Cayden Ryan: Four Years in the Mines, the Real Truth About the Money, and Learning to Say 'I Love You'

Cayden Ryan is 23, he works underground in the mines, and he's one of the most disarmingly honest guests you'll hear on The Open Tab. Over more than two hours, he punctures a few myths — about money, about work, about what success even is — and quietly lands on the stuff that actually matters to him.

"I think you might see me as more successful than I see myself, to be honest with you," he says early on. That gap — between how others read him and how he reads himself — runs through the whole conversation.

The work ethic started at McDonald's

Before the mines, there was Macca's. For four years, while still at school, Cayden ran a schedule that would flatten most adults: school Monday to Friday, then McDonald's from 4:30pm to midnight every weeknight, then KFC day shifts on the weekends when it opened.

"I had money in my account at that point, but I still couldn't see this," he says — meaning where he'd eventually end up. The point isn't the hours; it's that the work ethic was built long before the job that gets all the attention.

His advice to anyone wanting to follow him into mining is blunt: "You need a good work ethic. You've got to prove it." On most sites, he explains, you're working alongside people who've done the hard yards for twenty years. Walk in with the wrong attitude — "coming in thinking you know everything when you don't" — and you won't last. "I've seen people last a week."

The truth about mine money

Here's the part that cuts against the legend. Everyone assumes mining is "super good money." Cayden says that's mostly not true.

"I'm not on that much more money than someone on machinery at the council, really. If you want big money, you need to be doing the dangerous jobs in big mines."

And those jobs? Brutally hard to get into. The competition is fierce, sites don't want to put inexperienced people on dangerous roles, and you hit the classic catch-22 — you need experience to get the job, and the job to get experience. His honest summary of how people actually break through: "You have to know someone. And it's so true."

He's clear-eyed about the bigger picture too — he'd seen that the average Australian salary is around $106,000, and that to clear that, "you're going to have to do more," or move away. He's weighing FIFO, a possible building apprenticeship, and eventually his own business somewhere new.

A million vs a billion

One of the sharpest exchanges is almost a thought experiment. People throw around "millionaire" and "billionaire" as if they're neighbours. Cayden lands the difference with a question:

A million seconds is just over a week. A billion seconds? Around 33 years. "That just shows you how big the difference is."

It reframes how he thinks about money entirely — and leads to the most revealing thing he says.

"I'd retire my parents first"

Ask Cayden what he'd do with a dream amount of money and he doesn't start with himself.

"I'd have enough money where I could retire my parents, and I'd set all my family and my closest friends up." Only then comes the half-joke about a mansion on the beach with his own golf course. If he won the lotto, he says, he'd give a lot of it away.

He's also refreshingly wary of money's dark side — he reels off cautionary tales of lottery winners whose lives fell apart, and concludes that the danger usually isn't the winner; it's "the people around it." Money, he reckons, changes everyone else.

The habit he's trying to break

The most human thread in the whole episode is about three small words. In Cayden's family, "I love you" just wasn't said — not out of coldness, but habit. When his brother, a few drinks in, hugged him and said it, Cayden admits he didn't know how to react and laughed it off.

"I think I'm sort of breaking… not a persona — it's more of a habit. But it's a habit I don't want to be in. I want to be better."

What "better" looks like, for him, is specific: being the safe place his younger brothers can come to. "If people want to express something, then they can." For a 23-year-old miner, that's a quietly brave thing to say out loud on a microphone.

On love, jealousy, and not forcing it

A couple of other ideas stuck. On relationships, he's against forcing anything — dating apps included. "If love's real, it'll come to you. If you try to force it, you're trying to make up something that's not real." He tells a genuinely strange story about meeting his closest-ever connection through a chain of coincidences he never could have planned.

And on the cost of doing well, he offers a warning Max will probably need: jealousy is everywhere, and it gets louder the better you do. He's already had kids assume his car was "daddy's money," when the reality was years of 4:30pm-to-midnight shifts. "People will say you got everything on a silver spoon — but really you haven't, and you've had to work for so much."

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This is the longest, most unfiltered conversation on the show so far. Watch or listen to the full Cayden Ryan episode →