Brian Wattchow - An outdoor educator, author, guide and Beau’s academic supervisor. Beau specifically referenced Songs of the Wounded River,

Beau Miles: Yeah, maybe. I think I might have just come up with a big three, it might be my next book, mate. Like many, many people I came across Beau Miles during COVID-19, through his Trials of Miles video. Like many, many people I fell easily in love with his affable, no-nonsense, slightly unhinged way of looking at things and putting expectations on their head. Take a tree house tour, and have a blast playing and exploring with your kids. Treehouse guests have so much fun entering the in real life pretend world! These are the adventures that childhood is made of. Find plans created by a treehouse architecture expert for the best results. 11. Make a climbing wall Beau Miles: Well, first of all, congratulations on doing that with the pinto beans. It was excellent. If your kids are old enough, consider adding a low-hanging zipline for your kids to swing across! A zipline is a great way for kids to burn up some of that excess energy.If a conversation is by definition a dialogue between two or more entities, then I live on a small property with hundreds of chatty, introverted things. I must look bonkers to peeping toms, but I'd feel even more bonkers going about my solo days in silence. Skulking about the place as if an apple tree isn't worth having a chat with. Q: You talk a lot in your book about perspective and the power of perception. What advice would you give to someone trying to make that shift in perspective and trying to see a familiar place with new, adventurous eyes? Beau Miles: Yeah. What it was, Brett was… And I’ve since stumbled upon this. What made that idea so successful I suppose, one, I did it with a sense of fun. Two, it’s not overly skill-orientated or I didn’t have… You don’t have to be a great runner to do it. And what those two things combined allow is a repeatable stunt. People can now do it themself. They can do it in their own way, in their own house, at their own pace, whatever they wanna do. And they don’t have to do a full marathon, they can do a half or a 10K or whatever. And just do a few things in between. And what a great concept. And so what it was was a repeatable thing to do, and then so people copied it.

A lot of people feel like they’ve seen and done everything there is to see and do in their local area. They’re bored of their daily routine, and contemplate going off on some grand adventure in a exotic locale.Beau Miles: Yeah, I love beans too, and I still do. People ask me that all the time, and… One of the big critiques of my film of eating my body weight in beans, which was 190 tins if I remember, was that I didn’t cook them properly like you did. You had the proper beans that you cooked up yourself, that you made a lovely sauce for or brine or something, and away you go, whereas I just bought store-bought tin beans and mixed them up and I ate as many as I could. I did that for a reason because of the simplicity of it and the fact that I could weigh things and measure things and all that, rather than having to do it on the fly. Ask yourself, “Why do I like adventuring? What is it that I’m looking for or chasing — a feeling, view, physical demise, physical bolstering, skills?” Then look at where you live or have ease of access to and overlay that place with those personal answers. Create an outdoor chalkboard for your kiddos to draw on! Did you know that there is great physical benefit for children to draw on a vertical surface? I love how to turns your fence into an integral part of the outdoor living room. Developing his storytelling craft is also an ongoing education. Being organic on film while refining the production process and creating films that resonate with people doesn’t just happen. “I have to open my mouth and say the very things I'm feeling or thinking, and I've got to try and be articulate about it - otherwise I'm wasting people's time,” says Beau. “So that's the craft. Sometimes it is harder [than just going out adventures without filming], because I'm having to force the issue or force this internal monologue out. But that doesn't make it a bad experience; it just makes it one where I have to work a bit harder sometimes.” In saying that, I’ve still had to go through a period of convincing myself that close-to-home places are adventuresome, playing on the human sense of perception to cash in on our invisible and intrinsic want to be in new places that bring about physical and emotional challenges. This only really needs to happen once through a genuine discipline of making the effort to see all, or many places, as adventurous. Once you can do that, the close-to-home world is your adventurous oyster.

Beau Miles: That’s right, yeah, yeah. I chose the shovel because it was very agricultural and I thought, “Oh, well, I kinda look like I’m part of the landscape if I’m lumping a shovel around. If I had anything else with me, then I look like a proper weirdo.” Q: Do you learn different kinds of things about yourself when you travel abroad as opposed to what you learn on your close-to-home adventures? A: It takes a natural curiosity to want to shift from classical, storybook adventuring to doing odd things close to home with few resources and a strange script. More to the point, it takes discipline, because going to exotic, faraway, newish places tends to be easy, subscriptive, and innately attractive, so you have to put in the hard work to make the shift. Avid runner. Award-winning filmmaker. Self-described oddball. All-around adventurer. Beau Miles is many things, but he’s no stranger to gallivanting around the globe. Recently, however, after years of running, kayaking, hitchhiking, and exploring around the world, Beau has settled down in his native Australia and is now devoting his time to finding adventures closer to home. Sound boring? It’s anything but.A: Everything. If you’re not genuinely curious about a thing, it isn’t worth doing as you’re kidding yourself. Audiences know if the storyteller is there for the right reasons — authenticity is key. And so students every year would make a paddle out of whatever wood they could get a hold of that they couldn’t buy. They’d have to get it from their granddad’s shed or their grandmother’s cupboard or on the side of the road or wherever. Go and see a hardware and see what pallets are at the front. And so our students did this for years, and I thought, “Well, I could make a film about just making a paddle or I could make a paddle that has a particular story and then I go on paddle with it.” So, I decided to just use junk wood that I could find between the train station and work that I used to commute to, and so I did that. Yeah, I just made it out of old wood that I could find between my 2.2 kilometer walk between the train station and my office and away I went. It was great, I loved it, and it’s actually one of my, I think, the most underrated film on my channel I really like.