EPISODE 55
TOO MUCH CHOICE US RUINING US
Kae Kurd was expected to follow a traditional path to save lives…Instead, he risked everything to completely rewrite his family's blueprint and build a life out of telling jokes.
In this episode of Off Script, we sit down with Kae for a deeply honest and raw chat about the weight of familial expectations and the grit it takes to forge your own path.
We dive into the relentless pressure of constantly chasing the next milestone, the chaos of raising children in an algorithm-driven world, and how modern social media is deeply distorting our reality around dating, community, and choice.
Kae Kurd joins Ty Temel on episode 55 of the Off Script podcast to share:
Kae’s journey from a university path toward medicine to a career in comedy
How recommendation algorithms shape what we watch, and how we see the world
The challenge of raising children with care around their digital lives
Why money and achievement don’t always deliver the contentment we expect
Family, belonging and the changing meaning of community in urban life
Watch on YouTube or listen on all major podcasting platforms 🎙️
EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS
“What kind of sanitised world do we want everybody to live in, where there’d just be so many boring stories? Lots of great art and stories and amazing things come from people being a little bit messed up.”
- Kae Kurd - 04:20
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“Remember when YouTube first started? Amazing, right? You’d watch one video and then next to it, it’d be a video about something else, but it was completely random. Now it feeds you down this funnel that’s so focused rather than anything sort of fun.” - Kae Kurd - 08:55
“I think there was a beauty in having five channels and people going, ‘Watch this.’ You had five options, choose one out of that five, and then there was this collective nature to it as well, because it’d be like, ‘Oh my God, did you watch this last night?’” - Kae Kurd - 10:40
“I don’t necessarily think it’s so much that iPads are bad. You’re going to let your kid have an iPad, but I think it’s being very aware of what they’re consuming. We don’t let children control their diet. Why do we let them control what they watch?” - Kae Kurd - 13:25
“For so many years, I was a part of that toxic narrative of, like, get up at four a.m., don’t sleep till midnight. You have to do this and that to be successful, working yourself into the ground. Being on a hamster wheel, chasing the pound note, thinking happiness is attached to money - and it cost me a marriage, if I’m honest.” - Ty Temel - 19:40
“When you’re so focused on that next goal, it’s never that goal that’s going to make you happy. You’ve got to look at something else, because you’re going to get to that goal and you’ll create something else for yourself. You get to the top of the mountain and you’re like, ‘What’s next?’” - Kae Kurd - 21:20
“I would hope that as a father, what I will be able to do is give you the lessons and the skills that you need, and the lessons that you need to learn without having to go through that hardship that I went through, or the hardship my father went through, or his father.” - Kae Kurd - 23:15
“My dad sat me down once and he said, ‘Son, pretend that your mum and I are no longer around, and whatever you would do to eat and to survive, do it now. I don’t care what it is, because at least if you fail or fall, you have a home to come to.’ He said, ‘I’ll support you if it goes wrong.’” - Ty Temel - 38:20
“I won’t deliberately try to hurt people’s feelings. I think whatever group of people you’re telling a joke about, you should be able to say it in front of that group of people. If you’ve got a joke about women that you can’t do in front of women, then you already know the answer, whether that joke’s right or not.” - Kae Kurd - 1:01:20