Life Uncut - Is Zuckerberg dumping the news?

Episode Date: March 18, 2024

Hey lifers! First up today, we've got two very special (s-paw-cial if you like a pun) guests in with us today. We go through the worst things you've done to get revenge on one of your exes and you are all very CREATIVE!! We also promise that we won't report any of you because some of these things are borderline illegal. Plus we unpack the big changes that Meta is about to make to your instagram and facebook news. Things could be really changing next month. But who is in the wrong here? Is it the government for legislating something that benefited some news providers (but not all), or it is Meta for wanting to save themselves from paying Australian news providers a lot of money. There are a few independent news players in this game that are really going to be affected by this change, despite them never benefiting from the agreement that was made in 2021. We also speak about our desire and ability to pay for content such as news. If we eventually did need to pay for this type of content to keep these news organisations going, would you be willing to? Would you only pay for some or the types that you liked and enjoyed? Would that make you end up in an echo chamber? You can watch us on Youtube If you have an question please send it on it to life uncut podcast on Instagram Join us on tiktok Or join the Facebook Discussion Group Tell your mum, tell your dad, tell your dog, tell your friend and share the love because WE LOVE LOVE! xxSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Life Uncut acknowledges the traditional custodians of country whose lands were never ceded. We pay our respects to their elders past and present. Always was, always will be Aboriginal land. This episode was recorded on Darug Walamutta land. Hi guys and welcome back to another episode of Life Uncut. I'm Laura. I'm Brittany. Things are like very chaotic here in the studio today. Delilah.

Because never before have both of us decided to bring our animals. And on the same day. You copied me. I had to bring Delilah in today because she has to go to an appointment. So I was like, I need to bring her to go. And then Solora's like, well, then I want to bring Buster. And now there's two dogs here. One dog was fine, but two dogs, they're just looking at each other from across the room,

wanting to like rumble. Buster wants to hump Delilah. Okay. To be fair. Delilah's good looking, yes. She is a pretty dog. You can't blame the guy. no he normally buster and i'm sorry to say this honey i know you can hear me right now and i don't

want you to feel shamed but buster is a humper which is very very very funny to see because he's only got everything he's only got three legs so he tries to mount things and he slips off the side but he doesn't try and hump delilah so she should be a fan maybe he knows delilah's out of his league no he did try remember they got into a fight once he tried it on her once and she snapped at him and he was like yep i'll raid the room he's like all right my advances are not wanted good yeah you should respect women more you bloody literally passed out i know he's so old now okay you were bringing delilah into the studio and i didn't want bus to be at home knowing that he was the one that just got left behind could you imagine what that would do to his psyche he doesn't know

he does he knows everything no he does not know that delilah okay that's enough anyway we're here now we have dogs in the studio it's all happening today i can i say no don't don't say it don't be keep it to yourself don't be offended girls what happened pretty skeeter and laura i got so many messages saying the best part about the episode the other day was delilah's mom chat so just saying they were like we're pro they were like we're pro delilah's mom you know how i was like the difference between us you guys were at a rave i was looking at pictures of delilah's mom everyone's like i'm your team i would have been at home looking at delilah's mom i'd love to know when you say i got so many like what at least four four five maybe i didn't count i lost count after

three i stopped counting after no there was so many i couldn't even make my way through all of the messages around delilah's albino mom chat i had rsi in my thumb from scrolling the messages well we did speak about this on thursday or maybe it was tuesday i can't remember but we spoke about a woman who had texted an eyebrow beautician to say and to ask the eyebrow beautician to go out of her way to give her friend the worst eyebrows that she could ever possibly imagine she literally texted the beautician was like yo this is my girlfriend fuck her up yeah and the reason why she did that is because she found out that her friend was sleeping with her boyfriend which you know drama drama drama the beautician didn't do it but the post is going viral across social media

so we gave you guys the call out because we wanted to know what is the most heinous revenge plot twist that you have ever enacted on an ex what did you do to get back to them and at the start look at the start they were pretty pg they were pretty pretty safe i would have said but then we did another call out and holy dick you came to the party i would like to start this conversation by saying we in no way encourage this sort of behavior we love to laugh at it but we are not telling anybody to take this and go and do anything with it we may be one or two endorsing it but also some of this stuff is probably like borderline illegal so we are laura you broke into your ex's house and stole his passport and forged his signature that's illegal not borderline

illegal i agree but it was 10 years ago and don't come and the statue of limitation says that 10 years you can do whatever the fuck you want okay all right so i'm gonna kick it off i went into his apartment after i found out that he had been cheating on me for six months i drenched his carpet and then i covered it in grass mix he was away on a work trip for three and a half weeks So I turned that central heating up to 30 degrees and I let the bad boy flourish. Imagine seating the lounge room carpet of an apartment. Wouldn't you get off on that?

I would come home and I'd be like, oh, yeah. You'd be like, more room to propagate. Look at the fresh air in here. Joke's on you. My indoor garden finally living out all my best dreams. Okay, I've got one. I went to the pet store and bought frozen rats and put them in his car. That was my favourite.

it there was more context to this he was away disgusting away for a long time as well this is what i'm learning from these if you're ever going to enact a revenge you've got to do it when they've gone away on a work trip and you can really let that sort of stuff just simmer in the sun or the heat okay i drove his car to the edge of our property and i covered it in shit like literal cow manure from top to bottom yeah you get your car that's not the worst for me you get your car shit on by birds and stuff all the time no she covered it in like a thick layer of manure that you would put it in the garden. Do something that's not going to gross you out too. You've got to put your hands in manure and like massage it into someone's car. Maybe they live on a farm.

Okay. This one is great. This one I thought was brilliant, especially coming from the plant person. So this woman, her boyfriend had a beautifully manicured front garden. Like he was really into his landscaping. He'd only recently had the landscaping in the front of the house finished. And she went to the pet store and she bought, you know, when you go and you get like the little pebbles for a fish tank she bought like brightly colored kilograms of the brightly colored little tiny pebbles that you put at the bottom of a fish tank and she scattered it all throughout his garden what the pink like pink and purple and green you would never ever ever be able to get that like handpick that out of your fucking garden okay finding it for years i got this i got

this garden one come in my ex loves to garden it was his pride and joy so after we broke up because he cheated on me I went to his house dug some of his grape plants out so that I could take them home myself and poisoned the rest oh that's really me I felt bad because they were beautiful but fuck you that's really me I unpicked the buttons on his work shirt just enough so that they would pop off while he was wearing them but she did it to every single one of his button-up shirts cut holes in the crotch of all his suits my husband was so lazy I know there is no way he would have noticed before putting them on the day of a november wedding i threw my ex's rolex in the yarra that's illegal but also that's also brutal fair i put hair remover cream in his shampoo and then

look it goes a bit further than that she put hair remover cream in his shampoo and then she urinated in his mouthwash which i am not condoning that's too far that's urine is sterile though no it is mouthwash before yeah so imagine if they're both together you had the cleanest mouth in history that's that is so illegal covered his car in glitter and lube that's really funny i opened a can of tuna and i hid it under his bed great you know what i was thinking when i was reading these because i'm not a revenger right like we know that my ex had a double life and all i did was take his toilet paper you need to be more spiteful well i don't hope i don't have to ever be spiteful again ben's an angel but what i

was thinking I would do is and I took this idea from all of you guys instead of just putting something in the curtain like fish in the curtains or tuna under the bed I would take the sheets off the bed and then cut on the underside of the mattress cut in a hole put all of whatever you want in there because no one is ever going to look for a hole in the mattress so all of the dead animals or the food goes into the mattress if you wanted to you could sew that seam back up put the sheets back on and there's no way in hell that they are ever finding that that is the most revolting thing i have ever heard but brilliant no you would realize pretty quickly that the stench was coming from your mattress but you'd be looking under it you wouldn't it's sewn up it's like i'm

essentially mi6 that is so fucking rank imagine someone getting frozen rats and putting them inside your mattress okay there's so many guys there was so so so many of these the most common one which we're also not endorsing was that you went and had sex with someone who they cared about like their brother or their best friend or their cousin or someone in their immediate family who you thought this is really going to hurt them also i poked a hole in his goggles so that they would just leak a tiny little bit when he was swimming which he did daily that's an annoying one reported him to the government for tax fraud and added him to a monthly bible subscription which he now receives in the postage month.

That's all right. Maybe he needed to find God. He needed to repent for his sins, motherfucker. Okay, this one's actually dangerous. Poured olive oil on the windscreen. You can't do anything that's going to kill someone. Is it dangerous, though? Would he realise as soon as he got in the car

that he couldn't clean that slime off? If it's oily and it's distorting your vision, like I'm getting really serious here, you can't do that. The Bible thing's one thing. All right. I mean, we really ended on a downer, didn't we, Bruce? I wanted to talk about something today that is a little bit different to your standard life uncut content which really does bounce around with a whole lot of different stuff

you guys might have seen that there are a lot of conversations happening online at the moment which is spearheaded by independent and by the major news groups around meta which is if you are not familiar with meta I'm sure you are it's Facebook and Instagram the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, Mark Zuckerberg, basically is changing the way in which Facebook is going to distribute news on their platforms. You might remember back in 2021, there was this like a couple of days when news was taken off Instagram and off Facebook and everybody was up in arms. It was like a news blackout. Absolutely. And the reason for that was because at the time, Meta and the government were at lockaheads around who should be paying for news and how was news in

Australia going to be distributed on social media platforms. Now, the agreement that they brokered in 2021 expires in April this year. And that agreement was called the Government News Media Bargaining Code, which basically meant that news outlets, the big major news outlets, I'm talking like Fairfax and Seven, it allowed them to negotiate with Meta to receive a payment for the news and the content that they put onto Meta's networks. So basically, if they were going to provide content and they're going to post and they're going to be driving people towards news and sharing the news what it meant is that the responsibility of payment laid with meta and so every year meta pays an absolute fuckload to australian news outlets i think it accounts for

up to 10 of their overall income that they're receiving this is not a new thing basically what's happened is that meta has turned around and said as of april we're binning the whole thing we are no longer going to be paying for news to be supported on our sites so ultimately what is going to happen is that they're removing the news tab so you'll no longer be able to go on facebook and have a news tab there where you can see what's current in the world and also they're going to limit any of the news platforms so i'm talking you know if you go on and you look at abc news or you look at sky news or you look at some of the independent ones as well like the daily oz who have been very vocal in this space you will no longer be able to see the content and so currently

this ban already exists in the UK. It exists in Germany, in France, and in Canada. They rolled this out earlier this year. And so if you go onto any news site in those places, it currently says news in this area cannot be accessed because it is banned on this network. So if you try and, and this is interesting because the Daily Oz did an episode on it. If you're in Canada at the moment and you try and Instagram search the Daily Oz, you cannot see the profile page and you cannot see the content that it has. Yeah, but I think the interesting thing is here, the reason Facebook's giving for saying, hey, we're going to withdraw our news. This is the official quote that Meta put out. They've decided that the cost of providing news in Australia is too high. Its reason for the

change is to better align our investments to our products and services people value the most. The interesting thing here is the statistic that Meta put out saying that in the last year, news clicks in Australia have declined by 80%, which is a huge amount. They're saying there's something like only 3% of engagement with news sites now, but how are we supposed to know that that is even a valid statistic? This is just purely coming from Meta. Meta can tell us whatever the fuck they want. Well, I found this so deeply fascinating. And the reason for that is because partly when I read all about this, and I do not think that Facebook are the good guys. Let me tell you that first I do not think that meta are the good guys in this but I also understand why they're

at a point now where they're like we no longer want the news on our platform so basically they've said that three percent of the content is what constitutes news and what people are engaged with when it comes to news on their platform and I know that there's no way for us to know the truth behind that and as to whether that is fact or not but the reality is why would they at Facebook their number one thing they want is for people to spend more time on their platform so if news was making up a hugely critical volume of people's interests, they wouldn't be removing it. They would be keeping it. So they have obviously done a cost analysis of, well, how much does it cost us to have the news? How much are we outlaying in order to have this content and for people to

engage with it? And is it valuable to us and do we need it? And they've come to the decision as a business, well, no, we don't need it. And the news outlets need us a fuckload more than we need them. And that's where this kind of like dynamic has been created. And the thing that I think is the biggest flaw with the Australian government's news media bargaining agreement that they came to in 2021 is that it doesn't benefit all news outlets. So independent news outlets like The Conversation, like Daily Oz, for example, they don't actually get a kickback from Meta. And arguably, they are some of the very creative news outlets who are putting out the most unbiased and fact-checked news news that as well i think is the most engaging on their platforms the daily

oz has grown it like absolutely exploded in the last three years since covid they have half a million followers on instagram alone yeah and when we interviewed sam a few years back they were only on like 150 000 so the thing with the daily oz is that they created a platform where it took news to the place where people engage with it that's on social media but the reason why i guess the whole thing is kind of like a bit of a problem and why it's kind of moved so far away from it being a news aggregator is that on one hand you have news outlets who have profiles on Instagram and in order to get people to engage with their content further what they do and it's what we've all seen is instead of having a news article sitting and living on Instagram they just have

a really clickbaity headline something that as you're scrolling you see it and you're like oh fuck what's that and then you have to click the link in bio in order to go and read the article so what news outlets are actually doing is that they're pushing people off the platform onto their own sites to engage with their own content and ultimately meta as a business doesn't want users leaving their platform we've discussed this so many times they want people with engaging with their content as much as possible for as long as possible the daily oz so if you don't know who they are you'll know the faces of it Zara and Sam they are the founders there's a bunch of people that have gone into it but they're the face that's who you'll hear from the most and I think Zara

summarized it really well so I just want to read exactly what she wrote she said without a strong news ecosystem on social media young Australians will have nowhere to access reliable fact-checked information we know young people won't actively seek out news elsewhere all the research tells us that so what will happen instead we'll see a rise in influencer-led commentary attracting young people to death with the editors fact checkers and journalists that make up modern newsrooms young people will have unchecked opinions in their place now just to sit on that for a second that is something that you don't immediately think about but that is so worrying we see so many loud people on social media that are stuffing their opinions that are often incorrect down your

throats and unfortunately biased biased opinion biased sometimes uneducated sometimes you know there's a whole multitude of things but they're throwing these down your throat and if you've got nowhere else to access your news it's very easy and we've seen it happen it's very easy to listen to what some influencer has said take that as gospel and then you and you go and spread that news yeah and also what it means is like people are not going to pay for subscription newspapers right like most people and i would love to just do a poll of you guys the lifers like who is paying for a subscription-based news outlet? Like are you subscribed to The Telegraph?

Are you subscribed to, I don't know, The New York Times? I would love to know how many of you actually are paying for news because we live in a society where we so deeply just expect things for free and I think people are getting most of their bite-sized information, whether it is a good thing or not, from social media. I guess the big question though in this, you can be angry at Meta and you can like stomp and be so like, this is an outrage, we should be able to have this, you know, free access to unfettered news. And now it means that

people are not going to have the ability to fact check. And it means that news is going to be more limited, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But is Meta the ones who are responsible for that? Or has the government created a situation where Meta is actually funding news organizations within Australia, and it's not their responsibility to do so. And the reason I say this is because there is no other industry that gets paid to put their content on a platform that is free that we all use daily that we all profit from in different ways and whether you profit from it because it allows you to connect your friendship group and you connect with your friends for no cost or whether it's because you and I when I say no cost I mean no financial cost because there is

always a cost of using meta we all pay with our data we all pay in some way but I think about me is a small business. I hugely financially profit from using Instagram for Tony May. And in fact, I have to pay a shitload of money in ads in order to be able to get my product and my services out there more freely. Now I know that I don't provide something that is as critical as the news nowhere near, but there are other organizations out there who do. There are other people who pay to use Meta and Facebook whose product is genuinely life-changing and amazing. And yet they still have to pay in order to be used and be on that platform well you know what i think it opens up it opens up another question and this is a completely different segue but it opens up the

question of of course we should be paying for things in all aspects of life every single person and every single industry is a business that needs to make money to survive so like we shouldn't be expecting people to give us things for free the problem in this situation lies in the fact of meta's worth meta makes so much money in 2023 they made an annual gross profit of 108 billion dollars so it comes back to the question of okay we get it we get that like you shouldn't be putting things out for free but you also make more than any other company like you're making 100 billion dollars a year is it that much to ask that we can have news on our platform and then it comes back to this question of okay does this responsibility fall on in all aspects of life if somebody makes more

money does that responsibility fall on them to provide things for free and I think it's a question and taking this away to simplify it for a second it's a question that we've done in on the podcast before where friends have said one of my friends earns so much more money than me should they be paying more for dinner you know it comes back to that like there are so many different levels I love that you just managed to make a linkage between Facebook and meta and going out to dinner but i agree i agree i'm just trying to put it on a level that we can understand in our in our own life because no no one listening to this i'm big call no one listening to this can relate to 100 billion dollars right we can't but does it always have to fall on the person that's making the most

money the most profit to then go and provide something extra for free because i don't know when you say it like that though part of me thinks if you're a monopoly and you have that level of income then you should be contributing back to the creators who keep people engaged on your platforms there is a part of me that says yes totally but i guess the reason why i kind of think that it's such a unique case when it comes to the news is because there are no other creators who are given the same sort of benefits, I guess. And at the end of the day, the impact that we're going to see really is that news within Australia is going to suffer because it already suffers. Back in the day, people used to pay for newspapers, physical newspapers. We used to buy them every

week. And now we don't invest in the news on a consumer level in the way that we used to. so what's going to happen is that these big organizations are still going to need to make money so subscriptions are going to increase news is going to become more limited because they need to make money they are also a business like that's going to have a flow on effect but also what it means is news is going to get more sensationalized because the headlines if that's the thing that's going to grab your attention to make you pay for the subscription they're going to get wilder it's going to get crazier that is going to be like shock jock news headlines that make you want to pay for the subscription or pay for that article that's what's going to get you

over the line now well there's a possibility it's going to become far more limited and we say that because if everybody does go to paid news there are a lot of free news outlets right but you still then if you are saying okay i only want to get my news from a free site so you already cut your options in half right like so those ones are all paid not going to even look at them it puts a lot more responsibility back on the consumer which we always encourage that anyway we always encourage you as a consumer to have responsibility on where you're getting your news but it's going to put no they don't but this is what I'm saying this is going to make that tenfold because your options are far more limited so you have to really put a bit of thought into where you're going to be

accessing the news and why but that's the thing right I mean if we if we look at consumer behavior and I I mean I'm guilty of this as well I would say that I'm someone who probably above average seeks out the news like I pay for subscriptions myself but I also ingest so much of it just because it's been served to me on social media and then it's something that I was interested in so then I kind of went down a rabbit hole and found more things the thing is is like you don't know what you don't know and so by limiting people's exposure to what's happening in the world it makes everybody's life a little bit more narrow and everyone's focus of interest a little bit more narrow especially if you're expecting them to pay for something that they didn't even

know that they were interested in in the first place I have a question that I've just thought about if you compare the programs that are something like a YouTube and how YouTube pays their creators based off of views and I don't know the metrics completely but you get my point YouTube actually pays people to create content that they put on their platform yeah why doesn't meta everyone knows that you can make money through Instagram but correct me if I'm wrong that is only if you are getting paid by a brand right like yes if you get a million views on a video they're not giving you money to compensate you for the fact that people have engaged with that content for that long so TikTok is different YouTube is different they do pay their creators

based off of views and time spent on there I didn't know TikTok pays their creators there's a creator it's not in Australia but it exists in America I'm not sure where else it exists but I know it doesn't exist here that is fascinating because the way in which YouTube pays you is through, they push ads. So if you're watching a YouTube video, you would know that like every couple of minutes or every, whatever timestamp it is, there's an ad that is pushed. And it's different to say a podcast ad, for example, because we might do ads with brands where we work directly with them. We help to script, but this is like an ad that they have no control over. It's just pushed out onto their platform. So that's kind of where the money comes from. And

that's why YouTube pays an overall fee because those ads are worth X amount of money. The other thing that I think is important to mention is most news outlets make a lot of money from their advertising on site. So they make money through banner ads through like, you know, when you go into Daily Mail and you get absolutely fucked in the ass by ads, sometimes you can't even read the article because the ads are popping up all over it. You know, they're what's called like banner or retargeting ads. And those ads are what generates a lot of money for that site. So the more hits and users you get to your website, obviously the more money you can make through your website. That's how most news organizations make their income. And I don't know if it's the

biggest percentage of income. I'm not sure what the split is, but it is a very considerable income for them. And so that's why I kind of unpack this idea that, well, when you see, click the link in bio to go to our website, you're double profiting from the same thing. As a news outlet, you're already being paid to put the content on meta, but then you're forcibly, some of them, some of them, the big users, some of them, but then you're forcibly pushing users to go to your website where you earn more money because they're engaging with content there where they're getting retargeting ads. So I think that that's why there's this, like at the moment, the dialogue that's happening around this big legislation change, it's going to have an immense impact on

us as people who consume social media. But I also don't know where the responsibility lies when you actually look at the complete picture. This will affect all of us once this government law that was passed in 2021 finally comes to an end it's the things that you don't think about too that i found really interesting when i was doing a bit of a deep dive david anderson who is the managing director of abc he has come out and said look we're obviously deeply disappointed because off the back of their deal with meta they funded roles for 60 journalists so that's just one that's just the abc conglomerate when you think about every single network or every media outlet that has gone and made these financial decisions based off a deal that they thought was going to be

with no end in sight, I suppose. How many people are going to be losing their jobs? So many journalists are going to lose their jobs. And I genuinely come back to what we said earlier about people like The Conversation, people like SBS even, it doesn't get a kickback from Meta, The Daily Oz, these independent news sources who have been creating fantastic content, contributing so deeply to the news cycle and to the news conversation, but they haven't been getting a kickback from meta, but they're going to be penalized. I think that they are really the ones that are going to be the most disadvantaged from this because they've built their entire network around creating fucking phenomenal content on a platform that is all about engagement.

But ultimately, I think this raises a bigger question and it's something that Brit, you and I and Keisha we've spoken about so many times we're content creators and we create podcasts and we are one of the only podcasts in the top 10 of Australia who doesn't charge subscribers for any additional content Life Uncut is free and has always been free and it's something that we've contemplated but maybe it comes down to imposter syndrome a little bit where we're like fuck what will people pay for well it's funny because we got asked to do paid content like to put up paywalls to put do patreons to subscribe monthly apple podcast additional subscription we had deep meetings with apple around subscription-based models we were asked multiple times and you know this is

back before it all kicked off i'm talking years ago before anyone in australia had really gone into the paid atmosphere because overseas it's normal right we had another meeting about it last year when other big players in the australian landscape were doing it you guys all know you know shameless and you know mamma mia but even shows like i think they're the top show in australia still one or two case file which is the true crime even they do subscription-based content yeah but even tiny podcasts do subscription-based totally content now and when mama mia for example i'm going to use them because you know we're all women that are doing podcasts that are talking about similar things totally the kickback that they got from their audiences who were always

supportive they have beautiful loving caring audiences for years and the second that they put a dollar value on their content saying hey guys we can't keep doing this for free people like that's wrong you shouldn't be charging but at the end of the day there's a bunch of people that are working really hard to bring you guys things every single week and they've done so for x amount of years for free why is it the expectation that it should be for free i think social media has bred a sense of entitlement to content i think we do genuinely think and expect that we have free access to everything and that the buck shouldn't stop with the consumer but i loved mia friedman's argument and debate to this because they received so much backlash and she was like

we're a female founded media company we create incredible content and we should be paid for the content that we create and the work that we put into it not just from brands and suppliers but also from the people who are consuming it and benefiting from the many incredible people who we pay to share their stories and i so deeply agree with this and i really want to make it clear we are not saying that we don't have a subscription model for you guys for the lifers because we think we're better than other podcasts we only do it because of that literal like imposter syndrome where we think like well are we putting out content that we feel as though we can charge people for you know that's an internal thing which I think a lot of women and a lot of creators and a

lot of people worry about you know price point setting and all that sort of stuff but the world is changing and I think for so long we've had free access to whatever we've wanted when it comes to content and slowly and slowly we are re-educating the consumer that content needs to be paid for depending on what it is and I think the same thing is going to happen within the news world now we're going to become more comfortable with and more accepting of the fact that we have to pay for news some people will and some people will have subscriptions and some people will choose to be ignorant because they don't care about the news and they don't care about what's happening in the world and to be fair those people probably weren't engaging with news in a very healthy way

anyway online they probably were the ones who were reading the headlines and then being sensationalized i don't know and we're also not saying we're about to go and slap on a fee for life uncut like we're not this isn't us getting you ready for like hey in a couple of weeks but it's a conversation that we do constantly have and maybe one day in the future it's something that we will look at in some capacity we don't know but it's always an add-on and i don't i want to like warn you guys if we ever did do a subscription model it's not to access the content full stop yeah we're never ever going to take away from you we would only ever be giving you more that would be the model we've done nearly five years and 500 550 episodes and never charged a dollar for it i think i mean

we charge brands so no but no the consumer we've never charged the consumer ever can i just zoom out though and the main concern for me about this whole thing i don't have a problem paying for my news i pay some news organizations we pay a dollar a month to the new york times i have subscriptions to other podcasts and that kind of thing i don't have a problem with paying a small amount of money per month i think it's a really good thing if you can to support the people that you enjoy the content from what i do think is quite concerning is that if you look back 20 years ago where there was such a monopoly of information that was shared to us at murdoch media i'm not I'm just going to outright say it.

They impacted your television news. They impacted your newspaper news. And it's only quite recently in the big scale that we've seen a push towards a more independent source of information. And I think that largely it's because of people like Cheek Media, like the Daily Oz. So now taking them out of the equation, I'm like, I'm still happy to pay for some news sites but is this going to push us back to the fact that we get news in a more traditional way it's so biased it's so skewed to whatever the people who run those organizations are willing

to show you and i think that's really terrifying i'm just annoyed about the fact that they got funding for what six or seven companies in australia and yet the more independent ones never got the money and now they're going to be disadvantaged because meta have changed their mine and gone well we don't want to get fined so I to me it's it's quite scary because I think this is the start of where you could end up in an echo chamber you know like I like I said I'm happy to pay for some subscriptions but I'm not going to pay for subscriptions to Sky News because I don't like their content but I still read it because I go I want to hear the other side and but if I had to pay for it I think it makes you end up in a bit of an echo chamber if you don't

ever see the other opinions and you're not going to pay for something that you don't like or don't agree with but also keish not just like you don't want to pay for it we're in a cost of living crisis people can't pay for the luxuries yeah some people can't even pay for their own rent and food and taking care of their pets like there has been a huge increase in pets being like left at adoption facilities because people can't pay for pet food they're sure as shit not going to be paying for the news so it is a privilege to be able to seek out new information and i i kind of hate that we left this to the very end to unpack, but the cost of living is going to affect people's ability to subscribe because that's a luxury. And that's something that I think is unfair.

It's time for Accidentally Unfiltered, your most embarrassing story. And we had an absolute banger come in. Now, this is one of those stories that happens when you're a child. Like, you know, those stories that it's not recent, but you've never quite moved on from it. Yeah. Okay. Last Christmas, all my extended family got together to hang out. We were all sharing our own accidentally unfiltered oh that's so cute we love that you're taking this into your family we love love we love embarrassing stories we were all sharing our own accidentally unfiltered with each other and remembering all the embarrassing stuff we'd done in our childhood we'd all had a good laugh and then my aunt brought up a story that myself and my mum

had obviously forgotten about for good reason as the story goes it was my first year at primary school and I had a fresh brand new Harry Potter lunchbox to take with me. Cute. Apparently I was quite a shy kid and for some reason I didn't want to go to the toilet to do a number two. In details that are obviously too traumatic to be remembered by anyone I came home that day from school mum went to unpack my bag and smelt something awful. After investigating the source she discovered that I shit in my lunchbox and brought it home what the fuck why why wait that doesn't even make sense it's still doing a shit at school yeah you still where did you where did you shit where did you take the lunchbox like did you go into this I've got to go to the storeroom to get a new glue stick

and shit in your lunchbox like where is that shit taking place surely you didn't take it to the bathroom to do the shit i have so many more questions when you think okay it's embarrassing to do a poo in public did you think that the embarrassing part was doing it in the toilet he's obviously gone to like maybe he's gone to the sports storeroom you remember when you're doing a shit in the sports storeroom is worse than just going to and then walking around school being shit boy because that stench that stench is like coming out of your lunchbox i just snorted in my own hand because like if you're walking through the playground with a shit in your bag people gotta know my okay i just think if that was me and

marley came home with a shit in a lunchbox after school oh we've been having a sit down chat that's a that's a hey honey and mommy needs to talk to you let's go to the toilet let's go to the bedroom and have a little chat around what's happened i would think that like maybe she'd gotten bullied into doing I would never assume that she's gonna bully you to shit in your lunchbox what school did you go to go Wollongong from Wollongong I would never shit shit shit shit I would never assume that she had voluntarily taken her lunchbox into a toilet and shit on it I also think that my parenting had failed so deeply but also love the detail here like I thought that it was gonna have something to do with the story like the fact that it was a Harry Potter lunchbox had nothing to do

with the story they just wrote that in for some extra detail like I'm talking a brand new Harry bottle no i i appreciate the detail guys if you have an accidentally unfiltered or something from your past that you maybe you've forgotten it your auntie has to remind you about it please send it in because we need it and we love it and we won't laugh at you we will but we will also love with you we are laughing with you but no one knows who you are so it doesn't matter fine you're anonymously shitting in lunch boxes all around the country anyway guys it is time for suck and sweet our highlight and our low light of each and every week you go first okay my suck for this week because i can never think no i know you can't my sucker this week is that so matt and the girls

went away on a cruise you guys know they're home now but they went away yeah they're actually only away for five days oh you were so dramatic i made it matt has left me for six months said i said he's cruising the atlantic i said a week but it was like five days and five days is close enough to a week i think it started at 10 days and then you said 10 days and i was like a week oh so I'm the problem yeah it's you anyway sorry for sorry for misleading everyone with my fake news about how long away my husband was he was away for five days but my suck is it's not that bad but it's it's a bit annoying it would have been so nice to have those five days to actually like relax and maybe go to bed early don't you start complaining you went to a rave

on night one I did that was the only thing I did for myself in that whole time that the kids were away. Work has been so intense. We've had heaps going on with Tony May. We've had so much going on with Life Uncut. Like every day has been, you know, like 12 hour work days. And so getting to bed really late, waking up super early in the morning, which it's good that they're not here because I would have had immense mum guilt if I was trying to do this kind of like workload whilst the kids are here. But it just kind of hasn't really felt like, I don't know. I was like, oh my God, Matt's going, the kids aren't here. I'm going to be able to shave my legs for a change, but i haven't done that so to be honest yeah that's kind of my suck for the week and then

the kids are back so matt being home and having the kids back that is my absolute sweet because i have missed lola and marley getting into my bed at four in the morning which i know yeah i have i've missed them i've missed them so much so i'm so happy they're home that's very sweet my suck i always have trouble thinking of sucks and i genuinely mean that because i just feel like i like my life um but my suck has to be and I didn't tell you I'm not growling don't worry when I um when I told you guys I got laser last week I just forgot this part I got it on all my legs and my bikini line I don't think I told you that so I got a whole Brazilian and my legs anyway so she's like okay roll over now onto your tummy and I'll laser your

legs so I was like the back of the legs and I was like yeah cool so I was getting the back of my legs lasered and then she goes do you want your butthole done as a finisher yeah and I was like yes I do that makes it sound like it's a celebration no it kind of sounds like an aperitif after your meal do you want a little limoncello on your butthole done yeah you want to finish that you want a butthole with your limoncello yeah and so I was like a limoncello on a butthole I was like I was like do I want my butthole is it and I was like well fuck I'm already here and I'm laying on my tummy and I was like imagine if you didn't get the butthole done and everything else was was there was not a hair inside and then you bend over to do doggy one day

and just your butthole is hairy like just like a forest I don't have I'm not a hairy person shut up dude i have no hair on me i never look at my arms i'm not a hairy person but i was like something with a hairy butthole would say i was like yeah okay do it so she goes all right spread them and i was like oh i didn't really think how it's gonna happen did you have to hold it is so humbling to be laying naked on your tummy and everyone that has had laser nose and then pull your own butt cheeks apart so that this poor woman can get in there and i was like i am sorry you have to do this she's like it's good i do it all day got in there zapped it and i was like this is mortifying fuck i have so many hemorrhoids from giving birth that i would not want to have

to part my cheeks can you just laser the hemorrhoids while you're there please thank you no that's mortifying so that was my suck and the other part is like you have to do that multiple times it's not a one-off like it's i think it's like a six treatment thing anyway i'm gonna do six butthole reveals well i reckon my butt needs less i reckon my butt needs less all right well anyway guys I haven't got a sweet yet oh shit sorry my sweet is boring for everyone but I caught up with a friend that I haven't seen in a very long time and that was it we went to lunch we had a really nice day because I feel like I don't make a lot of time for my friends and it's I've really thought about that lately I was like it's shitty of me to be you know like you just said

Laura you're like work work work work work it's so easy to be like sorry I don't have time this week let's do next week let's do next week and all of a sudden it's been eight months we actually have a very interesting conversation about this coming up which around friendships we did a poll or we did call out sorry on instagram so you guys might have seen it but that is in the works anyway guys that's it that's it from us and you know the drill if you have enjoyed the episode please go leave a review share it with your friends tell your mom about it like all the stuff and don't forget we have a youtube channel now so you can go and watch all of our content well most of it we don't put every single thing up there but there's there's going to be some extra behind the scenes

stuff it's really different to be able to sit down and watch these interviews as opposed to just listening to them especially when we have our guests in the room also speaking of guests can we just take one second to appreciate how well behaved both little doggos were they are the goodest goodest babies we have a really incredible episode for you tomorrow with one of our very own nikia love our own life she is a lifer she has been so active in the facebook community you may have seen her if you are part of the discussion group nikia she found actually had leukemia and she was posting her journey in our Life Uncut discussion group now knowing that this is the month of the world's greatest shave and it's also around leukemia

awareness but Nakia's story and that interview was honestly for me it was one of my my deep favorites and I and I don't know how to describe this without how I can get this across to you any more than saying it was like a life-changing chat and I think also because it's somebody who feels so familiar to us she's a friend of us she's someone who is so part of the life uncut dna and the life uncut community it reminded me of the type of conversation we had with chanel bryant she spoke about her breast cancer and how much that conversation stayed with me and meant to me and nikki love she's currently in remission with her cancer journey but she shares about fertility she shares about pregnancy loss and also about overcoming cancer it is a fucking

amazing conversation and that will be tomorrow's ep don't forget to mom to dad to dog to your friends and share the love because we love love Thank you.