EP031 | CHAT - How One Text Message Helped Raise $100 Million | Adam Spencer

It is Dry July this month on Chat on Tap, we're putting the drinks aside for a cause that's become one of Australia's great fundraising success stories.

Adam Spencer is one of Australia's best known broadcasters, mathematicians, authors and comedians. But for nearly two decades, he's also been one of the driving forces behind Dry July.

What started with one text message has now helped raise more than $100 million for people affected by cancer.

Adam joins us to tell the story of how Dry July almost never happened, and why taking just one month off alcohol has become much bigger than simply giving up a drink.

In this episode:

• 📱 The text message that accidentally created Dry July
• 💰 How a $3,000 fundraising goal became a $100 million movement
• 🍺 What a month without alcohol teaches you about your relationship with drinking
• 🧠 Why rituals can be harder to break than the alcohol itself
• 🤖 Adam's thoughts on AI, education and the future of learning
• 🔢 Mind-blowing maths facts that'll completely change your perspective
• 🦢 A passionate detour into the Sydney Swans and why the club is so special

Along the way we discuss the famous "Golden Ticket", why Dry July has stood the test of time, and how a simple idea from three mates has gone on to support cancer patients and their families right around Australia.

Whether you're taking part in Dry July yourself, curious about your own drinking habits, or just enjoy a great conversation, this is one you won't want to miss.

Pubs. Pints. People.

🍺 Support Our Dry July Team

This year I'm taking on Dry July alongside The Frothy Moe Co, raising money for Australians affected by cancer.

If you'd like to support the cause, you can donate here:

https://www.dryjuly.com/teams/frothy-moe-co

Every dollar helps fund practical services that make life a little easier for cancer patients and their families—from transport and accommodation to better hospital facilities and wellbeing programs.

🍺 About Adam Spencer

Adam Spencer is an Australian broadcaster, comedian, author and one of the country's best-known communicators of mathematics and science. After spending years on Triple J and ABC Radio, Adam now speaks around the world on technology, artificial intelligence, space, mathematics and innovation.

He's also been an ambassador and passionate advocate for Dry July since its earliest days, helping grow the campaign into one of Australia's most successful annual fundraisers.

Follow Adam Spencer

🌐 Website: https://adamspencer.com.au
📰 Nerd News (Substack): https://adambspencer.substack.com
📘 Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/adamspencerofficial
📸 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/adamspencerofficial
🐦 X: https://x.com/adambspencer

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:02

Welcome to Chat on Tap, and this month we are dry. We're doing dry July, and I thought would we call you a patron saint?

SPEAKER_00 0:10

Patron Saint, ambassador, inventor, founder, chief dryer, whatever you wish, Davo.

SPEAKER_01 0:16

Davo. That is Adam Spencer or Spence. He is a mathematician, comedian, author, broadcaster, and just all round great guy. I'm really pleased that you've come to join me for to celebrate Dry July and get behind this really great cause.

SPEAKER_00 0:32

Pleasure to be at Chad on Tapala to all the tappers out there. I'm here with Dave, Davo, Leno, Squiggy. There's so many different names. First time I think I've ever seen you at this time of day. Yes. Without the two of us wiping crust out of our eyes in between non-stop blocks of pink and maroon five.

SPEAKER_01 0:50

So um Spencer and I have met in the in the world of commercial radio many years ago. It's a um another license of the. Well, you are the maths guy, and I want to get to some stats on Dry July in just a sec. But for someone who hasn't had the pleasure of coming across Spence, let's say you're in a you're sitting in an airport bar in San Francisco, someone doesn't know anything about Australia, doesn't know who you are, and they say, What are you about? What would you say?

SPEAKER_00 1:22

Australia's best known, though nowhere near best mathematician. I was originally powering through university, doing a law degree, actually, with maths as a sort of cheeky little side hustle, dropped law and everything else, fell in love with mathematics and was working at quite a high studying at quite a high level, won a big stand-up comedy competition just down the road from where I'm currently sitting in the ABC studios, Triple J Radio. Yep, ran something called raw comedy. They still run it. Undiscovered stand-up comedians. This year celebrated 30 years of raw comedy. I went in the very first raw comedy. Uh, so first time they'd ever done it, the stand-up was appalling. So I won. And uh and they said, Do you want to come and hang at the radio station? I had this crystal moment where I realised in a in a room of randomly selected people, I'm a maths genius. In a room of maths PhDs, I'm as dumb as a box of hammers, right? But I'm pretty good at talking about that sort of stuff and getting passionate and excited about it. So I'm a media persona's always been smarter than the funny guys, funnier than the smart guys. I'm not a straight up comedian. If you want 20 minutes at your Christmas party of hey, men and women, a bit different, aren't they? But I've got Dave Hughes' number and he'll he'll tear it to pieces. But if you ring Hughes and say, look, we've got this conference coming up about artificial intelligence, we need someone to interview the CEO, but we wouldn't mind it also being a little bit entertaining. Husie will say, ah, yeah, go and get Spence. What's wrong with Albow and go and get Spence? And uh and and we and we go from there. So that's sort of been my groove, my place I did a you know, uh on the National Radio Network Triple J, played a lot of alternative music with my mate Will Anderson, did a show there for a while, then went onto the grown-up ABC for about eight years as a breakfast radio presenter, and now just float around the world of technology and AI and conferences and events talking about all that sort of stuff.

SPEAKER_01 3:06

Okay, I've got some questions on that actually. But we're here to talk dry July because this is a uh you know a beer and pub podcast. We've gone dry to challenge ourselves, rethink the how you're finding it. Okay, what are we? We're just over the midway point.

SPEAKER_00 3:18

How good was the 15th of July around noon? All down here, baby.

SPEAKER_01 3:24

I found it maybe easier than I thought, but there's been a couple of unexpected things. One has been I'm really tired at night, despite my Garmin telling me I'm getting the best sleep of my life.

SPEAKER_00 3:36

That's interesting.

SPEAKER_01 3:37

Yeah, about 8:30, 9.15. It's like the wall, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 3:41

What would you normally be tucking into a couple of scotches and kicking into fourth gear?

SPEAKER_01 3:45

Could be anything, could be anything. So, yeah, I'm not sure about that. I found on the weekend uh it was a little bit tough on a Sunday afternoon, the weather was good. I walked past someone who was wearing my local brewery's jumper, Village Day Brewery in Gladesville, and I was like, geez.

SPEAKER_00 3:59

You're Glaswell boy. Yeah. I grew up in Glaswell. Oh, there you go. Gorgeous part of Sydney.

SPEAKER_01 4:03

Have you tried Village Days? I have not.

SPEAKER_00 4:05

Okay. I'll go and knock on the local. I'd like it.

SPEAKER_01 4:07

Two Triple One lager or the Glades Pale?

SPEAKER_00 4:09

Oh, two Triple One. Postcode. Yeah, you know. Postcode lager. You know, the Glades Pale.

SPEAKER_01 4:13

Yeah, so that I think the weekend was pretty tough. We've got I I still think it's cheating having a golden ticket. But I've got one golden ticket with the other boys from the Frothy Moco, who's the team I'm doing this with. Yep. We're having a uh a lunch and a couple of beers on Saturday.

SPEAKER_00 4:27

Yeah, mate, forget with the we we do get so for people not familiar, the golden ticket's an idea we've had from the start at Dry July, that if you wanted to go dry for July, but it's your daughter's 21st or something or your best mate's getting married or something, someone can sponsor you to have the day off. They can buy you a golden ticket, which I think to be honest, we really haven't knocked up the price of the golden ticket in keeping with inflation across the journey.

SPEAKER_01 4:47

I wanted to ask you about this because the golden ticket is 25 bucks.

SPEAKER_00 4:50

See, it's it's been 25 bucks since it started. I said a decade ago, it's got to be at 50. Yeah, 50's enough.

SPEAKER_01 4:54

Because everyone, every donation has been above $25 so far.

SPEAKER_00 4:57

Yeah, it should be at $1.

SPEAKER_01 4:58

It's actually discounted. I will talk to someone about that.

SPEAKER_00 5:00

Okay. But and the thing is, as opposed to housing prices, because you can't claim your golden ticket on um capital gains, unfortunately. But uh we we do have the occasional person who enrolls every year in dry July, buys themselves 31 golden tickets, donates 775 bucks, and then just goes about business as usual. We'll take your money, but that's not the idea.

SPEAKER_01 5:18

No, I had a I had a friend on the 3rd of July who wanted to buy me a ticket so that we could um have a beer at the footy with the mighty swans, our swans. Yep. Um and I was like, mate, it's the 3rd of July. That is missing the point. Yep. Missing the point.

SPEAKER_00 5:31

I've done it every year since you know we we founded it in 2008, and there's been a couple of years where I've done it quite easily. There's a couple of years where I haven't quite made it, there's a couple of years, all sorts of things, a couple of years I've golden ticketed myself. There was one time when I was travelling internationally, okay, and I I strictly so I think I think in the in the in the time zone I'd left, it was I was fine, and I had a couple of beers on the plane, and I may as I may have I may have lasted only about four minutes if you took me on the landing time. And we've never I've never looked through the terms and conditions of dry July. Back when we did this in 2008, we never thought it would still be going 20 years later, and that you'd have to worry about international travel via time zones and things like that.

SPEAKER_01 6:11

Okay, so talk to us about nearly 20 years ago when this started. Yep. This was almost an accident.

SPEAKER_00 6:16

It was a complete accident. So we uh it's a it's a story I love telling because it is so fortuitous. You're literally talking probably a 45 to 60 second window, or this thing never would have happened. So I'm doing my breakfast radio show, and the way we used to do the show, you're talking in the microphone, and there's a screen there where text messages can come through. And a text message had come through. It also comes through with the with the caller's number. Um, so if you want, you can contact them back and get them on air to talk about something they've got. And I was interviewing Brendan Cow, the Aussie filmmaker, uh about and and and playwright, about a play he'd written about giving up alcohol, and what that process was like for him, and people calling in saying if they'd given up alcohol themselves and all these observations about, you know, I found it easy, but gee, my friends got stressed and all sorts of great stuff. People are ringing in. And this text message flashes up on the screen. Me and a couple of mates are having a dry July this year to raise $3,000 for Prince of Wales Hospital. But the crucial thing was my show used to finish at 7 45am, strictly at 7 44 and 50 seconds on the time delay, you'd switch over to the news. This text message came through at 7.44 and 20 seconds. He's a math sky. If it had come through 30 seconds earlier, I would have just read it. Said, oh, great, good luck to you guys, and gone. If it had come through a minute later, I would have been out of the studio because I literally, the moment that show finishes, I'm out, next person's coming in, getting ready to start. I would have missed it all together. It landed so I could see it, looked at the clock, thought, I'm not gonna have time to read that, I'll just jot the number down and I'll go and call these guys after the show. Spoke to them off air, got them on air the next day, and everything went from there. Literally, if it had been 30 seconds earlier, 30 seconds later, I could have missed it all together, or just blurted it out on air and wasted it. And their story was one of the three of them had had a cancer scare. And when he was in the waiting room at Prince of Wales Hospital in City, where the care is incredible, the people are amazing, but the waiting room was a little bit old and tatty. It's just not where the priority of funding goes, understandably, in a hospital, you're paying doctors, you're paying staff, that sort of stuff. The old TV, the color TV on the wall was black and white and not working all that well. And my the guy who was having the cancer treatment turned out to be completely alright, but he was thinking, you know, there's some people sitting here pretty stressed out, some of whom are going to get some awful news.

SPEAKER_01 8:38

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 8:39

You'd like to think they could at least watch, you know, this is probably Steve Liebman's today. Show. No, whatever, it would have been Carl, it was Carl Stefanovic before he woke up and started telling the truth. Uh you at least want to be able to hear the TV, right? So these guys thought, him and two of his mates thought, let's go dry and raise three thousand bucks amongst our mates, who don't think we'd be able to go 12 months without a beer, uh, 12 uh a month without a beer, and we'll raise 3,000 bucks from Institute's hospital. Got him on the show and they told that story. And people started ringing and going, Oh, I'll I'll I'll sponsor him 50 bucks, yeah, no trouble. A few people started ringing and going, I'll go dry myself if you can, if and I'll get people to uh and beautiful happenstance, one of the three of them was a web designer.

SPEAKER_01 9:18

Yep.

SPEAKER_00 9:18

So Phil knocked up this wheat uh cheapest chips website, and people just started, and instead of three people, a thousand people went dry. Wow. Instead of three thousand bucks, we raised two hundred and fifty-seven thousand dollars. And I still remember Lulu, who ran the foundation of Prince of Wales, as we're handing over the giant novelty check, lean over to me and said, It's gonna be a fucking nice TV, I'll tell you that. And so we brought them all this outdoor furniture and everything as well, and that was it. And and like ten months later, people were saying, Well, we've got to do it again, don't we? Did it the second time, raised a million dollars, and it was off and running. And so it's literally a text message, a one minute to 90 second window, if we'd missed it, never would have happened. Last year, we donated our 100 millionth dollar from that text message.

SPEAKER_01 10:03

Okay, so what are the other numbers around?

SPEAKER_00 10:06

We think uh over 400,000 people have done dry July at least once. Yep. Our record keeping across the 20 years, you know, you've changed a lot of technology in that time, but hundreds of thousands of people have done it. Just under 20,000 people doing it again this year. Uh we'll raise again, you know, in the in the high single millions of dollars. Last year was the 100 millionth. There's about 40 adult-related cancer services this year that'll receive uh small through modest up to quite substantial amount. It's been done internationally. It's created spin-offs, some of which have spoken to us and said, you know, can we have what can we do to get it set up? Others have just blatantly ripped us off. Yeah, whatever, it's all for a good cause. Uh and so it's it's spurned this it's spraw spawned this sort of you know international movement in some ways.

SPEAKER_01 10:56

Yeah, it's I mean it's it's quite incredible. I last did it in 2013, I think. So it's been 13 years.

SPEAKER_00 11:01

And I think the bottle shops in the Gloucestville area notice. They noticed that dip and that pickup and that.

SPEAKER_01 11:06

That was in WA then. There you go.

SPEAKER_00 11:08

They um the economy depends on the podule in WA respect.

SPEAKER_01 11:12

But I remember at the time thinking I got to the end of the month and went, I've done 31 days, I can do however many days ever, and then it hasn't been until now, and I feel like doing um what it is that I'm doing now, it feels right to let's talk about the relationship with alcohol as well as the cause, you know.

SPEAKER_00 11:28

It is interesting because some people I know some people haven't drunk for eight or ten years and it was a dry July that kicked them off, and then they suddenly realised, okay, well, why should I go back? Others really struggle to get to the 31-day mark, some do, some don't. The good thing about a month is I've always said that's that's long enough to have a bit of a look at your relationship with alcohol and without being judgmental. I think the bulk of people, whether you are a moderate drinker, medium, or drink more than you should, I think if you took a hundred people and asked them to estimate how much they drink, many more would underestimate than accurately guess or overestimate how much they drink. It's just the sort of, I think we do, like people who say, I'll probably have a couple of cigarettes a week, and you go, Wow, is it there are only a couple in a pack, is there, buddy? Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I think we're the same with booze. Yeah. And a month off is enough to both note a couple of really big things where you would have got trolley that you just didn't, and just notice the incidental drinking. Notice that you're at a lunch and you'll realize, you know, that's the fifth time I've said to that waiter, no, I'm fine, thanks. Yeah. Buddy. And it's not until you say, actually, mate, take away the glass, I'm not going to drink anything. That even that's not their fault. That's just they're accustomed to every time you offer someone a drink, they'll take it. I love to say you go to events that you normally might have a few drinks at. You know, see you with your swans cap on, represent I'm going to be at the Swans uh on Friday night watching them go around. And it turns out when you go to the footy completely sober, the umpires are trying as hard as they can. They make mistakes for both reasons, both sides. It's not really why your team lost. They just weren't good at what? What? Like in April, May, there is a vast, overreaching conspiracy extending to the top of the fing AFL. Did you say it was holding the fing ball?

SPEAKER_01 13:09

Yeah, that's so funny. I have noticed, I reckon the one that I the main one I've noticed is the the amount of times I would think about it in a day. And it's not sitting there thinking, gosh, I'd love a drink. But that's not that's not the case, so that's good. That means I can sit there comfortably and say, Oh, I'm not just fizzing for the next bit of alcohol in my system. It is the walking home and going, could I stop off on the way? Yeah. Is it, oh, I'm cooking. Should I open one while I'm cooking? So uh yeah, it's been nice to find a different way to deal with that because it's not I don't think for me, it's the like, oh, I need the it in my system, and maybe it is like right, but but it's the oh, I can open a can of shweps, yeah, and I've I've fixed the ritual.

SPEAKER_00 13:50

My wife doesn't drink much. Uh she drinks rarely, and she doesn't have a high tolerance or anything. She doesn't enjoy drinking a lot of alcohol. Works very hard, it doesn't mind the occasional uh glass of wine or whatever, and and she's very she'll ask me, Are you fine? Okay, that's I'm doing dry drill, you knock knock yourself out, do whatever you want. But she'll have a glass of a bottle of wine, put the lid back on, and then have no interest in drinking it for the next few days. And I know that three-quarters of a bottle is going to be thrown out because it's going to aerate.

SPEAKER_01 14:19

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 14:19

And that there's there's a bizarre part of me going, I know how much I paid for that bottle. It would make more sense for me to drink it, at least so we would have got value out of it.

SPEAKER_01 14:30

Well, I know you just pour it. Actually, yeah, no, that's it's it's funny because I find I find myself not opening a bottle of wine, because in my mind I go, that's got to be two and a half glasses tonight and two and a half glasses tomorrow, otherwise I've wasted my money.

SPEAKER_00 14:42

Yeah. My old mate Peter Fitzsimons points out also, because you do, it's it's it's pretty good for the health and the sleep's an interesting one, but you you do you know, you pick up a bit of energy, and uh Peter Fitzsimons points out that there's the same calories in a bottle of wine as there is in a Big Mac.

SPEAKER_01 14:58

Right.

SPEAKER_00 14:58

So imagine if every night when you're starting to cook dinner for the family, you reach over, you open a Big Mac.

SPEAKER_01 15:05

Yeah, I see.

SPEAKER_00 15:06

And you have a you have a couple of bites of the Big Mac, then you take the Big Mac over to dinner with you, you have a couple more bites of the Big Mac, and then while you're washing up and tiding up, you go, Well, well, the Big Mac's almost finished, I might as well finish it. And then a couple of months later, you say to your friends, Am I I just feel a bit lethargic. Am I have I put on a couple of curls? Could be the extra Big Mac you're eating with dinner four nights a week. Pow. So it's just yeah, it's an it's just an interesting little perspective shift.

SPEAKER_01 15:31

The other one for me is Kit Cats. I noticed last time I did it, I was like, well, I'll have a Kit Kat every day. It put up, put on way. Yeah. And this time I found myself reaching for the Kit Kat. My sweet tooth had come back. There you go. But this is, you know, it's been a nice, it's only been two weeks. I'll have one day off. Um, this also times well for me personally. I've got a baby on the way.

SPEAKER_00 15:49

So congratulations, mate.

SPEAKER_01 15:50

Be ready to go at any time.

SPEAKER_00 15:52

Fantastic.

SPEAKER_01 15:52

That's right, July. Do you know the mother? I do. Well, because yeah, good. That's very good. Um I want to talk about something else. Um maths. Yay! Right? You're the maths guy. He said. I do a bit. You're the most known.

SPEAKER_00 16:08

Maybe not the maybe not the best, but the best Australian mathematician is Terence Tau, UCLA, possibly the greatest mathematician in the world. Uh, possibly the second best Australian mathematician is Geordie Williamson, University of Sydney. Absolutely elite. I'm not fit to dust their chalkboards.

SPEAKER_01 16:24

Okay. Well, that's very interesting. Uh I know you're a big you're very passionate about um about education and science and whatnot. Uh my big question, and this is a big one, where do we s where do you see with AI coming in in terms of the importance of learning these things? Because it feels like now at the moment, I I I think if it's a complex maths thing, let a computer do it. Where where do we sit? Where do you sit?

SPEAKER_00 16:48

Yeah, look, the practically every aspect of this rapidly evolving suite of technologies is there are pluses and there are minuses, and we just don't know at the moment where it's going to land. And I think education's right in the heart of that. I think education will be one of the industries most disrupted by these technologies in every conceivable way. Uh the way teachers prepare material and teach will be radically overhauled. The way teachers set exams and assess, you won't have any more a situation where every kid in class is doing the same paper exam. Easy question, medium question, hard question, very hard question. If the poor kid gets the first three easy questions wrong, why torture them with the really hard stuff? Yeah. Let's have an interactive exam thing that goes, okay, so what do you know, don't you know? If little Sarah hits the first three easy trigonometry questions out of the park, don't waste her time with more easy stuff. Let's go deep for the rest of the 45 minutes we've got. You'll have that. The way students absorb material, mate. Your phone probably already is, or is certainly not far from being the greatest Shakespeare scholar on earth. Right? So you don't need to go to St. Lardy Dar's College anymore to get a world-class Shakespeare. You can go to Knuckle High and get a world-class Shakespeare education if you've got the grit and desire and focus to do it yourself. At the same time, this thing can write a Shakespeare essay for me that I don't understand or care to understand, hand it in, and I know I'm going to get eight out of ten. That's no good. That's brain poison. So the challenge for the way we teach, the way kids absorb, the way we assess what they've learned to know if they really have, is the real challenge there. I write a um on Substack, Adam B. Spencer.substack.com. It's called nerd news. I write a couple of newsletters a week. Uh, these two this week, um the one that's just dropped today is about these signals they they interpreted from space. No one had any idea what these sounds were. Guy at the University of Sydney has just worked out it's this incredible white dwarf going around a star. Yeah, amazing stuff, right? I've got no qualms saying I use large language models to help me research, get a reading list, bang it backwards and forwards, get a first draft of that final article. This sort of thing that if I was a CEO, someone in comms would give me as the briefing notes for a speech I had to give on that week. I then go and completely rewrite that article. I'm fine that it's my own voice. I'm fine that I understand the content, I could explain it back to people later. I don't think it's killing my learning and understanding, it's saving me incredible amounts of time. So if you can find that relationship with these technologies, I think they're great. But there's early evidence already that you can get people to write an essay with ChatGPT and ask them minutes later, after they've submitted it, can you quote something back from your essay? And in a survey done last year, 83% of people could not quote something back minutes after they'd written it. So that's no good. So there's all that's there's really interesting challenges around absorption of knowledge, use of knowledge. These things will know more than we do in terms of having access. If you power that and keep making sure that you're using it to inform and educate yourself, knock yourself out. If you did if it's doing the heavy lift, it's like going to the gym and getting your personal trainer to lift the weights. Yeah. No good.

SPEAKER_01 19:57

Okay, interesting. Uh you've actually just sparked my brain, and this is a bit of a like look-at me moment. Um I can quote something I wrote in a year two uni essay about media. I did journalism and broadcasting. And it was about the way in which at that time, like Twitter was Twitter wasn't part of our you know, standard practice to get a quote from or whatever. Um, we were still very much old media, and I remember writing in my essay, and my teacher said she's going to use it for future classes, was we will start to consume media on a platter. It'll basically be out in front of you, and you just pick which one you want. It's no longer do you pick nine news or seven news or ABC. Um, and I think that obviously speaks to wider technology. There's no point to that story, except I feel proud of myself to say at least I learned something at university. Exactly. The platter. And I I it would be remiss of me to not talk to you about the Swannies. Hey. Now, we're both big fans, but you've had quite an involvement uh with the Swannies over the years.

SPEAKER_00 20:53

I've been an ambassador for the Swans since the early 2000s when I was on Triple J, they started an ambassadors program and reached out to high profile uh Sydney Ciders. And uh yeah, they reached out to me in the early 2000s. I've been on board the Swan's bus deeply since then.

SPEAKER_01 21:07

Okay, because I've seen, you know, I've been at events that you've emceed at. Yeah, you do a lot of that. That's a fairly regular gig.

SPEAKER_00 21:14

Yeah, I'm lucky. I do I do season launches, do the best and fairest, that sort of stuff. And if I'm ever at a Swan's home game and they know I'm there, I'm sort of the in emergency break glass.

SPEAKER_01 21:24

Sure, sure, sure.

SPEAKER_00 21:25

If you need someone to suddenly turn up and just yak somewhere about something, I'm your guy. I love it. I mean, it's a it's a great organization, it's a beautiful sport, and there is just something about that permanent challenger mindset that they need. People listening to this uh you know, national, international podcast uh in a traditional AFL state, if you're listening to Victoria and Perth, you just don't realise how hard it is. We posted just today that the Swans have set a membership record now. Oh, yeah. 77,500 members. We only went through 50,000 a day. Decade ago. So it's gone up half. That's incredible. And I'm not going to dump a bucket on the other Sydney-based team, but you can see the incredible struggles they have to get any traction, to get a decent number of people at games or anything like that. What the Swans do is amazing. You go to the league, or you go to the AFL. You can go to both because they're on alternate weekends and there's only two teams. Sydney is the dominant AFL team in an NRL city in the NRL capital of the world. And we're averaging 40,000 people a game this season. It's unbelievable. And I'm so proud of a club that can do that and turn out young men of exceptional quality on the field and off. It's a great institution. It's just a pleasure to be involved with it.

SPEAKER_01 22:53

And with the women's team as well.

SPEAKER_00 22:54

Oh, the girls. Woo! Hello? And and what I love is I'll regularly go down there at North Sydney in particular, and you'll walk past and you'll see a few of the Swans boys there watching who aren't there on if it's during if it overlaps with the Swans season and they're there, they'll be there as a club unit because they've got to get there and back and they've got a training and a game. But the boys just go and watch. Yeah, yeah. And they go and cheer and you know, shout a bit of advice over the fence. The girls turn and go, don't tell me how to kick it from here, perhaps I know what I'm doing. Um, it's just great, total buy-in. And and I've I've been at the club when the boys and girls are training together, eating meals together, and the swans are pulling in close to the highest average crowd now of any AFLW team in the comp. Regularly getting 6,000 people to Henson Park. Yeah. Picnic blankets out, kids watching footy, face painting, great group of young women. Yeah. Yeah, the AFLW is pumping in Sydney.

SPEAKER_01 23:44

Were you already an AFL man to begin with?

SPEAKER_00 23:46

I knew of the sport and followed it a bit. I was traditional NRL, grew up in Baumain Tiger territory, as you would know. My dad, my dad used to say that 1969 was the best year of his life, uh, because his son was born and the Tigers won the grand final, and then he'd always pause for a couple of seconds and say, and don't get me to rank those two events. And I think I know deep down which one mattered more. It was Sid Barnes and the Bloody Tigers getting up over South's 11-2, as he constantly reminded me. Um and so I grew up in an NRL rugby league household, and I think it's I think the interesting comparison between the sports is that if you were going to invent a game that was great for television, it's NRL because it's it's the two lines are very close together, it's a very sort of one-dimensional sport, and it's and incredible athleticism, but at any time you can see 90% of the players on the field and anything that's happening in just one sweeping camera angle.

SPEAKER_01 24:39

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 24:40

Live, little bit samey for mine, a bit boring. If you want to invent a sport that is almost impossible to capture on TV, let's make it one where you can pass the ball anywhere from 30 centimetres to 60 metres in the full 180, 360-degree arc at any moment, where the ball might go on the ground or incredibly high in the air. And you let's let's do that.

SPEAKER_01 25:02

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 25:02

It's and and it you it's amazing now. God, go back and watch AFL in the 80s and 90s on TV. That's a tough watch. That's why they called it aerial ping-pong, because it really did just seem to be this ball going up and down. You go and watch it live and you're in. Why are they cheering? Because he's kicked it to him. You see, they go, that guy just slipped over there. If we can get it to him and on to him, we're a chance to score a goal about 30 seconds from now.

SPEAKER_01 25:21

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 25:22

That's that is just riveting and exciting. And once you're there with the SCG pumping, oh yeah, I think you're hooked. If you get people to games, I think they fall in love with it very quickly.

SPEAKER_01 25:32

Actually, just on that, I wonder if we have the same answer. Is there a particular moment you can say at the Ms at the SCG that was where it was most electric?

SPEAKER_00 25:40

Mate, earlier this year when Jay Sarong goal to get us up over the line over St. Kilda was incredible. Um the the in the last few seasons we've had a couple of absolute buzzer beaters, possibly Gary Rowan's after the siren goal when we kicked three goals in two minutes against Essident, I think. That was just so bizarre and just so chaotic. Um I was there for the Nick Davis four-goal final quarter. That's probably the wildest. Yeah. When his fourth one goes in with seconds to play, that's very close to the wildest I've ever heard it.

SPEAKER_01 26:18

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 26:19

You were gonna go with?

SPEAKER_01 26:20

I was gonna go with, I was gonna, I'm glad that we didn't count down. I was gonna say the 2024 qualifying final against the Giants. Yep. The comeback there with you know the 60 metre Heaney kick and the um and the And then through to Joel on Marty to finish it off with pretty much the only touch of the game. The only touch of the previous 18 months, I think it was. But anyway, this is this isn't a Swans podcast. This isn't the bloodlines. Bloodlines or true bloods. I just wanted to chat about that. Um before you go, I want to mention one thing from our um a previous time, previous encounter of ours, because you are the maths guy. I want to s a stat that I've told so many times over and over again, and I just want to make sure that it is I did hear it right, and that was in actual fact the case.

SPEAKER_00 27:00

Here we go.

SPEAKER_01 27:02

During COVID, when it was at its peak, right? I think you know the stat I'm talking about. Yeah. When it was at its peak, uh, unfortunately, many, many people dying, many, many, many people sick around the world, a lot of people in lockdown.

SPEAKER_00 27:13

Yep.

SPEAKER_01 27:14

You said that the virus molecules are so small that the entire world's virus could fit into a coke can.

SPEAKER_00 27:22

Yes. Now I don't know if that goes to at its peak, but certainly at a time when COVID was everywhere, a guy in the UK did a calculation. And so I used to ask this question to people, and I'd show show up on a board four images, and I said, if I currently to there's currently X million people around the world we think have COVID, and they're you know if I took all the COVID particles in the world at the moment, they'd roughly fill, oh yeah, what what what's the smallest receptacle I could be confident I could, and I had a I had a a 1.5 liter soft drink bottle, I had a car engine, 60 litres, I had a small stand-up backyard swimming pool, and I had an Olympic swimming pool. And I said if I was if I had to bring I only I could only bring one of these and I had to be confident I could get all the COVID into it. And it's pretty painful to get, you know, do I have to bring the Olympics? And most people were going for either the stand-up inflatable backyard paddle pool, most people were going, no, you'd need an Olympic swimming pool. It was less than a can of Diet Coke, it was less than 375 mils, was the estimate of this guy at the time, which is just so beautifully stunning. Here's another one for you.

SPEAKER_01 28:43

Yes, yes.

SPEAKER_00 28:45

I'll give you three things. Great. Two of these, there's pretty much effectively exactly the same amount of. One of them massively less. Okay. Okay? Number of drops of water on planet Earth. Number of planets in the observable universe, number of hundredths of a second since time began, since the big bang. Hundredths of seconds since the big bang, planets in the observable universe, drops of water on Earth. Which of those is massively less than the other two that are pretty much the same?

SPEAKER_01 29:36

Unfortunately, because I know we're playing a bit of a game, I'm gonna go which were what I think where the trick is, and I'm gonna say the time is the least.

SPEAKER_00 29:44

You're absolutely correct. We think there's about 10 followed by 25 zeros of drops of water and planets, and there's a bit of a range on both of those, and it's tough to say what constitutes a drop of water, how big, house, blah, blah, blah. So either of those could be in front. They're roughly the same. Millions of millions of factors of how many seconds. Yeah. So even going down to hundredths of a second makes no difference. Not in the same ballpark.

SPEAKER_01 30:16

Wow.

SPEAKER_00 30:17

In the billion, the 13.8 billion years there's been. So every second that ticks on, you've got to think of another million planets somewhere in the universe.

SPEAKER_01 30:30

The part for me, I think, is just the the understanding the sheer size of our oceans.

SPEAKER_00 30:35

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 30:35

That's the part.

SPEAKER_00 30:36

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. One one with about 25 zeros after it, number of drops of water on planet. 97% of which is seawater, so uh freshwater very, very important. But again, we're not a freshwater podcast, though. During dry July, I think we are.

SPEAKER_01 30:50

Well, yeah, Spence, there are so many things I'd love to talk to you about. You I've I've done the full commercial interview and I tried to try to hit all of them very quickly. But um, I think this whole interview just goes to prove you don't need to be on the piss to have a random conversation at the pub and possibly remember some of it a little bit later.

SPEAKER_00 31:09

Absolute pleasure, mate. Keep up the great work by spreading the news and um doing your own uh dry July for the second time around. Have you gone as far, have you chosen a name? Do you or do you know that the if it's gonna be a boy or a girl? It's going to be a girl. Have you chosen a name yet? Uh no, not specifically. Right. Brace yourself for if you're waiting to see what she looks like, and then we'll choose a name, it's awkward because she's gonna look like you.

unknown 31:33

Right?

SPEAKER_00 31:34

This is such like baby babies of both genders, boys, the baby boys and baby girls, and it's more pronounced and it strikes you more with baby girls, come out looking like dad, which I think is an evolutionary thing from back where dad could have been any caveman in the tribe. Sure, sure. And it just forms the attachment for dad. Uh, and uh, and and from day one, mum's genes just start fighting to try and get over the top, and thankfully they get to at least 50-50 or you know, unfortunately, in the case of my younger daughter's forehead, can't quite get there. I'm sorry about that, Liz. Uh but yeah, so don't wait and see, because she's gonna pop out and you're gonna go, okay, we're gonna call her Davo or Lenny or Squiggles, and that's that's not gonna land well, bud.

SPEAKER_01 32:15

Okay, uh well, it do we go? Do I have hope to be similar to your father and that 2026 might be the greatest year of my life?

SPEAKER_00 32:23

There you go.

SPEAKER_01 32:23

The birth of the first child, and perhaps the swans get the grandfather.

SPEAKER_00 32:26

Don't get you to choose between them. And then and then you'll be under an obligation to have at least eight kids in the next 12 years. And you're gonna say to your wife, look, sorry, darling, I know it's yeah, but sweet art. Destiny.

SPEAKER_01 32:38

She's more of a Swans fan than I am. And she wasn't five years ago. You're gonna be the one going, can we stop at six? She's going, great five. Spence. I really appreciate your time. Pleasure, mate. Um, wonderful work you've done with Dry July and all the other great work you do, and I appreciate your time on the podcast. And I'd love to get you back when we're not doing Dry July.

SPEAKER_00 32:59

I'm back. Okay. Have a beer together. How about 14 seconds past midnight on the 1st of August?

SPEAKER_01 33:09

How good was Spence? Look, I just wanted to jump on the back of this episode and give you some details about Dry July if you want to join the donation front. So, Fruffimoko is a kind of collective of of blokes who like craft beer who uh got together from November last year, you may remember, um, to raise money for men's mental health. And then this year, three of us, so Dave Stenlake, Disco Dave Beer, and Dwayne from Build and Brewer, uh, are also doing Dry July. We're meeting up this weekend um for our golden ticket, but uh I'll have the link in the show notes for you to donate. It is a great cause for people affected by cancer for those ancillary things that we need, like the stuff in the waiting rooms, the transportation to and from, uh the hospital, and and so on and so forth. So it's a great cause. Thank you so much for listening. Um do get in touch if you've got a recommendation for non-alchapeers, or if you've got a great yarn or someone we should speak to, send us an email. Uh hello at chat on tap. Make sure you follow all the socials, subscribe to YouTube, yada yada yada, and uh I'll see you next week for a drink, which this week is a copy.