S1E22 · Beau Miles

Hey guys, welcome to the Virtus Performance Podcast. Before we get stuck into today's episode, I'd like to thank all of you guys who have been listening for the last 21 weeks. Thank you for all of your messages of support, all of your suggestions and everything for the podcast. It's been very, very much appreciated. If you have been enjoying the podcast, you have been listening, I would love for you guys to write a review, chuck it up on iTunes or Podbean and give us some feedback. That would be absolutely spectacular. Today's episode, I've got the great man Beau Miles in.

He is an adventurer, a filmmaker. He's just recently finished his PhD. He's a lecturer at Monash University and someone who I've been lucky enough to, I guess, admire from afar for the last few years after watching a few of his videos, having the connection of him teaching a few friends and things like that. He's someone who's definitely inspired me to be a little bit more outdoorsy and spend a little bit more time outside of the house and in the natural environment and challenge the amount of time that we actually spend indoors and not adventuring and exploring and things like that.

This was something I've been looking forward to for a little while once I got in touch with Beau and I hope you guys really, really enjoyed it. Thanks. My personal and business goal is to be just a little bit better every day. I believe everyone, especially normal people, have a story to tell. The Virtus podcast exists to help us all find small ways of consistent improvement by discussing the journey and experiences of each of our guests. Beau, welcome to the podcast. Thanks, mate. This is new to me. What a whole new medium. It's going to be very exciting, I think, for all the people that follow you on YouTube and have been taught by you and things like that.

I think it's a really good way to get an insight into why you do what you do and what it is you actually do. First question for you. What gets you out of bed in the morning? Gee, lately the alarm sucks, but I've just finished my PhD, so I tend to be sharpest in the morning. Well, after 20 minutes, when I've had a pot of coffee and I've emptied myself, I write and I tend to be pretty sharp right through until about an hour after dawn, and then I head into work. So that's what my

last six months has looked like for writing this PhD, which has been a bit of an albatross for a rotting fish hanging around my neck. Look, otherwise, I say this often, I've never been bored in my life ever. I'm pretty excited about getting up each day, because the potential of a day is off the charts, really. It's not a case of what I want to do today, it's what am I not going to do, in a sense. How do I make the most out of this day, because I'm pretty excited about it. That's a magical way of looking at it.

I'm bored, I've got nothing to do, but now I look back and now I'm fairly busy compared to what I used to be, and I think, I can't believe I was ever bored, I can't believe I have a waste of time, and I think that's really important to have that kind of mindset around what you're doing. Yeah, you're too right. This whole idea of boredom means you probably, and I reckon your parents have got a lot to do with it. Definitely. You know, we didn't have a lot of direct stimulation from our parents when we

were younger, we sort of had to make up our own fun, and that leaves you in pretty good stead to go and make your own fun, and then you become curious on your own account, rather than someone giving you the curiosity. Yeah, 100% and you start to actually chase and, I guess, dive into the things you actually want to do. Why a PhD? How did you get to the point of spending that much time, I guess, focused on one topic? Well, I'll paint the scene for you, because I don't like the idea of being a specialist.

I really do not like that idea, I want to be a jack of all trades and experience lots of things. And so, when I was sitting out on an island, Snake Island, which is part of Munga, yeah, this beautiful part of the world, quite understated, and I was sitting there with an American academic, Dr. Wynn Shooter, a really great guy, and I've sort of taken over for his role here at Monash, and unfortunately he had to leave for me to have a place here, and we're sitting around, we're having cup of tea, and he's a

total hippie, a real dude, you know, a real affectionate, engaging sort of fellow, and when he looks you in the eye, and he talks to you, he is talking to you, you know, there's no, it's called phatic conversation, P-H-A-T-I-C, I think it is, where people just talk because they're going to fill in space, you know. They're waiting for someone to stop talking so they can put their own thing in. Yeah, and he's not like that. He asks you a question, and he wants to know the answer genuinely. And he said to me, Beau, he said, how's my American accent, I said, Beau, what do you want, what's your knowledge contribution in life?

What a question. I know, and I never thought of it like that, you know, I'm on the cusp of doing my Ph.D. at that stage, this is about seven years ago, and I never thought of it like that, I never thought that I could create something that is new knowledge, and I'm still skeptical, I must admit, right, but anyway, that's where it started off, and I suppose the bug bit, and I thought, well, maybe there's an idea out there that I can contribute to scholarship or to, to be honest, I want to go broader than scholarship, I think that's too specialised, and that's why I like things like film and podcasts and, you know, what you're doing, it's broader.

So yeah, I suppose that's what I wanted to contribute to, is something that was really specialised and known to me, but maybe has broader implications. That's really cool. What's your, so what's your topic, what's your subject matter for your Ph.D.? Well, you know, the first three years of the project was trying to understand sea kayakers, so not just my experiences, other sea kayakers, for their, it's a really unique view of the world, literally, you know, you're out in the sea. It's a very different pursuit. Yeah, you sit with your bum below the water level and

you head off from land and you come back when you hit your fear factor, you know, to some degree, and you stay out for as long as you're comfortable, and you sort of, you have this handhold of land the whole time, and so the sea kayaking idea is really kind of cool. So for the first three years, I thought, right, I want to study other sea kayakers, and then I have, you have a panel, you have these sort of examinations all throughout your Ph.D., and I was in one of them, I was getting grilled by some very smart person, and I said, well, Beau, you tend to always sort of come back with your own questioning and your own misunderstandings.

Why don't you scrap the idea of studying others and research yourself? And I thought, well, I'm bloody sick of myself, you know, I really am. And yet I still do have such burning questions, and if, if I can't answer my own questions about self, then stuff it if I'm going to try and unpack others. And so my study about three or four years ago really switched to becoming auto-ethnographic, so studying myself as a reflection of the world around me. Did you, do you find that three, the three years studying other people helped you delve deeper into you and what drove you?

Too right, yeah, good call, mate, and I, and I did, and I went, I went to a sea kayaking symposium in New York, just on the banks of the Hudson, about an hour north of the city, and this whole idea was, all right, Beau, am I going to study others or is this yourself? I was still at the cusp at that stage. And that, that was such a, it was really intimidating. I came back from that thinking, well, you know, I don't think I can really put other people's head on the plate here and see what, what's tasty and what's not.

So yeah, I sort of made the decision about then. Awesome. What was the kind of first step in terms of looking at yourself and, and really delving into those questions? What did you, what did you do? Did you have any trips planned or, yeah, what was the process from there? It's a good question. I kind of had to go back to the drawing board because no longer was I then looking at others and how they experience an expedition or sea kayaking or land and seascape and all these sort of key words I was cooking up.

And so I had to come back to, and you know, when you look at yourself in the mirror, it's the most, well, it's the most revealing thing you'll ever do. And so, look, my default of that was, okay, Bo, come on, write and think about something that you completely want to spend time doing and want to know more about. And so that is my relationship with the natural world, I suppose, I really get a kick out of going out there and, and just being a lot, I really like my own company. And so, yeah, I

mapped it around myself on expedition, going sea kayaking, and I suppose to use the filmmaking thing, you know, how do I see the world through a camera as much as just living it, you know, because that's very much shaped my, that's shaped my last 15 years of expeditions. So I really just settled on the things I really give a damn about, you know, it's very selfish. Selfish was probably the best way to kind of attack a learning experience because you're going to be have that passion to keep coming back to the whale and, and continue to learn.

Where did that, I guess, the love for the natural world kick off? Where did it start? I wrote the introduction to my PhD very last, well, that's not true, I wrote the little, I wrote the thank yous last, and part of that, and this was only a few weeks ago or a month ago now, it was, I wrote it to my mother and my father up top, saying that my father's a landscape artist and my mother's a gardener. And so I've got this really, sort of, I suppose, deeper knowledge or deeper insight into how people perceive the world, dad does it in paint, mum does it in planting things.

And they both outside all the time, you know, so I just see great value in it and great wealth in it. So I'm really just, you know, I'm an offshoot of their DNA. When did the, I guess, adventure for lack of a better term, when did that start? That's a good question. I was a bit of a piss hand of a kid, you know, I didn't really, I didn't explore, I was quite scared as a kid, and I still have a really healthy fear threshold. And you're like, I'm really interested about finding where that is, and where those boundaries are.

And I'm probably becoming better at pushing towards those fears, the older I get, whereas in some respects, it was the other way, it's around the other way for a lot of people, kids are fearless often, and young adolescents particularly, whereas, you know, in football, if I was a football player as a 12 year old, I'd be timid, because now we can give stuff, you know, I'd just go for the ball, which is the opposite of what happens happens. Yeah, so I don't know how that's happened. And I think maybe my expeditions will mirror that. I

don't tell that to my mother, because she, you know, bloody hell, I went to Africa for five months, and she aged five years, I can imagine, dude. So look, what, what ventures, you know, that's such a contested term, right? And so I'm still coming to grips with that myself, because I've done some things recently, you know, just walking to work or paddling to work, I busted my ass on those two trips, and I felt and was, was exposed to feelings that I've had in, you know, 20 k's off the coast of Africa, you know, so I've had these sort of similar experiences in very different places.

Well, I'll get to the trips a little bit later, but it must have been pretty interesting having those same thoughts, like in your own backyard, effectively, to the same thoughts you had off the coast of Africa. What was it? What was it like experiencing that here? Well, Lachie, I think we, I think we think we know a lot about where we live. But until you until you do it in a maybe a different way, or try crossing the places that you think you know really well in different modes, yeah, in different times a day, hungry or full, or with someone in particular, you know, you can really shape your experience, you can really mold it.

And so by walking to work, which usually takes me 55 minutes, right, and it took me two days to walk, just plodding along, and you're just thinking all these sorts of wonderful things, and I got more and more hungry as I got closer, there was less and less food, my whole world shifted, you know, and I was finding out and seeing things on my commute, my regular commute path, that I would never have thought, you know, and that was really cool, mate. On that walk, what was the, what was the thing that, I guess, surprised you the most?

I didn't get, well, one, I didn't find as much food, right? So I'm a runner, and I always run around the roads, and you always see a half-eaten burger thrown out the window, or you know, a half-eaten apple, or something that's flipped out of the back of some trade is you, that's half edible, so I thought I'd be fine, I thought I'd just eat off other people's scraps, and it just wasn't anything. So the biggest thing by sort of day two, I wobbled in, and I was genuinely energy deprived, and I was in a sort

of state of, well, you'd have to take a pretty expensive drug to get that kind of feeling, I suppose, which was pretty cool, you know. Just took you two days to get there. Yeah, yeah, it did. That's really cool. Back to, I guess, growing up, what was, when you were a kid, you know, early teens, or, what did you want to do? What was your, what was your goal? You know, well, to answer that, I'd probably say I still don't know what I want to do. So I like to be good at lots of things,

and I don't necessarily have to be the best at those things, but I want to try them like someone who is the best at them that does them. I love that. That makes sense. So to be able to run a race to my threshold, to be able to chop a block of wood like a professional would, and feel it through the axe handle, you know, to build something with competency or to write like someone that can put together a piece of work that inspires someone or something. So yeah, I don't know, what did I want to be as a kid?

I mean, you have those sort of dreams of wanting to be an athlete when you're 12 and 13, but I was pretty crap at sport really, you know, I was sort of okay. And then I sort of grew into a body that could be abused, I think, you know, so I've realized at about the age of 20 that, you know, shit, I can go to the long haul and maybe do it the next day and the day after that, and I sort of tapped into this sort of grunt. And so I say now, it's a

bit of a throwaway line, but my strength now is really my strength, because I'm certainly not great at a lot of things, but I can sort of just keep going as well. Do you think that's more a physical attribute or a mental attribute, being able to kind of grind it out? I've had this debate with the physiologists upstairs, right, so I don't know the body like that. It would have liked to be a fly on the wall in that debate. Yeah, they're really interesting. But, and yet, and so they've got the science behind them, and a lot of them are athletes too.

And look, ultimately, I think I know my body better than anyone, it's about the only thing I do know. It's very cool. Right, so it's the only thing I have complete ownership of. And I'm still of the opinion, you know, I've busted my ass to train over my life. So I've done plenty of Ks in various ways. So I've sort of built up this sort of muscle resilience. So I suppose there's that, there's certainly that physicality. Definitely both, yeah. But I bloody want it to, you know, when I make a decision to go from one

place to the next, I really want it, you know, and so I suppose you use your body in the best way you can to do it. That's a fair call. Why do you run? Is that your preferred mode of transport? I suppose it's most bang for your buck and it's simple. Look, I just went for running the gym today, which is not really my bag, but it tends to squeeze in between work the most efficient way possible, and I don't have to put on sunscreen and I get the shower out of it and it's, you know, you win, right?

So I did that in two-buck op shop runners, you know, because you can wear crap runners on a treadmill because it's soft anyway. Nice and soft, yeah. Yeah, so I really like the fact that it's really easy, you know, and that's why the Africans are so good at it, they've got bloody nothing and yet they're the world's best runners. And so I really like that, even my wood shopping now, which I'm trying to get better at, the open axe head's 500 bucks, you know, and you hit a knot and do, ding, you know, there's another axe, you know, so they're quite expensive.

Yeah, it's just simple, it's just you and wherever you want to take it. And you can be such an idiot, you know, Forrest Gump, he wasn't the smartest tool in the shed, he ran everywhere, mate, I get called that a lot, you know. It's probably not the worst thing, I've been called worse. Oh, when they throw their dirty, you know, half a chip packet at you or a Maccas container yelling out Forrest Gump, run you idiot, you know. Depends how hungry you are, I guess. That's true. Day two, you would have been pretty happy about that.

I get cross with them about littering. Yeah, that's true. They can call me whatever you like, but don't get it, you moron. That's it. When school finished up, what was the pathway to, I guess, being a uni lecturer and PhD? That's a good question. I had a gap year and I encouraged that hugely. Your sister's about to go to Canada and I think that's the best thing in the world. Shout out to Sarah, she said about eight times that I needed to say hello to her, so hello. She's a gunster. Simon Fraser Uni, which is, holy moly, what a beautiful uni that is, it's a beauty.

Yeah, she's looking forward to it. Well, yeah, this idea of a gap year, and I don't think it suits everyone, because I think some people are ready to go straight from school to uni, but I certainly was not. I wanted to go and be a young adult and drive crap cars and pretend to be an adult, in some respects, earn crap money and just be a bit of a young dude in the world. But what I did do is I did a traineeship in Afteread and I met a great mentor and learnt the value of full-time work.

Yeah, I'd say that was as formative year as any year in my life under John Quay, a guy. He's now an associate professor at Melbourne Uni. Awesome. I remember going to bed and I've got all the energy in the world, and here I am going to bed and he's up in his tent reading papers, he was doing his masters. You know, these 20-hour day sort of fellas, you know? But yeah, that was a great year and I learnt a lot about the outdoors. Where to from there? Was that straight to uni after that gap year? Yeah, which was a bit of a lackluster year, actually, after that.

So you go from 200 days in the field, all the energy in the world and your own autonomy on programs and then I have to go back to step one to learn how to set up a trangia, you know? What am I doing? Yeah. But I met some of the best friends in Melbourne, you know, so half the crew I graduated with from that uni course are going to be at my wedding next year, you know, so it was a really good plan. That's really cool. What, I guess, for all the students out there that,

I guess, have a really good taste of what they're doing and then go to uni, do you think uni needs to change the way they attack things or do you think that the students need to change the mindset around doing all that simple stuff again and just relearning and making sure that they're on point? Yeah, well, you should get into media, mate. That's a good question. I don't know, it's, okay, so yes, students need to probably come to university with more of a university mindset. University was well and truly my first port of call for

my years doing it and secondary was getting drunk, work, women, you know, they sort of, whatever, yet now I think sort of work and adult life and anything but uni, almost growing up too quickly, comes before the university life and I think the universities have got a lot to answer for too because they're digitalising things, they're making less face-to-face hours, there's more online platforms, it's becoming less of a person experience and that's a bloody great shame. Of course, yeah. And it is and outdoor ed's still got that, you know, we're thick as thieves because we

go camping together, it's very simple, you know, it's very simple and so I know that a lot of people miss that and when we get reduced field days and we get these reduced relationships with some, because the students really aren't students to me in my field, they're friends, you know, so that's important. Yeah, I think it's really important because we certainly, through our internship programs and through us experiencing uni as coaches, we see the same thing now in our industry and I'm sure it's the same across every industry but we get coaches who come out

and they've spent less time coaching, they've spent less time in a gym, they've spent less time out running and doing all these different things because they've just spent time sitting in a uni and listening to lectures and that's it and doing some things online and that's it and they're supposedly able to come out and be like an, I guess, a part of our industry and I guess you guys would be probably even more so having those, yeah, like you said, the lack of less field days. What's the main difference that you find in learning for your students between, I guess, the field versus the classroom or the lecture theatre?

Well, it's contested that you can almost, and I'll go away next month with our small sort of college of outdoor educators here at Monash and we'll say, "Righto, do we turn this on its head again or try something that's radical or what is the point of classroom teaching for our field?" We know it has a place because the outdoor educator in the school setting has to go into a school setting and teach at times in a school setting or in a classroom but maybe if we just do such a great job of field work teaching then that's just going to translate into four walls.

So maybe we go away next year and rather than having two tutes a week in various classes, we just do it all in the local park, well hell, we just do a 10-day trip and everything's all in one. I don't know whose experiences are going to last from a classroom, ever. There might be an inspirational lecture that comes along sometimes or a really good reading. That kind of opens the book, opens the door to do something like a big trip or... Yeah, but I know I'm not inspired by four walls unless it's a really great, amazing room of architecture with lovely angles and light spraying in and half a tree growing through it.

I don't give a toss about it and so I reckon a lot of people are the same. Hell, we've got an amazing outdoor classroom out there. Let's use it more. 100%. It's the biggest classroom ever. And yeah, it's the freest thing in the world and it's the most expensive thing when you put it through a university algorithm. Yeah, go figure. A day in the field for me costs them a lot more than having me in an office. Well, that's fair. Yeah, that's true. So yeah, it's an interesting tug of war going on between what you, I guess, feel that students should be doing and how they should be learning and what you have to do to a point.

Yeah, and look, I'm not an expert either and I can say that because I'm becoming an expert in the field and I know nothing about it. I spent a lot of time with my 10-year-old nephews this weekend and we went for a walk through the forest and they're just doing cool stuff and they're out there completely engaged and I'm out there overthinking what's going on and they're just whacking sticks on sticks, digging holes and throwing rocks at each other and having a great time. That's really cool for 10-year-olds to be that engaged in the environment.

A little bit of a turn in what we're talking about, but I guess the introduction of technology and it's an incredibly positive thing, but it can also be an incredibly negative thing. How do you feel its impact on the natural environment and our ability to actually experience and interact and engage? What a timely question. So three hours ago, I reviewed a paper, it took me three hours for an overseas journal and the paper's title went something along the lines of modes of digital technology to engage students in outdoor learning. What they did is for 90

minutes, they took a bunch of 12-year-olds up a creek bed and for 30 minutes of that 90 minutes, they used iPads and various things to interpret nature and for the other hour, they used traditional forms of learning. You know, this is a tree, this is a leaf, let's look at this, let's draw it, whatever. And they came out with all sorts of conclusions and discussion about this. And at the end of the article, I sat there for about 15 minutes, sitting there drizzled in my own sweat after going for a jog, halfway through it, because I didn't know what to think.

What's the point of all, you know, I still don't quite get it. So in my review, I wrote that what is the why here? Are you trying to figure out if technology makes them see and perceive better? Or are you trying to give them a better idea of what technology can offer and it's not just about who you want to date or what's happening somewhere else or what shoes to buy, you know? So I didn't quite know the why. And so, mate, I'm, jury's out on technology, I know it's going to come. Yeah. It's almost

just trying to find means to justify the fact that it's there and it's a thing and that we've got to more or less figure out how to make it a positive impact. Well, the way I thought, and I didn't say it in the review, but I know that if you sharpen an axe for half an hour and it's quite pleasurable and it would be pleasurable for most people if they can take some rusty old axe and sharpen it and then you go and chop something and what you chop down, you can then make something, you

make a spoon out of it or you can, it lights your fire that then you cook your meal and hell, you make a shelter out of it. To see those really tangible felt things that are just real and very basic and very old with being using that sort of technology for a long time, I think use your screens elsewhere. Get stuffed. You know, this is our domain of reality. Let's not be on a screen. I like that. And so maybe I should have had the passion and the balls to say that in the review to say, why am I wasting my time with this?

There is so much fodder out there in the real world. Don't waste my time nor the student's time with thinking that you're getting anywhere with this, you know? Yeah, it's a really cool way of looking at it. What got you from the point of, I guess, a uni student to being a uni lecturer? What was that process like and how long did it take? I remember the phone call, late 2007, I think, you know, I think I was a bit of a ring in. As you know, I don't think I was the first option. Nothing wrong with that.

But it was, Beau, we've got a group going out, can you come and help out? Yeah. That was a sea kayaking trip. I wasn't long back from somewhere, done a bit of sea kayaking and ponch, my great mentor said, can you fill in for us? And that started off my return to Monash, now being sort of back part time for three years and now full time for seven odd, which are chalking up the years like that. It takes over pretty quickly, hey? Oh, mate, you know. Why do you do it? Why do you teach? Well, there's a lot of worse things you can do, I suppose, you know?

True. I genuinely love my day to day. I get to hang out with people like your sister, who want to go camping and want to learn from. And that's a very cool thing when you've got all these, there's all this energy bound up and all these young people who want to go and do cool stuff. And you can tell a few stories about it, you can teach them some neat things about the world, but more so, they'll probably teach you because you're going out there doing it again. Yeah. And each experience is probably different, even the same trips.

Well, that's becoming a bit of a bugbear. So I want to say a bugbear, I think I chalked up my 20th paddle of Tokamal to Bama this year. So I've done the length of the Murray in one section. There you go. And so I, you know, and halfway down, I was thinking, gee, I reckon I know the colour of the bark of that tree before I see it, you know? And yet I didn't. And so that was really, I had to catch myself because it sounded kind of arrogant, but yeah, you're right in that now the only reason I go to a lot of these places is because the group is going to give me that different angle.

And yet I'll always wander off and go and have a cup of tea by myself by the thing and look up and see some kookaburra, you know, eating a small snake or something like that's cool. I've just witnessed something that's completely genuine, new and get over yourself. What's changed on whether it be lecturing or those camps over the last 10 years with your three years part-time and seven years full-time? What's different now? I tend to step back a lot more now. I used to be sort of one of the clan, you know, but I think I've hit that age now where I sort of ease away and I'm no longer a 20-something, I'm a 30-something, and my mindset's definitely changed.

I feel a bit older. Yeah. Maybe just in my mind because I can still go for a long run. You've had all those experiences, so you kind of... Yeah, I think so. And I just, I don't know, the transition's kind of nice, but I think I want to experience it more as another kind of bow and not just the jocular sitting around the camps while telling stories. Yeah, it's really interesting. What are the biggest learnings you have off your students, either on the camps or here? What are the main things you learn from them? Because

obviously you're in a position to teach, but like I've found the more that I teach with a lot of education programs, the more I learn. What do you learn off your students? Well, I think students are really progressive, more so than me, so this Gen Y idea of these... And I remember this bloke at a conference a few months ago said, "What do you mean by Gen Y?" And I said, "Well, that's a good question. I'm not quite sure. I'm just putting a bunch of people at a similar age in a bucket, and that's unfair, right?"

What I would say that I suppose the modern day student would get through the 20 or 22, they think pretty quick, and that's got a lot to do with their device in their pocket. They've got a lot of information that they're filtering through, probably more than the dim-witted me. I tend to take a bit more time to filter things, so they teach me a lot of how to be progressive. Yeah, and it's probably too much information to a point, which I definitely find myself thinking about 30 different things I've got to do, trying to pick which ones are most important.

You end up spread so thinly, you don't actually get anything done. So it's probably not a bad thing being somewhat dim-witted. How do you manage the time? Do you have a big calendar spread out for the day? Yeah, it's a learning experience for me at the moment. At the moment, I'm kind of journaling everything that I do for the day. I'm doing that for the next three months, so I'm about four weeks in. So my 6 a.m. to about 10 p.m. is not locked in, but the night before I write down what I'm going to do.

So I've got that blocked out so that I'm being a little bit more productive with my time. If it's an hour just to chill out, I've blocked that out as an hour to chill out. If it's an hour to sit down and record a podcast with someone like you, I've blocked that out. So it's just an exercise in being mindful of what I spend my time doing, because I definitely had a couple of weeks there where I was trying to do 15 things at once, and none of them got done. And the ones that did get done, didn't get done well.

So yeah, it's an interesting one, but I think it's a journey and it's an experience you're always going to be trying to get a little bit better at, yeah. So you're adventuring. When did that really start? And you said you started, you're getting a little bit more adventurous with each one. When did it start? When was your first big one? Well, I suppose Africa was my first, oh, well no, I had some defining moments in, I took off on a sea kayaking trip in 2003, I wanted to go and paddle around or circumnavigate all of the main islands of the main island chains between Adelaide and Perth.

So there's three island chains, the Reshersh Archipelago, the Noyts Archipelago, and the Sir Joseph Banks Group, and they're all sort of anywhere between 20 and 60 k's offshore of the Australian mainland. And so off I went, and my golly, what a learning experience that was, you know. I can imagine. I didn't know a lot about a lot of things. Maybe that was the strength of the trip in that you're sort of, your naivety's on your side and you sort of just, oh, well there's water, this big blue expanse, and there's a kite that floats that put the two new together.

Trying to get to point A to point B. Exactly, you know, and I know now that it's a fair bit more complicated than that, but I learned a lot about myself and kind of got away with a few near misses. So I had this sort of feeling of, here's the near misses here, let's roll them into something that's a bit bigger and bolder and culturally different. So that's when I went to Africa. So I never still really considered myself an adventurer, and even now I'm a bit cautious when I say that. I'd rather be some sort of a quirky thinker and a woodchopper or a farmer than maybe an adventurer.

But I think all of those things can still complement each other. Yeah, of course. But you've kind of, with some of your commute to work and kayak to work, you've kind of reinvigorated that word adventure to not necessarily mean some far off place, somewhere where no one's been. It's reinvigorated that adventure right in your own backyard, which is super cool. Absolutely, Lachie. I mean, I think any word, especially a key word, you know, if you're going to live by something or if you are called something, really ask yourself, what does that mean to me? You know, what does it really mean?

So I could say that an adventure is all sorts of things, and yes, my definition is shifting, because it is completely a state of mind. You know, I teach a lot about wilderness, and I've learned a lot of these things from people like Brian Watchopanch, one of my mentors. You know, this sort of state of mind, wilderness can be back street of Bourke Street in Melbourne as much as it can be in the middle of the bush. So why can't adventure is the same, you know? The sewers of Melbourne could be just as adventurous as the tunnels of the Nether wall.

Yeah. Is that the next sea kayak? Sure. Through the sewers of Melbourne? Yeah. Has it? That's great. Yeah. That's insane. Through someone else's school. Was Africa the first, I guess, film that you started putting together? No, my first one was actually during uni. I did some mountaineering with some Norwegian friends in Canada. Just real basic stuff, you know, but to us it was pretty far out, and we drank a bit of whiskey on the way and found some old stuff on the mountain, and it was a half-active volcano in the US. Amazing. So I took a camera of that and thought, "Oh, this is pretty neat."

Made a crap film about it, and then did the same thing, in fact, it was a few years earlier, I did the same thing in Nepal. Awesome. I read that great book called "Into Thin Air," John Cracker, and wrote in the cover, you know, "I will go to Everest Base Camp while I'm a teenager," and so I did that when it was still legal to hike by yourself, now you've got to do it through a tour company and whatnot, so I did that and did some sort of illegal scampering up the side, up to base one, up to camp one, and thought this was just incredible, you know.

In saying that, it scared the hell out of me. So when I first looked at Everest, I thought, "Wow, that's just ridiculous," you know, this big thing up there, and you're sort of almost so close to it you can touch it, and yet it feels like it. Yeah, far away. Yeah, so that was my first sort of stab at film work, and then it's developed since then. What was that like on top of Everest, or like at the camp one, what was it like sitting up there and kind of being almost on top of the world?

It was amazing, you know, and being there alone in such a space, and here's this Australian kid, I've never seen mounts like this, holy moly, you know, our mounts here are brown and a bit green and round. Yeah, big heels. And so to go over there with this big jaggedy world that's ice and crevasses, and the scale and the contrast of these mounts was, even think about now, you know, and I haven't really been in mounts like that since. It was incredible. It's like a lot of things of those first years of adulthood, it's shaped my life, I reckon.

I got pretty crook up there too, so that sort of told me a bit about myself, that you're not a mortal and you can get real crook in these places. Showed you how little you were? Yeah, all that, yeah, the scale, the scale of the world, and that's what those big places do. Maybe that's why I'm attracted to sea kayaking too, it puts me back in my place, just a little piss ant that's washing around in this giant tidal world, you know. How sketchy did that get when you were sick, because that was for your 20th birthday, correct?

Well done, mate. I did some research, Sarah pointed me to the right direction, yeah, what was it like, how ill were you? Oh, looked fine, but I didn't come down, I probably should have come down more, I came back down to base camp, and there was a local there because it was December, so it was their off season, cold as bugger eats in the winter, but there was one little family that was still living there, I was the only one in residence, oh there was Pete the Alaskan that he'd left, and I just ate spuds for five days, and so that became a real thing too with his family.

And I've had that since actually, I've been in some real tight situations for the last 15 years on and off, and it's locals that have shown me this real sense of humanity. That's amazing. Because I often don't believe in humanity much, I reckon humans are bastards half the time, and so they sort of restore these little families. That's a very pessimistic view of the world for someone that seems very optimistic. Yeah, you're right, look I think, I had this conversation this morning with a colleague upstairs actually, if I was to say one thing or another, are humans inherently good or are humans inherently selfish and want to self better, I'm not sure I know.

I don't think there's one answer though. No, and maybe that's it, maybe that's the answer, there is no answer. It depends on the situation, and it's an interesting question to unpack, it's a whole other podcast I think. It is, yeah, we're probably right about that, aren't we? No, we've got 20 minutes or so, we've got a little bit to go. So from those trips, what were the main things that I guess you were able to learn and experience from going to, I guess, experiencing those amazing heights of Everest to all the sketchy things that happened in Africa and all these kind of things?

So what are the comparisons? Yeah, what are the comparisons between, I guess, both, you got to experience the good and the almost bad. What did you learn? Well, I learned a lot of Khaki, right, which is similar to beige, you know, you heard people call people beige people, you know, they're kind of not one thing or another. I'd never want to be that, I don't want to just give the status quo, and you know, I must admit I'm living the status quo now, and that's Monash, which is a very wealthy thing too, in that I have this really, I've got this amazing crutch, and that's Monash right now.

So I've got to figure out if I want to keep that crutch, or get rid of it and wobble off onto something else. Which I feel I kind of must, I'm just not sure how or when, or whether I keep my foot in the door of academia, for whatever that is. There's a lot of smarter people out there that don't have PhDs, you know, so I'm becoming a little bit skeptical of where I'm at. And that's nothing, Monash is an amazing place, right? So to go back to the comparison point, yeah, I need to, I need to shake things up again before I get too wobbly myself physically, you know, well I've still got this physical sort of thing.

Do you know what that looks like? Do you know where your head's at in terms of the next challenge or the next step? No, and you know, I sometimes think, I hope it just hits me in the face, but they just don't. You've got to chase those things, and so emails like phishing sometimes, you know, I sometimes think that, you know, you send out a few things on email sometimes, and you hope they come back in a particular way, and they nearly always don't. You know, you've put out these feelers, and so you really have to go and find those things yourself.

And so it's not really about phishing and just dumb luck. It's about going and figuring out what you want to do, and doing it. Yeah, putting a bloody snorkel and mask on and finding the fish yourself. And so maybe I've, I know I have to do that more, but whether it's in six months or a year or eight months, and I've been saying that for about a year now, so I've got to get them out together. Something's going to happen. Yeah, I'm not sure, mate. But I'm at the cusp. The PHD was a big beast, you know, so.

And you've only just wrapped that up, okay? Yeah, month ago. So to have, to be sort of post-doc, the world's, the family's been put into it, the family now. You getting married next year? Yeah, married, and we'll be having kids that night, I think. It doesn't really work that way, does it? No, no. Nine months and four days later. I'm not that well versed on the subject, but I don't think it works that way. We'll go back to school. We'll see how we go, yeah. So your kids are a big thing. Awesome, awesome. For, I

guess, the budding, and again, the term adventurer, the people that want to experience the world and not just the bitumen streets of Melbourne, what advice would you have for them? People that might have had no experience at all? Well, my, one of my chapters in my PhD was sort of, in a sense, defining what the adventurer is. Yeah. And so I went through these terms like the traveler, the adventure traveler, the expeditioner, the explorer, and you've got this sort of modern day existential adventurer, which I suppose I embody because I'm no longer after any things that haven't been seen before.

Good little Earth can get you wherever it is on the planet, essentially. And so I can't show anyone anything different, but I can maybe tell the story in a different way. And so, for me, very much the adventure experience now hinges as much on how I interpret that as a story through film, through books, through whatever, through writing. Yeah. So if you're, I suppose, it doesn't have to be much, you know, Alistair, what's his name? There's a fella in the UK, he calls them microadventures, you know, these sort of things have been there for years.

It's just going out for a day or two days or a weekend, just doing something cool that's a little bit edgy that's beyond what you'd regularly do. You know, it's not just car camping, but my key piece of advice for anything that has any kind of adventurous spin is yes, do it with people, but do it by yourself first. That's cool. I'm a huge exponent of when you are the autonomous, the buck stops with you for everything from shelter to food to decision making to distance to your body, holy moly, you know, self learning for you, some really quick way to learn a little bit about yourself.

So in our second year class we used to do, I'd ask everyone, this is after two full years of study, 20, 21 year old people. Have you ever spent 24 hours alone in your own head or in your own company and maybe one of a class of 40? This is a 20 year human that's never ever been alone for 24 hours. That's insane. That's pretty, you know, I would say my grandmother's generation, they were alone a lot more in some respects. We're always connected now, whether it be from that device in our pocket or from friends and family always around us.

And I think that's where you'll get that, what's that famous quote, "silence is deafening". I think people to go out and to be by themselves, they will hear things and see things and they'll hear their internal ticking, you know, they really will, you'll hear your heart for the first time probably ever and you'll feel it pulse in your body. And that's pretty important I think. Yeah, that's really cool. I've actually had planned to do Everest Base Camp by myself about this time and I've hurt my shoulder with footy so I couldn't go, but next year I think that's the plan, spend a couple of weeks.

And try and do it as alone, well no, do it in so many ways, be adventurous, but to have that small solo time you just get away. On your, like all of your trips, you've obviously done a lot of solo stuff, a lot of group, a lot of led trips, what do you enjoy the most or do you enjoy them all for different reasons? Yeah, all for different reasons. I must admit, I'm getting to the stage now and I say this to Helen, the future Helen, that I sometimes have countdown trips now where I really

do on day two I'm thinking shit, five days to go, four days to go, three days to go and I don't like that about myself nor the program because you tend, well what a waste of time, you know, well if I'm counting down then I'm not living in it. And so that's crept through a little bit in the last few years and that's a bit disappointing. So trips that are highly repeated and that tends to be the case when you're at one place for a while, but yeah, they're all different and I must admit, my last crossing at Bass Bike Kayak, I did it with two guys and that reshaped the social experience for me, that was awesome.

And even in Queensland a couple of weeks ago with our third year, it was really fun, you know, just, and an all girl trip too, or mostly girl trips, sorry Troy, sorry Hugh, yeah it was, you sort of just see different people in different ways, it was nice. Awesome, really really cool. A couple on the environment before we finish off with a quick little lightning round. Can you explain your connection between, I guess, the self and the environment to people that might not have experienced it and might not have spent 24 hours alone outside the comfort of their own home?

Which, come to think of it, I don't think I have, so I think that might be a goal for the next two weeks. Yeah, it would be really good, you would be amazed at how your business might go through the roof with five decisions you make out of it, or probably just one. Just one big one. One big one, yeah. You would come back and you'd think, I'm crystal clear, and maybe that's the whole, maybe that's the answer to your question, that the environment is about, maybe it gives you answers to yourself that I don't think you can get around the clutter and the hyper media world of our regular lives, you know.

I have green space all over my house, I have lots of windows, you know, I don't do the lawns as much as I probably should, you know, so there's lots of bugs and birds and stuff everywhere. It's not messy and yet it's a bit more raw, I know also that I live in a really manicured landscape, I live in a really pretty green fielded, it looks like a rolling blanket laid out, you know, in Jindavik, it's looked like that for 100 years, and before that it was a big bloody mega forest, so I'm sort of torn between what I think is beautiful and what I think is natural, you know, because it's very pretty.

I'm in awe of big trees and things like that and yet I also like using timber, so I have this love affair with wood in both its living form and how it can make shelter and spoons and everything, and trusses for a shed, you know, whatever, a beautiful seat. So I'm not sure what to say about the self and nature in that there's many ways you can think about it, this great author, he's a phenomenologist, which I suppose I've dipped my toes into with my PhD, David Abram, his name is, and he has this lovely

term called more than human, and he says, okay, there's the humans of the world, and then there's everything else, and it's not less than us, and in fact, it's probably more powerful, more potent, and it's more than human, it's more complex, it's less, it doesn't judge, there's no such thing as a judgment in their respects for anything other than humans, and so it just goes about its business, you know, I think they're pretty powerful ideas. Yeah, and just to experience, it's probably the big one, just. Oh, to look around, to go back to this paper

I reviewed earlier today, one of their methodologies was to get students to list as many things as they could in five seconds, and I said, what's five seconds? Yeah, what are you going to do in five seconds? What are you going to do in five seconds? I've barely turned around in five seconds, and I'm still hearing the person next to me, you know, we need to be, this is Ralph, I think he was, 1976, you know, we need to be intimate observers, and we're just not, and I reckon I am sometimes, but I'm getting less

and less because I'm in front of a screen wall, it's two foot in front of me and it's telling me what to look at, you know, so I don't know mate, people just need to go and have a look around, you know, and be by their self whilst they're doing it maybe, and you'll see things and hear things you haven't heard before. Awesome, yeah, that's really cool, that's awesome advice, now I've got a few questions from your students, your ex-students, so I'll nail a couple of these and then we'll knock over some quick ones. I reckon I'll be able to pick the dirt bags too.

If you can pick it, I'll be very impressed, when we constantly find ourselves clouded by a world of endless opportunities and decisions in the pursuit of living purposefully, what is one piece of advice that you would give someone to start every day as a cornerstone to finding their own meaningful direction? Well Helen would have a glass of water, before she does everything she drinks water, which I need to do more of, I need to drink less tea and coffee and wine and more water. The next piece of advice was, and I've written this on my

wall a couple of times before ripping it down thinking I felt like a bit of a wanker by doing it, so I would say take no prisoners, and I've said this to them before, do exactly what you want to do, pretend it's not about money and it's not about status or fame or what your mum wants or your dad wants or what you think you want, what do you want? And do it. That's awesome. And that's it. Spot on. And if you do that, not only will you make truckloads of money probably, and you'll probably get status and all the other stuff, but they're so secondary, you know, and the more we realise that the better.

And I have to live and die by that myself a bit more, and so I'm questioning that. Yeah, well I guess when you teach that to your students it makes you revisit, well am I actually living that way? Yeah. Which is pretty powerful. I think so, look yeah certainly there's always compromise too, because this is some height, you know, that's a fairly righteous thing to say, he's a red-headed white male in a white neoliberal university, you know, so I know all that, but, and there will always be compromise, so make the compromises where they matter and where you have to, and the rest take no prisoners.

Awesome. For aspiring educators, such as my sister, may have come from her, she's someone who you aspire to be like, and she's very inspired by you, as I guess all of your students I'm sure. Who has been your greatest external influence, and who are the people that you most look up to? So mentors, parents, anyone? Yeah, look my grand, I think I've got to start with my grandparents, just because they're the matriarch and the patriarch of this big network of us, right, all of us family, and I see great wealth in that. And they're very

practical, I'm really inspired by people who can just do stuff, you know, they can just fix things, and they're problem solvers, and they're very intelligent by just what they can physically do, I have great respect for that, my grandfather for example just made bloody everything, you know, and if it was broken he'd fix it, somehow he would fix it, and then do it with, you know, MacGyver type stuff, you know. Look thinking people, my dad's a real thinker, my mum's a real doer, Helen's the best communicator we've ever met, my future wife, she's amazing at

communicating, I have some friends, Marco, one of my best mates, he came and had lunch with me the other day and he bought all the stuff he'd made, you know, we didn't go to the cafe and buy a five buck roll, we made our roll with stuff he'd made, and I bloody knee kissed him on the forehead, you know. So I really love those sort of people, Ponch and John Quay, you know, these sort of thinkers within the university space, and then there's lots and lots, yeah, lots and lots. Awesome. With some of your bigger

trips, so your, I guess, Bass by kayak been a big one, Africa by kayak, your trials and miles, what, and especially the communities, what gave you those ideas, or was it just a little fire that you thought, that'd be cool? Yeah, well I want to explore the community more, so that's sort of in progress, I'm about to do something with that, but yeah, just ideas, and they're just, half of them aren't even very good ideas, you know, but they're just ideas, and for every ten ideas I have, you do one, you know, I write about

them lots, I've got sticky notes all over the place that I make into a document every now and again, yeah, you just, we all have ideas, I think a bit like a ten year old that is almost a fifteen year old, they shut down a lot of those ideas, you know, they become this regular, industrialized human, and stuff that, just keep writing down your weird ideas and go and do them every now and again. Good. Really, really cool. And I think actually doing them is a big thing, because so many people have ideas and have things they want to do, and it's just actually going, you know what, I'm going to pull the trigger on that.

Yeah. So yeah, I'm going to make you hold me to that, going away for twenty-four hours by myself. That would be really good. I'm going to do it. And actually, we could do a part B, and I'd love to, I'd love to interview you about it. Let's do it. Let's do that. Twenty-four hours inside your own head, and that's no human sounds, no human visions, that's just you in some space, you know, whether it's by the sea or up in the forest or whatever, just to be by yourself, you know, you're warm, you're comfortable, you've got a cup of tea, you know, you've got somewhere to look at, maybe you're walking far, I don't know.

Cool. You're good. I'll explore it. I'll definitely get it done. A couple of really quick questions on the first thing that comes into your head. If you could choose, would you live on the land or in the water, and why? Land. Just because I really like things like trees, and I like the smell of the land, and, you know, the salt and sand after a while is a pun in the arse, literally. True. You know, it's just, but I love the sea too, but not land. Good. If you could change one thing about the world, what would it be?

Ah, geez, ah, licorice, maybe if it grew on trees, that'd be cool. A licorice tree, I'd plant on those suckers, like an apple, just an apple that is licorice. Just a giant ball of licorice. Yeah, that's right. That's the best answer I've had. There you go. What is success to you? I'm still figuring that out too, because I often think I'm unsuccessful, and yet, you know, you chalk up all these things, and you do all this great stuff. Ah, look, it's a bit wanky, but just being happy, and I'm really happy right now, so I suppose I'm successful, you know?

Yeah, good. If you could give Teenage Bo one piece of advice, what would it be? Don't worry about your hair, mate, it'll be alright. Being a ranger is okay, and oddly enough, I wore a hat for so long since that point, now it's brown, it's boring, it's matchy. Anyway. You still get a little bit with the beard. I know. Which I'm exactly the same. You've got to stop wearing that. Yeah. What's the nicest thing you've ever done with someone? Um, I don't know, I hope to think they're really nice gestures, I really like writing letters

that are completely unexpected, so writing an actual letter, a handwritten letter, that's just you talking about the world and asking them questions, and just giving them an insight of yourself, this genuine insight, and not just, you know, just filling in fat air. It's probably something that's lost a little bit. Yeah, I really like writing letters, and it's quite a selfish thing too, because it makes me feel good, and you're dumping these ideas out, getting something to post is really great, so I've done a bit of that recently. Awesome. What's the last book you read, start to finish, and what did you learn from it?

Finished it last week, The Happy Islands of Oceania by Paul Thoreau, bloody beast of book, 500 odd pages, he travels around 51 islands of the Pacific, and basically, and he's not a, what do you call it, an anthropologist, but he may as well be, it's very good, he's very cutting, he's a bit, he's very brutal, you know, he rips apart the local cultures, but he also does, he rips apart himself as a privileged white male looking at these things, and it's quite funny, and he does it in a kayak, so I was quite attracted to his mode of transport.

Of course. It was a very, very good book, The Happy Islands of Oceania. Amazing. If you could have dinner with three people, dead or alive, who would they be, and why? I always forget the really attractive women in the world, because, you know, Emma Stone, I have there there, so I think she's fascinating, and she reminded me of Helen anyway, so those two I could compare. Yeah, good. She'd be doing me the same now, but I just want to have them in the same room, you know, I reckon I've got a better version, actually. Good. Good save.

Yeah, good save. Emma Stone. Look, Paul Thoreau, and I think he's actually dead now, but I've read a few of his books over the years, I'm really fascinated by these deep thinking authors. I think he may be one, just because I'm on the spot, and then, I don't know, a third member? Someone who's dead and buried? I don't know. Drew's out, I'll get back to you under the next one. Cool. If you could be remembered in one sentence, what would it be? Bo did stuff. Good. Good. That should be your title of your next movie. Yeah.

Bo did stuff. That's not bad, actually. Bo did stuff. The Bo did stuff series. I'd watch it. Yeah. Where do you write all your ideas, your journal, do your diary, how do you put everything that's in your head out? I spend an awful lot of time on the computer now, so I have a full-time document just always open on the left-hand side, it's about a third of the screen, and that's just my notes. And I just, they'll often be deleting them, but they're just notes. Helen does it on her phone, and I know some of

my more esteemed colleagues, they do it in notebooks, like the Moleskines and things, a bit like yours, but I'm so computer-centric now, and I figure I often turn those ideas into something that's a digital file anyway, so I have a footprint. That's a good way of doing it, I find myself stuck between the three, whether it's a phone, whether it's a diary, whether it's a computer, because I want to get away from the computer and write it all down, but at the same time, you're right, it ends up being on the computer anyway. It's exactly

the same, five, six years ago, I had these lovely Moleskines and I'd write notes on my phone, but now the phone I just use for phone calls, the computer is pretty much my everything. And it's a lot like thing, the computer world is bloody amazing, and it has made a lot of stuff possible. Yeah, like a lot of people are going to hear this conversation, hopefully, or mum will, probably KP will listen to it, that might be better. Helen will listen in the first 12 minutes. Good, so she won't hear you say that. No, that's fine.

I don't know about her, Emma Stone, so it'll be all good. If you could have a billboard over the top of the Monash Freeway, what would you put on it? Oh, that's another big question. Oh, just maybe it's all black and white, maybe it goes back to that 1992 Apple advertorial, which is think, or think big, or think outside, or just think, or be happy, yeah, think. Cool. A couple of favourites to finish off, favourite movie? Gee, that's hard too. I was almost becoming an alleged soldier of some kind. I'd done all the paperwork, only told a few people about it, and I went and saw Saving Pro Ryan, and didn't.

Was that the kicker? Ten days later I wrote a letter saying I'm not in, so I passed a lot of the tests and was ready to go. So I didn't do that. A sliding doors moment. Yeah, kind of. And look, the movie itself, it's a war movie, and Tom Hanks is very good, whatever, but that was a pretty pivotal kind of movie, I suppose, because on the other night I thought about it. There you go. What's your favourite part of the world? Look, I'm pretty smitten on Jindavik where I am at the moment, because I've

got a little vineyard there now, and I've got fencing that I've made, and a little cedar shack that's going to potentially hold a family and stuff, so that's pretty grouse. But I worked in Vermont for ten years in the US, and that's as home as anywhere I've been to. I miss that deeply. It's kind of, it's a bit of a festering wound, that one, I do miss it. Good. Favourite resource for new information? Look, the internet, of course, bloody Google machine, but I do love libraries, I really love libraries, and books, I really just like the book.

My PhD, you know, I've read all these journals, hundreds of them, and then I found a book called The Adventurer by a fella written in 1974 in New York this week, and it's amazing. And a book is a very different beast to a journal or Google, it's got that different, it's different. Well, it's a tangible thing that you can sit there and hold and read and, yeah. Yeah, but then the modernist in me too, I'm on YouTube, and that's amazing, there is, music's amazing, but, oh look, the online world is far out, you can get lost in that.

And I don't often because I'm so on the computer so much anyway, but if I am a bit idle sometimes and I've got a filler between something that I've got to be doing, I'll go to YouTube. Go down a rabbit hole. Yeah, don't take me long to be inspired. Yeah, good. Last one, favourite quote? Thoreau, what is it, 1848, I think, I wanted to live a life more purposely. Good. I think I've misquoted that, it might be 10 or 12 years earlier or a few more words, but to live a life purposely. And to have hands with blisters on, yeah, till I die.

Good, yeah, awesome. Where can people find your stuff, how can people get in contact with you if they want to email you or write you a letter? That would be really good, yeah, bowmilesfilm.com or go to my YouTube page would be awesome, so check out that, link's through pretty easily, so yeah, bowmilesfilm.com, which will be bowmiles.com pretty soon and YouTube, which just type in YouTube and bowmiles, it should land you there. I'll sign up for a bachelor degree and spend the next three years with you. Good call. Yeah, four years. Four years. You can listen to this rubbish.

Four years. Mate, thank you very much, I appreciate it. [MUSIC PLAYING]