Latest / The Christian Reeve Podcast / Keith Hutchings | The Christian Reeve Podcast | #96 |

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Keith Hutchings | The Christian Reeve Podcast | #96 | · The Christian Reeve Podcast

• 0:02
  Hello and welcome to another episode of the Christian Reef
• 0:06
  podcast. Today's guest is an entrepreneur
• 0:09
  and a public speaker all the way from Perth Australia.
• 0:13
  His name is Keith Hutchins. Welcome to the show Hayden.
• 0:16
  I'm really good. Yeah, I just yeah, I'm having so
• 0:20
  much fun. I'm having more fun than a grown
• 0:24
  man ought to be allowed to have. I'm just putting that out there
• 0:27
  right from the beginning. So yes, that in life, in this
• 0:30
  podcast, What we talking? Well we haven't been in the
• 0:33
  podcast, very long silence on that but in general in my life.
• 0:37
  Yeah I'm just you know I'm 58 years old and yeah I just
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  decided to hmm you know in the last year or so that I'm just
• 0:50
  going to let things happen. And yeah so I'm doing I'm doing
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  shit that five years ago I would have just it would have been
• 0:58
  inconceivable and so now I'm just Just doing it.
• 1:01
  So what's changed exactly. Is it just like a different
• 1:04
  mindset or is there something in specifically that you change?
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  I mean, I kind of know where you're coming from because I
• 1:10
  feel like in the past year, I've had a similar change but I want
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  to know exactly what your what Your there are two things that
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  change. So there's all the big picture
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  of the long work. So I started doing kind of
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  personal growth, sort of work, 30 years ago.
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  I've been part of a men's group for 20 years.
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  So that's a cumulative process of Clearing away the childhood
• 1:33
  shit have growing up in a dysfunctional family.
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  And then the big change that happened about six months ago,
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  which just moved an enormous amount of change.
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  Was I finally overcame The Imposter syndrome because you
• 1:52
  know what the Imposter syndrome Well, I can't say that I do.
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  I said I've heard of it. Okay.
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  So maybe you don't have it or are you just now heard never
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  heard the sir. So it's this idea, you know,
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  like, you know, maybe Frank Sinatra or somebody is about to
• 2:07
  step on stage but they're thinking.
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  What am I doing here? I'm in, you know, how did I get
• 2:13
  here any minute now? Somebody's going to figure out
• 2:17
  that I'm a complete fake and that this was a mistake.
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  It's a common story. Apparently.
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  It's more challenging for women, but yeah.
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  Okay, and lots of people have it, you know, famous people have
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  this kind of thing and so I'm in this process, I'm trying to
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  change the way we build houses here.
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  Okay. Australia.
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  But I'm not a builder. I'm not an architect, people
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  would say. So are you an architect?
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  And I said, no, I just decided that the way we build houses
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  here, shit. So I thought I'd do something
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  about it and And then I realized that so I work as a handyman.
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  That's how I pay the bills. The housing project is an
• 3:03
  obsession, it doesn't actually make me any money and but I was
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  always suffering this imposter syndrome and then I realized in
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  the last six years I have been in 800 to 1,000 houses.
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  So I have decided I have bestowed upon myself and
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  Honorary doctorate degree in house ology because I know more
• 3:32
  about how not to do housing, having been an 800 to 1,000
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  houses in the last six years. I know more about how not to do
• 3:42
  housing than anybody in the Free World.
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  So, it's like, okay, I can talk, I am now, an expert, I have a
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  degree, I have a doctorate Which I declared myself.
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  So, you know, people say, oh where'd you get your doctorate
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  degree? Awesome.
• 3:59
  Well I just gave it to myself. Well.
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  Okay, so you've been in 800 to 1,000 homes.
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  What are the main things that people shouldn't be doing in
• 4:11
  terms of building their houses to make them more sustainable
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  orange? Just in general?
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  Like what are the well do not. So yeah, I'm going to backtrack
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  a little bit. People talk about
• 4:22
  sustainability. We've been talking about
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  sustainability since the 1970s, you know, the hippies my
• 4:27
  parents, they were hippies and they talked about sustainability
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  and living better on the planet. Nobody gives a shit.
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  So people have not Change the way that don't think
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  substantially in all this time. So I'm like, let's stop talking
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  about sustainability, what we should be doing, which we have
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  known how to do. Since the 1970s is build our
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  houses so that they're warm in the winter.
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  They're cool in the summer. And they basically, if a
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  well-designed house wouldn't require we require minimal
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  amounts of energy to keep it comfortable throughout the life
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  of the home. So that's not only.
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  Yeah, it's good for the planet because you're not burning oil
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  or natural gas or whatever. But also your living you know
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  the average Australian spends, 1,500 to 2,000.
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  Hours a year on energy costs, it would obviously be much higher
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  in colder parts of North America, but we could build our
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  houses. So they don't actually need are
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  they need minimal amounts of energy.
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  Yeah. If you're in Canada, you're
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  probably going to need some Heating in there when it's 50
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  below outside but you can build a house.
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  So all of the heat that you are producing isn't going out and
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  then even in cold parts of the world, the Sun comes out, a
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  couple of, you know, for long periods of I'm during the day
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  and you can bring that heat in and warm up your house with this
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  heat from the Sun rather than, you know, spending money.
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  Okay, I'm clueless when it comes to this, all I know is kind of
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  like, okay, so the powers blah, blah, blah.
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  I kind of understand that. So is it possible for example,
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  that you could collect all of that kind of heat power in the
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  In summer right? And then I don't know save that
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  for the winter. Is that something that can be
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  not the no not really okay? You know what it what it is is
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  you know the average like if you look at the temperature through
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  the day of you know it's like doing this it gets you know much
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  hotter in the middle of the day and then it drops down and then
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  it comes back up again the next day and what a well-designed
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  house will be is it just kind of does?
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  These little waves. So it gets a little bit warmer
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  during the day, and it cools down a little bit at night.
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  And that's, you know, housing accounts for somewhere between
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  40 and 60 percent of global carbon emissions.
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  So, you know, making a change on this is big but you know if
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  we're trying to sell people on it's good for the planet.
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  Well that hasn't work in the last 50 years or so.
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  It's not likely to change right now, but your kids are less
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  likely to get asthma. You're less likely to develop
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  respiratory diseases because you don't have mold and mildew in
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  your house. You know, gas heating produces,
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  a lot of moisture when you're burning the gas and that
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  moisture buildup in your house and producers mold mildew.
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  That's yeah. And and that then becomes really
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  toxic, you know, the molds molds, mildew is, whatever in
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  your house. So, What I keep saying to people
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  is climate, change is a marketing problem, it's not a
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  technical problem. We know how to solve it, but
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  we've done a sorry. I have to do this again.
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  We've done a shithouse job of marketing it and we have to
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  change that. We have to talk about things in
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  terms of how good it is. You know, people are talking
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  about electric cars, they're good for the planet.
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  But I talked to somebody who just bought the Cooper mini and
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  they were they just said it's so much fun to drive and they got a
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  kind of glassy out there like it's like having a bumper car,
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  you know, and I was like why is nobody talking about?
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  It is just so much fun to drive. They're talking about all this,
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  you know, that's a really good point actually.
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  Like what when all I hear about? When it comes to Electric.
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  As you know, is, well, I suppose is just you just think of Tesla
• 8:55
  straight away, and then that's kind of it, really?
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  I mean, they do push obviously the fact that it's
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  environmentally friendly, it's better for the environment,
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  blah, blah blah, which is great. But, yeah, there doesn't seem to
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  be like, I don't see like a lot of adverts on TV.
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  I don't see like big Billboards, especially anything General.
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  I mean, I don't see like people trying to make it cool.
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  Like you said, Basic Marketing? Making it cool.
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  It's like it just doesn't really seem to exist and yeah.
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  Yeah, infinite torque. So I talked to a client I was
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  working for they've got a Tesla it's it's a nice car.
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  You know, it's a luxury car but they said yeah you go out on
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  your out on the freeway and you put your foot down and it just
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  goes and you know it's not like waiting for it to wind up as
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  soon as you put your foot down its infinite torque, it's as
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  much as you want. So yeah.
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  But nobody's talking about, it's like driving a bumper car.
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  So again it's this, my I just think it's weird.
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  Once I said, it's what - why are they talking about?
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  It's good for the environment. Yeah, no one cares.
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  Yeah, so that is n. And that stretches across to,
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  you know, I'm not really focused on any of the other parts of
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  dealing with climate change. But yeah, let's talk about how
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  much good it'll make our So yeah, it's crazy.
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  What kind of tips could you give to property owners who want to
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  kind of make their homes more sustainable?
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  So let's okay, let's suppose people aren't going straight
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  with your company. Maybe there's just like little
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  bits and Bobs, they can do right now before they sort of spend
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  that cost and make a bigger chance.
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  What are some things we could all do right now to make our
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  homes more sustainable? Well, I mean, I think the first
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  thing in terms of Stanton, sustainability, if you're
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  talking about sustainability, is, you know, What are you
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  bringing into? What are you spending your money
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  on? What are you buying?
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  Because as so that's a big part of it.
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  The I haven't really spent a lot of time.
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  Looking at the renovation side of it, how to improve an
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  existing house. But you know, there's lots of
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  other people. I'm really looking at Ground Up
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  construction. Okay.
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  New, you know, building new houses because there's 18,000
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  new houses built It in Western Australia every year.
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  That's a lot of houses. So I figure, Somebody's gotta
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  focus on changing the way those houses are built, someone else
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  can focus on the renovation, the existing houses, you know
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  there's lots of those. So do you think it's better to
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  maybe like if someone is looking to renovate their house versus
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  just building from scratch? You'd sort of say it's just
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  better to just build from scratch like it's much easier
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  that way? No, I don't think I would say
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  that because you know, one of the big things About climate
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  change is embodied energy, it's how much energy is going into
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  the building, but there comes to a point, you know?
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  I mean we're in a house that was built in the 1960s, it has
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  minimal insulation in the roof, no insulation in the walls, the
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  house was built. It's not quite perfectly
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  backwards. My neighbor's house is perfectly
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  backwards but you know it's got all the windows in the living
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  areas on the west side. Side here in Western Australia.
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  The Sun comes in in the afternoon and just our biggest
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  issue is heat rather than cold in Australia.
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  You know, we have more so, would it make sense to renovate it.
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  Mmm. Yeah, possibly, there's things
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  we could do. I could put double glazing in on
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  that Western, the big Lounge room windows.
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  On the western side. Keep that Sun out or put like
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  just Shade Sails. So big thing in terms, Of
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  keeping it cool because you're in California, aren't you know,
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  I'm in the UK and that's right I just made shit up.
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  I do that. No let me change that.
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  You are in l.a. now I'm just yeah sorry I keep that spoken.
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  You are you are now you walk out the door and it's like oh yeah
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  yeah yeah I get my worries. Yeah yeah so yeah so you're in
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  the UK. You're dealing with cold and
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  you're wanting to get that son in.
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  So, you know, it's like their scales of things.
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  The first thing is, if you're in an older house is getting some
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  insulation in it. You know, like we're in a house,
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  there's no insulation in the walls, so the bricks on the
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  outside heat up. And then, in the summer, they
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  just radiate that heat out through the night.
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  And then, you know, we just can't get enough heat into the
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  house. Like, we've got a wood Our will
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  warm it if the fire goes out the house just turns into an icebox
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  really quickly. How do you get around that?
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  Because I've actually lived in houses like that abroad and
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  obviously, I would assume because those houses were built
• 14:13
  very well, the heat was contained right?
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  Up until the next morning. Yeah.
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  But like, how do you get around that?
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  Like if you've got a house that yeah like the just did the cold
• 14:24
  ghost show after fire? Yeah.
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  Yeah, so if we were going to stay in this house, the first
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  thing I do is put more insulation up into the roof.
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  There's there's a, it's not blown cellulose, it's rockwool.
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  It's like a crushed and you can get that they put little slices
• 14:43
  between the bricks and then blow it into the walls.
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  And so, that then fills, that Gap up with insulation, says,
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  lots of things you can do. And then like our main Lounge
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  room window again, our issue is heat.
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  Than cold more so would be to replace that Lounge room window
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  with double glazing all of the windows in that house because
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  it's, it was a badly built 1960s house because it was State
• 15:11
  housing. So all the windows are like
• 15:15
  warped and bowed and things. So I'd go through and replace
• 15:19
  all those windows with new windows because the are just,
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  you know, like if it's windy D outside it's just howling
• 15:28
  inside. All of our doors are leaky.
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  So there's lots of you know it's like steps of how much do you
• 15:33
  want to put into it. Yeah, I mean this house was so
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  badly built. I would I would love to be able
• 15:40
  to afford to well basically knock it down and start again
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  but yeah, do you think it's some in your experience is it is it
• 15:49
  very costly to, you know, create a sustainable home or is it
• 15:55
  something that you can do on a Of a lower budget.
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  Like what's the cost factor involved?
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  The cost is the cost of building is in the materials.
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  Mmm. So like the basic frame of a
• 16:11
  house is, is just going to be based on the M2 image of the
• 16:15
  house. And it's going to cost the same,
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  whether it's a well-designed house or not the cost that doing
• 16:23
  this. The first of all, you're going
• 16:24
  to put a lot more insulation into that House and and more
• 16:28
  insulation than what's required by law.
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  The building code at least here in Australia is a minimum, and
• 16:35
  it's pretty, pretty minimal. But then the, if you want a
• 16:42
  house that's going to be comfortable, you're going to
• 16:43
  spend a little more on insulation.
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  The other thing is design, the house has to be designed for the
• 16:50
  block that, you know, the piece of land that you're on.
• 16:54
  So that where the Open towards the prevailing Breeze when in
• 17:00
  the summer so you can get the cool air in the evening and
• 17:04
  flush the heat out. You want to get the sun in to
• 17:08
  the house? You want your main living areas
• 17:10
  pointed towards? Where the sun is?
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  So towards the equator, it gets backwards with the Northern
• 17:16
  Hemisphere and the southern hemisphere.
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  So I don't want to talk about directions because I'll just
• 17:21
  confuse people and myself which is more dangerous and But then
• 17:29
  at the same time. So you know, the project home
• 17:31
  builders, the guys that they just go along with their cookie
• 17:35
  cutter and they stamp out the house.
• 17:37
  And so they save money because they've got one set of drawings.
• 17:41
  They've done the engineering for it.
• 17:43
  They know there's 2,776 drywall screws in it, how.
• 17:51
  So and there's 1429 65 out. No, I'm making shit up again
• 17:59
  board feet of Timber, so that it was that size.
• 18:02
  So they've got everything down to the, you know, to the dollar
• 18:06
  and they've spread that cost of working of the design and
• 18:13
  everything over, you know, 100 or 1,000 different homes, which
• 18:17
  were built the same way to wear if you're building.
• 18:22
  To first of all, this specific piece of land that you're on
• 18:27
  then there's a going to be a cost in that because it has to
• 18:30
  be designed. It has to be engineered for
• 18:33
  that. So that's going to add a little
• 18:34
  bit of cost but it's not a huge amount, it costs what let's just
• 18:38
  say cost 150,000 dollars to build a house and you pay a
• 18:42
  building designer two or three thousand dollars to design the
• 18:45
  building. It's not a huge amount of money
• 18:49
  the Others. But at the same time, you're
• 18:53
  designing it. You're designing it for you.
• 18:56
  So like here it's really hard to buy a house that's not a
• 19:02
  three-bedroom house. Hmm.
• 19:05
  And I went and looked at this guy house he bought a house
• 19:09
  because he liked the area was in.
• 19:11
  Yeah it's like four-bedroom house he's across three stories.
• 19:16
  I said man you've got a lot more house than you need.
• 19:21
  Here. And that's the thing, you know,
• 19:23
  builders make their money by the M2, right?
• 19:27
  So their marketing is to sell you a lot more house and people
• 19:34
  say, well, you know, housing affordability is a big issue yet
• 19:37
  either. Whoa, I don't need a theater
• 19:39
  room, you know. Basically, the marketing is
• 19:42
  saying to you right now. Yeah.
• 19:45
  If you don't have nine bathrooms and it least Three theater rooms
• 19:53
  opening up four fingers which tells you how good I am
• 19:56
  accounting. If you don't have at least three
• 19:59
  theater, rooms your children will end up drug addicts.
• 20:06
  There is no gray area in there to theater rooms.
• 20:12
  Their crimes against humanity. They're ending up there and
• 20:16
  that's what the marketing is selling people on and it's like,
• 20:20
  so is it more expensive? Well, Wipe Out the theater room,
• 20:23
  the whole family, you'll find this hard to believe, but the
• 20:26
  whole family can sit together in the same room and watch the same
• 20:31
  movie. They don't have to be in three
• 20:34
  different parts of the house. We have.
• 20:37
  We've lived in this house. For 20 years, we have one
• 20:40
  toilet. There have been some traffic
• 20:42
  issues at times. We need some guy with like
• 20:45
  doodoo doodoo but you know two toilets would be really nice.
• 20:50
  Yeah, but you know if that's like the second bathroom and a
• 20:55
  house cost about 15 thousand dollars.
• 20:57
  When it's essential though in some properties like yeah I'm
• 21:02
  currently house hunting in the moment or searching for a
• 21:05
  property and now I'm just looking for a one-bed but I was
• 21:11
  looking A lot of house shares. And, you know, every now and
• 21:15
  again you'd see like a five bedroom property with only one
• 21:18
  bathroom and I'm like, absolutely not.
• 21:22
  You know? Yeah, just now.
• 21:25
  Yeah. And especially now we're we're
• 21:27
  all working from home. Yeah.
• 21:28
  Right. Yeah.
• 21:30
  And and if it's five blokes that are going to be sharing house
• 21:33
  where they all go into the bathroom for like 25 minutes and
• 21:37
  you know, work on a couple of chapters of War and Peace while
• 21:40
  they're in. There.
• 21:42
  It's it's yeah, it's going to end in tears or come to blows or
• 21:46
  something. It's not going to be good on.
• 21:48
  Sweep is girls. It's like the shower, you know.
• 21:51
  It's like, they go into the shower and it's like three days
• 21:55
  later. So, yeah, but an en suite.
• 21:58
  That's what you need. That's, that's the go.
• 22:00
  Yeah, yeah, yeah. That, that would be nice.
• 22:03
  Yes, hmm. Let's talk about your company.
• 22:05
  So you're the chief Communications officer at the
• 22:09
  comfortable Home Project. Company aiming to provide
• 22:12
  sustainable, housing and affordable price.
• 22:15
  Obviously, you've kind of given us a reflection of that for
• 22:17
  through everything that we've spoken about.
• 22:19
  But tell us specifically like what you guys are offering and
• 22:24
  why people should consider your brand.
• 22:27
  Well, we're a really strange company.
• 22:30
  I don't know if company as the right word, I tend to use
• 22:33
  organization, we call it to comfortable home project because
• 22:36
  it's a project you know, I don't know where it's headed, okay?
• 22:41
  And we don't actually make any money from this project which is
• 22:45
  very strange, and of itself and is possibly a sign of mental
• 22:49
  illness on my part. People say, well, what do you
• 22:50
  do? Oh, how do you make money from
• 22:52
  that? I said, I don't, it's just a
• 22:54
  crazy obsession. Is your go to eventually make
• 22:57
  money from it. Or I would really like to make
• 22:59
  money. I'm trying to work out how to do
• 23:00
  that. Right now, the important thing
• 23:04
  for me is to that, we get the word out that we change the way
• 23:10
  people are thinking. King about housing here in
• 23:13
  Australia because it's being done so badly.
• 23:17
  So our emphasis at this point is letting people know that they
• 23:22
  have an option. So you know what the future will
• 23:27
  hold? Well, you know, advertising on
• 23:30
  the site, I say to people we are a we are marketing agency
• 23:35
  without any clients as we don't. Actually I've got if you've
• 23:40
  looked on the website, Site. You can see there's a service
• 23:42
  directory there, there's a whole bunch of Builders Architects,
• 23:46
  Town planners, all those kind of people that you would need, if
• 23:49
  you wanted to build this kind of house, they don't pay to be on
• 23:55
  that site and they're all small business owners and they're all
• 23:58
  existing simply on word-of-mouth referrals.
• 24:03
  And so, I said, we could do this better, we'll get more So
• 24:07
  eventually, but it's still, it were very small.
• 24:10
  And you know how long it had been doing it know how long I've
• 24:15
  been doing well. I shot my first video, If you go
• 24:18
  onto our Facebook page, don't try this at home, these men are
• 24:23
  idiots. But if you go onto our Facebook
• 24:25
  page and you scroll all the way down to the bottom, You will
• 24:30
  come to the first video I Shot, which, at this point was, it was
• 24:33
  five years ago in August. I bought an eight dollar tripod
• 24:39
  at that. Has a little clip to put your
• 24:42
  phone in at Kmart. I set it up on a table and I
• 24:48
  interviewed this guy. I didn't know what he was
• 24:51
  actually working on. I hadn't talked to him
• 24:52
  beforehand, I had no fucking idea what I was doing, and it is
• 24:58
  so. Pauling Lee bad that I leave it
• 25:02
  up on the Facebook to page as so that people who say to me, oh, I
• 25:10
  could never I could never make video content.
• 25:13
  Mmm, I'd say. Go look at our Facebook page.
• 25:17
  You can't be worse than that's it.
• 25:22
  It's actually hilarious. There would they have this weird
• 25:25
  brass light like a fan like a 30s, kind of Steampunk thing in
• 25:34
  the over the table, it in their office.
• 25:38
  Hmm But what I didn't notice when I set up the camera was
• 25:41
  that there was a mirror behind me and that light was reflected
• 25:44
  in the mirror. So Looks like I have this Dome
• 25:49
  spaceship over my head. It's yeah, that look is exactly
• 25:53
  that sums it up perfectly, you know?
• 25:55
  Yeah. That's the one.
• 25:56
  It's just hilarious. And, yeah, because I was
• 26:00
  shooting with the phone and I didn't know how to edit.
• 26:04
  So we were doing it at everything in one take.
• 26:06
  So we had to run through it about four times because one of
• 26:09
  us would just lose our train of thought in the middle of it and
• 26:13
  I'm okay, let's do it again and we ran through it.
• 26:15
  Because the only thing I knew how to do was cut the front in
• 26:19
  the back office. That's five years.
• 26:21
  I now have a team of young marketing students who are
• 26:25
  working with me and, yeah, that's why I say we're having so
• 26:29
  much fun because I've got these young people who are really
• 26:33
  enthusiastic. They want to change the world
• 26:35
  but they also want to get experiences as actually, you
• 26:39
  know, the way to learn marketing is to do marketing.
• 26:42
  So they are, you know, Doing marketing for me.
• 26:47
  So we're looking at building our Facebook page doing are you
• 26:52
  know, I've got one guy who's Reba.
• 26:55
  He said oh I want to learn how to do SEO and Google analytics.
• 27:00
  I still want to do it on our website.
• 27:03
  Yeah. So he's been slowly working
• 27:05
  through rebuilding our website and he goes oh oh oh I want to
• 27:09
  do this thing. I don't know how to do it.
• 27:11
  I'll he and then he just finds out how to do it and then he
• 27:14
  fixes it. It's amazing to watch.
• 27:17
  You know, it's young people who are they're driven.
• 27:21
  So if they want to learn something, they're not waiting
• 27:24
  for permission because I've given them permission.
• 27:27
  I think, just do it. If it goes horribly wrong, it
• 27:31
  can't be worse than what we're doing now, which is nothing.
• 27:35
  So, set up our Instagram page, make it grow, if it doesn't grow
• 27:39
  as fast, figure out what you're doing wrong and change it.
• 27:43
  Fair enough? Yeah it's the kind of, you know,
• 27:47
  an ordinary companies run by a sane person would not say to
• 27:53
  you. Oh, you want to learn how to do
• 27:55
  Instagram, take over my Instagram account, set it up,
• 27:59
  run it. Create content for it and see
• 28:02
  what happens. But I'm like, well, I don't have
• 28:05
  an Instagram page. My wife has been telling me for
• 28:08
  four years. I mean, Instagram page days,
• 28:11
  right? But yeah, you did.
• 28:15
  She was right but I didn't have time to do it.
• 28:17
  So when Jane comes along and says I'm interested in doing
• 28:20
  your Instagram Pages, great make an Instagram page.
• 28:24
  So yeah, that's the way we're working and just growing stuff
• 28:28
  and and learning as we go, they're learning as fast as I
• 28:32
  am. So now they're learning faster
• 28:34
  because they're smarter than me but I'm the good-looking one I
• 28:39
  bring the tone. So, You actually are originally
• 28:45
  from New Jersey. Yes, you made the move to
• 28:48
  Australia. When did you make the move to
• 28:50
  Australia? And why?
• 28:53
  Well, so I was living in New York city.
• 28:55
  So we'll be circling back to background.
• 28:58
  I was working as a theater Tech in here in New York City and I
• 29:03
  could see it was not a place to grow old, and it definitely
• 29:07
  wasn't a place to raise kids. Just was talking to young people
• 29:11
  who grew up in York City, and it didn't sound good at all.
• 29:15
  So, I was spending in, basically, there's no theater
• 29:20
  work in New York City during the Summers, because all the people
• 29:23
  who can afford to go to the theater, flee, the city.
• 29:27
  And so I would spend my Summers traveling kind of shopping for a
• 29:32
  home. I went up to British Columbia
• 29:35
  went up to Alaska. It was really nice here.
• 29:37
  What's it like here in the winters 50 below zero?
• 29:40
  Yeah. Not this place, head back and I
• 29:43
  kept meeting Australians and really liking them.
• 29:46
  So I came here, I met a bunch of people and one of them
• 29:51
  eventually became my wife. So I've been here for 30 years
• 29:55
  now, whoa, okay. Yeah, particularly yeah.
• 29:59
  Just got to the point just recently, where I've been here
• 30:04
  longer than I was there. So yeah, when I turned 50, I
• 30:11
  turned 56. I You know, 28 years there in 28
• 30:17
  years here and now. So we're a little bit over that
• 30:19
  now. So, yeah, today, I love living
• 30:22
  here. Yeah, I can tell and I'm sort of
• 30:25
  intrigued, because I've lived abroad before as well for years.
• 30:28
  Not that long, but I lived abroad for about three years DD,
• 30:32
  ever. Find yourself getting sort of
• 30:35
  home sick with with the us or missing it at all.
• 30:39
  Or is that just in the background?
• 30:40
  Now in the past, Well, you know, there are times when okay, so my
• 30:49
  mom was sick for a while a couple of years ago, it was hard
• 30:53
  being here, right? My father's quite unwell now and
• 30:57
  I'd really like to get back there and spend some time with
• 31:02
  him. He's kind of probably in his
• 31:04
  last year of life. So, you know, that's hard being
• 31:08
  so far away and particularly with the, you know, the Zombie
• 31:13
  apocalypse right now, getting back, there is, is just not, you
• 31:17
  know, I'm trying to go through the process now.
• 31:22
  In Australia, is actually a very difficult place right now to get
• 31:24
  out of, so, yeah, but the, but the day-to-day living, I mean,
• 31:33
  particularly with America right now between the kind of the
• 31:38
  tribalism of, you know, Democrats and it just It just is
• 31:43
  not to me. And then the Health Care System,
• 31:47
  you know, America just the health.
• 31:51
  Like when I lived there, I left when I was 28.
• 31:55
  So you know it's like I didn't think about it because I was
• 31:58
  young, I was invincible, I never get sick.
• 32:00
  But now I'm here. I'm starting to get to an age
• 32:05
  and it's like, oh I've got that funny pain, what's that?
• 32:09
  I just go to a doctor and the doctor says you just imagining
• 32:12
  shit you hyper And Iraq have a very good doctor.
• 32:18
  But if I was in America, it's like you know, my wife got sick
• 32:24
  while we were traveling in America.
• 32:26
  Fortunately we had travel insurance because the emergency
• 32:29
  boom bill came to fourteen thousand dollars.
• 32:32
  You know I was like a couple of days in the hospital and the
• 32:38
  head doctor at that hospital was a family friend of mine.
• 32:42
  My aunt and uncle and so that was like the maitri price.
• 32:47
  Yes. They they never expected to get
• 32:50
  because they didn't know that we you know, they didn't know that
• 32:54
  we hadn't travel insurance. So they were looking after us
• 32:58
  because my aunt and uncle asked them to hmm, but they never
• 33:03
  expected to see any money on. They were going to write it off
• 33:06
  and it's like, yeah, that was three or four days in the
• 33:09
  hospital, 14 thousand dollars that.
• 33:12
  Yeah. It was just crazy.
• 33:15
  And yes, oh, I'm so glad now as somebody who's starting to get
• 33:20
  old that it's like, you know, my mother-in-law had a heart attack
• 33:27
  a couple of weeks ago, she's feeling a bit funny.
• 33:31
  She's got some chest pains, she Rings up the ambulance.
• 33:34
  They come off they take her to the hospital.
• 33:36
  She spends five days in the hospital.
• 33:39
  What is it? Cost her?
• 33:41
  What doesn't cost her anything? Cost my wife about $15 and
• 33:44
  parking so you know okay yeah, yeah yeah.
• 33:49
  It's a real piss off. It's a, you know.
• 33:52
  Yeah, we have to pay for parking at the hospital.
• 33:55
  You have to pay to go to the hospital but you have to pay you
• 33:58
  park your car there and it's it's yeah you know like two or
• 34:01
  three dollars an hour it's and then you know but if she was in
• 34:08
  America that would be what a hundred thousand dollars or
• 34:11
  something. Yeah.
• 34:13
  It's crazy, isn't it? No.
• 34:14
  And then we have this climate, you know, the coldest it ever
• 34:18
  gets here in Perth is like two degrees.
• 34:23
  You'll wake up in the morning, it'll be 2 degrees.
• 34:25
  It's like, yeah, it's cold to put a jacket on by lunchtime, I
• 34:28
  take it off, you know, even but like I go to work with a jacket
• 34:32
  on, as soon as I start working I take it off.
• 34:35
  Yeah, it gets hot in the summer but even you know, so the
• 34:38
  climate here is I can't imagine a place in the world.
• 34:42
  And that has a better climate and Perth.
• 34:45
  Oh, oh. I'm not supposed to tell people
• 34:47
  about that shit. The snakes did I mention the
• 34:51
  snakes that are being controlled by the spiders that are as big
• 34:56
  as houses? Yeah, it's a terrible place to
• 34:59
  live. I have to set myself on fire to
• 35:03
  get rid of the spider every day. That's the truth shit.
• 35:11
  I screwed that up. I would have been in A lot of
• 35:13
  trouble. Yeah I know it's a terrible
• 35:15
  place to live hate it. Hate it catchy.
• 35:20
  What would you say are the best and worst things about Perth
• 35:23
  Australia. One of the best things I mean
• 35:27
  yeah the the climate it's a very it's a very friendly place like
• 35:34
  Coming from New York City. The there's a word for people
• 35:39
  who talk to you like while you're standing on line, they're
• 35:43
  called the mentally ill. Like, normal people, don't talk
• 35:48
  to you. If you're online in New York
• 35:50
  City, it's like everybody pretends.
• 35:53
  No one else is there. But you know, I'll be standing
• 35:57
  on line at the grocery store and although I see you know, but
• 36:01
  right person, shopping cart and go, hmm, what's for dinner?
• 36:03
  Tonight and we'll strike up a conversation and that is
• 36:07
  perfectly normal. And they don't Edge away from
• 36:10
  me, most of the time, like, I'm insane.
• 36:12
  I think it's big sea life actually, because I grew up in
• 36:15
  London and I can, I can really relate to that.
• 36:18
  I mean, it's this, it would be the same if you're getting the
• 36:21
  tube if you speak to people, when you're getting the tube,
• 36:24
  they look at you, like you've got really sick.
• 36:26
  Yeah. Literally, you know either.
• 36:28
  Yeah. And simple like, oh my God, can
• 36:30
  you please give me the time? Like, people people will look at
• 36:32
  you, I mean, to be fair, that's not.
• 36:33
  Normally code for I'm going to rob you but you know, because
• 36:37
  there's clocks everywhere there's time everywhere, you
• 36:40
  know what I mean? Yeah.
• 36:41
  Yes. But nobody you kind of do have
• 36:44
  to watch your back living there and yeah, yeah.
• 36:46
  That's that's true. But I mean yeah it was funny
• 36:50
  when I went back a few years ago and I was sitting on the train
• 36:54
  and I turn to woman next. To me, just to ask her a
• 36:57
  question or just made a comment. I think it was rush hour in the
• 37:02
  train stopped. Like, you know, as they do, they
• 37:06
  just sort of stopped in the middle and I made some kind of
• 37:11
  comment and she just looked at me like I was a lunatic because
• 37:14
  I acknowledge her existence. Wow.
• 37:18
  So Perth is not like that. It's the Germans have a term for
• 37:22
  it. It's million dorf.
• 37:24
  It's a village of a million people and Perth is two million
• 37:28
  people, but it's really like that.
• 37:30
  If you talk to somebody, there's a really high T that they you
• 37:35
  know, like if you mentioned someone else, they were their
• 37:38
  roommate in college, they're married to their brother-in-law
• 37:42
  there, you know, these connections, it's a very kind of
• 37:46
  small incestuous community which I really like but you can't get
• 37:50
  in. You can't get away with anything
• 37:52
  here of like doing the dirty on someone.
• 37:55
  Yes everybody knows everybody else does that not get jarring
• 38:00
  sometimes everyone knowing your business so that will get
• 38:03
  annoyed. Doesn't bother me because I
• 38:05
  don't, you know, I don't do anything that I don't do
• 38:08
  anything that I often too. So, you know, it wouldn't be a
• 38:11
  good place to have an affair with, you know, some bimbo.
• 38:19
  You know, I saw Keith in this in the restaurant with his
• 38:23
  secretary last week. Right.
• 38:26
  You know, special dinner, Somethin.
• 38:27
  Ya know, you'd never get away with that.
• 38:30
  Yeah. But yeah.
• 38:33
  Downsize. The outside from the spiders.
• 38:36
  Did I mention the spiders and the snakes?
• 38:38
  The killer snakes. Yes.
• 38:44
  Yeah, one, well, I mean the biggest thing here is, you know,
• 38:49
  talking about living in New York City or London, is it's a car
• 38:52
  city. Hmm.
• 38:53
  If an alien were to come down and to observe with their
• 38:57
  cloaking device, observe the city, they would assume that we
• 39:01
  worship the automobile as a God, our God, the automobile takes
• 39:08
  the most important position. It's roads are so you can't
• 39:16
  leave here without a car. Some people do some of my crazy
• 39:21
  wacko, Greenie friends, they ride bikes.
• 39:25
  Which is that one time. Yeah.
• 39:27
  On the subject of signs of mental illness.
• 39:29
  They ride bikes everywhere. But yeah.
• 39:31
  Not this little black duck and you really can't.
• 39:34
  You know, I was coming home last night from an event and the last
• 39:40
  train out of the city he was going to be leaving at 9:45
• 39:46
  because so because they were doing some maintenance on the
• 39:50
  track. But, you know, like New York
• 39:53
  City, you can basically take the train 24 hours a day, so you may
• 39:57
  get your kidneys remove, but you can ride them 24 hours a day,
• 40:01
  you know, it's so much of a 24-hour City, we're here, it's
• 40:05
  by midnight, they've rolled up the sidewalks and it's, you
• 40:08
  know, I mean, it's not that big a deal for me now, When my kids
• 40:12
  were younger and they were wanting to go to events up in
• 40:15
  the city, and it's like, yeah, the last bus.
• 40:18
  So the train goes till midnight, but the last bus lives leaves
• 40:22
  the bus station to come home at 9:00.
• 40:25
  So I would have, you know, yet 9:00.
• 40:29
  So I would have to go to the bus station to pick them up when
• 40:34
  they wanted to come home at 10:00.
• 40:37
  You know, wild crazy people that they were Yeah, it was like, so
• 40:43
  I had to stay up where, you know, they were 17 18, they were
• 40:47
  old enough that they could be up in the city, stay up there till
• 40:51
  midnight, but, you know, this is long enough ago.
• 40:54
  Now, they would just grab an Uber home, but that wasn't an
• 40:57
  option then. And yeah, you know, a taxi would
• 41:01
  have been 60 or $70 or something.
• 41:03
  So, the car sit Enos of it is the, and right now, we are such
• 41:10
  a spread out City to drive From Rockingham which is probably you
• 41:15
  think of the southernmost part of the city to should.
• 41:20
  I can't even remember the most northern part of the greater
• 41:25
  Perth suburbs would be a three-hour drive or something.
• 41:30
  And it's you know it's not unusual to hear people with an
• 41:32
  hour and a half long commute which means you're spending
• 41:36
  three hours a day in a car. So yeah.
• 41:40
  The the urban Planning here was entirely done by Banks and
• 41:49
  property developers. So Perth is a wholly owned
• 41:54
  subsidiary of property developers.
• 41:57
  So what do they do? How do they make their living?
• 42:00
  They clear off blocks of land and plunk houses on them and so
• 42:08
  they're like, yeah, let's do more of that.
• 42:10
  And so, the city has just kept Reading further and further.
• 42:14
  So that's, you know, it's a great place to live, but if you
• 42:17
  don't have a lot of money then to buy a house then you're
• 42:21
  buying a house someplace where you're going to end up spending
• 42:25
  10 grand a year. Ian, the cost of commuting.
• 42:30
  So, yeah. And then, you know, spending
• 42:33
  three hours a day sitting in traffic so yeah, as a city.
• 42:40
  Yeah. And it's a hard place to make.
• 42:42
  A living like my son is a filmmaker and so he's had to
• 42:46
  move to Melbourne. There's you know you there are
• 42:49
  some people making a living as a filmmaker here if you want to be
• 42:53
  a musician if you want to be a filmmaker you basically have to
• 42:56
  leave the city so we'll drive up whole pack you're good you know
• 43:02
  you want to but drive a big truck you can make a living as
• 43:05
  in the mining industry. But yeah what's the pandemic
• 43:09
  like been in Australia? This is kind of embarrassing
• 43:15
  because it's been a piece of piss.
• 43:19
  You know, we shut down the borders really early.
• 43:22
  We had a premier that people were like wearing t-shirts, you
• 43:27
  know. This is the head of the state
• 43:28
  government and people are wearing t-shirts, wanting to
• 43:32
  elect him as an emperor because he just said, we're closing
• 43:36
  everything. You know, Perth has three ports.
• 43:42
  I've International Airport in all of like Western Australia.
• 43:46
  There are five international airports is it even maybe three
• 43:51
  airports and there's like five roads that come into the state.
• 43:55
  He's just said, right? Okay, nobody's coming in and
• 43:59
  they closed all the borders. So we started there was a cruise
• 44:03
  ship that landed here really early.
• 44:06
  That had a couple hundred people who'd all been exposed to.
• 44:09
  They sent them off to rockness which is an island.
• 44:12
  And about a 20-minute boat ride off of.
• 44:16
  So they emptied this boat for 500 people and dump them out on
• 44:21
  a tourist Island until they could fly them out.
• 44:24
  Well, and so, by July, we were basically back to normal, like
• 44:33
  social distancing. Yeah, but we had no Community
• 44:38
  cases. We had a couple of months back.
• 44:42
  Somebody came into they'd arrived here from somewhere else
• 44:48
  and then got sick while they were in the hotel and somebody
• 44:52
  working in the hotel because they're doing these hotel
• 44:54
  quarantines and so they said and oh and he was working in the
• 45:01
  hotel and then working as an Uber driver.
• 45:04
  So he'd been all over again and incontinent like 30 different
• 45:08
  places. Yeah they said right okay we're
• 45:10
  going to shut down the city for five.
• 45:12
  Days. We went into a five-day
• 45:14
  lockdown. Well, and then at the end of
• 45:18
  that, I was just like bum business.
• 45:19
  As usual. I'm about a month back.
• 45:21
  We did a three-day lockdown. Yeah.
• 45:25
  Just didn't leave the house for three days so and that's it.
• 45:28
  So it's actually been kind of embarrassing because I listen to
• 45:33
  people. So I was talking to the young
• 45:35
  guy who built my website, he's up in Singapore and it was just
• 45:39
  at the tail end of that five day lockdown.
• 45:42
  And I was carrying on like a pork chop about having to wear
• 45:45
  masks when I was outside, he's like, we've been wearing masks,
• 45:51
  anytime we're out of our house for the last 12 months.
• 45:55
  So as you can imagine, I didn't get a lot of sympathy out of him
• 46:00
  for my terrible five-day trauma. Yeah, a very start, you know,
• 46:04
  like here in Manchester ever since the beginning of the
• 46:08
  pandemic, like people, pretty much always.
• 46:12
  Wore masks inside. I mean obviously now it's gotten
• 46:15
  a bit lacks but that's the expectation.
• 46:17
  But as far as being outside pretty much, no one wears them
• 46:21
  outside. Yeah.
• 46:23
  I mean they did in the very beginning and still people do
• 46:25
  sometimes wear them outside. My kind of rule was always like
• 46:30
  if there's way too many people or wear it but I don't know I
• 46:32
  feel a bit more relaxed now that I've had the vaccination twice
• 46:36
  so it's kind of like I don't know, it's always been a sort of
• 46:40
  a gray area and we've been all over.
• 46:42
  The place as far as lockdowns, are concerned, we've been in and
• 46:46
  out of lockdown all the time. And most recently, we've pushed
• 46:50
  back the date of Freedom that we were supposed to have, which was
• 46:54
  going to be the 21st June, and now it's like Journal end of
• 46:57
  July or something. All right, yes.
• 47:01
  Yeah. So much, you know, and when you
• 47:05
  look at the, you know, the deaths per capita is, you know,
• 47:11
  because you can say, oh yeah, Yeah.
• 47:12
  Well you know half a million people died in America.
• 47:15
  Yeah but there's 300 million people in America.
• 47:18
  So write it, you know, it's not a, I saw one thing in the early
• 47:25
  days of, you know, people having a go at President, Trump saying,
• 47:30
  you know, 6,000 people have died in America.
• 47:34
  Only 200 people have died in Germany.
• 47:39
  I'm making numbers up. I don't sure what they were
• 47:41
  exactly, but it was a On that kind of ratio and I was like
• 47:45
  yeah those you know it's not the.
• 47:48
  I know it's numbers mean nothing.
• 47:50
  Yeah and you're comparing I don't know.
• 47:52
  What is their 60? 70 million people in here.
• 47:54
  Has to be put your has to be proportionate to the entirely
• 47:58
  know why. Yeah, the kind of stupid stuff
• 48:02
  that I see coming out of America.
• 48:04
  People are, you know, getting into fights because someone
• 48:06
  wants to wear them to wear a mask.
• 48:08
  Mmm. Yeah, pretty crazy.
• 48:12
  Yeah, so we haven't really had much of that.
• 48:16
  Somebody refuse to wear a mask. You know, the cops were really
• 48:20
  like. If you don't have a mask will
• 48:22
  give you a mask. If you refuse to wear that mask,
• 48:26
  we will then arrest you. You know people are like I them
• 48:31
  Nazis gonna come making us wear these masks and the premier just
• 48:35
  went No, just don't be a dickhead and if you're not a
• 48:40
  dickhead, like if you forget your mask.
• 48:44
  Yeah. It's not big deal.
• 48:46
  Yeah. Okay.
• 48:47
  You know. But some guy refused to wear a
• 48:50
  mask, he's been wearing watching too much American TV or
• 48:54
  something and you know this is little Storm Troopers and So
• 49:01
  they arrested his ass. You know.
• 49:04
  We had some girl arrived here from the eastern states.
• 49:07
  She got a truck driver to hide her in her truck and then came
• 49:12
  over and yeah, they arrested her, you know, some other girl
• 49:18
  from Melbourne was supposed to do two weeks, quarantine, but it
• 49:23
  was her friends 21st birthday on the night.
• 49:26
  She arrived, so she snuck out of quarantine.
• 49:30
  So they Rested her. But yeah, you know most people
• 49:34
  have been really good and really saying about it so yeah.
• 49:41
  So it's been it's been a piece of piss and it's kind of
• 49:44
  embarrassing. How when I hear how hard it's
• 49:47
  been for other people. Hmm what would you say?
• 49:52
  The biggest differences between life in the USA and life in
• 49:55
  Australia? I don't know that I could say
• 50:00
  because I've been here for 30 years now, so I was 28.
• 50:05
  You know I was I was a young adult when I moved here and I've
• 50:11
  lived here. You know, I've raised my kids
• 50:14
  here. I've the biggest thing that I
• 50:17
  noticed between being there and being here is just the pace of
• 50:23
  life like here, it's just so much.
• 50:28
  Lower. And and it was the same, you
• 50:31
  know, Sydney was the same. It's that it's more of a big
• 50:34
  city thing. Then a, you know, then on
• 50:38
  Australia America think, you know, everybody's just running
• 50:42
  from place to place all the time and life is just slower here.
• 50:47
  I mean I think it's like that for my son in Melbourne you know
• 50:52
  they're little bit faster than they would be here but slower
• 50:56
  than Sydney's. Sort of middle craziness.
• 51:00
  You know the other the other biggest thing is the socialized
• 51:05
  medicine to health care that I mentioned earlier.
• 51:08
  You know, I've heard stories I spend entirely much too much
• 51:11
  time on Reddit and hearing stories of guys saying yeah
• 51:16
  everybody's gotta have a hobby feeling drivers being told by
• 51:21
  somebody having a heart attack and saying, look can you just
• 51:23
  drive me around for a little while?
• 51:25
  Don't take me to the hospital because I don't want Burden, I
• 51:28
  don't want to ruin my family's life, I have no insurance and if
• 51:32
  you take me to the hospital, it's ya know they're going to
• 51:36
  end up with a half a million dollars with a medical debt and
• 51:41
  that to me, is insane. It is so it's not having life is
• 51:46
  a lot. Looks like it's a lot more
• 51:49
  stressful in America than it is here.
• 51:52
  So because we do have, I mean, we've got a conservative
• 51:55
  government that's been trying to slowly.
• 51:57
  Mantle that safety. Net that's here.
• 52:01
  But it's still a lot better than it is at least in America.
• 52:06
  So yeah. So earlier in the conversation,
• 52:09
  you mentioned that you are a freelance theater technician in
• 52:14
  New York City's for about eight years.
• 52:17
  So talk to us about this experience.
• 52:20
  Your favorite moments and your biggest take away from that.
• 52:26
  I'm going to do those in reverse order.
• 52:28
  So the, the biggest takeaway that still exists in my life
• 52:32
  right now. Is two things.
• 52:33
  Is I really thought I'm the only Tradesmen possibly in Australia
• 52:39
  who will say to my clients. I'm really happy to work with
• 52:42
  you. So you want to put flat-pack
• 52:45
  Furniture together. Let's do it together, it will be
• 52:48
  fun. I always say that it will be fun
• 52:53
  and And, you know, like I've painted the insides of houses
• 52:57
  with people and it's like because the theater work.
• 53:02
  It was normal to work as a team. So I ran I was a maintenance
• 53:05
  person for a school for a number of years.
• 53:08
  I ran busy bees for people, you know, and it was some woman
• 53:13
  would rock up and I'd say, well, what do you want to do?
• 53:16
  And she's like, well, I'd have a list there and not say, okay,
• 53:20
  here's the cordless drill, here's what you're going to do,
• 53:22
  here's this the tools that you need and and they were always a
• 53:26
  little bit amazed because it's like well, I don't know how to
• 53:28
  do this. It's like it's not that
• 53:30
  complicated if I can do it, you can do it, you can raise kids,
• 53:34
  you can do so. And then, the other part of that
• 53:36
  is weekends, mean nothing to me, people are like, oh yeah, it's
• 53:40
  Friday. It's right.
• 53:41
  Yeah, I'd rather have a day off on a Monday when the bank is
• 53:46
  open, the shops are open, then to have a day off on a Saturday.
• 53:50
  So days, holidays, you know, sometimes my clients I'll say,
• 53:55
  look, let's do this job on a Saturday and they're like, do
• 53:58
  you charge more for Saturday's? It.
• 54:02
  I'll just take a day off during the week, it'll be more fun, you
• 54:06
  know, so though that's kind of that I loved being a freelance
• 54:14
  theater Tech. Like I didn't make a lot of
• 54:16
  money. There's this sort of cultural
• 54:20
  belief in the theater that you should be honored that they're
• 54:24
  letting you take part being a part of the Arts.
• 54:27
  Yeah, so it was not a great way to make a living.
• 54:31
  NG which is part of why. I, you know I was like now this
• 54:34
  is not a job I can do. Therefore I knew some guys who
• 54:37
  were older and we're doing that work and I was like, yeah, that
• 54:41
  doesn't look like fun at all. But at the time you know 21 to
• 54:48
  28 we were just having so much fun.
• 54:52
  You know, it's like working one night.
• 54:56
  We were doing a bunch of rigging in a small theater in the West
• 55:00
  Village. And we decided to go out for
• 55:05
  coffee but we all got climbing harnesses on.
• 55:08
  So we go to the coffee shop with our climbing harnesses on
• 55:12
  because it was cool. I imagine everybody else.
• 55:14
  Just thought we were, you know, like gay bondage people but you
• 55:19
  know, I look at it in retrospect it and I'm like, yeah, we were
• 55:22
  wankers but we were having a lot of fun.
• 55:25
  Okay, well, Cool Wind kiss. We were cool.
• 55:29
  We were Legends in our Our own minds.
• 55:32
  And that's what's important. Anybody else?
• 55:34
  You know, actual cool, people would have looked at us and gone
• 55:38
  Those guys are weird. Yeah, exactly the sort of dog
• 55:42
  watching television. Look the sort of head to the
• 55:45
  side like Yeah. But yeah, but just having a lot
• 55:50
  of fun and, you know, going into places that you didn't, you
• 55:56
  know, like I did a couple of parties at the Metropolitan
• 56:01
  Museum of Art. So we're in the met at midnight,
• 56:06
  setting up lighting and stuff for a show.
• 56:08
  You know, it was a lot of fun. I did a lot of work on fashion
• 56:11
  shows and things like that. The hours were weird.
• 56:16
  You know, this I loved going to work at 11:00 at night and
• 56:20
  working through. So you'd walk out of a hotel
• 56:23
  ballroom at 7:30 in the morning. Forgetting that it's not night
• 56:28
  anymore. Open up and then driving home on
• 56:32
  the, you know, the BQE or something.
• 56:36
  And the sun's just coming up and it's a lot better way to see the
• 56:40
  beauty of the morning. When you've been awake all
• 56:43
  night, rather than when you just woke up in your life, Yeah, I
• 56:49
  know what you mean. Yeah.
• 56:50
  So that kind of working that not, you know, the looks that I
• 56:55
  would get wear because in New York City, you can buy a beer 24
• 56:59
  hours a day. So you knock off at 7:30 in the
• 57:02
  morning, you go into a, you know, a little greek American
• 57:07
  Cafe kind of place. Yeah, I can, I have two eggs,
• 57:10
  sunny-side up sausages on. Can I have a beer with that?
• 57:15
  And the look of it? Salud horror you get from the
• 57:18
  guy from the cabin. Yeah it's like it's A beer.
• 57:25
  You'd want to be here when you're knocked off work.
• 57:27
  Yes. So it was a lot of fun.
• 57:30
  Yes. But yet really glad to be out of
• 57:33
  that business at 58. You cannot do those kind of.
• 57:36
  Oh yeah, you know, we used to brag about who'd worked longest.
• 57:40
  Hmm. Oh, yeah.
• 57:41
  All I've done 30 hours continuously without support.
• 57:47
  I honestly think night shifts are the worst.
• 57:49
  I've only done a few in my life. I used to work in a supermarket
• 57:52
  years ago and I did it around Christmas time and it was good
• 57:56
  in the sense that I evaded the customers and you could.
• 58:00
  Hmm, just work from. I think I worked from like 8:00
• 58:04
  or 9:00 at night and through till like, 6:00 7:00 a.m. the
• 58:08
  next morning and you put your music in.
• 58:10
  You'd stop the shelves, do your thing right?
• 58:13
  But oh my God, it messed with my body Clerk and I'd really didn't
• 58:18
  feel well. I did it for like, four days,
• 58:20
  but I felt just, oh, there's the one can do one or the other.
• 58:24
  It's like switching in between it was the hard part.
• 58:27
  So I would do big stretches of, you know, night, but I was
• 58:32
  drinking a lot of coffee then also.
• 58:34
  So, yeah, so yeah, no, it's not good for you.
• 58:37
  That's part of the reason why they wanted to get out of the
• 58:40
  theater business. When, you know, even like So I
• 58:47
  was about 26 and I was it was summer, but I was just kind of
• 58:53
  getting ready to head off traveling and somebody rang me
• 58:57
  up and said, you know, Keith I would been giving your number,
• 59:00
  it was a Summer Stock theater up in Massachusetts.
• 59:04
  And the set designer had screwed up the drawings to the drawings
• 59:10
  had arrived really late and they had like a week to build this
• 59:13
  massive set. So they pulled some.
• 59:16
  From someplace and and a job din for professional Carpenters.
• 59:21
  Because the thing normally the said would be built by like
• 59:24
  interns or something. And so, we showed up that is
• 59:28
  bunch of like, hardcore freelance, dudes.
• 59:32
  Who this is what they do for a living as opposed to like
• 59:34
  University students. And so the last night we were
• 59:41
  going to be up there, they were doing a rehearsal during the day
• 59:44
  and then we were going to stay up all night. working the doing
• 59:49
  the finishing, the stuff on the set and at 4:00 in the was so we
• 59:55
  started work at like 11:00 at night and at 4:00 in the morning
• 1:00:01
  we say Are you going to feed us? Cuz like we've just worked all
• 1:00:08
  these hours. We need food.
• 1:00:10
  Yeah and so we just sat down we just said we are not doing any
• 1:00:15
  more work until you feel, right? Exactly.
• 1:00:19
  Now I was used to working what are called Industrials, which is
• 1:00:23
  basically a theater presentation for a corporate thing.
• 1:00:28
  So we would do that, you know, in a big hotel.
• 1:00:31
  Ballroom And so at 4:00 in the morning they would order us room
• 1:00:36
  service and it was like here's the menus order, anything be
• 1:00:39
  reasonable and you know they feed us all.
• 1:00:43
  So finally somebody so they had to get somebody out of bed
• 1:00:48
  because we were being such assholes and Eddie came in and
• 1:00:55
  he came in with three boxes of Dunkin Donuts. and I was like,
• 1:01:01
  What's Sona you brought us? Fucking doughnuts.
• 1:01:05
  Wow. And and I was really pissed off
• 1:01:07
  because it's like, you're really tired and just pouring on, you
• 1:01:11
  know, you're going to crash in an hour but we ate them, we
• 1:01:15
  finished up, we were have to do felt like shit but then I
• 1:01:19
  thought about it later and I was like, you know, two years before
• 1:01:23
  I would have been like donuts. Yes.
• 1:01:27
  Yeah, so I still I still think they're like if you've been
• 1:01:31
  working your ass off for like God knows how many hours and
• 1:01:34
  then that's what gets brought like.
• 1:01:35
  Yeah, you be grateful for anything but the same time you
• 1:01:38
  will when you're 21. It's like yes donuts and when
• 1:01:42
  you're 26 27 and it's like fucking Donuts you know I need
• 1:01:46
  some real human food. Yeah that was this places ass
• 1:01:50
  knowledge, isn't it? I suppose you went once you
• 1:01:52
  start reality. Yeah exactly.
• 1:01:54
  Like and then but then also your body it's like Like you know
• 1:01:56
  what 21, it's like drink all night and then still slightly
• 1:02:02
  drunk, you know, go to work and all that kind of stuff.
• 1:02:06
  You get to like 30 in the body goes who knew we're not going to
• 1:02:11
  be doing that. I've already got to that point.
• 1:02:14
  Oh, really? I'm not even 30, I'm 28 and I'd
• 1:02:17
  say for the past, Mmm, two or three years.
• 1:02:22
  I just got here. Well, the thought of having to
• 1:02:24
  work after drinking and I don't even drink, I don't even get
• 1:02:27
  drunk. I just, I don't know what it is.
• 1:02:29
  I get all of the worst parts of a hangover without sickness.
• 1:02:33
  I just feel like drained and I could only be just one or two
• 1:02:37
  beers. And the next day I decided just
• 1:02:39
  don't drink really to be honest because it's just not fun.
• 1:02:41
  Save so much money. Oh, that's any of you doing your
• 1:02:44
  life, right? You know, it's I realized that
• 1:02:48
  Later when I was, you know, because well I was basically I
• 1:02:52
  was probably a borderline alcoholic when I was living in
• 1:02:55
  New York City because the theater is an alcoholic
• 1:02:57
  industry, right? If you're not a candidate for
• 1:03:01
  AAA you can actually work in that industry, you know, it's
• 1:03:04
  like we would finish at 4:00 in the morning, working on
• 1:03:08
  something and head to a bar and have drinks.
• 1:03:12
  Even though we had to be back in the theater at, you know, 9:00
• 1:03:15
  that was normal. That wasn't considered normal.
• 1:03:18
  Behavior. But then, you know, I got to and
• 1:03:24
  to me not doing that. Was inconceivable at that point.
• 1:03:27
  It's like what you don't want to come to the bar with us.
• 1:03:32
  What's wrong with you, dude? There's nothing wrong with you,
• 1:03:36
  boy, there's something wrong with you more in the morning
• 1:03:42
  when we have to be back here in four hours.
• 1:03:46
  And then, you know, I did a whole bunch of like personal
• 1:03:50
  growth work and then and then doing stuff like changing
• 1:03:55
  people's lives, kind of stuff. And it's like, wow, holy shit.
• 1:04:01
  I'm having so much more fun than I ever did under the influence
• 1:04:07
  of alcohol or drugs or anything else.
• 1:04:11
  I know exactly what tell people. Yeah, it's like we've done this
• 1:04:15
  really bizarre strange thing. And it's so, Much fun.
• 1:04:19
  And it's you know, it's it's different to like getting it's
• 1:04:26
  so different from getting pissed that yeah, person who's not
• 1:04:30
  doing this like this right now. Here I'm talking to this.
• 1:04:34
  Some guy weird guy from Manchester over the, you know,
• 1:04:38
  it's like at that time to do that without a couple of beers
• 1:04:44
  would be but then we'd be you know, talking about football or
• 1:04:47
  something, I don't know. I've never Been into sports but
• 1:04:49
  you know, this kind of really surface level stuff.
• 1:04:52
  Where When You're Sober you can actually have a really deep but,
• 1:04:57
  you know, Silly and mad conversation and this is my idea
• 1:05:02
  of fun now. So yeah, I must say, I really do
• 1:05:05
  concur like for me, you know like after after I'm done here
• 1:05:10
  today you know in a couple of hours or an hour.
• 1:05:13
  So I'll go and I'll live stream, right?
• 1:05:15
  Yeah. And I genuinely love to do that
• 1:05:17
  and I get a lot of questions. What do I do?
• 1:05:19
  In my spare time? I do this.
• 1:05:21
  I do this. I mean, you know, because I love
• 1:05:24
  to do this and I mean, I want to do this for a living.
• 1:05:27
  I have goals to be an actor musician podcast, that TV guy,
• 1:05:31
  you know, you know me, but I do really love doing these things.
• 1:05:36
  And I think like, you got to be passionate about what you do for
• 1:05:40
  a living. It's very important.
• 1:05:41
  We did, we did a Facebook live last week I'm cool with the With
• 1:05:49
  an architect. So I sat at a table with an
• 1:05:51
  architect and asked him questions, I had my filmmaker
• 1:05:55
  there, I had my social media strategist, who's running the
• 1:06:00
  Facebook live, feeding me questions.
• 1:06:03
  All right. And at the end I say and and I
• 1:06:06
  had so much fun and that the even though things were going
• 1:06:12
  wrong and we are having technical problems, just drive
• 1:06:15
  home twice because I forgot shit.
• 1:06:18
  And then I had was like, oh fuck, I don't have my webcam,
• 1:06:21
  that's not going to work drive home.
• 1:06:23
  Fortunately home was only five minutes away and then back again
• 1:06:27
  and then I finished and I go. So were there.
• 1:06:30
  Many people on the, on the live call?
• 1:06:33
  He said, no, no, no one. So where'd you get the questions
• 1:06:36
  from? He said, that was the team that
• 1:06:38
  was the rest of the people. They were what sapping him
• 1:06:40
  questions, because they are all Facebook admin.
• 1:06:44
  So they couldn't actually post questions because they were all
• 1:06:47
  admins on the count. So they would all show up as
• 1:06:50
  admin and it was like, they were really good questions and I had
• 1:06:54
  a great time and he was like, huh?
• 1:06:56
  Yeah, we can get really many anybody on it.
• 1:06:59
  I think we did it at the wrong time.
• 1:07:00
  I was like, I really don't care. I had so much fun.
• 1:07:03
  You're totally right now, you're right.
• 1:07:05
  It doesn't matter how many people are there, like, I have
• 1:07:08
  this, with my live streams. I see friends of mine and
• 1:07:10
  they've got hundreds of hundreds of years and stuff.
• 1:07:13
  And, you know, I'll be lucky to get like 10 viewers in mind, but
• 1:07:16
  it's all about having fun. There's sometimes people in
• 1:07:19
  there that will be like oh hey thanks this, you know, this made
• 1:07:23
  my day better. I was having a bad week or a bad
• 1:07:25
  day and I'm like, you know what awesome we haven't been out of
• 1:07:29
  it, you know because I do it as well.
• 1:07:30
  Like I'm I've been going through some difficult times lately and
• 1:07:34
  sometimes I just do live streaming, you know I don't even
• 1:07:37
  like obviously every time I do it, it's technically it's
• 1:07:41
  contributing towards pushing things forward, right?
• 1:07:43
  But I don't even, I don't even think about it.
• 1:07:45
  Sometimes I just put on and go you know what?
• 1:07:47
  Let's just take my mind. My problems and have fun and it
• 1:07:50
  worked. That's so I totally get where
• 1:07:52
  you're coming from. Yeah, yeah.
• 1:07:54
  And and that's when I say, you know, five years ago is because
• 1:07:59
  of the work I've done on myself that five years ago, be
• 1:08:03
  inconceivable to me. It's like, do you want to do a
• 1:08:06
  Facebook live events? That sounds really weird and
• 1:08:10
  weird. Now, I don't want to do that.
• 1:08:12
  And here I did it. I sat with an architect and I
• 1:08:16
  really like the guy he really likes me.
• 1:08:18
  Had a great conversation and a whole bunch of laughs.
• 1:08:22
  And, you know, somebody May sit down and watch a 45-minute
• 1:08:29
  conversation later, you know, there was a lot of really good
• 1:08:34
  information there. If somebody wants to learn about
• 1:08:37
  these kind of stuff, but yeah, the hell fun.
• 1:08:40
  So, I didn't the best conversations.
• 1:08:41
  I like that. Like, that's one of the things I
• 1:08:43
  try to achieve with my podcasts as much as possible.
• 1:08:46
  Like, I You know, you can't kind of always determine how it will
• 1:08:51
  go. Sometimes they're more like
• 1:08:52
  interview, sometimes, they're more like discussions, but I'm
• 1:08:55
  always a lot happier when it turns into more of a discussion
• 1:08:57
  because I think that's when you do get those little nuggets,
• 1:08:59
  those little brilliant moments that will become Clips later but
• 1:09:04
  you know, once the editing stuff.
• 1:09:06
  But but it's true. You know, me, you don't get
• 1:09:09
  those through, you know, Jagged kind of straightforward
• 1:09:12
  questions. Like I ask you this question and
• 1:09:15
  I ask you this question and then this like it From natural flow
• 1:09:19
  of conversations, I get what you mean.
• 1:09:21
  Yes, yeah and it's the conversation.
• 1:09:23
  You would have down at the pub only without the alcohol and
• 1:09:26
  with headphones on. So, you know, you mentioned that
• 1:09:33
  your father, I'd like to know what the key things.
• 1:09:37
  You've kind of learn through being a father Oh boy.
• 1:09:42
  Now you got to remember my daughter is 35 36.
• 1:09:49
  And yeah, I'm old. I'm old.
• 1:09:51
  I'm older than dirt and I'm is 27 now so it's been a while
• 1:09:58
  since I've been. I know what you mean.
• 1:10:03
  Answer this question in a slightly different way because
• 1:10:07
  in addition to being a dad, I was also the parent I was The
• 1:10:11
  maintenance person at a school. Oh, cool.
• 1:10:14
  And the thing, I learned more that I got better at after my
• 1:10:20
  kids were bigger, people would say to me.
• 1:10:23
  So the kids love to work with me and I put the kids to work at
• 1:10:28
  the school, which people from America just couldn't believe
• 1:10:31
  but anyway, and you know, kids had come up to me after school
• 1:10:36
  and say, you know, moms in a meeting because you know, is
• 1:10:40
  there anything I can And ooh, and it's like, yeah.
• 1:10:43
  Let's wow, fun. Let's go move desks.
• 1:10:47
  And, you know, their mothers would say He never works like
• 1:10:52
  that for me at home. I think, you know, they wasn't
• 1:10:55
  like, let's just go hang out with Keith.
• 1:10:57
  It was like I put them to work, you know, it's like lift dig a
• 1:11:01
  trench because I needed a trench and I was a, let's move a
• 1:11:06
  hundred chairs from one part of the school to another.
• 1:11:09
  Yeah. Okay and then mother's it's a
• 1:11:12
  lie. He never works like that at home
• 1:11:14
  for me and I was always tempted to say Yeah, cuz you don't like
• 1:11:19
  him as much as I do because I didn't have to get him to brush
• 1:11:26
  his teeth. I didn't have to get him to do
• 1:11:28
  his homework night. I didn't calf to get him to eat
• 1:11:32
  his brussel sprouts, or whatever.
• 1:11:35
  So I could just like them. And so the, you know, the
• 1:11:41
  lesson, the kind of take home message for someone who's
• 1:11:45
  becoming a parent now, or is hanging around with young,
• 1:11:49
  people is just like them and, you know, yeah, you still have
• 1:11:54
  to get them to brush their teeth.
• 1:11:56
  But if you can get that part in there, then and my son had this
• 1:12:02
  teacher, so they have. So he was at a Waldorf School.
• 1:12:07
  So it's like a Steiner School Walder School, same name, same
• 1:12:11
  different names, same school system.
• 1:12:14
  So they had the teacher who was there, the their High School
• 1:12:21
  like Guardian Call it for. So from class eight to class 12.
• 1:12:29
  When I leave for that for years and 7, let me anyway.
• 1:12:34
  And she just really liked teenagers, and people are
• 1:12:39
  special teenagers, you know, they're so moody and all this
• 1:12:43
  stuff, she just found all of it, you know?
• 1:12:46
  She loved them. Like all the boys are also
• 1:12:50
  smelly, it's also hilarious. Larious.
• 1:12:53
  And I was like, I took that as a model.
• 1:12:55
  It's like, yeah. Just like them.
• 1:12:59
  Yes. You still have to say, you know,
• 1:13:02
  you've got to do your your fucking homework.
• 1:13:05
  She probably didn't say fucking crazy better person than me,
• 1:13:07
  but, you know, you still have to do your homework.
• 1:13:11
  And I know that your girlfriend just dumped you and ice but I
• 1:13:15
  still expect this after you but I really like you.
• 1:13:19
  Yeah. And coming from that place.
• 1:13:20
  I see so many Don't really like their kids.
• 1:13:23
  It's like kids are just, and especially when I get to
• 1:13:26
  teenagehood and yeah, they're a pain in the ass, you know,
• 1:13:29
  they're noisy, they're complaining, they're smarter
• 1:13:31
  than you, they're not easy to be around, but if you can manage to
• 1:13:38
  succeed at that kind of level of just coming from a place of just
• 1:13:43
  liking them and, you know, the, the extension off of that is
• 1:13:48
  what I found the other side of that was that I just I just
• 1:13:52
  expected them. So I talked to them like adults
• 1:13:56
  and I expected them. To be like adults, I expected
• 1:14:02
  them. So I never talk to them, like,
• 1:14:03
  they were little kids, you know? So it also meant that like I
• 1:14:07
  handed an eight-year-old to eight-year-olds cordless drills
• 1:14:11
  and told them to go around because they had all these
• 1:14:14
  chains on posts around the school and they get ripped off
• 1:14:17
  because they were just into Pine poles.
• 1:14:19
  And you know, every so often it would be my job to go around and
• 1:14:22
  screw them back on. So I Busy Bee, I just say,
• 1:14:25
  here's the to cordless drills, drilled a hole here then use
• 1:14:28
  this to To drive the screw in and go and do it.
• 1:14:31
  And it's like, look at me, I'm a new man.
• 1:14:34
  You just given like a to cordless drills to an eight and
• 1:14:39
  a ten year-old put them off to work.
• 1:14:41
  Yeah. Because you pee expect that of
• 1:14:43
  them, then they most of the time, you know, I just found
• 1:14:49
  that they, they behave people who are not used to, that find
• 1:14:54
  it very strange and kids also will find it strange.
• 1:14:57
  They think of the Adults is the enemy so they will like I'll go
• 1:15:03
  to some of my clients. I will go and I'm like hey how
• 1:15:06
  was school today? And they're just like this guy's
• 1:15:09
  a pedophile. Good.
• 1:15:11
  Yeah, Timmy and I'm like, oh yeah, but the kids at the
• 1:15:14
  Waldorf School, they just expected.
• 1:15:16
  It was like, you know, adults just talk to them and then they
• 1:15:20
  talk back. So I think there's a, like, a
• 1:15:22
  cultural thing if you talk to them, like they are adults, just
• 1:15:28
  short. Then they, they sort of respond
• 1:15:32
  like that. I don't know.
• 1:15:34
  That's, that's my long-winded theory on child.
• 1:15:37
  Rearing probably would send a child psychologist screaming,
• 1:15:42
  but it kind of worked for me, you know, it worked better with
• 1:15:47
  my son than with my daughter where I tried to be more
• 1:15:50
  apparent e to her. So, but having said that kids
• 1:15:57
  need boundaries, they need, you know, I've seen, Not too many
• 1:15:59
  times with parents, it's like, oh, you know, if you don't feel
• 1:16:04
  like doing your homework just don't, you know, it's like, I
• 1:16:08
  don't want to press, you know, know they have to they can't
• 1:16:11
  live in the world and they can't live on potato chips.
• 1:16:14
  Which kids would very happily live on potato chips and ice
• 1:16:17
  cream. If you let them they news one of
• 1:16:23
  the kindy teachers once said, you know, kids need to get in
• 1:16:27
  the habit of hearing know. No.
• 1:16:29
  Yeah, so that they understand the word and then they can use
• 1:16:33
  it later. It's the kids that have no
• 1:16:36
  boundaries that no one ever says no to them that then get in
• 1:16:40
  trouble later because they don't understand the meaning of the
• 1:16:42
  word. So, yeah, so we went to
• 1:16:46
  Indonesia the Preamble that, you know, you're a public speaker
• 1:16:50
  told us about your work as a public speaker.
• 1:16:52
  And what have been your biggest successes with public speaking?
• 1:16:57
  Well, so I did four years, a Toastmaster so I haven't but I
• 1:17:01
  haven't done any big. Kind of talks to the the biggest
• 1:17:07
  success that I did. There was a small conference
• 1:17:10
  here. Those two, I got two successes
• 1:17:13
  in that time there was a small conference called the social
• 1:17:19
  impact Festival here in Perth and I managed to talk my way
• 1:17:22
  into giving a talk even though I have no background in, Fear
• 1:17:27
  nothing. And then I tried to learn a
• 1:17:31
  speech. I memorize this speech around
• 1:17:34
  creating a revolution around housing and I just, I could not
• 1:17:38
  memorize the speech. I did it run throughs.
• 1:17:41
  I did run throughs at the group, I just couldn't get it anywhere
• 1:17:45
  to memorize it. And finally, I was talking to
• 1:17:48
  somebody the week before and they done a run-through with
• 1:17:52
  them, over the phone, just like the last practice.
• 1:17:55
  And they said something to Me and I don't remember what it
• 1:17:57
  was, but I was like, I don't actually have to give a speech
• 1:18:02
  and what I ended up doing instead of giving a speech as I
• 1:18:05
  crowdsource the speech. So I started with, you know,
• 1:18:12
  does everybody in the room? Know what passive solar is?
• 1:18:15
  Is there anybody in the room and doesn't know what passive solar
• 1:18:18
  is 45 people. Put their hands up.
• 1:18:20
  This is anybody in the room. Got a really good definition of
• 1:18:23
  a passive solar house. It turned out of the Like 30
• 1:18:27
  people in the room, they were for engineers and six Architects
• 1:18:32
  and so I was going to stand there.
• 1:18:33
  This guy who has no credentials whatsoever until Architects and
• 1:18:38
  Engineers, how they should be doing their job.
• 1:18:41
  And I was so glad I didn't because instead we just had
• 1:18:45
  this, it was like a facilitated conversation where I would ask
• 1:18:50
  questions and then the experts in the room would answer.
• 1:18:54
  It was so much fun and it Works so well and I was like, oh, that
• 1:19:00
  was so much better than just giving a kind of talking.
• 1:19:03
  Yeah, PowerPoint slide and then just recently, some people,
• 1:19:09
  there's a group of people that I'm working with that are,
• 1:19:12
  they're running these kind of classes called inspired infill,
• 1:19:16
  which is about a lot of the houses built in the 50s and 60s
• 1:19:20
  here. Had these Big Blocks with the
• 1:19:23
  house sitting at the front, and then a big backyard.
• 1:19:26
  So, you know, our block of land is 730 M2.
• 1:19:32
  So it's a pretty big hunk of land.
• 1:19:36
  Our house sits in the middle of the block.
• 1:19:39
  So there isn't a lot of room to build it the back but there are
• 1:19:42
  a lot of people where the house was built at the front where
• 1:19:47
  they are then building at the back.
• 1:19:49
  And so what this group of people are trying to do is show people
• 1:19:52
  that there's a way to do that much better because mostly what
• 1:19:55
  they do is they build this Hideous, little shit box.
• 1:19:58
  That brick pave. Everything that's a technical
• 1:20:01
  term, they just cover everything with brick paving and then and
• 1:20:07
  it's usually gray brick paving because that's what's
• 1:20:09
  fashionable these days. So, we were doing this talk and
• 1:20:12
  I said look, why don't I come along?
• 1:20:14
  And I'll be the kind of MC of the meeting and bring people on
• 1:20:18
  and bring people off and you know conduct and they were like,
• 1:20:22
  oh yeah. Sure because they had no idea
• 1:20:24
  what it is. I do.
• 1:20:27
  Yeah. They were like, yeah.
• 1:20:30
  Okay. And it was like, I was funny.
• 1:20:34
  I was weird. I kept people moving.
• 1:20:37
  I moved people along in a timely manner.
• 1:20:39
  I got the speaker's, like, when they're just going.
• 1:20:43
  Well, when will, you know, they get to that wofully on point and
• 1:20:46
  I'm like, yeah, you need to finish and just kept the whole
• 1:20:50
  evening moving and, and one of the guys was like, wow, you're
• 1:20:54
  actually really good at this. This thing.
• 1:20:57
  Yeah, yeah, yeah, so yeah. But I, you know, they they paid
• 1:21:03
  me that night which they didn't plan on doing, but I didn't know
• 1:21:10
  I was getting paid. I was just like the guy at the
• 1:21:13
  end of the night said, oh, you can put an invoice for $250.
• 1:21:17
  I was like, yeah. You know, Gary vaynerchuk gets
• 1:21:25
  like Thousand dollars for tuck. I got $250 and you got paid man.
• 1:21:30
  Doesn't matter how I got paid. Yeah, that was big.
• 1:21:33
  Yeah. So eventually I want to get to
• 1:21:35
  the hundred thousand dollar point, you know, rock the room.
• 1:21:39
  But yeah, it to me it's just it's a lot of fun.
• 1:21:44
  Like four years, a Toastmasters was just I would recommend to
• 1:21:49
  anybody who's listening you know, Toastmasters even just
• 1:21:54
  when I had to go to my boss and go You know, I need to get paid
• 1:21:58
  more money, was just much easier because I'd already practiced,
• 1:22:02
  how to form an argument, how to talk about things and stuff like
• 1:22:06
  that. So yeah.
• 1:22:08
  Mmm, what advice could you give to aspiring public speakers?
• 1:22:15
  I think the advice I would give to an aspiring public.
• 1:22:17
  Speaker is well, first of all, he's go to Toastmasters.
• 1:22:21
  The second thing is what I would do is the same advice.
• 1:22:25
  I'd give to any certainly any of your listeners.
• 1:22:29
  Particularly young adults is work on your mental health.
• 1:22:35
  Do a take active action to improve your mental health
• 1:22:40
  because the thing that holds us back is the Belief systems that
• 1:22:44
  we are given in our family homes.
• 1:22:47
  It's a belief systems were given in school.
• 1:22:49
  I mean, the entire school system is basically designed to crush,
• 1:22:55
  the will of people, so that they will work in factories on a
• 1:22:59
  machine, Murr, Murr, Murr, Murr, Murr.
• 1:23:03
  And so, you know, we have this whole history of people who are
• 1:23:11
  just Unhappy in their lives and yeah.
• 1:23:16
  So if you want to be good at anything, the first thing to do,
• 1:23:20
  is to dismantle the belief systems that you were fed as a
• 1:23:24
  child, which are, what are holding you back from whatever
• 1:23:28
  it is you want to do? I've seen so many people, I mean
• 1:23:31
  so I was watching a conference the other day last week.
• 1:23:35
  That's a thing called nudge stocks about Behavioral Science
• 1:23:38
  fascinating but half the people who were speaking there.
• 1:23:42
  Actually fairly terrible public speakers.
• 1:23:45
  Not half there were a couple people really good in a couple
• 1:23:48
  of people really bad and I was like, the thing that's holding
• 1:23:52
  them back is their beliefs about themselves.
• 1:23:54
  Yeah, you know, so yeah, I'm doing this crazy stuff now
• 1:23:59
  because I've been working so hard for the last 30 years on
• 1:24:04
  clearing up the shit that was fed to me in the first 30 years
• 1:24:08
  of my life. So yeah, but with the biggest
• 1:24:11
  things that you kind of Dismantle door overcame.
• 1:24:17
  Well, certainly, a propensity for alcoholism was an early part
• 1:24:23
  of that and then, you know, the family history of alcoholism.
• 1:24:28
  The thing I've worked the most honest, shame.
• 1:24:32
  You know, I grew up in a generation that used shame as a
• 1:24:36
  as a tool, shame and guilt as a tool to control children.
• 1:24:42
  So you shamed people so that they Would do what you wanted.
• 1:24:47
  And, you know, so that was the tool.
• 1:24:49
  My parents use, my father was raised a Catholic, so lots and
• 1:24:54
  lots of guilt and you know, so I've spent a lifetime trying to
• 1:24:59
  free myself of that and that's you know that's part of that.
• 1:25:04
  Then is the Imposter syndrome the sort of all those things.
• 1:25:08
  It's like it's like the whole bunch of little nibbling away at
• 1:25:12
  a whole bunch of different belief systems that I've been
• 1:25:15
  working on. What advice could you give to
• 1:25:19
  aspiring entrepreneurs? I think I'd give the same
• 1:25:24
  advice, you know, again often time what I see is that people
• 1:25:28
  are their own worst enemies that they're, you know, they're
• 1:25:33
  either if they're working with a group of people, if you're the
• 1:25:39
  boss, but you're carrying around a whole bunch of baggage that
• 1:25:43
  just gets in the way of dealing with everybody else.
• 1:25:47
  So it's a and all that, you know, one of the consistent
• 1:25:50
  things that comes out of interviews.
• 1:25:53
  The biggest names of, you know, in business or whatever.
• 1:25:59
  You know, the Bezos and all the gate is that they all have some
• 1:26:03
  kind of meditation practice, mmm, tried to get into
• 1:26:06
  meditation. I've never succeeded at it, but
• 1:26:09
  if you can do it, I think it's a fantastic thing, but you've got
• 1:26:12
  to be doing something to actively be improving your
• 1:26:17
  mental health. You know, a lots of people are
• 1:26:19
  going to Jim's these days to improve their physical health.
• 1:26:24
  But it's only just starting to be a cultural thing that you
• 1:26:28
  need to put as much time into your mental health as your
• 1:26:31
  physical health. So I would add to.
• 1:26:36
  That is don't watch the news. Oh yeah.
• 1:26:39
  And then the last thing you could do.
• 1:26:45
  Yeah, I've never questioned. I feel like you've already kind
• 1:26:47
  of answered this but, you know, I don't know.
• 1:26:49
  I always ask my castle back. Okay.
• 1:26:51
  It's my favorite question to ask my guest.
• 1:26:53
  Well, we cannot do it, then, can we What is the biggest life
• 1:26:58
  lesson that you've learned so far?
• 1:27:07
  I think the thing for me, that just pops into my head is the
• 1:27:12
  biggest lesson has also been. The my biggest challenge is
• 1:27:16
  learning to love. I've been married for 30 years
• 1:27:20
  now, it's been a lot of work. We both come from families, that
• 1:27:26
  were pretty profoundly dysfunctional and both of our
• 1:27:29
  parents really loathed each other.
• 1:27:31
  It wasn't just God, sorry. I can't hang out with.
• 1:27:35
  You was like a Loathing, they both kind of overcame that in
• 1:27:41
  both families, you know, near the end of their lives.
• 1:27:45
  But you know that was so opening up my heart, allowing myself to
• 1:27:54
  both love and be loved was my biggest challenge.
• 1:27:58
  And then in many ways has been, my biggest success is so yeah,
• 1:28:03
  still working at that one. So, Yeah and then then just
• 1:28:09
  having more fun than ever. So any advice you could give to
• 1:28:13
  people about you know making making allow marriage lasts that
• 1:28:17
  long. Congratulations.
• 1:28:18
  Oh my God. Oh God.
• 1:28:20
  No, I don't think I'd go down that road.
• 1:28:22
  Yeah, that would just be yeah. No, no, I'm not going to, I'm
• 1:28:29
  not going to do that. We've just really just bumbled
• 1:28:33
  along and somehow I've gotten here, I don't know, you know,
• 1:28:38
  Yeah, fair enough. Don't don't, you know, I think
• 1:28:41
  what I would say is, don't marry a lunatic ex-alcoholic, you
• 1:28:46
  know, recovering alcoholic. This is yeah.
• 1:28:48
  Don't don't marry me as the first choice that.
• 1:28:52
  Yeah. So, you know, but, you know, my
• 1:28:55
  wife is one of the few people on the planet who gets who
• 1:28:58
  understands my sense of humor. So suppose importantly, and
• 1:29:02
  that'd be fine, somebody make you laugh so I can make her
• 1:29:06
  Laughs. She can make me laugh.
• 1:29:08
  Yeah, we do have a lot of fun together.
• 1:29:12
  Yeah, awesome. Yeah.
• 1:29:15
  As we draw things to a close for today.
• 1:29:17
  Do you have any final thoughts or some upcoming projects that
• 1:29:20
  you'd like, to share with our listeners?
• 1:29:22
  Well, I'd really love people to, even though you're in England,
• 1:29:26
  for them to look at our website, the comfortable home
• 1:29:31
  project.com, There's a contact us page on there if they have
• 1:29:39
  any comments about it, any thoughts?
• 1:29:43
  Yeah. To think about and and I'd like
• 1:29:47
  people to think about what they can do to solve climate change
• 1:29:51
  because I see it as a when the people lead the leaders will
• 1:29:54
  follow. So I think we all have to be
• 1:29:57
  driving that and it should be, you know, if we do everything
• 1:30:04
  that we know how to do we We will bring in a golden age.
• 1:30:08
  This is not like you have to do all this stuff and then we will
• 1:30:12
  go bang rocks together in a cave which is what the fossil fuel
• 1:30:16
  industry wants us to think so go and do it, change the world.
• 1:30:22
  And have a lot of fun in the process and make the world a
• 1:30:24
  better place. Yeah, I want to say a massive,
• 1:30:28
  thank you for being on the show Keefe.
• 1:30:29
  It's been an absolute pleasure and I've really enjoyed this and
• 1:30:33
  I know that our listeners are going to enjoy this too.
• 1:30:35
  So yeah, just massive. Thank you.
• 1:30:37
  Yeah, cool. And you know if it comes out of
• 1:30:40
  people having questions, they're more than welcome to, you can
• 1:30:46
  shoot questions through me, find the the Email address on the
• 1:30:52
  website. If people have more questions
• 1:30:54
  and if any of your friends have a podcast, I'll be a guest on
• 1:30:59
  there too. I love this shit.
• 1:31:02
  Yeah, cool. Okay, thanks very much.
• 1:31:04
  This has been a hell of fun and yeah, we'll do it again.
• 1:31:07
  Sometime pleasure. And thank you.
• 1:31:11
  Everyone listening to the Christian Reef podcast be safe,
• 1:31:14
  be well, and I'll see you in the next one.