David Knoff

Yeah, I mean, thanks for having me on and yeah, keen to unpack it and go through stories. Look, it's, yeah, like anything, you know, it starts years before that. It didn't just all of a sudden, "Hey, you're stuck in Antarctica during a global pandemic for far longer than expected with an uncertain ride home and kind of no end in sight," which up until it happened to us, I was down with a team of 24 at the time. Up until it happened, it was the realms of science fiction. This sort of stuff didn't happen. You'd read about in a book or you see a movie like, "I wonder what would happen if you're stuck on an Antarctic station when a pandemic breaks out or there's aliens and all these sorts of crazy..."

That's right. So we, um, we were originally going down for for 12 months, which was part of a sort of ongoing rotation with the Australian Antarctic Program that they've manned those stations for sort of 70 odd years with a 73rd rotation of Australia's permanent presence in Antarctica.

So I was running the station. I was a station leader.

And you, you're doing the overwinter science and overwinter maintenance to keep the place running. And everything in Antarctica focuses around the three months or so of summer. Mhm. So we, we had that big summer period of, we're talking 2019-20 that summer. So we'd left Australia in October 2019. I think COVID kicked in March. Correct? 2019. So that was the last time we saw a ship. Um, the ship came down, picked up all the scientists that had been there for summer, left 24 of us there. And we thought we'd be there for about seven more months through the winter from March through to sort of October, November. And we'd go home as planned in sort of late 2020. Yeah. By halfway through the year, so 23rd of June 2020, when we're nearly two-thirds of the way through our trip at this point and the end is only a few months away, I remember the day really clearly. I went into my office, fired up Microsoft Teams for a meeting with my boss back in Hobart and or just outside of Hobart where the head office was. And he just lays it out cold. And he's like, "Look, mate, got to update you on some logistical changes for, for..." I don't even think he said bad news, he's just, just clinical of like, "I've got to update you on some logistical changes of the fact that, yeah, we don't have a ship. The ship that we thought was going to come and get you, which was a brand new vessel being built under contract, was further delayed because of COVID. The old ship had been onsold and couldn't come and get us anymore. We couldn't do any aviation that summer because of COVID and implications that was having on getting aircraft in from, you know, running the flip season in North America and a whole range of other operational reasons that just distilled down to like, well, well, what does that mean?" He's like, "Well, we're going to have to leave you and your team there, uh, sort of indefinitely. We reckon we'll get you out at the end of summer, uh, so sort of, sort of earlyish 2021. Uh, but there was a very live chance could have gone even longer."

Uh, midway through 2020, they're telling us now that you're staying.

No, not at that point.

So I was, I was thankfully kind of single at the time, which helped in some regards. I could just focus then on the problem of you've now got a team of people that thought they were going home, who are now there at least, end up being another 6 months. And the uncertainty though was the challenge of when you go into something. I, I like to describe it as if you're running a marathon, you know you're running a marathon, you go, "Okay, I got 42 Ks, give or take," right? "If I can get to each 10 K marker and then I'll get to the 40 K and then it's just, you know, change from there and I, I'll stumble home." But if you get to the 30 K mark and make a wrong turn or they go, "Oh, you've got a purple bib, you're, you're doing the ultramarathon. Good on you." And you're like, "Shit, what?"

And they go, "Oh, not only are you doing the ultramarathon, but we won't actually even tell you when it ends. It might be 50, but it might be 60 Ks." So just, just keep running. And you'd go, you don't know what to do. You don't know. You don't, you know, if you're running your marathon, you're like, "Right, I got to do 5 minute 30 Ks. I'm aiming for 6 minute Ks or whatever it is at your different times." And when you don't know how far you're running, you're standing, you go, "Well, I don't know. Do I, do I, do I walk? You know, how far am I going? Am I doing what distance?" So that was the challenge then for us mentally was not knowing when it ended, when it was going to end and what the end would even look like.

Thankfully, the way we run the Antarctic stations is there's a lot of redundancy. So we, we sort of run double or triple redundancy in terms of food stocks and fuel and things. Now that often means you've got to then go into rationing. Thankfully, we didn't. Um, besides things like we ran out of crunchy nut cornflakes and ran out of cashew nuts, the important things. But, uh, we talk about nutrition as well. If you, if you want like, that starts to decline a little bit.

No, like frozen meat and everything. Obviously that'll freeze for years. And we had a small hydroponics lab where you could grow kind of cos lettuce and little baby tomatoes and a few things, which would supplement the diet to some degree. And we had a great chef. So that, that really helped. Got a full-time chef down there running it. But when everything's frozen and then over time you're starting to deplete the good stuff and you're saving, you know, let's save the good, the good meat for Christmas. So let's save it a little bit longer and that stuff.

Look, if you broke it down, it would be a bell curve. You know, most people got on board with the challenge and were like, okay, unexpected but not unheard of in Antarctic exploration and Antarctic expeditions, said, "Hey, things change. You got to stay a bit longer." And we had a whole number of other challenges along the way, including right up to the end when we're coming home. Um, the ship we were on that was chartered halfway across the Southern Ocean had a catastrophic explosion. Um, huge fireball engulfed the engine room.

And that was a whole other story.

It, it picked us up. So when we're on our way home and we're you a week away from Australia and you're just daydreaming of, "Yep, I'll be back home setting up the dances," and the ship catches fire. It was pretty dire. It took, uh, took a couple of hours to get the fire out and under control and and everyone accounted for and thankfully everyone was safe and and some some brave action from the crew and others on board to manage that particular emergency. But it was then another four or so hours of standing there in a dead in the water, 6-meter waves rocking side to side. There's a 100-meter ship and you're still rocking, you know, 30 degrees either way, not knowing if we're going to have to get on the lifeboats and abandon ship in the middle of the of the Southern Ocean in the middle of nowhere. Uh, we were still a week out of Australia. No other ships anywhere near us as well. So we would have just sat there in the dead silence of the the waves for, you know, a number of days if not a week. Thankfully, we were able to get the ship restarted on on the one remaining good engine and then sailed back into to Fremantle, which was slightly closer at the time.

Yeah, that's a really tough one to unpack. So everyone, and this is what I love to talk about with mental health, is you'll all have your own journey. And out of the 24 of us, anyone that says they didn't have a bad day or a rock bottom is is kidding themselves. And and they would admit that that everyone had moments and days where you just, you either cracked or you lost it. And it's never about what you lose. There was, there was arguments over doorstops and people leaving vehicles unfueled and all sorts of random standard stuff that could happen. You know, people haven't packed up tents properly or they've they've left a door open and snow's got in or whatever it is, right? So you'll have a blowout or you, you'll snap over that and you'll lash out at someone or something. We all had those moments. It's about then acknowledging that that's human. That's going to happen. When you push to the limits like we were, you're going to have those moments. And and we even had incidents where where people were basically borderline like, "I can't do this anymore. I've had enough. I need to, I need to get out of here." And you have to sit down with them and talk them back from the the ledge to be like, "Look, we can't do that. The the one thing that's going to solve..."

That's right. And you just go the, the one thing that's going to solve that problem is to go home. And it's the one thing we can't do. We've just got to find a way to to work through it. Which in a lot of ways meant then people rose to the challenges even better. Like and I like to use the quote, "Quitting is not an option" in the middle of an Antarctic winter and certainly when you're in the middle of a pandemic where they, they can't come and get you. When you have to do it, you find the resilience, you find the way. And that's where kind of led to this mantra of resilience becomes a choice. You know, often if you don't have an option that your choice is to find a way to do it and and continue and go through. And you look at some of history's greatest survival stories and tales, it'll come from a fact that they mentally went, "I didn't have an option. I had to do it." Whereas if if quitting is an option or you've got a way out, that that voice gets louder and louder of like, "You can quit. You can there's a way out."

That's right.

Yeah, it's a, it's a good question. Um, and I think if you took that particular year, those 24 individuals and and put all their resumes and bios and ran it through, you know, AI or or a team of psyches, you'd get it pretty right. But there'd be some outliers. And there'd be a few where you go, "This person should have been amazing or this person should have been at the higher end of the scale or someone who you actually look at and go, I hadn't really done that much." You you talk about resilience of it's often the, the kind of, uh, the sum of all your other tough experiences. If you've had, you know, you're a bit older, you're a bit wiser, you've had some challenges in your life, you'd think they might bring in or...

Versus some, actually they're quite young. They haven't had those experiences, but they've got an adventurous attitude and a kind of can-do attitude. That tended to be the one that saw people do better was if they actually had full buy-in to, "I want to go on an adventure." Yeah. And then when it gets worse, you know, you get extended, the ships catch fire, you had to do medical evacuation, you got all these crazy things going on. If you had full on, "I want an adventure," when that adventure gets tougher, you do better. Whereas if you've gone, "Hey, this will be an interesting opportunity," and your your motivation or your reason was a bit different and then you get pushed, it becomes a bit bit harder.

Good point. You, you build it in the smallest elements of your day-to-day. I talked before just about, you know, resilience becoming a choice. Yeah. You go and we talked about this before off off air around your morning routine. Do you wake up and just go, "I'm going to sleep in the absolute maximum," and then do the bare minimum to get out the door and get to work or to get the kids to school or get the kids or whatever it is, right?

Or do you choose, "I'm going to get up 5 minutes earlier and just do some stretches and some push-ups. I'm going to get up." And then that builds the next day. You go 10 minutes earlier. Yeah. And then you start to go, "Okay, let's do half an hour earlier."

And it and you build it long before it's tested and long before you ever need it. It's a bit like that, like the kind of 10,000 hours thing of if you get to a point where you, you know, if you take take the average person off the street, put them in an Antarctic station during the middle of a pandemic, if they've gone from zero to 100, they're probably not going to do that well on on statistics. I'm sure there'd be plenty of people...

Yeah. So I've just been reading Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell. A bit a bit dated as a book, but still great. And he covers the 10,000 hours principle, which is he's got some good examples of it where you've got people like like Bill Gates he uses as as a great example that when the time came to launch Microsoft and software and and everything in the the late '80s, he'd already been working hard at programming and punch cards and and had all that experience. So that the minute the market was there and the moment was right, he's already got the experience and he's ready to go. Mhm. And I think Bruce Lee talked about the 10,000 hours thing as well of don't learn 100 punches half decently. Learn learn one punch 10,000 times so that when you hit you hit well. And that's the same with resilience. You're not going to be able to go, "I've done some aptitude testing and I've, I've think I've got I've got my morning routine and I've got my plan, I can deal with anything." You actually look at and go in all the little elements of your life. And I think this spoke to the expeditioners I've seen that that do better in in Antarctica and and those real extreme environments. They've tested little bits of resilience in everything they do. They're disciplined. They've failed as well. And they've they've seen that failure and then they've gone, "Hey, what's going to make me succeed next time? Better preparation is probably nine times out of 10 going to help you in in business, life, fitness, whatever it is." And that's where that 10,000 hours thing comes from. Once you can master your trade or your skill and you got 10,000 hours of repetition of it, when the moment comes and you need to stand up and do it, boom. And I think in a lot of ways what helped me lead that team and and and get through that situation was that certainly wasn't my first rodeo in terms of I'd been in extreme environments and you're in the army.

I've been in the army for a couple of years, um, when I was a young fella. Uh, was lucky enough to get a piece...

Oh, hey, that's that's not that's not the good gains these days. Um, been in the good paddock over summer. You enjoyed yourself a bit too much.

That's right. Um, but yeah, and I had 10 years working in in war zones and conflict zones before that in uncertain environments, challenging political climates. You know, you've got bad guys out there as well. Always get a vote in in your day and your week and your month and your your trip. So I'd had that. So that then when it came to it and you're getting all the the craziness of what happened to us in 2020 unfold, you're drawing on each of those little experiences to to find the moment. And and I have this mantra as well of lead the team you've got and the situation you face. That it's not good enough to just go, "Oh, well, Harvard Business School taught me to lead a team like this." It might require, and what, what often confuses people or throws people, they think, "Oh, running an Antarctic expedition. You run it like a military operation." Like, "All right, Nick, you're doing this. You do that."

Yeah, exactly. Not at all.

Party! No. The thing is like, people they think that and yeah, when it's when it's push comes to shove, it's during a resupply or you've got an emergency. Yeah, it's, it's pretty direct. But the rest of the time you're trying to run it and the best way to do it is like it's a volunteer sports club where you're appreciating everyone and everything.

Yeah, you **make your own fun**. And that's one of the like I like to talk about the things that I learned in that I've done seven different Antarctic expeditions. As It's not all just about that one one trip. But it's what you learn to do to keep yourselves entertained. And some of the best memories from myself and the teams I've worked with down there are creating your own fun. And one of my favorite ones was we were once it was so May 2020. Uh, we're in the kind of middle of winter and we're running out of things to do. We used to celebrate anything and everything down there. And we, we go to the calendar each week and be like, "Oh, what is it? Oh, yeah, it's Mental Health Day or it's R U OK? Day or it's, you know, Men's Day or Women's Day, whatever it, you pick your event and you go, "Yeah, we'll, we'll do that." And we're in May and there's not not a lot not a lot of public holidays and not much going on. So we're like, "Okay, what do we got?" We're like, "All right, we got fourth, Fourth of May. May the 4th be with you. Star Wars day." We're like, "Oh yeah, maybe." And we go, "Okay, what's up?" You got Cinco de Mayo. You go, "Okay, Cinco de Mayo. We don't really have any Mexicans or Spanish on the team. It's an Australian station."

Yeah, we had a combination.

And largely male. So 21 male, three female.

Put a pin in that. I'll come back. I'll finish the story. We'll get to that. So anyway, so we go, okay, well, let's merge those two things. And we ran this event, **Cinco de Mayo the 4th be with you, Star Wars Mexican Fusion Day**. Yeah. And someone straight away, people are making like Death Star pinatas. People are dressed up as like Mexican Han Solo. So you got your your Han Solo stuff, your sombrero, your dodgy mustache and you're quoting Star Wars but in Spanish and all this sort of stuff. So to to create your own fun. And we had open mic nights. Like I got up at one point and opened the the musical night with, um, some of the songs from Tiger King, which we'd all just watched on Netflix. So got up. Yeah, and sang, uh, "I Saw a Tiger." Yeah. That was one of those moments in full kind of the name not Joe Exotic, but whatever his name was. You channeling that. So you make your own fun. And I also love as well, we there's no shops or anything like that. So you make presents for anyone. If it's your birthday, you go, "Hey, what does Nick like? Oh, he's into podcast and business." So you think of a theme around, "Okay, how do I do that?" And you might make like a wooden microphone and go, "Oh, yeah, cool. Here's a cool little," or make a Grammy award or something. Go, "Here's your Grammy award for your podcast." And you're making that out of scrap metal or scrap timber. And I've kept that in my life now afterwards that rather than it's someone's birthday, let's buy them a present. Now, look, if they need something, you buy it, right? But I don't like buying things unnecessarily. So I now just build everyone presents. So my whole family now got and my, yeah. My family have all got...

I'll get you a balance board. And then I've got this whole setup now, balance board under my desk. So I can sit at my desk on a Swiss ball balancing on a balance board. So you you're not just typing. You're actually, you're doing a core work in your...

So balance boards under desk, balance boards and stuff. So all that and you you build stuff, make someone a present and they remember it a hundred times or a thousand times more. If like, "Oh, Nick built me my birthday present." Even if it's crap, they'll, they'll be like, "Oh, you made it for me." Rather than, "Oh, you went down the shops and bought something." Anyway, relationships on station. So, um, 'cause 18 months without a cuddle is a long time.

Yeah, that, that is probably the toughest thing about the trip. Um, so that that was that experience. But there was actually in that team there was a married couple. And so they, they applied for jobs on the station in in different, you know, different capacities. Both got the jobs. And the program are happy with that as long as you don't have a a conflict of interest or a direct report situation. So if I'm the station leader, I can't have my wife on station or something like that. It'd be inappropriate. But they were in non-direct report roles. They worked in separate buildings. And they were amazing.

Uh, there was one thing then I had this was just chance that in the office sort of adjacent to mine, someone had put in a **chin-up bar**. And I'd always wanted, I'd always wanted to be able to do 10 heaves.

Heaves, sorry, just over and overhand, grass chups. Yep. And so I saw that on day one and I'm like, "All right, I can do one." And you go, "All right, well at that point I thought I had a year." Turns out I had 18 months. And you just get incrementally better. And I set up a challenge with a a mate back. Right. And we'd send videos to each other like, "Hey, your weekly what are your weekly reps?" And some weeks you have good weeks. You have other times you have bad weeks. You get a little, little twang here and there and you take a couple of weeks off. But by the end of it could do 10 chin-ups. And and that was something that just, you know, great.

Um, I think, look, there's a photo and you could Google this one. Like ABC News, uh, Fremantle.

D Yes, Google like David Fremantle ABC News interview. And I'm like standing on the dock the day after I got back. And if you go to the images come up. Um, standing on the dock. Yeah.

So, you know, that also can impact your sex drive. It can. It can.

No, I wasn't on it then. So I got back, did that interview. And people are like, "Going to be bored, mate." And I'm like, "All right." Literally, I can see the difference with your hair.

That's right. And so then that photo there. But that, I think there was an element of a my hair was kind of in a bad state.

Lack of nutrients. Yeah. Lack of nutrients and some of that. So that photo there is on the couch ABC. Little bit porky. You look a bit healthier now.

Yeah. And that was a case of, I think you just a bit of time back and down there. Like you're getting plenty of sunlight in the summer, but you're wearing a lot of sunscreen. You're covered up. So when you do get exposed to sunlight, you tend to get burnt. There's no ozone layer down in Antarctica. So you tend to just get, you're burnt or white. There's not a lot of tan. Um, and yeah, so we were supplementing the the the diet with a bit of fresh food occasionally from the hydrolab. You're taking Vitamin D supplements in the winter and you're kind of everyone's on multivitamins. You're trying to manage it. But I think over the time you just, you don't have a fresh diet. And and case in point is one of the things when you you go into the hydrolab once a month, you might be on the rotation to to prune the the crop. And you go in there, it's UV light. So you take your shirt off, get some UV light, you dance around. We had the radio on. So you dance around pruning the little the kale. And I remember at one point, you you're eating raw kale and your body is saying, "This is delicious." And you go, "Something's wrong here." Because if you if you can eat fresh kale and go, "Oh my God, that's amazing." Your body is saying, "Mate, you need greens. You need that stuff." And that was a reminder. 'Cause now if you're going to eat fresh kale, you just go, "That needs that needs some oil on it. That needs that needs some mayo and all sorts of stuff."

Yes.

No, not at all. Not at all. Not at all.

No, absolutely. Look, look, those days, yeah. 100 years ago, yeah. They used to eat seals, eat penguins, they'd feed it to the sled dogs and all that sort of stuff. That's 100 years ago. Yeah. We don't do that at at all.

Not even the fish. No. So if you think of Antarctica as Earth's national park, you know, you don't go into a national park and just start fishing. Now, there's incidental collect for some of the scientific projects. So we came across a dead macaroni penguin, which was the ones with the big yellow eyebrows. And they're quite rare where we were. And they're not kind of native to that particular region. So when we found that dead penguin, we actually found him alive and then later on found him dead. 'Cause it was, it's too cold for him. A penguin froze to death in Antarctica, which, you know, someone let's knock him off. We're able to then, you've got to, you got to get a permit. You got to get the right approvals from the scientific scientists that that ran that project and they said, yeah, collect it, bag it up. And you you then you've got to deal with all the quarantine stuff to get it shipped back to Australia for them to dissect it and and look at that stuff. So from a from a scientific purpose or for scientific purposes, yes, people collect penguins, seals, whatever it is. But it's always with a with a purpose.

Uh, I wouldn't. I never say never. Uh, it's not on my radar at the moment. I've done, I've done one winter, which was the the long one. And I've done multiple other summer trips down there for, you know, two or three months running, generally science-focused trips. And I've done a couple of other resupply voyages where you just jump on the ship in Hobart, sail down, drop off a year's worth of food and supplies and people come home a few weeks later and they're, you know, pretty quick and dirty. You kind of need the experience of having winter in some regards. And you're not absolutely critical, but that helps. So I can now use that experience and do shorter trips. Um, and I'm not really set up at the moment to take another 12 months out of my life to to do that.

That's right. Never say never.

Yeah, so I was an **infantry officer**. Um, I'd actually started out just as a reservist. And straight away loved it. I was at uni at the time, joined as a reservist and went, "This is great. This is way more fun than bloody sitting in lectures and you know, fair enough doing that every day."

Yeah, there you go. So if it and that sort of helped me do both that I could get my scratch the itch of getting out and about and all the leadership training as well. I got to do through RMC and and as an officer was great and set me up I think for success in in later life as well. And then the opportunity came up to switch over to full-time service, go on a peacekeeping operation, uh, in 2007. And loved it. I was one of the youngest members of the platoon I was leading. So that's 30 soldiers and you got...

22. I think. Young. Yeah. Yep. Um, but absolutely phenomenal, really experienced team. So I had, uh, great platoon sergeant. Shout out to Glenn, who's out there. Like he was a little bit older. Um, he was, you know, Victorian policeman and there was a couple other cops in the team. Classic Army Reserve kind of background if you've got. Yep. Cops and others. And then a mixture of other full-time and reserve members in the platoon and and around the the company. So it, it had a good vibe. And I had the experience around me and was able to acknowledge, "Right, I'm, I don't have the the most experience. I've got the most training in terms of being an officer. But use your platoon sergeant, use the members of the team who had been to Iraq and been to other war zones and done more, using that to get the most out of it."

Yeah, look, it's, it's up to you. I think there's, there's a lot of...

It was good for me. And it's great for a lot of people, but it's not good for others. I think there's some great programs now. I don't want to be a billboard or anything for defense, but there's some great projects now. You can do like a gap year or like I did, start out in the reserves. So you're not signing up for four years. Originally, I wanted to be a fighter pilot. And you know, they sign up for like 10 or 15 years in terms of your return of service obligation once you've done all your training. And that's that's a huge commitment. Yeah. But there's other ways to go, hey, you either want to do it and like I said before, if you've got you go, "I want to be a fighter pilot." There is no second option. You've probably got the motivation to get through what is incredibly difficult training for them. Same with special forces. You go, "I want to be in the SAS." And recruiting might say, "Oh, well, you know, there's also these other roles. You can be an electrician or you can be a truck driver or you can be a whatever." And they're like, "I want to be an SAS trooper with bloody camo paint on my face, kind of doing these ones." And kind of like all that stuff, right? And just don't take no from an answer of recruiting and through you go. And there's a great, um, what's his name? Dan Pron, the, uh, author of, uh, *Combat Doctor*. He talks about his time when he did SAS selection. They hand out the form of like, "All right, when you want to resign or withdraw from selection, fill out this form and you'll be off the course straight away." He took the form and ate it. He just said, "I need to know that."

He ate the form.

He probably got some calories out of it, which is always good on on selection. And you know, someone's pretty wild when they eat forms. But that was the thing of like, "That form doesn't exist." I now can't...

Yeah. It does not exist. It's in my stomach. I can't quit because I don't have a form to quit. Now, obviously you get another form or if you you say, "I need to quit." They, they let him out. That was his way to just mentally say, "Want to quit."

Yeah, it was good for me. And it's something that if you want to do it, know know that you want to do it, you can get a lot of good things out of it.

On what grounds?

Yeah.

Correct. And and if you don't know what you want to do. Like I probably didn't, like out of school, I, I wanted to be an engineer. I thought, you know, and and it turns out I didn't. And that time in the army gave me a chance to meet a bunch of other people from different walks of life. Fairly similar. They're a fairly narrow band in some regards. But and then getting out and overseas on that peacekeeping operation.

Look, we called it an **armed vacation**. You know, the time was, it could have gone from, you know, 0 to 100 quickly. Things can go wrong. And at one point we're up against a riot and you go, "Okay, they've got coconuts. We've got rifles. We don't want to use them." But that's the kind of disparity. Anyway, seeing a local throw a coconut and smash a bulletproof windscreen with a coconut, you're like, "All right, this is, yeah, you go that is should get that guy pitching for the bloody Dodgers or something like that. Is that is good."

So you go and that was a lot of that was sort of anti-Chinese sentiment there where they're trying to restore law and order. But you go, even if we're saying, "How did you guys relate to the Chinese?"

Pissed off the Chinese. We're there to just overall bring in kind of stability. And we're seen as the good guys. Very well.

That's right. Like we're there in an in a way that, you know, invited by the Solomon Islands government to provide that security force. And it was a partner force with Kiwis and PNG's and Tongans and other Pacific islands. So you're very welcome. But when you're in the middle of a riot, not everyone's thinking that. Like, "Oh, no, the Australians are the, they're here to provide law and order." They're like, "Right, cool. We're ready to go." And something can go wrong. And that's that's the challenge. If you're there, you're trying to all these political things going through your head and it doesn't matter. All of that other stuff goes out the window. Like he says in *Blackhawk Down*, all that goes out the window when you're there and things are actually happening. Now that's coconuts not bullets. So you know, the risk isn't that bad. Yeah. And then cut forward to to years later when I was in in real war zones. That's the same sort of stuff. You've got what's happening there. Uh, so I spent time in Iraq and then in and around the war in Afghanistan, but I was actually just in Pakistan.

Uh, look, I was there for I guess Iraq War 3, uh, 2016 odd, around, um, the fight against ISIS, which is fascinating times. And and we'd already started to learn the lessons out of Afghanistan at that point of the role Australian military was given. And I was there as an adviser from the embassy embedded with the Australian task group. But we're already, already trying to not get too involved. You know, acknowledging that the first and second, or the second Iraq War, the kind of 2003 onwards war that we'd gotten too involved and it was too messy. And we then became unwelcome of, "Yep, you got rid of Saddam, but now go home." And we stuck around. Coalition stuck around. It was a mess.

Yeah. So we went in 200, evacuated within one month. That's right. Mess. I mean, there's some great stories out of that. I got a mate that I've always been pushing it, telling like he's one of the last Aussies out of out of Kabul. Him and the ambassador and a few others on the last flight out. And I'm like, "Mate, you got to get that RM."

Just like last boot on the ground. Um, RM Williams boot and put in the war memorial or something. So he's, he's a, yeah, great bloke. And and that was a harrowing story of what that was like in those last days. When you've got Australians that you know, or people that had helped out coalition forces and we're trying to make sure we can help them get out. But where do you draw the line of who helped? Who didn't help? Who do we trust? We can't just give everyone a pre-visa to Australia.

That was, I mean, that's the Afghan War in in a nutshell. Who do you trust? And we, you know, when we went into Afghanistan, we were invited and and like, in some regards, and welcomed by different community aspects of the community. We're like, "Yeah, you know what? Get rid of the Taliban or get rid of Al-Qaeda. We don't want them here. We don't need this war. Come in, find Bin Laden, get rid of Al-Qaeda," whatever, you know, and varying degrees thereof. 20 odd years later, that whole population like, "Just go home." You know, "If we'll take Taliban over coalition," is essentially where it all came down to. And there's grossly simplified that whole thing. But that whole that changes. And I remember when I first started working around that war and you the conditions for success were like, "Okay, we're going to achieve women's education and we're going to achieve sanitation and health to this level and we're going to do this." And yeah, we're going to get everyone off opium crops and we're going to plant pumpkins or whatever it is. Right? The success criteria when we actually left was like, "Right, leave."

Yeah. And and that was an interesting thing to to see. And there's a hundred examples in history where big governments and and regimes have have got that wrong.

Yeah. Hundreds. Um, one example I like to to say that was just one of those **sliding doors moments** is I was coming back, um, this is in Islamabad, so capital of Pakistan. I was coming back back home. I had to get back to my house late at night. And at the time I was, I, you know, was was occasional to a dart or two. And I was, I was out, out of dries. And so you have the packet in the left shoulder.

And I'm like, "Okay." So there was a little shop, kind of a little, you'd call it call it a 7-Eleven, 'cause I'm not a 7-Eleven, and on the way home. And I'm like, "I'll just, I could duck in there and get it done." I'm like, "No, you don't need that. You need it. Have a little, have a little puff. Go home. Go to bed. That'll be better for you." Yeah. Next morning when I wake up, jump back in the car and driving back to work and I lived about 10 K's away from the embassy. And so driving back into work, driving past that particular shop and it's completely destroyed. There'd been a **suicide bombing** there the night before. So I get to work, check the reports, check the kind of reporting on that. It was literally minutes after I would have walked in there and been buying a pack of smokes.

And that was one of those moments where you're like, and you know, at the time that wasn't uncommon. It was fairly rare in Islamabad to have have bombings. But across Pakistan that was a daily occurrence. And they'd clean, it's the same as a almost like a car accident here in Australia. Yeah. But yeah, people will stop, be like, "Oh my God." Cops will turn up, they'll clean it all up. An hour later traffic's going. And that was at the and that was probably the worst part and worst time in their recent history for them. And now thankfully, you know, a number of years later, it's doing a bit better.

Yeah. So I mean, that was in my **diplomatic career**. So I had a few years in the army and then switched to to working with foreign affairs and trade. And you know, trading a camouflage suit for a tuxedo and everyone thinks everyone thinks diplomat, tuxedo. It's normally cargo pants and a polo shirt sort of stuff, especially in those locations. Um, what made me change was really some of those moments. They just start to accumulate and you go, one of these days the doors will slide the wrong way. And you see that with with friends and colleagues and and those around you. You hear stories of idea about old man who doesn't have an arm now. You're like, "Yep, I knew him." And you start to know more and more people who've been physically and mentally scarred by the time in these locations. And for me, you're seeing the worst in humanity. I mean, you know, when you're flying over places like Iraq and you…

And it's a challenge. I remember when I got back to Australia after the Antarctic trip in in 2021 and certainly back to Melbourne and no one really knew the story at that point. And I'd get home and and people are like, "Oh, mate." But they couldn't relate to it. They couldn't relate 'cause they're sitting there going, "Oh, you wouldn't believe it. Dan Andrews, you couldn't go to the, you couldn't go to the playground." And I'm like, "Oh, it must have been tough."

But it's, it's context of of if you've lived that COVID bubble in Melbourne and the uncertainty of...

And that, and that just, that pressure cooked everyone of Melbourne was still scarred by what went on there.

That's right. So that, that stuff was was sort of interesting. Um, but I find that with explaining everyone knows a little bit about the war in Afghanistan and Iraq in some regards. But I always like to kind of, you ask a few questions, you gauge a few people's understanding of, "Okay, can they name who was the president or who's you name a high-profile member of of Al-Qaeda or something other than Bin Laden." And then a few people names or and then you go, "Cool. I can, I can give you a pretty truthful version of of what I went through and what what happened over there." Versus someone that's like, "Oh, that was ridiculous. You should." And you go, "Yeah, okay. Yeah, it was." And it's hard to know where to gauge that story. And that was an interesting part of when I wrote the book, chatting to really high-profile an amazing Vietnam veteran, Dave Sabben, who'd been one of the platoon commanders at the Battle of Long Tan in Vietnam. And he and I were able to kind of talk about this, "How do you tell a story? How do you when you know you've got an interesting story to tell that very few will understand?" You know, his was obviously extreme. You know, getting artillery fired from Vietcong for you a day and a night. Yeah. Leading a, you know, platoon in in combat. And you know, a lot of Australians died in that. Completely different to what we went through. It was trying to understand from him when he got back, and this is that whole narrative of Vietnam vets getting back and the narrative of, "Oh, veterans didn't want to RSL, didn't want to welcome them." People didn't want to hear their story. I wanted to hear from him of how he dealt with that and how he then came to tell that story. And years later now that there was and this was around the time the movie *Danger Close* had come out. So you've got kind of Hollywood versions of of him and and everything happening. How do you deal with that? And that helped me understand to kind of put put pen to start writing the book, tell the story, knowing that there's going to be people that aren't a fan of it. Um, you know, a small number of the team weren't really on board. They're like, "Oh, I don't know about that."

I think just in in a lot of ways, like it's our story. Yeah. And some people were then protective of that. But it was so importantly, I spoke to a number of the team who were then really supportive.

Yeah, look, it was one of those things. You're like, no one really said, "Hey, absolutely, I completely object." They were just a case of, "Look, I don't want to be involved. Please don't, don't write any characters or don't mention my name. Don't, don't have anything to do with with that." And like, "Yep, absolutely. Honor that." And there's I think again, people were probably worried which version, you know, how is he going to tell that story? And there's a quote in the book at the end. I say, "Look, there's 24 versions of this story and this is just mine." And I tried to keep it very true to the fact of it. I certainly it's not a book that says, "Hey, here's here's my version of events and I did everything right and made the right decisions and and I'm amazing." It's not that at all. And in fact, I'm really proud of some of the the darker moments where I lie there awake at night going, "I have no idea what I'm doing. I'm lost. I'm beyond what I signed up for." The team, I felt at that point, kind of fracturing and going in different directions. And I had no answers. I'd always had a plan and always had answers to any other problem in life. At that darkest point, about the 12-month mark, we still got six months to go and even then we don't know we're going home. I'm lying there awake at night staring at the roof. You got minus 30 degrees outside, 100 kilometer an hour winds banging at at your door and the windows, the buildings are shaking. And you're going, "There's no way home. I don't know what home's going to even look like, but will Dan Andrews let me go to the park or not?" And you're trying to hold that team together.

Great question. The darkest moment, the way to solve it was to **remember throughout history** and remember other times in the Antarctic programs and Antarctic nations and different stations, people had had similar problems and they'd found a way through it. And I remember thinking, uh, you know, as far back as you kind of Ernest Shackleton in these times, you go, they got through it. And they hauled boats across pack ice and then sailed to South Georgia, sailed across Elephant Island and South Georgia in reindeer skin jackets and and with just manhauling boats across ice and like, "This is 100 years later, we've got Wi-Fi. We'll get through this now. We can deal with this. We've got a great team, great equipment, well equipped. We've got enough food and fuel. We've got all the things we need to survive." Yeah, we'll get there. "There'll be a way home." Like you have that faith. But you've got to get now at the individual level though, how do you get through the micro moments of like, "I don't know what to do"? I found it came back to again, some of those **routines** or one of those **practices**. You go, "Right, I don't want to get out of bed 'cause I don't want to face the questions and the same mundane routine stuff day in, day out." "I'm going to get out of bed and do something I want to do." So, "I'm going to jump out of bed and do five push-ups. And then I'm going to go get to my heave beam and I'm going to try and do my max reps heaves." And then I'll just turn that into a little workout. And then all of a sudden you go, "Now I can face the breakfast table and now I can face the challenge." And interestingly, some of those just little limits and just giving people the chance to to warm up and get ready to face the day, that can be so important. And, uh, two years ago, I ran a camp, um, out near a place in the Bunger Hills, which is near a place called the Denman Glacier, part of a a multi-year program. But we're running this scientific camp, 42 of us out in the middle of nowhere, 400 K's from the nearest station. You're living in tents. It's -15° outside. You're sleeping in a tent. Your pee bottle freezes, your water bottle freezes, your socks are frozen. And you you're lying in your tent. And you wake up and it's -15° outside. You're nice and snug in your very, very expensive sleeping bag. But you've got to get out of that sleeping bag somehow, get yourself dressed and get to the mess tent to hopefully get a a hot a cup of tea and start the day. Yeah, I'd roll like, I'd wake up and kind of roll onto my stomach and start a plank. Just to start planking just to kind of generate some core temperature. And you do. And then you turn that into a couple of push-ups as you like roll your sleeping bag down a bit. Do a few more reps.

Energize the body a bit. Start stretching. And then you're starting to put your overalls on and you're beating your gloves and and all that stuff. And then you get to the mess tent. And the hardest thing for myself is I was the camp leader. And then the hardest one as well was the the poor helicopter pilots often used to get this and the field officers that would take all the the scientists out to their their places. They'd walk in the tent and people would start they be like, "Hey, are we are we flying today? Are we can we go to this location?" And they're like, "Mate, just got out of bed. I haven't had a cup of tea." And so it's just the one blanket rule was like, absolutely no work questions until 8:00 a.m. Yeah. And that's it. Now it doesn't matter. It's 24 hours of daylight. Time kind of becomes a bit irrelevant. But it was just...

Yeah, it's weird. You get up at 4:00 a.m. and it's pitch, pitch, you know, daylight. But that stuff's hilarious. All that stuff becomes so crucial to success that you go, "Right, do not ask a work question until 8:00." Yeah. And then 8:00, we're going to look at the weather brief. We're going to get a brief from the meteorologists. We'll do an ops briefing. We'll go through the plan. We'll look at the locations that are suitable. We'll look at the helicop, like the aviation plan for the day. And then we'll brief it. And then we'll go. And most of the time you're just confirming what the plan was from the night before. Or, "Yep, the weather's no good in this location. So we're going to cancel your project for today. And we're going to go these other people need to be ready and they they'd be excited." They go...

Good question. Um, I would take, yeah, talk about subs and stuff. I'd probably take more, take some NMN, get onto finasteride a bit earlier, then when I get home, I've got better-looking hair than I had. So vanity drug, look better. Um, I think, look, it's a hard one 'cause I that leads to the question like, what would you change or what would you regret? And I actually don't regret anything. We did the good and the bad. The whole thing made it how it is. I think one of the things I change, it's not something I'd take 'cause there's certainly nothing I feel that would have made it better or different other than yeah, there's little bits of gravy that might have made it better. The one thing I'd change would have been if we could have somehow known or better conveyed to the whole team that, yes, we're signing up for a 12-month expedition. And yes, you've been told things can change. It's Antarctica. Things go wrong. Are you prepared to stay for 2 years, two winters and even longer? Are you signed up to this in every aspect of the adventure or are you here for a 12-month trip? And I think that would have meant one or two people would have said, "Oh, I'm, I'm only good for 12 months, maybe 13 months, and then I've got to be back for other very important reasons."

Or no, "I can, I'm, I'm indefinite. I'm doing this. I want to summit and I want to make it back. Doesn't matter what." And that would have been the one change. So it's not something I'd take, but it's something I'd mentally prepare the team for.

If I knew about if I knew about them before I left.

Love this question. Uh, 'cause everyone always, yeah. Everyone's always like, "Oh, we're in the Nazi bases and aliens and UFOs and stuff in Antarctic." Look, okay, I can't confirm on camera. I, I haven't, haven't seen any any aliens.

The thing is like Antarctica is so big and so much of it is relatively unexplored and certainly under the ice. We don't know what's down there. And we're drilling for kind of million-year-old ice cores. And we're taking samples from these places. And some of the locations I've been to, you're the third group of people to ever go there. Like less people have been to some of these particular rocky outcrops than have been to the moon. Because you know, and and in a lot of ways, 'cause there's nothing there. There's a bunch of rocks. And so the first geologist that went there in the 1950s went, "Yep, there's rocks." Next team went in the '80s, went, "Still rocks." And the team that went 2022, "Goes rocks." And we just got more rocks or we got different type of rocks or something. "Well, those rocks have moved." You know, they're more exposed 'cause there's been more melt. So maybe there's new rocks. The coolest thing I've seen in Antarctica that kind of goes down that that rabbit hole was there was an **old Soviet station** that I was able to visit that's in an abandoned area. And it's sort of there. There is still a Russian, there's a newer Russian and a newer Polish camp there, but the buildings are still from kind of 1950s and Soviet era stuff. And that was just like stepping back in time. You're going into this room. There's like wooden wall panels in the middle of Antarctica. And it's if they'd left yesterday. So you've still got hammer and sickle posters on the wall. You know, you've got this like cast iron coal fire furnace in the middle of the building and you could, you can tell, you're like, "Geez, you can see the ghosts of like the past." And yeah, there's still husky furs and cross-country skis and all that from the '50s scattered around and and it's as if they left yesterday. And that was something you kind of go, that is just phenomenal. And then old Soviet era vehicles and other stuff. So you take the vehicle for a drive. Uh, you well, a, you're like, "Oh, well, I don't know if you get a tetanus shot before you get in there." Um, and how much asbestos by going near it. But not sure if you took a new battery down, it'd probably fire up.

I love that question because I get it from both school kids and from CEOs and and podcasters alike.

There we go. I'm a podcaster. There's no polar bears in the south. They're only in the north.

You're not the first one. Um, so there's no land predators. So where like in terms of you've got leopard seals and orca whales and other stuff like apex predators in the water that'll chase. But there's nothing on land. Nothing on land that will kill you. Now, if you got in the wrong, you got on the wrong side of a, you know, one and a half ton elephant seal and you got in its way, I'm sure it would inadvertently injure you. But, uh, essentially no land predators down there. The most dangerous thing is is the ice and the environment itself. You know, it's so cold. If you fall over and incapacitate yourself, you could, you know, lapse into a coma and then frostbite and hypothermia are going to follow shortly after. And that's even in the height of summer. So it's a very dangerous environment to just exist, which we can you can mitigate that with the right equipment and training and other stuff. So that's your biggest risk is just the environment.

Uh, yes. I've fallen down a crevasse once, which was, and like not fully. I kind of just put a leg through a snow bridge. And then I was on a rope. This was a different expedition over on the Antarctic Peninsula with a bunch of...

Uh, not really. I bet I was in I in two avalanches while snowboarding down there, which was, um, and again, little baby avalanches or I wouldn't be here telling the story that were pretty harrowing. Where you just and this was again another private trip over on the Antarctic Peninsula snowboarding with a bunch of mates as you do. And yeah, the snow gives way and all of a sudden you were snowboarding one minute and now you're just a passenger. Just looking back on a lounge.

And you're just sliding down the mountain with snow everywhere. The rope I was on, fall. That's the thing. Like your rope's together. So, you know, you've got a safety line between you and your mate. So that if anything happens, but in the first second that just gets wrapped around a rock and snaps. So you, you're like, you see the safety line just flailing. You're like, "All right, well, I'm on my own now." And then the the avalanche stops and we're all spread out now hundreds of meters apart, but going, we don't really know where we are. And you don't want to walk by yourself because of the risk of crevasses that now you don't have the safety line. But you go, "Well, I got no option."

So we all just had to beeline for the nearest rocks hoping that we got there. And we're luckily all safe. Few cuts and bruises.

No, thanks for having me on. And, uh, yeah, good luck with everything you you're doing as well.