The Dirty Chai podcast discusses the book "Please Unsubscribe, Thanks" by Julio Vincent Gambuto, which explores how to reclaim our time, attention, and purpose in a world filled with unnecessary distractions. The book encourages intentional participation and reflection on the things we subscribe to, such as emails, social media, and ideologies. Unsubscribing from unnecessary subscriptions creates space for personal growth and fulfillment. The podcast highlights the importance of being mindful about what we engage with and actively choosing what brings us joy and aligns with our values.
Welcome to the 6th installment of the Dirty Chai podcast with me, your host Chiyo. The podcast where we focus on holistic, professional and personal success by growing and developing the common denominator to all your successes or your failures and everything in between – you. It's about the mindset, emotional regulation and the intentional personal development that underpins holistic success. Today's installment is called Please Unsubscribe, Thanks. It's based on a book written by Julio Vincent Gambuto and the tagline for the book is How to Take Back Our Time, Attention and Purpose in a World Designed to Bury Us in Bullshit.
It's interesting, I don't have a scientific method for picking the books that I read. Some of the books I find, others I get recommendations from maybe a podcast or from a YouTube channel, but some books find me via the algorithm and I have a firm belief, what I know for sure is that the book that I need to read at a particular point in time will find me and it always does. This was the same with Please Unsubscribe, Thanks.
Please Unsubscribe is a book that I've obviously read at the beginning of December when a lot of things begin to happen, a lot of invitations begin to come through, a lot of things that are normally auto-pilot things begin to happen and this was the perfect time for a book that reminds me to pause and think and ask whether I need to participate would come along. And that's the big idea of the book. The big idea of the book is you do not have to participate on a macro or a micro level in most things.
You do not have to participate automatically in most things and the idea is to be intentional about your participation, to be thoughtful about your participation, to be engaged in your participation so that life is not happening to you and that you are participating in creating the life that you're after. But now it's easily, that very easily can come across as the usual sort of stuff that I talk to, but I like the take that Julio has or Julio has, so I'm going to try and articulate it a bit further because he goes into great detail.
In his book, Julio speaks about how he was inspired to write the book. He was inspired to write the book because of the COVID-19 pandemic. His life got turned upside down all of a sudden as most of our lives did. Like most of us, he knew a lot of people who passed away. Like most of us, he was stuck in a closed space for a long time while the restrictions were in place. This was most of us, right? Most of us, though, may or may not have realized that there was an opportunity in all of that to pause, stop, and ask ourselves, if all these things can be stopped in this manner by this pandemic, are they all truly necessary? From the time that we are young, we are sent to school, you're told that you must excel in school in order to go to the next stage, and then when you excel at that stage, you go to the next stage, and then, and then, and then, and then, and then, and then eventually when you find yourself in a corner office of either your own business or somebody else's business, then you've made it in life, right? But at no point in that entire system of training are we taught the idea of thinking for yourself, of shaping the world that you want, of deciding what your goals are outside of those pre-set rules.
In fact, schools, if I read this somewhere, I have to fact check it, I haven't fact checked it, but I read somewhere that schools were initially put in place as a way to support creating, to support factories by creating a disciplined workforce, right? And I don't know if that is factually correct, but if you think about it, if you think about it colloquially, it seems right, it seems to fit, and we don't need it necessarily to be factually correct for this purpose.
What we need is for it to trigger a thought process for you, for it to say to you, okay, you were educated, but how does that education free you versus how does that education bind you to stay in the same place or to be on a particular path or to do a certain thing without thinking about it? Then the premise of please and subscribe, thanks, is to consider life on every level. So this is from the number of emails you subscribe to, to the social circles that you subscribe to, and to ask yourself, am I here because I want to be? Am I here because my value systems align with these people? Am I here because I pour into the space and the space pours back into me and I am happy as a consequence? Am I here because I'm learning something? Am I here because I'm growing? Am I here simply because I want money? Why am I here? And it's wrapping words around why you are there and then determining from that place whether it is a place you wish to stay subscribed to.
Now let's go into the details. So there were multiple areas in which I thought he did a particularly good job of being thought provoking. The book is simply, it's not science, it's astute economic and social commentary. It's funny as well. It really is a great dinner conversation starter. It really is a food for thought. It inspires you to think. So now that we understand the premise of unsubscribing, let's talk about a few of the ways in which he describes unsubscribing.
One is literally, literally unsubscribing from all those mailing lists, all those mails that you receive in your Gmail in particular, those shopping website emails, those Virgin Active emails, those, who else emails, airline emails, booking.com, all of those things that you've unconsciously clicked accept all, right, yes, send me marketing, all of those emails that send you tons and tons of emails, most of which you never open, unsubscribe to those. The idea behind unsubscribing is whether you are aware of it or not, these things that you subscribe to on a micro or a macro level, take up space in your brain.
So let's create space so that we can use it for other things like connecting with ourselves and finding joy, right? So now, all these emails that you've got, you've unsubscribed to, he has a nuclear option for unsubscribing and he has a slow and steady option for unsubscribing and I think those things are important. Again, when you read a book like this, you do not need to subscribe to the entire concept as a whole and to nuke your entire life.
If you want to do that, you can do that, but you can also just slowly and steadily reconsider, which is also a great option. You can also use the nuclear option in some aspects of your life and not nuke the other aspects of your life. These are options. The idea is for you to take control. So you start with the things that we know and associate with the word subscription. And it's an interesting thought. He shares a lot of thoughts around this thought of unsubscription, unsubscribing, goodness me, this thought of unsubscribing, particularly to shopping, et cetera, and marketing.
that in the, pre the internet, pre this connectivity that we have now, businesses aspired to getting a customer and retaining a customer, but it was a very difficult thing to do. If they sold you a magazine one time, you are a one-time customer and you were gone. And what they wanted was for you to consistently purchase the item, hence the term subscription and hence the idea of subscribing. So there you go. You have this idea that you must subscribe, subscribe.
But even then, people would sleep, people had to be found, door-to-door salesmen had to knock and say, do you want to buy this? Do you want to subscribe to this? Only later when the internet intersected with that desire, did the idea of constant 24-hour subscriptions become a thing. The idea that businesses can reach you wherever you are 24 hours a day. This is great in that it has made life more efficient. You can get things immediately.
You can get, Amazon Prime can have things to you within hours. Take a lot can have things to you within hours. But it also means that unlike our, the previous generations that didn't have internet access on the scale that we have it, we never leave the store. You are in the shop 24-7. You are in the shop when you're in your email, you're in the shop when you're on the shopping website, you're in the shop when you see something and you think, oh, I want that.
Actually, I can get that off take a lot right now. The idea behind unsubscribing is creating space for yourself to leave the shop from time to time, to go home, to sleep, to disengage, to think about other things beyond how can I continue to feed off or be fed by this subscription. If you think of that principle and take it through, it will make a lot of sense when we talk about ideas and ideologies, when we talk about family and when we talk about work.
So that's unsubscribing to email. It's the same thing as social media. So we might think of subscribing as purely subscribing via email or subscribing to shopping emails. Those are the easiest. When you unsubscribe from all of those things, then you consider, so the idea behind unsubscribing is not that you must disengage from the world as a whole. The internet has done great things for us. The idea is what is it that you actually need? What is it that actually brings you joy? And let's subscribe to those things only.
You do not need to be subscribed wholesale to the world at large. You do not need to give the world that kind of attention, and it takes up too much quality space in your brain, quality space that you could be using for quality endeavors. This is not a quality endeavor. So then there's social media. Whether you think about it in that way or not, when you follow someone, when you engage with their content, you're subscribed. You're subscribed to their content.
You are logging on and you are seeing what it is that they are up to. You have to be conscious about what it is that you're subscribed to. Do the things that you're seeing give you value, whatever value that might be for you in line with your values. Is it entertainment? Does it grow you? Does it help your mind quiet down? Does it just give you a shot of endorphins? What does it do for you? And once you know what it does for you and you are satisfied that that is what you want it to do for you, then you continue to subscribe or you unsubscribe and you go and seek out something that does those things for you.
That is the concept. I have spoken about this in many other episodes and in many a newsletter and many a blog post. The idea is to curate your social media so that it speaks to you and your values. What's important to understand about social media though is you can always find your people. So whether you are an anarchist, as he points out, an anarchist, or you are a Catholic, or a devout Catholic, or you are a knitting person, or you are a runner, when you go on the internet, you will find your people.
So when you choose your subscriptions, also choose the odd subscription or two that reminds you that there is a world at large outside of the world that you have locked yourself into. Remind yourself that you are in the context of a larger whole, that individualism is not the be-all and end-all, that dependence is a weakness, that co-dependence is a weakness, dependence is a weakness, independence is strength, but the ultimate strength is interdependence, the ability to connect with others, to intersect with other circles, and to synergize from a place of I can stand alone, but we can stand better together, okay? Then there's the idea of WhatsApp groups, which I thought was interesting because I'm probably in 20 or 30 WhatsApp groups that I've never opened, that I don't even go into.
I don't care much for WhatsApp groups. I'm a big fan of individual conversations with people or making the odd plans when we need to make plans, but I'm not a big fan of WhatsApp groups. I just think they take up way too much brain space. So why am I in those WhatsApp groups was the question he's asking me. Why are you there? Why don't you send a nice message saying, hi guys, I've read this book, it's shaken me up, I'm going to unsubscribe from everything, I may or may not be back, but I love you long time bye, or simply exit, depending on what it is, but anyway, food for thought.
So number one is that literally unsubscribing. Number two is unsubscribing from ideas and ideologies that limit you, with or without knowing it. So Julio is gay, and this is important because he uses that as an example. So he says that when he came out of the closet, he struggled because he had subscribed to the idea that had never been expressly stated to him as a gay person, but that he had internalized as an individual growing up in a community that believed these things, that there was something wrong with being gay, that there was something wrong with people who were gay.
So it's not that he actually, he chose that belief, it's that that belief slowly made a little nest in his brain by virtue of the community that he was in and the language that that community was using. And it is a powerful example, because we need to also consider what nests have been formed in our heads by the community ideologies that we grew up with, whether or not we are conscious of those ideologies. For example, are you deserving of being in a corner office? Answer me yes or no.
I'll give you a beat. Do you see yourself as the leader of many, and that you would be respected and loved for who you truly are, without making some sort of wild compromise of ethics or values? Pause and think about it. Do you think you're worthy of love? Did you experience love growing up? Do you think it is okay for someone to hold you, simply for the sake of it? When was the last time you felt safe? When was the last time someone said I love you to you, and you felt truly loved, and you felt that it was exactly right in your world? When you imagine earning two million Rand, does that seem outrageous to you or not? And why? Which ideology is informing your responses? This is the exercise that you need to undertake.
These are the questions that you need to ask yourself. These are the thought processes that you need to go to. It is a complex exercise. It's a detailed exercise. You need to see yourself get triggered. I felt myself get triggered yesterday in a work situation. And I paused immediately, I exited the room. And I needed time to figure out what is happening here. Which ideology has been triggered to this extent? Why am I feeling the way I'm feeling so strongly? What have I subscribed to? What should I be unsubscribing to? What is happening with me before I go out there and say what is happening with the world? This is the idea of challenging the ideas and ideologies that you may have consciously or unconsciously absorbed and may not realize that they're there limiting what you are capable of.
It's a conversation we had. If you want to listen in detail to how your brain works as far as limiting you or limiting your ability to spot opportunities based on the ideologies you've subscribed to, you want to go back to an episode, I think it's episode two or three, where I explain the science behind the secret. I think the episode is called the science behind the secret and it will answer all the questions. It's worth a listen.
But for the purpose of this episode, I'm going to leave this here. There's work. Work is where we do the most unconscious subscribing because we arrive there with the delusion that we are purely going to work and produce results and then we're going to go home. But things quickly intersect. Corporate has politics. Corporate has relationships. When I say corporate, it's also synonymous with business because it's the same thing. You have to build relationships. Corporate has money.
All of these things intersect and they create ideologies and groups and cliques that people subscribe to and you have to choose whether you want to subscribe to these things. The thing is, though, in the corporate workplace in particular, you might not see yourself subscribing. It happens. You might connect with people and then you subscribe to an idea that they have. You might connect with people and you start thinking in terms of they and us. You might connect with people and you start thinking in terms of this cannot be for me.
It can only be for those people or maybe I should stay away from those people because they're more likely to cause me harm, etc., etc. Those are ideologies to which you are subscribing. When it comes to work, the great unsubscribe looks like challenging the belief system that you've built around the workplace. For example, if you thought you were going to work there forever, why? Why did you think that you were going to work there forever? Why do you think that you cannot work anywhere else or do you think you can work anywhere else and you're choosing not to work anywhere else? Are you afraid of change or do you feel that you are comfortable? Is the workplace aligned with your comfort? Are you going to be safe and comfortable five years from now? Ask yourself real questions about the stories you have told yourself so you can figure out what is real and what is not.
Renee Brown, in doing her research, found that the most powerful people are the people who are able to distill their thoughts into the story I am telling myself is. It is a recognition that you are subscribing to a narrative about a situation and there is a possibility that there is another story and you need to check what that story is. All you need is the ability to check what the other story is. Just check. And then once you see what that other story is, you can work out consciously what it is that you want to subscribe to.
Is it this or is it that? And if it is that, then you go there and do that. You do not have to choose a subscription and be stuck with it for life. Every few years you can reassess, unsubscribe, resubscribe. Every few years you can change. You can find value in different things. You can become a different person. But the idea is be there when it happens. Do not be swept up by a random wind of which you are unconscious.
The same thing goes for friends and family. It is easy to stay friends with people simply because Julio gave an example that hit me in a deep, deep place as a recovering people pleaser. It is the subscription that he had. Let me tell you his story and then I will tell you mine. He talks about how he had a friend, a really close friend, and their friendship was on his friend's turn. They went where his friend wanted to go.
They did the things that his friend wanted to do. His friend was much older than him. And once upon a time, Julio had loved him. It was an unrequited love and he had settled for friendship. And he said in settling for friendship, when he truly thought about it later, he realized that he had subscribed to the idea that if he can demonstrate that he can take rejection, if he can demonstrate that he can be mistreated by someone and still be the bigger person, then he is indeed the bigger person, that he is indeed above it all and he is bulletproof, etc.
But what he realized was actually he had set himself up in situations where he continued to feel pain a little at a time and continued to seek approval from this person in other ways. And this person treated him as such. And he had to reframe the terms of their relationship or exit the friendship. And ultimately the friendship ended. And as he did this exercise, he worked out that he was friends with a lot of would-be lovers that who had rejected him based on the same premise.
And as he followed the train of thought through the different areas of his life, he realized that he had an unhealthy way of dealing with rejection. And I thought that was particularly powerful because if you are, again, if you are a recovering people pleaser, and that comes from many things, so I went to a Catholic school, I had a difficult relationship with my dad, those things manifest in people pleasing. I was rewarded for excelling. My mother actually would pay me for my grades, so she didn't stress me with, oh, you must study, etc., etc.
She worked out the perfect reward system for me. She would give me, it was back then, it was a different, it was the money had different value because it had a much higher value. She would give me $100, $100 for a distinction, $80 for a 90, wait, it was $100 for anything above 90, it was $90 for anything above 80, it was $80 for anything above 70, and nothing below. You don't get any money below. Listen to me.
I got 90s throughout because I have always loved the freedom that money gives you. Money gives you freedom to purchase, to do things. It gives you freedom to do stuff, and I've always loved money. Maybe it comes from there. I must check why I'm subscribed to that idea of loving money, actually, so this is Julio's book in action, but the result is I find myself an overachiever. I find myself a person who throws themselves wholeheartedly into every exercise.
I find myself the person who wants to score in the 90s across the board, personally, professionally, friendship-wise, et cetera, and lately I found myself stopping and asking myself, what am I getting back for this 90? Is this a symbiotic relationship? Am I appreciated? Do I appreciate the space that I'm in? Do I feel good when I leave? Not because I scored the 90, but do I feel good? These things seem very airy-fairy and very woo-woo, but in my value system, in the value system of a person who has gone through so much grief and loss and suffering, I've told you many times that I was orphaned early, I raised my siblings, I missed out on my 20s because I was doing this.
I don't know if I'm ready to share that part yet, but let me say I was in an extremely difficult marriage that was very unhappy. I feel that the world has taken a lot of joy from me, and therefore I'm deliberate about creating joy for myself. So when I say that my happiness is important in determining whether or not I'm going to be in a space, I truly mean it because it is a cornerstone value for me now.
It is a cornerstone value for me now. I know that I can place myself in any work situation and excel and achieve, but to place myself in a work situation where I am predominantly happy is now of fundamental importance to me. If I find that that is compromised, for me, that can end any subscription to the idea that I would stay at a place forever. It can end any subscription to the idea that I enjoy a place.
That is the exercise that you're required to go through. When you find yourself in part of a clique, when you find yourself part of a WhatsApp group, when you find yourself going out with people regularly, ask yourself, is this the right value system for me? How do I feel when I leave here? Is this a symbiotic relationship? Am I getting what I am giving? Is this feeling me as I am feeling it? These are questions that you are entitled to ask in accordance with your value system.
For example, I have found, especially in recent years, that any situation that involves emotional manipulation, any situation that involves the use of shame or guilt to try and get me to produce a particular outcome is a hard no for me. That is it. The trust is broken immediately. If it is a situation I can leave immediately, I will. If it's a situation I can't leave immediately, I will immediately begin making plans to exit because that is a fundamental violation for me.
If it's a friend who lies and manipulates you to get to do something, same. Maybe we're not friends anymore. These are just things that you need to. So this is me demonstrating my value system in making a subscription assessment. And this is what you're required to do across every level of your life. A pandemic the size and scale of COVID-19 cannot come and sweep through the world and we delude ourselves into thinking that we can go back to normal.
There is nothing like that. There cannot be anything like that. Otherwise, what was it all for? Instead, what is it that it reminded us was important? And what are we doing about those things? Are we taking risks now? Are we smiling more? Are we seeking out joyful spaces? Are we being intentional? Are we being present? Do we see things happening while they're happening? And do we participate? That is the definition of a successful life. Unlimit yourself, unsubscribe, and then resubscribe thoughtfully.
I hope this episode has been as useful to you as it was for me, as timely for you as it was for me. If you like it, subscribe, share, like, send me feedback, talk to me about it, DM me. I love hearing from you. I'm ever so grateful for the growing listenership. Thank you to everybody who's recently joined and welcome. I look forward to growing with you, or at least having you around to witness my messy growth in the hope that it does something for you or someone that you know.
Thank you so much and bye.
