The Chaser Report - What Is 'Cozzie Livs?'| Ange Lavoipierre

Episode Date: June 14, 2023

Ange Lavoipierre joins Dom Knight to talk about all the things happening in the zeitgeist on their podcast Schmeitgeist! Why do young people hate landlords? Is everyone getting ADHD now because of the internet? Are Dom's neighbours trying polygamy? The answers are in the pod.Listen to Schmeitgeist here and support the national broadcaster.https://www.abc.net.au/everyday/programs/schmeitgeist Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Chaser Report is recorded on Gadigal Land. Striving for mediocrity in a world of excellence, this is The Chaser Report. Hello and welcome to The Chaser Report with Dom and Charles. Without Charles today, we have an improvement in our personal. We have Ange Lwapier from the Schmitegeist podcast produced by ABC Every Day. Friend of the show, journalist and stand-up comic. Ange, Ang, welcome back. Thanks so much for having me.

Congrats on the new series of Schmitegeist. Thank you. Our final episode in this. season is out today. So all eight are out in the world. And yeah, I do feel, I don't know. I mean, I've heard about giving birth. I haven't given birth. But I feel, it feels, I imagine how that feels, except, you know, if it was octoplets. Octoplets. Wow. Eight little babies. Well, let's talk about a couple of your babies. Let's talk about the anti-capitalism that's sweeping across young people, apparently. Also online ADHD diagnoses I'm

to get into. And we'll finish up with some polyamory. Yeah, why not? All the these massive trends as isolated by Angie and the team after this. Okay, so this is very interesting. There's a cute term for cost of living challenges. See, you're so plugged into what's going. I have no idea about all this, but I think we're all feeling the same pain, but millennials have used it to create content.

I think we maybe even have Gen Z to thank for this one. Oh, yeah. So Cozy lives, if you've not heard of it. I've got uptake my references. It's Gen Z not. Millennials are old now. I kept forgetting, cosy lives, wow. Cozy lives, baby.

Yeah, cosy lives, which is, you know, look, it's been something that I've been noticing for a while, is this sort of broad anti-capitalist sentiment that crops up, you know, I think it's visible in a lot of places. And I was aware of it. It was sort of in my periphery. But it really smashed in and felt as if I couldn't ignore it anymore. When I was watching this drama unfold on the internet about deep, Repop resellers. Now, Deepop, if you're not aware, is a platform where mainly Gen Z

sells each other secondhand clothes. I'm so not aware. There you go. So some people have professionalised, they will go to the op shop and like during the weekend just like come back with a big bag of stuff and then they sell it in a much more organized way and they'll post their quote, thrift halls on a platform such as TikTok. So this is this subcategory of genre and it's quite like, it's a lot of fun to watch in the first place and it's, they're very funny. It's like, everything's vintage and like, I just love this one and you guys are going to love this and oh my God, I just, I think I'm going to keep it.

No, no, I want. I'll put it up. It'll be on my shop. So they love the authenticity of the old tat that they picked up for some shop. And everything's vintage and it's really funny anyway. But there was this one deep-op reseller named Jack in America and she's like this sweet seeming kid and she's posting her swift hall. Like she does every few days and it blows up like six, seven.

million views, right? And 10.5,000 comments last I checked. Now, some of those comments were like, oh, like, you've got great taste. And some of them were really mean and really, uh, calling her a landlord. A landlord. A landlord. Now, uh, that, that really jumped out at me because, I mean, this was a debate that was going on about the depop, deep up girlies, uh, and their, the, the, the, the, uh, the, the, as in the deep up resellers who were, I, In the words of the critics of this practice, gentrifying thrift stores and shops. Right. So, but you would think that in general parlance, like traditional values of Western society, someone who goes and buys something cheaply and resells it for a lot of money,

that would be a win for most people. You're using your ingenuity and your skills, you buy something and you make money out of it. But this makes you apparently a landlord. Yeah, I mean, you know, there was an argument that they were denuding the op shops in their area of the high quality products that, you know, someone of a lower income may have, you know, benefited from. And making a profit off it, you know, the critics would argue with very little effort. And so that is like compared to, quote, rent seeking the landlord behaviour. It is kind of gentrifying vinnies, isn't it? I mean, if you think

without it, someone going in there getting the best stuff. It's de-gent. It's slumifying vizies. It's like taking it out or whatever. So people who really need. to buy cheap clothes, just to have clothes, can't afford it, because all the good stuff gone online to be brought up by people with big budgets who think it's terribly authentic. That actually is really annoying. That person's a total landlord. You're getting sucked into it. Okay, so this, okay, here's the thing.

Look, there are arguments, valid arguments on both sides of the Deepop walls. How ABC of you. I know, no, hear me out. This is incredibly on ABC this episode because what I took from that was actually holy shit, everyone just understands. Everyone in the audience, who is young, by the way, understands that landlord is a slur. Well, I mean, if you ask anyone in a major Australian city at this point,

they would agree. I mean, the fucking rent increases that are coming through are insane. And you had some audio in this episode of Schmitegeist where you've just got young people just sharing. And this is what young people do is a bad life experience happens and they just immediately do a post about it. There's no filter. My rent just got put up by $700 a week, I think, was the clip that you see.

Yeah, $700 and people kind of freaking out about where they're going to live. You know, we can't afford to move, you know, let alone pay this rent increase. And if you search on TikTok like, you know, rental crisis or, you know, and look in any city, you can see all this playing out in real time. So, yeah, you can see where it comes from. But I was super interested that, one, okay, even the language gentrifying landlord, basically this is, I think, a generation, and I'm part of it as well, by the way. So it's like millennials and down who have developed essentially a kind of sensitivity to

inequality, particularly economic inequality, and feel really strongly about capitalism in particular. And this is like, yes, I can see examples of it online. You can see it, you know, causing lives. You can see it like the discourse around Nepo babies, for example. Basically just this total focus on inequality and sensitivity to it that wasn't there before. Like 10 years ago. Lily Rose Depp's not getting a nice time on the internet.

She's having a hard time because she got that role in The Idol. And also she was like, you know, Walt Fish, Chanel and everything. And so people look at Lily Rose Depp and go, is it because of your dad? And yeah, I think you can see this play out in polls as well. So I was interested to find, because there isn't heaps of polling about this. But when we dug for it, in 2018, there was polling that showed that 59% of millennials believed that capitalism had failed. Now, that's 20, that's 2018.

That's pretty extraordinary. And that's a lot. That's a lot. That's a pre-economic crisis at the moment. Right. So the rental crisis has got worse since then. Yeah. Wage growth has been stagnant that whole time.

And so you can only imagine that that 59% is higher. now than it was before, and you have Gen Z added into the cohort as well. You can see it reflected in elections as well. So in 2022, you know, we saw millennials reach an age where, historically speaking, they would have drifted to the right, but they're not doing that. The very moment in this cohort's life, when they would typically have started voting for the coalition or a greater number of them would have. It's not happening at all.

They went away. They drifted away in huge numbers. Well, this is the stereotype as you start out super, super left. Yeah, the same. At university and so on. And then by the time you die, you're incredibly right wing. If you're not a socialist at 25, you have no heart. If you're not a conservative at 35, you have no brain.

So goes the saying. But also, when you have nothing, you think everything should be shared. When you have a lot of assets, you want to hold them. But this is the thing. I mean, certainly whenever I interview people kind of mid-30s and below, you get the sense that no one actually believes that there's a bright future. And this is the really fascinating thing.

And certainly for me, we always thought that if we did what we were supposed to do, you know, I'm mid-40s, if you did what you were supposed to do, it was all going to come good. You know, you were going to be able to have a house.

You're going to be able to have a lifestyle. You're going to be able to go on holidays, all this kind of stuff. And even in my generation now, it's clearly not really working out like that for a lot of people. But in the younger generation, holy shit, it's completely bleak.

What's the point of doing anything? Where's the motivation? And I completely understand. that. It just seems like pointless grind. Yeah. Yeah. And so like, you know, you can absolutely do away with whatever cliches used to exist before about like, oh, young people don't care about politics. Like maybe they're drifting away from the centre that, and, you know, in the States, maybe like voter engagement is down, but they're like, they're not, it's not because they don't care. It's because they don't believe that the largely centrist political options on the table

have the solution, have any kind of solutions for them because they're still, by and large, reflecting the values of the sort of 20, 30, 40 years that came before from an economic perspective, you know, business as usual. And you get people like AOC, Ocasio-C Cortez, in the states who really seem to be from this tribe, who is going, you know what, the system is actually quite broken. And she would call herself a democratic socialist. But I got the sense, and sans from your investigation to all this, the people aren't really subscribing to labels. And in many cases, there's some sort of bizarre blends of left and right. and that the old paradigms might even be broken.

So left to right, not relevant anymore, particularly not the younger you go. So you can see, you know, there are subredits that are, you know, devoted to these really fine-grained political surveys. Like, you know, you would have seen it. So you've got like the left-to-right axis, for example, and then across that you have libertarian to,

what's the word I'm looking for? Authoritarian. Authoritarian, thank you so much. I think Elon Musk even tweeted this at one point. Yeah, I mean, you've got, you can find like Mario and Luigi placed on. Really? Yeah, apparently Mario's authoritarian right. Why?

They go through it. I'm baffled, but it was like, I've watched part of a Twitch stream. He's a blue collar worker age. He's a plumber. Right, yeah, so he's got some, like, union association, but his Catholic background. Small business too. Yeah, small business. And then, yeah, and then, you know, maybe use some pro-abortion views potentially.

We don't know, so. That's putting a massive, like. Like, most of his friends are mushrooms. I think we possibly over analyzing this. I don't know what you mean. But it's certainly true that, yeah, it does seem as though there's just an absence of hope. And so when people, I guess, in the past have been fed the American dream and the notion that the system rewards hard work and an opportunity is there for all, yeah.

What do you do? And the thing that I found a bit sad about your episode about this, a smart guy, is so they didn't really, they didn't really seem to be an answer. There's not like a panacea. There's no theory that's unifying people. There's nothing that's... Well, the thing that is unifying people is anti-capitalism. That's what's interesting.

But they're against the thing, but they're not for anything. I remember when people crowded the streets for Barack Obama with hope and change and all this stuff. And that didn't really pan out to any major shifts. I mean, he was still had a cabinet full of people from Golden Sacks. Yeah. So what are people marching for now? What do people want other than...

I think, okay, so there's a couple of ways that this plays, right? When you have even more of these people, the generations who are to completely, have a total lack of faith in capitalism and the existing structures, when they are all in a voting age, then you start to see a broad coalition form to choose an alternative. But it would need to be broad. It would need to be incredibly broad because, you know, we were looking in this episode at, like,

margar communists, like people who support Donald Trump and support Mark, like, come up. How does that work? How does someone who supports Donald Trump? the most, you know, dedicated person to private ownership imaginable is also a communist. Do they not understand who Donald Trump is? You know, there are some elements of, because the other part about Trump is that, of course, and I'm not an advocate, I'm not pro-Trump, but, you know, is hugely, at least in his

rhetoric, anti-globalist, like, globalist, anti-est, like, how you can be a billionaire and you're anti-elate, but it kind of works. Yeah, it does make sense. There are, and like that's, that is one corner, right? And look, I mean, interestingly, you know, as an example of the left-right political spectrum blowing apart and people bundling together previously, you know, the sorts of beliefs you just would never have seen together. You know, Donald Trump is, would speak out against and did speak out against cutting social

security in some instances and people, you know, like quite stridently. And so people were like, yeah, like, because it's a pop, and that's a populist sort of move. He may well be about to, you know, live in socialised houses and in jail. That's true. Okay, so left right is irrelevant. Left right is gone and then this is... Libertarian is the new paradigm. Yeah, I mean, look, the point is people are abandoning the centre.

And they are splitting off in more directions than they previously used to because they have access to a more diverse range of, like the menu is just larger because these are generations that have grown up on the internet. So they're not taking to the streets. taking to TikTok. Yeah, and also they are getting some pretty, like, fringe ideas online and some, like some of them are dangerous, some of them, not some of them are just fringe, you know, isms that I couldn't provide you with the definition for, you have like, you know, 12-year-olds who are, seriously, like this is, we interviewed this great internet researcher Joshua

Citarella who monitors emerging, like, political patterns in Gen Z and has been like looking at those movements in like, yeah, 12 to 17-year-olds in. some cases and, you know, who have like a commitment to, if not the practices, then the ideals of someone like Ted Kaczynski, you know, like... Ted Kis, the Unabomber. Yes, the Unabomber, but who wrote this, the 5,000 page manifesto, which was all like anti-tech and, you know, and so it's like a primitivist. I think I'm using that correctly.

Forgive me any Ted Kaczynski fans were listening to who... Kaczynski still a bit of our audience. Please don't post any post. None of us open our letters anymore. That's part of his legacy. So there you go. So, yeah, I mean, it completely rings true to me, Ange, that the old system doesn't seem to work at all,

but there's no hope for the future. What will it be replaced by? I guess we'll find out. In a moment, though, I want to find out about why everyone's diagnosing themselves with ADHD and polyamory is apparently taking off. The Chaser Report, news you can't trust. Okay, Anne, so ADHD,

I've certainly seen a lot of people using this language and saying, oh, maybe I've got it. and looking at various things. I've always wanted to know where does a particular kind of personality kind of end and a diagnosis of ADHD begin because, I mean, people who are messy or whatever, a bit disorganized, a bit creative. A lot of them have been saying that I've heard,

well, I have ADHD, I reckon. Well, I think it's like a false split, right? And I say this is someone who has had a recent ADHD diagnosis. Right. So in November of last year, I got a diagnosis. Having ADHD did take me until February to get treated. But it's been a game changer. Oh, wow.

Yeah, yeah. So that was really good. But I'm part of this wave. We don't know exactly how big it is, but we do know, I mean, there is this unprecedented demand at the moment for psychiatrists so much so that it, you know, you can pay $3,000 out of pocket, out of pocket. That's on top of what Medicare will contribute for a diagnosis alone, for an assessment alone. I remember when the government said, look, we're going to double the number of

psychologist consults available per year on Medicare, a lot of people were really angry because meant they were less likely to be able to get in. That's how popular it is to go and see therapists these days. Well, yeah, but I mean, beyond that, so I mean, there's psychologists, there's all kinds of counselors you can go and see for mental health support. But psychiatry is its own thing, right? Because these are people with medical degrees. They are doctors in the traditional sense. And they, you know, there are nowhere near enough to go around at the moment. So there is this weird bottleneck that's going on. I mean, that's one indication of demand.

But, yeah, looking at the wave and, like, how people are, I guess, assessing this. What we wanted to get to the bottom of with this episode was really, like, sincerely assess the claim that social media makes ADHD, has made it cool somehow. And no one can see the inverted commas I'm doing with my fingers, but I am. So this idea that there is something attractive about it. And I think the impulse that a lot of particularly progressive people have and people in the neurodivergent community as well have is to push back against that and say, of course not. Of course there's nothing attractive about it. Of course there's, you know, it's difficult having it. And that is true that it is difficult that I think there is a little more nuance to it than that in that it's not that people might wish that they had ADHD, but they may, there's something attractive about, you look for an answer.

And if you think that you already have it, then the idea of solutions is a really attractive one. Yeah, that makes it. I mean, for so many millennia, we've all wanted to try and create a better version of ourselves, like through whatever reason, through whatever method. And so if you think, well, there's something that's wrong about my life that could be fixable, yeah, I can see the appeal of that. Yeah. And, you know, when you have a context where the stigma associated with ADHD has dramatically lowered,

which is an overwhelmingly positive thing. You have a diagnostic environment where, look, we used to just think that it was like Bart Simpson was the ADHD archetype and anyone sort of fell outside that was, you know, by and large, missed in the last few decades. But we've adjusted our diagnostic criteria really significantly, and it means that all of a sudden we are catching up a lot of adult women, getting a diagnosis of adult men to it, but it's particularly pronounced in women.

And so, yeah, there is this framework now for catching those people. We have a non-deficit model for talking about it. That's why you hear the word neurodivergent. So we're not saying, hey, you lack something. We're saying, you're different. It's just, you know, a fundamental shift in the way that we think about this stuff and talk about this stuff. And so, yeah, less stigma.

And then, you know, these very, you know, like these jet engine algorithms that serve you up content that is like, hey, do you maybe like sometimes lose your keys or like walk to the room and forget why you were there? You might have ADHD. And because TikTok professionalized as well, so that there is, there is now cold hard cash to be made for influences per view. And so, you know, it's kind of, it's this perfect storm in some ways. And that doesn't mean that people who are diagnosing online. I diagnosed myself. Like I initially got the idea. I didn't diagnose myself. Like I, you know, I got the idea that, huh, maybe this is me from looking at social media, from looking at like memes and videos and going, oh, I do relate to that. Oh, and then

doing some more research and getting there. So I'm not saying that's not a reasonable way to start. And there are great, like, there is great support in those online communities. They're kind of, they're really cool places in some ways. But there are a lot of people who online, maybe trying to sell you coaching, maybe trying to sell you services, maybe just trying to get their views up, just get some shares, who there's this sort of industry that sprung up around ADHD on social media as well. And an industry on the other side, bricks and mortar world, and they will fleece you for a diagnosis as well. Is it possible though, Ange, that the way we live now, particularly in this sort of hyper switched on, plugged into social media, bombarded with a million

ideas second and unable to let your brain sort of wander, which certainly the way that I live. I cannot be bored. I pick out my phone and I just feed more information and adrenaline, whatever, into my system all the time. I'm sort of addicted to it. Is that creating or is that basically making us into creatures of ADHD? I'm not trying to say it's not real, it's not a thing,

but I'm wondering if the way that we live is actually sort of exacerbating what's going on, such that, I mean, if part of the condition is an issue with attention and an issue with focus, which I gather it is, don't we live in a world that is constantly trying to stop us from focusing? Okay, so two things. There is like a bit of a narrative, and I know what you're saying is more complex than this, but if we were just to shrink it down to its kind of crudest version, it's like, is social media giving people ADHD? And the short answer to that is, well, the long and the short answer to that is no, there's

data to back up that. Then if we sort of split it out and go, okay, well, is social media and like the byproduct, let's call it internet poisoning. Is the fact that we have internet poisoning tricking us into thinking that we have ADHD and that is like a maybe. Now look, if you go to a doctor and they are a good doctor and most are, they, there is a more rigorous framework for assessing it than just going like, is your attention, like do you have split focus? Oh, and there's a lot more going on, I know, in the condition of HACD than just that. But, you know, in terms of people seeking, like thinking, looking at memes, looking at TikToks and going, oh, I think I have this based on that experience of being short of attention,

overstimulated, that kind of thing. Yes, yes, yes, yeah. It's technically possible that, you know, they might have, they might be, you know, essentially experiencing internet poisoning. But the other thing about ADHD that we know now, that we didn't know before, is that it flies in a flock with other conditions. And it predisposes you if you have lifelong untreated ADHD. You know, you're more likely to develop, I don't know, anxiety, depression. You know, it can be confused with PTSD some of the time. Like there are a lot of, like maybe if you think

you have ADHD, it doesn't mean, oh, you're making it up for attention. Like, you might have something else. Or you might have both. You might have like a, it's comorbidity. I interviewed someone about Tourette's syndrome last week. And that seems to have quite similar neural pathways going on, even though it's a somewhat different condition. Certainly there's a lot of kind of things that has in common. So there's certainly a lot going on there. So maybe a lot of us were like this and just didn't, A, have the language for it. And B, didn't have, I guess, the awareness of it that's coming through from what you're saying of people talking about it. Yeah. And spectrum disorder is the other thing I would say. So, you know, in the same way that you can be a little bit gay,

you can be a little bit ADHD. Well, this is the whole thing that we're, understanding. I mean, certainly when I first started talking about these conditions, it was kind of on or off. It was a binary thing. Yeah. I understand there's spectrums and ranges and complexity. So, yeah. And I saw you popping up up on the Corona cast feed of all places this weekend. Did I? You did with Teigen Taylor talking about this for her new podcast. So, yeah. A lot of people are talking about this. All right. So there's two episodes of Schmitegeist on this. You had so much. Yeah. Well, this is the thing. So we initially set out to be like, well,

you know, is TikTok overselling neurodivergence? Like, are we being tricked? Let's get to the bottom of it. And then, like... Sounds like it reversed on itself. I found so, like, it was, I was so shocked by what I found. And then I found, like, the instances of what looks to, look, a cynic might call it price gouging.

The instances of price gouging that we saw, you know, people, psychiatrists, ADHD psychiatrists taking home salaries of $900,000 a year. Like basically I saw something happening in the market that was so, and it's not like traditionally what we would do on Schmite guys. Traditionally we'd like look at trends and like. Sounds like some hard journalism. Yeah, well, you know, 15 years of training is hard to, it's hard to bench as it turns out. And I was like, why would I not cover this? This is a huge story.

And it sounds like utter bullshit to be getting all the money. All right. So, we're genuinely having quite a tough time. That's it. So let's finish up with one of the other trends that you found. And there, I guess you've had HDs two, then there's. There's seven trends in this series of Strikeguise. Polyamory's is big.

Yeah. Which is certainly not saying that exists much in my world. But it might exist more than you think. Well, actually, I have heard, I have heard tell of people in my neighbourhood who live a fairly swinging lifestyle and whatever. So maybe, maybe it's the thing. Someone gave me a tour and said, there's swingers there, there's swingers there, there's there.

So perhaps now that I'm remembering, perhaps it is all going on and I'm just not aware of it. So, but I guess this is just reinventing relationships, isn't it? Yeah, so look, folly amory, we looked at close up, but more generally we were looking at ethical non-monogamy. So that is like anything that sits outside of monogamy that isn't cheating, right? Yeah, it's something negotiated. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. We've all agreed to this and, you know, we hope it's ethical.

Is it always not necessarily? It's certainly complicated, I'm sure, but no, I mean, not doing things behind your partners or plural partners' backs. Yeah, yeah, so important. And look, again, and just because of the way that we've, this is, this episode is shaken out between you and I, it does seem like I've just picked exclusively topics that are about me specifically. But part of the reason I wanted to talk about this is because, so I'm Polly. Oh, right. Yeah.

And I have been, you know, in different permutations of ethical non-monogamous, ethically nominate, anyway, E&M relationships for most of my adult life. Um, and I have no, like I'm, I'm just, I'm just wired that way and it's just kind of how I am and it's just a sort of bottom line for me. Whenever I meet someone new, I kind of try and get it out nice and early because no one, you know, you don't want to like fall in love with someone and then find out later. Because it, you know, some people just can't do it and that's fine. Yeah. It's not for everyone. I can't not do it. It's not good for me, um, to not do it. Uh, and it's not about sex either necessarily. It's not like, I'm simply must fuck everyone. It's really about intimacy for a lot of people and that's what it is

for me as well. I'm creating like, not creating conditions where you're then going to get yourself into a mess because you have a connection with a new person and then you make yourself unhappy by denying that or worse, you know, God forbid, being really dishonest about it or something. I remember a friend of mine in my early 20s absolutely insisting to all of us that the right number was four, but more than four just got too complicated, but four partners was the right number to have. If you had fewer than that, you were missing out. In this economy, what a mess. In this economy, you can't be like earning enough money to live on and have four partners. That was when dating was cheaper. Yeah. And living was cheaper because you've got to be working a

certain number a week. Like, you know, anyway, I don't think, I got a few partners. I think a few months later. Thank my stars that some of them are like overseas and interstate because otherwise I don't know what I would do. A few months later, this person announced actually we've decided to go exclusive and then went back to four. It was just, it was a journey. It was a whole journey. And it can be. I guess this is the thing that we talk about this, we're aware of this. But this has always happened.

There's always been polyamory. But it just hasn't been the ethical sort. It's been secretive. Yeah. And look, I think there, again, there's a lesser stigma around this now. And for all of the harm that social media has done us, which is, you know, massive. Massive. There's another podcast series for you.

Yeah. I feel like we all know what's in that one, though, right? But what it has done is allowed for a conversation to happen around these practices. So it's the ethical bit that's new. It's to try and actually be open about it and make sense of it. Yeah. It's new. I admire that.

Also the, yeah, which is just more visible now and people have, so, you know, I mean, the seminal text, so to speak, on this topic is the ethical slut, right? And that was an attempt to kind of reclaim. And this was, I want to say in the 90s, but yeah, it was an attempt to kind of reclaim this. But that is like the worst thing that you can think about yourself if you don't have other examples or a framework or a community or other people saying, hey, I know, we do this. And it doesn't mean that you're Satan's born or a big old slut or unless that is

something that that's a word you enjoy, in which case, go for it. That word was reclaimed in the 90s. I remember saying that happening. Yeah. That was people having fun with that. But I guess what I'm saying is like. Like now you, when you see more examples, I remember when I first started doing this, there were, I had so few examples.

I did not know anyone who was doing it. And I found myself constantly having to defend it to the people in my life to whom I was out, which was relatively few then, clearly much more now. We didn't make a podcast about it. Yeah, we made a podcast about it. But now I don't have to anymore. And it's just been really, I mean, apart from, you know, whatever mapping we can do of this, I've been, I've just seen it around me.

It's just become something that either people have been doing. more, or they're admitting to now. I think a lot of couples actually do have various arrangements and things, particularly if they're living separately. Certainly seen that. Yeah. And that's Enemm, you know. And in older people that I know, like, you know, people live in older than me.

But I guess the other thing is as well, one of the extraordinary things about the internet, and at some degree, so much of Schmike Geist is about the internet because it's such a big part of how any culture evolves these days, is that if you are in what was previously a nation fringe practice in your community, it's easy to find a community of online of millions of people who are similar to you. I mean, we find our tribes online and it's massively affirming. And anyone you talk to who's growing up in, I don't know, in a small village or a country town or something like that, who has just never felt like they felt they were unique in that environment now can go online and discover, look, not at all. Yeah. This is something that is

universal in human society. So that's very uplifting and affirming. And I don't know, I guess, too, I mean, I'd just always come back to this sort of stuff, just as long as there's happiness involved for everyone, I mean, which is not always easy to achieve, God knows, but who cares as long as people are enjoying themselves? Totally. There is still a sensitivity around this, and I think I really discovered that making this podcast and trying to talk about it, you know, because the ABC does really serve the whole of Australia. And so, you know, when I was talking about it on various stations and things, I really found

that, look, as much as the stigma is lowered and the conversation is a much more evolved one, particularly online and in younger generations, there is still like a, there is still a real kind of fear around it in other parts of the community. And I was reminded of that in making this episode and talking about it. I can believe that. Yeah, it's not impossible to believe. All right. Well, and you've got, the whole series is up now. Shmight guys, go to the place where you get podcasts from. In fact, this place, wherever you're getting this one from, you can get Shmike Gus from as well. Also, the ABC Listen app, I'm sure we should mention just so you can plug the thing you meant to plug. Yeah. I know what you meant to plug. But there's also

a plug for a debate coming up this weekend. You have got some amazing people, including, of all people, Norman Swan, in what I believe is a comedy debate. I'm kind of really fascinated to hear how that goes. Yeah. You know, Australia's favourite comedian, Norman Swan. Yeah. With, you know, I up-to-date coroner cast opinions and lulls. Yeah, we've also got Alex Lee, we've got James Colley, we've got Annalise, Constable, Anna Piper Scott, Elfie Scott, no relation. But yeah, just like a wildly good lineup of comedians and journalists. And Dr. Norman Swan.

And Dr. Norman Swan, who I've bullied into arguing for ethical non-monogamy. So we will be settling the matter once and for all. The winners will write the subsequent legislation, which kind of relationship is legally permitted in Australia, henceforth. This could mean that those of us who aren't ethical, non-monogamous, are about to get our lives opened up. The monogs and the non-monogs.

Yeah, so this is instead of the plebiscite. We thought we'd, you know, we thought we'd just settle. It seems like a more ethical way to do. If you just do it in a debate, it saves time. Yeah, it does set time. Yeah. Postal survey. So this is Saturday at 6.30 p.m. at the Vivid Ideas Exchange in the CBD of Sydney.

You can find the tickets on the Vivid website or via my social sale. There will be a link in the bio. There you go. So, Ange, thanks for coming in and talking us through all those things. I guess I've sort of seen. Charles wasn't here because we just couldn't have got through all that. No, I don't think so. But there's even more in the full podcast series. Always so nice to chat, Ange. Thanks for coming in. Thanks for having me. Here is from Road. We're part of the Iconiclass Network. See ya.