As well as can be expected, this is what I always say, but yeah, no, I'm good. Very good. Hey, looking well. Trying to keep fit, it gets harder when you get to the grand old age of 78, which I am. Okay, 52, but that's old enough. Yeah, so it's not the old struggle, isn't it, when you're a bit older? He's different now though for us, isn't it? Because I'm not as old as you, obviously. By that I mean I'm 51. But like when I was a kid, Scott, there's no way a 51-year-old would be down the gym, smashing it, you know, going out, cracking ultramarophans, doing triathlon, wearing hoodies and running tops and baseball caps. When I was a kid, by the time you got to about 25, you were old, like really old. You're dressed in tweed, you had a hat, you didn't swear and stuff like... Times have changed, haven't they? Well, we were, people were older because if you joined the Corp, for instance, at 16 or 18 or 20, whatever people did, but you really only stayed to your 40, that was it. So when I was a young bootneck, 16 or 18 years old, you look at a sergeant major, when I was 70, you thought, they are super old.  And so you look at, I had this line in the sand forever, that 40-year-old, you know. And then when I reached 40 and started going plus, I was like... Still alive. And so I think you do draw a line in the sand at 40 being in the military, you know. And it's changed a bit now, I know, is it because they tend to go on a little bit further. It's mad that people I joined up with are still, they're just leaving now, but they've been serving up until now. So almost 35 years, many of them reached the, you know, rank of major and this sort of thing. Yeah, yeah. Gazz, who I was, did the nine mile with at the weekend, or the previous weekend, he's a colonel now. It's just, I find it absolutely, absolutely fascinating. Personally, I wouldn't swap the adventure I've been on across, well, the whole world and all the learning involved, sort of, for any position in any company. But have you found that yourself? Because you must have travelled quite a bit now.  Well, it's funny, actually, I thought it was, well, time I left the Marines anyway, I thought it was quite tough.   But I've had, like, these three sort of main careers, really, so I had the first element, 12 years, that's a lie, actually. I always exaggerate, Chris, it was 11 years, 11 months and nine days or something. So we'll say 12 years, 12 years in the core, about 18 years in the police. But I made a transition, started making the transition into sort of outdoor adventure and TV stuff, maybe 10 years into that. And then at the last eight years, solidly being in TV, doing, well, not just TV, events, guiding, mountaineering, all that sort of stuff, you know, but the TV is paying the mortgage, you know. So what you would join the core around the same time I would have, I'm assuming. 86. Oh, OK. July 86. Yeah, I was 88. 88 when training got really, really tough. You wouldn't know about that, mate. Well, as you know, it was always, always tougher when we did it. Just a few years before you. But hey, I'm glad it wasn't any tougher. So I sometimes do a few talks and I say, you know, I was one of the youngest marines. But there were so many young lads. I was, I don't know how I did actually, because I was 16 years and three and a half months. And I don't know what the rules were, because my birthday is in March, as of April, May, June, yeah, July, so nearly four months, so 16 and four months. So I'm sure there's people who were younger than that, but there couldn't have been too many younger than that, I don't think. What about you? How old are you? I was 18 when I joined. I think 17 when I went to recruit an office. Practically a man. Almost a grown-up. Yeah, you know, being a 16-year-old was a lot easier because we didn't have to run quite as far. And we used to get specialist treatment. You know, we used to get half a pint of milk a day, which gave us the edge on everyone else, really, as a junior. You've got your half a pint of milk. I don't know if you did it when you were in, but we got our milk every day. So that gave us the edge, that, you know, that was preferential treatment. Are you being serious now or taking a make? I thought the standards were the same across the board. Yeah, they're absolutely the same. But with the only difference being that, what we are, I think there's about 11 or 12 juniors in the troop who are under 17, under 18. So we got half a pint of milk and we had to go every morning. The commander test, did you get longer time? OK, OK. You have to carry the 84, you're only 16, it's a bit heavy for you. OK, so the point we're getting to is it.  You either do it or you don't. Yeah. And officers have to do it all a quicker, obviously. Yeah, they do do it a bit quicker, some of the tests for all the tests. But I joined at 16. I think a few years before that and someone will probably comment, they used to have junior troops and the whole troop, I think, was made up of kids, you know, under 17. I can't come on on that, but mine was mixed. So we had, I don't know how many it was, maybe 52 people. And I think there was about 10 or 12 of us were 16 or certainly under 17. Yeah.  And, you know, but it was great. Yeah, it's good. Yeah. Did that affect you then when he got to you, Nick, because you would have been too young to go on active service, would you not? Yeah, I did. So immediately I passed out of training, which was 27th of March, following year, so I was just 17 by three weeks.  I was at full two commando and company. We had to beat up for spearhead and we were off to Northern Ireland for sort of quick tour, six or seven weeks. So I did all the beat up and no one said anything to me. It was like, here we go. You know, and then about a week before I was going and Sergeant Major called me and said, yeah, a bit of an issue.     But so, yeah, you can't go.   And it was quite difficult for a few months to fit back in there, you know, and start sort of building bridges again, you know, I think it was in the following year we went to Norway, usual winter deployment. Yeah, it's fine then, you know, three months and then you're back in. But so, yeah, it was, I was upset with that. Yeah, at the time. How did you find Norway, then, if you were so young? Again, you know, we used to have tent sheets in those days. We used to carry these seven tent sheets on your back. And again, if you're under 18, the lads are really kind. And they say you don't have to carry the tent sheets because you're under 18 or the Yelper sledge and actually don't have to ski so far. Yeah, I mean, God, I was five foot five and ten stone. No, I was five foot five and eight and a half stone. I wasn't much bigger when I was actually in Norway. And then, you know, three or four years later, I was trying to be a PTI. I was five foot ten and, you know, twelve stone. So that was the difference between a boy's body and a man's body. So, yeah, you know, I struggled. Always passing, always there with the team, but always at the back and, you know, struggling. But, yeah, it was it was good, though. It was good. Yeah, did you get out to Ireland in the end? Yeah, so I went to I became an LC about two years later. I went down to Paul and actually it was brilliant because, you know, we always say, don't we join the core and see the world? But probably you don't necessarily see that much of the world. But as an LC, I got a deployment on Intrepid. And so actually we went to, I don't know, the whole we did a mediterranean tour, world tour, you know. But just before that, also when I came back from that, I went back to Paul and then I went off to Northern Ireland, which was then called Snowney. And we did Carlinford Lock and Locknate. So I did in the end, a nine month tour, actually, I did six months ago and got extended, volunteered to stay out there because it was just a great job. So in the end, did sort of back to back tours there. But, you know, yeah, it's good, interesting. And what's your role there? Are you trying to stop weapons being transited across the lakes or the locks? The main role is tried to tolerate small ships routine with 20 Matlos. That's the hardest challenge. No, good, good lads, actually. Yeah, so I worked for Dominic Carlinford Lock and so we did boardings every day. We did our patrols, some land patrols and some on the water, OPs, you know. And, yes, trying to stop not just, I think, weapons, drugs, crew and activity as well as terrorist activity, but we did boardings. They were the bits that were great fun. You know, all the time of the day and night and all the weather conditions. We put the lads up on the on the boat, you know. Ships would only slow down to 10, 12, maybe 15 knots. They're all good fast boardings, nighttime, you know, exciting days, actually. Yeah, did you ever get out to Hong Kong? You know, I didn't. I was I went to the IT shed afterwards, which is the the old radar instructor team and all the boys and their old sweats, you know, honky fin and there was all dits and stories about Hong Kong and, yeah, no, I never went out there, actually, but I would have loved to. It was the one place I would have loved to have gone. Yeah, but they always have a lifetime anyway. They used to go out in the South China Sea and they'd have to stop the smugglers coming from the mainland and probably vice versa.  What did you have any sort of finds or anything? Or do you have any successes or any hairy moments? Did we have any hairy moments? I don't know. Sometimes we get a couple of O.P. work, some O.P. work with some of the SB lads and they were always doing good ops. And that was quite exciting. We come under fire a couple of times, but only random, nothing really. I was squeezed between a couple of big firefights at the tour before me. One of the lads, I think, got shot on the L.C. lads called Frank Parker. It was maybe a year before got shot shot in the in over the backside or the leg, I think, opened up on. So, you know, it was amongst it, but we didn't really, you know, have too many contacts really, just in support of other people. Quite quiet. And what branch of the police did you join? Is that the right expression? Well, you joined just as a police officer, first of all. And of course, I became a PTI and I did seven or eight years, really finishing my time in the Corps as a PTI. So when I left the Marines to join the police, and by the way, I was sulking. I went up to Antarctica, I spent a year in Antarctica on board H was Endurance, brilliant draft. The sort of draft that you knew was brilliant when you're on it.  But now I look back, it was brilliant on it. I knew that it was like life changing and amazing. I was the only PTI responsible all for the fitness and stuff. And I just loved it. Expeditions, if you like mountaineering, brilliant. And then you get a preferential draft at the end of it. I put in four, I think, pool again as PTI. And the Corps decided that I was just due from a senior's, actually senior command course. So they thought they'd help me out by sending me to four, five commando, which was geographically the furthest place for my home. And so I showed them. I showed them and left Corps and joined the police. And I'm on the side of the major going, OK, see you then. You know, what? Surely, you know, you want to fight for me, no. So yeah, I joined the police. Just as a Bobby. And so I left the easy transition when you leave the Corps fitness wise and all that sort of stuff, you know, out of one uniform, into the next I went to Ashford Police Training College and 15 weeks and, you know, you're polishing shoes and ironing shirts and getting to police training. But the biggest step was diversity.  And, you know, you've got to stop working with lots of other people from lots of other backgrounds of communities and public course.  For instance, you can't just punch people in the face. That's a no, no, you have to have some rules and then you can punch people in the face. So it was it's quite difficult to make that transition. And a load of lads, bootnicks, mat loads, you know, army lads, they went by the wayside, you know, they just couldn't make that transition behaviour, you know, and it's only just being careful what you say and knowing your audience, I think. But actually, it was great. I did six or seven years front line policing and who wouldn't want to do that? You know, fast cars going to fights and really adrenaline all the time and new challenge. It was great. Yeah, you know, it was good. I nicked this one guy for murder, which is always a or attempted murder, you know, get the old murder badge. And it was funny, he was an ex-gurka and he'd stabbed someone and they said, yeah, you know, go go to this job and he's been stabbed in the back of a cabin. I get there and I arrive. It's right outside the front of a pub of about 300 people in the garden and open the taxi and there's this guy on the floor, blood everywhere, lying there with my colleague and she sort of starts giving him first aid and the taxi driver says, behind you, behind you, you know, and there is this guy ready for action. And it's funny because if you read some of these statements, they go, oh, the lad, the police officer was amazing, really muscular, massive police officer, got to be six for eight.  You know, it was all very exciting. And that was literally the landlord's statement. But in fact, I've walked around the front of the car, but we put my hand on the taxi. The guy was crying, who committed the crime and he didn't have a knife. He had one of those big carving forks, you know, that you do Sunday roast with. Obviously, he still did a bit of damage and he fell to the floor himself onto his knees and dropped the knife, the fork. And I just grabbed his wrist and then he fell onto the floor. I mean, he literally put himself onto his front, but now he's gone back. And that was it. I'll tell you what, Scott, let's go for the other story. We'll do a bit of editing. Wow, incredible. Yes, I was I listened to Ann Middleton's book. A couple of years back when he was saying he he joined the police for a while. Did he? Yeah. And. It was a very short lived career. I don't think he got through training because of what you were saying. And it wasn't that according to his account, it wasn't that he'd done anything particularly bad. But he said to I'm guessing it would be a seek. At breakfast one day in training, he said, you're going to wear that thing every day. Right. And of course. The sad nature of society is it was just a genuine question, especially if you're going to be a policeman and you're supposed to wear a helmet and this kind of stuff. And yeah, I think he was quickly on some sort of warning. Well, it wouldn't take much. I mean, that wouldn't have gotten chucked out. But accumulation of a few, you know, things. You do have to get switched on quite I made loads of faux pas and people took me to one side and get out of quite word. And it went on for a while, actually, because your training is two years. You do this probationary period. And that's the time when you can really get it wrong. So luckily, I was super lucky. My first sergeant was an ex-bootneck guy called Jeff Brooks. He's dead now. Nice guy.  It's funny. You know, he didn't exactly grab me by the throat, but he sort of a nose to nose of, you know, you know, this is this is not the call.   But it was great because every time I did go over the top, you know, it was like not just bootneck mentality, but PTI as well. So guess what? I'm a bit over the top.   Hey, Scott, I've got a brilliant joke for you, right? How do you drown a PTI? No, it's impossible, I think. Put a mirror on the bottom of the pool. Do you know what? I tell this, I remember time. Is it true? I couldn't walk past a mirror without looking in it. Now I dare look in it. We've all been there. We were all in there now. Yes. So I'm actually more fascinated to hear about your travels and your adventures and how you, I mean, you've got Pasigone on your hat. I'm going to guess a lot of people probably don't even know where that is. No disrespect if you do know where it is. But Southern part of Argentina, very rugged wasteland, but ideal for adventure programs and I think there's sort of, well, it ends in Tierra del Fuego, which is where you have to go if you want to expedition to Antarctica, or at least that's one of the routes. Oshuaia down there on the very southern tip, it's a little bit sort of like the Falklands when you're down there. And it's similar as if you've got to the very north point of Scotland. So John O'Groats, it's that really beautiful, unique, but almost barren and desolate sort of feeling. So I just went on a bit of a tangent there, but you can see I love traveling and, or I'm pleased that I've done a fair bit of it. At what point did you start to get involved in the television stuff? Well, just on the travel quickly course, I did a bit in the core and then my year in Antarctica, you go down all the coasts of South America. We went to Buenos Aires and Montevideo and down to Uruguay. We went on a little expedition in Uruguay, a course over to South Georgia, had six weeks in South Georgia, then Antarctica on the back of the other side. So I did a lot of travel there. But what I found is in the police, I went from police officer to police sergeant and then I was a police trainer. So I started doing some farms and taser and self-defense officer safety training and PSU and all this sort of stuff. And with all those skills from police officer and the training elements particularly, because I tell you this, the big thing that comes into TV is risk and risk assessment. I'll come back to that. So what the police did is they made me go on a national risk assessment course from fact to health and safety call called NEBOSH. People may not have heard of it. You might have heard of all sorts of health and safety qualifications. NEBOSH is the front runner. NEBOSH, you know, throughout the UK, that is your expertise in sort of health and safety.  I'll never get back. They sent me to university one day a week to do this NEBOSH. And once you pass your NEBOSH exam, you then have to start talking like this and being unreasonable about taking any sort of risks. So that was a really good certificate. But basically everything I'd done in the call, particularly as a PTI, and then the police sort of gave me all these tools, which are going to be very useful in not so much TV, but the TV and the outdoors. And so, you know, you're already there. You can work with helicopters. You can work with boats. You can do risk assessments, your first aid and medic stuff, which in the police is really high as well. And then just all you experienced travel. And of course as a PTI, I was already not a mountain guide, but a mountain leader, you know, and we used to have to do what's called a jet smile and a UEL and SPA and all these qualifications for climbing and absailing and mountaineering. So you've got it all if you're going to work in extreme environments. And the first place I went to, to work with Bear anyway, my first real outdoor show was in Sumatra.  So I took a bit of annual leave and I said to my boss, can I have some unpaid leave? You know, it's just one trip in a sort of lifetime. He said, yeah, yeah, take it. So I went to Sumatra for 33 days down in Indonesia, beautiful, rugged, amazing part of the world. Yes. Funny enough, one of the few parts of the world I haven't really experienced, obviously, been in Thailand and Southeast Asia, but yes, looks quite exotic is the feeling I get when I think about that part of the world. I know, it is great. But once you get down there, you know, very few roads, all jungle tracks, you know, you've got extreme jungle conditions there. But it's amazing. And we did one show in the jungle and one show on the coast. But great. And at the same time as doing the TV, I then started to start working or my own company, which at the time was called Yonk Training and Consultancy. And I started doing guiding. So yeah, little trips in North Wales and then that's quickly spread over to the Alps and then that quickly spread to places like Nepal, of course. And so I was working every time I could get any time off at all in TV and if I had any more available time when I was doing my own company stuff and gradually easing down the police. So after I'd used up all my leave and the police weren't happy anymore for unpaid leave, I started taking a day off a week. So I was part-time. And then two days, then three days until I got to the very bare minimum, which was 16 hours. Bit like being a PTI then. Exactly the same. We were slightly smaller biceps.  But, you know, the last eight years particularly have opened up for me because I've had more time available now working in the industry full-time. And there's no doubt about it. You know, people say to me, oh, you've got the best job in the world. And I have Chris. I have because what I tend to do, it's not just me, there's a team of two or three of us. We usually divide up, but there'll be a series and we'll have to film two shows using a location. And a good example is next week I'm off for two or three weeks to Mammoth Mountains in the States. And, you know, I'll have two weeks with a fixer who sort of knows the area quite well and I'll go to 25 locations, hide the mountains and the gorges and the lakes and I'll try and find some amazing sort of journeys. You know, I'm looking for a waterfall and then quite close to it is a little cave system and maybe just in the next valley is a lake.   So I've got this A to B to C to D journey. And then we put other bits in there as well. And then so that's week one or two. And then I'll come home a couple of weeks later to go back out again. And this time I'll just take a buddy one of my boys and we'll test everything. So we'll climb the rock face. I'll up sail down the waterfall. You know, we'll paraglide from the top of that mountain and test those bits and pieces just to make sure that, you know, our crew can get up there and do it because they have to be on the same terrain, you know. And of course the cast, the stars and the presenters can do it as well. And make sure it's safe. So we're putting all those protocols in. Then phase three is to filming. We get out there. Then it runs at a million miles an hour and then our job world changes from wrecking scout to looking after the crew as they bounce around and try and cross the same terrain as the presenters. So I'm going to dive in there with a question. Have you had crew that you just wanted to throttle because they were so useless? Sorry, I've gone straight in with a negative there, folks. I've had to execute several crew members and we've left them buried under dry riverbeds. No, you know, first of all, these TV crews, a lot of them, if you, you know, you might be brilliant at your job at sound or audio or light wherever it is or cameraman. But actually on the train we are in, sometimes the train is very, very difficult and sometimes they're extreme environments. You know, sometimes we are in the middle of nowhere. It's taken two or three days to get there and helicopter bumps and you are in extreme locations. Other times they look extreme, but actually they're not so bad. But the crew that we work with a lot usually are pretty good on their feet and they know what they're doing. In fact, the crew that I work with, 99% of the time, these guys are bloody good. You know, they bounce from rock to rock. In fact, sometimes they move a bit fast and take a few, too many risks in order to, you know, to get that shot. And so sometimes it's just a matter of putting them on a rope and calming them down a bit, but they're highly talented, not just in the job role that they do, but the movement on the train as well. But now and again you get a new member in and actually before Christmas I was in Moab and we had an almost entirely new team really and it's a big, big difference. But then you just adjust the way that you deal with people on the ground, slow it down, give lots more safety briefs, clip on a safety rope a bit more often than you would with the other guys and getting to, you know, learn as they go along. We had a cameraman actually never been in a helicopter and we just had to do some GV.  So he sat with his legs down there over the side and I've clipped him on.  And of course I'm just sitting next to him on my phone just reading my emails, you know. And I noticed as we start to bank the helicopter he's leaning out the aircraft, his bum's off the ground because he's going with the helicopter. He's getting sort of fixated on the ground and, you know, he can't really go anywhere. He's had about three inches of movement, but it was just funny to see. And he put the camera down like that and he was like, oh, that was really weird. So just by putting a hand on his shoulder he gave him a bit more confidence and he was fine. But, you know, you only need one or two rides in the helicopter then it becomes normal, you know. And we get shipped around so much. It's just a bus, it's just a taxi, isn't it? I think we used to call him cabs, didn't we? It's an incredibly expensive one, though. It is, and on those shows they buy them out for the whole day, you know, three or four days and at three, three and a half thousand an hour, whatever it is, dollars, you know, it's a lot of cost. But the pilots love being called taxi drivers. They're really keen on that. I bet you have to resist the urge to say, look, I'm taking this baby up. Well, the main guy we use in the UK will bank some GB helicopters. He's a legend. He's an ex-Matlow pilot. Famous for landing his links on a warship and the links to sign to slip over the side into the ocean. That was him. But I tell you this, he is a phenomenal pilot. You know, of course he is, all that military background and he puts this all over the place. You know, we definitely go places that other helicopters wouldn't even consider. But, you know, he is amazing, very good.  It's just a massive surplus of helicopters. But they were so basic they probably were worth, you know, five thousand pounds or something. You lose the links. That's a few million quids worth going over the side. I'm guessing. Yeah. And let's not forget about the two, the pilot and navigator. They're probably quite a good commodity. Yes. Yes. And when you're flying, you're also flying a lot.  Yeah, a bit of a boner contention. And so I'll air it on this, on this media now.  But it makes me laugh. They then get to location and they, in their contract, they've usually got a day off to a co-form, you know, jet lag and old wanker chops here. That, you know, seven o'clock in the morning, straight in the car, starting the recce process. And actually an hour later, I could be tying knots and rigging up cells and tear a hinge, you know. And so it's one of my bug bears. But yeah, unfortunately I'm in the back in cattle class, which doesn't mean too bad recently because there's no one in the back. So just before Christmas to Moab, I just stretched out across five chairs, you know, because there was like 11 people flying to the States. But I'm sure we'd be back to normal now. So yeah, it's a bit annoying, but of course it's super extravagant, isn't it? Business class compared to being in the back end. Yeah. Well, if you're flying the whole crew out at business class or first class or whatever they call it, that's an awful lot of money, isn't it? That's going to put the production costs through the roof. I sort of get it. But anyway, that's my little bug bear. But you know, they're the bosses. Nothing's ever going to change, you know, and that's the way it is. And that's how life is. But yeah, you know, we get treated well. Don't get me wrong. We get all our expenses, of course, all our fuel and taxis and accommodation.  And you know, so you don't have to keep going until you want it. So you know what? We get treated well. We get treated well. Scott, I've heard a few things, right? And I have to ask you, is Bear Grylls actually a bear? That's exactly the first question that I thought he was going to ask actually, because I'd already prepped for it. So is he a grizzly or a brown bear? Or a polar bear perhaps? Do you know what?  That's what he will say first and foremost. You know, that's what he does.  And you know, he's got his journey and what he's done over the last 20 or 30 years. And it's controversial, anyone on TV. I mean, TV is cheated. You know, TV, to get the pictures that you see has to be to a degree cheated. It was not like we could go away from what we did years and years ago and have 30 days filming for two shows. Now we have to do the same thing in four days, you know?  And the whole of TV is the same. I worked with Gordon Ramsay last week on the show. And of course it is, you know, if it doesn't happen on TV in front of the camera, then it doesn't happen. And so people who love him or love him, you know, they do Middleton in a different way.  He's good on the ground, you know, his movement and his fitness. And, you know, he is one of the good guys. He's a truly nice guy. He's always trying to do the right thing. And if you just, you know, he's an honorary colonel in the Marines. I know he gets maybe a bit of grief at that, but actually, you know, he's doing it for the right reasons. He's doing it because his dad was in the Corps and he wants to try and help the Corps with its recruitment, you know, and he's doing his bit. Same with the Scouts, you know, and he really is committed to those charities. The Scouts, the Corps, and I think Tusk is the other one he does at the moment with the Rhino. He puts a lot of time and effort into it. So, you know, he's one of the good guys. And, you know, yeah, I like him. I like him a lot. And he's incredibly successful and good at what he does. What can I say? What's his real name then? Because I know, Bear, I've heard him explain the nickname. Is it Reginald? Barry. Barry. No. His real name is Edward. Oh, of course it is. Edward Grylls, yeah.  And they go, now we're going to our next guest speaker. He works for Barry Gryllis. His name is Stephen Hetfield. That's me, you know, they always get it wrong, Bear's name. And my name as well. Which is funny. But yeah, you know, I know the story as well, but yeah, he's good lad. He's a good lad. I read an interesting story years ago. You might, you might even have heard it yourself, but it was Matt Dickinson. And he set off to film one of Brian Blessed's, I think many attempts on Everest. And it was back when I think Brian tried to do it in all the traditional gear that Mallory and you know, that kind of era would have won. And when Brian got to X amount of 1000 feet and decided to pull out, they had no documentary. So Matt Dickinson, he was just, I'll say just, I don't mean that rudely, but he was the cameraman. And when they said, well Matt, why don't you go up and we'll make the documentary about you. And so he ended up on the top of Everest. And I think it might have been that year of what they refer to as the killer storm as well. I remember watching it and I remember him carrying on and doing it. And yeah, no, I think it was Brian by blessed.  I know art is ever changing by art. I mean, media. But do you think that format will change?  When you get a bit older, you kind of, especially if you, it's a bit like, I mean, I've written books for 12 odd years. And so when all the books about the Gulf War came out, you just know as an offer going, right, oh, okay. Yeah, no names mentioned, but you just, and I just wonder if that kind of format of hyping everything right now I'm going to do this and now I'm going to, whether that will, maybe it will need to change because people will get fed up with the kind of, the disingenuousness of it. Can I say that? Yeah, you can. And I agree with it. You know what, when we did the born survivor shows, the man versus wild, you know, it was pretty wild as in, there wasn't that much preparation, not that much planning in the early days anyway. I didn't do too many of them. I only did a couple.     And so, you know, if nothing else, it kept his morale going, just wet his lips and no doubt, it wasn't doing very much good, but, you know, he survived and whatever reason. So, yeah, I think you're right. Bear, I know he's still like that to degree. We've got lots of new programs. They're doing this, you versus wild, which is interactive. And that has really taken the world by storm, actually.   And so there's all that sort of thing, but honestly, not just bear, I actually think that we're all fed up or we've had enough of. I think to degree, don't get me wrong here. I don't want it to be so, but the military guys and the sort of maybe not pointed particularly at Milton, but you know, the big bearded military, Afghanistan, taking nothing away from those guys at all. But I know the TV industry is sort of searching for, you know, a bit more diversity in their adventures. And so they're looking at sort of different areas because, you know, the faster viewers, everything's dangerous, it could kill you. I think people are really pressing towards experience and education and learning and all that sort of stuff. And quite happily see, you know, a female adventurer who hasn't been in the military and he wasn't gun-ho and sort of extrovert, plotting along, having great adventures as well. You know, I'm in a different format. You know, every time I talked to a TV company three years ago, it was all about escape and evasion, you know, sort of these adventures which are like jump out of helicopters and all that sort of stuff. And I just think, I don't know, I think it's time for change to move on and, you know, change the formats completely. But the trouble is those old formats at the moment, Chris, they still put bums on seats. TV companies are scared to take a risk. They're scared to get a new format and go, wow, this is so new, let's get it on there. They'd rather just go, we know Middleton's going to put two million on Channel Four's seat in, you know, or Foxy, I think, has got a new show coming out and he, to a degree as well, you know, put some bums on seats and again, massive respect to those guys, great what they do. And I love any bootneck or serviceman who can make a second career out of the media and go through it. But I don't know, maybe, you know, we do have to look at these formats. It's the world of reality TV almost, isn't it? It's not quite reality TV, but, you know, it's sort of... You've got to remember, well, we've got to remember that, I'm going to talk about young men now. I mean, I could talk about young women just with equal passion and defence. But young men look around them to a society of overweight fanies. They were perfectly content to just do a job for 40, you know, work in a cool centre, sit behind a computer, and I mean this no disrespect with what was used to be called women's work. And they do that. They don't get out. They don't get the adventure. The furthest they get is they put the light chron on a Saturday and they go out on their mountain bike and they're racer. Perhaps a bit of that, oh, I wanted to join the Marines, but this kind of thing. And you can understand why young men look to people like Bear and the Ant Middletons and they just must be open-eyed and sort of living vicariously through these stories, because the average life for someone now just isn't really, it's risk adverse. It's cotton-walled. You can't even say the F word without getting a barrage of whatever. So am I making sense? They must look at these guys and think they're absolute legends, whereas you and I know, you can buy around a world ticket for a grand and a half, maybe it's a bit more. You can end up in Patagonia. This company is doing guided tours up Akinagua. You can get into the Amazon. You can fish for piranhas. You can stay overnight in shelters there. I mean, I'll backpack every single, through every single country in America from Alaska down to Ushuaia there on the southern tip of Argentina, just backpack with my cooker in my, you know, I used to cook for cheap so I could make my money last. I did my first skydive on that round-the-world trip. I did that in New Zealand, in Taupo. Subsequently went back to get my pilot license and skydiving license in Florida, all this sort of stuff. It's not, it's accessible, isn't it? But I think, I don't know if the whole Xbox thing has something to do with giving people this false sense of adrenaline, but without actually giving them the goods which cements in your mind the strategies, the techniques and the philosophies that make you understand that it's all available to get out there and smash it. I agree with what you said. And actually, you know, what you're doing, that's a proper adventure. It's a field of, you know, potential danger on your own or even if you have someone else, you know. And I always used to think in the Marines, okay, in the core, you might be Afghanistan, you might be in Iraq and there's different things, you know, there's bullets flying, there's people getting their limbs blown off. But my point is that actually, you've got support mechanism as an adventure, whereas you've got accommodation and food and you're gonna get paid. And when I joined the police, it was the same. And then when I, in the TV role, guess what, I've got the old production company in the hotel or at least a nice campsite and it's all supported. What you do or what you've done is totally unsupported, you know, going across the world and whatever you've done. That's a real adventure. We're no backup. When you talk about Xbox, people like taking all the risks on the back of a computer. There's never, you know, nothing can go wrong. Okay, they might lose the game and they start again. And people do get, I know a couple of grown-ups nearly my age who spend maybe five hours a day on a computer and they live in the dream. But there's no consequences. And even to a degree what I do and have done, there's no consequences. What you do and what you've done when you have a proper adventure and you go backpacking or cycling or anywhere, you know, whether it's New Zealand, Australia, Nepal, anywhere. You know, you've got that risk, the real risk of running out of money, getting lost and these are the minor ones.  So that's amazing thing there. When we do the TV sometimes, yeah, we do do some big stunts. We do take a few chances. But do you know what? When you see Bear sort of out of something and he's tied the rope around a stinger net or bush and it's pretty much backed up with a couple of safety votes here and there. So it's not too bad really. But my big thing to everyone is go and have an adventure. That's when I finish all my talks, I just go go and have an adventure and don't have to, you know, do exactly what other people done, what you've done. All they've got to do is head off to Wales for weekend. You know, take their bivvy bag, do a bit of wild camping, you know, break a few rules maybe and have an adventure. Funny enough in everything I've done across 85 countries now. I've done 86. Did I say 85? I meant 86 and a half. You've done me, you've done me. But I can, for people listening, it's a very simple set of rules. All of them are telling now I've broken them. But it's like, don't go on a beach at night. That is just a golden rule in any, can we say impoverished country, you just attract trouble if you go on a beach at night and this is, we had a terrible incident when I was on HMS Invincible, one of our, one of our friends had to endure in Barbados. Don't buy drugs. That is another like fun or whatever that word is, that the risk just becomes exponential in that scenario. Watch the currents when you're swimming. That's another one that gets a lot of people. And there's a lot of small kind of tips like in the Americas, what can happen is some will come up to you and point at your backpack and you'll look and there's like mayonnaise on it or mustard, right?   And of course they're not, they're just going through all your pockets at light and speed in the marketplaces.  Anything, it's all got to be down the pants or something because you're just going to get, and it's clever the way they pick pocket and have someone with a blanket over their arm. Someone will come up behind you, you feel them undo the button on your cargo trousers or whatever and they're quick. They're out with the passport. They shove it under this blanket of the guy in front. He takes it like that and goes that way. So while you're shouting at this senorita or this senora, she's got nothing. She's sort of in the clear. I've just made it sound like travelling is really dangerous. It's super dangerous. Start at home, play Xbox. But the danger of not doing it is way, way, way. Many people go travelling. It's absolutely fine. Just stay away from those areas that I said and it's the odds of well in your favour of dying a happy life. Let's say that knowing you've lived your dreams. You've got to learn, haven't you? It's the adult learning cycle kicking in so you can get caught out when you're younger if it's your first time travelling. But actually, when you've been on a couple of little expeditions, I always say start slowly. Don't bite off too much. People got no experience. They go, I know I'm going to walk around the world or I'm going to go across Patagonia or I'm going to do this. And I just think, just start a little bit. Get your skills together. There's nothing wrong with doing a bit of training. Do a bit of first aid training. There's lots of companies that provide a little one day and two day courses to give this advice that actually you've just been talking about. But go on a little adventure on the Isle of Wight in the New Forest and then maybe progress, do something in Europe and then actually, bang, let's go for it. Let's go for a biggie. I think that's a... And then you learn. You start to learn as you go along and that's going to make it a little bit less painful, I think, rather than just throwing it all in. I know it's a fantastic thing to do.  It'd be fine. What could go wrong? Let's just take a backpack and a packet of matches. But when it does go wrong, it can go horribly wrong. I tell what I love as well, these new in-reaches, these in-reach minis you can get now. Have you heard of the in-reach, Chris? I've heard of it. You have to refresh my aging memory about what it actually is. Well, it's just a tiny little box, transmitter, GPS, emergency thing, American thing, Garmin, I think it is. And yeah, if you hit the red button, don't get me wrong. You're not going to get special forces coming, but they know exactly where you are and they can organise a rescue. You pay a set free for it. You can put it on sleep and pay like $7 a month. And then when it's activated, as in you're going away, it's like maybe $30. I don't know what the exact costs are. But you can text on it as well. The great thing is it's satellite GPS anywhere. You're not waiting for a phone signal. This thing will work everywhere on the globe. So it's the in-reach. And I think the new one's the mini-in-reach, which is a little one. I might be totally wrong, but great bit of kid. I've got the old in-reach, which is great. Because one of the issues in the Americas is a lot of people go up, say, they go up to see the crater of a volcano in the jungle. They come down. All you've got to do is take the wrong path. And very quickly, you're totally disorientated. And people will walk for days thinking, oh, maybe it's this way. And some get rescued, fortunately. But many, many haven't. Yeah, no. It's easy done, isn't it? Easy done. So Scott, to finish off, what's next on your exciting planner? Well, I was thinking of early retirement. You look too old for that. Shouldn't you have done that already? Do you know what? I do want to ease down a little bit. I've been in the lockdown, had the odd job. Luckily, quite a big job, which has kept me ticking over, paying the mortgage. But I've managed to get out and do loads of paragliding and paramotoring, which is my love now. So every flyable day I'm out.  Nothing on. I've got loads on. You know, I'll be back on the bike. I love riding my bike and still in the gym and going on little mini expeditions and climbing. You know, that's what I love to do. So, you know, that's cool. I just need a few more pennies for maybe just a little bit longer. So the TV world is just starting to pick up again. It's sort of picked up already at Christmas in the UK, because most of the stuff that I'm attached to is worldwide. So it's just starting to open up. And then I've got a job starting next week in, say, Mammoth Mountains for a couple of weeks. And then I've got three or four more good TV shows to wreck in Scout before Christmas, which will tick me over nicely. But after Christmas, I'd like to, you know, do more mountaineering and just ease down a little bit if I can afford to do so. I mean, when is it, Chris, the right time to, you know, enough is enough. You know, when have you made enough money? I'm not a millionaire by any stretch. But, you know, just keep going. I'll just do another job. Well, that's quite a big job. I'll just keep going. And for me, it's not about the money. It's about weeks away from home. And actually, for the first time this year, it's been quite nice being home a bit more after spending a long time away from home. You know, the last eight or 10 years, I've probably done at least 200 days a year out the country. Wow. And, you know, that is probably for a good eight years of those 10. So you've got kids. Oh, he's like, he's a man. He's like 23, 24 soon. Okay. So that's not too much of a sacrifice in that area then. Yeah. No, he's doing his own thing, but that's okay. Have you ever thought of Everest? Is that anything that you do? Do you know what? I think every mountaineer, you know, on any capacity, but particularly professional mountaineer, would think of Everest at some point. And we all poo poo at it. We go, well, you know, it's too commercial.  And it's not really a mountain climate site. It's more of a yomp and all this lot. But the truth is in the back of your mind, you always think yourself it would be quite nice. Yeah. To go on Everest and summit because, you know, just the way it is. Although I often said to people in talks, there's a million other mountains, which are great to climb. And I've done a few biggies myself, you know, and been to Nepal three or four times now. But actually it's always in the back of the mind. What I've always hoped for is that might be a TV job and they need some safety on it. And then I can do it for free and get paid to do it.  But yeah, maybe it will still be there. I'd certainly take it on if it was a TV job for sure. Would you go up? Yeah, I've got a few issues there actually that have come to life. First of all, I've just realized I've got low blood pressure. Or I don't know. A sports doctor might tell you know Chris, it's because you're athletic. But my, I'm like 120 over 67 at the moment, it's just technically puts you in that box. I don't know if you've got any, I don't really know what that is Scott, because I'm not like a, you know, it's not something I've ever really had to consider before, but where it affected me is I did a triathlon on Sunday. And the pre swim, I just went just chuck myself in a sea the day before just to see the temperature.  What, what, what looked, what you would describe as Reinhardt syndrome is I could see where the blood had drained from my toes and my fingers leaving almost a yellow waxy like skin as if it's just about to go frostbite that kind of weird feeling. And that it's, it's concerns like that that I'd have to get, I'd have to get sorted out before I could consider putting my body into that, that, that sort of temperature. I mean that is, that is low blood pressure, but of course you are fit as well. And that will have a bearing on it, but that is quite low and circulation. I know you're going to go and see what the scores with it, but I mean, I'm getting a super fit. Yeah, well, I'm, yeah, I've never considered myself as a fit person, but for my age, I suppose I should say that I am. But yeah, it's presenting quite a challenge really with respect to get into the bottom of it, because I'm not obviously not big on going to doctors and I'm certainly not big on taking pharmaceuticals. But I am big on diet and breathing and I'm looking at this cold water immersion that seems to be really, really pot, but I have a cold shower every day anyway, so.  He loves it and he swears by it, you know. Definitely. Yes, I'm also starting a charity. So one of the things in the back of my mind might be to somehow amalgamate a trip to Everest or trip up Everest into it. So maybe our paths will will cross in the future, Scott. Oh yeah, no. Bring me in. I'd love it. Yeah. I'd love to go back to Nepal again.  That's what people mostly do. Actually, there's so many other places to go into bed and Nepal worth investigating. So I'd love to go back maybe next year and try and do something. Because, you know, people always think a higher is harder. And yes, you've got the altitude issues, but actually, you know, you can get some amazing invigorating challenging climbs much lower down, you know, which are good fun. So yeah. Wasn't it Annapurna? I've read a great book recently. I'm sure it is Annapurna. One of the first 8000 meter peaks to be to be climbed in the Himalayas. Yeah. You look at the names like Herzog. Yes, that's the gentleman. Yes.  Didn't they? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, things haven't changed much now. But yeah, that's great book. Yes, it was. Yeah. Definitely. There are a lot of versions because I think a few different people have written about that. And Herzog was the main guy. He was the guy who wrote the book, but he had a couple of French mountain guys. They all fell out as well.  Yeah. Who knows what went on the mountain. I should say for our friends at home, my charity idea isn't just I started charity so I can climb Everest. No. My charity is, I don't know, what I want to sort of encourage people that are struggling a bit with life and what's helped me over the years and break down a few barriers and phobias and maybe tweak a few paradigms just to open up the future for people. And I've been thinking about doing it through adventure sport. And so things like rowing the ocean perhaps or climbing a mountain, this kind of stuff. I'll just chuck that in there before I'm... Great. It was all super worthwhile. And I like to do a bit more for charities as well because it's such a good way to live your life and do adventures. It's not all about chasing the dollar. I'm sort of done doing that really. Everything I want to do now has to be... It's really sound cheesy, but for fun or the great good, that's how I feel now with it. Because you can just chase the dollar and chase the dollar and when's enough. Yes, definitely. Scott, stay on the line while I click off record and I can thank you properly. But for the purposes of this interview, you've heard this a few times before. I'm now turning off the tape. No. Massive thank you, Royal. Absolute... As you can tell, I love all this sort of stuff. It's just... For me, it's a fascinating area alive. It combines travel with the media, with adventure and a bit of art or production work thrown in. So thank you for coming and enlightening us as to what goes on behind the scenes of a Bear Grylls production. Well, I know I've really enjoyed it, Chris. Thanks for asking me. And there's a few more dits you can drag out on me on another occasion. Yes, let's do that. Perhaps we can do a live Q&A together. They're always quite popular. Yeah, I know. I'd love to. Definitely. For our friends at home, much love to you all. Look after yourselves. If you could like and subscribe, that will really help. And we'll see you next time.


So as many of you might know, with the introduction of the Crown Tundra, we also got access to a brand new item called the ability patch. Now you can find this in the max layer talking to this NPC trader here who will offer you the ability patch for a hefty price of 200 dinite ore. So it is very expensive and probably prices out of a lot of people's plans with their Pokemon. You might have one of the starter Pokemon or a shiny Pokemon that you want to use it on, but a 200 dinite ore is a pop. That's a lot of Dynamax Adventure Rids that you're going to have to grind through to get that amount. Now one of the things that we have had introduced as well is a bunch of new dens in the Crown Tundra and with those dens comes a lot of new goodies. Now in today's episode, like I mentioned at the start of the video, I'm going to show you where you can get Dracovish, Dracozalt, Octovish and Octozalt in the Crown Tundra with their hidden abilities along with a bunch of other hidden ability fossil Pokemon without the cost of any dinite ore or an ability patch. So where do we need to go? We need to head up to the... Snor slide slot. So if you fly here, what we want to be doing is making our way up to the top of this cave system here and it's in the cave system where we're going to be locating this Max raid den. When you are here at this Snor slide slot, what you want to do is come into the tunnel to the top. Now if you follow my directions, you shouldn't have too much issue finding this den. Now it is a little bit difficult because you can 100% get lost in here. It is very windy and back and forth but like I say, I'll try and guide the way as best I can and you'll be able to pause this video and kind of come back to it and stop and start it when you want to. So we need to be trying to make our way over to this direction because we need to find another little like exit that'll take us out to like a snowy strip which looks like it's kind of going nowhere here but there is a path to the right and you want to take this cut down here and then this will bring you to another cavern and salamence normally pops up here. There's a wild spawn for salamence there.  So like I say, it's pretty easy to find if you know the way but it can be quite tricky to find otherwise. So this den here is the den that we are looking for. You will need a purple beam because the hidden ability fossil pokemon will not spawn in a regular rare beam. So that's what the first step what we need to do. So as in our old guides, we haven't done this for such a long time because we haven't really done dens. You want to save in front of the den here.  But for this example, I'm just showing you this and to get a red beam, what you're going to do is just drop a wishing piece into here and before the text finishes, you want to have your hand hovered over the home button because if it's not a purple beam, you want to reset the game and then come back to this spot. Okay. And it's not. So you can see there you've got a split second where is just a red beam and we're looking for a purple beam. This is what you want to do. This is an old an age old trick that we've had with Sword and Shield and doing this for the benefit of you guys coming in that are new to the Crown Tundra or the Isle of Armour and you haven't really seen the guides on how to do this. So this is for your benefit, Arnie. I'm sure the rest of you will understand that this is a method that is quite important to this step. So bear with me while I do this and we're not going to go through the whole step. So when we come back into the game, we're at the same point. You want to just drop that wishing piece. You're not wasting wishing pieces by doing this, which is the beauty about this. You want to say save. Yes. And you want to keep an eye and you want to make sure that you reset in the game before the text finishes. Now you want to just go back into the game again and you just rinse and repeat this process until you get that purple beam. So we'll be back when I do get the purple beam for this den. There we go. It didn't take too long to actually get the purple beam that we wanted.  In case anything goes wrong and you lose the beam because the next step is checking out what it is. So it's Aerodactyl. We're actually going to go for Dracovish or Dracozalt in this one. So what you're going to do is do the Datescape glitch. You click invite others. Don't be online when you're doing this.  And you want to come down to settings, date and time.  Date and time you want to come down. Just move the date forward one day. Hit your home button. Come back into the game and then quit out of the den. And that will move 24 hours forward in the game and it will mean that the den has got a new Pokemon in it. So you can only do this with a wishing piece. Don't try this on dens that are just randomly spawning every day because they will just disappear when you change the date and they will respawn somewhere else. So you have to do this with a wishing piece. And it only requires one wishing piece. And you just constantly do this Datescape glitch until you hit the Pokemon that you want. We're getting to see a lot of nice Pokemon in these dens, which is good. So you can see all the fossils that we've had so far. We've had Aerodactyl and that is OctoVish, I think. Or Octozalt. Octozalt, that's the one. It's the one. I should know. It was the very first fossil that I received in my Pokemon Sword. Plitter. And I actually played with it. It's a cool Pokemon. I haven't really used it since then. Daily Bird, obviously, as well. There's a bunch of Pokemon here under the red beam, but it is the fossils that we are going for. So you just kind of repeat this method over and over again until you kind of hit the desired kind of target Pokemon that you're looking for. And once you do that, we'll get to that stage. So we've got Dracozalt here. Now I am looking for Dracozalt with its hidden ability. And obviously, DracoVish, they both get Sandrush now. So we'll go for this one in this example here.  That to make this easier, what you can do is use a Pokemon with the Trace ability. So that's what we're going to be looking for now in your box. So yeah, there you see, I do have a Guard of War. I can use the Guard of War here. Obviously, you can use anything that does have Trace. I'm not going to invite others, but just for the sake of this guide, I'm just going to go into the battle. And we will, by having a Trace Pokemon at the start of your party, you're going to be able to see the ability straight away. And then that will confirm whether it's the Pokemon you want to catch, or if you want to reset and kind of continue those day to give glitches for another Pokemon. So as you're going to see, DracoVish here, we are tracing, and it is Sandrush. So like I said, this is where you are going to get the hidden ability fossil Pokemon in the Crown Tundra. So this den I've taken you to, I've shown you where you can get to this den. I've shown you all the steps up to now, how you can manipulate the den, make sure you get a red beam without wasting wishing pieces, and also how you can change the Pokemon in the den. There is also the ability to shiny hunt this den as well. You know, the seed checkers are out there. We've got one on our Discord channel. If you want to jump in and join the Discord community and then use our free seed checker bot, you're more than welcome to. And you'll be able to shiny hunt for these fossil Pokemon, which is going to be very exciting because beforehand getting shiny fossils in Sword and Shield was very difficult. So it's definitely something I'll be doing. And if you do give it a try, good luck with it. And I will link our seed checking video and how to do that whole process down in the description below. But we're going to end it there, friends. Have a great rest of your day. I'm not going to catch this DracoZolt because I am going to plan on shiny hunting this den and get myself a DracoZolt and a DracoVish because they are so nice, shiny. So I hope you can appreciate why I'm not catching it, but I have shown you through the trace ability that it does have Sandrush and you can get them with their hidden abilities using this method. So have a great rest of your day. Thank you so much for tuning in. Leave a comment down below. Let me know your opinions on the ability patch and what you think of the pricing that they've labeled it with in the Crown Tender. Personally, me, I think they've priced it way too high. I think they could have made it at least like a hundred dinite or would have been more reasonable. And I think a lot more players would have seen a lot more use from it. So thank you so much for tuning in, friends, and I'll see you all for the next one. Until then, take care and bye-bye.


Hearing kind of the most salient resident pieces that emerged in each of the four breakout groups and each final reflections from the anchors of each group. So I'm gonna just start by asking either just one or both of the anchors of each of the groups to share. Share what was most resonant for you about your conversation that you wanna share with everybody. I'm wondering if Cole, you all wanna start? We've delegated that responsibility to Maura, who will be speaking on behalf of our group. Thank you Maura. Thank you Maura. She totally got called and told by me. Absolutely by Maura. Oh, I'm told that's my favorite group. Oh, I'm told. Oh, I'm told. Oh, I'm told. Well, let me be where I was in a group with some very profound thinkers. So it's not hard to offer you incredible gems that were shared. So I wanna start with Ebony. We heard from Ebony and Nicole about their practices and Ebony went first. Ebony, and I happen to have them also give just having spent a little time with Ebony a couple of weeks ago at Duke in another kind of conference. So I've gotten a couple of angles on your work. And the foundation, and actually I think it would apply to our conversation in general is about emancipation. And this, I mean like the grounding that you have in notions of emancipation just really blow me away. And that sort of everything comes from there. And I feel like I can really relate that in that this moment, but to this notion of the comments as well and that the comments depends on a kind of emancipation first of all. And that what we find in ourselves when we are emancipated is this deep, I think you had that wonderful slide, like the deep, there was a mouth and like yeah. Like that's what becomes available to us when we find this emancipation. And that was the link to Nicole's work, particularly around the ceremony. She did lead us through a ceremony with each other where we empowered and encouraged our own heroism. And that was very moving. And for each other's heroism I should say. And so Nicole's work is also very deep and very inspiring around creating revolutionary practices slash ceremonies to, I would say, lead to this emancipation or contribute to this emancipation. So that was, we also heard about Lenny Reifersdahl which was interesting and a very interesting sort of intersection to the thinking about danger, I would say, or dangerous practices within that. Anyway, that's what I got. Nice to have you on. Thank you so much, thank you so much. Morgan, would you or somebody else from your group wanna share or reflect on your conversation? Well I feel like kind of like through a wrench into my group a little bit. Okay. So I would love someone else to talk about what they got. I mean basically what we were really talking about. Claudia, like Claudia talked a lot about specific things that she did at Oregon Shakespeare Festival. That a lot of it was about how people contribute, how events happen around specific issues or actions. But we talked about magnetic centers and involvement of community, talked about extraction of stories. But I'd really love someone else to respond. What do you do Daniel wanna respond? Or just share any reflection? Any reflection on what? What was resonant for you from that conversation? What stays with you? Sure. So one of the question was, yeah forgive me. You just done this to me again where you changed the formative score and then trying to rise to the challenge.  So one of the things we talked about was or if there's a sentence that I crafted was because you gave us a beautiful challenge of hey can you sum up in a sentence what your death charge is? What's your one thing you're doing to change the world? And I was like well I'm crafting self-generating sustaining performance for communities to do healthy practices. That was a beautiful sentence that you helped me to write. We all told a lot of stories about the work that we're doing. So there's people at the table who are doing work or they're trying to help communities to create their own performances. So there's a lot of co-creation models that we talked about. And one of the examples that I talked about was the Martin Luther King Day celebration which is a show where we had to have a long-term strategy of getting institutions to buy in to the project and then it can become self-sustaining and it's a co-creation model where everyone writes the show and everyone is in the show. And then we also talked about dangers of extraction in communities. We talked about New Orleans, St. Louis, Ferguson. We talked about capitalism in the market and again forgive me, my notes are all cloudy and they weren't reflective of the conversation. They were reflective of the things Claudia was thinking about as everyone was sharing beautiful stories. So the market resists social justice. So how do you work beyond that? Can we, how do we share infrastructure? So you talked, you shared some beautiful stories about HowlRound and shared infrastructure on HowlRound TV. And then how do you share mission? Can you share values? And then you shared something beautiful about you can occupy the same landscape and that might not mean that you have the same values but you're occupying the same landscape which brought me back to my concept of the radical middle. That's where we all have to work because that's where we are. Thank you Claudia. Thank you. Mark, how about you and our others from your group? Why don't you join me? Great. Now why don't we do this? Only time to go first and then I'll fill in the information on it. Oh. So. How do you prepare, how do we prepare? One of the questions I think kind of was for me was just this idea of it. How do we prepare to imagine equity? What's needed just to do that, imagine it and you know, obviously it's something you notice. There's a kind of privilege that lets you imagine and the bankers say that until this equity, how can we collectively imagine that there's equity because we're all imagining from very different places, you know and so that notion very much kind of resonating in my brain. One of the other things that we noted here was neighborhood conversations and local transformation. How do we just start to transform kind of on local levels? You have a community conversation that can happen pretty informally that just gets people talking together if it's something about grounding first in a local neighborhood place. I'm not sure about the network theory. I think so. Sure, I think folks were talking about power of some kind of artist activist networks and roots and some of the other ones that are out there that, you know we're really moving from this kind of I spoke in a hub approach to these kind of networks and working together equally and that's been a near and non-independent artsy culture but within movements in the country and technology is allowed to do that even more but it's still being replicated just in our home communities also. We talked about the power of art and cultural practice to around neural networks that it reaches a different place than facts and figures do. There was a, that we all are capable of that but artists had a special role and kind of creating that creating that pathway and holding that. Some folks we asked, we had a brief conversation about popular culture kind of the Kool-Aid levels in the ocean and how we're swimming in it and how do we affect that from all the messages that are kind of coming into us all the time and we talked about culture having the power to act on culture Thank you so much. Vijay, I'm wondering if you might be willing to Oh I thought you would do it. I wasn't thinking in an orderly way either at all. Does anybody else from our group want to share some resonant bear maybe or Todd? I can share some thoughts. I'm not going to talk about getting a sense of what HowlRound does and how they're functioning and how they've sort of opened up space in the performance world for people to be operating in a more sort of common space model and anybody feel free to jump in at any point and we talked about, I loved your question Havia, about the role of remembering in terms of imagining so what do we have to remember backwards in order to be able to imagine forward into the future and we talked around that and we kind of talked on all kinds of different things those are the things that are sticking with me right now And you also shared some about the project you're working on which do you want to just say just name it so that people can ask you about it So I talked a little bit about the Dijkvar project which is the oral industry and theater project happening in New Orleans where after the last lesbian bar in New Orleans closed a few years ago we started taking oral industries of the people who had sort of come of age in those spaces and so it was just like really resonant with what you had shared about this idea of remembering in order to imagine so going back and learning these queer histories that are often really sort of sublimated and underground and hidden for a good reason but often aren't sort of transmitted in the same way that other women just are and so going back to learn that history in order to empower ourselves to be able to envision a queer future forward Yeah And I'd say we also spent a fair amount of time wrestling with what David had presented and the challenges really of living in capitalism and dealing with the market and the institutions we've inherited and trying to make you know make a way out of that and sort of really thinking about I mean you were sort of taught we talked some about the need to really create enough of an alternative that you're giving people a viable option for meeting their needs that is really separate from these institutions that are creating so much harm and damage so you know we talked some about that and what those might look like I think also Vijay in sharing about how around really talked about how in creating this commons online you've really begun to shift the culture of the theater community from one that at once was very you know competitive to one that's much more collaborative willing to share and come together in new and different ways which seemed really really powerful and promising I'd say for me it was very inspiring That came up with us too the whole idea of like sharing resources organizing around not necessarily shared value but you know an intentionality that can embrace different approaches So I'm wondering if there's any other just reflections that folks that have bubbled up in these conversations that anyone really wants to share with a larger group in preparation to close the conversation for today and knowing that we're going to come back to this tomorrow and I think make more sense and meaning of how these three conversations that we've had throughout the day are connected and what it means for us going forward Inspired and excited about your presentation and just allowing me to get a little bit more in depth of a subject that has been kind of on the periphery of my mind but at the same time I'm also so conscious and this is true with Hall around too that there have been communities and cultures and you know non-dominant communities that have had these practices and had these shared you know metallic ethos for you know centuries and so whenever I'm in a group of like contemporary performance makers I sometimes want to remind us that it's not so contemporary you know A and B like that that honor that existence that's already has been in place so easy to think we're revolutionizing when in fact it's something else I think that the injustice that we speak of thrives on amnesia thrives on amnesia at the memory over here the memory is the great innovator you know you don't have to keep making the memory is the innovator amnesia and anemone the lack of bias I think another suggestion would be that for a change if people of color write history for one year and the dominant narrative just reads it I wonder you know what that would be because we have never articulated you know publicly our own histories our history has always been framed where we are the subjects of the gaze we never really have the agency in the center and in this group I'm hoping that I'm not I don't have to add the disclaimer what I mean is allies are you know I mean I'm just assuming that this is a group where we don't have to say disclaimers yeah and anything else that folks want to bring into this space before we close reflections that are bubbling I just want to say how profoundly grateful I feel to be part of a convening like this and that that is bubbling up almost more than anything the power that this kind of space holding, invitation and space sharing can offer us and I hope to think about ways to replicate this I'm thinking about my classroom actually based on this experience this weekend thank you thank you so much Todd did you want to I don't know I feel like I talked so much I guess there's this sense that we were talking about in our group that I feel here too in response to what Daniel said is that there is a way in which and this goes back I think also to something Kerry was saying before it's like you spend a lot of your life in the fight against what is and then at a certain point you make a different world you make alternative world and I feel like what you guys have done or invited us into this weekend is kind of a picture of that kind of alternate world and it is sufficient and it is abundant and we've seen and even in our group talking about the HowlRound example the way it can suddenly everybody in that other world is scrambling to have some of what the alternate has because it has a life because it is alive it's vital and it's bubbling up and then the other thing which is a thought that goes back to a median HowlRound and Matthew was there and we were talking about it is this book the Sebastian Junger book tribe which is about PTSD but this goes to this goes to the point of Morris Point which is that communal cultures because they embrace returning warriors don't have the same struggles with PTSD that our advanced capitalist system does where we reject that part of ourselves and outsource it to other people and then reject them and so there is that thing that so it is that thing about the liberation of memory it's like remembering who we are and where we come from is also a way of finding our own alternative systems that are even deeper than the present from which is which is old and dominant but not as old so I think with that we're going to close and Matthew do you want to do you want to instruct us or lead us say something about tonight and tomorrow and this transition time and well one thing that occurs to me from all three of these conversations and David's wonderful talk that reaffirms the what's it called the same that the map is not the territory but with that in mind I think that there's something about tomorrow's conversation that has to do with what is the territory and what is the map so that we can use both to our advantage in concrete ways as well thinking about constellations and how do we use these bridges that get built in a short period of time going forward what are things that are very specific that we'd like to see change in the collective imagination and then how do we help each other yes that we're going to have a very quick transition now and I need to ask that it be efficient and I forgive that for this day but it will be helpful because we're transitioning from having our performance so you know I won't be able to empathize a little bit so tonight there's a dinner of the Ashford Lake House