The "Level Up" with Duayne Pearce Podcast
I take on the role of an authoritative voice that fearlessly communicates truths drawn directly from my lived experiences. With a genuine sense of ownership, my insights are free from any hidden agendas – they truly belong to the audience. My stories and journey add remarkable value, the key now lies in harnessing its power effectively to help others.
My purpose is to create a new residential building industry. My mission is to inspire unshakable self-confidence in my colleagues in the industry, empowering them to orchestrate prosperous, enduring, and lucrative businesses that bring exceptional projects to fruition for our clients.
My goal is to foster a deeper comprehension among clients about the identity and functions of builders, redefining their perceptions.
The "Level Up" with Duayne Pearce Podcast
How To Transform Your Mindset and Life with Outdoor Adventure | Level Up With Duayne Pearce
Glenn Azar shares how adventure, mindset, and youth development can change lives! From military lessons to leading life-changing expeditions, Glenn dives into resilience, mental health, and practical tips for leveling up.
Check Glenn Azar's work: https://buildingbetterhumansproject.com.au/ https://www.instagram.com/glennazar/?hl=en
Check out the Duayne Pearce website here...
https://duaynepearce.com/
G'day guys, welcome back to another episode of Level Up. We are back in the shed this afternoon for another cracking episode, and I am pumped about our guest today. So uh in about seven months' time, I am off to Kakada. Uh we've put a bunch of blokes together and mates and uh other builders, and we're going to um get over there. And um, I think the plan is to finish on Anzac Day, which I'm really looking forward to. I think it's going to be very emotional, but um I'm definitely putting in the work and preparing myself for it. But uh the man I have sitting here with me today is Glenn Azar. He's actually the one taking us on the trip. Um, so Glenn runs Adventure Professionals, he also does a Building Better Humans project. Um, so I'm really excited to have you here this afternoon, mate, and have a chat. Thanks, mate.
SPEAKER_02:We had that phone conversation yesterday and I put up a video saying I'm pumped for this. So I got home and I spoke to Millie, my partner. So I'm I'm actually pumped for this one. And so she goes, All right, now she's now she's invested in listening to it. So we better not screw it up.
SPEAKER_03:I um so I I got introduced or put on to you, mate, because it's today's the first time we've met in person. We spoke on the phone yesterday, but um, Luke, one of the other builders that's coming on the trek um with us, and another builder mate of mine, uh Ryan from RKB Constructions. Um Ryan knows you. Luke has been listening to your podcast, and that's how I first actually got introduced to you. Luke sent me one of your podcasts, said, Hey, check this guy out, he's he's on the same page, like does some good stuff. So and I get on these um, I don't know, I I listen to podcasts and audible books and stuff, but I get onto a podcast, and if I enjoy it, like I I smash out a bunch of them until I'm like, oh yeah, right, I've got to try something else. So I got stuck on your podcast for about, I don't know, a four or five week period, and I smashed out a lot of them. So I really I really like the messaging that you put out there.
SPEAKER_02:That was the Building Better Humans project. Yeah, yeah, because I do two podcasts, I do one on Kokoda, which is very haphazard. Um, and that's just to give information to people on Kokoda. But Building Better Humans really, which is what owns adventure professionals, so we got that's how the company structure is. I believe adventure is the best personal development in the world. So, you guys, who you are at the start of Kokoda versus who you are at the end will be two different people. You can't unexperience something as amazing as that when it's done well. And so the Building Better Humans project, when I first started, it was really just around my belief in personal development. That's really how it started. But now there's 12, maybe 1300 episodes. Yeah, from little short ones that I do on my own to interviews and that sort of thing. And I haven't interviewed people for a while, but I was listening to yours recently, and you were saying your last one you did was you talking on your own, and you said we get a lot of good feedback. Well, that was me too. I did 20 or 30 episodes of interviewing people, um, Phil Debella from Debella Coffee, you know, Michael McNabb from McNabb Construction, so um, a couple of Victoria Cross recipients and so on. And then when I started doing little episodes on my own because you know a guest wouldn't pull up on time or something would happen, the feedback was really good. So I thought, oh, well, and now I talk a lot more on my own. So I don't have to wait for someone.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, some of the ones I listened to, it sounded like you're having a good time. I think you're travelling in a caravan or something, checking out Australia, and you obviously just randomly pulled up and smashed out some podcasts.
SPEAKER_02:Well, back in the day, I used to record just on a phone, and then all this road gear came out, all this stuff didn't exist when I first started. Um, and then yeah, so I've got a full roadcaster set up inside my van. I've got a I've got the van life thing going on, and it's just a a VW crafter that a mate of mine who's um he's a mad boatie, so he knows how to build things into small spaces, which I know you're into. And he just fitted this thing out, and I told him I don't want an internal shower, I didn't want any of that stuff, I wanted space, so you can sit four or five people in there comfortably. It's got an external shower, um, which is all that's because that's all I needed. And yeah, I sit and record podcasts regularly in there.
SPEAKER_03:And you're probably looking over the ocean or up in the hills or you can be anywhere, yeah.
SPEAKER_02:You can be anywhere, and and that's a really big thing, I guess, because for me, uh I I'm not ADHD or anything, but I can't sit still for long periods of time. And so, and then maybe that's my military background. Uh my dad used to he was in the military, he'd uproot us every two years to do to be somewhere. Yeah, and I think that that's kind of caught on with me. So I love if there's nothing on, there's something on. I'll get in the van and I'll drive up the coast for the weekend or you know, whatever we've got. I'm most of the time we've got young kids, uh, Millie, my partner and I. So in the footy season, most of the weekends are taken up with footy. But yeah, when we can, we just like to get out and travel.
SPEAKER_03:I agree exactly with what you said before, mate. I think um the best personal development is is out in the outdoors, pushing yourself, doing those um getting out of your comfort zone. Yeah. But um, before we get into that more, and I really want to know more about the building better humans. Like, can you give us a little bit of your backstory?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, so I moved out of home really young, so I was like 14 when I moved out of home. There's just a lot of um alcohol and violence in our household, and and my dad, I guess, being a military guy, and that that was probably pretty common during that Vietnam era, I guess, during all of those soldiers. So I moved out of home really young. I joined the army by the time I was 17. And a lot of people think that you do that because uh you know you want to serve the country, and that's not really why I did it. I did it because the first Gulf War started, and I was young and angry, and I remember thinking, oh, they pay you to fight people, how could this? Because I didn't really link to my dad being in the military, so I joined the 8-9th Infantry Battalion in Brisbane, and I remember, and I I mean I was a weedy little kid, I was you know 70 kilos, I couldn't have fought my out of wet paper bag. I've been in war zone since, and I realised I wasn't ready for that at 17, but I thought I was. And six weeks or seven weeks into basic training, which goes for 13 weeks, this is pre-mobile phones, pre-internet, they come out with the newspaper, and they go, all right, man, the war's over. And we were all deflated, like we couldn't believe the war was over. That's why we all signed up. But you'd signed for a set amount of years, and we thought, what are we gonna do now? Anyway, life goes on, and um, I injured myself very early in that career, and then they moved me across to medical corps. And at the time I didn't want to be in medical corps because I wanted to be a gunfighter. I thought I was tough. Um, so I went into medical corps. It turned out to be the best thing that ever happened to me because I had a longer career than all my mates. Infantry is a really tough physical career. Um, I did 17 years before I got out. I specialised in aviation medicine. Um, I joined with a year nine education, and they pay for me eventually to do a university degree. Like, where else does that for you? So I did uh I was a paramedic by trade, and then I did my registered nursing degree, um specialized in Iroquois and then Blackhawk evacuation. So when you think about all of that, like it's it I think about personal development and where I'm at now. I was being given personal development from a really young age without even realizing it. The military's pretty big on building you into someone that's you think you're 10 foot tall and bulletproof. They need that because of what we do, and you'd probably don't appreciate it enough when you're in, but when you get out, I've used so many life lessons. Um, so I've got four children to my first marriage, and they're all adults from 18 to 30. Um, you know, I've got my second daughter, Alyssa, climbed Mount Everest when she was 19. She climbed Mount Everest a second time when she was 21. And so people think, wow, that's pretty amazing. But then I've got a 21-year-old son who's autistic and intellectually impaired. So in our household, I guess we've got both ends of the spectrum of what a human can achieve. And then we've got a kid that can't wipe his own bum, you know, and never will. He will never drive a car, he's mentally, you know, sort of five or six years of age, IQ-wise, he'll never have a job, he'll never play a sport. And I use that to teach my daughters and everyone I work with in personal development to say you owe it to kids like Christian to live your life fully. Because as able-bodied, neurotypical humans, it's real easy for us to think life's tough sometimes, you know, in business or anywhere else. I've been in war zones and I look back now and think that wasn't as tough as Christian went to high school at Aspie Special School. There are kids there that can't walk, can't talk, they're you know, they've done nothing wrong. They were just born that way. Christian did nothing wrong, he was born that way. And then I think, and we dare to whinge about how hard life is. I reckon those kids, if they could understand it, would swap their absolute best day for our worst day in a heartbeat. Um, you know, but but they don't get to do that.
SPEAKER_03:So no small world, sorry to butt in, but we um Camille and my wife and I we're big supporters of the Astley specialists. Um I don't know why, but that that like we're very lucky we've got two really healthy kids. We're healthy, but um I've just got a soft spot in my heart for those people, and um so we started maybe four or five years ago. We donate money there regularly. Yeah, um, we're actually going back there next Friday because the last sort of money we donated uh they've used to uh restock their workshop with new tools and things for the kids, and the kids have asked us to come back and they want to show us, so um yeah. When you say actually special school, it's a small world, eh?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, and it's pretty it is pretty cool that so many people get in and support those kids because we're okay financially, but there are plenty of parents there who have got nothing, who are lower socioeconomic, and I think, man, life must be tough for you. And I've when he was in Twombury, I was at Tornburgh West Special School for primary school, and in the middle of winter in Tornbury, it gets bloody cold, and there'll be parents that would turn up with no shoes on in the freezing cold, but the kids would be well dressed, and they'd have two kids sometimes in that special needs sector, and you think, man, that is that's tough going. So yeah, but these days I've um I've got I'm in a new relationship, you know, for the last few years now. Um, and Millie, my partner,'s got two boys that are 10 and 12. So I've I'm kind of getting a chance to be a parent again because, like all of us, you do the best that you can. But I spent a large chunk of my life in the military. So my kids, whilst I I'm close to them, they didn't, I don't think, get the best version of me, if I'm really honest, because I was married to the military first. Um, if there was a call up to go somewhere, I go because that's what I signed up for. And I think this time around, I'm getting to, with Millie and with the boys, hopefully be a little bit more present. Um, so I'm pretty fortunate in in that sense as well. And the boys are 10 and 12, so we still get to go and play footy and do all of the things, you know. They're at that age now, they're little fellas, but they always want to fight me. And Millie always says, like, you know, don't hurt them. And and sometimes she wants me to go soft on them, and sometimes I do get hurt because they just don't stop. And I said, You can you need to understand that for men and for young men, this is just a part of the process of them testing themselves against me because one day they'll be bigger and stronger than me. Yeah, but it's not the older boy Samuel said to me, I'll be bigger and stronger than you one day. I said, Yeah, one day, I said, but it's not gonna be this year. He goes, next year, I said, No, it won't be next year either. But one year it'll just happen.
SPEAKER_03:I think that sort of stuff's really important, mate, for people growing up. Like you look, we're all human, we're meant to do certain things, and a lot of that I believe is rough and tumble and getting dirty and uh figuring out where you where you stand in the food chain.
SPEAKER_02:Absolutely, for everyone, but specifically for boys, because now I do a lot of work in youth development. Um, and the problem we have is there's always this talk about toxic masculinity, and masculinity in and of itself can't be toxic, it's necessary in society, and I know that does trigger some people. Um and I got asked recently for my podcast what's the difference by a friend of mine, actually, who's got a few boys, and he said, you know, what's the line between healthy and toxic masculinity? And the only way I could really explain it was that masculinity that lifts other people up, that helps other people, that protects people, that's healthy. But if it hurts people, if it tears people down, if it's damaging, then that's toxic. And and so I've had boys jumping in the boxing ring, which is our background, and uh and it's not a part of our programs, but they see the boxing ring and they want to jump in there. I say, you can get in there if you want, but there's no crying once you get in there. So you no one has to get in there, and they get in and they all call each other out, and there's a few tears, and oh mate, get out. And and I've had people commenting on our Instagram stories when I had that gym saying, Oh, this is this is where toxic masculinity starts, and I couldn't disagree more. I think boys in particular need rough play. That's just a part of yeah, you know, we all grew up wrestling our dads and our uncles and our of course you never beat them, but that was the whole process of becoming a man, and I I just feel like we're trying to turn our back on that, not to make this controversial, but that's my experience since working in youth space.
SPEAKER_03:Couldn't agree more, mate. I I think um like I I my view is like I think the the world's got an agenda, we've got to have a whole podcast about all that sort of stuff, but um I think we need to get back to more of our roots, yeah as humans, like what we're meant to be doing. And I I truly believe um, like I was saying to you when you pulled up about my two girls, like they they love getting out to the farm and getting dirty and going fishing and doing farm work and like all that sort of stuff. I think every young person needs to experience some tough work and and hard work to figure out who they are.
SPEAKER_02:Man, I take young people out to properties. I've got a mate that's got 135 acres up on the Sunshine Coast Hinterland, their phones don't work out there. Like we've got Starlink for emergency, but we don't give that to the kids. And I take some of these city kids out, you know, to some from pretty tough backgrounds, they've never camped before. They get excited when they see a kangaroo. It's this at first it scares them. It's just really foreign. And then when their phones don't work, there's I remember this young indigenous kid, Koi Koi, he's a great young kid, and the first program he came on uh because we take their phones off them, and we're doing a 90-minute drive out to Mount Maroon, and there's two busloads of kids, 27 kids, and he said, Oh, can we get our phones back? And I said, No. I said, What do you need them for? He goes, Well, so we can message our girlfriends and we can listen to music. And I said, No, you're not getting your phones back. And he said, Well, what are we supposed to do? And I said, Talk to each other. And he goes, We don't even know each other. Anyway, the bus driver said they didn't stop talking once they got started. Yeah, but if they had all had their phones, they wouldn't have talked to each other because they would have been absorbed in the world that we were trying to pull them away from just for three days. Just three days. And we when these kids come back, and you'll experience this on Kokoda too, it's almost like that was amazing. I get adults on Kokoda who say, after eight days of not hearing from anyone, I almost don't want to turn my phone back on.
SPEAKER_04:Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:Because we these things never let us stop. You know, we're old enough to remember a time when I would leave work, I used to be in the army base out at Oki, I'd drive into Toumbo, that might be a 30, 40-minute drive with traffic, I might go to the supermarket, I might go to boxing training, you might be uncontactable for five hours. If you aren't contactable for five hours now, people think you've died. Yeah.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah. Mate, that was the most disappointing thing. Uh I I did Everest Base Camp eight years ago. And in my mind, I thought, I like I hugged Camille and the girls. I was like, you're not gonna hear from me. Like, once we leave Katmandu, I'll I'll try and contact you before we get up in the hills, but you won't hear from me. And we got there and like flew from Kathmandu up to Lookla, and then that first day, like it's only two or three hours walking. Got to this little village up in the hills, uh, threw our bags in the room, and then went walking down the street, and like everyone's on their phone. And that that continued for the whole trip, and um, it was really disappointing for me because I I just wanted to be off grid. So I was the only uh there was only myself and one other guy in our group, uh, because we we took a group, it was all um people we knew. Um, but there was two of us out of 13 that didn't buy a SIM card and just did not use our phones for that trip. All the others, as soon as they knew they could get it, they went to the shop, they bought the SIM card, and every night they're on Facebook, they're on Instagram, they're checking.
SPEAKER_02:It's actually worse now, too. Like I went there last year or the year before uh I went to base camp. I've done like 18 base camp treks, and it's it's everywhere now. All the at least it used to be once you got up out of Namche or you know, or Tingbusha, you'd sort of get nothing through much until you got into a village and you'd pay a bit extra for it, which people would still buy these cards back then. Well, that's all opened up now. There's cafes up there, and and even on Kokota, there are two or three spots along the track now where your phone will work, yeah. And people are busting to get to those spots. Yeah, yeah. I had a young bloke on a trip with me just recently with his dad, and he's probably 21, 22, and he's on top of this hill at the Minari Gap and trying to ring his girlfriend, and then they all went down, so I stayed up there with him, not to leave him up there because I had another track leader. And I can hear her roasting him, like, why haven't you contacted me? And he's going, You don't understand, I can't just contact you. She goes, Well, that's a real likely story. But it's because at 21 or 22, she probably doesn't understand there are still places in the world where people can't contact you. Yeah, so look, it is coming, unfortunately, and I understand for the locals they want phone service because it gives them access to medical and all of those sort of things. Kokoda is definitely westernizing slowly. Um, they're in a hurry, I think they're gonna regret it.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:I was talking to Mike Killer, who's my head guide years ago now, and I was talking about depression and anxiety and suicide, and he couldn't really get his head around it, and particularly suicide. He said, What do you mean? I said, Well, you know, when people kill themselves, like, because I wanted to know what that was like over there. And he was like, Why would someone kill themselves? He couldn't get his head around that, and that's was pre-COVID days, and it made me realise that in Western society we're so far out of whack because mental health is a real thing for us. Like you drive around Redcliffe and you see all the homeless, people living in tents, and I've heard people say, Oh, it's an eyesore. Well, where are these people supposed to go? And it's sad we've created a society where people can't afford to live. I've seen tradies. There's a trade in um that I used to see nearly every morning near my gym in Newstead, and he was sleeping in a rooftop tent just because he couldn't get a rental, obviously. Well decked out, he'd come down, he'd have a shower in the morning, he'd go and get a coffee, fold his tent up and drive to work, and he'd be there every night. Yeah, it's crazy that we have to live like that, you know.
SPEAKER_03:And he's got a job. The um, yeah, being like it's like they say, like, we're more connected than we've ever been, but we're really more disconnected than we've ever been. Like the um I look forward to finding those places that my phone, like I don't know, it's a mental thing now, I think, because everything's so accessible. You just know in your head that when you're in a position where your phone's not working, it's like I'm out. Like I can actually I can shut down a little bit.
SPEAKER_02:Mate, I've had people on Kokoda who get fake or what we call phantom buzzing. They think their phone's buzzing, and your phone doesn't even work there. They breach up with their phone. So, mate, your phone's not working here. So, where does it work? You know, like they're just so desperate for it.
SPEAKER_03:So, mate, how did you go from um yeah, the army to doing what you're doing now with the building better humans project and stuff?
SPEAKER_02:So, I started out initially with just the adventure side, and I was working with a company years ago called Executive Excellence, and this was back in the days when there was three or four companies doing cocoa only. These days it's about 50. Some of them are really good, some of them are terrible, like every industry, and then you got all your people in the middle. But back in those days, it was pretty remote. There was around 900 people a year with Trek Cocota. In its heyday, which was around to pre-the GFC in 2009, it hit 9,500 people, did it? And now it sits around the sort of anywhere from two and a half to three and a half, so it's kind of settled again. Some people complain about that and think that we need more people over there. I kind of like it because it stops them westernizing too much with all of us coming through. But I had a mate, Al Forsyth, and he's I worked with his brother, and Al was in the SAS, he was um one of Australia's longest-serving special forces soldiers, 22 years, Vietnam veteran right through. And this bloke was about I reckon he's about five foot four, if he was lucky, but he had a chest on him like this, he could run a 17 and a half minute 5k in his 50s and could do 30 overgrass chin-ups. This guy was a freak. And he started doing programs under executive excellence for um banks, like he did all the heads of Westpac, and then they decided to take them to Kokoda. And back then PNG was a bit of an unknown. Now, if you're taking executives, you're talking about millions of dollars worth of the bank's talent. So the bank freaked out and they said we need to put safety around this. And I was up in uh Townsville, and so we just got this comes in all the time. When you're in medical corps, we can't just sit around and practice our jobs, we have to be doing our jobs. So when you're not deployed, you'll go and work for the Ambos, you'll go to hospitals, you've got to keep your skills. Whereas other soldiers, like infantry, they'll just practice, but we have to be doing. So I just got this memo come across, and I was running an evacuation cell, and they said we're looking for an aviation qualified medic. Now that's overkill on Cocoa, but I put my hand up, I didn't know that at the time, and I put my hand up and and I went over, and you know, I convinced my bosses that this would be really great for my medical skills. The worst thing I've ever seen on Kokoda is a twisted ankle, a sore knee. Like you don't get big injuries over there like people think. So it didn't help my medical skills at all, but I loved it. And it was the first time I'd done something where I thought I could see myself doing this when I get out of the army, because I'd never thought about getting out of the army. The army was an absolute my life. I was very, very dedicated to it and I was very good at it. But having a son that's autistic and intellectually impaired, I started to realise like no one joins the army for the money. You don't get paid that well. There's a lot of other benefits, but it's not money. And I started thinking, I don't really have the luxury of dying, and that's a silly term for some people. But what I meant by that is if I was to die, my three daughters at the time, they're all neurotypical, they can get jobs, they can look after themselves. But Christian needs me around forever, or he needs someone around forever. So money and business and the capacity to earn started to become more important. But I knew I couldn't just have a nine to five. Like you couldn't sit me in an office, you can't expect me to do admin. And so once I went out and was walking, it's the same thing: a backpack on without a rifle, but you know, putting people into pretty tough environments and giving them safety, certainty, and confidence. And you guys have sat in when I did a webinar recently, so you know how calming that process is when you know all the answers. Well, that's what my team and I provide when we're on the track. So that's that's how I first got into it. And I didn't know back then that you couldn't do this for a job. I just thought, and when I saw track leaders out there, because I'd only ever had one job, the army, I thought that all these people must work full-time, but I realised that most of them have jobs and then they just come and do this. And so I started doing it full-time without realizing that you actually can't do that. But because I didn't know you couldn't do it, I did it, and I've been doing it ever since. So I'm pretty fortunate.
SPEAKER_03:I think it's an incredible job because you don't you don't just do Kakato, you do Everest and Yeah, I do Everest Base Camp, Mount Kilimanjaro.
SPEAKER_02:Um, when there's no wars on, we go and do Mount Elbrus in Russia. Um, we do we've done the Black Cat track in PNG, we do the Aussie Ten Peaks in Australia, we go dog sledding in the Yukon. So we give people their own six to eight dogs and we teach them how to run them for eight days through the Yukon and run along the Yukon Quest Trail. That's pretty amazing.
SPEAKER_03:I'm I'm super keen to put my hand up for that one, but we'll see how Kikada goes first.
SPEAKER_02:So, yeah, we we do a heap of different things. Um, people often ask me why don't you go to New Zealand or I don't go to places where people don't need me. And so if I'm gonna go somewhere, my skill set of getting you into and out of a country in an emergency, that's pretty important. Um, you don't need that in in well-westernized countries that and New Zealand's got adventure pretty ironed out, but on Everest Base Camp, on Kokoda, it certainly comes in handy.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah. The um and so how's the Building Better Humans program? Where's that come into all this?
SPEAKER_02:So I was running adventures for a while, um, probably not making enough to make a living, and I had a gym as well in Toomba when I was living up there when I first got out of the army, and then I started getting more and more into the mindset stuff and started studying that. I just had a real fascination with it, and I did a psychology degree, not I didn't finish it, I just did the whole degree minus the last year, where you go into a placement because I didn't want to be a psychologist. I just was fascinated by the way people think, and I did that during COVID when degrees were cheap as chips, so I were just trying to sign people up to stuff, and I did that with Swimburn Online. So I started going down that road, and one day I was doing a talk. Um, so a mate of mine, he's an ex-sniper, and he bought me into a corporate group. Uh, I can't remember the name of the company, but it was a massive company in Sydney on the top floor of this building to meet with this big CEO about potentially running adventure for his corporate clients or his corporate staff, I should say. So we just got chatting about all that sort of stuff, and I just had said to him that, you know, my job really isn't to help your staff be better at what they do for a job. I don't know what they do. Like, I couldn't help you be a better builder, or that's not what I do. And I just said to him, what I do is is help people be better humans. This is really all about building better humans. It was just a throwaway line. And then we kept talking for a while. And when I got, I left there and I jumped in a cab and went home and went back to the hotel. And my mate rang me. He said, The CEO has not stopped talking about this building better humans line. And then I thought, when I decided to do a podcast, maybe nine, ten years ago, I started that. Well, what do I try and do? We try and build better humans. And the other side of it was one of my best mates in the military, um, he was a special forces trainer, a physical training instructor, and we'd done our courses together, we'd deployed to T War together. And he said to me one day, you jump all around the place, you do fitness and gym stuff, because I used to own a gym, you do adventure stuff and you do mindset stuff, and um you should just do one thing. And I remember thinking, well, no, they're all tied into the same thing. They're all about building better humans, physically, mentally, and emotionally. So that's where the Building Better Humans project came in, and we use that to run specifically now youth development and adventure, and it's personal development, built on fitness, mindset, and adventure. So, you know, we work on people's mentality, and you would already experience that if you're inside the adventure professionals private group. I talk about why are you doing Kokoda? Like, what's the why? Because when people get over there and it's a little bit tough, that why is really important. Yeah, you know, it just because it sounds like a cool thing to do, it's not gonna be enough sometimes.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, I think it's really important, mate. But I I agree totally. Like, I you get so caught up in the day-to-day life and um just business and family and relationships and all those types of things, but getting out and doing physical activity, I don't know what it is, getting the blood pumping or something, but I know these days like I can be having the shittest time ever. But if I just get out, like I just go around here, some hills and heights and stuff that I do, uh, or even just like each morning I've got a pretty set routine, and even if I am stretched for time that morning, I'll still just pack it into like five to ten minutes, and just getting that physical activity, getting the blood pumping, like it just sets me up.
SPEAKER_02:I think people forget that we're an animal, we've become cidified. Um, obviously, you're out on a bit of land here, but when you get in the city, people just build on top of each other. People don't have backyards anymore. People we've become really cidified, and if we do have yards, we've got big fences to keep the rest of the world out, and that's the world we live in. But we are an animal at the end of the day, and I think it grounds us to be out in nature. And I find even with youth, when I take troubled youth out or just any kids out, they become really calm out in nature really quickly. Um, there's a really good book that's worth reading called The Adventure Revolution. I can't think of the name of the lady who wrote it, but she's a psychologist, and the whole thing is is about the benefits of adventure, of challenge, or putting yourself in situations. The thing about adventure is you can you guys can prepare as well as you want for Kakoda, but you still don't know what she's gonna throw at you. We can get there and have a totally dry trip. But if we get rained on hard, it'll add two or three hours a day. If you get sick, if you you just don't know what what's gonna happen. And people often say to me, What do we do if it rains? And I say, Well, we get wet. That's that's our only option out here. We're not stopping, we're not changing our itinerary, we just have to deal with it. And I look back and I think that was the military too. We would get given a job to do, and typically we would um tell the our bosses what we needed, equipment-wise, manpower-wise, and so on, vehicles, the whole bit. And they might give it some of it to you or all of it to you, they might not, but you still have to go and do the job. It could rain on you, you still have to go and do the job. You can be in the middle of the snow, you still have to do the job. So it taught us that wherever you get put, the mission doesn't change. So, Kakoda, the whole or any of these adventure experiences, if you get hit with some severe weather, you realize how insignificant we are as an animal, yeah, and that Mother Nature always wins, and it teaches you to adapt to whatever gets put in front of you. So, what I teach kids on their adventures is solve the problem in front of you. Too often in life, we're trying to solve the problem, even in business. People are trying to think about and they catastrophise what's what's six months down the track or what's ten steps down the track, and they haven't solved the problem that's right in front of them. And I just say solve that problem first, and then let's look at the next one. Because sometimes people, young people, and even people in business, they're trying to solve a problem that doesn't exist yet, and they've probably catastrophized it. And I'll say, for that thing to happen here that you're worried about, how many things have to happen first? And there'll be like 10 things. Well, why don't we focus on these two? Because if we fix those, that might never happen. Yeah, and so then we tend to stress ourselves about things that may never happen. So I try not to I'm a I do understand forward planning, but I try not to solve hypotheticals. Yeah, if it's not happening, I'm not gonna put too much energy into it right now. But adventure teaches us that you have the capacity to solve whatever gets put in front of you. You will work it out. And a good example of that is when I first started running youth development camps, I never tell parents what the kids are doing. I tell them what equipment to bring, what time to drop them off, and what time to pick them up, and nothing else. Parents freak out about that initially. And then I the very first time I did that, I had that was a time I had 27 young boys. I had a couple of mums message me. I didn't know them, they just booked their kids on the thing, and they were like, you know, what are we doing? What are we doing? So I eventually told them, these are two different ladies, and I told them what we're gonna do. And one of the things we were going to do is go and climb Mount Maroon in the middle of the night. So we were getting to the top midnight, one o'clock in the morning, which would freak parents out. I understand that because we try and protect our kids. And so I told them that, and then both of them come back to me with their boys having severe anxiety. One lady said, He's been so anxious about this. Um, he wet the bed the night before coming in, he was 14 years of age. On the drive, he said, I wish I'd killed myself rather than go to this thing, which is all really extreme, because she had told him all the things we were going to do. And I said, I asked you not to do that, and I trusted them to give him that information. She said, But he gets really anxious, and so I thought if I tell him, he won't get as anxious. I said, Well, how did that go? He got worse. Once I took his phone off him, because then for the first two hours I don't take their phones just to let them settle in, and then she messaged. Me at one stage and said, You can take your phone if you want, because he's messaging me saying, You have to get me out of here. So we took his phone and everyone's phone. And by the next morning, he's running around with the other kids, he's smiling, he's not thinking about what's going to happen later in the day, he's just focusing on what's happening now. And I sent a photo to her, and she said, I haven't seen him smile like that in two years. Yeah. So we think we're doing kids favours by giving them these things because everyone's got one. I don't agree. I 100% do not agree with that. Um, I've got a really good young athlete I've been working with since she was 12 years of age. Her name's Shalom Suasso. She just debuted for the Broncos this year. She won the NRL W debutant of the year. They won the grand final, obviously. She's playing for Samoa. She's 18 years of age, this kid. She's played two seasons of Super W already because the NRLW wouldn't let you play it until you're 18. So at 16, she's playing Super W for the women's team. Uh at 17, she wins the Queensland Reds attacking player of the year. This kid never had a mobile phone. At 16, she was saying to me, I really want a phone. Like all my friends have got a phone. And I said, Lomie, I think you're as good as you are because you don't have one, if I'm really honest. Because she focused on training. Everyone else is TikToking and focusing on how they look on social media, and there's a lot of bullying goes on in schools. She ended up getting one at 17, and I you know I talked to mum and dad about that, but by then she had enough maturity. They're just not they don't have the brain capacity to handle. I don't think we have the brain capacity to handle them. How easy is it to get down a rabbit warrant on these things?
SPEAKER_03:It's insane. Like our our young girls have got them, and the only reason they have them is because they catch the bus.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah.
SPEAKER_03:And um, but they're like they're incredibly um like we're not strict with it, but they've just seen how we use our phones, and like they're they're very rarely on them. And it's like we went up the farm on the weekend, uh, brother-in-law had his 40th up there, and like they have their phones, they take them because they use them to take photos and things, but they don't do a lot on there. And from my oldest daughter, she's 15. From one of her friends, she had 243 messages over the weekend from one person, and a lot of those messages were why aren't you responding why like why aren't you texting me? What's going on? What are you doing? Like, I thought you had reception at your farm. Like, yeah, my daughter's just out having a fat time enjoying life, and and like then we get in the car to drive home, and she then they ask, Oh, can we check our phones? And she's like, My friends messaged me 243 times. I was like, Well, that's probably a friend you might not want.
SPEAKER_02:Adults do that, like, yeah. I um our boys have got them, they're 10 and 12 for the same reason they do a lot, and they're very physical, they're outside all the time, so we use that to justify. But have I seen some negatives? Yeah, we do have to control the usage because they can't, yeah, they they won't. So, and if we say that the phone's turning off at this time, say oh no, so we say 8 p.m.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:At and at 8 p.m. when you try and take it, it's like just one more minute, just one more minute. You think you've been on it for ages, but so their brains aren't really built for it, and again, I don't necessarily think ours are, but it's hard to have that level of discipline. So, again, adventure and outdoor activities are I think are necessary to ground us. Yeah, you know, we do you think about all the stuff people doing now, we're doing the ice bars and the breath work, and the and there's so much benefit in that. But what is all of that? It's all us getting back to our bodies. Yeah, well, that's what nature is, yeah, getting out around trees, um, you know, like we're meant, we're an animal, and we just we've become cidified.
SPEAKER_03:Isn't it insane that like people like for hundreds of years, thousands of years, that was a way you jumped in a cold river to have a bath, and like that that was just what you did. You you chilled out with the rest of your community, did some breath work, like sat around a communal fire. Like it was just all life. That's you'll love that on Kokoda, because that's literally Kokoda.
SPEAKER_02:And my partner Millie's from PNG, so she was born there and she moved to Australia at 15 to go to finish schooling up in Cairns. So she grew up in village, she grew up, and when she comes back to Kokoda, she says, This is this is just home. Getting in a river to have a bath, that's just that's natural for them. Yeah, and when you get on Kokoda, I would love to do a podcast at the end of that with you because a lot of things will change. Like what however good you're expecting that experience to be, you'll 10x that. I will confidently say that to you. Yeah, for a few reasons. One, because that's the experience, two, because from my brief knowing of you, that's the human you are. You're looking for those experiences, you'll find it. Yeah, but what you'll notice is you'll see three generations of families sitting around together. You'll see mums and dads and grandparents, and you'll see sometimes mum and dad and the grandparents will go out and work on the on their what they call their farm, but it's they grow their own vegetables in a in a crop area, and then kids sort of 10, 11, they'll be holding little babies on their hip because that's their job to look after. Like in Australia, we wouldn't disappear. I'll see you in eight hours, you're ten, keep an eye on your one-year-old brother. We just of course we wouldn't do that. It's a different society, but they can, they've got this safety. You see kids, they live in grass huts, mud floors. You they're happy. You give them a footy, but you bring a couple of footies over, you give one to a group of kids, and they'll kick the skin off that thing in a month's time when I get back there. They have a ball, they they they're happy about everything. When I take Westerners through Kakota, they'll often say, What are they doing? Because they're just sitting around, they seem to just be sitting around. Like it's a our perception is that's a lazy society. And our brain says it's Monday, nine o'clock, why aren't they doing something? Well, I'll tell you why, there's nothing that needs to be done. But if it needs to be done, they'll build a house in two days. Though if if you everyone has a basic entitlement to a home. So if your house burns down, which happens because they run fires inside their houses, uh, if the house burns down, the whole village comes together and builds your new house, and they'll do that in two days. And they do it at a you guys will appreciate the level they do it at, considering that they're in the jungle. They'll just chop the trees down, they've got food, they've got water, they've got wood, they've got family, they don't need anything else. Yeah, um, and and COVID, I think about how we all responded during the COVID period, how as in Western society, out there it was like nothing happened. They just this is just normal. All that happened was no Westerns are coming over. So if the world fell apart tomorrow, those are the people that would survive. Yeah, whereas we were fighting over toilet paper, bread. Uh I did a job for the woman who was the head of HR for Woolworths during that COVID period, and the story she was telling me with her HR team, um, because they were limiting how much milk people could buy, and and the one of the worst stories I thought anyway was a 16 or 17-year-old kid, and a woman had, you know, a trolley full of milk, and she said, You can't have all that milk because there's a limitation on how many you can get. And it it became a little bit of an argument, and the kid stood around because that's what she was told. This woman threw a two-litre bottle of milk, hit the kid in the face, and smashed her nose. I just think that is ludicrous that that was your response to a kid who's clearly not in charge, she's just doing what she's told, saying you can't have all that milk because someone else might need it as well.
SPEAKER_03:It's crazy, mate. And to me, COVID just really showed how backwards we've become. Yeah, like we need to get back to our roots a lot more. But from my um that's something I'm really looking forward to with Cakoda, and you're 100% right. Like, I I search for these things, like I um doing Basecamp really like it changed my life, but um I got so much gratitude out of just well, I I can't remember who it was, but uh someone I knew before I went um gave me some advice and he said just like don't take it for granted, don't try and be at the front of the pack. And he said, Every corner you get to, take the moment to turn around, look back, and appreciate where you are. And I did that, and so we would get to the lodges or huts or whatever they were each night, and the only thing I was using my phone for was photos, and like I'd get me and another guy would we'd be flicking through photos, and then like other people would see them like, oh, where was that? Where was that? Where was that? And like three-quarters of the group completely missed so many opportunities to take in the view to to acknowledge the villages. So, one of the things I I'm always up for anything, and one morning we started walking, uh putting our boots, and the rest of the group just put their boots on and started going. And out of the corner of my eye, I've seen these blokes chopping a tree down, and I'm like, oh I'm gonna have a crack of this. So I'm like, oh, get back here, get back here. And and half the group come back, we jumped the fence and we went over, and these villagers had this very dodgy scaffold set up, and they had a log laying on top of it, and one was underneath, and one was on top, and they had this massive big saw, and they're chopping these logs. And I couldn't talk their language, but I'm like saying with sign language, like, can I have a go? Can I have a go? And they let us have a go. So, like, I've got these incredible photos of me in my hiking gear with this massive saw, um, working in with the locals, chopping these trees, and to me, those experiences like changed my life. But to the thing that I really took away from the trip was how happy they were. Yeah, like they just they didn't need much, and they were just the happiest people ever. And I did a thing with my girls before I went, um, and I just said, Every time you guys are naughty, you you have to give me something small, and I'm gonna take it off you and I'm gonna give it to kids over there that don't have anything. So I ended up with this little bag of like plastic bag of things, and then another mate of mine Justin, who he's also coming on this trip. Um, he just went to the toy shops and he bought some of those. Remember the old foam, like you peel the top open, you pull it out, and you make a plane? Yeah. And he, I don't know, he bought a couple of dozen of them. And uh each morning when we started walking, it was around the time that they were going to school. So, like, if you did it here, you'd go to jail. But like, we would walk along, and these little kids, like, we'd we'd say, Do you like do you want something? Do you want something? And mate, these kids were just like they could not stop saying thank you. Like, they were so grateful, they were so happy.
SPEAKER_02:Kakoda's the same, people appreciate everything. Yeah, and people make jokes about certain things, like you'll see them wearing two different thongs or one thong, and the joke is like, Why is he wearing that? Because if if it's not broken, I'm not throwing it out. They don't waste anything over there. Yeah, whereas we're a throwaway society, we need to replace something straight away.
SPEAKER_03:But just seeing that amount of gratitude and that happiness, like I and yet, like you walk around wherever here, like you go out to dinner or you go to the shops, like people can't even sit there and take in the moment. Like, how many times do you go out and both couples or the kids are all on the phone?
SPEAKER_02:On the phone, yeah. Like no one's and people won't make eye contact when they walk around all the time. So Millie and I are interesting. We uh, whenever we go out anywhere from a cafe to a fine dining restaurant where we're fully dressed up, we take a pack of cards and we play a game. It's a PNG game called Last Card. Yeah, and so we play that, and it's a really quick game. It's kind of like Uno, but with just a normal deck of playing cards. We play that. I would be every day we'll play that somewhere, and it doesn't matter where we are, we could be at the airport. The amount of times we've been out to Moo Moo restaurant, we're playing it, the staff get involved. They come in and they talk to us. We've I don't drink, but Millie will have a drink, and we were at a restaurant in the city uh only a few weeks back, and they come over and gave us free drinks because and they were so enamoured by the fact that we're playing this card game. But the thing is we never touch our phones as a result of that. Whereas people get bored, they can't. I like deep level conversations. I'm not gonna lie, Millie and I have deep level conversations, but some people can't even hold a surface level conversation without having to start to, you know, they're looking for the thing, or they'll share reels or means of shit. We do that too when we're not together. Yeah, we're not laying in bed sharing reels with each other because we're actually having a chat. And I'm not disrespecting people who do that, I'm just saying be more conscious of being we call it being where your feet are. And and it's funny you mentioned that whole experience you had on base camp because right before that I'd I'd been thinking to say to you that one of the things I'd love you guys to experience on Kakoda is to be where your feet are, don't rush the experience because I always get people that want to be right on. I'll normally lead the trip and I'll have another staff member at the back, or vice versa, just for the pacing, because otherwise people go too fast, they miss things, and I'll have people breathing right down my neck, they just want to go faster, they just want to go faster, and this trip will be over like that. Yeah, and on day one, two, or three, particularly if you're if you're finding it a bit tough, it oh, there's forever to go, and then all of a sudden it's day six, day seven, and all of a sudden you think this trip's over. Like that's life. Like I'm 53 years of age, yeah, and I know how fast life seems to go, and so I don't know why we're in a hurry.
SPEAKER_03:One um I well, this is it's probably we'll talk about it on the podcast because it might help someone else. But um, the other thing I was tired with base camp, which I want to do for this trip, is to make sure I'm fit enough that I'm not staring at my feet all the time.
SPEAKER_02:I literally talk about that in my fitness program. Yeah. Because I've taken people, I took this guy years ago, and I don't know if I talked about him on the webinar, but um, he just didn't do the training, and he kept telling me he was doing the training because I checked in on him every now and then. We got there, we walked the first sort of hour and a half coming from the Kokoda in is pretty flat, and then we stopped at this little village called Hoy, and so we'd maybe been walking for 90 minutes, and we sat there for half an hour and no sign of him, or the or my guy that was at the rear, my medic. So I just left the group and with my boys, and I've got a big team, and I just went back and I found him a ways up the road, and he was blowing and he was struggling, and I'm like, he I knew he was gonna be trouble because as soon as I saw him at the airport, I went, okay, he just hasn't done the work. Yeah, and I said to him, mate, what's going on? And had a chat, and he's going, Oh, I think it might be my heart medication. I'd checked all of his medications, I'd checked all of his scans, and he was fine. But the truth is that I and I said to him, You just haven't done the work. And he goes, and I said to him, I'll be really honest, I think you need to lose a bit of weight. And he goes, Yeah, that's what I came here for. No, no, not here. I would do that before he got here. Yeah. Just to enjoy the experience. But he had the whole trip where he was just looking at his feet. He was he got to the stage where he didn't have a pack on, which is fine, but I would have a stick and he would hold on to the stick when we're going up a hill, and then one of the other boys would be behind pushing him, and we just pushed and pulled him up the hills to get him through it. We would stop at certain points to go and talk about something of military significance, and he'd say, I'll just stay here. He would just stay in the camp. So he missed all of these things. He was a real estate agent, and then real estate agents buy, you know, advertising space in those lift-outs in the paper. And when he got home, he used that. I was still in the army at the time, he used that to write a whole Kokoda story, but it wasn't his experience. Because he talked about back then there was still a fuzzy wuzzy alive, one of the old fuzzy wazzies, and he said, Oh, we went and met with a fuzzy wazzy, and he didn't speak English, but when he spoke to you, he was communicating with his eyes. Well, everyone said that, but this guy never experienced that because he just sat in his tent and went, No, I'm not going anywhere. And I think, what a shame that you didn't get to actually experience that. And yeah, you I just say to people, I want you to be fit enough that at the end you go, Oh, that wasn't actually as hard as I thought it was going to be. That's ideal for me, yeah. As opposed to looking down at your feet going, I cannot wait for this day to be over, I cannot wait for this trip to be over. And I've experienced both of those. And I started the Kokoda Track podcast because I wanted more people, because I'm a tiny company, they're much bigger companies than us, and I see people all the time unfit, unhealthy, struggling. And I just wanted them to have a better understanding of what they were doing so that they would have a better experience. Because I don't like it when people have a bad experience out there, even if I'm not taking them. Yeah, so yeah.
SPEAKER_03:Um because yeah, it's not just struggling looking at your feet. Like if you're looking down, you're not taking it everything, right? You're not looking at the views, you're not meeting the people, you're not making eye contact.
SPEAKER_02:Those are the experiences. Yeah, you know, that just getting out and having a good time with the locals. I can teach you everything about the history, I can make sure that you're safe. But if you want to learn the culture and the people, you've got to talk to the people. Yeah, and and that's what we encourage people to do. But also, I'll say to people, and you'll get this when we get over there and do the briefing. When you're walking, if you see something, you think, Oh, I should take a photo of that, stop and take a photo of that because you may never be back there. And some people just go, I'll get I'll get it later, but uh there'll be a similar photo. There might not be. And so and the track changes every time I go over. So stop and take the photos, stop and talk to the people. No one cares if you got in first. When you finish Kakoda, I'll guarantee this to you that there's not a single person you'll ever speak to that'll say, Did you win? It's not a race, no one cares. You know, they just what was the experience like? You know, even when it comes to carrying backpacks and using porters, which a lot of people have ego around, no one says, you know, did you carry your pack? No one cares. They just want to know what was the experience like, mate? Like, what did you take out of it? What were the people like? That's all the stuff they care about.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah. Well, mate, you must be pretty proud. Like, you've you've like so the trip that we're on is going to be your 100th Picada.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, well, so you're there's two trips. I'm not sure which one you guys are on, but I'm back to backing for Antex. I'm doing 99 and 100 together. Uh, and that's been a long time coming. People go, oh, that's amazing, but that's over 22 years of doing it. So some years I've done 10 and some years I've done one. COVID years I did none, obviously, but um I don't know when I'll stop. Uh 150, 200, I don't know. I'll just keep doing it. People have often said to me, like, you does it get boring? Does it no, it doesn't, because it's not about just walking the track anymore, it's about you guys, if I'm really honest. So it's about the people you take, it's about the local people over there who I've got a massive passion for, and everything that we're doing. Obviously, with Millie coming from PNG, we're very, very passionate about the customs, the culture, looking after the people. Um, you know, there's a lot of things happen in these countries, Nepal, Africa, um, PNG, where a lot of Westerners come over and they rip off the locals, and uh, and that happens unfortunately, and I would never name companies because it's not my place, but we don't do that. Um, and and that's one of the things I'm proud of, and particularly even before I met Millie, but with Millie being from PNG, she loves that we get to employ her people, they get looked after. Um, killer who runs that side of the business, it's called Adventure Professionals in PNG, but I don't own one percent of it, it's all his. And I think, as far as I know, he's the only um porter and PNG guy that lives on the track that runs his own company. And we had to set it up for him. Um every trip I do, you know, I get a whole quote off him, but I have to write it. Yeah, send it to him and his cousin, and because his cousin reads about it as they go through it and make sure the pricing's right based off what's currently happening, then they send it back to me. Yeah, so I still do a lot of his work for him, but how cool that he gets to employ his own people. Yeah, everyone that he employs comes from or is married into his village. Yeah, so they're normally from Kokoda up to Alola. That's pretty cool. So they're not being ripped off by anyone, they're being well looked after, they've been well fed. Um, we're pretty proud of that, more than I'm proud of the hundred troops.
SPEAKER_03:Oh mate, I think it's uh it's amazing. So, what like what sort of people do you have come on your adventures? Like, what are they or what are they looking for, do you reckon?
SPEAKER_02:The sort of people we have is that's a really hard question because it's changed a lot over the years. When I first started, women didn't really do adventures, it was mostly blokes, and now there's a massive shift. I we tend to get more women across the board of a whole year than what we than what we do men. And I don't know if that's because my daughter climbed Everest and and that's but women are just out doing more. But mate, I get people who are professionals or business owners, I get people that bring their kids over, I get I had an apprentice hairdresser, and I think, imagine how much she had to save to do a Kokoda trip. Because that's that's a big chunk, you know. We're at ages where we can afford these things, but a 20-year-old or 19-year-old doing an apprenticeship, that's a pretty big thing. But typically the people who come to us are people that want professionalism, they want people who are passionate about what we do, and they want to know that the local population is being looked after. That's that's my experience. Mostly they're looking for, in my experience, anyway, they want to have an an experience, but they also want to know that they're safe. Yeah. See, you're gonna be fine over there, you're not gonna think about it too much. But the safety aspect is about our husbands, our wives, our kids, our mums and our dads back in Australia who don't hear from you for 10 days, and things will happen. So every every now and then something will happen in the news. People occasionally someone's died on Kokoda or and there could be a 30-year-old that something's happened to and they've been air vaccine, it gets in the newspaper. Your wives, your husbands, your mums and dads, even if I'm 53, they think well, it could be him, maybe they've just got the age wrong, and our phones blow up. Yeah, um, and so we provide that safety. You know, we've got people know that you're safe. We update our social media daily because I ring Brooklyn every night, my daughter, and tell her this is where we are, because we might not be on itinerary because things happen. Um, so then she just gets to post a little post saying, Hey, the group's made it to here and they're all traveling well. And then your family can see you don't consider it because you're out having the experience. So the safety is not about you, it's about everyone else feeling comfortable.
SPEAKER_03:I like that you talk about as an experience because I I think everything in life should be an experience. Like even in my building business, we we aim to give our clients an experience. Like we go, like people come to our farm, I want to give them an experience. Like, people come over for dinner, like I want it to be an experience. Like, no, and that comes back to that whole connection thing. Like, you want you want people to think back 12 months, five years, 10 years, and go, wow, like can you can you remember that dinner we had with with Dwayne and his family, or can you remember that trip we did at Cakoda?
SPEAKER_02:Like, but as you get older, which we're we're on that side of things, well, certainly I'm on the back back half of life, unless I live to a 106, which I I don't know. But time is more important to you, who you spend time with, where I my time is more valuable than any money in this day and age, so I make a lot of decisions around that. Because I work in the personal development space, I get a lot of people through social media who reach out and say, I made love to um shout you a coffee and pick your brain. I'd prefer to buy my own coffee and have an hour to myself if I'm honest. So, and it's not that I'm all about money, but at some level I need to be paid for what I'm doing if I'm gonna take time away from my family. And then on weekends, you can offer pay me whatever you want, and I'm not taking time away from my family. Whereas go back 10 or 15 years, I'd be available 24 hours a day. If you message me at 10 o'clock on a Sunday night, I'm answering you. And then one day I got a mentor and he said, mate, you've conditioned people that you answer your phone no matter what, and you need to stop doing that. Because I was getting to that expectation. Yeah, I was getting to say to us a bitch, oh mate, people just message me all the time. He's going, Well, do you answer them? I said, Yeah. I said, Try not answering them. And I've had clients push back against that. I had a lady years ago and I'd say to her, you know, I don't answer my phone on Sundays. And sometimes she'd message me and say, Great episode of the podcast on a Sunday morning. I don't want my phone to ping at six o'clock or at seven o'clock in the morning on a Sunday for something trivial. And I'd say to her, you can just tell me on Monday when you see me at the gym, because I had a gym back then, you could just tell me on Monday that you like the podcast. She goes, Yeah, but what if I forget by then? I said, What changes? Nothing, nothing changes if you forget. We're right, we're okay. Um, and I slowly had to train that into people that I'm not just going to drop everything and answer everything because every second, well, I I when I did my degree in psychology, they were saying that um with kids, like every time you look down at your phone, that's a disconnect from them. Yeah, and they just have this belief that whatever's happening in there is more important to dad than this conversation they're having with me. And I've done it, and I know other people have done it where we're having a chat and then all of a sudden the phone pings. We look down. Oh, sorry, mate, we get back to you, and the kids just think, well, whatever's happened there is more important than me. That's a terrible thing. I don't want my kids to feel that, and I don't want the boys to feel that, you know. So I'll spend hours at the skate park, I'll spend hours at footy. Years ago, I used to think, oh, I don't want to spend hours doing that stuff, but now that's the stuff we live for.
SPEAKER_04:Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:Plus, we also take the boys out and climb mountains, you know. We take them out and do things, and when you first take them out, they're like, Oh, we don't want to do this. This is the kids' latest, I know our kids are 10 and 12, so they've got all these words you've never heard of. The latest word is buns. Apparently, when something's buns, it's crap. So, oh, we don't want to do that, that's buns. I was like, What are you talking about? That's crap. And you get out there, they're having a ball. Can we do that again next week? Yeah, but yeah, once you get them out there in nature and doing stuff, but yeah, everything should be an experience. Actually, everything is an experience, it's either a good or a bad one.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, so yeah, definitely. So, what's the work you're doing now? You're doing a lot of work with kids still, aren't you?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, so we did a lot of youth development work, and funny enough, um, that's Ryan's tied into that story, and I think I might have told you this off-air, but um years ago, I took all of the top-performing pharmacists from Terry White Kemmart across Kakota, the most alpha humans outside the military I think I've ever worked with. Very successful people, and people don't succeed accidentally. So I took them all out, their CEO and everyone, and I remember at the time um Ryan's wife Karen came and she's a very successful businesswoman and and was a very successful athlete, um, you know, professional netballer, the whole bit. So she are pharmacists tend to try and do um development or health care and mental health and all that sort of stuff. But for blokes, we don't tie into it, but women do. So when young girls are old enough to have their periods, they're talking to someone. When they're going through pregnancy, they're talking to someone. When they reach the other end of that and be menopausal, they're talking to someone. We don't talk to anyone. So she started running these information nights and she'd get footy players in. So Alistair Clarkson, one year, Wally Lewis, because blokes will turn up for that, and then they sneak in a bit of mental health and a bit of health stuff. And then after we did Kakoda, she said, I'd love you to come and do one. I said, Well, no one's gonna come listen to me because I'm not anyone, as far as famous, or I don't have a footy story. But she talked me into it because she's very convincing, so I went and did it. And there was, I don't know, I can't remember, a hundred or so people turn up, so a lot less than when Wally Lewis spoke. But they took so much out of it because I had to deliver real content because I don't have a footy story to tell you. So I delivered what I normally deliver, and they were just blown away by it. And she said, You really would you consider doing some stuff for younger people like youth development? I just I don't have time, I legitimately don't have time. I like the idea, but I don't have time. And then COVID hit. And the thing about successful people, they're successful for a reason, they just don't give up on stuff. And I remember her ringing me and she said, Um, I reckon you're not that busy right now, which which hurt a bit because the adventure business had just stopped. And so we started running talks for young kids and then we started running camps. She actually came on and ran a camp with me, she sponsored a couple of the camps. Yeah, um, but the problem we had in the early days was valuing the camps. So we were charging 400 bucks for three days, where we've got 24 hours of staff members, so we're all doing it for free, myself and all my team. Yeah, and one of my young blokes, uh, he's a footy player. Um he plays Super League in the UK now, but his wife's a school teacher, Krista, and she kind of did the numbers and she said it costs about 900 bucks to run this camp, and you're charging 400. But if you had to pay people, 900 to break even if you've got X amount of people. So 68% of the kids who came in the camp couldn't afford it. So we used to sponsor them. We'd have people that would give us money to sponsor them, and my accountant eventually said, You can't keep doing this because you're going backwards. But we put 3, uh 648 kids through camps, or or 3,468. But anyway, those are the numbers. And so 3,500 people. And then we stopped doing them for about 18 months. Um, I sold my gym because they're knocking down that building for the Olympics, and we're just starting to relaunch that now. But this time we've done it differently. We've got we're getting the government involved at some level, so we're doing kids coming out of youth detention, we're doing uh at-risk youth to try and help solve the youth crime problem because we're a community, that's what we believe. And then I was just at Churchy the other day talking to their team because they want to start running them through Churchy as well, so the whole spectrum. Um, and we'll get back into that. So that's our main focus. And how it started was I thought we call this uh an upstream program. So, what happens for most of us? I make used to make my living out of sort of 40 to 55-year-olds who struggled when life didn't quite turn out how they thought it would be. And so to my mindset was they've fallen in the river, and we've kind of pulled them out and trying to help them out, work their way through that, which is most of us, you know, when we're 40 and life hasn't quite done what we thought it would. And then I thought, what if you could give these skill sets to young people before they even needed them? So this is upstream before they've fallen in. So if they fall in the river, which they will because that's life, they've already had some introduction, they've already got some skill sets. And I've had, I'll give you a good example. I did a job out at Marsden High School where I had 24 kids do a leadership program, it was volunteer, they didn't have to do it. So we're running this program, and I had this young young girl who I can mention, Anna, and she did the program, and they got a really good outcomes. But I gave them a book called High Performance Habits by Brendan Bouchard, it's one of my favourite books around personal development. We got 24 books, we gave it to the school. They initially tried to put them in the library, we said, no, that's for these kids. So she didn't read the book, but she did pretty well in the program. Then I was she's quite big on TikTok, this kid, three, four hundred thousand followers. And so she's a rugby player and whatnot. And then I watched her, and she was doing the 75 Hard Challenge earlier this year, so you know, three or four years after she did the program. She said, I'm doing 75 Hard. And for those that know the program, you've got to uh exercise twice a day, one indoors, one outdoors. You have to follow some sort of diet. They don't tell you what to follow, but it's just about discipline. You have to drink, I think it's like four litres of water a day, you have to take a selfie every day, but you also have to read, I think it's 10 pages of a some sort of personal development. And she in this TikTok said, I'm gonna read this book. I was given it on this program like four years ago, and I've never looked at it, but now I'm gonna read it. So you don't know when this stuff's gonna land for people, but it was cool to watch that it had landed for her a few years later. Yeah. Um, so that's really the the background of the hows and whys. And now we're just really passionate about. I think about this youth crime problem in in Queensland in particular. We've got the worst youth crime sets in Australia. And if we want to pretend it doesn't exist, we're kidding ourselves because if you're in business, it's costing you money. At the end of the day, when the when the government struggles to pay for a thing, they take it off the small business owner. So it affects all of us, so therefore, we should all try and help solve the problem. Um Millie works as a youth worker in residential youth care, so she's first hand on the front line of this stuff, and it's pretty tough. We can bag these kids all we want, but they've had the most incredibly hard lives, and so you need to understand why they ended up where they did. They didn't, they're not bad kids, they're just in bad situations.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, I agree 100%, mate. Like they A lot of these kids, as you said before, like you get them out in the the outdoors, you sit around a fire, you have some good conversation, you teach them some good skills, and they'll come out different people.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, but I've had Millie come home from work crying when she's read some of the things that these kids have been through, and you think, man, how's this kid got a chance? But they'll have a chance if everyday people, you and I, people watching and listening to this, put their hand up in some way, shape, or form and help, as opposed to going lock them up for longer. That's not necessarily the answer. I'm I'm all about the adult crime, adult time for certain things, but also how can we try and stop them from happening in the first place?
SPEAKER_03:So how can people get behind that and support that?
SPEAKER_02:Well, we're in the middle of setting it up as a charity, so that's a process right now. But once that's up and running, if they just follow our stuff through the Building Better Humans project, we're building a residential youth housing model called Wantok House. Wantok, and you'll learn when you go to PNG, um, is a word for family for community. So if someone's your Wantok, it means they're normally from your village. Um it's what Maldives would call FANU, um, some owners called Iiger. It's just that real family-community feeling so we wanted to use a word that tied into uh PG because we we're passionate, and because of military's uh sorry, because of Millie's history there. And so eventually there'll be the capacity for people to chip in and help, and we'll need people to. We don't have the capacity. It'll honestly it'll cost us half a million dollars to set this up properly, but no one else is doing it. And so I'm not scared to put my hand up for stuff. I'll publicly talk about what I'm gonna try and achieve, and I'll do everything I can to achieve it. But my long-term goal is to build enough finance into what we're doing that we can take some of these kids to Kakota because you will experience and your mates will experience a life-changing experience.
SPEAKER_03:But hopefully all the level uppers, mate, will get behind you and start following Glenn on Instagram and see when this happens and we can all pitch in.
SPEAKER_02:But I think we take them all to Kokoda after you've done it, we'll get your level uppers over there, right?
SPEAKER_03:Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:It's life-changing, but they can afford to change their life. Yeah, these kids can't. So then I think, well, what if we could? So the idea behind having a charity too is when Sir Churchy wants to take a group of kids. So what if they chipped in an extra couple of thousand dollars each that would go into the charity that eventually three kids can take one extra kid along and so on whose whose parents can't afford to go? That's the idea.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, I think it's fantastic, mate. Because that like everything, a lot of so everything we've talked about today all comes back to just there, like we're animals, like we need to get back to our simple instincts.
SPEAKER_02:More importantly, we're a communal animal. But we've kind of Western society has made us very protective, yeah, very suspicious of each other, uh, and for good reason in in certain places, but I would just love to see us get back to being a bit more communal and saying, you know what, my life's pretty good. I've I've been I've had some levels of success in business or whatever. Maybe I could help someone else. And that's where my mind's at at the moment. And I'm conscious that as good as I feel at 53, I am 53, in 10 years, 63, in 10 years 73, and I hope to still be doing this, but you don't know. And so I want to make as much impact as I can and bring as many people along that journey. So I've got young athletes I work with, I've got school teachers that I mentor, I've got people in businesses that all have capacity. You think if everyone that we know in our circles chipped in one to five thousand dollars towards changing the world for the better, that's actually a lot of money. It's uh yeah, it's you know that you can't rely on the government to do it. You just can't.
SPEAKER_03:Do you um I think we're very similar, Glenn, in a lot of ways. The um, like one of my big mottos is like, if I'm not right, nothing around me can be right. 100%. I truly, well, I don't just believe it anymore. I'm seeing it happening. Like the the better I am, the better I the more I do on myself, the more exercise I do, the more I get out in nature, the better I feel. The the better my businesses do, which then allows me to help more people. And I'm addicted to it. Like, I just want to help as many people as I possibly can.
SPEAKER_02:But I bang this drum all the time, and I've had people attack us about this. Um, Millie and I do a Monday episode on our podcast, which we call Mayhem Monday. She's a boxer, so she's representing PNG at the Commonwealth for the Commonwealth Games next year. Um, she fights amateur and professional, she's the current PNG champion. She's fighting for the Australian title in a few weeks, so the professional title. Yeah, and so Mayhem's her nickname. Uh controlled chaos, we call that. So we do Mayhem Mondays, which is just us talking about stuff, but we do a thing called NGL, which is a not gonna lie. And so it's a link where people can ask us anonymous questions. You'd be surprised how often we get attacked by people who go, Oh, it's all bullshit. This personal development stuff's all bullshit. And yeah, hey, I'm not here to convince you otherwise, I just know what works for me. Yeah, I run online programs, like I run a 12-week design your life online program, so it's all been written by me, pre-filmed by me. You just buy the program, it's$400 for lifetime access. And people go, that's ridiculous, that price. And you go, What? Like you you go to a Tony Robbins seminar and you spend five grand. I'm not bagging Tony Robbins out, I'm just saying you'll spend a lot of money, and that's if you do the base level of the program. I run a 28-day habit builder um program that people can buy online for like 90 bucks. Like it's it's designed to be cheap enough to to not deter people, and it it wouldn't matter if it's ten dollars, someone would think it's a waste of time. I'm not here to convince them otherwise. I've been attacked about everything and anything, and that's all bullshit. Okay, like who am I to convince you of otherwise?
SPEAKER_03:We get the exact same thing. In my um training business, we do a um one we've got a small entry-level sort of thing, it's 190 odd bucks, we call it launch pad, and it's um it gives them four sort of key things that like they get the document, they get a recorded video to watch to talk them through that, and um the builders that have taken that, listened to it, watched it, done the documents, have had a lot of success. And so we've got this um it's an automated system. So I get a uh calendar invite put in my calendar um 30 to 45 days after um they've purchased it, which should be more than enough time for them to do it. And uh I give them a call and just say, hey, just touch and bass in, how you're going. I would say 70% of people that purchase that do not even open it. But the amount of people that I ring up that they haven't even opened the email. And I say to them, look, you obviously bought it for a reason. Like you you want to improve, like, and it's always the same old excuses. Oh, I got no time, I got young kids, I uh life's busy, work's busy, I haven't got enough employees, I can't get away from site, like all these same excuses. But anybody, like my I believe anybody on this planet can have and be and do whatever they want.
SPEAKER_02:100%. You can't they I believe you can do anything, you can't do everything. Yeah, so if you find your time poor, you've got to work out well, where am I spending time, maybe wasting time on things that aren't important, yeah. And then it's about being really honest with yourself around those things, and you've got it, you've got to commit.
SPEAKER_03:Like if you want change, you have to do something with it. You can't um you can't just spend money on a program and then blame the program when it's like signing up to the gym and not going, and then so I'm just not getting any fitter, but I'm paying me membership.
SPEAKER_02:Well, okay, but you've got to go and do the thing, so and you've got to get a bit uncomfortable to do the thing. So, yeah, I'm really big on all of that sort of stuff. I'm big on morning routines and afternoon routines, and if people start to cleanse their lives a little bit, I'm not saying we need to become monks, but just tidy up a few things. You'd be saying, Oh, I actually do waste a bit of time on this, that, and the other thing. And what's your morning routine, mate? Morning routine for me, which the most basic one I teach people is just move, motivate, and hydrate. It's not about getting up at 4 a.m. because that's what the rock does, or it's about what works for you. Yeah, um, so move, motivate, and hydrate is just move your body. And it's I'll often say to people, do 10 or 20 burpees. People go, oh, burpees because they're thinking CrossFit jumping up and down. No, if you lay down and stand up, lay down and stand up ten times as slow as you want. It's called blood shunting. You it just starts pumping the blood around your body. Um, motivate is just listen or read something motivation. If I read it, I read it out loud. If I listen to it, I've got go-to videos on YouTube that I've saved, or things that just inspire or motivate me in someone, so I'm putting something good in. Because we don't all wake up every day feeling amazing. So I'm trying to change my physiology and then hydrate's just you know, drink a litre of water or half a litre or whatever it is for you. I used to be the guy that would just get up and and uh skull a can of Pepsi Max or drink a coffee and grab a piece of toast and run straight out the door. I've got my caffeine, and and truthfully, I can fall back into that if I'm not really careful. Um, I'm someone that gets up very early, 2:30, 3 o'clock some mornings. I'm just crazily inspired, and sometimes I need to temper that a little bit. Yeah, um, but just move, motivate, and hydrate, just get your body primed to do something. These people that hit snooze, hit snooze, hit snooze, and then now we're behind the eight ball. Uh and I always joke about this. I say, so after eight or nine hours sleep, what you really needed was a nine-minute nap. But that doesn't make sense to me. So if that's true, you haven't slept well. There's something else going on. Because when you hit that snooze button, that's what it gives you that magic nine minutes. Yeah. Um, and and there are strategies around that. And you know, put your clothes further away, put your alarm clock further away. I say to people not to keep their phones in the room because people check their phones. When I say that to kids, they go, Well, that's my alarm clock. I say for 15 bucks from Kmart, you can buy an alarm clock if that's the issue, right?
SPEAKER_03:No phones in the room.
SPEAKER_02:Just try and give yourself every opportunity to succeed. And I I have this underlying belief that the world wants you to win, you've just got to get out of your own way. Maybe that's true, maybe it's not, but it's not a bad belief to have.
SPEAKER_03:I think that's definitely a good belief to have. Mate, tell us a little bit that's not dead yet.
SPEAKER_02:So, not dead yet is our belief system for the adventure business. Initially, it started that people go, like, why would you track Kokoda? Or why would you climb Mount Kilimanjaro? Because it's hard and it's uncomfortable. And we just sort of said, Well, we do what we do because we're not dead yet. And how that came about really was um I was I was at Bomana War Cemetery where you guys would go after you finished Kokoda. It's the biggest war cemetery in the Southern Hemisphere, it's the biggest Australian war cemetery in the world, 4,000 graves there. And I saw this laminated um piece of paper that had some photos in it and had some words written on it, and it was a guy who at fought on Kokoda at 2021 with his mate, and his mate was killed. And so he put this whole story and he laminated it and put it up against his mate's grave and just outlined his whole life uh into his 80s. And he basically said, I did everything in my life, every decision I made was because you didn't get to do any of those things. And so that I've got mates, particularly coming from a military background, who didn't make it to 50. So I'll never complain about my age, whether it's through things that happen in war zones or taking their own lives after war, which which happens. Um there's plenty of people that didn't get to 50, so I'll never complain about being 50, and I'll never complain about being 60, and because that's a privilege. Um, the other side of that is when I think about kids like Christian, and when he was at Aspie Special School, there were 131 kids there. Um, these kids, again, like I said earlier, they didn't ask to have the situation that was put on them. And so it's almost a disrespect to them, it's a disrespect for mates of mine that aren't alive anymore for me to sit around and mope around about my life and not go out and do things. When my daughter wanted to climb Mount Everest, she was 14 when she made that decision. We're coming down off Mount Kilimanjaro, she did Kokoda when she was eight, Everest Base Camp when she was 10, and then coming down off Killy, she said, I want to climb Mount Everest. Now I'm I'm a nature over. She's been to the top. Yeah, she summited. She summited Mount, she's the youngest woman, she was the youngest Australian, someone's beaten that record now, and she's the youngest woman to have summited Mount Everest from both the north and south routes, which she did by the age of 21. And when she wanted to do that, I knew nothing about climbing Mount Everest. I'd trekked there, but I'm not the guy that's going to say no, because I think, well, Christian doesn't get those opportunities. He can't even play a game of footy or a game of cricket. When I drive past kids at school playing a game of cricket, and I think, well, Christian will never get to do that. And I always said to the girls, whatever you decide to do, you should do it to the best of your ability because you owe it to him. Whether that's if you want to be a hairdresser or a doctor or an accountant, I don't care what you want to do, but just do it 100%. You you owe it to kids like him to do that.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:And that's kind of what the not dead yet philosophy is. And then we've transitioned it into the youth, particularly the at-risk youth, to say not dead yet is about staying in the fight. You know, life's handed you a shit sandwich. There's some things that shouldn't have happened to you that have happened to you. But as long as you stay in the fight, you're every chance of coming out the other side and taking control of your life. Yeah. And so we use not dead yet for that. I wear it on bands, I wear it on shirts. It's it's deeply ingrained into who we are these days. But really, it's just about living life, having a crack.
SPEAKER_03:Oh, I think it's fantastic, mate.
SPEAKER_02:When I was nursing, I went to a nursing home when I was 30, 31, when I first started my nursing degree, and that's your first placement. There were people 60 years of age sitting around in a nursing home waiting to die. And I remember saying to this guy, man, you could live until you're at least 85. That's 25 years you're gonna sit here. And yet I've taken a 79-year-old lady across Kokoda, a group of blokes in their 70s who were Vietnam veterans years ago. I took to Kokoda. One of them had two busted knees, and his surgeon said he needed both knee replacements. But I'll do it after Kokoto. Man, he struggled, his knees were swollen, it looked hard. Yeah, but he didn't just it was a hard ass. He just went out and got it done. And yeah, I've seen 40-year-olds go, oh man, I'd love to do that, but I'm too old now. Yeah, stop it.
SPEAKER_03:I used to think, like growing up, like, and my parents are quite young, like my old boys are only bloody 67 or something now. But um, I used to, and even my boss, like my boss was in his mid-40s, maybe late 40s, and I used to think, man, they're old. Like, look at like 50's old, like, I don't want to get to 50. Yeah, and like I've just turned 45 a few weeks ago, and I this year I've definitely put the yards in, but like I got a trainer, I'm eating well, and mate, I feel better than when I was in my 20s. And I just think, like, if I'm feeling this good now, like I I want to make the most of the next 20-30 years, like, I want to do as many adventures as I can, I want to have experiences. Like, to me.
SPEAKER_02:A funny story about that. Years ago, when I first became a physical training instructor in the army, that was a dual role. I was 21 or 22, and I was running PT for our battalion, and there was this corporal there who had been around for a long time. And as we're out running uh and doing stuff, he goes to me, for fuck's sake, Azar. I'm nearly 35 years old. I remember thinking, Oh, that's pretty old. Then I got to 35, I thought, what's he talking about? So you are what you believe yourself to be, I guess. I'm there. Mate, I'm not like I was 20 or 30 years ago. I'm at that lucky stage of life where people go, you're fit for your age. I'll take it. I've got injuries, galore. I've as you guys know, I was telling you, I've torn my pec minor when I was over dog setting, I've torn both of my biceps off, neither of them are attached anymore through stupid things I did in my 40s. So there's a heap of stuff I can't do, but I can do a lot, yeah. And so I'm not never going to complain. My body's not like it was at 20, but I've abused it, so so it's doing alright.
SPEAKER_03:Mate, I uh honestly I can talk to you all night. I'm I am so looking forward to our trip.
SPEAKER_02:Um, do we get to hang out like uh each night or sit around a fire or yeah, we'll get into camps depending on the days between sort of 2 and 4 p.m. Um and then there'll be a lot of just sitting around the fire, go and have a tub, um just people chatting. And because I'm so involved in personal development and people who come on Kokoda typically have listened to podcasts, they know that that's what we're about. You you're not gonna hang around with me and not have those conversations. But as a result, we also attract a lot of people that are into those conversations. Um, and when I first started doing the Building Better Humans project, I did it as a marketing tool in a way. I wanted people to know who I was, so then if you want to come on an adventure, you know what you got. Because I'm not for everyone, and I'm okay with that. And what I found was before that, people didn't know who you were. Every company looks the same, all their websites look the same, pricing's not that much different when you add it all up. And you just get some people that really needed to be mole-coddled that, and and that's I'm not that guy. Um, and I remember I had years ago, this guy rang me up and he wants to do cocota, and he said, My wife is enamoured with your daughter, and you know, she wants to do cocota with you for that reason, and they wanted to go south to north, and I said, Well, I'm personally not going that way because I like to go the way the battle unfolded, so I'd like to put the battle on the ground. So I gave him some names of some companies that go the other way. He rang me back two weeks later and he said, mate, look, I've spoken to Sam and she's decided, no, we're gonna do it with him, so we'll go the way you're going. So no rose. He said, She wants to talk to you first, and she gets on the phone and no hello, no anything. And she just says, Sell yourself to me. I said, I beg your pardon. She goes, Sell yourself to me. Why should I come with you? And I said, Yeah, I don't really do that. So maybe go with someone else. So she went with someone else. Yeah. And I ran into her on the track, and she gave me the greasiest looks. Yeah. But I just didn't want to attract people that required me to have the whole experience for them. And you'll learn on the track. I want you to have the experience. There'll be things that you'll work out, particularly. I've taken people over that have never camped before, and then two or three days in, they're still trying to work out how to pack their bags and how to do stuff. And I'll give them some tips and mostly let them work it out. After two or three days, if they haven't worked it out, which most people have, then I'll help them. They go, Why don't you tell me that three days ago? Well, because it's your experience. We're here to facilitate it, we're here to keep it safe, but I'm not here to have the experience for you. And sometimes you get people that want the red carpet rolled out, and that's not adventure. So the idea of the Building Better Humans project was if people know who I am. I had a mate that used to work for me, and he said, When people ring up, they just ring up with their credit card and pay their deposit. I said, because they already know who I am. We're not trying to convince them of anything. And if they don't like me, they're not ringing me. And that's also okay. Yeah, I you have to become okay with people not liking you. Yeah. So yeah, mate. It's gonna be a cracking experience. You'll love it.
SPEAKER_03:I am really looking forward to it, but um, I'm also just looking forward to continuing to follow your journey, mate, and I I hope we can do some more adventures after Kakada. Definitely keen to get on this Yukon uh dog sledding thing, but um mate, just keep doing what you're doing. Like I I love it, I love everything about it. You, I love what you're for. Um, I love that you're helping the youth and that sort of thing. So um, yeah, just keep smashing it out, mate. Just um last thing before we go, mate, what's level up mean to you?
SPEAKER_02:Level up to me, if I was to think about that, would be no matter what level we're at in life, and we're whether we're down here or up here, there's always going to be another level. So if we're really, really honest with ourselves, there are things that we can improve. I feel like sometimes people, when you're in this industry, will talk about you being a guru or something. I'm so far from that, and I'm a very average bloke. Uh, I think we're all pretty average, if I'm really honest. But in order for you to level up, you've got to have some real brutal honesty around some things, and I've struggled with that over the years. So personally and professionally, and the way I do everything, I run at a pretty high level. But as an example, relationships, I've always really struggled with interpersonal relationships, as in with intimate relationships. Um, and there's a lot of issues from growing up. I understand psychologically why that is, and Millie's someone who's very brutally honest, like brutally honest, she'll just hit you between the eyes. And I found that really challenging at first, and I tried to kind of ignore it or turn it away. Um, and I had to really face that with a brutal honesty, which I still haven't ironed out. And so, level up to me means be willing to look at yourself and say, is there another level in this for me? And if you're honest, yeah, there is, there always is.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, that's awesome, mate. Really appreciate you taking the time out. And um, yeah, I think we will get you back for another one after we've done this track and can chat and uh see what's happening there. But guys, look as usual, thanks for um watching and listening. Um, make sure you go check Glen Azar out on Instagram, uh, Adventure Professionals on Instagram as well.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, so there's Building Bit of Humans Project. There's my own personal Glen Azer, which is where I do most of my stuff, and then Adventure Professionals.
SPEAKER_03:Yep, and uh go to the DuanePears.com website, make sure you get your merch. And uh, as always, if you've got any questions, you want to jump on the podcast, you want to know something, make sure you reach out. And we really appreciate you helping us make this Australia's number one construction podcast. See you on the next one. All right, guys, I want to introduce you to a really exciting new product that I believe is going to play a massive role in Australia building healthier homes. As you all know, I am extremely passionate about healthy homes, and I'm doing a lot of research and putting a lot of time and effort into making sure my construction business is leading the way when it comes to building healthy homes here in Australia. We've teamed up with the guys from Highwood Timber. Highwood Timber are pioneering condensation management with their high flow ventilated LVL baton system. High flow batten give builders a stronger, straighter, and smarter way to create a ventilated cavity behind cladding and underneath roof without compromising on structural performance. While tackling condensation to improve building health and ease of insulation, highwood battons are built to perform. When it comes to dealing with condensation and ventilation, high-flow batons will help you create continuous ventilated cavities behind all your cladding and underneath your roof sheeting. They reduce condensation risk and support healthier, longer lasting buildings. Highwood timber battons are also in alignment with the proposed NCC condensation management requirements as well as passive house ventilation requirements. Being an engineered LVL product, they are stronger, straighter, and more dimensionally stable than a solid material such as pine. This helps resist warping, twisting, and shrinkage, ensuring more consistent installs, less prone to sweating than solid timber. Howard timber batons are precisely manufactured, meaning that your installation will be faster and easier than other products on the market. The part that I like the most about these batons are they are H3 treated for long-term protection against decay and turmoil. They use a waterborne H3 treatment which reduces reactivity with membranes and adhesive when compared to LOSP. These are the exact buttons that you want to be using on your hands and your build if you were considering building a healthier hand.