Welcome to the For Love and Money podcast, the show where business and social purpose meet to inspire a movement for positive change. Here's your host, Carolyn Butler-Madden. Tim Stubbs is a founding director of a strategy and environment consultancy called Wolfpeak. Now, Tim would much rather be surfing than working, but there are bills to pay.
So with his co-founder, Steve Fermio, they set up Wolfpeak to see if they could grow a profitable company doing work they believed in, because Wolf Peak has been set up to do good. With his training as an environmental engineer and being a people person, it's not surprising that he does most of his work at the interface of those three things, environment, engineering, and people, and trying to understand how we bring them together to improve our world.
Now, the theme of today's episode is starting point. Tim shares his view on our traditional approach, which puts business and economic growth as the starting point, which we then try to fit everything else around, you know, environmental and human considerations. Tim invites us to consider an alternate perspective, understand the constraints of human beings and the environment that we have grown in, use these as the natural starting points, then ask, how does business fit into that?
How would our behaviours and actions change if these were our starting points? It was such a thought-provoking conversation with Tim as he drew on his learnings from different knowledge sources and my hope is this interview might open some new perspectives for you as it did for me. Enjoy. Tim, welcome to the For Love and Money podcast. Thank you for joining us. Thanks for having me. It's really good to be here and I'm looking forward to it.
So first question I asked my guest is about love, you know, straight to the love part of the Love and Money podcast. In your view, is there a role for love in business? Yeah, I thought about this a bit and I kind of think it's the opposite way around and it's is there a role for business in love? And I kind of feel like we sort of put this business thing, it drives so much of what we think about and how we look at things and it's not really, you know, why you're a human and why you're here.
You know, life is, I feel like much more about that experience of, you know, why are you alive as an organism and what are you here to get out of it? And it's a lot more love than business, I'd hope. So, you know, I think maybe just sort of reframing that question and sort of saying, well, you want to have a life of love or where you enjoy your life and have a lot of rich experience and business can definitely be part of that, but it's not the other way around.
So we're not trying to fit love into business. We're trying to fit business into love. That is such a powerful reframe and I absolutely love it.
It fires all sorts of things in my thinking because you've flipped it on its head totally and it's like yeah business isn't why we're here right yeah yeah it's really important and it's how we at a base level it's how we sort of sustain ourselves day to day and it definitely brings elements of love there's things we love about our work potentially or that different people will love about business but yeah i think just to reframe it i guess in what i get sort of frustrated and we'll
probably talk about this more in the environmental space where i work is more and more the business frame drives everything and the financial frame drives everything at a very high level policy corporate kind of space and we have these ideas that we We sort of get reminded of, oh, we're humans and, oh, there's all these differences in us that are important and we all need to feel fulfilled and we want to have meaningful lives and all that.
And we then go, oh, how do we cram this into our business framework of making money and growth and all of that? Oh, all these things we forgot. We have to try to cram them in. So we write a policy. We probably develop a plan. We develop a whole lot of actions and KPIs around, oh, we've got to incorporate love into business. We've got to incorporate equity into business, you know, or all these different things, environment into business, social into business.
And we try to fit it into a business frame and we yeah we try to make it fit a business mindset and you know it seems to always end up with the we need more accountants that tally and collate all these business metrics so we can report on them more effectively and it just to me turned into like a steaming mountain of crap we don't really get in touch with and connect with the the whole reason that we we started it and maybe if we started it from hey we all want meaningful lives
where we work and we provide for ourselves and we do good stuff and what what are the what are the requirements for that like what are the elements we need for that what's the environment for that and then okay how do we fit business into that you know how do we fit a how do we fit making money how do we fit all those different attributes that we enjoy about business say how do we fit that into that framework of what's a healthy meaningful
life and the same for the environment like that we live on a planet it has you know there's sort of ecological functions and just physical functions that occur to make this planet work you know it's just like our own bodies.
And rather than try to sort of fit environment into the business frame and business is just a set of ideas that we've come up with as humans as we've evolved and our ecology has evolved and we've got sort of our thinking and society has evolved we try to fit the environment into that frame instead of going hey hang on we live on this amazing pool that has all these super intricate intricate interactions that make it work and has made the environment that has allowed us as humans to evolve
even from you know single cell organism to what we are now you know we didn't do that the the environment that we evolved it did that and we evolved within it. And yet now we think that this idea of business and growth and economy and finance, we need that thing that made us should fit into our idea rather than going back to that thing again and saying, how does this work? Do we really understand how this works? Do we understand how when we do this, what happens over there?
You know, so when we clear some forest here, what happens to the aquifer thousands of kilometers away that happens to the mound spring that happens to the ecology of that wetland that is impacted by all those complex interrelationships that don't you know to happen at a tiny scale like within the little catchment you might live in every day you knew everyone we all live in little catchments where the water flows and the ecology interacts and all that and
it can happen at a very small scale you know you can watch some water flow down the gutter in your street and wonder about where's that water going what's the journey it's on what's the ecology it's going to interact with how important is it how does the plants that are down in the sort of lagoon near where it flows into the sea impacted by what happens in the water up here and how it flows and how does that affect the fish and and all of those things yeah
i think we want to maybe we want to understand that more and how that works and how important that is and And then think about, well, how do we fit business into those constraints? So it's sort of the two lots of constraints, the constraints of us as human beings and what we need in a life and what's a meaningful life. And then the constraints of the very environment that we've grown in from a single cell organism to what we are. And that's the most real.
And your life experience sort of is the most real. And how do we sort of maybe start at those points and then say, well, how does business fit into that? You know, more and more, it feels like we go the other way and it doesn't really work. Yeah. And I mean, you're going to the heart of the big, the big, massive problem, aren't you? Yeah, it's not a problem. It's like the big, massive opportunity. Like how many people sort of don't love their work how many people feel lonely and tired and.
Disenfranchised a bit and stuff like their problems finding a way to sort of reconnect with the planet that we survive on and each other and ourselves as humans and what life means and then finding a way to sustain ourselves and get all those benefits and pleasures that you get from business and achieving something and feeling like you've done something. There's a lot of good stuff about it, but understanding how that's an opportunity.
It's not a problem. The problem is when we turn away from it. The problem is when we distract ourselves with the busyness of business and the busyness of our lives and we're not kind of tackling that. That, yeah, it's a discomfort, but it's not a problem. That's brilliant. That's absolutely brilliant. And it's so true. So I just want to go back on a few things. So just to pick up that last bit that you spoke about, it is a huge opportunity.
And I know when I speak to people about my journey and my pivot from my previous marketing career, and I did that in my early 50s, right, which is the time that people are meant to be winding down. And I hear a lot of people going, oh, I'm too late to do anything. And yet I always thought I loved what I did through my agency, but I really struggled with what I was creating. I was just selling more stuff, chocolate, soft drink, you know.
And in the last few years doing what I've been doing today, you know, through my purpose consultancy, it's completely different. And I think I've mentioned this on the podcast before. I talk about the changes. I used to love what I did. I used to love the skills I got to use. But today I love what I do and there's a significant difference. And it means that I have so much more energy to overcome barriers and to seek out opportunities and to do things.
And when I speak to people, I sometimes think they kind of look and go, oh gosh, you know, only some people get that, but everybody has it in their power. Maybe not everybody, but talking to the listeners of this podcast, so many people have it in their power to rethink and reframe what they do and how they do it. And it comes back to, you know, So starting with different starting points with how you think about life.
Yeah, and I think too like it's sort of not devaluing the life you live until you get to that change. Like you learn so much, you experience so much, you've got to experience the boredom, the badness, the frustration, the maybe guilt about what you do, the turning away from it. That's all part of it. That's part of getting to there. Yeah, and then, yeah, I think that idea that as you're older and you're in the back part of your career, you should wind down or you should get put on the
scrap heap. You definitely want to wind down in that you don't want to be smashing out big hours and whatever you want to maybe embrace. Sort of other parts of what it means to be a human and all that. But that doesn't mean that that can't be work. Work doesn't have to be bad and that you can actually give a lot and get a lot by changing a bit of direction. I guess you look at sort of the Aboriginal culture. I do a lot of work with Aboriginal people.
And the elders are revered in their culture. And you're not an elder just by age. You're an elder by what you give to the community. I remember one of the Aboriginal people I worked with, they were an older person, and we were spending a fair bit of time together on a project in the bush. And they said to me, you know, in the Aboriginal culture, you were valued on your contribution, not what you got or what you had. So, you know, the more you contributed to the society and the community,
the more status you got in that community. And yeah, they couldn't, you know, in a nomadic society, you can't accumulate stuff to show your status. So you accumulate contribution, you accumulate respect and knowledge and all of that sort of thing. And yeah, I think there's a lot that we could kind of learn from that.
Yeah, and even, again, we kind of don't have to learn it by then going, oh, okay, we need to implement a program to get everybody at the age of 55 to retrain and there's a whole lot of KPIs and you've got to do this and da-da-da-da-da-da. And that's what we sort of, I feel like we want to do. We want to make everything really defined and structured and implement. But maybe it's just like you said before, a bit of a mindset change for each individual to go, hey, I'm going to do this.
Maybe I'm not burnt out and maybe some of that stuff I had a lot of energy about when I was, I don't know, 17, 18, when it felt like the world was opening up and, you know, there was so much opportunity for me in my life. Maybe I can reconnect with that and I can give that a second run, you know. I can go back and get some of that energy and optimism back and reimagine.
And hopefully, you know, and this isn't the case for everyone, absolutely, but maybe you're in a better position where those opportunities that weren't open to you back then because there are the physical realities of, you know, you've got to start earning, you've got to pay for a house. You probably, you know, you might have a family, you might have a partner, you might have all these things that, you know, sort of inhibit on a fully creative life.
You maybe have sort of feared a lot of those hurdles. And yeah, maybe if you could tap back into that energy and optimism and sort of wide-eyedness, that second part of your career is the perfect time to do it. And you bring all that knowledge and experience to bear on that openness that you had back then. 17 or 18. So it's probably a really powerful combination. Or it doesn't even have to be the later part of your career. That was my story.
But I hear a lot of senior people, CEOs who are burnt out, cynical of corporate organizations who are like, oh, I just want to go work for a nonprofit. And it drives me insane because it's like you have an opportunity to create change where you are, right?
And the level of change you create is going to differ according to your environment and, you know, your stakeholders and everything, but you have an opportunity to create that change, and the change you create there is going to be far more impactful than just jumping on another ship that's already creating impact.
And I think there's a massive opportunity within business to do that and for people to it goes back to what you were saying before is reframing how you think about business yeah and where you're that starting point is like i think it will.
To me it's like it's just a it's a full you know it might be a small shift in your perspective as a human being but it's a tiny shift and it will play out in every part of your life yeah it'll It'll play out in your business life and the decisions you make and who you hire and how you influence and, you know, but it'll also play out in your friendship circle. It'll play out with your family.
I guess, yeah, it's just sort of maybe –. Connecting back to some of that stuff and taking time to sort of connect into the environment, spending a bit more time outside and going back and trying to get a bit back into what you are as a human and why you're here and bringing that to your business life.
And before we get into Wolf Peak, which I want you to tell us about, I just want to pick up again what you talked about before a couple of times and this sort of interconnection of everything and how First Nations people really understand that.
And I've been reading a book, I'm in the middle of the book, Right Story, Wrong Story by Dr Tyson Young-Caporta and I'm going to get all the details of this wrong but at one point he shares this thing where he said, you know, I'm in northern Victoria and don't pick me up on the species of tree, I'll get it wrong but for example he says the willow tree is flowering and I don't know what that means here because it's a native of southern queensland and when the willow tree
blooms in southern queensland it means that carp come out to breed or or whatever but it's this so i've got all those things wrong whatever they are the species a couple of bad choices in tree and fish species but anyway okay okay is right exactly but but the idea that everything is connected. Everything has its place, its source, is connected to something else in nature, that we've just lost that. Entirely lost that, and not entirely, but.
Yeah, we definitely haven't entirely lost it. I think we've all still got it. And I think, you know, like I'm not an Aboriginal person. I spend a fair bit of time doing work with Aboriginal people, but that doesn't make me an expert and definitely doesn't make me understand their view of the world.
But I guess just, you know, if you think, I wanted to do a project, I haven't done it yet, but at my kid's school, where we'd paint a line that would sort of represent the time that different people have been in Australia.
So if you painted the line for Aboriginal people and you say, you know, they've been in Australia for 60,000 years and I can't remember how you, I think I'd have two metres for 1,000 years or something like that, then it'd be 120 metres for the Aboriginal people and you could do a fantastic line winding its way all around the school grounds and get the kids to.
Paint it and get some aboriginal artists in to sort of help you know bring it to life and really make it a meaningful thing for the kids and they could learn about culture and stuff while they did that but then at the end of it you could paint the european occupation of australia and if you say that's 200 years you know if a thousand years is two meters then 200 years is going to be a mass it's going to kill me here but anyway it's not very long so you know you've got 120 meters for
the aboriginal occupation of australia and then you'll have you know however many centimeters for the european and i think that physical representation is really important because it just sort of shows you that those people spent a lot of time here and really got to understand how these plates works so there's a lot to learn from that and we should learn from that to understand how we live here it's kind of like if you go and visit friends in an overseas
city you don't start telling them where you should go and what you should do you go and say hey. Great to be here, what should we do? And they go, oh, we'll go here, we'll go there, we'll have food here, we'll eat at that restaurant, and you do it because, you know, well, these guys are going to show me how to enjoy their city the most. And we don't kind of do that here. But again, opportunity, right? There's so much opportunity.
There's so much opportunity. And also, I guess, respecting the knowledge and just sort of putting it in the place where it should be and informing how we live and where's the starting point?
Again is the starting point business and profitability and all that and go oh well we've got to shove this one to that knowledge or is the starting point the knowledge and going oh okay how does this landscape work how does this country we live in work how does it survive how does it thrive how do we fit into that how does business fit into that yeah that's the key isn't it yeah yeah but we don't do it but there are many people who are wanting to change the way we do
things and, you know, it's people like you speaking as you do now that help others understand and help them move further along. The other bit in that that's really important for me is there's no expert in it. No one can tell you how to better connect with your environment. No one can tell you how to, what like a healthy, a happy life is for you and how you fit work into that.
I feel like so often certain people get elevated as experts and they tell everyone you have to do it like this and this is the way we save the environment and this is the way. That's so not the answer like to me the answer comes from every individual thinking well.
Okay i understand a bit more about the environment that i'm in i understand how it works so what do i want to see from it what's my role in it how can i get some nourishment from actually interacting with it for myself and you know what's the solution here because it's not the same everywhere and it's not the same for every person and you know that tendency for us to kind of let experts dictate every part of it like definitely
we need the people that have done the work in the area the knowledge holders to share that knowledge and for us to try to share it and learn it and then it's sort of for each individual to be part of like well how do I use that you know yeah that's so important and the other the other part of that I think is judgment. Like we're living in a society where people are so judgy about what others do.
And, and even when someone, you know, someone or a business or organization does something good, there's, there's, there's judgment at every end. There's judgment from people who say you're not doing enough. There's judgment from people who say, well, you know, they're, they're, yeah, they're doing this, but they're not doing this, this, this, and this. So we need to shout them down. And it's like judgment gets us nowhere. It divides us. And, you know, I think celebrating small changes is.
But keeping people accountable as well is really important and far more. Yeah, and I guess being clear on, yeah, is it a change? Yeah, it's really hard because there's both sides to that coin and you've got to have both and you've just got to balance both, you know, because, yeah, if we too much a bit, we sort of do things and go, oh, well, that's done, that's it, I'm done, you know, I've done my bit. I don't know, filled out the survey or I signed the petition.
There, I made a contribution. No, you didn't really. You know, you can't. Yeah, I don't know. That's where accountability. There's a very hard middle line there somewhere. And I think that's where accountability comes in because, you know, you don't want to celebrate and encourage greenwashing or purpose washing or whatever.
But it's like, but at the same time, I know businesses who are too scared to take any step because they fear they're going to be, you know, judged and shouted down because they haven't taken other steps. And I feel like when it comes to larger businesses, for example, there's a real risk that they are just engaging in greenwashing or purpose washing. But I think there are some who want to start making change. And I think it's like celebrate but hold them accountable to the next step.
Don't just stop there. Encourage. It probably comes back to that work you do before you make the change and how much you... Spend some time understanding the environment you're operating in and understanding your people, yourself, your business, what is love and work and what is the environment you work in and how does it work and what's going to help it.
And I think if people do that, businesses, individuals, whatever, do that first and then make your decisions about, well, this is what I'm going to do and this is why I'm going to do it, you're in such a stronger position than another organization that may have, you know, to the outside world published all, you know, look at all this amazing stuff we're doing. It's fantastic. We're the best. We're the greenest. But it might not be meaningful. It might not be having the impact in the environment.
In fact, it could be having a negative impact on the environment, and it might not be addressing the biggest impacts that their business activity has on the environment because they haven't taken the time to actually understand the interactions. You know, carbon offsetting is really important, and getting to sort of net zero is absolutely critical because that's a critical pressure.
So, yeah, everyone's got to do it. But for a lot of businesses, it may not be the most environmentally impacting action they have. There could be something way more negatively impacting the environment, which potentially has much bigger carbon impacts down the whole chain.
And by changing that activity in some way they're going you know down the chain have a much better impact on climate and carbon emissions and all that sort of thing than just saying oh well we've done a carbon assessment and we're buying this many offsets and you know like yeah that's great good that you've done that but you haven't really grasped the nettle and and looked at really understood what you're doing and the environment you're operating in and and how do you you make
a change that's really real and I kind of would have thought even from a business sense that sort of change has much greater longevity and much greater marketability because you can speak with a lot of authority and knowledge hey we we did this process and we found out that these activities we were doing were really having a negative impact on the groundwater or the biodiversity or the da da da and here's how it was all connected and here's how we worked it out and here's what we did
to change it and here's the impact of that change and it's not just oh oh, we've just met our net zero target or projection or whatever. It's like, oh, no, we've done that, yeah, but we did it in this really creative, different way and we have had these fantastic impacts on biodiversity and we've helped these...
Communities and these different individuals and we've had a great impact on water quality and now there's fish stocks down here you know because it's all connected you can run that connection a fair way and that's such to me that's such a meaningful story like that's something you can actually market and you can actually go and tell people about and it kind of floats their boat where's gun and saying oh yeah we've we're on track for our net zero target
you're like oh oh, that's really good, but not flying my boat. Absolutely. And it's moving from a compliance mindset to an impact-led mindset. It's like, you know, where is the greatest impact that we can create with the business that we have that's going to have the best positive effect, not just in the short term, but in the medium and longer term?
Yeah, and that's definitely a bigger commitment. But I kind of feel like, and it comes back to that opportunity piece that we talked about earlier, that's how you'll identify the next opportunity. That's how you'll get ahead of your competitors and go, whoa, hang on. That's where innovation starts. That's right. If we change this and do that, yeah, we're going to reduce our environmental impact, but hang on, does that mean can we cut that cost out there or can we reduce that?
And so much already that those people that have been sort of trying to lead the charge and there are lots of them in all different areas are finding that, oh, wow, well, if we do this to reduce our impact, we're actually saving a lot of money and we're getting benefit. And I think we've kind of scratched the edge of that idea. We haven't gone back to understanding the function of the planet and gone, oh, how do I sit in that?
And that's the, to me, that's the next big, probably, if we did it, the next big kind of business evolution, revolution. And that's, Tim, the, you know, going back to what you were talking about, about the context of business. I've had so many guests on this podcast who have started businesses with the end in mind. Like we want to solve the problem. We want to contribute to solving the problem of untrashing the planet. So what's the best business for us to be in in order to do that?
We want to help solve the problem of, you know, sex trafficking in Cambodia. What is a business that I can create to help contribute towards that problem?
Problem we want to help solve the problem of you know women who financially exposed due to domestic violence what is the business i can create that helps solve that problem and i've got guest after guest after guest whose business has started from that problem and business is the means to solve the problem and money is an outcome yeah not the means right yeah yeah yeah i'm like Like, wow, yeah, those people, I guess, are the embodiment of giving that a crack and taking the risk and, yeah.
Enjoying the podcast? If you're looking for more inspiration, head to our website, thecauseeffects.com.au for more resources on how you can start using your business as a force for good. Or buy the For Love and Money book. Every copy sold allows us to protect one square metre of rainforest. forests. Help us save 10 000 square meters by 2025.
So tell us about Wolfpeak. If you can give us an overview of what Wolfpeak is and what it does and then just briefly if you could just sort of share your background to story to what brought you to where you are today. Yes, I guess Wolfpeak is, if you want to sort of put it in a bucket, it's an environmental consultancy.
So there's about, you know, 30 or so people in Wolfpeak and we do a whole range of work, you know, stretching from sort of environmental work on big infrastructure projects so like right at the coalface of how are those projects interacting with the environment around them and how do you manage that and try to minimize the impact of building a new rail tunnel or you know a transmission line for electricity or something
like that so you know we do that we do some sort planning and approvals type environmental work. We do auditing to make sure that projects are complying with their environmental approval conditions. We do sustainability work. So we also do corporate ESG sustainability work. And we have ecologists. So we have an ecology team that are out there on the ground doing ecology day in, day out. And then we also do government and corporate work.
I guess in government, we find more and more we're helping government solve.
Kind of complex problems not always in the environment space we find it's diversifying out of that but the approach you use is sort of always the same and it's almost that you know starting point type idea again of like well let's see how far back we can unpack this problem and and let's start with going out and talking to the people that have the problem and all the different players and let's sort of start that conversation and that working together as a group to work out how we solve it.
Within the context of government and all the pressures that apply in a, you know, political environment of a government and what it needs to achieve. Yeah, and how do we sort of get things done? And I guess that's the space where we've worked a lot with Aboriginal communities, Aboriginal groups, really.
Through, you know, helping Aboriginal groups get money through business cases to fund projects that they want to do to sort of help improve and move their communities forward and move the sort of opportunities and that sort of thing for their communities ahead. Yeah, we've sort of got involved in that space and then once you work with those people.
You develop a relationship where they then trust you and you trust them and you decide you want to go together into the next stage and you help build the thing, which we're sort of project managing projects and stuff like that, which is not really our thing. But, you know, it's all about getting people together and putting some frameworks in place so that you can get things done and you deliver. But it's bringing everyone on the journey.
Can you give us an example of that kind of work that you're doing with Aboriginal projects? Yeah, there's a few. I mean, one that's probably the longest is with the Eden Local Aboriginal Land Council. And yeah, that was a really interesting project. I was doing some other projects with the Department of Premier and Cabinet in New South Wales and they were around sort of Snowy 2.0 and how do the community prepare for that project and a few other things like that.
And then, you know, this need came up to write a business case for the Eden Land Council and the Eden Land Council for a long time had wanted to build a walking track called the Bundian Way and in its sort of holistic form, the Bundian Way goes from Eden all the way out to Kosciuszko, which is about 360 kilometres and it's a sort of, it's a really ancient east-west pathway that Aboriginal people have been using for thousands of years. You know, it's older than the Silk Road, it's, you know.
Wow. And it's the trading pathway and it was the pathway way that people used to get up to the mountains to, you know, feed on the bogan moths when it was the right time of year and then move down to the coast to feed on, you know, the different coastal foods and all of that stuff. And I mean, Eden is such an amazing town and obviously there's the relationship that the Aboriginal people had with the whales.
You know they they developed a relationship with the killer whales and the killer whales, there was a pros you know the aboriginal people would indicate to the killer whales that they needed them to go and help them gather some food and the killer whales would go out and and push a hump back in onto the beach and the aboriginal people would then kill it and share share that, food with the killer whales in a way that they both knew was what they both needed and you know the.
The killer whales weren't just whales, they were the ancestors. There was a whole much deeper and important connection there that I don't understand. I'd like to understand it, but I recognise that I don't and that's fine. But I love working with the guys down there and just, yeah, spending time. And so we got asked or I got asked to write the business case for them, but I had to go down and meet BJ, who's the elder down there,
and get him to say, yeah, I want to work with this guy. And I went down and did that. And, yeah, we started on the journey. And, yeah, we sort of hired, employed one of the guys from down there because I could see that was the best way to make this work because I was just a passenger, really. You know, I was bringing some skills, but I wasn't. I was just a passenger that they'd invited in on this journey.
I was just going to ask you because, you know, those stories, I remember reading about that story of the Killer Whales in Dark Emu. Yeah. But when you're working with people and they're sharing those stories directly with you and you're working on this project with them. Yeah, how does that change how you operate? Yeah, I guess maybe for me personally, it just aligns with how I guess I operate. So, I don't know, you're attracted to what you like in a way, you know.
You hear what you want to hear, you see what you want to see. So, when I hear those stories, they're what I want to hear. They align with maybe my setup as a human. So, it definitely engages me more. or it makes me feel like there's more meaning to the work that I'm doing. Yeah, I think it just disconnects me more. I just feel like, yeah, this is good. It's bigger than just work, you know. It's something good. And you mentioned before you said, I'm just a passenger.
And it makes me feel like when you learn, when you hear stories like this and you learn from, you know, the oldest living civilization in the world, it must make it makes me feel how much i don't know and how much i have to learn and you know feel so much more so much respect towards older cultures and what we can learn from them and yeah you saying i'm just a passenger in this is quite interesting because i'm assuming you're kind of you know paying your respect to
them and learning from them as you're creating value at the the same time yeah i think so but i i hope they're they feel some value from me too like you know that we're both learning one guy i guess i built the closest relationship with and you know we're friends from this that work because it's still going we're still trying to build that track we're getting it done but it's a long it's been a long slog les les is yeah he's yeah he's a fantastic person and we often talk about.
Yeah, I talk to him about how I feel or what does he think about this or that or am I doing this wrong or, you know. And Les is definitely a kind of, in that community and just in the Aboriginal community, he's someone that's thoughtful and a leader. And, you know, I sometimes probably get too excited about, oh, we need to learn more off the Aboriginal culture and that.
And Les goes, yeah, we need to find our new culture as Australians and it's not the Aboriginal culture and it's not the European culture, but it's the culture that comes from us evolving together from both those cultures and it'll be different and it'll be new and hopefully it will take the best of both.
And so no one is better than the other. Yeah, absolutely, the Aboriginal people and their culture to know more about this place and there's tons to learn from that culture but that's not saying that our culture is second rate it's not saying one's better than the other les's yeah the view he kind of expressed to me was like well the best culture will be when we work out how to do the best from each culture you know and i've been reading
a book lately i've read it twice actually it's such a good book it's called this view of life and it's by a guy called david sloan wilson and it's called Completing the Darwinian Revolution. And in it, he talks a lot about how in ecology, we're really comfortable with this idea of evolution and that that's the framework that helps us understand evolution and make sense of it all.
But he sort of argues in the book that Darwin's theory of evolution applies not just in that sort of genetic and physical evolution that's in ecology but it's culture and that we can apply it to our own culture and and that idea of you know two different cultures being together but if we let them both sort of interact enough the culture will evolve and it will be the you know it will evolve to the environment of the world that we now live in because yeah i know that the aboriginal culture
that was just can't work in the world that is now it's too different but definitely if we're open and if we listen to each other and have the diversity of views and the diversity of people and skills and loves and whatever and we find better ways to have all of that together then we can really find our next evolution as the culture and the more we kind of monoculture ourselves and put us into this sort of of maybe business-driven framework of profit and whatever,
then we lessen our opportunities for those businesses. In the biology world, it would be a genetic change that leads to a genetic evolution that proves to be more beneficiary or more beneficial. The less diverse we have our culture, the less opportunity there is for us to find that next cultural evolution or change that lets us go, whoa, there's a whole new way to see the world and how we interact as humans and society and all that. So yeah, it's an interesting book. Definitely worth a read.
I'll put a link into the show notes and, yeah, I'm going to be getting my hands on it after this interview. What do you think? We've talked a bit about starting points. This idea of, you know, evolving culture by bringing first Aboriginal culture together with, you know, Western Australian culture as it stands today.
You've talked about being open and listening to each other and finding better ways but how might how might someone start that do you think what is the starting point, for you know bringing those cultures together yeah that's super hard and again it almost comes back to i'm not the expert in it you know each person needs to go and find their own starting because the starting point will be different for someone in Sydney compared to someone.
I grew up in Kempsey, so the starting point for me was, you know, caught a bus and went to school with Aboriginal kids all the time. So I had no influence on that starting point. It was there. It was something that happened to me. So I can't claim to be an expert in it because I didn't do it, you know. You're an expert in your own experience, right?
Well, kind of. And I guess it's almost changing just maybe the starting point is just changing that little bit in your head space of yourself as an individual and going, hey, yeah, okay, I'm going to subscribe to that thinking a bit or that resonates with me a bit because then maybe you're just a bit more open. And you see the world through a different lens and you see those opportunities for yourself where because you weren't looking through that lens, you never saw the opportunity.
I'll go back to this book, but there's a section in the book that talks about when Darwin was young before he sort of had done all his sort of great thinking, he was doing his sort of PhD or whatever and he was working in Wales and he was in a sort of valley that clearly had been carved out by glaciers.
But they didn't know that at the time and so they were looking at this valley and trying to work out all the landforms and it didn't make sense and they just couldn't work it out because there had never been any thinking at that point that Europe had been covered by huge ice sheets. But then after a while, the knowledge came in that, hey, Europe had been covered by huge ice sheets.
And then suddenly with that knowledge, they went, oh, my God, it was, you know, absolutely everything here tells us this was formed by glaciers and everything is exactly right for that.
And then there were lots of glacial valleys in other parts of the world that people had studied and said, yeah, these are all the attributes of a glacial valley but they couldn't even though they were right there in front of them and the knowledge was there as well they couldn't put the two together because they didn't have the lens to say hey this was once covered by an ice sheet so rather than maybe saying hey yeah this is how you start that process it's more just saying hey have the
mindset that you might be open to it and the opportunities to start will probably present themselves because you will be looking at your world, your everyday world exists through a different lens. Yeah, I love that. I love that. One of the best things, I used to work for a group called the Wentworth Group of Concerned Scientists for a while and that was a group that was funded by a philanthropist that had all the best scientists, sort of natural resource scientists and economists together.
And I'd get to spend a lot of time with these guys and ladies, blokes, and they're just so ingrained in what they do.
But I remember one time I was walking from Circular Quay with one of them over to the Wharf Theatre, sort of near Barangaroo there, and we walked through the argyle cut and for people that sort of don't know sydney well the argyle cut is literally a road cutting through the sandstone of sydney and it sort of cuts from one side over a hill so it's quite a deep cutting and we're walking through that and you know 99.9 percent of the population it's a road cutting
and there's dirty big sandstone walls on each side and a bridge over the top and there's cars and trucks and you just walk through this thing and get through it now i'm with this professor it's bruce tom and he's like oh and he used to call me mr stubs we had this joke going he'd call me mr stubs and i'd call him professor or whatever and he go mr stubs look at this and he's telling me the history of you know the last i don't know million few million years that he can read it in that rock face
and how you know the whole sydney basin was actually when it was formed when we were gondwana and it was from you know erosion. Of a mountain range that's now in Antarctica and that formed the sandstone of the Sydney Basin and here's all these lines and this is what it's telling you and. Just the richness of what he could see around him because of the lens he had to look through. And then I'd be out in the bush or, again, I'd be with, I remember I was flying
to Adelaide with Bruce one time. We were on the plane. He pretty much pushed my head through the window. He just wanted me to say, oh, look at these, look at the channels and look at the landscape and look at how it's formed. This is what happened there. For most people, they're looking out the window going, oh, Jesus, just red earth down there, not much to see. For him, it was a massive tapestry or book of the history of the formation of the planet. What an amazing person.
Yeah, but they all have that knowledge, you know, like the guys, the ecology guys, they're out there and they're just like completely, when they see landscape, they just see so much more information. And then, you know, the Aboriginal people have that too. I mean, imagine what their, the lens they look through before the Europeans arrived, just what an amazing lens.
So there's so much opportunity to bring all these different knowledge sources and these lenses and even business lens, like someone who is a fantastic business person looks at something and goes, hey, here's an opportunity for a business to make money or, but not even money being the end point, just to make something happen here.
I can make something out of this. What a fantastic talent and skill and what a fantastic lens ends and a creative person you know you sort of that's where you get the energy isn't it tim that's where like you don't get people's energy around we can make so much money and not you know money is not bad it's good to make money but it's a means to an end and yeah but for some people that's a great lens because it's not the
money it's like yeah i'm gonna be so good at what i'm good at i'm like so many spreadsheets i'm gonna analyze it so well i'm gonna be so disciplined discipline whatever it is yes i guess when it comes back to that love and work thing start at love what do you love and then how does that become your work maybe that's a. Better way to go i mean yeah that's the goal isn't it i i mean you've talked a lot about history and learning from history and and the role you know the
knowledge that that aboriginal people carry because it has been passed down, you know, through stories and things like that. I can't help thinking, recalling Noel Pearson's press club speech in the lead up to the voice referendum. Actually, yeah, was it? No, it was in the lead up to the referendum. And he said, you don't know us. You know, you don't drink with us at the pub. We're not your mates. Yeah. We don't have that relationship, but our children can have that relationship.
And it goes back to what you were saying. You know, you grew up in Kempsey. Your starting point was, you know, you caught the bus with Aboriginal people. You had friends. You met them. You knew them. And I feel like, you know, opening ourselves up to knowing, but also being careful. I had another guest on this podcast, Desmond Campbell from Welcome to Country, and he cautioned people.
He said, you know, I'm like a walking billboard. He said, you know, people want to talk to me all the time, but don't talk to me or other Aboriginal people for your entertainment because it costs us. You know, we're happy to talk to you, but do it with the view that you're going to learn something and do something with that knowledge. And I think that's, you know, a great opportunity. Now, listen, I know you've got to go and we are over time. So, So first of all, I want to thank you.
This conversation has been so revealing, so insightful. It's given me a lot to think about and take away. And I feel we've only, you know, reached the tip of the iceberg. I feel like, you know, we could continue this conversation, but I can see you've got to go.
Can you just close out this episode with your dream, Tim's dream, if you could magically create your dream outcome in your world what might it look like five years from now oh i don't know that it would look i don't know what it looked like and i don't want to know because that limits it i don't have all the answers and i definitely don't know i can only think a little bit you know but the dream would be that maybe every person has a little bit of time to reflect, some time for themselves,
and just thinks about, do I want to change my lens a little bit? And if every person changed their lens a little bit, not massively, yeah, we'd probably have a better life. Thank you, Tim, and thanks for taking the time to come on this podcast. No worries. Thanks for having me. Music. Thanks for listening to this episode of the For Love and Money podcast. If you'd like to take a deeper dive into the purpose movement, visit us at thecauseeffect.com.au. And remember, doing good is
good for business. So if you're not doing good, then what are you doing?