because i guess you can interpret the music more in the dance but yeah figure skating is quite precise it's actually more of a tradition in ice dancing so ice dancing has allowed music with lyrics that's the issue here so he's talking about classical music ice dancing's allowed music with lyrics since the late 1990s yeah because of the popularity of things like dancing on ice would be the modern version disney on ice all that stuff so there was pressure to make it feel a bit more like that yeah if you want people to carry on watching this sport then you have to somewhat evolve yeah the time several decades before and and crucially young people to want to do it as well um if it feels more like pop dancing then they're more likely to want to train to do it yeah um so ice dancing's had that

for a while the change in figure skating which now does allow music with lyrics as i was suggesting has actually only i mean it's been really recent so it was it was at the last winter olympic games because oh wow the international skating union agreed to do it in 2014 but they said wait until after sochi because people had already prepared their routines and stuff so they agreed in 2014 and then it came into effect at the winter Olympics of 2018 so the next Winter Olympics in 2022 will be only the second time people have been able to choose music with lyrics and I think their choices will get more adventurous that's so incredibly recent yeah I wonder whether there are also restrictions about length presumably there are and also uh form I mean quite boring

restrictions that wouldn't normally make their way into an entertainment-based podcast but i have been on the website go on i'm excited to know so for example all music used for competitive events must be played on high quality electronic recorders e.g mp3 player or similar computer or cd player one or two of which shall be used during the competition so you can't bring in a gramophone um you can't use a homemade song it's got to be a commercially released track and it's got to be played through a quality thing you can't bring in a gramophone um you can't use a homemade song it's got to be a commercially released track and it's got to be played through a quality thing you can't play original music i wonder why that is well no i think you could but you'd have to have it recorded professionally so if your mate's in a band and you want to dance their song that's fine but it needs to be a

licensed track it's going out all around the world right on telly you can't i suppose because they would need the publishing and performance rights or something. I mean, I think the skating union just don't want to battle with PRS, do they? They've got ice skating to worry about. Right. It's just surprising to me because everyone's always moaning about what a bad former MP3 is. High quality enough, it seems. Right. You'd think nowadays they'd go AAC at least, wouldn't you?

Give them a wav. It's the Olympics. Also, there is a code of ethics that the international skating union has generally about how you behave as an international sports person in a family sport etc which as far as i know this hasn't been applied to music choices yet are they not all family sports yes basically but that's why you don't swear when you're throwing a javelin for example they're not gonna like allow ice skating to fuck the police or something like that zoran asks you know who chooses the track as far as i

can tell i mean obviously you might get some quite um dominant coaches who insist on choosing the tracks but generally it's the dancers they choose the track that the figure skaters themselves um and they seem to like cold play a lot there's a lot of cold play at the last olympics but uh the international skating union would be able to veto it if it was felt that it breached their code of ethics. So something with swearing in it or something that they felt had a political message that was not aligned with the Olympics.

They could, but haven't yet ever vetoed. What could go wrong, though, is that if you're felt to be dramatically out of line with the reputation of the sport, is you could be deducted points on your performance which any figure skating athlete would probably not want to take the chance of happening so um in the days before music with lyrics were allowed if you went ahead anyway and used music with lyrics you were taking that risk so um in 1988 the former world champion from canada kurt

browning kept the word tequila in the otherwise instrumental song of the same name he kept the tequila bit fun choice and that had no points deducted because i guess that was deemed to be essentially an instrumental song yeah but no message really yeah indeed but in 2011 the french skater florent Amodio performed a Michael Jackson medley, brazenly, with songs, lyrics, the whole bit, knowing that he would get an automatic deduction. But he wanted to make the point and fuck the skating union with their stupid rules. I suppose if you think, well, I'm unlikely to win against this competition anyway, so I'm going to use my platform to make a point.

Yeah, and to be broadcast all around the world, being the first figure skater dancing to Michael Jackson. I mean, that's going to, I was about to say going to go viral, but in 2011, I'm not sure really it did, but you know. Has anyone done one of these competitions to no music or is that not allowed? That is very, very, very, very much. And I cannot emphasize this enough, Helen, very much not allowed. So when you go onto the International Skating Union's website, you look at the regulations around music, only underlined rule all programs must be skated to music what if it's four minutes 33 by john cage oh yeah someone should do that no i mean that person would be a wanker wouldn't that person having spent 10 years training for this moment but if you got like a

professional recording someone doing like uh i don't know like frere jacques like with an armpit fart noise that's fine yeah that's why i want to hear although arguably brings the sport into disrepute so they could still have that veto but i guess if it's a really funny routine and you're good then i mean they're not going to say that i don't know why armpit fart noise is not considered a legitimate instrument in the eyes of the olympic skating committee here's the fact I didn't know, though. Figure skating is the oldest sport in the Winter Olympic Games. Whoa! It's been there since 1908, the London Games. And I don't know, I obviously never thought about that,

because, like, why would you? But I guess I would have assumed throwing yourself down a hill on skis, that would have been the oldest one. Difficult in London. Yes, true. So when you say it's the oldest sport, does that mean they had other sports then

that are no longer in the Winter Olympics? Oh, good point. Yeah, because then all the other sports that happened in 1908 would still be the equal length oldest sport. Yeah, you're right. So what else did they do in the 1908 games that they don't do now? Build a snowman. Yeah, wrestle the snowman. What do I love so much about Tom Waits? Is it his gravelly voice or his gravelly face? Or the instruments he made from metal plates? And an anvil and a saucepan?

If you love him so much, then make a podcast about him. I have. Build a Squarespace site so you can tout him. I did. And one day there may be an award even your show can win. It already did. Fuck you both. Our deep thanks to the deep pockets of Squarespace for sponsoring this episode of Answer Me This.

Especially as they sponsor the Super Bowl. Yeah, they don't need us. That might be considered a bigger deal than us. We're an optional add-on. Who's playing our halftime show? But they remain a superb product if you are in the market for designing yourself a brand new spanking website with lots of minimalist space and easy to use across mobile platforms. It's very easy to set up. You just browse their award-winning design templates and then you can start adding the features that you would like in your version. They've got placeholder text, which I think throws some people.

That's just to show you how the thing works. That's you can take all that lore and ipsum out yeah or you can keep it if you want sure that'd be avant-garde also conveniently uh you can set up a store on there with uh ease ollie man has done that yes the answer me this store uh available at answer me this store.com imaginative address like to browse whilst you listen uh is where you can buy our first 200 episodes and albums and our essentially pointless app that nonetheless I'm going to shift at least 15 units a month yeah well there is the little bit of bonus content

on there and I know that at least one of you Mark listens to Mark I'm making it for you anyway we're very grateful you can buy all our stuff from there that is an example of a website that frankly doesn't look that amazing. And I say this with respect, Squarespace. It doesn't look amazing because I only did that in like three hours.

That's how easy it is to set up a website. So if you actually spend a couple of days properly designing a website, they really do look amazing. And it is just drag and drop, really easy to use. Well, my Song by Song website looks pretty good. I don't think it took me more than three hours. Well, perhaps you could open that in a rival window, compare and contrast.

What is it, songbysongpodcast.com? songbysongpodcast.com? Yeah, and then you could compare it to theillusionist.org and vmipod.com. You could. I'm just saying you could. Are those Squarespace sites too? Yes, sir.

Oneman.co.uk with two Ns,.co.uk, also a Squarespace website. The range of websites you can do when you have an audio product like we do, but also other things. So if you want to try it out, then go to squarespace.com answer play around during the two-week free trial if you create something you like and you want to keep it then use our code answer to get 10 off your first purchase of a website or domain and buy some of our classic

episodes to listen to whilst you're designing your website treat yourself yeah need to put something in your ears it's the perfect entertainment for when you're doing something visual and can't watch your youtubes that's right uh here's a question from katie from kingston in canada a few months ago i was stopped on my way to class she says by some mormon missionaries and since my dad was going through a health crisis which he's since recovered from glad to hear it i thought what the hell might as well explore religion that's how they get you that is exactly how they get you i met with them a few times and whilst i decided the church of the latter-day saints wasn't for me i am now the proud-ish owner of a copy of the book of mormon i mean that's not a rare thing is it i mean they're happy to give

them away i understand true true i currently use it to prop up a fan, but that seems a bit disrespectful. To the book or the fan? Both, potentially. I also want to get rid of it, she says. Normally, for books, I just donate them, but that seems strange for this particular book, like passing on the burden to someone else. That's an interesting thing to explore, isn't it? I mean, that's the case with encyclopedias, if that makes you feel any better.

Encyclopedias are a nightmare for any charity shop or secondhand bookstore. Yeah, but Bibles aren't. I mean, there's always a market for them, surely. Right, yeah. Yeah, I don't think that is. What's the burden? Like someone who buys it from a charity shop is keen on reading it. Yeah, someone else might be genuinely interested in this document.

Yeah, so I'm not sure I accept her terms here. But anyway, I don't want to just throw it away, she says. Again, the disrespect thing. And waste. And the only other suggestion i've gotten is from a very devout friend of another religion who offered to burn it for me more disrespectful i think than propping up a fan at this point i'm tempted to make blackout poetry of it what does that mean i think it's where you black out words so the words that you can still see

form a poem i mean i'd go further and say that's massively disrespectful you could do paper crafts with it like you sometimes see on instagram someone's done an exquisite sculpture out of the pages of a book by folding them in a clever way. Right. Fine. Helen answered me this. How do I properly get rid of a book of Mormon? I doubt the Mormons have an officially sanctioned line on that. I think I have a few religious books that are not religions that I am affiliated with, but I just thought might be interesting and then probably never looked at. Do you have a copy of the Bible?

Like, is it on your reference shelf? I know you don't live anywhere permanent at the moment. No, I think I just have dictionaries of the Bible, but not the Bible itself. I've got the like Oxford Classics edition of the Bible, Old and New Testament. Never read it. Cliff notes.

But I just thought that's a good book. I don't mean in the traditional sense. I just mean it's a useful book to have in the house. Like a dictionary or thesaurus. It's just like part of the... Right. If you ever have to do a mock trial at home, you could get people to do the oath. Or if you just quickly want to check.

And I figure that if I ever need to know something that's in the Bible, I can probably look it up online. Do you have any family heirloom Bibles? Not in my family, mate. No, really? Because at some point then they have been destroyed or passed on. I think there was a big Bible at my parents, but I don't know if they kept it when they moved house

and got rid of a lot of their books. They also got rid of the ones to do with yoga and tantra and a bunch of my dad's old spiritual and health fads. So it may have gone with those. But my first thought with this was to donate it to somewhere that has use for religious texts, like a university or a school places that are studying religions okay because then they might have use for it you don't necessarily need any mormons in the town but then you wouldn't feel compromised i see because it's an academic context that you're donating it yeah but my other options would be to

sneak it in somewhere like a library or a cafe or a pub if they've got bookshelves i think pop it in there which is kind of passing the problem along but i think other people whose eyes are light upon it and may want to read it or otherwise interact with it it's it's not necessarily a problem for them this is matt from melbourne helen and ollie answer me this um what's up with that monk hairstyle where they like shave the top of their heads um what's that about do people still do that um and do you think that that'll ever be like a fashionable look taking his last question first i think it could become a fashionable look because people are always looking for difficult and edgy hairstyles and there's not much that hasn't been done if a woman did that that would be edgy and new wouldn't it like shaved off the middle part yeah if the long bits on the side yeah i guess keith flint is sort

of shaved across the middle and had two little mohawks or terry nutkins you know he never cut back on the on the hippie stuff but lost all the bit in the middle of the time but you know undercut used to be quite edgy but now they're very common and mullets those come in and go out pretty regularly so this seems like one of the last bastions of edgy hair and also you might think well people go bald on top and they don't necessarily want that because society has trained them to think baldness is bad but they also did that with gray hair and gray hair is quite fashionable dyed gray hair so i reckon it could come in yeah my 15 year old neighbors got metallic gray hair yeah and who'd have thought 20 years ago that people would i mean it's quite difficult uh color to maintain as well anyway monk hairdo definitely a talking point if you're not a monk if you are a monk i'd imagine more of a talking point to not have the monk hairdo and that's the point isn't it i was interested to read that in 1972 there was a papal order abandoning the tonsure

which is what this is called and it had been around for about 1500 years before that but um basically since then it's been on the way and so you could do it but they largely turned not to because the pope was like stop it some people speculate the pope might have done it because he thought it was discouraging young men from becoming monks in such a hirsute time as the early 70s yes very contrary to fashion then wasn't it right exactly yeah i think there are still symbolic haircuts and i think some monks just saved the whole lot but the tonsure is it's no longer such a popular monk style but what is the origin of it why had it been there for 1500 years they're not really sure and it caught

on it seems in quite a narrow period of time so it possibly was like a coordinated thing that monks were going to do but straight off it symbolizes you are sacrificing vanity for religion so you're renouncing worldly things i suppose you're also making pretty big declaration that you're one of the monks yes you know more than like wearing a lanyard or something but that's so extreme compared to i mean because obviously like muslims and jews don't they don't they women cover their hair yeah but to shave it all off that feels like i mean it's a different way of tackling with the same issue yeah yeah like but it's it's going beyond concealing beauty and into making yourself conventionally unattractive that's kind of what that is isn't it it's quite a statement i think a lot of it

is about making that statement and also when hair was held to be sexual it was refusing that sexuality yeah and rejecting it also i think often they got the tonsure to mark their entry into monkhood. And then if they didn't keep the tonsure, that was the equivalent of trying to abandon your monk status. And in a 1917 law, any tonsured monk who did not resume having a tonsure within a month of being warned about letting it grow out lost their monkishness there's some other theories as well that um it came about to represent christ's crown of thorns so you've got that little strip of hair that looked like that there's some speculation as

well by historians that this hairstyle came about because people would shave slaves heads i was a bit like kissing the feet of the prisoner type thing well it's like declaring yourself as a slave of christ oh okay not necessarily equal before god but slave to god very much not equal yeah but there's also um different styles of tonsils so some they would just shave the whole head some they would do that circular ring of hair around a bald spot and then there might have been one which was a celtic one which was like shaving a strip from ear to ear like a bald band across your head or a triangle but they that was banned

um because i think at the time and and this is like 7th century, they were like, well, people are wearing their hair differently. That indicates that multiple religions have got to stop it. Interesting. Martin, young Martin, did every type of hairstyle, didn't he?

Did you ever shave completely? No, I didn't. I mean, I certainly went down to like on the clippers where it's like number zero. I've seen the photos. It's haunted me forever. It's not great. You never went all the way down to the skin not like a full razor no no i had some friends to that and it didn't look great like i think you've got to have a lot

of poise to carry that off i think of all the haircuts i had this very very short like number zero cut was the one that my parents disliked most because it reminded them of like belson and stuff like that they have these very negative associations of what i thought was like hey i'm doing kind of a cool like slightly clubby cut and they were just like you're reminding us of war crime yeah basically if you don't even know what a question is then you're probably at the wrong place because religion's on Godcasts Dogs are on Dogcasts Fish are on Rodcasts But we don't do fish

Because on this podcast You answer me this Time for a question from Katie in Portland, Oregon, who says, I have a friend who recently started seeing a life coach. This friend does not have a lot of money and often isn't able to go out with friends as a result but has confided that she's

paying her life coach $1,000 a month. I looked up the life coach and she's essentially a really pretty influencer posting selfies and vague uplifting messages on Instagram and her blog with seemingly no qualifications. You're shitting me. There isn't a degree in life coaching.

Yet she's actually managed to convince my friend that $1,000 a month isn't enough for her services. And my friend feels bad she's not paying more. Now, in addition to the life coach, my friend has also signed up for classes with a business coach again just a pretty instagram influencer with seemingly no qualifications who just posts selfies and shares how she earns 50 grand a month from her clients by charging them a thousand dollars a month for life coaching and have 50 clients that's it ingenious uh my friend is now emulating these women on instagram and has started calling herself a coach i always worry about this is like people who like people who end up working in recruitment, isn't it? I think, did they just start by wanting a job? Kind of multi-level marketing, isn't it? Yeah. I worry she's being scammed and is essentially scamming others by marketing herself as a coach now, but I know she doesn't see it that way,

and I'm not sure it's my place to say anything, so I've written to a podcast to say it to lots of people. Helenen answer me this should i share my concerns with my friend how can i do so in a supportive way without making it seem like i'm attacking her interests ambitions and life choices well i suppose by asking her about her interests ambitions and life choices rather than just going straight in with, you're being scammed, why are you doing this? Yeah, because she's in this position because people weren't listening. Right.

Why is she seeing the life coach? She had to pay someone to listen. Yeah. A thread came up in a Facebook group I'm in the other day, which was talking about life coaches. And someone was saying, well, I'm an accredited life coach, but I would suggest to most people that they go and see a therapist because that is more likely to clarify what you want out of life well let's do the textbook definition what is a life coach then well i

mean what do accredited life coaches say that a life coach is helping you make decisions about your your life i guess like particularly career i would think or living situation like a mary condo style declutter a guru but for your brain and your social engagements yeah or like mentoring yeah but not necessarily just for a particular job mentoring is a better word life coach is problematic because it suggests that the same person who can help you with your business diary can also help you with your relationships and you know your sexuality and where you live and that's where it feels a bit like we were saying earlier with religions preying on vulnerable people that there's something to be exploited there that someone who's not in a good way will pay more and more.

I've had periods in my life where I could have used the advice of a life coach because I didn't know what I was doing in my career or I didn't have any vision for it at all. But would a life coach or a careers coach know more than me about this new area of podcasting? Probably not. Well, we've all had times where we just want a grown-up to tell us what to do all the time because that is what happens when you become the grown-up as you realize shit i don't know what i'm doing damn it and also then the grown-ups who were in your life as the grown-ups like my parents i wouldn't ask them now for useful advice they become the ones that you're mentoring in some ways yeah you're like please just uh

dial that opinion back in, parent. Yeah. It seems to me like the dawning realization of most people in their 20s and into their 30s is that all the grown-ups around them didn't have a clue what they were doing either. Everyone's just busking it. Right. Including the life coaches, probably. Well, this is it. But then with experience comes some knowledge. You learn that too.

And I guess that's what you've previously thought was the natural wisdom of age you realize that's just no there's some people have experience in certain fields and and also other people's problems are easier than your own so other people it's sort of clearer the decision making than it may be to yourself i mean the point is we all can understand that there's a need sometimes to seek advice yeah Yeah. And actually, I don't have a problem with, I mean, like many things in the 21st century, which come down to basically sort of labelling. Fine. Like if someone wants to call themselves a life coach rather than a therapist,

and if someone feels more comfortable seeing a life coach than a priest, fine. Like if it's helping them, it's not a problem. I guess it's when you're talking these sums. There's a lot of jobs where you are that because you kind of self-declare as that or there is no official accreditation like what we do like we didn't have to go through any training to do it we just did it but I suppose the difference should totally set up an academy but I suppose the difference with life coaches and I was thinking like other things that you don't necessarily have to be qualified for like some alternative therapies

you can just set yourself up and even coun counseling there's not a huge amount of qualification you need to get compared to other forms of treatment and i see the difference with those is that someone really needs them to work and also the amounts of money you're talking about here are so significant but i mean i don't think that life coaching is a completely invalid idea and it seems like a really useful thing. But how do you find one that is legit? And apparently increasingly people are looking for life coaches who are members of a professional organization and people who've done these courses that are approved by an independent coaching body such as the Coach Federation or Global Coaching and Mentoring Alliance. But joining these organisations is not necessarily difficult and getting these qualifications is not necessarily difficult either. So the Life Coaching Diploma or Level 3 Official Certification is on sale for £129 including VAT. And it's just 36 hours of teaching that you have to complete within 12

months and it's basically self-guided learning so it is kind of the thing that even if you're accredited sort of anyone can do it and there's no one checking that you're good at it like a weekly shop at a supermarket isn't it right for a family of four i if i was a life coach selling business i'd want to charge more for my life coach diploma just so that people believed it was worth more than that right but it does show a certain level of effort like if someone hasn't even done that maybe that person isn't taking those things that seriously right what about this specific thing that katie's referring to here which is um in this case attractive younger women who use instagram to get clients based on i suppose an aspirational look you know look at me i'm having a great time look at me at this party

look at me owning this room does that discredit those people from being able to offer good advice and i suppose actually if your friend is now being able to emulate them and create her own business actually the answer is no it doesn't does it i mean you might not like it because you think it's not very clinical but i mean but yeah but but it is a business isn't it well i suppose it's a pyramid scheme of scamming or they genuinely are having their best life and you know they're people who are so excited to be at those networking events and sharing themselves in a you know black evening dress whilst they're giving a speech this is the thing maybe it is working in some way for your friend yeah and

therefore even if it doesn't seem like anything other than bullshit to you, perhaps there is enough in it to keep her going on it or she'll run out of money and stop doing it. My dad had a lot of weird fads, a lot of which were quite expensive, but then he couldn't afford to keep them going for more than a few months. That said, we're being diplomatic. Life coach is one of those phrases that immediately my bullshit detector goes off when someone i know says i'm seeing a life coach or i'm training to be a life coach and i always end up having a discussion where i'm sort of saying it sounds a bit like you've fallen for some bullshit here

do you ever ask them though why are you seeing a life coach what how is it working out what's the process or if you're training to be a life coach what does that involve not as much as i should probably because i'm genuinely curious exactly because my hackles are up that's why i don't ask those questions but like if i'm honest there's no reason that it has to be bad and it's not my judgment to say that it is but it does just go with someone who's been duped or someone who's vulnerable very often so then what do you do if you feel like your friend is being scammed right i suppose you say how it looks to you and in a non-judgmental way say am i wrong you explore the issue don't you or you ask for the breakdown of what she's getting for the thousand dollars a month like rather than going

you're wrong just uh just try and tease out the facts a bit more. And you could be like, oh, that seems like quite a lot. Or if you saved up all of your life coach money after a year, you possibly could afford to do something life changing with it. That is probably ultimately the piece of advice, isn't it? Maybe when you finally get to life coaching apex, the solution is all that money you're spending on me, put into what you really want to do. And then you would have a better life. So give your friend a piggy bank and be like, put your life coaching money in this.

And then in a year we'll revisit it and you'll have like 12 grand to go and do something incredible. I think there's a bit of an issue here, though, if she's getting bought into not just receiving this wisdom, but trying to dispense it herself, that once you start getting into that conversation of like is this bullshit like you're not only questioning her beliefs you're questioning her business i think something that could be important katie is to just try to be a good friend because there's obviously something making your friends see these people but also if you're critical of what she's doing and how much she's paying then she'll probably find herself in greater alignment with them than you because they are accepting of her. And she's in deep. I mean, if it is a fraud, if it is a scam, you know, I made a documentary about psychics recently. This is how it works.

You know, you start with a relatively harmless, here's a session for $100. By the time she's even considering paying $1,000 a month to someone plus more to someone else, she's in deep enough that they've already given her the defenses to explain why that's the case and a whole new belief system about why it's working, if it's a fraud. Like they're clever. If they're charlatans, they'll be clever enough, having extracted this money, to have given her the answers to your questions anyway. So I think be very careful about saying things that would alienate your friend further because she's vulnerable and because you

might just send her even more into this because they are welcoming to her and her credit card right and maybe try and spend more time with her and find out what's going on deep in her mind look after each other and yourselves is basically our final thought here isn't it give us a thousand dollars please uh if you have a question for the next edition of answer me this we don't charge you anything for that no we'll mentor you through whatever problem you're experiencing for free i'm just thinking though how much money we would have now if everyone had to give us 10 pence yeah for every question they send in i know be so fucking rich i know and uh as ever if you would like to send us a question, all the contact details are listed on our website.

AnswerMeThisPodcast.com And you can also find links to our Twitter and our Facebook to be our internet friend. And you can find links to our other work. Oli, what does February hold in Oli Mann stuff? Yes, I have five podcasts. You can discover them all at OliMann.com. But on my monthly magazine show, The Modern Man, this month there is an episode called The Candidate.

We have been following in a documentary style the general election campaign of Leila Moran MP. Wow. Who, even if you're not interested in politics, you may have come across recently when she became Britain's first openly pansexual politician recently. But we talk about what it's like really to be a young female Palestinian pansexual MP in 2020. Which, you know, is certainly something that people probably don't appreciate, like the

stress of standing for public office these days. So if you're interested in that, you can find it at modernmanwith2ends.co.uk helen well this month we reached the season finale of the first season of veronica mars in our recap podcast veronica mars investigations and if any of you have seen that finale of season one of veronica mars is really fucking dramatic in real life have you got further than that like have you seen all veronica mars but now you're recapping it i've seen it before are there any episodes you haven't seen yes right because they did a an extra season last year and i've only seen four out of eight and now you're saving that for when you get to it in the podcast yeah

kind of don't feel that motivated to finish it because i know a lot of people really hate it okay that's not it's probably better that you haven't seen it then yeah it's good when you're doing a tv recap podcast of a show that really went off the boil in its later seasons that you've got that to look forward to. So season one of Veronica Mars Investigations is complete so you can watch the whole of season one and listen along to me and Jenny Owen-Young recapping season one at

vmipod.com. Very fun and interesting times and also there's The Illusionist at theillusionist.org Martin! Well I've got a new single out, it's called Apple Tree and it was written for the podcast new single out. It's called Apple Tree. It was written for the podcast The Family Tree. It's based on the oldest written piece of music, which is called

The Hurrian Hymn to Nicall, who's a goddess of apple trees and orchards. I wonder if they performed it at the 1908 Winter Olympic Games. They probably did. All of the music is at palebirdmusic.com. Remember as well to subscribe to our show wherever you get your podcasts to get our free retro episode,

which you only get by subscribing to the podcast feed in the middle of the month. And it being February, you may want to check out Answer Me This Love as well, our exclusive album about romance and sex and stuff. And then we'll be back with a fresh new episode on the first Thursday of March. Bye!