Really Good Conversations

Summary
What does it really take to stop making excuses and become someone you can trust?
This conversation isn't just about blindness, sport or breaking records. Matt Formston AM joins Amy to explore identity, trust, accountability and what it really takes to stop making excuses and become someone you can trust.
Guest
Matt Formston AM is a world champion surfer, world champion cyclist, Paralympian, Guinness World Record holder, business leader, keynote speaker, husband and father of three.
Overview
Matt Formston AM has built an extraordinary life across elite sport, business and leadership. Diagnosed with macular dystrophy at the age of five, Matt was told he would lose most of his sight and face a life of limitation. Instead, he went on to become a world champion athlete, business leader and author.
In this conversation, Amy and Matt explore why blindness was never his biggest fight, how bullying and anger shaped his early years, and what it took to rebuild himself through trust, accountability and what Matt calls his hard standards.
They discuss the difference between genuine limitations and inherited excuses, why "standards without consequences are just wishes", and how self-trust is built one small promise at a time.
Key outtakes
Why blindness can be deeply isolating, and what people often misunderstand about it
The difference between genuine limitations and inherited excuses
How Matt's parents helped shape his "Why Not?" mindset
Why standards, consistency and time are essential to building trust
How one small non-negotiable helped Matt rebuild self-trust
 
For more information: 
Matt Formston https://www.mattformston.com/
Pre-order the book 'Why not?' https://www.mattformston.com/books/why-not-pre-sale
 
Transcript 
Amy:
Welcome to the Really Good Conversations Podcast. Today I am joined by Matt Formston.
Matt is a world champion surfer, world champion cyclist, Paralympian, Guinness World Record holder, business leader, keynote speaker, husband and father of three.
At the age of five, Matt was diagnosed with macular dystrophy and told he would lose most of his sight. He now has less than three per cent peripheral vision and no central vision, but has gone on to build an extraordinary life across elite sport, business and leadership.
His story is featured in the Netflix documentary The Blind Sea, and his new book Why Not? explores what he calls his eight Hard Standards: the principles that helped him rebuild his life from the inside out.
This conversation isn't just about blindness, sport or breaking records. It's about identity, trust, accountability and what it really takes to stop making excuses and become someone you can trust.
Welcome to the podcast, Matt.
Matt:
Thank you, Amy. That was a bit of a mouthful, so I appreciate you getting through all that.
Amy:
There is certainly a lot to include in your bio, across life, work and sport, so thank you for joining me.
People hear about your achievements, the Guinness World Record and the Netflix documentary, but in your book Why Not? you have the opening line: "Blindness was never my biggest fight." So we'll start there. What was?
Matt:
People often assume that because I'm blind, that is my biggest challenge in life. And there can be an excuse for that.
But actually, I went through school and got bullied a lot. Kids would say, "How many fingers am I holding up?" I was one of the first kids in Australia to have a laptop, and I'd write stuff on my laptop, walk away, come back, and they'd highlight everything and delete all my work.
It was endless bullying. It escalated to the point where, if I was running after someone, they'd run under a tree branch and duck, and I wouldn't see it, so I'd run straight into it. It was full on.
Because of all that, I found that the way to resolve bullying was through physical altercation. If someone bullied me, I would end up fighting them. I learnt that if I hurt someone, they would not bully me again. So I had this learned behaviour that if you fight someone, you get an outcome.
Talking never got an outcome. The teachers would say, "It's okay, Matt, they only just did this," because they didn't see the mountain of little things that built up to the absolute destruction of my psychology.
I took that behaviour out of school and into early adulthood. I would get into pub fights. I played elite sport through school: representative rugby league, ice hockey, full-contact sports. Against all the odds as a blind kid, I played these sports, but then I lost sport and I basically lost my identity.
I went into this spiral. I had bad relationships with women. I had bad behaviour. So my biggest challenge was getting out of that learned behaviour and thinking the whole world was out to get me.
That was my biggest challenge: getting my way out of that bad behaviour and getting back to being the kid who was able to be selected in rugby league, rugby union and ice hockey over sighted kids because he put the hard work in.
Amy:
Gosh. So many of us listening cannot even relate to that experience. School can be hard enough, never mind with a disability and the bullying as well.
What do you think most people misunderstand about blindness?
Matt:
There are so many things, but one thing I would say is that blindness is a very isolating disability.
For example, if you go into a pub environment and it's loud, most sighted people start lip-reading without realising they're doing it. If you go into a loud environment one day, put your hand over your mouth and try to communicate with your friends. You'll realise how much you're using your eyes to lip-read.
I'm not able to use that skill, so I go into a pub environment and I'm isolated. I'm there by myself.
At school, if my mates left the classroom and the teacher said, "Matt, can you just stay back for a bit to make sure you understood the lesson?", they were actually isolating me. I would never find my friends at lunch and I'd spend lunch by myself.
Blindness creates a lot of isolation. Obviously, you can't drive, so you're not able to get to places. It really creates a lot of isolation.
The other thing I'd say is to do with any sensory disability. People say, "When you lose one sense, your others get stronger." I'm sure you've heard that phrase.
Amy:
I have, yes.
Matt:
Because of the amount of times I've told my story now, in interviews and media, I've worked out my take on it. I've spoken to doctors about this and I believe it's accurate.
It's not that the sense gets better; it's that your ability to capture the data gets better.
You live in a visual world where most of the data you trust, you see with your eyes. That data is supported by things you hear, smell and sense in other ways.
I'm not able to trust my eyes, so I don't trust that data. I use data from my ears, for example. I can hear in a courtyard, or I can hear things that will tell me where a certain type of food is. Then I can use my nose to smell and verify that that's what it is. I can smell a chemist.
The reason I know my hearing definitely isn't better is because I'm a husband, and I'll always not hear my wife when she asks me to unpack the dishwasher.
Amy:
I think that's a common husband trait.
Matt:
Exactly. But it's not about the hearing. It's more about the data not being captured.
So the misconception is that when you lose one sense, the others get better. I don't think they do. You just get better at capturing data from those other senses.
Amy:
That makes a lot of sense. You're tuning into it more and verifying if that's a trustworthy source or not.
You were told from a young age that there were things you wouldn't be able to do. How did you learn the difference between a genuine limitation and an inherited excuse?
Matt:
This is where I have to give credit to my parents.
At the age of five, my parents were told at Sydney Eye Hospital by a professor, one of the heads of ophthalmology in Australia, that I was going to go blind. I had full vision until I was five, we believe.
They were basically told that the son they had all these aspirations for — getting married, having a job, playing sport — that was all gone. He won't be able to play sport. He won't really get an education. He'll never get a good job. He won't have many friends in life.
That was the prognosis.
My parents believed the diagnosis: yes, he is going to go blind. But they didn't believe the prognosis.
They never told me all that. They protected me from that information. When discrimination happened behind the scenes with my parents, they didn't tell me, "We've been told you can't do this." They just said, "Get on with it. Go and do this."
They would deal with the "you're not welcome" conversation until they got to, "Okay, we'll let him have a crack."
In the first rugby league team I played on, parents were saying, "You're bad parents for putting your child with a disability in harm's way," rather than, "You're great parents for giving him an opportunity."
The other part is that we were brought up in a household where we weren't allowed to use the word "can't". That's where the name of my book, Why Not?, comes from.
A lot of people say, "My dad said that too — there's no such thing as can't." But my dad didn't stop there. He would say, "Why not?"
It was the worst idea you could ever have to say, "I can't do my homework," or "I can't do something," to my dad, because he would say, "Why not?" And he would keep asking. "Explain more. Explain more."
As you start explaining your "can't", you actually start explaining the solution.
Then he'd say, "Right, so it's not a 'can't' problem. It's an 'I'm not able to do this yet' problem, or 'I don't have this capacity yet', or 'I need X to help me get to this.'"
Then he'd say, "Okay, you've now found what you need to do, so go and do it."
Amy:
That is amazing. Credit to your parents, because what the medical professionals were saying was a limiting prognosis. That can be such a big problem for people who go through some sort of diagnosis in their lives: the mindset can limit people immediately.
Whereas what your father said gave you a different foundation.
I remember being told, "There's no such thing as can't," but I don't know how much I was probed beyond that. It probably stopped there, and you were still left thinking, "I can't."
Matt:
Exactly. How do you get from there to doing it? I think it's the "why not?" part that gets you to the conversation and to the point of saying, "This is my plan now."
You've got a plan of how to get there, as opposed to being told you need a miracle to go from "I can't" to "I can."
Amy:
I love that. I know we touched on this before — you've got three children and I've got a four-and-a-half-year-old as well. I'm trying to instil that mindset in him when I ask him to do something and he says no or that he can't help. I'm trying to get him involved and ask, "What can we do to help you do the thing? Have a go first, and then we'll help you."
You share in the book about standards. What were the private standards behind all these public achievements?
Matt:
There are eight standards, so to reel them all off is a bit tricky. But one thing I'll say is that one of the standards is literally standards.
If you talk about a business, for example, you've got values on the wall. Everyone's got their three values or five values. People would probably call them their standards as well. I would challenge that.
My definition of a standard is something that actually has a consequence. If it doesn't have a consequence when you don't adhere to it, then it's not a standard. It's a wish.
My challenge to businesses is: if it's really a cultural standard, if that's what you say your values are, then if people don't adhere to those, there needs to be a consequence. Otherwise, you're telling the market something that you're not being consistent about.
That builds into one of my other standards: trust.
I believe everything I've done in sport and business comes back to trust. Especially in an era of AI, where we don't trust our AIs because it always feels like they're just going to tell us what we want to hear.
It comes back to this formula that I've built, which is:
Standards × Consistency × Time.
The standard has to be something that has a consequence. Then you need to do it consistently, showing people and showing yourself that you do it consistently. Then, over time, that builds trust.
You can have self-trust, team trust, leadership trust, customer trust. They all apply to the same formula.
Amy:
What do you think breaks trust faster than people realise?
Matt:
Not adhering to that formula.
If you don't have the standards, or people don't actually know what the standard is, then people don't know what you stand for.
Think about global politics at the moment. No one knows what these people stand for because they change their mind every two minutes.
Then that comes back to consistency. You might have a standard, but if you're not consistent with it, or if you change it with different people, that will build distrust. In leadership, if you're not treating your team the same way and people are treated differently, that will build distrust.
Amy:
I guess you can come at the concept of trust from business, family and sport, because in your sporting career you are often relying on other people to be your eyesight. How do you get to a space of giving that total trust to somebody?
Matt:
It comes back to that formula every time.
They've shown me they're going to hit a standard, and they're going to do it consistently over a certain amount of time. Then I know I can trust them.
At a sporting level, I got towed into a 51-foot wave. It's a five-storey building of water, and I can't see the wave.
Most people who go to Nazaré in Portugal, where the biggest waves in the world are and the records are set, have all these gates before they go. They can look at YouTube and say, "I don't want any part of that." If they get through that gate, they fly to Portugal and stand on the headland, look at the wave and hear the power of the waves smashing against the cliff. That's another gate.
If they go through that gate, they go out on the jet ski and can see it from the water. They can still say yes or no. There are all these gates for sighted people.
I don't have those gates.
I have to use trust with my team. I can't trust my eyes. I can't use that data. The data has to come through my team telling me what it is.
Then I get towed into the wave, and my team blows a whistle. I have to trust that when they blow that whistle, they have put me in the right spot, and I drop down a five-storey wall of water.
If you're talking about trust, I don't know that there are many things in the world that require much more trust.
People die there. Three weeks after I was there, someone died surfing a 30-foot wave. I was on 50-foot waves and I'm blind.
There are consequences. But I believe if you build capability and trust in your team, anything is achievable. But you need to build it with the right people, and you need clear standards and consistency.
Amy:
Communication must be a huge part of this too. If a whistle gets blown, that has to hit at exactly the right moment. It must be a lot of pressure on the other people as well.
Matt:
It is. And the pressure goes both ways.
If I haven't done the training and I die, the guys towing me are the best big wave surfers in the world. We're talking about Dylan Longbottom and Lucas Chumbo. They're literally the best guys in the world.
If they kill the blind guy, the world media had already said I was going to die. It's the same narrative, the same voice that told my parents when I was five that he can't do life, he's not going to get a job, he won't play sport, he won't have many friends.
The world media said, "He will die at Nazaré. Blind guy can't do this." When I was trying to play rugby league, the mothers were saying my mum was a bad mother because she let me play sport.
It's the same voice all the time saying, "He can't. He can't. He can't."
But I've built enough trust in myself because I've shown myself that if I have the right standards and I do it consistently, I'll execute. So when the world says I can't now, I just laugh and go, "Well, you're not the expert. I'm the expert in what I'm doing."
The other flip side is, if I die there and I haven't built the capacity to do it, then that affects my team. It required me doing a lot of work. I can hold my breath for six minutes. It takes a lot of physical capacity to do that.
If my team didn't think I had the capability to do it, they wouldn't do it, because if I die there, they lose their livelihood. They're getting paid by Red Bull and other big brands to do their job. They're not going to get re-signed next year if they kill the blind guy.
It was the same with my cycling career. I was on a tandem. If I lean the wrong way, we both die.
So the trust is not just about me trusting my team. It's about them trusting me to have the capability to do the things we're doing as well.
Amy:
With everything you have set out to achieve in life, both in your corporate career and your sporting careers, has a lot of it been driven by a desire to prove people wrong?
Matt:
Yes, for sure.
There's a pivotal part in the book where I talk about how the main thing that changed my life, when I was on that bad path, was that I really wanted to get married.
I was having all these failed relationships and I was blaming the other person. "She did this, she did that." You can always blame somebody else.
I had just had a failed relationship. On paper, everything looked good. I was a sales director, I had property in Sydney, and on paper everything looked lovely. But I wasn't happy. I didn't think I was thriving.
So I wrote down a list of 12 things I wanted in a wife. Even though I can't see it, I just wrote these things on a piece of paper.
Then I realised that, out of the 12 things, I wasn't six of them. So it was unreasonable for me to want someone to have all those things if I didn't have them.
Then I rebuilt myself with the standards that are in the book. From that point on, I stopped trying to prove to the world that I could do things. It wasn't about them anymore. It became about me and what I wanted to achieve.
Since I changed that mindset, now I do things to contribute. I've rewired everything from having to prove people wrong to saying, "This is something I want to do."
Now I get to do all these things. I'm on boards, I'm on federal government advisory committees, I'm an executive, and I do all these different things at the same time because I've built that capacity.
The key thing for me now is that I get to add value, because I love being part of a team. Whatever team I'm in, I know how I add value and what I don't do so well. I know what I do really well, and I make sure I add value before moving on to the next thing.
It's the same as when I was playing rugby league or ice hockey. What's my position in this team? How does that add value? Then I do that well.
Amy:
When you had that realisation and started doing that self-reflection work, did you have external mentors or coaches, or was it something you had to do alone?
Matt:
It was just me. It was all me.
I was so independent and so scared of being seen as a failure that I wouldn't let anyone else give me guidance up until that point.
A lot of blind people are fiercely independent, almost independent despite themselves. I still am now. I have found some amazing mentors after that point, but up until then, it was just me.
The way it started was with the standards piece. The first standard I held was that I put a chin-up bar in my doorway. I wasn't allowed to walk in or out of that door in my bedroom without doing 10 chin-ups.
If I'd gone out to work in the morning and left my keys in my bedroom, I would do 10 chin-ups on the way in, get the keys, and do 10 chin-ups on the way out.
That was the first standard. I started getting out of bed at the same time and having these black-and-white standards that I wasn't allowed to budge on.
That was how I built trust in myself. Once I built trust in myself, I started building it with teammates. Then with leadership. It kept expanding.
Now I've got this really fulfilled life where I get to be a dad, a leader and an athlete. We haven't talked about freediving yet, but my current goal is to set a world record in freediving either later this year or early next year.
Once you implement these standards in your life, even though it's hard work, it becomes easy.
Amy:
The reward must feel amazing when you achieve those goals and challenges you set yourself.
We touched on this before: I know I'm great with external accountability. If I've had a PT or worked with coaches, when I know that appointment is coming up, I will do the work. Last year I was learning to play golf, and I knew at the next lesson the coach would ask who had practised, so I was at the driving range the night before.
I can identify in myself that I'm good with accountability to others, but how do you build that personal accountability within yourself?
Matt:
In business, you would have a strategy. A one-year strategy or a five-year strategy. I would say it's very important to have a five-year strategy.
Across all the strategies you have, you probably don't go back to your personal five-year plan and ask how that plugs into the strategy — whether that's a fitness goal, business goal or whatever it is.
Amy:
Yes. I'm great at writing them, and then they stay in Google Drive and I forget to look at them because I get too busy.
Matt:
So flip it. Write a five-year strategy for you as a person. Then, instead of looking at the business first, look at how what you're doing externally plugs into that.
You still need to do those things, but ask: is this allocating an appropriate amount of time to each piece?
That might sound selfish, but it's not really. If you do well in everything you do, then you're being selfless because you're helping your teams achieve.
For me, it's about priorities. The thing that is the biggest priority gets the biggest chunk of time. If at the moment that is to get physically fit, that's the priority.
Everyone will have challenges in life. We've all got system issues with work and different problems. But as soon as you have a health problem, you have no other problem. That is your problem.
If being healthy and happy needs to happen for me to be more successful in other areas and contribute better to my team, then that should become the priority. You allocate the appropriate amount of time to it and you don't negotiate on it.
It becomes one of those standards that is not negotiable. That will help you achieve better, be happier and healthier, and have more energy in other areas. Then you'll be more productive, and you won't have to spend as much time in those areas because you're more productive.
Amy:
For those listening who feel like they are making excuses, or know that their standards have slipped, what would you say is the first honest step to take?
Matt:
Pick one standard.
For me, it was the chin-up bar. Pick one thing you know you are letting slip and don't let that slip again. Just pick one thing.
If you try to do all of them at once, it's too hard. Pick one thing, do that for a couple of weeks, and show yourself you can do it. That's building self-trust.
If you know you've let your standards slip, they are your personal standards. If you're not even holding your own personal standards, how can you expect others to hold theirs? How can you hold standards as a team? How can you hold standards as a leader?
It's showing yourself that you can trust yourself because you're going to hold your standards. Once you can do that, you can do everything else better.
Amy:
I love that. I can be guilty of going from zero to hero and trying to do all the things at once. It might last a few weeks or a couple of months, then things get in the way.
Matt:
Just do one thing at a time.
In the movie I've got on Netflix, one of the things I say at the end of the film is: just do one thing and do that well.
That's what I think I've become very good at: doing one thing at a time and doing that really well. That's how I'm able to wear so many different hats.
The other thing I'd say is that we talk a lot about identity being a fixed thing. We think that to be authentic, you have to have one identity. I think that's a flawed concept.
I think you have to have one set of values and one set of standards, but how they come out in your different identities will look different.
Me as an executive looks different to me as a dad. If I'm with my mates in a pub and we're mucking around, that personality in the boardroom is not going to add value to that environment.
We are all different people. So why not identify how we turn up differently in different environments and lean into that? Work out how you turn up differently and amplify that, rather than dulling it down and trying to be the same person everywhere.
Don't change your values. Don't change your standards. Just change how you present.
Amy:
That's brilliant. Before we go on to some of our Really Good Conversations questions, I wanted to ask: as you revisited your story to write this book, how did that feel?
Matt:
It was hard. There was crying. There were tears.
One of the first things in the book, in the first chapter, is called "Rock Hard, Marshmallow Soft".
I've surfed 50-foot waves, broken world records in cycling, and I'm a blind guy who used to fight in pubs. I don't think anyone can say I'm physically soft. I'm probably as hard as a man can get physically.
But emotionally, I used to be really hard too. One of the things I learnt was to become emotionally soft. I can be rock hard, but I can also be emotionally soft. I think that's a trait more men should have.
But I think teaching all men to be soft across the board is not helping society. We need more hard men, but men who can also be soft when they need to be.
That's one of the things I learnt going through the book: how I've become the man who is comfortable being as hard as you can be in a physical environment, but also really soft with my children and soft with my teams when I need to be.
It was a journey. From my test readers, I know the first eight chapters are hard reading. My life was hard. There were a lot of really hard things I went through.
Readers have said to me, "It's really hard." And I was like, "Yeah, but you're only reading about it. I had to live through it."
So yes, it was a journey.
Amy:
Thank you for sharing that journey and for putting the book together. So many of us cannot relate to the journey you've been on, from the disability to the record-breaking achievements, the corporate job and family life. It's fascinating to learn from people like yourself.
One question I've been asking people this year is: can you recall a conversation that has profoundly changed the direction of your life?
Matt:
I don't know if it changed the direction of my life, but it definitely would have changed the direction of my life.
It was a conversation I had early in my career. I was on an escalation with a customer and I lost my patience a bit with them. Afterwards, a senior leader who had overheard the conversation pulled me aside and said, "The way you treated that person then — was it okay?"
I said, "Well, I followed the process."
He said, "That's fine. You followed the process. But did you treat them in the way that you should have?"
I was all about what she did and what she said. I was making it about them, not about me. Standard excuse behaviour.
He said, "Next time you're in a situation like that, I want you to think about that person as your mother or your sister."
At the time, I didn't have children, but he said if I had children, think about them.
That really reframed things for me. Every time I had a heated discussion with somebody from that point on, I reflected back on that. I thought, "Is this the way I would want someone to treat my mother, my sister or someone I care about?"
It changed the trajectory of my career and the way I treated people. I moved away from the perspective of thinking, "They should be doing this because I expect them to," and it allowed me to be more patient and empathetic.
One of the standards in my book is that empathy is a superpower in leadership. That is something I do really well now. I have empathy for my teams and understand where they're coming from. I spend time finding out what they do.
That superpower I have as a leader came from that conversation almost 20 years ago.
Amy:
That is such a good reminder. So much of what we see in the world, whether it's comments on social media or how people speak to each other, makes you wonder: would you speak to a relative like that? They'd probably say no.
I'm going to ask you three questions from our Really Good Conversations cards.
Question number one: if you had a warning label, what would it say?
Matt:
Warning: gives very direct, strong feedback.
Amy:
I love that.
Question number two: what is the biggest misconception people have about you?
Matt:
That blindness is my biggest challenge. We've already gone over it, but I think it can't be understated.
Amy:
Question number three: what is one piece of wisdom you want to pass on to future generations?
Matt:
You can achieve so much more than you think.
It's such a cliché statement, but you really can. My life proves that we are all pretty lazy. We think we have big goals, but they're pretty small. So set bigger goals than what you think is possible.
I say to my kids that my parents brought me up with "no such thing as can't", and obviously I do the same thing with them.
My son is 12 now. When he was 10, he came into the room and was trying to learn how to do a Rubik's Cube. He was frustrated and said, "Dad, there is such a thing as can't."
He didn't say it about the Rubik's Cube. He said, "I can't fly to the moon with my arms."
I said, "Mate, I think you can. If you're 10 years old and you really think that's your life purpose, to fly to the moon with your arms, and you're myopic about it, nothing else gets in the way, and you work hard every day, you'll build relationships, build technology, find ways of getting revenue, and do all the things someone with a really strong goal does.
You'll either learn to fly to the moon with your arms by the time you end your career, or you'll have created so much value in the wake of that goal that it will have been a worthwhile life."
He didn't like the answer to that question, but I really think we need to set bigger goals.
And I think if he really wanted to fly to the moon with his arms, he could probably do it with technology.
He did end up learning to do the Rubik's Cube, by the way. He got down to about 18 seconds, then gave up and moved on to something else.
Amy:
I love that. Maybe he had the dopamine hit of finally achieving it, and then the exhaustion of thinking, "Thank goodness that's over." He probably kept going just to show you he could do it because you said it was possible.
I don't know if I've ever completed a Rubik's Cube myself. I think back in the day, we just peeled the stickers off and put them on the other side.
The last question I love to ask all of our guests is: if you could ask someone a question, dead or alive, who would it be and what would you ask them?
Matt:
I thought about this before I came on, and this is going to be a very controversial answer, I think.
I would go back to someone like Genghis Khan and ask him what standards he believed helped him manage and lead an army of that size, and keep everything together.
We can take the values aside and all the bad things that happened aside. From a leader's perspective, if you could ask, "What are the top standards that helped you manage that army?", I think we could bring that back into modern society.
I think we've lost our way from a standards perspective. To take lessons from great leaders who were able to do things that are hard to even imagine — the amount of cultural leadership, physical dominance and emotional leadership required to do something of that nature — would be fascinating.
Amy:
That is a fascinating answer. Thank you so much.
Thank you for everything you have shared in this conversation today. We could have gone in so many directions and covered so many topics, but I was really keen to explore more of your journey and the "Why Not?" philosophy. I think that is a good reminder to leave everybody with.
Before we finish, tell our listeners where they can find out more about you, the book, and what's on the horizon for you. You touched on freediving earlier, so give us a little more information for people who would like to find out more.
Matt:
You can follow me everywhere at Matt Formston. LinkedIn, Instagram, all the different socials, and mattformston.com.
The book, Why Not?, should be out on 1 August, and on audiobook as well.
There are things like the freediving in there too. I didn't think it was possible for me to ever dive through a shipwreck because I can't see it. There's a story in the book about cycling, big-wave surfing and my four world titles in surfing.
One of the last stories is me diving through a World War II shipwreck. My dive coach is holding the front of my blind cane, which I use on land, and I'm holding the back. We swim down 60 feet underwater on a single breath through a shipwreck.
There are lots of stories and lots of goals.
By the end of this year or early next year, I want to set a world record in freediving for depth.
My biggest goal, though, and the thing that will make me feel my life has been worthwhile, is if my children become good people.
I have lots of different clients I coach, businesses I talk to and keynote stages I stand on, but there's no more important client that I have than my three children.
I hope they become good people one day. That will mean all the lessons and standards I've built are worthwhile.
Amy:
That's beautiful. Thank you so much for everything today. Thank you for your time, and best of luck with that next challenging goal later this year.
Matt:
Thank you so much.

What is one piece of wisdom you want to pass on to future generations?
In this special compilation episode, Amy shares how a family loss helped inspire Really Good Conversations and why it is so important to ask meaningful questions while we still have the opportunity.
Hear the varied responses from this year's podcast guests as they reflect on the lessons, values and advice they hope future generations will carry forward.
It may leave you considering the wisdom you have received, the stories you still want to hear and the answer you would give yourself.
Key takeaways:
Why meaningful questions can unlock stories that may otherwise go untold
The importance of learning from people across different generations
Wisdom and life lessons from this year's podcast guests
Why we should not wait to ask those closest to us about their experiences
A question to consider and share with your own friends and family
 
Guests include: 
Maz Farrelly
Isiah McKimmie
Jodie Whelan and Jodie de Vries
Andrew Sloan
Phillip di Bella 
Maku Fenaroli 
Kylee Dennis 
Dara Simkin
Nova Eden
 
Trancript: 
Amy
Welcome to the Really Good Conversations podcast.
Today, I'm going to invite you to consider one question:
What is one piece of wisdom you want to pass on to future generations?
It is a question from our first edition pack of Really Good Conversations cards, and one I have been asking all of our podcast guests this year.
It has been fascinating to hear the different answers people have shared, so in this special compilation episode, I'm bringing those responses together.
This is a shorter episode, but it is centred around a question that has been on my mind quite a lot recently.
I have seen a growing amount of content online, particularly on social media, where people stop strangers in the street and ask them questions such as what advice they would give to their younger selves, what they would do differently if they were in their twenties again, or whether they have any regrets.
It is amazing to hear the responses from people of different ages, backgrounds and walks of life.
Seeing these conversations has reminded me why we started Really Good Conversations in the first place.
Many of you will already know our story, but for those who do not, the idea began after Alex's grandad passed away in 2019.
He was in his nineties, from the north of England, lived in Leeds and had served during the war.
After he passed away, we found ourselves talking about how, when older generations are no longer with us, we lose the opportunity to ask them questions, hear their stories and learn from their experiences.
For Alex in particular, it raised the question of how much he had ever really asked his grandad.
It made us realise how easily we can move through life without having these deeper conversations with our friends and families.
At different stages of life, we naturally have different priorities.
When you are a teenager, you often want to spend most of your time with your friends rather than your parents or grandparents. Then, perhaps, you go to university, move away, travel or begin meeting people from different parts of the world.
We were fortunate enough to travel and meet people from all sorts of places. It was incredible to hear their stories and learn about their lives.
But sometimes, while we are busy learning about new people, we do not always take the opportunity to hear the stories of those closest to us.
My great-grandad started our family business in 1920, and I remember wondering what it must have been like to start a business at that time compared with today.
Why did he start it? What was he hoping to achieve?
I asked my dad, who has been involved in the business himself since he was ten years old, whether he had ever asked his grandad those questions.
He said no.
I think that is often the case. These conversations do not always arise naturally. Sometimes, we need to make a conscious effort to ask.
That is why I wanted to share this episode now, in the middle of the year, and bring together the wisdom our guests have shared so far.
It is clearly a topic that is resonating with a lot of people, and I would encourage you to ask this question of the older people in your own family.
But I would also invite you to consider your own answer.
What wisdom would you want to pass on?
Right now, we are in what is sometimes called the sandwich generation, with young children on one side and ageing parents on the other.
The reality is that we can learn from every generation around us, from young children through to those who have lived long and varied lives.
I hope you enjoy hearing how our guests answered this question, and I would love to know what your answer would be too.

Summary
What's disappearing from childhood & why children need an analogue childhood in a digital world
In this episode, Amy speaks with Nova Eden from One Collective Power and the Smartphone Free Childhood movement about how smartphones, social media, iPads, EdTech and AI are reshaping modern childhood.
They explore what children may be losing to screens, from boredom and play to imagination, attention and real-world connection, and share practical ways families can build healthier digital habits at home.
 
Guest
Nova Eden is a leadership and systems change advocate, founder of One Collective Power, and a campaigner with the Smartphone Free Childhood movement.
Her work focuses on children's wellbeing, digital habits, smartphone-free schools and parenting in the digital age.
Nova works with parents, schools, organisations and policymakers to help create healthier relationships with technology, and has presented her work in Parliament as part of the growing conversation around children, smartphones, social media and digital wellbeing.
Overview
Smartphones, social media and digital devices are now woven into childhood, family life and education. But did we move too quickly? In this conversation, Amy and Nova Eden explore the impact of screens on children's wellbeing, development, attention and relationships.
Nova shares the personal moment that led her into this work, why she believes children are living through a global digital experiment, and how parents, schools and policymakers can start to rethink the role technology plays in modern childhood.
The conversation covers smartphone-free schools, EdTech, early years screen use, social media safety, dopamine, sleep, boredom, analogue childhood and the emerging risks of AI.
It is a thoughtful and practical discussion for parents, educators and anyone interested in what children need to thrive in the digital age.
 
Key Outtakes
• Why children are living through a digital experiment
• What screens are replacing in childhood
• Why boredom, play and imagination still matter
• Why "digital literacy" isn't the same as digital wellbeing
• Simple ways families can build healthier screen habits
• Why AI may change the conversation again
More Information
Collective Power https://onecollectivepower.co.uk/
Smartphone Free Childhood https://www.smartphonefreechildhood.org/
 
Transcript 
Amy
Welcome to the Really Good Conversations podcast.
Today, I am joined by Nova Eden, who has been at the centre of one of the biggest conversations facing parents right now: children, technology and modern childhood. Through her work with One Collective Power and the Smartphone Free Childhood movement, Nova has been working with parents, schools and policymakers to rethink how and when children engage with smartphones, social media and digital life.
This isn't just about screen time. It's about what kind of childhood we're designing and what role we as adults, parents and educators need to play in that.
Welcome to the podcast, Nova.
Nova
Thank you so much, Amy. It's lovely to be here this morning.
Amy
Even before we've hit record, we have already been talking about so many elements of this.
It's been a busy year in the UK as well with this topic of conversation around social media, phones and bans. But what I first wanted to ask you was how you got into this space of digital awareness, digital wellness, education, and the use of devices for children and in education.
Nova
I've always worked with children, and my speciality has been children's mental health and wellbeing. A few years ago, my eldest son came to me and said, "Mum, everyone's getting a smartphone. I'm the only one without a phone."
Of course, like every parent, I felt that pressure to conform to the social norm of giving my son a smartphone. I was worried about him being socially isolated during that crucial stage of his development.
So I gave in to the peer pressure and realised very quickly I had made a mistake, because I saw him change. I saw that he didn't want to play anymore. All he wanted to do was look at his phone.
Around the same time, I was having conversations with parents and friends, and everybody kept saying, "These phones and kids, it's such a nightmare." I started hearing all these horror stories about this child sending this naked picture or that child being bullied. I started hearing one too many awful stories about what was happening with phones, with kids, online.
It was around the time when I read an article about a young girl called Molly Russell, who sadly and tragically took her own life because she was pushed harmful content into her newsfeed. So I realised that I wanted to do something about it and I really wanted to get involved. It was just when the Smartphone Free Childhood campaign first took off.
I was very aware that I wanted to make different decisions with my younger children, and I wanted to help other parents really understand what they were getting themselves in for. Years ago, when I first started campaigning, there wasn't the awareness that there is today. This wasn't a big national conversation.
So I was very passionate that I wanted to protect other parents and other children, and it snowballed. It became a big national campaign very quickly with Smartphone Free Childhood. It became a big conversation. I started working with head teachers and schools, and really trying to raise awareness.
I remember people telling me back then, "Nothing's going to change." I'm delighted to say they were wrong. Things have changed. I've presented my work in Parliament, in Scottish Parliament and with the Department for Education. People really are listening.
We now have legislation to make all schools smartphone-free here in the UK, and we are working towards raising the age for social media for under-16s, which is a fantastic step. There's still a lot of work to do, but we are definitely moving in the right direction.
Amy
Fantastic. Do you feel it is a bit like we've been living through, and still are in, a social experiment with all of this? Perhaps at the beginning, we adopted social media and phones before anyone really understood the consequences.
Nova
Absolutely. Our children and Gen Z are living through an experiment. I think it's time for us to advocate that our children are not the test subjects anymore. We now know the harm that's being done to children via smartphones, social media and excessive screen time.
It's time for meaningful, accelerated change. We need to start challenging these norms that are no longer serving our children, and we need to make real behaviour change. We need education. We need policymakers to step up and implement legislation.
Parents are struggling and children are suffering, and this can't continue. I think that not only is this now a big national conversation, it is a global movement.
Amy
Absolutely. As you know, I'm sitting here in Australia, originally from the UK. Australia went ahead with the social media ban. I think the jury is still out on the effectiveness of these things because, as we've touched on before, children are tech savvy these days and they sometimes find ways around these mechanics.
But when we talk about screen time, is it no longer actually just about screen time, but also what else these children are missing out on in their childhood?
Nova
Yes, that's exactly right. I think there has been some negative press about what Australia is doing not working. But actually, we do know that it's working. It's just going to take a long time to see the results. We know that five million children have come off social media. We know that book sales have increased, which is brilliant and exactly what we want. Of course, the tech companies are making it very easy for these children to get around it.
But what we really need to look at is not just the fact that these children are having excessive screen time, but what they're missing out on. We know they are no longer outside as much as they used to be. They're not socialising face to face as much as they used to be. It's the interactions and healthy activities that they need at this critical stage in their development.
I think if we are going to tackle screen time in our teenagers, we need to look at what's happening in the early years, because digital wellness and healthier digital habits need to start in those early years.
We've just had some recent government guidelines come out in the UK where they are saying that under-two-year-olds shouldn't have screen time, which I completely agree with. As little screen time as possible for under-fives, an hour a day, is what we should be aiming for. But I think it should be more than that. I think we should be advocating for no iPads for under-fives.
We now know that excessive interactive screen time in the early years is causing developmental delays and speech and language delays. We know that children who have excessive screen time in the early years often find it more difficult to regulate their emotions.
It's about what they're missing, because if a child has a choice between a toy and a screen, the screen will always win. What they need at that crucial stage in their development is free play, time, space, creativity and imagination. That's what we're really lacking.
There's been a sharp rise in children going to school not being able to read, and not having basic life skills. So we need to raise awareness. I think everybody knows about smartphones and social media now, but we need to really look at iPads. If Steve Jobs, who was instrumental in creating iPads, didn't give them to his own children, we need to reconsider why we are handing out iPads to our young children.
Amy
Absolutely. That totally hits a nerve when you hear that about Steve Jobs. Everything you're saying resonates because we've got a four-and-a-half-year-old and, in his life, we had at times succumbed to him having the phone here or there and watching things. At times, you could then see that change in behaviour. When you came to take the device off him, it would be like, right, we need to stamp this out.
One trick we did play, bless him, was when we did the long-haul flight back from the UK to Australia. Then we said, "The iPad doesn't work in Australia." That was the end of that. It was full cold turkey. We had been travelling around in the UK and having the device in the car.
It's not until we continue to hear from people like yourself, have these conversations, listen to some of the research coming out, and speak to people like a child psychologist I had on the podcast about a year ago, who equally highlighted that children under five really shouldn't be having any form of screen devices, that it becomes mind-blowing to hear.
I think a lot of people listening will also feel, "Crikey, we've all slipped into using them at one time or another." What's the thinking when we come into education? It's wild to think that when we were all at school, it was pen and paper, and now people obviously have devices. Is there the thinking that technology in education is automatically going to be better for learning?
Nova
I think we've been sold this idea that more technology equals better education, but EdTech is a billion-dollar industry which has crept into our schools. We now have over two decades of research to show that children actually learn better and retain information more when they are learning from books and paper rather than screens.
We know there is a connection between their brain and their hand. Handwriting activates thinking in ways that screens don't. So what we're losing is deep thinking and focused attention.
There is a massive problem with the attention economy at the moment, and children are having fragmented attention spans because of what they're watching and the type of content. So it's really important that we look at the quality of what our children are watching, but also what's happening with EdTech and what's happening to their attention spans.
We know that in one hour of a child being on a device, whether it's an iPad or a laptop for school purposes, up to 38 minutes will be spent off task. So we're losing that ability to learn deeply. We know that the best thing to prepare our children for a digital future is actually an analogue childhood.
Having that time to learn through pens and paper, human interaction and socialising: these are the key skills that screens can't teach them. More technology early on doesn't mean better education. We now have a significant amount of research and evidence to show that it's actually detrimental to their learning.
Amy
Yeah, gosh. Do you think we're going to be able to pull it back? Even for us adults, we're guilty of being on our phones, whether we're scrolling through content or having our attention spans hijacked. It's happening across all ages. But when we think about the analogue childhood, are we going to be able to go back in time almost? It's like we need to reset some of those human skills.
Nova
Well, I hope so. I hope that by raising awareness, which is now happening globally, with lots of people campaigning and supportive MPs, politicians and head teachers, we can. I think this is a societal problem and every single one of us has a part to play.
There's no one solution. We have to educate children. We have to educate parents around digital wellness and healthier digital habits, and we need to have stricter boundaries.
We need smartphone-free schools. We need to help parents who are struggling with the peer pressure to get those phones and social media at such a young age. I think it's going to take a long time, but implementing a minimum age for social media is a great place to start, because eventually it will become normal, just like we have a minimum age for smoking, drinking and driving.
It's not going to be an overnight fix. We need to hold these tech companies and platforms accountable. At the same time, we have to take a holistic approach and we all need to do it together as parents, as leaders and as educators to make real change for the next generation of children.
Amy
We are both parents ourselves and we're living through this. Across the ages of your children, you have quite the broad spectrum. You've seen this unfold at the different milestones and ages that children go through. What is the biggest misconception adults still have about children, smartphones and social media?
Nova
I think the fact that some adults think we can teach children how to use social media safely is one of the biggest misconceptions. At the moment, these platforms are not a safe place for children. They are adult products that have been designed for adults.
Whilst we know that tech companies are pushing dangerous and harmful content into our children's newsfeeds, and whilst we know they are creating dangerous algorithms for our children and pushing content that we as parents may not see, but these young teenagers are seeing, you cannot teach young children to use that safely.
So we have to delay as long as possible while these platforms are not safe. We have to delay smartphones. We have to delay social media. In the meantime, while our children are going through this stage of development in puberty, when they're worried about what everybody else is thinking, we have to make sure they are not feeling like their value and worth is based on what everybody else thinks about them.
That's what social media does. It's quantifying how popular you are, how pretty you are or how good your holiday is. You're never going to win on social media because there's always going to be someone who has more friends or who is more popular. It's an incredibly unhealthy environment and an unhealthy place for children to be.
So I think it's really about raising awareness that, at the moment, whilst these products are not safe, we can't teach children to use them safely. This isn't a balanced conversation where we're being too strict. We know it's a dangerous product. Delaying it and giving children more time in their childhood, where they're outside, playing and doing all the healthy activities they need, is the most important thing we can do.
Hopefully, eventually, once they're a little bit older, they will be able to handle these platforms and then we can start giving them education on how to use them, how to implement them and how to bring them into a family slowly, one stage at a time and one platform at a time.
An 11-year-old's brain is very different to a 16-year-old's. They still have a lot to learn because their prefrontal cortex, which is the part of the brain that helps to regulate emotions and make good decisions, doesn't fully develop until they're in their twenties. As you say, if we as adults are all struggling with our phones, which we are, if we're honest, then these young children with a prefrontal cortex that is not fully developed find it almost impossible to self-regulate.
Amy
Absolutely. With all of this talk, I often think back to when I got a mobile phone. Back in those days it was just a Nokia with Snake on it, text messages and phone calls. I remember I got the phone because my mum wanted to get me off the house phone, because at that time you were on the phone at night. I think I could have been 14 or 15 at the time.
But I do remember at bedtime having the debate with Mum. I'd still be texting with friends and Mum was like, "Right, put it out in the hallway. Go to bed." I remember some of the arguments we would have about that, and it's almost embarrassing and cringe-inducing to think of it now.
When I think that all that phone had on it was the ability to send text messages, maybe play Snake and make phone calls, the thought of a child who is 14, 15 or younger having access to even more, whether it's interesting things, engaging things, other ways of communicating with real people or just content, until they're going to sleep at night, is a horrifying thought. I think about how I was myself and I was only texting.
Nova
Right, exactly. Sleep is the foundation of good, positive mental health. Not having screen time before you go to bed, and not having your phone as the last thing you see before you go to sleep, is so important.
Allowing children to have that time for slow dopamine, whether that's reading, playing or whatever it is, is what they need. What they're getting from their phones is this excessive amount of dopamine flooding their brains. Everything else in life becomes quite boring because, compared to what they're getting from their devices, whether it's their smartphone, social media, gaming or iPad, it becomes dull.
We need to make sure we are balancing out that dopamine. Tech companies are fishing for our kids, and they're using dopamine as bait. It's incredibly hard to manage.
Amy
Absolutely. For people listening, at times it can feel like we're in a bit of a losing battle. But it is amazing to hear that the research and information are coming out. For people listening, if they were to try to make one meaningful change in their household this week, where should they start?
Nova
I think digital wellbeing is engaging in deliberately slow practices. Whether that's walking, yoga, mindfulness, meditation or reading, it's about allowing yourself to have the ability to focus and pay attention, which is what we're all struggling with because our collective attention spans are diminishing as a society.
So really creating that in your daily life, whether it's five minutes or 20 minutes, is important. We all need to start training our attention and focusing our brains. When our brain and body are synchronised and calm, decision-making improves, creativity flows and we can function at peak efficiency.
So, no phones before you go to bed. Have that time and space. No phones first thing in the morning. Have a device station where you all charge your devices as a family, perhaps in the kitchen. First of all, we're role modelling, because that's the most important and powerful lesson we can give as adults.
Make sure there are no screens in the bedroom, no unrestricted access, and also have that time and space in the morning. That way, we're not starting with those stress responses if we're looking at the news or a busy work schedule, or if our children are looking at social media first thing in the morning.
I think this is not just about digital wellbeing. This is about family wellbeing, and we all need to do it together. We all need to slow down, build that healthy, intentional relationship with tech and take back control. At the moment, these tech companies are in control of us constantly checking our phones and getting these notifications.
One thing I always advocate for, which is really helpful in breaking phone addiction, is really simple: leave your phone in a different room. We know that the mere presence of a smartphone reduces students' cognitive capacity. That's why we have campaigned to get smartphones out of schools.
By leaving your phone in a different room, you naturally have that time and space to regulate. You don't feel distracted. You don't feel that urge to pick it up, and you can have that mental clarity. When we're in control of our tech use, we feel much better. I can't say it enough: it's about role modelling and showing our children what healthier digital habits and digital wellness look like.
Amy
Before we go into some of the extra questions I like to ask from Really Good Conversations, when we make the effort to reduce screen time and reduce the digital usage that we're all doing, what are we intentionally managing to put back into childhood that has been missing?
Nova
Boredom and space. These kids don't know how to be bored these days. They are so used to this constant dopamine. We're all so busy. We're rushing them from one structured activity to another. We need to give them that time and space to play and to be creative, but also to have meaningful social interactions.
Here in the UK, where it's really hard in the winter and we feel like we can't put our kids outside because it's cold or wet, just get those kids outside. It is hard, but it doesn't matter. They still love playing football and playing around, regardless of whether it's raining or not.
Putting on muddy boots and going for a walk, or taking that football up to the park, is something we need to create. We need to create play, sport and activity because that helps with the neurons in their developing brains. It helps them to focus and concentrate.
If we are taking away screen time and cutting back and reducing it, we need to allow them time to be bored, be creative, use their imagination and also be active. That's the part we need to play: get them outside and make sure they're moving, because movement is medicine.
Amy
I love that. While I don't want to bring in panic as such, if we don't course correct this and put the effort and energy in across the board, what concerns you the most about the adults of tomorrow?
Nova
It's so concerning. I feel that we are dumbing down a whole generation and we need to get a grip on this because AI is here and AI is coming. If we don't knuckle down and start getting this right now, it's going to be a catastrophe.
It's incredibly worrying because AI could actually be said to be more dangerous than social media. Social media is a race for attention, but AI is a race for attachment. These chatbots are creating relationships with young children. Children might start using them for homework in an innocent way, but they can create meaningful relationships that perhaps they don't have.
It's very worrying. We absolutely have to continue to advocate that our children are not the test subjects, and we have to get this right now. We need to make sure that we're giving them time for deep, meaningful thinking and critical thinking, so that when they do start using AI, hopefully when they're older, they will know the difference between using it as a tool and using it to do every part of their life, thinking, homework and business.
These products are made for adults. We need to remember that. That's why we have to keep our children away from them in these younger years, because it doesn't take into consideration that children don't know how to use these products.
Amy
At the moment of us recording this, I think one of the AI companies I read about this morning was valued at over a trillion dollars. I can't remember the exact figure, but we also have to stop and question it. Amazing technology can do this, but then when you question it, this is big, big business for some people who are making a lot of money out of an audience, and we are that audience.
There is so much we could talk about and continue to talk about on this topic. It is vast. It really is. We could go down so many rabbit holes. I think there are a lot of conversations for us all to keep having, and a lot of conversations for parents to be having with their children. Obviously, we are all about conversations, and I wanted to ask whether there has been a conversation, either through this journey or during your life, that has profoundly shaped or changed the direction of your life.
Nova
I think that just before I started campaigning, when I was having those real conversations with other adults and parents and hearing their struggles, I heard about a young child who sent a silly naked video to his girlfriend. Then they broke up. This was someone I knew quite well, and that video got sent around the whole year group at school.
When you hear things like that, you think something has to be done. I feel like that was one of the moments when I thought, these children need help. We can't continue to just hand out these devices because we know that children are too young to be able to navigate them. That was definitely a real moment for me where I thought, parents are struggling, children are suffering, and we need to make real change.
Amy
That's fantastic. Thank you for sharing. As I said before, if people like you don't stand up and do it, you look around and think, who else is going to? I will move on and ask you three questions from our pack of Really Good Conversations. I've actually done a mix. I've got some from our kids pack here and some from our yellow pack.
Question number one: if you could switch lives with any person for a day, who would it be and why?
Nova
That's interesting. Well, at the moment, with what I'm doing, I would probably like to switch lives with Keir Starmer so I could sort out this issue and protect children. I think that's really what I'd like to do, because they're dragging their feet and there are a lot of problems in the UK at the moment. I think we need some real leaders here to make meaningful change for the next generation of children.
Amy
Brilliant, thank you. And do you know what's weird? In my head, I knew that's who you were going to say. As soon as you were about to say your answer, that name popped into my head. That is so funny.
Question number two: what would you do if you were invisible?
Nova
I'd probably go to my children's school and spy on them. I'd love to see what they get up to, because our kids are generally well behaved when they're at school and then they come home tired, grumpy and hungry. Sometimes we don't always get the best of them in the afternoons, and we're the ones who have to make them do their homework.
I'd love to see them when they're happy, with their friends and at school. So, yes, I'd like to spy on them.
Amy
I love that. Equally, I love it when people say such nice compliments about our little one and you're like, that's so fantastic to hear. He's not always that polite at home, so great, I'm glad to hear he is on the outside.
Question number three: what is one piece of wisdom you want to pass on to future generations?
Nova
Practice mindfulness. It's so important. In a world where we are doing too much, everything is so fast, and we are bombarding our brains with a tsunami of information, we're not respecting our brain's capacity.
Start young. Start practising mindfulness and meditation. Learn to be slow and thoughtful with your actions, your thoughts and how you move through life. Be mindful. Find those moments where, when it comes to technology, you can stand in a queue and not look at your phone. You can wait at a bus stop or for the train and not look at your phone.
It's the little things that mindfulness teaches you which will lead on to digital wellness. I think that's something that is not just a luxury. It's absolutely essential for all of us these days.
Amy
It so is. The final question I love to ask all of our guests is: if you could ask someone a question, dead or alive, who would it be and what would you ask them?
Nova
That's a really good question. I think, because I've got my work hat on, I would like to sit down with one of the tech bros and just say, "What are you doing? What are you doing to the children in this world and the next generation, and why? Why are you doing this?"
Because they know what they're doing. I think I would really like to hear what they have to say, because we now have internal documents and research to show that they know the harm that they're doing. Yet they're not making the changes they need to make, which they could probably implement really easily and really quickly.
Amy
Wow. I would love to be invisible in those conversations as well, because it is always food for thought. These people behind these companies have children themselves and families themselves. You do think, is the only thing you're looking at the profit line and not the impact? At times, you wonder where it's all going to go. Is it just going to get switched off one day? Perhaps it just needs to have an outage.
Thank you so much, Nova, for everything you've shared today. Honestly, we really could keep going on lots of topics. I think what you've shared today is really thought-provoking for anyone listening and hopefully shared some new information they hadn't considered, or some tips they can take into their own world as well.
Please share with our listeners where they can find out a bit more about you, the work you're doing, and anything you've got on the horizon.
Nova
Thank you, Amy. Firstly, it's been so lovely to speak to you and meet you properly today.
In terms of support for children and parents, please do have a look at One Collective Power. We have created a fantastic website where, if you have any concerns as a parent, teacher, educator, child or teen, you can go to our website and find help, resources and support. So do have a look.
In terms of upcoming work, I've got some big stuff with the NHS, which is fantastic. I'm really looking forward to supporting the hardworking parents and carers at the NHS. I'm also working with some charities and doing lots of talks in corporates and schools, and all the normal stuff that I do, which I'm so passionate about. I'm very lucky to enjoy my job, help people and do a good thing at the same time.
So that's it, really. Have a look at our website, and if we can help you in any way, help your children, or offer any advice with parenting in the digital age, please reach out.
Amy
Fantastic. I will certainly be including all of those links. It's amazing that the work you and some of the fellow campaigners are doing is shining a light on this and educating people who are also in those roles of passing on education and information. Thank you so much again. Best of luck, and we'll speak again soon.
Nova
Thank you, Amy. Thank you so much. Take care.

Summary
Amy speaks with Dara Simkin about why adults forget how to play and what we lose when life becomes too focused on productivity, achievement and keeping up.
Dara explores play as a mindset, not just an activity, and shares why it can help us reconnect with curiosity, creativity, joy and each other.
 
Guest
Dara Simkin is the founder of Culture Hero and co-author of Full Stack Human.
Her work explores play, creativity and human connection, helping people and teams build the human skills that technology cannot replace.
 
Overview
From achievement syndrome and success amnesia to the pressure to always be doing, this conversation looks at why play is not childish, but deeply human.
Dara explains how small, low-stakes moments of play can help us feel more present, connected and alive in a world that often asks us to optimise everything.
Key Outtakes: 
*]:pointer-events-auto R6Vx5W_threadScrollVars scroll-mb-[calc(var(--scroll-root-safe-area-inset-bottom,0px)+var(--thread-response-height))] scroll-mt-[calc(var(--header-height)+min(200px,max(70px,20svh)))]" dir="auto" data-turn-id= "request-6a015108-756c-83ec-bb9b-91fabc1ac4c0-5" data-turn-id-container= "request-6a015108-756c-83ec-bb9b-91fabc1ac4c0-5" data-testid= "conversation-turn-60" data-scroll-anchor="false" data-turn= "assistant"> Why play is a mindset, not just something children do
How achievement can stop us enjoying the life we've built
Why adults need permission to be less serious
How play helps us reconnect with joy, curiosity and other people
Simple ways to bring play back without adding more to the to-do list




 







For more information:
Dara Simkin - https://www.culturehero.co/
The book Full Stack Human - https://www.culturehero.co/full-stack-human-book
 
Transcript
Amy: Welcome to the Really Good Conversations podcast.
Today I'm joined by Dara Simkin, founder of Culture Hero and co-author of Full Stack Human: The Mindset Upgrade You Need to Stay Human in a World Ruled by Technology.
Dara's work explores the role of play, creativity and human connection in the way we live, work and lead. In this conversation, we'll explore why adults forget how to play, what we lose when everything becomes about productivity, and how play can help us connect, create and stay human in a fast-changing world.
Welcome to the podcast, Dara.
Dara: Hello, Amy.
Amy: Thank you so much for joining me today. You're regarded as one of Australia's leading voices in play at work. So before we get into why adults need to get back to playing, can you explain for our listeners what you actually mean by play?
Dara: I think when we often hear the word play, we think of something quite specific.
Let's have a little go, shall we? When you think of the word play, what immediately comes to mind?
Amy: Having fun.
Dara: Exactly. And I think that's a very universal idea of play, which it is. Play is absolutely about having fun.
But when we ask adults what they associate with play, they often say dogs, babies, kids, sports, board games and so on.
When we talk about play through the lens of serious play, intentional play or purposeful play, it's really about play as a mindset or a mode, rather than an activity.
It's about how we allow ourselves to get into a place where we feel more open, more relaxed and more capable of accessing dynamic thinking. We're able to be more generative in the way we think. We suspend judgement as best we can. We're open to failing, experimenting and giving things a go.
So when I think about play, it's really this capacity to arrive in our lives in a very different way to how we normally arrive: overwhelmed, rushed, up to our eyeballs in things to do, in fight or flight, going, going, getting things done.
I always liken it to those "aha" moments we have in the shower. We solve world hunger in the shower because it's probably the first time in our day where we're relaxed, in our body, by ourselves, and our mind is able to open because of those conditions.
Amy: Yes, I can totally relate to that.
It makes me think of previous roles I've had in other companies, where you're sitting at a desk all day and then you go into a meeting room and it's suddenly: "Right, we need to have a creative brainstorm. Everyone has to be creative now."
You've got a one-hour meeting in the diary where you have to crack creativity, and it can feel like the most forced environment. It's not what you've just described at all.
When you're in the shower, you remember things. You have ideas. You suddenly remember what you forgot to do.
When I was preparing for this podcast, I was reminded of that old phrase: "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy." I looked it up and it was first recorded in print in 1659 in James Howell's Proverbs.
It's a saying we all know. We know it from films and popular culture, but I wonder whether we're really leaning into the meaning of it.
Do you think adults have forgotten how important play is?
Dara: One hundred per cent.
I think we've actually created a culture that is suspicious of play.
When we think back to the Puritan work ethic, which dates back 500 or 600 years, there's this idea that work is salvation, play is demonised, and productivity is a form of godliness.
I think most institutions have been created around that perception.
When you think about the Industrial Revolution and the point where we started replacing human labour with machines, we became cogs in a system. I don't think we've really been able to rectify that until now.
I think conversations are being had where we look around and realise so many people are depressed, anxious, overwhelmed, stressed, burnt out or on multiple medications. We are incredibly unwell.
I think we're realising more and more that the lifestyle that has been put upon us, around efficiency, getting a mortgage, having a nice car and this idea of success that's been sold to us, sucks.
Amy: Definitely. The amount of times I've said to Alex, my husband, "I'm not sure about all this adulting."
There's just such a long list of life admin to function as what we perceive to be an adult.
We've both got young children, and seeing them play, and seeing their curiosity, is amazing. It's definitely brought that back to me.
At what point do you think adults start to lose that natural instinct to play?
Dara: I think it starts in adolescence, to be honest.
When we start to gain more of a sense of individuality, identity and ego, we begin to compare ourselves to other people.
My son is only five, and he's already talking about how other kids' clothes are cooler than his. I'm thinking, "Where is he getting that from?" Because it certainly isn't me.
I'm astonished by this need to fit in and conform, but at the same time, it makes complete sense from an evolutionary perspective. We had to be part of a tribe. We had to belong and be included, otherwise we wouldn't survive.
A lot of Full Stack Human is about understanding our evolutionary wiring, the things we are biologically designed to do in order to survive, and how the culture we live in can distort and over-sensitise those things, especially when it comes to belonging.
We now understand so much about the brain, dopamine, reward and motivation. Brilliant people work in advertising and marketing, and when the message is "look like this, smell like this, wear this, buy this, do this, be this", that pressure starts from a very young age.
So not only are we trying to conform and belong when we're young, we're also put into classrooms where we're expected to sit down, be quiet and learn numeracy and literacy.
I've just been on a school tour for my son. He's five, so I was looking at what his primary school experience might be like. I asked the principal, "How much time do they have for imaginative play? How much time do they spend outside?"
He could tell me about morning tea, recess and lunch, but when it came to imaginative play in the classroom, he didn't really have an answer.
Amy: I absolutely feel you because we're in the exact same space right now.
I had the same thoughts when I went on school tours earlier this year. It all felt quite restrictive inside the classroom. I looked at some of the classrooms and thought, "This feels the same as when we were at school."
If we think about how we've evolved as adults, have we attached everything to having an outcome? Are we obsessed with everything needing some form of achievement?
You talk about achievement syndrome. What do you mean by that, and how does it affect our ability to play?
Dara: I came across this concept through a newsletter by a great researcher and writer called Michael Simmons, who is based in the States.
Achievement syndrome is also this idea of achievement addiction, and it's really the thing that happens before burnout.
As a society, especially in Western culture, we have a big obsession with burnout at the moment, and that's an important conversation to have. But based on the work and research I've done around achievement syndrome, the burnout conversation can be too late, because by then we're already at the end point.
Michael talks about going back to childhood, where we get gold stars for doing the right thing. We start to realise that when we are good, smart or achieve something, we get accolades, recognition and validation.
For many of us, especially those who had baby boomer parents, we didn't always get that validation at home. My parents had a hard time telling me they were proud of me, so we start to seek that out in other places, from teachers, sports coaches and so on.
We start to learn that our value is connected to an output or an achievement. That gets reinforced when we go to work, where we get raises and promotions. If you're in sales, maybe you get the trip to Hawaii or whatever it is.
So we double down on output. The more we do, the more we're recognised and revered. Then we start to optimise everything in order to do as much output as possible.
Eventually we reach a point of diminishing returns. The thing we were once passionate about, the thing we studied for, worked towards and felt excited about in our twenties, doesn't give us the same feeling anymore.
We get the raise. We get the promotion. But we're too exhausted to enjoy it or even recognise it.
I think a comorbidity of achievement syndrome is success amnesia, where we forget about our successes because we're already onto the next thing.
I speak from experience. As an entrepreneur, I have very much been on that hamster wheel of constantly doing, because it's endless. There's always more.
Amy: There's no finish line, really.
Dara: Exactly.
When it doesn't feel as good as it once did, we've already created this baseline of chaos in the way we operate and live our lives. We have a mortgage we may be in over our heads with, or children in schools that cost $20,000 a year, or whatever it might be. Then we're on a one-way ticket to burnout.
In the book, we talk about how if we want to stop sacrificing our humanity for success, we need to understand our relationship with success.
How do we define it for ourselves? What does it look like? Is it money? A big house? Fancy holidays? Or is it something else?
Amy: Let's talk a little bit about the book. It's called Full Stack Human. What does that phrase mean for our listeners?
Dara: To keep it simple, it comes from computer programming.
When you're a full stack developer, you can design a programme or an app from end to end. You understand the zeros and ones, the bits and bytes, the backend, and you can also design the shiny interface, the UX people interact with.
From a people perspective, it's about knowing your own programming. Understanding your relationship to success, how you navigate change, what your biases and assumptions are, and the things unconsciously driving the way you behave and act every day.
That's the backend concept of the first few chapters.
Then the shiny user interface is about mental health, how we show up at work and how we lead.
In the middle is what we call the five-layer stack, or the upgrade. That includes serious play, radical curiosity, embodied adaptability, intelligent optimism and strategic hope.
There's a word in front of each concept: serious, radical, embodied, intelligent, strategic, because we're interested in the idea of being active. How do you become an active participant in your own life?
I think we've created a society where we are so comfortable that we have a hard time being uncomfortable. We've created so many ways to maximise comfort, and I think that's doing us a massive disservice.
When we talk about embodied adaptability, for example, it's about understanding how your nervous system responds to challenge. How do you adapt in a way that allows your nervous system to stay regulated and grounded even when things are hard?
Strategic hope is about believing you can do it and that there is a way forward. There's agency in that. It's not just, "I hope this is going to be okay."
The same applies to optimism. Optimism can be blind positivity or "good vibes". Intelligent optimism is about seeking fact-based evidence that a better future can be built, rather than just doomscrolling and listening to sensationalised media.
Amy: And then filling your head with all the doom and gloom and coming offline in a panic.
You talk about the human operating system. What do you think we need to protect or strengthen in ourselves right now?
Dara: I think it starts with the responsibility to understand ourselves.
A concept that emerged for me while writing the book was this idea of intelligent self-compassion. We're able to have compassion for ourselves and our situation because we are educated and aware of how we operate.
I often say comprehension creates compassion.
When we understand that we have nearly 200 documented biases that help us navigate the world, it gives us context. When there's too much information, not enough meaning, or when we need to act quickly, we make assumptions about ourselves and the world. Those assumptions are also inherited from when we were young, from our parents, caregivers, religion, background or whatever else shaped us.
We also have an immunity to change. We are wired to evolve and not die at the same time. A lot of people don't realise that.
We have this need to learn, grow and become a better version of ourselves, but we're also wired not to take risks because we want to survive. There is a psychological tension inside us that most people are unaware of.
So when we try to change and have the best intentions, we sometimes can't do it and we don't know why. A lot of it has to do with our assumptions, and also our relationship to success.
In the book, we talk about creating a clear-eyed view of what's breaking us. A lot of it has to do with our resistance to change, our biases, our assumptions and the way we navigate success and achievement.
From an operating system upgrade perspective, we need to understand that as a baseline.
A lot of people who have read the book have said it freed them from thinking, "It's me. Why aren't I coping? Why can't I keep up? Why is this so hard? Why am I so overwhelmed?"
We berate ourselves as if it's a deficit of our own, when actually it's often society's pressure around technology, keeping up and all the expectations placed on us.
So I think it starts with getting a baseline understanding of how our brain works.
Amy: When people have that understanding, so much of it can feel like environmental factors. Whether it's your workplace or somewhere else, people might be listening and thinking, "That's great, but I can't really change how things operate at work. I don't make those decisions."
So for people listening who think, "Great, I can read the book and understand this, but what action can I actually take in my everyday life that doesn't feel like another thing on the to-do list?"
Dara: For me, it's about being an active participant.
It's easy to say, "I can't do this. I don't have control." And yes, if you work in a toxic culture and you don't have the luxury of finding a new job, I totally understand that.
But there are other environmental factors that affect your bandwidth and capacity that you do have control over.
Look at the people you spend time with. Are you hanging out with people who fill your cup, who make you feel good, who energise you?
Are you connecting with people physically, or are you just texting, calling, Facebooking or messaging?
We need physical connection as human beings. That fills our cup, and we are often disconnected from that because we don't prioritise it.
A great psychiatrist I follow, Ned Hallowell, calls it vitamin C: vitamin connect. We sometimes forget how important relationships are. Not just with our partner, child, mum, dad, brother or sister, but with friends and even colleagues.
If work is hard, having a person you can go for coffee with, have a chat with and vent to can lighten the load.
I also think we need to prioritise ourselves and prioritise play.
The way we approach play is often backwards. Play becomes a reward. It's the thing we get after everything else is done.
But everything is never done. It's endless.
So if we treat play as a reward, or book one holiday and then get sick because our nervous system finally has a chance to come out of stress mode, we're missing the point.
We need to prioritise small moments where we walk outside and notice where we are and what we're doing. We don't have headphones in. We don't have our face in our phone. Moments of wonder, awe and novelty.
We need to look at play as an on-ramp to living more sustainably, being more connected and being more joyful.
A lot of that comes down to thinking about what makes you feel good, and doing more of that. It's not rocket science.
Sometimes, with self-improvement and the wellness industry, there's so much stuff we get overloaded with. Don't overcook it.
What brings you joy?
And I don't mean alcohol or Netflix. I mean things where you are participating, using your hands, using your brain, creating new neural pathways and getting involved.
It could be going for a walk, seeing a friend, playing basketball or being present with your child while doing Lego. There are micro moments.
When people think, "How do I change? What do I need to do? I'm going to join the 5am club and go to the gym every day," it can become another source of pressure.
How can you do things that are low stakes, easy, accessible, doable and repeatable? Things that give you positive feedback, where you think, "That felt good. I want to do that again."
You don't need to enrol yourself in a 12-week clowning course unless you want to. That would be my thing, but not everyone's.
Go back to basics. What did you like doing as a kid? If you loved tinkering, go and do a woodworking workshop.
Amy: I love it.
So much of what you've said connects with other conversations I'm having, and with a lot of the wider narrative we're seeing online. It feels like we're in an era of waking up to how comfortable we've made life for ourselves, and all the technology we've brought into our lives.
Now we seem to be in a phase of having to teach ourselves how to be human again and take ourselves back to the basics.
All of the quick fixes or recommendations we see online, go do this, go do that, can end up giving us more layers.
Dara: Can I just say: fuck the hack.
For me, this idea of hacking anything is like, "Give me the quick shortcut. What do I have to do?"
Just pause. Take a breath.
Play is in all of us. We are biologically wired to play. It is part of our emotional system. It is as baked into our brain as fear, lust and seeking.
Play is a part of us. It's not something you have to learn. It's something you have to dig up. Something you have to remember, recall and reconnect to.
I'm not here for a play hack.
It's about saying, "I was playful at some point in my life. I have felt joy before. What was I doing? Where was I?"
Amy: If people listening are thinking, "I can't even remember how to play or what I used to find joy in," what could they start doing?
Dara: I don't believe you.
If you're listening and thinking that, I don't believe you. You just have to pause and give yourself a moment to remember.
This idea of "I don't remember how to play" or "I don't remember how to feel joy", you do. You just have to give yourself enough time and space to unravel a little and access that part of yourself.
Sometimes the best thing we can do in order to play is pause.
Sit on your couch for five minutes with a cup of tea and no distraction. Take a few breaths.
A lot of people turn their nose up at mindfulness and meditation, so let's call it the practice of nothingness.
Can you do that? Can you do absolutely nothing for a minute?
Amy: It's a struggle. I know when I try it, I immediately start thinking of all the things I need to get done. It takes time.
This has been fascinating. Obviously, we are all about conversations in our world, and I know you are too in a lot of the work you do.
I always ask: has there ever been a conversation that has profoundly shaped you or changed the direction of your life?
Dara: I feel like every therapy session I go to is a life-changing conversation.
But I think a conversation that really shaped me was with our friends Graham Panther and Honor Eastly, who are amazing mental health advocates. We interviewed them for the book.
They run an amazing community called the Big Feels Club, which is very much about community-based mental health support and normalising conversations around mental health.
When I was speaking with Honor, she talked about bandwidth, and the idea that we don't have a resilience problem, because resilience is really indicative of our bandwidth.
If we're having a really difficult time in life, we've lost a parent, we've been sick, work is hard, whatever it might be, our bandwidth is low.
So our ability to bounce back, which is often how people define resilience, becomes inaccessible. That's okay. It doesn't make us a non-resilient person. It means we need to fill our cup again. That might be through recovery, rest or something else.
For me, I have ADHD. I operate at a very different frequency to many people, and I can crash and burn. I don't really identify with burnout. I know that when my body starts telling me I'm not okay, I need to take the time to respond.
Having that language around bandwidth, and understanding that bandwidth is not infinite, changed things for me.
Each of us has a cup of a particular size depending on who we are and how we operate. We need to realise how our bandwidth expands and shrinks.
Once I started thinking about that in my own life, I thought, "Where am I putting my energy, and am I getting it back?"
A lot of the time, we put energy into things and don't get it back.
To have a real conversation, I'm 40 years old. I've been separated for three years. I have a five-year-old. My dating pool is small. I also have ADHD, which means rejection sensitivity, hyper-focus and dopamine seeking.
Dating for me takes a lot of bandwidth. Getting on apps and doing the whole thing was depleting me. I was suffering. I wasn't being present with my child. I had "boy brain", and it was taking away from the things that needed my focus, like my child and my business.
So I stopped. I went on a six-month hiatus to recalibrate.
That conversation around bandwidth changed the way I think about what I'm actually able to do.
Amy: It's such a good reminder. I know I'm guilty of cramming more and more things in and almost thinking they all have the same level of priority, when often they don't.
Thank you for sharing that. I think so many people can relate.
Now I'm going to ask you three questions on the spot from our pack of cards.
Question number one: if you came with a warning label, what would it say?
Dara: Can be incredibly hyperactive.
I'm late-diagnosis ADHD. I've had my diagnosis for a year, but I can connect to being this way my entire life.
I can be very high octane. As a younger person, I definitely put my foot in my mouth a lot. As an adult, I've learnt not to be as impulsive in that way.
While ADHD is a great way for me to think differently, be creative and do the amazing things I've done, it can also be really difficult.
So my warning label would be: can be hyperactive.
Amy: Question number two, which feels appropriate because we've been talking about play and childhood: what was there to do when you were a teenager?
Dara: Go to the mall.
There was a place I loved getting pretzels from called Auntie Anne's. We'd go to the movies and then hang outside after the movie.
Because I grew up in Miami, there were also these all-age clubs you could go to. They don't exist anymore, but I have a very distinct memory of being 15 with my best friend, Melissa.
My mum would never let me go, but my best friend's mum was super cool, so I would spend the weekend there. Her mum drove us to this club called Mad Max. We dressed up, went dancing and hung out, and her mum slept in the car park waiting for us to come back.
So I was clubbing and hitting the dance floor at a very young age, having grown up in Miami.
Amy: Brilliant. I love that.
 
Amy: Question number three: what is one piece of wisdom you want to pass on to future generations?
Dara: I could try to say something really profound, but for me it's: never forget to play.
We play when we're young and we play when we age. What happens in that 40-year period in between?
Even children are playing less now because of technology and devices. I know in Scandinavia, GPs are prescribing play for children, which I think is devastating and really highlights what's happening in our world today.
But yes, don't forget to play. Do things that bring you joy.
Amy: And the last question I ask all of our guests is: if you could ask someone a question, dead or alive, who would it be and what would you ask them?
Dara: I took a bit of time to think about this, and I'm going to keep it on theme with play.
There's a quote attributed to Plato: "You can learn more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation."
I'd love to have a cup of tea with Plato and say, "Where did that come from? What did you see? What were the Greeks doing that made you think that?"
I'd love to chat with Plato and ask, first of all, "Did you actually say that?" Because who knows when we're quoting Greek philosophers.
But I think it's brilliant and so true, and I'd love to unpack that with him.
Amy: Fantastic.
Dara, thank you for everything you've shared today. This has been a really thought-provoking episode, and I hope people listening take some of these ideas into their own lives and worlds.
As we wrap up, where can people find out more about you, Culture Hero and the book?
Dara: The book is available through most online retailers, so wherever you are in the world, you can get it on Amazon. You can also visit fullstackhumanbook.com for more information.
If you're in the professional world, you can find me on LinkedIn, where I share different insights.
My business is Culture Hero, and the website is culturehero.co.
If you're looking to engage your people in interesting and dynamic ways in the learning space, around developing human skills, that's my thing.
I like to say I design experiences that boost human capability around what algorithms can't replace.
So yes, hit me up.
Amy: Fantastic. I'll include all of those links as well. Thank you so much for joining me today.
Dara: Thanks, Amy. It was a really good conversation.
Amy: Thanks for listening. I hope you enjoyed the episode and that it's left you with something to reflect on or talk about beyond this conversation.
Be sure to check out the show notes for more information on today's guest. And if really good conversations are your thing, share this episode with a friend, hit subscribe and join us next time.

Summary
"We touch our phones more than our loved ones." It's a jarring statement from scientist and broadcaster Dr. Niraj Lal, but the data backs it up. 
In this episode, we go "Behind the Screens" to understand why our biology is no match for the modern algorithm. From the "junk food" of digital connection to the looming challenges of AI and deepfakes, we explore how to build guardrails that protect our attention, our children, and our human relationships.
 
Guest
Dr. Niraj Lal is a scientist, ABC presenter, and host of the Imagine This podcast, which has reached over 16 million listeners. 
With a background in solar cell physics and science communication, Niraj is dedicated to sparking critical thinking in the next generation. 
His new book, Behind the Screens, serves as a guide for young people (and adults) to navigate the ones and zeros of our digital world.
 
 
Overview
Why do we find it so hard to put our phones down, even when we know the content we're consuming isn't good for us?
Dr. Niraj Lal joins Amy to pull back the curtain on the economic and biological structures that keep us hooked.
We dive into the "Awareness Trap"; the idea that simply knowing how an algorithm works isn't enough to change our behavior because these platforms are designed to hijack our most basic social needs for validation and connection. Niraj explains the "frictionless" design of the internet and why we need to move beyond simple screen-time limits toward true digital agency.
As global conversations ramp up around social media bans for children, Niraj offers a timely perspective on how to prepare the next generation.
We discuss the rise of AI, the death of "seeing is believing," and why, in an increasingly automated world, the most valuable thing we can hold onto is the direct evidence of our human relationships.
Key Outtakes 
The 2,000-Touch Reality: Why we touch our phones more than our loved ones and how to reset that balance
The Awareness Trap: Why simply "knowing" how algorithms work isn't enough to stop the scroll
Digital Junk Food: How to identify "low-nutrition" content that hijacks your social needs
Beyond the Ban: Practical "guardrails" for kids that go deeper than just setting screen-time limits
How to navigate a world of AI, deepfakes, and computer-generated truth
The Ultimate Happiness Hack: Why scientific data proves human connection is still our greatest currency


For more information:
Dr. Niraj Lal website https://nirajlal.org/
The book 'Behind the Screens' https://www.uqp.com.au/books/behind-the-screens
 
 
Transcript: "We Touch Our Phones More Than Our Loved Ones"
Amy: 
Today I'm joined by Dr. Niraj Lal, scientist, ABC presenter, and host of the Imagine This podcast, which has gained over 16 million listens. His new book, Behind the Screens, helps young people understand how the digital world really works. It covers everything from algorithms and AI to social media, gaming, and online behavior.
This conversation isn't just about kids and screens. It's about how all of us are learning to live, think, and connect in a world shaped by technology. Welcome to the podcast, Niraj.
Dr. Niraj Lal: You can call me Nidge, Amy, if you'd like! But yeah, great to be with you. Thanks for having me.
Amy: Fantastic. Now, I have your recent book here, Behind the Screens. It feels like such a topical book right now. There is a lot of talk around the world about social media bans and kids' use of technology, and also our own use as adults. I'm really keen to dive into this topic with you. But firstly, you come from a scientific background. What drew you to understanding how things work, from your science work right through to the digital world we're living in?
Dr. Niraj Lal: Well, I think I was always just asking questions. I probably was an annoying kid, but I just try to figure out how the world works and the things that matter to all of us. I studied science and art at university: physics, maths, politics, and philosophy. Then I concentrated on physics to figure out how to make the world work for all of us.
My background is in solar cell physics, trying to make solar panels more efficient. I still work in that field, but I increasingly do science communication for young ones. The aim is not just to teach facts, but to spark the skills of creative and critical thinking. It is about learning how to distinguish true information from everything else. This book stems from that: helping a young generation navigate the internet and learn what's going on "behind the screens" so they can make it work in their best interests.
Amy: So many of us are walking around and we don't even question how things work or the technology we're using. When was the moment you thought, "Actually, I need to dig deeper on this"?
Dr. Niraj Lal: It went by degrees. You just look at adults today: catching public transport or anywhere you are, we're all really plugged into our devices. The average adult in the Western world checks their phone more than 85 times a day. That's every 10 minutes during waking hours. We touch our devices more than 2,000 times a day. We touch them more than anything else: more than our loved ones, and more than we touch ourselves.
We're all a little bit hooked. Seeing the impact this has on our society and our civic conversations, how we speak to each other and see the best side of someone else's viewpoint, it's becoming harder. We're getting more polarized. There was a wonderful documentary, The Social Dilemma, that talked to tech executives who knew exactly what drives engagement. It's not always true information, and it's not always in our best interests. I wondered if we could teach that to kids before they get a phone, to give them a bit of armor before they go online.
Amy: We put a lot of focus on kids, but as you highlighted, as adults, we're all doing it. What do you think most people misunderstand about how the internet actually works?
Dr. Niraj Lal: It's designed to be incredibly seamless. It's like, "How does a fish recognise water?" It's just around us.
That frictionless design is intentional. I think it's helpful to be aware of what happens when your device sends something online: what metadata is, how it's used to create a profile of you, and how that's used to figure out which ads to show you. Nothing is "evil" there; it's just how it works. If we're aware of it, it helps. I think the same thing will happen for AI.
Amy: You've touched on metadata and algorithms. Why is it that as humans, we might understand this intellectually, but our behavior doesn't actually shift?
Dr. Niraj Lal: Because we're human. Our brains evolved as social creatures on the savanna with an almost infinite capacity for being liked and connected. App developers have found a way to hijack that for profit. It's a bit like junk food; we know it's bad for us, but we still eat it. The difference is there's a physical limit to how much junk food you can eat before you feel sick, but I don't know if there's the same limit to feeling validated or connected.
Amy: In your view, are we dealing with a technology problem or a human behavior problem?
Dr. Niraj Lal: I don't know if it's a problem so much as an outcome of who we are as biological organisms and how our society is structured around profit-making. We're usually catching up with technology, and we're trying to catch up now with legislative changes. The first step is awareness.
Amy: Is it too late? Are we so far into it that we can't go back?
Dr. Niraj Lal: I don't think we're too late. It is tricky for the generations that have already slipped through. I don't know if we did right by the young people who were online before these social media bans. But every other technological revolution has found ways to have appropriate guardrails, and we can do the same here. It's up to us to say, "Hey, we want this to work in our best interest."
Amy: I'm conscious of my phone use around my son. What are kids really learning from watching adults use technology?
Dr. Niraj Lal: It's absolutely critical. "Monkey see, monkey do." It's hard to be those role models when we feel so time-pressured with work and life admin. Kids are observing how we do it well and how we don't. But the kids I spoke with for the book are actually quite savvy. They can see what's going on and they want to make it work for them.
Amy: What is the one conversation parents should have before giving a child a phone?
Dr. Niraj Lal: My tip is that it doesn't have to go from zero to 100%. It can be a gradual process. "Here's a device with messages and a phone; we'll talk about adding more apps over time." Keep the conversation as open as possible. Let them know: "If you see something that makes you feel weird or yuck, that's totally okay and you can talk to me." Make sure they have a safety network. If they're gaming, join them. If they're scrolling, do it together sometimes. Keeping that connection open is the most important part.
Amy: We are now in this world of AI, and you talk about the difficulty of knowing what's "real." Are we moving toward a world where truth is about trust rather than facts?
Dr. Niraj Lal: We're certainly in an age where any image or video has a real possibility of being computer-generated. Trust, independent verification, and being aware of your media sources will become vital. I think face-to-face, in-person experiences will become even more important: the things we can learn through direct evidence.
Amy: What concerns you most about this shift?
Dr. Niraj Lal: The conversation is accelerating so quickly. It's helpful to look under the hood of what a Large Language Model actually is, because that gives us agency. We shouldn't assume that just because an AI can converse in a personable manner, it carries the same empathy, value judgments, and ethical frameworks that we take for granted as humans.
Amy: I've got some quick "Mythbuster" questions for you. Answer "Myth," "Truth," or "Somewhere in between." Number one: Kids understand technology better than adults.
Dr. Niraj Lal: Somewhere in between. Kids are better at fixing the aerial or the video player, but they don't always have the healthy skepticism or that gut sense that something smells fishy.
Amy: Number two: If you understand algorithms, you're less influenced.
Dr. Niraj Lal: True. If you're aware of what's being put in front of you to keep you engaged, it helps you seek out opposing views.
Amy: Number three: Screen time is the main problem.
Dr. Niraj Lal: False. Screen time is a symptom. The problem is that we've created economic structures where we don't value social spaces or natural environments enough. We've outsourced parenting to digital devices because they are free and engaging. But when something is free, you or your kids are the product.
Amy: Number four: AI will make it impossible to know what's real.
Dr. Niraj Lal: False. I believe in our ability to figure out frameworks to verify information. It will be harder, but humans will always have the capability to understand what's real through direct evidence and the scientific process.
Amy: What's something you're still figuring out yourself?
Dr. Niraj Lal: All of it! All the theory in the world doesn't help when you find yourself doom-scrolling. I'm figuring out effective ways to stay healthy with it, just like everyone else.
Amy: Has there ever been a conversation that profoundly shaped you?
Dr. Niraj Lal: So many. My grandparents, primarily. I remember asking my grandma for advice and she just said, "Just be happy." At the time, I expected something more complex, but over time I realized that most people are about as happy as they make up their minds to be.
Amy: I love that. Simplicity is often the answer. Now, three quick questions from our Really Good Conversations pack.
Number one: If you were a superhero, what would your superpower be?
Dr. Niraj Lal: Flying! Easy one. And without carbon emissions, that'd be pretty cool, wouldn't it?
Amy: Question two: What was your biggest highlight from last year?
Dr. Niraj Lal: Going fishing with my kids and seeing them catch a bunch of fish. I'm getting into spear-fishing too, finding "flow" in the ocean.
Amy: And question three: What is one piece of wisdom you want to pass on?
Dr. Niraj Lal: The insight from the long-running Harvard study on happiness: human relationships, more than money or fame, are what lead to happier, healthier, longer lives. Value those close personal connections above all the noise.
Amy: If you could ask anyone, dead or alive, a question, who would it be?
Dr. Niraj Lal: My dad, who passed away in 2021. I'd love to have more conversations with him. Professionally, Carl Sagan. I'd love to hear his thoughts on how we can communicate the wonders of the natural world to young people today to help us with the challenges we face as a society.
Amy: Fantastic answers. Thank you so much for sharing. I feel like we've only scratched the surface! I hope our listeners leave with some reflection on their own habits. Where can they find out more about you and your book?
Dr. Niraj Lal: Thanks for having me, Amy. This was a beautiful thing. People can find me at nirajlal.org, and Behind the Screens is available wherever you get your books.
Amy: Thank you, Nidge. And thank you for the work you're doing to help us navigate this world.
Thanks for listening,join us next time for another Really Good Conversation.