[00:00:00] What's up, dude?
[00:00:07] Today, right?
[00:00:08] Can you hear me, mate?
[00:00:10] I can.
[00:00:11] I can hear you.
[00:00:12] Maybe there's a little bit of freezing happening, but that's okay.
[00:00:14] Excellent.
[00:00:15] You're on my phone because my computer doesn't have Chrome, and I'm up on my wireless internet
[00:00:22] in the cabin, and it was going to take too long to download, so problem solving on the
[00:00:28] fly, mate.
[00:00:29] Thank you for my lateness, or sorry for my lateness.
[00:00:32] No, it's all good.
[00:00:35] I appreciate it.
[00:00:36] Actually, I've been sort of hyping myself up here a little bit.
[00:00:38] I've been watching some of your videos, just like little bits and pieces of them, going
[00:00:41] like, okay, brainstorm some talking points.
[00:00:44] Let's go.
[00:00:45] Oh, yeah.
[00:00:46] We'll be fine.
[00:00:47] Yeah.
[00:00:48] No worries.
[00:00:49] I'm sure any kind of insight you bring, mate, will make something of it.
[00:00:53] That's good.
[00:00:54] Fantastic.
[00:00:55] Cool.
[00:00:56] So welcome.
[00:00:58] First of all, it's an absolute honor speaking to Australia's best seven out of 10 author.
[00:01:06] It might even be 6.5.
[00:01:11] The more I read passages of the old book, the more I realize how flawed the book is,
[00:01:17] but that's okay.
[00:01:18] Your first book needs to have some flaws so that you write a better one, and that's
[00:01:22] hopefully what I'm doing now.
[00:01:24] Yeah, that's kind of a not a bad summary, but yeah, thanks for having me, mate.
[00:01:29] Thanks for being patient.
[00:01:30] I think we've been dancing around for six or eight months on trying to get an email
[00:01:35] at time, sort of.
[00:01:37] Something like that.
[00:01:38] Yeah.
[00:01:39] I know that Alistair Humphries put us in contact way back last November, so it's been
[00:01:44] in the works, but here we are.
[00:01:46] Yeah, excellent.
[00:01:47] Well, look, I'll just put myself over to you, mate, because I'll talk to you this
[00:01:52] morning, and then I'll go for a bit of a jog before I start a few hours of work
[00:01:55] and then get back into dad mode.
[00:01:56] Whenever you want to start, mate, and command the ship, you just go right ahead.
[00:02:02] Right on.
[00:02:03] Well, you know, in all seriousness, I do have to say what every fan of yours says
[00:02:07] when they meet you, and that is you have been a massive inspiration for all of
[00:02:12] my outdoor adventures over the last four years, especially during the pandemic.
[00:02:17] And when I first started this podcast, I wrote down three names, and yours was
[00:02:22] at the top of the list as somebody I wanted to have on as a guest, because
[00:02:26] two years ago, I did a bikepacking trip all around Ontario.
[00:02:30] It was two weeks, or no, sorry, it was 10 days, and yourself, Jimmy Chin, and
[00:02:37] Martin Doolard were the ones who I captioned at the start of that film,
[00:02:41] thanking for the inspiration, so.
[00:02:44] Now, that's really cool, mate, and I'm starting to get inspired by the
[00:02:49] fact that other folks are inspired by me, because I'm an accidental inspirational
[00:02:54] thing.
[00:02:55] I never in my life set out to be inspiring other people or an inspired
[00:03:01] kind of character.
[00:03:03] I think it's folly if you were able to do such a thing, you know.
[00:03:07] I think people that lead cults and want to be president, maybe that's
[00:03:11] exactly what they want to do, but I certainly don't.
[00:03:14] So that's kind of a nice, that's nice when that becomes the default
[00:03:18] without meaning to be, so thank you, mate.
[00:03:20] And Jimmy Chin, yeah, he inspires me too.
[00:03:24] I think he's a really good authentic filmmaker and a real bloody hard
[00:03:27] arse too, so I get it, so it's nice to be in his company.
[00:03:33] Right on, man.
[00:03:35] Something that I would love, or where I would love to begin this
[00:03:37] conversation, I should say, is the start of your career.
[00:03:43] Because I know that you've been on YouTube for quite some time,
[00:03:46] and I read your book a couple years ago when it first came out.
[00:03:49] In fact, I listened to the audio book, and something that I've never
[00:03:53] worked out or really pieced together is how you started in the outdoor community.
[00:03:59] I know that eight years ago, ten years ago on YouTube, it all sprung
[00:04:03] about via kayaking, but I mean, going back prior to that, how did you
[00:04:07] actually get into these things?
[00:04:11] Well, I mean, in terms of outdoors, and a lot of people think that it's a,
[00:04:16] that I've always been a kind of outdoor type and an outdoor type
[00:04:19] that took a camera along, and that's not necessarily the case.
[00:04:23] When you grow up on a small farm or in a rural area, outdoor life is kind of normal life.
[00:04:29] You're not inside during the day at all.
[00:04:31] You just sleep inside and eat inside.
[00:04:34] And so I've always been an outdoor person just because of where I've grown up.
[00:04:39] To the point where you don't really think you're an outdoor person,
[00:04:42] that's very normal, and going for hikes and being muddy and
[00:04:47] climbing trees and doing all that stuff as a kid is pretty,
[00:04:51] it's just part of your regular every day.
[00:04:52] So then to turn it into something that is a vocation or something that you're going
[00:04:57] to do for the rest of your life and get paid for it, that was,
[00:05:01] that's kind of the turning point, I suppose, because you have to turn it
[00:05:04] into a skill set that earns money or a skill set that is interesting
[00:05:08] for others to see or watch or desire or whatever it might be.
[00:05:13] And that's becoming a guide.
[00:05:15] And so I probably about the age of 14, 15,
[00:05:19] I went on a 10 day hike.
[00:05:21] It was a sponsored 10 day hike for an outdoor education centre.
[00:05:26] And I just remember thinking that the guys and girls that led me,
[00:05:30] Jimmy James and Joey, were awesome.
[00:05:34] I thought I want to be them.
[00:05:36] And if they're getting paid for this, even if it's peanuts and it was peanuts,
[00:05:40] that's good.
[00:05:41] You're spending peanuts when you're doing it anyway, right?
[00:05:43] You're spending 10 bucks a day on food.
[00:05:45] So if you're getting 25 bucks a day, that's a good deal by me.
[00:05:49] So I thought, oh, that's a cool thing to do.
[00:05:51] And I kind of from the age of 14 or 15 thought, yeah,
[00:05:55] I want that kind of outdoor guide life.
[00:05:58] And it wasn't probably until I was sort of 19, it was 19,
[00:06:03] when I thought I wouldn't mind making a film about this
[00:06:05] based on being inspired somewhere along the lines
[00:06:07] watching outdoor films as a young adult.
[00:06:12] So that's kind of where it started.
[00:06:13] I took a camera with me to Everest Base Camp
[00:06:15] when I walked there as a 19 year old
[00:06:18] when you could still do it without guides
[00:06:20] and when you can still do it solo.
[00:06:21] And now it's changed even since I did it.
[00:06:24] But yeah, that kind of kicked things off.
[00:06:26] And all these years later, this is where I am.
[00:06:30] Funnily enough, as a kind of YouTuber,
[00:06:32] and where did that come from?
[00:06:33] Well, yeah, that's another story altogether, I suppose.
[00:06:36] But yeah, here we are.
[00:06:40] And I'm not sure where all of those crossed paths came to be.
[00:06:46] Right.
[00:06:47] I mean, yesterday, I was speaking with an individual,
[00:06:51] Ryan Van Duzer, who's another YouTuber type who
[00:06:54] does these big expeditions.
[00:06:56] And just to pull up a reference here,
[00:06:58] he used to be a journalist way back in the day,
[00:07:01] like 20 years ago when he was my age.
[00:07:03] And that's how he sprung into the whole creative outlet
[00:07:07] via YouTube, was he went from TV journalism,
[00:07:11] and then eventually it sort of steamrolled and became
[00:07:13] YouTube documentary making one day.
[00:07:15] So it's kind of interesting how you started as basically
[00:07:19] as somebody who gained inspiration
[00:07:21] via a summer camp, more or less.
[00:07:23] That's sort of how I said.
[00:07:24] Yeah, that's a good point, actually.
[00:07:26] I forgot, although I always thought
[00:07:28] that was kind of a sort of a strange outdoor life
[00:07:32] as being a summer camp, because it was so playful, too.
[00:07:35] It was almost like professional mentorship,
[00:07:38] where you're just good and fun to 10 and 12-year-olds
[00:07:43] and 14-year-olds.
[00:07:44] You're just a good person, and you do cool stuff.
[00:07:47] It didn't seem professional in any way,
[00:07:49] and I think that's its strength.
[00:07:51] It doesn't seem like it's work.
[00:07:53] So yeah, the camp counseling thing in Vermont, USA,
[00:07:56] was frickin' fun.
[00:07:57] And yeah, it did set me up, I suppose,
[00:07:59] for I really liked seasonal life at that stage,
[00:08:02] because if you do that for more than 10 weeks,
[00:08:04] you'll be burnt out, right?
[00:08:05] So doing that for 10 weeks,
[00:08:07] doing some strange stuff in between,
[00:08:09] and then doing some academic, you know,
[00:08:11] I suppose, study and teaching six months
[00:08:14] for the rest of the year was a really good fit for me.
[00:08:17] And I suppose the difference,
[00:08:18] and like your journalist friend that you just met with,
[00:08:22] I suspect a lot of 10, 15, and 20-year-olds
[00:08:26] want to be YouTubers now,
[00:08:28] whereas no one wanted to be a YouTuber
[00:08:30] when I was 10, 15, or 20, or even 30, for that matter.
[00:08:33] It was just a thing on the internet,
[00:08:36] and now it's a thing.
[00:08:37] Now you can earn money from it,
[00:08:39] you can become this so-called influencer.
[00:08:41] So YouTube is now a profession,
[00:08:44] and it certainly bloody wasn't when I started filmmaking.
[00:08:46] It was a whole different game.
[00:08:48] You're trying to shoot something
[00:08:49] that's gonna capture a much wider audience,
[00:08:52] because there's a lot less channels in the world.
[00:08:55] Now there's a channel for knitting with pink wool
[00:08:58] on a sunny day sitting on a mountaintop.
[00:09:00] You know, you can really bloody hell,
[00:09:03] everything's about niche entertainment now,
[00:09:05] where that wasn't the case
[00:09:06] when I was starting out with my filmmaking.
[00:09:09] No, exactly.
[00:09:10] And you know, that immediately brings to mind
[00:09:13] this follow-up question.
[00:09:16] So when you were 14, 15 growing,
[00:09:18] and you were in Vermont and you were at this camp,
[00:09:20] and you gained inspiration from this trip,
[00:09:23] do you think that that later influenced your drive
[00:09:26] to become a teacher and have an influence
[00:09:28] on the younger generation coming up?
[00:09:31] I never had a great desire ever to be a teacher as such,
[00:09:35] because I always thought a teacher
[00:09:37] was a classroom-based thing,
[00:09:39] and I think for the most part it kind of is.
[00:09:42] I've never really taught in a classroom at a school level.
[00:09:45] I did at a university for 10 years,
[00:09:48] but that seemed different too,
[00:09:49] because you see a student for maybe 10 or 15 hours
[00:09:53] across a semester, maybe 20 hours,
[00:09:56] and then you go on a big old trip with them.
[00:09:58] Whereas in a school, you see them for 40 or 50
[00:10:01] or 100 hours in a school,
[00:10:02] and then you go for a small trip with them.
[00:10:04] It's sort of, it's far more classroom-based,
[00:10:07] and I wasn't attracted to that at all,
[00:10:11] and the freedoms with academia are far more wide-reaching.
[00:10:15] You can really, yeah, you can be fantastical
[00:10:19] as an academic in a sense,
[00:10:21] because you can make your own rules far more.
[00:10:24] You're not as tied down to a curriculum as much,
[00:10:26] and if you're worth your salt,
[00:10:28] you're always bargaining for what's best for the student,
[00:10:31] and generally, you can teach whatever it is
[00:10:34] that you've bargained for,
[00:10:35] whereas you just can't do that in a school.
[00:10:37] You've got syllabuses and curriculums and principals.
[00:10:42] Yeah, so yeah, the evolution of my life as an outdoor person
[00:10:46] in terms of where I wanted to spend that time was,
[00:10:49] yeah, I suppose I'm just,
[00:10:54] I always question what the hell I'm doing doing it,
[00:10:57] because I'm very selfish with my time.
[00:11:01] One, because I think it's better for me,
[00:11:02] but two, I think it's better for whoever I'm hanging out with.
[00:11:06] So as a teacher, I wanna do the exact kind of teaching
[00:11:08] I wanna do,
[00:11:12] because it's a good two-way relationship,
[00:11:14] but I also know, Ray, that's very selfish.
[00:11:18] There are so many better teachers out there than me,
[00:11:20] because they're willing to do jobs that are harder,
[00:11:24] and I haven't really done that.
[00:11:25] I've done lots of jobs,
[00:11:28] but they've always been pretty peachy,
[00:11:30] in a sense, they've been with great students
[00:11:32] or with people that are hand-picked or that I really like.
[00:11:37] So that's why I've worked there.
[00:11:39] I haven't done hard graph teaching
[00:11:41] or outdoor work like a lot of people.
[00:11:44] Well, let me tell you something.
[00:11:45] I am currently, I've returned to school.
[00:11:49] So I'm 25, and here I am post-COVID.
[00:11:54] I went to school a few years ago for fitness and health
[00:11:57] at a local community college,
[00:11:58] and I worked as a personal trainer for a couple of years
[00:12:01] prior to, and then sprinkled in
[00:12:03] at the beginning of the pandemic.
[00:12:06] And since then, I've left that field,
[00:12:09] and it's been a little bit more difficult for me
[00:12:11] to find work, because I went to school
[00:12:13] for computer programming at one point,
[00:12:15] and it's just a huge, long story.
[00:12:17] Tons of years in post-secondary education.
[00:12:20] And I'm returned to school now for kinesiology.
[00:12:24] It's concurrent with Teachers College.
[00:12:27] It was encouraged by my grandparents.
[00:12:30] My grandfather encouraged me greatly and heavily
[00:12:33] to return to school and get a proper official degree
[00:12:37] and become a teacher.
[00:12:39] So that's what I'm working towards at the moment.
[00:12:42] A physical education teacher would be the,
[00:12:45] what's at the end of the tunnel, six years down the line.
[00:12:48] So I've got a huge long haul here.
[00:12:51] I'll be 30 when I graduate, and right around 30, 31,
[00:12:55] by the time I actually get into the field,
[00:12:57] which isn't actually that bad.
[00:12:59] It's a good age, I feel, to be mentoring children
[00:13:04] of that age, 16 through 19,
[00:13:07] whatever it is for high school kids nowadays.
[00:13:09] But this is something that I never anticipated
[00:13:13] that I would do.
[00:13:14] I never, even like a year ago,
[00:13:17] I was as happy as can be.
[00:13:20] I was working in landscaping.
[00:13:22] I was doing a little bit of a,
[00:13:23] I just finished a contract with a video game company,
[00:13:27] and I helped do some video game design for them.
[00:13:32] But this is something that I never anticipated
[00:13:34] I would be doing.
[00:13:36] But here I am doing it and pursuing this thing,
[00:13:39] which I believe will result in something phenomenal.
[00:13:43] Because like you said,
[00:13:44] the lifestyle of somebody like that is this perfect balance.
[00:13:49] A lot of my time is my own,
[00:13:51] but a lot of my time is also given over to others.
[00:13:53] So I'm serving the community.
[00:13:56] I'm gonna be putting myself forward in a positive manner
[00:13:58] that'll hopefully affect a generation,
[00:14:02] if you see what I'm saying.
[00:14:03] And then I also will be having all this free time
[00:14:07] to pursue my own endeavors.
[00:14:09] So I completely understand where you're coming from.
[00:14:11] Yeah, it's quite mature and self humbling to do that.
[00:14:17] A lot of people won't make those harder decisions
[00:14:19] to change fields,
[00:14:21] given that you gotta go back to less money,
[00:14:25] more compliance, you've gotta hand in all these assignments
[00:14:28] based on structures now.
[00:14:30] Technically, you could probably teach tomorrow.
[00:14:32] You could go into a school and teach something
[00:14:34] and be quite competent at it,
[00:14:35] but you have to jump through a million hoops to do it.
[00:14:38] And that's what life is, right?
[00:14:40] It's about the discipline of doing
[00:14:42] what structures are in front of you.
[00:14:44] And in some respects, telling some structures to get stuffed
[00:14:47] and it's figuring out which ones are which.
[00:14:49] But I get that, that I think it's really good.
[00:14:53] I don't think enough people do it.
[00:14:55] I mean, even you've just said,
[00:14:57] then you think it's gonna be a wonderful life
[00:14:59] in front of you.
[00:15:00] I hope that's the case,
[00:15:01] but don't hold a candle to that either.
[00:15:04] If it's not what it is, cracked up to be,
[00:15:07] go sideways or move within it or do something else.
[00:15:11] And I think people are often,
[00:15:14] I've got two 18 year old nephews at the moment, twins.
[00:15:17] They're about to finish school
[00:15:19] and they really have no idea what they're going to do.
[00:15:23] And I think that's perfectly okay.
[00:15:26] But the trouble with their current disposition
[00:15:29] is that they're shit scared of trying something
[00:15:32] because they think they've got to keep doing it
[00:15:33] for five years or 10 years or even one year.
[00:15:37] Just have a go and do it well
[00:15:40] and be critical about it,
[00:15:42] but be disciplined too.
[00:15:43] Sometimes you have to do shit you don't like to do
[00:15:45] because it turns out that you do like it.
[00:15:47] So I'm no life coach
[00:15:52] other than to say, try stuff, work hard
[00:15:55] and question everything.
[00:15:58] So I think you've probably got a touch of that in your right.
[00:16:02] Well, I'm curious to get your perspective on this.
[00:16:04] I mean, just to expand on that story a little bit,
[00:16:09] during the pandemic,
[00:16:10] that's when I really got into the great outdoors
[00:16:12] and adventuring and camping and bikepacking
[00:16:14] and all this awesome fun stuff.
[00:16:16] And I really felt like I was stepping into who I was.
[00:16:20] Like I really discovered myself, if you will,
[00:16:23] if you wanna be dramatic and cheesy about it.
[00:16:25] But I mean, that's what you do in your early 20s, I guess.
[00:16:28] I mean, that's what happened to me is the pandemic happened,
[00:16:32] everything shut down, my job got put on pause.
[00:16:34] So I got out there and I explored.
[00:16:36] And I did that for four years quite consistently.
[00:16:39] And like you say,
[00:16:42] when you step back into the education system,
[00:16:45] you're immediately confined
[00:16:47] to all these rules and regulations and structure.
[00:16:50] And obviously that's just the way that it has to be
[00:16:53] in order to get somewhere.
[00:16:55] But I mean, it's a double-edged blade here
[00:16:58] because I feel also at the same time,
[00:17:00] it's like I had all this freedom
[00:17:03] and now a lot of that freedom is gone.
[00:17:05] And now I feel like I've been pushed and shoved
[00:17:07] and do this and do that and here's your timetable.
[00:17:10] And it's just like I had no timetable really
[00:17:13] for like the past little while it feels like.
[00:17:15] So it's kind of an alternative spin on life.
[00:17:17] And I know that you've experienced things like that too
[00:17:19] because you're this humongous adventurer
[00:17:22] who's gone on all these worldly expectations,
[00:17:24] but you're also a teacher.
[00:17:27] Yeah, yeah.
[00:17:31] Yeah, I think if there's a few guiding lights
[00:17:34] for my life at the moment, other than parenthood,
[00:17:37] which is probably the biggest one,
[00:17:39] it's quite overwhelming actually when you become a parent,
[00:17:42] you shelve your sense of self,
[00:17:44] you have to kind of have to just to function.
[00:17:47] And that's healthy too, that's good.
[00:17:49] I mean, you've got small versions of yourself
[00:17:51] running around that you have to really put work into.
[00:17:53] And I respect that.
[00:17:56] But in terms of if there's a couple of big things,
[00:17:58] big rocks that are guiding me at the moment,
[00:18:00] it is what structures do you take on
[00:18:04] and what do you not in terms of big things out there.
[00:18:10] So I currently work for myself, but I don't either.
[00:18:13] That famous Bob Dylan song is so true
[00:18:16] that we're always ruled by someone or something.
[00:18:21] So whilst I think I work for myself right now,
[00:18:25] I kind of don't, I work with a business partner,
[00:18:28] I work with contractors who work for us,
[00:18:30] I work for YouTube, I work for people I've never met.
[00:18:35] And I'm wanting their eyeballs to watch my films
[00:18:38] or read my book.
[00:18:40] And so I'm constantly chasing sort of this sense
[00:18:45] of liberation through still heavily guarded structures.
[00:18:52] If I was to go back to university or a university,
[00:18:55] I would be paid weekly and allotment of money
[00:18:59] and I would have a million other structures overlaid to me,
[00:19:02] but they would be very similar in the way they make you feel
[00:19:06] in some respects than so-called freedom
[00:19:09] and so-called working for yourself.
[00:19:12] Now, if you are to go right back to being a COVID person
[00:19:16] and you go off and you go for big, long extended bushwalks,
[00:19:20] hikes, travelling around the globe
[00:19:21] and you do it for five bucks a day
[00:19:23] and you're very cheap and you're very nimble,
[00:19:26] that might be the great resistance.
[00:19:28] But unless you keep doing that,
[00:19:32] it is just putting on pause what is inevitable
[00:19:35] which is to come back to a system of some kind.
[00:19:39] So in terms of my decision-making now in life,
[00:19:42] it is a very much about, all right,
[00:19:46] one, careful what you wish for
[00:19:48] because working for yourself
[00:19:49] isn't always what it's cracked up to be.
[00:19:52] And sometimes the sanctity of a big organisation
[00:19:55] like a university or a school or a big company
[00:19:59] has tremendous freedoms inherent within it.
[00:20:01] I know I had tremendous freedoms within my university
[00:20:06] based on it kind of being the top of the tree
[00:20:08] of outdoor education.
[00:20:09] So, Beau, you're here as an expert of sorts
[00:20:12] in outdoor education.
[00:20:14] You make your programmes, make them good,
[00:20:17] do as you please, do it well.
[00:20:19] Now, that's remarkable.
[00:20:21] It's kind of like being your own CEO, your own guide
[00:20:24] and your own teacher all wrapped up in one
[00:20:26] and yet you're not the one paying the bills.
[00:20:29] So, I mean, that's a really long winded answer Ray
[00:20:33] or a statement, I suppose
[00:20:35] because yeah, yeah, I constantly wonder
[00:20:42] what the hell freedom is in a sense.
[00:20:44] But that's from a parent's perspective too.
[00:20:47] I'm a little bit older than you now
[00:20:48] or I'm another generation older than you
[00:20:50] and I've had to switch gears to say,
[00:20:52] okay, I'm a parent now, what's all this mean?
[00:20:57] No, exactly.
[00:20:58] And the thing that I've come to realise
[00:21:02] over the last couple of weeks
[00:21:03] ever since I've moved away from all my friends
[00:21:06] and family to pursue this
[00:21:08] is that this is just another one of life's adventures.
[00:21:11] It's different than what I've been doing
[00:21:13] for the last four years,
[00:21:14] which is spending time with my dog,
[00:21:16] spending time out in the bush,
[00:21:17] on the trails with my friends,
[00:21:19] going on hikes, bikepacking, camping.
[00:21:22] Right, that was one adventure that lasted four years
[00:21:26] and now I am over here doing something completely different
[00:21:30] and of course, there's gonna be different limitations
[00:21:33] just like how there were obviously limitations back then.
[00:21:36] You can't make, well, I made no money doing that.
[00:21:39] Somebody like yourself makes money doing that
[00:21:40] but it's also a business.
[00:21:42] Somebody like Alistair Humphries makes money doing that
[00:21:45] but it requires work.
[00:21:48] Now I'm over here, I'm back in the education system
[00:21:51] but I'm away from home for the first time.
[00:21:54] I'm here, I'm making new friends,
[00:21:56] I'm in a completely new culture, a new society.
[00:21:58] I'm pretty far away from home
[00:22:00] and things are very different here
[00:22:02] but it's life's next adventure for me
[00:22:05] and I'm hoping that the next six years
[00:22:08] are going to trump the last four years
[00:22:10] and if that happens, I mean,
[00:22:12] if it even comes close to my experiences
[00:22:14] in the last four years, I would be thrilled
[00:22:17] and I imagine that-
[00:22:18] That's not, that's a good attitude.
[00:22:20] It's kind of like, yeah,
[00:22:21] it's always trumping the last experience
[00:22:23] so that's not bad, I don't mind that.
[00:22:25] I've always despised the statement trip of a lifetime.
[00:22:30] I've always thought that's,
[00:22:32] you know, when someone says that,
[00:22:33] they're kind of setting themself up for failure
[00:22:35] for the rest of their life
[00:22:36] or something that's underwhelming.
[00:22:37] I think, oh, why would you do that?
[00:22:39] I hope I never go on a trip of a lifetime
[00:22:41] because it means I can never go on a better one, you know?
[00:22:44] Right.
[00:22:45] It feels strange to say that
[00:22:46] and my question to you, Ray, is what's happened to your dog?
[00:22:49] Oh, it's with my parents.
[00:22:51] Yeah. Ah, you're a bummer.
[00:22:54] Yeah, it is a huge bummer.
[00:22:55] That's been the biggest drag the last year
[00:22:58] just sitting in the back of my head going,
[00:23:00] oh, I can't wait for that day to come
[00:23:01] where I have to say goodbye to the dog.
[00:23:04] And yeah, it makes me sad, but you know what?
[00:23:06] It is what it is.
[00:23:08] I gave my parents a tour
[00:23:10] of all the different trails in the area.
[00:23:12] So they've been taking her.
[00:23:14] So it's been keeping me at ease mentally going,
[00:23:16] okay, the dog is still happy, but yeah, that is a bummer.
[00:23:20] It is a tough one.
[00:23:22] That's cool.
[00:23:23] But I was gonna say, I imagine that,
[00:23:27] so I mean, I know that in a lot of your earlier videos
[00:23:30] dating back like eight, 10 years ago,
[00:23:32] you weren't married at the time
[00:23:35] and you didn't have any kids at the time
[00:23:37] as far as I can tell.
[00:23:39] And back then it must've,
[00:23:41] there must've been a completely different sense of freedom
[00:23:43] when you were doing the Horn of Africa
[00:23:46] via kayak and all that.
[00:23:48] Like the sense of freedom back then
[00:23:50] versus the, well, freedom and adventure back then
[00:23:53] must be completely different than the freedom and adventure
[00:23:56] that you feel now having a wife and a child.
[00:24:00] Yeah, absolutely.
[00:24:02] I mean, and they're the eras of our life
[00:24:03] and they change and shift
[00:24:05] and they change and shift for all the right reasons.
[00:24:07] In a sense, your body becomes different,
[00:24:10] your financial stability becomes different.
[00:24:13] You find that you,
[00:24:15] you know, you're putting,
[00:24:16] I was putting money into my superannuation,
[00:24:18] which is kind of like your retirement fund, you know?
[00:24:22] I found I was doing that to save tax
[00:24:26] and, you know, I would never have given that
[00:24:28] a second thought as a 20 year old, hell, you know?
[00:24:31] I still very much live by a hand to mouth mentality.
[00:24:35] I don't ensure my house or my car
[00:24:37] because if I smash up my car, then I'll suffer through it.
[00:24:41] If I smash someone else's car,
[00:24:43] I'm probably gonna regret it.
[00:24:44] But if my house burns to the ground,
[00:24:45] I'll build another one and I'll just make it work.
[00:24:49] I'm very much, I like to live and die by my own sword
[00:24:52] rather than the sort of things
[00:24:54] that are constricting us from the outside.
[00:24:57] Because fundamentally, I'm really happy
[00:24:59] with living with a bag of oats in a tent.
[00:25:02] But I can't do that anymore with a family.
[00:25:04] So, you know, I've had to go sideways
[00:25:06] and create a warm living space
[00:25:09] and make sure we have stability in terms of finances
[00:25:12] so our kids can go to school
[00:25:13] and do all those sorts of things.
[00:25:15] And I think that's cool, that's no worries.
[00:25:18] So my adventures and my outdoor life
[00:25:20] has shifted dramatically because of it.
[00:25:23] And don't you worry, I freaking know
[00:25:25] that I really do miss long range adventuring
[00:25:29] and the whimsical nature that I think I'm good at
[00:25:33] and I really like is going with the bloody wind blows,
[00:25:37] problem solving along the way and living via my body.
[00:25:41] I love it.
[00:25:42] And in fact, that is my theme,
[00:25:45] that is my real heartbeat.
[00:25:47] And the fact that I can make money out of it now
[00:25:49] is kind of remarkable, but it is work too,
[00:25:51] you mentioned that.
[00:25:53] But I would say that I am also a bit
[00:25:57] of a counterfeit character too, Ray.
[00:26:01] You know, coming up with backyard adventuring
[00:26:03] is very practical for me now
[00:26:04] because I can go away and have a day or two
[00:26:07] of adventure and toil and not eating properly
[00:26:10] and not sleeping enough
[00:26:11] and doing some cool sort of hard challenging things.
[00:26:16] And I love doing them in my backyard,
[00:26:19] but I'm also at an era now
[00:26:21] where I'm traveling a bloody lot.
[00:26:23] Since COVID, which I adored, I loved being locked down.
[00:26:26] It was brilliant.
[00:26:27] I loved the idea of living on my five acres
[00:26:29] and having this, you know, I'm doing this now
[00:26:32] from the top of my five acre block
[00:26:34] in a beautiful little building that I built during COVID.
[00:26:38] And I've happily, I didn't really leave the farm for a year
[00:26:41] and I could have done that for another five,
[00:26:43] bit like four years of experiencing out in the bush
[00:26:46] in the wilderness with your dog.
[00:26:48] But now I'm figuring I found that this,
[00:26:52] I found that I love this home life
[00:26:54] and now I'm getting good at telling stories on YouTube.
[00:26:57] So it's taking me all over the world again.
[00:26:59] And I'm thinking, gee,
[00:27:01] that doesn't sound very backyard adventury to me.
[00:27:04] And in terms of me saying,
[00:27:06] I just feel like I'm a bit of a bloody,
[00:27:10] I said counterfeit before,
[00:27:11] but I feel like I'm a little bit of a fraud
[00:27:14] in that I probably shouldn't.
[00:27:18] I'm about to go to Portugal to shoot a pilot
[00:27:20] for a major brand, a potential TV show.
[00:27:24] And it's all very exciting
[00:27:27] and I love the idea of it and it will be good.
[00:27:30] But it also takes me away from the very thing
[00:27:32] I think I've kind of stumbled upon,
[00:27:34] which is back here in front of me.
[00:27:36] And so I am at a real phase of life, Ray,
[00:27:39] where I don't think I've got the right answers
[00:27:41] and I'm not sure I'm making the best decisions
[00:27:43] but I'm still in a sort of feel out mode, you know.
[00:27:48] Well, if that's the case,
[00:27:50] and I mean, you would have to have some sort of baseline
[00:27:52] to reference that opinion.
[00:27:53] I mean, at what point in your life
[00:27:54] did you feel like you did have all the answers then
[00:27:57] and felt that you were making all the right decisions?
[00:28:02] That's a good question.
[00:28:03] I certainly don't have all the right answers,
[00:28:05] but if you really just sit yourself in a corner and say,
[00:28:10] okay, would I rather,
[00:28:15] for the same amount of money,
[00:28:17] get paid by someone else to do a TV series,
[00:28:21] five Ks down the road, you would probably do that,
[00:28:23] rather than go to Portugal to do it.
[00:28:26] Now, the thing is Portugal is very exciting.
[00:28:28] The idea of it excites me
[00:28:29] and going to these wonderful islands
[00:28:31] off the coast of Portugal.
[00:28:33] But I will be there not as Bo, doing Bo's thing.
[00:28:39] I will be there for a big company doing a company thing
[00:28:42] and I won't really experience the place.
[00:28:46] And so, in all honesty, I know the right answer,
[00:28:50] but I'm doing it because one, it's a bit experimental.
[00:28:54] We're not sure where it goes and it pays well.
[00:28:57] And I don't have an alternative TV show,
[00:28:59] five Ks down the road.
[00:29:01] Right.
[00:29:02] But I should probably push for that.
[00:29:04] I could probably say, all right, why don't we do that?
[00:29:08] Why don't I propose this to another brand here?
[00:29:12] I suppose it all boils down to,
[00:29:14] I'm still very opportunistic,
[00:29:16] but I still take on board things that I at heart know
[00:29:22] I wouldn't do under if I had to or not.
[00:29:30] Yeah, but yeah, you're right.
[00:29:34] I still don't know the answers and that's cool.
[00:29:36] Fair enough.
[00:29:38] I mean, so when I hear that,
[00:29:40] when you tell me, oh, I'm going to Portugal
[00:29:42] to shoot a pilot for a TV show,
[00:29:44] I think, oh, that's awesome.
[00:29:45] I wish I had that opportunity.
[00:29:47] But it sounds like, I mean,
[00:29:48] cause I know that you've tied yourself down
[00:29:50] to this title backyard adventurer
[00:29:53] and doing something like that obviously goes against that.
[00:29:57] Do you think that if you didn't give yourself that title
[00:30:00] that this mindset of yours wouldn't be mixed
[00:30:03] on doing something like that?
[00:30:06] Maybe, yeah.
[00:30:07] I was always a bit apprehensive
[00:30:08] of calling myself the backyard adventurer.
[00:30:11] Right.
[00:30:13] Rather than calling it an episode or an episodic book,
[00:30:17] you could say backyard adventuring
[00:30:19] or a backyard adventurer
[00:30:22] or a series of backyard adventures.
[00:30:25] But in many respects, my heartbeat
[00:30:28] and my soul is still very much backyard.
[00:30:30] Like when I go to Portugal,
[00:30:32] I will still be looking for backyard adventures to do
[00:30:35] as in I won't be paying someone a lot of money
[00:30:37] to take me up a mountain or a volcano.
[00:30:40] I wanna go and do that shit myself with a sandwich
[00:30:43] and without a guide and without a map.
[00:30:45] I wanna go and do those things.
[00:30:47] Essentially, when I go other places,
[00:30:50] I try and see the place like other folks might use them
[00:30:54] if they lived there,
[00:30:57] which is somewhat, that's contradictory too
[00:30:59] in some respects,
[00:31:00] but I always try and live a life
[00:31:03] or see things that the locals see
[00:31:07] or that the locals know so well
[00:31:09] that they don't see anymore, if that makes sense.
[00:31:12] I look around now and the beauty in my life,
[00:31:15] I don't often see as much as someone else
[00:31:17] who washes through the place.
[00:31:18] So I'm trying to find that middle ground when I do travel,
[00:31:21] but yeah, I'm trying not to badge myself either.
[00:31:25] Maybe I'm trying to wiggle out of the idea
[00:31:26] of the backyard adventurer,
[00:31:28] knowing that I just need counterpoints for that anyhow.
[00:31:33] Right.
[00:31:33] And I know that it's kind of funny
[00:31:35] and correct me if I'm wrong here,
[00:31:36] it's been a couple of years since I've read the book,
[00:31:38] but in the novel, you talk about all of your,
[00:31:43] I mean, basically for those who haven't read the book,
[00:31:46] it's essentially all of your films,
[00:31:48] but the expanded upon narrative
[00:31:50] that you get out of a book in book format.
[00:31:53] So if you're a watcher,
[00:31:55] if you're somebody out there who loves your YouTube page,
[00:31:58] you get the gist of what the book is about to a degree.
[00:32:00] It's just like an expanded edition.
[00:32:03] And I know that your adventures started
[00:32:07] with kayaking the brass straight,
[00:32:12] and then it eventually led you to the Horn of Africa.
[00:32:16] So I mean, to me,
[00:32:17] that doesn't sound like backyard adventuring at all.
[00:32:19] I mean, you can consider Australia your backyard,
[00:32:23] but I mean, Australia is a big place.
[00:32:26] Australia is massive.
[00:32:27] I mean, I wouldn't really consider where I am right now,
[00:32:31] five, six hours away from where I used to live,
[00:32:34] my backyard.
[00:32:35] I mean, it's all terms and definitions,
[00:32:37] but I mean, you're a worldly traveled guy.
[00:32:40] So I mean, you never even started as a backyard adventurer.
[00:32:43] That's something that sprung up during COVID.
[00:32:46] Yeah, and that's a really good point.
[00:32:48] And I might write about that actually,
[00:32:49] because an astronaut was a kid once
[00:32:55] that had a backyard,
[00:32:56] and then they go up and they can see Earth
[00:32:59] as a thing out of the window of a spacecraft
[00:33:02] or of a space station.
[00:33:04] Those remarkable viewpoints.
[00:33:05] So few people will really appreciate.
[00:33:09] And yet we kind of all get that now too.
[00:33:11] We have Google Earth and we do this
[00:33:13] in some sort of artificial interpretation.
[00:33:16] We all use global positioning systems now
[00:33:20] like they are,
[00:33:21] like it's so normal for us to see the world
[00:33:24] from a bird's eye perspective
[00:33:25] or from a space eye perspective.
[00:33:28] And so yeah, what is a bloody backyard?
[00:33:30] It's just, it's getting bigger.
[00:33:32] Globalization is here in full force.
[00:33:34] And so, yeah, it is remarkable
[00:33:37] that I can be as far away as possible,
[00:33:39] 15, 16,000 kilometers away,
[00:33:41] and I can be doing that.
[00:33:43] And I can be there within a day,
[00:33:46] in a different season,
[00:33:48] with the sun is in a different hemisphere.
[00:33:50] It is bloody remarkable.
[00:33:52] And yet you can go on and do things there
[00:33:55] in much the same capacity
[00:33:56] as you did from where you've come from.
[00:33:58] So yeah, I think you're right.
[00:34:00] I think what is a backyard,
[00:34:02] don't be constricted to it being,
[00:34:03] because I happen to have a five kilometer backyard here.
[00:34:06] A lot of people have no backyard
[00:34:07] or some people have,
[00:34:09] they live in Central Australia
[00:34:10] and they have a million acres
[00:34:12] and they have to catch a helicopter to school.
[00:34:15] So I like your thinking, Ray,
[00:34:18] I think the world is a backyard and embrace it.
[00:34:21] Exactly, well, you know what?
[00:34:22] When we ever evolve eventually
[00:34:25] into Frank Herbert's Dune
[00:34:27] and we're multi-planetary
[00:34:28] and Elon Musk runs everything,
[00:34:30] Earth will just be the backyard, so.
[00:34:33] Yeah, I hear you, mate.
[00:34:35] And I'm kind of,
[00:34:36] I'm gonna be one of those characters one day.
[00:34:37] I'm gonna hand so much money
[00:34:39] to just buy planets or moons
[00:34:41] or those sort of weird bloody crazy shit, isn't it?
[00:34:46] Yeah, no, I do like the idea.
[00:34:48] Steve Irwin, who was a great hero of mine,
[00:34:51] although kind of in hindsight,
[00:34:52] not necessarily when he was living,
[00:34:54] but I was a great fan of him once he died actually.
[00:34:58] And I looked really into who this character was
[00:35:00] who was larger than life.
[00:35:02] And that was his whole shtick.
[00:35:04] He earned his wealth and he's fortunate
[00:35:07] to buy great tracts of forest
[00:35:09] to just essentially lock it up for biodiversity.
[00:35:12] And I thought that was quite remarkable.
[00:35:17] And so, yeah, I hope to do something like that one day.
[00:35:20] I hope to make a national park one day
[00:35:22] or the equivalent of buy a big tract of broken down farm
[00:35:26] and ray forest at ray ecology,
[00:35:28] you know, rain set things that are long gone.
[00:35:32] I think that'd be really cool.
[00:35:35] Something that I would love to ask you about here.
[00:35:37] And I was gonna pull it up in my notes so I get it right.
[00:35:40] So, like I've said a few times,
[00:35:44] your origin in adventuring, it seems like,
[00:35:47] is via kayaking.
[00:35:50] And a couple of years ago, back in 2018, 2017, 2018,
[00:35:53] you did your PhD and you wrote this paper,
[00:35:56] this humongous, it's basically a book
[00:35:59] called The Secret Life of the Sea Kayaker.
[00:36:03] I haven't read it, but I know that it's like 336 pages.
[00:36:07] I'm looking at it for the first time in front of me here.
[00:36:11] How did that come about?
[00:36:12] I mean, how did you get involved in kayaking
[00:36:14] way back in the day?
[00:36:16] And then how did it eventually lead you
[00:36:18] to be so inspired to write your PhD about it?
[00:36:23] Well, expeditionary sea kayaking, long range form,
[00:36:26] like I was kind of dabbling into,
[00:36:29] you know, you do a trip over a hundred days
[00:36:31] and you kind of live it.
[00:36:33] I lived out of my kayak.
[00:36:34] Like people would live out of a bike
[00:36:37] like Alistair did when he rode around the world.
[00:36:39] Or when people sail across the Atlantic,
[00:36:41] they live out of their boat.
[00:36:42] I kind of did the same out of two hatches in a kayak.
[00:36:45] And it was remarkable life.
[00:36:47] It was a hard life though, it was really hard.
[00:36:49] And I've done lots of other trips since, not as long.
[00:36:53] But I do, there's very few people doing it like that.
[00:36:56] You know, there might be a thousand people in the world
[00:36:58] that have done trips of that nature.
[00:37:00] And so it's an untapped kind of form of knowledge
[00:37:04] in a sense, expeditionary sea kayaking.
[00:37:07] And one of the ironies of long range life like that
[00:37:10] is often people don't write about it
[00:37:12] because that's exactly why they do it.
[00:37:13] So they don't have to tell anyone about it.
[00:37:15] They don't have to represent it.
[00:37:17] It's their own incredible journey, right?
[00:37:20] And so I thought, all right,
[00:37:23] there's nothing really in the knowledge space
[00:37:25] about this at a educational level.
[00:37:28] And so I thought, whenever you write a PhD,
[00:37:31] you have to find a gap in the knowledge.
[00:37:33] And so that's what I did.
[00:37:34] I thought, I'll try and give
[00:37:35] a really good lived experience account
[00:37:37] of expeditionary sea kayaking.
[00:37:40] And as someone who's very interested in reflection
[00:37:44] and the lived experience and storytelling,
[00:37:46] I'll combine all these things and wrap it up into a PhD.
[00:37:49] And look, I've probably enjoyed 80% of it, right?
[00:37:53] The other 20% was hard graft, getting it across the line.
[00:37:56] And those final six months of a PhD is really hard
[00:37:59] to bring all of these,
[00:38:01] because to write a PhD for anyone who's ever done it,
[00:38:04] they know well, the truth.
[00:38:04] You've got to go really wide.
[00:38:06] You've got to read extensively.
[00:38:08] You've got to, and you're constantly looking
[00:38:12] for kernels of insight that could potentially
[00:38:16] be exploded into something worth saying.
[00:38:19] And so you're doing all this,
[00:38:20] and you're making all of this sort of a firecrack
[00:38:23] a few years where everything is exploding
[00:38:25] and you're listening to all this stuff
[00:38:26] that's going on around you,
[00:38:27] but you have to pick the sound
[00:38:29] that you want to explore more and stay with it.
[00:38:32] And that point, when you find that last thing,
[00:38:36] then you have to finish that idea process off
[00:38:39] and you've got to do it well.
[00:38:41] Otherwise you're going to get your ass kicked
[00:38:42] by examiners and panelists.
[00:38:45] But fundamentally it was about showing the reader
[00:38:51] that sea kayaking is a really different form
[00:38:54] of day-to-day life,
[00:38:55] and yet it shares similarities of course
[00:38:58] with other forms of life.
[00:39:00] But it really is this hybrid form of land and sea.
[00:39:04] Sailors don't really have it
[00:39:06] because sailors are one or the other.
[00:39:08] They go out to sea for 20 or 30 days
[00:39:10] and then they come back to land.
[00:39:11] This one is, I was just, you go out to sea each day,
[00:39:15] then you come, your workplace is via your body
[00:39:17] and via a craft.
[00:39:19] You can see land most of the time.
[00:39:23] Yeah, and look, drawing parallels,
[00:39:25] but what's the point of doing all this?
[00:39:27] Why did we do any of this sort of stuff
[00:39:29] in an educational setting?
[00:39:30] I was trying to come up with some implications
[00:39:33] for school programs that might use sea kayaking
[00:39:35] or adventurers that go and do this stuff
[00:39:38] and is it just one of the other big selfish acts
[00:39:41] that adventurers do and potentially kill themselves?
[00:39:43] All those sorts of big questions came through.
[00:39:48] I was speaking with Sean Conway a couple of weeks ago,
[00:39:51] and he just finished last year his big 105 Iron Mans
[00:39:56] where he did his run, bike, swim for the Iron Man distance
[00:40:00] every day for 105 consecutive days.
[00:40:03] And he also just finished writing his book all about that.
[00:40:05] And he said to me during that interview
[00:40:08] that the book was equally, if not more difficult
[00:40:13] than the actual writing itself.
[00:40:15] And I was working with a few people
[00:40:16] who have said the same thing.
[00:40:19] Just a quick shout out to Chris Lee,
[00:40:21] who's also been on his podcast.
[00:40:22] He did a huge bike trip from Vancouver
[00:40:25] all the way to Nova Scotia here in Canada.
[00:40:29] And it took him six or seven years, I believe,
[00:40:32] to write his novel about that trip.
[00:40:35] And it always amazes me how creative writing
[00:40:38] is just such a impossibly difficult task for everybody.
[00:40:44] Even people like Stephen King
[00:40:45] who write every single day 2,000 plus words.
[00:40:48] It is something that definitely drains you,
[00:40:50] but it's incredibly rewarding.
[00:40:53] And in an instance, like a PhD,
[00:40:57] I mean, you must just, at the end of it,
[00:40:59] I know that in the film about it,
[00:41:01] in episode six of that Horn Around Africa trip
[00:41:06] documentary series,
[00:41:07] you said that at the end, when you finished the trip,
[00:41:10] when you finished the documentary,
[00:41:11] when you finished the PhD,
[00:41:13] there was this empty void that you felt having completed it.
[00:41:18] Like you've just shut the door
[00:41:20] on this humongous chapter of your life.
[00:41:22] So, I mean, what would you say
[00:41:24] were the things that you took away
[00:41:26] from all those experiences
[00:41:27] and then closing the door on that chapter of your life?
[00:41:33] Yeah, it's funny.
[00:41:36] It's less so, yeah, that was very real.
[00:41:39] And that once you come,
[00:41:40] more so when you finish a trip,
[00:41:43] less so when you finish a book about it
[00:41:45] or a film about it.
[00:41:47] Whenever I've finished a, you know,
[00:41:49] my second book's getting close to being finished
[00:41:52] about Bad River, which is a series on YouTube too.
[00:41:56] That plus PhD, my book and any article I've ever written
[00:42:00] or once those things come full circle
[00:42:03] and they get published or they go up online,
[00:42:07] I don't feel some sort of vacuous loss in life.
[00:42:11] It's, you know, you've mourned it for the last six months,
[00:42:14] whatever it might be,
[00:42:15] they're ready to be done and walk away with.
[00:42:18] What you do miss though is the experience itself.
[00:42:22] So, you know, finishing Bass Strait
[00:42:24] or finishing the African trip
[00:42:26] or, you know, at the end of a long run over the mountains,
[00:42:30] the day or two afterwards feels completely
[00:42:33] and utterly abstract and strange
[00:42:37] that you have a running tap and a kettle next to you
[00:42:39] and you're sitting in a seat, a comfortable seat,
[00:42:43] you have fresh clothes on, all those sorts of things.
[00:42:45] Everything feels very new and yet very,
[00:42:49] it doesn't feel like it has much meaning
[00:42:51] because you've stopped this thing that had great meaning.
[00:42:55] So, yeah, my representation acts now,
[00:42:58] which is my whole life, two to 300 days a year,
[00:43:02] I'm creating things in the aftermath.
[00:43:06] So what I miss in that reflective process is the doing.
[00:43:11] I do really miss doing more,
[00:43:14] but I just can't do more at the moment
[00:43:16] if I'm trying to make it life
[00:43:17] and I'm being a parent, et cetera, et cetera.
[00:43:20] The one thing I've filled that void with, Ray,
[00:43:22] is running, so at the moment I'm running more
[00:43:24] than I ever have before,
[00:43:26] eight to 12 hours a week of quite heavy training,
[00:43:29] you know, where I'm really pumping it
[00:43:30] and I'm not just being opportunistic about running,
[00:43:32] I'm doing it for a cause or a purpose.
[00:43:35] So I'm trying to reinsert
[00:43:37] that sort of daily purpose in my physicality
[00:43:40] and it doesn't really fit the bill of just winging it,
[00:43:44] which I love a lot more by nature,
[00:43:46] but it's something and it's sort of functional
[00:43:49] for being a parent.
[00:43:51] So as somebody who looks at your films
[00:43:54] and everything that you do from the outside,
[00:43:57] and I've been following you for years
[00:43:58] and I've literally watched all of them
[00:44:01] in chronological order as they've come up
[00:44:03] throughout the last decade or so.
[00:44:05] And something that I've realized is at the beginning,
[00:44:09] it was very much like a BBC documentary,
[00:44:12] like you could feel that it was very documentary,
[00:44:16] that there was a clear path to what you were trying to do,
[00:44:20] there was a clear story,
[00:44:21] it was a little bit more clear cut.
[00:44:23] But nowadays, as things have evolved over time,
[00:44:28] it's more of just like these joyful, loose,
[00:44:32] exciting films that are more tight
[00:44:35] in their narrative structure.
[00:44:37] And they don't need six episodes to tell.
[00:44:39] And not that there's anything wrong with that, of course.
[00:44:41] I mean, some stories do demand more video,
[00:44:44] but a lot of your films just for example,
[00:44:48] like some of your most popular things out there
[00:44:50] are like sub 20 minutes, sub 30 minutes.
[00:44:53] Like you're a running a marathon,
[00:44:56] the video that almost has 5 million views on YouTube,
[00:44:59] that video is only 17 minutes and it's very clear cut.
[00:45:03] You run a mile an hour for 24 hours
[00:45:05] and then you do these little odd jobs in between.
[00:45:08] It seems like back like both miles 10 years ago,
[00:45:12] you were documenting adventures
[00:45:14] that you were just happened to go on.
[00:45:16] And nowadays you're trying to create adventures
[00:45:19] that can be turned into fun films.
[00:45:23] Yeah, absolutely.
[00:45:25] I've learnt in the last sort of five or six years
[00:45:28] that the best way for me to tell stories
[00:45:30] is to be positive with them and have fun with them.
[00:45:34] Big, large, scale expeditions.
[00:45:35] One, I can't do them right now as a family man.
[00:45:39] But two, they're not often the funnest of trips either.
[00:45:41] They're just a lot of bloody hard work.
[00:45:44] I've yet to ever watch an Everest expedition film
[00:45:47] that is fun.
[00:45:49] And that I'm smiling or laughing
[00:45:52] as much as I'm biting my fingernails.
[00:45:54] So I don't wanna do biting my fingernail trips anymore
[00:45:59] because I don't wanna live that life.
[00:46:03] I wanna, I actually think too
[00:46:05] that a lot of adventurous can take themself,
[00:46:08] should take themself a lot less seriously
[00:46:09] and probably have more fun.
[00:46:12] And probably not necessarily do shit that's death defying.
[00:46:16] I don't think that risking your life is worth it at all either.
[00:46:21] So yeah, but my filmmaking has definitely changed
[00:46:24] in that I'm no longer a filmmaker.
[00:46:26] So yes, I started out as a,
[00:46:28] I would call myself a documentary maker.
[00:46:31] And you can probably see that in the way
[00:46:32] I still shoot things, but I'm also a collaborator now.
[00:46:35] So Mitch Drummond, who was my student at university
[00:46:39] and he's now my business partner
[00:46:41] and he does most of shooting when it's not me myself.
[00:46:44] He's a great shooter.
[00:46:46] He's a great editor,
[00:46:47] but he's a very different storyteller.
[00:46:49] And while we share the same sympathies,
[00:46:51] he's a different generation to me.
[00:46:54] He wants things neater, tighter, shorter
[00:46:57] and made for multimedia.
[00:47:00] Whereas I didn't give a shit for that when I started out.
[00:47:02] I just wanted to create big long winded adventures.
[00:47:07] And if I had fun, great.
[00:47:08] If I didn't have fun, doesn't matter.
[00:47:10] And I wanted to show cultures of life
[00:47:13] and different things in the world.
[00:47:15] And I don't have as much time to do that anymore
[00:47:18] which is a real great shame.
[00:47:19] But yeah, that's the evolution
[00:47:21] from documentary to YouTuber.
[00:47:23] They're very different beasts.
[00:47:25] No, exactly.
[00:47:27] Something that I catch myself doing
[00:47:30] and I have to stop myself
[00:47:31] with my little 300 subscribers on YouTube
[00:47:34] is not taking it seriously at all.
[00:47:37] I mean, when I began this podcast,
[00:47:39] it was just something that I 100% wanted to do for myself
[00:47:42] and it still is.
[00:47:43] If nobody tuned in, if I didn't even publish it,
[00:47:45] I don't care.
[00:47:47] Like these conversations,
[00:47:48] my goal and objective with all of them
[00:47:51] is just to hang out with somebody who's like-minded
[00:47:54] and talk to them and be inspired by the conversation
[00:47:57] and all that good stuff.
[00:47:59] And so when I'm telling my friends
[00:48:02] and my family's sending me messages
[00:48:04] and I'm getting comments from people who watch the episodes
[00:48:07] and go, oh man, this is fantastic, this is great stuff.
[00:48:10] I need to just be like, that's phenomenal
[00:48:13] but it's not for them, right?
[00:48:16] I mean, this is something that, what's his name?
[00:48:18] Rick Rubin talks about quite significantly
[00:48:20] in a lot of his work.
[00:48:22] He constantly says the job of an artist
[00:48:26] is not to create anything for anybody else
[00:48:28] except for themselves.
[00:48:30] And so when you go into a creative project,
[00:48:32] you can't sit there and be like,
[00:48:34] oh, I hope people will like this.
[00:48:36] And sometimes I need to catch myself
[00:48:38] during these conversations
[00:48:39] and I am thinking to myself,
[00:48:41] oh, I hope people will like this.
[00:48:43] No, it's like, I hope I like this
[00:48:44] when I hit end call at the end, so.
[00:48:48] Yeah, I get where you're coming from
[00:48:49] but I must admit I totally disagree with Rick Rubin.
[00:48:52] I've heard that statement before
[00:48:54] about I completely and utterly make films for others.
[00:48:58] Okay.
[00:48:59] Absolutely.
[00:49:00] If I had the choice to not make a film
[00:49:03] or make a film, I would not make a film.
[00:49:05] I would go running or I'd go bike riding or fishing
[00:49:08] or for a trip with my daughter
[00:49:09] and I would not film it.
[00:49:10] I would simply just be.
[00:49:12] But I'm using it as a mechanism to make money
[00:49:15] and to make stories because I like that too.
[00:49:18] I like it, but I don't love it.
[00:49:20] And there's an important thing there.
[00:49:23] For an artist to make something that is just for themselves
[00:49:28] and they're not then contributing to another person's joy
[00:49:31] or another person's inspiration
[00:49:34] and not that you have to set out to inspire someone
[00:49:36] but to create something of art
[00:49:39] or a book or a film that is not compatible to other people
[00:49:43] I think is an absolute waste of time.
[00:49:46] And I say that with great humility
[00:49:48] because I totally get what you're saying as well
[00:49:52] because I think the best artists
[00:49:54] still do things for themselves.
[00:49:55] But I think thinking about an audience
[00:49:58] is absolutely important.
[00:50:02] And I say this mostly because my father is an artist.
[00:50:06] He's a landscape artist
[00:50:08] and he's painted his whole life
[00:50:10] and he is always painted for himself
[00:50:13] but he is always painted to sell
[00:50:15] and you can do both.
[00:50:19] Because fundamentally when you get me on your show
[00:50:22] I don't wanna just be a great conversationalist with you.
[00:50:25] I wanna be beamed to as many earbuds as possible, right?
[00:50:30] So we have to do our job right
[00:50:32] to make our conversation interesting enough
[00:50:36] that it's not just for 12 people.
[00:50:39] And if you continue to do a better job at your conversation
[00:50:42] that 12 turns to 20 and 20 turns to 100, so on and so forth.
[00:50:46] I think that's very healthy.
[00:50:48] It's a competitive commercial way of thinking of art
[00:50:52] but I think we all need to bloody earn money.
[00:50:55] So Rick Rubin, if you create art your whole life
[00:50:58] and you're the only one that ever likes it
[00:51:00] how the hell do you make money?
[00:51:03] How do you eat?
[00:51:04] Do you swap your art for one person that likes your art
[00:51:07] and you get bread for the rest?
[00:51:08] Well, okay, that's cool, that's no worries
[00:51:10] but I imagine it's never that simple.
[00:51:14] So yeah, go back to the Bob Dylan thing
[00:51:18] we're always a slave to someone, anyone, right?
[00:51:20] So as long as we know where these transactions are going
[00:51:22] and I think that's all fair and war.
[00:51:26] No, I do understand that point.
[00:51:29] And this could just be me being young
[00:51:31] and naive with no experience
[00:51:33] but I think I somewhat disagree.
[00:51:37] Like I understand where you're coming from with that
[00:51:39] and I don't mean to turn this into a debate
[00:51:41] but this is a tricky conversation
[00:51:46] or this is a tricky avenue to go.
[00:51:48] And I sitting here with six months of experience
[00:51:51] versus you with a decade of experience
[00:51:53] this is gonna sound maybe ridiculous
[00:51:55] but I mean, the mindset that Rick Rubin comes from
[00:52:00] is one where as you sit down to produce the music
[00:52:04] or you sit down to host the conversation
[00:52:05] or sit down to film the adventure
[00:52:08] in that moment, right?
[00:52:10] You can't think about what other people will think
[00:52:14] of what it is that you're doing, right?
[00:52:16] You need to create something fundamentally
[00:52:17] that comes from the soul,
[00:52:19] comes from something that you truly believe
[00:52:21] is wholly unique to yourself.
[00:52:23] And the second you begin to picture
[00:52:26] what other people will interpret from your art,
[00:52:30] it's the same moment that you also will produce
[00:52:32] what everyone else is producing, right?
[00:52:34] Because then there's outside influence.
[00:52:36] If you are just locked in and dialed
[00:52:37] and you're sitting in your little shed
[00:52:38] at your editing station
[00:52:40] and I'm sitting here having this conversation,
[00:52:42] there's nobody feeding me, oh, tell him this,
[00:52:45] ask him this question, say this
[00:52:47] because that's what we wanna hear, right?
[00:52:51] It no longer is unique at that point
[00:52:53] because it's just what everybody wants to hear.
[00:52:56] Do you see what I'm trying to say?
[00:52:58] Totally, yeah.
[00:52:58] I mean, that has merit to the point though
[00:53:01] where social construction experts would say,
[00:53:06] I mean, you never, you're always influenced by others, right?
[00:53:10] So sitting in a vacuum dust doesn't exist.
[00:53:12] And so you might have pure thoughts
[00:53:15] of what your art looks and feels like
[00:53:17] and the song might, you know,
[00:53:19] and you think like you're coming up
[00:53:20] with all this stuff yourself,
[00:53:21] but you are, every ounce of you is constructed
[00:53:24] by the stuff around you.
[00:53:26] And yeah, your genetics and biology
[00:53:28] has got a lot to do with it too,
[00:53:29] but we mirror what is around us,
[00:53:32] whether we like it or not
[00:53:33] or whether we think about that or not.
[00:53:35] I suppose what Rick's talking about
[00:53:37] and what you're talking about
[00:53:38] is just the lack of pressure
[00:53:41] to produce something of a particular type.
[00:53:43] And that's wonderful, right?
[00:53:45] And that's all you need to think.
[00:53:46] You just need to think,
[00:53:48] what gives me the greatest freedom in my creativity
[00:53:51] and I'm gonna do that.
[00:53:52] And that's really good, that's healthy.
[00:53:55] I totally get that, no worries.
[00:53:58] But fundamentally, if you're gonna be successful
[00:54:01] at what you do,
[00:54:02] you still need to tap into
[00:54:03] what other people might be interested in.
[00:54:05] And whether you do that subconsciously or not,
[00:54:07] that's your choice.
[00:54:08] But the best YouTubers in the world
[00:54:11] aren't the best storytellers.
[00:54:13] They're the best at figuring out
[00:54:14] what people might be interested in.
[00:54:17] And why not have your cake and eat it too?
[00:54:20] Why not create an artistic something
[00:54:26] where you can feel like you've got freedoms,
[00:54:28] but on the other hand,
[00:54:29] you are really thinking about
[00:54:31] who might listen or see or hear
[00:54:34] whatever it is you're doing
[00:54:36] because you need them.
[00:54:37] And it is greatly respectful
[00:54:40] when you know you need them.
[00:54:42] And you need other people to
[00:54:44] buy into what you've just done or seen
[00:54:47] because I think that's empowering too.
[00:54:50] No, I, there you go.
[00:54:52] I do 100% agree with that.
[00:54:53] That is a phenomenal point.
[00:54:56] Yeah, so, you know,
[00:55:00] when you send an email out to potential,
[00:55:02] have you had Jimmy Chin on the show yet?
[00:55:05] No, not yet.
[00:55:06] Maybe one minute.
[00:55:07] So Jimmy will come on your show,
[00:55:08] I imagine, when you get big enough, right?
[00:55:11] So you need to create an audience
[00:55:13] that knows you're good at your craft
[00:55:15] before Jimmy or his PR agent will say,
[00:55:18] you know what, Ray's really good at what he does.
[00:55:21] Ray's got an audience of X.
[00:55:24] So that's very important.
[00:55:26] You know, Jimmy Chin, he gets 100 emails a day
[00:55:29] from people wanting to interview him.
[00:55:30] So how does he choose from those things?
[00:55:32] And in the raw, horrible mechanics of things,
[00:55:35] he's gonna go to people who have an audience
[00:55:39] based on them having an X amount of flavor
[00:55:42] or whatever it might be.
[00:55:43] Now, you know, you might be better
[00:55:46] than half of the people that send him an email,
[00:55:49] but that's just where he's gonna go to
[00:55:51] because that's the default of how bloody
[00:55:53] the hierarchy of stuff works, rightly or wrongly.
[00:55:58] And a lot of the time it is, you know,
[00:56:00] in some respects it does mean something.
[00:56:01] So I suppose that's the cruelty of creativity too.
[00:56:08] Well, exactly, especially modern day creativity
[00:56:11] where everything is a numbers game, it seems like.
[00:56:13] Yeah, yeah, oh yeah, YouTube is vicious.
[00:56:17] But if I, you know, so me being on YouTube,
[00:56:20] the platform, right, I could not be just a pure artist.
[00:56:23] I don't think, and I think you're right.
[00:56:25] I think there are a lot of pure artists on YouTube
[00:56:29] that they do something that's so unique to themself
[00:56:31] and so quirky and they're so great at it,
[00:56:33] but they're also the lucky ones and they're so few.
[00:56:37] You know, think of how many artists
[00:56:38] become Taylor Swift's very few.
[00:56:40] And yet, so there's a lot of people
[00:56:42] that are as good at music as Taylor Swift.
[00:56:44] So, you know, I can only exist on YouTube
[00:56:48] if I try and be the best form of that in YouTube land.
[00:56:53] So to me, that means trying to broaden my demographic
[00:56:58] or broaden the way I tell stories
[00:56:59] so I can increase those numbers
[00:57:01] because staying in my lane,
[00:57:03] I'm basically just gonna appeal to outdoor types
[00:57:05] that don't like showering, you know?
[00:57:07] And so I'm just, I'm narrowing it down a bit more.
[00:57:10] So I need to expand my thinking.
[00:57:13] That is true.
[00:57:15] Do you know who Steve Wallace is?
[00:57:17] No.
[00:57:18] No?
[00:57:19] He, so he's somebody on YouTube similar to yourself
[00:57:22] where he does all these crazy stealth camps,
[00:57:25] all these wild camps and he has like one point
[00:57:27] some million subscribers.
[00:57:29] And he's somebody that I look at,
[00:57:32] I look at his videos where it's just him and his camera
[00:57:35] camping in some bush beside a police station
[00:57:37] or something crazy.
[00:57:38] And you can tell immediately
[00:57:39] that he decided to do that a couple of days ago,
[00:57:43] got some camping equipment from Canadian Tire,
[00:57:46] which is sort of our outdoor thing here in Canada.
[00:57:48] He's a Canadian.
[00:57:49] And he just went into the bush,
[00:57:51] filmed this thing and then threw it, put it on YouTube.
[00:57:54] And there's a few channels like that
[00:57:55] where you can tell that it's super low budget.
[00:57:59] They're just filming on their phone
[00:58:00] and it's done cheaply and it's done with no script
[00:58:04] or anything like that.
[00:58:04] And these people have great followings.
[00:58:06] And so, I mean, there is, again, this is YouTube.
[00:58:10] This is the modern day creative era.
[00:58:12] I mean, you yourself are obviously not in that category.
[00:58:16] You have this, you have a few people,
[00:58:18] you have a script to an extent,
[00:58:19] like you have plans and ideas and drones and GoPros
[00:58:23] and $5,000 cameras and everything else.
[00:58:26] So, I mean, I guess it just depends on the individual
[00:58:28] and what they hope to get out of it.
[00:58:30] I mean, are they doing it because it's their livelihood?
[00:58:32] And in that case, yes.
[00:58:34] You definitely do need to take it
[00:58:35] a little bit more seriously, but,
[00:58:37] or is it just your hobby, right?
[00:58:39] Cause this is not my livelihood.
[00:58:41] And I do of course appreciate and respect and enjoy
[00:58:45] when people send me messages and say,
[00:58:46] hey, that was a great conversation.
[00:58:48] But the podcast at this moment for me
[00:58:51] is not my number one priority.
[00:58:52] My number one priority is holding the expectations
[00:58:56] of my grandparents and my family to do well in school.
[00:59:00] So I guess it just comes down to where your priorities are.
[00:59:04] Yeah, yeah, well said, mate.
[00:59:07] Yeah, and good only for doing it too.
[00:59:10] Everyone needs things that,
[00:59:13] I suck at giving advice and I don't like doing it really,
[00:59:15] but I heard this from someone else.
[00:59:17] I forget who it was, but it was a really nice quote
[00:59:21] that I'm lucky enough to do what I'm sort of good at.
[00:59:25] And even that, I say that with a half fingers crossed
[00:59:30] because I still think I've got a lot to learn
[00:59:32] in my space of writing and storytelling
[00:59:34] and talking and whatever it might be.
[00:59:36] But I'm relatively good at what I do
[00:59:39] to earn enough money out of it, I think.
[00:59:41] But I don't love it.
[00:59:42] And I think that's really important.
[00:59:44] I think doing what you're good at
[00:59:45] and not necessarily what you love.
[00:59:47] If I did what I love,
[00:59:49] all I'd do is tinker in the barn all day
[00:59:51] and go for runs and make bread.
[00:59:53] And I'd probably have three friends and that was it.
[00:59:56] I'd keep things far simpler
[00:59:58] and I wouldn't be this sort of social media
[01:00:02] beast that I'm trying to become,
[01:00:04] whatever it might be.
[01:00:05] But that's healthy.
[01:00:07] I think having those side projects that you're good at
[01:00:10] or rather the side things that you do that you love
[01:00:13] and then your day job is what you're good at.
[01:00:15] I think that's a good combo.
[01:00:17] Wonderful.
[01:00:18] Well, I think that is a phenomenal note to end on,
[01:00:21] a good positive high note.
[01:00:23] The last thing that I would love to ask you about though,
[01:00:25] just because I did write a couple of things down,
[01:00:29] is your new book.
[01:00:30] So you promoted it just a little bit the other day
[01:00:33] on social media all about this trip of yours down the,
[01:00:37] it's Australia's dirtiest river, right?
[01:00:39] Yeah, so the series is about,
[01:00:42] there's four rivers in Australia I picked.
[01:00:44] They're all really distinctly different.
[01:00:46] One's the worst urban river,
[01:00:48] almost polluted urban river.
[01:00:49] One's the most ecologically dead river from mining.
[01:00:53] One is the oldest river that is under pressure
[01:00:56] from something like climate change.
[01:00:57] And then the other one is our biggest river in Australia,
[01:00:59] which has just got all of the calamity and problems.
[01:01:02] And yeah, it's a film series on YouTube.
[01:01:04] Two of the four episodes are out so far
[01:01:07] and I've done the first draft of the book
[01:01:09] and now whittling through the second draft of the book,
[01:01:12] which should be out early to mid next year, Bad River.
[01:01:15] Super exciting stuff.
[01:01:16] And the book at the moment, Ray, is crap.
[01:01:20] It's got some glimmers of hope in there
[01:01:23] and I've got to hold on to those glimmers of hope
[01:01:25] and expand on them.
[01:01:27] So my job at the moment is to make four out of 10 writing
[01:01:31] into seven out of 10 writing
[01:01:33] and then it'll go through another phase of editing.
[01:01:35] But yeah, I'm in the writing phase at the moment.
[01:01:38] Oh, that's awesome.
[01:01:39] Yeah, those films were fantastic.
[01:01:41] And I know that those were done,
[01:01:42] that was done during the pandemic too, right?
[01:01:44] Yeah, yeah, amazingly.
[01:01:46] We were able to do it around lockdowns
[01:01:47] because Victoria, where I live in Australia down South,
[01:01:51] we were the, I think we're the most,
[01:01:52] our claim to fame is we were the most lockdown city
[01:01:54] in the world.
[01:01:55] Melbourne was crazy.
[01:01:57] They had hundreds of days where they couldn't,
[01:02:00] well, they couldn't leave the house.
[01:02:01] They could go for exercise for a certain amount of time
[01:02:03] in a 5K radius or some such.
[01:02:06] I'm out here on the farm.
[01:02:07] So I didn't really apply to us as much.
[01:02:09] I'd just go into the bush and disappear.
[01:02:11] But yeah, it was a strange time to create films.
[01:02:18] The last thing that I would love to ask you about,
[01:02:20] just because this popped into my mind the other day
[01:02:22] and I can't let you go without asking this.
[01:02:26] So I was sitting in class,
[01:02:27] one of these classes that I have and of course,
[01:02:30] so I'm 25, everyone else there is 17, 18, 19.
[01:02:34] So there's a little bit of a,
[01:02:35] there's a small generation gap,
[01:02:36] but there's a gap nonetheless.
[01:02:40] And the teacher was asking these questions to us
[01:02:44] and waiting for us to respond and it was just dead silent.
[01:02:47] And in my head, I was like, oh man, this is painful.
[01:02:50] This is painful because the teacher wants engagement.
[01:02:53] So I put my hand up, answer the question
[01:02:55] and it's like, okay, that felt kind of like a good relief.
[01:02:59] Good side, yeah, you helped them out there.
[01:03:01] Exactly, you could tell.
[01:03:02] Oh, the teacher was like, oh yes, yes.
[01:03:05] And I'm curious.
[01:03:07] I mean, you do all these shows all over the world now.
[01:03:09] You just finished a little tour around Australia
[01:03:13] with the modern day audience being what it is.
[01:03:16] I don't know what your demographic is
[01:03:18] at these shows necessarily,
[01:03:19] but just based off of my experience
[01:03:21] from modern day auditoriums,
[01:03:23] what is that experience like?
[01:03:25] Do you find it fun and engaging?
[01:03:27] And is it dynamic or I mean,
[01:03:29] what's the modern audience to you in your opinion?
[01:03:32] Yeah, well, it is super fun.
[01:03:34] It really is.
[01:03:35] And it's still challenging.
[01:03:37] I go out and do a five to 10 minute opening set
[01:03:40] and I never have notes, it's all what I construct.
[01:03:44] And I really like that really raw.
[01:03:47] It's kind of a touch stand up, a touch Q and A,
[01:03:52] statement orientated based on the behind the scenes
[01:03:57] of the documentaries or the films that I'm showing.
[01:03:59] It's bloody brilliant.
[01:04:00] It's a really good format.
[01:04:01] I would still rather be out running in the bush,
[01:04:04] but it is a very good feeling.
[01:04:06] And when you have a big crowd,
[01:04:08] so I ended in Melbourne a few weeks ago
[01:04:10] and there was a thousand people that came to that show,
[01:04:13] packed to the gunnels.
[01:04:14] They're all having beers and wine and they are vibing.
[01:04:17] It's a Friday night in Melbourne
[01:04:18] and they're kind of my people.
[01:04:20] They're there for a good time
[01:04:24] and they wanna hear some insights
[01:04:25] and they wanna be surprised.
[01:04:27] And I try and deliver that with stuff
[01:04:30] that I've never thought before, stuff that's edgy
[01:04:33] and it's a real rush.
[01:04:34] It's really good fun.
[01:04:35] So I'll do a European show,
[01:04:37] European tour and UK tour next year.
[01:04:40] We're gearing up towards that now,
[01:04:41] but I suppose to answer your question,
[01:04:43] it's a really good compliment to filmmaking
[01:04:47] if you're up for that kind of thing
[01:04:49] because I'm not as successful on YouTube
[01:04:51] as I need to be to earn money for a small team,
[01:04:54] this fills in the gaps.
[01:04:56] You can go on tour and earn money in between
[01:04:59] showing the films before they go on YouTube.
[01:05:01] And it's really the only thing that's saving me
[01:05:05] from quitting YouTube at the moment is the tours.
[01:05:08] Yeah, so it's serving a purpose of financial windfalls
[01:05:15] as well as being a genuinely good concept
[01:05:18] and a good show.
[01:05:19] And I'm surprised more YouTubers don't do it.
[01:05:23] I don't mean to keep pushing this along,
[01:05:24] but do you mind if I ask you about that?
[01:05:26] I mean, the fact that the audience at these tours
[01:05:29] keeps you making films on YouTube,
[01:05:31] I mean, why is that?
[01:05:33] It's kind of funny.
[01:05:35] I know that books sort of almost died 20 years ago
[01:05:38] and so did live music when the internet took off.
[01:05:42] And it's kind of nice to think that live audiences,
[01:05:46] there's only more humans on the world
[01:05:49] and yet I think the more we can make more reality,
[01:05:52] more live shows, the better.
[01:05:54] Taylor Swift just earned one and a half billion dollars
[01:05:56] touring the world,
[01:05:58] which is more than what our album is worth.
[01:06:02] People orientation is really good.
[01:06:06] And so it's sort of almost,
[01:06:08] it's not exploiting that as an idea,
[01:06:10] but it kind of is too.
[01:06:11] That's what rock stars have done for a long time
[01:06:13] that they know how powerful a live experience can be
[01:06:16] if it's done well.
[01:06:17] And so I just wanna do that well.
[01:06:21] And it's a bit quirky.
[01:06:22] People turn up, they don't know what films
[01:06:24] they're gonna show to be shown,
[01:06:25] what state the films are in,
[01:06:27] none of them are finished.
[01:06:28] And what I'm gonna say
[01:06:29] or what kind of form I'm gonna be in.
[01:06:31] So it's all very unknown to them.
[01:06:33] And yet it's a bit more of a polished show than that
[01:06:36] from our end, but yeah, it's good fun
[01:06:38] and it really does just help supplement the YouTube income
[01:06:41] which is not enough for a team of three or four.
[01:06:46] Fair enough.
[01:06:48] Well, Beau, thank you so much.
[01:06:49] I've been looking forward to this conversation
[01:06:52] for basically 10 months
[01:06:54] and I appreciate you finding a little bit of time
[01:06:56] to sit down with me this morning.
[01:06:59] It's nighttime here though.
[01:07:00] And yeah, it's been a blast and I appreciate it.
[01:07:04] Thank you, Ray.
[01:07:05] Thank you for your patience.
[01:07:06] Good on you for what you do, mate.
[01:07:07] And you're gonna make a bloody fine teacher
[01:07:09] and I'll get my people to ring Jimmy Chin
[01:07:12] and say, look, Jimmy, Ray is a good egg.
[01:07:14] Get on it.
[01:07:15] Sounds perfect.
[01:07:16] I'll wait for the email from him.
[01:07:19] And for the record, I don't have any people.
[01:07:22] Yeah, yeah.
[01:07:23] That would be me calling Ray.
[01:07:24] I mean, me calling Jimmy and I don't have his direct line.
[01:07:26] So I'd be cold calling too, mate.
[01:07:29] Well, I appreciate it.
[01:07:30] Well, the next time you're in Toronto, man,
[01:07:33] I'll go to one of your shows.
[01:07:34] So that'll be fun.
[01:07:35] I'll get your ticket.
[01:07:36] Thank you, Ray.
[01:07:37] Nice talking to you, mate.
[01:07:38] Right on.
[01:07:39] All righty then.
[01:07:40] Till next time.
[01:07:41] See you, mate.