What you are agreeing to

The short version

If you send a question here, you are giving me permission to use it publicly. I may play your recording out loud, read your words out, quote you, edit it for length, and put it on YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, a podcast, my website, or anywhere else I publish. There is no time limit on that permission.

Sending it is final. There is no take back. Once your question is in, it is content this show can use, and there is no process for asking for it back, asking for it to be skipped, or asking for it not to be answered. Please decide before you send rather than after.

It is also completely free, and free is the trade. Being used means your first name, your age and the country you are writing from go out to everyone watching, and strangers will comment on your situation. If what you want instead is privacy, that is the paid Ask page, and it is a different thing entirely.

That is the honest trade. If it is not something you want, please do not submit, and nothing is lost.

What name do you use on air?

Your first name, and only your first name. The form asks for your full name so I have a record of who sent it. Your last name is never said out loud and never appears on screen.

There is no alias box any more, and that is deliberate. Made up names were taking the realness out of a show whose whole point is real people asking real questions. If you are not comfortable with your first name being said out loud, please do not send this one in.

I will normally say which country you are writing from, because it helps other people recognize themselves in your situation. Your city and your state or region are never said and never shown. If you would rather I did not name your country either, say so in your question and I will not.

What exactly are you giving permission for?

To play the audio you recorded or uploaded, in full or in part.

To read out, quote or paraphrase anything you wrote.

To edit, shorten, caption, subtitle or translate it.

To re-record or re-enact it, including having it read by a different voice or by a synthetic voice, so that your own voice does not have to be published if the piece is better without it.

To publish and re-publish it on any platform, in any format, now or in the future, and to keep it up.

To use it in promotional material for my own work.

You keep the right to tell your own story anywhere else. This permission is not exclusive and it does not take your story away from you.

Am I paying you, or are you paying me?

Neither. This is free to send and there is no payment for being used on the show. If you want a private, personal answer recorded just for you, that is a different thing and it lives on the Ask page.

Will my question definitely be answered?

No, and I want to be straight with you about that up front. Far more questions come in than I can get to. Most are never used. Sending one is not a booking, and there is no queue position or waiting list.

I am also not going to email you to say your question was not chosen, because that email would be worse than silence.

Can I take it back?

No. Sending a question here is final. There is no take back, no un-send, and no way to ask for yours to be skipped or left unanswered.

Here is the honest reason, because it is not me being difficult. This is a free, open submission hub. Questions come in from people all over the world, far more of them than can ever be answered, and if any one of them could be pulled back out at any point before it airs, the queue would stop being a queue. My team would spend their days chasing retractions instead of reading what people sent, and there would always be someone saying they had asked and nobody replied. So the answer has to be the same for everybody: once it is in, it is in.

That is what the tick box is for. Ticking it is the decision, and it is the only moment where the decision is yours to make. After that, what you sent is content the show can use and share.

One narrow thing stays true whatever the paragraphs above say, because it is law and I am not going to pretend otherwise. If you are in the UK or the European Union you keep your data protection rights, including asking me to erase the personal information I hold about you, and if you are in Canada you can withdraw consent to my continued use of your personal information under PIPEDA. Those are about the personal details I am storing. They are not a way to be taken out of the queue, to have a question un-answered, or to reach back into anything already published, and they are much narrower than they sound: they cannot recall copies of a video that already exist in other people's hands.

Free costs you your privacy, and that is the whole trade

It is completely free to send a question here. It does not cost you anything and it never will. What it costs you instead is privacy.

If yours is used, you are not anonymous. Your first name is said out loud. Your age and the country you are writing from go on the screen. Your situation is read out, discussed, clipped, and published across YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook and anywhere else this show goes.

And people will have opinions. Hundreds or thousands of strangers may comment on your relationship, your choices and what you should have done differently. Some of it will be kind. Some of it will not be, and some of it will sting in a way that is hard to imagine until it is your situation on the screen. That is not something I can shield you from once it is out, and it is the part people underestimate most.

So please think about it properly before you send, rather than in the moment because it is free and it is right there. A free question in front of an audience and a private question kept between us are two different products, and you cannot have both at once.

If what you actually want is privacy, the Ask page is the private route. That one is paid, and what you get for paying is that nobody else ever hears it.

What if I also send a private question?

They stay completely separate, and that is a promise rather than a courtesy. If you send a private question on the Ask page, it is never used on the show, never read out, and never published, even if you also sent a question here and I can see it is the same person.

It only runs one way. Anything you send to the show can be used by the show. Nothing you send privately ever crosses over.

So if you have already submitted here and you have since thought better of how public it is, the thing to do is not to ask for this one back. It is to send the private one instead, and let this one be what it is.

This is not therapy, and nobody is watching this in real time

I am not a therapist, a doctor, a lawyer or a counsellor, and nothing I say on the show is professional advice or treatment. It is my honest opinion, and you are responsible for what you decide to do with it.

Please also understand that this form is not a helpline. Nobody sits and watches it. It can be days before a submission is read, and most are never read at all. So if something is happening right now, please do not wait on me.

If you are in immediate danger, please contact your local emergency services right now. For free, confidential help any time: in the US or Canada you can call or text 988 for the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. In the US you can also text START to 88788 for the National Domestic Violence Hotline; in Canada you can reach the Assaulted Women's Helpline at 1-866-863-0511. If you are somewhere else, your local emergency number or a local crisis line can help right away.

Do not send this if you are under 20

The show has a hard floor of 20. That is higher than the legal adult age on purpose. Relationship questions answered out loud in front of a live audience are not something I am willing to do with someone younger than that, however sensible the question is.

If you are under 20, please do not submit. If something is going on and you need to talk to somebody, please speak to an adult you trust, or a youth support line where you live.

Please be careful about other people's names

Tell me anything you need to about your own life. But when it comes to other people, first names or no names are safest. Do not send someone else's full name, their address, their workplace, their phone number, their social media handle or their photograph. I edit those out when I spot them, and it is much better if they were never sent.

You are responsible for what you choose to say about other people.

What I do with your details

Your email and phone number are for reaching you about your submission. Your question is stored encrypted. Recordings are stored in private cloud storage that is not publicly listable.

If you send a recording, it is passed to a speech-to-text service so I have a written transcript of what you said, and passed again if your question is shown on screen, so the words can be lit up in time with your voice. It is used for nothing else, and it is not used to train anything.

If you type your question instead, it is passed to a text-to-speech service, which produces an audio version read by a synthetic voice, and that audio is passed to the same speech-to-text service so the words can be lit up in time with it on screen. That synthetic reading is stored alongside your submission and is deleted with it. So either way, one processing service sees your question. Typing instead of recording means no third party ever receives your actual voice, but it does not mean nothing leaves this site.

Because this is a signed permission, I also keep proof that you gave it: the IP address and browser your submission came from at the moment you ticked the boxes, the exact wording you ticked, and the time you ticked it. That record is never published and is never used to track you around this site. It is deleted with the rest of your submission only in the narrow data protection case described further up, and that is the only route there is.

The full detail is in the Privacy Policy.

The legal bit

By ticking the box and submitting, you confirm that you are 20 or older, that what you are sending is yours to send, and that you grant Tomisin Atobatele and anyone he authorises an irrevocable (to the fullest extent the law where you live permits), perpetual, worldwide, royalty free, non exclusive licence to reproduce, adapt, edit, perform, synthesise, publish, distribute and otherwise use your submission and your recorded voice, in whole or in part, in any medium now known or later devised, together with the right to use your first name and the country you gave.

You waive any claim arising from that use, including claims based on privacy, publicity, or moral rights, to the fullest extent the law where you live allows a person to do so. Where it does not, this release applies as far as it can and the rest is unaffected.

This release is governed by the laws of the Province of Ontario and the laws of Canada that apply there.