Good team.
I hope you're bloody terrific. Welcome to another installment of the You Project. It's Harps and what's your middle name? Coops?
Is it? What is it?
Well?
If you were addressed me formally, Harps, it would be Jacqueline and Cooper.
I thought it was Anne.
I thought it was Jacqueline and Cooper. Five time Olympian, five time World champion, Woman about town, business woman, keynote speaker, highly paid, way much more dough than me. She cosper hour you could have about ten hours with me and one for her, because she's a big deal.
What I said, because I'm better?
Yeah, no, well, no doubt. I mean that wasn't even in question. Oh that's why they paid the big bucks. So you've got nowhere to go now. I didn't argue with you. How you fucked?
An't you?
Yep? I'm embarrassed.
Yeah, no, you are. You are a big deal.
But despite the fact that you do take the piss out of me, which is because we've been friends for four hundred years, you are very good.
At what you do. Welcome back to the Youth Project.
You're the busiest woman in Australia.
What's going on with you?
There's a few things we can't discuss, but might one of them might become apparent in a week or so. We need to be evasive and somewhat mystical. No's that's not the right word, but anyway, there might be something that the public might become aware of mystical.
I like, yeah, so end of last year, I went away and did something pretty exciting. I wouldn't say it was a bucket list thing for me to do, but once I got offered the opportunity, I was like, Okay, this sort of kicks all of my boxes. I want to go and do it.
And in the next.
Couple of weeks we'll be able to actually announce what it was, where I was, who I was with, and why I was doing it. So it's going to be a lot of fun. I'm excited to see it.
All may Yeah, that'll do.
That'll do. Hey.
You know, when you're when you've got a profile and you're you or like you that is well known and you know, five times Olympian all that stuff, five times World champion, you get offered lots of things from you know, different opportunities. Some of them are not really opportunities, they're kind of dressed up as an opportunity. But when you get into it and I get asked a few things as well, which on the surface it's like, we've got an opportunity for you, and then you go, no, this
is actually an opportunity for you, not me. But what's the weirdest thing, the weirdest opportunity in inverted commas that you've been presented with, like whether or not it's working with a company or doing a weird gig, or some kind of sponsorship or some kind of alignment or relationship where you got into it and you went, this is actually bullshit.
Well it's it wasn't even a sponsorship. I guess it was a request where they thought it would be I mean, money would be changing hands. But when an Australian, as someone that lives in Australia heard that I was going through IVF, they offered to buy my eggs because of the potential DNA.
Wow, so yeah.
It's pretty crazy.
They thought, well five time, limping, good jeans, nice muscular and they said, if you've got spare either embryos, which is obviously with my husband, come together, ready to go, or just my eggs.
And they said, yeah, they slid into my DMS.
Then asked if that would be an opportunity that I'd like to seek and I'd be rewarded for it. I was like, oh my gosh, imagine if I did that, I'd have fibblings of my children, like their potential brothers and sisters are wandering around.
That's a big no. So you do get to them.
How many minutes did you consider that for?
I was like, don't lie, block, block, no, not okay, hang on a million dollars.
They offer you a million dollars for one of your eggs.
A million.
Now we've still got one in a freezer. And it was talked about in a book that I wrote about my IVF journey, and that's why it's sparked an interest in somebody, like you've got one in the freezer because the IVF. I guess it's always that conundrum at the end, when you are lucky enough to have a family like Mario and I and you do have spare embryos like that.
What do you do?
What do you do when you know that your family's complete? You can either donate it to science. You can obviously just discard it. And the other one is that you can put it into like an embryo bank and it can go out there. And this person thought, well, we're not going to wait for it to go into a bank. We're going to offer you an opportunity.
Just from reading my book.
I'm like, oh, it's we call it the frosty. It's still in the freezer. It's been there for nine years. It's it's staying there.
How long is I know, you know, clearly I'm an IVF researcher. How long is the embryo viable?
I think is the medical term?
Oh so I think that. Well, they send out reminder letters every couple of years because you have to pay storage fees at the facility where they're being kept. So there's a couple of years that goes by, you know, minor, do you still want to pay the rental, you.
Know, the storage fee, this potential human that we've got here.
So I think after ten years they really get you to decide. Like I turned fifty in January, the frosty is never ever going to be thawed for us, So that I'll probably send out another email saying what is it that you'd like to do with that? So for us as a family, we still haven't even discussed that because I'm like, that's Mario, that's me, that's together. But it's something that gets talked about, and I'll probably get a lot of people after me now listening to this
saying why wouldn't you donate it? Why wouldn't you give it to a couple? But when it comes to IVF and donor embryos, there's a lot of laws that haven't been really locked down. So it is the same as adoption, so that that embryo can come back and find you. So I don't think we're a bad family to find, but you know, it's something that I probably wouldn't want for my family. We feel like our family is complete
the way it is. But it's that question that I still don't even know how to answer, to do the right thing by that embryo.
But also, like, you know, what I'm about to say is almost ironic because we are talking about it publicly, But then what you do or don't do with that embryo is really nobody else's business. Like it doesn't impact anyone else unless they make it, you know what I mean. It's like, it's not it's a completely private decision and issue.
One hundred percent. It is. It's our business.
It's got nothing to do with anybody else. But the word impact is a big one, Craig, because whilst it doesn't we feel like it doesn't impact them, it could impact them and that's what they think. They think this is something that could impact us. We actually have that family that you're written about, that you dreamed about, that you've now got and you're going to flush an embryo. So it's a really tricky thing.
I don't know.
Did you see them the series that I've been out on Channel nine moment called Big Miracles.
I've seen it, No, I have not. I know that it's on, I'm aware of it, but I have not watched it. Did you.
Yeah, So I've been watching parts of it because we were that couple, we were trying to have a family. It's about IVF and every single person's journey.
Is completely different.
Some happen to get pregnant the first go, and they've saved all their money to obviously try for an IVF cycle, and some are years and years and years down the track, which is obviously years of heartache and hope and lost hope, and then obviously think that maybe you're going to get that child again, and then there's loss.
If there's miscarriage.
So there's so much emotion when it comes into having a baby, and if you're not there yet and you haven't had one, I know what that was like. So I yearned for something so much. Who knows, maybe I would message someone in Instagram saying that embryo, do you want to have that? So I understand it's desperations is too much of a hard word, but at that point you'll try anything to try and get a family that you feel like you deserve and rightly.
So yeah, I don't know very much.
But what don't Is there something that people who've never been through if or never even IVF will never even open the door to think about it or.
Explore it or research it.
Is there something that would shock people like that, somebody like me who doesn't know much that I would never have thought about or I wouldn't get about the process or going through it.
Well, I'll quickly give you a couple of things. So it's around about ten thousand dollars per cycle, so that's obviously a female's monthly cycle. So if you don't get pregnant the first time, then it might not be ten thousand, and then next it depends on how many eggs were hard harvested, so a ten thousand dollars cycle. If you qualify, if you're deemed infertile, then Medicare will step in and
you're welcome for a rebate. Not everyone gets a rebate if you're socially it's a social decision if you want to try IVF because you want to freeze your eggs, or I'm not too sure about same sex now that same sex marriages are legal in Australia, but back when I was doing IVF, if you're a same sex couple, you wouldn't get the rebate because they had said that was a social choice, which is just nuts, right, trying
to have baby, trying to have a baby. So it's around ten thousand dollars, and that's where you start injecting yourself for a week or so to try and grow the embryos that you can't actually do yourself. And when they're about twenty mils, so about two centimeters the follicle itself, they book.
You into hospital.
Your husband or your partner or your donor goes into supplies a sperm sample close by the hospital, not like in a dodgy place, but actually in a proper facility where they can keep that sperm warm all of the eggs that they've retrieved. Sometimes you might get one, sometimes you'll get none, and you'll get maybe ten.
It depends. They match the sperm and.
The eggs together and they'll call you back to the next day with a fertilization update. So you may have gotten ten eggs, but match with the sperm, nothing fertilized, So that is absolutely heartbreaking. You've had surgery, you've gone through a couple of weeks, you've spent ten grand, and like, hey, nothing fertilized. So you can have another process called IXY where they actually inject the sperm into the egg. That gives you a higher rated success, but it's more expensive.
So now it's like the plus plus IVF is ten grand plus plus. You want to do IXY, that's plus another two thousand. You want to take the embryodo of five days in a lab being watched twenty four to seven by an embryologist, plus plus plus, So it gets very very expensive. So you can see why the pressure and the stress of trying to make it work for a cycle because for a lot of Australians.
Is just too much. It's just too much.
It's prohibitive, isn't it?
Speaking of all things? You know, bodies, you are? You just turned fifty. Okay, hang on, you just turned fifty. You don't look at you don't look at you look you look a good forty. But you retired from competition at thirty three?
Am I correct?
Thirty seven?
Thirty seven? Oh that's right, because when we reconnected it was thirteen years that you had Okay, So you and I used to do some work together. I used to train you and do some of your conditioning stuff back in the day when you were jumping off ramps and twisting and turning and periodically landing.
Mostly landing percentage was only twenty percent. Say again, my landing percentage over my entire career was twenty percent.
How does that compare.
Well, that's like showing up every day to work knowing that eighty percent of your day is going to be a shit show.
That's true.
In the very beginning, I landed nothing. I landed nothing for years and years and years, and then I started landing one every now and again, and then I started landing a couple and then by the end of twenty years, I was landing more than I crashed. But I kept a log book, and people think that's kind of crazy. But during COVID, I got out all of my logbooks and put it into a spreadsheet, as you do, and I wanted to work out my landing percentage, and it
was only twenty percent. And people ask me all the time, I'm like, why, I know, if would you keep going knowing that it is going to be a hard day eighty percent of a hard day wiping snow out of your ears and landing on your face and having to like brush off the snow and start again, and knowing that you're going to go up there and got an eighty percent chance of crashing failing, just all of it. And I said, that's where I actually learned the most.
Craig was learning how to do better, how to change what I was doing, reinvented a little bit, deconstructed work with my coach, processes feedback better, because when you're an aerial scare and you do land, it's such a shocking thing. The coach is like, oh great, do that again. No real usable feedback in do that again. But where the feedback and all the work came in was actually on the eighty percent where we had to try and fix it.
Why'n shoe landing, We've got to get you to land What do we need to do to make that happen, because if you're not landing, you're getting injured. So, yes, aerial skiing, I crashed more than I landed. And that was a career of twenty years and I retired thirteen years ago from that crazy merry go around.
And one of the byproducts of landing twenty percent of the time and not eighty percent of the time is thirty three operations or something.
Yeah, So I had twenty five surgeries during my active careers, just small scopes, scoping the knee a few times, scooping ntannie a few times. I'll be reconstruction, shoulder, reconstruction, new reconstruction. Broke my hip, dislocated, it broke my face. So during the active career there was twenty five surgeries and I've had about seven since and sort of.
Like the cleanup to try and get you back to.
How you were before you started the sport, and one included a total hip replacement less than a year ago.
WOASA wowsa.
And so you and I reconnected because of this mysterious thing that we can't talk about. Well more than that, we caught up, and now we've been catching up and
I'm clearly your best friend in the world. Thanks. How has it been getting back into training, because you not that you did nothing for thirteen years, but you didn't really train per se although you're very active and busy and still was on skeeze a fair bit, but in terms of being in a gym and working out with a focus to build strength and achieve a few things physically, you weren't really doing that. And then I guess six months ago you started training again, give or take. How
has your body changed? And are you hating it? Are you loving it? Are you glad you got back into it? Or is it just opened another door and that weird brainy yours.
It's all of them.
I think I sort of hate it now because I'm back to feeling that guilty if you don't go to the gym, where I sort of gave up on myself, so I didn't have that bit saying, oh I get to the gym, get to the gym. I just didn't even think about getting the gym, so there wasn't that internal sort of wrestle that you have every day with I've got to get to the gym.
Do I want to go to the gym. I'm in the car back door. I want to go to the gym.
I don't want to go subway, you know so, But I absolutely love it. I feel like that I've woken up. My body was so broken after what it did for twenty years. Then after my hip dislocation, I spent thirteen years cutting the back out of my sneakers so where your heel fits, I cut them so that they could just I could just slide into my sneakers so they almost look like wearable slippers. I couldn't bend down and do it my shoelacers. I couldn't really organize a shoehorn.
That's how stuffed up my knee joint. My hip joint was so because the hip was so bad, my knee was so bad. So I didn't go to the gym because even just walking to pick up the kids from school pickup meant that I was in so much pain at the end of the day that I'd have to sort of build a nest in the bed to fall asleep comfortably, and then I had to take all these different medications to keep the pain under control, the inflammation under control. So having a hip replacement was wonderful, but
then us getting back together again. It's honestly, I sort of thrown myself back into that athlete mode and my body didn't take long to respond at all. I mean, you could probably talk to that better than me. But you know, I went from being a mum of thirteen years doing nothing in the gym to walking in there now and I look at myself in the mirror and there's parts of me that look very athletic still. So I'm proud of how my body you responded. I'm proud
of how the shape that it's taken on. I love that I'm fifty and I've got a pretty good six pack. So there's a lot to like about working hard, and I'm honestly, I'm so grateful Craig. It's it's been the best place to reunite.
Yeah.
Well, I mean we do take the piece a little bit, but I will say people who train a bit will understand this, and for those that don't, I'll try and put it in context. But so I introduced you to They're called different things, but basically a revolving staircase StairMaster. They're called different things by different companies, but so I introduced Jackie to this thing called a revolving staircase, which
is fucking horrible. And it goes from level one, which is very slow, up to level sixteen, which is essentially running. And to give you an idea, like, I'm not unfit. I don't do heaps of cardio, but if I had to go out run five kilometers now I could with not too much problem. I'm eighty four kilos, I'm quite lean. I do way more weights than cardia. But don't smoke, don't drink. My default setting is pretty fit. But I remember jumping on the not that long ago. I jumped
on the old revolving staircase. I did fifteen hundred steps, and I nelly died. I haven't told you this, Cooper. I did fifteen hundred. I call it Cooper. I did fifteen hundred steps and I Nelly died. Now your second workout, I think, after thirteen years of no training, you did five thousand, and you did all of them faster, at
a faster rate. So like level ten, level twelve and I plot at level six, level eight, and I was just looking at you and that there's something weird about you, and because you're I mean, firstly, you weren't unfit, but you hadn't trained. Like you're just busy and active, and you walk a lot, and you move a lot, and you've got kids, and you've got sport, and you've got school, and you've got in and out of planes and cars, and you've got speaking gigs and you're always probably walk
thirty thousand steps a day. I reckon, But you hadn't been training, and I was watching you on this thing. I was looking at your face. I'm like, she is in.
The best possible way. She's a fucking weirdo.
I was just looking at you and you were like, I'm not letting this thing beat me. I mean, it was just day two of training after thirteen years off, and you would think that it was a gold medal that you were vying for. You hate giving up, and you hate you hate like you almost can't work at If I go I want you to work at six out of ten, You're like, nah, get fucked, I can't is spot on.
I feel like I have to beat the machine. Then I feel like I've had a victory for myself. Competitive people. You can't turn it off, even though it was aerial skiing.
You can move that drive to something else.
And honestly, it was almost like you, I don't know, let the tiger out of a cage or something.
I'm not too sure what happened.
But when you introduce me to that bloody stam master, because it is tricky and it is difficult.
And it's so hard to actually.
Get good at, I thought, I'm fucking sort this thing out on day two, and now I can take phone calls at like a level six, level seven, at level ten on board because it's too slow at twelve, I'm sort of moving along. And that competitive thing too, is like, oh, let's try and stay it for half an hour at thirteen or fourteen, and I want to try and beat last week's steps, and I photograph what I've done just so I can beat last week.
I know, I get the photos sent to me.
I know I've absolutely loved it though, So it is great. And you know, whether it was the hip replacement, the thing that we can't talk about coming out, you and I connecting again, I feel like as a fifty year old. If I had said to myself thirteen years ago, as a retiring athlete, in the best form of my life, just retiring from Olympic Games, I hope I can look like ABC and D when I'm fifty.
I feel like I'm there.
Craig, Yeah, you are well. You don't look your age at all. In your face, you don't look your age. You look I reckon early forties. But your body you look like an athlete again.
Like you lean, you're strong, you've got muscle, you've got definition and and you know, some of that's genetics, but a lot of that is just hard work. But I think the thing that people don't, you know, we kind of understand. We know there's a relationship between the mind and the body and the emotions, and you know just how we experience life based on those three variables. But I don't think we genuinely understand how great exercise is for your mind and for your emotions and for your
happiness and for creating the right brain chemistry. You know, dopamine and you know, just the stuff that makes you feel good right, and then you do their workout and not only have you done a great thing, physiologically for your body, but also mentally and emotionally. You feel good for the rest of the day because you've ticked this big box.
Well that's right, so you're ticking that big box. But if you can manage to go with a bunch of friends like we all meet up, it's also that social connection as well. So I sort of feel like there's four, five, six, seven boxes that I'm kicking just by going with you. So I'm getting all of that, and I'm also having a social outlet away from the school mum to pick up the drop off the work side being at home, and it's just like there's another part of me now and there's a friendship.
Group that I think.
It's like going to like the new pub, you know, we're going to go or a cafe. We go there, hang out, get a workout done, connect with each other, check in with each other, and you drive away you chitch.
Feel good.
Well when you think about it.
So what Jackie's talking about everyone is there's a bunch of people that I kind of help and a few friends. And one is Johnny that you know that got blown up in the gas bottle accidents, and another one is the crab that you've heard about, who literally died at the gym for seventeen minutes, and his daughter Jamie, who's a freak, and you know Chris, and I'd coat some friends of mine who who have just gotten on board.
And there's just this eclectic mix of humans and like in normal life, in whatever that means, we would never intersect. Like everybody is so different, so wildly different, and big Christian everybody's so different. But in that place, there are no differences. Everybody's just there for the same reason to have a good time, to lift some weights, to do something good for their body. And it's kind of the great equalizer I think in some ways working out together.
Well, yes, I agree. And by the way, you actually call us the merry band and misfits. Okay, so it doesn't say the eclctic group of humans, it's the misfits. Hey, I'm getting the misfits together.
Do you want to come?
I'm like, right, Okay, I've been labeled, but I'm happy to be labeled. You're right, we would never have intersected. But wow, what I've learnt by Johnny and he's resilience to be there and to show up and everyone will drop there waits to help him out because he's just such a fighter and just the whole group and it isn't equal because whilst I've been to five Olympic Games and one, you know, five world titles, you look at Jamie over there and I could never have done or
do what she does. So there's all there, and there's inspiration, and there's there's really just I'm just so excited for her and obviously her body and everybody else, like everyone's physical journey.
That's I'm proud of them.
You, you know, with your most people probably don't know this, but your your main correct me if I'm wrong, But your main job in inverted comments these days is standing on a stage and talking to groups in various you know, primarily in the corporate space, but you do skills and you do other things, but a lot of corporate and here and all over the world. Do you kind of have the same level of all the same energy of I need to be fucking awesome at this because I know,
like you've done a lot of presenting. I've done a lot of presenting, like I can and I don't, but I can kind of almost just walk on stage auto pilot, do my thing, but be amusing, be engaging, tell a few stories, say share some thoughts and ideas and just rely on miles on the clock and bit of skill and a bit of awareness and.
Walk off right. I try not to do that.
I try to be very present and I want everyone to be the best one I've ever done. Are you kind of competitive with yourself in terms of being the best you you could ever be on stage? But not only I feel like you want to be the best speaker in Australia that's paid the most as well?
Well, I want to be this. I definitely want to be the best speaker. But what I love is a challenge. So when I do a speaker brief, so once you get booked for a job, two weeks before the event, you make contact. FUR will contact with the client and the client tells you about the event and normally the client will say, wow, gee, this has been an event we've had the last ten years, we've had some really
great speakers. The best speaker Where've ever had was I'm like, oh, the best speaker right, I'm like, I want to be the best speaker. And I actually say to them, if you don't think I'm the best speaker.
When I'm finished, you don't actually have to pay me.
And they're like, no, stop, stop it stop, and I'm like, no, I am serious.
If you don't think that I.
Was better than your best speaker last time you had this event, don't pay me, because I want him to feel absolutely excited by that, thinking, Okay, he's froffing at the mouth, he's excited, thinking she's so competitive. And usually nine times out of ten, the MC will say, well, it looks like we actually have to pay this Jackie Mouth because she was the best speaker. I try to bring a lot of energy to this to the stage. I am the double espresso that the audience didn't even
realize they needed, wanted, or had. They just leave with so much energy. And it's by the way I engage, It's the way I project, It's the way I connect with the audience.
And I just want to bring them on my journey and it.
Will lift them up, but will feel like that they can do anything and hopefully cart Wiel out of the auditorium or out of the venue feeling like life is good and I'm ready to go and attack it with a champion attitude.
Yeah.
Yeah, And some people are going to be listening to this a small percentage going, oh, gee, she's pretty happy with herself. But I'm telling you that's actually all true. She actually is phenomenal. So if you've got heaps cash, you know, and you're running an event, you know, just reach out.
I also got a research to Craig. I know you touched on that saying that you want to be prepared and stay present. I don't take for granted what I do, and I don't just clip the ticket either, So I show up hours in advance, and if there's tables to be set or conference showbacks, I go and put them to help out the event organizer, like I'm happy to be there, I'm grateful to be there. I want to feel like that I'm a part of the event and I wasn't just a transaction. I'm a big one on
old style relationships. You build them respectfully, and I do a lot of research into your business, into the people that I'll be speaking to, so that when the questions are asked, I can answer with meaning and that it will mean something to them and hopefully they can use it within their personal and their professional lives.
Yeah, I think that ability when you're working with a group to be able to understand their culture, their needs, what it is they do, who, what their product and services are, who their customers are, what's going great in their organization, what's not going great, what are their challenges, and why they're you know, I asked that, I go, why are you bringing me in?
You know?
And sometimes they go, oh, well, we need to speak.
I'm like, all right, is there anything else?
Yeah? So it's yeah.
But if you can understand the culture of the organization and the needs of the organization and where they're at into you know, dynamically with the group, with the business, with even with the P and L perhaps or just at how long they've been around, what it is they do, what's going great, what's not going great, and then then you can share your stuff but be relevant.
To them, yes, definitely. And then if you have no relevance, then there's no importance. There's no meaning for you to be there, so it means nothing. And you want to make connections. When you've made a connection with someone, you know that you're making change right, and change is so important.
But I honestly feel so grateful.
I mean, besides being speaking too, I work for the Trope Financial as you know, as a brand ambassador, so I get to do some really amazing things for them. My recent one was up for international women, say, inspiring women within the finance industry. I'm doing a staff event for them tomorrow. Imagine new staff coming in and they're hit with the dose of me. They're like, who is this woman? So I've got some really really great clients. Obviously, I work for some great people La Trobe, the Mount
Buller and a whole lot of other people. So it's been a great thirteen years since I retired, that's for sure.
I've spoken with.
When I say spoken with, I've spoken on the same program as quite a lot of Olympians, probably twenty Olympians, I reckon. I'll tell you off air who. But there's a couple, God bless them, and they're good, but they're a bit of a one trick pony, like they basically tell the same you know. Like there are some that I've been at four different conferences and they've spoken and they have one keynote and it goes for the exact same amount of time because it's all choreographed, the same music,
the same videos, the same everything. So it's essentially a performance. Please tell me you don't do that.
It depends on actually what they want. So I would say that my after dinner because it's meant to be a bit light, very engaging.
It's a different audience.
That is a very different style of presentation than what you would give when you're standing in front of a conference and they're saying exit, enter stage left, exit stage right, and there's a theme and you've got to hit all of the high notes. The after dinner or even the breakfast one, it's more punchy, it's shorter, the presentation has to lift faster, so constantly changing my presentation. I competed
for twenty years. I've got twenty years worth of stories, so be very boring if I just repeated the same two or three stories. So I'm always begging for either more time so I can tell more stories. Because they're all great ones, and you've heard a lot of them. I've had some fun stuff happen, which all have great meaning, and there would be I think a benefit to companies hearing all of the stories. But you don't get all of the time. And sometimes people say, my friend heard
you speak. I want you to just do that because they know that that work for that other person, and they know that that was good enough for their audience. But by the time you do a speaker brief, you generally talk about what it is, why people are coming together, how often are you having it, what type of engagement do they need? Is it more conversation or is it just a straight pinot no questions?
They're all very different.
When you get on stage, what's your overwhelming or perhaps underlying emotional state.
Is it excitement? Is it anxiety? Is it fear?
I'm pretty sure it's not anxiety or fear.
Is it like?
What are you?
What are you feeling? Or are you just really calm and focused? Like?
What's your like? I'm interested because I know how I am. And also this is such a source of fucking terror for so many human beings. The idea of you've got to get up in front of all of those people, talk for an hour, don't say, don't fuck up, be interesting, be a bit funny, and we're all going to sit there and evaluate you ready, set go right. That's horrifying for people, but that's the real of what goes on. So what are you feeling when you get up?
So start my keynote, I show a six minute video, which is a non negotiable for me. I'm really lucky that Bruce McAvaney and I became quite close over my career, and when I retired, he put together a video like a mini movie of my career and he narrates it.
So he but that's not fair. That's like, that's fucking steroids, Like you're on the gear, like that is literally performance enhancing.
Well, you know what I feel like at that point, I don't even need to do anything because they're already like they're in. When I get clients saying we don't really want to have that sort of audio setup, we don't really want to have major av I'm like, listen, you need to have visits, Bruce. Bruce is like my entree. You know, when you go to a great restaurant and you eat an entree and it's amazing. You're like, fuck, if that's the entree, I can't wait for.
The main course.
And he gets my audience primed, ready salivating. So this video plays and while the videos play, it's six minutes, I'm actually watching a video going Oh my left arm was two bent and I could have added that better, like I'm actually critiquing myself from vision from moments that happened twenty years ago. So I sort of watched the video. I'm watching the crowd. Twenty percent of the people start crying during the video because Bruce does that to people
just with the words. And then I come up and I'm ready to sort of extend that moment that he's already had with them. So I'm usually, you know, foaming at the mouth, throwing at the bit, ready to go, and I just come up.
It's NonStop.
It's forty five minutes, barely taking a breath, never taking a drink of water. And the only time I stop is where I'm asking the crowds of questions.
Amazing.
All right, well we can only chat briefly today because you've got a very busy day because you're because you're a big deal, as you keep telling me, Oh no, you're a big deal.
It's all right, We're okay.
With it, but is an idiot. I don't go around saying I'm a big deal idiot?
Oops? Stay there, we'll say goodbye there.
But do you want to tell anyone anything where they can find you or website or anything? Ah?
Sure, So I'm exclusive with Saxon speakers. If you want to hear more from me your next conference, go to Saxton's or you can message me and I'll send you to the.
Right people.
And we forget together in a couple of weeks so we can talk about the thing that we can't talk about.
We will definitely be back.
We'll chat for longer in a couple of weeks, but for the minute, everyone, love your guts as your collective gutzs.
See you soon.