RADIO ROOM · TRAILMARK · 2 OCTOBER 2024
Beau Miles on adventure and meaning
Ray Targosz talks with Australian filmmaker, author, and adventurer Beau Miles about outdoor work, scale, making, teaching, and the life around an adventure.
ORIGINAL CONVERSATION · 1:07:52
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What's up, dude?
Today, right?
Can you hear me, mate?
I can.
I can hear you.
Maybe there's a little bit of freezing happening, but that's okay.
Excellent.
You're on my phone because my computer doesn't have Chrome, and I'm up on my wireless internet
in the cabin, and it was going to take too long to download, so problem solving on the
fly, mate.
Thank you for my lateness, or sorry for my lateness.
No, it's all good.
I appreciate it.
Actually, I've been sort of hyping myself up here a little bit.
I've been watching some of your videos, just like little bits and pieces of them, going
like, okay, brainstorm some talking points.
Let's go.
Oh, yeah.
We'll be fine.
Yeah.
No worries.
I'm sure any kind of insight you bring, mate, will make something of it.
That's good.
Fantastic.
Cool.
So welcome.
First of all, it's an absolute honor speaking to Australia's best seven out of 10 author.
It might even be 6.5.
The more I read passages of the old book, the more I realize how flawed the book is,
but that's okay.
Your first book needs to have some flaws so that you write a better one, and that's
hopefully what I'm doing now.
Yeah, that's kind of a not a bad summary, but yeah, thanks for having me, mate.
Thanks for being patient.
I think we've been dancing around for six or eight months on trying to get an email
at time, sort of.
Something like that.
Yeah.
I know that Alistair Humphries put us in contact way back last November, so it's been
in the works, but here we are.
Yeah, excellent.
Well, look, I'll just put myself over to you, mate, because I'll talk to you this
morning, and then I'll go for a bit of a jog before I start a few hours of work
and then get back into dad mode.
Whenever you want to start, mate, and command the ship, you just go right ahead.
Right on.
Well, you know, in all seriousness, I do have to say what every fan of yours says
when they meet you, and that is you have been a massive inspiration for all of
my outdoor adventures over the last four years, especially during the pandemic.
And when I first started this podcast, I wrote down three names, and yours was
at the top of the list as somebody I wanted to have on as a guest, because
two years ago, I did a bikepacking trip all around Ontario.
It was two weeks, or no, sorry, it was 10 days, and yourself, Jimmy Chin, and
Martin Doolard were the ones who I captioned at the start of that film,
thanking for the inspiration, so.
Now, that's really cool, mate, and I'm starting to get inspired by the
fact that other folks are inspired by me, because I'm an accidental inspirational
thing.
I never in my life set out to be inspiring other people or an inspired
kind of character.
I think it's folly if you were able to do such a thing, you know.
I think people that lead cults and want to be president, maybe that's
exactly what they want to do, but I certainly don't.
So that's kind of a nice, that's nice when that becomes the default
without meaning to be, so thank you, mate.
And Jimmy Chin, yeah, he inspires me too.
I think he's a really good authentic filmmaker and a real bloody hard
arse too, so I get it, so it's nice to be in his company.
Right on, man.
Something that I would love, or where I would love to begin this
conversation, I should say, is the start of your career.
Because I know that you've been on YouTube for quite some time,
and I read your book a couple years ago when it first came out.
In fact, I listened to the audio book, and something that I've never
worked out or really pieced together is how you started in the outdoor community.
I know that eight years ago, ten years ago on YouTube, it all sprung
about via kayaking, but I mean, going back prior to that, how did you
actually get into these things?
Well, I mean, in terms of outdoors, and a lot of people think that it's a,
that I've always been a kind of outdoor type and an outdoor type
that took a camera along, and that's not necessarily the case.
When you grow up on a small farm or in a rural area, outdoor life is kind of normal life.
You're not inside during the day at all.
You just sleep inside and eat inside.
And so I've always been an outdoor person just because of where I've grown up.
To the point where you don't really think you're an outdoor person,
that's very normal, and going for hikes and being muddy and
climbing trees and doing all that stuff as a kid is pretty,
it's just part of your regular every day.
So then to turn it into something that is a vocation or something that you're going
to do for the rest of your life and get paid for it, that was,
that's kind of the turning point, I suppose, because you have to turn it
into a skill set that earns money or a skill set that is interesting
for others to see or watch or desire or whatever it might be.
And that's becoming a guide.
And so I probably about the age of 14, 15,
I went on a 10 day hike.
It was a sponsored 10 day hike for an outdoor education centre.
And I just remember thinking that the guys and girls that led me,
Jimmy James and Joey, were awesome.
I thought I want to be them.
And if they're getting paid for this, even if it's peanuts and it was peanuts,
that's good.
You're spending peanuts when you're doing it anyway, right?
You're spending 10 bucks a day on food.
So if you're getting 25 bucks a day, that's a good deal by me.
So I thought, oh, that's a cool thing to do.
And I kind of from the age of 14 or 15 thought, yeah,
I want that kind of outdoor guide life.
And it wasn't probably until I was sort of 19, it was 19,
when I thought I wouldn't mind making a film about this
based on being inspired somewhere along the lines
watching outdoor films as a young adult.
So that's kind of where it started.
I took a camera with me to Everest Base Camp
when I walked there as a 19 year old
when you could still do it without guides
and when you can still do it solo.
And now it's changed even since I did it.
But yeah, that kind of kicked things off.
And all these years later, this is where I am.
Funnily enough, as a kind of YouTuber,
and where did that come from?
Well, yeah, that's another story altogether, I suppose.
But yeah, here we are.
And I'm not sure where all of those crossed paths came to be.
Right.
I mean, yesterday, I was speaking with an individual,
Ryan Van Duzer, who's another YouTuber type who
does these big expeditions.
And just to pull up a reference here,
he used to be a journalist way back in the day,
like 20 years ago when he was my age.
And that's how he sprung into the whole creative outlet
via YouTube, was he went from TV journalism,
and then eventually it sort of steamrolled and became
YouTube documentary making one day.
So it's kind of interesting how you started as basically
as somebody who gained inspiration
via a summer camp, more or less.
That's sort of how I said.
Yeah, that's a good point, actually.
I forgot, although I always thought
that was kind of a sort of a strange outdoor life
as being a summer camp, because it was so playful, too.
It was almost like professional mentorship,
where you're just good and fun to 10 and 12-year-olds
and 14-year-olds.
You're just a good person, and you do cool stuff.
It didn't seem professional in any way,
and I think that's its strength.
It doesn't seem like it's work.
So yeah, the camp counseling thing in Vermont, USA,
was frickin' fun.
And yeah, it did set me up, I suppose,
for I really liked seasonal life at that stage,
because if you do that for more than 10 weeks,
you'll be burnt out, right?
So doing that for 10 weeks,
doing some strange stuff in between,
and then doing some academic, you know,
I suppose, study and teaching six months
for the rest of the year was a really good fit for me.
And I suppose the difference,
and like your journalist friend that you just met with,
I suspect a lot of 10, 15, and 20-year-olds
want to be YouTubers now,
whereas no one wanted to be a YouTuber
when I was 10, 15, or 20, or even 30, for that matter.
It was just a thing on the internet,
and now it's a thing.
Now you can earn money from it,
you can become this so-called influencer.
So YouTube is now a profession,
and it certainly bloody wasn't when I started filmmaking.
It was a whole different game.
You're trying to shoot something
that's gonna capture a much wider audience,
because there's a lot less channels in the world.
Now there's a channel for knitting with pink wool
on a sunny day sitting on a mountaintop.
You know, you can really bloody hell,
everything's about niche entertainment now,
where that wasn't the case
when I was starting out with my filmmaking.
No, exactly.
And you know, that immediately brings to mind
this follow-up question.
So when you were 14, 15 growing,
and you were in Vermont and you were at this camp,
and you gained inspiration from this trip,
do you think that that later influenced your drive
to become a teacher and have an influence
on the younger generation coming up?
I never had a great desire ever to be a teacher as such,
because I always thought a teacher
was a classroom-based thing,
and I think for the most part it kind of is.
I've never really taught in a classroom at a school level.
I did at a university for 10 years,
but that seemed different too,
because you see a student for maybe 10 or 15 hours
across a semester, maybe 20 hours,
and then you go on a big old trip with them.
Whereas in a school, you see them for 40 or 50
or 100 hours in a school,
and then you go for a small trip with them.
It's sort of, it's far more classroom-based,
and I wasn't attracted to that at all,
and the freedoms with academia are far more wide-reaching.
You can really, yeah, you can be fantastical
as an academic in a sense,
because you can make your own rules far more.
You're not as tied down to a curriculum as much,
and if you're worth your salt,
you're always bargaining for what's best for the student,
and generally, you can teach whatever it is
that you've bargained for,
whereas you just can't do that in a school.
You've got syllabuses and curriculums and principals.
Yeah, so yeah, the evolution of my life as an outdoor person
in terms of where I wanted to spend that time was,
yeah, I suppose I'm just,
I always question what the hell I'm doing doing it,
because I'm very selfish with my time.
One, because I think it's better for me,
but two, I think it's better for whoever I'm hanging out with.
So as a teacher, I wanna do the exact kind of teaching
I wanna do,
because it's a good two-way relationship,
but I also know, Ray, that's very selfish.
There are so many better teachers out there than me,
because they're willing to do jobs that are harder,
and I haven't really done that.
I've done lots of jobs,
but they've always been pretty peachy,
in a sense, they've been with great students
or with people that are hand-picked or that I really like.
So that's why I've worked there.
I haven't done hard graph teaching
or outdoor work like a lot of people.
Well, let me tell you something.
I am currently, I've returned to school.
So I'm 25, and here I am post-COVID.
I went to school a few years ago for fitness and health
at a local community college,
and I worked as a personal trainer for a couple of years
prior to, and then sprinkled in
at the beginning of the pandemic.
And since then, I've left that field,
and it's been a little bit more difficult for me
to find work, because I went to school
for computer programming at one point,
and it's just a huge, long story.
Tons of years in post-secondary education.
And I'm returned to school now for kinesiology.
It's concurrent with Teachers College.
It was encouraged by my grandparents.
My grandfather encouraged me greatly and heavily
to return to school and get a proper official degree
and become a teacher.
So that's what I'm working towards at the moment.
A physical education teacher would be the,
what's at the end of the tunnel, six years down the line.
So I've got a huge long haul here.
I'll be 30 when I graduate, and right around 30, 31,
by the time I actually get into the field,
which isn't actually that bad.
It's a good age, I feel, to be mentoring children
of that age, 16 through 19,
whatever it is for high school kids nowadays.
But this is something that I never anticipated
that I would do.
I never, even like a year ago,
I was as happy as can be.
I was working in landscaping.
I was doing a little bit of a,
I just finished a contract with a video game company,
and I helped do some video game design for them.
But this is something that I never anticipated
I would be doing.
But here I am doing it and pursuing this thing,
which I believe will result in something phenomenal.
Because like you said,
the lifestyle of somebody like that is this perfect balance.
A lot of my time is my own,
but a lot of my time is also given over to others.
So I'm serving the community.
I'm gonna be putting myself forward in a positive manner
that'll hopefully affect a generation,
if you see what I'm saying.
And then I also will be having all this free time
to pursue my own endeavors.
So I completely understand where you're coming from.
Yeah, it's quite mature and self humbling to do that.
A lot of people won't make those harder decisions
to change fields,
given that you gotta go back to less money,
more compliance, you've gotta hand in all these assignments
based on structures now.
Technically, you could probably teach tomorrow.
You could go into a school and teach something
and be quite competent at it,
but you have to jump through a million hoops to do it.
And that's what life is, right?
It's about the discipline of doing
what structures are in front of you.
And in some respects, telling some structures to get stuffed
and it's figuring out which ones are which.
But I get that, that I think it's really good.
I don't think enough people do it.
I mean, even you've just said,
then you think it's gonna be a wonderful life
in front of you.
I hope that's the case,
but don't hold a candle to that either.
If it's not what it is, cracked up to be,
go sideways or move within it or do something else.
And I think people are often,
I've got two 18 year old nephews at the moment, twins.
They're about to finish school
and they really have no idea what they're going to do.
And I think that's perfectly okay.
But the trouble with their current disposition
is that they're shit scared of trying something
because they think they've got to keep doing it
for five years or 10 years or even one year.
Just have a go and do it well
and be critical about it,
but be disciplined too.
Sometimes you have to do shit you don't like to do
because it turns out that you do like it.
So I'm no life coach
other than to say, try stuff, work hard
and question everything.
So I think you've probably got a touch of that in your right.
Well, I'm curious to get your perspective on this.
I mean, just to expand on that story a little bit,
during the pandemic,
that's when I really got into the great outdoors
and adventuring and camping and bikepacking
and all this awesome fun stuff.
And I really felt like I was stepping into who I was.
Like I really discovered myself, if you will,
if you wanna be dramatic and cheesy about it.
But I mean, that's what you do in your early 20s, I guess.
I mean, that's what happened to me is the pandemic happened,
everything shut down, my job got put on pause.
So I got out there and I explored.
And I did that for four years quite consistently.
And like you say,
when you step back into the education system,
you're immediately confined
to all these rules and regulations and structure.
And obviously that's just the way that it has to be
in order to get somewhere.
But I mean, it's a double-edged blade here
because I feel also at the same time,
it's like I had all this freedom
and now a lot of that freedom is gone.
And now I feel like I've been pushed and shoved
and do this and do that and here's your timetable.
And it's just like I had no timetable really
for like the past little while it feels like.
So it's kind of an alternative spin on life.
And I know that you've experienced things like that too
because you're this humongous adventurer
who's gone on all these worldly expectations,
but you're also a teacher.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, I think if there's a few guiding lights
for my life at the moment, other than parenthood,
which is probably the biggest one,
it's quite overwhelming actually when you become a parent,
you shelve your sense of self,
you have to kind of have to just to function.
And that's healthy too, that's good.
I mean, you've got small versions of yourself
running around that you have to really put work into.
And I respect that.
But in terms of if there's a couple of big things,
big rocks that are guiding me at the moment,
it is what structures do you take on
and what do you not in terms of big things out there.
So I currently work for myself, but I don't either.
That famous Bob Dylan song is so true
that we're always ruled by someone or something.
So whilst I think I work for myself right now,
I kind of don't, I work with a business partner,
I work with contractors who work for us,
I work for YouTube, I work for people I've never met.
And I'm wanting their eyeballs to watch my films
or read my book.
And so I'm constantly chasing sort of this sense
of liberation through still heavily guarded structures.
If I was to go back to university or a university,
I would be paid weekly and allotment of money
and I would have a million other structures overlaid to me,
but they would be very similar in the way they make you feel
in some respects than so-called freedom
and so-called working for yourself.
Now, if you are to go right back to being a COVID person
and you go off and you go for big, long extended bushwalks,
hikes, travelling around the globe
and you do it for five bucks a day
and you're very cheap and you're very nimble,
that might be the great resistance.
But unless you keep doing that,
it is just putting on pause what is inevitable
which is to come back to a system of some kind.
So in terms of my decision-making now in life,
it is a very much about, all right,
one, careful what you wish for
because working for yourself
isn't always what it's cracked up to be.
And sometimes the sanctity of a big organisation
like a university or a school or a big company
has tremendous freedoms inherent within it.
I know I had tremendous freedoms within my university
based on it kind of being the top of the tree
of outdoor education.
So, Beau, you're here as an expert of sorts
in outdoor education.
You make your programmes, make them good,
do as you please, do it well.
Now, that's remarkable.
It's kind of like being your own CEO, your own guide
and your own teacher all wrapped up in one
and yet you're not the one paying the bills.
So, I mean, that's a really long winded answer Ray
or a statement, I suppose
because yeah, yeah, I constantly wonder
what the hell freedom is in a sense.
But that's from a parent's perspective too.
I'm a little bit older than you now
or I'm another generation older than you
and I've had to switch gears to say,
okay, I'm a parent now, what's all this mean?
No, exactly.
And the thing that I've come to realise
over the last couple of weeks
ever since I've moved away from all my friends
and family to pursue this
is that this is just another one of life's adventures.
It's different than what I've been doing
for the last four years,
which is spending time with my dog,
spending time out in the bush,
on the trails with my friends,
going on hikes, bikepacking, camping.
Right, that was one adventure that lasted four years
and now I am over here doing something completely different
and of course, there's gonna be different limitations
just like how there were obviously limitations back then.
You can't make, well, I made no money doing that.
Somebody like yourself makes money doing that
but it's also a business.
Somebody like Alistair Humphries makes money doing that
but it requires work.
Now I'm over here, I'm back in the education system
but I'm away from home for the first time.
I'm here, I'm making new friends,
I'm in a completely new culture, a new society.
I'm pretty far away from home
and things are very different here
but it's life's next adventure for me
and I'm hoping that the next six years
are going to trump the last four years
and if that happens, I mean,
if it even comes close to my experiences
in the last four years, I would be thrilled
and I imagine that-
That's not, that's a good attitude.
It's kind of like, yeah,
it's always trumping the last experience
so that's not bad, I don't mind that.
I've always despised the statement trip of a lifetime.
I've always thought that's,
you know, when someone says that,
they're kind of setting themself up for failure
for the rest of their life
or something that's underwhelming.
I think, oh, why would you do that?
I hope I never go on a trip of a lifetime
because it means I can never go on a better one, you know?
Right.
It feels strange to say that
and my question to you, Ray, is what's happened to your dog?
Oh, it's with my parents.
Yeah. Ah, you're a bummer.
Yeah, it is a huge bummer.
That's been the biggest drag the last year
just sitting in the back of my head going,
oh, I can't wait for that day to come
where I have to say goodbye to the dog.
And yeah, it makes me sad, but you know what?
It is what it is.
I gave my parents a tour
of all the different trails in the area.
So they've been taking her.
So it's been keeping me at ease mentally going,
okay, the dog is still happy, but yeah, that is a bummer.
It is a tough one.
That's cool.
But I was gonna say, I imagine that,
so I mean, I know that in a lot of your earlier videos
dating back like eight, 10 years ago,
you weren't married at the time
and you didn't have any kids at the time
as far as I can tell.
And back then it must've,
there must've been a completely different sense of freedom
when you were doing the Horn of Africa
via kayak and all that.
Like the sense of freedom back then
versus the, well, freedom and adventure back then
must be completely different than the freedom and adventure
that you feel now having a wife and a child.
Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, and they're the eras of our life
and they change and shift
and they change and shift for all the right reasons.
In a sense, your body becomes different,
your financial stability becomes different.
You find that you,
you know, you're putting,
I was putting money into my superannuation,
which is kind of like your retirement fund, you know?
I found I was doing that to save tax
and, you know, I would never have given that
a second thought as a 20 year old, hell, you know?
I still very much live by a hand to mouth mentality.
I don't ensure my house or my car
because if I smash up my car, then I'll suffer through it.
If I smash someone else's car,
I'm probably gonna regret it.
But if my house burns to the ground,
I'll build another one and I'll just make it work.
I'm very much, I like to live and die by my own sword
rather than the sort of things
that are constricting us from the outside.
Because fundamentally, I'm really happy
with living with a bag of oats in a tent.
But I can't do that anymore with a family.
So, you know, I've had to go sideways
and create a warm living space
and make sure we have stability in terms of finances
so our kids can go to school
and do all those sorts of things.
And I think that's cool, that's no worries.
So my adventures and my outdoor life
has shifted dramatically because of it.
And don't you worry, I freaking know
that I really do miss long range adventuring
and the whimsical nature that I think I'm good at
and I really like is going with the bloody wind blows,
problem solving along the way and living via my body.
I love it.
And in fact, that is my theme,
that is my real heartbeat.
And the fact that I can make money out of it now
is kind of remarkable, but it is work too,
you mentioned that.
But I would say that I am also a bit
of a counterfeit character too, Ray.
You know, coming up with backyard adventuring
is very practical for me now
because I can go away and have a day or two
of adventure and toil and not eating properly
and not sleeping enough
and doing some cool sort of hard challenging things.
And I love doing them in my backyard,
but I'm also at an era now
where I'm traveling a bloody lot.
Since COVID, which I adored, I loved being locked down.
It was brilliant.
I loved the idea of living on my five acres
and having this, you know, I'm doing this now
from the top of my five acre block
in a beautiful little building that I built during COVID.
And I've happily, I didn't really leave the farm for a year
and I could have done that for another five,
bit like four years of experiencing out in the bush
in the wilderness with your dog.
But now I'm figuring I found that this,
I found that I love this home life
and now I'm getting good at telling stories on YouTube.
So it's taking me all over the world again.
And I'm thinking, gee,
that doesn't sound very backyard adventury to me.
And in terms of me saying,
I just feel like I'm a bit of a bloody,
I said counterfeit before,
but I feel like I'm a little bit of a fraud
in that I probably shouldn't.
I'm about to go to Portugal to shoot a pilot
for a major brand, a potential TV show.
And it's all very exciting
and I love the idea of it and it will be good.
But it also takes me away from the very thing
I think I've kind of stumbled upon,
which is back here in front of me.
And so I am at a real phase of life, Ray,
where I don't think I've got the right answers
and I'm not sure I'm making the best decisions
but I'm still in a sort of feel out mode, you know.
Well, if that's the case,
and I mean, you would have to have some sort of baseline
to reference that opinion.
I mean, at what point in your life
did you feel like you did have all the answers then
and felt that you were making all the right decisions?
That's a good question.
I certainly don't have all the right answers,
but if you really just sit yourself in a corner and say,
okay, would I rather,
for the same amount of money,
get paid by someone else to do a TV series,
five Ks down the road, you would probably do that,
rather than go to Portugal to do it.
Now, the thing is Portugal is very exciting.
The idea of it excites me
and going to these wonderful islands
off the coast of Portugal.
But I will be there not as Bo, doing Bo's thing.
I will be there for a big company doing a company thing
and I won't really experience the place.
And so, in all honesty, I know the right answer,
but I'm doing it because one, it's a bit experimental.
We're not sure where it goes and it pays well.
And I don't have an alternative TV show,
five Ks down the road.
Right.
But I should probably push for that.
I could probably say, all right, why don't we do that?
Why don't I propose this to another brand here?
I suppose it all boils down to,
I'm still very opportunistic,
but I still take on board things that I at heart know
I wouldn't do under if I had to or not.
Yeah, but yeah, you're right.
I still don't know the answers and that's cool.
Fair enough.
I mean, so when I hear that,
when you tell me, oh, I'm going to Portugal
to shoot a pilot for a TV show,
I think, oh, that's awesome.
I wish I had that opportunity.
But it sounds like, I mean,
cause I know that you've tied yourself down
to this title backyard adventurer
and doing something like that obviously goes against that.
Do you think that if you didn't give yourself that title
that this mindset of yours wouldn't be mixed
on doing something like that?
Maybe, yeah.
I was always a bit apprehensive
of calling myself the backyard adventurer.
Right.
Rather than calling it an episode or an episodic book,
you could say backyard adventuring
or a backyard adventurer
or a series of backyard adventures.
But in many respects, my heartbeat
and my soul is still very much backyard.
Like when I go to Portugal,
I will still be looking for backyard adventures to do
as in I won't be paying someone a lot of money
to take me up a mountain or a volcano.
I wanna go and do that shit myself with a sandwich
and without a guide and without a map.
I wanna go and do those things.
Essentially, when I go other places,
I try and see the place like other folks might use them
if they lived there,
which is somewhat, that's contradictory too
in some respects,
but I always try and live a life
or see things that the locals see
or that the locals know so well
that they don't see anymore, if that makes sense.
I look around now and the beauty in my life,
I don't often see as much as someone else
who washes through the place.
So I'm trying to find that middle ground when I do travel,
but yeah, I'm trying not to badge myself either.
Maybe I'm trying to wiggle out of the idea
of the backyard adventurer,
knowing that I just need counterpoints for that anyhow.
Right.
And I know that it's kind of funny
and correct me if I'm wrong here,
it's been a couple of years since I've read the book,
but in the novel, you talk about all of your,
I mean, basically for those who haven't read the book,
it's essentially all of your films,
but the expanded upon narrative
that you get out of a book in book format.
So if you're a watcher,
if you're somebody out there who loves your YouTube page,
you get the gist of what the book is about to a degree.
It's just like an expanded edition.
And I know that your adventures started
with kayaking the brass straight,
and then it eventually led you to the Horn of Africa.
So I mean, to me,
that doesn't sound like backyard adventuring at all.
I mean, you can consider Australia your backyard,
but I mean, Australia is a big place.
Australia is massive.
I mean, I wouldn't really consider where I am right now,
five, six hours away from where I used to live,
my backyard.
I mean, it's all terms and definitions,
but I mean, you're a worldly traveled guy.
So I mean, you never even started as a backyard adventurer.
That's something that sprung up during COVID.
Yeah, and that's a really good point.
And I might write about that actually,
because an astronaut was a kid once
that had a backyard,
and then they go up and they can see Earth
as a thing out of the window of a spacecraft
or of a space station.
Those remarkable viewpoints.
So few people will really appreciate.
And yet we kind of all get that now too.
We have Google Earth and we do this
in some sort of artificial interpretation.
We all use global positioning systems now
like they are,
like it's so normal for us to see the world
from a bird's eye perspective
or from a space eye perspective.
And so yeah, what is a bloody backyard?
It's just, it's getting bigger.
Globalization is here in full force.
And so, yeah, it is remarkable
that I can be as far away as possible,
15, 16,000 kilometers away,
and I can be doing that.
And I can be there within a day,
in a different season,
with the sun is in a different hemisphere.
It is bloody remarkable.
And yet you can go on and do things there
in much the same capacity
as you did from where you've come from.
So yeah, I think you're right.
I think what is a backyard,
don't be constricted to it being,
because I happen to have a five kilometer backyard here.
A lot of people have no backyard
or some people have,
they live in Central Australia
and they have a million acres
and they have to catch a helicopter to school.
So I like your thinking, Ray,
I think the world is a backyard and embrace it.
Exactly, well, you know what?
When we ever evolve eventually
into Frank Herbert's Dune
and we're multi-planetary
and Elon Musk runs everything,
Earth will just be the backyard, so.
Yeah, I hear you, mate.
And I'm kind of,
I'm gonna be one of those characters one day.
I'm gonna hand so much money
to just buy planets or moons
or those sort of weird bloody crazy shit, isn't it?
Yeah, no, I do like the idea.
Steve Irwin, who was a great hero of mine,
although kind of in hindsight,
not necessarily when he was living,
but I was a great fan of him once he died actually.
And I looked really into who this character was
who was larger than life.
And that was his whole shtick.
He earned his wealth and he's fortunate
to buy great tracts of forest
to just essentially lock it up for biodiversity.
And I thought that was quite remarkable.
And so, yeah, I hope to do something like that one day.
I hope to make a national park one day
or the equivalent of buy a big tract of broken down farm
and ray forest at ray ecology,
you know, rain set things that are long gone.
I think that'd be really cool.
Something that I would love to ask you about here.
And I was gonna pull it up in my notes so I get it right.
So, like I've said a few times,
your origin in adventuring, it seems like,
is via kayaking.
And a couple of years ago, back in 2018, 2017, 2018,
you did your PhD and you wrote this paper,
this humongous, it's basically a book
called The Secret Life of the Sea Kayaker.
I haven't read it, but I know that it's like 336 pages.
I'm looking at it for the first time in front of me here.
How did that come about?
I mean, how did you get involved in kayaking
way back in the day?
And then how did it eventually lead you
to be so inspired to write your PhD about it?
Well, expeditionary sea kayaking, long range form,
like I was kind of dabbling into,
you know, you do a trip over a hundred days
and you kind of live it.
I lived out of my kayak.
Like people would live out of a bike
like Alistair did when he rode around the world.
Or when people sail across the Atlantic,
they live out of their boat.
I kind of did the same out of two hatches in a kayak.
And it was remarkable life.
It was a hard life though, it was really hard.
And I've done lots of other trips since, not as long.
But I do, there's very few people doing it like that.
You know, there might be a thousand people in the world
that have done trips of that nature.
And so it's an untapped kind of form of knowledge
in a sense, expeditionary sea kayaking.
And one of the ironies of long range life like that
is often people don't write about it
because that's exactly why they do it.
So they don't have to tell anyone about it.
They don't have to represent it.
It's their own incredible journey, right?
And so I thought, all right,
there's nothing really in the knowledge space
about this at a educational level.
And so I thought, whenever you write a PhD,
you have to find a gap in the knowledge.
And so that's what I did.
I thought, I'll try and give
a really good lived experience account
of expeditionary sea kayaking.
And as someone who's very interested in reflection
and the lived experience and storytelling,
I'll combine all these things and wrap it up into a PhD.
And look, I've probably enjoyed 80% of it, right?
The other 20% was hard graft, getting it across the line.
And those final six months of a PhD is really hard
to bring all of these,
because to write a PhD for anyone who's ever done it,
they know well, the truth.
You've got to go really wide.
You've got to read extensively.
You've got to, and you're constantly looking
for kernels of insight that could potentially
be exploded into something worth saying.
And so you're doing all this,
and you're making all of this sort of a firecrack
a few years where everything is exploding
and you're listening to all this stuff
that's going on around you,
but you have to pick the sound
that you want to explore more and stay with it.
And that point, when you find that last thing,
then you have to finish that idea process off
and you've got to do it well.
Otherwise you're going to get your ass kicked
by examiners and panelists.
But fundamentally it was about showing the reader
that sea kayaking is a really different form
of day-to-day life,
and yet it shares similarities of course
with other forms of life.
But it really is this hybrid form of land and sea.
Sailors don't really have it
because sailors are one or the other.
They go out to sea for 20 or 30 days
and then they come back to land.
This one is, I was just, you go out to sea each day,
then you come, your workplace is via your body
and via a craft.
You can see land most of the time.
Yeah, and look, drawing parallels,
but what's the point of doing all this?
Why did we do any of this sort of stuff
in an educational setting?
I was trying to come up with some implications
for school programs that might use sea kayaking
or adventurers that go and do this stuff
and is it just one of the other big selfish acts
that adventurers do and potentially kill themselves?
All those sorts of big questions came through.
I was speaking with Sean Conway a couple of weeks ago,
and he just finished last year his big 105 Iron Mans
where he did his run, bike, swim for the Iron Man distance
every day for 105 consecutive days.
And he also just finished writing his book all about that.
And he said to me during that interview
that the book was equally, if not more difficult
than the actual writing itself.
And I was working with a few people
who have said the same thing.
Just a quick shout out to Chris Lee,
who's also been on his podcast.
He did a huge bike trip from Vancouver
all the way to Nova Scotia here in Canada.
And it took him six or seven years, I believe,
to write his novel about that trip.
And it always amazes me how creative writing
is just such a impossibly difficult task for everybody.
Even people like Stephen King
who write every single day 2,000 plus words.
It is something that definitely drains you,
but it's incredibly rewarding.
And in an instance, like a PhD,
I mean, you must just, at the end of it,
I know that in the film about it,
in episode six of that Horn Around Africa trip
documentary series,
you said that at the end, when you finished the trip,
when you finished the documentary,
when you finished the PhD,
there was this empty void that you felt having completed it.
Like you've just shut the door
on this humongous chapter of your life.
So, I mean, what would you say
were the things that you took away
from all those experiences
and then closing the door on that chapter of your life?
Yeah, it's funny.
It's less so, yeah, that was very real.
And that once you come,
more so when you finish a trip,
less so when you finish a book about it
or a film about it.
Whenever I've finished a, you know,
my second book's getting close to being finished
about Bad River, which is a series on YouTube too.
That plus PhD, my book and any article I've ever written
or once those things come full circle
and they get published or they go up online,
I don't feel some sort of vacuous loss in life.
It's, you know, you've mourned it for the last six months,
whatever it might be,
they're ready to be done and walk away with.
What you do miss though is the experience itself.
So, you know, finishing Bass Strait
or finishing the African trip
or, you know, at the end of a long run over the mountains,
the day or two afterwards feels completely
and utterly abstract and strange
that you have a running tap and a kettle next to you
and you're sitting in a seat, a comfortable seat,
you have fresh clothes on, all those sorts of things.
Everything feels very new and yet very,
it doesn't feel like it has much meaning
because you've stopped this thing that had great meaning.
So, yeah, my representation acts now,
which is my whole life, two to 300 days a year,
I'm creating things in the aftermath.
So what I miss in that reflective process is the doing.
I do really miss doing more,
but I just can't do more at the moment
if I'm trying to make it life
and I'm being a parent, et cetera, et cetera.
The one thing I've filled that void with, Ray,
is running, so at the moment I'm running more
than I ever have before,
eight to 12 hours a week of quite heavy training,
you know, where I'm really pumping it
and I'm not just being opportunistic about running,
I'm doing it for a cause or a purpose.
So I'm trying to reinsert
that sort of daily purpose in my physicality
and it doesn't really fit the bill of just winging it,
which I love a lot more by nature,
but it's something and it's sort of functional
for being a parent.
So as somebody who looks at your films
and everything that you do from the outside,
and I've been following you for years
and I've literally watched all of them
in chronological order as they've come up
throughout the last decade or so.
And something that I've realized is at the beginning,
it was very much like a BBC documentary,
like you could feel that it was very documentary,
that there was a clear path to what you were trying to do,
there was a clear story,
it was a little bit more clear cut.
But nowadays, as things have evolved over time,
it's more of just like these joyful, loose,
exciting films that are more tight
in their narrative structure.
And they don't need six episodes to tell.
And not that there's anything wrong with that, of course.
I mean, some stories do demand more video,
but a lot of your films just for example,
like some of your most popular things out there
are like sub 20 minutes, sub 30 minutes.
Like you're a running a marathon,
the video that almost has 5 million views on YouTube,
that video is only 17 minutes and it's very clear cut.
You run a mile an hour for 24 hours
and then you do these little odd jobs in between.
It seems like back like both miles 10 years ago,
you were documenting adventures
that you were just happened to go on.
And nowadays you're trying to create adventures
that can be turned into fun films.
Yeah, absolutely.
I've learnt in the last sort of five or six years
that the best way for me to tell stories
is to be positive with them and have fun with them.
Big, large, scale expeditions.
One, I can't do them right now as a family man.
But two, they're not often the funnest of trips either.
They're just a lot of bloody hard work.
I've yet to ever watch an Everest expedition film
that is fun.
And that I'm smiling or laughing
as much as I'm biting my fingernails.
So I don't wanna do biting my fingernail trips anymore
because I don't wanna live that life.
I wanna, I actually think too
that a lot of adventurous can take themself,
should take themself a lot less seriously
and probably have more fun.
And probably not necessarily do shit that's death defying.
I don't think that risking your life is worth it at all either.
So yeah, but my filmmaking has definitely changed
in that I'm no longer a filmmaker.
So yes, I started out as a,
I would call myself a documentary maker.
And you can probably see that in the way
I still shoot things, but I'm also a collaborator now.
So Mitch Drummond, who was my student at university
and he's now my business partner
and he does most of shooting when it's not me myself.
He's a great shooter.
He's a great editor,
but he's a very different storyteller.
And while we share the same sympathies,
he's a different generation to me.
He wants things neater, tighter, shorter
and made for multimedia.
Whereas I didn't give a shit for that when I started out.
I just wanted to create big long winded adventures.
And if I had fun, great.
If I didn't have fun, doesn't matter.
And I wanted to show cultures of life
and different things in the world.
And I don't have as much time to do that anymore
which is a real great shame.
But yeah, that's the evolution
from documentary to YouTuber.
They're very different beasts.
No, exactly.
Something that I catch myself doing
and I have to stop myself
with my little 300 subscribers on YouTube
is not taking it seriously at all.
I mean, when I began this podcast,
it was just something that I 100% wanted to do for myself
and it still is.
If nobody tuned in, if I didn't even publish it,
I don't care.
Like these conversations,
my goal and objective with all of them
is just to hang out with somebody who's like-minded
and talk to them and be inspired by the conversation
and all that good stuff.
And so when I'm telling my friends
and my family's sending me messages
and I'm getting comments from people who watch the episodes
and go, oh man, this is fantastic, this is great stuff.
I need to just be like, that's phenomenal
but it's not for them, right?
I mean, this is something that, what's his name?
Rick Rubin talks about quite significantly
in a lot of his work.
He constantly says the job of an artist
is not to create anything for anybody else
except for themselves.
And so when you go into a creative project,
you can't sit there and be like,
oh, I hope people will like this.
And sometimes I need to catch myself
during these conversations
and I am thinking to myself,
oh, I hope people will like this.
No, it's like, I hope I like this
when I hit end call at the end, so.
Yeah, I get where you're coming from
but I must admit I totally disagree with Rick Rubin.
I've heard that statement before
about I completely and utterly make films for others.
Okay.
Absolutely.
If I had the choice to not make a film
or make a film, I would not make a film.
I would go running or I'd go bike riding or fishing
or for a trip with my daughter
and I would not film it.
I would simply just be.
But I'm using it as a mechanism to make money
and to make stories because I like that too.
I like it, but I don't love it.
And there's an important thing there.
For an artist to make something that is just for themselves
and they're not then contributing to another person's joy
or another person's inspiration
and not that you have to set out to inspire someone
but to create something of art
or a book or a film that is not compatible to other people
I think is an absolute waste of time.
And I say that with great humility
because I totally get what you're saying as well
because I think the best artists
still do things for themselves.
But I think thinking about an audience
is absolutely important.
And I say this mostly because my father is an artist.
He's a landscape artist
and he's painted his whole life
and he is always painted for himself
but he is always painted to sell
and you can do both.
Because fundamentally when you get me on your show
I don't wanna just be a great conversationalist with you.
I wanna be beamed to as many earbuds as possible, right?
So we have to do our job right
to make our conversation interesting enough
that it's not just for 12 people.
And if you continue to do a better job at your conversation
that 12 turns to 20 and 20 turns to 100, so on and so forth.
I think that's very healthy.
It's a competitive commercial way of thinking of art
but I think we all need to bloody earn money.
So Rick Rubin, if you create art your whole life
and you're the only one that ever likes it
how the hell do you make money?
How do you eat?
Do you swap your art for one person that likes your art
and you get bread for the rest?
Well, okay, that's cool, that's no worries
but I imagine it's never that simple.
So yeah, go back to the Bob Dylan thing
we're always a slave to someone, anyone, right?
So as long as we know where these transactions are going
and I think that's all fair and war.
No, I do understand that point.
And this could just be me being young
and naive with no experience
but I think I somewhat disagree.
Like I understand where you're coming from with that
and I don't mean to turn this into a debate
but this is a tricky conversation
or this is a tricky avenue to go.
And I sitting here with six months of experience
versus you with a decade of experience
this is gonna sound maybe ridiculous
but I mean, the mindset that Rick Rubin comes from
is one where as you sit down to produce the music
or you sit down to host the conversation
or sit down to film the adventure
in that moment, right?
You can't think about what other people will think
of what it is that you're doing, right?
You need to create something fundamentally
that comes from the soul,
comes from something that you truly believe
is wholly unique to yourself.
And the second you begin to picture
what other people will interpret from your art,
it's the same moment that you also will produce
what everyone else is producing, right?
Because then there's outside influence.
If you are just locked in and dialed
and you're sitting in your little shed
at your editing station
and I'm sitting here having this conversation,
there's nobody feeding me, oh, tell him this,
ask him this question, say this
because that's what we wanna hear, right?
It no longer is unique at that point
because it's just what everybody wants to hear.
Do you see what I'm trying to say?
Totally, yeah.
I mean, that has merit to the point though
where social construction experts would say,
I mean, you never, you're always influenced by others, right?
So sitting in a vacuum dust doesn't exist.
And so you might have pure thoughts
of what your art looks and feels like
and the song might, you know,
and you think like you're coming up
with all this stuff yourself,
but you are, every ounce of you is constructed
by the stuff around you.
And yeah, your genetics and biology
has got a lot to do with it too,
but we mirror what is around us,
whether we like it or not
or whether we think about that or not.
I suppose what Rick's talking about
and what you're talking about
is just the lack of pressure
to produce something of a particular type.
And that's wonderful, right?
And that's all you need to think.
You just need to think,
what gives me the greatest freedom in my creativity
and I'm gonna do that.
And that's really good, that's healthy.
I totally get that, no worries.
But fundamentally, if you're gonna be successful
at what you do,
you still need to tap into
what other people might be interested in.
And whether you do that subconsciously or not,
that's your choice.
But the best YouTubers in the world
aren't the best storytellers.
They're the best at figuring out
what people might be interested in.
And why not have your cake and eat it too?
Why not create an artistic something
where you can feel like you've got freedoms,
but on the other hand,
you are really thinking about
who might listen or see or hear
whatever it is you're doing
because you need them.
And it is greatly respectful
when you know you need them.
And you need other people to
buy into what you've just done or seen
because I think that's empowering too.
No, I, there you go.
I do 100% agree with that.
That is a phenomenal point.
Yeah, so, you know,
when you send an email out to potential,
have you had Jimmy Chin on the show yet?
No, not yet.
Maybe one minute.
So Jimmy will come on your show,
I imagine, when you get big enough, right?
So you need to create an audience
that knows you're good at your craft
before Jimmy or his PR agent will say,
you know what, Ray's really good at what he does.
Ray's got an audience of X.
So that's very important.
You know, Jimmy Chin, he gets 100 emails a day
from people wanting to interview him.
So how does he choose from those things?
And in the raw, horrible mechanics of things,
he's gonna go to people who have an audience
based on them having an X amount of flavor
or whatever it might be.
Now, you know, you might be better
than half of the people that send him an email,
but that's just where he's gonna go to
because that's the default of how bloody
the hierarchy of stuff works, rightly or wrongly.
And a lot of the time it is, you know,
in some respects it does mean something.
So I suppose that's the cruelty of creativity too.
Well, exactly, especially modern day creativity
where everything is a numbers game, it seems like.
Yeah, yeah, oh yeah, YouTube is vicious.
But if I, you know, so me being on YouTube,
the platform, right, I could not be just a pure artist.
I don't think, and I think you're right.
I think there are a lot of pure artists on YouTube
that they do something that's so unique to themself
and so quirky and they're so great at it,
but they're also the lucky ones and they're so few.
You know, think of how many artists
become Taylor Swift's very few.
And yet, so there's a lot of people
that are as good at music as Taylor Swift.
So, you know, I can only exist on YouTube
if I try and be the best form of that in YouTube land.
So to me, that means trying to broaden my demographic
or broaden the way I tell stories
so I can increase those numbers
because staying in my lane,
I'm basically just gonna appeal to outdoor types
that don't like showering, you know?
And so I'm just, I'm narrowing it down a bit more.
So I need to expand my thinking.
That is true.
Do you know who Steve Wallace is?
No.
No?
He, so he's somebody on YouTube similar to yourself
where he does all these crazy stealth camps,
all these wild camps and he has like one point
some million subscribers.
And he's somebody that I look at,
I look at his videos where it's just him and his camera
camping in some bush beside a police station
or something crazy.
And you can tell immediately
that he decided to do that a couple of days ago,
got some camping equipment from Canadian Tire,
which is sort of our outdoor thing here in Canada.
He's a Canadian.
And he just went into the bush,
filmed this thing and then threw it, put it on YouTube.
And there's a few channels like that
where you can tell that it's super low budget.
They're just filming on their phone
and it's done cheaply and it's done with no script
or anything like that.
And these people have great followings.
And so, I mean, there is, again, this is YouTube.
This is the modern day creative era.
I mean, you yourself are obviously not in that category.
You have this, you have a few people,
you have a script to an extent,
like you have plans and ideas and drones and GoPros
and $5,000 cameras and everything else.
So, I mean, I guess it just depends on the individual
and what they hope to get out of it.
I mean, are they doing it because it's their livelihood?
And in that case, yes.
You definitely do need to take it
a little bit more seriously, but,
or is it just your hobby, right?
Cause this is not my livelihood.
And I do of course appreciate and respect and enjoy
when people send me messages and say,
hey, that was a great conversation.
But the podcast at this moment for me
is not my number one priority.
My number one priority is holding the expectations
of my grandparents and my family to do well in school.
So I guess it just comes down to where your priorities are.
Yeah, yeah, well said, mate.
Yeah, and good only for doing it too.
Everyone needs things that,
I suck at giving advice and I don't like doing it really,
but I heard this from someone else.
I forget who it was, but it was a really nice quote
that I'm lucky enough to do what I'm sort of good at.
And even that, I say that with a half fingers crossed
because I still think I've got a lot to learn
in my space of writing and storytelling
and talking and whatever it might be.
But I'm relatively good at what I do
to earn enough money out of it, I think.
But I don't love it.
And I think that's really important.
I think doing what you're good at
and not necessarily what you love.
If I did what I love,
all I'd do is tinker in the barn all day
and go for runs and make bread.
And I'd probably have three friends and that was it.
I'd keep things far simpler
and I wouldn't be this sort of social media
beast that I'm trying to become,
whatever it might be.
But that's healthy.
I think having those side projects that you're good at
or rather the side things that you do that you love
and then your day job is what you're good at.
I think that's a good combo.
Wonderful.
Well, I think that is a phenomenal note to end on,
a good positive high note.
The last thing that I would love to ask you about though,
just because I did write a couple of things down,
is your new book.
So you promoted it just a little bit the other day
on social media all about this trip of yours down the,
it's Australia's dirtiest river, right?
Yeah, so the series is about,
there's four rivers in Australia I picked.
They're all really distinctly different.
One's the worst urban river,
almost polluted urban river.
One's the most ecologically dead river from mining.
One is the oldest river that is under pressure
from something like climate change.
And then the other one is our biggest river in Australia,
which has just got all of the calamity and problems.
And yeah, it's a film series on YouTube.
Two of the four episodes are out so far
and I've done the first draft of the book
and now whittling through the second draft of the book,
which should be out early to mid next year, Bad River.
Super exciting stuff.
And the book at the moment, Ray, is crap.
It's got some glimmers of hope in there
and I've got to hold on to those glimmers of hope
and expand on them.
So my job at the moment is to make four out of 10 writing
into seven out of 10 writing
and then it'll go through another phase of editing.
But yeah, I'm in the writing phase at the moment.
Oh, that's awesome.
Yeah, those films were fantastic.
And I know that those were done,
that was done during the pandemic too, right?
Yeah, yeah, amazingly.
We were able to do it around lockdowns
because Victoria, where I live in Australia down South,
we were the, I think we're the most,
our claim to fame is we were the most lockdown city
in the world.
Melbourne was crazy.
They had hundreds of days where they couldn't,
well, they couldn't leave the house.
They could go for exercise for a certain amount of time
in a 5K radius or some such.
I'm out here on the farm.
So I didn't really apply to us as much.
I'd just go into the bush and disappear.
But yeah, it was a strange time to create films.
The last thing that I would love to ask you about,
just because this popped into my mind the other day
and I can't let you go without asking this.
So I was sitting in class,
one of these classes that I have and of course,
so I'm 25, everyone else there is 17, 18, 19.
So there's a little bit of a,
there's a small generation gap,
but there's a gap nonetheless.
And the teacher was asking these questions to us
and waiting for us to respond and it was just dead silent.
And in my head, I was like, oh man, this is painful.
This is painful because the teacher wants engagement.
So I put my hand up, answer the question
and it's like, okay, that felt kind of like a good relief.
Good side, yeah, you helped them out there.
Exactly, you could tell.
Oh, the teacher was like, oh yes, yes.
And I'm curious.
I mean, you do all these shows all over the world now.
You just finished a little tour around Australia
with the modern day audience being what it is.
I don't know what your demographic is
at these shows necessarily,
but just based off of my experience
from modern day auditoriums,
what is that experience like?
Do you find it fun and engaging?
And is it dynamic or I mean,
what's the modern audience to you in your opinion?
Yeah, well, it is super fun.
It really is.
And it's still challenging.
I go out and do a five to 10 minute opening set
and I never have notes, it's all what I construct.
And I really like that really raw.
It's kind of a touch stand up, a touch Q and A,
statement orientated based on the behind the scenes
of the documentaries or the films that I'm showing.
It's bloody brilliant.
It's a really good format.
I would still rather be out running in the bush,
but it is a very good feeling.
And when you have a big crowd,
so I ended in Melbourne a few weeks ago
and there was a thousand people that came to that show,
packed to the gunnels.
They're all having beers and wine and they are vibing.
It's a Friday night in Melbourne
and they're kind of my people.
They're there for a good time
and they wanna hear some insights
and they wanna be surprised.
And I try and deliver that with stuff
that I've never thought before, stuff that's edgy
and it's a real rush.
It's really good fun.
So I'll do a European show,
European tour and UK tour next year.
We're gearing up towards that now,
but I suppose to answer your question,
it's a really good compliment to filmmaking
if you're up for that kind of thing
because I'm not as successful on YouTube
as I need to be to earn money for a small team,
this fills in the gaps.
You can go on tour and earn money in between
showing the films before they go on YouTube.
And it's really the only thing that's saving me
from quitting YouTube at the moment is the tours.
Yeah, so it's serving a purpose of financial windfalls
as well as being a genuinely good concept
and a good show.
And I'm surprised more YouTubers don't do it.
I don't mean to keep pushing this along,
but do you mind if I ask you about that?
I mean, the fact that the audience at these tours
keeps you making films on YouTube,
I mean, why is that?
It's kind of funny.
I know that books sort of almost died 20 years ago
and so did live music when the internet took off.
And it's kind of nice to think that live audiences,
there's only more humans on the world
and yet I think the more we can make more reality,
more live shows, the better.
Taylor Swift just earned one and a half billion dollars
touring the world,
which is more than what our album is worth.
People orientation is really good.
And so it's sort of almost,
it's not exploiting that as an idea,
but it kind of is too.
That's what rock stars have done for a long time
that they know how powerful a live experience can be
if it's done well.
And so I just wanna do that well.
And it's a bit quirky.
People turn up, they don't know what films
they're gonna show to be shown,
what state the films are in,
none of them are finished.
And what I'm gonna say
or what kind of form I'm gonna be in.
So it's all very unknown to them.
And yet it's a bit more of a polished show than that
from our end, but yeah, it's good fun
and it really does just help supplement the YouTube income
which is not enough for a team of three or four.
Fair enough.
Well, Beau, thank you so much.
I've been looking forward to this conversation
for basically 10 months
and I appreciate you finding a little bit of time
to sit down with me this morning.
It's nighttime here though.
And yeah, it's been a blast and I appreciate it.
Thank you, Ray.
Thank you for your patience.
Good on you for what you do, mate.
And you're gonna make a bloody fine teacher
and I'll get my people to ring Jimmy Chin
and say, look, Jimmy, Ray is a good egg.
Get on it.
Sounds perfect.
I'll wait for the email from him.
And for the record, I don't have any people.
Yeah, yeah.
That would be me calling Ray.
I mean, me calling Jimmy and I don't have his direct line.
So I'd be cold calling too, mate.
Well, I appreciate it.
Well, the next time you're in Toronto, man,
I'll go to one of your shows.
So that'll be fun.
I'll get your ticket.
Thank you, Ray.
Nice talking to you, mate.
Right on.
All righty then.
Till next time.
See you, mate.
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