The final part with John Rayner is one big love letter to the bush, and it starts in Fred Brophy's boxing tent at the Birdsville races. After days patrolling the Simpson Desert, Johnny fronted up to the tent chasing the family legacy, his grandfather was a tent fighter back in the day. Jessie got caught in the crush at the front, and when the RFDS bloke helping Fred asked if there was anything he could do, she dobbed Johnny straight in: he really wants to fight. Hand up, on the board, matched with the tent champion Afro Savage, who reckons he's never lost.

Then the kicker. Unbeknown to Johnny, his grandfather had picked that exact year to tow the car up from Goulburn to Birdsville, spotted his grandson's name on the board, and ended up in his corner as ring man, calling the shots while Johnny went three rounds with a bloke who could've flogged him into next week. Afro bought him a beer afterwards and had the hide to claim Johnny broke his nose. Last year the crew went back for the final Brophy tent at Birdsville, and the trip out was half the fun: hot artesian baths at Charlotte Plains, bathtub races and a rock carrying comp at Quilpie lost by two seconds on a technicality with a grand on the line, yabby races at Windorah where the cheap yabby costs $800, and a mate's charity fight with his young fella screaming go dad from the front row.

It all lands on the message both blokes finish the series with: get out and see your own country. Stay at the pubs, buy the meat pie, get your fuel local, put money into the small towns doing it tough after the floods, and if you're struggling in the city, maybe the answer is a little further west. As Johnny says, the bush is good to everyone.

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Part four with John Rayner is the ranger years, and it opens with how he got there: taking the pay cut from mining money to a National Parks traineeship, moving down to Barmah on the Murray with his now fiancee Jessie after four months together, and walking into an Echuca bottle shop to tell the manager he'd work that night for free and be given a job by close. Advice to the young fellas, that's how it's done. The bottle shop yarns from houseboat party season are worth the listen on their own.

Then it's into the good stuff. Learning tree felling from the old forestry boys and dropping burning giants on fire jobs, cultural heritage lessons from the local mobs, ring trees and sacred country from the Murray to The Rock at Wagga, then landing the dream posting at Diamantina National Park, seven hours from Longreach, seven from Mount Isa, halfway pub and nothing else. Out there he watched floods to rival 1974 rip hundred year old trees out of the ground, met a bloke driving a camel wagon from north of Alice to Taree with chooks hanging off the side, had a plane club land uninvited and drink the social club's grog, and waged war on a dirty old cow that learnt to hold the floodgates open and let the whole herd into the only springs on earth where one tiny fish exists.

And the title moment: filming an inland taipan during bilby surveys, the world's deadliest snake, one bite and you're gone, and it wandered over, had a sniff of his boot and kept going, looking for mice. His boss called him an idiot. Johnny agrees. Knuckles also drops a proper true Middleton pub yarn of his own about how close his old man came to owning the loneliest pub in Queensland.

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Part three with John Rayner opens with the maddest scheme of the series. The same cousin from part two, now unlicensed and living back at mum and dad's, loses the plot when his mum vacuums a blonde wig out from under his bed and wants to wear it to a 70s party. His explanation: that's me licence. When he drives with the wig on, the cops think he's a woman. Her reply, God bless her, is the best line of the episode: mate, you've got a beard.

From there it's back to the Cudgegong River, hundred pound handlines, loaves of bread and carp as long as a shovel handle, plus a riverbank yarn about that same cousin, a hidden magazine and the clay bank that you'll simply have to hear for yourself, because there's no writing that one down. Then the old quarry at Mudgee: a three storey jump into crystal clear water, rope swings, a track mowed through the Bathurst burr, and a generation that looked after the place until the next lot drove cars through the fences.

The back half turns into something both blokes clearly care about: kids these days aren't allowed to climb a tree, let alone live on a push bike, build bows out of willow, go yabbying or hit the old man's golf balls into the paddock. Johnny's take is that if you've got the skills, fishing, hunting, fixing cars, any of it, passing them on to the kids in your community is your job. That's how you learnt it, so get out there and teach it.

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Part two with John Rayner is about the cousin he idolised, the bloke he describes as Stifler: smooth as anything, great with women, would pump you up one on one and shit on you the second there was an audience. The same bloke who once woke a sleeping Johnny up by putting a steak knife in his leg.

The yarns get wilder from there. The tin dropped in the car park on the way to the Mudgee food festival, a carton of rum throwdowns, and the night of hazing that ended with 15 year old Johnny passed out on the grass with a ring of fire lit around him and a blue heeler digging its toy out of his pants. That was the night he swore off drugs for good, and looking back, he reckons it was the moment that changed his life, even if it took him years longer to walk away from the bloke behind it.

Then Knuckles shares one he's maybe never told before, about his own idolised cousin, a Queensland swimmer and Australian judo talent who went off the rails, and what happened when that cousin turned up at his 21st after ten years. The ep lands on the advice both of them wish they'd had as young fellas: if you've got that person in your life, you don't have to burn bridges, just move away.

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Fresh out of the Proper True Yarn fight camp, John Rayner sits down with Knuckles ahead of the seven man royale at Podcast Royale 3.0, and he's not there to make friends. No gym, no weight set, no boxing gloves. Johnny's training farm strong, throwing 44 gallon drums and tyres around and belting the bag in riggers, and reckons the city pricks on the card are in for a rude shock. There's respect for the legend Benny, but as Johnny says, no more sympathy votes. Whoever fights the best gets the win.

Then the yarns start. Growing up in Mudgee when it was still a small country town, the unspoken deal where the league boys did the fighting during union season and vice versa, and punching their way to a famous schoolboy rugby title against one of the biggest schools in the state. Later came the Woolpack in its days as the most violent pub in Australia, and the army application where he passed everything with flying colours until the psych test, where a contractor heard how many fights he'd been in, told him getting smacked as a kid was domestic abuse he should sue over, and marked him down as a psychopath.

From there it was industrial tiling in the mines and a proper welcome to manhood alongside wiry blokes with man strength, 18 hour shifts, poly welding out in the bush, then giving up two and a half grand a week for a $750 national parks traineeship he's never regretted. Twelve years on he's still a parks man, and part two digs into the national park yarns.

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The final chapter with Michael Crossland, and it opens with the scan that changed everything. Three years ago, busy again and skipping his checkups, Michael lay on a table while a trainee sonographer casually counted out loud: there's one there, another one, two more down there. He hadn't been told about any of them. Six more tumours in his throat, on top of the one from 2016, and a doctor once again telling him his tomorrows weren't guaranteed.

What he did next is the hardest part of this episode. He didn't tell his mum. He didn't tell his kids. His wife Mel played it cool while hurting more than anyone, and Michael kissed his babies goodbye at the airport having told them daddy was going away for some talks, knowing he might never hold them again. He told the surgeon he didn't care if he never spoke another word on stage, as long as he came home with nothing left in his throat. They took out all seven tumours plus a skin cancer they found on his shoulder mid surgery, and Michael walked out of that hospital completely cancer free.

The episode rounds out with news of the movie being made about his life, with producers attached and a Hollywood dream on the cards, Michael's answer on which actor should play him (his wife has a strong opinion involving a Hemsworth), and the most inspiring person he's ever shared a stage with. Not Branson, not the big names. His mum. If you've missed the earlier parts, go back to the start, because this series is something special.

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The full circle moments in this one are hard to believe. Ten days before the birth, Michael had reluctantly done a fundraiser for the Miracle Babies Foundation, a charity he’d never heard of. When he collapsed on the floor of level three, the woman who picked him up was the foundation’s CEO, and she told him everything was going to be okay. Then the man who spent four years of his childhood at Ronald McDonald House found himself living there again 30 years later with his own sick little boy. When sepsis hit and doctors said making it to the end of the week would be a miracle, Michael begged: take my house, my money, my career, everything I own, but please don’t take my little boy.

Five days later, his boy smiled. A Channel 9 interview and one cheeky question later, Michael raised $50,000 for recliners and medical fridges for the NICU before his cab made it back to the hospital. His son has since travelled the world with him, a healthy baby girl arrived in 2021, and Michael now has two little humans running around with his heart in their bodies. As Knuckles says, they could sit there all day.

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Part four with Michael Crossland starts with the promise kept. Years after losing his mum’s money in the GFC, he bought her a beautiful little home and put a pink ribbon on the door, told her he’d rented it for 12 months, then told her the truth: it was hers. No, he wasn’t rich. The bank lent him the money and he pays the mortgage every week.

Four weeks before he finally got his scans done, a surgeon speaking at the same health forum pulled him aside and said something didn’t look right about his throat. Four tumours. Your tomorrows aren’t guaranteed. And when his mum rang the second he walked out of that appointment, Michael got to use her exact words, 20 years later: the doctor told me everything’s going to be okay. He finally got the chance to carry the burden for her.

Then he postponed the surgery. If he was going to die, the book had to be finished so his wife and his mum were looked after. That book is now a bestseller in six countries with hundreds of thousands of dollars donated to charity. Surgeons removed three of the four tumours, but the fourth was wrapped around his vocal cord, the very thing that puts food on his family’s table. And just when you think that’s the story, he ends the episode with one line about finally walking in his mum’s shoes that sets up the biggest episode yet.

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Then came the part he calls one of the hardest of his story. When his parents separated, Michael invested his mum’s share of the settlement in a high risk portfolio to try and buy her a home. Six weeks later the global financial crisis hit and he lost everything she had, the money of the one person who’d sacrificed her whole life for his. What followed was rock bottom at a caravan park, bacterial meningitis, fluid on the brain and Bell’s palsy, learning to walk and talk again, and the darkest stretch of his life, with his wife refusing to leave his side.

Out of it came his why. Michael and his wife went to Haiti after the earthquake, rebuilt a school that now teaches 270 kids, and met an eight year old boy eating out of a bin who’d lost his whole family. Michael rebuilt his orphanage from the ground up, became a father figure to 44 kids, and that little boy has just graduated engineering with honours in the top 10 per cent of university students in the world. And as Knuckles says, we’re not even halfway through this story.

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Part two with Michael Crossland picks up where the trial drug left off. The doctors said he'd never go to school, never play sport, and if he reached his teenage years it'd be a miracle. His mum told him everything was going to be okay and sent him to school anyway.

School turned out harder than hospital. No hair, no eyelashes, bandages over the burns, a nebuliser at every recess, and not a single day he didn't cop it from the other kids. Then, laid up after his first heart attack at just 12 years old, a get well card arrived from his class. Buried in the nice messages were four words he can still see clearly today: hope you die, Steve. What that card taught him about whose words get to weigh you down, and what's really in your cup when life bumps you, became the foundation of everything he now shares on stage.

From a 22 student primary school to a 1200 student high school, from being told he'd never play sport again to making the under 16 Australian baseball team two years later, Michael ends up on a full ride scholarship in Texas at 17, telling American girls his cancer scar came off a crocodile's tail. Six months in, he slid into second base, woke up in hospital, and at 18 it was all over. And as he says, that's only the start of it.

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