Anthony Moffatt or Harry as you've been known as Welcer to Straight Talk mate.
Thank you Mark. Yeah, so pleasure to be here. So I.
Like, I always want to know how someone's name goes from Anthony to Harry and your name, of course it Moffatt, But like, tell me how that occurred? How did you get that nickname?
Yeah, so Harry came from an old Rodney Rude character. Harry Muff was his name, and a lot of people called me mof so it was Harry moff in the end, and I don't think there was much of a likeness. Wasn't that funny?
But who named you?
Bloke by the name of Ken Studeley on our essays selection course he made up a poem and a rhyme about everyone. He's one of the funniest guys who you'll meet. And yeah, he was one that gave me the night the name in the part and stuck. It stuck. Yeah, Well you resist these names and they stick hard.
I don't they totally. So that would have been in like the eighties, nineteen ninety ninety nine.
Yeah, yeah, because I remember Rodney was he had a Radis show on TV show. I also remember Kerry closing his TV one of his programs now actually mid program because carriage isn't like the way he went on. But he was a funny barsad I remember him. And so you're in the mid nineties. You were let's call it trying out whatever the word is for essays.
Yeah, attempting essays selection, and it hasn't changed a great deal as anywhere between five hundred and one thousand applicants, they pick one hundred and fifty odd and you go to Perth and out of that we generally get twenty. I still return to the unit today to mentor the new charges coming through, and the numbers haven't changed over time, which is good.
So let's say that's in the nineties.
He obviously weren't born in nineteen eighty because you would have been too young to be doing this. Were you in the military. What's that process? Joining the military then trying for essas? Were just decided one day at midday I saw the SAS TV shows series on Channel seven or Channel nine where it is, and I decided want to become an essays soldier. I mean, how does that work? I mean you become how do you become? Well, how do you get the instinct and the ambition to join the ESAs.
Yeah, it was a spark for me. I was going to be running out of full Ford for Hawthorne football team up until I was twelve years old. That was my dream, or open the opening the batting for Australia. But I saw the images you may remember Princess Gate, the Iranian embassy siege in the UK and nineteen eighty and that flickered across a grainy black and white television set and it just captured my imagination. And I read
a bit in those days. I was reading from an early age, and I started reading some books about counter terrorism and anti terrorism. These are that was the golden era in the eighties, you know, the aircraft hijackings and et cetera. So it was in the geist, if you like. It was in the background, and I just thought, whatever they're doing looks awesome and sexy, and they're all dressed in black. And the more I dug, the more I was intrigued and the more I wanted to do it.
So I joined that the Army in nineteen eighty six as a regular and when the SAS circus came to town and beat the drums. I signed up and went through started a selection process, pre selection into that one hundred and fifty proper selection, and then you go into a eighteen month odd reinforcement cycle, which is still part of the selection. So it's probably all in a two year process once you're in the system.
I wouldn't mind just talking about it because I've always been fascinated with the process of being selected. And I guess you're also self selecting too, because correct you might decide I'm going to drop that as well. It's not just somebody saying you're the dude. You might say I'm not the dude. I want to go back to that in a second.
But self selection is a really important part to grew insight.
I can imagine because it happens in business too, and people think they're going to be an entrepreneur, but ultimately you self select yourself and or the market will tell you whether you can do it or not. But some people fail to self select out when they should, when they should be getting out. And it's not there's nothing wrong with selecting to get out of these things. Self selecting out, that's just what your instincts telling you. After
you've gone through the process. It's not instinct. With our process. Process informs your instinct at the end of the day. But we'll come back to that in a second. Because it seems like you have a view on it, a strong view on it. But you were a like use, I think you said, regular soldier, Yeah, what does that mean?
So you just join the ADF you going to any number of cores infantry. I went into signals core. You can be in catering, transport, artillery. And so the regular I suppose process is the military picks you and where you go, whereas the self selection part of the SAS is entirely voluntary and you hand yourself over to them completely.
You don't really have much in the way of hands on your own destiny, whereas in the regular army you pick a call, you get put in, and then you start a career, regular career.
In that way, it's pretty full on. If you go back forty years, which we are to be, for a young man to be reading articles about or reading articles about war and what's going on in the various territories war territories, it's pretty out there, pretty unusual. I would have thought back then, for because I don't know anybody. I had one mate, Andy Nolan. He became an SS guy. But that's the only person I know, And I don't even know how he became one. But he's just weird
shit though. I can to you, Like when it used to rain really heavy down in rose Bay, he used to get into the after after having he's also an architect, but after having left the sas, he used to get in a like a one man canoe and get into the canals when the heavy rain.
Was just to test himself, is that right?
And go through weird tunnels you think, And like he was the most unassuming person in the world that you would never think he was a morement architect, but he went through the whole process. Yeah, a massive risk taker. And just every now and then when it's a heavy rain. You know, I did see him this is this is back in the eighties. He say, I've just been going down the canals and lunatic.
What's wrong with you?
Like what.
Is wide sort of like effectively rapids because it's filling it with water down rose By and end up out in the harbor somehow. But it's I don't know anyone who thinks this way. Other than him, and now I'm meeting somebody else. What is it that makes you a or having such an inquiring mind that you start rooting me this sort of stuff and then makes you when you mentioned the circus comes to down, you know, the
sas recruitment comes to town. What was it that made you feel as though, yeah, this is for me, I'm going to have a crack at this.
Yeah, I've thought about this, and we've studied this in fact in the unit. But I resolve my thinking to it's an internal competitiveness, as an internal drive, which you would be very familiar with. It happens in the business what I see it in the business world in sports, and I think when the essays in particular, it's it's the opportunity to test yourself to see if you have what it takes. And you're not impressing anyone at that stage because no one really knows about it. It's very
done in house, very much. But it's that just that drive to see you do I have what it takes? You know? And the more you read you go you think you question yourself, you know, is this would I would this suit me? And that kind of in a way attracts you even more some of the common characteristics that I've observed over time, high tolerance to ambiguity, and an appetite for risk taking. But it's generally quite measured. They kept within the informed risk informed, and also a
competence level of risk within your own competence. You have a good sound understanding of the scope and limit of your scope and limitations.
So it's not much as so are you saying though it's not reckless.
I would say that, although.
In other words, it's not like And that's actually quite an interesting point because I noticed in the briefing that I got that, you know, a lot of the stuff you talk about your book is the Fourth Pillar, your most recent book, the Fourth Pillar. But one of the things I noticed in the description of the book is modern Stoicism. So you know, what's interesting to me anyway, is that you just mentioned the word reckless. And we'll come back to that. And one of the headings of
your book is Stoicism. And the Stoicism, of course, is a you know, thousands of year old virtue, you know, like going right back to the Stoics, and Aristotle talked about stoicism, but you talked about recklessness and then there's a an Aristotle himself talked about the difference between courage and recklessness is somewhere in between the two, the gold, the gold what he called gold mean, it's not in the middle, it's somewhere else.
And for each individual it's different for everybody else.
Someone might be closer to recklessness, and someone might be closest closer to courage. But it's definitely not recklessness. In other words, it's not and fearless is different to courage. And do they in the when you're training for the sas, do they go through this virtue type deal to start talking to you about these old school things that our old school I don't mean that in a disrespectful way,
but old school virtues. Do you talk about these things stoicism, recklessness, courage, blah blah blah.
We do now and back then it really was a matter of survival. And so if you were tough enough to wait it out, to run it out, to just persist and in a very pure stoic fashion, you know, just to be able to persist and put up with it. Stand your ground, stand your ground, don't complain. In fact,
no one's listening anyway. It's a nail feedback environment, which is very, very harsh, and that's what makes something like tolerance to ambiguity very such a valuable measuring or measure of someone who's suitable.
For virtue words tolerance.
Yeah and so, yeah, and you do you need to survive. But these days I actually go back and teach applied ethics to our junior operators, not only for the moral challenges that they will face in their careers, you know, physical, mental, and moral in service. But back in those days, it was how how how hard you could go for how long, and what you could tolerate and put up with. So there's there's two kind of sides to that coin. My generation is the pure stoic, just put up with it
and keep persisting. These days we have a more virtue approach to it, because we realize now that servicing this this kind of these kinds of units has a moral toll as well, and that gets mixed up with the mental health toll that it takes on people, or.
With the final outcome, you know, like because you know, you don't want people being all these things and then walk out and their and their careers finished, and all of a sudden there are a wreck.
Yeah, but inside that's correct exactly. And I'm as a psychologist now, I spend a fair bit of time in that. But I guess at the start of an sas soldier's journey, what we want is to give some guidance around what
is reckless and what is controlled and informed. And I think we always want to select people who are probably going to lean towards the reckless part because some of the nature of the work is such that it's high risk, high consequence, catastrophic consequences not only for ourselves but for the people around us. So we need people to be willing to step into that space without question, without being afraid,
a feared, or or without hesitation in most cases. So we want people who are probably that side of it. But I think the golden mean of Aristotle, if you will, it's a navigable space. What we also want is people to come back to a normal setting, a civilian setting, and readjust those parameters as well, And that takes a certain kind of person. We don't always get right, but I think we're pretty bloody good at it.
So recently Donald Trump announced and Peter X announced that they're going to change their Department of defense to the Department of War and got all sorts of reactions around the world. And initially I thought to myself that might be good for recruitment, because recruitment is a big deal. For we don't have national service, and so recruitment is
really a big deal important to have recruits. It's not saying you the whole country to join the army or whatever it is, whatever the military is, but you definitely want you've got to recruit and or retain as well. And maybe that has a bit of marketing appeal to it. But how does that fit into the narrative in a modern day, modern day in terms of the types of people might attract.
Do you think, yeah, I think it's it can be a concern, and particularly in a nation like America where they're in a marshall footing your martial kind of culture. Australia not so much. I'm not sure it would fly well here. I get I get the idea we want to be proactive, I guess, and maybe at war rather than being defensive and on the back foot. And I heard a bit more and I think I've punched out a semi poem or something like that to Romance Donald but I don't know that it would make a marked
difference on recruiting. That would be have to play out. I think what's important to state is during times of peace, recruiting naturally goes down. You know, the boys that turn out to want to go on the adventures and go to war seem to spike when that's imminent or in the in the news. I've had a few people say
or ask me the question. You know it means Australian Defense Force in trouble and recruitings down and all the rest of But I'd say, look, you know, it's never as bad as it seems, never as good as it seems, and we probably need a more moderate conversation about it. But it's a lot of money to sustain a standing
army that's not doing anything and not going anywhere. And if the example I give is at the end of World War One, a lot of the old guys were saying because a lot of men we died in World War One, and they were having a shot at the next generation coming through, saying they're all soft and weak, and you know they need to be trained up, and things like scouts and outward bound and you know these will will forced and all of these other things were
invented to make to toughen up the next generation. And when the sixteen and eighteen year olds went off to Kokoda Track, they did a pretty bloody good job. And the young charges I see come into contact with regularly. I think Australia's in good stead. I don't think we should panic. If we do need to raise an army, we'll do so. Capability is still strong. This is the time to spend a bit of money on the on the hardware. And I think hardware being tech, yeah, tech
and hardware and some decent chips and things like that. Yeah, But I think Australia, I think we should just calm the farm a little bit. On that. I think Australian the essence of the Australian soldiers still here and will serve our country well come the time.
So do you think that essence that you're talking about cuts across Australian Australian values?
Do you think? Because is that essence and Australian value.
And given our immigration and our change in the sort of the makeup of our nation, and it's rapidly changing, probably faster now than has ever done. As past in terms of cultural changes, sense of nationalism, perhaps religious relationships, like at one stage pretty much a Christian nation.
These days we're much more mixed.
Then there's conflict overseas relative to some of the some of the religions relative to other religions, and that's pretty obviously we'll be talking about who might be talking.
About we're thinking about at the moment. Do you think these things will.
Ultimately create a bit of a chasm in our armed forces military?
Yeah, potentially. I think there's parts of the military which have been maybe distracted by what's going out on going on out in society. So I give that. But to feel and have a strong standing Australian Army, we need about one hundred thousand people and I think there's well inside that many to service our military. And we'll always remember we're a small nation. Our GDP and defense is tiny.
It's probably the budget of the first Marine Division and we're now one of Americas if not biggest aircraft carrier and the Marines increasing in numbers. So I think again there are challenges, there's no doubt mark from a broader society perspective, but I think I would like to see the kind of margins and the fringes. Discussions that I see in the veteran community go on just kind of
keep our power to dry. I think we should take comfort that we will still be able to raise a strong army that's that will do its job.
So do we need I mean, there's probably more war strategy question.
And you know, I don't know if I'm oversetting the marqu here, but because you're you're on the ground guy.
You're the guy who.
Goes and does stuff like it's more tactical than you undertake a strategy outcome, but you're going to have to make changes.
This is a strategic tool, a strategy.
Go in there, but you've got to make changes.
This didn't more get the way we wanted to work, and we've got to do this tactically and then make some quick change, a quick thinking.
And as a group, do you think that we need as many.
Regular soldiers, regular military people as we have done in the past, Given I'm not too sa I'm not talking about specialized people. I'm talking about regular guys and girls. Do you think we need as many these days? Given what's going on, giving the giving, given what we see in Ukraine, what we're seeing in various other places what's going on in the world at the moment as we have needed in the past, in other words, drones and all those other things.
Is the World War potentially more technological?
Well, definitely got technological very quickly back in the US Civil War, you know, So that doesn't change. I think that's expected strategically no matter what conflict we're going to. There's probably a good point to make here around the type of war that we might be engaged in. The wars that we've had recently and arguably since the end of World War Two have been wars of choice. Really, they haven't been wars that we've been invaded or we've chosen to a company America or a coalition or UK
and they've been choice. They've been largely wars of choice. So they have a different a different context and a different requirement, especially when we're being asked for certain capabilities to travel overseas. And then there's wars like Ukraine, where that's not a war of choice for Ukraine, that's a war that arrives on one's doorstep and you need to do whatever you've got to do. And I don't think it's controversial to say that they find themselves in a
pretty conventional situation and they need warm bodies. It kind of comes down to that, Yeah, the technology matters, and it's been amazing to watch that, hasn't it That the adaptation and the little drone shops underground and whatnot have
been fascinated by that. That's just human adaptability. But at the end of the day, they need warm bodies defending a line dug in and it takes you back to well, the US Civil War, you know, where they started digging in and and that's kind of that was the precursor.
So it takes me back to Breaking Rand. The first thing I think of, remember the Australian movie Breaking Around, I do, yeah, And I think that was like in the Boer War or something it was, and which is like eighteen ninety or somewhere in center anyway, and we're very famous movie for those people who haven't watched a great movie, one of the great films.
At Australia.
Government was actually able to well southtrat Gun was able to help one, but they were they were sitting in trenches and in those days communication was done by a runner.
That's right. Now communication might be slightly different, but well, interestingly in the Ukraine k phones so it's landline.
Yeah, yeah, it's like a box with the that's what I call it.
And they're targetable and they're being used because there's electronic magnetic pulses and all this type of stuff being used blanketing out communications conventional communicator. There's runners are being used still, and notes and notes. So in the in the in the short in the battle space, the forward edge of the battle area, the fever as it was called, in those trenches, there's notes and runners being used between pits
and those types of things. So comm's cord you might never have heard of that, but three tugs means safe to come and too. So all this these in a conventional war that's not of our choosing, you don't get to use the full remit of technology and capability because there's an enemy that's just the equal of yours.
Certainly going to make that bing that yeah, you can't make, you can't meet that, you can't make any other presumption because more likely you could be wrong.
And the gravity of that is a big deal exactly. And so those wars of choice that I've been involved in.
And so which was have you been where have you gone to? So I served in the.
Big Three team or Afghanistan and Iraq over eleven over a period about a dozen deployments and then other missions and other activities around them.
And what was your role?
So I started off as a six ICEE and then end up running what's that? A trooper? So I was in a team and I was the shipkicker, the junior guy in nineteen ninety one, and then I was in the unit until pretty much until twenty seventeen. In twenty fifteen, I finished up on the teams as a team commander or our bravo, the senior sergeant role in the.
We're talking says correct? So what would your maybe the role is probably not the right word. What would your function be of your unit? Would be to go and do something, catch someone as surveillance what would have been?
Yeah, all of those things and more so. We were special missions unit, so we greet or we address missions without precedent. So what's often means that problems and attacks on or threats to the national capability and national interests of Australia without precedents. You know, whether that's by terrorists, whether it's technical humans, war fighting, all of those things.
So I've worked everything from one up by myself in the streets of some shitty a city in the world, to what would your mission be with the captive someone or to watch them be surveillance or something along those lines, to related to information and people, and then everything through to working is a thirty man troupe on a more conventional direct attack or direct a more direct active jumping out of helicopters and blowing things in the essays gets a bit confused at times by the imagery we see
movies and the movies, yeah, and it makes us look very one dimensional, but we're not where, We're anywhere anything anytime, force and everything that that encapsulates.
Do you have to in the course to become apart from be able to prove that you know you can you know you're not going to panic when you get go under water or whatever those things you see in the TV shows, apart from those things. In the learning process, do they what skills do they teach you apart from how to shoot and all those sort of things, but obviously combat whatever, But what other skills they teach, like engineering skills or you do a little bit of everything.
Yeah, a little bit of everything like computer skills, code writing, language skills right up to paramedicine, surgery, all the weapons, all the things that go bang. We do your high altitude parachuting, which is everything. If you can imagine, as at its extreme, jumping from an airplane at twenty five thousand feet at night wearing five hundred kilos worth a kit sounds like a lot. It's a lot, and you're jumping on oxygen. So it's a highly technical, highly high
risk event. To rebreathing underwater, rebreathing diving underwater and submarine release. And one thing Australia is really well renowned for is our long range vehicle patrols and capability and those three things amongst others. There really only means to get to the job. The majority of the SAS work is done
in infill and extraction. The job itself is a whole other set of skills, and that's whether we take the expert and get them there safely, or we bring the skills and execute the mission on the ground as required.
Are you're talking about that that transport vehicle that we've come from, the name of it. Now we've sent quite a few of them to the Ukraine, I think, oh.
Yeah, yeah, the as labs I think itself either, but so we but astraight as good at building those things.
Is it because of our train H yeah?
I think so. I think they we We were getting I D strikes in Afghanistan regularly and surviving a lot of them. So I think there was a I think there was a technology that just evolved in a local place and that's had a asymmetric kind of impact or certainly interest from around the world, and that technology spread. It's just v shaped holes, so I guess.
At the bottom of the Yeah, the transport machine.
It still goes bang inside. I don't know that. But but the vehicles, it's it's survivable.
Morphs dispersus the vibration impact, the impact. So because you experience it yourself, ID is that's right?
In two thousand I unfortunately it was in two thousand and eight drove over an I D which turned out what we think was an old Russian anti tank mine that was remote detonated, and a colleague of mine was killed beside me, and our interpreter lost effectively lost both of his legs in the blast. I was very traumatic, and you know, it's remarkable to think out of the dozens of strikes that we had in Afghanistan on the cars that we drove, very few deaths. I think we
really had. We had two or three, I think it was over that time. A lot of injuries, et cetera, but high survivability. They went to vehicles we had. We had our own set of vehicles.
And what happened to you? Did any happen to you?
Yeah? I had fragged through the back of both legs and burnt. Actually the force blew a boot off of an army bootoff, just to give give you an idea of the force, which I don't need much idea, really, I guess. And I was actually okay. I had a bit of surgery and came back to the troop. But I contracted an infection. Most of Afghanistans covered in human feces and animal feces.
Really and yeah, well you know, leveraging systems.
They haven't had a huge sanitary advance there. But and they use a fertilizer actually, be fair to them, they use they reuse it for fertilizer. These are pretty humble existences.
And so I got a staff infection, a goal and staff infection that kind of got up into my Yeah, it started there and I had to be repatriating in the end because it just that my testicles were swollen up to the size of a soccer ball and that started to get into my thoracic cavity and they were they were going to remove my leg, but they got into some heavy drugs back in in Perth. I was back just in time, thankfully, and over weeks it calm down.
And would that have been a signal to you maybe it's time and how to hanging the boots up a bit?
Yeah, well I was. I was forty at that age.
Is there a retirement age do they forty?
Is it? There's two retirement ages. One is around fifty five or so, yeah, and the other ones, the more realistic one is when the young fellas say, Harry Off, you were a bit slow, and a few times towards end and my time, the guys did turn around say mate, you're looking a bit slow.
Oh really?
Yeah, yeah, that's and you do straight up and your ego wants not to hear that. But slow in terms of keeping up, you mean, yeah, definitely keeping up. You remember the backpack on absolutely, yeah, when you're getting gunshots, fighter you need everybody up in the line. And I never fell off or let anyone down, but there was a sense that it was harder than it should have been.
And is that their job to tell you that.
I think it's all about jobs to tell each other that it's you know the essays. Regiment's a prison yard you get to go home from. It's it's brutal, but there's a as am in respect. You don't have to be everyone's best friend, but you need to respect the fact that the bloke next to you has got what it takes to look after you and you'll have your back when it matters.
Sounds like a footy team.
Yeah, it's a lot like a footy team. I work in AFL and NRL teams and it is a familiar environment.
And you want confidence that the guy next to you is not going to leave a gap, or if there is a gap, that he's going to close the gap. And then he's going to run up the line all the time with you, and every time you're up, he's going to run up.
And we want to know too that if you're bleeding out in the AO that they're going to do their best to get your home as well. You know, that's a kind of a commitment that we make to all the families when we deploy as well.
And when you did make this decision to leave, you mentioned a couple of times you have psychology qualifications. Did you do that during your army period or did you decided to go in to psychology after that.
No. I took some advice of a man I call my kind of second far the Gary Kingston. I've mentioned him a lot, and in the book he once said words the effect of, don't let this place be everything you are. You know, it's not all you are.
You're more.
And he was a great proponent of educating yourself, whether that was tertiary or build a carpentry or whatever it was. Do something else, be something else. And I took that to heart, so I started studying seriously in the last ten years I was in the regiment. So often I would joke that I'd have a book from a university book out on patrol with us and be reading that digging a trench while I was having a break. I'd be finishing a Uni degree. And it didn't add any
way to any any effort overseas. It actually gave me a distract, helpful, healthy distraction away from planning all the time. And it just so happened in twenty nineteen when I left the Defense Force full time the weekend or the week after I started, I was qualified and registered as a psych and I've been.
So you did that.
You do that that whilst you were in the military, That's right. Last two is online type call I tended.
Psychology is a seven year degree, the last three of which you need to do face to face supervisions and all this type of stuff, so like as in an intern type thing exactly. Yeah, And so the military gave me a part time gig and helped me do that. And the military is pretty forgiving like that.
But the military is great. I mean, the defense forces generally are great.
That way it is now, Yeah, it is support people. Yeah, it's much better these days.
Is my psychology?
Well it seemed to make a lot of sense to me. It was something else I was interested in. I kind of dropped out of UNI after year twelve. I didn't I was going to UNI, and then I thought, I'll join the army now, or do UNI and then join the army. That was the kind of conundrum, and I ended up doing the latter, doing the former. But yeah, it was a little bit underfinished business. I read a lot about psycholog Jean philosophy. They were kind of my staples.
I found them fascinating, love the stories that went behind them. So yeah, it was kind of It's just natural for me. It wasn't I felt like and it makes very good use of my lived experience. Now when I work with mission critical teams or sports teams or hedge funds. I love working with hedge funds. I think they have a semi very similar vibe to them when they're up and running a private capital team or a deal team. You know, you've got a dozen young men and women who just
want to shoot the lights out. It's the few that I work with. Sometimes they feel like a footy team. There's that kind of camaraderie in the trenches fighting. So I think that my background psychology pulls it together, gives it an evidence base, and allows me to tell stories and share hopefully my small w wisdom with those people.
So when did you write Because your first book, I think this is your first book, eleven bats.
My mates, Tommy, I should have called a bat's eleven because I'm a ship bats.
But what is that about eleven bats?
What's it's just an autobiography mark of my journey from Williamstown, Victoria to back to Victoria really where I ended up end up at the end of that book at the mcg doing an Anzac Days speech and the eleven bats. It was my habit to take a cricket bat every operation that we went on, every tour we went on, and a ball, I presume, and a ball, yeah, a few balls because they get a bit lost Sean balls. And we'd play cricket, you know, and we recreate or
we'd even gather information. We use them to gather intelligence and bricket Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So you build rapport with the localists playing game of cricket and they become you a layer of an extra layer of defense. Or you go up to the street urchins who you know, you've thrown them a ball or whatever, let them get you out, and you might just say who's who's old mate over there?
Who's he you know? And they'll look after you. They'll come to knocking and doing and saying this such and such as bad man, he's back in town and that type of stuff. When I was looking after Alfredo Ronaldo up in the hills of Malbusi in Team or Less Day he was the protagonist and the antagonist he had the militia up there. He was the most interviewed person on the planet at one stage, CNN, ABC, Fox, everybody was coming to interview him, and there was a conga line.
So we set up this game of cricket and we needed to note everybody who came into seem because there were spies running everywhere from all corners, from Portugal to the US, et cetera, Indonesia and Indonesia, lots of them, and so we'd play a game of cricket and everyone
was forced to stop. We got photos, got a bit of narrative from them, fingerprints where we thought there was a high threat, would just throw throw them a ball or give him a glass or something, just all in this of the ball it was, yeah, there was, there was all that kind of carry on.
So that was your sort of is your go to eleven bats being a cricket side, that's right, eleven men eleven bats. But you've played around with that because is that something that was that you can that was your common denominator. I guess from most of your deployments.
Yeah, I came home to cricket, to the apple Cross Cricket Club. Who I'm still available for selection?
There he's calling out.
Yeah, that was a place to come home and be moth not Harry, if that makes sense. And my cricket mates grew to unders really deeply understand that, and they didn't bug me about my military service. I could just come home, be one of the blokes, a handy up here into the breeze bowler, a normal human being. And I speak emotively about it because it played such a massive role in normalizing life for me.
You know, how does that work?
One minute, you're in Afghanistan and you're trying to work out if someone's going to blow you up or do something terrible, and you're seeing all sorts of crazy stuff and living with individuals who are.
Same the same milk.
Then you come back to Victoria and where everybody is just like running the local coffee shop and making baking and eggs and digging ditches for as a plumb or whatever, and your mates from school, I presume, and you create club.
How does that transition work?
It's bizarre, it really is. We talk about being away. I ended up referring to being away like being at home, and being at home like being away. That was really how it felt. That makes so much sense to me. Yeah, we go away to the unordered, extraordinary world where things that happened shouldn't happen we wish or wish they didn't. Then we come back to this ordinary world. You talk about post office, milk bars, and.
It's all structured the morning, get a coffee.
Control, Yeah, less unless you feel under control. But yeah, so I remember being walking the streets of Afar off country, being one of the most dangerous jobs I'd been in decades or in years, on a Friday night, and I knew I was leaving in the morning. We'd finished up, I did the handover, got on the plane and got home. And on the Sunday, I was sitting at home the family dinner in Australia with the kids and Daniel and my wife, and we were having broccoli mash s buds
and lamb chops. That was my welcome home dinner, always my favorite dinner. And the kids are arguing and I just caught myself thinking, what the fuck, what's just going on? My head's still there because I'm going I wonder if John I got to mate in time, and I wonder if anyone got hurt on the particular part of the mission I knew. And it takes a week or two just to stop wanting to is everything okay? Do you need hand and dure walking the streets or jumping in out?
So it's a very very hard transition. But my wife worked out very early on that I needed to get down to the club pretty quick too. That was it was a source of tension earlier now in that period, but in my career, our marriage. But it's remarkable how well that social setting would buffer those It would bring me back to Earth's decompression. Absolutely, it's a perfect word
for it. Yeah, decompressing. So when I go back and mentor young men, now, I talk about your third thing, your first things, your family, your second things, your vocation, and really they get just wound up together inextricably. But you need a third, third thing and that is you. You know, buger the family, bugger the vocation. Where can I go just to be the real identity inside of me? Because in a lot of ways, the sas facade, if you're not careful, takes over.
Yeah, you become that you become.
That and that's let me sound strange, let me say that that's not an identity you want to carry around with you forever. That's something you want to be able to slip in and out of. And that's an agility that we talk about now, which is a discussion that we never had, and I think it's a really important discussion.
That's an interesting point in terms of particularly business people or people just people generally when it comes to remaining relevant to society. If you see that as an important thing, that to some extent means that you can then follow how society is changing as opposed to just sticking in one spot and just being that person you think you are. Like, our brain is interesting, and you're, being a psychologist know
more about this than me. But our brains a very interesting in terms of how we build a story about ourselves and everything we do and then ends up becoming affirmation of the story you built about ourselves.
And then.
And then sometimes we end up just living that life and get stuck as opposed to making use the plasticity of our brain to think of our life.
I love the words stuck, by the way, it's the perfect word stuck in time, stuck in characters, stuck in family, stuck in event, or trauma, whatever, whatever.
It is, including trauma. It's perfect, including trauma, and a lot of people suffer from this.
But you know, our brain does have plasticity, and which basically means I can change things and change the story about myself and start affirming the news story about myself. And people often say to me, ask me about it. How do you stay relevant given changes? Like you know, one stage, I worked at a law firm and I mortgage business and then I'm broadcasting this type of stuff. And how important is the willingness for an individual to be able to You've done it to be able to.
I might use it technical term, use our brain to actually stay relevant. Not me being relevant to an audio, it's just me being relevant to society. What can I contribute to my society? Not everybody, but my society. How important is that as a technique?
I think it's very important. And you've a couple of things there. You know, the plasticity of the brain is a thing these days. It's labile is another term that's used that applies to all aspects of us as humans. We're never ever static. We're allostatic. We're navigating the world changing. You know, we're not a beat of strings or a
straight linear line. We're kind of Depending on which philosophy you want to talk to process theory with Whitehead would talk about we're spiraling through space, changing every second, and that's true. You know, we're evolving or adapting as we go, which is the other point you raise. You are an adaptable, highly adaptable person. Not everybody is. There's a biology behind our personality and our psychology, and some people are more
tolerant to ambiguity. You would be someone like that. Founders. I find work a lot with founders and also with individuals who started their own family offly high net wealth, so who might be a bit stuck in their family in the wealth and the intergenerational transfer, etc. But founders have a high tolerance to ambiguity and they're under the same I think, the same risk profile that they can get stuck in this persona that they've created for themselves.
You know, the King of Collins Street or the King of Macquarie and the suit and tie and I say, well, when was the last time you went and had a Friday night at the footy with your mates? Your schoolmates, because most of our schoolmates are still good, close community, and it's not surprising to hear them say, oh, months ago, or I don't really catch up, or I'm too busy, or and Mark, i've sat new again. This is your area of expertise. But I've been surprised at how many
I don't know. I'll make a generalization at sixty sixty five year old men who've sold their business for a life changing amount of money. To some it's twenty million, to some it's two hundred million, and their life around them behind the facade is atrophied, their relationships of atrophied, their health is atrophied, their social connectivity and all that. I can go on. And it's and they feel it. They feel there like a sense of loss almost or regrets, or they it's not as a happy time as they
had been imagining. I shouldn't laugh, but it's so I don't think it's just as real. It's very real, and so I don't think it's necessarily just the remit of veterans or sports athletes have the same thing.
Time.
For every one hundred athletes, one of them will make life changing.
Money and means or become a TV presenter or a.
TV presenter exactly. But the other ninety nine who have sacrife everything to on the on the journey won't have that. So this is what do you say to them? Well, you've got the very first thing any human needs to do if they want to change is do and they have check where you at right now? And let's be realistic, But at.
What point before they get to the retirement point?
Or well, I can only go off when they first come to me if I'm working to them, and I do a bit more of that than I would have expected these days. But yes, a reality check, a fish slabe, wake up, you know, let's let's let's where are we at? You know? And there's any any number of means. And I'm from the Maslow kind of school of psychology where I'm not there to provide solutions, and no psychologists should be. We're here to get it out of you. As Plato says,
all information exists within us. It's just us up to us to find it. And so I become the mid wife to your birthing, your your understanding of yourself. And I think with that facade to sometimes and as our lives atrophying, behind it the distance with there's a distance with ourselves that we create. And you alluded to that earlier about how we look for reassurance that we're on
the right path. And I think when we the soldiers that I see, particularly special forces soldiers, if this is all they are, this, this, this character, if they don't have this kind of deeper sense of connection to community or to to citizenry, as the ancient Greeks might put it, then it's it's very hard work to kind of pull them back.
Is it a trade off though, between and I have no idea, but is it I'm just wondering.
Is it a trade of between the effectiveness of a particularly a specialized soldier like an s a says person
and there identification of themselves as being this person. Is there a trade off between that being really effective at their job but therefore as a result of being less effective in terms of looking at the bigger picture for when the day they retire, And is there a sort of a process where it's when they're first starting, they're really effective when they're twenty eight, twenty on, whatever the age is when they first kick it off, and as they start to reach forty, does the army or does
the defense forces try and do this for them so that they just become more effective as a citizen.
The way I love it mostly, and we haven't done a great job of that with my generation, so I probably see more people stuck there. In fact, what you're talking about is exactly what the book is about. Oh cool, it's about the fourth pillar is the philosophical pillar. The other three pillars in any high performance program on the planet largely around the three pillars physical, psychological, and social pillars.
And that's whether they mean to or not. That's and so the fourth pillar, I argue in the book is a philosophical pillar. To your question, we can do both at the same time, and we can learn from the Greeks.
Here the agogies of the ancient Greeks, whether they be the Spartans or going back further pre Socratic Heraclitus times, when they grew warriors or soldiers, they went off to these agogies and they were schoolhouses to train not only military martial skills, but they learned erudition, history, geography, They learnt storytelling, dance, poetry and the reasons for dance and poetry, and they learned about a respect for life, and how to take a life, and the respect for that life,
and how they're not in competition, they're actually mutually inclusive, and they learn about how to be a good citizen and what that means. The advantage that they had is that the warrior cultures were embedded in the society, because these are societies on more footings permanently, aren't they if you can imagine the Greek societies, and in some ways we still are today. But I think that we can learn some lessons, and I try to tease that out in the book. What are the lessons that we can learn?
And as I said earlier, when I sit with young soldiers now, I try my hardest to make that point to them. You know, one of the first conversations I have with a young sas soldier is what your plan be That there's a twenty five percent chance you'll be
dead inside ten years. It's not that dramatic, but there's a chance, a really high chance you'll be injured with a career ending broken back, leg or whatever the case may be, or lose a foot or and I and so you've got about a fifty percent chance of being here after ten years. So you know, what your plan be.
The reality is that in this room of twenty five of you won't be here in three years time due to matters outside of your control, because that the job's tough like that, and so it's a bit of again a fish slab. This is where you're at. You're back to the bottom again. You're coming in and we expect you to be elite with guns, languages, and technology. We also expect you to be elite at personal administration personal life.
Being connected to the community doesn't mean you have to go and serve on boards or anything like that, but it just means you have.
To have a good sense to a member a cricket.
I think it's as flippant as it sounds crochet cricket or Canasta club. As I say, three, get out and get let civilians reflect back to you that this is what you're coming you. Eventually we have to return to it.
And I guess what you've got to teach them as an openness to be that person. Yeah, because a lot of them probably think, no, I can't be that because because that might create weakness in me. In my current job, my current role is I cannot have any weakness in me whatsoever, because I'm going out there against whoever.
It needed, the enemy.
But at the same time, I think you can be I'd be interested here what you got to say. I think you can be open but not be weak. I think actually openness to me is a strength. It makes you strongsolutely. Yeah, it makes you more of a whole.
Person, which means you're probably stronger.
Absolutely, And you want to combine the king and the philosopher. You know that the wisdom is embodied in the courage, in the ability to be able to switch from compassionate father and lover at home to a warrior who can be brutal and deliver violence when required. I hope I'm
a kind of living of that. And the majority of sas soldiers that I've served with, I would say embody that they're compassionate, good men who are also able to do things that they're asked to do in the interests of the national national security.
And so today the sorts of things you do, I presume hopefully this is the case you are doing. You go and do talks and this sort of stuff. People can book you to do a lot of speech, but like a.
Talk to a group, yeah, yeah, do yeah, lecturing. I don't do a heap of keynote speaking, but I do a bit here and there. For corporates are pretty happy to hear or keen to hear the stories. But I do spend a lot of time with young soldiers. One thing I'd like to do is set up a program and an institute where soldiers from all across the journey from civilian to elder, without going into it too deeply, can come and discuss and share stories. And I think
that's something that's missing. There's an old there's an old kind of proverb. I'll be very quick with the soldiers. Once would go away to war, they'd be away for a long time. It's along the lines of Homers return to Ithacus, you know, distances the Odyssey.
But the.
Warriors would you know, at sixteen, they'd be trained up, they'd go off to war, and then I come home
and the young warriors wouldn't come straight home. They'd be left on the edge of the village and they would be left there to process the events, to celebrate the successes and commemorate the losses, to share stories about what they'd been through, and the village would come out to them, share food, and say when you're ready, we're here for you, and the elders and the spiritual leaders would come out and help them process and sit and listen to them,
and then when they are ready they would come home and kind of decompression. This sense of decompressing and processing the experiences and I think in the modern world when it's such a bloody rush and this is not only for veterans, this is for our police, our emergency services. They live in the extraordinary world and it's something that we don't do well to bring transition them back to the ordinary world, which for anyone listening in the in
the mission critical teams, it's a wonderful world. Back in civilian world, there's a great place to be and I think I'd like that's something I'll be looking at in the future. Well, we're not in the future. We're doing now to help to share those stories and I'm not sure what it looks like yet, but at the moment, it's a fireside chats and those discussions that you alluded to.
And your two show says Stone, just explain what that is. That's obviously your business name, but what is it.
Yeah, Percy Sritie, who's one of the themes or one of the characters in the book. The Greatest, I think the greatest coach of all time owned a dozen world champions and gold medals and world championships out of a tin shack in Portsy. He was a prolific writer and reader. And he had a philosophy called the Stoton philosophy, which is a portmanteau or a blended word from Stoic, sto and Spartan, and that's the st that the ta n
and he put those words together. He believed the Stoic philosophy was good, but it was found wanton in terms of an embodied philosophy. So the physical training aspects, he thought Spartan, the Spartan a go Gey approaches was the missing piece to Stoicism to make it complete for an athlete, which he believed was the purest and the highest order of humanity. And that's what I borrow that from my business name.
And that's something obviously believe.
It's funny you're just talking about a month ago about like a decompression process of putting pa outside the village and the village coming to them and letting people just sort of stay outside the village before until they're ready to come in. And you mentioned Odysseus or the Odyssey, Well, Homer's story allegedly it was Homer, who we don't know
actually who wrote it. Let's say it was Homer. And it seems like that whole Odyssey was for Odysseus was a decompression process for him to get back into society back in Ithaca, because he just finished the Trojan more, he just came out of the Trojan War and and and between wherever Troy was and getting back to Ithaca, which is on the other side of Grease on the western side.
Agrees, he had to go through a whole lot of adventures.
That's right.
And maybe do you do you have you ever thought about this?
Maybe Homer was writing a story about decompression and getting back into society.
I hope so, because that's that's the model. Yeah, well lutely do. And and you know the monsters, the cyclops and the sirens and all the temptations. The temptations are all the monsters of from within, you know, yeah, very Freudian kind of of So these are the monsters and the demons that he wrestles with to get home to
his beloveds and back to being back to citizenry. And yes, I do, and I think that it's funny that it's not funny, it's it's it's curious that in other indigenous cultures they have similar stories about the warriors coming home and how they will depro There's a theory about World War One, which I think is very rubbery, that the ship trips home, that the trips home in the ships helped some veterans or some of the soldiers to prolong
the long, long trips. I don't think the research backs that up, but it's again, I think it would have been helpful for some. And I'm not even sure that making room to process can can completely address anything. There's the bruised apples theory that you know, we you roll them down the stairs enough stairs and the bruises don't kind of heal. But I know another model I use is the oak table. You know, a veteran is like
a beautiful, old, hundreds of years old oak table. You're going to take that over the ike every day of the week. It's battered and bruised and being burned on the corners and chipped. And Grandpa act I saw a bit off and add a new Bit's got lots of stories and lots of stories in Providence exactly exactly, and it's that patina that we all carry that we should be we should be really be embracing and the metaphor of the village or the metaphor of Homer for veterans,
that that's kind of the staple to my stories. And as I said, it's not only I've realized now that it's not not only the mission critical teams, police, emergency services and first responders, but it's also athletes. I think it's a useful conversation and also think it's a useful conversation for burnt out private credit team. I got a number of forty year olds I'm working with at the moment that I'm saying, are you sure this is the
right job for you? You know, you've you've shot the lights out, but it's taken a toll, you know, and you've got to stop and assess that at some stone.
I know one forty plus year rold that you do look after and he's a mate. You need it say his name, but he has that name.
Chair.
Yeah, so you need more of Harry. And by the way, you're lucky you've got Harry. Harry, thanks very much. I really appreciate it.
And this is the fourth pillar. This sort of reading is not what generally.
I would expect to get from a veteran an XSAS person, but the wisdom and from what we're just discussing because I haven't read the book yet, but the wisdom and the whole discussion around how we look at our lives, not as a veteran but as anyone who's retiring from anything. That's really important because I've been through that process myself,
wondering we'll hang on a minute. I used to identify myself with a certain as a certain type of person, and I actually got quite ill for about three months, very sick and because because it was a full stop put in my career voluntarily, but I didn't realize how much I was thought I was that person, and it took me years to work it out. I'm lucky I'm much older now, but it took me a long time to work that stuff out. And I was one of the lucky ones because I had good support around me,
et cetera. But I recommend someone read these things, and if you're a partner of somebody who's in the same category.
This is a great type of insight. This type of insight is what we need to read. So thanks very much.
Appreciate you, Mark, I appreciate it. Thank you.
You're welcome.