Between 18 and 55, the most common cause of death for men

is suicide. Our leading cause of death will be ourselves. We lose about seven blokes

every day. In this world where there's all these resources out there, why

is it going up? Last year, we lost about 1,200 people. It

was a national road toll, men, women, children, the whole. That number is

less than half of the men who took their own lives, and

Just talking to boys in person, face to face, having that interaction. You

It is a bit of a fine line. You want to play with the fire even though you

know you're going to get burnt. The closer you get to the line, kind of the funnier it is.

On the amusing side, taking the piss out of yourself. That's all you need to do. Men have

to be stoic all the time. Everyone has this broader picture of

stoicism that you have to be hard and stoic the entire time. There's

an unrealistic expectation on blokes at the moment that this is what

Welcome to the Better Bloke Podcast. I'm Matty. I'm Rob. And

we're just a pair of average blokes on a mission to try and be a

We're going to speak about all things highs and lows of what it feels like to be a

bloke, plus speak to some legends along the way about what it takes to be a better

Welcome back, episode three of the Better Bloke Podcast. Three

episodes in, how are you? Are you getting into the grind

It's not much of a grind, but I feel like going to

Burley and just dressing all in

Like when I hear Pav, I just think Pavlova. That's

On this one, I wanna jump into kind of all the

shit that we've done over the years at Blokes Advice. So everything

from like kind of fundraising and the activations, the

tours, things that we've done, I guess, in the mental wellbeing space

and just to help other blokes out or even connecting blokes to helping

I might pull you back there as well, because it's very apparent that you're from

the marketing side of employment. Yes, yes I am. Activations,

do you wanna break that down in layman's terms or? One, our

An activation. Yeah. Okay, sorry. Marketing spiel,

members meets, like doing shit. Like we went to summon arts, you know.

There you go, look at you go. Activations covers everything from getting

boys together in a pub, to meeting up in

a park for the black dog tour, to going to a summon

eights or a V8 supercars to sort of, you know, meet

No more activations. Sorry guys, we're canceling the lot. Before

we jump into it, something that's big on Blokes Advice is the banter.

That's sort of like the glue that like gets the boys talking.

A lot of shit talk. And I think to a lot of people outside

the group, they don't kind of understand the context of it. It can be

seen as like mean and I don't

know, a bit rowdy. It's like bullying almost. Well,

okay. Banter versus bullying. It is a bit

of a fine line. You've sort of been in the trade world. Like

how does that, I guess, manifest itself in

I think a lot of it comes down to knowing your audience. Like

there's some things that I could say to you that I'm not going to say to

someone else because he's going to take it differently. It's

also about what you say. So if

someone's going to take severe offense to something, probably

don't say it. If someone's going to find the funny side of

it, and it comes back to this whole jokes thing, something's a fucking joke. If

it's a joke, it's supposed to be funny. You don't take offense. Yeah,

I think it all comes down to that, where know your audience, know

who you're delivering to, know what it is you're saying. There

It is. And I mean, you've got to tread that line, because the closer you get

Yeah, it's like you sort of, you want to play

with the fire, even though you know you're going to get burnt, you're going to do it

Yeah. And even if you're at the expense of it, like it's

kind of like funnier if it's true, you know, and that is going to

kind of feel shit, but at the same time it's give and take,

Yeah. A hundred percent. It's the same with, if you can't love yourself, who can? If

you can't take the piss out of yourself, you're going to get offended

when people do it back. I don't know,

It's hard on bloke's advice because obviously it's written,

Yeah, so there's no context as well. That's the big thing where like

I can look at you in the eyes and go, you're a piece of shit, Matty. And

We literally just discussed this. Why mate? We're trying to do

Yeah. And just that there, you know,

like I'm a, I'm a long haired Yahoo. I can't even say that, but

that's you taking the piss out of yourself because you know it. I

know that I'm okay with calling you a long haired Yahoo now. So

it's sort of, that's what helps draw that line with, I don't know, the

Yeah. And like you said, context to the whole concept

of blokes advice is a bit of a funny one because within the

group, the private group, 300,000 blokes in there, you

know, we get new members in and they sort of got to figure out what is the

context of this group? How do people relate? Like

what sort of shit do you post? How do you comment? How do you interact with

people? And without actually being in it and sort of

No, it's very much a, you need to be there to

understand what it is. And then even then you can,

I've seen so many boys join Blokes Advice

and they last a couple of hours and they're like, I

can't deal with this. Horses for courses. It's

not for everyone, but I mean, we were

at nearly 800,000 once in the last group. So obviously there

is a considerable amount of people that are into what we're

into, which we're not going to dive too deep into it this early on

because if you want to see it, join

I think that's part of the reason Bloke's advice has been so strong because we know

who we are, we know who we stand for, you don't like it, fuck

off. Yeah, that's pretty much it. So yeah,

that's what the group's about and it's kind of like, I like to think of

it like Drawing a comparison to a comedy club, right?

So you hear these stories of like headline news of

comedian says this direct quote, but it's just some

shitty material He was working on he said some stuff in

the context of a comedy club, which is where you're supposed to say

it Yeah, and then it's taken out of context and suddenly it takes

on a new meaning blokes advice much the same Like you

can be thrown around jokes in there because the blokes in the group, they

understand what you're doing. You take it outside of there, chuck

it on a news article, suddenly not quite the same context and

Yeah, very much so. And even to the extent that it's

all text. So it comes back to that context of

being in the moment. You can't take text as

exact evidence of what someone's saying. They may be saying it in

Yeah. And you see these comments where a

bloke said a joke and like, I read it. I'm like, oh

Yeah. Like you missed a mark. That's majority of my comments. Nah,

it's not. I throw great chat. You throw fire. Yeah.

But in saying that, like us boys behind the scenes have a little bit

of a heads up. where obviously we're seeing the

post first. So everyone always thinks, oh, they

get to think about what they're going to say. Some of us do. But

One of my favorite things that you do is from the public page, throwing

chat to public profiles. Yeah. So you'll jump on

like a post from Queensland health or one of the big

Actually on that shared at Queensland health, they throw great chat back.

Whoever's running Queensland health. I've seen some back and forth with

you and them on like, Do you remember any? So

A lot of them, there's been a lot of STD ones that they've, they've

thrown some great chat back. A lot of it, this

actually, this probably goes into another thing where a lot of the, the

funny relatable posts that they're putting up, and this is why they are so good,

is a lot of the men's issues that they're putting up, they're using

humor to sort of put it out to the world. And that sort

of goes back to that whole banter thing is, That's how blokes relate.

So yeah, shout out Queensland Health. Great chat. Need

Whoever's running the Facebook page, jump on the party. Yeah,

hit us up. Bit of red tape government there. We'll see how that goes. Personal,

come on. Yeah, it's fine. It's fine. Let's jump into some of the shit that we've actually

sort of done and achieved before we started Better Blokes, which, you

Is essentially everything because we've just started this relatively

Yeah, and if people haven't tuned into the earlier episodes,

the Better Bloke Project is, I guess, an initiative and

a branch of Blokes of Ice, but it's a separate

We've spent the last eight years building Bloke's Advice and the community behind

Yeah, we believe in community. We believe in

the ethos and supporting men in much the same way. But

we've gone down the route of a completely verified, certified, government

approved charity. It's a non-for-profit charity. which

is going to allow us to do so many things from events, activations,

So yeah, so we'll be able to catch up

with people out in public. This is purely,

and we mentioned this earlier on the episodes, this is purely preventative. type

thing that we're doing, we are not professionals by

Definitely not professionals at podcasting, but we will be. Eventually.

Yeah, maybe. Some of the shit that we've actually done,

like there's a few top line things. I think the

blood drives being a big I guess aspect of

what we've promoted for years and years. You've been super involved in that for

quite a long time, given heaps of blood yourself. You want to run us through what

So Lifeblood, formerly known as Red25. So

we had one of our members, I think it might have

been 2018. It actually all

came from a Korean male post, funnily enough. He

was wearing a shirt and mentioned about how, you

know, everyone donating blood saved his life because

he's got a rare blood condition that he needs transfusions pretty regularly.

He reached out and he went, hey, you guys have a great platform. Do you reckon, you

know, I could talk to you about this? And I went, yeah, that's fuck, that's a fat idea.

So we did it. And we are on most top

lists in most of the blood donning centers now throughout Australia, which

is pretty good. So I think we're I know you're better with statistics. How

Yeah, we're sitting at just around 15,000 donations, which

comes in at about potentially saving 35,000 lives. Yeah, which

is unreal. Which is super good. And a big part of

what we do, we have like a bit of responsibility, right? Being blokes. Blokes

Plasma. Plasma. Blokes are better at giving plasma. So we've got thicker

veins. I don't

know, blokes just do most things better. Yeah, well,

obviously. We're not going to go down that path just yet. We

Yeah, my bad. But yeah, so blokes are

better at giving plasma purely just because of the size of their veins.

There's a lot more science behind it. We might get

someone from Red Cross on eventually to run us through it because it

I would love a scientific professional saying why men are

So yeah, let's do that. It might carry a bit more weight, but

DonateBlood mentioned that you're in Bloke's

Advice and yeah, become part of Team Bloke's Advice for the tally.

If you're already giving blood and you're a Lifeblood member, you

can pretty much select your team, just type in Bloke's Advice and then

you pretty much add to our tally, become part of our team and

we can sort of, you know, do it all together and you're doing it

And you get free milkshakes at the end, they're fucking sick. So good. They're

Other things we've done. Obviously the fundraising over the

Very different, somewhere like it's hundreds of thousands of

That hundreds of thousands of dollars is only what we know about also. There

has been a lot going on with that

sort of I guess, knowledge within

comments and whatnot, which we, we can't

condone that purely just because we don't

want boys getting burnt just because of how many big hearts are in the group. Um,

but yeah, we're running up well into the hundreds of thousands of

Yeah. And that's, you know, purely for a specific cause. So

we've raised this money for things like kids' funerals. Tombstones.

Tombstones, ongoing treatment, helping, you know,

dads with disabled kids, stuff like that. And it's a hundred percent

proceeds goes to whoever it is. The sort of GoFundMe is

Which are substantial because it is a business and whatnot, which actually

that might lead us into a bit of a segue as to what you're working on

Yeah, so obviously now we're a non-for-profit charity. So

we're kind of going to be able to take over

the management of that and still if we do decide to

do anything we still want 100% of proceeds going to whatever the

cause is. Obviously early days we're still fleshing

that out but it will be something we will be able to do. And

going back to what we were talking about, not having full visibility over

GoFundMe. In recent years, we've actually had

to say, look, we're not doing external fundraising in

the page. We're gonna hone it back and only

Advice or services. So in saying that with the

fundraiser, we still get a lot of boys reaching out for help. And

there are guys that have services that can offer

that help. So not everything needs to

be a monetary donation. I think that that's

probably where I'm trying to go with that, that you can offer

help, not just by giving advice, obviously, if

that's all you can do, that's good. But just say someone's

house is fucked. And they've got kids. They

need an emergency fix. One of the boys might

have that emergency fix. He can shoot around and help out. That's

Yeah, I saw a bunch of boys earlier in the year

when the final Queensland floods happened. Some

guys were in a position, they had boats and generators and bits and pieces. And

there was this camaraderie happening within the group. Kind

of, we were hands off, obviously facilitate the group. They organized it.

It's not about money. On the GoFundMe thing, it's

pretty much …we don't have visibility over who it

actually is. And like you said, blokes with big hearts like…

…if we're not like somewhat controlling it… …we

And that's it. You can't… …with how easy it is

to create fake profiles and whatnot now… …we don't

know who… …obviously we've got certain things in place

that… …you know, we don't let new profiles into the group and whatnot. But… One

sitting there, they just want to start up a GoFundMe, pull on the heartstrings. Next

thing you know, they're ripping off a bunch of members because

of their goodwill. We don't want that. There is somewhat

of duty of care over the boys that have essentially

made BA what it is. It's the members of Mayblocks have lost what it

So the Better Blow project is pretty much going to be able to help facilitate

that better. So we're not going to hop on about that, but it's

something that we would like to do around all the other shit. Another thing

we did was a black dog tour. Yes. So we've done two of them, um,

which is pretty much, uh, I guess a tour around

Taking it off the screens, yeah. Members in the real world is kind of what we

wanted to do. And we had some of the boys go

in a van and go around and actually meet all these communities in

real life. They'd meet at pubs, parks, whatever, barbecues, beers,

whatever. And then just be able to have a

It's very much along a similar line of what

we're doing. It's literally that, it's just blokes having

chats that you don't need

a professional all the time just to have a chat to someone. You can open up. Obviously

there is reasons for professionals, but just

talking to boys in person, face to face, having

that interaction with people face to face is so

So good. So that and members

mates, like that's kind of what it was. We just had the van

to drive around to all of them. Love to start doing some members meets locally

real soon. So we'll do the members mates, but also seminars,

Anyone has a van, an old shitty van? We'll wrap it up and put your logos

Yep. So, or a new cool van. I don't

I mean, beggars can't be choosers. So look, whatever we,

whatever we can get at the moment while we're kicking this off to

get out in people's faces and essentially just

help, help spread the word on, you know,

A big point of, or a

recent thing we did was down in Canberra on International Men's

Day last year. And we laid out with a bunch of other grassroots organizations, two

and a half thousand shoes to represent the men we

lost to suicide that year alone. Now,

that's something that's kind of close to our hearts. We don't

want the whole of better blokes to be built around suicide and those issues.

But one way or another, that's the end result. That's what we're trying to

avoid by taking five steps back and dealing with the problems there.

Yeah, 100%. And it's, I

think because we've seen so many different scenarios that

lead blokes there, that's what puts us in a position to be able to go, yep,

sweet, let's do what we can to to just wind

it back a little bit and stop

talking people off the edge of the ledge, why

That would be great. Yeah. That said, that event was incredibly

It was, we'll put up some video, but it was a field

It was such a- In saying that, even,

so we've got, millions of views across those videos.

Um, and the videos

didn't do it justice, just how powerful that was to see in person, which

I think probably we need as

many people to see that as possible. So, because I

think it's sort of, it goes off, well, we're, we're

both in our thirties. Um, a big

thing that I guess not a lot of people probably pay

attention to is that between

now and us turning 50, our

leading cause of death will be ourselves. That's a

Yeah, it is fucked. Between 18 and 55, the most common cause

of death for men is suicide. We lose

about seven blokes every day. Obviously,

that's ended up at about 2,560 people in the course of last year. 2023, that

number is actually up from 2022. So in

this world where we're talking about, it's okay to talk about your feelings, like

there's all these resources out there. Everyone knows about all these charities. Why

is it going up? It seems a bit counterintuitive. There's

And that's what we're trying to fix. And I think that the thing with

that is everyone is so easy

to I guess ask on one

specific day, are you okay? Or quickly

turn around and say, it ain't weak to speak. The

difference is like, we know it's fucking hard, but

that's okay. Like you just need to be helped

along there. Like no one's saying, oh, you have to talk. You can

do it whichever way you fucking want. That's what blokes do. But

Yeah. And like a context like this

podcast, like we're going to be talking to guests and stuff like that, talking about,

you know, how we're fucking average and how they're average. And

we've gone through shit like that. I think the exposure to that kind of

stuff rather than a beyond blue billboard

on the side of the highway, you know, it's a

different way of approaching reducing

the stigma. Yeah. And I think it's a 2024 way. It's social

media. This is what, you know, it's kind of about. And

it's a real problem. Like to

put some scale on the size of the issue, we

all know about like people that die on the roads, right? We

see it every time there's Easter long weekends, double demerits, don't

drink and drive. Every K over is a killer. So many resources. Last

year we lost about 1,200 people, right? That's

how many was in national road toll, men, women, children, the

whole works. So that number is less than half of

the men who took their own lives. And that's not an

accident. Like they actually did it. So that shows the

scale of like what we're actually dealing with. It should have more

fucking light. Like it is a bit of a national crisis. We're

No, no, we're not. It

definitely needs to be spoken about, but it needs to be done

in the right way. And that's, I think that

that's the tricky play where it's

not, it doesn't need to be political. It

doesn't need to be a gender issue. It

doesn't need to be anything other than what it fucking

is. It's an issue for men. Everyone

is relatable to men at some point. or they've got some

man in their life they love. If they care about

them, they should probably be paying attention to this.

I remember being out there at 2500 Shoes and

Sammy Snowdon, we were sitting there and it's

all these shoes laid out on the ground and like imagine a bloke

standing there. And he's like, nah, imagine the

bloke, his missus, his kids, his friends, his

family. He's like, there's 20,000 people there that

Just the ripple effect from what one person does because they

They didn't know better. They thought it was too gloomy. They

didn't have access to resources or the resources weren't

right or whatever it is. There's a million ways people

get there. And that's why people say, what's the solution? There's

not one. There's not one. There's a whole bunch of

I think there's a, and that's probably why it's so important that we're

going to do what we're going to do is everyone

targets a specific group with

how they do it. Obviously, you've got multiple organisations that

go, we're going to focus on this. We're

not. We know that we're

blokes. We know who we relate

to. We relate to you. We

are them. Why the fuck would we go out and try

and talk Feelings, rainbows,

sunshines, flowers. Fuck

that. Let's talk skids, burnouts, cars,

footy, beers, babes. And

then we'll talk about feelings. If you fucking want. Like,

you know, that's the thing. You don't need to talk about it until

you're ready to talk about it. Some people don't even need to talk about it. But as

long as they're sorting shit out in their own ways, that's the, that's the main thing. I think we

Yeah. And that's the thing. That's why Blokes Advice exists.

People talking about a whole manner of shit. And then, you

know, when they are ready or they do want to consume that sort of content, it's

there. And obviously the Better Bloke Project as

a charity, we are going to be doing things. In terms of seminars,

we're going to be talking about family law, we're going to be talking about fitness, nutrition.

Finances. Mental well-being, finances. All these things

sort of tie into the bigger picture and hopefully one

of them or two of them are going to be applicable to you and maybe you

can be a better bloke. There it is. Before

we sign off, I wanted to talk about what you spoke about earlier. You

mentioned ain't weak to speak. Now

that has been a, I guess a motto that's

been plastered all over everywhere for a little while now. But

I guess we wrote a blog a little while ago breaking down what

that actually means. Do you have thoughts?

I think that the day

and age that we live in at the moment Everyone is

quick to chase clout, essentially. And the

whole mental health space, it's

sort of cool to talk about it, um, to

talk about it in the negative aspects. And I think everyone's sort

of jumping on this bandwagon about like, Oh, I don't wait to speak. I'm all for it.

But people need to realize that he's

fucking hard. A lot of the time when you do speak to

people. They don't want to fucking talk about it.

There's this stigma that everyone's quick to push the

whole, you know, yeah, mate, I'm here if you need. A

lot of the time they're not though. And I don't

know, I think that's just, it's the world we live in. Everyone's

attention spans are sort of fucked. So everyone's just

do anything to grab attention and not

realize that there's repercussions to actually going out and saying it

Yeah, exactly. If you're sharing that shit, like fucking

make sure you're actually sending those old messages here and there, sort of

paying attention to what's going on with people. And

then. It's a good breakdown like

of this idea that's sort of been around for decades

or centuries of men have to be stoic all the

time. Like we think that's a really strong value and

it is important that you are a leader for your family, the

people around you, but it doesn't have to be 100% of

the time. We would rather you have that little break rather

than have a big break down the track. Have a big break down the track. If

you need that break, that's what it's there for. So that saying sort

of like, I guess there's a representation of that, but

Yeah. I think going back to what you were just referring to as stoicism too,

is that everyone has this broader picture of stoicism that

you have to be hard and stoic the entire time, which

that's not the case. Even the old

school Stoics like Marcus Aurelius and whatnot, they

still had moments that they took a break and took a step aside. It

was just in that moment where they were required to be Stoic, that's

when they did it. So there's an unrealistic expectation

on blokes at the moment that this is what

It got super deep. It went super deep this one. It did go a bit deep. But

We will, because we are. It's an important conversation, right? It is. And like,

it's a conversation that needs to be had, but it's not a conversation that

And as I was saying, ain't weak to speak, awesome

step one, because it starts a conversation. Conversation doesn't

change a lot. It requires action after

that. So take step one, have that conversation, but back

to the big A word, accountability. Like if you're not actually going

to do something about it, learn what you need to learn, change what you need to

change. The conversation is kind of pointless. You

do the circle and you end up in the same position. And

that's kind of where we see guys, I guess, spiraling. Because,

you know, they might have ain't weak to speak. They reached out

and said, hey, my life's shit. But they didn't actually take

You need to do something different. If you're going to do what you've always done,

And on that note, guys, thank you very much for watching episode three.

Yeah, the Pavlova. No fruit. Influencer spec. Yeah. If

you want to find out more, jump on our socials, the Better Bloke Project

everywhere, or jump over to Blokes Advice. You can find the group

via the link tree and all of our buyers. Jump in,

Have a gander. Have a gander. Remember, stay

better. Thanks for tuning into today's episode of Better Bloke.

If you want to learn more about everything we're doing, head to the description, hit

the links and follow us on the socials. If you want to learn more about the project,